The only force that can stop Microsoft is Open Source. And it's got to reach a certain critical mass first; a big user -- an entire country, a multinational company or The Entire Pr0n Industry -- has got to be bold, make the decision to switch from MSFT to OSS, and stick with it for better or worse. Which means there must be absolutely no possibility of Microsoft buying them off before the benefits have set in (let's not kid ourselves: this will take awhile, however well the project is managed). It must be no backies; either the market sector must have a really compelling reason not to use Microsoft at any price, or they must be blacklisted by Microsoft.
Microsoft aren't stupid; or at least they have no excuse for acting stupidly. They will do anything to keep OSS from being widely adopted. Giving away a few million Windows and Office licences is no skin off their nose, and they could easily bribe a project leader.
Vista and Office 2007 might prove to be Microsoft's undoing. If the learning curve is steep enough, the hardware requirements are hefty enough and the compulsory DRM troublesome enough, some people just might be persuaded to evaluate alternatives. Now could be a good time to be hawking migration strategies. (Clue; start with OSS on XP on a few desktops that really need Windows for some critical application, pure OSS wherever it can be got away with, and that will buy you enough time to get to work on a replacement for the "deal-breaker" applications, including Office Macros.)
Poor Man's Way to view(read only -- probably good enough for old correspondence that needs to be kept) legacy Office documents on OSS:
Run Windows and (possibly a few different versions of) Office on one or a few machines (at your end or at client's end)
Set up a server perfectly emulating a JetDirect print server with PostScript printer
Print all old Office documents to this printer
Compress resulting PostScript files and store in some sort of indexed database
Set deadline for new documents to be created using only Open Source Software
For the odd cases where something really needs editing, it can be sorted out manually using the PostScript file as a reference rendering. In practice, the vast majority of all legacy documents will only ever need to be viewed, and possibly reprinted. PS will never "go stale" (become unsupported) because it's not a secret, undocumented proprietary format.
I wouldn't really expect a simple, outright ban to succeed. However, I would rather people found a way to deal with the fact that the Internet is, by its very nature, always going to be primarily a medium for adults -- and broad-minded ones with that. Make parents -- for it is they who are ultimately responsible for raising children -- aware that if they want their children to get the best out of the Internet, they need no less careful supervision than they do anywhere in the Big Blue Room.
This creates a business opportunity: ISPs could provide content filtering (which has intrinsic value to a segment of the population) as a chargeable service. (Conversely, enforced censorship creates an opportunity for the provision of less-heavily filtered or unfiltered content as a service, which would have intrinsic value to a different segment of the population. It's just that I think the former situation, being more like upholding a standard, is more likely to appeal to honest types; whereas the latter, bearing more similarity to smuggling, is more likely to appeal to dishonest types. And I know which I'd really rather have in charge.) At the most expensive level, you'd have near-real-time monitoring and blocking at the ISP level; a more inexpensive service might consist of no more than a subscription allowing you to download a simple firewall-configuration file straight to your own router every so often.
However, the first step in creating an Internet with truly family-friendly zones is to acknowledge that there are non-family-friendly zones out there. And I'm not sure that certain people are ready to admit such a thing.
Only in the USA could a corporation's secrets be valued more highly than the Democratic Process.
Any voting system requires Universal Comprehensibility in order to be trustworthy. After all, how can you trust something that you cannot even understand? The use of Open Source Software is not enough: it restricts the set of people who can understand the system to competent programmers.
Elections should not depend upon any technology that is beyond the understanding of a school leaver with passing grades. Pencil, paper, slotted boxes, wire seals and hand-counting have been used successfully since democracy was first invented. Everybody can understand how they work -- and, just as crucially, all the potential failure modes.
What's more, using complex machinery doesn't change the failure modes, nor the need for vigilance. If the voting machines use a paper journal roll, someone still has to inspect each and every machine to make sure that the take-up spool is empty at the beginning of the election, and certify same by fitting a tamper-evident seal which prevents the machine from accepting votes. How is that any better than someone checking that each and every ballot box is empty, and sealing the slot with a tamper-evident seal?
I think the earlier poster got it right in saying that it would really be truer to say that it's Microsoft who are fighting on the same side as the SFLC.
Nevertheless, there is such a thing as "National Sovereignty"; which basically means that a nation's laws stop at that nation's borders. If Person A does something which is legal in Nation X but not in Nation Y, and does it in Nation X, then Nation Y has no redress against Person A. The consumption of alcohol and extra-marital sex are both illegal in Saudi Arabia; however, any Saudi resident who drinks several litres of Guinness while visiting Ireland is not committing any crime for which they can be punished under Saudi law. That's because the Republic of Ireland is a sovereign nation. Only Irish Law applies to acts performed in the Republic of Ireland, whether or not they be done by Irish citizens. If the Arab in question then visited certain parts of the Continent, he might even be permitted to engage in lawful (subject to payment of the appropriate taxes) sex with a prostitute, and possibly even (again legally) to consume certain other substances less harmful than alcohol. Again, local (not Saudi) law would be applicable.
