Just because these people are spending other people's money, doesn't mean they aren't nice enough with their own kind. It would never work any other way. For a subculture to work, it must have its own rules.
Anyway, the only people who lose money are idiots who fall for age-old scams. Phishing? Don't make me laugh. For crying out loud, when you open a bank account, they tell you that they will never ask you for personal details online. How long does it take to ring your bank and ask them whether an e-mail is genuine or not? And if you've already had several e-mails apparently from banks with whom you do not even have an account {and therefore obviously fake} why should you expect that one apparently from a bank with whom you do have an account?
Restaurant card fraud? That one has been going as long as credit cards. Even long before the Internet existed -- it began in the days of imprinting machines. Now, of course, thanks to Chip and PIN, you don't even need to let the card out of your sight to get ripped off. Oh, Chip and PIN machines are reckoned to be secure; but how the hell do you know that thing you put your card in and pressed a few buttons was a real Chip and PIN machine and not a fake one? For all you know they cloned your card and grabbed your PIN, and will use the clone card and PIN in a real C+P machine a few minutes down the line, within the margin of error of most people's watches and memories. Solution, pay by cheque. Not cash, because if they see you have cash then they will expect a tip.
As for backup tapes going missing, well, there isn't a lot anyone can do about that -- besides asking, before they open a bank account, how effective the bank's procedures are and what losses they have swallowed on customers' behalf. Little things like never transporting data by the same means as the decryption key make a lot of difference.
Summary: Never make the mistake of assuming anything is secure.
Yes. Pharming is when DNS is subverted to direct traffic intended for legitimate sites towards other sites. On a real computer, you need to be root {because of privilege separation} in order to create bogus zonefiles and reconfigure the local nameserver to make it appear to be authoritative for those domains. On a toy computer, however, there is no local nameserver. Instead, there is a file called "hosts" which is checked before DNS queries are sent to the outside world. In the absence of privilege separation, it's easy enough to append or even overwrite this {so you can even subvert another pharmer's attempts on your victim}.
What this really is, is an exercise in "grooming" the public to accept privacy invasion on an even greater scale.
CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem. There was an incident a few years ago, along a road out of the city where every building is a shop, restaurant or pub. Some runt went around spraying graffiti on every establishment that was not CCTVed. The only images were a few blurred, grainy ones of him running from one shop to the next.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor. Crime will simply be displaced to the non-CCTV areas. Meanwhile, the public will gradually be getting used to the concept of never expecting to be able to go totally unobserved. The way will be paved for ever deeper intrusions into individuals' lives.
"Mummy, does Jesus watch you when you're on the toilet?" "As long as he's watching channel 36, yes!"
It's the same in Britain, where a person's rights of "fair dealing" generally are not specifically enumerated but are left for the courts to determine {though I believe it's already been held that recording a TV programme is legal if your TV licence was paid up at the time of recording and you only keep it for 28 days; I don't have a citation for this, and I think this would effectively outlaw the use of DVD+R media for TV recording, but you can still buy one-time-write media so make of that what you will}.
It certainly sounds as though this move is intended to pre-empt a court ruling. If they legalise it specifically now, they can regulate it tightly and include nasty provisions like "..... unless specifically prevented by technological measures" {clue: this gets around even the Sony rootkit and can be used to rip protected or unprotected CDs even on a computer which is already infected}. If they wait for a court case which will legalise it generally, then they can't include such measures. Theoretically, even anything not specifically allowed under this new law could still be held to constitute fair dealing anyway -- but the ease of getting away with disobeying an unjust law is dependent on the perceived injustice in the law disobeyed, and until you think about it for five minutes this does sound fair.
The problem is this. If you create a top-level domain specifically for porn, you are admitting that porn exists. And unfortunately, there are too many people who have a problem with that.
Multi-region DVD players are legal on the European mainland, and so probably in the UK too. It has been ruled by one of the European Courts that region-locking is anti-competitive behaviour.
Well, since it contains images of an undressed minor, it would be child pornography plain and simple. You, the intended recipient, and everyone who had seen the recording would be deemed to be nonces.
I keep hearing this; but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever been busted in the UK for making a backup {by all means correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love a few more miscarriages of justice to cite}. And nor are they ever likely to be.
