I just wanted to point out that there are several FUSE-based filesystem implementations that do the same thing (functionally, not implementation-wise) and they do not require hooks in the device drivers -- they don't even care what the filesystem is for the original or the backup.
And, yes, RAID is a very good solution if you've got the money and are smart enough to recognize when a disk fails...
And those out there that own one too can back me up on this:
Dell not promoting Linux to run on their machines is a net positive. Not that Linux won't run on them, it's just that most of the hardware is really bad stuff. You can't polish a Dell turd by sticking Linux/MacOSX/*BSD on it.
The "DRM" (Fair-Use Circumvention Kit) features the MPAA would like to see in the player are not legal everywhere, and where they are, turning them off frequently is not illegal. Further, it's a widely held belief that one day the consumer or the powers that be might realize that people are getting the proverbial shaft and ultimately take a more sensible tack that obviates (or at least, no longer mandates) the need for such measures.
Samsung is simply building a player where the anti-consumer features can be made as consumer-friendly (or hostile) as the prevailing market conditions permit. This saves them effort of hardwiring different rules and functionality for each and every market or whenever there's been changes to local laws or customs.
Lets face it -- a minority have the player, and there's no tangible effect on the MPAA, since professional pirates wouldn't use a player like this to make bootlegs; heck, most amateur pirates would just as well rip the DVD.
You'd approach the voting booth and type in a some phrase that would be used to calculate a signature for your ballot, which is assigned a pseudo-random id. You get a copy of your ballot and the identifying marks for your votes.
After the election, you could download (or search online) the official vote. If the ballot doesn't match yours, or doesn't appear, there's a problem. If there are a statistically significant number of "problems", then something's fishy. The integrity of an election could be measured by taking a random sample of people and verifying their ballots (or even asking EVERYONE to do so in a certain area). The results of the election would be a matter of public record and verifiable.
It wouldn't immediately catch votes for which there was no corresponding voter (that would take another validation mechanism), but it seems simple enough that the absence of even a simple scheme like that would be grounds for suspicion.
I'm not saying Clint Curtis is to be believed, I'm just saying that without any evidence to the contrary (and in light of some of the strange things that have happened in that case), one can't be to sure what the truth is. You'd expect someone to at least that receipts aren't a bad idea.
You're thinking of an entirely different kind of rotary engine that uses pistons and spins the engine block around a stationary shaft. That type of engine is pretty rare these days (I actually don't know of any modern use), but, as you say it was common on various types of planes in the 1910's and 1920's because it had a better power-to-mass compared to other engines available at the time.
This is actually funny because I had mentioned some time back, on Slashdot, I think, that I'd really like to see a RENESIS-based hybrid engine developed. Now, here we go.
This is probably a software issue more than anything else. Did you try a different OS on it?
We've got two older laptops at home, a 1GHz (700MHz when on battery) P3-based Dell Inspiron w/ 384M RAM and a 2GHz Celeron-based Compaq w/ 512M RAM. The P3-based Dell running Mandriva Linux runs rings around the 2GHz Celeron with XP. I suspect it's both the OS, and the stuff that runs in the background under XP (particularly NAV).
In that case, the Mac is probably nicer more because of the performance offered by the OS than differences in the hardware. I bet if you tried the same OS (compiled for different processors) on both machines, you'd find them pretty close to on-par.
You can't "own" software, even if you do code it yourself. It's not property. You may hold a copyright for the software, but that's much different. The software you write (or Microsoft writes) belongs to the public at large, it's just that you (or they) as the creator is granted a temporary exclusive and transferable license to it by the government.
As far as hacking OS/X -- like it or not, doing so is a felony in the US until a court has ruled the DMCA unconstitutional. To tempt fate is to risk a financial death sentence... The cost of taking such an issue all the way to the SCOTUS is prohibitive for all but a very few.
