I like the idea of a foreign company who's purpose is simply to own software that the author is too afraid to claim responsibility for. We might even want to got deeper under ground and have a P2P system like GNUnet where people can publish code anonymously, without having a central server that could be blocked by the US. It makes me mad to even think about having to hide authorship of creative works. But that's the direction we're headed in the US. Being creative will only be legal in other countries.
This is a really interesting point. If we could put those cycles to good use, we'd do the world some good while at the same time contribute to the stability of Internet cash transactions. So, how can we do massive competitive proof of work calculations based on protein folding?
Since I have thought about it (a total waste of time, but fun!), I can confirm with my half-assed unprofessional opinion that it is in fact a ponsi scheme (similar to pyramid but different). It's super cool stuff. First, the world needs bitcoin, or something like it, a lot. We need real cash we can spend on the Internet, not just Paypal. Much of the world doesn't have access to credit, and bitcoins could work for them. It's fun to imagine a world where 2 billion people take part in a bitcoin based economy. There are several ways to estimate what a bitcoin would be worth then, and I come up with anywhere from $2000 to $250,000 per BTC.
However, here's why it's a ponzi scheme. Some a-hole reading slashdot is going to come up with a better system than bitcoin, and then all of us geeks will naturally switch over to it. At that point, demand for bitcoins will decline, and all the early miners will panic and dump their coins on the market, crashing the price to zero. All the guys manipulating the market prices will laugh all the way to the bank while the rest of us realize our investment is worth nothing.
I built a bitcoin mining machine two weeks ago. There's more you should know that TFA only hints at. First, check out these graphs. The total CPU power competing for the 50 BTC generated every 10 minutes has increased 10X every quarter for 6 quarters, and soon, it will drop to 30 BTC every 10 minutes. If you think you can make money given that bitcoin value is flat or falling, while you have to split pay outs with more miners every day, well... ha ha! That's a good one.
That said, I'm a happy miner. I was looking for an excuse to build a gaming machine anyway, and I was able to do a decent machine for about $430, with an HD5770 doing just over 200 MH/s. Even if I earn nothing for mining, I'm still glad I built the machine. I needed another Ubuntu server anyway, and the mining only loads the CPU 1%. Next year, I plan to put Windoz on it and give the machine to my son. I can hardly wait to see what he thinks of the graphics.
Just curious but why does the operating system underneath it all matter?
Because iOS will rob you of your freedoms in ways that Bill Gates never imagined. I assume you mean "free software", as in freedom, when you say "open source". Unless of course, you don't care about freedom. There's no such thing as free software on iOS. It's incompatible with Job's EULA. I recommend getting a real OS. Free software, something less likely to screw you: in this case, Android.
Just a dumb idea... Get musicians, authors, artists, coders, and other digital work creators to join a new Digital.coop cooperative designed to eliminate the middle man. Users pay $5 to join, but then any profits are split between users and the artists. It gets around Apple's agency model problem, so you save 30% on all digital stuff right there. I write more about the idea at Ebooks.coop.
Right on. The government should offer rewards for hacks like this, in any critical system: voting databases, military secrets, IRS database, etc. It would be the equivalent of the whistle-blower law we passed to reward people who expose fraud in government contracts. Just require the hackers to make public enough to prove they have accessed sensitive data, but not enough to compromise important systems. State how they did the hack in secret communication, and get money from the US government, as bitcoins through the Tor network. Allow the hackers to collect the reward over and over once a month until the system is secure.
Imagine how awesome such a program would be for exposing which important secrets have been compromised? With say a $100K reward to any worker anywhere who can prove they have access to critical US "secrets", we'd learn a ton about what systems are secure and which aren't. That's the kind of information that wins or loses wars.
We always paid for the most expensive support contracts. The machines were under $2K, but support was IIRC something like $350. The truth was, we hardly ever called Dell, because the hardware was pretty reliable. Also, we run Linux on most machines, and never needed or expected any kind of software support. I'm pretty sure Dell made most of it's money off of our support contracts, but since some machines were mission critical, I didn't mind paying it. Failing to support to companies who buy lucrative support contracts on every machine is IMO the dumbest business decision Dell ever made.
