I already have the games. They are DRM free. I already have a way to keep track of my library. It's at https://www.humblebundle.com/h.... All it takes is a single password. Why would I want another one, merely for the privilege of having another one?
Most of the games I have (at least, those I'm actually playing) have no multiplayer mode that I'm aware of.
The "single connection" limitation is not much of an issue for me (I do, actually, honor the conditions I bought the games under, which is that they are only for my use), but why would having the DRM to enforce it be an advantage for me?
I'll just add that Debian split the non-free stuff into a separate repository, not enabled by default. Not only are you free not to install non-free software, you get an easy way of making sure that non-free doesn't creep in by mistake.
No one is talking about shipping DRM as part of Debian (or even in non-free). Valve isn't talking about shipping its games inside Debian. Their games are proprietary, cost money, and contain DRM, and at least the last two make them technically incompatible with the Debian distribution system.
What Valve is offering is for Debian developers to get, free of charge, a Steam subscription to play (almost) all of Valve games. Assuming you are not a Debian developer, you will not see any actual difference in Debian.
Personally, I'm a bit ambivalent on whether to take them up on that offer. All of my proprietary games have come from The Humble Bundle and are DRM free. I do not even have Steam installed, and am not eager to install it. I am, however, curious to see what games are available. Add to that the original commenter's comment, humorous though it was meant to be: I'm not taking a good enough care of my FOSS projects as it is.
Either way, however, this is something for Debian developers to use, not something that affects Debian itself.
On the one hand, I know very few people who claim that countries can do without collecting intelligence. This includes both electronic intelligence and actual spies. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is not that the NSA are trying to collect as much information as they can. It is that they are using illegitimate means to do so.
The issue here is not that the NSA is trying to glean as much information about as many people it can. That's what it is meant to do, and anyone saying it shouldn't is welcome to bring forward detailed analysis of how the USA (or any other country) can afford to be without an intelligence organization.
There are two point of real issue here. The first is that it spies on US citizens and residents. The theory goes that I can spy on other countries as far out as I can reach them, because their natural resistance to my spying attempts is limiting my ability to achieve total knowledge which, as you said, is dangerous. The same logic dictates that I do not use the same means against my own citizens and residents, as there are no limiting factors. The NSA's collection of US phone records is the perfect example of why that rule is so important. It is also the reason I think that the NSA getting the UK intelligence to give it UK citizen's phone records is so problematic.
The second issue is that the NSA subverted commercial entities in order to do its spying. This is a violation of the right of ownership. A business has the right to manage its own policies and reputation, and the NSA's ability to force commercial entities to develop features designed to subvert their business plan (see the Lavabit debacle).
I used to head Check Point's product security. One of the accusations commonly heard was to point out that Check Point's founders came from the IDF intelligence corps, and to therefore suspect that Check Point's products had deliberate backdoors. I was in a position where, had that been the case, I'd probably know about it, and I can therefore tell you that, at least during the years 2000-2003, that was not the case. We never deliberately installed a vulnerability, and would do everything we can to make sure there are no vulnerabilities, and fix them when when found.
The disadvantage is that you'd actually have to do stuff, which means that a) you'd have to buy expensive military hardware instead of F-16s which were designed to be second-line aircraft in the 70s, and b) some of the stuff you did would turn out wrong and everyone would yell at you.
I'm wondering how much of what you said you'd still say if you looked up (e.g. - on some of my other posts in this thread) which country I actually live in.
I am an Israeli citizen and resident. As such, I do not have 4th amendment protection. There are similar principles in the Israeli law (yes, there are, really), but they protect me from unauthorized searches done by my country, not be searches done by the US.
If the NSA is spying on me (or, in this particular case, on my prime minister and minister of defense), then they might be breaking Israeli law, but they are not breaking American law.
If, on the other hand, the US got my government to spy on me and transfer the data to the US (AFAK did not happen with Israel, but did with the UK and several others), then, yes, I think I deserve to know about it. Even if it's legal for the NSA to do so, it is not legal for the IDF/Mossad/whatever to do it.
Yet again, if the NSA cooperated with the Israeli intelligence to collect intel on what's happening in, e.g., Syria, then that is not a violation of law in either countries. It is not over stepping their boundaries. That is precisely why these agencies were set up to do to begin with. Any details released on those operations, particularly if the release compromises these operations, is a violation of Snowden's security clearance.
