Clearly, the Congresscritters in the US will never go Jedi, as they're already devotees of the Book of Bokonon. This can be seen by their tendency to speak in foma, or as the rest of us call them, "reassuring lies.";-)
I design hardware for my company and write the software for it, and you know what? there are ALWAYS specs written for both, such that others can pick up on the work at a later time, EVEN if it's just a test fixture. (For example, the contract programmers and hardware designers I supervise to do some of the subsystems.) Is this rocket science, or can anyone who has a mere moiety of a clue do the same and make life simpler all around?
(Well, OK, in this case it IS rocket science, 'cause that's what I do, but it isn't DIFFICULT. I even write decently full specs for my hobby projects; it's actually easier overall than just cowboy-coding everything, even when it's just for my use. It's a habit the better grade of engineers get into.)
No, the problem you're bewailing is neither poor programmers nor clueless hardware designers. The problem is companies with bad development practices and bad attitudes. (Would YOU allow a development project to be released to manufacturing without good documentation? If so, you had better be able to outrun your mistakes...)
People are getting tired of Cinderella's castle. They want Howl's castle instead.
Having only seen the trailer, (which by itself convinced me to see the film - Studio Ghibli is GOOD!) I have only brief images of that walking building to go on, but that would be an AWESOME experience. Technically challenging o do anything like it, of course, but well worth it!
There's a scene in Charles Stross' novel "Singularity Sky" where a character goes riding around town in a Baba-Yaga-house-on-chicken-legs, which idly munches other buildings while waiting for the boss to get back. Gotta power that gadget somehow...
So, either the transition from the PPC architecture to the x86 architecture will be hell for users of applications, or it will make lotsa Linux apps quickly available for x86 OS X, or both.
Neither one is a win for Apple.
User hell is an obvious problem; the less obvious one is, making OS X run on Intel PCs (whaddya think Apple has been running their secret versions on, custom hardware? Bah! Commodity hardware!) raises the inevitable question, "Why should I buy an expensive x86 Mac when I can buy an inexpensive white box PC and run Linux on it with much of the same software?"
Going head-to-head against Microsoft, Apple has been moderately successful with great (if pricy) machines. Changing the hardware over to go head-to-head against BOTH Linux AND Microsoft appears questionable in terms of sanity.
(especially useful for reformed IP litigation companies who've gotten a conscience)
1. Identify companies who are violating the GPL by secretly incorporating it into their proprietary products.
2. Make licensing arrangements with the Open Source authors involved, so as to be able to sue on their behalf. Register the copyrights involved on behalf of the authors (this allows increased damage awards for willful copyright violation, IIRC)
3. Contact the GPL violators and get them to comply and pay a please-go-away fee; sue those who won't comply, and win by judgement or settlement (including GPL compliance either way).
4. Profit! (in an ethically responsible way, even!)
There is certainly some confusion (myself included) about just who is entitled to ask for the source code of a GPL'ed program that is sold in binary form.
In actual practice, however, I think the question is moot. My reasoning is this:
Once *anyone* has received a copy of the source from the company that sold the binaries, they can (and, given the folks who bother to do the requesting, at least one person likely will) distribute the source to EVERYONE else without restriction.
This means that once ONE copy of the source is distributed, it makes no difference whether the distributor of the binaries limits its offer of source code to those who bought the binaries, or just posts the source for all to download. The source is out there, and the seller cannot make any claim that anyone "improperly" received it, since its redistribution is unrestricted per the GPL.
It is certainly possible that litigious scoundrels might try to sue under this circumstance, but such a suit would certainly be doomed. Damages for "improperly" receiving something you could easily have received for free by an essentially-equivalent "proper" process that has the identical result? The judge would fall off the bench laughing.
If you're the producer of a Linux distro, do you want to have to recompile and patch EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE you put in your distro, EVERY TIME you update it? Or else require all the users to do the same if they want to run apps you didn't include, or update them when you haven't?
Admittedly, this is a worst-case scenario; no distro will be incompatible with ALL apps. Nonetheless, this is the situation that prevails when you don't have a standard base to use. Having a standard reduces the effort for everyone involved. Things will "just run".
