Well there goes my purchase. I no longer believe manufacturers when they make promises on future capabilities of their hardware or software. Granted, it's probably Adobe that is causing the delay with the new Tegra platforms, but I've been burned too many times by promises of updates. While I wait for the Xoom to get flash I'll sit happy with my little T-Mobile G2 which runs Flash 10.1 like a champ.
If I can now speed with permission, how about make it so I can pay $50 and be able to drive after drinking two beers, which I am still more than capable to drive after.
The whole idea is beyond stupid. It just adds to the thought that if you have the money, you can be above the law.
Seriously. 7 inches might be fine for the lap of a kindergartener, but certainly not for an adult. The tablet is already too big to fit into a pocket, so why not just make it 10" like the iPad? This is retarded from a size standpoint.
I always find that a couple pounds of thermite in a clay potting plant does a pretty good job of melting old hard drives into a glob of molten metal. Good luck recovering any data from that. It's Geek Squad proof!
Prior to coming to the company I'm at now, this exact situation happened. The IT budget was severely underfunded but the COO wanted NT4 servers, workstations, and MS Office. Being unable to purchase all of the software they needed, he essentially used pirated copies of everything. He was later summarily booted from the company on some non-related issue and went straight to the BSA. They fined my company (a small non-profit cancer research center) $200K, told us to destroy all copies of the software and uninstall them, purchase all new licenses and submit to random audits for a period of two years. Since that happened and I arrived, I had to still fight for my hardware budget, but they never argued when I brought up what I needed for software.
I suppose you've never heard of OpenXchange (http://www.open-xchange.com)? There's no reason to be binded to a Microsoft Exchange Server with it. In fact, I've used this to replace Exchange 2003 altogether. It is compatible with Outlook and supports shared calendars/tasks/etc. The best part is it's GroupWare web interface. It literally blows all of the functions of Exchange away, and costs a fraction of the price. Most importantly, it uses a open standards databasel; PostgreSQL. They also have an easy to use migration tool so that you can pick up exactly where you left off on your old Exchange server. There are a lot of Open Source solutions out there for enterprise email, and ones that have good support. The problem is that your trying to make Exchange work with non-Microsoft products, and it's never going to be seamless. Even Apple Mail doesn't give you that sort of integration, and thats made by a large company. Evolution may one day get close to being the Outlook killer.
As for push email, I haven't quite found a solution for that, but I can always sync my Treo via IMAP a few times a day.
Just because it's not running Darwin does not mean that it's not based off of some of the similar if not directly linked technologies that OS X is built off of. Apple could've created their own proprietary "Darwin" for iPhone if they wanted, much how Linux was a clone of proprietary "Unix". Seeing as it's built for a small and limited device, you wouldn't have to clone all of the OS.
When Jobs refers to OS X, I assume he is talking about the system that they built on top of Darwin. To me, Darwin will be just that; Darwin. It's a BSD. There have been many interviews where Jobs has said that OS X was built on top of Darwin or Unix, so the only logical avenue of thought is that he's not stating that Darwin and the OS X are one in the same (since you CAN run a system off of Darwin alone without OS X), yet recognizes that they hold a symbiotic relationship in Apple's application of merging the two together.
I read through your entire thread on the Ubuntu Forums regarding this problem, and your main problem is that you jumped into the process of installing another totally different OS before taking the correct precautions.
The logical thing to do before installing ANY OS that you aren't familiar with is to read the main parts of the admin guides (or try a LiveCD if one exists), and check the hard drives and installation media your using PRIOR to installing the OS. That's just common sense. You wouldn't drink water out of a pond before you knew it was safe to do so, would you?
You should've also had a backup image of your hard drive prior to the installation, so that you could simply restore it if things went south. Don't whine about being unable to access your data if you didn't care enough about it to create a backup image prior to doing a potentially destructive process as installing an OS. Symantec Ghost is incredibly easy to use, and so are many other free OSS imaging utilities (dd is easy enough for a chimp) available as well. You have no excuse besides your own ignorance, which is commonly typical of users such as yourself.
This all goes down to the phrase, "Check yourself before you wreck yourself."
PS - the reason Windows "worked" on this drive even though it was bad was probably because Windows wasn't installed on that disk, and was being used as just a slave addition. I guarantee you if Windows was running off of that drive (or even it's pagefile), you would've run into some serious issues. Windows (NTFS) is commonly less graceful when it encounters bad sectors/blocks than most Linux filesystems like Ext3 or ReiserFS.
