You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
If IChessU claims they didn't agree to the GPL, they're still in violation of the Jin copyright.
Contracts are only needed when you want to impose additional restrictions beyond those imposed by copyright law. That's why you have to click "I Accept" to EULAs; those are contracts. The GPL is not.
I just took a look at the COA for XP Home on the bottom of my Lenovo laptop. It actually has the words "Proof of License" printed on it, along the left edge, directly above the words "Certificate of Authenticity".
However, it also has "Label not to be sold separately" printed along the right edge.
This is in the US, though. Maybe they print different labels for the UK market.
If you use Tor, you're actually going through a sequence of several proxies, using different encryption keys for each hop along the route. The first proxy in the chain knows who you are, but can't see where you're going; it can only see the next proxy in the chain. The last proxy in the chain can see where you're going, but it doesn't know who you are, because all it can see is the previous proxy in the chain. Those in the middle can't see either the origin or the destination.
Unless an attacker manages to compromise all the nodes along your route (which changes every few minutes), the Tor network can't figure out who was going where.
I believe the machine identification used by Windows Product Activation is a sort of hash of all your hardware combined. It'll tolerate minor changes (such as upgrading your RAM or adding a second hard drive), but if you change too many things, it has to be reactivated.
VMware doesn't virtualize the processor, so a virtual machine sees the same processor ID as the host, but everything else is virtualized. Transferring a VMware disk image from one host to another looks like replacing the processor and keeping all the other hardware the same. Transferring a disk image from, say, VirtualPC into VMware would look like transplanting a hard drive from one computer into another, completely different one, and would require reactivation (and possibly even reinstallation).
Interestingly, Windows has a "hardware profiles" feature that lets it deal with completely different hardware configurations, and you can use it to create an installation that can be booted both within VMware, and "natively" on the host machine... but it'll require reactivation every time you switch from one hardware profile to the other. (IIRC, at least -- it's been awhile since I saw that happen.)
Non-free isn't "officially" part of Debian, but Debian still distributes it, so they do care quite a lot about license compliance. The only thing that gives Debian any permission to distribute that software is the licenses, so Debian must not violate any licenses or it loses its permission to distribute and can be sued for copyright infringement.
Well, patents are different -- those are enforced by law, so they apply to everyone, no voluntary agreement needed. Microsoft wouldn't need a license agreement if it was just patents.
A click-through license agreement is a contract, and contracts are voluntary agreements between two parties. You're not bound by the terms of such a document unless you voluntarily agree to it -- that's why they're always positioned such that you can't do the thing you want (installing some software, reading a spec, etc.) without agreeing to the license.
I haven't read this WMP license, but I'll bet that somewhere in it, it specifies that you must not give your copy of the spec to anyone else. Otherwise you could give it to a third party who is not bound by the agreement between you and Microsoft.
(Actually, I think that answers my question about what happens if someone posts a direct link to the document so people who don't know about the license can read it. The other people would be in the clear, but the person who posted the direct link could be sued for breach of contract, because they gave the document to someone else after agreeing not to do so.
Whether you physically click the "accept" button isn't really all that significant. If you look at the HTML source to find the URL that the accept button links to, and intentionally load that URL with the understanding that it's meant to be obtained as a result of accepting the license, this can easily be construed as you having accepted the license, even though you didn't actually click the button. It doesn't get you around the license, any more than (say) closing your eyes so you can't see the words "I accept" written on the button when you click on it.
Posting a direct link for use by someone else who hasn't read the license is a different story, though. If someone else follows the link while understanding that it's "behind" a license agreement, one could argue that that also counts as accepting the agreement, but if someone follows the direct link while having no idea that they were supposed to be shown a license before getting that link, then I don't know.
Well, the issue isn't that your phone records are stored in a telco database. The issue is that the government was (allegedly) examining phone records without legal permission to do so. They need a warrant for that, and to get a warrant, they need to convince a judge that they have credible evidence suggesting that you might be a criminal.
