He seems to have the most trivial understanding of the reasons behind the pseudo-opensourcing of UNIX and Stallman's choice for GNU.
When AT&T created UNIX, they were a regulated monopoly. They were restricted in two critical ways WRT UNIX.
They could not market products outside of the Phone systems market, and
They could not artificially restrict (non-telephone?) technology that they created.
When they were first asked to make UNIX available, their lawyers cited (1) above and said that the company could not sell UNIX to the interested universities. Management agreed, and the distribution of UNIX was halted.
They were sued, successfully by people citing (2), so they resumed selling UNIX.
When they resumed selling UNIX, they were sued by other computer companies citing (1) above. At&T lost again.
So the lawyers looked at the apparent legal condrum, and concluded that they had to make UNIX available, but they could neither market it or support it. Thus, what they did was write up a non-disclosure agreement that allowed entities (mostly Universities, at the time, who got it for a song), to play with the source, but only disclose it to other people who had a similar license (which soon became just about any universities, and many large companies). In return for signing the NDA, and paying the license fee, you got a mag tape that included the source code and a bootable binary and a hearty "good luck".
The result was that UNIX, although technically proprietary was the next - best thing to Open Source for many years until the push to truely proprietarize and commercialize it in the 80s.
Stallman, on the other hand, just didn't like proprietary systems, generally (as noted in his article that another poster pointed out). When he came up with GNU, he choose UNIX because he thought that it was a good system to n replicate. The impending (effective) closure of the UNIX codebase was little more than a synergistic coincidence.
(( I also once made the mistake of presuming that RMS created GNU because of the impending closure of UNIX, but I was intelligent enough to forward my article to him for comment, and he was kind enough to provide me with the necessary correction ))
The internet originally developed as a Co-op. Anybody who wanted to could get involved in the discussions about creating the IP protocols and the rules of the 'net back in the '80s. Granted, money made it easier to attend the face-to-face meetings, but the theory and much of the practice was that we were equal. Now, some people had more 'say' in the process, but that was often simply due to the fact that they had proven themselves capable, insightful, and/or productive and not because of any inherent power.
As for the person who claims that there's no endeavor where everybody is exactly equal -- that's not necessary. The point is that everybody has equal access to participate, including in the decision-making process. When that happens, some people will rise to the top by dint of their ability to produce and listen etc. however, in a well-designed co-op, their 'power' is a function of their productivity and not their 'position'. If they stop being good leaders, then the people will simply stop listening to them.
The GPL actually enforces this sort of situation.... If Red-Hat stops serving their customer base, then white-box is completely capable of taking the mantle away, simply by getting the attention of the market as a better servant of the user base.
I have some friends who have a convenience store. They blocked off a section in the back, and turned it into a web cafe. This works, because the store pays most of the rent/overhead, and the cafe part simply adds to the profit -- The two parts are synergestic -- Each half draws in customers for the other half.
Having a cafe that only works off of it's computers is a dangerous thing. Remember that after a year or so, your hot machine is going to be rather pasé. This means that you're either going to have to cycle your computers through the store on a regular basis, or be able to use the 'old' machines for another purpose after a relatively short time. Also, as the market shifts (and the computer market shifts far faster than most), a business model that seems pretty decent today may not be as good a year or two down the road.
There are a few reasons why Redhat not continuing support for RH9 isn't a big deal...
Linux is open source. That means that, if there's a problem that's a show stopper for somebody, a company can (or a group of them can get together to) take the (available) source code, and put in the fix themselves... If there's actually a large body of companies that are using RH9 for important applications, then all sorts of company can (and will) pop up to provide that support (as happend when 7.3 lost support -- One friend of mine that still has a machine or two running 7.3 still has a choice of companies to get support from.)
I would note that, while people who were using 7.3, way back when they still have access to third party support, while people who paid good money for windows ME and 2000 are gonna be completely SOL if they need something done, and Microsoft refuses to do it.
