1) Everyone will. Because you won't be buying it from Joe Schmoe, but from companies like Dell or Gateway, or from places like Red Hat (when the PC maker outsources it's OS development)
2)It will happen... whenever a windows developer wants to know how it really works under the hood, or feels it is better to fix the OS then to make the code work around the OS.
3) Standards will form. MS may champion the standards, but they will have to comply with places like Gateway and Dell. If they try to hijack the standard they risk open rebellion from the PC makers. Customers will be hesitant to buy something they can get for free, so software that depends on non-open standards risk failure.
The UCITA gives you the oportunity to return software that you don't like the license agreement for. So go into your local Best Buy (which has a no-return policy on opened software), buy something, open it up, and return it to Best Buy demanding a full refund. Get lots of your friends to do it too.
Target a particular company, say microsoft, to purchase things for. Have a specific complaint about the license agreement. (like demanding arbitration only or allowing the company to remotely disable the software.) It is far less effective if you target non-noxious EULAs. (Like the old Borland "like a book" license.)
It's legal. It will piss of Best Buy, and it will send a message.
Furthermore to make things really interesting insert a piece of paper into each package you return that looks like it came with the software but really didn't. Write on it "You have just purchased a used piece of software. I hope you didn't buy this as new.".
Then you can turn around and sue the chain for selling used merchandise as new merchandise.
But if you wanted to have political influence, it could happen. First of all get some organization like EFF to generate voting guides. This is the first critical step. It would focus on a small number of issues that we can agree on instead of all the issues. (Do you really think all of geekhood would agree on things like defense spending?)
In the infancy stages you will just get campaign workers answering questions. But after a few elections, if you can show that a large number of people read the guides, you will get more and more direct access to politicians.
A key, and overlooked, area will be getting responses from prospective judges. They have surprising control over what goes on, and they are rarely scrutinized by the press in areas "we" care the most about.
The next step is to collect money. Money that will go directly to supporting or harming politicians that are for or against your causes. When you start pulling in millions that serve to help candidates who espouse and vote for your platform, you will get candidates altering their views to get the money.
The real power comes when (surprise) a candidate is or is not elected because of how they respond to the questions and the group's interest.
Then you have what you wanted. Why don't we have it now? It requires lots and lots of hard, unpaid work... that is far less rewarding than most open source development.
That doesn't quite follow. Just because a search engine like Yahoo points to a blocked site, it doesn't enable the user to bypass the block. (Then again, Google's cacheing might.) The article does provide information on how to access a blocked site. So by extension, the article is blocked for everything because it allows for access to everything.
I am just trying to think like them.
The same argument does not apply to criticism. If, for example, you removed all pieces of the article relating to bypassing the security, and this was also blocked, then you would have a stronger suit for libel. I think.
Mattel's defense could be that while the site does not contain any of the things listed, the site could be used to access information that is in this category.
This is not to say that they would win a suit, but one should have a good counter arguement to it before you go to court.
Maybe if everyone who is blocked filed a small claims court action against Mattel they could bog them down?
Take them to small claims court. Nothing fancy, just ask for 3x the ISP fees you paid them, and a court order to reverse their stance. Make the ISP _Prove_ that you have done something wrong. Bring proof that you haven't.
Oh, And be sure you have read the agreement before hand. If their actions are not in line with their own agreement... well, the judge will likely side with you.
But chances are they will want to settle the moment they get the summons.
Every time someone publishes an article critical on Linux, the Linux community tends to take the wrong attitude. They are too eager to look for the knife in the back, and not interested in looking for helpful criticisms. Yes, there are articles out there that are little more than propaganda. But not all of them are.
This article has several good points. He isn't the first person to mention them, and he isn't the last. Linux has a long way to go to get to mainstream, and his complaints are valid ones.
Some people don't want Linux to be mainstream. But the simple fact is that the more computer-ignorant people that use Linux, the more likely it is that the next time you sit down at a strange computer, be it your new job, your friends, a customers, or what have you, the more likely it is going to be running the OS that you like the best. The more people who run Linux, the more applications there are going to be for Linux, and the greater chance that the next app that you _must_ have will be designed, developed and implemented for it.
