The RIAA has been threatening prosecution under a law (the DMCA), that gives them a 30,00 dollar penalty at base, or 5 times that (150,000 per incident) if they can prove willfullness. They are being taken to court under RICO, a law aimed at organized crime, yet that law only allows 3x damages, and requires proving criminal intent, which seems to be a lot higher standard than willfulness. It's a good thing for the RIAA that the "cruel and unusual" clause doesn't automaticly apply to civil suits, or that very fact would shoot down the DMCA.
Why do they have a special law that lets them come down harder on file sharers than victims of the mob can fight back against mobsters? Do we really need a law that is tougher on copyright violators than the law is allowed to get on Drug Kingpins, Murder for Hire rings, or general Racketeers?
Actually, this is a pretty close metaphor. Real pirates killed people. They tortured them to get that treasure. They kidnaped people for ransom and often they defaulted on the promise to return them and killed them anyway. They raped. In many cases, they bore arms against the militarys of their former nations in time of war, which fits the general definition of Treason. Calling copyright violators pirates IN COURT is simply an attempt to emotionally influence the jury. Further, a lawyer has taken oaths and claims to abide by ethical standards, some of which require them to attempt to speak accurately in using legal terms in court, and, as anybody should know, Piracy is first a legal term in a court, and only secondarily at best a metaphor.
I just downloaded the NSA's version of the Linux 2.6 Kernal, which they are distributing freely as a highly secure Linux. (Truth). Next time I'm there, I'll have to see if they've posted Echelon's source code.
It's patentable in part because XML's not like HTML. HT means hypertext, and since HTML is allegedly object oriented, effectively, the claim is that the objects all have the properties of being parts of (hyper)text. X means Extensible. so if you accept that XML is object oriented, the objects can be almost anything you can shoehorn in there. (I know that OOP is mostly a buzzword when it comes to markup languages, but tell that to the Patent Office). The patent Office's view may well be: Since X can be a lot of things the originators never expected, Microsoft's method can make some of those possible objects in XML actual. That meets the tests for novelty and non-obviousness that are part of Patent claims. Since we don't know just what objects can now be better constructed in XML by using this Microsoft patented method, we can't argue that anyone would easily see the obviousness of an application. Trying to say the same about HTML would be (roughly) like claiming that someone had implemented capitalzation and bold face text, but italics or underlining were not obvious steps from there. (With that said, I am not a Lawyer).
Design patents are normally very easy for courts to arbitrate, and only occasionally can they be abused. For example, the Apple trash icon doesn't allow an action against Microsoft for any of their standard Recycle bin Icons, or against the triple arrow recycle sysmbol as used by Next and some Gnome/KDE ports.
Apple has used the broader look and feel patent for their whole Aqua desktop to restrain freeware graphics designers from doing ports of the Aqua desk to Lightstep, Windowblinds, and so on, but they are only able to do that because the freeware graphics artists can't possibly afford to fight a lawsuit over the limits of look and feel. You can argue that it's still being abused, but how on earth can we write law so that a single citizen of limited means just can't possibly be pushed around by a corporation no matter what - If Apple wanted to sue some random guy who lived in L.A. for breathing air colored Aqua, they probably could make his life miserable even on that flimsy pretext. The public usually trusts that big companies have better things to do with their money than obviously frivolous lawsuits against random victims. (Or is your point that that trust is breaking down).
Apple's DRM patents are probably stooping to the level of Microsoft's DRM "trusted computing" patents. You don't say whether any of IBM's patents are either for design elements in software or for DRM, so without specifying, it's kind of comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges, You may well be right, but I'd like to see more specifics. By the way, IBM doesn't hold thousands of patents, they hold tens of thousands, but a lot of them are for hardware, and it's hard to argue for restricting hardware patents on the basis of these software patent abuses.
Since they're going to have take a ride on what is essentially a carousel first, I propose we put laser vivisection gear at the end of it (faster and less painful). Some mice may make it past the devices, and try to run. NASA will need to have someone trained to track down these runners. Since the experiment intends to simulate Martian conditions, the mice will be tracking sand with them as they flee, so we could make it more cost effective if the hunters clean that up, too, and we could call them sandmen.
