Approveded by peer review. Constantly scrutinised. Examined by thousands of competent programmers. Tested and debugged by tens of thousands. Neither the puppet McBride nor the puppet master Gates have that capability. It can only happen with open source.
In the UK, the last several extremist governments, starting with Maggie Snatcher, not having the guts to openly dismantle our National Health Service, once the envy of the world, are doing so by stealth. Blair, an alleged socialist, is doing even worse. The fact is that politics is circular, left and right meet somewhere and follow exactly the same policies. Health care will basically be a truly socialist system, with two levels, excellent for the ruling classes, and useless for everyone else.
I am amazed that the US continues to tolerate their system, or maybe poorer people don't vote. Maybe they are too sick to get to the polling station. It makes me think that in fact the US is the most socialist country on earth. All the signs are there, an elite ruling class, currently with an illegally elected president, intent on rigging the voting system to keep themselves in power, and an impoverished and ill-informed working class. A convicted monopolist continuing his vile work, seemingly with full knowledge and approval of the government. A legal system which favours only the
ruling class. etc etc.
Unfortunately the UK tends to follow US trends a few years behind, and I have to live here.....
Yes, it is not socialist at all. Socialism in all its implementations has always resulted in a two-class system, "All are equal but some are more equal than others" as George Orwell once wrote. It relies heavily on a ruling elite who by stealth and deception fool people into thinking that they will create some kind of Utopia, until the day after the election of course. In the UK we currently have a so-called socialist government, a fascist dictatorship would be a more accurate description. It does not listen to the will of the people. Chairman (or is it President?) Blair is getting worse.....
That can't happen with free software. If Linus and his associated do not deliver what people want, or get some crazy ideas about their own importance (like someone in Redmond we all like to bash), then he has no hold over anyone, they can go away and fork another kernel, not that anything I have seen so far would suggest that such an event will be necessary. Any likely forks will be to fulfil specialist needs, without bloating the main kernel tree. Because the development process is open, there is little opportunity for mistrust to develop, for example.
It would seem that if anything, free software is apolitical, but not anarchy.
Did Ballmer not say something similar to McBride a while ago? Un-American may have been one term used, which some people take to be the same as Communist. Now we see where the Gates Gang are going today, they are using McBride as part of their usual ploy to illegaly dominate the world. Then they will dump him of course. That particular empire does definitely resemble a malignant dictatorship, with a useless incompetent at the top, Pol Pot comes to mind somehow.
They can, but it will cost them, in terms of programmer's hours, and they are unlikely to get the degree of expertise which exists within the gcc team. So McBride has shot himself in the foot again.
What does stop GPL software including gcc dead in its tracks is if it has been illegally comingled with non-free software, and I think the area which almost certainly violates the GPL is the "Linux Personality Module". That needs very close examination, it may be that there is a substantial violation, maybe even sufficient to get an injunction against SCO. It could even result in SCO having to publish their kernel source. Now that would be a nice end to McBride's main source of revenue, other than stock market fraud, and Bill's petty cash, of course.
Why not alter the logging programs? Surely we are only talking about turning a few numbers into human-readable values? With sed, awk, perl....... it can't be all that difficult, if that is what you need to do.
But they have to know it is there first, and there is no requirement to use either lpd or X for a simple lineprinter, and you can obfuscate things by making a device file with a weird name which simply accesses the serial or parallel port.
The delay usually built in to the login program, which in some cases doubles at every failed attempt, would take care of this. Don't know what it is called in a network environment, in the old days of simple dial up modems or direct RS232 connection, it was done by a daemon called "getty" which was replaceable, if it did not have that feature already. Maybe it is done by pppd or something nowadays, or in a different place if you connect via ethernet instead of point to point, the same delaying tactic could still be applied, the extra code surely can't be difficult if it is not there already.
You would want to consider the netmask in addition to the address as the id to control the algorithm, so a hacker who was using random addresses would still get clobbered.
