What is being proposed under current cloning, that is the process which produced the Dolly sheep, is essentially the creation of an identical twin who is much younger than you are.
What were you immagining a clone was ? Some sort of Star Trek transporter echo ? If we create an embryo from one of your cells, then it still has to be implanted in womb that will not reject it and then raised to adulthood.
As such, cloning is much more of an incremental advance than the reactions of congress and slashdot would suggest. Parents of a sickly child already occasionally choose to have additional children to increase the number of potentional organ or marrow donors for the first child, an ethically problematic decision because you are bringing someone into the world with a purpose or implied obligation.
You say "Just wait until the KKK can begin brewing their own perfect children." But that's exactly what they think they are doing already, by marrying white women and raising their children to be racists.
In India and China many pregnancies are tested for sex and aborted on those grounds. In the US this surely happens too; people also test for various genetic diseases such as Down's syndrome and choose to abort pregnancies based on that. Can you immagine how a mother who had aborted a Down's syndrome pregnancy feels when she finally has a child, and the kid decides to make himself retarded by sniffing glue ?
People will be bad parents regardless of the tools science offers them or the tools congress denies them. The ability to create an identical twin embryo from an adult won't change all that much. Idiots will want to clone dozens of Sarah Michelle Gellers, so what ? Some of them will probably grow up ugly, and then we'll learn a bit more about how the womb and environment effect our development.
Why would you ever develope anything for either ? I don't understand why people think you need to use KDE or Gnome to interact with the user. Ideally, you should have a readline based text only interface that will accomplish at least the basic things, and then a GUI which will be better for new users primarily because they can learn just by pulling down the menus and looking at the options. Xemacs and emacs are a good examples.
Of all the applications I use on a regular basis -- OpenOffice, Abiword, X/Emacs, Mozilla, ymessenger, and whatever Gnutella client is crashing least this week -- none of them are integrated with KDE or Gnome. Oh, I occasionally use kppp when at home with only a dialup -- but of course, like most of those KDE/Gnome applications, you don't need to actually run that gross desktop just to lauch that little application. Also I launch gnumeric once a month when I pay bills.
People need to learn that the answer to the KDE vs. Gnome question is NEITHER.
Run a small very simple window manager, and spend the couple of hours it takes to figure out how to add your browser and a couple of other applications into the menu that comes up when you click the background. Write GUI interfaces that at most just need the gtk or qt libraries to be on the machine. End of story. You will spend less money than any competitor wiritng bloatware integrated with KDE or Gnome or both, and everyone can still use your stuff.
Is there a good auction site left ? Yahoo bent over for the French, so they are out. Ebay is out mainly for pulling used software auctions on the behest of Microsoft, among other things. Both sites go beyond the restrictions required by law in all manner of ways -- take firearms for instance.
So who is left ? Is there a decent operator out there ?
Could we design an auction protocol that would use a decentralized method (say news group posts with bids in a special formatted reply, or something) ?
If your goal is to allow one person to use ssh to get outside, but not just anyone, it seems that by using tunneling you are depending on the fact that everyone else isn't smart enough to figure out how to do it also. This a very bad idea.
In relation to your specific question, the way I would solve it would be to put a separate standalone box inside the firewall, and change the firewall to allow connections from that inside IP address to the outside on the ssh protocol. Then I would allow only myself or others I trusted to login to that machine, i.e., it would have a subset of the normal accounts on it. (I am sure that there is a better way to do this, without needing a separate machine, but I don't know it.) Then you would use this by connecting to the priviledged box and then connecting to the outside.
But what I really want to criticize is the instinct to incorporate presumptions about all the other employees ignorance ignorance into your security plan. If you want to allow some people (who are presummably smart enough to know the dangers) to use ssh through the firewall and not the general population, then you should have that explicit policy, not one that depends on an obscure hole never being discovered because most people are weenies. Then you can enforce that explicit policy of who has ssh priviledges through some normal mechanism, like what I outlined above or something more sophisticated.
I think a lot of big security disasters start like this -- someone sort of hacks their way around their own system, but presummes that the rest of the world will never figure out how to do it so their hack doesn't need to be incorporated into an explicit security model or plan, and then gets burned.
Yeah but by leaving it open ended you can get him to respond to what he sees as the strongest ethical criticisms. Of course he can duck any question or just leave it out of the responses.
