It's sad how every article about hybrids always focuses on how many years it takes to save enough gas to pay fro the added cost of the car. That's not what it is about!
Yes it is.
The thing about money... It's not a renewable resource. It's not environmentally friendly to spend lots of it. You make it somewhere, and chances are that SOMEWHERE happens to either directly or indirectly pollute, use petroleum, etc.
Not to mention that the cost of the product you're buying is usually a good indication of how much energy was spent to build it, and therefore how much pollution is created in its construction.
Money is usually a pretty good indication of whether something is environmentally friendly, or not.
Universities... Other non-profits... A few companies that have more to gain by interoperability of their improvements than they spent to develop them. Obviously that's not the situation with something like h.264.
The lack of patent protection hasn't stopped Ogg Vorbis or Theora, PNG, or SVG.
Theora is the worst possible example you could possibly have picked... Without patent protection, On2 wouldn't have developed VP3, and later open sourced the code and released their patents on it. Additionally, Theora is perpetually unfinished, and even the best possible outcome for the codec is, years from now, being a terrible performing, and still with about the quality of MPEG-1, on which patents have expired years ago...
Vorbis isn't the best example, either. The quality is only slightly better than the very old MP3 format, and requires vastly higher resources for both encoding and decoding. It lacks a vast number of features like multi-channel joint encoding, distorts in many situations, and overall just doesn't compare favorably with more recent patented formats like AAC. Musepack compares much more favorably in most every way, but they piggy-backed on numerous patents over the years, and still fall under a few.
And what must be said about every patent-free format is that their developers have depended greatly on patented technology... even if they then modified the patented process slightly to avoid patents. Numerous instances of that are well-documented in VP3, and I have no doubt there's plenty in most other patent-free formats.
And, additionally, it needs to be mentioned that in places where patents are not enforceable, there is rarely any use of these patent-free formats. The patents formats are superior in many ways to their patent-free equivalents that without the fees, there is no motivation for using anything else.
All the software patent law suits are fraudlent. It s really rather ignorant due to the fact that copyright is more appropriate and terms are longer.
If not for software patents, there would be no open standards... The only protection would be keeping it secret and preventing others from re-implementing their designs. Software patents are too long, but still almost an order of magnitude shorter than copyright.
Software patents have gone insane... However, throwing them out all-together would be a horrible idea. There are some innovating things going on, and offering them no protection or compensation for their work would cause corporate research and development to grind to a halt.
I doubt anyone would claim that h.264 is obvious, but software patents are the only form of protection and profit model it has. And to make matters worse, the US is basically subsidizing the rest of the world, as we pay the patent license fees, while most other countries do not.
Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company.
I do it all the time, and absolutely don't see any of the 2D performance differences you've listed.
Xv (video playback) is slower with nv than nvidia, but not significantly so. And there's no way to compare the same between ati and fglrx, since the later doesn't even have Xv support at all.
The open source drivers for ATI and NV of course don't have GL support, or at least, not very good support. Unless you're using GL, you shouldn't notice a significant difference.
Things like support for dual monitors and TV can be tricky, but usually doable with a proper modeline, as divined by the X11 gods...
Of course, I do agree with you that proper open source 3D/GL drivers are important. With ATI seriously depreciating Xv, it won't be surprising if they start to omit hardware 2D support and leave the software drivers to emulate/convert it. With HDTV gaining popularity, GL video output is simply much faster than Xv overlay. And, of course, it's hard to say what other clever things people might come up with when those features are easily and widely available.
Anybody got any more details? They talk about the lack of a timeline, but "graphics drivers" is also vague, and could mean 2D, or just another small subset of features.
I'm certainly not going to go out and start buying ATI cards until all the details are worked-out.
Being an idiot doesn't necessarily preclude his occasionally being somewhere in the ballpark of the truth.
No, but what's the good of the analogous "stopped-clock" that is wrong most of the time? You certainly can't depend on it, so even if occasionally correct, you have no way of knowing that until after the fact, so it's completely worthless.
The article makes it sound as if people are suspending their (previously) impeccable judgment when turning on their GPS unit... Certainly that's not the reality. The only thing new here is people blaming the GPS, instead of any other little thing that came to mind, like street lighting, road signs, other cars/pedestrians/animals, etc.
An entire generation of kids [e.g. me] grew up on nothing more than 4MHz single-issue, no cache, barely any memory systems and did just fine.
