Everyone cares when he realises that his liberties are endangered. No-one cares when others' are endangered, or when liberties he doesn't use are endangered. Most people are sheep, with a very simple, straightforward and incorrect view of right and wrong.
I fear you are too right.
The only hope is for people to be more vigilant
and thoughtful than what history has proved them to be.
Always ask yourself:
Who is searching me?
Why are they searching me?
What are they looking for?
If they do not search me, then what are the consequences?
If suddenly the who, what, why or me (see above) is interchanged with something completely different, would that be a satisfactory society to live in?
Providing good policy requires a lot more thoughtfulness, more than the majority of our citizens are willing to engage in.
Unfortunately, in our representative government, those same lax attitudes are being made into poor policy these very days.
You will see more and more frequent use of the term "terrorism" in all kinds of contexts where the authors wish to gain attention to their cause.
I can see it coming...
"Down here at Bob's New and Used Car Supercenter, we're having an anti-terrorism Sale-A-Thon! We're not stopping until the last high price has been eliminated!"
to come up with reasons not to use Open Source software.
In the past, the argument was frequently made that OSS was inferior to available closed source software. In a lot of cases, that was true. Now, it is not true as much. And, even if there is a higher quality closed source alternative, you'll end up paying a lot more money for it, detracting from that advantage over OSS.
As a business user, it could be argued that using open source software gives you no advantage over your competition, who also has access to the source code. But, it would be difficult for you to buy closed source software that your competitor could not buy. Unless you happen to have a lot more money than your competitor. In that case, perhaps you can obtain an advantage buying expensive software they cannot afford. Assuming, that is, that the software is worth the money to you for your purposes.
No, really the only arguments against open source software will come from software producers and sellers, not from the users.
Users stand to gain from OSS at every opportunity in decreased costs, lower risk of lock-ins and upgrade treadmills, obsolescence, etc.
OSS puts software producers in a fix. They have to produce something substantially better than the OSS to justify the price. They have to create substantial, real value in their products, and the bar that defines that value keeps getting raised with time. It's a difficult endeavor that takes a more time, money and talent. No wonder various software producers are against OSS; particularly those whose software products are not based on providing real value as in locking in their customers to provide the company with future revenue streams.
So, OSS really is unAmerican, because America currently hosts many software producers that benefit from the world's dependency on closed source software.
I don't know about you, but this American thinks that we should be above such tactics which artificially inflate the costs of software to the world at large. That world could really stand to benefit from the use of software to improve their productivity and standard of living.
end advice as to how to avoid endless bickering about trivial issues
You sound like you've already had more experience in this area than most.
From what I've seen in the Linux camp, bickering is allowed to continue so long as valid points are being generated. Once the antagonists freeze their positions to merely make themselves look good, then it is time for the project leader to exercise benign dictatorship rights and pick a resolution.
And, as others have noted, participants that provide substance toward a solution are more valuable than participants that talk about solutions, and those that talk about solutions are more valuable than those who just gripe and whine about what's bad without suggesting positive improvements.
My name is Scottissue Pulp and I'm the Manager of the Linux Security Response Center and I'd like to take this opportunity to decry this
"practice of deliberately publishing explicit, step-by-step instructions for exploiting security vulnerabilities, without regard for how the information may be used."
One nice way for your email client to tell the mail server "hey, stop sending me mail like this" would be for it to
save your mail deletion history and use it to dynamically update your procmail recipes.
I could certainly use something like this.
Some people delete "good" mail that they read and find interesting, but I save all "good" mail, and actually only delete mail that I have absolutely no interest ever in seeing again and probably didn't want to see in the first place. All other email I save.
Under that model, it should be possible for my email client to concoct rules for a spam collection inbox that would be scheduled for automatic deletion, with an ability to see the subject titles and senders listed.
I know that procmail lets you do this already, but the key problem with procmail, as others have noted, is the level of individual effort required to constantly fine-tune the ~/.procmailrc file to "get rid of messages like this new one."
