That's just Dell's opinion. Contract law actually requires (for most contracts) the presence of an intentional mark, made for the express purpose of agreement to the contract. None of those acts described fit the bill; they are all things that occur in the normal course of usage of the software.
This is like you coming up to me on the street, selling me a newspaper, and then saying to me, "By opening that newspaper, you agree to never use it to line your birdcage." This is patently ridiculous - it's my newspaper now, not yours, and if Polly needs some cage lining, there's nothing you can do about it. Your statement that I agree has no force, because I do not in fact agree. Agreements require actual two-way consent, and for commercial software, that means signing real contracts.
This would be simple from a software company's perspective - require businesses that obtain your software to mandate that customers sign EULA cards or somesuch. But as it is, these "agreements" are not agreed upon, and so are not binding contracts.
Also, for that card, it's worth the money for the dial-a-power feature: right now, i'm about six feet from the base station, so I'm transmitting at 1mW and saving battery. When I want to do something interesting (like pull into the parking lot of a wireless-covered building in order to check something online from my car), I can crank it up to 100. It's fun.
Georgia Tech's policy in this course is "don't discuss homework."
The student in question discussed his homework. Furthermore, he admits that he did so, and argues that he should have been allowed to do so, and therefore is justified.
Now, you can argue that allowing more collaboration is appropriate for this course. (The equivalent course at my university requires all work to be done in pairs.) You can say that it undermines the educational process to forbid students from seeking help from each other.
You may even be right. I'm likely to agree - this course sounds like it's taking the idea of noncollaboration to an excess.
But the fact is, at a university with an honor code, when you're told that a certain level of collaboration is cheating, then that amount is cheating - you are on your honor to understand and follow the policies of the course. If the policies don't make sense to you - make a stink! Complain to the professor. Complain to the department. Write a scathing end-of-semester evaluation.
But if you turn in work that you know falls outside the bounds of what is allowed under the honor code, then you've crossed the line.
Remember, though: under most honor codes, you haven't committed a violation until you've turned the work in. It's always your choce not to do so. If this student were really interested in learning the material, then he could have collaborated with others, produced a solution set, refrained from turning it in, then looked at the published solutions and seen where his differed. Instead, he chose to submit work he knew to be in violation.
I have very little sympathy for this very poor choice.
He said *PowerBook*. If I'm going to run X applications on my Mac laptop, three buttons would be nice - two is nearly absolutely necessary to avoid keypress contortions.
Sure, I can buy a USB external mouse, but what am I going to mouse with when I'm sitting in my easy chair surfing wirelessly? It'd be nice if my portable included all of the features I need in its portable package - the whole idea is that I'm not always plugging and unplugging my mouse.
You're right, of course - throwing more processors at the problem does not evade Turing's uncomputable brick wall.
There's an interesting example that one of my professors pointed out in class - a kind of problem for which being multithreaded (not necessarily multiprocessor, just an environment in which you can spawn threads, are guaranteed bounded waiting for your next turn at the processor, and can kill off threads) actually buys you the ability to solve more problems.
Consider the problem of reducing Boolean expressions to their truth values. Now add a twist: in addition to the values T and F, you introduce a value B (bottom). Trying to compute the truth value of B results in an infinite loop, so, for instance, a program that tries to compute the truth value of the expression "T AND B" never returns a result. This is the correct behavior for such a program; neither true nor false is the right answer, so the program goes into an infinite loop.
The interesting thing is when you consider boolean short-circuiting. What's the value of "F AND B"? If you're using a short-circuiting AND operator, you see the F, decide not to bother with the right hand side, and return F as the value of the expression.
But now order matters: "F AND B" returns F, but "B AND F" never returns. This doesn't seem to make sense; in both cases you'd like to return F. Boolean operators should be commutative, even in this new world where you might randomly blow up upon encountering the value B.
The solution is to implement your AND reducer as a function that spawns two threads which are handed each side of the expression. It returns T if both threads return T; if either thread returns F, the other thread is killed off and F is returned. A similar trick is performed for the OR reducer.