I used to buy only Dell computers, and was influential in getting three companies to switch all Dell, from 1991 until about 2002 (two of which are now publicly traded, and presumably still using Dell). The kind of demo I could do for the higher level decision makers was fun. Got a stupid Microsoft PowerPoint question? Ever try to get it answered from Microsoft? Yeah... right. I could call Dell support about any stupid Windows question, and I'd get a very knowledgeable guy on the other end who would take more time on my stupid question than was warranted, and end with "You know technically, we don't support Microsoft software, but the answer is..." It as awesome. As for hardware issues, one call and a guy who could fix the problem was at my door within hours. Sometime shortly after the tech bubble burst, when suddenly out-sourcing was all the rage, the people answering my support calls changed. I don't mind that they're Indian. What I mind is that they refused to do support. I had a critical tape out and was under pressure and needed the f**king machine up and running, and some SOB from Dell simply refused to send anyone to help. The damage caused to our little company buy an insanely stupid Dell refusal to honor their support contract... well, I'm still not over it. I had to go to Best Buy and buy their highest end machine that day, and it had neither the memory or CPU power we needed. Ever do LVS/DRC on a compaq presario mini-tower?
So, I set company policy to never again buy a support contract from Dell, and instead make sure we had a spare model of any Dell computer we used lying around if needed. We saved a ton of money, and never had to deal with those Dell support goons again. I still kept buying Dell computers, though. They remain the best deal in the USA, IMO, for cheap reliable hardware. Unfortunately for Dell, when my company was bought, the new owners had a different reaction to their own Dell support nightmare: switch the entire company to HP, with full support contracts. We now spend a ton more on hardware and support, but HP support rocks. Like the poster above, I don't blame the Indian call center employees. They weren't in the same class as Dell's old support, but clearly the management chain at Dell was mainly at fault.
Yeah, sorry about that. I wanted to take it back just after I'd hit "submit". Let me offer a more constructive reply. I personally find some blind people have outstanding spelling, and make superb proof-readers. For one thing, many can listen super fast to a document and detect if any sentence sounds wrong while our eyes tend to correct spelling on the fly and cause people to miss mistakes. On the other hand, unless they spell character by character, which is slow and painful, they wood knot fined any errors hear. I am somewhat bitter about central vision loss, which I hope explains rather than excuses my previous reply. However, I still see well enough to read slowly, and so I see a lot of mistakes in Skype when IM-ing with the blind. In general, I only point out spelling mistakes if it's likely they will repeat it in group e-mails and it's important, like a name people wont recognise (Cena vs Sina, for example). Names are very tough for them, though frankly English could be a lot simpler to spell. It's not like they learn to spell by reading, like the rest of us, unless they read Braille, which most blind kids today do not (a big mistake IMO).
Never bug the blind about spelling, unless you want to burn in hell. If it sounds the same when spoken by their TTS engine, chances are they wont do letter by letter navigation over at dicionary.com to get it exactly right. Just read it phonetically and move on.
It turns out that the blind who use both Windows and Linux extensively don't use the mouse at all. Linux has an awesome screen reader, Orca, which currently only works with Gnome (sorry KDE - but maybe soon?). It works, but basic crap like the GTK calendar control and icons in tables are not accessible at all, not due to Orca, but due to lack of caring about accessibility across the Gnome groups, especially the GTK+ team. Windows wins (sorry Linux). This is because that great evil man Bill Gates actually does have a heart, and made sure Windows was accessible far before Linux or Mac. If you want to know how to use a computer without a mouse, just ask a blind computer geek. It's Windows, man, which totally sucks.
Instead of phasing out the penny, state and federal laws should change to round all taxes due on any transaction to the nearest $0.05. The only reason stores need pennies is taxes have to be computed and collected that way. Change the tax code, and people would simply stop using pennies.
