1kg. of ice when melted gives 1kg. of water. {there are still the same number of molecules; they just aren't stuck so rigidly to their neighbours anymore}.
Water expands when it freezes, so 1kg. of ice occupies more than 1 litre of space.
A floating object displaces an equal mass of the fluid in which it is floating.
So suppose we have a bucket of water, and we put 1kg. of ice into it. The ice floats, because it is less dense than water. As a result, exactly 1kg. of water is displaced. 1kg of water occupies 1 litre of space, so the level in the bucket has apparently gone up by 1 litre.
After awhile, a quarter of the ice has melted. Now there is 750g. of ice and it is only displacing 750g. of water. But there is an extra 250ml. of water in the bucket. Therefore, the level has not changed.
By the time all the ice has melted, the water really has gone up by one litre.
Now, we never mentioned exactly how much water was in the bucket. All we said was the ice cube was floating. It will work with any amount greater than the draught of the ice cube.
In the case where ice is sitting completely on land, rather than floating on the water, then it will increase the water level if it melts. However, there is trapped air in the ice making it even less dense. That air won't add to the volume of water. Also, melting ice absorbs a lot of heat while not actually getting any warmer {work is done breaking the intermolecular bonds which hold the solid together, and stored as potential energy. This energy is released as heat when the liquid resolidifies. Anyone who has ever used a hot melt glue gun will know about this. If you get hot glue on yourself, it really canes}.
If more heat is reaching the earth, or if the atmosphere is becoming better at trapping heat, then the melting of large amounts of ice is a good buffer to store some of that energy. It certainly should last long enough for someone to work out a way of getting rid of some of the excess. Of course, certain elements within society are going to use ignorance to spread fear and wield the Guilt Stick.....
As opposed to capitalism, which keeps the vast majority of citizens in poverty whilst a tiny minority own all the money. The arithmetical mean amount of money per head under capitalism looks plausible, but that is all. Look just beneath the surface, and you'll see how rotten it really is.
Capitalism has created this strange myth called "consumer choice". Basically, it allows people to delude themselves that they are making decisions -- possibly satisfying some primal instinct, like "Um, back there I could have run away from that thing with the teeth but I climbed this tree instead and now it's gone away" -- when in fact their "decisions" have no bearing on the eventual outcome. Who needs fifty kinds of fags to choose from when they all give you cancer? Who needs twenty brands of washing powder when they all pollute watercourses and irritate your skin? Who needs a hundred beers to choose from when there is only one wall to piss them against? Who needs half a dozen different companies to sell you overpriced, artery-clogging, fat- and sugar-laden "fast food" {this definitely does satisfy a primal urge -- some foodstuffs are hardcoded to taste good because, in the wild, they are rare and should be eaten anytime they are found} when it makes no difference which of them is exploiting third world farmers? The oil companies benefit enormously when you drive across town to save a penny or two on a litre of fuel, and burn up more fuel in the process than the money you saved.
I'm not saying the old Soviet Union was perfect, but capitalism is nowhere near perfect either.
sis900 and rhine are also popular onboard ethernet adaptors. In general, modprobe foo; lsmod where foo is the hardware you want to look for. See if you can see foo in the output. If the hardware is absent, the modprobe will fail and the lsmod output won't change. I use Slackware Live as a sysdiag tool, because it works so well at identifying stuff. {Alright, so does Knoppix, but it wants to go straight into X.} This IMHO is an area where Debian is lacking. On the other hand, perhaps they thought it was less annoying to have to experiment a bit than to risk knackering everything early on with dodgy autodetection. That's the tradeoff.
If you're running Slackware, you can put stuff in/usr, but if you're running any kind of package-managed system {RPM or DEB} you're better off installing to/usr/local instead, because the package managers are designed never to touch/usr/local. That's specifically so you can install stuff which the package management team haven't got around to arranging yet.
Of course, you might conceivably end up installing some libraries twice {once in/usr/local/lib and once in/usr/lib} if your library paths are seriously mucked up and there's some command you forgot to use to tell your system you updated some libraries.
Why worry about uninstalling anyway? HDD space is cheap enough these days, that you can afford just to take the programme out of the menus. If you can remember where you put the source, "make uninstall" might get rid of the installed parts..... after which you can delete the directory and the tarball.
Seriously, though, if someone comes up with a new killer app that does package management, automatically resolves dependencies and uploads its discoveries to a web site..... that WOULD be cool. In the meantime, if you're using an RPM based distro, here's my tip: when you want to install some package foo, be sure to install the foo-devel package. This holds for all foo. IMLE the files that other packages depend on are, inexplicably, most often in here.
I installed Mandrake 8.2 initially just to get a working X setup {intending to use the same settings in a later Debian install}, then found myself installing applications on it and using it. I do have to agree that the task-oriented "what to do" menu is great for someone new to the environment.