I would really prefer that ISPs don't
do wholescale blocking in their crusade against spam, but, if they don't, then the current situation puts too much onus on the users to cull through things, even with procmail. I'd like to be able to (i) live in a free society and, (ii) have time to live a life of doing things besides edit ~/.procmailrc
Or, if you work in a computer support organization, you know very well that YOU are going to get the blame. (Even if you can mumble some technical jargon that shifts blame back onto the proper source - "We've called that Outlook bug into Microsoft and they've got programmers working on it.")
Reminds me, though, of a quote I saw in the IT press a year or so back that I found priceless:
"Customers know what they want. Customers have told us what they want. Customers want one throat to choke."
gettin apps, particularly binaries, easier for
x86
but that's just me - cheap and lazy.
A friend that runs both UNIX and Macs has his Mac laptop setup to run Linux on PPC.
He likes it because he spends all day in XEmacs on a Sun and the Linux box is a good facsimile of the same environment but in a portable. But, he also gets the Mac and GUI that he's liked for many years.
Also, I noticed recently that the as-yet-still-vaporous G5 looks to really cook, blowing the doors off the 2 GHz P4 from the quoted SPECint2K and SPECfloat2K figures. That kind of performance is always interesting, and having a Linux platform that runs on it is a plus.
I mean, like, around Slashdot everyone already knows this and has for a long time.
Moving on from that, I'm wondering how good this CNET piece comes out to be, since it will be read by more than just the Slashdot readership. It would be good if they do their research and talk to both technology and business people on the leading edges of IT, as well as those solidly in the middle, those placid people unaware of the tides that carry them.
I'm presuming that your Slashdot posts, such as the subject line, are not subject to your usual high standards!
Seriously, though, I appreciate where you're coming from. I don't think anyone here starts out their career with the ambition of "hacking out barely functional code". No indeed. We all want our code to be the ultimate work of art, lasting for many years, referred to again and again as an example of elegent, timeless code to be emulated by future coders.
Unfortunately, there are deadlines and various annoyances coming in from management and marketing, demanding increasing capabilities in decreasing time. Say "no can do" to those demands is very hard for someone that takes pride in what they do.
...but you can probably send copies of your email somewhere else and use both for a while to see if you like Evolution.
An excellent idea - thanks!
Once I get my Linux box up, then I'll use my procmail recipe to divert copies of my email over there just to see how Evolution works for me.
In the future, my current simple SMTP to mbox file environment will change to a corporate Exchange server. I'm thinking of slurping the contents of the Exchange server using fetchmail, then procmail, to a file, then MUA (Evolution). I'm hoping that will provide me with a good solution, that there aren't any strange side effects with getting LDAP info (addresses) from the Exchange server, but reading local boxes.
I've used fetchmail at home to extract mail from my ISP, but I haven't had to use it at work much because the 24x7 services of the LAN have made SMTP to mbox file route painless.
I'm almost ready to jump over Evolution to handle my email.
Currently, I use exmh, which I've found to be a great GUI interface to my email. It uses tcl and tk for the GUI and MH for folders, but has all kinds of extensions to support PGP, address books, in-line HTML display, etc.
Is anyone, familiar with both exmh and Evolution, able to point out their relative merits and detractions?
You've got to do better to interpret context in your translations from other languages.
The correct translation is obvious to anyone that has been involved in negotiating Enterprise Licenses with Microsoft lately and bringing up the issue of Linux or any other option to Windows.
And I'm still using fvwm2 because I don't like the bloat of CDE. It was especially bad in the early years when it first came out and the hardware SPARCStation 2's and 10's was not as fast as it is now.
Now, with the hardware capabable, I'm hoping to use either Gnome or KDE, just because it seems like more development is occurring for those environments than for CDE.
It's too bad Gnome won't be coming with Solaris 9.
Over the next month I'll bring up an Athlon system as soon as I can buy SuSE 7.3. I suspect that for desktop applications it will suit me better. Then, if I really need a Solaris app, I'll run it over X from the server.
the processors are much slower than the equivalent Intel or AMD (by how much varies by who you ask and what you're doing)
Verily.