So it seems to me that if a US-owned company were to create software in some non-US territory which might violate US patents if it were imported into the USA but (by dint of the scope of patentability) would not violate any patents in the territory where it were created, the laws of the territory where the software were created would be applicable. And for the USA to seek to prevent a perfectly legal act within the borders of another sovereign nation could be construed as an Act of War.
I've been installing sshd on all machines on our works LAN as a matter of course. There was one time when one machine out of about 30 was generating HTTP requests fast enough to knock over our Apache2 server. Solution? Use "ssh", "su" and "poweroff" in that order! (The problem later turned out to be a faulty keyboard; the f5 key, meaning "reload", was stuck. Of course, there was a web browser running, because we use custom web applications; and the mouse cursor was over the browser, so sending keystrokes to that application, because it was the last thing anyone had used.) I've also used the following:
for i in/usr/*; do eject && sleep 2 && eject -t && sleep 2; done
Because it's bollocks, is why. Given the way the prices of the components of computer systems have changed with respect to one another over time, at some point in history it must have been economically viable to exploit the phenomenon of "recovering overwritten data" -- if it really existed -- for the purpose of expanding storage capacity.
It's never been done because it's physically impossible to recover data which has been overwritten even once. However, if you're a government, it's more politically expedient to claim that you recovered information using techniques like this than techniques like this (or, absit omen, you faked evidence to secure a conviction). If you're a hard drive manufacturer, omitting to point out that overwritten data is unrecoverable might lead to the completely unnecessary destruction of perfectly-reusable drives -- and hence, more sales for you. And if you're a data recovery specialist, you really don't want to admit that anything is beyond your capabilities.
The only machine ever built with anything approaching the mythical capability to recover overwritten magnetic data was a German reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, featuring a "trick record" button which disconnected the erase head (back in those days, they used energised-field erase heads) allowing you to mix a new recording with an existing one (e.g. play an instrument, then sing over it). And even then it was, frankly, a bit crap: no way to monitor the old recording and the result sounded sort of fuzzy due to interference between the old and new recordings' high-frequency bias signals.
Yes, and the main thing about childhood is, in your own words, you can grow out of it.
The things you mention are off-limits for a reason, whether you like it or not (and sometimes the reason for putting one thing out-of-bounds is simply to make it look less terrible that another thing is out-of-bounds). But all will be taken care of eventually by the ticking of the clock.
everyone knows kids don't have money so they steal stuff
Bollocks. Kids will steal stuff they could afford to pay for, even stuff they don't even need or want, just for the hell of it. See also here.
Instead of seeking to make the Internet safe for children, why not simply ban children from the Internet?
After all, this is primarily an adult world. Childhood is a temporary phase. There are some things that are not, and never will be, suitable for children. That does not mean they are not suitable for adults.
From Allo Allo (and from memory, have searched but can't find scripts online):
Edith: Oh, Captain! Without your glasses, you look so much more attractive!
Geering: Without my glasses, you look so much more attractive!
I live in the UK where our mains is 230V and our light bulbs have a 22mm. push-and-twist base, and I have always found that CFL bulbs start up immediately (though they take awhile to reach full brightness; but isn't that why eyes have irises?) The spectrum is noticeably not the same as daylight; but then, neither is filament bulb light, nor candlelight for that matter.
LEDs would be better, obviously. You can light LEDs from the mains if you wire two in opposite directions (so one will light up whichever way the current is flowing) and use a capacitor rather than a resistor for a ballast (the excess voltage charges the capacitor; when the mains polarity reverses, the capacitor is discharged, effectively into the national grid). You do need a resistance (and it must be a metal-film type, which invariably fail open-circuit; not a carbon-composition type, which can fail short-circuit, unless you also include a fuse) in series with the capacitor to limit the inrush current (a discharged capacitor looks like a short-circuit), and it's sensible to wire another resistance (470K ohms is fine) in parallel with the capacitor, so that it doesn't stay charged when unplugged. The series resistance (and the LEDs) will feel the full force of the mains for less than half a cycle, so it needn't be rated for this dissipation continuously; just select it to get an inrush of about 1A if turned on smack-bang in the middle of a crest or trough. To calculate the value of the ballast capacitor, use the formula Xc = 1 / (2 * pi * f * C) where Xc is the reactance of the capacitor in ohms, f is the frequency in Hz and C is the capacitance in Farads. White LEDs drop about 3 volts apiece; any 5mm. LED should be able to withstand 30mA of current indefinitely. There are specialist LEDs with more metal inside the envelope which can handle up to 50mA. In calculations, you can safely ignore the parallel resistance. Pretend the series resistance is multiplied by j; in other words, use Z = sqrt(R ** 2 + X ** 2) to get the combined impedance.
