There have been political tensions on and off between Ireland and the UK since the fifteenth century.
The latest bout has more or less calmed down now, but at one point we were arresting and holding people indefinitely for the "crime" of being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sound familiar?
The problem with this approach is that as soon as you arrest a man who was thought to be fairly blameless within his circle of friends and family, most of whom were aware of the political tension but were otherwise fairly ambivalent towards you, they turn against you. Lather, rinse and repeat a few times and if you didn't have a terrorist organisation before you do now.
They don't all have Bin Laden's current postal address and telephone hotline. If they did, it would be fairly trivial to track him down.
Of course, as soon as you start thinking of a terrorist organisation like this, you have a huge problem.
Conventional methods that you might use against a country (eg. declare war) or a criminal conspiracy (eg. infiltrate them) don't work. You just wind up playing whack-a-mole with a twist - for every mole you whack, there's a good chance that two will appear in their place.
Whether or not he had any direct hand in it, he was the leader of the organization responsible,
Whoa... stop right there.
A terrorist organisation - or at least, one that's even remotely successful for any length of time - doesn't have the pyramid-style management structure that you're used to seeing.
Instead, it has a bunch of loosely-organised small groups, each consisting of no more than a dozen people. These groups may have a little communication between them but by and large they're fairly autonomous - they just use a common name to identify with the common cause they share. This is why it's damnably difficult to efficiently infiltrate the organisation - put simply, nobody knows much about anyone outside their own group and this is by design.
It follows that even if there are a few people who are considered inspirational by most within the organisation, getting rid of those few people won't necessarily achieve much. In fact, it could well be counter-productive because you'll turn them into martyrs.
It seems fairly straightforward to invoice them for your resonable costs in phoning them up. If they don't pay, take them to small claims.
I'm not sure how well that would work in the UK seeing as the law is fairly clear: the company you buy the product from is liable to ensure that you get what you bought. Not the company who made the product.
Having said that, I'm given to understand that the company you buy the product from is liable for reasonable expenses you incur in getting it to work/rejecting it. So if Game (major UK game retailer) tell you that you have to call EA to get your game working, you might be able to take Game to court for the telephone bill.
Because this has NOTHING to do with piracy. I repeat: NOTHING at all to do with piracy. This is a plan by EA to take out the used games market and take away your right to first sale.
And here we have the absolutely classic case explaining how the law is lagging behind technology.
Back when the right to first sale was established in law, the very idea of technology which could prevent you exercising your rights when there was no technical reason why you couldn't (ie. it's not a product which intrinsically loses all its value the moment you open the box) simply didn't exist.
So now we have the faintly absurd scenario where there are a whole bunch of laws which work in the consumer's favour and a whole bunch of companies who are essentially taking advantage of loopholes in those laws (which didn't exist when they were written) to nullify them.
At which point you return it, or (check your CC terms), dispute it if they decline to accept a return on a defective product, or after properly documenting everything, file a an action in small claims (this presumes you were not reinstalling it for spite, but instead, actually having problems).
Of course, there is the bijou issuette that your small claims case will likely be against the retailer rather than the manufacturer, as it's the retailer that's refusing to accept a return of a faulty product.
Chances are the publisher won't even hear about it unless it happens many times to a sufficiently large retailer who's got the clout to turn around and say "don't do that again".
But people are trying to get him fired over it? That's bullshit. The guy can hold his opinion, and as long as he sticks to the curriculum without creationism, why get him fired over his goddamned opinion?
Because his job is to act as ambassador to education for a highly respected scientific society. If he starts spouting stuff which no scientist is prepared to take seriously, then he shouldn't be doing the job.
Having said that, there's a world of difference between "We should teach Creationism" (what he's quoted as saying) and "If a pupil asks, a teacher should be prepared to explain how Creationism isn't scientific rather than just ignore the question" (which is what he claims to have meant).
I know which one of those comments makes better headlines, though.
Experience is the best teacher, but unfortunately it's not a particularly fast one. Anyone on/. can point you at a few interesting things like Slackware, Google and O'Reilly's back catalogue, and plenty of people already have.
