How many Smith or Johnson or Williams do you think have tried registering their name? Hell, I was barely able to find a domain for my very obscure surname (<50 in the world) because one of them had registered most everything. I just searched and found a page with wikipedia stats, there are roughly 76000 "John Smith" registered. People do not have unique names and it's silly to try beating that square peg into a round hole.
The concept is pretty much stillborn anyway. Open source software thrives on the ability of people to apply a patch and compile it themselves or at least download some precompiled binary. I suppose you can download a FPGA design and use/tweak that, but only an extremely small subset of users have access to one of those. For anything else you pretty much need a company to do production runs and sell them so if they reject your changes it's very hard to get it into an actual product.
And unlike a bad patch that you can revert a bad design can cause subtle failure with massive recalls and losses, Intel just had a billion dollar one. No sane company will accept random patches to a hardware design without a lot of validation and testing, things that cost lots and lots of money. So it might be open for some other reasonably sized company but it's not very open for you, personally. And that sort of defeats the purpose IMO.
You can collapse the world economy to the point where no one trusts representative value, then you will be bartering a cow and a dozen chickens for your next iPhone.
Well, we don't have to go all the way back there. Even 2500 years ago they made coins based on precious metals like gold, silver and copper. The imprint was not for representative value, but for the authenticity of the amount of precious metals. You could simply take the current price of gold and price everything in the weight of gold and silver. So you'd sell your cow and chicken for some coins, then buy your iPhone with those coins. It has its problems but no doubt we'd use easily transportable and non-perishable resources as intermediaries rather than direct bartering.
We don't need any more TLDs. We should be phasing out some of the existing ones, not creating new ones. The.mil and.gov TLDs should be transitioned to reside under.us, and.net and.edu should be transition to reside under the appropriate country. Everything else other than.com,.org, and country TLDs should be phased out.
If you're going to go that far, why not take it all the way and drop all of them, just require a three letter minimum so to not confuse them with country TLDs. The.com domain is so huge compared to the other non-country TLDs that technically it'd be no problem, just promote them to root DNS servers. If for any reason you really need to divide it, split it by the last letter so if you try to resolve google intelligent DNS resolvers will query the "e" server while legacy resolvers will query the root.
Seriously, does anyone have a good example where both the ".com" and ".org" are taken by two different serious companies/organizations and not just cybersquatters and the like? I think just having google, youtube, msn, ibm, oracle, slashdot etc. be the full domain is plenty.
No single country can veto something, it takes a majority to agree to the veto.
No single country can veto something, if a majority disagrees with the veto. It's more than semantics, nobody needs to confirm a veto. In practice it probably means each country do their own thing and unless someone starts blocking "global" terms you won't be able to raise enough shit about it to make the rest of the world intervene.
Probably because the "finding life" is just something essentially tacked on for press. It's a better way of doing mass spectroscopy, because we're mostly looking for rock and soil compositions. Yes, if they happen to be organic that could contribute to the discovery of life but that is a fringe case. That and that life is likely to be hidden away from the surface, we have a bigger chance of observing deposits that have been brought to the surface than actual life.
I don't know if you've seen what's on the app store, but it's not games which take risks. There's a 1000 variations on Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. I wouldn't call something like Fruit Ninja a risky proposition in terms of game design.
Yep, there's a 1000 variations of them but only a handful that *are* Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. There's only a few slots for the "get on the top seller list and stay there because you are on the top seller list" business model. The rest have to sell themselves in some different way, which is why I don't think the game industry as such is threatened. I got Angry Birds. I'm also planning to buy Dragon Age II. However, many of the crappy light entertainment games that cost $5-20 will be gone and good riddance.
Hahahhahahaha you seriously believe it don't you... just head on over to bugs.kde.org and you'll see there's 23000 open bugs. A quick search on the Firefox bug tracker shows a little over 20000 open bugs, I don't know of any similar overview for Gnome but no doubt tens of thousands there too. Of course not all of these are valid bugs but there's plenty things that don't work on Linux, extremely rarely the kernel but everything from X and up is not nearly as solid. In particular I find the regression testing poor, quite often I try to upgrade and find something has broken and I don't think all the problems are distribution related. I think it's more the "scratch an itch" mentality of developers that it works for me so I'm happy. If it broke it for somebody else, not really my problem.