At 230V / 50Hz, you would need a 390nF capacitor to deliver 30mA to a single pair of LEDs (actually 415nF; 390 || 22 is closer). With the greater voltage drop of several LEDs in series, you'd get away with the more-readily-available 220 || 220. At 120V / 60Hz, use 2*330nF in parallel. As this is Slashdot, I'll use dc to work it out:
10 k set no. of fractional places 230 volts.03 amps / 2 3.1415927 50 Hz * * * 1000000 get answer in uF r / p
Note that as you use more LEDs in series, and especially on a lower-voltage supply, you do need to take account of the LEDs' own voltage drop. Also, LEDs are zeners in disguise; so it's better to wire several inverse-parallel pairs in series (so limiting the reverse voltage across any individual diode to the forward voltage of its partner) than two series chains in inverse-parallel. There must be a current path in each direction. If you really need an odd number of LEDs, you can make up the figures with a rectifier diode.
No, you don't need bright light for close work. You need reading glasses. Yes, there's the Inverse Square Law to contend with, but the human eye is remarkable for its ability to see over a range of light levels.
If you've ever used a camera with a manual aperture setting (remember them?), you will know that the focus is much more critical at f/2.8 that f/16 (you can pretty much get away with leaving it on infinity beyond f/8, which is exactly what cheap cameras do).
In bright light, your pupils contract. This increases your eyes' depth of focus, moving your far limit further away and your near limit closer, thus allowing you to see better over more range. Wearing convex lenses will artificially shift your near and far limits closer, thus allowing you to see clearly close up.
I was born short-sighted -- I can't see anything clearly that is more than a couple of metres away. Some time before my 17th birthday, I got my eyes tested and found I would need glasses for driving. It's like having a macro mode when I'm not wearing my specs (which is most of the time, because I'd rather bump into things than wear glasses.) So I don't need reading glasses.
You're missing
grep phrase $HOME/.gaim/logs/protocol/login_name/* Your IM conversations are stored right there in plain text. (So are your passwords, in $HOME/.gaim/accounts.xml -- but that's alright because the directory is 700 so nobody except you or root can read them.)
There is no such thing as an "onboard RAID controller". They all use software RAID with a binary-only, and usually Windows-only, driver. In most cases, Linux's own "md" software RAID is faster and performs better than whatever binary driver they provide (and you get the Source Code; which for something as fundamental and important as a disk controller, should be the Law anyway.)
Grub is trendy; but LILO Just Works (except, possibly, on a mixed 32/64 bit installation like the [broken] Fedora way). If anyone recommends Grub, ignore them. The proper procedure under Debian (and probably Ubuntu, if it is still using the same installer) is to crash out of the installer and back to the menu when it first warns you it's about to install GRUB, and go down to the next step (which says "install LILO").
The box isn't "bricked", as long as you can get LILO installed. Every LILO user has had to do the first part of this sometime: Reboot with your installer CD. Switch to a console (ctrl+alt+F2). Make a directory called something like/host and mount your root filesystem there (chances are it's the first partition on the drive, but you won't do much harm by just mounting and ls'ing). Look in/host/etc/fstab and manually mount all other filesystems that belong under / in the appropriate place under/host. This typically includes/home (as/host/home) and maybe/usr (as/host/usr). Now chroot/host. Your machine is now running normally enough for you to be able to install LILO using apt. (If you'd merely gone and munged an existing LILO-based system by installing a brand new kernel and not telling LILO, which everyone does at some stage or another, this is the point where you would run/sbin/lilo to fix that.) However, very important: don't shut down the machine YET! Your newly-fixed system is still running in a chroot and if you shut down from within the chroot, some of your changes may not get properly decached. You must exit that chroot by going to the terminal where you invoked it (ctrl+alt+F2), then repeatedly pressing ctrl+D until you get back to the "press enter to activate" message. Then press enter to activate the console; and this time, type poweroff to shut the machine down. Reboot, taking a detour via the BIOS setup screen to allow you to retrieve the CD. This time you should get the familiar "LILO loading Linux" message.
The problem with using any kind of machine for voting is that the procedures of an election have to be transparent if democracy means anything. And you can't have transparent procedures without universal comprehensibility. Anyone who can't understand for themself exactly how the whole process works, can't be satisfied that the process is fair.
Using Open Source Software in voting machines doesn't really help much. You can't really be certain that the machine is running only the software whose source code you read -- it might just be an emulator running the published software on top of a lower layer which does assorted sneaky things you don't know about. If it uses an internal journal roll, how can you be sure that it's not adding extra votes while nobody is looking? In fact, how do you know that the take-up spool was empty before the first vote was cast? Obvious answer, you get somebody to inspect it. But then if you need a person to inspect the machines for extra votes on the rolls before the election starts, why can't they just inspect a simple ballot box to make sure there are no extra papers inside it before the election starts?
And if you're going to have to re-count the papers by hand after the election anyway (assuming there is anything to count; direct-recording systems are problematic here), why not just count the papers by hand in the first place? Either right there in the polling station, or transport them securely to the Town Hall; but definitely count them in the presence of all candidates' representatives (so everyone will be looking out for everyone else cheating). With the counting suitably parallelised, it can be surprisingly fast; especially if the ballot papers are designed from the outset to be hand-count-friendly.