...then I hope to god that they put Irix in line with the OS capabilities of this day. I have to support a small fleet of SGI Octanes running Irix 6.5, and damned if those aren't the slowest and most aggravating machines.
I would potentially believe that security through obscurity works if so many of our servers that run the critical tasks of our Internet's infrastructure didn't run Apache or other Linux operating systems. The great thing about Open Source software is that you don't have to leave the code the same way you received it. For example, if the DoD wanted to adopt Apache to run all of their webservers, they could always modify or build an entirely new custom Apache-ish server off of the source code. In essence, that could make an exploit that would normally succeed on a standard Apache server fail on the DoD's modified model. As long as they don't turn around and resell it, it's within their rights in the GPL to modify it. That's the freedom in Open Source software. No proprietary software would allow you to do that without first paying them a metric ton of money.
"Thanks! I hope my theory is correct that those absurdly short sentences are rare."
Unfortunately, it's not that rare. It's insane also that people who rape children get less time than those who rape adults. There is just something particularly evil and worthy of more than when it's against a child.
I would agree that he shouldn't just get a slap on the wrist. What he did was entirely illegal and unethical. There is no doubt about that. What I am saying is that there needs to be a reassessment in the country in making the time fit the crime. There are deplorable discrepencies in the amount of prison people get for white collar crimes vs. violent crimes or crimes against children. The chasm is beyond offensive, which I think you would agree with.
"Can somebody please provide an example of somebody who was convicted of raping a child and who received less than seven years? I'm sure there are examples out there, but my guess is that they are quite rare. By comparison, the seven year sentence for software piracy was the largest such ever. So, seven year sentences for software piracy are also exceedingly rare.
Of course. Ready to be rudely awaken? Granted, these are sentences handed down from state courts, not federal.
And I could go on and on and on. You want to see how many years the proclaimed "Worst Child Rapists" gets? Twenty years. Not life. Twenty. fucking. years.
Worst Ever Rapist gets 20 Years
I do write to the senators of my state when things like this happen. I would implore those of you who live in states from these above articles to also write your representatives. I'm sure I'll be modded off-topic, but this is worth arguing over.
Time and time again I see child rapists get no more than 3 years. Sometimes first time offenders get suspended sentences with probation. Every state of course has their own sentencing rules for such acts, but you would be extremely surprised. Child rapists deserve all the negative stigma they deserve. They destroy lives, cause children to commit suicide, lead lives addled with drug addiction and sometimes as adults even facilitate the very abuse they received onto others. One count of child rape should equal one count of at least Murder 3. Even murderers these days are getting out of prison in less than 15 years. Besides, do you think that anyone is going to want to hire a man convicted of a multimillion dollar felony charge? No. He will likely carry that for the rest of his life.
As you can see, I don't sympathize with child predators as you may. You reap what you sow. Again, that is for a different debate that I am more than willing to publically have with you elsewhere.
While I hate thieves more than most, it is quite maddening and ironic that we put software pirates away for longer than we do child rapists. The courts tend to favor the rights and property of corporations over that of human lives. It's deplorable.
I'm sure that this man had sold this software at prices far below what any legitimate retailer could afford. With that being a reasonable assumption (since he sold so damn much of this software), the people he sold it to would probably have been unlikely to purchase the software at all had it not been at such a deep discount. If they would not have purchased the software otherwise, there is a net damage of almost zero to the manufacturer of the software. There is no lost supplies, real property, or investment. They did not have to do the advertising for this person's business either. If anything, the pirated software he did sell made for great PR to those software companies. The people who would've not otherwise purchased the software at regular or semi-discounted prices are probably pleased with their purchase, and will now be far more likely to buy the new improved releases of that product later on.
"How do you figure this? By checking the file timestamps? There is no fool proof way to identify such things. It depends upon the situation, but your statement that a forensics specialist could tell when a file was placed on someone's machine is patently false."
Not true. Just like in other fields of forensics, you can tell when something has been modified. Therefore, even if the timestamps on the file were altered by the hacker, there are several ways they can still tell when the actual date was. There are alot more tools out there, software and hardware based, that can identify tampering.
With a good computer forensics specialist, it would not be that hard to figure out if something had been planted on his computer after he was infected by the Sub7 trojan, which was the point at which the hacker had access to his machine. It would be simple to prove if these pictures existed on his system prior to the hacking. Simply stating that something *could* have been planted does not make it truth. There have been many other cases like this where people have claimed that evidence was planted, which was easy to prove or disprove.
