You're missing my point. I'm not talking about "clones" or "ripping off." I'm talking about exact functional copies of software, the only distinguishing characteristic of which is that the developer or developers give away the source. It started with the original GNU programs-- feature-for-feature copies of AT&T's utilities-- and went forward from there. If I make a spreadsheet program, that's one thing. If I replicate the precise features and functions of somebody else's spreadsheet program, that's something else.
There's just no innovation to speak of going on in the open source community. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and other companies are trying like hell to come up with something new. Sun basically redefined the web application over the past few years with Java and related technologies. Apple is trying to design a user interface from a blank slate, and doing a pretty damn good job. Microsoft... well, say what you want about them, but they're trying like crazy to come up with new ideas like Hailstorm and SOAP. Not every idea is a good one, but at least they're new and different.
Let's see some examples of new ideas in the open source community. KDE and Gnome are fighting it out to see which one can be the blandest, least user-friendly desktop environment. Linux, as neat as it is, is caught between trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX, and trying to catch up to desktop OS's like OS X and XP. It's doing an okay job of both, but not an exceptional one of either. And think of all the brainpower that's being wasted on dumb ideas like the Mozilla sidebar! If only the community rewarded-- through peer validation or whatever you open-source guys use for currency-- original ideas, instead of incomplete implementations of other people's ideas, we might actually see something revolutionary and interesting come out of the open source community. As it stands right now, all I see is a bunch of projects whose names really ought to start with the words "yet another."
Mod me down if you feel that's the right thing to do. This post is definitely off-topic, except to the extent that I'm extending an idea I introduced upthread. And it's flamebait only inasmuch as I will certainly get flamed for it. It's not a troll, but I'm sure people who disagree with me will hold the opinion that it is.
So moderators, do what you must. But know before you do that I'm just saying what lots and lots of other people are already thinking.
If you're an interface freak and love the OS X UI, try writing a GTK+ engine or whatnot to recreate Aqua (and no, Aquiline doesn't count).
Wrong. If you want to work on interfaces, either go take a job with Apple and work on Aqua, or make up your own UI appearance. Aqua is the property of Apple Computer; it's a trademark, and nobody else has the right to make a user interface just like it.
<rant>That's fundamentally the problem with the open source community. By and large, they're more interested in stealing other people's ideas (Evolution looks so much like Outlook there ought to be royalties involved) than coming up with their own.</rant>
Wrong? Immoral? Unjust? No. Patents on software, just like patents on anything else, exist to encourage innovation. Without the promise of a monopoly-- temporary though it will be-- there would be no incentive to innovate. Of course, the average Slashdot poster would respond that innovation will come from hobbyists and other creators of open-source software, who believe themselves to be acting philanthropically. The average Slashdot poster hasn't the foggiest idea how the world actually works, and has no respect whatsoever for the power of the profit motive.
And unconstitutional? Please refer to Article I, section 8: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." All patents are fundamentally constitutional, as long as they are granted for a limited time.
In other words, they're trying to use software patents to keep people from writing their own implementations of C# / CLI libraries and software.
Hey, that's quite a scoop there. You've stumbled on the fact that this is exactly what patents are for. They are a limited monopoly on an invention or innovation. Until Microsoft's patents expire, you can't do any of the stuff described in them without an explicit license.
I always get such a kick when people post this sort of thing to Slashdot with such indignation. "They're trying to use patents to keep people from doing things!" How dare they.
My opinion: boycott this crap.
Given the degree of insight inherent in your first observation, I'm not sure how much I value your opinion on this matter. But rest assured; if it's crap, a boycott will be quite unnecessary. In the computer industry moreso than any other, bad ideas wither on the vine.
It makes the analysis of copy protection software illegal.
Wrong. The reverse engineering of copy protection devices for the purposes of circumventing copy protection is illegal. The distribution of a device that circumvents a copy protection mechanism is illegal. Distributing instructions describing how to circumvent a copy protection system is illegal. Some people-- including, evidently, yourself-- have jumped to the conclusion that analysis of copy protection mechanisms is now illegal. That's just bull. If you want to analyize a copy protection mechanism, go right ahead. Just don't cross the lines described in the DMCA, and you're completely fine.
