Well, actually some of the plant matter decays underground and turns into new fossil fuels, thus locking away some carbon -- but this process is very, very, very slow.
But we need to cut the rate of CO2 production right now, even if we can't reverse it straight away. The longer we leave it in the hope of finding some magical cure-all, the harder it is going to be to clear up the mess even if and when we do find it. In the meantime, if we all specify gas boilers with electronic ignition {no wasteful pilot lights; especially not the Glow-Worm Swiftflow range, which need the fan running on half speed all the time just to keep the pilot alight} and energy-saving light bulbs wherever feasible {i.e. not used to illuminate moving machinery and not on dimmer switches}, and reduce or eliminate unnecessary car journeys, that will go some way towards offsetting the worst effects.
To say that something is not good enough because it's not absolutely perfect is as foolish as to say that something is perfect when it is only barely good enough. We need an interim solution right now, and we need to recognise it as such.
The problem is that these people are in complete denial about their own mortality. They don't know about the harsh realities of nature; they just see animals as cute and fluffy and not nice to kill. Sure -- meat is inefficient, but it still compares favourably with the production of the soya- and mushroom-based meat substitutes favoured by the trendy-veggies.
I say you should take your trendy-veggie friends for a day out on a real working farm and let them get bitten by cows, chased by pigs and pecked by chickens until they feel the desire for revenge without compunction.
NO, because hydrocarbons contain hydrogen as well as carbon -- so when you burn something that has a formula of approximately CH2, you get CO2 and H2O, but when you burn H2, you get just H2O. The trouble is that the C-H bond stores more energy than the H-H bond, so you need to react more molecules of H2 with O2 for the same amount of energy output than you would CH2 with O2.
But, manufacturing hydrogen uses water anyway -- it takes one molecule of H2O to make one molecule of H2 {and you get half a molecule of O2 as a byproduct}. If there is more water vapour in the atmosphere, it will rain more; but all that water, when it comes down, can be used up in the manufacture of hydrogen.
Re:Why am I getting spam from Linspire?
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I had one of those too. I use Virtual Hosting, and so give everyone slightly different versions of my e-mail address -- then I can tell who's been selling my address on.
The one they used to contact me was one I had supplied in an e-mail regarding the nVu HTML editor. {In the end I couldn't get to grips with it, and went back to kate, which -- like most of KDE -- has gone from strength to strength}.
What is it with the MySQL bashers around here? Have you actually used it or are you just content to parrot what you have heard elsewhere?
For read-only, or even read-mostly, MySQL is blisteringly fast. It slows down when doing many INSERT or UPDATE queries on large tables because the whole table is held in one file, which has to be locked during a write and so slows things down.
On Linux, with a disk caching policy of "Never, ever commit anything unless you have to swap something from RAM, or are about to umount the file system" and enough RAM to cache the whole table file, MySQL writes almost as fast as it reads. OSes with more conservative policies, such as insisting to decache often and verifying before releasing the RAM, obviously won't be so fast {but who'll be laughing at who when the power comes back on?}.
Ah, shit, I'm feeding a troll, aren't I? I wasted fifteen minutes of my life and I can never have them back.....
Most people get their hot water heated by their central heating system. The most common types are: (1) a cistern-fed cylinder, with a coil of copper pipe in which water from the boiler is circulated {so the two water streams, from the boiler and to the taps, never mix, and the water in the boiler's heat exchanger is not being continually replaced} -- a three-way valve downstream of the boiler and pump selects whether to heat the radiators, cylinder or both; and (2) a combi boiler, an all-in-one system which uses a plate-to-plate heat exchanger to heat water from the mains as it is used {a flow sensor in the hot water piping triggers the divertor valve and fan/ignition cycle}. In homes without central heating, either cistern-fed cylinders with just an electric immersion heater {3kW}, or gas flow-heaters are used.
The cistern-fed system has the disadvantage that hot water pressure is limited. So showers in the UK are most often heated by an electric flow-heater, usually 7-10kW -- unless you have a gas flow-heater or combi boiler, or the shower is on the ground floor and the piping is mostly 22mm and mostly straight down.
