1.2 Mandatory Activation. The license rights granted under this EULA are limited to the first thirty (30) days after you first install the Software unless you supply information required to activate your licensed copy in the manner described during the setup sequence of the Software. You can activate the Software through the use of the Internet or telephone; toll charges may apply.
So they disable the internet activation, and make the telephone activation an expensive call, thus recouping the costs.
7. ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE/SERVICES. This EULA applies to updates, supplements, add-on components, product support services, or Internet-based services components, of the Software that you may obtain from Microsoft after the date you obtain your initial copy of the Software, unless you accept updated terms or another agreement governs. Microsoft reserves the right to discontinue any Internet-based services provided to you or made available to you through the use of the Software.
There's their privilege to disable the Internet-based registration. Heck, there is their privilege to disable _your_ Internet connection. Maybe in 2014, the Windows IP stack stops working (hmm, that's one way to stop the botnets...)
Got to back that up. Babbage always gave credit to Jacquard for the idea (of using cards), but his personal spin on it was to make it general purpose - to solve any problem that could be expressed in the form of an algorithm.
That's the power of the computer - the fact that it is general purpose, not single purpose.
FWIW Jacquard got the idea of using cards to control looms from earlier mechanised looms that used cylinders with raised dots - which in turn came from mechanical music organs.
How can you grade on a curve and have an average of 7 out of 100? The whole point of grading on a curve is that the average clusters around 50%, so that the outliers (the As and Fs) are more exceptional.
(Oh, and why would you grade on a curve? Consider, say, an engineering exam, where the pass mark might be as high as 90% - grading on a curve ensures that the people who get 98-100% stand out compared to the ones who get 90-92%, and that the ones who fail dismally with as low as 85% are highlighted)
It's because the fans of the team would get really pissed off and vote against the city management that allowed the team to leave, of course. (Well, that and the money flowing behind the scenes).
Politicans do tend to listen to _their_ voters - at least enough to keep their votes.
You want that sort of stuff to stop, you need to get the majority of people who don't attend the games to be willing to stake a vote on it.
Well, it's not just for funnelling money into the congresscritter's own district. The really bad cases are like the one I hinted at - Representative Don Young of Alaska who allocated $10 million to a bridge in Florida, which was opposed by the representative for the district, and was inserted after the bill was approved by the House and Senate, but before it got signed by President Bush.
The language within the earmark was changed during a process called "bill enrollment," when technical corrections such as changes in punctuation are made to legislation before it is sent to the President
Young did this shortly after a real estate developer in Florida gave him $40,000.
In a slightly more conventional case, Young also got funding allocated, via an earmark, for a bridge about the size of the Golden Gate Bridge to connect an island with a population of 80 to the mainland; this funding (about $300 million) was de-funded explicitly in yet-another-piece-of-legislation.
He also once told John McCain that Hurricane Katrina victims could "kiss my ear!".
Note that almost every other parliamentary system has lawmakers voting on the final draft, with no room for "technical corrections" once it's approved.
I'm not trying to be self-righteous - I'm just pointing out that eliminating parts of the government that are prone to corruption (your simple solution) is far from simple in practice. Lessig isn't standing on a corner bitching about how government should be wiped out - he's actively trying to push a solution that (in his mind) has a chance of working.
If the problem was simple, it would have been corrected long ago. It's an extremely complex problem.
An earmark is this crazy system the Americans have for tacking supplementary pieces of legislation in. For example - let's say there's this important piece of legislation for, say, feeding starving babies. It's bound to get through - no question. So some congresscritter from Alaska says "I'll vote for this, but I'm adding this clause where we also give $500million to build a bridge in Florida". If the bill passes, so does the addition - the earmark.
It's a tad more complicated than that, but that's the general gist; US politicans can append stuff to legislation (in some cases, after it's already been voted on!) and there is no easy way to get it taken out, but the bill is still needed, so the whole tainted package gets through.
How the US ever came up with such a wacky system I don't know...
Lessig acknowledges that the goal is to get to a smaller government; it's even in the article. He pointed out, quite correctly, that the current structure won't get you to a smaller government, and is trying to change the structure.
