I don't think you quite understand the situation here. Linux on the desktop was a hobbyist project until very recently. Hobbyist projects rarely amount to much: good programmers usually don't have a whole lot of spare time. Novell and Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth started pushing desktop Linux a couple of years ago, and it's already made tremendous gains. Linux is certainly pretty successful on the server, which is where 98% of the development effort was going. IBM and Redhat don't care about the desktop; they needed a server operating system, and they were quite successful at creating it.
The fact is, open-source is a highly efficient way to collaboratively develop software. It is a great framework for collaboration on a corporate level: it's simple and lightweight, with no complicated corporate agreements and resulting conflicts of interest. This is what Google is trying to accomplish here. If a few of the major 5-10 handset vendors gets serious and hires a few developers to push this platform along, it will quickly surpass anything Microsoft or Symbian can come up with, simply because the handset vendors know how to make phones and Microsoft doesn't. Google is just trying to kick-start the process.
Thousands of dollars? 32" TVs have been at the $500 price point for a while now, and 37" ones are under $900. There is no real difference between brands anymore, since it's all cheap made-in-china shit. It's a very different situation from what it was a few years ago, when the cheapest shittiest HDTV set cost well over $1000.
I have a $900 viewsonic TV I got a while back. I sure as hell am not going to spend more than $200 on a player; probably closer to $150. Whoever hits that pricepoint first with a quality product will pretty much win the format war.
The question that keeps nagging me now, though, is, whether this is the only incident. Or rather, what if there're more "proofs" out there that are actually none? The way research works, we rely on proven concepts to build our own research on top of it. What if our foundations are shaky? Does anyone actually test old theorems that were proven (or falsified)?
There is no point in doing that. If you can build a large self-consistent mathematical structure on a basis of some results, especially a structure that is useful, it is a positive result. If a foundational theorem was wrong, you would not have been able to build anything on top of it -- soon you would run into an inconsistency, an absurdity, and you would see that something is wrong. If an assumption does not result in an absurdity, then it's perfectly valid to build mathematical structures on top of it; in fact, that is how many areas of mathematics got created. People either found that a certain axiom could be removed, or that additional assumptions opened up interesting and nontrivial possibilities.
From a mathematical point of view, it is completely irrelevant what the resolution of vinyl actually is. You mainly care about the SNR and the bandwidth. The bandwidth is limited by our hearing range (20Hz - 20kHz). The SNR of a CD is much higher than that of a record, although it's not fair to compare the two directly (vinyl noise is mostly uncorrelated noise which is acoustically tolerable, while digital quantization "noise" is strongly signal-dependent and sounds nasty). However, if the CD quantization noise is, say, 20dB below the vinyl noise floor, you can confidently say that the digital recording actually holds more information than the analog vinyl medium.
First, it is completely irrelevant how the drive disappeared, so long as that happened before you buy the item. This is Best Buy's problem -- not the manufacturer's, or anyone else's. Second, you shouldn't have to prove anything -- as long as you are willing to sign a police report or an affadavit of some sort. In court, sworn testimony is considered the best kind of evidence.
In this situation, I would call the police department. This is simple theft by deception (on Best Buy's part). I would also dispute the transaction with the credit card company. While someone certainly scammed Best Buy, that does not give them the right to scam you. Opening up the package and inspecting it is not the answer. Even if you remove the drive from the antistatic packaging and compare serial numbers, a scammer could potentially take an older drive, remove the labels, and print counterfeit new ones. It is not that difficult to find a thermal label printer.
This is also why it's a much better idea to buy these items online. Online retailers generally have much stricter return policies, and you are much less likely to get someone's broken drive. In fact, I see no justification whatsoever for having a return policy for non-defective items, especially delicate electronic components. This is also Best Buy and Western Digital's fault for not having appropriate tamper-proof packaging for their products. The older plastic bubble packs they used were annoying to open, but would have prevented this situation.
I think that's a really big deal, considering 1) that most ipods only last 12-18 months due to battery problems and it's simply not economic to bother getting them replaced (with either genuine or 3rd party parts),
What? My ipod is 2.5 years old, and the battery still performs like new. The expected lifetime for this kind of product is 3-4 years. I think the battery is perfectly adequate. Making the battery replaceable would have made the ipod/iphone uglier, thicker, and more expensive. Besides, replacement OEM batteries are usually $40-$50 bucks. It costs $65 to have apple replace the battery in an ipod, and there's other services that will do it for even less. A replaceable battery saves you very little money.
