Anything you merely display is not a copyright violation, like me reading your copyrighted post in a web browser. Fixing it to a permanent medium like downloading is a violation of the reproduction right, assuming it's not covered by fair use AND the bits you're storing were legally distributed. This should be obvious, the same way you couldn't hook up a bunch of DVD recorders to a legal TV broadcast and sell your own DVDs. Also, all copies of an illegal copy are illegal no matter what. That so many armchair quarterback lawyers here claim otherwise is a good example of why you should not go here for legal advice. Read the Napster case if you don't believe me.
Your attempts at trying to be a smartass would be mauled in court. Even if there's nothing about the door itself that tells you whether you're trespassing or not, the judge would obviously look at the context and if you were walking in doors in my apartment building it's obvious they're not meant for public access while the door to the McDonald's obviously is. That is, if you are on TPB and click a link that appears to point to a pirate copy, nobody will accept that you "a priori" don't actually know if the file contains that until you download it, at best it's a possible defense if you were trolled into clicking something worse than a goatse link.
In contrast, to have 3D acceleration on an Nvidia card, you are often forced to install a non-free driver, and Nvidia may or may not drop support for your card as you move to newer Linux kernels.
Yes, but they support much older cards than AMD's Catalyst drivers. Go check it out, I doubt you can argue this is a real problem. There's been a few times nVidia hasn't supported the latest API breakage so you can't be quite as on the bleeding edge, but then it applies to all nVidia cards and doesn't last long.
But if you want to run 3D graphics intensive applications, and also have the benefits of a libre software environment,
Then you are going to have to pick your poison. Really, the radeon drivers have some 3D acceleration but they're not nearly on par with the fglrx driver nor nVidia's blob in 3D performance. Hell, if you buy a HD7000 series card then right now you can't even get a picture. It's #1 when you've eliminated all but nouveau, which is like winning the Special Olympics against a quadraplegic. Right now I'd say if you're running HD5000 series card or older and don't expect huge 3D performance it's okay, but if you want either the performance or the features of the newer cards it'll be on closed drivers.
I guess NVidia must be getting awfully close to [open-sourcing their drivers]. I would say, just waiting for a suitably high profile occasion to announce it now. Stranger than fiction: they have some strong OSS advocates on the inside.
Not going to happen, not that way for the same reason AMD can't open source their Catalyst/fgrlx drivers. Licensed code, patents, DRM, competetitive advantage, clues about future products and improvements and absurd amounts of lawyer time needed. They'd almost certainly have to go down the same route AMD has, announce an open source strategy and start building a driver from scratch (or nouveau), release blocks of programming information bit by bit and will probably lack certain bits like VDPAU, just like AMD still haven't been able to release any UVD information 4.5 years into their open source project.
Well, it's not like Intel does it just to annoy you. The top Intel chips have 16 EUs which is roughly equal to 32 shaders. A top graphics card like the 7970 has 2048 shaders. So if you use AMD's $450 price as basis that works out to about $7 for an Intel, make it $10 to include QuickSync and whatnot. For that small savings Intel would have to validate a new design and risk a potential shortage of chips with/without IGP. Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.
Actually what he's frustrated about isn't the Mac Pro, it's that there's no normal Mac. Not a micro, not a all-in-one, not pro. Just a normal box that you'd find at any PC store that uses normal consumer CPUs, normal RAM, normal graphics cards, normal HDDs, normal everything. Because he might like OS X, he might like Mac software, but the hardware is such a total mismatch it's not going to happen. Been there, considered that but the only Mac I'd consider buying is a Mac laptop because luckily the form factor is so constrained they can't help being like a PC laptop.
And that is why they will succeed. Because you think that at some point you have no choice, so you will go there.
It'll be a loooooooooooooooooooooooooong time until everyone can download BluRays at home - and anywhere else they'd like to watch them. I'm guessing I'll die of old age before they're able to kill off discs.
People are making fun of a laughable attempt to DRM movies that people bought before DRM, at cost to the consumer.
Apparently DeCSS has been around so long you forgot that DVDs always had DRM. It's not effective anymore and it hasn't been for 15 years, but there was no before. That people bought DVDs after DeCSS came knowing they could rip it as much as they wanted anyway is a completely different matter.
Next you'll tell me to get over the ST-225s that were dead out of the box. Those were the worst drives I've ever owned.