As for package management issues, some distributions are better than others. Generally, RPM files from the CDs have worked better than RPM files from who-knows-where. Though I have never had really massive problems with apt-get. Now, with.tar.gz files, it's a different matter again..... Some work "out of the box", some have awkward dependencies. However let me point out that the ones I've had problems with, were all weirdy ones that you would never dream of installing unless you already knew most of what it takes to get a package working.
I'm seriously thinking of forging ahead with an SQL-based package manager. Maybe I'll call it MyPacMan just to annoy people looking for arcade machine roms.....
Probably because the Soviet Union - at least in the cold war days - was not at all communist, but authoritarian-socialist. It's all a matter of definition. In a genuinely communist society, the state would not have any power per se, because all that power would have been delegated to smaller units {a.k.a. "soviets"} each responsible for a closed system.
Basically, "anything not specifically permitted is forbidden" is authoritarian, and "anything not specifically forbidden is permitted" is libertarian. Then "make as much money as you like and never mind who gets hurt in the process" is capitalism, and "make sure everyone gets a fair share" is socialism.
Actually, burning paper isn't as bad for the environment as people make it out to be, as long as you do something useful with the heat. After all, you aren't increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, since the carbon in the paper came from CO2 in the air in the first place. It is, however, somewhat risky..
On the other hand, you really want to be looking upstream. Lots of people potentially have access to that information before anybody even thinks of getting rid of it..... Sure, you might hear of the odd case of someone getting lucky by skipdiving or similar, but there are many, many other ways to get hold of this information.
Of course, there was no such thing as "identity theft" in villages where everyone knew everyone else. And as likely as not there would be no such thing as identity theft if everyone had RFID chips embedded in their bodies..... but that's another story.....
Just buy some rats or gerbils and give them your confidential papers to chew. {It can't be that poisonous for them; otherwise city rats would be dead from all the discarded papers found in city streets}. You will also need to give commercially-available mix with extra monkey nuts {leave the shells on - rodents need to chew stuff}, sunflower seeds, carrot sticks and occasionally a bit sliced hard-boiled egg, maybe a bit of bacon or chicken for extra protein. Make sure plenty of fresh water is available, especially if giving protein-rich foodstuffs. A rat lasts at least 2 years, is easily tamed and you won't even notice what it costs to feed.
Under British law, certain rights cannot be waived and consent cannot be given for certain actions. Look at the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977. This is why we have that phrase on purchase guarantees and various contracts: to cover one party's behind. If they forgot to mention something, then it might appear that they were trying to limit your rights. That would come under the general heading of interfering with the process of law, and is punishable as seriously as it sounds like it might be.
Of course, there might be different rules in force in less civilised nations:-)
You mean, sort of like Microsoft did with Windows 3.1 and DR-DOS?
That would make the Free Software community no better than Microsoft -- it would be stooping to their level.
This, on the other hand, is a shot over SCO's bows -- a warning that we have, and are prepared to use, deadly force, but that we expect not to have to use it.
I think the law is on the side of IBM and the GPL. Look at the facts.
The Law of the Land:
Copyright law says basically that you need permission from the author to make copies of software and the like, except in certain limited circumstances which may vary from one jurisdiction to another.
If the law of the land says that you have a right to do something, then nothing and nobody can take that right away from you. Ever. Even if you sign a piece of paper saying you have given up that right, in the eyes of the law you still have that right. This is what that catch-all phrase "Your statutory rights are not affected" means.
Civil law gives you remedies, as a copyright holder, if someone performs unauthorised acts in relation to your work. The courts may decide on the nature and magnitude of such remedies. In general, whistling a tune in the street is likely to attract substantially smaller damages than broadcasting an unreleased movie.
The GPL:
The GPL gives you the necessary permission to make and distribute copies of the work, in addition to any statutory rights you may have, if and only if you comply with certain restrictions. For instance, if you modify the work, you must not restrict distribution of your modified version, save that you may keep it entirely to yourself.
If you fail to comply with the conditions of the GPL, then your special permission to copy, modify and distribute is withdrawn. Copyright law is what bars you from making copies, not the GPL.
There's nothing complicated in there; it is all quite straightforward. SCO has released code under the GPL, thereby granting a licence to others to copy it. That licence cannot now be withdrawn.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. When you want to do something critical with Free Software - such as running a system where people will get hurt or killed if it fails - reading the source code is due diligence. Don't want to read it yourself? Don't know how and can't be bothered to learn? Then pay someone to read it for you. That's the way people make money out of Free Software. What SCO was doing was critical in a different way, because SCO was trying to keep proprietary code separate from GPL code. Nobody's life was in danger, but SCO mucked up anyway by not checking for things they didn't want in the code before releasing it.