There's been a coupl of times when I dug out the sources to a Red Hat RPM, added functionality that dealt with a problem that a customer was having, and offered the changes back to Red Hat. Anybody can do that.... Unlike Israel who almost had to go to war to get Microsoft to (ahem) 'graciously offer' to fix the Hebrew support in Microsoft's OSX version of Office.
Well, given that RH9 never really had a strong support regime (commercial customers who wanted long-term support were pointed at RHEL), I don't think that this would have been a big shock... This is more like getting people who downloaded the Vista Betas being pissed off that they're expected to actually install and ooooh! pay for the commercial version when it comes out in 200[678].
I can't see OS working too well here.. There are too few users of the application to get any of the major benefits of Open Source -- other than the fact that you're free to continue using the software forever -- and you can get that with a decent closed source license.
The real problem here is that the city bought some software with a wonky license. If they'd gotten a permanent license it would have cost more at the start (you'd have to pay for the full development costs up front), but less over time. It also looks like there was a severe lack of performance clauses and transitional periods in the contract. Bad negotiations generally is my reading here.
It also sounds like the company with the software is trying to 'tie' their software to the hardware -- seemingly claiming that the only way to use the hardware is to use their software, and when you toss the software you have to replace the hardware too. Now, if that's really what they're effectively claiming, then I'd be inclined to tell them to stuff that idea where the sun don't shine.
The people who were probably (hopefully) the most likely investors in SCOX were likely to have been the kind of people who invest in venture funds -- and don't mind a 10-1 long shot as long as the likely profits are at least 15-1. SCO was one of those.... Not too likely to win, but if they did, they might win big.
Now their ods are waaaay to long for anybody's stomach, and probably the only thing keeping the stock out of the sub $1 market is the many short sellers who still have to cover their positions from time to time. -- I mean, who else in their right mind is going to buy SCO stock these days, other than an insider on orders from 'higher up'?
Hanging up on telemarketers and not voting/participating are two entirely different things. Telemarketing is designed to get the uninformed plebes who are easily maleable and/or just vote republican/democratic "because my grandpa did", and remind them to vote.
If you really want to kick ass politically, then go out and work on a campaign or something like that... Work for the Green Party, or the Libertarians, or find a good Dem/Rep who actually pays attention to what works for his constituants (as opposed to his big-money donors).
You do realise, don't you, that software developers don't work for free at Apple (or Microsoft) and therefore the true cost of software is not the duplication cost?
True.. Unfortunately, it's very hard to gague the actual cost to MS for their software, so I figured it's better to come up with a reasonable cost for producing a CD, which clearly doesn't include overhead costs, rather than just guessing in the $10-$40 range (which appears to be more realistic), but not knowing just how far off I am. In the DOJ case, MS obscured their actual costs, but recent comments seem to have indicated a gross profit margin in the 90-95% range.
Anyway, I am glad that Microsoft is fighting against beige box syndrome. Computer makers seem to think that painting their 'puters black instead of off-white is what consumers want.
When you've got a product in a comodity market where the software (which costs about $.50 to duplicates can cost more than the hardware (which costs $200 + to duplicate), you don't have a whole lot of room in the 'make it look pretty' department.
If you want a pretty box, then go to a corner computer store and buy one of their 'pretty' boxes for an extra $20-$50 -- or go to a custom box modder and pay out to your heart's content.
Apple can afford to put an extra $10-$20 into box design because they still have the software markup built into the price.
OK: let's be blunt.
with an average survival time in months, one person lasting 3 years would be good. 2 people lasting 3 years means either
1) this study group got really lucky or,
2) This method is really, really promising.
with bets on #2.
I think that somebody posted that the 3 year survival rate is something like 3%, so this 10% survival rate is unusually high -- but possibly skewed by the sample size. This also depends on the patient group.... Young patients (rare) have a higher survival rate (up to 20% at 5 years according to this table), while retired people (who make up almost half the sufferers) have a less than 1% chance at surviving 5 years.
Granted, with a sample size of 18, it's not absolutely sure that the treatment was responsible, but even with a good sized tail, 2/18 patients lasting 3 years is enough to make it worthwhile funding another study.... At absolute worst this treatment did the patients little, if any harm (statistically speaking).
