Or get a bit fancier (which I suspect you'll have to) and list any email addys you challenge on a provisional whitelist and only move them over to the real whitelist once they've correctly responded.
This allows you to get funky with the provisional list - add time expiry rules, move addys to a blacklist if they screw up the challenge more than a few times, scan the provisional list for 'spammy' IP ranges etc etc
As with any arms race the ideal is to use layered defences and a mix of techniques, so whitelists have a part to play, but so do blacklists, reputational systems, cryptographic signatures and so on.
If the parent had RTFA, he/she would've seen that this option was discussed and discounted. The author's conclusion was that if you automate the whitelisting solution in the email infrastructure then spammers can figure out a way to game the automation.
Personally I feel that is overly pessimistic, but I don't design protocols for a living and I haven't really thought hard about the spamming problem at a strategic level so I'm not really qualified to comment.
If you want more detail you should check out the February issue of Scientific American, which has four or five feature articles discussing the cosmological theories these experiments are addressing.
I already addressed all those issues in earlier posts, and feel no need to repeat myself ad nauseum. Just because you learned something last week doesnt make it new, or news.
Really? Where? All I see is a bunch of borderline flammage about a problematic Exchange upgrade and some dodgy COM implementations and then one post made after your reply to mine which missed (or ignored) the point of the original argument.
Here's my third point restated more clearly:
MSoft has acquired a defacto monopoly of the desktop OS.
The monopoly on the desktop is a bad thing because it allows them to raise the barriers to entry for competitors and permits them extract an ongoing monopoly rent from their locked in customers. This is a market failure that leads to the less than efficient distribution of resources across the wider economy and, absent external intervention, it is unlikely to be self-correcting.
Indeed the secure bastion of MSoft's desktop OS monopoly has permitted MSoft to extend its monopoly into the desktop application space and seek to expand into other nearby competitive areas (eg. servers, game consoles, peripherals etc). So not only is the monopoly not self-correcting it is actively seeking to grow more powerful and more dominant.
Basically my contention is that Monopolies Are Bad, which has been a staple of economic theory since Adam Smith. Are you arguing contra?
MS "tax"
This term you guys cooked up is the dumbest fucking arguement Ive ever heard.
That's probably because it is a term, not an argument. Its also not mine, which is why the thing has quotation marks around it. I prefer 'rent' as being a more accurate description of the situation (in a technical economic sense) - but you know that already 'cuz you snipped that bit out when you responded to my post.
You are using something which fulfills a need.
[everyday examples snipped]
Likewise, paying for an operating system isnt some "Microsoft tax".
No it's a "Microsoft Rent" (the excessive profit part of it anyway). MSoft are able to impose higher than market-rate prices by virtue of their monopoly lock in. Their customers (OEMs chiefly) have little choice but to accede to these prices (and other onerous MSoft contractual terms) if they want to stay in the computer business. Contrariwise, I have a great deal of choice when it comes to getting a haircut, eating out or having my car serviced, which is why the money paid for these products and services cannot accurately be described as a "hairdressing rent", or even a "hairdressing tax".
MSoft's excessive profit is economically suboptimal and, left undisturbed, leads to a self-reinforcing concentration of power and wealth which is Bad-with-a-capital-B both for the economy and for wider society. I don't know how I can say this any clearer or simpler.
You might argue about how much of MSoft's profits are a monopoly rent, but given their ability to steeply discount their products and services as soon as a significant customer seriously starts looking at alternatives makes it very difficult (IMO impossible) to argue that there hasn't been any monopoly gouging going on since the mid-90s at least (I would contend earlier but its a moot point).
If you dont like it, go fucking use something else! MS isnt forcing people to use their OS. Just because third parties only program for MS proves the superiority of their platform; nobody wants to support multiple OS versions of the same product if they dont have to.
Underneath the invective there are some serious points being made here. There are significant network benefits and efficiencies derived from having one (or a few) consistent technical architecture. The question is whether those advantages outweigh the consequential costs.
Programs that require Admin: That's why we have competition. I've massaged some badly behaving apps into working as a regular user - it's not hard to loosen up the minimums an app "needs".
I've run into this with some netgear Wifi kit recently, the scanning client seems to assume Admin privileges for correct function under WinXP.
I'm not actively chasing this down at present because I've got a bunch of other techie chores to do at home before I go back to getting WiFi to work (including mothballing the XP install in favour of Linux so it might be a moot point).
