when there was a lady in the last election that was able to vote once for herself and once foe each of her four pets?
Also, votes have been tallied electronically for some time. The only difference is that you don't fill out a paper ballot, your votes are recorded by touching a screen. When you fill out a paper ballot, the computer counts it electronically and the ballot is thrown into a box. With touch-screen voting you don't have the paper ballots to verify the results. That doesn't makes me worry though seeing how many extra votes mysteriously materialized for Al Gore in Florida when the ballots were counted by hand.
I think electronic voting would be fine, just assign a random number to each ballot that is linked internally with the voter but is never seen outside. Print them off a little ticket after they verify and submit their votes with their unique vote number on it. Then let anyone check all votes on the web given their number. They couldn't be linked back to an individual person without the secret list so anyone could see each and every vote in each precinct without worrying too much about privacy. If you know which number is yours, you can verify your vote online to make sure it was counted correctly. That way the counting of the votes could be done by anyone to get the correct totals, and the verification of each individual vote could be done by the person that voted. If each vote had to be matched back to an actual person, that could be done internally, but you shouldn't give out the list of people linked to their votes.
Ah, by moving slowly they mean it will move the entire 6' length of the reactor in 30 years, that makes sense now:) When they said slowly moves, it made it sound like it was constantly in motion.
If the shield moves too fast, the core "burns" more quickly, yielding the same amount of power but reducing the reactor's life
So if it moved too quickly to the bottom, say 6' per second the entire 6', the bottom part of the core would be used up quickly (say a few years?) and the reactor would be done for, but the entire chunk of uranium didn't burn, the top part would be practically unused, right?
That's just the point, these are practically meltdown-proof but they don't make energy as efficiently as a large nuclear plant. In a normal reactor, the production of heat is controlled by inserting and removing uranium rods and the reaction must be cooled by water. If the water leaks out and no one pulls the rods out, you're going to have a meltdown. Here you have a design with a block of uranium that isn't as pure or enriched that just won't melt down. No rods have to be inserted or removed and even if there was no coolant the thing wouldn't melt down.
I don't quite get how the reflector controls the reaction, but it doesn't sound like there would be any problems if it jammed or if it went too quickly.
Yes, I wasted almost an entire summer in elementary school playing Racing Destruction Set on my C64 with my brother and friends, let's hope it has all the options for cars, weapons, gravity, etc.
One thing they're good for is keeping you from getting bad discs if you're burning to CD-R or DVD-R, especially if the data is coming over the IDE bus as well.
Apparently both machines were running Linux and had 512mb ram each, but not much else was the same. Did the hard drives have the same filesystem even? Could one have been more fragmented (i.e. the one the author of the article uses all the time before copying the files to the SCSI test system?)? Before buying any hard drive you should check out benchmarks on it. IDE drives with the same size, cache, and rotational speed can have more than 2x difference in benchmarks.
I'd also like to know what IDE controller was used. I was sorely dissappointed in the performance of the hard drive that came with my Dell computer using the on-board controller. I could really tell it was slow switching applications and booting up. It showed a rather pathetic score of 398 on PCMark 2002. I thought "to hell with that" and bought a new 160gb hard drive that was rated really well on tom's hardware. My score actually dropped to 244. That didn't make any sense. I updated all the drivers I could to no avail. Finally I bought a PCI IDE card at CompUSA for about $40 to try it out. The score jumped to 1216. That's almost up to the 1400 I have at home with my IDE raid setup, and much more than the 800 or so my brother got with his 10,000 rpm SCSI Cheetah drive.
Download the free version of PCMark 2002 and check your own hard drive scores.
Comparing SCSI and IDE on a P166 isn't a fair test nowadays. IDE definitely uses more processor cycles than SCSI, maybe with a P166 it was maxing your CPU. With today's 2+ghz processors though, intese IDE disk usage is not going to ever max your CPU.
Here's the link to a letter stating understandings between IBM and AT&T in regards to the Unix license (on SCO's website no less). Page 2, section 2 clearly states any modifications and derivative works prepared by IBM are owned by IBM, except that the portions that are from Unix System V still belong to AT&T. Clearly then SCO has no right to any technologies developed by IBM.
I also think the end of section 5 is interesting: "In any event our respective representatives will exert their mutual good faith best efforts to resolve any alleged breach short of termination." Good faith would at least be pointing out what parts of Linux SCO thinks is copied so they could be removed. Section 12 states that IBM won't have to reveal their customers for auditing purposes, which SCO was trying to accomplish.
