... purred the synthesised female voice of the sexy-looking robot.
The patron willingly obliges.
The robot's voice loses its seductive charm and, growing sterner and less human, intones:
"Blood... alcohol... levels... excessive... no... more... alcohol... for... seventy... three... minutes..."
From the article, it looks good.
But let me say that I've sometimes been in the position of having to merge branches. In my first hacking job, I had to take code that had been written by 2 crazy Polish programmers, and merge 37 non-working branches into one branch that worked. It was *not* fun, and I enjoyed a well-deserved beer when it was done.
IMO, a distributed system of archive management that doesn't make ongoing reference to a central tree is a sure recipe for chaos, and poses the risk of making software harder to install/use for the non-skilled, and creating a lot of work in merging disparate branches for the skilled.
You want package xxyzz? OK - go to Jim's store in San Diego. It's easy to set up. Oh, I forgot to tell you, you've gotta get some bits from Lucy's store in Manchester, and Frieda's fixed a few bugs too - get her fixes from Bonn. And don't forget Peter's enhancements - his store is at the Adelaide University site. What? it doesn't compile? What kind of idiot are you? Just hack it till it does compile, then put it together in your own tree!
$ telnet slashdot.org 80
Trying 64.28.67.150...
Connected to slashdot.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / http/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2002 10:31:19 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Bender: My life, and by extension everyone else's, is meaningless.
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
...
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
Now, *that*'s a REAL web browser.
The rendering is left to the surfer's imagination!
The biggest problem with marketing Linux-based PDAs is the miniscule software catalogue.
I'm not referring to the wide range of GPL'ed Linux applications that work on Linux PDAs (read: can be possibly made to work with reduced features after 'just a bit' of massive re-architecting and 'just a few' 36-hour porting/hacking/debugging sessions). I'm talking about the tiny pittance of ready-to-run pre-packaged apps, compared to the thousands of apps already available for Windows CE/Pocket PC and PalmOS PDAs.
While I'm a fan of Linux and Open Source, I have to acknowledge the catch-22 problem of trying to capture market share for Linux PDAs when Microsoft and its PDA minions - Compaq, HP and Casio etc, are barging their way in with the support of huge R&D and marketing budgets - and attracting the attention and efforts of legions of corporate and independent software developers who smell the $$ and cut their code, confident that they will recoup their development costs and make a profit before their apps end up on the warez/crack sites, Morpheus, Gnutella etc.
Growing software catalogues feed bigger hardware sales, and vice versa.
The moral?
If you want to push a new hardware/OS combination into the market, all you need is a few billion dollars behind you, and allow some time for the developers to get on board and feed your credibility with a software catalogue before you *have* to turn a profit.
would be to legislate that all new residential and commercial dwellings be built from transparent concrete.
Anyone refusing to demolish their existing house would be added to a database of 'potential conspirators'.
This would be quite consistent with recent 'anti-terrorist' surveillance legislation.
Also, the boom in building would boost the flagging economy.
Imagine whole neighbourhoods of people living in complete exposure, proving they're real honest patriotic Americans.
I hope that someone can take it one step further and gain a ruling that DVDs legally purchased anywhere else in the world can be played legally in Australia - effectively, a ruling invalidating any so-called 'right' for content producers to restrict disks to geographical regions.
The 'region encoding' thing totally sucks. Not only do the anti-De-CSS rulings effectively make it illegal to play a DVD on a Linux box, it's also a thin edge of the wedge allowing content producers to exercise ridiculous levels of control over how people are able to consume content. What'll it be next? You can't watch a show unless you key in a serial number from inside the lid of a Coke bottle, plus a code from inside a Pizza Hut carton?
Australian legislators have some 'quirky' notions of technology that often differ to those elsewhere in the world - it just might be possible to get such a ruling and overturn this ridiculous region coding bullshit once and for all.
How to migrate from Windows
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the major weaknesses of Wine so far is that there's no support for Windows-only drivers. For example, Matrox Marvel G200 MJPEG video capture. This wipes out whole classes of applications - multimedia, OCR and others.
Fortunately, VMWare version 3 now supports USB, which can allow installation of drivers for USB hardware.