I don't have a Linux machine in front of me right now so I can't check, but I strongly suspect that all of this will have been done years ago, to deter brute force attacks. If not, why not? Maybe everyone thought someone else would do it? Maybe someone should do it pronto!
Nonetheless, a good idea. It was quite common to see logging to a 132 column printer with something like A3 size fanfold, with the green stripes, many years ago. The problem now it that inexpensive printers are inkjet, and are pageprinters, they don't want to print a line at a time, unlike the old dinosaurs. I don't even know if it is possible to buy dot matrix, inky ribbon printers any more, or even electric typewriters with an interface. If someone knows how to get line by line printout using modern, inexpensive equipment, please let us know.
The chance is about as great as Gates delivering a new OS on time, within the original memory usage and performance estimates, and with less than 10,000 new bugs. I don't think there is sufficient precision in the IEEE 80 bit floating point format to express the actual probability numerically, it is a lot less troublesome to think of it as simply ZERO. Pure mathematicians will no doubt not be impressed by such an "engineering approximation" to the truth.
IIRC Xenix was a load of junk, with numerous incompatabilities with the real Unix of its day. Nothing new in that, of course. The point about all modern variants of *nix is that they are useless unless they adhere closely to the core of Posix standards and various other conventions which are expected, thus making porting of application programs very easy compared to, for example, doing a port of an application between different versions of Windoze.
A typical Microtrash implementation would have so many incompatabilities, intentionally and otherwise, that no-one would bother to develop for it. Anyway, it has been said, by those who apparently know about how his random mind works, that Bill HATES Unix. I have always thought that the reason for his hatred was that he can't get used to using / instead of \, or maybe he just misses the BSOD several times a day.
IIRC, XP, certainly 2000, have been said to be Unix-like, or even Posix compliant, although having both at home I have been unable to find the slightest trace of anything that resembles Posix. Maybe someone can enlighten me. Among the 70,000 (IIRC someone published a figure in that region the other day) odd APIs (and within that disgraceful mess lies the source of most buggy code and programmer's misery) there does not appear to be one called fork() for example. With no fork(), nor a tolerably efficient way of simulating it, programming can be messy. If you need a child to inherit much of the state of its parent, a very common requirement, you have a big problem, trivial in Unix/Posix. IIRC Unix and X used to have a total of 1170 APIs, hence "Spec1170", it has probably grown a little bit since, but is a manageable number.
Bill allegedly has some fairly vile personal habits, maybe one is that he eats with his fingers, and so has no need of a fork()!
If Bill does try to produce Xenix 2.0, I predict that he will fail utterly, and be sued successfully by Linus or the FSF for copying 3,000,000 lines of GPL code. The Microtrash kernel will have bloated to 4GB in the meantime, and will need a Service Pack of on average 100MB every day.
Better to use half the money to set up a competitor to the FSF, so they don't get accused of being a monopoly! If some major application, not necessarily a kernel, "controlled" by the FSF was to gain dominance in the market, Bill would be very quick to complain. They already on numerous occasions eg in South America have made the spurious claim that the use of free software is anti-competitive. If two benevolent bodies each control a sizeable part of the market, I doubt that a monopoly could be alleged to exist, not by any rational person at least.
One way forward, which will attract a lot of flames, is to suggest that the BSD world is the competitor to the FSF. I do not like that idea, BSD people are most welcome to do things their way, and we have all benefitted from their efforts, but the problem is that their work can be turned into closed source at any time, with no reward to the original contributors, who can't generally even get copies of the enhanced, proprietary code, based on their hard work. As an end user, I would willingly use BSD code, but as a developer, I would feel strongly disinclined to contribute, but fully respect the rights of others to do so.
A better way might be to devise a new licence which does allow commercial exploitation in a controlled way, with a portion of the profits being distributed between the contributors. I can't immediately see a way to solve some of the complex issues this presents. Possibly the free version might lag behind the commercial version by a year or so, but the commercial version would still come with source, and any end user who did useful modifications and fed them back would then be eligible for some of the funding as a contributor. It would only be fair if contributors (I am not one, so I don't have a financial interest personally at the moment) did get some reward. The idea is to give strong commercial incentives to drive development forward, while allowing those who can't pay, or who might only use the program on rare occasions and not get value for money otherwise, to benefit also, and of course to retain visibility of source code so future generations of programmers can see how things work.
