Sounds like a much more compelling reason to procure some of this open source software I've been hearing about. Not only can I get it for free, but I can be sure it was never pirated.
Actually it can be pirated. Most easily by a proprietary software company. But even the MPAA managed to do it.
The problem is the IP clauses in it. Any company with a reasonable legal department has already made even the installation of a GPLv3 package a fireable offense.
It's an odd definition of "reasonable legal department" which dosn't know that the GPL is explicitally not an EULA and only becomes relevent if you wish to change the software or distribute it to third parties. Most companies are simply not in the business of altering/distributing software. Indeed such legal departments might be better employed looking at the sorts of things which come with proprietary software, including EULAs. Since these are relevent to installation/execution of software.
V3 has all sorts of automatic grants of patent rights in it. Its toxic to any company trying to even maintain a defensive IP portfolio.
Only a minority of companies hold parents at all and it's probably a minority of these who "V3 has all sorts of automatic grants of patent rights in it. Its toxic to any company trying to even maintain a defensive IP portfolio". To the vast majority this is about as relevent as knowing the rules for employing commercial airline pilots...
That's an interesting suggestion. SSL without authentication (i.e., with self-signed certificates), while vulnerable to MITM, is certainly better than no SSL at all.
The current system of "authentication" is vulnerable to such attacks. Since in essence things come down to complete trust of a third party CA.
No, all the FOSS guys have said 'if has , lets see it'.
Even if there was a match you'd still need to show that the proprietary code hadn't been taken from a published source. Including an open source project.
With patents, it's all about protecting a concept for which anyone who implements has to be able to use the patent or they can be sued.
Including cases of "independent invention". Even though these would tend to indicate that the patent should be voided. It also dosn't tend to help that patents can be written in the most obfuscated and ambiguous language possible.
RAND doesn't work for FLOSS projects because "reasonable" is in terms of "reasonable fee" and non-discriminatory is "same price to all comers" so while it didn't present a barrier to entry when it was dreamed up, it does to FLOSS where a fee is never charged.
Dosn't FLOSS predate RAND by some considerable time, rather than the other way around. Anyway there's no problem so long as the price is zero (in any currency you care to name.)
The hysteria right now is starting to remind me of Three Mile Island. The press got their hands on an EPA report that there had been minute amounts of radioactivity above normal levels found in the local milk. What followed was almost a witch hunt, with calls for milk to be pulled off the shelves, school officials being publicly hounded and berated for "poisoning" schoolkids by feeding it to them at lunch, etc. All this for amounts of radiation a tiny fraction of what you would get from eating a banana, and almost completely avoidable with iodine tablets.
Since "iodine" tablets are potassium iodide they'd probably be effective potassium 40 in bananas:)
Actually, I suspect more people are going to be harmed by all the exhaust from all the gas and wood heating being used in evacuation centers in lieu of electric heating, than from this nuclear accident. But death by breathing in soot is not as sexy as death by radiation, so the press isn't going to report that.
As well as the tens of thousands of people killed by the earthquake and tsunami. Due to such things as drowning and having buildings collapse. There are also fires in chemical and industrial plants. Yet little fuss has been made about toxic fumes and smoke from such sites.
Destroying the reactors beyond repair. Turning to seawater cooling means they have given up all hope of salvaging the reactors in a working state, and will settle for just non-exploding.
One of the reactors was due to be shut down for good in a couple of weeks. Most likely the other two damaged reactors are BER.
A radical policy would be too allow one unit to keep running if the plant was expected to lose mains and diesel. After all, we have seen they do not shut down quickly enough to prevent problems.
Actually nuclear reactors can shut down very quickly, within a matter of seconds. The problem is then you still need cooling to deal with heat produced by radioactive decay.
But I doubt these plants are set up to power themselves anyway. I seem to recall they depend on the grid to make it all work.
Probably more a case even one reactor (and one generator) produces too much power. Without a connection to the power grid there is nowhere for that energy to go.