It prevents people from exercising fair-use rights.
That's for the court to decide. I believe you're wrong again. The DMCA makes it illegal to distribute devices that circumvent copy protection. If a copy prevention mechanism prevents people from making fair use of a work-- fair use, of course, not being a right, but a privilege granted by Title 17 as an exception to copyright, which is a right-- then that copy prevention mechanism may be in violation of the law. The law protecting copy prevention mechanisms in principle is not flawed on those grounds.
DeCSS, which was designed for a legitimate purpose (viewing DVDs on Linux), was deemed illegal.
DeCSS was designed for the sole purpose of decrypting DVDs without authorization. It doesn't matter why you're decrypting DVDs without authorization; it only matters that you are doing so, and that doing so is illegal. DeCSS has no legitimate legal use. If DeCSS were erased from existence tomorrow, no one at all would be harmed by its absence. Therefore it serves no legitmate purpose. If you want to watch DVDs, use one of the myriad licensed playback devices that are widely available. Don't illegally circumvent the encryption that the manufacturers put on the discs.
How is the DMCA not attacking tools with legitimate purposes here?
I think I've demonstrated that quite clearly.
Having a contract which states "Thou shalt do nothing that violates the law" is pointless, because the statutory law is "higher" than contract law.
Of course it's not pointless. Isn't that clear to you by now? It's a limitation of liability on the part of the vendor, and it's a perfectly reasonable and legitimate thing. It's not pointless, and it's not redundant.
If you'd read the document, you would know that most of it deals with setting up the Active Directory server, something that is the same no matter whether the client is running 10.1 or 10.2. Setting up the LDAP client in 10.2 is utterly trivial.
Also, the only reason the document refers to a Mac OS X Server is for file sharing among the Active Directory clients. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary. You can just ignore those parts if all you want to do is set up authentication to Active Directory.
While we're on the subject of breathing three times, please read the document and think for a second before responding that my answer was unsuitable.
Go to Google. Type "apple.com active.directory" in the search box, and mind the periods. The very first result is a PDF from Apple's site entitled "Integrating Mac OS X With Active Directory." (Just to be clear, that link is directly to the PDF, so don't click unless you're ready to download.) In it you can find step-by-step instructions for setting up both the clients (simple) and the server (complex, but only has to be done once).
Since you said in your submission, "Documentation? HA! No sign of it anywhere on Apple's site," it seems clear that you haven't read this document yet. Give it a try. As I wrote elsewhere, I don't have any Windows servers, but from reading the instructions, it looks like it will be very easy for you to set this up just the way you want it.
Yes. It's unnecessary. Active Directory can expose an LDAP interface, and Mac OS X is an LDAP client. The only tricky part is synchronizing the schemas, and Apple's documentation describes how to do that. On paper, it looks really simple. Since I don't have any Windows servers, I can't say whether it's simple in practice or not. The submitter evidently thinks it isn't.
In some ways you're right, but you also said a couple of things that are wrong. The first one was, "We don't need duplicate laws to outlaw that which is already outlawed." Nobody here is talking about duplicate laws. We're talking about license agreements. A license agreement isn't a law; it's a contract between two parties granting one party permission to use software in return for some payment or other concession. It's perfectly reasonable for contracts to contain clauses that limit liability. (Wow. Alliteration boy is in the house.) There's nothing wrong with that. Company A says, "We tacitly acknowledge that it's possible for you to use our product to commit a crime. We therefore require you, as a condition of using our product, not to commit any crimes with it. If you do, you're in violation of your license, and you're using the software without authorization. We are therefore not responsible for what you do with it during that unauthorized use."
