This can be executed on any webhost with ftp access and a cgi-bin.
Er... how many admins do you know are stupid enough to allow a directory in the ftp upload area to be treated as a cgi-bin by the webserver? In that case, you could do a lot of damage without the need for this kernel exploit.
I know this may sound pedantic, but this is one of those confusions which we are encouraged to make by the state and it's friends in the media. One we all need to be wary of. Slipping betwen `immoral' and `illegal' is easy and dangerous.
I don't think this is pedantic at all. I think it is an excellent point, and I would like to expand on it by asking this question: What do we do with kiddie porn when no children are abused to make it?
Here's what I mean: I recently watched a few all-computer generated movies with my wife (Shrek, Finding Nemo, to name a few). In the bonus material on these, there were making-of documentaries. In nearly every one of them, they stated that their initial animation was too photo-realistic. They actually had to purposely scale it back to make it look generated.
Now, granted, at the moment, only big studios like Pixar that have gobs of money can pull off something this good. But this is not always going to be the case. Hell, it's already started; a lot of the studios use Linux, which is effectively free. So what happens in the future when kiddie porn is all computer-generated and not one real-world child is abused? Now what do we do? The rallying cry against child porn is that the children need to be protected. Fair enough, and I agree with this. But what happens after real, physical children are no longer needed to produce the material? Do we keep censoring kiddie porn on moral grounds?
But this *is* fighting child pornography. By putting barriers to the potential demand you're actually affecting the offer.
No, you're not, you're just changing how the demand is met. All you need is to look at the history of prohibition in the US to see a shining example of that. The only way prohibition would have worked is by making people not want to drink.
Before everyone does the kneejerk censorhip response, this seems no different than what goes on in real life. Access to child pornography is blocked in real life. Your local Kwik-E-Mart is not going to be carrying Russian Lolitas Monthly next to the Playboys and Penthouses. Nor should they.
There is a subtle difference here, however, and its a matter of economics.
Putting together and mass-publishing a magazine is not easy or cheap. It takes a good deal of money to do it. So your average Joe Citizen is not going to be doing it anytime soon, no matter how passionate he may be about his opinions. But the internet is a different story. Anyone can post a website very cheaply. The web gives an outlet to Joe Citizen to express his views. Because this medium is so easy to use and helps promote such freedom, it needs to be treated more gently than print media.
Also, consider this: Say someone were to put together a child porn magazine and actually get some stores to carry it. When the police find out, they will indeed remove the magazines from the store, but they will also shut down the publisher.. The court order would likely be granted the same day. This is NOT happening with the kiddie porn websites. Instead they're choosing to just do a mass censorship of all of them and sort it all out later. But there won't be a later. Politicos will simply pat themselves on the back for "removing" this evil from the net, and because of most people's "out of sight, out of mind" mentality, they'll reward them with votes. Meanwhile, the child porn sites set up shop elsewhere and the cycle of abuse continues.
Seriously, I would rather have not one child be sexually abused for losing one of those "inaliable rights" everyone loves.
I'll bet that there were children among the casualties when allied forces liberated France during 1944/1945. Guess we should have called off D-Day. Rather lose some rights than let any children get hurt.
Ironic that this topic should come up on the 60th anniversary of D-Day. I would say that this move by BT makes an absolute mockery of the memory of that day.
This isn't a troll, but seriously THINK about what powers we as citizens have (of whatever country you reside in). You CAN make a difference if you try hard enough. Martin Luther King never was what he became without hard work, dillegence and direction.
You just proved my point. The citizens can indeed make a difference, but that needs to come about by getting at the source of the problem, which is the people supplying kiddie porn and the ones that demand it. As I said in another post, censoring is a band-aid. It doesn't get at the real problem.
And I don't like the NRA. Should I demand my ISP block those sites too? And I believe in a woman's right to choose, so maybe I should demand my ISP block anti-abortion sites? I don't like the republican party. Should I demand that the ISP block their sites?
Anyone who now responds with "but that's not the same thing!" is missing the point. Blocking something that most people (myself included) is a universal evil sounds like a good idea, but it sets a dangerous precedent. It can be twisted around to allow someone to start blocking sites that have unfavorable political views by associating them with child porn in some way. Do this enough times, and eventually they'll stop even trying to make the association since censorship will become a fact of life.