Examining the phone records of a particular person who's suspected of a crime is OK. Examining the phone records of large numbers of people who are not suspected of crimes, just in case might turn out to be a criminal after all, is not OK. The reason it's not OK is that pervasive surveillance of innocent people is regarded as more harmful to society than the few additional criminals it might catch.
Remember that the ultimate goal is not to catch all terrorists at any cost. The ultimate goal is to preserve the existence of the nation and our way of life, and that involves catching as many terrorists (and other criminals) as possible without sacrificing the rights and freedoms that define our society.
"Because, therefore, we are defending a way of life, we must be respectful of that way of life as we proceed to the solution of our problem. We must not violate its principles and its precepts, and we must not destroy from within what we are trying to defend from without." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech given at 1951 NATO Council
"I'm sure that liberal and conservative nerds alike can recognize that there ought not to be a splitter on the optic fibers carrying your internet communications, that is monitorable by the NSA without a warrant or oversight."
Not monitorable. Actually monitored. As long as the equipment has a significant legitimate use (such as CALEA compliance, as someone else pointed out above), it's okay that it could be abused as long as it is not actually abused. This is the same reasoning we use when arguing that P2P software should not be illegal even though it can be used for copyright infringement.
When I'm walking around in public, I am shootable with a gun and stabbable with a knife. But as long as nobody actually shoots me with a gun or stabs me with a knife, I have not been wronged.
Wait to find out what the equipment was actually being used for before you pass judgement on its being there. This document is valuable information, but it's not the whole story.
With Outlook. I can even get someone's telephone extension by right-clicking their name in an email. Outlook 2003 also tells me when they're free by checking their calendar.
These aren't really features in Outlook itself; this information is provided by the Exchange server that your organization is using. If you were to use Outlook outside an Exchange environment -- say, for checking your personal email from home -- you wouldn't have these features either.
Outlook's advantage in this case is simly that it supports using an Exchange server, while most other mail clients do not. For business use, Exchange is valuable, but for personal use it isn't really applicable, and there are other approaches, such as iCal files published on the web, that are better-suited to the less-centralized patterns that personal communication often follows.
SELinux is not a distribution, and it's not a total security solution. It's a component of the kernel that provides what's known as "mandatory access control", which basically lets you configure which roles are allowed to access which resources, so that an attacker who breaks one part of the system is prevented from accessing other parts of the system, regardless of conventional permissions or being root. It does nothing to prevent intrusions; that's left to other components of a security solution. It just helps limit the damage that can be done after an intrusion has occurred.
I think you're missing the point of the GPL slightly. The "viral" (Microsoft's term) nature of the GPL isn't an "issue" to be "fixed"; it's the main point of the GPL. It's the essence of the principle of copyleft. People license their software under the GPL because they specifically want that property of the license.
Linus's "quid pro quo" explanation describes it pretty well. In short: I'm willing to share with you if you're willing to share with me. If you don't want to share your code, then I don't want to share mine with you. The alternative, you taking the code that I worked hard to write and making a closed product out of it without contributing anything in return, is something that many developers don't want, and that's why they choose to distribute their code with a GPL-style copyleft license rather than a BSD-style license.
Forgot to mention, Gentoo also has binaries available for install through portage as well as the source, so what now, Apt?
As Krafft said in the interview, Apt is just the tip of the iceberg -- you can't characterize a whole distribution by its package manager alone. That goes for Gentoo as well: Portage is nice, but it's not the one and only thing that differentiates Gentoo from the rest. Both are great distributions, and my "ideal" would be a hybrid of the two, but you really can't just say "Apt is nothing compared to Portage", without even any supporting argument, and conclude from this that Gentoo is superior to Debian. Logic doesn't work that way.
And people say Debian users act too high-and-mighty about their distribution...
(As I write this, BTW, I'm in the process of installing Gentoo in VMware on a Debian host.)
