I should clarify. If you are intimately familiar with the format, and if it is a multi-frame format, such as a compressed audio or video format, it is possible to programmatically detect that there are frames that reference illegal frames, frames whose structure is not valid, etc. in much the same way that you can detect a JPEG file whose header is invalid.
Again, though, none of this will be caught by merely opening the movie; the movie will generally play correctly up until the decoder encounters the error, at which point it may recover and continue playing content after the gap, or it may just choke and die. Either way, detection isn't something that can be easily automated.
But the open usually won't fail. Unless the error is within the header bytes of a movie or image, the media will open, but will appear wrong. Worse, there is no way to detect this corruption because media file formats generally do not contain any sort of checksums. At best, you could write a script that looks for truncation (not enough bytes to complete a full macroblock), or write a tool that computes the difference between adjacent pixels across macroblock boundaries and flags any pictures in which there is an obvious high energy transition at the macroblock boundary, but even that cannot tell you whether the image is corrupt or simply compressed at a low quality setting with lots of blocking artifacts.
The short answer, however, is "no". Such corruption can't usually be detected programmatically.
If I had to draw an analogy, it's like if the police were to actively search for jaywalkers and only jaywalkers. That's just ridiculous.
No, that's still a poor analogy. Deaths from jaywalking are quantifiable. Jaywalking poses a clear risk to human life in some cases. On the scale of actual damage, jaywalking causes far more harm to society than non-commercial piracy.
It's more like the police creating an entire special crimes division to prosecute the unauthorized sale of lemonade by schoolchildren. In theory, restaurants are harmed because people buy fewer drinks. Therefore, the unauthorized manufacture and sale of lemonade reduces restaurants' potential profit. Further, those unauthorized producers consume and provide resources without paying money back to the government in sales taxes, so the government loses money, too, and they're violating the law. It is in almost every way an accurate analogy; the only real differences are that the composition of a glass of lemonade is not particularly creative and that the copy is not likely to be exact.
The cost to restauranteurs across the nations from these unauthorized lemonade sales is probably huge, possibly even on the order of tens of millions of dollars annually, worldwide, assuming that you quantify every child-sold glass of lemonade as the lost sale of a $3.50 glass of lemonade from a restaurant. Yet although the cost is high in aggregate, the cost per infraction is negligible, and the cost of enforcement would vastly exceed the amount of money you could possibly hope to extract from the destitute kids committing the acts of lemonade piracy.
Now, to take the analogy one step further, I'll describe how the restaurant industry could ostensibly overreact to match the music and movie industries:
Restaurants could build anti-theft devices into every disposable cup of lemonade that introduces a bad flavor when you carry it out the door. This prevents kids from making taste test comparisons to improve the quality of their copies.
As kids find ways to disable these devices, the restaurants could create newer, more sophisticated devices to thwart future attempts.
When kids discover that they can pour the contents into another container, the restaurants could install full body X-ray scanners at the door to detect any concealed pouches of liquids, and could hire full-time guards to monitor those scanners.
When kids realize that they can conceal pouches of liquids inside their mouths, the restaurants could upgrade to full-body CT scanners.
When restaurants discover kids with an illegal lemonade stand, they could obtain a search warrant for their parents' houses to search for evidence that the kids copied their lemonade.
Restaurants could hire lawyers to go to lemonade stands to infiltrate their lines of customers and try to obtain information for prosecution purposes. When the kids and other people in line refuse to tell who the children's parents are, the restauranteur associations could get subpoenas to force them to provide that information so that they can sue the parents. Eventually, though, the judges would realize that the mere existence of a kid with a lemonade stand is not sufficient to prove that his or her parents knew about it, and would begin rejecting the requests for subpoenas.
Restaurants could hire their own cop-like enforcers to break into businesses and inspect lemonade at random, requiring the business owners to prove that they purchased their lemonade through an authorized channel.