Of course, some software, as we've already discussed, basically has no legitimate legal use. (I'm going to back off the Kazaa thing, because in some ways it's fundamentally no different from FTP, and FTP has legitimate uses out the wazoo. But I think it's fair to say that there's some software out there somewhere that has no legitimate use at all, and that only exists in order to cause mayhem.) In that case, the vendor's saying that illegal use of the software is prohibited is a farce. It's kind of like those web and FTP sites-- we've all seen 'em-- that say the MP3s aboard are for evaluation purposes only and must be deleted after 24 hours. Like that somehow gets around the fact that you're illegally distributing copyrighted materials. All the disclaimers in the world won't help you there.
The other thing you said that I disagree with is this: "This is one reason why laws like the DMCA are so loved around here: because they try to restrict tools that _CAN_ be used to engage in activities that are already illegal, but which have all kinds of legitimate uses." I don't know what DMCA you're talking about, but that's not a valid interpretation of the one I've read. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection, or to distribute tools that exist solely for the purpose of circumventing copy protection. It can't be used to restrict tools that can be used to circumvent copy protection; the wording of the law is very specific on that point.
Then there's your last point, "When you get a driver's license, you don't need to accept a contract saying you won't kidnap anyone with your car, do you?" As a matter of fact, you do. When I got my driver's license, umpteen years ago in another state, I signed a piece of paper saying that I understood that my license authorized me to operate any appropriate vehicle in accordance with the laws governing such use. It wasn't a contract, but it was an explicit statement of the implied contract I was entering into with the state. If I speed, the state has the right to pull me over and make me beg for mercy. It's not a contract in the sense of a license agreement, but it's a legally binding arrangement nonetheless.
Oh, now, at the risk of getting just the slightest bit serious on you here, I'd have to say that the ability to complain isn't so much a right as it is a privilege. You're lucky enough to live in a (city|country|world|whatever) where people who complain about stuff they didn't work on and didn't pay for are only rarely dragged out into the street and beaten within an inch of their lives by angry mobs armed with torches and pitchforks. Don't take that for granted.
But RPM will, naturally, report the dependency as being on "libneverheardofyou.0.0.53.0," and figuring out which package to install will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Even lock-picking equipment has a perfectly legal use: picking locks you own.
In my state, at least, locksmiths have to be licensed. You can't buy certain tools unless you have a license. You can't buy lock picking tools at all.
The law already forbids these illegal activities. If those laws can't be enforced then they need to be changed.
Restricting the mechanism of committing a crime is one part of enforcing the law that defines that crime. If Kazaa, and similar items, are found to be of the same legal standing as lock picking tools, they should be banned. That's up to the legislature to decide, and the judiciary to review.
Nope. I feel fine about it. If you are trying to say that you were making a joke or something, you blew it. There's nothing funny about your signature.
American Computer Workers suck. Support the hiring of H1B employees instead. American kids eat too much anyways.
You know, with all the out-of-work American computer workers reading Slashdot, you're not going to be making any friends with your sig, there, toupsie.
I'll even go so far as to take the opposite point of view. Hire American technology workers! They're standing on street corners with cardboard signs that say "will debug Java for food" anyway, so you can probably pick a few of 'em up cheap.
(Yeah, yeah. Immigrants are the glue that hold the gears of our society together and all that. Blah. I'll hire a foreign worker-- if I ever get in the position to hire anybody again-- when there are no suitable American workers available.)
Hear, hear. I used to-- before I got laid off again and decided to give it all up and go to cooking school-- be a professional programmer. I used computers (SGIs mostly, but also PCs) intensively all day, and sometimes all night if I had a deadline to meet. All of my personal computers are Macs. I like being able to get my email, surf the web, write letters to grandma, play music, and do other things without ever having to fiddle with any internals.
Of course, since I've got OS X on all my machines, the low-level stuff is available to me if I want to touch it. I just don't have to.
Question: Since you have a license for the software, would you be breaking any laws by pirating the version for the other OS?
Yes. The Mac version and the PC version are not the same software. You have a license for "the software," and that means whatever binary code you bought. If you bought the Mac version, you would not have received a license for the PC version.
