This is not the complete story. The argument about not forcing them into mental hospitals against their will was a smokescreen; the primary driving factor was bugetary. Most of the homeless people with mental health problems couldn't get back into a mental hospital if they tried because they have no way to pay for it and the government won't pick up the tab.
That carbon was out in the atmosphere before the oil and coal formed, and the Earth was quite habitable at that time.
The question is not whether the Earth would be inhabitable in the sense that life would still be possible; it clearly would be. The question is whether the climate change would be so disruptive that it would cause us major problems, which it also clearly would.
If we were to burn all of the fossil fuels in the world, there's good reason to think that this would raise global temperatures by about 5-7 C (9-13 F). That's a huge change, and would be enough to make life very unpleasant for a lot of people. In France right now, for instance, they're blaming a recent heatwave for over 5000 deaths; having weather even hotter than that every year would not be a good thing!
And that's just the direct effect of things being warmer. There are all kinds of nasty indirect effects, like changes in global weather patterns. Some areas that currently get plenty of precipitation might rapidly turn into deserts, and vice versa. Even if that didn't decrease global food supplies, it would probably force large-scale shifts in the global economy with all the upheaval that implies. And then there's the risk of melting the polar ice caps, which would be terrible for costal areas. A comparatively small rise in sea level would completely devastate a country like Bangladesh, for instance.
Not only that, but biomass is essentially a closed cycle. All of the CO2 that you're generating is coming from plants that recently took that same CO2 out of the air, so there's no net addition of greenhouse gasses. This is a direct contrast to fossil fuels, where the carbon was previously buried in the ground for millions of years.
For example, 110,000 lines of Unix System V code for read copy update, 55,000 lines of NUMA code and more than 750,000 lines of symmetric multi-processing code from Unix System V has made its way into Linux, attorneys and SCO executives claimed.
Why does this sound as if somebody just ran the whole directory tree for each of these areas through wc and recited the total number of lines?
The key is that people take a whole lot more pictures with digital cameras, thus taking pictures they never would with a film camera, and any picture you take is MUCH better than the picture you didn't. And, the more pictures you take, the higher your chances of snapping a gem by sheer luck (I know skill plays no part in my photography).
There's probably also a matter of practice. The more often you take pictures, the more you develop the skills needed to do a good job of it. If you only break out the camera once a year at Christmas, the chances are that you will have forgotten just about everything that your last batch of photos would have taught you about photography. But if you get in the habit of taking pictures all the time, you're much more likely to be able to learn from your mistakes (and successes) the next time.
Digitals also have the huge advantage of instant feedback. You can tell right away if you got the picture that you want, and you can try again if you didn't. There are few things more annoying than discovering that the "perfect" picture that you thought you took actually had some flaw in it when it's too late to try again. That's much less of a problem with a digital.
Except that white blood cells don't usually cause lots of damage themselves.
Not really true. The body's immune response is frequently what causes unpleasant effects when you get sick. Things like fever, swelling, and similar "disease" simptoms are actually a result of your immune system, not the disease vector. And then there are all sorts of diseases that are the result of an over-active immune system, like allergies, asthma, type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and the like. Or leukemia, which is essentially cancer of the white blood cells.
What you can do is to look in detail at the actual files that the update was supposed to contain. If the correctly named files with the correct MD5 hashes are in the right places, you know that the update has been installed correctly. Fortunately, RPM is actually able to check things like MD5 hashes to confirm that the files that were supposedly installed actually have been installed, and that makes the kind of corruption that would hide the truth much more difficult to carry out.
I'll admit that in this case Microsoft is doing a good thing by releasing a more detailed scanner that will actually check to ensure that the appropriate patches have really been installed, rather than just taking the registry's word for it. But doing so is not a built-in part of the system the way it is for RPM.
It's also imprtant to note that this is an advantage of Linux distributions not being a mono-culture. Corrupting the RPM database won't help you if the system that you've invaded is a non-RPM using system like Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo, each of which uses a different packaging system. It's not even clear how much it would help if you were invading a Suse or Mandrake system instead of a RedHat one, since the expected names of the packages would be different, too.
