Slashdot Mirror

Penurious Penguin writes "Privacy-oriented search-engine and Google-rival DuckDuckGo is contending possible anti-competitiveness on the part of Google. MIT graduate and founder of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg cites several examples; his company's disadvantages in the Android mobile OS; and browsers, which in Firefox requires only a single step to set DuckDuckGo as the default search — while doing so in Chrome requires five. Weinberg also questions the domain duck.com, which he offered to purchase before it was acquired by Google. His offer was declined and duck.com now directs to Google's homepage. Weinberg isn't the first to make similar claims; there was scroogle.org, which earlier this year, permanently shut down after repeated compatibility issues with Google's algorithms. Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, there certainly seems a growing market for people interested in privacy and objective searches — avoiding profiled search-results, a.k.a. 'filter bubbles.'"

Penurious Penguin writes "Privacy-oriented search-engine and Google-rival DuckDuckGo is contending possible anti-competitiveness on the part of Google. MIT graduate and founder of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg cites several examples; his company's disadvantages in the Android mobile OS; and browsers, which in Firefox requires only a single step to set DuckDuckGo as the default search — while doing so in Chrome requires five. Weinberg also questions the domain duck.com, which he offered to purchase before it was acquired by Google. His offer was declined and duck.com now directs to Google's homepage. Weinberg isn't the first to make similar claims; there was scroogle.org, which earlier this year, permanently shut down after repeated compatibility issues with Google's algorithms. Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, there certainly seems a growing market for people interested in privacy and objective searches — avoiding profiled search-results, a.k.a. 'filter bubbles.'"

hypnosec writes "ICANN is receiving more and more requests for new generic top level domains, and governments around the world are busy registering their complaints and objections with the proposed names. To date, more than 200 objections have been raised against proposed gTLDs, with Australia leading the pack with over 120 objections. Some of the other countries which are at the forefront of registering their objections include France, Germany and India. US and UK are near the bottom of the list. ICANN's "early warnings" about national objections to gTLDs serves as formal objections but it doesn't mean that these domains will never be signed off. There is always room for discussions and mediation that would allow prospective registrants to keep on pursuing their claims. Australia has objected to names such as '.baby,' '.app,' and '.beauty' among other. It has also objected to names such as '.sucks' and '.wtf,' stating that these names have 'an overtly negative or critical connotation.'"

New submitter zzats writes "The Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Jolla, started by ex-Nokia Meego engineers, is showing it's Linux-based Sailfish OS for the public for the first time today. The first keynote speech aired at 9:15 GMT, with an UI-focused presentation starting later, 15:00 GMT. In addition to using the OS on their own devices, Jolla is planning to license it to third party manufacturers. The company has previously stated their initial focus for creating an ecosystem is in the Chinese market." sfcrazy adds: "Jolla has signed a deal with Finland's 3rd largest mobile operator DNA to market the MeeGo based smartphones in the Finnish market."

Imagine that you are at 33 Flatbush Ave. in the Brooklyn borough of what David Letterman calls "the world's greatest city." You go to the 7th floor. Congratulations. You have found New York City's community biolab, Genspace. It's a well-equipped facility without a single mad scientist in sight. Indeed, everyone here seems as happy as the people you see in a makerspace -- which should not be surprising, since Genspace is essentially a makerspace for biologists. It is confined to non-hazardous experiments, but there is plenty going on, including ongoing projects and courses with titles like DIY Neuroscience: Controlling Behavior from the Inside. You can keep up with Genspace by following their blog. And of course, if you're in the neighborhood you should stop in. It's a welcoming environment, dedicated to the idea that science is for everyone, not just a chosen few.

Hugh Pickens writes "Sarah Tory reports that the debut of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense shield has added a new element to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza strip, one that military officials are calling a 'game-changer.' Israeli officials are claiming that the shield is destroying 90 percent of missiles and rockets it aims at that have been fired into southern Israel by Hamas. This level of success is unprecedented compared with older missile defense systems such as the American-made Patriot model used during the 1991 Gulf War. The missile-defense system can detect rocket launches and then determine the projectiles' flight paths and only intercepts rocket or artillery shells if they are headed for populated areas or sensitive targets; the others it allows to land. It takes a lot of raw computing power to rapidly build a ballistic profile of a fast-incoming projectile, make a series of quick decisions concerning potential lethality, and launch a countermeasure capable of intercepting said projectile in-flight. One reason Iron Dome is showing a much more robust capability than the Patriot system did is simply that its battle control hardware and software are several generations more advanced than those early interceptor systems. 'Israeli officials point out that Iron Dome saves money despite the fact that the interceptors cost up to $100,000 each,' writes Tory. 'The cost of rebuilding a neighborhood destroyed by a rocket attack — not to mention people wounded and lives lost — would be far greater than the cost of the interceptor.' Most important, the system buys Israel time, allowing it to plan out an appropriate response without the political pressure that would be generated by hundreds of potential deaths."

New submitter prpplague writes "After a three-year restoration project at The National Museum of Computing, the Harwell Dekatron (aka WITCH) computer will rebooted on 20 November 2012 to become the world's oldest original working digital computer. Now in its seventh decade and in its fifth home, the computer with its flashing lights and clattering printers and readers provides an awe-inspiring display for visiting school groups and the general public keen to learn about our rich computer heritage."

An anonymous reader writes with a quick bit from a press release about Intel's CEO retiring: "Intel Corporation today announced that the company's president and CEO, Paul Otellini, has decided to retire as an officer and director at the company's annual stockholders' meeting in May, starting an orderly leadership transition over the next six months. Otellini's decision to retire will bring to a close a remarkable career of nearly 40 years of continuous service to the company and its stockholders."

Bennett Haselton writes: "Online political futures betting is in a legal limbo in the United States. But with the lifting of legal sanctions, and with the addition of one simple new feature, online futures betting could not only provide more accurate forecasts of the merits of different candidates, but also provide a tool for quieting partisan blowhards who think the opposing party's candidate is going to drag the country to hell. Let the blowhards bet!" You'll find the rest of Bennett's story below.

Did you have a strongly felt prediction about the 2012 elections that went against the conventional wisdom? Then you could have placed a bet at the Iowa Electronic Markets website (with real money); yet most people don't know the website exists. Indeed, it's only able to exist at all because of an exemption from U.S. laws that make other political betting websites illegal. The Irish-based online political betting site Intrade doesn't even accept American customers (you can't wire money to them from a U.S. based account), and their late CEO reportedly told John Stossel he was afraid of being arrested if he set foot in the U.S.

That's too bad, because I think that legalized Web-based betting on political outcomes could serve two valuable purposes in American politics: to provide forecasts of the relative merits of living under either of two candidates, and to force partisan blowhards to seriously consider whether they actually mean what they say. But in order to make this happen, in addition to the government lifting any legal restrictions on the ability of such sites to operate, I think a valuable additional feature would be the ability to place "if-bets", betting on particular events (the level of unemployment, for example) if a particular candidate were elected.

In September I happened to stop by the King County Republicans booth at the Puyallup Fair, and asked one volunteer, just for the sake of argument, what he thought was the best case against re-electing President Obama. (I'm a liberal, but I spend more time reading conservative blogs and opinion pieces than liberal ones, partly just to see what pieces I might agree with.) He said flatly that if President Obama were re-elected, unemployment could rise as high as 20 percent, and listed some other dire figures.

Well, I didn't consider that an "argument", but I asked him, "Would you be willing to bet on it?" -- not proposing that we actually wager, but asking him to think seriously about whether he would be willing to wager, if it were an option. In other words, if Obama is re-elected, and employment rises to 20 percent some time in the next four years (or perhaps if average employment over 4 years is above some designated threshold), then I pay my new Republican friend $100. If Obama is re-elected and no such thing happens, then the Republican pays me $100. If Obama is not re-elected, then the whole wager is void. After I spelled this out, the volunteer got a thoughtful look -- as if he were thinking, for perhaps the first time, whether he really believed what he had been saying. (Of course I've probably made similarly ill-thought-out predictions about politicians that I disliked, where the offer of a wager would have made me stop and think harder about what I actually believed.)

