This is the closest I could find on short notice w/o having to go dredge up the ISBNs of the relevant books I've read it from concerning RMS Titanic and its US and UK post-mortem inquiries: Quick Wiki Link.
"Is there any actual evidence that pirate FM broadcasters cause chaos?"
In FM, probably, but it'd be minor. OTOH, in 1912 there was ample evidence, which is why the FCC was established in the first place: It was said that distress signals from RMS Titanic were stepped-on, garbled, and the transmission of events surrounding the ship's sinking were tough to pass around via radio because there were so many people stepping all over the frequencies. Not sure of the whole story though, so take it as you will.
"However, getting Joe User to switch from IE to firefox is difficult, especially when he percieves no problems with IE."
Not really... Months ago, I removed all the IE shortcuts from my g/f's machine and changed the Firefox desktop icon to the one with that big blue "e"... she didn't notice it until last week. Once I got done catching Hell for it and explained to her why I did it, she decided that it worked well enough anyway. I changed the icons back, and she's been using FF ever since. It's not that she's unintelligent or anything, it's just that she's an ordinary user as far as computer skills, and apparently the normal user's computer habits seem to take a very long time to self-audit, as it were.
I suspect that, given my (admittedly limited) experience with MS Works, the files generated probably won't be usable in MS Office (I remember a ton of docs from my girlfriend's install of MS Works that simply would not open at all in MS Word).
Given that, I believe that you'll likely still have to buy MS Office if you want to open a.doc made in Word, and vice-versa.
You really might want to read This first... 64% of total sounds more than just a bit too big of a number, 'mano. (the site you supplied may explain why... I'm not Bush's greatest fan or anything, but man - propaganda is propaganda, no matter what side you view it from)
IANAE (and thank Heavens - my social life is geeked-up enough as it is), but why the doom-and-gloom over what IMHO is basically a short-term shift? (the US economy grew at 5+% the first quarter of this year, and 2.5% 2nd quarter)... (ref: here
. I mean, seriously - if they were relying on year-to-year results to get a trend, okay... but quarter-to-quarter for a long-term forecast? Maybe I just don't grok economics so well, but it seems weird to me, to say the least.
Also, US Economy != World Economy, influences be damned. Is the global economy slowing overall, or no?
After RTFA, I think someone was trying to short some Yahoo stock more than make an accurate forecast...
"Make no mistake: Sam and Jed know damn well that their software is used primarily for piracy. Jed told me so himself, when I happened to run into him at a party in San Francisco years ago. The P2P business was already booming when he launched eDonkey, and he wanted a piece of it, because he knew there was money to be had."
Ah - I should've been more clear: a company's officially stated intent, so long as it is incontrovertable (that is, as long as someone can't prove otherwise w/ solid evidence), cannot be magically changed to evil just because said company is being sued. Hearsay about what the CEO said at a party, even if he did say so outright, won't stand much chance in court (at least in the US) - now if you have internal emails, memos, stuff like that? Then you have something that proves actual intent, which is a different story altogether.
The Napster case - wasn't their defense destroyed because Fanning basically admitted to his intent in an interview?
"The difference between FTP/HTTP and eDonkey is that eDonkey while providing a mechanism for sharing files, PROFITED from the copyrighted intellectual property of others"
Oh? How about all those years that people used Agent Pro, or Netscape News Reader, or...? software writers turned a decent profit from those items for quite awhile.
And, umm, "NNTP", not "HTTP". You know, like "USENET". Will no one rid me of these troublesome newbs!?
Or were you referring to proprietary vs. open standards for transferring files? Shouldn't matter either way, there - unless it's suddenly illegal to write and sell proprietary software that uses proprietary communications protocols ('course, you could try and sue Novell for doing that... they've been at it for years!;) )
Ah, wait - nevermind... your premise is flawed in another way entirely, which means that I don't have to keep guessing at WTF you were attempting to talk about: eDonkey made money from sales of their "Pro" software, not from pirating everyone else's stuff. Customer motivations have nothing to do with sales intent, otherwise gun and knife makers would be civilly liable for every murder committed with their products. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good parallel (and a reason why most lawsuits against gun makers have failed utterly on such premises...)
