First off, I did a little more research. The HRC already has a server at http://hillsource.house.gov. Their equivalent for the Democrats is the House Democrat Caucus, and they have a website at http://dcaucusweb.house.gov. Since the HRC already has a server at a meaningful location, why would they need another at a misleading location?
Secondly, if the purpose of these groups is to handle all the complicated technical details, preventing duplication of effort on non-controversial issues, then why are they separated by party? Every technical committee is bipartisan, these are not technical committees. My understanding is that their purpose is to make it easier for those congressmen who want to be loyal party members to see which bills they are supposed to be voting for or against.
Sure enough, a quick look at these websites show them both to be sharply partisan. The HRC opens with bright red text saying "STOP THE RAID", referring to the GOP's stand on recent social security debates. The HDC hides it a little better, but the partisan sentiment is at least as strong on their site.
Again, these are clearly extensions of the political parties, why do they have official government standing? Secondly, why does the HRC, who already have a website, need another one; particularly one whose name carries the implication that the Republican Party is a core government agency?!?
If it's going to be site of the House Republican Conference, it is not in violation of the RFC, but it's still poorly located. It should be "hrc.house.gov", not "gop.gov", same way the House Committee on Veterans Affairs has "veterans.house.gov".
Their use of GOP instead of HRC makes me particularly suspicious that the intent of the site is for party business, not HRC business. They are using the HRC's government status to get access to an address they would otherwise not have access to. A political party should never masquerade as a government entity, we are not the Soviet Union (nor is Russia anymore).
In fact, I question the need to give the HRC (and whatever the Democrats' counterpart is, the HDC?) official house committee standing. The fact that members of Congress share a party should not be something to form a committee over, it should be an unofficial caucus at best.
First some background. It is clear to anyone who has studied Special Relativity and/or Quantum Physics that the "common" perception of time just doesn't work. Special Relativity shows that two events that are simultaneous according to one person are not simultaneous according to a person with different motion. Quantum Physics shows that, on a subatomic scale, time is non-linear, and can even be percieved to run in reverse.
It's clear that we need a new concept of time that incorporates what we currently know. Barbour offers us one. It's not earth shattering, since it offers no new verifiable predictions, but it's a viewpoint that might just help someone else come up with something earth shattering. Rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, he peeks over and takes a picture so the rest of us can see.
There's often good ham news at Bruce Perens' Technocrat.Net. Bruce has been an avid ham for a while, so he makes sure to post the important stuff there. Not much on there today, but a couple of weeks ago there were several ham articles.
My main argument against the termination/euthanasia/whatever term you want to use is both emotional and practical. Emotionally, I think it's just wrong. Practically speaking, a good illustration of why it is wrong can be summed up in one person. St ephen Hawking.
He wasn't born disabled, but if his parents could have looked at his genes and see how he would suffer as he grew, they would have been appalled. They might have even considered it a blessing to terminate him as an infant to spare him the suffering. If they had done so, they would have snuffed out a life that was not only full, but truly pushed the envelope of human understanding.
Non-internet source code distribution could also legitimately include shipping costs. So you'd have three elements: media, labor/handling and shipping. The media and shipping costs are tough to pull highway robbery for, you can easily find the cost of a CD-R and a DHL letter pack in the market from which the distributor is distributing from. If they deviate too far from that amount, it would never hold up in court.
The labor/handling charges they've got a little more flexibility with. If the average hourly wage is 6USD for a technician, and they charge 300USD for labor, again no court would accept it.
Almost everyone who talks about Open Source software wants to know whether or not Linux stands a chance of dethroning Windows.
He's really talking to the wrong people then. As far as I can tell, most people who are talking about Free software are talking about how they can increase the features available with the Free software codebase, and how to handle the software patent issues. Even with the Open Source folks that O'Reilly, the issues seem more geared towards how they can encourage more companies to open their licenses. Most of the Linux people are worried about better supporting an increasingly dynamic hardware environment, and improving scalability and performance.
None of these people are talking about Windows. The media is talking about Linux vs. Windows, some of the users are talking about Linux vs. Windows, but the people who count don't really give a damn about Windows. It's just irrelevant.
Even if you break up Microsoft, you still have to impose a conduct remedy, with corresponding oversight. Say you break up Microsoft into an operating systems and an applications division, but have no restrictions on conduct. One division could just acquire the other.
