No, the actual statistics show that for good or better drivers, the SUV's are safe. It is only when you speed or drive drunk that you get problems with the rollover, which is worse than cars.
Unfortunately, about half of all drivers are worse than average.
Because the smaller cars hold fewer passengers and carry less cargo, you often get two smaller cars instead of one SUV, so it evens out.
Well, given that the average occupancy of cars is about 1.4 people, the cases that a bigger car is needed are very rare indeed.
...CAFE standards...
I agree that whatever standards gouvern normal cars should also hold for SUVs. But the reason for SUVs is much less "the need of the public" as the marketing of the car companies, who, of course, like to sell bigger, more expensive cars, wether needed or not.
We are getting off-topic here, but I'll give you a short reply:
SUV's are typically safer. You only get problems if someone is drunk or reckless.
Well, they are sold as being safer. However, all actual statistics I have seen deny the fact. They fare somewhat better in frontal collisions, but they do overturn easier. In sum, it seems a wash-out even in collision with normal-sized cars.
The cost to the environment is the same as with the small cars. And the more engineering, the better.
Both wrong. A bigger car uses more resources, in making it, in disposing of it, and in running it. It guzzles more fuel and damages the roads much more than a smaller car.
And an adequate amount of engineering is good. If you do much more, you waste resources better spent elsewhere. We don't build bridges from Titanium, but from steel and concrete. Titanium bridges would be "better" in a certain sense, but engineering to that level is plain unnecessary.
Well, you can argue the noise problem from a libertarian point of view
as well. By what right do other people, e.g. by driving on a public
road, project noise into my hallowed home?
I can see that a person who walks in front of my house with an
air-horn blasting my windows is infringing on my freedoms. Your
example leaves off too many other variables. What if, for example, I
chose to live next to a busy freeway? Can I then start screaming,
"These noisy cars are infringing on my rights!" The more complicated
question is, "Are rights infringed upon when freeways are built near
housing?"
Indeed, it boils down to the question of who owns the property rights
to the transmission of noise through my house -- if it makes sense to
speak of those things as property rights at all. It's a similar
problem with the transmission of EM radiation or even the plain
consumption and pollution of air. It is inherent nearly impossible to
parcel out these rights to individual owners - and if it were
possible, the result would not be desirable, and the cost would be so
high as to leave everybody off worse.
As an example, just consider each property surrounded by sound- and
airtight plexiglas, with air exchange carefully controlled and
metered, and accounted for by individual contracts between all
neighbors. In addition to the incredible overhead and inconvenience,
we would play havoc with the global climate, and probably all die off.
For that reason, we have to treat some things as shared resources (or
collective property if you prefer that notion). And to avoid
the tradgedy of the commons, we have to manage these shared resources
reasonably. And exactly that is happening with the noise mapping and
reduction.
Unfortunately, if everybody tries to achieve the optimum individually,
we don't get a global optimum. In fact, we might even all be worse
off.
If everyone follows their own rational self-interest, then I think we
will have the most moral and productive society. The key is rational
self-interest. A society of self-important thugs who fights for their
own pleasure at the expense of everyone else is not a society worth
living in.
I agree with your second sentiment, but with your first statement only
to a very small degree. It entirely depends on the definition of
rational self-interest. There are many examples were a
locally optimal behavior leads away from the global optimum, even if
we assume perfect information. I'll give
you two examples (assuming you know about the classical prisoner's
dilemma): Vaccination and cars.
In a well-vaccinated population, the risk from vaccination side
effects is greater than the risk from the disease, because the disease
has basically no way to spread (there are to few carriers). So my
rational self interest tells me not to get vaccinated. If, however,
everyone acts like that, vaccination levels sink, and suddenly the
population is vulnerable again. One way out of this dilemma is to make
vaccination mandatory. Another would be to pay people to get
vaccinated. But both require a collective decision with some ability
of enforcement.
For the second example, think about the current SUV wave. If everybody
drives a reasonably small car, everybody is equally protected in
car-car collisions. If I follow my self-interest, I decide to buy a
bigger car (assuming that bigger cars are more secure, which for SUVs
typically is untrue). Now I'm in a better position, but everybody else
is worse off (they might collide with my bigger vehicle, which might
smash their small tin cans). So they buy bigger cars as well. After
one round of this, everybody has a big, heavy, over-engineered car, at
great cost to our purses and the environment, but safety-wise, we have
not gained anything. We only upped both protection and destructive
force of our vehicles.
