Now could someone please translate this acronym-laden message for those of us who do not happen to have spent their entire lives following this particular mailing list? (Don't get me wrong, of course it's only natural and quite alright for them to develop their own abbreviations and conventions, and no doubt some will already be familiar with them, but how is a wider audience supposed to understand it, this way, taken out of context and posted here?)
Without a truckload of background information, it is hard to figure out how Doug's reply even relates to the parent message by RMS.
RFC 2821 is about the only thing which is referred to in a way that can be looked up without analyzing approximately half of the list archive... but if the intention is to convince the world that M$'s about to do some dastardly deed, and how it could be averted, this information will need to be presented in a much more enlightening and accessible fashion.
captain igor: Why would they deliberately call a missile Satan?
Actually they wouldn't. SS-## and the "S..." names are NATO shorthand from the cold-war era (for obvious reasons, the Soviet Union would rather not offer the specsheets for download at that time). "Russian" designations for the same systems were R-## etc.
cbreaker: Don't you think it's even a little possible that we're the audience they are targeting here?
Not at all, I'm afraid.
In many countries, trademarks expire prematurely if they have been out of use for a while. This sounds like yet another effort to save the PET and VIC trademarks (if they are) as "assets" for their respective holder - and it's not the first time we see this type of thing happening with the "Commodore" brand - surprisingly "low-tech" computer accessories ("concept holders", "CD trays" etc., you get the idea...) with that name as a label have been surfacing in the stores every now and then for years.
If at first this doesn't seem to make any sense when computers haven't been sold under these labels for years, just imagine that company lawyer talking along the lines of "so you can still claim its 'yours', send a cease&desist letter and/or sue e.g. for their earnings 'made by infringement' whoever uses the same or a similar name for some other product in this category."
Astounding how such news breaks on this very day that marks the anniversary of a historic event when another country in a nearby place in Latin America tried to show how imperialism often backfires (even quite literally) on its proponents.
No one would wish for Brazilian politicians to resort to firing squads (where an army of penguins -and lawyers- will do), but this strange coincidence should serve as a surefire warning for emperors of any kind not to defy their companies' destiny by forcing products and business models down someone's throat where entire countries reject them: "You're not welcome here" is a message loud and clear...
Thus the crime is not just about forcing someone to pay money (anymore). So how doesn't purposefully making allegations which are known to be at least partially unfounded (i.e. with respect to some or all of the recipients of these threats), and forcing the victims to expend time, effort (and even still quite possibly money) to prove their innocence fall foul of this definition?
Cheaper ones than the above and the OQO, which are also much more "linuxy" models, are discussed here and most possibly made available by everyone outside Japan mailing their interest to buy one (or more, but with wireless connectivity please;-)) here now.
As it has already been suggested in this thread (albeit somewhat sarcastically), this is the time to let Sharp know now there are markets in the West virtually without competition for quite a while, and a geek population eager to spend some money on what should be their next incarnation of the Zaurus (i.e. in reasonable amounts on reasonably-equipped devices: Who wouldn't want a clamshell version of this Linux machine if it was more easily procurable, and finally came with 802.11g & Bluetooth...). A Slashdot effect from a few hundred thousand potential buyers' eMail (form) requests;-) should just do the trick and get the subject some management attention...
Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.
Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). [...]
Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. [...]
Asterisk not only supports traditional phone equipment, it enhances them with additional capabilities.
Using the Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) Voice over IP protocol, Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seamlessly across disparate networks. While using Packet Voice, it is possible to send data such as URL information and images in-line with voice traffic, allowing advanced integration of information.
Just in case anyone actually likes to read German;-), Asterisk has recently been covered by c't in this article (60 Eurocents).
"AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it."
"I have to give credit where credit is due. Brown got that one completely right."
These lines are just one of many examples why Professor Tanenbaum should not personally try and rebut Ken Brown's statements any longer.