Needless to say I will *not* be happy with WiFi s/ware that won't run under (in XP parlance) a restricted user. We shall see.
When WinXP Home edition ships with an out-of-the-box install that doesn't start you off as passwordless Administrator (sorry 'Owner') with all services running and provides some way to upgrade to a properly implemented file permissioning system without requiring use of CACLS from the command line, then you will have a point. Until that day you don't.
MSoft *say* they are taking security seriously these days, but their marketing/usability reflexes are still calling the shots when tradeoffs have to be made. While that remains true there will always be too many people running Winboxen with Admin privileges for comfort.
Ahh the joys of newbies! Windows to Windows is just as bad...often worse!
Tell me about it. I'm doing some consultancy for a large UK financial organisation who will be spending UKP35 million on upgrading their NT4 estate to XP/Server2003 over the next couple of years.
That's a sizeable chunk of change in anyone's book.
it's fundamentally bad for the economy (it's limiting competition, and an artificial constraint on increasing effeciency, all of which are bad for the economy).
I dont see how having people buy from a US company or get something free can be seen as bad in terms of economic competition. In that respect, people should be all for MS, because Munich using SUSE isnt bringing a single deuchmark into the US.
Firstly it isn't deuchmark (or even deutschmark) - Munich is in the Eurozone these days.
Secondly, IBM are acting as lead contractors on this migration so a certain percentage of those 35 MegaEuros will be ending up in Armonk, NY at some point along the line.
Thirdly the grandparent was criticising MSoft's monopoly lock-in as bad for the small-e economy (ie on general economic grounds in that it is effectively a rent upon all economic activity) rather than the big-E economy (ie the US balance of payments). In any case why should a bunch of regional civil servants in Germany be bothered about the US economy when it comes to deciding their IT strategy?
Second, I dont see that its artificially contraining effeciency, especially since the alternative isnt really going to make people work any faster.
Efficiency is going to be lower if MSoft is able to command an ongoing monopoly premium on its software prices. The MSoft 'tax' (actually a rent) represented by their monopoly premium, acts as a general drag anchor upon the economy. The excess profits derived from this monopoly would be more efficiently utilised within the economy as reduced unit costs or increased profits for MSoft's customers and/or competitors.
Of course distinguishing between MSoft's 'honest' profit and its 'excess' is a tricky proposition at the best of times - made harder by the natural human inclination towards rent-seeking (and the fact that this natural inclination is, in MSoft's case, bankrolled by an enormous warchest built up from earlier excess profits).
If people exchanged documents in a more open format, it'd be a heck of a lot easier to migrate to a non-windows environment.
And your point is? I dont see why people complain about MS using non-open formats. Why should they?
Because they think that the MSoft monopoly is a Bad Thing economically (see above) and view their proprietary formats as a bulwark of that monopoly?
Because they don't like the way that MSoft breaks their formats every few years in order to encourage people to upgrade their software?
Because they don't want essential interactions with legal and governmental agencies to require the software products of a single company?
Because they are archivists who want a document format that will be readable in 50 years time?
Because they want assurances that the document format won't leak interesting metadata when published?
Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that. Sounds like a good stopgap fix. Thanks.
Of course now the ADSL is playing up (was fine earlier in the week) and I've managed to use the Mandrake control centre to configure Linux into (non-functioning) winmodem mode and can't it get back to the default LAN mode so there's still plenty of mucking about and twiddling to be done this weekend... g/f is starting to voice concern that a Mac might have been a better idea, so I'd better get cracking.
Regards
Luke
... using Mandrake 9.2 and there are some minor personal nitpicks for her:
1 - initial impression of Gnome was good, but she immediately picked up on a tendency to laggy-ness. If it continues to grate I'll have to look at alternative graphical managers (I can sell the availability of alternatives as a plus of course).
2 - her HP Jornada won't play with Linux so it looks like we'll have to keep the XP partition for the timebeing (suits me - I can use it for games that don't run under Wine...).
3 - the scanner is playing up so that's something I need to troubleshoot over the weekend. Doing this sort of project while working away during the week is a major pain BTW - telephone calls from frustrated g/f and nothing to be done for 3-4 days *isn't* a good selling point.
4 - she thinks the time it takes to boot into Linux is excessive.
