If you don't pay for unlimited rights, you don't have them when you're licensing media.
Extra points to everyone who saw the bus-sized hole in this statement.
ANY media I purchase is subject to the doctrine of first sale. That means, when I buy it it's mine to do with what I want within limits we all know and follow.
The media conglomerates want to pretend the doctrine of first sale doesn't exist by pretending digital media is somehow radically different than an LP/VHS or even the CD.
On its face that is ridiculous and you either are astroturfing for the media conglomerates or woefully misinformed. In case it is the latter, you have given away your personal freedoms for absolutely nothing and opened the door to even more abuse.
The good doctor makes some cleverly written statements that build some very false assumptions:
"ripping" He is passively criminalizing the term. The doctrine of first sale clearly establishes this is completely within the bounds of lawful behavior. Say it loud and often, "ripping is legal!"
"When files are distributed there is a set of identifiers that are used to tie the files back to the user. These identifiers include the IP address of the client distributing the files, the name of the file, file size and the content hash. In addition there are file descriptors that provide information like the artist name, album name, and description field....
First of all, it doesn't tie anything back to anyone. 1. Is the IP address permanent? No. 2. Their PUBLIC IP address is in fact associated with their PRIVATE ip address at the time of the infringement is impossible to establish. 3. Can prosecution establish the computer cannot be under anyone else's control. As the average windows PC is easily infected. Remote desktop is quite easly enabled, I could go on. 4. The so-called identifiers are not unique in any way and can easily be changed by anyone at any time. 5. Hashes are not fingerprints. They do not uniquely and unequivicolly (sp) identify anything. I can make two completely different files that calculate the same hash. To summarize, it's possible that there was copyright infringement, but it's impossible to establish this person did it and the files in question were actually infringed.
The only thing they have to do is produce CD's from which the songs were lawfully ripped and the doctrine of first sale protects them.
Even *if* they stored their lawfully ripped files in the so-called shared folder, They can't establish they were uploaded to other users when IP addresses are temporary and lack any verifiable association with a PC?
His document is stuffed full of half-truths that don't withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.
Maybe the legal staff needs a little explanation as to why these questions are *so* important and hopefully clarifying things.
1. Screenshot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot There is *no* way to prove where a screenshot came from. There is *no* audit trail, no chain of custody, no way to verify where the screenshot came from. NOTHING. Practically speaking it is *very* simple to completly fabricate screenshots. I'm not saying prosecution would do that, but very substantial doubt is easily established by asking the parent's questions.
2. Chain of custody on the PCs in question Has the chain of custody been established and verified? Do you know the PC hasn't been tampered with by prosecution? Obviously you can't say that outright, but what they are claiming is almost impossible to verify.
3. What were prosecution's discovery techniques? Substantial doubt can be established by punching holes in their discovery methods. Screenshots is a good example. Easily faked. Or maybe it's just a case of "the wrong man" because it's not clear who did the stealing which doesn't question the prosecution's standing as good lawyers so much. There will be many holes you can drive a bus through and slashdot is just the place to clarify/verify. I for one will be happy to volunteer if it sets some precedent. mpapetATyahoo.com.
4. Chain of custody on the files in question It's possible that the files were transferred to them lawfully. Can prosecution establish a chain of custody on the files in question? Files on a computer is impossible to establish as fact the time/date the file was written. The opposite example is how easy it is to establish the time/date a shoplifter was in a store. A store employee would testify, "Because I saw them there" or "I caught them." There's no such analogy in file sharing.
5. Doctrine of First Sale Check out the doctrine of first sale. That's a long-established precendence that may help you.
I'm shooting in the dark, but I want to help. I have a good server and some bandwidth, if you need a way to collect expert advice from the techies in maybe a wiki or slashdot style site let me know. It'll take a couple of days to set up. I'll do it for peanuts just to establish some precedent.
How this will probably work is the end solution uses a smart card to do some authentication and key storage.
