Take a look at it again. The biggest filter on prosecutablity is that you have to forge the headers you can send out spam all day every day as long as you are honest about where it's coming from. If you lie about where it's coming from, it's fraud and prosecutable. Check the laws again, you can put no return address on an envelope and it's fine, but if you put somebody else's address on it it's mail fraud. This is no different.
Actually it's not, think about reconstruction etc, and you do have a lot of similarities. Check the prices, the styles, you really do have a lot of parallels, and they are not coincidental.
During 'reconstruction' there was a large part of the US govt that wanted to punish the South for the assasination of Lincoln. Serenity is set in a period following a civil war, with a strong centralized govt, that seems to have an attitude that the browncoats still need to be taught why they were wrong.
Insane Taxes were used during reconstruction to begger most of the wealthy members of southern society. Carpetbaggers were able to come in and reap huge profits because they got govt subsidies paid for by special taxes against the southern land owners. In Firefly it seems smuggling is profitable not just because the product is illegal, but because it's got obscene import taxes on it.
flat out harrasment of former soldiers - check
placing unelected officials in charge of some of the southern states. Seems to also be the case w/ Firefly
It's one of the major reasons people from the south moved west during that period - they were looking for their freedom. Just because someone can draw parallels to the US Cival War, doesn't mean that it's about the same excuses. The cival war was never really about slavery - not at it's heart - it was about Federal vs State authority. It just happened to be slavery that catalized the issue.
You will bow to the great film god Ray Harryhausen when you mention B movies about giant insects.
The man pretty much single handedly developed the special effects industry.
Actually the PtB know there is good sci-fi, what they havn't figured out is how to get good sci-fi to interest enough people to attract the advertisers.
Look at it this way, what makes for a good sci-fi show?
storyline - both a theme and a per episode storyline are what pulls people into a show.
character buy in - you have to like the characters - or hate them - either will do.
character interaction - the more intricate the character interaction, the easier it is to buy into them
character development - 2d cutouts of people just aren't interesting to watch for an hour - they have to have a personality & then develop the quirks as time goes on.
Note that cool special effects don't make the list. Twilight zone had very few special effects, all the focus is on the people - the sets & the special effects are just window dressing that highlight the people in the show.
Now look at what advertisers are pushing - 1 season reality shows where they change the cast every season. Big brother, Fear factor, Survivor etc. The studios love them, they are dirt cheap to produce - the cast get's paid next to nothing, the sets are primative, and post production is just editing the raw film - no special effects to add, no foley stage work. I don't know the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that a season of Big Brother costs less than half of one of Firefly. As a studio, if I can make an extra half mil profit per episode by showing junk reality shows as opposed to quality sci-fi, junk it is. As an advertiser, I'm not going to pay that extra half mil, unless you can show me some truely awe inspiring viewership.
Actually this is not just gross signal monitoring. The phone company does this with cell phones now. When you look at the signal as a matrix of about 6 to 8 things you can identify 2 cell phones that came off the assembly line sequentially. This type of signal monitoring is looking at things like micro-second variations in responce times, frequency modulation differences, and frequency stability. All of these things are unique to a specific phone, not a brand or model of phone.
The issue here is figuing out how to register a new card, and what types of variation you are going to permit - a cold card is going to process minutely differently than a warm one.
Check out Jury Nullification it's the basis for the 'he needed killing' defense.
Basically, the jury can say - 'fuck the law, what he did wasn't wrong & we won't punish him for it' - it has a lot of historical support & is part of the reason for a jury of your peers.
I believe the concept of zero originated on the Indian sub-continent not with the arabs - that's just where the Europeans got it.
Also, but not useful in a western history discussion, the Myans also developed the concept.
And to Vedders comments on her tardy response to the commissions report she was traveling during the August 10 meeting, and did not join via teleconference as did several other panel members, including Robert Zemsky from Singapore Elliott said in her e-mail reply that she was completely offended by this personal attack. This has nothing to do with my corporate responsibilities, and [Miller] was well aware of my availability and access in August. (In Thursdays interview, she added that she had given Miller her proxy[em mine] at the August 10 meeting based on her sense of the report at the macro level, but had not had a chance to review the final document until recently.)
I didn't say the proxy didn't have a bias - just not her (Vedder's) bias.
So, it's perfectly reasonable that Elliot voted with[out] having totally read the draft, and then had to practically admit to it when it came out that her bosses were rightfully not satisfied with it.