You'd think it would at least be difficult or require specific action to write to the registry, since this is probably only something that needs to happen when installing software.
Except that it isn't. One of the problems with the registry is that it's a vast, multi-purpose thing. Not only does it have records of vital stuff like what software you've installed, it also does much more mundane things like keep track of your preferences. Every time you change your desktop wallpaper, for instance, Windows has to update the registry. (In fact, changing the registry is the only way I know of changing the wallpaper for the logon screen.) There are restrictions on changing the registry- random users aren't allowed to change other users' preferences, for instance- but if a worm can get system privileges then it can alter anything it wants.
Windows Update works by adding an entry into the system registry every time it installs a patch. When users log on to the update tool, it scans their registry and offers them list of patches that have not yet been installed. Cooper said that this mechanism was found to be flawed.
"We found that people had got the registry key for the patch, but not the file," he said, explaining that the error could be triggered by a number of reasons -- from an incomplete installation to a lack of system resources.
They're missing a really big flaw, here, which is that this is horribly vulnerable to malicious behavior. There are already plenty of viruses and worms out there that make registry entries for one purpose or another. It seems to me that if you were exploiting a vulnerability for which a patch already existed it would be very easy to automatically modify the registry to make it appear that the patch had already been applied. This would make tracking which systems were vulnerable much, much more difficult. This would work particularly well if you were trying to make a stealth worm.
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved.
Realistically, though, the deregulation and fraud were closely tied together. Under the old, regulated system, there wouldn't have been the opportunity to commit the fraud in the first place. The exact form of the deregulation, specifically the way that long-term contracts weren't allowed, was also important. Had the California Legislature done a better job on the deregulation then the fraud probably wouldn't have taken place.
That doesn't excuse the power industry, of course. The opportunity to commit fraud profitably is not an excuse for doing so. The power industry was also deeply involved in writing the deregulation legislation, so they're also partly responsible for setting up the damaging conditions in the first place. (Note that this is an example of one problem of legislative term limits; the legislators involved were inexperienced, which tends to give more influence to lobbiests and beaurocrats.)
I am waiting for the next SCO press conference where McBride will announce that "all your bases now belong to us".
I'm sorry, but the phrase you're looking for is All Your Base Are Belong to Us". I suppose, given their propensity for getting everything else wrong, that SCO probably couldn't get that quote right either. In any case, I think that both IBM and RedHat have already told SCO "You are on the way to desctuction".
I don't think that EMACS is an inherently big program. Fundamentally it's nothing but a LISP interpreter. The thing is that it's infinitely extensible by writing new LISP routines, and people have spent the past couple of decades extending it. That means that there's a huge amount of baggage around it, but the core is not some awful, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink monstrosity.
No idea what most of this means, but it sounds very impressive:-)
What this really means is that IBM's lawyers are being properly dilligent. These are a bunch of standard counterarguments that you can easily tack on to your response. Many of them are probably bogus and/or contradict others, but now IBM has properly established a right to mount any or all of these defenses without SCO having the right to claim that they were sandbagged. Equally important is that IBM can force SCO's lawyers to consider each one of these and waste time and money fighting them.
By far my favorite quote from IBM's response, though, was this:
36. States that it is without information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments of paragraph 36, except admits that IBM POWER chips are currently more powerful than the Intel chips described in these averments.
Yeah, if you twist their arms hard enough, IBM will admit that their chips are faster than Intel's. Oh, the agony!
I think an email address or user is the same thing.
But they're not the same. There are zillions of possible valid email addresses out there, but not every one has an actual recipient available to read the messages. For instance, there are about 200 billion possible usernames that contain exactly 8 letters. If you send messages to every username from aaaaaaaa@aol.com to zzzzzzzz@aol.com, most of them will be bounced or dropped harmlessly because there's no mailbox corresponding to that name. Some of them, though, will be valid usernames and will be sent to the appropriate user (assuming, of course, that AOL doesn't filter them as spam).
