I don't know why you would insist on using a term that you know will offend others. Personality disorder?
"Fuck" will offend others. But it's one of the most used words in the English language. Words like "vomit" and "feces" will offend some people... Should we not use those, also? Some people are just very easily offended. Maybe we should all just stop communicating entirely, so that we won't risk offending anyone, ever.
Would snide casual talk of a similar nature about women / blacks / etc be acceptable in the same place, PC or not? No. And for good reason.
I call Bullshit. Day in and day out I hear people refer to friends & coworkers "bitch" -- and no one gets offended. It's all about context, something you appear to lack.
I'm sorry but no. Words don't have a different meaning just because you want them to. You can't call someone a "child molester" just because you want "child molester" to mean "liar", "ignorant" or anything else.
Yes, actually, you can.... The point of language is to communicate. If you choose to use these words this way, as long as the person you use them with agrees on the meaning and understands what you mean, then they do in fact mean that, and you are still communicating effectively.
Words and their meanings don't magically appear in our brains; they come to mean what they mean only after someone has used them. Do you suppose "onion" has always referred to the buttocks? Here's a hint: no, it hasn't. But do you understand when people use it that way? I can't remember when the last time used the term in my presence when it wasn't understood, so I assume you do. I wonder how that happened...
...I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.
It's the nature of language to evolve; words mean what you use them to mean. Many words have more than one meaning, and gay is one of those. For years, "gay" has been colloquially used to mean, roughly, "silly in a lame way." Some people instead use the word "ghey" to reflect this idea, to disconnect its use from the use of gay to mean homosexual.
Use of the word "nigger" is not comparable, AFAIK; it has never been in common use for any other meaning than as a pejorative for dark-skinned people of African origin.
Even downloading movies, which we tend to think of as a more victimless crime, means that for every dollar saved by someone watching a movie for free in their dorm room, the shortfall has to be made up by paying ticket buyers.
I find this statement to be utterly false. The movie industry releases hundreds of movies per year; some of the movies do hundreds of millions of dollars in business, some do at most a few million dollars, or even less. So how do you define "shortfall" as used above? The movie industry (and apparently the contributor) apparently assume that anyone who downloads a movie illegally would have been willing to pay $10 to see it legally, if downloading it were not an option. If you downloaded 200 movies over a month's time (or even a few months time), that's $2,000 worth of movie tickets... How many people are really willing to spend that much on movie tickets, in a month or even a few months? How many college students watching illegally downloaded movies in their dorm room have $2,000 a month/semester/whatever to spend on movie tickets? Or for that matter, time to watch them? The idea that every illegally downloaded movie represents a shortfall to the movie industry is absolutely absurd.
I posted to a forum asking what the best method was to jail SFTP users. I wanted something like FTP, but secure, and I didn't want users to be able to browse the whole filesystem. Some security expert chimed in basically calling me a moron, that if I didn't want people to browse the whole filesystem, I should use FTP and jail people. A lot of people in the forum agreed.
Maybe they're not as expert as they think... at least two programs exist which provide this. One is called scponly. The other is called rssh, which is what I recommend you use, mainly because I wrote it.:)
As problems go, security sucks... to be effective, you DO just about need to be an expert, generally; and if you're not, you're probably just wasting your time. So, if you need security, be prepared to read ALL the documentation THOROUGHLY, and then when you're done, read it again. And then hope you didn't miss anything important when you configure your solution, or at least that no one is particularly hell-bent on breaking into your stuff. Otherwise, you'll lose.
'Incompetent people implementing security solutions are a real problem.'
Man, things like this make me want to NOT switch to Linux... Even though I had a better experience with Ubuntu that I did Vista.
