"Do you feel you could have taken the SAT and done well without the calculators?"
I did damned well on it twice. Once with a 4-function calculator, and again without a calculator at all. Maybe it makes a difference that I'm a math major, maybe not.
"Is it any coincidence that a Republican won the election?"
It's not a coincidence: There were only Republicans on the ballot. The surprising thing is that election officials seem to think that it's more appropriate for a Democrat to vote for a Republican than to not vote at all. (The really surprising thing is that the nonvotes were only one percent or so, meaning a whole lot of straight-ticket Democrats DID vote for a Republican when that was the only choice.)
>Hmmm, I guess you would have to ask the 2.5 >million that have lost their jobs
A small minority. The big picture (seen from my office window) is, lots of late model cars, people living in new-construction homes, and "satisfaction" being the general mood.
>Or ask the military personnel whose combat pay >was cut in half.
An exaggeration. And are they deserting? Are they rebelling? I'd suggest they are probably re-enlisting.
> or our kids in 15 years
Conjecture.
The point is, nobody is, as yet, upset enough to take up arms against the authority. Pretty much everybody seems to be willing and able to live another day, rather than make the ulitmate sacrifice to force change.
We don't have the social or economic conditions that trigger a revolution.
You say "just ask anybody", and I say, if things were that bad, you wouldn't have to ask -- the chaos would come to you.
I think my problem is that I've studied too much Russian history. Read up on what conditions were like during the Five Year Plan under Stalin, and then tell me again how your life is hard because jobs where you sit at a desk and stare at a monitor are becoming more scarce.
They did press "Vote." (I don't personally know how it worked, but the story says they acknowledged a warning screen.)
Consider that the choices in that race were "Vote for a Republican or don't vote at all!"
If I was a straight-ticket-Democrat, I think I'd be hopping mad at a voting system that forced me to vote for anyone in the opposition party, and did not allow me to abstain. (I think, in fact, I'd make a Federal case out of it.)
"I don't think he meant natural normal deaths that are par for the course."
Deaths due to environmental conditions can't be anything but natural...
I guess Earth was suicidal, by creating a sentient being that is capable of doing extreme damage to the planet... Probably just nature's way of ensuring that we don't have to deal with the Sun shutting down or orbital decay...
"[H]e predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans."
That doesn't sound completely unreasonable, provided that an equivalent number were born. How many people did die during the 1980's? Was it more or less than 65 million Americans?
"Maybe the US troops in Iraq should come back to liberate this country."
Maybe they would if they had a reason.
What issue do you think is heavy enough to cause a military force to turn on its own command? There are countless examples from history, so we know that it's possible. But do you really believe the US has such an issue today, or will have, in the forseeable future? What issues would those be?
It looks to me like everybody is pretty much blissfully happy with the general state of affairs, and that the people in the military rank and file are just about as loyal and satisfied as any military organization has ever been in history. For your revolutionary scenario, all that would have to be pretty much the opposite of how it is right now, which is to say nothing of how bad things would have to get before the military *commanders* decided death was a better choice than fighting *for* the country.
You assume the dictator is the same person as the chief. Consider how long some of the current administration heads have been working in the government. My favorite example is Jack Valenti. He gets onto the radar of these young nerds because of recent dealings in the entertainment industry. But how many realize that he'd occupied a position of authority for 4 decades? How many know he was in the JFK motorcade?
Consider Ashcroft's career. Did you vote for Ashcroft? He had power 8 years ago, and he will probably still have power 8 years hence, even though Mr. Bush will be quietly enjoying his retirement.
How about Rumsfeld? He didn't just fall off a turnip truck in 2000 either -- he's been pulling strings in Washington DC since the Eisenhower administration! Did you vote for Rumsfeld? Why didn't he disappear after 8 years in the executive team?
The people fucking up the State are NOT elected, and they do NOT have finite limits on how long they can stay in power. Some of the most important people making some of the most significant decisions in the history of the country, weren't even elected by the people.
Too bad the misdirection works so well, making everybody point their blame the temp worker who occupies the hot seat while the real power people stay under the radar for decades.
"Get a component MD deck and you get optical in and out."