What does or does not constitute "fair dealing" {which is a defence to a charge of copyright infringement} is to be determined by the courts. The Crown Prosecution Service are never going to allow the courts to rule on whether or not e.g. taping an album to listen in the car is legal {and it should be, since it's a necessary step in persuading the car's analogue cassette deck to reproduce the sounds represented by the zeros and ones on the CD; which was sold subject to fitness for purpose, and that purpose is to be listened to} because whichever decision they reach would be disastrous. It doesn't take a genius to see that: one way they piss off the powerful music industry, the other way they piss off the entire music-loving public {and in all probability end up doing a massive U-turn and pissing off the powerful music industry anyway}.
So "fair dealing" is kept well and truly in a legal grey area. Anything that isn't obvious, for-profit piracy {like offloading dodgy discs at a car boot sale} gets conveniently ignored. And the fact of it not being strictly legal means it can be used for leverage. The presence of one or two dodgy C-90s in a suspect's vehicle might conceivably be used by officers to obtain a search warrant without it sounding too much like a fishing trip.
Well, if some villain wanted to send a small quantity of dope and they really had no option save to do it by some form of postal service, there would be worse ways to send it than inside a hollowed-out scented candle.
"Mr Big" would first have carefully to remove the safety warning sticker from the bottom of the candle -- but not the cellophane wrapping around the sides of the candle -- and slowly, methodically, patiently carve out a hollow in the base, big enough comfortably to accept a sealed container {such as a 35mm. film can -- anybody remember 35mm. film?} holding the merchandise. He would of course save up all the wax he was removing. The Evil Drugs Baron would then melt a small quantity of wax in a specially-made bain-marie ordered from a drug dealers' supply house -- he would not need to improvise using a Pyrex basin over a pan of boiling water on the stove -- and use this to "cement" the container in place within the cavity. From reading his drug dealer training manuals, he would know never to microwave the paraffin wax, which is a poor absorber of microwaves; nor to heat it directly, which would evaporate away the perfume. He would then fill the space around the stash container with more molten wax. Now, when this had cooled, it would contract, leaving a slight depression; so the Assassin of Youth would have to perform one final melt to level off this cavity. Standing the candle just briefly on a heated ceramic tile would give it a completely flat base to which the warning label could be re-attached. Thus giving the appearance of a perfectly normal scented candle in store-fresh condition.
Now, why anybody would be sending a cheap scented candle, ostensibly worth less than the postage cost, through the post is another question. But not one that occurs to the minds of the postal service, who after all are there to make money and probably would love to offer special, discreet and secure premium-rate services to drug dealers, if this could be done without making them look as though they were taking bribes or aiding and abetting criminals.
It's a defence to any crime that you only carried it out in order to prevent a greater crime. Like the old "dog in distress" scenario: it's perfectly OK to force entry into a vehicle or building in order to rescue a trapped animal in serious distress. By committing criminal damage {a crime against property} you have stopped an act of cruelty to animals {a crime against living things, therefore by definition a much greater offence}.
If analogies from outside the computing world applied within the computing world, then it would be a valid defence for McDanel to say that his {fairly minor} offence of sending an e-mail to employees of a company was done in order to prevent a much greater crime involving exploiting a security flaw in that company's products. As things stand today, however, non-computer analogies don't translate well to computerised situations.
But the phrase "former employer" is ambiguous because it is not clear whether he had already left their employment at the time when the mail sending occurred.
Whilst microkernels are a lovely idea in theory, they don't deliver in practice. There is already a bottleneck between user space and kernel space and this will impact upon performance. No matter what you are trying to do, the slowest part of the process will always determine the maximum rate at which you can do it.
Monolithic, Linux/Netware-style modular and so-called hybrid kernels get around this limitation by moving things to the other side of the bottleneck. It makes sense on this basis to put a hardware driver in kernel space. You usually only pass "idealised" data to a driver; the driver generally has to pass a lot more to the device because it isn't ideal. For example, when talking to a filesystem driver, you generally only want to send it the data to stick into some file. The filesystem driver has to do all the donkey work of shunting the heads back and forth and waiting for the right spot of disc to pass under them.
It might be "beautiful" to have as little code as possible situated on one side of the division, but it's most practical to have as little data as possible having to travel through the division.
Adams recommends mashing in a teapot and adding to milk already in the cup, on the basis that the interaction between cold milk and hot tea is order-dependent; a small quantity of hot tea poured into a larger quantity of cold milk will heat the milk slower than pouring a small quantity of cold milk into a larger quantity of hot tea. However, the specific heat capacities of water and milk are very similar; the main difference between the two scenarios is the maximum rate of heat exchange, and it is my experience that rate of heating has less effect on milk than terminal temperature {which is the same in either case; the tea gives up Mt * Ct * [Tt - Tf] J. of heat, and the milk accepts Mm * Cm * [Tf - Tm] J. There is nowhere else for this energy to go, so these two figures must be equal and so we can determine Tf}.