You have to understand the reality of that comment... The fact is, lots of people try to implement security solutions (or solutions of all sorts) without taking the time to really understand how they work, and the ramifications of using them. Often such people are inexperienced system administrators, or worse still they are people who are not system administrators at all, but nevertheless are tasked with maintaining some piece of infrastructure and keeping it secure. This is a fact of life, but such people rarely succeed in truly securing the infrastructure in question; they simply lack the knowledge and experience required. Due to other requirements being given to them, they simply lack the time to do the required investigation to understand the software enough to sufficiently provide the requisit level of security. Often enough, their efforts are sufficient, mainly because no one sufficiently competent at breaking into computers actually cares about getting into the resource in question. Nevertheless, a competent and determined attacker will succeed at bypassing their efforts to secure the resource. If you're such a person, you shouldn't take the comment above as a personal insult -- you're in a tough position. But instead, you might take away from such a comment that security is extremely complex, and a cursory knowledge of security probably just won't help you out all that much... If you are responsible for managing the security of, well, anything, then you need to completely understand the thing you're securing and the solution you're using to secure it. If you don't, you can't possibly know what holes you're leaving open, nor the potential impact of getting it wrong. Most people simply don't understand this aspect of security.
I wrote a piece of security software (which happens to make use of chroot to improve security), and I see this all the time. The e-mail thread that spawned this article is a prime example: people complain about a particular behavior being broken, but in actuality there's nothing wrong with the behavior; it's their own knowledge that is lacking.
I don't completely agree with Alan; chroot() can effectively be used as a security tool under specific circumstances. But this can only be true if (along with other limitations) the code running inside the jail is not running as root, and the essence of what he said is correct. Don't forget: root is essentially the god of his system; he can bypass file system permissions, alter running programs running in memory, and (if he's sufficiently clever) even change the way the kernel works at a whim; and yes, he can break out of a chroot jail, which is less drastic a change (or intrusion) than some of that other stuff. The root user can do anything, by design.
My software does the best it can to maintain security by calling a special SUID helper program to create the chroot jail, calling the chroot() system call as soon as it programmatically is able to do so, and immediately dropping root privileges after that. In such a way, chroot() can be an effective security tool. But it is NOT magic... you need to know what you're doing, and take great care to get it right. Certain types of misconfiguration of my software can easily result in a system that is easy to exploit. This is not a flaw in my software per se; it's just a fact of life. Most people -- even experienced programmers -- just don't have the required detailed knowledge that is needed to get it right. This doesn't make them bad people, and it doesn't even make them bad programmers. It simply makes them uninformed about a particular aspect of system behavior and programming. Any programmer, no matter how experienced, will have such gaps in knowledge. By definition, they are incompetent to program a solution which makes use of them. That statement isn't necessarily meant as an insult; it's just a fact.
As far as I see it, theres as much chance of data in the recieve buffer created by background radiation being a viable 'virus' as there is a deliberate chunk of data will be
OK... In order for there to be a threat, there must be hostile aliens in the first place, and they must be sufficiently intelligent to pose a threat. So for the sake of argument, let's assume that. Then, it follows:
1. We still have not detected them, after years of trying.
2. Therefore, they must be using signaling technology which is more advanced than ours.
3. Subsequently, they are smarter than YOU.
It is folly to assume that because you don't know how to do something, it is impossible. Likewise, though you may not know of the existence of something, that is not proof that it does not exist. These are the very principles which today allow black-hat hackers to break into your systems and steal your credit card info, etc. This is the essence of computer security: someone figured out how to break things in a way that was unexpected by the designer.
I can't find a proper attribution, but somebody smart once said, "The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know."
Since the U.S. federal government limits my liability to $50 for someone fraudulently using my credit card, and all of my credit card companies waive even that, I don't care who uses my credit card.
This is precisely the kind of small-minded, self-centered thinking that's wrecking this country. It's asinine. You think retailers are willing to foot the bill for credit card fraud? Not on your life. Whether they get reimbursed by insurance companies, or directly from you, one way or the other, it's the consumer who gets the bill.
Maybe Walmart pays millions of dollars a year for fraud insurance. If so, they consider that cost part of doing business, and it affects their prices. They pass the cost on to you, the consumer. Small shops which can't afford to pay for such insurance pass the cost on to you directly, again, in the form of higher prices.