Queen Margarethe did not issue a statement "we need to show our opposition to Islam." The closest thing was a statement saying "we need to show our opposition to radical Islam and religious fundamentalism that endorses violence." Actually, it was considerably more eloquent than that, but I'm not much of a translator and Danish is my 4th language.
From the standpoint of the Danes, Islam itself, until recently, had never been perceived specifically as a threat.
The Danish right had long rallied against Denmark's highly liberal immigration laws and social programs, in part because the porous borders were permitting a lot of opportunism -- originally for southern Europeans, but more recently for people from the middle east.
Denmark's not much different than the rest of the world where a tautological marginalization and systematic disenfranchisement of Muslims is occurring. I think it's intentional, not on the part of the west, or on the part of Muslims in general, but on the part of a faction of Muslims specifically looking to overtake the majority and establish themselves as a ruling class.
Fascism is not a hard drug to sell. Better still if you can sell it to your neighbors (the USA, for example, is a much more fertile ground for fascist rhetoric than it once was; it's even mainstream "neoconservatism" in some places).
Somebody is poor. They move somewhere where they don't speak the language, nor understand the culture, nor how to deal with the bureaucracy. They are told by people they trust, people that understand them and speak their language, that they aren't accepted, that their new neighbors disrespect their beliefs, that they should not associate -- Some of it sticks, some of it doesn't, but plant the seed and fertilize it with the natural confusion and frustration and draw focus to support the thesis that they are downtrodden or pariahs persecuted for their worldview and - BANG! True or untrue you've got yourself a sympathetic person. And you work your way from there.
This is where it becomes a tautology. The perception leads to behavior that produces backlash that reinforces the perception which redoubles the behavior which redoubles the backlash... ad infinitum. Generally, such a situation would peak then wane, but in this instance there are a number of parties that very actively pump energy into keeping the feedback loop in place.
Islam is merely being used as a means to an end here. For those in the islamo-fascist end of the loop, the rallying point is jihad (which a conflict with "the west" cannot be since jihad is a holy conflict with infidel, which, by definition must first be Muslim; nor can non-believers blaspheme). For those in the occidento-fascist end of the loop, it's the "global war on extremism" and all the nastiness that one could justify with that tag-line.
Yet for the majority of us (both east and west), it's just irrational people doing dangerous and irrational stuff that we'd just as well assume they do somewhere far away from us. Count us out guys. Do as you will, but try not to make too much of a mess because we meek peaceful-types stand to inherit the place one you're all gone (your various religions agree on that point, don't you know).
Re:Yes, 'cuz that's what teenaged music fans want.
on
Songbird Flies Today
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· Score: 1
I'd point out that the number of people writing extensions for FireFox is pretty big. The issue there is that many of them are not very generic. I know several companies that use such extensions internally for all sorts of things.
Sorry, where I live, it's Verizon with the fiber. Of course, it's only where they have fiber they are offering the service, so the same logic stands (it also stands for other companies doing the same thing in other markets).
As far as I can tell, they're the only player lighting up the last mile, and the majority of their video bandwidth will be on segments wholly devoted to their own network. I regularly use 50Mb/sec, but since it's withing my house and on my LAN, I don't think anybody has a right to complain.
I'd like to say that more of the laid fiber is lit, but most of it is just plain dark. So long as we're only using a small fraction of the capacity of the medium already in place, what does it matter how much they use? They pay for it, they light it up, they can use it. If there's more demand, light up some more fiber.
My finances are not very complex, but apparently enough that I'm relegated to the long-form return. I've got to search various forms for fields labelled with numbers to copy out numbers and add them together, copy those to other numbered fields into another form, add them together, altogether having to read an instruction for each field that often reads: "refer to IRS document X to see if this applies to you", or "complete worksheet X and if you get a number between -100 and 325, ignore this line". PLEASE, GOD, WHY?!?!
In my wife's home country, all taxes are collected at whatever transaction takes place. At the end of the year, you get a receipt to review. If everything seems in order, you are all set.
