Actually, for systems that were flushed with dirty water such as that from coffee spills ceiling leaks, washing with distilled water is very helpful for washing away the corroding residue from the dirty water. You have to apply some sense in what and how you clean it, but if you don't clean it, the boards are much more likely to fail as acidic residue eats into the various coatings and compoents.
It's spelled "copyright", referring to your rights to make a copy, not how you write a copy.
Congratulatons, you've learned something for tomorrow, too! (I don't normally bother about spelling errors on Slashdot, but this was actually a good point to remember.)
That's a different story. Under the "Unsolicited Bulk Communications" definition I cited, this would be solicited. But I'd still strongly suggest you switch to an "opt-in" rather than an "opt-out" format for your first advertisement, just to be safe. The number of people who forge requests for spamvertisement is pretty scarey, and you could easily be hittng quite a few people with requests that were fake.
It's particularly fun when a website insists on filling out a form to download or read something to fill it out with a fake name, address, and especially email address of family members of the advertiser.
The definition you're looking for is "Unsolicited Bulk Communications". Unlike many common definitions of spam, this one does not have to evaluate the content for fraud, commercial content, or anything other than the fact that it is sent in bulk. And no, blocking fraud is ineffective because the "legitimate" businesses like yours will expand to fill any gaps left by the purely fraudulent spammers. After all, isn't a miracle cure for your cancer worth telling you about? A great deal on a penny stock? Or passing a letter to help that kid, Craig Shergold? Or your "legitimate" business, which I don't want and didn't ask for nor did any but a very, very few of the recipients?
An excellent legal framework for it exists in the federal junk fax law, which could easily be extended to accomplish this except for spammers like you who fight it wildly through their lobbying organization the Direct Marketing Association.
There are numerous actions the township could take. Police harassment is always good in a corrupt town: cutting off utilities, failing to plow the poster's street, refusing to grant building permits to the builder or their family, "losing" tax records, or if the person is an "insider" with personal knowledge of such corruption, firing them on any convenient pretext while making sure they get bad references. It's unfortunately common to do this to irritating whistleblowers in academia, industry, and politics. But you need to have the person's identity to aim your efforts properly.
For examples of how badly this can go, take a look at SCO's repeated fraudulent claims and harassmentn against Pamela Jones. And for how a fraudulent claim can be used to get a warrant and break open the shield of anonymity, take a good look at how anon.penet.fi was shut down by its owner after a fraudulent claim of cracking was made, through Interpol, to get a warrant against one of its users.
A mere 200 lines probably constitutes "fair use", which is built into copyright law. The guidelines are deliberately vague, but please do not cast all such snippets as blatantly illegal. Unless there's some interesting other issue such as a trade secret or patent, then the author is probably OK with such a snippet.
Contacting the author would be polite, especially to encourage the author to put a license on the software that users could follow. And like your mother telling you to always keep both hands on your bicycle's steering wheel and wear a helmet, it's your corporate lawyer's job to follow every letter of the law, or to at least tell *you* to do so so that he is not liable for telling you it was legal. But it can get excessive, and this case sounds like the author should not be overly concerned about such a small code snippet.
Your description of those events is in direct conflict with DEC's lawsuits of the time, and the reports of DEC personnel, including former employees I've asked about it. I'm inclined to believe DEC and what remained of their personnel on this: David Cutler also took quite a lot of his development team with him, and among them they seem to have rebuilt (or simply copied in) a great deal of the VMS infrastructure. It got attenuated in the move from 64-bit to 32-bit, but memory management especially was extremely similar.
The availability of NT on Alphas was one of the results of the DEC lawsuit, and part of the settlement: DEC thought they could maintain their hardware lead with that architecture and provide workable business models with NT, but forgot about how badly Microsoft's ports of their core tools to other OS's worked, such as we all learned with Macintosh version s of MS Office. DEC also reckoned without Intel's wholesale theft of Alpha technologies: with the dual-threat of both Windows and Intel, locked together, and each having stolen one half of that set of DEC's core technologies, DEC was doomed.
