1) If the license is substantially the same as one that's already approved, there's no reason to approve it. One of the functions of OSI was to reduce the number of licenses one had to consider.
2) This license was written by MS lawyers. It may look innocuous, but that doesn't mean that a court would find it so. IANAL, so I don't accept that lawyers working for someone else have my best interests at heart, and I also don't presume that a court would interpret clear English in the same way that I would.
3) No case has been presented that these licenses serve any particular useful purpose. (With specificity, naming the useful purpose.)
4) What function does the OSI serve if we can't trust them? Can we trust them? (I find that I am unwilling trust them. I distrust MS more than I used to trust OSI.)
You're probably right (thanks to your careful choice of words). When I was a MSWind user, I found it fairly trivial to move from version to version, except when I was trying to tinker deeply. It was also, however, easy for me to move to the Mac. Linux, at that time, required a lot move investment of time and energy. (I did it because of the EULAs, which I found insupperable.)
OTOH, I am not a typical end user. I'm a programmer. I know many people who needed to be trained to move from MSwind95 to MSWind98. And they aren't necessarily stupid, they just have interests in different areas, so they don't have the same kind of model of computers that I do. Their model tends to be spatial...and if you shuffle the icons on their desktop, it bothers them until they memorize the new layout. It can be a real problem trying to teach them to use the find command. They just don't get the idea that what's being matched are character strings, not words or phrases. (The MSWind95 find command breaks the match pattern at each space and returns the union of matches.)
Don't presume that just because something is easy for you, that it's easy for any intelligent person. Not until you've brushed a resisting dog's teeth. (Unfair. That one often calls for a general anesthetic. That was a trick question to show also that just because something sounds easy doesn't mean it is.) Try this one then: Knap a stone arrowhead and fasten it to a shaft using only naturally available materials. It's GOT to be easy, because it's one of the first technologies that our species mastered. But just TRY. My arrowheads kept cutting the bindings, even though I used the material that Ishi recommended as the absolute best starting material. (Milk bottle glass. You may have to search for it these days...and they may have changed the composition. Obsidian is a nearly equivalent substitute.) I suppose that the problem was that I didn't have any raw guts to use as the binding cord, but I don't even know that THAT's the problem. And this HAS to be a problem with a trivial solution.
I don't see an original date of publication on that page. (The date that I found was this year.) As such, your link doesn't refute his assertion. NOW there's an upgrade path. That doesn't mean that one was available at the time.
Also, I seem to remember the assertion as being true. Not, I'll admit, with clarity, but I seem to remember some rather jubuliant comments when the update path became available. Unfortunately, although I know it was on/., I don't even know what year. (I've never used either, so it's been on the fringes of my awareness.)
Any proof of this? MS has a long history of pre-loading dirvers, and even large sections of programs "for faster response". As such, I have no difficulty believing that they'd do it again, and a bit of difficulty believing that "but *this* time they didn't do it".
Still, I'll admit I've no evidence. Merely an established pattern of behavior.
One thing to remember is that when it comes to AI, computers are still underpowered. Things are just now getting to the point where small groups with moderate funding can start serious experimentation. Up until this decade there's been what.. 5 people in the world?..who had adequate computer power to test their theories on anything except toy problems. This decade that number's going to explode!
N.B.: Even this decade the computers will be underpowered for anything serious...but high end user-space systems will be able to tackle more than toy problems. At this point we start getting cars that can drive themselves. (DARPA contest to the contrary, we aren't quite there yet.) We might also start getting useful conversations in a clipped form of basic English. (The problem there is that the programs don't have enough real world knowledge to operate outside of specialist domains...so they're quite brittle.)
But today's interactive systems probably have less computing power on the average than does a mosquito. So it's not too surprising that no real AI has materialized. The question is what's the minimal capacity for understanding natural language...unfortunately, this seems to be equivalent to "how much knowledge of the world do you need to have in order to operate resiliently?" A depressingly large number. But a lot of English can't even be parsed without understanding what's being talked about. So people makes guesses until one of them turns a bunch of phonemes into something sensible. [Note that you can't even get word boundaries without knowing "sort of" what's being said.])