If your doing something illegal, you should be punished if someone other than the police finds out and reports it, regardless of how they get the information. Now, if you had to break a law in your country to prove that someone did something illegal, you should be punished for breaking that law, such as trespassing. This man from Turkey broke no laws because he is not bound to our laws. US law is not universal. If he broke a law in Turkey, then he should probably be punished in some way for breaking that law, while keeping in mind the good he did by breaking that law. He should receive a less severe punishment, such as probation. If he broke that law for his own gain or selfishness (e.g. hacking for the purpose of identity theft or fraud) then he should feel the full force of the law in his country.
While I don't advocate hacking for any other purpose other than to expose threats in an ethical manner, I feel that the good that this man did to bring these pedophiles to justice cancels out the unethical act of hacking those pedophile's computers. Let us say an unethical act like hacking could be expressed in a negative number, such as -3. Let us also say that an ethical act of bringing pedophiles to justice is expressed as a postive number, say 5. You add the sums of the ethical and unethical acts, and together you get 2. The outcome of the actions, and their final sum measured says that in the end, his acts were positivly ethical, overall. Add that to the fact that he is not bound to our laws and opinions of what is right or wrong. This should be considered when forming your opinion on whether the ends justifies the means.
This is beyond truth; it's surrealism. What is the most entertaining is when I'm standing there, watching them trying to reproduce the problem, and they actually get angry that the problem is gone. It makes no sense. They are upset that their computer is not working, but become even more upset when it suddenly works again.
This is an awesome decision for not only the students who get a chance to see the power and usefulness of Linux, but for the tax payers as well. Like the Indiana school district, the institution I work at is funded largely by the government (grants mostly) and needs to make every dollar go as far as it can. I've been introducing Open Source solutions such as SLES/SLED 10, Open-Xchange, OpenOffice and the such to our staff and many are adopting it with little qualms. In fact, many of our administrative staffers appreciate the extremely intuitive advances in the Xgl/compiz UI that makes their jobs easier. OSS has saved us well over $40,000 alone in the last 3 months, as we would have had to pay for exorbant MS licenses to upgrade our Exchange Server, upgrades from Windows 2000 Server (which SLES 10 does just as good of a job or better), and not to mention the heavy costs of CALs which add up very quickly! The measly amount we pay for upgrade/update protection and support is damn near hilarious in comparison to closed source products. Our CFO is still laughing his way to the bank. I'll also be enjoying a decent future raise and a nicer budget for next fiscal year.
...but I call it a very possible and scary reality
Like others, especially Bush supporters, I hear the following
"Unless you have something to hide, why should you be worried?"
Ok. Say a majority of Americans agreed that the NSA recording our calls, making transcripts, keeping phone records, etc. is acceptable for security. Let's see how this might draw out in the next 20 years.
Year 2010
The Government has passed legislation to require PC manufactures to install a chip on the motherboard that allows keylogging, and the data can be collected via an 802.11 adapter that transmits the information to WiFi towers througout neighborhoods, or by gathering the encrypted data directly over the internet. Americans respond, "If you have nothing to hide, why worry?"
Year 2015
The news reports that the Empire State Building was leveled with explosives planted at it's foundations by a terrorist cell. Later this year, the Goverment ratifies several amendments to the Constitution which dramatically relaxes privacy rights for Americans, and increases the broadness in which the Fed's can enact "State Secret". The Freedom of Information Act was also repealed, due to national security concerns of the Senate and administration. The Government now chooses to install camera's into every home w/ audio feeds, which the new law allows. American's respond "If you have nothing to hide, why worry?"
Year 2017
With the increasing number of people being arrested for suspected terrorist or treasonist activity and not being allowed a public trial or attorney, Bill Smith began speaking out vehemently against the governments actions. Four months later, Mr. Smith was arrested by the Government on undisclosed charges, and transported to a secret location. After 3 months of no disclosure as to Mr. Smith's arrest and confinement, family of the Smith's filed suit against the Government for information. The suit was swiftly shot down by the government as it enacted "state secret" saying that due to National Security, it would not grant the court or the defendants attorney's the security clearance to investigate. The Dept. of Justice dismissed all charges against the Government. No other further comments by the Government have been made.
Year 2030
The Smith family receive a letter from the Government stating that Bill Smith died in prison of natural causes. Due to National Security, the body would not be released to the family, nor would the details of the Governments charges against it. Another lawsuit is launched by the Smith family, which is quickly shot down in the same manner as their last lawsuit for their previous suit.