You may have been "fine" but I sincerely doubt your 4MHz computer helped you achieve the goals that the OLPC is setting out to achieve.
If your only source of information was PNG images, your 4MHz computer would have been a severe hinderance. If your only source of information was a compressed Vorbis audio stream, your 4MHz computer wouldn't have been able to make sense of any of it (without massive storage). If your only source of information was PDFs, you'd be sitting around for a very long time, just waiting for the next page to render. If you wanted to do VoIP, you'd simply have been completely out of luck.
Usually, CPU power, and bandwidth have an inverse relationship. When CDs were the standard form of distribution, low-compression Cinepack videos that played on very slow system were just fine. Now that internet distribution is common, smaller MPEG-4 video are common, but unplayable on slower systems.
So, while the OLPC has far more CPU power than it needs, the idea that 4MHz would work is a complete misunderstanding of the goals of the project.
The Classmate isn't running XP Professional, but XP Embedded, which gives you a stripped-down version of XP, including only the components you want
That sounds nice, in theory, but the reality is quite different.
To get the performance, stability, security, kernel hooks, etc., etc. into XP Embedded that they get from OSS, you're going to be re-writing the operating system nearly from scratch.
Basically, saying they could use XP Embedded if they went through and modified it drastically, is like saying they can start from bare metal, and code their way up to a fully functional operating system...
It doesn't have to have anything it won't need. Though with Windows, you get to run Windows software *and* open-source software.
One of the big things it won't need, and would be a liability, is the Win32 API/ABI, which means Windows software won't run.
Also, saying open source software will run on Windows is like saying Windows software will run on Linux using WINE... In other words, performance is bad, stability is reduced, memory requirements increase, it can't be integrated with the rest of the system, etc., etc.
Wikipedia is meant to be the jumping-off place for all accumulated human knowledge; relying on the existence of 3rd-party texts -- most of which do NOT have their information on the Internet -- severely limits the usefulness of Wikipedia for everyone.
I can't wait for the Wiki that teaches people to read... And the English language... Or logic... Or the wiki about finding articles on the wiki...
The real solution is to use more of the chemical energy to provide power for moving the vehicle and less of it to heat the components.
Gee, we need better fuel efficiency? Who'd ever have thought of that? I'm sure glad you're here to explain it to us.
Trying to store the energy in rechargeable batteries will result in mostly short-range urban and novelty vehicles for a very long time, since the energy density of the storage, both in mass and volume, and recharge rate are pathetic compared to diesel, gasoline, or compressed propane/methane.
That's just not true. Energy density in chemicals is only higher if either you have extremely high efficiency that's completely impossible in current designs, or you fail to take into account the large, heavy, etc. drive-train needed to utilize the chemical energy.
Modern all-electric cars are usually lighter than gasoline/diesel-powered vehicles, with about the same range as you'd get on a full tank.
Recharge times need some work, but that's entirely doable.
If you want to reduce the CO2 footprint of humans, along with ending overfishing of the oceans, sucking the deep aquifers dry, destruction of the rain forests for farmland, habitat destruction for either human use or by diversion of fresh water resources, pollution by agricultural runoff,..., reduce the number of humans by 6 billion, or so. Unless you do that, nothing else will matter.
That's unbelievably idiotic.
CO2 output can be reduced to trivial levels through the use of wind and solar... If governments and or several huge corporations were willing to invest huge amounts of money in it right now, in a couple decades CO2 emissions would be minuscule, even if cars don't really improve in that time.
Over-fishing seems obvious... Humans don't need to eat fish all the time, and prices don't have to be as cheap as they are. Alternatives like farming fish are also practical, and being done (on a smaller scale) now.
The water cycle is a closed loop. Aquifers are merely convenient to use in some areas, and refilling them is not. My own city is developing plans to refill the local aquifer using surface water in the coming years. Of course it's just always cheaper to keep using something until it runs out, and never bother trying to replenish it.
Destruction of rain forests is not necessary for human survival. It is caused by economic depression in and around forested areas. There are vast expanses of empty land around the world, that could be used for farming instead of the rain forests. But the impoverished people in those regions don't have the means to relocate or build-up basic infrastructure, or enough industrialized jobs (and wealth) to avoid the need for expansive local agriculture. Technology keeps reducing the amount of land needed for agriculture, and the fact that not everyone has access to it is entirely an artificial construct.
