Neither do you, if you think that modern technology isn't used at any point in the process. Yes, the swords are made the same way, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Yes, they're still made with alternating layers of clay and metal. Yes, there's still a lot of ritual that goes along with the creation of a sword.
And yes, modern metallurgical techniques are used.
Who do you think reads all those graduate theses which have been written on Japanese swords? Swordmakers, for the most part. Because once you take a good, hard look at what makes a Masamune so perfect, that gives you a big hint as to how to make your own swords better.
Your comment is about as informed as someone saying "violinmakers haven't changed their techniques in hundreds of years". Considering that some scientists come tantalizingly close to producing Stradivarius-quality instruments by careful study and analysis, violinmaking is undergoing rapid change due to modern technology.
This is the way the world works. The world wants it fast, cheap and good. The merchant says "fine, pick two", but the prosperous merchant says "fine, I'll give you all three". The second kind of merchant puts the first kind out of business.
Science is a wonderful tool with which to drive down costs of quality goods. It doesn't replace the human touch, nor can it ever replace human expertise; but people who say that science has no adjunct role to play are smoking crack.
This applies to just about everything mechanical, not just firearms, BTW.
Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made.
Which Colt revolver would this be? The Single Action Army? The Patterson? The Python? The King Cobra? All of them are remarkable weapons (I've used all of them save the Patterson). All of them were machined.
... machined rather than hand matched.
Samuel Colt didn't "hand match" his weapons. He was smarter than that. The virtue of Sam Colt's weaponry was that the parts were all interchangeable, and that's only possible with machining and mass production, not handcrafted individual objects d'art.
Today's guns suck by comparison--the tolerances are way down
My SIG-Sauer is manufactured to tolerances which are usually reserved for jet aircraft. My Kimber M1911A1, likewise.
You also seem confused about tolerances in general. Saying that "tolerances are way down" is a good thing. That's like saying "tolerances fifty years ago were 0.1mm, tolerances this year are 0.01mm." If tolerances are down, that means manufacturing techniques have improved.
Now, manufacturing tolerance isn't the same as operational tolerance. Operational tolerance ought to be very high--weapons are expected to tolerate many different kinds of ammunition without a hiccup, in the most awful conditions. A modern 9mm Glock will chamber any 9mm ammunition you want to throw at it--AET, JHP, LRN, hardball, Glaser, whatever. A 9mm Browning, built in 1935, suffers feed failures on anything other than hardball unless you've had a gunsmith do a throat and ramp-polish on it.
Modern firearms: manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
This, by the by, is reflected in every other manufacturing field. You remember the early '80s, when people had massive air conditioners running in their computer rooms? Now, in 2000, it can be 90 degrees in the house and I don't have any qualms about firing up my dual Pentium IIIs. Manufacturing tolerances down (from point-whatever micron down to.18 or so), operational tolerances up.
Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14 spends more than half of its operational lifetime on the ground being serviced. The average F-22 doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
A $10 toaster from 50 years ago is big, clunky, heavy and totally reliable. A $10 toaster today is lightweight and totally reliable (at least, mine has never failed me). Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
Good grief. Show me one, just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques. Even Japanese swordsmithing has gone modern. Four hundred years ago, smiths had to resort to crude and inexact methods to measure certain vital characteristics of metal. Today, smiths use modern metallurgical know-how and thermocouple thermometers to determine exactly what the optimal temperature for forging and tempering is.
Anyone who's talking about "nuclear hand grenades" is, quite simply, full of it.
1. Critical mass for Pu-239 is measured in the kilos. As in multiple kilos. How far do you really think you can throw 50 pounds of plutonium?
2. Shielding for radioactive materials is heavy as all get-out, too. Often, plutonium or uranium nuclear pits are cladd in nickel, tungsten, or some other very hard, dense metal. That also adds considerably to the weight.
3. The amount of explosives required to compress Pu239 in the initial stages of detonation is highly nontrivial.
4. It's possible to get by with less radioactive mass by switching to californium, or some other radioactive element that's easily fissionable and is extremely radioactive. However, the explosives, shielding, etc., are not so easy to switch around.
5. In other words, if your prof told you the Russkies were into nuclear hand grenade research, your prof has zero credibility whatsoever.
The problem with e-mail is the ability it gives to send many millions of e-mails to lots of people.
That's not a problem with email (note the lack of the hyphen--Don Knuth has a good linguistic analysis of why email is hyphenless somewhere on his site), but with people abusing email. It's pretty much like saying, "the problem with cars is the ability it gives people to drink and drive".
I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family know about it.
Wow. You mean all of us here at Slashdot are trusted members of your family? Really? Free hint: just by having a address for us Slashdotters to submit to, you undercut the very point you're trying to make.
My own email address, posted at the top of this message, is a spambouncer. It checks email and forwards them on to my real email account, where I can decide if I want to share my email addy with you or not.
So far, I've managed to stay (mostly) spam-free by a combination of judicious filtering and using proxy addresses.
Other people (like this guy) manage to do just fine, too, to the point where he has his Palm VII set up to receive wireless email from complete strangers, just because he thinks it's cool.
(Bruce, if you're reading this: you rock. Way to be accessible to the community. I would email this to you directly, but I don't want to spam you.)
So in other words, KTB, your "I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family" argument only holds water for you. There are lots of other people--ESR, BP, RMS, Linus, just to name a few--who manage to get by just fine, even though they get reams more email than you do.
The lack of trustworthyness [sic] and the dilution of feeling that is a result of mass e-mailing does not lend itself to mass communication, I have found.
If you're finding this, you're looking in the wrong places. Some mailing lists, such as the Continuing Time and Millennium's End lists which I'm on, are actual communities. If you think mass email is "remote", then how do you account for the vibrant BBS communities of old?
How can you beat the handwritten letter for the personal touch?
Try investing a little of yourself in your emails. Believe it or not, it really does work.
I agree, it sounds terribly atypical, but that's my experience with it. I'm still trying to figure out why Explorer crashes so often and takes down the entire system. It's a stock install with only mild tweaking.
Remember what he said before Windows 2000 came out?
Yep. What's your point? Visionaries are more often spectacularly wrong than they are spectcularly correct. If you take what ESR says as being prophecy, you'll find him to be a remarkably lousy prophet. If you take what ESR says as being rumination, you might find a lot in there that warrants consideration.
And frankly, I find his ruminations to be far more interesting than anything I've seen from you here on Slashdot.:)
[N]ow it's out without any problems at all.
Win2K adoption is running less than half what was predicted, and far less than Microsoft was hoping. They put out a media blitz for Win2K which brought the Win95 launch to mind--in some ways it was even more over-the-top; Microsoft paid top dollar to make sure that every PC in the Bond movie The World Is Not Enough was running computers marked as "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" and all the handhelds were running WinCE. That kind of massive media blitz costs a lot of money and suggests MS had a lot of confidence it'd sell like hotcakes.
So far, sales have been tepid.
Insofar as reliability goes, my Win2K box crashes about every three or four days. Windows NT 4.0 crashed once a month or so. Win2K, on my own machine at home (dual PIII/800s, VIA mobo) has failed to be reliable.
I think the problem is that he is a hangover from the immature days of Linux.
As soon as I have to wear a suit and tie to be taken seriously in the Linux community, I'll defect to FreeBSD. I do my hacking sitting in my boxers at 3AM. Kernel development proceeds chaotically and "immaturely", yet at a breakneck pace.
If you take away the "immaturity", you take away Linux's greatest strength--that it's young and still explodingly vibrant.
Imagine if MS spokesmen spent their time with unfouded [sic] attacks on Linux.
This section seems to be a call to arms against copyrights. I agree that US citizens have the right to protest against laws that they consider unfair, but law enforcement agencies have the authority and the responsibility to penalize them if they break the law in doing so.