For a spammer, knowing which of those addresses reach a real recipient and which ones get dropped is valuable information. There are some spammers who try variants of this approach, sending meaningless spams to huge numbers of guessed addresses and hoping to find out which ones are live by waiting for the mail agent to pick up their coded 1x1 gif and show that the recipient exists. If you give each real user a program that autofetches all of the urls in each spam, this will effectively notify the spammer that the address actually has a mailbox attached and somebody is receiving the mail. Far from the effect that Mr. Graham suggests, that spammers would stop sending to those addresses, it would actually alert spammers that the address is real, when silently deleting the message would leave them thinking that it wasn't real.
Of course a really clever spammer would include two links, one that would normally be fetched automatically (like an image) and one that would only be fetched by a program that mindlessly followed each possible link in the message (like a link with no clickable area). Messages that retrieved the image but not the hidden link would be classified as live, while those that retrieved both would be viewed as automated responses and uninteresting. The problem is that the address harvesters probably don't care. They're harvesting addresses to sell them to somebody else, so they just want the largest possible list of verified email addresses, and don't particularly care whether they're likely to respond.
Actually, the opposite would happen: since all links in all spams get hit, this technique would make putting UIDs into URLs worthless for the purpose of authenticating users.
But it's not there to authenticate a user; it's just there to authenticate that the email address is actually live rather than a bogus one like nobody@example.invalid. Spammers already use this trick, including uniquely coded urls into each email to track which users actually open the mail, and autoresponding is a possible problem.
Mr. Graham actually suggests that auto-following could be beneficial to everyone. He argues that spammers would start putting working unsubscribe links in their spam as a way of filtering out spam filters with the autorespond feature and cutting their bandwidth bills. I'm not so sure that this would really work. For one thing, the fact that many spammers already encourage people to download a link in the form of an invisible gif to track live email addresses suggests that the bandwidth problem might be less of an issue than he thinks. Equally important, a lot of spamming is done by contract spammers, not directly by the people being advertized, and I'm not convinced that the contract spammers would really care that much about their clients' web-sites being hammered.
Red Hat is going to be drained of money for a loooong time in court.
That should be at least as much a worry for SCO, though. As numerous people have pointed out, RedHat has a lot more cash than SCO does, and their basic business is burning through that cash a lot more slowly, so that if the lawsuit comes down to being a battle of attrition than RedHat is likely to win. Just because SCO is acting like a big bully doesn't mean that they actually have the resources to back that up.
In the long run, it's not who is right, it's who looks good in the end....
I strongly suspect that what RedHat is worried about is looking good now. It's quite possible, even likely, that SCO's FUD is making some of RedHat's customers worry about their legal position, and if that's true than RedHat really has to do something about it. A willingness to launch a lawsuit to protect their customers' interests is exactly the kind of thing that will reassure those customers.
I mean, with Linux and the *BSDs available in source, and with Microsoft's recent announcement about opening WinCE (source? api? or what?) what are the chances of being able to produce a whole new operating system without someone claiming some kind of IP violation?
Very good. After all, the BSD license is essentially designed to encourage people to copy the code and use it in new projects. Starting from BSD thus gives you a very good legal starting point. They've already won their lawsuit against ATT, so it's known to be free from copyright claims, and it's available under terms that make incorporating that code into your new OS very easy. I'd say that it's probably easier to make your own OS today than at any time in the past.
if you asked a company to put you on their DNC list, they had to. if you ask them and they still call you, it's considered harassment.
And how is this system so different from that? If it's legitimate to require each business that wants to telemarket to maintain its own DNC list, it should be just as legitimate for there to be a single master DNC list. If anything the single DNC list should be preferable for everyone. People no longer need to ask each company to stop calling them separately, and the companies no longer need to maintain their own separate lists. The real complaint is that there's actually a chance that the national DNC list will be effective.
To filter out telemarketers, you also have to get the additional
feature known as Anonymous Call Block, wherein if the caller is
blocking caller ID he gets a message saying you don't receive
anon calls, and your phone doesn't ring.
