yes, I agree this is the same risk. I think this question comes from the (misguided) assumption that FOSS is somehowe more likely to be infringing patents...
Governments are smart enough to know that the risk of patent litigation (which is small-to-none for a government, as other/. posters point out) is the same regardless of how the product is licensed. Government departments are sometimes concerned about support of FOSS, but this is typically not really their concern either -- they leave that to their technology outsourcers. These outsource companies vary in their own assesment of support availability for FOSS (I personally agree that support for FOSS it is available and reasonable, with trained and certified technicians easily hireable in Austraila, but many IT outsource companies in Australia don't share my view).
This is why take-up of FOSS is mixed in Australian government: some outsourcers recommend FOSS (IBM), others do not (EDS), and whether a particular government department has adopted FOSS usually is reflection of that technology company's recommendation (or it's agreements with non-FOSS co-suppliers...)
Or if we are really hopefull (wishfull thinking I know), they may be educated by what the see with their parent's guidance so that they may not become porn stars themselves... long shot, but one can hope...:-(
Um, isn't the issue that: a) the children who are the subject of child-porn are the main victims. b) banning such content from viewing in Australia does nothing for the poor children photographed oversees in the first place (the proposal was to filter out kid porn from outside Aust). c) "what about the children viewing the porn?" Yes indeed. And what about the other offensive things they view, like adult porn, or bestiality, or planes flying into tall buildings, or.... where is the line drawn?
Filtering is not an answer. Education, while only reaching those who's mind-share you already have, is probably the only sensible solution, and it only addresses item c. Unforturnately nothing can be done about a or b. Directly. In fact by filtering it out, you lose the opportunity to catch the adult consumers of the content, and hense lose a lead back to the perpetrators of a...
Brian Harradine is such a f*ck-wit! While he's asking inane questions, how about "Why don't we also ban general broadcasts of news involving violence during prime-time, since this exposes violence to children?". Sheesh, to think my parents vote for this dick.
I hope you're right goombah99. Personally I wonder if Dirac can be incorporated into the Xiph suite to suplement the ogg theora codec (I googled for 'xiph dirac' and already came up with a zero-content article about BBC competing for title of wierdest codec name with xiph, but nothing with more meat). I also wonder if it would be worth it, not knowing teribly much about video compression and streaming... Theora just went Alpha 2, so it's probably further along in development, if that means anything.
This sheds new light on the old "look left, look right, look left again" rule when crossing the street: In quantum, by looking at the cars, you can affect their positions!
Doesn't apply to me (I tried, nearly got run over). Maybe it works if you're blond...?
There's a pinout chart here . I suppose you could cut #23 and see what happens...
I thought it was a drastic/inconvinient approach because you have to carry the cable around with you and install it. Not good on company controlled assets (the field support guys start freeking out, stuff about waranties, it gets wierd).
Alternatively if you're going to do a mass-install for a kiosk or something, then that's a lot of cables to cut and afterwards you can't write to the discs on any of those machines.
IMHO the point of these Linux CDs is to have the Linux OS available at whichever machine you're at, without installing / munging that machine. Cutting cables doesn't seem to mesh with this. Also read only for other OSes seems out of scope because you are booting Linux. Again, I guess I don't see what you're trying to do:-)
huh?
Not sure what you're trying to achieve here, but if it's just to prevent people munging their Windoze drives, it seems pretty drastic (and darn inconvinient when you want to use Windoze again)...
Better to just mount the hard drive read-only instead:
mkdir -p/var/mnt/win-c && mount -t vfat -ro/dev/hda1/var/mnt/win-c
(assuming/var is on a RAM disk / USB key or somewhere that is writeable to MandrakeMount)
Probably MandrakeMount already does this -- Knoppix does, and it seems sensible that Mandrake would adopt Knoppix's "hands off" approach...