I would say that history so far proves your right. However, I feel we can do better. For example, I'd love to see an open-source cross-platform app store for Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, and iOS that enables coders to get to a lot of users with minimal red tape. I like the Android model of running apps in jails with detailed level of user controlled permissions, and the way Android never upgrades a dependency from under your app to cause it to crash. It simplifies package creation and reduces the need for long term user testing before exposing an app to average users. I also like the Ubuntu launchpad services which automate building packages for multiple platforms from one source. User PPA's are one of the most important ways right now that developers can innovate and reach users quickly. I love the Debian model for sharing libraries where I can search through tens of thousands of existing libraries with one command, and install the one I want with one more. If we could combine the best of these systems in new open-source cross platform super-highway between developers and users, we might be able to get open source innovation back on track.
RMS since 1984, when he declared the GNU free software operating system effort, has been the GNU/FSF champion. He invented the GPL license, which along with similar licenses that have been developed, are the legal cornerstone enabling software innovators around the world to collaborate on free software efforts. However, with the emacs project, RMS showed a lack of skill in encouraging innovators to go nuts with whatever development they like. Everything had to be approved to get into the official emacs release, and RMS was a single point of failure, constricting the flow of innovation from others while providing most of it himself.
Linus, on the other hand, has the people skills needed to enable innovators to contribute while standing enough out of the way to keep from restricting innovation. That's why he's credited for this model of governance. That's the model we need to figure out how to replicate. Unfortunately, it seems to require a benevolent dictator who is brilliant, has thick skin, and good people skills. If we can figure out how to replicate that kind of success, based on how Linus did it, then we can credit him for the model, but so far it seems that Linus' model requires a very rare kind of benevolent dictator who is brilliant technically, has good people skills, and likes to enable others to innovate as much as they like to contribute themselves.
No good model for sharing the efforts of software innovators exists today. Of all platforms, Android seems to have the most innovation at present, simply because they allow any old coding fool to publish an app with minimal red tape. However, Android more or less forbids sharing between developers. We'll never get where we need to be with the current models.
I wish that were true, but I fear open source governance to date has gotten entirely away from the sort of innovative leadership Linus provided. Let's take Debian, for example. Innovation back when everyone compiled everything from source, and it was truly a bazaar model, was off the charts. Then came the Debian package manager and Debian official commiters, and multi-year release cycles, all driven with open source governance. What we have now is a cathedral model, where a minority of the community determine what goes in and what doesn't, and where any new innovation takes years to get into the stable release. What Linus provided with the Linux project was solid leadership in a bazaar model that no longer exists, except for those of us still willing to download and compile from source. I find, now that I'm developing for Windows and Android, that innovation is more rapid there, because you can write code and have it in user's hands without the red tape. No good governing system should create barriers between innovators and users, and potential super-star leaders need to be empowered to lead. Linus ran Linux development in a way that connected users and innovators, while keeping final authority over his project in his hands. A good bazaar needs a skilled benevolent dictator, not a innovation crushing exclusive republic like Debian.
Or, the warmers might point out that we finished the quietest sun-spot cycle in well over a century, yet hit new record high global temperatures in 1998, 2005, and last year, 2011. It is very unlikely that this new cycle will be as quite as the last. I could go on, but I tire of the never-ending effort of training the ignorant. However, I am making a bit of money off these fools:-) Just go to intrade.com and find the price of this month or year being the warmest on record, and make bets with your foolish brain-washed Republican friends. Works for me!
So, not to pick on you specifically, but don't the spelling and grammar police on slashdot realise that half of us are massively dyslexic? The reason "it's" gets through is the spell checker blessed it. Otherwise, spelling is up to my fingers. It's weird, but as I age, my muscle memory has begun to learn to spell, while my "inner eye" remains blind to spelling. You don't even want to know how bad my spelling was before I typed a few millions of lines of text.
Well said. I also have a number of software patents I feel forced into. I avoided them for years, and then a competitor patented a software algorithm I'd invented and used as a trade secret for years. Since then, I probably filed a dozen software patents, though every one reduces a coder's ability to innovate. Feel free to search for "William Cox" and "QuickLogic" for the first few. I have never seen a software inovator create new algorithms because of the draw of patents. I have only seen large companies use them to scare developers from using products like Android and Linux, while patent trolls use them to suck insane profits from large companies. These patents are bad for everyone.
