Many of my friends got rid of their land lines in prefference of their cell phones. From their perspective they tend to get more tele-markiters calls than legitimate calls, and who wants to pay $25 to $35 for basic access to a phone with long distance capability. Some folks don't even use the phone more than one time per week, so it doens't justify the.75c to $1 a day to get nothing.
Plus with cell phones many times you can get deals for free long distance, and internet connectivity (the phone being a data modem).
I think I'll go take a shit in the woods, and go piss on a tree. One less "WHOOSH..." down the toilet. Hey, it saves water, and that water could be donated to some squirel or a starving person in Ethiopia or some other equally tree huging manuever! Happy Earth day slashdot!
Freedom of speech in the USA is a myth. The 5th is true, but they just hold you in prision until you cooperate with the spooks, or get you via a special court ordered survalence warrent. Think Kevin Mitnik, or Nicodermo Shapiro. Another factor is that the notion of evidence being held against you is difficult when you have to prove that the crypto is, or *is not* evidence. There is an old thought experiment called the schrodingers cat box, and the same ideas apply. Is the evidence really evidence as soon as it is enciphered? Aka is the cat still alive once inserted into the catbox? The answer is both yes and no, but mainly no (the cat is dead to us, the crypto is inaccessible to the spooks). Its a really sticky situation. =)
A property of quantum crypto is the utter inability for people to eves drop on communications. At least at the physical layer anyways, there is no possibility of a man in the middle, or splice tap into the physical medium. At the network layer there is always the possibility, but the Cicso router hardly plays a hand in crypto in that space since it is only a data exchanger/switch/router. So the solution is to simply use SSL, IPsec, and SSH in conjunction of each other (aka crypto over crypto) on the public networks (the internet).
yes, and there is also algorythms that allow for two plaintext messages to co-mingle in the same ciphertext, yet use two different keys. The idea is that you give the 2nd key to the spooks (aka authorities), and keep the real legitimate key a secret. Most communication protocals (like ssh) already use a combination of DSA/RSA, and onetime-pad's in a layered framework. The RSA keys being encrypted with a passphrase incase the private key is comprimised by the spooks. The spooks solution to the above is to install a key stroke recorder to capture the pass phrase. That is where quantum cryptography comes in. The idea is to have a fiber optic cable from the keyboard to the computer terminal that uses quantum crypto so that the connection can never be intercepted (by a key stroke recorder) with a device in the middle. The keyboard also having a high FIPS rating to avoid the potential for being xrayed, etc... but if we need that level of protection, we got other issue far worse to contend with. After all, only criminals would use that level of crypto, so the FBI says.
What is the point of encryption if you have to give up the keys. I say its up the the spooks to have the capabilities to crack my encryption rather than force me to hand over the keys. Even then, I'd only hand over the keys in encrypted form, still forcing them to use their supper computers. Serriously, encryption is a black and white area... some grey, but mostly either a situation where you use it, or don't...
Targeting a large group of developers with an organized email attack seems almost perfect grounds for a law suite! (hint hint) Besides, I've never heard of the opposing project before, yet it doens't mean it doesn't have a large group of supporters... I suspect that it doesn't compare the the numbers of Mozilla users who might be equally motivated to fire up their email-spewing perl scripts. Heck, 5 minutes of my time to send 500,000 emails their way is worth the warm fuzy feeling it would bring for even mentioning an attack on Mozilla (thinking about it even). =)
That right. I dind't mention that cuz it wasn't very relevant considering all phone cables are now 4 wire, including infrastructure. But at least somebody else knows, you know! thx.
I hate to get technical here in slashdot (cuz I know all the trolls are readings), but a city wide network is called a metropolitan area network. Networks that go from one city to another are called a Wide Area Network (aka WAN), and networks within a building are called Local Area Networks (aka LAN). A LAN does not exist when the network leaves the building, and a WAN doesn't exist until you leave the city/town. Get it right people! City wide networks are not that impressive when you consider the phone company already has you connected to the phone system, and a T1 line is nothing more than a standard phone line.
It hard to target the poeple who simply download, and a bit easieer to go after the folks who are making music available for public consumption without a license (a student is't a radio station). It is much easier to go after the people who facilitate the prior two people's ileagle activity, and I have no sympathy for the student. He obviously wan't very smart, and dind't need to go to school anyways.