When I buy a DVD, I buy a disk that has a movie on it - not a license.
I believe the company that manufactured that disk disagrees with you.
What the company that manufactured that disc thinks is irrelevant. They accepted payment for it; it's not their property anymore. According to the Law of the Land, what anybody does with it from that moment on is None Of The Manufacturer's Damn Business.
You might not realize this but but your statement doesn't do anything to clarify what you own
No, but consumer protection law is quite clear on the matter. Your right to use any article purchased at retail by you for its Rightful Purpose is protected by the Law of the Land. If you purchase a DVD at retail, its Rightful Purpose includes private home viewing by the owner, their friends and family and for which an admission fee is not charged. If the goods you have purchased are not fit for their Rightful Purpose, then you are entitled to return it to the place of purchase and receive a full refund of the purchase price paid.
Do you actually own the disk?
You paid money for it. It's your property.
Can that ownership be revoked?
That would be called Theft.
Are you entitled to a copy of the disk if that disk is damaged or destroyed?
Not necessarily. It is your property and you are generally responsible for taking proper care of it. However, unauthorised, deliberate damage by a third party may constitute Criminal Damage.
Do you own the contents of that disk? Are you licensed to watch the contents of that disk?
Watching the contents of the disc would be considered the Rightful Purpose of the disc. Your right to use your own property for its Rightful Purpose is protected by the Law of the Land. You do not need any other licence to watch it.
Are you no longer a licensed viewer of the contents of that disk when that disk is no longer viewable (destroyed/damaged)?
You do not need any licence to view the contents of the disc. Your right to do so stems directly from your ownership of the disc. If the disc is covered by an insurance policy, the original disc will become the property of the insurer when they pay out (and therefore you would no longer have the right to view its content) -- however, they may give it to you anyway, in order to transfer any obligations regarding proper recycling of waste onto you.
Are you licensed to show the contents of that disk to non-licensed viewers?
You do not need any licence to view the contents of the disc. Refer to established case law regarding viewing of recordings. Generally, it is OK to show it to your friends and members of your family if an admission fee is not charged; and a licence can be arranged for a small fee (payable through a royalties collection agency) to allow showing it in a workplace or to members of a club or society (which is deemed beyond Rightful Purpose, and so requires permission from the copyright holder or their authorised agent [i.e. a royalties collection agency]).
Can you charge non-licensed viewers for the privilege of viewing the contents of that disk?
You have to obtain a special licence for exhibition other than to friends and members of your family or for which an admission fee is charged. A licence permitting the general Public to attend the viewing (which certainly exceeds Rightful Purpose) is generally more expensive than a licence for a viewing restricted to a workplace or members of a club or society.
Can you derive profit from displaying ads from showing the contents of that disk?
Yes, if you are properly licenced to do so. See above.
Can you copy the contents of that disk? Can you copy and change the format of the contents of that disk?
The C64, Amiga, Atari ST and so forth were perceived as home games machines, hardly up to the job of running a business. They just weren't "industrial" enough. Business adoption was what brought down the price of the IBM-compatible PC. If some big enough corporation had decided to standardise on, say, Amigas, then history might have run differently. As it was, every non-IBM system found a niche. The BBC and later Acorn RISC machines, with their ROM OS, built-in structured BASIC and accessible hardware, found their way into education and science laboratories; the Mac was used for desktop publishing; the Atari ST, with its built-in MIDI interface, was used in recording studios and the Amiga with its graphics capabilities (you could synchronise its video timing to an external source) was used for video post-production. Mainstream businesses went with IBM-compatible PCs (the Amstrad PCW8256 and co. served many users very well for a long time, but were eventually replaced with PCs) running DOS or Windows.
The rest is history. Millions of expensive typewriters, calculators and desk ornaments were sold on the basis that everybody else was buying them so we need some too. PCs eventually reached a critical mass, bringing down prices. Lower prices meant less initial investment to become a hardware developer, hence more hardware development (don't forget, the early machines' 8- and 16-bit buses were very easy to interface to); and as even more hardware became available, PCs managed to equal and eventually surpass the competition. Software developers also were attracted by less expensive machines (leading, unfortunately, to a huge glut of poor-to-mediocre software [cf. the situation with 8-bit home computers c.1983-4]; however, Microsoft's tolerance of piracy meant that MS software was effectively free-as-in-beer, so eventually bankrupting publishers of software which competed directly with MS). General-purpose I/O cards, Windows, MIDI interfaces, genlock-capable video cards and the inexorable March of Time all eventually helped PCs displace the older machines.
This Court agrees with the Corley court that the purchase of a DVD does not give to the purchaser the authority of the copyright holder to decrypt CSS.
What were they smoking? This goes completely against Common Law Property Rights! Without the express or implied right to decrypt CSS, the owner of the disc is unable to use it for its Rightful Purpose. The DVD is thus rendered Unfit for Purpose.
