Posts by Richard Kay

The sun uses gravity to do the job

So we already have a thermonuclear reactor that generates useful power. All we need to do to harness it is build a few dozen square miles of concentrated solar thermal power generation in deserts and use solar energy indirectly in the form of wind energy.

Seems likely to be a great deal quicker, simpler and cheaper to me, but I guess that doing what we already know very well how to do on a bigger scale or just a little bit cheaper isn't the stuff that great careers in science and Nobel prizes are made of.

@Gareth Edwards

"I use Ubuntu and it comes with Firefox pre-installed - does this mean that it will have to be removed now?"

Install the Konqueror package:

sudo apt-get install konqueror

And this includes a great alternative browser and many other useful things, e.g. file browsing, the fish protocol for access to files on a remote ssh server and ability to create image galleries. Firefox isn't a monopoly regardless of alternatives like Konqueror anyway, because by being open source any company can sell and support their own version of it, or the mainstream version for that matter.

Charge those profiting

And let everyone else copy. ISPs profit when customers pay for bigger bandwidth caps and faster downloads. Blank media vendors profit when people go and buy a few or very many blank CDs and DVDs. It seems a fair deal for the music and film business to get a cut in exchange for legalising use of openly sold blank media and bandwidth by those who don't profit financially, but get to enjoy what the media is used for.

But the music biz is far too greedy to agree this with the ISPs. Consequently they get little from new uses while screwing their artists all the harder over declining physical sales. So we have a market failure - what could be a market isn't one, which was the reason government stepped in 200 years ago and legislated the solution we call "copyright law" in the first place.

Copyright worked well when it takes a cut from profitable business of a few commercial beneficiaries and lets everyone else get on with doing whatever they like. This was true in connection with the book publishing business a couple of hundred years ago and will be true again when ISPs are seen in the same light as commercial printers - able to get on with making money from bulk copying of content which others want and paying a cut to the artists who created the recent content.

Given that copyright law was a government response to market failure in the first place, making this reflect the changing technology of copying should not need to involve it attempting to spy on and modify the behavior of very many people.

Protocol needed for criminal domain seizure

If botnet herders can hide their zombie control channels using a constant domain name and dynamic addresses, then instead of criminalising dynamic DNS users, what is needed is a workable protocol for identifying, confirming, suspending and seizing domain names used for criminal purposes. If all but a few small domain registries agree to follow the protocol then if the criminals can't be traced through the registrar, at least they can have the domain seized from them and the holdout registrars' names can be blacklisted as aiders and abetters.

Better still to prevent domain registration without proof of ID, but this one will vary between different jurisdictions.

But what subsidy does fossil fuel get ?

Quite a lot it would seem from those who suffer from the floods, droughts and hurricanes caused by the climatic effects. And those who pay insurance premiums against such increased risks. But why should I care when I drive my gas guzzling 4x4 to the airport for my weekend away if my tabloid says I shouldn't and the cost of my extravagance is picked up by someone else ? And these costs will be trivial compared to a 10m sea level rise. Would the nimbies who don't want wind generators cluttering their skyline or sea view prefer climate refugee camps next door instead ?

It's high time to tax airline, power generation and central heating fossil fuel to cover some of these externalised costs. Then we won't have to subsidise wind, solar and tidal.

History repeats

IBM was pretty bloated in the eighties and the industry momentum was then going elsewhere. So it posted some large losses, shed many of its staff, massively restructured and concentrated on developing core strengths.

The desktop computer is becoming a cheap commodity and those selling software into this market are competing against free. Free software is getting better each year and has more engineers actively working on it and getting paid to do so through different revenue models.

So we are going to see much harder downwards pressure on prices than Microsoft is used to. They still have much goodwill from their core customer locked in base, which won't evaporate overnight, but in markets where customers have a choice, the software won't sell for much if anything, and a growing number of new customers with choice are going for better quality software available elsewhere.

In the late eighties people did start getting sacked for buying IBM. The money now isn't on the commodity desktop, it's in web advertising where Microsoft is in third place and servers where Microsoft is in second place.