DOA drives? If they're going to fail, that's the best time. The worst drives are those that last just long enough for you to fill them up with data, and then you think you can do without a backup copy while you repartition/reformat the drives you just emptied. Noooooooooooo I'm not bitter. (Yes, yes, I know I should have had a proper offline backup too.)
Anandtech's review is up, only single threaded benchmark I saw though was the Cinebench one where the 2.2 GHz is only a slight improvement. The 2.9 GHz top model is running away from everything else though, if you got $2000 to spare...
Well, when I started on my Commodore 64 you started at the command prompt read to write code, so yeah I'd say it takes at least a little more prodding than before to get into programming. Also you started with just two lines:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 GOTO 10
Okay, so it doesn't produce a very impressive result but as "bang for the buck" it's pretty good. If the reaction is "All that to produce so little?!" you've lost. Hell, you might have lost anyway if they point you to a $100 million AAA game and say that is cool, I want to make something like that. But since you can't ask for time to be turned back to simple sprite based graphics you can't change that, but at least not start them off down the long road.
Personally today I think I'd actually start them off with a game toolkit where you can script events, like Neverwinter Nights or something like that. First of all because it's a game and looks good and produces something cool, second of all because you can start with a level that already exists. Have them modify it and they'll start thinking about objects, attributes, state, conditions, boolean logic (assuming you want to start them down the OOP path) without banging their head on the really hard issues. Plus you get to make your own adventure, which is creative and fun while learning.
Plus about 10 ARM companies. Intel has a bigger challenge now than AMD has given them for years.
Meh, if Intel maintains domination over laptops, desktops, servers and supercomputers they'll have a ton of resources to push into the smartphone/tablet battle. I think they'll find being ten 30-pound kids doesn't match one 300-pound sumo wrestler. The Atom is still basically the same 2008 design which was designed for netbooks/nettops, Medfield and Clover Field this year are just repurposed stop gaps. Silvermont in 2013 is their first real smartphone/tablet design, I suspect it'll be a big wake-up call. Intel is not going to sit idly by and watch ARM take their market, they will retaliate. AMD discovered that, so will the ARM producers I think.
For example, I just set up a couple servers from COTS parts. They used AMD FX-8120's (8 core, 4.0Ghz turbo) for $199.99/ea. It seems the comparable Intel is the i7-980 (6 core, 3.6Ghz), which is selling at $589.99.
Modded informative? Only on slashdot... Also you compare turbo speeds (and GHz is silly anyway due to the difference in IPC), yet say:
The servers actually use as many cores as I can throw at them, so it's extremely beneficial to have more cores at high speeds.
If all cores are 100% loaded, you're not going to get anywhere close to max turbo. That's the extra boost it can give if only one core is working.
Toms hardware suggests the i5-2500K (4 core, 3.7Ghz turbo) for $224.99 or i7-2600K (4 core 3.8Ghz turbo) for $324.99 as comparable.
Tomshardware never tested the FX-8120, so that's a lie. They tested the FX-8150 and found:
In the very best-case scenario, when you can throw a ton of work at the FX and fully utilize its eight integer cores, it generally falls in between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K
The FX-8120 has 500 MHz lower base frequency which is far more significant than the 200 MHz lower max turbo. Not many have tested it but xbitlabs did:
Slower eight-core modification, AMD FX-8120, looks even less convincing, because it has significantly lower clock frequencies. In terms of performance, this processor ranks even below the quad-core competitor solutions. Moreover, FX-8120 is also slower than the top previous-generation AMD CPU - Phenom II X6 1100T.
So just admit it, you use AMD because you like AMD but clearly you have no clue what the competition offers.
He could have been right at the bottom of his class, and taking the easiest classes possible, for all we know.
For all you know, I don't think you graduate magna cum laude being bottom of your class. And as relevant to the topic: QED.
Re:Linux security or trust
on
GitHub Hacked
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The master branch isn't on github, if there was any tampering a trivial check against Linus' master branch would see if there'd been any extra git commits. Nobody has to go through more than that. By the way, it's also impossible to insert an "old" commit in git because you'd have to reapply every subsequent patch and all the ids would change. But I guess that you're scaremongering and the mods are either clueless or feeding the troll.
Yes, because being able to look up information at a whim is going to make people more stupid.