As for your "simple solution" - how exactly do you plan to "eliminate that part of the government"? Which seat are you running for again?
a) It's in the FA - about 1.6GB per PST file. Above that, you risk corruption of indexes, which makes reliable retrieval hard to impossible (not least because emails, like all of MS's file formats, get broken up into pieces and shoved where they fit)
b) It is terabytes of email - about 10TB, actually. (5000 archives @ 2GB each). Email doesn't have to be small.
Oh, it's definitely Real Property. Look at patents - they literally were a grant from the Crown giving you exclusive rights to develop an idea, just as a land grant gave you exclusive rights to develop land.
Copyrights, in the European model, were also a grant from the Crown. Just like Real Estate.
The US, when they finally started to produce a volume of creative content, decided they needed to recognise copyright (as opposed to just ripping off European copyrighted material whenever they wanted). They adopted a model similar to the European one.
Here's the big difference between personal property and real estate (and "intellectual property") - personal property defaults to being owned, and needs no special legislation to indicate it is owned. Real estate defaults to being communal with government regulations, and intellectual property is the same. Remember - when the copyright expires, the work goes back to the public domain.
The fact that the Discovery Institute is full of scientists with Ph.Ds does not mean that there is a controversy in scientific circles about evolution. Case in point: "Guillermo Gonzalez was a professor of Astronomy" - an astronomer doesn't get to weigh in on how biological evolution does or does not work; he lacks the credentials. (Though he could weigh in on star formation theories, and other astronomical phenomenon).
IIRC the Discovery Institute has, like, 2 biologists on staff, one of whom deliberately went into the field of biology in order to challenge evolution. The other had an interesting write up in the NYTimes, I think, where he said that his biology education forced him to have a crisis of faith - everything he was learning as a scientist was contradicting his faith, and in the end he decided to ditch his belief in science and evidence to keep to his faith beliefs. Contrawise, there are numerous examples of biologists who had similar crisis's of faith and came down on the side of a less fundamentalist belief.
Being a "scientist" isn't enough to weigh in to the scientific debate - your field of research must be relevant.
More to the point - there is a public API that can give the same effect (which is used in Firefox 3). Yes, it turns out that WebKit has a similar, but different method - but it's not an advantage that's just for WebKit.
The FTA even makes it clear - FF3 got the speed advantage they wanted, using the public API. The FTA even has an addition making it clear that the Slashdot article is taking the wrong slant. 'nuff sad.
Not knowing how that information was used, it's hard to say. OTH, if, say, his opponent was portraying him as being disorganised and incompetent, having the fact that you can't even keep track of when to pay your gas bill may be yet another nail in the coffin. Certainly, a good attack campaign could take that information and run with it.
We followers of his Divine Noodleness have no need to take revenge when infidels diss our faith. He has the power to avenge himself, and will cheerfully cause your plate of pasta to fall into your lap - while you are wearing your best suit - because you are interviewing for your dream job later that day.
Nor will avoiding pasta spare your the wrath of his Divine Noodleness; it will merely cause waiters in restaurants to become very clumsy.
The reason followers of false religions take it upon themselves to wreak vengeance is because they know their non-existent deity isn't up to the job at hand.
Actually, any interplanetary travel is going to require constant acceleration. If you can even pull off microgravity thrust, you can bring down the travel time to the planets to a few months. The trick is to do it without rockets.
For my money, look for light sails, or ion drives. Ion drives are more economic, mass wise, than rockets because the ions go out so much faster than rocket exhaust. Momentum transfer is linear with exhaust velocity, so you get much more acceleration. The catch is you need so much more energy.
Sending stuff from the Moon wouldn't be expensive at all - it would be practically free. Yes, it would require energy, but any possible space settlement (esp. a lunar one) is going to be extremely energy rich.
I personally believe a self-sustaining Lunar colony would not be impossible. It would need a hell of a push to get going, but you could build a colony within, say, 50 years that does not require support from Earth. Food? Grow it, using hydro farms, processed lunar soil, recycled wastes, and so on. Clothing? Make it - synthetics, probably. Manufactured goods? Automated factories.
Asteroids have one big problem - lack of space. Things like solar energy require space to give you the huge energy resources needed to make space viable.
Both the UK and Australia do hand-counting. All votes are piled up in stacks of 100, verified by other people, and then the stacks of 100 are counted. In Australia, we even pull this off with our preferential voting system.