It would be easy for Intrade and similar companies to support these kinds of conditional "if-bets". Then their website could list data on, for example, what the bettors currently think are the odds of unemployment reaching 20% (or 15%, or 25%) if Obama were re-elected, or if Romney were elected. Ideally there would be a different betting market for each percentage point -- and you could aggregate all the market odds for those percentages into one simple graph, with a bell curve showing what the market thinks are the odds of employment hitting 10%, 11%, 12%, etc. under either Obama or Romney.

The first benefit of such a system would be obvious: to the extent that betting markets are an accurate predictor of political outcomes, this would be an easy way to see what conventional wisdom projected for unemployment, inflation, infant morality rates, or any other statistic that Intrade accepted bets on, if either candidate were elected. As long as either candidate had a realistic chance of winning, the people wagering on the "if-bets" would have to take them seriously. (If one candidate had virtually no chance of winning, then the "if-bets" conditional on that candidate's victory might not show anything useful, since everyone expects the bets will be declared void. So it wouldn't work for evaluating the merits of a long-shot candidate like Jill Stein - who might have some good ideas, but the "if-bet" betting markets wouldn't be able to tell us that.)

The second benefit would be that whenever anyone claimed projections that departed radically from the market odds, you could simply ask them, "Why not go to Intrade and bet on it?" If a person really believed that their dire predictions were more likely than the market seemed to think, then they could wager accordingly. Even if they don't think their prediction is likely to come true, as long as they think an event is more likely than the market seems to think, they should still believe that they could make money in the long run by betting accordingly. (For example, if you think there's only a 1-in-3 chance that Romney will win, but the market says 1-in-5, you should bet that Romney will win, at the 4-to-1 odds offered by the market. If you bet on lots of separate events where you think the probability of event occurring is 1/3 but the market says 1/5, then if you're right and the probabilities really are about 1/3, you'll lose 2 out of 3 times, but every 3rd time you'll make back 5 times the amount of your wager, and come out ahead. Assuming that you really are smarter than the market, of course.)

There could be rules and safeguards to prevent abuses of the system (rules that could be imposed by U.S. law, even if they're not enforced by overseas betting markets), such as not allowing individuals to bet more than $500. (This is already enforced by the Iowa Electronic Markets.) That's small enough to stop individual bettors from trying to manipulate the market through enormous wagers (although they might find ways to do that anyway). It's also small enough that it wouldn't be worth it for any one individual to try and influence a political outcome just to win a bet. You could try to enlist your friends to help you place a collective $10,000 bet on a single outcome, but the more people you rope into your coalition, the greater the chances of someone (a) turning you in for violating the betting laws, or (b) taking the $500 you lent them, and then refusing to pay it back if they win their portion of the wager.

At the same time, the $500 limit is large enough that anyone who makes a bold claim about the future, could not plausibly claim that it's not worth their time to go over to Intrade and make a wager. (Well, billionaires could claim it's not worth their time. We could have a higher limit for higher-income individuals, but the problem is that for someone like Donald Trump, any betting limit large enough to get him to take the wager seriously, would also be large enough to allow him to manipulate the market. So we might just have to get by on ignoring Trump the old-fashioned way.)

However, even if Intrade implemented "if-bets", and even if futures betting were made unambiguously legal under U.S. law, we'd have to overcome a certain amount of cultural taboo against betting on politics, especially for members of certain professions. When Joe Scarborough called Nate Silver a "joke" for saying that Obama had a 75% chance of winning, Nate Silver gave exactly the right response: "Wanna bet?" (for charity). However, the New York Times Public Editor (an office that I've dealt with in the past) rebuked Nate Silver for offering the wager, although in a 600-word essay, the Public Editor wrote only one sentence saying why she thought it was a bad idea: because it "[gives] ammunition to the critics who want to paint Mr. Silver as a partisan who is trying to sway the outcome". This doesn't make much sense, since Nate Silver had already staked his reputation on the outcome, which was worth astronomically more to him than the $1,000 (so to the extent that he had any conflict of interest, it would have already been in place anyway). Still, for anyone in a profession that placed a high value on "perceived objectivity", they might be able to use that as an excuse for not placing a wager.

Even for the rest of us not in danger of finger-wagging from the Times Public Editor, I think there would be one big obstacle to using the markets to tell blowhards to "place your bets or shut up": people would come up with dumbass excuses not to do it. I can't even anticipate the kinds of excuses that people might make, because I think I just think too rationally (at least by my own definition), so I tend to anticipate semi-logical objections like, "I think Romney will win, so I don't want to support a system that says he will lose." To that I would say: If you think the market odds are wrong, you should place the bet anyway, and if you win, you'll be taking money from the people who bet that Romney would lose, not "supporting" them. And in fact by placing the bet, you will slightly increase the market-reported odds of Romney winning. So you'll be taking money from the people who bet against your guy, and shifting the reported odds in favor of a Romney victory, which ought to be a win-win. Even better, if you're sure he'll win, you'll have winnings afterward that you can donate to the Republican Party.

So while I don't think that's a valid objection, it at least has the form of a logical argument, which is what makes it possible to answer it. The excuses that I think people would actually give, would be along the lines of, "I don't do that." Well, if you want to support your candidate and you're confident in your predictions, why not? Or, "I think it's wrong to bet against the future of our country." Hey, if you place a bet that unemployment will go up under Obama, then that will be reported in the aggregate forecasts of what the market thinks will happen under the two candidates -- which will actually slightly increase the chance of a Romney win (which is presumably what you want), right? Besides, you realize that if you have life insurance on your spouse, you're "betting" every month that they will die? How much more ethical is that?

But for everyone else who wouldn't come up with excuses not to bet on the outcomes, I wonder, in what might be hopeful naivete, if the available of online political "if-betting" might bring our partisan extremes closer together. When my Republican counterpart and I were discussing the future of the nation under Obama or Romney, if we were forced to confront the possibility of betting on the result (not betting on who would win, but betting on what would happen if a particular candidate won), I think several things would have gone through my mind. First, I might realize that despite any stridently partisan statements I had made, I didn't really know with much confidence what would happen. Second, the humility of realizing that I would want to check the online prediction markets, because I think the rest of the world collectively has more wisdom on the matter than I do. And third, if the online prediction markets showed projected similar outcomes (for unemployment, for example) no matter who is elected, then we could calmly accept the fact that neither candidate is going to be able to perform miracles, but neither candidate is going to destroy the country either, so we can accept the fact that the country will probably do OK no matter who wins, and go have a beer.

Assuming, of course, the other guy felt the same way. I can get along fine with people who don't agree with me, but I don't think I'd get along with someone who didn't even want to seriously consider whether he really believed the things he was saying. However, if the various competing futures markets would implement "if-bets", and if the U.S. government would just give the OK to online futures betting generally, I'd be perfectly happy to take the guy's money.

Dupple writes with some remarks by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as reported by the BBC, on the Ariane 5 launch vehicle: Musk is anything but a disinterested party, but he has some especially harsh words for the ESA rocket: "'I don't say that with a sense of bravado but there's really no way for that vehicle to compete with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. If I were in the position of Ariane, I would really push for an Ariane 6.' Ariane's future will be a key topic this week for European Space Agency (Esa) member states. They are meeting in Naples to determine the scope and funding of the organisation's projects in the next few years, and the status of their big rocket will be central to those discussions."

An anonymous reader writes "Stanford researchers have developed a new algorithm (Abstract only) that significantly improves the control and performance of neural prosthetics — brain-controlled computer interfaces for individuals suffering from spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative disease to aid interaction with computers, drive electronic wheelchairs, and control robotic arms and legs. With this algorithm, monkeys implanted with multielectrode arrays in motor regions of their brain controlled a computer cursor more quickly and accurately than ever before, including navigation around obstacles. Further, the system maintained this high performance across 4 years, demonstrating long-term reliability. These improvements in performance and robustness are crucial for clinically-useful neural prosthetics, and pave the way for success in clinical trails."

