Seeing how the DMCA clone was defeated in Canada, (at least for now) this may be the best time to apply some pressure for a DMCA rollback in the US. Sure, money talks but if we can make this into a significant election issue the RIAA and MPAA doesn't really have a lot of friends outside of their home base. Especially if attention is made to some of the really loony effects of this law, and how it affects joe and jane average.
Was this ever proven with a recent side by side transistoror DSP vs. tube listening test using the same speakers? I doubt it. Sounds like a good mythbusters episode.
I had 2k at the time and was more or less happy with it. The reason for going to XP was gaming and DOS compatability. Most games at the time were written for Win9x and didn't run under 2k. Additionally, XP had better support for old DOS games, and I had plenty of those. There was plenty of reason to move away from Win9x, as it wasn't very stable and bad drivers would irrevocably trash the system every few months. (User and supervisor modes were not separated)
I didn't perceptibly lose much in the 2K to XP transition. It was a bit more bloated to be sure, but was almost as stable as 2k and I could run Win9x games.
Thanks to the razor thin minority government that exists here right now, they cannot be arrogant and a few thousand determined people actually can make a difference. This is the way government should be - it should be scared of the people, not vice-versa. This plus an alert press ensures they do not dare try to slide a fast one under the table for well heeled friends. One massively unpopular bill could tip the scales against them and they damned well know it.
I don't live anywhere near Calgary, but I was one of the ones who (politely but firmly) e-mailed him with my objections to a Canadian DMCA and how C-60 loomed large in my mind last election.
If the current government can ignore the Kyoto accords, they sure as heck can choose to ignore WIPO as well.
Sorry to follow up my own posting, but I posted a response for them:
We make use of similar network storage products in our IT department, (150+ employees) but I cannot consider specifying this drive given the file format restrictions listed. We often post internal employee/sales training and customer visible product videos, as well as downloadable infomercials in the afforementioned formats. We will have to explicitly specify competing products to avoid these artificial limitations. Our IT staff is quite capable of managing any licensing issues that may arise.
Contact their service and support line and politely let them know you will no longer purchase any WD products which are defective by design. Especially let them know if you have purchasing authority for IT departments. If a few hundred do this, or better yet a few thousand then they might just get the message.
Finally, it looks like SCO has played and lost its final hand. They can delay no more, and Judge Kimball is going to burn them to a cinder. They aren't just toast, they are carbon.
I read an interview with Ernie Ball after the raid. He DID switch to Red Hat Linux, and by his estimate saves $100K per year. He thanked microsoft for the money he is now saving.
Re:Openness is Fundamental to Mathematics
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
I used octave and LaTeX for my Master's thesis, and it did a fine job for me, 4 years ago on a machine that was far from bleeding edge at the time. ( A P3-450 or something like that)
The only things I needed non FOSS tools for was the emulator, and SPSS for crunching the statistics, since I couldn't find an open source equivalent. (Believe me, I tried)
I talked the local MATLAB rep into giving me a free one year license, which thankfully I never used, since I was wasn't finished my analysis and ready to use it before the one year expired. I would have been totally screwed! And yes, I know about the cheaper student edition, but had a lot more data to crunch that it allowed you. Octave while inferior was at least not crippled in functionality. As it was, I had to crunch my data quickly before the "trial 30 day" version of SPSS ran out, and when I found a flaw in my analysis and had to rerun the data, I had to install it on another older computer I had kicking around to reset the 30 days.
I think there are open source alternatives to SPSS available today, I would obviously prefer them even if technically inferior. At least I don't have to shell out thousands of dollars I don't have to finish my analysis.
(I couldn't use the university's facilities either, since I had moved in the meantime and was finishing my thesis from 500 Km away)
Rogers Canada throttles all encrypted packets, (I use citrix to connect into work) so this year I dropped them as an ISP, and told them why. Having no problems with my current provider, and they still supported me, when I told them I was running all Ubuntu/Debian on my home network.
> Their pipes, their rules. Except you have paid to lease that pipe with a promised level of service. XXX GB/month cap, or "unlimited" YYY MBPS means exactly what it says. Would you still pay your full electrical/gas bill if they drop your line voltage/gas pressure 90% every time you really need it? They have oversold their service and can't deliver.
