The funny thing is that they are perfectly legal to import and the government has to *prove* that the challenged toilet bowl was not a pre-existing one grandfathered in.
The rights written about in the US Constitution are rights of the people granted by God. The rights do not cease when crossing boundaries. It is just the government's respect for such rights which may change.
Rregarding your question of a declaration of war, if some drunk idiot fires a potshot across the border, does that mean that the US and Canada are at war? Of course not, since it was not a conscious act of the state. They tend to call these things 'border incidents'. But states do have their relationship suffer if there is an increase of such cross-border incidents without reaction from the source state's government or if the source state isn't taking reasonable precautions to minimize such incidents at all.
The point is to raise the seriousness of attacks and to fit cyber acts into existing law framework. Take a look at militia statutes and you will find some very good law on the subject, frankly it's the only body of law that covers such things.
They do get into a load of marketing trouble if they were to hike their license fees on their IP since this customer unfriendly action would be reflected in revised TCO numbers and whadda ya know Windows becomes much more expensive than Unix.
The fact that they were less expensive than the commercial Unix variants was one of their strong points on the volume low/medium segments of the market.
Quietly, without much fanfare, I've been prepping to move our IT out from under MS's thumb into a standards based, platform neutral infrastructure. I doubt I'm the only Network Admin to be doing this.
The government wants to have its cake and eat it too. It has had a decades old policy of counting encryption technology as munitions so why doesn't the 2nd amendment come into play? Just because our arms are electronic doesn't mean that the penumbra of the 2nd amendment doesn't cover them. Self defense does apply with all the benefits and risks associated with it. It's just that human shield situations (zombie computers) exist much more frequently in electronic fights than in physical ones.
The laws exist, it's just laws that leftists are uncomfortable with so the available tools and precedents are not taken advantage of because too many of our defenders come from the left tradition. That's not to say that they need to change their voting patterns (or at least it's not germane to this discussion) but they have their own blind spots just like people coming from the right tradition do.
I know, I know, we've invested a lot of capital to have encryption code escape from the munitions designation. But we don't oppose the idea that encryption or other technology can be dangerous, we oppose the law because it's stupid, hindering the good guys while leaving the bad guys with all the technology they need. This also happens to be the argument that the NRA uses on most gun control measures they oppose. Could we have allies we didn't even know about?
Are you saying that Unix systems are inherently unadministrable securely by an offsite technician? I think not. If Apple doesn't do it, I can think of a dozen companies offhand that would be glad to pick up the support slack. And the need to share a password can be fixed by having a bootable CD that boots the system in a controlled way that allows the tech to securely log in but only from a particular IP block or set of MAC addresses and you need a particular security key (probably public key) as well.
Let's face reality, if tech support told a windows user to fdisk their hard drive at least a significant minority would actually do it. For most normal users (non-nerds) you call these people because you trust them. Giving a tech admin access to fix your admin problems is not unreasonable, at least it's as reasonable as giving your car to a mechanic instead of fixing it yourself.
Would the moving costs plus payroll increases be worth the benefit to not be broken up? That would require MS economists to calculate the economic advantage of their monopoly position. Now that would be an interesting document for a future subpeona.
The ability to put restrictions on the sale of Microsoft's products would run right straight into NAFTA. An example of how this currently works is, i kid you not, toilet bowls.
It's now illegal to produce in the US any toilet bowls that have the classic 5 gal tank. They aren't illegal in Canada. Therefore, lots of people cross the border, buy Canadian, and bring them back, duty free, into the US. Does anybody seriously think that the eco-nazis really like this and would stop it if they could?
Nope, the restrictions that could be put on MS sales are probably quite minor unless we want to get rid of NAFTA and at that point you run right smack into the big three auto makers and much of the old mainline economy that is manufacturing in Canada and Mexico precisely because of NAFTA advantages.
