You just have to introduce a new feature that's so spectacular, that over 50% of the user base will sacrifice the fact that it's not open source to have it.
they already have that: it's called "It's from Microsoft." Remember, MS has a dominant position in the PC field, and most PC users don't even know there's a choice. What they need is a feature that will make over 50% of all Linux/FreeBSD users willing to ignore that it's not OS and that FOSS developers can't copy.
No, it wasn't written as a reference work, although your point is well taken. If it were, there'd have been no need for all the repeated examples. As it was, I got the impression that they were there to fill out an otherwise very small book.
I remember, years ago, buying a book on CSS from O'Reily. It went into quite a bit of detail, although some of it was redundant. (That is, they'd show you how to do whatever the chapter was about for the same five types of page in each chapter.) However, the author neglected to include one very important, basic fact that made the book useless to me: he never showed how to get a css file into a web page. I'm sure all you web designers and webmonkeys out there are smirking, but remember, somebody had to show you how to do it too. At the time, all I knew was basic html, not even enough to use such things as frames, but I wanted to do some simple things like make sure all the pages on my private site had the same color scheme without needing to cut and paste from one to the other. Alas, the book turned out to be useless to me because the author thought that what I needed was too obvious to bother with. I hope this book is different, and that a reader who knows absolutely nothing about css will find enough here to be able to use it in their web site.
No, no... They can just ask. It is not illegal to ask and be granted. (It probably should be but it isn't.)
It's not illegal for a number of reasons, but I'll only discuss one. (IANAL, and this is the only non-technical one.) Why should law enforcement be forced to waste time, effort and money getting a warrant for something that the owner was willing to provide without coercion? It only takes a few seconds to ask, and they can always try(!) to get a warrant if they're turned down. It costs nothing, and sometimes they're told, "Sure; go ahead," so why not? What, in the long run is harmed by their asking? If you want to make them dot the I's and cross the T's, you can always tell them to get a warrant, and there's nothing they can do about it. They won't even hold a grudge, because you're just following the law, which is what they'd like more people to do anyway.
The law says that law enforcement officials need a warrant to seize evidence without the owner's consent. There's nothing in the law that prevents them from taking something without a warrant as long as they are given permission to do so. In this case, they requested permission and it was granted, so they FOLLOWED THE LAW, just as you suggested.
The FBI did nothing unlawful if (and only if) when they asked the director of the library for permission to take the computers, he granted it. Just asking permission isn't enough; the person you ask has to grant it and, of course, have the authority to do so. As nobody seems to deny that the director did exactly that, I'd have to say that there's no legal problem, although the director's judgment might be questioned.
Who doesn't appreciate the impotent music of the 80s? Those of us who remember the vigor and liveliness of the music of the 50s and early 60s, before the flower children castrated it.
Yes. And, as Calvin's father explained, old movies are in Black and White because back that's the way everything really was. We didn't start getting color movies, like The Wizard of Oz until color itself was invented.
If I remember it correctly, it's roughly 25,000 statute miles in circumference at the equator. I might be wrong, but you specified "without looking it up," so I didn't.
I'd be happy if they'd just do a little debugging on their Linux drivers. After I bought an nVidia card for my Fedora 9 box, installed the drivers and got Compiz running, my system started hanging, sometimes several times a day. It was always when I was trying to come back from xscreensaver. After considerable googlemancy, I found an nVidea forum (Sorry, I don't have a link for it.) that had several hundred threads about screensaver issues with Linux. Apparently, there's a problem coming back from screensavers that do "line drawing." I don't know how true it is, or if it's been fixed, but I do know that ever since I set it to one screensaver only instead of random there hasn't been a problem. There's been an update, and I really should try again, but I haven't had the time for it as yet.
The ONLY flaw I see in the entire Vista/TPM system is that users don't seem to have a way of manually trusting things they genuinely want to trust. If it hasn't been blessed by MS its not trusted...
Exactly. I see nothing wrong with third-party boot loaders not being trusted by Vista/TPM by default. If nothing else, the system has no way of knowing if you installed them yourself or if they're part of some sort of root kit. What I don't like is that there isn't a way for the person who owns the computer to override this. As several other posters have commented, this just shows that "trusted" means "trusted by Microsoft not to let users do anything except what Microsoft wants them to."
I see this a lot on Slashdot, and I wonder... where do you keep your money? Banks are companies, as are brokerages.