Folks, this could happen. The slippery slope is real, especially when it comes to Government power. I leave you with a previously mentioned quote by Ben Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Installing Java, Flash, media codecs, a media player HALF as capable as a good 3 or 4 I know on Windows? Pain in the arse. These are basic technologies used by lots of normal users, and it's POSSIBLE to install them, nay, quite easy for the *experienced* user, but for a noob to have to refer to a help file line by line? It's just not intuitive enough for the average user, and it's far too much hassle.
In OSS only distro's, it's true you won't get proprietary codecs such as WMV, Real, or in some cases MP3. This really isn't the distro's fault per-se, because in order to include these features the distro maker must obtain licenses to use these proprietary formats. However, if you got a commercial version of SuSE 10 Linux, all those codecs, Flash, Java, would've been installed by default. As far as media players that are half as good as the ones in Linux, there is XMMS (a literal clone of WinAmp - which is a great media player), Kaffiene, VLC (which is so friggen awesome that I couldn't even explain it all here), or Beep-Media Player. Most of those media players are installed by default as well to, if you select "Multimedia Applications" during the install. The only time that things are hard to install are when your compiling them from source. Installing anything from an RPM is as easy as installing something in Windows.
For those OpenSource only distro's, like OpenSuSE, it's a little more of a hassle to add those proprietary add-ons. You have to add several different 3rd party internet repositories that have those software packages, and then do a simple search in Software Management (at least for SuSE. Synaptic for those Ubuntu users) for java, flash, and codecs. You'll easily find what you need there.
Figuring out what distro to use is not that hard. It's no harder than having to decide whether you want to use Windows 2000, XP Home, Pro, Media Center Edition, or Server 2003 for your needs.
Most reputable computer stores carry several different distro's of Linux. CompUSA for instance sells Linspire and SuSE 10. If you read the boxes, Linspire touts ease of use for their distro. SuSE advertises it's scalability and large repository of software, to include ease of use. Assuming that a customer cannot research simple things such as basic functionality is really underestimating the ability of even the most novice Windows user. I think you should give people more credit than that.
Oh, how did she determine she wanted to use SuSE? How did she get the install?
My fiancee chose SuSE because she knows I run it on my computer, and like it. She's doing her Master's, so having free software to get her daily work done was beneficial to her. Simple reasons, really. Most of the largest Linux distro's are pretty much the same, except for under-the-hood features and configuration capabilities (such as the YaST management tool for SuSE). I could probably install Knoppix on her computer tonight before she got home, and she wouldn't even notice the difference.
Or if you decide to continue to think that just every windows user off the street can just get up and choose a Linux distro, get the correct version from a reliable source and install it easier than they do with Windows you keep thinking that
Like I said, SuSE Linux was by far easier to install than Windows. She didn't even have to install drivers, not even for her wireless card. It "Just Worked". How much easier can you get? Saying that Linux in general is hard to install is disregarding all the easy to use distro's out there. Reliable source? Go to CompUSA. Correct version? Get the latest version off the shelf. It's usually just fine for the basic or even intermediate user.
"Most windows users who even know what Linux is still don't even know how to choose what distro is best for them let alone the install procedure for even getting to screen one"
Say a user doesn't download their version of Linux, and just buys the cd's from the store? That takes out the "Most Windows users are too clueless to know how to burn a.iso to disk," argument. Thats what I did when Mandrake 8.0 came out and I was new to Linux. Installation was a breeze even back then.
As to your comment about Linux "snobs" wrongly assuming that a common Windows user wouldn't know how to install it, you really must think people are retarded these days, or just haven't attempted to install a major distribution of Linux lately. My fiancee is totally computer ignorant, and she was able to install SuSE 10.0 Linux without even having to ask me a single "Honey, what do I do now?"
Most distro's, for the exception of ones like Gentoo and Slackware are super easy. Boot off the CD. Select "Installation". Click next. The GUI setup utility takes you through the setup, and even will automatically suggest settings for you, such as disk partitioning, package selection, etc. In 45 minutes, she was done installing SuSE Linux, all of her hardware worked (hence, no need for additional drivers to install), and she had all the software she needed for day to day work. Fin.
"And yes, the cop should wait until he enters the bank and attempts to rob it. Until he does so, there is no crime."
Your logic is not only flawed, but I'm beginning to wonder if your a sympathizer for these types of people.