We know who the winning political party (and thus the Prime Minister) on the night. Sure, some seats take a while, as postal votes have to come in, and the last 1/6th of the Senate takes a while to become known, but the raw figures are known on the night, and the delay for the final numbers is purely to allow for postal votes.
The UK, with 3 times our population, gets it done in one night as well. The nice thing about having more people is you can bring more people in to count. Mind you, their "first-past-the-post" system is easier to count.
The US could easily do hand-counted votes. You will still know the main numbers (President, Congress, Senate) on the night, before the Hawaiians have finished voting. You may have to wait a day or two to find out who was elected dog-catcher, but I think you can live with that.
I'd claim "unsuitable for purpose" and not pay. Except (and I'm sure this is the case...): Maryland probably borrowed money to pay for the system, Diebold has already been given their money and won't give it back, and the creditors don't care how the money was spent.
*yawn* I can tell if you're an American or not within a few minutes of passive observation. The same amount of time would give me a good determination of whether you're worth robbing, or killing, etc. Ransom value would take time, but heck, why not just kidnap you and ask you those questions in private?
The $45 card will be optional and cannot be used for air travel. Travelers can opt for a more secure, if more costly, e-passport that costs $97 and contains a radio frequency chip that can only be read at a distance of three inches. Privacy and security experts said the new passport cards that transmit information over longer distances are much less secure.
Also in the FA it is stated that all that is contained is the passport number - presumably the rest of the details get looked up.
So, here we have a card that: a) costs still more money. b) can't be used at airports (just land and sea border crossings) c) can't identify you to random strangers - they'll need access to the US passport database.
So the point of this is that when you're driving across the border from Canada, they've verified your passport details while you wait in the queue, then all they do is take a look at you and send you through to customs.
Of course, this same thing could be done by having a second checkpoint to do the Q&A stuff.
Now, can we please take all the comments about lines at the airport out of the discussion?
There have been four recorded incidents of hijacking for the purposes of crashing the plane (and killing everyone on board) - all in the 9/11 2001 attack. There have been numerous incidents of hijacking for the purpose of using the passengers as hostages.
In the majority of hostage scenarios, the majority of passengers get away safely.
Now consider what would happen if there were a couple of dozen armed passengers (not law enforcement officials) on a plane. First, the hijackers would be well aware of the preponderance of armed travellers. So, when they act as a group, probably the first thing they will do is take several hostages immediately - probably women and children. These hostages would be used human-shield. The hostages would also be physically separated on the plane. There's also a good chance that the hijackers would have smuggled explosives on board, with a dead-man switch. (Hey, if you can get ammo on board, you can get explosives)
The hijackers would quickly move to secure the cockpit - those nice modern armoured doors are great, but how likely is it that the captain will hold up if the hijackers threaten to kill a child? Especially if they make it clear that they don't intend to crash the plane (e.g. by letting the captain fly the plane to the destination, or even radioing for help)?
Now, in the middle of all this, some macho idiot is going to pull his concealed pop-shooter and try to take out the few hijackers he can see. Odds are it's going to be a solo action, or at best poorly coordinated. The hijackers, who would have moved to establish clear fields of fire in the first few seconds, are going to shoot to kill anyone making a sudden move. So the first guy to do this is, at best, going to be a diversion at the cost of his life.
Maybe this triggers a dozen or so other passengers to take action. The resulting fire-fight would leave the dozen or so other passengers dead, with a few hijackers taken down. They'd probably also kill a number of bystanders. Way to go, guys.
All this, of course, assumes that there is no serious damage done to the plane in all this. Yes, a bullet isn't going to blow a large hole in the side of the plane. But it could rupture the hydraulics, or control lines, or the fuel tank, or hit the turbine engines. Not likely, but sure as hell possible.
Remember: most terrorist groups are reasonably well-trained, and very dedicated. They aren't stupid, and don't attempt missions that have no chance of success. All putting lots of guns on a plane is going to do is get people killed in the event of a hijacking.
*sigh* Try RTFAing for a change... the helicopter pilot and observer traced the visible-light beam (by the backscatter) back to the house of the defendants. A subsequent search (with warrant) found the green laser pointer. The couple then admitted that they were using it on the night in question.
About the only question left for the court is did the couple shine it at the helicopter directly (in which case it was an intentional attack), or were they shining it in the sky and were just careless.