If you put the simple requirement that they can't do that, either division could still grab anything else. If you limit one division to "only operating system products" and the other to "only applications and development products", then you are getting into the hard to define and enforce conduct remedies that Rep. Campbell claims to be trying to avoid. You also get into very tricky things, like how to define "operating system".
I don't have an easy answer. In fact, I don't thing there is an easy answer.
RedHat has come up with a good and complex distribution, pretty much from scratch. That deserves some amount of respect.
Mandrake has come up with a new spin on RedHat's distribution (different default desktop, Pentium-optimized binaries, and a few other changes). They did some new things, also deserving of some amount of respect.
Cheapbytes has taken RedHat and Mandrake, copied everything that's freely redistributable, and packaged them at a much much more affordable price. They didn't do much creatively, but their price opens up Linux to more people, which is worthy of some respect.
Macmillan has taken Mandrake (they used to take RedHat), cloned it, charged an arm and a leg for it, and flooded the shelves of companies like CompUSA with misleading packaging. I know many people who bought Macmillan's RedHat 5.2 thinking they were buying the "New version of Red Hat" (6.0 at the time). Their business practices border on fraud, they don't do anything creative, and they sour people to the Linux community. Why should we respect them?
The Debian distribution has set up to do pretty much exactly what you're asking for for a long time now (right down to the distribution of ISO 9660 images for offline machines). In addition, the updates and fixes are better tested and more independant from each other than the corresponding ones in Windows, resulting in a more stable overall environment. It refrains from adding the security holes that Windows Update gives.
Personally, I prefer RedHat, because it gives me more individual control, but Debian sounds like it would be far better for you, and get you away from the nasty broken Service Packs.
In the article, Jane's discounts the benefits of state sponsorship to cyberterrorism, since tools are commonly available. This is misguided.
Most of the recorded cyberterrorist attacks have been either defacement of a website, or crashing a system on the internet. I would call this the "car bomb" level of cyberterrorism. It causes a little mayhem, gets a little publicity, but doesn't make a big wave in the scheme of things.
A cyberterrorist can do a lot more with a full scale infiltration of a key system. Assuming social engineering doesn't work to get sufficient access, crypto might be required to ensure access. That requires a lot of CPU time, something a terrorist organization won't have without help from the big boys.
Lastly, if the goal of a cyberterrorist is to disrupt electronic systems, there's nothing that does it better than an EMP. "EMP Guns", that is a portable device that can produce a localized or directed EMP without human or property damage, are a persistant urban legend that clearly has some kernel in fact. With over the counter hardware, you can build a HERF gun able to produce a trivial EMP. Is it that far fetched to think that the big governments have the technology to do better than that, considering they've been researching EMP for the past three decades? One could possibly find its way into the hands of terrorists. The midwest millitias seem to be very proficient at obtaining US military hardware.
Regardless, it's not an urban myth that an airburst nuclear weapon can produce a substantial EMP with little human or property damage. In fact, here's some congressional testimony detailing this. The biggest problem facing a terrorist who wants a nuclear weapon isn't figuring out how to build it, it's obtaining the fissionable material. Here again, government sponsorship of a terrorist organization could become key. China has shown itself very willing to supply governments that might sponsor terrorists with nuclear materials.
A terrorist with a nuclear weapon might well decide that a country-wide EMP would be a better use of it than blowing up a piece of a city. It would be easy to implement too, just place the weapon on an airplane and time it properly.
In all, cyberterrorism is in its infancy, and in order to determine an appropriate response to or defence against it, you need to look at what's possible, and not what happened so far.
It's also worth noting that the FBI's requests for additional computer tapping rights and restrictions on encryption "to protect against terrorism" would not do anything against such a terrorist. Any computer savvy terrorist will use strong encryption (easily available on foreign websites), and communicate on a server that is in a country where the US would have enforcement problems. The FBI's requests do not defend against either of these.
In addition to all the other excellent rebuttals and points that others have made better than me, there is a big thing that the original author missed. Sun couldn't make Solaris Free if they wanted to. Does the author think that Sun actually wrote Solaris?
Sun licensed AT&T's System V Unix code, and incorporated it into their existing SunOS codebase (based on BSD). They then tweaked it a bit for better performance and features on their Sparc systems and called it Solaris. Since a good portion of Solaris code is licensed from AT&T, Sun couldn't Free it without AT&T's permission. Anyone who was working on BSD in the 4.3 days will realize how futile hoping for AT&T's permission to Free their source code is.