It is one of the hazards of too much jpeg compression, an artifact puts black on some of the pixels which would be white in a well-rendered font. Oh, the hazards of low-bandwidth communication! The damage is done on compression, it should always uncompress to the same in any browser, unless it is simultaneously re-sized.
Better to use pdf, or a vector file format, or png for diagrams with text, or do a bit of clever work with the html, and overlay true font-based text on a jpeg (or whatever) picture (but that last method would find out the bugs in certain browsers, notably those from Redmond, which have no respect for the notion of standards compliance).
This Slashdotter uses Linux exclusively at home, Konqueror and/or Mozilla, depending on which I have open at the time (i.e. for no good reason at all), but at work the company is moving even closer to M$, and I only have a junk PC with NT4 and all its service packs and even more bugs. Still, it is only a temporary contract, next job may have more enlightened management. Last employer had a very enlightened IT dept, they left me with local administrator privilege on Win2000, so I had Mozilla and lots of other good things. OpenOffice.org was frequently in use to rescue corrupt Word files, which perversely it does much better than anything from Bill.... Given free choice, I would never use a Microtrash product again, ever.
It would be very interesting to know what others use, what they may be forced to use at work, and what they choose to use at home.
Now we know where Linux is REALLY developed! And to think that most people always thought it was an empty wasteland, with nothing but a few well-insulated huts, occupied by scientists of various nationalities, at the pole.
I fought a criminal parking ticket one and won also. I simply wrote them a letter alleging fraud, and that if they persisted, I would refer the matter to the relevant authorities for investigation. I got a grovelling apology, trying to explain that the guy had written down one digit of my registration wrongly. What had actually happened was that the previous day, when I was parked legally, I saw them recording registrations. He had in fact got the number right, and tried to charge me for being there illegally the next day. But when they dropped the action, I could not be bothered to push the fraud allegation all the way.
The moral of this is that McBride should be told clearly and precisely what he has done wrong, and what action will be taken if he persists. If he backs down, the matter should be dropped. He should clearly be given, say 14 days, to drop it.
If not, then all the damaged parties should mount a class action. If he has any brain at all, that should not be necessary.
Yes, but the Linux development community is truly international, and so is McFraud's business, so action may be taken in countries where the legal system is much more favourable.
If he has to employ a schyster to defend each case, it will bring him down.
You are right, and I don't see how they imagine they have the slightest chance of winning.
I think that it is more likely that SCO have in fact used BSD code illegally. I think the BSD people should be pro-active on this, while SCO are busy with Linux......
Not at all, suing someone who has clearly violated the terms of the GPL, is entirely different to suing someone who uses your code for a purpose you do not like. The GPL is entirely fair and impartial. Mr. Stallman, who seems to be its main author, might secretly like to ban certain uses, but he has taken the only sensible road possible and chosen to not do so, making freedom the main priority, otherwise there would be a terrible mess of differernt restrictions in use in every piece of software. Suppose Linus does not like genetic resaerch, while Alan Cox has an issue with fish farming for example, or one of the female contributers hates men, and only wants women to be allowed to use it..... (of course all of these people are actually sensible, as we all know). So the licence must be fair and impartial to all, and allow every imaginable use.
The probable infringement is the Linux Personality Module, which almost certainly contains Linux code, and is supplied as part of SCO. But, as I keep saying, it is not a copyright infringement, it is a breach of licence. The GPL is a licence, not a copyright. It imposes the restriction that in effect if you break the licence, the right to use the code terminates. Having done so, it is then possible that a breach of copyright may occur, but the initial offence is simply a contractual one, a licence is a contract which gives you certain rights, and restricts others.