Which just goes to show who is really profiting from telemarketers: the phone companies. They've never had it so good. On the one hand, they're making a lot of money renting phone lines and dialing equipment to the telemarketers so they can bother you during dinner. Then that forces you to pay them extra to get caller ID (how many people would give up their caller ID if they weren't worried about telemarketers?) which has to be one of their highest margin services. Then they turn around and charge the telemarketers more money for the service that lets them block your caller ID, and you more money for the service that blocks people who block their caller ID. It's an arms race, and the phone companies are getting rich selling to both sides.
The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.
OTOH, the software protection schemes of the 1980's were dealing with comparatively primitive approaches to distributing the deprotected software. Today it's not enough to prevent most people from being able to bypass the DRM. You have to do that and make the system so that the few people who can bypass the DRM can't pass it out to the rest of the world using a system like Napster. That means either locking down systems to the point that they can't run anything that isn't signed (which kills backward compatibility among other problems) or playing whack-a-mole with file "sharing" systems. The first is unlikely to happen because of consumer resistence, and the second is technically very, very difficult.
When will software choices be made by virtue of technical merit, and not political views?
What makes you think that software will ever be chosen exclusively by technical merit? Even if you exclude "political issues" there will always be factors like price that will have significant impact on decisions about which software to use. And neglecting the importance of those "political issues" (presumably mostly licensing) is extremely foolish. The ability to modify software and use it legally in the way that you want to is a very important real-world consideration, and deriding it as a secondary political question is a mistake.
Or, to put it a different way, people will make decisions based on technical merit rather than political views when those political views are no longer a relevant factor. Since they currently are and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future, the answer is no time soon.
There's actually some dispute about where fortune cookies were invented. I know of at least one shop in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles that claims to be where they were invented. (And yes, that is a Japanese shop, not a Chinese one.) I'm sure that there must be more places that make the same claim. It's probably impossible to track down the truth today, but it is fairly clear that the fortune cookie was invented in the US.
You haven't been paying very close attention, have you? One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft file formats is that they seem to change with every version of the software, and the new versions always default to saving things in the newest format. This causes problems because people who have the newer version of the software send out files that users of older versions can't read without upgrading. Meanwhile, the new version can still read files from the older versions, so there's no trouble accessing your old documents. That makes it easy to upgrade and hard to avoid upgrading.
Some of the file format incompatibility is natural. After all, if there are new features in the software they may require new features in the file format to support them. At the same time, though, it should be possible to make file formats so that they remain readable by older versions of the software so long as they don't incorporate any new features. I thought that one of the attractive features of XML formats is that they're supposed to behave this way very easily. That MS makes no effort to do this, or to automatically save in the oldest format that will support all features used in the document, is a sign that they're using file format incompatibility as a way of forcing upgrades.
I'm not sure which is scarier, the fact that he's not allowed to post truthful stories (even ones that took place in front of hundreds of witnesses, as he claims some did) or that:
Judge Lewis ruled on May 6, before Mr. Max was notified of the suit and without holding a hearing.
Now IANAL, but I thought that one of the basic principles of jurisprudence is that you have to at least try to listen to both sides of the story before making a decision. Deciding the case not only without a hearing, but before the defendant has even been notified of the action seems as though it thoroughly violates the idea of due process.
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This is not the complete story. The argument about not forcing them into mental hospitals against their will was a smokescreen; the primary driving factor was bugetary. Most of the homeless people with mental health problems couldn't get back into a mental hospital if they tried because they have no way to pay for it and the government won't pick up the tab.
The question is not whether the Earth would be inhabitable in the sense that life would still be possible; it clearly would be. The question is whether the climate change would be so disruptive that it would cause us major problems, which it also clearly would.
If we were to burn all of the fossil fuels in the world, there's good reason to think that this would raise global temperatures by about 5-7 C (9-13 F). That's a huge change, and would be enough to make life very unpleasant for a lot of people. In France right now, for instance, they're blaming a recent heatwave for over 5000 deaths; having weather even hotter than that every year would not be a good thing!