FTFA, she was traveling during the meeting & was unable to attend via video-conference. She 'did not have a change to fully read the document until recently'. Her vote was via proxy with one of the other members. So no, she didn't read it before hand, and the person she proxied her vote to, didn't have her bias against open source.
Having writen a few grants, yes they are. If your grant request references this type of document & it's relevant, then you get brownie points on the scoring. All other things being equal, the grant that is trying to impliment a new policy/vision that's been officially endorsed will win - unless the reviewer is opposed to the notion of the grant of course:)
If public money is used to push certain products, outcomes are presented for public use but you are not allowed use it, even though they paid for a portion of it;
Of course they are allowed to use it. With a BSD liscense they can take everyone's work, encapsulate it with a MS GUI and claim it's theirs - with a note in the copywrite saying "well not all ours - these guys helped". With a GPL liscense, they can wrap it in a MS GUI, but then they have to show everyone how to do the GUI too.
I don't know about the Mozilla and Apache liscenses, or the other lesser used ones out there, I'm sure there are some that are 'free for non-commercial use & verboten for commercial'. I agree that that type of liscense wouldn't go over well with businesses, but I don't know how common they are - also, I don't know that colleges would generally use that type of liscense for their projects.
Remember this is a document that is designed to do nothing more than be a broad outline of the future heading of higher education. There are not a lot of specifics in here. For this bit, they are saying that open - in the sense of colaberative - projects are the way to go as opposed to closed prorietary solutions.
Actually, chances are pretty good he would be arrested. Phone service is extremely regulated - more to keep new people out than to actually control the people already in.
Office parks and MSB are all corperations controlling the buildings that are being wired. As such they are in effect wiring their own property. Also most MSB's actually don't own the PBX, the TelCo just installs one there for convienence. If he were to wire his own house with an Asterisk server - no problems, but reselling that service outside his house is likely to get him in trouble.
Because the hemp plant makes better paper than wood pulp, and you can harvest it 2-3 times a year - resulting in 10X the paper production/year over what you can get with wood. The Hearst newspaper enterprise owned acres of forrest in the NW & was a wee bit threatened by this. Combign 'think of the children' with a big politically connected corperate empire & you get whatever you want.
I suggest you take a closer look at the facts in this situation. The police confiscated all the servers at the ISP. Pirate Bay, Pirate Party, and every other server hosted at the ISP. It was not an attempt to shut down the pirate party, it was a clear instance of attempting to intimidate ISP's into not hosting Pirate Bay. The Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay share several things, but servers is not one of them, nor is one a direct affiliate of the other.
There was evidence that the P2P programs/networks the RIAA said she was using were in fact on her PC prior to being 'cleansed'. In addition to that there are the documentations showing time/date/file/ip that the RIAA goes to the ISP with to resolve the John Doe warrent into a specific individual.
The court rendered default judgement because it determined that the plaintiff acted in bad faith, showing "blatant contempt" for the court and a "fundamental disregard for the judicial process." This makes no sense.
Actually I think it makes a lot of sense. She was charged in a civil case with copywrite infringement. She destroyed the evidence - which could have proved either innocence or guilt. Since she actively destroyed the evidence, we can assume it did not prove her innocence. Now, the judge could cite her for contempt of court, or the more criminal evidence tampering, but that would require more paperwork & time on the part of the court. Instead, the court concluded she destroyed the evidence because it showed she had in fact been doing the P2P copying. It's the same judgement the court would have entered if she hadn't shown up in court. IDR-TFA & it looks like there was more evidence than just the lack of MP3's on the disk, it didn't look like a virus wipe gone bad or any of the other things people had suggested, it looked like she deleted/shredded specific programs & directories but didn't clean the registry too.
Bluntly, she was stupid & her stupidity is going to hurt. Isn't that part of what we usually advocate here at/.?
Thermite is powdered aluminum mixed with iron-oxide (rust). In order to be explosive, you have to create a fine mist of both the aluminum and the iron-oxide while keeping both in contact with each other. Remember, this is not aluminum burning, it is an Oxidation/Reduction chemical reaction between the aluminum and the iron-oxide. It certainly can be done, but not by sticking a box of the stuff in a corner and lighting a fuse.