Friendly companies could offer a "side-grade" discount, but it's easy to understand why they don't. How can you, the user, prove to the company that you've disposed of your copy of the PC version? That's the only way a company like Adobe would be willing to give you a 90% discount on a different build of the same application. In the absence of that kind of transaction-- you give the company back the software, they give you the other software, and everybody trusts everybody else-- the best you could ever hope for is the $99-off upgrade price.
Seems to me that it would be-- if it had a legal definition, which I'm not sure that it does-- any item that has no reasonable legitimate purpose other than the furtherance of a crime. Lock-picking equipment is illegal is many, or most, jurisdictions because it has no purpose other than the opening of locks without a key. Cars are legal because they have tons of purposes other than to serve as a getaway device during a kidnapping.
Kazaa probably has no legitimate legal use. But I don't use it-- because I'm a Mac guy, not because of any delusion of moral superiority-- so I can't say that for sure.
Seriously, such a system would be constructed in self-contained sections; if one fails, nothing particularly serious would happen.
Completely and utterly impossible. The vacuum must be contiguous, because capsules or pods or whatever must move at high speeds through the structure. It would not be possible to build the system with isolated sections of tube.
And as for the rest, a vacuum-filled container represents a great deal of potential energy. Ever seen a bell jar fail? It only contains a few liters of volume, but when one fails, it explodes like a hand grenade. That's why school vacuum demonstrations always should-- they sometimes don't, but they always should-- contain bell jars behind or inside lexan shields.
Actually, you're wrong. The movie was ironic, but in a tongue-in-cheek way. When they sang, "Blame Canada," you'd better believe they fucking well meant it.
You missed the implication. (Or maybe I didn't make it clear enough.) Decelerating at one gee for three minutes with nothing but a lap belt on will make it pretty easy to smack your face on the back of the seat in front of you. Thus the bloody nose.
How different do you think the air pressure is at, say, 40,000 feet and on the moon?
Air pressure at 40,000 feet is about 2.7 psi, or about 1/6th of one atmosphere. That's not nearly enough to live on-- you can't transport oxygen to your brain fast enough at that pressure-- but it's survivable with an oxygen mask. The near-total vacuum on the surface of the moon is definitely not survivable. Your tissues would expand dramatically due to the pressure difference-- no, you wouldn't explode-- and your blood pressure would drop to zero. There would basically be no circulation of blood in your body. Oxygen or no, you'd be unconscious in seconds, and dead in a minute or two.
So the difference between 40,000 feet and the moon is extreme and significant. I don't think "not much" is an accurate description.
Do you need a pressure suit if the outside pressure increases by 1 atmosphere?
Going from one atmosphere to two, or from one to one-half, is not difficult. Going from one-half atmosphere to virtually zero is very hard, however.
But losing 1 atmosphere will not make your blood boil and your eyes pop out of your head. And you won't explode.
Actually, the free liquid on the surface of your body-- your eyes, and in your mouth and nose-- will boil. In 1966, a technician at NASA was exposed to a low-pressure environment of less than 1 psi. He survived, but he reported that the last thing he remembered was his saliva starting to boil.
Also, in experiments on animals, water vapor does form in the tissues an in the blood vessels and third spaces, although you wouldn't call it boiling per se. The bodies of the animals swelled rapidly to up to twice their normal volume when exposed-- slowly, under controlled depressurization-- to vacuum. They didn't explode, but they died ugly.
The human body is tougher than you give it credit for being. There have been many cases of humans surviving brief exposure to very low pressure environments. A good example is described here. The subject survived 30 seconds of very low pressure with no long-term ill effects. He did not "blow up."
Of course, he would have died in minutes if they hadn't pressurized the chamber, but that's not exactly the same thing.
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You're missing my point. I'm not talking about "clones" or "ripping off." I'm talking about exact functional copies of software, the only distinguishing characteristic of which is that the developer or developers give away the source. It started with the original GNU programs-- feature-for-feature copies of AT&T's utilities-- and went forward from there. If I make a spreadsheet program, that's one thing. If I replicate the precise features and functions of somebody else's spreadsheet program, that's something else.
