The horrid thing about the notwithstanding clause is that the only thing that is required of a government that wishes to breach and trample the most valued civil rights nominally entrenched in The Constitution is for them to explicitly acknowledge that they are doing so.
The problem with this is that, generally speaking, the kind of government which would be most willing to do something like that is also precisely the kind of government against which the people would be most likely to need the protection of the charter.
And if we ever get into a worst-case scenario with the notwithstanding clause, there will be nothing that the people will be able to say or do about it because, by the time we realize what's going on, those rights and freedoms will have been among the first to fall to the notwithstanding clause.
Btw: the internet is only mentioned in one place in the whole 48K text..
FYI: 48K is relatively small for an SCC decision. In this case, I think it is both concise and broad. It makes it clear that, even though the restriction on advertising is only a side-effect of an otherwise well-meaning law, it's effects on effective free speech are unacceptable.
I think that, among other things, it serves notice that a DMCA-type law would not be accepted in Canada (unless the government were to invoke the dreaded notwithstanding clause).
Please also note theat the MS Computational Clustering is portrayed as experimental. This implies that anybody with production exerience with MS clustering is going to have experience with their 'traditional' clustering
(which, as I understand it, is required if you need to have any hope of 24/7 uptime)
My guess is that the real reason why the MS rep made the "what would it take" offer is that they're desparate for someone stupid^h^h^h^h^h^h brave enough to experiment with their clustering software and re-invent some of the wheels that beowulf has long ago perfected.
If the prof in question is willing to take this on, he should be able to wrangle lots of free hardware, software -- and even some hard money out of Microsoft.
Going with Microsoft clustering is probably going to cost him in terms of having to buy software that would be free under Linux, difficulty in the development process, dealing with immature technology and needing extra support people to just keep the whole thing anywhere near as stable as a beowulf cluster. If Microsoft's offer doesn't at least cover that, then I think he'd be better of running away from the table.
It takes some work for people to open up about such things. Most people who've been abused or raped don't really talk about it much.(My guess is that they feel that most people aren't interested). They have to be pretty comfortable to mention it and, even then, it takes something to trigger the conversation -- but once the elephant is out of the fridge, there's a lot more willingness to talk about it.
In my experience, the 'natural' way for such conversations to open is cryptic comments that only make sense to someone who has suffered a similar abuse. If there's a positive response the conversation can quickly open up.
My guess is that once your friend started the conversation it made it a lot easier for more and more people on the cast to share (or for that matter -- even remember!) their own abuse experiences.
Given that the person with the negative response hadn't had such an experience, it's not surprising that other cast members haven't spuriously mentioned it to him. -- and unless someone mentions something like that to you, it's unlikely that you're going to figure it out.
One of my sisters supressed memory of abuse that she had experienced as a child until she was almost 30, and I'd probably never have known that a girlfriend of mine and her best friend had been abused if they hadn't started talking about fear of spiders which led to them discovering each other's abuse (and they'd been friends for years).
Like said -- It's not the kind of thing that comes into the conversation space without a good trigger, so lack of any comment is quite a bit different than an explicitly negative responce.
I can easily understand them taking this long to get a suit to market. Getting your legal paperwork and research done is time consuming -- and if it's being done on a contingency basis, this means that the peroson(s) doing the work still has to put a slight priority on cases that provide immediate cash (or (s)he will end up bankrupt too!)
Also: impetus on taking this case forward didn't really arrive until the Supreme Court refused Microsoft's appeal on the finding that they are a monopoly. Given that finding, they no longer need to do the heavy work of proving the existence of a monopoly. 'All' they really have to do now is prove that Microsoft's application of that monopoly power drove them (almost) out of business.
This means that the real work has really only been going on for about 6 months. -- not a bad time scale for filing a complicated suit.
----------------
Even if the Bush administration manages to completely trash the Netscape case, they won't be able to undo the supreme court finding in agreement that Microsoft is a monopoly. My expectation (hope) is that this is just the opening of the legal floodgates upon the big boys in Redmond.
