Some of this would apply more in a civil suite. A level of irresponsibility in applying patches that makes the hacked machine owner say 5% responsible for what was done would allow civil claims, even if it was far short of shifting criminal responsibility. I, for one, would still worry about the law claiming building your house with a carport instead of a fully enclosed garage was sufficent to count, to continue your analogy. By they way, I recommend using the full name of the mal-prog MS-Blaster, simply because Microsoft seems to want everyone to forget that first part.
Still, it looks like the theatrical release will have two of the endings, and leave off the ones that are more problematic for the average viewer (That's not a swipe at the audience's intelligence - I just mean that nothing in the first two films has explained why Sauron's fall will coincide (roughly) with a new calender and a fourth age, so people going just by the movies would see some of the cast sail off into the rain, with no reason to suspect it had any added significance worth ending the movie there.) This is about as good as can be done in a mere 9 hours, and I wish some of the people complaining had seen the Ralph Bakshi or Rankin-Bass adaptations to get an idea of how bad it could have been.
Count them:
1. The ring gets destroyed.
2. Aragorn gets crowned.
3. The scouring of the shire.
4. Sailing to the west.
With all that, Film 3 still has to get in some middle, like Shelob, The Witch King's final death, Denethor's pyre scene, maybe even Aragorn's taking the Paths of the Dead. Endings 1 and 2 just about have to be there, as the name of the film is Return of The King, and the build up to the ring's distruction has to be wrapped up. Ending 3 is bitter sweet by itself without 4, or it will have to be dumbed down. Personally I want ending 4 to make it. That will probably wait for the Director's Cut too.
Whoops, I know better than to say "there" evaluation instead of "their" - Sorry! While we're at it, here's several commas (,,,,). please feel free to add them if it makes phrases such as "second most common unsolicited" read better. Unused commas may be saved for other posts.
The US generally doesn't close the polls at 6 pm. This is because we also don't make much effort to educate employers that they have to let people attend the polls, we have many citizens who are afraid it would have a negative impact on their jobs to invoke that particular right. (When I worked polls I heard at least 3 people who showed up right before close of polls and had to wait in line, bitch about how they didn't trust their supervisor not to let leaving the workplace to vote influence there evaluation, every single time. It was the second most common unsolicited comment I heard, right after, "Why can't I pick a president from one party and a vice president from another?"). Given that other comment, I don't know if there are that many bad employers or just a lot of foolish sheep among the voters, but either way we cater to keeping the polls open to 8 or 9, then expecting the results by the 11 pm news. Lengthening that 2 hour window to 6 hours or so would definitely help.
This is just a hunch, mind you, the sort of thing you feel like you know without knowing how you know it, but reading this newest SCO thread, I got a strong premonition that this case has reached the stage where, by the time it is all over, some people connected are going to be dead, by what at least looks like suicide. If I'm right, you can call me psychic, or say it was a subconsious awareness of similarities between this case and Worldcon and other previous ones, but I'm willing to go on record with the prediction either way. (And If I AM right, I'm gonna claim first post to the thread that will doubtless result).
IBM has a vested interest in making any investment firm that might have actually helped SCO think better of doing the same thing again. It doesn't matter from their perspective if this was the result of corruption or stupidity. The penalty however, may matter, as if some of these firms were just stupid, they may stay in business with just a big, but non-lethal hit to their reputation and bottom line. If they are shown to be that crooked, they won't, as their investors will sue on top of IBMs actions and the court's. Even for the just stupid case, IBM will benefit because any of those firms who say anything negative about IBMs own stock will be seen as just suffering from sour grapes syndrome for years to come.
IBM can't really discover that Microsoft is (or for that matter isn't) behind this. What they can do is find evidence that points to a possibility, and try to convince the court to start on a discovery process. IBM's evidence doubtless won't point to Microsoft directly, but to brokerage firms, the SCO parent Canopy group, and others, and tracing it through multiple layers would be necessary. IBM simply can't trace it that far until the court is willing to question these intermediaries. This is not the sort of thing where you can hire prvate detectives and get photos of secret meetings, unless you want to waste money getting evidence that a judge will refuse to admit. Even SCO itself has too good a legal team to allow that sort of evidence in, and anyone else behind them likely has better. However, if MS is behind SCO's acts, they had better be worried. After all, being bigger than anyone else on their side also means they have deeper pockets.