The result is that you can now compute the truth values for all expressions that have Bs only in parts of the expression which are not necessary to compute due to short-circuiting. A straightforward, single-threaded approach will go into infinite loops for some inputs that this method will find a result for.
If I own a house, I have the right to enter it and to live in it; nobody else does, and I can leave the house to my descendants. The house isn't a 'title of nobility', and neither is copyright.
(Not that physical property and "intellectual property" are at all similar - it's just that neither constitutes a grant of nobility.)
This is absolutely true. However, these systems are not at all designed to foil the presumed intent of the recipient to copy the content (as DRM systems for copyrighted entertainment content are). They're designed to give a level of automatic prevention against inadvertent copying.
Consider, as an example: I run a business in which sensitive information is bandied about by internal corporate e-mail. In order to keep a whole variety of bad things from happening to that information (subpoenas years later, inadvertent forwarding to somebody who shouldn't see it, proprietary information being leaked by cast-off hardware), I enact an electronic document destruction policy; one year after an internal e-mail is sent, it is destroyed. I mandate use of one of these self-shredding systems to help enforce my policy.
Now I haven't really helped anything from a strict can-it-be-done standpoint: a whistle-blowing employee can still take the aforementioned camcorder and set it up; a sysadmin who's for some reason obsessed with archiving all his mail can probably download a crack for the system in question. These issues are pushed into the realm of policy, but the number of such issues that have to be dealt with strictly by policy means decreases by an order of magnitude. What I have really accomplished is to drastically reduce the probability that something will happen that nobody in the organization intended.
Why does the wireless card have to protrude out like that? Why not integrate it, a la Airport, into the chassis of the device, and use large internal antennae?
Sure, you can pull the wireless card and put some other card in - but why not roll it in fully integrated, and leave the slot available?
This is the later Klingon look, but in TNG Worf says "something happened" to change the Klingons' appearance that they don't discuss.
If I recall correctly, this was in an episode that was an intentionally campy retrospective; Worf's comment was a joke on the part of the writers. Don't think of this as a continuity error; rather, think of it as the new series taking advantage of better makeup techniques in order to better represent the Klingons.
Star Trek, despite its geeky appeal, does not have to have absolute internal consistency.:)
I hate to be a Graminazi but you just asked for it.:)
Your sentence literally means: "Until it has grammar checking capabilities like those of Word, and also has WordPerfect, it will not replace Word on my computer."
I doubt that you want StarOffice to include WordPerfect; I'd bet that you intended to say "Until it has grammar checking capabilities like those of Word and WordPerfect, it will not replace Word on my computer." Your sentence doesn't say what you mean, but a grammar checker won't flag it because it is a valid, grammatical sentence.
Icon suggestion:
on
ACM vs. RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Funny
A human brain with a padlock running through or around it?
I believe that, upon intrusion detection, the IBM card zeroizes all its RAM in a secure and non-recoverable fashion. The idea is that you can generate your crypto keys and keep them on the card, never exposing them anywhere outside its secure perimeter. This means that if an attacker gains physical access to your server (by breaking into the machine room or somesuch), even that level of access will be insufficient to recover the key material.
This level of paranoia is appropriate for organizations for whom Crypto is Life (think CAs, credit card companies, banks, big e-commerce houses, etc.)
I wouldn't be surprised if a determined cracker could make it out from packet traffic. Let's say you're looking for someone su'ing to root; this behavior has a fairly established pattern:
It may occur very soon into the session - if you're logging in to do system maintenance, the su command may be the very first thing that you type.
It follows a fairly well-timed pattern; the su command is three typed characters (s, u, return), each of which is echoed back to the user's terminal, then a glob of data ("Password: "). Then there are some characters sent at a typing cadence, but not echoed back to the terminal (this alone might be enough to isolate passwords).