Restaurants could mandate that all new infants be equipped with devices implanted in their mouths. These devices would search for sophisticated watermarks (specific chemical additives that make it possible to distinguish authorized lemonade from copies), and would refuse to allow the infants to consume unlicensed lemonade.
You get the idea. To describe the current copyright policing in the U.S. as utterly ridiculous is perhaps
Python, Ruby, Perl and their ilk are very useful for throw-away scripts, and even small applications. But beware if you're thinking of using any dynamic language for anything beyond a small application, especially if there'll be more than one or two developers working on it at any given time.
When working on larger projects, especially involving many developers, any time saved due to the capabilities of dynamic languages will be lost debugging problems that the compiler would've caught when using Java, C#, or C++.
I currently maintain a tool that consists of over 62,000 lines of Perl. In the decade that I've been working on it, I can count the number of times that a compiled language would have saved me from a mistake on two hands, or one if I count in binary.
Maybe the problem isn't the language, but rather that you're using it for types of computation that don't lend themselves to that language. Or maybe your programming team just uses too many polymorphic classes.
Does anyone remember "bubble memory"? Is was going to replace magnetic media. Optical drives were going to replace magnetic media. SSD were going to replace magnetic media.
One out of three isn't bad. Okay, so SSDs haven't completely replaced magnetic media, but in some contexts, they have. Nobody carries around floppies these days, and laptops are clearly heading in that direction, too.
I'll address your point and the GP's point in the same reply.
Cygwin is not part of the OS.
PowerShell is not a UNIX/Linux CLI; it is basically DOS, which while distantly related, behaves very differently, from the syntax for flags versus switches to the basic commands used to list the contents of directories.
Yes and no. It is giving in insofar as it is cooperating with the government by not allowing your users to (ostensibly) use your site for whatever they're investigating. On the other hand, it is not giving in insofar as the government doesn't get squat from you, nor from your users through you, the people they were investigating (if any, and likely other people who they should have been investigating, but weren't yet) are likely to go into hyper-paranoid mode as a result, and tens of thousands of people who don't know how to read are calling the FBI agents and screaming, asking why they shut down your website.
So on balance, it's giving in in much the same way that leaning the dying guy up against a tree with a hand grenade in war movies is giving in.... It is realizing that you can't always save everybody, and it is better for some minor player to go down in a blaze of glory—the minor player in this case being your website, which is a far better choice than the minor player being an actual person (i.e. you going to jail).
In electronics, AFAIK, gold is still used for the bonding wires between the actual silicon chip and the metal pins on the outside of chips in a lot of cases.
In dentistry, AFAIK, gold is still commonly used for crowns, both as the exterior material (sometimes) and as the structural material for porcelain-on-metal crowns (more commonly).
In medicine... well, go read the Wikipedia article on gold. I'm not going to try to explain any of that.:-)
No, IMO gold does have inherent value. Gold is utile and scarce. Therefore, it has value. Although gold's primary use is jewelry, it is also used in electronics, medicine, dentistry, etc.
There is a third choice. When they ask immediately shut down the servers and replace them with a static page that tells your users why, along with contact information for the agents who gave the order. Then, tell them to fuck off and die. They can't jail you for refusing to provide back-door access to a service that no longer exists.
It only takes one big service the size of GMail doing that before riots break out.
The part of the analysis that is incorrect is the part where it assumes that the government will force people to provide the service rather than raising the amount that it will pay. Sure, the government does create such mandates for corporations (more precisely, that they must provide X service for Y cost or else they won't be able to provide any service for the government at all), but A. corporations are not people, and B. they always have the right to refuse to provide the service, so long as they are willing to give up all of their other government-paid-for patients.
That second point is the most important one. Rights are, by definition, balanced against other rights. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." I have the right to free speech. That does not mean that you do not have the right to walk away and not listen to it. And so on. No right exists in a vacuum. The problem with the libertarian philosophy in general is that it tries to treat rights as though they did, which is a fundamentally flawed understanding of rights. Any argument starting from such a flawed premise is prima facie flawed.
