Another factor is that a criminal jury must usually be unanimous, although I think some jurisdictions recognize that even kooks have the right to sit on a jury so they'll convict on less than unanimous votes.
In contrast, I think many civil juries can decide a case with simple 2/3 or 3/4 majority.
You know the joke about how "I am firm, you are stubborn, and he's a flaming *******"?
Linux/Unix is the same thing. To most people, Linux and Unix are synonymous because they have the same architectural structure, same POSIX libraries, same POSIX tools, etc. Does it run X? Does it run vi? Do you have a command shell somewhere that takes lots of cryptic commands? Then it's Unix.
Even the vast majority of developers will not see a significant difference in the way they develop code for a Linux vs. "Unix" system. A few files are in a different place, a few commands have "odd" flags, but overall it's about as much difference as between Dallas and New York, vs. New York and New Dehli. With the common use of GNU tools, there's much less perceived difference between Linux and *BSD than Solaris and HP/UX (or AIX!)
But in the same way that many French Canadians can't forgive the British Canadian majority for a defeat hundreds of years ago (going as far as putting "I Remember!" on their the car license plates) we have a few tormented souls who want to make sure that we never, ever, forget the fact that the Linux source tree can't list three pages of "begats" that lead back to King Davi... sorry, back to the original AT&T source.
Is there a real difference? Yes, but the number of people who actually have to worry about them will probably fit into a small room. For the rest of us, the only real difference is a group that's coming across as increasingly bitter that they have finally achieved the Holy Grail of "Unix" Integration only as they band together to fight the Linux intruder... and they *really* hate to be told that this constant "Linux isn't Unix, nah nah nah" harping is exactly the childish mindset that lead to Unix fragmentation in the first place. This is how they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory a decade ago, and many of us really don't want to see a repeat of it.
I know one of the defining characteristics of geeks is great precision in speech, but it's time for everyone to remember the big picture. We're in the game show of life and one side has the MS family (daddy W2K, Mom Win98, insane child WinCE) and the other side has the Unix family (daddy AT&T, brother *BSD and adopted brother Linux), and it only helps MS when the Unix family's first response to a question is to whip out a gun and commit fraticide.
Debian *releases* tend to come out at a glacial pace (but still at a faster pace than most other OSes - 1 year vs. 3 for MS (95, 98, 01)), but Debian *security patches* appear within hours of the problem being reported on Bugtraq, CERT, etc.
For political reasons, I considered getting a MSCE about a year ago. In the course of that, I read a substantial amount of the O'Reilly books (which I highly recommend) and agreed with the claims that:
- about 1/3 of the MSCE is stuff that would usually be handled by technicians in any real "engineering" discipline. We still need to know about limitations on cable lengths and the like, but knowing that makes you a "network engineer" no more than being able to change the oil in your car makes you a "engine engineer" ready for an exciting new career in Detroit or Seattle (Boeing).
- about 1/3 of the exam is unabashed MS advertising. Microsoft not only has the best protocols, they're the fastest and they'll even find you a date for Saturday. Use the outdated, flawed protocols used by Unix, Novell, Apple, or others and you'll be shunned by friends, rejected by lovers, and have your car repossessed.
- the rest of the exam actually contains "useful" information. Use this screen to change this value. Use that screen to change the other value. And remember to reboot the system every time you modify your system. Again, I was left with the feeling that the guy in those late-night ads who is thrilled by the CAD system somehow thinks it makes him qualified to design skyscrapers, mile-long suspension bridges, etc.
The O'Reilly MSCE books *are* good references for using Windows systems, but only because I already have a good grasp of the concepts. But the idea that anyone could demonstrate any skill beyond "technician" via that exam is a sick joke.
The worst thing is when you find yourself simplifying some data structure so that you won't confuse someone who thought his freshmen "algorithms" class was the sum total of human knowledge of the field.
On the other hand, I've known a few old geezers (no other word for it, even though they were young) who insisted that every meaningful discovery in computer science was made by 1982. Nothing since then - Red-Black trees, splay trees, the astoundishing advances in solving matrix equations, are worth learning or using.
I assume that you were tweaking the pitiful instructions from the teacher, and aren't really the sad consequences of a biology experiment demostrating the hazards of siblings having unprotected sex.
So, tell us, how *do* you write a recursive bubble sort? The only thing I can think of is replacing the iteration with tail recursion -- and that code should have been pretty clean even though the runtime performance would suck bigtime.
I'm in the camp that says the first programming class (for programmers, not people who just need a quick exposure to the subject) should be done on the slowest, dumbest system you can find. E.g., the 386/40 I have in the closet.
The reason for this is it forces you to focus on the fundamentals. What are your data structures? How to you manipulate them? How do you recognize a fast algorithm vs a slow one?
On the 500 MHz GUI with a fancy development environment, you don't have a chance of learning this -- there's too else going on.
As a professional, you need to worry about *everything*. But a student needs to focus on the fundamentals... and it's far easier to make a lasting impression by demonstrating the power of the correct algorithm or data structure with the slower hardware. E.g., code both a quick sort and bubble sort, then run the data on a set of data 20 times larger than used for testing. The quick sort finishes during the class period. The bubble sort is still running when students return to class the next day. These students will *know* that you can't just throw faster hardware at the problem -- the students can take the software home and run it on their 500 MHz P-IIIs... and see that the problem *always* occurs as the problem gets larger.
On your other question, about teacher credentials... It would be nice, but the official policy of the "education establishment" is that a teacher is a teacher not because of personal knowledge of the field - he's a teacher because he has a firm command of pedagogical principals and a cheat sheet that keeps him just ahead of the class. It's not unreasonable for the middle and bottom of the bell curve, but it prevents students with a natural aptitude (or independent knowledge) from developing their skills.
I don't know of any solution to this. I jumped straight from my junior year in high school to college - my school didn't have AP credits and I would have had independent study courses for five of my six classes. That was over twenty years ago, so don't be too confident that *your* kid will have it any better.
Post her email address and let us all send her a brief message, complete with a copy of the GPL (or better yet, all common open licenses) and representative code.
When the school's mail server (or her personal account) collapses under thousands of messages containing tens of megabytes, the situation <b>will</b> change. But probably not to your advantage.:-)
Unfortunately, the real question is the credentials of your teacher. Most teacher unions are extremely strong, and extremely exclusionary. (E.g., you have a master's degree and 20 years experience and you want to help out? Sorry, but the school system (and teacher's union) assert you are unqualified to teach the subject matter - but the 21-year-old who just got her education BS *is* qualified to teach the material. A few states are experimenting with "fast track" certification of domain experts, but they're the exception.)