...unless of course you're going to assert that they made their cash from actially selling pirated stuff online - you aren't dumb enough to assert that, are you AC? Didn't think so.
Instead of threats of violence or interference, there's threats of lawsuits to extract cash and force the death of anything that threatens a well-financed-enough organization. Yay. (as/me shakes head)...
It's almost as if the RIAA can now go after any company who sells products with any sort of file-transfer technology... I wonder why they haven't gone after any web browser that supports FTP, or anyone who makes/distributes an NNTP reader? Hell, FTP and NNTP were passing copyrighted files around long before AOL even reared it's head... Ah, but the answer is pretty obvious in thsoe cases, no?
N.B. how much money does a grassroots organization have to scrape together and put in the politicians' pockets before we can get some sort of copyright law reforms, anyway?
Cripes - half the fun of watching old sci-fi (hell, half the fun of reading it too) involves the whole attempt at special effects given for that period in time. It gives an intelligent viewer as much insight into things at that time which are incidental --but just as important-- as how they thought about the future. The visuals are a vital part of that. Sure, it's cardboard and glue (and small plastic models on fishing line), but that's just as important to the stories, written right at the same time, as the story itself.
Seriously - leave it alone so that anyone in the distant future who stumbles across it can actually learn about the ones who wrote it. While Trek isn't exactly a classic like, oh, something by H.G. Wells, it may someday become something akin to a classic, given its popularity. We can learn a lot about Wells' time and society from our century-plus future vantage point by reading the stories and seeing period sketches and prints illustrating it, if possible. Sure, it's not exactly eye candy, but it's worth it.
"The Supreme Court's job is to uphold law, not make new ones."
...but do they not also invalidate bad laws (e.g. the kind that had been struck down during the Civil Rights movement of the mid 1900's, anti-sodomy laws, things like that?)
I don't want them to go out and make new laws - I just want to see them strike down an obviously (IMHO) bad one.
The beauty of iptables (Linux) or ipfilter (does pretty much the same thing on BSD, Solaris, and others) is the fact that by default, only root sets the parameters. That way, a malicious proggie, which would normally be running under normal user permissions, cannot mangle the firewall settings (so long as the perms on the conf files or the firewall binary aren't monkeyed with by the admin of the box).
Windows OTOH lets ordinary users bang around with the 'personal firewall' settings, even turning the thing off outright. Vista may change this (one would hope), but I wouldn't hold my breath.
iptables is a lot more subtle and flexible IMHO (e.g. it can control NAT routings), but Firestarter (if it isn't just a front-end for iptables anyway - not sure) should work okay for you as well, so long as only root can change the settings and turn it on/off.
Yep - which prevents most newbies (who likely cut + pasted their rules in from the tute at freebsd diary anyway) from rebuilding it immediately (evil grin).
"Riser cards with Memory-And-CPU-Both-of-Them (à la Slot 1) is possible (and highly anticipated, because it'll make possible a much wider possibility of specialized accelerators to be plugged than currently with AM2 socket)"
This already occurs in the server space - the Hewlett-Packard DL-585 has their (AMD Opteron) CPUs and memory on grouped daughterboards.
Not a bad box in my experience, but my only gripe? Woe betide the fool who doesn't use HP-branded RAM on the bastich...
Actually, it wasn't that bad... in the earliest iterations, it was miles above what Windows could provide, and for ordinary users, it was rather slick. I remember as a 16-year-old the day I saw the Macintosh 'Classic' for the first time when my mother brought it home from work for the weekend (the Mac Classic form factor was fairly brand new then) - compared to the Windows 2.0/DOS rig on my parents' shiny new Amstrad "2286" (remember DOSSHELL? - Windows 2.0 it was pretty much like that)? The Mac blew away Windows/DOS in usability, presentation and performance. It was damned slick.
