You need both working together to accomplish the task of accessing the "protected" content. The circumvention tool is the *combination* of software and hardware. One or the other by themselves will *not* circumvent anything. I can hand you a disk with all the cracker software "tools" on it, and you can't do a thing with it until you run it on the computer. If it is some console cartridge thing, there's still software burned on a ROM, but it needs the computer circuitry to actually accomplish the task.
I know this is sorta pedantic, but really, you do need both.
With that said, I think the law is BS, along with most of the laws on "digital products". I lost all respect for US copyright law with that dmca and the huge copyright years extension. Now I don't personally pirate or download crap like that,but I got nothing against people who do either, or jailbreak their phones, or play games when they shouldn't be able to, stuff like that. I just don't care one way or the other. And ya, that even means the Linux kernel, I think it should have gone freely into the public domain by now, along with tons of computer software, both closed and open source, under whatever "license" they were transferred under, from a lot of places, and that you should be allowed to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate all ya want to with it after a much more reasonable "copyright" period. A lifetime or three like it is now, just way too long. Needs to be at the most maybe ten years. That's an entire decade to come up with something else to sell, should be sufficient.
Here's a link for additional links with a lot of resources for teachers to get kids exposed to alternative energy.
Alternate, your choice on google, just look for DIY windchargers. Ton of hits from many sites, some freebie, some cheap plans, many interesting homebrew projects.
Any hard drive with the correct software on it connected to a computer can be used to "circumvent" this or that to run pirated content for that matter, to be used as a tool. So where is the real dividing line there?
..that's why I wrote this "Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options,..".they should just go to desert styled landscaping. I for sure don't want tens of millions of people to just leave the desert areas where they are now and go move to other places where they take productive farmland out of the picture. We already lose too much farmland to development as it is. More water we can store up and move where required, we can't just store up and move good farmland. And even irrigated farmland we have now would benefit, look at California's central valley this year with tons of farms put out of production because they just can't get enough water. This is our number one winter vegetable area. It's wiping them out, whole communities going bust now, unemployment just through the roof, plus loss of all that food. And we need replacements for the other ag areas that are pumping fossil water for irrigation. The farm land is good, it is developed and in production already, they just need an alternative water source. We have excess water yearly in several areas, just oceans of it, if we can capture and use just a small fraction of that, it's a big win all around.
I've supported a plan to create many more national strategic reservoirs all over (just like we have a strategic petroleum reserve and like we *should* have with basic foodstuffs, they ended that program unfortunately) and capture excess water,(like all the flashfloods we got yesterday here in north Georgia, billions and billions of gallons, just a huge amount, our bottom fields flooded out so bad it has smashed a lot of fences, it was medium awesome to see it) then a system of interconnected pipelines to move the water around on demand based on real needs, perhaps with concurrently developed windchargers along the routes with more hydropower at some of the reservoirs if practical. Sort of a national highway system, that scale of a project, but with water. Something like the Pickens plan idea, but on a hugemongous scale and using reservoirs instead of underground sources. More electricity, more water available where required, and better management thereof, a lot more useful productive jobs, better national physical and economic security. Fund it with seriously large and multi year, perhaps even multi decade, tax credits. The benefits would more than outweigh the costs on a large enough construction and time scale.
I lived several years with zero modern conveniences people take for granted, including running water or electricity. I tell you, and I have thought about this a lot and lived it, clean potable water on demand is *the* dividing line between stoneage raw existence and civilization. I don't care *what* other tech advances you have, if you have no water, or way too much water, all the rest is useless. As such, I think it should be our number one national scale priority and emphasis in this century. People just don't care about it much until it is *too late* to do much about it when a disaster strikes.
Large dams and hydroelectric facilities there are only one half the benefit, we also store water for drought times, and this is critically important and we just slap need those dammed up reservoirs now. In fact, we need more of them, not less.
Yes, there are environmental negatives to them, same as anything else, but we simply *need* the water storage facilities, there is no replacement for them with any other practical tech out there at this time, and as long as we need that, might as well get some electricity from it at the same time.. For example, where I live in Georgia, we are coming off a near three year drought with plenty of rain this year, like right now in fact, but we got to within a few weeks of no water but emergency supplies only for millions of people in the Atlanta region last year, and that is *with* large reservoirs. If they didn't exist and got torn down, well....it would fall into the maximum suckage area. Same with any number of other places around the US and the world. We have little choice. Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options, desalination is just way way way too expensive to do it for billions of people,even nuke powered. It's just better to store up rain when it is plentiful.
As to that "salmon" bugaboo, we have the tech to mitigate that, it's called fingerlings and tanker trucks. They don't do it a lot but *they could* for wild salmon. They can get moved around the dams without major loss. It doesn't take many adults to get thousands and thousands of fingerlings either, they could net some adults when migrating up the river to go spawn, or they use what are called "fish ladders", move em around the dam, then re capture the fingerlings later and put them back in the river downstream of the dam, or do it in long concrete runway tanks that are already old and used tech. Using tanker trucks is the main way they move around and stock trout now for instance.
As to the methane, that's what natural gas is, methane with some scent added to it so people can smell it. If we can eliminate the need to burn natural gas in generating plants by using hydropower and windchargers and so on, that's the tradeoff for the dammed up areas releasing some methane. It's not perfect, but we get a lot more benefits from the hydropower and reservoirs than not. *Everything* we humans do is a tradeoff with "nature", so the best is to look where we can be cleaner and more efficient. And that's it.
...should get together and explore the feasibility of banding together in a co-op and see how feasible an all wireless network might be, wifi to microwave bridges to..WiMax to...got no idea, "wireless", I'll let the wireless gurus here fill in those blanks (or shoot it down, this is just an idea).
I get a canopy connection here and it is *some* miles from the tower and I am in a little stream valley with really crappy to non existent "line of sight" and I still connect at least a lot better than dialup, and it works. Not perfect, not blazing fast like some folks get, but dang, can actually get linux isos now and so on. I waited YEARS for any sort of telco or cable company to offer something, and nyet, they ain't interested, despite living on a two lane blacktop that really isn't that far out of their regular "service" area for cable or DSL, like a mile or so too far so they just don't care about it. But this wireless works now after a few hiccups and thanks to those techs, customer service in spades setting this up for me, and they are getting my loot now, and not the dialup and telco (at least directly). Comes in roughly half price what I was paying previously, added plus goodness there.
Maybe it is possible on an even larger geographical area and a more cooperative scale (hundreds of smaller local ISPs and independent customers, etc), given there might be so many customers who would be more than happy to have a bridging tower AP thing set up out in the back 40 for a freebie connection maybe..