Could the teacher have had strong CS exposure in college? It's possible, but the colleges of Education and Engineering tend to have very little overlap. Any C. Ed class using computers will focus on using them as teaching aids, not software development models. At most, the teacher might have had a year of "CS 101" -- and be considered an expert by her teaching peers.
Could the teacher have gotten her education credentials, worked in industry, then returned to the classroom? It's possible, but unlikely due to fiscal reality. An experienced coder will probably earn twice what most teacher makes. An experienced coder with technical leadership or management experience (who will actually be dealing with software licenses professionally) will make far more than most teachers. A few people will earn a nest egg then return to their first love, but software salaries aren't *that* high. (Stock options change that slightly, but it's still the exception.)
In other words, the teacher would probably be dismissed as a flake by any working software developer. This is why many of us have qualms about collegiate CS programs - and outright hostility towards secondary CS programs. If you're lucky, you'll learn the skills appropriate to a 70's era IBM 370 programmer - and you'll know it's a 30-year-old development model which is *not* followed today. More likely, you'll get a hodge-podge which makes no sense but makes it *far* harder for you to learn how software development is actually done.
Let's put this education argument in perspective. I've seen this argument before, and as I recall the educational norms of the period you refer to (mid-18th Century to mid-19th Century, ending with the contemporary introduction of the telegraph, railroad and steamship) include:
<ul> <li>High schools either did not exist, or were a weird idea out of the rebellious American colonies. The elite had private tutors, but the vast majority of the public learned from on the job. BTW, adolescence and even "childhood" are modern concepts. Even a 6-year-old can work in the field pulling weeds, etc. <li>In the 19th Century, when universal public schooling was becoming widespread most working people dropped out by the 8th grade. Among blue collar urban workers and rural residents a 4th grade education wasn't uncommon. <li>A typical 12th grade education included a strong emphasis on the classics - Latin and Greek, with an extensive reading of the classics in their native language. Don't believe me? - look up the history of the Kansas City public schools sometime. <li>Even "professionals" often had shockingly modest backgrounds, in modern eyes. A country doctor might not even have a high school degree, and no collegiate experience outside of "medical school." Don't forget that this period predates not only drug therapy (which requires a solid foundation of organic chemistry), it predates the introduction of "germ theory." A modern boy scout with a "first aid" merit badge knows more about medicine than most of these doctors... with the notable exception of practical experience. <li>A college degree was a mark of extremely priviledged background. There were no college majors as we know them today - everyone studied everything. (Hence the term "university".) Of course, to them "everything" meant more Classics, modern theology, and maybe an incidental class or two to cover everything that happened in the past 1500 years. IIRC the first College of Engineering wasn't founded until well into the Industrial Revolution -- definitely after the era of rapid transcontinental communications. <li>Finally, take a close look at the educational credentials of our modern heros. Charles Darwin was a professor of theology - IIRC the only college degree granted in England at the time he was a student. I'm not so sure about James Watt, but again I'm sure it was primarily, if not exclusively, classical and Christian theologian. </ul>
And never forget that this period was far more classist than ours. There were no "self-made men" - most other business owners would shun someone without the proper background regardless of the merits of their business offer.
In this environment, <b>of course</b> your average business correspondence would shame modern authors. However, if you make this a fair fight and compare the top 2% of the population you'll find that our ancestors come across as one trick ponies. They could write better, but we are better at communicating to the masses. They would have a better understanding of classical music, painting and sculpture, but we have a better understanding of other culture's art and abstract art. The know Christian theology... and why everyone else is going to Hell. We have an awareness, at some basic level, of other theologies. Their natural science is laughable - the modern 2% reads Scientific American, a magazine which wasn't founded until after the end of the period your refer to.
Overall, I think I prefer generalists who occasionally have a hard time articulating their ideas than one-trick ponies whose primary skill, in hindsite, was in running the European Colonial system.
X is a *lot* more than a "graphical shell." Consider the fact that essentially all graphical display on Linux (and Unix and *BSD) systems use X. Alternatives exist (SVGA, GGI), but few applications use them.
Anyway, under trademark law the real issue is if the names will cause any reasonable person to be confused. Nobody will confuse United Airlines and United Van Lines, but "X programming" suddenly means both X Windows programming and X-Box programming. Microsoft will undoubtably avoid it, but people writing code for the X-Box will naturally refer to it as "X Windows" programming, since it's Windows programming for the X-Box platform.
This isn't an abstract worry - one of my professional hats is X/Motif programming and I know that a lot of technical recruiters already confuse "X Windows" and "[MS] Windows." This new platform will only make it worse.
All of this ignores the fact that the law doesn't make the fine distinctions you assume. To the lawyers, computers are computers are computers, so (IIRC) it's infringement to have similar names on both hardward and software. I believe that Chris Carter could even make a valid claim that "X-Box, the entertainment device" conflicts with "X-Files, the entertainment programming" because of the likely confusion if/when approached another vendor for an X-Files game.
It sounds like a joke, but it's not. I had assumed that the "X" in "X-box" was a mere placeholder. If it is the actual product name, there will be a *lot* of confusion between X Windows and "games" programming in 2002.
Microsoft has already preempted the term "Windows." Even in technical circles, refering to "MS Windows" elicits strange looks as most of the people wonder what other type of "windows" exist. Now they're trying to equate "X" with games programming - something you would never want associated with your mission critical backbone.
The simple fact is that "Windows" is a generic term which the X Consortium didn't challenge at the time -- but which Microsoft has been ruthless in defending as its own since then. Now Microsoft is trying to "embrace and extend" "X" with its own meaning. Given its history, I have no doubt they will vigorously prosecute anyone who tries to introduce "new" display software which includes the letter "X" but doesn't relate to their gaming software.
So What the Fsck are we supposed to call our display manager? In 2003, are we supposed to tell people that we run "SYSTEM", since Microsoft will sue into nonexistence anyone who uses the words "X" or "Windows"?! Or do we just go with "Version 11"?!
It sounds like a joke, but given Microsoft's legal history we can't laugh until after MS announces a different name for the product, its display system, etc. Because of history, neither the X Consortium or our community can easily dismiss the continued use of "X" as a mere coincidence. The legal trademark holder *must* ask Microsoft to find a different name since the proposed name is likely to cause massive confusion among the public and (non-Unix-centric) technical communities.