Your religion has defined private property and free enterprise as "evil". It is from these premises that you weigh these alleged benefits and costs.
Well, you can argue the noise problem from a libertarian point of view as well. By what right do other people, e.g. by driving on a public road, project noise into my hallowed home? If they want to drive/use the public (or even a private) road, they should better make sure that they don't affect my private property with their emissions, wether noise or CO2 or unburned Benzene.
Of course, enforcing such a view now would make our society collapse. It is not feasible. Instead, we recognize that some things are inherently shared ("collective property") and try to minimize the impact of the use of those resources collectively.
Unfortunately, if everybody tries to achieve the optimum individually, we don't get a global optimum. In fact, we might even all be worse off.
As for the noise example, if people become ill or depressed or go postal because of noise, we all have to bear a part of that burden. So it makes sense for all of us share the remedy. I'm very much amazed by people in the US who balk at paying $5/month in taxes for better police and schooling to reduce the crime rate, but think nothing of spending $5000/month for a walled condo that does nothing to solve the crime problem, but at best moves crime somewhere else.
What is the logic here? I'd think that the more studied system would be considered most secure? Posters here seem to agree it's easy to pick an RSA key long enough to stop Eve - even when she has the spiffiest math and fastest computers. Then why not choose RSA when it's been attacked with some success but still holds up beautifully?
The more studied system is only more secure if no weaknesses turn up. For factoring, we do have had quite significant progress over the last years, and promises for more. Now, this is the kind of progress that moves breakbility from 10e26 processor years to 10e25 processor years or so, but still, it is there.
As somebody else already mentioned, there now seems to be similar progress for the discrete log problem used by ElGamal, so I don't know if my original statement still holds in the cryptographic community.
Hope you can clarify a bit - after all you're the Dr. rer.nat.:-)
Hey, not fair! I'm not an Austrian, after all;-)
When my theorem prover is used in cryptographic applications, one of the assumptions is usually that the cypher is unbreakable and that the protocol is the weak part. And how either theorem proving or cryptography end up under "natural things" is anybody's guess.
Re:Mine is 1024 too...
on
RSA-576 Factored
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Is the ElGamal algorithm inherently more or less secure than RSA?
RSA is based on the factorization of large numbers. El Gamal is based on the discrete log problem in a cyclic group. We don't know polynomial solutions for either problem, but we also do not have a strong lower bound for the complexity of either problem.
I think currently El Gamal is regarded as slightly more secure, if only because more progress has been made with factorization (probably because its better known and easier accessible/explainable). In practice, it should not matter until some real mathematical breakthrough.
Wow, I havn't really read in to it, but is that very big? I mean, they were talking about not too long ago that 128bit encryption is "almost impossiable" to break. If this is 576bit encryption, and they've broken it, doesn't this mean that 1024bit is looking slightly weak? Whats the 'difficulty' of breaking this key on a relative scale?
There is a different between keys for symmetric encryption algorithms like DES, 3DES, Blowfish, and keys for asymmetric (public key) algorithms like RSA and Diffie-Hellman. Symmetric 128 bit keys are still considered safe. 1024 bit asymetric keys are safe for the moment - I belive for long-term security sensitive applications, 2048 bit keys are recommended nowadays. Here is a table comparing the cost of breaking (well, brute-forcing) symmetric and asymmetric cyphers for a given key lenght.
My PGP key is still 1024 bits, and I don't break a sweat.
Do worms count as a comprimise? I can't see any possible way that you couldn't count them, and I can't see any possible way that linux would have more comprimises in a year than any of the latest worms would generate in a month.
The study referenced above is from mi2g, a company that is known for reports that overstate risk and damage (hey, they sell security services), and is not considered a particularly good source. Moreover, they counted only attacks on servers (without a clear definition of what a server is) and only "successful and verifiable" attacks. How they got those numbers again is not explained in any of the online articles, and neither is what constitutes an attack (A ping? A portscan? A DOS attack? Or a remote root exploit?).
So anyways, they did not count (most) worm incidents, as they would happen on non-server windows machines.
