i think the fact that an unforeseen erroneous condition caused the plant to *shutdown* and not *meltdown* is a pretty good indication that it was designed quite well. really? you think that the loss of a power plant for a period of time due to network traffic is a sign of "quite good design"?
This might sound unreasonable but I would never expect a power plant (which has a lot of things depending on it) to shut down unless there was a major failure of a component or some other safety risk. Network traffic on its own, or its effects shouldn't ever be the cause. In a nuclear power plant you control ALL the nodes attached to the network, the nodes attached should not be in a position where they can saturate any individual node to the point of failure, especially if that failure causes a shut down of something as critical as a power station.
I can think of times where I have seen massive network spikes usually caused by issues with routing on fairly non-trivial networks, or loops where mistakes have been made and policies have not been followed, (lack of sleep or lack of patience), but then comparing an advertising companies internal network at 3am, or a paper factories network at midnight to a nuclear power station is taking it a little far.
There will always be unforeseen situations. The key is for the system to shutdown in an orderly fashion. In programming, this is accomplished through use of error traps.
That would be fair if we were talking about a software failure after some sort of unforeseen environmental issue, it would even be OK if an auto plant stopped production because of an unforeseen fault, and whilst power plants should certainly fail safe, they should be robust enough that a situation where failure is the only option is extremely difficult to achieve. whatever happened to redundancy?
Now, the hysteria surrounding terrorism is another thing the plant engineers have to worry about. As for the external angle terrorism or not, I doubt it. If there is a system that can be brought down by weight of traffic, and that system is important enough that failure requires a power-plant reboot (:)) then there needs to be an air-gap. Someone up thread suggested an employee's laptop with a virus as a possible method of infection.. Who in the hell allows an unchecked laptop of any description onto their LAN? never mind a network that also contains components that run a power plant!!
I would suggest that this is hype to 1) keep terrorism at the top of everyone's agenda, and make people feel unsafe, after all that sells papers and grabs viewers (which in turn sell advertising) 2) deflect some of the negativity that this incident would produce (I wish that I could blame terrorists for my mistakes sometimes... "no that project plan... I haven't got it, but I'm checking to see if my poor time management is caused by terrorism or simply my inability to organise my resources properly") and 3) Security risks presumably attract additional funding, sureley it would be nice to get an extra few million in the next budget.
Honestly, this probably shows a component failure and some poor design, understandable, but unacceptable in this area. If and I say If with some considerable doubt, this turns out to be, or is reported as an external event, then whoever enabled external network access to what appear to be critical systems within a nuclear power plant on the US mainland need to be identified and punished, together with the contractors who built or maintained it, the managers or consultants that assessed and managed it and the politicians who have responsibility for public safety. But as I said, it will probably turn out to be a simple component failure and some poor design.
Nope. The only person who decides on the license that a piece of software is licensed under is the copyright owner, not the distributor, that is true for software licensed under the BSD, GPL, a Proprietary or any other license.
With the GPL the idea is that the distributor is only allowed to distribute the software (modified or unmodified) if it is distributed under the same terms as it was received under. If the distributor doesn't like that license then they simply cannot distribute, the license cannot change without permission from the copyright owner. This is obviously better than proprietary software which usually cannot be distributed nor modified.
What the distributor can do is take GPL v2 code and fork it to keep it GPL v2, obviously that code would need to be maintained, and any updates from the original code base would not be usable if it was changed to GPL v3.
As for forks, even if you fork a project and modify it a lot, if it is a derivative you must still distribute it under the license you received the original code under, to get out from under the license you need to rewrite it.
Its sensible really; I couldn't grab a load of GPL code and release it as BSD, or as closed source, nor could I grab the source of MSWord 2007 fork it and GPL it.
Here is an alternative - Ive been seeing the origional one pop up so regularily that I am surprised no one else has messed around with it yet... - I had to... appologies to the copyright holder of this much used piece, this derviative is intended as a parody...: My business faces ruin. Software sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many products as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those little software stores that sell well known, major software releases that everyone uses, even the people that don't them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a wider demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family software - stuff that the whole family could use. I don't sell sick stuff like violent games or gambling simulations , and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive education sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase software that worked without coming accross profanity or violent games. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer titles. Why is no one buying software? Are people not interested in compters? Do people prefer to use pen and paper, outsource;? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - seven in ten webservers now run F/OSS. On The Internet, you can find and download replacements for thousands of dollars worth of software in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the software industry, from lower management, to upper management to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike software, it's harder to make F/OSS books and distribute them over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with these F/OSS'er communists gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put Debian on my PC instead of this Vista junk, I'll download it right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the software industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came past the counter to leave, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to use unamerican, communist F/OSS replacements to good honest god-fearing proprietry software and tell your friends about it, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of F/OSS'ers. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If F/OSS'ers want to give stuff away for free, with the source code and divert cash from the software industry, then the software industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable software store will allow you to buy another title. If the F/OSS'ers can't buy the software to begin with, then they won't be able to make alternatives and give them away free over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting poor people from access to non-emergency medical care.
But it just comes on when you've pluged in the power cord
My Ipaq cradle has the same sort of thing going on and I find it useful, primarily because I move my Ipaq around a lot* and sometimes forget to plug in the power cable, or leave the power pack somewhere else, its a reminder that whilst the PDA is in its cradle, if there is no pretty light it is NOT on charge. (mine also flashes when charging and stops flashing when the PDA and/or spare battery are done so I guess there is an additional point in the lights favour)
*Familiar Linux, Wifi and an NFS server (on my main machine) means I have an Ipaq with 300Gb worth of accessible storage, in effect a portable stereo and (tiny) TV, just add speakers.