An anonymous reader writes "Stanford researchers have developed a new algorithm (Abstract only) that significantly improves the control and performance of neural prosthetics — brain-controlled computer interfaces for individuals suffering from spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative disease to aid interaction with computers, drive electronic wheelchairs, and control robotic arms and legs. With this algorithm, monkeys implanted with multielectrode arrays in motor regions of their brain controlled a computer cursor more quickly and accurately than ever before, including navigation around obstacles. Further, the system maintained this high performance across 4 years, demonstrating long-term reliability. These improvements in performance and robustness are crucial for clinically-useful neural prosthetics, and pave the way for success in clinical trails."

An anonymous reader writes "Stanford researchers have developed a new algorithm (Abstract only) that significantly improves the control and performance of neural prosthetics — brain-controlled computer interfaces for individuals suffering from spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative disease to aid interaction with computers, drive electronic wheelchairs, and control robotic arms and legs. With this algorithm, monkeys implanted with multielectrode arrays in motor regions of their brain controlled a computer cursor more quickly and accurately than ever before, including navigation around obstacles. Further, the system maintained this high performance across 4 years, demonstrating long-term reliability. These improvements in performance and robustness are crucial for clinically-useful neural prosthetics, and pave the way for success in clinical trails."

cervesaebraciator writes "A 'Coffee Branding Workshop,' sponsored by the World Intellectual Property Organization, was held recently in Arusha City, at which the Director General of the Tanzania Coffee Board presented a paper titled 'Supporting the Coffee Sector with added Value Products Through Intellectual Property and Branding.' The paper encouraged the use of intellectual property claims, including trademarks, copyrights, patents, and designs, as sources of income which can be used to support agriculture in Africa. The Director General claimed that '[Intellectual property rights] are the basis for today's knowledge based economy and international competitiveness.' This is no doubt related to a broader effort to advance western style intellectual property in Africa through claims of the benefits it offers agriculture. Promoting western style intellectual property law as a means of third world development is a popular strategy for WIPO, the only branch of the UN to have significant wealth deriving from contributions independent of Member States. On a related note of interest to Slashdotters, there is a history of tension between WIPO advocates and FOSS advocates." I hope they take advantage of the marketing possibilities offered by civet-processed coffee.

cervesaebraciator writes "A 'Coffee Branding Workshop,' sponsored by the World Intellectual Property Organization, was held recently in Arusha City, at which the Director General of the Tanzania Coffee Board presented a paper titled 'Supporting the Coffee Sector with added Value Products Through Intellectual Property and Branding.' The paper encouraged the use of intellectual property claims, including trademarks, copyrights, patents, and designs, as sources of income which can be used to support agriculture in Africa. The Director General claimed that '[Intellectual property rights] are the basis for today's knowledge based economy and international competitiveness.' This is no doubt related to a broader effort to advance western style intellectual property in Africa through claims of the benefits it offers agriculture. Promoting western style intellectual property law as a means of third world development is a popular strategy for WIPO, the only branch of the UN to have significant wealth deriving from contributions independent of Member States. On a related note of interest to Slashdotters, there is a history of tension between WIPO advocates and FOSS advocates." I hope they take advantage of the marketing possibilities offered by civet-processed coffee.

Billly Gates writes "In a bizarre, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using WebKit stagnates open standards and innovation on the Web. According to the call to action in its Windows Phone Developer Blog, Microsoft is especially concerned about the mobile market, where many mobile sites only work with Android or iOS with WebKit-specific extensions. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which is being written as -WebKit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market WebKit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliance and not use the proprietary (yet open source) WebKit."

cervesaebraciator writes "Saturday an article was featured on Slashdot which expressed some hope, if just a fool's hope, that a recent Republican Study Committee Brief could be a sign of broader national discussion about the value of current copyright law. When one sees such progress, credit is deservedly given. Unfortunately, others in Washington did not perhaps see this as worthy of praise. The committee's executive director, Paul Teller, sent a memo today disavowing the earlier pro-copyright reform brief. From the memo: 'Yesterday you received a Policy Brief or [sic] copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand.' People who live in districts such as Ohio's 4th would do well to send letters of support to those who crafted the original brief. I cannot imagine party leadership will be happy with so radical a suggestion as granting copyright protection for the limited times needed to promote the progress of science and useful arts."

Zocalo writes "Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' attempt to reboot the Space Sim genre, hit a major funding milestone earlier today, exceeding the previous record of $4,163,208 secured by the game Project Eternity and more than doubling the initial funding target set by the producer of the Wing Commander series. With Stretch Goals now being passed every few hours bringing new features to the planned game, and David Braben announcing a new installment of the classic Elite using a similar funding model at Kickstarter could this be a wake-up call for the big game publishers to take another look at the genre? There are still two days left for Star Citizen funding as well, so if you feel like taking part, you can chip in either at the main RSI site or on Kickstarter."

cervesaebraciator writes "Regardless of how one feels about the GOP generally, it is always heartening to see current copyright and IP law questioned on a national stage. A Republican study committee, chaired by Ohio Representative Jim Jordan released a brief today titled Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it. Among other things, the brief attacks current copyright law as hampering scientific inquiry, penalizing journalism, and retarding the potential of the internet to allow the dispersion of knowledge through e-readers. In the briefs words, 'Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets – rather it destroys entire markets.' Four potential policy solutions are proposed: statutory damage reform, expansion of fair use, punishing false copyright claims, and limiting copyright terms. There may yet be hope for a national debate on the current oppressive copyright system, if just a fool's hope."

In October, Linus Torvalds expressed concerns that udev was making "...changes that were known to be problematic, and are pure and utter stupidity." Several Gentoo developers were also concerned about the removal of features and uncooperative nature of udev maintained by the systemd developers, so they've announced a fork: "After speaking with several other Gentoo developers that share Linus' concerns, I have decided to form a team to fork udev. Our plan is to eliminate the separate /usr requirement from our fork, among other things. We will announce the project later this week." The project name (for now) is udev-ng, and you can grab the code from Github. Update: 11/16 21:29 GMT by U L : One of the developers commented that this isn't yet an official Gentoo project (but hopefully it will be!). There's also an informative flamewar about the fork on debian-devel.

RenderSeven writes "In a press release issued today, baker Hostess Brands asked a bankruptcy court for permission to close all of its plants and sell off their assets, immediately laying off 18,500 workers. Citing high labor and rising health care costs, increasing competition and growing consumer awareness of healthy foods, Hostess says it can no longer operate without union concessions. A crippling strike has already shut down operations at all facilities, and while the Teamsters Union has ratified a new contract to keep Hostess in business, the Bakers Union has refused saying they would rather see the company closed than accept pension cuts. The Teamsters union is urging the bakers union to hold a secret ballot on whether to continue striking; citing its financial experts who had access to the company's books, the Teamsters say that Hostess' warning of liquidation is 'not an empty threat or a negotiating tactic' but a certain outcome if workers keep striking. If your late-night programming is fueled by Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Zingers, better stock up now." [Editor's note: A whole bunch of users submitted this news. I worry about our readership's cholesterol levels.]

Kethinov writes "My Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren, a prominent opponent of the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act, has introduced two bills to the U.S. House of Representatives designed to protect the free and open internet, expand the protections of the Fourth Amendment to digital communications, and protect against the introduction of any further SOPA-like bills. Since these are issues Slashdotters care deeply about, I wanted to open up the bills for discussion on Slashdot. The bills are: ECPA 2.0 and the Global Free Internet Act. Is my Congresswoman doing a good job? Is there room for improvement in the language of the bills? If you're as excited by her work as I am, please reach out to your representatives as well and ask them to work with Rep. Lofgren. It will take a big coalition to beat the pro-RIAA/MPAA establishment politics on internet regulation."