I can envisage that many people will follow an integration path like:
1) Mainly using Windows, add a linux partition
2) Learn the Linux apps, often boot Windows partition
3) Progressively migrate Windows apps to VMware under Linux, less frequent use of Windows partition
4) Progressively migrate Windows apps from under VMware into the Wine environment
5) Progressively convert data from Windows apps to formats usable by native Linux apps
Hopefully, at some point along this path, one can delete the Windows partition, and later the VMware box, and use only native Linux apps or run some Windows apps under wine.
Realistically, I would hope to be completely free of my Windows partition in 6-12 months, and free of VMware in 6-18 months.
But the time to really 'pop the cork' on the Wine is when it supports native Windows device drivers, which will be a feat indeed!
REUTERS, MARCH 5
The University of Minnesota has been granted a patent for what it calls 'The Ultimate [human] Stem Cell'.
It is now illegal for humans to generate this cell, or invoke its capabilities to develop into any human tissue, without a license from the University of Minnesota.
Expectant mothers and fathers, upon confirmation of pregnancy, will be asked to sign a Universal Stem Cell End User License Agreement, and pay an annual license fee.
Healing of disease, and repair of damaged body tissues, will incur special levies.
Any use of Universal Stem Cells in any bodily function will result in substantial fines, possible jail terms, and compulsory MRI scans and biopsies for the forced removal of offending cells from the bodies of perpetrators.
One of the noblest moments in human history was when settlers in the new America rose up to assert and defend their independence from the religious oppression that was endemic throughout Europe.
We now face a similar threat to freedom, with governments around the world asserting power to stifle free speech originating from other countries.
However, this time, guns simply won't work.
The call to arms that I espouse is for all internet users to adopt the weapons of anonymity and encryption.
For the sake of basic online human rights, I call on all netizens to familiarise themselves with all anonymising technologies, and for all people with development skills to create and improve such technologies.
One basic weapon is the anonymising proxy server. This allows people to use the web to publish opinions that cannot be traced to them personally (assuming of course the operator of the proxy server don't keep logs and make them available to various authorities worldwide).
But an even more potent weapon is the Free Network project at www.freenetproject.org. Freenet provides technology that allows freesites (similar to websites) to be published. The advantage of freesites is that they can't be traced to their author, since they are distributed at several points around the network. In fact, any attempt to locate the source of the information, or delete it, results in such information proliferating further around the net.
However, Freenet is just a taste of things to come. There's a whole new generation of stealth technologies emerging which will wrest the power of the internet out of the hands of governments and restore it to the common citizen. One such technology is the Invisible Internet Project (formerly called Invisible IRC Proxy), which will provide secure IP-level tunnelling, anonymising and encryption features.
People, please don't take these threats to your freedom lying down. If enough of us start using these new liberating technologies, we'll be too large a market for ISPs and governments to block us.
People disgruntled with their current or former employers should consider using Freenet to espress their grievances.
With Freenet, strong encryption and sophisticated routing ensures the near-impossibility of determining the actual author of anything published.
Also, with the growing number of websites with public Freenet gateway pages, it's almost as good as publishing on the web anyway.
How long will it be before laws are passed requiring every transaction to be logged against personal ID? Like, transactions becoming illegal unless they're logged? For example,
"Daddy, can I have 45 euro for a new skirt?"
"Sure sweetheart, here you go"
"But daddy, you've gotta scan the money over to me, or the shops won't accept it"
"Oh sorry, can we do it on your computer, mine's in the middle of something?"
"Sure"
"What do I do?"
"I gotta scan your passport first. Then, I gotta scan my student card, then we scan the 45 euro on the government website, only takes 20 secs"
"Man this feels complicated. I remember the good old days"
"But daddy, we gotts stop the terrorists!"
For your information, dude, I live in New Zealand.
The article was satire (look up that word in www.dictionary.com or somewhere), and based on real experience:
I was offering download of a banned book on a website hosted on my server here in NZ. The ISP pulled the plug in obedience to a US court order, and in so doing, 'acknowledged' US jurisdiction on New Zealand soil.
In an unprecedented legal twist, the BBC's website has been taken offline, and will stay offline pending the outcome of a legal dispute.
Following the BBC's decision to trial the use of the inherently insecure Ogg Vorbis format, the Recording Industry Association of America, in a case heard by the San Franscisco District Court, won an injunction against the BBC, with the order that name service to all BBC internet domains be terminated, effectively making the BBC sites unreachable.
