Re:Does this work for non native speakers?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 1
My native language is French, but I learned English rather early and I read a lot in English, almost more than in French, and I had no trouble understanding most of the texts done with this method (maybe a word or two required rereading). So I guess it's down to familiarity with the language and possibly how much and how fast you can read in it. Once someone reaches a familiarity with reading the language, you need to get to a point where you recognize the words instead of really reading them, and past that point recognizing the scrambled words becomes easy.
I see that as a good thing. It's NOT easy to do, and has to be upheld regularly (every five years IIRC), or about the same time governments usually change. To have laws that are too absolute can lead to future grief and problems, especially as changes in the constitution are veyr hard to do. This provides a temporary way to do it for specific needs. It also emphasizes that the provinces can rule themselves.
It has rarely happened, mostly to enact laws regarding the use of French in Quebec province, and I'm not sure this is the right place and time to start THAT argument.
Canada. Our PM is a moron, and there is some government corruption, but civil rights are embedded in the constitution and are upheld. Fair use of copyrighted works is a law, and our justice system works rather well compared tot he US one. We also don't kill each other at an alarming rate.
We also speak french here in Quebec, but a place like Toronto is nice to live. Mostly english-sepeaking, but still cosmopolitan enough to find different ethnicities represented, with little or no racism and segregation.
Re:I have always wondered...
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Blind Lake
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Tachyons? Come on, these are a pretty wild conjecture, and the fact that their existence would violate special relativity tells me that they most likely do not exist, instead of believing that special relativity can't be true because tachyons might exist.
All scientific theories were once wacky out-there beliefs.
To those who didn't understand them, maybe, but to other scientists they're not. There's a difference between "wacky" and "widely disbelieved".
I'm not saying I'm not ready to believe a different theory, but "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Before you posit a theory or suggestion that violates relativity you'd better have thought about it for a LONG time and built a pretty good argument. No, referencing "tachyons" doesn't do it.
Everthing is a theory until is proven wrong.
That's pretty, but that doesn't stop me from taking relativity as granted for the time being. I'll revise my opinions when and if anything comes, but I strongly suspect it will not redefine relativity, but instead will add to it and enlarge our understanding of it by adding more detail.
Re:I have always wondered...
on
Blind Lake
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At some point, you need to move beyond the "best guess" and realize that it's valid. There is at this point no theory or observation that doesn't validate relativity.
Which means we have to assume that it's valid. Just like I know the Sun may not come up tomorrow morning, since my belief is just based on induction, but to actually fear it might not come up, or to argue a point based on that possibility, is just childish and not very contructive. I know relativity might be wrong. I'm just putting that aside and accepting the theory as valid.
It's the same argument some people have with the theory of evolution, saying "it's just a theory", at some point the evidence is so overwhelming you have to accept it as a real law of nature, accept that it's not just belief but knowledge, and the real work is to nail out the details, and refine it. Although a theory may not be perfect, that does not invalidate it. Just like general relativity was a refinement of Newton's gravitation theory.
Would you disbelieve that most of the little pinpricks of light in the sky are actually of the same nature as our Sun? I certainly hope not, and yet we've never been so close to them, and we have more direct evidence that relativity is a correct theory than we do about the nature of stars.
If you don't accept relativity as correct, I'd really like to hear your arguments against it. Unless you have some good ones, I'll stick to my knowledge that the speed of light is an absolute maximum within the space-time fabric of our Universe, and build arguments and ideas around that knowledge, rather than trying to build arguments on some superstition or some science-fiction belief.
Re:I have always wondered...
on
Blind Lake
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· Score: 1
That is travel faster than light
Ever heard of a scientist named Einstein? He wrote of a very important theory: Relativity.
And one of the major points of this theory is that the speed of light is an absolute. You cannot go faster. You can't even REACH light-speed if you have any mass, because that would require an infinite amount of energy.
There are other things that might allow you to get there before the light. A wormhole, being a "hole" in space-time joins two places so they are very close through the hole while they're farther away through normal space-time. But you're NOT going faster than light.
There have also been theories that the universe is curved, and that the light would come back. But that would take more than 15 billion years...
That's probably one of the worst articles I've read from Slashdot lately. The "report" in question appears to be from British security company "mi29". First of all, that name is wrong their name is mi2g. Oh wait, THAT mi2g?
