In all the areas that matter (compatibility, price), it is.
Price, that's a given.
Compatibility, no way. Consider that 95% of what you need to be compatible with is MS Office, what difference does it make if OO can read more formats? (and can it? I'm not so sure.) What matters is that MS Office is better at reading that 95% than OO is.
At work, I'm a Linux user in an ocean of Windows users. 90% of the stuff that's sent to me, I can read reasonably well -- sometimes (50% ?) fonts and formatting are messed up, but most of the time it's usable. But the rest of the time, I've got to find a Windows box to view thing stuff on -- or not view it at all (haven't fought with Wine to make it work.) And on the occasions that office documents are sent out of the company, or come in from other companies... 99+% of the time, they're in MS Office format.
Fair or not, MS Office wins the compatibility argument. It's not really fair that what it has to be compatible with itself, but that's the way things have worked out. Any new Office-type softwares that appear have to be able to read and write MS Office files, and not the other way around.
In the areas you're thinking of (functionality, user interface, performance), it's a toss-up.
No way. MS Office has OO beat pretty soundly there. Even performance, which is surprising.
If you're not willing/able to spend any money, and still want to be legal, OO wins handily. But the post that I was responding to was claiming that MS Office was `the worst', and it's not -- the only places where OO wins is platform compatibility and price.
Oh yeah, it's also stupid because better software exists and they have "standardized" on the worst.
You aren't saying that OpenOffice is better than MS Office, are you? It's cheaper, it runs on more platforms (which is why I use it on my Linux box for the very few cases where I need Office-type software), but other than that, it's most certainly NOT better.
I love to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy, probably more in fact, but when I'm looking for examples of great free software, OpenOffice usually isn't one of my first choices. It's slow, buggy and just as bloated as Office is -- if not more so. (AbiWord is better, but still not perfect...)
Re:Notice: Video Link
on
The BBC On RMT
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Personally I'd like to see only videos with transcripts posted on slashdot, but probably that's just me.
That would be nice. Though in this case, what set this story apart was not really the story itself (it's nothing we didn't already know) but the green screen work that Zonk mentioned. It's kinda cute seeing the reporter walking around in the WoW world -- clever. I'm surprised I haven't seem more reporters doing that.
On the plus side, at least it's a video type that plays easily under Linux (x86, granted. And only with a 32 bit browser, blech.) The flash video players really have taken the world by storm -- even msnbc.com uses them now, and now I can even see their movies without switching computers.
you should see what a felony conviction does for your life... I doubt any of these would be felonies, only misdemeanors.
Not that it couldn't get you in trouble, mind you, but it's probably not as much trouble as a felony could cause.
I guess if you were the sort of person that expected to be sued by the RIAA for this sort of thing, you'd keep your mp3s and P2P working directory on an encrypted drive, one that looks like unused space on the drive so you can't prove there is an encrypted drive, though I doubt that would be very convincing. And in a civil case, you don't have the right to remain silent (!), and they could tell you to give up the key and a refusal could get you a contempt of court charge... it gets nasty, fast.
Incidentally, how come SAMBA isn't included by default? This bit me recently when trying to move files between 2 networked (but not on the internet) computers. Because they install from a single CD, and so they can't include everything in the base install. So something has to be removed... a lot of something, in fact.
Consider that FC6 takes up the better part of a DVD, and even then they leave a whole lot of stuff in Fedora Extras, availably online rather than on the DVD.
Though Samba is pretty small, so they could have probably installed it by default easily enough. I guess the reasoning was that being a networking component, anybody who needed it was likely to have Internet connectivity to install it.
the more people downloading using the torrents, the faster it is for everyone You know, that's NOT how bittorrent works, but yet people keep saying that...
Unless you're dealing with something like multicast or broadcast, for every single byte downloaded by somebody, there's a byte uploaded by somebody else. If you're downloading from a web site, only the web server is uploading bytes (yes, I'm oversimplifying.) If you're downloading from a torrent, everybody is downloading and uploading.
Adding new members who have 0% of the file in question to a torrent does not speed things up -- they slow them down (for users already in the torrent), at least at first. As they get some of the files in question, they start uploading them to other users, so the average download rate creeps back up, but probably not higher than the original rate unless the new members permit higher than average upload speeds.