I've always been curious as to how fast the Transmeta chips are in real life.
I got the impression that the inherent adaptability of the Transmeta Crusoe only shined in benchmarks where the repetitive nature of the processing was a significant part of the workload.
And that the Crusoe came out wimpy on the typical standard benchmarks because of this.
So I've been curious whether laptop users with the Crusoe find it fast for what they spend time doing with their laptops, or whether that kind of optimization is practically irrelevant.
My (UK-based) accountants have always treated PC software as a consumable, rather than an asset, precisely because of the difficulty of realising any value from its sale at a later date. Consequently, it's written off within the same year as it's purchased.
Consumed within 1 year. Interesting.
If old software continues to provide value to me, though, I think I would be less inclined to "upgrade" to expensive new software.
OTOH, it does seem that old software degrades in general interoperability as time proceeds. But given that software doesn't change one bit, I have to blame the environment of "new software" for the apparent deterioration of my "old software".
Atty General Ashcroft was questioned later about the amendment crafted by RIAA lobbyists.
He explained, "that it was a compromise, the effective give and take of a freedom-loving nation acting of one accord for the national interest."
According the AG, evidently, earlier proposed legislation would have provided protection to agents acting on behalf of vital national security interests, such as the RIAA and MPAA, if they were to invade homes physically in search of terrorist contraband, such as open source/hacker computers that were used to criminally steal valuable American property, such as CD recordings of Madonna.
Said Ashcroft, "I thought physical searches were probably a bad idea because of the technicalities involved. Many judges would mistakenly interpret the Constitution too rigidly and impeded such searces as being 'unreasonable'. For that reason, I though it best if the searches were restricted to electronic means."
Senators in favor of the proposed legislation said they were "unfamiliar" with the amendments, which had been added at the last minute by staffers, many of whom had industry backgrounds that enabled them to understand complicated technical issues.
One Senator harrumphed "If Osama bin Laden thinks he can get away with software piracy, he has another thing coming!"
Public key encryption would prevent 3rd parties from eavesdropping, but would NOT stop the 2nd party (the receiver) from sharing the unencrypted data with others whom the first party does not want the information to be shared with.
Unless, of course, DRM is taken to the extreme.
What would be the extreme, you ask?
To insure that only the purchasing individual receives the content, it would be necessary for each individual to receive their own, unique content stream that cannot be interpreted by any other individual, i.e.
each individual is taught their own individual language, one that no other can understand except for a machine
This would insure that e-magazine articles that I read would be useless to anyone else.
This would insure the kind of lock-down that RIAA and MPAA would love to have, the kind of lock-down on identification and use that mass marketers would love to have, and the kind of lock-down that any authoritarian government would love to have.
Granted, it's extreme and practically unimplementable - yet.
I think that in the long run people will find the restrictions too cumbersome on their everyday lives and freedom of expression. As in, "whaddya mean I hafta to send in a credit card number to authorize a MS Passport so that my mother-in-law can properly play the home movie that I just sent to her over the internet?"
I think you'll find tension between content purveyors and the public at large for some years to come. You won't have to pay to look at your watch - money, that is. But expect your watch dial to include payment options in the form of advertising that you are forced to endure.
P.S. You gotta love the cute use of words. This "Digital Rights Management" is certifiably fluffy. Better to call it that than something I would propose as more accurate, such as "Content Use Restriction", or CUR:)
The net is little more than the buzz of a large virtual crowd, with louder presences being occupied by well-funded organizations, the same well-funded organizations that promulgate traditional media.
The real problem is extracting signal from crowd noise.
It requires a great deal of diligence and effort to extract the rational and the truthful from the crowd noise.
Plus, once it's done, it's not sufficiently appealing from a marketing perspective to justify placing it in a louder volume forum.
Let's all just go wallow in the infotainment just like peasants everywhere!
Re:I feel like this is my fault.
