That fact that the sensitive info is on a public network, or networks connected to the internet, is reason enough to believe there is incompetence involved.
It doesn't work that way. Outside of the DoD, just about everything is connected to the Internet these days; workers expect to have access to the Internet for research while they work, or so that they can take breaks during the day and read their personal email.
The fact that you can't make an inbound connection to those computers (because of firewalls, etc.) doesn't matter. Somebody emails the person a trojan movie. That trojan extracts the actual movie, then opens it to distract the user while it creates a new admin account, opens up a PPP over SSH connection on port 80 to some server in [insert random country here], and enables routing between that PPP connection and the intranet. That night, when nobody is paying attention, the bad guys begin looking around the system for interesting information, probing other systems connected to the network, and so on.
As for "cyber war" being a grab for defense money, as long as it results in a decrease in money available for all the other money grabs, I'm all for it. For the most part, those of us in the tech industry know what needs to be done to make computing more secure, and as engineers, we'll fight any attempts to subvert that with useless tech that harms privacy or prevents getting work done. Thus, this "cyber war" is mostly upside. The money was going to get wasted anyway. Society might as well waste it on something that we'll collectively refuse to implement instead of on porno scanners or newer, better military jets that the DoD doesn't want.
The design wasn't severely flawed. The death toll stems from a lot of small design mistakes:
Insufficient insulation around structural steel (that tended to flake off easily).
Sprinkler system design problems—the requirement of manual activation of the pumps, the need for power to the pumps, and only a single water riser with a single connection to it per floor.
Elevator doors and cars that were not blast rated, thus causing the cars to turn into giant fireballs.
Poor placement of elevators and stairwells (all in the center instead of distributing some of them at the corners)
Lack of controlled descent systems.
And the government made a fair number of mistakes, too:
Failure to evacuate the south tower the moment the north tower was hit. Thankfully, some 3,000 people ignored the instructions to shelter in place and evacuated anyway prior to the second crash. Were that not the case, the death toll on that day could have easily doubled.
Lax building code that allowed for the building to be fire-rated at two hours when an actual evacuation (after the first bombing) took five.
Lax building code that does not take into consideration the height of buildings when determining stairwell capacity.
Local laws that prevented employers from requiring employees to practice stairway evacuation.
Placement of the command and control center in one of the WTC buildings (and failure to move it after the first terrorist attack on the WTC).
Laws that allowed the buildings to be noncompliant with local building codes (under which both towers would have required a fourth stairwell, which would have significantly improved the odds of people getting out of the first tower.
Go read the NIST study on the twin towers. It is eye-opening.
Dude.... DS9 was way too bogged down in politics. TNG FTW.
Besides, it's not just fragmentation. The fact of the matter is that Linux isn't designed with any sort of binary compatibility in mind, and consumers don't have the patience for trying to learn why compiling the latest Foo application produced some obscure error about C++ symbol availability... or worse.
This problem came to a head for me when I had to port an app to a newer version of a library to avoid breaking everything else on the system; the library in question was, IIRC, a popular sound library—the sort of library whose existing API should never just suddenly go away and get replaced with a different API. For me, it took all of about fifteen or twenty minutes; for a non-programmer, it would take all of about fifteen or twenty years, all because they couldn't be bothered to include a three-line compatibility shim as part of their new API. And that right there is why Linux will never make it on the desktop as long as the hacker mentality prevails.
What most consumers want is to know that for the next several years, they'll be able to get new apps without having to upgrade their OS, and that those apps will be simple, drag-and-drop binary blobs that "just work". Anything less than that, and Linux won't go anywhere.
True, but it's worth noting that computers weren't able to play back DVD video without dedicated hardware codec chips until about 2000, give or take, and most of the work to hardware accelerate playback with more generic hardware likely didn't begin until about that time. So if you want to write an all-scalar-math version of the codec that sucks down all four cores to decode 480i, then yes, you'll be able to do it without running into patents in only three or four years, but it is likely that most of the implementations that are even marginally usable will remain under patent protection for several more years after that.
It won't be nearly as bad for future codecs now that the techniques are well understood (and thus not realistically patentable for future codecs), but MPEG-2 decoding broke new ground in a lot of ways.