I think it would be interesting to see what issue he associates with "not sleeping well".
A few people have posted below that they would pay a fee to veiw slashbot banner-free.
If I pay a fee, can I view slashdot censorship free ? I probably would, especially if it was as low as $30. By censorship free I mean that a portion of the money goes to a lawyers fund to fight Scientologists and Microsofties when they try to delete posts -- but I also want all 0 and -1 posts archived instead of being deleted. If that's too much, maybe all low ranking posts by fee paying trolls could at least be saved ? (Some idiot would of course write something to take arbitrary data, uuencode, post to slashdot, and use it as his slow networked drive . . . oh wait, maybe that and a little code to get around the filter explains a lot of slashdot traffic.) Perhaps the ordinary posts at 0 or with one -1 moderation could be left off, but those posts that actracted lots of downward or upward moderation activity could at least be saved ?
Ok, maybe I'd settle for just a guarantee that you guys would would fight lawyers from CoS and MS. But I'd pay more for the trolls also.
"The appeals court main concern in the Microsoft remedy was that we're just replacing one monopoly for another."
You know, this is something I really don't understand. The law doesn't say you can't be a monopoly; it just says that if you are a monopoly, then there are additional things you can't do. The governments' case is that Microsoft is a monopoly, and they did do those things.
So what if we get another monopoly ? Maybe the next one will actually obey the law. If there must be a monopoly, at least it will be a law abiding one.
I would bet that the retailer would prefer a straight price cut to a rebate. They would sell more stuff that way. I think retailers probably participate in rebate scams reluctantly.
It differs by what you are selling, but very often retailers don't pay for what is on the shelves until they sell it. If they had actually bought it, they could choose to drop the price to an unprofitable level just to get back the shelf space, but then they have to have capital tied up in inventory, so they are usually willing to trade that control for not having to pay up front.
On top of that, the retailer often enters into some agreement for under what terms they can return items to the distributor or manufacturer, who pays shipping, etc.
The upshot of all this is that the retailer will probably be on your side, but they are trapped. They probably see the rebate scam as a much more inefficient way to clear the shelves of a slow-moving product, that endangers their reputation and turns off buyers to the store in general, but they just don't have a choice.
If enough people do as you did, and force the retailer to eat the rebate cost, the retailers may start refusing the rebate deals from the manufacturers.
"I know what I'm doing is illegal and that bugs me."
What you are doing is not illegal. Just because Lars says something is stealing doesn't mean that it is. Since we (well, the lucky ones) don't live in Russia where laws can be kept secrete, you can just download Title 17 of the US Code off of some of the various web sites and check it out. It's a bit dense, but understandable. I left it by the toilet and worked few a few more pages each day.
I think the conclusion you will draw is that as long as no money is changing hands, as long as you aren't paying for the music files, then you are not in violation. (Of course, one still might hold the position that Title 17 should be updated to cover the non-commercial distribution of computer files, but I don't think the position that it is currently illegal is tenable.)
You see, what is happening is similar to the big anti-piracy propaganda campaign of the 80s and 90s. Remember those posters in school computer labs extorting people not to pirate software ? Remember the ads in industry magazines ? They made a big deal about illegal copying in the media, but the cases they brought to court always were carefully choosen instances of people using illegal software for a business, or people selling copies of software. (Occasionally a they did go after someone else, and the strategy was to run them into bankruptcy with legal fees before the case was adaquatly reveiwed, but they still failed occasionally.)
So don't be such a pansy. Don't let the legal shit intimidate you. (I'm not saying that you shouldn't look for ways to support the music you like to make sure their will be more of it, although I would suggest that to little of that $16 for the CD serves that purpose to make it cost effective.)
Twins have similar, but different, fingerprints and retinal scans.
Search google on "twins fingerprints retinal" to retrieve numerous references.
It's nice to keep in mind that numerous individuals with identical DNA exist. Don't go off the deep end, dude. Like everything else that people get excited about, it is just an incremental change.
It reminds me of a CNN story on global warming I watched about two years ago.
They interviewed Greenpeace and a dozen other American sources. All were predicting disaster in outrageous terms, and some professor even suggested the survival of the human race was in question, citing the demise of the dinosaurs.