But when things started going bad at IBM, IBM shares were not organised as a pyramid scheme through employee salaries being paid in share options. Bill Parish claims that at Microsoft these options are not being accounted as a cost or liability:

http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html

So how much longer can Microsoft pay its serfs in funny money before this becomes worthless paper and they leave in droves ?

Would Vista have been any easier ?

Well, despite her dad writing this comment using Ubuntu/Firefox, my daughter started university last September and had very similar problems with her University site which wasn't very well set up for her Vista laptop. But she had enough persistence to get the site support people to fix their web application after going round in circles for a couple of days so that it would work with Vista.

I suspect the lady who couldn't get her Ubuntu laptop to work or accept advice from her college concerning how to get it to work wasn't attending, and this was her excuse.

What do you expect ?

No movement that starts from small beginnings and grows rapidly is without the inevitable problems caused by human fallibility and egos. As time goes on, the procedures for resolving disputes become more sophisticated and bureaucratic and so the growth of the movement slows down as it acquires weight and substance. When they eventually build their glorious head office to house all the bureaucrats who manage their by then massively legalistic and heavyweight process, the movement will by then have lost all momentum and become a crusty and old institution.

We've seen this dynamic with so many movements throughout history which have changed history and I doubt Wikipedia will be exempt from this kind of organisational bloat tendency. While it has all of 23 paid staff it's still a very lean, dynamic and highly flexible organisation. As to how bureacracies manage to increase in size, see also Parkinson's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law .

day long calms

Are better dealt with by uprating hydro electric facilities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage#Hydroelectric_dam_uprating

Wikipedia is run by humans

Yes fallible humans with good intentions who have to arrive at judgements and who sometimes make mistakes, and whom I will never put on any pedestal. So what does anyone expect from an organisation that employs all of 23 people ? Get real folks, this is a human organisation. The most likely critics if someone provides something mostly good for free are going to be those who previously made money by supplying a competing product paid for by other means. I havn't donated to Wikipedia yet, but it's enough use to me that I would if they were strapped for cash. I help keep a more specialised online news organisation going through a voluntary subscription, because what they write is worth a lot more to me than the effort I would have to go through to research, digest and compile the same information by other means.

@Paul M

Paul, your ad-hominem insults and straw men imply that copyright extenders and extremists don't have a case. Otherwise you wouldn't have to resort to these discredited rhetorical devices.

"I thought Mac zealots were mad! Anti-copyright extremists like Richard Kay almost make them look sane and rational."

Ad hominem insult.

"The comparison of American freedom fighters like Richard Otis to anti social inadequates who don't want to pay for digital music shows how mentally retarded these people are."

Straw man and Ad hominem insult combined in one sentence. Straw man because there are many motivations for opposing copyright extremism and obtaining content free of price is just one of them.

"How on Earth is paying for art that you value oppression?"

Straw man because this isn't my case. Laws which unreasonably prevent people from doing what they are capable of doing are oppression. I'm very willing to debate what is "reasonable" here, but this isn't unlimited in duration and it doesn't extend to locking people up and spying on our communications. Society has to get as much as it can in return if a legal privilege is going to be extended to a minority. If this is to be done at all the legal privilege must be as small as is necessary for the purpose, and fundamental freedoms (to privacy and freedom of expression) are not negotiable in exchange for access to art.

"When I last looked DRM hadn't killed anyone, and paying for music was not compulsory."

Straw man because I didn't claim DRM killed people. I do claim the DRM supportive DMCA was responsible for the pre-trial arrest and detention of Dmitry Sklyarov, in order to suppress discussion of technical details of DRM implementation, contrary to the provisions of the first amendment to the US constitution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment

"You can always spot a fanatic like Richard Kay because they have lost all sense of proportion."