It's a law of nature that it takes 70 watts of power to heat one litre of water one degree hotter per minute. If the water is coming in at 10 degrees and you want to heat it to, say, 40 degrees, then you will need to put in 2.1kW just to get a flow rate of one litre per minute! An 8.4kW shower will give you 4 litres a minute at 30 deg. differential, but it will require a 35 ampere supply.
Massachusetts could always pass a law stating that the government had the right to ignore so-called "intellectual property" restrictions anytime, for the greater common good. Then there would be a legal way for them to review old documents -- by making not-illegal-anymore copies of old application software. {Assuming, that is, suitable operating system software and hardware could even be found to run it on.....}
That option probably would do much more harm in the long term, as well as in the short term, than insisting on open document formats. I really hope that someone points this out to Microsoft et al.
The whole article is nothing but a bad-tempered whinge. Aren't you glad that the people who used to fit oil lamps to horse-drawn carts didn't feel the same way that Microsoft and co. feel today?
Right now, you need to understand that if you use proprietary, closed document formats, your data is being held to ransom. If Microsoft bring out a new version of Office, your choice is: buy it, or get everybody else in the whole wide world to save their files that they want to send you in the older format. Which really doesn't sound to me like much of a choice.
From the article: "Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property." - Eric Kriss.
Finally, someone who gets it: some things are more important than money. The right of all the people to access government documents is more important than the {supposed} right of one company to make money by charging the people a fee -- no matter how small -- to access government documents. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and the needs of the few outweigh the whims and caprices of the many.
As for mentioning the Boston Tea Party..... that's just sweet, considering which state kicked off the whole Open Standards thing.
This is an important detail; I hadn't considered the "countries where nobody cares about patents" case.
And I guess there are plenty of people in countries without software patents, who find the very concept so utterly absurd as never to have given it much thought. When the BSD licence was written, even the USA did not recognise software patents.
Hmmm... if that [distribution under GPL being permitted in software-patent-free countries] were true, I would have to wonder why anyone cares about this situation at all then.
It's probably a cultural thing..... Americans are used to the idea of software patents {and the harm they have already done} and reasonably fear the same situation arising in the Rest Of The World, so you imagine the worst case scenario. We Brits and Europeans feel that some things are more important than making money -- and we still cling to a fond hope that, on some level, our elected representatives actually give a damn about the people who pay their wages. In the UK in particular, we are used to having daft laws; but they tend to be selectively enforced, i.e. only against criminals {by which we really mean those we consider beneath us; many of us are technically criminals}.
We should all remember that the EU really only voted out software patents by a hair's breadth -- and thank Poland for what they did.
Yes, but the BlackBerry {which doesn't infringe any patent in Canada, where software patents are unenforcible} is being physically distributed to users in the USA -- so RIM are still aiding and abetting patent infringement {even although the patents they are helping others infringe are not applicable on their home territory}. Anyway, it's hard not to use the words "dose" and "own medicine" when talking about this case.
If you ran an offshore data format conversion bureau, there's no way anybody could get any charge to stick. Patents cover one specific means to an end, not the end in itself -- in fact, if there were no alternative means to the end, then that would be grounds to refuse a patent. Possession of an un-patent-encumbered file would obviously be legal, sending a patent-encumbered file overseas to a country without the patent restriction would probably be legal {if not, there'd be a pretty big bullet hole in Microsoft's boot}, and the only patent-encumbered stuff would be taking place on non-US territory where it would not be restricted. The worst you could do is threaten the people who ran the bureau with arrest if they entered US territory -- which might well be considered an act of war.
Word's.doc format supports more features than OpenDocument format.
How so?
OpenDocument is a compressed archive containing a simple manifest {a plain text list of all the files} and several more files; some of them XML, some of them "others" such as JPG and MP3. The XML files make reference to the others.
You can add any kind of data to the document, preserving the original file exactly. For instance if you add a.jpg photograph to an OpenOffice Draw document, there will be an XML container which refers to the filename in the main XML file, and the original.jpg in the archive.
They'd either have to change the OpenDocument format or remove features from Word.
No they wouldn't. Non-XML data is quite welcome in an OpenDocument document.
In order to 'legally' use a patent, you need a license to the patent.
Or to be in a jurisdiction such as this one, where any patent on mathematics is null and void.
The GPL prohibits any requirement which forces said license to be included in any GPL software.