Rather, a visit to the next police station may be appropriate to make sure that (if there is such as thing in their statute books) the prosecution has their criminal defamation lawsuit -and hopefully handcuffs- ready next time Brown dares to visit the Netherlands (or Finland for that matter). Moreover, Professor Tanenbaum's and Torvalds' lawyers might see sufficient grounds to sue for compensation as well... and it's to them that the aggrieved should leave the talking:
According to Professor Tanenbaum's own account, he immediately identified Brown as a clueless individual who had failed to do his homework, and that was within minutes after meeting him. So the idea of Professor Tanenbaum now spending many hours or even days writing rebuttals to Ken Brown as if both of them were holding opposite but equally defendable views e.g. like two researchers involved in a bona fide scientific debate... this only gives Brown undeserved credibility and an opportunity to brag even more about "the most important people talking to me all the time."
To make things worse, replying to Brown misses the point, as from their latest piece of slander at least (even viciously insinuating, in an utterly patronizing tone, that "good" Tanenbaum was some kind of nutty professor, which reminded me of McBride's equally arrogant allegation that Eben Moglen rather than himself was the one who did not know copyright law), it is clear that the Institution does not engage in a discussion at all: As Professor Tanenbaum and others have sadly had to observe, AdTI just continue to uphold their claims even where they have been proven wrong. Rather, they are building a case for an entirely different audience in which their report will be the first and only thing ever read on this subject matter, and believed without hesitation, for among its targetted readers it commands nothing less than the sacrosanct authority of Alexis de Tocqueville (le pauvre tourne dans sa tombe...)!
Pretending that a grown-up discussion with them was possible only gives Brown a chance to assert that every word not expressly rejected had been conceded by his interlocutors. Professor Tanenbaum had to experience this already, so it should come as no surprise if the next Brown communications will be somewhere along the lines "The good professor has immediately acknowledged most of our findings, in particular that pro-Linux developers are rabid zealots."
Shsh... don't you give 'em politicians new ideas!
"Overheard from imaginary Members 1 to 4 of Some Parliament:"
You know, everyone and their Mum at their kitchen table can now write programs that can be used to forge money, so we must outlaw unlicensed development tools immediately!
So that's another good reason for what the representatives of MicScoSoft who invited me for dinner at the Deluxe Grand Hotel last week proposed too? They are saying people abuse these very same tools to siphon their company's IP by creating cancerous leprosy software and spreading it on unsuspecting victims "for free"...
Well, industry could still give compilers to authorized certified developers for a fee, so the measures we propose cannot possibly curtail any legitimate development.
This database should give everyone a good idea whom to elect, and whom to vote out of office ASAP.
The fact that so few people participate in European elections only adds to the weight of your votes.
A reasonably composed European Parliament (which can now veto most of the proposals by Commission and Council) is our best chance for (more) sensible lawmaking in the future.
Playing weird tricks, using millions of moviegoers as guinea pigs...?!
I hope the next time an idea like this starts to shine like a bright strobelight in its inventor's mind, at least they'll have a look at some hardly known websites like these:
While waiting for Windows 95 to come out (and it was already quite late), IBM had a golden opportunity with OS/2. They could have heavily marketed it, sold more copies, and given Miscrosoft something to remember. Instead, they waited until Windows 95 came out, then pushed it when it was too late. IMHO, OS/2 was better than Windows 95.
However, their boss of the era has recently been bragging about his "wisdom" of killing off their superior product (despite resistance and against the advice of those who built it and knew better) in spite of this unique opportunity:
The OS/2 decision created immense emotional distress in the company. Thousands of IBMers of all stripes--technical, marketing, and strategy--had been engaged in this struggle. (...)
My consumer packaged goods background helps me understand the emotional attachment companies have for their products. But the situation is different, and far more intense, in the IT industry. I didn't fully understand this when I came to IBM, but I learned in a hurry when I was thrust into our own religious war--the fight for the desktop superiority, pitting IBM's OS/2 operating system against Microsoft's Windows. (...)
The pro-OS/2 argument was based on technical superiority. I can say without bias that many people outside IBM believed OS/2 was the better product. (...)
What my colleagues seemed unwilling or unable to accept was that the war was already over and was a resounding defeat--90 percent of the market share for Windows to OS/2's 5 percent or 6 percent. (...)
The last gasp was the introduction of a product called OS/2 Warp in 1994, but in my mind the exit strategy was a foregone conclusion. All that remained was to figure out how to withdraw.
(Louis Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, 2002)
The European elections are approaching, which means MEPs might be more willing to listen to our views than normal.