The penalty should be imposed, SCO are in breach of the GPL, which they accepted when they used the code, and as their rights have terminated, they must remove it from the SCO distribution. If they continue when asked not to, they are in fact then using copyright code without any kind of authorisation, they become liable to a joint action by all of the people who have contributed to the code, whose names are in the copyright statement at the head of each file. But first to get to copyright violation, they must have broken the terms of th licence, which they have.
I don't know about US law, but in many countries including the UK, this kind of copyright infringement is a criminal offence because it is done in the course of a running a business or making profit. A private individual violating copyright, not for financial gain, here commits a civil offence and is liable to a slap on the wrist, costs of probably 4 times the value of what he ripped off, and court costs, (and all but once in a million settles out of court anyway) but any sort of commercial activity is criminal, and is prosecuted by the authorities.
I wonder if the damaged parties have thought about going after McBride in countries like the UK where he does business, but legal costs are much less, the process is quicker, and there are quite a few senior judges experienced in handling this kind of issue.
It is not only what Linus wants that matters, he is not the only copyright holder involved. I think that it should be a corporate decision by all contributors to kernel code, and if the GPL is seen as under threat, that should be widened to include all contributors to GPL code. Most people, like Linus, will quite rightly not want to be involved in horrible legal actions, but the consensus of opinion and the need to protect the future of free software, may dictate otherwise. But, I hope McBride gets a good legal kick in the teeth by other means such that people who simply want to produce software don't need to get their hands dirty with vile people like him.
Actually 95% of what I get in the UK does originate from the US, or is on behalf of US based companies which want to sell me something. They are actually stupid, because most of their products, finance, viagra, etc cannot be sold here or are not applicable in some other way. I hope that the law (IANAL so I might not understand it) deals with people in the US, regardless of where their spam servers, mail relays, or wahtever, are located.
As you say, the do-not-spam list would be a goldmine. The US urgently needs a Data Protection Act, as in the UK, with severe penalties and a well-motivated regulator to enforce it. That would then criminalise illegal use of personal data, which would I believe include the info in the database, including the email address.
The present UK government are imbeciles when it comes to internet issues, this one was the work of the nasty Maggie Thatcher IIRC. However very little spam seems to originate in the UK, most is in fact relayed by stupid people with cable modems and no firewall, and it is not that hard to trace it back a stage beyond where it seems to be coming from. I would also like to see legal control of mail relays, with explicit provision for a warning rather than legal action for these idiots, but if it is a domestic PC it should be confiscated if the offence continues. Some people need to learn that persistent stupidity or negligence will not pay.
Thre has also been a shift to certain oriental countries as sources of spam. If they are made to realise that the western world can be quite self-sufficient without them, I think they would need to take steps to stop it, on economic grounds alone. Otherwise, their connectivity to the global internet shoult be cut off, or severely reduced in bandwidth till it stops.
I have never received a single spam from Singapore. Their government has invested heavily in broadband, runs the local ISP, and being a benevolent dictatorship, can respond quite quickly to new threats such as spam. The threat of a severe flogging would deter most, I think.
Severe problems (and spam is severe) need severe measures to stamp them out.
My memory is not as good as it once was. Are these the same analysts who said IIS was insecure, several years after we all knew that, and after countless very public security breaches, and recommended moving to Apache? If so, their analysis is 100% accurate but invariably too late to be of much relevance, because it lags way behind information that is already in the public domain.
People who need to know, need to know NOW, not when it is far too late to affect crucial decisions. What professional qualifications does an analyst need, and does any professional body oversee their competence? Or could I become one, as of now, bearing in mind that all of my guesses about defective Microsoft products, for example, have been proven correct?
You are absolutely correct. I have experience of EMP protection at the design stage, when it used to be applied to avionics. The human body is a very poor screen to EMP pulses, the momentary induced current is very high (very small action integral due to the short pulse so no direct health hazard), and the antenna loop is quite exposed. The only possible protection would be tranzorbs on the leads where they exit the casing, probably backed up by low pass filters, but all that capacitance would have to be charged and discharged on every pulse from the pacemaker, which would drive its power consumption way up. Remember, it has to run for many years on a fairly minimal energy source. Series resistors would be possible instead, but I bet they would just flash over unless they were very large. The induced emf could be many KV, from a lowish source impedance.
