Much simpler than that; they've already made it illegal to carry a non-folding knife, or one longer than 3 inches without a 'good reason' - and you need a good reason every single time. So if you say, have a locking pocket knife that you use when you go fishing, you can only carry it or keep it in the car when you're going or coming back from going fishing. Going fishing tomorrow, and keeping the knife in the car overnight? That's breaking the law, sonny. If you're lucky, you'll just get a caution; which is a criminal record, so good luck applying for jobs in the future, or even leaving the country.
No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. We just need to ban wood, hammers and nails. A 10 year stint in the pokey for owning, carrying, buying or selling a pack of nails or piece of wood will be just the thing to save our children from this new flood of shillelagh crime.
What they *should* have done is bought napster, kept it running as was, promoted the hell out of it, and made buckets of money with advertising and promotion. Imagine radio, but with the ad dollars going straight into the record labels pockets (with a small percentage going to the actual artists, as usual)
But since we're on the suing individual uploaders path, lets examine that:
1) laughable standards of evidence gathering. Infringement notices sent to network printers, or even people sharing their own work with a vaguely similar name to something else.
2) Arguably illegal methods of evidence gathering, certainly unlicenced investigators
3) abuse of due process to get default judgements before the defendent even knows they're being sued
4) going after innocent people when it's clear they're innocent; grannies sued for the use of windows software on her mac
5) going after people, no matter the method. Suing dead people, or after losing the case against the parent, refile against the under-age kids
6) extortion; pay a fine now to our settlement centre, or face huge court costs regardless of your innocence
7) blatant lies in court, with technical 'experts' not even considering alternative explanations (unsecured wireless etc), the misrepresentation of 'making available', etc etc
8) going after alleged infringers for huge fines; civil cases are supposedly about making good the plaintiff's losses, instead they want judgements running to hundreds of thousands times their actual losses
9) other abuses of the political and legal system, like root-kits, lobbying for the right to destroy alledged infringers computers remotely, or the three-strikes laws with no evidence required to cut people off the internet at will, ever increasing retroactive copyright terms, destroying the public domain.
10) doing everything in their power to destroy or limit legitimate alternatives to their current system; hulu/boxee, raising the prices on itunes, DRM, massive rate hikes for online radio, the PRS and google music videos, the list goes on and on.
11) still treating the actual artists like crap, screwing them out of even the small amounts they're contracted to pay for say, online radio
The media cartels are actively damaging the public good, the artists, the legal and political systems with their witch-hunt. and for what?
'home taping is killing music'; 'don't copy that floppy'; 'The VCR is to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to a woman alone'; 'you wouldn't steal a car'.
Every time the copyright cartels have complained about new technology destroying their business model, and fighting it kicking and screaming for a few years, it turns round and becomes their new biggest way to make money. Good art is still hard to make; quality and convenience still have value. There's still money to be made, when the economy isn't in the crapper, anyway.
True enough. The same applies for much of the British air fleet (eurofighter, F35), and the same goes in reverse for the US; the harrier is a British design, for example, and the F35 design was heavily funded by the UK.
It makes sense for strong allies to pool development costs for expensive new defence projects, instead of going it alone. Britain did shelve it's own ballistic missile program (british nuclear weapons were deployed by bomber) and buy into polaris, then trident as it was a lot cheaper than building their own.
Now you're just being picky. Why not separate the cone cells into S,M and L, or split the sense of smell down into the thousands of distinct odours we can detect?
Besides, you're missing the point. The 5 senses description is part of the lies-to-children approach to teaching. You teach the basics by giving them a simplification or outright falsehood that conveys the meaning well enough - and that lie is good enough for that purpose, even for an adult layman.
Take physics, with newton's laws of motion compared to special relativity. Newton is good enough for general purposes, even if it is wrong with a more detailed understanding. Or the Bohr model of the atom; I remember when I did my A-level in chemistry, and the first thing my teacher told me was everything I'd been told about the atom up to that point was wrong. The same thing happened at university.
It's all part of specialization; the mechanical engineer looks at the human senses, and compares them to their human-built equivalent sensors, which is an entirely different approach to that of a biochemist.
Ah, but you're missing something. For many ISPs, p2p users cost them money. They've priced their products so low, that they only make profit on the browser brigade; people who use far less bandwidth than they actually promised them. Those who use anything like their full capacity allowances cost them money instead.
Having a user accused of copyright infringement by the 'official' representatives? Hey, that means we can kick off our heaviest users without argument, and charge them a termination fee for breach of their terms and conditions! Yay! The only downside is having to do the paperwork.