Personally, I'd like to see the entire body of personal tax law reduced to 2 pages. If you can't fit it in 2 standard-size pages in 10-pt type, you can't tax it. Further, taxes should be collected at transaction time (payment, sell investment), and the rate ought to be flat and without deductions. Do that, and Gates taxes would look like this:
But, whether the wiretaps are legal or not isn't relevent to the complaint. Assuming the wiretaps are relevent, providing access to the consumer information in AT&T's database would still violate a number of laws still on the books. This is actually a good complaint specifically because it's a peculiar case whereby it strikes at a place where the government hasn't actually asserted any authority.
However, I would guess that the prize for the EFF is not in wining the case, but what they may find in discovery.
For what it's worth, if the film had been encrypted using CSS (like a normal CD), then the DMCA applies. If the DMCA applies, the act was criminal (copyright infringement is a tort, while a DMCA violation is a crime).
In this sense, the copyright owner need not complain at all. Anyone may report the crime to law enforcement (it being a federal law, that would probably be the FBI), and it is their duty to investigate and then prosecute if the evidence supports it.
Nothing in copyright law nor the DMCA implies that profit need be a motive or that the copyright holder was financially harmed by the act. Look it up.
While it is certainly true that there's a lack of feedback between clinic and lab, there are reasons.
First off, confidentiality regulations make the exchange of useful data a complex task. It requires careful planning, auditing for compliance, and some very special arrangements on how it's handled. Compliance makes it not for the faint of heart (or faint of wallet).
But the article misses the greater point: namely that basic and fundamental research on the etiology of disease is difficult and expensive (especially when people are involved). Basic research is necessary for everyone, but impractical for companies (in and of itself, it's not going to get you a product). Dropping public funding for basic research coupled by rules that allows publicly funded researchers and institutions to patent or commercially exploit findings rather than disseminate them has more or less gutted the last bastion of basic research: academia and non-profits.
You need money to do research, you don't get money for basic stuff anymore, you need something that will draw an investor. So, you skip on to another interesting project that might bring companies a-knockin'.
About the time I got out of graduate school, the commercialization of academic research was really starting to take hold. It took only a few years to effectively bury anything that might look like basic research for the good of all.
High treason is quite explicitly attempting to forcibly overthrow the government. While that might be the effect of the Bush administration, it would be very difficult to prove it as the aim (after all, they have much of the support of the people).
However, the way the system currently operates is that things do not come under scrutiny until a complaint is made unless there is specific oversight. In this particular instance, the administration explicitly did a run-around the oversight, got the justice department to support them, and congress has dragged its feet on the matter (namely, "democrats" are pissed but ineffectual, and "republicans" either blindly support Bush or want to try and handle things in a cordial manner out of the public eye to save face for the party with which their careers are connected).
So, what option is there if Americans are collectively affected by dubious shenanigans of government and their legislative representatives don't do anything? They sue. It forces the issue into the judicial branch (which can simply dismiss it, but at least it gets an airing).
I don't know which is more shameful, the sorry state of government today, or that so few people think there's a problem. It's sad.
... develop a path of least resistance (highest bandwidth) protocol on top of the existing protocols. If users want content, providers want to provide it, and carriers want to screw with it, simply route traffic through the fattest pipes and peer-to-peer to maintain (or improve) the bandwidth.
The fourth ammendment is generally read to concern one's privacy with regard to government intrusion. In this context, the intruder is a private corporation, and thus the 4th ammendment wouldn't explicitly apply.
For that reason, we have a wide array of law with regards to tresspass, publication of personal records of various sorts, etc. It just so happens that cell phone records are not yet covered. That said, the described activity cited as "pretexting" is probably illegal since it involves a fraudulent transaction (if you had an arrangement with your carrier to keep the information private, and a thrid-party was subverting that arrangment by pretending to be you).