Truecrypt was written with such a scenario in mind - You can encrypt a file with two passwords, one unlocks mundane stuff, the other password unlocks things you truly want kept secret from everybody, which is kept in a hidden area of the filesystem.
It isn't unusual for even not so smart weapons to turn on their handlers. There are lots of very old historical precedents.
A few years back, a cadet had his hands blown off by a cannon at Fort Henry, Ontario. While he was tamping down the powder charge,a few leftover embers from a previous shot touched off the powder and blasted away the tamping rod with his hands attached. Apparently this was a common way to be injured or killed on wooden warships.
I was not unusual for soldiers to be killed by accident with US civil war gatling guns which lacked a mechanism for locking the crank in place. As a result, the crank would occasionally make a quarter turn or so under force of gravity, popping off a few rounds. Tough beans for anybody unlucky enough to be in front of it. Automatic weapons can "cook off" a round just from the heat of prior sustained firing.
The Forrestal fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Forrestal_(CV-59) of 1967 was caused when an freak electrical surge caused a F4 to launch a missile across the deck, puncturing the fuel tank of another plane loaded with live munitions and touching off a chain reaction that ultimately killed 132 of the crew.
Even then, a lot of people download stuff they would never buy - Like a 15 year old who uses a cracked copy of MS-Office or Photoshop, instead of using Open Office or GIMP. People download stuff they would never actually go out and pay for.
No, the jury is free to vote with its conscience. The juror's conscience is the final line of defense against an immoral and unjust law. The beginning of the end of Canada's old abortion laws came when juries repeatedly refused to convict a doctor of providing abortion services, which finally clued in the politicians to the fact that the winds of public opinion were turning against the law.
If you are on a jury and feel that the law was unjustly applied, nobody can stop you from putting your foot down and refusing to convict.
Have you ever read "A man called Intrepid?" The British Secret Service in WW2 used to hand out such information to partisans (printed on rice paper so it could be eaten or otherwise easily destroyed by captured agents) and to their own citizens at the time when they feared invasion. During WW2, they were actively organizing a guerilla warfare campaign in occupied europe, and preparing a campaign of resistance given the real possibility that they themselves would be overrun by Hitler.
It is very much like building your own state of the art, deep submicron IC fabrication plant. In the early days it was relatively easy to stay current, and in the 1970's even some universities could have a bleeding edge fab. As the technology gets more complex, the costs go up asymptotically, and the small players have to fold.
Many canadians remember the "Avro Arrow" the last fighter jet built here. To bring it into production would have taken up the entire defense budget, and once you have built enough fighters to satisfy the needs of your own air force, how do you keep the team together to maintain it and build enhanced versions? You either sell your aircraft to foreign nations, (often unstable and/or war torn 3rd world dictatorships that have disproportionately large military budgets) team up with foreign nations to increase your market and share the costs. (like the newest eurofighter) No matter how good the arrow was, (the project is still controversial) it couldn't be built economically without selling it abroad.
The Israeli's tried and failed with the Lavi project. Technically they could have done it, but it didn't make economic sense no matter how badly they wanted control and ownership of their own weapons platform.
Other countries such as Sweden and France manufacture high tech fighters - the French were notorious for selling their all over the world. I predict the project will probably fold after spending billions of dollars, and just maybe cranking out a factory prototype or two.
The US can do it simply because they are such a large country with the world's biggest military budget. Even they have run into problems where the production run was completed, yet they didn't want to lose the technology and expertise when the production line shut down and the team disbanded, so wound up buying more aircraft than the air force wanted.
Imagine playing a game where if the other side is losing they get to rewrite the rules of the game in their favour - retroactively if necessary. They have done it before, and they will do it again. The terrorists have already won. Our own governments have destroyed our freedom on their behalf, and it doesn't matter anymore who wins "the war". John Q. Public loses either way.
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Seeing how the DMCA clone was defeated in Canada, (at least for now) this may be the best time to apply some pressure for a DMCA rollback in the US. Sure, money talks but if we can make this into a significant election issue the RIAA and MPAA doesn't really have a lot of friends outside of their home base. Especially if attention is made to some of the really loony effects of this law, and how it affects joe and jane average.
Was this ever proven with a recent side by side transistoror DSP vs. tube listening test using the same speakers? I doubt it. Sounds like a good mythbusters episode.
