Some people are spunking their pants over the idea that one day, there will be advertisements in telephone calls. Your conversation will be interrupted; each party will hear a targeted advertisement, and be unable to hear anything the other party is saying. After the advertisement is finished, the conversation can be resumed. If you hang up mid-advert, then you will have to listen to another advertisement all the way through before you get another chance to dial.
That's the reason why eBay bought Skype, but it might not actually destroy Skype -- Skype might not even last long enough to die that way.
Skype is using a closed, proprietary protocol and thus incompatible with industry standards such as Asterisk. And incompatible protocols simply don't work in telephony. I expect to be able to talk to people, and send and receive SMS messages, independent of what make of phone they are using, or to which telephone company's network it is connected. Hell, they could be using an old-fashioned tethered-to-the-wall phone with brass bells and a rotary dial for all I care. All I need to know is their number, and it's the business of the telcos to make it all work. But that model breaks down when the phone companies won't co-operate, and both un-co-operative parties suffer. If you couldn't call an NTL landline from an Orange mobile, nobody would want to go with NTL or Orange even if they did not have friends on the other network at the time, because you never know who you are going to want to call up.
And of course most people don't want to tie their phone to their computer..... geeks might, but they aren't most people. I think the Skype bubble will burst pretty quickly. I can see a "broadband telephone" with a built in ADSL router {probably next-gen wireless}, which will just plug into a broadband-equipped phone line, pick up some configuration data from the net, and do auto-routing using POTS or VoIP as appropriate. The user experience is the same {pick up receiver, hear dial tone, punch in number, far end rings, far end answers, talk, hang up receiver} whichever system is being used..... and most people aren't going to care what the little "network" and "padlock" icons in the display will mean, except that they're saving them money somehow and keeping things secure somehow respectively.
Yes, it will deal correctly with things like
Smith,"John R",1980-01-01,1.8,74,"88, Acacia Avenue, Anytown AN1 2PQ",, ..... where there are quoted, unquoted and null fields, and - crucially - commas inbetween the quotes.
I was going to post a section of my perl script here, just a function which parses a single line from a CSV file into an array; but the lameness filter got in the way {for which I blame nobody except the trolls}. I even tried adding comments fore and aft, but it just wasn't having it.
Ah. I see. I still feel a bit vindicated, though; because it still looks as though the proliferation of file formats you are seeing is due to others upstream using a spreadsheet when what they really wanted was a database. I see the same thing in my line of business..... often we get CSVs containing essentially the same sort of information, but with different column naming and ordering schemas. So I use head foo.csv to get a butchers at the field names and the general format; then a bit of Perl I wrote to turn the CSV lines into an array and poke the important bits into a database.
If you can create "artificial" muscles, surely a better use for them would be to build an engine that runs on glucose and produces only lactic acid as exhaust? You put in a small electrical stimulus, the muscle does more work than the energy supplied and the excess comes from breaking bonds in the glucose. And it has the advantage of being synchronous, which would make it ideal for distributed power generation; you could very easily get your crests and troughs to line up with everybody else's.
Meanwhile, I'll stick with a natural steak, thank you very much. Five to burnt, with chips, petits pois, mushrooms, onions, freshly ground sea salt and black pepper; and freshly-baked bread and real dairy butter. Black Forest Gateau and ice cream to follow.
OK...but who/what is nature to develop/come up with these rules? The argument your [sic] trying to debunk is that they couldn't be created by chance....there is nothing chance about having "rules" to create proteins...and for that matter...order.
The rules just are. You might as well ask why does light travel in straight lines? or why does the pressure in a fluid act equally in all directions? Why is there no such thing as ferric bicarbonate?
Maybe there is an alternative universe with different {but mutually consistent} rules; where light does not travel in straight lines, the pressure in a fluid acts unevenly and ferric bicarbonate exists in abundance. But we would never know about it, because it would not obey the right set of laws of physics to be observed by us.
It sounds to me like you are using your spreadsheet as though it were a database. That's a common mistake, and no doubt something that can be {rightly or wrongly} blamed on Microsoft. {Unix = a well-stocked tool box with one screwdriver for each type of screw recess: slotted, Posidriv, hex, Phillips, Torx, and those weirdy ones you get on appliances. Windows = a "magic hammer" with which you can fasten any kind of screw simply by hitting it like a nail. When raised, it uses a small camera to identify the screw recess; on the way down it automatically fits the correct screwdriving bit, and the impact is turned into rotary motion by a ratchet system.} A spreadsheet looks a bit like a table, but its real purpose is highly-parallel numerical calculations {that's why they all have names ending in *calc, or they used to before Microsoft killed them all off}.
A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!