Foo still falls through wire screen floors in 1/3 G nicely. Even for older experiments in microgravity, a small downward air flow, adding only about a 0.5 cm/second/second to the forces acting on the mouse, was enough to keep things about as clean as most privately owned mice have it.
IQ definitely has a strong relationship to the chance the criminal gets convicted. The only other factor that has similar impact is economic status. There are even some theories about why this should be a meaningful, cause and effect type relationship for both cases. Problem is, that makes it very difficult to prove anything at all about the relationship of IQ and crime if we include criminals who haven't gotten caught. In the same way, its hard to find anything meaningful in our data on the relationships of social class and crime if we look at only the non-economic aspects of class.
I'm starting the Open source Nano-society, the Free Nanoware Foundation, and writing the first draft of the GNNPL(Gnn's not Nano Public Liscence), even as we speak. Please donate.
Right, but it's many orders of magnetude more radioactive because it is decaying many orders of magnetude faster. It can't be emitting a lot of radiation and not decaying fast at the same time. A fleck of Fermium or Mendelyevium big enough to see with the naked eye will emit enough radiation to kill you in minutes at 10 yards. However, its half life is a small fraction of a second, so it won't stay that hot long enough for you to get it out of the particle accelerator where it was made and get exposed to it.
Actually, there's reasons to think that a low rate of errors makes evolution proceed faster (Counter-intuitive though that sounds). Very infrequently is good.
Nature doesn't seem to be "trying" to avoid evolving better copying, it's just gotten as good at it as it can, and there's only so much one can do to avoid errors with a chemical encoding method, when most of those errors proceed from more fundamental physics. (In simpler words, when a carbon 14 atom that is actually part of a DNA molecule decays, or a stray gamma ray knocks the crap out of everything, there is no chemical way to stop a transcription error from occuring).
Nature is often perfectly cool with stagnation. A lot of bacterial forms have been unchanged for more than a billion years, and if those cute, cuddly little Coelicanths want to swim around looking just like their ancestors of 500 million years ago, nature sometimes decides that's just fine, and coos over them.
Anything self replicating is also made of hundreds of thousands of parts, or more. Usually, they're called genes and proteins. Cars are also capable of some elements of reproduction - a car CAN typically transport all of the parts to assemble another car to bring those parts together in the same location, even if it has to make several trips - cars ARE quite deliberately designed to do some stages of building themselves, and not to have anything to do with other stages.
Cars exist in small numbers. There's not even a billion (American units) of them in the world today. Complex life apparently developed from simpler molecular compounds in the seas of the early Earth. These compounds were just as far from true reproduction as cars at one point, but they were two dozen orders of magnetude more numerous, had processes replacing them if they got broken down, and had half a billion years to get lucky once. What looks absurd for a few hundred million cars over a hundred years, (especially from the viewpoint of the car's self aware external support systems that could consiously choose to withdraw that support), looks inevitable for 10E26 cars with an automatic support system called nature, over half a billion years.
That's not likely to be a goal of the present crop of terrorists, unless they know of some specific political figures with a targetable medical condition. On the other hand, a new crop of Marxist types might well want to target new medical breakthroughs, as a way of aiming at the "Oligarchs". "Greens" with terrorist ambitions might see this as a version of infrastructure hits.
Short form, we shouldn't be worried about the next generation of UBL'oids thinking along these lines, but that still leaves the next Unabomber.
Let's see. The UK is generally a bit farther north than France, and has more rainy days. That means passive solar and active solar technologies have more problems. Growing Rapeseed for fuel-oil or Gasahol grade corn both have lower yields than France too, and per hectare prices for farm land are higher in the UK. The UK has depleted its coal reserves faster and more thoroughly than France as well, largely because they started this industrial revolution stuff earlier.
Despite having less incentive than the UK, France has made nuclear power work pretty well financially, and the UK seemingly just plain can't. Congratulations original poster, you have just proved this is a political problem and not a technological one.
