Oh, you're on Mac OS X. Check for "javaws" in your path. Java Web Start is a system for broadcasting applications to clients. On Windows it's automatic; on Mac OS X and Linux, you will have to use "javaws file.jnlp".
As somebody who helps maintain an embedded Linux distro (iPodLinux), I honestly have to wonder whether or not Ubuntu could ever become light enough to fit comfortably onto handhelds, and whether or not they're going to bring any improvements to community projects like ucLinux.
"The quality of the music is high, there is no record of the transaction that the school or ISP can hand over to the RIAA, there is no way to detect this copyright infringement."
But isn't making a copy for a friend fair-use? Excellent point. Sneakernets are a valid, if somewhat abusive, application of the rights of first sale. After the CD is sold to you, copies that you produce are your property, and you can give them away, although you cannot profit from them. The only one you may sell is the original.
You bring up an interesting point. If I have a 2GB U3-enabled USB pen drive, with Azureus and Limewire, I can plug into any Java-enabled Windows box and do my thing, even at a public terminal. If I do that, how is liability possibly going to be assigned to me? The computer doesn't know; it's a public box with a single, anonymous login. The IP addresses can only tell them which physical box in the public pool it was, and that's assuming that the residential Internet is tied to MAC addresses.
So, in this hypothetical, who takes the liability? What if I do this at a public library? Is the library responsible?
Grammar Nazi here: "Or," in the English language, is an exclusive OR (XOR), not an inclusive OR. It signifies a mutually exclusive phrase. The easiest way to turn it into an inclusive OR is to change the clause into a so-called "or-comma-or" phrase, like so:
In my opinion, they are either ignorant or evil, or ignorant and evil.
His point is that Gnash has no restrictions on its features, and could theoretically support features like enabling copying of Flash movies or permitting advertisements to be skipped. The official player will never support that since Adobe is introducing these features specifically in order to prevent bypasses.
I don't know about you, but in Oregon, state law is that fire trucks, ambulances, police, and sheriffs are permitted to speed and run red lights when they are doing their duty. This proposal would mean that police cars cannot run red lights if they are not in pursuit of somebody or answering a call; it does not mean that they can never run red lights.
As someone who has contributed more than a few patches to iPodLinux, you may be interested in knowing that using Cygwin to generate the userland (used to) create binaries with a.elf extension. The extension isn't needed; it's just the way that the Cygwin toolchain ended up naming them.
This technology sounds like it's stuck behind the buzzword "meaning-based media," which seems to just be an abstract notion of finding and sorting media without profiling, hashing, fingerprinting, tagging, watermarking, sourcing, or naming (in other words, by going on bullshit notions and intuition. "Oh, it looks copyrighted.")
More importantly, it looks like it can't do anything unless the target is somewhere on the Web and is reasonably active. The darknets and private trackers are still safe.
The stories about his programming escapades are quite epic. He supposedly wrote a BASIC interpreter on a plane once, on the way to a presentation. The story goes that he forgot to write a BASIC interpreter, so he hammered one out on the plane without any testing or debugging, and it magically worked when the presentation was given.
He wrote all kinds of interfaces and adapters back when he was a code monkey. It's just that he has been in a primarily administrative position for over twenty years, and hasn't coded much.
It's entirely true. I first dug into Metallica and Black Sabbath when I was about 13, and I find myself hooked on Dream Theater, Shadow Gallery, and Symphony X now.
Hard rock, progressive rock, and heavy metal all usually talk about social and political issues in a manner that is both musical and lyrical, and it's a lot easier to dig into and associate with than the lamenting dorks that populate alternative and indie rock nowadays.
- No need to defrag your system. - Can have lots and lots of files in the same folder without limit (not so important for everyone I guess) - When you cut and paste DVD movie files from one folder to another on the same Hard Drive its almost instant (as in doesn't copy anything just reallocates it). - When you copy files from one location to another and theres no space left it doesn't delete all the files that you just copied. - When you copy files to a new location it checks that there is enough space for it to copy all the files. - When your doing something CPU intensive it doesn't slow down the GUI. You can watch a movie even though the CPU is at 100% doing something else. The first two items are general attributes of ext3 and reiserfs. The next two are part of the kernel's generic FS layer (if I remember correctly.) That last one is just due to Linux's thread scheduler being very intelligent.