"This is our opportunity to wipe out all open source music distribution", said an RIAA spokesman who declined to be named. "We intend to use this case as a step towards banning all insecure digital music formats. The next step is getting Microsoft to change XP to make it impossible to play insecure media such as MP3, then to lobby for laws to ban ISPs from accepting connections from customers who aren't running content-secured operating systems. It'll take about 2 more years, but I'm confident we will prevail".
I reckon that you'd have an easier time educating kids to swear off sex totally (except for procreation within marriage) than getting them to honour all forms of 'intellectual property'.
I argue here that the notion of intellectual property is not natural to humanity.
While animals relate easily to concepts of scarcity, one thing that distinguishes humanity is its capability to comprehend of abundance.
Human societies the world over have emerged from the caves by their ability and willingness to share information freely, and use this information to better their lives.
The notion of 'ownable intellectual property' was an artificial construct used initially to protect the incomes of publishers (who faced the large costs of typesetting and production), then was extended to generating an incentive for authors and providing them with a way to earn a living from the fruits of their creative labours.
However, to me, the 'intellectual property' system is clearly now serving the interests of the 'machine' far more than the interests of original creators.
How many masterpiece books actually make it into print? Many bestseller authors tell stories of their work being only accepted by the 30th publisher they approached. And even for those who find an outlet, they typically get screwed, receiving a miniscule percentage of the profit from their works.
And, it's the publishers and retailers who benefit far more from copyright than the original creators.
But with the advent of the Internet, I strongly feel it's now time to revise the whole notion of 'intellectual property'.
For the first time in human history, it's cheap, fast and easy to distribute information worldwide (anything that can be digitised - music, literature, art - perhaps even sculpture soon).
I strongly suggest that instead of trying to educate kids against 'piracy', we teach them to be innovative in finding new ways of profiting from their creativity in a new climate of abundance.
I would feel happiest with a system which limits copyright to the right of a creator to receive credit and acknowledgement for their work.
I feel that human society would thrive and evolve far better by setting the internet free, and encouraging everyone to participate in the new Abundance.
Why don't they go the whole hog:
1) Abolish ownership of all domain names, and replace it with a system of 12-month leases, issued by auction.
2) At end of every 12 month period, auction each domain name again?
Hell, even as it is, you can't register a.org.au domain unless you're a legally incorporated association. You can't register a.com.au unless you're a legally registered business, and the domain name has to be the same as the business' trading name.
I was born in, and spent the first 32 years of my life, in Australia. Looking at it from outside, I'm fascinated how the 'convict streak' there is paralleled by a severe authoritarian streak.
Hell, it's even against the law there to webcast an audio or video stream without a government license.
I'm surprised they haven't yet legislated to force all TCP/IP connections to go through Censorship Board firewalls.
I've spent 5 of the last 7 years in New Zealand (by virtue of my Kiwi wife), and I've never felt so free!
What we need is some devs to write some killer apps that refuse to run alongside any software lacking an 'open source' certificate.
Create a database of open source apps, with each OSS app 'trusting' all others, and mistrusting all proprietary apps.
If someone tries to run an open source app while a proprietary app is running, then pop up a window with propaganda like "Security Warning: You are running a proprietary application, which fails to comply with open software security standards. Click OK to close proprietary applications, or Cancel to quit this program."
Slashdot Mirror
... purred the synthesised female voice of the sexy-looking robot.
The patron willingly obliges.
The robot's voice loses its seductive charm and, growing sterner and less human, intones:
"Blood... alcohol... levels... excessive... no... more... alcohol... for... seventy... three... minutes..."
From the article, it looks good.
But let me say that I've sometimes been in the position of having to merge branches. In my first hacking job, I had to take code that had been written by 2 crazy Polish programmers, and merge 37 non-working branches into one branch that worked. It was *not* fun, and I enjoyed a well-deserved beer when it was done.
IMO, a distributed system of archive management that doesn't make ongoing reference to a central tree is a sure recipe for chaos, and poses the risk of making software harder to install/use for the non-skilled, and creating a lot of work in merging disparate branches for the skilled.