Now many techniques that were originally created for artificial intelligence ARE being used regularly and all over the programming space...but those aren't AI.
Also consider that some important pieces, e.g. expert systems, aren't useful outside of the proper context, but are very powerful within it. But these are *COMPONENTS*. It's like complaining because your car's transmission isn't a good vehicle. (OTOH, this isn't entirely a neutral statement. Many of these pieces were oversold by early promulgators who believed that they'd found the last needed piece. It's not a situation of "No blame.".)
My current projections put extensively useful AI around 2020, and human level AI around 2030. There may be one or two early arrivals, but computer power necessary to embody them won't be cheap enough.
OTOH, the early arrivals are very important. AIs may be programs, but they also need to learn about the world. This takes YEARS. A decade is pushing it, especially for a new entity who doesn't have a well-defined position in the social matrix. But once it is created, it's a program, and can easily be copied to multiple machines. So if a company creates and raises an AI around '17 (when the equipment for doing so is still too expensive for anything outside a research lab), by '23 (when the const is considerably more reasonable) the entity can be emplaced into, say, a certain kind of new car that can drive itself and park itself, and come for you when you call for it, and protect itself against being stolen...and link itself back to the company for information and upgrades. The next model year they also come out with a wheelchair for quadriplegics that and care for them, assistant surgeons, and agricultural field workers. Experience about the world has been accumulating at a tremendous rate, so the next year they come out with a robot nanny (lots of miniaturization has been going on these last two years!). By the time we get to 2030, we have robot units that are as useful as people in *many* situations, and sessile units that are much more intelligent, but which also understand the world.
Things won't necessarily happen this way, but they could. If so, society will be coerced into an extremely rapid change. This change could take many different forms, from the extremely dystopian to the extremely utopian.
O, yes. And if any particular country should decide to not
And if you installed XP or Vista... the same problem would occur. Except that you'd need to look in *slightly* different places to find the missing drivers.
It's a reasonable retort to the comment saying that the same 13 year old saw a lot of value in it. If you use her as a justifier, then you have to accept criticisms of her value as a justifier.
Now if Balmer had said "You saw value in it when you bought it", it would have been an irrelevant reply, and unjustifiable. But that isn't what happened.
That said, I trust the intellectual judgements of SOME 13 year olds more than I trust those of SOME adults. This will vary a lot by topic, but just as much by which particular individual is under consideration.
The last time I downgraded an OS (MSWind98 -> MSWind95) it involved reformatting the disk. You'd think that small a change would be relatively easy, but the installer didn't agree. (Probably there were hidden files that needed to be deleted, and which I didn't know about, but I also seem to recall something about the directory structure.)
You haven't used a recent version of Linux, have you. Even Gentoo has gotten easier, and they make a virtue of being difficult.
The tank controls are just about like the station wagon controls, unless you want to do something that the station wagon just couldn't do...and sometimes even then.
What point is the law if there are no consequences of breaking it? AT&T respects the right to free speech, downloading kiddie porn and conspiring/threatening to kill the President are ACTIONS.
So you're saying that AT&T has the right to charge you with a crime, judge you guilty, and sentence you to punishment...as long as it's restricted to withdrawal of personal (or corporate) communication?
Sorry, that's not the way "justice" is done. "Justice" means that lawyers fight it out in court.
I say "justice", because I don't believe that justice has a whole bunch to do with what the court system produces. It's still better than what you're proposing.
It might change your mind about what happiness consisted of. Of course, if you already thought that it was a state of mind, then your ideas wouldn't change much, but if you thought it was something external, like, say, having a lot of money, then you might change your mind. Of course this wouldn't stop you from trying to accumulate a large sum of money, you'd just need to change your reasons.
If my latin teacher was correct...virgin (in latin) meant young woman, and said nothing about anything else. It's true that the vestal virgins were suposed to be hymen intact, but that was a special case, not the general meaning of the word.