The areas that are borderline are areas where the NSA acts within its charter, but against "adversaries" that should not be adversarial. I am referring, among other things, to the NSA's tapping of phones and email for e.g. Israel and Germany's prime minister/counselor. While technically within the organization's charter, at best it is extremely hypocritical to do so.
The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.
Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.
The specific examples listed in the article may not be under the above category. Still, it is not clear who did the sifting through and filtering the material to decide what gets published. If Snowden did none of it, than those can be chalcked down to "collateral damage". If the bulk of the material is relevant for a whistle blower, I'd still go with clemancy.
Shachar P.s. Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.
It is, generically (not necessarily in this particular context), because of historical context. It is the same reason "Nigger", "Faggot" and "Gook" are offensive.
In this case, apparently, Tottenham's fans took a derogatory term and injected new meaning into it (for which I say "good for them", BTW).
Does that mean that I can go running around calling people "filthy chocolate-loving whiteys" and if I do it with enough conviction, I can get arrested?
Two things. First, actually reading my comment would reveal that I am actually against criminalizing derogatory names. The other thing is that you, alone, would do it, it would probably not become derogatory. If, however, it became a common way to degrade whatever group it was you meant for it to refer to (as pure guesswork I'd say it was Caucasians), then, yes, it would become derogatory.
The beauty of not criminalizing name calling is that it saves us the trouble of developing an objective test for what is derogatory, and leave the decision to take or not take offense to each individual. That is also just one of the many many problems of criminalizing name calling.
You are confusing tactics and strategy, I'm afraid.
If you want to pursue this line, please do so to my email address (in the header of this, and any, comment). I think we are veering off topic enough for the public thread.
At the very least, humans ought not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property unjustly.
As generic principles, those are as noble as any (and nobler than most). I do wonder what you'd do when it come to the practice side of things.
For example. We all agree that sending a bomb to an area dense with civilian population is a bad idea. What do you do, however, if someone is sending rockets into your civilian population, using dense civilian population areas as their rocket launch area? The way I see it, you have two options:
1. Let them bomb your civilians with impunity or 2. Do your best to target only military, but knowing you will, occasionally, fail
International law, BTW, completely accepts 2 as valid. International law forbids targeting civilians. It does not forbid accidentally hitting them. 2 is what Israel did in 2006, and is what earned it all the hatred and criticism you hear about it.
To say that Palestinians have been subjected to a form of genocide at the hands of the state of Israel is hardly 'antisemitism'.
You are right. It is ignorant, one sided and unfair, to the point of being completely, and usually willfully, wrong. It is not, however, inherently antisemitic.
I have to agree with you that the "antisemitic" card is pulled far too often, and far too early, by the pro-Israeli side. I am conducting these (pointless?) discussions (arguments?) for quite some time, and have only once seen a speaker I could say was arguing the anti-Israel side for whom I could say that racism was a major factor. Even then, it was Arab supremacy, rather than Jewish inferiority.
Here's the thing. Standing up for freedom of speech is meaningful especially when it is speech you disagree with. "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." (another Voltaire quote). As someone living in France, I hope this means something to you.
It is impossible to form an informed opinion without knowing what they actually said. The article does not elaborate, but it does give some general guidelines. Even as a Jewish Israeli, I have to admit those guidelines are worrying:
Supporters of the club often chant "Yid Army" and "Yiddo" at matches, using a term deemed offensive by some in the Jewish community, but fan groups say the term is used as a badge of honor rather than a derogatory remark.
However, the governing Football Association and police have warned that using the word "Yid" could lead to prosecution and a ban on attending matches.
Okay, so the "badge of honor" claim is bull. These are offensive. They are not (or, at least, should not), however, be criminal.
In my book, it is okay to ban fans who use those terms from attending plays (which is what "more speech" and social consequences is all about), but not, in itself, proper cause to open a criminal investigation.
I think your memory is failing you. The Amiga took forever to boot from floppies
FTFY. From hard disk, it wasn't so bad. I even had a startup sequence that would test the current kickstart, if it was 1.3, load a 2.04 kickstart that was hacked to run from memory, reboot, and then load the 2.04 workbench. The entire process would not take more than a minute. I actually remember much much less, but it was many years ago, and my memory may be failing me here.
but then so did all computers back then sans the Atari ST.
