My first preference would be to have the course taught by someone with real experience with the subject. If it's going to be the blind leading the blind, it's better to not have the course at all.
The police didn't act in good faith. When police ask a judge for a warrant, they do not present impartial evidence. They present the evidence to the judge in the manner they think is most likely to get the signature. In this case, though, it seems that they spun the evidence beyond any reasonable interpretation of probable cause in order to get a warrant.
The judge was most likely relying on the police officers' assurances that the warrant would be issued within the scope of sound probable cause, but didn't ask the officers any meaningful questions, such as, "is it normal for someone who repairs computers to have several in his possession?" A few simple questions like that could have headed this entire thing off before it got out of hand. In that regard, at the very least, the judge seems to have been asleep at the wheel (A.K.A. negligent).
There doesn't seem to have been any good faith (or sense) applied by law enforcement at all in this case. There doesn't have to be any malice on their part to make them liable for the consequences. They just have to be shown to be negligent. The county where I live was sued by the family of a jail inmate who died while incarcerated. The family got a bundle of money (multiple millions) in settlement not because they claimed the jail staff was malicious, but solely because they claimed the jail medical staff didn't monitor him closely enough. I'm not going to elaborate since it would take too long, but the death was sudden, and due to pre-existing conditions that the inmate never disclosed to the staff.
Don't be so quick to assume local governments are immune from prosecution over their actions. The legal system behaved terribly in the Boston student's case, and the possibility of ramifications is very real.
The first think I would do in this guy's situation is to sue the city under the premise that since the search warrant was illegal, all activities flowing from the warrant were performed outside of the city's normal police powers. Since the activities were carried out without any authorized police powers, they were also carried out without the normal protections granted police during the lawful execution of their duties.
Potential charges would be:
1) Breaking and entering. 2) Trespassing. 3) Illegal search and seizure. 4) Theft of personal property. 5) Possession of stolen property. 6) Vandalism. 7) Unlawful entry. 8) False arrest. 9) False imprisonment (note that this doesn't require actually being jailed). 10) Dereliction of duty.
The next two would also be levied against whatever organization the city hired to peruse through my files:
11) Unauthorized access to a computing device. 12) Circumvention of a copy-protection mechanism (my user and root passwords).
I'm sure I could come up with more if I did some research.
> Anyone who's read anything about PCs within the last year would have come to this conclusion.
Anyone who's used a Microsoft operating system in the last 15 years should have come to this conclusion a long time ago. I predict two things will happen:
1) The sun will rise in the morning (obvious inaccuracies aside).
2) Microsoft will release Windows 7 to much fanfare, and people will forget the last 15 years of wasted effort trying to keep Windows in operation. They will be shocked, SHOCKED, at all the Windows viruses hampering their work and play. They will bitch and moan, but will keep throwing their time and money in the fire. The temporary good judgment they showed at avoiding Vista will evaporate.
> The primary focus is *not* protecting the trademark owner. > Trademark law is all about protecting consumers from being deceived about the source of goods/services.
That is accomplished in part by protecting the integrity of the trademark. Google is allowing company A to advertise via explicit use of company B's trademark, which is illegal. There are only a few instances in advertising where using another company's trademark is allowed, and this isn't one of them. Using another company's trademark is so fraught with danger that most companies avoid it even when it is legal to do so. That's why commercials doing comparative advertising say things like, "the leading national brand" rather than naming the brand. They do so not because they're afraid of giving the competition free advertising (the leading national brand is already well known), but because they're afraid of getting sued for trademark infringement.
This is something for which Google deserves to get slapped hard.
Microsoft isn't even trying to come up with convincing lies anymore:
"You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership."
Really? What about the cost of upgrades? Does Microsoft give away subsequent versions with new features and bug fixes? No.
And ownership? Really? More like rental. The sticker price indicated the initial cost of rental.
What about the cost of anti-virus software needed to give the illusion of protecting Microsoft software from itself? What about the millions of man-hours each year lost while said anti-virus brings Microsoft-based computers around the world to a screeching halt for extended periods of time? Is all that supposed to be already factored out of the price of Microsoft software? No.
The cost of Microsoft software only begins with the purchase price, and is only a tiny, tiny fraction of what you end up paying.
My mind doesn't work in a linear fashion most of the time. Trying to get a line of reasoning from Point A to Point Z in a straight line works sometimes, but not usually. I always have many tangential threads in progress, and they proceed at their own pace. Forcing them rarely results in anything good, while letting them resolve themselves naturally almost always produces a positive result.