Freedom of speech means NOTHING if it is not open for all. Freedom for all, or freedom for none.
Also, consider this: Child porn would not be around if there was not a demand for it. Perhaps the problem should be addressed there, rather than accepting this band-aid solution.
So long as ads are respectful of your browser (I hate Flash ads, and it goes without saying that no one is friends with popup ads or other eye-pokers), their content doesn't concern me a whole lot.
I tend to agree. What pisses me off about LinuxToday has nothing to do with the content of the ads; I could care less that there are MS ads there. It's the fact that LinuxToday has a preponderance of flashplayer ads. I loathe flashplayer because I have a great deal of trouble reading when something is moving or flickering at the edge of my vision. I often have to right-click on these things in hopes of actually getting a menu where the play button 1) is actually there and 2) actually works. I'd rip out flashplayer from Mozilla if I didn't share the machine with my wife. I'm very tempted to install a second copy of mozilla without flashplayer just for me.
No, you don't have to be silent about your disagreeing with one person's representation of the truth, but asking an entire community to boycott a website due to the advertisements which it runs is a dangerous, dangerous slide into the sort of polarity we see in the United States today.
I don't get your point here. Why do you consider the act of asking to be dangerous? The community doesn't have to do shit if it doesn't want to. For instance, I can ask that people boycott the auto industry for not doing more to build cleaner cars, but I sincerely doubt I'll get many takers.
So who cares how many people ask for boycotts? Everyone is going to decide for themselves whether to participate or not. Refraining from asking just because it might "polarize" people is ridiculous.
Scientific studies have proven that if there was a nuclear holocaust, or a giant asteroid like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, that the RIAA would continue to survive.
That sounds similar to the studies that say that cockroaches would be among the sole survivors of a nuclear war. This would imply that the RIAA and cockroaches share something in common.
I am curious about one thing. What if SCO never fired the first shot in this IP war? Would they still need to downsize? Would they still be considered a dying company?
It is possible that if they had decided to stick to selling an actual product, they may still have been beaten down and would still be considered a dying company, if for no other reason than the competition in the marketplace is fierce.
But if the company did fold, at least one could say that they did it "honestly". Instead, they now have to face the possibility of going down in flames because of monumentally stupid and potentially illegal actions, thus gaining infamy for themselves in the annals of business, in effect becoming for the IT industry what Enron became for the power industry.
If this research turns out to be true, it can result in all-out war with every kind of weapon available. Power structures around oil are so entrenched, the oil producing countries and corporations will never allow their revenue to disappear.
Sigh. And this gets modded +4 interesting. Way to go, mods.
Take off your tin-foil hat. No war is going to result from oil being displaced as an energy source, and there are two main reasons for this.
The first reason is that having less a dependency on oil will mean that nations like the US won't have to give a shit about the unrest in the Middle East. Reducing the need for oil for power generation means the world could do without the Middle East oil. Oil from non-Middle East countries would suffice, obviating the need to be directly involved in Middle Eastern affairs. This would remove a huge thorn in the side of US foreign policy, for example.
The second reason is that we will still need a fair amount of petroleum products for the forseeable future. The reason? Plastics. Petroleum products are used in the production of many forms of plastic, and the industrial world uses a hell of a lot of plastic.
At least you didn't mention the auto industry, or perhaps that was an oversight. Auto manufacturers are already investing in alternate energy sources for cars, so this would simply continue the trend.
no. P&F weren't reviled because they were wrong. they were reviled because they circumvented the whole publishing and peer review part of science and went directly to the 'make wild-ass claims to the press' part.
This in itself would not have been bad had someone been able to accurately reproduce their experiments. However, because these bozos circumvented the process, they added a massive giggle factor to cold fusion. In addition, I maintain that the audacity of their claims immediately biased many of the physicists attempting to reproduce the experiment. They were looking for something to debunk and thus may have accidentally ignored results that, while certainly not conclusive, would have at least suggested that the subject merited some further review. Instead, scientists could not get the exact end result and branded it a hoax.
So when I read the article and discovered that many of the materials and methods being used now are very similar to what P&F used, I am not very surprised. Even if scientists manage to declare their theory completely sound, I will still not hold P&F in any regard because their antics set back the whole cold fusion research field by years.
