In the USA, there are nasty regulations on the export of encryption, which been included under the Arms Export Control Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_Export_Control_Act). This law has been extended and manipulated in unconstitutional ways: this used to be done as regulations under the Customs department, but were found to be unconstitutional there, and were transferred to the Commerce department, where they've been made somewhat more sane in the last decade but remain burdensome to software authors.
These regulations are not directly controlled by Congress, they're authorized by the Arms Export Control Act, so what is actually in them is confusing and serves the goals of the current administration, not Congress. It seems clear that whether the regulations are designed only to preserve the ability to eavesdrop on foreign communications, their direct effect is to protect the ability to eavesdrop on almost all civilian communications.
The case of Phil. Zimmerman, the author of PGP, being convicted of exporting weapons under this act simply illustrates the point. PGP could have been released for general use 10 years earlier, and incorporated in every email client in the world as a matter of course, if it were not for this regulation. DES suffered similar regulatory problems in the 1980's, and SSL suffered them in the 1990's and still suffers them.
I'm forced to disagree with your thoughtful comment. They know quite well what the _purpose_ was, and what it can be. What they're confused about is how to make money off of it. ICANN is funed, primarily, by registrars. But the opportunity to open up new revenue by selling off additional, duplicate hostnames in multiple domains is apparently irrestible, and they seem unwilling to take responsibility for managing the dominant ".com" domain properly. So they're delegating responsibility for it, and intend to collect the revenue from the top-level domain owners.
There are technological and social reasons to want more domains, but I'm afraid they're swamped by the potential for expanding the revenue stream.
Pairs of wires are twisted together to couple them to each other, rather than to their environment. This is useful for both digital and analog signals, and is key to differential signals which may accumulate quite a large "common" signal over their length from environmental factors, especially differences in "ground". Similar effects can also be achieved by wrapping one wire inside the other, also known as coaxial cable, but that's far more expensive to make and more awkward to terminate.
The details of what happens if the size of the twist happens to match a harmonic of the basic transmission frequencies is left to the reader. The consequences are easy to imagine, but difficult to calculate.
Different pairs are twisted at different rates to keep them from coupling to _other pairs_. A nearly inevitable result of this is that over a long cable, the tightly twisted pair winds up being slightly longer than the less twisted pair. But the key is that the twisted pairs do _not_ synchronize with each other due to the differences in twisting, not the minor differences in length.
I believe you have the wrong "fallacy of scale". The Chinese censorship is a pre-filtering: it requires pre-processing by Google of almost all their web traffic, for guidelines that are deliberately ill defined. The DMCA takedowns are quite specific. Even if they're incorrect, or issued by non-copyright-owners, they're limited and specific. The resource requirements for Google to do content filtering are profound, and it's certain that Google has not ignored the sheer _cost_ of doing such content filtering.
Given that connecting a new POP3 client, or new IMAP client, and syncing up your data is likely to grab everything in your relevent folders, including "All Mail" if you're not careful, I doubt that such transactions would normally be noticed. And given the incredible amount of logging involved, I doubt that Google hangs onto those logs for very long. Can anyone attest to how long individual transaction is preserved for at Google?
Microsoft did nothing "nice". They were dragged, kicking and screaming, into court and had their fingers slapped to the tune of over one billion US dollars by the EU for their misbehavior. And they attempted to poison the well by inserting patents into the published documents, patents incompatible with GPL software such as Samba. There are plenty of references to the court cases, but the interview with such developers of Samba as Jeremy Allison at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070919214307459 are particularly enlightening.
And if you think there's anything "nice" about their efforts, go read the documentation. It was apparently written by monkeys trying to produce Hamlet, and bears little if any resemblance to how the protocols actually work.
-live systems can be converted from RHEL to the free rebuild, CentOS, with a single reboot to change the kernel and unless you're using one of the few non-open-source components, such as the RHN management tools (which require registered systems). For most applications, it takes a local CentOS repository and takes each systemm about an hour to complete the switchover, but it's quite effective. And you can switch them back when you buy licenses.
