At least in Bab5, dead was dead, and was pretty permanent for most characters
Unless you die on Zha'ha'duum (or however it's spelled). Then you don't really die for another
20 years. That was just as much of the cliffhanger-death-thats-not-a-death hook as other shows use. (Not that I mind, B5 was the best - but it did use that some old plot device just like everyone else did. The difference was that the event was planned from the very beginning of the show, so it seemed to "fit" better than in other shows where they do it.)
Imagine if you lived in a world where a car's usefulness was directly related to how many *other* people used similar cars. Then it would become your business that a lot of other people are using inferior cars, becasue by them chosing those cars, you have to deal with them too.
I'd love to never deal with Windows ever again. I don't have that option as long as lots of *other* people keep using it, unless I want to shut myself off from the outside world and never work with others.
As more students fail out or graduate with lousy GPAs, the more the college's ranking drops,
Is that really the way it works? If so then the measuring technique is backward. Given the same set of students, with the same abilities, a college that gives them a higher GPA is an *easier* college than one that gives them a lower one.
I'm one of those people. I don't know why I do it, but I think it has to do with avoiding sensory deprivation. I can't stand being in a silent room either. I can't stand having to sit with either no sensations, or the same exact steady sensations contintuing in a monotonous way. And, no it's not consious. In fact quite the opposite. It takes me consious effort NOT to do it. In fact it's more distracting for my attention for me to sit still than it is for me to bounce my leg, because for me sitting still is an activity that requires continuous consious effort.
But then corporate america is stupid for thinking that an AMD purchase today ties one to an AMD purchase tomorrow. It's not like that. If they are concerned with the fact that intel is more likely to come out with new stuff than AMD what stinking difference does that make to the purchase they make today of comparable CPU's? CPU's don't get upgraded like software does. They just get thrown out and you purchase another, typically with a new motherboard too since you probably need it to handle a new chip if it's been more than a year or so since your last purchase - so motherboard/cpu compatability for the future isn't an issue either. If you replace your cpu/motherboard with a new intel one tomorrow, you still purchase it from scratch anyway whether your current setup is intel or AMD.
("Oh and slash put together" should be really easy
to remember. In fact it's the first thing I tried
when I decided to give this a whirl in vi.
(Now of course if you have the wrong font, it
doesn't have the ø character, but that's not vi's
fault.)
That's nice. Now what does it have to do with what I said, where I was NOT trying to assert that it was the entire HTML editor that was covered. I was saying that it was false to say that ONLY the MSN and MSNBC items are covered. ALL Frontpage Web components are covered, not just the two examples that were listed.
False. It refers to "the FrontPage Web components", which it then goes further to say includes the MSN/MSNBC components. It never said ONLY those web components in the example list it gave were covered.
the clause only referred to the use of the MSN and MSNBC components,
This is false, at least it is assuming the lawyers were writing using standard English meanings (sometimes they don't, so I can't be sure). The EULA said that the software consisted of the FrontPage Web components including the MSN and MSNBC components. Nowhere did it say only those components and no others. It just gave them as two examples in the list. If I say "I know several programming languages, including C and Perl", I'm NOT saying that C and Perl are the only programming languages I know.
The way it was worded, ALL those things that could fall under the description "the FrontPage Web components" are covered by the clause. There's a lot of stuff that can fit that umbrella term.
I wonder if it does this in the OS using the technical definition of 'server' rather than the colloquial one that was intended by the lawyers.
They tried this in NT workstation and got seriously reamed for it because it messed up all the cases where the protocol runs counter to the colloquial notion of a "server". For example, running an X server program on your machine. To the layman, this looks like X is the client and all the little programs running in it are servers on other machines, because the layman has the false sense that "client" means "my little machine" and server means "big machine lots of people are using." This is an understandable misconception for laymen users, but when MS itself made that mistake by putting a 10 server limit into the TCP/IP stack for NT workstation, they pissed off a LOT of people. Those who have NT on their desktops but also have X-windows connectivity to a Unix machine elsewhere found out the OS prevented them from having more than a few X programs up at a time, because of a stupid line of code that attempted to enforce this license term, but did it badly. MS eventually relented and in subsequent versions of NT. The license limit was still there, but wasn't actually enforced in the code anymore, due to the inability of the code to figure out the difference between a "server" in the technical meaning and "server" in the meaning MS's lawyers intended it (Which I still don't know what they meant. Their concept of what a "server" means is fuzzy.)