Almost, but not quite. If you have a licence to implement the patented method in the USA, you can write software, based on GPL software, which implements the method -- BUT you can't distribute it under the GPL in the USA {you may be allowed to distribute it by special permission or under fair use exemption}.
It isn't clear from the GPL whether or not you could distribute software under the GPL in some countries, but not in others; my gut feeling is yes, because the "additional restriction" is added by the law of the land and not on the whim of an individual. Some countries forbid strong encryption, but that didn't keep GnuPG from being released under the GPL.
Well, when I tried transferring.mp3 files to the phone {mounts just like a disk drive}, they sounded great through the supplied headphones/binaural handsfree kit; but the phone just refused to let me use them for ringtones or transfer them wirelessly -- probably cos my phone company, Vodafone, are afraid that I wouldn't be downloading ringtones from the overpriced download service they provide. {Well, I still am not!} I suspect this may just be a "custom firmware" issue, which probably can be overcome by reflashing the phone {and I know someone who can do this for me}. Which network are you on?
Software patents are invalid in many countries: anybody living in the EU, for instance, is well within their rights to develop software that would otherwise infringe on Microsoft's patents. Anybody who wants to use it in a country where software patents are valid may have to obtain the appropriate licence, obviously, if their usage isn't exempted for some reason; but within the EU, Microsoft does not hold any software patents {because there is no such thing} and so there can be no infringement.
Sending patent-encumbered data to a patent-free country to have it converted to a different, unencumbered format probably would not infringe any patent, either..... because whatever happens in such a country is entirely legal under that country's laws. It would be like travelling from Saudi Arabia to Britain just to drink a pint of beer and then travelling back -- but you would break no laws in the process. And there might just be enough money in it to make it worth someone's while paying you to convert their data rather than buy more expensive software.
Also, patents expire after 20 years; and government departments do not have to abide by them anyway.
Then don't be a computer programmer in this new world! Nobody said you had to be one. Or do be a computer programmer, but understand that you are not necessarily going to get paid just for programming. You do not have an automatic right to get paid for whatever you do. The sewage company do not pay me money everytime I take a dump in my toilet..... I sometimes wish they would, but the simple fact is they don't need my shit that badly.
If Source Hoarding became illegal -- which I honestly hope it will in my lifetime -- you could always try eking out a living by charging people for independent source code audits.
My old Nokia 3210 had a feature called "composer" where you could type in a tune, note by note, up to 50 notes long. You got three octaves including accidentals, but only one timbre {"tinny little mobile phone speaker"}. Still, if you were canny, you could fit in just enough of the tune to recognise; and 50 notes is actually long enough to answer a telephone, so nobody is going to notice if it stops short.
My new Sony Ericsson {bought before the rootkit debacle, honest!} k750i supports the ability to download ringtones from my phone company's overpriced music store, but it also has several wireless transfer modes. And although the phone refuses to allow you to send a paid-for tone by bluetooth or infrared, there is one thing it can't or won't stop me doing, one wireless transfer mode that is available unconditionally.
If I press Menu, Entertainment, Record Sound, Select, then it uses the phone's own mic to record a sound bite -- which I can later use as a ringtone, and even send to other people by BT or IR. And it works better than you might think. Modern phone mics are quite directional; it has automatic gain control; and the ultimate frequency response is limited at playback time by the ringer speaker. These are all factors that work in your favour. What can the phone manufacturers do about this? Not a lot. They can't very well make phones with no mic; though I admit, I would certainly buy one for my mother if they did.....
I can get all the ringtones I want, just from watching the TV adverts for them -- so I must be saving a fortune! Although admittedly, it is kind of like a "walk instead of taking the bus - save a pound; walk instead of taking a taxi - save a fiver" saving, cos it's not money IO would ever have spent -- if I couldn't get them for free, I would be more than happy to do without.
Perhaps you could apply for a grant to have a giant saltwater lake dug, complete with sandy beaches, to make up for the fact that you have to travel for at least two hours to reach the sea?
Or have an air filtration system installed in the city centre -- draw in the traffic fumes around ground level, purify them with electrostatic precipitation and chemical scrubbing, inject a little oxygen if required, and blast out nearly-fresh air about head height. {Before you dismiss this as ridiculous, remember that 200 years ago they mocked the idea of treating sewage before dumping it in watercourses.}
It would be impossible for you to get your hands on the unencrypted bits.