That does not mean that Linux boxen should not have better default security settings, of course.
While most of the "spam" I get nowadays is sent by fast spreading Microsoft worms
Please, spare us the anti-Microsoft fabricated bullshit stories and stick to the topic.
Well, for me that is true. For about 6 month or so a vast number of UBEs I have received are virus warnings about "W32/Gibe" or something similar. At the height of the epidemic, about 2/3rds of all my email was (directly or indirectly) worm-generated. By now it seems to be down to maybe 40%, but it is still the biggest individual category.
I'm sure he will incur travel expenses during this process, so it's good that funding sources are available.
Travel expenses? At least in Germany, a witness gets reasonable travel expenses from the court and is also compensated for the time lost. Costs are part of the total court cost (and in Germany are paid by the loser).
I assumed that to be so in most western countries. Why on earth should a witness be put at a disadvantage for the fact that he or she helps the court finding a sound judgement?
He suffers from the "words mean what I want them to mean. fsck common usage" syndrome. (re: free (or Free (or pHree (whatever))) refering to limits, and the totally non-standard definition of "operating system" that he coined to justify the whole GNU/world rant)
I'm not claiming that you are totally wrong with respect to RMS. However,
you have been influenced by to much advertising. Free indeed has to do more with freedom than with price.
If he were honest to a fault, he would admit that before the GNU/universe thing hit the fan, NO ONE refered to the utilities that run under a kernel as an "operating system."
Well, I took a course in operating systems in 1989, and I've been notetaker in a lot of examns about operating systems from 1995 to 2002. The most common definition of an operating system I encountered is "A collection of programs enabeling the efficient operation of a computer system.".
The OS==kernel view seems to be strictly limited to home computers and PCs. And even MS-Dos and CPM cam with loads of utilites in the operating system floppies.
You cannot fault somebody if he has a larger vision than you. The UNIX tapes have always carried millions of utilities, and without them, the kernel would have been totally useless -- because of the modular design that is one of the strenght of UNIX. Consider the shell, ls, mv, cat. The fact that they are separate programs instead of kernel built-ins does not make them less part of the OS.
From what I've heard about Stallman (including that my mother knew him in the late 70s:)), he is not a good public speaker. I think we all already know that, though - he's caused many an uproar on Slashdot by statements made that have infuriated even people that mostly agree with him.
Well, he may not be a brilliant speaker, but he is better than Joe Schmock off the street. Also, he is a brilliant logical thinker, honest to a fault, and very much speaks his mind. I think he will make an excellent impression.
However, I don't know if the judge will take kindly to him correcting both the judge and SCO's counsel about the correct distinction between Linux (the kernel) and GNU/Linux (the operating system)....AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN;-)
The problem, then, is verifying the integrity of a paper trail. If someone is going to rig an election by tampering with electronic voting machines, they're also more than capable of forging the paper trail.
But large-scale systematic tampering is a lot easier electronically. You only need very few people tampering with the software. Yes, fixing one precinct may be doable by hand, but to really mess things up you need a computerized system.
Reminds me of a Scrooge McDuck story where Huey (or one of the others) says "That's one reason why Unca Scrooge keeps his money in the money bin. At least it takes a lot of very noisy and conspicous lorries to steal it all."
Or let's go with fresh fruits, I live in Toronto and guess what, most of my apples come from California.
Just like the AC said, read up on comparative advantage. It's called free trade. I live in a temperate area. I can't get pineapples from my region because you can't grow pineapples in temperate zones. Thus the Thai produce it for me. My regional economy is better suited to producing apples and grapes, so these products are produced in leiu of other products.
It's not horrifically wrong at all. It makes perfect sense and it is the way the world economy should work. That is, unless you'd like to go back to preindustrial conditions and live by the mercy of the harvest.
In fact, the truth is, as usual, in between. There is nothing wrong with us buying pineapples from Thailand (I like pineapple;-).
What is wrong is that we allow the producers and/or traders to externalize much of the price of actually making and shipping things around, i.e. we all pay for the infrastructure and subsidize energy costs (either directly, e.g. by invading unfriendly but petroleum-rich countries) or indirectly, by not charging for enviromental degradation.