The difference is that airports could compete. If even one airport in any given metro area paid attention to the people screaming about how much the experience sucks, and had the right to tear down the abusive screening processes, then over the following few months, the other airports in the area would start to see people choosing the other airport, and they would be forced to do the same.
And not just in metro areas. In the rare situation where I fly back home instead of taking Amtrak anymore, there are two significant airports that are both a couple of hours from where my folks live. Ditching the pornoscanners would be enough to easily make me choose one airport over the other.
If you don't intend to commit the first strike, there's no reason to build missile defenses.
Horseshit. All it takes is one terrorist nutter getting his or her hands on some launch codes and then taking a silo by force, and a major U.S. city is fucked. There's a damn good reason to build missile defenses even if you would never in a million years commit the first strike. Anyone who says otherwise is either living in fantasy land or hasn't watched the news for the past eleven years or so.
Besides, the former Soviet states have this nasty habit of... shall I say... selling their military assets to keep the lights on. As a result, the U.S. is scared shitless that they might sell a Topol-M or similar self-contained missile/launch platform package to the wrong person. All it takes is one.
Are the religious sites with the most viruses perhaps connected with religions that certain governments (whose names and faces have been changed to protect the ignorant) might associate with terrorism? If so, what's the chance that these viruses are, in fact, actually cyberwarfare rather than cybercrime? Just a thought.
do you tell high wire crews fixing storm damaged lines to 'not take the money for the risk' you and i would not be discussing this topic at all if people weren't allowed to take a risk because they'd have to shut down the entire grid (not easy) at certain points just to 'safely' repair some things that can only be fixed either by shutting down a lines power or else work on 'hot' equipment.
A high tension line is not hot when it is being repaired, by definition; it's point-to-point. That thing falls and hits the ground or a tower, and the other end shuts off power to protect the rest of the grid from the overload. There are certain types of repairs that are done on hot wires (mostly things like reconnecting an entire neighborhood to a high voltage, low tension line), but the people who do those types of repairs are trained in how to do them properly and safely, and generally do so with the help of long, nonconductive poles. Thus, except when mistakes happen, such repairs are basically safe.
By contrast, contact in football is not a mistake. It is an inevitable part of the game on a regular basis. Head injuries, therefore, are fairly common. They're not a rare fluke caused by somebody screwing up. They can't be cut dramatically by better training. In other words, the two are not comparable.
If you mean the Oracle v. Google case, it's being tried in the Northern District Court of California. Three of that district's four courts are considered to be in or on the outskirts of the Silicon Valley (and I would surmise that it isn't being tried in Eureka). I think it's safe to say that they should have no trouble finding qualified jurors.
You don't have to practice evacuation all the way down. You just have to practice going down a few floors to ensure that A. everyone knows where the stairs are, B. everyone who is mobility-impaired has a buddy to help them down, C. your company's safety and security personnel have practice at going through the floor and confirming that it is clear of personnel, and D. you don't have any idiots in your sales/marketing/executive team that keep talking on the phone for ten minutes claiming that their call is more important than your drill. (I kid you not, this happens more often than you'd like to think.)
Simple. The judge lets the accused walk and restores any weapons that might have been in his or her possession at the time. You don't even have to provide the accused with the work and home addresses of the asshole FBI agents who crossed the line; odds are the accused will find a way to hunt them down. Sure, the accused will still probably get shot and killed, but the FBI will get the message.
Alternatively, you could go for the much-less-radical solution: convince a hotshot D.A. to prosecute the agents for conspiracy to commit a terrorist act. After all, the fact that the agents provided fake explosives does not inherently prevent the person from studying those explosives, determining them to be fake, and substituting actual explosives, in which case the agents' actions could actually cause the very incident that they claim to be trying to prevent.