Ad hominem insult. Was the demonstration I attended outside the US embassy in London over the imprisonment of Dmitry Sklyarov out of proportion to the violation of his first amendment rights as a visitor to the US ? If you were wrongfully arrested, charged and imprisoned awaiting criminal proceedings, would you prefer that people did nothing to question, challenge and confront those responsible ? Copyright extremists lobbied for the DMCA which caused Dmitry to be locked up, and which clearly violates the first amendment.

After that happened I started getting annoyed with periodically being made to watch copyright extremist brainwashing at the start of watching any DVD or going to see a movie. ( the current Userfriendly comic thread shows I'm not the only one fed up with this: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090101 )

"What a sad and lonely man you must be to take away creator's rights and call it fighting for freedom." More ad hominem insult and straw men.

Paul, please stop and think more carefully about what your side is doing to protect and extend your precious copyrights and try to think a bit harder about this one before you spout any more of your silly insults and construct your ridiculous straw men:

a. Locking Dmitry up and thereby threatening to do the same to others to suppress what we can say about how DRM works.

b. Intercepting our communications in case we're sharing something copyright law says we shouldn't.

c. Brainwashing the public with the same old lies every time one of us watches a movie. Unlicensed copying isn't killing music or film-making as fast as copyright extremism is giving lobbyists for these industries a bad reputation. The arts themselves are very much alive.

It's the copyright extremists and extenders who have lost the plot, not the copyright limiters.

Time to uprate hydro power

Much of the UK's existing hydro plant was designed for a time when hydro was suitable for continuous base load. Then they developed pumped hydro storage with a plant near Llanberis as a means to balance the grid when everyone switches on the kettle during the ad break on Coronation St. It now makes sense to uprate older base load hydro generation so that water can be stored in the reservoir when it's windy and released faster giving a higher power output than would be possible with the old continuous base-load plant when the regional wind plant is becalmed.

This uprating involves some fairly heavy engineering work. It needs to be planned to coincide with the growth in wind generation beyond 20% of total supply. We may also need to trade off volume of available water supply in connection with reservoirs designed primarily for water supply given these structures also have generating potential. Most people would prefer to take a shower instead of a bath and leave washing the car or watering the lawn for a few weeks in preference to having 6 hours a day of power cuts or sky high electricity bills.

Fortunately if some of the water supply is replaced with wind electricity backup, this use is more likely to be needed in winter, which isn't when we are most likely to suffer from drought.

random thoughts

In no particular order:

1. Isn't this what cellphone companies have been doing since the invention of the cellphone ? Tracking a phone as it moves from one cell to another ?

2. This depends upon a government bureacracy where the right and left hands know what each other are doing and all systems are joined up. Evidence of this capability is notable by its absence. This kind of thing could be useful for local policing of football hooligans but I think national level surveillance will continue to be labour intensive requiring a significant team to monitor one individual effectively.

3. I think automated facial recognition is quite easily defeated. Ask any hoody, or beardy, or someone with sunglasses, a hat or a scarf. The best trained police officers in the Met anti terrorism branch mistook an innocent Brazilian electrician for a suicide bomber with fatal consequences. Imagine the match had been done by machine and politicians and managers trying to get away with that one.

Been there, moved on

When I started with Perl it was a revelation that problems as hard as I could then solve using Perl were solvable with so little effort compared to strictly typed languages lacking decent libraries. After using Perl for a couple of years I discovered I could solve even harder problems using Python in a reasonable amount of time and later I discovered I could still understand my own coding a year or 2 later after I'd designed something.

mark of the beast

These could certainly beat RFID chips, the current generation of which are remotely readable and clonable and therefore insecure. Once they can get one of these to be implantable and securely able to receive, decrypt, manipulate, sign and return an encrypted token, then we have a technology many organisations, governments and banks would require employees, travellers, prisoners, those on parole and account holders to have inside them at all times if enough people don't resist it. By enough people I don't just mean the usual few bleeding heart civil liberty activists and intelligentsia suspects whom the banks and government decision makers can generally afford to ignore. But in this case the question as to "why would enough people care strongly enough to prevent it ?" has an unusual answer:

If you take the Book of Revelation at face value, you won't be able to buy or sell without such an implant, and Christians won't be able to accept one without rejecting our faith. Reading more between the lines, maybe it's the fact that more than a few people will take this warning at face value and would be willing to fight it at great personal cost if needs be, that will prevent this from ever becoming a politically realistic option, in countries with a Christian culture where the ideas of democracy and civil rights have been developed. Forwarned is forarmed, but how, other than by unbelievable coincidence, could an ageing St John living on the Greek island of Patmos over 1900 years ago, by seeing strange and apocalyptic visions, have known anything about this specific possibility either to predict or to help prevent it ?