Good points. How do you feel about water marking? It can be done in such a way that it becomes difficult to remove. However, it violates a freedom RMS is concerned about: anonymity.
I loved reading Applied Cryptography, especially the jibes at AI. Anyway, it's been a few years, but last I read, it looked like SHA-256 would be a solid document signing method for many years, and SHA-512 is for the truly paranoid. It's mostly used as a signing method, so I'm confused by the OP worrying about SHA rather than his stream encryption, which is likely some sort of AES. Truth is, ARC4 was hacked, but if you drop the first bytes, say 768, it's perfectly secure, so far as anyone publicly acknowledges (unless you count the ability to detect that a gigabyte of data isn't actually random as compromising security). We could still be using WEP securely today with this minor change.
Anyway, I always hear people pleading for hackers to avoid rolling their own security protocol. I believe that so long as you confine it's use to an appropriate application, go have fun and hack up a new one. It's not likely to be as good as existing algorithms, but how is the new generation of crypto hackers suppose to get any good without rolling their own a few times?
I challenge you to try and buy him. In my experience, he's glad to have income, but only if there is exactly zero compromise to his freedom. He sticks to this principle literally to a fault. Freedoms like being allowed to modify software embedded in electronic devices don't show up on the list of most protester's demands. RMS will give up a life with a good income, but never control over his personal data.
Anyway, TFA's title is wrong. It should have said GNU/Linux, and then it would have been accurate. RMS did found GNU, the original and successful effort to rewrite Unix as free software. GNU code makes up far more of most GNU/Linux systems like Debian than does the Linux kernel. I think RMS could have used a good class in marketing. GNU, a hard to pronounce recursive acronym, never had a chance to get implanted in Joe Sixpack's mind. Linux... now that's easy to say. "Guh-new-slash-linux". Now there's a phrase taking the world by storm:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I like the idea of a foreign company who's purpose is simply to own software that the author is too afraid to claim responsibility for. We might even want to got deeper under ground and have a P2P system like GNUnet where people can publish code anonymously, without having a central server that could be blocked by the US. It makes me mad to even think about having to hide authorship of creative works. But that's the direction we're headed in the US. Being creative will only be legal in other countries.
This is a really interesting point. If we could put those cycles to good use, we'd do the world some good while at the same time contribute to the stability of Internet cash transactions. So, how can we do massive competitive proof of work calculations based on protein folding?
Since I have thought about it (a total waste of time, but fun!), I can confirm with my half-assed unprofessional opinion that it is in fact a ponsi scheme (similar to pyramid but different). It's super cool stuff. First, the world needs bitcoin, or something like it, a lot. We need real cash we can spend on the Internet, not just Paypal. Much of the world doesn't have access to credit, and bitcoins could work for them. It's fun to imagine a world where 2 billion people take part in a bitcoin based economy. There are several ways to estimate what a bitcoin would be worth then, and I come up with anywhere from $2000 to $250,000 per BTC.
However, here's why it's a ponzi scheme. Some a-hole reading slashdot is going to come up with a better system than bitcoin, and then all of us geeks will naturally switch over to it. At that point, demand for bitcoins will decline, and all the early miners will panic and dump their coins on the market, crashing the price to zero. All the guys manipulating the market prices will laugh all the way to the bank while the rest of us realize our investment is worth nothing.
I built a bitcoin mining machine two weeks ago. There's more you should know that TFA only hints at. First, check out these graphs. The total CPU power competing for the 50 BTC generated every 10 minutes has increased 10X every quarter for 6 quarters, and soon, it will drop to 30 BTC every 10 minutes. If you think you can make money given that bitcoin value is flat or falling, while you have to split pay outs with more miners every day, well... ha ha! That's a good one.
That said, I'm a happy miner. I was looking for an excuse to build a gaming machine anyway, and I was able to do a decent machine for about $430, with an HD5770 doing just over 200 MH/s. Even if I earn nothing for mining, I'm still glad I built the machine. I needed another Ubuntu server anyway, and the mining only loads the CPU 1%. Next year, I plan to put Windoz on it and give the machine to my son. I can hardly wait to see what he thinks of the graphics.
