If you want them to have privacy why are you putting their full name in their email address?
Damn fine question, thank you... you're possibly right. However, I'm one of those people who happens to believe that if you're prepared to send it you should be prepared to stand by it. If you don't want the wrong people to contact you, don't give out the details to the wrong people. I'd have thought that that was an important lesson to teach kids too, to treat email the same way you'd treat paper or your phone number... but maybe a couple of domains that can be thrown away in a few years might be worth considering, just to allow for the fact that kids can make mistakes.
And just out of curiosity, how would you set up a mechanism which doesn't allow you to "nailfile/chmod a+rwx diary"? Put in a request for the key, but the kid has a 48-hour period in which he/she can veto it? Let him/her know in advance and mark messages as hidden as necessary?
Another damn fine question, Mr 76. I see what you're getting at. With your ISP or work email account, you trust that the email administrator won't go to the message store and type something like "grep -i p[0,o,r][0,o,r]n *" just on a whim (tempting though that might be at times). I'd probably see it more like a problem that could be solved by a system at least superficially resembling the kind of email archiving systems used for compliance with financial regulations, and a system trustable by both users and admins to allow access under carefully defined conditions but fully log and report it. I suppose the argument that your ISP's admins could look at your ISP account mail as easily as your parents could look at your home account is negated to some extent by the fact that your ISP's mail admins probably don't give a flying fsck about you and the fact that parents are notoriously stupid and short-sighted when it comes to trust issues, but I suppose it comes down to establishing a measure of trust and ensuring that they know they can always rely on me to help pick up the pieces if needed... and not to rifle through their desk drawers unless they've disappeared.
I don't have all the answers. I don't expect I ever will. I fully expect that a number of my ideas will end up being revised or thrown out. I think some of it I'll just have to make up as I go along and as the technology becomes available, underpinned by instilling through example such notions as "access != authorisation" and the constant thought "How would I feel about this if our roles were reversed?"
But no-one would use it, it's too much of a hassle.
I intend setting up a vanity domain and running a mail service on it. I intend doing white-listing and quarantining for the kids to begin with, and as the kids get older I intend doing things like:
- Encrypted message store, with mechanisms for gaining access to the keys that are transparent and well-logged (so if they disappear we can hunt for clues, but can't casually do the equivalent of chmodding their diary +r with a nailfile without their knowledge)
- Allow them to manage their blocklists themselves
- Teach them about on-line safety and privacy, so they are able to keep themselves safe
- Hopefully make this mail system the obvious, convenient choice for them (with firstname@surname.org being the clincher - why go with hotmail when you can have something like that?)
I know from personal experience that growing up with parents who don't respect your privacy sucks... but as a parent, and someone who encounters stupid users with email and privacy issues every day, I see a very difficult path ahead of me. I only hope I'm up to the task.
I shudder to think what would happen if an actor like Jim Carey or Will Farrell got this role
Personally, I think Mike Myers would have been a good choice, but only if he was as sleazy as he was in Studio 54. "Here, have some candy, little girl..."
I use five different blocklists (NJABL Dynamic, Spamhaus SBL/XBL, DSBL ORDB, Spamcop) plus some local entries for known offenders and dynamic ranges that have been dumping large amounts of spam and virus traffic on us, and get maybe half a dozen reports of blocked messages per month. That's okay - we block between twenty and forty thousand messages per day this way on average. Every rejection politely invites the sender to contact postmaster@$WORKPLACE to discuss the matter in the event that the blocked message wasn't spam, and I'm happy to consider whitelistings where appropriate and to offer suggestions to the admins of the blocked sites about what they might be able to do to improve the general deliverability of their blocked mail and how they might get off the blocklists if appropriate.
Sure, blocklists aren't perfect, but they work well enough to keep my users able to productively use email, keep the load on in incoming mail relays lower than it might be if they had to scan every virus spewed out by an infected home machine on a DSL connection, and help those with legitimate systems that are getting abused find out about it sooner. They all sound like good things to me.
This is why I keep on adding big HDDs to my mini tower. At 20GB an hour for full DV quality, it won't take you long to fill up a Mac Mini's storage. When you do this, you'll have to start adding external firewire drives, which isn't really all that neat...