Have a Google for some introductory stuff on mysql or postgresql {you're likely to have one or the other, if not both, on your distro CDs} and see if that's what you were really trying to do in the first place. At entry level there isn't much to choose between them {the so-lightweight-it's-almost-a-toy MySQL is falling out of favour following an ill-thought-out deal with SCO; and PostgreSQL, having shaken off its reputation for slowness, is the new darling}. By the time you get onto more advanced stuff, you will know which one is for you.
If you're familiar with perl, then you won't have any trouble extracting data from a CSV. Try bunging it into an SQL database {actually, a table within a database} and searching that instead.
Hmm. Some time ago, I seem to recall, there was some talk of whether or not the chimpanzee should be considered to belong to the genus homo.
You've just suggested an experiment that would prove once and for all, one way or the other; but somehow, I can't see any chance of it receiving official approval.
There is a standard package format -- it's a src.tar.gz file created with autoconf and automake. Unfortunately, most people don't use these tools properly; so their configure scripts do not check for everything they ought to and allow you to get as far as "make" before the problems show up. Doubly unfortunately, most people who succeed to fix this dependency situation are so pleased with themselves at doing so, they then forget to contact the package maintainer to say what the problem was and how to fix it.
If you want more than a couple of hundred "native" packages to choose from, Debian Testing/Unstable {including k?ubuntu} and Gentoo are the only realistic choices.
So what? The binaries on the Mozilla site were infected. Big deal. If you downloaded the source tarball and built it yourself, you would have a clean copy. Likewise, if you downloaded the binary package from your Linux distributor, you would have a clean copy {since they compile the sources themselves, and just make the appropriate tweaks to make it fit in better with their distro}.
If you download untrustworthy binaries, you're a twat, and you deserve everything that happens to you. It might teach you a lesson. What earthly good is a door with multipoint locking and over a billion key differs, if you go inviting random strangers off the street into your home?
It's not hard to see where Symantec's motivation is coming from. But in any discussion of computer topics, the mere fact of there being computers involved seems to make people say stupid things. So let's look at a simple non-computer-based analogy.
Bloggs Builders Ltd. build new houses with wooden window frames and doors and cheap, easily-picked rim locks. Fred Bloggs, the owner of Bloggs Builders, also happens to have a not insubstantial stake in Bettavue PVCu Ltd., manufacturers of a range of high-security PVCu replacement windows and doors.
Jones Family Homes Ltd. build new houses with PVCu windows and doors with multipoint locking as standard from day one.
When Bettavue produce a long list of statistics, comparing the relative security of Bloggs' and Jones' houses, who do you think they are going to favour?
If you have a ballpoint pen that will not write, but clearly has ink in it, don't do meaningless zigzags and scribbles in the hope of persuading some ink to flow from the nib -- just try writing a swear-word with it.
Four times out of five, it will magically start working again.
I have no explanation for this phenomenon, and you probably won't believe it at first, but don't dismiss it till you've tried it.
Anything that grows in your garden, but that you did not plant is a weed. Anything on your computer that you did not install by an informed, deliberate action is illegally-installed software.
However, just because it's illegal, doesn't stop people doing it. Lots of people transport beneficial plant products across imaginary lines; this is against the law in many countries, but enough of them are getting away with it for it to be worthwhile.
Windows fanboys bitch about it being "complicated" or "awkward" to install software on GNU/Linux, but it is that way for a reason. Yes, you have to open an xterm and type something like apt-get install packagename. One little command. It downloads the software {from an independently-verified repository -- one more layer of safety}, installs it system-wide and updates the menus for all your window managers {if you use more than one}. And frankly, I don't see how this is any more counter-intuitive than having to click twice in rapid succession on an application icon to launch it.....
You don't need Adobe Acrobat reader. Just # pt-get install gpdf {maybe I should have said # emerge gpdf to get modded up by some Gentoo fan?} Does everything I need.
I'm currently thinking of contacting the webmaster of every website where I see "Requires Acrobat Reader" and pointing out that there are alternative solutions for viewing PDF files.
But it's easy to delete your "unique" Google cookie before they can build up enough information against it to be dangerous. {I do the same thing with Sainsbury's Nectar cards: get a card, build up a few pounds of savings, then claim the vouchers and start again with a brand new card. And, just for the sheer hell of it, I try to skew the stats they are building up..... but living equidistant from Sainsbury's and Morrison's, I can afford to do that}.
As for Yahoo! messenger, I looked for the source tarball, and couldn't find it; so I went here instead, and never looked back. I stand by my assertion that on at least 95% of occasions, if someone won't show me the code, it's because they are hiding something they don't want me to see.
Am I the only person around here who uses Konqueror as their primary browser?
It has tabbed browsing {what doesn't nowadays?}, tight integration with a mail client, and it can do file management. It can do user agent spoofing {googlebot gets into places many browsers can't.....} It's not quite ACID2 compliant, but I don't know of a browser that is {unless Opera is}. It supports all manner of extensiony things -- try audiocd:/ with a music CD in the drive sometime!