Well, if you stop gathering and remembering facts because you can look them up you might not be stupid but you're ignorant in the "I couldn't point out Europe on the world map but I could look it up if I needed to" way. Ignorance leads to stupid questions/statements like "Why didn't AMD buy nVidia instead of ATI?" / "AMD should have bought nVidia instead of ATI." because you don't know the fact that nVidia was about twice as large AMD in market cap. There's a saying "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it", how will you learn from the past when you have absolutely no recollection of it?
Of course you could say all of this is poor research, not poor knowledge. That you should have looked it up, not that you should have known. It's like walking around with a lantern, it's illuminated exactly where you are and it'll be dark again once your mind moves on. I prefer it to be more like lighting torches, once I've visited a subject area I should end up knowing something about it. Okay I might not remember every side street or detail and it dims over time but I know the main roads, it's not simply a dark maze I'd have to start over again with my lantern. That I start recognizing patterns, relations, analogies, how these subject areas fit together. Of course I'll never cover the whole maze and know everything about everything, but I'm trying to understand more today than I did yesterday.
I don't understand the people who think the world can be reduced down to simple, single discipline fact-finding missions. Let's for example say that I'm trying to make a team be more productive. How many fields would you like to draw on? I mean it can be individual, what motivates people? Demotivates people? Is it the group dynamics, the working environment? Is it poor communication and collaboration tools? Is is a stupid incentive model? Is the workflow wrong? Maybe you need to know a little psychology, technology, economics, domain knowledge and so on from a wide range of fields. That's pretty hard to do if you're just running around with a lantern, no matter how smart you are. You have to actually have a working knowledge in each field.
Try working at a consultancy house, then at times I ended up with three. Their laptop, the client's laptop and my laptop. Still, unless it's the difference between carry-on and checked in luggage I don't see it as a big deal as corporate travel generally meant taking a taxi anyway and the few meters I walk it's on wheels. If you feel a spare notebook is too much to haul around then drop it and spend you time in the hotel's exercise room. Seriously.
Storage servers are required; there is no way a popular file sharing site would remain undetected even if it were deployed as a hidden service. It would require too many resources to run, and eavesdropping would not even be necessary to narrow down the targets. Bandwidth is too limited; it would take days to download an HD movie over Tor, which is even less convenient than going to the nearest video store to buy it legally.
Personally I'm surprised that nobody has come up with an application that basically merges what TOR and Freenet does into one. A distributed storage would provide both the capacity and the upload bandwidth, while freeing up resources from onion sites. The network bandwidth is actually not that bad, I've had files run at 200 kB/s when connected to a high-speed site in the normal web. Of course if people did that in volume the exit nodes would choke and die, but the network itself is rather capable if you could move the files on the inside.
Yes, there are much stronger anonymous designs but the downsides are equally high. I'd call several of these recent designs "anonymous light", good enough that the MAFIAA can't just hook up and collect IPs but not good enough if you have the FBI, NSA or anything like that after you. Personally I don't like this design exactly because what if one of those I trust download something nasty? They'll come to me. I'd much rather see a design that affords some plausible deniability, that no it wasn't me it must have been one of the other nodes in the network, downloading through me.
On that note, the GPL is probably the "safer" choice. Releasing GPL code as BSD is simple, oh now you can use the code in proprietary code too. Going from BSD to GPL is trying to put the cat back in the bag, often leading to a fork and drama from those who no longer can/want to use it. If the developer is clueless it's less harmful that people can't use the code the way he intended than that people can use the code in ways he didn't intend. "Oh you want the code under the BSD, here you go" is a lot easier to fix than "OMG WTF you mean Apple and Microsoft can just take my code for nothing now? That's not what I wanted!"
Broader? Hogwash. If you dig into the KnowledgeBase figures they list only a little over 13765+984+409=15158 GPL family projects. While the Debian stats say:
The last Debian release, Squeeze, which emerged in February 2011, had 28,126 packages of which 26,271, representing 93 per cent, were under the GPL family.
So the one saying there is a decline is missing at least 10,000 GPL projects, plus quite possibly more that are not in Debian. Seems to be it's their figures that are incredibly narrow and wrong.