There was this 20 second clip slipped into the middle of the thing, you could easily miss it, in which they interviewed a Dutch minister who was in charge of Dikes and port infrastructure, or something. He gently chuckled at the reporter and told her (in perfect English, of course) "I could raise our walls one meter in three years for a third of our annual budget. If the sea starts rising it won't be an issue for us at all; we'll appropriate a small increase, and spread out the funding so it will be unnoticeable." And then he went on to suggest that the interviewer talk to people from poor nations in the South Pacific, saying that the Western world had enough money to take care of itself.
No American agency head would ever say something like that. If you asked them about pink aliens, they would claim immediate danger and the need for double their budget and an "awareness campaign".
I think our government system is better than that parlimentary system, but the individuals staffing it are a collection of third prizes. It's our own fault of course; we reward hypesters and alarmists, and punish the calm and accurate.
In addition to the right to sell the devices without copy protection, remember the right to remove copy protection from a device with it.
A common sequence of arguments from these people is "I should have the righ to sell something with copy protection, right?" "Therefore, you don't have the right to remove it."
Warmer temperatures are evidence of globol warming, colder temperatures are evidence of global warming. What would be evidence of no global warming ?
It is more than a little suspicious that these atmospheric modelers never come out with a prediction; it's always the case the observations just made fit the model of a global climate change (incedentally the model most likely to increase their own salaries as well).
This un-dis-provable assertion stuff belongs more in the class of religion than science. You can't disprove "God exists;" that doesn't mean that religion is somehow wrong, it just means that religion is not a scientific type of issue. A lot of these environmental types drift over into that area: any contridictory evidence just means that "the jury is still out" until they get what they want, and the faith can never be disproven.
They need to pre-publish their models and the expected measurements. Of course the expected values shouldn't be single values, but rather probability distributions. But then at least we can have the possiblity of failure, and we would make progress on the question instead of just listening every year to the same old models tweaked to predict crisis from last year's numbers to get next year's research grants.
I was about to post that, but I didn't immediately see how to do the one feature that he asked for -- highlight an area in hex and highlight the same area in the ascii display. I've been looking for documentation on hexl mode, I can't believe that it is impossible.
Maybe there is some piece of elisp floating around out there on usenet ?
I would ask this question on one of the emacs or xemacs news groups.
Look, you don't need someone who is specially trained in open source. Just hire any good programmer, and explain to them what needs to be done, and put them on it. Even if they have only worked on Windows previously, they'll figure it out and pick it up (well, if they are totally unix illiterate, their might be a more extenisve learning curve on that).
If you don't fetter your code with obscene licenses or keep it secrete, then you will be an "open source" developer.
It's not like you need a sixth finger or something. "Open Source" development is behaviour, and anyone can adopt it. Importantly, it is a property of YOU as well as your employee. You have to not keep your code secrete, and let other people make use of it -- that's all.
One other thing -- I don't think Solaris counts as open source.
What you are trying to describe is a way to send a message via two differnet channels to make sure that an intercepter on one channel would be revealed. But you don't have to send an message that has to match over the different channels; just send the public key itself.
Instead of doing this phrase thing, if you can call the guy, why don't you just have him read you your public key aloud, and you can look at it while he talks and make sure it is the same (or vice versa) ?
Printing out the key and mailing it to him works great also. (A floppy disk or anything else to attract attention to the envelope may be a had idea for Russian mail.)
This is not Andre. This is George. Or, Andre is George on slashdot, however you want to put it.
Here's the interviewee's user page (also her in text -- slashcode is not making it a link for some reason: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=gbd
), if you have to convince yourself. The writing style is unmistakeable and unreplicable. The only difference is that he never says "GOD" (all caps) and his wife is not mentioned. I guess that's because it's a technical topic.
No problem, you're welcome; glad I could clear that up.
Does the software cost more than $100 ? Consider that if you don't buy the software with a new computer, microsoft tends to charge a lot more. If you are running windows already, would you really notice ? (If they only check at installation time, you don't have to run the virtual PC when you are using it, anyway.)
In any case, the point is that this remains an option that would be very hard for microsoft to close. If this is the only way to pirate microsoft's stuff (unlikely, because people will figure out how to crack it and make copies that can be installed on anything) then people will do it.
Microsoft probably understands this; I don't think that they are so stupid as to imagine that they can stop the professionals. I think this is just further evidence that they view much of the legitimate use of properly purchased copies of windows as fair targets. Being able to install the software "on at most one computer at a time, copies for back up only" is not restrictive enough for them.