...maybe not, but it's dead easy - and that's what's needed by normal people. You and I could wire up anything to anything else in our sleep, but part of the target market for something like the Mac Mini is people who would have trouble figuring out how to plug their TV into the wall.
That said, I'd consider getting a mac mini if I was pressed for space or felt a compelling reason to move away from [L,W]intel (mostly L, these days).
municipal wifi is a great idea if you want to lock in 802.11g as the standard for the future... being able to sell homes and businesses wifi technology is what keeps pushing the technological envelope... want to kill wiMax? Support municipal wifi
You know, this is about the first reasonable argument I've heard against municipal wifi, and is an issue that hadn't occurred to me. I don't see it as good enough reason to dismiss municpal wifi outright, but it's worth taking into account. Mind you, even though betamax was a technically superior video format, twenty years on you don't see many people lamenting the fact that VHS became the entrenched domininant format.
In this day and age, anyone with any sense who has a legitimate need to run a mail server on a dynamic address also relays through their ISP's mail servers and bypasses blocks like that anyway.
Except that doing that takes away one of the big advantages of running your own mail server, a lack of limits on outgoing attachments. Now, depending on ISP, this may or may not be a big deal, but in 2005, a 2MB attachment limit is rather small.
Then look at using mailertables, either with your ISPs outbound mail server as the default and your friends' systems as mailertable entries, or your own system connecting directly by default and relaying via your ISP's mailrelay for those systems which reject direct connections from you. Or, cough up for a static IP and proper forward and reverse DNS entries.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to run your own mailserver. Kudos to you for recognising the benefits to doing so, and they can be many. However, you need to be aware of the total environment you operate in, and recognise that certain networks almost exclusively have certain kinds of traffic coming from them and take appropriate measures to ensure you can reasonably quickly change your setup to send mail via an alternate route if necessary.
I feel your pain on the issue of seemingly un-necessary or inappropriate blocks, as I'll be looking for a DSL provider in about six months and don't want to be hampered unnecessarily - I've already dropped a few otherwise promising candidates off my shortlist over things like the fact that they reject DSN messages sent to accounts on their system... I WANT to know if my mail couldn't get delivered, dammit! . My guess is you're using a consumer-grade service, and that will likely have all sorts of restrictions "for users' own good" - and given that any cretin can get a DSL line and hook a brand new and completely unpatched Windows machine to the Internet this is not necessarily a bad thing in most cases. Looking for a provider who is prepared to open up the service a little more if requested by knowledgeable users, or paying a little more for a soho or business-class service, might be worth considering. I understand many ISPs directly block outbound port 25 connections unless you explitly request that they open that up, for example, and that's quite a responsible anti-spam action. Blocking SSH is just plain dumb, though - there's more to the Internet than http on port 80, but you wouldn't know it from some of the services some ISPs are offering. Shop around.
There is nothing easier for a spammer to defeat then a RBL; they just set up a server in their closet and run their own SMTP server
No, most spammers aren't that stupid. That's a good way to get your ISP and in some countries the law to ream you a new one.
,b>
Most DSL and cable connections use temporary IP addresses and you can't RBL Verizon
Why not, or at least RBL their dynamic address ranges? In this day and age, anyone with any sense who has a legitimate need to run a mail server on a dynamic address also relays through their ISP's mail servers and bypasses blocks like that anyway. Blocking cable modem and dsl ranges, can also take some load off your AV mailscanners too when outbreaks occur, and can help pro-actively protect your users to some extent from new virus variants.
Unfortunately, there aren't any complete dynamic address blocklists that I know of - but layering a few different types of blocklists can give good results.
No spammer is going to co-lo a server to send spam from.
Maybe not in the US any more, but a number apparantly did in the past. Besides, why should they bother when they can access large numbers of trojanned windows machines on cable or dsl connections?