Thank you, I was thinking that. Unfortunately, most (not all) of the more powerful open source tools, such as gcc and OpenOffice, are much better maintained and developed in the Linux world. I'm seeing optimization and performance come out of the BSD world, but not new tools. (And before you say OpenSSH, remember that that came from ssh.com's commercial work.)
Oh, oh my goodness. If the UK doesn't have backroom discussions among tenured faculty who steer thesis committees, then I'll be *amazed*. I've certainly seen traces of it, back when I'd make sure my advisor's computers did the things they were supposed to do. Graduate student funding is pretty fragile in the US, especially if you're on a student visa.
I'm not saying that kind of panicked censorship is the norm, but it certainly happens among scientists. Even among engineers in the professional world, I've seen the infighting when some group suggests a new email system, and the established IT group puts in every obstacle they can think of to keep from replacing existing infrastructure with something lighter weight and more robust that's not from a major vendor (usually Microsoft!), and discarding half of their maintenance team as unnecessary.
Perhaps I was unclear. The *advisor* is blocking the thesis, not the PhD candidate. The candidate may not even realize the implications imperil the advisor's funding. This is partly why good universities try to have a way for a candidate to switch advisor gracefully, although it's very difficult.
And it's not like this is a unique problem to science. Sharp young students who are better than their masters, or who invent something that makes the master's work look shabby, is an ancient, ancient problem. It's not a surprise, it's nearly impossible to avoid. Science research and education tries to have ways to verify the data so this doesn't become widespread.
By "priest", I meant the more anthropological term of "declared religious leaders", not the particular version of "priest" versus "nun" versus "brother" versus "bishop" versus "pope" that is in the Catholic hierarchy.
And there are plenty of other Christians besides Catholics who believe in the "body and blood" of Communion as being the actual blood and guts of Christ, in a magical/religious sort of way, or who have wave vs. particle arguments about whether Jesus was a man or a god. I'm old enough to remember when that airplane full of soccer players got stranded in the Andes and they had to resort to cannibalism, and church's reactions when the survivors described it as a "sacrament".
And there are plenty of Catholics who do, in fact, read it and take it very seriously, and who analyze it historically. Catch a scholarly discussion about the history of the Nicene Creed or the history of the St. James Bible some time if you'd like to see the fur fly about this material, it's as much fun as a town council about changing snow plow contracts. The infighting is an education in itself.
Oh, no. They *hated* the Narnia movie, and hated the Narnia books and the other Christian founded books by C.S. Lewis such as "Perelandra". (I highly recommend C.S. Lewis books for good, out-of-date science fiction and theological thought.) Portraying the Christ figure of Aslan in a different way than standard Christian doctrine is heresy, despite the splendor of it in those books.
And if you don't think scientists scientists, and engineers, get attached to their beliefs, well, you haven't seen a PhD advisor block approval of a thesis that proves 20 years of his research work and his entire lab's purpose was wasted. (It happens in all fields, but it's particularly common in molecular biology right now.)
Doctrines of belief, whether they're "let's eat human flesh and blood of some poor crucified guy every Sunday and call it Mass", or "let's strap explosives to our bodies to kill children on a bus and go to heaven", fight dirty. They've always done so, and they've survived well enough to still cause mayhem and madness. So I don't think you can really say they always lose arguments with science and its kissing cousins, open debate and reasoning.
But many religions are founded on a core belief that what the priests say is the unquestionable word of God. Discrediting the physically verifiable parts of the Bible seriously, seriously threatens this. It's not belief in the flying spaghetti monster that they need: it's belief in the authority of the priests.
Well, now that I've completely countered the reasons you tried the first time, you try another set. Fair enough, let's see.
Lack of wifi access? Yes, it's an issue. There are some fascinating models of providing satellite based hotspots for whole communities that lack copper or fiber, just as we're seeing cell phone use in Africa spread faster into areas there. That's an enabling technology that may just not be available or affordable yet. But for the kids closer to cities, or in high schools where there may need more than a dozen books over the course of 3 years to get a decent education. it's much cheaper to have someone in the city fill a USB memory stick and mail it, with an OLPC, and get accompanying materkal that the books can't provide. These devices are not for the destitute: they're for making a very limited budget, much more effective. I'd expect them to be very useful around libraries and similar hotspots, with schools forming relay services to share the data.