Are the bars going to be displaying a privacy policy saying exactly what information they will be storing, how long records will be kept, and who they're going to give information to? Without having a policy and the willingness to enforce it, they could give your information to anyone and there's nothing you could do about it.
What if they decide to do any of the following?
Sell your information to advertisers - get ready to start recieving lots of beer coupons in the mail
Let's say you decide to run for local office - the newspaper might be interested in how often and what bars you went to. Mabye potential voters would like to know that you frequent gay bars...
Give your information to the police. What if a shooting or a drug deal took place outside a bar you've been to? It doesn't matter if they have any other reason to suspect you or not, they'll probably interview everyone at the bar that night.
I don't know how much of that is true. I'm not a patent lawyer, but I listened to an episode of Science Friday (listen to past episodes in RealAudio or Windows Media Player for free) where they had an hour-long segment on inventions and patents. They said that you have to go get patents in other countries as well.
So at $0.20/watt that would be just $1,400 to save $100 a month over the next 20 years? Doesn't sound bad at all... Even at $3.29 it looks like you would come out about even (12 months, 20 years = 240 months * $100 = $24,000). If you're in an area where you can pump energy back into the grid for a credit, you can forget the batteries (unless you want them just in case the power goes out). Of course that's a big initial investment for a small payoff. If electricity costs increase though, you can think of that as making interest on your investment.
I didn't mean "logically" as in an overall accepted way of viewing things that anyone should understand, but logically as the tariff laws are written. A gaming console is just a specialized computer. By seeing that there is one tariff rate for personal computers and a higher rate for gaming consoles, I would conclude that an exception was made for gaming consoles and that the higher rate should be applied if a product can be classified as a gaming console.
Now looking at the PS2, it's easy to see that it is designed as a gaming console. The primary input method is by a controller that is designed for playing games. It is hard to find a piece of software for the PS2 that is not a game (are there any except for the linux kit?). Looking at the playstation website, it's obvious the PS2 is being marketed as a gaming console ("Live in your world, play in ours").
I'll give you that the PS2 is a computer, but I don't think you could ever convince me that it's not a gaming console. I'd also ask you to agree that all gaming consoles are computers, dating back to the Atari 2600 and before. They all have CPUs, memory, input devices, output ports, and ways to run software. It all depends on the definition of "gaming console" on where you draw the line. I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least a paragraph in the tariff regulations doing just that, but I can't find them. I just know that from all the evidence and my experience, it's a gaming console.
A gaming console is a specialized computer designed for gaming. That's readily apparent by the company's advertising and if you open a PS2 box (there's no keyboard or mouse, just a controller designed for playing games). Go to Best Buy and try to find a word processing application for your PS2. Take a poll of PS2 owners to see what percent have installed the Linux kit or have even heard about it. Sure you can play CDs and DVDs, so why not tax it as a DVD player? The company that produces a product shouldn't have discretion to apply the most favorable tax possible, the product should be classified logically.
Seems like they have a solid case to me. A Trademark is what a company uses to identify itself in the marketplace. Trademark law is around to make sure companies don't adopt similar names if they offer similar products to prevent confusion in the marketplace. I didn't see much of a problem with a computer company calling themselves "Apple" when a music company had the name "Apple Corps". But come on, opening up your own online music store and selling portable devices used to listen to music? Ok, now I've never even heard of Apple Corps before, but they did have the name first...
Well, it appears that it was cracked by a local user back in march during a week between when the vulnerability was discovered and fixed in the kernel.
As for "they don't seem to have full backups", the reason they are requesting the MD5 sums is that any backups from after march could have been compromised as well. They are asking for verification from the people that uploaded the files to them if I understand it correctly.
I think what they are trying to say is that you ONLY get the binary license. You still have no license to use their source code. That means you CANNOT compile your own kernel.
Now to make my point simply: Whatever the outcome of SCO's IP issues, they are violating copyright law by licensing Linux systems and besides civil penalties, they could face criminal penalties up to $250,000 and 5 years in jail.
The only license that pertains to the majority of the kernel source is the Gnu Public License (GPL). You cannot charge to license your IP that is part of Linux without releasing it under the GPL as well. They could force everyone to stop using Linux kernels that contain their source code and hope they switch to SCO Unixware (lol), but there is no way they can charge for a license to use Linux. They are commiting a federal crime (out-in-the-open software piracy) and the persons in charge should be fined and go to jail.
BTW - I think all owners of Caldera OpenLinux should return their boxes to SCO and expect a full refund as the product was not licensed.
IANAL, but from my limited understanding of the law, SCO is committing copyright infringement against the FSF and any contributors holding copyrights to part of the Linux kernel. Not only are they still selling Linux, but trying to extort licensing fees from people that have purchased other versions of Linux and haven't agreed to any licensing terms with SCO.