That is why I'm typically working on at least three or four simultaneous projects at work. While I'm working on one of them, I'm frequently hit with a seemingly random insight into another one. Then I switch projects to implement that insight. The same thing happens when I zone out and let my mind wander wherever it wants to go.
Daydreaming is also a great way to relieve tunnel-vision and stress. I can't count the number of times I've reached a seemingly dead-end, only to find out that I was over-thinking things. Stepping away from the problem and thinking about random, totally unrelated things frequently eliminates mental blocks and allows me to see problems from different perspectives. It's a great problem-solving tool that gets a bad rap because it's so easily abused.
This is an unworkable plan. Personal computers, by their very nature, require the end-user to tamper with them. The moment the end-user installs some 3rd-party software, or swaps out any piece of hardware, the environment the software runs under changes. This new environment will frequently produce a permutation that is impossible to predict and test against.
Additionally, many mainstream hardware manufacturers are TERRIBLE at producing hardware that conforms to the standards to which software developers target their code. Software developers can do everything right, but still see their programs malfunction due to circumstances beyond their control.
If this brain-damaged statute passes, the European Union will witness a steady exodus of consumer software, both closed and Open Source, from its member nations. There are just too many intermediaries between the software producer and software consumer to make this kind of liability feasible in any way, shape, or form. The price of even simple software would also rise to that of a small skyscraper, as a deluge of lawsuits would be filed by users for problems they caused themselves, but blamed on the software.
The cost to the European Union would be devastating.
> Then the US can become a nation of grunt workers while the real power and intellect (and taxable personal income) is abroad.
You seem to think that American business loves a vacuum. If existing US companies cease to operate in the US (and most won't, because the US offers businesses too much to just throw away), other companies will be created or expanded to fill the void. However, thinking that a significant number of US companies will cease operating in the US if tax loopholes are closed is ludicrous.
The companies whining about being materially harmed by having to pay their fair share of taxes, and moving away if they can't keep cheating the US, are just sabre-rattling. These companies need to either play by the rules, or get the hell out of the country (and stay out).
> 3) To everyone screaming how idiotic it is that medical devices have Windows on them: you may be a geek, but have clearly never worked in a real enterprise environment.
I'm sure there was a lot of the same type of justification in the financial industry to the few people who pointed out how idiotic the risks being taken with money were. It's irrelevant *why* something so moronic is being done. It's still tremendously stupid, and needs to be changed. Windows does not belong anywhere lives are at stake. Everyone up and down the decision tree that promotes Windows in critical functions should be held criminally negligent.
As with all decisions, do a simple cost/benefit analysis. Regardless of how that turns out, tell your boss that there is no special secret to making quality cables (but only if you're capable of making them). If it's cheaper to buy the cables, then buy them. If it's significantly cheaper to make them yourself, tell this to your boss. If he still wants you to buy them, then buy them.
If your boss is vindictive and unforgiving, then buy the cables even if it's much cheaper to make them, and look for a job where your boss isn't a prick.
> One would think being sold all you can eat service, then having it cut off for using it would be seen as universally crappy.
I would consider it a breach of contract, or deceptive advertising at the very least. If I signed up for a 3mb DSL service, then my montly bandwidth cap is roughly 905.25 GB per month:
375,000 bytes per second. 22,500,000 bytes per minute. 1,350,000,000 bytes per hour. 32,400,000,000 bytes per day. 972,000,000,000 bytes per 30-day month.
Divide that by 1,073,741,824 bytes (1 GB) = 905.25 GB (935.42 GB for a 31-day month). That's what I signed up for, that's what I'm paying for. That is the understanding that the broadband advertisements are trying to impart to potential subscribers.
Local, state, and federal laws need to start enforcing fraudulent advertising laws if broadband providers are going to be pulling these kinds of stunts. It doesn't matter one bit what "most customers" use per month. Anyone should be able to leave their network link at full throttle 24x7 at their subscribed speed, as that is what they're paying for. It's the provider's fault if they oversell their capacity, not the subscriber's.
The first thing you need to determine is just how secure you want your Linux to be, how much control you want, and how much expertise you can muster to implement those security policies. If you want total control and have a staff with high technical expertise, then you may want to go with Linux From Scratch. You'll have total control (and total responsibility) for everything, but it's going to require a lot of work.