Now, if you're downloading from a web site, and you can get other users to get off the web site and go to a torrent, then your download rates from the web site will increase. Perhaps this is what you're referring to, but since this doesn't speed things up for the people already on the torrent, it's NOT faster for everyone -- just faster for those using the web site, and possibly faster for those who switched to the torrent (if the torrent is faster than the web site, which is often the case on release day.)
But torrents don't get faster and faster the more people who use them. What makes torrents speed up is 1) people with faster upload speeds (who have something to upload, which usually happens relatively quickly), and 2) people who leave their torrent going once they're done to seed. The seed/leech (for lack of better terms) ratio, and average upload speed are probably the most important factors.
Considering that it's electromagnetic waves rather than sound waves, nobody under 40 will be able to hear it either. Not with their ears, anyways.
And the `Mosquito' that you're alluding to isn't so imperceptible to adults as people would lead you to believe. I have no trouble hearing it, and I'm only 38. I don't think that two years will make the difference...
I guess it could be a new Ring Tone.
Perhaps for Bender...
In any event, at a high enough intensity, you could probably feel it -- it would likely feel warm, or hot, or instantly incinerate you -- it just depends on just how high the intensity is:)
My flashlight achieves orders of magnitude higher frequencies in a snap! Hell -- my body emits radiation that's orders of magnitudes higher. Not as high as your flashlight (at least not in any significant amount) but still much higher. I haven't found an effective way to modulate it at a high rate of speed, however.
The remote for my TV also uses frequencies orders of magnitude higher than those in this article. And it even modulates the signal! Perhaps they should not think quite so much about electronics, and think more about optics...
For work, for lab Linux boxes, I wrote a perl script that customizes the box almost immediately.
It copies some skeleton and data files from a NFS share, and uses these to edit a bunch of config files if needed (it also detects if it's needed, and leaves things alone if not. And backups are kept of the files in case it makes a mistake.)
Things updated include:/etc/hosts/etc/passwd/etc/shadow/etc/group/etc/syslog.conf/etc/inittab/etc/mail/submit.cf/etc/mail/sendmail.cf/etc/auto.master/etc/exports/etc/ntp.conf/etc/samba/smb.conf/etc/mail/aliases/root/.bashrc and others.
It also looks for certain packages, and will install them if missing (if it knows how to for this particular distribution.) It turns off services we don't use, and turns on services we do use.
It can even be added to rc.local and run every time the system reboots, and will look for changes and apply them. If the script itself has changed (there's a copy in the NFS data directory it uses) then it'll get the updated version and update itself.
It's pretty slick. It took a while to write, but it's now pretty well set up, and it can handle most of the distributions we've ever used or even looked at. I even had it working for Solaris as well, but it didn't do quite as much for Solaris, and we don't use Solaris as much so I haven't really maintained that part of it.
So, to answer the question, less than five seconds.
If you take a look at their stock (SCOX) since 2000, you will notice that they have gone from $94 to a mere $0.89. As much as I love bashing SCO, that's hardly unusual for that period of time.
For example, in the company I work for, in the same period, our stock has gone from approximately 1000 (split-adjusted) to 19 right now -- and we're even making a profit now, and weren't back then. Irrational exuberance indeed!
It's called the dot-com bubble, and lots of stocks did that.
Who is going to get a change approval from every single one of them?
It doesn't really matter, because if Linus wanted to, he could start releasing changes to the Linux kernel under GPLv3 (and it specifically said GPLv3) -- so the old code would be under GPLv2 (or really, whatever version of the GPL you preferred, because unless you specifically say what version of the GPL applies, people can pick whichever version of the GPL they want. Read section 9 from the GPL for more on that) and the new Linus provided code would be GPLv3, with all the baggage that entails.
So, if you were a company that GPLv3 punished, then you'd be punished when dealing with these new kernels, even though most of the kernel didn't have a GPLv3 specific license.
Now, this assumes that Linus wants GPLv3, which so far he does not. If he doesn't want GPLv3, somebody could attempt to sneak in some patches/new code with a GPLv3-only license, and if Linus put them into the kernel, then the kernel would then have the same GPLv3 baggage. But I suspect that Linus would reject any such patches for now, and if one was snuck in, it would probably be removed if found later.
In any event, even if the kernel remains non-GPLv3, we may find some commonly used packages going GPLv3-only -- and I'm thinking of things like gcc, binutils, fileutils, textutils, etc. If this happens (and it sound very likely), then anybody who doesn't want to be restricted by the GPLv3 restrictions will not be able to distribute updated versions of these packages. In the short term, this won't be such a big deal, but in the long term, it certainly will be.