What I would advise is:
1. Learn to see past the bullshit. There's a lot of it in IT, generally being spewed by salesmen and managers who pretend they know more than they do. In my experience, the less intelligible the communication (ie. the more buzzwords), the more likely it is you're talking to someone who doesn't have a clue. The word "Enterprise" is a good barometer there - it's often used completely unnecessarily and in the IT world has almost zero meaning.
Example: A Dell 2950 with every component that can be made redundant made redundant isn't an "Enterprise Server". It's a server. If you haven't specced it with redundant power supplies and disks, I wouldn't even class it as a server. It's a PC in a very expensive case.
2. Sometimes it's worth paying for a solution./. would have you believe that Open Source is the Answer to All Our Prayers, and that Richard Stallman is the Messiah. Not true - there are plenty of products which don't have a half-decent open source alternative. Courier is a great IMAP server but at the end of the day, Exchange is a very capable product and is fantastically hard to beat feature-wise. Zimbra comes close but who knows what kind of a future it's got as it's owned by Yahoo. And I defy you to find a F/OSS business accounts system which isn't half-arsed. You can't say to the tax authorities "Errr... about those accounts we're due to submit - yeah, we just realised that our accounts system hasn't been updated to account for the recent changes in tax law and so we're having to wait until it is. Don't know how long that will take".
3. Security, security, security. Understand the ideas rather than just mindlessly installing the patches - a hardened Apache installation with a locked down PHP configuration behind a firewall operating some fancy layer 7 intrusion prevention system is great, and will help mitigate many forms of attack - but at the end of the day if you've got a badly designed PHP application all that'll happen is that intruders will access your data through a pretty web-based user interface.
4. Look at what the business does right now, think of how things could be made better and put together a system to make things better. It doesn't necessarily have to be something that will see the light of day - it could just be feasibility checking - but it'll give you something useful to do with definite goals which will teach you a great deal and at the same time may very well benefit the business.
All in all, I'm not sure sure that such source code shouldn't be truly "open". I know what you're saying, and it's logical enough. However, being available to defense lawyers and such leaves too much room for a serious defect to simply be swept under the rug by an out-of-court settlement. Consequently, people involved in similar cases would not be able to benefit from discovery.
IANAL, but my understanding regarding criminal cases (and bear in mind that I'm not American either, so I may be way off here) there's no such thing as an out-of-court settlement.
There's "dropping the charges because we've just discovered that our evidence is nonexistent", and there's "pleading guilty (to either the original charge or a lesser charge)", both of which substantially reduce the amount of time spent in court.
rule that all programming used for government functions be open source, unless there's an overriding reason for it to be closed.
That would never fly, on the simple basis that every government department would have to replace every IT system they own - and some people with an awful lot of money are still very attached to the idea of closed source.
However, I can't think of any good reason why "open source" should not be applied to equipment used for justice purposes (eg. speed cameras, breathalysers) and mean "open to the government and, where applicable, to defence lawyers for use by expert witnesses" rather than "available to anyone on sourceforge".
About the only way to kill music would be something which would kill the human race. However if the current music industry were to die, for any reason, a new one would come into being within a short time.
And the people best equipped to do it would be those who understand how music works.
Note that this may not be the money men in suits at the top - it may be the talent scouts rather nearer the bottom.
You really have to think that after 10 years of consumers telling the labels and studios what they want, and then voting with their feet when they don't get it, it would have sunk into even the head of the thickest *AA dinosaur. In the annals of colossal stupidity, the last 10 years of IP wars will have to rank pretty near the top.
10 years? Try 100.
Radio will kill the live music industry. Vinyl will kill radio and live music. Home taping will kill vinyl, radio and live music. Copying CDs will kill music. MP3s will kill music.
It wasn't true back then and it isn't true now. People want to listen to music, plain and simple. The RIAA know that damn well, they're not that stupid. Quite why they're so keen to describe every new piece of technology as the thing that will eventually kill them, I don't know. Some sort of control thing?
A system based on a sensor and a road which has magnets strategically placed to trigger those sensors rather than trying to essentially process video and make decisions based on the video in realtime is more reliable?
No f*cking kidding. Trying to turn a single image into something which a computer can make decisions on is hard. Trying to turn a sequence of images in realtime at 60mph is fantastically hard. However, when you're dealing with something much simpler like a magnetic sensor, you've already had most of the processing essentially done for you. The only reason it hasn't taken off is that nobody really likes the idea of fitting every mile of road with magnets (or whatever they ultimately use to trigger the sensors).