Many of us would argue that you are "doing it right" now - by giving him some freedom but checking up on him.
Think about it - what is the biggest problems teenagers (and many adults) face? Impulse control. You don't want a kid who doesn't drink because the liquor cabinet is locked, you want one who doesn't drink because he fears that so you find out later and punish him. He becomes an adult who doesn't overindulge because of awareness of the consequences of his actions. Ditto unsafe sex (not doing it for fear of the consequences, not because of lack of opportunity), drug use, dangerous driving habits, etc.
Sure, this is more work than letting some censorware handle the chore, BUT IT'S YOUR FSCKING JOB AS A PARENT. If you weren't willing to do the time, you should have worn a party hat or kept it in your pants 14 years ago!!!
Am I arguing that censorware is *never* appropriate? No - two good examples are preventing *accidental* exposure to very young children (or easily offended adults), and preventing deliberate exposure by teenagers who are unusually immature and have not developed *any* self-restraint. If you've only caught your kid a few times, it sounds like he's developing healthy self-control and it's now your job to help him develop it further. Unless he's the first exception in a few thousand years, he *will* be tempted and he *will* fail -- and your job as a parent (IMHO) is to set up situations where he can learn "how far is too far" safely. Would you rather he occasionally be goaded into loading a porn site by a friend... or be goaded into trying a couple puffs or dangerous sex by that friend?
(Hint: before you answer that watch the PBS episode on the gonorrhea epidemic in an upscale Georgia suburb... and the extreme frustration at the public health officials at their inability to get the parents to face the fact that *they* - not MTV, not movies, not rock stars, but indifferent parents who were too busy to listen to their children - were the reason why their little darlings the same age as your son were having orgies with three-ways, four-ways, unprotected anal sex, etc.)
A lot of people are reacting to MS's "breaking" yet another standard, and don't understand the real problem that MS is trying to solve.
In a nutshell, Kerberos is a *network* authentication mechanism, not a system authentication mechanism. That means that when John Smith sits down at his terminal and acquires a Kerberos ticket, it's validated against a central site *with no cross-reference to local information.*
In an ideal world, the principal name and local user name would be identical. The local system could then look up the principal name in its local user database and acquire user information from/etc/passwd and/etc/groups, or their local equivalents. In the real world, this isn't always possible but many sites use a (standard?) secondary mechanism that maps Kerberos principals to local user names, and again you acquire user information from/etc/passwd and/etc/group.
Other alternatives are getting that information out of NIS, LDAP, etc., or Kerberos-enhanced versions of the same if they're paranoid about someone trying to spoof that information.
(AFAIK) what MS did with W2Kerberos is put the equivalence of/etc/passwd and/etc/group information into the "authorization" field. That's unusual, but not inappropriate -- and arguably an elegant solution to the crippled NT environment.
However, for reasons that make no sense to anyone in this reality they decided to digitally sign that information. From a security standpoint, this is utterly insane - Kerberos tickets already use strong encryption and session keys, so there's nothing to be gained by adding an additional layer of encryption to the payload. Furthermore, the KDC should be physically and electronically secured, so it should not be a significant risk to maintain unsigned user authority information on the KDC in plaintext. Assuming you don't simply colocate those services, of course!
However, digitally signing that data and failing to disclose the details is an excellent way to control market share, if the user community doesn't rip their head off for this trick. In this case it's a possibility since the sites that use Kerberos are more security-aware than your average site, and they might not be willing to compromise their security by maintaining two realms (or worse, replacing their Unix KDCs with Windows KDCs).
The same thing can be said of all witness evidence, audio- and video-taped evidence, etc.
In all of these cases you look for messages (or items) that refer to other things that are 1) verifiable, and 2) not widely known. The email message could still be forged, but it's far less likely. Do that with hundreds or thousands of messages and the "reasonable persons" on the jury will decide that the messages must be legitimate.
The defense can still assert that some messages were forged, of course, but if the prosecution/plantiff believes it's legitimate it will be presented to the jury as a "question of fact."
[It is legal swing a bat wildly...] but it becomes illegal at your nose....
Not quite. (IANAL, but) it is a crime ("menacing") the instant you present a credible threat of intentionally striking the other person with the bat.
This has some pretty deep consequences. If you swing the bat at me, I don't have to wait until the bat connects before acting in self-defense. This applies even if you're "spoofing" me and I misinterpret the facts in the fraction of a second between seeing a fast-moving bat and my response. Since a baseball bat to the head is "lethal force," in most jurisdictions I have the right *to kill you* in self-defense. In these cases it won't even matter that the bat is a hollow plastic toy, if I have no reasonable way to know this. (This could happen if you come up on me from behind.)
On a related note, every so often you hear about some teen killed while branishing an unloaded weapon - or even a realistic toy. They seem to think that there is some legal distinction if the weapon is unloaded (or unreal). They're wrong - and just as in the case of the bat the victim isn't forced to wait until the instant the bullet strikes his skull before he can act. In many jurisdictions merely displaying possession of a gun constitutes use of lethal force - and the other person is legally able to use lethal counterforce to remove himself from that situation. People might be able to outrun bats and knives, but not guns, and the only sure way for most people to disarm someone with a gun is to kill them first. Remember that next time some kids complain that The Man has no sense of humor about them driving down the street while waving (realistic) toy guns out the window. That actually happened here, a few years ago!
What you quoted is actually a misquote a First Amendment "protected speech" argument. Your speech might offend me (and others), but it doesn't cause us harm in the same way that a punch in the nose does. So we have to live to learn with objectionable speech, not with idiots who wildly swing their fist (or bats!) around others.
Back on point, this is totally irrelevant. Nobody said that L0phtCrack was intrinisically illegal to possess, they said that it was a "criminal tool" used while commiting criminal acts. That's no different from calling a hammer a "criminal tool" because it was used to break car windows, a screwdriver a "criminal tool" because it was used to break the lock in the steering column, etc.
They're mini-CDs, not full-sized CDs. CD media reads from the inner tracks outwards, so as long as the "disc" is balanced you could use any shape.
(Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.)
Kerberos is also available for both Red Hat and Debian. Debian has at least three implementations - two European implementations are on non-US, and I've packaged MIT Kerberos 5. (Still no word on when MIT will drop the export nag page, unfortunately.)
OpenSSH is still an excellent choice, but not because it alone supports Kerberos.
two-party vs. three-party authentication
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Any list, no matter how short, should include a reference to two-party vs. three-party authentication.