I appreciate what the FSF is trying to do with GPLv3, but I suspect that it's going to cause the `free software movement' a lot of pain, as companies will probably try to move to BSD from Linux (and even then they won't really get away from the GPL, as the BSDs use gcc as their compiler. Perhaps there will be another gcc fork, with the official GPLv3 version and the fork still being GPLv2 or GPLvwhatever?)
Last I checked, profiling was generally legal, and only illegal under certain conditions (such as police choosing who to pull over based on race.)
And racial profiling is not the only sort of profiling done. It has been shown that drivers under 25 have more accidents -- so insurance companies charge them higher rates, and car rental places often won't rent them a car. It's age profiling... and it's not illegal, or even frowned upon (unless you're under 25, I guess.)
She advocates being a woman in public. That's still too much for some people to put up with.
But you're just guessing, aren't you? Or do you actually have some sort of inside information?
Yes, it's a reasonable guess, given the given information. But as far as I know, it's just a guess.
And really, does she explicitly advocate being a woman in public or just merely do it herself? Woman web-loggers are hardly unique or even rare. Granted, most merely yammer on about their mood or their dog or what music they're listening to (just like the male web-loggers) but a few pick more serious topics, and they don't get death threats...
A lot of the violent crimes committed against males are due to them doing something to provoke it.
So, what has Kathy Sierra done to provoke this?
I'm not saying that she did anything wrong, but these threats certainly don't seem random. Did she piss off somebody somehow? Snub somebody? Unpopular political views? Is merely being a successful, apparently intelligent woman sufficient? (I don't know anything about her beyond what's in her Wikipedia page, but she does appear to be successful and intelligent. But I wouldn't consider that to be unusual enough to warrant death threats?)
When you look at someone like Dunn who has a bunch of cancer in her body, it's pretty obvious that she didn't have the time to eat well and exercise.
You must see something I don't -- I don't see anything about her that screams that she obviously didn't have time to eat well and exercise. CEOs often are very busy with their jobs, that's true, but often they're driven to be extremely fit as well, especially the younger ones. (Not always, but often.)
Not that I know anything about Dunn. She doesn't look particularly out of shape in any pictures I've seen of her, so I don't know where this `obvious' comes from.
And even extremely healthy people, who stay fit and always eat right, get cancer. They just get it less often...
See the leading report on such statistics for further details, sources of data and so on. Fair enough -- though it's extremely close according to this chart. If you read it's chart of populations and prison populations, it doesn't actually give a figure for Prison population rate for Rwanda, and instead says `*(Prison population total includes about 53,000 held on suspicion of participation in genocide.)' But if you do the math yourself, 67,000/9.2m = 728 per 100,000, compared to the US's 738. But 738 is indeed higher than 728, so I stand corrected (but the change is relatively recent -- for comparsion, here's several earlier versions of that report.)
Though it's interesting that the authors of this report find that Rwanda's prison population isn't worth including in the rankings, presumably because so many people are being held for suspicion of genocide. But they're still being held, aren't they?
Considering every executed prisoner is one less in the headcount for next XX years, this would have a major impact. Of course. But we're talking about statistics, and you know the saying -- `there's lies, damn lies and statistics'.
If you want to make the US look bad, you say `The US has the largest per-capita prison population!' (the US used to be #1, at least until Rwanda put lots of people into prison for genocide.) If you want to make China look bad, you say China has the second largest prison population in the world! or `China probably executes more prisoners than any other country!' (I don't know if they do or not.) (I'm also guessing that China doesn't accurately report the number of prisoners they incarcerate and execute, which further skews the numbers.)
Pick any country, and you can probably find a few statistics that, by themselves, make it look bad or `the worst'.
You also said it's "not right," but I don't think anything could be righter.
Well, what I meant was `not right' is that unconsitutional laws are even made, and when they are made, they aren't immediately overturned. Nobody should have to break a law that they know is unconsitutional and then wait in jail for what could be *years* before it works it's way through the courts so that somebody can actually declare the law unconsitutional. Assuming it gets that far -- a higher court may very well decide that it doesn't want to hear that case for whatever reason, and then you're just stuck in jail.