Sorry people, but I don't think they're reliable or trustworthy. They're nothing but fearmongering vultures from what I've seen of them. And as for the report? Well, it's not free, it costs 30 pounds.
So we're presented with declarations from a report of which we cannot check the methodology, by a firm who likes to regularly make pronouncements of doom that never happen. Should we believe it? Certainly not. We should simply suspend judgment for the simple reason that we lack critical information to judge its value.
I disagree. They should not be held accountable for the whole thing, of course, but at some point it should become evident that their employers are doing unethical and illegal manipulations of the market, and that to stay there as an employee means helping them, and a tacit agreement.
It's not so different from a soldier who knowingly follows an order to kill civilians. Yes, he followed the order, but the order was unethical and he should have refused to do it.
There are no white-hat, gray-hats or black-hats. Only criminals and law-abiding citizens.
Yes, of course, we all know the world is black or white, that there are no grey areas.
And you probably believe anyone who's against Bush or the war in Iraq is a traitor to his nation and should be killed too?
Or that reading certain books automatically makes you an anarchist/communist/whatever?
No. Everything is grey, black and white are just illusions that happen when we can't see well enough to realize it's really grey... When we don't know or understand all the issues, we categorize events in the way you do, or we make flawed analogies and believe that all the characteristics of the analogy apply to the case.
What, pray tell, do you find an acceptable course of action for the RIAA?
Fold up and die?
I don't completely disagree with your opinion, but I think a lot of people on Slashdot understand one thing which the RIAA doesn't: This is the Digital Age, and Everything has Changed.
Not ethics, not morality, but the rules have changed and are changing everyday, and trying to stick to the old rules will only prevent society from going forward. Laws are made to serve society, to enable it to exist, and grow, not to stifle the lives of people or to protect corporations. To protect our right to live free and in reasonable privacy, unless we have been already convicted of a crime, and our right to earn our living, not to protect the right of corporations to exploit the people, or to allow them to become vigilantes.
We must go forward, and this requires us to re-evaluate our "morals" (which I don't like, I prefer ethics), and our laws, and our beliefs as a society. Ideas are free, and cannot be stopped once released, it is the same with art, once produced music can be reproduced or remembered. Any attempt to limit its propagation can only be temporary.
I think we stand at a limit point, and the RIAA and MPAA are trying to keep us on this side, because once we really cross it it will be too late for them.
On a purely ethical viewpoint, what's WRONG with file sharing? It is not theft, because I do not directly deprive the composer/performer of a good. Neither does the file sharer directly profit from it. No, what we do by these activities is to "deprive them of theoretical revenue". This is not in any way different from the BSA's line. Who would have kept the major share of that revenue? The RIAA's member organizations - not the artists, who get very little at the end.
I agree that to profit from file sharing by selling the works for more than the cost of the media or misrepresenting a work as being from someone else than the original artist is unethical and should be illegal.
But file sharing itself? No. The whole idea of "copyright infringement" has to be reviewed in this digital age, the Age of Information. Because information is running the risk of becoming a commodity in the control of the corporations.
I have a pretty big Excel spreadsheet (4.5MB empty, with about 10,000 lines of VBA code) which I spent about 200 hours doing. I started it on Excel 97, and carried and enhanced it to Excel XP at this point. Problem is now that it only runs on Windows (Macs support some VBA but it's limited). I've been looking at alternatives, translation to other formats, but I seem to have only one option at this point: I'll need to rewrite all the code if I want some portability.
Now, the question is in what do I rewrite. Basically, I know Basic. Another thing is that my spreadsheet doesn't use much advanced math tools, and it might be a good idea to switch it to a databse format instead. But which? SQL is too complex. I've been thinking of Filemaker, since it's Pc/Mac, and can be hosted on a web server and thus be fully cross-platform. Any other option?
There are a few differences, though they're well hidden. Using VBA to work on cell ranges, for example, is much easier and faster, in previous versions I had to implement very cpu-intensive loops.
Not saying that the changes are earth-shattering, they're certainly not, and for 95% of people nothing that really matters to them.
As for 2003 beta, Outlook has been changed in good ways, but since I've abandoned it for Thunderbird at home, and I mostly use OS X at work (w/ Outlook 2001, the Entourage support is a joke), it doesn't affect me too much.
Sorry, I must have forgotten to include the [sarcasm] tags.