Kethinov writes "My Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren, a prominent opponent of the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act, has introduced two bills to the U.S. House of Representatives designed to protect the free and open internet, expand the protections of the Fourth Amendment to digital communications, and protect against the introduction of any further SOPA-like bills. Since these are issues Slashdotters care deeply about, I wanted to open up the bills for discussion on Slashdot. The bills are: ECPA 2.0 and the Global Free Internet Act. Is my Congresswoman doing a good job? Is there room for improvement in the language of the bills? If you're as excited by her work as I am, please reach out to your representatives as well and ask them to work with Rep. Lofgren. It will take a big coalition to beat the pro-RIAA/MPAA establishment politics on internet regulation."

the_newsbeagle writes "Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish, which lived in the brain and could translate any language in the universe, was so incredibly useful that it simultaneously proved and disproved the existence of God. This real-time translation app for mobile phones, offered by the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo, isn't going to freak out theologians any time soon. The company admits it has lots of work to do to improve translation accuracy, and it can currently only translate between Japanese and three languages: English, Korean, and Mandarin. But by allowing phone calls to pierce the language barrier, we just might have taken a step toward the universe that Adams envisioned: one where open communication between people of different cultures leads to an onslaught of terrible bloody warfare."

c0lo writes "'Severely brain-injured Scott Routley hasn't spoken in 12 years. None of his physical assessments since then have shown any sign of awareness, or ability to communicate, thus being diagnosed as vegetative (vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world).' Scott Routley was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine. British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Owen said Mr Routley was clearly not vegetative. 'Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is.' As a consequence, medical textbooks would need to be updated to include Prof Owen's techniques, because only observational assessments (as opposed to using mind-readers) of Mr. Routley have continued to suggest he is vegetative. Functional MRI machines are expensive (up to $2 million), but it's quite possible that a portable high-end EEG machine, costing about $75,000, can be used at a patient's bedside. Phillip K. Dick's world is one step closer."

Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that U.S. airlines are facing their most serious pilot shortage since the 1960s. Federal mandates are taking effect that will require all newly hired pilots to have at least 1,500 hours of prior flight experience — six times the current minimum. This raises the cost and time to train new fliers in an era when pay cuts and more-demanding schedules already have made the profession less attractive. Meanwhile, thousands of senior pilots at major airlines soon will start hitting the mandatory retirement age of 65. 'We are about four years from a solution, but we are only about six months away from a problem,' says Bob Reding, recently retired executive vice president of operations at AMR Corp. A study by the University of North Dakota's aviation department indicates major airlines will need to hire 60,000 pilots by 2025 to replace departures and cover expansion over the next eight years. Meanwhile, only 36,000 pilots have passed the Air Transport Pilot exam in the past eight years, which all pilots would have to pass under the Congressionally imposed rules, and there are limits to the ability of airlines, especially the regional carriers, to attract more pilots by raising wages. While the industry's health has improved in recent years, many carriers still operate on thin profit margins, with the airlines sandwiched between rising costs for fuel and unsteady demand from price-sensitive consumers. 'It certainly will result in challenges to maintain quality,' says John Marshall, an independent aviation-safety consultant who spent 26 years in the Air Force before overseeing Delta's safety. 'Regional carriers will be creative and have to take shortcuts' to fill their cockpits."

Artefacto writes "The Ksplice team has made available a git repository with the changes Red Hat made to the kernel broken down. They are calling this project RedPatch. This comes in response to a policy change Red Hat had implemented in early 2011, with the goal of undercutting Oracle and other vendors' strategy of poaching Red Hat's customers. The Ksplice team says they've been working on these individual patches since then. They claim to be now making it public because they 'feel everyone in the Linux community can benefit from the work.' 'For Ksplice, we build individual updates for each change and rely on source patches that are broken-out, not a giant tarball. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to take the right patches to create individual updates for each fix, and to skip over the noise — like a change that speeds up bootup — which is unnecessary for an already-running system.'"

eldavojohn writes "Professor Gerald "Jerry" Crabtree of Stanford's Crabtree Laboratory published a paper (PDF) that has appeared in two parts in Trends in Genetics. The paper opens with a very controversial suggestion: 'I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.' From there, Crabtree speculates we're on the decline of human intelligence and we have been for at least a couple millennia. His argument suggests agriculture and, following from that, cities, have allowed us to break free of some environmental forces on competitive genetic mutations — a la Mike Judge's theory. However, the conclusion of the paper urges humans to keep calm and carry on, as any attempt to fix this genetic trend would almost certainly be futile and disturbing."

According to a story at Northwest Public Radio, the state of Virginia's board of education has decided to institute different passing scores for standardized tests, based on the racial and cultural background of the students taking the test. Apparently the state has chosen to divide its student population into broad categories of black, white, Hispanic, and Asian — which takes painting with a rather broad brush, to put it mildly. From the article (there's an audio version linked as well): "As part of Virginia's waiver to opt out of mandates set out in the No Child Left Behind law, the state has created a controversial new set of education goals that are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities. ... Here's what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities." (If officially determined group membership determines passing scores, why stop there?) Florida passed a similar measure last month.

According to a story at Northwest Public Radio, the state of Virginia's board of education has decided to institute different passing scores for standardized tests, based on the racial and cultural background of the students taking the test. Apparently the state has chosen to divide its student population into broad categories of black, white, Hispanic, and Asian — which takes painting with a rather broad brush, to put it mildly. From the article (there's an audio version linked as well): "As part of Virginia's waiver to opt out of mandates set out in the No Child Left Behind law, the state has created a controversial new set of education goals that are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities. ... Here's what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities." (If officially determined group membership determines passing scores, why stop there?) Florida passed a similar measure last month.

YokimaSun writes "This may be one of those projects that will get trounced on soon enough like the great Bleemcast Project, but a group of developers calling themselves the PPSSPP Project have released the first PSP Emulator for the Android OS, the emulator lets you play PSP Games with a touchscreen which was something PSP owners had wanted for years. At the moment games that are playable are Puzzle Bobble Deluxe, Puyo Pop Fever & Pinball Fantasies. The emulator has also been released for Windows and BlackBerry."

cstacy writes "The Inamori Foundation has awarded the Kyoto Prize to graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland, for developing Sketchpad in 1963. The award recognizes significant technical, scientific and artistic contributions to the 'betterment of mankind, and honors Sutherland him for nearly 50 years of demonstrating that computer graphics could be used "for both technical and artistic purposes.'"

cstacy writes "The Inamori Foundation has awarded the Kyoto Prize to graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland, for developing Sketchpad in 1963. The award recognizes significant technical, scientific and artistic contributions to the 'betterment of mankind, and honors Sutherland him for nearly 50 years of demonstrating that computer graphics could be used "for both technical and artistic purposes.'"

New submitter Joiseybill writes "Now that the election is over, any voters that may have been influenced can rest easy. Space.com reports that the agency has been 'thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon's far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025.' Space policy expert John Logsdon said, 'NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan. They've been holding off announcing that until after the election.' According to the article, 'Rumors currently point toward parking a spacecraft at the Earth-moon L2 gateway, so NASA (and perhaps international partners) can learn more about supporting humans in deep space. Astronauts stationed there could also aid in lunar exploration — by teleoperating rovers on the moon's surface, for example.'"

"Reverberation is the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound is produced," says Wikipedia. More often than not, in studio recordings reverb is added digitally; virtually every FOSS or proprietary sound-editing program has a built-in reverb utility. But what if you're the sort of purist who prefers the analog sound of vinyl records to the digital sound of MP3s or CDs? What if you're the kind of musician who records at the original Sun Studio in Memphis to get that original rock and roll sound? That may be overly picky for most musicians, but there are some who would rather sound like Johnny Cash than Flavor Flav, and they're the ones who are going to insist on real analog reverb instead of twiddling a setting in Audacity. There are many types of analog reverbs, of course. One of the purest types, preferred by many audio purists, is the adjustable plate reverb, and Jim Cunnigham's Ecoplate is considered by many to be the best plate reverb ever -- which brings us to Mike Storey, who wanted an Ecoplate-type plate reverb so badly that he spent eight months building one. He'll run your audio files through it for a (highly negotiable) fee, and maybe give you a bit of advice if you want to build your own, although his biggest piece of advice for you (at the end of the video) to think long and hard before you become a home-brew reverberator, with or without advice and components from Jim Cunningham.