Those who won't listen mustn't ever become MEPs (again). This is what election time next month is all about.
"The geek vote" alone won't make the difference, but never underestimate our ability to educate the electorate: These might be the first European elections in which we have a chance to make our voices heard and convince a significant number of people of our point.
However, at the same time, this might also be our last chance to do so on this level: With the current parliament, we have only narrowly averted an opening of the floodgates for spam, and probably failed to obtain an unequivocal ban on overreaching surveillance; we have seen the EUCD being adopted despite all the damage the DMCA had done, and now there are software patents looming if majorities turn the wrong way. From RFID to biotechnology, a number of issues are emerging which need to be regulated by the knowledgeable.
If we don't get enough awareness into the next European parliament right now, "geekdom as we know it" may not prevail throughout the next legislative period. One of the questions about this generation that I for one don't want to have to answer one day would be this: "Dad, why did you let Linux die?" (...and there are similar ones about the entertainment industry and many other issues!)
Europe in the years to come can be high-tech heaven or harder than hell - the choices are ours, and they are to be made right now.
Precisely at this point in time, we do have the knowledge and the momentum to make almost everyone realise what is at stake, and to do so and achieve considerable coverage before next month's elections. With all the recent incidents making technology headlines even in the general media, and now the patents decision as an even louder wakeup call, people -and journalists in particular- are quite willing to listen to what the computer-savvy -and the "wizards of (FL)OSS" in particular- have to say.
A brief window of opportunity is wide open right now - don't dare to complain later that you "should have" spoken up.
They cannot claim that it wasn't a scenario waiting to happen.
Back in 2000 already, Tom Geller made this statement in a discussion with the EFF:
The saddest part of the spam problem is this: The "technical solutions" you name above already cause
entire nations to be blackholed in thousands of servers around the world. Many postmasters have received only spam from.cn and.kr, so they dump all mail from those TLDs in the trash.
Mind you, it is the Spanish government's explicit duty under EU legislation to stop precisely this situation from happening to all of Europe - this is the very reason why Directive 2002/58/EC was adopted in the first place, and its wording is crystal clear - anything that is not opt-in (with the onus on the sender to prove it) is strictly illegal:
Article 13
Unsolicited communications
1. The use of [...] electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing may only be allowed in respect of subscribers who have given their prior consent.
It was a long hard fight getting this on the statute books almost all across an entire continent - but now, finally, the law is definitely not on the spammers' side.
Blacklists are a bad idea in the first place, but if legitimate eMail gets blocked because a provider fails to fight spam, it is that ISP (rather than the blacklist operators) who deserves all the wrath of its customers.
Sad as the current situation is, combined with the onslaught of Trojan eMail it will hopefully make Spanish businesses and citizens pressure their authorities to enforce a draconian crackdown on the perpetrators - finally treating spammers as the cyber-terrorists they are.
I recall this part of America was still a democracy last time I checked... and while the "geek vote" alone may not make a difference, educating the public about the harm that over-zealous copyright protection has already done (on eitherside of the pond) certainly will.
However, to connect to your network (at more than 56kbps) and play back anything from there, a Dreamcast (unlike the Xbox) will need an optional Broadband or LAN Adapter, still at several times the price of the console itself (if you can point out a cheap source, please do):
Sega.com has discontinued Broadband Adapter distribution. You can buy used ones on eBay, or you can go to Lik-Sang and purchase one for $120.
Moreover, the "Divx" you are referring to seems to be a "Pocket DivX", specifically transcoded to run on less powerful hardware (that could not cope with the full-featured format):
Why does my video and audio skip and or freeze?
A: Again play with the encoding settings... try reducing the video bitrate, decimating by 2 or reduces the audio bitrate down to 22khz mono to avoid these skips. If you have found a magical setting that works GREAT share you findings (...)
The current decoder CORE cannot handle resolutions larger than 496x496. But a bigger issue is that anything higher then that the Dreamcast hardware can not handle (A/V skips). So do not look for any larger resolution anytime soon.
Wondering why another issue is commonly overlooked, though it might justify to shell out even as much as $1400 for a design like this:
Probably much more likely than heatpipes, fans will fail one day, especially if they draw dust and vapors into the PC/server in some environments.