There's just no innovation to speak of going on in the open source community. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and other companies are trying like hell to come up with something new. Sun basically redefined the web application over the past few years with Java and related technologies. Apple is trying to design a user interface from a blank slate, and doing a pretty damn good job. Microsoft... well, say what you want about them, but they're trying like crazy to come up with new ideas like Hailstorm and SOAP. Not every idea is a good one, but at least they're new and different.
Let's see some examples of new ideas in the open source community. KDE and Gnome are fighting it out to see which one can be the blandest, least user-friendly desktop environment. Linux, as neat as it is, is caught between trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX, and trying to catch up to desktop OS's like OS X and XP. It's doing an okay job of both, but not an exceptional one of either. And think of all the brainpower that's being wasted on dumb ideas like the Mozilla sidebar! If only the community rewarded-- through peer validation or whatever you open-source guys use for currency-- original ideas, instead of incomplete implementations of other people's ideas, we might actually see something revolutionary and interesting come out of the open source community. As it stands right now, all I see is a bunch of projects whose names really ought to start with the words "yet another."
Mod me down if you feel that's the right thing to do. This post is definitely off-topic, except to the extent that I'm extending an idea I introduced upthread. And it's flamebait only inasmuch as I will certainly get flamed for it. It's not a troll, but I'm sure people who disagree with me will hold the opinion that it is.
So moderators, do what you must. But know before you do that I'm just saying what lots and lots of other people are already thinking.
If you're an interface freak and love the OS X UI, try writing a GTK+ engine or whatnot to recreate Aqua (and no, Aquiline doesn't count).
Wrong. If you want to work on interfaces, either go take a job with Apple and work on Aqua, or make up your own UI appearance. Aqua is the property of Apple Computer; it's a trademark, and nobody else has the right to make a user interface just like it.
<rant>That's fundamentally the problem with the open source community. By and large, they're more interested in stealing other people's ideas (Evolution looks so much like Outlook there ought to be royalties involved) than coming up with their own.</rant>
Wrong? Immoral? Unjust? No. Patents on software, just like patents on anything else, exist to encourage innovation. Without the promise of a monopoly-- temporary though it will be-- there would be no incentive to innovate. Of course, the average Slashdot poster would respond that innovation will come from hobbyists and other creators of open-source software, who believe themselves to be acting philanthropically. The average Slashdot poster hasn't the foggiest idea how the world actually works, and has no respect whatsoever for the power of the profit motive.
And unconstitutional? Please refer to Article I, section 8: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." All patents are fundamentally constitutional, as long as they are granted for a limited time.
In other words, they're trying to use software patents to keep people from writing their own implementations of C# / CLI libraries and software.
Hey, that's quite a scoop there. You've stumbled on the fact that this is exactly what patents are for. They are a limited monopoly on an invention or innovation. Until Microsoft's patents expire, you can't do any of the stuff described in them without an explicit license.
I always get such a kick when people post this sort of thing to Slashdot with such indignation. "They're trying to use patents to keep people from doing things!" How dare they.
My opinion: boycott this crap.
Given the degree of insight inherent in your first observation, I'm not sure how much I value your opinion on this matter. But rest assured; if it's crap, a boycott will be quite unnecessary. In the computer industry moreso than any other, bad ideas wither on the vine.
It makes the analysis of copy protection software illegal.
Wrong. The reverse engineering of copy protection devices for the purposes of circumventing copy protection is illegal. The distribution of a device that circumvents a copy protection mechanism is illegal. Distributing instructions describing how to circumvent a copy protection system is illegal. Some people-- including, evidently, yourself-- have jumped to the conclusion that analysis of copy protection mechanisms is now illegal. That's just bull. If you want to analyize a copy protection mechanism, go right ahead. Just don't cross the lines described in the DMCA, and you're completely fine.
It prevents people from exercising fair-use rights.