Unrestricted access is also a huge issue, in any nation. We can't have kids viewing porn, or reading notes about their own government's police brutality problems and the history of the last 5 times anyone tried to invade Afghanistan. But that's going to be a lot tougher to limit to OLPC's than it is in shipments of text books. If they're going to limit the populaton that thoroughly, they've got big problems. The use of the OLPC XO, instead of Windows (where this thread started!) will help vastly reduce the amount of rootkits, key loggers, and monitoring of encrypted channels common on Windows boxes. That doesn't completely counter your concern, but it helps. And as laptops or cheap PC's spread to the third world, I don't want them contributing to the Botnet problem! That will suck away their bandwidth and resources even more than the higher prices of Wintel boxes will.
I see you're one of Dick Cheney's advisors. How's that job working out now that "stone age" people are handing the US its ass on a platter, just like they did to the British Empire and the Russians in the long run?
So do you go to your local Heart Association for urban planning? Give them a break: hit up another group for funding to buy a few of these laptops, don't expect them for free from a group whose finances are stretched and for whom it is not in the charter.
Until 3 years later, when they need a new laptop for a new child or for a project or their old laptop needs upgrade or replacement. And until you need new software, which is locked to that proprietary OS and costs 5 times as much as it should.
I'll trump that "dozen textbooks" with Wikipedia and Google any day of the week. Add the ability to email, and get current weather reports or data that isn't under the direct control of your local priest or government bureaucrat, and you've got a real educational winner.
Oh, my goodness. You need to check back on the lawsuits. Microsoft illegally strong-armed resellers into installing IE as the default browser. Partly by bribery, partly by raising prices to vendors who dared install Netscape at all, much less make it the default browser. They effectively charged vendors money to install Netscape's free browser by doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it their name refers to their prices?
Such services are not quite invaluable, but they tend to earn their money.
Actually, for systems that were flushed with dirty water such as that from coffee spills ceiling leaks, washing with distilled water is very helpful for washing away the corroding residue from the dirty water. You have to apply some sense in what and how you clean it, but if you don't clean it, the boards are much more likely to fail as acidic residue eats into the various coatings and compoents.
It's spelled "copyright", referring to your rights to make a copy, not how you write a copy.
Congratulatons, you've learned something for tomorrow, too! (I don't normally bother about spelling errors on Slashdot, but this was actually a good point to remember.)
That's a different story. Under the "Unsolicited Bulk Communications" definition I cited, this would be solicited. But I'd still strongly suggest you switch to an "opt-in" rather than an "opt-out" format for your first advertisement, just to be safe. The number of people who forge requests for spamvertisement is pretty scarey, and you could easily be hittng quite a few people with requests that were fake.
It's particularly fun when a website insists on filling out a form to download or read something to fill it out with a fake name, address, and especially email address of family members of the advertiser.
The definition you're looking for is "Unsolicited Bulk Communications". Unlike many common definitions of spam, this one does not have to evaluate the content for fraud, commercial content, or anything other than the fact that it is sent in bulk. And no, blocking fraud is ineffective because the "legitimate" businesses like yours will expand to fill any gaps left by the purely fraudulent spammers. After all, isn't a miracle cure for your cancer worth telling you about? A great deal on a penny stock? Or passing a letter to help that kid, Craig Shergold? Or your "legitimate" business, which I don't want and didn't ask for nor did any but a very, very few of the recipients?
An excellent legal framework for it exists in the federal junk fax law, which could easily be extended to accomplish this except for spammers like you who fight it wildly through their lobbying organization the Direct Marketing Association.
There are numerous actions the township could take. Police harassment is always good in a corrupt town: cutting off utilities, failing to plow the poster's street, refusing to grant building permits to the builder or their family, "losing" tax records, or if the person is an "insider" with personal knowledge of such corruption, firing them on any convenient pretext while making sure they get bad references. It's unfortunately common to do this to irritating whistleblowers in academia, industry, and politics. But you need to have the person's identity to aim your efforts properly.
For examples of how badly this can go, take a look at SCO's repeated fraudulent claims and harassmentn against Pamela Jones. And for how a fraudulent claim can be used to get a warrant and break open the shield of anonymity, take a good look at how anon.penet.fi was shut down by its owner after a fraudulent claim of cracking was made, through Interpol, to get a warrant against one of its users.