Irrelevant. Your bank doesn't need to know about your stock portfolio unless it's also your broker; same goes for your mortgage. There's no reason for it toh have any access to your medical records or employment history among other things. Yes, all this and more is stored in electronic form at various places, but it's spread out, compartmentalized and no one archive has access to anything other than what it needs.
I think that the OP is worried that using an OS like this would end up with some sort of centralized repository where all of his data is in one place, and one security breach can expose everything at once. Personally, I doubt it, but I do admit that Microsoft does seem to encourage people to do exactly that, so I won't rule out the possibility.
Getting out in the Big Blue Room is always a good idea. If you drive to work, don't park right next to the entrance to your building; park a bit out where you have to walk a ways, both morning and evening. If you don't work too high up, use the stairs, not the elevator. On weekends, get in the habit of going for a walk, at least once a week, if not twice. You don't have to go a long distance, especially at first, but try to work up until you're going a mile or two at a time. It's not hard, and in good weather it can be very pleasant, but it helps you keep in shape and burns off some extra calories. For that matter, if you don't live that far from the market, walk there and back instead of driving. After a month or so of this, you'll wonder why you weren't doing this years ago.
According to you, Enron should never have been allowed to fail: because millions were affected, and hence Enron should have been propped up.
Don't put words in my mouth, and stop comparing apples to oranges. Enron failed because of bad business decisions, not because it was forced to stop doing business by the courts. Two entirely different things. You can't, in the long run, stop companies from failing, but it's a bad idea to use the courts to force a healthy concern out of existence just because it did one stupid thing.
So how do you protect customers while punishing the criminal: Put him in Jail while liquidating his assets to pay for alimony.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, because the word alimony doesn't make any sense in this context. Guessing that you mean that his assets should be used to compensate his victims, (which isn't what alimony is for) that's not a bad idea, and is even used sometimes. What would be the best punishment here? Honestly, I'm not sure. Maybe putting a restriction on Comcast that it's not allowed to set rates giving it more than a certain minimal profit for the next N years because that would probably ensure that the current management would be thrown out by the stockholders.
Try having well written, very clear policies that that kind of action is forbiden.
It's all well and good having policies like that, but if your employees either don't know about them or can plausibly claim they don't know, they won't do any good. Every employee who has, or even might have access to sensitive data should be required to sign a copy of that policy and it should be part of their records. That way, if anything happens, they won't be able to pretend they didn't know they were violating company policy. Depending on local laws, this might help you avoid (or defend) a suit for wrongful termination.
If the FCC really wanted to help, they would have stepped aside and let the SEC and/or the FTC in to prevent this stupid monopoly from happening in the first place.
How could the SEC have done anything? There was no stock manipulation or stock fraud involved. And, for that matter, I honestly have no idea if the FTC would have had jurisdiction.
This is exactly the kind of stupid reasoning that gives corporates more leverage and power than us.
No. This is how business works. I take it that you've never studied the basics of accounting, or been involved in the management of even the smallest business.
Will a judge accept this reasoning?
Of course, because unlike you, the judge would understand how the Real World works. Actually, in such a case, the judge wouldn't even be consulted on this. The fine would be levied and paid, then Comcast would list the fine as an expense and calculate its fees based on their total expenses, just like always. That's how business works. It's also what happens, BTW, when you "tax" a business: they pass it on to their customers.
If the FCC is really serious (which am sure it is not) about setting an example, it will simply suspend the license of comcast for one year as punishment.
That's not going to happen because, unlike you, the FCC understands that the real punishment would fall on all of Comcast's customers, many of whom have no other real option for either broadband Internet or cable TV. It would also land on the rank and file of their employees, who would be laid off without pay because there'd be no work for them.
How much do you want to bet that they will just pass the fine along to their subscribers?
Of course they will, just as they pass on any and all taxes, fines, fees or other costs of doing business. That's what the fine is, you know, a cost of business, nothing more.
Back when I worked for an ISP, you had to power-cycle the cable modem if you switched which computer or router was directly connected to it. No need to call us, just kill the power to it for about fifteen seconds, turn it on, let it read the MAC address of the new NIC and Bob's your uncle.
You are correct that greek is the original language of the bible (well actually a syrian arameic dialect for most of the bible, but most of the new testament was indeed originally written down in greek), but the versions that were actually used were latin, not greek.
Not for the Old Testament it isn't! That's mostly in Hebrew, with a few, short sections in Aramaic. (There's a pair of letters and a commentary between them in Ezra, I think it is, and the book of Daniel switches from Hebrew to Aramaic in mid-sentence and stays there for a while before coming back.)