That's for the court to decide. I believe you're wrong again. The DMCA makes it illegal to distribute devices that circumvent copy protection. If a copy prevention mechanism prevents people from making fair use of a work-- fair use, of course, not being a right, but a privilege granted by Title 17 as an exception to copyright, which is a right-- then that copy prevention mechanism may be in violation of the law. The law protecting copy prevention mechanisms in principle is not flawed on those grounds.
DeCSS, which was designed for a legitimate purpose (viewing DVDs on Linux), was deemed illegal.
DeCSS was designed for the sole purpose of decrypting DVDs without authorization. It doesn't matter why you're decrypting DVDs without authorization; it only matters that you are doing so, and that doing so is illegal. DeCSS has no legitimate legal use. If DeCSS were erased from existence tomorrow, no one at all would be harmed by its absence. Therefore it serves no legitmate purpose. If you want to watch DVDs, use one of the myriad licensed playback devices that are widely available. Don't illegally circumvent the encryption that the manufacturers put on the discs.
How is the DMCA not attacking tools with legitimate purposes here?
I think I've demonstrated that quite clearly.
Having a contract which states "Thou shalt do nothing that violates the law" is pointless, because the statutory law is "higher" than contract law.
Of course it's not pointless. Isn't that clear to you by now? It's a limitation of liability on the part of the vendor, and it's a perfectly reasonable and legitimate thing. It's not pointless, and it's not redundant.
If you'd read the document, you would know that most of it deals with setting up the Active Directory server, something that is the same no matter whether the client is running 10.1 or 10.2. Setting up the LDAP client in 10.2 is utterly trivial.
Also, the only reason the document refers to a Mac OS X Server is for file sharing among the Active Directory clients. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary. You can just ignore those parts if all you want to do is set up authentication to Active Directory.
While we're on the subject of breathing three times, please read the document and think for a second before responding that my answer was unsuitable.
Go to Google. Type "apple.com active.directory" in the search box, and mind the periods. The very first result is a PDF from Apple's site entitled "Integrating Mac OS X With Active Directory." (Just to be clear, that link is directly to the PDF, so don't click unless you're ready to download.) In it you can find step-by-step instructions for setting up both the clients (simple) and the server (complex, but only has to be done once).
Since you said in your submission, "Documentation? HA! No sign of it anywhere on Apple's site," it seems clear that you haven't read this document yet. Give it a try. As I wrote elsewhere, I don't have any Windows servers, but from reading the instructions, it looks like it will be very easy for you to set this up just the way you want it.
Any reason not to try?
Yes. It's unnecessary. Active Directory can expose an LDAP interface, and Mac OS X is an LDAP client. The only tricky part is synchronizing the schemas, and Apple's documentation describes how to do that. On paper, it looks really simple. Since I don't have any Windows servers, I can't say whether it's simple in practice or not. The submitter evidently thinks it isn't.
In some ways you're right, but you also said a couple of things that are wrong. The first one was, "We don't need duplicate laws to outlaw that which is already outlawed." Nobody here is talking about duplicate laws. We're talking about license agreements. A license agreement isn't a law; it's a contract between two parties granting one party permission to use software in return for some payment or other concession. It's perfectly reasonable for contracts to contain clauses that limit liability. (Wow. Alliteration boy is in the house.) There's nothing wrong with that. Company A says, "We tacitly acknowledge that it's possible for you to use our product to commit a crime. We therefore require you, as a condition of using our product, not to commit any crimes with it. If you do, you're in violation of your license, and you're using the software without authorization. We are therefore not responsible for what you do with it during that unauthorized use."
Of course, some software, as we've already discussed, basically has no legitimate legal use. (I'm going to back off the Kazaa thing, because in some ways it's fundamentally no different from FTP, and FTP has legitimate uses out the wazoo. But I think it's fair to say that there's some software out there somewhere that has no legitimate use at all, and that only exists in order to cause mayhem.) In that case, the vendor's saying that illegal use of the software is prohibited is a farce. It's kind of like those web and FTP sites-- we've all seen 'em-- that say the MP3s aboard are for evaluation purposes only and must be deleted after 24 hours. Like that somehow gets around the fact that you're illegally distributing copyrighted materials. All the disclaimers in the world won't help you there.