Of course none of what I wrote makes any sense, because it applies to the past. But if the world goes on as it is, if the current predisposition towards the ascendency of corporations over individuals remains on the same tangent, and the length of a copyright is indefinitely extended, and silly patents continue to be granted, that's how things may eventually go. I simply used absurd examples of the past to show how the current interpretation of the law (and their contract) by SCO might affect modern society if it had been in effect back then.
It was not my intent to troll, it was my intent to show by an absurd metaphor how the world might be if, in the past, copyrights had been what they are becoming, and if SCO's definition of derivative works and their asserted rights on those works were te become commonplace.
Realize that if they win, this kind of practice, to claim any derivative work as your own, might become commonplace, imbedded in EULAs and contracts, and possibly made law. That's how it starts. Remember MSN's claim to own all that went through their servers (messenger, hotmail, etc).
It's not just actual, "real" derivative works. Even their "definition" of derivative is wrong, as according to them it's anything that's added to their works. Might this make any text I write in Word the property of Microsoft? I know, it's far-fetched, and pretty inconceivable right now, and maybe I think too much of 1984, although the way things are, it's not so much the government that will become Big Brother, but corporations...
As soon as this Linux thing blows over, they'll be charging anyone who ever watched any Bond movies $500 to be in compliance. Next year, the price goes up to $1500 per viewing, per retina.
An estimated 4 billion people have seen at least one Bond movie in their entire life.
And if they were to claim ownership on the music, too, they could probably get a fee from everyone on Earth, or close to.
Despite SCO's spin to the contrary, this isn't about the GPL model versus the proprietary software model; it's about unethical versus ethical business practices, and SCO is on the wrong side of the fence.
People, stop trying to reduce this to one or two issues. It's MUCH larger than this at this point.
In my view, this is about the GPL, this is about the rule of the law, this is about the power corporations have versus the individual, this is about free software, and about copyright, and it's about the ethics of business, and it's about patents, and the right to create derivative works, to reverse-engineer.
It's about the right of human beings to create and make that creation profit humanity. It's about what it means to be human in our modern society for the sub-culture that we have become. It's about defining our rights, and our choices.
It's about the importance of the USA versus the rest of the world as far as intellectual rights can go. For me, intellectual rights are the rights to create, the disseminate information, not the right to restrict it. It's about how, if the retarded US law system lets this through it will destroy creativity in the US even worse than the patent system already is.
Ahhhh, but the esteemed counsel that SCO has sought out stated previously, that copyright law allows for one and only one copy to be made, for backup purposes only, so MGM better make damn sure they were using the original footage, with their fingers on the fast forward/rewind buttons, or even they are not in compliance with the SCO version of law.
Actually, according to SCO any work derived or made for an original is owned by the first inventor/holder. I hope they paid Ian Fleming in full for writing James Bond at first. Or whomever first wrote a spy novel. Or Boccaccio who wrote the first novel. And the Lumiere brothers for making movies possible. And...
I guess you get the idea. If any and all derivative works are considered the property of the original inventor/creator, there would be no inventions, because everything comes from something else...
Hey, we could probably find a sumerian mummy and bring it in court to file a suit against SCO for use of the written language.
Actually, at this point, I'm expecting SCO to sue God or something like that, since his "creation" incorporates works derivative of Unix.
No, really, this isn't much news, I do that all the time at work to get data back for customers, and most often for important stuff (thesis work and the like). The Quantum Fireball CX were notorious for a specific chip failing all the time on the controller. Must have done board swaps 50 times on those (and went through 10 different controllers, even our "good ones" would fail at some point).
This must be a really slow day for THIS to make it to the front page.
There is no hypocrisy involved. Microsoft's campaigns against open-source are misguided and misleading, but they have made it clear that they think a package like the BSD TCP stack should be released under a very liberal license. It would be a disaster if it had been released under the GPL- companies would have used their own inferior implementations, which would probably end up being somewhat incompatible or would break the standard.
Just wanted to point out that what Microsoft does is to release their protocols and APIs under licenses that pretty much prohibit anyone else from using them, and that they modify open protocols all the time to block others from inter-operating with them. But God forbid anyone but them do it, oh no, it would be anti-competitive and Evil. That pretty much sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Do you or your organisation use any Unix or Linux derivative?
AIX, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X are all threatened by SCO's recent actions; although it has been argued that BSD is safe due to the historical AT&T-Berkeley lawsuit, small things like legal precedent don't seem to bother SCO too much.
We use MacOS X extensively here, and our major servers run AIX, so I see myself as threatened by SCO's actions.