The store sold him a faulty product! Seriouly - anything so flimsy that it only lasts 5 months clearly had something wrong with it when it was made. I'd expect a representative for the store that sold it to fix this problem. Then it's up to them to take it up with the manufacturer.
In theory, the free market should fix this by making manufacturers who pull stunts like this (sell $500 printers that pack up after 5 months and refuse to replace them) go out of business.
However, when an entire industry is trying desperately to cut every corner they can by reducing warranties to the bare minimum and outsourcing manufacturing to the cheapest, nastiest companies that wouldn't know QA if they were run over by a lorry delivering printed copies of ISO 9001, it doesn't quite work.
(I have the luxury of being able to say "Sucks to be you!" because I live in Europe and everything has at least one year, and up to 6 years mandated in law. Though to be fair some manufacturers (*cough* HP *cough*) have got the "fail 3 weeks after the warranty expires" trick down to a fine art).
"Linux support" is an extremely broad brush because really it depends on what package you're talking about. I'm a sysadmin so most of my experience relates to Linux on the server type issues, but I can tell you now:
OpenLDAP : Frequently outright hostile to newbies. Core product is good at what it does, but is severely limited in terms of features compared to every other LDAP server around. The core developer team will actually go so far as to write papers explaining why OpenLDAP is better than any other LDAP server and why feature "X" cannot reliably/sensibly be implemented by anybody because it's physically impossible (even if feature "X" is already implemented by every other LDAP server in existence). Strangely, these people don't seem to object too loudly if a new version of OpenLDAP supports feature "X". (Any OpenLDAP supporters who wish to dispute this, first examine the mailing lists for the history of multimaster replication in OpenLDAP).
Samba : Generally very helpful, but expect you to have RTFM and ask intelligent questions. If there's one fault there are about 100 ways you can write a configuration file such that Samba will run and seem to broadly work but under specific circumstances will fail to work as expected in various interesting ways, none of which are discussed in the manual. The FM only discusses configurations that do work, and it's very easy to have a single line that messes everything up.
Bacula : Very helpful mailing list. Core developers hang out on it and have been known to diplomatically raise it as an issue when unwelcoming "RTFM n00b!" replies are sent.
Ubuntu Forums : No disrespect, but once you get to a certain point in Linux you're generally better off joining the mailing list that applies to the specific app that's causing trouble. I've read plenty of threads in these forums which went on for pages when they could be answered in one short paragraph and thought "In the valley of the blind...."
It seems to me that while OEMs are free to include the default Windows install disk, they never do.
As others have said, this is frequently available as an optional extra.
Dell will include it - Dell will ship OS, crapware and drivers on separate CDs.
HP include a utility to create your own - though that does reinstall the crapware.
IBM will usually charge for the install disk (but they didn't when I had a hard disk fail on a 3 week old laptop) and I've used it - the version I had was a 7 CD monster, 6 CDs of which were completely useless crapware but you couldn't easily stop it from installing them as it was all scripted.
I will say that since I built my own PC (for the first time) and bypassed all of the OEM crap, Windows hase been more stable and usable than ever before.
Funny you should say that, my experience comes from making the conscious decision to stop relying on the OEM install and instead use the Windows corporate install for new PCs that I roll out - and I'd say exactly the same thing.
So its MS Windows you get with your OEM. As a result MS could insist that the OEM supply an install disc, or could supply them itself, but the chance to save a few cents means more than the user benefits.
Back in the days of Windows '95 they used to, and the certificate of authenticity was a real, separate sheet of paper glued onto a "getting started" book which you were meant to keep for every PC you owned. (BSA won't accept anything other than paper invoices as proof of licensing, Microsoft won't accept anything other than Certificates of Authenticity, go figure)
However Microsoft figured there were two benefits to having OEMs generate the CD.
1. Microsoft no longer needs to press one CD for every PC which is ever built. 2. Pirated copies made by taking a friends' OEM CD could be drastically reduced by discouraging the OEM from providing install CDs. ("But how is the customer supposed to reinstall the OS if the hard disk fails?" you cry. That's between the OEM and the customer, Microsoft don't care).