But actually the cooling diesels worked fine until the tsunami hit the plant. That caused the diesels to stop working and hence the failure of the cooling system.
Piston engines tend to break when water gets inside. Diesel engines being especially vulnerable to "hydrolock" due to their high compression ratio. Also "stop working" in this case tends to mean "requires complete engine rebuild before there is any chance of working again".
The rule is based on people who use cell phones tend to get back into the car, sliding themselves across the seat and charging themselves with static electricity as they do so. That *can* (and has) lead to fires.
The simple solution is pumps where you must hold down a trigger for the fuel to flow...
Alcohol and tobacco are legalised and taxed. If neither of them are hard drugs, I don't know what is.
IIRC nicotine is actually more addictive than opiates (it's certainly more toxic)
Before we prohibited heroin in this country (UK), there were only about 500 addicts in the whole country, and they could still live their lives with a reasonable amount of normality.
This tends to be the case with people addicted to legal drugs. Including perscription only drugs.
Prohibition came, and now 50,000 risk death from adulterated doses of uncertain strength and are forced by prohibitionists to steal or sell themselves to pay black-market prices.
Even highly taxed legal drugs would be likely to be considerably cheaper than those from any kind of black market.
Prohibition is necessary in the case of hard drugs. Its true that we need to attack it from all angles, but legalization and taxation of most of the illegal drugs would be a societal disaster the scale of which we have never seen.
If you look at history the opposite is true. Prohibition of alcohol in the US something of a disaster. Also remember that prohibition is very recent, yet society didn't collapse in the several thousand years before someone came up with the idea.
The wait lines for electronic books is still insanely long - for popular books, there are hundreds of people waiting to be able to check them out.
It's especially insane when you consider how much extra work is needed to make an e-"book" emulate a physical book. Something which by default is simply a file easily copied and transfered between different media.
It wasn't until several years after the 1976 Copyright Act (which was a major revision of the law, replacing the 1909 Act, and is still what we use today) that the government finally worked out how it wanted to handle software copyrights. Section 117 of the Copyright Act was enacted, and it basically says that if you own a copy of a computer program, you have a right to make such copies and modifications as are necessary in order to make it run, and you have the right to make backup copies for your own use, provided that you don't keep the backups if you don't keep the original. (N.B. however that there are still serious problems with the intersection of computers and copyright, mainly involving the reproduction right, the inescapable fact that all computers copy things incessantly just in order to function, and the strict liability nature of civil copyright infringement)
Thus, the need for a license for ordinary users is obviated. Copies could be sold outright without preventing users from lawfully doing what they need to, and without jeopardizing the rights of the developers or publishers. Only more complex situations -- site licenses, distributing modified copies as per the GPL, etc. -- actually require licenses.
The GPL example isn't complex, it's simple. Considerably less complex than just about anything you find with proprietary software.
However, end user licenses are traditional, apparently, so the industry mostly still uses them despite not needing to. I've never been able to figure out why, nor have other lawyers I've asked who should be in a position to know
One obvious way in which EULA's (including "site" licenses and CALs) don't really make much sense is where the owner is a corporate entity.
No doubt there were some shows that got canned deservedly. In other cases, however, the mis-handling of the show by SciFi channel was a major factor in causing audience dislike. The extent of mis-handling suggests that the scheduling decision-makers lacked any understanding of SciFi, and were likely completely alienated by it. Why else would they do things which were almost certain to decrease audiences?
One example is Lexx, a pretty good series if you get it on DVD. In its "wisdom", the SciFi channel decided not to show the first season at all [*]. This guaranteed that the audience would be a bit mystified, as the first season provided the context for subsequent seasons, and was excellent in itself. The SciFi channel then aired the second season shows out of their intended sequence. Audience confusion was complete, and the series bombed in North America, largely due to the actions of the SciFi channel morons.