I never did any serious amount of work with the Atari ST, so I wouldn't know about that. As for the others: the 8 bit machines took no time at all to load. An Apple ][ would finish loading DOS from floppies in under 5 seconds. Most other machines had all they intended to have in ROM anyways, so boot time was non existent. Situation with 16 (i.e. - IBM PC) and 32 bit machines was slightly different, I but don't recall any of them being as bad as an Amiga loading from floppies.
2000 is when I first saw a computer (it was a 200Mhz pentium, if my memory is serving me correctly) that ran, through UAE, and Amiga 500 emulation at around 100% speed. It might actually have been even earlier than that. I don't remember what precise program I tested this with, but I'm fairly certain it was a game that used the copper.
So, yeah, the current technology isn't particularly impressing, at least as far as raw emulation speed is concerned.
I also can't explain why it is taking it so #!@$&!@# long to load the workbench. On the original Amiga, disks were read one track at a time, causing horrible access speed. Even with assuming they did not replace the disk access routines, the Amiga's DMA architecture would mean you'd use the native CPU to just dump the data into the Amiga's memory, which should result in much much much faster boot times. The only explanation I have is that they are deliberately emulating the horrid access times the original Amiga had.
I have not analyzed this cypher, but generally speaking, the IV is not considered secret. In fact, under the common block cyphers, it is considered completely okay to actually publish it.
I remember reading somewhere, and I do not remember where, that a study found out that Arabic was the language most difficult to read/write from all the languages that use consonants as a writing basis (i.e. - not Chinese). I vaguely remember that they connected this to the cursive nature of the writing, but as this is all from memory (and a while ago), I cannot tell you how.
Actually, non Arabic natives could gain from doing precisely that. The cursive nature of the writing, coupled with the amount of characters that are only differentiated by the number of dots they have, make it a relatively hard language to learn to read. The multiple forms each letter take depending on its position in the word don't help either. In fact, some elementary schools in Israel teach spoken Arabic by using Hebrew letters, not bothering with trying to teach reading or writing.
As someone who went through the motion of pretending to try to learn literary Arabic in school, I actually don't think that's a bad idea. Get some vocabulary and grammar going, and only then dump trying to decipher the text on students. After all, that's also the order in which native Arabic speakers do it.
As for Hebrew, there are some madmen who tried something very similar. See, for example, http://www.stav.org.il/karmeli/. Needless to say, it did not gain any significant traction.
While I agree with the point you are trying to convey, I think you chose a really bad way of driving (sorry about the pun) it home.
This is not a contract. This is the law. Violating it isn't a contract dispute. It is a criminal offense. There is not difference, as far as your consent goes, between driving without a license and driving under the influence.
You did not accept the rules when you got your license. The rules bind you whether you agree with them or not. Within the rules, you are free to choose not to get your license (and not drive), or to drive only when the law decides you are not prohibited from doing so.
Is there any reason at all to assume this is anything more than a company, which happens to be American, interested in buying the assets of another company, which happens to be Israeli? If so, please do elaborate.
The STR912 has an ARM9 based 32 bit CPU, and, depending on precise model, about 96KB of flash and about 48KB of RAM. Running all of the code from RAM is simply impossible.
So, no, this is very far from limited to 16bit and old. Newer versions (the STR912 is, after all, around 6 years old) have, as far as I know, similar flash/ram ratio.
What happened with windows is the least energy path all software takes. It, in fact, takes a huge investment for any long maintained program to not take this path.
It is true that Microsoft, for reasons that had to do with marketing (and also the anti competition, true) took this path quicker than was purely mandated by normal entropy laws. They also defined an "always backward compatible" policy (even when apps use unsupported, undocumented, APIs or side effects), that made it impossible to invest the (quite hefty) price and refactor out the ugliness.
Still, aside from the anti-competitive part (which did not take as big a part as you'd expect), there is no evidence of malice here. Just poor engineering policy and too strong a marketing department.
Slashdot Mirror
You lost me.
I already have the games. They are DRM free. I already have a way to keep track of my library. It's at https://www.humblebundle.com/h.... All it takes is a single password. Why would I want another one, merely for the privilege of having another one?
Most of the games I have (at least, those I'm actually playing) have no multiplayer mode that I'm aware of.
The "single connection" limitation is not much of an issue for me (I do, actually, honor the conditions I bought the games under, which is that they are only for my use), but why would having the DRM to enforce it be an advantage for me?
