You seem to be making a common mistaken assumption about the GPL. A company can make all the private modifications they want to any GPLed code & distribute them all over the the inside of the company w/o fear of legal retribution. Its only if they try and distribute the code OUTSIDE of the company is where the GPL's source-code-must-also-be-available clause kicks in.
If you GPL a MP3-player program, which includes the patented MP3 technology, and offer the program free of charge, there is no issue for you. You are not in violation of the patent.
Not true - you are still in violation of the patent, but Thomson has said that they will not enforce it in this case. Whether or not you believe that they will continue to selectively enforce the patent is another matter.
Picture this scenario: Terrorists, armed with whatever, try to take over the plane. They are highly trained in improvised weapons and hand to hand combat and there are four of them (a la 9-11.
I don't see this scenario being possible after 9-11. Anybody trying to hijack a plane with non-projectile/non-explosive weapons will be DOGPILED by the other passengers, especially if it looks like they're trying to get into the cabin. Improvised weapons and/or intensive combat training will only help you hurt/kill other individuals, but it won't move 800 pounds of desperate human flesh pinning you to the ground, and if you really make them desperate, it won't stop them from eventually gouging your eyeballs out & choking you to death.
In order to hijack a plane now a days, you need either a weapon dangerous enough to be likely to kill a significant number of the people on the plane in an instant, or you need enough hijackers (at least 30% of the passengers maybe?) to physically control all the rest of the passengers.
Having said that though, Star Buck's double espresso's are not bad. Only in Canada do Star Buck espresso's suck.
That's interesting - do you know why the Canada espresso is different? (I'm actually seriously asking here:-)
I've tried Starbucks espresso in at least 4 different countries around the world (business traveling) _except_ for Canada, and was impressed at how the espresso tasted _exactly_ the same as my local Starbucks in Portland, Oregon.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
Then you've got to ask the question _WHY_ 75% of the population decided to become thieves. If that amount of your population "suddenly" became thieves, then there's obviously some basic need that the current society wasn't satisfying & which had to be provided outside of the existing legal framework. Either that, or the definition you are using for the word "thief" needs to be adjusted to fit reality.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2
...convicted felons...
I've never particularly agreed that convicted felons shouldn't be allowed to vote. I figure that if the number of convicts actually gets to the point where their vote makes a difference, then THAT is an indication that the laws have been making too many people convicts instead of functioning for the general good of society.
Saying it another way, allowing convicts to vote introduces a feedback into the law-making process which discourages laws (perhaps based on ideology rather than the good of the society) from being passed which make large sections of the general populace become convicts. It might also provide some incentive for society to do its best to rehabilitate convicts as much as possible, to try and reduce the chance of "revenge" voting.
Huh - I'll believe the "private education will be better than public" when the private schools have to follow the same rules as the public: 1) the private schools have to accept ALL students that apply (they don't get to pick and choose, except possibly based on capacity--and even then, they should be required to use a lottery), and 2) they can't kick out "problem" students unless those students are shown to be a physical danger to other people or property (they have to deal with them just like the public schools), and 3) they have to meet _ALL_ of the same academic standards as the public schools, and 4) schools aren't allowed to set their expense/student to above the voucher value (i.e., any student will be allowed to go to any school they can reach).
If you don't have all these requirements, then the private schools will immediately take all the good students, and leave the public schools to deal with the problem students. Can you say, "class discrimination?" I bet idiot private school advocates would probably even point to this situation as the "success" of private education.
Providing a good, strong, uniform education to EVERY single one of its citizens is the only fair way that a society can claim they provide "equal opportunities", and give every member of its society the chance to bootstrap themselves out of bad circumstances (unlike welfare, where you just hand money to people & hope that they'll somehow miraculously start a new life).
A practical system to counter-act such devices: a directional ultrasonic receiver & a hammer.
You can claim "justifiable insanity" at the trial: "Yes Yer Honor, I _was_ hearing voices in my head!"
Re:This "speaker" Doesn't "sound" differnt either.
on
Voices in Your Head
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure how the technology works (they don't give much actual detail about it) but it may be vibrating the skull
The article mentioned that he was using a pair of ultrasonic beams, so it was my assumption that he was focusing the two beams on the person's head and that the person was hearing the "beat frequency" of the two beams.
People are finding it exceedingly difficult to make money off OSS
Correction: people are finding it hard to make money selling products based on OSS. They aren't having many problems SAVING money based on OSS products.