I do think the $$$ amount is a bit excessive, but this fellow "created a bazzar of illeagle activity", as the article says. I would place the fine at $20 per unlicense song swap! Depending on the actual amount swapped it would bring the fine down into the hundreds of millions instead of billions.
Encryption; Thats is what the file swappers are going to have to resort to. Terrorism in the eyes of the Justice dept, since only criminals/terroris use crypto! Hehe... They had better watch out cuz they might go from bad to worse, from the pan to the fire as Tolkin would say. I mean it seems obvious to me that in order to swap files people are going to have to embrace crypto on a person by person basis until crypto is a common notion in America. on second thought, what am I saying... this would hinder crypto... stay away file swappers! stay away!
A prime example of somebody justifing their actions. Radio plays music that is licensed to be broadcast for public consuption. You listen to music for free on the radio, in analog low quality, and that is licensed. You purchase cd media and get audio, and a license use use the cd media for personal consumption.
Digital theft is easy, and you can sit around all day long and compare apples to oranges (radio Vs Napster). Since it is so easy to steal music, it is equally easy to justify it. There is no justification for theft!
Most music shops will let you sample music at the store kiosk. There is no justification to steal an unlicensed copy to sample the music. You could listen to the radio to sample music. You could go to the club and watch what the DJ spins, or read the play list.
Simple logic dictates that if a fraction of the people on napster were actuially sampling music, there would be a increase in music sales proportional to the of music dowloaded on napster, and that is simply not the case. Even if only 5% were using Napster to sample music, and they actually purchase 2% of the music they sampled, there would be a significant increase in music sales.
It is diferent only because you have created a perception of it being different. In reality it is theft on many levels. This only proves that by and large most peopel have convinced themselves that the activity is justifiable due to some notion that it is not the same as physical theft.
Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources.
This is the most absurd thing I have read in recent days. The notion of stealing music inorder to preview it for later purchase is insane. Would you steal a CD from the music shop only to turn around and go make a purchase of the exact same thing. NO, you would not!
People think up the weirdest shit to justify that their actions are legitimate, and many times they belive their own lies. I can speculate that some folks steal music, and then go out and purchase some of the tunes they stole. But how many tunes are sampled, yet never purchased. Also, a sample of music is typically a segment of the audio, not the entire tune. People do not trade samples, they trade entire tracks/albums.
Simply put, napster is not designed to be a preview service. It is designed to move mp3 files from one computer to another, and search the data of remote computers for whatever your criteria is(genre, artists, albums, etc). I'm not sure what is worse, people who download music from napster, or peope who make their albums available on napster. The people who share their tunes are facilitating a criminal activity by the people who steal (aka download) the music.
My opinion on the entire mess is that if Napster could hurt the music industry, it probably does. Dowloading a binary file is inocent in of itself. A downloader has no notion if the binary they download (mp3's) are copyright, or not. The notion of a filename is meaningless as files can be renamed, so respect of copyrights based on recognition of the bands name in the filename is a flawed argument. Clearly the criminal liability points to the people who make music available for download, but since in napster downloaders, and publishers are one in the same. Thus, the method of correcting the criminal situation is to remove the napster servers.
Actually, the way I read it is this only affects the solid propelant variants. High power rocketeers can still use the hybrid engine format that they have been using for 5 years to get around various transport restrictions. The hybrids use nytrous-oxide as a propelant, with a solid catalist. THe solid not actualyl being propelant. The synergy of the nitrus + catalist makes it stronger, faster, etc.. Check out a link to a hybrid motor maker.
This will certainly make it hard for the really hardcore of use who use the Solids for first stage boost. The hybrids are prefered for 2nd or 3rd stage int he realyl high power areana.
I was wondering if anybody would counter my point with the subject you mentioned. Actually Hydrogen/Oxygen would be ideal.... but hydro-floride is cheap, and easy to produce. Hydrogen-peroxide is expesive, and hard to produce. Even harder than oxy/hydro impulse power. I thik that Carmak is going to have the exact same problem I had getting fuel.
You see, I'm a member of the trippoly association. We gateher at the black rock desert every year for high altitude launches of out rockets. Yes, i used to be into high powered amature rocketry, like Carmak is into now. I know about all the goverment restrictions, and the difficulties in getting certain matterials. Carmak will nver get his peroxide. It is simply too dangerous to handle for the civilian public. Especially in his biz park colocation facility. In Mesqite texas, 5 miles from my residence.