I would not want to be liable for a system that starts a fire rather than powering down after running for a while without cooling, e.g. as it fails to recognise a broken fan a few years down the road.
A case like Zalman's could be dropped at a client's site e.g. even at a petrol plant in the middle of a desert, without having to worry just as much - about travelling a long way for service every now and then, or about potential responsibilities for applying only second-best components which are bound to break in a possibly hazardous way some day.
Not that magically nothing's prone to go wrong anymore at all, but isn't it a good start that due to the absence of fans, you may spare yourself one nightmare?
Microsoft should have considered one further option which is also left to the manufacturers of "formatted blank media" such as USB/CompactFlash/etc. memory:
Of course, just as Microsoft may have assumed, manufacturers could either use FAT and pay up, or sell their media unformatted, in which case the customer needs a M$(-licensed) product to format it to FAT.
However manufacturers will probably want to test an initial write/read cycle, but if (for the sake of quality control) they simply format their media to something else (let's call it FOSFS, the hypothetical Free and Open Source File System;-/, in order not to express any preference for one of the solutions in existence), most customers could not read it and/or would have to reformat it to FAT - with someone owing royalties to M$ as above.
If this has been Microsoft's reasoning, they have neglected to consider another possibility:
On current removable media of 256 megs and up, an entire Linux distribution takes up less than 10% of capacity:
Unless the boot process from USB memory requires more than a rudimentary, non-infringing "allusion to FAT", such media could not just be formatted in an emptyFOSFS, but it might rather be sold with preinstalled software such as this (compiled without FAT support of course):
Cameras etc. could switch to the new FOSFS immediately, for PCs would not need to support it "out of the box", as the removable media itself would actually "be its own driver" (and media viewer, and provide network connectivity, etc.).
In this case, such "not-so-blank media" should certainly bear the penguin logo as a "seal of quality". To justify adding a Creative Commons mark next to it, one could even fill the remaining space with some free and open (motion) pictures and/or audio to be played on first use.
Microsoft itself would have to catch up and release Windows support for the FOSFS before everyone sends and serves pictures from some sort of "USB Linux". If only one major manufacturer of removable memory takes an approach like this, at M$ the employee who came up with that "bright idea" of a FAT license but failed to see this option may have a hard time explaining...
From the book of truly desperate measures to "silence" a PC (without killing it), take a look at this interesting episode (only some images archived - anyone got a mirror?): An entire mainboard was submerged into pure mineral oil, to work silently below the surface of this unconventional computer coolant - which it actually did, and survived...
The movie 23 depicts hacking in this era, and drastically illustrates the issues which could be caused by the size, cooling and power requirements of a full-grown PDP-11.
1) The representatives to the EU are not elected, WRONG therefore are not responsible to you (i.e., the people who pay the bills) WRONG
We DO notice what is going on, it's just that we cannot do anything legal to stop it.
WRONG
I've had this feeling for a long while now, that a revolution is brewing. It's time (again) to take the power back to the people.
Of course the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who are now deciding on the issue of Software Patents do have to worry about being re-elected (cf. Article 190 of the Treaty establishing the European Community: each term is limited to five years).
Neither most of them nor most of their voters may now understand the importance of preventing software patents, but there is one thing to be made clear to the MEPs:
The impact of software patents (and this includes any compromise claiming to avoid them while leaving plenty of loopholes to grant them nonetheless) will be felt by the public at large, and as software patents hurt companies large and small, and force them to eliminate jobs all across Europe, on election day the people will know for sure who made the mistake. Contact as many MEPs as you can right now, with a reasoned statement explaining to them why software patents are bad for you and bad for them. You should also remind the MEPs that despite all the spin-doctoring by the software patents' proponents, software patents are not about protecting intellectual property, but about artificially creating an intellectual property interest in typically trivial, individual steps of software development, which relies on and owes all of its progress to gradual innovation, and about assigning this made-up monopoly interest mostly to foreign megacorporations - to the detriment of everyone else. For this reason, however, it is all the more important not to allow the EPO to grant software patents in the first place, for if thoughts are turned into intellectual property and then people realise that this has been a mistake, there is no cheap and easy fix by simply repealing the law (technically, a software patents directive and its implementations), as this means to disown those who have been granted an unjust proprietary ownership of ideas - i.e. those who received such undeserved gifts will cry for compensation as then what they hold title to has to be taken away from them.