All gov't employees will at some point get an ID card similar to the Common Access Card. This will have a number of public keys on it. One of which probably decrypts their workstation.
The U.S. gov't is building the capacity to issue millions of smart cards on their own. See this: http://www.fcw.com/article94813-06-07-06-Web There was a proper publicly available contract up for bid for this project but it wouldn't surprise me if it has been pulled in favor of a no-bid award.
Before anyone says, "Well it should be a secret! What if the terrists get a badge?!" There are two things to remember.
1. Lots of bad people have proper ID in their country of choice. Identification has little if any relationship to their activities. The failure points remain the usual human factors out in the field.
2. There's no need for secrecy in the production environment. Every half-decent perso system/PKI properly manages such an obvious point of failure. If a Visa-certified card plant can manage to keep track of 10's of millions of cards anyone can. It's not rocket science.
Not so much that Halliburon will get it, probably not.
But there's only a couple of IT contractors who handle stuff like this. And the way this works is the government wonks may select a product, but it's the IT project management firm that gets the contract to implement and this is where it starts going awry.
-The backroom politics is fierce and has nothing to do with public service. This is a good game of influence peddling where deep pockets wins. See the story last month where the details of Microsoft's dealings with Massachusets (sp?) after ODF was killed were dissected. -Layers upon layers of management. -Actual product vendor is squeezed for every last cent while the IT project managers get to bill time for squeezing their vendor. -Implementation (if it ever gets that far) is handled by another firm with no interaction with the software vendor. And the IT project manager gets to squeeze the implementers and bill those hours as well.
This, ladies and gentlement is how even implementing a pilot project costs millions and never sees the light of day.
There is hardly enough valid opinion in the comment to mod it 5 insightful so I suspect copious amounts of Microsoft FUD at least from the moderators.
Let's examine it carefully.
"people" in general want to use whatever everyone else is using Yup. And that's why the killer linux desktop app will make people switch. When it fulfills a need that their current desktop doesn't then they'll switch. Look at Apple. They are hardly winning the war despite having the vastly superior OS.
a. Exchange replacement This one is right. There's no 1-for-1 replacement and Outlook makes this extremely difficult to do anyway.
. Policy management like Active Directory This is wrong. Horribly so. As someone that deals with policy objects every day they are a nasty hack. I can do the same thing a couple of different ways in Linux where someone else can come along and figure out what I did easily. Active directory? Not so much.
Microsoft compatibility Clearly you have never dealt directly with Microsoft. Please don't make such foolish statements. Microsoft doesn't want it to happen.
Security updates that really are without question Sadly, you aren't kidding and you must like Microsoft's update routine. As a system administrator I WANT to know if the update is replacing a critical file and any sysadmin worth half her salary will want the same thing.
Educational Facilities These comments clearly show complete ignorance when it comes to abusive Microsoft licensing practices. Please don't comment so authoritatively on something you know nothing about.
More shades between "root" and "user". This one is particularly humorous. There are many, many ways to do this. If you are too lazy to edit a sudo file, then this http://csrc.nist.gov/rbac/ won't do you any good either.
Somewhere to put "common documents I don't know what the hell this is about but it sounds like you are just too lazy to do it because it's not hard.
1. There is a well-worn and completely false assumption that Microsoft is somehow -still- subject to competitive market forces. They are not. Not tomorrow, not 10 years from now. Just like the telephone company, they are not going anywhere. They will not be unseated. There's no one "coming up fast." No Apple, no Linux, no one.
2. A windows-equipped PC taxes all computer consumers. How is that possible? Windows is sold at a monopolist's high price and this reduces the volume of computer hardware sold. So we all pay more because fewer computers are being sold.
There is simply no historical or economic evidence that things will be different with Microsoft than it was for any other monopolist.
I think someone at Microsoft understands that most paid OSS developers choose their salaries over the many principals violated with the deal. I'm not discrediting the developers who make this choice. I've sacrificed my principals in exchange for feeding my family many times and I'm not alone.
