Keep in mind that disconnected phone lines usually still work with 911. That is assuming that you still have a phone on the line, and it is actually wired to the phone company.
For this reason it is often a good idea to plug a phone into a landline even if you don't pay for service.
The same applies to cell phones - usually phones without service can still dial 911, so feel free to give an old phone to your aunt who is afraid of breaking down but doesn't own one.
Seems to me like a use of the courts as a tool that they were not intended. What sort of remediation can the site owners take on the DOJ?
Intended by who? Somehow I suspect this was exactly what was intended by these kinds of seizure rules.
Winning court cases is hard. So, the solution has been to turn the process of justice into its own form of punishment. If you don't like somebody you accuse them of a crime, and seize half their possessions as evidence. Then you hold onto them for years, or drag them through a long and very expensive process. By the time it is over the person has lost their job, family, home, and is in a mountain of debt. At that point, does it really matter what the verdict is?
And seizure is often even worse - in many cases there may not even be an opportunity to mount a defense. The property is sezied, and the owner need not even be charged with a crime.
Well, imagine if you're some Army general and you just paid somebody $200M to come up with some nifty encryption system. Would you want to publish it so that the Enemy could use it for free?
Uh, keep in mind that the only reasons most Linux distros or Linux itself exists are the collective whims of its developers. People do things that are fun. Linux is the result. The guy building your DE doesn't care if you like it - he cares if he likes it, or maybe if those he respects like it.
Actually, the esoteric bit about moving files between machines raises a much more fundamental issue with Linux. Suppose I have 10 computers on a hostile network, and I'd like to share/usr or/home between them, but I don't trust all of those computers fully. How do I do this?
It seems like options include: 1. NFS - which has all kinds of security issues with it. 2. SMB - which is secure, but not POSIX, which means all kinds of issues if you try to use it for/usr, though you might get away with it for/home. 3. OpenAFS - which seems abandoned and seems like it requires a PhD to set up. 4. Maybe sshfs - no idea if that would even work and it is a bit of a hack.
On windows you can just use SMB, and can set up account credentials/etc so that you don't have to trust all the individual computers to do this. Seems like file sharing is one of the simplest things to do on most OSes, but on Linux it is a real pain, and I think this is largely due to NFS which is "good enough" that nobody bothers to improve things.
what do you imagine would happen if you took some component - say... a gnome "clock" widget that plugs into the taskbar - and by that i mean you took the *binary* not the source code - from Gnome 1.0 (whenever it was written - when was it - 15 years ago, now?) and tried to use it in Gnome 3.0?
The same thing that would happen if I took clock.exe from windows 1.1 and tried to run it in windows 7.
I suspect you're basically making his point - did COM exist in Windows 1.1? I wouldn't be surprised if clock.exe from windows 3 did actually work in win7, and one from win95 would be even more likely to do so. If his point is that some Windows IPC feature was key to its success, then pointing out that Windows wasn't as nifty before that feature was added is just making his point.
Not so much arrogance as self-interest. People work on FOSS because they want to - few are paid to do it. Many who are paid to do it work for distros that want to differentiate themselves, which means doing something different anyway.
So, suppose you're some guy working on a desktop environment. What would you rather put on your resume - that you fixed a few bugs in a product somebody else invented, or that you invented some new shiny product of your own?
Stuff like this happens at work all the time - whatever is the next big thing gets lots of attention, and then everything else rots until it becomes a crisis that can be treated as high-priority again.
I suspect that is mainly due to having such a small install base. The OS might be secure, but many exploits are in applications (Flash, Acrobat, Office, etc). Linux is just as vulnerable to this as Windows is - if my office application has a buffer overflow, then it can execute code in my document even if it is just a notepad clone. There is no reason to expect OSX to be any better in this regard. I don't think even iOS prevents all application security vulnerabilities, but if an app does have one at least they can push out an update, since it essentially is a package manager.
And that is the lack of a package manager problem on Windows. The issue isn't that people can run executables, the problem is that it isn't possible to tell if software is out of date unless every application bundles its own auto-update service as well (and yes, I love having all of those sucking up RAM).