On the other end is (K)ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, and other easy to use Linux distributions. Setup and maintenance are very easy, but they are managed outside of your direct control. You can always boot from read-only media or run the system (slowly) from CD or DVD, though. Outside of creating your own operating system and applications, though, you're probably going to have to compromise on total control. In that case, any of these distributions are more or less on equal security footing; all of them are good choices.
How paranoid you are will go a long way towards deciding which distribution you want to use.
Give AcidRip another try. I have yet to encounter a DVD it couldn't rip. More accurately, I have yet to encounter a DVD that mencoder, the encoding program behind most (all?) of the DVD rippers on Linux, couldn't rip. For some DVD's, it may appear as if AcidRip has malfunctioned, as the entire system can become unresponsive or very jerky for long periods of time, and the system log will fill with sector error messages.
If you check the size of the video file, however, you will notice that it is slowly growing. This is mencoder making its way through the access restrictions on the disk, but encountering a lot of resistance. It is succeeding, though. For these disks, I let AcidRip run overnight.
You could look at it a different way, as well. If someone asks you, "What Mutoh printers do you have to replace this one?", but you then point them to the HP printers and say, "these."
By itself, it's not a problem. But what if HP paid you to point customers to their printers anytime someone asked about Mutoh printers? That is the essence of what Google is doing here: being paid by an advertiser to interject its products into the search results for competing products.
Google should be bitch-slapped for this, everyone at Google involved with this should have to write their "don't be evil" slogan 5,000 times, and turn it into the teacher before the end of the day.
It's no big deal that the Amiga did that, because Commodore controlled the production of hardware and could guarantee that hardware behaved a certain way.
Intel/PC hardware manufacturers are a crap shoot when it comes to making hardware that conforms to specifications, so it's a much harder trick to create a standard operating system device driver API that behaves the same way across device classes.
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My first preference would be to have the course taught by someone with real experience with the subject. If it's going to be the blind leading the blind, it's better to not have the course at all.
> Where Cobol and RPG, the languages that run business?
I saw them being led into the alleyway. If we're lucky, we'll hear gunshots soon.
As a sad commentary on the state of the patent system, your convoluted description of coffee was easier to follow than most patent applications.
The police didn't act in good faith. When police ask a judge for a warrant, they do not present impartial evidence. They present the evidence to the judge in the manner they think is most likely to get the signature. In this case, though, it seems that they spun the evidence beyond any reasonable interpretation of probable cause in order to get a warrant.
The judge was most likely relying on the police officers' assurances that the warrant would be issued within the scope of sound probable cause, but didn't ask the officers any meaningful questions, such as, "is it normal for someone who repairs computers to have several in his possession?" A few simple questions like that could have headed this entire thing off before it got out of hand. In that regard, at the very least, the judge seems to have been asleep at the wheel (A.K.A. negligent).
There doesn't seem to have been any good faith (or sense) applied by law enforcement at all in this case. There doesn't have to be any malice on their part to make them liable for the consequences. They just have to be shown to be negligent. The county where I live was sued by the family of a jail inmate who died while incarcerated. The family got a bundle of money (multiple millions) in settlement not because they claimed the jail staff was malicious, but solely because they claimed the jail medical staff didn't monitor him closely enough. I'm not going to elaborate since it would take too long, but the death was sudden, and due to pre-existing conditions that the inmate never disclosed to the staff.
Don't be so quick to assume local governments are immune from prosecution over their actions. The legal system behaved terribly in the Boston student's case, and the possibility of ramifications is very real.
IANAL.
The first think I would do in this guy's situation is to sue the city under the premise that since the search warrant was illegal, all activities flowing from the warrant were performed outside of the city's normal police powers. Since the activities were carried out without any authorized police powers, they were also carried out without the normal protections granted police during the lawful execution of their duties.
Potential charges would be:
1) Breaking and entering.
2) Trespassing.
3) Illegal search and seizure.
4) Theft of personal property.
5) Possession of stolen property.
6) Vandalism.
7) Unlawful entry.
8) False arrest.
9) False imprisonment (note that this doesn't require actually being jailed).
10) Dereliction of duty.
The next two would also be levied against whatever organization the city hired to peruse through my files:
11) Unauthorized access to a computing device.
12) Circumvention of a copy-protection mechanism (my user and root passwords).
I'm sure I could come up with more if I did some research.
> If it's too sticky even for Hägsta Domstolen, it gets forwarded to Häagen-Dazs. (Now that's what I call a sticky situation!)
Yes, but even the losers walk away satisfied.