As has been said before, Microsoft is trying to narrow its Linux competition to one or two then eliminate them later. The influx of corporate politics and big money/power stands to poison the whole notion of bazaar-style development. Big-Money has a way of doing that. Look at Debian and dunc-tank. That's hardly big money and it's already affected volunteerism at that project.
As is often the case, there are just a couple of people who carry such a strong sense of principals, that they choose a more uncertain path over a more predictable one that is the result of having more flexible principals.
Check the number of patents on the back of that gift card you just bought as a gift. Fancy corners? Got it's own hang tag? All patented and litigated recently.
The good news is I've patented emoting with ascii characters.:););/;\:/:\ I'll be back for my royalties in 2007!
if there are patent infringements in Linux that probably would only minorly affect Linux
Microsoft doesn't care about kernels. Kernel litigation with SCO failed anyway. They worry about distros because they are stealing Microsoft's lunch.
And the of the top-100 distros over at distrowatch.org, how many have DEEP pocket to go more than one day in court? Damn Small Linux? Mepis? Slackware? When microsoft has finished culling the herd, they'll litigate most distros into oblivion. They will be careful about it too, because they've got enterprise customers they don't want to piss off.
Linux code is GPL - it can't disappear They don't want it to disappear. They just don't want anyone using it. If the only place to get it is some repo in Germany then your PHB certainly won't run it. Linux as a product will be unmarketable. Mission accomplished for Microsoft.
Microsoft has a damn good plan. Distros should be preparing for long-term litigation.
being able to download a software as a single file, and double-click this file to install the software. Depending on the distro this is either impossible or theoretically possible but always failing.
There are a couple of issues with your statements.
I can do this right now on Debian Stable and Testing and Suse with a KDE desktop. I'm assuming I can lump Kubuntu in here too. The problem you probably have may be that you find rpm's out there that you think you want, but can't use because they aren't built for your distro version. Stick to the package manager gui and you are good to go.
2. The OS does the right thing by denying automagically installing package dependencies. Automagically installing package dependencies is very much Microsoft-style thinking. It's a security disaster waiting to happen. If you stick to the package manager on your desktop you will be fine.
You won't have any problems if you stick to the repository in most popular disros.
The companies mentioned have some very smart people working for them. It's a shame the PHB's pretty much kill whatever innovation is happening in the belly of those beasts.
The wisdom of the crowds is frequently spoiled by individuals that game the system. Microsoft astroturfers on/. is a good example. So-called climate science coming from the U.S. Gov't that doubts global warming is another. As a former Tech Buzz Game player I can tell you from personal experience the game was stopped and restarted with new rules because of cheating.
The end result is the wisdom a crowd was supposed to provide essentially evaporates.
Not without bees they won't. Magic fairy pixie dust maybe? Wait, Science will fix it? You mean when biologic mega-corps patent some half-broken version of pollination they'll just make it free out of the goodness of their corporate heart?
What about all of the other plants bees polinate? Those won't be around either.
Do you think McDonalds just manufactures hamburgers out of thin air?
Where will you get the micronutrients your body needs? Not McDonalds.
What about the hundreds of thousands of other products made with nuts and other pollinated plants?
Please reconsider your opinions in this matter carefully because right now you are advocating sudden and massive starvation either through food being too expensive for most to eat (even in the U.S.) or simply unavailable.
Sometimes stuff dies. Marginalizing an important issue like biodiversity is fun isn't it?
This is/. where software monoculture is almost universally agreed is a Bad Thing(r).
It stands to reason a biologic monoculture carries with it even more dire consequences than software. Our best interests are served to ensure there are as many species as possible walking/crawling/swimming around.
Let me give you an example. Bees. The American commercial bee population is a monoculture. In California the central valley bee population has been decimated by a disease that the bee keepers can no longer control. Guess what? No tree nut harvest. How about the other plants that bees pollinate? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=6299480
Now, what happens when it's cows or corn? Rice? Wheat? Please re-examine this belief carefully and mod parent down.