To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to composite video displayed by the video card's overlay hardware, which is what XVideo typically uses. The video frames are processed by a completely separate portion of the video card, and all the 2D hardware sees is the chroma-key color (typically blue) that the overlay uses to determine where to superimpose the video. You could get composited video by using ordinary bitmap-drawing operations instead of the overlay, but then you lose the benefit of hardware-accelerated colorspace conversion (YUV to RGB) and scaling, both of which are fairly intensive operations.
On the other hand, it is possible to do those operations in hardware using the 3D pipeline: colorspace conversion can be done by pixel shaders (or so I infer from the article's mention of GL_ARB_fragment_program) and scaling is a normal part of the process of drawing texture-mapped polygons. So an OpenGL-based XVideo implementation can do its work using the 3D hardware rather than the overlay hardware, and the result is video frames in OpenGL textures which can be mapped onto the screen in any way the user wants.
I know there's no direct relationship between Composite and XRender -- that's why I said Composite "facilitates" the XRender-based compositing approach. The Composite extension is needed for any sort of compositing manager to work, including one with draws the desktop using XRender.
The problem is that Composite doesn't interact well with things that don't use the 2D pipeline, such as OpenGL and XVideo stuff; by default you can't even enable Composite unless you disable GLX, IIRC. Even if you do use a compositing manager which renders the display using GL, you have a problem when an application creates its own, completely-separate GL context for its own graphics. You have the same problem when something uses XVideo. The difficulty is that these things bypass the 2D pipeline and therefore can't be "intercepted" and redirected to offscreen buffers by Composite.
I read a suggestion somewhere (I wish I could remember where, and I have no idea whether this is planned to be implemented) that a fully-GL-based X server like XGL could use the "framebuffer object" extension found in most new OpenGL implementations to neatly handle this problem. GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, if I understand it correctly, would allow XGL to give an application its own GL context, just like usual, but bound to a "framebuffer object" rather than to the actual screen, and the application would be completely oblivious to the fact that it's drawing into a texture in video memory rather than to the screen itself. The code responsible for drawing the actual screen (a compositing manager, XGL itself, etc.) could then just map that texture onto a polygon or whatever, just as it does with any other window, and bingo: 3D applications running in a window get the same translucency, wobble effects (a la Luminocity), and other such eyecandy that everything else does. That's not something that can be done with plain old Composite on a 2D display, AFAIK.
and Linux isn't "now matching" Windows in any respect, it's pulling further ahead of it.
Not really -- Vista will be doing this too, with Direct3D rather than OpenGL.
(And OSX has been doing it since day one.)
What it comes down to is that people want nifty translucency and fluid animation effects even in a 2D GUI, and the best way to implement it is by compositing the desktop using the video card's 3D engine. The Composite extension currently available in Xorg facilitates an alternative approach, based on XRender which still uses the video card's 2D engine, and that's quicker to implement, but not as robust or flexible. (And XRender doesn't benefit from hardware acceleration -- they're working on that now, under the name "Exa", but the nice thing about OpenGL is that we already have it accelerated.)
If you mean in the sense that POV-Ray does, then no, this is very different. It's an "image-based" rendering technique, which means that you create new images using photographs and other such real-world measurements as input. Conventional ray tracing gives you pictures of models built in the computer's memory, which might approximate a real-world object.
The important difference is that you don't have to build a computer model of the geometry you're trying to render. This is both a help because many real-world objects are hard to model accurately in a computer, and a hindrance because you can only render pictures of objects that you actually have in the real world.
You know. I'm frankly getting sick and tired of moral relativists claiming that it's ok for Bush or the Republicans to be corrupt because Democrats might be corrupt to if they were in power.
I am too. It's wrong no matter what party does it. But nobody should be pointing fingers saying "see, here's what happens when you put that party in control of things" as if theirs were any better. Such behavior is not productive toward solving the underlying problem.
...what, would that make it somehow less sleazy in your mind?
Of course not. But there are a number of people here, presumably Democrats, using this opportunity to bash the Republican party from a high-and-mighty stance. They may be right, but they're not really any better.
I'm just wishing we'd switch to a fair election system so we can get out of the two-party stranglehold. More competition would be as good for the Presidential market as it is for every other market in the US economy.