Almost any combustable will explode when dispersed in a mist with sufficient oxygen. It's what causes silo's and coal mines to explode. IIRC the technical name is a Fine Particulate Dispersion explosion, and it's what they are talking about when they say a 'coal dust explosion'. When trying to do this with thermite, you need to have a dispersion of your 'combustable' -aluminum - in contact with sufficient iron-oxide - not oxygen to get the explosion. The only way I can think of doing that off the top of my head would be to create a bi-metal sheet of iron/aluminum powder it, and then allow the iron to rust. Now you just have to disburse it throughout several levels of a building - in a fairly small PPM range that's difficult to achieve in a lab on a room scale.
Again, thermite has no significant advantages in this scenario, and a large number of disadvantages. Even creating a FPD with thermite, you'll get less concussive force than with typical high explosives. If you, for some reason, want a FPD type explosion, gasses are easier to work with.
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
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Computer Voodoo?
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Mine wasn't that bad, but I had a PowerTower from powerPC - built on the Apple 7200 MB IIRC. My issue was always the SCSI setup. I had a ZIP drive & a scanner. If the scanner was on the left side of the desk, it had to go PC => ZIP => Scanner. Moving the scanner to the right side of the desk required PC => Scanner => Zip. Cable changes and even renumbering the hardware had no effect.
'So they planted some thermite' That's the issue. It takes hundreds of pounds of high explosives to 'pull' a building the size of WTC 7, strategicly placed in cuts on the support posts. Thermite is not an explosive, it is an extremely exothermic Red-OX reaction - a hot burn if you will, and fast - but not explosive. You are looking at trying to cut 25-75 vertical beams (conservative number), each over an inch thick, with a material that's going to try to fall as soon as it melts the surface of the beam you've attached it to. OK so we just place it where the beams join the floor - except don't you think someone would notice people ripping up an entire floor - clearing the concrete/matrix from around those joints, and carting in cases of thermite. Oh,and when it burns through, it's still going to fall down, not burn sideways. Look at the footage again, the WTC 1&2 collapse started in the impact areas, did your conspiritors just get lucky & put thermite in that area - or did they put enough thermite on every floor to start a pancake? I stand by the statement, you don't use thermite to bring down a building. Not by burning out it's supports anyway. It's not the right tool for the job.
Hmmm, Aircraft body - aluminum. Window frames - aluminum Lighting Fixtures - aluminum Structural support for Twin towers - Steel girders & iron rebar in the concrete Thermite - 2Al + 3Fe02 => 2AL03 + 3Fe +Heat IIRC Yeah, I would expect to be able to detect some responce of a 'thermite' reaction. As for white hot - A couple of tons of burning jet fuel will do that. Thermite is nice, but it's heavy, and in this case would have been pointless. An airial dispersal won't 'explode', and if you can get it to ignite, you just get a flashover in the room with no real damage to the building. A lump of it sitting on the floor burning would probably burn through a floor or 2 before it was done, but then you have... a couple of holes in the floor - get me my spackle. If you wanted to take down the WTC with thermite, you need to use it to burn through the foundation supports (in a controlled placement) not toss it on a plane you're crashing into the building. Nice idea, but not supported by the realities of engineering.
Depends, he's already been thrown out of a courtroom once. If that happens a few more times, the judges will bar him from appearances. "Why yes, I am a lawyer, but unfortunately I can't actually go to court because the judges all think I'm an ass."
The payback is supposed to be that we get to play with the product. By including the signature verifying component in the hardware, they are making it a one sided tradeoff -- otherwise know as "a bad deal"
No it's not one sided. They made modifications to the various pieces of code and returned those pieces to the community. You can download their code, examine it, change it, and run it on another system. Hell you can download the code, tweak it, and use it without buying a TIVO. How exactly is that 1 way? The only thing you are not getting is open access to the hardware, which the GPLv2 never requested.
I have to agree with Linus, this is a software liscense, creating hardware dependencies in it is outside it's scope. The other thing you have to look at is what people value more - the code or the end use. For Linus and others, the code is the important thing, since TIVO provided the code they use to restrict sharing, and the format shows are saved in (those should be in the GPL code they returned), I can rip open a TIVO, pull the HD & retrieve the shows to use how I want on my PC. For others, the end use experiance of being able to run their tweaks on the same hardware is more important.