The extra effort this entails for BIG deployments of windows will be a temporary headache for a small group of sysadmins until of course they upgrade to the Microsoft server designed to handle this....
The bigger picture is locking everything out.
1. Reaching into the networking peripherals market to extract a tax for the privilege of connecting to a Vista PC. Give Microsoft a few cents for every device sold and no consumer will care. Microsoft can then tighten the DRM noose and increase revenue simultaneously.
2. Making mixed computing environments harder to deploy.
3. Each Vista PC will obviously send a unique id/signature so DRM and law enforcement knows what you are doing online all of the time. Has it happened? No. Will it happen? Yes. How do I know? Historic evidence of what other monopolies have done makes it a sure bet. Economists also have one of their very exciting graphs illustrating this as well.
As a component of a broader security system, cryptography is valuable and solves many problems.
History shows that the weak links in systems employing cryptography is usually some other part of the system. DVD's are an obvious example.
Outside of gov't agencies and the mega-corps that service them, I don't see this taking off like the ipod. The PHB's in the banking world certainly won't understand why this is better than the systems they have now.
He had one in the U.S. for his entire life. Picking lemons. The produce business was merciless too.
He owned the house he lived in plus a couple more, had good health insurance for the entire family. Both parents worked very hard to get what they had. They managed to make it through the Great Depression too.
It's possible to have a stable working class no matter the era. You've been convinced otherwise because it's in the owner's best interest to maximize profits at your expense.
Getting the political machine to endorse and legislate their perspective has been relativley easy because politics isn't personal or transparent.
First, you utterly fail to comprehend how corrupt most tech industries are. if it were possible to effectively quadruple the size of the agency doing this investigation, they would STILL never run out of tech importers that don't follow american business rules. I know this because I worked for an OEM.
Second, It's this attitude of looking the other way because the price is right TODAY that is the reason that economically, this country is headed for very hard times. You are watching out for number one and everything is right with the world because you are doing well. Check the news on how many "people that matter" are saying the dollar is over-valued. What about the U.S. savings rate? Negative. Trade deficit? What are Americans producing that other countries want? Agricultural goods, entertainment and ? Everything is okay right?
It's the principal that's important here. Being guided by the rule of law instead of corruption is a win. Yes, it's "water under the bridge" at this point, but transparency and accountability are good things and along the way American industry gets a better chance at competing globally.
What I want to know is how this particular issue got to the top of the stack. Who pushed it there? How much did it cost them? Why are they allowed to investigate this one? Now THAT's a story worth reading.
Employment Stats: Number of years in the workforce 47 +/- Number of employers: 2 +/- Longest Stint: 40 years.
Promises companies (and governments) make aren't really binding My father would say this is the difference between his generation and mine. In his day, people's word actually meant something. Even if those people worked for a corporation there was a sense of personal responsibility in your daily dealings.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you didn't read it carefully enough, but I think "within limits we all know and follow" pretty much covers it.
Doing those other things are unfair anyway.
If you don't pay for unlimited rights, you don't have them when you're licensing media.
Extra points to everyone who saw the bus-sized hole in this statement.
ANY media I purchase is subject to the doctrine of first sale. That means, when I buy it it's mine to do with what I want within limits we all know and follow.
The media conglomerates want to pretend the doctrine of first sale doesn't exist by pretending digital media is somehow radically different than an LP/VHS or even the CD.
On its face that is ridiculous and you either are astroturfing for the media conglomerates or woefully misinformed. In case it is the latter, you have given away your personal freedoms for absolutely nothing and opened the door to even more abuse.
Mod parent down.
The good doctor makes some cleverly written statements that build some very false assumptions:
"ripping"
He is passively criminalizing the term. The doctrine of first sale clearly establishes this is completely within the bounds of lawful behavior. Say it loud and often, "ripping is legal!"