Because iOS will rob you of your freedoms in ways that Bill Gates never imagined. I assume you mean "free software", as in freedom, when you say "open source". Unless of course, you don't care about freedom. There's no such thing as free software on iOS. It's incompatible with Job's EULA. I recommend getting a real OS. Free software, something less likely to screw you: in this case, Android.
Just a dumb idea... Get musicians, authors, artists, coders, and other digital work creators to join a new Digital.coop cooperative designed to eliminate the middle man. Users pay $5 to join, but then any profits are split between users and the artists. It gets around Apple's agency model problem, so you save 30% on all digital stuff right there. I write more about the idea at Ebooks.coop.
Right on. The government should offer rewards for hacks like this, in any critical system: voting databases, military secrets, IRS database, etc. It would be the equivalent of the whistle-blower law we passed to reward people who expose fraud in government contracts. Just require the hackers to make public enough to prove they have accessed sensitive data, but not enough to compromise important systems. State how they did the hack in secret communication, and get money from the US government, as bitcoins through the Tor network. Allow the hackers to collect the reward over and over once a month until the system is secure.
Imagine how awesome such a program would be for exposing which important secrets have been compromised? With say a $100K reward to any worker anywhere who can prove they have access to critical US "secrets", we'd learn a ton about what systems are secure and which aren't. That's the kind of information that wins or loses wars.
No! Those of us who don't live in Florida love all the comedy. You would ruin it for the rest of us.
We always paid for the most expensive support contracts. The machines were under $2K, but support was IIRC something like $350. The truth was, we hardly ever called Dell, because the hardware was pretty reliable. Also, we run Linux on most machines, and never needed or expected any kind of software support. I'm pretty sure Dell made most of it's money off of our support contracts, but since some machines were mission critical, I didn't mind paying it. Failing to support to companies who buy lucrative support contracts on every machine is IMO the dumbest business decision Dell ever made.
I used to buy only Dell computers, and was influential in getting three companies to switch all Dell, from 1991 until about 2002 (two of which are now publicly traded, and presumably still using Dell). The kind of demo I could do for the higher level decision makers was fun. Got a stupid Microsoft PowerPoint question? Ever try to get it answered from Microsoft? Yeah... right. I could call Dell support about any stupid Windows question, and I'd get a very knowledgeable guy on the other end who would take more time on my stupid question than was warranted, and end with "You know technically, we don't support Microsoft software, but the answer is ..." It as awesome. As for hardware issues, one call and a guy who could fix the problem was at my door within hours. Sometime shortly after the tech bubble burst, when suddenly out-sourcing was all the rage, the people answering my support calls changed. I don't mind that they're Indian. What I mind is that they refused to do support. I had a critical tape out and was under pressure and needed the f**king machine up and running, and some SOB from Dell simply refused to send anyone to help. The damage caused to our little company buy an insanely stupid Dell refusal to honor their support contract... well, I'm still not over it. I had to go to Best Buy and buy their highest end machine that day, and it had neither the memory or CPU power we needed. Ever do LVS/DRC on a compaq presario mini-tower?
So, I set company policy to never again buy a support contract from Dell, and instead make sure we had a spare model of any Dell computer we used lying around if needed. We saved a ton of money, and never had to deal with those Dell support goons again. I still kept buying Dell computers, though. They remain the best deal in the USA, IMO, for cheap reliable hardware. Unfortunately for Dell, when my company was bought, the new owners had a different reaction to their own Dell support nightmare: switch the entire company to HP, with full support contracts. We now spend a ton more on hardware and support, but HP support rocks. Like the poster above, I don't blame the Indian call center employees. They weren't in the same class as Dell's old support, but clearly the management chain at Dell was mainly at fault.