ISPs make money selling bandwidth, file hosts make money from advertising, most usenet servers charge a subscription fee. There's nothing inherently wrong about offering a commercial service, even if you know a significant portion of your users will pirate.
What you don't get to do is cater specifically to that use or encourage piracy, which is what they may run afoul of here. That said the arguments aren't exactly watertight. For example imagine if YouTube had a profit split model where the uploaders got part of the ad revenue. You might say that'd encourage piracy, but you might also argue it's an incentive to create popular content. That people upload pirated material is not as such a fault of the model.
No doubt they're in the gray area of the law, but as long as there's money in it companies will test those limits. What we do know is that RapidShare is legal and Grokster was illegal. Hotfile is floating somewhere in between, either way we're likely to see another precision of what you can do and not.
I don't agree with your logic, as a student you're inevitably being assigned the same tasks as many other people have in the past and with lots of public information. There will always be a lot of papers you can copy fairly directly either in word or spirit, often with little thought work. In my experience, pretty much all the people I knew that cheated - let's call that copied - knew less than those that at least tried solving it on their own.
If real life was like that it'd be great, but there's nobody else doing exactly my job, of course I have documentation and colleagues and some things I can look up on the Internet, but the core part of it isn't there. What you describe are the hellish coworkers that only shuffle work on others because they got no skills and are incapable of doing their own work, they only know how to copy. Letting them copy the answers won't bring them any close to the how or why.
I have had some very productive group assignments, as long as all people are roughly on an equal level and the cooperation is voluntary. Most of the time in school it's not so, which leads to a double effect both of slackers knowing they have an easy grade and the hard working ones not wanting a "D grade" part of their assignment that they want an A on. You will find there is a much stronger internal justice system in business, the boss will very quickly be made aware who isn't up to par.
Teachers are exactly the opposite and like to keep their groups balanced, we had exactly one assignment where we got to choose freely and the four brightest of us produced an assignment that was head and shoulders above the rest. In business it'd be applauded, but for the teacher it just made his life hard because it showed off the great imbalance in the class, there was nobody to "save" the grades in the other groups and it simply depressed the worst students. After that we were each put on a separate group so all the groups could save face.
Assuming he actually bins it. My desktop tends to replace my dad's machine that'll replace my mom's machine and sometimes a generation is used as my server. So barring hardware failure it can easily last 12 years even if I replace it every three. Or just sell it on the second hand market or whatever. If you are one of those still pushing the limits - even if it's just for entertainment like gaming - then three years is still a long time.
Both include 25% VAT so $55 is around $44 without taxes. That combined with good warranty in law (2 or 5 year, depends) I'd say the prices are very close to global market prices.
Disable it in BIOS, remove the physical ports, update the specs. Sure it'll be an odd configuration to only ship with 2 SATA ports, but it won't be a "taint". I'd be very surprised if after all this, Intel will let OEMs ship machines with faulty ports. Personally I wouldn't mind a 4 port SATA card that I could bring along to my next machine.
In fact, I'm surprised that Intel hasn't made a cheap SATA controller of their own, the cheapest 4-port controller card I can find costs 313,- NOK while you can get a full H67 motherboard with 6 ports for 667,- NOK. Discrete controller cards are extremely overpriced.
Which is why every private transport company has been a security disaster. Wait, nope it hasn't. Being unreliable and lethal tends to be bad for business and as the industry matures it's sure to be updated with security regulations.
If you want safe then strapping yourself on top of tons of rocket fuel to be shot up into space probably isn't the best idea anyway, the margins before something goes catastrophically wrong are slim no matter who runs it.
That said, I think the Shuttle is a rather poor business case. With something like SpaceX you can feed yourself launching satellites which only carry an economic risk, then use your most conservative and trusted designs for human transport. The Shuttle is just too expensive for that.