It hardly makes communicating data in a graphical form simple if you use random or unclear scales, I still remember a university sandwich year student who produced a graph displaying 12's of people per 144 minutes... (supposed to show user activity peaks) - apparently it made sense (144 minutes being 1/10th of a day and in this case 12 people being approx 1/10th of the sample. Would have done better to represent them as percentages, or 10's people per hour.. it makes interpreting the data easier... Its a nightmare when you are trying to figure out what 32.7 x 12 people at 576 minutes actually means. Well at least you can still see the trends.
My personal check-list for this kind of thing is..
1) Make sure that the site design is sensible and contains valid html + valid css. (if used) 2) Make sure that all the text is relevant and not overly complex for the sake of it. (nice clear simple language..) 3) Have a site map. (A normal one - I don't know if google sitemaps, i.e. the xml stuff you can add to your site are useful) 4) Use all the useful meta information, (description, abstract etc..)...But don't duplicate content or meta information for no reason (500 random key words really wont help you) 5) Make sure that the links on site (internal and external) are valid and go where you think they should...But don't have link page upon link page to random sites 6) If you use a CMS or any content generation (i.e. data driven sites) make sure that the generated page addresses are neat, rewrite them if neccessary (possible). www.whatever.com/about.html is better than www.whatever.com/generated/pages/index.php?page=ab out&theme=pretty&data=-1&uid=14568681. 7) Update the content on your site on a regular(ish) basis.
8) Never ever let an SEO company that claims it an get you X hits per day/month anywhere near it, most SEO techniques involve gaming search engines in one way or another, whether through comment spam, blog spam, dodgy link farms or other nefarious methods. If an SEO company comes to you and says it will look at the layout/content of your site to optimise it to your sites demographic (by cleaning up the language or the code) you should be golden, anything else is a disaster waiting to happen. You should launch your site expect a few visitors and if it is a useful and usable site, then your user base will find it, as they find it, the links and traffic will come naturally.
One quirk that I noticed a while back whilst writing a company site that listed news headlines from a couple of news agencies, was that the site was appearing in conjunction with some weird search terms, like "$companyname terrorists" and "$companyname organised crime". Its not just the search terms you want to be associated with that will work - but anything that is available on your site, dynamic content and all.
Serious point, for a single workstation Linux is easier to manage (as in centralised user management and single workstation mail etc.., I assume however you are talking about a large network or similar. a large and complex Linux environment is as manageable as any large and complex Windows environment, for the Linux environment you will have to work a little harder to get your point and click centralised GUI a la active directory with all the exchange components in, but at least you wont need to license another Windows OS to do it and you will need even less hardware to do it with. The only negative is that for the windows environment you *can* get away with badly qualified techs and support staff, on Linux you will need at least a few people who know what they are doing.
I know someone who just upgraded from Win98 to Vista for the same reason, so mine's a little better.
Just out of curiosity, I assume that that upgrade was coupled with a hardware purchase, althuogh correct me if I am wrong. Assuming that they had wanted to use their previous OS on their new hardware, would they have been able to? (not that I can see why they would want to). If their original media was OEM and came with the PC, then the answer is; not without buying an additional 98 license, probably from a somewhat dubious source.
I would suggest that a state by state (as in US States and European member states) would be interesting to look at, although I have no idea as to where to start looking. However I doubt that GDP is going to be a good indicator of the economy in genera, other than possibly to show trends. In fact realistically I cannot conceive of a fair and accurate way to compare two massively different economies, even more so given that neither is a single entity with single economic policy (or for that matter a single tax system or even similar service provision (i.e. healthcare).
A simple meaningful (meaningful as it tells you how much money you have in your pocket) comparison would be median weekly wages for a household, however the data is so hard to get at that it is impossible to do an accurate comparison (UK does median values for individuals but only averages for households, the US census bureau does the reverse...)
Lets try anyway -I'll use California as the US state as it is apparently the best performing economy, and the UK because their statistics are in English. Sources are census.gov for the US and statistics.gov.uk for the UK.
Califoria Median *household* income, 2003 $48,440 (annual) (lets average it out to monthly i.e. 48440 / 12) US$4036 UK Median *individual* income,2002/03 £447. (weekly) (lets average it out to monthly i.e. (447 * 52) / 12) GB£1937
The average exchange rate in December 2003 was 0.55 GBP to the US Dollar, (so 1937 / 0.55 gets you the dollar value) US$3521.82
That means that in the UK mean individual income is lower than US household income by about 13%. So what does that tell us? well not a lot, I have no idea as to how many of the households in the US data have multiple wage earners, and I have no idea how many earners would be present in a uk household.
The interesting thing with the above is that it shows that unless you have exact data, of exactly the same type, that is gained in the same way meaningful comparisons are pointless. GDP is not an indicator of anything substantial, yet if it is improving you will hear about it, comparative tax rates are meaningless if the services provided are different, average wages are also no use as they bare no relation to purchasing power.