There's an easy answer, Fetchmail is a good package with very little work to do. A programmer with some time to work on a new project would be hard pressed to find something worthwhile to do with Fetchmail: it supports almost anything; for most transfers, the server is the performance bottleneck, not Fetchmail; it's stable and reasonably bug-free; it's ported to most relevant platforms. Without having something interesting to do, the programmer is going to look for a different project to work on.
Does it really make a difference. The government spies because it wants to know if you're a subversive or terrorist. The corporations spy because they want to know if it's worth their while to try to sell you soda, or a new computer, or whatever. I don't think either is worse than the other. They're both bad, and I want my tools to encourage neither and discourage both.
The trouble is that KOffice requires Qt, and Qt for Windows is not only non-Free, it is very expensive (Over $1,000/developer). In order for a KOffice port to happen, someone would have to take the QPL'ed Unix/Linux version and develop a patch to port it to Windows.
It's clear from both the original article and the other comments from people who have dealt with Qwest that this was not an issue of simple trouble configuring Linux.
Qwest requires additional information to initiate the account. The only documented way to supply that information, and start the Qwest account, is to connect with their Windows software. In other words, they effectively prevent non-windows users from accessing their service. Some people suggest good workarounds, but Qwest is not volunteering any such information. Considering how much money Microsoft is dumping into Qwest, this behaviour is hardly surprising.
I don't expect every ISP to fully support every operating system out there. I do think it is reasonable to expect every ISP out there to support generic TCP/IP. That is to say, someone who knows how to configure TCP/IP and communications on their OS of choice should be able to get the basic information and connect with it, without needing any special software. That is not too much to ask, but too many big ISP's (eg. Qwest, AOL, Compuserve) refuse to support this basic level of connectivity.
It appears that both of your Anonymous Coward and named versions of your comments got marked as flamebait. Before you cry "Foul! Unfair Moderation!", why don't you think about what you are posting:
How long until linux users just bite the bullet and admit its better? That is a groundless insult to the Linux users. If you are going to say X is better than Y, give a reason. An old DALNet post referring to an ancient version of Linux is not a reason it's bad, or should I disrespect all BSD users because of licensing problems with NET-2. It's just as ludicrous.
FreeBSD software is necessarily a superset of linux. I don't think anyone would agree with that one.
So it's either flamebait or a troll, live with it.
Any genes from a natural organism, a human, dog, fruit fly, whatever, should be considered to have too much prior art to be patentable. The gene was developed by at least the parents of the organism, and in most cases their distant ancestors.
A gene constructed by sequencing in the lab, or by direct genetic manipulation of a creature (as opposed to husbandry) has a good argument for patent protection.
It is impossible to block all PICS-free data. Even if you can somehow figure out which webpages are missing PICS information, if the info goes over, say, the ftp port, there's absoultely no way of knowing to block the data.
As for the sites, the more sites that are out there, the harder it would be to block them all. Most ISP's wouldn't care enough to bother, they'll be doing the absolute minimum required to stay within the law.
Here is the actual whitehouse briefing. The articles had no info on online or free software distribution, because the press release had no information. Our media has gotten so absurdly lazy, they don't bother to inquire about anything.
It would be good if someone could find an online copy of the actual Executive Order.
As earlier posters have indicated, the solution is both too complex and destroys anonymity. Here's another idea, it's very simple, and it improves anonymity.
Take Squid. Modify it to strip PICS information from any pages read through it. Run it on a decent box with a decent connection in a privacy friendly area. Better yet, have many people each run one or a few. Run some of them on alternate ports.
Anyone, using most existing software, can point their browser to one of these servers as a proxy. Free software can be modified to only bug the server when it gets a page blocked due to PICS restrictions. Some of these proxy servers might be set to only support the friendly browsers.
Your ISP won't see any PICS headers indicating naughty sites, so it won't filter anything from you. It's simple to implement, doesn't require authentication, works with most existing software, and actually improves anonymity, since the target site will see the HTTP requests come from the squid server, not from your machine.
Yes, The Henson Associates and all its trademarks, characters and images are owned by the Henson family (the closest you can come to the "estate of Jim Henson"). They were going to be sold to Disney, but that never fully went through. On the other hand, since Jim's unfortunate departure, the company has gotten frighteningly commercial, and works very closely with Disney.