Laws, RBLs, regulations... all these things are both ineffective and erode our freedom
Freedom to do what - reject what you consider to be in all likeleyhood spam? I run a mail system and use several RBLs, and block large numbers of messages through them (more than 50% of connection attempts, totalling half a million to a million rejected attempts per month). I get very few queries about erroneous blocking. So long as you offer legitimate mail senders a chance to plead their case with you, I don't see a problem with RBLs. They're not a total solution, but in practice they can be very useful and save you having to pay for a lot of bandwidth you didn't ask to have used on your behalf.
Use an email filter. The good ones don't even use blacklists and work great.
SpamAssassin can be configured to use blocklists in assessing messages, and any good implementation of it will use that as part of the overall assessment. If a message gets a couple of points for containing forged Hotmail headers but nothing else on the content because it's plain text, the fact that it's listed in a couple of blocklists other than the one you use can help you detemine its probable spamminess... but you need to at least let the other mailserver send the message's data to you before you can make a full SpamAssassin assessment of the message... and why bother letting it get that far, if it's from someone listed on the SpamHaus XBL? If they're listed in some services, they've got more to worry about than whether their users can send mail to your users.
Do you need to be careful which blocklists you use? You betcha - there are some I'd never use. Others, however, can provide great benefits for minimal effort and vanishingly small amounts of collateral damage to legitimate mail. Offer a way to resolve the issue in the rejection, and be polite and informative when handling complaints, and only true anti-antispammer zealots can take offence at how you run things.
There is some IP that belongs to someone in nearly any product of a little compexity.
That much is blindingly obvious.
Ever saw a car manufacturer telling the people on which roads they could drive or a shoe manufacturer dictating where you can walk or what you can do while wearing the shoes?
Actually, yes. It's usually in the form of "You won't do this if you want to keep your vehicle warranty, or your feet, intact" - but it's done. Safety boots have environmental limits, and I've seen car manuals which specified the kinds of obstacles the vehicle could drive over or through without undue risk of damage to the vehicle or to the manufacturer's ongoing obligations to fix it for free if it breaks. It generally has nothing to do with intellectual property rights, though. A closer example might be CD mastering software - an infringing use of it might be to make illegal copies of itself, although that requires deliberate action on the part of the user. The fact that plants are frequently self-propagating doesn't by itself invalidate the right of the owners of the IP they contain to protect that IP - although it should probably at the very least severely limit their ability to seek remedies in cases where it has disseminated itself because of the inherent nature of their chosen distribution medium i.e. plant genes.
Cars and footwear are fundamentally different products from GM crops, though. Although my footwear frequently smells like it is capable of reproducing, and my car isn't far behind, neither can produce a new item containing either Blundstone or General Motors intellectual property no matter what I try. GM crops will cross-pollinate other plants, be spread by wind or animals or vehicles, and the patented genes will make their way into places where the GM crop was not deliberately sown. That makes others infringe the GM crop's patents without their knowledge or consent, and would be morally akin to SCO disseminating a computer virus and then filing suit against everyone whose system got infected for using and distributing SCO IP without authorisation. That's the issue here. Not any half-remembered Doctrine of First Sale bullshit. Not any "It's my property, if I want to stick it in the ground I can" arguments, although I personally agree that it is morally reprehensible to force some third-world (or even first-world) farmer to mill all their grain and buy new seedstock rather than keep part of the last harvest for planting. Not any easily rebuttable "They'd never get away with it for any other product" arguments, when it's plain that software and physical goods have been sold with different usage restrictions for different purposes and to different customers for years, especially in the commercial and government sectors. Despite your protests that things can't be like that because they should not be like that, the law says otherwise. I tend to agree with you on the point that things should be very different, but the law disagrees. The law needs to be fixed, and pertinent and persuasive points need to be made. Hell, I know this is Slashdot, and I know I'm not the most coherent person here at times, and I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but so help me if I need to explain this a fourth time you're either getting a fourth freak or your first fan - I can't decide which.
And, after all, this is totally stupid. Only ways how to construct something should be protected by IP law, not the products themselves and what the owner does with them.
I never said it was right; I said it was the way things are. The way things stand at the moment, the law states that (a) some corporation's IP is embodied in those plants, and (b) they can prevent others using that IP. Obviously, since selective defence of patents is looked at very closely in patent suits, and GlobalMegaPlantCorp lawyers are likely to be pretty sharp, there must be some kind of licence to cover the fact that their IP is being duplicated millions or billions of times on each farm that uses their seeds. They don't prosecute the farmer who delivers his crop to the oil press, yet he's made billions of copies of the protected seeds...