While they marketed it as "Surge" in the US, Coca-cola's soft-drink was marketed (and trademarked) as "Urge" throughout the rest of the non-English speaking world -- where it's still relatively popular.
This is a strange new idea, instead of following the law you instead try to gain political power and change the laws. I know there are a few people out there that actually can convince themselves that they are not stealing, but I doubt they could get 4% of a country to feel the same way.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
Well, you see, Sweden is a democratic nation. So, this may seem strange to you, but the way it works is that if you think a law is bad you collect a group of like minded individuals and convince others to vote so as to change the law. Bizarre, but true.
Stranger yet is "intellectual property"... even in the US, where there's no such thing, there are "intellectual property" lawyers. Why? Because there's a well funded lobby trying to get property laws applied to things that aren't property (like copyrights and patents). A lot of people in the US would probably tell you making a bootleg of a CD is stealing, but of course, according to US law, it isn't stealing at all -- and they want this changed. However, the media lobby, like the pirates, is afforded the opportunity to influence others to change the law.
The UK is where this whole thing becomes the most comical. It's where copyright first originated in the 18th century as a reaction to the monopoly on publication held by the printer's guilds (originally chartered to censor seditious protestant texts). The Statute of Anne brought forth modern copyright that granted rights to authors and limited the duration (previously, guild members had perpetual rights to works). Yet, today, various media companies are -- somewhat successfully -- lobbying to eliminate this tradition and return to the 16th century system (media companies are the guilds, copyright terms extended every few years until effectively perpetual, collusion with electronics manufacturers to lock up content, limit access, transfer rights away from the original authors, etc.).
While the piratspartiets position might strike people as regressive, they are certainly (from a historical perspective) more progressive than their commercial contrarian counterparts. Lang liv til folkspiratspartiet!
LILO is still actively developed and handles things like RAID disks and special hardware much better than GRUB (which is why it still ships with all the various distributions).
You'll note that GRUB and LILO both have this feature. From the LILO documentation, for example:
/sbin/lilo {-u|-U} - uninstall LILO boot loader
... grub is quite similar. At the GRUB prompt, type:
grub> uninstall
... of course, if you are installing a new OS from scratch, this would do it too:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
Of course, you could have figured that out from searching the documentation or *HORROR* using Google to look for it, so I assume you knew all that to begin with and are just troll baiting...
There should be absolutely no reason that a user should need to sudo to change permissions, copy an move files, etc. That's something that should be done explicitly by the systes administrator.
We're currently setting up a Beowulf cluster and my job is to manage the queues, setup the resource management, and tune the scheduler to optimize the performace.
I've never seen a situation where anyone has needed to change ownership of a file except for where someone departs. De rigeur, you put in a request to the admin to chmod all files under that user id to g+r and directories g+rx. That's it. Anyone in the person's department can then copy out whatever they need.
Install software? We simply provide the software with instructions, and a log of installation on another machine -- or a binary RPM -- to the admin wit a request to install it. It's not like we install applications every day. This is doubly important in a Beowulf cluster since you need to sync the software amongst the compute nodes.
No, if you find yourself wanting root access for such things, then you are doing something seriously wrong.
Re:Time For Apple To Release The Cocoa Runtime
on
Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 2, Informative
In many industries, this is the preferred method. I know our company increasingly is offered (and purchases) laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and curated databases with various front-ends that are Java apps.
Comment as you will, they have actually proven to perfom exceptionally well and been quite resilient and easy to install across a variety of platforms (like most in our industry, we have a combination of Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux desktops with Solaris, Irix, and HP/UX servers).
For things like Linux, the ability to treat jar-files as native executables (using the binfmt-misc mechanism) makes it dead-simple to deploy apps.
This is not entirely unique to Java..Net holds some promise here. It won't be useful in our industry until it's well-supported outside Windows, but I imagine that there's other industries that still have less heterogeneous environments...