"Reverberation is the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound is produced," says Wikipedia. More often than not, in studio recordings reverb is added digitally; virtually every FOSS or proprietary sound-editing program has a built-in reverb utility. But what if you're the sort of purist who prefers the analog sound of vinyl records to the digital sound of MP3s or CDs? What if you're the kind of musician who records at the original Sun Studio in Memphis to get that original rock and roll sound? That may be overly picky for most musicians, but there are some who would rather sound like Johnny Cash than Flavor Flav, and they're the ones who are going to insist on real analog reverb instead of twiddling a setting in Audacity. There are many types of analog reverbs, of course. One of the purest types, preferred by many audio purists, is the adjustable plate reverb, and Jim Cunnigham's Ecoplate is considered by many to be the best plate reverb ever -- which brings us to Mike Storey, who wanted an Ecoplate-type plate reverb so badly that he spent eight months building one. He'll run your audio files through it for a (highly negotiable) fee, and maybe give you a bit of advice if you want to build your own, although his biggest piece of advice for you (at the end of the video) to think long and hard before you become a home-brew reverberator, with or without advice and components from Jim Cunningham.

RenderSeven writes "As previously reported the immensely popular Buckyballs office toys have been targeted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Last week Maxfield and Oberton, the maker of Buckyballs gave up the battle and announced they would discontinue sales and close. However, being driven out of business is not enough for R Buckminster Fuller's estate, who has filed yet another lawsuit that they own all rights to the name "buckyballs" despite widespread use of the term. If you still haven't bought your own yet, a few thousand sets in stock are still available."

Hugh Pickens writes "Alexander George writes about a new app that takes the data from a smartphone's accelerometers, GPS, and inclinometer to plot information for braking force, lean angles, speed, and on-track location onto Google Maps to shave precious milliseconds off each lap time in motorcycle races. Race Sense is designed to be a useful tool for someone who races for a living and a very fun toy for those who just like to brag about what lean angle they got at their ride day, and what top speed they reached down the main straight. Australian Grand Prix motorcycle road racer Anthony West provided much of the R&D that went into tweaking the app. 'With sponsorship's so hard to find and I need another way to survive. I spent some of my own money developing it with an Italian guy who also likes to ride himself, and who writes programs,' says West who designed Race Sense to fulfill the needs of a genuine MotoGP racer. 'Sometimes it's one second [separating] 20 people. If you adjust one little thing thinking about something in one corner you can lose four places.'"

pigrabbitbear writes "There's a reason why Elon Musk is being called the next Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, he's a visionary, a super successful serial entrepreneur, having made his initial fortune with a company he sold to Compaq before starting Paypal. Like Jobs, he saved his beloved baby Tesla Motors from the brink of oblivion. Like Jobs, [he has] a knack for paradigm-shifting industry disruption. Which means he's also demanding. 'Like Jobs, Elon does not tolerate C or D players,' SpaceX board member and early Tesla investor Steve Jurvetson told BusinessWeek. But while Jobs was slinging multi-colored music players and touchable smartphones, Musk is building rocket ships and electric-powered supercars. It's why his friends describe him as not just Steve Jobs but also John D. Rockefeller and Howard Hughes all wrapped in one. His friend Jon Favreau used Musk as the real-life inspiration for the big screen version of Tony Stark. Elon Musk is a badass."

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC report that David Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite, the classic space trading game that he co-wrote in the 1980s. It has already received £122,000 in less than a day."

Hugh Pickens writes "PBS reports on a proposal of arming Syrian rebels with a force equalizer to make a decisive blow against Bashar al-Assad's ruling regime — an idea that has so far failed to take hold inside the Obama administration because of serious concerns about flooding a troubled region with dangerous weapons that someday might fall into the wrong hands. Could sophisticated weapons, such as anti-aircraft missile systems, be outfitted with mechanisms that would disable them if they fell into the wrong hands? According to military analyst Anthony Cordesman the U.S. could modify Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons with batteries that cease functioning in a few weeks or months or the weapons could be built to require authentication codes before they are enabled to work. "I think it would be relatively decisive," says Cordesman. ... Another idea is to install GPS-disabling devices so that Stinger missiles only worked in a designated geographic area, such as only in Syria. Such weapons, it is believed, might tip the balance in favor of the rebels in the same way that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, provided by the United States to the Afghan Mujahedeen, helped expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Cordesman stressed that this type of weapon would have to be thoroughly tested to make sure the controls work and could not be undone. 'You could not transfer these types of weapons without these types of protections. You simply have no way to know where they would end up, how they would be transferred, what would happen to them.'"

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Side-channel attacks against cryptography keys have, until now, been limited to physical machines. Researchers have long made accurate determinations about crypto keys by studying anything from variations in power consumption to measuring how long it takes for a computation to complete. A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina, University of Wisconsin, and RSA Security has ramped up the stakes, having proved in controlled conditions (PDF) that it's possible to steal a crypto key from a virtual machine. The implications for sensitive transactions carried out on public cloud infrastructures could be severe should an attacker land his malicious virtual machine on the same physical host as the victim. Research has already been conducted on how to map a cloud infrastructure and identify where a target virtual machine is likely to be."

Phil Shapiro isn't famous, but he's a pretty good writer whose work appears regularly at opensource.com. He makes his living as the tech support person (he calls it "public nerd") at the Takoma Park Maryland Library. He has also -- see the link to his bio page above -- lived in New Delhi, India; Copenhagen, Denmark; Paris, France; and Scarsdale, New York. He got started with Linux as a "social justice" thing; because Linux and FOSS helped make it possible for people of modest means (we used to just call them "poor") to learn about computers and get on the Internet. He's still a big "computer for the masses" advocate and computer rehab volunteer. What's especially interesting about this interview (which is slightly out of sound/visual synch; you may prefer reading the transcript) is the amount of credit Phil gives Slashdot for spurring him on and getting him excited about FOSS. He also sees Slashdot as instrumental in helping start the Maker subculture. Do you agree? If so, should influencing the future of technology be Slashdot's main mission? Also: If so, how do you suggest we do it? And more specifically, do you know any other non-famous Slashdot readers (or people in general) we should talk to because they are doing interesting things?

A while ago you had the chance to ask Bruce Perens about how open source has changed in the past 15 years, what's happening now, and what's to come. Bruce has been busy traveling, but he's found some free time and sent in his answers. Read below to see what he has to say. Where Is the Open Source Hardware?
by eldavojohn

Recently at Linux.conf.au 2012 you gave the keynote and you said: “Open source is the only credible producer of software and now hardware that isn’t bound to a single company’s economic interest,” Well, where is this open source hardware? Every time something comes up on Slashdot reported to be "open source hardware" there's a whole slew of comments about how it's not truly open source. Anything from "where are the schematics" all the way down to the verilog/VHDL compilers and place/route algorithms being closed source. I've seen a 3D printer but not much else that meets the most stringent requirements. So tell me, where is this seemingly mythical "open source hardware" that will now free me from a single company's economic interest?

Bruce: Actually, I didn't give a talk about “Open Source Hardware”. All of my speeches are about “Open Hardware” , and I say it that way for marketing reasons. One of my largest criticisms of the entire Free Software community is that we are “inward-facing”. Our communications are mostly targeted to each other rather than to the public we should be marketing to. And then we wonder why the general public aren't using our stuff, and why laws get passed that work against us. It's our own fault.

So, “Open Source Hardware” is marketed to people who already understand Open Source. That's limiting the audience. I try to do real marketing, take time to understand the person who is the target of the message, and I always try to be outward-facing. I joke that the inward-facing crowd might soon call it “Free/Libre Open Source Hardware” or FLOSHW. Ugh.

So, the problem we are having in getting Open Hardware that's really Open is actually diagnosed right in your question: we need it to be separate from any company's economic interest. Which means making it with a non-profit. The very best organization that I've seen for making Open Hardware is TAPR, which specializes in ham radio and ultra-precise frequency and time. Their most interesting current project is a complete software-defined radio transceiver for global-range communications.

TAPR does manufacturing runs successfully, and funds new designs, and have been doing this for decades although only more recently is it formally “Open Hardware”. TAPR decided at their annual meeting this year that they will use their TAPR Open Hardware License on the devices they fund – they previously had a non-commercial license option which is now deprecated.

So, I'd suggest TAPR as a model for organizations that would successfully produce Open Hardware. TAPR, however, caters to a specialist community. Can we do the same thing with a product meant to reach the general public?

Jumping to radio software for a moment, check out the Codec2 project, where we have an excellent codec for two-way radio that does telephone quality voice in 150 bytes per second (1200 Baud). We are replacing the proprietary codecs that, unfortunately, are in commercial products for radio hams and are the government-mandated standard for two-way radio for police, fire, etc.