He could try Hydrogen/Floride reaction to produce similare results. He could go with a hybrid engine to to take advantage of relaxed chemical handling rules that he seems to be hitting. Peroxide is way too dangerous for Carmak to handle. Serriously! The version of peroxide he needs is very pure. The stuff you get at the pharmacy is like 2% or less of peroxide. The stuff he wants is so volitile that it cannot ever come in contact with any other substance, including air, or else you might have an explosion. Most of the time pereoxide is used as a catalist in the overall reaction. The best place to go for x-price feul is the local welders supply. If carmak were highly motivated, he could simply mix his own peroxide. But that would involve containment, and nobody wants to worry about that.
There is several rules for handling the stuff, like you cannot have it within 1000 yards from train tracks (because of electro-static coming down the rails), and obviously a no smoking facility. Thats not all, pure peroxide needs to be incased in a layered cylinder where some type of innert matterial is in between the outside, and the inter peroxide tank. So getting pereoxide is hard, for good reasons. There is very few commercial applications of the stuff.
Its strange to consider that Microsoft didn't protect parts of the hardware with fips rated hardware like some crypto cards are. In case you don't know what FIPS means, it is "Federal Information Protection Standard", and parts of it covers secure hardware. Stuff like crypto accellerator boards that self destruct if you attempt to x-ray, or break the hermetricly sealled gel enclosures. Stuff like that protects the boards from people who would attempt to reverse engineer hardware. Microsoft *did* do some things to make life hard for hackers with the way the HDD works. Microsoft does stuff that is more anoying than a barrier to reverse engineering.
Locating the private keys for the games would be the best way to hack an xbox. Considering a modified xbox will not jive with future xbox games, and or network servives... the hardware mod is not desireable.
Further more, hacking contests should be managed by the original vendor, in this case Microsoft. Think of the RSA crypto challenges. Those are fair contests, that actually interest crypto folks to invest serrious effort, and brain power.
As far as poor BeOs not being able to use linux drivers in their OS... huh? Why should they? If they want to use, they have to share. What's wrong with that? And if they can't build a replacement OS that has the broad range of features and compatibilities as linux, or other free Operating Systems, then more the fool them for trying to get into a dying business model. Maybe they should have found a business model that leveraged free software rather than trying to compete with it. Let Be be a lesson to other commercial software companies.
Actually, thsi *did* happento me! I used to work for Be Inc, and I wanted better support for my 3com 3c509 based isa card. BeOS had a driver, but it was in house home brew hack, and I wanted to have it work liek my slack box. So I took Donald Beckards driver, and we developed a wrapper for it so the driver thought it was talking to a Linux kernel (but was really BeOS 4.5). To make a long story short I had to remove the driver from the official Be website, and later from other sites..... as a result of the GPL. So I'm sure you can understand my sentiments about the subject. My supperiors actually were contacted by RMS himself to remove the BeOS wraper based driver. When I caught wind from up above, I sent email myself to RMS, and got a reply. I wish I still had an archive of the email, but let me just say RMS's notorious optinions bleed thru, plus a few attacks at BeOS being inferior due to not being OSS. Technically my wrapper violated the a GPL clause about linked libraries having the notion of being "derivitave", and thus "extending" a GPL'ed work... even though the driver was just linked in... it was linked to the BEOS kernel, and that was *not* available for Beckard to look at.
I hope this little story was interesting, because it really happened, and to me (and one other guy at Be). Now look at Microsoft, back in the mid 1990's they took code from BSD to implement a native IP-tcp/udp stack. Most people would say that was good for Microsoft. Linux also took lots of code from BSD, and that was percieved good for Linux. So I wonder when writing code as GPL ever was *better* that writing it as BSD style.
But the problem with that is that when that used to be case (your "early days" of the computer industry) commercial entities would rape the public domain software by taking the software and modifying it in ways that locked you into a vendors product, be it hardware or software.
I actually think that helped more than hurt the industry, and that the OSS movement would have continued anyways. Vendor lock in can also be called vendor inovation, and many new good things came from the way ATT licensed UNIX to various vendors. Don't forget that this same vendor lock in is also what gave us the broad spectrum of advanced hardware platforms with tailored software. This same advancement in vendor lockin also spured OSS inovation. Just look at NetBSD that is able to boot 31 various platforms.