I hope they also leave the code out of XP like they eventually did with NT. Actually, now that I think on it, no I don't. I hope they leave it in there and let XP users feel the stupidity of MS when things like ICQ get counted toward their 10 "server" limit.
It doesn't say the "Software" includes JUST the logos and MSN services. It says the "Software" is "The FrontPage Web components", then goes on to list those other things merely as examples of what that includes, not an exhaustive list of everything it inlcudes.
If I say, "I know a lot of programming languages, including C and Perl.", that sentence does NOT say that C and Perl are the only programming languages I know.
If they outlaw use of "the FrontPage Web components" for disparaging to MS sites, they have just greatly limited the "functionality" of Frontpage for someone who wants to use it for that purpose - especially since it won't be clear to all users whether or not they are using a "FrontPage Web component", since some of them assuredly get inserted as part of standard templates and editing operations in the program.
It's only when you're using GPLed *code* that you have to
release modifications and addons to that code under the GPL.
Even that much isn't true. It's not all "use" of the code that requires you to release your mods under GPL, it's only when you *distribute* the GPLed code, you have to distribute your mods to it as well.
As long as you don't redistribute the GPLed code, do whatever you feel like. If your own code is modularly seperated from the GPL code enough that you don't need to release any GPL code in order to release your own code (if your own code can be released in a stand-alone fashion), then pick whatever license terms you want. The "viral" nature of the GPL only applies to situations where you are passing on the GPL code to others. If you write some software that's modular enough that you can make installation instructions like "First download GPL product Foo, then download my product Bar, then compile Foo, then compile Bar and run it." Then in that case your product Bar can use whatever license you like, because you aren't really distributing the GPL Foo code - you are just distributing your own code and that's it.
This is why, for example, you may distribute a binary you compiled with gcc, without having to GPL your source for it (and this was true even before the invention of the LGPL).
To the idiots who keep trashing the GPL based on this myth, let me repeat: The "viral" nature ONLY applies to when you have to RE-distribute the GPL'ed program as part of your own. You don't have to do that unless you merged your code with the GPL code in some way. If you didn't do that, you wouldn't need to redistributed the GPL code as part of your own.
To really make a worm mess people up, it needs to get root access. That fact alone is enough to make Apache more secure than IIS, due to the fact that unless you're an idiot you run your Apache servers as a non-root user. And even if you're an idiot there's still a good chance you are running your server as 'nobody' anyway, since that's the default insallation setting. You would have to be a very special sort of idiot, the kind that goes out of his way to do idiotic things on purpose, in order to be running Apache as root.
Now, this doesn't alleviate all the problems of course, because even with "normal user" access a person can still do some damage. The web pages are probably owned by that normal user, so with normal access a person could alter your content. The normal user could set up cron jobs for himself such that he attacks other machines later, and thus you can still get propigation without root. So this still leaves open the possiblity of having DNS attacks (since being a part of the attack doesn't require root privilieges, just any user will do.) But it doesn't really leave any way to mess up the target machine permanently. You couldn't alter the httpd program, for example, since it isn't owned by the same user as the user ID it runs under.
At worst, you lose the web pages themselves, but
most likely you have those copied over from some other location as part of your "I'm going to edit in a scratch area and then install these changes for real after I try them out" technique.
It doesn't matter what was intended. What is *written* is NOT what you say. What is written is that you cannot use frontpage server-side elements for anything disparaging of Microsoft. Period. It does not say, "but only if the MS logo shows up on the screen when you do it."