I know eventually *some place* in this theoretical wireless co-op scenario they have to tap into the main backbones, but maybe a few legs of the wireless could cross the border into the US where they could do that, or the coop could run a few private fiber lines? Something like that. Then all these ISPs (and maybe some more customers like a lot of little burgs and villages, etc) could just completely bypass those two monopolies.
Now I don't think any *one* wireless tech would work for the whole shebang, but maybe a combination of what is out there now might help get it established.
That's it, all you can do now, when and if you see it. If it takes out pasture to the side, or row crops to the side, you still have to do that. And ya, sprays are toxic, but there's a few really nasty things growing out there that could seriously bork the food supply, so it's a tradeoff, and sometimes there are areas where that sort of spray is the only credible solution.
The option of letting it grow unchecked is really the worse of several evils now, and it could go from just being sucky to a catastrophe. Do some googling and look for images, and see what it does unchecked, it creeps into forests even and crowds stuff out, let alone open areas. I've been hip to this stuff for some time now, that's why I keep an eyeball out for it, even when I am driving around, because if I see it, and I don't care who's property it is, I'll sure as hell report it to the extension service.
When *nothing* will eat the thing, including goats, and it can spread underground, along with billions of teeny tiny seeds that can be blown around or carried around, and it chokes everything else out eventually, that makes it a grade A emergency and drastic measures will have to be used to eradicate it.
One of the most effective ways to deal with an out of control forest fire is to burn a backfire. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice for the larger good.
Ya, it sucks and I don't like using it myself, but it's the only cheap* thing we got to do that chore with now.
* for some values of cheap. It's still real expensive, but since it fell out of patent you can save a few bucks.
The next potentially less sucky approach would be that "terminator gene" thing I mentioned, which I think is dangerous as all get out to introduce into food crops, and I am totally against the production of such a plant or seed there, but might be useful as an alternative to control species like this.
Just like (well, it would be kinda sorta) one of the more effective ways they have found to control nasty insects (example, med fruit fly) is to introduce billions of sterile males in the targeted infested area, instead of toxic spraying everything.
"KDE and Gnome are also not complete distros on their own."
You are correct, but they could be, and IMO, they *should be*, because they both have stuff that works perfectly fine for the most part and have established organizational structure and name cred. Either of them could have taken a lead there and developed a business model around their efforts, like canonical is trying or Redhat, etc has established. And, they can still be "non profits". Non profits can make money besides from donations, and also can pay salaries. The OLPC charges money for their work and product, the kids laptop. They just screwed the pooch in not taking advantage of economies of scale and income by not releasing a "civilian" model for sale, perhaps with a modest but useful 10% markup they could use to further their "charity" efforts, instead of the extremely limited and completely screwed up effort where they charged a full 100% markup over what in essence was already the full "retail" price, and even then had it limited geographically and with bad shipping and so on..
Well, some other "real" companies saw what they did wrong, took the basic idea, which was quite sound and reflected a still untapped at the time huge business niche, and ran with it (and it didn't take long for them to do so, either, because it was obvious and easier than not to do) and now look at the explosion in netbooks. That could have been them, easily. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by not being flexible or applying plain vanilla business practices to what they were doing. They could have garnered more interest, built and shipped way more units, and taken an early and big lead in the "dinky and cheap but still functional enough to be useful" laptop market. They only needed two different enough appearing products (with a small but reasonable pricing difference4 as well) to still follow all their basic philospophy, the "poor kids laptop for learning and exploring", and then have "other than that", a normal one. Cosmetic differences and color and perhaps a bit more oomph in the street commercial version for sale in the more richer parts of the world, etc would have differentiated them out on the street so that the kids laptop wouldn't wind up on ebay, instead of staying in the poor kids hands.
Canonical is the only one big company out there now that has an emphasis on "linux on the desktop", and that's why they are ahead there in that particular market, because of that focus, most of the rest of the big names are server and "enterprise" oriented, and either of the two big main DEs could have done the same exact thing, just emphasizing joe regular desktop user instead.
There's still plenty of room out there to explore linux on the desktop, perhaps even with a full guaranteed to work stack like apple does with both software and hardware. There are SIX billion people out there on this rock, that's a lot of potential customers.
Gnome and KDE are in a good position to do that, because they already have and actively develop the bulk of what a desktop user actually uses on a day to day basis. Adding in the kernel and some other stuff and making it all tie together is bog standard, and completely free for them to use, just like any number of smaller distros do that now. And the smaller, well, heck, even the larger distros primarily usually just pick Gnome or KDE anyway to be the default "facing" environment that endusers see and interact with, which is really the most important part.
Think about it. Every dollar someone makes is taxed with income taxes (and sales taxes for a lot of them). That same dollar, keep your eye on it, gets spent, someone else gets it, for producing a good or service that it is exchanged for. They in turn are taxed on it. And again, and again, and again. And it just keeps going like that. Dollars get taxed on themselves several times over what they are worth, and they start as private bank debt notes to begin with and are loaned into existence. And because this is an exchange of debt instruments for debt instruments, the original "fee" that the lender charged can never be "paid off".
It's the biggest complicated ongoing set of economic frauds out there, since they switched from money being representations of past produced wealth (or intrinsic wealth directly), with a natural scarcity that more reflected the real market, to representations of poof created "credit" by some anointed private contractor to the government, which is all the "Federal" reserve is, a private contractor that took over which was legally supposed to be Congress's job on setting the value of the officially recognized and accepted currency.
And that's why we have such an economic mess today, one of the main reasons, they opened up the legal possibility of unlimited future calls on your labor to the banking establishment, "just because", with *no way possible even theoretically* to ever "pay them off".
Doesn't even need to be pelletized. They have outside furnaces now that are designed to take big round bales. And I imagine any coal burning plant has the means to take the stuff in bulk as well. But then harvesting it and moving it around would just spread the seeds further.
With that said, there probably isn't any chemical control that would work, although that monsanto "terminator" gene tech might. Still risky though.
Invasive species are a PITA, I am always having to deal with them here. For example I have gradually started turning tide on multiflora rose, after five years of a lot of effort, spraying, mowing and physically yanking the big clumps out by the roots with chains and the tractor. They get to be like freeking little trees almost. One interesting thing I found out though, this rose also attracts another invasive species, Japanese beetles, that munch on it. So sometimes I get a good "twofer" opportunity for eradication.
I haven't seen that cogongrass yet on the property, but IF I do, I'll make it a point to nail that stuff daily if that is what it takes.
I would imagine anyone sophisticated enough to make the weapon would also be good enough to come up with the cure or vaccine whatever before they released it. And that's just the obvious surface level.