It's most likely that the custom of "pre-milking" {which is considered vulgar by some} arose from the time when cheaply-made cups would crack if heated rapidly. If one knew for sure that one's china was capable of withstanding tea at 90 degrees, one should demonstrate this. Conversely, one who poured the milk into the cup first to protect the china from the effects of the hot tea was evidently used to cheap, fragile china {and hence common}.
My method also has the advantage that the teabag {if it is removed from the cup in good time} never comes into contact with the milk. There is, or used to be, some reason why that's important. By the way, the best teabags are tetrahedral in shape and contain tea of identical quality to loose leaf tea. Flat rectangular ones are so-so. Don't even bother with flat round teabags; these are made with the sweepings from the blending room floor.
All my crockery now is by Denby Pottery. It keeps its smart appearance forever despite near-continuous abuse. I've never seen the point of keeping one's "best china" in a display cabinet. The Craftsman's Mug is of the shape alluded to above. It has exceptional heat retention and the absence of obvious stress points makes it virtually unbreakable.
Get yourself a kettle {NB, this will need a supply of about 10 amps; and if you're outside the UK, it will have to be earthed [if you're in the UK then it already is earthed]}, a filter jug, a china mug {with parallel sides or a temporary narrowing just below the mouth}, a steel teaspoon with the stiffest shank you can find, some teabags and some full-cream milk {not skimmed, not semi skimmed, it must be blue top for the authentic taste}. The milk must be as close as possible to 0 degrees and as far as possible from its expiry date.
Pour one litre of filtered water in the kettle. This will make up to three cups of tea {a standard mug holds 250ml but you should never empty the kettle completely}. Start the kettle boiling.
Whilst the kettle is heating up {use the formula: time in seconds = ([100 - T] * 4.17 * V) / P, where V = volume of water in litres, P = power of heating element in kW and T = initial temperature of water}, place a teabag and a stiff-shanked teaspoon in a china mug. This should ideally have a wide base, then a constriction before belling out; this shape works to minimise evaporative cooling losses and hence maintain OST {optimum sipping temperature} as long as possible. Failing that, a traditional, parallel-sided mug can be used.
The very instant the kettle boils, pour about 200ml. of boiling water, as close as possible to 100 degrees, over the teabag. Leave alone for 15 seconds, then begin mashing the hell out of the teabag with the spoon. Keep going until the tea stops getting any darker. Finally, crush the teabag hard between the bowl of the spoon and the wall of the mug to remove as much liquid as possible, and hike it out. It's biodegradable and can be composted.
Replace the spoon in the mug {it's acting as a heatsink} and add about 50ml of ice-cold milk to the tea. Stir immediately. Remove spoon and sip gently. Feel sensation as though you are receiving kind words and a hug on a tropical beach with crystal-clear water and silver sands and everything is generally all right with the world or better.
NB: Add more cold water to the kettle as soon as possible after boiling. This will cool it down, so slowing the rate of heat loss and minimising TTNM {time to next mashing}. Don't keep the filter jug in the fridge, you're already paying to heat it, you don't want to pay to cool it so you can heat it more.
Your arguments would carry a bit more weight if it weren't for the fact that right now, to all intents and purposes, we don't have much in the way of choice. If it was as easy as just choosing in a free and fair market whether to buy open or closed hardware, well, I know what I'd be buying and I know what I'd be telling my friends and family to buy.
Unfortunately, the closed hardware has an unfair market advantage. nVidia and ATI can tell as many lies as they like about their products and hide behind the veil of secrecy. They can exploit their unfair advantage to skew benchmarks in their favour, incorporating features designed to pass pre-ordained tests. Anyone making an open graphics card has to tell the truth about it, because anyone can discover the truth about it.
Making something that's useless (to you, or to everyone) isn't a crime, nor is making something that could be useful but only telling people how to use it in specific situations.
No, but my point is that I believe that it should be a crime.
If they suddenly invented processed foods tomorrow, you can bet your arse that the manufacturers would be against labelling requirements. That doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that it's wrong to tell consumers what ingredients are in them, and how much fat, protein, starch and sugar are found in each 100g.