I've just spent 3 days installing some esoteric science packages on a Linux distro they weren't certified for, and I could never have succeeded if I weren't an uber-geek. This is not the experience we want Linux users to have, regardless of whether we are commercially oriented or just wanna rock Open Source.
I hope this sheds some light on why a standard is needed...
Note that these terms don't actually allow one to CREATE software to read this format, just USE it. Nor does it permit using this software you used (but couldn't create) to modify MA govt docs or read or write any other docs in the format. Also, obtaining the format docs themselves requires a click-through license, which may well change for the worse as soon as MA is committed to the format...
Well, as one who puts up with spam-fax 'cause we can't use anonymous call blocking, and who deletes lotsa spam from my inbox just to FIND my mail, I'm actually glad someone has found a way to profit from spam at the expense of the spammers.
Even if Mr. Mummers does engage in suing spammers on a regular basis, and even if he makes a tidy living from it, this doesn't mean his suit is without merit. Unless he's abusing the law or the system (impossible for us to know without all the facts on hand), more power to him...
Synology (www.synology.com) sells the DS-101 Disk Station, a NAS appliance based on uCLinux, with no source offered and no GPL references anywhere on their site.
Jim Buzbee did a review on Tom's Networking recently thst mentions the detectable presence of BusyBox and thttpd in the firmware image. His review mentions that Synology are "working on" this issue, but they don't appear to actually be complying. I've written them as well, politely asking them to do so, and aside from a polite "We're on vacation, we'll look into it" response, there's been nothing for weeks.
I hope they do release the source, as the modding possibilities for the box are enticing; but to date, they're still in violation of the GPL.
No wonder voter turnout is so low. Folks have figured out that we're screwed no matter which party is in power. Gonna be a difficult time ahead until we develop a viable third party, if at all...
The perception of the journal business as a parasitic racket is bolstered by the phenomenon of authors having to pay per-page charges to get articles published in these very expensive publications. Reminds me of the pharmaceutical industry...
Yes, there is a need for someone, somehow, to finance the organized peer-review and publication of scientific articles. However, I flatly refuse to accept the proposition that $1500/year subscriptions and author-paid page charges are a good way to do this. Free interchange of information is essential to science; academic publishers on the present model, however, are NOT.
The IEEE, based on my reading of the article in the dead-tree newsletter, is worried that they'll be innovated out of the academic publishing business, and they cannot imagine what will supplant it. This is a frankly bizarre attitude for an organization dedicated to technical advancement.
Of course, as an IEEE member, I've seen a great deal of bizarre behavior from IEEE HQ.
In grad school at RPI's Physics department, I worked on semi-automated physics lab projects using the SYM-1, a single-board KIM-1 clone with some extra goodies (including text-only NTSC video output, IIRC, though we might have added that on ourselves).
One of the gadgets I helped hack together was a graphics overlay device for the video port; it plotted a single-valued function as an overlay on the video text by counting the vertical scan lines and horizontal pixel clocks, comparing the scan-line count at each horizontal position (pixel clock count) to a value stored in a static RAM chip, and boosting the video signal in that horizontal position if the scan line count matched the RAM cell value. It was cheap, crude, very simple, and dead elegant. Great for plotting measurement results on-screen above the explanatory text.
Of course, a single-chip uC now does what the single-board system did then, but those systems did their part to transform the world, and they were a joy to work with!
Mebbe even a correct answer. If I'm lucky. The EPO has ben merrily granting "illegal," unenforceable software patents for some time now. Patents that have no legal force 'cause software-specific patents are not presently valid. How they get away unpunished with THAT is another good question. (Or maybe it's a "god" question, the way I initially typed the word...)
Should the software patent directive be adopted, all these presently-unenforceable, meaningless existing pieces of paper will become valid, enforceable patents under the laws then in effect. The fact that they were granted long ago won't mean they aren't valid then. True, they will *expire* sooner than if they had been issued on or after the directive date.