Frankly, I think that the right solution was always to put BillG and SteveB in jail for RICO violations (longstanding criminal conspiracy to defraud ISVs by hiding pieces of the Win32 API and purposefully breaking software compatibility then lying about it). No breakup, no MS going over the border, but it would send exactly the right message. Unfortunately, the Democrats are addicted to the idiocy that is anti-trust and the Republicans can't see past their free market slogans to do the legitimate regulation that all governments must do in any real market, remove the dishonest.
Why would there be any confusion? When a mac mounts an IBM formatted floppy, the OS puts a very readable IBM on the icon. When it's a Mac floppy, no IBM.
Oh, you mean you were trying to continue the FUD that Mac's can't read IBM floppies years after they made that standard in the OS? Shame on you.
Since this mouse is likely to come out after Mac OS X the call will more likely involve having the tech telnet in and fix what is wrong. And what's so nightmarish about that?
If the license agreement says that by using the software I have agreed to sell them my first born for use as spare body parts, I am pretty sure that this portion of the license agreement would be deemed unenforceable in any court of law. In fact, I've seen some joke licenses require that and equally silly clauses.
Perhaps any software purchased directly from a vendor should be paid by check with a contract on the back. "By cashing this check you are agreeing to waive all UCITA rights". I've seen AT&T use exactly this strategy to get people to change their long distance.
Does anybody have access to Lexis/Nexis searches? perhaps we could get some listings of articles with negative references to Apogee or its games. If we were to notify the copyright holders that they would be in violation of UCITA by republishing their own articles, that might wake up the press.
The problem isn't so much what you are talking about, you are largely correct that there is a portability v/extra features tradeoff on all compilers. What's disturbing and really should give anybody pause are the screaming maniacs in MS leadership who tell their underlings to make software less compatible, break interoperability, and generally screw with anybody they perceive as direct competition.
This leads to computing disasters like the code to generate spurious errors in DR-DOS. The case just got settled for gobs of money but it isn't likely the only instance of MS code tampering, just the one that had enough money for lawyers to drive it to settlement at decent terms. It's this executive pressure for hidden code tampering to make MS less interoperable with their ISVs and competitors that makes MS a walking, talking disaster waiting to happen. Use their tools if you must but stay near a lifeboat if they decide *you* are a threat to them.
My point is that you shouldn't have to watch out. A good vendor IMO is one who gives you good results but leaves the interoperability and portability doors open without you having to watch for sneaky tricks and steering towards the vendor's own OS.
You, individually, may be smart enough to look beyond the steering efforts and negotiate the minefields. But the fact that you need to do that influences your code like it or not and it also influences the code that other's write and you use. Code that steers you towards a partcular OS can be avoided by a % but the aggregate effect is that the platforms that are being steered towards get more software and those being discouraged will have less. This leads to lowered practical OS choices for even the smart programmers who don't submit to steering.
That first hit of crack is generally on discount/free as well. The problem with MS dev tools is the same as the problem with most MS products, they are working hard to lock you into using only their products. In the case of development tools they have a history of also tweaking your code so that it is not portable or not as efficient on other platforms (see the whole J++ mess for great examples). In other words, by using their tools you become a co-conspirator in the march to MS world domination.
You speak about the 'RightWay(TM)' as whatever works for each person. I believe that the argument over which way is right is about what are appropriate criteria for determining what works best.
How much is code portability worth to you? How much is the peace of mind that the IDE vendor isn't sabotaging your code behind your back worth to you? Do you even think these things are issues?
I actually was one of those people born inside a communist state. I can assure you that I wasn't engaged in calling myself an idiot or a murderer. A communist is one who actually believes and acts to advance that belief whether in word or in deed without having a gun put to his head. Thank you for the straw man, NEXT!
OTOH: I am interested in hearing your justification for the Catholic bashing. Nobody is arguing that the Catholic Church was running the death camps in WW II and certainly the Jews of the time had kind words for the pontiff's stands as a leader thumbing his nose at the Axis in the middle of their power. The accusations only started coming years later and it is sad to see off the wall bigotry like you posted above. Shame on you.