And if it was just an economic weapon, designed to just make money or injure/cause economic losses, but not destroy the target group (or most of them), you wouldn't have to worry about it as much, because you would have wagamed the spread of it in advance anyway, into your own population or demographic, like sacrificing pawns for greater advantage..unless it was ethnic-specific, which is the most common of these sorts of "theoretical" weapons that have been talked about before.
Because you could sit back and just watch it unfold, come up with some "lock the borders down" response that you claim made you avoid much of the spread. Perhaps anyway. I don't flat out reject the notion that biowarfare agents could not or would not be used based on the "you'll infect yourself" counter argument, I've thought about this a lot before.
Here's another one why I have this view, suppose you or your group "didn't care at all" if you got infected, or if everyone got infected, maybe you WANTED that to be the case. A one way ride for *everyone*, let the FSM sort it out. Mad jihadis or even madder "the human species is the cause of all the world's troubles" folks could do it, an aggressive and faster form of the human voluntary extinction idea.
There are more. Just too many possible scenarios where some justification in the minds of the weapon's creators could occur for me to just dismiss the possibility of such weapons being developed or used, and given how much better and easier this tech is today compared to a few decades ago...feelin' lucky? I know I'd bet a year's pay that all these treaties "banning" bioweapons and so forth are a buncha paper, and the labs just got buried deeper.
And also. bioweapons are called in slang "the poor man's nuke".. for a variety of reasons.
It is more logical to guess that the US did, in fact, know about it but kept that information secret to themselves, to not give away sources or any edge (perceived or real). Just like the UK didn't blab back to the Germans that Enigma was compromised. The Germans didn't know for sure it was, and the UK let them keep thinking that because that offered the strategic advantage. And even if it was "revenge", they still most likely thought that there would be survivors, and they needed that revenge strike to protect them in the future. A parent sacrificing themselves for a child type thing. *None* of the global war scenarios had every single human croaking. Someone was still going to win, even by just raw still living body count. Sort of a Rocky Balboa win was the worst case, 9/10ths beat to death, opponent loses because he got to 9.5/10ths.
Both sides in the cold war (and all throughout the leadup to ww2 and during the hot war really) had extensive spying efforts, electronic and human. They didn't rely on governmental official press releases to gather intel.
And to this day the US would probably claim no knowledge, as wherever (whomever) they got that knowledge from might still be alive and still needs protection both for him, and perhaps his handlers and the procedures used. I know if I was joe spy boss I wouldn't be giving that up. That's just the default, you give nuthin up if possible, ever, for any reason. You *gather* intel, you only *give away* bullshit, or partial bullshit.
As for the Russians, and opposed to the prevailing viewpoint here, I would say they had no advantage to leaking or deliberately transmitting the knowledge of the doomsday machine..because if you recall, all the nuke war scenarios involved multiple waves of attacks, from multiple sources.
Both sides *already had* an acknowledged and understood "doomsday response" in the form of sub launched missiles, and low altitude bombers. There was no possible way for either side to take out already flying bombers that were in the air 24/7, or really know where all the boomers were. maybe some good guesses, but.... And how about mobile based missiles? Or merchant marine armed Q ships? No way either side would have known exactly where they all were at any given time, so they would have been available for any of the response scenarios, first strike, retaliation, second strike, third...., in short, there already existed multiple doomsday machines, overlapping.
So, there was little to no advantage to the soviets to give it up that there was still yet *another* last ditch fixed based rocket weapon (at least fire control) system, and most to all the of reasons to just keep it quiet (of the nuke weapons, both sides also had extensive plans for bio warfare and chemical warfare, even if it meant "scorched earth", no one really wins, and also guerrilla fighting behind the lines that might have gone on for years and years, with hidden caches, etc)(Proly still some on US soil that are *really* well hid...).
The answer to that is "plausible deniability" engineered biowarfare agents.(something is released on a target population and no one knows where it came from or if it is natural or not, and all the big players claim it ain't them did it) They proly already have bunches of them in blackops labs, both government *and* most likely private. I could easily see "private" efforts just for financial gain. Use your imagination there on how that might work, say something nasty, but isn't all that lethal, just close enough to warrant an expen$ive response..
If you mean "hard" tech, what we normally think of as weapons, that would be robotics combined with directed energy weapons, both directly offensive (lasers and whatever) and again, perhaps some plausible deniability directed energy weapons, like some sort of super HAARP weather control efforts that any state using them could just keep claiming were for "normal scientific research", etc., as in "we don't care what you think, that category 15 hurricane that hit your coast is just your bad luck, you don't have any proof, and you wear a tinfoil hat, etc"
What performance penalty do they have? I am not a dev, so I really don't know. Doesn't Apple use something like a microkernel approach with OSX now, or am I just remembering wrong? I like reading these sort of threads, but have a severe lack of knowledge sometimes as it isn't my main business or even a hobby. I just drive this box on the desk, that's it. I can change the oil and sparkplugs and fix a flat, that's about as far as I can go with computers.
...microkernels are better *in the long run*? You only add what you really need and want to, to the basic kernel? Sort of like FF as a browser, which comes stock with just pure browser functionality and no more, then you salt to taste with thousands of add-ons?
..no more ISP automatic bans on home servers, or forcing you to pay "extra" for that "privelege". The promise of the net is that it is a full two way street for data sharing (basically), and they keep trying to turn it into a combo cable TV and cellphone "plan", with restrictions and locked down features up the wazoo.
It will just become one plastic blob, with the circuitry embedded right in the plastic, and being semi immune from bending fatigue breakage. No board and separate case in other words. I guess they'll need a way to do the sim card, but perhaps they can do with with bluetooth.(or some other shortrange wireless tech). Charging the blobbed batt will be inductive. Pros are sturdy, weather proof and most likely pretty cheap, cons, no user serviceable entry at all without some serious leet dremel skills and a microscope and so on. But really, if they can get them cheaper than even now, along with much higher resistance to breakage, most people won't care about getting inside the thing anyway.
Writers REPORT the scandals. That is, the distill the information, write it up in somewhat easy to read form, their editors and proofreaders do the final touch up, etc but they DON'T for the most part "uncover" many scandals without the leaks. There are a few exceptions, such as lately those undercover Acorn whorehouse facilitating vids, but again, someone had to first leak that Acorn was doing such things. And that particular scandal did NOT come from main stream news expensive reporters, it came from private, very low ball cost, independent video bloggers, who just took a cheap cam, threw on laughable "pimp and ho" Halloween costumes, and waltzed in..