Don't count on the mainsteam ISPs being your ally in this fight. Some of them will be as glad to cut you off the internet as the RIAA is to cut you off. Remember, a stated goal of measures like this is to put pressure on families; teenagers using p2p don't care or even know about copyright law, but surveys have shown they're a lot more concerned about what will happen to them if they cause their Dad's internet connection to get cut off. That innocent people will also get cut off doesn't matter to the music labels, as long as they make teenagers afraid to download,
The European Coal and Steel Community, which eventually became the EU, and the marshall plan had a lot more to do with the peace in Western Europe than US troops stationed in the region.
WWII came about directly because of the political failures of the resolution to WWI; specifically, reparations and the attempts to hobble Germany militarily without actually succeeding. That resentment lead to National Socialism, and the failure to act soon enough to stop Hitler was down to fear amongst the western politicians about another mass slaughter like WWI.
France and Germany tied themselves together tightly politically and economically with the ECSC, with the deliberate goal of preventing another war like WWII. "The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to 'make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.'"
Substantial material help from the US towards Germany rebuilding - partly as a bulwark against the soviets in the brewing cold war - was also a definite part of the solution. Remember, in WWI, the war was largely fought on French soil; the Germans generally didn't feel they actually lost, so resented the massive punishment inflicted on them by the allies in the post-war settlement. WWII left germany in utter ruin - partly because nobody wanted to make the same mistakes as WWI. If germany had been left in rubble, who knows what might have happened afterwards?
Britain got the raw end of the deal though; the US bled the british empire dry through the cash and carry act, arming Britain at huge expense; then there was the anglo-american loan after the war, which Britain only finished paying off in 2006, the cost of which lead to rationing in the UK lasting well into the 50's.
Lastly; nuclear weapons. War between major powers in the 1950s and 60s was a very different beast than war in the 1930s. Wars by proxy became the standard.
Trident missiles are not rented, they're paid for. The warheads are british, and the decision to fire them is solely the decision of the Prime Minister, or the submarine captain in the event of complete loss of communication in the event of war - there is no US veto.
Unlike the US, TV in the rest of the world fulfills a lot of other purposes - apolitical news, documentaries, education, current affairs as well as entertainment shows that are too high-brow/niche for the commercial channels to bother with.
Besides, it's not government-run, it's government funded; there's a difference. When TV is used to keep the populace informed, instead of just keeping the population stupified, it helps not to spend 30% of the runtime playing adverts.
A lot of pro-lifers don't actually give a damn about life; see how little they care about what happens after the children are born, for example, or arabs killed in other countries, or even back the death penalty.
Many pro-lifers see having children as punishment for having sex outside marriage; abortion is a way out of that punishment. Stem-cell research is 'creating freaks of nature in a lab', and such science, like gays, are disgusting and counter to God's plan.
IVF, on the other hand, is good for Godly married couples who are too old or otherwise infertile to have the children they want; since God loves children, IVF is just helping God along a bit.
Next time you see a pro-life argument, substitute anti-sex, and you'll see it explains a lot of the inconsistencies.
Why not got one further, and simply ban software patents of all kinds, like most other countries in the world?
Software is covered by copyright; there's no need to grant patents on it too. Filesystems, like many other software concepts are relatively easy to come up with, on a broad basis - and the same general patent covers many, many approaches and denies them to competitive forces for way too long. The clever, hard work is in actually implementing the idea and making it work.
Patents were originally intended so that someone could come along, read the patent, and easily replicate the entire product, once the monopoly period was over, and the inventor compensated for putting his work into the public domain. The equivalent for software, direct instructions on how it works - is the code and documentation itself, not some vague patent intentionally designed to cover as many possible variations upon the idea as possible.
Software patents are solely about preventing competition and raising the bar to entry for smaller, innovative firms. When engineers are specifically instructed to never, ever read patents in case they get sued for subsequently implementing anything that vaguely touches on a similar area; when this happens, patents are actively harmful to innovation and endeavour. Get rid of them, as pretty much every other country in the world has done.
Faking evidence and presenting it to a court, with the intention of fooling the court into thinking it's genuine for the purpose of convicting someone is illegal no matter what your jurisdiction - generally, you could be prosecuted for perjury (up to 7 years in prison in the UK) or contempt of court (up to 2 years).
Presenting a fake screenshot, with the explicit intention of demonstrating how easy it is to fake a screenshot though, as part of defence expert testimony; that's a different matter. Such tactics have been used in the past in UK courts. However, it's pretty easy to fake all sorts of evidence; printed letters are just as easy to fake, yet they're accepted as evidence still. We rely on the prosecution not knowingly providing false evidence to the court.