IMO the Star Trek universe is out of gas. There's nothing to see here. Move on.
Yes and no.
Yes, there's nothing more to be done with it, but only with regards to the known characters and the prehistory. There is vast amounts of unknown territory in the future of the timeline.
Here's what I want to see: A Star Trek story set a century or two ahead of any of the current series. Have the Federation face a huge crisis in which its very existence is threatened, but have that crisis focus around the characters. In other words, don't just make it some made-up techno-quantum-subspace-whatever anomaly.
My vote: A civil war.
Nothing is more disruptive and terrible to a nation than to have it torn apart from within by civil unrest. The reason the American civil war was so hard on the nation was that you literally had families fighting on both sides of the war. This could be played up in a Federation civil war. Or starship captains that were in the same academy class or served together now having to choose opposite sides.
Naturally, this would fly in the face of Roddenberry's ideals of a humanity that had buried its difference and learned to work together. My reaction to this is, so what? It's time for Star Trek to grow up and grow beyond the boundaries set down by Roddenberry. We can't let his ghost rule over the future of the franchise forever.
Remember, these predictions are based on the theory that the earth is warming at an alarming rate and that the Earth is hotter than it ever was.
No, it isn't. You're reading that into it. No one in the right mind who knows something about past Earth climate history claims that the Earth is hotter now than it ever was. It is the first part of this statement, that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate, that is the concern.
For example, some millions of years in the past, Earth's average temperature was an astounding 10 degrees celsius higher than today. Nearly the entire land surface of the planet was rain forest. But the buildup to this apparent temperature extreme occurred over millions of years, giving life a chance to adapt.
What we are possibly seeing now is an increase in temperature on a much shorter timespan, which does not give life a chance to adapt. It is this which is the danger. Whatever temperature we manage to drive the Earth to, it will likely fall short of this past maximum, but it will be on such a short scale that it will wreak havoc with the ecology. You're not going to see rain forests popping up everywhere by a long shot.
Here's the scary thing: the longer you go without watching, the more all the shows REALLY SUCK when you try to start again.
Man, you said it. I don't even get as far as turning the TV on anymore. Just the ads on the radio for these shows make me want to puke.
For me, it was getting married that did it. I used to be a huge TV watcher, but then I met a woman who was just the opposite. The euphoria of love + marriage cushioned the withdrawal nicely, though I made one exception. No way was I giving up Babylon 5. Hell, I got HER hooked on it, and she agrees with me to this day that it was probably the last intelligent thing put on TV since.
I really hope this push to get cable companies to offer a la carte programming goes through. I'd take only VH1 Classic (for my 80's music buff wife) and History Channel (for me).
I think that the public needs to be more educated about the alternatives to the monopoly which controls the machines all around us, as well as about the monopoly itself and the harm that it does. [emphasis mine]
With a company like Microsoft, this is going to be rather difficult. Here's an angle that perhaps has not been considered: We as techies know that MS is still using potentially illegal tactics to maintain its monopoly (remember, under US law, having a monopoly is not illegal, but using illicit means to maintain it is illegal), but the end user does not see this because the tactics used are "kindler and gentler" than ones used by monopolists in the past.
Take the case of the breakup of Standard Oil, still one of the most successful cases of anti-trust litigation ever. The case against the company was a no-brainer. Standard Oil was actually using hired goons to literally beat up their competitors. This was something that could be used to raise the ire of the consumers. This is a lot harder with today's back-office tactics. Witness how the shenanigans at Enron did not surface until the company was near collapse, or how SCO's actions barely register with the average computer user.
This is one of the reasons why the case against IBM foundered (we often forget that the current Linux darling IBM was itself once in the DOJ's crosshairs), and why the case against MS resulted in a slap on the wrist. There was little or no public outcry for a harsh reckoning with the company. Compare this to the successful breakup of AT&T. Here the public could be rallied around the cause, since everyone is always willing to complain about their phone bills.
We should stop trying to tell Joe User about the evils of monopoly, because it will fall on deaf ears. The only way to get people to turn from MS is with a better product and a way of delivering it to the masses.