In short, I am sure I could use the above to claim that UK incomes are higher than those in the US, an individual in the UK earns 87% of what a whole household earns in the US, so with two earners per household on average (or 1.5 or even 1.2) the average UK household earns 70% more annually than a household in the US (it would be 30% more with 1.5 earners or 4% with 1.2 earners), (obviously I could also claim the reverse). Even if I did, what of taxes, tax breaks, tax credits, services, pensions, investments, savings, mortgage values etc.
I can combine random indicators to fortify my claim, for example the average UK home is £184924 whilst in the US its £132270 (at today's dollar rate using the most recent data I can get hold of), that means that in the UK people can afford houses that are 72% more expensive than in the US, so surely the fact that UK households (2 earners remember) earn 70% more than their US counterparts must be correct!!
So what am I trying to say?
your statement of
Europe as a whole. But individual countries are still screwing the pooch worse than us.
Can not be substantiated, there are far too many variables, is the US economy stronger than the UK? maybe but there is no real way of knowing. Are EU citizens better off than their UK counterparts? maybe but again there is no easy comparison. Statistics are hard to interpret, The EU will claim its better than the US, and the media in the EU will do the same unless there is a crisis and the US will claim that it is better than the EU but again, the media will help people think that unless there is a good doom and gloom story that makes for better news.
In my opinion the best (but least useful on an economic or PR
The bonus of this method, presumably, is that anyone at the crime scene who breathed in any of the NAno-CRIme-DEtetor-DUst (NACRIDEDU (R)(TM)(etc)) get a free internal medical exam in HD with 6.1 surround sound.
Humans seem to be the first creature from this planet that may just be able to completely sever the cord with our home ecosystem by creating artificial ones.
Seriously, what's artificial? I assume (If I'm wrong shoot me down, assumption being the mother of all f**k-ups) you are talking about orbital or deep space based habitations in this instance, but I have real difficulty defining artificial. If we are a product of an ecosystem how can we ever introduce something that is not natural? I should point out here that I am not some sort of anti-environmentalist (as in being anti environmentalists rather than anti environment:) but I have difficulty about defining things like natural and nature. The argument I have normally had presented is that we as a species have a massive negative impact on our environment, we destroy other species and modify our environment so drastically that it becomes impossible of supporting other life, we destroy the balance that is nature, therefore our actions are not natural.
However I cant quite see it as being that simple, I agree that we do all of those things, but I don't think there is an inherent or natural balance. (species die out, others replace them and habitats change). Sure we do it more quickly, but we are (after all) a product of the same environment. As a product of that environment (and going back toward this balance thing) we only do things that are in our interest, and within our capabilities. Our interests and capabilities however, are significantly different from other life forms (most animals interests are food, sex and territory, whilst ours are... (oh wait..!) more complex, our relative capabilities as a species are incomparable....
I think that we will eventually see that some of our actions need to be modified significantly to serve our own interests (well if not we may all die and then it will all be rather academic anyway..) and I hope that that occurs in time to prevent too much damage to other species and local ecosystems (if its not too late already) but I do sort of see this as a continuation of a natural process. I guess we could call it TurboDarwinism, and just hope that we evolve into something a little more sensible, and maintain numbers that are sustainable.
Oops, t'was intended mainly as humour however, your replacements would presumably be mutually exclusive, surely respecting nature would rule out aiding anyone. Although I suppose we could now have a debate about what constitutes nature or natural and we could establish whether a lifeform indigenous to a particular environment can evolve to the point where it is no longer 'part' of that environment but 'above' it. - There has got to be a better way of expressing that....
Its a "procedure" that is "stored" somewhere, if it works it works!
For the record on the MySQL (The world's most popular open source database) vs PostgreSQL (The world's most advanced open source database), I think Prefer flat files and grep.
...tiny chips with flexible skins could be used to glide through a planet's atmosphere in swarms to gather data and report back...
Replace "gather data" with "decimate indigenous life" and "report back" with "multiply exponentially", and you have either a classic horror movie or an Iain Banks novel.
Actually its quite scary either way... grey goo anyone?
There is a difference between making source code available and releasing the same code under a permissive license. Just because the GPL, BSD and the various common licenses are the most visible does not mean that that is the only way to release code.
A situation where a piece of software is open source, but does not come with any rights to distribute and/or modify code would be one where a company or government want to carry out a code review usually (but not exclusively) on the grounds of security, or compliance. Just because you have no experience of the source code being available for a piece of software that does not come with a permissive license, does not mean that it is not something that happens regularity.
To take it one step further, I have worked with organisations where they have had access to source code under a restrictive license. The license in that instance did allow for code modification (the licensee had a large number of developers, and the application was core to the business). Changes could be made however they could certainly not be distributed (the software was licensed per server and per seat, at well over £3000 per seat), and if changes were made, the support contracts were invalidated. If you wanted a change to be supported, you needed to submit the alteration to the company providing the software with a transfer of copyright (i.e. you no longer owned copyright to your own changes). If you were lucky those changes would be accepted and support continued.
The above does constitute open source code as the source is open and available, it does not however fit in with the principals of the FLOSS movement. It is still a hell of a lot better than buying completely closed software where you have no options.
Since when does open sourcing anything give people the right to do anything other than look at the code (recipe in this case)? Duplicating / distributing / creating derivatives of something that is open source is still a copyright violation unless you have a license that says otherwise...
I know what you mean, Iraq is the same, guns everywhere but never a shot fired. Damn, I've got it - its not that guns should be more available, its that heavy weaponry should be more readily available, maybe throw in a few RPG's too. That'll make criminals think before they act.
