As Gore mentioned in a recent documentary/presentation he did, a sampling of all research papers on the subject of global warming DOES NOT show disagreement from the scientific community.
A perusal of media articles by pseudo-scientists and pundits reveals that the only people denying the reality and likely impacts of global warming are media shills, politicians, and corps who don't like the impact on their bottom line if they're forced to deal with the damage they do.
Do we all need to fucking DIE before we stop listening to people who don't know what they're talking or writing about?
Look around the world. The damage to the antarctic, lake Chad, and more sensitive ecosystems around the world is undeniable. We cannot stick our heads in the sands any more, because it may already be too late to turn things around.
Personally, I think it's rather likely that it's "too late."
a) It has been years since software was packed such that you could not read the EULA before breaking the seal.
b) No one forced you to buy the software, hence "duress" does not apply.
c) If, after reading the EULA, you decide not to install the software, return it to the retailer. As a grandparent mentioned, sue for the refund if necessary.
Dang, the mods may be volunteers, but some of them really haven't got a freakin' clue about what a mod is supposed to do. How in the world can a comment about a comedian's material in a thread about aforementioned comedian possibly be offtopic?
Flamebait if you're a Borat fan who is offended, but off topic?
Microsoft convinces competition to rally behind "standard."
Competition invests obscene amounts of money, marketing, and technology to deliver the "standard."
Microsoft releases a competing incompatible product, ignoring their own "standard."
Truly this is the beginning of a new era. Now Microsoft isn't content with breaking industry standards, they create them just so they can have fun breaking them later, driving everyone crazy!:eek:
(And coincidentally locking the competition out of the "updated" "standard".)
I guess the question is what a EULA or TOS license is providing as a contract.
Clearly there must be some value exchange or the service or software provider would be a fraud or a thief.
The common BSD license phrase disclaiming responsibility for a particular purpose or use basically says that the author is taking no responsibility for whether the software does what it was designed to do. From a financial perspective that makes sense, but if the software doesn't do what it was designed for then it may as well not exist, as it serves no defined purpose or function. Such a license is only a legal protection construct, not a measure of any amorphous "thing" software may be.
Even with "free" or OSS software, there must be some other value a software, service, or distribution provider is selling. I can't see people paying $50+ for a shiny box, so that's not the intrinsic value of shrink-wrap software distribution.
People must be paying on the presumption that the software will work as advertised and designed.
Proprietary products must function as documented and designed, and any unreasonable defects must be repaired, the same as an automaker has to issue a recall. The service contracts are analagous to leasing arrangements, where the actual ownership of the product or service isn't at the heart of the deal -- the functionality and honest best efforts to meet service goals is sold by the provider, not actual ownership of the software.
Similar to safety regulations, industry standards for functionality and services define the minimal capabilities of a product before it can be licensed and used. Products which claim to provide a service without meeting the relevant industry standards are an unnecessary risk, and working around their flaws is an additional ongoing investment over the initial purchase price. i.e. Non-standard is a bad investment for a technical architecture.
You have an IP address that response packets are routed to. The server knows that IP address. So does every node routing the traffic on the internet -- every "hop" can see both sender and receiver IP addresses.
A DNS lookup identifies the service provider.
An authorized data access maps the IP address to a service address and possible customer identification. Hopefully this is a rigorously documented and monitored process in your nation.
Anonymizer routing can still be tracked, it just takes more work and some high-powered address correlation hardware. Or a simple but massive gate array, looking for data checksum correlations between streams entering and leaving an anonymizer.
Internet anonymity is illusion.
The only remaining question is whether you stand by your posted opinions, or hide as an anonymous coward.
What of all the other licenses on the installation? Unless someone is bringing a patent case against a GPL implementation, I fail to see how the GPL-specific clauses are relevant. Perhaps the concern is something under Mozilla, Apache, BSD, or other license that may overstep an existing patent or few.
The GPL is a good theory, but the fact is that non-GPL OSS exists, too. The requirements of GPL do not affect the whole of OSS, only GPL software.
I hadn't considered the issue of election timing, but it is suspicious.
Saddam's sentence is no surprise. The threats of retaliation are no surprise.