But yes, this sort of thing should be decided by the courts. But even before that, Congress and the President should not be making laws that are unconsitutional. They took an oath to uphold the Constitution and they should do so! Yes, some thing aren't quite so clear if they're consitutional or not, but many things are quite clearly unconstitional. And even if you're not sure, you probably should do some research before you push for the law rather than pass it and let the courts work things out later.
Alas, the system I describe does not seem to exist anywhere in the real world...
If so then that part of the USAPATRIOTACT is null and void, as anything that conflicts with the Constitution in federal code is legally null and void. You know, that sounds great, but it won't be much comfort when you find yourself in a federal `pound you in the ass' prison.
Ultimately, being unconstitutional is not enough. You also need an appropriate judge to rule that it's unconstitutional, and until that happens it's really just you hoping that an appropriate judge might rule that it's unconstitutional -- if it ever comes to that.
It's not right, but it's the way it is. The current administration has been pretty loose in it's interpretation of the Constitution, and so far the other branches of government have not done much to stop it, though that may be slowly changing now. You may choose to violate the law because you know the law is unconstitutional -- and you may even be right -- but it would be wise to consider how long it might take to get things straightened out and what it'll cost you.
In college most of my waking hours were spent wandering around record stores, swap meets and record conventions, much to the dismay of the women I was ostensibly dating.
Swap meets? Then you're not their dream consumer.
Their `dream consumer' knows that buying second hand goods is theft just as clearly as downloading it off the intraweb is -- they just haven't bought laws making that illegal yet. (But don't worry -- they're working on it. The Doctrine of First Sale is just another way of stealing the fruits of the labors of the poor musicians and therefore must be destroyed. DRM is one way of achieving this goal, but it's not a complete solution.)
Sort of like saying "SUVs are safer in a collision." Well, yes, if you hit someone smaller, but if everyone owned SUVs their advantage would disappear
To be fair, this isn't really correct. Larger cars ARE, as a general rule, safer -- even if you hit another large car. A large car has more space around you to absorb the impact. So in the case of a head on collision, you slow down from 60 mph to 0 mph in 10 feet rather than 5 feet -- so the odds of you surviving are indeed signifigently higher.
As for everybody transmitting with more power, there's some benefit there as well. What matters is the S/N ratio, and with spread spectrum systems somebody else's signal is your noise and vice versa. So if you double the Signal and double the Noise, the S/N ratio doesn't change. However, this assumes that the only source of noise is other WiFi systems. If there's other noise sources (like plasma TVs, microwave ovens, etc.) then there may be some benefit to everybody using more power. I'm not saying that everybody should just use more power, but just that saying `it won't help' is simplifying things too much.
The maximum power for the 2.4GHz 802.11x is 100mW.
Actually, it's one watt, with a maximum EIRP of 4 watts (which corresponds to one watt and a 6 dBi antenna.) (You're in the US, so I'm assuming that you're talking about the US here. I am, just so there's no confusion.)
Sec. 15.247
Omni-Directional Antennas
(b) The maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator shall
not exceed the following:
(1) For frequency hopping systems operating in the 2400-2483.5 MHz
or 5725-5850 MHz band and for all direct sequence systems: 1 watt.
For the 2.4 GHz band, for point to point use, you can use a higher gain (more directional) antennna, but you have to reduce your power by 1 dB for each 3 dB of gain your antenna has over 6 dBi. For the 5.8 GHz band, you can use higher gain antennas with no power reduction for point to point connections.
I see how Cisco's documentation says 100 mW, but I'm not sure what that's about, because that's not what the FCC says. Perhaps they're referring to other countries -- I think the limit is now 100 mW in much (all?) of Europe now, for example. Perhaps that's what Cisco is referring to -- they want to make gear that can be sold outside of the US as well.)
Your antenna gain analogy took a few too many liberties. You really can't compare a dipole to an incandescent bulb, and a high gain antenna to a more efficient florescent bulb. In both cases, a good antenna is pretty close to 100% efficient for transmitting, low or high gain. The difference is that the high gain antenna sends most of the signal in one direction, and a low gain antenna (like a dipole, but a dipole does have 3 dBi of gain) sends it all over the place. A 100 watt spotlight vs. a 100 watt bare bulb is a much better analogy -- both emit the same amount of light (assuming similar efficiencies) but the spotlight sends it mostly in one direction, and the bare bulb sends it in all directions. As for which is better, it depends on what you need -- high gain antennas are not automatically better than low gain ones.