> Anyone who's read anything about PCs within the last year would have come to this conclusion.
Anyone who's used a Microsoft operating system in the last 15 years should have come to this conclusion a long time ago. I predict two things will happen:
1) The sun will rise in the morning (obvious inaccuracies aside).
2) Microsoft will release Windows 7 to much fanfare, and people will forget the last 15 years of wasted effort trying to keep Windows in operation. They will be shocked, SHOCKED, at all the Windows viruses hampering their work and play. They will bitch and moan, but will keep throwing their time and money in the fire. The temporary good judgment they showed at avoiding Vista will evaporate.
> The primary focus is *not* protecting the trademark owner.
> Trademark law is all about protecting consumers from being deceived about the source of goods/services.
That is accomplished in part by protecting the integrity of the trademark. Google is allowing company A to advertise via explicit use of company B's trademark, which is illegal. There are only a few instances in advertising where using another company's trademark is allowed, and this isn't one of them. Using another company's trademark is so fraught with danger that most companies avoid it even when it is legal to do so. That's why commercials doing comparative advertising say things like, "the leading national brand" rather than naming the brand. They do so not because they're afraid of giving the competition free advertising (the leading national brand is already well known), but because they're afraid of getting sued for trademark infringement.
This is something for which Google deserves to get slapped hard.
Microsoft isn't even trying to come up with convincing lies anymore:
"You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership."
Really? What about the cost of upgrades? Does Microsoft give away subsequent versions with new features and bug fixes? No.
And ownership? Really? More like rental. The sticker price indicated the initial cost of rental.
What about the cost of anti-virus software needed to give the illusion of protecting Microsoft software from itself? What about the millions of man-hours each year lost while said anti-virus brings Microsoft-based computers around the world to a screeching halt for extended periods of time? Is all that supposed to be already factored out of the price of Microsoft software? No.
The cost of Microsoft software only begins with the purchase price, and is only a tiny, tiny fraction of what you end up paying.
My mind doesn't work in a linear fashion most of the time. Trying to get a line of reasoning from Point A to Point Z in a straight line works sometimes, but not usually. I always have many tangential threads in progress, and they proceed at their own pace. Forcing them rarely results in anything good, while letting them resolve themselves naturally almost always produces a positive result.
That is why I'm typically working on at least three or four simultaneous projects at work. While I'm working on one of them, I'm frequently hit with a seemingly random insight into another one. Then I switch projects to implement that insight. The same thing happens when I zone out and let my mind wander wherever it wants to go.
Daydreaming is also a great way to relieve tunnel-vision and stress. I can't count the number of times I've reached a seemingly dead-end, only to find out that I was over-thinking things. Stepping away from the problem and thinking about random, totally unrelated things frequently eliminates mental blocks and allows me to see problems from different perspectives. It's a great problem-solving tool that gets a bad rap because it's so easily abused.
It's about time Intel got nailed for this. Now the EU needs to go after Microsoft (again!) for the same illegal practices.
I was too quick on the reply button. It's because there are many links to different videos about browsers on that page.
Why link to Blogspot for the video (which doesn't actually have it) instead of the actual video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5535Ts-iOP0
This is an unworkable plan. Personal computers, by their very nature, require the end-user to tamper with them. The moment the end-user installs some 3rd-party software, or swaps out any piece of hardware, the environment the software runs under changes. This new environment will frequently produce a permutation that is impossible to predict and test against.
Additionally, many mainstream hardware manufacturers are TERRIBLE at producing hardware that conforms to the standards to which software developers target their code. Software developers can do everything right, but still see their programs malfunction due to circumstances beyond their control.
If this brain-damaged statute passes, the European Union will witness a steady exodus of consumer software, both closed and Open Source, from its member nations. There are just too many intermediaries between the software producer and software consumer to make this kind of liability feasible in any way, shape, or form. The price of even simple software would also rise to that of a small skyscraper, as a deluge of lawsuits would be filed by users for problems they caused themselves, but blamed on the software.
The cost to the European Union would be devastating.
> Then the US can become a nation of grunt workers while the real power and intellect (and taxable personal income) is abroad.
You seem to think that American business loves a vacuum. If existing US companies cease to operate in the US (and most won't, because the US offers businesses too much to just throw away), other companies will be created or expanded to fill the void. However, thinking that a significant number of US companies will cease operating in the US if tax loopholes are closed is ludicrous.