Thugs and bullies always think democracy means they'll get their way, and they degenerate into gang violence and terrorism when they don't get it. Few things are more sickening than someone letting a group or party affiliation blind them to the fact that the individual they're trying to defend is a violent degenerate or sociopath.
But before we point too many fingers at Saddam's defenders for the inevitable round of violence and murder, take a look at North America. Our bullies don't degenerate to violence, murder, and terrorism, but they sure don't accept their losses gracefully. They dig up the same old issues over and over, either to distract from real issues, or in a whining child-like attempt to force appeasement of their wants and wishes.
Saddam's conviction should be irrelevent to American politics. Pay very close attention to what the other hand is doing for any politician that even mentions the conviction. It's up to you to decide whether they're using distactics, playing off your hopefully-blind patriotism, or just trying to play an opportunity for air time.
I pray the American people vote with open eyes, ears, and minds this time.
Distributed systems are designed for component integration from day one.
Has everyone been sleeping?
Didn't we learn from the Grand Banks Cod fisheries
on
Oceans Empty By 2048?
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand the skepticism.
The collapse of the Grand Banks Cod fisheries and the west coast Salmon runs in Canada are historical fact from well over a decade ago. We know as a nation and globally that uncoordinated greed does far worse than decimate a crop species -- it takes the species to and beyond the risk of extinction.
We know what we're doing to the environment. Too many people, corporations, and governments just don't care to accept responsibility for what they're doing.
I've heard the term eco-terrorism bandied about. I don't think it's quite the same as the eco-genocide we're tolerating now.
There are no industry barriers or boundaries to what has and is being done: fisheries, former rain forests, former lakes, elimination of crop species due to invader and GMO species, wholesale targetting of natural crops to protect patented synthetic replacement markets, and an utter disregard for the long-term risks and impacts of those actions.
Say good bye to Lake Chad, the icefields, the Antarctic ice shelves, and the coastal population of most regions around the world. Hello, consequences.
The Volnovo pact will mean that non-commercial individual contributors can make Open Source, but if anyone actually uses it for something other than a hobby or a non-profit organisation Vole can bring a software patent lawsuit against them unless they are a Novell customer, he said.
What an interesting way of reverse-reading an agreement.
The agreement is that Vole will not sue Novell customers. Period. An indemnity agreement.
The fact that other users or customers are not covered by the agreement is not setting the stage for an attack. It is limiting the scope of the negotiated contract to Novell's customer base.
Now if they obtain a similar agreement with RedHat indemnifying RedHat's customers, they gain more revenue for the indemnification and another segment of the Linux community is "protected" or licensed.
Where in the world did anyone come up with the insane concept that an agreement with any one Linux distributor was somehow an agreement with the non-paying and/or non-contributing masses? You wouldn't expect my Windows XP Pro license to cover your machine's installation, so why would a Mandriva customer expect a RedHat or Novell indemnification to cover their license risks?
Targetted attacks to acquire indirect access to systems (take over your VPN in to the office), customer information, technology under development, or even some freak stalking some cutie on the second floor are all very real threats.
The technology is easy. The attacks are only as difficult as accessing the resources to deploy the attack -- and most major corporations and government agencies have such resources. If a cracker seizes control over those resources, even temporarily, they can do a lot more than blast an unwanted popup from your browser.
To be fair, the last 2-3 distros I've installed have had zero installation problems. The most recent release of OpenSuSE ran me through reasonable first-time installation configuration for the network, printers, etc.
The one weakness was the configuration and support of dial-up connections.
There is no technical reason PCs can't be preloaded and distributed the same way with Linux as with WinXX. It's purely an issue of convincing the vendors to make the option readily available, to make the purchase of a Brand Foo Linux box as trivial as clicking "XP Pro" instead of accepting the default of "XP Home" at Dell.
In terms of "plug it in and it works", most Linux distros come closer to that than a Windows box. The document viewers, CD burning utilities, etc. are all with the distro, not add-ons to be installed later and updated seperately.