What kind of armed resistance can even a large militia give against even light armor and artillery from the US's military?
The primary safety against the use of military force against civilians is to make sure that the military forces have many connections to the civilian population (family, friends, etc). It's difficult to get many people to shoot in cold blood an unarmed man or woman they were just having a beer with the other day. They're more likely to turn their weapons on the people giving the orders.
In many of the situations where a country's military has been used against the civilian populace, the military has been carefully conditioned for personal loyalty to the people giving the orders, rather than to "protecting the populace". They're isolated from the rest of the populace, prevented from establishing any positive emotional ties, given special privileges (to make them feel good about their positions) & careful propaganda.
If the military didn't care about the general populace, I sincerely doubt that the minor weapons available to a typical citizen in the US would slow any properly equipped military unit down, even with many such armed citizens (especially considering the US preference for airstrikes).
If you want to worry about that kind of thing, then worry about all of the automated drone systems which the US military (and the related defense industry) are developing. Whose hands are going to be on those triggers?
It might be good to worry about simple incompetence as well - wasn't there a story recently about somebody who ended up with a bomb in their living room - in TEXAS?
Just fundamentals are "boring", and kids tend to forget them right after the next test - unless they have some kind of interesting project where they can _apply_ those fundamentals.
Your company *ought* to have a computer use policy that prohibits you from installing software, making changes that exceed your privileges, or trying to escalate privileges yourself beyond those provided. You should always be able to request privilege escalation when your job functions require it, but your system should be locked down to prevent malicious user activity.
No, the problem _IS_ fixing the machine. I need the machine working to get my job done. The IT department is NOT fixing the machine, therefore to get my job done, I have to fix it myself. (The IT department wasn't exactly incompetent, just understaffed and overloaded. They were perfectly happy that somebody was able to fix their own machine.)
Idiot blanket policies not allowing anybody to alter anything on any machine just prevent _me_ (supposedly an expensive company resource) from getting my job done.
BTW, if you think that kind of policy is useful at stopping _malicious_ user activity, you're completely in dream land. Users have _PHYSICAL ACCESS_ to their machines. There's nothing that the IT dept can do to stop them from installing or using anything they want on their machines. A competent malicious user will do anything they want on that machine.
All the IT dept can do is try and limit the fallout from _accidental_ user mistakes, set up a good secure network architecture & provide some competent monitoring to try and discover if anything out of the ordinary is occurring.
One thing is for sure, if the IT department thinks that establishing complete control over everyone's machine is more important than actually doing the work that keeps the company alive, then everyone in the IT department needs to be fired. They've got to find the balanced solutions that provide decent security while minimizing the inconvenience to the people actually doing the work.
Most compromises of computer and network security come from within a company and your company is apparently not addressing that fact. Not to mention they can't fix a problem in the first place. Sorry to hear that.
I'm not with that company anymore (left amicably), but when I was, it was doing just fine, thank you for the concern. Most of the reason is because most of the managers were more interested in helping us get our job done rather than thinking they had to maintain absolute control over all our actions.
The _best_ way to reduce the probability of malicious insider activity (or to increase the probability of discovering such malicious activity) is to make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing (transparency). (Not everyone in the company, obviously, but a wide enough circle of peers to provide decent self-monitoring.) This also has the added benefit of improved communication between team members & less unproductive screwing around (to avoid looking bad in front of your peers).
work done. Let's see, risk getting fired because I'm better at protecting my machine than the IT department & they are whining about me giving them the metaphorical finger, or get fired because I'm not getting any work done & all my boss hears is how the "IT department is full of incompetents".
I believe I'll take the risk over the sure thing. I even get to keep some of my self-respect.
Gee, if you want to put it that way - I've been running 200 sigma for the last ten minutes on my laptop. Of course, once I shut it off, then my stats won't be so good.
Ever heard of a fax machine? I've gone places, been asked to sign something, and then promptly marched over to their fax machine and faxed it to my laywer.
Must be real nice to be able to afford regular access to a lawyer. My mother, when she was earning $15k/year (teacher's intern salary), thought that it was her highest expense priority to have any contract she had to sign reviewed by her retained lawyer.
Oh wait a minute, _food & shelter_ were more important - come to think of it, the less contact she had with lawyers, the more money she had for her survival. Funny how that works.
I'm sure that poor people deserve to get screwed over by any contracts they sign, 'cause they didn't have those contracts carefully scanned by their family lawyers.