However the major roadblock (possibly a deal-breaker) is the f*cked up OEM version of WinXP that gets shipped with Compaq boxen these days. What it means is that after installing Linux, any time you opt to boot into Windows (to export contacts from Exchange ready for Evolution fer instance) it spots that the MBR has been altered by the bootloader and initiates the 'Recovery for Morons' mode (meaningful explanation of what is going on? nada; option to flip into an 'I Know What I'm Doing' mode and tell it to STFU? nope). The only options, apart from aborting and going back to Linux, are where to Recover from (partition or DVD) and of course either process takes 10-15 minutes, zeroes your box back to factory settings (bang go any security patches, config changes, user settings and the like) and blows out the bootloader (so you have to go through the Mandrake installation routine to reinstate Linux again).
I gather that Compaq, or rather HP, are obliged to provide full installation media upon request; so that's the *other* thing I'm doing this weekend (beyond the valentines thang that is) and as soon as they arrive I'm doing a proper install and blitzing the recovery partition - I could care less about Compaq's warranty support...
I'm an obstinate SOB however and do this sort of thing for a living; if Linux-on-the-Desktop really gets some mass-market traction in the next year or two I can forsee whole swathes of the general public hitting this Windows Recovery Tango on recent vintage OEM machines and running screaming from the Penguin unless some primers that cover this issue are made a prominent part of the online resources.
Regards Luke
PS Another gripe I have with XP (only 1?) is the Simple Security Model forced upon you by the Home Edition. I gather that booting into Safe Mode gets you around this irritatingly idiotic example of MSoft's 'helpfulness' and makes the security tabs available within Windows Explorer, but the OEM-crippled piece of cr*p I have seems to think that Safe Mode isn't necessary now that you have their groovy Recovery feature. Anyone know how to get to it? Its not offered as an option during startup or shutdown at present.
Cats are a poor example of animal culture, descended as they are from a solitary species. Their interactions are pretty simple (as noted in your post) and taken in the round cats are pretty dumb.
Dogs on the other hand are social carnivores and have the capability for far more complex social behaviour as a consequence. Dogs and wolves are pretty bright - much more so than cats.
A common idea people have about cats and dogs is that cats are smarter than dogs, because they can't be told what to do by their keepers whereas dogs will make endless fools of themselves in order to please their alpha. This is mistaken however and merely interprets a cat's solipsistic narcissism as evidence of some form of a higher, machievellian intellect.
In fact cats don't play the fool for their parent/keeper figures because they don't have the capability to form these social pair-bonds, which are the linchpin of pack/band formation.
That's why the collection of papers make a point of referring to *individualised* species. Its not to say that social insects aren't a fascinating and productive area of study but their forms of intelligence and social organisation are such a radically different thing that its questionable how applicable conclusions drawn from insect studies are to mammalian or avian sociability.
You need to include an exponent to factor out the effects of the cube/square law and there have been plenty of cross-species studies (and unfortunate mishaps - check out the story of the elephant who got dosed with LSD back in the early 60s) that back up a scaling factor of around ^0.7 or so.
It really all depends on what you grew up with, and where. Analog more closely represents the "real world". The earth spins, and the shadow of your sundial spins around with it. It's cyclic as well, showing the whole period of sweep for 12 hours.
This is why I wear an analogue (a Citizen automatic diving watch if you're interested). How many digital watches can be used as an improvised compass?
Is it illegal to put mp3s you have legally purchased on a P2P network, and then download them from somewhere else, say at work?
Would it be legal to put their DRM files (which I understand are trivial to break) up on the P2P network so you can download them from somewhere else?
IANAL etc etc.
It all depends upon which jurisdiction you are operating in, but generally speaking everywhere recognises 'fair use' provisions which would make your first scenario legal provided no one else d/loaded the MP3s. If someone else did d/load the tracks and you don't have permission from the copyright holder then you are guilty of infringing distribution and liable to some fairly serious legal penalties (provided an interested party can be bothered to sue you for it). Note that if you were in Canada (rather than, say, the US) you would be covered by the media levy for copyright holders they have their and your distribution would be kosher - I have no idea if this would apply if you were to distribute to someone outside Canada however.
The second scenario would follow the first insofar as distribution is concerned, but some jurisdictions (notably the US with the DMCA) make it an offence to bypass or crack DRM. In which case you could find yourself liable for circumventing the DRM even if you were in the clear with respect to distributing copyrighted material.