Payment can be secure, or it can be quick and easy. It can't be both. The easier you make it to do a legitimate transaction, the easier you also make it to do a dodgy one.
Contactless reading is going to cause problems. With the current generation of credit card readers, the information is read from the memory chip on the card by physical contact with the chip, and confirmed by entering a PIN into a numeric keypad. Unfortunately, the arrangement of the numbers on the pad is static. So, by careful observation, it is possible for an attacker to determine what number is being entered {the fingers may be concealed by a shroud, lulling the shopper into a false sense of security as the movements of elbow and shoulder reveal the number to a trained observer}; and at some later date, obtain the actual card -- possibly with the assistance of a third party -- and make several expensive purchases. {A phone with a video camera helps tremendously}. When the system was first introduced, customers were heard -- against all advice -- to say their PIN out loud.
While a legitimate reader is reading an RFID device, another reader could be snooping on the same signal. Now, one hopes that a rolling code system would be in operation; that is to say, the encryption key would not be the same each time the card is used. However, the fact that several readers must be able to work with the same card suggests that there must be some sort of key exchange per transaction. Given the small amount of storage space on present-generation smart cards, we can hypothesise that once-used keys are not blocked against re-use.
With a PIN discovered by traditional methods, and a simulated non-contact card, one can make purchases and other transactions, and the legitimate cardholder need not be aware until their limit has been exceeded. {Of course, too low a limit renders payment less convenient}.
The physical appearance of a traditional credit card is a very simple first test -- a cashier would be immediately suspicious of one of the plain white cards that are supplied in smart card development kits. A card which is not shown to the cashier need not bear any visual resemblance to the card it is pretending to be -- the first prototype could be a rucksack full of equipment, just so long as it produces the correct responses to the RF signals. If the non-contact cards have to be physically shown to a cashier, then there is little point in their being contactless in the first place.
At the end of the day, this is pointless willy-waving. Technology for technology's sake. And it will end up with another layer being badly grafted onto it, completely defeating the original purpose {which nobody will remember by then}.
Fair Dealing is a statutory defence to copyright infringement. {And your dancing club application might well count as "academic study" if you ran it as a class.}
As long as enough people on the jury are guilty of essentially the same thing, they will have to acquit you in order to avoid incriminating themselves -- whatever the judge tries to say. If the court decides to punish you, the Old Bill will be out there searching every single car in the car park for dodgy tapes just as soon as the doors open..... Points Make Prizes in the modern police force, and no copper is going to pass up an easy nick.
Of course, you have to actually get as far as a courtroom in the first place, and then the prosecution have to get all the way through without blowing it on a technicality; till such a time, there isn't a lot of point arguing about it.
You're right, Ford don't include the full blueprints of their cars; but they don't try to tell me I can't go around my Fiesta 1.8TDdi with a measuring stick either, or try to use the force of law to prevent me from modifying it using non-Ford accessories.
All the products of all human endeavour rightly belong to all of humanity. How long do you think the human race would have lasted, if some caveman had decided to try to keep fire a proprietary secret, charge everyone for a light and piddle on any unlicenced fires?
Your Fair Dealing rights under Copyright law are not strictly enumerated anywhere on the statute books -- they have to be determined by the courts. And a good thing too, because the courts are there to deal with the details -- and the details change over time.
You would first have to get caught {and the police really do have drier lentils to soak these days, what with all these unarmed Brazilian electricians innocently going about their legitimate business in tube stations}, and have the matter taken to Crown court. From then on, you just have to convince a jury that you were not doing anything you shouldn't -- which will come down to a matter of due diligence on your part that the only copying you did was necessary and all the copies you made were properly accounted for at all times {if you always had the originals about you, or at least always knew where they were, that also would not harm you}. As long as at least two of the people on that jury have at least one home-taped cassette in their cars, you are in the clear and probably so is everyone else in future.
Copy prevention on DVDs was ruled illegal in France, I think, but I forget the actual reference.
I had an idea for a DRE {actually, DREM -- direct recording electromechanical} voting system which would be totally transparent to public scrutiny and amazingly cheap to build. Unfortunately it only works for simple, first-past-the-post elections; but here goes.
There are two parts to the system, connected by a multi-core cable. The Voting Booth Unit has a large rotary switch, which is turned around to one of the candidate's positions; a big red button, which is pressed to cast a vote; a meter with a simple red-green scale indicating whether or not the system is ready; and a large, low-leakage capacitor.