You say of course local governments get involved.. as though this was the dictate of God on high and not merely one option. Then you stoop to personal insults unworthy of any rational adult. Your abusive conduct merely demonstrates you have not bothered to develop a real arguement, or are incapable. You also fail to grasp entirely one of my points, which is that when you give governments the power to interfere in the ways I mentioned, you have given them the power to do the very sorts of things you so evidently disapprove of.
1. If there was a chemical reaction that could produce energy on the nuclear level, it would disrupt nuclear processes - So whatever elements it happened between would transmute each other on contact. Look around. Do you see any natural element below the radioactive ones on the periodic table that is undergoing alchemical style (i.e. lead to gold style) transmutation to another element? No? Then there is a peak limit for how much power you can get out of any chemical battery, and it's lower than the weakest natural nuclear reactions observed. 2. The most electromotive elements are the reactive metals, like Potassium, Calcium, and Sodium at one end, and Florine and Clorine at the other. The reactive metals burn on contact with cold water, and the problems with handling the reactive gasses are legion. Batteries generally work with an anode and a cathode of two different mentals or metal compounds. Electrodes are generally made from metals in the middle of the electromotive range, like Pb, Cd, Cu, Ni, and even Hg, and their compounds. To get better energy storage per weight than zinc, nickel or cadmium just about always means working with something more reactive for at least one electrode. So "better" batteries are generally more environmentally damageing, or pose bigger health risks to humans working with them.
3. There is a metal with electromotility better than oxygen or clorine gas. It's called Gold. Unfortunately it is hard to get gold to react with chemicals, it's heavy, and it's just a touch expensive.
The government isn't hiding anything from us. The government is a tool that is used to hide things from us, but often isn't even told what it is they should hide. People like Ashcroft aren't privy to some big plan that tells them the inside scoop and why the rest of us aren't supposed to know, they are functionaries who help hide things because someone is dangling the chance of actually getting to be on the real inside, in the know, in front of them. Probably more than half the reasons Bush, Ashcroft, and so on are doing things re. national secrecy are pseudo-reasons someone made up to manipulate them. These sombodies tend to be people with money, old family connections, and a spider-like web of strings they can pull, but they don't want to hold office personally. When one gets elected, it's because his fellows decide to put the dumb one in the public eye.
The percentage of the internet that is owned or controlled by non-US interests is steadily increasing. Europe is laying high speed backbone rapidly, mainland China is moving fairly well, and even some "third world" nations such as Malaysia are catching up at a rate that may make them "1st world" in a generation. Beyond that, Control means more than having a majority interest, it's being able to block others from reducing that interest, which the US isn't doing, and probably couldn't do if it wanted to.
1. Investors will often shy away from a company with fair profitability if the employee payroll ecxeeds about 8%. For some industries, that's closer to 5%. 2. Legal hired guns often get 20% or better for their results (for example SCO, currently, is in a 20% deal). Lawyers get a one shot profit for the company, not a continueous one, and in some cases there's a real risk it is a paper profit only, where the losing company lacks the assets to pay. Why don't investors shy away from such companies? Why doesn't a labor cost 2 1/2 to 4 times what makes them nervous look positively insanely risky as a profit model?
What country do you all live in? I only ask, because in my nation, state and local governments have spent litterally billions on building stadiums and arenas for sports. They routinely put dozens of extra police and emergency personnel on duty during sporting events at each one, often paying overtime wages. They allow impacts on traffic and travel that have often caused them to refuse parade permits to other groups wishing to practice free assembly. They consider funds for training young people to play these games to be part of educational funding, even though not one young athlete in a thousand grows up to make a living from it. Where is this land where the government is not involved?