Thing is that there are many examples and not just with one channel. You'd think it would be obvious that showing episodes out of order and on an irregular schedule would tend to discourage an audience. Yet somehow there never appears to be a "learning from mistakes"...
They changed it without writing the simplest of gui configurable dialog to set it (or set it back). Instead you had to work around the default configuration with gnome's own command line configuration hacking.
This wasn't the only thing changed without a simple way to revert to the previous behavior. Also notable was GDM defaulting to listing all users.Something which might be useful when you have 3 years, is rather cumbersome with 30 and utterly daft when you have 300 (or more).
Then in the same breath you mention that Ubuntu is a "desktop" distro, meant for the masses while your CEO then takes the time to lambast the complaining user base that "free doesn't mean you get what you want, you get what we want".
The interesting thing is that Ubuntu offer "desktop" and "server" distributions. But the "server" version has many of the same quirks as the "desktop" even ones which make little sense for a server.
Is it just me or is it actually completely insane to arbitrarily change the clock because we don't like when the sun comes up? It's the rotation of the earth. Why don't we just rotate the clock on the wall by 30 degrees?
I could make a monster list of reasons this is a bad idea in general, but it's like talking to a wall, or explaining an obvious joke. DST _WAS_ an obvious joke until some numbskull politician decided to take it seriously.
When the idea was thought up there were probably far fewer clocks than there were people. As opposed to now where it's typically several per person.
Not at all. One of the issues with this change is it is largely driven by the English outlook - while it's understandable in terms of population distribution, it means that regions which are further north and west suffer quite seriously in terms of daylight hours. For example, sunrise in N. Ireland is typically about 40 to 45 minutes later than London in winter.
Most of Ireland actually belongs in the GMT -1 timezone.
Actually, in the programmers' world, we see a lot of systems costing more because of this : Because DST regulations change almost every year (and I am not talking about leap seconds) the only away to have an accurate local time on a device is to have either regular maintenance or to link the device on internet to receive updates (and add some work to ensure the security of this, which can cost a lot on critical systems).
There are many clocks and watches which can only be changed manually. If anything there appear to be more and more such machines each year. Without any standard way of adjustment. Also human body clocks can't be adjusted so easily....
IMEI identifies the phone, not the SIM. You can not lock the IMEI to the carrier and even if you could, it wouldn't have anything to do with using SIM.
The network sees both the IMEI and the SIM ID. It's quite possible for the network to say "I don't like that IMEI or that IMEI/SIM combination."
Would it not have been fairly simple to put in some sort of security that basically warned when an authorized SIM was being used outside what should have been a fixed location?
Even simpler to just bar voice (and data if you are using SMS) calls
Hell for that matter wouldnt a simple alarm when the sim was removed been sufficient.
If the system uses data have it send a status signal every so often, not getting this means you need to send a crew out. If the last status messages wern't along the lines of "No mains, battery critical" it's likely that something major has gone wrong with the control unit.
The cost of GSM data isn't very high when all you're sending is "help I'm not working correctly". Since the link serves no other purpose, four bytes should be enough to send a basic diagnostic code.
With 160 bytes being able to send some quite extensive diagnostics. One cheap way to do things would be to use prepaid SIMS which will at most have enough credit to send 5-10 texts.
"You can produce modified traffic lights that can do all this cool stuff, but then you can't lock the sim cards to that particular bit of proprietary hardware? Whiiiiiffffffff"
But the "change the calling plan" idea could be done quickly after the fact and save the rest of their installed base, that's even easier.
Even if the installers did not record which SIM goes with which IMEI the network will have this information.
You would think it would be a no-brainer to have the SIM cards on some sort of custom phone plan which only allows calls to a fixed set of numbers, though.
Presumably that was why the crooks initially only took a few. Then came back when they had checked that they could use the SIMs. Having each SIM tied to the IMEI of the modem would also have been a good idea.