I think it's too late already unless you actually manage to contact your MEP personally by phone. A fax and a letter processing is probably so slow that it won't arrive in time.
You'd be surprised what just 30 metres of protest faxes can do (provided they are reasoned rather than rants, of course)!
Anyway, just days before a similar vote last year, people also lamented about there being "nothing more they could do" in the same way when the EU tried to legalise spam, but then intense popular opposition did help overturn the pro-spam majority at the very last minute, making a solid anti-spam provision part of the Telecommunications Data Protection Directive instead (unfortunately a similar success could not be achieved to eradicate another article which "allows for" data retention, however this is mostly inconsequential though, as trying to implement what the directive tries to permit in this regard is unconstitutional in many Member States anyway).
Therefore, heck, no, it's only too late if we let the proposed Directive get parliamentary assent. On the other hand, the geek crowd will not be forgiven (nor ever forgive itself) if it lets this happen, especially not on the eve of an international conference like the WSIS that aims to make this whole world a better place by promoting our technophile way of life.
To see for yourself that contacting the MEPs directly is possible, follow this link, find a wealth of information regarding the MEPs from your respective country (especially the socialists seem to be reconsidering their support right now) - and then use it.
The European Commission wants to avoid the American situation
...or so they say. In fact, many European politicians do know that allowing software patents and business method patents inevitably leads to countless trivial patents.
You wouldn't believe it, but here is what the Directive's proponents have admitted themselves:
"Arlene McCarthy, chair of the legal affairs committee, said earlier this month she was not prepared to consider any proposals for amendments that do not acknowledge the patentability of software."
In other words, they do want to conjure up a legal framework which
scares even IT industry giants such as SAP, and not just small and medium enterprises, open-source advocates, academics and initiatives such as Attac that are of little importance to those prepared to discard or ignore any arguments made from what is just "the commie corner" in their view of the world. (P.S.: I am posting the google links rather than the direct URLs, for as of this writing, FFII.org itself seems to be unreachable, at this crucial moment in time...)
The plenary vote on the new patents directive will be held within a few days, so please do contact some Members of the European Parliament (rather not just by eMail) right now and tell them that the introduction of software patents is a mistake their voters will never forget, no matter whether it is made knowingly nor out of ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Without a truckload of background information, it is hard to figure out how Doug's reply even relates to the parent message by RMS.
RFC 2821 is about the only thing which is referred to in a way that can be looked up without analyzing approximately half of the list archive... but if the intention is to convince the world that M$'s about to do some dastardly deed, and how it could be averted, this information will need to be presented in a much more enlightening and accessible fashion.
Actually they wouldn't.
SS-## and the "S..." names are NATO shorthand from the cold-war era (for obvious reasons, the Soviet Union would rather not offer the specsheets for download at that time).
"Russian" designations for the same systems were R-## etc.
Not at all, I'm afraid.
In many countries, trademarks expire prematurely if they have been out of use for a while. This sounds like yet another effort to save the PET and VIC trademarks (if they are) as "assets" for their respective holder - and it's not the first time we see this type of thing happening with the "Commodore" brand - surprisingly "low-tech" computer accessories ("concept holders", "CD trays" etc., you get the idea...) with that name as a label have been surfacing in the stores every now and then for years.
If at first this doesn't seem to make any sense when computers haven't been sold under these labels for years, just imagine that company lawyer talking along the lines of "so you can still claim its 'yours', send a cease&desist letter and/or sue e.g. for their earnings 'made by infringement' whoever uses the same or a similar name for some other product in this category."
IMHO there is:
Astounding how such news breaks on this very day that marks the anniversary of a historic event when another country in a nearby place in Latin America tried to show how imperialism often backfires (even quite literally) on its proponents.
No one would wish for Brazilian politicians to resort to firing squads (where an army of penguins -and lawyers- will do), but this strange coincidence should serve as a surefire warning for emperors of any kind not to defy their companies' destiny by forcing products and business models down someone's throat where entire countries reject them:
"You're not welcome here" is a message loud and clear...