The argument of Linux vs. Windows vs. OS/X for the corporate environment is 99% FUD and 1% technical issue. If third party vendors wouldn't explicitly prevent Java-based and web-enabled technology from running against non-"mainstream" operating systems, the majority of office users would neither notice nor care that the PC changed. The differences are more like an individual's UI skin preference than a real difference in functionality.
They provide maintenance services for dead product lines that have existing service and support contracts for their production systems. When the product line is killed, the existing contracts still have to be honoured. CA buys those service contracts as a product-line bundle.
It's not a glamorous business, and of course the products in question don't get new features and major enhancements. They're already on life-cycle support.
Near as I can tell, it was downloading a component that is only made available after registering the installation of IE7. I can't imagine any other reason why it spent 5-10 minutes downloading an "update" for software that was released in the past 48 hours.
After a 2.5 hour download, the IE7 installer promptly started downloading updates from Microsoft with no estimate as to the size of those downloads nor how long it will take.
Major thumbs down on being honest about the size of the update.
But I need to see if it's got any compatibility issues with the CSS and hopefully a fix for the black backgrounds on "transparent" images. i.e. Is it any closer to W3C, or still a mess of workarounds and hacks on the server side?
What I don't understand is why the voting machines have been susceptible to tampering when it is no longer common to hear about similar issues with ATMs (cash machines.)
Cash machines are much more complex, yet they're not so vulnerable.
Why? Clearly the technology exists to harden the physical system, software, and communications streams or files. Other industries do it every day.
Customer source licenses at least let the developer do detailed debugging, which is invaluable for embedded hardware programming.
It might make people a little more comfortable with the "closed" aspect of Microsoft being the only maintainer. As sole maintainers, they're taking responsibility for the security, reliability, and scalability of the implementation(s). They get paid rather well for the job, don't they?
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy enough to find Mark Sobkow in the phone book, or you can do an IP trace in the next few minutes while I'm logged in.
The fact that I'm not anonymous doesn't mean I'm about to broadcast the details.
A threat does not constitute assault.
Verbal abuse does not need to include a threat, yet still constitutes assault.
The battery charge goes to the first one to snap and start swinging.
As Gore mentioned in a recent documentary/presentation he did, a sampling of all research papers on the subject of global warming DOES NOT show disagreement from the scientific community.
A perusal of media articles by pseudo-scientists and pundits reveals that the only people denying the reality and likely impacts of global warming are media shills, politicians, and corps who don't like the impact on their bottom line if they're forced to deal with the damage they do.
Do we all need to fucking DIE before we stop listening to people who don't know what they're talking or writing about?
Look around the world. The damage to the antarctic, lake Chad, and more sensitive ecosystems around the world is undeniable. We cannot stick our heads in the sands any more, because it may already be too late to turn things around.
Personally, I think it's rather likely that it's "too late."
a) It has been years since software was packed such that you could not read the EULA before breaking the seal.
b) No one forced you to buy the software, hence "duress" does not apply.
c) If, after reading the EULA, you decide not to install the software, return it to the retailer. As a grandparent mentioned, sue for the refund if necessary.
"Off topic"?
Dang, the mods may be volunteers, but some of them really haven't got a freakin' clue about what a mod is supposed to do. How in the world can a comment about a comedian's material in a thread about aforementioned comedian possibly be offtopic?
Flamebait if you're a Borat fan who is offended, but off topic?
Yeesh! :p
Microsoft creates "standard."
Microsoft convinces competition to rally behind "standard."
Competition invests obscene amounts of money, marketing, and technology to deliver the "standard."
Microsoft releases a competing incompatible product, ignoring their own "standard."
Truly this is the beginning of a new era. Now Microsoft isn't content with breaking industry standards, they create them just so they can have fun breaking them later, driving everyone crazy! :eek:
(And coincidentally locking the competition out of the "updated" "standard".)
I guess the question is what a EULA or TOS license is providing as a contract.
Clearly there must be some value exchange or the service or software provider would be a fraud or a thief.
The common BSD license phrase disclaiming responsibility for a particular purpose or use basically says that the author is taking no responsibility for whether the software does what it was designed to do. From a financial perspective that makes sense, but if the software doesn't do what it was designed for then it may as well not exist, as it serves no defined purpose or function. Such a license is only a legal protection construct, not a measure of any amorphous "thing" software may be.