The difference wrt a "new crime" is that the hypothetical later-criminalized act began and ended before it became illegal. The patent document represents a continuous grant of protection over a defined period rather than an act performed at an instant of time. In that sense, it's rather more like an ongoing activity that becomes criminalized (example: ongoing financial suppor of an organization that gets outlawed. Past support not a crime, continuing support is/will be a crime.)
Run conduit in the walls and ceilings, with a couple of pull strings in each pipe so you can run the newest kinds of cable (or replace older lines) after the fact.
I've run conduit for some wiring retrofits, and you simply cannot beat it for sturdiness and ability to pur new stuff in. Power wiring has to be heavier when run in conduit, but yopu'll NEVER kill a circuit nailing up a shelf again.
If the thing can't hack it as a security guard, it's DOOMED as a kids' party chaperone/herdsman. All the cleverness of adults with none of their awareness of "but you can't do that". Kids will think of angles no adult would ever come across. Toughest audience imaginable for a security device...
I understand you're bitter about the decline of your favorite products, but it's not like there are no alternatives. I keep hearing that TI has done a lot of the cool stuff that everyone was hoping would happen with HP calculators.
Funny, but my HP 15C still runs like a charm decades after the competitive TI calculators are landfill. The newer HP models have been similarly superior; the HP culture of rock-solid best-of-breed equipment works very well for engineering equipment, and those calculators are definitely engineering equipment.
HP was always, always less successful in computers 'cause they didn't quite understand the market, and it was a commodity market (I worked there, and heard this discussed often; we always knew this.)
Low-margin lowest-cost stuff was never HP's forte; it was best-quality gear that engineering folks would pay a premium for 'cause it was more than worth it. Agilent does well 'cause they are the core of HP's original bread and butter business and still follow the original plan.
I worked at HP in the 80s, still hold stock in the company, and I have been horrified for years at the degradation of HP from a great place to work (and a profitable, socially responsible company) into a soulless, internally repressive corporate tyranny. Bill and Dave would be speechless with rage were they still with us.
Ms. Fiorina has presided over such low points as dumping a profitable calculator division (without even spinning it off or doing an EBO!), and a recent corporate general meeting where the proxy-voting process was blatantly abused and manipulated to ensure the board got their way regardless of what the stockholders wanted.
To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits; they preferred to make money by adding value, and believed in interoperability and good corporate citizenship (a quaint concept, I know, but I'm an old fart...)
I shed no tears (and gave a few cheers) at Ms. Fiorina's daparture; I just wish I had some confidence her successor will be an improvement.
3) Electronic systems are easier to manipulate, with many single-point-of-vulnerability opportunities to own the entire system, and are MUCH harder to design and implement in a really secure way than those primitive old paper things. Geeks understand these problems much more acutely than almost anyone else (with the possible exception of certain parties interested in gaming the election results again...?)
Ouch! That tinfoil hat is suddenly getting very hot!
You might be interested in reading Bob Edwards' book on Edward R. Murrow and the origins of broadcast jounalism; I just finished it, and it's quite interesting. I gather from it that quality journalism has always been somewhat the exception, less so in the early days than now, and has suffered enormously from corporate profit motives in broadcasting (ownership of broadcast networks by non-broadcasters, elimination of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, corporate treatment of news organizations as profit centers, and massive media ownership consolidation).
I'm afraid we have many fewer "journalists" today than "people who pretend to be journalists on TV and radio but aren't really."
Parent poster is correct, and well explained. Here's another way to look at the twisted-pair concept.
Any electrical circuit forms a loop; you can trace the current going out from the power source, through the load, and back to the other side of the power source.
For an electric power transmission line, this "loop" is the wires on the left and right sides of the power-line crossbar (OK, not all lines look like that, but the principle is the same). You can trace an imaginary line down one side of the power line and back on the other, enclosing a loop 12 feet wide and many miles long, with enormous area. This is one reason power lines are a bad idea for carrying RF signals; they make a GREAT antenna.
For radio interference, the area enclosed by this loop is an important factor; reduce the loop area, and you reduce the radiated interference. The DIRECTION of the current in the loop also counts; a clockwise loop radiates with a phase opposite that of a counterclockwise loop and can cancel it out if the two are right next to one another.