I had 2k at the time and was more or less happy with it. The reason for going to XP was gaming and DOS compatability. Most games at the time were written for Win9x and didn't run under 2k. Additionally, XP had better support for old DOS games, and I had plenty of those. There was plenty of reason to move away from Win9x, as it wasn't very stable and bad drivers would irrevocably trash the system every few months. (User and supervisor modes were not separated)
I didn't perceptibly lose much in the 2K to XP transition. It was a bit more bloated to be sure, but was almost as stable as 2k and I could run Win9x games.
Thanks to the razor thin minority government that exists here right now, they cannot be arrogant and a few thousand determined people actually can make a difference. This is the way government should be - it should be scared of the people, not vice-versa. This plus an alert press ensures they do not dare try to slide a fast one under the table for well heeled friends. One massively unpopular bill could tip the scales against them and they damned well know it.
I don't live anywhere near Calgary, but I was one of the ones who (politely but firmly) e-mailed him with my objections to a Canadian DMCA and how C-60 loomed large in my mind last election.
If the current government can ignore the Kyoto accords, they sure as heck can choose to ignore WIPO as well.
Sorry to follow up my own posting, but I posted a response for them:
We make use of similar network storage products in our IT department, (150+ employees) but I cannot consider specifying this drive given the file format restrictions listed. We often post internal employee/sales training and customer visible product videos, as well as downloadable infomercials in the afforementioned formats. We will have to explicitly specify competing products to avoid these artificial limitations. Our IT staff is quite capable of managing any licensing issues that may arise.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php
Contact their service and support line and politely let them know you will no longer purchase any WD products which are defective by design. Especially let them know if you have purchasing authority for IT departments. If a few hundred do this, or better yet a few thousand then they might just get the message.
What is sad, is that we could be on the ground there before 2015 if it was budgeted like the Iraq war.
Finally, it looks like SCO has played and lost its final hand. They can delay no more, and Judge Kimball is going to burn them to a cinder. They aren't just toast, they are carbon.
Maybe they would want to end up like him.
I read an interview with Ernie Ball after the raid. He DID switch to Red Hat Linux, and by his estimate saves $100K per year. He thanked microsoft for the money he is now saving.
No more time zones and daylight savings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time
I was able to prove the unified theory of everything using "secret" proprietary algorithms...
http://www.scienceteecher.com/miracle_large.jpg
I used octave and LaTeX for my Master's thesis, and it did a fine job for me, 4 years ago on a machine that was far from bleeding edge at the time. ( A P3-450 or something like that)
The only things I needed non FOSS tools for was the emulator, and SPSS for crunching the statistics, since I couldn't find an open source equivalent. (Believe me, I tried)
I talked the local MATLAB rep into giving me a free one year license, which thankfully I never used, since I was wasn't finished my analysis and ready to use it before the one year expired. I would have been totally screwed! And yes, I know about the cheaper student edition, but had a lot more data to crunch that it allowed you. Octave while inferior was at least not crippled in functionality. As it was, I had to crunch my data quickly before the "trial 30 day" version of SPSS ran out, and when I found a flaw in my analysis and had to rerun the data, I had to install it on another older computer I had kicking around to reset the 30 days.
I think there are open source alternatives to SPSS available today, I would obviously prefer them even if technically inferior. At least I don't have to shell out thousands of dollars I don't have to finish my analysis.
(I couldn't use the university's facilities either, since I had moved in the meantime and was finishing my thesis from 500 Km away)
Or if you run linux, you could just pipe them your output /dev/random. :)
Rogers Canada throttles all encrypted packets, (I use citrix to connect into work) so this year I dropped them as an ISP, and told them why. Having no problems with my current provider, and they still supported me, when I told them I was running all Ubuntu/Debian on my home network.
> Their pipes, their rules.
Except you have paid to lease that pipe with a promised level of service. XXX GB/month cap, or "unlimited" YYY MBPS means exactly what it says. Would you still pay your full electrical/gas bill if they drop your line voltage/gas pressure 90% every time you really need it? They have oversold their service and can't deliver.
Truecrypt was written with such a scenario in mind - You can encrypt a file with two passwords, one unlocks mundane stuff, the other password unlocks things you truly want kept secret from everybody, which is kept in a hidden area of the filesystem.