Even with "free" or OSS software, there must be some other value a software, service, or distribution provider is selling. I can't see people paying $50+ for a shiny box, so that's not the intrinsic value of shrink-wrap software distribution.
People must be paying on the presumption that the software will work as advertised and designed.
Proprietary products must function as documented and designed, and any unreasonable defects must be repaired, the same as an automaker has to issue a recall. The service contracts are analagous to leasing arrangements, where the actual ownership of the product or service isn't at the heart of the deal -- the functionality and honest best efforts to meet service goals is sold by the provider, not actual ownership of the software.
Similar to safety regulations, industry standards for functionality and services define the minimal capabilities of a product before it can be licensed and used. Products which claim to provide a service without meeting the relevant industry standards are an unnecessary risk, and working around their flaws is an additional ongoing investment over the initial purchase price. i.e. Non-standard is a bad investment for a technical architecture.
You have an IP address that response packets are routed to. The server knows that IP address. So does every node routing the traffic on the internet -- every "hop" can see both sender and receiver IP addresses.
A DNS lookup identifies the service provider.
An authorized data access maps the IP address to a service address and possible customer identification. Hopefully this is a rigorously documented and monitored process in your nation.
Anonymizer routing can still be tracked, it just takes more work and some high-powered address correlation hardware. Or a simple but massive gate array, looking for data checksum correlations between streams entering and leaving an anonymizer.
Internet anonymity is illusion.
The only remaining question is whether you stand by your posted opinions, or hide as an anonymous coward.
When logic fails, all that remains is faith, whether in a deity or in some fundamental sanity of the human race.
That's all well and good for GPL software.
What of all the other licenses on the installation? Unless someone is bringing a patent case against a GPL implementation, I fail to see how the GPL-specific clauses are relevant. Perhaps the concern is something under Mozilla, Apache, BSD, or other license that may overstep an existing patent or few.
The GPL is a good theory, but the fact is that non-GPL OSS exists, too. The requirements of GPL do not affect the whole of OSS, only GPL software.
Some of the "Borat" bits are funny, especially the improv interviews.
Portions of it border on racism, emphasizing stereotypes of a "backwater" region that might need help rather than denigration.
But to each their own. I'll put my entertainment dollars elsewhere.
I hadn't considered the issue of election timing, but it is suspicious.
Saddam's sentence is no surprise. The threats of retaliation are no surprise.
Thugs and bullies always think democracy means they'll get their way, and they degenerate into gang violence and terrorism when they don't get it. Few things are more sickening than someone letting a group or party affiliation blind them to the fact that the individual they're trying to defend is a violent degenerate or sociopath.
But before we point too many fingers at Saddam's defenders for the inevitable round of violence and murder, take a look at North America. Our bullies don't degenerate to violence, murder, and terrorism, but they sure don't accept their losses gracefully. They dig up the same old issues over and over, either to distract from real issues, or in a whining child-like attempt to force appeasement of their wants and wishes.
Saddam's conviction should be irrelevent to American politics. Pay very close attention to what the other hand is doing for any politician that even mentions the conviction. It's up to you to decide whether they're using distactics, playing off your hopefully-blind patriotism, or just trying to play an opportunity for air time.
I pray the American people vote with open eyes, ears, and minds this time.
Distributed systems are designed for component integration from day one.
Has everyone been sleeping?
I don't understand the skepticism.
The collapse of the Grand Banks Cod fisheries and the west coast Salmon runs in Canada are historical fact from well over a decade ago. We know as a nation and globally that uncoordinated greed does far worse than decimate a crop species -- it takes the species to and beyond the risk of extinction.
We know what we're doing to the environment. Too many people, corporations, and governments just don't care to accept responsibility for what they're doing.
I've heard the term eco-terrorism bandied about. I don't think it's quite the same as the eco-genocide we're tolerating now.
There are no industry barriers or boundaries to what has and is being done: fisheries, former rain forests, former lakes, elimination of crop species due to invader and GMO species, wholesale targetting of natural crops to protect patented synthetic replacement markets, and an utter disregard for the long-term risks and impacts of those actions.