But that's expensive, and my rack already has a dedicated pc with an 8-channel 24/96 sound card. Are you sure you can disable SCMS on your component deck? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the "mini" in "minidisc?"
"Makes sense when you consider their intended use."
It doesn't make sense to me. The intended use is to deprive me of my artwork? Or to raise the barrier to entry into high-quality sound recording? Why isn't this the consumer's choice?
In a mall? You mean in a store, or you mean people using them?
There are 2 kinds of users, producers and consumers. Producers want to record their own work. They need recorders. Consumers want to play back the work of others. They need players.
In my local mall, I can find several brands of minidisc, and a variety of DAT recorders. I don't see a lot of people using them, because they tend to be consumers. They just want a small MP3 player, and those are about as ubiquitous as cell phones.
I'm a musician though. I want to record more than playback. I don't want my recording device to decide for me whether I can keep my recording or whether it can be copied. I also don't want to pay ten grand for a "pro" deck that has those features disabled. So I end up using my old DAT that has SCMS disabled and has a sp/dif output, but the tapes are fairly expensive and it doesn't run very long on a battery charge. Or I just use my computer, which gives me full control of the 24 bit audio, and is always armed and connected to my mixing board.
I'd use my minidisc if it wasn't intentionally crippled -- media is dirt cheap, and it records quite well, lossy codec or no lossy codec, but the problem is it's a one-way-street.
The lossy codec isn't so bad, but the one-way-street is a showstopper. I can use minidisc to record practice sessions, but then it's basically lost, because I'd have to play that back through a cheap DAC in order to use the track. If the sony md's had sp/dif output, I wouldn't care about the lossy encoding. It's the analog-only output that pisses me off. (This is MY music you're "protecting". You're violating MY rights when you do that...)
The impression I'm getting is that, while it should be possible to photograph the crash site, there is not sufficient telemetry data to locate the crashed lander. All that's known is that it's probably within a huge area.
We have to keep in mind the scale. The landers are very small objects, compared to the angle and depth of focus of the cameras on the satellites, which are dealing with a *planetary* scale.
If you drop your watch in the grand canyon, do you think you'd ever find it?
"You can't forge those without a supercomputer or two. Geez."
More to the point, if you found that you could forge an encryption format that's generally accepted, you would be in a position to choose any target you'd like. With this ability, you could probably find sufficient legitimate endeavors so that you wouldn't need to commit fraud anyway, at least for the short time that you remain the only person who can routinely break "strong" encryption. It would be a super-power for a while...
While it's not easy to put a highly secure lock on a file cabinet, it would have been extremely easy to put truly effective digital security on the document signature in Word. Instead of doing the easiest thing in the world, say incorporating a generally accepted crypto mechanism in the product, they decided to put a facade that represents an illusion of security. Why did they even bother?
"2. Email your favorite tech reporter anonymously and state what you found."
Why can the tech reporter expose this with impunity and you cannot? Does his right to free speech outweigh yours? Consider this: The reporter *IS* getting financial gain from the story.
"in either case, the consumer wins (as in case 2, more competitive companies will spring up to take their place"
What about when the individual consumer loses before The Consumer wins? What if the only real damages are to the customer and not the business? What if the customer never actually makes the connection between his ID theft, etc., and any particular retailer?
Most business degree plans don't cover statistics. Sometimes they get math through brief calc, but even that's pretty rare. Lots of biz majors are psych minors though, and they get a survey class in statistics, sometimes bundled with a "research methods" course.
Preaching to the choir, I know... But we still can't touch the I/O. Or the hardware reliability.
>Microsoft just doesn't get it.
They'll get it whenever they observe their strategy stops making them assloads of money. You could argue that they DO get it, and aren't ashamed to exploit it.
>4) Linux does not have lobbyists in Washington >nor "friends" in the courts.
Did you forget that the plaintiff is IBM (not "Linux")?
IBM most certainly does have friends in the courts. Linux isn't on trial. SCO and IBM are on trial.
Linux has a luxury that few others share: It doesn't have to live in the USA or even within the reach of the long arm of the USA's law. It can continue to exist. Okay, so it won't get software market dominance that way, but was it going to do that in the first place?