Reasons for the choice of the flame icon should be obvious !

I'll see it in my logs

Anyone running a NTP (Network Time Protocol) client which logs the system clock corrections made will be able to see the evidence of the extra 1 second adjustment.

art or pornography ?

This has been a difficult question for many years, and standards and tastes have oscillated, e.g. when Victorian prudes removed genitalia from renaissance statues and paintings. It's not surprising that this one should eventually challenge Wikipedia policy, especially given the growing use of many of the excellent articles in this encyclopedia in education.

My own view is that this image and comparable album covers from the same period are art and not pornography. While I don't think of these as being in as good taste as many statues and paintings from the renaissance period which are equally if not more revealing and provocative, who is to judge how future generations will see the controversial album covers ?

You can see many images of renaissance art of similar or greater exposure starting with simple searches on Google images even with strictsafe mode on. Some of these are on Wikipedia itself, and I hope no-one would dream of removing them. Wikipedia's problem is that it is going to be difficult for them to remove controversial seventies rock album art on any objective basis without also removing many highly valued renaissance art images.

Will renaissance art now be banned ?

It seems to me as if much renaissance art until now generally considered suitable for all including children will either have to be banned or an extremely inconsistent stance is being taken. I searched for "renaissance cupid" on google images using strictsafe search option on:

http://images.google.co.uk/images?gbv=2&&hl=en&safe=active&q=renaissance+cupid&&sa=N&start=36&ndsp=18

What indeed is an oil on canvas painting if it is not a "virtual photograph" ?

The images I saw as a consequence were on very much the same level of provocation and indecency as the image from the Wikipedia Scorpions, article the text of which I was not allowed to read on account of Virgin Media following the IWF blacklist and wrongly telling me the web page in question was empty. This censorship was clearly not effective in denying access to the image in question which I had seen years ago in Germany displayed for sale in a shop then open to children. I was able to find the same image within a couple of minutes elsewhere, but the censorship did prevent me from reading the rest of the Wikipedia Scorpions article.

This is totally crazy. What right do the self-styled "Virgin Media" have to ban the Scorpion's Virgin Killers German edition cover any more than e.g. the "Venus and Cupid", oil on canvas painting by Battista Dossi, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battista_Dossi ) and then claim to be "Virgin Media" as opposed to the Whore of Babylon Media themselves ? Time for Richard Branson to consider a name change for his company.

denyhosts and network mode

If you install denyhosts it can lock out an attacker after the number of guesses you choose to configure. If you then run denyhosts in network mode it can share your blacklist with other denyhosts users, which means when more than however many similar servers have been attacked by a host that you choose to configure, you won't get a single attempt on your own server from that host. Not as secure as restricting logins to allowed addresses only, but it means you can still fix your server if you go away on holiday and get an SMS monitor telling you that something is down and you need to login to it from the nearest Internet cafe. If you need to be more secure than this you'll have to carry the right crypto SSH key everywhere you go and disable non-key based logins.

3 level network

I can confirm much of this article from my own weekly automated reports about SSH attacks and spam rejects. The number of spam rejects dropped suddenly to a quarter when the McColo net was taken down. But the number of IP addresses getting locked out for SSH brute force password guesses trying to break into my Linux hosted server quadrupled immediately afterwards. (If your logs show you have this problem, denyhosts is well worth installing). It seems the botnets still under criminal control were being used to try to get more Linux servers under their control as level 2 C+C servers. Level 1 in their C+C network seems to be a few machines under long-term criminal control, presumably in a country where they can bribe the authorities to stay out of their way. Level 3 seems to be compromised Windows PCs, and level 2 are compromised Linux servers. This arrangement presumably allows for more plausible deniability as to the location, use and purpose of the level 1 servers.