I whole-heartedly favor cross-platform VMs to whatever extent they are appropriate and I really don't buy the "jarring difference in appearance" argument. Clipboard interoperability, maybe; hosting native media widgets, sure, but button textures? Dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
I just wanted to point out that there are several FUSE-based filesystem implementations that do the same thing (functionally, not implementation-wise) and they do not require hooks in the device drivers -- they don't even care what the filesystem is for the original or the backup.
And, yes, RAID is a very good solution if you've got the money and are smart enough to recognize when a disk fails...
Not illegal so much as actionable -- presuming you don't have license to the content.
Quite a bit of BitTorrent traffic is non-infringing transfer of copyrighted material (Linux distro RPMs, datasets, demo software, etc.).
And those out there that own one too can back me up on this:
Dell not promoting Linux to run on their machines is a net positive. Not that Linux won't run on them, it's just that most of the hardware is really bad stuff. You can't polish a Dell turd by sticking Linux/MacOSX/*BSD on it.
The "DRM" (Fair-Use Circumvention Kit) features the MPAA would like to see in the player are not legal everywhere, and where they are, turning them off frequently is not illegal. Further, it's a widely held belief that one day the consumer or the powers that be might realize that people are getting the proverbial shaft and ultimately take a more sensible tack that obviates (or at least, no longer mandates) the need for such measures.
Samsung is simply building a player where the anti-consumer features can be made as consumer-friendly (or hostile) as the prevailing market conditions permit. This saves them effort of hardwiring different rules and functionality for each and every market or whenever there's been changes to local laws or customs.
Lets face it -- a minority have the player, and there's no tangible effect on the MPAA, since professional pirates wouldn't use a player like this to make bootlegs; heck, most amateur pirates would just as well rip the DVD.
You'd approach the voting booth and type in a some phrase that would be used to calculate a signature for your ballot, which is assigned a pseudo-random id. You get a copy of your ballot and the identifying marks for your votes.
After the election, you could download (or search online) the official vote. If the ballot doesn't match yours, or doesn't appear, there's a problem. If there are a statistically significant number of "problems", then something's fishy. The integrity of an election could be measured by taking a random sample of people and verifying their ballots (or even asking EVERYONE to do so in a certain area). The results of the election would be a matter of public record and verifiable.
It wouldn't immediately catch votes for which there was no corresponding voter (that would take another validation mechanism), but it seems simple enough that the absence of even a simple scheme like that would be grounds for suspicion.
I'm not saying Clint Curtis is to be believed, I'm just saying that without any evidence to the contrary (and in light of some of the strange things that have happened in that case), one can't be to sure what the truth is. You'd expect someone to at least that receipts aren't a bad idea.
Incorrect. The Mazda RENESIS rotary engine is an improved Wankel rotary engine, a form of pistonless engine without a crankshaft.
You're thinking of an entirely different kind of rotary engine that uses pistons and spins the engine block around a stationary shaft. That type of engine is pretty rare these days (I actually don't know of any modern use), but, as you say it was common on various types of planes in the 1910's and 1920's because it had a better power-to-mass compared to other engines available at the time.
This is actually funny because I had mentioned some time back, on Slashdot, I think, that I'd really like to see a RENESIS-based hybrid engine developed. Now, here we go.
This is probably a software issue more than anything else. Did you try a different OS on it?
We've got two older laptops at home, a 1GHz (700MHz when on battery) P3-based Dell Inspiron w/ 384M RAM and a 2GHz Celeron-based Compaq w/ 512M RAM. The P3-based Dell running Mandriva Linux runs rings around the 2GHz Celeron with XP. I suspect it's both the OS, and the stuff that runs in the background under XP (particularly NAV).
In that case, the Mac is probably nicer more because of the performance offered by the OS than differences in the hardware. I bet if you tried the same OS (compiled for different processors) on both machines, you'd find them pretty close to on-par.
You can't "own" software, even if you do code it yourself. It's not property. You may hold a copyright for the software, but that's much different. The software you write (or Microsoft writes) belongs to the public at large, it's just that you (or they) as the creator is granted a temporary exclusive and transferable license to it by the government.