Expect to see that ruling challenged. It would never have gone that way in Britain or Europe (and the Continentals have even stricter consumer protection laws than we do).
What stops you from emulating the TPM within the Virtual Machine? So the software thinks it's talking to a real TPM, but in actual fact it's talking to an emulated TPM.
But if the "banned" key happens to be associated with a popular consumer-grade player, then the manufacturers will have to replace or upgrade every single one of those players in the field (except, maybe, the actual one that was used to obtain the key -- at the very least, it might be considered a warranty-voiding modification). They can't associate keys with individual players; there would be more keys than movie on the disc! (And it would be easy to find a key). People will take their players back to the store if they don't work, which is something that they have every right to do under consumer protection laws, and they will kick up a stink.
And it will end up making the 2006 Sony Rootkit fiasco seem like a methodist sunday school picnic.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft aren't stupid; or at least they have no excuse for acting stupidly. They will do anything to keep OSS from being widely adopted. Giving away a few million Windows and Office licences is no skin off their nose, and they could easily bribe a project leader.
Vista and Office 2007 might prove to be Microsoft's undoing. If the learning curve is steep enough, the hardware requirements are hefty enough and the compulsory DRM troublesome enough, some people just might be persuaded to evaluate alternatives. Now could be a good time to be hawking migration strategies. (Clue; start with OSS on XP on a few desktops that really need Windows for some critical application, pure OSS wherever it can be got away with, and that will buy you enough time to get to work on a replacement for the "deal-breaker" applications, including Office Macros.)
Poor Man's Way to view (read only -- probably good enough for old correspondence that needs to be kept) legacy Office documents on OSS:
- Run Windows and (possibly a few different versions of) Office on one or a few machines (at your end or at client's end)
- Set up a server perfectly emulating a JetDirect print server with PostScript printer
- Print all old Office documents to this printer
- Compress resulting PostScript files and store in some sort of indexed database
- Set deadline for new documents to be created using only Open Source Software
For the odd cases where something really needs editing, it can be sorted out manually using the PostScript file as a reference rendering. In practice, the vast majority of all legacy documents will only ever need to be viewed, and possibly reprinted. PS will never "go stale" (become unsupported) because it's not a secret, undocumented proprietary format.I wouldn't really expect a simple, outright ban to succeed. However, I would rather people found a way to deal with the fact that the Internet is, by its very nature, always going to be primarily a medium for adults -- and broad-minded ones with that. Make parents -- for it is they who are ultimately responsible for raising children -- aware that if they want their children to get the best out of the Internet, they need no less careful supervision than they do anywhere in the Big Blue Room.
This creates a business opportunity: ISPs could provide content filtering (which has intrinsic value to a segment of the population) as a chargeable service. (Conversely, enforced censorship creates an opportunity for the provision of less-heavily filtered or unfiltered content as a service, which would have intrinsic value to a different segment of the population. It's just that I think the former situation, being more like upholding a standard, is more likely to appeal to honest types; whereas the latter, bearing more similarity to smuggling, is more likely to appeal to dishonest types. And I know which I'd really rather have in charge.) At the most expensive level, you'd have near-real-time monitoring and blocking at the ISP level; a more inexpensive service might consist of no more than a subscription allowing you to download a simple firewall-configuration file straight to your own router every so often.
However, the first step in creating an Internet with truly family-friendly zones is to acknowledge that there are non-family-friendly zones out there. And I'm not sure that certain people are ready to admit such a thing.
"For external use only" -- ah, so that's why the Essex girl was standing in the pouring rain applying Savlon to a cut!
Only in the USA could a corporation's secrets be valued more highly than the Democratic Process.
Any voting system requires Universal Comprehensibility in order to be trustworthy. After all, how can you trust something that you cannot even understand? The use of Open Source Software is not enough: it restricts the set of people who can understand the system to competent programmers.
Elections should not depend upon any technology that is beyond the understanding of a school leaver with passing grades. Pencil, paper, slotted boxes, wire seals and hand-counting have been used successfully since democracy was first invented. Everybody can understand how they work -- and, just as crucially, all the potential failure modes.
What's more, using complex machinery doesn't change the failure modes, nor the need for vigilance. If the voting machines use a paper journal roll, someone still has to inspect each and every machine to make sure that the take-up spool is empty at the beginning of the election, and certify same by fitting a tamper-evident seal which prevents the machine from accepting votes. How is that any better than someone checking that each and every ballot box is empty, and sealing the slot with a tamper-evident seal?
I think the earlier poster got it right in saying that it would really be truer to say that it's Microsoft who are fighting on the same side as the SFLC.