Every time someone writes an article critical of Linux, be it too difficult to run, slower or less featured than a competitor, or just too small of an installed base, don't flame. Instead spend your time thinking about how you can improve Linux so that when someone writes an article a year later on the same topic, they won't have any complaints. The free OS is getting free suggestions on how to improve it. Is anyone listening?
Hi... I am working right now on the analysis team for the Terra mission (at GSFC), and I just wanted to offer a status update.
Terra was launched on December 18th 18:57:39Z and it was a beautiful launch. After months (years) of delays and setbacks, seeing it go up was a great feeling. I think many people felt that it would never happen, but we are finally up.
Yes, Originally we were supposed to launch on the 16th. Launch was scrubbed at T-39seconds because someone made some changes to the launch database, and they never bothered to do a practice run with the new database. A decision from upon high came to scrub Saturday's launch at around 9:30 PM EST to check the database and make sure it is right.
We at the operations center found out about it as a rumor from the guards at VAFB.
The high gain antenna was deployed on Sunday, and we successfully had a few TDRSS contacts. Until about 354-03:15Z where the HGA stopped moving. A spacecraft emergency was declared, and an anomaly team was called, but there is still no verdict on what caused the problem.
We have had several OMNI TDRSS contacts since the anomaly, and we are no longer in spacecraft emergency mode.
Hopefully the problem will be solved as part of the shakedown process. Life is a little bit too exciting here at the MAR, but it keeps me awake for the night shift.
Regardless of the issues that have happened so far, we still hope to get good science out of this thing and have it running nominally soon.
A thorough study of mental illness in America, that happens to agree with many other past studies, reveals that 22% of Americans have some kind of mental illness in a given year.
You would like to blame it on the drug companies.
You would also like to tell people to "Take a walk in the park" or some other such strategy. If that works for you, great. But don't ask everyone else in the country to rely on your solution, because everyone is unique, and different people respond to different treatments.
Many people with severe depression respond well to SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, like Prozac). Would you take it away from them if it works? Would you rather have someone unable to hold down a job or have any kind of meaningful social interaction so that they can prevent the pharmaceutical companies from getting a few more dollars?
Most of the 22% are still functional. They may experience a decrease in quality of life, but they manage to get by. For example if someone has a fear of public speaking, and their career suffers because of this, this would be a mental illness. It would also be a treatable mental illness, quite probably without any medication.
Don't be so quick to judge. Not everyone is as stable as you are. Maybe drugs are used too often in the industry, but a lot of people who do take them are helped by them.
It is a matter of intent. If you write a program intended to allow users to recover forgotton passwords and someone uses it to steal information, you are not at fault. If you write a programs with intent to do harm you are at least partially at fault.
If someone writes a virus and they don't control the virus (such as, posting the virus to a script-baby site), I would assume that they intended to do harm. Beyond that it would be very difficult if not impossible (short of an incriminating email or the like) to prove that the intent was to do harm.
The real grey area is where the developer is conciously aware of the good and evil uses of his software. BO2K is a good example. The developers are fully aware that it could be used as a usefull utility and as a devastating attack. Are the authors liable if someone uses it to do harm? To a very small extent, yes. But if I were a juror in a cival trial I would assign less than 1% of the actual damages to the authors, the rest being up to the person who used the software.
Early reports have said the workers who saw the flash had detectable levels of radioactive Na isotopes in their bodily fluids. The only way for this to hapen is if they got a large nuetron dose.
The symptoms (G.I. tract problems within 30 minutes of the incident) are consistant with at least 250 REM, but people suspect that they may have gotten a K-REM.
The LD 50/30 for an accute dose (50% of the people who got this dose are dead in 30 days) is _I think_ about 400 REM.
There is a chance the workers will live. I wouldn't bet on it.
But then, if three workers were killed in another kind of industrial accident, you wouldn't hear about it.
Could this relate to past agreements between the two companies had in 1996? (look at this article.) and not anything to do with netscape's browser technology.
After all, if it was just the browser, wouldn't NCR go after Microsoft as well?
The rate of interaction (cross-section) between normal mater and neutrinos is vanishingly small. However, if you make a lot of them, it begins to be a problem. But if peoples guesses have any meaning, we would need several orders of magnitude more of them for them to start doing the kind of damage cosmic rays do.
