I am all for supporting companies like Riverbend who offer both GPL and proprietary licenses.
I don't, and for just the reasons you give. Dual-licensed libraries use the GPL as a nuisance license; that's not its intent or purpose. Furthermore, dual-licensed code makes it impossible for others to contribute to the code on the same terms as the licensor. Dual-licensed projects can't really be forked either, and that's a bad thing, too. Dual-licensing just doesn't work well for open source projects, and the best thing to do is to stay away from dual-licensed projects altogether. Qt used to have this problem. For PyQt, Nokia has fixed it now. Java still has this problem, although maybe Oracle will fix it.
Anybody who releases software under a dual GPL/commercial license is a "freeloading leech": they are trying to use the FOSS community to do their marketing for them, and anybody who contributes to such a project has to assign rights to the company. Dual licensing is better than closed source software, but it does not conform to the goals of open source software.
You're confusing the GPL and the LGPL. The LGPL is a perfectly fine license, and it happens to be what Nokia chose.
The BSD/MIT/... license has specific problems and pitfalls relative to the LGPL; in particular, it raises the possibility of a proprietary fork. Both Apple and Microsoft have made proprietary forks of BSD/MIT-licensed projects, with arguably worse outcomes than if they had been forced to open source under the LGPL.
Well, tough. Either Microsoft is responsible to Dell for patent infringement claims against Word, in which case Microsoft has to pay for the consequences, or Dell decided to bear the risk themselves. Either way, I see no reason why Dell should be shielded from Microsoft's patent infringement.
Microsoft isn't doing any of that. Bill Gates is doing that with his own money.
But the comparison shouldn't be of Bill Gates doing it vs nobody doing it, it should be Bill Gates doing it vs other people doing it with their own money if Bill Gates hadn't sucked the money out of their pockets with his monopoly pricing.
Does running a Google operating system that only runs a Google browser and ties into Google web services by default really count as "platform-neutral?"
Yes, it really does.
The Google OS doesn't provide any functionality that you can't get from Google web services on any other platform, so there is no bundling, tying, or extending any kind of monopoly.
Furthermore, the Google OS's platform is the hardware, and Google OS is platform neutral because it is open source, based on Linux, and already runs on a wide variety of (hardware) platforms.
What exactly do you think this kind of "company failure" is? It's a deliberate decision by specific persons at the company to ignore standard security practices. Since it is a deliberate decision that causes others harm, those people should be held personally responsible, and they shouldn't be able to hide behind the company.
Being a company employee does not shield you from prosecution for criminal negligence or fraud.
There is no "lying" involved; the SI prefixes have well-defined meanings and they are the power-of-ten meanings. Most hardware manufacturers have always been using the power-of-ten meanings. The confusion was caused by programmers on some operating systems that used power-of-two units because it simplified address calculations.
(As for "gallon" and other non-metric units, there are multiple of them in use. The US versions are pretty consistently smaller than the UK versions. I wonder why that is...)
The "k", "M", and "G" prefixes are defined as international standards to be powers of ten. The standard binary prefixes are "ki", "Mi", and "Gi".
People should start using the consistently. And for anybody not performing address calculations, the power-of-ten prefixes are the more useful.
(Maybe adoption would be faster if we ensured that any computer scientist continuing to misuse the SI units for binary receives a digitectomy, so that their use of power-of-two units is backed up by having power-of-two digits.)
Dr Smith also said that Australia's banks were "being kind" when they bore the costs of cyber crime.
No, they are simply taking advantage of their customers. Banks should be considered criminally negligent when their customers are victims of identify theft, since the technology to protect their customers exists and is not all that expensive, and the banks and their staff should be punished accordingly.
Maybe there's some upcoming movie in which this is part of the plot? In that case, getting national press coverage for this kind of event might be a marketing stunt.
TiVo shouldn't have gotten patents on digital video recording and time shifting in the first place; at the time they got the patent, it was already an obvious application of digital recording technologies and one of the intended applications of digital video compression.
The only reason TiVo was successful was because they started shipping around the time when the decrease in disk storage costs made this kind of device feasible.
It's quad-band GSM and tri-band 3.5G. In the US, it should work on T-Mobile and AT&T, since both carriers allow unlocked phones. It will also work pretty much anywhere else in the world.
The hardware looks great, but otherwise, I'm not sure what to make of this. But the N900 is yet another platform, and it's not even a stable one, since they are moving from Gtk+ now to Qt in the near future.
Even if that were true, it would already eliminate many kinds of attacks.
But it's actually not even true (the NYT article got it wrong--typical). In correctly implemented banking systems, such tokens aren't used for logging in, they are used for authenticating transactions, after the transactions have already been entered and confirmed.
Security for online banking in the US is awful. Transactions should require a second physical authentication token in addition to the password; most US banks have nothing.
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I am all for supporting companies like Riverbend who offer both GPL and proprietary licenses.
I don't, and for just the reasons you give. Dual-licensed libraries use the GPL as a nuisance license; that's not its intent or purpose. Furthermore, dual-licensed code makes it impossible for others to contribute to the code on the same terms as the licensor. Dual-licensed projects can't really be forked either, and that's a bad thing, too. Dual-licensing just doesn't work well for open source projects, and the best thing to do is to stay away from dual-licensed projects altogether. Qt used to have this problem. For PyQt, Nokia has fixed it now. Java still has this problem, although maybe Oracle will fix it.
Anybody who releases software under a dual GPL/commercial license is a "freeloading leech": they are trying to use the FOSS community to do their marketing for them, and anybody who contributes to such a project has to assign rights to the company. Dual licensing is better than closed source software, but it does not conform to the goals of open source software.