The Presiding Officer's unit has a battery, a switch and several electromagnetic counters - all but one of which have a metal cover screwed over them. On the inside of each cover is a paper label recording the counter reading when the cover was sealed. One of the screws is fastened with wire and a lead seal crimped over the end. The reading on the remaining, master counter is also recorded. A copy of each counter reading is also sealed in an official envelope.
Each candidate has their own counter; the coils of each candidate's counter are wired in series with the master counter, so that both will advance together. The rotary switch in the polling booth selects a current path from the capacitor {which has a voltmeter across it so the voter can see whether or not anything is going to happen when the voting switch is pressed}, through the voting switch, one of the candidate counter coils and the master counter coil. There is a switch on the P.O.'s unit which allows the capacitor to be charged from the battery {and the counters disconnected} or connected to the voting circuit; and the capacitor is a low-leakage type {paper dielectric?} so the only thing draining any charge from it is the voltmeter.
The voter arrives, and enters the booth. The Presiding Officer sets the switch to CHARGE and then back to VOTE. The voter turns the dial to their preferred candidate, makes sure the meter needle is in the green zone, and presses the voting button. The capacitor discharges through the selected candidate's counter coil and the master counter coil: both counters move up one notch. Now the capacitor is discharged, so there is no way to cast another vote. The voter spins the dial at random, so as nobody can see who they voted for, and leaves the booth.
If the voter is taking too long in the booth, the Presiding Officer can top up the charge in the capacitor. While this is happening, the meter will drop to zero indicating "not ready". When the master counter advances, the Presiding Officer knows that a vote has been cast and not to move the switch to CHARGE until the next voter is in the booth.
At the end of polling day, the counters are unsealed and the previously-recorded figures subtracted from the figures shown to give the number of votes for each candidate. The master reading is also checked and should correspond to the sum of the individual candidates' counts.
It's a direct recording system with instantaneous anonymisation -- there is no way to tell anything about the order in which votes were cast nor who voted for whom. It does rely somewhat on the diligence of the presiding officer {and to a lesser extent on the diligence of the voter}, but no more so really than the simple pencil-and-paper ballot we all know. When elections are not being conducted, any person would be free to examine the actual voting units. Sure it's low-tech, coming straight out of a turn-of-the-century telephone exchange; but sometimes you can have too much tech. The less science you rely on {in this case, the amount of current flowing through two things connected in series is the same}, the less chance there is for it to go wrong. Electromagnetic counters are hardly unproven technology; such risks as they pose are well understood.
If a library needs to be upgraded, then the upgrade will potentially break every application that was compiled against that library. There's really no way around that, other than recompiling a lot of applications {or having different versions of the same library on your system, which does sort of work but is hardly a good way to go about things}. OTOH, if the application will compile fine against the library version you have already got, then you can do so. {Of course, you open yourself up to all manner of risks that way..... if an important library needs upgrading, it's usually because someone has found a vulnerability}.
I think what really needs to be challenged as unhealthy is this apparent aversion some people have to compiling programs from source. There is nothing wrong with compiling programs: it's a perfectly natural -- even, dare I say it, beautiful -- process. Even Windows XP had to be compiled, once!
Let's forget once and for all about binary compatibility. Bury it. Because it does not really benefit most people. There is one very well-known operating system which implements as near full binary compatibility as you can get -- and it's generally regarded as a disaster.
What matters is source compatibility. And right now GNU/Linux has that in spades. Not just GNU/Linux, but the BSDs, Mac OSX, Solaris and even Windows have it. If the source code is properly written, and properly packaged, then it will compile on any machine that is up to the job of running it. If you make any really drastic changes -- the standard C library for instance -- you might well have to recompile some applications. Is that a major hardship? I don't think so. Back when we changed from round-pin 5 and 15 amp plugs to rectangular-pin 13 amp plugs, people had to have their houses rewired. When we went from artificial gas to natural gas, people had to have their cookers and heaters modified. When Channel Five launched, many VCRs needed their RF output shifted. These were all necessary changes for the better {ironically enough, we probably will be going back to artificial gas in future..... but the new stuff probably will be more like the natural stuff so nothing will need to be changed}.
Binary compatibility was never more than a nasty hack, fudged in for the benefit of those who want to lock up the source code of their software. These people are pure evil. By not sharing their code with you, they are just one very tiny step removed from stealing from you. It had the beneficial {at least, it was beneficial when processors were slow and disk space small} side effect that you did not have to spend CPU time and disk space compiling applications locally; but now that disk space and processor power are cheap, the benefits of pre-compiled applications are diminished substantially.
There's even a good argument to be made in favour of deliberately introducing binary incompatibility. If programs compiled on my computer would only ever be able to run on my computer, and any program compiled on anyone else's computer would never be able to run on mine, then there would be no such thing as viruses or buffer overrun vulnerabilities. {Unfortunately, this raises the question of how to ever get any computer up and running}.
