The way I read it, it looks like the FCC said, "that's OUR spectrum to allow or deny access to. Don't you make policy regarding OUR spectrum." I don't think it's a constitutional issue at all, just the FCC enforcing their Federal mandate to regulate spectrum usage.
I really don't see what all the fuss was about with Janet's "wardrobe malfunction". The video clip I saw, that tit could just as easily have been a baseball or a big scoop of icecream. Enlarging the image just made it really fuzzy...
Or did some TV channel manage to get a High Def pin sharp image?? I'd bet that a large fraction of the live audience didn't even realize what had happened until after the show.
Not that I really care - I'm sure there are better looking boobs on much better looking girls...
I think he was referring to the various "business partners" that really have no business being connected together. So, for example, 1-800-contacts could be affiliated with an insurance company, who in turn could be affiliated with a phone company, which could also be an ISP, and suddenly you'd be getting telemarketers calling to offer long-distance+DSL with Web services on the side. All perfectly legit, as long as you allow the nebulous "business partners" relationship to span friends-of-friends-of-friends, out into completely unrelated industries. And, you have to tell each one individually to quit calling...
If push comes to shove and you get dragged into court, MS will find that it's not what they think it means, it's what the mythical "reasonable man" thinks it means. If the license says "for use with a new computer" and doesn't go on to define "new computer" in a way that precludes home assembly, they'd be out of luck. Especially if you can hand the judge the receipts for all the brand spanking new components that you turned into a functional computer.
Re:Damned if I'm going to use a copy protected OS.
on
Is That Pirated Software?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Couldn't you make a ghost image right after the activation step?? When you wipe the disk, slap the image back on it and carry on trucking...
I have to assume I'm in the clear regarding USBkey-type devices - I was handed one along with the new laptop the company supplied me with recently. Given that I'm allowed to take the laptop home at night, the usbkey is kinda superfluous. I really don't know why it was added in, except that it may have been a freebie with bulk-ordered laptops.
You're missing the part where, after Longhorn is finally released, any new PC will have it pre-loaded, in exactly the same way that WinXPHome is currently loaded on almost every store-bought PC. Sure, the unsuspecting buyers will take their new PCs home and find that some devices don't work. Some of them will take the PC back to the store, others will call tech support, but they'll all have to upgrade those devices just to use them.
It's possible, I suppose, that if the new USB "standard" came out soon enough, then all new USB devices could be engineered to work with both old and new PCs. In which case, by the time the new PCs come out with Longhorn, older non-compliant devices will have had time to die naturally and be replaced. After a transition period, the devices would be built without old-PC compatibility, but by then the new PCs would be more prevalent, so things will carry on "just working" in most cases.
probably still be able to use them in Linux, so long as someone writes the drivers.
But that's exactly where Microsoft bites us - some aspect of the driver technology will be copywrited or patented so that anyone even trying to write a driver will be liable to get slapped with a DMCA violation (or something - IANAL). Development of such a driver would probably take place overseas, but it may still be illegal to possess such a thing in the US.
At the very least, your organization would have sysadmins who would have full access to all the systems. Not one guy, but a group of sysadmins.
And where I work, all us sysadmin types recently had our old desktops upgraded to brand new laptops. Not only that, we're told that one condition of getting a laptop is that we're expected to drag the damn thing home every night. So, there are literally dozens of us walking out the door every evening with, potentially, many Gb's worth of data. I don't know about the others, but I've got a 60Gb disk in mine, not to mention the DVD burner. The entire disk would fit on 15 DVDs, and I'm sure I could carry a lot more in the backpack they provided, if I felt that way inclined. Makes those 256Mb USBkeys look kinda stupid...
Also, many other employees are being upgraded to laptops, including managers and programmers. I think the plan is that if anyone manages to "anthrax" our building somehow, we all get together at Starbucks or Kinko's and continue working...
I predict that the new USB devices and software will be reverse-engineered in a country that doesn't give a rat's-ass about the DMCA. The problem that Microsoft will face will be the same as the DVD folks faced - once CSS was hacked, the only real way to regain control of DVD content was to replace CSS with something better. In the meantime, too many DVDs and devices made it into the marketplace, making such a replacement scheme difficult.
Microsoft will have the same problem - after expending a lot of money and effort to get the Next Generation Trusted PC implemented, the details will escape into the wild and be integrated into other stuff that they don't control.
As well as the IDM countersuit, there's the very real possibility that the judge would take an extremely dim view of SCO saying "Wups, sorry. Didn't mean it really"... And didn't SCO mention something in SEC filings about the pots of money they expected to get in settlements and licensing when they finally won this case?? If so, they can't really back down without irritating the SEC as well as the judge...