Nothing is free, and in the end it's us that pays for everything. The sooner you get that, the better off you'll be.
Why do most slashdotters assume that just b/c you have an MBA you must be some evil hell bent individual?
Huh?
The post to which you're replying said no such thing. What was said, if I may quote, was precisely this:
You're giving away the MBA secret that big business is not honourable.
This does not mean or even imply that all MBAs are evil. Nor do all MBAs work for evil corporations. Maybe you should have studied English instead of business...
Being an MBA may not make you evil, but the reality is, you don't get to be as big as IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, RJR Nabisco, etc. without stepping on some toes. In big business, people get hurt. Always. But that's the nature of competition.
That whole serial format is what makes things like 24, West Wing, Farscape, Stargate SG:1 interesting to watch.
Actually, that's what wrecked Farscape. Not so much the serialism, but all the overdone melodrama that invariably accompanies it. SG-1 has only a small element of serialism, which is what makes it good -- enough to keep you interested, but not so much that the story lines make you want to puke. You want to turn good sci-fi into soap operas... Go watch General Hospital. None for me, thanks.
Have you ever actually interacted with RMS? I have. His methods and tactics are often obtrusive, annoying, and at times can be downright offensive. He's arrogant and rude, until you let him make his point. He will not relent until he gets his way. I mean, I agree with the guy most of the time, and I still want him to shut up.
If you want to see the government start using open-source software, then rms is the last person you want near those discussions. The folks in the legislature will not tolerate his shenanigans for very long...
What? Are you on crack? Current U.S. Treasury makes it incredibly difficult to reproduce a GOOD counterfiet bill. If you know what to look for, detecting most counterfiet money is easy. It's just that most people never look. My advice: look at all your money. You could find yourself (temporarily, in all likelihood) in jail for passing a bad note.
As for checks, well... FTC guidelines on bank drafts, if followed, make it almost as tough to produce counterfiet checks. Then there are those who want to print their own checks... This is legal, but were I a merchant, I probably wouldn't accept them...
Fingerprints are easy though. All that takes is balls. Take the example of this story: All I need to do to get fingerprints is watch some unsuspecting customer go through the line, pay by thumbprint, and then get them to hold something. This can be accomplished in any number of ways, if you're devious enough.
"Excuse me, but I don't have my glasses. Could you take a look at this glass I just purchased and see if it looks scratched? If it is, I'm going to go return it..."
For the really gutsy (or stupid), there's always the 'ol cut the finger off trick... Or break into the person's house and steal something with their fingerprints. Then, follow the directions posted in another comment for producing the gelatin. No problem.
Don't you people watch movies? Sure, they're fake, but that doesn't mean some of the tricks the bad guys use aren't real...
The opinion is often expressed here that the average user can't cope with any variation from the MS desktop, yet they transitioned from 3.1 to 95/8 to 2k/xp easily enough. Most could handle a Mac. People aren't that stupid, give them a desktop close enough and they'll accept it.
History has shown that this isn't true. Much resistance to switching to Linux is that it is unfamiliar. No matter how familiar you make it look and feel, you still get this argument, mostly from people who don't know any better and don't want to. I was at an interview recently where a business manager said essentially, "Why would I want to switch to Linux? I don't know how to use that..." This is preposterous; the default Red Hat KDE desktop looks and works essentially just like the Windows desktop, leaving very little for new users to learn.
The reason Windows has become so popular is momentum. More people started using it, because their companies did. Now, they feel threatened by the prospect of changing to something different, afraid that they will no longer know how to do their job.
What you mean to say is, force upon them a desktop that's close, and they'll accept it. The only reason people accept changes between desktop interfaces in differing versions of Windows is because they percieve that they don't have a choice. Not so with Linux; the choice is don't switch, and you don't need to learn anything.
People are their own worst enemy. They prevent themselves from making progress out of FUD or out of sheer laziness... The only way to get people, who aren't already inclined to seek alternatives, to switch to something new is to make them switch. Period.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The word "department" is a collective noun. Here, though department represents a group of people, there is only/one/ department, and the action expressed applies to the department as a whole, so the singular form of the verb is correct.