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Sounds like a much more compelling reason to procure some of this open source software I've been hearing about. Not only can I get it for free, but I can be sure it was never pirated.
Actually it can be pirated. Most easily by a proprietary software company. But even the MPAA managed to do it.
The problem is the IP clauses in it. Any company with a reasonable legal department has already made even the installation of a GPLv3 package a fireable offense.
It's an odd definition of "reasonable legal department" which dosn't know that the GPL is explicitally not an EULA and only becomes relevent if you wish to change the software or distribute it to third parties. Most companies are simply not in the business of altering/distributing software.
Indeed such legal departments might be better employed looking at the sorts of things which come with proprietary software, including EULAs. Since these are relevent to installation/execution of software.
V3 has all sorts of automatic grants of patent rights in it. Its toxic to any company trying to even maintain a defensive IP portfolio.
Only a minority of companies hold parents at all and it's probably a minority of these who "V3 has all sorts of automatic grants of patent rights in it. Its toxic to any company trying to even maintain a defensive IP portfolio". To the vast majority this is about as relevent as knowing the rules for employing commercial airline pilots...
That's an interesting suggestion. SSL without authentication (i.e., with self-signed certificates), while vulnerable to MITM, is certainly better than no SSL at all.
The current system of "authentication" is vulnerable to such attacks. Since in essence things come down to complete trust of a third party CA.
No, all the FOSS guys have said 'if has , lets see it'.
Even if there was a match you'd still need to show that the proprietary code hadn't been taken from a published source. Including an open source project.
With patents, it's all about protecting a concept for which anyone who implements has to be able to use the patent or they can be sued.
Including cases of "independent invention". Even though these would tend to indicate that the patent should be voided.
It also dosn't tend to help that patents can be written in the most obfuscated and ambiguous language possible.
RAND doesn't work for FLOSS projects because "reasonable" is in terms of "reasonable fee" and non-discriminatory is "same price to all comers" so while it didn't present a barrier to entry when it was dreamed up, it does to FLOSS where a fee is never charged.
Dosn't FLOSS predate RAND by some considerable time, rather than the other way around. Anyway there's no problem so long as the price is zero (in any currency you care to name.)
The hysteria right now is starting to remind me of Three Mile Island. The press got their hands on an EPA report that there had been minute amounts of radioactivity above normal levels found in the local milk. What followed was almost a witch hunt, with calls for milk to be pulled off the shelves, school officials being publicly hounded and berated for "poisoning" schoolkids by feeding it to them at lunch, etc. All this for amounts of radiation a tiny fraction of what you would get from eating a banana, and almost completely avoidable with iodine tablets.
:)
Since "iodine" tablets are potassium iodide they'd probably be effective potassium 40 in bananas
Actually, I suspect more people are going to be harmed by all the exhaust from all the gas and wood heating being used in evacuation centers in lieu of electric heating, than from this nuclear accident. But death by breathing in soot is not as sexy as death by radiation, so the press isn't going to report that.
As well as the tens of thousands of people killed by the earthquake and tsunami. Due to such things as drowning and having buildings collapse. There are also fires in chemical and industrial plants. Yet little fuss has been made about toxic fumes and smoke from such sites.
Destroying the reactors beyond repair. Turning to seawater cooling means they have given up all hope of salvaging the reactors in a working state, and will settle for just non-exploding.
One of the reactors was due to be shut down for good in a couple of weeks. Most likely the other two damaged reactors are BER.
A radical policy would be too allow one unit to keep running if the plant was expected to lose mains and diesel. After all, we have seen they do not shut down quickly enough to prevent problems.
Actually nuclear reactors can shut down very quickly, within a matter of seconds. The problem is then you still need cooling to deal with heat produced by radioactive decay.
But I doubt these plants are set up to power themselves anyway. I seem to recall they depend on the grid to make it all work.
Probably more a case even one reactor (and one generator) produces too much power. Without a connection to the power grid there is nowhere for that energy to go.