NAT adds an important layer of security to the firewall - you can't tell what machines are behind it. Even how many, much less what their address ranges are.
It takes precisely one packet to discover the number and (private) addresses of machines behind a NAT. The level of obscurity NAT provides is trivially small.
A NAT box on its own will provide an effective firewall (provided it's coded to not allow inward routing, which it will be unless the programmer that designed it is totally retarded).
Routing packets and doing NAT are two entirely separate things, and I have NEVER seen a single system that would do NAT but would not otherwise route packets (inward) without explicitly using a stateful firewall. From Cisco routers, to Windows/Linux/BSD, absolutely none of them work in the "secure" way you think NAT does. Indeed, such a form of NAT that otherwise disallows regular routing would require burying the NAT code deep inside the kernel, which is decidedly impractical.
interested readers who have opinions on the issue do not, in general, actually believe that we should abolish copyright and leave a vacuum.
I thought the same thing, at first... But I DIDN'T skip the/. discussion of the first article. Sure enough, there were HUNDREDS of people claiming exactly that copyright should be completely abolished.
So, they're saying the way to get security in IPv6 is to throw away the whole concept of firewalls and hope that the protocol won't leave us with out collective bums hanging out in the wind??
It seems that having unique addresses for every device is a small step away from being able to track and monitor every device on the net.
It's not as if large ISPs are doing NAT for all their customers.
Your NAT box's IP address is more than enough for anyone to uniquely identify households...
With IPv6, you have thousands of addresses to play with... Want to change the address of your computer every hour??? Go right ahead.
Of course, these addresses are all under the same subset, which can be aggregated and perhaps narrowed down to the household level...
So you're really no worse off.
Not to mention, your public IP address isn't the information you really need to be worrying about. Things like cookies, user agents, stack fingerprinting, etc., etc. allow pin-pointing specific devices, and specific users of each device.
Being able to assign every device a routable address means that you can implement a stateless firewall instead of a stateful firewall. For most purposes, a simple firewall that filtered incomming TCP connection requests and UDP packets on all ports except those specifically allowed would suffice.
Congratulations! You can't access the internet!
"Stateful" firewalls are precisely what allows you to allow in-bound replies to out-bound requests, without leaving every port (above 1023) fully open. Try to do this, and you won't get anywhere.
This has the advantage that the firewall wouldn't need to track the state of TCP connections, and would eliminate problems like firewalls deciding a connection has been idle too long and closing it.
Firewalls keeping state information is decidedly not a burden. If the software is written to do it, and the hardware isn't some 5MHz 8080, there's really no penalty. Connection time-outs are a rare enough occurance, or else the default time-out periods would be increased, and networked software can deal with dropped connections easily enough...
Intel will have their finger in the pie too, as they've recently announced a prototype [...] chip [that] will be just one-seventh the size of normal chips, and consume only 10% of the power of existing processor. What does this mean for projects such as OpenMoko? Healthy competition, or the beginning of the end?"
Or more of Intel ridiculously over-hyping future products?
This seems to be the kindergarten introduction to firewalls, written by someone who is feeling around in the dark, and doesn't really know what he's talking about...
So what's the point of the pages full of irrelevant details about how Vista and ZoneAlarm works?
Stateful firewalls require you to explicitly allow incoming connections certain ports, even with IPv6. That's it. Nothing else there.
What he completely misses is that this is worlds better than NAT, which also requires assigning a unique port on the single IP address... You're screwed if you want more than one machine to access the same service, which doesn't allow you to use a non-default port.
Want two web servers running (on port 80)? Want two machines to be able to receive VoIP calls? Want multiple machines to be able to play some online game? Too bad. It's only with the multiple addresses IPv6 offers that it's really possible.
His position is that we can't just get rid of copyright, but we would have to replace it with something more modern.
In other words, something that isn't copyright, but exactly like copyright...
That part of his argument is a complete straw man... The original article is about people advocating the ABOLITION of copyright, not "updating" copyright.
Obviously she wouldn't drink beer and wear a pirate suit in the classroom... but is this the image she wants to communicate with your classroom, who surely will see this at some point in time?
A picture demonstrating that you're not a joyless machine doesn't make you a bad teacher.
I've had plenty of teachers who dressed up in costumes from time to time, whether based on the subject at hand, or just for classes on Halloween...