The companies whining about being materially harmed by having to pay their fair share of taxes, and moving away if they can't keep cheating the US, are just sabre-rattling. These companies need to either play by the rules, or get the hell out of the country (and stay out).
> He stopped and went in.
And not necessarily in that order.
I think this is largely a test bed for software as a service.
> My guess would be
* disabled non-microsoft drivers
* removed networking
* removed usb stack
* removed firewire stack
You forgot one:
* turned off the power
> 3) To everyone screaming how idiotic it is that medical devices have Windows on them: you may be a geek, but have clearly never worked in a real enterprise environment.
I'm sure there was a lot of the same type of justification in the financial industry to the few people who pointed out how idiotic the risks being taken with money were. It's irrelevant *why* something so moronic is being done. It's still tremendously stupid, and needs to be changed. Windows does not belong anywhere lives are at stake. Everyone up and down the decision tree that promotes Windows in critical functions should be held criminally negligent.
As with all decisions, do a simple cost/benefit analysis. Regardless of how that turns out, tell your boss that there is no special secret to making quality cables (but only if you're capable of making them). If it's cheaper to buy the cables, then buy them. If it's significantly cheaper to make them yourself, tell this to your boss. If he still wants you to buy them, then buy them.
If your boss is vindictive and unforgiving, then buy the cables even if it's much cheaper to make them, and look for a job where your boss isn't a prick.
> One would think being sold all you can eat service, then having it cut off for using it would be seen as universally crappy.
I would consider it a breach of contract, or deceptive advertising at the very least. If I signed up for a 3mb DSL service, then my montly bandwidth cap is roughly 905.25 GB per month:
375,000 bytes per second.
22,500,000 bytes per minute.
1,350,000,000 bytes per hour.
32,400,000,000 bytes per day.
972,000,000,000 bytes per 30-day month.
Divide that by 1,073,741,824 bytes (1 GB) = 905.25 GB (935.42 GB for a 31-day month). That's what I signed up for, that's what I'm paying for. That is the understanding that the broadband advertisements are trying to impart to potential subscribers.
Local, state, and federal laws need to start enforcing fraudulent advertising laws if broadband providers are going to be pulling these kinds of stunts. It doesn't matter one bit what "most customers" use per month. Anyone should be able to leave their network link at full throttle 24x7 at their subscribed speed, as that is what they're paying for. It's the provider's fault if they oversell their capacity, not the subscriber's.
The first thing you need to determine is just how secure you want your Linux to be, how much control you want, and how much expertise you can muster to implement those security policies. If you want total control and have a staff with high technical expertise, then you may want to go with Linux From Scratch. You'll have total control (and total responsibility) for everything, but it's going to require a lot of work.
On the other end is (K)ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, and other easy to use Linux distributions. Setup and maintenance are very easy, but they are managed outside of your direct control. You can always boot from read-only media or run the system (slowly) from CD or DVD, though. Outside of creating your own operating system and applications, though, you're probably going to have to compromise on total control. In that case, any of these distributions are more or less on equal security footing; all of them are good choices.
How paranoid you are will go a long way towards deciding which distribution you want to use.
Give AcidRip another try. I have yet to encounter a DVD it couldn't rip. More accurately, I have yet to encounter a DVD that mencoder, the encoding program behind most (all?) of the DVD rippers on Linux, couldn't rip. For some DVD's, it may appear as if AcidRip has malfunctioned, as the entire system can become unresponsive or very jerky for long periods of time, and the system log will fill with sector error messages.
If you check the size of the video file, however, you will notice that it is slowly growing. This is mencoder making its way through the access restrictions on the disk, but encountering a lot of resistance. It is succeeding, though. For these disks, I let AcidRip run overnight.
You could look at it a different way, as well. If someone asks you, "What Mutoh printers do you have to replace this one?", but you then point them to the HP printers and say, "these."
By itself, it's not a problem. But what if HP paid you to point customers to their printers anytime someone asked about Mutoh printers? That is the essence of what Google is doing here: being paid by an advertiser to interject its products into the search results for competing products.
Google should be bitch-slapped for this, everyone at Google involved with this should have to write their "don't be evil" slogan 5,000 times, and turn it into the teacher before the end of the day.
It's no big deal that the Amiga did that, because Commodore controlled the production of hardware and could guarantee that hardware behaved a certain way.
Intel/PC hardware manufacturers are a crap shoot when it comes to making hardware that conforms to specifications, so it's a much harder trick to create a standard operating system device driver API that behaves the same way across device classes.