Microsoft is not likely to adopt ext3 or ext4 support, much less reiserfs support. File copying is fairly old and not likely to be updated. It's feasible, though, that Microsoft could improve their thread scheduler, but it's not going to be a high priority because they will be busy for a while writing security patches for Vista and I highly doubt they will release kernel optimizations for the newly obsoleted XP.
I've used Red Hat back when it had to be installed from floppy, and have an FC6 box for dev work on my desk today. (Don't get me too wrong. My fileserver's Gentoo, and the personal laptop I'm on right now is Debian Etch.)
When you say that Red Hat is "greedy," do you mean that they are wrong for selling Linux? After all, people who buy Red Hat's Linux get support, oodles of manuals (good luck getting that brand-new SATA2 RAID card to work in Ubuntu without some arcane incantation halfway through your init (WTF is up with Ubuntu's init anyway? Sure, I appreciate that it's clean and nice-looking, but why is it so damn slow? Even Knoppix CDs boot faster on my friend's dev box than his Ubuntu installation does...)), and they also get a bit of a warranty, which is not something that comes with any flavor of free Linux.
I like Ubuntu much better than Red Hat e.g. package management etc. Yeah, I can't argue with that. Even today, APT still kicks yum out of the water when it comes to being non-buggy and working right. Of course, Ubuntu isn't exactly the best example; they clutter up their repos with an astounding amount of virtual packages.
Also, Ubuntu is nothing like Red Hat in their philosophy. Red Hat sells Linux in order to make a profit. Thus, they work on making their Linux fast, clean, and fully documented, in order to maximize sales. Ubuntu makes Linux in order to promote Linux's desktop share. Thus, they make their distro complete, with out-of-the-box support for proprietary drivers and with oodles of applications. Neither side is perfect: Red Hat's distro is not free if you want the enterprise support, and Ubuntu's distro is bloated and poorly designed for expert users.
Okay, so listen up. If you can't afford a Ferrari, that is understandable. Ferraris are spendy little cars. But DVDs? They're perfectly affordable. So is basic cable. The problem here is not cost, not at any level -- Australia is an English-speaking country with similar obscenity laws and a excellent grasp of American culture. There should not be any costs associated with "preparing" episodes for export to Australia, neither for broadcast nor for DVD.
People are pirating it because there is no other way to get it. For some inexplicable reason, the industry seems to think that there is little to no demand for importing these shows, and so they've neglected to do so. It's sort of sad, really; the industry hasn't always been this way. For example, Cartoon Network started airing late-night anime precisely because polls showed that the biggest demographic of anime fansubbers and traders was also the demographic most likely to sit up late at night and watch cartoons. While this may not seem like a big deal to you, it was an amazingly awesome thing for anime lovers, and I think that Cartoon Network got it right.
Your "wait for it" method assumes that the show in question will in fact be aired and released in Australia regardless of consumer input. This is not true. There are many shows in markets which simply never arrive in places due to a lack of demand. For every anime imported, dubbed, edited, NTSCed, and aired or released in America and Canada, there are dozens that they predict just won't sell no matter how snazzy the packaging is. The only way to show that there is a serious demand is to pirate the shows.
The TV business is usually not as receptive to input as the Adult Swim guys. They don't understand much besides money and ratings. The only way to force them to speed up their importing schedules is to create economic impetus -- to pirate the shows that are being demanded. Anything else is futile.
I worked in a high school's computer tech center for a few years. I'm not a lawyer, though.
In terms of legality, you're in the clear for that express purpose only (visiting MySpace.) Anything else might make you liable. I would suggest a click-through.
Also, if the school is anything like the one I worked at, the extent of their blocking will be harvesting visited URLs and looking to see if there are any frequent hits at interesting domain names. However, we never caught small *.mine.nu-type DynDNS addresses unless a teacher explicitly told us, and our job was only to enforce teachers' policies, not make up new ones.
So, here's a handful of reasons why bundling the drivers is bad.