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eBay probably will destroy Skype.
..... geeks might, but they aren't most people. I think the Skype bubble will burst pretty quickly. I can see a "broadband telephone" with a built in ADSL router {probably next-gen wireless}, which will just plug into a broadband-equipped phone line, pick up some configuration data from the net, and do auto-routing using POTS or VoIP as appropriate. The user experience is the same {pick up receiver, hear dial tone, punch in number, far end rings, far end answers, talk, hang up receiver} whichever system is being used ..... and most people aren't going to care what the little "network" and "padlock" icons in the display will mean, except that they're saving them money somehow and keeping things secure somehow respectively.
Some people are spunking their pants over the idea that one day, there will be advertisements in telephone calls. Your conversation will be interrupted; each party will hear a targeted advertisement, and be unable to hear anything the other party is saying. After the advertisement is finished, the conversation can be resumed. If you hang up mid-advert, then you will have to listen to another advertisement all the way through before you get another chance to dial.
That's the reason why eBay bought Skype, but it might not actually destroy Skype -- Skype might not even last long enough to die that way.
Skype is using a closed, proprietary protocol and thus incompatible with industry standards such as Asterisk. And incompatible protocols simply don't work in telephony. I expect to be able to talk to people, and send and receive SMS messages, independent of what make of phone they are using, or to which telephone company's network it is connected. Hell, they could be using an old-fashioned tethered-to-the-wall phone with brass bells and a rotary dial for all I care. All I need to know is their number, and it's the business of the telcos to make it all work. But that model breaks down when the phone companies won't co-operate, and both un-co-operative parties suffer. If you couldn't call an NTL landline from an Orange mobile, nobody would want to go with NTL or Orange even if they did not have friends on the other network at the time, because you never know who you are going to want to call up.
And of course most people don't want to tie their phone to their computer
Yes, it will deal correctly with things like
Smith,"John R",1980-01-01,1.8,74,"88, Acacia Avenue, Anytown AN1 2PQ",,
..... where there are quoted, unquoted and null fields, and - crucially - commas inbetween the quotes.
I was going to post a section of my perl script here, just a function which parses a single line from a CSV file into an array; but the lameness filter got in the way {for which I blame nobody except the trolls}. I even tried adding comments fore and aft, but it just wasn't having it.
Ah. I see. I still feel a bit vindicated, though; because it still looks as though the proliferation of file formats you are seeing is due to others upstream using a spreadsheet when what they really wanted was a database. I see the same thing in my line of business ..... often we get CSVs containing essentially the same sort of information, but with different column naming and ordering schemas. So I use head foo.csv to get a butchers at the field names and the general format; then a bit of Perl I wrote to turn the CSV lines into an array and poke the important bits into a database.
If you can create "artificial" muscles, surely a better use for them would be to build an engine that runs on glucose and produces only lactic acid as exhaust? You put in a small electrical stimulus, the muscle does more work than the energy supplied and the excess comes from breaking bonds in the glucose. And it has the advantage of being synchronous, which would make it ideal for distributed power generation; you could very easily get your crests and troughs to line up with everybody else's.
Meanwhile, I'll stick with a natural steak, thank you very much. Five to burnt, with chips, petits pois, mushrooms, onions, freshly ground sea salt and black pepper; and freshly-baked bread and real dairy butter. Black Forest Gateau and ice cream to follow.
Maybe there is an alternative universe with different {but mutually consistent} rules; where light does not travel in straight lines, the pressure in a fluid acts unevenly and ferric bicarbonate exists in abundance. But we would never know about it, because it would not obey the right set of laws of physics to be observed by us.
It sounds to me like you are using your spreadsheet as though it were a database. That's a common mistake, and no doubt something that can be {rightly or wrongly} blamed on Microsoft. {Unix = a well-stocked tool box with one screwdriver for each type of screw recess: slotted, Posidriv, hex, Phillips, Torx, and those weirdy ones you get on appliances. Windows = a "magic hammer" with which you can fasten any kind of screw simply by hitting it like a nail. When raised, it uses a small camera to identify the screw recess; on the way down it automatically fits the correct screwdriving bit, and the impact is turned into rotary motion by a ratchet system.} A spreadsheet looks a bit like a table, but its real purpose is highly-parallel numerical calculations {that's why they all have names ending in *calc, or they used to before Microsoft killed them all off}.
A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!
Have a Google for some introductory stuff on mysql or postgresql {you're likely to have one or the other, if not both, on your distro CDs} and see if that's what you were really trying to do in the first place. At entry level there isn't much to choose between them {the so-lightweight-it's-almost-a-toy MySQL is falling out of favour following an ill-thought-out deal with SCO; and PostgreSQL, having shaken off its reputation for slowness, is the new darling}. By the time you get onto more advanced stuff, you will know which one is for you.