As a result I can often buy a pineapple at about the same price per gramm as apples grown next door. I don't want to pay more for pineapples (I react slighly allergic to plain raw plain apples, and I like pineapples better anyways), but I definitly agree that a more rational system would make them quite a lot more expensive.
Capitalism is very good at optimizing resource usage within a given set of constrainst. It's the job of politics to provide the constraints that lead to a reasonable outcome. And it's our job to elect politicians that actually do something about it, instead of those that just promise lower taxes, higher profits, and cheaper pineapples.
Besides, do you really want them to start charging everybody right now? I'd welcome this reprieve.
Yes, I want them to "start charging everybody", so that everybody (or at least somebody) has legal standing to sue them into the ground. Guess why it is impossible to buy a license?
Also note that a SCO license is absolute snake oil. Even if they had a point, i.e. if there were non-free SCO code in Linux, the whole kernel
could not be distributed under the GPL and hence could not be distributed at all, because any other license would violate the copyright of a couple of thousand kernel developers.
You might legally be able to continue to run your existing
copy, but I doubt even that.
From a purely economic point of view, free copying, wether of music or of software, is a good thing.
Nope. The devaluation of labor and the products of labor are never good things.
Huh? Then I guess all rationalization is bad, as it indeed decreases the value of labour. It does, however, decrease the price of goods even more. So on the whole we come out on top.
The value that is lost by the cooperations is regained by the people that get free copies.
Nope. Once a thing has been illegally copied, the value that it had disappears. It can no longer fetch a price on the open market, so it no longer has value economically speaking. Piracy destroys economic value.
No, it does not. You are speaking about price, not value. The value of a shovel does not drop if a guy next door gives shovels away. I can still use it to dig up my garden and plant potatoes.
And since more people get copies if they are cheaper, the economy comes out on top.
Uh? That made zero sense.
A shovel has a certain usage value for everyone. It also has a price, dictated by marked conditions. If the difference between value and price is positive, I will buy and use a shovel, thus realizing its value. If it is not, the value I could create with a shovel is lost. If the shovel becomes cheaper (or free), more people will use shovels to create value.
In other words, if GE stops buying licenses for Word, but uses OpenOffice instead, Microsoft loses value, but GE gains it.
What does that have to do with piracy?
Replace "OpenOffice" with "pirated copies of Word" and tell me how the economic balance changes (assuming the two products are interchangable).
Wrong, you moron. If a corporation is harmed, then people's pension funds are harmed. If a corporation is harmed people are put out of work. If a corporation is harmed, the economy as a whole takes a hit.
Jesus, go take a fucking Economics class, will you?
Maybe you should take one as well. From a purely economic point of view, free copying, wether of music or of software, is a good thing. The value that is lost by the cooperations is regained by the people that get free copies. And since more people get copies if they are cheaper, the economy comes out on top. In other words, if GE stops buying licenses for Word, but uses OpenOffice instead, Microsoft loses value, but GE gains it.
It's only second order effects that justify IP protection, i.e. the fact that we want IP producers to have an incentive to produce more (and to be guided my the market as to what kind of IP the produce).
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
In what way is being captured on a battlefield considered arbitrary arrest, detention or exile? Would you rather that the US Army refuse to take prisoners?
Recent joke in rec.humor.funny (rephrased):
Discussion of the Iraq war in heaven:
Alexander the Great: "If I only had some of those C130 supply planes, I certainly would have conquered India!"
Frederik the Great: "Wow, with some of those M1A tanks I would have won the 7 years war in weeks!"
Napoleon: "Yes, and if I had had FOX News, nobody would ever have heard about Russia!"
Or, in other words, read how some of thes people have been taken "on the battlefield". And even if we assume that the arrest was legal, the detention certainly is not.
Also note that people have all the rights in the declaration of human rights, including those in article 10, which you conveniently deleted.
The only thing about all of those linked stories is... they aren't American citizens being held in Guantanamo. However you feel about their detention in Cuba (of all places!), it really has no relevance to the post about due process. Non-American citizens have no inherant rights to a speedy (or any) trial in America.
Universal declaration of Human Rights:
[...]
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Yes, but I think the issue wasn't with the company editing any of their own employee's outgoing email. It was only with censoring incoming mail.
That is indeed what I was talking about. Sorry if I wasn't clear about this. I, as the author of a number of web pages and nearly countless emails object to the illegal changes to my copyrighted works by corporate censors.