Of course, by the time the story got to latin it has already been translated twice...so who knows WHAT the original meaning was. (In the Greek version it would have been translated on time fewer, so fewer errors should be expected...but I've never met a classic Greek scholar and asked him what it meant...and I don't think the Hebrew or Aramaic versions survive.)
All in all, I suspect that the bit about Mary being a virgin in the modern sense may have been added in the middle ages. Believe it if you want. (Perhaps "God" inspired the addition?)
As others have noted, it's also questionable that the biblical Jesus had ANY historical counterpart. No good evidence seems to exist, and lots of evidence that should be present has gone missing without proof that it has ever been present. (E.g., BOTH the Judaic courts and the Roman courts kept records of trials. Neither has a trial that can be matched to the story in the Bible. Or at least so I've heard. I haven't gone looking myself.)
Some hypotheses present themselves: 1) The biblical stories of Jesus are a work of fiction. 2) The actual events happened much earlier than they were reported. Names have been changed in an attempt to update the story. (This also accounts for some places where the names of the characters don't match with historic records very well.) 3) By a special miracle, God personally removed all physical evidence so that faith would be required. 4) It's a work of propaganda by a Jewish political revolutionary faction (that wanted to throw the Romans out). This is really a special case of 1.
Personally, choice 1 feels like the proper choice. Proving it is probably impossible, but attempts to prove it wrong don't seem to fare well. (They tend to put us at choices 2 or 3.)
You would want to specify them because if you know your patents are being violated, and you don't either sue with specificity, or define in particular which patents so that the offending party can correct the problem, then you eventually lose the right to sue over the patents being violated.
"Eventually" is the sticking point. I don't know how long the period is, but it's measured in years, but I believe fewer than 5 of them. (I'm not sure that courts have ever decided on a particular number...so in egregious cases it could be shorter...or longer.)
This implies that if MS knows about the patent violation and neither acts to cure it nor enables others to cure it, then it is in danger of losing the right to sue. (Well, not actually to sue, but to win.) I think this is called the doctrine of latches.
For that very reason I used to make/usr/local a separate partition.
I don't bother any more. If it's at all important to you, make it a separate partition. Usually you can do it at install time. (I generally create about 10 partitions at install time, if I cound swap partitions. This is because I like to have several distros installed at once. My general rule of thumb is: 1 partition for / 1 partition for/home 2 partitions for swap 1 partition for backup 1 partition for each intended additional install. Mount everything except swap in all of them.
P.S.: You need enough disk space for this to be practical. This is for a desktop system.
I *THINK* I understand what you're complaining about. But bad packaging happens on all systems.
Also, on all systems with any consideration for disk efficiency, you'll have sets of programs that can't be installed together, even though, separately, they install without problems. This can frequently be solved by installing one of them in a non-standard location. If that won't work, run it in chroot.
N.B.: None of this applies to "clueless users". This is medium to high tech stuff.
P.S.: Perhaps you could solve it in MSWind...I've honestly got no idea of how to, however, short of VMWare.
In Ubuntu you can just use apt-get...but it's easier if you use the package manager, because you often don't know the name of the package, only enough to search for it. Personally I always choose synaptic for this, but Ubuntu does have a simplified variant (called, I think, package-manager).
Actually, these GUIs still just generate and execute the apt-get's for you, but they make it easier if you need to look up "Now what did they call wxWidgets for Python?"
A committee was chosen and decided. They picked RPM. Debian and Ubuntu didn't stop providing alien...so they claim compatibility. I'm not sure about Slackware, but *MOST* Linux variants can claim standard compatibility via one weaseling or another. (And, of course, Red Hat didn't have to weasel at all. They merely chaired the committee. [Joke. May or may not be true.])
This is the committee that created the Linux Standards Base, or LSB.
OK, then installing a rootkit is breaking and entering, and Sony BMG is an admitted party to criminal conspiracy on a very large scale. Criminal, not equitable. All parties involved should be charges separately for each offense, i.e., for each person whose computer was thus broken into as a result of their conspiracy.