The better ground to attack is the nature of the evidence; whether it shows what it purports to show, whether the evidence can be interpeted a different way, and whether the evidence might be gathered correctly, but still wrong (laser printers getting p2p cease and desist letters)
But if you're looking to benefit from someone else's proven model, someone else's money, and someone else's risk, then yeah your liberties are going to go unrespected because you're the one throwing them away.
I take exception to this remark; you're saying that only business owners get to have human rights - which is unvarnished bullshit.
I work as a sysadmin in a private school. This is advantageous for both of us; they get a specialized person who can do a job no-one else there can, and I get to spend all my time working on the job I'm good at, instead of spending half my time on drumming up business and paperwork.
I've worked for big companies, I've worked for small companies, I've even run a my own (very small) company. As an employer, you get to judge me on my public life; that's why it's public. You don't get to dig up my private and family life as bluntly, it's none of your damn business. I don't give up my right of free speech and right to privacy (which IS a human right in the EU) just because you pay me money to do work you can't.
The government can only rule as long as a majority of the house of commons support them. In the back-bench revolts you mention, Tony Blair survived due to 1) having a HUGE majority, so able to weather a large number of dissenters 2) support from the opposition parties, when the legislation was one they rather liked.
The upper house can make passing bad legislation very painful and drawn out indeed, though not block it altogether.
Finally, the UK government does not control the military; the Crown is nominal head of the armed forces, and the government has to effectively ask permission to use them.
The government is not a dictatorship, but it is a parliamentary democracy heavily weighted away from balanced or hung parliaments. The government of the day does have very wide ranging powers indeed, as long as parliament back them. The next government can of course reverse the lot if they choose.
A constitution is only worth the weight the government itself puts in it. How effective has the US constitution been at preventing waterboarding, or stopping illegal wiretaps? Plus all the wrangling over interpreting the wording. It's a nice idea, but in the end of the day there's very few limits that are actually effective.
Well, New Labour might not get elected again if we're not living in fear of terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants. Got to give the police all the powers they need to fight these terrible crimes and protect us.
Oh wait, you said citizens. But when 'if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear' is pretty much the win-every-time argument with the citizenry, they're rather getting what they wanted in the first place.
Already done. Failure to hand over the keys to any encrypted files they have a 'reasonable suspicion' you have the keys to, is punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
Having the DNA records of hundreds of thousands of innocent people - including young children - stored on the police database indefinitely was ruled illegal by the Court recently.
So far, the UK government has done jack all about changing the situation, and is muttering about having a consultation about maybe putting in place a machanism by which innoncent people can have their DNA removed from the database, considering the merits, in exceptional circumstances. But the police of course constantly trump how important the database is to fighting crime and preventing terrorism, and of course they care about civil liberties, but they have to balance those in a fair manner against the need to fight crime effectively. There are already such rules in place, but the case has to be pretty damn exceptional indeed to get your details off, even if you've never been convicted of anything.
Any such ruling by the court of human rights regarding other illegal data collection and mining would also likely be ignored, as the council of ministers and even the parliament is leaning towards ever greater data retention laws, such as the one passed in 2005.
They do use that argument, but the favourite phrase by far is "without these tools, the police will be hampered in their efforts to protect us from terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants".
With the implied argument that if you're a 'civil liberties campaigner' who dares argue against the database state, you're in favour of the terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants getting away scot-free.
Thanks for the package advice. I've been running samba tied to NT4 domains, and then LDAP; I wasn't looking forward to going through and bringing them across to our new AD 2008 domain (exchange desired by management, ergo the new AD system). That looks a lot simpler.
Wish it showed up a lot more often on google, I've never heard of it before!
Server 2008 also has multicast support for WDS and MDT desktop deployment, if that's something you're using.
We use it virtualized on vmware, where it's considerably higher hardware requirements are a bit of a problem, to be honest - we can run 2 or 3 2003 servers with the same resources.
We went with 2008 for our active directory and DFS shares though, because we're gonna keep em around a while and 2003 is that much closer to mandatory retirement. We've got a couple of isolated 2000 server boxes doing single jobs for isolated departments, and now we've got to replace them entirely, as the hardware isn't up to spec for 2008/sql server 2005.
Our linux boxes are being cycled through into new virtual replacements, but the licencing costs to upgrade to the latest versions are a lot lower;)
Because it isn't really a natural form of sex....many people consider it as abnormal as necrophilia, pedophilia, or bestiality.