If you can get your eyes and ears on the unencrypted signals, then you can always get your hands on them.
The only way to rip audio would be to re-digitize the audio output from your speakers, and that'd be a lower-quality, non-bitwise copy.
But once you did successfully redigitise it, that copy -- and every copy you made from it -- would be unprotected, and further copying would not incur any loss of quality. Provided that you use true analogue lowpass filtering between the D-to-A and A-to-D {clue: I mean passive filtering; real inductors, and absolutely no polyester capacitors anywhere}, it will work with hardly any quality loss. Remember, analogue technology was used for years, and all its shortcomings were understood and overcome before the shift to digital.
The only way to rip video would be to aim a camera at the screen.
Or to use the "fake CRT" device I have described before, which connects to an existing monitor in place of the real CRT and picks up the red, green and blue grid signals {giving you an RGB signal} and H and V scan coil drives {giving you timing}. The monitor has no way to know the difference between it and a real CRT. LCDs ought to be even easier to deal with, since the signal is sent pixel-by-pixel; but I have had sufficiently little contact with them as to treat them mostly as magic.
Beside which, people are willing to put up with truly abysmal picture quality if the price is right. The fact that anyone gets away with selling NTSC-encoded VHS cassettes should tell you all you need to know about that! If a camera trained on the screen is really what it takes, people will put up with it.
The only way to evade these "impossibilities" -- to get at the bits, or obtain the keys you'd need to perform your own decryption -- would involve electron microscopes and micromachining techniques.
Again, once it was done, it would be done for all time; instantly rendering every penny ever spent on the project a penny wasted.
You'd have to disassemble and probe the TCPA chip on your motherboard which enables all this -- and it would be explicitly designed to make such disassembly very, very difficult.
Never underestimate the possibility of an Inside Job. The guys in the labs enjoy music and movies as much as anyone else, they wouldn't be working there if they weren't serious gadget fiends, and they will build in "essential testing functions" -- i.e. back doors, like the Philips DVD recorder one.
Copy protection is mathematically impossible. That limitation is not one of technology, which would be overcome by a suitable invention -- it is a limitation of the way the universe works. {Blame the appropriate God if you're so inclined}.
I can't provide a formal proof, unfortunately. But let's just say that there's no way for the dumb, read-only CD even to be certain of, much less do anything about, what lies downstream of the laser head, and that's where the problem begins and ends: the act of reading the CD for the legitimate purpose of listening to it is, on some level, utterly indistinguible from the act of reading the CD for nefarious purposes such as copying it. Of course, you might well have a right to copy it anyway: think Fair Use / Fair Dealing. If you've a cassette player, but no CD player, in your car, then you are allowed to make a copy of the CD onto a cassette as a necessary step in listening to the music on the CD -- your common law property right by virtue of ownership of the CD -- in your car. It only infringes copyright if you part with the CD and retain the cassette for longer than is reasonable for you to get around to recording something else over it, or if someone steals the cassette -- and they are the infringing party. You were merely aiding and abetting copyright infringement, but ignorance of the fact is a defence. These rights aren't set in stone anywhere, because exactly what constitutes Fair Dealing is determined by the courts; but face it, no court in the land is ever going to send you down for taping albums -- hell, even the judge probably has a few in his car.
If you boot up a Linux LiveCD on a computer which has already been infected with the Sony rootkit, you can still rip it with cdparanoia. That proves the protection is ineffective. And while it isn't obvious to everyone how to do it yet, it's a foregone conclusion that someone somewhere will make a Linux distro just for ripping CDs.
Why don't the record companies learn from the printing industry? Many newsagents have a photocopier sitting right next to the magazines and newspapers. Does anybody ever illegally photocopy the Times, the Penguin Shaggers' Gazette, the Woman's Monthly, or the latest Harry Potter novel? No, of course not.
The fact is that CDs are overpriced, and downloading offers an economically viable alternative to purchase. Downloading isn't free: it takes up time, bandwidth and drive space that all have some value to the downloader. If the intention is to burn the tracks to an actual CD, then this requires additional resources: a jewel case and about 1.05 blank CDs {remember the hit rate is not 100%}. Recreating the CD packaging -- even crudely -- will require further resources in the shape of paper, ink and time.