In these days of identity theft I asked him questions to verify his legitimacy. He began to yell at me.
If this happens to you again, stop the call right there. Most states have laws that regulate the conduct of collection agencies, and these laws tend to label what happened to you as harassment that can lead to criminal charges against the collection agency.
From what I have observed (and from one personal experience in fending off a collection agency bastard that had a case of mistaken identity), if you stand up to them and inform them they are likely breaking the law, they invariably back down. They will still pursue the actual collection, but generally will stop the harassment. They count on people they go after not knowing their legal rights.
If this happens again, contact your state government and see if you can find out what laws are on the books about collection agencies and use them to your advantage.
About the Java Desktop rollout: I can't speak for those in large Sun offices like Broomfield, CO and Burlington, MA; they may be running it already,...
As a Sun employee that DOES work in Broomfield, I can wholeheartedly confirm we've been using this for some time. Moreover, I work in a particular building on the campus that has its own Sunray network. We're mandated to use this special network, which contains just about everything on the bleeding edge that Sun has to offer, including the next unreleased version of Solaris and StarOffice, so we get to deal with the problems before the customers do.
So just to add emphasis to your statement, is Sun "eating its own dog food"? Damn right it is.
While building from source can be fun, and necessary sometimes, I don't think it makes sense. You spend far too much time tweaking minor issues, and lose sight of major problems.
I tend to agree, but I have found one case on Redhat where RPMs give me nothing but trouble: Perl.
I have always had problems with Perl when I go to install a new module from CPAN if Perl was installed with an RPM file or came with the system (i.e. installed when the system was installed). Perl itself works great, but some CPAN packages barf when I try to compile them. Tk is the worst offender. I have yet to get it to compile cleanly using an RPM'ed Perl. Some modules are very sensitive to the exact configuration under which Perl itself was compiled, and more likely than not the Perl RPM was created on a system different enough from mine to cause problems.
The same thing happened to me just a month ago when I got a brand new machine with RH9 preinstalled. Tk would not build properly with the preloaded Perl, so I downloaded and compiled my own from scratch and it worked perfectly after that.
...why in earth would NASA want to cover up such a thing?
Mod this up, for crying out loud.
This hits the nail on the head. We have all this talk from the conspiracist nuts claiming that all this evidence of civilizations and life on Mars is being covered up without really giving us any coherent idea as to why.
If NASA sent up a probe and really DID find ruins of a past civilization, there would be no way it could be suppressed. There is no way they would want to suppress it. Hell, a discovery like that might lead to NASA's budget being tripled due to public interest in the matter. There would be a mad scramble to find a way -- ANY way -- to get a real live human being up there to explore it, or at least to send up a probe that could actually take something back to Earth.
So what reason would the government/NASA have to cover it up? If anything, the US government would love for such a discovery to happen. It would divert the people's attention from things the current administration would like us to forget, such as Iraq and dubya's invisible WMDs and our so-called "jobless recovery."
Wanna know what will REALLY give the conspiracy theorists, New Age freaks, etc? "Sedna" is "Andes" spelled backwards! Everyone knows the advanced Inca civilization lived in the Andes mountains, and there are more than enough wacky theories about the Incas involving aliens and whatnot. Oooh...why is an Inuit god named after backwards-Andes...are the Inuits actually Inca refugees? They're close the Pole, too, and there are already crazy theories about a hole to the interior of the earth where advanced civilizations live, and the Eskimos are somehow related....
Great, you just went and gave Erich Von Daaniken the plot of his next book.
Slashdot Mirror
You Know You're Using POVray Too Much When ...
... You can recognize the picture that will be generated simply by reading the source code.
Er ... how many admins do you know are stupid enough to allow a directory in the ftp upload area to be treated as a cgi-bin by the webserver? In that case, you could do a lot of damage without the need for this kernel exploit.
For great justice!
I don't think this is pedantic at all. I think it is an excellent point, and I would like to expand on it by asking this question: What do we do with kiddie porn when no children are abused to make it?
Here's what I mean: I recently watched a few all-computer generated movies with my wife (Shrek, Finding Nemo, to name a few). In the bonus material on these, there were making-of documentaries. In nearly every one of them, they stated that their initial animation was too photo-realistic. They actually had to purposely scale it back to make it look generated.