"So let me get this straight: My choice is to die within months from this aggressive cancer, or let you inject me with scorpion venom?"
"yep".
"this reminds me of a George Carlin joke: '"Well Jim, there's no reason why you shouldn't live another twenty to thirty years. However, you will be bleeding constantly from both eyes'".
On Sept 11, about 3000 people died because of a terrorist plot that took years to plan and carry out. 3000 people is less then the number of people who die from drunk driving in a month. It's also something like half a week's death toll from cigarettes (both direct and second hand).
You notice that they're not rounding up Tobacco executives or bartenders.
9/11 was spectacular and it was easy to pin on an identifiable 'someone else'. (Oklahoma only had one of those two features). This makes it a good excuse to waste a lot of time, money and civil rights.
If the government can slap the label 'top secret' and 'security' on their worst rights violations, it makes it that much harder for us to fight for our rights. If the neighbour who mysteriously disappears in the middle of the night is 'the only one it happened to', then it's an anomaly easily ignored. If you know that 10,000 others have been nabbed in the same way, then you've got more incentive to fight.
In the other direction, if the government is transparent and you can actually look up the names of everybody nabbed in this way and you find that your neighbour really was one of only 4 in the last 2 years, then there's no need to start considering conspiracy theories. (a raw head count gives no way to verify that the numbers are (in)accurate).
Cops, like anybody else, have a tendency to do whatever they think they can get away with. The laws and policies that dribble down from the top will tend to set the bar for this.
Right now, we have laws on the books that allow cops to hunt through your electronic data on a hunch, and arrest and detain you on a hunch that you're a security risk. It's not gonna be a big hunch to see some cops testing their new powers to see how far they can run with them...
If we don't push back against cops who try to bully us into not taking pictures of them then the nastiest of them will think that they have the freedom to do whatever they want want.
It may be a 'right', but rights need to be fought for and defended. The lines of our freedom are dynamic. If we don't fight to expand them then they'll shrink, and if they shrink far enough it will take a bloody and vicious fight to get them back again. It's far better to fight while the fighting is easy.
Try reading the paraphrasing of a famous poem on my website.
That's more of an application issue. With an application like MS word, where there's lots of hidden metadata, it's easy to store changes as a change log.
With things like VI, where you're working with the raw text, the normal way to do a save is to write the new version of the file and then, when the write is complete, replace the old file with the new file. In that case, the only way to save the changelist would be to preserve VI's.swp file -- which may, or may not save intermediate changes (read: undo logs).
And -- Yeah, I'll agree that this isn't a terribly bad feature -- The only real complaint about enabling it by default is that it is part of the MS standard of enabling (often questionable) features by default without telling people -- like the default web server in 2000 that turned out to be a hacker's wet dream.
This one, I expect, they'll get away with. I mean, how many people out there have undelet tools, or have had to restore files for people that they deleted and then thought twice about?.
The occasional pornster is gonna get cooked on this one, but it's not like a forensic analysis couldn't hae found this data anyways. (like the guy that got his laptop searched at the border, after Canadian authorities told US order authorities about the porn they found on his laptop.
Read the quote again. That was the cost to the officers, not the cost to the citizen. In other words, perhaps officers would think twice about doing such things if they knew fellow officers had to pay so much out of their own pockets in this case.
Well, $14,000 is probably not to far from the cost of prosecuting the civil suit. That does stop a lot of people from fighting back against this sort of stupidity. Unless you can get a lawyer to take the case Pro Bono or on contingency, a lot of people will just walk away from the case and be happy that they didn't get jail time.
Yeah, but there's also a lawyer who would try and sue you for cutting off their free wifi when you converted to WEP.
On the other hand, any lawyer who took on suing me for mangling my transmissions (and I'd just claim that it was weak encryption which makes the interceptin and 'decoding' illegal), should also brief his/her client on the possibility of me countersuing for accessing my computer beyond authority (which, given some of the stuped precedents, I'm a good bit more likely to win).