Here again, if I have a normal contract of purcase, the crops become my property. If the seller had any contracts that prohibited him from selling it to me, it's his problem.
I wish that was true. As the law stands, GM plants contain somebody's IP, and that somebody gets the right to say what it can be used for. The fact that someone has given or sold you a copy of someone elses intellectual property doesn't exempt you from the laws associated with that intellectual property.
I don't agree with the concept of legally preventing people saving a portion of their crop as seed stock; that's fundamentally wrong, in my opinion. I also think that allowing the patenting of aspects of plants is legislative negligence, because I can't think of a single example of another patent which has the danger of polluting the IP of others (whether private or public domain) with its own IP without knowledge or consent.
I can see why particular companies would want plant patents. Monsanto's patents on glyphosate will have expired by now, meaning that anyone can produce a Roundup-workalike legally. Producing plants which are glyphosate-resistant and covered by patents helps them do two things. It gets them an income peripherally associated with an old herbicide with very strong brand recognition, and it gets genes associated with resistance to that herbicide out into wild relatives - this is important, because it means that by the time the plant patent expires, glyphosate will be commercially useless for both themselves and their competitors and there will be a marketing opportunity for the "Next Big Herbicide" and its matching resistant crops. Paranoid? Me? Maybe, but I don't think so. They have to know those things will crossbreed and go feral. If they get the opportunity to litigate a few other seed suppliers out of business along the way too, so much the better. You think Microsoft looks like a litigious, anticompetitive bullyboy now? They're going to look pretty tame in comparison with companies like Monsanto, unless people start waking up to the dangers associated with our current patent system and take action to correct it.
I have no problem with people protecting their research and effort, provided that they can do so without forcing others to use that IP without their consent. By effectively releasing those plant genes into the wild, it's only a matter of time before "infringing copies" start appearing in other wild and commercial plants. Patents were meant to stop others using your ideas without your consent - they were never meant to allow you to sneak your ideas into the work of others and then demand compensation.
Yes, just like the CD your commercial compiler came on.
I can do whatever I want with them, plant, sell or eat them.
...subject to the terms of the licence "shrinkpwrapped" with them. There is a patent in force, and your licence allows you to grow grain for feed purposes (human or livestock) but not as seedstock. A bit like how some Borland compilers used to come with an EULA that prohibited using them to produce new compilers or operating systems, iirc (the OS bit is correct, unsure about the other compiler bit...)
If I grow them and the resulting plants grow seeds themselves, these seeds are my very own property, too.
Yes, they are your property... that's the whole point of selling the seedstock to you in the first place...
I can do whatever I like with my property, and nobody has any right to tell me when I can put my property in the ground and when not!
I'd prefer it if that was how things are, too. Unfortunately, when you purchase GM seeds from the owner of the intellectual properly, you're effectively licenced for one use of them only - growing the crop for feed or industrial use. If you acquire the seed in any other way (whether through purchase from someone who doesn't have a licence to sell it as seedstock, or from your own fields) you aren't licenced to use it as seedstock. You can mill it, you can feed it to your pigs, you can use it to make biodiesel, but if you stick it in the ground you have committed an unlicensed use of the seed.
What makes plant patents so insidious is that they will interbreed with wild relatives (canola/rapeweed, cultivated cotton with the wild cotton you see by the roadside in cotton country etc) and neighbouring crops. This is a truly viral licence, as without your knowledge or consent you could easily find that your crops acquire patented genes.
IANAL, but I'd argue that plant patents could be used to litigate other seed suppliers out of existence - puff some pollen over their crop fields, and in a couple of generations there may well be enough of your IP in enough of their seeds for a patent suit to stick. In the past, if you didn't want to get sued, you didn't use someone elses IP - and they couldn't make you. These days, it may well be possible for someone else to introduce their IP into your product without your knowledge or consent, and you're liable for the infringement. If you could prove you'd been set up you might be able to make a case against the IP owners, but you can bet lawyers and corporations are a lot smarter in this post-Tobacco and post-Asbestos era and that no evidence will be left.