But actually the cooling diesels worked fine until the tsunami hit the plant. That caused the diesels to stop working and hence the failure of the cooling system.
Piston engines tend to break when water gets inside. Diesel engines being especially vulnerable to "hydrolock" due to their high compression ratio. Also "stop working" in this case tends to mean "requires complete engine rebuild before there is any chance of working again".
The rule is based on people who use cell phones tend to get back into the car, sliding themselves across the seat and charging themselves with static electricity as they do so. That *can* (and has) lead to fires.
The simple solution is pumps where you must hold down a trigger for the fuel to flow...
Alcohol and tobacco are legalised and taxed. If neither of them are hard drugs, I don't know what is.
IIRC nicotine is actually more addictive than opiates (it's certainly more toxic)
Before we prohibited heroin in this country (UK), there were only about 500 addicts in the whole country, and they could still live their lives with a reasonable amount of normality.
This tends to be the case with people addicted to legal drugs. Including perscription only drugs.
Prohibition came, and now 50,000 risk death from adulterated doses of uncertain strength and are forced by prohibitionists to steal or sell themselves to pay black-market prices.
Even highly taxed legal drugs would be likely to be considerably cheaper than those from any kind of black market.
Prohibition is necessary in the case of hard drugs. Its true that we need to attack it from all angles, but legalization and taxation of most of the illegal drugs would be a societal disaster the scale of which we have never seen.
If you look at history the opposite is true. Prohibition of alcohol in the US something of a disaster. Also remember that prohibition is very recent, yet society didn't collapse in the several thousand years before someone came up with the idea.
The wait lines for electronic books is still insanely long - for popular books, there are hundreds of people waiting to be able to check them out.
It's especially insane when you consider how much extra work is needed to make an e-"book" emulate a physical book. Something which by default is simply a file easily copied and transfered between different media.
It wasn't until several years after the 1976 Copyright Act (which was a major revision of the law, replacing the 1909 Act, and is still what we use today) that the government finally worked out how it wanted to handle software copyrights. Section 117 of the Copyright Act was enacted, and it basically says that if you own a copy of a computer program, you have a right to make such copies and modifications as are necessary in order to make it run, and you have the right to make backup copies for your own use, provided that you don't keep the backups if you don't keep the original. (N.B. however that there are still serious problems with the intersection of computers and copyright, mainly involving the reproduction right, the inescapable fact that all computers copy things incessantly just in order to function, and the strict liability nature of civil copyright infringement)
Thus, the need for a license for ordinary users is obviated. Copies could be sold outright without preventing users from lawfully doing what they need to, and without jeopardizing the rights of the developers or publishers. Only more complex situations -- site licenses, distributing modified copies as per the GPL, etc. -- actually require licenses.
The GPL example isn't complex, it's simple. Considerably less complex than just about anything you find with proprietary software.
However, end user licenses are traditional, apparently, so the industry mostly still uses them despite not needing to. I've never been able to figure out why, nor have other lawyers I've asked who should be in a position to know
One obvious way in which EULA's (including "site" licenses and CALs) don't really make much sense is where the owner is a corporate entity.
No doubt there were some shows that got canned deservedly. In other cases, however, the mis-handling of the show by SciFi channel was a major factor in causing audience dislike. The extent of mis-handling suggests that the scheduling decision-makers lacked any understanding of SciFi, and were likely completely alienated by it. Why else would they do things which were almost certain to decrease audiences?
One example is Lexx, a pretty good series if you get it on DVD. In its "wisdom", the SciFi channel decided not to show the first season at all [*]. This guaranteed that the audience would be a bit mystified, as the first season provided the context for subsequent seasons, and was excellent in itself. The SciFi channel then aired the second season shows out of their intended sequence. Audience confusion was complete, and the series bombed in North America, largely due to the actions of the SciFi channel morons.