You stop trying to push your ideas on everyone else!
You cannot steal an idea. You can only steal things that can be owned. The test for ownership is "would the person who claims to own this thing be legitimately annoyed if someone were to destroy the thing". Ideas cannot be destroyed. Ergo, ideas cannot be owned and, by extrapolation, cannot be stolen.
And if you did develop a perfect painless cancer cure, and you kept it to yourself, you would be no better than someone who went around giving people cancer.
Exactly. Just get yourself an Ordnance Survey map and a Silva compass. No need for GPS. You can correct for Magnetic Declination in one of three ways.
Ignore it and just take extra sightings {relying on your waymarks being sufficiently close that you will be only a few metres off}
Correct it in your head
Pencil new north-south lines {based on present-day mag north} on your map
I actually saw a TV programme where two drivers {one with GPS, the other with map and compass} set off to find the same place. The GPS user got hopelessly lost! Another victory for low-tech!
People buying commodities short on supply (art collectors and such) do this all the time.
People do a lot of things all the time. That doesn't make any of them right, though.
WHAT THE HELL RIGHT TO YOU HAVE TO ANYTHING I MAKE?!
Every right. You are human. Your mind is part of the Collective Human Consciousness. Any idea that originates in your mind is part of the Collective Human Consciousness and all of humanity has the right to benefit from all of human endeavour. Really, it's more a question of "What right have you to stop anyone else benefitting from your ideas?"
"But!" I hear you cry, "My ideas are my babies!" Yes. And one day those babies are going to learn to live without you. Deal with it.
What we need is a new law, not a bodge to make existing ones work. Create a Statutory Default Software Licence, which basically would grant all the rights the GPL already grants without dependence on copyright law. The SDSL would apply to every piece of computer software, unless an author had placed a copy of the source code in escrow in order to ensure eventual entry into the public domain - only so could an author secure copyright on computer software. Additionally, vendors would be required to guarantee software to perform substantially as advertised, unless full access is offered to the source code {in which case, examinination of the source code would constitute due diligence. If that sounds beyond you, you can pay an expert. If you don't want to pay, you can do the hard work yourself}.
Mandating open-source might put people out of business. To this I have just one thing to say: So did the thirteenth amendment.
Taking on board the above, what I'm thinking of is a CD {or it might have to be a DVD, but WTH - we're trying to introduce new users to Linux and the chances are they have DVD-capable systems. Recycling older boxes has a different set of priorities. Perhaps worthy of another distribution} that would autodetect everything {like Knoppix or Slackware Live}, boot up a desktop, display a series of prompts to confirm everything and take manual input where necessary, and proceed to install a system.
How about if each requester that appears has a toggle device for "expert mode" where you get access to more esoteric options {with automatic switching to expert mode where the computer really can't make its own mind up}. Packages in the distribution would be carefully selected. Dependency checking can be done by judicious use of scripts. We tweak "our" distribution's configure scripts to generate output that a GUI front-end can handle, whilst still being geek-readable.
Also, I had another wild idea. What if our distribution's package management was database-driven? Before you argue that installing MySQL would bloat the base system, remember we don't care about that here. This is a non-geek system we're building. In fact, let's have Apache and all three scriping languages, so we can get started straight away with LAMP applications whatever you think the P stands for. We can keep package details in a MySQL database, which should make for quicker searching than flat files. Stick a simple frontend on, and you've got an Access-alike.
One thing that will be required is an active online community. We should aim to integrate community participation from the ground up. I want it almost to be difficult not to participate in the process. Our users are going to be using the latest equipment, quite likely on ADSL connections. So if a permanent connection is available, let's make use of it to set up a knowledge-sharing system. Provide a means to submit new step-by-step instructions, and examine documents written by other users. It's the legitimate use for P2P! Make it clear that although you haven't paid for the software in cash, you might well be expected to put in a little hard work making it work, and to share whatever you may learn in the process. That, after all, is the Free Software spirit. I accept that it is my destiny to make occasional mistakes and face occasional obstacles that others as well as I may learn from them. This is the price I pay for all the mistakes I did not have to make and the obstacles I did not have to face.
Suppose you want to install a "non-official" package. You download the tarball, but when you get to the scary "voodoo" part, a journalling system logs everything you do - every command and all the diagnostic messages. Now, if it all goes off a breeze, you can have a report auto-submitted saying that it worked with your configuration. Even if it doesn't work first time, you can bribe your local geek to fix it and you still have a record of how you eventually got it to work. That might help someone work out exactly how to fix the package, and eventually create an "official" version which will install from the box {more likely, the net}.
I think nearly all the bits are there. We just need to stick them together.....