Bottom line, my right to know about my physical property outweighs anyone else's right to keep secrets from me.
Does any operating system still actually care about file extensions? I thought that they were a legacy remaining from an old PDP-11 operating system. It's easy enough to tell what a file is by looking at the first few bytes; most probably they will be a recognised header of some sort that you can identify from a table. Otherwise, if they're mostly printable it's ASCII text and if they're mainly non-printable it's binary data.
Actually, I have a simple solution to the Phishing problem. It is for the banks to put in huge, massive type in their Terms and Conditions leaflet, the following dozen words:
WE WILL NEVER, EVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS ONLINE. EVER.
And, of course, for them to pay me a royalty everytime they use that particular copyrighted phrase:)
Oh, please. If you have to rely on a programming language to keep you from doing "dangerous" things, you have already lost.
If the language really doesn't enable you to do "dangerous" things, then it's in all probability computationally incomplete. {Of course, any computer with finite memory and hard drive space is technically computationally incomplete..... the question is, to what extent, and is it likely to have a detrimental effect on real-life applications? Does the newest version of ADA allow a single keystroke to be read without waiting for the RETURN key?}
If an "intrinsically-safe" language was written in a language which lets you do "dangerous" things, then there is still a possibility that something could fail behind the scenes and cause "dangerous" things to happen anyway. Or, if you can prove mathematically that that is never going to happen with the "safe" language compiler written in a "dangerous" language, then you can prove the same thing for any application written in a "dangerous" language.
These kind of comments are invariably made by teachers of pure mathematics, who like Noddy-car languages such as Pascal and Modula-2 and are constantly troubled by the thought that somebody, somewhere is doing something useful with a computer.
ATI and nVidia are effectively a cartel, riding on the back of Microsoft's dominance. It's also quite likely that they are using deceptive and misleading practices in their advertising, under the cover of secrecy.
And anyway, you're ignoring the point. If I buy a piece of hardware, then I have a right to know everything there is to know about using that piece of hardware. The details of what each register does, and so forth, are not proprietary secrets -- they form part of the instructions for use.
Most people are never going to make much use of that information and would not be bothered by its omission. But for the minority who are bothered by its omission, and who are being unfairly denied access to it, it's one hell of an issue.
Surely the next step now is to build something with artificial muscles and chlorophyll-containing leaves, so that it can produce its own energy by photosynthesis -- using nothing more than carbon dioxide and daylight?
Some do. We seem to be a nation of masochists, hanging onto ridiculous things as though they mattered. I personally love Europe -- I'm just practising for when we get kicked out of the EU. But this is spiralling further away from topic.
What you really need to do is to write to your local lawmakers, explaining why it is wrong that companies such as ATI and nVidia should be allowed to keep the driver details for their video cards secret. Not only does it effectively lock Open Source out of the market, it also hinders competition in the marketplace; denies users the freedom to use their own property to its fullest potential; and allows ATI and nVidia to make mendacious advertising claims which cannot be disproven.
ATI and nVidia are the robber barons of the display adaptor marketplace, and the best solution to their unacceptable behaviour is legislation. This is why we, as the people who pay their wages, must demand action from the governments of the world.
The problem is that Fedora is distributed from the USA, which allows stupid things to be patented. In Europe and Britain, the MP3 patents are null and void; and it is quite OK to distribute MP3 playback and recording software in those places. {As an aside, if they ever do allow software patents in the UK or Europe, all the illegally-granted patents won't automatically come into force: patent holders will have to reapply for them, and may not get them on the grounds of prior art or obviety.} Likewise in Europe and Britain, if you own a DVD then you are legally entitled to do whatever is necessary to watch it on your own equipment.
Sun's problem is that they don't want something that isn't Java to take the place of Java. I think I have the solution and it works using existing laws.
All Sun have to do is register the Java name as a trademark. There are already established regulations covering the use of trademarks. Sun could licence the trademark subject to any conditions they liked, so all they have to do is impose the condition that the Java name can only be used to refer to software products that pass a suite of tests specified by Sun. The software could then be released under the GPL. The GPL is a copyright licence only, it says nothing about trademarks. Clause 7 makes the distributor responsible for ensuring compliance with other IP considerations.
If someone, i.e. Microsoft, implement an extended but incompatible "Java", they won't be allowed to call it Java. And without the recognised Java brand name, it will be all but worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because these people are spending other people's money, doesn't mean they aren't nice enough with their own kind. It would never work any other way. For a subculture to work, it must have its own rules.