If your distro has a current version of the app you want. The problem with the Linux model is that the responsibility lies with the package maintainer, who is usually maintaining a bunch of projects for the distro, rather than with the app developer. People working on a distro have no real reason to keep maintaining support for older distros after a year or two. Thus, even though the app developer may be taking the time to make sure that the app builds and works on older OSes, the distro doesn't provide the packages needed to make it happen.
In the Window/Mac model, by contrast, the people writing the apps want them to be used as broadly as possible, so they design them to work correctly on a wide range of OS versions. Because they release the apps directly to the users without a distro middleman, the users benefit from that desire.
Also, you're failing to account for incompatibilities that arise from library versioning. Distros don't upgrade all of their packages in lock step. Thus, if you have an app that you depend on that only builds correctly against version 1.0 of a library (due to incompatible changes to the API made in version 2.0) and you need to upgrade a second app to fix a bug, there's every possibility that the second app will need version 2.0 of that library. At this point, you're screwed, whether you're building from the source or are grabbing binary builds with the package manager. It's the Linux equivalent of DLL hell.
Indeed, that's exactly where I found myself a few weeks ago. I needed to run a newer version of LIRC (I think) than my distro provided in order to fix a bug, but there was no way to upgrade to that version because it required newer versions of key libraries that other parts of the OS used, and those key libraries were not backwards compatible with the existing binaries throughout the OS. Thus, I had to build LIRC myself (after back-porting it to the old libraries). Note that even compiling it myself was not sufficient; I had to actually rewrite a fair amount of code to get it running on the older machine.
This is yet again, an example of why the Mac/Windows model of binary compatibility works a lot better, and the Mac model in particular. Apple designs their system-provided libraries with binary compatibility in mind so that you can always move to a newer version of the library without worrying about your app breaking (bugs notwithstanding). And for developer-provided libraries, each application is a bundle (folder), containing the app and any libraries that it requires, thus minimizing the risk of conflicts with other apps that may require different versions of that same library.
In short, if the Linux community doesn't want to remain an also-ran that never makes it on the desktop, people have to get over the assumption that most people reinstall their systems every year or two. A lot of the consumers I know are still using computers from five, six, even seven years ago, running the original OS that came with them, but they still buy/download new versions of applications and run them. And there are other people who still run applications that were written a decade ago (without modification) on their current systems because the development team stopped supporting the app.
That's the level of consistent compatibility that an OS must achieve if it wants to be successful as a consumer OS. I'd love to think that the Linux community can pull off the sort of long-term thinking required; that said, I made similar comments on Slashdot several years ago, most folks agreed with me, and here we are, years later, having the same discussion, so I'm not holding my breath. My challenge to the Linux community: prove my cynicism wrong.
Given the Muslim attitude towards porn, it is no surprise that he would try to hide the incriminating files. That is not at all relevant evidence of guilt, and would probably be stricken from the record on first amendment grounds if the prosecution were foolish enough to bring it up.
However, the fact that the person did try to hide it might be construed as probable cause to ask for a search warrant to look for further evidence, in which case either this guy has the ability to decode that information or he doesn't, so he's either probably guilty or probably not.
Slashdot Mirror
I should clarify. If you are intimately familiar with the format, and if it is a multi-frame format, such as a compressed audio or video format, it is possible to programmatically detect that there are frames that reference illegal frames, frames whose structure is not valid, etc. in much the same way that you can detect a JPEG file whose header is invalid.
Again, though, none of this will be caught by merely opening the movie; the movie will generally play correctly up until the decoder encounters the error, at which point it may recover and continue playing content after the gap, or it may just choke and die. Either way, detection isn't something that can be easily automated.
But the open usually won't fail. Unless the error is within the header bytes of a movie or image, the media will open, but will appear wrong. Worse, there is no way to detect this corruption because media file formats generally do not contain any sort of checksums. At best, you could write a script that looks for truncation (not enough bytes to complete a full macroblock), or write a tool that computes the difference between adjacent pixels across macroblock boundaries and flags any pictures in which there is an obvious high energy transition at the macroblock boundary, but even that cannot tell you whether the image is corrupt or simply compressed at a low quality setting with lots of blocking artifacts.