Would that make every nuclear reactor on the planet the equivelent of a script kiddie running some kind of ping flood kill on all of the neutrinonet users? Would every card come attached to a million+ gallon pool to handle detections? If I had to guess, we won't see the aplication of neutrinos in our lifetime. W
Heavy water tends to consist of dueterium (sp?), one proton, one nuetron, one electron. Tritium, (one proton, two nuetrons, and one electron) is unstable, has a half life of about 13 years, and I think would be very poorly suited for a detector. (because you have so many other decay events going on.)
Bear with me here a sec... it has been a few years since any of my Nuke Eng classes.
Now yes, you do get neutrons from the environment. But very very few. Neutron decay is not a common mode of decay for most isotopes. You tend to get more alpha, beta, and gamma decays. A 'thermal' neutron is a neutron who's velocity is predominately determined by the temperature of the medium it is traveling in. Some neutrons are released as 'thermal', others are released as 'fast' (like from a fission reaction).
Water is good in reactors and for shielding of neutrons because it contains hydrogen, and hydrogen is good for three reasons. One, as you mentioned, it is approximately the same mass as a neutron. Think of billiard balls. If you have one very fast ball, and a lot of slow balls, after very few collisions you have a lot of moderate speed balls. In cases of heavier elements, think of bowling balls with the billiard ball... It takes a lot of collisions to reduce the speed.
The second reason hydrogen is good for reactors is that it doesn't absorb neutrons very easily. (if you wanted just shielding from neutrons, you would maybe use boron, which is an excellent and cheap neutron absorber.) And the third reason is that it tends to reflect neutrons very readily. Other elements work better (like heavy water), but water is the cheapest.
Lead tends to be stable. But it isn't completely stable unless you have old lead, because you have trace amounts of unstable forms of lead.
So... back to water and neutrinos. There are other people who can speak more accurately on this than I, but I believe they are looking for a muon interaction, which comes out in light (maybe cherinkov (sp?) radiation?). So you need something that is translucent, shielded (from pesky cosmic rays), and huge. It is feasible to have a large, dark, water chamber. It isn't for most other elements.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Everyone will. Because you won't be buying it from Joe Schmoe, but from companies like Dell or Gateway, or from places like Red Hat (when the PC maker outsources it's OS development)
2)It will happen... whenever a windows developer wants to know how it really works under the hood, or feels it is better to fix the OS then to make the code work around the OS.
3) Standards will form. MS may champion the standards, but they will have to comply with places like Gateway and Dell. If they try to hijack the standard they risk open rebellion from the PC makers. Customers will be hesitant to buy something they can get for free, so software that depends on non-open standards risk failure.
No arguement on 4)
W
Jell-O in their eyes
stinging, burning, shades of green
apparently not
(Jell-O is a registered TM of somebody or other.)
Simple. Return policies.
The UCITA gives you the oportunity to return software that you don't like the license agreement for. So go into your local Best Buy (which has a no-return policy on opened software), buy something, open it up, and return it to Best Buy demanding a full refund. Get lots of your friends to do it too.
Target a particular company, say microsoft, to purchase things for. Have a specific complaint about the license agreement. (like demanding arbitration only or allowing the company to remotely disable the software.) It is far less effective if you target non-noxious EULAs. (Like the old Borland "like a book" license.)
It's legal. It will piss of Best Buy, and it will send a message.
Furthermore to make things really interesting insert a piece of paper into each package you return that looks like it came with the software but really didn't. Write on it "You have just purchased a used piece of software. I hope you didn't buy this as new.".
Then you can turn around and sue the chain for selling used merchandise as new merchandise.
Have fun!
W
But if you wanted to have political influence, it could happen. First of all get some organization like EFF to generate voting guides. This is the first critical step. It would focus on a small number of issues that we can agree on instead of all the issues. (Do you really think all of geekhood would agree on things like defense spending?)
In the infancy stages you will just get campaign workers answering questions. But after a few elections, if you can show that a large number of people read the guides, you will get more and more direct access to politicians.
A key, and overlooked, area will be getting responses from prospective judges. They have surprising control over what goes on, and they are rarely scrutinized by the press in areas "we" care the most about.
The next step is to collect money. Money that will go directly to supporting or harming politicians that are for or against your causes. When you start pulling in millions that serve to help candidates who espouse and vote for your platform, you will get candidates altering their views to get the money.