Yeah, if you used it in an open area, the cops might have more problems. OTH, it was a police helicopter, which are used to chase down suspects all the time.
"Officer, my husband never came home from work yesterday - I want to lodge a missing person's report" "Sorry ma'am, he's not missing." "Then where is he?" "Sorry ma'am, I'm not allowed to say. That information has been restricted for privacy reasons. Oh, and it looks like he never got around to consenting that you could access his private information in regards to dealing with local law enforcement."
Yeah, like that would bloody work.
Arrests are public for the good of society - so that the government can't just lock people up and not admit to it. The individual's private need is outweighed by the need to see that the government isn't abusing its authority.
Slashdot Mirror
So they disable the internet activation, and make the telephone activation an expensive call, thus recouping the costs.
There's their privilege to disable the Internet-based registration. Heck, there is their privilege to disable _your_ Internet connection. Maybe in 2014, the Windows IP stack stops working (hmm, that's one way to stop the botnets...)
Got to back that up. Babbage always gave credit to Jacquard for the idea (of using cards), but his personal spin on it was to make it general purpose - to solve any problem that could be expressed in the form of an algorithm.
That's the power of the computer - the fact that it is general purpose, not single purpose.
FWIW Jacquard got the idea of using cards to control looms from earlier mechanised looms that used cylinders with raised dots - which in turn came from mechanical music organs.
How can you grade on a curve and have an average of 7 out of 100? The whole point of grading on a curve is that the average clusters around 50%, so that the outliers (the As and Fs) are more exceptional.
(Oh, and why would you grade on a curve? Consider, say, an engineering exam, where the pass mark might be as high as 90% - grading on a curve ensures that the people who get 98-100% stand out compared to the ones who get 90-92%, and that the ones who fail dismally with as low as 85% are highlighted)
It's because the fans of the team would get really pissed off and vote against the city management that allowed the team to leave, of course. (Well, that and the money flowing behind the scenes).
Politicans do tend to listen to _their_ voters - at least enough to keep their votes.
You want that sort of stuff to stop, you need to get the majority of people who don't attend the games to be willing to stake a vote on it.
No the performers tend to be screwed more than the songwriters (with the exception of the celebrity performers like Britney).
In a typical band, for example, the songwriter would get a lot more than the rest.
I'm not trying to be self-righteous - I'm just pointing out that eliminating parts of the government that are prone to corruption (your simple solution) is far from simple in practice. Lessig isn't standing on a corner bitching about how government should be wiped out - he's actively trying to push a solution that (in his mind) has a chance of working.
If the problem was simple, it would have been corrected long ago. It's an extremely complex problem.
An earmark is this crazy system the Americans have for tacking supplementary pieces of legislation in. For example - let's say there's this important piece of legislation for, say, feeding starving babies. It's bound to get through - no question. So some congresscritter from Alaska says "I'll vote for this, but I'm adding this clause where we also give $500million to build a bridge in Florida". If the bill passes, so does the addition - the earmark.
It's a tad more complicated than that, but that's the general gist; US politicans can append stuff to legislation (in some cases, after it's already been voted on!) and there is no easy way to get it taken out, but the bill is still needed, so the whole tainted package gets through.
How the US ever came up with such a wacky system I don't know...
Lessig acknowledges that the goal is to get to a smaller government; it's even in the article. He pointed out, quite correctly, that the current structure won't get you to a smaller government, and is trying to change the structure.
As for your "simple solution" - how exactly do you plan to "eliminate that part of the government"? Which seat are you running for again?
a) It's in the FA - about 1.6GB per PST file. Above that, you risk corruption of indexes, which makes reliable retrieval hard to impossible (not least because emails, like all of MS's file formats, get broken up into pieces and shoved where they fit)
b) It is terabytes of email - about 10TB, actually. (5000 archives @ 2GB each). Email doesn't have to be small.
Oh, it's definitely Real Property. Look at patents - they literally were a grant from the Crown giving you exclusive rights to develop an idea, just as a land grant gave you exclusive rights to develop land.
Copyrights, in the European model, were also a grant from the Crown. Just like Real Estate.
The US, when they finally started to produce a volume of creative content, decided they needed to recognise copyright (as opposed to just ripping off European copyrighted material whenever they wanted). They adopted a model similar to the European one.