Another aspect of the problem is partly technical, partly greed: Microsoft cannot and will not proper basic installation disc with each machine. As a result, customers cannot easily bypass the OEM applications. Again, the competition manages to work through the problem.
Not true. OEMs are perfectly free to include an install disc which just installs Windows, nothing more. They generally automate the installation so there's no "enter your 25-digit serial number here" crap or "click next for no good reason", either by automating Windows or by using an imaging solution; not all OEM reinstall the shovelware.
The problem with Windows is mostly not technical but social. Microsoft is ultimately responsible for the quality of the apps installed by OEMs, and excusing them on technical grounds clarifies nothing.
Actually, the problem is legal.
Way back before all the antitrust stuff, Microsoft exerted a great deal of pressure on OEMs to ensure that Windows didn't come bundled with a load of crap, that only certain icons were visible to the end user when the PC first booted. Probably so that their solution to any given problem would be the default, though it would have the additional effect of reducing the risk of installed shovelware denting their reputation.
However, the whole point of the antitrust action was "Microsoft see a need arise, and a market to supply that need come up. They write software to fill that need, bundle it with the operating system and force OEMs to make their software the prominent one on the newly-supplied PC. The market that previously supplied that need evaporates, companies go out of business, IT is poorer as a result. Were Microsoft not a monopoly, that market wouldn't evaporate and so it wouldn't be a problem. They are a monopoly, these decisions do cause other markets to evaporate and it is a problem".
So, other than crappy graphics drivers which make your system unstable, crappy printer drivers which take a week of wrestling to install, OEM software agreements which result in your shiny new PC being rendered practically unusable before it's even left the factory, a poorly implemented security feature and scary DRM, Vista's just fine?
There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults.
Evolution is a process, not some being watching over us. It doesn't care about whether what you do helps you live a long and healthy life. It doesn't care about whether you do something which the majority of people might consider "bad".
All the process is about is how good you are at making babies and keeping them alive long enough that they can look after themselves and ultimately make their own.
In the case of humans, evolution has taken the path of a social animal blessed with intelligence and reasoning. In the case of most insects, evolution has taken the path of "produce so many damn kids that it's practically impossible for them all to get killed".
But as I said above, it's a process. It doesn't care. If the process takes a few million years and winds up with heavily specialised creatures and then the environment changes such that any species which isn't adaptable dies out, tough.
As long as we make sure than when the stupid people loose money, the government doesn't replace it. This might be too drastic for government these days.
The reason for that is simple.
When 50,000 people (be they rich or poor) lose a lot of money, they are in trouble.
When a significant proportion of the population stands to lose all their money, the government's in trouble.
There were a lot of 'email me's and talk about bad htps settings but not much content on really what needs to be done for fixing an existing site or properly setting up a new site to be secure.
Executive summary:
It is possible to set a single bit in a cookie sent to the browser which means "Only send this cookie over secured connections".
Many websites (including some important ones like online banking) don't set this bit for the cookie(s) used for session tracking. Hence, it is possible for an attacker to get the cookie with an invisible proxy that injects HTML which forces the browser to fetch something from the server which set up the cookie.
eg. I set up an invisible proxy on my wireless network which injects into every page and logs the cookie your browser sends when it attempts to connect to mail.google.com for the image.
I can now plug this cookie into Firefox and read your email.
Solution: if your website sets any cookies over an HTTPS connection, such cookies must set the bit meaning "Only send over secure connections". How one goes about doing this will depend on whether you're generating cookies yourself or using an existing framework.
if they were to try to take my laptop for this while i have files from those sevices on them, or even digital copies, They'd better be willing to have a fight on their hands.
If you're seriously willing to fight either verbally (against someone who doesn't really have the intellect to understand the rules but sure as hell knows that the only answer they're allowed to give to someone trying to get a laptop back that they've impounded is "no") or physically (against someone who's got a whole team of burly knuckleheads, some armed, to support them) then I don't want to be anywhere near you when you're going through security at an airport.
You won't change the system that way. All you'll do is give them someone to make an example of.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been political tensions on and off between Ireland and the UK since the fifteenth century.
The latest bout has more or less calmed down now, but at one point we were arresting and holding people indefinitely for the "crime" of being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sound familiar?