The short answer, however, is "no". Such corruption can't usually be detected programmatically.
No, that's still a poor analogy. Deaths from jaywalking are quantifiable. Jaywalking poses a clear risk to human life in some cases. On the scale of actual damage, jaywalking causes far more harm to society than non-commercial piracy.
It's more like the police creating an entire special crimes division to prosecute the unauthorized sale of lemonade by schoolchildren. In theory, restaurants are harmed because people buy fewer drinks. Therefore, the unauthorized manufacture and sale of lemonade reduces restaurants' potential profit. Further, those unauthorized producers consume and provide resources without paying money back to the government in sales taxes, so the government loses money, too, and they're violating the law. It is in almost every way an accurate analogy; the only real differences are that the composition of a glass of lemonade is not particularly creative and that the copy is not likely to be exact.
The cost to restauranteurs across the nations from these unauthorized lemonade sales is probably huge, possibly even on the order of tens of millions of dollars annually, worldwide, assuming that you quantify every child-sold glass of lemonade as the lost sale of a $3.50 glass of lemonade from a restaurant. Yet although the cost is high in aggregate, the cost per infraction is negligible, and the cost of enforcement would vastly exceed the amount of money you could possibly hope to extract from the destitute kids committing the acts of lemonade piracy.
Now, to take the analogy one step further, I'll describe how the restaurant industry could ostensibly overreact to match the music and movie industries:
You get the idea. To describe the current copyright policing in the U.S. as utterly ridiculous is perhaps
I currently maintain a tool that consists of over 62,000 lines of Perl. In the decade that I've been working on it, I can count the number of times that a compiled language would have saved me from a mistake on two hands, or one if I count in binary.
Maybe the problem isn't the language, but rather that you're using it for types of computation that don't lend themselves to that language. Or maybe your programming team just uses too many polymorphic classes.
Actually English standards are correct. It's American standards that are incorrect. You're following the British English rules.
One out of three isn't bad. Okay, so SSDs haven't completely replaced magnetic media, but in some contexts, they have. Nobody carries around floppies these days, and laptops are clearly heading in that direction, too.
I'll address your point and the GP's point in the same reply.
Cygwin is not part of the OS.
PowerShell is not a UNIX/Linux CLI; it is basically DOS, which while distantly related, behaves very differently, from the syntax for flags versus switches to the basic commands used to list the contents of directories.
Yes and no. It is giving in insofar as it is cooperating with the government by not allowing your users to (ostensibly) use your site for whatever they're investigating. On the other hand, it is not giving in insofar as the government doesn't get squat from you, nor from your users through you, the people they were investigating (if any, and likely other people who they should have been investigating, but weren't yet) are likely to go into hyper-paranoid mode as a result, and tens of thousands of people who don't know how to read are calling the FBI agents and screaming, asking why they shut down your website.
So on balance, it's giving in in much the same way that leaning the dying guy up against a tree with a hand grenade in war movies is giving in.... It is realizing that you can't always save everybody, and it is better for some minor player to go down in a blaze of glory—the minor player in this case being your website, which is a far better choice than the minor player being an actual person (i.e. you going to jail).
In electronics, AFAIK, gold is still used for the bonding wires between the actual silicon chip and the metal pins on the outside of chips in a lot of cases.
In dentistry, AFAIK, gold is still commonly used for crowns, both as the exterior material (sometimes) and as the structural material for porcelain-on-metal crowns (more commonly).
In medicine... well, go read the Wikipedia article on gold. I'm not going to try to explain any of that. :-)
Not really. I'd expect a lot more Mac users know how to use a UNIX/Linux command line than Windows users, given that Mac OS X... you know... has one.
No, IMO gold does have inherent value. Gold is utile and scarce. Therefore, it has value. Although gold's primary use is jewelry, it is also used in electronics, medicine, dentistry, etc.