Your problem is most probably related to Debian's {well-intentioned} system of only putting stuff they are sure and certain is stable in their stable distribution. Knoppix is based around Debian, but has had KDE3 grafted onto it. Unfortunately there are library change issues from KDE2 to KDE3. We probably will have to wait till the next release before KDE3 becomes the norm for Debian.
Part of the problem, IMHO, is that users have become conditioned to think in a certain way {everything in terms of pointing and clicking} and thus don't take any active interest in what the computer is really doing. Instead of feeling the curves and the bumps of the track as they happen, we become conditioned to accept an artificial view and a control method which does not give real negative feedback. An error message from your own computer doesn't mean you got anything wrong. It just means you need to do a little detective work. And you learn and become stronger.
If you really hate RPM and APT, use Slackware.
And I'm making the following pledge: Sometime after this discussion is "over", I will throw together a bit of scripting to address at least one issue raised herein.
How about using a giant outdoor mist-screen to show flickery 8mm. movies of ghosts &c. from a concealed projector, in order to scare away the residents from an old village where you have been secretly conducting a highly lucrative but probably illegal operation, so they won't nick your money / grass you up?
Oh, wait, I think this might have been done before.....
My solution would be to turn it around and go from the opposite end. Bar elected bodies from dealing with issues related only to a mere subset of the people they represent. For example, no higher authority than a parish council should have jurisdiction over anything which has effect only within that parish. District and county councils would be responsible for collating parish laws and policy documents and making general statements for the purpose of clarification {e.g. 'riding a bicycle to which a dog is tied is permitted in Upper Piddle and Nether Piddle; but not in Middle Piddle, where a fine of 37.5p shall be imposed unless the offender dismount from the machine with a 180 degree flying leap and untie the creature'}, but anyone can do that - no decision-making is involved, so it doesn't matter whether it is done by a tory or a socialist. Every decision that can affect people would be made at the lowest possible level -- by {the representatives of} those who would be affected by its consequences, but not those who would not. Obviously some decisions need to be taken at high levels {e.g. transport infrastructure is properly a national or even international concern}. But, by and large, local policy should shape national policy rather than the other way around. Additionally, taxes should be collected regionally and distributed upwards to national / state and federal governments. I think this would solve many concerns. Most of the "decision-makers" in your life would be real people - and you would know where they lived, where their kids went to school &c.
I've run Windows 95 in 4MB RAM "just to see if it would". {well, alright; I was waiting for some 16MB SIMMs to be delivered, and found some 1MB ones in a drawer}. It did. Eventually!
Regardless of that, surely it's more important that the candidate who actually got the most votes win, than that the system be simple for the authorities to set up.
I agree with the original person. I can't state it loud enough that THE INTEGRITY OF ELECTION RESULTS IS A FAR GREATER CONCERN THAN ANY CORPORATION'S RIGHT TO SECRECY! The mechanism by which our leaders are chosen must be absolutely open to public scrutiny and any government that does not believe this so, deserves to be overthrown.
even if the code is opensource, how can you be sure the voting machine executable has been compiled from the genuine source code ?
I've looked at this one before and it is a problem, because the C compiler may be rigged so that when you try to compile it from source, then it modifies itself subtly so as to insert various backdoors; in other words, the code you get from the compiler does not match up against the source you compiled. Then, it does not matter how "clean" any of the source code is; because the compiler might modify the code during compilation. Even if you run the original, clean compiler source through it, chances are that the compiler could spot this and mung it, giving you a "dirty" compiler.
Throughout the following, I'm assuming you - or someone you trust - can spot malicious C code just by looking at it, and can write assembler code you know is safe. You don't have to be able to look at someone else's C-generated assembler and know whether it's safe.
You first need to write a simple C interpreter in assembler. Note, it only has to interpret; it doesn't have to compile. As long as the assembler instructions it generates do the same thing as the C source code you feed it - even if much more slowly than a compiled version - then it is good enough for the time being. It can even waste as much memory as you can spare. The most important thing is that you know the temporary interpreter is safe. Then you take the source code for the compiler you want to compile - you know this is safe, but the pre-compiled binary might not be safe - and run it through the interpreter. Now the output from the interpreted compiler is actually a compiled compiler, and it's safe. You haven't run the "dirty" compiler binary, which might have modified the compiler.
Now you have a compiler which you know for certain isn't going to produce binaries which don't do what the source said. And that's the first step to trustworthy computing. Maybe get someone we all trust to sign the code by encrypting it with their secret key {so when you decrypt with their public key you recover the original; recall that P(S(x)) = S(P(x)) = x}. Problem is, you can't trust anyone with election results, because the stakes are so high.