The problem with the distros is the problem with the upstream project - people want to do new and exciting things, not boring ones. If you're going to maintain a package, are you going to want to maintain the old crusty one that is going to be abandoned, or are you going to maintain the new fancy one? The distros abandoned KDE3.5 for the same reason that upstream did - it wasn't cool. That's why in a year or so you won't be able to run Gnome without SystemD, and with that big of a change good luck running it on something like Ubuntu.
KDE is probably the least offensive mainly because they did the tick-everybody-off thing about 4-5 years ago and they're finally back into stable operation again. I abandoned KDE 3.5 for Xfce since KDE 4 wouldn't even be functional on my computer. Now I can run KDE 4 minus nepomuk and it works reasonably well (well, for not having kdepim, which requires it).
Well, apt-get doesn't break only because it either installs compatibility libraries for everything, or reinstalls every package on the system that links to the OS-supplied libraries (like glibc).
MacPorts works fine in the same sense, that you can reinstall everything and have it work.
Gentoo Prefix would be another alternative, and it of course has the same issue. I can't speak for MacPorts, but Gentoo at least has tools for doing all that rebuilding (since Gentoo users do it all the time).
Ok, but back to my original point - I want to install software on my phone, and I don't want to pay somebody to do it. I don't want somebody else to have to pay for me to do it either.
Charging a fee to put stuff in the app store seems reasonable. Making that the only way to get software onto the phone isn't.
Seems like a bit of a degenerate case to me. The two stars orbit each other each 7.5 days. I wouldn't be surprised if their atmospheres practically overlapped with that kind of distance. The planets essentially would be orbiting the center of mass of the two stars as a result. I wonder if they'd eventually merge, and what would happen then.
I think that this situation is likely to be a lot more stable than having another star orbiting further out than the planets.
The issue is that the stuff they copied wasn't anything that ought to be legally protected in the first place - like rounded corners and slide to unlock. If they stuck an apple logo on the thing I'd be fine with trademark laws applying. However, this really isn't a place to be applying patent law.
So, the verdict was wrong, and if the verdict was supported by the law, then both the law and the verdict are wrong. If you happen to agree with the verdict and the law, then you're wrong. And if 95% of the population of the US agrees with you, then they're wrong. Right and wrong have nothing to do with what is legal, what a jury finds, or what is popular.
How do they know if it is in airplane mode, or that the airplane mode works? The device could be malfunctioning and transmitting a signal.
Granted, it might do that even if turned off, but the risk would likely be lower.
In any case, it makes more sense to design the planes to handle anything short of a jammer inside rather than try to control the behavior of hundreds of people. If it really were unsafe for somebody to leave a phone turned on in their purse then we'd have planes falling out of the sky left and right.
Sorry - I will amend my last statement a little. There is another area where market cap does tend to matter - if somebody else wanted to buy Apple they'd have to find some way to give out more than $600B to its current stockholders if they want them to be likely to approve the deal.
Even that tends to be a bit murky though. If somebody were to buy Apple they could use Apple's own assets and stock value as part of the deal or as collateral for financing. This is like buying a house - you don't need $200k in cash to buy a $200k house - a house purchase could in an extreme case be nothing more than a deal where one person sells the house, but all the money goes to the bank, and the buyer gets the money to buy it from the same bank, so in the end it is nothing more than changing the name on the mortgage and paying a ton of fees.
So, market caps are even of limited value in looking at acquisitions. Usually what you need to do a hostile takeover is to convince the shareholders that one way or another they'll get more money with you in charge than with the current manager. That might involve up-front payment for their shares (if you can give somebody $120 today for stock that they just bought for $100 they'll be happy), or a compelling promise for more later. Neither is likely to happen to Apple right now.
So? Market cap is worthless unless you plan to sell stock, or trade it for something else. Oh, and if you want to do either what matters is what the person you're giving the stock to values it at, not what the current stockholders value it at. Usually they're related, but if you're talking about a lot of stock that breaks down fast.