Yes, they do, or the shielding on reactors would not become contaminated over time, and a lot of secondary nuclear waste wouldn't be such an issue, and NASA would have an easier time shielding astronauts from solar radiation. It's not an instantaneous transformation: it's not like a flu virus or cooties, it takes significant exposure to high energy radiation.
Whether they glow is relative to the type and *amount* of radiation. I take it that you don't remember radium watch dials?
You're correct. But that subset was getting much too _small_ with ESX 3.5 and the old 2.4 kernel. And its lack of IDE emulation made for additional work migrating ancient servers into VMWare for legacy support reasons difficult in ways it needn't be. Has that been addressed in ESX 4.0? And has anyone over at RedHat and VMWare figured out how to license a bundle of vitualized instances? To manage costs, and stop wasting time _arguing_ about licensing, I had to switch a whole VMWare environment over to CentOS guests.
_Good_. When was that released? VMWare ESX 3.5 was a mauled and stripped version of RHEL 3, and oh, dear me, it was painful to backport contemporary account management or monitoring tools into, and tended to have serious problems with hardware components whose drivers were less than 4 years old.
Other projects include Xen virtual software (where the parent company, Xensource, was bought by Citrix.) It was very exciting for a while there, but I'm seeing the leading edge Linux users turn to KVM and the corporate users stick with VMWare, not realizing the problems of the server hardware and VMWare's ancient 2.4 kernel. I'm not sure why: I've not had the opportunity to do side-by-side comparisons with the latest versions of all of them.
The Amanda backup software has been taken up by Zmanda, who have apparently destabilized it in the midst of trying to add glitzy GUI's to it which they sell only as corporate add-ons and which have caused two companies I know to throw it out, not because the Amanda was not fast and functional, but because the admins handed the backup management couldn't figure out the GUI and configure things properly.
Then it's time to consider a learned lesson, document the problem to cover your own behind, and get out. "Non-productivity clubs" like that poison a workplace, and lead to the sort of workplace fraud and harassment and abuse that poison a company and a life.
Ask the people at your workplace. I keep an eye on various relevant technical and social issues with Slashdot, and it keeps me on my toes to chat with sharp people here who know about other fields. A certain amount of slack at work while my code is compiling or my brain is working on other fields seems harmless, and I normally put in plenty of after hours work to cover any missed worktime. Conversely, you may be right about people slacking off: it can be due to many reasons, such as genuine frustration at not being allowed to do anything useful or watching their good ideas being thrown out by an incompetent manager.
Also, IT work is often like firefighting. You spend a lot of time cooking meals and reading magazines and keeping yourself and your equipment fit, and then at disaster time you and your equipment are supposed to go all out with skills and _plans_ to fix things and recover data. That on-call time can be valuable, too.
You haven't helped raise children, have you? Oh, dear, if you want to see complex and buggy, try working with a 12 year old who usually lives with their mother.
A lot of copyright laws are international, and China is a signatory. There are good business reasons to do this, even though such laws are frequently and casually violated in China, even moreso than in the USA.
Craigslist for NYC shows single rooms in sublets or shared apartments at a minimum of $125/week, so it's not outrageous to have your own space with a lockable door this way.
Agents or not, they should not be trusted more than any other police department, because they can and do make profound mistakes. Take a good look at what happened to anon.penet.fi, the anonymous remailer, described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer. Interpol cooperated in serving what was a fundamentally fraudulent warrant. Told that an anonymous remailer was used to "steal files from Scientology", the warrant demanded the real contact information of all anonymous users of the service. The manager of the site managed to talk the off-duty police serving the warrant into accepting a single specific name, but it caused the manager of the site to give up what had been a wonderfully helpful and effective service for people discussing emotional problems, medical problems, whistleblowing, or just trying to date online.
And of course, nothing happened to Interpol for cooperating with such a stupid request, nor did they ever file charges for the alleged "theft".
Because OEM vendors don't keep the computers online while they're sitting in the boxes, and service packs take time and bandwidth to install, and because they use a "golden image" to install all the OEM systems. They also get what are effectively bribes to put that trialware debris on their image or have to waste expensive engineer time to strip it from the installation setups when they build those golden images. (Adobe, Microsoft, and Nero are all bad about this.)