Well, if when setting up the system you enabled the correct repositories...then the updates could be applied automagically. If you want a secure, safe, and stable system, then you need to manually vet each proposed change. If you don't, enable security, volitile, and perhaps a few other repositories.
(Caution: my sole experience is with testing, and the repositories are organized differently. Same update programs though. I switch between apt-get and synaptic depending on whether or not I already know how to refer to the programs that are being updated.)
That's it's good feature...but also it's bad feature. I think possibly twice during each cycle of testing (say 0.5 times per year) an update will hose my system. (Well, I'm using testing. If I wanted stable, I'd choose stable.)
You can be pretty well guaranteed that the time this happens will be in one of the massive updates...like, say, when all of KDE is being upgraded. This happened to me most recently around a month ago, so the possibility is still fresh in my memory. That time the problem was that a package told me to choose autoremove...and my network access got autoremoved. Fortunately, I had a backup partition, and after a copy/update/avoid autoremove everything was working again. (Actually, by the time I had the update complete, the request for autoremove had been fixed...and it wasn't asking for that any more. Must have been just some VERY unfortunate timing on my part.)
As a result, I don't recommend anything BUT stable to people unless they really know what they're doing. (And I don't know enough about the stable packages to know all of the repositories that I ought to recommend. All I really know about is security...I hadn't even heard of volatile, but then I always run testing.)
What is the necessity for "robust" watermarking? Simple watermarking should serve to "keep honest people honest", and real pirates aren't going to be bothered if the watermark is non-removeable. They'll just use a non-traceable purchase. Or a stolen copy. (Here I'm not talking about copyright infringement...though I guess that's possible too.)
So the complaint about lack of "robust watermaking" is designed to confuse criticism rather than clarify the issue. Look for what they're *really* complaining about. It will be something discreditable, that they don't want you to notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the FSF and MS both have a track record. This causes me to be more accepting of one than the other.
1) If the license is substantially the same as one that's already approved, there's no reason to approve it. One of the functions of OSI was to reduce the number of licenses one had to consider.
2) This license was written by MS lawyers. It may look innocuous, but that doesn't mean that a court would find it so. IANAL, so I don't accept that lawyers working for someone else have my best interests at heart, and I also don't presume that a court would interpret clear English in the same way that I would.
3) No case has been presented that these licenses serve any particular useful purpose. (With specificity, naming the useful purpose.)
4) What function does the OSI serve if we can't trust them? Can we trust them? (I find that I am unwilling trust them. I distrust MS more than I used to trust OSI.)
Ok. It's not how I remember, but I wasn't paying much attention.
You're probably right (thanks to your careful choice of words). When I was a MSWind user, I found it fairly trivial to move from version to version, except when I was trying to tinker deeply. It was also, however, easy for me to move to the Mac. Linux, at that time, required a lot move investment of time and energy. (I did it because of the EULAs, which I found insupperable.)
OTOH, I am not a typical end user. I'm a programmer. I know many people who needed to be trained to move from MSwind95 to MSWind98. And they aren't necessarily stupid, they just have interests in different areas, so they don't have the same kind of model of computers that I do. Their model tends to be spatial...and if you shuffle the icons on their desktop, it bothers them until they memorize the new layout. It can be a real problem trying to teach them to use the find command. They just don't get the idea that what's being matched are character strings, not words or phrases. (The MSWind95 find command breaks the match pattern at each space and returns the union of matches.)
Don't presume that just because something is easy for you, that it's easy for any intelligent person. Not until you've brushed a resisting dog's teeth. (Unfair. That one often calls for a general anesthetic. That was a trick question to show also that just because something sounds easy doesn't mean it is.) Try this one then: Knap a stone arrowhead and fasten it to a shaft using only naturally available materials. It's GOT to be easy, because it's one of the first technologies that our species mastered. But just TRY. My arrowheads kept cutting the bindings, even though I used the material that Ishi recommended as the absolute best starting material. (Milk bottle glass. You may have to search for it these days...and they may have changed the composition. Obsidian is a nearly equivalent substitute.) I suppose that the problem was that I didn't have any raw guts to use as the binding cord, but I don't even know that THAT's the problem. And this HAS to be a problem with a trivial solution.