The scandals themselves come from NON journalist insiders who are concerned over the crimes they see at work or wherever. Basically, all "investigative journalists" do is pretty up the story, and it became the fashion for these large old print media and broadcast media to claim they "uncovered" it. A lot of times they didn't, they just got tipped off, that's all. Most of the scandals probably. The classic Woodward and Bernstein and "deep throat". There was NO STORY without "deep throat" leaking it. Nowadays they wouldn't be needed, TOR and wikileaks (and etc other ways) would have sufficed to get the story out.
How much is "news" worth, when we can still get the basic story today in a fashion that is just a little worse grammatically possibly, with some typos, or maybe the video is not top of the line professional quality, but "plenty good enough"?? I contend it is NOT worth billions of dollars annually anymore.
And for regular local news, ordinary enthusiast bloggers can cover that, we are already seeing it, such as on Examiner and Topix and millions of other smaller efforts. Heck, look at "black box voting". The dang big guys didn't do jack shit with a pretty damn important story, neither uncovered it nor did much coverage of it, it was independent concerned people risking a lot that did it, put stuff up on the web about it, and are still the main source of information about this issue.
There are enthusiasts for this or that, local kids baseball to the county board payoff scandals to huge geopolitical events, this area or that, big cities and foreign nations to little podunk towns and way the hell out in booganoogaland, and enjoy writing about it, and pay is a secondary issue, if it even matters to them at all, as most are completely content to do it for free, for their own reasons.
And you don't need to "fly in" some expensive newsie anyplace any more, cellphones and the net are everywhere, even in remote developing nations, and the locals there are ALREADY THERE and have a BIG INTEREST in getting any sort of important "news" concerning their area out..and they are *doing so* now, and it is becoming more extensive daily. And it's just not all that hard to write well enough for other people to understand it, either, even having to jump through language translations hoops.
The old news "business" paradigm is broken, because of modern tech. It's on the way out, just like the old business paradigm of charging ludicrous amounts for copies of music is on the way out, because "copies" are now extremely close to "free" in cost to make and distribute widely.
World wide cheap easy internet has just utterly SMASHED any number of old dinosaur businesses now, they are just thrashing around in pools of their own bleeding irrelevancy. They are no longer "worth" what they think they are, not even a fraction of it, just because they WERE pre internet and cellphones.
That was then, this is now, the sooner those people realize that, the sooner they can go find something else to do to "make tons of money". Or in the case of tools like Murdoch and his ilk, why can't they just close shop, call it a night cowboy, and go retire on the billions they already made?
Do you get the same bad effects from LED lighting? I know for area lights they suck (at least the ones I have seen so far), but for reading lights, etc they work OK.
I haven't done it, but maybe if you took LED spots, then had a white or light colored ceiling and tried to just bounce it/diffuse that way around the room or a piece of the room where it mattered you could use them for area lights. I need to try this...
I agree with you on the compact fluorescents, I try to be as energy efficient as possible, and tried some of those things and they just weird me out, can't stand them, have difficulty reading with them, or doing such things as opening the box up for repairs or upgrades, etc..anything close, close work or reading, they just slap don't work well.. But, normal long tube fluorescents as overhead lights like in shops or offices, etc, don't seem as bad to me for some reason, I can at least tolerate them (except for some that make a hideous high pitched noise that doesn't seem to bother most people but I can hear), but the screw in fluorescent replacements for incandescents just don't cut the mustard for my needs in any place I have tried them yet.
We just got back from town, on the trip, a convoy of antique cars went by obviously going to or from some rally. Now, I doubt many of those companies exist, or if they do, still offer "official authorized" factory repair parts, which we will term "patches". That market is now made up of enthusiasts who build their own replacement parts, or small shops that turn them out because they know there is a market..just to keep those old cars running. And the same applies to more modern era "muscle cars".
Why is it that any software, that is granted patents, etc, is treated different? Why is it "legal" to not be able to thoroughly analyze, observe all the bits, and come up with "parts" or aftermarket "patches"? No one gets sued for making old car parts, and it isn't illegal, or anything like that. And it isn't illegal to reverse engineer, disassemble, inspect, or even *improve upon* the original design of this that or the other part.
This has been seriously bogus for a long time, either just copyrights, or treat it like a tangible manufactured product because they are allowed patents, etc, but not both.
And what's the deal with no warranty anyway, why does software get a free skate on that, this "caveat emptor" stance that no other "thing" in the market place has, when all other products, whether outright sold or leased -"licensed to use", must provide, or have automatically applied to them, a minimum warranty as to suitability for purpose and free from glaring and harmful defects and so on?
Software gets double legal protection, something no other "product" gets, while having zero legal requirements for actual functionality and security (free from harmful defects) (most generally speaking), again, something no other product gets.
I'd really like to see this taken all the way so that we got a legal ruling on software either being a work of art, OR a tangible-like product worthy of patent protection, and in that case warranties should apply. Both, plus no warranty required, is just too dang much, especially for bits that have serious folding money attached to the transfer of same, which said bits then get used and put "at risk" of effecting a million times (whatever) more in volume of this serious folding money stuff. And it has and still does have a huge past record of negatively impacting businesses and people who have lost data, money, had ID and CC info swiped and used, etc because of glaring and unpatched code, proving it was not quite up to the task of being suitable for purpose nor free from glaring defects..
Heh, I can even envision the scene in the courtroom to get this analogy across to the judge, the "Boston Legal" method. That younger yuppie lawyer they got, the one with the out of the box thinking brain, forget his name, he comes in with all the old car busted parts, then spanking new ones that have been built, and NOT by Belchfire, while Shatner is floating around wearing old driving duds complete with goggles and the snap brim hat, with his 1919 restored Belchfire Steamer parked out front (if they manage to prevent him driving it right into the courtroom, which he tries to do).
"Rice, of the 600 block of East 27th St. in Baltimore, had 29 prior convictions for crimes such as breaking and entering, Guglielmi said. He had been released Saturday from the Baltimore County Detention Center, where he had been held after his arrest by county police last year for stealing a car in the city. He was found guilty in December of unauthorized removal of property and was sentenced to 18 months in prison."
29 PRIOR CONVICTIONS!
Good for you man, thanks for removing that scumbag. I'm really sorry you had to go through that crap, but congrats on sticking up for yourself and self defense (of property and person) in general. I've been through similar, but luckily it never had to escalate to that extreme.
Back in the day..when we lost major chunks of our anatomy playing in the lava pits, we cut filets of cactus for the wounds, stuck them on spiny side in to hold them in place, then wrapped it with raw rattlesnake hide, which we skinned off with our teeth.