Here's the big difference between personal property and real estate (and "intellectual property") - personal property defaults to being owned, and needs no special legislation to indicate it is owned. Real estate defaults to being communal with government regulations, and intellectual property is the same. Remember - when the copyright expires, the work goes back to the public domain.
The fact that the Discovery Institute is full of scientists with Ph.Ds does not mean that there is a controversy in scientific circles about evolution. Case in point: "Guillermo Gonzalez was a professor of Astronomy" - an astronomer doesn't get to weigh in on how biological evolution does or does not work; he lacks the credentials. (Though he could weigh in on star formation theories, and other astronomical phenomenon).
IIRC the Discovery Institute has, like, 2 biologists on staff, one of whom deliberately went into the field of biology in order to challenge evolution. The other had an interesting write up in the NYTimes, I think, where he said that his biology education forced him to have a crisis of faith - everything he was learning as a scientist was contradicting his faith, and in the end he decided to ditch his belief in science and evidence to keep to his faith beliefs. Contrawise, there are numerous examples of biologists who had similar crisis's of faith and came down on the side of a less fundamentalist belief.
Being a "scientist" isn't enough to weigh in to the scientific debate - your field of research must be relevant.
More to the point - there is a public API that can give the same effect (which is used in Firefox 3). Yes, it turns out that WebKit has a similar, but different method - but it's not an advantage that's just for WebKit.
The FTA even makes it clear - FF3 got the speed advantage they wanted, using the public API. The FTA even has an addition making it clear that the Slashdot article is taking the wrong slant. 'nuff sad.
Not knowing how that information was used, it's hard to say. OTH, if, say, his opponent was portraying him as being disorganised and incompetent, having the fact that you can't even keep track of when to pay your gas bill may be yet another nail in the coffin. Certainly, a good attack campaign could take that information and run with it.
We followers of his Divine Noodleness have no need to take revenge when infidels diss our faith. He has the power to avenge himself, and will cheerfully cause your plate of pasta to fall into your lap - while you are wearing your best suit - because you are interviewing for your dream job later that day.
Nor will avoiding pasta spare your the wrath of his Divine Noodleness; it will merely cause waiters in restaurants to become very clumsy.
The reason followers of false religions take it upon themselves to wreak vengeance is because they know their non-existent deity isn't up to the job at hand.
The first two got cut because an Egyptian port started ordering ships to anchor-at-sea in a new area - one which the cables passed through.
It's not that ship anchors have become more dangerous, it's that humans have become more careless.
Actually, any interplanetary travel is going to require constant acceleration. If you can even pull off microgravity thrust, you can bring down the travel time to the planets to a few months. The trick is to do it without rockets.
For my money, look for light sails, or ion drives. Ion drives are more economic, mass wise, than rockets because the ions go out so much faster than rocket exhaust. Momentum transfer is linear with exhaust velocity, so you get much more acceleration. The catch is you need so much more energy.
Sending stuff from the Moon wouldn't be expensive at all - it would be practically free. Yes, it would require energy, but any possible space settlement (esp. a lunar one) is going to be extremely energy rich.
I personally believe a self-sustaining Lunar colony would not be impossible. It would need a hell of a push to get going, but you could build a colony within, say, 50 years that does not require support from Earth. Food? Grow it, using hydro farms, processed lunar soil, recycled wastes, and so on. Clothing? Make it - synthetics, probably. Manufactured goods? Automated factories.
Asteroids have one big problem - lack of space. Things like solar energy require space to give you the huge energy resources needed to make space viable.
Both the UK and Australia do hand-counting. All votes are piled up in stacks of 100, verified by other people, and then the stacks of 100 are counted. In Australia, we even pull this off with our preferential voting system.
We know who the winning political party (and thus the Prime Minister) on the night. Sure, some seats take a while, as postal votes have to come in, and the last 1/6th of the Senate takes a while to become known, but the raw figures are known on the night, and the delay for the final numbers is purely to allow for postal votes.
The UK, with 3 times our population, gets it done in one night as well. The nice thing about having more people is you can bring more people in to count. Mind you, their "first-past-the-post" system is easier to count.
The US could easily do hand-counted votes. You will still know the main numbers (President, Congress, Senate) on the night, before the Hawaiians have finished voting. You may have to wait a day or two to find out who was elected dog-catcher, but I think you can live with that.