Anyway, the only people who lose money are idiots who fall for age-old scams. Phishing? Don't make me laugh. For crying out loud, when you open a bank account, they tell you that they will never ask you for personal details online. How long does it take to ring your bank and ask them whether an e-mail is genuine or not? And if you've already had several e-mails apparently from banks with whom you do not even have an account {and therefore obviously fake} why should you expect that one apparently from a bank with whom you do have an account?
Restaurant card fraud? That one has been going as long as credit cards. Even long before the Internet existed -- it began in the days of imprinting machines. Now, of course, thanks to Chip and PIN, you don't even need to let the card out of your sight to get ripped off. Oh, Chip and PIN machines are reckoned to be secure; but how the hell do you know that thing you put your card in and pressed a few buttons was a real Chip and PIN machine and not a fake one? For all you know they cloned your card and grabbed your PIN, and will use the clone card and PIN in a real C+P machine a few minutes down the line, within the margin of error of most people's watches and memories. Solution, pay by cheque. Not cash, because if they see you have cash then they will expect a tip.
As for backup tapes going missing, well, there isn't a lot anyone can do about that -- besides asking, before they open a bank account, how effective the bank's procedures are and what losses they have swallowed on customers' behalf. Little things like never transporting data by the same means as the decryption key make a lot of difference.
Summary: Never make the mistake of assuming anything is secure.
Yes. Pharming is when DNS is subverted to direct traffic intended for legitimate sites towards other sites. On a real computer, you need to be root {because of privilege separation} in order to create bogus zonefiles and reconfigure the local nameserver to make it appear to be authoritative for those domains. On a toy computer, however, there is no local nameserver. Instead, there is a file called "hosts" which is checked before DNS queries are sent to the outside world. In the absence of privilege separation, it's easy enough to append or even overwrite this {so you can even subvert another pharmer's attempts on your victim}.
What this really is, is an exercise in "grooming" the public to accept privacy invasion on an even greater scale.
CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime; they displace it to camera-free areas, where it obviously isn't anyone's problem. There was an incident a few years ago, along a road out of the city where every building is a shop, restaurant or pub. Some runt went around spraying graffiti on every establishment that was not CCTVed. The only images were a few blurred, grainy ones of him running from one shop to the next.
If the "experiment" is not universally opposed, the government will find a way to take it nationwide. The more affluent areas of every city will be filled with cameras that anyone can monitor. Crime will simply be displaced to the non-CCTV areas. Meanwhile, the public will gradually be getting used to the concept of never expecting to be able to go totally unobserved. The way will be paved for ever deeper intrusions into individuals' lives.
"Mummy, does Jesus watch you when you're on the toilet?"
"As long as he's watching channel 36, yes!"
Exactly!
It's the same in Britain, where a person's rights of "fair dealing" generally are not specifically enumerated but are left for the courts to determine {though I believe it's already been held that recording a TV programme is legal if your TV licence was paid up at the time of recording and you only keep it for 28 days; I don't have a citation for this, and I think this would effectively outlaw the use of DVD+R media for TV recording, but you can still buy one-time-write media so make of that what you will}.
It certainly sounds as though this move is intended to pre-empt a court ruling. If they legalise it specifically now, they can regulate it tightly and include nasty provisions like "..... unless specifically prevented by technological measures" {clue: this gets around even the Sony rootkit and can be used to rip protected or unprotected CDs even on a computer which is already infected}. If they wait for a court case which will legalise it generally, then they can't include such measures. Theoretically, even anything not specifically allowed under this new law could still be held to constitute fair dealing anyway -- but the ease of getting away with disobeying an unjust law is dependent on the perceived injustice in the law disobeyed, and until you think about it for five minutes this does sound fair.
The problem is this. If you create a top-level domain specifically for porn, you are admitting that porn exists. And unfortunately, there are too many people who have a problem with that.
Multi-region DVD players are legal on the European mainland, and so probably in the UK too. It has been ruled by one of the European Courts that region-locking is anti-competitive behaviour.
Well, since it contains images of an undressed minor, it would be child pornography plain and simple. You, the intended recipient, and everyone who had seen the recording would be deemed to be nonces.
I keep hearing this; but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever been busted in the UK for making a backup {by all means correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love a few more miscarriages of justice to cite}. And nor are they ever likely to be.