Let's take a hypothetical situation. Say have a 13 year old daughter. You also have an adult friend (lets say 35 year old) that hangs out with you and your daughter quite often. One day, while cleaning your house, you find a note on the floor that was addressed to your daughter from your best friend which revealed that there was a sexual relationship brewing between the two of them, and that he was going to take her virginity on such and such day. You have a piece of evidence that provides intent. Do you go to the police and tell them of this finding immediately, or wait for him to rape your daughter before you believe there has been any crime committed?
If intent can be proven that a crime would've most likely been committed, it is against the law. It's just like the most recent case of when detectives in Riverton, Kansas found out from reading several teenagers Myspace web pages that they were planning a massacre at their school. There was enough proof of intent to make an arrest. Stockpiles of weapons were found at one of the households of the teens. Only a insane person would argue against them that being charged for attempted murder.
I am so glad you are not in charge of passing legislation.
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Well there goes my purchase. I no longer believe manufacturers when they make promises on future capabilities of their hardware or software. Granted, it's probably Adobe that is causing the delay with the new Tegra platforms, but I've been burned too many times by promises of updates. While I wait for the Xoom to get flash I'll sit happy with my little T-Mobile G2 which runs Flash 10.1 like a champ.
If I can now speed with permission, how about make it so I can pay $50 and be able to drive after drinking two beers, which I am still more than capable to drive after. The whole idea is beyond stupid. It just adds to the thought that if you have the money, you can be above the law.
Seriously. 7 inches might be fine for the lap of a kindergartener, but certainly not for an adult. The tablet is already too big to fit into a pocket, so why not just make it 10" like the iPad? This is retarded from a size standpoint.
I always find that a couple pounds of thermite in a clay potting plant does a pretty good job of melting old hard drives into a glob of molten metal. Good luck recovering any data from that. It's Geek Squad proof!
Prior to coming to the company I'm at now, this exact situation happened. The IT budget was severely underfunded but the COO wanted NT4 servers, workstations, and MS Office. Being unable to purchase all of the software they needed, he essentially used pirated copies of everything. He was later summarily booted from the company on some non-related issue and went straight to the BSA. They fined my company (a small non-profit cancer research center) $200K, told us to destroy all copies of the software and uninstall them, purchase all new licenses and submit to random audits for a period of two years. Since that happened and I arrived, I had to still fight for my hardware budget, but they never argued when I brought up what I needed for software.
I suppose you've never heard of OpenXchange (http://www.open-xchange.com)? There's no reason to be binded to a Microsoft Exchange Server with it. In fact, I've used this to replace Exchange 2003 altogether. It is compatible with Outlook and supports shared calendars/tasks/etc. The best part is it's GroupWare web interface. It literally blows all of the functions of Exchange away, and costs a fraction of the price. Most importantly, it uses a open standards databasel; PostgreSQL. They also have an easy to use migration tool so that you can pick up exactly where you left off on your old Exchange server. There are a lot of Open Source solutions out there for enterprise email, and ones that have good support. The problem is that your trying to make Exchange work with non-Microsoft products, and it's never going to be seamless. Even Apple Mail doesn't give you that sort of integration, and thats made by a large company. Evolution may one day get close to being the Outlook killer. As for push email, I haven't quite found a solution for that, but I can always sync my Treo via IMAP a few times a day.
Just because it's not running Darwin does not mean that it's not based off of some of the similar if not directly linked technologies that OS X is built off of. Apple could've created their own proprietary "Darwin" for iPhone if they wanted, much how Linux was a clone of proprietary "Unix". Seeing as it's built for a small and limited device, you wouldn't have to clone all of the OS.
When Jobs refers to OS X, I assume he is talking about the system that they built on top of Darwin. To me, Darwin will be just that; Darwin. It's a BSD. There have been many interviews where Jobs has said that OS X was built on top of Darwin or Unix, so the only logical avenue of thought is that he's not stating that Darwin and the OS X are one in the same (since you CAN run a system off of Darwin alone without OS X), yet recognizes that they hold a symbiotic relationship in Apple's application of merging the two together.
I read through your entire thread on the Ubuntu Forums regarding this problem, and your main problem is that you jumped into the process of installing another totally different OS before taking the correct precautions.
The logical thing to do before installing ANY OS that you aren't familiar with is to read the main parts of the admin guides (or try a LiveCD if one exists), and check the hard drives and installation media your using PRIOR to installing the OS. That's just common sense. You wouldn't drink water out of a pond before you knew it was safe to do so, would you?