On the other hand, why bother with voting machines at all? In this country, we count votes by hand. It may not be high-tech, but it works and it's harder to subvert. Hand-counting of small batches of papers {which are kept, in case of dispute, until the next election is out of the way} is not significantly slower than machine counting. Anyway, what's a few hours here or there when a term of office can last for four or five years? To throw an election, you would need to bribe several people, not all of whom are politicians. The ballot paper {taken at random from a book of identical ones and by a different person than the one who sees your voter ID - the only communication between them is a slight nod} is the only record of the vote, and the voter has already had the opportunity to verify it before depositing it.
For how often elections are held, it probably is less work to keep on doing all this stuff by hand than it is to put the safeguards in place that would make machine voting trustworthy.
Dude, that's only an hour's drive! Why not get a contract mobile with inclusive minutes..... if the called party is on the same network, or a landline, such calls are usually free off-peak. But you do have to sign a contract, which you don't with a regular one.
Slashdot Mirror
- 1 litre of water weighs 1kg.
- 1kg. of ice when melted gives 1kg. of water. {there are still the same number of molecules; they just aren't stuck so rigidly to their neighbours anymore}.
- Water expands when it freezes, so 1kg. of ice occupies more than 1 litre of space.
- A floating object displaces an equal mass of the fluid in which it is floating.
So suppose we have a bucket of water, and we put 1kg. of ice into it. The ice floats, because it is less dense than water. As a result, exactly 1kg. of water is displaced. 1kg of water occupies 1 litre of space, so the level in the bucket has apparently gone up by 1 litre.After awhile, a quarter of the ice has melted. Now there is 750g. of ice and it is only displacing 750g. of water. But there is an extra 250ml. of water in the bucket. Therefore, the level has not changed.
By the time all the ice has melted, the water really has gone up by one litre.
Now, we never mentioned exactly how much water was in the bucket. All we said was the ice cube was floating. It will work with any amount greater than the draught of the ice cube.
In the case where ice is sitting completely on land, rather than floating on the water, then it will increase the water level if it melts. However, there is trapped air in the ice making it even less dense. That air won't add to the volume of water. Also, melting ice absorbs a lot of heat while not actually getting any warmer {work is done breaking the intermolecular bonds which hold the solid together, and stored as potential energy. This energy is released as heat when the liquid resolidifies. Anyone who has ever used a hot melt glue gun will know about this. If you get hot glue on yourself, it really canes}.
If more heat is reaching the earth, or if the atmosphere is becoming better at trapping heat, then the melting of large amounts of ice is a good buffer to store some of that energy. It certainly should last long enough for someone to work out a way of getting rid of some of the excess. Of course, certain elements within society are going to use ignorance to spread fear and wield the Guilt Stick
As opposed to capitalism, which keeps the vast majority of citizens in poverty whilst a tiny minority own all the money. The arithmetical mean amount of money per head under capitalism looks plausible, but that is all. Look just beneath the surface, and you'll see how rotten it really is.
Capitalism has created this strange myth called "consumer choice". Basically, it allows people to delude themselves that they are making decisions -- possibly satisfying some primal instinct, like "Um, back there I could have run away from that thing with the teeth but I climbed this tree instead and now it's gone away" -- when in fact their "decisions" have no bearing on the eventual outcome. Who needs fifty kinds of fags to choose from when they all give you cancer? Who needs twenty brands of washing powder when they all pollute watercourses and irritate your skin? Who needs a hundred beers to choose from when there is only one wall to piss them against? Who needs half a dozen different companies to sell you overpriced, artery-clogging, fat- and sugar-laden "fast food" {this definitely does satisfy a primal urge -- some foodstuffs are hardcoded to taste good because, in the wild, they are rare and should be eaten anytime they are found} when it makes no difference which of them is exploiting third world farmers? The oil companies benefit enormously when you drive across town to save a penny or two on a litre of fuel, and burn up more fuel in the process than the money you saved.
I'm not saying the old Soviet Union was perfect, but capitalism is nowhere near perfect either.
sis900 and rhine are also popular onboard ethernet adaptors. In general, modprobe foo; lsmod where foo is the hardware you want to look for. See if you can see foo in the output. If the hardware is absent, the modprobe will fail and the lsmod output won't change. I use Slackware Live as a sysdiag tool, because it works so well at identifying stuff. {Alright, so does Knoppix, but it wants to go straight into X.} This IMHO is an area where Debian is lacking. On the other hand, perhaps they thought it was less annoying to have to experiment a bit than to risk knackering everything early on with dodgy autodetection. That's the tradeoff.
If you're running Slackware, you can put stuff in /usr, but if you're running any kind of package-managed system {RPM or DEB} you're better off installing to /usr/local instead, because the package managers are designed never to touch /usr/local. That's specifically so you can install stuff which the package management team haven't got around to arranging yet.
/usr/local/lib and once in /usr/lib} if your library paths are seriously mucked up and there's some command you forgot to use to tell your system you updated some libraries.
..... after which you can delete the directory and the tarball.