So, the worst case scenario that takes Linux out of the software market in the US and the countries that suck the US tit, doesn't really do anything except set back the American devlopers, hobbyists, and the relatively few commercial interests to whom linux is a significant piece of their action.
Linux would become an underground import, probably literally illegal to import. Think that would kill it or make it even more popular? Think it would be enough to make people stop talking about leaving the US in favor of a Free country... and make them actually do it? (I know there will be a breaking point somewhere that creates a wave of emigration, but I have a feeling it will be something more serious than the software market or entertainment control...)
"...don't you think it'd be worth throwing a few dollars at them just in case they're right? "
In *hindsight*, which is one of the key points in the article, yes.
But, even the uninformed dilettante who invests on a whim does not have to do much research at all before he discovers there is significant contraversy about the SCO deal, and because of that, it should have big red flags saying "RISK" even for the greenest player.
As the OP said, if you'd bought SCO when the story broke, you could be rich now -- and you'd be pulling your money out now which would actually work against the company...
"He didn't say he published an article in a peer-reviewed compsci journal"
It reflects poorly on his integrity.
"My Ph.D. is less valid because I shoplifted (and was caught) when I was 8 years old"
No... But if you did crimes at 30, after you had your J.D., you might very well be disbarred for it.
"So is any other document. What's your point?"
My point is that the lab notes might find their way to a jury without the NDA or contracts attached.
"He didn't say it's an agreement to falsify results, he said MS can decide not to publish the results at their whim. Big difference."
Sort-of. They said they wouldn't pay for the labor. That puts the researcher under serious pressure to toe the line, which puts integrity at risk.
"The drug company doesn't publish the results."
The researcher agrees to do unbiased studies. The studies are done. The person funding the research decides not to pay for the work, saying "if you want our money, you will try again and make the results square with our expectations."
Slashdot Mirror
"Do you feel you could have taken the SAT and done well without the calculators?"
I did damned well on it twice. Once with a 4-function calculator, and again without a calculator at all. Maybe it makes a difference that I'm a math major, maybe not.
"Is it any coincidence that a Republican won the election?"
It's not a coincidence: There were only Republicans on the ballot. The surprising thing is that election officials seem to think that it's more appropriate for a Democrat to vote for a Republican than to not vote at all. (The really surprising thing is that the nonvotes were only one percent or so, meaning a whole lot of straight-ticket Democrats DID vote for a Republican when that was the only choice.)
>Hmmm, I guess you would have to ask the 2.5
>million that have lost their jobs
A small minority. The big picture (seen from my office window) is, lots of late model cars, people living in new-construction homes, and "satisfaction" being the general mood.
>Or ask the military personnel whose combat pay
>was cut in half.
An exaggeration. And are they deserting? Are they rebelling? I'd suggest they are probably re-enlisting.
> or our kids in 15 years
Conjecture.
The point is, nobody is, as yet, upset enough to take up arms against the authority. Pretty much everybody seems to be willing and able to live another day, rather than make the ulitmate sacrifice to force change.
We don't have the social or economic conditions that trigger a revolution.
You say "just ask anybody", and I say, if things were that bad, you wouldn't have to ask -- the chaos would come to you.
I think my problem is that I've studied too much Russian history. Read up on what conditions were like during the Five Year Plan under Stalin, and then tell me again how your life is hard because jobs where you sit at a desk and stare at a monitor are becoming more scarce.
They did press "Vote." (I don't personally know how it worked, but the story says they acknowledged a warning screen.)
Consider that the choices in that race were "Vote for a Republican or don't vote at all!"
If I was a straight-ticket-Democrat, I think I'd be hopping mad at a voting system that forced me to vote for anyone in the opposition party, and did not allow me to abstain. (I think, in fact, I'd make a Federal case out of it.)
"I don't think he meant natural normal deaths that are par for the course."
Deaths due to environmental conditions can't be anything but natural...
I guess Earth was suicidal, by creating a sentient being that is capable of doing extreme damage to the planet... Probably just nature's way of ensuring that we don't have to deal with the Sun shutting down or orbital decay...
"[H]e predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans."
That doesn't sound completely unreasonable, provided that an equivalent number were born. How many people did die during the 1980's? Was it more or less than 65 million Americans?
"Maybe the US troops in Iraq should come back to liberate this country."