SSH and (IIRC) IPsec use two-party authentication. That means anyone can talk to anyone else, but as another article pointed out it also opens the door to "man-in-the-middle" attacks.
Kerberos, digital-certificates and some government sponsored systems use three-party authentication. This puts some limitations on your use, but these are generally reasonable restrictions if you think about it. (E.g., do you really want John Cracker to be able to remote mount your files?) Third-party authentication got a bad rep after some clumsy government posturing with the clipper chip, but it seems that a lot of people lost track of the many places where it's appropriate.
IANAL, but I *do* know that civil disobedience has a very specific definition.
<b>It does *not* apply to civil contracts - such as the GPL.</b>
<b>It does *not* allow you to harm others in any significant manner.</b> You may cause a minor inconvenience by a sit in, for instance, but not by punching somebody in the nose.
Finally, <b>civil disobedience *requires* that you be willing to pay the full legal price for your actions.</b> You refuse to sit in the back of the bus? Fine - but be prepared to sit in jail as well. You think the draft is immoral? Fine, but be prepared to send the next year or two in prison, not Canada.
These rules sound strict - and they are - but that's to prevent the common crook from wrapping his actions in the flag. Even if we ignore the fact that this is a civil, not criminal, case, let's ask some other questions. Is Slade being forced to use the GPL software? No. Is Slade being prohibited from developing his own software free of the GPL "encumbered" code? No.
No, Debian stable = proven packages. It may not be sexy, but it means you aren't constantly mucking with the system while others are muttering that maybe they should go back to good old reliable MS Windows.
And if you really want to run the cutting edge, you can always run unstable.
"Quantum" means that the step is indivisible, not that it's large or small.
Stairs have quantum steps of about 8". My old analog radio receiver had a continuous tuning circuit, but my digital radio receiver has quantum steps of 200 kHz (iirc).
The dictionary definition of "quantum leap" makes sense in that it describes a discontinuous change. By their nature, discontinuous changes are abrupt and can't be broken down into smaller steps. The "dramatic advance" follows from the fact that most human-scale continuous changes are actually the result of many small discrete changes, so they're drawing a distinction by specifying this change is large.
That categorization is required *because* the LDP is a documentation effort. The results should be usable on web servers, printed material, PDAs, and the Goodyear Blimp if required.
Documents written in HTML will remain in HTML. Documents written in TeX will convert to text and postscript, but not info format (modulo the use of texinfo macros, of course).
LinuxDoc and DocBook can be a real pain, but these formats are designed to be sufficiently abstract that the documents can be converted to any reasonable format. That means it's far more likely that a HOWTO will be maintained for the indefinite future, while a GUIDE may be dropped once the author moves to a new format himself.
My strategy has been to donate what I saved in commercial software fees. I *do* recall the days when we paid big bucks for crappy software... and not just because the PHB insisted on a particular vendor.
The problem with this strategy is that the license fees have gotten obscene. My Linux systems aren't comparable to a $200 personal Windows seat, they're equivalent to a $10,000+ Windows NT/2K system with multiple CALs, enterprise web, ftp and database servers, etc. Can I justify writing a donation check larger than the cost of my hardware? Can I justify it when I'm also donating my effort to maintain OSS applications?
On the other hand, employers should definitely be evaluating using a "matching fund" approach to OSS. E.g., if they choose Apache over IIS they should cut a check to Apache, or another OSS project. Even ten cents on the dollar will go a *long* way towards paying lawyer fees, bandwidth and storage, travel expenses, etc.
It's even a sound decision when looking at the bottom line. Donating $1000 to Apache is still far cheaper than the cost of using their own staff to maintain and extend Apache themselves.
Then stop whining and start writing!
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Giving Back
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You may find this difficult to believe, but we *know* that newbie documentation is a big problem. But we also know that it's impossible for someone with 20 years of Unix experience to write that documentation because we've long since forgotten the process we went through back then.
Even if we do recall what we went through, our assumptions were very different. I used punch cards in college, and the card reader (I was told) transmitted the job to another university 100 miles away for processing. Each run cost "money" and after maybe 25 tries we had to ask the professor for more computer time. In graduate school I got *unlimited* access to a VT-100 which was connected to a BSD-4 system (not *BSD. *Real* BSD that ran on a VAX 11/750 in its own shrine room with picture windows to impress the underclassmen.) I thought I had died and gone to heaven... and I didn't work with a GUI display for almost a decade afterwards.
Do you think I have any chance of writing useful "newbie" documentation? Get real. But *you* know what assumptions a newbie - or at least *some* newbies - bring with them when they try out Linux. You know what questions they will ask -- and what type of information is useful to them.
So *you* should be writing the newbie documentation. You might not think you can do much, but even a list of the 50 things you wish someone told you a few months ago might be enough to make it much easier for the next person.
It's important to note that that's how I write my HOWTOs. I don't write them for Joe Q. Random, I write them to remind me what I did 6 months later. If I think they're general enough, and there's not already a HOWTO out there, I'll toss them up on my web site. If I get enough feedback to show that others find it useful, I'll also send it to the LDP.
This is enforced by following the (unofficial) US Nuclear Use Policy - don't mess with us because we're irrational idiots with nuclear weapons!
Most spammers will ignore these suits because it's only a few bucks. They figure nobody will spend thousands of dollars to collect $10.
They're wrong. Some people are so fed up with spammers - more precisely, their attitude that they're above the rules that apply to the rest of us - that they'll use the legal rights that most people don't use because it's not cost effective.
A court judgement is a powerful tool. With it, a credit report is fair game, as are calls to friends, relatives and neighbors to verify that you are not hiding resources for a lawful court judgement. With it, the angry victim can garnishee a wages, or bank accounts. They can have the local sheriff seize property and auction it off until the judgement, court costs and collection costs are satisfied.
Or they could simply call up the BBB to find the collection agency with the worst reputation, the tell them that you'll pay them $500 to take as long as possible while collecting. Nothing illegal, mind you, but you want to hit them hard and long so they won't mess you again... and you already have the court papers that open a lot of doors.
From a purely financial perspective this is madness - you're going to spend countless hours to get a net profit of a few bucks. From a revenge perpective, it's a very effective way to make someone's life a living hell.
This enforcement effect will be modest while only a handful of states have these laws on their books, but that will change as more states pass these laws. Even the one-in-a-million number in the hundreds once you cover most states. Courts will quickly learn to see contempt (in the legal sense) in messages with foreign origination sites but domestic PO Boxes for checks.