Linus, as the head of the Kernel dev team, is concerned with seeing the Linux Kernel continuing to develop and grow. GPLv3 trims an entire branch from the possible growth tree. Face it, DRM & Trusted Computing are not evil in and of themselves*, they are tools, and GPLv3 prohibits them from being used in any meaningful way.
*
DRM can simplify corporate/govt/military/medical document security by ensuring that only those persons with the apropriate clearance can view/copy the documents, reguardless of who has physical access to them. Sorry, the 'no information should be secured' crowd can sod off, I don't think you have any right to view my medical history.
Trusted computing goes along with DRM in this instance - only by verifying that the OS & the viewer are running secured versions can the DRM of the document be trusted.
Until a DRM format is created that automatically expires with the copyright, and allows for the defined rules of 'fair use', DRM is not suitable for use with copyright protected media.
The only thing the GPL prevents is somebody else using the program in a closed product. And you know what? I don't care if they do. If they want to, they're free to. It doesn't hurt me or any other users one bit.
It does however hurt the other developers. By not returning their improvements to the code to the community, they are stealing from all of the developers who contributed to the initial code. If you don't care if people/companies contribute their improvements back to you/the community, use the BSD liscense. The essense of GPL is, "We made this with our time & effort, if you use it as the basis for your product, you have to share your time & effort by giving the changes back so we can learn from it." That's true for both v2 and v3. The difference is that v3 includes a prohibition against Trusted Computing.
The calibration company - because they employed him.
Company X - because they manufactured a system that allowed him to do it, and they probably have the deepest pockets.
Now is that right? Not really, but it's reality.
I also have a problem with the GPLv3 requiring hardware to run all software. As I understood the purpose of GPL, it's to enhance and ensure the freedom of the authors to have their code - which they are generously and freely giving - remain open and available, to ensure that any enhancements to the core code are returned to the GPL community and the whole continues to grow and improve.
In most cases, there is no economic bennifit to anyone to create hardware/firmware which locks out alternate versions of the OS/Software. In Tivo's case, it does have a bennifit, by requiring a signed OS, it is capable of imposing restrictions on the devices use - IE block unrestricted copying of recorded programming - which allow them to operate without the constant threat of legal action by copyright holders. In the heart monitor/defibulator case, it would again provide proof against liability for unauthorized changes.
In both of those cases, there is a compelling legal reason to use the 'Trusted Computing' mode. Remember, locking out software via signing is part of trusted computing not DRM. DRM is about Digital Rights Management - controlling access to digital data, Trusted Coputing is about being able to verify the authenticity of software. While I do not agree with the 'need' for a hardware mfg to provide a locked environment to protect someone else's IP, it's the way our legal system currently operates. In other cases where high security, and zero fault tolerance are required, the Trusted Computing model is not only viable, it's desireable.
The problem with GPLv3 is that, the requirement that keys be provided to resign modified code negates the entire concept of Trusted Computing. This means that some of the largest industries will have no incentive to provide support for FOSS. The medical hardware industry is as fanatical about zero defect as the guys at SecureBSD are about security. If their efforts twords zero defect can be negated by any hack with a serial cable, they won't help. The same with the financial industry, if they are prohibited from blocking modified code, they have no incentive to help make the core code better.
So it comes to a choice of what's more important:
The continued contributions to, and improvement of, the FOSS community and its body of knowledge by corporate sponsor donations of code and patent liscensing.
The ability to run modified code on every embeded device
Of the 2, I find the contributions to be more rewarding, and more in the open spirit of the FOSS movement. I want my medical records to be stored in a system that requires validated software, that way I have 1 less worry that my data is going to be compromised by some asshat waving his cyberdick around. I also want that system to be running FOSS, both because I want bragging rights for having contributed, and because I feel that more coders looking at the software does make it more secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at it again. The biggest filter on prosecutablity is that you have to forge the headers you can send out spam all day every day as long as you are honest about where it's coming from. If you lie about where it's coming from, it's fraud and prosecutable. Check the laws again, you can put no return address on an envelope and it's fine, but if you put somebody else's address on it it's mail fraud. This is no different.
- During 'reconstruction' there was a large part of the US govt that wanted to punish the South for the assasination of Lincoln.
- Insane Taxes were used during reconstruction to begger most of the wealthy members of southern society. Carpetbaggers were able to come in and reap huge profits because they got govt subsidies paid for by special taxes against the southern land owners. In Firefly it seems smuggling is profitable not just because the product is illegal, but because it's got obscene import taxes on it.