If you're familiar with perl, then you won't have any trouble extracting data from a CSV. Try bunging it into an SQL database {actually, a table within a database} and searching that instead.
Hmm. Some time ago, I seem to recall, there was some talk of whether or not the chimpanzee should be considered to belong to the genus homo.
You've just suggested an experiment that would prove once and for all, one way or the other; but somehow, I can't see any chance of it receiving official approval.
There is a standard package format -- it's a src.tar.gz file created with autoconf and automake. Unfortunately, most people don't use these tools properly; so their configure scripts do not check for everything they ought to and allow you to get as far as "make" before the problems show up. Doubly unfortunately, most people who succeed to fix this dependency situation are so pleased with themselves at doing so, they then forget to contact the package maintainer to say what the problem was and how to fix it.
If you want more than a couple of hundred "native" packages to choose from, Debian Testing/Unstable {including k?ubuntu} and Gentoo are the only realistic choices.
So what? The binaries on the Mozilla site were infected. Big deal. If you downloaded the source tarball and built it yourself, you would have a clean copy. Likewise, if you downloaded the binary package from your Linux distributor, you would have a clean copy {since they compile the sources themselves, and just make the appropriate tweaks to make it fit in better with their distro}.
If you download untrustworthy binaries, you're a twat, and you deserve everything that happens to you. It might teach you a lesson. What earthly good is a door with multipoint locking and over a billion key differs, if you go inviting random strangers off the street into your home?
It's not hard to see where Symantec's motivation is coming from. But in any discussion of computer topics, the mere fact of there being computers involved seems to make people say stupid things. So let's look at a simple non-computer-based analogy.
Bloggs Builders Ltd. build new houses with wooden window frames and doors and cheap, easily-picked rim locks. Fred Bloggs, the owner of Bloggs Builders, also happens to have a not insubstantial stake in Bettavue PVCu Ltd., manufacturers of a range of high-security PVCu replacement windows and doors.
Jones Family Homes Ltd. build new houses with PVCu windows and doors with multipoint locking as standard from day one.
When Bettavue produce a long list of statistics, comparing the relative security of Bloggs' and Jones' houses, who do you think they are going to favour?
If you have a ballpoint pen that will not write, but clearly has ink in it, don't do meaningless zigzags and scribbles in the hope of persuading some ink to flow from the nib -- just try writing a swear-word with it.
Four times out of five, it will magically start working again.
I have no explanation for this phenomenon, and you probably won't believe it at first, but don't dismiss it till you've tried it.
Anything that grows in your garden, but that you did not plant is a weed. Anything on your computer that you did not install by an informed, deliberate action is illegally-installed software.
.....
However, just because it's illegal, doesn't stop people doing it. Lots of people transport beneficial plant products across imaginary lines; this is against the law in many countries, but enough of them are getting away with it for it to be worthwhile.
Windows fanboys bitch about it being "complicated" or "awkward" to install software on GNU/Linux, but it is that way for a reason. Yes, you have to open an xterm and type something like apt-get install packagename. One little command. It downloads the software {from an independently-verified repository -- one more layer of safety}, installs it system-wide and updates the menus for all your window managers {if you use more than one}. And frankly, I don't see how this is any more counter-intuitive than having to click twice in rapid succession on an application icon to launch it
You don't need Adobe Acrobat reader. Just # pt-get install gpdf {maybe I should have said # emerge gpdf to get modded up by some Gentoo fan?} Does everything I need.
I'm currently thinking of contacting the webmaster of every website where I see "Requires Acrobat Reader" and pointing out that there are alternative solutions for viewing PDF files.
But it's easy to delete your "unique" Google cookie before they can build up enough information against it to be dangerous. {I do the same thing with Sainsbury's Nectar cards: get a card, build up a few pounds of savings, then claim the vouchers and start again with a brand new card. And, just for the sheer hell of it, I try to skew the stats they are building up ..... but living equidistant from Sainsbury's and Morrison's, I can afford to do that}.
As for Yahoo! messenger, I looked for the source tarball, and couldn't find it; so I went here instead, and never looked back. I stand by my assertion that on at least 95% of occasions, if someone won't show me the code, it's because they are hiding something they don't want me to see.
Am I the only person around here who uses Konqueror as their primary browser?
.....} It's not quite ACID2 compliant, but I don't know of a browser that is {unless Opera is}. It supports all manner of extensiony things -- try audiocd:/ with a music CD in the drive sometime!
It has tabbed browsing {what doesn't nowadays?}, tight integration with a mail client, and it can do file management. It can do user agent spoofing {googlebot gets into places many browsers can't
And, of course, it's GPL.
I know it's bad form to respond to sigs, but .....