Of course, censorously changing outgoing mail might be illegal from another point of view. It may not be copyright infringement if you consider everything written during working hours as a work for hire. But it certainly is fraud if you send someone an email allegedly signed by some employee, but in fact modified after he sent it.
Just imagine what effect the creative insertion of not or even just a few zeroes can have...
Yes... I'm not really sure it matters "how I feel" about this idea of content editing, because what's more important is where the law stands on it.
As far as I can tell, it's probably still under the umbrella of "legality" for a corporation to censor incoming email content, since they can argue they own the network and the systems, and add the assertion that "your email at work is not private".[...]
Privacy is only one aspect of the legal situation here.From that point of view, I find it appalling that a company would censor its workers email, and somewhat less appalling if they restrict web access. Actually changing emails or web pages should be absolutely out!
But from my uncensored point of view, there is another aspect. My writing, on which I have a copyright, is changed and redistributed without my permission. That certainly is illegal. Even filtering of images out of a page by some intermediate (not by the end user) is creating and distributing an unauthorized derivative work.
By putting stuff on the web I implicitely grant permission to download and read it. But I certainly do not grant any assholes permission to fuck with my creation!
Scewy? It makes sense to me. A phone number is a phone number is a phone number.
Really messed up Mexican system deleted
Give me a U.S.-style, "I pay for all my minutes but have 4500 free, including national long-distance" type system anytime.
Well, that's like saying "break my leg, compared to what the inquisiton did its quite good"!
At least in Germany, cell phone numbers have a distinct prefix, similar to, but different from all area codes. You can immediately recognize a cell phone number, and know what you are in for.
Caller pays.
Of course you can have your land line phone number rerouted to your cell phone, but that is handled as two separate calls (original caller calls your land line (and pays), you call your cell phone (and pay)).
Seems to be a rational and fair system to me. Oh yes, did I mention nation-wide (in practice, Europe-wide, but expensive) seamless digital coverage regardless of carrier?
Well, why don't you? It's an interesting read, and much easier going than most commercial licenses (possibly because its purpose is to educate the reader as opposed to confuse and bore him to dead).
...but if I have a closed source software, and use some open source "bits" that have been distributed under GPL, can't I just encapsulated the GPL stuff in a library and give the source to the library, and not the complete source to the software.
No, not if your library is linked directly with the executable. If you manage to use some loose coupling, you might get away with it. As someone else wrote, the LGPL will let you link libraries as long as you make the library code available.
My personal feelings towards OpenSource software, is that is it is good for research and academics, but I find it difficult to understand how a person can earn money by releasing the source to the software. (Now if it is ok by the GPL to pay for the exe and the code, then that would a different story)
It is okay to pay for the code. You can charge whatever you get away with for the program. The only limit is that if you distribute just the binary, you must make the source available at minimal cost. But you can (try to) sell the combined package for a Million a seat.
There are a lot of other ways of earning money. I am the sole author of a GPLed program, so I can release it under various licenses, and I sold a license for proprietary versions to a company. I also did consulting, getting paid for adding certain features (to either or both versions), and for training people about use and architecture of the software.
reiserfs never was the fastest, but namesys does claim that reiser4 is "the fastest fs". i don't know if its true or not, if they have a speed v/s features than perhaps they do.
That is one thing to keep in mind. Another thing is to look at the hardware. They used an ancient 450 MHz Pentium-2 machine. ReiserFS always used a lot of CPU, hence it may be at least partially CPU bound. There is always a trade-off between computation (say rebalancing trees or reorganizing hashes for optimal access) and I/O. Normally, I/O cost dominates nowadays, so it makes sense to compute a lot to safe just a little bit of IO. But for the combination of a slow processor and a fast disk, things may look different.
To get more reliable results, these test should be repeated on various other configurations (and, of course, with different work loads - a news server is very different from a streaming video server).
not to mention a do-not-spam registry is stupid in the sole fact that it gives spammers a huge list of millions of VALID email addresses - doing their job FOR them
This is the hard part. How can you make it a crime to traffic or abuse a list of email addresses?
Well, one thing you could do is to not publish the list of addresses, but only a list of md5-hashes of them. You could still verify if an address is valid (or rather was added to the do-not-spam-list, not quite the same thing), but at least you don't get an explicit list.