Not really a call to arms against copyright, per se--rather, a very loud statement that government doesn't get to decide what the laws are: we do. Too many people are too willing to believe the government when it says this law or that is good, necessary, essential, etc. After all, "what about the children?"
At some point, you have to make your own decision on these issues, and you have to have the courage to live up to your convictions. Yes, law-enforcement will come down on you for breaking the law. That's unavoidable, and they'd be derelict in their duties if they didn't do so.
If I understand you here, you're saying that you can't steal IP because the owner still has a copy and the owner isn't deprived of the benefit of that property. The first point is obviously correct. The second point is not.
If the second point were not true, intellectual property violations would be prosecuted as theft. Since they are not, I conclude that in the eyes of the law it is not theft.
business views IP as an asset
Thinking doesn't necessarily make it so. RIAA also thinks that it can forbid you from lending a CD to a friend by putting a message on the back of a CD case denying you that right (see the back of Denis Leary's Lock and Load). Should we change our determinations of lawful and unlawful, right and wrong, to meet the interests of corporate America?
I wonder how much a company like Capcom would claim the copyright to the NES version of Bionic Commando, is worth, anyway?
Dunno. But note that I made a difference between software which is currently available and that which is not. If I want to get an illegal copy of Linux (maybe, for instance, from a guy who tells me he absolutely won't provide source), then have I committed theft from the Linux copyright owners? After all, the transfer was in violation of the license.
If I get an illegal copy of Solaris 8 instead, have I committed theft from Sun?
Similar actions must be judged similarly. Either (a) both are theft and ought to be loudly condemned, or (b) neither is theft and it's a nonissue.
If you were right, then copyright infringement law wouldn't exist--it would be subsumed under theft laws, which it isn't. So yes, the law itself realizes that copyright infringement isn't theft, because otherwise people would get prosecuted for theft.
GnuPG fails to fully implement RFC2440 due to the IDEA patent. While IDEA is specified as a PGP cipher, GnuPG can't implement it.
For a long while, the RSA patent was also an obstacle to GnuPG, OpenSSH, and just about everything else out there that needed public-key crypto. The expiry of the Diffie-Hellman patent (in 1997) helped some, but there were still a lot of obstacles.
1. NATURAL VERSUS ARTIFICIAL RIGHTS.
In the eyes of the law, the right of propertyowners to control the use of their property is a natural right. The right of people to be equal, regardless of skin color, is a natural right. The right to vote, regardless of gender, is a natural right. Note that the Constitution has not always specifically acknowledged these natural rights, and there are many natural rights which the Constitution does not recognize.
In addition to natural rights, there are such things as artificial rights. These are more accurately called "privileges". Just like you have a natural right to travel where you like in the US, you have an artificial right to drive on public highways. Remember how they told you in Driver's Ed that driving is a privilege and can be revoked by the State at will? It's the same principle.
Interesting, copyright is not a natural right. All natural rights recognized by the Constitution are phrased in terms of absolutes and imperatives: the government shall not pass law that restricts your freedom of speech, it shall not forbid you arms, it must get a warrant from a judge before violating your privacy rights, etc.
Copyright is a permissive, not an absolute. Congress may, in order to further social goals (scientific discoveries, literary development, etc.) secure for authors and inventors a monopoly on the usage of their creations. As can be seen from the wording of the Constitution, copyright is not a right--it's a privilege.
2. WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
The fundamental question of any government is, and always will be, who's in charge here? In the United States, that question was answered in 1783 when Washington accepted Cornwall's surrender, and again in 1789 when our Constitution was established: we the people are. If we, the people, feel that the social ills of copyright outweigh its beneficial effects, then it is our absolute and sovereign right to ignore any and all acts of Congress which are contrary to our wishes.
America has a long tradition of rabble-rousing, much to the dismay of the government. When civil rights were not recognized by Congress and segregation was still the law, we, the people, marched on Selma and on Washington. We, the people, disobeyed the government. When Vietnam was tearing the country in half, we, the people, burned draft cards and engaged in civil disobedience.
Congress is not in charge of the government. Nor is the judiciary, nor is the executive. The people who are ultimately in charge are you and me.
3. WHAT IS THEFT, ANYWAY?
Black's Law describes theft as the unauthorized (not unlawful) deprivation of property, or in some cases, benefit of that property.
By that legal definition, unauthorized copying is not and cannot be theft. The `benefit of property' is none; if the author of the software is sitting on it and not turning a dime of profit by sitting on it, then I'm not depriving him of a dime by using it anyway and sharing it with my friends. After all, he still has his original copy (so I'm not depriving him of property), and he's not been deprived of any benefit (since he was receiving no benefit before).
Unauthorized copying is not equivalent to theft. Black's Law says so.
CONCLUSIONS:
1. "... The focus will switch to owning intellectual property."
As pointed out, it is impossible to own intellectual property. Physical property exists as a natural right; "intellectual property" is a privilege granted by the State, and privileges can always be revoked.
The alternative is to elevate intellectual property to the level of natural right, and if you're arguing that this should be the case, you're going to have a hard time convincing me--but please, try!:)
2. "If I broke into your home and took things out of your attic or basement, then you'd be outraged. But somehow calling it `IP' makes the difference? Does it really?"
Absolutely. The former is theft--the deprival of property and benefit thereof. The latter is unauthorized copying.
Now, it's likely that a theft argument can be made for unauthorized copying of material which is already available for a fee. If my favorite garage band is selling CDs for $10 a pop and I start burning copies of that CD for all my friends, I'm depriving them of a fraction of $10 per sale. (After all, most of my friends wouldn't buy their CD; of the ten people I burned a CD for, the band probably lost only one sale. Thus, their losses are $10, not $100.)
In the case of abandonware, no profit is being made, and thus, no damage has been done.
I got Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 6 mixed up. Pioneer 10 is at 3.2K, Pioneer 6 is in solar orbit.
Re: the SR-71. I didn't use it to represent the pinnacle of technical progress; by today's standards, it's interesting but not fascinating. Same can be said about the Bell X-1. But by the standards of the day, both were absolutely stunning--and neither could have, would have, been designed if it'd been done in-house.
They already do this. Have you ever seen avionics software? Much of it is written in Ada or its subsets, with intensive review and oftentimes provably-correct methodology, such as the Ada83 subset SPARK. (Note that provably-correct software is only provable to do what you tell it to do; it's not provably what you want done.)
Why does this old tech last so long
It doesn't. The Smithsonian and other museums are having a hell of a time with the Apollo spacesuits, because they're beginning to crumble away into nothingness.
Keep in mind that Pioneer is being kept cryogenically cooled at 3.2K in a hard vacuum and far away from most sources of ionizing radiation. It's not exactly hard to keep tech operating in those kinds of optimal conditions.
If I were NASA... I would demand that all design work and construction take place in house
That's why you're not NASA, and why I never, ever want to get my ass launched into orbit by a NASA-designed, NASA-constructed spacecraft. If you think NASA has all the brainpower, you're dead wrong. When it comes to avionics, the brainpower is in Boeing, Martin-Marietta, General Dynamics, Lockheed and other places in the same vein.
Who designed the SR-21 Blackbird, one of the greatest aviation feats of all time? Free hint: it wasn't the government.
Who designed the X-1, the first plane to fly faster than sound? It wasn't the government.
If you're going to construct everything in-house, you're going to need a chip fab plant to build your own computer hardware. Never mind that we've got exhaustively-tested, radiation-hardened 386SX chips... we have to throw out the 386SX, even though it's a fine, well-proven chip, simply because it was designed by Intel, not "in house".