Cheaper ones than the above and the OQO, which are also much more "linuxy" models, are discussed here and most possibly made available by everyone outside Japan mailing their interest to buy one (or more, but with wireless connectivity please ;-)) here now.
As it has already been suggested in this thread (albeit somewhat sarcastically), this is the time to let Sharp know now there are markets in the West virtually without competition for quite a while, and a geek population eager to spend some money on what should be their next incarnation of the Zaurus (i.e. in reasonable amounts on reasonably-equipped devices: Who wouldn't want a clamshell version of this Linux machine if it was more easily procurable, and finally came with 802.11g & Bluetooth...). ;-) should just do the trick and get the subject some management attention...
A Slashdot effect from a few hundred thousand potential buyers' eMail (form) requests
"I have to give credit where credit is due. Brown got that one completely right."
These lines are just one of many examples why Professor Tanenbaum should not personally try and rebut Ken Brown's statements any longer. Rather, a visit to the next police station may be appropriate to make sure that (if there is such as thing in their statute books) the prosecution has their criminal defamation lawsuit -and hopefully handcuffs- ready next time Brown dares to visit the Netherlands (or Finland for that matter).
Moreover, Professor Tanenbaum's and Torvalds' lawyers might see sufficient grounds to sue for compensation as well... and it's to them that the aggrieved should leave the talking:
According to Professor Tanenbaum's own account, he immediately identified Brown as a clueless individual who had failed to do his homework, and that was within minutes after meeting him. So the idea of Professor Tanenbaum now spending many hours or even days writing rebuttals to Ken Brown as if both of them were holding opposite but equally defendable views e.g. like two researchers involved in a bona fide scientific debate... this only gives Brown undeserved credibility and an opportunity to brag even more about "the most important people talking to me all the time."
To make things worse, replying to Brown misses the point, as from their latest piece of slander at least (even viciously insinuating, in an utterly patronizing tone, that "good" Tanenbaum was some kind of nutty professor, which reminded me of McBride's equally arrogant allegation that Eben Moglen rather than himself was the one who did not know copyright law), it is clear that the Institution does not engage in a discussion at all: As Professor Tanenbaum and others have sadly had to observe, AdTI just continue to uphold their claims even where they have been proven wrong. Rather, they are building a case for an entirely different audience in which their report will be the first and only thing ever read on this subject matter, and believed without hesitation, for among its targetted readers it commands nothing less than the sacrosanct authority of Alexis de Tocqueville (le pauvre tourne dans sa tombe...)!
Pretending that a grown-up discussion with them was possible only gives Brown a chance to assert that every word not expressly rejected had been conceded by his interlocutors. Professor Tanenbaum had to experience this already, so it should come as no surprise if the next Brown communications will be somewhere along the lines "The good professor has immediately acknowledged most of our findings, in particular that pro-Linux developers are rabid zealots."
Shsh... don't you give 'em politicians new ideas!
"Overheard from imaginary Members 1 to 4 of Some Parliament:"
money-wise, such as banknotes with RFID serial numbers (making anonymous transactions impossible even for cash, plus creating a huge data trail even for innocuous daily purchases, and finally giving robbers the opportunity to single out the most promising victim before aiming their gun or swinging the baseball bat), which seems to scare even the RFID industry itself, and
otherwise, especially with respect to the creation of dangerous additional intellectual property rights (undue powers for copyright holders, and software/business method patents).
This database should give everyone a good idea whom to elect, and whom to vote out of office ASAP.
The fact that so few people participate in European elections only adds to the weight of your votes.
A reasonably composed European Parliament (which can now veto most of the proposals by Commission and Council) is our best chance for (more) sensible lawmaking in the future.
I hope the next time an idea like this starts to shine like a bright strobelight in its inventor's mind, at least they'll have a look at some hardly known websites like these:
However, their boss of the era has recently been bragging about his "wisdom" of killing off their superior product (despite resistance and against the advice of those who built it and knew better) in spite of this unique opportunity:
(Louis Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, 2002)"The geek vote" alone won't make the difference, but never underestimate our ability to educate the electorate: These might be the first European elections in which we have a chance to make our voices heard and convince a significant number of people of our point.