Regardless of whether or not Jim Henson would be against it, his survivors seem to be very much for it. It's a shame.
But at what percentage do you draw the line? As far as I know, the current rule of thumb in antitrust law is 70%. Last I checked, Microsoft controls 90% of the Desktop OS Market.
And can you prove it was detrimental to consumers? The easiest way is to prove that the Windows costs more than it would if Microsoft had no monopoly. The DOJ presented strong evidence of that in the trial. Another way is to show that the product is of an inferior quality then it would be without the monopoly. I think that's pretty obvious too.
The second definition is more to provent collusion between companies to create a monopoly. For example, if Coke & Pepsi were to arrange a coordinated price hike, so everyone payed more for soda, it would fall under the second definition.
This is much trickier to prove. It's clear (but tough to prove) that Microsoft and Intel colluded to push consumers into a never ending stream of hardware and software upgrades, hence raising the price (per year) of their products to the detriment of the public. It's clear that Microsoft's OEM arrangements would raise the price of non-Windows machines to the detriment of the public, and the DOJ touched upon this in the trial.
Yes, the definition of a monopoly does not have much to do with anticompetitive business practices. Where those come in is after a company is declared a monopoly. It is legal for most companies, but illegal for a monopoly, to use all sorts of anticompetitive business pracices. For example, a monopoly can't do bundling (eg IE & Windows, or Windows & DOS for the Caldera case), but other companies can, since they won't be tying one product to a monopolistic product.
It's clear from the trial that Microsoft is a monopoly, they did things a monopoly is not allowed to do, and they violated the consent decree that allowed them to stop the prior antitrust suit. What's not clear is what punishment will be levelled against Microsoft, and how effective it will be at preventing future abuses. I think they will lose, but after all the appeals courts are done, they'll be left with a slap on the wrist (i.e. a simple monitary fine plus legal costs).
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I did a little more research. The HRC already has a server at http://hillsource.house.gov. Their equivalent for the Democrats is the House Democrat Caucus, and they have a website at http://dcaucusweb.house.gov. Since the HRC already has a server at a meaningful location, why would they need another at a misleading location?
Secondly, if the purpose of these groups is to handle all the complicated technical details, preventing duplication of effort on non-controversial issues, then why are they separated by party? Every technical committee is bipartisan, these are not technical committees. My understanding is that their purpose is to make it easier for those congressmen who want to be loyal party members to see which bills they are supposed to be voting for or against.
Sure enough, a quick look at these websites show them both to be sharply partisan. The HRC opens with bright red text saying "STOP THE RAID", referring to the GOP's stand on recent social security debates. The HDC hides it a little better, but the partisan sentiment is at least as strong on their site.
Again, these are clearly extensions of the political parties, why do they have official government standing? Secondly, why does the HRC, who already have a website, need another one; particularly one whose name carries the implication that the Republican Party is a core government agency?!?
----
If it's going to be site of the House Republican Conference, it is not in violation of the RFC, but it's still poorly located. It should be "hrc.house.gov", not "gop.gov", same way the House Committee on Veterans Affairs has "veterans.house.gov".
Their use of GOP instead of HRC makes me particularly suspicious that the intent of the site is for party business, not HRC business. They are using the HRC's government status to get access to an address they would otherwise not have access to. A political party should never masquerade as a government entity, we are not the Soviet Union (nor is Russia anymore).
In fact, I question the need to give the HRC (and whatever the Democrats' counterpart is, the HDC?) official house committee standing. The fact that members of Congress share a party should not be something to form a committee over, it should be an unofficial caucus at best.
----
First some background. It is clear to anyone who has studied Special Relativity and/or Quantum Physics that the "common" perception of time just doesn't work. Special Relativity shows that two events that are simultaneous according to one person are not simultaneous according to a person with different motion. Quantum Physics shows that, on a subatomic scale, time is non-linear, and can even be percieved to run in reverse.
It's clear that we need a new concept of time that incorporates what we currently know. Barbour offers us one. It's not earth shattering, since it offers no new verifiable predictions, but it's a viewpoint that might just help someone else come up with something earth shattering. Rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, he peeks over and takes a picture so the rest of us can see.