It probably would not be hard at all to isolate packets from an SSH dump in order to determine exactly which ones constitute a password. It's trivial, from this, to determine the length of the password. You also have timing information which, if accurately collected and combined with a profile on the typist, might allow you to refine a brute-force search considerably (the paper's researchers apparently were able to speed up their brute force crack by a factor of fifty - if you had a profile of the typist on file, you might be able to improve that by an order of magnitude or two.)
Another vulnerability stemming from having touch-type profiles: during World War II, individual telegraph operators could be recognized by their "fist," the characteristic way they typed their messages. It's probable that individual computer users could be similarly recognized and automatically profiled.
Fox - owned by a content congomerate of the same name
CBS - owned by Westinghouse, which is diversifying into ownership of cable music channels
We can't reasonably expect unbiased reporting on this subject when the top five television news companies all have a vested interest in preserving the DMCA intact.
You're spouting nonsense and you know it. Do you really think that broad overgeneralizations about the scope of the DMCA and faulty conclusions are the best way to fight it?
The DMCA has to go, but clueless, uninformed rambling only helps the other side.
(On that note: has anyone written an anti-DMCA advocacy FAQ? We need some guidelines in order to present a unified front to the politicians and media. The Linux
Advocacy mini-HOWTO is a terrific example of the type of document meant to keep advocacy focused and rational, and has been quite successful.)
Agreed up to a point. Law enforcement has a legitimate interest in monitoring the communications of a very limited, very deserving subset of people. This type of activity - implantation of hardware bugs - is, in my opinion, an adequate balance between the individual right to privacy and the government's need to investigate crime. It permits law-abiding citizens and criminals alike to use crypto, and prohibits driftnet operations in which everyone's communications are sniffed; law enforcement must have a sufficiently compelling interest in someone's communications to enter their home or office and physically plant the bug.
The problem in this specific case is that the FBI had a search warrant, not a wiretap authorization. There's a distinct difference: the suspect knows that his home or office has been searched when a search warrant is acted upon. In the case of a wiretap, the suspect necessarily knows nothing.
What we have here is law enforcement gaining authorization for one type of activity - a search of a premises - and undertaking in another. I agree that keystroke logging is a valid investigative technique, but there needs to be a legal structure set up to make sure that it's not abused, as, I believe, it was in this case.
Why is it okay for Joe Sysadmin to obscure details of his network configuration, but it's better for software writers (and particularly cryptologists) to release the details of their work?
The answer is simple: ease of review. Obscurity is meant to put stumbling blocks in the path of those who desire to review the system, for whatever motive - be it academic curiosity, security assurance, or even to learn how to penetrate into it. The hidden web server trick described in the article, closed-source security software, and proprietary crypto are all examples of techniques that are meant to obscure and thus make review difficult.
The question of whether to obscure, then, reduces to whether you'd like the system you're building to be reviewed. There are several very bad reasons that could motivate you to hinder review of your system: attempting to hide security flaws you either know or suspect to be found therein is one of the bigger ones.
But the decision to impede review can be perfectly reasonable - depending on who the reviewers are likely to be. If you know, for instance, that your community of reviewers includes honest, skilled people who want to use your product and who will alert you to problems that they find, then that's a very big reason not to obscure anything. This is what motivates Linus, the Apache group, the GnuPG folks, and everyone else out there tirelessly trying to produce systems that function in the most security-hostile of environments. These folks have literally thousands to millions of users, almost all of whom are honest, and many of whom are skilled enough to discover flaws in the system.
Joe Sysadmin doesn't have that kind of community. His users are very likely incapable of discovering security flaws, or if they are, unlikely to share the information they find with Joe. The majority of people who might be interested in reviewing Joe's network are malicious and intent upon using any information they find to the detriment of Joe and his users.
In this case, the decision to put up walls of obscurity is as much of a no-brainer as the decision to use an open-source web server. Joe has assessed his community of potential reviewers and has determined that, on the whole, he'd rather not have that set of people learning things about his network. He will certainly use products that have proven themselves under strict review, but he is under no obligation to describe to anyone how he's configured his network. In his situation, doing so would only undermine his security.