However, at the same time, this might also be our last chance to do so on this level: With the current parliament, we have only narrowly averted an opening of the floodgates for spam, and probably failed to obtain an unequivocal ban on overreaching surveillance; we have seen the EUCD being adopted despite all the damage the DMCA had done, and now there are software patents looming if majorities turn the wrong way. From RFID to biotechnology, a number of issues are emerging which need to be regulated by the knowledgeable.
If we don't get enough awareness into the next European parliament right now, "geekdom as we know it" may not prevail throughout the next legislative period. One of the questions about this generation that I for one don't want to have to answer one day would be this: "Dad, why did you let Linux die?" (...and there are similar ones about the entertainment industry and many other issues!)
Europe in the years to come can be high-tech heaven or harder than hell - the choices are ours, and they are to be made right now.
Precisely at this point in time, we do have the knowledge and the momentum to make almost everyone realise what is at stake, and to do so and achieve considerable coverage before next month's elections. With all the recent incidents making technology headlines even in the general media, and now the patents decision as an even louder wakeup call, people -and journalists in particular- are quite willing to listen to what the computer-savvy -and the "wizards of (FL)OSS" in particular- have to say.
A brief window of opportunity is wide open right now - don't dare to complain later that you "should have" spoken up.
Back in 2000 already, Tom Geller made this statement in a discussion with the EFF: Mind you, it is the Spanish government's explicit duty under EU legislation to stop precisely this situation from happening to all of Europe - this is the very reason why Directive 2002/58/EC was adopted in the first place, and its wording is crystal clear - anything that is not opt-in (with the onus on the sender to prove it) is strictly illegal: It was a long hard fight getting this on the statute books almost all across an entire continent - but now, finally, the law is definitely not on the spammers' side.
Blacklists are a bad idea in the first place, but if legitimate eMail gets blocked because a provider fails to fight spam, it is that ISP (rather than the blacklist operators) who deserves all the wrath of its customers.
Sad as the current situation is, combined with the onslaught of Trojan eMail it will hopefully make Spanish businesses and citizens pressure their authorities to enforce a draconian crackdown on the perpetrators - finally treating spammers as the cyber-terrorists they are.
BTW SaveCanadianLiberties.com (and friends) aren't taken yet AFAICS...
Probably much more likely than heatpipes, fans will fail one day, especially if they draw dust and vapors into the PC/server in some environments.
I would not want to be liable for a system that starts a fire rather than powering down after running for a while without cooling, e.g. as it fails to recognise a broken fan a few years down the road.
A case like Zalman's could be dropped at a client's site e.g. even at a petrol plant in the middle of a desert, without having to worry just as much - about travelling a long way for service every now and then, or about potential responsibilities for applying only second-best components which are bound to break in a possibly hazardous way some day.
Not that magically nothing's prone to go wrong anymore at all, but isn't it a good start that due to the absence of fans, you may spare yourself one nightmare?
Of course, just as Microsoft may have assumed, manufacturers could either use FAT and pay up, or sell their media unformatted, in which case the customer needs a M$(-licensed) product to format it to FAT.
However manufacturers will probably want to test an initial write/read cycle, but if (for the sake of quality control) they simply format their media to something else (let's call it FOSFS, the hypothetical Free and Open Source File System
If this has been Microsoft's reasoning, they have neglected to consider another possibility:
On current removable media of 256 megs and up, an entire Linux distribution takes up less than 10% of capacity:
Unless the boot process from USB memory requires more than a rudimentary, non-infringing "allusion to FAT", such media could not just be formatted in an empty FOSFS, but it might rather be sold with preinstalled software such as this (compiled without FAT support of course): Cameras etc. could switch to the new FOSFS immediately, for PCs would not need to support it "out of the box", as the removable media itself would actually "be its own driver" (and media viewer, and provide network connectivity, etc.).
In this case, such "not-so-blank media" should certainly bear the penguin logo as a "seal of quality".
To justify adding a Creative Commons mark next to it, one could even fill the remaining space with some free and open (motion) pictures and/or audio to be played on first use.
Microsoft itself would have to catch up and release Windows support for the FOSFS before everyone sends and serves pictures from some sort of "USB Linux".