----
There's often good ham news at Bruce Perens' Technocrat.Net. Bruce has been an avid ham for a while, so he makes sure to post the important stuff there. Not much on there today, but a couple of weeks ago there were several ham articles.
----
My main argument against the termination/euthanasia/whatever term you want to use is both emotional and practical. Emotionally, I think it's just wrong. Practically speaking, a good illustration of why it is wrong can be summed up in one person. St ephen Hawking.
He wasn't born disabled, but if his parents could have looked at his genes and see how he would suffer as he grew, they would have been appalled. They might have even considered it a blessing to terminate him as an infant to spare him the suffering. If they had done so, they would have snuffed out a life that was not only full, but truly pushed the envelope of human understanding.
----
Non-internet source code distribution could also legitimately include shipping costs. So you'd have three elements: media, labor/handling and shipping. The media and shipping costs are tough to pull highway robbery for, you can easily find the cost of a CD-R and a DHL letter pack in the market from which the distributor is distributing from. If they deviate too far from that amount, it would never hold up in court.
The labor/handling charges they've got a little more flexibility with. If the average hourly wage is 6USD for a technician, and they charge 300USD for labor, again no court would accept it.
----
Tim O'Reilly said:
Almost everyone who talks about Open Source software wants to know whether or not Linux stands a chance of dethroning Windows.
He's really talking to the wrong people then. As far as I can tell, most people who are talking about Free software are talking about how they can increase the features available with the Free software codebase, and how to handle the software patent issues. Even with the Open Source folks that O'Reilly, the issues seem more geared towards how they can encourage more companies to open their licenses. Most of the Linux people are worried about better supporting an increasingly dynamic hardware environment, and improving scalability and performance.
None of these people are talking about Windows. The media is talking about Linux vs. Windows, some of the users are talking about Linux vs. Windows, but the people who count don't really give a damn about Windows. It's just irrelevant.
----
Even if you break up Microsoft, you still have to impose a conduct remedy, with corresponding oversight. Say you break up Microsoft into an operating systems and an applications division, but have no restrictions on conduct. One division could just acquire the other.
If you put the simple requirement that they can't do that, either division could still grab anything else. If you limit one division to "only operating system products" and the other to "only applications and development products", then you are getting into the hard to define and enforce conduct remedies that Rep. Campbell claims to be trying to avoid. You also get into very tricky things, like how to define "operating system".
I don't have an easy answer. In fact, I don't thing there is an easy answer.
----
Tomsrtbt fits on a floppy. :-)
----
RedHat has come up with a good and complex distribution, pretty much from scratch. That deserves some amount of respect.
Mandrake has come up with a new spin on RedHat's distribution (different default desktop, Pentium-optimized binaries, and a few other changes). They did some new things, also deserving of some amount of respect.
Cheapbytes has taken RedHat and Mandrake, copied everything that's freely redistributable, and packaged them at a much much more affordable price. They didn't do much creatively, but their price opens up Linux to more people, which is worthy of some respect.
Macmillan has taken Mandrake (they used to take RedHat), cloned it, charged an arm and a leg for it, and flooded the shelves of companies like CompUSA with misleading packaging. I know many people who bought Macmillan's RedHat 5.2 thinking they were buying the "New version of Red Hat" (6.0 at the time). Their business practices border on fraud, they don't do anything creative, and they sour people to the Linux community. Why should we respect them?
----
The Debian distribution has set up to do pretty much exactly what you're asking for for a long time now (right down to the distribution of ISO 9660 images for offline machines). In addition, the updates and fixes are better tested and more independant from each other than the corresponding ones in Windows, resulting in a more stable overall environment. It refrains from adding the security holes that Windows Update gives.
Personally, I prefer RedHat, because it gives me more individual control, but Debian sounds like it would be far better for you, and get you away from the nasty broken Service Packs.
----
In the article, Jane's discounts the benefits of state sponsorship to cyberterrorism, since tools are commonly available. This is misguided.
Most of the recorded cyberterrorist attacks have been either defacement of a website, or crashing a system on the internet. I would call this the "car bomb" level of cyberterrorism. It causes a little mayhem, gets a little publicity, but doesn't make a big wave in the scheme of things.
A cyberterrorist can do a lot more with a full scale infiltration of a key system. Assuming social engineering doesn't work to get sufficient access, crypto might be required to ensure access. That requires a lot of CPU time, something a terrorist organization won't have without help from the big boys.