The real power comes when (surprise) a candidate is or is not elected because of how they respond to the questions and the group's interest.
Then you have what you wanted. Why don't we have it now? It requires lots and lots of hard, unpaid work... that is far less rewarding than most open source development.
W
That doesn't quite follow. Just because a search engine like Yahoo points to a blocked site, it doesn't enable the user to bypass the block. (Then again, Google's cacheing might.) The article does provide information on how to access a blocked site. So by extension, the article is blocked for everything because it allows for access to everything.
I am just trying to think like them.
The same argument does not apply to criticism. If, for example, you removed all pieces of the article relating to bypassing the security, and this was also blocked, then you would have a stronger suit for libel. I think.
W
Mattel's defense could be that while the site does not contain any of the things listed, the site could be used to access information that is in this category.
This is not to say that they would win a suit, but one should have a good counter arguement to it before you go to court.
Maybe if everyone who is blocked filed a small claims court action against Mattel they could bog them down?
W
Take them to small claims court. Nothing fancy, just ask for 3x the ISP fees you paid them, and a court order to reverse their stance. Make the ISP _Prove_ that you have done something wrong. Bring proof that you haven't.
Oh, And be sure you have read the agreement before hand. If their actions are not in line with their own agreement... well, the judge will likely side with you.
But chances are they will want to settle the moment they get the summons.
Every time someone publishes an article critical on Linux, the Linux community tends to take the wrong attitude. They are too eager to look for the knife in the back, and not interested in looking for helpful criticisms. Yes, there are articles out there that are little more than propaganda. But not all of them are.
This article has several good points. He isn't the first person to mention them, and he isn't the last. Linux has a long way to go to get to mainstream, and his complaints are valid ones.
Some people don't want Linux to be mainstream. But the simple fact is that the more computer-ignorant people that use Linux, the more likely it is that the next time you sit down at a strange computer, be it your new job, your friends, a customers, or what have you, the more likely it is going to be running the OS that you like the best. The more people who run Linux, the more applications there are going to be for Linux, and the greater chance that the next app that you _must_ have will be designed, developed and implemented for it.
Every time someone writes an article critical of Linux, be it too difficult to run, slower or less featured than a competitor, or just too small of an installed base, don't flame. Instead spend your time thinking about how you can improve Linux so that when someone writes an article a year later on the same topic, they won't have any complaints. The free OS is getting free suggestions on how to improve it. Is anyone listening?
What about the "... and then I am going to get medieval on his arse." bit? That had me laughing for a few weeks.
W
W
Hi... I am working right now on the analysis team for the Terra mission (at GSFC), and I just wanted to offer a status update.
Terra was launched on December 18th 18:57:39Z and it was a beautiful launch. After months (years) of delays and setbacks, seeing it go up was a great feeling. I think many people felt that it would never happen, but we are finally up.
Yes, Originally we were supposed to launch on the 16th. Launch was scrubbed at T-39seconds because someone made some changes to the launch database, and they never bothered to do a practice run with the new database. A decision from upon high came to scrub Saturday's launch at around 9:30 PM EST to check the database and make sure it is right.
We at the operations center found out about it as a rumor from the guards at VAFB.
The high gain antenna was deployed on Sunday, and we successfully had a few TDRSS contacts. Until about 354-03:15Z where the HGA stopped moving. A spacecraft emergency was declared, and an anomaly team was called, but there is still no verdict on what caused the problem.
We have had several OMNI TDRSS contacts since the anomaly, and we are no longer in spacecraft emergency mode.
Hopefully the problem will be solved as part of the shakedown process. Life is a little bit too exciting here at the MAR, but it keeps me awake for the night shift.
Regardless of the issues that have happened so far, we still hope to get good science out of this thing and have it running nominally soon.
Welcome to the conspiracy theory of the week.
A thorough study of mental illness in America, that happens to agree with many other past studies, reveals that 22% of Americans have some kind of mental illness in a given year.
You would like to blame it on the drug companies.
You would also like to tell people to "Take a walk in the park" or some other such strategy. If that works for you, great. But don't ask everyone else in the country to rely on your solution, because everyone is unique, and different people respond to different treatments.
