Microsoft seems to design their protocols to be as hostile as possible to 'other' OSs (without being openly anti-competitive). This is good for their business plan but bad for users. A side effect of this is (like another comment in this thread noted), that it's really difficult to expand the system beyond what Microsoft wants you to be able to do.

Given that you're using mostly 'other' operating systems, I think it would be a big mistake to make the bulk of your systems beholden to a hostile mistress.

OK: so the proper title would be: "...may destroy life signs it was sent to find."

On the bright side, though, if we can show that Martian soil contains a big enough volume of perchlorates, it might be possible to use that knowledge to lower the payload of a manned mission (in-situ oxygen generation).

Did they mention to the hearing that they're doing their damndest to close the analog hole? Did they give a plan for what teachers could do when they manage to do that?

Why not just ask the sysadmin guys at Geocities to 'surplus' you a full copy of backup tapes (or disks, or whatever it is they use for backups).

It may still take you years to understand the backups, but at least you'll have the full data for posterity.

3-10 foot lengths of cable are worth buying in bulk. They tend to be worth the money, and the extra couple of feet isn't a big deal. When you get over 20 feet, though, there tends not to be the kind of granularity of length and you can end up with 10-30 feet of unwanted cable after a run.

If you multiply that by 20 (not to mention 2000) long cables in a building, you can quickly end up with an unruly mass of unwanted copper that makes maintenance an absolute horror.

As for the quality of the link -- not a big issue. With a good crimper and reasonable training (I was taught how to crimp ethernet cables by an EE who ran a networking equipment company), I've had about as many (few) problems with commercial cables as handmade ones. With factory-made cables, however, are you really gonna pull a 60' length of cable out of the wall just to return it to the manufacturer? If that's the case, then you're probably financially strapped enough that you should be using a hand crimper.

I'm more inclined to just lop the head off of the offending cable and put a new end on.

The constitution gives congress the right to

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

(emphasis mine>

DRM, on the other hand, gives 'Authors' control of their 'writings' for an unlimited time. As such, DRM is not protected by article 1 Section 8 of the constitution. This means that DRM provisions are now far more susceptible to (for example) a first-amendment challenge than most other copyright provisions.

I can see 2 possibilities:

• The GP has been (accidentally?) purchasing bootleg products, and/or
• The GP has a penchant for independent films.

Case in point: Vinyl records.

In the 70s and 80s there was a reasonably robust trade in 'import records' -- even entire stores devoted to the market. If someone was an especially strong devotee of a given artist or record, they could get the 'foreign' version -- often in addition to the 'local' version. This is simply impractical (and commercially infeasible) with DVDs.

You either put up with the local rendition, or you starve to death.

Region Locking may have more of an effect than you think. It prevents us (in North America) from even considering buying, for example, a Japanese or European video. Like Anime? Want to see the original Japanese cut of "Ghost in the Machine"? You're going to be hard put to find it in any shop in your city. Your only real choices are:

1. obtain a bootleg copy,
2. Buy it Direct from Japan -- which would also require a Japanese-region DVD player.

Thus it is that most people don't even think about option 2, unless they're seriously considering building a large library of Japanese video...

The effective result is that most people don't even consider option 2. Either they get a bootleg copy, find (and limit themselves to) americanized version of foreign movies or they forget about buying foreign DVDs altogether.

In terms of cross-culture polination, it simply sucks.

No, you need a computer mounted (or mountable) on the dash -- and a (bi-directional) internet connection to violate their patent. (I read the patent a couple weeks ago, so my memory's not solid).

That doesn't change the fact that it's completely bogus. It basically covers the idea of putting a net-capable computer into or on your dash. For Prior Art, you should probably watch "The Jetsons".

I work for Free Geek Vancouver. Free Geeks are a loosely associated set of organizations dedicated to computer reuse and recycling (in that order). It's often the case (in Vancouver, anyways) that people will pop a drive before dropping by with a donation, so it's sometimes a problem that 'larger' drives run short ('larger' being in the 40G and up range for desktops and 20G+.

Free Geek organizations (I can't speak for others) have a comittment to destroying data on donated drives before they go out again. If you don't want to (or are not allowed to) trust that, then you can download a copy of DBAN and nuke your drives for a few hours (or days) before you donate them.

For most civilian uses, 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX' is sufficient (with today's drive density) to make the data on the drive effectively irrecoverable. --- but, if the NSA is after you for violating the Nuclear Secrets Act, all bets are off.

It's apparently a known path for MS in maintaining their monopoly that they'll lock a provider into 'promising' more product than they can really sell and then 'rolling that over' on top of their projections for the next year ... and so on .. and so on. (There was just a tad of sarcasm in my note.)

In the meantime, the MS 'customer' is left run out on a string year after year.

If they were allowed to sell their excess product elsewhere, it would pretty much kill the impetus of MS's tactic.

The real difference is that, now, it seems like MS middlemen are getting desperate enough that they're now willing to jump out of the MS boat and swim to the apparently safer shores of Free software.

If companies go bankrupt, MS will still get some money -- it may just take a little while longer.

Well, they can always sell the unused licenses on Ebay -- if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft has browbeaten Ebay into making that effectively verboten.

If you're looking to make it impossible for people to install unsanctioned programs, you can mount the home directories noexec. That won't prevent things like shell scripts (bash myfile), but it will prevent people from installing binaries. If you have specific users that you trust, then you can give them a writable directory on an exec-capable mount, and (if it's not their entire home directory), symlink that directory into their home directory.

If that's not what you're talking about, then just what kind of lockdown do you require?