Lastly, if the goal of a cyberterrorist is to disrupt electronic systems, there's nothing that does it better than an EMP. "EMP Guns", that is a portable device that can produce a localized or directed EMP without human or property damage, are a persistant urban legend that clearly has some kernel in fact. With over the counter hardware, you can build a HERF gun able to produce a trivial EMP. Is it that far fetched to think that the big governments have the technology to do better than that, considering they've been researching EMP for the past three decades? One could possibly find its way into the hands of terrorists. The midwest millitias seem to be very proficient at obtaining US military hardware.
Regardless, it's not an urban myth that an airburst nuclear weapon can produce a substantial EMP with little human or property damage. In fact, here's some congressional testimony detailing this. The biggest problem facing a terrorist who wants a nuclear weapon isn't figuring out how to build it, it's obtaining the fissionable material. Here again, government sponsorship of a terrorist organization could become key. China has shown itself very willing to supply governments that might sponsor terrorists with nuclear materials.
A terrorist with a nuclear weapon might well decide that a country-wide EMP would be a better use of it than blowing up a piece of a city. It would be easy to implement too, just place the weapon on an airplane and time it properly.
In all, cyberterrorism is in its infancy, and in order to determine an appropriate response to or defence against it, you need to look at what's possible, and not what happened so far.
It's also worth noting that the FBI's requests for additional computer tapping rights and restrictions on encryption "to protect against terrorism" would not do anything against such a terrorist. Any computer savvy terrorist will use strong encryption (easily available on foreign websites), and communicate on a server that is in a country where the US would have enforcement problems. The FBI's requests do not defend against either of these.
----
In addition to all the other excellent rebuttals and points that others have made better than me, there is a big thing that the original author missed. Sun couldn't make Solaris Free if they wanted to. Does the author think that Sun actually wrote Solaris?
Sun licensed AT&T's System V Unix code, and incorporated it into their existing SunOS codebase (based on BSD). They then tweaked it a bit for better performance and features on their Sparc systems and called it Solaris. Since a good portion of Solaris code is licensed from AT&T, Sun couldn't Free it without AT&T's permission. Anyone who was working on BSD in the 4.3 days will realize how futile hoping for AT&T's permission to Free their source code is.
----
There's an easy answer, Fetchmail is a good package with very little work to do. A programmer with some time to work on a new project would be hard pressed to find something worthwhile to do with Fetchmail: it supports almost anything; for most transfers, the server is the performance bottleneck, not Fetchmail; it's stable and reasonably bug-free; it's ported to most relevant platforms. Without having something interesting to do, the programmer is going to look for a different project to work on.
----
Does it really make a difference. The government spies because it wants to know if you're a subversive or terrorist. The corporations spy because they want to know if it's worth their while to try to sell you soda, or a new computer, or whatever. I don't think either is worse than the other. They're both bad, and I want my tools to encourage neither and discourage both.
Let's leave watermarking out of computers.
----
The trouble is that KOffice requires Qt, and Qt for Windows is not only non-Free, it is very expensive (Over $1,000/developer). In order for a KOffice port to happen, someone would have to take the QPL'ed Unix/Linux version and develop a patch to port it to Windows.
----
It's clear from both the original article and the other comments from people who have dealt with Qwest that this was not an issue of simple trouble configuring Linux.
Qwest requires additional information to initiate the account. The only documented way to supply that information, and start the Qwest account, is to connect with their Windows software. In other words, they effectively prevent non-windows users from accessing their service. Some people suggest good workarounds, but Qwest is not volunteering any such information. Considering how much money Microsoft is dumping into Qwest, this behaviour is hardly surprising.
I don't expect every ISP to fully support every operating system out there. I do think it is reasonable to expect every ISP out there to support generic TCP/IP. That is to say, someone who knows how to configure TCP/IP and communications on their OS of choice should be able to get the basic information and connect with it, without needing any special software. That is not too much to ask, but too many big ISP's (eg. Qwest, AOL, Compuserve) refuse to support this basic level of connectivity.
----
It appears that both of your Anonymous Coward and named versions of your comments got marked as flamebait. Before you cry "Foul! Unfair Moderation!", why don't you think about what you are posting:
How long until linux users just bite the bullet and admit its better?