In some ways the proprietary sector can benifite by the GPL, like SGI has with XFS. If can let the community have XFS, and eat its cake too since if IMB wanted to fix XFS those changes would go back to SGI. As a greed software company that would be good. In general that is how the GPL works by supporting the greed in society. My father used to tell me that communism would never work just because of the old maxum that: "If every human on Earth had exactly one acre of land to use as they wish, and never any more or less... jsut one acre. There would always be some people who want *two* acre's of land". The GPL works the same way for greed developers/companies. Considering that the above maxum is practically a constant truth, the GPL fundamentally doesn't work. What I'm saying is that since people are greedy: developers want the GPL, and consumers want to rip off the GPL. In fact, for people who want to steal gpl code, there really isn't much stopping them, especially not the GPL. This is like arguing that copyright laws is going to prevent teenagers from tradings mp3's on p2p networks. People are going to do what they want to anyways, and we BSD folks simply don't understand all the fuss about the GPL politics.
I cannot stand it when people confuse freedom with free (as in price). The GPL isn't 100% *free* as in the definition of the term "freedom". The GPL has a nasty restriction, and even one restriction means it is not free (as in freedom). As we all know the GPL forces you to make any modification availabel to the original writer. In the end, GPL code is only usefull in academic environments, from whence it came at MIT. You can read code, learn from it, and go reimplement it away from the infected GPL code. This is the same reason many unix guru's tend to use oe of the BSD's over one of the Linux distro's, its the BSD license! In BSD you can look at thge code, get ideas, and go copy it. Or you can simply use the existing BSD code, and skip a step in the process.
There are some good examples of GPL code that is good, and the fact that it is licensed under a restrictive license doesn't take away from the usefullness of the program. I speak of the GCC tool chain, and many more (too many to mention). Many of these tools are so good that its simply not worth the effort to clean room copy the tools.
So it could be argued that GPL is not suitable for certain things. STuff like protocals, audio/video codex, and device drivers. Where the GPL would be perfect for userland applications. A good example of this argument would be the reasons why the Ogg/Vorbis programes decided to convert the vorbis codex form GPL to BSD license. The GPL was too restrictive, and would prevent chip fabricatin fo the codex for portable players, etc. A Network protocal shoudl be free of restrictions for the same reasons as the audio codex: hardware implementation! Device drivers that exist only as a GPL implementation are no good to other alternative OS users, such as BeOs back in the day didn't ahve as many network drivers as linux, but couldnt' use the existing linux drivers because they would force Be to expose its proprietary code (that it sold).
We sometimes have to remind ourselves that the entire computer industry would not be where it is today without the openness of computer programers back in the early days. This open spirt existed way before any GNU license existed, and that was good enough for us then, good enought now.
Companies like microsoft don't nessicarily see our GNU stuff as a threat to them, but a threat to computer programming in general. To clarify, I think Microsoft biggest fear is to be in a world where all code is saturated by a gnu encumberance, and one could not modify any code without being forced to publish the modifications. A world so utterly GPL that it collapses upon itself into stagnation.
I hear that medical doctors have to get really good insurance in case they get a malpractice suit against them. Apparently the ability to smear a doctor's name by simply engaging in litigation is too easy. So they must maintain expensive insurance to prevent lossing their assets in the event of a lost court case, and to simply pay the lawyers. I belive it is the insurance companies that allow this to continue. They play both sides of the field. They take money from doctors when patients sue them, and they take money from patients to pay the doctors.
SMTP is lame, it has no built-in ways to white-list, or black-list people or things. All that stuff is left to some imaginary higher level layer in the eyes of SMTP. Thats great in theory, but then what is to stop the use of bandwidth in the first place? To make things worse is the fact that most open relays are because of inexperienced administrators. Lets face it, bad people will always look for a way to get in your face be it email, chat, junk-mail, tv commercials, whatever.
The ultimate solution is not going to be passing anti-spam laws to send spammers to jail. No, what we need is strong protocals that support the notion of privacy. Fundamentally SMTP will never be secure by itself. You add in stuff like pgp to make email secure for ytour eyes only, but SMTP itself is very insecure, it sends the email on the public network. Places your emails passed by forwared it to another place that eventually gets it to your email server. Don't blam the spammers, blame the IETF for certifing a bad protocal.
Earth quakes do more damage on land than they do under the land. Thsi is because of the ultra-low sound waves disrupt the air molecules more efficiently than solid earth dirt molecules. It is a fact, it is safer to be under ground in an earth quake than in an other place.