You have to throw away the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, even though they're masterpieces of engineering--one failure in the entire operational life of the Shuttle fleet, and Morton-Thiokol engineers warned NASA that launching in cold conditions would cause the failure. By every measurable standard, the Morton-Thiokol SRBs are fine and reliable pieces of engineering, when used within their specified tolerances (which are, BTW, pretty damn generous). Why? Because it wasn't designed or built in-house.
Outside contracting to commercial companies does not work; they just cut corners and introduce mistakes.
The SR-71 disagrees with you. As do the Shuttle's main engines. As do the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters. As do the United States' impressive array of spy satellites, the majority of which were constructed by TRW.
Are you sure you still want to assert that outside contracting results in poor engineering and shoddy workmanship?
Re:A solution? Yes. To the wrong problem.
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You missed it.
No, actually, you did. No matter how much you hide the data, no matter how much you encrypt the data, no matter how much you shuffle data around, it still doesn't change three basic facts:
1. The data has to get to your PC somehow for you to use, manipulate, or deal with it in any way.
2. The data which comes to and goes from your PC has address headers on it.
3. The cops don't have to cryptanalyze the packets, or even know what's in them--they just have to know that you're sending traffic they want to monitor.
As soon as the cops start taking a specific interest in you and what you're doing, you need a hell of a lot more than crypto and obfuscation. It doesn't matter if they're using one-time pads in a cryptographically perfect fashion; this entire system is fundamentally busted.
A solution? Yes. To the wrong problem.
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First, the RIP act requires that communications be archived for seven years, draconian penalties for refusal to hand over decryption keys, etc., etc. Let's ignore the fact that the RIP probably violates the EU's human-rights agreement, of which the UK recently signed acceptance--after all, the UK seems to be ignoring it.
So. Communications must be archived for several years, with decryption keys available on request. Supposing we had some ultrasecure OS which encrypted absolutely everything out there, as well as as much of the TCP/IP packet as is possible. That basically leaves only the address field and routing information unencrypted.
Now we have a person using this machine, A, to communicate over a fundamentally insecure network (the Internet) with machine B. The authorities think that either A or B want to be doing something un-American (err--un-British?) like, I don't know, sharing the recipe for Colonel Sanders' secret blend of herbs and spices. What do the authorities do?
They start listening on the machine, of course. So what if every packet is encrypted--they can still look at TCP/IP headers and discover where the packets are going. If, in fact, it turns out that packets are going out addressed for B, then that's a pretty clear sign the machines are communicating. Suddenly, B gets a knock on the door and a warrant served, and told to hand over those conversations "oh, and don't tell A a word of all this".
That only covers direct peer-to-peer connections, though. The naieve counter to this is that relayed connections, such as email, are immune to this because they don't get sent directly to the target machine. Well, maybe... but that just means there are more points of failure for the authorities to exploit.
Even something as dramatic as establishing an IPsec connection with a mail relay in Seahaven wouldn't be proof. The American government seems to think that using encryption is evidence of malfeasance (see the recent story about the FBI using a keysniffer to defeat PGP). The British government, which is even more behind-the-times than the American government when it comes to encryption, will probably take it as evidence of high treason, or something similarly melodramatic and groundless.
If they can tell a judge, "look, milord, this bloke 'ere's got hisself a highly encrypted network with a rogue nation-state that's know t' be a haven f'r data pirates", the judge will probably spend all of three seconds before deciding that yes, you're a threat, and you really ought to hand over your decryption keys just so the government can be sure.
In other words, this solves nothing.
To every social problem, there is a technological solution which is hip, cool, sexy and broken. This is it.
First, I think you could successfully persuade Bjarne to agree that C++ is not C's successor; it is now its own totally distinct language from C, which supports a very large subset of the ISO C90 specification.
C has no successor, because it doesn't need one. C is meant to be a portable assembly language, and it does that remarkably well. It will continue to do it remarkably well for years to come. The problem set C was originally meant to address is still around, and C still addresses that problem set very well.
C++ did not "do it pretty badly". People who condemn C++ so broadly generally don't know the first thing about the language (free hint: there's a lot more to it than the "class" keyword). Is the language spec large? Yes. The Jargon File is dead accurate when it says that the language spec is just at the limit of memory. The language spec is large because C++, moreso than any language other than Perl, is a Swiss Army chainsaw.
You want generic programming? It's in there. You want an OO language? It's in there. You want a pure OO language? You can write pure OO in C++ (need a few libraries). You want a procedural language? It's in there. C++ can be usefully used in a staggering variety of problem sets, but only if the programmer understands that there's more than one way to solve things.
C++ gets its bad reputation more from lousy programmers than from flaws in the language itself.
My own C++ code winds up looking like Perl by the time I'm done with it. Something as simple as:
... Presto. You get the encryption functionality, you get error handling, you get secure memory management facilities, you get versatile file and network I/O, all without needing to bat an eyelash.
Sometime, take a look at Bjarne Stroustrup's homepages. He's got a great comparison of C versus C++ for a trivial enter-your-name program.
C has no successor because it doesn't need one. The problem set C was meant to address is still with us, and C is still a great way to solve those problems.
C++ is not C's successor. It was not meant to be. It addresses a much larger, much different problem set.
Smart hackers will know when a C++ approach is called for (more accurately, which C++ approach is called for--there are many to choose from), and when a C approach is called for, and when a LISP or Standard ML approach is called for.
Unless I miss my guess, the Standard doesn't specify a size for char, either. It does guarantee that char <= short int <= int <= long int, but nothing more than that.
Note that it's perfectly valid to have a C compiler where all the integer data types are of the exact same size.
The most important thing you can do to secure an OS isn't auditing, it's intelligent design. Windows NT has been pretty heavily audited internally by Microsoft, and it's still a block of Swiss cheese due to its design.
Auditing is a good step, but no amount of auditing can overcome brain-damaged design.
If it's seven billion light years away, then that might explain why my pings to it always timeout.:)
(I think you meant seven billion here, not seven billion light years. One LY = 6 trillion miles/9 trillion KM, if I recall correctly. I really, really doubt that Pioneer 10 is 63 billion trillion KM away.)
Unfortunately, the litany of errors that MS's legal team committed would fill a large set of books. It's pretty well agreed, though, that Allchin's pre-trial prep could've been better handled by a third-year law student from Legal Aid.
What you say may be true. It may be false. At this point in litigation, the veracity of your claim is totally irrelevant, and that's what most Slashdotters keep forgetting. At this point, if it's not in the court record, then it didn't happen, and you can't make it happen now.
Should MS have brought this up? Sure. Would've drastically improved their odds on appeal. But they can't argue "the benefit is that it's already there"--the appellate court won't even deem that argument to be worth responding to, except in the most curt and cursory fashion.
After all, the appellate logic goes, if it was important, they'd have brought it up at trial.
Just remember this: at the appellate level, all they can argue is that the trial wasn't fair. They can't argue the facts. They can't introduce new evidence. They can't contest one single iota of the judge's Findings of Law and Fact.
All they can do is contest that the trial was not fair--not only flawed, but so flawed that the Constitutional promise of fairness was violated. And that's going to be a pretty hard thing to sell the court. Jackson was admirably fair (up until his one-day remedy deliberations, which may well get bounced back to him for reconsideration--and Jackson may well institute the exact same remedy again, just after longer deliberations).
Appellate argument is not, repeat, is not the same as trial argument. They're totally different beasts. At the trial level your assertion is "we're not guilty, and even if we are, we're not that guilty". At the appellate level your assertion is "okay, so we're guilty, but the trial wasn't fair, and with a fair trial we'll prove our innocence despite our overwhelming guilt."
First, you aren't allowed to introduce new evidence at the appellate level (except in extremely unusual circumstances). There's no new testimony allowed, there's no new evidence allowed. All you're allowed to argue on is the court record.
Microsoft had plenty of opportunity to show "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser". The reality of it is, not only did they not show this, their own witness discredited this claim.