I could see flushing it as helpful, and preloading patches as helpful, and worth a few bucks to a sucker who doesn't want to waste time cleaning things up. But goodness only knows what other "optimizations" various shops do, because it's not defined anywhere I can find. We only have a nice Slashdot posters word here, not a spec sheet.
Because that license allows me, as a developer, access to the public's and my GPL peers' work to give me a base to sell my own work to people who want changes, or support. It's paying my salaries, and RedHat is profitable, so it's clearly a functional business model. And my clients pay me to help them avoid the traps of the business models you're espousing.
More like breaking up with his wife, signing the divorce papers and custody agreements, but now she wants to move to another state where access to his kids will be far more difficult. Because Monty went with the dual licensing model, he thought he could retain his business model as well.
This is _exactly_ the sort of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too, model that the GPL helps _avoid_. The situation is in fact mislabeled as a GPL issue. It was the dual model, GPL for the core and BSD for business ventures model that Sun used and that Monty's later business ventures are based on, and that is now at risk.
Oh dear, that was badly stated. Let me retype that:
"I speak as if your original suggested choice between illegal immigration to the USA, and legitimate employment where they come from, is not always available."
No, I speak as if your original comparison between illegal immigration to the US and legitimate employment where they is come from not always available. And your friend had a legitimate option: perhaps the UK doesn't pay as well as the US, but I hope you did notice that she left _Iran_. Would she be able to teach and publish there? Safely?
I'm glad your friend had the option to stay in the UK. But they have their own immigration issues with fake EU passports and immigration corruption.
Because they can't do the same work above board? Or there is no work for them back home? Educated women from theologically run Muslim countries have been fleeing for years in order to be able to speak and publish. The Dalai Lama, as amazingly wonderful as he is, is clearly unable to return to his home country safely. Others crave access to medical or physics research tools unavailable in their home countries: ask any of the international astronaut candidates who aren't from Russia or the USA, although they're far less likely to be illegal immigrants.
Slashdot Mirror
In the USA, there are nasty regulations on the export of encryption, which been included under the Arms Export Control Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_Export_Control_Act). This law has been extended and manipulated in unconstitutional ways: this used to be done as regulations under the Customs department, but were found to be unconstitutional there, and were transferred to the Commerce department, where they've been made somewhat more sane in the last decade but remain burdensome to software authors.
These regulations are not directly controlled by Congress, they're authorized by the Arms Export Control Act, so what is actually in them is confusing and serves the goals of the current administration, not Congress. It seems clear that whether the regulations are designed only to preserve the ability to eavesdrop on foreign communications, their direct effect is to protect the ability to eavesdrop on almost all civilian communications.
The case of Phil. Zimmerman, the author of PGP, being convicted of exporting weapons under this act simply illustrates the point. PGP could have been released for general use 10 years earlier, and incorporated in every email client in the world as a matter of course, if it were not for this regulation. DES suffered similar regulatory problems in the 1980's, and SSL suffered them in the 1990's and still suffers them.
I'm forced to disagree with your thoughtful comment. They know quite well what the _purpose_ was, and what it can be. What they're confused about is how to make money off of it. ICANN is funed, primarily, by registrars. But the opportunity to open up new revenue by selling off additional, duplicate hostnames in multiple domains is apparently irrestible, and they seem unwilling to take responsibility for managing the dominant ".com" domain properly. So they're delegating responsibility for it, and intend to collect the revenue from the top-level domain owners.
There are technological and social reasons to want more domains, but I'm afraid they're swamped by the potential for expanding the revenue stream.
He was right. You don't know.
Pairs of wires are twisted together to couple them to each other, rather than to their environment. This is useful for both digital and analog signals, and is key to differential signals which may accumulate quite a large "common" signal over their length from environmental factors, especially differences in "ground". Similar effects can also be achieved by wrapping one wire inside the other, also known as coaxial cable, but that's far more expensive to make and more awkward to terminate.
The details of what happens if the size of the twist happens to match a harmonic of the basic transmission frequencies is left to the reader. The consequences are easy to imagine, but difficult to calculate.