Actually the 'none of your business' attitude was enshrined by the peace of Westphalia which ended the thirty years war. When you don't have at least some 'none of your business' involved in the affairs of nations then any busybodies can reach inside your borders and force you to change your policies as long as they are stronger and are willing to use that strength to enforce their own preferences.
The unravelling of Westphalia is going to lead to more war as people decide that it is OK to get into each other's business and the inevitable backlash will lead to asymetric warfare and other low intensity style conflicts.
After killing off 100 million of their own subjects during the last century in lots of different countries using many, many variations of communism, it's kind of hard to gain any enthusiasm for the proposition that we should still differentiate between good communists and bad communists. This is on par with scrupulously maintaining the distinction between the 'smart' flat earthers and the 'dumb' flat earthers. Give it up already!
Let's face it, at this point, there aren't any good communists, there are just those who have blood on their hands and can't live with the fact that they were a part of the machinery of evil (and are thus in major denial), those who look forward to getting in the power seat and don't mind blood on their hands in future, and those fellow travellers who can't admit to themselves and others that they have been supporting a monstrous unadulterated evil.
Actually, the state reserves to itself a monopoly on actual violence which is why companies have to buy legislation in order for your door to get busted down, otherwise they would just hire Sandline to settle it all for them.
Corporations in democratic republics are usually fairly restrained creatures by comparison to what they end up being in places like China where they are overwhelmingly government dominated. The Chinese army (PLA) has thousands of businesses that they actually use to meet payroll. Labor negotiations in such places are conducted with the full knowledge that the boss has tanks and can use them at any time.
One problem is when you are degenerating from a democratic republic to a corporatist state (my take on the US). You have the theoretical restraints of the Constitution but ever more frequently they don't hold as government has gotten beyond the control of the people and corporations are successful at buying law.
I've had windows computers fail to respond to the 'three fingered salute' plenty of times. I've even had a few so screwed up that they lost track of their power switches (which, like the iMac, were not simple hardware switches).
You may want to look up and see if the iMacs have the latest firmware. I believe that there was a stability helping fix published try http://asu.info.apple.com/ and click on the search for the imac updates link
Most mac service calls that I've done in my 13 years of mac experience were resolved by:
1. clean up the desktop (command+option on startup) 2. Boot with CD and run disk repair 3. zap PRAM (command+option+P+R) 4. Boot without extensions (shift) and then use extension manager to figure out which of your extensions has gone corrupt or is conflicting (many reboots follow). Then you reinstall if it is corrupt or if it is a load order problem, you change the spelling of one of the extensions (they load alphabetically) so that they load in the proper order.
Oh, now you want to get technical on me! B-) Actually, being a party is not a requirement.
source= http://www.duhaime.org/dict-a.htm
Affidavit A statement which before being signed, the person signing takes an oath that the contents are, to the best of their knowledge, true. It is also signed by a notary or some other judicial officer that can administer oaths, to the effect that the person signing the affidavit was under oath when doing so. These documents carry great weight in Courts to the extent that judges frequently accept an affidavit instead of the testimony of the witness.
All governments are socialistic by nature. They seek to survive, thrive, and enlarge. The success of the US is based on the fact that the government has, for most of its history, been far more hobbled than other governments, so while the governments of Europe were driving their best and brightest out, the US govt. seemed much less hostile.
The adblocker code is going to be largely irrelevant, just forcing people to pull their adserving machines back into their own domains. Whoopie. Somebody (doubleclick?) is even going to offer it as a trivial code drop-in that they will kindly manage and you are back at square one except that if you want to get around the adblocker you are going to have to get in bed with an ad agency and accept them touching your server.
Since selling the ad cookie data is going to be part of people's income, doubleclick can just aggregate the code dumps into exactly the sort of profiling as before with exactly the same privacy implications.