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Many of my friends got rid of their land lines in prefference of their cell phones. From their perspective they tend to get more tele-markiters calls than legitimate calls, and who wants to pay $25 to $35 for basic access to a phone with long distance capability. Some folks don't even use the phone more than one time per week, so it doens't justify the .75c to $1 a day to get nothing.
Plus with cell phones many times you can get deals for free long distance, and internet connectivity (the phone being a data modem).
I think I'll go take a shit in the woods, and go piss on a tree. One less "WHOOSH..." down the toilet. Hey, it saves water, and that water could be donated to some squirel or a starving person in Ethiopia or some other equally tree huging manuever! Happy Earth day slashdot!
Freedom of speech in the USA is a myth. The 5th is true, but they just hold you in prision until you cooperate with the spooks, or get you via a special court ordered survalence warrent. Think Kevin Mitnik, or Nicodermo Shapiro. Another factor is that the notion of evidence being held against you is difficult when you have to prove that the crypto is, or *is not* evidence. There is an old thought experiment called the schrodingers cat box, and the same ideas apply. Is the evidence really evidence as soon as it is enciphered? Aka is the cat still alive once inserted into the catbox? The answer is both yes and no, but mainly no (the cat is dead to us, the crypto is inaccessible to the spooks). Its a really sticky situation. =)
A property of quantum crypto is the utter inability for people to eves drop on communications. At least at the physical layer anyways, there is no possibility of a man in the middle, or splice tap into the physical medium. At the network layer there is always the possibility, but the Cicso router hardly plays a hand in crypto in that space since it is only a data exchanger/switch/router. So the solution is to simply use SSL, IPsec, and SSH in conjunction of each other (aka crypto over crypto) on the public networks (the internet).
yes, and there is also algorythms that allow for two plaintext messages to co-mingle in the same ciphertext, yet use two different keys. The idea is that you give the 2nd key to the spooks (aka authorities), and keep the real legitimate key a secret. Most communication protocals (like ssh) already use a combination of DSA/RSA, and onetime-pad's in a layered framework. The RSA keys being encrypted with a passphrase incase the private key is comprimised by the spooks. The spooks solution to the above is to install a key stroke recorder to capture the pass phrase. That is where quantum cryptography comes in. The idea is to have a fiber optic cable from the keyboard to the computer terminal that uses quantum crypto so that the connection can never be intercepted (by a key stroke recorder) with a device in the middle. The keyboard also having a high FIPS rating to avoid the potential for being xrayed, etc... but if we need that level of protection, we got other issue far worse to contend with. After all, only criminals would use that level of crypto, so the FBI says.
What is the point of encryption if you have to give up the keys. I say its up the the spooks to have the capabilities to crack my encryption rather than force me to hand over the keys. Even then, I'd only hand over the keys in encrypted form, still forcing them to use their supper computers. Serriously, encryption is a black and white area... some grey, but mostly either a situation where you use it, or don't...
Targeting a large group of developers with an organized email attack seems almost perfect grounds for a law suite! (hint hint) Besides, I've never heard of the opposing project before, yet it doens't mean it doesn't have a large group of supporters... I suspect that it doesn't compare the the numbers of Mozilla users who might be equally motivated to fire up their email-spewing perl scripts. Heck, 5 minutes of my time to send 500,000 emails their way is worth the warm fuzy feeling it would bring for even mentioning an attack on Mozilla (thinking about it even). =)
That right. I dind't mention that cuz it wasn't very relevant considering all phone cables are now 4 wire, including infrastructure. But at least somebody else knows, you know! thx.
I hate to get technical here in slashdot (cuz I know all the trolls are readings), but a city wide network is called a metropolitan area network. Networks that go from one city to another are called a Wide Area Network (aka WAN), and networks within a building are called Local Area Networks (aka LAN). A LAN does not exist when the network leaves the building, and a WAN doesn't exist until you leave the city/town. Get it right people! City wide networks are not that impressive when you consider the phone company already has you connected to the phone system, and a T1 line is nothing more than a standard phone line.
It hard to target the poeple who simply download, and a bit easieer to go after the folks who are making music available for public consumption without a license (a student is't a radio station). It is much easier to go after the people who facilitate the prior two people's ileagle activity, and I have no sympathy for the student. He obviously wan't very smart, and dind't need to go to school anyways.
I do think the $$$ amount is a bit excessive, but this fellow "created a bazzar of illeagle activity", as the article says. I would place the fine at $20 per unlicense song swap! Depending on the actual amount swapped it would bring the fine down into the hundreds of millions instead of billions.