Now imagine twisting the two wires around each other; you get many very tiny loops with alternating CW/CCW directions of current flow in the loop; their net radiating effects cancel out.
Interesting note: Cross-country power lines ARE in fact twisted pairs, to prevent another interference type. At every Nth tower, you'll see the lines cross over so the left-hand line goes to the right. This results in loops of a half-mile length or so; useless for shielding from RF, but VERY important for protecting the grid from geomagnetic storms, where the Earth's magnetic field is pushed around by solar wind. Making the net loop area zero prevents the transmission line from acting as a giant DC generator and blowing out the switchgear, causing major blackouts (this happened in Canada in the 1970s, IIRC).
OK, so let's play along with Mr. McBride's crazy gold-rush metaphor for a minute...
In a gold rush, lots of get-rich-quick types run around trying to grab a nominally free resource (minerals lying on the ground) and peddle it as their property. Some of them are rather, shall we say, unscrupulous in their methods.
If we accurately apply this metaphor to the situation of IP, and more particularly to Open Source software and the IP rights thereto, the present SCO are a bunch of thieving claim-jumpers screaming "Mine! My Preciousss! Gollum!", and the Open Source community are out there giving the stuff away for free -- as long as you're willing to share it fairly.
"Counter-cultural," says Mr. McBride? Maybe so; I for one am totally counter to the culture he advocates. Let's counter that culture for all we're worth!
IANAL, but it occurs to me that proof of this sort of misconduct might well be sufficient for a reawakened DOJ to go back to the judge and ask for the Seattlement to be nullified and the case reopened (only possible if Kerry wins, obviously; if Bush wins, the DOJ yawns and rolls over again). It would depend heavily on the seriousness of the misconduct and the will of the DOJ to pursue it.
Does anyone actually know whether this is a legal possibility?
I have spent much time playing against an old DOS Go program published by Toyogo called Nemesis Go Master (still on my shelf at work; wonder if the 5.25" disk is still readable, hmmm). While I still play a terrible game of Go, it did improve my skills tremendously. Anyone else heard of this program?
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Clearly, the Congresscritters in the US will never go Jedi, as they're already devotees of the Book of Bokonon. This can be seen by their tendency to speak in foma, or as the rest of us call them, "reassuring lies." ;-)
I design hardware for my company and write the software for it, and you know what? there are ALWAYS specs written for both, such that others can pick up on the work at a later time, EVEN if it's just a test fixture. (For example, the contract programmers and hardware designers I supervise to do some of the subsystems.) Is this rocket science, or can anyone who has a mere moiety of a clue do the same and make life simpler all around?
(Well, OK, in this case it IS rocket science, 'cause that's what I do, but it isn't DIFFICULT. I even write decently full specs for my hobby projects; it's actually easier overall than just cowboy-coding everything, even when it's just for my use. It's a habit the better grade of engineers get into.)
No, the problem you're bewailing is neither poor programmers nor clueless hardware designers. The problem is companies with bad development practices and bad attitudes. (Would YOU allow a development project to be released to manufacturing without good documentation? If so, you had better be able to outrun your mistakes...)
People are getting tired of Cinderella's castle. They want Howl's castle instead.
Having only seen the trailer, (which by itself convinced me to see the film - Studio Ghibli is GOOD!) I have only brief images of that walking building to go on, but that would be an AWESOME experience. Technically challenging o do anything like it, of course, but well worth it!
There's a scene in Charles Stross' novel "Singularity Sky" where a character goes riding around town in a Baba-Yaga-house-on-chicken-legs, which idly munches other buildings while waiting for the boss to get back. Gotta power that gadget somehow...
So, either the transition from the PPC architecture to the x86 architecture will be hell for users of applications, or it will make lotsa Linux apps quickly available for x86 OS X, or both.
Neither one is a win for Apple.
User hell is an obvious problem; the less obvious one is, making OS X run on Intel PCs (whaddya think Apple has been running their secret versions on, custom hardware? Bah! Commodity hardware!) raises the inevitable question, "Why should I buy an expensive x86 Mac when I can buy an inexpensive white box PC and run Linux on it with much of the same software?"