"try to fix, break, try to fix again, break even worse, before you finally figure it out. I sure wouldn't risk doing that with a car."
You probably should, at least a little. Maybe try doing your own plugs or oil change once, just to get a feel for it. Yes there are things you shouldn't risk, but fewer than you probably think. I screwed up with where I hooked the keeper springs, the first time I did my own brake shoes. That sounds really dangerous or expensive, but it's really just a reason to test the car away from other people's cars, take it slow at first, and in the end, an extra hour re-reading that part of the Chilton's manual and getting it exactly right the second time.
It's that oh so uncommon sense. The first thing you ever fix yourself on a car should not be the brakes, and the first thing you ever fix on a PC shouldn't be the power supply. You work up, by installing a few DIMMs or a CD drive, before you try the tricky stuff. You keep priorities clear - frying yourself or another person is a much bigger deal than frying a motherboard.
"Hi, I'm Bob. I bought a cheap little ole Web TV. Then I put the money I saved into a new Eventruder power-boat. If y'all think I'm really lame for not having that Pimpium 8 with lebenty leben K now, just raise your hands, and y'all can stay on the beach while my real friends go waterskee'un!"
I can't deny your points about popularity, but there are some mitigating factors that need to be mentioned. How long an exploit remains unpatched is a huge factor. Nothing really new makes it out to the script kiddee level until the real discoverers exploit it privately for a few months.
What's disturbing about MS products is that users have been hit harder by minor variant viruses finding a way around previously patched bugs, than by the actually novel exploit, and people who give a damn about security and do cooperate with good practices aren't seeing nearly as much improvement in their chances as they should.
I know that last point is a bit subjective - just how much safer is not being totally clueless going to make you? - Answer: YMMV.
Certainly, if Linux, (or BSD, or OS X) had 18 times its current market share, there would be about 18 times as many people trying to find holes in it. There might even be 18 times as many genuinely original viruses, worms, and trojans written. (I think it would be somewhat better, maybe only 9 times instead of 18, but you could well be right).I don't think there would be 18 times as many minor variants and kit bashed exploits as there are now, following on those, and I don't think those minor variants would spread as effectively or do as much damage (economically speaking at least).
I've found that Mac calls tend towards the extremes. If the problem is relatively simple, i.e. if the user had just RTFM'ed it would be solved, then it's usually simpler for me to straighten out than on a windows box (whether 98, XP or other).
If the problem is something like bad 3rd party drivers, it ends up taking longer on a Mac. Less stuff on a Mac involves undocumented features, vulnerabilities, and just plain bad default settings, but when it does, Mac tech support seems to take more time and levels before I get someone clueful, I spend more time reading bits of mac support manuals that turn out not to be relevant, I hunt through more docs to find that one bit of info that's the real key to the problem and so on. I'll still support Win 95 (grudgingly), or NT 3.0, but I'm having to draw the line with macs and say no pre-OS X support, as it's just too likely it will take more time than it's worth. That's from the paying customer's view as much as mine.
The concrete level answer is given in the article and several replies to Saeed al-Sahaf's post. There's also a more abstract point about IP law here that I'm not seeing mentioned.
One of the big issues I have with copyright law, is the period it now covers is much longer in the past, but at the same time, the rest of IP law makes the natural period it applies to shorter even as the legal period gets longer. Here, IP considerations make the natural lifespan of the games more and more closely tied to the sales life of one and only one console, which is currently a period of only about 3 years. Meanwhile the gap between that and the corporate held copyrights on the game content is now 95-3=92 years (!). No wonder there's a lot of pressure to bootleg orphanware.