You should've also had a backup image of your hard drive prior to the installation, so that you could simply restore it if things went south. Don't whine about being unable to access your data if you didn't care enough about it to create a backup image prior to doing a potentially destructive process as installing an OS. Symantec Ghost is incredibly easy to use, and so are many other free OSS imaging utilities (dd is easy enough for a chimp) available as well. You have no excuse besides your own ignorance, which is commonly typical of users such as yourself.
This all goes down to the phrase, "Check yourself before you wreck yourself."
PS - the reason Windows "worked" on this drive even though it was bad was probably because Windows wasn't installed on that disk, and was being used as just a slave addition. I guarantee you if Windows was running off of that drive (or even it's pagefile), you would've run into some serious issues. Windows (NTFS) is commonly less graceful when it encounters bad sectors/blocks than most Linux filesystems like Ext3 or ReiserFS.
...then I hope to god that they put Irix in line with the OS capabilities of this day. I have to support a small fleet of SGI Octanes running Irix 6.5, and damned if those aren't the slowest and most aggravating machines.
I would potentially believe that security through obscurity works if so many of our servers that run the critical tasks of our Internet's infrastructure didn't run Apache or other Linux operating systems. The great thing about Open Source software is that you don't have to leave the code the same way you received it. For example, if the DoD wanted to adopt Apache to run all of their webservers, they could always modify or build an entirely new custom Apache-ish server off of the source code. In essence, that could make an exploit that would normally succeed on a standard Apache server fail on the DoD's modified model. As long as they don't turn around and resell it, it's within their rights in the GPL to modify it. That's the freedom in Open Source software. No proprietary software would allow you to do that without first paying them a metric ton of money.
Unfortunately, it's not that rare. It's insane also that people who rape children get less time than those who rape adults. There is just something particularly evil and worthy of more than when it's against a child.
I would agree that he shouldn't just get a slap on the wrist. What he did was entirely illegal and unethical. There is no doubt about that. What I am saying is that there needs to be a reassessment in the country in making the time fit the crime. There are deplorable discrepencies in the amount of prison people get for white collar crimes vs. violent crimes or crimes against children. The chasm is beyond offensive, which I think you would agree with.
Of course. Ready to be rudely awaken? Granted, these are sentences handed down from state courts, not federal.
Judge - No prison time for child rapist
Sex Offender ruled too short for Prison
Man rapes child for 10 years. Gets no prison time
Child Rapist gets 60 days in prison
And I could go on and on and on. You want to see how many years the proclaimed "Worst Child Rapists" gets? Twenty years. Not life. Twenty. fucking. years. Worst Ever Rapist gets 20 Years I do write to the senators of my state when things like this happen. I would implore those of you who live in states from these above articles to also write your representatives. I'm sure I'll be modded off-topic, but this is worth arguing over.
Time and time again I see child rapists get no more than 3 years. Sometimes first time offenders get suspended sentences with probation. Every state of course has their own sentencing rules for such acts, but you would be extremely surprised. Child rapists deserve all the negative stigma they deserve. They destroy lives, cause children to commit suicide, lead lives addled with drug addiction and sometimes as adults even facilitate the very abuse they received onto others. One count of child rape should equal one count of at least Murder 3. Even murderers these days are getting out of prison in less than 15 years. Besides, do you think that anyone is going to want to hire a man convicted of a multimillion dollar felony charge? No. He will likely carry that for the rest of his life.
As you can see, I don't sympathize with child predators as you may. You reap what you sow. Again, that is for a different debate that I am more than willing to publically have with you elsewhere.
While I hate thieves more than most, it is quite maddening and ironic that we put software pirates away for longer than we do child rapists. The courts tend to favor the rights and property of corporations over that of human lives. It's deplorable.
I'm sure that this man had sold this software at prices far below what any legitimate retailer could afford. With that being a reasonable assumption (since he sold so damn much of this software), the people he sold it to would probably have been unlikely to purchase the software at all had it not been at such a deep discount. If they would not have purchased the software otherwise, there is a net damage of almost zero to the manufacturer of the software. There is no lost supplies, real property, or investment. They did not have to do the advertising for this person's business either. If anything, the pirated software he did sell made for great PR to those software companies. The people who would've not otherwise purchased the software at regular or semi-discounted prices are probably pleased with their purchase, and will now be far more likely to buy the new improved releases of that product later on.
"How do you figure this? By checking the file timestamps? There is no fool proof way to identify such things. It depends upon the situation, but your statement that a forensics specialist could tell when a file was placed on someone's machine is patently false." Not true. Just like in other fields of forensics, you can tell when something has been modified. Therefore, even if the timestamps on the file were altered by the hacker, there are several ways they can still tell when the actual date was. There are alot more tools out there, software and hardware based, that can identify tampering.