Encryption; Thats is what the file swappers are going to have to resort to. Terrorism in the eyes of the Justice dept, since only criminals/terroris use crypto! Hehe... They had better watch out cuz they might go from bad to worse, from the pan to the fire as Tolkin would say. I mean it seems obvious to me that in order to swap files people are going to have to embrace crypto on a person by person basis until crypto is a common notion in America. on second thought, what am I saying... this would hinder crypto... stay away file swappers! stay away!
A prime example of somebody justifing their actions. Radio plays music that is licensed to be broadcast for public consuption. You listen to music for free on the radio, in analog low quality, and that is licensed. You purchase cd media and get audio, and a license use use the cd media for personal consumption.
Digital theft is easy, and you can sit around all day long and compare apples to oranges (radio Vs Napster). Since it is so easy to steal music, it is equally easy to justify it. There is no justification for theft!
Most music shops will let you sample music at the store kiosk. There is no justification to steal an unlicensed copy to sample the music. You could listen to the radio to sample music. You could go to the club and watch what the DJ spins, or read the play list.
Simple logic dictates that if a fraction of the people on napster were actuially sampling music, there would be a increase in music sales proportional to the of music dowloaded on napster, and that is simply not the case. Even if only 5% were using Napster to sample music, and they actually purchase 2% of the music they sampled, there would be a significant increase in music sales.
I cannot disagree, and I actually think you hit it on the nail! Thx
It is diferent only because you have created a perception of it being different. In reality it is theft on many levels. This only proves that by and large most peopel have convinced themselves that the activity is justifiable due to some notion that it is not the same as physical theft.
This is the most absurd thing I have read in recent days. The notion of stealing music inorder to preview it for later purchase is insane. Would you steal a CD from the music shop only to turn around and go make a purchase of the exact same thing. NO, you would not!
People think up the weirdest shit to justify that their actions are legitimate, and many times they belive their own lies. I can speculate that some folks steal music, and then go out and purchase some of the tunes they stole. But how many tunes are sampled, yet never purchased. Also, a sample of music is typically a segment of the audio, not the entire tune. People do not trade samples, they trade entire tracks/albums.
Simply put, napster is not designed to be a preview service. It is designed to move mp3 files from one computer to another, and search the data of remote computers for whatever your criteria is(genre, artists, albums, etc). I'm not sure what is worse, people who download music from napster, or peope who make their albums available on napster. The people who share their tunes are facilitating a criminal activity by the people who steal (aka download) the music.
My opinion on the entire mess is that if Napster could hurt the music industry, it probably does. Dowloading a binary file is inocent in of itself. A downloader has no notion if the binary they download (mp3's) are copyright, or not. The notion of a filename is meaningless as files can be renamed, so respect of copyrights based on recognition of the bands name in the filename is a flawed argument. Clearly the criminal liability points to the people who make music available for download, but since in napster downloaders, and publishers are one in the same. Thus, the method of correcting the criminal situation is to remove the napster servers.
</rant>
Actually, the way I read it is this only affects the solid propelant variants. High power rocketeers can still use the hybrid engine format that they have been using for 5 years to get around various transport restrictions. The hybrids use nytrous-oxide as a propelant, with a solid catalist. THe solid not actualyl being propelant. The synergy of the nitrus + catalist makes it stronger, faster, etc.. Check out a link to a hybrid motor maker.
This will certainly make it hard for the really hardcore of use who use the Solids for first stage boost. The hybrids are prefered for 2nd or 3rd stage int he realyl high power areana.
Serriously!
I was wondering if anybody would counter my point with the subject you mentioned. Actually Hydrogen/Oxygen would be ideal.... but hydro-floride is cheap, and easy to produce. Hydrogen-peroxide is expesive, and hard to produce. Even harder than oxy/hydro impulse power. I thik that Carmak is going to have the exact same problem I had getting fuel.
You see, I'm a member of the trippoly association. We gateher at the black rock desert every year for high altitude launches of out rockets. Yes, i used to be into high powered amature rocketry, like Carmak is into now. I know about all the goverment restrictions, and the difficulties in getting certain matterials. Carmak will nver get his peroxide. It is simply too dangerous to handle for the civilian public. Especially in his biz park colocation facility. In Mesqite texas, 5 miles from my residence.
yes, and its actually easier to get than peroxide.