As for "beer," well... She's drinking out of a cup, there's no indication whether she's drinking beer, milk, soda, slim-fast, etc.
And even if there was, there's absolutely nothing illegal, or morally wrong about drinking beer, or being seen drinking beer by people of any age... Now, if it was a beer bong, or drinking a full bottle of hard liquor, or something else clearly suggestive of irresponsible behavior, then you might have something. As is, from her picture I see nothing to suggest anything but a responsible adult.
What's next, should we throw out teachers that put up pictures of themselves at a target-shooting competition, or driving in a professional or armature car race, because it promotes minors using guns, and speeding?
You've just made the exact point that the article is refuting.
The article is completely confused, and simply, completely, wrong.
It's trying to refute an article that was, in fact, correct.
If you oppose copyright, but can't do anything about the existence of copyright, you can at least put stuff into the public domain without allowing someone to wrap it up in copyright and resell it. That's basically all the GPL does,
Nope. The GPL doesn't just allow copying of binaries, it forces you to release your SOURCE CODE as well. THAT is a world of difference, and something it seems most everyone has missed in both (ranting) discussions.
Without copyright, you'd be able to copy binaries all you want, but you'd never be able to force someone to release the source code they used to create it. NEVER.
A binary is pretty useless if you want to create derivative works. You can only make the most basic modifications to binaries, without access to the source code. You can't port it to another platform (Windows -> Linux), you can't port it to another architecture (x86 -> PPC), you can't use bits and pieces of it in your own programs... etc. etc.
The GPL absolutely requires copyright restrictions to be able to work, at all. Otherwise, it just becomes the BSD license.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is.
The thing about money... It's not a renewable resource. It's not environmentally friendly to spend lots of it. You make it somewhere, and chances are that SOMEWHERE happens to either directly or indirectly pollute, use petroleum, etc.
Not to mention that the cost of the product you're buying is usually a good indication of how much energy was spent to build it, and therefore how much pollution is created in its construction.
Money is usually a pretty good indication of whether something is environmentally friendly, or not.
Universities... Other non-profits... A few companies that have more to gain by interoperability of their improvements than they spent to develop them. Obviously that's not the situation with something like h.264.
Theora is the worst possible example you could possibly have picked... Without patent protection, On2 wouldn't have developed VP3, and later open sourced the code and released their patents on it. Additionally, Theora is perpetually unfinished, and even the best possible outcome for the codec is, years from now, being a terrible performing, and still with about the quality of MPEG-1, on which patents have expired years ago...
Vorbis isn't the best example, either. The quality is only slightly better than the very old MP3 format, and requires vastly higher resources for both encoding and decoding. It lacks a vast number of features like multi-channel joint encoding, distorts in many situations, and overall just doesn't compare favorably with more recent patented formats like AAC. Musepack compares much more favorably in most every way, but they piggy-backed on numerous patents over the years, and still fall under a few.
And what must be said about every patent-free format is that their developers have depended greatly on patented technology... even if they then modified the patented process slightly to avoid patents. Numerous instances of that are well-documented in VP3, and I have no doubt there's plenty in most other patent-free formats.
And, additionally, it needs to be mentioned that in places where patents are not enforceable, there is rarely any use of these patent-free formats. The patents formats are superior in many ways to their patent-free equivalents that without the fees, there is no motivation for using anything else.
If not for software patents, there would be no open standards... The only protection would be keeping it secret and preventing others from re-implementing their designs. Software patents are too long, but still almost an order of magnitude shorter than copyright.
Software patents have gone insane... However, throwing them out all-together would be a horrible idea. There are some innovating things going on, and offering them no protection or compensation for their work would cause corporate research and development to grind to a halt.
I doubt anyone would claim that h.264 is obvious, but software patents are the only form of protection and profit model it has. And to make matters worse, the US is basically subsidizing the rest of the world, as we pay the patent license fees, while most other countries do not.
And if you think the response time of LCDs is bad... just wait for EPaper displays!
I do it all the time, and absolutely don't see any of the 2D performance differences you've listed.
Xv (video playback) is slower with nv than nvidia, but not significantly so. And there's no way to compare the same between ati and fglrx, since the later doesn't even have Xv support at all.
The open source drivers for ATI and NV of course don't have GL support, or at least, not very good support. Unless you're using GL, you shouldn't notice a significant difference.