I have to reiterate that IANAL, but SCO is trying to profit on the backs of the thousands of people that have made Linux what it is today because someone might have copied (no proof given yet) some code from one of their products into the Linux kernel. This seems to be exactly what copyright law is trying to prevent from happening. So far SCO has been seeking civil penalties from IBM and that's it. That's all fine and dandy, we'll let the courts figure that out. But now they are trying to license Linux for use for a fee, something in direct violation of the copyright of all the other Linux authors that released their code intentionally under the GPL. Not only that, they are charging licensing fees for single processor systems, ones that don't even take advantage of the enhanced functionality that their code purportedly helps Linux out with.
Before they were just warning companies not to use Linux. If their claims are true (I'm not 100% sure they aren't), this would be an acceptable course of action. In good faith of course they should make it known exactly what parts of the code are copyrighted by them so they could be removed. Of course the same would have to apply to their own customers as they are in violation of the GNU license. I believe that's reprehensible, but I could accept that as plausibly legal. However, they are now actively seeking licensing fees for a product they don't have the right to license. This is out and out copyright infringement. Even if they say "we are only licensing any code that belongs to us", the only feasible way it could be used is in an illegal system where it is compiled with code only released under the GPL. If nothing else they are aiding and abetting copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is not limited to being litigated in civil courts. Copyright infringement is a federal crime with punishment of up to $250,000 AND five years in prison. SCO is knowingly violating the copyright of all other contributors to Linux by attempting to license it for profit.
Can someone point out the fault in this logic:
Copyright infringement is a Federal Crime with penalties up to $250,000 and 5 years in jail
The only way anyone can distribute code or binaries derived from code licensed only under the GPL is if the entire product and all modifications are licensed under the GPL.
SCO is still selling Linux with their source code linked in that is NOT licensed under the GPL (in violation of 2 above)
SCO is in violation of copyright law and the company and individuals who came up with this pirating scheme can be held accountable in civil and criminal courts.
IANALBIWLAO (i am not a lawyer but I watch law and order) - There was a case on Law and order where the family of the victim got a lawyer and filed to force the DA to prosecute the person they thought was guilty. Are there any lawyers out there reading Slashdot? Couldn't anyone that has contributed to the Linux kernel sue SCO? Could someone force the DA in Lindon, Utah to bring criminal copyright infringement charges against SCO? What is the jurisdiction, could suit be brought somewhere else? Is anyone interested in starting a fund to do this?
First, let me say that IANALibertairan, but I have read about it. Libertarianism isn't perfect, but you should try to understand it if you want to criticize it. You try to equate Libertarianism (an ideology) with Capitalism (an economic system).
Libertarians believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are our rights. You also have the right to what you own. Contrary to what you say, people DO own things. Even in a communist society, people own things, they are just distributed by the government (ostensibly on the basis of need instead of who produced the goods). I own my car. I have the title and the bill of sale to prove it. The dealership used to own my car, they have paperwork showing how they got it from the factory. The factory produced the car, they have paperwork showing how they paid for the parts. The companies that made the parts purchased the raw materials from somewhere (let's say a mining company). The mining company has the deed to the land. There's a chain of ownership for every piece of my car.
If you steal my car, that is taking something from me against my will, or the initiation of force. This is because one has a right to their own property. If I use force to try and stop you, that is a reaction to your force and not an initiation. In Libertarianism, the goal is to maximize the rights for everyone. There's no way you can claim a right to my car. If you did, we would have a dispute and I would have to drag the title to court and you would have to bring whatever evidence you have that you should own the car.
Well, $200 million might be chump change to microsoft, but this is only for Florida. There's 49 other states out there that could be suing next year. $10 billion would get their attention, but I'm betting if more states sued they would actually try to fight the case.
By the by, I didn't see a price drop of Windows XP or Office XP at the end of last year, seems to me like they are doing the same old things and could be sued by the same plantiffs again later.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, votes have been tallied electronically for some time. The only difference is that you don't fill out a paper ballot, your votes are recorded by touching a screen. When you fill out a paper ballot, the computer counts it electronically and the ballot is thrown into a box. With touch-screen voting you don't have the paper ballots to verify the results. That doesn't makes me worry though seeing how many extra votes mysteriously materialized for Al Gore in Florida when the ballots were counted by hand.
