I was a big fan of Mad Scientists Club a few years after they came out. They're one of those books that was so good at the time, that even being forced to take a bathroom break from reading was annoying.
I'd already read all of the Danny Dunn and Foobar book about a year or two before then.
My little brother reached back even further in time, dredging up books from Tom Swift and Baz series, usually about Tom and his pop inventing some incredible earth boring machine, getting into trouble, etc. I think they were originally written in the 1930's.
I was trying to find the MSC books earlier to give them to a nephew, but used bookstores were quoting me prices ~$75/copy a year ago. Too much.
There was yet another juvenile science series I remember vaguely with Henry and Midge, but the titles escape me at this time...
I was surprised that FreeBSD didn't show better in the "benchmark", too.
While I'm a Linux user, I've always admired the real world performance of ftp.cdrom.com, a FreeBSD based site, IIRC. It would handle legendarily humongous loads of network connections and file transfer (bytes/day) on cheapo x86 hardware.
Comparing to the other OS on the above review, I got the impression that FreeBSD meant not only getting the free{beer,speech} advantage over W2K and Solaris/x86, but reliability (which Linux has), but, as of several years ago, a significantly better network and VM performance than Linux.
A friend of mine showed me an interesting trick. If a dog is harassing you, reach down and touch the ground with the knuckles
of your first two fingers. The dog either backs off, or it goes completely ballistic, because that posture, that of a human being
reaching down to pick up a rock, is hardwired into its genes to mean trouble.
A friend of mine showed me an interesting trick. If a troll on Slashdot is harassing you, start replying with increasingly crazy answers. The troll backs off, or it goes completely ballistic because that reply, that of a deranged madman, is hardwired into its genes to mean trouble.
Yes, it's probably too elementary for your subtle and keenly-developed sense of computer security, but these guidelines might actually be useful to the great unwashed masses, many of whom die in droves while
crossing the street, talking to strangers, clicking through default W2K security settings
If 90% of the computer security fatalities are a result of supposedly trivial things to fix, that does not make it any less helpful and useful to suggest trivial fixes, given how much grief can be saved.
I don't know with what computer programming language engineers will fight the next big project, but the one after after that will be fought with wires and plugs.
It sounds like you guys at Oxford have the right approach.
Pardon me for possibly espousing an anachronistic viewpoint, but aren't universities places where students (you know, tomorrow's leaders) should learn both
depths of knowledge
depths of responsibility
eh?
To that end, I think it's great if you make available software tools for students to check their machines, and it's great if you care enough to support an expert IT staff on site that keeps up on the latest technology, runs vulnerability scans, consults with users, etc.
Ultimately, however, you should expect the students to exercise some willingness to educate themselves as to the nature of the dangers of their computer (mis-)use, both about the technologies and about the responsibilities that are incumbent on them.
In a nutshell:
do provide a supportive environment (software, expert personnel, etc.), including a statement of dangers and an expectation that users will be responsible,
don't mandate specific behaviors,
do be prepared to use axes on network access to educate users about the consequences of not learning the lessons well enough.
If our future leaders are spoon-fed with an iron-fist, then I shudder to think of the world we'll live in two decades from now.
Some of the particular issues surrounding Sandia's Cplant project were the subject of a previous story on Slashdot.
AFAICT, the upshot is all the tweaking that must be done to coax higher performance on numerically intensive codes with that many processors.
As many in the numerical simulation community already know, message-passing codes abuse a network in a way that web browsers do not; demanding lower latency and higher bandwidth than can be provided by plain ole 10/100 Mb Ethernet (at least for large numbers of high SPECfp processors with any reasonable memory speed.)
The existence of Linux open source code facilitates the creation of their Portals layer that sits underneath MPI and above the Myrinet hardware on these Alpha machines.
Much controversy has surrounded Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, particularly given the differences between the licensing terms that apply to MS Shared Source and the licensing terms that apply according to the GNU Public License.
Hypothetically, suppose I am a programmer with MS Shared Source in front of me on one hand, and a different GPL source in front of me on the other hand.
Suppose, further, that in both cases I have a brilliant idea, an idea that will substantially increase the feature set, reduce bugs, and increase performance.
For both application programs, each under its own license, describe exactly
the costs (money, time, opportunity)
the benefits (same)
that would pertain to each of three important parties
myself, the programmer
Microsoft corporation
everyone else (public users, other companies, other programmers, etc.)
both in the short term and in the long term if I were to improve the code for the respective application program.