Dunno if it's because of the industries I've been working in (first a big document management system, then semiconductor CAD), but I have rarely seen where software prototypes have been very useful on a large scale. As long as your requirements fit _exactly_ what the prototype was built to handle, then you can use it - but the moment your problem space includes something that wasn't taken into account when the prototype was designed, in my experience the resultant system is often twice as complicated & hard-to-maintain as something which was built custom for that application.
On the other hand, I've found the "component" concept extremely useful & productive. I love small components with well-defined, well-behaved functionality.
Therefore, the only way to change your retinal signature would be to get yourself partially blinded by destroying part of the retina (use a surgical laser to burn parts sufficient to render the blood vessel pattern unrecognisable, or use a drug or infective agent to cause fluid buildup to detach/destroy part of the retina).
I wonder if you'd be able to change your retinal patterns by using some of that stem-cell research that is being done to restore the sight of the blind. (Or I wonder what a computer would think about one of those guys who have had the silicon-chip-based "artificial" retina implanted in their eyes:-)
I have vague memories of the human body being able to act like a decent antenna (e.g, holding onto a broken-off antenna nub on a radio to improve the reception). Maybe this effect is only for certain frequency ranges? Perhaps the implanted stuff can use this effect to get decent reception w/o requiring long implanted wires or extensive subdermal shielding.
It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment.
Darn right, and true of any video link. I can't count the number of times I've been called by family & friends to help with a computer problem, where I would've killed to be able to see what they were doing (instead of trying to figure it out by listening to their description of the "square shape on the screen with a big gray bar shape, and then the little rounded shape in the corner with a word on it").
Shouldn't children be taught to make up their own minds...
Up to a certain age (actual age determined by "maturity" level), most children don't really want to make up their own minds - they want their parents/guardians to tell them what's wrong & right. That gives them a moral base which they can incrementally adjust as they get more life experience.
It's not too hard to imagine a kid raised by someone who _really_ let the kid "make up his/her own mind". The term "spoiled brat" comes to mind.
The general idea is that you wrap your message in several layers of encryption, then bounce your message through 3 or more randomly-picked, anonymous remailers. Each remailer "peels" a level of encryption off the message, and then the just-decrypted part of the message tells it the next remailer to send the rest of the encrypted message. The final message is sent directly to the desired recipient, although the contents of the message can be still encrypted.
Each anonymous remailer has various algorithms to try and make traffic analysis more difficult (random outgoing delivery, fake messages, etc).
It's a pretty good theoretical setup (requiring that eavesdroppers be able to monitor all paths through the remailer "network" to have full traffic analysis coverage), but the hard part is keeping all of those remailers up & running reliably (since most of the remailers are being provided by volunteers with limited resources).
In addition, remailers are notorious for having been abused by spammers to cover their tracks using email-to-mailing list or email-to-netnews gateways.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be making a common mistaken assumption about the GPL. A company can make all the private modifications they want to any GPLed code & distribute them all over the the inside of the company w/o fear of legal retribution. Its only if they try and distribute the code OUTSIDE of the company is where the GPL's source-code-must-also-be-available clause kicks in.
Not true - you are still in violation of the patent, but Thomson has said that they will not enforce it in this case. Whether or not you believe that they will continue to selectively enforce the patent is another matter.
I don't see this scenario being possible after 9-11. Anybody trying to hijack a plane with non-projectile/non-explosive weapons will be DOGPILED by the other passengers, especially if it looks like they're trying to get into the cabin. Improvised weapons and/or intensive combat training will only help you hurt/kill other individuals, but it won't move 800 pounds of desperate human flesh pinning you to the ground, and if you really make them desperate, it won't stop them from eventually gouging your eyeballs out & choking you to death.
In order to hijack a plane now a days, you need either a weapon dangerous enough to be likely to kill a significant number of the people on the plane in an instant, or you need enough hijackers (at least 30% of the passengers maybe?) to physically control all the rest of the passengers.
Oh yeah, those Munich beergardens!
:-)
When you're dealing with mugs that big, you can stay at a beergarden w/your friends from lunch through dinner time
That's interesting - do you know why the Canada espresso is different? (I'm actually seriously asking here :-)
I've tried Starbucks espresso in at least 4 different countries around the world (business traveling) _except_ for Canada, and was impressed at how the espresso tasted _exactly_ the same as my local Starbucks in Portland, Oregon.