I think electronic voting would be fine, just assign a random number to each ballot that is linked internally with the voter but is never seen outside. Print them off a little ticket after they verify and submit their votes with their unique vote number on it. Then let anyone check all votes on the web given their number. They couldn't be linked back to an individual person without the secret list so anyone could see each and every vote in each precinct without worrying too much about privacy. If you know which number is yours, you can verify your vote online to make sure it was counted correctly. That way the counting of the votes could be done by anyone to get the correct totals, and the verification of each individual vote could be done by the person that voted. If each vote had to be matched back to an actual person, that could be done internally, but you shouldn't give out the list of people linked to their votes.
If the shield moves too fast, the core "burns" more quickly, yielding the same amount of power but reducing the reactor's life
So if it moved too quickly to the bottom, say 6' per second the entire 6', the bottom part of the core would be used up quickly (say a few years?) and the reactor would be done for, but the entire chunk of uranium didn't burn, the top part would be practically unused, right?
They're not suing for money though, they're suing for the courts to force NASA to release documents.
I don't quite get how the reflector controls the reaction, but it doesn't sound like there would be any problems if it jammed or if it went too quickly.
Yes, I wasted almost an entire summer in elementary school playing Racing Destruction Set on my C64 with my brother and friends, let's hope it has all the options for cars, weapons, gravity, etc.
One thing they're good for is keeping you from getting bad discs if you're burning to CD-R or DVD-R, especially if the data is coming over the IDE bus as well.
I think it says something that he was only doing this test to convince his wife that he needed to spend the money on SCSI :)
I'd also like to know what IDE controller was used. I was sorely dissappointed in the performance of the hard drive that came with my Dell computer using the on-board controller. I could really tell it was slow switching applications and booting up. It showed a rather pathetic score of 398 on PCMark 2002. I thought "to hell with that" and bought a new 160gb hard drive that was rated really well on tom's hardware. My score actually dropped to 244. That didn't make any sense. I updated all the drivers I could to no avail. Finally I bought a PCI IDE card at CompUSA for about $40 to try it out. The score jumped to 1216. That's almost up to the 1400 I have at home with my IDE raid setup, and much more than the 800 or so my brother got with his 10,000 rpm SCSI Cheetah drive.
Download the free version of PCMark 2002 and check your own hard drive scores.
Comparing SCSI and IDE on a P166 isn't a fair test nowadays. IDE definitely uses more processor cycles than SCSI, maybe with a P166 it was maxing your CPU. With today's 2+ghz processors though, intese IDE disk usage is not going to ever max your CPU.
I have a wattmeter too and my usage jumps from about 95-100 watts idle to 145-160 when my system (a Dell 1.7ghz P4) is under stress.
I also think the end of section 5 is interesting: "In any event our respective representatives will exert their mutual good faith best efforts to resolve any alleged breach short of termination." Good faith would at least be pointing out what parts of Linux SCO thinks is copied so they could be removed. Section 12 states that IBM won't have to reveal their customers for auditing purposes, which SCO was trying to accomplish.
What if they decide to do any of the following?
I don't know how much of that is true. I'm not a patent lawyer, but I listened to an episode of Science Friday (listen to past episodes in RealAudio or Windows Media Player for free) where they had an hour-long segment on inventions and patents. They said that you have to go get patents in other countries as well.
"Linux is already dead"... Looks like SCO employees can't even take the time to create an account here before posting.
So at $0.20/watt that would be just $1,400 to save $100 a month over the next 20 years? Doesn't sound bad at all... Even at $3.29 it looks like you would come out about even (12 months, 20 years = 240 months * $100 = $24,000). If you're in an area where you can pump energy back into the grid for a credit, you can forget the batteries (unless you want them just in case the power goes out). Of course that's a big initial investment for a small payoff. If electricity costs increase though, you can think of that as making interest on your investment.
Now looking at the PS2, it's easy to see that it is designed as a gaming console. The primary input method is by a controller that is designed for playing games. It is hard to find a piece of software for the PS2 that is not a game (are there any except for the linux kit?). Looking at the playstation website, it's obvious the PS2 is being marketed as a gaming console ("Live in your world, play in ours").
I'll give you that the PS2 is a computer, but I don't think you could ever convince me that it's not a gaming console. I'd also ask you to agree that all gaming consoles are computers, dating back to the Atari 2600 and before. They all have CPUs, memory, input devices, output ports, and ways to run software. It all depends on the definition of "gaming console" on where you draw the line. I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least a paragraph in the tariff regulations doing just that, but I can't find them. I just know that from all the evidence and my experience, it's a gaming console.