Cutbacks in the Air-Force over the last 12 years mean many more pilots aren't ex-service, and start out owing huge student loans for their training than in the past. Private pilot training up through big jets level can cost more than a decent medical degree. Those that stick with it long enough to pay these off can do pretty well, but there is no way enough people would take the risk of a short career and being sidelined by worsening vision in middle age, or other health-safety risks, if they weren't reasonably certain they could stick it out past the loan repayment stage. Pilot's unions are far from powerful. The last few times they have tried to strike, the federal government has simply ordered them not to.
The only reson I doubt that Saddam and UBL are being deliberately left to stand as symbols is that there's also Sheik Omar, the 20th hijacker, and whomever was spreading Anthrax on the east coast, and probably some others who also haven't been caught but would be good for the US government's reputation to catch. It looks more like we are having genuine trouble than pseudo-trouble. Now watch UBL get caught 3 days before the next general election and prove me wrong.
Oh Good - If the Matrix is all an urban landscape, I can sit here looking out the window at the rolling mountains covered with glorious fall colors and the geese flying past, and think about how wonderful it is to be in reality. Now how much do they want a month again, for me to plug into a grimy city with extra drive by shootings?
How valuable a given piece of information is can be ranked, for example on a scale of 1 to 10 (yes, this is a bit crude and approximate, please bear with me). So what happens if you would rate the info you need as a 3, say, and you type a few words into Google, and get that info, but the meta-information, that someone did a search using that particular combination of words, is rated far more valuable? For example, if Echelon is working as some claim, you might search for some terms such as "Fuel-Air Explosive" and "Ebola" for a trivial reason (You saw Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak and it sparked mild curiosity, or you ran across the phrases in a Tom Clancy novel). To you, that search is a 2. To the people supervising Echelon, the terms you combined are an 8. How much effort at privacy do you take on something you rate a 2? How hard will the NSA work at something they rate an 8?
This will happen more and more often, not just with national security, but with other cases, such as companies checking to see if their new concept has been thought of elsewhere. Now that there's Cherry, Lemon, and Vanilla Coke, It's just possilbe someone might want to know who typed in "Blueberry" and "Cola" to Google, a lot more than you wanted to know whatever you were searching for.
There certainly will be star-trek like computers, competent enough to do what you mean in a non-disasterous fashion - non-disasterous for them anyway. Those who can't be clear about what they really mean may face the major disaster of being treated as rightless sub-humans, or the minor disaster of having all the high paying fun jobs go to those machines, depending on how much we manage to keep up on some level. It will be nice if the uber-machines develop enough empathy to appreciate the plucky human who at least tries to keep up.
If MS scripting was as broken as some people say, virus writing would be limited to a few gurus, who would barely be able to coax a trick or two out of it, but wouldn't be able to make them stable enough for the script kidees. Windows scripting has to work better than that, or it wouldn't be possible to exploit it so easily. Personally, I'm getting more and more interested in its legitimate uses as I see just how much some people seem to be able to do illegitimately - Or maybe we all need to learn L33T'speak and move to AOL to become real hackurz.
Fortunately, companies that size don't usually coast downhill gracefully for decades. A big corporation can bleed out with surprising speed. Look at the amounts involved in the IBM/SCO case, and imagine MS, with declining revenues, getting into lawsuit after lawsuit with stakes that big. What MS is spending on catching virus writers is actually reasonable. What they have spent encouraging SCO is less so, and what they are spending on lobbying governments to use windows, or on developing new lines such as console gaming or net server tech is worse, as little of it has shown any profit yet. When every new action starts costing them lots of extra money to fend off the consequences of the last ill advised plan or lawsuit, they will find themselves suddenly posting a multi-billion quarterly loss, and the deadline to go broke or smarten up will be a few months rather than a few decades away.