Maybe they would if they had a reason.
What issue do you think is heavy enough to cause a military force to turn on its own command? There are countless examples from history, so we know that it's possible. But do you really believe the US has such an issue today, or will have, in the forseeable future? What issues would those be?
It looks to me like everybody is pretty much blissfully happy with the general state of affairs, and that the people in the military rank and file are just about as loyal and satisfied as any military organization has ever been in history. For your revolutionary scenario, all that would have to be pretty much the opposite of how it is right now, which is to say nothing of how bad things would have to get before the military *commanders* decided death was a better choice than fighting *for* the country.
You assume the dictator is the same person as the chief. Consider how long some of the current administration heads have been working in the government. My favorite example is Jack Valenti. He gets onto the radar of these young nerds because of recent dealings in the entertainment industry. But how many realize that he'd occupied a position of authority for 4 decades? How many know he was in the JFK motorcade?
Consider Ashcroft's career. Did you vote for Ashcroft? He had power 8 years ago, and he will probably still have power 8 years hence, even though Mr. Bush will be quietly enjoying his retirement.
How about Rumsfeld? He didn't just fall off a turnip truck in 2000 either -- he's been pulling strings in Washington DC since the Eisenhower administration! Did you vote for Rumsfeld? Why didn't he disappear after 8 years in the executive team?
The people fucking up the State are NOT elected, and they do NOT have finite limits on how long they can stay in power. Some of the most important people making some of the most significant decisions in the history of the country, weren't even elected by the people.
Too bad the misdirection works so well, making everybody point their blame the temp worker who occupies the hot seat while the real power people stay under the radar for decades.
"Get a component MD deck and you get optical in and out."
But that's expensive, and my rack already has a dedicated pc with an 8-channel 24/96 sound card.
Are you sure you can disable SCMS on your component deck? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the "mini" in "minidisc?"
"Makes sense when you consider their intended use."
It doesn't make sense to me. The intended use is to deprive me of my artwork? Or to raise the barrier to entry into high-quality sound recording? Why isn't this the consumer's choice?
In a mall? You mean in a store, or you mean people using them?
There are 2 kinds of users, producers and consumers. Producers want to record their own work. They need recorders. Consumers want to play back the work of others. They need players.
In my local mall, I can find several brands of minidisc, and a variety of DAT recorders. I don't see a lot of people using them, because they tend to be consumers. They just want a small MP3 player, and those are about as ubiquitous as cell phones.
I'm a musician though. I want to record more than playback. I don't want my recording device to decide for me whether I can keep my recording or whether it can be copied. I also don't want to pay ten grand for a "pro" deck that has those features disabled. So I end up using my old DAT that has SCMS disabled and has a sp/dif output, but the tapes are fairly expensive and it doesn't run very long on a battery charge. Or I just use my computer, which gives me full control of the 24 bit audio, and is always armed and connected to my mixing board.
I'd use my minidisc if it wasn't intentionally crippled -- media is dirt cheap, and it records quite well, lossy codec or no lossy codec, but the problem is it's a one-way-street.
The lossy codec isn't so bad, but the one-way-street is a showstopper. I can use minidisc to record practice sessions, but then it's basically lost, because I'd have to play that back through a cheap DAC in order to use the track. If the sony md's had sp/dif output, I wouldn't care about the lossy encoding. It's the analog-only output that pisses me off. (This is MY music you're "protecting". You're violating MY rights when you do that...)
>Saying that the probe is "probably within a huge
>area" is like saying that my lost mittens are
>probably on earth somewhere. If I ever had
>mittens.
That's rather my point. Except we're sure that we did have mittens. I think we have their location pinned down to 1/4 of the planet.
The impression I'm getting is that, while it should be possible to photograph the crash site, there is not sufficient telemetry data to locate the crashed lander. All that's known is that it's probably within a huge area.
We have to keep in mind the scale. The landers are very small objects, compared to the angle and depth of focus of the cameras on the satellites, which are dealing with a *planetary* scale.
If you drop your watch in the grand canyon, do you think you'd ever find it?
Screen shot and OCR? Dictaphone and a secretary?
"You can't forge those without a supercomputer or two. Geez."