----
Oh yeah... and filing the lawsuit against MS will also probably extend the life of the company.. Many shareholders driving to disolve the company may hold off in hopes that the lawsuit will give them some of the profits that they originally envsioned getting out of the OS.
I think that it's consistent with the original intent of the WINE project -- which is to provide a real alternative to a Windows-only world.
If developers are able to distribute their software with a known API, it will encourage them to
develop for that API,
Fix bugs in that API, and -- as a legal requirement --
contribute those bug fixes back to the larger world.
For someone who has a multi-million dollar project hanging in the ballance, assigning a person or two to work with the open-source world is cheap. If the result is a viable alternative to dual-boot systems, I'm all for it.
I originally came up with the idea when I got assigned a phone # that used to be some business' fax number. Well, even though it's illegal, fax spammers would try to send me faxes at, like, 4:00am, so I started replying with these 50% grey faxes from my mac.
(un)fourtunately, my fax modem and fax software had this wierd bug with some fax machines where, after sending the page, the page acknowledgement would get lost and the program would abort --- to try again. I had the software set to retry 10 times...
One day I sent off a grey-scale fax to a company before I ran off to work. It got hit by the bug, and repeatedly tried sending the fax... It succeeded on the 5th or so try, tying up their fax machine until the early evening to get that one page fax through.
hehe.
BTW. Part of the reason for using the 50% grey scale is that it minimizes paper waste while getting in maximum time. A single grey-scale page at 1200 baud takes the same amount of time as 90 pages of regular text. an 8 page fax will take almost 12 hours.
Every once in a while I get spam from someone who gives an '800 number to fax orders to....
I send them off a nice fax, on a 50% grey scale, full page background which orders them to stop spamming..
Why 50% grey scale? Because it's near worst-case for fax compression (which expects mostly blocks of white then smaller blocks of black). Faxing a 1 page grey scale at 1200 baud can take 90 minutes (800 number, remember? It's on their quarter).
I'll usually do a voice callback first to make sure I'm not responding to someone who's being smurfed by an enemy.
I briefly dabbled with the 8088 back in the day, but the concept of segment registers offended me.
They offended me too.. I quickly came to the realization that the 8088 series was basically an 8085 with bank-switching formalized in the processor design. addressing anything beyond 64K of data was a hardwired kludge.
Something else: I honestly believe that IBM chose the 8088, rather than a 'real' processor, like the 68000 because the functionality of the 68000 was too close to the IBM/370 series.
The 8086 architecture was too hobbled to ever be a 'real' CPU (and thus a threat to their mainframe market). For the marketing 'droids at IBM, this would be considered "a good thing".
Many people weren't aware, because the CoCo was packaged like a toy -- but the COCO was able to run circles around the IBM PC in terms of raw processing
power. It's biggest draw back was that the 6809 inside of it was incapable of directly addressing more than 64K of ram (then again, the 8086 was only barely capable of doing that either.
The 6809 was also a really nice CPU. 2 hardware stacks. two general purpose registers, and hardware (8x8->16) multiply (!).
It was really on the border between 8 bit and 16 bit computers (just the other side of the 8088) - - and the instruction set was one of the cleanest I've ever seen. It's the only CPU that I was ever willing to do hand coded machine language on (and it was all completely relocatable code when I was done, too!).
For people who wanted to do programming, it was far superior to the Comodore 64 or the apple II.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the subject of the thread....
Evolution is directed by the needs generated by (or arising from) the immediate environment.
and -- yes, I agree. The earth and nature have no needs, per se. As an environmentalist, I would say that we have needs, and if we sate our needs and desires in a way inconsistent with what Mother nature 'needs' (i.e. what would be required for it to stay stable and supportive of thriving human life), we're going to pay bigtime, in the future.