And those people are close minded bigots. None of those three types of sex are between two consenting adults, unlike gay couples. Besides, putting 'I'm a lesbian!' in your freaking profile isn't exactly forcing someone to watch icky sex they find disgusting, is it.
Would you be equally as happy banning people from putting 'I'm black!' or 'I was born deaf!' in their live profiles? Cos being gay, black and born disabled are all genetically predetermined.
If you have no problem being bigoted against one group, then you should be just as proud of your bigotry against the others.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing it was pretty much inevitable that he'd be fired. Effectively telling your boss to fuck off when he gives you an order is unlikely to be good for your long term job prospects. As you say, he could have written them all down beforehand and stuck them in a safe somewhere, to increase the bus factor. (my colleague that I trust has all the root passwords, just in case)
The fear over getting blamed for someone else's mistakes isn't complete horseshit though; look at the things they've tried to stitch him up with since, including outright falsehoods and complete misunderstanding of the tech (11000 modems hidden in filing cabinets!) Given there appears to a serious lack of competent technical staffing in the department, and the management are just breathlessly bad, it's entirely possibly they'd screw up the changes afterwards, blame him for 'setting up a booby trap' and then sue him for damages.
They should never have let it get to this situation - that's a clear failure of management. It appears pretty likely they already had an agenda to get rid of him in the first place, thus the secret audit that kicked it all off. Was he overly paranoid? Quite possibly - but since it looks like they really are out to get him, that's not really paranoia any more.
If they manage to successfully prosecute this guy on the criminal charges they've already laid against him, with the dodgy evidence and complete lack of technical understanding by the prosecution, then every competent network tech in the state is at risk for the same charges.
He was sprung with a surprise secret audit, and claims he caught the auditor taking a hard-drive, at which point he confronted her. At which point she locked herself in, and called the CIO.
On July 9, 2008 and at all relevant times, Richard Robinson was the Chief Operations Officer of DTIS [the San Francisco Technology Information Services Department]. Defendant unwittingly found himself at a meeting with Robinson in a room at the police station at the Hall of Justice. Present at that meeting were Lt. Greg Yee and Vitus Leung from the City's Human Resources Dept. Waiting outside the room but joining the meeting midway was Inspector Ramsey. The meeting was unorthodox and short on civilities. Defendant was told that he was being reassigned and was asked to disclose the FiberWAN passwords in addition to other passwords. There was no advance notice to defendant of this request. The surrounding circumstances of this request were unnerving and troubling to defendant at best. He resisted this surprise request to disclose the passwords to the FiberWAN, telling Robinson that no one was qualified to have the passwords. Under the pressure of the situation, defendant gave password information that could not be validated. During this exchange wherein defendant was questioned regarding the passwords, a speakerphone was on the desk in meeting room and people were listening in on the other end of the phone connection in a different part of the City.
Would you have given over the root passwords for your network and servers in those circumstances? Especially since you're likely to take the blame and/or get sued if some monkey screws something up and then blames it on you.
As you say, a civil action would have been more than adequate to recover them - he only wanted to hand them over in secure fashion to someone qualified to know them. He did hand them over the Mayor, "the only person he felt he could trust," a few days later, after he was already in jail.
OK, Childs had a bit of a God complex, but after years designing something that intricate, and being the only 24/7/365 support for a few years due to budget cuts, it's understandable. They've basically charged him for having the tools, access and knowledge to actually do his job.
Ironically, after claiming he was the one threatening the network, the city put the list of vpn passwords they found in his house into evidence unredacted, thus compromising half of the vpn 2-factor security for the entire network, forcing them to reset them all 2 days later; locking everybody out of the vpn access entirely. This was the first network outage since they imprisoned Childs, and was directly caused by the incompetence of the city technical management.
The primary purpose of a trademark is to distinguish your product; to ensure that others can't sell a similar product under the same name, and fool the public into buying their knock-off instead of your original.
The biggest issue then, would be selling or promoting a competitors product called a netbook on your blog, when psion own the trademark - which is why psion have sent cease and desist notices to the makers of other netbooks. Whether they'll win, given the 5 years since psion last sold netbooks, is another question.
Generally, people have fair use of trademarks to either accurately describe an aspect of a trademarked product, or that you're using the mark to name the owner of the mark.