He could try Hydrogen/Floride reaction to produce similare results. He could go with a hybrid engine to to take advantage of relaxed chemical handling rules that he seems to be hitting. Peroxide is way too dangerous for Carmak to handle. Serriously! The version of peroxide he needs is very pure. The stuff you get at the pharmacy is like 2% or less of peroxide. The stuff he wants is so volitile that it cannot ever come in contact with any other substance, including air, or else you might have an explosion. Most of the time pereoxide is used as a catalist in the overall reaction. The best place to go for x-price feul is the local welders supply. If carmak were highly motivated, he could simply mix his own peroxide. But that would involve containment, and nobody wants to worry about that.
There is several rules for handling the stuff, like you cannot have it within 1000 yards from train tracks (because of electro-static coming down the rails), and obviously a no smoking facility. Thats not all, pure peroxide needs to be incased in a layered cylinder where some type of innert matterial is in between the outside, and the inter peroxide tank. So getting pereoxide is hard, for good reasons. There is very few commercial applications of the stuff.
And when that rouge banna asextually spawns roots in my back yard, do I require a license for the genetic patents?
Its strange to consider that Microsoft didn't protect parts of the hardware with fips rated hardware like some crypto cards are. In case you don't know what FIPS means, it is "Federal Information Protection Standard", and parts of it covers secure hardware. Stuff like crypto accellerator boards that self destruct if you attempt to x-ray, or break the hermetricly sealled gel enclosures. Stuff like that protects the boards from people who would attempt to reverse engineer hardware. Microsoft *did* do some things to make life hard for hackers with the way the HDD works. Microsoft does stuff that is more anoying than a barrier to reverse engineering.
Locating the private keys for the games would be the best way to hack an xbox. Considering a modified xbox will not jive with future xbox games, and or network servives... the hardware mod is not desireable.
Further more, hacking contests should be managed by the original vendor, in this case Microsoft. Think of the RSA crypto challenges. Those are fair contests, that actually interest crypto folks to invest serrious effort, and brain power.
As far as poor BeOs not being able to use linux drivers in their OS... huh? Why should they? If they want to use, they have to share. What's wrong with that? And if they can't build a replacement OS that has the broad range of features and compatibilities as linux, or other free Operating Systems, then more the fool them for trying to get into a dying business model. Maybe they should have found a business model that leveraged free software rather than trying to compete with it. Let Be be a lesson to other commercial software companies.
Actually, thsi *did* happento me! I used to work for Be Inc, and I wanted better support for my 3com 3c509 based isa card. BeOS had a driver, but it was in house home brew hack, and I wanted to have it work liek my slack box. So I took Donald Beckards driver, and we developed a wrapper for it so the driver thought it was talking to a Linux kernel (but was really BeOS 4.5). To make a long story short I had to remove the driver from the official Be website, and later from other sites..... as a result of the GPL. So I'm sure you can understand my sentiments about the subject. My supperiors actually were contacted by RMS himself to remove the BeOS wraper based driver. When I caught wind from up above, I sent email myself to RMS, and got a reply. I wish I still had an archive of the email, but let me just say RMS's notorious optinions bleed thru, plus a few attacks at BeOS being inferior due to not being OSS. Technically my wrapper violated the a GPL clause about linked libraries having the notion of being "derivitave", and thus "extending" a GPL'ed work... even though the driver was just linked in... it was linked to the BEOS kernel, and that was *not* available for Beckard to look at.
I hope this little story was interesting, because it really happened, and to me (and one other guy at Be). Now look at Microsoft, back in the mid 1990's they took code from BSD to implement a native IP-tcp/udp stack. Most people would say that was good for Microsoft. Linux also took lots of code from BSD, and that was percieved good for Linux. So I wonder when writing code as GPL ever was *better* that writing it as BSD style.
But the problem with that is that when that used to be case (your "early days" of the computer industry) commercial entities would rape the public domain software by taking the software and modifying it in ways that locked you into a vendors product, be it hardware or software.
I actually think that helped more than hurt the industry, and that the OSS movement would have continued anyways. Vendor lock in can also be called vendor inovation, and many new good things came from the way ATT licensed UNIX to various vendors. Don't forget that this same vendor lock in is also what gave us the broad spectrum of advanced hardware platforms with tailored software. This same advancement in vendor lockin also spured OSS inovation. Just look at NetBSD that is able to boot 31 various platforms.