It looks like most of the webpad-type appliances I've seen all run Linux; it is the dominant desktop OS for this market.
This means that, if this market takes off, suddenly lots more software companies have to support Linux. We could see (dare I say it?) a Quicktime port.
Precisely. The GPL gains all of its legal force from copyright laws; the gist is that, if you distribute or modify GPL'd software in ways that contradict its strictures, you are in violation of the author's copyright. When authors no longer have their copyright, they lose their right to enforce the GPL.
A couple of points, though: first, there is absolutely no software in existence which has passed out of copyright through expiration (though authors have released software into the public domain); second, copyright is 75 years only for works that are written 'for hire' (that is, produced by a corporation as part of its business). Works generated by individual authors, in which category most GPL'd software falls, have copyrights that extend 50 years beyond the death of the author.
Amen. Vendors should not have any defined idea of where their files go; system administrators should have fine-grained control over where software packages end up. (The --prefix option in configure scripts is a godsend; every package should use something like this!)
Good control over where software goes facilitates terrific schemes for software management, like the outstanding, time-tested/usr/site
system, which permits extremely fine-grained control over what packages are installed, allows multiple architectures to be handled at once, and splits installs such that all of a package's files all go under one logical place, so that the whole package can be terminated with a simple rm -rf.
This is one place where free software leapfrogs commercial, in its ability to handle nonstandard placement (after all, if the software doesn't like where you want to put it, just fix it so it does!)
"the record format- a 'score' number which is zero-filled and represents the number of certified platinums times the number of years since the album's release..."
I don't quite understand why this is a relevant measurement of album performance. It weights albums dramatically towards those that have been out longer - witness the absolute domination of the Beatles atop the list of performers, simply because their albums were released first. I like the Beatles, but this method of accounting doesn't make all that much sense to me.
Of course this study is going to indicate lackadaisical performance by the Britney Spears and N'Syncs of today's music world: their albums haven't had nearly enough time to build up the massive multiplier factors awarded to those albums from older, more established bands. If an album were to be released today that became an instant craze, selling 60 million copies in one year, it would take yet another year to eclipse a merely double-platinum album that had been released in 1970.
Clearly, the project is trying to weight away from such insane explosions of buying frenzy, and towards artists who have established careers practicing their craft. This is a noble goal, but explicitly multiplying by number of years since release causes older acts to automatically become more significant simply by virtue of being older; a one-hit wonder from the early eighties will outrank any number of career artists who started in the mid-nineties and show no sign of stopping anytime soon.
Perhaps a better weighting factor for the purposes of the study would be one that awarded different point values to different platinum events. An album's first platinum would be awarded a flat rate; subsequent platinum certifications could be multiplied by the number of years since the album's release. This could be somehow extended to artists, as well - artists who consistently earn platinum status could be rewarded, even if no individual album does extraordinarily well. If you haven't gone platinum in a while, you don't get awarded more points for rocking in your chair and reminiscing about when you were a star.
Re:Quick Question thats not in the FAQ
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions
of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will
be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to
address new problems or concerns.
If the FSF did try to pull such a stunt, a strong argument could be made that the 'any later version' clause can be ignored: the software author would have a promise in writing that the new GPL would not contain any such backdoors, and the FSF would have violated that promise.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just Dell's opinion. Contract law actually requires (for most contracts) the presence of an intentional mark, made for the express purpose of agreement to the contract. None of those acts described fit the bill; they are all things that occur in the normal course of usage of the software.
This is like you coming up to me on the street, selling me a newspaper, and then saying to me, "By opening that newspaper, you agree to never use it to line your birdcage." This is patently ridiculous - it's my newspaper now, not yours, and if Polly needs some cage lining, there's nothing you can do about it. Your statement that I agree has no force, because I do not in fact agree. Agreements require actual two-way consent, and for commercial software, that means signing real contracts.
This would be simple from a software company's perspective - require businesses that obtain your software to mandate that customers sign EULA cards or somesuch. But as it is, these "agreements" are not agreed upon, and so are not binding contracts.