Actually, that was one of the first openly revolutionary move on the part of Ghandi to free India from the British.
At the time, it was illegal to obtain salt -- except by purchase from government sources. In a tropical country, this is pretty close to taxing air.
His revolutionary move was to gather together thousands of people who picked up dried sea salt along the beach. The movie "Ghandi" portrays the government forces beating people as they moved forward to pick salt up off the ground.
This is, perhaps, where the multinationals want to go tomorrow.
Natural selection is an aspect of evolution -- and the aspect which makes it directed.
The mutations are random, but the resulting evolution is directed by the needs of the environment.
As a reader from Australia noted in an e-mail to me, "evolution is by definition an undirected process with natural selection." You might, however, argue that there is undoubtedly some direction in the Linux kernel development.....
I'm going to disagree with this notion of evolution. Evolution is not undirected. The current environment gives a good deal of direction to the sorts of evolution that occurs. For example: evolution appropriate to tropical beaches is unlikely to occur in the arctic tundra.
Similarly, Evolution in the Linux world is also mostly in reaction to environmental needs. Where the difference in randomness comes is that the mutations that lead to biological evolution are generally random in nature -- but environment and statistics choose which mutations lead to enhanced viability.
For Linux, patches are generally in direct response to specific needs. The nature of these changes are directed by nature but generally random in form -- ranging from the icky to the elegant. Fork maintainers like Torvalds and Cox are more like the social interactions which can shift the survivability of an otherwise brilliant mutation/patch. Although this social rejectin will deeply affect survivability, an especially bright change can still give a survivabillity edge that makes up for the rejection
This is really the pleasant aspect of the Linux community; exactly those people who are busy and sought after by many journalists and hackers are also those who take time to answer questions with enthusiasm and a very positive attitude. Thank you Andrea, thank you Alan.
This is something of a chicken and egg proposition. Those people "who take time to answer questions with enthusiasm and a very positive attitude" are precisely those who will likely be sought out by Journalists and others. I mean -- come on! Are you going to take your question to someone who regularly beats into submission anybody who comes to them with (what they consider) a non-profound queston?
Journalists, especially often need their question answered today, and can't be bothered to wait for someone who berates them for half an hour for asking a straightforward question -- especially if they then forget what the origina question was (no known anectdote comes to my mind).
Conflicting ideas are not the only cause of a fork. Conflicting needs can make a strong argument for forking. The various realtime forks are a prime example here.
Keeping the realtime code in the main code tree would be counter productive -- confusing the development of the larger Linux tree, but not providing much of anything to the 98% of us who have little need for hard realtime in our systems.
This was a number of years ago, so it's possible that music distributers have managed to beat radio stations into submission since then.
In Canada, playing the radio is royalty free (as of late last year).
Taken on it's face, Playing a radiostation shouldn't classify as 'rebroadcast'. It may be a case of ASCAP bending the rules and daring some mini-mart to take them to court over it... I can, however, see it making those TV/Cable repeaters ilegal (:-).
As far as I can see, the Sony release of Linus is in violaiton of the GPL.
From the article:
This is how the Runtime Environment (RTE) works. In order to get Linux running on your PS2, you must boot the system using the PS2 Linux DVD. During boot, after all the copy-protection stuff is taken care of, the system lays down the Runtime Environment. This is basically a layer that hides access to the SPU2 (Sound Processing Unit), the input/output processor, the hard drive, the CD/DVD-ROM system, the controllers, memory cards, USB, i.Link and other peripherals. The RTE does supply hardware looking hooks, an educated guess being faux-memory address and registers. Then the Linux kernel is loaded onto of this. There are Linux device drivers that accesses the Runtime Environment that are open source, but it's just a device driver calling in all actuality, another device driver that's closed.
From the GPL:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But
when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Given that their runtime environment is an integral part of the PS/2 Linux distribution, refusal to release the source code to the RTE would be a violation of the GPL -- and thus a copyright violation.