In some ways the proprietary sector can benifite by the GPL, like SGI has with XFS. If can let the community have XFS, and eat its cake too since if IMB wanted to fix XFS those changes would go back to SGI. As a greed software company that would be good. In general that is how the GPL works by supporting the greed in society. My father used to tell me that communism would never work just because of the old maxum that: "If every human on Earth had exactly one acre of land to use as they wish, and never any more or less... jsut one acre. There would always be some people who want *two* acre's of land". The GPL works the same way for greed developers/companies. Considering that the above maxum is practically a constant truth, the GPL fundamentally doesn't work. What I'm saying is that since people are greedy: developers want the GPL, and consumers want to rip off the GPL. In fact, for people who want to steal gpl code, there really isn't much stopping them, especially not the GPL. This is like arguing that copyright laws is going to prevent teenagers from tradings mp3's on p2p networks. People are going to do what they want to anyways, and we BSD folks simply don't understand all the fuss about the GPL politics.
I cannot stand it when people confuse freedom with free (as in price). The GPL isn't 100% *free* as in the definition of the term "freedom". The GPL has a nasty restriction, and even one restriction means it is not free (as in freedom). As we all know the GPL forces you to make any modification availabel to the original writer. In the end, GPL code is only usefull in academic environments, from whence it came at MIT. You can read code, learn from it, and go reimplement it away from the infected GPL code. This is the same reason many unix guru's tend to use oe of the BSD's over one of the Linux distro's, its the BSD license! In BSD you can look at thge code, get ideas, and go copy it. Or you can simply use the existing BSD code, and skip a step in the process.
There are some good examples of GPL code that is good, and the fact that it is licensed under a restrictive license doesn't take away from the usefullness of the program. I speak of the GCC tool chain, and many more (too many to mention). Many of these tools are so good that its simply not worth the effort to clean room copy the tools.
So it could be argued that GPL is not suitable for certain things. STuff like protocals, audio/video codex, and device drivers. Where the GPL would be perfect for userland applications. A good example of this argument would be the reasons why the Ogg/Vorbis programes decided to convert the vorbis codex form GPL to BSD license. The GPL was too restrictive, and would prevent chip fabricatin fo the codex for portable players, etc. A Network protocal shoudl be free of restrictions for the same reasons as the audio codex: hardware implementation! Device drivers that exist only as a GPL implementation are no good to other alternative OS users, such as BeOs back in the day didn't ahve as many network drivers as linux, but couldnt' use the existing linux drivers because they would force Be to expose its proprietary code (that it sold).
We sometimes have to remind ourselves that the entire computer industry would not be where it is today without the openness of computer programers back in the early days. This open spirt existed way before any GNU license existed, and that was good enough for us then, good enought now.
Companies like microsoft don't nessicarily see our GNU stuff as a threat to them, but a threat to computer programming in general. To clarify, I think Microsoft biggest fear is to be in a world where all code is saturated by a gnu encumberance, and one could not modify any code without being forced to publish the modifications. A world so utterly GPL that it collapses upon itself into stagnation.
I hear that medical doctors have to get really good insurance in case they get a malpractice suit against them. Apparently the ability to smear a doctor's name by simply engaging in litigation is too easy. So they must maintain expensive insurance to prevent lossing their assets in the event of a lost court case, and to simply pay the lawyers. I belive it is the insurance companies that allow this to continue. They play both sides of the field. They take money from doctors when patients sue them, and they take money from patients to pay the doctors.
SMTP is lame, it has no built-in ways to white-list, or black-list people or things. All that stuff is left to some imaginary higher level layer in the eyes of SMTP. Thats great in theory, but then what is to stop the use of bandwidth in the first place? To make things worse is the fact that most open relays are because of inexperienced administrators. Lets face it, bad people will always look for a way to get in your face be it email, chat, junk-mail, tv commercials, whatever.
The ultimate solution is not going to be passing anti-spam laws to send spammers to jail. No, what we need is strong protocals that support the notion of privacy. Fundamentally SMTP will never be secure by itself. You add in stuff like pgp to make email secure for ytour eyes only, but SMTP itself is very insecure, it sends the email on the public network. Places your emails passed by forwared it to another place that eventually gets it to your email server. Don't blam the spammers, blame the IETF for certifing a bad protocal.
Earth quakes do more damage on land than they do under the land. Thsi is because of the ultra-low sound waves disrupt the air molecules more efficiently than solid earth dirt molecules. It is a fact, it is safer to be under ground in an earth quake than in an other place.