Parts of MPEG-2 (AAC, for one) were not published until 1997, and some hardware codec chips might have patents that were filed much later. Similarly, there may be patents on algorithm optimizations that were filed much later, e.g. patents on ways to use pixel shaders to perform some part of the MPEG-2 decoding process. So although the format will ostensibly become free and clear of patents four years from now in its barest reference implementation, that does not necessarily mean that you can't get sued if you write your own implementation.:-)
Yes, it is. Yahoo, in financial trouble, makes information available to governments for a price. Google, in a couple of decades, could easily run out of money and resort to the same rather than requiring those pesky warrants.
Yahoo was the company that caused an uproar just a couple of years ago when someone posted a copy of their price list for what amounts to espionage services available to world governments. I'd call that abusive, personally.
In context, I'm even more uncomfortable with the wording. Why should I give them any rights to use my content while developing new services? What kind of new services? Does that mean, for example, that without me taking any explicit steps to share them, my private files containing proprietary information could end up on some new Google+ private image search service for my friends to search?
No, proper terms of service and privacy policies should state exactly how you intend to use a customer's data, which does not include the right to expand that usage in whatever way you see fit except at the user's direction. A proper policy makes it explicitly clear that the user's private data will not be shared with anyone unless the user explicitly authorizes that sharing. A proper policy does not grant the company any rights except as required in order to perform the actions that the user initiated. This is not a well-written policy.
And anyone claiming that it is unlikely is a fool. Had Yahoo had such a term of service fifteen years ago, everyone would have called it unlikely to be abused at the time. And now, fifteen years later, the company is in such bad financial shape that I wouldn't put such a desperate move past them if it could keep them afloat. There's no reason that Google couldn't eventually end up in dire straits financially someday, and when they do, they'll have your data and the right to exploit it.
If everything about the two schools were otherwise equal, then sure, but in practice, no two schools are equal unless you aren't looking at the details.
In academics, one school might have a stronger Biology department, whereas the other school might have a stronger English department. And even within a narrow area, one school might have an amazing journalism school, but only limited facilities for student TV production, whereas the other school might have a stronger production curriculum with a weaker J-school.
A given student will face differences in cost, differences in availability of scholarships, differences in what the student has to do to keep certain scholarships, and so on. And the facilities that schools provide will vary in quality and upkeep, from dorms to cafeterias to exercise facilities.
And location matters. Some folks want to stay close to home, others want to go far away, and still others prefer something in the middle. Some folks want to be in a city, some in the country, some prefer to be near (but not in) a city, and some people don't care.
And no matter what girls may tell you, size matters. Can you walk to class or is the campus so big that you have to take a bus? Do you prefer a school with a huge number of people, or would you rather know everybody in your major? What about class sizes? Thirty people? Fifty? Two-hundred? Are your classes mostly taught by professors, or are all of the classes for the first two years taught by a grad student? Are most of the classes taught by instructors? Are those instructors people who work in your particular industry, or is the school just being cheap?
Do you want to join a frat or a sorority? Does your school have them? What about clubs or professional organizations in your major? Debate teams? Competitive science or math teams? Other organizations?
Once you factor in all of those concerns, someone who is serious about academics (or even socializing) will usually find enough other differences to mostly render the quality of the sports team moot. If the local ball team sucks you can always watch a better team on TV or drive to another school to watch a weekend game. For that matter, even a bad team can be fun to watch. You can root for the other team, play with a beach ball in the stands, and generally act like a complete jackass, and nobody will fault you for it. Or you can leave after the band does its halftime show like they always used to do where I went to undergrad (but they did stick around to hear us).
Either way, my point is not that having a good sports team on campus doesn't provide useful entertainment. My point is that with the number of actual differences between any two schools you might choose, the number of non-sports-playing students who end up picking based on that should get lost in the noise, statistically speaking. If it isn't, that suggests that you have a bunch of students with somewhat misplaced priorities.
Why's that? Not many people would stop using refrigeration just because the coolant is more expensive. The cost of coolant is a relatively small factor in most Americans' lives.
Actually, at some point, everyone will have to either stop using refrigeration or replace their hardware, and if that hardware is indoors, that may or may not be possible because of space constraints. In order for a heat exchanger to provide the same level of cooling with the new freon, the size of the coils increases significantly. A lot of water source heat pump owners are massively screwed because nobody builds heat pumps that will fit into the same space indoors as the old systems, and these systems are built into people's closets. (These folks are feeling this problem right now, largely because replacement coils for water source heat pumps are not cost effective, and they start to develop massive freon leaks after only about 10 years, on average).