If you get spam from their network it will be from a level 3 machine likely to be located anywhere as they are less likely to want to get their level 2 systems blacklisted.

controlled fusion not much nearer

Since I started following these experiments in the sixties, no respectable scientist working in this has promised practical controlled fusion as a cheap electricity source as within the realms of possibility in less than 30 years. This announcement might help cast some of the remaining problems yet to be understood, let alone solved, into slightly clearer focus, but I think we are very far from having a complete picture of all the problems yet to be solved. I agree that it is worth continuing with globally funded research into this, but let's not get overexcited by something that may take a very long time to deliver this potential.

In the meantime, maintaining quality of life and feeding the hungry in developing countries has to go on, so we need to see much more research, development and investment in more practical nearer-term and more mature sustainable energy technologies.

We also need to accept carbon polluters (this means all of us) paying to clean up this mess so dirty technologies don't get subsidised through externalities, i.e. our neighbours picking up the cost of having to clean up after us. Renewable technologies can only compete on a level playing field when dirty energy technologies are no longer subsidised by this means.

Bit of work to do

I'll need to find a day or two to update my Python course materials and the web application I develop for community currency users and then my spam filtering software. The teaching materials are more urgent, while the applications can run fine on 2.6 until 3.x has stabilised a bit and become generally available in stable Linux distribution install packages. Just as well I've got an extensive testing suite for the web application.

I'd rather have to do this kind of upgrade once in a while as a price worth paying for having the language maintain its design purpose. Having a 10% speed hit is neither here nor there if you compare the performance of Python to Ruby on Rails especially on a point zero release.

propaganda - don't be taken in

Copying is not theft. Copying in breach of copyright is just that. Theft deprives the original owner of something they had before the theft occurred and copying something does not do this. Piracy is armed robbery on the high seas. Misusing terms which mean one thing to express disapproval of a very different thing is propaganda pure and simple.

A few years ago copyright law controlled the actions only of the few who owned expensive printing plant. The majority of us have not been consulted until this matter has been debated and consultation is carried out through media which doesn't spew propaganda while reporting the issue one sidedly because it has a vested interest in the matter.

Don't accept taxation imposed through corrupt law bought by lobbyists without representation of the interests of the majority which wants reasonable but not excessive remuneration for the creative minority which can benefit us through their work. The rights of the majority not to have our communications spied upon and controlled for this purpose must also take priority. 25 million downloaders have not been fooled by mass media propaganda which is not going to present this issue responsibly, fairly or truthfully at any time before Turkeys vote for Christmas.

For UK residents and citizens who think copyright terms excessive you have an opportunity to say so by signing this petition:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ShortenCopyright/

DNS usable for all kinds of data

Since the invention of the DNSBL, any entity with domain name A can publish opinions about unique entity B in relation to any context C by stringing together a domain name structured: B.C.A , e.g. the existence of the domain:

4.3.2.1.zen.spamhaus.org is used by my email server to decide not to accept email from a host with address 1.2.3.4 . Spamhaus maintain more than one context or reputation database. If the entity B is a domain instead of an IP address, its labels don't need to be reversed, because IPs are little endian while domains are big endian.

The context could just as easily be a whitelist.

The idea of storing contact details using the DNS isn't new as this was proposed for telephone numbers in RFC 2916: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2916.txt

Junior cock up or senior conspiracy ?

This appears to me that a decision was made by a police officer which should have been referred to and considered at a very much higher level than where I hope this decision was made. If this decision was made at an appropriately high level then it represents a direct and considered attack on the democratic process, and comparisons with Robert Mugabe's approach are relevant. If, as I hope, it was made at a more junior level, then the police officer who made this decision appears to have been clueless about how politics work in a democratic country.