I don't see an original date of publication on that page. (The date that I found was this year.) As such, your link doesn't refute his assertion. NOW there's an upgrade path. That doesn't mean that one was available at the time.
/., I don't even know what year. (I've never used either, so it's been on the fringes of my awareness.)
Also, I seem to remember the assertion as being true. Not, I'll admit, with clarity, but I seem to remember some rather jubuliant comments when the update path became available. Unfortunately, although I know it was on
Any proof of this? MS has a long history of pre-loading dirvers, and even large sections of programs "for faster response". As such, I have no difficulty believing that they'd do it again, and a bit of difficulty believing that "but *this* time they didn't do it".
Still, I'll admit I've no evidence. Merely an established pattern of behavior.
One thing to remember is that when it comes to AI, computers are still underpowered. Things are just now getting to the point where small groups with moderate funding can start serious experimentation. Up until this decade there's been what.. 5 people in the world? ..who had adequate computer power to test their theories on anything except toy problems. This decade that number's going to explode!
N.B.: Even this decade the computers will be underpowered for anything serious...but high end user-space systems will be able to tackle more than toy problems. At this point we start getting cars that can drive themselves. (DARPA contest to the contrary, we aren't quite there yet.) We might also start getting useful conversations in a clipped form of basic English. (The problem there is that the programs don't have enough real world knowledge to operate outside of specialist domains...so they're quite brittle.)
But today's interactive systems probably have less computing power on the average than does a mosquito. So it's not too surprising that no real AI has materialized. The question is what's the minimal capacity for understanding natural language...unfortunately, this seems to be equivalent to "how much knowledge of the world do you need to have in order to operate resiliently?" A depressingly large number. But a lot of English can't even be parsed without understanding what's being talked about. So people makes guesses until one of them turns a bunch of phonemes into something sensible. [Note that you can't even get word boundaries without knowing "sort of" what's being said.])
Now many techniques that were originally created for artificial intelligence ARE being used regularly and all over the programming space...but those aren't AI.
Also consider that some important pieces, e.g. expert systems, aren't useful outside of the proper context, but are very powerful within it. But these are *COMPONENTS*. It's like complaining because your car's transmission isn't a good vehicle. (OTOH, this isn't entirely a neutral statement. Many of these pieces were oversold by early promulgators who believed that they'd found the last needed piece. It's not a situation of "No blame.".)
My current projections put extensively useful AI around 2020, and human level AI around 2030. There may be one or two early arrivals, but computer power necessary to embody them won't be cheap enough.
OTOH, the early arrivals are very important. AIs may be programs, but they also need to learn about the world. This takes YEARS. A decade is pushing it, especially for a new entity who doesn't have a well-defined position in the social matrix. But once it is created, it's a program, and can easily be copied to multiple machines. So if a company creates and raises an AI around '17 (when the equipment for doing so is still too expensive for anything outside a research lab), by '23 (when the const is considerably more reasonable) the entity can be emplaced into, say, a certain kind of new car that can drive itself and park itself, and come for you when you call for it, and protect itself against being stolen...and link itself back to the company for information and upgrades. The next model year they also come out with a wheelchair for quadriplegics that and care for them, assistant surgeons, and agricultural field workers. Experience about the world has been accumulating at a tremendous rate, so the next year they come out with a robot nanny (lots of miniaturization has been going on these last two years!). By the time we get to 2030, we have robot units that are as useful as people in *many* situations, and sessile units that are much more intelligent, but which also understand the world.
Things won't necessarily happen this way, but they could. If so, society will be coerced into an extremely rapid change. This change could take many different forms, from the extremely dystopian to the extremely utopian.
O, yes. And if any particular country should decide to not
And if you installed XP or Vista ... the same problem would occur. Except that you'd need to look in *slightly* different places to find the missing drivers.
It's a reasonable retort to the comment saying that the same 13 year old saw a lot of value in it. If you use her as a justifier, then you have to accept criticisms of her value as a justifier.