If we haven't found evidence of life before we introduce areonaughts and then we *do* find evidence of life, there'll always be the suspicion that what we found hitch-hiked in on the manned mission.
Of course if there actually *isn't* any life whatsoever on Mars for us to find, then eventually we'll have to draw a line under the search and go ahead with a manned mission - but given what we have discovered about extremophiles on Earth in the last couple of decades it'd be a damn shame if we didn't give the search a decent crack of the whip.
I see where you're coming from, but I disagree. There are moral lines involved that many people--if not the majority--simply will not cross, regardless of the circumstances.
I have a less optimistic view of humanity. In the situation postulated by the grandparent (war to the knife - an all out struggle for national or political survival) enough people on all sides are willing to 'do whatever is necessary' to ensure that things spiral down into barbaric cruelty across the board pretty damn quickly. The various resistance movements in Europe during WWII are a good example from recent history.
The US as a society is fortunate not to have been placed into such a desperate situation recently - even WWII wasn't really a life-or-death issue for the US (WWIII would have been if WWII had gone badly of course, but I digress). Nevertheless there was enough bad stuff going on in the ACW and the Revolutionary War to give an idea of what we're talking about.
Although the group in York are the lead team, it is actually an EU project (there's a clue to this in the project name - which was the restaurant in Italy where the idea was first kicked about).
The main benefit will be achieved (assuming the project is successful) in the sparsely populated south and the former comecon countries who are joining the EU later on this year.
Regards
Luke
That's the iTunes service part of the deal. Jobs basically greased up and bent over for the RIAA. The labels get pretty much the same deal as they do for physical media, but don't have to pay many of the corresponding costs plus they get a DRM trojan horse into the consumer electronics sector - what's not to like?
My understanding is that the iPod is generating a healthy profit however - for Apple, iTunes are the driver for iPod sales.
I think the file sharing idea is to make it harder to do stupid things. In the default "simple" mode you have to move the files you want to share to a special folder.
Is there a non-default file-sharing concept in XP Home? Thus far (a couple of hours noodling around with Windows Help and a few cursory google searches) I've not found anything that doesn't involve using CACLS from the command prompt.
I'd pretty much resigned myself to knocking together a little permissioning applet as a front-end to CACLS for my g/f, but it'd be nice not to have that chore if there's an alternative.
What you are missing is the fact that SCO are lying, predatory scumbags who are engaging in vexatious litigation in order to run a pump-and-squeeze number on their stock price.
To date SCO officers have cleared a total of several millions in stock options that they got at pennies per share back in '01-'02 and (more importantly) Canopy Group have extracted a *much* bigger slice of cash by 'selling' one of their other wholly-owned subsidiaries to SCO for a chunk of nicely inflating SCO stock.
Follow the money trail and all becomes clear. I suspect that SCO are attempting to provoke the court into making a procedural error when ruling against them, so they can continue to run out the clock by appealling the case to a higher court. I predict that even if the bench and IBM do a watertight job and no procedural errors are made, they will *still* appeal the case; in all probability this is what Boise has been retained for.
They have to provide, with specificity, references to filenames, versions and line numbers of the code they allege is infringing along with details for each item as to why they think its theirs, who (to their knowledge) has had access to it, who (to their knowledge) has ownership rights to it and why they think it was IBM that put it into Linux. This was an order of the court with a hard deadline and the judge spelled things out extremely clearly at the hearing.
Quite frankly sixty pages of evidence at that level of detail is not enough to back up the craptacular garbage they have been spewing for the last nine months.
Further, for a case of this scale and at the level that they are supposed to be working, turning in a 60 page brief at this stage is so *spectacularly* pathetic as to be insulting. If they were a serious plaintiff (rather than the scumbag vexatious litigants that they are) then they should have had a pretty good answer for the sort of questions IBM have been asking when they started the case. Whining about how difficult it has been, what with the holidays and everything, is the final nail in the coffin of their credibility for the judge - when you are party to a 3 billion dollar suit, holidays don't *exist* for your officers and litigation team. To then follow up with a further whinge about how you can't give everything you were asked for until IBM accede to your discovery requests after the judge *specifically* ruled that you were getting nothing from IBM until you provided this discovery just beggars belief - its the very essence and epitome of chutzpah
In fact SCO's behaviour is *so* outrageous that I strongly suspect they are trying to piss the judge off enough that she does something procedurally stupid as she vapourises the case and so give them grounds for an appeal. Its the only thing that makes anything like sense to me at this stage - the executives at SCO and Canopy, although technically clueless, aren't stupid and this has the requisite low cunning and weaselly logic that would appeal to them. I think they have misjudged their opposition however - if IBM's lawyers are anything like they are reputed to be then they are alive to this possibility and they won't let such a mistake happen.