..... that WOULD be cool. In the meantime, if you're using an RPM based distro, here's my tip: when you want to install some package foo, be sure to install the foo-devel package. This holds for all foo. IMLE the files that other packages depend on are, inexplicably, most often in here.
Of course, you might conceivably end up installing some libraries twice {once in
Why worry about uninstalling anyway? HDD space is cheap enough these days, that you can afford just to take the programme out of the menus. If you can remember where you put the source, "make uninstall" might get rid of the installed parts
Seriously, though, if someone comes up with a new killer app that does package management, automatically resolves dependencies and uploads its discoveries to a web site
I installed Mandrake 8.2 initially just to get a working X setup {intending to use the same settings in a later Debian install}, then found myself installing applications on it and using it. I do have to agree that the task-oriented "what to do" menu is great for someone new to the environment.
.tar.gz files, it's a different matter again ..... Some work "out of the box", some have awkward dependencies. However let me point out that the ones I've had problems with, were all weirdy ones that you would never dream of installing unless you already knew most of what it takes to get a package working.
.....
As for package management issues, some distributions are better than others. Generally, RPM files from the CDs have worked better than RPM files from who-knows-where. Though I have never had really massive problems with apt-get. Now, with
I'm seriously thinking of forging ahead with an SQL-based package manager. Maybe I'll call it MyPacMan just to annoy people looking for arcade machine roms
Probably because the Soviet Union - at least in the cold war days - was not at all communist, but authoritarian-socialist. It's all a matter of definition. In a genuinely communist society, the state would not have any power per se, because all that power would have been delegated to smaller units {a.k.a. "soviets"} each responsible for a closed system.
Basically, "anything not specifically permitted is forbidden" is authoritarian, and "anything not specifically forbidden is permitted" is libertarian. Then "make as much money as you like and never mind who gets hurt in the process" is capitalism, and "make sure everyone gets a fair share" is socialism.
Actually, burning paper isn't as bad for the environment as people make it out to be, as long as you do something useful with the heat. After all, you aren't increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, since the carbon in the paper came from CO2 in the air in the first place. It is, however, somewhat risky..
..... Sure, you might hear of the odd case of someone getting lucky by skipdiving or similar, but there are many, many other ways to get hold of this information.
..... but that's another story .....
On the other hand, you really want to be looking upstream. Lots of people potentially have access to that information before anybody even thinks of getting rid of it
Of course, there was no such thing as "identity theft" in villages where everyone knew everyone else. And as likely as not there would be no such thing as identity theft if everyone had RFID chips embedded in their bodies
Just buy some rats or gerbils and give them your confidential papers to chew. {It can't be that poisonous for them; otherwise city rats would be dead from all the discarded papers found in city streets}. You will also need to give commercially-available mix with extra monkey nuts {leave the shells on - rodents need to chew stuff}, sunflower seeds, carrot sticks and occasionally a bit sliced hard-boiled egg, maybe a bit of bacon or chicken for extra protein. Make sure plenty of fresh water is available, especially if giving protein-rich foodstuffs. A rat lasts at least 2 years, is easily tamed and you won't even notice what it costs to feed.
Under British law, certain rights cannot be waived and consent cannot be given for certain actions. Look at the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977. This is why we have that phrase on purchase guarantees and various contracts: to cover one party's behind. If they forgot to mention something, then it might appear that they were trying to limit your rights. That would come under the general heading of interfering with the process of law, and is punishable as seriously as it sounds like it might be.
:-)
Of course, there might be different rules in force in less civilised nations
You mean, sort of like Microsoft did with Windows 3.1 and DR-DOS?
That would make the Free Software community no better than Microsoft -- it would be stooping to their level.
This, on the other hand, is a shot over SCO's bows -- a warning that we have, and are prepared to use, deadly force, but that we expect not to have to use it.
The Law of the Land:
- Copyright law says basically that you need permission from the author to make copies of software and the like, except in certain limited circumstances which may vary from one jurisdiction to another.
- If the law of the land says that you have a right to do something, then nothing and nobody can take that right away from you. Ever. Even if you sign a piece of paper saying you have given up that right, in the eyes of the law you still have that right. This is what that catch-all phrase "Your statutory rights are not affected" means.
- Civil law gives you remedies, as a copyright holder, if someone performs unauthorised acts in relation to your work. The courts may decide on the nature and magnitude of such remedies. In general, whistling a tune in the street is likely to attract substantially smaller damages than broadcasting an unreleased movie.
The GPL:- The GPL gives you the necessary permission to make and distribute copies of the work, in addition to any statutory rights you may have, if and only if you comply with certain restrictions. For instance, if you modify the work, you must not restrict distribution of your modified version, save that you may keep it entirely to yourself.
- If you fail to comply with the conditions of the GPL, then your special permission to copy, modify and distribute is withdrawn. Copyright law is what bars you from making copies, not the GPL.