Try running Linux someday - chances are you'll get an X11 lockup within a few days (if your hardware is even supported) if you try to do anything more than stare at the desktop.
Hmmm... let's see... my desktop P4 machine in the office is running Debian Sid. What do I do with it? Oh, the kind of things you've said you do with your Powerbook. Rather than log out each evening, I lock the X11 session so my KDE session durations frequently exceed several weeks (Why? It's easer than using screen for local things I have in progress, and I've been too lazy to organise anything better than Mozilla to filter my 2000+ daily email messages). On the extremely rare occasion that X11 does seem to lock, I can usually shut down the display manager from a virtual console or (shudder) by ssh-ing in from my notebook or the sparc behind me or even walking to the machine room and ssh-ing in from one of the web proxies or mail relays.
I love my 200MHz 604 running OS 8, but if that's the kind of reliability you're getting with a Powerbook and OS X for real work I think I'll have to stick with Linux on Intel. That's a shame, because I had a G5 with Debian and MOL on my post-lottery wishlist too.
Do many porn spammers use Chinese web hosting, or do they just relay through there? This could work out well for the rest of us, even if it's a(nother) kick in the goolies freedom-wise for the Chinese people.
I don't know how much good it'll do them, though. The authors probably won't try to connect to it again, and it'll only be machines being raped or the curious who will even attempt it now.
I sure hope Netfirms have good logs, and that the bastards who did it were stupid enough to set the account up directly from their own machines rather than via a compromised intermediary.
If this is your cup of tea then please read "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. [google].
You know, when I first heard about contestants using V2-derived launch vehicles, I had two thoughts:
1 - Where did they get enough Imipolex G?
and
2 - Wasn't the Schwartsgerat a single-seater? Or did it actually refer to the pilot? It's been too long since I read it.
In a move from the humourous to the wildly off-topic and karma-burning, I got within 60 pages of the end and just lost interest and just stopped reading. Normally I never do that, but I just couldn't read any more of it - which is interesting, considering I used to use American Psycho and a crazy grin to guarantee an empty seat next to me on public transport...
Joe Haldeman's The Mazel Tov Revolution also springs to mind as an example of space property rights in fiction. It is also an example of a monopolist getting a stranglehold but eventually losing out. Well worth reading.
One of the problems I've seen in the consumer end of the computer industry is that practically anyone can call themselves a "computer technician" and fix the things. I've seen people ripped off horribly. Case in point, my wife has a friend who was told "Once there's a virus on your hard disk, it's there forever - for $200 we'll provide a new one, install all your software on it, and safely dispose of the old one". No, that's not the rip-off because I fixed the thing for her instead - the initial purchase of the system and all its pirate software was in this instance, but I've got a dozen similar tales dating back fifteen years. Registration doesn't indicate competence, but it does mean that they've needed to provide a fee and adequate identification to the state before setting out their shingle. It makes it that much more likely that in the event of a problem you can track them down. It makes it a little less likely for the more overt shonks to set up shop for a month or two then move. It's annoying for the legitimate businesses, but might under some circumstances help keep the less desirable out. Of course, then we have the ongoing problem of who is deemed "undesirable", and with computers being able to be viewed as playback or encryption devices we have a whole other can of worms.
If the DEC VAX systems are so antiquated, wouldn't it make more sense for businesses using these systems to simply upgrade to newer/better technology? I mean even if they have incredibly stability and "wow" factor, wouldn't it be easier than both solutions just to upgrade the software to newer systems.
Say you've got an existing system performing a particular task - maybe your inventory or payroll system, and it's coping with the load and has sufficient flexibility to allow you to make changes in response to foreseeable business and legislative changes. You are faced with a bill of a couple of thousand dollars every time something breaks, and that's happening more frequently. You know you want to get newer software in the future, but you're not entirely sure what you want and want time to look but are concerned the old system will not last until then.
In this situation, you could spend a couple of thousand dollars on a new machine and run your old software on it using a free emulator. Hell, the machine you just ordered for your secretary would probably out-perform the old server. The new machine will be one twentieth the size of the old, use one twentieth of the electricity and won't have twenty years of accumulated wear and tear.