- flat out harrasment of former soldiers - check
- placing unelected officials in charge of some of the southern states. Seems to also be the case w/ Firefly
It's one of the major reasons people from the south moved west during that period - they were looking for their freedom. Just because someone can draw parallels to the US Cival War, doesn't mean that it's about the same excuses. The cival war was never really about slavery - not at it's heart - it was about Federal vs State authority. It just happened to be slavery that catalized the issue.Serenity is set in a period following a civil war, with a strong centralized govt, that seems to have an attitude that the browncoats still need to be taught why they were wrong.
You will bow to the great film god Ray Harryhausen when you mention B movies about giant insects.
The man pretty much single handedly developed the special effects industry.
Look at it this way, what makes for a good sci-fi show?
- storyline - both a theme and a per episode storyline are what pulls people into a show.
- character buy in - you have to like the characters - or hate them - either will do.
- character interaction - the more intricate the character interaction, the easier it is to buy into them
- character development - 2d cutouts of people just aren't interesting to watch for an hour - they have to have a personality & then develop the quirks as time goes on.
Note that cool special effects don't make the list. Twilight zone had very few special effects, all the focus is on the people - the sets & the special effects are just window dressing that highlight the people in the show.Now look at what advertisers are pushing - 1 season reality shows where they change the cast every season. Big brother, Fear factor, Survivor etc. The studios love them, they are dirt cheap to produce - the cast get's paid next to nothing, the sets are primative, and post production is just editing the raw film - no special effects to add, no foley stage work. I don't know the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that a season of Big Brother costs less than half of one of Firefly. As a studio, if I can make an extra half mil profit per episode by showing junk reality shows as opposed to quality sci-fi, junk it is. As an advertiser, I'm not going to pay that extra half mil, unless you can show me some truely awe inspiring viewership.
Actually this is not just gross signal monitoring. The phone company does this with cell phones now. When you look at the signal as a matrix of about 6 to 8 things you can identify 2 cell phones that came off the assembly line sequentially. This type of signal monitoring is looking at things like micro-second variations in responce times, frequency modulation differences, and frequency stability. All of these things are unique to a specific phone, not a brand or model of phone.
The issue here is figuing out how to register a new card, and what types of variation you are going to permit - a cold card is going to process minutely differently than a warm one.
Jury nullification not sure why it didn't take the first time.
Check out Jury Nullification it's the basis for the 'he needed killing' defense.
Basically, the jury can say - 'fuck the law, what he did wasn't wrong & we won't punish him for it' - it has a lot of historical support & is part of the reason for a jury of your peers.
I believe the concept of zero originated on the Indian sub-continent not with the arabs - that's just where the Europeans got it.
Also, but not useful in a western history discussion, the Myans also developed the concept.
Having writen a few grants, yes they are. If your grant request references this type of document & it's relevant, then you get brownie points on the scoring. All other things being equal, the grant that is trying to impliment a new policy/vision that's been officially endorsed will win - unless the reviewer is opposed to the notion of the grant of course :)
Of course they are allowed to use it. With a BSD liscense they can take everyone's work, encapsulate it with a MS GUI and claim it's theirs - with a note in the copywrite saying "well not all ours - these guys helped". With a GPL liscense, they can wrap it in a MS GUI, but then they have to show everyone how to do the GUI too.
I don't know about the Mozilla and Apache liscenses, or the other lesser used ones out there, I'm sure there are some that are 'free for non-commercial use & verboten for commercial'. I agree that that type of liscense wouldn't go over well with businesses, but I don't know how common they are - also, I don't know that colleges would generally use that type of liscense for their projects.
Remember this is a document that is designed to do nothing more than be a broad outline of the future heading of higher education. There are not a lot of specifics in here. For this bit, they are saying that open - in the sense of colaberative - projects are the way to go as opposed to closed prorietary solutions.
Actually, chances are pretty good he would be arrested. Phone service is extremely regulated - more to keep new people out than to actually control the people already in.
Office parks and MSB are all corperations controlling the buildings that are being wired. As such they are in effect wiring their own property. Also most MSB's actually don't own the PBX, the TelCo just installs one there for convienence. If he were to wire his own house with an Asterisk server - no problems, but reselling that service outside his house is likely to get him in trouble.