Slashdot Mirror
Another factor is that a criminal jury must usually be unanimous, although I think some jurisdictions recognize that even kooks have the right to sit on a jury so they'll convict on less than unanimous votes.
In contrast, I think many civil juries can decide a case with simple 2/3 or 3/4 majority.
You know the joke about how "I am firm, you are stubborn, and he's a flaming *******"?
Linux/Unix is the same thing. To most people, Linux and Unix are synonymous because they have the same architectural structure, same POSIX libraries, same POSIX tools, etc. Does it run X? Does it run vi? Do you have a command shell somewhere that takes lots of cryptic commands? Then it's Unix.
Even the vast majority of developers will not see a significant difference in the way they develop code for a Linux vs. "Unix" system. A few files are in a different place, a few commands have "odd" flags, but overall it's about as much difference as between Dallas and New York, vs.
New York and New Dehli. With the common use of GNU tools, there's much less perceived difference between Linux and *BSD than Solaris and HP/UX (or AIX!)
But in the same way that many French Canadians can't forgive the British Canadian majority for a defeat hundreds of years ago (going as far as putting "I Remember!" on their the car license plates) we have a few tormented souls who want to make sure that we never, ever, forget the fact that the Linux source tree can't list three pages of "begats" that lead back to King Davi... sorry, back to the original AT&T source.
Is there a real difference? Yes, but the number of people who actually have to worry about them will probably fit into a small room. For the rest of us, the only real difference is a group that's coming across as increasingly bitter that they have finally achieved the Holy Grail of "Unix" Integration only as they band together to fight the Linux intruder... and they *really* hate to be told that this constant "Linux isn't Unix, nah nah nah" harping is exactly the childish mindset that lead to Unix fragmentation in the first place. This is how they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory a decade ago, and many of us really don't want to see a repeat of it.
I know one of the defining characteristics of geeks is great precision in speech, but it's time for everyone to remember the big picture. We're in the game show of life and one side has the MS family (daddy W2K, Mom Win98, insane child WinCE) and the other side has the Unix family (daddy AT&T, brother *BSD and adopted brother Linux), and it only helps MS when the Unix family's first response to a question is to whip out a gun and commit fraticide.
Debian *releases* tend to come out at a glacial pace (but still at a faster pace than most other OSes - 1 year vs. 3 for MS (95, 98, 01)), but Debian *security patches* appear within hours of the problem being reported on Bugtraq, CERT, etc.
For political reasons, I considered getting a MSCE about a year ago. In the course of that, I read a substantial amount of the O'Reilly books (which I highly recommend) and agreed with the claims that:
- about 1/3 of the MSCE is stuff that would usually be handled by technicians in any real "engineering" discipline. We still need to know about limitations on cable lengths and the like, but knowing that makes you a "network engineer" no more than being able to change the oil in your car makes you a "engine engineer" ready for an exciting new career in Detroit or Seattle (Boeing).
- about 1/3 of the exam is unabashed MS advertising. Microsoft not only has the best protocols, they're the fastest and they'll even find you a date for Saturday. Use the outdated, flawed protocols used by Unix, Novell, Apple, or others and you'll be shunned by friends, rejected by lovers, and have your car repossessed.
- the rest of the exam actually contains "useful" information. Use this screen to change this value. Use that screen to change the other value. And remember to reboot the system every time you modify your system. Again, I was left with the feeling that the guy in those late-night ads who is thrilled by the CAD system somehow thinks it makes him qualified to design skyscrapers, mile-long suspension bridges, etc.
The O'Reilly MSCE books *are* good references for using Windows systems, but only because I already have a good grasp of the concepts. But the idea that anyone could demonstrate any skill beyond "technician" via that exam is a sick joke.
The worst thing is when you find yourself simplifying some data structure so that you won't confuse someone who thought his freshmen "algorithms" class was the sum total of human knowledge of the field.
On the other hand, I've known a few old geezers (no other word for it, even though they were young) who insisted that every meaningful discovery in computer science was made by 1982. Nothing since then - Red-Black trees, splay trees, the astoundishing advances in solving matrix equations, are worth learning or using.
I assume that you were tweaking the pitiful instructions from the teacher, and aren't really the sad consequences of a biology experiment demostrating the hazards of siblings having unprotected sex.
So, tell us, how *do* you write a recursive bubble sort? The only thing I can think of is replacing the iteration with tail recursion -- and that code should have been pretty clean even though the runtime performance would suck bigtime.
I'm in the camp that says the first programming class (for programmers, not people who just need a quick exposure to the subject) should be done on the slowest, dumbest system you can find. E.g., the 386/40 I have in the closet.
The reason for this is it forces you to focus on the fundamentals. What are your data structures? How to you manipulate them? How do you recognize a fast algorithm vs a slow one?
On the 500 MHz GUI with a fancy development environment, you don't have a chance of learning this -- there's too else going on.
As a professional, you need to worry about *everything*. But a student needs to focus on the fundamentals... and it's far easier to make a lasting impression by demonstrating the power of the correct algorithm or data structure with the slower hardware. E.g., code both a quick sort and bubble sort, then run the data on a set of data 20 times larger than used for testing. The quick sort finishes during the class period. The bubble sort is still running when students return to class the next day. These students will *know* that you can't just throw faster hardware at the problem -- the students can take the software home and run it on their 500 MHz P-IIIs... and see that the problem *always* occurs as the problem gets larger.
On your other question, about teacher credentials... It would be nice, but the official policy of the "education establishment" is that a teacher is a teacher not because of personal knowledge of the field - he's a teacher because he has a firm command of pedagogical principals and a cheat sheet that keeps him just ahead of the class. It's not unreasonable for the middle and bottom of the bell curve, but it prevents students with a natural aptitude (or independent knowledge) from developing their skills.
I don't know of any solution to this. I jumped straight from my junior year in high school to college - my school didn't have AP credits and I would have had independent study courses for five of my six classes. That was over twenty years ago, so don't be too confident that *your* kid will have it any better.
How can I possibly change this situation?
:-)
Post her email address and let us all send her a brief message, complete with a copy of the GPL (or better yet, all common open licenses) and representative code.
When the school's mail server (or her personal account) collapses under thousands of messages containing tens of megabytes, the situation <b>will</b> change. But probably not to your advantage.