With a good computer forensics specialist, it would not be that hard to figure out if something had been planted on his computer after he was infected by the Sub7 trojan, which was the point at which the hacker had access to his machine. It would be simple to prove if these pictures existed on his system prior to the hacking. Simply stating that something *could* have been planted does not make it truth. There have been many other cases like this where people have claimed that evidence was planted, which was easy to prove or disprove.
While I don't advocate hacking for any other purpose other than to expose threats in an ethical manner, I feel that the good that this man did to bring these pedophiles to justice cancels out the unethical act of hacking those pedophile's computers. Let us say an unethical act like hacking could be expressed in a negative number, such as -3. Let us also say that an ethical act of bringing pedophiles to justice is expressed as a postive number, say 5. You add the sums of the ethical and unethical acts, and together you get 2. The outcome of the actions, and their final sum measured says that in the end, his acts were positivly ethical, overall. Add that to the fact that he is not bound to our laws and opinions of what is right or wrong. This should be considered when forming your opinion on whether the ends justifies the means.
This is beyond truth; it's surrealism. What is the most entertaining is when I'm standing there, watching them trying to reproduce the problem, and they actually get angry that the problem is gone. It makes no sense. They are upset that their computer is not working, but become even more upset when it suddenly works again.
This is an awesome decision for not only the students who get a chance to see the power and usefulness of Linux, but for the tax payers as well. Like the Indiana school district, the institution I work at is funded largely by the government (grants mostly) and needs to make every dollar go as far as it can. I've been introducing Open Source solutions such as SLES/SLED 10, Open-Xchange, OpenOffice and the such to our staff and many are adopting it with little qualms. In fact, many of our administrative staffers appreciate the extremely intuitive advances in the Xgl/compiz UI that makes their jobs easier. OSS has saved us well over $40,000 alone in the last 3 months, as we would have had to pay for exorbant MS licenses to upgrade our Exchange Server, upgrades from Windows 2000 Server (which SLES 10 does just as good of a job or better), and not to mention the heavy costs of CALs which add up very quickly! The measly amount we pay for upgrade/update protection and support is damn near hilarious in comparison to closed source products. Our CFO is still laughing his way to the bank. I'll also be enjoying a decent future raise and a nicer budget for next fiscal year.
Like others, especially Bush supporters, I hear the following
"Unless you have something to hide, why should you be worried?"
Ok. Say a majority of Americans agreed that the NSA recording our calls, making transcripts, keeping phone records, etc. is acceptable for security. Let's see how this might draw out in the next 20 years.
Year 2010
The Government has passed legislation to require PC manufactures to install a chip on the motherboard that allows keylogging, and the data can be collected via an 802.11 adapter that transmits the information to WiFi towers througout neighborhoods, or by gathering the encrypted data directly over the internet. Americans respond, "If you have nothing to hide, why worry?"
Year 2015
The news reports that the Empire State Building was leveled with explosives planted at it's foundations by a terrorist cell. Later this year, the Goverment ratifies several amendments to the Constitution which dramatically relaxes privacy rights for Americans, and increases the broadness in which the Fed's can enact "State Secret". The Freedom of Information Act was also repealed, due to national security concerns of the Senate and administration. The Government now chooses to install camera's into every home w/ audio feeds, which the new law allows. American's respond "If you have nothing to hide, why worry?"
Year 2017
With the increasing number of people being arrested for suspected terrorist or treasonist activity and not being allowed a public trial or attorney, Bill Smith began speaking out vehemently against the governments actions. Four months later, Mr. Smith was arrested by the Government on undisclosed charges, and transported to a secret location. After 3 months of no disclosure as to Mr. Smith's arrest and confinement, family of the Smith's filed suit against the Government for information. The suit was swiftly shot down by the government as it enacted "state secret" saying that due to National Security, it would not grant the court or the defendants attorney's the security clearance to investigate. The Dept. of Justice dismissed all charges against the Government. No other further comments by the Government have been made.
Year 2030
The Smith family receive a letter from the Government stating that Bill Smith died in prison of natural causes. Due to National Security, the body would not be released to the family, nor would the details of the Governments charges against it. Another lawsuit is launched by the Smith family, which is quickly shot down in the same manner as their last lawsuit for their previous suit.