Your post had me in fits of laughter until I realised I'd mis read it - I read
So you see, Senator Hatch has a rather personal stake in copyright law. I mean, if his works weren't protected by civil and criminal law unto 70 years after his death, he'd have no incentive to create anything.
as:
So you see, Senator Hatch has a rather personal stake in copyright law. I mean, if his works weren't protected by civil and criminal law unto 70 years after his death, he'd have no incentive in dying.
I would point out that it is necessary for political elements to have extreme views in order to enact substantial change.
Sadly true - mainly because there is not sufficient popular awareness as to what is going on, ask the average person why a drug such as Herceptin is so expensive. The answer you are likley to get is the cost of production. In reality as I am sure you are aware given your position, the manufacturing process is hardly a factor in cost, to the point where research into alternative production methodologies (GM crops for example) is not pursued by the pharmaceutical companies to any great degree (although others do fund it). If these people were aware how much of the cost of these drugs is down to the marketing (quite a large chunk), and down to the testing regime's (even bigger chunk) and then the approval process. I am sure there would be more pressure on various world governments to do something about it, either through subsidy or collective agreements (a central body to provide approval for a drug, rather than multiple requirements for example).
If you come in saying that all you want is to limit copyrights to 10 years, and patents to 4 years, you'll get 30 years and 12 years.
Personally I think the length of copyright is less important in this field, it is the patents that are the issue. A company should not be permitted to simply take a competitors product and copy it, they should however be able to independently re-create the product, in my personal opinion there should also be no limitations on creating derivative products, as long as they meet some sort of bar as to usefulness and are sufficiently novel. Even saying that however I do believe that periods of copyright are too long, 10 years for a device, 7 for a drug, 5 for software and 3 for music/video would be something that appeals to me. That dropping scale in my opinion would reflect both the rate of change within the respective areas, and also the benefit to the public of the copyright being removed.
Those impractical people suggesting that patents be abolished entirely (which I admit I have a personal stake in, as I'm a research scientist and one of my few routes to making it big is coming up with a really awesome idea) need to exist in order to make limiting patents to four years sound reasonable and middle-ground (though from my experience, 4 years really isn't even enough time to bring most things to market, 7 years is more reasonable in cases of non-software stuff).
Patents are the most interesting question in this area, there are huge issues as to patentability (too many things are being patented that should not be...). More over, patents on discovery are not the same thing as patents on creations. It is simply wrong for anyone to be able to find a naturally occurring material or organism and to patent it. That includes in my opinion things like genes and naturally occurring molecules. Research should be heavily state funded, and the results of such state funded research should be openly available, anything that is in the national / public interest should be subject to mandatory license (not popular but important).
As for recognition and personal gain for those carrying out the research (after all that's what we are all after to some degree) isn't ability and recognition a currency all of its own within academia and research organisations? doesn't that kind of fame(?) ensure that you are employable and able to demand higher and better wages, or be granted better bursaries and grants? That said, I can see the issues surrounding personal renumeration it just isn't easy to find a sensible middle ground. Should you get nothing fr helping to cure cancer - of course not, should you get 2 billion dollars for doing so? probably not that much either, especially if it means that the cure you have hypothetically discovered becomes prohibitively expensive to actually use. Now replace the you in those statements to 'a company' - in my view
See, I don't get this argument. Ignoring any principals and/or pro-anti patentability stances, are you suggesting that if the pharmaceutical companies didn't get the huge amount of protection they get the would simply close up shop? they would go from making less money, to making *no money*?. As I understand it pharmaceutical companies benefit from all sorts of things they don't pay for, from R&D at universities, through to government subsidies. They make a huge amount of money, making less, or having to collaborate wouldn't be a bad thing for the users of their products. And anyway, what use is a treatment for a disease you have if you cant afford it?
Oh, and what about the fact that some drug companies research and development aims are geared toward high value markets (dieting and beauty for example, which can be addressed through other means) rather than areas that would help large sections of the population with actual illness (where a drug may be the only option)? The market forces involved force company's to do what is best for their bottom lines, most of the time, Not what is best for society as a whole. With a shift of our IP related legislation, maybe that would change.
All true, I guess what I am trying to say is that you cannot judge the impact of a crash simply by the effect you would expect it to have. In the case of a non server application such as a word processor the impact of a crash would be loss of productivity, not a security vulnerability as such, unless it can be triggered remotely, or by another application running on the same machine (becomes academic at this point as there is a lot worse you could do.)
with a complex application you should be in a position to say that every precaution to prevent a crash from exposing data or allowing arbitrary execution, but you cannot guarantee that. (well you can its just extremely extremely unlikely, and you would need to be in control of the environment in which the code is run as well) If you are in the position of being able to determine every possible scenario, then you should (realistically) be in a position to handle every scenario in a graceful manner, that would after all be the neatest way to go.
The DoS point really does only come into play if it is a server type application, or it is something that can be caused remotely and repeatedly. I would stand by the fact however that the scenario presented in the article would suggest a security vulnerability. I would also suggest that when looking at application crashed, there can be no such thing as a guaranteed outcome in every scenario, and in every environment.
Then again, what do I know, I only ever write in C, and even then it tends to be relatively simple client server applications. Even then I wouldnt characterise myself as above average skill wise. Maybe my view is slanted by my own perceived shortcomings.