Now, granted, at the moment, only big studios like Pixar that have gobs of money can pull off something this good. But this is not always going to be the case. Hell, it's already started; a lot of the studios use Linux, which is effectively free. So what happens in the future when kiddie porn is all computer-generated and not one real-world child is abused? Now what do we do? The rallying cry against child porn is that the children need to be protected. Fair enough, and I agree with this. But what happens after real, physical children are no longer needed to produce the material? Do we keep censoring kiddie porn on moral grounds?
No, you're not, you're just changing how the demand is met. All you need is to look at the history of prohibition in the US to see a shining example of that. The only way prohibition would have worked is by making people not want to drink.
There is a subtle difference here, however, and its a matter of economics.
Putting together and mass-publishing a magazine is not easy or cheap. It takes a good deal of money to do it. So your average Joe Citizen is not going to be doing it anytime soon, no matter how passionate he may be about his opinions. But the internet is a different story. Anyone can post a website very cheaply. The web gives an outlet to Joe Citizen to express his views. Because this medium is so easy to use and helps promote such freedom, it needs to be treated more gently than print media.
Also, consider this: Say someone were to put together a child porn magazine and actually get some stores to carry it. When the police find out, they will indeed remove the magazines from the store, but they will also shut down the publisher.. The court order would likely be granted the same day. This is NOT happening with the kiddie porn websites. Instead they're choosing to just do a mass censorship of all of them and sort it all out later. But there won't be a later. Politicos will simply pat themselves on the back for "removing" this evil from the net, and because of most people's "out of sight, out of mind" mentality, they'll reward them with votes. Meanwhile, the child porn sites set up shop elsewhere and the cycle of abuse continues.
I'll bet that there were children among the casualties when allied forces liberated France during 1944/1945. Guess we should have called off D-Day. Rather lose some rights than let any children get hurt.
Ironic that this topic should come up on the 60th anniversary of D-Day. I would say that this move by BT makes an absolute mockery of the memory of that day.
This isn't a troll, but seriously THINK about what powers we as citizens have (of whatever country you reside in). You CAN make a difference if you try hard enough. Martin Luther King never was what he became without hard work, dillegence and direction.You just proved my point. The citizens can indeed make a difference, but that needs to come about by getting at the source of the problem, which is the people supplying kiddie porn and the ones that demand it. As I said in another post, censoring is a band-aid. It doesn't get at the real problem.
And I don't like the NRA. Should I demand my ISP block those sites too? And I believe in a woman's right to choose, so maybe I should demand my ISP block anti-abortion sites? I don't like the republican party. Should I demand that the ISP block their sites?
Anyone who now responds with "but that's not the same thing!" is missing the point. Blocking something that most people (myself included) is a universal evil sounds like a good idea, but it sets a dangerous precedent. It can be twisted around to allow someone to start blocking sites that have unfavorable political views by associating them with child porn in some way. Do this enough times, and eventually they'll stop even trying to make the association since censorship will become a fact of life.
Freedom of speech means NOTHING if it is not open for all. Freedom for all, or freedom for none.
Also, consider this: Child porn would not be around if there was not a demand for it. Perhaps the problem should be addressed there, rather than accepting this band-aid solution.
I tend to agree. What pisses me off about LinuxToday has nothing to do with the content of the ads; I could care less that there are MS ads there. It's the fact that LinuxToday has a preponderance of flashplayer ads. I loathe flashplayer because I have a great deal of trouble reading when something is moving or flickering at the edge of my vision. I often have to right-click on these things in hopes of actually getting a menu where the play button 1) is actually there and 2) actually works. I'd rip out flashplayer from Mozilla if I didn't share the machine with my wife. I'm very tempted to install a second copy of mozilla without flashplayer just for me.
I don't get your point here. Why do you consider the act of asking to be dangerous? The community doesn't have to do shit if it doesn't want to. For instance, I can ask that people boycott the auto industry for not doing more to build cleaner cars, but I sincerely doubt I'll get many takers.
So who cares how many people ask for boycotts? Everyone is going to decide for themselves whether to participate or not. Refraining from asking just because it might "polarize" people is ridiculous.
That sounds similar to the studies that say that cockroaches would be among the sole survivors of a nuclear war. This would imply that the RIAA and cockroaches share something in common.