What does or does not constitute "fair dealing" {which is a defence to a charge of copyright infringement} is to be determined by the courts. The Crown Prosecution Service are never going to allow the courts to rule on whether or not e.g. taping an album to listen in the car is legal {and it should be, since it's a necessary step in persuading the car's analogue cassette deck to reproduce the sounds represented by the zeros and ones on the CD; which was sold subject to fitness for purpose, and that purpose is to be listened to} because whichever decision they reach would be disastrous. It doesn't take a genius to see that: one way they piss off the powerful music industry, the other way they piss off the entire music-loving public {and in all probability end up doing a massive U-turn and pissing off the powerful music industry anyway}.
So "fair dealing" is kept well and truly in a legal grey area. Anything that isn't obvious, for-profit piracy {like offloading dodgy discs at a car boot sale} gets conveniently ignored. And the fact of it not being strictly legal means it can be used for leverage. The presence of one or two dodgy C-90s in a suspect's vehicle might conceivably be used by officers to obtain a search warrant without it sounding too much like a fishing trip.
Well, if some villain wanted to send a small quantity of dope and they really had no option save to do it by some form of postal service, there would be worse ways to send it than inside a hollowed-out scented candle.
"Mr Big" would first have carefully to remove the safety warning sticker from the bottom of the candle -- but not the cellophane wrapping around the sides of the candle -- and slowly, methodically, patiently carve out a hollow in the base, big enough comfortably to accept a sealed container {such as a 35mm. film can -- anybody remember 35mm. film?} holding the merchandise. He would of course save up all the wax he was removing. The Evil Drugs Baron would then melt a small quantity of wax in a specially-made bain-marie ordered from a drug dealers' supply house -- he would not need to improvise using a Pyrex basin over a pan of boiling water on the stove -- and use this to "cement" the container in place within the cavity. From reading his drug dealer training manuals, he would know never to microwave the paraffin wax, which is a poor absorber of microwaves; nor to heat it directly, which would evaporate away the perfume. He would then fill the space around the stash container with more molten wax. Now, when this had cooled, it would contract, leaving a slight depression; so the Assassin of Youth would have to perform one final melt to level off this cavity. Standing the candle just briefly on a heated ceramic tile would give it a completely flat base to which the warning label could be re-attached. Thus giving the appearance of a perfectly normal scented candle in store-fresh condition.
Now, why anybody would be sending a cheap scented candle, ostensibly worth less than the postage cost, through the post is another question. But not one that occurs to the minds of the postal service, who after all are there to make money and probably would love to offer special, discreet and secure premium-rate services to drug dealers, if this could be done without making them look as though they were taking bribes or aiding and abetting criminals.
It's a defence to any crime that you only carried it out in order to prevent a greater crime. Like the old "dog in distress" scenario: it's perfectly OK to force entry into a vehicle or building in order to rescue a trapped animal in serious distress. By committing criminal damage {a crime against property} you have stopped an act of cruelty to animals {a crime against living things, therefore by definition a much greater offence}.
If analogies from outside the computing world applied within the computing world, then it would be a valid defence for McDanel to say that his {fairly minor} offence of sending an e-mail to employees of a company was done in order to prevent a much greater crime involving exploiting a security flaw in that company's products. As things stand today, however, non-computer analogies don't translate well to computerised situations.
But the phrase "former employer" is ambiguous because it is not clear whether he had already left their employment at the time when the mail sending occurred.
Whilst microkernels are a lovely idea in theory, they don't deliver in practice. There is already a bottleneck between user space and kernel space and this will impact upon performance. No matter what you are trying to do, the slowest part of the process will always determine the maximum rate at which you can do it.
Monolithic, Linux/Netware-style modular and so-called hybrid kernels get around this limitation by moving things to the other side of the bottleneck. It makes sense on this basis to put a hardware driver in kernel space. You usually only pass "idealised" data to a driver; the driver generally has to pass a lot more to the device because it isn't ideal. For example, when talking to a filesystem driver, you generally only want to send it the data to stick into some file. The filesystem driver has to do all the donkey work of shunting the heads back and forth and waiting for the right spot of disc to pass under them.
It might be "beautiful" to have as little code as possible situated on one side of the division, but it's most practical to have as little data as possible having to travel through the division.