In about a century of ham radio, this closed codec was the first time that we had a technology that we weren't allowed to understand and to build by ourselves. That had to change, and I'm glad to say we're successful. The first prototype of Free Software for international digital voice communications is working, I think we're close to getting it in the hands of the world's hams. It works with their their SSB radios, but uses half the bandwidth of SSB voice, with better quality and better range.

To put Codec2 in walkie talkies, I am obviously looking at Open Hardware. But I won't talk about that until I have working hardware to show.



Best Open Source hardware licenses?
by Alwin Henseler

On a related note: what are the best licenses for libre hardware designs, that:
1.) Allow linking smaller projects as part of larger ones, possibly with different licensing on those other parts. Think HDL re-implementations of various chips in FPGA based designs that consist of a number of them (and many other things like that). I've seen the GPL slapped on a few smaller projects that are meant to combine with other (differently licensed) parts, where in legal sense this wouldn't even be allowed as everything is linked in the same binary (FPGA programming file).
2.) Don't require an entire evening and/or a lawyer to read (especially for hobbyists). For this reason I personally like BSD style licenses, while at the same time I'm leaning towards (L)GPL when it comes to openness of a design. Appreciated would be a short intro on pro's/con's of specific licenses, and make / break issues why a hardware designer would pick one over the other.

Bruce: Hi Alwin,

You've touched on a few issues that I think we got wrong with Open Source, and that I hope we can do better with Open Hardware.

The first is that there are a ton of licenses, and that too many of us spend time figuring out how they interact. Imagine if all of the recommended licenses actually were compatible with each other, and there were so few that we could understand them all. You really can have that, and have a BSD-like license, a LGPL-like license, and a GPL-like license, each to address a different business requirement. About three licenses that work together would be optimal. I think I know which three would do it today, and am hoping to have the full recommendation out soon.

Now, the bad news. Copyright doesn't really work for schematics the way it works for programs. If you look at the law in the U.S., which is 17 USC 102(b), it's pretty clear:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

So, functional stuff is the domain of patent rather than copyright. I have had this online for a year or so at Hardware Isn't Generally Copyrightable in the hope that the community's expectations will be corrected.

Having read that, you might wonder why software is copyrightable at all. It turns out that only the expressive elements in software, which (in short) are parts that would be written differently by different programmers, rather than parts that are always required to function, are copyrightable. This was important in the recent Oracle v. Google case (where I played a minor role) and you can understand it better by reading about Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, on Wikipedia.

So, our licenses tend to govern how we can distribute the plans to Open Hardware more than the hardware itself. For example, around 2007 a team applied the GPL to the Gray-Hoverman antenna, which was covered on Slashdot. While a lot of people felt that the GPL would prevent commercial manufacturing of the antenna, I think that anyone can manufacture and sell it as long as they don't redistribute the plans with it. So, our licenses are imperfect for hardware.

That said, let's concentrate on the parts of hardware that are copyrightable and apply licenses to them. There is some special protection for FPGA bitstreams in law, so we do have some copyrightable elements. At the moment, I recommend the TAPR Open Hardware License as a GPL-like license. There is also an Apache-like hardware license that I am considering.

There is a CERN Open Hardware License that I would like to use as a LGPL-like license, but I feel it needs modification before it is safe for the community to use, and thus I either recommend you not use it at present, or that you remove the following paragraph from it.

“6.5 Except as may be otherwise agreed with the Intergovernmental Organization, any dispute with respect to this License involving an Intergovernmental Organization shall, by virtue of the latter's Intergovernmental status, be settled by international arbitration. The arbitration proceedings shall be held at the place where the Intergovernmental Organization has its seat. The arbitral award shall be final and binding upon the parties, who hereby expressly agree to renounce any form of appeal or revision.”

As you can see, that paragraph creates a specially-protected class of users, organizations like CERN, who have their own special court where you, the creator of the design, would be at a severe disadvantage and would have to spend a ton of money just to get there and enforce your rights. No other Open Source license gives special rights to a particular class of users against the developers! This license doesn't comply with the Open Source Definition or the Open Hardware Definition as long as that particular paragraph is in place.

Nothing but that particular paragraph is a problem. If CERN removed it, the license would be acceptable.



Changes in licensing of open source projects
by TWX

At one point, my employer was considering open source software for a particular printing need. During their evaluation phase the producer of the software decided to close the source, and my employer got nervous and decided to back out of using the software. I assume that any version released under GPL is still perfectly valid to use even if later versions are no longer GPL, and that should anyone, be they my employer or anyone else, decide to fork the project from that last GPL-licensed release, they'd be free to do so, and that my employer's decision to no longer use the software was unnecessary. I expect that I'm not the first person to see this occur with a company getting cold feet because of a license change. Have you been involved in this before, and how have other organizations handled it when software they were using stopped being open source or changed licenses in newer releases?

Bruce: There are all sorts of perception problems in business. One of the most disturbing was when a major international bank told me that Linux was no longer gratis (free of charge) because Red Hat was charging per system. They somehow felt that they didn't have an option but to pay Red Hat.

And then there are the companies who feel that they are helping the community by paying for Red Hat or by joining the Linux Foundation. If you want to help Linux or Open Source, help a free software project directly. Red Hat exists for Red Hat's stockholders, and while the Linux Foundation is sometimes helpful, it represents large companies rather than the developer community, and only a fraction of its budget pays actual programmers.

Regarding the problem your company had, I've noticed that sometimes it's when a company decides to close source that the project really gets opened. LibreOffice is an excellent example. It is everything that OpenOffice should have been and never was allowed to be – and not because OpenOffice closed, but because there was a lack of trust that existed for a decade but finally became intolerable with the Oracle purchase. We really should have forked the project away from Sun years earlier.

Interestingly enough, the Oracle-and-IBM-supported “Apache OpenOffice” doesn't have the traction that LibreOffice has, and doesn't look like it's going to get it. There's enough strength in a real community to easily beat one with corporate support.

Yes, the GPL protects your rights forever. It doesn't terminate and it really doesn't matter if someone decides to close their source or not, the GPL code you have is always free. But your company might have had a problem if no viable fork of the project formed. Going it alone might have been no fun.



What has changed since 2001?
by i.r.id10t

Bruce - your interviews make up a large portion of the documentary "Revolution OS". If a second part were to be made starting now in 2012 or early 2013, what changes do you think would be highlighted?

Bruce: It's unfortunate that J.T.S. Moore's Revolution OS is as much the story of VA Linux Systems as it is about Open Source.

So, let's tell the story after the movie ends: people had no problem buying Linux hardware from HP and Dell, even though it wasn't their specialty. VA's sales didn't sustain its stock price, and the few people who had really large amounts of stock kept selling while the stock value fell, and fell, and fell. One or two folks became very rich while most lost. In the end the company was split up mostly for its web assets (including Slashdot), which have been no great performers.

So, in retrospect I think J.T.S. could have stuck to the community side and the film wouldn't be quite so dated today. But I don't know if VA was supporting the film then, and if that's the reason he made it partly about them.

I have a whole lot more hair in that film than I do now :-)



UserLinux vs. Android
by jbolden

Bruce, you were the founder of UserLinux which aimed to create binary compatibility for Linux, a simple VAR platform. Google with Android attempted something similar. How well do you believe Android fulfills the objectives you set out for UserLinux. And where they missed do you believe those misses were unavoidable given the changes in focus (desktop vs. handset) or something where a minor change of strategy could allow them to achieve those missed objectives?

Tablets/Phones
by zoward

Bruce, first off, thank you for everything you've done to advance the cause of FLOSS. My question: It's not hard to notice the shift in mass market computing away from the PC and toward the tablet and phone. While at its core Android runs the Linux kernel, it's hard for me to think of it with the same fondness that I have for my favorite FLOSS OS distributions. I can't just load up a new Linux distro on my Acer tablet, or in many cases even an updated version of Android, short of "jailbreaking" it. It's seems clear to me that such hardware is designed with the intent to replicate Apple's success with a vertical hardware/software stack. Given this (or perhaps not given this, if you disagree with my statements above), what do you think the future of open source will be in the tablet and phone world? Android? Meego? WebOS? Something else? Will it be open source programs in a not-quite-completely open OS like Android?