And besides, any idiot can tell that "group Foo uses MS software to do Bar" is not the same thing as "MS supports Bar". Or at least it would if MS didn't go around plastering their logo on every little component. (Do they? I don't know since I don't use their web stuff, I'm insuating that they do from your response {otherwise your response doesn't make any sense at all}.)
Even a company as low and slimy as MS probably wouldn't do that because the user at the browser end doesn't really know what the content will be like until after he reads it. So such a clause as you suggest would be essentially making something illegal that the person might have no control over. It's like making it illegal to *receive* SPAM, rather than making it illegal to send it.
It merely restricts visible elements (server-side controls and such) from
being associated with objectionable content. And that seems pretty reasonable to me.
Not all server-side things are "visible elements" to the user. No, plain and simple MS is saying you can't use MS FOO to communicate something bad about MS. It doesn't matter one iota whether MS FOO is an entire product or a subset of a prodcut (as in this case). The ethical issue is still the same. Here's an analogy: The phone company saying you can't use their three-way calling, caller ID, call waiting, or voice mail to say bad things about the phone company to your friends, but you can still use the more mundane generic phone call to do so. If you can't see what's wrong with that, then your psychology is so different from mine that you might as well be an alien.
Okay, so instead of it being illegal to use product "MS foo" to say disparaging things about MS, it's actually "MS bar" that's illegal to use to say disparaging things about MS. From an ethical standpoint, the issue is no different. It's still just as slimy either way.
And, further, in this case, the "MS bar" in question is a product that, while not technically always required for MS foo to work, is required for the full set of features of MS foo to work.
In practice, however, this probably won't come up often, given that a site that is disparaging of MS is probably NOT going to be edited in Frontpage.
Saying you have the right to encryption without a backdoor is like saying you have the right to smoke. You enjoy
it, but the activity hurts other people.
Smoking always harms those nearby. Encryption very infrequently harms others, but most of the time is benign. Come back when you understand why this makes your analogy flawed.
To require people to use government-approved cryptography packages only requires that the government get a large number of the services to require it, so that without it you have problems doing day-to-day mundane things like manage your bank account. Think what would happen if Microsoft had the capacity to enact legislation. How would they force everyone to use IE and ditch all other browsers if they had write-access to the lawbooks? Not by doing it at the consumer end, but by doing it at the vendor end of things and forcing sites to refuse browsers whose user agent string isn't "approved". (Then once they figure out that the user agent string can be faked, they'd make it illegal to falsify that information, and prosecute whomever they can find that has done so, to scare the rest.) This is the sort of tactic that works best.
No, I'm not saying the government is actually going to do this, just that it *could* be done and it means they don't really have to enforce it in each consumer's house for it to work.
Of course, then it only gets the ordinary citizens trying to do ordinary business and not those determined to communicate to each other with their own means, but I'm not gullable enough to believe that the terrorists are who the government is really after with this anyway.
{From the side of a box of tater tots, in the future}
HEY KIDS!
Ever wonder what tater tots used to look like when your parents ate them as kids? Look at the purple tater tots in the green Heinz ketchup. Continue staring at them without moving your eyes while you count to 30. Then look at a blank white sheet of paper and you'll see an image of the potatoes amd ketchup in their old colors like your parents used to eat!
"Open source encryption prevents government backdoors" == "Government declares open source encryption illegal"
In our current mania after the WTC attack, that just might happen. The probable route to get there from here would start with "All communications must be snoopable by the government. Oh, you are using a technique we can't snoop on? Well then you must have something to hide...People who use open source encryption to transmit must be Bad Guys(tm)..." Then watch the witch hunt begin.
If there's any people out there who don't think there's anything wrong with mandating government backdoors in all encrypting software, consider this: How can they mandate that encryption software retains that backdoor unless they prevent people from seeing the source code? This would be the death of any open source software that happens to do encryption. This asinine attitude that congress has, that lerge corporate software is the only software that needs to exist, is rearing it's ugly head again here. It's the same attitude that made it so that the DMCA prevents open source DVD players. If you can't beat open source down by technical means, then beat it down with the law.