Different pairs are twisted at different rates to keep them from coupling to _other pairs_. A nearly inevitable result of this is that over a long cable, the tightly twisted pair winds up being slightly longer than the less twisted pair. But the key is that the twisted pairs do _not_ synchronize with each other due to the differences in twisting, not the minor differences in length.
I believe you have the wrong "fallacy of scale". The Chinese censorship is a pre-filtering: it requires pre-processing by Google of almost all their web traffic, for guidelines that are deliberately ill defined. The DMCA takedowns are quite specific. Even if they're incorrect, or issued by non-copyright-owners, they're limited and specific. The resource requirements for Google to do content filtering are profound, and it's certain that Google has not ignored the sheer _cost_ of doing such content filtering.
Given that connecting a new POP3 client, or new IMAP client, and syncing up your data is likely to grab everything in your relevent folders, including "All Mail" if you're not careful, I doubt that such transactions would normally be noticed. And given the incredible amount of logging involved, I doubt that Google hangs onto those logs for very long. Can anyone attest to how long individual transaction is preserved for at Google?
You can use "less" or "emacs" under CygWin instead, unless Windows file-locking causes trouble.
Microsoft did nothing "nice". They were dragged, kicking and screaming, into court and had their fingers slapped to the tune of over one billion US dollars by the EU for their misbehavior. And they attempted to poison the well by inserting patents into the published documents, patents incompatible with GPL software such as Samba. There are plenty of references to the court cases, but the interview with such developers of Samba as Jeremy Allison at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070919214307459 are particularly enlightening.
The Samba site also has this note about the patent encumberment and GPL incompatibility Microsoft tried to slip in: http://us1.samba.org/samba/ms_license.html.
And if you think there's anything "nice" about their efforts, go read the documentation. It was apparently written by monkeys trying to produce Hamlet, and bears little if any resemblance to how the protocols actually work.
And don't forget:
-live systems can be converted from RHEL to the free rebuild, CentOS, with a single reboot to change the kernel and unless you're using one of the few non-open-source components, such as the RHN management tools (which require registered systems). For most applications, it takes a local CentOS repository and takes each systemm about an hour to complete the switchover, but it's quite effective. And you can switch them back when you buy licenses.
Yes, they do, or the shielding on reactors would not become contaminated over time, and a lot of secondary nuclear waste wouldn't be such an issue, and NASA would have an easier time shielding astronauts from solar radiation. It's not an instantaneous transformation: it's not like a flu virus or cooties, it takes significant exposure to high energy radiation.
Whether they glow is relative to the type and *amount* of radiation. I take it that you don't remember radium watch dials?
You're correct. But that subset was getting much too _small_ with ESX 3.5 and the old 2.4 kernel. And its lack of IDE emulation made for additional work migrating ancient servers into VMWare for legacy support reasons difficult in ways it needn't be. Has that been addressed in ESX 4.0? And has anyone over at RedHat and VMWare figured out how to license a bundle of vitualized instances? To manage costs, and stop wasting time _arguing_ about licensing, I had to switch a whole VMWare environment over to CentOS guests.
_Good_. When was that released? VMWare ESX 3.5 was a mauled and stripped version of RHEL 3, and oh, dear me, it was painful to backport contemporary account management or monitoring tools into, and tended to have serious problems with hardware components whose drivers were less than 4 years old.
Other projects include Xen virtual software (where the parent company, Xensource, was bought by Citrix.) It was very exciting for a while there, but I'm seeing the leading edge Linux users turn to KVM and the corporate users stick with VMWare, not realizing the problems of the server hardware and VMWare's ancient 2.4 kernel. I'm not sure why: I've not had the opportunity to do side-by-side comparisons with the latest versions of all of them.
The Amanda backup software has been taken up by Zmanda, who have apparently destabilized it in the midst of trying to add glitzy GUI's to it which they sell only as corporate add-ons and which have caused two companies I know to throw it out, not because the Amanda was not fast and functional, but because the admins handed the backup management couldn't figure out the GUI and configure things properly.
Then it's time to consider a learned lesson, document the problem to cover your own behind, and get out. "Non-productivity clubs" like that poison a workplace, and lead to the sort of workplace fraud and harassment and abuse that poison a company and a life.