So, Apple is worth more in market cap than 5 of its competitors. What's it going to do, issue a ton more stock and buy out its competitors? Gee, getting a 20% premium on their stock price will sure make its competitors upset... And issuing that much stock is likely to affect the market cap anyway.
The only thing that the market cap really directly relates to is the ability to do stock deals to buy much smaller companies, not ones that are worth tens of billions of dollars or more. And Apple would probably just pay cash for a small company anyway. That's why many really question the value of the market cap number is - it doesn't really translate into some real reserve of money the company can use.
Citation needed. Because last I heard, getting treated for cancer costs a lot of money.
I didn't say that it didn't cost a lot of money, only that this is considered a crime against humanity. Try asking your next door neighbor about how he'd feel about a company that offered a cure for cancer for $50k, and refused to give it to anybody who didn't pay for it.
And right now there isn't a cure for cancer. There are various treatments, and for the most part only the hospitals make a lot of money on them, not the people who discovered them. They probably made a lot of money back in the day, but that was before making money off of medial advances fell out of favor.
I've started worrying less about the cost of my endeavors and more about the time commitment. I can always make more money, but damnit I've only got another 20 great years left
Ah, first world problems. Most of the people alive today, and probably a majority of those living in the US, aren't sure whether they'll be able to afford their next rent payment.
The key to true morality isn't "what would Jesus do", but "what makes sense and actually works to produce favorable outcomes".
Favorable outcomes? I'd say that our society is already pretty good at coming up with favorable outcomes. They're just favorable for the ones in charge.
The problem with all this "scientists are the solution" stuff is that science is just a methodology for figuring out whether some principle grounded in the real world is true or not (and it is limited to only that which is testable).
Science can teach us nothing about values. Oh, it can be used to determine whether one course of action or another is likely to result in more people living or dying or whatever, but it can't speak to whether more people living or dying is a good or a bad thing. To do true science you might even have to have a few people die to answer that question.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that disconnected phone lines usually still work with 911. That is assuming that you still have a phone on the line, and it is actually wired to the phone company.
For this reason it is often a good idea to plug a phone into a landline even if you don't pay for service.
The same applies to cell phones - usually phones without service can still dial 911, so feel free to give an old phone to your aunt who is afraid of breaking down but doesn't own one.
Seems to me like a use of the courts as a tool that they were not intended. What sort of remediation can the site owners take on the DOJ?
Intended by who? Somehow I suspect this was exactly what was intended by these kinds of seizure rules.
Winning court cases is hard. So, the solution has been to turn the process of justice into its own form of punishment. If you don't like somebody you accuse them of a crime, and seize half their possessions as evidence. Then you hold onto them for years, or drag them through a long and very expensive process. By the time it is over the person has lost their job, family, home, and is in a mountain of debt. At that point, does it really matter what the verdict is?
And seizure is often even worse - in many cases there may not even be an opportunity to mount a defense. The property is sezied, and the owner need not even be charged with a crime.
Well, imagine if you're some Army general and you just paid somebody $200M to come up with some nifty encryption system. Would you want to publish it so that the Enemy could use it for free?
Uh, keep in mind that the only reasons most Linux distros or Linux itself exists are the collective whims of its developers. People do things that are fun. Linux is the result. The guy building your DE doesn't care if you like it - he cares if he likes it, or maybe if those he respects like it.
Actually, the esoteric bit about moving files between machines raises a much more fundamental issue with Linux. Suppose I have 10 computers on a hostile network, and I'd like to share /usr or /home between them, but I don't trust all of those computers fully. How do I do this?
It seems like options include: /usr, though you might get away with it for /home.
1. NFS - which has all kinds of security issues with it.
2. SMB - which is secure, but not POSIX, which means all kinds of issues if you try to use it for
3. OpenAFS - which seems abandoned and seems like it requires a PhD to set up.
4. Maybe sshfs - no idea if that would even work and it is a bit of a hack.
On windows you can just use SMB, and can set up account credentials/etc so that you don't have to trust all the individual computers to do this. Seems like file sharing is one of the simplest things to do on most OSes, but on Linux it is a real pain, and I think this is largely due to NFS which is "good enough" that nobody bothers to improve things.