Also, for that card, it's worth the money for the dial-a-power feature: right now, i'm about six feet from the base station, so I'm transmitting at 1mW and saving battery. When I want to do something interesting (like pull into the parking lot of a wireless-covered building in order to check something online from my car), I can crank it up to 100. It's fun.
Georgia Tech's policy in this course is "don't discuss homework."
The student in question discussed his homework. Furthermore, he admits that he did so, and argues that he should have been allowed to do so, and therefore is justified.
Now, you can argue that allowing more collaboration is appropriate for this course. (The equivalent course at my university requires all work to be done in pairs.) You can say that it undermines the educational process to forbid students from seeking help from each other.
You may even be right. I'm likely to agree - this course sounds like it's taking the idea of noncollaboration to an excess.
But the fact is, at a university with an honor code, when you're told that a certain level of collaboration is cheating, then that amount is cheating - you are on your honor to understand and follow the policies of the course. If the policies don't make sense to you - make a stink! Complain to the professor. Complain to the department. Write a scathing end-of-semester evaluation.
But if you turn in work that you know falls outside the bounds of what is allowed under the honor code, then you've crossed the line.
Remember, though: under most honor codes, you haven't committed a violation until you've turned the work in. It's always your choce not to do so. If this student were really interested in learning the material, then he could have collaborated with others, produced a solution set, refrained from turning it in, then looked at the published solutions and seen where his differed. Instead, he chose to submit work he knew to be in violation.
I have very little sympathy for this very poor choice.
He said *PowerBook*. If I'm going to run X applications on my Mac laptop, three buttons would be nice - two is nearly absolutely necessary to avoid keypress contortions.
Sure, I can buy a USB external mouse, but what am I going to mouse with when I'm sitting in my easy chair surfing wirelessly? It'd be nice if my portable included all of the features I need in its portable package - the whole idea is that I'm not always plugging and unplugging my mouse.
You're right, of course - throwing more processors at the problem does not evade Turing's uncomputable brick wall.
There's an interesting example that one of my professors pointed out in class - a kind of problem for which being multithreaded (not necessarily multiprocessor, just an environment in which you can spawn threads, are guaranteed bounded waiting for your next turn at the processor, and can kill off threads) actually buys you the ability to solve more problems.
Consider the problem of reducing Boolean expressions to their truth values. Now add a twist: in addition to the values T and F, you introduce a value B (bottom). Trying to compute the truth value of B results in an infinite loop, so, for instance, a program that tries to compute the truth value of the expression "T AND B" never returns a result. This is the correct behavior for such a program; neither true nor false is the right answer, so the program goes into an infinite loop.
The interesting thing is when you consider boolean short-circuiting. What's the value of "F AND B"? If you're using a short-circuiting AND operator, you see the F, decide not to bother with the right hand side, and return F as the value of the expression.
But now order matters: "F AND B" returns F, but "B AND F" never returns. This doesn't seem to make sense; in both cases you'd like to return F. Boolean operators should be commutative, even in this new world where you might randomly blow up upon encountering the value B.
The solution is to implement your AND reducer as a function that spawns two threads which are handed each side of the expression. It returns T if both threads return T; if either thread returns F, the other thread is killed off and F is returned. A similar trick is performed for the OR reducer.
The result is that you can now compute the truth values for all expressions that have Bs only in parts of the expression which are not necessary to compute due to short-circuiting. A straightforward, single-threaded approach will go into infinite loops for some inputs that this method will find a result for.
I don't think this follows.
If I own a house, I have the right to enter it and to live in it; nobody else does, and I can leave the house to my descendants. The house isn't a 'title of nobility', and neither is copyright.
(Not that physical property and "intellectual property" are at all similar - it's just that neither constitutes a grant of nobility.)
This is absolutely true. However, these systems are not at all designed to foil the presumed intent of the recipient to copy the content (as DRM systems for copyrighted entertainment content are). They're designed to give a level of automatic prevention against inadvertent copying.