Unfortunately, the real question is the credentials of your teacher. Most teacher unions are extremely strong, and extremely exclusionary. (E.g., you have a master's degree and 20 years experience and you want to help out? Sorry, but the school system (and teacher's union) assert you are unqualified to teach the subject matter - but the 21-year-old who just got her education BS *is* qualified to teach the material. A few states are experimenting with "fast track" certification of domain experts, but they're the exception.)
Could the teacher have had strong CS exposure in college? It's possible, but the colleges of Education and Engineering tend to have very little overlap. Any C. Ed class using computers will focus on using them as teaching aids, not software development models. At most, the teacher might have had a year of "CS 101" -- and be considered an expert by her teaching peers.
Could the teacher have gotten her education credentials, worked in industry, then returned to the classroom? It's possible, but unlikely due to fiscal reality. An experienced coder will probably earn twice what most teacher makes. An experienced coder with technical leadership or management experience (who will actually be dealing with software licenses professionally) will make far more than most teachers. A few people will earn a nest egg then return to their first love, but software salaries aren't *that* high. (Stock options change that slightly, but it's still the exception.)
In other words, the teacher would probably be dismissed as a flake by any working software developer. This is why many of us have qualms about collegiate CS programs - and outright hostility towards secondary CS programs. If you're lucky, you'll learn the skills appropriate to a 70's era IBM 370 programmer - and you'll know it's a 30-year-old development model which is *not* followed today. More likely, you'll get a hodge-podge which makes no sense but makes it *far* harder for you to learn how software development is actually done.
Let's put this education argument in perspective. I've seen this argument before, and as I recall the educational norms of the period you refer to (mid-18th Century to mid-19th Century, ending with the contemporary introduction of the telegraph, railroad and steamship) include:
<ul>
<li>High schools either did not exist, or were a weird idea out of the rebellious American colonies. The elite had private tutors, but the vast majority of the public learned from on the job. BTW, adolescence and even "childhood" are modern concepts. Even a 6-year-old can work in the field pulling weeds, etc.
<li>In the 19th Century, when universal public schooling was becoming widespread most working people dropped out by the 8th grade. Among blue collar urban workers and rural residents a 4th grade education wasn't uncommon.
<li>A typical 12th grade education included a strong emphasis on the classics - Latin and Greek, with an extensive reading of the classics in their native language. Don't believe me? - look up the history of the Kansas City public schools sometime.
<li>Even "professionals" often had shockingly modest backgrounds, in modern eyes. A country doctor might not even have a high school degree, and no collegiate experience outside of "medical school." Don't forget that this period predates not only drug therapy (which requires a solid foundation of organic chemistry), it predates the introduction of "germ theory." A modern boy scout with a "first aid" merit badge knows more about medicine than most of these doctors... with the notable exception of practical experience.
<li>A college degree was a mark of extremely priviledged background. There were no college majors as we know them today - everyone studied everything. (Hence the term "university".) Of course, to them "everything" meant more Classics, modern theology, and maybe an incidental class or two to cover everything that happened in the past 1500 years. IIRC the first College of Engineering wasn't founded until well into the Industrial Revolution -- definitely after the era of rapid transcontinental communications.
<li>Finally, take a close look at the educational credentials of our modern heros. Charles Darwin was a professor of theology - IIRC the only college degree granted in England at the time he was a student. I'm not so sure about James Watt, but again I'm sure it was primarily, if not exclusively, classical and Christian theologian.
</ul>
And never forget that this period was far more classist than ours. There were no "self-made men" - most other business owners would shun someone without the proper background regardless of the merits of their business offer.
In this environment, <b>of course</b> your average business correspondence would shame modern authors. However, if you make this a fair fight and compare the top 2% of the population you'll find that our ancestors come across as one trick ponies. They could write better, but we are better at communicating to the masses. They would have a better understanding of classical music, painting and sculpture, but we have a better understanding of other culture's art and abstract art. The know Christian theology... and why everyone else is going to Hell. We have an awareness, at some basic level, of other theologies. Their natural science is laughable - the modern 2% reads Scientific American, a magazine which wasn't founded until after the end of the period your refer to.
Overall, I think I prefer generalists who occasionally have a hard time articulating their ideas than one-trick ponies whose primary skill, in hindsite, was in running the European Colonial system.
X is a *lot* more than a "graphical shell." Consider the fact that essentially all graphical display on Linux (and Unix and *BSD) systems use X. Alternatives exist (SVGA, GGI), but few applications use them.
Anyway, under trademark law the real issue is if the names will cause any reasonable person to be confused. Nobody will confuse United Airlines and United Van Lines, but "X programming" suddenly means both X Windows programming and X-Box programming. Microsoft will undoubtably avoid it, but people writing code for the X-Box will naturally refer to it as "X Windows" programming, since it's Windows programming for the X-Box platform.
This isn't an abstract worry - one of my professional hats is X/Motif programming and I know that a lot of technical recruiters already confuse "X Windows" and "[MS] Windows." This new platform will only make it worse.
All of this ignores the fact that the law doesn't make the fine distinctions you assume. To the lawyers, computers are computers are computers, so (IIRC) it's infringement to have similar names on both hardward and software. I believe that Chris Carter could even make a valid claim that "X-Box, the entertainment device" conflicts with "X-Files, the entertainment programming" because of the likely confusion if/when approached another vendor for an X-Files game.
It sounds like a joke, but it's not. I had assumed that the "X" in "X-box" was a mere placeholder. If it is the actual product name, there will be a *lot* of confusion between X Windows and "games" programming in 2002.
Microsoft has already preempted the term "Windows." Even in technical circles, refering to "MS Windows" elicits strange looks as most of the people wonder what other type of "windows" exist. Now they're trying to equate "X" with games programming - something you would never want associated with your mission critical backbone.
The simple fact is that "Windows" is a generic term which the X Consortium didn't challenge at the time -- but which Microsoft has been ruthless in defending as its own since then. Now Microsoft is trying to "embrace and extend" "X" with its own meaning. Given its history, I have no doubt they will vigorously prosecute anyone who tries to introduce "new" display software which includes the letter "X" but doesn't relate to their gaming software.
So What the Fsck are we supposed to call our display manager? In 2003, are we supposed to tell people that we run "SYSTEM", since Microsoft will sue into nonexistence anyone who uses the words "X" or "Windows"?! Or do we just go with "Version 11"?!
It sounds like a joke, but given Microsoft's legal history we can't laugh until after MS announces a different name for the product, its display system, etc. Because of history, neither the X Consortium or our community can easily dismiss the continued use of "X" as a mere coincidence. The legal trademark holder *must* ask Microsoft to find a different name since the proposed name is likely to cause massive confusion among the public and (non-Unix-centric) technical communities.
