If you need more than [metadata consistency] -- and you really, probably don't -- you have to do special things, such as running an OS that never, ever, ever crashes...
Garbage.
There are schemes for writing the data and metadata, along with an indication of transaction boundaries, that provide consistency on the disk at all times.
The simplest ones have the downside that they write the data twice. That can be worked around - usually at the cost of slowing crash recovery a bit.
He's unaware of the fact that filesystem journaling was *NEVER* intended to give better data integrity guarantees than an ext2-crash-fsck cycle and that the only reason for journaling was to alleviate the delay caused by fscking.
Well I was unaware of it, too.
And when I did a journaling system back in the mid '80s the whole POINT of it was to maintain a consistent ("though not necessarily current") filesystem on the disk at all times. ("Not necessarily current" means transactions that haven't yet hit the disk get lost in a crash. So if you want to build a reliable transaction processor on top of it you have a bit more to do.)
The idea behind it: Servers are intended to run continuously. So the commonest mode of shutdown will be system crash. Thus the server needs to:
1) Always be able to recover from a crash.
2) Do it very quickly. (Once you have that you don't even need a shutdown mechanism. Just kill it. Kick off the clients first if you're really concerned about not reversing transactions.)
I had THOUGHT that the journaling file systems we've come to know and deploy were also based on this set of ideas. If they AREN'T, it's time to build one that IS.
(And if I'd known earlier that they weren't I might have gone and done it. B-( )
it sounds like you are invoking the "they laughed at Christopher Columbus" defense
Nope. I'm just saying that the "they haven't come up with a power plant yet" attack is unreasonable. (And could also be applied to the hot fusion research. B-) )
= = = =
I'd love to see "cold" fusion work - neutronic or otherwise. But (except for muon-catalyzed fusion) I don't see any theoretical underpinning yet. So I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
IMHO if this phenomenon is real it's at the "galena/point-contact crystal set" stage: Where a single instance of a functional device can be created using a microscopic "found" configuration on an irregular mass of material. It would be waiting for the same class of theoretical breakthrough that lead from modeling the low-power diode behavior to fabrication of diodes, the invention of first the bipolar transistor then a series of other devices, and the fabrication techniques of large-scale power devices and integrated circuitry.
If this power is really fusion and is coming from a tiny, accidentally-formed, surface structure or small volume structure that does some condensed-matter quantum-mechanical hack to catalyze fusion, understanding it can quickly lead to fabrication of devices with the rare accident systematically repeated over their whole surface or through their whole volume, by well-developed small-scale fabrication technologies [, (This would potentially be followed by a number of other condensed-matter-catalyzed nuclear processes playing off the same new understanding physical principles.)
Then you could end up with something like a chip you can dunk in heavy water or boric acid solution, apply a little excitation power and control signaling, and generate kilowatts of heat and steam, directly-converted electricity, or (perhaps modulated) floods of alpha particles at well-defined energies. Your power densities might be limited only by the temperature where the structure melts down.
So let's see whether it's real and whether someone can come up with a theoretical breakthrough corresponding to Shockley's _Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors_, or technical breakthroughs like the junction transistor, the Bardeen/Brattain point contact transistor, etc.
Getting past breakeven is likely to require first discovering and understanding a fusion mechanism that makes it possible, followed by a LOT of engineering to make it happen.
The successful path will likely start with something that produces a handfull of reactions - just enough to leave an identifiable signature - just as it did with nuclear fission bombs and reactors.
Unlike nitroglycerine, nuclear fission bombs didn't start with a lab explosion. Simalarly, nuclear fission power plants didn't start with a lab fire or a flask boilover (though there WERE a few such incidents along the way during the manufacturing-engineering phase, once they knew what they were doing but had some issues with knowing how to avoid doing it accidentally). Don't expect novel-mechanism nuclear fusion power plants to be any different.
... most terrorists are average people having little to no specialized skills, they aren't a professional architect,...
You shouldn't make that assumption or use it in anti-censorship arguments. In fact a non-trivial number of the planners in terrorist organizations ARE such experts.
Osama, for instance, is/was a civil engineer and owner/operator of a major civil engineering firm. Not only is he such an expert but he had many more working for him aboveground and thus plenty of potential recruits for underground work.
It's pretty clear that the attack on the Twin Towers was well designed to take the building down, probably by experts working with the building plans: The building had a failure mode that could be exploited by heat (weakening the floor structures, which braced the supporting walls against buckling, so the floors would drop away and leave the walls unbraced) and the planes were fully fueled and banked just before impact so their fuel would be deposited on several consecutive floors.