You might even use a rather expensive hashing algorithm (say 1 second per address) to make large-scale verifying of addresses hard.
Slashdot Mirror
And an adequate amount of engineering is good. If you do much more, you waste resources better spent elsewhere. We don't build bridges from Titanium, but from steel and concrete. Titanium bridges would be "better" in a certain sense, but engineering to that level is plain unnecessary.
Thanks.
Indeed, it boils down to the question of who owns the property rights to the transmission of noise through my house -- if it makes sense to speak of those things as property rights at all. It's a similar problem with the transmission of EM radiation or even the plain consumption and pollution of air. It is inherent nearly impossible to parcel out these rights to individual owners - and if it were possible, the result would not be desirable, and the cost would be so high as to leave everybody off worse.
As an example, just consider each property surrounded by sound- and airtight plexiglas, with air exchange carefully controlled and metered, and accounted for by individual contracts between all neighbors. In addition to the incredible overhead and inconvenience, we would play havoc with the global climate, and probably all die off.
For that reason, we have to treat some things as shared resources (or collective property if you prefer that notion). And to avoid the tradgedy of the commons, we have to manage these shared resources reasonably. And exactly that is happening with the noise mapping and reduction.
I agree with your second sentiment, but with your first statement only to a very small degree. It entirely depends on the definition of rational self-interest. There are many examples were a locally optimal behavior leads away from the global optimum, even if we assume perfect information. I'll give you two examples (assuming you know about the classical prisoner's dilemma): Vaccination and cars.
In a well-vaccinated population, the risk from vaccination side effects is greater than the risk from the disease, because the disease has basically no way to spread (there are to few carriers). So my rational self interest tells me not to get vaccinated. If, however, everyone acts like that, vaccination levels sink, and suddenly the population is vulnerable again. One way out of this dilemma is to make vaccination mandatory. Another would be to pay people to get vaccinated. But both require a collective decision with some ability of enforcement.
For the second example, think about the current SUV wave. If everybody drives a reasonably small car, everybody is equally protected in car-car collisions. If I follow my self-interest, I decide to buy a bigger car (assuming that bigger cars are more secure, which for SUVs typically is untrue). Now I'm in a better position, but everybody else is worse off (they might collide with my bigger vehicle, which might smash their small tin cans). So they buy bigger cars as well. After one round of this, everybody has a big, heavy, over-engineered car, at great cost to our purses and the environment, but safety-wise, we have not gained anything. We only upped both protection and destructive force of our vehicles.
And unfortunately, we don
Of course, enforcing such a view now would make our society collapse. It is not feasible. Instead, we recognize that some things are inherently shared ("collective property") and try to minimize the impact of the use of those resources collectively.
Unfortunately, if everybody tries to achieve the optimum individually, we don't get a global optimum. In fact, we might even all be worse off.
As for the noise example, if people become ill or depressed or go postal because of noise, we all have to bear a part of that burden. So it makes sense for all of us share the remedy. I'm very much amazed by people in the US who balk at paying $5/month in taxes for better police and schooling to reduce the crime rate, but think nothing of spending $5000/month for a walled condo that does nothing to solve the crime problem, but at best moves crime somewhere else.
As somebody else already mentioned, there now seems to be similar progress for the discrete log problem used by ElGamal, so I don't know if my original statement still holds in the cryptographic community.
Hey, not fair! I'm not an Austrian, after allWhen my theorem prover is used in cryptographic applications, one of the assumptions is usually that the cypher is unbreakable and that the protocol is the weak part. And how either theorem proving or cryptography end up under "natural things" is anybody's guess.
My PGP key is still 1024 bits, and I don't break a sweat.
So anyways, they did not count (most) worm incidents, as they would happen on non-server windows machines.
That does not mean that Linux boxen should not have better default security settings, of course.
I assumed that to be so in most western countries. Why on earth should a witness be put at a disadvantage for the fact that he or she helps the court finding a sound judgement?
The OS==kernel view seems to be strictly limited to home computers and PCs. And even MS-Dos and CPM cam with loads of utilites in the operating system floppies.