Not to mention the fact that people with older systems are going to have to start replacing their systems as old-style freon becomes unavailable. You can't just introduce the new freon into an old system. This will be a boon to the heating industry for the folks who replace their systems, not so much for the people who realize that they could live without those systems, so it's a mixed bag. Of course, this won't happen until some time after 2020, but still....
I would suggest that their measurements were not made before Victor's decision, but merely before Victor's realization of that decision. Victor believes that his decision was random, but in fact it was actually biased strongly (and possibly determined entirely) by the overall state of the universe as a whole.
Newtonian physics would suggest that if you could simultaneously know the position, velocity, spin, etc. of every particle in the universe, you could know the future. If one particle is entangled with another particle and "knows" its spin until the entanglement is broken, what is to say that at some basic level, those particles do not also "know" whether Victor is going to choose to entangle the photons or not based upon the inherent predictability of the source of randomness?
On the other hand, if that theory is correct, then it is also entirely possible that we have no free will, and that the entire past, present and future are already predetermined, which would have all sorts of other fun practical implications.... Maybe this is the point where "then a miracle occurs" might be the less depressing explanation....:-)
Except that, assuming sufficiently accurate clocks and the ability to sufficiently delay a stream of multiple photons, the very act of disentangling them is, in fact, transmitting information. Whether the particles are still entangled or not is a binary state, which is information in and of itself.
For example, if you wanted to communicate faster-than-light to Mars, you could ostensibly put a mirror in orbit around the sun such that its distance from Earth was half the distance to Mars, then send half of an entangled photon pair to Mars and half to the mirror. One particle would arrive at Earth at the same time as the other pair would arrive at Mars. If you then disentangled them in a pattern, it would cause the other half to be disentangled with that same pattern. Assuming you know enough information to determine that a particle has been disentangled (and I think that this is the case), then you have faster-than-light transmission of information.
Am I missing something? I'm not saying that such transmission would be even remotely practical, but I don't see how you can say that no information is being conveyed here.
I can't speak for the grandparent, but no, it's more like arguing that because you didn't die from a bullet wound to the leg, you are unlikely to die from a subsequent bullet wound to the leg. Millions of years ago, the primordial atmosphere is believed to have been mostly methane and CO2. From that starting point, nature brought it to where it is today. In the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then, the suggestion that pushing it a fraction of the way back towards that state will cause a runaway greenhouse reaction when it did not occur under similar conditions in the distant past seems utterly absurd on the surface. It's an unbelievably extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary proof.
I don't refute that humans have changed the climate on Earth. I might even believe that if we continue to do what we're doing now, we may screw things up badly enough to make us uncomfortable as a species. However, given Earth's history, I'd rate the chances of a runaway greenhouse effect as somewhere between zero and... well... zero with some almost infinitesimally small margin of error. The odds are so small so as to be essentially a measurement error. It is billions of times more likely that some computer model overflowed the precision of a floating point value somewhere....
I own two Samsung Blu-Ray players. I'm not surprised by this in the slightest. You can usually judge the security of an app by how reliably it does its intended function, and their Blu-Ray players are anything but reliable. (Their older TVs work well, but I've never used one of their newer, networked TVs, which I'm assuming are as buggy as their Blu-Ray players.)
For example:
After a firmware update, one player now stalls for half a second at every DVD layer skip.
The last two Harry Potter movies have audio glitches throughout (on both players, but not on an LG player).
After a firmware update, the other player how has sporadic problems switching between different types of media, sometimes requiring a power cycle to get it back into operational status.
And so on. In short, Samsung's software quality control appears to be utterly awful. So hearing that they have security holes is almost as surprising as hearing that Flash has security holes....
The problem is that the people who choose a school based on the success of their sports teams are for the most part not the students you actually want to attract. The students who are principally focused on the quality of education they will receive are also the ones most likely to care enough to put in the time to get a good education, which means they will (hopefully) do better in life, which means more money flowing back to the school through donations, etc.
What I'm hoping for is a search site that limits results to technical content even if the term has some other meaning in popular culture, and more to the point, blocks all the pop culture crap that hurts my oversized brain. Once they find ways to block all the highly complex content from the non-techies, it shouldn't be all that hard to invert the limits....