You want package xxyzz? OK - go to Jim's store in San Diego. It's easy to set up. Oh, I forgot to tell you, you've gotta get some bits from Lucy's store in Manchester, and Frieda's fixed a few bugs too - get her fixes from Bonn. And don't forget Peter's enhancements - his store is at the Adelaide University site. What? it doesn't compile? What kind of idiot are you? Just hack it till it does compile, then put it together in your own tree!
$ telnet slashdot.org 80
Trying 64.28.67.150...
Connected to slashdot.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / http/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2002 10:31:19 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Bender: My life, and by extension everyone else's, is meaningless.
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
...
Connection closed by foreign host.
$
Now, *that*'s a REAL web browser.
The rendering is left to the surfer's imagination!
I had a listen, and it's a bit bland. Hard to listen to.
It needs a bit of spice - a drum loop, some samples, and a bit of scratching. Give it a bit of 'old school' Hip-Hop.
[boom blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
f-f-f-for [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
LEFT paren [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
i-i-i-i [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
equals [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
z-z-z-zero
[scratch-hctarcs-scratch-hctarcs]
s-s-s-semicolon !
I had a listen, and it's a bit bland. Hard to listen to.
It needs a bit of spice - a drum loop, some samples, and a bit of scratching. Give it a bit of 'old school' Hip-Hop.
f-f-f-for
LEFT paren
i-i-i-i
equals
z-z-z-zero
s-s-s-semicolon !
...
The biggest problem with marketing Linux-based PDAs is the miniscule software catalogue.
I'm not referring to the wide range of GPL'ed Linux applications that work on Linux PDAs (read: can be possibly made to work with reduced features after 'just a bit' of massive re-architecting and 'just a few' 36-hour porting/hacking/debugging sessions). I'm talking about the tiny pittance of ready-to-run pre-packaged apps, compared to the thousands of apps already available for Windows CE/Pocket PC and PalmOS PDAs.
While I'm a fan of Linux and Open Source, I have to acknowledge the catch-22 problem of trying to capture market share for Linux PDAs when Microsoft and its PDA minions - Compaq, HP and Casio etc, are barging their way in with the support of huge R&D and marketing budgets - and attracting the attention and efforts of legions of corporate and independent software developers who smell the $$ and cut their code, confident that they will recoup their development costs and make a profit before their apps end up on the warez/crack sites, Morpheus, Gnutella etc.
Growing software catalogues feed bigger hardware sales, and vice versa.
The moral?
If you want to push a new hardware/OS combination into the market, all you need is a few billion dollars behind you, and allow some time for the developers to get on board and feed your credibility with a software catalogue before you *have* to turn a profit.
I heard some time ago that PSs are considered a 'potential security risk' because of the possibility of adapting them to missile control applications.
/bin/laden'.
Given the disharmony between Iraq and the Taleban, this gives new meaning to the post-Sep11 catchphrase 'rm -rf
Talk about the Slashdot Effect.
I can't even get to the Mandrake site just now.
would be to legislate that all new residential and commercial dwellings be built from transparent concrete.
Anyone refusing to demolish their existing house would be added to a database of 'potential conspirators'.
This would be quite consistent with recent 'anti-terrorist' surveillance legislation.
Also, the boom in building would boost the flagging economy.
Imagine whole neighbourhoods of people living in complete exposure, proving they're real honest patriotic Americans.
I hope that someone can take it one step further and gain a ruling that DVDs legally purchased anywhere else in the world can be played legally in Australia - effectively, a ruling invalidating any so-called 'right' for content producers to restrict disks to geographical regions.
The 'region encoding' thing totally sucks. Not only do the anti-De-CSS rulings effectively make it illegal to play a DVD on a Linux box, it's also a thin edge of the wedge allowing content producers to exercise ridiculous levels of control over how people are able to consume content. What'll it be next? You can't watch a show unless you key in a serial number from inside the lid of a Coke bottle, plus a code from inside a Pizza Hut carton?
Australian legislators have some 'quirky' notions of technology that often differ to those elsewhere in the world - it just might be possible to get such a ruling and overturn this ridiculous region coding bullshit once and for all.
One of the major weaknesses of Wine so far is that there's no support for Windows-only drivers. For example, Matrox Marvel G200 MJPEG video capture. This wipes out whole classes of applications - multimedia, OCR and others.