You assume that every application needs to run with every permission my user has, which is obviously false. For example this browser could be locked to its own application directory and a download directory. If I want to open anything executable it could trigger some kind of "sandbox to user" prompt like sudo or UAC. Accessing any other file, like for example if I want to upload something could go through a broker process that'd be heavily audited and give the application a handle to work with, yet unable to access anything but that specific file. That way if my browser is compromised it can't do more than wipe my download directory, not my whole home directory.
For example, a media player would work quite fine with write access to its own configuration file and nothing but read access to anything else. Or it could be given specific accesses to certain media libraries if you want to make changes from within the application. There's lots of such things that could be used to tighten security.
I think it's better to talk of backwards and forwards compatibility, either at a system or UI level.
For example to use one of the great debate subjects, the move from menus to a ribbon is clearly what I consider a major version because people who are used to the old version can't continue working in the same way they have. Typically it's the kind of change that in a corporate setting would require training to use and cause temporary productivity loss, that you would never (semi-)silently upgrade your users to.
Implementing new features like 64 bit support or the "identity" feature I would consider minor changes, as long as people can continue to use it as before on 32 bit and without using the identity feature. You can of course add some extra menu entries and dialog options to use them, but not alter existing workflows much. If the new features are really important to the users and involve say new best practices that differ, I'll accept some market based promotions to major versions.
Finally, you have the patch level. They should not change any features, just fix bugs. It really just exists to know what patches has been applied and not. I'd say that kind of x.y.z pattern is quite well defined. The Qt toolkit for example uses this pattern and I find it quite informative. Version 4.5.2 tells me most everything I need to know.
Always respond to a user action within 50 ms Never lose user data or state
So it runs on faerie wings and pixie dust...
Build Web Apps, Identity and Social into the Open Web Platform
...and will be some Web 3.0 monstrosity.
Maybe they can pull it off but the roadmap isn't really worth anything, it sounds a lot like other products I know where the next version will fix all the slowness and data/state bugs. Combined with the buzzword bingo, I wouldn't put money on it.
Computer may be multi-purpose but there are many discs that are single-purpose or close to it. Like say if you insert a driver disk, it's very likely you are trying to install a driver. If you insert a game disc, it's very likely you are trying to install/play it. Yes, you might be making a CD image or whatever but you're looking very hard to find the 1% exceptions and not the 99% common use case, this is what's called a "sane default". Exceptions such as yourself probably know how to disable it, either by holding down the shift key to disable it once or to disable it permanently. From a usability perspective in a world without malicious discs, I have absolutely no problem seeing the benefits. Inserting the disc is my command to the computer, telling it twice is redundant and poor usability. You can pretend that's not a sacrifice but it is, there's not always a win-win between security and usability.
You can always try to say you should pick the "smart" regulation and not the "stupid" regulation, but in practice you almost always end up in a tug of war where the choices are "more regulation" or "less regulation". Here in Norway we currently have 7 parties in parliament, but even so most issues are very one dimensional with the parties choosing sides. Remember that even in our system we couldn't even cover all combinations of three yes/no questions - 2^3 = 8 would take even more parties. If I were to give 2 word descriptions they'd be:
SV - radical socialists Ap - moderate socialists Sp - rural / environmentalists KrF - value conservatives V - social liberals H - moderate conservatives FrP - populist conservatives
Just from those descriptions you can guess where they'll end up in most questions. You essentially have one socialist block, one conservative block and three small special interest parties that'll court one of the blocks for influence.
I find the huge advantage is more that every party must fight to keep their votes, because there are parties much closer to you politically but with different candidates and different management. You can still vote conservative without voting for those conservatives. Unlike the US, where you have no "democratish" or "republicanish" choice if you like the politics but think the people are asswads.
I think the short summary is that I can't change OS X any more than I can change Windows, no matter how much BSD code is in it. There's no "open source" freedoms to BSD-derivatives.
Either you can say that those freedoms aren't important and that open source exists to produce such great derivatives and bring all software forward, open and closed source. BSD code is more of a toolbox for other developers than something normal users have access to.