So my challenge to the music industry is to set a new price point for CDs that compares favourably with this figure. Make it cheaper to buy the physical CD than to download the tracks. And people will buy CDs in preference to downloading.
Now I've seen the documentation, that does actually look as though it would do the business.
It does say something that it's turned off by default, though..... looks like it might be really easy to mess up and end up with a system that either won't execute CGI scripts at all, or isn't as well-protected as you think it might be.
Yeah, but not having root / administrator at all would be worse.
Any "normal" user account which is allowed to do anything only root should be doing, is potentially as big a security risk as root. Even enabling root access in hardware isn't ideal, since it will create problems around servers in co-lo.
The problem with that method you describe -- separate groups per user with www-data as a member of each one -- is that each user's scripts, running as the www-data user -- which can read files from any user's web space -- will still be able to read any other user's files.
Chip Pan Fires on the Increase, says Chief of new Privatised Fire Brigade.
Anti-virus companies have a vested interest in there being malware out there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were encouraging the script kiddies. Dunno about anybody else, but I expect for software just to work, as it comes, and that goes double for software that you pay for. Imagine if you bought a phone, and then had to pay extra for the charger! Sure, you could use a laboratory power supply, if you already had one..... like you can be careful with Windows if you know how. But the real problem is that Windows, as it needs to be configured to work with certain applications, is insecure by design.
"/etc/init.d/foo reload" pretty much always just sends a SIGHUP to the prime instance of foo {the one whose PID is kept in/var/run/foo}. But not every daemon rereads its configuration files when it receives a SIGHUP; which is why we have all these scripts in init.d, with a unified syntax across all of them.
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Well, actually some of the plant matter decays underground and turns into new fossil fuels, thus locking away some carbon -- but this process is very, very, very slow.
But we need to cut the rate of CO2 production right now, even if we can't reverse it straight away. The longer we leave it in the hope of finding some magical cure-all, the harder it is going to be to clear up the mess even if and when we do find it. In the meantime, if we all specify gas boilers with electronic ignition {no wasteful pilot lights; especially not the Glow-Worm Swiftflow range, which need the fan running on half speed all the time just to keep the pilot alight} and energy-saving light bulbs wherever feasible {i.e. not used to illuminate moving machinery and not on dimmer switches}, and reduce or eliminate unnecessary car journeys, that will go some way towards offsetting the worst effects.
To say that something is not good enough because it's not absolutely perfect is as foolish as to say that something is perfect when it is only barely good enough. We need an interim solution right now, and we need to recognise it as such.
The problem is that these people are in complete denial about their own mortality. They don't know about the harsh realities of nature; they just see animals as cute and fluffy and not nice to kill. Sure -- meat is inefficient, but it still compares favourably with the production of the soya- and mushroom-based meat substitutes favoured by the trendy-veggies.
I say you should take your trendy-veggie friends for a day out on a real working farm and let them get bitten by cows, chased by pigs and pecked by chickens until they feel the desire for revenge without compunction.
Yes, but you are putting back exactly the same amount you take out. So it all balances neatly.
NO, because hydrocarbons contain hydrogen as well as carbon -- so when you burn something that has a formula of approximately CH2, you get CO2 and H2O, but when you burn H2, you get just H2O. The trouble is that the C-H bond stores more energy than the H-H bond, so you need to react more molecules of H2 with O2 for the same amount of energy output than you would CH2 with O2.
But, manufacturing hydrogen uses water anyway -- it takes one molecule of H2O to make one molecule of H2 {and you get half a molecule of O2 as a byproduct}. If there is more water vapour in the atmosphere, it will rain more; but all that water, when it comes down, can be used up in the manufacture of hydrogen.
I had one of those too. I use Virtual Hosting, and so give everyone slightly different versions of my e-mail address -- then I can tell who's been selling my address on.
The one they used to contact me was one I had supplied in an e-mail regarding the nVu HTML editor. {In the end I couldn't get to grips with it, and went back to kate, which -- like most of KDE -- has gone from strength to strength}.
What is it with the MySQL bashers around here? Have you actually used it or are you just content to parrot what you have heard elsewhere?
.....
For read-only, or even read-mostly, MySQL is blisteringly fast. It slows down when doing many INSERT or UPDATE queries on large tables because the whole table is held in one file, which has to be locked during a write and so slows things down.