Yeah, sorry about that. I wanted to take it back just after I'd hit "submit". Let me offer a more constructive reply. I personally find some blind people have outstanding spelling, and make superb proof-readers. For one thing, many can listen super fast to a document and detect if any sentence sounds wrong while our eyes tend to correct spelling on the fly and cause people to miss mistakes. On the other hand, unless they spell character by character, which is slow and painful, they wood knot fined any errors hear. I am somewhat bitter about central vision loss, which I hope explains rather than excuses my previous reply. However, I still see well enough to read slowly, and so I see a lot of mistakes in Skype when IM-ing with the blind. In general, I only point out spelling mistakes if it's likely they will repeat it in group e-mails and it's important, like a name people wont recognise (Cena vs Sina, for example). Names are very tough for them, though frankly English could be a lot simpler to spell. It's not like they learn to spell by reading, like the rest of us, unless they read Braille, which most blind kids today do not (a big mistake IMO).
Never bug the blind about spelling, unless you want to burn in hell. If it sounds the same when spoken by their TTS engine, chances are they wont do letter by letter navigation over at dicionary.com to get it exactly right. Just read it phonetically and move on.
It turns out that the blind who use both Windows and Linux extensively don't use the mouse at all. Linux has an awesome screen reader, Orca, which currently only works with Gnome (sorry KDE - but maybe soon?). It works, but basic crap like the GTK calendar control and icons in tables are not accessible at all, not due to Orca, but due to lack of caring about accessibility across the Gnome groups, especially the GTK+ team. Windows wins (sorry Linux). This is because that great evil man Bill Gates actually does have a heart, and made sure Windows was accessible far before Linux or Mac. If you want to know how to use a computer without a mouse, just ask a blind computer geek. It's Windows, man, which totally sucks.
Instead of phasing out the penny, state and federal laws should change to round all taxes due on any transaction to the nearest $0.05. The only reason stores need pennies is taxes have to be computed and collected that way. Change the tax code, and people would simply stop using pennies.
I would say that history so far proves your right. However, I feel we can do better. For example, I'd love to see an open-source cross-platform app store for Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, and iOS that enables coders to get to a lot of users with minimal red tape. I like the Android model of running apps in jails with detailed level of user controlled permissions, and the way Android never upgrades a dependency from under your app to cause it to crash. It simplifies package creation and reduces the need for long term user testing before exposing an app to average users. I also like the Ubuntu launchpad services which automate building packages for multiple platforms from one source. User PPA's are one of the most important ways right now that developers can innovate and reach users quickly. I love the Debian model for sharing libraries where I can search through tens of thousands of existing libraries with one command, and install the one I want with one more. If we could combine the best of these systems in new open-source cross platform super-highway between developers and users, we might be able to get open source innovation back on track.
RMS since 1984, when he declared the GNU free software operating system effort, has been the GNU/FSF champion. He invented the GPL license, which along with similar licenses that have been developed, are the legal cornerstone enabling software innovators around the world to collaborate on free software efforts. However, with the emacs project, RMS showed a lack of skill in encouraging innovators to go nuts with whatever development they like. Everything had to be approved to get into the official emacs release, and RMS was a single point of failure, constricting the flow of innovation from others while providing most of it himself.
Linus, on the other hand, has the people skills needed to enable innovators to contribute while standing enough out of the way to keep from restricting innovation. That's why he's credited for this model of governance. That's the model we need to figure out how to replicate. Unfortunately, it seems to require a benevolent dictator who is brilliant, has thick skin, and good people skills. If we can figure out how to replicate that kind of success, based on how Linus did it, then we can credit him for the model, but so far it seems that Linus' model requires a very rare kind of benevolent dictator who is brilliant technically, has good people skills, and likes to enable others to innovate as much as they like to contribute themselves.
No good model for sharing the efforts of software innovators exists today. Of all platforms, Android seems to have the most innovation at present, simply because they allow any old coding fool to publish an app with minimal red tape. However, Android more or less forbids sharing between developers. We'll never get where we need to be with the current models.
I wish that were true, but I fear open source governance to date has gotten entirely away from the sort of innovative leadership Linus provided. Let's take Debian, for example. Innovation back when everyone compiled everything from source, and it was truly a bazaar model, was off the charts. Then came the Debian package manager and Debian official commiters, and multi-year release cycles, all driven with open source governance. What we have now is a cathedral model, where a minority of the community determine what goes in and what doesn't, and where any new innovation takes years to get into the stable release. What Linus provided with the Linux project was solid leadership in a bazaar model that no longer exists, except for those of us still willing to download and compile from source.