Planners in terrorist organizations don't necessarily ever end up on the operations. Thus they aren't expended and a few of them can plan many attacks.
The Standard Model literally breaks down and starts to make no sense at all arounf 1TeV in energy: without the Higgs it predicts certain interactions will happen more than 100% of the time! Hence we either have to see the Higgs or something else if the Higgs does not exist.
Or there has to be some other mechanism to prevent interactions above 1TeV. B-)
Britain will be calling in help from Boston's bomb technicians to confirm the grenade is disarmed.
But it's a HOLY hand grenade. That implies the explosion may be miraculous. Which means normal tests for whether it's armed and normal disarmament techniques may not work.
You need a priest to handle this. (If it were an UNholy hand grenade you'd need an exorcist.)
You remember... when it was discovered that RAM doesn't disappear all its data instantly on poweroff?
[Does that enable] an attack [that] sticks across cold-boots?
The RAM content may persist. But you know darn well it won't be executed until it's been overwritten. If it were the machine would have been executing random code on every boot and typically flaking out as a result.
So, no, I don't think persistence in powered-down RAM is a significant threat.
(I could imagine it being exploited, though, by a small amount of code that got burned into flash which checked a larger block in RAM to see if it had survived and, if it had, executed it.)
As much as it pains us all, these banks really are too big to fail.
Unfortunately, nothing is too big to fail. And the bigger they are the harder they fall.
So when they're falling, what's the right approach? Try to prop them up with stacks of additional money (which also gets lost when they fall over anyhow?) Or refuse to throw the additional money into the pit and just get it over with?
I claim the latter is the right approach. Makes the disaster smaller, more limited to the institutions whose people made the wrong decisions (rather than robbing the people who made better decisions to pay for it), and serves as an object lesson for future decision-makers.
That needs to be fixed. We simply cannot have corporations that are so essential that we taxpayers must "insure" them.
With you there.
But that's tomorrow's fight. Today we just need to survive.
NOT with you THERE.
The more we prop up the failing giants, the more of us go down with them.
From a memetic point of view, this only makes sense. Any religion that believe offing yourself as fast as possible was a good idea would be like the Ebola of religions, wiping itself out before getting a good shot at jumping hosts.
As the suicide thing was explained to me:
1) Early Christians attempted to get themselves into a state of grace by good works and baptism. Many of them, when they had convinced themselves they had achieved it, tended to suicide rather than taking the risk of backsliding and dying while out of grace. The religion survived mainly because, on the average, it recruited faster than it lost adherents due to suicide.
2) The church officials came up with an interpretation of the scriptures that made committing suicide a sin that would, itself, pull the adherent out of a state of grace. This was, of course, a mortal sin, not because it was particularly evil, but because, being dead, the adherent could no longer repent, atone, and again achieve grace. Oops!
This didn't stop the behavior, of course. But now it became a game of the adherent trying to get somebody ELSE to kill him, rather than doing it himself, and goading them into it in a way that did not constitute sin.
A lot of Christians were in the Roman Empire and annoying Roman officials became a common method. (They had policies of non-interference with the local religions as long as they weren't a problem and of making a painful and fatal example of anyone who upset the operation of their empire.) Things like aggressively preaching using the governor, the general, the bureaucrats, and the legionaries as shining examples of horrible sinners, gang protests, etc. You get the idea. Get killed while trying to propagate the religion and not only hold onto the state of grace but gain some martyr points. The Romans were more than happy to oblige. (Volunteers for the games!) Thus was born the Roman Persecution
3) Eventually the church officials came up with another interpretation to close off that route (and practically made "rendering onto Caesar" a duty, turning the church into something suitable for making the adherents more docile subjects rather than toxic pains-in-the-neck). Roughly that time a Roman emperor converted and gave state sanction to the church. Suicide-by-cop was now out and the church-state connection born.
Now I don't claim that this is accurate. But assuming it happened this way it makes sense in three ways:
- Legitimate (and perhaps divinely inspired) interpretations - straight face value.
- Cynical design by officials to raise their congregations' size and donations, or survival rate.
- Meme-theory evolution, with the pro-survival doctrinal mutations becoming more successful as their hosts live longer and better, propagating this version of the infection farther and faster.
Most voice software works great for english-speaking people in the midwestern United States. But if you have an accent...