"What makes you think I get any less annoyed on finding the toilet seat down than you do on finding it up?" -- ajs318
Payment can be secure, or it can be quick and easy. It can't be both. The easier you make it to do a legitimate transaction, the easier you also make it to do a dodgy one.
Contactless reading is going to cause problems. With the current generation of credit card readers, the information is read from the memory chip on the card by physical contact with the chip, and confirmed by entering a PIN into a numeric keypad. Unfortunately, the arrangement of the numbers on the pad is static. So, by careful observation, it is possible for an attacker to determine what number is being entered {the fingers may be concealed by a shroud, lulling the shopper into a false sense of security as the movements of elbow and shoulder reveal the number to a trained observer}; and at some later date, obtain the actual card -- possibly with the assistance of a third party -- and make several expensive purchases. {A phone with a video camera helps tremendously}. When the system was first introduced, customers were heard -- against all advice -- to say their PIN out loud.
While a legitimate reader is reading an RFID device, another reader could be snooping on the same signal. Now, one hopes that a rolling code system would be in operation; that is to say, the encryption key would not be the same each time the card is used. However, the fact that several readers must be able to work with the same card suggests that there must be some sort of key exchange per transaction. Given the small amount of storage space on present-generation smart cards, we can hypothesise that once-used keys are not blocked against re-use.
With a PIN discovered by traditional methods, and a simulated non-contact card, one can make purchases and other transactions, and the legitimate cardholder need not be aware until their limit has been exceeded. {Of course, too low a limit renders payment less convenient}.
The physical appearance of a traditional credit card is a very simple first test -- a cashier would be immediately suspicious of one of the plain white cards that are supplied in smart card development kits. A card which is not shown to the cashier need not bear any visual resemblance to the card it is pretending to be -- the first prototype could be a rucksack full of equipment, just so long as it produces the correct responses to the RF signals. If the non-contact cards have to be physically shown to a cashier, then there is little point in their being contactless in the first place.
At the end of the day, this is pointless willy-waving. Technology for technology's sake. And it will end up with another layer being badly grafted onto it, completely defeating the original purpose {which nobody will remember by then}.
Fair Dealing is a statutory defence to copyright infringement. {And your dancing club application might well count as "academic study" if you ran it as a class.}
..... Points Make Prizes in the modern police force, and no copper is going to pass up an easy nick.
As long as enough people on the jury are guilty of essentially the same thing, they will have to acquit you in order to avoid incriminating themselves -- whatever the judge tries to say. If the court decides to punish you, the Old Bill will be out there searching every single car in the car park for dodgy tapes just as soon as the doors open
Of course, you have to actually get as far as a courtroom in the first place, and then the prosecution have to get all the way through without blowing it on a technicality; till such a time, there isn't a lot of point arguing about it.
You're right, Ford don't include the full blueprints of their cars; but they don't try to tell me I can't go around my Fiesta 1.8TDdi with a measuring stick either, or try to use the force of law to prevent me from modifying it using non-Ford accessories.
All the products of all human endeavour rightly belong to all of humanity. How long do you think the human race would have lasted, if some caveman had decided to try to keep fire a proprietary secret, charge everyone for a light and piddle on any unlicenced fires?
Ah yes ..... the London Underground. Guaranteed to make even a hardcore Brummie feel like a country boy .....
Your Fair Dealing rights under Copyright law are not strictly enumerated anywhere on the statute books -- they have to be determined by the courts. And a good thing too, because the courts are there to deal with the details -- and the details change over time.
You would first have to get caught {and the police really do have drier lentils to soak these days, what with all these unarmed Brazilian electricians innocently going about their legitimate business in tube stations}, and have the matter taken to Crown court. From then on, you just have to convince a jury that you were not doing anything you shouldn't -- which will come down to a matter of due diligence on your part that the only copying you did was necessary and all the copies you made were properly accounted for at all times {if you always had the originals about you, or at least always knew where they were, that also would not harm you}. As long as at least two of the people on that jury have at least one home-taped cassette in their cars, you are in the clear and probably so is everyone else in future.
Copy prevention on DVDs was ruled illegal in France, I think, but I forget the actual reference.
I had an idea for a DRE {actually, DREM -- direct recording electromechanical} voting system which would be totally transparent to public scrutiny and amazingly cheap to build. Unfortunately it only works for simple, first-past-the-post elections; but here goes.
There are two parts to the system, connected by a multi-core cable. The Voting Booth Unit has a large rotary switch, which is turned around to one of the candidate's positions; a big red button, which is pressed to cast a vote; a meter with a simple red-green scale indicating whether or not the system is ready; and a large, low-leakage capacitor.
The Presiding Officer's unit has a battery, a switch and several electromagnetic counters - all but one of which have a metal cover screwed over them. On the inside of each cover is a paper label recording the counter reading when the cover was sealed. One of the screws is fastened with wire and a lead seal crimped over the end. The reading on the remaining, master counter is also recorded. A copy of each counter reading is also sealed in an official envelope.