There's nothing complicated in there; it is all quite straightforward. SCO has released code under the GPL, thereby granting a licence to others to copy it. That licence cannot now be withdrawn.I've said it before and I'll say it again. When you want to do something critical with Free Software - such as running a system where people will get hurt or killed if it fails - reading the source code is due diligence. Don't want to read it yourself? Don't know how and can't be bothered to learn? Then pay someone to read it for you. That's the way people make money out of Free Software. What SCO was doing was critical in a different way, because SCO was trying to keep proprietary code separate from GPL code. Nobody's life was in danger, but SCO mucked up anyway by not checking for things they didn't want in the code before releasing it.
You stop trying to push your ideas on everyone else!
You cannot steal an idea. You can only steal things that can be owned. The test for ownership is "would the person who claims to own this thing be legitimately annoyed if someone were to destroy the thing". Ideas cannot be destroyed. Ergo, ideas cannot be owned and, by extrapolation, cannot be stolen.
And if you did develop a perfect painless cancer cure, and you kept it to yourself, you would be no better than someone who went around giving people cancer.
- Ignore it and just take extra sightings {relying on your waymarks being sufficiently close that you will be only a few metres off}
- Correct it in your head
- Pencil new north-south lines {based on present-day mag north} on your map
I actually saw a TV programme where two drivers {one with GPS, the other with map and compass} set off to find the same place. The GPS user got hopelessly lost! Another victory for low-tech!"But!" I hear you cry, "My ideas are my babies!" Yes. And one day those babies are going to learn to live without you. Deal with it.
What we need is a new law, not a bodge to make existing ones work. Create a Statutory Default Software Licence, which basically would grant all the rights the GPL already grants without dependence on copyright law. The SDSL would apply to every piece of computer software, unless an author had placed a copy of the source code in escrow in order to ensure eventual entry into the public domain - only so could an author secure copyright on computer software. Additionally, vendors would be required to guarantee software to perform substantially as advertised, unless full access is offered to the source code {in which case, examinination of the source code would constitute due diligence. If that sounds beyond you, you can pay an expert. If you don't want to pay, you can do the hard work yourself}.
Mandating open-source might put people out of business. To this I have just one thing to say: So did the thirteenth amendment.
Taking on board the above, what I'm thinking of is a CD {or it might have to be a DVD, but WTH - we're trying to introduce new users to Linux and the chances are they have DVD-capable systems. Recycling older boxes has a different set of priorities. Perhaps worthy of another distribution} that would autodetect everything {like Knoppix or Slackware Live}, boot up a desktop, display a series of prompts to confirm everything and take manual input where necessary, and proceed to install a system.
.....
How about if each requester that appears has a toggle device for "expert mode" where you get access to more esoteric options {with automatic switching to expert mode where the computer really can't make its own mind up}. Packages in the distribution would be carefully selected. Dependency checking can be done by judicious use of scripts. We tweak "our" distribution's configure scripts to generate output that a GUI front-end can handle, whilst still being geek-readable.
Also, I had another wild idea. What if our distribution's package management was database-driven? Before you argue that installing MySQL would bloat the base system, remember we don't care about that here. This is a non-geek system we're building. In fact, let's have Apache and all three scriping languages, so we can get started straight away with LAMP applications whatever you think the P stands for. We can keep package details in a MySQL database, which should make for quicker searching than flat files. Stick a simple frontend on, and you've got an Access-alike.
One thing that will be required is an active online community. We should aim to integrate community participation from the ground up. I want it almost to be difficult not to participate in the process. Our users are going to be using the latest equipment, quite likely on ADSL connections. So if a permanent connection is available, let's make use of it to set up a knowledge-sharing system. Provide a means to submit new step-by-step instructions, and examine documents written by other users. It's the legitimate use for P2P! Make it clear that although you haven't paid for the software in cash, you might well be expected to put in a little hard work making it work, and to share whatever you may learn in the process. That, after all, is the Free Software spirit. I accept that it is my destiny to make occasional mistakes and face occasional obstacles that others as well as I may learn from them. This is the price I pay for all the mistakes I did not have to make and the obstacles I did not have to face.
Suppose you want to install a "non-official" package. You download the tarball, but when you get to the scary "voodoo" part, a journalling system logs everything you do - every command and all the diagnostic messages. Now, if it all goes off a breeze, you can have a report auto-submitted saying that it worked with your configuration. Even if it doesn't work first time, you can bribe your local geek to fix it and you still have a record of how you eventually got it to work. That might help someone work out exactly how to fix the package, and eventually create an "official" version which will install from the box {more likely, the net}.