OK, you are kinda right, but an error correcting code certainly doesn't "guess" what the most likely symbol is. An ECC adds redundant data to the signal, so that a word can be perfectly reconstructed if N of the bits are wrong. Assuming your bit error rate is less than N, the algorithm will always reconstruct the word correctly.
99% of the power conditioning market is indeed bullshit. But 1% is not. In pro audio we use balanced power for some applications. 2 60 volt sources, 180 degrees different in phase to the normal "hot" and "neutral". The same system is used in submarines to reduce the electromagnetic signnature. This can reduce the noise floor of the connected equipment as much as 20 db. Measurable, not snake oil.
Uh, bullshit. The reason it reduced your "noise floor" (actually level of 60Hz hum, it's not the same thing) is because you removed a ground loop somewhere. You can do the same exact thing by disconnecting the safety ground, inserting an isolation transformer in the audio path, using balanced connections, or plugging things into the same outlet. There is no difference from an electrical standpoint between "balanced power" and the normal way of connecting things except for what you call "ground". Grounding is complicated, but grounding problems can be solved much more cheaply than investing in expensive "power conditioners" (which may not even solve the problem). I'm not saying it's a bad idea to buy a line filter, but a good one shouldn't cost more than $50 or so retail. An isolation transformer is a waste of money.
Actually, digital cables are a bit more sensitive than, say, speaker cables. SPDIF is a pretty shitty standard, and cable quality can make a small difference. Granted, you don't need anything better than a composite video cable for SPDIF (75 ohm impedance). But if you use a cheapo audio lead, it will work, but it can cause some problems with edges, which would increase your clock jitter. I doubt it will be audible, but it's certainly measurable. This happens because SPDIF carries a sample clock multiplexed with the digital data, and jitter on the sample clock translates directly to signal distortion when you run it through a DAC. The amount of jitter is highly dependent on the DAC architecture and the clock recovery circuit, but it's certainly there and it does cause distortion. Whether it's audible is an open question.
There are no such concerns with HDMI (you don't care about distortion) or speaker cables (very low parasitics). Line-level audio cables can sometimes cause high frequency rolloff (if they have too much capacitance), but that's not a function of cost. Analog video cables, on the other hand, have a large effect on video quality -- a good video cable needs to have a very good impedance match, low loss, and flat frequency response. But you can easily see the effects from that on a test pattern -- a good cable will have less ghosting and sharper edges than a cheap one. This still doesn't mean Monster Cable is worth the money -- I get perfectly good results using fairly cheap component cables, they just use proper RG6 coax instead of cheap shielded wire.
OK, maybe "incompetent" was a poor choice of words. "Corrupt" or "dishonest" would be more accurate phrases. The thing is, I've met plenty of people that support Bush, but might agree that his administration is dishonest and/or corrupt. My point is, this phenomenon is not limited to China. People respect authority figures even after they manage to discredit themselves.
I think your post is quite silly. Think about this: a human operator can generally tell spam from non-spam with 100% accuracy and zero false positives. This means the problem is possible to solve. The real question is how to do it easily and efficiently, and this is where the real problem starts. Most of today's approaches are simplistic and, thus, unreliable. This doesn't mean a good approach is impossible to implement. With some tuning, a basic SpamAssassin setup can be quite good -- I get about 130 spams a day; on average, only 1 or 2 get through the filter, and I've never had a false positive. If tuning and heuristic generation could be done automatically, it would probably perform even better.
If you have so much trouble understanding this stuff, then just look at the US. How many people voted to re-elect Bush, even after seeing how incompetent he was? You don't think it's the same phenomenon?
Considering that the entire purpose of the space station from NASA's perspective was to find something for the Shuttle to do, this is entirely expected. Not to mention, the reason Russia wants to keep it operating is so they can send more space tourists up there (which, I would say, is a much better endeavor than NASA's pointless "what if we do X in space" experiments/busywork).
Not to mention, Apple's margins are actually quite slim there. I used to work for a company that made telecom equipment. They were a very low-cost supplier; even then, their bill of materials on any given product rarely exceeded 20% of the price. After all, they aren't selling a bag of parts. They are selling a product that costs real money to design, assemble, program, sell, support, and service. Profit only comes after all that.
I think people generally talk about dollars when they say "millionaire", even in foreign countries. Even then, the guy apparently makes something like $200k/year and doesn't spend any of it since he's too busy playing starcraft. Really sounds like a shitty way to go. You can make more money than that driving a truck if you are willing to devote your entire waking hours to work, and I think it would be far more fun than playing starcraft for 13 hours a day for a few years.