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 4, Funny
A few issues after I started reading the Perl Journal, it temporarily went under (and now it's back and much smaller). A few months ago, I started reading LWN. And now it's on the ropes. I must have hexed it. Go figure.
Gasp! And now you're reading Slashdot!!! What are you trying to do?!?!
found some new evidence from that illegally acquired information, it would probably get tossed out of court, along with the case (fruit of a poisoned tree).
Absolutely. If not, you can see the court proceedings...
Prosecutor:"Your honor, if it pleases the bench, we would like to show the jury Exhibit A, to wit, the computer keystroke log of the defendent, "Scarfo".
(aside)"Please start the on-screen display."
"As you can see here, he is entering a secret pass phrase for a highly sophisticated encryption algorithm called P-G-P."
"You can make out the individual letters of this secret key..."
C-o-p-s- -a-r-e- -s-u-c-h- -l-o-o-z-e-r-s-.
"And now you can see Scarfo entering the accounts information for his highly illicit operation."
"I think any reasonable person would have to conclude that Scarfo was running an illegal operation and was taking great pains to hide this fact through his use of sophisticated high technology."
(aside)"Please halt the projector."
(Projector continues as Scarfo keystrokes exit from his business operations and he enters a chat room.)
(with urgent pleading)"Halt the projector, please!"
(The jury and much of the courtroom are breaking into barely concealed sniggering as they view Scarfo's conversation in the chat room.)
Defense Attny:(suddenly jumping to his feet)"Objection, your honor!"
"As you can plainly see from this chat room conversation, the investigators were clearly out to embarrass my client in front of his wife by presenting evidence that he was involved in impressing high school age girls with his youthful machismo while, as you can plainly see, he is actually an overweight, balding middle-aged man."
"This evidence was not pertinent to the case, could unduly sway the jury's opinion of my client, and was used to blackmail my client into fabricating incriminating evidence of some supposed crime. I request the case be dismissed."
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that feedback was one of the biggest problems with voices. My ears still ring from a Who concert years ago!
Everyone cares when he realises that his liberties are endangered. No-one cares when others' are endangered, or when liberties he doesn't use are endangered. Most people are sheep, with a very simple, straightforward and incorrect view of right and wrong.
I fear you are too right.
The only hope is for people to be more vigilant and thoughtful than what history has proved them to be.
Always ask yourself:
- Who is searching me?
- Why are they searching me?
- What are they looking for?
- If they do not search me, then what are the consequences?
- If suddenly the who, what, why or me (see above) is interchanged with something completely different, would that be a satisfactory society to live in?
Providing good policy requires a lot more thoughtfulness, more than the majority of our citizens are willing to engage in.Unfortunately, in our representative government, those same lax attitudes are being made into poor policy these very days.
You will see more and more frequent use of the term "terrorism" in all kinds of contexts where the authors wish to gain attention to their cause.
I can see it coming...
to come up with reasons not to use Open Source software.
In the past, the argument was frequently made that OSS was inferior to available closed source software. In a lot of cases, that was true. Now, it is not true as much. And, even if there is a higher quality closed source alternative, you'll end up paying a lot more money for it, detracting from that advantage over OSS.
As a business user, it could be argued that using open source software gives you no advantage over your competition, who also has access to the source code. But, it would be difficult for you to buy closed source software that your competitor could not buy. Unless you happen to have a lot more money than your competitor. In that case, perhaps you can obtain an advantage buying expensive software they cannot afford. Assuming, that is, that the software is worth the money to you for your purposes.
No, really the only arguments against open source software will come from software producers and sellers, not from the users.
Users stand to gain from OSS at every opportunity in decreased costs, lower risk of lock-ins and upgrade treadmills, obsolescence, etc.
OSS puts software producers in a fix. They have to produce something substantially better than the OSS to justify the price. They have to create substantial, real value in their products, and the bar that defines that value keeps getting raised with time. It's a difficult endeavor that takes a more time, money and talent. No wonder various software producers are against OSS; particularly those whose software products are not based on providing real value as in locking in their customers to provide the company with future revenue streams.