Slashdot Mirror
Governments are smart enough to know that the risk of patent litigation (which is small-to-none for a government, as other /. posters point out) is the same regardless of how the product is licensed. Government departments are sometimes concerned about support of FOSS, but this is typically not really their concern either -- they leave that to their technology outsourcers. These outsource companies vary in their own assesment of support availability for FOSS (I personally agree that support for FOSS it is available and reasonable, with trained and certified technicians easily hireable in Austraila, but many IT outsource companies in Australia don't share my view).
This is why take-up of FOSS is mixed in Australian government: some outsourcers recommend FOSS (IBM), others do not (EDS), and whether a particular government department has adopted FOSS usually is reflection of that technology company's recommendation (or it's agreements with non-FOSS co-suppliers...)
Or if we are really hopefull (wishfull thinking I know), they may be educated by what the see with their parent's guidance so that they may not become porn stars themselves... long shot, but one can hope... :-(
Um, isn't the issue that:
a) the children who are the subject of child-porn are the main victims.
b) banning such content from viewing in Australia does nothing for the poor children photographed oversees in the first place (the proposal was to filter out kid porn from outside Aust).
c) "what about the children viewing the porn?" Yes indeed. And what about the other offensive things they view, like adult porn, or bestiality, or planes flying into tall buildings, or.... where is the line drawn?
Filtering is not an answer. Education, while only reaching those who's mind-share you already have, is probably the only sensible solution, and it only addresses item c. Unforturnately nothing can be done about a or b. Directly. In fact by filtering it out, you lose the opportunity to catch the adult consumers of the content, and hense lose a lead back to the perpetrators of a...
I think that lead is worth keeping.
Brian Harradine is such a f*ck-wit! While he's asking inane questions, how about "Why don't we also ban general broadcasts of news involving violence during prime-time, since this exposes violence to children?". Sheesh, to think my parents vote for this dick.
I hope you're right goombah99. Personally I wonder if Dirac can be incorporated into the Xiph suite to suplement the ogg theora codec (I googled for 'xiph dirac' and already came up with a zero-content article about BBC competing for title of wierdest codec name with xiph, but nothing with more meat). I also wonder if it would be worth it, not knowing teribly much about video compression and streaming... Theora just went Alpha 2, so it's probably further along in development, if that means anything.
was thinking they would never get to the point.
like they really didn't have anything more to say.
or else the editor is a moron and just learned to use cut&paste.
Sort of like that -- and then the point of the article was exactly the same anyway...
Now I know why I keep missing all those ferral cats that I try to hit with my car.... must be Schrodinger's.... ;-)
This sheds new light on the old "look left, look right, look left again" rule when crossing the street: In quantum, by looking at the cars, you can affect their positions!
Doesn't apply to me (I tried, nearly got run over). Maybe it works if you're blond...?
There's a pinout chart here . I suppose you could cut #23 and see what happens...
I thought it was a drastic/inconvinient approach because you have to carry the cable around with you and install it. Not good on company controlled assets (the field support guys start freeking out, stuff about waranties, it gets wierd).
Alternatively if you're going to do a mass-install for a kiosk or something, then that's a lot of cables to cut and afterwards you can't write to the discs on any of those machines.
IMHO the point of these Linux CDs is to have the Linux OS available at whichever machine you're at, without installing / munging that machine. Cutting cables doesn't seem to mesh with this. Also read only for other OSes seems out of scope because you are booting Linux. Again, I guess I don't see what you're trying to do :-)
Hope the URL helps anyway...
huh? Not sure what you're trying to achieve here, but if it's just to prevent people munging their Windoze drives, it seems pretty drastic (and darn inconvinient when you want to use Windoze again)... Better to just mount the hard drive read-only instead: mkdir -p /var/mnt/win-c && mount -t vfat -ro /dev/hda1 /var/mnt/win-c
(assuming /var is on a RAM disk / USB key or somewhere that is writeable to MandrakeMount)
Probably MandrakeMount already does this -- Knoppix does, and it seems sensible that Mandrake would adopt Knoppix's "hands off" approach...