"When files are distributed there is a set of identifiers that are used to tie the files back to the user. These identifiers include the IP address of the client distributing the files, the name of the file, file size and the content hash. In addition there are file descriptors that provide information like the artist name, album name, and description field....
First of all, it doesn't tie anything back to anyone.
1. Is the IP address permanent? No.
2. Their PUBLIC IP address is in fact associated with their PRIVATE ip address at the time of the infringement is impossible to establish.
3. Can prosecution establish the computer cannot be under anyone else's control. As the average windows PC is easily infected. Remote desktop is quite easly enabled, I could go on.
4. The so-called identifiers are not unique in any way and can easily be changed by anyone at any time.
5. Hashes are not fingerprints. They do not uniquely and unequivicolly (sp) identify anything. I can make two completely different files that calculate the same hash.
To summarize, it's possible that there was copyright infringement, but it's impossible to establish this person did it and the files in question were actually infringed.
The only thing they have to do is produce CD's from which the songs were lawfully ripped and the doctrine of first sale protects them.
Even *if* they stored their lawfully ripped files in the so-called shared folder, They can't establish they were uploaded to other users when IP addresses are temporary and lack any verifiable association with a PC?
His document is stuffed full of half-truths that don't withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.
Maybe the legal staff needs a little explanation as to why these questions are *so* important and hopefully clarifying things.
1. Screenshot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot
There is *no* way to prove where a screenshot came from. There is *no* audit trail, no chain of custody, no way to verify where the screenshot came from. NOTHING. Practically speaking it is *very* simple to completly fabricate screenshots. I'm not saying prosecution would do that, but very substantial doubt is easily established by asking the parent's questions.
2. Chain of custody on the PCs in question
Has the chain of custody been established and verified? Do you know the PC hasn't been tampered with by prosecution? Obviously you can't say that outright, but what they are claiming is almost impossible to verify.
3. What were prosecution's discovery techniques?
Substantial doubt can be established by punching holes in their discovery methods. Screenshots is a good example. Easily faked. Or maybe it's just a case of "the wrong man" because it's not clear who did the stealing which doesn't question the prosecution's standing as good lawyers so much. There will be many holes you can drive a bus through and slashdot is just the place to clarify/verify. I for one will be happy to volunteer if it sets some precedent. mpapetATyahoo.com.
4. Chain of custody on the files in question
It's possible that the files were transferred to them lawfully. Can prosecution establish a chain of custody on the files in question? Files on a computer is impossible to establish as fact the time/date the file was written. The opposite example is how easy it is to establish the time/date a shoplifter was in a store. A store employee would testify, "Because I saw them there" or "I caught them." There's no such analogy in file sharing.
5. Doctrine of First Sale
Check out the doctrine of first sale. That's a long-established precendence that may help you.
I'm shooting in the dark, but I want to help. I have a good server and some bandwidth, if you need a way to collect expert advice from the techies in maybe a wiki or slashdot style site let me know. It'll take a couple of days to set up. I'll do it for peanuts just to establish some precedent.
How this will probably work is the end solution uses a smart card to do some authentication and key storage.
All gov't employees will at some point get an ID card similar to the Common Access Card. This will have a number of public keys on it. One of which probably decrypts their workstation.
The U.S. gov't is building the capacity to issue millions of smart cards on their own. See this: http://www.fcw.com/article94813-06-07-06-Web There was a proper publicly available contract up for bid for this project but it wouldn't surprise me if it has been pulled in favor of a no-bid award.
Before anyone says, "Well it should be a secret! What if the terrists get a badge?!" There are two things to remember.
1. Lots of bad people have proper ID in their country of choice. Identification has little if any relationship to their activities. The failure points remain the usual human factors out in the field.
2. There's no need for secrecy in the production environment. Every half-decent perso system/PKI properly manages such an obvious point of failure. If a Visa-certified card plant can manage to keep track of 10's of millions of cards anyone can. It's not rocket science.