And that's just the direct effect of things being warmer. There are all kinds of nasty indirect effects, like changes in global weather patterns. Some areas that currently get plenty of precipitation might rapidly turn into deserts, and vice versa. Even if that didn't decrease global food supplies, it would probably force large-scale shifts in the global economy with all the upheaval that implies. And then there's the risk of melting the polar ice caps, which would be terrible for costal areas. A comparatively small rise in sea level would completely devastate a country like Bangladesh, for instance.
Not only that, but biomass is essentially a closed cycle. All of the CO2 that you're generating is coming from plants that recently took that same CO2 out of the air, so there's no net addition of greenhouse gasses. This is a direct contrast to fossil fuels, where the carbon was previously buried in the ground for millions of years.
Why does this sound as if somebody just ran the whole directory tree for each of these areas through wc and recited the total number of lines?
There's probably also a matter of practice. The more often you take pictures, the more you develop the skills needed to do a good job of it. If you only break out the camera once a year at Christmas, the chances are that you will have forgotten just about everything that your last batch of photos would have taught you about photography. But if you get in the habit of taking pictures all the time, you're much more likely to be able to learn from your mistakes (and successes) the next time.
Digitals also have the huge advantage of instant feedback. You can tell right away if you got the picture that you want, and you can try again if you didn't. There are few things more annoying than discovering that the "perfect" picture that you thought you took actually had some flaw in it when it's too late to try again. That's much less of a problem with a digital.
Not really true. The body's immune response is frequently what causes unpleasant effects when you get sick. Things like fever, swelling, and similar "disease" simptoms are actually a result of your immune system, not the disease vector. And then there are all sorts of diseases that are the result of an over-active immune system, like allergies, asthma, type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and the like. Or leukemia, which is essentially cancer of the white blood cells.
What you can do is to look in detail at the actual files that the update was supposed to contain. If the correctly named files with the correct MD5 hashes are in the right places, you know that the update has been installed correctly. Fortunately, RPM is actually able to check things like MD5 hashes to confirm that the files that were supposedly installed actually have been installed, and that makes the kind of corruption that would hide the truth much more difficult to carry out.
I'll admit that in this case Microsoft is doing a good thing by releasing a more detailed scanner that will actually check to ensure that the appropriate patches have really been installed, rather than just taking the registry's word for it. But doing so is not a built-in part of the system the way it is for RPM.
It's also imprtant to note that this is an advantage of Linux distributions not being a mono-culture. Corrupting the RPM database won't help you if the system that you've invaded is a non-RPM using system like Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo, each of which uses a different packaging system. It's not even clear how much it would help if you were invading a Suse or Mandrake system instead of a RedHat one, since the expected names of the packages would be different, too.
Except that it isn't. One of the problems with the registry is that it's a vast, multi-purpose thing. Not only does it have records of vital stuff like what software you've installed, it also does much more mundane things like keep track of your preferences. Every time you change your desktop wallpaper, for instance, Windows has to update the registry. (In fact, changing the registry is the only way I know of changing the wallpaper for the logon screen.) There are restrictions on changing the registry- random users aren't allowed to change other users' preferences, for instance- but if a worm can get system privileges then it can alter anything it wants.
This strikes me as being a really bad thing:
They're missing a really big flaw, here, which is that this is horribly vulnerable to malicious behavior. There are already plenty of viruses and worms out there that make registry entries for one purpose or another. It seems to me that if you were exploiting a vulnerability for which a patch already existed it would be very easy to automatically modify the registry to make it appear that the patch had already been applied. This would make tracking which systems were vulnerable much, much more difficult. This would work particularly well if you were trying to make a stealth worm.
Realistically, though, the deregulation and fraud were closely tied together. Under the old, regulated system, there wouldn't have been the opportunity to commit the fraud in the first place. The exact form of the deregulation, specifically the way that long-term contracts weren't allowed, was also important. Had the California Legislature done a better job on the deregulation then the fraud probably wouldn't have taken place.