Tasers are quite safe, and are very useful. First, they protect police officers from getting injured. Second, they are quite effective at subduing criminals. Third, they teach whiny douchebags like this guy a painful lesson.
I am not sure why you think the guy was subjected to some undue risk. We aren't talking about nightsticks, plastic bullets, or pepper spray, all of which can actually injure people. A small electric zap on the skin surface is about as safe as you are going to get, and it's unpleasant enough to actually be effective.
Oh, come on. The guy was trying to be a disruptive douchebag. You can tell just from all the commotion he created as he was removed by the cops. It's one thing to ask a legitimate question. The guy launched into an incredibly long, whiny, and disrespectful tirade with no end in sight, and then resisted attempts to remove him, effectively disrupting the entire event. Free speech and hooliganism are quite different concepts, and you seem to be unable to distinguish between them.
Eh? How exactly does the GPL help you with this? If anything, the BSD license is the worst at it. For a great example of this, take a look at SPICE, the circuit simulator. There are literally dozens of different commercial versions of it, selling for a lot of money, but the free version is ancient and practically worthless. I'm sure if it was GPLed to begin with, it would have been a lot more useful now.
First, the only person who can say whether or not something qualifies as a derivative work is a judge. You can't possibly say whether or not something is "significant enough". If you add one single line of code, it might be a derivative work. Besides, you can always add the GPL to a code file, since the original license does not prohibit that.
I doubt that is the case. The file is not encrypted; it's just signed with a hash. You can still get the files off of the thing, and you can find out what they are from the database, which is still readable. It's just impossible to modify the iTunesDB with third-party software now (at least until this gets cracked, which shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks). I'm guessing the reason is either for database integrity, or as some part of FairPlay (maybe to keep people from copying DRMed content between iPods).
Let me guess: you don't own one. The fact is, the iPod is about the only music player out there whose designers actually have a basic clue about usability and user interface design. If you use it for even 5 minutes, you will see that. Every other player I have had a chance to use felt like the user interface was an afterthought. Considering that the primary function of a music player is to organize and play music, the factors you listed are completely irrelevant. A music player does not need to be able to transfer files, support weird formats, or highlight your individuality. It just needs to work well. The iPod does. Nothing else I've used even comes close.
With this said, I am going to say that I hate Apple as a company, and I hope their market share never gets too large. They are the kings of proprietary, and love to screw over their users. But they do make excellent products that are far above everything else in quality and usability.
Mesh and conductive paint might work for killing cell phone reception (which is marginal to begin with), but they won't do much for preventing snooping by a determined attacker. Mesh provides far from perfect attenuation.
Real RF/EMC test chambers are constructed of sheet steel, with special RF gaskets around joints and openings. The doors use pretty hardcore latches. There are special filters on all wires entering and exiting the enclosure. There is a reason for that -- any defect in your shielding acts as an antenna. Here's a company that sells EMC chambers and equipment. Turning your house into one of these would be quite difficult. You would have to install special filters on your power lines, water pipes, vents, and so on. You would probably have to block off all the windows. Any slots, openings, or imperfect connections will still allow signal to leak out.
I don't think you could do that with a network cable. CRT monitors emit tons of RF, at very low frequencies (which propagate much better through walls). They have practically no shielding. UTP cable behaves as a transmission line (so it doesn't radiate RF all over the place), and uses pretty small signal levels. With very good equipment and a low-EMI environment, you might be able to do it from 1 or 2 meters away, but not much farther.
Contrary to popular belief, Faraday cages do little to stop professional snoopers. Unless you put all your stuff into an RF test chamber with no openings whatsoever, the effectiveness of your shielding will be pretty low. Professional spies can probably overcome the 10-20dB attenuation that you would get, just by using better equipment.
In most cases, it is far easier to gain access by purely physical methods. They can open doors, replace or bribe security guards, install surveillance equipment, and so on. There is no real way for any given individual to prevent any of that, so the whole argument is pretty pointless.
You are assuming that Novell somehow holds a grudge against Microsoft. They don't. They are a company, and they've been reorganized to the point where they bear little resemblance to their predescessor. Your SCO theory does not hold water -- Microsoft did nothing improper, and the SCO case is not even over yet. The logical explanation is that Microsoft offered Novell the patent license at an attractive price to create FUD in the open source community and plant the perception that Linux infringes on Microsoft's patents. Obviously, Novell swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker in an attempt to compete with Red Hat. Didn't seem to work too well, but many people are still not seeing the problem here.