Slashdot Mirror
Much simpler than that; they've already made it illegal to carry a non-folding knife, or one longer than 3 inches without a 'good reason' - and you need a good reason every single time. So if you say, have a locking pocket knife that you use when you go fishing, you can only carry it or keep it in the car when you're going or coming back from going fishing. Going fishing tomorrow, and keeping the knife in the car overnight? That's breaking the law, sonny. If you're lucky, you'll just get a caution; which is a criminal record, so good luck applying for jobs in the future, or even leaving the country.
Next up - banning all knives with points.. I wish I was making this up.
No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. We just need to ban wood, hammers and nails. A 10 year stint in the pokey for owning, carrying, buying or selling a pack of nails or piece of wood will be just the thing to save our children from this new flood of shillelagh crime.
Yeah, that one slashdot guy is a total hypocrit!
What they *should* have done is bought napster, kept it running as was, promoted the hell out of it, and made buckets of money with advertising and promotion. Imagine radio, but with the ad dollars going straight into the record labels pockets (with a small percentage going to the actual artists, as usual)
But since we're on the suing individual uploaders path, lets examine that:
1) laughable standards of evidence gathering. Infringement notices sent to network printers, or even people sharing their own work with a vaguely similar name to something else.
2) Arguably illegal methods of evidence gathering, certainly unlicenced investigators
3) abuse of due process to get default judgements before the defendent even knows they're being sued
4) going after innocent people when it's clear they're innocent; grannies sued for the use of windows software on her mac
5) going after people, no matter the method. Suing dead people, or after losing the case against the parent, refile against the under-age kids
6) extortion; pay a fine now to our settlement centre, or face huge court costs regardless of your innocence
7) blatant lies in court, with technical 'experts' not even considering alternative explanations (unsecured wireless etc), the misrepresentation of 'making available', etc etc
8) going after alleged infringers for huge fines; civil cases are supposedly about making good the plaintiff's losses, instead they want judgements running to hundreds of thousands times their actual losses
9) other abuses of the political and legal system, like root-kits, lobbying for the right to destroy alledged infringers computers remotely, or the three-strikes laws with no evidence required to cut people off the internet at will,
ever increasing retroactive copyright terms, destroying the public domain.
10) doing everything in their power to destroy or limit legitimate alternatives to their current system; hulu/boxee, raising the prices on itunes, DRM, massive rate hikes for online radio, the PRS and google music videos, the list goes on and on.
11) still treating the actual artists like crap, screwing them out of even the small amounts they're contracted to pay for say, online radio
The media cartels are actively damaging the public good, the artists, the legal and political systems with their witch-hunt. and for what?
'home taping is killing music'; 'don't copy that floppy'; 'The VCR is to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to a woman alone'; 'you wouldn't steal a car'.
Every time the copyright cartels have complained about new technology destroying their business model, and fighting it kicking and screaming for a few years, it turns round and becomes their new biggest way to make money. Good art is still hard to make; quality and convenience still have value. There's still money to be made, when the economy isn't in the crapper, anyway.
True enough. The same applies for much of the British air fleet (eurofighter, F35), and the same goes in reverse for the US; the harrier is a British design, for example, and the F35 design was heavily funded by the UK.
It makes sense for strong allies to pool development costs for expensive new defence projects, instead of going it alone. Britain did shelve it's own ballistic missile program (british nuclear weapons were deployed by bomber) and buy into polaris, then trident as it was a lot cheaper than building their own.
8-13. The different Taste Receptors
Now you're just being picky. Why not separate the cone cells into S,M and L, or split the sense of smell down into the thousands of distinct odours we can detect?
Besides, you're missing the point. The 5 senses description is part of the lies-to-children approach to teaching. You teach the basics by giving them a simplification or outright falsehood that conveys the meaning well enough - and that lie is good enough for that purpose, even for an adult layman.
Take physics, with newton's laws of motion compared to special relativity. Newton is good enough for general purposes, even if it is wrong with a more detailed understanding. Or the Bohr model of the atom; I remember when I did my A-level in chemistry, and the first thing my teacher told me was everything I'd been told about the atom up to that point was wrong. The same thing happened at university.
It's all part of specialization; the mechanical engineer looks at the human senses, and compares them to their human-built equivalent sensors, which is an entirely different approach to that of a biochemist.
Ah, but you're missing something. For many ISPs, p2p users cost them money. They've priced their products so low, that they only make profit on the browser brigade; people who use far less bandwidth than they actually promised them. Those who use anything like their full capacity allowances cost them money instead.
Having a user accused of copyright infringement by the 'official' representatives? Hey, that means we can kick off our heaviest users without argument, and charge them a termination fee for breach of their terms and conditions! Yay! The only downside is having to do the paperwork.