First, it's copyright infringement two different ways to do so. ATI and Nvidia both forbid commercial and non-commercial redistribution of their drivers -- the only way to get them is from ATI or Nvidia. This is the same on Windows boxes and Linux boxes alike. Also, it's against the terms of the GPL to redistribute (ship) a tainted kernel, if I remember correctly. At any rate, I do know for a fact that the kernel developers refuse to debug tainted kernel dumps, so a kernel that ships tainted is not conducive to errors that might affect an entire distribution. (Before you get all angry about kernel devs, let me remind you that if a binary blob is the cause of a kernel panic, the devs have no real way to fix it.)
Second, it's a waste of space. This argument is somewhat dated, considering the current distribution mirrors (my university, OSU, hosts one of the biggest American Linux mirrors, and it's FAST), but it's still somewhat relevant. Distros like Ubuntu have "generic kernels," in which there is a stripped-down kernel with only the most basic optimizations and an initial ram disk with just about every module on the planet inside. Now, the proprietary drivers are not exactly small. If they can be kept out of the ram disk, then the amount that has to be redistributed grows.
Third, they are not "necessary for boot." Debian and many of its descendants, including Ubuntu, have a "popularity contest" system. Popularity contest is a way of tallying packages and seeing what is commonly on a system. This data is used to prioritize packages for LiveCDs and one-CD Internet installers. At current, the free drivers can provide 2D support, a framebuffer, and a text console, which is just fine for some people (case in point: I have a handful of headless servers, and except for the fileserver which requires VNC administration, they are all non-graphical.)
Fourth, you make it sound as if Linux should magically work perfectly out-of-the-box. Let us say that Linux should work as well as Windows without extra stuff. Well, it does, except for video codecs for Windows Media and DVDs. (Oh, and there are a few rare USB devices and wireless cards that don't have native drivers, but those are few and far between.) On Windows, drivers do not magically work for video cards. You get basic VGA-level support and a framebuffer, just like on Linux. If you want your hardware acceleration and your OpenGL, you've still got to go and get your drivers online (or sometimes they're on a CD with the card), but it's not any easier.
Fifth, it's not permissible. You may not appreciate the work ethic behind Linux, but I guarantee you that the thousands of people that coded long, arduous hours to bring you the system upon which you now work are damn well aware of the conditions under which they make available their code. You might not realize it, but the Debian coders whom Ubuntu and other derivatives are descended from work very hard at making things work. On some systems, like Gentoo, there is actually a package, "debianutils," that contains the Debian-specific utilities not provided by GNU or BSD. I would say that at the very least, you could acknowledge their rules and refrain from being the most recent person in a very long line to ask for something that is blatantly against policy.
Sixth, it's not helpful to the community. Supporting the proprietary drivers by default chokes off impetus to work on the open-source drivers.
Causality is flawed in most cases. The best thing to do is to look for evidence of NO chain of cause and effect, like this paper does. Otherwise...
* The Internet is created from ARPA, CERN, and espresso. * Universities pick up the Internet. * Shawn Fanning gets bored, writes Napster. * RIAA shuts down Napster. * Nullsoft designs and releases Gnutella. * Neo-Modus designs and releases DC. * Kazaa is released. * Gnutella-style networks evolve into semi-anonymous brightnets. * The first open-source darknet client, DC++, matures. * Studies correlating the evolution of file-sharing software and copyright infringement appear. * (Unrelated origin: Bram Cohen releases Bittorrent's white-paper and the original client/tracker.) * RIAA begin filing frivolous lawsuits. * Kazaa dies. * The Azureus project is founded.
I do believe that that is an accurate, if somewhat truncated, chain of causes and effects from the beginnings of the Internet to today. If we are to follow that, then we should be blaming Al Gore for inventing the damn tubes in the first place.
Instead, look to disprove causality. If there is no link between something, it is more significant than if there is a link.
The patents (or lack thereof) have not had effects on cryptography endorsements before. One of the more popular AES candidates in use is the 384-bit key-based cipher, Blowfish, which has a public domain specification and is very useful in slow key-rescheduling conditions. One common use is for LUKS or Truecrypt hard drive encryption, and another is in BSD password hashes (the idea being that it takes the cipher about two seconds to reset itself internally each time a password is guessed, and so even with the ciphertext, the password takes a longer time to crack.)