It would probably be a great service to the windows world to make widely available some easy method of getting around machine-specific installation. But why encourage people to not switch to something else ?
If I were planning to pirate software which would only install on a particular computer, I would use a virtual or emulated pc (plex86 or bosch) to fake the correct pc underneath the new installation on each machine. If the CD itself looks for a certain MAC address and CPU ID locally, just give it the right numbers. If it wants to connect over the internet to a microchip embedded in Bill Gate's big toe to get authorization, then the virtual/emulated PC has to look at the key outgoing traffic, and run a little web-proxy like service to emulate Bill's toe.
So what you would do is distribute copied images of the target software, along with a second CD that had the trimed-down, minimal linux which immediately boots the virtual PC with the right configuration.
(Some people will note that it is probably easier to install the software to 650 MB partition, and edit and modify the parts of it that do the various checks, and then simply distribute images of that partion. They are right; but the nice thing about emulating, is it should always be able to work, thus arguing that copy protection is always doomed on an open architecture like the PC. I mean, I wouldn't encourage anyone to use any copy of a microsoft product, anyhow; I just want to make the point.)
It's not always simple of course -- similar to emulating one of those hardware serial port keys in software, you may have to crack a scheme, in terms of figuring out exactly what the microsoft central server should be sending back. But if you observe it happen once, and you are emulating the entire world of the computer, then you can set the time on the virtual machine to the same time as the first time, and just replay the transaction.
Of course that emulation or virtualization software can introduce bugs or be very slow, another potential problem.
The conclusion I draw from all this is, since I'm no genius, obviously a lot of people at microsoft understand this too. So they are probably aware they they will not stop the industrial scale operations with resources to invest in setting all this up. So they know that the benefit from them comes from encumbering their product to the point where honest people have to buy more copies than they needed to.
Slashdot Mirror
Twins are clones.
What is being proposed under current cloning, that is the process which produced the Dolly sheep, is essentially the creation of an identical twin who is much younger than you are.
What were you immagining a clone was ? Some sort of Star Trek transporter echo ? If we create an embryo from one of your cells, then it still has to be implanted in womb that will not reject it and then raised to adulthood.
As such, cloning is much more of an incremental advance than the reactions of congress and slashdot would suggest. Parents of a sickly child already occasionally choose to have additional children to increase the number of potentional organ or marrow donors for the first child, an ethically problematic decision because you are bringing someone into the world with a purpose or implied obligation.
You say "Just wait until the KKK can begin brewing their own perfect children." But that's exactly what they think they are doing already, by marrying white women and raising their children to be racists.
In India and China many pregnancies are tested for sex and aborted on those grounds. In the US this surely happens too; people also test for various genetic diseases such as Down's syndrome and choose to abort pregnancies based on that. Can you immagine how a mother who had aborted a Down's syndrome pregnancy feels when she finally has a child, and the kid decides to make himself retarded by sniffing glue ?
People will be bad parents regardless of the tools science offers them or the tools congress denies them. The ability to create an identical twin embryo from an adult won't change all that much. Idiots will want to clone dozens of Sarah Michelle Gellers, so what ? Some of them will probably grow up ugly, and then we'll learn a bit more about how the womb and environment effect our development.
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm/
is the bottlerocket homepage. Searches on freshmeat and sourceforge will turn up other packages, I think.
Why would you ever develope anything for either ? I don't understand why people think you need to use KDE or Gnome to interact with the user. Ideally, you should have a readline based text only interface that will accomplish at least the basic things, and then a GUI which will be better for new users primarily because they can learn just by pulling down the menus and looking at the options. Xemacs and emacs are a good examples.
Of all the applications I use on a regular basis -- OpenOffice, Abiword, X/Emacs, Mozilla, ymessenger, and whatever Gnutella client is crashing least this week -- none of them are integrated with KDE or Gnome. Oh, I occasionally use kppp when at home with only a dialup -- but of course, like most of those KDE/Gnome applications, you don't need to actually run that gross desktop just to lauch that little application. Also I launch gnumeric once a month when I pay bills.
People need to learn that the answer to the KDE vs. Gnome question is NEITHER.