Your purchasing preferences are information, and like all other information it wants to be free too.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is that they are perfectly legal to import and the government has to *prove* that the challenged toilet bowl was not a pre-existing one grandfathered in.
Here's to civil disobedience flushing!
DB
The rights written about in the US Constitution are rights of the people granted by God. The rights do not cease when crossing boundaries. It is just the government's respect for such rights which may change.
Rregarding your question of a declaration of war, if some drunk idiot fires a potshot across the border, does that mean that the US and Canada are at war? Of course not, since it was not a conscious act of the state. They tend to call these things 'border incidents'. But states do have their relationship suffer if there is an increase of such cross-border incidents without reaction from the source state's government or if the source state isn't taking reasonable precautions to minimize such incidents at all.
The point is to raise the seriousness of attacks and to fit cyber acts into existing law framework. Take a look at militia statutes and you will find some very good law on the subject, frankly it's the only body of law that covers such things.
DB
They do get into a load of marketing trouble if they were to hike their license fees on their IP since this customer unfriendly action would be reflected in revised TCO numbers and whadda ya know Windows becomes much more expensive than Unix.
The fact that they were less expensive than the commercial Unix variants was one of their strong points on the volume low/medium segments of the market.
Quietly, without much fanfare, I've been prepping to move our IT out from under MS's thumb into a standards based, platform neutral infrastructure. I doubt I'm the only Network Admin to be doing this.
DB
The government wants to have its cake and eat it too. It has had a decades old policy of counting encryption technology as munitions so why doesn't the 2nd amendment come into play? Just because our arms are electronic doesn't mean that the penumbra of the 2nd amendment doesn't cover them. Self defense does apply with all the benefits and risks associated with it. It's just that human shield situations (zombie computers) exist much more frequently in electronic fights than in physical ones.
The laws exist, it's just laws that leftists are uncomfortable with so the available tools and precedents are not taken advantage of because too many of our defenders come from the left tradition. That's not to say that they need to change their voting patterns (or at least it's not germane to this discussion) but they have their own blind spots just like people coming from the right tradition do.
I know, I know, we've invested a lot of capital to have encryption code escape from the munitions designation. But we don't oppose the idea that encryption or other technology can be dangerous, we oppose the law because it's stupid, hindering the good guys while leaving the bad guys with all the technology they need. This also happens to be the argument that the NRA uses on most gun control measures they oppose. Could we have allies we didn't even know about?
DB
Are you saying that Unix systems are inherently unadministrable securely by an offsite technician? I think not. If Apple doesn't do it, I can think of a dozen companies offhand that would be glad to pick up the support slack. And the need to share a password can be fixed by having a bootable CD that boots the system in a controlled way that allows the tech to securely log in but only from a particular IP block or set of MAC addresses and you need a particular security key (probably public key) as well.
Let's face reality, if tech support told a windows user to fdisk their hard drive at least a significant minority would actually do it. For most normal users (non-nerds) you call these people because you trust them. Giving a tech admin access to fix your admin problems is not unreasonable, at least it's as reasonable as giving your car to a mechanic instead of fixing it yourself.
DB
Would the moving costs plus payroll increases be worth the benefit to not be broken up? That would require MS economists to calculate the economic advantage of their monopoly position. Now that would be an interesting document for a future subpeona.
DB
The ability to put restrictions on the sale of Microsoft's products would run right straight into NAFTA. An example of how this currently works is, i kid you not, toilet bowls.
It's now illegal to produce in the US any toilet bowls that have the classic 5 gal tank. They aren't illegal in Canada. Therefore, lots of people cross the border, buy Canadian, and bring them back, duty free, into the US. Does anybody seriously think that the eco-nazis really like this and would stop it if they could?
Nope, the restrictions that could be put on MS sales are probably quite minor unless we want to get rid of NAFTA and at that point you run right smack into the big three auto makers and much of the old mainline economy that is manufacturing in Canada and Mexico precisely because of NAFTA advantages.