I for one welcome our fully encrypted overlords.
Not so much that Halliburon will get it, probably not.
But there's only a couple of IT contractors who handle stuff like this. And the way this works is the government wonks may select a product, but it's the IT project management firm that gets the contract to implement and this is where it starts going awry.
-The backroom politics is fierce and has nothing to do with public service. This is a good game of influence peddling where deep pockets wins. See the story last month where the details of Microsoft's dealings with Massachusets (sp?) after ODF was killed were dissected.
-Layers upon layers of management.
-Actual product vendor is squeezed for every last cent while the IT project managers get to bill time for squeezing their vendor.
-Implementation (if it ever gets that far) is handled by another firm with no interaction with the software vendor. And the IT project manager gets to squeeze the implementers and bill those hours as well.
This, ladies and gentlement is how even implementing a pilot project costs millions and never sees the light of day.
There is hardly enough valid opinion in the comment to mod it 5 insightful so I suspect copious amounts of Microsoft FUD at least from the moderators.
Let's examine it carefully.
"people" in general want to use whatever everyone else is using
Yup. And that's why the killer linux desktop app will make people switch. When it fulfills a need that their current desktop doesn't then they'll switch. Look at Apple. They are hardly winning the war despite having the vastly superior OS.
a. Exchange replacement
This one is right. There's no 1-for-1 replacement and Outlook makes this extremely difficult to do anyway.
. Policy management like Active Directory
This is wrong. Horribly so. As someone that deals with policy objects every day they are a nasty hack. I can do the same thing a couple of different ways in Linux where someone else can come along and figure out what I did easily. Active directory? Not so much.
Microsoft compatibility
Clearly you have never dealt directly with Microsoft. Please don't make such foolish statements. Microsoft doesn't want it to happen.
Security updates that really are without question
Sadly, you aren't kidding and you must like Microsoft's update routine. As a system administrator I WANT to know if the update is replacing a critical file and any sysadmin worth half her salary will want the same thing.
Educational Facilities
These comments clearly show complete ignorance when it comes to abusive Microsoft licensing practices. Please don't comment so authoritatively on something you know nothing about.
More shades between "root" and "user".
This one is particularly humorous. There are many, many ways to do this. If you are too lazy to edit a sudo file, then this http://csrc.nist.gov/rbac/ won't do you any good either.
Somewhere to put "common documents
I don't know what the hell this is about but it sounds like you are just too lazy to do it because it's not hard.
1. There is a well-worn and completely false assumption that Microsoft is somehow -still- subject to competitive market forces. They are not. Not tomorrow, not 10 years from now. Just like the telephone company, they are not going anywhere. They will not be unseated. There's no one "coming up fast." No Apple, no Linux, no one.
2. A windows-equipped PC taxes all computer consumers. How is that possible? Windows is sold at a monopolist's high price and this reduces the volume of computer hardware sold. So we all pay more because fewer computers are being sold.
There is simply no historical or economic evidence that things will be different with Microsoft than it was for any other monopolist.
I think someone at Microsoft understands that most paid OSS developers choose their salaries over the many principals violated with the deal. I'm not discrediting the developers who make this choice. I've sacrificed my principals in exchange for feeding my family many times and I'm not alone.
As has been said before, Microsoft is trying to narrow its Linux competition to one or two then eliminate them later. The influx of corporate politics and big money/power stands to poison the whole notion of bazaar-style development. Big-Money has a way of doing that. Look at Debian and dunc-tank. That's hardly big money and it's already affected volunteerism at that project.
As is often the case, there are just a couple of people who carry such a strong sense of principals, that they choose a more uncertain path over a more predictable one that is the result of having more flexible principals.
I for one admire his sense of conviction.
This email from October 26 is pretty darn informative when it comes to dunc-tank. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/10/msg 00260.html
6 /11/msg00004.html
/.ers just go straight to http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/ and get the news. I certainly wish the editors at /. would.