Each candidate has their own counter; the coils of each candidate's counter are wired in series with the master counter, so that both will advance together. The rotary switch in the polling booth selects a current path from the capacitor {which has a voltmeter across it so the voter can see whether or not anything is going to happen when the voting switch is pressed}, through the voting switch, one of the candidate counter coils and the master counter coil. There is a switch on the P.O.'s unit which allows the capacitor to be charged from the battery {and the counters disconnected} or connected to the voting circuit; and the capacitor is a low-leakage type {paper dielectric?} so the only thing draining any charge from it is the voltmeter.
The voter arrives, and enters the booth. The Presiding Officer sets the switch to CHARGE and then back to VOTE. The voter turns the dial to their preferred candidate, makes sure the meter needle is in the green zone, and presses the voting button. The capacitor discharges through the selected candidate's counter coil and the master counter coil: both counters move up one notch. Now the capacitor is discharged, so there is no way to cast another vote. The voter spins the dial at random, so as nobody can see who they voted for, and leaves the booth.
If the voter is taking too long in the booth, the Presiding Officer can top up the charge in the capacitor. While this is happening, the meter will drop to zero indicating "not ready". When the master counter advances, the Presiding Officer knows that a vote has been cast and not to move the switch to CHARGE until the next voter is in the booth.
At the end of polling day, the counters are unsealed and the previously-recorded figures subtracted from the figures shown to give the number of votes for each candidate. The master reading is also checked and should correspond to the sum of the individual candidates' counts.
It's a direct recording system with instantaneous anonymisation -- there is no way to tell anything about the order in which votes were cast nor who voted for whom. It does rely somewhat on the diligence of the presiding officer {and to a lesser extent on the diligence of the voter}, but no more so really than the simple pencil-and-paper ballot we all know. When elections are not being conducted, any person would be free to examine the actual voting units. Sure it's low-tech, coming straight out of a turn-of-the-century telephone exchange; but sometimes you can have too much tech. The less science you rely on {in this case, the amount of current flowing through two things connected in series is the same}, the less chance there is for it to go wrong. Electromagnetic counters are hardly unproven technology; such risks as they pose are well understood.
I think you have misunderstood something.
..... if an important library needs upgrading, it's usually because someone has found a vulnerability}.
If a library needs to be upgraded, then the upgrade will potentially break every application that was compiled against that library. There's really no way around that, other than recompiling a lot of applications {or having different versions of the same library on your system, which does sort of work but is hardly a good way to go about things}. OTOH, if the application will compile fine against the library version you have already got, then you can do so. {Of course, you open yourself up to all manner of risks that way
I think what really needs to be challenged as unhealthy is this apparent aversion some people have to compiling programs from source. There is nothing wrong with compiling programs: it's a perfectly natural -- even, dare I say it, beautiful -- process. Even Windows XP had to be compiled, once!
Let's forget once and for all about binary compatibility. Bury it. Because it does not really benefit most people. There is one very well-known operating system which implements as near full binary compatibility as you can get -- and it's generally regarded as a disaster.
..... but the new stuff probably will be more like the natural stuff so nothing will need to be changed}.
What matters is source compatibility. And right now GNU/Linux has that in spades. Not just GNU/Linux, but the BSDs, Mac OSX, Solaris and even Windows have it. If the source code is properly written, and properly packaged, then it will compile on any machine that is up to the job of running it. If you make any really drastic changes -- the standard C library for instance -- you might well have to recompile some applications. Is that a major hardship? I don't think so. Back when we changed from round-pin 5 and 15 amp plugs to rectangular-pin 13 amp plugs, people had to have their houses rewired. When we went from artificial gas to natural gas, people had to have their cookers and heaters modified. When Channel Five launched, many VCRs needed their RF output shifted. These were all necessary changes for the better {ironically enough, we probably will be going back to artificial gas in future
Binary compatibility was never more than a nasty hack, fudged in for the benefit of those who want to lock up the source code of their software. These people are pure evil. By not sharing their code with you, they are just one very tiny step removed from stealing from you. It had the beneficial {at least, it was beneficial when processors were slow and disk space small} side effect that you did not have to spend CPU time and disk space compiling applications locally; but now that disk space and processor power are cheap, the benefits of pre-compiled applications are diminished substantially.
There's even a good argument to be made in favour of deliberately introducing binary incompatibility. If programs compiled on my computer would only ever be able to run on my computer, and any program compiled on anyone else's computer would never be able to run on mine, then there would be no such thing as viruses or buffer overrun vulnerabilities. {Unfortunately, this raises the question of how to ever get any computer up and running}.