What you have missed is that the current officers of SCO are technically clueless, predatory scumbags (sociopaths is the clinical term but I prefer scumbags) who lie like a rug to the press (where there are few sanctions) and then twist and weasel out of their wild claims several months later when in court (where perjury and being found in contempt are valid concerns).
They will be smacked, hard, by the magistrate at the hearing on the 23rd and I think there is a strong chance that the case will be dismissed with prejudice if IBM ask for a summary judgement.
Yup - the only people who have actually been on the recieving end of real (albeit incredible) threats from SCO are those who had a previous relationship with them.
This is a very good reason not to have anything to do with these guys in any way, shape or form.
IANAL yadda yadda... if you receive a letter from these clowns seek legal advice yadda yadda...
Slashdot Mirror
Or get a bit fancier (which I suspect you'll have to) and list any email addys you challenge on a provisional whitelist and only move them over to the real whitelist once they've correctly responded.
This allows you to get funky with the provisional list - add time expiry rules, move addys to a blacklist if they screw up the challenge more than a few times, scan the provisional list for 'spammy' IP ranges etc etc
As with any arms race the ideal is to use layered defences and a mix of techniques, so whitelists have a part to play, but so do blacklists, reputational systems, cryptographic signatures and so on.
Regards
Luke
If the parent had RTFA, he/she would've seen that this option was discussed and discounted. The author's conclusion was that if you automate the whitelisting solution in the email infrastructure then spammers can figure out a way to game the automation.
Personally I feel that is overly pessimistic, but I don't design protocols for a living and I haven't really thought hard about the spamming problem at a strategic level so I'm not really qualified to comment.
Regards
Luke
Nope. The turned-to-stone trolls appear in the theatrical cut, the extended edition added Sam's bit of dialogue calling attention to their presence.
Regards
Luke
Regards Luke
Really? Where? All I see is a bunch of borderline flammage about a problematic Exchange upgrade and some dodgy COM implementations and then one post made after your reply to mine which missed (or ignored) the point of the original argument.
Here's my third point restated more clearly:
MSoft has acquired a defacto monopoly of the desktop OS.
The monopoly on the desktop is a bad thing because it allows them to raise the barriers to entry for competitors and permits them extract an ongoing monopoly rent from their locked in customers. This is a market failure that leads to the less than efficient distribution of resources across the wider economy and, absent external intervention, it is unlikely to be self-correcting.
Indeed the secure bastion of MSoft's desktop OS monopoly has permitted MSoft to extend its monopoly into the desktop application space and seek to expand into other nearby competitive areas (eg. servers, game consoles, peripherals etc). So not only is the monopoly not self-correcting it is actively seeking to grow more powerful and more dominant.
Basically my contention is that Monopolies Are Bad, which has been a staple of economic theory since Adam Smith. Are you arguing contra?
That's probably because it is a term, not an argument. Its also not mine, which is why the thing has quotation marks around it. I prefer 'rent' as being a more accurate description of the situation (in a technical economic sense) - but you know that already 'cuz you snipped that bit out when you responded to my post.
No it's a "Microsoft Rent" (the excessive profit part of it anyway). MSoft are able to impose higher than market-rate prices by virtue of their monopoly lock in. Their customers (OEMs chiefly) have little choice but to accede to these prices (and other onerous MSoft contractual terms) if they want to stay in the computer business. Contrariwise, I have a great deal of choice when it comes to getting a haircut, eating out or having my car serviced, which is why the money paid for these products and services cannot accurately be described as a "hairdressing rent", or even a "hairdressing tax".
MSoft's excessive profit is economically suboptimal and, left undisturbed, leads to a self-reinforcing concentration of power and wealth which is Bad-with-a-capital-B both for the economy and for wider society. I don't know how I can say this any clearer or simpler.
You might argue about how much of MSoft's profits are a monopoly rent, but given their ability to steeply discount their products and services as soon as a significant customer seriously starts looking at alternatives makes it very difficult (IMO impossible) to argue that there hasn't been any monopoly gouging going on since the mid-90s at least (I would contend earlier but its a moot point).