You're confusing the GPL and the LGPL. The LGPL is a perfectly fine license, and it happens to be what Nokia chose.
The BSD/MIT/... license has specific problems and pitfalls relative to the LGPL; in particular, it raises the possibility of a proprietary fork. Both Apple and Microsoft have made proprietary forks of BSD/MIT-licensed projects, with arguably worse outcomes than if they had been forced to open source under the LGPL.
Well, tough. Either Microsoft is responsible to Dell for patent infringement claims against Word, in which case Microsoft has to pay for the consequences, or Dell decided to bear the risk themselves. Either way, I see no reason why Dell should be shielded from Microsoft's patent infringement.
Well, there's hope for Microsoft yet, in another decade or two. After Gates, Ballmer needs to leave too.
but they are saving lives, and educating children
Microsoft isn't doing any of that. Bill Gates is doing that with his own money.
But the comparison shouldn't be of Bill Gates doing it vs nobody doing it, it should be Bill Gates doing it vs other people doing it with their own money if Bill Gates hadn't sucked the money out of their pockets with his monopoly pricing.
Does running a Google operating system that only runs a Google browser and ties into Google web services by default really count as "platform-neutral?"
Yes, it really does.
The Google OS doesn't provide any functionality that you can't get from Google web services on any other platform, so there is no bundling, tying, or extending any kind of monopoly.
Furthermore, the Google OS's platform is the hardware, and Google OS is platform neutral because it is open source, based on Linux, and already runs on a wide variety of (hardware) platforms.
The drunk's judgment is impaired when the drunk gets behind the wheel.
The drunk's judgment was not impaired when he decided to get drunk.
Yes, texting while driving seems like a superfluous activity.
What about entering data into your GPS?
What about looking at the GPS screen?
What about changing a station on the car radio?
What about looking up a phone number and then using voice dialing?
What about fiddling with your BMW car's control joystick?
Those aren't illegal under the current Utah law; should they be? Which level and kind of distraction is reasonable and which isn't?
Why don't you just pullover? (duh.)
Because you usually can't do that on the highway. If you try, police will generally pull up, check you, and require you to be on your way.
Why punish the staff for a company failure?
What exactly do you think this kind of "company failure" is? It's a deliberate decision by specific persons at the company to ignore standard security practices. Since it is a deliberate decision that causes others harm, those people should be held personally responsible, and they shouldn't be able to hide behind the company.
Being a company employee does not shield you from prosecution for criminal negligence or fraud.
Actually, they may also be getting more. Countries that switch to metric often use approximate informal units, like
pound = 500g
quart = 1l
gallon = 4l
These are just as likely to give you a little more.
There is no "lying" involved; the SI prefixes have well-defined meanings and they are the power-of-ten meanings. Most hardware manufacturers have always been using the power-of-ten meanings. The confusion was caused by programmers on some operating systems that used power-of-two units because it simplified address calculations.
(As for "gallon" and other non-metric units, there are multiple of them in use. The US versions are pretty consistently smaller than the UK versions. I wonder why that is...)
The "k", "M", and "G" prefixes are defined as international standards to be powers of ten. The standard binary prefixes are "ki", "Mi", and "Gi".
People should start using the consistently. And for anybody not performing address calculations, the power-of-ten prefixes are the more useful.
(Maybe adoption would be faster if we ensured that any computer scientist continuing to misuse the SI units for binary receives a digitectomy, so that their use of power-of-two units is backed up by having power-of-two digits.)
Well, then what they are doing won't work either, since there is bankofsweden.to, bankofsweden.com, etc.
Dr Smith also said that Australia's banks were "being kind" when they bore the costs of cyber crime.
No, they are simply taking advantage of their customers. Banks should be considered criminally negligent when their customers are victims of identify theft, since the technology to protect their customers exists and is not all that expensive, and the banks and their staff should be punished accordingly.
Cramer's transactional theory is an exception, it is symmetric and there is no collapse, but it doesn't get much attention.
As far as I know, Cramer's "theory" doesn't make any testable predictions. Hence, it's not actually a theory, it's more like religion or philosophy.
Maybe there's some upcoming movie in which this is part of the plot? In that case, getting national press coverage for this kind of event might be a marketing stunt.
Maybe AT&T concluded that TiVo's patent really should be invalidated, and they are willing to challenge it again.
If so, good for AT&T and the rest of us, because I think TiVo should never have been issued these patents in the first place.
TiVo shouldn't have gotten patents on digital video recording and time shifting in the first place; at the time they got the patent, it was already an obvious application of digital recording technologies and one of the intended applications of digital video compression.
The only reason TiVo was successful was because they started shipping around the time when the decrease in disk storage costs made this kind of device feasible.
It's quad-band GSM and tri-band 3.5G. In the US, it should work on T-Mobile and AT&T, since both carriers allow unlocked phones. It will also work pretty much anywhere else in the world.
The hardware looks great, but otherwise, I'm not sure what to make of this. But the N900 is yet another platform, and it's not even a stable one, since they are moving from Gtk+ now to Qt in the near future.
Even if that were true, it would already eliminate many kinds of attacks.
But it's actually not even true (the NYT article got it wrong--typical). In correctly implemented banking systems, such tokens aren't used for logging in, they are used for authenticating transactions, after the transactions have already been entered and confirmed.
Unless you have some evidence that MS spent a lot of time commissioning multiple studies on this, there's no basis on which to claim bias.
Well, we have
(1) a clear basis on which to claim bias in the selection of the study for publication
(2) a clear basis on which to claim that the study is scientifically worthless because it is not reproducible or peer reviewed.
What more do you want?
Security for online banking in the US is awful. Transactions should require a second physical authentication token in addition to the password; most US banks have nothing.