James Allchin's direct testimony (submitted in written form) claimed that customers benefitted from the integration of browser and OS in ways which were not possible with the products being separate. He had seventeen or eighteen points which he hammered on.
When Boies cross-examined Allchin, Boies went step-by-step through Allchin's direct testimony and asked him if those exact same benefits couldn't be obtained by downloading IE 4.0 as a separate product and installing it on Win95/B.
On every single claim, Allchin was forced to admit that "correct, the integration offers no advantage in this case".
Boies' cross of Allchin ought to do in the Litigants' Hall of Fame. Allchin was bloodily eviscerated on the witness stand, and Microsoft's strongest witness turned out to be the strongest witness, all right... strongest PLAINTIFF'S witness.
They might argue that IE/Win is beneficial to the users, but the court record shows MS's own witness admitting, seventeen times, that the integration conferred no benefit.
In other words, they're just putting that argument in there to look good. I'd expect the appellate judges to come down pretty harshly on them for it.
Another thing to keep in mind--the last time the appellate bench overruled Jackson, they said that tying products together was lawful as long as it conferred a benefit to the consumer. Most people don't remember that; all they remember is "they said the `integration' was okay". Microsoft is apparently depending on the appellate court to say that integration is always okay.
But if the appellate court holds to their earlier opinion, Microsoft is in a hell of a lot of hot water.
First off, one thing to remember about appellate judges. They're extremely busy people, with very little time to waste. If you want to score points with an appellate judge, the way you do it is to keep your arguments clear, concise, and realistic. If there were three "real errors" in your trial and another twelve "didn't affect the outcome, but still wrong", ignore the twelve and focus on the three.
If you put all fifteen in your brief and force the judges to figure out, on their own, that three of the issues were worthwhile and the other twelve was just attorney ego-stroking, don't be surprised if Los Federales take a very dim view of you.
Microsoft lost in trial court, but they wouldn't have lost as badly if they hadn't committed the cardinal sin of pissing off the judge. You can get past any legal hurdle in any courtroom except that one.
With a 150-page legal brief, which the appellate judges will have to examine point-by-point in their opinion, Microsoft is guaranteeing to make a lot of judges on the appellate bench unhappy, too.
Were I Microsoft, I'd have focused on only a handful of issues (and maybe made a token attempt at discrediting James Allchin, since he turned out to be Boies' best witness). I sure as hell wouldn't go about writing a 150-page monster which is guaranteed to make me enemies of the judges before I ever set foot in their courtroom for oral arguments.
(Note: the following is tongue in cheek. If you're humor impaired, skip this.)
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm much more of a traditionalist when it comes to home security hardware. While my cousin swears by the virtues of the.40 S&W Cor-Bon and a good SIGarms P226, and my brother's Glock 21 in.45 Super serves him well, I believe that nothing on God's green earth has yet surpassed the Benelli M1 series firing 2.75-inch 12-gauge shells packed with #6 birdshot.
Let me tell you, the ability to fire five controlled shots in under a second from a piece of hardware as authoritative as a 12-gauge is enough to make even the most deranged lunatic run for his life. And thanks to the small birdshot, overpenetration and blow-through is minimized while still maintaining extremely high one-shot stops at ranges of seven meters or less!
Put that MP5 back on the shelf, my friend, and stop looking lasciviously at that M4A1 carbine. NATO STANAG is all well and good, but remember... shotguns are the only infantry weapons so terrifyingly lethal that it's a violation of the Geneva Accords to use them in wartime.
O'course, the US never signed the Geneva Accords, so, unless you're doing your shooting in a country which is signatory, you can't be charged with a war-crime for putting enough steel shot into him to make his sorry ass worth $1.95 just in recyclables alone.
Marrying the finest in Italian shotgun technology with the finest in Finnish OS technology makes for a system to be feared. All you have to do is wire up a standard M14 sentry mount (available from fine merchants everywhere) with the Benelli, using ample duck tape to pad out those few places where the Benelli is smaller than the old 7.62mm battle rifle.
From there, remove the IR filter on your Intel web camera and point it in the direction of the front door. Now it comes time to take advantage of the open-source nature of the Linux operating system, and write your own image recognition software to positively identify your friends and neighbors.
Of course, any fine weapon system needs thorough testing before it can go truly live. Just as every soldier must constantly ask himself the question, "Will I kill my enemy before he will kill me?" and make the appropriate decision, your Linux sentry gun must ask himself the question "Is this a family member, or a Jehovah's Witness?" and make the appropriate decision.
I suggest calling up your local chapter of Jehovah's Witnesses and telling them that you're ready to receive the truth of Christ Jesus, you wish to join the 144,000 saved souls, and ask them to bring plenty of copies of The Watchtower when they arrive. In no time flat you'll have a veritable Mongol Horde of targets to test your sentry gun on--and, in so doing, you'll get a good handle on how many rounds per minute your sentry gun can fire, as well as when you need to code timeouts so that the barrel can cool.
Good luck, and remember: gun control means being able to hit your target!
Older X-ray machines used higher levels of radiation, which means that your risk increases with the age of the airport.
The other risk factor is the HD itself. How dense is the media? Is it set up to do software RAID? Is it a name brand, or is it a fly-by-night? Speaking generally, Big Name manufacturers are more resistant to stresses of all kinds than a HD which just fell off the back of a turnip truck.
To summarize--let your modern laptop go through modern X-ray machines without too much worry. But if either of them aren't modern, you might want to ask Security to hand-check it.
Like I said, to a lesser extent. It's the same story told from multiple different perspectives, and each time you see a different version of the same story.
I first got my hands on a PC back in 1981, when Ellsworth College got their first PCs and my elementary school (I was in first grade) took a tour of the facilities. Right then and there, I was hooked.
I spent summers coding on a Commodore PET during '81 and '82. During the school year I got my grubby hands on an Apple II+ and delved into BASIC. In '84 my parents bought me a Commodore 64, and a couple years later bought a Commodore 128. I was in paradise.
In 1990 I got an IBM 386DX/20 (*hot shit* hardware for 1990, lemme tell you) and I discovered Pascal and C++. And from there things have only ballooned.
Today, I'm an engineer with a good job. Playing games on the machines didn't hurt my technical skills one bit, although it didn't really help, either.
What helped the most, without question, was when I first got on the Net (BBS and Internet) in '88. Suddenly, there were entire worlds available to me. I met other kids who were into tech, I found a couple of helpful mentors who helped change the way I thought about programming (thanks, Chris, wherever you are)... I'd spend a couple of hours each day on BBSes and the Net, talking about things that interested me--you know, geek stuff.
That was the most helpful thing, insofar as learning about tech: finding mentors and fellow geeks. In my case, the computer was a medium by which to find them. But if a kid is just using a computer as a glorified Nintendo, the kid's going to wind up thinking of it as a glorified Nintendo. They're not going to talk about 3D performance and why antialiasing is so important to clear graphics, they're going to talk about "d00d! did u know that there's a naked mod for Drakkan?"
(Not that I think there's anything wrong with teenage boys talking about naked mods for Drakkan. If they weren't talking about sex at least part of the time, I'd wonder what was wrong with them... But I think if they never think about anything other than mods and warez, they're missing out.)
Find a mentor for your kid, someone who can show your kid that there's an entire world out there that's just ripe for the taking. And, by all means, keep on doing what you're doing--paying attention and worrying.;) That's what kids need the most, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither do you, if you think that modern technology isn't used at any point in the process. Yes, the swords are made the same way, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Yes, they're still made with alternating layers of clay and metal. Yes, there's still a lot of ritual that goes along with the creation of a sword.
And yes, modern metallurgical techniques are used.