Things like support for dual monitors and TV can be tricky, but usually doable with a proper modeline, as divined by the X11 gods...
Of course, I do agree with you that proper open source 3D/GL drivers are important. With ATI seriously depreciating Xv, it won't be surprising if they start to omit hardware 2D support and leave the software drivers to emulate/convert it. With HDTV gaining popularity, GL video output is simply much faster than Xv overlay. And, of course, it's hard to say what other clever things people might come up with when those features are easily and widely available.
Anybody got any more details? They talk about the lack of a timeline, but "graphics drivers" is also vague, and could mean 2D, or just another small subset of features.
I'm certainly not going to go out and start buying ATI cards until all the details are worked-out.
No, but what's the good of the analogous "stopped-clock" that is wrong most of the time? You certainly can't depend on it, so even if occasionally correct, you have no way of knowing that until after the fact, so it's completely worthless.
The article makes it sound as if people are suspending their (previously) impeccable judgment when turning on their GPS unit... Certainly that's not the reality. The only thing new here is people blaming the GPS, instead of any other little thing that came to mind, like street lighting, road signs, other cars/pedestrians/animals, etc.
Be quiet. After all, you're dead. I saw the box...
You may have been "fine" but I sincerely doubt your 4MHz computer helped you achieve the goals that the OLPC is setting out to achieve.
If your only source of information was PNG images, your 4MHz computer would have been a severe hinderance. If your only source of information was a compressed Vorbis audio stream, your 4MHz computer wouldn't have been able to make sense of any of it (without massive storage). If your only source of information was PDFs, you'd be sitting around for a very long time, just waiting for the next page to render. If you wanted to do VoIP, you'd simply have been completely out of luck.
Usually, CPU power, and bandwidth have an inverse relationship. When CDs were the standard form of distribution, low-compression Cinepack videos that played on very slow system were just fine. Now that internet distribution is common, smaller MPEG-4 video are common, but unplayable on slower systems.
So, while the OLPC has far more CPU power than it needs, the idea that 4MHz would work is a complete misunderstanding of the goals of the project.
That sounds nice, in theory, but the reality is quite different.
To get the performance, stability, security, kernel hooks, etc., etc. into XP Embedded that they get from OSS, you're going to be re-writing the operating system nearly from scratch.
Basically, saying they could use XP Embedded if they went through and modified it drastically, is like saying they can start from bare metal, and code their way up to a fully functional operating system...
One of the big things it won't need, and would be a liability, is the Win32 API/ABI, which means Windows software won't run.
Also, saying open source software will run on Windows is like saying Windows software will run on Linux using WINE... In other words, performance is bad, stability is reduced, memory requirements increase, it can't be integrated with the rest of the system, etc., etc.
I can't wait for the Wiki that teaches people to read...
And the English language...
Or logic...
Or the wiki about finding articles on the wiki...
Gee, we need better fuel efficiency? Who'd ever have thought of that? I'm sure glad you're here to explain it to us.
That's just not true. Energy density in chemicals is only higher if either you have extremely high efficiency that's completely impossible in current designs, or you fail to take into account the large, heavy, etc. drive-train needed to utilize the chemical energy.
Modern all-electric cars are usually lighter than gasoline/diesel-powered vehicles, with about the same range as you'd get on a full tank.
Recharge times need some work, but that's entirely doable.
That's unbelievably idiotic.
CO2 output can be reduced to trivial levels through the use of wind and solar... If governments and or several huge corporations were willing to invest huge amounts of money in it right now, in a couple decades CO2 emissions would be minuscule, even if cars don't really improve in that time.
Over-fishing seems obvious... Humans don't need to eat fish all the time, and prices don't have to be as cheap as they are. Alternatives like farming fish are also practical, and being done (on a smaller scale) now.
The water cycle is a closed loop. Aquifers are merely convenient to use in some areas, and refilling them is not. My own city is developing plans to refill the local aquifer using surface water in the coming years. Of course it's just always cheaper to keep using something until it runs out, and never bother trying to replenish it.
Destruction of rain forests is not necessary for human survival. It is caused by economic depression in and around forested areas. There are vast expanses of empty land around the world, that could be used for farming instead of the rain forests. But the impoverished people in those regions don't have the means to relocate or build-up basic infrastructure, or enough industrialized jobs (and wealth) to avoid the need for expansive local agriculture. Technology keeps reducing the amount of land needed for agriculture, and the fact that not everyone has access to it is entirely an artificial construct.
etc. etc.