Back in the earlier FF days, I used to take character names from good fantasy books or books I was reading at the time.
Of course, with modern online games, this has become pretty much impossible - all those names are taken before you can even log on. I tried a few things but none stuck.
Until last year when Warcraft III was released. I'd shortly before bought my One Ring and cooked up an elvish (Quenya) moniker, "Cormacolinde" (it means "Ring Bearer"). I used that name, and started playing a lot. I liked the name, and it has a nice short version (Corma). Since then I've used it and some interesting variants (Cormacale, ring of light for example) or other made-up elvish names.
I appears this guy has been sent to prison and condemned to lifelong impoverishment because of knowledge.
It now appears that knowing something, and using that knowledge to build things is illegal if a corporation could be hurt finacially by that knowledge. What's next, thought control, to make sure no one has any "illegal" knowledge?
Slashdot Mirror
That'll help. ICANN are so corrupted they're sleeping in the same bed as Verisign.
Maybe you should read this Register.
And this article about ICANN.
My native language is French, but I learned English rather early and I read a lot in English, almost more than in French, and I had no trouble understanding most of the texts done with this method (maybe a word or two required rereading). So I guess it's down to familiarity with the language and possibly how much and how fast you can read in it. Once someone reaches a familiarity with reading the language, you need to get to a point where you recognize the words instead of really reading them, and past that point recognizing the scrambled words becomes easy.
I see that as a good thing. It's NOT easy to do, and has to be upheld regularly (every five years IIRC), or about the same time governments usually change. To have laws that are too absolute can lead to future grief and problems, especially as changes in the constitution are veyr hard to do. This provides a temporary way to do it for specific needs. It also emphasizes that the provinces can rule themselves.
It has rarely happened, mostly to enact laws regarding the use of French in Quebec province, and I'm not sure this is the right place and time to start THAT argument.
Canada. Our PM is a moron, and there is some government corruption, but civil rights are embedded in the constitution and are upheld. Fair use of copyrighted works is a law, and our justice system works rather well compared tot he US one. We also don't kill each other at an alarming rate.
We also speak french here in Quebec, but a place like Toronto is nice to live. Mostly english-sepeaking, but still cosmopolitan enough to find different ethnicities represented, with little or no racism and segregation.
To those who didn't understand them, maybe, but to other scientists they're not. There's a difference between "wacky" and "widely disbelieved".
I'm not saying I'm not ready to believe a different theory, but "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Before you posit a theory or suggestion that violates relativity you'd better have thought about it for a LONG time and built a pretty good argument. No, referencing "tachyons" doesn't do it.
That's pretty, but that doesn't stop me from taking relativity as granted for the time being. I'll revise my opinions when and if anything comes, but I strongly suspect it will not redefine relativity, but instead will add to it and enlarge our understanding of it by adding more detail.
Which means we have to assume that it's valid. Just like I know the Sun may not come up tomorrow morning, since my belief is just based on induction, but to actually fear it might not come up, or to argue a point based on that possibility, is just childish and not very contructive. I know relativity might be wrong. I'm just putting that aside and accepting the theory as valid.
It's the same argument some people have with the theory of evolution, saying "it's just a theory", at some point the evidence is so overwhelming you have to accept it as a real law of nature, accept that it's not just belief but knowledge, and the real work is to nail out the details, and refine it. Although a theory may not be perfect, that does not invalidate it. Just like general relativity was a refinement of Newton's gravitation theory.
Would you disbelieve that most of the little pinpricks of light in the sky are actually of the same nature as our Sun? I certainly hope not, and yet we've never been so close to them, and we have more direct evidence that relativity is a correct theory than we do about the nature of stars.
If you don't accept relativity as correct, I'd really like to hear your arguments against it. Unless you have some good ones, I'll stick to my knowledge that the speed of light is an absolute maximum within the space-time fabric of our Universe, and build arguments and ideas around that knowledge, rather than trying to build arguments on some superstition or some science-fiction belief.
Ever heard of a scientist named Einstein? He wrote of a very important theory: Relativity.
And one of the major points of this theory is that the speed of light is an absolute. You cannot go faster. You can't even REACH light-speed if you have any mass, because that would require an infinite amount of energy.
There are other things that might allow you to get there before the light. A wormhole, being a "hole" in space-time joins two places so they are very close through the hole while they're farther away through normal space-time. But you're NOT going faster than light.