That doesn't excuse the power industry, of course. The opportunity to commit fraud profitably is not an excuse for doing so. The power industry was also deeply involved in writing the deregulation legislation, so they're also partly responsible for setting up the damaging conditions in the first place. (Note that this is an example of one problem of legislative term limits; the legislators involved were inexperienced, which tends to give more influence to lobbiests and beaurocrats.)
I'm sorry, but the phrase you're looking for is All Your Base Are Belong to Us". I suppose, given their propensity for getting everything else wrong, that SCO probably couldn't get that quote right either. In any case, I think that both IBM and RedHat have already told SCO "You are on the way to desctuction".
I don't think that EMACS is an inherently big program. Fundamentally it's nothing but a LISP interpreter. The thing is that it's infinitely extensible by writing new LISP routines, and people have spent the past couple of decades extending it. That means that there's a huge amount of baggage around it, but the core is not some awful, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink monstrosity.
What this really means is that IBM's lawyers are being properly dilligent. These are a bunch of standard counterarguments that you can easily tack on to your response. Many of them are probably bogus and/or contradict others, but now IBM has properly established a right to mount any or all of these defenses without SCO having the right to claim that they were sandbagged. Equally important is that IBM can force SCO's lawyers to consider each one of these and waste time and money fighting them.
By far my favorite quote from IBM's response, though, was this:
But they're not the same. There are zillions of possible valid email addresses out there, but not every one has an actual recipient available to read the messages. For instance, there are about 200 billion possible usernames that contain exactly 8 letters. If you send messages to every username from aaaaaaaa@aol.com to zzzzzzzz@aol.com, most of them will be bounced or dropped harmlessly because there's no mailbox corresponding to that name. Some of them, though, will be valid usernames and will be sent to the appropriate user (assuming, of course, that AOL doesn't filter them as spam).
For a spammer, knowing which of those addresses reach a real recipient and which ones get dropped is valuable information. There are some spammers who try variants of this approach, sending meaningless spams to huge numbers of guessed addresses and hoping to find out which ones are live by waiting for the mail agent to pick up their coded 1x1 gif and show that the recipient exists. If you give each real user a program that autofetches all of the urls in each spam, this will effectively notify the spammer that the address actually has a mailbox attached and somebody is receiving the mail. Far from the effect that Mr. Graham suggests, that spammers would stop sending to those addresses, it would actually alert spammers that the address is real, when silently deleting the message would leave them thinking that it wasn't real.
Of course a really clever spammer would include two links, one that would normally be fetched automatically (like an image) and one that would only be fetched by a program that mindlessly followed each possible link in the message (like a link with no clickable area). Messages that retrieved the image but not the hidden link would be classified as live, while those that retrieved both would be viewed as automated responses and uninteresting. The problem is that the address harvesters probably don't care. They're harvesting addresses to sell them to somebody else, so they just want the largest possible list of verified email addresses, and don't particularly care whether they're likely to respond.
But it's not there to authenticate a user; it's just there to authenticate that the email address is actually live rather than a bogus one like nobody@example.invalid. Spammers already use this trick, including uniquely coded urls into each email to track which users actually open the mail, and autoresponding is a possible problem.
Mr. Graham actually suggests that auto-following could be beneficial to everyone. He argues that spammers would start putting working unsubscribe links in their spam as a way of filtering out spam filters with the autorespond feature and cutting their bandwidth bills. I'm not so sure that this would really work. For one thing, the fact that many spammers already encourage people to download a link in the form of an invisible gif to track live email addresses suggests that the bandwidth problem might be less of an issue than he thinks. Equally important, a lot of spamming is done by contract spammers, not directly by the people being advertized, and I'm not convinced that the contract spammers would really care that much about their clients' web-sites being hammered.
That should be at least as much a worry for SCO, though. As numerous people have pointed out, RedHat has a lot more cash than SCO does, and their basic business is burning through that cash a lot more slowly, so that if the lawsuit comes down to being a battle of attrition than RedHat is likely to win. Just because SCO is acting like a big bully doesn't mean that they actually have the resources to back that up.