I'd claim "unsuitable for purpose" and not pay. Except (and I'm sure this is the case...): Maryland probably borrowed money to pay for the system, Diebold has already been given their money and won't give it back, and the creditors don't care how the money was spent.
*yawn* I can tell if you're an American or not within a few minutes of passive observation. The same amount of time would give me a good determination of whether you're worth robbing, or killing, etc. Ransom value would take time, but heck, why not just kidnap you and ask you those questions in private?
In other words - this doesn't increase risk.
Also in the FA it is stated that all that is contained is the passport number - presumably the rest of the details get looked up.
So, here we have a card that:
a) costs still more money.
b) can't be used at airports (just land and sea border crossings)
c) can't identify you to random strangers - they'll need access to the US passport database.
So the point of this is that when you're driving across the border from Canada, they've verified your passport details while you wait in the queue, then all they do is take a look at you and send you through to customs.
Of course, this same thing could be done by having a second checkpoint to do the Q&A stuff.
Now, can we please take all the comments about lines at the airport out of the discussion?
There have been four recorded incidents of hijacking for the purposes of crashing the plane (and killing everyone on board) - all in the 9/11 2001 attack. There have been numerous incidents of hijacking for the purpose of using the passengers as hostages.
In the majority of hostage scenarios, the majority of passengers get away safely.
Now consider what would happen if there were a couple of dozen armed passengers (not law enforcement officials) on a plane. First, the hijackers would be well aware of the preponderance of armed travellers. So, when they act as a group, probably the first thing they will do is take several hostages immediately - probably women and children. These hostages would be used human-shield. The hostages would also be physically separated on the plane. There's also a good chance that the hijackers would have smuggled explosives on board, with a dead-man switch. (Hey, if you can get ammo on board, you can get explosives)
The hijackers would quickly move to secure the cockpit - those nice modern armoured doors are great, but how likely is it that the captain will hold up if the hijackers threaten to kill a child? Especially if they make it clear that they don't intend to crash the plane (e.g. by letting the captain fly the plane to the destination, or even radioing for help)?
Now, in the middle of all this, some macho idiot is going to pull his concealed pop-shooter and try to take out the few hijackers he can see. Odds are it's going to be a solo action, or at best poorly coordinated. The hijackers, who would have moved to establish clear fields of fire in the first few seconds, are going to shoot to kill anyone making a sudden move. So the first guy to do this is, at best, going to be a diversion at the cost of his life.
Maybe this triggers a dozen or so other passengers to take action. The resulting fire-fight would leave the dozen or so other passengers dead, with a few hijackers taken down. They'd probably also kill a number of bystanders. Way to go, guys.
All this, of course, assumes that there is no serious damage done to the plane in all this. Yes, a bullet isn't going to blow a large hole in the side of the plane. But it could rupture the hydraulics, or control lines, or the fuel tank, or hit the turbine engines. Not likely, but sure as hell possible.
Remember: most terrorist groups are reasonably well-trained, and very dedicated. They aren't stupid, and don't attempt missions that have no chance of success. All putting lots of guns on a plane is going to do is get people killed in the event of a hijacking.
*sigh* Try RTFAing for a change... the helicopter pilot and observer traced the visible-light beam (by the backscatter) back to the house of the defendants. A subsequent search (with warrant) found the green laser pointer. The couple then admitted that they were using it on the night in question.
About the only question left for the court is did the couple shine it at the helicopter directly (in which case it was an intentional attack), or were they shining it in the sky and were just careless.
Yeah, if you used it in an open area, the cops might have more problems. OTH, it was a police helicopter, which are used to chase down suspects all the time.
Ummm... you want arrest records sealed?
"Officer, my husband never came home from work yesterday - I want to lodge a missing person's report"
"Sorry ma'am, he's not missing."
"Then where is he?"
"Sorry ma'am, I'm not allowed to say. That information has been restricted for privacy reasons. Oh, and it looks like he never got around to consenting that you could access his private information in regards to dealing with local law enforcement."
Yeah, like that would bloody work.
Arrests are public for the good of society - so that the government can't just lock people up and not admit to it. The individual's private need is outweighed by the need to see that the government isn't abusing its authority.
Oh, wait... you're American, right?