On Linux, with a disk caching policy of "Never, ever commit anything unless you have to swap something from RAM, or are about to umount the file system" and enough RAM to cache the whole table file, MySQL writes almost as fast as it reads. OSes with more conservative policies, such as insisting to decache often and verifying before releasing the RAM, obviously won't be so fast {but who'll be laughing at who when the power comes back on?}.
Ah, shit, I'm feeding a troll, aren't I? I wasted fifteen minutes of my life and I can never have them back
Most people get their hot water heated by their central heating system. The most common types are: (1) a cistern-fed cylinder, with a coil of copper pipe in which water from the boiler is circulated {so the two water streams, from the boiler and to the taps, never mix, and the water in the boiler's heat exchanger is not being continually replaced} -- a three-way valve downstream of the boiler and pump selects whether to heat the radiators, cylinder or both; and (2) a combi boiler, an all-in-one system which uses a plate-to-plate heat exchanger to heat water from the mains as it is used {a flow sensor in the hot water piping triggers the divertor valve and fan/ignition cycle}. In homes without central heating, either cistern-fed cylinders with just an electric immersion heater {3kW}, or gas flow-heaters are used.
The cistern-fed system has the disadvantage that hot water pressure is limited. So showers in the UK are most often heated by an electric flow-heater, usually 7-10kW -- unless you have a gas flow-heater or combi boiler, or the shower is on the ground floor and the piping is mostly 22mm and mostly straight down.
It's a law of nature that it takes 70 watts of power to heat one litre of water one degree hotter per minute. If the water is coming in at 10 degrees and you want to heat it to, say, 40 degrees, then you will need to put in 2.1kW just to get a flow rate of one litre per minute! An 8.4kW shower will give you 4 litres a minute at 30 deg. differential, but it will require a 35 ampere supply.
Massachusetts could always pass a law stating that the government had the right to ignore so-called "intellectual property" restrictions anytime, for the greater common good. Then there would be a legal way for them to review old documents -- by making not-illegal-anymore copies of old application software. {Assuming, that is, suitable operating system software and hardware could even be found to run it on .....}
That option probably would do much more harm in the long term, as well as in the short term, than insisting on open document formats. I really hope that someone points this out to Microsoft et al.
Right now, you need to understand that if you use proprietary, closed document formats, your data is being held to ransom. If Microsoft bring out a new version of Office, your choice is: buy it, or get everybody else in the whole wide world to save their files that they want to send you in the older format. Which really doesn't sound to me like much of a choice. Finally, someone who gets it: some things are more important than money. The right of all the people to access government documents is more important than the {supposed} right of one company to make money by charging the people a fee -- no matter how small -- to access government documents. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and the needs of the few outweigh the whims and caprices of the many.
As for mentioning the Boston Tea Party
We should all remember that the EU really only voted out software patents by a hair's breadth -- and thank Poland for what they did.
Yes, but the BlackBerry {which doesn't infringe any patent in Canada, where software patents are unenforcible} is being physically distributed to users in the USA -- so RIM are still aiding and abetting patent infringement {even although the patents they are helping others infringe are not applicable on their home territory}. Anyway, it's hard not to use the words "dose" and "own medicine" when talking about this case.
If you ran an offshore data format conversion bureau, there's no way anybody could get any charge to stick. Patents cover one specific means to an end, not the end in itself -- in fact, if there were no alternative means to the end, then that would be grounds to refuse a patent. Possession of an un-patent-encumbered file would obviously be legal, sending a patent-encumbered file overseas to a country without the patent restriction would probably be legal {if not, there'd be a pretty big bullet hole in Microsoft's boot}, and the only patent-encumbered stuff would be taking place on non-US territory where it would not be restricted. The worst you could do is threaten the people who ran the bureau with arrest if they entered US territory -- which might well be considered an act of war.
OpenDocument is a compressed archive containing a simple manifest {a plain text list of all the files} and several more files; some of them XML, some of them "others" such as JPG and MP3. The XML files make reference to the others.
You can add any kind of data to the document, preserving the original file exactly. For instance if you add a
It isn't clear from the GPL whether or not you could distribute software under the GPL in some countries, but not in others; my gut feeling is yes, because the "additional restriction" is added by the law of the land and not on the whim of an individual. Some countries forbid strong encryption, but that didn't keep GnuPG from being released under the GPL.