Say good bye to Lake Chad, the icefields, the Antarctic ice shelves, and the coastal population of most regions around the world. Hello, consequences.
I'm rather familiar with Ingres 6.3 circa 1988-90.
Sybase won, Ingres lost. Ingres was the better core, technically, but Sybase was marketted better.
That video card has 50% more memory than my development database server.
Kinda scary, eh?
What an interesting way of reverse-reading an agreement.
The agreement is that Vole will not sue Novell customers. Period. An indemnity agreement.
The fact that other users or customers are not covered by the agreement is not setting the stage for an attack. It is limiting the scope of the negotiated contract to Novell's customer base.
Now if they obtain a similar agreement with RedHat indemnifying RedHat's customers, they gain more revenue for the indemnification and another segment of the Linux community is "protected" or licensed.
Where in the world did anyone come up with the insane concept that an agreement with any one Linux distributor was somehow an agreement with the non-paying and/or non-contributing masses? You wouldn't expect my Windows XP Pro license to cover your machine's installation, so why would a Mandriva customer expect a RedHat or Novell indemnification to cover their license risks?
Targetted attacks to acquire indirect access to systems (take over your VPN in to the office), customer information, technology under development, or even some freak stalking some cutie on the second floor are all very real threats.
The technology is easy. The attacks are only as difficult as accessing the resources to deploy the attack -- and most major corporations and government agencies have such resources. If a cracker seizes control over those resources, even temporarily, they can do a lot more than blast an unwanted popup from your browser.
To be fair, the last 2-3 distros I've installed have had zero installation problems. The most recent release of OpenSuSE ran me through reasonable first-time installation configuration for the network, printers, etc.
The one weakness was the configuration and support of dial-up connections.
There is no technical reason PCs can't be preloaded and distributed the same way with Linux as with WinXX. It's purely an issue of convincing the vendors to make the option readily available, to make the purchase of a Brand Foo Linux box as trivial as clicking "XP Pro" instead of accepting the default of "XP Home" at Dell.
In terms of "plug it in and it works", most Linux distros come closer to that than a Windows box. The document viewers, CD burning utilities, etc. are all with the distro, not add-ons to be installed later and updated seperately.
The argument of Linux vs. Windows vs. OS/X for the corporate environment is 99% FUD and 1% technical issue. If third party vendors wouldn't explicitly prevent Java-based and web-enabled technology from running against non-"mainstream" operating systems, the majority of office users would neither notice nor care that the PC changed. The differences are more like an individual's UI skin preference than a real difference in functionality.
People often misunderstand what CA does.
They provide maintenance services for dead product lines that have existing service and support contracts for their production systems. When the product line is killed, the existing contracts still have to be honoured. CA buys those service contracts as a product-line bundle.
It's not a glamorous business, and of course the products in question don't get new features and major enhancements. They're already on life-cycle support.
Near as I can tell, it was downloading a component that is only made available after registering the installation of IE7. I can't imagine any other reason why it spent 5-10 minutes downloading an "update" for software that was released in the past 48 hours.
After a 2.5 hour download, the IE7 installer promptly started downloading updates from Microsoft with no estimate as to the size of those downloads nor how long it will take.
Major thumbs down on being honest about the size of the update.
Download running. 2+ hours. Yay.
But I need to see if it's got any compatibility issues with the CSS and hopefully a fix for the black backgrounds on "transparent" images. i.e. Is it any closer to W3C, or still a mess of workarounds and hacks on the server side?
What I don't understand is why the voting machines have been susceptible to tampering when it is no longer common to hear about similar issues with ATMs (cash machines.)
Cash machines are much more complex, yet they're not so vulnerable.
Why? Clearly the technology exists to harden the physical system, software, and communications streams or files. Other industries do it every day.
Customer source licenses at least let the developer do detailed debugging, which is invaluable for embedded hardware programming.
It might make people a little more comfortable with the "closed" aspect of Microsoft being the only maintainer. As sole maintainers, they're taking responsibility for the security, reliability, and scalability of the implementation(s). They get paid rather well for the job, don't they?