The problem with this approach is that as soon as you arrest a man who was thought to be fairly blameless within his circle of friends and family, most of whom were aware of the political tension but were otherwise fairly ambivalent towards you, they turn against you. Lather, rinse and repeat a few times and if you didn't have a terrorist organisation before you do now.
They don't all have Bin Laden's current postal address and telephone hotline. If they did, it would be fairly trivial to track him down.
Of course, as soon as you start thinking of a terrorist organisation like this, you have a huge problem.
Conventional methods that you might use against a country (eg. declare war) or a criminal conspiracy (eg. infiltrate them) don't work. You just wind up playing whack-a-mole with a twist - for every mole you whack, there's a good chance that two will appear in their place.
Whether or not he had any direct hand in it, he was the leader of the organization responsible,
Whoa... stop right there.
A terrorist organisation - or at least, one that's even remotely successful for any length of time - doesn't have the pyramid-style management structure that you're used to seeing.
Instead, it has a bunch of loosely-organised small groups, each consisting of no more than a dozen people. These groups may have a little communication between them but by and large they're fairly autonomous - they just use a common name to identify with the common cause they share. This is why it's damnably difficult to efficiently infiltrate the organisation - put simply, nobody knows much about anyone outside their own group and this is by design.
It follows that even if there are a few people who are considered inspirational by most within the organisation, getting rid of those few people won't necessarily achieve much. In fact, it could well be counter-productive because you'll turn them into martyrs.
Can one install this game in a VM so as to limit the spread of its DRM to just that VM? If not, then there's yet another reason not to buy.
I'm not certain, but AFAIK most virtualisation systems are lousy WRT 3d graphics.
It seems fairly straightforward to invoice them for your resonable costs in phoning them up. If they don't pay, take them to small claims.
I'm not sure how well that would work in the UK seeing as the law is fairly clear: the company you buy the product from is liable to ensure that you get what you bought. Not the company who made the product.
Having said that, I'm given to understand that the company you buy the product from is liable for reasonable expenses you incur in getting it to work/rejecting it. So if Game (major UK game retailer) tell you that you have to call EA to get your game working, you might be able to take Game to court for the telephone bill.
Take legal advice before doing this. IANAL.
Because this has NOTHING to do with piracy. I repeat: NOTHING at all to do with piracy. This is a plan by EA to take out the used games market and take away your right to first sale.
And here we have the absolutely classic case explaining how the law is lagging behind technology.
Back when the right to first sale was established in law, the very idea of technology which could prevent you exercising your rights when there was no technical reason why you couldn't (ie. it's not a product which intrinsically loses all its value the moment you open the box) simply didn't exist.
So now we have the faintly absurd scenario where there are a whole bunch of laws which work in the consumer's favour and a whole bunch of companies who are essentially taking advantage of loopholes in those laws (which didn't exist when they were written) to nullify them.
At which point you return it, or (check your CC terms), dispute it if they decline to accept a return on a defective product, or after properly documenting everything, file a an action in small claims (this presumes you were not reinstalling it for spite, but instead, actually having problems).
Of course, there is the bijou issuette that your small claims case will likely be against the retailer rather than the manufacturer, as it's the retailer that's refusing to accept a return of a faulty product.
Chances are the publisher won't even hear about it unless it happens many times to a sufficiently large retailer who's got the clout to turn around and say "don't do that again".
But people are trying to get him fired over it? That's bullshit. The guy can hold his opinion, and as long as he sticks to the curriculum without creationism, why get him fired over his goddamned opinion?
Because his job is to act as ambassador to education for a highly respected scientific society. If he starts spouting stuff which no scientist is prepared to take seriously, then he shouldn't be doing the job.
Having said that, there's a world of difference between "We should teach Creationism" (what he's quoted as saying) and "If a pupil asks, a teacher should be prepared to explain how Creationism isn't scientific rather than just ignore the question" (which is what he claims to have meant).
I know which one of those comments makes better headlines, though.
Which, unfortunately, isn't that common.
Experience is the best teacher, but unfortunately it's not a particularly fast one. Anyone on /. can point you at a few interesting things like Slackware, Google and O'Reilly's back catalogue, and plenty of people already have.
What I would advise is:
1. Learn to see past the bullshit. There's a lot of it in IT, generally being spewed by salesmen and managers who pretend they know more than they do. In my experience, the less intelligible the communication (ie. the more buzzwords), the more likely it is you're talking to someone who doesn't have a clue. The word "Enterprise" is a good barometer there - it's often used completely unnecessarily and in the IT world has almost zero meaning.