We don't need any more laws. We already have far too many silly laws that never get enforced anyway. Furthermore, there is already a body of law that covers this kind of thing: tort law.
The concept at play here is called trespass to chattels. A chattel is a concrete possession that is movable, such as a car or a computer. Land, or a home, for example, are not chattels, because they are not mobile. Trespass to chattels is when one interferes with the use of an object by its owner. In this case, the specific tort might be conversion. Conversion is when someone wrongfully exercises control over, or "converts" the object in question for their own purposes.
The real tricks are a) trying to convince a judge that a trespass or conversion has occured, and b) showing damages to which one should be entitled. But before any of that can happen, someone has to sue the software author/vendor. Is it worth their time? Maybe... but probably not. That's why this crap goes on so much.
Stop thinking. There's already a legal concept that describes exactly the deprivation of use of owned properties. It's part of tort law. Tort law is the body of law that covers civil non-contractual wrongs.
The concept at play here is called trespass to chattels. A chattel is a concrete possession that is movable, such as a car or a computer. Land, or a home, for example, are not chattels, because they are not mobile. Trespass to chattels is when one interferes with the use of an object by its owner. In this case, the specific tort might be conversion. Conversion is when someone wrongfully exercises control over, or "converts" the object in question for their own purposes.
So though the CPU cycles of a CPU that you own aren't property per se, you still have a right to use them, and to decide how they are used. Software installed on your system without you being informed and which does things that you don't want it to clearly violate some of these principles.
Oh, yeah... buy what's valuable for a song, dump the rest, screw the investors and employees, file Chapter 7...and Angell walks away with a bag full of money and IP while everyone else gets screwed. And I thought Linux was supposed to be different...
Ok, I was one of the employees that got the axe, and I'm telling you it ain't like that. The company was very up-front about all their dealings and did everything in their power to keep the employees from getting screwed. They paid us for a month and maintained our benefits while we basically used their facilities to find new work.
As for Rick Angell, he's taking a gamble. He's paid what I consider more than what the IP is worth for both the IP and the company's debt (which must still be discharged somehow), gambling that MCL's IP will actually become worth something, and he's kept around as many employees as made sense to work on those projects. In the end, it could all still fall flat...
FWIW I've dealt with Rick personally, and he believes in Linux. He also believes in (at least some of) the products MCL was/is developing, and is pumping his own money into the company to keep it alive. That's quite a gamble to take, if your goal is to rape the failed company... And even the rest of the investors weren't interested in screwing over the employees... If they were, they could have declared bankruptcy a month early and split the cash that was paid to employees in salaries and benefits.
Sure, it's easy to be cynical when something like this happens. But management and the investors really did try to do everything they could to keep the company alive... and then for the employees, when it became evident that wasn't an option.
It never fails to amaze me that people ask such complicated questions which have obvious legal ramifications, and potentially serious ones at that, of the people who hang out here.
Half the people who hang out here are either teenagers with no professional experience (though some may have), or complete twits, or both.
The other half of the people who tend to hang out here are geeks, with little or no legal expertise. This does not preclude the possibility that you will get insightful advice from someone who has been in your situation, or someone who IS a lawyer. But, do you really want to depend on the answers you get here? Your job, your career, or even your life may depend on you getting good, sound advice.
Even if the advice you get from people here is based on real-world events that actually happened to them, you must remember that a) the laws may be different where you live; b) the terms of your employment may be different than theirs; c) if you end up in court, the judge you get may not see the case the same way.
The way I see it, if you care about this project that you've been working on, you only have 3 choices:
1) See a lawyer ASAP
2) Explain your situation to your manager, and see a lawyer ASAP
3) quit your job, and see a lawyer ASAP
For your own sake people, Don't "Ask Slashdot" for legal advice! Get a clue from someone who has a clue. Go get professional legal council, and do it NOW, before you screw yourself over.