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I don't think you quite understand the situation here. Linux on the desktop was a hobbyist project until very recently. Hobbyist projects rarely amount to much: good programmers usually don't have a whole lot of spare time. Novell and Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth started pushing desktop Linux a couple of years ago, and it's already made tremendous gains. Linux is certainly pretty successful on the server, which is where 98% of the development effort was going. IBM and Redhat don't care about the desktop; they needed a server operating system, and they were quite successful at creating it.
The fact is, open-source is a highly efficient way to collaboratively develop software. It is a great framework for collaboration on a corporate level: it's simple and lightweight, with no complicated corporate agreements and resulting conflicts of interest. This is what Google is trying to accomplish here. If a few of the major 5-10 handset vendors gets serious and hires a few developers to push this platform along, it will quickly surpass anything Microsoft or Symbian can come up with, simply because the handset vendors know how to make phones and Microsoft doesn't. Google is just trying to kick-start the process.
Thousands of dollars? 32" TVs have been at the $500 price point for a while now, and 37" ones are under $900. There is no real difference between brands anymore, since it's all cheap made-in-china shit. It's a very different situation from what it was a few years ago, when the cheapest shittiest HDTV set cost well over $1000.
I have a $900 viewsonic TV I got a while back. I sure as hell am not going to spend more than $200 on a player; probably closer to $150. Whoever hits that pricepoint first with a quality product will pretty much win the format war.
The question that keeps nagging me now, though, is, whether this is the only incident. Or rather, what if there're more "proofs" out there that are actually none? The way research works, we rely on proven concepts to build our own research on top of it. What if our foundations are shaky? Does anyone actually test old theorems that were proven (or falsified)?
There is no point in doing that. If you can build a large self-consistent mathematical structure on a basis of some results, especially a structure that is useful, it is a positive result. If a foundational theorem was wrong, you would not have been able to build anything on top of it -- soon you would run into an inconsistency, an absurdity, and you would see that something is wrong. If an assumption does not result in an absurdity, then it's perfectly valid to build mathematical structures on top of it; in fact, that is how many areas of mathematics got created. People either found that a certain axiom could be removed, or that additional assumptions opened up interesting and nontrivial possibilities.
From a mathematical point of view, it is completely irrelevant what the resolution of vinyl actually is. You mainly care about the SNR and the bandwidth. The bandwidth is limited by our hearing range (20Hz - 20kHz). The SNR of a CD is much higher than that of a record, although it's not fair to compare the two directly (vinyl noise is mostly uncorrelated noise which is acoustically tolerable, while digital quantization "noise" is strongly signal-dependent and sounds nasty). However, if the CD quantization noise is, say, 20dB below the vinyl noise floor, you can confidently say that the digital recording actually holds more information than the analog vinyl medium.
First, it is completely irrelevant how the drive disappeared, so long as that happened before you buy the item. This is Best Buy's problem -- not the manufacturer's, or anyone else's. Second, you shouldn't have to prove anything -- as long as you are willing to sign a police report or an affadavit of some sort. In court, sworn testimony is considered the best kind of evidence.
In this situation, I would call the police department. This is simple theft by deception (on Best Buy's part). I would also dispute the transaction with the credit card company. While someone certainly scammed Best Buy, that does not give them the right to scam you. Opening up the package and inspecting it is not the answer. Even if you remove the drive from the antistatic packaging and compare serial numbers, a scammer could potentially take an older drive, remove the labels, and print counterfeit new ones. It is not that difficult to find a thermal label printer.
This is also why it's a much better idea to buy these items online. Online retailers generally have much stricter return policies, and you are much less likely to get someone's broken drive. In fact, I see no justification whatsoever for having a return policy for non-defective items, especially delicate electronic components. This is also Best Buy and Western Digital's fault for not having appropriate tamper-proof packaging for their products. The older plastic bubble packs they used were annoying to open, but would have prevented this situation.
Yeah, like it's difficult to file a patent on a vaporware technology. Hell, there are hundreds of patents for perpetual motion machines.
I think that's a really big deal, considering 1) that most ipods only last 12-18 months due to battery problems and it's simply not economic to bother getting them replaced (with either genuine or 3rd party parts),
What? My ipod is 2.5 years old, and the battery still performs like new. The expected lifetime for this kind of product is 3-4 years. I think the battery is perfectly adequate. Making the battery replaceable would have made the ipod/iphone uglier, thicker, and more expensive. Besides, replacement OEM batteries are usually $40-$50 bucks. It costs $65 to have apple replace the battery in an ipod, and there's other services that will do it for even less. A replaceable battery saves you very little money.