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This might sound unreasonable but I would never expect a power plant (which has a lot of things depending on it) to shut down unless there was a major failure of a component or some other safety risk. Network traffic on its own, or its effects shouldn't ever be the cause. In a nuclear power plant you control ALL the nodes attached to the network, the nodes attached should not be in a position where they can saturate any individual node to the point of failure, especially if that failure causes a shut down of something as critical as a power station.
I can think of times where I have seen massive network spikes usually caused by issues with routing on fairly non-trivial networks, or loops where mistakes have been made and policies have not been followed, (lack of sleep or lack of patience), but then comparing an advertising companies internal network at 3am, or a paper factories network at midnight to a nuclear power station is taking it a little far.
There will always be unforeseen situations. The key is for the system to shutdown in an orderly fashion. In programming, this is accomplished through use of error traps.That would be fair if we were talking about a software failure after some sort of unforeseen environmental issue, it would even be OK if an auto plant stopped production because of an unforeseen fault, and whilst power plants should certainly fail safe, they should be robust enough that a situation where failure is the only option is extremely difficult to achieve. whatever happened to redundancy?
Now, the hysteria surrounding terrorism is another thing the plant engineers have to worry about. As for the external angle terrorism or not, I doubt it. If there is a system that can be brought down by weight of traffic, and that system is important enough that failure requires a power-plant reboot (:)) then there needs to be an air-gap. Someone up thread suggested an employee's laptop with a virus as a possible method of infection.. Who in the hell allows an unchecked laptop of any description onto their LAN? never mind a network that also contains components that run a power plant!!I would suggest that this is hype to 1) keep terrorism at the top of everyone's agenda, and make people feel unsafe, after all that sells papers and grabs viewers (which in turn sell advertising) 2) deflect some of the negativity that this incident would produce (I wish that I could blame terrorists for my mistakes sometimes... "no that project plan... I haven't got it, but I'm checking to see if my poor time management is caused by terrorism or simply my inability to organise my resources properly") and 3) Security risks presumably attract additional funding, sureley it would be nice to get an extra few million in the next budget.
Honestly, this probably shows a component failure and some poor design, understandable, but unacceptable in this area. If and I say If with some considerable doubt, this turns out to be, or is reported as an external event, then whoever enabled external network access to what appear to be critical systems within a nuclear power plant on the US mainland need to be identified and punished, together with the contractors who built or maintained it, the managers or consultants that assessed and managed it and the politicians who have responsibility for public safety. But as I said, it will probably turn out to be a simple component failure and some poor design.
Nope. The only person who decides on the license that a piece of software is licensed under is the copyright owner, not the distributor, that is true for software licensed under the BSD, GPL, a Proprietary or any other license.
With the GPL the idea is that the distributor is only allowed to distribute the software (modified or unmodified) if it is distributed under the same terms as it was received under. If the distributor doesn't like that license then they simply cannot distribute, the license cannot change without permission from the copyright owner. This is obviously better than proprietary software which usually cannot be distributed nor modified.
What the distributor can do is take GPL v2 code and fork it to keep it GPL v2, obviously that code would need to be maintained, and any updates from the original code base would not be usable if it was changed to GPL v3.
As for forks, even if you fork a project and modify it a lot, if it is a derivative you must still distribute it under the license you received the original code under, to get out from under the license you need to rewrite it.
Its sensible really; I couldn't grab a load of GPL code and release it as BSD, or as closed source, nor could I grab the source of MSWord 2007 fork it and GPL it.
Here is an alternative - Ive been seeing the origional one pop up so regularily that I am surprised no one else has messed around with it yet... - I had to... appologies to the copyright holder of this much used piece, this derviative is intended as a parody...:
My business faces ruin. Software sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many products as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those little software stores that sell well known, major software releases that everyone uses, even the people that don't them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a wider demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family software - stuff that the whole family could use. I don't sell sick stuff like violent games or gambling simulations , and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive education sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase software that worked without coming accross profanity or violent games. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer titles. Why is no one buying software? Are people not interested in compters? Do people prefer to use pen and paper, outsource;? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - seven in ten webservers now run F/OSS. On The Internet, you can find and download replacements for thousands of dollars worth of software in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the software industry, from lower management, to upper management to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike software, it's harder to make F/OSS books and distribute them over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with these F/OSS'er communists gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put Debian on my PC instead of this Vista junk, I'll download it right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the software industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came past the counter to leave, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to use unamerican, communist F/OSS replacements to good honest god-fearing proprietry software and tell your friends about it, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of F/OSS'ers. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If F/OSS'ers want to give stuff away for free, with the source code and divert cash from the software industry, then the software industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable software store will allow you to buy another title. If the F/OSS'ers can't buy the software to begin with, then they won't be able to make alternatives and give them away free over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting poor people from access to non-emergency medical care.
My Ipaq cradle has the same sort of thing going on and I find it useful, primarily because I move my Ipaq around a lot* and sometimes forget to plug in the power cable, or leave the power pack somewhere else, its a reminder that whilst the PDA is in its cradle, if there is no pretty light it is NOT on charge. (mine also flashes when charging and stops flashing when the PDA and/or spare battery are done so I guess there is an additional point in the lights favour)
*Familiar Linux, Wifi and an NFS server (on my main machine) means I have an Ipaq with 300Gb worth of accessible storage, in effect a portable stereo and (tiny) TV, just add speakers.