Now if Balmer had said "You saw value in it when you bought it", it would have been an irrelevant reply, and unjustifiable. But that isn't what happened.
That said, I trust the intellectual judgements of SOME 13 year olds more than I trust those of SOME adults. This will vary a lot by topic, but just as much by which particular individual is under consideration.
The last time I downgraded an OS (MSWind98 -> MSWind95) it involved reformatting the disk. You'd think that small a change would be relatively easy, but the installer didn't agree. (Probably there were hidden files that needed to be deleted, and which I didn't know about, but I also seem to recall something about the directory structure.)
You haven't used a recent version of Linux, have you. Even Gentoo has gotten easier, and they make a virtue of being difficult.
The tank controls are just about like the station wagon controls, unless you want to do something that the station wagon just couldn't do...and sometimes even then.
So they're still claiming the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. Low justice only, of course.
I wonder what their status is on middle justice? If they terminate your account, can they still charge you for it until the end of your contract?
And, of course, high justice is reserved to the monarch.
What point is the law if there are no consequences of breaking it? AT&T respects the right to free speech, downloading kiddie porn and conspiring/threatening to kill the President are ACTIONS.
So you're saying that AT&T has the right to charge you with a crime, judge you guilty, and sentence you to punishment...as long as it's restricted to withdrawal of personal (or corporate) communication?
Sorry, that's not the way "justice" is done. "Justice" means that lawyers fight it out in court.
I say "justice", because I don't believe that justice has a whole bunch to do with what the court system produces. It's still better than what you're proposing.
It might change your mind about what happiness consisted of. Of course, if you already thought that it was a state of mind, then your ideas wouldn't change much, but if you thought it was something external, like, say, having a lot of money, then you might change your mind. Of course this wouldn't stop you from trying to accumulate a large sum of money, you'd just need to change your reasons.
If my latin teacher was correct...virgin (in latin) meant young woman, and said nothing about anything else. It's true that the vestal virgins were suposed to be hymen intact, but that was a special case, not the general meaning of the word.
Of course, by the time the story got to latin it has already been translated twice...so who knows WHAT the original meaning was. (In the Greek version it would have been translated on time fewer, so fewer errors should be expected...but I've never met a classic Greek scholar and asked him what it meant...and I don't think the Hebrew or Aramaic versions survive.)
All in all, I suspect that the bit about Mary being a virgin in the modern sense may have been added in the middle ages. Believe it if you want. (Perhaps "God" inspired the addition?)
As others have noted, it's also questionable that the biblical Jesus had ANY historical counterpart. No good evidence seems to exist, and lots of evidence that should be present has gone missing without proof that it has ever been present. (E.g., BOTH the Judaic courts and the Roman courts kept records of trials. Neither has a trial that can be matched to the story in the Bible. Or at least so I've heard. I haven't gone looking myself.)
Some hypotheses present themselves:
1) The biblical stories of Jesus are a work of fiction.
2) The actual events happened much earlier than they were reported. Names have been changed in an attempt to update the story. (This also accounts for some places where the names of the characters don't match with historic records very well.)
3) By a special miracle, God personally removed all physical evidence so that faith would be required.
4) It's a work of propaganda by a Jewish political revolutionary faction (that wanted to throw the Romans out). This is really a special case of 1.
Personally, choice 1 feels like the proper choice. Proving it is probably impossible, but attempts to prove it wrong don't seem to fare well. (They tend to put us at choices 2 or 3.)
Who's Britney?
For that matter, is Paris Hilton related to the hotels?
Inquiring minds don't care enough to look it up on Google.
You would want to specify them because if you know your patents are being violated, and you don't either sue with specificity, or define in particular which patents so that the offending party can correct the problem, then you eventually lose the right to sue over the patents being violated.
"Eventually" is the sticking point. I don't know how long the period is, but it's measured in years, but I believe fewer than 5 of them. (I'm not sure that courts have ever decided on a particular number...so in egregious cases it could be shorter...or longer.)