Adams recommends mashing in a teapot and adding to milk already in the cup, on the basis that the interaction between cold milk and hot tea is order-dependent; a small quantity of hot tea poured into a larger quantity of cold milk will heat the milk slower than pouring a small quantity of cold milk into a larger quantity of hot tea. However, the specific heat capacities of water and milk are very similar; the main difference between the two scenarios is the maximum rate of heat exchange, and it is my experience that rate of heating has less effect on milk than terminal temperature {which is the same in either case; the tea gives up
Mt * Ct * [Tt - Tf] J. of heat, and the milk accepts
Mm * Cm * [Tf - Tm] J. There is nowhere else for this energy to go, so these two figures must be equal and so we can determine Tf}.
It's most likely that the custom of "pre-milking" {which is considered vulgar by some} arose from the time when cheaply-made cups would crack if heated rapidly. If one knew for sure that one's china was capable of withstanding tea at 90 degrees, one should demonstrate this. Conversely, one who poured the milk into the cup first to protect the china from the effects of the hot tea was evidently used to cheap, fragile china {and hence common}.
My method also has the advantage that the teabag {if it is removed from the cup in good time} never comes into contact with the milk. There is, or used to be, some reason why that's important. By the way, the best teabags are tetrahedral in shape and contain tea of identical quality to loose leaf tea. Flat rectangular ones are so-so. Don't even bother with flat round teabags; these are made with the sweepings from the blending room floor.
All my crockery now is by Denby Pottery. It keeps its smart appearance forever despite near-continuous abuse. I've never seen the point of keeping one's "best china" in a display cabinet. The Craftsman's Mug is of the shape alluded to above. It has exceptional heat retention and the absence of obvious stress points makes it virtually unbreakable.
Get yourself a kettle {NB, this will need a supply of about 10 amps; and if you're outside the UK, it will have to be earthed [if you're in the UK then it already is earthed]}, a filter jug, a china mug {with parallel sides or a temporary narrowing just below the mouth}, a steel teaspoon with the stiffest shank you can find, some teabags and some full-cream milk {not skimmed, not semi skimmed, it must be blue top for the authentic taste}. The milk must be as close as possible to 0 degrees and as far as possible from its expiry date.
Pour one litre of filtered water in the kettle. This will make up to three cups of tea {a standard mug holds 250ml but you should never empty the kettle completely}. Start the kettle boiling.
Whilst the kettle is heating up {use the formula: time in seconds = ([100 - T] * 4.17 * V) / P, where V = volume of water in litres, P = power of heating element in kW and T = initial temperature of water}, place a teabag and a stiff-shanked teaspoon in a china mug. This should ideally have a wide base, then a constriction before belling out; this shape works to minimise evaporative cooling losses and hence maintain OST {optimum sipping temperature} as long as possible. Failing that, a traditional, parallel-sided mug can be used.
The very instant the kettle boils, pour about 200ml. of boiling water, as close as possible to 100 degrees, over the teabag. Leave alone for 15 seconds, then begin mashing the hell out of the teabag with the spoon. Keep going until the tea stops getting any darker. Finally, crush the teabag hard between the bowl of the spoon and the wall of the mug to remove as much liquid as possible, and hike it out. It's biodegradable and can be composted.
Replace the spoon in the mug {it's acting as a heatsink} and add about 50ml of ice-cold milk to the tea. Stir immediately. Remove spoon and sip gently. Feel sensation as though you are receiving kind words and a hug on a tropical beach with crystal-clear water and silver sands and everything is generally all right with the world or better.
NB: Add more cold water to the kettle as soon as possible after boiling. This will cool it down, so slowing the rate of heat loss and minimising TTNM {time to next mashing}. Don't keep the filter jug in the fridge, you're already paying to heat it, you don't want to pay to cool it so you can heat it more.
Your arguments would carry a bit more weight if it weren't for the fact that right now, to all intents and purposes, we don't have much in the way of choice. If it was as easy as just choosing in a free and fair market whether to buy open or closed hardware, well, I know what I'd be buying and I know what I'd be telling my friends and family to buy.
Unfortunately, the closed hardware has an unfair market advantage. nVidia and ATI can tell as many lies as they like about their products and hide behind the veil of secrecy. They can exploit their unfair advantage to skew benchmarks in their favour, incorporating features designed to pass pre-ordained tests. Anyone making an open graphics card has to tell the truth about it, because anyone can discover the truth about it.
If they suddenly invented processed foods tomorrow, you can bet your arse that the manufacturers would be against labelling requirements. That doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that it's wrong to tell consumers what ingredients are in them, and how much fat, protein, starch and sugar are found in each 100g.