If he didn't mean they should negotiate a Java license with Sun, why did he say:
It seems likely that he meant that they should negotiate with Sun for a license. However, the most likely meaning of such a statement (when spoken or written by an engineer) is that it would be easier to get a quality product out the door in a timely manner if they licensed Java from Sun than if they wrote their own implementation, and thus, from an engineering perspective, they needed to do so. The powers that be chose to rewrite it instead of buying a license, therefore no license was needed from either a legal or a technical perspective. It is therefore downright silly to interpret such a statement from an engineer as implying that a license was legally necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't work that way. Outside of the DoD, just about everything is connected to the Internet these days; workers expect to have access to the Internet for research while they work, or so that they can take breaks during the day and read their personal email.
The fact that you can't make an inbound connection to those computers (because of firewalls, etc.) doesn't matter. Somebody emails the person a trojan movie. That trojan extracts the actual movie, then opens it to distract the user while it creates a new admin account, opens up a PPP over SSH connection on port 80 to some server in [insert random country here], and enables routing between that PPP connection and the intranet. That night, when nobody is paying attention, the bad guys begin looking around the system for interesting information, probing other systems connected to the network, and so on.
As for "cyber war" being a grab for defense money, as long as it results in a decrease in money available for all the other money grabs, I'm all for it. For the most part, those of us in the tech industry know what needs to be done to make computing more secure, and as engineers, we'll fight any attempts to subvert that with useless tech that harms privacy or prevents getting work done. Thus, this "cyber war" is mostly upside. The money was going to get wasted anyway. Society might as well waste it on something that we'll collectively refuse to implement instead of on porno scanners or newer, better military jets that the DoD doesn't want.
The design wasn't severely flawed. The death toll stems from a lot of small design mistakes:
And the government made a fair number of mistakes, too:
Go read the NIST study on the twin towers. It is eye-opening.
Dude.... DS9 was way too bogged down in politics. TNG FTW.
Besides, it's not just fragmentation. The fact of the matter is that Linux isn't designed with any sort of binary compatibility in mind, and consumers don't have the patience for trying to learn why compiling the latest Foo application produced some obscure error about C++ symbol availability... or worse.
This problem came to a head for me when I had to port an app to a newer version of a library to avoid breaking everything else on the system; the library in question was, IIRC, a popular sound library—the sort of library whose existing API should never just suddenly go away and get replaced with a different API. For me, it took all of about fifteen or twenty minutes; for a non-programmer, it would take all of about fifteen or twenty years, all because they couldn't be bothered to include a three-line compatibility shim as part of their new API. And that right there is why Linux will never make it on the desktop as long as the hacker mentality prevails.
What most consumers want is to know that for the next several years, they'll be able to get new apps without having to upgrade their OS, and that those apps will be simple, drag-and-drop binary blobs that "just work". Anything less than that, and Linux won't go anywhere.
First to file doesn't preclude the obviousness defense.
...fly into Charles de Gaulle and drive.
Oh, crap. I have a beard. Guess that means....
Close. It's our sun, but in the evil twin universe. Or are we the evil twin? Hard to say, really.
Or crawl through the barrage of bullets muttering something about uptime (obligatory xkcd).
True, but it's worth noting that computers weren't able to play back DVD video without dedicated hardware codec chips until about 2000, give or take, and most of the work to hardware accelerate playback with more generic hardware likely didn't begin until about that time. So if you want to write an all-scalar-math version of the codec that sucks down all four cores to decode 480i, then yes, you'll be able to do it without running into patents in only three or four years, but it is likely that most of the implementations that are even marginally usable will remain under patent protection for several more years after that.
It won't be nearly as bad for future codecs now that the techniques are well understood (and thus not realistically patentable for future codecs), but MPEG-2 decoding broke new ground in a lot of ways.
Parts of MPEG-2 (AAC, for one) were not published until 1997, and some hardware codec chips might have patents that were filed much later. Similarly, there may be patents on algorithm optimizations that were filed much later, e.g. patents on ways to use pixel shaders to perform some part of the MPEG-2 decoding process. So although the format will ostensibly become free and clear of patents four years from now in its barest reference implementation, that does not necessarily mean that you can't get sued if you write your own implementation. :-)
Yes, it is. Yahoo, in financial trouble, makes information available to governments for a price. Google, in a couple of decades, could easily run out of money and resort to the same rather than requiring those pesky warrants.