Who do you think reads all those graduate theses which have been written on Japanese swords? Swordmakers, for the most part. Because once you take a good, hard look at what makes a Masamune so perfect, that gives you a big hint as to how to make your own swords better.
Your comment is about as informed as someone saying "violinmakers haven't changed their techniques in hundreds of years". Considering that some scientists come tantalizingly close to producing Stradivarius-quality instruments by careful study and analysis, violinmaking is undergoing rapid change due to modern technology.
This is the way the world works. The world wants it fast, cheap and good. The merchant says "fine, pick two", but the prosperous merchant says "fine, I'll give you all three". The second kind of merchant puts the first kind out of business.
Science is a wonderful tool with which to drive down costs of quality goods. It doesn't replace the human touch, nor can it ever replace human expertise; but people who say that science has no adjunct role to play are smoking crack.
Even when it comes to swordmaking.
This applies to just about everything mechanical, not just firearms, BTW.
... machined rather than hand matched.
.18 or so), operational tolerances up.
Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made.
Which Colt revolver would this be? The Single Action Army? The Patterson? The Python? The King Cobra? All of them are remarkable weapons (I've used all of them save the Patterson). All of them were machined.
Samuel Colt didn't "hand match" his weapons. He was smarter than that. The virtue of Sam Colt's weaponry was that the parts were all interchangeable, and that's only possible with machining and mass production, not handcrafted individual objects d'art.
Today's guns suck by comparison--the tolerances are way down
My SIG-Sauer is manufactured to tolerances which are usually reserved for jet aircraft. My Kimber M1911A1, likewise.
You also seem confused about tolerances in general. Saying that "tolerances are way down" is a good thing. That's like saying "tolerances fifty years ago were 0.1mm, tolerances this year are 0.01mm." If tolerances are down, that means manufacturing techniques have improved.
Now, manufacturing tolerance isn't the same as operational tolerance. Operational tolerance ought to be very high--weapons are expected to tolerate many different kinds of ammunition without a hiccup, in the most awful conditions. A modern 9mm Glock will chamber any 9mm ammunition you want to throw at it--AET, JHP, LRN, hardball, Glaser, whatever. A 9mm Browning, built in 1935, suffers feed failures on anything other than hardball unless you've had a gunsmith do a throat and ramp-polish on it.
Modern firearms: manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
This, by the by, is reflected in every other manufacturing field. You remember the early '80s, when people had massive air conditioners running in their computer rooms? Now, in 2000, it can be 90 degrees in the house and I don't have any qualms about firing up my dual Pentium IIIs. Manufacturing tolerances down (from point-whatever micron down to
Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14 spends more than half of its operational lifetime on the ground being serviced. The average F-22 doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
A $10 toaster from 50 years ago is big, clunky, heavy and totally reliable. A $10 toaster today is lightweight and totally reliable (at least, mine has never failed me). Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.
Good grief. Show me one, just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques. Even Japanese swordsmithing has gone modern. Four hundred years ago, smiths had to resort to crude and inexact methods to measure certain vital characteristics of metal. Today, smiths use modern metallurgical know-how and thermocouple thermometers to determine exactly what the optimal temperature for forging and tempering is.
Good grief.
Anyone who's talking about "nuclear hand grenades" is, quite simply, full of it.
1. Critical mass for Pu-239 is measured in the kilos. As in multiple kilos. How far do you really think you can throw 50 pounds of plutonium?
2. Shielding for radioactive materials is heavy as all get-out, too. Often, plutonium or uranium nuclear pits are cladd in nickel, tungsten, or some other very hard, dense metal. That also adds considerably to the weight.
3. The amount of explosives required to compress Pu239 in the initial stages of detonation is highly nontrivial.
4. It's possible to get by with less radioactive mass by switching to californium, or some other radioactive element that's easily fissionable and is extremely radioactive. However, the explosives, shielding, etc., are not so easy to switch around.
5. In other words, if your prof told you the Russkies were into nuclear hand grenade research, your prof has zero credibility whatsoever.
The problem with e-mail is the ability it gives to send many millions of e-mails to lots of people.
That's not a problem with email (note the lack of the hyphen--Don Knuth has a good linguistic analysis of why email is hyphenless somewhere on his site), but with people abusing email. It's pretty much like saying, "the problem with cars is the ability it gives people to drink and drive".
I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family know about it.
Wow. You mean all of us here at Slashdot are trusted members of your family? Really? Free hint: just by having a address for us Slashdotters to submit to, you undercut the very point you're trying to make.
My own email address, posted at the top of this message, is a spambouncer. It checks email and forwards them on to my real email account, where I can decide if I want to share my email addy with you or not.
So far, I've managed to stay (mostly) spam-free by a combination of judicious filtering and using proxy addresses.
Other people (like this guy) manage to do just fine, too, to the point where he has his Palm VII set up to receive wireless email from complete strangers, just because he thinks it's cool.
(Bruce, if you're reading this: you rock. Way to be accessible to the community. I would email this to you directly, but I don't want to spam you.)
So in other words, KTB, your "I can't let anyone but the most trusted members of my family" argument only holds water for you. There are lots of other people--ESR, BP, RMS, Linus, just to name a few--who manage to get by just fine, even though they get reams more email than you do.
The lack of trustworthyness [sic] and the dilution of feeling that is a result of mass e-mailing does not lend itself to mass communication, I have found.
If you're finding this, you're looking in the wrong places. Some mailing lists, such as the Continuing Time and Millennium's End lists which I'm on, are actual communities. If you think mass email is "remote", then how do you account for the vibrant BBS communities of old?
How can you beat the handwritten letter for the personal touch?
Try investing a little of yourself in your emails. Believe it or not, it really does work.
I agree, it sounds terribly atypical, but that's my experience with it. I'm still trying to figure out why Explorer crashes so often and takes down the entire system. It's a stock install with only mild tweaking.
Remember what he said before Windows 2000 came out?
:)
Yep. What's your point? Visionaries are more often spectacularly wrong than they are spectcularly correct. If you take what ESR says as being prophecy, you'll find him to be a remarkably lousy prophet. If you take what ESR says as being rumination, you might find a lot in there that warrants consideration.
And frankly, I find his ruminations to be far more interesting than anything I've seen from you here on Slashdot.
[N]ow it's out without any problems at all.
Win2K adoption is running less than half what was predicted, and far less than Microsoft was hoping. They put out a media blitz for Win2K which brought the Win95 launch to mind--in some ways it was even more over-the-top; Microsoft paid top dollar to make sure that every PC in the Bond movie The World Is Not Enough was running computers marked as "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" and all the handhelds were running WinCE. That kind of massive media blitz costs a lot of money and suggests MS had a lot of confidence it'd sell like hotcakes.
So far, sales have been tepid.
Insofar as reliability goes, my Win2K box crashes about every three or four days. Windows NT 4.0 crashed once a month or so. Win2K, on my own machine at home (dual PIII/800s, VIA mobo) has failed to be reliable.
I think the problem is that he is a hangover from the immature days of Linux.
As soon as I have to wear a suit and tie to be taken seriously in the Linux community, I'll defect to FreeBSD. I do my hacking sitting in my boxers at 3AM. Kernel development proceeds chaotically and "immaturely", yet at a breakneck pace.
If you take away the "immaturity", you take away Linux's greatest strength--that it's young and still explodingly vibrant.
Imagine if MS spokesmen spent their time with unfouded [sic] attacks on Linux.
You have been living under a rock, haven't you?
This section seems to be a call to arms against copyrights. I agree that US citizens have the right to protest against laws that they consider unfair, but law enforcement agencies have the authority and the responsibility to penalize them if they break the law in doing so.
Not really a call to arms against copyright, per se--rather, a very loud statement that government doesn't get to decide what the laws are: we do. Too many people are too willing to believe the government when it says this law or that is good, necessary, essential, etc. After all, "what about the children?"