Nevertheless, there is such a thing as "National Sovereignty"; which basically means that a nation's laws stop at that nation's borders. If Person A does something which is legal in Nation X but not in Nation Y, and does it in Nation X, then Nation Y has no redress against Person A. The consumption of alcohol and extra-marital sex are both illegal in Saudi Arabia; however, any Saudi resident who drinks several litres of Guinness while visiting Ireland is not committing any crime for which they can be punished under Saudi law. That's because the Republic of Ireland is a sovereign nation. Only Irish Law applies to acts performed in the Republic of Ireland, whether or not they be done by Irish citizens. If the Arab in question then visited certain parts of the Continent, he might even be permitted to engage in lawful (subject to payment of the appropriate taxes) sex with a prostitute, and possibly even (again legally) to consume certain other substances less harmful than alcohol. Again, local (not Saudi) law would be applicable.
So it seems to me that if a US-owned company were to create software in some non-US territory which might violate US patents if it were imported into the USA but (by dint of the scope of patentability) would not violate any patents in the territory where it were created, the laws of the territory where the software were created would be applicable. And for the USA to seek to prevent a perfectly legal act within the borders of another sovereign nation could be construed as an Act of War.
Because it's bollocks, is why. Given the way the prices of the components of computer systems have changed with respect to one another over time, at some point in history it must have been economically viable to exploit the phenomenon of "recovering overwritten data" -- if it really existed -- for the purpose of expanding storage capacity.
It's never been done because it's physically impossible to recover data which has been overwritten even once. However, if you're a government, it's more politically expedient to claim that you recovered information using techniques like this than techniques like this (or, absit omen, you faked evidence to secure a conviction). If you're a hard drive manufacturer, omitting to point out that overwritten data is unrecoverable might lead to the completely unnecessary destruction of perfectly-reusable drives -- and hence, more sales for you. And if you're a data recovery specialist, you really don't want to admit that anything is beyond your capabilities.
The only machine ever built with anything approaching the mythical capability to recover overwritten magnetic data was a German reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, featuring a "trick record" button which disconnected the erase head (back in those days, they used energised-field erase heads) allowing you to mix a new recording with an existing one (e.g. play an instrument, then sing over it). And even then it was, frankly, a bit crap: no way to monitor the old recording and the result sounded sort of fuzzy due to interference between the old and new recordings' high-frequency bias signals.
The things you mention are off-limits for a reason, whether you like it or not (and sometimes the reason for putting one thing out-of-bounds is simply to make it look less terrible that another thing is out-of-bounds). But all will be taken care of eventually by the ticking of the clock. Bollocks. Kids will steal stuff they could afford to pay for, even stuff they don't even need or want, just for the hell of it. See also here.
If it was the old CFC-based stuff, at least it was neither electrically conductive nor inflammable .....
Instead of seeking to make the Internet safe for children, why not simply ban children from the Internet?
After all, this is primarily an adult world. Childhood is a temporary phase. There are some things that are not, and never will be, suitable for children. That does not mean they are not suitable for adults.
From Allo Allo (and from memory, have searched but can't find scripts online):
Edith: Oh, Captain! Without your glasses, you look so much more attractive!
Geering: Without my glasses, you look so much more attractive!
I live in the UK where our mains is 230V and our light bulbs have a 22mm. push-and-twist base, and I have always found that CFL bulbs start up immediately (though they take awhile to reach full brightness; but isn't that why eyes have irises?) The spectrum is noticeably not the same as daylight; but then, neither is filament bulb light, nor candlelight for that matter.
.03 amps / 2 3.1415927 50 Hz * * * 1000000 get answer in uF r / p
LEDs would be better, obviously. You can light LEDs from the mains if you wire two in opposite directions (so one will light up whichever way the current is flowing) and use a capacitor rather than a resistor for a ballast (the excess voltage charges the capacitor; when the mains polarity reverses, the capacitor is discharged, effectively into the national grid). You do need a resistance (and it must be a metal-film type, which invariably fail open-circuit; not a carbon-composition type, which can fail short-circuit, unless you also include a fuse) in series with the capacitor to limit the inrush current (a discharged capacitor looks like a short-circuit), and it's sensible to wire another resistance (470K ohms is fine) in parallel with the capacitor, so that it doesn't stay charged when unplugged. The series resistance (and the LEDs) will feel the full force of the mains for less than half a cycle, so it needn't be rated for this dissipation continuously; just select it to get an inrush of about 1A if turned on smack-bang in the middle of a crest or trough. To calculate the value of the ballast capacitor, use the formula Xc = 1 / (2 * pi * f * C) where Xc is the reactance of the capacitor in ohms, f is the frequency in Hz and C is the capacitance in Farads. White LEDs drop about 3 volts apiece; any 5mm. LED should be able to withstand 30mA of current indefinitely. There are specialist LEDs with more metal inside the envelope which can handle up to 50mA. In calculations, you can safely ignore the parallel resistance. Pretend the series resistance is multiplied by j; in other words, use Z = sqrt(R ** 2 + X ** 2) to get the combined impedance.