I think nearly all the bits are there. We just need to stick them together
Your problem is most probably related to Debian's {well-intentioned} system of only putting stuff they are sure and certain is stable in their stable distribution. Knoppix is based around Debian, but has had KDE3 grafted onto it. Unfortunately there are library change issues from KDE2 to KDE3. We probably will have to wait till the next release before KDE3 becomes the norm for Debian.
Part of the problem, IMHO, is that users have become conditioned to think in a certain way {everything in terms of pointing and clicking} and thus don't take any active interest in what the computer is really doing. Instead of feeling the curves and the bumps of the track as they happen, we become conditioned to accept an artificial view and a control method which does not give real negative feedback. An error message from your own computer doesn't mean you got anything wrong. It just means you need to do a little detective work. And you learn and become stronger.
If you really hate RPM and APT, use Slackware.
And I'm making the following pledge: Sometime after this discussion is "over", I will throw together a bit of scripting to address at least one issue raised herein.
How about using a giant outdoor mist-screen to show flickery 8mm. movies of ghosts &c. from a concealed projector, in order to scare away the residents from an old village where you have been secretly conducting a highly lucrative but probably illegal operation, so they won't nick your money / grass you up?
.....
Oh, wait, I think this might have been done before
My solution would be to turn it around and go from the opposite end. Bar elected bodies from dealing with issues related only to a mere subset of the people they represent. For example, no higher authority than a parish council should have jurisdiction over anything which has effect only within that parish. District and county councils would be responsible for collating parish laws and policy documents and making general statements for the purpose of clarification {e.g. 'riding a bicycle to which a dog is tied is permitted in Upper Piddle and Nether Piddle; but not in Middle Piddle, where a fine of 37.5p shall be imposed unless the offender dismount from the machine with a 180 degree flying leap and untie the creature'}, but anyone can do that - no decision-making is involved, so it doesn't matter whether it is done by a tory or a socialist. Every decision that can affect people would be made at the lowest possible level -- by {the representatives of} those who would be affected by its consequences, but not those who would not. Obviously some decisions need to be taken at high levels {e.g. transport infrastructure is properly a national or even international concern}. But, by and large, local policy should shape national policy rather than the other way around. Additionally, taxes should be collected regionally and distributed upwards to national / state and federal governments. I think this would solve many concerns. Most of the "decision-makers" in your life would be real people - and you would know where they lived, where their kids went to school &c.
I've run Windows 95 in 4MB RAM "just to see if it would". {well, alright; I was waiting for some 16MB SIMMs to be delivered, and found some 1MB ones in a drawer}. It did. Eventually!
I can't honestly recommend it to anyone, though.
Regardless of that, surely it's more important that the candidate who actually got the most votes win, than that the system be simple for the authorities to set up.
How dare you presume to tell me that I am not allowed to supervise the process by which my elected representative will speak in my name?
Get your head out of your arsehole. It's because of idiots like you that your country's in the mess it's in.
Throughout the following, I'm assuming you - or someone you trust - can spot malicious C code just by looking at it, and can write assembler code you know is safe. You don't have to be able to look at someone else's C-generated assembler and know whether it's safe.
You first need to write a simple C interpreter in assembler. Note, it only has to interpret; it doesn't have to compile. As long as the assembler instructions it generates do the same thing as the C source code you feed it - even if much more slowly than a compiled version - then it is good enough for the time being. It can even waste as much memory as you can spare. The most important thing is that you know the temporary interpreter is safe. Then you take the source code for the compiler you want to compile - you know this is safe, but the pre-compiled binary might not be safe - and run it through the interpreter. Now the output from the interpreted compiler is actually a compiled compiler, and it's safe. You haven't run the "dirty" compiler binary, which might have modified the compiler.
Now you have a compiler which you know for certain isn't going to produce binaries which don't do what the source said. And that's the first step to trustworthy computing. Maybe get someone we all trust to sign the code by encrypting it with their secret key {so when you decrypt with their public key you recover the original; recall that P(S(x)) = S(P(x)) = x}. Problem is, you can't trust anyone with election results, because the stakes are so high.
On the other hand, why bother with voting machines at all? In this country, we count votes by hand. It may not be high-tech, but it works and it's harder to subvert. Hand-counting of small batches of papers {which are kept, in case of dispute, until the next election is out of the way} is not significantly slower than machine counting. Anyway, what's a few hours here or there when a term of office can last for four or five years? To throw an election, you would need to bribe several people, not all of whom are politicians. The ballot paper {taken at random from a book of identical ones and by a different person than the one who sees your voter ID - the only communication between them is a slight nod} is the only record of the vote, and the voter has already had the opportunity to verify it before depositing it.
For how often elections are held, it probably is less work to keep on doing all this stuff by hand than it is to put the safeguards in place that would make machine voting trustworthy.
And there probably is a free version for GNU/Linux or BSD ..... so you don't even need Windoze.