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You need both working together to accomplish the task of accessing the "protected" content. The circumvention tool is the *combination* of software and hardware. One or the other by themselves will *not* circumvent anything. I can hand you a disk with all the cracker software "tools" on it, and you can't do a thing with it until you run it on the computer. If it is some console cartridge thing, there's still software burned on a ROM, but it needs the computer circuitry to actually accomplish the task.
I know this is sorta pedantic, but really, you do need both.
With that said, I think the law is BS, along with most of the laws on "digital products". I lost all respect for US copyright law with that dmca and the huge copyright years extension. Now I don't personally pirate or download crap like that,but I got nothing against people who do either, or jailbreak their phones, or play games when they shouldn't be able to, stuff like that. I just don't care one way or the other. And ya, that even means the Linux kernel, I think it should have gone freely into the public domain by now, along with tons of computer software, both closed and open source, under whatever "license" they were transferred under, from a lot of places, and that you should be allowed to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate all ya want to with it after a much more reasonable "copyright" period. A lifetime or three like it is now, just way too long. Needs to be at the most maybe ten years. That's an entire decade to come up with something else to sell, should be sufficient.
Here's a link for additional links with a lot of resources for teachers to get kids exposed to alternative energy.
Alternate, your choice on google, just look for DIY windchargers. Ton of hits from many sites, some freebie, some cheap plans, many interesting homebrew projects.
Any hard drive with the correct software on it connected to a computer can be used to "circumvent" this or that to run pirated content for that matter, to be used as a tool. So where is the real dividing line there?
..that's why I wrote this "Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options, ..".they should just go to desert styled landscaping. I for sure don't want tens of millions of people to just leave the desert areas where they are now and go move to other places where they take productive farmland out of the picture. We already lose too much farmland to development as it is. More water we can store up and move where required, we can't just store up and move good farmland. And even irrigated farmland we have now would benefit, look at California's central valley this year with tons of farms put out of production because they just can't get enough water. This is our number one winter vegetable area. It's wiping them out, whole communities going bust now, unemployment just through the roof, plus loss of all that food. And we need replacements for the other ag areas that are pumping fossil water for irrigation. The farm land is good, it is developed and in production already, they just need an alternative water source. We have excess water yearly in several areas, just oceans of it, if we can capture and use just a small fraction of that, it's a big win all around.
I've supported a plan to create many more national strategic reservoirs all over (just like we have a strategic petroleum reserve and like we *should* have with basic foodstuffs, they ended that program unfortunately) and capture excess water,(like all the flashfloods we got yesterday here in north Georgia, billions and billions of gallons, just a huge amount, our bottom fields flooded out so bad it has smashed a lot of fences, it was medium awesome to see it) then a system of interconnected pipelines to move the water around on demand based on real needs, perhaps with concurrently developed windchargers along the routes with more hydropower at some of the reservoirs if practical. Sort of a national highway system, that scale of a project, but with water. Something like the Pickens plan idea, but on a hugemongous scale and using reservoirs instead of underground sources. More electricity, more water available where required, and better management thereof, a lot more useful productive jobs, better national physical and economic security. Fund it with seriously large and multi year, perhaps even multi decade, tax credits. The benefits would more than outweigh the costs on a large enough construction and time scale.
I lived several years with zero modern conveniences people take for granted, including running water or electricity. I tell you, and I have thought about this a lot and lived it, clean potable water on demand is *the* dividing line between stoneage raw existence and civilization. I don't care *what* other tech advances you have, if you have no water, or way too much water, all the rest is useless. As such, I think it should be our number one national scale priority and emphasis in this century. People just don't care about it much until it is *too late* to do much about it when a disaster strikes.
Large dams and hydroelectric facilities there are only one half the benefit, we also store water for drought times, and this is critically important and we just slap need those dammed up reservoirs now. In fact, we need more of them, not less.
Yes, there are environmental negatives to them, same as anything else, but we simply *need* the water storage facilities, there is no replacement for them with any other practical tech out there at this time, and as long as we need that, might as well get some electricity from it at the same time.. For example, where I live in Georgia, we are coming off a near three year drought with plenty of rain this year, like right now in fact, but we got to within a few weeks of no water but emergency supplies only for millions of people in the Atlanta region last year, and that is *with* large reservoirs. If they didn't exist and got torn down, well....it would fall into the maximum suckage area. Same with any number of other places around the US and the world. We have little choice. Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options, desalination is just way way way too expensive to do it for billions of people,even nuke powered. It's just better to store up rain when it is plentiful.
As to that "salmon" bugaboo, we have the tech to mitigate that, it's called fingerlings and tanker trucks. They don't do it a lot but *they could* for wild salmon. They can get moved around the dams without major loss. It doesn't take many adults to get thousands and thousands of fingerlings either, they could net some adults when migrating up the river to go spawn, or they use what are called "fish ladders", move em around the dam, then re capture the fingerlings later and put them back in the river downstream of the dam, or do it in long concrete runway tanks that are already old and used tech. Using tanker trucks is the main way they move around and stock trout now for instance.
As to the methane, that's what natural gas is, methane with some scent added to it so people can smell it. If we can eliminate the need to burn natural gas in generating plants by using hydropower and windchargers and so on, that's the tradeoff for the dammed up areas releasing some methane. It's not perfect, but we get a lot more benefits from the hydropower and reservoirs than not. *Everything* we humans do is a tradeoff with "nature", so the best is to look where we can be cleaner and more efficient. And that's it.
...should get together and explore the feasibility of banding together in a co-op and see how feasible an all wireless network might be, wifi to microwave bridges to..WiMax to...got no idea, "wireless", I'll let the wireless gurus here fill in those blanks (or shoot it down, this is just an idea).
I get a canopy connection here and it is *some* miles from the tower and I am in a little stream valley with really crappy to non existent "line of sight" and I still connect at least a lot better than dialup, and it works. Not perfect, not blazing fast like some folks get, but dang, can actually get linux isos now and so on. I waited YEARS for any sort of telco or cable company to offer something, and nyet, they ain't interested, despite living on a two lane blacktop that really isn't that far out of their regular "service" area for cable or DSL, like a mile or so too far so they just don't care about it. But this wireless works now after a few hiccups and thanks to those techs, customer service in spades setting this up for me, and they are getting my loot now, and not the dialup and telco (at least directly). Comes in roughly half price what I was paying previously, added plus goodness there.
Maybe it is possible on an even larger geographical area and a more cooperative scale (hundreds of smaller local ISPs and independent customers, etc), given there might be so many customers who would be more than happy to have a bridging tower AP thing set up out in the back 40 for a freebie connection maybe..