OK, you are kinda right, but an error correcting code certainly doesn't "guess" what the most likely symbol is. An ECC adds redundant data to the signal, so that a word can be perfectly reconstructed if N of the bits are wrong. Assuming your bit error rate is less than N, the algorithm will always reconstruct the word correctly.
Uh, bullshit. The reason it reduced your "noise floor" (actually level of 60Hz hum, it's not the same thing) is because you removed a ground loop somewhere. You can do the same exact thing by disconnecting the safety ground, inserting an isolation transformer in the audio path, using balanced connections, or plugging things into the same outlet. There is no difference from an electrical standpoint between "balanced power" and the normal way of connecting things except for what you call "ground". Grounding is complicated, but grounding problems can be solved much more cheaply than investing in expensive "power conditioners" (which may not even solve the problem). I'm not saying it's a bad idea to buy a line filter, but a good one shouldn't cost more than $50 or so retail. An isolation transformer is a waste of money.
Actually, digital cables are a bit more sensitive than, say, speaker cables. SPDIF is a pretty shitty standard, and cable quality can make a small difference. Granted, you don't need anything better than a composite video cable for SPDIF (75 ohm impedance). But if you use a cheapo audio lead, it will work, but it can cause some problems with edges, which would increase your clock jitter. I doubt it will be audible, but it's certainly measurable. This happens because SPDIF carries a sample clock multiplexed with the digital data, and jitter on the sample clock translates directly to signal distortion when you run it through a DAC. The amount of jitter is highly dependent on the DAC architecture and the clock recovery circuit, but it's certainly there and it does cause distortion. Whether it's audible is an open question.
There are no such concerns with HDMI (you don't care about distortion) or speaker cables (very low parasitics). Line-level audio cables can sometimes cause high frequency rolloff (if they have too much capacitance), but that's not a function of cost. Analog video cables, on the other hand, have a large effect on video quality -- a good video cable needs to have a very good impedance match, low loss, and flat frequency response. But you can easily see the effects from that on a test pattern -- a good cable will have less ghosting and sharper edges than a cheap one. This still doesn't mean Monster Cable is worth the money -- I get perfectly good results using fairly cheap component cables, they just use proper RG6 coax instead of cheap shielded wire.
OK, maybe "incompetent" was a poor choice of words. "Corrupt" or "dishonest" would be more accurate phrases. The thing is, I've met plenty of people that support Bush, but might agree that his administration is dishonest and/or corrupt. My point is, this phenomenon is not limited to China. People respect authority figures even after they manage to discredit themselves.
I think your post is quite silly. Think about this: a human operator can generally tell spam from non-spam with 100% accuracy and zero false positives. This means the problem is possible to solve. The real question is how to do it easily and efficiently, and this is where the real problem starts. Most of today's approaches are simplistic and, thus, unreliable. This doesn't mean a good approach is impossible to implement. With some tuning, a basic SpamAssassin setup can be quite good -- I get about 130 spams a day; on average, only 1 or 2 get through the filter, and I've never had a false positive. If tuning and heuristic generation could be done automatically, it would probably perform even better.
If you have so much trouble understanding this stuff, then just look at the US. How many people voted to re-elect Bush, even after seeing how incompetent he was? You don't think it's the same phenomenon?
Considering that the entire purpose of the space station from NASA's perspective was to find something for the Shuttle to do, this is entirely expected. Not to mention, the reason Russia wants to keep it operating is so they can send more space tourists up there (which, I would say, is a much better endeavor than NASA's pointless "what if we do X in space" experiments/busywork).
Not to mention, Apple's margins are actually quite slim there. I used to work for a company that made telecom equipment. They were a very low-cost supplier; even then, their bill of materials on any given product rarely exceeded 20% of the price. After all, they aren't selling a bag of parts. They are selling a product that costs real money to design, assemble, program, sell, support, and service. Profit only comes after all that.
I think people generally talk about dollars when they say "millionaire", even in foreign countries. Even then, the guy apparently makes something like $200k/year and doesn't spend any of it since he's too busy playing starcraft. Really sounds like a shitty way to go. You can make more money than that driving a truck if you are willing to devote your entire waking hours to work, and I think it would be far more fun than playing starcraft for 13 hours a day for a few years.