Going head-to-head against Microsoft, Apple has been moderately successful with great (if pricy) machines. Changing the hardware over to go head-to-head against BOTH Linux AND Microsoft appears questionable in terms of sanity.
(especially useful for reformed IP litigation companies who've gotten a conscience)
1. Identify companies who are violating the GPL by secretly incorporating it into their proprietary products.
2. Make licensing arrangements with the Open Source authors involved, so as to be able to sue on their behalf. Register the copyrights involved on behalf of the authors (this allows increased damage awards for willful copyright violation, IIRC)
3. Contact the GPL violators and get them to comply and pay a please-go-away fee; sue those who won't comply, and win by judgement or settlement (including GPL compliance either way).
4. Profit! (in an ethically responsible way, even!)
There is certainly some confusion (myself included) about just who is entitled to ask for the source code of a GPL'ed program that is sold in binary form.
In actual practice, however, I think the question is moot. My reasoning is this:
Once *anyone* has received a copy of the source from the company that sold the binaries, they can (and, given the folks who bother to do the requesting, at least one person likely will) distribute the source to EVERYONE else without restriction.
This means that once ONE copy of the source is distributed, it makes no difference whether the distributor of the binaries limits its offer of source code to those who bought the binaries, or just posts the source for all to download. The source is out there, and the seller cannot make any claim that anyone "improperly" received it, since its redistribution is unrestricted per the GPL.
It is certainly possible that litigious scoundrels might try to sue under this circumstance, but such a suit would certainly be doomed. Damages for "improperly" receiving something you could easily have received for free by an essentially-equivalent "proper" process that has the identical result? The judge would fall off the bench laughing.
If you're the producer of a Linux distro, do you want to have to recompile and patch EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE you put in your distro, EVERY TIME you update it? Or else require all the users to do the same if they want to run apps you didn't include, or update them when you haven't?
Admittedly, this is a worst-case scenario; no distro will be incompatible with ALL apps. Nonetheless, this is the situation that prevails when you don't have a standard base to use. Having a standard reduces the effort for everyone involved. Things will "just run".
I've just spent 3 days installing some esoteric science packages on a Linux distro they weren't certified for, and I could never have succeeded if I weren't an uber-geek. This is not the experience we want Linux users to have, regardless of whether we are commercially oriented or just wanna rock Open Source.
I hope this sheds some light on why a standard is needed...
Note that these terms don't actually allow one to CREATE software to read this format, just USE it. Nor does it permit using this software you used (but couldn't create) to modify MA govt docs or read or write any other docs in the format. Also, obtaining the format docs themselves requires a click-through license, which may well change for the worse as soon as MA is committed to the format...
Well, as one who puts up with spam-fax 'cause we can't use anonymous call blocking, and who deletes lotsa spam from my inbox just to FIND my mail, I'm actually glad someone has found a way to profit from spam at the expense of the spammers.
Even if Mr. Mummers does engage in suing spammers on a regular basis, and even if he makes a tidy living from it, this doesn't mean his suit is without merit. Unless he's abusing the law or the system (impossible for us to know without all the facts on hand), more power to him...
Synology (www.synology.com) sells the DS-101 Disk Station, a NAS appliance based on uCLinux, with no source offered and no GPL references anywhere on their site.
Jim Buzbee did a review on Tom's Networking recently thst mentions the detectable presence of BusyBox and thttpd in the firmware image. His review mentions that Synology are "working on" this issue, but they don't appear to actually be complying. I've written them as well, politely asking them to do so, and aside from a polite "We're on vacation, we'll look into it" response, there's been nothing for weeks.
I hope they do release the source, as the modding possibilities for the box are enticing; but to date, they're still in violation of the GPL.
No wonder voter turnout is so low. Folks have figured out that we're screwed no matter which party is in power. Gonna be a difficult time ahead until we develop a viable third party, if at all...
The perception of the journal business as a parasitic racket is bolstered by the phenomenon of authors having to pay per-page charges to get articles published in these very expensive publications. Reminds me of the pharmaceutical industry...