Yeah,
It hardly makes communicating data in a graphical form simple if you use random or unclear scales, I still remember a university sandwich year student who produced a graph displaying 12's of people per 144 minutes... (supposed to show user activity peaks) - apparently it made sense (144 minutes being 1/10th of a day and in this case 12 people being approx 1/10th of the sample. Would have done better to represent them as percentages, or 10's people per hour.. it makes interpreting the data easier... Its a nightmare when you are trying to figure out what 32.7 x 12 people at 576 minutes actually means. Well at least you can still see the trends.
Tank Engine, its Thomas the Tank Engine. Oh and I wish that they would change the song back to the original one, the new one drives me nuts...
OT - But thank you for bringing some happiness to my currently stressed out life, that post made me laugh. a lot.
Yup - Agree 100%.
...But don't duplicate content or meta information for no reason (500 random key words really wont help you) ...But don't have link page upon link page to random sitesb out&theme=pretty&data=-1&uid=14568681.
My personal check-list for this kind of thing is..
1) Make sure that the site design is sensible and contains valid html + valid css. (if used)
2) Make sure that all the text is relevant and not overly complex for the sake of it. (nice clear simple language..)
3) Have a site map. (A normal one - I don't know if google sitemaps, i.e. the xml stuff you can add to your site are useful)
4) Use all the useful meta information, (description, abstract etc..)
5) Make sure that the links on site (internal and external) are valid and go where you think they should
6) If you use a CMS or any content generation (i.e. data driven sites) make sure that the generated page addresses are neat, rewrite them if neccessary (possible). www.whatever.com/about.html is better than www.whatever.com/generated/pages/index.php?page=a
7) Update the content on your site on a regular(ish) basis.
8) Never ever let an SEO company that claims it an get you X hits per day/month anywhere near it, most SEO techniques involve gaming search engines in one way or another, whether through comment spam, blog spam, dodgy link farms or other nefarious methods. If an SEO company comes to you and says it will look at the layout/content of your site to optimise it to your sites demographic (by cleaning up the language or the code) you should be golden, anything else is a disaster waiting to happen. You should launch your site expect a few visitors and if it is a useful and usable site, then your user base will find it, as they find it, the links and traffic will come naturally.
One quirk that I noticed a while back whilst writing a company site that listed news headlines from a couple of news agencies, was that the site was appearing in conjunction with some weird search terms, like "$companyname terrorists" and "$companyname organised crime". Its not just the search terms you want to be associated with that will work - but anything that is available on your site, dynamic content and all.
How do you do that with Vista?
Serious point, for a single workstation Linux is easier to manage (as in centralised user management and single workstation mail etc.., I assume however you are talking about a large network or similar. a large and complex Linux environment is as manageable as any large and complex Windows environment, for the Linux environment you will have to work a little harder to get your point and click centralised GUI a la active directory with all the exchange components in, but at least you wont need to license another Windows OS to do it and you will need even less hardware to do it with. The only negative is that for the windows environment you *can* get away with badly qualified techs and support staff, on Linux you will need at least a few people who know what they are doing.
I know someone who just upgraded from Win98 to Vista for the same reason, so mine's a little better.
Just out of curiosity, I assume that that upgrade was coupled with a hardware purchase, althuogh correct me if I am wrong. Assuming that they had wanted to use their previous OS on their new hardware, would they have been able to? (not that I can see why they would want to). If their original media was OEM and came with the PC, then the answer is; not without buying an additional 98 license, probably from a somewhat dubious source.
Please return all your shirts immediately.
Although I must say I agree with you, I wouldn't buy anything else that I knew was broken before I opened he package
I would suggest that a state by state (as in US States and European member states) would be interesting to look at, although I have no idea as to where to start looking. However I doubt that GDP is going to be a good indicator of the economy in genera, other than possibly to show trends. In fact realistically I cannot conceive of a fair and accurate way to compare two massively different economies, even more so given that neither is a single entity with single economic policy (or for that matter a single tax system or even similar service provision (i.e. healthcare).
A simple meaningful (meaningful as it tells you how much money you have in your pocket) comparison would be median weekly wages for a household, however the data is so hard to get at that it is impossible to do an accurate comparison (UK does median values for individuals but only averages for households, the US census bureau does the reverse...)
Lets try anyway -I'll use California as the US state as it is apparently the best performing economy, and the UK because their statistics are in English. Sources are census.gov for the US and statistics.gov.uk for the UK.
Califoria Median *household* income, 2003 $48,440 (annual) (lets average it out to monthly i.e. 48440 / 12) US$4036
UK Median *individual* income,2002/03 £447. (weekly) (lets average it out to monthly i.e. (447 * 52) / 12) GB£1937
The average exchange rate in December 2003 was 0.55 GBP to the US Dollar, (so 1937 / 0.55 gets you the dollar value) US$3521.82
That means that in the UK mean individual income is lower than US household income by about 13%. So what does that tell us? well not a lot, I have no idea as to how many of the households in the US data have multiple wage earners, and I have no idea how many earners would be present in a uk household.
The interesting thing with the above is that it shows that unless you have exact data, of exactly the same type, that is gained in the same way meaningful comparisons are pointless. GDP is not an indicator of anything substantial, yet if it is improving you will hear about it, comparative tax rates are meaningless if the services provided are different, average wages are also no use as they bare no relation to purchasing power.