At least not in the "Which distro do you want?" form, because they probably have no idea. They expect you to know this best. I'd say something like "As I'm sure many of you know, unlike Windows there are many companies and organizations that create distributions of Linux. All of these are built on the Linux kernel but can look and behave quite differently. For those of you who have any experience or preferences in that regard, you're free to choose your own distribution as most of the current developers have. For the rest of you we will start you out on $distro, which should be a good and user-friendly way to start learning Linux. That way it's easier to teach you as a group and it will also be easier for you to learn from each other until you learn the basics. It's rather easy to switch later so feel free to ask the others here what they use and feel the pros and cons are. Any questions?"
You will never know if someone made a copy of your vote before it was anonymized, either on the client or server side. You will never know if someone altered your vote in flight, either at the client or server side. Unlike a visible process you have to trust an invisible process. Instead of compromising thousands of voting locations you can mass compromise the system. Any government could trivially disregard all your pretty rules of how it's "supposed to" work and you'd never know it.
Pretty much all your attempts at verifying results will fail because the more reason you have to fear the outcome, the less honest people will be. That in itself is a huge bias, people will be much less willing to admit voting for controversial parties. Any attempt to verify against a control group of paper voters or RSA key voters fails to take into account that it's a bias in itself, I expect the people to vote online to vote differently than those that don't. Likewise with RSA keys. Even a 1% swing is huge if you can make it in a winner takes-it-all system, if you'd flipped Florida then Bush would never be president. How about a little prod and pull now in the primaries? Even worse in representative systems where you can tweak small parties above or below the minimum limit most countries have.
I think it's a really, really bad idea but people are constantly trying to push it. What I fear is that the most "democratic" countries will do it, because here the threat level is extremely low. Then all the shady regimes with all their shady machines and shady policies will do it too and say "hey, we're just like you". It's an invitation to do even more election fraud than they do today, without all the evidence.
Uh, if we had this technology then the easiest way of wiping out the competition would be to not stop. You get all the mentioned effects plus the ship itself as an RKV and any destruction the warp field can do to their planet. It's like the difference between an asteroid and a space capsule - it's easy to hit Earth, it's harder not to leave a crater on impact...
Slashdot Mirror
Anything you merely display is not a copyright violation, like me reading your copyrighted post in a web browser. Fixing it to a permanent medium like downloading is a violation of the reproduction right, assuming it's not covered by fair use AND the bits you're storing were legally distributed. This should be obvious, the same way you couldn't hook up a bunch of DVD recorders to a legal TV broadcast and sell your own DVDs. Also, all copies of an illegal copy are illegal no matter what. That so many armchair quarterback lawyers here claim otherwise is a good example of why you should not go here for legal advice. Read the Napster case if you don't believe me.
Your attempts at trying to be a smartass would be mauled in court. Even if there's nothing about the door itself that tells you whether you're trespassing or not, the judge would obviously look at the context and if you were walking in doors in my apartment building it's obvious they're not meant for public access while the door to the McDonald's obviously is. That is, if you are on TPB and click a link that appears to point to a pirate copy, nobody will accept that you "a priori" don't actually know if the file contains that until you download it, at best it's a possible defense if you were trolled into clicking something worse than a goatse link.
In contrast, to have 3D acceleration on an Nvidia card, you are often forced to install a non-free driver, and Nvidia may or may not drop support for your card as you move to newer Linux kernels.
Yes, but they support much older cards than AMD's Catalyst drivers. Go check it out, I doubt you can argue this is a real problem. There's been a few times nVidia hasn't supported the latest API breakage so you can't be quite as on the bleeding edge, but then it applies to all nVidia cards and doesn't last long.
But if you want to run 3D graphics intensive applications, and also have the benefits of a libre software environment,
Then you are going to have to pick your poison. Really, the radeon drivers have some 3D acceleration but they're not nearly on par with the fglrx driver nor nVidia's blob in 3D performance. Hell, if you buy a HD7000 series card then right now you can't even get a picture. It's #1 when you've eliminated all but nouveau, which is like winning the Special Olympics against a quadraplegic. Right now I'd say if you're running HD5000 series card or older and don't expect huge 3D performance it's okay, but if you want either the performance or the features of the newer cards it'll be on closed drivers.
I guess NVidia must be getting awfully close to [open-sourcing their drivers]. I would say, just waiting for a suitably high profile occasion to announce it now. Stranger than fiction: they have some strong OSS advocates on the inside.