OR, what if SCO is the stupid, greedy, bastages we all know and love, but still realized that their lawsuit was unlikely to damage open source in the long run. Maybe they even did the bidding of some evil overlord corp, but did it knowing their master's evil plot for world domination wasn't going to actually work.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of this would apply more in a civil suite. A level of irresponsibility in applying patches that makes the hacked machine owner say 5% responsible for what was done would allow civil claims, even if it was far short of shifting criminal responsibility. I, for one, would still worry about the law claiming building your house with a carport instead of a fully enclosed garage was sufficent to count, to continue your analogy. By they way, I recommend using the full name of the mal-prog MS-Blaster, simply because Microsoft seems to want everyone to forget that first part.
Still, it looks like the theatrical release will have two of the endings, and leave off the ones that are more problematic for the average viewer (That's not a swipe at the audience's intelligence - I just mean that nothing in the first two films has explained why Sauron's fall will coincide (roughly) with a new calender and a fourth age, so people going just by the movies would see some of the cast sail off into the rain, with no reason to suspect it had any added significance worth ending the movie there.) This is about as good as can be done in a mere 9 hours, and I wish some of the people complaining had seen the Ralph Bakshi or Rankin-Bass adaptations to get an idea of how bad it could have been.
Count them: 1. The ring gets destroyed. 2. Aragorn gets crowned. 3. The scouring of the shire. 4. Sailing to the west. With all that, Film 3 still has to get in some middle, like Shelob, The Witch King's final death, Denethor's pyre scene, maybe even Aragorn's taking the Paths of the Dead. Endings 1 and 2 just about have to be there, as the name of the film is Return of The King, and the build up to the ring's distruction has to be wrapped up. Ending 3 is bitter sweet by itself without 4, or it will have to be dumbed down. Personally I want ending 4 to make it. That will probably wait for the Director's Cut too.
A most trenchant commen... Oooh! Shiny!
Whoops, I know better than to say "there" evaluation instead of "their" - Sorry! While we're at it, here's several commas (,,,,). please feel free to add them if it makes phrases such as "second most common unsolicited" read better. Unused commas may be saved for other posts.
The US generally doesn't close the polls at 6 pm. This is because we also don't make much effort to educate employers that they have to let people attend the polls, we have many citizens who are afraid it would have a negative impact on their jobs to invoke that particular right. (When I worked polls I heard at least 3 people who showed up right before close of polls and had to wait in line, bitch about how they didn't trust their supervisor not to let leaving the workplace to vote influence there evaluation, every single time. It was the second most common unsolicited comment I heard, right after, "Why can't I pick a president from one party and a vice president from another?"). Given that other comment, I don't know if there are that many bad employers or just a lot of foolish sheep among the voters, but either way we cater to keeping the polls open to 8 or 9, then expecting the results by the 11 pm news. Lengthening that 2 hour window to 6 hours or so would definitely help.
This is just a hunch, mind you, the sort of thing you feel like you know without knowing how you know it, but reading this newest SCO thread, I got a strong premonition that this case has reached the stage where, by the time it is all over, some people connected are going to be dead, by what at least looks like suicide. If I'm right, you can call me psychic, or say it was a subconsious awareness of similarities between this case and Worldcon and other previous ones, but I'm willing to go on record with the prediction either way. (And If I AM right, I'm gonna claim first post to the thread that will doubtless result).
IBM has a vested interest in making any investment firm that might have actually helped SCO think better of doing the same thing again. It doesn't matter from their perspective if this was the result of corruption or stupidity. The penalty however, may matter, as if some of these firms were just stupid, they may stay in business with just a big, but non-lethal hit to their reputation and bottom line. If they are shown to be that crooked, they won't, as their investors will sue on top of IBMs actions and the court's. Even for the just stupid case, IBM will benefit because any of those firms who say anything negative about IBMs own stock will be seen as just suffering from sour grapes syndrome for years to come.
IBM can't really discover that Microsoft is (or for that matter isn't) behind this. What they can do is find evidence that points to a possibility, and try to convince the court to start on a discovery process. IBM's evidence doubtless won't point to Microsoft directly, but to brokerage firms, the SCO parent Canopy group, and others, and tracing it through multiple layers would be necessary. IBM simply can't trace it that far until the court is willing to question these intermediaries. This is not the sort of thing where you can hire prvate detectives and get photos of secret meetings, unless you want to waste money getting evidence that a judge will refuse to admit. Even SCO itself has too good a legal team to allow that sort of evidence in, and anyone else behind them likely has better. However, if MS is behind SCO's acts, they had better be worried. After all, being bigger than anyone else on their side also means they have deeper pockets.