At 230V / 50Hz, you would need a 390nF capacitor to deliver 30mA to a single pair of LEDs (actually 415nF; 390 || 22 is closer). With the greater voltage drop of several LEDs in series, you'd get away with the more-readily-available 220 || 220. At 120V / 60Hz, use 2*330nF in parallel. As this is Slashdot, I'll use dc to work it out:
10 k set no. of fractional places
230 volts
Note that as you use more LEDs in series, and especially on a lower-voltage supply, you do need to take account of the LEDs' own voltage drop. Also, LEDs are zeners in disguise; so it's better to wire several inverse-parallel pairs in series (so limiting the reverse voltage across any individual diode to the forward voltage of its partner) than two series chains in inverse-parallel. There must be a current path in each direction. If you really need an odd number of LEDs, you can make up the figures with a rectifier diode.
No, you don't need bright light for close work. You need reading glasses. Yes, there's the Inverse Square Law to contend with, but the human eye is remarkable for its ability to see over a range of light levels.
If you've ever used a camera with a manual aperture setting (remember them?), you will know that the focus is much more critical at f/2.8 that f/16 (you can pretty much get away with leaving it on infinity beyond f/8, which is exactly what cheap cameras do).
In bright light, your pupils contract. This increases your eyes' depth of focus, moving your far limit further away and your near limit closer, thus allowing you to see better over more range. Wearing convex lenses will artificially shift your near and far limits closer, thus allowing you to see clearly close up.
I was born short-sighted -- I can't see anything clearly that is more than a couple of metres away. Some time before my 17th birthday, I got my eyes tested and found I would need glasses for driving. It's like having a macro mode when I'm not wearing my specs (which is most of the time, because I'd rather bump into things than wear glasses.) So I don't need reading glasses.
You're missing
grep phrase $HOME/.gaim/logs/protocol/login_name/*
Your IM conversations are stored right there in plain text. (So are your passwords, in $HOME/.gaim/accounts.xml -- but that's alright because the directory is 700 so nobody except you or root can read them.)
It's been my experience that people such as you described tend to end up in management.
There is no such thing as an "onboard RAID controller". They all use software RAID with a binary-only, and usually Windows-only, driver. In most cases, Linux's own "md" software RAID is faster and performs better than whatever binary driver they provide (and you get the Source Code; which for something as fundamental and important as a disk controller, should be the Law anyway.)
Grub is trendy; but LILO Just Works (except, possibly, on a mixed 32/64 bit installation like the [broken] Fedora way). If anyone recommends Grub, ignore them. The proper procedure under Debian (and probably Ubuntu, if it is still using the same installer) is to crash out of the installer and back to the menu when it first warns you it's about to install GRUB, and go down to the next step (which says "install LILO").
/host and mount your root filesystem there (chances are it's the first partition on the drive, but you won't do much harm by just mounting and ls'ing). Look in /host/etc/fstab and manually mount all other filesystems that belong under / in the appropriate place under /host. This typically includes /home (as /host/home) and maybe /usr (as /host/usr). Now chroot /host. Your machine is now running normally enough for you to be able to install LILO using apt. (If you'd merely gone and munged an existing LILO-based system by installing a brand new kernel and not telling LILO, which everyone does at some stage or another, this is the point where you would run /sbin/lilo to fix that.) However, very important: don't shut down the machine YET! Your newly-fixed system is still running in a chroot and if you shut down from within the chroot, some of your changes may not get properly decached. You must exit that chroot by going to the terminal where you invoked it (ctrl+alt+F2), then repeatedly pressing ctrl+D until you get back to the "press enter to activate" message. Then press enter to activate the console; and this time, type poweroff to shut the machine down. Reboot, taking a detour via the BIOS setup screen to allow you to retrieve the CD. This time you should get the familiar "LILO loading Linux" message.
The box isn't "bricked", as long as you can get LILO installed. Every LILO user has had to do the first part of this sometime: Reboot with your installer CD. Switch to a console (ctrl+alt+F2). Make a directory called something like
The problem with using any kind of machine for voting is that the procedures of an election have to be transparent if democracy means anything. And you can't have transparent procedures without universal comprehensibility. Anyone who can't understand for themself exactly how the whole process works, can't be satisfied that the process is fair.
Using Open Source Software in voting machines doesn't really help much. You can't really be certain that the machine is running only the software whose source code you read -- it might just be an emulator running the published software on top of a lower layer which does assorted sneaky things you don't know about. If it uses an internal journal roll, how can you be sure that it's not adding extra votes while nobody is looking? In fact, how do you know that the take-up spool was empty before the first vote was cast? Obvious answer, you get somebody to inspect it. But then if you need a person to inspect the machines for extra votes on the rolls before the election starts, why can't they just inspect a simple ballot box to make sure there are no extra papers inside it before the election starts?
And if you're going to have to re-count the papers by hand after the election anyway (assuming there is anything to count; direct-recording systems are problematic here), why not just count the papers by hand in the first place? Either right there in the polling station, or transport them securely to the Town Hall; but definitely count them in the presence of all candidates' representatives (so everyone will be looking out for everyone else cheating). With the counting suitably parallelised, it can be surprisingly fast; especially if the ballot papers are designed from the outset to be hand-count-friendly.