If you've got a custom application written in a dead language, emulation may be the best way to continue fulfilling your requirements too. Sure, a new app in the shiny new language du jour might be nice, but if you've got proven 30 year old code and performance on the old hardware is adequate then it makes sense to keep things ticking on a virtual vax or pdp. And think of the kind of server room consolidation you could perform!
Other posters have commented on the proven behaviour of hardware v. emulators - how the latter could have bugs that aren't apparant, and may thus be unsuitable for users like NASA etc. Surely it's easier to produce a bug-for-bug compatible emulator than it is to re-write possibly millions of lines of legacy code in a bug-free manner. Sure, it's nice in the long run to re-write software with greater portability in mind, but while that's happening wouldn't it be worth making sure you can continue to run your existing programs without having to worry what will happen if some obscure I.C. elects a new Pope?
It'll probably allow businesses to keep using their old Sun hardware a bit longer; they won't necessarily have to junk their Solaris boxes once they standardize on Linux for their core apps.
Yay! Just like we keep using our old Sun sparc kit and our DEC Alpha gear with Debian. And our new-ish Sun Intel gear with Debian. And our IBM equipment with Debian. And that Shiny! new quad Opteron we've got on evaluation from HP on Debian. Yes, I'll really be tempted to install Solaris 10 on our Intel gear instead...
However, I don't see it selling any new Sun product. "Oh boy, now I can pay thousands for Sun/Solaris HW/SW, so I can run the same apps I could have run on a $500 PC! Yay!!":-)
Okay, I might not like Solaris terribly much, but they do some very nice equipment that's more appropriate in server rooms than the average $500 PC. If your apps won't run noticeably better on one of their sparc systems than on bargain-basement PC gear, they're probably not that interested in getting your business anyway.
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I don't have all the answers. I don't expect I ever will. I fully expect that a number of my ideas will end up being revised or thrown out. I think some of it I'll just have to make up as I go along and as the technology becomes available, underpinned by instilling through example such notions as "access != authorisation" and the constant thought "How would I feel about this if our roles were reversed?"
- Encrypted message store, with mechanisms for gaining access to the keys that are transparent and well-logged (so if they disappear we can hunt for clues, but can't casually do the equivalent of chmodding their diary +r with a nailfile without their knowledge)
- Allow them to manage their blocklists themselves
- Teach them about on-line safety and privacy, so they are able to keep themselves safe
- Hopefully make this mail system the obvious, convenient choice for them (with firstname@surname.org being the clincher - why go with hotmail when you can have something like that?)
I know from personal experience that growing up with parents who don't respect your privacy sucks... but as a parent, and someone who encounters stupid users with email and privacy issues every day, I see a very difficult path ahead of me. I only hope I'm up to the task.
Sure, blocklists aren't perfect, but they work well enough to keep my users able to productively use email, keep the load on in incoming mail relays lower than it might be if they had to scan every virus spewed out by an infected home machine on a DSL connection, and help those with legitimate systems that are getting abused find out about it sooner. They all sound like good things to me.
That said, I'd consider getting a mac mini if I was pressed for space or felt a compelling reason to move away from [L,W]intel (mostly L, these days).
Well, at least with the Apple version you can surf porn without, well, you know, ruining your input device.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to run your own mailserver. Kudos to you for recognising the benefits to doing so, and they can be many. However, you need to be aware of the total environment you operate in, and recognise that certain networks almost exclusively have certain kinds of traffic coming from them and take appropriate measures to ensure you can reasonably quickly change your setup to send mail via an alternate route if necessary.