In short, I am sure I could use the above to claim that UK incomes are higher than those in the US, an individual in the UK earns 87% of what a whole household earns in the US, so with two earners per household on average (or 1.5 or even 1.2) the average UK household earns 70% more annually than a household in the US (it would be 30% more with 1.5 earners or 4% with 1.2 earners), (obviously I could also claim the reverse). Even if I did, what of taxes, tax breaks, tax credits, services, pensions, investments, savings, mortgage values etc.
I can combine random indicators to fortify my claim, for example the average UK home is £184924 whilst in the US its £132270 (at today's dollar rate using the most recent data I can get hold of), that means that in the UK people can afford houses that are 72% more expensive than in the US, so surely the fact that UK households (2 earners remember) earn 70% more than their US counterparts must be correct!!
So what am I trying to say?
your statement of
Europe as a whole. But individual countries are still screwing the pooch worse than us.
Can not be substantiated, there are far too many variables, is the US economy stronger than the UK? maybe but there is no real way of knowing. Are EU citizens better off than their UK counterparts? maybe but again there is no easy comparison. Statistics are hard to interpret, The EU will claim its better than the US, and the media in the EU will do the same unless there is a crisis and the US will claim that it is better than the EU but again, the media will help people think that unless there is a good doom and gloom story that makes for better news.
In my opinion the best (but least useful on an economic or PR
The bonus of this method, presumably, is that anyone at the crime scene who breathed in any of the NAno-CRIme-DEtetor-DUst (NACRIDEDU (R)(TM)(etc)) get a free internal medical exam in HD with 6.1 surround sound.
Pedant :) Its all about context.
Humans seem to be the first creature from this planet that may just be able to completely sever the cord with our home ecosystem by creating artificial ones.
:) but I have difficulty about defining things like natural and nature. The argument I have normally had presented is that we as a species have a massive negative impact on our environment, we destroy other species and modify our environment so drastically that it becomes impossible of supporting other life, we destroy the balance that is nature, therefore our actions are not natural.
Seriously, what's artificial? I assume (If I'm wrong shoot me down, assumption being the mother of all f**k-ups) you are talking about orbital or deep space based habitations in this instance, but I have real difficulty defining artificial. If we are a product of an ecosystem how can we ever introduce something that is not natural? I should point out here that I am not some sort of anti-environmentalist (as in being anti environmentalists rather than anti environment
However I cant quite see it as being that simple, I agree that we do all of those things, but I don't think there is an inherent or natural balance. (species die out, others replace them and habitats change). Sure we do it more quickly, but we are (after all) a product of the same environment. As a product of that environment (and going back toward this balance thing) we only do things that are in our interest, and within our capabilities. Our interests and capabilities however, are significantly different from other life forms (most animals interests are food, sex and territory, whilst ours are... (oh wait..!) more complex, our relative capabilities as a species are incomparable....
I think that we will eventually see that some of our actions need to be modified significantly to serve our own interests (well if not we may all die and then it will all be rather academic anyway..) and I hope that that occurs in time to prevent too much damage to other species and local ecosystems (if its not too late already) but I do sort of see this as a continuation of a natural process. I guess we could call it TurboDarwinism, and just hope that we evolve into something a little more sensible, and maintain numbers that are sustainable.
If not there is always space...
Oops, t'was intended mainly as humour however, your replacements would presumably be mutually exclusive, surely respecting nature would rule out aiding anyone. Although I suppose we could now have a debate about what constitutes nature or natural and we could establish whether a lifeform indigenous to a particular environment can evolve to the point where it is no longer 'part' of that environment but 'above' it. - There has got to be a better way of expressing that....
Its a "procedure" that is "stored" somewhere, if it works it works!
For the record on the MySQL (The world's most popular open source database) vs PostgreSQL (The world's most advanced open source database), I think Prefer flat files and grep.
Replace "gather data" with "decimate indigenous life" and "report back" with "multiply exponentially", and you have either a classic horror movie or an Iain Banks novel.
Actually its quite scary either way... grey goo anyone?
There is a difference between making source code available and releasing the same code under a permissive license. Just because the GPL, BSD and the various common licenses are the most visible does not mean that that is the only way to release code.
A situation where a piece of software is open source, but does not come with any rights to distribute and/or modify code would be one where a company or government want to carry out a code review usually (but not exclusively) on the grounds of security, or compliance. Just because you have no experience of the source code being available for a piece of software that does not come with a permissive license, does not mean that it is not something that happens regularity.
To take it one step further, I have worked with organisations where they have had access to source code under a restrictive license. The license in that instance did allow for code modification (the licensee had a large number of developers, and the application was core to the business). Changes could be made however they could certainly not be distributed (the software was licensed per server and per seat, at well over £3000 per seat), and if changes were made, the support contracts were invalidated. If you wanted a change to be supported, you needed to submit the alteration to the company providing the software with a transfer of copyright (i.e. you no longer owned copyright to your own changes). If you were lucky those changes would be accepted and support continued.
The above does constitute open source code as the source is open and available, it does not however fit in with the principals of the FLOSS movement. It is still a hell of a lot better than buying completely closed software where you have no options.
Since when does open sourcing anything give people the right to do anything other than look at the code (recipe in this case)? Duplicating / distributing / creating derivatives of something that is open source is still a copyright violation unless you have a license that says otherwise...
I know what you mean, Iraq is the same, guns everywhere but never a shot fired.