I know eventually *some place* in this theoretical wireless co-op scenario they have to tap into the main backbones, but maybe a few legs of the wireless could cross the border into the US where they could do that, or the coop could run a few private fiber lines? Something like that. Then all these ISPs (and maybe some more customers like a lot of little burgs and villages, etc) could just completely bypass those two monopolies.
Now I don't think any *one* wireless tech would work for the whole shebang, but maybe a combination of what is out there now might help get it established.
That's it, all you can do now, when and if you see it. If it takes out pasture to the side, or row crops to the side, you still have to do that. And ya, sprays are toxic, but there's a few really nasty things growing out there that could seriously bork the food supply, so it's a tradeoff, and sometimes there are areas where that sort of spray is the only credible solution.
The option of letting it grow unchecked is really the worse of several evils now, and it could go from just being sucky to a catastrophe. Do some googling and look for images, and see what it does unchecked, it creeps into forests even and crowds stuff out, let alone open areas. I've been hip to this stuff for some time now, that's why I keep an eyeball out for it, even when I am driving around, because if I see it, and I don't care who's property it is, I'll sure as hell report it to the extension service.
When *nothing* will eat the thing, including goats, and it can spread underground, along with billions of teeny tiny seeds that can be blown around or carried around, and it chokes everything else out eventually, that makes it a grade A emergency and drastic measures will have to be used to eradicate it.
One of the most effective ways to deal with an out of control forest fire is to burn a backfire. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice for the larger good.
Ya, it sucks and I don't like using it myself, but it's the only cheap* thing we got to do that chore with now.
* for some values of cheap. It's still real expensive, but since it fell out of patent you can save a few bucks.
The next potentially less sucky approach would be that "terminator gene" thing I mentioned, which I think is dangerous as all get out to introduce into food crops, and I am totally against the production of such a plant or seed there, but might be useful as an alternative to control species like this.
Just like (well, it would be kinda sorta) one of the more effective ways they have found to control nasty insects (example, med fruit fly) is to introduce billions of sterile males in the targeted infested area, instead of toxic spraying everything.
"KDE and Gnome are also not complete distros on their own."
You are correct, but they could be, and IMO, they *should be*, because they both have stuff that works perfectly fine for the most part and have established organizational structure and name cred. Either of them could have taken a lead there and developed a business model around their efforts, like canonical is trying or Redhat, etc has established. And, they can still be "non profits". Non profits can make money besides from donations, and also can pay salaries. The OLPC charges money for their work and product, the kids laptop. They just screwed the pooch in not taking advantage of economies of scale and income by not releasing a "civilian" model for sale, perhaps with a modest but useful 10% markup they could use to further their "charity" efforts, instead of the extremely limited and completely screwed up effort where they charged a full 100% markup over what in essence was already the full "retail" price, and even then had it limited geographically and with bad shipping and so on..
Well, some other "real" companies saw what they did wrong, took the basic idea, which was quite sound and reflected a still untapped at the time huge business niche, and ran with it (and it didn't take long for them to do so, either, because it was obvious and easier than not to do) and now look at the explosion in netbooks. That could have been them, easily. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by not being flexible or applying plain vanilla business practices to what they were doing. They could have garnered more interest, built and shipped way more units, and taken an early and big lead in the "dinky and cheap but still functional enough to be useful" laptop market. They only needed two different enough appearing products (with a small but reasonable pricing difference4 as well) to still follow all their basic philospophy, the "poor kids laptop for learning and exploring", and then have "other than that", a normal one. Cosmetic differences and color and perhaps a bit more oomph in the street commercial version for sale in the more richer parts of the world, etc would have differentiated them out on the street so that the kids laptop wouldn't wind up on ebay, instead of staying in the poor kids hands.
Canonical is the only one big company out there now that has an emphasis on "linux on the desktop", and that's why they are ahead there in that particular market, because of that focus, most of the rest of the big names are server and "enterprise" oriented, and either of the two big main DEs could have done the same exact thing, just emphasizing joe regular desktop user instead.
There's still plenty of room out there to explore linux on the desktop, perhaps even with a full guaranteed to work stack like apple does with both software and hardware. There are SIX billion people out there on this rock, that's a lot of potential customers.
Gnome and KDE are in a good position to do that, because they already have and actively develop the bulk of what a desktop user actually uses on a day to day basis. Adding in the kernel and some other stuff and making it all tie together is bog standard, and completely free for them to use, just like any number of smaller distros do that now. And the smaller, well, heck, even the larger distros primarily usually just pick Gnome or KDE anyway to be the default "facing" environment that endusers see and interact with, which is really the most important part.
Think about it. Every dollar someone makes is taxed with income taxes (and sales taxes for a lot of them). That same dollar, keep your eye on it, gets spent, someone else gets it, for producing a good or service that it is exchanged for. They in turn are taxed on it. And again, and again, and again. And it just keeps going like that. Dollars get taxed on themselves several times over what they are worth, and they start as private bank debt notes to begin with and are loaned into existence. And because this is an exchange of debt instruments for debt instruments, the original "fee" that the lender charged can never be "paid off".
It's the biggest complicated ongoing set of economic frauds out there, since they switched from money being representations of past produced wealth (or intrinsic wealth directly), with a natural scarcity that more reflected the real market, to representations of poof created "credit" by some anointed private contractor to the government, which is all the "Federal" reserve is, a private contractor that took over which was legally supposed to be Congress's job on setting the value of the officially recognized and accepted currency.
And that's why we have such an economic mess today, one of the main reasons, they opened up the legal possibility of unlimited future calls on your labor to the banking establishment, "just because", with *no way possible even theoretically* to ever "pay them off".
Doesn't even need to be pelletized. They have outside furnaces now that are designed to take big round bales. And I imagine any coal burning plant has the means to take the stuff in bulk as well. But then harvesting it and moving it around would just spread the seeds further.
With that said, there probably isn't any chemical control that would work, although that monsanto "terminator" gene tech might. Still risky though.
Invasive species are a PITA, I am always having to deal with them here. For example I have gradually started turning tide on multiflora rose, after five years of a lot of effort, spraying, mowing and physically yanking the big clumps out by the roots with chains and the tractor. They get to be like freeking little trees almost. One interesting thing I found out though, this rose also attracts another invasive species, Japanese beetles, that munch on it. So sometimes I get a good "twofer" opportunity for eradication.
I haven't seen that cogongrass yet on the property, but IF I do, I'll make it a point to nail that stuff daily if that is what it takes.
I would imagine anyone sophisticated enough to make the weapon would also be good enough to come up with the cure or vaccine whatever before they released it. And that's just the obvious surface level.