I have a southeastern Michigan accent - essentially the same as the "standard radio/TV accent" (Cincinnati OH). It was chosen for that service because it makes ALL the American English phonetic distinctions (vs. for example an east-coast accent which merges "l" and "r" making Kennedys sound like they're saying Fidel heads "Cuber") and because it's intelligible to speakers of ALL the American English accents.
You'd think that a modern voice recognition system should be able to handle THAT, at least? Especially if it came in a vehicle manufactured in Detroit, right?
Just bought a For T150 Lariat. Great truck. Came with the "link" system by Microsoft. Does navigation, cellphone hands-free by bluetooth,... Has voice recognition for control to keep hands on the wheel.
Darn thing has a horrible time recognizing my voice, even when I'm speaking carefully and clearly. (For instance: Tried to call home yesterday and it called the "identify a piece of music" number that Sony-Ericsson threw into my cellphone's phone directory. Doesn't ask for confirmation before making a call, either.)
If your system is capable of it: Configure it to divide the bandwidth equally between the active customers during congestion. Do this moment-to-moment by dropping packets of the over-share customer or dynamically adjusting his bandwidth on a very short term basis. This will cause his TCP connections (and some UDP flow hacks) to throttle back. (If you can do it, give preference WITHIN A CUSTOMER'S FLOWS to the packets related to low-bandwidth streaming traffic such as VOIP, so it's less-sensitive traffic that takes the hit.)
Note that I said "between customers", not "between flows". Some download tools open a bunch of connections, so this would cheat if the throttling algorithm didn't take into account which customer the flows were going to.
Editors, please be a bit more sensitive. There is no country "Europe", and most of us on the continent Europe do not want it to become a country We are only stuck with some assholes that we did not vote for, that created a "government" that we can't really vote for, and that we explicitly can't vote not to exist in the first place. Americans who were stuck with an asshole President, should understand this.:)
We've understood it fine since at least the Civil War.
(In case you're not familiar with the real issue: That's when the Several States found out, violently, that they couldn't leave the federation if they disagreed with its politics or the economic central planning that moved the money to New York and kept what's now "flyover country" in third-world status. Freeing slaves was never the target - it could have been done a LOT cheaper by buying them, as it was in the rest of the world - and the Emancipation Proclamation was tacked on near the end as a tactical move, though "freeing slaves" had been used as pro-war propaganda - like the "going after the WMD" stories about Iraq (though there really WERE slaves) - even in the period leading up to the conflict.)
... alteration of enzyme kinetics... looks viable for detection of / interference by low-energy radiation.... [there's] speculation on coupling to excitable membranes...
Folding might be an issue, too, where a short-term exposure could have long-term effect.
= = = =
That said: The move to everything-spread-spectrum would help to reduce the ability of microwave photons to gang up by resonance, potentially increasing the threshold of exposure necessary for an effect (though simultaneously eliminating the ability for a tuned signal to miss a particular sensitive frequency so if there IS any effect once the exposure is high enough to provide the energy it's far more likely to occur).
... culminating in something to dwarf the Teapot Dome scandal...
(And yes I do know that Harding was a Republican and Teapot Dome was related to cronyism with, and bribery from, buddies in the oil industry and would thus have been a more resonant example if I were decrying possible corruption in a Bush administration. But I'm more concerned with magnitude than particulars here.)
I thought the government under Obama was going to be made of rainbows and kittens glued together with hope. Are you telling me Obama's administration is as corrupt as any other but also has a one-party supermajority Congress and a cheerleading media backing it?
He's a successful politician from the Chicago machine, which makes Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall look like minor pranks on a boy scout campout. What did you expect?
*I* expect ongoing machine corruption scaled up to the national level, culminating in something to dwarf the Teapot Dome scandal and any corruption in any other administration since than (including the Clinton and both Bush administrations).
But then I've dealt with Chicago politics a little bit... (Thank Murphy I've never had to live there.)
Slashdot Mirror
I kept thinking about derailing a car, before I realized I was on the wrong track.
It's easy. (With a little help from Google Images...)
Car
Derailer
If you need more than [metadata consistency] -- and you really, probably don't -- you have to do special things, such as running an OS that never, ever, ever crashes ...
Garbage.
There are schemes for writing the data and metadata, along with an indication of transaction boundaries, that provide consistency on the disk at all times.
The simplest ones have the downside that they write the data twice. That can be worked around - usually at the cost of slowing crash recovery a bit.
He's unaware of the fact that filesystem journaling was *NEVER* intended to give better data integrity guarantees than an ext2-crash-fsck cycle and that the only reason for journaling was to alleviate the delay caused by fscking.
Well I was unaware of it, too.