Underneath the invective there are some serious points being made here. There are significant network benefits and efficiencies derived from having one (or a few) consistent technical architecture. The question is whether those advantages outweigh the consequential costs.
Clearly we
I'm not actively chasing this down at present because I've got a bunch of other techie chores to do at home before I go back to getting WiFi to work (including mothballing the XP install in favour of Linux so it might be a moot point). Needless to say I will *not* be happy with WiFi s/ware that won't run under (in XP parlance) a restricted user. We shall see.
Regards Luke
When WinXP Home edition ships with an out-of-the-box install that doesn't start you off as passwordless Administrator (sorry 'Owner') with all services running and provides some way to upgrade to a properly implemented file permissioning system without requiring use of CACLS from the command line, then you will have a point. Until that day you don't.
MSoft *say* they are taking security seriously these days, but their marketing/usability reflexes are still calling the shots when tradeoffs have to be made. While that remains true there will always be too many people running Winboxen with Admin privileges for comfort.
Regards
Luke
That's a sizeable chunk of change in anyone's book.
Regards Luke
Firstly it isn't deuchmark (or even deutschmark) - Munich is in the Eurozone these days.
Secondly, IBM are acting as lead contractors on this migration so a certain percentage of those 35 MegaEuros will be ending up in Armonk, NY at some point along the line.
Thirdly the grandparent was criticising MSoft's monopoly lock-in as bad for the small-e economy (ie on general economic grounds in that it is effectively a rent upon all economic activity) rather than the big-E economy (ie the US balance of payments). In any case why should a bunch of regional civil servants in Germany be bothered about the US economy when it comes to deciding their IT strategy?
Efficiency is going to be lower if MSoft is able to command an ongoing monopoly premium on its software prices. The MSoft 'tax' (actually a rent) represented by their monopoly premium, acts as a general drag anchor upon the economy. The excess profits derived from this monopoly would be more efficiently utilised within the economy as reduced unit costs or increased profits for MSoft's customers and/or competitors.
Of course distinguishing between MSoft's 'honest' profit and its 'excess' is a tricky proposition at the best of times - made harder by the natural human inclination towards rent-seeking (and the fact that this natural inclination is, in MSoft's case, bankrolled by an enormous warchest built up from earlier excess profits).
Because they think that the MSoft monopoly is a Bad Thing economically (see above) and view their proprietary formats as a bulwark of that monopoly?
Because they don't like the way that MSoft breaks their formats every few years in order to encourage people to upgrade their software?
Because they don't want essential interactions with legal and governmental agencies to require the software products of a single company?
Because they are archivists who want a document format that will be readable in 50 years time?
Because they want assurances that the document format won't leak interesting metadata when published?
Regards Luke
Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that. Sounds like a good stopgap fix. Thanks. Of course now the ADSL is playing up (was fine earlier in the week) and I've managed to use the Mandrake control centre to configure Linux into (non-functioning) winmodem mode and can't it get back to the default LAN mode so there's still plenty of mucking about and twiddling to be done this weekend... g/f is starting to voice concern that a Mac might have been a better idea, so I'd better get cracking. Regards Luke
... using Mandrake 9.2 and there are some minor personal nitpicks for her:
1 - initial impression of Gnome was good, but she immediately picked up on a tendency to laggy-ness. If it continues to grate I'll have to look at alternative graphical managers (I can sell the availability of alternatives as a plus of course).
2 - her HP Jornada won't play with Linux so it looks like we'll have to keep the XP partition for the timebeing (suits me - I can use it for games that don't run under Wine...).
3 - the scanner is playing up so that's something I need to troubleshoot over the weekend. Doing this sort of project while working away during the week is a major pain BTW - telephone calls from frustrated g/f and nothing to be done for 3-4 days *isn't* a good selling point.
4 - she thinks the time it takes to boot into Linux is excessive.
However the major roadblock (possibly a deal-breaker) is the f*cked up OEM version of WinXP that gets shipped with Compaq boxen these days. What it means is that after installing Linux, any time you opt to boot into Windows (to export contacts from Exchange ready for Evolution fer instance) it spots that the MBR has been altered by the bootloader and initiates the 'Recovery for Morons' mode (meaningful explanation of what is going on? nada; option to flip into an 'I Know What I'm Doing' mode and tell it to STFU? nope). The only options, apart from aborting and going back to Linux, are where to Recover from (partition or DVD) and of course either process takes 10-15 minutes, zeroes your box back to factory settings (bang go any security patches, config changes, user settings and the like) and blows out the bootloader (so you have to go through the Mandrake installation routine to reinstate Linux again).