Yo. Well, it's pretty much as you say. Wikipedia currently has about 200 servers, most of which are dedicated to a single task. There's a web cluster running Apache with PHP (with eAccelerator, I believe,) that runs the Mediawiki software and serves requests. (That is about 100 servers, if I remember right.) There's a database cluster which runs the Mysql databases; one cluster is English, a few other languages have dedicated boxes, (Chinese, Korean, Spanish, I think...), and another cluster for all other languages. There's also a Nagios box somewhere in there that monitors the whole shebang. Everything is situated behind a set of Squids, like you suggested. In fact, three of four vrequests to Wikipedia are hitting a Squid, not an Apache server. Also, some of the Apaches have memcached.
Wikipedia is indeed just text and images, but even with the cache, the entire thing has to run a disturbingly large number of edits through a database and then retrieve any one of over 1.6 million articles anytime it's requested. The scale on which the software runs hurts my head, and I would imagine the guys at Wikimedia's server place have similar headaches hourly.
In the past, I've tried to obtain the best physical proof possible, be it a timestamped email that affirms the license, or a piece of paper with a signature on it. Really, the best method is to get a positive affirmation on the work being CC, before the license is pulled.
This isn't meant to replace APT or RPM. It runs over them, like Pup or Synaptic. The difference is that CNR is designed for user-friendliness and clarity. If I need, say, an audio sequencer, but I don't know about Audacity, I can search through my repo now and find out about Audacity, read some reviews, look at some screencaps...
If the article is accurate about its capabilities, then I see this as good news.
Um, as The Pirate Bay has demonstrated already, there are three wrong with your supposition. First off, ICANN does not and will not revoke domain names at the behest of the government. As long as Doom9 has backbone (and this hasn't been their first time in this type of situation), they're not gonna crumple.
The second thing is that they might not be located in the USA. The whois dossier shows that the domain was registered by (anonymous) proxy, and it's entirely possible that he's not American. If his servers are physically located outside of the USA, then he can't be legally threatened by civil suits, and he's not subject to DMCA. (However, this is a hypothetical, and since he refuses to host DeCSS, it is my guess that he is somewhere in the USA.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you're on Mac OS X. Check for "javaws" in your path. Java Web Start is a system for broadcasting applications to clients. On Windows it's automatic; on Mac OS X and Linux, you will have to use "javaws file.jnlp".
As somebody who helps maintain an embedded Linux distro (iPodLinux), I honestly have to wonder whether or not Ubuntu could ever become light enough to fit comfortably onto handhelds, and whether or not they're going to bring any improvements to community projects like ucLinux.
Musicians should not rely on Pro Tools. That's all.
But isn't making a copy for a friend fair-use? Excellent point. Sneakernets are a valid, if somewhat abusive, application of the rights of first sale. After the CD is sold to you, copies that you produce are your property, and you can give them away, although you cannot profit from them. The only one you may sell is the original.
You bring up an interesting point. If I have a 2GB U3-enabled USB pen drive, with Azureus and Limewire, I can plug into any Java-enabled Windows box and do my thing, even at a public terminal. If I do that, how is liability possibly going to be assigned to me? The computer doesn't know; it's a public box with a single, anonymous login. The IP addresses can only tell them which physical box in the public pool it was, and that's assuming that the residential Internet is tied to MAC addresses.
So, in this hypothetical, who takes the liability? What if I do this at a public library? Is the library responsible?
Grammar Nazi here: "Or," in the English language, is an exclusive OR (XOR), not an inclusive OR. It signifies a mutually exclusive phrase. The easiest way to turn it into an inclusive OR is to change the clause into a so-called "or-comma-or" phrase, like so:
In my opinion, they are either ignorant or evil, or ignorant and evil.
His point is that Gnash has no restrictions on its features, and could theoretically support features like enabling copying of Flash movies or permitting advertisements to be skipped. The official player will never support that since Adobe is introducing these features specifically in order to prevent bypasses.
I don't know about you, but in Oregon, state law is that fire trucks, ambulances, police, and sheriffs are permitted to speed and run red lights when they are doing their duty. This proposal would mean that police cars cannot run red lights if they are not in pursuit of somebody or answering a call; it does not mean that they can never run red lights.