Shachar
I'll just add that Debian split the non-free stuff into a separate repository, not enabled by default. Not only are you free not to install non-free software, you get an easy way of making sure that non-free doesn't creep in by mistake.
Shachar
and now this proposition to ship DRM!
No one is talking about shipping DRM as part of Debian (or even in non-free). Valve isn't talking about shipping its games inside Debian. Their games are proprietary, cost money, and contain DRM, and at least the last two make them technically incompatible with the Debian distribution system.
What Valve is offering is for Debian developers to get, free of charge, a Steam subscription to play (almost) all of Valve games. Assuming you are not a Debian developer, you will not see any actual difference in Debian.
Personally, I'm a bit ambivalent on whether to take them up on that offer. All of my proprietary games have come from The Humble Bundle and are DRM free. I do not even have Steam installed, and am not eager to install it. I am, however, curious to see what games are available. Add to that the original commenter's comment, humorous though it was meant to be: I'm not taking a good enough care of my FOSS projects as it is.
Either way, however, this is something for Debian developers to use, not something that affects Debian itself.
Shachar
There's a conundrum at play here.
On the one hand, I know very few people who claim that countries can do without collecting intelligence. This includes both electronic intelligence and actual spies. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is not that the NSA are trying to collect as much information as they can. It is that they are using illegitimate means to do so.
The issue here is not that the NSA is trying to glean as much information about as many people it can. That's what it is meant to do, and anyone saying it shouldn't is welcome to bring forward detailed analysis of how the USA (or any other country) can afford to be without an intelligence organization.
There are two point of real issue here. The first is that it spies on US citizens and residents. The theory goes that I can spy on other countries as far out as I can reach them, because their natural resistance to my spying attempts is limiting my ability to achieve total knowledge which, as you said, is dangerous. The same logic dictates that I do not use the same means against my own citizens and residents, as there are no limiting factors. The NSA's collection of US phone records is the perfect example of why that rule is so important. It is also the reason I think that the NSA getting the UK intelligence to give it UK citizen's phone records is so problematic.
The second issue is that the NSA subverted commercial entities in order to do its spying. This is a violation of the right of ownership. A business has the right to manage its own policies and reputation, and the NSA's ability to force commercial entities to develop features designed to subvert their business plan (see the Lavabit debacle).
I used to head Check Point's product security. One of the accusations commonly heard was to point out that Check Point's founders came from the IDF intelligence corps, and to therefore suspect that Check Point's products had deliberate backdoors. I was in a position where, had that been the case, I'd probably know about it, and I can therefore tell you that, at least during the years 2000-2003, that was not the case. We never deliberately installed a vulnerability, and would do everything we can to make sure there are no vulnerabilities, and fix them when when found.
Sadly, AT&T cannot say the same.
Shachar
The disadvantage is that you'd actually have to do stuff, which means that a) you'd have to buy expensive military hardware instead of F-16s which were designed to be second-line aircraft in the 70s, and b) some of the stuff you did would turn out wrong and everyone would yell at you.
I'm wondering how much of what you said you'd still say if you looked up (e.g. - on some of my other posts in this thread) which country I actually live in.
Shachar
I am an Israeli citizen and resident. As such, I do not have 4th amendment protection. There are similar principles in the Israeli law (yes, there are, really), but they protect me from unauthorized searches done by my country, not be searches done by the US.
If the NSA is spying on me (or, in this particular case, on my prime minister and minister of defense), then they might be breaking Israeli law, but they are not breaking American law.
If, on the other hand, the US got my government to spy on me and transfer the data to the US (AFAK did not happen with Israel, but did with the UK and several others), then, yes, I think I deserve to know about it. Even if it's legal for the NSA to do so, it is not legal for the IDF/Mossad/whatever to do it.
Yet again, if the NSA cooperated with the Israeli intelligence to collect intel on what's happening in, e.g., Syria, then that is not a violation of law in either countries. It is not over stepping their boundaries. That is precisely why these agencies were set up to do to begin with. Any details released on those operations, particularly if the release compromises these operations, is a violation of Snowden's security clearance.
The areas that are borderline are areas where the NSA acts within its charter, but against "adversaries" that should not be adversarial. I am referring, among other things, to the NSA's tapping of phones and email for e.g. Israel and Germany's prime minister/counselor. While technically within the organization's charter, at best it is extremely hypocritical to do so.
Shachar
The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.
Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.