The same thing that would happen if I took clock.exe from windows 1.1 and tried to run it in windows 7.
I suspect you're basically making his point - did COM exist in Windows 1.1? I wouldn't be surprised if clock.exe from windows 3 did actually work in win7, and one from win95 would be even more likely to do so. If his point is that some Windows IPC feature was key to its success, then pointing out that Windows wasn't as nifty before that feature was added is just making his point.
Uh, for that workload why even run X11? I guess it might be helpful for the paste buffer...
Screen or tmux are essentially your window managers. :)
Not so much arrogance as self-interest. People work on FOSS because they want to - few are paid to do it. Many who are paid to do it work for distros that want to differentiate themselves, which means doing something different anyway.
So, suppose you're some guy working on a desktop environment. What would you rather put on your resume - that you fixed a few bugs in a product somebody else invented, or that you invented some new shiny product of your own?
Stuff like this happens at work all the time - whatever is the next big thing gets lots of attention, and then everything else rots until it becomes a crisis that can be treated as high-priority again.
I suspect that is mainly due to having such a small install base. The OS might be secure, but many exploits are in applications (Flash, Acrobat, Office, etc). Linux is just as vulnerable to this as Windows is - if my office application has a buffer overflow, then it can execute code in my document even if it is just a notepad clone. There is no reason to expect OSX to be any better in this regard. I don't think even iOS prevents all application security vulnerabilities, but if an app does have one at least they can push out an update, since it essentially is a package manager.
And that is the lack of a package manager problem on Windows. The issue isn't that people can run executables, the problem is that it isn't possible to tell if software is out of date unless every application bundles its own auto-update service as well (and yes, I love having all of those sucking up RAM).
The problem with the distros is the problem with the upstream project - people want to do new and exciting things, not boring ones. If you're going to maintain a package, are you going to want to maintain the old crusty one that is going to be abandoned, or are you going to maintain the new fancy one? The distros abandoned KDE3.5 for the same reason that upstream did - it wasn't cool. That's why in a year or so you won't be able to run Gnome without SystemD, and with that big of a change good luck running it on something like Ubuntu.
KDE is probably the least offensive mainly because they did the tick-everybody-off thing about 4-5 years ago and they're finally back into stable operation again. I abandoned KDE 3.5 for Xfce since KDE 4 wouldn't even be functional on my computer. Now I can run KDE 4 minus nepomuk and it works reasonably well (well, for not having kdepim, which requires it).
Well, apt-get doesn't break only because it either installs compatibility libraries for everything, or reinstalls every package on the system that links to the OS-supplied libraries (like glibc).
MacPorts works fine in the same sense, that you can reinstall everything and have it work.
Gentoo Prefix would be another alternative, and it of course has the same issue. I can't speak for MacPorts, but Gentoo at least has tools for doing all that rebuilding (since Gentoo users do it all the time).
Ok, but back to my original point - I want to install software on my phone, and I don't want to pay somebody to do it. I don't want somebody else to have to pay for me to do it either.
Charging a fee to put stuff in the app store seems reasonable. Making that the only way to get software onto the phone isn't.
Seems like a bit of a degenerate case to me. The two stars orbit each other each 7.5 days. I wouldn't be surprised if their atmospheres practically overlapped with that kind of distance. The planets essentially would be orbiting the center of mass of the two stars as a result. I wonder if they'd eventually merge, and what would happen then.
I think that this situation is likely to be a lot more stable than having another star orbiting further out than the planets.
The issue is that the stuff they copied wasn't anything that ought to be legally protected in the first place - like rounded corners and slide to unlock. If they stuck an apple logo on the thing I'd be fine with trademark laws applying. However, this really isn't a place to be applying patent law.
So, the verdict was wrong, and if the verdict was supported by the law, then both the law and the verdict are wrong. If you happen to agree with the verdict and the law, then you're wrong. And if 95% of the population of the US agrees with you, then they're wrong. Right and wrong have nothing to do with what is legal, what a jury finds, or what is popular.