I don't often agree with RMS, but today I do. In our country's mad panic we are enacting changes that will reduce our freedoms forever, and all in the hypocritical name of protecting our freedom.
- the recent UN Racism conference, which the US pulled out of because of the suggestion that Israel might be racist towards the
Palestinians.
What a load of manure. It was a hell of a lot more than a "suggestion". It was an attempt to make it an a priori conclusion, to be taken as an axiom before the conference even began.
The deaths occured because Communism itself was treated like a relgion of state worship. They killed the religious because the religious were their competition. They killed them because of how alike they were, not how different.
Now, the day you can convince me that all atheists must necesarilly be communists, you might have a point.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to never deal with Windows ever again. I don't have that option as long as lots of *other* people keep using it, unless I want to shut myself off from the outside world and never work with others.
I'm one of those people. I don't know why I do it, but I think it has to do with avoiding sensory deprivation. I can't stand being in a silent room either. I can't stand having to sit with either no sensations, or the same exact steady sensations contintuing in a monotonous way. And, no it's not consious. In fact quite the opposite. It takes me consious effort NOT to do it. In fact it's more distracting for my attention for me to sit still than it is for me to bounce my leg, because for me sitting still is an activity that requires continuous consious effort.
But then corporate america is stupid for thinking that an AMD purchase today ties one to an AMD purchase tomorrow. It's not like that. If they are concerned with the fact that intel is more likely to come out with new stuff than AMD what stinking difference does that make to the purchase they make today of comparable CPU's? CPU's don't get upgraded like software does. They just get thrown out and you purchase another, typically with a new motherboard too since you probably need it to handle a new chip if it's been more than a year or so since your last purchase - so motherboard/cpu compatability for the future isn't an issue either. If you replace your cpu/motherboard with a new intel one tomorrow, you still purchase it from scratch anyway whether your current setup is intel or AMD.
In insert mode: press ctrl-K, then o, then /
("Oh and slash put together" should be really easy
to remember. In fact it's the first thing I tried
when I decided to give this a whirl in vi.
(Now of course if you have the wrong font, it
doesn't have the ø character, but that's not vi's
fault.)
That's nice. Now what does it have to do with what I said, where I was NOT trying to assert that it was the entire HTML editor that was covered. I was saying that it was false to say that ONLY the MSN and MSNBC items are covered. ALL Frontpage Web components are covered, not just the two examples that were listed.
False. It refers to "the FrontPage Web components", which it then goes further to say includes the MSN/MSNBC components. It never said ONLY those web components in the example list it gave were covered.
The way it was worded, ALL those things that could fall under the description "the FrontPage Web components" are covered by the clause. There's a lot of stuff that can fit that umbrella term.
I hope they also leave the code out of XP like they eventually did with NT. Actually, now that I think on it, no I don't. I hope they leave it in there and let XP users feel the stupidity of MS when things like ICQ get counted toward their 10 "server" limit.
If I say, "I know a lot of programming languages, including C and Perl.", that sentence does NOT say that C and Perl are the only programming languages I know.
If they outlaw use of "the FrontPage Web components" for disparaging to MS sites, they have just greatly limited the "functionality" of Frontpage for someone who wants to use it for that purpose - especially since it won't be clear to all users whether or not they are using a "FrontPage Web component", since some of them assuredly get inserted as part of standard templates and editing operations in the program.
Even that much isn't true. It's not all "use" of the code that requires you to release your mods under GPL, it's only when you *distribute* the GPLed code, you have to distribute your mods to it as well.
As long as you don't redistribute the GPLed code, do whatever you feel like. If your own code is modularly seperated from the GPL code enough that you don't need to release any GPL code in order to release your own code (if your own code can be released in a stand-alone fashion), then pick whatever license terms you want. The "viral" nature of the GPL only applies to situations where you are passing on the GPL code to others. If you write some software that's modular enough that you can make installation instructions like "First download GPL product Foo, then download my product Bar, then compile Foo, then compile Bar and run it." Then in that case your product Bar can use whatever license you like, because you aren't really distributing the GPL Foo code - you are just distributing your own code and that's it.