Bruce: If you just stand in an Apple store some time, you will notice the crowd of happy, enthusiastic people who are joyfully binding themselves to Apple's way of doing things. Those folks sincerely believe that their new tools give them freedom, too. The freedom to do things that would be more difficult or impossible otherwise. Similarly, one must acknowledge that the Kindle gives people freedom from those awkward stacks of paper at the same time we acknowledge the existing and potential abuses of the device.

The fact that normal folks are going with iPad and Kindle or a locked-down Android should not be lost on Free Software developers. We aren't meeting the needs of these folks well enough to even be given the chance to teach them about their electronic freedom. We must change, it makes zero sense to expect them to do so for us until we do.

I am conflicted about Android for the same reasons as user “zoward”, and I do have a strategic direction as requested by “jbolden” but it is not a minor one. I want to change the mission of our entire community to be more outward-facing and to have more sympathy for the common person rather than, as we do today, to make our software mostly for our own community to use. One reason that Android is successful is that we weren't making any alternative and never started any organization that could have gotten phones on carriers. Even Hildon/Maemo/Meego was mainly a Nokia-driven effort rather than a community one. Now, I think the Mozilla project might be able to do that with its feature-phone platform, we'll see.

On the one hand, you might say that Android is the fulfillment of getting Linux in the hands of real users. It's the Linux Desktop that never was, at least never was in the hands of normal people in any large number. I think that there are more Android phones activated daily than there are Ubuntu users.

On the other hand, the usual Android device brings users none of the benefits of Free Software. It's locked down, and unless you are lucky enough to be a target of the latest release of CyanogenMod, your device is probably stuck with the Android version is comes with forever. The rooting community for these devices are more like script kiddies than the Free Software developers I know. With a few exceptions there is nothing like real release management among them, and one has to search through boards for the latest software version for a phone. Some manufacturer's devices are pitifully easy to brick to the point that you need JTAG to recover, although if you build the device the way Google wants you to, that's less of a problem. Samsung, for one, doesn't do things in Google's way for no reason that I understand.

I bought an Android tablet from one of the few companies that respects your freedom. The hardware, though, is rather lacking for the price. Maybe they'll be able to catch up.

I don't really see any Android community that has succeeded in bringing freedom to a significant number of users. I am hoping that the Mozilla foundation will do better with their feature-phone platform.

I think there is room for more community work on making our systems, including GNOME and KDE, attractive to non-geeks and getting together a platform that really does give freedom to non-hackers in significant numbers. Right now, our tablet-oriented interfaces are mostly intolerable on the desktop, but I'm sure they'll improve.

This is part of being outward-facing. If we are not making products for people outside of our community, we're really just playing with ourselves. That's strong, but the mission – of having a real platform with freedom and real people using it – is super-important.



Favorite hack
by vlm

Kick back and tell the tale of your favorite hack. For example, Linus had a good one in his interview. You define hack, and favorite. Hardware, software, legal, moral, ethical, financial whatever. Something you did, or something you saw someone else do. As long as its your story. The only requirement of the story is that it be a good story.

Bruce: My favorite hack is a social one. One day, right here on Slashdot, I announced “Open Source” to the world. We were standing on the shoulders of Richard Stallman, but Richard was poorly suited to empathize with normal people - rather than us hackers – and thus evangelize to them. A policy document that I had created for the Debian project 8 months earlier became the manifesto of the Open Source movement and the definition of Open Source licensing, and has remained that way to this day.

I was just another programmer, out of millions of programmers, sending out a manifesto on the then baby Internet. Six months after the announcement of Open Source there was a Microsoft press conference in which Craig Mundie was asked by a reporter if Microsoft would Open Source Windows NT. Mundie answered that Open Source wasn't just source code, that it was about licensing intellectual property in ways that conflicted with Microsoft's model. Mundie had read my manifesto and was explaining it to the press. That's my favorite hack.

While revolutions eat their leaders, I seem to have survived. As has Richard.



What's out of scope?
by Lev13than

Almost anything you can do or use today has an open source option. You have open source options for everything from your operating system [linux.org] to your chat app [blueimp.net]. You can read open source textbooks, cookbooks [wikibooks.org] and encyclopedias [wikipedia.org]. You can even build an open source airplane [makerplane.org] or brew your own free beer [freebeer.org] (free beer as in free speech, not free beer as in free beer). Given all these options, what part(s) of your life would you be unwilling to open source? Your children's education? Vaccines? A pacemaker? If so, what would your test be for deciding that a closed-source option is the only choice?

Bruce: I defer to Karen Sandler on the topic of pacemakers. If you haven't read her story, do so.

A lot of the life-and-property-critical things you mention would be better if the world could look over the shoulder of their developers the way we do with Open Source developers. Devices aren't safe until they're disclosed and safe. What we've found about medical devices is that their code standards are often horribly low and that they still are based on the idea of security-by-obscurity rather than any real security. Only having many eyes – even though those eyes can't contribute modifications directly – will solve that problem.

In the name of safety, I would like to see disclosure of the code of Google's self-driving automobiles. They don't have to Open Source it, but trade secret is wrong for life-and-property-critical devices that are operating autonomously around us. I think this is a mission that our community should get behind. Let's give Google a nudge on this!

You mentioned cookbooks. For reasons already discussed about hardware above, recipes aren't copyrightable. The photos, the commentary, and the compilation (the organization of all of the recipes into a book) are copyrightable. So, with the proprietary cookbook recipes you have more rights than you might have known.

That MakerPlane's not for real yet, and the RepRap never came close to making other RepRaps so completely as a couple of goldfish can produce more fish. I have been a critic of hype in the community, and at least in the RepRap case I think my criticism helped to get it cleaned up.

So, what's not right for Open Source? I helped to make feature films at Pixar and have an IMDB credit on two of them. While you can create stories in an Open Source paradigm, the best of them seem to be made in the conventional one. I believe that films should be playable on any device and should not be encumbered with DRM. I don't see a problem with an artist being paid for each copy of a film or music.

I put the question of entertainment being different from tools before John Sullivan, the new executive director of the Free Software Foundation, in front of an audience at the Libre Software World Conference a few weeks ago in Santiago de Compostela. John thought the issue of whether entertainment must be free was off-message for the Free Software Foundation. I think it may still be a personal issue for Richard Stallman, but it doesn't appear to clearly be FSF policy.

I don't believe we need the full freedom that we desire in our tools for something that is merely entertainment. But I do think there is a set of freedoms that is important for entertainment: the freedom to move them in place and time and play them on any device, the freedom to convert them in format, the freedom to preserve them as part of history, the freedom to report, caricature and criticize.

For life-and-property critical devices, it may be necessary for someone to stand between any Open Source community and the users, and make sure that the version the users get is free of any chance of malicious, incorrect, or naïve additions. The Debian OpenSSL Key Bug of several years ago is the classic example of a naïve addition. It is worthwhile for some devices to be guarded from that sort of problem, and for the result to be paid for per copy. But this does not mean that there can not be an Open Source community developing experimental versions of the same thing, and (through filters) contributing to the protected one.



Does SaaS change everything?
by Anonymous Coward

Now that most interesting new software is delivered to us over the web or via other network protocols, does this marginalize the contributions of open source and free software? For example Google, Amazon, and Facebook all have had some involvement with open source software as both users and contributors, but for the most part their technology stacks above the OS level (Linux) are under lock and key.

Bruce: Google, Amazon, Facebook all acknowledge a simple economic fact. There is no point in having your own programmers write anything that is not a customer-visible business differentiator for your company if you can get it from the Open Source community. A “business differentiator” in this case means something that makes your company look better than a competitor, to the customer directly. Too much “glue code”, and “infrastructure” is written by organizations that have no real need to do so if they would adopt Open Source. The message that is driving them to do so is the huge stack of cash being made by the companies that do use us.

We are, ironically, seeing a revolution in proprietary software that we created. We enabled these companies to work better with our Free Software, while we didn't, even when we used GPL, compel them to share everything.

Some time ago Free Software evangelists recognized that SaaS breaks the GPL. The Affero GPL was created to handle the Googles of the world. I participated in the very first internal FSF meeting on this issue, which must be more than a decade ago.