Many of us would argue that you are "doing it right" now - by giving him some freedom but checking up on him.
Think about it - what is the biggest problems teenagers (and many adults) face? Impulse control. You don't want a kid who doesn't drink because the liquor cabinet is locked, you want one who doesn't drink because he fears that so you find out later and punish him. He becomes an adult who doesn't overindulge because of awareness of the consequences of his actions. Ditto unsafe sex (not doing it for fear of the consequences, not because of lack of opportunity), drug use, dangerous driving habits, etc.
Sure, this is more work than letting some censorware handle the chore, BUT IT'S YOUR FSCKING JOB AS A PARENT. If you weren't willing to do the time, you should have worn a party hat or kept it in your pants 14 years ago!!!
Am I arguing that censorware is *never* appropriate? No - two good examples are preventing *accidental* exposure to very young children (or easily offended adults), and preventing deliberate exposure by teenagers who are unusually immature and have not developed *any* self-restraint. If you've only caught your kid a few times, it sounds like he's developing healthy self-control and it's now your job to help him develop it further. Unless he's the first exception in a few thousand years, he *will* be tempted and he *will* fail -- and your job as a parent (IMHO) is to set up situations where he can learn "how far is too far" safely. Would you rather he occasionally be goaded into loading a porn site by a friend... or be goaded into trying a couple puffs or dangerous sex by that friend?
(Hint: before you answer that watch the PBS episode on the gonorrhea epidemic in an upscale Georgia suburb... and the extreme frustration at the public health officials at their inability to get the parents to face the fact that *they* - not MTV, not movies, not rock stars, but indifferent parents who were too busy to listen to their children - were the reason why their little darlings the same age as your son were having orgies with three-ways, four-ways, unprotected anal sex, etc.)
A lot of people are reacting to MS's "breaking" yet another standard, and don't understand the real problem that MS is trying to solve.
/etc/passwd and /etc/groups, or their local equivalents. In the real world, this isn't always possible but many sites use a (standard?) secondary mechanism that maps Kerberos principals to local user names, and again you acquire user information from /etc/passwd and /etc/group.
/etc/passwd and /etc/group information into the "authorization" field. That's unusual, but not inappropriate -- and arguably an elegant solution to the crippled NT environment.
In a nutshell, Kerberos is a *network* authentication mechanism, not a system authentication mechanism. That means that when John Smith sits down at his terminal and acquires a Kerberos ticket, it's validated against a central site *with no cross-reference to local information.*
In an ideal world, the principal name and local user name would be identical. The local system could then look up the principal name in its local user database and acquire user information from
Other alternatives are getting that information out of NIS, LDAP, etc., or Kerberos-enhanced versions of the same if they're paranoid about someone trying to spoof that information.
(AFAIK) what MS did with W2Kerberos is put the equivalence of
However, for reasons that make no sense to anyone in this reality they decided to digitally sign that information. From a security standpoint, this is utterly insane - Kerberos tickets already use strong encryption and session keys, so there's nothing to be gained by adding an additional layer of encryption to the payload. Furthermore, the KDC should be physically and electronically secured, so it should not be a significant risk to maintain unsigned user authority information on the KDC in plaintext. Assuming you don't simply colocate those services, of course!
However, digitally signing that data and failing to disclose the details is an excellent way to control market share, if the user community doesn't rip their head off for this trick. In this case it's a possibility since the sites that use Kerberos are more security-aware than your average site, and they might not be willing to compromise their security by maintaining two realms (or worse, replacing their Unix KDCs with Windows KDCs).
The same thing can be said of all witness evidence, audio- and video-taped evidence, etc.
In all of these cases you look for messages (or items) that refer to other things that are 1) verifiable, and 2) not widely known. The email message could still be forged, but it's far less likely. Do that with hundreds or thousands of messages and the "reasonable persons" on the jury will decide that the messages must be legitimate.
The defense can still assert that some messages were forged, of course, but if the prosecution/plantiff believes it's legitimate it will be presented to the jury as a "question of fact."
[It is legal swing a bat wildly...] but it becomes illegal at your nose....
Not quite. (IANAL, but) it is a crime ("menacing") the instant you present a credible threat of intentionally striking the other person with the bat.
This has some pretty deep consequences. If you swing the bat at me, I don't have to wait until the bat connects before acting in self-defense. This applies even if you're "spoofing" me and I misinterpret the facts in the fraction of a second between seeing a fast-moving bat and my response. Since a baseball bat to the head is "lethal force," in most jurisdictions I have the right *to kill you* in self-defense. In these cases it won't even matter that the bat is a hollow plastic toy, if I have no reasonable way to know this. (This could happen if you come up on me from behind.)
On a related note, every so often you hear about some teen killed while branishing an unloaded weapon - or even a realistic toy. They seem to think that there is some legal distinction if the weapon is unloaded (or unreal). They're wrong - and just as in the case of the bat the victim isn't forced to wait until the instant the bullet strikes his skull before he can act. In many jurisdictions merely displaying possession of a gun constitutes use of lethal force - and the other person is legally able to use lethal counterforce to remove himself from that situation. People might be able to outrun bats and knives, but not guns, and the only sure way for most people to disarm someone with a gun is to kill them first. Remember that next time some kids complain that The Man has no sense of humor about them driving down the street while waving (realistic) toy guns out the window. That actually happened here, a few years ago!
What you quoted is actually a misquote a First Amendment "protected speech" argument. Your speech might offend me (and others), but it doesn't cause us harm in the same way that a punch in the nose does. So we have to live to learn with objectionable speech, not with idiots who wildly swing their fist (or bats!) around others.
Back on point, this is totally irrelevant. Nobody said that L0phtCrack was intrinisically illegal to possess, they said that it was a "criminal tool" used while commiting criminal acts. That's no different from calling a hammer a "criminal tool" because it was used to break car windows, a screwdriver a "criminal tool" because it was used to break the lock in the steering column, etc.
They're mini-CDs, not full-sized CDs. CD media reads from the inner tracks outwards, so as long as the "disc" is balanced you could use any shape.
(Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.)
Kerberos is also available for both Red Hat and Debian. Debian has at least three implementations - two European implementations are on non-US, and I've packaged MIT Kerberos 5. (Still no word on when MIT will drop the export nag page, unfortunately.)
OpenSSH is still an excellent choice, but not because it alone supports Kerberos.