This is why, for example, you may distribute a binary you compiled with gcc, without having to GPL your source for it (and this was true even before the invention of the LGPL).
To the idiots who keep trashing the GPL based on this myth, let me repeat: The "viral" nature ONLY applies to when you have to RE-distribute the GPL'ed program as part of your own. You don't have to do that unless you merged your code with the GPL code in some way. If you didn't do that, you wouldn't need to redistributed the GPL code as part of your own.
Now, this doesn't alleviate all the problems of course, because even with "normal user" access a person can still do some damage. The web pages are probably owned by that normal user, so with normal access a person could alter your content. The normal user could set up cron jobs for himself such that he attacks other machines later, and thus you can still get propigation without root. So this still leaves open the possiblity of having DNS attacks (since being a part of the attack doesn't require root privilieges, just any user will do.) But it doesn't really leave any way to mess up the target machine permanently. You couldn't alter the httpd program, for example, since it isn't owned by the same user as the user ID it runs under.
At worst, you lose the web pages themselves, but most likely you have those copied over from some other location as part of your "I'm going to edit in a scratch area and then install these changes for real after I try them out" technique.
And besides, any idiot can tell that "group Foo uses MS software to do Bar" is not the same thing as "MS supports Bar". Or at least it would if MS didn't go around plastering their logo on every little component. (Do they? I don't know since I don't use their web stuff, I'm insuating that they do from your response {otherwise your response doesn't make any sense at all}.)
Gee, can't they make up their minds? With Microsoft products, accurate references == disparaging comments.
Even a company as low and slimy as MS probably wouldn't do that because the user at the browser end doesn't really know what the content will be like until after he reads it. So such a clause as you suggest would be essentially making something illegal that the person might have no control over. It's like making it illegal to *receive* SPAM, rather than making it illegal to send it.
And, further, in this case, the "MS bar" in question is a product that, while not technically always required for MS foo to work, is required for the full set of features of MS foo to work.
In practice, however, this probably won't come up often, given that a site that is disparaging of MS is probably NOT going to be edited in Frontpage.
To require people to use government-approved cryptography packages only requires that the government get a large number of the services to require it, so that without it you have problems doing day-to-day mundane things like manage your bank account. Think what would happen if Microsoft had the capacity to enact legislation. How would they force everyone to use IE and ditch all other browsers if they had write-access to the lawbooks? Not by doing it at the consumer end, but by doing it at the vendor end of things and forcing sites to refuse browsers whose user agent string isn't "approved". (Then once they figure out that the user agent string can be faked, they'd make it illegal to falsify that information, and prosecute whomever they can find that has done so, to scare the rest.) This is the sort of tactic that works best.
No, I'm not saying the government is actually going to do this, just that it *could* be done and it means they don't really have to enforce it in each consumer's house for it to work.
Of course, then it only gets the ordinary citizens trying to do ordinary business and not those determined to communicate to each other with their own means, but I'm not gullable enough to believe that the terrorists are who the government is really after with this anyway.
HEY KIDS!
Ever wonder what tater tots used to look like when your parents ate them as kids? Look at the purple tater tots in the green Heinz ketchup. Continue staring at them without moving your eyes while you count to 30. Then look at a blank white sheet of paper and you'll see an image of the potatoes amd ketchup in their old colors like your parents used to eat!
What I am worried about is this:
"Open source encryption prevents government backdoors" == "Government declares open source encryption illegal"
In our current mania after the WTC attack, that just might happen. The probable route to get there from here would start with "All communications must be snoopable by the government. Oh, you are using a technique we can't snoop on? Well then you must have something to hide...People who use open source encryption to transmit must be Bad Guys(tm)..." Then watch the witch hunt begin.
I don't often agree with RMS, but today I do. In our country's mad panic we are enacting changes that will reduce our freedoms forever, and all in the hypocritical name of protecting our freedom.
Now, the day you can convince me that all atheists must necesarilly be communists, you might have a point.