That said, this kind of issue is complex, and bleeds between the legal and the technical. You may want to contact an organization such as the EFF (www.eff.org) who has experience with this sort of legal trouble, so that you can (hopefully) receive help from lawyers who DO understand the issues that you face. Or, at least, make sure the lawyer you speak with has experience with computer-related law, or can recommend someone who does.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe now I can throw away all those baseball caps that make me look silly... ;-)
I don't know why you would insist on using a term that you know will offend others. Personality disorder?
"Fuck" will offend others. But it's one of the most used words in the English language. Words like "vomit" and "feces" will offend some people... Should we not use those, also? Some people are just very easily offended. Maybe we should all just stop communicating entirely, so that we won't risk offending anyone, ever.
Would snide casual talk of a similar nature about women / blacks / etc be acceptable in the same place, PC or not? No. And for good reason.
I call Bullshit. Day in and day out I hear people refer to friends & coworkers "bitch" -- and no one gets offended. It's all about context, something you appear to lack.
I'm sorry but no. Words don't have a different meaning just because you want them to. You can't call someone a "child molester" just because you want "child molester" to mean "liar", "ignorant" or anything else.
Yes, actually, you can.... The point of language is to communicate. If you choose to use these words this way, as long as the person you use them with agrees on the meaning and understands what you mean, then they do in fact mean that, and you are still communicating effectively.
Words and their meanings don't magically appear in our brains; they come to mean what they mean only after someone has used them. Do you suppose "onion" has always referred to the buttocks? Here's a hint: no, it hasn't. But do you understand when people use it that way? I can't remember when the last time used the term in my presence when it wasn't understood, so I assume you do. I wonder how that happened...
...I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.
It's the nature of language to evolve; words mean what you use them to mean. Many words have more than one meaning, and gay is one of those. For years, "gay" has been colloquially used to mean, roughly, "silly in a lame way." Some people instead use the word "ghey" to reflect this idea, to disconnect its use from the use of gay to mean homosexual.
Use of the word "nigger" is not comparable, AFAIK; it has never been in common use for any other meaning than as a pejorative for dark-skinned people of African origin.
Even downloading movies, which we tend to think of as a more victimless crime, means that for every dollar saved by someone watching a movie for free in their dorm room, the shortfall has to be made up by paying ticket buyers.
I find this statement to be utterly false. The movie industry releases hundreds of movies per year; some of the movies do hundreds of millions of dollars in business, some do at most a few million dollars, or even less. So how do you define "shortfall" as used above? The movie industry (and apparently the contributor) apparently assume that anyone who downloads a movie illegally would have been willing to pay $10 to see it legally, if downloading it were not an option. If you downloaded 200 movies over a month's time (or even a few months time), that's $2,000 worth of movie tickets... How many people are really willing to spend that much on movie tickets, in a month or even a few months? How many college students watching illegally downloaded movies in their dorm room have $2,000 a month/semester/whatever to spend on movie tickets? Or for that matter, time to watch them? The idea that every illegally downloaded movie represents a shortfall to the movie industry is absolutely absurd.
I posted to a forum asking what the best method was to jail SFTP users. I wanted something like FTP, but secure, and I didn't want users to be able to browse the whole filesystem. Some security expert chimed in basically calling me a moron, that if I didn't want people to browse the whole filesystem, I should use FTP and jail people. A lot of people in the forum agreed.
Maybe they're not as expert as they think... at least two programs exist which provide this. One is called scponly. The other is called rssh, which is what I recommend you use, mainly because I wrote it. :)
As problems go, security sucks... to be effective, you DO just about need to be an expert, generally; and if you're not, you're probably just wasting your time. So, if you need security, be prepared to read ALL the documentation THOROUGHLY, and then when you're done, read it again. And then hope you didn't miss anything important when you configure your solution, or at least that no one is particularly hell-bent on breaking into your stuff. Otherwise, you'll lose.Man, things like this make me want to NOT switch to Linux... Even though I had a better experience with Ubuntu that I did Vista.