As a Lib Dem I feel I can speak on this without anyone thinking I have an axe to grind in favour either of the Labour government or the Tory official opposition. This one is about the ability of Members of Parliament to be able to go about the job we elect them to do without interference by the government whom they are responsible for holding to account.

Very easily bypassed

Have the politicians who will be signing the big cheques never heard of servers hosted in other jurisdictions and VPNs ? Sure GCHQ might be able to do some traffic analysis on VPNs but even that could be defeated with a bit of chaff. Those they will be able to get useful data on will either be innocent and inappropriate targets of state surveillance or crooks and terrorists too technically incompetent or inadequately supported to do the above securely.

@Dr. Mouse

'Take the example of someone who has a terminal illness, and will last a couple of years at most in excruciating pain. Would that person be "by definition mentally ill" if they wanted to end their own life?'

Being in persistent and excruciating pain makes someone unable to make rational choices, regardless of whether or not they can be considered to be mentally capable in other respects.

And who is going to condemn such a person to 2 years in excruciating pain anyway ? I have heard representatives from the hospices movement, who do not kill people, and whose purpose in life is to care for those with terminal illnesses, who would consider your description of someone's prospects to represent gross mismanagement of the medical condition of the patient concerned. They are not in the business of condemning the terminally ill to years of excruciating pain. In such cases the purpose of ethical medical treatment is neither to maximise the duration of life, nor to support the cop-out of suicide through treatment which directly kills the patient, but to do the best they can for the quality of remaining life of the patient by helping them manage the pain.

The case being discussed above isn't that of someone who was terminally ill. This was a depressed teenager, who could presumably have been helped and treated, and whose life potential would have been seen as having value by anyone whose ethics are worthy of consideration.

Assisted suicide in connection with those with terminal illnesses is a separate debate, and personally I do not and never could support legalisation of this means of hastening the demise of the inconvenient, whatever claimed "safeguards" those who propose this might come up with.

@Paul M

Paul, the Swedish Pirate Party didn't need many votes to get other parties to adopt their policies.

simulations

Any kind of Monte Carlo simulation workload can be parrallelised. This is an evolutionary programming approach. Many design optimisations and game strategies can benefit from this kind of algorithm. A term used in this connection worth looking up is "simulated annealing". E.G. to layout the tracks on a PCB with thousands of interconnects and to place the PCB components in the optimal locations you want to be able to simulate the performance of the product for very many possible layouts and then focus on the better result regions where further narrower optimisations can be achieved. Think about the value of adding 2p to the value of something you make by the million and shaving 2p off the cost.

No joke

It's not a joke when a US friend of a relative loses his business, his home, and his voice over a bogus patent he can't afford to defend. He lost his voice because the imposed settlement was made cheaper for him (they could have put him into debt as well as taking what he had) by his signing a non disclosure agreement. The company that owned the patent had gone bust so the liquidators sued him for every dollar they could squeeze after checking what his house, car, business etc. were worth. The liquidators had a legal duty to obtain as much as they could from the bankrupt's assets and had no industry reputation to uphold in doing so. It is also impossible for a software business to insure against this kind of risk.

@Ken Hagan

Not totally sure DNSSEC was ready enough to be deployed technically 15 years ago by many people and some improvements have been made since then but not enough to make deployment at all easy. Another factor holding back deployment is the Esperanto problem. Great language, but too few people speak it to make it worth learning. The application that will probably need to go to DNSSEC first is probably money - banks are likely to adopt DNSSEC themselves and then force e-commerce sites to use it next because the losses from phishers routinely compromising ordinary DNS become too great.

Once enough ISPs support DNSSEC for their customers, your bank won't let you make on-line payments or do online banking from ISP connections that don't.

@Pascal Monett

"ISP contracts should include limits on email emmission"

Perhaps, for email emission going out through consumer ISP's own smart hosts, but how do the ISPs enforce the rest without scanning every customer packet and decrypting VPN traffic encrypted over their connections ? I host a number of active email lists for voluntary groups with around 1000 members in total (all subscribers fully confirmed opt ins), generating currently around 10,000 wanted message copies a week.