This implies that if MS knows about the patent violation and neither acts to cure it nor enables others to cure it, then it is in danger of losing the right to sue. (Well, not actually to sue, but to win.) I think this is called the doctrine of latches.
Caution: IANAL.
For that very reason I used to make /usr/local a separate partition.
/home
I don't bother any more. If it's at all important to you, make it a separate partition. Usually you can do it at install time. (I generally create about 10 partitions at install time, if I cound swap partitions. This is because I like to have several distros installed at once. My general rule of thumb is:
1 partition for /
1 partition for
2 partitions for swap
1 partition for backup
1 partition for each intended additional install.
Mount everything except swap in all of them.
P.S.: You need enough disk space for this to be practical. This is for a desktop system.
I *THINK* I understand what you're complaining about. But bad packaging happens on all systems.
Also, on all systems with any consideration for disk efficiency, you'll have sets of programs that can't be installed together, even though, separately, they install without problems. This can frequently be solved by installing one of them in a non-standard location. If that won't work, run it in chroot.
N.B.: None of this applies to "clueless users". This is medium to high tech stuff.
P.S.: Perhaps you could solve it in MSWind...I've honestly got no idea of how to, however, short of VMWare.
In Ubuntu you can just use apt-get...but it's easier if you use the package manager, because you often don't know the name of the package, only enough to search for it. Personally I always choose synaptic for this, but Ubuntu does have a simplified variant (called, I think, package-manager).
Actually, these GUIs still just generate and execute the apt-get's for you, but they make it easier if you need to look up "Now what did they call wxWidgets for Python?"
A committee was chosen and decided. They picked RPM. Debian and Ubuntu didn't stop providing alien...so they claim compatibility. I'm not sure about Slackware, but *MOST* Linux variants can claim standard compatibility via one weaseling or another. (And, of course, Red Hat didn't have to weasel at all. They merely chaired the committee. [Joke. May or may not be true.])
This is the committee that created the Linux Standards Base, or LSB.
So your wish has already been granted.
OK, then installing a rootkit is breaking and entering, and Sony BMG is an admitted party to criminal conspiracy on a very large scale. Criminal, not equitable. All parties involved should be charges separately for each offense, i.e., for each person whose computer was thus broken into as a result of their conspiracy.
I think that's a much closer fit.
Well, if when setting up the system you enabled the correct repositories...then the updates could be applied automagically. If you want a secure, safe, and stable system, then you need to manually vet each proposed change. If you don't, enable security, volitile, and perhaps a few other repositories.
(Caution: my sole experience is with testing, and the repositories are organized differently. Same update programs though. I switch between apt-get and synaptic depending on whether or not I already know how to refer to the programs that are being updated.)
That's it's good feature...but also it's bad feature. I think possibly twice during each cycle of testing (say 0.5 times per year) an update will hose my system. (Well, I'm using testing. If I wanted stable, I'd choose stable.)
You can be pretty well guaranteed that the time this happens will be in one of the massive updates...like, say, when all of KDE is being upgraded. This happened to me most recently around a month ago, so the possibility is still fresh in my memory. That time the problem was that a package told me to choose autoremove...and my network access got autoremoved. Fortunately, I had a backup partition, and after a copy/update/avoid autoremove everything was working again. (Actually, by the time I had the update complete, the request for autoremove had been fixed...and it wasn't asking for that any more. Must have been just some VERY unfortunate timing on my part.)
As a result, I don't recommend anything BUT stable to people unless they really know what they're doing. (And I don't know enough about the stable packages to know all of the repositories that I ought to recommend. All I really know about is security...I hadn't even heard of volatile, but then I always run testing.)
What is the necessity for "robust" watermarking? Simple watermarking should serve to "keep honest people honest", and real pirates aren't going to be bothered if the watermark is non-removeable. They'll just use a non-traceable purchase. Or a stolen copy. (Here I'm not talking about copyright infringement...though I guess that's possible too.)
So the complaint about lack of "robust watermaking" is designed to confuse criticism rather than clarify the issue. Look for what they're *really* complaining about. It will be something discreditable, that they don't want you to notice.