Tasers are quite safe, and are very useful. First, they protect police officers from getting injured. Second, they are quite effective at subduing criminals. Third, they teach whiny douchebags like this guy a painful lesson.
I am not sure why you think the guy was subjected to some undue risk. We aren't talking about nightsticks, plastic bullets, or pepper spray, all of which can actually injure people. A small electric zap on the skin surface is about as safe as you are going to get, and it's unpleasant enough to actually be effective.
Oh, come on. The guy was trying to be a disruptive douchebag. You can tell just from all the commotion he created as he was removed by the cops. It's one thing to ask a legitimate question. The guy launched into an incredibly long, whiny, and disrespectful tirade with no end in sight, and then resisted attempts to remove him, effectively disrupting the entire event. Free speech and hooliganism are quite different concepts, and you seem to be unable to distinguish between them.
Eh? How exactly does the GPL help you with this? If anything, the BSD license is the worst at it. For a great example of this, take a look at SPICE, the circuit simulator. There are literally dozens of different commercial versions of it, selling for a lot of money, but the free version is ancient and practically worthless. I'm sure if it was GPLed to begin with, it would have been a lot more useful now.
First, the only person who can say whether or not something qualifies as a derivative work is a judge. You can't possibly say whether or not something is "significant enough". If you add one single line of code, it might be a derivative work. Besides, you can always add the GPL to a code file, since the original license does not prohibit that.
I doubt that is the case. The file is not encrypted; it's just signed with a hash. You can still get the files off of the thing, and you can find out what they are from the database, which is still readable. It's just impossible to modify the iTunesDB with third-party software now (at least until this gets cracked, which shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks). I'm guessing the reason is either for database integrity, or as some part of FairPlay (maybe to keep people from copying DRMed content between iPods).
Let me guess: you don't own one. The fact is, the iPod is about the only music player out there whose designers actually have a basic clue about usability and user interface design. If you use it for even 5 minutes, you will see that. Every other player I have had a chance to use felt like the user interface was an afterthought. Considering that the primary function of a music player is to organize and play music, the factors you listed are completely irrelevant. A music player does not need to be able to transfer files, support weird formats, or highlight your individuality. It just needs to work well. The iPod does. Nothing else I've used even comes close.
With this said, I am going to say that I hate Apple as a company, and I hope their market share never gets too large. They are the kings of proprietary, and love to screw over their users. But they do make excellent products that are far above everything else in quality and usability.
Mesh and conductive paint might work for killing cell phone reception (which is marginal to begin with), but they won't do much for preventing snooping by a determined attacker. Mesh provides far from perfect attenuation.
Real RF/EMC test chambers are constructed of sheet steel, with special RF gaskets around joints and openings. The doors use pretty hardcore latches. There are special filters on all wires entering and exiting the enclosure. There is a reason for that -- any defect in your shielding acts as an antenna. Here's a company that sells EMC chambers and equipment. Turning your house into one of these would be quite difficult. You would have to install special filters on your power lines, water pipes, vents, and so on. You would probably have to block off all the windows. Any slots, openings, or imperfect connections will still allow signal to leak out.
I don't think you could do that with a network cable. CRT monitors emit tons of RF, at very low frequencies (which propagate much better through walls). They have practically no shielding. UTP cable behaves as a transmission line (so it doesn't radiate RF all over the place), and uses pretty small signal levels. With very good equipment and a low-EMI environment, you might be able to do it from 1 or 2 meters away, but not much farther.
Contrary to popular belief, Faraday cages do little to stop professional snoopers. Unless you put all your stuff into an RF test chamber with no openings whatsoever, the effectiveness of your shielding will be pretty low. Professional spies can probably overcome the 10-20dB attenuation that you would get, just by using better equipment.
In most cases, it is far easier to gain access by purely physical methods. They can open doors, replace or bribe security guards, install surveillance equipment, and so on. There is no real way for any given individual to prevent any of that, so the whole argument is pretty pointless.
You are assuming that Novell somehow holds a grudge against Microsoft. They don't. They are a company, and they've been reorganized to the point where they bear little resemblance to their predescessor. Your SCO theory does not hold water -- Microsoft did nothing improper, and the SCO case is not even over yet. The logical explanation is that Microsoft offered Novell the patent license at an attractive price to create FUD in the open source community and plant the perception that Linux infringes on Microsoft's patents. Obviously, Novell swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker in an attempt to compete with Red Hat. Didn't seem to work too well, but many people are still not seeing the problem here.