Consider, as an example: I run a business in which sensitive information is bandied about by internal corporate e-mail. In order to keep a whole variety of bad things from happening to that information (subpoenas years later, inadvertent forwarding to somebody who shouldn't see it, proprietary information being leaked by cast-off hardware), I enact an electronic document destruction policy; one year after an internal e-mail is sent, it is destroyed. I mandate use of one of these self-shredding systems to help enforce my policy.
Now I haven't really helped anything from a strict can-it-be-done standpoint: a whistle-blowing employee can still take the aforementioned camcorder and set it up; a sysadmin who's for some reason obsessed with archiving all his mail can probably download a crack for the system in question. These issues are pushed into the realm of policy, but the number of such issues that have to be dealt with strictly by policy means decreases by an order of magnitude. What I have really accomplished is to drastically reduce the probability that something will happen that nobody in the organization intended.
Why does the wireless card have to protrude out like that? Why not integrate it, a la Airport, into the chassis of the device, and use large internal antennae?
Sure, you can pull the wireless card and put some other card in - but why not roll it in fully integrated, and leave the slot available?
And while we're at it, who needs a battery case that actually holds the battery in? :)
(Happened to myself and a friend of mine. My Rio now sports a fashionable duct-tape reinforcement on the battery holder.)
Wouldn't that be a lark - your IRC experience, sponsored by the Colorado Buffaloes football team.
If I recall correctly, this was in an episode that was an intentionally campy retrospective; Worf's comment was a joke on the part of the writers. Don't think of this as a continuity error; rather, think of it as the new series taking advantage of better makeup techniques in order to better represent the Klingons.
Star Trek, despite its geeky appeal, does not have to have absolute internal consistency.
Your sentence literally means: "Until it has grammar checking capabilities like those of Word, and also has WordPerfect, it will not replace Word on my computer."
I doubt that you want StarOffice to include WordPerfect; I'd bet that you intended to say "Until it has grammar checking capabilities like those of Word and WordPerfect, it will not replace Word on my computer." Your sentence doesn't say what you mean, but a grammar checker won't flag it because it is a valid, grammatical sentence.
A human brain with a padlock running through or around it?
This level of paranoia is appropriate for organizations for whom Crypto is Life (think CAs, credit card companies, banks, big e-commerce houses, etc.)
It probably would not be hard at all to isolate packets from an SSH dump in order to determine exactly which ones constitute a password. It's trivial, from this, to determine the length of the password. You also have timing information which, if accurately collected and combined with a profile on the typist, might allow you to refine a brute-force search considerably (the paper's researchers apparently were able to speed up their brute force crack by a factor of fifty - if you had a profile of the typist on file, you might be able to improve that by an order of magnitude or two.)
Another vulnerability stemming from having touch-type profiles: during World War II, individual telegraph operators could be recognized by their "fist," the characteristic way they typed their messages. It's probable that individual computer users could be similarly recognized and automatically profiled.
Consider the major television media players:
diversifying into ownership of cable music channels
We can't reasonably expect unbiased reporting on this subject when the top five television news companies all have a vested interest in preserving the DMCA intact.
The DMCA has to go, but clueless, uninformed rambling only helps the other side.
(On that note: has anyone written an anti-DMCA advocacy FAQ? We need some guidelines in order to present a unified front to the politicians and media. The Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO is a terrific example of the type of document meant to keep advocacy focused and rational, and has been quite successful.)
The problem in this specific case is that the FBI had a search warrant, not a wiretap authorization. There's a distinct difference: the suspect knows that his home or office has been searched when a search warrant is acted upon. In the case of a wiretap, the suspect necessarily knows nothing.
What we have here is law enforcement gaining authorization for one type of activity - a search of a premises - and undertaking in another. I agree that keystroke logging is a valid investigative technique, but there needs to be a legal structure set up to make sure that it's not abused, as, I believe, it was in this case.