This email from November 16 will pretty much bring everyone up to date on Etch status: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/200
Since its publication, Etch has gone into bug-fixing only.
Nice little bonus for debian users on the end if you read it all the way through.
Please, please
Is now mandatory.
:) ;) ;/ ;\ :/ :\ I'll be back for my royalties in 2007!
Check the number of patents on the back of that gift card you just bought as a gift. Fancy corners? Got it's own hang tag? All patented and litigated recently.
The good news is I've patented emoting with ascii characters.
if there are patent infringements in Linux that probably would only minorly affect Linux
Microsoft doesn't care about kernels. Kernel litigation with SCO failed anyway. They worry about distros because they are stealing Microsoft's lunch.
And the of the top-100 distros over at distrowatch.org, how many have DEEP pocket to go more than one day in court? Damn Small Linux? Mepis? Slackware? When microsoft has finished culling the herd, they'll litigate most distros into oblivion. They will be careful about it too, because they've got enterprise customers they don't want to piss off.
Linux code is GPL - it can't disappear
They don't want it to disappear. They just don't want anyone using it. If the only place to get it is some repo in Germany then your PHB certainly won't run it. Linux as a product will be unmarketable. Mission accomplished for Microsoft.
Microsoft has a damn good plan. Distros should be preparing for long-term litigation.
Parent is exactly right.
I've been trying figure out a way to describe the Novell/Microsoft situation for weeks.
Write this one down because this is exactly how the corporate mind works and how Microsoft's game will play out.
Writer doesn't have a clue. Microsoft doesn't get "punished" by anyone.
being able to download a software as a single file, and double-click this file to install the software. Depending on the distro this is either impossible or theoretically possible but always failing.
There are a couple of issues with your statements.
I can do this right now on Debian Stable and Testing and Suse with a KDE desktop. I'm assuming I can lump Kubuntu in here too. The problem you probably have may be that you find rpm's out there that you think you want, but can't use because they aren't built for your distro version. Stick to the package manager gui and you are good to go.
2. The OS does the right thing by denying automagically installing package dependencies. Automagically installing package dependencies is very much Microsoft-style thinking. It's a security disaster waiting to happen. If you stick to the package manager on your desktop you will be fine.
You won't have any problems if you stick to the repository in most popular disros.
Indeed...
/. is a good example. So-called climate science coming from the U.S. Gov't that doubts global warming is another. As a former Tech Buzz Game player I can tell you from personal experience the game was stopped and restarted with new rules because of cheating.
The companies mentioned have some very smart people working for them. It's a shame the PHB's pretty much kill whatever innovation is happening in the belly of those beasts.
The wisdom of the crowds is frequently spoiled by individuals that game the system. Microsoft astroturfers on
The end result is the wisdom a crowd was supposed to provide essentially evaporates.
I'm sure the trees will get pollinated
Not without bees they won't. Magic fairy pixie dust maybe? Wait, Science will fix it? You mean when biologic mega-corps patent some half-broken version of pollination they'll just make it free out of the goodness of their corporate heart?
What about all of the other plants bees polinate? Those won't be around either.
Do you think McDonalds just manufactures hamburgers out of thin air?
Where will you get the micronutrients your body needs? Not McDonalds.
What about the hundreds of thousands of other products made with nuts and other pollinated plants?
Please reconsider your opinions in this matter carefully because right now you are advocating sudden and massive starvation either through food being too expensive for most to eat (even in the U.S.) or simply unavailable.
If this species was not an integral part of our environment, then why all the fuss about its death?
1. I'm not here to teach you basic biology. Shame on you if you graduated high school without a basic understanding of the food chain.
2. Humans are creating biologic monoculture.
A pandemic WILL come along and without biodiversity we're all dead.
These are historical facts that cannot be argued away.
Sometimes stuff dies.
/. where software monoculture is almost universally agreed is a Bad Thing(r).
y Id=6299480
Marginalizing an important issue like biodiversity is fun isn't it?