Of course, time went on, and things changed radically since then, but Mac UI development was, in its early days, miles beyond what Microsoft could muster.
Now - why MacOS decided to stick with the same setup in spite of Win95/98? Dunno.
"The argument that the machine is a "dongle" only works if it were true. It's not. "
It does and it doesn't. Identical CPU types are probably okay, but different ones won't work, at least with the OEM install disks.
A few years back, I was at a LAN party w/ my dual G5 PowerMac, with perhaps 5 other Mac users out of the 250 who showed up. One of the other Mac guys wanted to do a re-install on his G4 iMac (he had royally hosed something up, but I forgot exactly what).
I lent him my install disks, figuring that he had OSX 10.3 before it blew, I had 10.3, so machts nights IMHO. Upon boot, the software informed him that he didn't have the correct disks for his machine. Eventually he ran home and got his own to do the reinstall, where it worked just fine.
Just my 2 rubles and what I'd seen w/ it, but I suspect that at least in the case of OEM install disks, they've been somewhat specific in what they'll install to. Not sure ab't the retail disks, however, and not sure at all anymore in light of the Intel switchover. OTOH, it'd be a great way to insure that you still have to have a huge dongle for at least a little while...
Slashdot Mirror
HTH a little.
In FM, probably, but it'd be minor. OTOH, in 1912 there was ample evidence, which is why the FCC was established in the first place: It was said that distress signals from RMS Titanic were stepped-on, garbled, and the transmission of events surrounding the ship's sinking were tough to pass around via radio because there were so many people stepping all over the frequencies. Not sure of the whole story though, so take it as you will.
Not really... Months ago, I removed all the IE shortcuts from my g/f's machine and changed the Firefox desktop icon to the one with that big blue "e"... she didn't notice it until last week. Once I got done catching Hell for it and explained to her why I did it, she decided that it worked well enough anyway. I changed the icons back, and she's been using FF ever since. It's not that she's unintelligent or anything, it's just that she's an ordinary user as far as computer skills, and apparently the normal user's computer habits seem to take a very long time to self-audit, as it were.
Given that, I believe that you'll likely still have to buy MS Office if you want to open a .doc made in Word, and vice-versa.
You really might want to read This first... 64% of total sounds more than just a bit too big of a number, 'mano. (the site you supplied may explain why... I'm not Bush's greatest fan or anything, but man - propaganda is propaganda, no matter what side you view it from)
Also, US Economy != World Economy, influences be damned. Is the global economy slowing overall, or no?
After RTFA, I think someone was trying to short some Yahoo stock more than make an accurate forecast...
http://iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net/chunkyhtml/ c91.html
"Iptables is also able to work on higher layers, such as the Application layer." (ref. below).
Ergo, it can be used as an application firewall. While most users won't go near doing so, it does work as such - you can even script it as such.
ref: as a quick insta-googled example
Ah - I should've been more clear: a company's officially stated intent, so long as it is incontrovertable (that is, as long as someone can't prove otherwise w/ solid evidence), cannot be magically changed to evil just because said company is being sued. Hearsay about what the CEO said at a party, even if he did say so outright, won't stand much chance in court (at least in the US) - now if you have internal emails, memos, stuff like that? Then you have something that proves actual intent, which is a different story altogether.
The Napster case - wasn't their defense destroyed because Fanning basically admitted to his intent in an interview?
Oh? How about all those years that people used Agent Pro, or Netscape News Reader, or ...? software writers turned a decent profit from those items for quite awhile.
And, umm, "NNTP", not "HTTP". You know, like "USENET". Will no one rid me of these troublesome newbs!?