If only one major manufacturer of removable memory takes an approach like this, at M$ the employee who came up with that "bright idea" of a FAT license but failed to see this option may have a hard time explaining...
From the book of truly desperate measures to "silence" a PC (without killing it), take a look at this interesting episode (only some images archived - anyone got a mirror?): An entire mainboard was submerged into pure mineral oil, to work silently below the surface of this unconventional computer coolant - which it actually did, and survived...
The movie 23 depicts hacking in this era, and drastically illustrates the issues which could be caused by the size, cooling and power requirements of a full-grown PDP-11.
WRONG
therefore are not responsible to you (i.e., the people who pay the bills)
WRONG
WRONG
Of course the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who are now deciding on the issue of Software Patents do have to worry about being re-elected (cf. Article 190 of the Treaty establishing the European Community: each term is limited to five years).
Neither most of them nor most of their voters may now understand the importance of preventing software patents, but there is one thing to be made clear to the MEPs:
The impact of software patents (and this includes any compromise claiming to avoid them while leaving plenty of loopholes to grant them nonetheless) will be felt by the public at large, and as software patents hurt companies large and small , and force them to eliminate jobs all across Europe, on election day the people will know for sure who made the mistake.
Contact as many MEPs as you can right now, with a reasoned statement explaining to them why software patents are bad for you and bad for them. You should also remind the MEPs that despite all the spin-doctoring by the software patents' proponents, software patents are not about protecting intellectual property, but about artificially creating an intellectual property interest in typically trivial, individual steps of software development, which relies on and owes all of its progress to gradual innovation, and about assigning this made-up monopoly interest mostly to foreign megacorporations - to the detriment of everyone else. For this reason, however, it is all the more important not to allow the EPO to grant software patents in the first place, for if thoughts are turned into intellectual property and then people realise that this has been a mistake, there is no cheap and easy fix by simply repealing the law (technically, a software patents directive and its implementations), as this means to disown those who have been granted an unjust proprietary ownership of ideas - i.e. those who received such undeserved gifts will cry for compensation as then what they hold title to has to be taken away from them.
You'd be surprised what just 30 metres of protest faxes can do (provided they are reasoned rather than rants, of course)!
Anyway, just days before a similar vote last year, people also lamented about there being "nothing more they could do" in the same way when the EU tried to legalise spam, but then intense popular opposition did help overturn the pro-spam majority at the very last minute, making a solid anti-spam provision part of the Telecommunications Data Protection Directive instead (unfortunately a similar success could not be achieved to eradicate another article which "allows for" data retention, however this is mostly inconsequential though, as trying to implement what the directive tries to permit in this regard is unconstitutional in many Member States anyway).
Therefore, heck, no, it's only too late if we let the proposed Directive get parliamentary assent. On the other hand, the geek crowd will not be forgiven (nor ever forgive itself) if it lets this happen, especially not on the eve of an international conference like the WSIS that aims to make this whole world a better place by promoting our technophile way of life.
To see for yourself that contacting the MEPs directly is possible, follow this link, find a wealth of information regarding the MEPs from your respective country (especially the socialists seem to be reconsidering their support right now) - and then use it.
You wouldn't believe it, but here is what the Directive's proponents have admitted themselves:
"Arlene McCarthy, chair of the legal affairs committee, said earlier this month she was not prepared to consider any proposals for amendments that do not acknowledge the patentability of software."
In other words, they do want to conjure up a legal framework which scares even IT industry giants such as SAP, and not just small and medium enterprises, open-source advocates, academics and initiatives such as Attac that are of little importance to those prepared to discard or ignore any arguments made from what is just "the commie corner" in their view of the world.
(P.S.: I am posting the google links rather than the direct URLs, for as of this writing, FFII.org itself seems to be unreachable, at this crucial moment in time...)
The plenary vote on the new patents directive will be held within a few days, so please do contact some Members of the European Parliament (rather not just by eMail) right now and tell them that the introduction of software patents is a mistake their voters will never forget, no matter whether it is made knowingly nor out of ignorance.
Moreover, there is no need to rush to precedential judgment now, only weeks before the World Summit on the Information Society, which (according to proposals such as these) may well turn on its head overreaching IP laws.