So, OSS really is unAmerican, because America currently hosts many software producers that benefit from the world's dependency on closed source software.
I don't know about you, but this American thinks that we should be above such tactics which artificially inflate the costs of software to the world at large. That world could really stand to benefit from the use of software to improve their productivity and standard of living.
end advice as to how to avoid endless bickering about trivial issues
You sound like you've already had more experience in this area than most.
From what I've seen in the Linux camp, bickering is allowed to continue so long as valid points are being generated. Once the antagonists freeze their positions to merely make themselves look good, then it is time for the project leader to exercise benign dictatorship rights and pick a resolution.
And, as others have noted, participants that provide substance toward a solution are more valuable than participants that talk about solutions, and those that talk about solutions are more valuable than those who just gripe and whine about what's bad without suggesting positive improvements.
Paraphrasing from the money aphorism:
My name is Scottissue Pulp and I'm the Manager of the Linux Security Response Center and I'd like to take this opportunity to decry this
One nice way for your email client to tell the mail server "hey, stop sending me mail like this" would be for it to
I could certainly use something like this.Some people delete "good" mail that they read and find interesting, but I save all "good" mail, and actually only delete mail that I have absolutely no interest ever in seeing again and probably didn't want to see in the first place. All other email I save.
Under that model, it should be possible for my email client to concoct rules for a spam collection inbox that would be scheduled for automatic deletion, with an ability to see the subject titles and senders listed.
I know that procmail lets you do this already, but the key problem with procmail, as others have noted, is the level of individual effort required to constantly fine-tune the ~/.procmailrc file to "get rid of messages like this new one."
I would really prefer that ISPs don't do wholescale blocking in their crusade against spam, but, if they don't, then the current situation puts too much onus on the users to cull through things, even with procmail. I'd like to be able to (i) live in a free society and, (ii) have time to live a life of doing things besides edit ~/.procmailrc
they blame the computer maker, not Microsoft.
Or, if you work in a computer support organization, you know very well that YOU are going to get the blame. (Even if you can mumble some technical jargon that shifts blame back onto the proper source - "We've called that Outlook bug into Microsoft and they've got programmers working on it.")
Reminds me, though, of a quote I saw in the IT press a year or so back that I found priceless:
Well, I've always found
- x86 hardware is dirt cheap
- gettin apps, particularly binaries, easier for
x86
but that's just me - cheap and lazy.A friend that runs both UNIX and Macs has his Mac laptop setup to run Linux on PPC.
He likes it because he spends all day in XEmacs on a Sun and the Linux box is a good facsimile of the same environment but in a portable. But, he also gets the Mac and GUI that he's liked for many years.
Also, I noticed recently that the as-yet-still-vaporous G5 looks to really cook, blowing the doors off the 2 GHz P4 from the quoted SPECint2K and SPECfloat2K figures. That kind of performance is always interesting, and having a Linux platform that runs on it is a plus.
I mean, like, around Slashdot everyone already knows this and has for a long time.
Moving on from that, I'm wondering how good this CNET piece comes out to be, since it will be read by more than just the Slashdot readership. It would be good if they do their research and talk to both technology and business people on the leading edges of IT, as well as those solidly in the middle, those placid people unaware of the tides that carry them.
I'm presuming that your Slashdot posts, such as the subject line, are not subject to your usual high standards!
Seriously, though, I appreciate where you're coming from. I don't think anyone here starts out their career with the ambition of "hacking out barely functional code". No indeed. We all want our code to be the ultimate work of art, lasting for many years, referred to again and again as an example of elegent, timeless code to be emulated by future coders.
Unfortunately, there are deadlines and various annoyances coming in from management and marketing, demanding increasing capabilities in decreasing time. Say "no can do" to those demands is very hard for someone that takes pride in what they do.
An excellent idea - thanks!
Once I get my Linux box up, then I'll use my procmail recipe to divert copies of my email over there just to see how Evolution works for me.