The FCC gives me the right to use (almost) any radio waves that hit my antenna at public wavelengths (like Wifi). If that data is unencrypted, I have the right to play with it and even respond to it. Modulo computer misuse laws, that pretty much gives me the right to at least try to use your network.
Although I may presume that your network connects sanely to the internet, you are not obligated to give me what I expect unless I have some sort of (explicit or implied) contract with you.
If you decide to provide fuzzy pictures where I expect normal ones, that's my problem... I only have the right to intercept your radio waves. You have the right to broadcast whatever you want in response to my own transmissions.
YOu only hav problems if you decide to spuriously broadcast kiddy porn or other illegal/harmful content in response to my signals. Just because I expect something doesn't obligate you to provide it unless I'm paying for the privelege. If I'm leaching, off of you, you can give me whatever you want.
Now. someone like Starbucks which is providing signal to encourage customers would be a different case... They're trading their signal for my business, which (arguably) produces an implied contract. It's a different case than my "unsuspecting" neighbour.
In this case, Canada Customs told US customs that they found porn on his laptop during his (very short) stay at the Kelowna airport.
In other words, even if the judge had found that they needed probable cause, they had it. The judge rulled, however, that probable cause wasn't needed. I can understand that, to a point, since people crossing the border can be coming from places where there are no limits on access to really nasty contraband, and even if there are, the country I'm coming from may not be in a mood to tell the government of the country I'm moving into that I've got 10KG of plutonium in my suitcase.
It's well known that when you cross the border you're subject to random (or not-so-random) searches. In this case, I think it was a given that the search was going to be found reasonable, It was just a case of what reason they were going to find ble.
Apparently, the attendees were also required to sign a (non)disclosure agreement that limited what they could do with the information they got from the meeting, and that allowed Microsoft to do whatever they wanted with what attendees said.
It's only a monopoly if you don't have other real choices.
There are a number of other criteria to being an effective monopoly.
Microsoft still controls enough of the market that they can bully companies like DEL into NOT shipping Linux to home users except under extreme duress, and NOT shipping a box without Windows (or shipping a box without windows for more than the same box with Windows), and making it impossible for you to return the OS if you don't accept the license agreement without also returning the box you bought it with.
That they can charge Hardware suppliers for 'certifying' their hardware, and then another $10/unit for, uhm, not slagging their driver when customers go to install it.
Things like that are indicators that MS still has monopoly power.
Oh, and their attempt to bully MA over ODF under the premise that anything not from MS isn't a standard.
* Install linux on a different physical harddisk and unplug it whenever you use Windows. Maybe put the least used one on an external hd.
* Use a bootable linux-cd, like Knoppix for daily work.
Okay, both of these are very unpractical...
I've been there.. I've installed a knoppix CD image on an external drive in a USB enclosure. I can then use a (modified) Knoppix CD that uses 'fromhd=/dev/sda5', to finish the boot from USB.
I've also installed a CD image on my main box, and setup GRUB to boot from it.
I can then mount/home/knoppix from another partition (in KNOPPIX/knoppix.sh) (or even the same partition if I remount the CD image partition R/W and load any extra packages from either the CD (safest) or the HD partion (more convenient). I've used that kind of setup for my basic desktop CD for most of this year (Just switched to a real ubuntu setup this month for various technical reasons).
Updates are a breeze -- I copy the latest Knoppix CD to another partition, copy in the extra DEB files and setup a GRUB stanza. One nice thing about it, from a security standpoint, is that the compressed disk image is relatively hard to compromise (and easy enough to check from the CD miniroot if I want to be paranoid).
As a proof-of-concept, it's been pretty effective. If I move the setup to an external USB HD, and combine it with a (credit-card sized) knoppix boot CD, then I've got a fully portable knoppix desktop. If I put it on a 2" laptop drive, then I can fit the whole thing in my shirt pocket. (( I'm currently using a full-sized USB enclosure)).
(note to self: always always always do at least one preview before posting).
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When AT&T created UNIX, they were a regulated monopoly. They were restricted in two critical ways WRT UNIX.
- They could not market products outside of the Phone systems market, and
- They could not artificially restrict (non-telephone?) technology that they created.