As far as hacking OS/X -- like it or not, doing so is a felony in the US until a court has ruled the DMCA unconstitutional. To tempt fate is to risk a financial death sentence... The cost of taking such an issue all the way to the SCOTUS is prohibitive for all but a very few.
Queen Margarethe did not issue a statement "we need to show our opposition to Islam." The closest thing was a statement saying "we need to show our opposition to radical Islam and religious fundamentalism that endorses violence." Actually, it was considerably more eloquent than that, but I'm not much of a translator and Danish is my 4th language.
From the standpoint of the Danes, Islam itself, until recently, had never been perceived specifically as a threat.
The Danish right had long rallied against Denmark's highly liberal immigration laws and social programs, in part because the porous borders were permitting a lot of opportunism -- originally for southern Europeans, but more recently for people from the middle east.
Denmark's not much different than the rest of the world where a tautological marginalization and systematic disenfranchisement of Muslims is occurring. I think it's intentional, not on the part of the west, or on the part of Muslims in general, but on the part of a faction of Muslims specifically looking to overtake the majority and establish themselves as a ruling class.
Fascism is not a hard drug to sell. Better still if you can sell it to your neighbors (the USA, for example, is a much more fertile ground for fascist rhetoric than it once was; it's even mainstream "neoconservatism" in some places).
Somebody is poor. They move somewhere where they don't speak the language, nor understand the culture, nor how to deal with the bureaucracy. They are told by people they trust, people that understand them and speak their language, that they aren't accepted, that their new neighbors disrespect their beliefs, that they should not associate -- Some of it sticks, some of it doesn't, but plant the seed and fertilize it with the natural confusion and frustration and draw focus to support the thesis that they are downtrodden or pariahs persecuted for their worldview and - BANG! True or untrue you've got yourself a sympathetic person. And you work your way from there.
This is where it becomes a tautology. The perception leads to behavior that produces backlash that reinforces the perception which redoubles the behavior which redoubles the backlash... ad infinitum. Generally, such a situation would peak then wane, but in this instance there are a number of parties that very actively pump energy into keeping the feedback loop in place.
Islam is merely being used as a means to an end here. For those in the islamo-fascist end of the loop, the rallying point is jihad (which a conflict with "the west" cannot be since jihad is a holy conflict with infidel, which, by definition must first be Muslim; nor can non-believers blaspheme). For those in the occidento-fascist end of the loop, it's the "global war on extremism" and all the nastiness that one could justify with that tag-line.
Yet for the majority of us (both east and west), it's just irrational people doing dangerous and irrational stuff that we'd just as well assume they do somewhere far away from us. Count us out guys. Do as you will, but try not to make too much of a mess because we meek peaceful-types stand to inherit the place one you're all gone (your various religions agree on that point, don't you know).
I'd point out that the number of people writing extensions for FireFox is pretty big. The issue there is that many of them are not very generic. I know several companies that use such extensions internally for all sorts of things.
Sorry, where I live, it's Verizon with the fiber. Of course, it's only where they have fiber they are offering the service, so the same logic stands (it also stands for other companies doing the same thing in other markets).
As far as I can tell, they're the only player lighting up the last mile, and the majority of their video bandwidth will be on segments wholly devoted to their own network. I regularly use 50Mb/sec, but since it's withing my house and on my LAN, I don't think anybody has a right to complain.
I'd like to say that more of the laid fiber is lit, but most of it is just plain dark. So long as we're only using a small fraction of the capacity of the medium already in place, what does it matter how much they use? They pay for it, they light it up, they can use it. If there's more demand, light up some more fiber.
My finances are not very complex, but apparently enough that I'm relegated to the long-form return. I've got to search various forms for fields labelled with numbers to copy out numbers and add them together, copy those to other numbered fields into another form, add them together, altogether having to read an instruction for each field that often reads: "refer to IRS document X to see if this applies to you", or "complete worksheet X and if you get a number between -100 and 325, ignore this line". PLEASE, GOD, WHY?!?!