Because the hemp plant makes better paper than wood pulp, and you can harvest it 2-3 times a year - resulting in 10X the paper production/year over what you can get with wood. The Hearst newspaper enterprise owned acres of forrest in the NW & was a wee bit threatened by this. Combign 'think of the children' with a big politically connected corperate empire & you get whatever you want.
I suggest you take a closer look at the facts in this situation. The police confiscated all the servers at the ISP. Pirate Bay, Pirate Party, and every other server hosted at the ISP. It was not an attempt to shut down the pirate party, it was a clear instance of attempting to intimidate ISP's into not hosting Pirate Bay. The Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay share several things, but servers is not one of them, nor is one a direct affiliate of the other.
There was evidence that the P2P programs/networks the RIAA said she was using were in fact on her PC prior to being 'cleansed'. In addition to that there are the documentations showing time/date/file/ip that the RIAA goes to the ISP with to resolve the John Doe warrent into a specific individual.
Actually I think it makes a lot of sense. She was charged in a civil case with copywrite infringement. She destroyed the evidence - which could have proved either innocence or guilt. Since she actively destroyed the evidence, we can assume it did not prove her innocence. Now, the judge could cite her for contempt of court, or the more criminal evidence tampering, but that would require more paperwork & time on the part of the court. Instead, the court concluded she destroyed the evidence because it showed she had in fact been doing the P2P copying. It's the same judgement the court would have entered if she hadn't shown up in court. IDR-TFA & it looks like there was more evidence than just the lack of MP3's on the disk, it didn't look like a virus wipe gone bad or any of the other things people had suggested, it looked like she deleted/shredded specific programs & directories but didn't clean the registry too.
Bluntly, she was stupid & her stupidity is going to hurt. Isn't that part of what we usually advocate here at /.?
Thermite is powdered aluminum mixed with iron-oxide (rust). In order to be explosive, you have to create a fine mist of both the aluminum and the iron-oxide while keeping both in contact with each other. Remember, this is not aluminum burning, it is an Oxidation/Reduction chemical reaction between the aluminum and the iron-oxide. It certainly can be done, but not by sticking a box of the stuff in a corner and lighting a fuse.
Almost any combustable will explode when dispersed in a mist with sufficient oxygen. It's what causes silo's and coal mines to explode. IIRC the technical name is a Fine Particulate Dispersion explosion, and it's what they are talking about when they say a 'coal dust explosion'. When trying to do this with thermite, you need to have a dispersion of your 'combustable' -aluminum - in contact with sufficient iron-oxide - not oxygen to get the explosion. The only way I can think of doing that off the top of my head would be to create a bi-metal sheet of iron/aluminum powder it, and then allow the iron to rust. Now you just have to disburse it throughout several levels of a building - in a fairly small PPM range that's difficult to achieve in a lab on a room scale.
Again, thermite has no significant advantages in this scenario, and a large number of disadvantages. Even creating a FPD with thermite, you'll get less concussive force than with typical high explosives. If you, for some reason, want a FPD type explosion, gasses are easier to work with.
Mine wasn't that bad, but I had a PowerTower from powerPC - built on the Apple 7200 MB IIRC. My issue was always the SCSI setup. I had a ZIP drive & a scanner. If the scanner was on the left side of the desk, it had to go PC => ZIP => Scanner. Moving the scanner to the right side of the desk required PC => Scanner => Zip. Cable changes and even renumbering the hardware had no effect.
'So they planted some thermite' ,and when it burns through, it's still going to fall down, not burn sideways. Look at the footage again, the WTC 1&2 collapse started in the impact areas, did your conspiritors just get lucky & put thermite in that area - or did they put enough thermite on every floor to start a pancake?
That's the issue. It takes hundreds of pounds of high explosives to 'pull' a building the size of WTC 7, strategicly placed in cuts on the support posts.
Thermite is not an explosive, it is an extremely exothermic Red-OX reaction - a hot burn if you will, and fast - but not explosive. You are looking at trying to cut 25-75 vertical beams (conservative number), each over an inch thick, with a material that's going to try to fall as soon as it melts the surface of the beam you've attached it to. OK so we just place it where the beams join the floor - except don't you think someone would notice people ripping up an entire floor - clearing the concrete/matrix from around those joints, and carting in cases of thermite. Oh
I stand by the statement, you don't use thermite to bring down a building. Not by burning out it's supports anyway. It's not the right tool for the job.