The other thing you said that I disagree with is this: "This is one reason why laws like the DMCA are so loved around here: because they try to restrict tools that _CAN_ be used to engage in activities that are already illegal, but which have all kinds of legitimate uses." I don't know what DMCA you're talking about, but that's not a valid interpretation of the one I've read. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection, or to distribute tools that exist solely for the purpose of circumventing copy protection. It can't be used to restrict tools that can be used to circumvent copy protection; the wording of the law is very specific on that point.
Then there's your last point, "When you get a driver's license, you don't need to accept a contract saying you won't kidnap anyone with your car, do you?" As a matter of fact, you do. When I got my driver's license, umpteen years ago in another state, I signed a piece of paper saying that I understood that my license authorized me to operate any appropriate vehicle in accordance with the laws governing such use. It wasn't a contract, but it was an explicit statement of the implied contract I was entering into with the state. If I speed, the state has the right to pull me over and make me beg for mercy. It's not a contract in the sense of a license agreement, but it's a legally binding arrangement nonetheless.
Actually, we _do_ have the right to complain.
Oh, now, at the risk of getting just the slightest bit serious on you here, I'd have to say that the ability to complain isn't so much a right as it is a privilege. You're lucky enough to live in a (city|country|world|whatever) where people who complain about stuff they didn't work on and didn't pay for are only rarely dragged out into the street and beaten within an inch of their lives by angry mobs armed with torches and pitchforks. Don't take that for granted.
But RPM will, naturally, report the dependency as being on "libneverheardofyou.0.0.53.0," and figuring out which package to install will be left as an exercise for the reader.
This year we're doing the battle of Bitkeeper from the Linux kernel list.
:shrug:
That's funny. I thought a precondition for reenactment was that the battle be over when the reenactment begins. Huh.
Vi is a word in several languages, which hugely inflates the results.
Not to mention all those "Episode VI," "Rocky VI," and "Star Trek VI" fan pages out there that skew the results even further.
Even lock-picking equipment has a perfectly legal use: picking locks you own.
In my state, at least, locksmiths have to be licensed. You can't buy certain tools unless you have a license. You can't buy lock picking tools at all.
The law already forbids these illegal activities. If those laws can't be enforced then they need to be changed.
Restricting the mechanism of committing a crime is one part of enforcing the law that defines that crime. If Kazaa, and similar items, are found to be of the same legal standing as lock picking tools, they should be banned. That's up to the legislature to decide, and the judiciary to review.
Nope. I feel fine about it. If you are trying to say that you were making a joke or something, you blew it. There's nothing funny about your signature.
American Computer Workers suck. Support the hiring of H1B employees instead. American kids eat too much anyways.
You know, with all the out-of-work American computer workers reading Slashdot, you're not going to be making any friends with your sig, there, toupsie.
I'll even go so far as to take the opposite point of view. Hire American technology workers! They're standing on street corners with cardboard signs that say "will debug Java for food" anyway, so you can probably pick a few of 'em up cheap.
(Yeah, yeah. Immigrants are the glue that hold the gears of our society together and all that. Blah. I'll hire a foreign worker-- if I ever get in the position to hire anybody again-- when there are no suitable American workers available.)
Hear, hear. I used to-- before I got laid off again and decided to give it all up and go to cooking school-- be a professional programmer. I used computers (SGIs mostly, but also PCs) intensively all day, and sometimes all night if I had a deadline to meet. All of my personal computers are Macs. I like being able to get my email, surf the web, write letters to grandma, play music, and do other things without ever having to fiddle with any internals.
Of course, since I've got OS X on all my machines, the low-level stuff is available to me if I want to touch it. I just don't have to.
Question: Since you have a license for the software, would you be breaking any laws by pirating the version for the other OS?
Yes. The Mac version and the PC version are not the same software. You have a license for "the software," and that means whatever binary code you bought. If you bought the Mac version, you would not have received a license for the PC version.