I have a stack of five optical drives under my desk. Four of them are dead, but only one of those is a DVD drive; the rest are old CD-ROM drives. The working drive is a K Hypermedia 48x CD-RW, which a friend gave to me after replacing it with a DVD burner.
What's not in that stack is another drive of mine which failed in a very peculiar way: it reads silver-colored pressed discs and CD-Rs just fine, but it rejects gold-colored discs, which happen to be about half the DVDs I own. I'm not sure about CD-RWs.
Currently in my computer I have a Plextor 16/10/40A and a generic DVD writer. The Plextor died a few years ago, but was replaced under warranty. These days, I have no problems with either drive.
How about the RSA public-key encryption algorithm?
It's a software process. (Note that particular implementations are covered by copyright; a patent covers the more abstract task that the software is doing.)
It's non-obvious and innovative. (Most of the cryptographic community thought public-key cyryptography was an impossible concept until someone actually did it).
It exists.
It protects significant investment (RSA Data Security, Incorporated). Well, protected, past tense -- the patent is expired now -- but I think it still counts.
What's sad is that you've accepted this as a normal part of using your computer.
Right now I'm using a Debian system that's been installed for four years -- and running the "unstable" branch, so there are new versions of packages (sometimes containing bugs) almost daily -- and it with a little care and feeding on my part, it's still running cleanly. I certainly wouldn't want to have to reinstall and lose all the work I've put into getting my system set up the way I like it.
"Local exploit" just means you need an account on the system, not physical access. You could log in over a network using SSH or Telnet and exploit this.
It's getting harder to build hardware that can be used in modern computers -- building a PCI or USB device, for example, requires significant "interface" hardware in addition to the device-specific functionality. Boards covered with tiny surface-mount parts are hard enough to even diagnose when they stop working, let alone fix by hand. There's not as much of use that a computer geek can do with a soldering iron anymore.
However, there's more to being a computer geek than "soldering things together". My degree is in computer science, not computer engineering or electrical engineering, and although I can use a soldering iron reasonably well, I rarely do so because hardware isn't really my thing; software is. I'm working on on writing a 3D renderer and an SSH client in my spare time, and my shelves are full of books on software architecture and design patterns.
I imagine that while useful computer hardware is getting harder to build by hand, it's getting easier to write useful software by hand, thanks to the rising number of open-source projects which one can build upon or contribute to directly. This might explain the trend you've noticed.
(Note that I don't mean to disparage hardware people... it's just that as the field matures, the barrier to entry gets higher, hence fewer amateurs.)
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The GPL is a copyright license, not a contract.
Section 5 of the GPL says:
If IChessU claims they didn't agree to the GPL, they're still in violation of the Jin copyright.
Contracts are only needed when you want to impose additional restrictions beyond those imposed by copyright law. That's why you have to click "I Accept" to EULAs; those are contracts. The GPL is not.
I just took a look at the COA for XP Home on the bottom of my Lenovo laptop. It actually has the words "Proof of License" printed on it, along the left edge, directly above the words "Certificate of Authenticity".
However, it also has "Label not to be sold separately" printed along the right edge.
This is in the US, though. Maybe they print different labels for the UK market.
If you use Tor, you're actually going through a sequence of several proxies, using different encryption keys for each hop along the route. The first proxy in the chain knows who you are, but can't see where you're going; it can only see the next proxy in the chain. The last proxy in the chain can see where you're going, but it doesn't know who you are, because all it can see is the previous proxy in the chain. Those in the middle can't see either the origin or the destination.
Unless an attacker manages to compromise all the nodes along your route (which changes every few minutes), the Tor network can't figure out who was going where.
Yep.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
See the section titled "Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style".
I believe the machine identification used by Windows Product Activation is a sort of hash of all your hardware combined. It'll tolerate minor changes (such as upgrading your RAM or adding a second hard drive), but if you change too many things, it has to be reactivated.