Thing is that there are many examples and not just with one channel. You'd think it would be obvious that showing episodes out of order and on an irregular schedule would tend to discourage an audience. Yet somehow there never appears to be a "learning from mistakes"...
They changed it without writing the simplest of gui configurable dialog to set it (or set it back). Instead you had to work around the default configuration with gnome's own command line configuration hacking.
This wasn't the only thing changed without a simple way to revert to the previous behavior. Also notable was GDM defaulting to listing all users.Something which might be useful when you have 3 years, is rather cumbersome with 30 and utterly daft when you have 300 (or more).
Then in the same breath you mention that Ubuntu is a "desktop" distro, meant for the masses while your CEO then takes the time to lambast the complaining user base that "free doesn't mean you get what you want, you get what we want".
The interesting thing is that Ubuntu offer "desktop" and "server" distributions. But the "server" version has many of the same quirks as the "desktop" even ones which make little sense for a server.
Is it just me or is it actually completely insane to arbitrarily change the clock because we don't like when the sun comes up? It's the rotation of the earth. Why don't we just rotate the clock on the wall by 30 degrees? I could make a monster list of reasons this is a bad idea in general, but it's like talking to a wall, or explaining an obvious joke. DST _WAS_ an obvious joke until some numbskull politician decided to take it seriously.
When the idea was thought up there were probably far fewer clocks than there were people. As opposed to now where it's typically several per person.
Not at all. One of the issues with this change is it is largely driven by the English outlook - while it's understandable in terms of population distribution, it means that regions which are further north and west suffer quite seriously in terms of daylight hours. For example, sunrise in N. Ireland is typically about 40 to 45 minutes later than London in winter.
Most of Ireland actually belongs in the GMT -1 timezone.
Actually, in the programmers' world, we see a lot of systems costing more because of this : Because DST regulations change almost every year (and I am not talking about leap seconds) the only away to have an accurate local time on a device is to have either regular maintenance or to link the device on internet to receive updates (and add some work to ensure the security of this, which can cost a lot on critical systems).
There are many clocks and watches which can only be changed manually. If anything there appear to be more and more such machines each year. Without any standard way of adjustment. Also human body clocks can't be adjusted so easily....
IMEI identifies the phone, not the SIM. You can not lock the IMEI to the carrier and even if you could, it wouldn't have anything to do with using SIM.
The network sees both the IMEI and the SIM ID. It's quite possible for the network to say "I don't like that IMEI or that IMEI/SIM combination."
Would it not have been fairly simple to put in some sort of security that basically warned when an authorized SIM was being used outside what should have been a fixed location?
Even simpler to just bar voice (and data if you are using SMS) calls
Hell for that matter wouldnt a simple alarm when the sim was removed been sufficient.
If the system uses data have it send a status signal every so often, not getting this means you need to send a crew out. If the last status messages wern't along the lines of "No mains, battery critical" it's likely that something major has gone wrong with the control unit.
The cost of GSM data isn't very high when all you're sending is "help I'm not working correctly". Since the link serves no other purpose, four bytes should be enough to send a basic diagnostic code.
With 160 bytes being able to send some quite extensive diagnostics.
One cheap way to do things would be to use prepaid SIMS which will at most have enough credit to send 5-10 texts.
"You can produce modified traffic lights that can do all this cool stuff, but then you can't lock the sim cards to that particular bit of proprietary hardware? Whiiiiiffffffff"
But the "change the calling plan" idea could be done quickly after the fact and save the rest of their installed base, that's even easier.
Even if the installers did not record which SIM goes with which IMEI the network will have this information.
You would think it would be a no-brainer to have the SIM cards on some sort of custom phone plan which only allows calls to a fixed set of numbers, though.
Presumably that was why the crooks initially only took a few. Then came back when they had checked that they could use the SIMs. Having each SIM tied to the IMEI of the modem would also have been a good idea.
Good way to frighten old timers: run you chips in a UV eraser.
The article does not mention the frequencies of light which the device uses to generate electricity.