There have also been theories that the universe is curved, and that the light would come back. But that would take more than 15 billion years...
That's probably one of the worst articles I've read from Slashdot lately. The "report" in question appears to be from British security company "mi29". First of all, that name is wrong their name is mi2g. Oh wait, THAT mi2g?
Sorry people, but I don't think they're reliable or trustworthy. They're nothing but fearmongering vultures from what I've seen of them. And as for the report? Well, it's not free, it costs 30 pounds.
So we're presented with declarations from a report of which we cannot check the methodology, by a firm who likes to regularly make pronouncements of doom that never happen. Should we believe it? Certainly not. We should simply suspend judgment for the simple reason that we lack critical information to judge its value.
It's not so different from a soldier who knowingly follows an order to kill civilians. Yes, he followed the order, but the order was unethical and he should have refused to do it.
Yeah, you'd think they'd at least try using real pink elephants!
Yes, of course, we all know the world is black or white, that there are no grey areas.
And you probably believe anyone who's against Bush or the war in Iraq is a traitor to his nation and should be killed too?
Or that reading certain books automatically makes you an anarchist/communist/whatever?
No. Everything is grey, black and white are just illusions that happen when we can't see well enough to realize it's really grey... When we don't know or understand all the issues, we categorize events in the way you do, or we make flawed analogies and believe that all the characteristics of the analogy apply to the case.
Fold up and die?
I don't completely disagree with your opinion, but I think a lot of people on Slashdot understand one thing which the RIAA doesn't: This is the Digital Age, and Everything has Changed.
Not ethics, not morality, but the rules have changed and are changing everyday, and trying to stick to the old rules will only prevent society from going forward. Laws are made to serve society, to enable it to exist, and grow, not to stifle the lives of people or to protect corporations. To protect our right to live free and in reasonable privacy, unless we have been already convicted of a crime, and our right to earn our living, not to protect the right of corporations to exploit the people, or to allow them to become vigilantes.
We must go forward, and this requires us to re-evaluate our "morals" (which I don't like, I prefer ethics), and our laws, and our beliefs as a society. Ideas are free, and cannot be stopped once released, it is the same with art, once produced music can be reproduced or remembered. Any attempt to limit its propagation can only be temporary.
I think we stand at a limit point, and the RIAA and MPAA are trying to keep us on this side, because once we really cross it it will be too late for them.
On a purely ethical viewpoint, what's WRONG with file sharing? It is not theft, because I do not directly deprive the composer/performer of a good. Neither does the file sharer directly profit from it. No, what we do by these activities is to "deprive them of theoretical revenue". This is not in any way different from the BSA's line. Who would have kept the major share of that revenue? The RIAA's member organizations - not the artists, who get very little at the end.
I agree that to profit from file sharing by selling the works for more than the cost of the media or misrepresenting a work as being from someone else than the original artist is unethical and should be illegal.
But file sharing itself? No. The whole idea of "copyright infringement" has to be reviewed in this digital age, the Age of Information. Because information is running the risk of becoming a commodity in the control of the corporations.
I have a pretty big Excel spreadsheet (4.5MB empty, with about 10,000 lines of VBA code) which I spent about 200 hours doing. I started it on Excel 97, and carried and enhanced it to Excel XP at this point. Problem is now that it only runs on Windows (Macs support some VBA but it's limited). I've been looking at alternatives, translation to other formats, but I seem to have only one option at this point: I'll need to rewrite all the code if I want some portability.
Now, the question is in what do I rewrite. Basically, I know Basic. Another thing is that my spreadsheet doesn't use much advanced math tools, and it might be a good idea to switch it to a databse format instead. But which? SQL is too complex. I've been thinking of Filemaker, since it's Pc/Mac, and can be hosted on a web server and thus be fully cross-platform. Any other option?
There are a few differences, though they're well hidden. Using VBA to work on cell ranges, for example, is much easier and faster, in previous versions I had to implement very cpu-intensive loops. Not saying that the changes are earth-shattering, they're certainly not, and for 95% of people nothing that really matters to them. As for 2003 beta, Outlook has been changed in good ways, but since I've abandoned it for Thunderbird at home, and I mostly use OS X at work (w/ Outlook 2001, the Entourage support is a joke), it doesn't affect me too much.
Sorry, I must have forgotten to include the [sarcasm] tags.