"Low count of like 10 per day is free, after that you get a fixed fee of 1 cent per mail."

So you are going to try to get my hosted server upstream ISP to charge me this on half a million or so wanted emails a year, and you imagine they will be able to keep my business ? Or you are going to get every ISP to do this all at the same time, despite the fact that they are competing with each other for customer business ? You have good intentions I'm sure, but you don't begin to know how to put them into practice do you ?

I suggest you check this article:

http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

It contains your plan to end spam alongside several dozen equally impractical and hair-brained schemes.

Fischer Tropsch process

The Fischer Tropsch process enables hydrogen generated through wind electricity and electrolysis to be combined with CO from burning biowaste and biomass in low oxygen to generate fully sustainable and storable hydrocarbon fuels usable in conventional engines and turbines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_Tropsch_synthesis

Another approach is to store compressed air directly in sealed old mine workings:

http://www.isepa.com/about_isep.asp

Or in undersea caissons or flexible bags:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage

blame game

So it's the people living near Heathrow who want to be able to sleep or think or concentrate at work who are to blame for global warming caused by air pollution. Silly me, I'd thought for years it was folk using air travel to go places.

There again, making the locals _really_ antagonistic by deliberately increasing noise to ear-splitting levels might just be the way to close an major airport down. Perhaps there is a method in this madness after all.

@Alan Fisher

1. God inspires many people in different ways. Many of these people incorrectly think they have the whole message, but because they hear and read different parts of it in different ways we end up with many different religions and denominations. As you say, this isn't a good reason to carry out evil actions. We may as well accept it as a fact of life.

2. People of all faiths are bad and do bad things and sometimes are good and do good things. This includes Christians, Buddists, Moslems, Hindus, Atheists (e.g. the crimes of Stalin) and Agnostics and those whose religion changes from day to day as the mood suits. Christians are no more collectively responsible for the actions of the inquisition or the crusades any more than atheists are collectively responsible for the crimes of Stalin. We are all individually responsible for our own individual choices. Institutions can also collectively repent for institutional wrongs done in the past by acknowledging these and by changing what the institution does now.

3. The Bible isn't either allegory or historical fact as it clearly contains both. I don't know anyone who considers the parables as other than allegory. We have to use our ability to read and understand the context in which different parts of the Bible were written to understand which is which. The Psalms are almost universally regarded as worship song lyrics for example.

4. As to why there can be such suffering and evil in a world created by a perfect God, we can't fully understand this, but we can deduce that it has something to do with free will and the fact we are all capable of doing bad things. Would you have preferred a God who created us as programmed robots instead of intelligent beings capable of making right and wrong moral choices ?

5. As to whether God cares, Christians believe he sent his Son to die in the struggle against evil fully as one of us. What more could God do, given we were made with free will, have choices and responsibility for our actions, and were not created as God-programmed robots ?

6. Whether God accepts us, as I see this, depends a lot more upon whether we accept Him, than whether we belong to the right group. Believe me, there are Christians who have, like me, had a personal encounter but can't let their family know who they now follow for fear of total rejection and exclusion or even murder by family and community. The term "Muslim" means one who submits to God. No doubt there are many who don't try to coerce family in this way and submit to God with as much love for all and respect for truth as He could expect of a Christian. An Atheist who places love, truth and timelessness above all other things is effectively placing the qualities of what Christians understand God to be in the highest place. Perhaps a kind of relationship may develop from this even though it is difficult for Christians to understand how. It is up to God to judge these things and it is foolish for anyone, Christian or otherwise, to say that salvation is reserved only for those in the "right" group when we all do wrong and persistently so.

I hope these answers address your very relevant questions, even if I can't pretend to give you complete answers - we all have to try to discover these as best we can for ourselves.

UK Computer Misuse act

I'd be really interested to hear if anyone who feels EA has carried out an unauthorised modification to their system is willing to complain to the police that an offence under this act has occurred. If one of EAs UK staff has to do jail time this would make others who imagine invasive DRM without informing the customer or obtaining their authorisation is a good idea think more carefully before ignoring our laws.