In my wife's home country, all taxes are collected at whatever transaction takes place. At the end of the year, you get a receipt to review. If everything seems in order, you are all set.
Personally, I'd like to see the entire body of personal tax law reduced to 2 pages. If you can't fit it in 2 standard-size pages in 10-pt type, you can't tax it. Further, taxes should be collected at transaction time (payment, sell investment), and the rate ought to be flat and without deductions. Do that, and Gates taxes would look like this:
But, whether the wiretaps are legal or not isn't relevent to the complaint. Assuming the wiretaps are relevent, providing access to the consumer information in AT&T's database would still violate a number of laws still on the books. This is actually a good complaint specifically because it's a peculiar case whereby it strikes at a place where the government hasn't actually asserted any authority.
However, I would guess that the prize for the EFF is not in wining the case, but what they may find in discovery.
For what it's worth, if the film had been encrypted using CSS (like a normal CD), then the DMCA applies. If the DMCA applies, the act was criminal (copyright infringement is a tort, while a DMCA violation is a crime).
In this sense, the copyright owner need not complain at all. Anyone may report the crime to law enforcement (it being a federal law, that would probably be the FBI), and it is their duty to investigate and then prosecute if the evidence supports it.
Nothing in copyright law nor the DMCA implies that profit need be a motive or that the copyright holder was financially harmed by the act. Look it up.
While it is certainly true that there's a lack of feedback between clinic and lab, there are reasons.
First off, confidentiality regulations make the exchange of useful data a complex task. It requires careful planning, auditing for compliance, and some very special arrangements on how it's handled. Compliance makes it not for the faint of heart (or faint of wallet).
But the article misses the greater point: namely that basic and fundamental research on the etiology of disease is difficult and expensive (especially when people are involved). Basic research is necessary for everyone, but impractical for companies (in and of itself, it's not going to get you a product). Dropping public funding for basic research coupled by rules that allows publicly funded researchers and institutions to patent or commercially exploit findings rather than disseminate them has more or less gutted the last bastion of basic research: academia and non-profits.
You need money to do research, you don't get money for basic stuff anymore, you need something that will draw an investor. So, you skip on to another interesting project that might bring companies a-knockin'.
About the time I got out of graduate school, the commercialization of academic research was really starting to take hold. It took only a few years to effectively bury anything that might look like basic research for the good of all.
High treason is quite explicitly attempting to forcibly overthrow the government. While that might be the effect of the Bush administration, it would be very difficult to prove it as the aim (after all, they have much of the support of the people).
However, the way the system currently operates is that things do not come under scrutiny until a complaint is made unless there is specific oversight. In this particular instance, the administration explicitly did a run-around the oversight, got the justice department to support them, and congress has dragged its feet on the matter (namely, "democrats" are pissed but ineffectual, and "republicans" either blindly support Bush or want to try and handle things in a cordial manner out of the public eye to save face for the party with which their careers are connected).
So, what option is there if Americans are collectively affected by dubious shenanigans of government and their legislative representatives don't do anything? They sue. It forces the issue into the judicial branch (which can simply dismiss it, but at least it gets an airing).
I don't know which is more shameful, the sorry state of government today, or that so few people think there's a problem. It's sad.
... develop a path of least resistance (highest bandwidth) protocol on top of the existing protocols. If users want content, providers want to provide it, and carriers want to screw with it, simply route traffic through the fattest pipes and peer-to-peer to maintain (or improve) the bandwidth.
The fourth ammendment is generally read to concern one's privacy with regard to government intrusion. In this context, the intruder is a private corporation, and thus the 4th ammendment wouldn't explicitly apply.