Bottom line, my right to know about my physical property outweighs anyone else's right to keep secrets from me.
Does any operating system still actually care about file extensions? I thought that they were a legacy remaining from an old PDP-11 operating system. It's easy enough to tell what a file is by looking at the first few bytes; most probably they will be a recognised header of some sort that you can identify from a table. Otherwise, if they're mostly printable it's ASCII text and if they're mainly non-printable it's binary data.
Actually, I have a simple solution to the Phishing problem. It is for the banks to put in huge, massive type in their Terms and Conditions leaflet, the following dozen words:
:)
WE WILL NEVER, EVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS ONLINE. EVER.
And, of course, for them to pay me a royalty everytime they use that particular copyrighted phrase
Oh, please. If you have to rely on a programming language to keep you from doing "dangerous" things, you have already lost.
..... the question is, to what extent, and is it likely to have a detrimental effect on real-life applications? Does the newest version of ADA allow a single keystroke to be read without waiting for the RETURN key?}
If the language really doesn't enable you to do "dangerous" things, then it's in all probability computationally incomplete. {Of course, any computer with finite memory and hard drive space is technically computationally incomplete
If an "intrinsically-safe" language was written in a language which lets you do "dangerous" things, then there is still a possibility that something could fail behind the scenes and cause "dangerous" things to happen anyway. Or, if you can prove mathematically that that is never going to happen with the "safe" language compiler written in a "dangerous" language, then you can prove the same thing for any application written in a "dangerous" language.
These kind of comments are invariably made by teachers of pure mathematics, who like Noddy-car languages such as Pascal and Modula-2 and are constantly troubled by the thought that somebody, somewhere is doing something useful with a computer.
ATI and nVidia are effectively a cartel, riding on the back of Microsoft's dominance. It's also quite likely that they are using deceptive and misleading practices in their advertising, under the cover of secrecy.
And anyway, you're ignoring the point. If I buy a piece of hardware, then I have a right to know everything there is to know about using that piece of hardware. The details of what each register does, and so forth, are not proprietary secrets -- they form part of the instructions for use.
Most people are never going to make much use of that information and would not be bothered by its omission. But for the minority who are bothered by its omission, and who are being unfairly denied access to it, it's one hell of an issue.
Surely the next step now is to build something with artificial muscles and chlorophyll-containing leaves, so that it can produce its own energy by photosynthesis -- using nothing more than carbon dioxide and daylight?
Some do. We seem to be a nation of masochists, hanging onto ridiculous things as though they mattered. I personally love Europe -- I'm just practising for when we get kicked out of the EU. But this is spiralling further away from topic.
What you really need to do is to write to your local lawmakers, explaining why it is wrong that companies such as ATI and nVidia should be allowed to keep the driver details for their video cards secret. Not only does it effectively lock Open Source out of the market, it also hinders competition in the marketplace; denies users the freedom to use their own property to its fullest potential; and allows ATI and nVidia to make mendacious advertising claims which cannot be disproven.
ATI and nVidia are the robber barons of the display adaptor marketplace, and the best solution to their unacceptable behaviour is legislation. This is why we, as the people who pay their wages, must demand action from the governments of the world.
The problem is that Fedora is distributed from the USA, which allows stupid things to be patented. In Europe and Britain, the MP3 patents are null and void; and it is quite OK to distribute MP3 playback and recording software in those places. {As an aside, if they ever do allow software patents in the UK or Europe, all the illegally-granted patents won't automatically come into force: patent holders will have to reapply for them, and may not get them on the grounds of prior art or obviety.} Likewise in Europe and Britain, if you own a DVD then you are legally entitled to do whatever is necessary to watch it on your own equipment.
Sun's problem is that they don't want something that isn't Java to take the place of Java. I think I have the solution and it works using existing laws.
All Sun have to do is register the Java name as a trademark. There are already established regulations covering the use of trademarks. Sun could licence the trademark subject to any conditions they liked, so all they have to do is impose the condition that the Java name can only be used to refer to software products that pass a suite of tests specified by Sun. The software could then be released under the GPL. The GPL is a copyright licence only, it says nothing about trademarks. Clause 7 makes the distributor responsible for ensuring compliance with other IP considerations.
If someone, i.e. Microsoft, implement an extended but incompatible "Java", they won't be allowed to call it Java. And without the recognised Java brand name, it will be all but worthless.