Frankly, I think that the right solution was always to put BillG and SteveB in jail for RICO violations (longstanding criminal conspiracy to defraud ISVs by hiding pieces of the Win32 API and purposefully breaking software compatibility then lying about it). No breakup, no MS going over the border, but it would send exactly the right message. Unfortunately, the Democrats are addicted to the idiocy that is anti-trust and the Republicans can't see past their free market slogans to do the legitimate regulation that all governments must do in any real market, remove the dishonest.
DB
Why would there be any confusion? When a mac mounts an IBM formatted floppy, the OS puts a very readable IBM on the icon. When it's a Mac floppy, no IBM.
Oh, you mean you were trying to continue the FUD that Mac's can't read IBM floppies years after they made that standard in the OS? Shame on you.
DB
Since this mouse is likely to come out after Mac OS X the call will more likely involve having the tech telnet in and fix what is wrong. And what's so nightmarish about that?
DB
If the license agreement says that by using the software I have agreed to sell them my first born for use as spare body parts, I am pretty sure that this portion of the license agreement would be deemed unenforceable in any court of law. In fact, I've seen some joke licenses require that and equally silly clauses.
Perhaps any software purchased directly from a vendor should be paid by check with a contract on the back. "By cashing this check you are agreeing to waive all UCITA rights". I've seen AT&T use exactly this strategy to get people to change their long distance.
DB
Does anybody have access to Lexis/Nexis searches? perhaps we could get some listings of articles with negative references to Apogee or its games. If we were to notify the copyright holders that they would be in violation of UCITA by republishing their own articles, that might wake up the press.
DB
The problem isn't so much what you are talking about, you are largely correct that there is a portability v/extra features tradeoff on all compilers. What's disturbing and really should give anybody pause are the screaming maniacs in MS leadership who tell their underlings to make software less compatible, break interoperability, and generally screw with anybody they perceive as direct competition.
This leads to computing disasters like the code to generate spurious errors in DR-DOS. The case just got settled for gobs of money but it isn't likely the only instance of MS code tampering, just the one that had enough money for lawyers to drive it to settlement at decent terms. It's this executive pressure for hidden code tampering to make MS less interoperable with their ISVs and competitors that makes MS a walking, talking disaster waiting to happen. Use their tools if you must but stay near a lifeboat if they decide *you* are a threat to them.
DB
My point is that you shouldn't have to watch out. A good vendor IMO is one who gives you good results but leaves the interoperability and portability doors open without you having to watch for sneaky tricks and steering towards the vendor's own OS.
You, individually, may be smart enough to look beyond the steering efforts and negotiate the minefields. But the fact that you need to do that influences your code like it or not and it also influences the code that other's write and you use. Code that steers you towards a partcular OS can be avoided by a % but the aggregate effect is that the platforms that are being steered towards get more software and those being discouraged will have less. This leads to lowered practical OS choices for even the smart programmers who don't submit to steering.
DB
That first hit of crack is generally on discount/free as well. The problem with MS dev tools is the same as the problem with most MS products, they are working hard to lock you into using only their products. In the case of development tools they have a history of also tweaking your code so that it is not portable or not as efficient on other platforms (see the whole J++ mess for great examples). In other words, by using their tools you become a co-conspirator in the march to MS world domination.
You speak about the 'RightWay(TM)' as whatever works for each person. I believe that the argument over which way is right is about what are appropriate criteria for determining what works best.
How much is code portability worth to you? How much is the peace of mind that the IDE vendor isn't sabotaging your code behind your back worth to you? Do you even think these things are issues?
DB
They call it Sherlock.
Mac OS X
DB
I actually was one of those people born inside a communist state. I can assure you that I wasn't engaged in calling myself an idiot or a murderer. A communist is one who actually believes and acts to advance that belief whether in word or in deed without having a gun put to his head. Thank you for the straw man, NEXT!