Hmmm, Aircraft body - aluminum. ... a couple of holes in the floor - get me my spackle. If you wanted to take down the WTC with thermite, you need to use it to burn through the foundation supports (in a controlled placement) not toss it on a plane you're crashing into the building.
Window frames - aluminum
Lighting Fixtures - aluminum
Structural support for Twin towers - Steel girders & iron rebar in the concrete
Thermite - 2Al + 3Fe02 => 2AL03 + 3Fe +Heat IIRC
Yeah, I would expect to be able to detect some responce of a 'thermite' reaction.
As for white hot - A couple of tons of burning jet fuel will do that.
Thermite is nice, but it's heavy, and in this case would have been pointless. An airial dispersal won't 'explode', and if you can get it to ignite, you just get a flashover in the room with no real damage to the building. A lump of it sitting on the floor burning would probably burn through a floor or 2 before it was done, but then you have
Nice idea, but not supported by the realities of engineering.
Depends, he's already been thrown out of a courtroom once. If that happens a few more times, the judges will bar him from appearances. "Why yes, I am a lawyer, but unfortunately I can't actually go to court because the judges all think I'm an ass."
I have to agree with Linus, this is a software liscense, creating hardware dependencies in it is outside it's scope. The other thing you have to look at is what people value more - the code or the end use. For Linus and others, the code is the important thing, since TIVO provided the code they use to restrict sharing, and the format shows are saved in (those should be in the GPL code they returned), I can rip open a TIVO, pull the HD & retrieve the shows to use how I want on my PC. For others, the end use experiance of being able to run their tweaks on the same hardware is more important.
Linus, as the head of the Kernel dev team, is concerned with seeing the Linux Kernel continuing to develop and grow. GPLv3 trims an entire branch from the possible growth tree. Face it, DRM & Trusted Computing are not evil in and of themselves*, they are tools, and GPLv3 prohibits them from being used in any meaningful way.
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- The calibration technician - because he did it.
- The calibration company - because they employed him.
- Company X - because they manufactured a system that allowed him to do it, and they probably have the deepest pockets.
Now is that right? Not really, but it's reality.I also have a problem with the GPLv3 requiring hardware to run all software. As I understood the purpose of GPL, it's to enhance and ensure the freedom of the authors to have their code - which they are generously and freely giving - remain open and available, to ensure that any enhancements to the core code are returned to the GPL community and the whole continues to grow and improve.
In most cases, there is no economic bennifit to anyone to create hardware/firmware which locks out alternate versions of the OS/Software. In Tivo's case, it does have a bennifit, by requiring a signed OS, it is capable of imposing restrictions on the devices use - IE block unrestricted copying of recorded programming - which allow them to operate without the constant threat of legal action by copyright holders. In the heart monitor/defibulator case, it would again provide proof against liability for unauthorized changes.
In both of those cases, there is a compelling legal reason to use the 'Trusted Computing' mode. Remember, locking out software via signing is part of trusted computing not DRM. DRM is about Digital Rights Management - controlling access to digital data, Trusted Coputing is about being able to verify the authenticity of software. While I do not agree with the 'need' for a hardware mfg to provide a locked environment to protect someone else's IP, it's the way our legal system currently operates. In other cases where high security, and zero fault tolerance are required, the Trusted Computing model is not only viable, it's desireable.
The problem with GPLv3 is that, the requirement that keys be provided to resign modified code negates the entire concept of Trusted Computing. This means that some of the largest industries will have no incentive to provide support for FOSS. The medical hardware industry is as fanatical about zero defect as the guys at SecureBSD are about security. If their efforts twords zero defect can be negated by any hack with a serial cable, they won't help. The same with the financial industry, if they are prohibited from blocking modified code, they have no incentive to help make the core code better.
So it comes to a choice of what's more important:
- The continued contributions to, and improvement of, the FOSS community and its body of knowledge by corporate sponsor donations of code and patent liscensing.
- The ability to run modified code on every embeded device
Of the 2, I find the contributions to be more rewarding, and more in the open spirit of the FOSS movement. I want my medical records to be stored in a system that requires validated software, that way I have 1 less worry that my data is going to be compromised by some asshat waving his cyberdick around. I also want that system to be running FOSS, both because I want bragging rights for having contributed, and because I feel that more coders looking at the software does make it more secure.