Uh, both of those websites have fees prominently listed at the top, so how are these ways to not pay Apple anything?
How do they know if it is in airplane mode, or that the airplane mode works? The device could be malfunctioning and transmitting a signal.
Granted, it might do that even if turned off, but the risk would likely be lower.
In any case, it makes more sense to design the planes to handle anything short of a jammer inside rather than try to control the behavior of hundreds of people. If it really were unsafe for somebody to leave a phone turned on in their purse then we'd have planes falling out of the sky left and right.
Sorry - I will amend my last statement a little. There is another area where market cap does tend to matter - if somebody else wanted to buy Apple they'd have to find some way to give out more than $600B to its current stockholders if they want them to be likely to approve the deal.
Even that tends to be a bit murky though. If somebody were to buy Apple they could use Apple's own assets and stock value as part of the deal or as collateral for financing. This is like buying a house - you don't need $200k in cash to buy a $200k house - a house purchase could in an extreme case be nothing more than a deal where one person sells the house, but all the money goes to the bank, and the buyer gets the money to buy it from the same bank, so in the end it is nothing more than changing the name on the mortgage and paying a ton of fees.
So, market caps are even of limited value in looking at acquisitions. Usually what you need to do a hostile takeover is to convince the shareholders that one way or another they'll get more money with you in charge than with the current manager. That might involve up-front payment for their shares (if you can give somebody $120 today for stock that they just bought for $100 they'll be happy), or a compelling promise for more later. Neither is likely to happen to Apple right now.
So? Market cap is worthless unless you plan to sell stock, or trade it for something else. Oh, and if you want to do either what matters is what the person you're giving the stock to values it at, not what the current stockholders value it at. Usually they're related, but if you're talking about a lot of stock that breaks down fast.
So, Apple is worth more in market cap than 5 of its competitors. What's it going to do, issue a ton more stock and buy out its competitors? Gee, getting a 20% premium on their stock price will sure make its competitors upset... And issuing that much stock is likely to affect the market cap anyway.
The only thing that the market cap really directly relates to is the ability to do stock deals to buy much smaller companies, not ones that are worth tens of billions of dollars or more. And Apple would probably just pay cash for a small company anyway. That's why many really question the value of the market cap number is - it doesn't really translate into some real reserve of money the company can use.
Uh, how do you configure an iPhone to use somebody other than Apple as a signing authority, without exploiting some security hole in the OS?
That does, actually. I mean, Samsung's been found guilty by a jury in a court of law.
So, what does the finding of a jury have to do with is right? Juries send innocent people to jail every day.
The legal system is a process. It doesn't create "justice" or "right," it is optimized mainly to generate predictability.
Citation needed. Because last I heard, getting treated for cancer costs a lot of money.
I didn't say that it didn't cost a lot of money, only that this is considered a crime against humanity. Try asking your next door neighbor about how he'd feel about a company that offered a cure for cancer for $50k, and refused to give it to anybody who didn't pay for it.
And right now there isn't a cure for cancer. There are various treatments, and for the most part only the hospitals make a lot of money on them, not the people who discovered them. They probably made a lot of money back in the day, but that was before making money off of medial advances fell out of favor.
I've started worrying less about the cost of my endeavors and more about the time commitment. I can always make more money, but damnit I've only got another 20 great years left
Ah, first world problems. Most of the people alive today, and probably a majority of those living in the US, aren't sure whether they'll be able to afford their next rent payment.
The key to true morality isn't "what would Jesus do", but "what makes sense and actually works to produce favorable outcomes".
Favorable outcomes? I'd say that our society is already pretty good at coming up with favorable outcomes. They're just favorable for the ones in charge.
The problem with all this "scientists are the solution" stuff is that science is just a methodology for figuring out whether some principle grounded in the real world is true or not (and it is limited to only that which is testable).
Science can teach us nothing about values. Oh, it can be used to determine whether one course of action or another is likely to result in more people living or dying or whatever, but it can't speak to whether more people living or dying is a good or a bad thing. To do true science you might even have to have a few people die to answer that question.