You have to understand the reality of that comment... The fact is, lots of people try to implement security solutions (or solutions of all sorts) without taking the time to really understand how they work, and the ramifications of using them. Often such people are inexperienced system administrators, or worse still they are people who are not system administrators at all, but nevertheless are tasked with maintaining some piece of infrastructure and keeping it secure. This is a fact of life, but such people rarely succeed in truly securing the infrastructure in question; they simply lack the knowledge and experience required. Due to other requirements being given to them, they simply lack the time to do the required investigation to understand the software enough to sufficiently provide the requisit level of security. Often enough, their efforts are sufficient, mainly because no one sufficiently competent at breaking into computers actually cares about getting into the resource in question. Nevertheless, a competent and determined attacker will succeed at bypassing their efforts to secure the resource. If you're such a person, you shouldn't take the comment above as a personal insult -- you're in a tough position. But instead, you might take away from such a comment that security is extremely complex, and a cursory knowledge of security probably just won't help you out all that much... If you are responsible for managing the security of, well, anything, then you need to completely understand the thing you're securing and the solution you're using to secure it. If you don't, you can't possibly know what holes you're leaving open, nor the potential impact of getting it wrong. Most people simply don't understand this aspect of security.
I wrote a piece of security software (which happens to make use of chroot to improve security), and I see this all the time. The e-mail thread that spawned this article is a prime example: people complain about a particular behavior being broken, but in actuality there's nothing wrong with the behavior; it's their own knowledge that is lacking.
I don't completely agree with Alan; chroot() can effectively be used as a security tool under specific circumstances. But this can only be true if (along with other limitations) the code running inside the jail is not running as root, and the essence of what he said is correct. Don't forget: root is essentially the god of his system; he can bypass file system permissions, alter running programs running in memory, and (if he's sufficiently clever) even change the way the kernel works at a whim; and yes, he can break out of a chroot jail, which is less drastic a change (or intrusion) than some of that other stuff. The root user can do anything, by design.
My software does the best it can to maintain security by calling a special SUID helper program to create the chroot jail, calling the chroot() system call as soon as it programmatically is able to do so, and immediately dropping root privileges after that. In such a way, chroot() can be an effective security tool. But it is NOT magic... you need to know what you're doing, and take great care to get it right. Certain types of misconfiguration of my software can easily result in a system that is easy to exploit. This is not a flaw in my software per se; it's just a fact of life. Most people -- even experienced programmers -- just don't have the required detailed knowledge that is needed to get it right. This doesn't make them bad people, and it doesn't even make them bad programmers. It simply makes them uninformed about a particular aspect of system behavior and programming. Any programmer, no matter how experienced, will have such gaps in knowledge. By definition, they are incompetent to program a solution which makes use of them. That statement isn't necessarily meant as an insult; it's just a fact.
It's full of lies. It told me that the Internet was invented by Larry Roberts, working for DARPA. Everyone knows it was Al Gore...
I took a shit that was about the same size as Pluto. Can we call it Planet Golgothan?
Holy Shit! Someone who's not a geek actually gets it?
OK... In order for there to be a threat, there must be hostile aliens in the first place, and they must be sufficiently intelligent to pose a threat. So for the sake of argument, let's assume that. Then, it follows:
1. We still have not detected them, after years of trying.
2. Therefore, they must be using signaling technology which is more advanced than ours.
3. Subsequently, they are smarter than YOU.
It is folly to assume that because you don't know how to do something, it is impossible. Likewise, though you may not know of the existence of something, that is not proof that it does not exist. These are the very principles which today allow black-hat hackers to break into your systems and steal your credit card info, etc. This is the essence of computer security: someone figured out how to break things in a way that was unexpected by the designer.
I can't find a proper attribution, but somebody smart once said, "The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know."
Which one of the guys is schtupping the girl?
This is precisely the kind of small-minded, self-centered thinking that's wrecking this country. It's asinine. You think retailers are willing to foot the bill for credit card fraud? Not on your life. Whether they get reimbursed by insurance companies, or directly from you, one way or the other, it's the consumer who gets the bill.