More to the point, if you found that you could forge an encryption format that's generally accepted, you would be in a position to choose any target you'd like. With this ability, you could probably find sufficient legitimate endeavors so that you wouldn't need to commit fraud anyway, at least for the short time that you remain the only person who can routinely break "strong" encryption. It would be a super-power for a while...
While it's not easy to put a highly secure lock on a file cabinet, it would have been extremely easy to put truly effective digital security on the document signature in Word. Instead of doing the easiest thing in the world, say incorporating a generally accepted crypto mechanism in the product, they decided to put a facade that represents an illusion of security. Why did they even bother?
Don't use Federal Reserve Notes at ALL.
Use the Barter System.
Sure that means you have to be part of the process of getting what you want. But that's a good thing.
"2. Email your favorite tech reporter anonymously and state what you found."
Why can the tech reporter expose this with impunity and you cannot? Does his right to free speech outweigh yours? Consider this: The reporter *IS* getting financial gain from the story.
"in either case, the consumer wins (as in case 2, more competitive companies will spring up to take their place"
What about when the individual consumer loses before The Consumer wins? What if the only real damages are to the customer and not the business? What if the customer never actually makes the connection between his ID theft, etc., and any particular retailer?
[statistics]
Most business degree plans don't cover statistics. Sometimes they get math through brief calc, but even that's pretty rare. Lots of biz majors are psych minors though, and they get a survey class in statistics, sometimes bundled with a "research methods" course.
Shame on you if you sign a contract with that kind of language. Would you rent a building out with a "withhold payment" clause like that?
Tenant reserves the right to withhold rent until building is satisfactorily decorated.
I'm SO sure.
>So why would anyone still run mainframes?
Preaching to the choir, I know... But we still can't touch the I/O. Or the hardware reliability.
>Microsoft just doesn't get it.
They'll get it whenever they observe their strategy stops making them assloads of money. You could argue that they DO get it, and aren't ashamed to exploit it.
>4) Linux does not have lobbyists in Washington
>nor "friends" in the courts.
Did you forget that the plaintiff is IBM (not "Linux")?
IBM most certainly does have friends in the courts. Linux isn't on trial. SCO and IBM are on trial.
Linux has a luxury that few others share: It doesn't have to live in the USA or even within the reach of the long arm of the USA's law. It can continue to exist. Okay, so it won't get software market dominance that way, but was it going to do that in the first place?
So, the worst case scenario that takes Linux out of the software market in the US and the countries that suck the US tit, doesn't really do anything except set back the American devlopers, hobbyists, and the relatively few commercial interests to whom linux is a significant piece of their action.
Linux would become an underground import, probably literally illegal to import. Think that would kill it or make it even more popular? Think it would be enough to make people stop talking about leaving the US in favor of a Free country... and make them actually do it? (I know there will be a breaking point somewhere that creates a wave of emigration, but I have a feeling it will be something more serious than the software market or entertainment control...)
"...don't you think it'd be worth throwing a few dollars at them just in case they're right? "
In *hindsight*, which is one of the key points in the article, yes.
But, even the uninformed dilettante who invests on a whim does not have to do much research at all before he discovers there is significant contraversy about the SCO deal, and because of that, it should have big red flags saying "RISK" even for the greenest player.
As the OP said, if you'd bought SCO when the story broke, you could be rich now -- and you'd be pulling your money out now which would actually work against the company...
"He didn't say he published an article in a peer-reviewed compsci journal"
It reflects poorly on his integrity.
"My Ph.D. is less valid because I shoplifted (and was caught) when I was 8 years old"
No... But if you did crimes at 30, after you had your J.D., you might very well be disbarred for it.
"So is any other document. What's your point?"
My point is that the lab notes might find their way to a jury without the NDA or contracts attached.
"He didn't say it's an agreement to falsify results, he said MS can decide not to publish the results at their whim. Big difference."
Sort-of. They said they wouldn't pay for the labor. That puts the researcher under serious pressure to toe the line, which puts integrity at risk.
"The drug company doesn't publish the results."
The researcher agrees to do unbiased studies. The studies are done. The person funding the research decides not to pay for the work, saying "if you want our money, you will try again and make the results square with our expectations."
That's more like what the OP suggested.