You say of course local governments get involved.. as though this was the dictate of God on high and not merely one option. Then you stoop to personal insults unworthy of any rational adult. Your abusive conduct merely demonstrates you have not bothered to develop a real arguement, or are incapable. You also fail to grasp entirely one of my points, which is that when you give governments the power to interfere in the ways I mentioned, you have given them the power to do the very sorts of things you so evidently disapprove of.
1. If there was a chemical reaction that could produce energy on the nuclear level, it would disrupt nuclear processes - So whatever elements it happened between would transmute each other on contact. Look around. Do you see any natural element below the radioactive ones on the periodic table that is undergoing alchemical style (i.e. lead to gold style) transmutation to another element? No? Then there is a peak limit for how much power you can get out of any chemical battery, and it's lower than the weakest natural nuclear reactions observed. 2. The most electromotive elements are the reactive metals, like Potassium, Calcium, and Sodium at one end, and Florine and Clorine at the other. The reactive metals burn on contact with cold water, and the problems with handling the reactive gasses are legion. Batteries generally work with an anode and a cathode of two different mentals or metal compounds. Electrodes are generally made from metals in the middle of the electromotive range, like Pb, Cd, Cu, Ni, and even Hg, and their compounds. To get better energy storage per weight than zinc, nickel or cadmium just about always means working with something more reactive for at least one electrode. So "better" batteries are generally more environmentally damageing, or pose bigger health risks to humans working with them. 3. There is a metal with electromotility better than oxygen or clorine gas. It's called Gold. Unfortunately it is hard to get gold to react with chemicals, it's heavy, and it's just a touch expensive.
But only if the OS version counts down - 94 - 93 - 92... each time you turn it on.
The government isn't hiding anything from us. The government is a tool that is used to hide things from us, but often isn't even told what it is they should hide. People like Ashcroft aren't privy to some big plan that tells them the inside scoop and why the rest of us aren't supposed to know, they are functionaries who help hide things because someone is dangling the chance of actually getting to be on the real inside, in the know, in front of them. Probably more than half the reasons Bush, Ashcroft, and so on are doing things re. national secrecy are pseudo-reasons someone made up to manipulate them. These sombodies tend to be people with money, old family connections, and a spider-like web of strings they can pull, but they don't want to hold office personally. When one gets elected, it's because his fellows decide to put the dumb one in the public eye.
The percentage of the internet that is owned or controlled by non-US interests is steadily increasing. Europe is laying high speed backbone rapidly, mainland China is moving fairly well, and even some "third world" nations such as Malaysia are catching up at a rate that may make them "1st world" in a generation. Beyond that, Control means more than having a majority interest, it's being able to block others from reducing that interest, which the US isn't doing, and probably couldn't do if it wanted to.
1. Investors will often shy away from a company with fair profitability if the employee payroll ecxeeds about 8%. For some industries, that's closer to 5%. 2. Legal hired guns often get 20% or better for their results (for example SCO, currently, is in a 20% deal). Lawyers get a one shot profit for the company, not a continueous one, and in some cases there's a real risk it is a paper profit only, where the losing company lacks the assets to pay. Why don't investors shy away from such companies? Why doesn't a labor cost 2 1/2 to 4 times what makes them nervous look positively insanely risky as a profit model?
What country do you all live in? I only ask, because in my nation, state and local governments have spent litterally billions on building stadiums and arenas for sports. They routinely put dozens of extra police and emergency personnel on duty during sporting events at each one, often paying overtime wages. They allow impacts on traffic and travel that have often caused them to refuse parade permits to other groups wishing to practice free assembly. They consider funds for training young people to play these games to be part of educational funding, even though not one young athlete in a thousand grows up to make a living from it. Where is this land where the government is not involved?