Yahoo was the company that caused an uproar just a couple of years ago when someone posted a copy of their price list for what amounts to espionage services available to world governments. I'd call that abusive, personally.
In context, I'm even more uncomfortable with the wording. Why should I give them any rights to use my content while developing new services? What kind of new services? Does that mean, for example, that without me taking any explicit steps to share them, my private files containing proprietary information could end up on some new Google+ private image search service for my friends to search?
No, proper terms of service and privacy policies should state exactly how you intend to use a customer's data, which does not include the right to expand that usage in whatever way you see fit except at the user's direction. A proper policy makes it explicitly clear that the user's private data will not be shared with anyone unless the user explicitly authorizes that sharing. A proper policy does not grant the company any rights except as required in order to perform the actions that the user initiated. This is not a well-written policy.
And anyone claiming that it is unlikely is a fool. Had Yahoo had such a term of service fifteen years ago, everyone would have called it unlikely to be abused at the time. And now, fifteen years later, the company is in such bad financial shape that I wouldn't put such a desperate move past them if it could keep them afloat. There's no reason that Google couldn't eventually end up in dire straits financially someday, and when they do, they'll have your data and the right to exploit it.
If everything about the two schools were otherwise equal, then sure, but in practice, no two schools are equal unless you aren't looking at the details.
In academics, one school might have a stronger Biology department, whereas the other school might have a stronger English department. And even within a narrow area, one school might have an amazing journalism school, but only limited facilities for student TV production, whereas the other school might have a stronger production curriculum with a weaker J-school.
A given student will face differences in cost, differences in availability of scholarships, differences in what the student has to do to keep certain scholarships, and so on. And the facilities that schools provide will vary in quality and upkeep, from dorms to cafeterias to exercise facilities.
And location matters. Some folks want to stay close to home, others want to go far away, and still others prefer something in the middle. Some folks want to be in a city, some in the country, some prefer to be near (but not in) a city, and some people don't care.
And no matter what girls may tell you, size matters. Can you walk to class or is the campus so big that you have to take a bus? Do you prefer a school with a huge number of people, or would you rather know everybody in your major? What about class sizes? Thirty people? Fifty? Two-hundred? Are your classes mostly taught by professors, or are all of the classes for the first two years taught by a grad student? Are most of the classes taught by instructors? Are those instructors people who work in your particular industry, or is the school just being cheap?
Do you want to join a frat or a sorority? Does your school have them? What about clubs or professional organizations in your major? Debate teams? Competitive science or math teams? Other organizations?
Once you factor in all of those concerns, someone who is serious about academics (or even socializing) will usually find enough other differences to mostly render the quality of the sports team moot. If the local ball team sucks you can always watch a better team on TV or drive to another school to watch a weekend game. For that matter, even a bad team can be fun to watch. You can root for the other team, play with a beach ball in the stands, and generally act like a complete jackass, and nobody will fault you for it. Or you can leave after the band does its halftime show like they always used to do where I went to undergrad (but they did stick around to hear us).
Either way, my point is not that having a good sports team on campus doesn't provide useful entertainment. My point is that with the number of actual differences between any two schools you might choose, the number of non-sports-playing students who end up picking based on that should get lost in the noise, statistically speaking. If it isn't, that suggests that you have a bunch of students with somewhat misplaced priorities.
Actually, at some point, everyone will have to either stop using refrigeration or replace their hardware, and if that hardware is indoors, that may or may not be possible because of space constraints. In order for a heat exchanger to provide the same level of cooling with the new freon, the size of the coils increases significantly. A lot of water source heat pump owners are massively screwed because nobody builds heat pumps that will fit into the same space indoors as the old systems, and these systems are built into people's closets. (These folks are feeling this problem right now, largely because replacement coils for water source heat pumps are not cost effective, and they start to develop massive freon leaks after only about 10 years, on average).
Not to mention the fact that people with older systems are going to have to start replacing their systems as old-style freon becomes unavailable. You can't just introduce the new freon into an old system. This will be a boon to the heating industry for the folks who replace their systems, not so much for the people who realize that they could live without those systems, so it's a mixed bag. Of course, this won't happen until some time after 2020, but still....