And when I did a journaling system back in the mid '80s the whole POINT of it was to maintain a consistent ("though not necessarily current") filesystem on the disk at all times. ("Not necessarily current" means transactions that haven't yet hit the disk get lost in a crash. So if you want to build a reliable transaction processor on top of it you have a bit more to do.)
The idea behind it: Servers are intended to run continuously. So the commonest mode of shutdown will be system crash. Thus the server needs to:
1) Always be able to recover from a crash.
2) Do it very quickly.
(Once you have that you don't even need a shutdown mechanism. Just kill it. Kick off the clients first if you're really concerned about not reversing transactions.)
I had THOUGHT that the journaling file systems we've come to know and deploy were also based on this set of ideas. If they AREN'T, it's time to build one that IS.
(And if I'd known earlier that they weren't I might have gone and done it. B-( )
it sounds like you are invoking the "they laughed at Christopher Columbus" defense
Nope. I'm just saying that the "they haven't come up with a power plant yet" attack is unreasonable. (And could also be applied to the hot fusion research. B-) )
= = = =
I'd love to see "cold" fusion work - neutronic or otherwise. But (except for muon-catalyzed fusion) I don't see any theoretical underpinning yet. So I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
IMHO if this phenomenon is real it's at the "galena/point-contact crystal set" stage: Where a single instance of a functional device can be created using a microscopic "found" configuration on an irregular mass of material. It would be waiting for the same class of theoretical breakthrough that lead from modeling the low-power diode behavior to fabrication of diodes, the invention of first the bipolar transistor then a series of other devices, and the fabrication techniques of large-scale power devices and integrated circuitry.
If this power is really fusion and is coming from a tiny, accidentally-formed, surface structure or small volume structure that does some condensed-matter quantum-mechanical hack to catalyze fusion, understanding it can quickly lead to fabrication of devices with the rare accident systematically repeated over their whole surface or through their whole volume, by well-developed small-scale fabrication technologies [, (This would potentially be followed by a number of other condensed-matter-catalyzed nuclear processes playing off the same new understanding physical principles.)
Then you could end up with something like a chip you can dunk in heavy water or boric acid solution, apply a little excitation power and control signaling, and generate kilowatts of heat and steam, directly-converted electricity, or (perhaps modulated) floods of alpha particles at well-defined energies. Your power densities might be limited only by the temperature where the structure melts down.
So let's see whether it's real and whether someone can come up with a theoretical breakthrough corresponding to Shockley's _Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors_, or technical breakthroughs like the junction transistor, the Bardeen/Brattain point contact transistor, etc.
Getting past breakeven is likely to require first discovering and understanding a fusion mechanism that makes it possible, followed by a LOT of engineering to make it happen.
The successful path will likely start with something that produces a handfull of reactions - just enough to leave an identifiable signature - just as it did with nuclear fission bombs and reactors.
Unlike nitroglycerine, nuclear fission bombs didn't start with a lab explosion. Simalarly, nuclear fission power plants didn't start with a lab fire or a flask boilover (though there WERE a few such incidents along the way during the manufacturing-engineering phase, once they knew what they were doing but had some issues with knowing how to avoid doing it accidentally). Don't expect novel-mechanism nuclear fusion power plants to be any different.
... most terrorists are average people having little to no specialized skills, they aren't a professional architect, ...
You shouldn't make that assumption or use it in anti-censorship arguments. In fact a non-trivial number of the planners in terrorist organizations ARE such experts.
Osama, for instance, is/was a civil engineer and owner/operator of a major civil engineering firm. Not only is he such an expert but he had many more working for him aboveground and thus plenty of potential recruits for underground work.
It's pretty clear that the attack on the Twin Towers was well designed to take the building down, probably by experts working with the building plans: The building had a failure mode that could be exploited by heat (weakening the floor structures, which braced the supporting walls against buckling, so the floors would drop away and leave the walls unbraced) and the planes were fully fueled and banked just before impact so their fuel would be deposited on several consecutive floors.
Planners in terrorist organizations don't necessarily ever end up on the operations. Thus they aren't expended and a few of them can plan many attacks.
It's always in the last place you look ...
That's because, when you find it, you stop looking.
The Standard Model literally breaks down and starts to make no sense at all arounf 1TeV in energy: without the Higgs it predicts certain interactions will happen more than 100% of the time! Hence we either have to see the Higgs or something else if the Higgs does not exist.
Or there has to be some other mechanism to prevent interactions above 1TeV. B-)
(Not bloody likely, of course.)