At some point, you have to make your own decision on these issues, and you have to have the courage to live up to your convictions. Yes, law-enforcement will come down on you for breaking the law. That's unavoidable, and they'd be derelict in their duties if they didn't do so.
If I understand you here, you're saying that you can't steal IP because the owner still has a copy and the owner isn't deprived of the benefit of that property. The first point is obviously correct. The second point is not.
If the second point were not true, intellectual property violations would be prosecuted as theft. Since they are not, I conclude that in the eyes of the law it is not theft.
business views IP as an asset
Thinking doesn't necessarily make it so. RIAA also thinks that it can forbid you from lending a CD to a friend by putting a message on the back of a CD case denying you that right (see the back of Denis Leary's Lock and Load). Should we change our determinations of lawful and unlawful, right and wrong, to meet the interests of corporate America?
I wonder how much a company like Capcom would claim the copyright to the NES version of Bionic Commando, is worth, anyway?
Dunno. But note that I made a difference between software which is currently available and that which is not. If I want to get an illegal copy of Linux (maybe, for instance, from a guy who tells me he absolutely won't provide source), then have I committed theft from the Linux copyright owners? After all, the transfer was in violation of the license.
If I get an illegal copy of Solaris 8 instead, have I committed theft from Sun?
Similar actions must be judged similarly. Either (a) both are theft and ought to be loudly condemned, or (b) neither is theft and it's a nonissue.
I view it as (b), myself.
If you were right, then copyright infringement law wouldn't exist--it would be subsumed under theft laws, which it isn't. So yes, the law itself realizes that copyright infringement isn't theft, because otherwise people would get prosecuted for theft.
GnuPG fails to fully implement RFC2440 due to the IDEA patent. While IDEA is specified as a PGP cipher, GnuPG can't implement it.
For a long while, the RSA patent was also an obstacle to GnuPG, OpenSSH, and just about everything else out there that needed public-key crypto. The expiry of the Diffie-Hellman patent (in 1997) helped some, but there were still a lot of obstacles.
1. NATURAL VERSUS ARTIFICIAL RIGHTS.
:)
In the eyes of the law, the right of propertyowners to control the use of their property is a natural right. The right of people to be equal, regardless of skin color, is a natural right. The right to vote, regardless of gender, is a natural right. Note that the Constitution has not always specifically acknowledged these natural rights, and there are many natural rights which the Constitution does not recognize.
In addition to natural rights, there are such things as artificial rights. These are more accurately called "privileges". Just like you have a natural right to travel where you like in the US, you have an artificial right to drive on public highways. Remember how they told you in Driver's Ed that driving is a privilege and can be revoked by the State at will? It's the same principle.
Interesting, copyright is not a natural right. All natural rights recognized by the Constitution are phrased in terms of absolutes and imperatives: the government shall not pass law that restricts your freedom of speech, it shall not forbid you arms, it must get a warrant from a judge before violating your privacy rights, etc.
Copyright is a permissive, not an absolute. Congress may, in order to further social goals (scientific discoveries, literary development, etc.) secure for authors and inventors a monopoly on the usage of their creations. As can be seen from the wording of the Constitution, copyright is not a right--it's a privilege.
2. WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
The fundamental question of any government is, and always will be, who's in charge here? In the United States, that question was answered in 1783 when Washington accepted Cornwall's surrender, and again in 1789 when our Constitution was established: we the people are.
If we, the people, feel that the social ills of copyright outweigh its beneficial effects, then it is our absolute and sovereign right to ignore any and all acts of Congress which are contrary to our wishes.
America has a long tradition of rabble-rousing, much to the dismay of the government. When civil rights were not recognized by Congress and segregation was still the law, we, the people, marched on Selma and on Washington. We, the people, disobeyed the government. When Vietnam was tearing the country in half, we, the people, burned draft cards and engaged in civil disobedience.
Congress is not in charge of the government. Nor is the judiciary, nor is the executive. The people who are ultimately in charge are you and me.
3. WHAT IS THEFT, ANYWAY?
Black's Law describes theft as the unauthorized (not unlawful) deprivation of property, or in some cases, benefit of that property.
By that legal definition, unauthorized copying is not and cannot be theft. The `benefit of property' is none; if the author of the software is sitting on it and not turning a dime of profit by sitting on it, then I'm not depriving him of a dime by using it anyway and sharing it with my friends. After all, he still has his original copy (so I'm not depriving him of property), and he's not been deprived of any benefit (since he was receiving no benefit before).
Unauthorized copying is not equivalent to theft. Black's Law says so.
CONCLUSIONS:
1. "... The focus will switch to owning intellectual property."
As pointed out, it is impossible to own intellectual property. Physical property exists as a natural right; "intellectual property" is a privilege granted by the State, and privileges can always be revoked.
The alternative is to elevate intellectual property to the level of natural right, and if you're arguing that this should be the case, you're going to have a hard time convincing me--but please, try!
2. "If I broke into your home and took things out of your attic or basement, then you'd be outraged. But somehow calling it `IP' makes the difference? Does it really?"
Absolutely. The former is theft--the deprival of property and benefit thereof. The latter is unauthorized copying.
Now, it's likely that a theft argument can be made for unauthorized copying of material which is already available for a fee. If my favorite garage band is selling CDs for $10 a pop and I start burning copies of that CD for all my friends, I'm depriving them of a fraction of $10 per sale. (After all, most of my friends wouldn't buy their CD; of the ten people I burned a CD for, the band probably lost only one sale. Thus, their losses are $10, not $100.)
In the case of abandonware, no profit is being made, and thus, no damage has been done.
I got Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 6 mixed up. Pioneer 10 is at 3.2K, Pioneer 6 is in solar orbit.
Re: the SR-71. I didn't use it to represent the pinnacle of technical progress; by today's standards, it's interesting but not fascinating. Same can be said about the Bell X-1. But by the standards of the day, both were absolutely stunning--and neither could have, would have, been designed if it'd been done in-house.
I would ban all software but the most basic...
... I would demand that all design work and construction take place in house
They already do this. Have you ever seen avionics software? Much of it is written in Ada or its subsets, with intensive review and oftentimes provably-correct methodology, such as the Ada83 subset SPARK. (Note that provably-correct software is only provable to do what you tell it to do; it's not provably what you want done.)
Why does this old tech last so long
It doesn't. The Smithsonian and other museums are having a hell of a time with the Apollo spacesuits, because they're beginning to crumble away into nothingness.
Keep in mind that Pioneer is being kept cryogenically cooled at 3.2K in a hard vacuum and far away from most sources of ionizing radiation. It's not exactly hard to keep tech operating in those kinds of optimal conditions.
If I were NASA
That's why you're not NASA, and why I never, ever want to get my ass launched into orbit by a NASA-designed, NASA-constructed spacecraft. If you think NASA has all the brainpower, you're dead wrong. When it comes to avionics, the brainpower is in Boeing, Martin-Marietta, General Dynamics, Lockheed and other places in the same vein.
Who designed the SR-21 Blackbird, one of the greatest aviation feats of all time? Free hint: it wasn't the government.
Who designed the X-1, the first plane to fly faster than sound? It wasn't the government.
If you're going to construct everything in-house, you're going to need a chip fab plant to build your own computer hardware. Never mind that we've got exhaustively-tested, radiation-hardened 386SX chips... we have to throw out the 386SX, even though it's a fine, well-proven chip, simply because it was designed by Intel, not "in house".
You have to throw away the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, even though they're masterpieces of engineering--one failure in the entire operational life of the Shuttle fleet, and Morton-Thiokol engineers warned NASA that launching in cold conditions would cause the failure. By every measurable standard, the Morton-Thiokol SRBs are fine and reliable pieces of engineering, when used within their specified tolerances (which are, BTW, pretty damn generous). Why? Because it wasn't designed or built in-house.