We are approaching a full moon right now, which is the absolute worst time to look for diffuse objects in the sky. :(
It isn't unusual for even not so smart weapons to turn on their handlers. There are lots of very old historical precedents.
,a few leftover embers from a previous shot touched off the powder and blasted away the tamping rod with his hands attached. Apparently this was a common way to be injured or killed on wooden warships.
A few years back, a cadet had his hands blown off by a cannon at Fort Henry, Ontario. While he was tamping down the powder charge
I was not unusual for soldiers to be killed by accident with US civil war gatling guns which lacked a mechanism for locking the crank in place. As a result, the crank would occasionally make a quarter turn or so under force of gravity, popping off a few rounds. Tough beans for anybody unlucky enough to be in front of it. Automatic weapons can "cook off" a round just from the heat of prior sustained firing.
The Forrestal fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Forrestal_(CV-59) of 1967 was caused when an freak electrical surge caused a F4 to launch a missile across the deck, puncturing the fuel tank of another plane loaded with live munitions and touching off a chain reaction that ultimately killed 132 of the crew.
HERO (Hazards of Electromagnetic Radiation for Ordinance) http://usmilitary.about.com/od/glossarytermsh/g/h2814.htm has long been a concern for the military.
Maybe sometimes it is better that Linux doesn't have such a great market share.
Even then, a lot of people download stuff they would never buy - Like a 15 year old who uses a cracked copy of MS-Office or Photoshop, instead of using Open Office or GIMP. People download stuff they would never actually go out and pay for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
Solaris CDE was announced in 1983 and is much older than this patent.
The 1980's vintage 512K Macs had something called a desktop switcher, which allowed flipping between multiple workspaces. (I used this as well)
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt&showcomments=1
No, the jury is free to vote with its conscience. The juror's conscience is the final line of defense against an immoral and unjust law. The beginning of the end of Canada's old abortion laws came when juries repeatedly refused to convict a doctor of providing abortion services, which finally clued in the politicians to the fact that the winds of public opinion were turning against the law.
If you are on a jury and feel that the law was unjustly applied, nobody can stop you from putting your foot down and refusing to convict.
Have you ever read "A man called Intrepid?" The British Secret Service in WW2 used to hand out such information to partisans (printed on rice paper so it could be eaten or otherwise easily destroyed by captured agents) and to their own citizens at the time when they feared invasion. During WW2, they were actively organizing a guerilla warfare campaign in occupied europe, and preparing a campaign of resistance given the real possibility that they themselves would be overrun by Hitler.
It is very much like building your own state of the art, deep submicron IC fabrication plant. In the early days it was relatively easy to stay current, and in the 1970's even some universities could have a bleeding edge fab. As the technology gets more complex, the costs go up asymptotically, and the small players have to fold.
Many canadians remember the "Avro Arrow" the last fighter jet built here. To bring it into production would have taken up the entire defense budget, and once you have built enough fighters to satisfy the needs of your own air force, how do you keep the team together to maintain it and build enhanced versions? You either sell your aircraft to foreign nations, (often unstable and/or war torn 3rd world dictatorships that have disproportionately large military budgets) team up with foreign nations to increase your market and share the costs. (like the newest eurofighter) No matter how good the arrow was, (the project is still controversial) it couldn't be built economically without selling it abroad.
The Israeli's tried and failed with the Lavi project. Technically they could have done it, but it didn't make economic sense no matter how badly they wanted control and ownership of their own weapons platform.
Other countries such as Sweden and France manufacture high tech fighters - the French were notorious for selling their all over the world. I predict the project will probably fold after spending billions of dollars, and just maybe cranking out a factory prototype or two.
The US can do it simply because they are such a large country with the world's biggest military budget. Even they have run into problems where the production run was completed, yet they didn't want to lose the technology and expertise when the production line shut down and the team disbanded, so wound up buying more aircraft than the air force wanted.
They nearly won, and it isn't over yet - there is another vote coming up in Februrary.
And Government is the biggest bully of all.
Imagine playing a game where if the other side is losing they get to rewrite the rules of the game in their favour - retroactively if necessary. They have done it before, and they will do it again. The terrorists have already won. Our own governments have destroyed our freedom on their behalf, and it doesn't matter anymore who wins "the war". John Q. Public loses either way.