Friendly companies could offer a "side-grade" discount, but it's easy to understand why they don't. How can you, the user, prove to the company that you've disposed of your copy of the PC version? That's the only way a company like Adobe would be willing to give you a 90% discount on a different build of the same application. In the absence of that kind of transaction-- you give the company back the software, they give you the other software, and everybody trusts everybody else-- the best you could ever hope for is the $99-off upgrade price.
What, precisely, is a crime-enabling product?
Seems to me that it would be-- if it had a legal definition, which I'm not sure that it does-- any item that has no reasonable legitimate purpose other than the furtherance of a crime. Lock-picking equipment is illegal is many, or most, jurisdictions because it has no purpose other than the opening of locks without a key. Cars are legal because they have tons of purposes other than to serve as a getaway device during a kidnapping.
Kazaa probably has no legitimate legal use. But I don't use it-- because I'm a Mac guy, not because of any delusion of moral superiority-- so I can't say that for sure.
Seriously, such a system would be constructed in self-contained sections; if one fails, nothing particularly serious would happen.
Completely and utterly impossible. The vacuum must be contiguous, because capsules or pods or whatever must move at high speeds through the structure. It would not be possible to build the system with isolated sections of tube.
And as for the rest, a vacuum-filled container represents a great deal of potential energy. Ever seen a bell jar fail? It only contains a few liters of volume, but when one fails, it explodes like a hand grenade. That's why school vacuum demonstrations always should-- they sometimes don't, but they always should-- contain bell jars behind or inside lexan shields.
Actually, you're wrong. The movie was ironic, but in a tongue-in-cheek way. When they sang, "Blame Canada," you'd better believe they fucking well meant it.
HHOS.
This shows a serious lack of respect. For the first time, my opinion of slashdot/taco has dropped severely.
So... you're new here, then?
You missed the implication. (Or maybe I didn't make it clear enough.) Decelerating at one gee for three minutes with nothing but a lap belt on will make it pretty easy to smack your face on the back of the seat in front of you. Thus the bloody nose.
How different do you think the air pressure is at, say, 40,000 feet and on the moon?
Air pressure at 40,000 feet is about 2.7 psi, or about 1/6th of one atmosphere. That's not nearly enough to live on-- you can't transport oxygen to your brain fast enough at that pressure-- but it's survivable with an oxygen mask. The near-total vacuum on the surface of the moon is definitely not survivable. Your tissues would expand dramatically due to the pressure difference-- no, you wouldn't explode-- and your blood pressure would drop to zero. There would basically be no circulation of blood in your body. Oxygen or no, you'd be unconscious in seconds, and dead in a minute or two.
So the difference between 40,000 feet and the moon is extreme and significant. I don't think "not much" is an accurate description.
Do you need a pressure suit if the outside pressure increases by 1 atmosphere?
Going from one atmosphere to two, or from one to one-half, is not difficult. Going from one-half atmosphere to virtually zero is very hard, however.
But losing 1 atmosphere will not make your blood boil and your eyes pop out of your head. And you won't explode.
Actually, the free liquid on the surface of your body-- your eyes, and in your mouth and nose-- will boil. In 1966, a technician at NASA was exposed to a low-pressure environment of less than 1 psi. He survived, but he reported that the last thing he remembered was his saliva starting to boil.
Also, in experiments on animals, water vapor does form in the tissues an in the blood vessels and third spaces, although you wouldn't call it boiling per se. The bodies of the animals swelled rapidly to up to twice their normal volume when exposed-- slowly, under controlled depressurization-- to vacuum. They didn't explode, but they died ugly.
(More fun facts here.)
The human body is tougher than you give it credit for being. There have been many cases of humans surviving brief exposure to very low pressure environments. A good example is described here. The subject survived 30 seconds of very low pressure with no long-term ill effects. He did not "blow up."
Of course, he would have died in minutes if they hadn't pressurized the chamber, but that's not exactly the same thing.