It takes precisely one packet to discover the number and (private) addresses of machines behind a NAT. The level of obscurity NAT provides is trivially small.
Routing packets and doing NAT are two entirely separate things, and I have NEVER seen a single system that would do NAT but would not otherwise route packets (inward) without explicitly using a stateful firewall. From Cisco routers, to Windows/Linux/BSD, absolutely none of them work in the "secure" way you think NAT does. Indeed, such a form of NAT that otherwise disallows regular routing would require burying the NAT code deep inside the kernel, which is decidedly impractical.
I thought the same thing, at first... But I DIDN'T skip the
NO!
Firewall != NAT
NAT != Firewall
Please move along.
It's not as if large ISPs are doing NAT for all their customers.
Your NAT box's IP address is more than enough for anyone to uniquely identify households...
With IPv6, you have thousands of addresses to play with... Want to change the address of your computer every hour??? Go right ahead.
Of course, these addresses are all under the same subset, which can be aggregated and perhaps narrowed down to the household level...
So you're really no worse off.
Not to mention, your public IP address isn't the information you really need to be worrying about. Things like cookies, user agents, stack fingerprinting, etc., etc. allow pin-pointing specific devices, and specific users of each device.
Congratulations! You can't access the internet!
"Stateful" firewalls are precisely what allows you to allow in-bound replies to out-bound requests, without leaving every port (above 1023) fully open. Try to do this, and you won't get anywhere.
Firewalls keeping state information is decidedly not a burden. If the software is written to do it, and the hardware isn't some 5MHz 8080, there's really no penalty. Connection time-outs are a rare enough occurance, or else the default time-out periods would be increased, and networked software can deal with dropped connections easily enough...
Now that's just being pedantic.
Or more of Intel ridiculously over-hyping future products?
This seems to be the kindergarten introduction to firewalls, written by someone who is feeling around in the dark, and doesn't really know what he's talking about...
So what's the point of the pages full of irrelevant details about how Vista and ZoneAlarm works?
Stateful firewalls require you to explicitly allow incoming connections certain ports, even with IPv6. That's it. Nothing else there.
What he completely misses is that this is worlds better than NAT, which also requires assigning a unique port on the single IP address... You're screwed if you want more than one machine to access the same service, which doesn't allow you to use a non-default port.
Want two web servers running (on port 80)? Want two machines to be able to receive VoIP calls? Want multiple machines to be able to play some online game? Too bad. It's only with the multiple addresses IPv6 offers that it's really possible.
In other words, something that isn't copyright, but exactly like copyright...
That part of his argument is a complete straw man... The original article is about people advocating the ABOLITION of copyright, not "updating" copyright.
A picture demonstrating that you're not a joyless machine doesn't make you a bad teacher.
I've had plenty of teachers who dressed up in costumes from time to time, whether based on the subject at hand, or just for classes on Halloween...
As for "beer," well... She's drinking out of a cup, there's no indication whether she's drinking beer, milk, soda, slim-fast, etc.
And even if there was, there's absolutely nothing illegal, or morally wrong about drinking beer, or being seen drinking beer by people of any age... Now, if it was a beer bong, or drinking a full bottle of hard liquor, or something else clearly suggestive of irresponsible behavior, then you might have something. As is, from her picture I see nothing to suggest anything but a responsible adult.
What's next, should we throw out teachers that put up pictures of themselves at a target-shooting competition, or driving in a professional or armature car race, because it promotes minors using guns, and speeding?
In other words:
The article is completely confused, and simply, completely, wrong.
It's trying to refute an article that was, in fact, correct.
Nope. The GPL doesn't just allow copying of binaries, it forces you to release your SOURCE CODE as well. THAT is a world of difference, and something it seems most everyone has missed in both (ranting) discussions.
Without copyright, you'd be able to copy binaries all you want, but you'd never be able to force someone to release the source code they used to create it. NEVER.
A binary is pretty useless if you want to create derivative works. You can only make the most basic modifications to binaries, without access to the source code. You can't port it to another platform (Windows -> Linux), you can't port it to another architecture (x86 -> PPC), you can't use bits and pieces of it in your own programs... etc. etc.
The GPL absolutely requires copyright restrictions to be able to work, at all. Otherwise, it just becomes the BSD license.