Damn, I've got it - its not that guns should be more available, its that heavy weaponry should be more readily available, maybe throw in a few RPG's too. That'll make criminals think before they act.
Your post had me in fits of laughter until I realised I'd mis read it - I read
So you see, Senator Hatch has a rather personal stake in copyright law. I mean, if his works weren't protected by civil and criminal law unto 70 years after his death, he'd have no incentive to create anything.
as:
So you see, Senator Hatch has a rather personal stake in copyright law. I mean, if his works weren't protected by civil and criminal law unto 70 years after his death, he'd have no incentive in dying.
I would point out that it is necessary for political elements to have extreme views in order to enact substantial change.
Sadly true - mainly because there is not sufficient popular awareness as to what is going on, ask the average person why a drug such as Herceptin is so expensive. The answer you are likley to get is the cost of production. In reality as I am sure you are aware given your position, the manufacturing process is hardly a factor in cost, to the point where research into alternative production methodologies (GM crops for example) is not pursued by the pharmaceutical companies to any great degree (although others do fund it). If these people were aware how much of the cost of these drugs is down to the marketing (quite a large chunk), and down to the testing regime's (even bigger chunk) and then the approval process. I am sure there would be more pressure on various world governments to do something about it, either through subsidy or collective agreements (a central body to provide approval for a drug, rather than multiple requirements for example).
If you come in saying that all you want is to limit copyrights to 10 years, and patents to 4 years, you'll get 30 years and 12 years.
Personally I think the length of copyright is less important in this field, it is the patents that are the issue. A company should not be permitted to simply take a competitors product and copy it, they should however be able to independently re-create the product, in my personal opinion there should also be no limitations on creating derivative products, as long as they meet some sort of bar as to usefulness and are sufficiently novel. Even saying that however I do believe that periods of copyright are too long, 10 years for a device, 7 for a drug, 5 for software and 3 for music/video would be something that appeals to me. That dropping scale in my opinion would reflect both the rate of change within the respective areas, and also the benefit to the public of the copyright being removed.
Those impractical people suggesting that patents be abolished entirely (which I admit I have a personal stake in, as I'm a research scientist and one of my few routes to making it big is coming up with a really awesome idea) need to exist in order to make limiting patents to four years sound reasonable and middle-ground (though from my experience, 4 years really isn't even enough time to bring most things to market, 7 years is more reasonable in cases of non-software stuff).
Patents are the most interesting question in this area, there are huge issues as to patentability (too many things are being patented that should not be...). More over, patents on discovery are not the same thing as patents on creations. It is simply wrong for anyone to be able to find a naturally occurring material or organism and to patent it. That includes in my opinion things like genes and naturally occurring molecules. Research should be heavily state funded, and the results of such state funded research should be openly available, anything that is in the national / public interest should be subject to mandatory license (not popular but important).
As for recognition and personal gain for those carrying out the research (after all that's what we are all after to some degree) isn't ability and recognition a currency all of its own within academia and research organisations? doesn't that kind of fame(?) ensure that you are employable and able to demand higher and better wages, or be granted better bursaries and grants? That said, I can see the issues surrounding personal renumeration it just isn't easy to find a sensible middle ground. Should you get nothing fr helping to cure cancer - of course not, should you get 2 billion dollars for doing so? probably not that much either, especially if it means that the cure you have hypothetically discovered becomes prohibitively expensive to actually use. Now replace the you in those statements to 'a company' - in my view
See, I don't get this argument. Ignoring any principals and/or pro-anti patentability stances, are you suggesting that if the pharmaceutical companies didn't get the huge amount of protection they get the would simply close up shop? they would go from making less money, to making *no money*?. As I understand it pharmaceutical companies benefit from all sorts of things they don't pay for, from R&D at universities, through to government subsidies. They make a huge amount of money, making less, or having to collaborate wouldn't be a bad thing for the users of their products. And anyway, what use is a treatment for a disease you have if you cant afford it?
Oh, and what about the fact that some drug companies research and development aims are geared toward high value markets (dieting and beauty for example, which can be addressed through other means) rather than areas that would help large sections of the population with actual illness (where a drug may be the only option)? The market forces involved force company's to do what is best for their bottom lines, most of the time, Not what is best for society as a whole. With a shift of our IP related legislation, maybe that would change.
All true, I guess what I am trying to say is that you cannot judge the impact of a crash simply by the effect you would expect it to have. In the case of a non server application such as a word processor the impact of a crash would be loss of productivity, not a security vulnerability as such, unless it can be triggered remotely, or by another application running on the same machine (becomes academic at this point as there is a lot worse you could do.)
with a complex application you should be in a position to say that every precaution to prevent a crash from exposing data or allowing arbitrary execution, but you cannot guarantee that. (well you can its just extremely extremely unlikely, and you would need to be in control of the environment in which the code is run as well) If you are in the position of being able to determine every possible scenario, then you should (realistically) be in a position to handle every scenario in a graceful manner, that would after all be the neatest way to go.
The DoS point really does only come into play if it is a server type application, or it is something that can be caused remotely and repeatedly. I would stand by the fact however that the scenario presented in the article would suggest a security vulnerability. I would also suggest that when looking at application crashed, there can be no such thing as a guaranteed outcome in every scenario, and in every environment.
Then again, what do I know, I only ever write in C, and even then it tends to be relatively simple client server applications. Even then I wouldnt characterise myself as above average skill wise. Maybe my view is slanted by my own perceived shortcomings.