For that reason, we have a wide array of law with regards to tresspass, publication of personal records of various sorts, etc. It just so happens that cell phone records are not yet covered. That said, the described activity cited as "pretexting" is probably illegal since it involves a fraudulent transaction (if you had an arrangement with your carrier to keep the information private, and a thrid-party was subverting that arrangment by pretending to be you).
While they marketed it as "Surge" in the US, Coca-cola's soft-drink was marketed (and trademarked) as "Urge" throughout the rest of the non-English speaking world -- where it's still relatively popular.
Well, you see, Sweden is a democratic nation. So, this may seem strange to you, but the way it works is that if you think a law is bad you collect a group of like minded individuals and convince others to vote so as to change the law. Bizarre, but true.
Stranger yet is "intellectual property"... even in the US, where there's no such thing, there are "intellectual property" lawyers. Why? Because there's a well funded lobby trying to get property laws applied to things that aren't property (like copyrights and patents). A lot of people in the US would probably tell you making a bootleg of a CD is stealing, but of course, according to US law, it isn't stealing at all -- and they want this changed. However, the media lobby, like the pirates, is afforded the opportunity to influence others to change the law.
The UK is where this whole thing becomes the most comical. It's where copyright first originated in the 18th century as a reaction to the monopoly on publication held by the printer's guilds (originally chartered to censor seditious protestant texts). The Statute of Anne brought forth modern copyright that granted rights to authors and limited the duration (previously, guild members had perpetual rights to works). Yet, today, various media companies are -- somewhat successfully -- lobbying to eliminate this tradition and return to the 16th century system (media companies are the guilds, copyright terms extended every few years until effectively perpetual, collusion with electronics manufacturers to lock up content, limit access, transfer rights away from the original authors, etc.).
While the piratspartiets position might strike people as regressive, they are certainly (from a historical perspective) more progressive than their commercial contrarian counterparts. Lang liv til folkspiratspartiet!
LILO is still actively developed and handles things like RAID disks and special hardware much better than GRUB (which is why it still ships with all the various distributions).
You'll note that GRUB and LILO both have this feature. From the LILO documentation, for example:
... of course, if you are installing a new OS from scratch, this would do it too:
Of course, you could have figured that out from searching the documentation or *HORROR* using Google to look for it, so I assume you knew all that to begin with and are just troll baiting...
There should be absolutely no reason that a user should need to sudo to change permissions, copy an move files, etc. That's something that should be done explicitly by the systes administrator.
We're currently setting up a Beowulf cluster and my job is to manage the queues, setup the resource management, and tune the scheduler to optimize the performace.
I've never seen a situation where anyone has needed to change ownership of a file except for where someone departs. De rigeur, you put in a request to the admin to chmod all files under that user id to g+r and directories g+rx. That's it. Anyone in the person's department can then copy out whatever they need.
Install software? We simply provide the software with instructions, and a log of installation on another machine -- or a binary RPM -- to the admin wit a request to install it. It's not like we install applications every day. This is doubly important in a Beowulf cluster since you need to sync the software amongst the compute nodes.
No, if you find yourself wanting root access for such things, then you are doing something seriously wrong.
In many industries, this is the preferred method. I know our company increasingly is offered (and purchases) laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and curated databases with various front-ends that are Java apps.
.Net holds some promise here. It won't be useful in our industry until it's well-supported outside Windows, but I imagine that there's other industries that still have less heterogeneous environments...
Comment as you will, they have actually proven to perfom exceptionally well and been quite resilient and easy to install across a variety of platforms (like most in our industry, we have a combination of Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux desktops with Solaris, Irix, and HP/UX servers).
For things like Linux, the ability to treat jar-files as native executables (using the binfmt-misc mechanism) makes it dead-simple to deploy apps.
This is not entirely unique to Java.
I whole-heartedly favor cross-platform VMs to whatever extent they are appropriate and I really don't buy the "jarring difference in appearance" argument. Clipboard interoperability, maybe; hosting native media widgets, sure, but button textures? Dumb.