In the future, my current simple SMTP to mbox file environment will change to a corporate Exchange server. I'm thinking of slurping the contents of the Exchange server using fetchmail, then procmail, to a file, then MUA (Evolution). I'm hoping that will provide me with a good solution, that there aren't any strange side effects with getting LDAP info (addresses) from the Exchange server, but reading local boxes.
I've used fetchmail at home to extract mail from my ISP, but I haven't had to use it at work much because the 24x7 services of the LAN have made SMTP to mbox file route painless.
I'm almost ready to jump over Evolution to handle my email.
Currently, I use exmh, which I've found to be a great GUI interface to my email. It uses tcl and tk for the GUI and MH for folders, but has all kinds of extensions to support PGP, address books, in-line HTML display, etc.
Is anyone, familiar with both exmh and Evolution, able to point out their relative merits and detractions?
You've got to do better to interpret context in your translations from other languages.
The correct translation is obvious to anyone that has been involved in negotiating Enterprise Licenses with Microsoft lately and bringing up the issue of Linux or any other option to Windows.
In case you still missed it, it is
I've run Sun desktops for years.
And I'm still using fvwm2 because I don't like the bloat of CDE. It was especially bad in the early years when it first came out and the hardware SPARCStation 2's and 10's was not as fast as it is now.
Now, with the hardware capabable, I'm hoping to use either Gnome or KDE, just because it seems like more development is occurring for those environments than for CDE.
It's too bad Gnome won't be coming with Solaris 9.
Over the next month I'll bring up an Athlon system as soon as I can buy SuSE 7.3. I suspect that for desktop applications it will suit me better. Then, if I really need a Solaris app, I'll run it over X from the server.
Except for the OpenGL based stuff...hmmm.
the processors are much slower than the equivalent Intel or AMD (by how much varies by who you ask and what you're doing)
Verily.
I've always been curious as to how fast the Transmeta chips are in real life.
I got the impression that the inherent adaptability of the Transmeta Crusoe only shined in benchmarks where the repetitive nature of the processing was a significant part of the workload.
And that the Crusoe came out wimpy on the typical standard benchmarks because of this.
So I've been curious whether laptop users with the Crusoe find it fast for what they spend time doing with their laptops, or whether that kind of optimization is practically irrelevant.
My (UK-based) accountants have always treated PC software as a consumable, rather than an asset, precisely because of the difficulty of realising any value from its sale at a later date. Consequently, it's written off within the same year as it's purchased.
Consumed within 1 year. Interesting.
If old software continues to provide value to me, though, I think I would be less inclined to "upgrade" to expensive new software.
OTOH, it does seem that old software degrades in general interoperability as time proceeds. But given that software doesn't change one bit, I have to blame the environment of "new software" for the apparent deterioration of my "old software".
So, since these licenses cause the software to become value-less, is this sort of depreciation of software in line with accepted accounting practices?
If I'm a small business owner, can I depreciate the MS software that I purchase and thereby offset income and capital gains on my tax return?
I just wondered, because, IIRC, there are strict rules on how this can be done for real property, etc.
Atty General Ashcroft was questioned later about the amendment crafted by RIAA lobbyists.
He explained, "that it was a compromise, the effective give and take of a freedom-loving nation acting of one accord for the national interest."
According the AG, evidently, earlier proposed legislation would have provided protection to agents acting on behalf of vital national security interests, such as the RIAA and MPAA, if they were to invade homes physically in search of terrorist contraband, such as open source/hacker computers that were used to criminally steal valuable American property, such as CD recordings of Madonna.
Said Ashcroft, "I thought physical searches were probably a bad idea because of the technicalities involved. Many judges would mistakenly interpret the Constitution too rigidly and impeded such searces as being 'unreasonable'. For that reason, I though it best if the searches were restricted to electronic means."
Senators in favor of the proposed legislation said they were "unfamiliar" with the amendments, which had been added at the last minute by staffers, many of whom had industry backgrounds that enabled them to understand complicated technical issues.
One Senator harrumphed "If Osama bin Laden thinks he can get away with software piracy, he has another thing coming!"