SSH, HTTPS, VPN, and other secure connections have markers on them that identify them.
As someone who has contributed more than a few patches to iPodLinux, you may be interested in knowing that using Cygwin to generate the userland (used to) create binaries with a .elf extension. The extension isn't needed; it's just the way that the Cygwin toolchain ended up naming them.
This technology sounds like it's stuck behind the buzzword "meaning-based media," which seems to just be an abstract notion of finding and sorting media without profiling, hashing, fingerprinting, tagging, watermarking, sourcing, or naming (in other words, by going on bullshit notions and intuition. "Oh, it looks copyrighted.")
More importantly, it looks like it can't do anything unless the target is somewhere on the Web and is reasonably active. The darknets and private trackers are still safe.
The stories about his programming escapades are quite epic. He supposedly wrote a BASIC interpreter on a plane once, on the way to a presentation. The story goes that he forgot to write a BASIC interpreter, so he hammered one out on the plane without any testing or debugging, and it magically worked when the presentation was given. He wrote all kinds of interfaces and adapters back when he was a code monkey. It's just that he has been in a primarily administrative position for over twenty years, and hasn't coded much.
It's entirely true. I first dug into Metallica and Black Sabbath when I was about 13, and I find myself hooked on Dream Theater, Shadow Gallery, and Symphony X now.
Hard rock, progressive rock, and heavy metal all usually talk about social and political issues in a manner that is both musical and lyrical, and it's a lot easier to dig into and associate with than the lamenting dorks that populate alternative and indie rock nowadays.
- Can have lots and lots of files in the same folder without limit (not so important for everyone I guess)
- When you cut and paste DVD movie files from one folder to another on the same Hard Drive its almost instant (as in doesn't copy anything just reallocates it).
- When you copy files from one location to another and theres no space left it doesn't delete all the files that you just copied.
- When you copy files to a new location it checks that there is enough space for it to copy all the files.
- When your doing something CPU intensive it doesn't slow down the GUI. You can watch a movie even though the CPU is at 100% doing something else. The first two items are general attributes of ext3 and reiserfs. The next two are part of the kernel's generic FS layer (if I remember correctly.) That last one is just due to Linux's thread scheduler being very intelligent.
Microsoft is not likely to adopt ext3 or ext4 support, much less reiserfs support. File copying is fairly old and not likely to be updated. It's feasible, though, that Microsoft could improve their thread scheduler, but it's not going to be a high priority because they will be busy for a while writing security patches for Vista and I highly doubt they will release kernel optimizations for the newly obsoleted XP.
When you say that Red Hat is "greedy," do you mean that they are wrong for selling Linux? After all, people who buy Red Hat's Linux get support, oodles of manuals (good luck getting that brand-new SATA2 RAID card to work in Ubuntu without some arcane incantation halfway through your init (WTF is up with Ubuntu's init anyway? Sure, I appreciate that it's clean and nice-looking, but why is it so damn slow? Even Knoppix CDs boot faster on my friend's dev box than his Ubuntu installation does...)), and they also get a bit of a warranty, which is not something that comes with any flavor of free Linux. I like Ubuntu much better than Red Hat e.g. package management etc. Yeah, I can't argue with that. Even today, APT still kicks yum out of the water when it comes to being non-buggy and working right. Of course, Ubuntu isn't exactly the best example; they clutter up their repos with an astounding amount of virtual packages.
Also, Ubuntu is nothing like Red Hat in their philosophy. Red Hat sells Linux in order to make a profit. Thus, they work on making their Linux fast, clean, and fully documented, in order to maximize sales. Ubuntu makes Linux in order to promote Linux's desktop share. Thus, they make their distro complete, with out-of-the-box support for proprietary drivers and with oodles of applications. Neither side is perfect: Red Hat's distro is not free if you want the enterprise support, and Ubuntu's distro is bloated and poorly designed for expert users.
Woot, a troll.
Okay, so listen up. If you can't afford a Ferrari, that is understandable. Ferraris are spendy little cars. But DVDs? They're perfectly affordable. So is basic cable. The problem here is not cost, not at any level -- Australia is an English-speaking country with similar obscenity laws and a excellent grasp of American culture. There should not be any costs associated with "preparing" episodes for export to Australia, neither for broadcast nor for DVD.