I would most appreciate a ranking of those costs and benefits.
So we all know that the only reason MS ports Office to MacOS is to keep alive a toy competitor on the desktop.
And, given the UNIX flavor of OSX, does this mean that MS is prepared to code Office to a UNIX-like API?
And, if so, then, making some albeit big leaps of speculation concerning the outcome of The Antitrust Trial about splitting the behemoth into baby Bills like Office and OS, does this not open up the possibility of Office running on not just OSX, but Linux, FreeBSD, etc.?
The number of users of X is a small proportion of the internet as a whole.
Those that do use X fall into 2 categories
Bandwidth rich LANs
Home users with a Linux box over PPP to an ISP
In the first case, there's little need to worry about introducing any more complexity to support remote X applications. Despite all the hoopla over a network based windowing system, the only time I take advantage of it is to run remote X terminal sessions (rxvt) to my display. Am I BW limited? No way.
Meanwhile, in the second case, I am BW limited, but using LBX does not address my problems running a Linux box at home. I run a browswer and all X clients locally and display locally. Maybe once I ran exmh on the ISP's machine just to see what it was like having direct disk access to my mail, but it generally didn't seem worth the hassle. Any graphics attachments still had to be rendered over a slow pipe.
If they had put LBX into the low level infrastructure from the beginning, so that all X protocol would use it transparently, then it would have been great. Otherwise, IMHO, it's just a great idea still looking for problem to solve.
I'm thinking that the reverse approach might be helpful here.
That is, instead of filtering to remove webbugs, they should be culled out carefully and rebroadcast to some zombies that will keep those nosy sites more than tickled with a flood of requests.
Yesterday I was disappointed by netscape-6.01A for Solaris 8 interminably rendering only a gray box for all my efforts to install it.
So, given the steadily improving reviews (I know - early slothfulness was a deliberate strategy to catch more bugs) of mozilla, I'd like to give it a try as a replacement for Netscrape-4.77
I'm behind a firewall that won't let CVS do its network checkout, so can anyone give a URL to a source (.tar.bz2) distribution of 0.9.1?
After yesterdays garish depiction of the juggernaut brought out 900+ posts spanning the full ranks of trolls, indignant types on all 7 sides of the political spectrum, astroturfers, and probably Elian Gonzalez and Timothy McVeigh as one time posters, I think we've seen the pro and the con adequately.
So use Mozilla/Apache, and they don't do what you want, add the functionality. Nobody forces you at gunpoint...
As long as the standards are openly published and well-defined, this is a great option. And, yes, Katz does tend to inflame an issue that has been beaten like a dead horse.
But.
As a commercial developer you do have to aim towards the marketplace, and if the blind herd of consumers is running Windows Me or whatever, then you have to respect that, however distasteful it may be to your political, philosphical or technical sensibilities.
The main problem with the premise of implementing a new feature in Mozilla or Apache, will be when you try to implement a "standard" that is owned by MS.
Like, for example, how does one display these binary.doc,.ppt,.xls files in the blessed way that 95% of people have come to expect? I'm still looking for the RFC on that "standard".
Like, for example, how does one openly interact with AOL Instant Messenger? Sorry, standards have changed in the last few days!
Likewise, wait till the XML server to your desktop audience wants to play with.NET using some kind of
<fetch_genuine_ms_net_authentication>
that takes as an argument the time-stamped updated hardware platform profile with your current windows server license ticket that, in order to get, requires its own back and forth dialogue with microsoft.com to get right.
Oh, and such authentication will be marketed as an added beneficial security feature that will prevent "hackers" from corrupting your innocent child's PC with terrorist porn. There will be barriers to entry.
If you think anyone with a non-MS box and some programming skill is invited onto that playing field, then I think you have another thing coming.
probably because their main product (Netscape Browser), does not make any money, but is very expensive to keep developing for.
Good point.
However, there simply has to be enough battle-scarred, experienced PC developers in their midst (especially from AOL) for them to realize that, once they concede the browser, MS will leverage that platform for its own business objectives, just as they have leveraged and continue to leverage the OS for their objectives from the get go.
Be assured the new "features" of IE 7 will "work best with MSN".
And, BTW, the business objectives of MS includes promotion of MS sites and portals, since growth of the company requires new markets, the old markets for OS, Office and IE having been effectively conquered and saturated.