Some people would even consider this a local exploit.
Then those people would be fools. Local means local -- you have to have access to the box in question already.
Granted, as far as remote exploits go, this one is pretty hard to exploit (since it needs IPv6 and access to another box on the same subnet), but it's still a remote exploit. It just means somebody has to exploit that Windows box on the same subnet (which may be a simple matter) and use THAT to attack the OpenBSD box.
If the OpenBSD box is at a colo, the odds of having other boxes on the same subnet that could be easily hacked and used to inject this attack are pretty high.
Slashdot Mirror
Compatibility, no way. Consider that 95% of what you need to be compatible with is MS Office, what difference does it make if OO can read more formats? (and can it? I'm not so sure.) What matters is that MS Office is better at reading that 95% than OO is.
At work, I'm a Linux user in an ocean of Windows users. 90% of the stuff that's sent to me, I can read reasonably well -- sometimes (50% ?) fonts and formatting are messed up, but most of the time it's usable. But the rest of the time, I've got to find a Windows box to view thing stuff on -- or not view it at all (haven't fought with Wine to make it work.) And on the occasions that office documents are sent out of the company, or come in from other companies ... 99+% of the time, they're in MS Office format.
Fair or not, MS Office wins the compatibility argument. It's not really fair that what it has to be compatible with itself, but that's the way things have worked out. Any new Office-type softwares that appear have to be able to read and write MS Office files, and not the other way around.
No way. MS Office has OO beat pretty soundly there. Even performance, which is surprising.If you're not willing/able to spend any money, and still want to be legal, OO wins handily. But the post that I was responding to was claiming that MS Office was `the worst', and it's not -- the only places where OO wins is platform compatibility and price.
A: Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Moreville, William de Traci and Richard Brito did it.
I love to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy, probably more in fact, but when I'm looking for examples of great free software, OpenOffice usually isn't one of my first choices. It's slow, buggy and just as bloated as Office is -- if not more so. (AbiWord is better, but still not perfect
On the plus side, at least it's a video type that plays easily under Linux (x86, granted. And only with a 32 bit browser, blech.) The flash video players really have taken the world by storm -- even msnbc.com uses them now, and now I can even see their movies without switching computers.
Not that it couldn't get you in trouble, mind you, but it's probably not as much trouble as a felony could cause.
I guess if you were the sort of person that expected to be sued by the RIAA for this sort of thing, you'd keep your mp3s and P2P working directory on an encrypted drive, one that looks like unused space on the drive so you can't prove there is an encrypted drive, though I doubt that would be very convincing. And in a civil case, you don't have the right to remain silent (!), and they could tell you to give up the key and a refusal could get you a contempt of court charge ... it gets nasty, fast.
Consider that FC6 takes up the better part of a DVD, and even then they leave a whole lot of stuff in Fedora Extras, availably online rather than on the DVD.
Though Samba is pretty small, so they could have probably installed it by default easily enough. I guess the reasoning was that being a networking component, anybody who needed it was likely to have Internet connectivity to install it.
Unless you're dealing with something like multicast or broadcast, for every single byte downloaded by somebody, there's a byte uploaded by somebody else. If you're downloading from a web site, only the web server is uploading bytes (yes, I'm oversimplifying.) If you're downloading from a torrent, everybody is downloading and uploading.
Adding new members who have 0% of the file in question to a torrent does not speed things up -- they slow them down (for users already in the torrent), at least at first. As they get some of the files in question, they start uploading them to other users, so the average download rate creeps back up, but probably not higher than the original rate unless the new members permit higher than average upload speeds.
Now, if you're downloading from a web site, and you can get other users to get off the web site and go to a torrent, then your download rates from the web site will increase. Perhaps this is what you're referring to, but since this doesn't speed things up for the people already on the torrent, it's NOT faster for everyone -- just faster for those using the web site, and possibly faster for those who switched to the torrent (if the torrent is faster than the web site, which is often the case on release day.)
But torrents don't get faster and faster the more people who use them. What makes torrents speed up is 1) people with faster upload speeds (who have something to upload, which usually happens relatively quickly), and 2) people who leave their torrent going once they're done to seed. The seed/leech (for lack of better terms) ratio, and average upload speed are probably the most important factors.
...