There is a third choice. When they ask immediately shut down the servers and replace them with a static page that tells your users why, along with contact information for the agents who gave the order. Then, tell them to fuck off and die. They can't jail you for refusing to provide back-door access to a service that no longer exists.
It only takes one big service the size of GMail doing that before riots break out.
The part of the analysis that is incorrect is the part where it assumes that the government will force people to provide the service rather than raising the amount that it will pay. Sure, the government does create such mandates for corporations (more precisely, that they must provide X service for Y cost or else they won't be able to provide any service for the government at all), but A. corporations are not people, and B. they always have the right to refuse to provide the service, so long as they are willing to give up all of their other government-paid-for patients.
That second point is the most important one. Rights are, by definition, balanced against other rights. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." I have the right to free speech. That does not mean that you do not have the right to walk away and not listen to it. And so on. No right exists in a vacuum. The problem with the libertarian philosophy in general is that it tries to treat rights as though they did, which is a fundamentally flawed understanding of rights. Any argument starting from such a flawed premise is prima facie flawed.
Not really the same comment, just a couple of the same facts.
That's okay. Most of what they do is for show anyway. At least this way, they'll be doing nothing cheaper and less invasively.
The difference is that airports could compete. If even one airport in any given metro area paid attention to the people screaming about how much the experience sucks, and had the right to tear down the abusive screening processes, then over the following few months, the other airports in the area would start to see people choosing the other airport, and they would be forced to do the same.
And not just in metro areas. In the rare situation where I fly back home instead of taking Amtrak anymore, there are two significant airports that are both a couple of hours from where my folks live. Ditching the pornoscanners would be enough to easily make me choose one airport over the other.
Horseshit. All it takes is one terrorist nutter getting his or her hands on some launch codes and then taking a silo by force, and a major U.S. city is fucked. There's a damn good reason to build missile defenses even if you would never in a million years commit the first strike. Anyone who says otherwise is either living in fantasy land or hasn't watched the news for the past eleven years or so.
Besides, the former Soviet states have this nasty habit of... shall I say... selling their military assets to keep the lights on. As a result, the U.S. is scared shitless that they might sell a Topol-M or similar self-contained missile/launch platform package to the wrong person. All it takes is one.
Are the religious sites with the most viruses perhaps connected with religions that certain governments (whose names and faces have been changed to protect the ignorant) might associate with terrorism? If so, what's the chance that these viruses are, in fact, actually cyberwarfare rather than cybercrime? Just a thought.
A high tension line is not hot when it is being repaired, by definition; it's point-to-point. That thing falls and hits the ground or a tower, and the other end shuts off power to protect the rest of the grid from the overload. There are certain types of repairs that are done on hot wires (mostly things like reconnecting an entire neighborhood to a high voltage, low tension line), but the people who do those types of repairs are trained in how to do them properly and safely, and generally do so with the help of long, nonconductive poles. Thus, except when mistakes happen, such repairs are basically safe.
By contrast, contact in football is not a mistake. It is an inevitable part of the game on a regular basis. Head injuries, therefore, are fairly common. They're not a rare fluke caused by somebody screwing up. They can't be cut dramatically by better training. In other words, the two are not comparable.
If you mean the Oracle v. Google case, it's being tried in the Northern District Court of California. Three of that district's four courts are considered to be in or on the outskirts of the Silicon Valley (and I would surmise that it isn't being tried in Eureka). I think it's safe to say that they should have no trouble finding qualified jurors.
Oops. I missed that part. That'll teach me to read the headline. :-)
In that case, edit that to say, "...and, were this in the United States, would probably be stricken...".
You don't have to practice evacuation all the way down. You just have to practice going down a few floors to ensure that A. everyone knows where the stairs are, B. everyone who is mobility-impaired has a buddy to help them down, C. your company's safety and security personnel have practice at going through the floor and confirming that it is clear of personnel, and D. you don't have any idiots in your sales/marketing/executive team that keep talking on the phone for ten minutes claiming that their call is more important than your drill. (I kid you not, this happens more often than you'd like to think.)