Fortunately, VMWare version 3 now supports USB, which can allow installation of drivers for USB hardware.
I can envisage that many people will follow an integration path like:
1) Mainly using Windows, add a linux partition
2) Learn the Linux apps, often boot Windows partition
3) Progressively migrate Windows apps to VMware under Linux, less frequent use of Windows partition
4) Progressively migrate Windows apps from under VMware into the Wine environment
5) Progressively convert data from Windows apps to formats usable by native Linux apps
Hopefully, at some point along this path, one can delete the Windows partition, and later the VMware box, and use only native Linux apps or run some Windows apps under wine.
Realistically, I would hope to be completely free of my Windows partition in 6-12 months, and free of VMware in 6-18 months.
But the time to really 'pop the cork' on the Wine is when it supports native Windows device drivers, which will be a feat indeed!
REUTERS, MARCH 5 The University of Minnesota has been granted a patent for what it calls 'The Ultimate [human] Stem Cell'.
It is now illegal for humans to generate this cell, or invoke its capabilities to develop into any human tissue, without a license from the University of Minnesota.
Expectant mothers and fathers, upon confirmation of pregnancy, will be asked to sign a Universal Stem Cell End User License Agreement, and pay an annual license fee.
Healing of disease, and repair of damaged body tissues, will incur special levies.
Any use of Universal Stem Cells in any bodily function will result in substantial fines, possible jail terms, and compulsory MRI scans and biopsies for the forced removal of offending cells from the bodies of perpetrators.
You have been warned!
Study of cash flowing into one particularly superdense gravistar rumoured to exist in a town called Redmond, Washington
One of the noblest moments in human history was when settlers in the new America rose up to assert and defend their independence from the religious oppression that was endemic throughout Europe.
We now face a similar threat to freedom, with governments around the world asserting power to stifle free speech originating from other countries.
However, this time, guns simply won't work.
The call to arms that I espouse is for all internet users to adopt the weapons of anonymity and encryption.
For the sake of basic online human rights, I call on all netizens to familiarise themselves with all anonymising technologies, and for all people with development skills to create and improve such technologies.
One basic weapon is the anonymising proxy server. This allows people to use the web to publish opinions that cannot be traced to them personally (assuming of course the operator of the proxy server don't keep logs and make them available to various authorities worldwide).
But an even more potent weapon is the Free Network project at www.freenetproject.org. Freenet provides technology that allows freesites (similar to websites) to be published. The advantage of freesites is that they can't be traced to their author, since they are distributed at several points around the network. In fact, any attempt to locate the source of the information, or delete it, results in such information proliferating further around the net.
However, Freenet is just a taste of things to come. There's a whole new generation of stealth technologies emerging which will wrest the power of the internet out of the hands of governments and restore it to the common citizen. One such technology is the Invisible Internet Project (formerly called Invisible IRC Proxy), which will provide secure IP-level tunnelling, anonymising and encryption features.
People, please don't take these threats to your freedom lying down. If enough of us start using these new liberating technologies, we'll be too large a market for ISPs and governments to block us.
People disgruntled with their current or former employers should consider using Freenet to espress their grievances.
With Freenet, strong encryption and sophisticated routing ensures the near-impossibility of determining the actual author of anything published.
Also, with the growing number of websites with public Freenet gateway pages, it's almost as good as publishing on the web anyway.
This would be the biggest 'vaporware' of all.
How long will it be before laws are passed requiring every transaction to be logged against personal ID? Like, transactions becoming illegal unless they're logged? For example,
"Daddy, can I have 45 euro for a new skirt?"
"Sure sweetheart, here you go"
"But daddy, you've gotta scan the money over to me, or the shops won't accept it"
"Oh sorry, can we do it on your computer, mine's in the middle of something?"
"Sure"
"What do I do?"
"I gotta scan your passport first. Then, I gotta scan my student card, then we scan the 45 euro on the government website, only takes 20 secs"
"Man this feels complicated. I remember the good old days"
"But daddy, we gotts stop the terrorists!"
For your information, dude, I live in New Zealand.
The article was satire (look up that word in www.dictionary.com or somewhere), and based on real experience:
I was offering download of a banned book on a website hosted on my server here in NZ. The ISP pulled the plug in obedience to a US court order, and in so doing, 'acknowledged' US jurisdiction on New Zealand soil.