Perhaps for BenderAnd the `Mosquito' that you're alluding to isn't so imperceptible to adults as people would lead you to believe. I have no trouble hearing it, and I'm only 38. I don't think that two years will make the difference
In any event, at a high enough intensity, you could probably feel it -- it would likely feel warm, or hot, or instantly incinerate you -- it just depends on just how high the intensity is
The remote for my TV also uses frequencies orders of magnitude higher than those in this article. And it even modulates the signal! Perhaps they should not think quite so much about electronics, and think more about optics
It copies some skeleton and data files from a NFS share, and uses these to edit a bunch of config files if needed (it also detects if it's needed, and leaves things alone if not. And backups are kept of the files in case it makes a mistake.)
Things updated include: /etc/hosts /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group /etc/syslog.conf /etc/inittab /etc/mail/submit.cf /etc/mail/sendmail.cf /etc/auto.master /etc/exports /etc/ntp.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/mail/aliases /root/.bashrc and others.
It also looks for certain packages, and will install them if missing (if it knows how to for this particular distribution.) It turns off services we don't use, and turns on services we do use.
It can even be added to rc.local and run every time the system reboots, and will look for changes and apply them. If the script itself has changed (there's a copy in the NFS data directory it uses) then it'll get the updated version and update itself.
It's pretty slick. It took a while to write, but it's now pretty well set up, and it can handle most of the distributions we've ever used or even looked at. I even had it working for Solaris as well, but it didn't do quite as much for Solaris, and we don't use Solaris as much so I haven't really maintained that part of it.
So, to answer the question, less than five seconds.
For example, in the company I work for, in the same period, our stock has gone from approximately 1000 (split-adjusted) to 19 right now -- and we're even making a profit now, and weren't back then. Irrational exuberance indeed!
It's called the dot-com bubble, and lots of stocks did that.
So, if you were a company that GPLv3 punished, then you'd be punished when dealing with these new kernels, even though most of the kernel didn't have a GPLv3 specific license.
Now, this assumes that Linus wants GPLv3, which so far he does not. If he doesn't want GPLv3, somebody could attempt to sneak in some patches/new code with a GPLv3-only license, and if Linus put them into the kernel, then the kernel would then have the same GPLv3 baggage. But I suspect that Linus would reject any such patches for now, and if one was snuck in, it would probably be removed if found later.
In any event, even if the kernel remains non-GPLv3, we may find some commonly used packages going GPLv3-only -- and I'm thinking of things like gcc, binutils, fileutils, textutils, etc. If this happens (and it sound very likely), then anybody who doesn't want to be restricted by the GPLv3 restrictions will not be able to distribute updated versions of these packages. In the short term, this won't be such a big deal, but in the long term, it certainly will be.
I appreciate what the FSF is trying to do with GPLv3, but I suspect that it's going to cause the `free software movement' a lot of pain, as companies will probably try to move to BSD from Linux (and even then they won't really get away from the GPL, as the BSDs use gcc as their compiler. Perhaps there will be another gcc fork, with the official GPLv3 version and the fork still being GPLv2 or GPLvwhatever?)
Last I checked, profiling was generally legal, and only illegal under certain conditions (such as police choosing who to pull over based on race.)
And racial profiling is not the only sort of profiling done. It has been shown that drivers under 25 have more accidents -- so insurance companies charge them higher rates, and car rental places often won't rent them a car. It's age profiling ... and it's not illegal, or even frowned upon (unless you're under 25, I guess.)
Yes, it's a reasonable guess, given the given information. But as far as I know, it's just a guess.
And really, does she explicitly advocate being a woman in public or just merely do it herself? Woman web-loggers are hardly unique or even rare. Granted, most merely yammer on about their mood or their dog or what music they're listening to (just like the male web-loggers) but a few pick more serious topics, and they don't get death threats ...
I'm not saying that she did anything wrong, but these threats certainly don't seem random. Did she piss off somebody somehow? Snub somebody? Unpopular political views? Is merely being a successful, apparently intelligent woman sufficient? (I don't know anything about her beyond what's in her Wikipedia page, but she does appear to be successful and intelligent. But I wouldn't consider that to be unusual enough to warrant death threats?)
Not that I know anything about Dunn. She doesn't look particularly out of shape in any pictures I've seen of her, so I don't know where this `obvious' comes from.