You cannot fault somebody if he has a larger vision than you. The UNIX tapes have always carried millions of utilities, and without them, the kernel would have been totally useless -- because of the modular design that is one of the strenght of UNIX. Consider the shell, ls, mv, cat. The fact that they are separate programs instead of kernel built-ins does not make them less part of the OS.
However, I don't know if the judge will take kindly to him correcting both the judge and SCO's counsel about the correct distinction between Linux (the kernel) and GNU/Linux (the operating system)....AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN ;-)
Reminds me of a Scrooge McDuck story where Huey (or one of the others) says "That's one reason why Unca Scrooge keeps his money in the money bin. At least it takes a lot of very noisy and conspicous lorries to steal it all."
What is wrong is that we allow the producers and/or traders to externalize much of the price of actually making and shipping things around, i.e. we all pay for the infrastructure and subsidize energy costs (either directly, e.g. by invading unfriendly but petroleum-rich countries) or indirectly, by not charging for enviromental degradation.
As a result I can often buy a pineapple at about the same price per gramm as apples grown next door. I don't want to pay more for pineapples (I react slighly allergic to plain raw plain apples, and I like pineapples better anyways), but I definitly agree that a more rational system would make them quite a lot more expensive.
Capitalism is very good at optimizing resource usage within a given set of constrainst. It's the job of politics to provide the constraints that lead to a reasonable outcome. And it's our job to elect politicians that actually do something about it, instead of those that just promise lower taxes, higher profits, and cheaper pineapples.
Also note that a SCO license is absolute snake oil. Even if they had a point, i.e. if there were non-free SCO code in Linux, the whole kernel could not be distributed under the GPL and hence could not be distributed at all, because any other license would violate the copyright of a couple of thousand kernel developers.
You might legally be able to continue to run your existing copy, but I doubt even that.
[...]
It's only second order effects that justify IP protection, i.e. the fact that we want IP producers to have an incentive to produce more (and to be guided my the market as to what kind of IP the produce).
Discussion of the Iraq war in heaven:
Alexander the Great: "If I only had some of those C130 supply planes, I certainly would have conquered India!"
Frederik the Great: "Wow, with some of those M1A tanks I would have won the 7 years war in weeks!"
Napoleon: "Yes, and if I had had FOX News, nobody would ever have heard about Russia!"
Or, in other words, read how some of thes people have been taken "on the battlefield". And even if we assume that the arrest was legal, the detention certainly is not.
Also note that people have all the rights in the declaration of human rights, including those in article 10, which you conveniently deleted.
[...]
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
That is indeed what I was talking about. Sorry if I wasn't clear about this. I, as the author of a number of web pages and nearly countless emails object to the illegal changes to my copyrighted works by corporate censors.
Of course, censorously changing outgoing mail might be illegal from another point of view. It may not be copyright infringement if you consider everything written during working hours as a work for hire. But it certainly is fraud if you send someone an email allegedly signed by some employee, but in fact modified after he sent it.
Just imagine what effect the creative insertion of not or even just a few zeroes can have...
But from my uncensored point of view, there is another aspect. My writing, on which I have a copyright, is changed and redistributed without my permission. That certainly is illegal. Even filtering of images out of a page by some intermediate (not by the end user) is creating and distributing an unauthorized derivative work.
By putting stuff on the web I implicitely grant permission to download and read it. But I certainly do not grant any assholes permission to fuck with my creation!
At least in Germany, cell phone numbers have a distinct prefix, similar to, but different from all area codes. You can immediately recognize a cell phone number, and know what you are in for.
Caller pays.
Of course you can have your land line phone number rerouted to your cell phone, but that is handled as two separate calls (original caller calls your land line (and pays), you call your cell phone (and pay)).
Seems to be a rational and fair system to me. Oh yes, did I mention nation-wide (in practice, Europe-wide, but expensive) seamless digital coverage regardless of carrier?
There are a lot of other ways of earning money. I am the sole author of a GPLed program, so I can release it under various licenses, and I sold a license for proprietary versions to a company. I also did consulting, getting paid for adding certain features (to either or both versions), and for training people about use and architecture of the software.
To get more reliable results, these test should be repeated on various other configurations (and, of course, with different work loads - a news server is very different from a streaming video server).
You might even use a rather expensive hashing algorithm (say 1 second per address) to make large-scale verifying of addresses hard.