If I were Netscape, attempting to compete on portal business with someone on an equal footing (say yahoo, for example), that would be one thing, more than a sufficient challenge. In such a contest, may the best portal win!
But, if I were competing with MS, I'd live in fear of the day the ax would fall and end my pitiful existence, as any worthwhile features I developed would be embraced, extended and repackaged by MS. And, when the next version of consumer Windows is "released" (on all the new hardware, as is typical), their market share will inexorably climb, as the complexity factor prevents most of my target audience from untying all the knots joining Windows to IE to MSN. And I would end up playing catch-up ball, trying to adapt to the new standards.
Netscape is simply following a tactical decision here to die more slowly, giving up the better long-term strategy because they haven't increased their browser market share in, what, 5 years?
"With regard to narrow passes, if you can occupy them first, let them be strongly garrisoned and await the advent of the enemy."
--Sun Tzu
where the SSL unlocks with an answer to a question the sender poses as a "suitable" restrictive piece of knowledge that only the sender and recipient are likely to share.
There are most certainly some security issues with a scheme like this, since I'm no an expert. It might help if the web page served up how many times it was hit by what IP addresses to alleviate the paranoia in the case of others trying to snoop. Probably should delete the message after the first render as well.
Social engineering could still be a problem, though.
I can just smell the new style spam at fakemail cache asking to be decoded with your SSN, DOB, mother's maiden name and checking account number.
With much grief and gnashing of teeth do we stoop to use this ill-conceived and bloated Latin based alphabet with 26 characters to respond to this bigoted viewpoint in a way that your feeble minds may understand.
I simply must take issue with your criticism of movie trailers. They offer incredible savings in both time and money!
For most modern Hollywood movies, I've found that I can adequately capture all the significant moments, the special effects, the character development and the entire plot of the movie by simply viewing the trailer instead of the actual 110 minute film.
I've been intrigued by KVM switches to isolate the noise-making parts of a PC, but I've always been under the impression that they're of limited responsiveness, that they are designed for sysadmin tasks more than heavy interaction with, say, a high performance 3D video card.
This article made me speculate about remotely putting a bunch of rack-mounted PC's down the hall (where, yes, Natalie, they could be a Bwlf cluster) and running KVM over 100Mb Ethernet to desks with nice sleek LCD flat panel displays.
But I gather this solution is not practical for some reason, like latency?
Those pushing for more democracy should consider replacing medical accreditation with a thumbs up/thumbs down vote at the local pub.
Yeah, I like our current system much better, where medical accreditation is controlled by state medical boards that are loath to publicly humiliate one of their own and sit on their hands.
In theory, it's great for experts to evaluate and regulate a field full of professionals, but I think our current system has demonstrated that conflict of interest can be a practical impediment to its effectiveness.
I read it as the entranceway TO THE HALL. The fact that MS put a big inflated thingie there hardly grants them ownership of the
whole fscking building.
You obviously need some education on the value of property rights. If you had known them better than you do, then you would not have so summarily dismissed some very important, specific, concrete rights of Microsoft Corporation in this instance.
You may be surprised to learn this, but:
Microsoft rented their upper floor booth and were entitled to its full use during the convention, including all of the air in the booth.
Microsoft rented the main reference hall and were entitled to its full use during the convention, including all of the air in the reference hall, much of which was being actively used by Microsoft representatives exhaling in a warm and huffy manner.
Microsoft actually owns the main reference hall, the surrounding 2300 acres, most of the state of Florida and its citizens, including the air contained in the inflatable Office XP box and were therefore entitled to the full use of these properties during the convention. Indeed, many of Microsoft corporation's representatives found it indispensible to take hits of air from the Office XP box as most of the air in the conventional hall had become unbreathable (see above). That was the reason why the box became limp during the later stages of the convention, although we cannot discount rumors of LUG representatives having punctured the inflatable Office XP box with the pointy parts of Clippy®
Microsoft owns the internet (having invented the.NET and most other innovative technology for the computer), including all of the air surrounding it, and so are entitled to its full use during the convention, as well as during the time that it retains such ownership. If you look closely, you'll notice an EULA applies to using the inter.NET
You can see that Microsoft's property rights extend quite a bit far beyond what you realized, and I hope that this education helps you to come to some kind of realization of that fact and to treat them with the respect that they deserve.
This has got to be the moral equivalent of impressing Real Surfer Dudes by hanging ten off one of those dinky 2 ft styrofoam dog paddle boards (like I used in the kiddie pools.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was a big fan of Mad Scientists Club a few years after they came out. They're one of those books that was so good at the time, that even being forced to take a bathroom break from reading was annoying.