And even extremely healthy people, who stay fit and always eat right, get cancer. They just get it less often ...
Though it's interesting that the authors of this report find that Rwanda's prison population isn't worth including in the rankings, presumably because so many people are being held for suspicion of genocide. But they're still being held, aren't they?
If you want to make the US look bad, you say `The US has the largest per-capita prison population!' (the US used to be #1, at least until Rwanda put lots of people into prison for genocide.) If you want to make China look bad, you say China has the second largest prison population in the world! or `China probably executes more prisoners than any other country!' (I don't know if they do or not.) (I'm also guessing that China doesn't accurately report the number of prisoners they incarcerate and execute, which further skews the numbers.)
Pick any country, and you can probably find a few statistics that, by themselves, make it look bad or `the worst'.
But yes, this sort of thing should be decided by the courts. But even before that, Congress and the President should not be making laws that are unconsitutional. They took an oath to uphold the Constitution and they should do so! Yes, some thing aren't quite so clear if they're consitutional or not, but many things are quite clearly unconstitional. And even if you're not sure, you probably should do some research before you push for the law rather than pass it and let the courts work things out later.
Alas, the system I describe does not seem to exist anywhere in the real world ...
Ultimately, being unconstitutional is not enough. You also need an appropriate judge to rule that it's unconstitutional, and until that happens it's really just you hoping that an appropriate judge might rule that it's unconstitutional -- if it ever comes to that.
It's not right, but it's the way it is. The current administration has been pretty loose in it's interpretation of the Constitution, and so far the other branches of government have not done much to stop it, though that may be slowly changing now. You may choose to violate the law because you know the law is unconstitutional -- and you may even be right -- but it would be wise to consider how long it might take to get things straightened out and what it'll cost you.
Their `dream consumer' knows that buying second hand goods is theft just as clearly as downloading it off the intraweb is -- they just haven't bought laws making that illegal yet. (But don't worry -- they're working on it. The Doctrine of First Sale is just another way of stealing the fruits of the labors of the poor musicians and therefore must be destroyed. DRM is one way of achieving this goal, but it's not a complete solution.)
As for everybody transmitting with more power, there's some benefit there as well. What matters is the S/N ratio, and with spread spectrum systems somebody else's signal is your noise and vice versa. So if you double the Signal and double the Noise, the S/N ratio doesn't change. However, this assumes that the only source of noise is other WiFi systems. If there's other noise sources (like plasma TVs, microwave ovens, etc.) then there may be some benefit to everybody using more power. I'm not saying that everybody should just use more power, but just that saying `it won't help' is simplifying things too much.
Here is my citation, right out of the FCC regulations, 15.247. (And here it is on the FCC site itself.) :
For the 2.4 GHz band, for point to point use, you can use a higher gain (more directional) antennna, but you have to reduce your power by 1 dB for each 3 dB of gain your antenna has over 6 dBi. For the 5.8 GHz band, you can use higher gain antennas with no power reduction for point to point connections.
I see how Cisco's documentation says 100 mW, but I'm not sure what that's about, because that's not what the FCC says. Perhaps they're referring to other countries -- I think the limit is now 100 mW in much (all?) of Europe now, for example. Perhaps that's what Cisco is referring to -- they want to make gear that can be sold outside of the US as well.)
Your antenna gain analogy took a few too many liberties. You really can't compare a dipole to an incandescent bulb, and a high gain antenna to a more efficient florescent bulb. In both cases, a good antenna is pretty close to 100% efficient for transmitting, low or high gain. The difference is that the high gain antenna sends most of the signal in one direction, and a low gain antenna (like a dipole, but a dipole does have 3 dBi of gain) sends it all over the place. A 100 watt spotlight vs. a 100 watt bare bulb is a much better analogy -- both emit the same amount of light (assuming similar efficiencies) but the spotlight sends it mostly in one direction, and the bare bulb sends it in all directions. As for which is better, it depends on what you need -- high gain antennas are not automatically better than low gain ones.
Granted, as far as remote exploits go, this one is pretty hard to exploit (since it needs IPv6 and access to another box on the same subnet), but it's still a remote exploit. It just means somebody has to exploit that Windows box on the same subnet (which may be a simple matter) and use THAT to attack the OpenBSD box.
If the OpenBSD box is at a colo, the odds of having other boxes on the same subnet that could be easily hacked and used to inject this attack are pretty high.