Yes, there is a need for someone, somehow, to finance the organized peer-review and publication of scientific articles. However, I flatly refuse to accept the proposition that $1500/year subscriptions and author-paid page charges are a good way to do this. Free interchange of information is essential to science; academic publishers on the present model, however, are NOT.
The IEEE, based on my reading of the article in the dead-tree newsletter, is worried that they'll be innovated out of the academic publishing business, and they cannot imagine what will supplant it. This is a frankly bizarre attitude for an organization dedicated to technical advancement.
Of course, as an IEEE member, I've seen a great deal of bizarre behavior from IEEE HQ.
In grad school at RPI's Physics department, I worked on semi-automated physics lab projects using the SYM-1, a single-board KIM-1 clone with some extra goodies (including text-only NTSC video output, IIRC, though we might have added that on ourselves).
One of the gadgets I helped hack together was a graphics overlay device for the video port; it plotted a single-valued function as an overlay on the video text by counting the vertical scan lines and horizontal pixel clocks, comparing the scan-line count at each horizontal position (pixel clock count) to a value stored in a static RAM chip, and boosting the video signal in that horizontal position if the scan line count matched the RAM cell value. It was cheap, crude, very simple, and dead elegant. Great for plotting measurement results on-screen above the explanatory text.
Of course, a single-chip uC now does what the single-board system did then, but those systems did their part to transform the world, and they were a joy to work with!
Mebbe even a correct answer. If I'm lucky.
The EPO has ben merrily granting "illegal," unenforceable software patents for some time now. Patents that have no legal force 'cause software-specific patents are not presently valid. How they get away unpunished with THAT is another good question. (Or maybe it's a "god" question, the way I initially typed the word...)
Should the software patent directive be adopted, all these presently-unenforceable, meaningless existing pieces of paper will become valid, enforceable patents under the laws then in effect. The fact that they were granted long ago won't mean they aren't valid then. True, they will *expire* sooner than if they had been issued on or after the directive date.
The difference wrt a "new crime" is that the hypothetical later-criminalized act began and ended before it became illegal. The patent document represents a continuous grant of protection over a defined period rather than an act performed at an instant of time. In that sense, it's rather more like an ongoing activity that becomes criminalized (example: ongoing financial suppor of an organization that gets outlawed. Past support not a crime, continuing support is/will be a crime.)
Run conduit in the walls and ceilings, with a couple of pull strings in each pipe so you can run the newest kinds of cable (or replace older lines) after the fact.
I've run conduit for some wiring retrofits, and you simply cannot beat it for sturdiness and ability to pur new stuff in. Power wiring has to be heavier when run in conduit, but yopu'll NEVER kill a circuit nailing up a shelf again.
If the thing can't hack it as a security guard, it's DOOMED as a kids' party chaperone/herdsman. All the cleverness of adults with none of their awareness of "but you can't do that". Kids will think of angles no adult would ever come across. Toughest audience imaginable for a security device...
I understand you're bitter about the decline of your favorite products, but it's not like there are no alternatives. I keep hearing that TI has done a lot of the cool stuff that everyone was hoping would happen with HP calculators.
Funny, but my HP 15C still runs like a charm decades after the competitive TI calculators are landfill. The newer HP models have been similarly superior; the HP culture of rock-solid best-of-breed equipment works very well for engineering equipment, and those calculators are definitely engineering equipment.
HP was always, always less successful in computers 'cause they didn't quite understand the market, and it was a commodity market (I worked there, and heard this discussed often; we always knew this.)
Low-margin lowest-cost stuff was never HP's forte; it was best-quality gear that engineering folks would pay a premium for 'cause it was more than worth it. Agilent does well 'cause they are the core of HP's original bread and butter business and still follow the original plan.
I worked at HP in the 80s, still hold stock in the company, and I have been horrified for years at the degradation of HP from a great place to work (and a profitable, socially responsible company) into a soulless, internally repressive corporate tyranny. Bill and Dave would be speechless with rage were they still with us.
Ms. Fiorina has presided over such low points as dumping a profitable calculator division (without even spinning it off or doing an EBO!), and a recent corporate general meeting where the proxy-voting process was blatantly abused and manipulated to ensure the board got their way regardless of what the stockholders wanted.