1. Whoever wrote this virus isn't just doing it because he was paid. It's not his job. Why? If he was doing this professionally, for organized crime, he'd know leaving clues in the virus that might help trace it back to those organized criminals would get him D-E-A-D. 2. Claiming that he's just doing his job helps fuel those folks that think SCO is doing this to themselves. Again, if that's true, the moment they read "Andy" in the news, Darl and Co. will be trying to cut this guy loose so he doesn't drag them down. The best way for them to do that, short of stooping to organized crime's level and shooting him, would be to announce they have found the culprit, one of their own programmers, who was "Working as a double agent for the enemy Linux zealots, and did everything without SCO's permission". Notice that hasn't happened. 3. If "Andy" doesn't work for SCO or Organized Crime, then why say "just doing my job". If he actually hates SCO as much as it appears at first, and that's not a ruse, the claim does further damage to SCO, as it encourages the "SCO did it to themselves" faction, and may result in more rumors and potentially damage SCO. Remember, if "Andy" is a genuine SCO hater, he thinks the virus will damage SCO, so he is likely to think FUD directed against them will as well. 4. But this makes the "just doing my job" line a lie. Ergo, "Andy" is at least very likely to be a lie too. Why? Because "Andy" has told one lie already AND because lieing like that has the secondary effect of helping hide his real identity, so why not do it some more once you've started.
1. Wireless keyboard and mouse, put them in a drawer when you're just using the box for media functions.
2. put the box on a LAN, run its PC-like functions from a more "normal" PC in another room.
3. Remember the people who hide all their media components in a genuine early American style colonial maple media center just like Thomas Jefferson hid his TV in. If haing a keyboard in the living room seems tacky, think of all the people who find a TV or a VCR equally tacky.
Righto - If I build one, I'm going to try to include abilities to do other PC tasks when no one is using it for media playback. There's always some task that is too CVU intensive to play well with some others, no matter how fast the CPU. The media box can be ripping MP3s from my CDs, serving as a temporatry file repository for other boxen on the LAN, or running SETI at home/Protein Folding/pretending it's a glorified Lava Light.
There are plenty of geeks who hack software only, but people who hack hardware and are reluctant to do a little sofware tweaking is a category very close to, if not identical to, the null set.
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The RIAA has been threatening prosecution under a law (the DMCA), that gives them a 30,00 dollar penalty at base, or 5 times that (150,000 per incident) if they can prove willfullness. They are being taken to court under RICO, a law aimed at organized crime, yet that law only allows 3x damages, and requires proving criminal intent, which seems to be a lot higher standard than willfulness. It's a good thing for the RIAA that the "cruel and unusual" clause doesn't automaticly apply to civil suits, or that very fact would shoot down the DMCA.
Why do they have a special law that lets them come down harder on file sharers than victims of the mob can fight back against mobsters? Do we really need a law that is tougher on copyright violators than the law is allowed to get on Drug Kingpins, Murder for Hire rings, or general Racketeers?
Actually, this is a pretty close metaphor. Real pirates killed people. They tortured them to get that treasure. They kidnaped people for ransom and often they defaulted on the promise to return them and killed them anyway. They raped. In many cases, they bore arms against the militarys of their former nations in time of war, which fits the general definition of Treason. Calling copyright violators pirates IN COURT is simply an attempt to emotionally influence the jury. Further, a lawyer has taken oaths and claims to abide by ethical standards, some of which require them to attempt to speak accurately in using legal terms in court, and, as anybody should know, Piracy is first a legal term in a court, and only secondarily at best a metaphor.
I just downloaded the NSA's version of the Linux 2.6 Kernal, which they are distributing freely as a highly secure Linux. (Truth). Next time I'm there, I'll have to see if they've posted Echelon's source code.
It's patentable in part because XML's not like HTML. HT means hypertext, and since HTML is allegedly object oriented, effectively, the claim is that the objects all have the properties of being parts of (hyper)text. X means Extensible. so if you accept that XML is object oriented, the objects can be almost anything you can shoehorn in there. (I know that OOP is mostly a buzzword when it comes to markup languages, but tell that to the Patent Office). The patent Office's view may well be: Since X can be a lot of things the originators never expected, Microsoft's method can make some of those possible objects in XML actual. That meets the tests for novelty and non-obviousness that are part of Patent claims. Since we don't know just what objects can now be better constructed in XML by using this Microsoft patented method, we can't argue that anyone would easily see the obviousness of an application. Trying to say the same about HTML would be (roughly) like claiming that someone had implemented capitalzation and bold face text, but italics or underlining were not obvious steps from there.