When they were first asked to make UNIX available, their lawyers cited (1) above and said that the company could not sell UNIX to the interested universities. Management agreed, and the distribution of UNIX was halted.They were sued, successfully by people citing (2), so they resumed selling UNIX.
When they resumed selling UNIX, they were sued by other computer companies citing (1) above. At&T lost again.
So the lawyers looked at the apparent legal condrum, and concluded that they had to make UNIX available, but they could neither market it or support it. Thus, what they did was write up a non-disclosure agreement that allowed entities (mostly Universities, at the time, who got it for a song), to play with the source, but only disclose it to other people who had a similar license (which soon became just about any universities, and many large companies). In return for signing the NDA, and paying the license fee, you got a mag tape that included the source code and a bootable binary and a hearty "good luck".
The result was that UNIX, although technically proprietary was the next - best thing to Open Source for many years until the push to truely proprietarize and commercialize it in the 80s.
Stallman, on the other hand, just didn't like proprietary systems, generally (as noted in his article that another poster pointed out). When he came up with GNU, he choose UNIX because he thought that it was a good system to n replicate. The impending (effective) closure of the UNIX codebase was little more than a synergistic coincidence.
(( I also once made the mistake of presuming that RMS created GNU because of the impending closure of UNIX, but I was intelligent enough to forward my article to him for comment, and he was kind enough to provide me with the necessary correction ))
As for the person who claims that there's no endeavor where everybody is exactly equal -- that's not necessary. The point is that everybody has equal access to participate, including in the decision-making process. When that happens, some people will rise to the top by dint of their ability to produce and listen etc. however, in a well-designed co-op, their 'power' is a function of their productivity and not their 'position'. If they stop being good leaders, then the people will simply stop listening to them.
The GPL actually enforces this sort of situation.... If Red-Hat stops serving their customer base, then white-box is completely capable of taking the mantle away, simply by getting the attention of the market as a better servant of the user base.
Having a cafe that only works off of it's computers is a dangerous thing. Remember that after a year or so, your hot machine is going to be rather pasé. This means that you're either going to have to cycle your computers through the store on a regular basis, or be able to use the 'old' machines for another purpose after a relatively short time. Also, as the market shifts (and the computer market shifts far faster than most), a business model that seems pretty decent today may not be as good a year or two down the road.
I would note that, while people who were using 7.3, way back when they still have access to third party support, while people who paid good money for windows ME and 2000 are gonna be completely SOL if they need something done, and Microsoft refuses to do it.
There's been a coupl of times when I dug out the sources to a Red Hat RPM, added functionality that dealt with a problem that a customer was having, and offered the changes back to Red Hat. Anybody can do that.... Unlike Israel who almost had to go to war to get Microsoft to (ahem) 'graciously offer' to fix the Hebrew support in Microsoft's OSX version of Office.
Well, given that RH9 never really had a strong support regime (commercial customers who wanted long-term support were pointed at RHEL), I don't think that this would have been a big shock... This is more like getting people who downloaded the Vista Betas being pissed off that they're expected to actually install and ooooh! pay for the commercial version when it comes out in 200[678].
The real problem here is that the city bought some software with a wonky license. If they'd gotten a permanent license it would have cost more at the start (you'd have to pay for the full development costs up front), but less over time. It also looks like there was a severe lack of performance clauses and transitional periods in the contract. Bad negotiations generally is my reading here.
It also sounds like the company with the software is trying to 'tie' their software to the hardware -- seemingly claiming that the only way to use the hardware is to use their software, and when you toss the software you have to replace the hardware too. Now, if that's really what they're effectively claiming, then I'd be inclined to tell them to stuff that idea where the sun don't shine.
Now their ods are waaaay to long for anybody's stomach, and probably the only thing keeping the stock out of the sub $1 market is the many short sellers who still have to cover their positions from time to time. -- I mean, who else in their right mind is going to buy SCO stock these days, other than an insider on orders from 'higher up'?