People are pirating it because there is no other way to get it. For some inexplicable reason, the industry seems to think that there is little to no demand for importing these shows, and so they've neglected to do so. It's sort of sad, really; the industry hasn't always been this way. For example, Cartoon Network started airing late-night anime precisely because polls showed that the biggest demographic of anime fansubbers and traders was also the demographic most likely to sit up late at night and watch cartoons. While this may not seem like a big deal to you, it was an amazingly awesome thing for anime lovers, and I think that Cartoon Network got it right.
Your "wait for it" method assumes that the show in question will in fact be aired and released in Australia regardless of consumer input. This is not true. There are many shows in markets which simply never arrive in places due to a lack of demand. For every anime imported, dubbed, edited, NTSCed, and aired or released in America and Canada, there are dozens that they predict just won't sell no matter how snazzy the packaging is. The only way to show that there is a serious demand is to pirate the shows.
The TV business is usually not as receptive to input as the Adult Swim guys. They don't understand much besides money and ratings. The only way to force them to speed up their importing schedules is to create economic impetus -- to pirate the shows that are being demanded. Anything else is futile.
I worked in a high school's computer tech center for a few years. I'm not a lawyer, though.
In terms of legality, you're in the clear for that express purpose only (visiting MySpace.) Anything else might make you liable. I would suggest a click-through.
Also, if the school is anything like the one I worked at, the extent of their blocking will be harvesting visited URLs and looking to see if there are any frequent hits at interesting domain names. However, we never caught small *.mine.nu-type DynDNS addresses unless a teacher explicitly told us, and our job was only to enforce teachers' policies, not make up new ones.
Um, no. Put away the tarbrush.
So, here's a handful of reasons why bundling the drivers is bad.
First, it's copyright infringement two different ways to do so. ATI and Nvidia both forbid commercial and non-commercial redistribution of their drivers -- the only way to get them is from ATI or Nvidia. This is the same on Windows boxes and Linux boxes alike. Also, it's against the terms of the GPL to redistribute (ship) a tainted kernel, if I remember correctly. At any rate, I do know for a fact that the kernel developers refuse to debug tainted kernel dumps, so a kernel that ships tainted is not conducive to errors that might affect an entire distribution. (Before you get all angry about kernel devs, let me remind you that if a binary blob is the cause of a kernel panic, the devs have no real way to fix it.)
Second, it's a waste of space. This argument is somewhat dated, considering the current distribution mirrors (my university, OSU, hosts one of the biggest American Linux mirrors, and it's FAST), but it's still somewhat relevant. Distros like Ubuntu have "generic kernels," in which there is a stripped-down kernel with only the most basic optimizations and an initial ram disk with just about every module on the planet inside. Now, the proprietary drivers are not exactly small. If they can be kept out of the ram disk, then the amount that has to be redistributed grows.
Third, they are not "necessary for boot." Debian and many of its descendants, including Ubuntu, have a "popularity contest" system. Popularity contest is a way of tallying packages and seeing what is commonly on a system. This data is used to prioritize packages for LiveCDs and one-CD Internet installers. At current, the free drivers can provide 2D support, a framebuffer, and a text console, which is just fine for some people (case in point: I have a handful of headless servers, and except for the fileserver which requires VNC administration, they are all non-graphical.)
Fourth, you make it sound as if Linux should magically work perfectly out-of-the-box. Let us say that Linux should work as well as Windows without extra stuff. Well, it does, except for video codecs for Windows Media and DVDs. (Oh, and there are a few rare USB devices and wireless cards that don't have native drivers, but those are few and far between.) On Windows, drivers do not magically work for video cards. You get basic VGA-level support and a framebuffer, just like on Linux. If you want your hardware acceleration and your OpenGL, you've still got to go and get your drivers online (or sometimes they're on a CD with the card), but it's not any easier.
Fifth, it's not permissible. You may not appreciate the work ethic behind Linux, but I guarantee you that the thousands of people that coded long, arduous hours to bring you the system upon which you now work are damn well aware of the conditions under which they make available their code. You might not realize it, but the Debian coders whom Ubuntu and other derivatives are descended from work very hard at making things work. On some systems, like Gentoo, there is actually a package, "debianutils," that contains the Debian-specific utilities not provided by GNU or BSD. I would say that at the very least, you could acknowledge their rules and refrain from being the most recent person in a very long line to ask for something that is blatantly against policy.