Or were you referring to proprietary vs. open standards for transferring files? Shouldn't matter either way, there - unless it's suddenly illegal to write and sell proprietary software that uses proprietary communications protocols ('course, you could try and sue Novell for doing that... they've been at it for years! ;) )
Ah, wait - nevermind... your premise is flawed in another way entirely, which means that I don't have to keep guessing at WTF you were attempting to talk about: eDonkey made money from sales of their "Pro" software, not from pirating everyone else's stuff. Customer motivations have nothing to do with sales intent, otherwise gun and knife makers would be civilly liable for every murder committed with their products. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good parallel (and a reason why most lawsuits against gun makers have failed utterly on such premises...)
Oh, damn... guess I don't need this iptables thingy then...
Instead of threats of violence or interference, there's threats of lawsuits to extract cash and force the death of anything that threatens a well-financed-enough organization. Yay. (as /me shakes head)...
It's almost as if the RIAA can now go after any company who sells products with any sort of file-transfer technology... I wonder why they haven't gone after any web browser that supports FTP, or anyone who makes/distributes an NNTP reader? Hell, FTP and NNTP were passing copyrighted files around long before AOL even reared it's head... Ah, but the answer is pretty obvious in thsoe cases, no?
N.B. how much money does a grassroots organization have to scrape together and put in the politicians' pockets before we can get some sort of copyright law reforms, anyway?
Seriously - leave it alone so that anyone in the distant future who stumbles across it can actually learn about the ones who wrote it. While Trek isn't exactly a classic like, oh, something by H.G. Wells, it may someday become something akin to a classic, given its popularity. We can learn a lot about Wells' time and society from our century-plus future vantage point by reading the stories and seeing period sketches and prints illustrating it, if possible. Sure, it's not exactly eye candy, but it's worth it.
I don't want them to go out and make new laws - I just want to see them strike down an obviously (IMHO) bad one.
Windows OTOH lets ordinary users bang around with the 'personal firewall' settings, even turning the thing off outright. Vista may change this (one would hope), but I wouldn't hold my breath.
iptables is a lot more subtle and flexible IMHO (e.g. it can control NAT routings), but Firestarter (if it isn't just a front-end for iptables anyway - not sure) should work okay for you as well, so long as only root can change the settings and turn it on/off.
Yep - which prevents most newbies (who likely cut + pasted their rules in from the tute at freebsd diary anyway) from rebuilding it immediately (evil grin).
C'mon Ted, you can do it!
Sure - just run this little, umm, 'booster' script:
-- /dev/null > /etc/ipf.conf /etc/ipf.conf
!#/bin/sh
cat
ipf -Fa -f
wall "pwn3d!"
--
(...point is, if something bad is already in there, and it has the right perms, no firewall is going to save you. None.)
This already occurs in the server space - the Hewlett-Packard DL-585 has their (AMD Opteron) CPUs and memory on grouped daughterboards.
Not a bad box in my experience, but my only gripe? Woe betide the fool who doesn't use HP-branded RAM on the bastich...
Of course, time went on, and things changed radically since then, but Mac UI development was, in its early days, miles beyond what Microsoft could muster.
Now - why MacOS decided to stick with the same setup in spite of Win95/98? Dunno.
It does and it doesn't. Identical CPU types are probably okay, but different ones won't work, at least with the OEM install disks.
A few years back, I was at a LAN party w/ my dual G5 PowerMac, with perhaps 5 other Mac users out of the 250 who showed up. One of the other Mac guys wanted to do a re-install on his G4 iMac (he had royally hosed something up, but I forgot exactly what).
I lent him my install disks, figuring that he had OSX 10.3 before it blew, I had 10.3, so machts nights IMHO. Upon boot, the software informed him that he didn't have the correct disks for his machine. Eventually he ran home and got his own to do the reinstall, where it worked just fine.
Just my 2 rubles and what I'd seen w/ it, but I suspect that at least in the case of OEM install disks, they've been somewhat specific in what they'll install to. Not sure ab't the retail disks, however, and not sure at all anymore in light of the Intel switchover. OTOH, it'd be a great way to insure that you still have to have a huge dongle for at least a little while...
The latter part simply isn't true - I'm using Firefox FFS! :)