Any lawyers out there willing to support/fight my conclusion??
My guess is that taking on Sony on this issue -- besides having the prospect of being rather expensive if it actually went to court -- would probably have some interesting side effects -- both legal and media-wise.
One of the differences (not mentioned in the excerpted bit) is that -- in the US and Canada, at least -- you can't fix a minimum price for selling something. A manufacturer can print a 'Suggested Retail Price' on the box, but if they try to enforce it, they'll get their wrist slapped.
A number of years, in Canada, one label (Polygram, I think) tried to charge radio stations for the 'priveledge' of playing their songs on the radio. Campus radio stations rebelled and simply refused to play anything from polygram.
Polygram first offered to let them play 'alternative music' only without any royalties. The radio stations refused. Polygram finally relented and allowed free play for all of their music. I don't know if this has changed, but it clearly shows that music companies get more than their share of value by letting radio stations play their music.
As far as I know (in canada, at least), it is legal to play radio in a public place without paying royalties. The broadcast on radio is considered the public performance and the use of the broadcast is considered 'fair use' -- but if you pop in a CD, it's considered a new public performance -- which requires a royalty payment.
(this information garnered from a TV news story about someone being sued for allegedly playing CDs in his restaurant).
They are not necessarily self-selecting. Not everyone has a choice of mail clients. Some are bound by corporate standards, or by their ISP's support policies..... Instead, he is blocking Windows users who are unwilling to accomodate his oddness
First of all: corporate policy and ISP support policies do not (usually) prevent you from using some other mailer in addition to the supporeted Internet Exasp.
You don't even have to use different software. If you have the intelligence to hack the headers, then you still get a free pass in.
Hell, If I really wanted to post, and my isp/employer had forced me to sign a contract promising only to use virgin Microsoft software, I could still telnet to his mail server on port 25 and type in the raw SMTP.
Second of all, he pointed out that the requirement was also a simple filter to keep out the newbies that didn't pay attention to posted instructions. I did a similar thing when I got annoyed with the people who didn't respond to no-TK warnings on my TRIBES server.
For a while, I set the name of my server to "Cannon's Foder Land PW=pw", and the password to "pw". The people who managed to get in tended to be higher in intelligence than the average player.
I liked it that way.
Summary: If you can't send mail that looks like it didn't come from MS Express, then you probably don't belong on the mailing list.
For me, it's a security issue. -- even if I am running Windows. Unless it's someone I know and they've already told me by some other channel that they're sending an executable document, I won't open it. (and I consider anything that starts up extra MS software executable).
Open a.doc file, and you risk getting the newest macro virus that Microsoft has somehow back-doored in. -- but isn't in your virus checker yet.
I'm assuming a fair bit here, but I'd bet that most of them studied English or psychology because IT degrees weren't around when they went to University. You have to remember that computers haven't been mainstream for all that long.
Not necessarily the case. In the early '80s a friend of mine switched from Computer Science to Psychology because he was real interested in doing real-time work, and there was more interesting realtime work being done in the psychology department than in Computer science.
Granted -- now you could get up to your eyeballs in Real-time working with the robotics group in most any large Computer Science department -- but as the earlier poster said: Look at what you're interested in, and then find the department that will best support you in that.
If you follow your heart, and find the niche that fulfills your love, you can almost always make money and live a fulfilled life. If you follow the money and find a way to fit into an ill-suited niche, you may or may not make money, but you probably won't be happy at it -- and the unhappiness will limit your potential in that field.
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The problem with this is that, generally speaking, the kind of government which would be most willing to do something like that is also precisely the kind of government against which the people would be most likely to need the protection of the charter.
And if we ever get into a worst-case scenario with the notwithstanding clause, there will be nothing that the people will be able to say or do about it because, by the time we realize what's going on, those rights and freedoms will have been among the first to fall to the notwithstanding clause.