Sixth, it's not helpful to the community. Supporting the proprietary drivers by default chokes off impetus to work on the open-source drivers.
There's why.
Causality is flawed in most cases. The best thing to do is to look for evidence of NO chain of cause and effect, like this paper does. Otherwise...
* The Internet is created from ARPA, CERN, and espresso.
* Universities pick up the Internet.
* Shawn Fanning gets bored, writes Napster.
* RIAA shuts down Napster.
* Nullsoft designs and releases Gnutella.
* Neo-Modus designs and releases DC.
* Kazaa is released.
* Gnutella-style networks evolve into semi-anonymous brightnets.
* The first open-source darknet client, DC++, matures.
* Studies correlating the evolution of file-sharing software and copyright infringement appear.
* (Unrelated origin: Bram Cohen releases Bittorrent's white-paper and the original client/tracker.)
* RIAA begin filing frivolous lawsuits.
* Kazaa dies.
* The Azureus project is founded.
I do believe that that is an accurate, if somewhat truncated, chain of causes and effects from the beginnings of the Internet to today. If we are to follow that, then we should be blaming Al Gore for inventing the damn tubes in the first place.
Instead, look to disprove causality. If there is no link between something, it is more significant than if there is a link.
The patents (or lack thereof) have not had effects on cryptography endorsements before. One of the more popular AES candidates in use is the 384-bit key-based cipher, Blowfish, which has a public domain specification and is very useful in slow key-rescheduling conditions. One common use is for LUKS or Truecrypt hard drive encryption, and another is in BSD password hashes (the idea being that it takes the cipher about two seconds to reset itself internally each time a password is guessed, and so even with the ciphertext, the password takes a longer time to crack.)
Yo. Well, it's pretty much as you say. Wikipedia currently has about 200 servers, most of which are dedicated to a single task. There's a web cluster running Apache with PHP (with eAccelerator, I believe,) that runs the Mediawiki software and serves requests. (That is about 100 servers, if I remember right.) There's a database cluster which runs the Mysql databases; one cluster is English, a few other languages have dedicated boxes, (Chinese, Korean, Spanish, I think...), and another cluster for all other languages. There's also a Nagios box somewhere in there that monitors the whole shebang. Everything is situated behind a set of Squids, like you suggested. In fact, three of four vrequests to Wikipedia are hitting a Squid, not an Apache server. Also, some of the Apaches have memcached.
Wikipedia is indeed just text and images, but even with the cache, the entire thing has to run a disturbingly large number of edits through a database and then retrieve any one of over 1.6 million articles anytime it's requested. The scale on which the software runs hurts my head, and I would imagine the guys at Wikimedia's server place have similar headaches hourly.
Well, it's not that intuitive if you're a Microsoft customer.
In the past, I've tried to obtain the best physical proof possible, be it a timestamped email that affirms the license, or a piece of paper with a signature on it. Really, the best method is to get a positive affirmation on the work being CC, before the license is pulled.
This isn't meant to replace APT or RPM. It runs over them, like Pup or Synaptic. The difference is that CNR is designed for user-friendliness and clarity. If I need, say, an audio sequencer, but I don't know about Audacity, I can search through my repo now and find out about Audacity, read some reviews, look at some screencaps... If the article is accurate about its capabilities, then I see this as good news.
Um, as The Pirate Bay has demonstrated already, there are three wrong with your supposition. First off, ICANN does not and will not revoke domain names at the behest of the government. As long as Doom9 has backbone (and this hasn't been their first time in this type of situation), they're not gonna crumple.
The second thing is that they might not be located in the USA. The whois dossier shows that the domain was registered by (anonymous) proxy, and it's entirely possible that he's not American. If his servers are physically located outside of the USA, then he can't be legally threatened by civil suits, and he's not subject to DMCA. (However, this is a hypothetical, and since he refuses to host DeCSS, it is my guess that he is somewhere in the USA.)
The third thing is that the website is http://www.doom9.org/ , not doom9.com.