If you really want to kick ass politically, then go out and work on a campaign or something like that... Work for the Green Party, or the Libertarians, or find a good Dem/Rep who actually pays attention to what works for his constituants (as opposed to his big-money donors).
True.. Unfortunately, it's very hard to gague the actual cost to MS for their software, so I figured it's better to come up with a reasonable cost for producing a CD, which clearly doesn't include overhead costs, rather than just guessing in the $10-$40 range (which appears to be more realistic), but not knowing just how far off I am. In the DOJ case, MS obscured their actual costs, but recent comments seem to have indicated a gross profit margin in the 90-95% range.
Do you have a better number?
When you've got a product in a comodity market where the software (which costs about $.50 to duplicates can cost more than the hardware (which costs $200 + to duplicate), you don't have a whole lot of room in the 'make it look pretty' department.
If you want a pretty box, then go to a corner computer store and buy one of their 'pretty' boxes for an extra $20-$50 -- or go to a custom box modder and pay out to your heart's content.
Apple can afford to put an extra $10-$20 into box design because they still have the software markup built into the price.
with an average survival time in months, one person lasting 3 years would be good. 2 people lasting 3 years means either
1) this study group got really lucky or,
2) This method is really, really promising.
with bets on #2.
I think that somebody posted that the 3 year survival rate is something like 3%, so this 10% survival rate is unusually high -- but possibly skewed by the sample size. This also depends on the patient group.... Young patients (rare) have a higher survival rate (up to 20% at 5 years according to this table), while retired people (who make up almost half the sufferers) have a less than 1% chance at surviving 5 years.
Bill Gates has just announced a whirlwind 4 nation third-world tour. Currently in Africa, supposedly on a safari . . . . .
You notice that they're not rounding up Tobacco executives or bartenders.
9/11 was spectacular and it was easy to pin on an identifiable 'someone else'. (Oklahoma only had one of those two features). This makes it a good excuse to waste a lot of time, money and civil rights.
If the government can slap the label 'top secret' and 'security' on their worst rights violations, it makes it that much harder for us to fight for our rights. If the neighbour who mysteriously disappears in the middle of the night is 'the only one it happened to', then it's an anomaly easily ignored. If you know that 10,000 others have been nabbed in the same way, then you've got more incentive to fight.
In the other direction, if the government is transparent and you can actually look up the names of everybody nabbed in this way and you find that your neighbour really was one of only 4 in the last 2 years, then there's no need to start considering conspiracy theories. (a raw head count gives no way to verify that the numbers are (in)accurate).
Right now, we have laws on the books that allow cops to hunt through your electronic data on a hunch, and arrest and detain you on a hunch that you're a security risk. It's not gonna be a big hunch to see some cops testing their new powers to see how far they can run with them... If we don't push back against cops who try to bully us into not taking pictures of them then the nastiest of them will think that they have the freedom to do whatever they want want.
It may be a 'right', but rights need to be fought for and defended. The lines of our freedom are dynamic. If we don't fight to expand them then they'll shrink, and if they shrink far enough it will take a bloody and vicious fight to get them back again. It's far better to fight while the fighting is easy.
Try reading the paraphrasing of a famous poem on my website.
With things like VI, where you're working with the raw text, the normal way to do a save is to write the new version of the file and then, when the write is complete, replace the old file with the new file. In that case, the only way to save the changelist would be to preserve VI's .swp file -- which may, or may not save intermediate changes (read: undo logs).
And -- Yeah, I'll agree that this isn't a terribly bad feature -- The only real complaint about enabling it by default is that it is part of the MS standard of enabling (often questionable) features by default without telling people -- like the default web server in 2000 that turned out to be a hacker's wet dream. This one, I expect, they'll get away with. I mean, how many people out there have undelet tools, or have had to restore files for people that they deleted and then thought twice about?.
The occasional pornster is gonna get cooked on this one, but it's not like a forensic analysis couldn't hae found this data anyways. (like the guy that got his laptop searched at the border, after Canadian authorities told US order authorities about the porn they found on his laptop.