It's a good thing the bartender didn't bring out the Chambord Liqueur.
They'd have decided he had an arsenal and he'd still be closed.
Britain will be calling in help from Boston's bomb technicians to confirm the grenade is disarmed.
But it's a HOLY hand grenade. That implies the explosion may be miraculous. Which means normal tests for whether it's armed and normal disarmament techniques may not work.
You need a priest to handle this. (If it were an UNholy hand grenade you'd need an exorcist.)
You remember ... when it was discovered that RAM doesn't disappear all its data instantly on poweroff?
[Does that enable] an attack [that] sticks across cold-boots?
The RAM content may persist. But you know darn well it won't be executed until it's been overwritten. If it were the machine would have been executing random code on every boot and typically flaking out as a result.
So, no, I don't think persistence in powered-down RAM is a significant threat.
(I could imagine it being exploited, though, by a small amount of code that got burned into flash which checked a larger block in RAM to see if it had survived and, if it had, executed it.)
As much as it pains us all, these banks really are too big to fail.
Unfortunately, nothing is too big to fail. And the bigger they are the harder they fall.
So when they're falling, what's the right approach? Try to prop them up with stacks of additional money (which also gets lost when they fall over anyhow?) Or refuse to throw the additional money into the pit and just get it over with?
I claim the latter is the right approach. Makes the disaster smaller, more limited to the institutions whose people made the wrong decisions (rather than robbing the people who made better decisions to pay for it), and serves as an object lesson for future decision-makers.
That needs to be fixed. We simply cannot have corporations that are so essential that we taxpayers must "insure" them.
With you there.
But that's tomorrow's fight. Today we just need to survive.
NOT with you THERE.
The more we prop up the failing giants, the more of us go down with them.
From a memetic point of view, this only makes sense. Any religion that believe offing yourself as fast as possible was a good idea would be like the Ebola of religions, wiping itself out before getting a good shot at jumping hosts.
As the suicide thing was explained to me:
1) Early Christians attempted to get themselves into a state of grace by good works and baptism. Many of them, when they had convinced themselves they had achieved it, tended to suicide rather than taking the risk of backsliding and dying while out of grace. The religion survived mainly because, on the average, it recruited faster than it lost adherents due to suicide.
2) The church officials came up with an interpretation of the scriptures that made committing suicide a sin that would, itself, pull the adherent out of a state of grace. This was, of course, a mortal sin, not because it was particularly evil, but because, being dead, the adherent could no longer repent, atone, and again achieve grace. Oops!
This didn't stop the behavior, of course. But now it became a game of the adherent trying to get somebody ELSE to kill him, rather than doing it himself, and goading them into it in a way that did not constitute sin.
A lot of Christians were in the Roman Empire and annoying Roman officials became a common method. (They had policies of non-interference with the local religions as long as they weren't a problem and of making a painful and fatal example of anyone who upset the operation of their empire.) Things like aggressively preaching using the governor, the general, the bureaucrats, and the legionaries as shining examples of horrible sinners, gang protests, etc. You get the idea. Get killed while trying to propagate the religion and not only hold onto the state of grace but gain some martyr points. The Romans were more than happy to oblige. (Volunteers for the games!) Thus was born the Roman Persecution
3) Eventually the church officials came up with another interpretation to close off that route (and practically made "rendering onto Caesar" a duty, turning the church into something suitable for making the adherents more docile subjects rather than toxic pains-in-the-neck). Roughly that time a Roman emperor converted and gave state sanction to the church. Suicide-by-cop was now out and the church-state connection born.
Now I don't claim that this is accurate. But assuming it happened this way it makes sense in three ways:
- Legitimate (and perhaps divinely inspired) interpretations - straight face value.
- Cynical design by officials to raise their congregations' size and donations, or survival rate.
- Meme-theory evolution, with the pro-survival doctrinal mutations becoming more successful as their hosts live longer and better, propagating this version of the infection farther and faster.
I was under the assumption that doing this was already possible using Crossover Office. ... Why is this news?
Just guessing here:
Because Crossover Office is proprietary and contains compatibility hacks that (as far as I know) aren't in the Wine mainline?
Perhaps the news is that somebody else did a set of compatibility hacks and got it working.
Oops. Meant "ah" and "arr".
(Thanks for the catch. Jumped tracks onto Engrish momentarily.)
Most voice software works great for english-speaking people in the midwestern United States. But if you have an accent ...