The answer is simple: ease of review. Obscurity is meant to put stumbling blocks in the path of those who desire to review the system, for whatever motive - be it academic curiosity, security assurance, or even to learn how to penetrate into it. The hidden web server trick described in the article, closed-source security software, and proprietary crypto are all examples of techniques that are meant to obscure and thus make review difficult.
The question of whether to obscure, then, reduces to whether you'd like the system you're building to be reviewed. There are several very bad reasons that could motivate you to hinder review of your system: attempting to hide security flaws you either know or suspect to be found therein is one of the bigger ones.
But the decision to impede review can be perfectly reasonable - depending on who the reviewers are likely to be. If you know, for instance, that your community of reviewers includes honest, skilled people who want to use your product and who will alert you to problems that they find, then that's a very big reason not to obscure anything. This is what motivates Linus, the Apache group, the GnuPG folks, and everyone else out there tirelessly trying to produce systems that function in the most security-hostile of environments. These folks have literally thousands to millions of users, almost all of whom are honest, and many of whom are skilled enough to discover flaws in the system.
Joe Sysadmin doesn't have that kind of community. His users are very likely incapable of discovering security flaws, or if they are, unlikely to share the information they find with Joe. The majority of people who might be interested in reviewing Joe's network are malicious and intent upon using any information they find to the detriment of Joe and his users.
In this case, the decision to put up walls of obscurity is as much of a no-brainer as the decision to use an open-source web server. Joe has assessed his community of potential reviewers and has determined that, on the whole, he'd rather not have that set of people learning things about his network. He will certainly use products that have proven themselves under strict review, but he is under no obligation to describe to anyone how he's configured his network. In his situation, doing so would only undermine his security.
This means that, if this market takes off, suddenly lots more software companies have to support Linux. We could see (dare I say it?) a Quicktime port.
A couple of points, though: first, there is absolutely no software in existence which has passed out of copyright through expiration (though authors have released software into the public domain); second, copyright is 75 years only for works that are written 'for hire' (that is, produced by a corporation as part of its business). Works generated by individual authors, in which category most GPL'd software falls, have copyrights that extend 50 years beyond the death of the author.
Someone should write a tool to find and erase all copies of this thing on a host. Wonder what such a thing could be called?
Good control over where software goes facilitates terrific schemes for software management, like the outstanding, time-tested /usr/site
system, which permits extremely fine-grained control over what packages are installed, allows multiple architectures to be handled at once, and splits installs such that all of a package's files all go under one logical place, so that the whole package can be terminated with a simple rm -rf.
This is one place where free software leapfrogs commercial, in its ability to handle nonstandard placement (after all, if the software doesn't like where you want to put it, just fix it so it does!)
I don't quite understand why this is a relevant measurement of album performance. It weights albums dramatically towards those that have been out longer - witness the absolute domination of the Beatles atop the list of performers, simply because their albums were released first. I like the Beatles, but this method of accounting doesn't make all that much sense to me.
Of course this study is going to indicate lackadaisical performance by the Britney Spears and N'Syncs of today's music world: their albums haven't had nearly enough time to build up the massive multiplier factors awarded to those albums from older, more established bands. If an album were to be released today that became an instant craze, selling 60 million copies in one year, it would take yet another year to eclipse a merely double-platinum album that had been released in 1970.
Clearly, the project is trying to weight away from such insane explosions of buying frenzy, and towards artists who have established careers practicing their craft. This is a noble goal, but explicitly multiplying by number of years since release causes older acts to automatically become more significant simply by virtue of being older; a one-hit wonder from the early eighties will outrank any number of career artists who started in the mid-nineties and show no sign of stopping anytime soon.
Perhaps a better weighting factor for the purposes of the study would be one that awarded different point values to different platinum events. An album's first platinum would be awarded a flat rate; subsequent platinum certifications could be multiplied by the number of years since the album's release. This could be somehow extended to artists, as well - artists who consistently earn platinum status could be rewarded, even if no individual album does extraordinarily well. If you haven't gone platinum in a while, you don't get awarded more points for rocking in your chair and reminiscing about when you were a star.