Folks, this could happen. The slippery slope is real, especially when it comes to Government power. I leave you with a previously mentioned quote by Ben Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
In OSS only distro's, it's true you won't get proprietary codecs such as WMV, Real, or in some cases MP3. This really isn't the distro's fault per-se, because in order to include these features the distro maker must obtain licenses to use these proprietary formats. However, if you got a commercial version of SuSE 10 Linux, all those codecs, Flash, Java, would've been installed by default. As far as media players that are half as good as the ones in Linux, there is XMMS (a literal clone of WinAmp - which is a great media player), Kaffiene, VLC (which is so friggen awesome that I couldn't even explain it all here), or Beep-Media Player. Most of those media players are installed by default as well to, if you select "Multimedia Applications" during the install. The only time that things are hard to install are when your compiling them from source. Installing anything from an RPM is as easy as installing something in Windows.
For those OpenSource only distro's, like OpenSuSE, it's a little more of a hassle to add those proprietary add-ons. You have to add several different 3rd party internet repositories that have those software packages, and then do a simple search in Software Management (at least for SuSE. Synaptic for those Ubuntu users) for java, flash, and codecs. You'll easily find what you need there.
Most reputable computer stores carry several different distro's of Linux. CompUSA for instance sells Linspire and SuSE 10. If you read the boxes, Linspire touts ease of use for their distro. SuSE advertises it's scalability and large repository of software, to include ease of use. Assuming that a customer cannot research simple things such as basic functionality is really underestimating the ability of even the most novice Windows user. I think you should give people more credit than that.
Oh, how did she determine she wanted to use SuSE? How did she get the install?
My fiancee chose SuSE because she knows I run it on my computer, and like it. She's doing her Master's, so having free software to get her daily work done was beneficial to her. Simple reasons, really. Most of the largest Linux distro's are pretty much the same, except for under-the-hood features and configuration capabilities (such as the YaST management tool for SuSE). I could probably install Knoppix on her computer tonight before she got home, and she wouldn't even notice the difference.
Or if you decide to continue to think that just every windows user off the street can just get up and choose a Linux distro, get the correct version from a reliable source and install it easier than they do with Windows you keep thinking that
Like I said, SuSE Linux was by far easier to install than Windows. She didn't even have to install drivers, not even for her wireless card. It "Just Worked". How much easier can you get? Saying that Linux in general is hard to install is disregarding all the easy to use distro's out there. Reliable source? Go to CompUSA. Correct version? Get the latest version off the shelf. It's usually just fine for the basic or even intermediate user.
"Most windows users who even know what Linux is still don't even know how to choose what distro is best for them let alone the install procedure for even getting to screen one"
.iso to disk," argument. Thats what I did when Mandrake 8.0 came out and I was new to Linux. Installation was a breeze even back then.
Say a user doesn't download their version of Linux, and just buys the cd's from the store? That takes out the "Most Windows users are too clueless to know how to burn a
As to your comment about Linux "snobs" wrongly assuming that a common Windows user wouldn't know how to install it, you really must think people are retarded these days, or just haven't attempted to install a major distribution of Linux lately. My fiancee is totally computer ignorant, and she was able to install SuSE 10.0 Linux without even having to ask me a single "Honey, what do I do now?"
Most distro's, for the exception of ones like Gentoo and Slackware are super easy. Boot off the CD. Select "Installation". Click next. The GUI setup utility takes you through the setup, and even will automatically suggest settings for you, such as disk partitioning, package selection, etc. In 45 minutes, she was done installing SuSE Linux, all of her hardware worked (hence, no need for additional drivers to install), and she had all the software she needed for day to day work. Fin.
Let's take a hypothetical situation. Say have a 13 year old daughter. You also have an adult friend (lets say 35 year old) that hangs out with you and your daughter quite often. One day, while cleaning your house, you find a note on the floor that was addressed to your daughter from your best friend which revealed that there was a sexual relationship brewing between the two of them, and that he was going to take her virginity on such and such day. You have a piece of evidence that provides intent. Do you go to the police and tell them of this finding immediately, or wait for him to rape your daughter before you believe there has been any crime committed?
If intent can be proven that a crime would've most likely been committed, it is against the law. It's just like the most recent case of when detectives in Riverton, Kansas found out from reading several teenagers Myspace web pages that they were planning a massacre at their school. There was enough proof of intent to make an arrest. Stockpiles of weapons were found at one of the households of the teens. Only a insane person would argue against them that being charged for attempted murder.
I am so glad you are not in charge of passing legislation.