Don't count on the mainsteam ISPs being your ally in this fight. Some of them will be as glad to cut you off the internet as the RIAA is to cut you off. Remember, a stated goal of measures like this is to put pressure on families; teenagers using p2p don't care or even know about copyright law, but surveys have shown they're a lot more concerned about what will happen to them if they cause their Dad's internet connection to get cut off. That innocent people will also get cut off doesn't matter to the music labels, as long as they make teenagers afraid to download,
The European Coal and Steel Community, which eventually became the EU, and the marshall plan had a lot more to do with the peace in Western Europe than US troops stationed in the region.
WWII came about directly because of the political failures of the resolution to WWI; specifically, reparations and the attempts to hobble Germany militarily without actually succeeding. That resentment lead to National Socialism, and the failure to act soon enough to stop Hitler was down to fear amongst the western politicians about another mass slaughter like WWI.
France and Germany tied themselves together tightly politically and economically with the ECSC, with the deliberate goal of preventing another war like WWII. "The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to 'make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.'"
Substantial material help from the US towards Germany rebuilding - partly as a bulwark against the soviets in the brewing cold war - was also a definite part of the solution. Remember, in WWI, the war was largely fought on French soil; the Germans generally didn't feel they actually lost, so resented the massive punishment inflicted on them by the allies in the post-war settlement. WWII left germany in utter ruin - partly because nobody wanted to make the same mistakes as WWI. If germany had been left in rubble, who knows what might have happened afterwards?
Britain got the raw end of the deal though; the US bled the british empire dry through the cash and carry act, arming Britain at huge expense; then there was the anglo-american loan after the war, which Britain only finished paying off in 2006, the cost of which lead to rationing in the UK lasting well into the 50's.
Lastly; nuclear weapons. War between major powers in the 1950s and 60s was a very different beast than war in the 1930s. Wars by proxy became the standard.
Trident missiles are not rented, they're paid for. The warheads are british, and the decision to fire them is solely the decision of the Prime Minister, or the submarine captain in the event of complete loss of communication in the event of war - there is no US veto.
Unlike the US, TV in the rest of the world fulfills a lot of other purposes - apolitical news, documentaries, education, current affairs as well as entertainment shows that are too high-brow/niche for the commercial channels to bother with.
Besides, it's not government-run, it's government funded; there's a difference. When TV is used to keep the populace informed, instead of just keeping the population stupified, it helps not to spend 30% of the runtime playing adverts.
A lot of pro-lifers don't actually give a damn about life; see how little they care about what happens after the children are born, for example, or arabs killed in other countries, or even back the death penalty.
Many pro-lifers see having children as punishment for having sex outside marriage; abortion is a way out of that punishment. Stem-cell research is 'creating freaks of nature in a lab', and such science, like gays, are disgusting and counter to God's plan.
IVF, on the other hand, is good for Godly married couples who are too old or otherwise infertile to have the children they want; since God loves children, IVF is just helping God along a bit.
Next time you see a pro-life argument, substitute anti-sex, and you'll see it explains a lot of the inconsistencies.
Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories
Ok, now I'm curious. what scientific theory is there
a) that explains evolution
b) the majority of the population of Oklahoma believe in
c) that Dawkins disses?
given that creationism, ID and 'His Noodliness did it' aren't scientific theories?
Why not got one further, and simply ban software patents of all kinds, like most other countries in the world?
Software is covered by copyright; there's no need to grant patents on it too. Filesystems, like many other software concepts are relatively easy to come up with, on a broad basis - and the same general patent covers many, many approaches and denies them to competitive forces for way too long. The clever, hard work is in actually implementing the idea and making it work.
Patents were originally intended so that someone could come along, read the patent, and easily replicate the entire product, once the monopoly period was over, and the inventor compensated for putting his work into the public domain. The equivalent for software, direct instructions on how it works - is the code and documentation itself, not some vague patent intentionally designed to cover as many possible variations upon the idea as possible.
Software patents are solely about preventing competition and raising the bar to entry for smaller, innovative firms. When engineers are specifically instructed to never, ever read patents in case they get sued for subsequently implementing anything that vaguely touches on a similar area; when this happens, patents are actively harmful to innovation and endeavour. Get rid of them, as pretty much every other country in the world has done.
Faking evidence and presenting it to a court, with the intention of fooling the court into thinking it's genuine for the purpose of convicting someone is illegal no matter what your jurisdiction - generally, you could be prosecuted for perjury (up to 7 years in prison in the UK) or contempt of court (up to 2 years).