I would suggest that their measurements were not made before Victor's decision, but merely before Victor's realization of that decision. Victor believes that his decision was random, but in fact it was actually biased strongly (and possibly determined entirely) by the overall state of the universe as a whole.
Newtonian physics would suggest that if you could simultaneously know the position, velocity, spin, etc. of every particle in the universe, you could know the future. If one particle is entangled with another particle and "knows" its spin until the entanglement is broken, what is to say that at some basic level, those particles do not also "know" whether Victor is going to choose to entangle the photons or not based upon the inherent predictability of the source of randomness?
On the other hand, if that theory is correct, then it is also entirely possible that we have no free will, and that the entire past, present and future are already predetermined, which would have all sorts of other fun practical implications.... Maybe this is the point where "then a miracle occurs" might be the less depressing explanation.... :-)
Except that, assuming sufficiently accurate clocks and the ability to sufficiently delay a stream of multiple photons, the very act of disentangling them is, in fact, transmitting information. Whether the particles are still entangled or not is a binary state, which is information in and of itself.
For example, if you wanted to communicate faster-than-light to Mars, you could ostensibly put a mirror in orbit around the sun such that its distance from Earth was half the distance to Mars, then send half of an entangled photon pair to Mars and half to the mirror. One particle would arrive at Earth at the same time as the other pair would arrive at Mars. If you then disentangled them in a pattern, it would cause the other half to be disentangled with that same pattern. Assuming you know enough information to determine that a particle has been disentangled (and I think that this is the case), then you have faster-than-light transmission of information.
Am I missing something? I'm not saying that such transmission would be even remotely practical, but I don't see how you can say that no information is being conveyed here.
I can't speak for the grandparent, but no, it's more like arguing that because you didn't die from a bullet wound to the leg, you are unlikely to die from a subsequent bullet wound to the leg. Millions of years ago, the primordial atmosphere is believed to have been mostly methane and CO2. From that starting point, nature brought it to where it is today. In the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then, the suggestion that pushing it a fraction of the way back towards that state will cause a runaway greenhouse reaction when it did not occur under similar conditions in the distant past seems utterly absurd on the surface. It's an unbelievably extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary proof.
I don't refute that humans have changed the climate on Earth. I might even believe that if we continue to do what we're doing now, we may screw things up badly enough to make us uncomfortable as a species. However, given Earth's history, I'd rate the chances of a runaway greenhouse effect as somewhere between zero and... well... zero with some almost infinitesimally small margin of error. The odds are so small so as to be essentially a measurement error. It is billions of times more likely that some computer model overflowed the precision of a floating point value somewhere....
Groundhog Day marathon.
I own two Samsung Blu-Ray players. I'm not surprised by this in the slightest. You can usually judge the security of an app by how reliably it does its intended function, and their Blu-Ray players are anything but reliable. (Their older TVs work well, but I've never used one of their newer, networked TVs, which I'm assuming are as buggy as their Blu-Ray players.)
For example:
And so on. In short, Samsung's software quality control appears to be utterly awful. So hearing that they have security holes is almost as surprising as hearing that Flash has security holes....
Easier.
"... there was a 3.8 kiloton explosion on the ground in California," Cooke told Spaceweather.com.
The problem is that the people who choose a school based on the success of their sports teams are for the most part not the students you actually want to attract. The students who are principally focused on the quality of education they will receive are also the ones most likely to care enough to put in the time to get a good education, which means they will (hopefully) do better in life, which means more money flowing back to the school through donations, etc.
What I'm hoping for is a search site that limits results to technical content even if the term has some other meaning in popular culture, and more to the point, blocks all the pop culture crap that hurts my oversized brain. Once they find ways to block all the highly complex content from the non-techies, it shouldn't be all that hard to invert the limits....
It seems likely that he meant that they should negotiate with Sun for a license. However, the most likely meaning of such a statement (when spoken or written by an engineer) is that it would be easier to get a quality product out the door in a timely manner if they licensed Java from Sun than if they wrote their own implementation, and thus, from an engineering perspective, they needed to do so. The powers that be chose to rewrite it instead of buying a license, therefore no license was needed from either a legal or a technical perspective. It is therefore downright silly to interpret such a statement from an engineer as implying that a license was legally necessary.