Cutbacks in the Air-Force over the last 12 years mean many more pilots aren't ex-service, and start out owing huge student loans for their training than in the past. Private pilot training up through big jets level can cost more than a decent medical degree. Those that stick with it long enough to pay these off can do pretty well, but there is no way enough people would take the risk of a short career and being sidelined by worsening vision in middle age, or other health-safety risks, if they weren't reasonably certain they could stick it out past the loan repayment stage. Pilot's unions are far from powerful. The last few times they have tried to strike, the federal government has simply ordered them not to.
The only reson I doubt that Saddam and UBL are being deliberately left to stand as symbols is that there's also Sheik Omar, the 20th hijacker, and whomever was spreading Anthrax on the east coast, and probably some others who also haven't been caught but would be good for the US government's reputation to catch. It looks more like we are having genuine trouble than pseudo-trouble. Now watch UBL get caught 3 days before the next general election and prove me wrong.
Oh Good - If the Matrix is all an urban landscape, I can sit here looking out the window at the rolling mountains covered with glorious fall colors and the geese flying past, and think about how wonderful it is to be in reality. Now how much do they want a month again, for me to plug into a grimy city with extra drive by shootings?
How valuable a given piece of information is can be ranked, for example on a scale of 1 to 10 (yes, this is a bit crude and approximate, please bear with me). So what happens if you would rate the info you need as a 3, say, and you type a few words into Google, and get that info, but the meta-information, that someone did a search using that particular combination of words, is rated far more valuable? For example, if Echelon is working as some claim, you might search for some terms such as "Fuel-Air Explosive" and "Ebola" for a trivial reason (You saw Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak and it sparked mild curiosity, or you ran across the phrases in a Tom Clancy novel). To you, that search is a 2. To the people supervising Echelon, the terms you combined are an 8. How much effort at privacy do you take on something you rate a 2? How hard will the NSA work at something they rate an 8? This will happen more and more often, not just with national security, but with other cases, such as companies checking to see if their new concept has been thought of elsewhere. Now that there's Cherry, Lemon, and Vanilla Coke, It's just possilbe someone might want to know who typed in "Blueberry" and "Cola" to Google, a lot more than you wanted to know whatever you were searching for.
There certainly will be star-trek like computers, competent enough to do what you mean in a non-disasterous fashion - non-disasterous for them anyway. Those who can't be clear about what they really mean may face the major disaster of being treated as rightless sub-humans, or the minor disaster of having all the high paying fun jobs go to those machines, depending on how much we manage to keep up on some level. It will be nice if the uber-machines develop enough empathy to appreciate the plucky human who at least tries to keep up.
If MS scripting was as broken as some people say, virus writing would be limited to a few gurus, who would barely be able to coax a trick or two out of it, but wouldn't be able to make them stable enough for the script kidees. Windows scripting has to work better than that, or it wouldn't be possible to exploit it so easily. Personally, I'm getting more and more interested in its legitimate uses as I see just how much some people seem to be able to do illegitimately - Or maybe we all need to learn L33T'speak and move to AOL to become real hackurz.
Fortunately, companies that size don't usually coast downhill gracefully for decades. A big corporation can bleed out with surprising speed. Look at the amounts involved in the IBM/SCO case, and imagine MS, with declining revenues, getting into lawsuit after lawsuit with stakes that big. What MS is spending on catching virus writers is actually reasonable. What they have spent encouraging SCO is less so, and what they are spending on lobbying governments to use windows, or on developing new lines such as console gaming or net server tech is worse, as little of it has shown any profit yet. When every new action starts costing them lots of extra money to fend off the consequences of the last ill advised plan or lawsuit, they will find themselves suddenly posting a multi-billion quarterly loss, and the deadline to go broke or smarten up will be a few months rather than a few decades away.
Erm, that big tube he's standing on IS the power cord...
OR, what if SCO is the stupid, greedy, bastages we all know and love, but still realized that their lawsuit was unlikely to damage open source in the long run. Maybe they even did the bidding of some evil overlord corp, but did it knowing their master's evil plot for world domination wasn't going to actually work.