Not going to happen, not that way for the same reason AMD can't open source their Catalyst/fgrlx drivers. Licensed code, patents, DRM, competetitive advantage, clues about future products and improvements and absurd amounts of lawyer time needed. They'd almost certainly have to go down the same route AMD has, announce an open source strategy and start building a driver from scratch (or nouveau), release blocks of programming information bit by bit and will probably lack certain bits like VDPAU, just like AMD still haven't been able to release any UVD information 4.5 years into their open source project.
Well, it's not like Intel does it just to annoy you. The top Intel chips have 16 EUs which is roughly equal to 32 shaders. A top graphics card like the 7970 has 2048 shaders. So if you use AMD's $450 price as basis that works out to about $7 for an Intel, make it $10 to include QuickSync and whatnot. For that small savings Intel would have to validate a new design and risk a potential shortage of chips with/without IGP. Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.
Actually what he's frustrated about isn't the Mac Pro, it's that there's no normal Mac. Not a micro, not a all-in-one, not pro. Just a normal box that you'd find at any PC store that uses normal consumer CPUs, normal RAM, normal graphics cards, normal HDDs, normal everything. Because he might like OS X, he might like Mac software, but the hardware is such a total mismatch it's not going to happen. Been there, considered that but the only Mac I'd consider buying is a Mac laptop because luckily the form factor is so constrained they can't help being like a PC laptop.
And that is why they will succeed. Because you think that at some point you have no choice, so you will go there.
It'll be a loooooooooooooooooooooooooong time until everyone can download BluRays at home - and anywhere else they'd like to watch them. I'm guessing I'll die of old age before they're able to kill off discs.
People are making fun of a laughable attempt to DRM movies that people bought before DRM, at cost to the consumer.
Apparently DeCSS has been around so long you forgot that DVDs always had DRM. It's not effective anymore and it hasn't been for 15 years, but there was no before. That people bought DVDs after DeCSS came knowing they could rip it as much as they wanted anyway is a completely different matter.
Next you'll tell me to get over the ST-225s that were dead out of the box. Those were the worst drives I've ever owned.
DOA drives? If they're going to fail, that's the best time. The worst drives are those that last just long enough for you to fill them up with data, and then you think you can do without a backup copy while you repartition/reformat the drives you just emptied. Noooooooooooo I'm not bitter. (Yes, yes, I know I should have had a proper offline backup too.)
Well, the Anandtech review on the Intel S2600GZ said:
Four GBe interfaces are on board and an optional I/O module can add dual 10 GBe (Base-T or optical) or QDR infiniband.
So maybe what you should be looking for is IO modules? I don't know.
Anandtech's review is up, only single threaded benchmark I saw though was the Cinebench one where the 2.2 GHz is only a slight improvement. The 2.9 GHz top model is running away from everything else though, if you got $2000 to spare...
Well, when I started on my Commodore 64 you started at the command prompt read to write code, so yeah I'd say it takes at least a little more prodding than before to get into programming. Also you started with just two lines:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Okay, so it doesn't produce a very impressive result but as "bang for the buck" it's pretty good. If the reaction is "All that to produce so little?!" you've lost. Hell, you might have lost anyway if they point you to a $100 million AAA game and say that is cool, I want to make something like that. But since you can't ask for time to be turned back to simple sprite based graphics you can't change that, but at least not start them off down the long road.
Personally today I think I'd actually start them off with a game toolkit where you can script events, like Neverwinter Nights or something like that. First of all because it's a game and looks good and produces something cool, second of all because you can start with a level that already exists. Have them modify it and they'll start thinking about objects, attributes, state, conditions, boolean logic (assuming you want to start them down the OOP path) without banging their head on the really hard issues. Plus you get to make your own adventure, which is creative and fun while learning.
Plus about 10 ARM companies. Intel has a bigger challenge now than AMD has given them for years.
Meh, if Intel maintains domination over laptops, desktops, servers and supercomputers they'll have a ton of resources to push into the smartphone/tablet battle. I think they'll find being ten 30-pound kids doesn't match one 300-pound sumo wrestler. The Atom is still basically the same 2008 design which was designed for netbooks/nettops, Medfield and Clover Field this year are just repurposed stop gaps. Silvermont in 2013 is their first real smartphone/tablet design, I suspect it'll be a big wake-up call. Intel is not going to sit idly by and watch ARM take their market, they will retaliate. AMD discovered that, so will the ARM producers I think.
