A Liberal in Canada is one belonging to a Liberal Party (www.liberal.ca). Other major Canadial parties are the Conservative Party (www.conservative.ca), and New Democratic Party (NDP) (www.ndp.ca), and Bloc Quebecois (www.blocquebecois.org), a Quebec separatist party. Of these, NDP is the most liberal, Liberals are somewhere in the middle and Conservatives are somewhat conservative, and Block Quebecois is all over the map, depending on the issue.
In the U.S. a liberal is someone of liberal (free) political views. These exist in Canada too, of course, though you'd call them as people with "liberal views" rathen than just "liberal".
What you are talking about has been a serious concern for a number of researchers. In particular David L. Parnas has been working on this problem for many years now. The basic problem is that software specification often lacks in precision required to make appropriate decisions when writing the software. This is compounded by the lack of precise specification of the OS itself.
Take a look at the CRL, SERG and SQRL reserach documents at
http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/serg/serg.publications. html
In particular read the CRL Report 241 - "Predicate Logic for Software Engineering" - it covers some of the fundamentals. Then read up on CRL Report 259 "Formal Documentation of Well-structured Programs". There is tons of other interesting reports there that address some aspects of this very issue.
It's unlikely that CG idols will not be tainted by scandals: I bet lots of popular CG idols will appear in prOn, have afairs with other CG idols, or even real people - they're computer generated, and so they are far more easy to reproducible, duplicate and copy than their flesh-and-bone counterparts.
Scandal and sex sure could sell well, and someone out there is going to try to make money on it, even if it's some CG Idol pirate ripping the Idol copyright owner off.
It's hard to judge exactly what happened, with the scant detail posted, but I presume that the fight was who had the right to use AW libraries.
While I applaud Adam for having the wit to write great code that someone else was very much interested it, I don't have much to say about his ability to protect is won iterests. Perhaps he was too young and gullible to have done any better, or perhpas he simply did not care at the time. The fact is that he did not do enough to protect himself.
As for the company, you can look at their actions from a different angle instead of painting them as a villainous lot. Lets not forget that the company in question had a vested interest in retaining the ownership of the code, preceisely because it was something useful and gave them an edge over the competition. This competitive advantage was obvously of great importance, enough to pursue legal action agains anyone (including it's creator) who would take it away from them. It might have even been a matter of survival.
Ignorance is not an exuse. Life's tough, so what ya goanna do about that?
One of the reasons why the patent for the Enigma machine was not granted was to keep it out of the public eyes. The panent filing requires exposure of certain specific details about the invention, and Enigma was a very powerful encription tool, well after WW II.
In fact, the British government have kept all of its captured Enigma machines out of public access for decades. Enigma was a very successful tool, and for long time after WWII it was sufficent for the needs of governments and international corportaion to encrypt sensitive information.
Thus, the real reason for not granting this patent earlier is quite likely desire to keep unscrupulous individuals to crack Enigma and Enigma-based encryption systems that were in use at the time.
Believe me, this is not just about recalling the DeCSS code off the web. They KNOW they cannot effectively enforce doing this. What's this about is more a preventive lawsuit - it will make any hacker out there think twice before posting his work.
This lawsuit is also a fiendish stab against Open Source, because the next time such code will be posted annonymously (so that the hackers can avoid being harrased), and the targets will not be the individuals, but the OpenSource community, and the companies that use it, like Red Hat.
This fight is not only about freedom of expression - it is the fight about the validity of the Open Source concept, and there are great many players out there that wish it was dead.
I believe it is encription. There was a huge effort at the dawn of the computer age during WWII to decript secret German messages encripted using the Enigma machine. That pushed computing technology forward, and proved that a general purpose computer can be programmed to solve many problems. Once this was figured out, the rest of the world started take notice.
Slashdot Mirror
A Liberal in Canada is one belonging to a Liberal Party (www.liberal.ca). Other major Canadial parties are the Conservative Party (www.conservative.ca), and New Democratic Party (NDP) (www.ndp.ca), and Bloc Quebecois (www.blocquebecois.org), a Quebec separatist party. Of these, NDP is the most liberal, Liberals are somewhere in the middle and Conservatives are somewhat conservative, and Block Quebecois is all over the map, depending on the issue.
In the U.S. a liberal is someone of liberal (free) political views. These exist in Canada too, of course, though you'd call them as people with "liberal views" rathen than just "liberal".
What you are talking about has been a serious concern for a number of researchers. In particular David L. Parnas has been working on this problem for many years now. The basic problem is that software specification often lacks in precision required to make appropriate decisions when writing the software. This is compounded by the lack of precise specification of the OS itself.
Take a look at the CRL, SERG and SQRL reserach documents at
In particular read the CRL Report 241 - "Predicate Logic for Software Engineering" - it covers some of the fundamentals. Then read up on CRL Report 259 "Formal Documentation of Well-structured Programs". There is tons of other interesting reports there that address some aspects of this very issue.It's unlikely that CG idols will not be tainted by scandals: I bet lots of popular CG idols will appear in prOn, have afairs with other CG idols, or even real people - they're computer generated, and so they are far more easy to reproducible, duplicate and copy than their flesh-and-bone counterparts.
Scandal and sex sure could sell well, and someone out there is going to try to make money on it, even if it's some CG Idol pirate ripping the Idol copyright owner off.
It's hard to judge exactly what happened, with the scant detail posted, but I presume that the fight was who had the right to use AW libraries.
While I applaud Adam for having the wit to write great code that someone else was very much interested it, I don't have much to say about his ability to protect is won iterests. Perhaps he was too young and gullible to have done any better, or perhpas he simply did not care at the time. The fact is that he did not do enough to protect himself.
As for the company, you can look at their actions from a different angle instead of painting them as a villainous lot. Lets not forget that the company in question had a vested interest in retaining the ownership of the code, preceisely because it was something useful and gave them an edge over the competition. This competitive advantage was obvously of great importance, enough to pursue legal action agains anyone (including it's creator) who would take it away from them. It might have even been a matter of survival.
Ignorance is not an exuse. Life's tough, so what ya goanna do about that?
One of the reasons why the patent for the Enigma machine was not granted was to keep it out of the public eyes. The panent filing requires exposure of certain specific details about the invention, and Enigma was a very powerful encription tool, well after WW II.
In fact, the British government have kept all of its captured Enigma machines out of public access for decades. Enigma was a very successful tool, and for long time after WWII it was sufficent for the needs of governments and international corportaion to encrypt sensitive information.
Thus, the real reason for not granting this patent earlier is quite likely desire to keep unscrupulous individuals to crack Enigma and Enigma-based encryption systems that were in use at the time.
Believe me, this is not just about recalling the DeCSS code off the web. They KNOW they cannot effectively enforce doing this. What's this about is more a preventive lawsuit - it will make any hacker out there think twice before posting his work.
This lawsuit is also a fiendish stab against Open Source, because the next time such code will be posted annonymously (so that the hackers can avoid being harrased), and the targets will not be the individuals, but the OpenSource community, and the companies that use it, like Red Hat.
This fight is not only about freedom of expression - it is the fight about the validity of the Open Source concept, and there are great many players out there that wish it was dead.
I believe it is encription. There was a huge effort at the dawn of the computer age during WWII to decript secret German messages encripted using the Enigma machine. That pushed computing technology forward, and proved that a general purpose computer can be programmed to solve many problems. Once this was figured out, the rest of the world started take notice.