Many people with severe depression respond well to SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, like Prozac). Would you take it away from them if it works? Would you rather have someone unable to hold down a job or have any kind of meaningful social interaction so that they can prevent the pharmaceutical companies from getting a few more dollars?
Most of the 22% are still functional. They may experience a decrease in quality of life, but they manage to get by. For example if someone has a fear of public speaking, and their career suffers because of this, this would be a mental illness. It would also be a treatable mental illness, quite probably without any medication.
Don't be so quick to judge. Not everyone is as stable as you are. Maybe drugs are used too often in the industry, but a lot of people who do take them are helped by them.
It is a matter of intent. If you write a program intended to allow users to recover forgotton passwords and someone uses it to steal information, you are not at fault. If you write a programs with intent to do harm you are at least partially at fault.
If someone writes a virus and they don't control
the virus (such as, posting the virus to a script-baby site), I would assume that they intended to do harm. Beyond that it would be very difficult if not impossible (short of an incriminating email or the like) to prove that the intent was to do harm.
The real grey area is where the developer is conciously aware of the good and evil uses of his software. BO2K is a good example. The developers are fully aware that it could be used as a usefull utility and as a devastating attack. Are the authors liable if someone uses it to do harm? To a very small extent, yes. But if I were a juror in a cival trial I would assign less than 1% of the actual damages to the authors, the rest being up to the person who used the software.
Early reports have said the workers who saw the flash had detectable levels of radioactive Na isotopes in their bodily fluids. The only way for this to hapen is if they got a large nuetron dose.
The symptoms (G.I. tract problems within 30 minutes of the incident) are consistant with at least 250 REM, but people suspect that they may have gotten a K-REM.
The LD 50/30 for an accute dose (50% of the people who got this dose are dead in 30 days) is _I think_ about 400 REM.
There is a chance the workers will live. I wouldn't bet on it.
But then, if three workers were killed in another kind of industrial accident, you wouldn't hear about it.
After all, if it was just the browser, wouldn't NCR go after Microsoft as well?
The rate of interaction (cross-section) between normal mater and neutrinos is vanishingly small. However, if you make a lot of them, it begins to be a problem. But if peoples guesses have any meaning, we would need several orders of magnitude more of them for them to start doing the kind of damage cosmic rays do.
Would that make every nuclear reactor on the planet the equivelent of a script kiddie running some kind of ping flood kill on all of the neutrinonet users? Would every card come attached to a million+ gallon pool to handle detections? If I had to guess, we won't see the aplication of neutrinos in our lifetime. W
Heavy water tends to consist of dueterium (sp?), one proton, one nuetron, one electron. Tritium, (one proton, two nuetrons, and one electron) is unstable, has a half life of about 13 years, and I think would be very poorly suited for a detector. (because you have so many other decay events going on.)
Bear with me here a sec... it has been a few years since any of my Nuke Eng classes.
... back to water and neutrinos. There are other people who can speak more accurately on this than I, but I believe they are looking for a muon interaction, which comes out in light (maybe cherinkov (sp?) radiation?). So you need something that is translucent, shielded (from pesky cosmic rays), and huge. It is feasible to have a large, dark, water chamber. It isn't for most other elements.
Now yes, you do get neutrons from the environment. But very very few. Neutron decay is not a common mode of decay for most isotopes. You tend to get more alpha, beta, and gamma decays. A 'thermal' neutron is a neutron who's velocity is predominately determined by the temperature of the medium it is traveling in. Some neutrons are released as 'thermal', others are released as 'fast' (like from a fission reaction).
Water is good in reactors and for shielding of neutrons because it contains hydrogen, and hydrogen is good for three reasons. One, as you mentioned, it is approximately the same mass as a neutron. Think of billiard balls. If you have one very fast ball, and a lot of slow balls, after very few collisions you have a lot of moderate speed balls. In cases of heavier elements, think of bowling balls with the billiard ball... It takes a lot of collisions to reduce the speed.
The second reason hydrogen is good for reactors is that it doesn't absorb neutrons very easily. (if you wanted just shielding from neutrons, you would maybe use boron, which is an excellent and cheap neutron absorber.) And the third reason is that it tends to reflect neutrons very readily. Other elements work better (like heavy water), but water is the cheapest.
Lead tends to be stable. But it isn't completely stable unless you have old lead, because you have trace amounts of unstable forms of lead.
So