For example, I just set up a couple servers from COTS parts. They used AMD FX-8120's (8 core, 4.0Ghz turbo) for $199.99/ea. It seems the comparable Intel is the i7-980 (6 core, 3.6Ghz), which is selling at $589.99.
Modded informative? Only on slashdot... Also you compare turbo speeds (and GHz is silly anyway due to the difference in IPC), yet say:
The servers actually use as many cores as I can throw at them, so it's extremely beneficial to have more cores at high speeds.
If all cores are 100% loaded, you're not going to get anywhere close to max turbo. That's the extra boost it can give if only one core is working.
Toms hardware suggests the i5-2500K (4 core, 3.7Ghz turbo) for $224.99 or i7-2600K (4 core 3.8Ghz turbo) for $324.99 as comparable.
Tomshardware never tested the FX-8120, so that's a lie. They tested the FX-8150 and found:
In the very best-case scenario, when you can throw a ton of work at the FX and fully utilize its eight integer cores, it generally falls in between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K
The FX-8120 has 500 MHz lower base frequency which is far more significant than the 200 MHz lower max turbo. Not many have tested it but xbitlabs did:
Slower eight-core modification, AMD FX-8120, looks even less convincing, because it has significantly lower clock frequencies. In terms of performance, this processor ranks even below the quad-core competitor solutions. Moreover, FX-8120 is also slower than the top previous-generation AMD CPU - Phenom II X6 1100T.
So just admit it, you use AMD because you like AMD but clearly you have no clue what the competition offers.
Actually he was not that gentle. He felt five minutes was sufficient...
He could have been right at the bottom of his class, and taking the easiest classes possible, for all we know.
For all you know, I don't think you graduate magna cum laude being bottom of your class. And as relevant to the topic: QED.
The master branch isn't on github, if there was any tampering a trivial check against Linus' master branch would see if there'd been any extra git commits. Nobody has to go through more than that. By the way, it's also impossible to insert an "old" commit in git because you'd have to reapply every subsequent patch and all the ids would change. But I guess that you're scaremongering and the mods are either clueless or feeding the troll.
Yes, because being able to look up information at a whim is going to make people more stupid.
Well, if you stop gathering and remembering facts because you can look them up you might not be stupid but you're ignorant in the "I couldn't point out Europe on the world map but I could look it up if I needed to" way. Ignorance leads to stupid questions/statements like "Why didn't AMD buy nVidia instead of ATI?" / "AMD should have bought nVidia instead of ATI." because you don't know the fact that nVidia was about twice as large AMD in market cap. There's a saying "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it", how will you learn from the past when you have absolutely no recollection of it?
Of course you could say all of this is poor research, not poor knowledge. That you should have looked it up, not that you should have known. It's like walking around with a lantern, it's illuminated exactly where you are and it'll be dark again once your mind moves on. I prefer it to be more like lighting torches, once I've visited a subject area I should end up knowing something about it. Okay I might not remember every side street or detail and it dims over time but I know the main roads, it's not simply a dark maze I'd have to start over again with my lantern. That I start recognizing patterns, relations, analogies, how these subject areas fit together. Of course I'll never cover the whole maze and know everything about everything, but I'm trying to understand more today than I did yesterday.
I don't understand the people who think the world can be reduced down to simple, single discipline fact-finding missions. Let's for example say that I'm trying to make a team be more productive. How many fields would you like to draw on? I mean it can be individual, what motivates people? Demotivates people? Is it the group dynamics, the working environment? Is it poor communication and collaboration tools? Is is a stupid incentive model? Is the workflow wrong? Maybe you need to know a little psychology, technology, economics, domain knowledge and so on from a wide range of fields. That's pretty hard to do if you're just running around with a lantern, no matter how smart you are. You have to actually have a working knowledge in each field.
Try working at a consultancy house, then at times I ended up with three. Their laptop, the client's laptop and my laptop. Still, unless it's the difference between carry-on and checked in luggage I don't see it as a big deal as corporate travel generally meant taking a taxi anyway and the few meters I walk it's on wheels. If you feel a spare notebook is too much to haul around then drop it and spend you time in the hotel's exercise room. Seriously.