Then you've got to ask the question _WHY_ 75% of the population decided to become thieves. If that amount of your population "suddenly" became thieves, then there's obviously some basic need that the current society wasn't satisfying & which had to be provided outside of the existing legal framework. Either that, or the definition you are using for the word "thief" needs to be adjusted to fit reality.
I've never particularly agreed that convicted felons shouldn't be allowed to vote. I figure that if the number of convicts actually gets to the point where their vote makes a difference, then THAT is an indication that the laws have been making too many people convicts instead of functioning for the general good of society.
Saying it another way, allowing convicts to vote introduces a feedback into the law-making process which discourages laws (perhaps based on ideology rather than the good of the society) from being passed which make large sections of the general populace become convicts. It might also provide some incentive for society to do its best to rehabilitate convicts as much as possible, to try and reduce the chance of "revenge" voting.
Huh - I'll believe the "private education will be better than public" when the private schools have to follow the same rules as the public: 1) the private schools have to accept ALL students that apply (they don't get to pick and choose, except possibly based on capacity--and even then, they should be required to use a lottery), and 2) they can't kick out "problem" students unless those students are shown to be a physical danger to other people or property (they have to deal with them just like the public schools), and 3) they have to meet _ALL_ of the same academic standards as the public schools, and 4) schools aren't allowed to set their expense/student to above the voucher value (i.e., any student will be allowed to go to any school they can reach).
If you don't have all these requirements, then the private schools will immediately take all the good students, and leave the public schools to deal with the problem students. Can you say, "class discrimination?" I bet idiot private school advocates would probably even point to this situation as the "success" of private education.
Providing a good, strong, uniform education to EVERY single one of its citizens is the only fair way that a society can claim they provide "equal opportunities", and give every member of its society the chance to bootstrap themselves out of bad circumstances (unlike welfare, where you just hand money to people & hope that they'll somehow miraculously start a new life).
A practical system to counter-act such devices: a directional ultrasonic receiver & a hammer.
You can claim "justifiable insanity" at the trial: "Yes Yer Honor, I _was_ hearing voices in my head!"
The article mentioned that he was using a pair of ultrasonic beams, so it was my assumption that he was focusing the two beams on the person's head and that the person was hearing the "beat frequency" of the two beams.
Correction: people are finding it hard to make money selling products based on OSS. They aren't having many problems SAVING money based on OSS products.
The primary safety against the use of military force against civilians is to make sure that the military forces have many connections to the civilian population (family, friends, etc). It's difficult to get many people to shoot in cold blood an unarmed man or woman they were just having a beer with the other day. They're more likely to turn their weapons on the people giving the orders.
In many of the situations where a country's military has been used against the civilian populace, the military has been carefully conditioned for personal loyalty to the people giving the orders, rather than to "protecting the populace". They're isolated from the rest of the populace, prevented from establishing any positive emotional ties, given special privileges (to make them feel good about their positions) & careful propaganda.
If the military didn't care about the general populace, I sincerely doubt that the minor weapons available to a typical citizen in the US would slow any properly equipped military unit down, even with many such armed citizens (especially considering the US preference for airstrikes).
If you want to worry about that kind of thing, then worry about all of the automated drone systems which the US military (and the related defense industry) are developing. Whose hands are going to be on those triggers?
It might be good to worry about simple incompetence as well - wasn't there a story recently about somebody who ended up with a bomb in their living room - in TEXAS?
Just fundamentals are "boring", and kids tend to forget them right after the next test - unless they have some kind of interesting project where they can _apply_ those fundamentals.
No, the problem _IS_ fixing the machine. I need the machine working to get my job done. The IT department is NOT fixing the machine, therefore to get my job done, I have to fix it myself. (The IT department wasn't exactly incompetent, just understaffed and overloaded. They were perfectly happy that somebody was able to fix their own machine.)
Idiot blanket policies not allowing anybody to alter anything on any machine just prevent _me_ (supposedly an expensive company resource) from getting my job done.
BTW, if you think that kind of policy is useful at stopping _malicious_ user activity, you're completely in dream land. Users have _PHYSICAL ACCESS_ to their machines. There's nothing that the IT dept can do to stop them from installing or using anything they want on their machines. A competent malicious user will do anything they want on that machine.
All the IT dept can do is try and limit the fallout from _accidental_ user mistakes, set up a good secure network architecture & provide some competent monitoring to try and discover if anything out of the ordinary is occurring.
One thing is for sure, if the IT department thinks that establishing complete control over everyone's machine is more important than actually doing the work that keeps the company alive, then everyone in the IT department needs to be fired. They've got to find the balanced solutions that provide decent security while minimizing the inconvenience to the people actually doing the work.