Public key encryption would prevent 3rd parties from eavesdropping, but would NOT stop the 2nd party (the receiver) from sharing the unencrypted data with others whom the first party does not want the information to be shared with.
Unless, of course, DRM is taken to the extreme.
What would be the extreme, you ask?
To insure that only the purchasing individual receives the content, it would be necessary for each individual to receive their own, unique content stream that cannot be interpreted by any other individual, i.e.
This would insure that e-magazine articles that I read would be useless to anyone else.This would insure the kind of lock-down that RIAA and MPAA would love to have, the kind of lock-down on identification and use that mass marketers would love to have, and the kind of lock-down that any authoritarian government would love to have.
Granted, it's extreme and practically unimplementable - yet.
I think that in the long run people will find the restrictions too cumbersome on their everyday lives and freedom of expression. As in, "whaddya mean I hafta to send in a credit card number to authorize a MS Passport so that my mother-in-law can properly play the home movie that I just sent to her over the internet?"
I think you'll find tension between content purveyors and the public at large for some years to come. You won't have to pay to look at your watch - money, that is. But expect your watch dial to include payment options in the form of advertising that you are forced to endure.
P.S. You gotta love the cute use of words. This "Digital Rights Management" is certifiably fluffy. Better to call it that than something I would propose as more accurate, such as "Content Use Restriction", or CUR:)
The net is little more than the buzz of a large virtual crowd, with louder presences being occupied by well-funded organizations, the same well-funded organizations that promulgate traditional media.
The real problem is extracting signal from crowd noise.
It requires a great deal of diligence and effort to extract the rational and the truthful from the crowd noise.
Plus, once it's done, it's not sufficiently appealing from a marketing perspective to justify placing it in a louder volume forum.
Let's all just go wallow in the infotainment just like peasants everywhere!
A few issues after I started reading the Perl Journal, it temporarily went under (and now it's back and much smaller). A few months ago, I started reading LWN. And now it's on the ropes. I must have hexed it. Go figure.
Gasp! And now you're reading Slashdot!!! What are you trying to do?!?!
found some new evidence from that illegally acquired information, it would probably get tossed out of court, along with the case (fruit of a poisoned tree).
Absolutely. If not, you can see the court proceedings...
Prosecutor:"Your honor, if it pleases the bench, we would like to show the jury Exhibit A, to wit, the computer keystroke log of the defendent, "Scarfo".(aside)"Please start the on-screen display."
"As you can see here, he is entering a secret pass phrase for a highly sophisticated encryption algorithm called P-G-P."
"You can make out the individual letters of this secret key..."
"And now you can see Scarfo entering the accounts information for his highly illicit operation."
"I think any reasonable person would have to conclude that Scarfo was running an illegal operation and was taking great pains to hide this fact through his use of sophisticated high technology."
(aside)"Please halt the projector."
(Projector continues as Scarfo keystrokes exit from his business operations and he enters a chat room.)
(with urgent pleading)"Halt the projector, please!"
(The jury and much of the courtroom are breaking into barely concealed sniggering as they view Scarfo's conversation in the chat room.)
Defense Attny: (suddenly jumping to his feet)"Objection, your honor!"
"As you can plainly see from this chat room conversation, the investigators were clearly out to embarrass my client in front of his wife by presenting evidence that he was involved in impressing high school age girls with his youthful machismo while, as you can plainly see, he is actually an overweight, balding middle-aged man."
"This evidence was not pertinent to the case, could unduly sway the jury's opinion of my client, and was used to blackmail my client into fabricating incriminating evidence of some supposed crime. I request the case be dismissed."
Judge:"Objection sustained. Case dismissed.
Mod up Geritol, please!
(It took me 2.5 paragraphs before I noticed the fishing line tied to the front end, but there's no excuse for not getting it by the end of the post.)
I just put 2 100 GB magnetic disks drives into my TiVo.
I think 200 of the 1 GB SDRAMs would take up quite a bit more space, even if the slots were there.