Run a small very simple window manager, and spend the couple of hours it takes to figure out how to add your browser and a couple of other applications into the menu that comes up when you click the background. Write GUI interfaces that at most just need the gtk or qt libraries to be on the machine. End of story. You will spend less money than any competitor wiritng bloatware integrated with KDE or Gnome or both, and everyone can still use your stuff.
Is there a good auction site left ? Yahoo bent over for the French, so they are out. Ebay is out mainly for pulling used software auctions on the behest of Microsoft, among other things. Both sites go beyond the restrictions required by law in all manner of ways -- take firearms for instance.
So who is left ? Is there a decent operator out there ?
Could we design an auction protocol that would use a decentralized method (say news group posts with bids in a special formatted reply, or something) ?
If your goal is to allow one person to use ssh to get outside, but not just anyone, it seems that by using tunneling you are depending on the fact that everyone else isn't smart enough to figure out how to do it also. This a very bad idea.
In relation to your specific question, the way I would solve it would be to put a separate standalone box inside the firewall, and change the firewall to allow connections from that inside IP address to the outside on the ssh protocol. Then I would allow only myself or others I trusted to login to that machine, i.e., it would have a subset of the normal accounts on it. (I am sure that there is a better way to do this, without needing a separate machine, but I don't know it.) Then you would use this by connecting to the priviledged box and then connecting to the outside.
But what I really want to criticize is the instinct to incorporate presumptions about all the other employees ignorance ignorance into your security plan. If you want to allow some people (who are presummably smart enough to know the dangers) to use ssh through the firewall and not the general population, then you should have that explicit policy, not one that depends on an obscure hole never being discovered because most people are weenies. Then you can enforce that explicit policy of who has ssh priviledges through some normal mechanism, like what I outlined above or something more sophisticated.
I think a lot of big security disasters start like this -- someone sort of hacks their way around their own system, but presummes that the rest of the world will never figure out how to do it so their hack doesn't need to be incorporated into an explicit security model or plan, and then gets burned.
Here's some explanation: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/17122 .html
Yeah but by leaving it open ended you can get him to respond to what he sees as the strongest ethical criticisms. Of course he can duck any question or just leave it out of the responses.
I think it would be interesting to see what issue he associates with "not sleeping well".
Mod this one up. It's the most succint way to address the ethical issues -- let the other nine questions be more specific stuff.
I believe that there was recently a New York Times article about them.
A few people have posted below that they would pay a fee to veiw slashbot banner-free.
If I pay a fee, can I view slashdot censorship free ? I probably would, especially if it was as low as $30. By censorship free I mean that a portion of the money goes to a lawyers fund to fight Scientologists and Microsofties when they try to delete posts -- but I also want all 0 and -1 posts archived instead of being deleted. If that's too much, maybe all low ranking posts by fee paying trolls could at least be saved ? (Some idiot would of course write something to take arbitrary data, uuencode, post to slashdot, and use it as his slow networked drive . . . oh wait, maybe that and a little code to get around the filter explains a lot of slashdot traffic.) Perhaps the ordinary posts at 0 or with one -1 moderation could be left off, but those posts that actracted lots of downward or upward moderation activity could at least be saved ?
Ok, maybe I'd settle for just a guarantee that you guys would would fight lawyers from CoS and MS. But I'd pay more for the trolls also.
You know, this is something I really don't understand. The law doesn't say you can't be a monopoly; it just says that if you are a monopoly, then there are additional things you can't do. The governments' case is that Microsoft is a monopoly, and they did do those things.
So what if we get another monopoly ? Maybe the next one will actually obey the law. If there must be a monopoly, at least it will be a law abiding one.
Yeah I know. It crashed last night between 12 am and 3:30 am, and then today between somewhere around 5:30 and at least 7 pm.
I can't believe what a looser I am, looking over that last sentence.
I would bet that the retailer would prefer a straight price cut to a rebate. They would sell more stuff that way. I think retailers probably participate in rebate scams reluctantly.
It differs by what you are selling, but very often retailers don't pay for what is on the shelves until they sell it. If they had actually bought it, they could choose to drop the price to an unprofitable level just to get back the shelf space, but then they have to have capital tied up in inventory, so they are usually willing to trade that control for not having to pay up front.
On top of that, the retailer often enters into some agreement for under what terms they can return items to the distributor or manufacturer, who pays shipping, etc.