Let's get the facts straight

Followup is needed on this story. Did the judge warrant transfer through 1. the owner (ICANN) or 2. the controller (Verisign) of the top level domain or 3. through one of the various competing retail registrars (could be any of various e.g. Tucows), or as appears from the linked court order, or 4. use the legal shotgun approach at all such entities ? If as appears it was the latter, how did each registrar or specific entity receiving it respond to the order ? For domains with retail registrars with offices within Kentucky likely to accept jurisdiction of Kentucky law then the offshore gambling companies should have used a retail registrar based outside the US and only have themselves to blame. If ICANN or Verisign acted over the heads of the retail registrars e.g. based outside the US, rather than contested jurisdiction, then owners of all domains potentially affected by this need to know.

OK as a lead article to a longer running story but more background work is needed before we know what it means.

documentation not enough

Those enforcing such actions should also be requiring provision of test cases for all APIs affected by the anti-trust judgement including source code for a complete test suite available on non-discriminatory terms - i.e. fully published and available for reuse within proprietary and open-source software without affecting the license terms of the competing product. The offender should be able to demonstrate that a typical programmer with no previous exposure to it can operate this suite and be able understand how to reuse code within test cases within a reasonable period of access to it. The test suite should cover both sides of the API - so in the case of an operating system interface tests should cover software that provides and uses this API, e.g. a set of system calls.

I think it very unlikely that Microsoft or any other software vendor would be able to develop and maintain products likely to get into such an abusive monopoly position without having a system as described above for in house use in any case. If they don't they are wasting considerable development effort and the shareholders should be worried about this. It's not as if a system as complex as todays Windows could be maintained without such tools.

Perhaps MSDOS was, but the regulators need more up to date knowledge of how complex software is actually developed to be able to impose appropriate redress.

upside down

Clearly VMWare want to build an OS business out of the virtualisation niche they are in, so want to add all the features of an OS to their product. Probably not the way to go. What seems more likely is the OS developers adding less resource hungry virtualisation to their OS offerings - KVM as part of Linux as AC points out, or Solaris containers. Microsoft have something more similar to VMWare with their VirtualPC product, though they will probably be building stronger support for Windows on Windows more directly into their host OS products if they are not already doing so. I guess you'll probably still need a fuller virtualisation layer if the host and guest operating systems are different than if they are the same.

bad taste and poor judgement

As a Lib Dem member I'm pretty disgusted. I'd also be surprised if this was decided at a high level. If it was whoever authorised it isn't getting my vote in any future leadership/presidential/candidates election until they have apologised and made suitable amends, as this seems to me to demonstrate a lack of judgement and bad taste.

Most OS development is paid work

The great majority of software is developed for motives other than to sell packaged software. Unless it is intended to be sold as such, it generally makes sense to develop it within the context of an open source community. This improves the quality and cuts the costs of what the organisation requiring the development knows it needs and is willing to pay for anyway. Recent surveys of who contributes what to recent Linux kernel releases prove that most of those working on it are paid to do so. This doesn't take away the motivation for much valuable additional volunteer contribution, but generally the best developers of an open source product are its keenest users.

@Repo

"So it's going to cost $60m to $600m to provide internet access to people in Central Africa and the Middle East???"

Divided between 3 billion people living close enough to the equator that's a princely 2 to 20 cents per person.

"A large percentage of those do not have clean water, working hospitals, freedom of speech, respite from civil war and/or oppression (if not outright genocide), access to anti AIDS medication, food or job opportunities."

So how does denying them access to the Internet help them with any of these things?

"... or at least they would if the could afford to buy a PC .. which they wouldn't be able to use anyway not having any electricity ..."

The cost and electricity consumption of a usable net-connected computer based on Moore's law gets cheaper by the year. You probably wouldn't think so based on the idea that everyone who is yet to use a PC has to have the bloat and cost that goes with Vista forced down their throats. But it's not an idea I agree with.