A gaming console is a specialized computer designed for gaming. That's readily apparent by the company's advertising and if you open a PS2 box (there's no keyboard or mouse, just a controller designed for playing games). Go to Best Buy and try to find a word processing application for your PS2. Take a poll of PS2 owners to see what percent have installed the Linux kit or have even heard about it. Sure you can play CDs and DVDs, so why not tax it as a DVD player? The company that produces a product shouldn't have discretion to apply the most favorable tax possible, the product should be classified logically.
Seems like they have a solid case to me. A Trademark is what a company uses to identify itself in the marketplace. Trademark law is around to make sure companies don't adopt similar names if they offer similar products to prevent confusion in the marketplace. I didn't see much of a problem with a computer company calling themselves "Apple" when a music company had the name "Apple Corps". But come on, opening up your own online music store and selling portable devices used to listen to music? Ok, now I've never even heard of Apple Corps before, but they did have the name first...
As for "they don't seem to have full backups", the reason they are requesting the MD5 sums is that any backups from after march could have been compromised as well. They are asking for verification from the people that uploaded the files to them if I understand it correctly.
I think what they are trying to say is that you ONLY get the binary license. You still have no license to use their source code. That means you CANNOT compile your own kernel.
The only license that pertains to the majority of the kernel source is the Gnu Public License (GPL). You cannot charge to license your IP that is part of Linux without releasing it under the GPL as well. They could force everyone to stop using Linux kernels that contain their source code and hope they switch to SCO Unixware (lol), but there is no way they can charge for a license to use Linux. They are commiting a federal crime (out-in-the-open software piracy) and the persons in charge should be fined and go to jail.
BTW - I think all owners of Caldera OpenLinux should return their boxes to SCO and expect a full refund as the product was not licensed.
I have to reiterate that IANAL, but SCO is trying to profit on the backs of the thousands of people that have made Linux what it is today because someone might have copied (no proof given yet) some code from one of their products into the Linux kernel. This seems to be exactly what copyright law is trying to prevent from happening. So far SCO has been seeking civil penalties from IBM and that's it. That's all fine and dandy, we'll let the courts figure that out. But now they are trying to license Linux for use for a fee, something in direct violation of the copyright of all the other Linux authors that released their code intentionally under the GPL. Not only that, they are charging licensing fees for single processor systems, ones that don't even take advantage of the enhanced functionality that their code purportedly helps Linux out with.
Before they were just warning companies not to use Linux. If their claims are true (I'm not 100% sure they aren't), this would be an acceptable course of action. In good faith of course they should make it known exactly what parts of the code are copyrighted by them so they could be removed. Of course the same would have to apply to their own customers as they are in violation of the GNU license. I believe that's reprehensible, but I could accept that as plausibly legal. However, they are now actively seeking licensing fees for a product they don't have the right to license. This is out and out copyright infringement. Even if they say "we are only licensing any code that belongs to us", the only feasible way it could be used is in an illegal system where it is compiled with code only released under the GPL. If nothing else they are aiding and abetting copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is not limited to being litigated in civil courts. Copyright infringement is a federal crime with punishment of up to $250,000 AND five years in prison. SCO is knowingly violating the copyright of all other contributors to Linux by attempting to license it for profit.
Can someone point out the fault in this logic:
IANALBIWLAO (i am not a lawyer but I watch law and order) - There was a case on Law and order where the family of the victim got a lawyer and filed to force the DA to prosecute the person they thought was guilty. Are there any lawyers out there reading Slashdot? Couldn't anyone that has contributed to the Linux kernel sue SCO? Could someone force the DA in Lindon, Utah to bring criminal copyright infringement charges against SCO? What is the jurisdiction, could suit be brought somewhere else? Is anyone interested in starting a fund to do this?
Libertarians believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are our rights. You also have the right to what you own. Contrary to what you say, people DO own things. Even in a communist society, people own things, they are just distributed by the government (ostensibly on the basis of need instead of who produced the goods). I own my car. I have the title and the bill of sale to prove it. The dealership used to own my car, they have paperwork showing how they got it from the factory. The factory produced the car, they have paperwork showing how they paid for the parts. The companies that made the parts purchased the raw materials from somewhere (let's say a mining company). The mining company has the deed to the land. There's a chain of ownership for every piece of my car.
If you steal my car, that is taking something from me against my will, or the initiation of force. This is because one has a right to their own property. If I use force to try and stop you, that is a reaction to your force and not an initiation. In Libertarianism, the goal is to maximize the rights for everyone. There's no way you can claim a right to my car. If you did, we would have a dispute and I would have to drag the title to court and you would have to bring whatever evidence you have that you should own the car.
By the by, I didn't see a price drop of Windows XP or Office XP at the end of last year, seems to me like they are doing the same old things and could be sued by the same plantiffs again later.