The upshot of all this is that the retailer will probably be on your side, but they are trapped. They probably see the rebate scam as a much more inefficient way to clear the shelves of a slow-moving product, that endangers their reputation and turns off buyers to the store in general, but they just don't have a choice.
If enough people do as you did, and force the retailer to eat the rebate cost, the retailers may start refusing the rebate deals from the manufacturers.
What you are doing is not illegal. Just because Lars says something is stealing doesn't mean that it is. Since we (well, the lucky ones) don't live in Russia where laws can be kept secrete, you can just download Title 17 of the US Code off of some of the various web sites and check it out. It's a bit dense, but understandable. I left it by the toilet and worked few a few more pages each day.
I think the conclusion you will draw is that as long as no money is changing hands, as long as you aren't paying for the music files, then you are not in violation. (Of course, one still might hold the position that Title 17 should be updated to cover the non-commercial distribution of computer files, but I don't think the position that it is currently illegal is tenable.)
You see, what is happening is similar to the big anti-piracy propaganda campaign of the 80s and 90s. Remember those posters in school computer labs extorting people not to pirate software ? Remember the ads in industry magazines ? They made a big deal about illegal copying in the media, but the cases they brought to court always were carefully choosen instances of people using illegal software for a business, or people selling copies of software. (Occasionally a they did go after someone else, and the strategy was to run them into bankruptcy with legal fees before the case was adaquatly reveiwed, but they still failed occasionally.)
So don't be such a pansy. Don't let the legal shit intimidate you. (I'm not saying that you shouldn't look for ways to support the music you like to make sure their will be more of it, although I would suggest that to little of that $16 for the CD serves that purpose to make it cost effective.)
Twins have similar, but different, fingerprints and retinal scans.
Search google on "twins fingerprints retinal" to retrieve numerous references.
It's nice to keep in mind that numerous individuals with identical DNA exist. Don't go off the deep end, dude. Like everything else that people get excited about, it is just an incremental change.
It reminds me of a CNN story on global warming I watched about two years ago.
They interviewed Greenpeace and a dozen other American sources. All were predicting disaster in outrageous terms, and some professor even suggested the survival of the human race was in question, citing the demise of the dinosaurs.
There was this 20 second clip slipped into the middle of the thing, you could easily miss it, in which they interviewed a Dutch minister who was in charge of Dikes and port infrastructure, or something. He gently chuckled at the reporter and told her (in perfect English, of course) "I could raise our walls one meter in three years for a third of our annual budget. If the sea starts rising it won't be an issue for us at all; we'll appropriate a small increase, and spread out the funding so it will be unnoticeable." And then he went on to suggest that the interviewer talk to people from poor nations in the South Pacific, saying that the Western world had enough money to take care of itself.
No American agency head would ever say something like that. If you asked them about pink aliens, they would claim immediate danger and the need for double their budget and an "awareness campaign".
I think our government system is better than that parlimentary system, but the individuals staffing it are a collection of third prizes. It's our own fault of course; we reward hypesters and alarmists, and punish the calm and accurate.
In addition to the right to sell the devices without copy protection, remember the right to remove copy protection from a device with it.
A common sequence of arguments from these people is "I should have the righ to sell something with copy protection, right?" "Therefore, you don't have the right to remove it."
Warmer temperatures are evidence of globol warming, colder temperatures are evidence of global warming. What would be evidence of no global warming ?
It is more than a little suspicious that these atmospheric modelers never come out with a prediction; it's always the case the observations just made fit the model of a global climate change (incedentally the model most likely to increase their own salaries as well).
This un-dis-provable assertion stuff belongs more in the class of religion than science. You can't disprove "God exists;" that doesn't mean that religion is somehow wrong, it just means that religion is not a scientific type of issue. A lot of these environmental types drift over into that area: any contridictory evidence just means that "the jury is still out" until they get what they want, and the faith can never be disproven.
They need to pre-publish their models and the expected measurements. Of course the expected values shouldn't be single values, but rather probability distributions. But then at least we can have the possiblity of failure, and we would make progress on the question instead of just listening every year to the same old models tweaked to predict crisis from last year's numbers to get next year's research grants.
I was about to post that, but I didn't immediately see how to do the one feature that he asked for -- highlight an area in hex and highlight the same area in the ascii display. I've been looking for documentation on hexl mode, I can't believe that it is impossible.