I gather that Compaq, or rather HP, are obliged to provide full installation media upon request; so that's the *other* thing I'm doing this weekend (beyond the valentines thang that is) and as soon as they arrive I'm doing a proper install and blitzing the recovery partition - I could care less about Compaq's warranty support...
I'm an obstinate SOB however and do this sort of thing for a living; if Linux-on-the-Desktop really gets some mass-market traction in the next year or two I can forsee whole swathes of the general public hitting this Windows Recovery Tango on recent vintage OEM machines and running screaming from the Penguin unless some primers that cover this issue are made a prominent part of the online resources.
Regards
Luke
PS
Another gripe I have with XP (only 1?) is the Simple Security Model forced upon you by the Home Edition. I gather that booting into Safe Mode gets you around this irritatingly idiotic example of MSoft's 'helpfulness' and makes the security tabs available within Windows Explorer, but the OEM-crippled piece of cr*p I have seems to think that Safe Mode isn't necessary now that you have their groovy Recovery feature. Anyone know how to get to it? Its not offered as an option during startup or shutdown at present.
Cats are a poor example of animal culture, descended as they are from a solitary species. Their interactions are pretty simple (as noted in your post) and taken in the round cats are pretty dumb.
Dogs on the other hand are social carnivores and have the capability for far more complex social behaviour as a consequence. Dogs and wolves are pretty bright - much more so than cats.
A common idea people have about cats and dogs is that cats are smarter than dogs, because they can't be told what to do by their keepers whereas dogs will make endless fools of themselves in order to please their alpha. This is mistaken however and merely interprets a cat's solipsistic narcissism as evidence of some form of a higher, machievellian intellect.
In fact cats don't play the fool for their parent/keeper figures because they don't have the capability to form these social pair-bonds, which are the linchpin of pack/band formation.
Regards
Luke
That's why the collection of papers make a point of referring to *individualised* species. Its not to say that social insects aren't a fascinating and productive area of study but their forms of intelligence and social organisation are such a radically different thing that its questionable how applicable conclusions drawn from insect studies are to mammalian or avian sociability.
Regards
Luke
Its not arbitrary at all.
You need to include an exponent to factor out the effects of the cube/square law and there have been plenty of cross-species studies (and unfortunate mishaps - check out the story of the elephant who got dosed with LSD back in the early 60s) that back up a scaling factor of around ^0.7 or so.
Regards
Luke
Regards Luke
It all depends upon which jurisdiction you are operating in, but generally speaking everywhere recognises 'fair use' provisions which would make your first scenario legal provided no one else d/loaded the MP3s. If someone else did d/load the tracks and you don't have permission from the copyright holder then you are guilty of infringing distribution and liable to some fairly serious legal penalties (provided an interested party can be bothered to sue you for it). Note that if you were in Canada (rather than, say, the US) you would be covered by the media levy for copyright holders they have their and your distribution would be kosher - I have no idea if this would apply if you were to distribute to someone outside Canada however.
The second scenario would follow the first insofar as distribution is concerned, but some jurisdictions (notably the US with the DMCA) make it an offence to bypass or crack DRM. In which case you could find yourself liable for circumventing the DRM even if you were in the clear with respect to distributing copyrighted material.
Regards Luke
Uncertainty.
If we haven't found evidence of life before we introduce areonaughts and then we *do* find evidence of life, there'll always be the suspicion that what we found hitch-hiked in on the manned mission.
Of course if there actually *isn't* any life whatsoever on Mars for us to find, then eventually we'll have to draw a line under the search and go ahead with a manned mission - but given what we have discovered about extremophiles on Earth in the last couple of decades it'd be a damn shame if we didn't give the search a decent crack of the whip.
Regards
Luke
I have a less optimistic view of humanity. In the situation postulated by the grandparent (war to the knife - an all out struggle for national or political survival) enough people on all sides are willing to 'do whatever is necessary' to ensure that things spiral down into barbaric cruelty across the board pretty damn quickly. The various resistance movements in Europe during WWII are a good example from recent history.