Example: A Dell 2950 with every component that can be made redundant made redundant isn't an "Enterprise Server". It's a server. If you haven't specced it with redundant power supplies and disks, I wouldn't even class it as a server. It's a PC in a very expensive case.
2. Sometimes it's worth paying for a solution. /. would have you believe that Open Source is the Answer to All Our Prayers, and that Richard Stallman is the Messiah. Not true - there are plenty of products which don't have a half-decent open source alternative. Courier is a great IMAP server but at the end of the day, Exchange is a very capable product and is fantastically hard to beat feature-wise. Zimbra comes close but who knows what kind of a future it's got as it's owned by Yahoo. And I defy you to find a F/OSS business accounts system which isn't half-arsed. You can't say to the tax authorities "Errr... about those accounts we're due to submit - yeah, we just realised that our accounts system hasn't been updated to account for the recent changes in tax law and so we're having to wait until it is. Don't know how long that will take".
3. Security, security, security. Understand the ideas rather than just mindlessly installing the patches - a hardened Apache installation with a locked down PHP configuration behind a firewall operating some fancy layer 7 intrusion prevention system is great, and will help mitigate many forms of attack - but at the end of the day if you've got a badly designed PHP application all that'll happen is that intruders will access your data through a pretty web-based user interface.
4. Look at what the business does right now, think of how things could be made better and put together a system to make things better. It doesn't necessarily have to be something that will see the light of day - it could just be feasibility checking - but it'll give you something useful to do with definite goals which will teach you a great deal and at the same time may very well benefit the business.
All in all, I'm not sure sure that such source code shouldn't be truly "open". I know what you're saying, and it's logical enough. However, being available to defense lawyers and such leaves too much room for a serious defect to simply be swept under the rug by an out-of-court settlement. Consequently, people involved in similar cases would not be able to benefit from discovery.
IANAL, but my understanding regarding criminal cases (and bear in mind that I'm not American either, so I may be way off here) there's no such thing as an out-of-court settlement.
There's "dropping the charges because we've just discovered that our evidence is nonexistent", and there's "pleading guilty (to either the original charge or a lesser charge)", both of which substantially reduce the amount of time spent in court.
rule that all programming used for government functions be open source, unless there's an overriding reason for it to be closed.
That would never fly, on the simple basis that every government department would have to replace every IT system they own - and some people with an awful lot of money are still very attached to the idea of closed source.
However, I can't think of any good reason why "open source" should not be applied to equipment used for justice purposes (eg. speed cameras, breathalysers) and mean "open to the government and, where applicable, to defence lawyers for use by expert witnesses" rather than "available to anyone on sourceforge".
About the only way to kill music would be something which would kill the human race. However if the current music industry were to die, for any reason, a new one would come into being within a short time.
And the people best equipped to do it would be those who understand how music works.
Note that this may not be the money men in suits at the top - it may be the talent scouts rather nearer the bottom.
You really have to think that after 10 years of consumers telling the labels and studios what they want, and then voting with their feet when they don't get it, it would have sunk into even the head of the thickest *AA dinosaur. In the annals of colossal stupidity, the last 10 years of IP wars will have to rank pretty near the top.
10 years? Try 100.
Radio will kill the live music industry. Vinyl will kill radio and live music. Home taping will kill vinyl, radio and live music. Copying CDs will kill music. MP3s will kill music.
It wasn't true back then and it isn't true now. People want to listen to music, plain and simple. The RIAA know that damn well, they're not that stupid. Quite why they're so keen to describe every new piece of technology as the thing that will eventually kill them, I don't know. Some sort of control thing?
A system based on a sensor and a road which has magnets strategically placed to trigger those sensors rather than trying to essentially process video and make decisions based on the video in realtime is more reliable?
No f*cking kidding. Trying to turn a single image into something which a computer can make decisions on is hard. Trying to turn a sequence of images in realtime at 60mph is fantastically hard. However, when you're dealing with something much simpler like a magnetic sensor, you've already had most of the processing essentially done for you. The only reason it hasn't taken off is that nobody really likes the idea of fitting every mile of road with magnets (or whatever they ultimately use to trigger the sensors).