Any list, no matter how short, should include a reference to two-party vs. three-party authentication.
SSH and (IIRC) IPsec use two-party authentication. That means anyone can talk to anyone else, but as another article pointed out it also opens the door to "man-in-the-middle" attacks.
Kerberos, digital-certificates and some government sponsored systems use three-party authentication. This puts some limitations on your use, but these are generally reasonable restrictions if you think about it. (E.g., do you really want John Cracker to be able to remote mount your files?) Third-party authentication got a bad rep after some clumsy government posturing with the clipper chip, but it seems that a lot of people lost track of the many places where it's appropriate.
IANAL, but I *do* know that civil disobedience has a very specific definition.
<b>It does *not* apply to civil contracts - such as the GPL.</b>
<b>It does *not* allow you to harm others in any significant manner.</b> You may cause a minor inconvenience by a sit in, for instance, but not by punching somebody in the nose.
Finally, <b>civil disobedience *requires* that you be willing to pay the full legal price for your actions.</b> You refuse to sit in the back of the bus? Fine - but be prepared to sit in jail as well. You think the draft is immoral? Fine, but be prepared to send the next year or two in prison, not Canada.
These rules sound strict - and they are - but that's to prevent the common crook from wrapping his actions in the flag. Even if we ignore the fact that this is a civil, not criminal, case, let's ask some other questions. Is Slade being forced to use the GPL software? No. Is Slade being prohibited from developing his own software free of the GPL "encumbered" code? No.
No, Debian stable = proven packages. It may not be sexy, but it means you aren't constantly mucking with the system while others are muttering that maybe they should go back to good old reliable MS Windows.
And if you really want to run the cutting edge, you can always run unstable.
"Quantum" means that the step is indivisible, not that it's large or small.
Stairs have quantum steps of about 8". My old analog radio receiver had a continuous tuning circuit, but my digital radio receiver has quantum steps of 200 kHz (iirc).
The dictionary definition of "quantum leap" makes sense in that it describes a discontinuous change. By their nature, discontinuous changes are abrupt and can't be broken down into smaller steps. The "dramatic advance" follows from the fact that most human-scale continuous changes are actually the result of many small discrete changes, so they're drawing a distinction by specifying this change is large.
That categorization is required *because* the LDP is a documentation effort. The results should be usable on web servers, printed material, PDAs, and the Goodyear Blimp if required.
Documents written in HTML will remain in HTML. Documents written in TeX will convert to text and postscript, but not info format (modulo the use of texinfo macros, of course).
LinuxDoc and DocBook can be a real pain, but these formats are designed to be sufficiently abstract that the documents can be converted to any reasonable format. That means it's far more likely that a HOWTO will be maintained for the indefinite future, while a GUIDE may be dropped once the author moves to a new format himself.
My strategy has been to donate what I saved in commercial software fees. I *do* recall the days when we paid big bucks for crappy software... and not just because the PHB insisted on a particular vendor.
The problem with this strategy is that the license fees have gotten obscene. My Linux systems aren't comparable to a $200 personal Windows seat, they're equivalent to a $10,000+ Windows NT/2K system with multiple CALs, enterprise web, ftp and database servers, etc. Can I justify writing a donation check larger than the cost of my hardware? Can I justify it when I'm also donating my effort to maintain OSS applications?
On the other hand, employers should definitely be evaluating using a "matching fund" approach to OSS. E.g., if they choose Apache over IIS they should cut a check to Apache, or another OSS project. Even ten cents on the dollar will go a *long* way towards paying lawyer fees, bandwidth and storage, travel expenses, etc.
It's even a sound decision when looking at the bottom line. Donating $1000 to Apache is still far cheaper than the cost of using their own staff to maintain and extend Apache themselves.
You may find this difficult to believe, but we *know* that newbie documentation is a big problem. But we also know that it's impossible for someone with 20 years of Unix experience to write that documentation because we've long since forgotten the process we went through back then.
Even if we do recall what we went through, our assumptions were very different. I used punch cards in college, and the card reader (I was told) transmitted the job to another university 100 miles away for processing. Each run cost "money" and after maybe 25 tries we had to ask the professor for more computer time. In graduate school I got *unlimited* access to a VT-100 which was connected to a BSD-4 system (not *BSD. *Real* BSD that ran on a VAX 11/750 in its own shrine room with picture windows to impress the underclassmen.) I thought I had died and gone to heaven... and I didn't work with a GUI display for almost a decade afterwards.
Do you think I have any chance of writing useful "newbie" documentation? Get real. But *you* know what assumptions a newbie - or at least *some* newbies - bring with them when they try out Linux. You know what questions they will ask -- and what type of information is useful to them.
So *you* should be writing the newbie documentation. You might not think you can do much, but even a list of the 50 things you wish someone told you a few months ago might be enough to make it much easier for the next person.
It's important to note that that's how I write my HOWTOs. I don't write them for Joe Q. Random, I write them to remind me what I did 6 months later. If I think they're general enough, and there's not already a HOWTO out there, I'll toss them up on my web site. If I get enough feedback to show that others find it useful, I'll also send it to the LDP.
This is enforced by following the (unofficial) US Nuclear Use Policy - don't mess with us because we're irrational idiots with nuclear weapons!
Most spammers will ignore these suits because it's only a few bucks. They figure nobody will spend thousands of dollars to collect $10.
They're wrong. Some people are so fed up with spammers - more precisely, their attitude that they're above the rules that apply to the rest of us - that they'll use the legal rights that most people don't use because it's not cost effective.
A court judgement is a powerful tool. With it, a credit report is fair game, as are calls to friends, relatives and neighbors to verify that you are not hiding resources for a lawful court judgement. With it, the angry victim can garnishee a wages, or bank accounts. They can have the local sheriff seize property and auction it off until the judgement, court costs and collection costs are satisfied.
Or they could simply call up the BBB to find the collection agency with the worst reputation, the tell them that you'll pay them $500 to take as long as possible while collecting. Nothing illegal, mind you, but you want to hit them hard and long so they won't mess you again... and you already have the court papers that open a lot of doors.
From a purely financial perspective this is madness - you're going to spend countless hours to get a net profit of a few bucks. From a revenge perpective, it's a very effective way to make someone's life a living hell.
This enforcement effect will be modest while only a handful of states have these laws on their books, but that will change as more states pass these laws. Even the one-in-a-million number in the hundreds once you cover most states. Courts will quickly learn to see contempt (in the legal sense) in messages with foreign origination sites but domestic PO Boxes for checks.