I have a southeastern Michigan accent - essentially the same as the "standard radio/TV accent" (Cincinnati OH). It was chosen for that service because it makes ALL the American English phonetic distinctions (vs. for example an east-coast accent which merges "l" and "r" making Kennedys sound like they're saying Fidel heads "Cuber") and because it's intelligible to speakers of ALL the American English accents.
You'd think that a modern voice recognition system should be able to handle THAT, at least? Especially if it came in a vehicle manufactured in Detroit, right?
Just bought a For T150 Lariat. Great truck. Came with the "link" system by Microsoft. Does navigation, cellphone hands-free by bluetooth, ... Has voice recognition for control to keep hands on the wheel.
Darn thing has a horrible time recognizing my voice, even when I'm speaking carefully and clearly. (For instance: Tried to call home yesterday and it called the "identify a piece of music" number that Sony-Ericsson threw into my cellphone's phone directory. Doesn't ask for confirmation before making a call, either.)
If your system is capable of it: Configure it to divide the bandwidth equally between the active customers during congestion. Do this moment-to-moment by dropping packets of the over-share customer or dynamically adjusting his bandwidth on a very short term basis. This will cause his TCP connections (and some UDP flow hacks) to throttle back. (If you can do it, give preference WITHIN A CUSTOMER'S FLOWS to the packets related to low-bandwidth streaming traffic such as VOIP, so it's less-sensitive traffic that takes the hit.)
Note that I said "between customers", not "between flows". Some download tools open a bunch of connections, so this would cheat if the throttling algorithm didn't take into account which customer the flows were going to.
Editors, please be a bit more sensitive. There is no country "Europe", and most of us on the continent Europe do not want it to become a country We are only stuck with some assholes that we did not vote for, that created a "government" that we can't really vote for, and that we explicitly can't vote not to exist in the first place. Americans who were stuck with an asshole President, should understand this. :)
We've understood it fine since at least the Civil War.
(In case you're not familiar with the real issue: That's when the Several States found out, violently, that they couldn't leave the federation if they disagreed with its politics or the economic central planning that moved the money to New York and kept what's now "flyover country" in third-world status. Freeing slaves was never the target - it could have been done a LOT cheaper by buying them, as it was in the rest of the world - and the Emancipation Proclamation was tacked on near the end as a tactical move, though "freeing slaves" had been used as pro-war propaganda - like the "going after the WMD" stories about Iraq (though there really WERE slaves) - even in the period leading up to the conflict.)
Yeah: I'm imagining opening the pantry door and the popcorn starts popping. B-)
... alteration of enzyme kinetics ... looks viable for detection of / interference by low-energy radiation. ... [there's] speculation on coupling to excitable membranes ...
Folding might be an issue, too, where a short-term exposure could have long-term effect.
= = = =
That said: The move to everything-spread-spectrum would help to reduce the ability of microwave photons to gang up by resonance, potentially increasing the threshold of exposure necessary for an effect (though simultaneously eliminating the ability for a tuned signal to miss a particular sensitive frequency so if there IS any effect once the exposure is high enough to provide the energy it's far more likely to occur).
... the arguments might have to expose some information that should be under seal.
And I fail to see how anything like that might come up in a constitutionality-of-statutory-damages argument.
But IANAL. (Hi, NYCL!)
If i had mod points I'd mod you down for using the pseudo-word 'boxen'.
If you want to read posts by hackers you have to put up with hacker jargon.
If you're revolted by it, what are you doing on Slashdot?
(This IS, by the way, part of the normal evolution of a language.)
... culminating in something to dwarf the Teapot Dome scandal ...
(And yes I do know that Harding was a Republican and Teapot Dome was related to cronyism with, and bribery from, buddies in the oil industry and would thus have been a more resonant example if I were decrying possible corruption in a Bush administration. But I'm more concerned with magnitude than particulars here.)
I thought the government under Obama was going to be made of rainbows and kittens glued together with hope. Are you telling me Obama's administration is as corrupt as any other but also has a one-party supermajority Congress and a cheerleading media backing it?
He's a successful politician from the Chicago machine, which makes Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall look like minor pranks on a boy scout campout. What did you expect?
*I* expect ongoing machine corruption scaled up to the national level, culminating in something to dwarf the Teapot Dome scandal and any corruption in any other administration since than (including the Clinton and both Bush administrations).
But then I've dealt with Chicago politics a little bit... (Thank Murphy I've never had to live there.)
1. IBM ("We pretend to support open source but ...
I'd say playing "mill of the gods" and grinding SCO exceedingly fine constitutes more than just "pretend" support for open source.