FYI: 48K is relatively small for an SCC decision. In this case, I think it is both concise and broad. It makes it clear that, even though the restriction on advertising is only a side-effect of an otherwise well-meaning law, it's effects on effective free speech are unacceptable.
I think that, among other things, it serves notice that a DMCA-type law would not be accepted in Canada (unless the government were to invoke the dreaded notwithstanding clause).
In a few months or so, it'll be moved into their by-volume section..
At the bottom of a deep pit. :-)
(which, as I understand it, is required if you need to have any hope of 24/7 uptime)
My guess is that the real reason why the MS rep made the "what would it take" offer is that they're desparate for someone stupid^h^h^h^h^h^h brave enough to experiment with their clustering software and re-invent some of the wheels that beowulf has long ago perfected.
If the prof in question is willing to take this on, he should be able to wrangle lots of free hardware, software -- and even some hard money out of Microsoft.
Going with Microsoft clustering is probably going to cost him in terms of having to buy software that would be free under Linux, difficulty in the development process, dealing with immature technology and needing extra support people to just keep the whole thing anywhere near as stable as a beowulf cluster. If Microsoft's offer doesn't at least cover that, then I think he'd be better of running away from the table.
In my experience, the 'natural' way for such conversations to open is cryptic comments that only make sense to someone who has suffered a similar abuse. If there's a positive response the conversation can quickly open up.
My guess is that once your friend started the conversation it made it a lot easier for more and more people on the cast to share (or for that matter -- even remember!) their own abuse experiences.
Given that the person with the negative response hadn't had such an experience, it's not surprising that other cast members haven't spuriously mentioned it to him. -- and unless someone mentions something like that to you, it's unlikely that you're going to figure it out.
One of my sisters supressed memory of abuse that she had experienced as a child until she was almost 30, and I'd probably never have known that a girlfriend of mine and her best friend had been abused if they hadn't started talking about fear of spiders which led to them discovering each other's abuse (and they'd been friends for years).
Like said -- It's not the kind of thing that comes into the conversation space without a good trigger, so lack of any comment is quite a bit different than an explicitly negative responce.
Also: impetus on taking this case forward didn't really arrive until the Supreme Court refused Microsoft's appeal on the finding that they are a monopoly. Given that finding, they no longer need to do the heavy work of proving the existence of a monopoly. 'All' they really have to do now is prove that Microsoft's application of that monopoly power drove them (almost) out of business.
This means that the real work has really only been going on for about 6 months. -- not a bad time scale for filing a complicated suit.
----------------
Even if the Bush administration manages to completely trash the Netscape case, they won't be able to undo the supreme court finding in agreement that Microsoft is a monopoly. My expectation (hope) is that this is just the opening of the legal floodgates upon the big boys in Redmond.
----
Oh yeah... and filing the lawsuit against MS will also probably extend the life of the company.. Many shareholders driving to disolve the company may hold off in hopes that the lawsuit will give them some of the profits that they originally envsioned getting out of the OS.
If developers are able to distribute their software with a known API, it will encourage them to
- develop for that API,
- Fix bugs in that API, and -- as a legal requirement --
- contribute those bug fixes back to the larger world.
For someone who has a multi-million dollar project hanging in the ballance, assigning a person or two to work with the open-source world is cheap. If the result is a viable alternative to dual-boot systems, I'm all for it.I originally came up with the idea when I got assigned a phone # that used to be some business' fax number. Well, even though it's illegal, fax spammers would try to send me faxes at, like, 4:00am, so I started replying with these 50% grey faxes from my mac.
(un)fourtunately, my fax modem and fax software had this wierd bug with some fax machines where, after sending the page, the page acknowledgement would get lost and the program would abort --- to try again. I had the software set to retry 10 times...
One day I sent off a grey-scale fax to a company before I ran off to work. It got hit by the bug, and repeatedly tried sending the fax... It succeeded on the 5th or so try, tying up their fax machine until the early evening to get that one page fax through.
hehe.