I feel your pain on the issue of seemingly un-necessary or inappropriate blocks, as I'll be looking for a DSL provider in about six months and don't want to be hampered unnecessarily - I've already dropped a few otherwise promising candidates off my shortlist over things like the fact that they reject DSN messages sent to accounts on their system... I WANT to know if my mail couldn't get delivered, dammit! . My guess is you're using a consumer-grade service, and that will likely have all sorts of restrictions "for users' own good" - and given that any cretin can get a DSL line and hook a brand new and completely unpatched Windows machine to the Internet this is not necessarily a bad thing in most cases. Looking for a provider who is prepared to open up the service a little more if requested by knowledgeable users, or paying a little more for a soho or business-class service, might be worth considering. I understand many ISPs directly block outbound port 25 connections unless you explitly request that they open that up, for example, and that's quite a responsible anti-spam action. Blocking SSH is just plain dumb, though - there's more to the Internet than http on port 80, but you wouldn't know it from some of the services some ISPs are offering. Shop around.
Do you need to be careful which blocklists you use? You betcha - there are some I'd never use. Others, however, can provide great benefits for minimal effort and vanishingly small amounts of collateral damage to legitimate mail. Offer a way to resolve the issue in the rejection, and be polite and informative when handling complaints, and only true anti-antispammer zealots can take offence at how you run things.
I love that series, but for some reason I can't help giggling every time I hear "I am the new Number Two".
Now, if we could just get David Lynch to direct a new season of The Pretender...
Cars and footwear are fundamentally different products from GM crops, though. Although my footwear frequently smells like it is capable of reproducing, and my car isn't far behind, neither can produce a new item containing either Blundstone or General Motors intellectual property no matter what I try. GM crops will cross-pollinate other plants, be spread by wind or animals or vehicles, and the patented genes will make their way into places where the GM crop was not deliberately sown. That makes others infringe the GM crop's patents without their knowledge or consent, and would be morally akin to SCO disseminating a computer virus and then filing suit against everyone whose system got infected for using and distributing SCO IP without authorisation. That's the issue here. Not any half-remembered Doctrine of First Sale bullshit. Not any "It's my property, if I want to stick it in the ground I can" arguments, although I personally agree that it is morally reprehensible to force some third-world (or even first-world) farmer to mill all their grain and buy new seedstock rather than keep part of the last harvest for planting. Not any easily rebuttable "They'd never get away with it for any other product" arguments, when it's plain that software and physical goods have been sold with different usage restrictions for different purposes and to different customers for years, especially in the commercial and government sectors. Despite your protests that things can't be like that because they should not be like that, the law says otherwise. I tend to agree with you on the point that things should be very different, but the law disagrees. The law needs to be fixed, and pertinent and persuasive points need to be made. Hell, I know this is Slashdot, and I know I'm not the most coherent person here at times, and I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but so help me if I need to explain this a fourth time you're either getting a fourth freak or your first fan - I can't decide which.
I don't agree with the concept of legally preventing people saving a portion of their crop as seed stock; that's fundamentally wrong, in my opinion. I also think that allowing the patenting of aspects of plants is legislative negligence, because I can't think of a single example of another patent which has the danger of polluting the IP of others (whether private or public domain) with its own IP without knowledge or consent.
I can see why particular companies would want plant patents. Monsanto's patents on glyphosate will have expired by now, meaning that anyone can produce a Roundup-workalike legally. Producing plants which are glyphosate-resistant and covered by patents helps them do two things. It gets them an income peripherally associated with an old herbicide with very strong brand recognition, and it gets genes associated with resistance to that herbicide out into wild relatives - this is important, because it means that by the time the plant patent expires, glyphosate will be commercially useless for both themselves and their competitors and there will be a marketing opportunity for the "Next Big Herbicide" and its matching resistant crops. Paranoid? Me? Maybe, but I don't think so. They have to know those things will crossbreed and go feral. If they get the opportunity to litigate a few other seed suppliers out of business along the way too, so much the better. You think Microsoft looks like a litigious, anticompetitive bullyboy now? They're going to look pretty tame in comparison with companies like Monsanto, unless people start waking up to the dangers associated with our current patent system and take action to correct it.
I have no problem with people protecting their research and effort, provided that they can do so without forcing others to use that IP without their consent. By effectively releasing those plant genes into the wild, it's only a matter of time before "infringing copies" start appearing in other wild and commercial plants. Patents were meant to stop others using your ideas without your consent - they were never meant to allow you to sneak your ideas into the work of others and then demand compensation.