(With that said, I am not a Lawyer).
Design patents are normally very easy for courts to arbitrate, and only occasionally can they be abused. For example, the Apple trash icon doesn't allow an action against Microsoft for any of their standard Recycle bin Icons, or against the triple arrow recycle sysmbol as used by Next and some Gnome/KDE ports.
Apple has used the broader look and feel patent for their whole Aqua desktop to restrain freeware graphics designers from doing ports of the Aqua desk to Lightstep, Windowblinds, and so on, but they are only able to do that because the freeware graphics artists can't possibly afford to fight a lawsuit over the limits of look and feel. You can argue that it's still being abused, but how on earth can we write law so that a single citizen of limited means just can't possibly be pushed around by a corporation no matter what - If Apple wanted to sue some random guy who lived in L.A. for breathing air colored Aqua, they probably could make his life miserable even on that flimsy pretext. The public usually trusts that big companies have better things to do with their money than obviously frivolous lawsuits against random victims. (Or is your point that that trust is breaking down).
Apple's DRM patents are probably stooping to the level of Microsoft's DRM "trusted computing" patents. You don't say whether any of IBM's patents are either for design elements in software or for DRM, so without specifying, it's kind of comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges, You may well be right, but I'd like to see more specifics. By the way, IBM doesn't hold thousands of patents, they hold tens of thousands, but a lot of them are for hardware, and it's hard to argue for restricting hardware patents on the basis of these software patent abuses.
Since they're going to have take a ride on what is essentially a carousel first, I propose we put laser vivisection gear at the end of it (faster and less painful). Some mice may make it past the devices, and try to run. NASA will need to have someone trained to track down these runners. Since the experiment intends to simulate Martian conditions, the mice will be tracking sand with them as they flee, so we could make it more cost effective if the hunters clean that up, too, and we could call them sandmen.
Foo still falls through wire screen floors in 1/3 G nicely. Even for older experiments in microgravity, a small downward air flow, adding only about a 0.5 cm/second/second to the forces acting on the mouse, was enough to keep things about as clean as most privately owned mice have it.
Try minesweeper!
IQ definitely has a strong relationship to the chance the criminal gets convicted. The only other factor that has similar impact is economic status. There are even some theories about why this should be a meaningful, cause and effect type relationship for both cases. Problem is, that makes it very difficult to prove anything at all about the relationship of IQ and crime if we include criminals who haven't gotten caught. In the same way, its hard to find anything meaningful in our data on the relationships of social class and crime if we look at only the non-economic aspects of class.
I'm starting the Open source Nano-society, the Free Nanoware Foundation, and writing the first draft of the GNNPL(Gnn's not Nano Public Liscence), even as we speak. Please donate.
That's easy to fix, just don't design your nano with pocket screws.
Right, but it's many orders of magnetude more radioactive because it is decaying many orders of magnetude faster. It can't be emitting a lot of radiation and not decaying fast at the same time.
A fleck of Fermium or Mendelyevium big enough to see with the naked eye will emit enough radiation to kill you in minutes at 10 yards. However, its half life is a small fraction of a second, so it won't stay that hot long enough for you to get it out of the particle accelerator where it was made and get exposed to it.
Actually, there's reasons to think that a low rate of errors makes evolution proceed faster (Counter-intuitive though that sounds). Very infrequently is good.
Nature doesn't seem to be "trying" to avoid evolving better copying, it's just gotten as good at it as it can, and there's only so much one can do to avoid errors with a chemical encoding method, when most of those errors proceed from more fundamental physics. (In simpler words, when a carbon 14 atom that is actually part of a DNA molecule decays, or a stray gamma ray knocks the crap out of everything, there is no chemical way to stop a transcription error from occuring).