Has anyone during this entire process given thought that maybe SCO took the code and claims it as their own? How will they ever prove this case is beyond me, since Unix was in existence before SCO was established as a company.
Actually, didn't Prof Davis also just prove that SCO's source doesn't include Linux code?? If SCO had stolen anything and included it in their code, it would have shown up in the comparator test, wouldn't it?? The comparison just shows common code, it doesn't distinguish which is the original and which is the copy.
Another reason to be more forgiving about a free solution is that the bugfix that resolves the problem isn't going to be packaged and sold as an upgrade.
Not only that, but the user who finds any given bug has a fighting chance of fixing it for himself, because he generally has the source available. And if not, it's likely that the developers are online and easy to talk to.
You'd hope, yes, but you'd be out of luck. There are so many different ways for vendors to fuck up a Windows system that Microsoft can't possibly test all the combinations of patches against all the available software....
That would be Airplanes - despite the best efforts of the bird control people at airports, a number of birds still get sucked into jet engines or collide with other parts of rapidly moving airplanes.
That depends... If the "premium" customers are big companies with a complex standard desktop load, it's likely they won't be doing any patch rollout for some time. Where I work, they've told us, "do not install XP SP2 - shit will break. Wait 'till we give you a safe patch kit."
Note, that doesn't stop them running around like headless chickens applying server patches to stop the latest virus/worm outbreaks, it's just to avoid having 50,000 peons with worthless desktops. Oh, and also the dozen or so top execs who'd be really pissed if their email and stock quotes broke.:)
Doesn't affect me either way - my standard XP install only sees the light of day for about 5 minutes per fortnight. The rest of the time I'm happily trucking along with Gentoo, getting some actual work done...
The article says something about the "onion" being at a facility in Utah, not in a regular NASA lab. They're still assembling the appropriate equipment, so the mirror on a stick is just the first look to see exactly how many hundreds of tupperware boxes they'll need to contain the various fragments...
Sounds about right to me. If the serial number is somehow determined to be an illegal copy, simply quit working. Perhaps put up a big banner window with an appropriate message in it.
Back in the day, Novell Netware 3 & 4 were able to tell if a second server on the same network was installed using the same serial-numbered floppy. A message would come up on both servers saying so. I don't remember if it actually quit working, but it certainly surprised me when I was setting up a new, faster, better server to replace our aging Novell installation.
Why would an Agent bother?? The JPL computers and everything else are figments of the Matrix's imagination - the Matrix would just rewrite history/reality so that the numbers were always correct...
It was just a thought. It's been said here and elsewhere that US politicians generally respond better to written letters than to email, though that is beginning to change. The theory is that anyone can bang out email on the spur of the moment, but actually putting pen to paper supposedly means you've thought about the issue and care enough to waste a stamp on it. Registered post or recorded delivery ought to send the same message.
Any issue I cared about, I'd just talk to my father. He was a County Councillor in East Sussex for many years, culminating in Chairman of the County Council for the full two years allowed, before retiring. As I recall, he made a point of seeing that every letter received a reply. I guess he wasn't as busy as an MP, though...:)
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The way I read it, it looks like the FCC said, "that's OUR spectrum to allow or deny access to. Don't you make policy regarding OUR spectrum." I don't think it's a constitutional issue at all, just the FCC enforcing their Federal mandate to regulate spectrum usage.
Or did some TV channel manage to get a High Def pin sharp image?? I'd bet that a large fraction of the live audience didn't even realize what had happened until after the show.
Not that I really care - I'm sure there are better looking boobs on much better looking girls...
I think he was referring to the various "business partners" that really have no business being connected together. So, for example, 1-800-contacts could be affiliated with an insurance company, who in turn could be affiliated with a phone company, which could also be an ISP, and suddenly you'd be getting telemarketers calling to offer long-distance+DSL with Web services on the side. All perfectly legit, as long as you allow the nebulous "business partners" relationship to span friends-of-friends-of-friends, out into completely unrelated industries. And, you have to tell each one individually to quit calling...
If push comes to shove and you get dragged into court, MS will find that it's not what they think it means, it's what the mythical "reasonable man" thinks it means. If the license says "for use with a new computer" and doesn't go on to define "new computer" in a way that precludes home assembly, they'd be out of luck. Especially if you can hand the judge the receipts for all the brand spanking new components that you turned into a functional computer.
Couldn't you make a ghost image right after the activation step?? When you wipe the disk, slap the image back on it and carry on trucking...