VMware doesn't virtualize the processor, so a virtual machine sees the same processor ID as the host, but everything else is virtualized. Transferring a VMware disk image from one host to another looks like replacing the processor and keeping all the other hardware the same. Transferring a disk image from, say, VirtualPC into VMware would look like transplanting a hard drive from one computer into another, completely different one, and would require reactivation (and possibly even reinstallation).
Interestingly, Windows has a "hardware profiles" feature that lets it deal with completely different hardware configurations, and you can use it to create an installation that can be booted both within VMware, and "natively" on the host machine... but it'll require reactivation every time you switch from one hardware profile to the other. (IIRC, at least -- it's been awhile since I saw that happen.)
Non-free isn't "officially" part of Debian, but Debian still distributes it, so they do care quite a lot about license compliance. The only thing that gives Debian any permission to distribute that software is the licenses, so Debian must not violate any licenses or it loses its permission to distribute and can be sued for copyright infringement.
Well, patents are different -- those are enforced by law, so they apply to everyone, no voluntary agreement needed. Microsoft wouldn't need a license agreement if it was just patents.
A click-through license agreement is a contract, and contracts are voluntary agreements between two parties. You're not bound by the terms of such a document unless you voluntarily agree to it -- that's why they're always positioned such that you can't do the thing you want (installing some software, reading a spec, etc.) without agreeing to the license.
I haven't read this WMP license, but I'll bet that somewhere in it, it specifies that you must not give your copy of the spec to anyone else. Otherwise you could give it to a third party who is not bound by the agreement between you and Microsoft.
(Actually, I think that answers my question about what happens if someone posts a direct link to the document so people who don't know about the license can read it. The other people would be in the clear, but the person who posted the direct link could be sued for breach of contract, because they gave the document to someone else after agreeing not to do so.
Whether you physically click the "accept" button isn't really all that significant. If you look at the HTML source to find the URL that the accept button links to, and intentionally load that URL with the understanding that it's meant to be obtained as a result of accepting the license, this can easily be construed as you having accepted the license, even though you didn't actually click the button. It doesn't get you around the license, any more than (say) closing your eyes so you can't see the words "I accept" written on the button when you click on it.
Posting a direct link for use by someone else who hasn't read the license is a different story, though. If someone else follows the link while understanding that it's "behind" a license agreement, one could argue that that also counts as accepting the agreement, but if someone follows the direct link while having no idea that they were supposed to be shown a license before getting that link, then I don't know.
Well, the issue isn't that your phone records are stored in a telco database. The issue is that the government was (allegedly) examining phone records without legal permission to do so. They need a warrant for that, and to get a warrant, they need to convince a judge that they have credible evidence suggesting that you might be a criminal.
Examining the phone records of a particular person who's suspected of a crime is OK. Examining the phone records of large numbers of people who are not suspected of crimes, just in case might turn out to be a criminal after all, is not OK. The reason it's not OK is that pervasive surveillance of innocent people is regarded as more harmful to society than the few additional criminals it might catch.
Remember that the ultimate goal is not to catch all terrorists at any cost. The ultimate goal is to preserve the existence of the nation and our way of life, and that involves catching as many terrorists (and other criminals) as possible without sacrificing the rights and freedoms that define our society.
Not monitorable. Actually monitored. As long as the equipment has a significant legitimate use (such as CALEA compliance, as someone else pointed out above), it's okay that it could be abused as long as it is not actually abused. This is the same reasoning we use when arguing that P2P software should not be illegal even though it can be used for copyright infringement.
When I'm walking around in public, I am shootable with a gun and stabbable with a knife. But as long as nobody actually shoots me with a gun or stabs me with a knife, I have not been wronged.
Wait to find out what the equipment was actually being used for before you pass judgement on its being there. This document is valuable information, but it's not the whole story.
These aren't really features in Outlook itself; this information is provided by the Exchange server that your organization is using. If you were to use Outlook outside an Exchange environment -- say, for checking your personal email from home -- you wouldn't have these features either.