The specific examples listed in the article may not be under the above category. Still, it is not clear who did the sifting through and filtering the material to decide what gets published. If Snowden did none of it, than those can be chalcked down to "collateral damage". If the bulk of the material is relevant for a whistle blower, I'd still go with clemancy.
Shachar
P.s.
Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.
It is, generically (not necessarily in this particular context), because of historical context. It is the same reason "Nigger", "Faggot" and "Gook" are offensive.
In this case, apparently, Tottenham's fans took a derogatory term and injected new meaning into it (for which I say "good for them", BTW).
Does that mean that I can go running around calling people "filthy chocolate-loving whiteys" and if I do it with enough conviction, I can get arrested?
Two things. First, actually reading my comment would reveal that I am actually against criminalizing derogatory names. The other thing is that you, alone, would do it, it would probably not become derogatory. If, however, it became a common way to degrade whatever group it was you meant for it to refer to (as pure guesswork I'd say it was Caucasians), then, yes, it would become derogatory.
The beauty of not criminalizing name calling is that it saves us the trouble of developing an objective test for what is derogatory, and leave the decision to take or not take offense to each individual. That is also just one of the many many problems of criminalizing name calling.
Shachar
You are confusing tactics and strategy, I'm afraid.
If you want to pursue this line, please do so to my email address (in the header of this, and any, comment). I think we are veering off topic enough for the public thread.
Shachar
At the very least, humans ought not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property unjustly.
As generic principles, those are as noble as any (and nobler than most). I do wonder what you'd do when it come to the practice side of things.
For example. We all agree that sending a bomb to an area dense with civilian population is a bad idea. What do you do, however, if someone is sending rockets into your civilian population, using dense civilian population areas as their rocket launch area? The way I see it, you have two options:
1. Let them bomb your civilians with impunity
or
2. Do your best to target only military, but knowing you will, occasionally, fail
International law, BTW, completely accepts 2 as valid. International law forbids targeting civilians. It does not forbid accidentally hitting them. 2 is what Israel did in 2006, and is what earned it all the hatred and criticism you hear about it.
Shachar
The Nazis never paid the people evicted from their homes fair market value for it. Israel does.
While I do agree that tearing down houses (and sometimes sealing rooms) is not a reasonable punishment, the comparison is waaay off base.
Shachar
To say that Palestinians have been subjected to a form of genocide at the hands of the state of Israel is hardly 'antisemitism'.
You are right. It is ignorant, one sided and unfair, to the point of being completely, and usually willfully, wrong. It is not, however, inherently antisemitic.
I have to agree with you that the "antisemitic" card is pulled far too often, and far too early, by the pro-Israeli side. I am conducting these (pointless?) discussions (arguments?) for quite some time, and have only once seen a speaker I could say was arguing the anti-Israel side for whom I could say that racism was a major factor. Even then, it was Arab supremacy, rather than Jewish inferiority.
With that said, have you read the Hamas charter?
Shachar
Here's the thing. Standing up for freedom of speech is meaningful especially when it is speech you disagree with. "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." (another Voltaire quote). As someone living in France, I hope this means something to you.
Shachar
It is impossible to form an informed opinion without knowing what they actually said. The article does not elaborate, but it does give some general guidelines. Even as a Jewish Israeli, I have to admit those guidelines are worrying:
Supporters of the club often chant "Yid Army" and "Yiddo" at matches, using a term deemed offensive by some in the Jewish community, but fan groups say the term is used as a badge of honor rather than a derogatory remark.
However, the governing Football Association and police have warned that using the word "Yid" could lead to prosecution and a ban on attending matches.
Okay, so the "badge of honor" claim is bull. These are offensive. They are not (or, at least, should not), however, be criminal.
In my book, it is okay to ban fans who use those terms from attending plays (which is what "more speech" and social consequences is all about), but not, in itself, proper cause to open a criminal investigation.
Shachar
I think your memory is failing you. The Amiga took forever to boot from floppies
FTFY. From hard disk, it wasn't so bad. I even had a startup sequence that would test the current kickstart, if it was 1.3, load a 2.04 kickstart that was hacked to run from memory, reboot, and then load the 2.04 workbench. The entire process would not take more than a minute. I actually remember much much less, but it was many years ago, and my memory may be failing me here.
but then so did all computers back then sans the Atari ST.