And if it was just an economic weapon, designed to just make money or injure/cause economic losses, but not destroy the target group (or most of them), you wouldn't have to worry about it as much, because you would have wagamed the spread of it in advance anyway, into your own population or demographic, like sacrificing pawns for greater advantage..unless it was ethnic-specific, which is the most common of these sorts of "theoretical" weapons that have been talked about before.
Because you could sit back and just watch it unfold, come up with some "lock the borders down" response that you claim made you avoid much of the spread. Perhaps anyway. I don't flat out reject the notion that biowarfare agents could not or would not be used based on the "you'll infect yourself" counter argument, I've thought about this a lot before.
Here's another one why I have this view, suppose you or your group "didn't care at all" if you got infected, or if everyone got infected, maybe you WANTED that to be the case. A one way ride for *everyone*, let the FSM sort it out. Mad jihadis or even madder "the human species is the cause of all the world's troubles" folks could do it, an aggressive and faster form of the human voluntary extinction idea.
There are more. Just too many possible scenarios where some justification in the minds of the weapon's creators could occur for me to just dismiss the possibility of such weapons being developed or used, and given how much better and easier this tech is today compared to a few decades ago...feelin' lucky? I know I'd bet a year's pay that all these treaties "banning" bioweapons and so forth are a buncha paper, and the labs just got buried deeper.
And also. bioweapons are called in slang "the poor man's nuke".. for a variety of reasons.
It is more logical to guess that the US did, in fact, know about it but kept that information secret to themselves, to not give away sources or any edge (perceived or real). Just like the UK didn't blab back to the Germans that Enigma was compromised. The Germans didn't know for sure it was, and the UK let them keep thinking that because that offered the strategic advantage. And even if it was "revenge", they still most likely thought that there would be survivors, and they needed that revenge strike to protect them in the future. A parent sacrificing themselves for a child type thing. *None* of the global war scenarios had every single human croaking. Someone was still going to win, even by just raw still living body count. Sort of a Rocky Balboa win was the worst case, 9/10ths beat to death, opponent loses because he got to 9.5/10ths.
Both sides in the cold war (and all throughout the leadup to ww2 and during the hot war really) had extensive spying efforts, electronic and human. They didn't rely on governmental official press releases to gather intel.
And to this day the US would probably claim no knowledge, as wherever (whomever) they got that knowledge from might still be alive and still needs protection both for him, and perhaps his handlers and the procedures used. I know if I was joe spy boss I wouldn't be giving that up. That's just the default, you give nuthin up if possible, ever, for any reason. You *gather* intel, you only *give away* bullshit, or partial bullshit.
As for the Russians, and opposed to the prevailing viewpoint here, I would say they had no advantage to leaking or deliberately transmitting the knowledge of the doomsday machine..because if you recall, all the nuke war scenarios involved multiple waves of attacks, from multiple sources.
Both sides *already had* an acknowledged and understood "doomsday response" in the form of sub launched missiles, and low altitude bombers. There was no possible way for either side to take out already flying bombers that were in the air 24/7, or really know where all the boomers were. maybe some good guesses, but.... And how about mobile based missiles? Or merchant marine armed Q ships? No way either side would have known exactly where they all were at any given time, so they would have been available for any of the response scenarios, first strike, retaliation, second strike, third...., in short, there already existed multiple doomsday machines, overlapping.
So, there was little to no advantage to the soviets to give it up that there was still yet *another* last ditch fixed based rocket weapon (at least fire control) system, and most to all the of reasons to just keep it quiet (of the nuke weapons, both sides also had extensive plans for bio warfare and chemical warfare, even if it meant "scorched earth", no one really wins, and also guerrilla fighting behind the lines that might have gone on for years and years, with hidden caches, etc)(Proly still some on US soil that are *really* well hid...).
The answer to that is "plausible deniability" engineered biowarfare agents.(something is released on a target population and no one knows where it came from or if it is natural or not, and all the big players claim it ain't them did it) They proly already have bunches of them in blackops labs, both government *and* most likely private. I could easily see "private" efforts just for financial gain. Use your imagination there on how that might work, say something nasty, but isn't all that lethal, just close enough to warrant an expen$ive response..
If you mean "hard" tech, what we normally think of as weapons, that would be robotics combined with directed energy weapons, both directly offensive (lasers and whatever) and again, perhaps some plausible deniability directed energy weapons, like some sort of super HAARP weather control efforts that any state using them could just keep claiming were for "normal scientific research", etc., as in "we don't care what you think, that category 15 hurricane that hit your coast is just your bad luck, you don't have any proof, and you wear a tinfoil hat, etc"
What performance penalty do they have? I am not a dev, so I really don't know. Doesn't Apple use something like a microkernel approach with OSX now, or am I just remembering wrong? I like reading these sort of threads, but have a severe lack of knowledge sometimes as it isn't my main business or even a hobby. I just drive this box on the desk, that's it. I can change the oil and sparkplugs and fix a flat, that's about as far as I can go with computers.
...microkernels are better *in the long run*? You only add what you really need and want to, to the basic kernel? Sort of like FF as a browser, which comes stock with just pure browser functionality and no more, then you salt to taste with thousands of add-ons?
..no more ISP automatic bans on home servers, or forcing you to pay "extra" for that "privelege". The promise of the net is that it is a full two way street for data sharing (basically), and they keep trying to turn it into a combo cable TV and cellphone "plan", with restrictions and locked down features up the wazoo.
It will just become one plastic blob, with the circuitry embedded right in the plastic, and being semi immune from bending fatigue breakage. No board and separate case in other words. I guess they'll need a way to do the sim card, but perhaps they can do with with bluetooth.(or some other shortrange wireless tech). Charging the blobbed batt will be inductive. Pros are sturdy, weather proof and most likely pretty cheap, cons, no user serviceable entry at all without some serious leet dremel skills and a microscope and so on. But really, if they can get them cheaper than even now, along with much higher resistance to breakage, most people won't care about getting inside the thing anyway.
Writers REPORT the scandals. That is, the distill the information, write it up in somewhat easy to read form, their editors and proofreaders do the final touch up, etc but they DON'T for the most part "uncover" many scandals without the leaks. There are a few exceptions, such as lately those undercover Acorn whorehouse facilitating vids, but again, someone had to first leak that Acorn was doing such things. And that particular scandal did NOT come from main stream news expensive reporters, it came from private, very low ball cost, independent video bloggers, who just took a cheap cam, threw on laughable "pimp and ho" Halloween costumes, and waltzed in..