Simple. The judge lets the accused walk and restores any weapons that might have been in his or her possession at the time. You don't even have to provide the accused with the work and home addresses of the asshole FBI agents who crossed the line; odds are the accused will find a way to hunt them down. Sure, the accused will still probably get shot and killed, but the FBI will get the message.
Alternatively, you could go for the much-less-radical solution: convince a hotshot D.A. to prosecute the agents for conspiracy to commit a terrorist act. After all, the fact that the agents provided fake explosives does not inherently prevent the person from studying those explosives, determining them to be fake, and substituting actual explosives, in which case the agents' actions could actually cause the very incident that they claim to be trying to prevent.
If your distro has a current version of the app you want. The problem with the Linux model is that the responsibility lies with the package maintainer, who is usually maintaining a bunch of projects for the distro, rather than with the app developer. People working on a distro have no real reason to keep maintaining support for older distros after a year or two. Thus, even though the app developer may be taking the time to make sure that the app builds and works on older OSes, the distro doesn't provide the packages needed to make it happen.
In the Window/Mac model, by contrast, the people writing the apps want them to be used as broadly as possible, so they design them to work correctly on a wide range of OS versions. Because they release the apps directly to the users without a distro middleman, the users benefit from that desire.
Also, you're failing to account for incompatibilities that arise from library versioning. Distros don't upgrade all of their packages in lock step. Thus, if you have an app that you depend on that only builds correctly against version 1.0 of a library (due to incompatible changes to the API made in version 2.0) and you need to upgrade a second app to fix a bug, there's every possibility that the second app will need version 2.0 of that library. At this point, you're screwed, whether you're building from the source or are grabbing binary builds with the package manager. It's the Linux equivalent of DLL hell.
Indeed, that's exactly where I found myself a few weeks ago. I needed to run a newer version of LIRC (I think) than my distro provided in order to fix a bug, but there was no way to upgrade to that version because it required newer versions of key libraries that other parts of the OS used, and those key libraries were not backwards compatible with the existing binaries throughout the OS. Thus, I had to build LIRC myself (after back-porting it to the old libraries). Note that even compiling it myself was not sufficient; I had to actually rewrite a fair amount of code to get it running on the older machine.
This is yet again, an example of why the Mac/Windows model of binary compatibility works a lot better, and the Mac model in particular. Apple designs their system-provided libraries with binary compatibility in mind so that you can always move to a newer version of the library without worrying about your app breaking (bugs notwithstanding). And for developer-provided libraries, each application is a bundle (folder), containing the app and any libraries that it requires, thus minimizing the risk of conflicts with other apps that may require different versions of that same library.
In short, if the Linux community doesn't want to remain an also-ran that never makes it on the desktop, people have to get over the assumption that most people reinstall their systems every year or two. A lot of the consumers I know are still using computers from five, six, even seven years ago, running the original OS that came with them, but they still buy/download new versions of applications and run them. And there are other people who still run applications that were written a decade ago (without modification) on their current systems because the development team stopped supporting the app.
That's the level of consistent compatibility that an OS must achieve if it wants to be successful as a consumer OS. I'd love to think that the Linux community can pull off the sort of long-term thinking required; that said, I made similar comments on Slashdot several years ago, most folks agreed with me, and here we are, years later, having the same discussion, so I'm not holding my breath. My challenge to the Linux community: prove my cynicism wrong.
Given the Muslim attitude towards porn, it is no surprise that he would try to hide the incriminating files. That is not at all relevant evidence of guilt, and would probably be stricken from the record on first amendment grounds if the prosecution were foolish enough to bring it up.
However, the fact that the person did try to hide it might be construed as probable cause to ask for a search warrant to look for further evidence, in which case either this guy has the ability to decode that information or he doesn't, so he's either probably guilty or probably not.