Nature is often perfectly cool with stagnation. A lot of bacterial forms have been unchanged for more than a billion years, and if those cute, cuddly little Coelicanths want to swim around looking just like their ancestors of 500 million years ago, nature sometimes decides that's just fine, and coos over them.
Anything self replicating is also made of hundreds of thousands of parts, or more. Usually, they're called genes and proteins. Cars are also capable of some elements of reproduction - a car CAN typically transport all of the parts to assemble another car to bring those parts together in the same location, even if it has to make several trips - cars ARE quite deliberately designed to do some stages of building themselves, and not to have anything to do with other stages.
Cars exist in small numbers. There's not even a billion (American units) of them in the world today. Complex life apparently developed from simpler molecular compounds in the seas of the early Earth. These compounds were just as far from true reproduction as cars at one point, but they were two dozen orders of magnetude more numerous, had processes replacing them if they got broken down, and had half a billion years to get lucky once.
What looks absurd for a few hundred million cars over a hundred years, (especially from the viewpoint of the car's self aware external support systems that could consiously choose to withdraw that support), looks inevitable for 10E26 cars with an automatic support system called nature, over half a billion years.
That's not likely to be a goal of the present crop of terrorists, unless they know of some specific political figures with a targetable medical condition. On the other hand, a new crop of Marxist types might well want to target new medical breakthroughs, as a way of aiming at the "Oligarchs". "Greens" with terrorist ambitions might see this as a version of infrastructure hits.
Short form, we shouldn't be worried about the next generation of UBL'oids thinking along these lines, but that still leaves the next Unabomber.
Let's see. The UK is generally a bit farther north than France, and has more rainy days. That means passive solar and active solar technologies have more problems. Growing Rapeseed for fuel-oil or Gasahol grade corn both have lower yields than France too, and per hectare prices for farm land are higher in the UK. The UK has depleted its coal reserves faster and more thoroughly than France as well, largely because they started this industrial revolution stuff earlier.
Despite having less incentive than the UK, France has made nuclear power work pretty well financially, and the UK seemingly just plain can't. Congratulations original poster, you have just proved this is a political problem and not a technological one.
"try to fix, break, try to fix again, break even worse, before you finally figure it out. I sure wouldn't risk doing that with a car."
You probably should, at least a little. Maybe try doing your own plugs or oil change once, just to get a feel for it. Yes there are things you shouldn't risk, but fewer than you probably think. I screwed up with where I hooked the keeper springs, the first time I did my own brake shoes. That sounds really dangerous or expensive, but it's really just a reason to test the car away from other people's cars, take it slow at first, and in the end, an extra hour re-reading that part of the Chilton's manual and getting it exactly right the second time.
It's that oh so uncommon sense. The first thing you ever fix yourself on a car should not be the brakes, and the first thing you ever fix on a PC shouldn't be the power supply. You work up, by installing a few DIMMs or a CD drive, before you try the tricky stuff. You keep priorities clear - frying yourself or another person is a much bigger deal than frying a motherboard.
"Hi, I'm Bob. I bought a cheap little ole Web TV. Then I put the money I saved into a new Eventruder power-boat. If y'all think I'm really lame for not having that Pimpium 8 with lebenty leben K now, just raise your hands, and y'all can stay on the beach while my real friends go waterskee'un!"
I can't deny your points about popularity, but there are some mitigating factors that need to be mentioned. How long an exploit remains unpatched is a huge factor. Nothing really new makes it out to the script kiddee level until the real discoverers exploit it privately for a few months.
What's disturbing about MS products is that users have been hit harder by minor variant viruses finding a way around previously patched bugs, than by the actually novel exploit, and people who give a damn about security and do cooperate with good practices aren't seeing nearly as much improvement in their chances as they should.
I know that last point is a bit subjective - just how much safer is not being totally clueless going to make you? - Answer: YMMV.