I'd already read all of the Danny Dunn and Foobar book about a year or two before then.
My little brother reached back even further in time, dredging up books from Tom Swift and Baz series, usually about Tom and his pop inventing some incredible earth boring machine, getting into trouble, etc. I think they were originally written in the 1930's.
I was trying to find the MSC books earlier to give them to a nephew, but used bookstores were quoting me prices ~$75 /copy a year ago. Too much.
There was yet another juvenile science series I remember vaguely with Henry and Midge, but the titles escape me at this time...
I was surprised that FreeBSD didn't show better in the "benchmark", too.
While I'm a Linux user, I've always admired the real world performance of ftp.cdrom.com, a FreeBSD based site, IIRC. It would handle legendarily humongous loads of network connections and file transfer (bytes/day) on cheapo x86 hardware.
Comparing to the other OS on the above review, I got the impression that FreeBSD meant not only getting the free{beer,speech} advantage over W2K and Solaris/x86, but reliability (which Linux has), but, as of several years ago, a significantly better network and VM performance than Linux.
I was impressed.
A friend of mine showed me an interesting trick. If a dog is harassing you, reach down and touch the ground with the knuckles of your first two fingers. The dog either backs off, or it goes completely ballistic, because that posture, that of a human being reaching down to pick up a rock, is hardwired into its genes to mean trouble.
A friend of mine showed me an interesting trick. If a troll on Slashdot is harassing you, start replying with increasingly crazy answers. The troll backs off, or it goes completely ballistic because that reply, that of a deranged madman, is hardwired into its genes to mean trouble.
Yes, it's probably too elementary for your subtle and keenly-developed sense of computer security, but these guidelines might actually be useful to the great unwashed masses, many of whom die in droves while
If 90% of the computer security fatalities are a result of supposedly trivial things to fix, that does not make it any less helpful and useful to suggest trivial fixes, given how much grief can be saved.
(Apologies to A. Einstein.)
It sounds like you guys at Oxford have the right approach.
Pardon me for possibly espousing an anachronistic viewpoint, but aren't universities places where students (you know, tomorrow's leaders) should learn both
- depths of knowledge
- depths of responsibility
eh?To that end, I think it's great if you make available software tools for students to check their machines, and it's great if you care enough to support an expert IT staff on site that keeps up on the latest technology, runs vulnerability scans, consults with users, etc.
Ultimately, however, you should expect the students to exercise some willingness to educate themselves as to the nature of the dangers of their computer (mis-)use, both about the technologies and about the responsibilities that are incumbent on them.
In a nutshell:
If our future leaders are spoon-fed with an iron-fist, then I shudder to think of the world we'll live in two decades from now.
Some of the particular issues surrounding Sandia's Cplant project were the subject of a previous story on Slashdot.
AFAICT, the upshot is all the tweaking that must be done to coax higher performance on numerically intensive codes with that many processors.
As many in the numerical simulation community already know, message-passing codes abuse a network in a way that web browsers do not; demanding lower latency and higher bandwidth than can be provided by plain ole 10/100 Mb Ethernet (at least for large numbers of high SPECfp processors with any reasonable memory speed.)
The existence of Linux open source code facilitates the creation of their Portals layer that sits underneath MPI and above the Myrinet hardware on these Alpha machines.
Sir:
Much controversy has surrounded Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, particularly given the differences between the licensing terms that apply to MS Shared Source and the licensing terms that apply according to the GNU Public License.
Hypothetically, suppose I am a programmer with MS Shared Source in front of me on one hand, and a different GPL source in front of me on the other hand.
Suppose, further, that in both cases I have a brilliant idea, an idea that will substantially increase the feature set, reduce bugs, and increase performance.
For both application programs, each under its own license, describe exactly
- the costs (money, time, opportunity)
- the benefits (same)
that would pertain to each of three important parties- myself, the programmer
- Microsoft corporation
- everyone else (public users, other companies, other programmers, etc.)
both in the short term and in the long term if I were to improve the code for the respective application program.I would most appreciate a ranking of those costs and benefits.
So we all know that the only reason MS ports Office to MacOS is to keep alive a toy competitor on the desktop.
And, given the UNIX flavor of OSX, does this mean that MS is prepared to code Office to a UNIX-like API?