The scandals themselves come from NON journalist insiders who are concerned over the crimes they see at work or wherever. Basically, all "investigative journalists" do is pretty up the story, and it became the fashion for these large old print media and broadcast media to claim they "uncovered" it. A lot of times they didn't, they just got tipped off, that's all. Most of the scandals probably. The classic Woodward and Bernstein and "deep throat". There was NO STORY without "deep throat" leaking it. Nowadays they wouldn't be needed, TOR and wikileaks (and etc other ways) would have sufficed to get the story out.
How much is "news" worth, when we can still get the basic story today in a fashion that is just a little worse grammatically possibly, with some typos, or maybe the video is not top of the line professional quality, but "plenty good enough"?? I contend it is NOT worth billions of dollars annually anymore.
And for regular local news, ordinary enthusiast bloggers can cover that, we are already seeing it, such as on Examiner and Topix and millions of other smaller efforts. Heck, look at "black box voting". The dang big guys didn't do jack shit with a pretty damn important story, neither uncovered it nor did much coverage of it, it was independent concerned people risking a lot that did it, put stuff up on the web about it, and are still the main source of information about this issue.
There are enthusiasts for this or that, local kids baseball to the county board payoff scandals to huge geopolitical events, this area or that, big cities and foreign nations to little podunk towns and way the hell out in booganoogaland, and enjoy writing about it, and pay is a secondary issue, if it even matters to them at all, as most are completely content to do it for free, for their own reasons.
And you don't need to "fly in" some expensive newsie anyplace any more, cellphones and the net are everywhere, even in remote developing nations, and the locals there are ALREADY THERE and have a BIG INTEREST in getting any sort of important "news" concerning their area out..and they are *doing so* now, and it is becoming more extensive daily. And it's just not all that hard to write well enough for other people to understand it, either, even having to jump through language translations hoops.
The old news "business" paradigm is broken, because of modern tech. It's on the way out, just like the old business paradigm of charging ludicrous amounts for copies of music is on the way out, because "copies" are now extremely close to "free" in cost to make and distribute widely.
World wide cheap easy internet has just utterly SMASHED any number of old dinosaur businesses now, they are just thrashing around in pools of their own bleeding irrelevancy. They are no longer "worth" what they think they are, not even a fraction of it, just because they WERE pre internet and cellphones.
That was then, this is now, the sooner those people realize that, the sooner they can go find something else to do to "make tons of money". Or in the case of tools like Murdoch and his ilk, why can't they just close shop, call it a night cowboy, and go retire on the billions they already made?
Just how freekin "rich" d
Do you get the same bad effects from LED lighting? I know for area lights they suck (at least the ones I have seen so far), but for reading lights, etc they work OK.
I haven't done it, but maybe if you took LED spots, then had a white or light colored ceiling and tried to just bounce it/diffuse that way around the room or a piece of the room where it mattered you could use them for area lights. I need to try this...
I agree with you on the compact fluorescents, I try to be as energy efficient as possible, and tried some of those things and they just weird me out, can't stand them, have difficulty reading with them, or doing such things as opening the box up for repairs or upgrades, etc..anything close, close work or reading, they just slap don't work well.. But, normal long tube fluorescents as overhead lights like in shops or offices, etc, don't seem as bad to me for some reason, I can at least tolerate them (except for some that make a hideous high pitched noise that doesn't seem to bother most people but I can hear), but the screw in fluorescent replacements for incandescents just don't cut the mustard for my needs in any place I have tried them yet.
Car analogy time
We just got back from town, on the trip, a convoy of antique cars went by obviously going to or from some rally. Now, I doubt many of those companies exist, or if they do, still offer "official authorized" factory repair parts, which we will term "patches". That market is now made up of enthusiasts who build their own replacement parts, or small shops that turn them out because they know there is a market..just to keep those old cars running. And the same applies to more modern era "muscle cars".
Why is it that any software, that is granted patents, etc, is treated different? Why is it "legal" to not be able to thoroughly analyze, observe all the bits, and come up with "parts" or aftermarket "patches"? No one gets sued for making old car parts, and it isn't illegal, or anything like that. And it isn't illegal to reverse engineer, disassemble, inspect, or even *improve upon* the original design of this that or the other part.
This has been seriously bogus for a long time, either just copyrights, or treat it like a tangible manufactured product because they are allowed patents, etc, but not both.
And what's the deal with no warranty anyway, why does software get a free skate on that, this "caveat emptor" stance that no other "thing" in the market place has, when all other products, whether outright sold or leased -"licensed to use", must provide, or have automatically applied to them, a minimum warranty as to suitability for purpose and free from glaring and harmful defects and so on?
Software gets double legal protection, something no other "product" gets, while having zero legal requirements for actual functionality and security (free from harmful defects) (most generally speaking), again, something no other product gets.
I'd really like to see this taken all the way so that we got a legal ruling on software either being a work of art, OR a tangible-like product worthy of patent protection, and in that case warranties should apply. Both, plus no warranty required, is just too dang much, especially for bits that have serious folding money attached to the transfer of same, which said bits then get used and put "at risk" of effecting a million times (whatever) more in volume of this serious folding money stuff. And it has and still does have a huge past record of negatively impacting businesses and people who have lost data, money, had ID and CC info swiped and used, etc because of glaring and unpatched code, proving it was not quite up to the task of being suitable for purpose nor free from glaring defects..
Heh, I can even envision the scene in the courtroom to get this analogy across to the judge, the "Boston Legal" method. That younger yuppie lawyer they got, the one with the out of the box thinking brain, forget his name, he comes in with all the old car busted parts, then spanking new ones that have been built, and NOT by Belchfire, while Shatner is floating around wearing old driving duds complete with goggles and the snap brim hat, with his 1919 restored Belchfire Steamer parked out front (if they manage to prevent him driving it right into the courtroom, which he tries to do).
tailgate down, or tailgate up, and...roof cargo rack, or not?
Bradbury tells all
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/09/16/1440244
"Rice, of the 600 block of East 27th St. in Baltimore, had 29 prior convictions for crimes such as breaking and entering, Guglielmi said. He had been released Saturday from the Baltimore County Detention Center, where he had been held after his arrest by county police last year for stealing a car in the city. He was found guilty in December of unauthorized removal of property and was sentenced to 18 months in prison."
29 PRIOR CONVICTIONS!
Good for you man, thanks for removing that scumbag. I'm really sorry you had to go through that crap, but congrats on sticking up for yourself and self defense (of property and person) in general. I've been through similar, but luckily it never had to escalate to that extreme.
kids..paper towels, what effete luxury!
Back in the day..when we lost major chunks of our anatomy playing in the lava pits, we cut filets of cactus for the wounds, stuck them on spiny side in to hold them in place, then wrapped it with raw rattlesnake hide, which we skinned off with our teeth.
And we *liked it*....