BTW. Part of the reason for using the 50% grey scale is that it minimizes paper waste while getting in maximum time. A single grey-scale page at 1200 baud takes the same amount of time as 90 pages of regular text. an 8 page fax will take almost 12 hours.
I send them off a nice fax, on a 50% grey scale, full page background which orders them to stop spamming..
Why 50% grey scale? Because it's near worst-case for fax compression (which expects mostly blocks of white then smaller blocks of black). Faxing a 1 page grey scale at 1200 baud can take 90 minutes (800 number, remember? It's on their quarter).
I'll usually do a voice callback first to make sure I'm not responding to someone who's being smurfed by an enemy.
They offended me too.. I quickly came to the realization that the 8088 series was basically an 8085 with bank-switching formalized in the processor design. addressing anything beyond 64K of data was a hardwired kludge.
Something else: I honestly believe that IBM chose the 8088, rather than a 'real' processor, like the 68000 because the functionality of the 68000 was too close to the IBM/370 series.
The 8086 architecture was too hobbled to ever be a 'real' CPU (and thus a threat to their mainframe market). For the marketing 'droids at IBM, this would be considered "a good thing".
The 6809 was also a really nice CPU. 2 hardware stacks. two general purpose registers, and hardware (8x8->16) multiply (!).
It was really on the border between 8 bit and 16 bit computers (just the other side of the 8088) - - and the instruction set was one of the cleanest I've ever seen. It's the only CPU that I was ever willing to do hand coded machine language on (and it was all completely relocatable code when I was done, too!).
For people who wanted to do programming, it was far superior to the Comodore 64 or the apple II.
Evolution is directed by the needs generated by (or arising from) the immediate environment.
and -- yes, I agree. The earth and nature have no needs, per se. As an environmentalist, I would say that we have needs, and if we sate our needs and desires in a way inconsistent with what Mother nature 'needs' (i.e. what would be required for it to stay stable and supportive of thriving human life), we're going to pay bigtime, in the future.
Actually, that was one of the first openly revolutionary move on the part of Ghandi to free India from the British.
At the time, it was illegal to obtain salt -- except by purchase from government sources. In a tropical country, this is pretty close to taxing air.
His revolutionary move was to gather together thousands of people who picked up dried sea salt along the beach. The movie "Ghandi" portrays the government forces beating people as they moved forward to pick salt up off the ground.
This is, perhaps, where the multinationals want to go tomorrow.
Natural selection is an aspect of evolution -- and the aspect which makes it directed.
The mutations are random, but the resulting evolution is directed by the needs of the environment.
I'm going to disagree with this notion of evolution. Evolution is not undirected. The current environment gives a good deal of direction to the sorts of evolution that occurs. For example: evolution appropriate to tropical beaches is unlikely to occur in the arctic tundra.
Similarly, Evolution in the Linux world is also mostly in reaction to environmental needs. Where the difference in randomness comes is that the mutations that lead to biological evolution are generally random in nature -- but environment and statistics choose which mutations lead to enhanced viability.
For Linux, patches are generally in direct response to specific needs. The nature of these changes are directed by nature but generally random in form -- ranging from the icky to the elegant. Fork maintainers like Torvalds and Cox are more like the social interactions which can shift the survivability of an otherwise brilliant mutation/patch. Although this social rejectin will deeply affect survivability, an especially bright change can still give a survivabillity edge that makes up for the rejection
This is really the pleasant aspect of the Linux community; exactly those people who are busy and sought after by many journalists and hackers are also those who take time to answer questions with enthusiasm and a very positive attitude. Thank you Andrea, thank you Alan.
This is something of a chicken and egg proposition. Those people "who take time to answer questions with enthusiasm and a very positive attitude" are precisely those who will likely be sought out by Journalists and others. I mean -- come on! Are you going to take your question to someone who regularly beats into submission anybody who comes to them with (what they consider) a non-profound queston?