Maybe Walmart pays millions of dollars a year for fraud insurance. If so, they consider that cost part of doing business, and it affects their prices. They pass the cost on to you, the consumer. Small shops which can't afford to pay for such insurance pass the cost on to you directly, again, in the form of higher prices.
Nothing is free, and in the end it's us that pays for everything. The sooner you get that, the better off you'll be.
Huh?
The post to which you're replying said no such thing. What was said, if I may quote, was precisely this:
You're giving away the MBA secret that big business is not honourable.
This does not mean or even imply that all MBAs are evil. Nor do all MBAs work for evil corporations. Maybe you should have studied English instead of business...
Being an MBA may not make you evil, but the reality is, you don't get to be as big as IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, RJR Nabisco, etc. without stepping on some toes. In big business, people get hurt. Always. But that's the nature of competition.
That whole serial format is what makes things like 24, West Wing, Farscape, Stargate SG:1 interesting to watch.
Actually, that's what wrecked Farscape. Not so much the serialism, but all the overdone melodrama that invariably accompanies it. SG-1 has only a small element of serialism, which is what makes it good -- enough to keep you interested, but not so much that the story lines make you want to puke. You want to turn good sci-fi into soap operas... Go watch General Hospital. None for me, thanks.
If you want to see the government start using open-source software, then rms is the last person you want near those discussions. The folks in the legislature will not tolerate his shenanigans for very long...
What? Are you on crack? Current U.S. Treasury makes it incredibly difficult to reproduce a GOOD counterfiet bill. If you know what to look for, detecting most counterfiet money is easy. It's just that most people never look. My advice: look at all your money. You could find yourself (temporarily, in all likelihood) in jail for passing a bad note.
As for checks, well... FTC guidelines on bank drafts, if followed, make it almost as tough to produce counterfiet checks. Then there are those who want to print their own checks... This is legal, but were I a merchant, I probably wouldn't accept them...
Fingerprints are easy though. All that takes is balls. Take the example of this story: All I need to do to get fingerprints is watch some unsuspecting customer go through the line, pay by thumbprint, and then get them to hold something. This can be accomplished in any number of ways, if you're devious enough.
"Excuse me, but I don't have my glasses. Could you take a look at this glass I just purchased and see if it looks scratched? If it is, I'm going to go return it..."
For the really gutsy (or stupid), there's always the 'ol cut the finger off trick... Or break into the person's house and steal something with their fingerprints. Then, follow the directions posted in another comment for producing the gelatin. No problem.
Don't you people watch movies? Sure, they're fake, but that doesn't mean some of the tricks the bad guys use aren't real...
History has shown that this isn't true. Much resistance to switching to Linux is that it is unfamiliar. No matter how familiar you make it look and feel, you still get this argument, mostly from people who don't know any better and don't want to. I was at an interview recently where a business manager said essentially, "Why would I want to switch to Linux? I don't know how to use that..." This is preposterous; the default Red Hat KDE desktop looks and works essentially just like the Windows desktop, leaving very little for new users to learn.
The reason Windows has become so popular is momentum. More people started using it, because their companies did. Now, they feel threatened by the prospect of changing to something different, afraid that they will no longer know how to do their job.
What you mean to say is, force upon them a desktop that's close, and they'll accept it. The only reason people accept changes between desktop interfaces in differing versions of Windows is because they percieve that they don't have a choice. Not so with Linux; the choice is don't switch, and you don't need to learn anything.
People are their own worst enemy. They prevent themselves from making progress out of FUD or out of sheer laziness... The only way to get people, who aren't already inclined to seek alternatives, to switch to something new is to make them switch. Period.
See also rule #5 at this page, or this link.
I love it when people correct the grammar of others, when they themselves are wrong. Morons.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The word "department" is a collective noun. Here, though department represents a group of people, there is only /one/ department, and the action expressed applies to the department as a whole, so the singular form of the verb is correct.
See e.g. The Beacon Handbook, pg. 177.