Outside contracting to commercial companies does not work; they just cut corners and introduce mistakes.
The SR-71 disagrees with you. As do the Shuttle's main engines. As do the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters. As do the United States' impressive array of spy satellites, the majority of which were constructed by TRW.
Are you sure you still want to assert that outside contracting results in poor engineering and shoddy workmanship?
No, actually, you did. No matter how much you hide the data, no matter how much you encrypt the data, no matter how much you shuffle data around, it still doesn't change three basic facts:
1. The data has to get to your PC somehow for you to use, manipulate, or deal with it in any way.
2. The data which comes to and goes from your PC has address headers on it.
3. The cops don't have to cryptanalyze the packets, or even know what's in them--they just have to know that you're sending traffic they want to monitor.
As soon as the cops start taking a specific interest in you and what you're doing, you need a hell of a lot more than crypto and obfuscation. It doesn't matter if they're using one-time pads in a cryptographically perfect fashion; this entire system is fundamentally busted.
First, the RIP act requires that communications be archived for seven years, draconian penalties for refusal to hand over decryption keys, etc., etc. Let's ignore the fact that the RIP probably violates the EU's human-rights agreement, of which the UK recently signed acceptance--after all, the UK seems to be ignoring it.
So. Communications must be archived for several years, with decryption keys available on request. Supposing we had some ultrasecure OS which encrypted absolutely everything out there, as well as as much of the TCP/IP packet as is possible. That basically leaves only the address field and routing information unencrypted.
Now we have a person using this machine, A, to communicate over a fundamentally insecure network (the Internet) with machine B. The authorities think that either A or B want to be doing something un-American (err--un-British?) like, I don't know, sharing the recipe for Colonel Sanders' secret blend of herbs and spices. What do the authorities do?
They start listening on the machine, of course. So what if every packet is encrypted--they can still look at TCP/IP headers and discover where the packets are going. If, in fact, it turns out that packets are going out addressed for B, then that's a pretty clear sign the machines are communicating. Suddenly, B gets a knock on the door and a warrant served, and told to hand over those conversations "oh, and don't tell A a word of all this".
That only covers direct peer-to-peer connections, though. The naieve counter to this is that relayed connections, such as email, are immune to this because they don't get sent directly to the target machine. Well, maybe... but that just means there are more points of failure for the authorities to exploit.
Even something as dramatic as establishing an IPsec connection with a mail relay in Seahaven wouldn't be proof. The American government seems to think that using encryption is evidence of malfeasance (see the recent story about the FBI using a keysniffer to defeat PGP). The British government, which is even more behind-the-times than the American government when it comes to encryption, will probably take it as evidence of high treason, or something similarly melodramatic and groundless.
If they can tell a judge, "look, milord, this bloke 'ere's got hisself a highly encrypted network with a rogue nation-state that's know t' be a haven f'r data pirates", the judge will probably spend all of three seconds before deciding that yes, you're a threat, and you really ought to hand over your decryption keys just so the government can be sure.
In other words, this solves nothing.
To every social problem, there is a technological solution which is hip, cool, sexy and broken. This is it.
First, I think you could successfully persuade Bjarne to agree that C++ is not C's successor; it is now its own totally distinct language from C, which supports a very large subset of the ISO C90 specification.
/* Variable and object decls */
/* Three lines for all the functionality */
:)
C has no successor, because it doesn't need one. C is meant to be a portable assembly language, and it does that remarkably well. It will continue to do it remarkably well for years to come. The problem set C was originally meant to address is still around, and C still addresses that problem set very well.
C++ did not "do it pretty badly". People who condemn C++ so broadly generally don't know the first thing about the language (free hint: there's a lot more to it than the "class" keyword). Is the language spec large? Yes. The Jargon File is dead accurate when it says that the language spec is just at the limit of memory. The language spec is large because C++, moreso than any language other than Perl, is a Swiss Army chainsaw.
You want generic programming? It's in there. You want an OO language? It's in there. You want a pure OO language? You can write pure OO in C++ (need a few libraries). You want a procedural language? It's in there. C++ can be usefully used in a staggering variety of problem sets, but only if the programmer understands that there's more than one way to solve things.
C++ gets its bad reputation more from lousy programmers than from flaws in the language itself.
My own C++ code winds up looking like Perl by the time I'm done with it. Something as simple as:
int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
try
{
string key(argv[1]);
fishtank::blowfish cipher(key, fishtank::ENCRYPT);
std::ifstream infile("myfile.txt");
std::ofstream outfile("myfile.txt.encrypted");
cipher << infile;
cipher.process();
cipher >> outfile;
}
catch (exception &e)
{
std::cerr << "Exception condition caught" << endl;
std::cerr << e.what() << endl;
return 1;
}
return cipher.result();
}
... Presto. You get the encryption functionality, you get error handling, you get secure memory management facilities, you get versatile file and network I/O, all without needing to bat an eyelash.
Sometime, take a look at Bjarne Stroustrup's homepages. He's got a great comparison of C versus C++ for a trivial enter-your-name program.
C has no successor because it doesn't need one. The problem set C was meant to address is still with us, and C is still a great way to solve those problems.
C++ is not C's successor. It was not meant to be. It addresses a much larger, much different problem set.
Smart hackers will know when a C++ approach is called for (more accurately, which C++ approach is called for--there are many to choose from), and when a C approach is called for, and when a LISP or Standard ML approach is called for.
Specialization is for weenies.
Unless I miss my guess, the Standard doesn't specify a size for char, either. It does guarantee that char <= short int <= int <= long int, but nothing more than that.
Note that it's perfectly valid to have a C compiler where all the integer data types are of the exact same size.
The most important thing you can do to secure an OS isn't auditing, it's intelligent design. Windows NT has been pretty heavily audited internally by Microsoft, and it's still a block of Swiss cheese due to its design.
Auditing is a good step, but no amount of auditing can overcome brain-damaged design.
If it's seven billion light years away, then that might explain why my pings to it always timeout. :)
(I think you meant seven billion here, not seven billion light years. One LY = 6 trillion miles/9 trillion KM, if I recall correctly. I really, really doubt that Pioneer 10 is 63 billion trillion KM away.)
Unfortunately, the litany of errors that MS's legal team committed would fill a large set of books. It's pretty well agreed, though, that Allchin's pre-trial prep could've been better handled by a third-year law student from Legal Aid.
What you say may be true. It may be false. At this point in litigation, the veracity of your claim is totally irrelevant, and that's what most Slashdotters keep forgetting. At this point, if it's not in the court record, then it didn't happen, and you can't make it happen now.
Should MS have brought this up? Sure. Would've drastically improved their odds on appeal. But they can't argue "the benefit is that it's already there"--the appellate court won't even deem that argument to be worth responding to, except in the most curt and cursory fashion.
After all, the appellate logic goes, if it was important, they'd have brought it up at trial.
Just remember this: at the appellate level, all they can argue is that the trial wasn't fair. They can't argue the facts. They can't introduce new evidence. They can't contest one single iota of the judge's Findings of Law and Fact.
All they can do is contest that the trial was not fair--not only flawed, but so flawed that the Constitutional promise of fairness was violated. And that's going to be a pretty hard thing to sell the court. Jackson was admirably fair (up until his one-day remedy deliberations, which may well get bounced back to him for reconsideration--and Jackson may well institute the exact same remedy again, just after longer deliberations).
Appellate argument is not, repeat, is not the same as trial argument. They're totally different beasts. At the trial level your assertion is "we're not guilty, and even if we are, we're not that guilty". At the appellate level your assertion is "okay, so we're guilty, but the trial wasn't fair, and with a fair trial we'll prove our innocence despite our overwhelming guilt."