Journalists, especially often need their question answered today , and can't be bothered to wait for someone who berates them for half an hour for asking a straightforward question -- especially if they then forget what the origina question was (no known anectdote comes to my mind).
Keeping the realtime code in the main code tree would be counter productive -- confusing the development of the larger Linux tree, but not providing much of anything to the 98% of us who have little need for hard realtime in our systems.
In Canada, playing the radio is royalty free (as of late last year). Taken on it's face, Playing a radiostation shouldn't classify as 'rebroadcast'. It may be a case of ASCAP bending the rules and daring some mini-mart to take them to court over it... I can, however, see it making those TV/Cable repeaters ilegal ( :-).
From the article:
From the GPL: Given that their runtime environment is an integral part of the PS/2 Linux distribution, refusal to release the source code to the RTE would be a violation of the GPL -- and thus a copyright violation.Any lawyers out there willing to support/fight my conclusion??
My guess is that taking on Sony on this issue -- besides having the prospect of being rather expensive if it actually went to court -- would probably have some interesting side effects -- both legal and media-wise.
One of the differences (not mentioned in the excerpted bit) is that -- in the US and Canada, at least -- you can't fix a minimum price for selling something. A manufacturer can print a 'Suggested Retail Price' on the box, but if they try to enforce it, they'll get their wrist slapped.
Polygram first offered to let them play 'alternative music' only without any royalties. The radio stations refused. Polygram finally relented and allowed free play for all of their music. I don't know if this has changed, but it clearly shows that music companies get more than their share of value by letting radio stations play their music.
As far as I know (in canada, at least), it is legal to play radio in a public place without paying royalties. The broadcast on radio is considered the public performance and the use of the broadcast is considered 'fair use' -- but if you pop in a CD, it's considered a new public performance -- which requires a royalty payment.
(this information garnered from a TV news story about someone being sued for allegedly playing CDs in his restaurant).
First of all: corporate policy and ISP support policies do not (usually) prevent you from using some other mailer in addition to the supporeted Internet Exasp.
You don't even have to use different software. If you have the intelligence to hack the headers, then you still get a free pass in.
Hell, If I really wanted to post, and my isp/employer had forced me to sign a contract promising only to use virgin Microsoft software, I could still telnet to his mail server on port 25 and type in the raw SMTP.
Second of all, he pointed out that the requirement was also a simple filter to keep out the newbies that didn't pay attention to posted instructions. I did a similar thing when I got annoyed with the people who didn't respond to no-TK warnings on my TRIBES server.
For a while, I set the name of my server to "Cannon's Foder Land PW=pw", and the password to "pw". The people who managed to get in tended to be higher in intelligence than the average player.
I liked it that way.
Summary: If you can't send mail that looks like it didn't come from MS Express, then you probably don't belong on the mailing list.
For me, it's a security issue. -- even if I am running Windows. Unless it's someone I know and they've already told me by some other channel that they're sending an executable document, I won't open it. (and I consider anything that starts up extra MS software executable). .doc file, and you risk getting the newest macro virus that Microsoft has somehow back-doored in. -- but isn't in your virus checker yet.
Open a
X-Message-Flag: Message text blocked: You are using a broken Microsoft mail reader which is probably being hacked as you read this.
?
Not necessarily the case. In the early '80s a friend of mine switched from Computer Science to Psychology because he was real interested in doing real-time work, and there was more interesting realtime work being done in the psychology department than in Computer science.
Granted -- now you could get up to your eyeballs in Real-time working with the robotics group in most any large Computer Science department -- but as the earlier poster said: Look at what you're interested in, and then find the department that will best support you in that.
If you follow your heart, and find the niche that fulfills your love, you can almost always make money and live a fulfilled life. If you follow the money and find a way to fit into an ill-suited niche, you may or may not make money, but you probably won't be happy at it -- and the unhappiness will limit your potential in that field.