OTOH: I am interested in hearing your justification for the Catholic bashing. Nobody is arguing that the Catholic Church was running the death camps in WW II and certainly the Jews of the time had kind words for the pontiff's stands as a leader thumbing his nose at the Axis in the middle of their power. The accusations only started coming years later and it is sad to see off the wall bigotry like you posted above. Shame on you.
DB
The unravelling of Westphalia is going to lead to more war as people decide that it is OK to get into each other's business and the inevitable backlash will lead to asymetric warfare and other low intensity style conflicts.
DB
After killing off 100 million of their own subjects during the last century in lots of different countries using many, many variations of communism, it's kind of hard to gain any enthusiasm for the proposition that we should still differentiate between good communists and bad communists. This is on par with scrupulously maintaining the distinction between the 'smart' flat earthers and the 'dumb' flat earthers. Give it up already!
Let's face it, at this point, there aren't any good communists, there are just those who have blood on their hands and can't live with the fact that they were a part of the machinery of evil (and are thus in major denial), those who look forward to getting in the power seat and don't mind blood on their hands in future, and those fellow travellers who can't admit to themselves and others that they have been supporting a monstrous unadulterated evil.
DB
Corporations in democratic republics are usually fairly restrained creatures by comparison to what they end up being in places like China where they are overwhelmingly government dominated. The Chinese army (PLA) has thousands of businesses that they actually use to meet payroll. Labor negotiations in such places are conducted with the full knowledge that the boss has tanks and can use them at any time.
One problem is when you are degenerating from a democratic republic to a corporatist state (my take on the US). You have the theoretical restraints of the Constitution but ever more frequently they don't hold as government has gotten beyond the control of the people and corporations are successful at buying law.
DB
I've had windows computers fail to respond to the 'three fingered salute' plenty of times. I've even had a few so screwed up that they lost track of their power switches (which, like the iMac, were not simple hardware switches).
You may want to look up and see if the iMacs have the latest firmware. I believe that there was a stability helping fix published try
http://asu.info.apple.com/
and click on the search for the imac updates link
Then why is it that the Apple icon wasn't used?
DB
Most mac service calls that I've done in my 13 years of mac experience were resolved by:
1. clean up the desktop (command+option on startup)
2. Boot with CD and run disk repair
3. zap PRAM (command+option+P+R)
4. Boot without extensions (shift) and then use extension manager to figure out which of your extensions has gone corrupt or is conflicting (many reboots follow). Then you reinstall if it is corrupt or if it is a load order problem, you change the spelling of one of the extensions (they load alphabetically) so that they load in the proper order.
DB
Oh, now you want to get technical on me! B-)
Actually, being a party is not a requirement.
source= http://www.duhaime.org/dict-a.htm
Affidavit
A statement which before being signed, the person signing takes an oath that the contents are, to the best of their knowledge, true. It is also signed by a notary or some other judicial officer that can administer oaths, to the effect that the person signing the affidavit was under oath when doing so. These documents carry great weight in Courts to the extent that judges frequently accept an affidavit instead of the testimony of the witness.
DB
All governments are socialistic by nature. They seek to survive, thrive, and enlarge. The success of the US is based on the fact that the government has, for most of its history, been far more hobbled than other governments, so while the governments of Europe were driving their best and brightest out, the US govt. seemed much less hostile.
DB
The adblocker code is going to be largely irrelevant, just forcing people to pull their adserving machines back into their own domains. Whoopie. Somebody (doubleclick?) is even going to offer it as a trivial code drop-in that they will kindly manage and you are back at square one except that if you want to get around the adblocker you are going to have to get in bed with an ad agency and accept them touching your server.
Since selling the ad cookie data is going to be part of people's income, doubleclick can just aggregate the code dumps into exactly the sort of profiling as before with exactly the same privacy implications.
Your purchasing preferences are information, and like all other information it wants to be free too.
DB