It is possible that if they had decided to stick to selling an actual product, they may still have been beaten down and would still be considered a dying company, if for no other reason than the competition in the marketplace is fierce.
But if the company did fold, at least one could say that they did it "honestly". Instead, they now have to face the possibility of going down in flames because of monumentally stupid and potentially illegal actions, thus gaining infamy for themselves in the annals of business, in effect becoming for the IT industry what Enron became for the power industry.
Sigh. And this gets modded +4 interesting. Way to go, mods.
Take off your tin-foil hat. No war is going to result from oil being displaced as an energy source, and there are two main reasons for this.
The first reason is that having less a dependency on oil will mean that nations like the US won't have to give a shit about the unrest in the Middle East. Reducing the need for oil for power generation means the world could do without the Middle East oil. Oil from non-Middle East countries would suffice, obviating the need to be directly involved in Middle Eastern affairs. This would remove a huge thorn in the side of US foreign policy, for example.
The second reason is that we will still need a fair amount of petroleum products for the forseeable future. The reason? Plastics. Petroleum products are used in the production of many forms of plastic, and the industrial world uses a hell of a lot of plastic.
At least you didn't mention the auto industry, or perhaps that was an oversight. Auto manufacturers are already investing in alternate energy sources for cars, so this would simply continue the trend.
This in itself would not have been bad had someone been able to accurately reproduce their experiments. However, because these bozos circumvented the process, they added a massive giggle factor to cold fusion. In addition, I maintain that the audacity of their claims immediately biased many of the physicists attempting to reproduce the experiment. They were looking for something to debunk and thus may have accidentally ignored results that, while certainly not conclusive, would have at least suggested that the subject merited some further review. Instead, scientists could not get the exact end result and branded it a hoax.
So when I read the article and discovered that many of the materials and methods being used now are very similar to what P&F used, I am not very surprised. Even if scientists manage to declare their theory completely sound, I will still not hold P&F in any regard because their antics set back the whole cold fusion research field by years.
Yes and no.
Yes, there's nothing more to be done with it, but only with regards to the known characters and the prehistory. There is vast amounts of unknown territory in the future of the timeline.
Here's what I want to see: A Star Trek story set a century or two ahead of any of the current series. Have the Federation face a huge crisis in which its very existence is threatened, but have that crisis focus around the characters. In other words, don't just make it some made-up techno-quantum-subspace-whatever anomaly.
My vote: A civil war.
Nothing is more disruptive and terrible to a nation than to have it torn apart from within by civil unrest. The reason the American civil war was so hard on the nation was that you literally had families fighting on both sides of the war. This could be played up in a Federation civil war. Or starship captains that were in the same academy class or served together now having to choose opposite sides.
Naturally, this would fly in the face of Roddenberry's ideals of a humanity that had buried its difference and learned to work together. My reaction to this is, so what? It's time for Star Trek to grow up and grow beyond the boundaries set down by Roddenberry. We can't let his ghost rule over the future of the franchise forever.
No, it isn't. You're reading that into it. No one in the right mind who knows something about past Earth climate history claims that the Earth is hotter now than it ever was. It is the first part of this statement, that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate, that is the concern.
For example, some millions of years in the past, Earth's average temperature was an astounding 10 degrees celsius higher than today. Nearly the entire land surface of the planet was rain forest. But the buildup to this apparent temperature extreme occurred over millions of years, giving life a chance to adapt.
What we are possibly seeing now is an increase in temperature on a much shorter timespan, which does not give life a chance to adapt. It is this which is the danger. Whatever temperature we manage to drive the Earth to, it will likely fall short of this past maximum, but it will be on such a short scale that it will wreak havoc with the ecology. You're not going to see rain forests popping up everywhere by a long shot.
Man, you said it. I don't even get as far as turning the TV on anymore. Just the ads on the radio for these shows make me want to puke.
For me, it was getting married that did it. I used to be a huge TV watcher, but then I met a woman who was just the opposite. The euphoria of love + marriage cushioned the withdrawal nicely, though I made one exception. No way was I giving up Babylon 5. Hell, I got HER hooked on it, and she agrees with me to this day that it was probably the last intelligent thing put on TV since.