Maybe there is some piece of elisp floating around out there on usenet ?
I would ask this question on one of the emacs or xemacs news groups.
I wonder if you could use that as a legal defense. "Since I bought taxed media, I already compensated the copyright holder."
Oh wait. This is France. A tribunal of bribed judges will just do whatever they want.
Look, you don't need someone who is specially trained in open source. Just hire any good programmer, and explain to them what needs to be done, and put them on it. Even if they have only worked on Windows previously, they'll figure it out and pick it up (well, if they are totally unix illiterate, their might be a more extenisve learning curve on that).
If you don't fetter your code with obscene licenses or keep it secrete, then you will be an "open source" developer.
It's not like you need a sixth finger or something. "Open Source" development is behaviour, and anyone can adopt it. Importantly, it is a property of YOU as well as your employee. You have to not keep your code secrete, and let other people make use of it -- that's all.
One other thing -- I don't think Solaris counts as open source.
What you are trying to describe is a way to send a message via two differnet channels to make sure that an intercepter on one channel would be revealed. But you don't have to send an message that has to match over the different channels; just send the public key itself.
Instead of doing this phrase thing, if you can call the guy, why don't you just have him read you your public key aloud, and you can look at it while he talks and make sure it is the same (or vice versa) ?
Printing out the key and mailing it to him works great also. (A floppy disk or anything else to attract attention to the envelope may be a had idea for Russian mail.)
Here's the interviewee's user page (also her in text -- slashcode is not making it a link for some reason: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=gbd ), if you have to convince yourself. The writing style is unmistakeable and unreplicable. The only difference is that he never says "GOD" (all caps) and his wife is not mentioned. I guess that's because it's a technical topic.
No problem, you're welcome; glad I could clear that up.
Does the software cost more than $100 ? Consider that if you don't buy the software with a new computer, microsoft tends to charge a lot more. If you are running windows already, would you really notice ? (If they only check at installation time, you don't have to run the virtual PC when you are using it, anyway.)
In any case, the point is that this remains an option that would be very hard for microsoft to close. If this is the only way to pirate microsoft's stuff (unlikely, because people will figure out how to crack it and make copies that can be installed on anything) then people will do it.
Microsoft probably understands this; I don't think that they are so stupid as to imagine that they can stop the professionals. I think this is just further evidence that they view much of the legitimate use of properly purchased copies of windows as fair targets. Being able to install the software "on at most one computer at a time, copies for back up only" is not restrictive enough for them.
It would probably be a great service to the windows world to make widely available some easy method of getting around machine-specific installation. But why encourage people to not switch to something else ?
If I were planning to pirate software which would only install on a particular computer, I would use a virtual or emulated pc (plex86 or bosch) to fake the correct pc underneath the new installation on each machine. If the CD itself looks for a certain MAC address and CPU ID locally, just give it the right numbers. If it wants to connect over the internet to a microchip embedded in Bill Gate's big toe to get authorization, then the virtual/emulated PC has to look at the key outgoing traffic, and run a little web-proxy like service to emulate Bill's toe.
So what you would do is distribute copied images of the target software, along with a second CD that had the trimed-down, minimal linux which immediately boots the virtual PC with the right configuration.
(Some people will note that it is probably easier to install the software to 650 MB partition, and edit and modify the parts of it that do the various checks, and then simply distribute images of that partion. They are right; but the nice thing about emulating, is it should always be able to work, thus arguing that copy protection is always doomed on an open architecture like the PC. I mean, I wouldn't encourage anyone to use any copy of a microsoft product, anyhow; I just want to make the point.)
It's not always simple of course -- similar to emulating one of those hardware serial port keys in software, you may have to crack a scheme, in terms of figuring out exactly what the microsoft central server should be sending back. But if you observe it happen once, and you are emulating the entire world of the computer, then you can set the time on the virtual machine to the same time as the first time, and just replay the transaction.
Of course that emulation or virtualization software can introduce bugs or be very slow, another potential problem.
The conclusion I draw from all this is, since I'm no genius, obviously a lot of people at microsoft understand this too. So they are probably aware they they will not stop the industrial scale operations with resources to invest in setting all this up. So they know that the benefit from them comes from encumbering their product to the point where honest people have to buy more copies than they needed to.