Microwave weapons were available to the IRA, had they wanted them. Certainly the technology to take out an entire office block would have been available, capable of being transported in a vehicle, and of being used more than once. But, it would not have been sufficiently spectacular to have any effect at all on the general public, which may possibly be why they never tried. Or did they, I wonder? It might have happened but not been recognised for what it was. They did have a supposedly good electronics engineer working for them at one time, I don't know if he may have been arrested by then, or moved on to more honourable work. He lived in the South and had openly appeared on TV, in about 1987.
Some of my work in that era was probably to counter people like him, there was a lot of work going on to detect things, and CCTV and image recognition for example were expanding rapidly. I know he was heavily into radio controlled detonators and similar things, but I think that they went out of fashion because of certain actions by the security services, if my guesses are correct. It seemed that IRA terrorists were suddenly blowing themselves up with their own bombs for a while. I never was able to confirm my theory as to why that had started happening, for obvious reasons.
A sad and ironic aspect of the whole thing, which highlights one of the major but unavoidable limitations of a democracy, is that, for many years, the IRA were known to be using large magnets to attach car bombs, and the UK importer of these magnets was about a mile down the road from the government establishment concerned with technical countermeasures. A totalitarian state would of course have cut off that source of supply immediately, a democracy can't do so, because it is a democracy and the business concerned was quite legitimate. I wonder how many other such farcical situations occur.
It will be interesting to see what laws get invoked if a terrorist does use an EMP weapon. In the UK it would certainly fall foul of the Wireless Telegraphy Act, possibly the EMC Directive (but the terrorists would have to do something really daft like impersonating an enforcement officer to be eligible for the most severe penalties, and I think they would also have to put their product on the market first), maybe, but unlikely, the Low Voltage Directive, if induced voltages could be shown to be above the safe limit for human life. I hope we don't have the dreadful spectacle of malignant terrorists getting off with the same slap on the wrist as a pirate radio operator, a fine which I think is 1000, and confiscation of the equipment.
The civilised world needs legislation now against this threat.
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Approveded by peer review. Constantly scrutinised. Examined by thousands of competent programmers. Tested and debugged by tens of thousands. Neither the puppet McBride nor the puppet master Gates have that capability. It can only happen with open source.
I am amazed that the US continues to tolerate their system, or maybe poorer people don't vote. Maybe they are too sick to get to the polling station. It makes me think that in fact the US is the most socialist country on earth. All the signs are there, an elite ruling class, currently with an illegally elected president, intent on rigging the voting system to keep themselves in power, and an impoverished and ill-informed working class. A convicted monopolist continuing his vile work, seemingly with full knowledge and approval of the government. A legal system which favours only the ruling class. etc etc.
Unfortunately the UK tends to follow US trends a few years behind, and I have to live here.....
That can't happen with free software. If Linus and his associated do not deliver what people want, or get some crazy ideas about their own importance (like someone in Redmond we all like to bash), then he has no hold over anyone, they can go away and fork another kernel, not that anything I have seen so far would suggest that such an event will be necessary. Any likely forks will be to fulfil specialist needs, without bloating the main kernel tree. Because the development process is open, there is little opportunity for mistrust to develop, for example.
It would seem that if anything, free software is apolitical, but not anarchy.
Did Ballmer not say something similar to McBride a while ago? Un-American may have been one term used, which some people take to be the same as Communist. Now we see where the Gates Gang are going today, they are using McBride as part of their usual ploy to illegaly dominate the world. Then they will dump him of course. That particular empire does definitely resemble a malignant dictatorship, with a useless incompetent at the top, Pol Pot comes to mind somehow.