And, if so, then, making some albeit big leaps of speculation concerning the outcome of The Antitrust Trial about splitting the behemoth into baby Bills like Office and OS, does this not open up the possibility of Office running on not just OSX, but Linux, FreeBSD, etc.?
The number of users of X is a small proportion of the internet as a whole.
Those that do use X fall into 2 categories
- Bandwidth rich LANs
- Home users with a Linux box over PPP to an ISP
In the first case, there's little need to worry about introducing any more complexity to support remote X applications. Despite all the hoopla over a network based windowing system, the only time I take advantage of it is to run remote X terminal sessions (rxvt) to my display. Am I BW limited? No way.Meanwhile, in the second case, I am BW limited, but using LBX does not address my problems running a Linux box at home. I run a browswer and all X clients locally and display locally. Maybe once I ran exmh on the ISP's machine just to see what it was like having direct disk access to my mail, but it generally didn't seem worth the hassle. Any graphics attachments still had to be rendered over a slow pipe.
If they had put LBX into the low level infrastructure from the beginning, so that all X protocol would use it transparently, then it would have been great. Otherwise, IMHO, it's just a great idea still looking for problem to solve.
Right on.
I'm thinking that the reverse approach might be helpful here.
That is, instead of filtering to remove webbugs, they should be culled out carefully and rebroadcast to some zombies that will keep those nosy sites more than tickled with a flood of requests.
Yesterday I was disappointed by netscape-6.01A for Solaris 8 interminably rendering only a gray box for all my efforts to install it.
So, given the steadily improving reviews (I know - early slothfulness was a deliberate strategy to catch more bugs) of mozilla, I'd like to give it a try as a replacement for Netscrape-4.77
I'm behind a firewall that won't let CVS do its network checkout, so can anyone give a URL to a source (.tar.bz2) distribution of 0.9.1?
After yesterdays garish depiction of the juggernaut brought out 900+ posts spanning the full ranks of trolls, indignant types on all 7 sides of the political spectrum, astroturfers, and probably Elian Gonzalez and Timothy McVeigh as one time posters, I think we've seen the pro and the con adequately.
Enough already!
So use Mozilla/Apache, and they don't do what you want, add the functionality. Nobody forces you at gunpoint...
As long as the standards are openly published and well-defined, this is a great option. And, yes, Katz does tend to inflame an issue that has been beaten like a dead horse.
But.
As a commercial developer you do have to aim towards the marketplace, and if the blind herd of consumers is running Windows Me or whatever, then you have to respect that, however distasteful it may be to your political, philosphical or technical sensibilities.
The main problem with the premise of implementing a new feature in Mozilla or Apache, will be when you try to implement a "standard" that is owned by MS.
Like, for example, how does one display these binary .doc, .ppt, .xls files in the blessed way that 95% of people have come to expect? I'm still looking for the RFC on that "standard".
Like, for example, how does one openly interact with AOL Instant Messenger? Sorry, standards have changed in the last few days!
Likewise, wait till the XML server to your desktop audience wants to play with .NET using some kind of
that takes as an argument the time-stamped updated hardware platform profile with your current windows server license ticket that, in order to get, requires its own back and forth dialogue with microsoft.com to get right.Oh, and such authentication will be marketed as an added beneficial security feature that will prevent "hackers" from corrupting your innocent child's PC with terrorist porn. There will be barriers to entry.
If you think anyone with a non-MS box and some programming skill is invited onto that playing field, then I think you have another thing coming.
probably because their main product (Netscape Browser), does not make any money, but is very expensive to keep developing for.
Good point.
However, there simply has to be enough battle-scarred, experienced PC developers in their midst (especially from AOL) for them to realize that, once they concede the browser, MS will leverage that platform for its own business objectives, just as they have leveraged and continue to leverage the OS for their objectives from the get go.
Be assured the new "features" of IE 7 will "work best with MSN".
And, BTW, the business objectives of MS includes promotion of MS sites and portals, since growth of the company requires new markets, the old markets for OS, Office and IE having been effectively conquered and saturated.
If I were Netscape, attempting to compete on portal business with someone on an equal footing (say yahoo, for example), that would be one thing, more than a sufficient challenge. In such a contest, may the best portal win!
But, if I were competing with MS, I'd live in fear of the day the ax would fall and end my pitiful existence, as any worthwhile features I developed would be embraced, extended and repackaged by MS. And, when the next version of consumer Windows is "released" (on all the new hardware, as is typical), their market share will inexorably climb, as the complexity factor prevents most of my target audience from untying all the knots joining Windows to IE to MSN. And I would end up playing catch-up ball, trying to adapt to the new standards.