Well, $14,000 is probably not to far from the cost of prosecuting the civil suit. That does stop a lot of people from fighting back against this sort of stupidity. Unless you can get a lawyer to take the case Pro Bono or on contingency, a lot of people will just walk away from the case and be happy that they didn't get jail time.
On the other hand, any lawyer who took on suing me for mangling my transmissions (and I'd just claim that it was weak encryption which makes the interceptin and 'decoding' illegal), should also brief his/her client on the possibility of me countersuing for accessing my computer beyond authority (which, given some of the stuped precedents, I'm a good bit more likely to win).
Although I may presume that your network connects sanely to the internet, you are not obligated to give me what I expect unless I have some sort of (explicit or implied) contract with you.
If you decide to provide fuzzy pictures where I expect normal ones, that's my problem ... I only have the right to intercept your radio waves. You have the right to broadcast whatever you want in response to my own transmissions.
YOu only hav problems if you decide to spuriously broadcast kiddy porn or other illegal/harmful content in response to my signals. Just because I expect something doesn't obligate you to provide it unless I'm paying for the privelege. If I'm leaching, off of you, you can give me whatever you want.
Now. someone like Starbucks which is providing signal to encourage customers would be a different case... They're trading their signal for my business, which (arguably) produces an implied contract. It's a different case than my "unsuspecting" neighbour.
Far more efficient CPU wise than those stupid high-res desktops and far easier to use remotely.
If, on the other hand, you simply mangle the images that (s)he's looking for, then you could say that you're protecting the kid from nasty content.
It's not like you have a contractual responsibility to deliver something that (s)he never asked or paid you for.
In other words, even if the judge had found that they needed probable cause, they had it. The judge rulled, however, that probable cause wasn't needed. I can understand that, to a point, since people crossing the border can be coming from places where there are no limits on access to really nasty contraband, and even if there are, the country I'm coming from may not be in a mood to tell the government of the country I'm moving into that I've got 10KG of plutonium in my suitcase.
It's well known that when you cross the border you're subject to random (or not-so-random) searches. In this case, I think it was a given that the search was going to be found reasonable, It was just a case of what reason they were going to find ble.
But, of course, it's the GPL that's viral....
There are a number of other criteria to being an effective monopoly.
Microsoft still controls enough of the market that they can bully companies like DEL into NOT shipping Linux to home users except under extreme duress, and NOT shipping a box without Windows (or shipping a box without windows for more than the same box with Windows), and making it impossible for you to return the OS if you don't accept the license agreement without also returning the box you bought it with.
That they can charge Hardware suppliers for 'certifying' their hardware, and then another $10/unit for, uhm, not slagging their driver when customers go to install it.
Things like that are indicators that MS still has monopoly power.
Oh, and their attempt to bully MA over ODF under the premise that anything not from MS isn't a standard.
* Use a bootable linux-cd, like Knoppix for daily work.
Okay, both of these are very unpractical...
I've been there.. I've installed a knoppix CD image on an external drive in a USB enclosure. I can then use a (modified) Knoppix CD that uses 'fromhd=/dev/sda5', to finish the boot from USB.
I've also installed a CD image on my main box, and setup GRUB to boot from it. /home/knoppix from another partition (in KNOPPIX/knoppix.sh) (or even the same partition if I remount the CD image partition R/W and load any extra packages from either the CD (safest) or the HD partion (more convenient). I've used that kind of setup for my basic desktop CD for most of this year (Just switched to a real ubuntu setup this month for various technical reasons).
I can then mount
Updates are a breeze -- I copy the latest Knoppix CD to another partition, copy in the extra DEB files and setup a GRUB stanza. One nice thing about it, from a security standpoint, is that the compressed disk image is relatively hard to compromise (and easy enough to check from the CD miniroot if I want to be paranoid).
As a proof-of-concept, it's been pretty effective. If I move the setup to an external USB HD, and combine it with a (credit-card sized) knoppix boot CD, then I've got a fully portable knoppix desktop. If I put it on a 2" laptop drive, then I can fit the whole thing in my shirt pocket. (( I'm currently using a full-sized USB enclosure)).
(note to self: always always always do at least one preview before posting).