I find, now that I'm developing for Windows and Android, that innovation is more rapid there, because you can write code and have it in user's hands without the red tape. No good governing system should create barriers between innovators and users, and potential super-star leaders need to be empowered to lead. Linus ran Linux development in a way that connected users and innovators, while keeping final authority over his project in his hands. A good bazaar needs a skilled benevolent dictator, not a innovation crushing exclusive republic like Debian.
Or, the warmers might point out that we finished the quietest sun-spot cycle in well over a century, yet hit new record high global temperatures in 1998, 2005, and last year, 2011. It is very unlikely that this new cycle will be as quite as the last. I could go on, but I tire of the never-ending effort of training the ignorant. However, I am making a bit of money off these fools :-) Just go to intrade.com and find the price of this month or year being the warmest on record, and make bets with your foolish brain-washed Republican friends. Works for me!
So, not to pick on you specifically, but don't the spelling and grammar police on slashdot realise that half of us are massively dyslexic? The reason "it's" gets through is the spell checker blessed it. Otherwise, spelling is up to my fingers. It's weird, but as I age, my muscle memory has begun to learn to spell, while my "inner eye" remains blind to spelling. You don't even want to know how bad my spelling was before I typed a few millions of lines of text.
Well said. I also have a number of software patents I feel forced into. I avoided them for years, and then a competitor patented a software algorithm I'd invented and used as a trade secret for years. Since then, I probably filed a dozen software patents, though every one reduces a coder's ability to innovate. Feel free to search for "William Cox" and "QuickLogic" for the first few. I have never seen a software inovator create new algorithms because of the draw of patents. I have only seen large companies use them to scare developers from using products like Android and Linux, while patent trolls use them to suck insane profits from large companies. These patents are bad for everyone.
But what about the impact? There's no denying our (the US) enemies are happy about it.
Corrupt elements within the NSA brought bogus charges against a heroic whistle blower and lost big-time. And... you think our enemies are happy?
Good points. How do you feel about water marking? It can be done in such a way that it becomes difficult to remove. However, it violates a freedom RMS is concerned about: anonymity.
You go in with as many claims as you can make up. It may be that it only takes one successful claim to ruin Android.
Indeed, you only need one. A better example of the folly of software patents is hard to find.
I loved reading Applied Cryptography, especially the jibes at AI. Anyway, it's been a few years, but last I read, it looked like SHA-256 would be a solid document signing method for many years, and SHA-512 is for the truly paranoid. It's mostly used as a signing method, so I'm confused by the OP worrying about SHA rather than his stream encryption, which is likely some sort of AES. Truth is, ARC4 was hacked, but if you drop the first bytes, say 768, it's perfectly secure, so far as anyone publicly acknowledges (unless you count the ability to detect that a gigabyte of data isn't actually random as compromising security). We could still be using WEP securely today with this minor change.
Anyway, I always hear people pleading for hackers to avoid rolling their own security protocol. I believe that so long as you confine it's use to an appropriate application, go have fun and hack up a new one. It's not likely to be as good as existing algorithms, but how is the new generation of crypto hackers suppose to get any good without rolling their own a few times?
I challenge you to try and buy him. In my experience, he's glad to have income, but only if there is exactly zero compromise to his freedom. He sticks to this principle literally to a fault. Freedoms like being allowed to modify software embedded in electronic devices don't show up on the list of most protester's demands. RMS will give up a life with a good income, but never control over his personal data.
Anyway, TFA's title is wrong. It should have said GNU/Linux, and then it would have been accurate. RMS did found GNU, the original and successful effort to rewrite Unix as free software. GNU code makes up far more of most GNU/Linux systems like Debian than does the Linux kernel. I think RMS could have used a good class in marketing. GNU, a hard to pronounce recursive acronym, never had a chance to get implanted in Joe Sixpack's mind. Linux... now that's easy to say. "Guh-new-slash-linux". Now there's a phrase taking the world by storm :-)