To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits; they preferred to make money by adding value, and believed in interoperability and good corporate citizenship (a quaint concept, I know, but I'm an old fart...)
I shed no tears (and gave a few cheers) at Ms. Fiorina's daparture; I just wish I had some confidence her successor will be an improvement.
And more entertaining than many other serials I've eaten (metaphorically speaking)...
3) Electronic systems are easier to manipulate, with many single-point-of-vulnerability opportunities to own the entire system, and are MUCH harder to design and implement in a really secure way than those primitive old paper things. Geeks understand these problems much more acutely than almost anyone else (with the possible exception of certain parties interested in gaming the election results again...?)
Ouch! That tinfoil hat is suddenly getting very hot!
You might be interested in reading Bob Edwards' book on Edward R. Murrow and the origins of broadcast jounalism; I just finished it, and it's quite interesting. I gather from it that quality journalism has always been somewhat the exception, less so in the early days than now, and has suffered enormously from corporate profit motives in broadcasting (ownership of broadcast networks by non-broadcasters, elimination of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, corporate treatment of news organizations as profit centers, and massive media ownership consolidation).
I'm afraid we have many fewer "journalists" today than "people who pretend to be journalists on TV and radio but aren't really."
Parent poster is correct, and well explained. Here's another way to look at the twisted-pair concept.
Any electrical circuit forms a loop; you can trace the current going out from the power source, through the load, and back to the other side of the power source.
For an electric power transmission line, this "loop" is the wires on the left and right sides of the power-line crossbar (OK, not all lines look like that, but the principle is the same). You can trace an imaginary line down one side of the power line and back on the other, enclosing a loop 12 feet wide and many miles long, with enormous area. This is one reason power lines are a bad idea for carrying RF signals; they make a GREAT antenna.
For radio interference, the area enclosed by this loop is an important factor; reduce the loop area, and you reduce the radiated interference. The DIRECTION of the current in the loop also counts; a clockwise loop radiates with a phase opposite that of a counterclockwise loop and can cancel it out if the two are right next to one another.
Now imagine twisting the two wires around each other; you get many very tiny loops with alternating CW/CCW directions of current flow in the loop; their net radiating effects cancel out.
Interesting note: Cross-country power lines ARE in fact twisted pairs, to prevent another interference type. At every Nth tower, you'll see the lines cross over so the left-hand line goes to the right. This results in loops of a half-mile length or so; useless for shielding from RF, but VERY important for protecting the grid from geomagnetic storms, where the Earth's magnetic field is pushed around by solar wind. Making the net loop area zero prevents the transmission line from acting as a giant DC generator and blowing out the switchgear, causing major blackouts (this happened in Canada in the 1970s, IIRC).
OK, so let's play along with Mr. McBride's crazy gold-rush metaphor for a minute...
In a gold rush, lots of get-rich-quick types run around trying to grab a nominally free resource (minerals lying on the ground) and peddle it as their property. Some of them are rather, shall we say, unscrupulous in their methods.
If we accurately apply this metaphor to the situation of IP, and more particularly to Open Source software and the IP rights thereto, the present SCO are a bunch of thieving claim-jumpers screaming "Mine! My Preciousss! Gollum!", and the Open Source community are out there giving the stuff away for free -- as long as you're willing to share it fairly.
"Counter-cultural," says Mr. McBride? Maybe so; I for one am totally counter to the culture he advocates. Let's counter that culture for all we're worth!
IANAL, but it occurs to me that proof of this sort of misconduct might well be sufficient for a reawakened DOJ to go back to the judge and ask for the Seattlement to be nullified and the case reopened (only possible if Kerry wins, obviously; if Bush wins, the DOJ yawns and rolls over again). It would depend heavily on the seriousness of the misconduct and the will of the DOJ to pursue it.
Does anyone actually know whether this is a legal possibility?
I have spent much time playing against an old DOS Go program published by Toyogo called Nemesis Go Master (still on my shelf at work; wonder if the 5.25" disk is still readable, hmmm). While I still play a terrible game of Go, it did improve my skills tremendously. Anyone else heard of this program?