Presenting a fake screenshot, with the explicit intention of demonstrating how easy it is to fake a screenshot though, as part of defence expert testimony; that's a different matter. Such tactics have been used in the past in UK courts. However, it's pretty easy to fake all sorts of evidence; printed letters are just as easy to fake, yet they're accepted as evidence still. We rely on the prosecution not knowingly providing false evidence to the court.
The better ground to attack is the nature of the evidence; whether it shows what it purports to show, whether the evidence can be interpeted a different way, and whether the evidence might be gathered correctly, but still wrong (laser printers getting p2p cease and desist letters)
But if you're looking to benefit from someone else's proven model, someone else's money, and someone else's risk, then yeah your liberties are going to go unrespected because you're the one throwing them away.
I take exception to this remark; you're saying that only business owners get to have human rights - which is unvarnished bullshit.
I work as a sysadmin in a private school. This is advantageous for both of us; they get a specialized person who can do a job no-one else there can, and I get to spend all my time working on the job I'm good at, instead of spending half my time on drumming up business and paperwork.
I've worked for big companies, I've worked for small companies, I've even run a my own (very small) company. As an employer, you get to judge me on my public life; that's why it's public. You don't get to dig up my private and family life as bluntly, it's none of your damn business. I don't give up my right of free speech and right to privacy (which IS a human right in the EU) just because you pay me money to do work you can't.
The government can only rule as long as a majority of the house of commons support them. In the back-bench revolts you mention, Tony Blair survived due to
1) having a HUGE majority, so able to weather a large number of dissenters
2) support from the opposition parties, when the legislation was one they rather liked.
The upper house can make passing bad legislation very painful and drawn out indeed, though not block it altogether.
Finally, the UK government does not control the military; the Crown is nominal head of the armed forces, and the government has to effectively ask permission to use them.
The government is not a dictatorship, but it is a parliamentary democracy heavily weighted away from balanced or hung parliaments. The government of the day does have very wide ranging powers indeed, as long as parliament back them. The next government can of course reverse the lot if they choose.
A constitution is only worth the weight the government itself puts in it. How effective has the US constitution been at preventing waterboarding, or stopping illegal wiretaps? Plus all the wrangling over interpreting the wording. It's a nice idea, but in the end of the day there's very few limits that are actually effective.
Well, New Labour might not get elected again if we're not living in fear of terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants. Got to give the police all the powers they need to fight these terrible crimes and protect us.
Oh wait, you said citizens. But when 'if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear' is pretty much the win-every-time argument with the citizenry, they're rather getting what they wanted in the first place.
Already done. Failure to hand over the keys to any encrypted files they have a 'reasonable suspicion' you have the keys to, is punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
Having the DNA records of hundreds of thousands of innocent people - including young children - stored on the police database indefinitely was ruled illegal by the Court recently.
So far, the UK government has done jack all about changing the situation, and is muttering about having a consultation about maybe putting in place a machanism by which innoncent people can have their DNA removed from the database, considering the merits, in exceptional circumstances. But the police of course constantly trump how important the database is to
fighting crime and preventing terrorism, and of course they care about civil liberties, but they have to balance those in a fair manner against the need to fight crime effectively.
There are already such rules in place, but the case has to be pretty damn exceptional indeed to get your details off, even if you've never been convicted of anything.
Any such ruling by the court of human rights regarding other illegal data collection and mining would also likely be ignored, as the council of ministers and even the parliament is leaning towards ever greater data retention laws, such as the one passed in 2005.
They do use that argument, but the favourite phrase by far is "without these tools, the police will be hampered in their efforts to protect us from terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants".
With the implied argument that if you're a 'civil liberties campaigner' who dares argue against the database state, you're in favour of the terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants getting away scot-free.
Thanks for the package advice. I've been running samba tied to NT4 domains, and then LDAP; I wasn't looking forward to going through and bringing them across to our new AD 2008 domain (exchange desired by management, ergo the new AD system). That looks a lot simpler.
Wish it showed up a lot more often on google, I've never heard of it before!
Server 2008 also has multicast support for WDS and MDT desktop deployment, if that's something you're using.
We use it virtualized on vmware, where it's considerably higher hardware requirements are a bit of a problem, to be honest - we can run 2 or 3 2003 servers with the same resources.
We went with 2008 for our active directory and DFS shares though, because we're gonna keep em around a while and 2003 is that much closer to mandatory retirement. We've got a couple of isolated 2000 server boxes doing single jobs for isolated departments, and now we've got to replace them entirely, as the hardware isn't up to spec for 2008/sql server 2005.