What does stop GPL software including gcc dead in its tracks is if it has been illegally comingled with non-free software, and I think the area which almost certainly violates the GPL is the "Linux Personality Module". That needs very close examination, it may be that there is a substantial violation, maybe even sufficient to get an injunction against SCO. It could even result in SCO having to publish their kernel source. Now that would be a nice end to McBride's main source of revenue, other than stock market fraud, and Bill's petty cash, of course.
Why not alter the logging programs? Surely we are only talking about turning a few numbers into human-readable values? With sed, awk, perl....... it can't be all that difficult, if that is what you need to do.
But they have to know it is there first, and there is no requirement to use either lpd or X for a simple lineprinter, and you can obfuscate things by making a device file with a weird name which simply accesses the serial or parallel port.
You would want to consider the netmask in addition to the address as the id to control the algorithm, so a hacker who was using random addresses would still get clobbered.
I don't have a Linux machine in front of me right now so I can't check, but I strongly suspect that all of this will have been done years ago, to deter brute force attacks. If not, why not? Maybe everyone thought someone else would do it? Maybe someone should do it pronto!
Nonetheless, a good idea. It was quite common to see logging to a 132 column printer with something like A3 size fanfold, with the green stripes, many years ago. The problem now it that inexpensive printers are inkjet, and are pageprinters, they don't want to print a line at a time, unlike the old dinosaurs. I don't even know if it is possible to buy dot matrix, inky ribbon printers any more, or even electric typewriters with an interface. If someone knows how to get line by line printout using modern, inexpensive equipment, please let us know.
Remember what Gartner said about IIS?
Cromulent? Bill's evil spellchecker, which is all I have at work, suggests "corpulent" or "crapulent". Please enlighten us.
I think Bill must be a bit backward in certain respects.
The chance is about as great as Gates delivering a new OS on time, within the original memory usage and performance estimates, and with less than 10,000 new bugs. I don't think there is sufficient precision in the IEEE 80 bit floating point format to express the actual probability numerically, it is a lot less troublesome to think of it as simply ZERO. Pure mathematicians will no doubt not be impressed by such an "engineering approximation" to the truth.
A typical Microtrash implementation would have so many incompatabilities, intentionally and otherwise, that no-one would bother to develop for it. Anyway, it has been said, by those who apparently know about how his random mind works, that Bill HATES Unix. I have always thought that the reason for his hatred was that he can't get used to using / instead of \, or maybe he just misses the BSOD several times a day.
IIRC, XP, certainly 2000, have been said to be Unix-like, or even Posix compliant, although having both at home I have been unable to find the slightest trace of anything that resembles Posix. Maybe someone can enlighten me. Among the 70,000 (IIRC someone published a figure in that region the other day) odd APIs (and within that disgraceful mess lies the source of most buggy code and programmer's misery) there does not appear to be one called fork() for example. With no fork(), nor a tolerably efficient way of simulating it, programming can be messy. If you need a child to inherit much of the state of its parent, a very common requirement, you have a big problem, trivial in Unix/Posix. IIRC Unix and X used to have a total of 1170 APIs, hence "Spec1170", it has probably grown a little bit since, but is a manageable number.
Bill allegedly has some fairly vile personal habits, maybe one is that he eats with his fingers, and so has no need of a fork()!
If Bill does try to produce Xenix 2.0, I predict that he will fail utterly, and be sued successfully by Linus or the FSF for copying 3,000,000 lines of GPL code. The Microtrash kernel will have bloated to 4GB in the meantime, and will need a Service Pack of on average 100MB every day.
One way forward, which will attract a lot of flames, is to suggest that the BSD world is the competitor to the FSF. I do not like that idea, BSD people are most welcome to do things their way, and we have all benefitted from their efforts, but the problem is that their work can be turned into closed source at any time, with no reward to the original contributors, who can't generally even get copies of the enhanced, proprietary code, based on their hard work. As an end user, I would willingly use BSD code, but as a developer, I would feel strongly disinclined to contribute, but fully respect the rights of others to do so.