Outlook's advantage in this case is simly that it supports using an Exchange server, while most other mail clients do not. For business use, Exchange is valuable, but for personal use it isn't really applicable, and there are other approaches, such as iCal files published on the web, that are better-suited to the less-centralized patterns that personal communication often follows.
btw, Evolution
, a mail client for the GNOME desktop, does have Exchange support, though I haven't used it myself so I can't say how well it works.SELinux is not a distribution, and it's not a total security solution. It's a component of the kernel that provides what's known as "mandatory access control", which basically lets you configure which roles are allowed to access which resources, so that an attacker who breaks one part of the system is prevented from accessing other parts of the system, regardless of conventional permissions or being root. It does nothing to prevent intrusions; that's left to other components of a security solution. It just helps limit the damage that can be done after an intrusion has occurred.
I think you're missing the point of the GPL slightly. The "viral" (Microsoft's term) nature of the GPL isn't an "issue" to be "fixed"; it's the main point of the GPL. It's the essence of the principle of copyleft. People license their software under the GPL because they specifically want that property of the license.
Linus's "quid pro quo" explanation describes it pretty well. In short: I'm willing to share with you if you're willing to share with me. If you don't want to share your code, then I don't want to share mine with you. The alternative, you taking the code that I worked hard to write and making a closed product out of it without contributing anything in return, is something that many developers don't want, and that's why they choose to distribute their code with a GPL-style copyleft license rather than a BSD-style license.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.htmlAs Krafft said in the interview, Apt is just the tip of the iceberg -- you can't characterize a whole distribution by its package manager alone. That goes for Gentoo as well: Portage is nice, but it's not the one and only thing that differentiates Gentoo from the rest. Both are great distributions, and my "ideal" would be a hybrid of the two, but you really can't just say "Apt is nothing compared to Portage", without even any supporting argument, and conclude from this that Gentoo is superior to Debian. Logic doesn't work that way.
And people say Debian users act too high-and-mighty about their distribution...
(As I write this, BTW, I'm in the process of installing Gentoo in VMware on a Debian host.)
To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to composite video displayed by the video card's overlay hardware, which is what XVideo typically uses. The video frames are processed by a completely separate portion of the video card, and all the 2D hardware sees is the chroma-key color (typically blue) that the overlay uses to determine where to superimpose the video. You could get composited video by using ordinary bitmap-drawing operations instead of the overlay, but then you lose the benefit of hardware-accelerated colorspace conversion (YUV to RGB) and scaling, both of which are fairly intensive operations.
On the other hand, it is possible to do those operations in hardware using the 3D pipeline: colorspace conversion can be done by pixel shaders (or so I infer from the article's mention of GL_ARB_fragment_program) and scaling is a normal part of the process of drawing texture-mapped polygons. So an OpenGL-based XVideo implementation can do its work using the 3D hardware rather than the overlay hardware, and the result is video frames in OpenGL textures which can be mapped onto the screen in any way the user wants.
I know there's no direct relationship between Composite and XRender -- that's why I said Composite "facilitates" the XRender-based compositing approach. The Composite extension is needed for any sort of compositing manager to work, including one with draws the desktop using XRender.
The problem is that Composite doesn't interact well with things that don't use the 2D pipeline, such as OpenGL and XVideo stuff; by default you can't even enable Composite unless you disable GLX, IIRC. Even if you do use a compositing manager which renders the display using GL, you have a problem when an application creates its own, completely-separate GL context for its own graphics. You have the same problem when something uses XVideo. The difficulty is that these things bypass the 2D pipeline and therefore can't be "intercepted" and redirected to offscreen buffers by Composite.
I read a suggestion somewhere (I wish I could remember where, and I have no idea whether this is planned to be implemented) that a fully-GL-based X server like XGL could use the "framebuffer object" extension found in most new OpenGL implementations to neatly handle this problem. GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, if I understand it correctly, would allow XGL to give an application its own GL context, just like usual, but bound to a "framebuffer object" rather than to the actual screen, and the application would be completely oblivious to the fact that it's drawing into a texture in video memory rather than to the screen itself. The code responsible for drawing the actual screen (a compositing manager, XGL itself, etc.) could then just map that texture onto a polygon or whatever, just as it does with any other window, and bingo: 3D applications running in a window get the same translucency, wobble effects (a la Luminocity), and other such eyecandy that everything else does. That's not something that can be done with plain old Composite on a 2D display, AFAIK.