Our linux boxes are being cycled through into new virtual replacements, but the licencing costs to upgrade to the latest versions are a lot lower ;)
Because it isn't really a natural form of sex....many people consider it as abnormal as necrophilia, pedophilia, or bestiality.
And those people are close minded bigots. None of those three types of sex are between two consenting adults, unlike gay couples. Besides, putting 'I'm a lesbian!' in your freaking profile isn't exactly forcing someone to watch icky sex they find disgusting, is it.
Would you be equally as happy banning people from putting 'I'm black!' or 'I was born deaf!' in their live profiles? Cos being gay, black and born disabled are all genetically predetermined.
If you have no problem being bigoted against one group, then you should be just as proud of your bigotry against the others.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing it was pretty much inevitable that he'd be fired. Effectively telling your boss to fuck off when he gives you an order is unlikely to be good for your long term job prospects. As you say, he could have written them all down beforehand and stuck them in a safe somewhere, to increase the bus factor. (my colleague that I trust has all the root passwords, just in case)
The fear over getting blamed for someone else's mistakes isn't complete horseshit though; look at the things they've tried to stitch him up with since, including outright falsehoods and complete misunderstanding of the tech (11000 modems hidden in filing cabinets!) Given there appears to a serious lack of competent technical staffing in the department, and the management are just breathlessly bad, it's entirely possibly they'd screw up the changes afterwards, blame him for 'setting up a booby trap' and then sue him for damages.
They should never have let it get to this situation - that's a clear failure of management. It appears pretty likely they already had an agenda to get rid of him in the first place, thus the secret audit that kicked it all off. Was he overly paranoid? Quite possibly - but since it looks like they really are out to get him, that's not really paranoia any more.
If they manage to successfully prosecute this guy on the criminal charges they've already laid against him, with the dodgy evidence and complete lack of technical understanding by the prosecution, then every competent network tech in the state is at risk for the same charges.
He was sprung with a surprise secret audit, and claims he caught the auditor taking a hard-drive, at which point he confronted her. At which point she locked herself in, and called the CIO.
On July 9, 2008 and at all relevant times, Richard Robinson was the Chief Operations Officer of DTIS [the San Francisco Technology Information Services Department]. Defendant unwittingly found himself at a meeting with Robinson in a room at the police station at the Hall of Justice. Present at that meeting were Lt. Greg Yee and Vitus Leung from the City's Human Resources Dept. Waiting outside the room but joining the meeting midway was Inspector Ramsey. The meeting was unorthodox and short on civilities. Defendant was told that he was being reassigned and was asked to disclose the FiberWAN passwords in addition to other passwords. There was no advance notice to defendant of this request. The surrounding circumstances of this request were unnerving and troubling to defendant at best. He resisted this surprise request to disclose the passwords to the FiberWAN, telling Robinson that no one was qualified to have the passwords. Under the pressure of the situation, defendant gave password information that could not be validated. During this exchange wherein defendant was questioned regarding the passwords, a speakerphone was on the desk in meeting room and people were listening in on the other end of the phone connection in a different part of the City.
Would you have given over the root passwords for your network and servers in those circumstances? Especially since you're likely to take the blame and/or get sued if some monkey screws something up and then blames it on you.
As you say, a civil action would have been more than adequate to recover them - he only wanted to hand them over in secure fashion to someone qualified to know them. He did hand them over the Mayor, "the only person he felt he could trust," a few days later, after he was already in jail.
OK, Childs had a bit of a God complex, but after years designing something that intricate, and being the only 24/7/365 support for a few years due to budget cuts, it's understandable. They've basically charged him for having the tools, access and knowledge to actually do his job.
Ironically, after claiming he was the one threatening the network, the city put the list of vpn passwords they found in his house into evidence unredacted, thus compromising half of the vpn 2-factor security for the entire network, forcing them to reset them all 2 days later; locking everybody out of the vpn access entirely. This was the first network outage since they imprisoned Childs, and was directly caused by the incompetence of the city technical management.
The primary purpose of a trademark is to distinguish your product; to ensure that others can't sell a similar product under the same name, and fool the public into buying their knock-off instead of your original.
The biggest issue then, would be selling or promoting a competitors product called a netbook on your blog, when psion own the trademark - which is why psion have sent cease and desist notices to the makers of other netbooks. Whether they'll win, given the 5 years since psion last sold netbooks, is another question.
Generally, people have fair use of trademarks to either accurately describe an aspect of a trademarked product, or that you're using the mark to name the owner of the mark.