I never did any serious amount of work with the Atari ST, so I wouldn't know about that. As for the others: the 8 bit machines took no time at all to load. An Apple ][ would finish loading DOS from floppies in under 5 seconds. Most other machines had all they intended to have in ROM anyways, so boot time was non existent. Situation with 16 (i.e. - IBM PC) and 32 bit machines was slightly different, I but don't recall any of them being as bad as an Amiga loading from floppies.
Shachar
2000 is when I first saw a computer (it was a 200Mhz pentium, if my memory is serving me correctly) that ran, through UAE, and Amiga 500 emulation at around 100% speed. It might actually have been even earlier than that. I don't remember what precise program I tested this with, but I'm fairly certain it was a game that used the copper.
So, yeah, the current technology isn't particularly impressing, at least as far as raw emulation speed is concerned.
I also can't explain why it is taking it so #!@$&!@# long to load the workbench. On the original Amiga, disks were read one track at a time, causing horrible access speed. Even with assuming they did not replace the disk access routines, the Amiga's DMA architecture would mean you'd use the native CPU to just dump the data into the Amiga's memory, which should result in much much much faster boot times. The only explanation I have is that they are deliberately emulating the horrid access times the original Amiga had.
Shachar
I have not analyzed this cypher, but generally speaking, the IV is not considered secret. In fact, under the common block cyphers, it is considered completely okay to actually publish it.
Shachar
I remember reading somewhere, and I do not remember where, that a study found out that Arabic was the language most difficult to read/write from all the languages that use consonants as a writing basis (i.e. - not Chinese). I vaguely remember that they connected this to the cursive nature of the writing, but as this is all from memory (and a while ago), I cannot tell you how.
Shachar
OT, but I couldn't resist :-)
Actually, non Arabic natives could gain from doing precisely that. The cursive nature of the writing, coupled with the amount of characters that are only differentiated by the number of dots they have, make it a relatively hard language to learn to read. The multiple forms each letter take depending on its position in the word don't help either. In fact, some elementary schools in Israel teach spoken Arabic by using Hebrew letters, not bothering with trying to teach reading or writing.
As someone who went through the motion of pretending to try to learn literary Arabic in school, I actually don't think that's a bad idea. Get some vocabulary and grammar going, and only then dump trying to decipher the text on students. After all, that's also the order in which native Arabic speakers do it.
As for Hebrew, there are some madmen who tried something very similar. See, for example, http://www.stav.org.il/karmeli/. Needless to say, it did not gain any significant traction.
Shachar
Nah, just caught me on a bad morning. I thought "two month", and then had the brain fart :-)
Yeah, I doubt I'll manage to use it in the time I have left. Better ask for that refund now.
I'm just pointing out that 12 hours ago the site was happy to collect money from me, with no mention of a deadline for using that money.
Shachar
Just yesterday I put in $10. Now I have one year to use it.
Shachar
While I agree with the point you are trying to convey, I think you chose a really bad way of driving (sorry about the pun) it home.
This is not a contract. This is the law. Violating it isn't a contract dispute. It is a criminal offense. There is not difference, as far as your consent goes, between driving without a license and driving under the influence.
You did not accept the rules when you got your license. The rules bind you whether you agree with them or not. Within the rules, you are free to choose not to get your license (and not drive), or to drive only when the law decides you are not prohibited from doing so.
Shachar
Just Wow!
How paranoid can one get?
Is there any reason at all to assume this is anything more than a company, which happens to be American, interested in buying the assets of another company, which happens to be Israeli? If so, please do elaborate.
Shachar
The STR912 has an ARM9 based 32 bit CPU, and, depending on precise model, about 96KB of flash and about 48KB of RAM. Running all of the code from RAM is simply impossible.
So, no, this is very far from limited to 16bit and old. Newer versions (the STR912 is, after all, around 6 years old) have, as far as I know, similar flash/ram ratio.
Shachar
What happened with windows is the least energy path all software takes. It, in fact, takes a huge investment for any long maintained program to not take this path.
It is true that Microsoft, for reasons that had to do with marketing (and also the anti competition, true) took this path quicker than was purely mandated by normal entropy laws. They also defined an "always backward compatible" policy (even when apps use unsupported, undocumented, APIs or side effects), that made it impossible to invest the (quite hefty) price and refactor out the ugliness.
Still, aside from the anti-competitive part (which did not take as big a part as you'd expect), there is no evidence of malice here. Just poor engineering policy and too strong a marketing department.
Shachar