A better way might be to devise a new licence which does allow commercial exploitation in a controlled way, with a portion of the profits being distributed between the contributors. I can't immediately see a way to solve some of the complex issues this presents. Possibly the free version might lag behind the commercial version by a year or so, but the commercial version would still come with source, and any end user who did useful modifications and fed them back would then be eligible for some of the funding as a contributor. It would only be fair if contributors (I am not one, so I don't have a financial interest personally at the moment) did get some reward. The idea is to give strong commercial incentives to drive development forward, while allowing those who can't pay, or who might only use the program on rare occasions and not get value for money otherwise, to benefit also, and of course to retain visibility of source code so future generations of programmers can see how things work.
Better to use pdf, or a vector file format, or png for diagrams with text, or do a bit of clever work with the html, and overlay true font-based text on a jpeg (or whatever) picture (but that last method would find out the bugs in certain browsers, notably those from Redmond, which have no respect for the notion of standards compliance).
This Slashdotter uses Linux exclusively at home, Konqueror and/or Mozilla, depending on which I have open at the time (i.e. for no good reason at all), but at work the company is moving even closer to M$, and I only have a junk PC with NT4 and all its service packs and even more bugs. Still, it is only a temporary contract, next job may have more enlightened management. Last employer had a very enlightened IT dept, they left me with local administrator privilege on Win2000, so I had Mozilla and lots of other good things. OpenOffice.org was frequently in use to rescue corrupt Word files, which perversely it does much better than anything from Bill.... Given free choice, I would never use a Microtrash product again, ever.
It would be very interesting to know what others use, what they may be forced to use at work, and what they choose to use at home.
Now we know where Linux is REALLY developed! And to think that most people always thought it was an empty wasteland, with nothing but a few well-insulated huts, occupied by scientists of various nationalities, at the pole.
The moral of this is that McBride should be told clearly and precisely what he has done wrong, and what action will be taken if he persists. If he backs down, the matter should be dropped. He should clearly be given, say 14 days, to drop it.
If not, then all the damaged parties should mount a class action. If he has any brain at all, that should not be necessary.
If he has to employ a schyster to defend each case, it will bring him down.
I think that it is more likely that SCO have in fact used BSD code illegally. I think the BSD people should be pro-active on this, while SCO are busy with Linux......
The probable infringement is the Linux Personality Module, which almost certainly contains Linux code, and is supplied as part of SCO. But, as I keep saying, it is not a copyright infringement, it is a breach of licence. The GPL is a licence, not a copyright. It imposes the restriction that in effect if you break the licence, the right to use the code terminates. Having done so, it is then possible that a breach of copyright may occur, but the initial offence is simply a contractual one, a licence is a contract which gives you certain rights, and restricts others.
The penalty should be imposed, SCO are in breach of the GPL, which they accepted when they used the code, and as their rights have terminated, they must remove it from the SCO distribution. If they continue when asked not to, they are in fact then using copyright code without any kind of authorisation, they become liable to a joint action by all of the people who have contributed to the code, whose names are in the copyright statement at the head of each file. But first to get to copyright violation, they must have broken the terms of th licence, which they have.
I don't know about US law, but in many countries including the UK, this kind of copyright infringement is a criminal offence because it is done in the course of a running a business or making profit. A private individual violating copyright, not for financial gain, here commits a civil offence and is liable to a slap on the wrist, costs of probably 4 times the value of what he ripped off, and court costs, (and all but once in a million settles out of court anyway) but any sort of commercial activity is criminal, and is prosecuted by the authorities.
I wonder if the damaged parties have thought about going after McBride in countries like the UK where he does business, but legal costs are much less, the process is quicker, and there are quite a few senior judges experienced in handling this kind of issue.
It is not only what Linus wants that matters, he is not the only copyright holder involved. I think that it should be a corporate decision by all contributors to kernel code, and if the GPL is seen as under threat, that should be widened to include all contributors to GPL code. Most people, like Linus, will quite rightly not want to be involved in horrible legal actions, but the consensus of opinion and the need to protect the future of free software, may dictate otherwise. But, I hope McBride gets a good legal kick in the teeth by other means such that people who simply want to produce software don't need to get their hands dirty with vile people like him.