Ideally we want it to go a long way away, not just skim by so close it touches the atmosphere.
Of course. I left the calculations for longer lead-times as an exercise for the reader. I figured that having shown how much of a change you could get in only six months was enough to demonstrate the principle.
Actually, now that I think about it, under some circumstances 2000 miles or so might well be ample. If the impact is expected along what might be called the Earth's trailing edge, or near one of the poles that would be enough to make it miss completely, without even skimming the atmosphere. Not all impacts are going to be dead center, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
they already have that: it's called "It's from Microsoft." Remember, MS has a dominant position in the PC field, and most PC users don't even know there's a choice. What they need is a feature that will make over 50% of all Linux/FreeBSD users willing to ignore that it's not OS and that FOSS developers can't copy.
No, it wasn't written as a reference work, although your point is well taken. If it were, there'd have been no need for all the repeated examples. As it was, I got the impression that they were there to fill out an otherwise very small book.
I remember, years ago, buying a book on CSS from O'Reily. It went into quite a bit of detail, although some of it was redundant. (That is, they'd show you how to do whatever the chapter was about for the same five types of page in each chapter.) However, the author neglected to include one very important, basic fact that made the book useless to me: he never showed how to get a css file into a web page. I'm sure all you web designers and webmonkeys out there are smirking, but remember, somebody had to show you how to do it too. At the time, all I knew was basic html, not even enough to use such things as frames, but I wanted to do some simple things like make sure all the pages on my private site had the same color scheme without needing to cut and paste from one to the other. Alas, the book turned out to be useless to me because the author thought that what I needed was too obvious to bother with. I hope this book is different, and that a reader who knows absolutely nothing about css will find enough here to be able to use it in their web site.
No, but for this purpose he's acting as the owner's agent, with full authority to permit the FBI to borrow the computers.
It's not illegal for a number of reasons, but I'll only discuss one. (IANAL, and this is the only non-technical one.) Why should law enforcement be forced to waste time, effort and money getting a warrant for something that the owner was willing to provide without coercion? It only takes a few seconds to ask, and they can always try(!) to get a warrant if they're turned down. It costs nothing, and sometimes they're told, "Sure; go ahead," so why not? What, in the long run is harmed by their asking? If you want to make them dot the I's and cross the T's, you can always tell them to get a warrant, and there's nothing they can do about it. They won't even hold a grudge, because you're just following the law, which is what they'd like more people to do anyway.
The law says that law enforcement officials need a warrant to seize evidence without the owner's consent. There's nothing in the law that prevents them from taking something without a warrant as long as they are given permission to do so. In this case, they requested permission and it was granted, so they FOLLOWED THE LAW, just as you suggested.
The FBI did nothing unlawful if (and only if) when they asked the director of the library for permission to take the computers, he granted it. Just asking permission isn't enough; the person you ask has to grant it and, of course, have the authority to do so. As nobody seems to deny that the director did exactly that, I'd have to say that there's no legal problem, although the director's judgment might be questioned.
Who doesn't appreciate the impotent music of the 80s? Those of us who remember the vigor and liveliness of the music of the 50s and early 60s, before the flower children castrated it.
Warning: do not click on the link in the above post unless you really want to be Rickrolled.
Yes. And, as Calvin's father explained, old movies are in Black and White because back that's the way everything really was. We didn't start getting color movies, like The Wizard of Oz until color itself was invented.
If I remember it correctly, it's roughly 25,000 statute miles in circumference at the equator. I might be wrong, but you specified "without looking it up," so I didn't.
I'd be happy if they'd just do a little debugging on their Linux drivers. After I bought an nVidia card for my Fedora 9 box, installed the drivers and got Compiz running, my system started hanging, sometimes several times a day. It was always when I was trying to come back from xscreensaver. After considerable googlemancy, I found an nVidea forum (Sorry, I don't have a link for it.) that had several hundred threads about screensaver issues with Linux. Apparently, there's a problem coming back from screensavers that do "line drawing." I don't know how true it is, or if it's been fixed, but I do know that ever since I set it to one screensaver only instead of random there hasn't been a problem. There's been an update, and I really should try again, but I haven't had the time for it as yet.
Interesting. Here in Southern California we use swedes instead of poles.