A mere 200 lines probably constitutes "fair use", which is built into copyright law. The guidelines are deliberately vague, but please do not cast all such snippets as blatantly illegal. Unless there's some interesting other issue such as a trade secret or patent, then the author is probably OK with such a snippet.
Contacting the author would be polite, especially to encourage the author to put a license on the software that users could follow. And like your mother telling you to always keep both hands on your bicycle's steering wheel and wear a helmet, it's your corporate lawyer's job to follow every letter of the law, or to at least tell *you* to do so so that he is not liable for telling you it was legal. But it can get excessive, and this case sounds like the author should not be overly concerned about such a small code snippet.
Your description of those events is in direct conflict with DEC's lawsuits of the time, and the reports of DEC personnel, including former employees I've asked about it. I'm inclined to believe DEC and what remained of their personnel on this: David Cutler also took quite a lot of his development team with him, and among them they seem to have rebuilt (or simply copied in) a great deal of the VMS infrastructure. It got attenuated in the move from 64-bit to 32-bit, but memory management especially was extremely similar.
The availability of NT on Alphas was one of the results of the DEC lawsuit, and part of the settlement: DEC thought they could maintain their hardware lead with that architecture and provide workable business models with NT, but forgot about how badly Microsoft's ports of their core tools to other OS's worked, such as we all learned with Macintosh version s of MS Office. DEC also reckoned without Intel's wholesale theft of Alpha technologies: with the dual-threat of both Windows and Intel, locked together, and each having stolen one half of that set of DEC's core technologies, DEC was doomed.
Thank you, I was thinking that. Unfortunately, most (not all) of the more powerful open source tools, such as gcc and OpenOffice, are much better maintained and developed in the Linux world. I'm seeing optimization and performance come out of the BSD world, but not new tools. (And before you say OpenSSH, remember that that came from ssh.com's commercial work.)
Good point, but as I read it, only the customer can force them to give it to that third party.
They don't have to make it available to everyone in the world: they do have to make it available to *you*, as a purchaser of the distributed software.
Could you please contact them and ask for a copy of the kernel source?
Oh, oh my goodness. If the UK doesn't have backroom discussions among tenured faculty who steer thesis committees, then I'll be *amazed*. I've certainly seen traces of it, back when I'd make sure my advisor's computers did the things they were supposed to do. Graduate student funding is pretty fragile in the US, especially if you're on a student visa.
I'm not saying that kind of panicked censorship is the norm, but it certainly happens among scientists. Even among engineers in the professional world, I've seen the infighting when some group suggests a new email system, and the established IT group puts in every obstacle they can think of to keep from replacing existing infrastructure with something lighter weight and more robust that's not from a major vendor (usually Microsoft!), and discarding half of their maintenance team as unnecessary.
Perhaps I was unclear. The *advisor* is blocking the thesis, not the PhD candidate. The candidate may not even realize the implications imperil the advisor's funding. This is partly why good universities try to have a way for a candidate to switch advisor gracefully, although it's very difficult.
And it's not like this is a unique problem to science. Sharp young students who are better than their masters, or who invent something that makes the master's work look shabby, is an ancient, ancient problem. It's not a surprise, it's nearly impossible to avoid. Science research and education tries to have ways to verify the data so this doesn't become widespread.
By "priest", I meant the more anthropological term of "declared religious leaders", not the particular version of "priest" versus "nun" versus "brother" versus "bishop" versus "pope" that is in the Catholic hierarchy.
And there are plenty of other Christians besides Catholics who believe in the "body and blood" of Communion as being the actual blood and guts of Christ, in a magical/religious sort of way, or who have wave vs. particle arguments about whether Jesus was a man or a god. I'm old enough to remember when that airplane full of soccer players got stranded in the Andes and they had to resort to cannibalism, and church's reactions when the survivors described it as a "sacrament".
And there are plenty of Catholics who do, in fact, read it and take it very seriously, and who analyze it historically. Catch a scholarly discussion about the history of the Nicene Creed or the history of the St. James Bible some time if you'd like to see the fur fly about this material, it's as much fun as a town council about changing snow plow contracts. The infighting is an education in itself.