The US as a society is fortunate not to have been placed into such a desperate situation recently - even WWII wasn't really a life-or-death issue for the US (WWIII would have been if WWII had gone badly of course, but I digress). Nevertheless there was enough bad stuff going on in the ACW and the Revolutionary War to give an idea of what we're talking about.
Regards Luke
Although the group in York are the lead team, it is actually an EU project (there's a clue to this in the project name - which was the restaurant in Italy where the idea was first kicked about). The main benefit will be achieved (assuming the project is successful) in the sparsely populated south and the former comecon countries who are joining the EU later on this year. Regards Luke
That's the iTunes service part of the deal. Jobs basically greased up and bent over for the RIAA. The labels get pretty much the same deal as they do for physical media, but don't have to pay many of the corresponding costs plus they get a DRM trojan horse into the consumer electronics sector - what's not to like?
My understanding is that the iPod is generating a healthy profit however - for Apple, iTunes are the driver for iPod sales.
Regards
Luke
I'd pretty much resigned myself to knocking together a little permissioning applet as a front-end to CACLS for my g/f, but it'd be nice not to have that chore if there's an alternative.
Regards Luke
What you are missing is the fact that SCO are lying, predatory scumbags who are engaging in vexatious litigation in order to run a pump-and-squeeze number on their stock price.
To date SCO officers have cleared a total of several millions in stock options that they got at pennies per share back in '01-'02 and (more importantly) Canopy Group have extracted a *much* bigger slice of cash by 'selling' one of their other wholly-owned subsidiaries to SCO for a chunk of nicely inflating SCO stock.
Follow the money trail and all becomes clear. I suspect that SCO are attempting to provoke the court into making a procedural error when ruling against them, so they can continue to run out the clock by appealling the case to a higher court. I predict that even if the bench and IBM do a watertight job and no procedural errors are made, they will *still* appeal the case; in all probability this is what Boise has been retained for.
Regards
Luke
They have to provide, with specificity, references to filenames, versions and line numbers of the code they allege is infringing along with details for each item as to why they think its theirs, who (to their knowledge) has had access to it, who (to their knowledge) has ownership rights to it and why they think it was IBM that put it into Linux. This was an order of the court with a hard deadline and the judge spelled things out extremely clearly at the hearing.
Quite frankly sixty pages of evidence at that level of detail is not enough to back up the craptacular garbage they have been spewing for the last nine months.
Further, for a case of this scale and at the level that they are supposed to be working, turning in a 60 page brief at this stage is so *spectacularly* pathetic as to be insulting. If they were a serious plaintiff (rather than the scumbag vexatious litigants that they are) then they should have had a pretty good answer for the sort of questions IBM have been asking when they started the case. Whining about how difficult it has been, what with the holidays and everything, is the final nail in the coffin of their credibility for the judge - when you are party to a 3 billion dollar suit, holidays don't *exist* for your officers and litigation team. To then follow up with a further whinge about how you can't give everything you were asked for until IBM accede to your discovery requests after the judge *specifically* ruled that you were getting nothing from IBM until you provided this discovery just beggars belief - its the very essence and epitome of chutzpah
In fact SCO's behaviour is *so* outrageous that I strongly suspect they are trying to piss the judge off enough that she does something procedurally stupid as she vapourises the case and so give them grounds for an appeal. Its the only thing that makes anything like sense to me at this stage - the executives at SCO and Canopy, although technically clueless, aren't stupid and this has the requisite low cunning and weaselly logic that would appeal to them. I think they have misjudged their opposition however - if IBM's lawyers are anything like they are reputed to be then they are alive to this possibility and they won't let such a mistake happen.
Regards
Luke
What you have missed is that the current officers of SCO are technically clueless, predatory scumbags (sociopaths is the clinical term but I prefer scumbags) who lie like a rug to the press (where there are few sanctions) and then twist and weasel out of their wild claims several months later when in court (where perjury and being found in contempt are valid concerns).
They will be smacked, hard, by the magistrate at the hearing on the 23rd and I think there is a strong chance that the case will be dismissed with prejudice if IBM ask for a summary judgement.
Regards
Luke
Yup - the only people who have actually been on the recieving end of real (albeit incredible) threats from SCO are those who had a previous relationship with them.
This is a very good reason not to have anything to do with these guys in any way, shape or form.
IANAL yadda yadda... if you receive a letter from these clowns seek legal advice yadda yadda...
Regards
Luke