First, you aren't allowed to introduce new evidence at the appellate level (except in extremely unusual circumstances). There's no new testimony allowed, there's no new evidence allowed. All you're allowed to argue on is the court record.
Microsoft had plenty of opportunity to show "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser". The reality of it is, not only did they not show this, their own witness discredited this claim.
James Allchin's direct testimony (submitted in written form) claimed that customers benefitted from the integration of browser and OS in ways which were not possible with the products being separate. He had seventeen or eighteen points which he hammered on.
When Boies cross-examined Allchin, Boies went step-by-step through Allchin's direct testimony and asked him if those exact same benefits couldn't be obtained by downloading IE 4.0 as a separate product and installing it on Win95/B.
On every single claim, Allchin was forced to admit that "correct, the integration offers no advantage in this case".
Boies' cross of Allchin ought to do in the Litigants' Hall of Fame. Allchin was bloodily eviscerated on the witness stand, and Microsoft's strongest witness turned out to be the strongest witness, all right... strongest PLAINTIFF'S witness.
They might argue that IE/Win is beneficial to the users, but the court record shows MS's own witness admitting, seventeen times, that the integration conferred no benefit.
In other words, they're just putting that argument in there to look good. I'd expect the appellate judges to come down pretty harshly on them for it.
Another thing to keep in mind--the last time the appellate bench overruled Jackson, they said that tying products together was lawful as long as it conferred a benefit to the consumer. Most people don't remember that; all they remember is "they said the `integration' was okay". Microsoft is apparently depending on the appellate court to say that integration is always okay.
But if the appellate court holds to their earlier opinion, Microsoft is in a hell of a lot of hot water.
First off, one thing to remember about appellate judges. They're extremely busy people, with very little time to waste. If you want to score points with an appellate judge, the way you do it is to keep your arguments clear, concise, and realistic. If there were three "real errors" in your trial and another twelve "didn't affect the outcome, but still wrong", ignore the twelve and focus on the three.
If you put all fifteen in your brief and force the judges to figure out, on their own, that three of the issues were worthwhile and the other twelve was just attorney ego-stroking, don't be surprised if Los Federales take a very dim view of you.
Microsoft lost in trial court, but they wouldn't have lost as badly if they hadn't committed the cardinal sin of pissing off the judge. You can get past any legal hurdle in any courtroom except that one.
With a 150-page legal brief, which the appellate judges will have to examine point-by-point in their opinion, Microsoft is guaranteeing to make a lot of judges on the appellate bench unhappy, too.
Were I Microsoft, I'd have focused on only a handful of issues (and maybe made a token attempt at discrediting James Allchin, since he turned out to be Boies' best witness). I sure as hell wouldn't go about writing a 150-page monster which is guaranteed to make me enemies of the judges before I ever set foot in their courtroom for oral arguments.
(Note: the following is tongue in cheek. If you're humor impaired, skip this.)
.40 S&W Cor-Bon and a good SIGarms P226, and my brother's Glock 21 in .45 Super serves him well, I believe that nothing on God's green earth has yet surpassed the Benelli M1 series firing 2.75-inch 12-gauge shells packed with #6 birdshot.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm much more of a traditionalist when it comes to home security hardware. While my cousin swears by the virtues of the
Let me tell you, the ability to fire five controlled shots in under a second from a piece of hardware as authoritative as a 12-gauge is enough to make even the most deranged lunatic run for his life. And thanks to the small birdshot, overpenetration and blow-through is minimized while still maintaining extremely high one-shot stops at ranges of seven meters or less!
Put that MP5 back on the shelf, my friend, and stop looking lasciviously at that M4A1 carbine. NATO STANAG is all well and good, but remember... shotguns are the only infantry weapons so terrifyingly lethal that it's a violation of the Geneva Accords to use them in wartime.
O'course, the US never signed the Geneva Accords, so, unless you're doing your shooting in a country which is signatory, you can't be charged with a war-crime for putting enough steel shot into him to make his sorry ass worth $1.95 just in recyclables alone.
Marrying the finest in Italian shotgun technology with the finest in Finnish OS technology makes for a system to be feared. All you have to do is wire up a standard M14 sentry mount (available from fine merchants everywhere) with the Benelli, using ample duck tape to pad out those few places where the Benelli is smaller than the old 7.62mm battle rifle.
From there, remove the IR filter on your Intel web camera and point it in the direction of the front door. Now it comes time to take advantage of the open-source nature of the Linux operating system, and write your own image recognition software to positively identify your friends and neighbors.
Of course, any fine weapon system needs thorough testing before it can go truly live. Just as every soldier must constantly ask himself the question, "Will I kill my enemy before he will kill me?" and make the appropriate decision, your Linux sentry gun must ask himself the question "Is this a family member, or a Jehovah's Witness?" and make the appropriate decision.
I suggest calling up your local chapter of Jehovah's Witnesses and telling them that you're ready to receive the truth of Christ Jesus, you wish to join the 144,000 saved souls, and ask them to bring plenty of copies of The Watchtower when they arrive. In no time flat you'll have a veritable Mongol Horde of targets to test your sentry gun on--and, in so doing, you'll get a good handle on how many rounds per minute your sentry gun can fire, as well as when you need to code timeouts so that the barrel can cool.
Good luck, and remember: gun control means being able to hit your target!
Older X-ray machines used higher levels of radiation, which means that your risk increases with the age of the airport.
The other risk factor is the HD itself. How dense is the media? Is it set up to do software RAID? Is it a name brand, or is it a fly-by-night? Speaking generally, Big Name manufacturers are more resistant to stresses of all kinds than a HD which just fell off the back of a turnip truck.
To summarize--let your modern laptop go through modern X-ray machines without too much worry. But if either of them aren't modern, you might want to ask Security to hand-check it.
Like I said, to a lesser extent. It's the same story told from multiple different perspectives, and each time you see a different version of the same story.
It's not Rashomon, but I see a similarity there.
I first got my hands on a PC back in 1981, when Ellsworth College got their first PCs and my elementary school (I was in first grade) took a tour of the facilities. Right then and there, I was hooked.
;) That's what kids need the most, I think.
I spent summers coding on a Commodore PET during '81 and '82. During the school year I got my grubby hands on an Apple II+ and delved into BASIC. In '84 my parents bought me a Commodore 64, and a couple years later bought a Commodore 128. I was in paradise.
In 1990 I got an IBM 386DX/20 (*hot shit* hardware for 1990, lemme tell you) and I discovered Pascal and C++. And from there things have only ballooned.
Today, I'm an engineer with a good job. Playing games on the machines didn't hurt my technical skills one bit, although it didn't really help, either.
What helped the most, without question, was when I first got on the Net (BBS and Internet) in '88. Suddenly, there were entire worlds available to me. I met other kids who were into tech, I found a couple of helpful mentors who helped change the way I thought about programming (thanks, Chris, wherever you are)... I'd spend a couple of hours each day on BBSes and the Net, talking about things that interested me--you know, geek stuff.
That was the most helpful thing, insofar as learning about tech: finding mentors and fellow geeks. In my case, the computer was a medium by which to find them. But if a kid is just using a computer as a glorified Nintendo, the kid's going to wind up thinking of it as a glorified Nintendo. They're not going to talk about 3D performance and why antialiasing is so important to clear graphics, they're going to talk about "d00d! did u know that there's a naked mod for Drakkan?"
(Not that I think there's anything wrong with teenage boys talking about naked mods for Drakkan. If they weren't talking about sex at least part of the time, I'd wonder what was wrong with them... But I think if they never think about anything other than mods and warez, they're missing out.)
Find a mentor for your kid, someone who can show your kid that there's an entire world out there that's just ripe for the taking. And, by all means, keep on doing what you're doing--paying attention and worrying.