Certainly, if Linux, (or BSD, or OS X) had 18 times its current market share, there would be about 18 times as many people trying to find holes in it. There might even be 18 times as many genuinely original viruses, worms, and trojans written. (I think it would be somewhat better, maybe only 9 times instead of 18, but you could well be right).I don't think there would be 18 times as many minor variants and kit bashed exploits as there are now, following on those, and I don't think those minor variants would spread as effectively or do as much damage (economically speaking at least).
I've found that Mac calls tend towards the extremes. If the problem is relatively simple, i.e. if the user had just RTFM'ed it would be solved, then it's usually simpler for me to straighten out than on a windows box (whether 98, XP or other).
If the problem is something like bad 3rd party drivers, it ends up taking longer on a Mac. Less stuff on a Mac involves undocumented features, vulnerabilities, and just plain bad default settings, but when it does, Mac tech support seems to take more time and levels before I get someone clueful, I spend more time reading bits of mac support manuals that turn out not to be relevant, I hunt through more docs to find that one bit of info that's the real key to the problem and so on. I'll still support Win 95 (grudgingly), or NT 3.0, but I'm having to draw the line with macs and say no pre-OS X support, as it's just too likely it will take more time than it's worth. That's from the paying customer's view as much as mine.
The concrete level answer is given in the article and several replies to Saeed al-Sahaf's post.
There's also a more abstract point about IP law here that I'm not seeing mentioned.
One of the big issues I have with copyright law, is the period it now covers is much longer in the past, but at the same time, the rest of IP law makes the natural period it applies to shorter even as the legal period gets longer. Here, IP considerations make the natural lifespan of the games more and more closely tied to the sales life of one and only one console, which is currently a period of only about 3 years. Meanwhile the gap between that and the corporate held copyrights on the game content is now 95-3=92 years (!). No wonder there's a lot of pressure to bootleg orphanware.
1. Whoever wrote this virus isn't just doing it because he was paid. It's not his job.
Why?
If he was doing this professionally, for organized crime, he'd know leaving clues in the virus that might help trace it back to those organized criminals would get him D-E-A-D.
2. Claiming that he's just doing his job helps fuel those folks that think SCO is doing this to themselves. Again, if that's true, the moment they read "Andy" in the news, Darl and Co. will be trying to cut this guy loose so he doesn't drag them down. The best way for them to do that, short of stooping to organized crime's level and shooting him, would be to announce they have found the culprit, one of their own programmers, who was "Working as a double agent for the enemy Linux zealots, and did everything without SCO's permission". Notice that hasn't happened.
3. If "Andy" doesn't work for SCO or Organized Crime, then why say "just doing my job". If he actually hates SCO as much as it appears at first, and that's not a ruse, the claim does further damage to SCO, as it encourages the "SCO did it to themselves" faction, and may result in more rumors and potentially damage SCO. Remember, if "Andy" is a genuine SCO hater, he thinks the virus will damage SCO, so he is likely to think FUD directed against them will as well.
4. But this makes the "just doing my job" line a lie. Ergo, "Andy" is at least very likely to be a lie too. Why? Because "Andy" has told one lie already AND because lieing like that has the secondary effect of helping hide his real identity, so why not do it some more once you've started.
1. Wireless keyboard and mouse, put them in a drawer when you're just using the box for media functions.
2. put the box on a LAN, run its PC-like functions from a more "normal" PC in another room.
3. Remember the people who hide all their media components in a genuine early American style colonial maple media center just like Thomas Jefferson hid his TV in. If haing a keyboard in the living room seems tacky, think of all the people who find a TV or a VCR equally tacky.
Righto - If I build one, I'm going to try to include abilities to do other PC tasks when no one is using it for media playback. There's always some task that is too CVU intensive to play well with some others, no matter how fast the CPU. The media box can be ripping MP3s from my CDs, serving as a temporatry file repository for other boxen on the LAN, or running SETI at home/Protein Folding/pretending it's a glorified Lava Light.
There are plenty of geeks who hack software only, but people who hack hardware and are reluctant to do a little sofware tweaking is a category very close to, if not identical to, the null set.
"Sorry.. case of premature submission."
According to my e-mail cache, there's a pill you can get for that...