The judge spoke the truth, but that seems to be irrelevant to the US legal system. herein lies the root of the problem.
As you say, the do-not-spam list would be a goldmine. The US urgently needs a Data Protection Act, as in the UK, with severe penalties and a well-motivated regulator to enforce it. That would then criminalise illegal use of personal data, which would I believe include the info in the database, including the email address.
The present UK government are imbeciles when it comes to internet issues, this one was the work of the nasty Maggie Thatcher IIRC. However very little spam seems to originate in the UK, most is in fact relayed by stupid people with cable modems and no firewall, and it is not that hard to trace it back a stage beyond where it seems to be coming from. I would also like to see legal control of mail relays, with explicit provision for a warning rather than legal action for these idiots, but if it is a domestic PC it should be confiscated if the offence continues. Some people need to learn that persistent stupidity or negligence will not pay.
Thre has also been a shift to certain oriental countries as sources of spam. If they are made to realise that the western world can be quite self-sufficient without them, I think they would need to take steps to stop it, on economic grounds alone. Otherwise, their connectivity to the global internet shoult be cut off, or severely reduced in bandwidth till it stops.
I have never received a single spam from Singapore. Their government has invested heavily in broadband, runs the local ISP, and being a benevolent dictatorship, can respond quite quickly to new threats such as spam. The threat of a severe flogging would deter most, I think.
Severe problems (and spam is severe) need severe measures to stamp them out.
People who need to know, need to know NOW, not when it is far too late to affect crucial decisions. What professional qualifications does an analyst need, and does any professional body oversee their competence? Or could I become one, as of now, bearing in mind that all of my guesses about defective Microsoft products, for example, have been proven correct?
You are absolutely correct. I have experience of EMP protection at the design stage, when it used to be applied to avionics. The human body is a very poor screen to EMP pulses, the momentary induced current is very high (very small action integral due to the short pulse so no direct health hazard), and the antenna loop is quite exposed. The only possible protection would be tranzorbs on the leads where they exit the casing, probably backed up by low pass filters, but all that capacitance would have to be charged and discharged on every pulse from the pacemaker, which would drive its power consumption way up. Remember, it has to run for many years on a fairly minimal energy source. Series resistors would be possible instead, but I bet they would just flash over unless they were very large. The induced emf could be many KV, from a lowish source impedance.
Some of my work in that era was probably to counter people like him, there was a lot of work going on to detect things, and CCTV and image recognition for example were expanding rapidly. I know he was heavily into radio controlled detonators and similar things, but I think that they went out of fashion because of certain actions by the security services, if my guesses are correct. It seemed that IRA terrorists were suddenly blowing themselves up with their own bombs for a while. I never was able to confirm my theory as to why that had started happening, for obvious reasons.
A sad and ironic aspect of the whole thing, which highlights one of the major but unavoidable limitations of a democracy, is that, for many years, the IRA were known to be using large magnets to attach car bombs, and the UK importer of these magnets was about a mile down the road from the government establishment concerned with technical countermeasures. A totalitarian state would of course have cut off that source of supply immediately, a democracy can't do so, because it is a democracy and the business concerned was quite legitimate. I wonder how many other such farcical situations occur.
It will be interesting to see what laws get invoked if a terrorist does use an EMP weapon. In the UK it would certainly fall foul of the Wireless Telegraphy Act, possibly the EMC Directive (but the terrorists would have to do something really daft like impersonating an enforcement officer to be eligible for the most severe penalties, and I think they would also have to put their product on the market first), maybe, but unlikely, the Low Voltage Directive, if induced voltages could be shown to be above the safe limit for human life. I hope we don't have the dreadful spectacle of malignant terrorists getting off with the same slap on the wrist as a pirate radio operator, a fine which I think is 1000, and confiscation of the equipment.
The civilised world needs legislation now against this threat.