Well, when I tried transferring .mp3 files to the phone {mounts just like a disk drive}, they sounded great through the supplied headphones/binaural handsfree kit; but the phone just refused to let me use them for ringtones or transfer them wirelessly -- probably cos my phone company, Vodafone, are afraid that I wouldn't be downloading ringtones from the overpriced download service they provide. {Well, I still am not!} I suspect this may just be a "custom firmware" issue, which probably can be overcome by reflashing the phone {and I know someone who can do this for me}. Which network are you on?
Software patents are invalid in many countries: anybody living in the EU, for instance, is well within their rights to develop software that would otherwise infringe on Microsoft's patents. Anybody who wants to use it in a country where software patents are valid may have to obtain the appropriate licence, obviously, if their usage isn't exempted for some reason; but within the EU, Microsoft does not hold any software patents {because there is no such thing} and so there can be no infringement.
..... because whatever happens in such a country is entirely legal under that country's laws. It would be like travelling from Saudi Arabia to Britain just to drink a pint of beer and then travelling back -- but you would break no laws in the process. And there might just be enough money in it to make it worth someone's while paying you to convert their data rather than buy more expensive software.
Sending patent-encumbered data to a patent-free country to have it converted to a different, unencumbered format probably would not infringe any patent, either
Also, patents expire after 20 years; and government departments do not have to abide by them anyway.
Then don't be a computer programmer in this new world! Nobody said you had to be one. Or do be a computer programmer, but understand that you are not necessarily going to get paid just for programming. You do not have an automatic right to get paid for whatever you do. The sewage company do not pay me money everytime I take a dump in my toilet ..... I sometimes wish they would, but the simple fact is they don't need my shit that badly.
If Source Hoarding became illegal -- which I honestly hope it will in my lifetime -- you could always try eking out a living by charging people for independent source code audits.
My old Nokia 3210 had a feature called "composer" where you could type in a tune, note by note, up to 50 notes long. You got three octaves including accidentals, but only one timbre {"tinny little mobile phone speaker"}. Still, if you were canny, you could fit in just enough of the tune to recognise; and 50 notes is actually long enough to answer a telephone, so nobody is going to notice if it stops short.
.....
My new Sony Ericsson {bought before the rootkit debacle, honest!} k750i supports the ability to download ringtones from my phone company's overpriced music store, but it also has several wireless transfer modes. And although the phone refuses to allow you to send a paid-for tone by bluetooth or infrared, there is one thing it can't or won't stop me doing, one wireless transfer mode that is available unconditionally.
If I press Menu, Entertainment, Record Sound, Select, then it uses the phone's own mic to record a sound bite -- which I can later use as a ringtone, and even send to other people by BT or IR. And it works better than you might think. Modern phone mics are quite directional; it has automatic gain control; and the ultimate frequency response is limited at playback time by the ringer speaker. These are all factors that work in your favour. What can the phone manufacturers do about this? Not a lot. They can't very well make phones with no mic; though I admit, I would certainly buy one for my mother if they did
I can get all the ringtones I want, just from watching the TV adverts for them -- so I must be saving a fortune! Although admittedly, it is kind of like a "walk instead of taking the bus - save a pound; walk instead of taking a taxi - save a fiver" saving, cos it's not money IO would ever have spent -- if I couldn't get them for free, I would be more than happy to do without.
Birmingham, eh?
Perhaps you could apply for a grant to have a giant saltwater lake dug, complete with sandy beaches, to make up for the fact that you have to travel for at least two hours to reach the sea?
Or have an air filtration system installed in the city centre -- draw in the traffic fumes around ground level, purify them with electrostatic precipitation and chemical scrubbing, inject a little oxygen if required, and blast out nearly-fresh air about head height. {Before you dismiss this as ridiculous, remember that 200 years ago they mocked the idea of treating sewage before dumping it in watercourses.}
Beside which, people are willing to put up with truly abysmal picture quality if the price is right. The fact that anyone gets away with selling NTSC-encoded VHS cassettes should tell you all you need to know about that! If a camera trained on the screen is really what it takes, people will put up with it. Again, once it was done, it would be done for all time; instantly rendering every penny ever spent on the project a penny wasted. Never underestimate the possibility of an Inside Job. The guys in the labs enjoy music and movies as much as anyone else, they wouldn't be working there if they weren't serious gadget fiends, and they will build in "essential testing functions" -- i.e. back doors, like the Philips DVD recorder one.