I strongly suspect that what RedHat is worried about is looking good now. It's quite possible, even likely, that SCO's FUD is making some of RedHat's customers worry about their legal position, and if that's true than RedHat really has to do something about it. A willingness to launch a lawsuit to protect their customers' interests is exactly the kind of thing that will reassure those customers.
Very good. After all, the BSD license is essentially designed to encourage people to copy the code and use it in new projects. Starting from BSD thus gives you a very good legal starting point. They've already won their lawsuit against ATT, so it's known to be free from copyright claims, and it's available under terms that make incorporating that code into your new OS very easy. I'd say that it's probably easier to make your own OS today than at any time in the past.
And how is this system so different from that? If it's legitimate to require each business that wants to telemarket to maintain its own DNC list, it should be just as legitimate for there to be a single master DNC list. If anything the single DNC list should be preferable for everyone. People no longer need to ask each company to stop calling them separately, and the companies no longer need to maintain their own separate lists. The real complaint is that there's actually a chance that the national DNC list will be effective.
Which just goes to show who is really profiting from telemarketers: the phone companies. They've never had it so good. On the one hand, they're making a lot of money renting phone lines and dialing equipment to the telemarketers so they can bother you during dinner. Then that forces you to pay them extra to get caller ID (how many people would give up their caller ID if they weren't worried about telemarketers?) which has to be one of their highest margin services. Then they turn around and charge the telemarketers more money for the service that lets them block your caller ID, and you more money for the service that blocks people who block their caller ID. It's an arms race, and the phone companies are getting rich selling to both sides.
OTOH, the software protection schemes of the 1980's were dealing with comparatively primitive approaches to distributing the deprotected software. Today it's not enough to prevent most people from being able to bypass the DRM. You have to do that and make the system so that the few people who can bypass the DRM can't pass it out to the rest of the world using a system like Napster. That means either locking down systems to the point that they can't run anything that isn't signed (which kills backward compatibility among other problems) or playing whack-a-mole with file "sharing" systems. The first is unlikely to happen because of consumer resistence, and the second is technically very, very difficult.
What makes you think that software will ever be chosen exclusively by technical merit? Even if you exclude "political issues" there will always be factors like price that will have significant impact on decisions about which software to use. And neglecting the importance of those "political issues" (presumably mostly licensing) is extremely foolish. The ability to modify software and use it legally in the way that you want to is a very important real-world consideration, and deriding it as a secondary political question is a mistake.
Or, to put it a different way, people will make decisions based on technical merit rather than political views when those political views are no longer a relevant factor. Since they currently are and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future, the answer is no time soon.
There's actually some dispute about where fortune cookies were invented. I know of at least one shop in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles that claims to be where they were invented. (And yes, that is a Japanese shop, not a Chinese one.) I'm sure that there must be more places that make the same claim. It's probably impossible to track down the truth today, but it is fairly clear that the fortune cookie was invented in the US.
That's odd. I thought that he was the founder and patron saint of the Church of Emacs.
You haven't been paying very close attention, have you? One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft file formats is that they seem to change with every version of the software, and the new versions always default to saving things in the newest format. This causes problems because people who have the newer version of the software send out files that users of older versions can't read without upgrading. Meanwhile, the new version can still read files from the older versions, so there's no trouble accessing your old documents. That makes it easy to upgrade and hard to avoid upgrading.
Some of the file format incompatibility is natural. After all, if there are new features in the software they may require new features in the file format to support them. At the same time, though, it should be possible to make file formats so that they remain readable by older versions of the software so long as they don't incorporate any new features. I thought that one of the attractive features of XML formats is that they're supposed to behave this way very easily. That MS makes no effort to do this, or to automatically save in the oldest format that will support all features used in the document, is a sign that they're using file format incompatibility as a way of forcing upgrades.
I'm not sure which is scarier, the fact that he's not allowed to post truthful stories (even ones that took place in front of hundreds of witnesses, as he claims some did) or that:
Now IANAL, but I thought that one of the basic principles of jurisprudence is that you have to at least try to listen to both sides of the story before making a decision. Deciding the case not only without a hearing, but before the defendant has even been notified of the action seems as though it thoroughly violates the idea of due process.