What makes plant patents so insidious is that they will interbreed with wild relatives (canola/rapeweed, cultivated cotton with the wild cotton you see by the roadside in cotton country etc) and neighbouring crops. This is a truly viral licence, as without your knowledge or consent you could easily find that your crops acquire patented genes.
IANAL, but I'd argue that plant patents could be used to litigate other seed suppliers out of existence - puff some pollen over their crop fields, and in a couple of generations there may well be enough of your IP in enough of their seeds for a patent suit to stick. In the past, if you didn't want to get sued, you didn't use someone elses IP - and they couldn't make you. These days, it may well be possible for someone else to introduce their IP into your product without your knowledge or consent, and you're liable for the infringement. If you could prove you'd been set up you might be able to make a case against the IP owners, but you can bet lawyers and corporations are a lot smarter in this post-Tobacco and post-Asbestos era and that no evidence will be left.
I love my 200MHz 604 running OS 8, but if that's the kind of reliability you're getting with a Powerbook and OS X for real work I think I'll have to stick with Linux on Intel. That's a shame, because I had a G5 with Debian and MOL on my post-lottery wishlist too.
Do many porn spammers use Chinese web hosting, or do they just relay through there? This could work out well for the rest of us, even if it's a(nother) kick in the goolies freedom-wise for the Chinese people.
I sure hope Netfirms have good logs, and that the bastards who did it were stupid enough to set the account up directly from their own machines rather than via a compromised intermediary.
Oh, and by the way, that's Mister Knobface to you, boyo!
1 - Where did they get enough Imipolex G?
and
2 - Wasn't the Schwartsgerat a single-seater? Or did it actually refer to the pilot? It's been too long since I read it.
In a move from the humourous to the wildly off-topic and karma-burning, I got within 60 pages of the end and just lost interest and just stopped reading. Normally I never do that, but I just couldn't read any more of it - which is interesting, considering I used to use American Psycho and a crazy grin to guarantee an empty seat next to me on public transport...
Joe Haldeman's The Mazel Tov Revolution also springs to mind as an example of space property rights in fiction. It is also an example of a monopolist getting a stranglehold but eventually losing out. Well worth reading.
One of the problems I've seen in the consumer end of the computer industry is that practically anyone can call themselves a "computer technician" and fix the things. I've seen people ripped off horribly. Case in point, my wife has a friend who was told "Once there's a virus on your hard disk, it's there forever - for $200 we'll provide a new one, install all your software on it, and safely dispose of the old one". No, that's not the rip-off because I fixed the thing for her instead - the initial purchase of the system and all its pirate software was in this instance, but I've got a dozen similar tales dating back fifteen years. Registration doesn't indicate competence, but it does mean that they've needed to provide a fee and adequate identification to the state before setting out their shingle. It makes it that much more likely that in the event of a problem you can track them down. It makes it a little less likely for the more overt shonks to set up shop for a month or two then move. It's annoying for the legitimate businesses, but might under some circumstances help keep the less desirable out. Of course, then we have the ongoing problem of who is deemed "undesirable", and with computers being able to be viewed as playback or encryption devices we have a whole other can of worms.
In this situation, you could spend a couple of thousand dollars on a new machine and run your old software on it using a free emulator. Hell, the machine you just ordered for your secretary would probably out-perform the old server. The new machine will be one twentieth the size of the old, use one twentieth of the electricity and won't have twenty years of accumulated wear and tear.
If you've got a custom application written in a dead language, emulation may be the best way to continue fulfilling your requirements too. Sure, a new app in the shiny new language du jour might be nice, but if you've got proven 30 year old code and performance on the old hardware is adequate then it makes sense to keep things ticking on a virtual vax or pdp. And think of the kind of server room consolidation you could perform!
Other posters have commented on the proven behaviour of hardware v. emulators - how the latter could have bugs that aren't apparant, and may thus be unsuitable for users like NASA etc. Surely it's easier to produce a bug-for-bug compatible emulator than it is to re-write possibly millions of lines of legacy code in a bug-free manner. Sure, it's nice in the long run to re-write software with greater portability in mind, but while that's happening wouldn't it be worth making sure you can continue to run your existing programs without having to worry what will happen if some obscure I.C. elects a new Pope?