Not really -- Vista will be doing this too, with Direct3D rather than OpenGL.
(And OSX has been doing it since day one.)
What it comes down to is that people want nifty translucency and fluid animation effects even in a 2D GUI, and the best way to implement it is by compositing the desktop using the video card's 3D engine. The Composite extension currently available in Xorg facilitates an alternative approach, based on XRender which still uses the video card's 2D engine, and that's quicker to implement, but not as robust or flexible. (And XRender doesn't benefit from hardware acceleration -- they're working on that now, under the name "Exa", but the nice thing about OpenGL is that we already have it accelerated.)
If you mean in the sense that POV-Ray does, then no, this is very different. It's an "image-based" rendering technique, which means that you create new images using photographs and other such real-world measurements as input. Conventional ray tracing gives you pictures of models built in the computer's memory, which might approximate a real-world object.
The important difference is that you don't have to build a computer model of the geometry you're trying to render. This is both a help because many real-world objects are hard to model accurately in a computer, and a hindrance because you can only render pictures of objects that you actually have in the real world.
I am too. It's wrong no matter what party does it. But nobody should be pointing fingers saying "see, here's what happens when you put that party in control of things" as if theirs were any better. Such behavior is not productive toward solving the underlying problem.
Of course not. But there are a number of people here, presumably Democrats, using this opportunity to bash the Republican party from a high-and-mighty stance. They may be right, but they're not really any better.
I'm just wishing we'd switch to a fair election system so we can get out of the two-party stranglehold. More competition would be as good for the Presidential market as it is for every other market in the US economy.
I have a stack of five optical drives under my desk. Four of them are dead, but only one of those is a DVD drive; the rest are old CD-ROM drives. The working drive is a K Hypermedia 48x CD-RW, which a friend gave to me after replacing it with a DVD burner.
What's not in that stack is another drive of mine which failed in a very peculiar way: it reads silver-colored pressed discs and CD-Rs just fine, but it rejects gold-colored discs, which happen to be about half the DVDs I own. I'm not sure about CD-RWs.
Currently in my computer I have a Plextor 16/10/40A and a generic DVD writer. The Plextor died a few years ago, but was replaced under warranty. These days, I have no problems with either drive.
How about the RSA public-key encryption algorithm?
What's sad is that you've accepted this as a normal part of using your computer.
Right now I'm using a Debian system that's been installed for four years -- and running the "unstable" branch, so there are new versions of packages (sometimes containing bugs) almost daily -- and it with a little care and feeding on my part, it's still running cleanly. I certainly wouldn't want to have to reinstall and lose all the work I've put into getting my system set up the way I like it.
"Local exploit" just means you need an account on the system, not physical access. You could log in over a network using SSH or Telnet and exploit this.
It's getting harder to build hardware that can be used in modern computers -- building a PCI or USB device, for example, requires significant "interface" hardware in addition to the device-specific functionality. Boards covered with tiny surface-mount parts are hard enough to even diagnose when they stop working, let alone fix by hand. There's not as much of use that a computer geek can do with a soldering iron anymore.
However, there's more to being a computer geek than "soldering things together". My degree is in computer science, not computer engineering or electrical engineering, and although I can use a soldering iron reasonably well, I rarely do so because hardware isn't really my thing; software is. I'm working on on writing a 3D renderer and an SSH client in my spare time, and my shelves are full of books on software architecture and design patterns.
I imagine that while useful computer hardware is getting harder to build by hand, it's getting easier to write useful software by hand, thanks to the rising number of open-source projects which one can build upon or contribute to directly. This might explain the trend you've noticed.
(Note that I don't mean to disparage hardware people... it's just that as the field matures, the barrier to entry gets higher, hence fewer amateurs.)