Couldn't get past the snaky rep who basically said they won't talk to you.
I called the bank and had them issue charge backs
Funny, in my experience "Sort it out now or I report you to the bank and let them sort it out" is a pretty effective way of getting problems solved.
It's not particularly diplomatic but then neither is getting the bank to issue a charge back.
The store sold him a faulty product! Seriouly - anything so flimsy that it only lasts 5 months clearly had something wrong with it when it was made. I'd expect a representative for the store that sold it to fix this problem. Then it's up to them to take it up with the manufacturer.
In theory, the free market should fix this by making manufacturers who pull stunts like this (sell $500 printers that pack up after 5 months and refuse to replace them) go out of business.
However, when an entire industry is trying desperately to cut every corner they can by reducing warranties to the bare minimum and outsourcing manufacturing to the cheapest, nastiest companies that wouldn't know QA if they were run over by a lorry delivering printed copies of ISO 9001, it doesn't quite work.
(I have the luxury of being able to say "Sucks to be you!" because I live in Europe and everything has at least one year, and up to 6 years mandated in law. Though to be fair some manufacturers (*cough* HP *cough*) have got the "fail 3 weeks after the warranty expires" trick down to a fine art).
"Linux support" is an extremely broad brush because really it depends on what package you're talking about. I'm a sysadmin so most of my experience relates to Linux on the server type issues, but I can tell you now:
OpenLDAP : Frequently outright hostile to newbies. Core product is good at what it does, but is severely limited in terms of features compared to every other LDAP server around. The core developer team will actually go so far as to write papers explaining why OpenLDAP is better than any other LDAP server and why feature "X" cannot reliably/sensibly be implemented by anybody because it's physically impossible (even if feature "X" is already implemented by every other LDAP server in existence). Strangely, these people don't seem to object too loudly if a new version of OpenLDAP supports feature "X". (Any OpenLDAP supporters who wish to dispute this, first examine the mailing lists for the history of multimaster replication in OpenLDAP).
Samba : Generally very helpful, but expect you to have RTFM and ask intelligent questions. If there's one fault there are about 100 ways you can write a configuration file such that Samba will run and seem to broadly work but under specific circumstances will fail to work as expected in various interesting ways, none of which are discussed in the manual. The FM only discusses configurations that do work, and it's very easy to have a single line that messes everything up.
Bacula : Very helpful mailing list. Core developers hang out on it and have been known to diplomatically raise it as an issue when unwelcoming "RTFM n00b!" replies are sent.
Ubuntu Forums : No disrespect, but once you get to a certain point in Linux you're generally better off joining the mailing list that applies to the specific app that's causing trouble. I've read plenty of threads in these forums which went on for pages when they could be answered in one short paragraph and thought "In the valley of the blind...."
It seems to me that while OEMs are free to include the default Windows install disk, they never do.
As others have said, this is frequently available as an optional extra.
Dell will include it - Dell will ship OS, crapware and drivers on separate CDs.
HP include a utility to create your own - though that does reinstall the crapware.
IBM will usually charge for the install disk (but they didn't when I had a hard disk fail on a 3 week old laptop) and I've used it - the version I had was a 7 CD monster, 6 CDs of which were completely useless crapware but you couldn't easily stop it from installing them as it was all scripted.
I will say that since I built my own PC (for the first time) and bypassed all of the OEM crap, Windows hase been more stable and usable than ever before.
Funny you should say that, my experience comes from making the conscious decision to stop relying on the OEM install and instead use the Windows corporate install for new PCs that I roll out - and I'd say exactly the same thing.
So its MS Windows you get with your OEM. As a result MS could insist that the OEM supply an install disc, or could supply them itself, but the chance to save a few cents means more than the user benefits.
Back in the days of Windows '95 they used to, and the certificate of authenticity was a real, separate sheet of paper glued onto a "getting started" book which you were meant to keep for every PC you owned. (BSA won't accept anything other than paper invoices as proof of licensing, Microsoft won't accept anything other than Certificates of Authenticity, go figure)
However Microsoft figured there were two benefits to having OEMs generate the CD.