Ask the people at your workplace. I keep an eye on various relevant technical and social issues with Slashdot, and it keeps me on my toes to chat with sharp people here who know about other fields. A certain amount of slack at work while my code is compiling or my brain is working on other fields seems harmless, and I normally put in plenty of after hours work to cover any missed worktime. Conversely, you may be right about people slacking off: it can be due to many reasons, such as genuine frustration at not being allowed to do anything useful or watching their good ideas being thrown out by an incompetent manager.
Also, IT work is often like firefighting. You spend a lot of time cooking meals and reading magazines and keeping yourself and your equipment fit, and then at disaster time you and your equipment are supposed to go all out with skills and _plans_ to fix things and recover data. That on-call time can be valuable, too.
You haven't helped raise children, have you? Oh, dear, if you want to see complex and buggy, try working with a 12 year old who usually lives with their mother.
A lot of copyright laws are international, and China is a signatory. There are good business reasons to do this, even though such laws are frequently and casually violated in China, even moreso than in the USA.
Craigslist for NYC shows single rooms in sublets or shared apartments at a minimum of $125/week, so it's not outrageous to have your own space with a lockable door this way.
Agents or not, they should not be trusted more than any other police department, because they can and do make profound mistakes. Take a good look at what happened to anon.penet.fi, the anonymous remailer, described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer. Interpol cooperated in serving what was a fundamentally fraudulent warrant. Told that an anonymous remailer was used to "steal files from Scientology", the warrant demanded the real contact information of all anonymous users of the service. The manager of the site managed to talk the off-duty police serving the warrant into accepting a single specific name, but it caused the manager of the site to give up what had been a wonderfully helpful and effective service for people discussing emotional problems, medical problems, whistleblowing, or just trying to date online.
And of course, nothing happened to Interpol for cooperating with such a stupid request, nor did they ever file charges for the alleged "theft".
Because OEM vendors don't keep the computers online while they're sitting in the boxes, and service packs take time and bandwidth to install, and because they use a "golden image" to install all the OEM systems. They also get what are effectively bribes to put that trialware debris on their image or have to waste expensive engineer time to strip it from the installation setups when they build those golden images. (Adobe, Microsoft, and Nero are all bad about this.)
I could see flushing it as helpful, and preloading patches as helpful, and worth a few bucks to a sucker who doesn't want to waste time cleaning things up. But goodness only knows what other "optimizations" various shops do, because it's not defined anywhere I can find. We only have a nice Slashdot posters word here, not a spec sheet.
Because that license allows me, as a developer, access to the public's and my GPL peers' work to give me a base to sell my own work to people who want changes, or support. It's paying my salaries, and RedHat is profitable, so it's clearly a functional business model. And my clients pay me to help them avoid the traps of the business models you're espousing.
Oh, dear. Thank you for the correction: I should have said "BSD-like".
More like breaking up with his wife, signing the divorce papers and custody agreements, but now she wants to move to another state where access to his kids will be far more difficult. Because Monty went with the dual licensing model, he thought he could retain his business model as well.
This is _exactly_ the sort of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too, model that the GPL helps _avoid_. The situation is in fact mislabeled as a GPL issue. It was the dual model, GPL for the core and BSD for business ventures model that Sun used and that Monty's later business ventures are based on, and that is now at risk.
Oh dear, that was badly stated. Let me retype that:
"I speak as if your original suggested choice between illegal immigration to the USA, and legitimate employment where they come from, is not always available."
No, I speak as if your original comparison between illegal immigration to the US and legitimate employment where they is come from not always available. And your friend had a legitimate option: perhaps the UK doesn't pay as well as the US, but I hope you did notice that she left _Iran_. Would she be able to teach and publish there? Safely?
I'm glad your friend had the option to stay in the UK. But they have their own immigration issues with fake EU passports and immigration corruption.
Because they can't do the same work above board? Or there is no work for them back home? Educated women from theologically run Muslim countries have been fleeing for years in order to be able to speak and publish. The Dalai Lama, as amazingly wonderful as he is, is clearly unable to return to his home country safely. Others crave access to medical or physics research tools unavailable in their home countries: ask any of the international astronaut candidates who aren't from Russia or the USA, although they're far less likely to be illegal immigrants.