So, have I got this right -- the Courts of the USA have ruled that a corporation's secrets are more important than the processes of democracy?
I'm really glad I live in a country that still uses pencil-and-paper votes counted by hand.
As long as 5% of the people are able to crack the copy-protection, the other 95% need only copy what the original 5% have de-protected.
What the company that manufactured that disc thinks is irrelevant. They accepted payment for it; it's not their property anymore. According to the Law of the Land, what anybody does with it from that moment on is None Of The Manufacturer's Damn Business.
No, but consumer protection law is quite clear on the matter. Your right to use any article purchased at retail by you for its Rightful Purpose is protected by the Law of the Land. If you purchase a DVD at retail, its Rightful Purpose includes private home viewing by the owner, their friends and family and for which an admission fee is not charged. If the goods you have purchased are not fit for their Rightful Purpose, then you are entitled to return it to the place of purchase and receive a full refund of the purchase price paid.
You paid money for it. It's your property.
That would be called Theft.
Not necessarily. It is your property and you are generally responsible for taking proper care of it. However, unauthorised, deliberate damage by a third party may constitute Criminal Damage.
Watching the contents of the disc would be considered the Rightful Purpose of the disc. Your right to use your own property for its Rightful Purpose is protected by the Law of the Land. You do not need any other licence to watch it.
You do not need any licence to view the contents of the disc. Your right to do so stems directly from your ownership of the disc. If the disc is covered by an insurance policy, the original disc will become the property of the insurer when they pay out (and therefore you would no longer have the right to view its content) -- however, they may give it to you anyway, in order to transfer any obligations regarding proper recycling of waste onto you.
You do not need any licence to view the contents of the disc. Refer to established case law regarding viewing of recordings. Generally, it is OK to show it to your friends and members of your family if an admission fee is not charged; and a licence can be arranged for a small fee (payable through a royalties collection agency) to allow showing it in a workplace or to members of a club or society (which is deemed beyond Rightful Purpose, and so requires permission from the copyright holder or their authorised agent [i.e. a royalties collection agency]).
You have to obtain a special licence for exhibition other than to friends and members of your family or for which an admission fee is charged. A licence permitting the general Public to attend the viewing (which certainly exceeds Rightful Purpose) is generally more expensive than a licence for a viewing restricted to a workplace or members of a club or society.
Yes, if you are properly licenced to do so. See above.
The C64, Amiga, Atari ST and so forth were perceived as home games machines, hardly up to the job of running a business. They just weren't "industrial" enough. Business adoption was what brought down the price of the IBM-compatible PC. If some big enough corporation had decided to standardise on, say, Amigas, then history might have run differently. As it was, every non-IBM system found a niche. The BBC and later Acorn RISC machines, with their ROM OS, built-in structured BASIC and accessible hardware, found their way into education and science laboratories; the Mac was used for desktop publishing; the Atari ST, with its built-in MIDI interface, was used in recording studios and the Amiga with its graphics capabilities (you could synchronise its video timing to an external source) was used for video post-production. Mainstream businesses went with IBM-compatible PCs (the Amstrad PCW8256 and co. served many users very well for a long time, but were eventually replaced with PCs) running DOS or Windows.
The rest is history. Millions of expensive typewriters, calculators and desk ornaments were sold on the basis that everybody else was buying them so we need some too. PCs eventually reached a critical mass, bringing down prices. Lower prices meant less initial investment to become a hardware developer, hence more hardware development (don't forget, the early machines' 8- and 16-bit buses were very easy to interface to); and as even more hardware became available, PCs managed to equal and eventually surpass the competition. Software developers also were attracted by less expensive machines (leading, unfortunately, to a huge glut of poor-to-mediocre software [cf. the situation with 8-bit home computers c.1983-4]; however, Microsoft's tolerance of piracy meant that MS software was effectively free-as-in-beer, so eventually bankrupting publishers of software which competed directly with MS). General-purpose I/O cards, Windows, MIDI interfaces, genlock-capable video cards and the inexorable March of Time all eventually helped PCs displace the older machines.
Expect to see that ruling challenged. It would never have gone that way in Britain or Europe (and the Continentals have even stricter consumer protection laws than we do).
What stops you from emulating the TPM within the Virtual Machine? So the software thinks it's talking to a real TPM, but in actual fact it's talking to an emulated TPM.
But if the "banned" key happens to be associated with a popular consumer-grade player, then the manufacturers will have to replace or upgrade every single one of those players in the field (except, maybe, the actual one that was used to obtain the key -- at the very least, it might be considered a warranty-voiding modification). They can't associate keys with individual players; there would be more keys than movie on the disc! (And it would be easy to find a key). People will take their players back to the store if they don't work, which is something that they have every right to do under consumer protection laws, and they will kick up a stink. And it will end up making the 2006 Sony Rootkit fiasco seem like a methodist sunday school picnic.