We don't need any more laws. We already have far too many silly laws that never get enforced anyway. Furthermore, there is already a body of law that covers this kind of thing: tort law.
The concept at play here is called trespass to chattels. A chattel is a concrete possession that is movable, such as a car or a computer. Land, or a home, for example, are not chattels, because they are not mobile. Trespass to chattels is when one interferes with the use of an object by its owner. In this case, the specific tort might be conversion. Conversion is when someone wrongfully exercises control over, or "converts" the object in question for their own purposes.
The real tricks are a) trying to convince a judge that a trespass or conversion has occured, and b) showing damages to which one should be entitled.
But before any of that can happen, someone has to sue the software author/vendor. Is it worth their time? Maybe... but probably not. That's why this crap goes on so much.
Stop thinking. There's already a legal concept that describes exactly the deprivation of use of owned properties. It's part of tort law. Tort law is the body of law that covers civil non-contractual wrongs.
The concept at play here is called trespass to chattels. A chattel is a concrete possession that is movable, such as a car or a computer. Land, or a home, for example, are not chattels, because they are not mobile. Trespass to chattels is when one interferes with the use of an object by its owner. In this case, the specific tort might be conversion. Conversion is when someone wrongfully exercises control over, or "converts" the object in question for their own purposes.
So though the CPU cycles of a CPU that you own aren't property per se, you still have a right to use them, and to decide how they are used. Software installed on your system without you being informed and which does things that you don't want it to clearly violate some of these principles.
Ok, I was one of the employees that got the axe, and I'm telling you it ain't like that. The company was very up-front about all their dealings and did everything in their power to keep the employees from getting screwed. They paid us for a month and maintained our benefits while we basically used their facilities to find new work.
As for Rick Angell, he's taking a gamble. He's paid what I consider more than what the IP is worth for both the IP and the company's debt (which must still be discharged somehow), gambling that MCL's IP will actually become worth something, and he's kept around as many employees as made sense to work on those projects. In the end, it could all still fall flat...
FWIW I've dealt with Rick personally, and he believes in Linux. He also believes in (at least some of) the products MCL was/is developing, and is pumping his own money into the company to keep it alive. That's quite a gamble to take, if your goal is to rape the failed company... And even the rest of the investors weren't interested in screwing over the employees... If they were, they could have declared bankruptcy a month early and split the cash that was paid to employees in salaries and benefits.
Sure, it's easy to be cynical when something like this happens. But management and the investors really did try to do everything they could to keep the company alive... and then for the employees, when it became evident that wasn't an option.
It never fails to amaze me that people ask such complicated questions which have obvious legal ramifications, and potentially serious ones at that, of the people who hang out here.
Half the people who hang out here are either teenagers with no professional experience (though some may have), or complete twits, or both.
The other half of the people who tend to hang out here are geeks, with little or no legal expertise. This does not preclude the possibility that you will get insightful advice from someone who has been in your situation, or someone who IS a lawyer. But, do you really want to depend on the answers you get here? Your job, your career, or even your life may depend on you getting good, sound advice.
Even if the advice you get from people here is based on real-world events that actually happened to them, you must remember that a) the laws may be different where you live; b) the terms of your employment may be different than theirs; c) if you end up in court, the judge you get may not see the case the same way.
The way I see it, if you care about this project that you've been working on, you only have 3 choices:
1) See a lawyer ASAP
2) Explain your situation to your manager, and see a lawyer ASAP
3) quit your job, and see a lawyer ASAP
For your own sake people, Don't "Ask Slashdot" for legal advice! Get a clue from someone who has a clue. Go get professional legal council, and do it NOW, before you screw yourself over.
That said, this kind of issue is complex, and bleeds between the legal and the technical. You may want to contact an organization such as the EFF (www.eff.org) who has experience with this sort of legal trouble, so that you can (hopefully) receive help from lawyers who DO understand the issues that you face. Or, at least, make sure the lawyer you speak with has experience with computer-related law, or can recommend someone who does.