London, Jan 3, 2002
In an unprecedented legal twist, the BBC's website has been taken offline, and will stay offline pending the outcome of a legal dispute.
Following the BBC's decision to trial the use of the inherently insecure Ogg Vorbis format, the Recording Industry Association of America, in a case heard by the San Franscisco District Court, won an injunction against the BBC, with the order that name service to all BBC internet domains be terminated, effectively making the BBC sites unreachable.
"This is our opportunity to wipe out all open source music distribution", said an RIAA spokesman who declined to be named. "We intend to use this case as a step towards banning all insecure digital music formats. The next step is getting Microsoft to change XP to make it impossible to play insecure media such as MP3, then to lobby for laws to ban ISPs from accepting connections from customers who aren't running content-secured operating systems. It'll take about 2 more years, but I'm confident we will prevail".
I reckon that you'd have an easier time educating kids to swear off sex totally (except for procreation within marriage) than getting them to honour all forms of 'intellectual property'.
I argue here that the notion of intellectual property is not natural to humanity.
While animals relate easily to concepts of scarcity, one thing that distinguishes humanity is its capability to comprehend of abundance.
Human societies the world over have emerged from the caves by their ability and willingness to share information freely, and use this information to better their lives.
The notion of 'ownable intellectual property' was an artificial construct used initially to protect the incomes of publishers (who faced the large costs of typesetting and production), then was extended to generating an incentive for authors and providing them with a way to earn a living from the fruits of their creative labours.
However, to me, the 'intellectual property' system is clearly now serving the interests of the 'machine' far more than the interests of original creators.
How many masterpiece books actually make it into print? Many bestseller authors tell stories of their work being only accepted by the 30th publisher they approached. And even for those who find an outlet, they typically get screwed, receiving a miniscule percentage of the profit from their works.
And, it's the publishers and retailers who benefit far more from copyright than the original creators.
But with the advent of the Internet, I strongly feel it's now time to revise the whole notion of 'intellectual property'.
For the first time in human history, it's cheap, fast and easy to distribute information worldwide (anything that can be digitised - music, literature, art - perhaps even sculpture soon).
I strongly suggest that instead of trying to educate kids against 'piracy', we teach them to be innovative in finding new ways of profiting from their creativity in a new climate of abundance.
I would feel happiest with a system which limits copyright to the right of a creator to receive credit and acknowledgement for their work.
I feel that human society would thrive and evolve far better by setting the internet free, and encouraging everyone to participate in the new Abundance.
They might have let him go free, but did they zip his mouth and implant a tracker bug through his navel?
Why don't they go the whole hog:
.org.au domain unless you're a legally incorporated association. You can't register a .com.au unless you're a legally registered business, and the domain name has to be the same as the business' trading name.
1) Abolish ownership of all domain names, and replace it with a system of 12-month leases, issued by auction.
2) At end of every 12 month period, auction each domain name again?
Hell, even as it is, you can't register a
I was born in, and spent the first 32 years of my life, in Australia. Looking at it from outside, I'm fascinated how the 'convict streak' there is paralleled by a severe authoritarian streak.
Hell, it's even against the law there to webcast an audio or video stream without a government license.
I'm surprised they haven't yet legislated to force all TCP/IP connections to go through Censorship Board firewalls.
I've spent 5 of the last 7 years in New Zealand (by virtue of my Kiwi wife), and I've never felt so free!
A strategic advantage this ship's instrumentation has over US seacraft:
On the bridge are numerous PCs, which (amongst other things) allow the ship's manuals to be read in Adobe e-Book format *and* PDF format.
A strategic advantage this ship's instrumentation has over US seacraft:
On the bridge are numerous PCs, which (amongst other things) allow the ship's manuals to be read in Adobe e-Book format *and* PDF format.
What we need is some devs to write some killer apps that refuse to run alongside any software lacking an 'open source' certificate.
Create a database of open source apps, with each OSS app 'trusting' all others, and mistrusting all proprietary apps.
If someone tries to run an open source app while a proprietary app is running, then pop up a window with propaganda like "Security Warning: You are running a proprietary application, which fails to comply with open software security standards. Click OK to close proprietary applications, or Cancel to quit this program."