I have to assume I'm in the clear regarding USBkey-type devices - I was handed one along with the new laptop the company supplied me with recently. Given that I'm allowed to take the laptop home at night, the usbkey is kinda superfluous. I really don't know why it was added in, except that it may have been a freebie with bulk-ordered laptops.
It's possible, I suppose, that if the new USB "standard" came out soon enough, then all new USB devices could be engineered to work with both old and new PCs. In which case, by the time the new PCs come out with Longhorn, older non-compliant devices will have had time to die naturally and be replaced. After a transition period, the devices would be built without old-PC compatibility, but by then the new PCs would be more prevalent, so things will carry on "just working" in most cases.
But that's exactly where Microsoft bites us - some aspect of the driver technology will be copywrited or patented so that anyone even trying to write a driver will be liable to get slapped with a DMCA violation (or something - IANAL). Development of such a driver would probably take place overseas, but it may still be illegal to possess such a thing in the US.
And where I work, all us sysadmin types recently had our old desktops upgraded to brand new laptops. Not only that, we're told that one condition of getting a laptop is that we're expected to drag the damn thing home every night. So, there are literally dozens of us walking out the door every evening with, potentially, many Gb's worth of data. I don't know about the others, but I've got a 60Gb disk in mine, not to mention the DVD burner. The entire disk would fit on 15 DVDs, and I'm sure I could carry a lot more in the backpack they provided, if I felt that way inclined. Makes those 256Mb USBkeys look kinda stupid...
Also, many other employees are being upgraded to laptops, including managers and programmers. I think the plan is that if anyone manages to "anthrax" our building somehow, we all get together at Starbucks or Kinko's and continue working...
Microsoft will have the same problem - after expending a lot of money and effort to get the Next Generation Trusted PC implemented, the details will escape into the wild and be integrated into other stuff that they don't control.
As well as the IDM countersuit, there's the very real possibility that the judge would take an extremely dim view of SCO saying "Wups, sorry. Didn't mean it really"... And didn't SCO mention something in SEC filings about the pots of money they expected to get in settlements and licensing when they finally won this case?? If so, they can't really back down without irritating the SEC as well as the judge...
Actually, didn't Prof Davis also just prove that SCO's source doesn't include Linux code?? If SCO had stolen anything and included it in their code, it would have shown up in the comparator test, wouldn't it?? The comparison just shows common code, it doesn't distinguish which is the original and which is the copy.
2 carrier battle groups.... In Utah??
Not only that, but the user who finds any given bug has a fighting chance of fixing it for himself, because he generally has the source available. And if not, it's likely that the developers are online and easy to talk to.
You'd hope, yes, but you'd be out of luck. There are so many different ways for vendors to fuck up a Windows system that Microsoft can't possibly test all the combinations of patches against all the available software....
That would be Airplanes - despite the best efforts of the bird control people at airports, a number of birds still get sucked into jet engines or collide with other parts of rapidly moving airplanes.
Note, that doesn't stop them running around like headless chickens applying server patches to stop the latest virus/worm outbreaks, it's just to avoid having 50,000 peons with worthless desktops. Oh, and also the dozen or so top execs who'd be really pissed if their email and stock quotes broke. :)
Doesn't affect me either way - my standard XP install only sees the light of day for about 5 minutes per fortnight. The rest of the time I'm happily trucking along with Gentoo, getting some actual work done...
If the location isn't static, why should the map be?? Just toss in a randomiser that returns the locations of certain things...
The article says something about the "onion" being at a facility in Utah, not in a regular NASA lab. They're still assembling the appropriate equipment, so the mirror on a stick is just the first look to see exactly how many hundreds of tupperware boxes they'll need to contain the various fragments...
Put some big springs on the outside, give the copter pilots several chances at catching the damn thing...
Back in the day, Novell Netware 3 & 4 were able to tell if a second server on the same network was installed using the same serial-numbered floppy. A message would come up on both servers saying so. I don't remember if it actually quit working, but it certainly surprised me when I was setting up a new, faster, better server to replace our aging Novell installation.
Why would an Agent bother?? The JPL computers and everything else are figments of the Matrix's imagination - the Matrix would just rewrite history/reality so that the numbers were always correct...
Does the PlanetLab network run on top of the regular Internet, or do they have a completely separate infrastructure??
Any issue I cared about, I'd just talk to my father. He was a County Councillor in East Sussex for many years, culminating in Chairman of the County Council for the full two years allowed, before retiring. As I recall, he made a point of seeing that every letter received a reply. I guess he wasn't as busy as an MP, though... :)