Oh, no. They *hated* the Narnia movie, and hated the Narnia books and the other Christian founded books by C.S. Lewis such as "Perelandra". (I highly recommend C.S. Lewis books for good, out-of-date science fiction and theological thought.) Portraying the Christ figure of Aslan in a different way than standard Christian doctrine is heresy, despite the splendor of it in those books.
And if you don't think scientists scientists, and engineers, get attached to their beliefs, well, you haven't seen a PhD advisor block approval of a thesis that proves 20 years of his research work and his entire lab's purpose was wasted. (It happens in all fields, but it's particularly common in molecular biology right now.)
Doctrines of belief, whether they're "let's eat human flesh and blood of some poor crucified guy every Sunday and call it Mass", or "let's strap explosives to our bodies to kill children on a bus and go to heaven", fight dirty. They've always done so, and they've survived well enough to still cause mayhem and madness. So I don't think you can really say they always lose arguments with science and its kissing cousins, open debate and reasoning.
But many religions are founded on a core belief that what the priests say is the unquestionable word of God. Discrediting the physically verifiable parts of the Bible seriously, seriously threatens this. It's not belief in the flying spaghetti monster that they need: it's belief in the authority of the priests.
Well, now that I've completely countered the reasons you tried the first time, you try another set. Fair enough, let's see.
Lack of wifi access? Yes, it's an issue. There are some fascinating models of providing satellite based hotspots for whole communities that lack copper or fiber, just as we're seeing cell phone use in Africa spread faster into areas there. That's an enabling technology that may just not be available or affordable yet. But for the kids closer to cities, or in high schools where there may need more than a dozen books over the course of 3 years to get a decent education. it's much cheaper to have someone in the city fill a USB memory stick and mail it, with an OLPC, and get accompanying materkal that the books can't provide. These devices are not for the destitute: they're for making a very limited budget, much more effective. I'd expect them to be very useful around libraries and similar hotspots, with schools forming relay services to share the data.
Unrestricted access is also a huge issue, in any nation. We can't have kids viewing porn, or reading notes about their own government's police brutality problems and the history of the last 5 times anyone tried to invade Afghanistan. But that's going to be a lot tougher to limit to OLPC's than it is in shipments of text books. If they're going to limit the populaton that thoroughly, they've got big problems. The use of the OLPC XO, instead of Windows (where this thread started!) will help vastly reduce the amount of rootkits, key loggers, and monitoring of encrypted channels common on Windows boxes. That doesn't completely counter your concern, but it helps. And as laptops or cheap PC's spread to the third world, I don't want them contributing to the Botnet problem! That will suck away their bandwidth and resources even more than the higher prices of Wintel boxes will.
I see you're one of Dick Cheney's advisors. How's that job working out now that "stone age" people are handing the US its ass on a platter, just like they did to the British Empire and the Russians in the long run?
So do you go to your local Heart Association for urban planning? Give them a break: hit up another group for funding to buy a few of these laptops, don't expect them for free from a group whose finances are stretched and for whom it is not in the charter.
Really? Go right to Wikipedia, and search for coffee. Then follow the links.
Until 3 years later, when they need a new laptop for a new child or for a project or their old laptop needs upgrade or replacement. And until you need new software, which is locked to that proprietary OS and costs 5 times as much as it should.
I'll trump that "dozen textbooks" with Wikipedia and Google any day of the week. Add the ability to email, and get current weather reports or data that isn't under the direct control of your local priest or government bureaucrat, and you've got a real educational winner.
Oh, my goodness. You need to check back on the lawsuits. Microsoft illegally strong-armed resellers into installing IE as the default browser. Partly by bribery, partly by raising prices to vendors who dared install Netscape at all, much less make it the default browser. They effectively charged vendors money to install Netscape's free browser by doing so.
It's nasty, and it's illegal monopoly behavior.
Windows 2000's kernel was basically NT version 5. NT was illegally built on David Cutler's development work at DEC creating VMS.
And bribery, and intellectual property theft, both of which Intel and Microsoft have been caught at repeatedly.