I really hope this push to get cable companies to offer a la carte programming goes through. I'd take only VH1 Classic (for my 80's music buff wife) and History Channel (for me).
With a company like Microsoft, this is going to be rather difficult. Here's an angle that perhaps has not been considered: We as techies know that MS is still using potentially illegal tactics to maintain its monopoly (remember, under US law, having a monopoly is not illegal, but using illicit means to maintain it is illegal), but the end user does not see this because the tactics used are "kindler and gentler" than ones used by monopolists in the past.
Take the case of the breakup of Standard Oil, still one of the most successful cases of anti-trust litigation ever. The case against the company was a no-brainer. Standard Oil was actually using hired goons to literally beat up their competitors. This was something that could be used to raise the ire of the consumers. This is a lot harder with today's back-office tactics. Witness how the shenanigans at Enron did not surface until the company was near collapse, or how SCO's actions barely register with the average computer user.
This is one of the reasons why the case against IBM foundered (we often forget that the current Linux darling IBM was itself once in the DOJ's crosshairs), and why the case against MS resulted in a slap on the wrist. There was little or no public outcry for a harsh reckoning with the company. Compare this to the successful breakup of AT&T. Here the public could be rallied around the cause, since everyone is always willing to complain about their phone bills.
We should stop trying to tell Joe User about the evils of monopoly, because it will fall on deaf ears. The only way to get people to turn from MS is with a better product and a way of delivering it to the masses.
If this happens to you again, stop the call right there. Most states have laws that regulate the conduct of collection agencies, and these laws tend to label what happened to you as harassment that can lead to criminal charges against the collection agency.
From what I have observed (and from one personal experience in fending off a collection agency bastard that had a case of mistaken identity), if you stand up to them and inform them they are likely breaking the law, they invariably back down. They will still pursue the actual collection, but generally will stop the harassment. They count on people they go after not knowing their legal rights.
If this happens again, contact your state government and see if you can find out what laws are on the books about collection agencies and use them to your advantage.
As a Sun employee that DOES work in Broomfield, I can wholeheartedly confirm we've been using this for some time. Moreover, I work in a particular building on the campus that has its own Sunray network. We're mandated to use this special network, which contains just about everything on the bleeding edge that Sun has to offer, including the next unreleased version of Solaris and StarOffice, so we get to deal with the problems before the customers do.
So just to add emphasis to your statement, is Sun "eating its own dog food"? Damn right it is.
I tend to agree, but I have found one case on Redhat where RPMs give me nothing but trouble: Perl.
I have always had problems with Perl when I go to install a new module from CPAN if Perl was installed with an RPM file or came with the system (i.e. installed when the system was installed). Perl itself works great, but some CPAN packages barf when I try to compile them. Tk is the worst offender. I have yet to get it to compile cleanly using an RPM'ed Perl. Some modules are very sensitive to the exact configuration under which Perl itself was compiled, and more likely than not the Perl RPM was created on a system different enough from mine to cause problems.
The same thing happened to me just a month ago when I got a brand new machine with RH9 preinstalled. Tk would not build properly with the preloaded Perl, so I downloaded and compiled my own from scratch and it worked perfectly after that.
Because it would be like fighing a duel with an unarmed man?
Mod this up, for crying out loud.
This hits the nail on the head. We have all this talk from the conspiracist nuts claiming that all this evidence of civilizations and life on Mars is being covered up without really giving us any coherent idea as to why.
If NASA sent up a probe and really DID find ruins of a past civilization, there would be no way it could be suppressed. There is no way they would want to suppress it. Hell, a discovery like that might lead to NASA's budget being tripled due to public interest in the matter. There would be a mad scramble to find a way -- ANY way -- to get a real live human being up there to explore it, or at least to send up a probe that could actually take something back to Earth.
So what reason would the government/NASA have to cover it up? If anything, the US government would love for such a discovery to happen. It would divert the people's attention from things the current administration would like us to forget, such as Iraq and dubya's invisible WMDs and our so-called "jobless recovery."
Jupiter: More beans, Mr. Saturn?
Saturn (waving its rings in Jupiter's direction): I'd say you had enough!
Great, you just went and gave Erich Von Daaniken the plot of his next book.