Of course none of what I wrote makes any sense, because it applies to the past. But if the world goes on as it is, if the current predisposition towards the ascendency of corporations over individuals remains on the same tangent, and the length of a copyright is indefinitely extended, and silly patents continue to be granted, that's how things may eventually go. I simply used absurd examples of the past to show how the current interpretation of the law (and their contract) by SCO might affect modern society if it had been in effect back then.
It was not my intent to troll, it was my intent to show by an absurd metaphor how the world might be if, in the past, copyrights had been what they are becoming, and if SCO's definition of derivative works and their asserted rights on those works were te become commonplace.
Realize that if they win, this kind of practice, to claim any derivative work as your own, might become commonplace, imbedded in EULAs and contracts, and possibly made law. That's how it starts. Remember MSN's claim to own all that went through their servers (messenger, hotmail, etc).
It's not just actual, "real" derivative works. Even their "definition" of derivative is wrong, as according to them it's anything that's added to their works. Might this make any text I write in Word the property of Microsoft? I know, it's far-fetched, and pretty inconceivable right now, and maybe I think too much of 1984, although the way things are, it's not so much the government that will become Big Brother, but corporations...
I was taught it was Boccaccio's Fiammetta, but it was probably the first Western novel.
An estimated 4 billion people have seen at least one Bond movie in their entire life.
And if they were to claim ownership on the music, too, they could probably get a fee from everyone on Earth, or close to.
People, stop trying to reduce this to one or two issues. It's MUCH larger than this at this point.
In my view, this is about the GPL, this is about the rule of the law, this is about the power corporations have versus the individual, this is about free software, and about copyright, and it's about the ethics of business, and it's about patents, and the right to create derivative works, to reverse-engineer.
It's about the right of human beings to create and make that creation profit humanity. It's about what it means to be human in our modern society for the sub-culture that we have become. It's about defining our rights, and our choices.
It's about the importance of the USA versus the rest of the world as far as intellectual rights can go. For me, intellectual rights are the rights to create, the disseminate information, not the right to restrict it. It's about how, if the retarded US law system lets this through it will destroy creativity in the US even worse than the patent system already is.
Actually, according to SCO any work derived or made for an original is owned by the first inventor/holder. I hope they paid Ian Fleming in full for writing James Bond at first. Or whomever first wrote a spy novel. Or Boccaccio who wrote the first novel. And the Lumiere brothers for making movies possible. And...
I guess you get the idea. If any and all derivative works are considered the property of the original inventor/creator, there would be no inventions, because everything comes from something else...
Hey, we could probably find a sumerian mummy and bring it in court to file a suit against SCO for use of the written language.
Actually, at this point, I'm expecting SCO to sue God or something like that, since his "creation" incorporates works derivative of Unix.
A mechanic actually replaced a screw!
No, really, this isn't much news, I do that all the time at work to get data back for customers, and most often for important stuff (thesis work and the like). The Quantum Fireball CX were notorious for a specific chip failing all the time on the controller. Must have done board swaps 50 times on those (and went through 10 different controllers, even our "good ones" would fail at some point).
This must be a really slow day for THIS to make it to the front page.
Just wanted to point out that what Microsoft does is to release their protocols and APIs under licenses that pretty much prohibit anyone else from using them, and that they modify open protocols all the time to block others from inter-operating with them. But God forbid anyone but them do it, oh no, it would be anti-competitive and Evil. That pretty much sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Do you or your organisation use any Unix or Linux derivative?
AIX, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X are all threatened by SCO's recent actions; although it has been argued that BSD is safe due to the historical AT&T-Berkeley lawsuit, small things like legal precedent don't seem to bother SCO too much.
We use MacOS X extensively here, and our major servers run AIX, so I see myself as threatened by SCO's actions.
Of course, with modern online games, this has become pretty much impossible - all those names are taken before you can even log on. I tried a few things but none stuck.
Until last year when Warcraft III was released. I'd shortly before bought my One Ring and cooked up an elvish (Quenya) moniker, "Cormacolinde" (it means "Ring Bearer"). I used that name, and started playing a lot. I liked the name, and it has a nice short version (Corma). Since then I've used it and some interesting variants (Cormacale, ring of light for example) or other made-up elvish names.
It's about localization of calls, not eavesdropping I'd think.
It now appears that knowing something, and using that knowledge to build things is illegal if a corporation could be hurt finacially by that knowledge. What's next, thought control, to make sure no one has any "illegal" knowledge?
This is so wrong...