Exactly. I see nothing wrong with third-party boot loaders not being trusted by Vista/TPM by default. If nothing else, the system has no way of knowing if you installed them yourself or if they're part of some sort of root kit. What I don't like is that there isn't a way for the person who owns the computer to override this. As several other posters have commented, this just shows that "trusted" means "trusted by Microsoft not to let users do anything except what Microsoft wants them to."
Irrelevant. Your bank doesn't need to know about your stock portfolio unless it's also your broker; same goes for your mortgage. There's no reason for it toh have any access to your medical records or employment history among other things. Yes, all this and more is stored in electronic form at various places, but it's spread out, compartmentalized and no one archive has access to anything other than what it needs.
I think that the OP is worried that using an OS like this would end up with some sort of centralized repository where all of his data is in one place, and one security breach can expose everything at once. Personally, I doubt it, but I do admit that Microsoft does seem to encourage people to do exactly that, so I won't rule out the possibility.
Getting out in the Big Blue Room is always a good idea. If you drive to work, don't park right next to the entrance to your building; park a bit out where you have to walk a ways, both morning and evening. If you don't work too high up, use the stairs, not the elevator. On weekends, get in the habit of going for a walk, at least once a week, if not twice. You don't have to go a long distance, especially at first, but try to work up until you're going a mile or two at a time. It's not hard, and in good weather it can be very pleasant, but it helps you keep in shape and burns off some extra calories. For that matter, if you don't live that far from the market, walk there and back instead of driving. After a month or so of this, you'll wonder why you weren't doing this years ago.
Don't put words in my mouth, and stop comparing apples to oranges. Enron failed because of bad business decisions, not because it was forced to stop doing business by the courts. Two entirely different things. You can't, in the long run, stop companies from failing, but it's a bad idea to use the courts to force a healthy concern out of existence just because it did one stupid thing.
So how do you protect customers while punishing the criminal: Put him in Jail while liquidating his assets to pay for alimony.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, because the word alimony doesn't make any sense in this context. Guessing that you mean that his assets should be used to compensate his victims, (which isn't what alimony is for) that's not a bad idea, and is even used sometimes. What would be the best punishment here? Honestly, I'm not sure. Maybe putting a restriction on Comcast that it's not allowed to set rates giving it more than a certain minimal profit for the next N years because that would probably ensure that the current management would be thrown out by the stockholders.
It's all well and good having policies like that, but if your employees either don't know about them or can plausibly claim they don't know, they won't do any good. Every employee who has, or even might have access to sensitive data should be required to sign a copy of that policy and it should be part of their records. That way, if anything happens, they won't be able to pretend they didn't know they were violating company policy. Depending on local laws, this might help you avoid (or defend) a suit for wrongful termination.
How could the SEC have done anything? There was no stock manipulation or stock fraud involved. And, for that matter, I honestly have no idea if the FTC would have had jurisdiction.
No. This is how business works. I take it that you've never studied the basics of accounting, or been involved in the management of even the smallest business.
Will a judge accept this reasoning?
Of course, because unlike you, the judge would understand how the Real World works. Actually, in such a case, the judge wouldn't even be consulted on this. The fine would be levied and paid, then Comcast would list the fine as an expense and calculate its fees based on their total expenses, just like always. That's how business works. It's also what happens, BTW, when you "tax" a business: they pass it on to their customers.
That's not going to happen because, unlike you, the FCC understands that the real punishment would fall on all of Comcast's customers, many of whom have no other real option for either broadband Internet or cable TV. It would also land on the rank and file of their employees, who would be laid off without pay because there'd be no work for them.
Of course they will, just as they pass on any and all taxes, fines, fees or other costs of doing business. That's what the fine is, you know, a cost of business, nothing more.
Back when I worked for an ISP, you had to power-cycle the cable modem if you switched which computer or router was directly connected to it. No need to call us, just kill the power to it for about fifteen seconds, turn it on, let it read the MAC address of the new NIC and Bob's your uncle.
Not for the Old Testament it isn't! That's mostly in Hebrew, with a few, short sections in Aramaic. (There's a pair of letters and a commentary between them in Ezra, I think it is, and the book of Daniel switches from Hebrew to Aramaic in mid-sentence and stays there for a while before coming back.)
Of course. I left the calculations for longer lead-times as an exercise for the reader. I figured that having shown how much of a change you could get in only six months was enough to demonstrate the principle.
Actually, now that I think about it, under some circumstances 2000 miles or so might well be ample. If the impact is expected along what might be called the Earth's trailing edge, or near one of the poles that would be enough to make it miss completely, without even skimming the atmosphere. Not all impacts are going to be dead center, you know.