That is a groundless insult to the Linux users. If you are going to say X is better than Y, give a reason. An old DALNet post referring to an ancient version of Linux is not a reason it's bad, or should I disrespect all BSD users because of licensing problems with NET-2. It's just as ludicrous.
FreeBSD software is necessarily a superset of linux.
I don't think anyone would agree with that one.
So it's either flamebait or a troll, live with it.
----
Any genes from a natural organism, a human, dog, fruit fly, whatever, should be considered to have too much prior art to be patentable. The gene was developed by at least the parents of the organism, and in most cases their distant ancestors.
A gene constructed by sequencing in the lab, or by direct genetic manipulation of a creature (as opposed to husbandry) has a good argument for patent protection.
----
It is impossible to block all PICS-free data. Even if you can somehow figure out which webpages are missing PICS information, if the info goes over, say, the ftp port, there's absoultely no way of knowing to block the data.
As for the sites, the more sites that are out there, the harder it would be to block them all. Most ISP's wouldn't care enough to bother, they'll be doing the absolute minimum required to stay within the law.
----
Here is the actual whitehouse briefing. The articles had no info on online or free software distribution, because the press release had no information. Our media has gotten so absurdly lazy, they don't bother to inquire about anything.
It would be good if someone could find an online copy of the actual Executive Order.
----
As earlier posters have indicated, the solution is both too complex and destroys anonymity. Here's another idea, it's very simple, and it improves anonymity.
Take Squid. Modify it to strip PICS information from any pages read through it. Run it on a decent box with a decent connection in a privacy friendly area. Better yet, have many people each run one or a few. Run some of them on alternate ports.
Anyone, using most existing software, can point their browser to one of these servers as a proxy. Free software can be modified to only bug the server when it gets a page blocked due to PICS restrictions. Some of these proxy servers might be set to only support the friendly browsers.
Your ISP won't see any PICS headers indicating naughty sites, so it won't filter anything from you. It's simple to implement, doesn't require authentication, works with most existing software, and actually improves anonymity, since the target site will see the HTTP requests come from the squid server, not from your machine.
----
jhoffmann wrote:
some day all those quarters will be worth something.
Yeah, after a while they might even be worth twenty-five whole cents!
----
Yes, The Henson Associates and all its trademarks, characters and images are owned by the Henson family (the closest you can come to the "estate of Jim Henson"). They were going to be sold to Disney, but that never fully went through. On the other hand, since Jim's unfortunate departure, the company has gotten frighteningly commercial, and works very closely with Disney.
Regardless of whether or not Jim Henson would be against it, his survivors seem to be very much for it. It's a shame.
----
SEAL asks:
But at what percentage do you draw the line?
As far as I know, the current rule of thumb in antitrust law is 70%. Last I checked, Microsoft controls 90% of the Desktop OS Market.
And can you prove it was detrimental to consumers?
The easiest way is to prove that the Windows costs more than it would if Microsoft had no monopoly. The DOJ presented strong evidence of that in the trial. Another way is to show that the product is of an inferior quality then it would be without the monopoly. I think that's pretty obvious too.
The second definition is more to provent collusion between companies to create a monopoly. For example, if Coke & Pepsi were to arrange a coordinated price hike, so everyone payed more for soda, it would fall under the second definition.
This is much trickier to prove. It's clear (but tough to prove) that Microsoft and Intel colluded to push consumers into a never ending stream of hardware and software upgrades, hence raising the price (per year) of their products to the detriment of the public. It's clear that Microsoft's OEM arrangements would raise the price of non-Windows machines to the detriment of the public, and the DOJ touched upon this in the trial.
Yes, the definition of a monopoly does not have much to do with anticompetitive business practices. Where those come in is after a company is declared a monopoly. It is legal for most companies, but illegal for a monopoly, to use all sorts of anticompetitive business pracices. For example, a monopoly can't do bundling (eg IE & Windows, or Windows & DOS for the Caldera case), but other companies can, since they won't be tying one product to a monopolistic product.
It's clear from the trial that Microsoft is a monopoly, they did things a monopoly is not allowed to do, and they violated the consent decree that allowed them to stop the prior antitrust suit. What's not clear is what punishment will be levelled against Microsoft, and how effective it will be at preventing future abuses. I think they will lose, but after all the appeals courts are done, they'll be left with a slap on the wrist (i.e. a simple monitary fine plus legal costs).
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