Copy protection is mathematically impossible. That limitation is not one of technology, which would be overcome by a suitable invention -- it is a limitation of the way the universe works. {Blame the appropriate God if you're so inclined}.
I can't provide a formal proof, unfortunately. But let's just say that there's no way for the dumb, read-only CD even to be certain of, much less do anything about, what lies downstream of the laser head, and that's where the problem begins and ends: the act of reading the CD for the legitimate purpose of listening to it is, on some level, utterly indistinguible from the act of reading the CD for nefarious purposes such as copying it. Of course, you might well have a right to copy it anyway: think Fair Use / Fair Dealing. If you've a cassette player, but no CD player, in your car, then you are allowed to make a copy of the CD onto a cassette as a necessary step in listening to the music on the CD -- your common law property right by virtue of ownership of the CD -- in your car. It only infringes copyright if you part with the CD and retain the cassette for longer than is reasonable for you to get around to recording something else over it, or if someone steals the cassette -- and they are the infringing party. You were merely aiding and abetting copyright infringement, but ignorance of the fact is a defence. These rights aren't set in stone anywhere, because exactly what constitutes Fair Dealing is determined by the courts; but face it, no court in the land is ever going to send you down for taping albums -- hell, even the judge probably has a few in his car.
If you boot up a Linux LiveCD on a computer which has already been infected with the Sony rootkit, you can still rip it with cdparanoia. That proves the protection is ineffective. And while it isn't obvious to everyone how to do it yet, it's a foregone conclusion that someone somewhere will make a Linux distro just for ripping CDs.
Why don't the record companies learn from the printing industry? Many newsagents have a photocopier sitting right next to the magazines and newspapers. Does anybody ever illegally photocopy the Times, the Penguin Shaggers' Gazette, the Woman's Monthly, or the latest Harry Potter novel? No, of course not.
The fact is that CDs are overpriced, and downloading offers an economically viable alternative to purchase. Downloading isn't free: it takes up time, bandwidth and drive space that all have some value to the downloader. If the intention is to burn the tracks to an actual CD, then this requires additional resources: a jewel case and about 1.05 blank CDs {remember the hit rate is not 100%}. Recreating the CD packaging -- even crudely -- will require further resources in the shape of paper, ink and time.
So my challenge to the music industry is to set a new price point for CDs that compares favourably with this figure. Make it cheaper to buy the physical CD than to download the tracks. And people will buy CDs in preference to downloading.
Now I've seen the documentation, that does actually look as though it would do the business.
..... looks like it might be really easy to mess up and end up with a system that either won't execute CGI scripts at all, or isn't as well-protected as you think it might be.
It does say something that it's turned off by default, though
Yeah, but not having root / administrator at all would be worse.
Any "normal" user account which is allowed to do anything only root should be doing, is potentially as big a security risk as root. Even enabling root access in hardware isn't ideal, since it will create problems around servers in co-lo.
It's a double edged sword that cuts both ways.
The problem with that method you describe -- separate groups per user with www-data as a member of each one -- is that each user's scripts, running as the www-data user -- which can read files from any user's web space -- will still be able to read any other user's files.
In other words, it won't work.
Chip Pan Fires on the Increase, says Chief of new Privatised Fire Brigade.
..... like you can be careful with Windows if you know how. But the real problem is that Windows, as it needs to be configured to work with certain applications, is insecure by design.
Anti-virus companies have a vested interest in there being malware out there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were encouraging the script kiddies. Dunno about anybody else, but I expect for software just to work, as it comes, and that goes double for software that you pay for. Imagine if you bought a phone, and then had to pay extra for the charger! Sure, you could use a laboratory power supply, if you already had one
"/etc/init.d/foo reload" pretty much always just sends a SIGHUP to the prime instance of foo {the one whose PID is kept in /var/run/foo}. But not every daemon rereads its configuration files when it receives a SIGHUP; which is why we have all these scripts in init.d, with a unified syntax across all of them.