Netscape is simply following a tactical decision here to die more slowly, giving up the better long-term strategy because they haven't increased their browser market share in, what, 5 years?
My apologies.
It looks as if HushMail is pretty close to this already.
That's a cool idea.
Or, how about something like:
where the SSL unlocks with an answer to a question the sender poses as a "suitable" restrictive piece of knowledge that only the sender and recipient are likely to share.There are most certainly some security issues with a scheme like this, since I'm no an expert. It might help if the web page served up how many times it was hit by what IP addresses to alleviate the paranoia in the case of others trying to snoop. Probably should delete the message after the first render as well.
Social engineering could still be a problem, though.
I can just smell the new style spam at fakemail cache asking to be decoded with your SSN, DOB, mother's maiden name and checking account number.
We Bynari take issue with this.
With much grief and gnashing of teeth do we stoop to use this ill-conceived and bloated Latin based alphabet with 26 characters to respond to this bigoted viewpoint in a way that your feeble minds may understand.
Our alphabet has exactlytwo letters.
The kids whose billions pay for this machine are not only fully aware it's a sham, they embrace the cynicism and still manage to enjoy the show.
I guess the music industry is the 3rd to go down this route, where the 2nd was politics, following the lead of the professional wrestling.
Hey!
I simply must take issue with your criticism of movie trailers. They offer incredible savings in both time and money!
For most modern Hollywood movies, I've found that I can adequately capture all the significant moments, the special effects, the character development and the entire plot of the movie by simply viewing the trailer instead of the actual 110 minute film.
I've been intrigued by KVM switches to isolate the noise-making parts of a PC, but I've always been under the impression that they're of limited responsiveness, that they are designed for sysadmin tasks more than heavy interaction with, say, a high performance 3D video card.
This article made me speculate about remotely putting a bunch of rack-mounted PC's down the hall (where, yes, Natalie, they could be a Bwlf cluster) and running KVM over 100Mb Ethernet to desks with nice sleek LCD flat panel displays.
But I gather this solution is not practical for some reason, like latency?
Am I missing something?
Those pushing for more democracy should consider replacing medical accreditation with a thumbs up/thumbs down vote at the local pub.
Yeah, I like our current system much better, where medical accreditation is controlled by state medical boards that are loath to publicly humiliate one of their own and sit on their hands.
In theory, it's great for experts to evaluate and regulate a field full of professionals, but I think our current system has demonstrated that conflict of interest can be a practical impediment to its effectiveness.
You obviously need some education on the value of property rights. If you had known them better than you do, then you would not have so summarily dismissed some very important, specific, concrete rights of Microsoft Corporation in this instance.
You may be surprised to learn this, but:
- Microsoft rented their upper floor booth and were entitled to its full use during the convention, including all of the air in the booth.
- Microsoft rented the main reference hall and were entitled to its full use during the convention, including all of the air in the reference hall, much of which was being actively used by Microsoft representatives exhaling in a warm and huffy manner.
- Microsoft actually owns the main reference hall, the surrounding 2300 acres, most of the state of Florida and its citizens, including the air contained in the inflatable Office XP box and were therefore entitled to the full use of these properties during the convention. Indeed, many of Microsoft corporation's representatives found it indispensible to take hits of air from the Office XP box as most of the air in the conventional hall had become unbreathable (see above). That was the reason why the box became limp during the later stages of the convention, although we cannot discount rumors of LUG representatives having punctured the inflatable Office XP box with the pointy parts of Clippy®
- Microsoft owns the internet (having invented the
.NET and most other innovative technology for the computer), including all of the air surrounding it, and so are entitled to its full use during the convention, as well as during the time that it retains such ownership. If you look closely, you'll notice an EULA applies to using the inter.NET
You can see that Microsoft's property rights extend quite a bit far beyond what you realized, and I hope that this education helps you to come to some kind of realization of that fact and to treat them with the respect that they deserve.I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with law enforcement in the U.S.
Might I offer a suggestion to improve the situation?
Many people I know have much better relations with police officers once they remove those bumper stickers that say:
This has got to be the moral equivalent of impressing Real Surfer Dudes by hanging ten off one of those dinky 2 ft styrofoam dog paddle boards (like I used in the kiddie pools.)