1. Microsoft no longer needs to press one CD for every PC which is ever built.
2. Pirated copies made by taking a friends' OEM CD could be drastically reduced by discouraging the OEM from providing install CDs. ("But how is the customer supposed to reinstall the OS if the hard disk fails?" you cry. That's between the OEM and the customer, Microsoft don't care).
Another aspect of the problem is partly technical, partly greed: Microsoft cannot and will not proper basic installation disc with each machine. As a result, customers cannot easily bypass the OEM applications. Again, the competition manages to work through the problem.
Not true. OEMs are perfectly free to include an install disc which just installs Windows, nothing more. They generally automate the installation so there's no "enter your 25-digit serial number here" crap or "click next for no good reason", either by automating Windows or by using an imaging solution; not all OEM reinstall the shovelware.
The problem with Windows is mostly not technical but social. Microsoft is ultimately responsible for the quality of the apps installed by OEMs, and excusing them on technical grounds clarifies nothing.
Actually, the problem is legal.
Way back before all the antitrust stuff, Microsoft exerted a great deal of pressure on OEMs to ensure that Windows didn't come bundled with a load of crap, that only certain icons were visible to the end user when the PC first booted. Probably so that their solution to any given problem would be the default, though it would have the additional effect of reducing the risk of installed shovelware denting their reputation.
However, the whole point of the antitrust action was "Microsoft see a need arise, and a market to supply that need come up. They write software to fill that need, bundle it with the operating system and force OEMs to make their software the prominent one on the newly-supplied PC. The market that previously supplied that need evaporates, companies go out of business, IT is poorer as a result. Were Microsoft not a monopoly, that market wouldn't evaporate and so it wouldn't be a problem. They are a monopoly, these decisions do cause other markets to evaporate and it is a problem".
So, other than crappy graphics drivers which make your system unstable, crappy printer drivers which take a week of wrestling to install, OEM software agreements which result in your shiny new PC being rendered practically unusable before it's even left the factory, a poorly implemented security feature and scary DRM, Vista's just fine?
Sounds like something out of Fawlty Towers.
There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults.
Evolution is a process, not some being watching over us. It doesn't care about whether what you do helps you live a long and healthy life. It doesn't care about whether you do something which the majority of people might consider "bad".
All the process is about is how good you are at making babies and keeping them alive long enough that they can look after themselves and ultimately make their own.
In the case of humans, evolution has taken the path of a social animal blessed with intelligence and reasoning. In the case of most insects, evolution has taken the path of "produce so many damn kids that it's practically impossible for them all to get killed".
But as I said above, it's a process. It doesn't care. If the process takes a few million years and winds up with heavily specialised creatures and then the environment changes such that any species which isn't adaptable dies out, tough.
As long as we make sure than when the stupid people loose money, the government doesn't replace it. This might be too drastic for government these days.
The reason for that is simple.
When 50,000 people (be they rich or poor) lose a lot of money, they are in trouble.
When a significant proportion of the population stands to lose all their money, the government's in trouble.
There were a lot of 'email me's and talk about bad htps settings but not much content on really what needs to be done for fixing an existing site or properly setting up a new site to be secure.
Executive summary:
It is possible to set a single bit in a cookie sent to the browser which means "Only send this cookie over secured connections".
Many websites (including some important ones like online banking) don't set this bit for the cookie(s) used for session tracking. Hence, it is possible for an attacker to get the cookie with an invisible proxy that injects HTML which forces the browser to fetch something from the server which set up the cookie.
eg. I set up an invisible proxy on my wireless network which injects into every page and logs the cookie your browser sends when it attempts to connect to mail.google.com for the image.
I can now plug this cookie into Firefox and read your email.
Solution: if your website sets any cookies over an HTTPS connection, such cookies must set the bit meaning "Only send over secure connections". How one goes about doing this will depend on whether you're generating cookies yourself or using an existing framework.
if they were to try to take my laptop for this while i have files from those sevices on them, or even digital copies, They'd better be willing to have a fight on their hands.
If you're seriously willing to fight either verbally (against someone who doesn't really have the intellect to understand the rules but sure as hell knows that the only answer they're allowed to give to someone trying to get a laptop back that they've impounded is "no") or physically (against someone who's got a whole team of burly knuckleheads, some armed, to support them) then I don't want to be anywhere near you when you're going through security at an airport.
You won't change the system that way. All you'll do is give them someone to make an example of.