The problems with using Tor in this manner are:
Storage servers are required; there is no way a popular file sharing site would remain undetected even if it were deployed as a hidden service. It would require too many resources to run, and eavesdropping would not even be necessary to narrow down the targets.
Bandwidth is too limited; it would take days to download an HD movie over Tor, which is even less convenient than going to the nearest video store to buy it legally.
Personally I'm surprised that nobody has come up with an application that basically merges what TOR and Freenet does into one. A distributed storage would provide both the capacity and the upload bandwidth, while freeing up resources from onion sites. The network bandwidth is actually not that bad, I've had files run at 200 kB/s when connected to a high-speed site in the normal web. Of course if people did that in volume the exit nodes would choke and die, but the network itself is rather capable if you could move the files on the inside.
Yes, there are much stronger anonymous designs but the downsides are equally high. I'd call several of these recent designs "anonymous light", good enough that the MAFIAA can't just hook up and collect IPs but not good enough if you have the FBI, NSA or anything like that after you. Personally I don't like this design exactly because what if one of those I trust download something nasty? They'll come to me. I'd much rather see a design that affords some plausible deniability, that no it wasn't me it must have been one of the other nodes in the network, downloading through me.
On that note, the GPL is probably the "safer" choice. Releasing GPL code as BSD is simple, oh now you can use the code in proprietary code too. Going from BSD to GPL is trying to put the cat back in the bag, often leading to a fork and drama from those who no longer can/want to use it. If the developer is clueless it's less harmful that people can't use the code the way he intended than that people can use the code in ways he didn't intend. "Oh you want the code under the BSD, here you go" is a lot easier to fix than "OMG WTF you mean Apple and Microsoft can just take my code for nothing now? That's not what I wanted!"
Broader? Hogwash. If you dig into the KnowledgeBase figures they list only a little over 13765+984+409=15158 GPL family projects. While the Debian stats say:
The last Debian release, Squeeze, which emerged in February 2011, had 28,126 packages of which 26,271, representing 93 per cent, were under the GPL family.
So the one saying there is a decline is missing at least 10,000 GPL projects, plus quite possibly more that are not in Debian. Seems to be it's their figures that are incredibly narrow and wrong.
At least not in the "Which distro do you want?" form, because they probably have no idea. They expect you to know this best. I'd say something like "As I'm sure many of you know, unlike Windows there are many companies and organizations that create distributions of Linux. All of these are built on the Linux kernel but can look and behave quite differently. For those of you who have any experience or preferences in that regard, you're free to choose your own distribution as most of the current developers have. For the rest of you we will start you out on $distro, which should be a good and user-friendly way to start learning Linux. That way it's easier to teach you as a group and it will also be easier for you to learn from each other until you learn the basics. It's rather easy to switch later so feel free to ask the others here what they use and feel the pros and cons are. Any questions?"
You will never know if someone made a copy of your vote before it was anonymized, either on the client or server side. You will never know if someone altered your vote in flight, either at the client or server side. Unlike a visible process you have to trust an invisible process. Instead of compromising thousands of voting locations you can mass compromise the system. Any government could trivially disregard all your pretty rules of how it's "supposed to" work and you'd never know it.
Pretty much all your attempts at verifying results will fail because the more reason you have to fear the outcome, the less honest people will be. That in itself is a huge bias, people will be much less willing to admit voting for controversial parties. Any attempt to verify against a control group of paper voters or RSA key voters fails to take into account that it's a bias in itself, I expect the people to vote online to vote differently than those that don't. Likewise with RSA keys. Even a 1% swing is huge if you can make it in a winner takes-it-all system, if you'd flipped Florida then Bush would never be president. How about a little prod and pull now in the primaries? Even worse in representative systems where you can tweak small parties above or below the minimum limit most countries have.
I think it's a really, really bad idea but people are constantly trying to push it. What I fear is that the most "democratic" countries will do it, because here the threat level is extremely low. Then all the shady regimes with all their shady machines and shady policies will do it too and say "hey, we're just like you". It's an invitation to do even more election fraud than they do today, without all the evidence.
Uh, if we had this technology then the easiest way of wiping out the competition would be to not stop. You get all the mentioned effects plus the ship itself as an RKV and any destruction the warp field can do to their planet. It's like the difference between an asteroid and a space capsule - it's easy to hit Earth, it's harder not to leave a crater on impact...