I'm not with that company anymore (left amicably), but when I was, it was doing just fine, thank you for the concern. Most of the reason is because most of the managers were more interested in helping us get our job done rather than thinking they had to maintain absolute control over all our actions.
The _best_ way to reduce the probability of malicious insider activity (or to increase the probability of discovering such malicious activity) is to make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing (transparency). (Not everyone in the company, obviously, but a wide enough circle of peers to provide decent self-monitoring.) This also has the added benefit of improved communication between team members & less unproductive screwing around (to avoid looking bad in front of your peers).
Spoken like somebody who never has to get any
work done. Let's see, risk getting fired because I'm better at protecting my machine than the IT department & they are whining about me giving them the metaphorical finger, or get fired because I'm not getting any work done & all my boss hears is how the "IT department is full of incompetents".
I believe I'll take the risk over the sure thing. I even get to keep some of my self-respect.
Gee, if you want to put it that way - I've been running 200 sigma for the last ten minutes on my laptop. Of course, once I shut it off, then my stats won't be so good.
Must be real nice to be able to afford regular access to a lawyer. My mother, when she was earning $15k/year (teacher's intern salary), thought that it was her highest expense priority to have any contract she had to sign reviewed by her retained lawyer.
Oh wait a minute, _food & shelter_ were more important - come to think of it, the less contact she had with lawyers, the more money she had for her survival. Funny how that works.
I'm sure that poor people deserve to get screwed over by any contracts they sign, 'cause they didn't have those contracts carefully scanned by their family lawyers.
Dunno if it's because of the industries I've been working in (first a big document management system, then semiconductor CAD), but I have rarely seen where software prototypes have been very useful on a large scale. As long as your requirements fit _exactly_ what the prototype was built to handle, then you can use it - but the moment your problem space includes something that wasn't taken into account when the prototype was designed, in my experience the resultant system is often twice as complicated & hard-to-maintain as something which was built custom for that application.
On the other hand, I've found the "component" concept extremely useful & productive. I love small components with well-defined, well-behaved functionality.
I wonder if you'd be able to change your retinal patterns by using some of that stem-cell research that is being done to restore the sight of the blind. (Or I wonder what a computer would think about one of those guys who have had the silicon-chip-based "artificial" retina implanted in their eyes :-)
I thought that Faraday Cages were only supposed to stop signals from getting out of an enclosed volume, not prevent outside signals from coming in.
What's your point?
A "rational" client will understand these tradeoffs & will work with you to establish a compromise between them.
If you have an "irrational" client, then you're going to be miserable no matter what you tell them.
I have vague memories of the human body being able to act like a decent antenna (e.g, holding onto a broken-off antenna nub on a radio to improve the reception). Maybe this effect is only for certain frequency ranges? Perhaps the implanted stuff can use this effect to get decent reception w/o requiring long implanted wires or extensive subdermal shielding.
Darn right, and true of any video link. I can't count the number of times I've been called by family & friends to help with a computer problem, where I would've killed to be able to see what they were doing (instead of trying to figure it out by listening to their description of the "square shape on the screen with a big gray bar shape, and then the little rounded shape in the corner with a word on it").
Up to a certain age (actual age determined by "maturity" level), most children don't really want to make up their own minds - they want their parents/guardians to tell them what's wrong & right. That gives them a moral base which they can incrementally adjust as they get more life experience.
It's not too hard to imagine a kid raised by someone who _really_ let the kid "make up his/her own mind". The term "spoiled brat" comes to mind.
The general idea is that you wrap your message in several layers of encryption, then bounce your message through 3 or more randomly-picked, anonymous remailers. Each remailer "peels" a level of encryption off the message, and then the just-decrypted part of the message tells it the next remailer to send the rest of the encrypted message. The final message is sent directly to the desired recipient, although the contents of the message can be still encrypted.
Each anonymous remailer has various algorithms to try and make traffic analysis more difficult (random outgoing delivery, fake messages, etc).
It's a pretty good theoretical setup (requiring that eavesdroppers be able to monitor all paths through the remailer "network" to have full traffic analysis coverage), but the hard part is keeping all of those remailers up & running reliably (since most of the remailers are being provided by volunteers with limited resources).
In addition, remailers are notorious for having been abused by spammers to cover their tracks using email-to-mailing list or email-to-netnews gateways.