This is
It stands to reason a biologic monoculture carries with it even more dire consequences than software. Our best interests are served to ensure there are as many species as possible walking/crawling/swimming around.
Let me give you an example. Bees. The American commercial bee population is a monoculture. In California the central valley bee population has been decimated by a disease that the bee keepers can no longer control. Guess what? No tree nut harvest. How about the other plants that bees pollinate? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Now, what happens when it's cows or corn? Rice? Wheat? Please re-examine this belief carefully and mod parent down.
The extra effort this entails for BIG deployments of windows will be a temporary headache for a small group of sysadmins until of course they upgrade to the Microsoft server designed to handle this....
The bigger picture is locking everything out.
1. Reaching into the networking peripherals market to extract a tax for the privilege of connecting to a Vista PC. Give Microsoft a few cents for every device sold and no consumer will care. Microsoft can then tighten the DRM noose and increase revenue simultaneously.
2. Making mixed computing environments harder to deploy.
3. Each Vista PC will obviously send a unique id/signature so DRM and law enforcement knows what you are doing online all of the time. Has it happened? No. Will it happen? Yes. How do I know? Historic evidence of what other monopolies have done makes it a sure bet. Economists also have one of their very exciting graphs illustrating this as well.
Besides the obvious Suse and Red Hat who's the third "premium" linux? I'd say Debian is not it, but Ubuntu sure has the resources to be #3.
Who do you think will be the top 3?
As a component of a broader security system, cryptography is valuable and solves many problems.
History shows that the weak links in systems employing cryptography is usually some other part of the system. DVD's are an obvious example.
Outside of gov't agencies and the mega-corps that service them, I don't see this taking off like the ipod. The PHB's in the banking world certainly won't understand why this is better than the systems they have now.
Computer prices are going *down.*
They are going down for two reasons:
1. Apple's laptops are using more generic components than long ago.
2. Volume of components produced has gone up.
Do Intel's newest/fastest/bestest CPU prices go down with each successive release? Factoring in volume, they do not.
There are quite a few bits and bobs inside the average PC where absent corruption an American company would have a chance.
He had one in the U.S. for his entire life. Picking lemons. The produce business was merciless too.
He owned the house he lived in plus a couple more, had good health insurance for the entire family. Both parents worked very hard to get what they had. They managed to make it through the Great Depression too.
It's possible to have a stable working class no matter the era. You've been convinced otherwise because it's in the owner's best interest to maximize profits at your expense.
Getting the political machine to endorse and legislate their perspective has been relativley easy because politics isn't personal or transparent.
LCDs should be the LEAST of these guys worries.
First, you utterly fail to comprehend how corrupt most tech industries are. if it were possible to effectively quadruple the size of the agency doing this investigation, they would STILL never run out of tech importers that don't follow american business rules. I know this because I worked for an OEM.
Second, It's this attitude of looking the other way because the price is right TODAY that is the reason that economically, this country is headed for very hard times. You are watching out for number one and everything is right with the world because you are doing well. Check the news on how many "people that matter" are saying the dollar is over-valued. What about the U.S. savings rate? Negative. Trade deficit? What are Americans producing that other countries want? Agricultural goods, entertainment and ? Everything is okay right?
It's the principal that's important here. Being guided by the rule of law instead of corruption is a win. Yes, it's "water under the bridge" at this point, but transparency and accountability are good things and along the way American industry gets a better chance at competing globally.
What I want to know is how this particular issue got to the top of the stack. Who pushed it there? How much did it cost them? Why are they allowed to investigate this one? Now THAT's a story worth reading.
Employment Stats:
Number of years in the workforce 47 +/-
Number of employers: 2 +/-
Longest Stint: 40 years.
Promises companies (and governments) make aren't really binding
My father would say this is the difference between his generation and mine. In his day, people's word actually meant something. Even if those people worked for a corporation there was a sense of personal responsibility in your daily dealings.