There is no economic or technical issue that prevents us from serving Free Software to people. Our community can do better against these companies than we are at present. The story's not over.



Usability in open source software?
by Jim Hall

Bruce, I'm doing a study of usability in open source software - how user interfaces can be designed in Free / open source programs so the program is easy to use by real people. So my question is twofold: What Free / open source program really got it right with usability? What qualities make for good usability in Free / open source software?

Bruce: Although I evangelize the issue of building our software for people outside of our community, I am no expert in usability at all. So, what that means is that there is room for others to evangelize best practices. I'd like to learn. I'll gladly pass your message along, if you build a compelling case.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Mozilla has more expertise in this than many Free Software projects. I have been running the GNOME 3 desktop in Debian Sid for a month or so, and I am not sure GNOME 3 is quite there yet. Keep it up, folks!



Can the Open Source community work smarter?
by WaywardGeek

The days of open collaboration between Linux developers has been hampered by binary incompatibility, and high hurdles to share software on popular software platforms like Debian and Fedora, and Gnome/GTK. We've seen hard feelings and fractures between groups like Ubuntu and Gnome, and lot's of unhappy users. Are the days of freely sharing software on lists essentially in the past, or is there some way to once again pump life into that creative engine? Can we work smarter?

Bruce: I think there are enough of us to staff conflicting forks. It is interesting that most of the conflicts you mention are between user-facing organizations. The lack of binary compatibility is unnecessary, and IMO is mostly driven by commercial distributions for their own economic interest.

I'm going to give you a solution for this that some will find offensive. Sorry, but it's what I believe. Don't help Red Hat. Don't help Ubuntu. Only help community projects and non-profits. Unfortunately, Red Hat and Ubuntu aren't really taking the community where we need to be. We thought they would, but they didn't get us sufficient users, and didn't get us the users we need for the most part, and the negative effects they have (like isolating us from our own users, and being public representatives in their own interest instead of the community's) aren't worth the rest. We need to work on other ways of getting to users that aren't Ubuntu and Red Hat.



Impending death of GPL
by fatphil

What is your reaction to the frequent stories in various media about people migrating away from the GPL and using less restrictive licenses, complete with predictions that the GPL will eventually become irrelevant? Do you believe that there's any truth to that - do you believe that the GPL is intrinsically moribund, or do you dismiss such stories as simply being partisan shiller

Bruce: I think it's 100% B.S. And it appears to me that it's driven by Black Duck and it really is time that someone called them upon it. I think the stories get them publicity, and maybe they are appealing to a prospective customer base who are indeed nervous about the GPL. But the trend they portray isn't a real one.

Of course, business has nothing to fear from the GPL if they will invest in proper due diligence. Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy, the entity that brings most GPL enforcement action, notes that the companies he goes after are the ones who are “going 100 miles an hour in a crosswalk”. That means a total failure of due diligence. I have seen Bradley waive enforcement against a company once they showed good intention in working to resolve compliance issues. He wanted to spend his time going after the more flagrant ones.

People use licenses for economic purposes, although they might not always think of it that way. Web platforms, because they are all about combining scripts, use the gift-style licenses instead of the sharing-with-rules ones. Black Duck takes this to be some sort of trend against further use of the GPL. The actual trend is that there are more and larger web platforms.

Thanks for the great questions, folks! It was fun to answer them.

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA reports that according to a study by Rebecca Martin and Mario Livio asteroid collisions may have provided a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life on earth delivering water and organic compounds to the early Earth and accelerating the rate of biological evolution with occasional impacts to disrupt a planet's environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies. 'Too many asteroids, and you've got an unrelenting cosmic shooting gallery, raining fiery death from above,' writes Fraser Cain. 'Too few asteroids, and complex life might not get the raw material it needs to get rolling. Life never gets that opportunity to really shake things up and evolve into more complex forms.' Martin and Livio suggest that the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is not an accident. The asteroid belt in our solar system, located between Mars and Jupiter, is a region of millions of space rocks that sits near the 'snow line,' which marks the border of a cold region where volatile material such as water ice are far enough from the sun to remain intact. 'To have such ideal conditions you need a giant planet like Jupiter that is just outside the asteroid belt [and] that migrated a little bit, but not through the belt,' Livio explains. 'If a large planet like Jupiter migrates through the belt, it would scatter the material. If, on the other hand, a large planet did not migrate at all, that, too, is not good because the asteroid belt would be too massive. There would be so much bombardment from asteroids that life may never evolve.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA reports that according to a study by Rebecca Martin and Mario Livio asteroid collisions may have provided a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life on earth delivering water and organic compounds to the early Earth and accelerating the rate of biological evolution with occasional impacts to disrupt a planet's environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies. 'Too many asteroids, and you've got an unrelenting cosmic shooting gallery, raining fiery death from above,' writes Fraser Cain. 'Too few asteroids, and complex life might not get the raw material it needs to get rolling. Life never gets that opportunity to really shake things up and evolve into more complex forms.' Martin and Livio suggest that the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is not an accident. The asteroid belt in our solar system, located between Mars and Jupiter, is a region of millions of space rocks that sits near the 'snow line,' which marks the border of a cold region where volatile material such as water ice are far enough from the sun to remain intact. 'To have such ideal conditions you need a giant planet like Jupiter that is just outside the asteroid belt [and] that migrated a little bit, but not through the belt,' Livio explains. 'If a large planet like Jupiter migrates through the belt, it would scatter the material. If, on the other hand, a large planet did not migrate at all, that, too, is not good because the asteroid belt would be too massive. There would be so much bombardment from asteroids that life may never evolve.'"

An anonymous reader writes "4 years ago I read about experimental targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) surgery on Slashdot. 3 years ago I crashed my motorcycle and had my leg amputated — at which time I had TMR done. Today I climbed 103 floors of the Willis Tower in Chicago with a experimental prosthetic using TMR. Thanks, Slashdot."

theodp writes "Enough with the dadgum naysayers. Google's Vivek Haldar lists some good reasons for why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age). Haldar's list would probably get a thumbs-up from billionaire SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who had this to say about coding when interviewed at age 56: 'I would be happy if I just stayed in my office and programmed all day, to tell you the truth. That is my one real love in life is programming. Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Lewis M. Cohen reports that this Election Day, Massachusetts is poised to approve the Death With Dignity Act, a modernized, sanitized, politically palatable term that replaces the now-antiquated expression 'physician-assisted suicide.' Oregon's Death With Dignity Act has been in effect for the past 14 years, and the state of Washington followed suit with a similar law in 2008. But the Massachusetts ballot question has the potential to turn death with dignity from a legislative experiment into the new national norm, because the state is the home of America's leading medical publication (the New England Journal of Medicine), hospital (Massachusetts General), and four medical schools (Harvard, Boston University, University of Massachusetts, and Tufts). If the act passes in Massachusetts, other states that have previously had unsuccessful campaigns will certainly be emboldened to revisit this subject. The initiative would allow terminally ill patients with six months or less to live to request from their doctor a prescription for a lethal dose of a drug. Doctors do not have to offer the option at all, and patients must make three requests, two verbal and one written. They must self-administer the drug, which would be ingested. The patients must be deemed capable of making an informed decision. 'It's all about choice,' says George Eighmey, a key player in instituting the Oregon law, defending it against repeal and shepherding it into reality. 'You decide. No one else can decide for you. No can can force you into it, coerce you into it or even suggest it to you unless you make a statement: "I don't want to live like this any more" or "I'm interested in that law out there, doctor, can you give me something to alleviate this pain and suffering."'"

New submitter Gonzalez_S writes "There are many digital pens out there, but none of them seem to work on Linux; unless you combine them with a tablet. I have contacted many vendors (Lifetrons, Dane-Elec, ApenUSA, IntelliPen..) and only Intellipen responded that there is very limited support for Linux. Do any of you know of a digital pen that works fine using Linux on normal paper? Some options to explore: can the pen work in real time on my PC screen? Can it function as a mouse? Can the pen work offline? Do I need a tablet (preferably not)? I would be happy if anyone shares a success story here, as they seem a great tool."