Or you can say that those features are important, and that running *BSD using only BSD code is the ideal. That in fact most people should run the "pure" tools because that gives them greater freedom.
Neither of those positions really make sense to me. In the first case, you essentially do free work for the derivatives developing their product. In the second case, you want more open source code yet divert most of the development into writing proprietary forks.
As for the GPLv3 controversy, yes it became important because there's an important distinction between being able to fix your hardware and using the code in some other hardware. They used to be one and the same before signature checking hardware and operating systems. Linux may just like to look at what others are doing and improve his kernel, but I think what most people want is the ability to fix their own hardware. So while the prominence was great, I think the actual divide is minor.
You seem to think this is something that they experimentally test in a lab and determine to be true or false. Reality is that game launches are so unique depending on so many factors both internal to the game and external in the market that nobody really can measure it. The same game has never launched at the same time in the same way both with and without DRM - and if you did that'd be pointless because it would essentially be like launching without DRM.
Publishers do things they think contribute positively into this mix. More marketing is better than less marketing, less bugs is better than more bugs but many things are unknown like if they'd gone with game play style X instead of Y. Or whether they should apply DRM and if so what kind. That is in fact just guesswork, sometimes educated guesswork and sometimes just pure belief.
It's a little bit like your health, very complicated thing. Everybody knows some things are healthy and some things are not, but some things are more belief than anything else. For example what the best way to lose weight is, I've heard roughly as many theories as the number of people I've talked to. Same with exercise and how you should exercise. People are more acting out of belief than fact, and game publishers are just like that.
The short summary is that they're the SCO of porn producers. Hell, SCO claimed the GPL was unenforceable, unconstitutional and void because Linux was pummeling it, Their PR campaign made the Iraqi information minister look honest.
YouTube doesn't lose their safe harbor even if they show ads along with a pirated video clip or song. "Directly attributable" in this sense means more of a profit-split, rather than the normal cost of using the company's services. If you pay for hosting and upload something illegal, the hosting company is still protected even though you paid them money. Least that's my impression of how that clause is interpreted. Your mileage in court may vary.
Does it matter anymore as only Intel makes chips to go with the newest Intel processors and there's a new generation of chips for each new CPU generation. "Sandy Bridge boards" == "Cougar Point" for all intents and purposes.
In fact, motherboards have become increasingly generic. There's your choice of chipset and how many USB/SATA ports come extra, but for the most part you could really just have Intel make all of them except for the anti-trust hell that'd make.
Slashdot Mirror
s/wikipedia/facebook/g
How many Smith or Johnson or Williams do you think have tried registering their name? Hell, I was barely able to find a domain for my very obscure surname (<50 in the world) because one of them had registered most everything. I just searched and found a page with wikipedia stats, there are roughly 76000 "John Smith" registered. People do not have unique names and it's silly to try beating that square peg into a round hole.
The concept is pretty much stillborn anyway. Open source software thrives on the ability of people to apply a patch and compile it themselves or at least download some precompiled binary. I suppose you can download a FPGA design and use/tweak that, but only an extremely small subset of users have access to one of those. For anything else you pretty much need a company to do production runs and sell them so if they reject your changes it's very hard to get it into an actual product.
And unlike a bad patch that you can revert a bad design can cause subtle failure with massive recalls and losses, Intel just had a billion dollar one. No sane company will accept random patches to a hardware design without a lot of validation and testing, things that cost lots and lots of money. So it might be open for some other reasonably sized company but it's not very open for you, personally. And that sort of defeats the purpose IMO.
You can collapse the world economy to the point where no one trusts representative value, then you will be bartering a cow and a dozen chickens for your next iPhone.
Well, we don't have to go all the way back there. Even 2500 years ago they made coins based on precious metals like gold, silver and copper. The imprint was not for representative value, but for the authenticity of the amount of precious metals. You could simply take the current price of gold and price everything in the weight of gold and silver. So you'd sell your cow and chicken for some coins, then buy your iPhone with those coins. It has its problems but no doubt we'd use easily transportable and non-perishable resources as intermediaries rather than direct bartering.
We don't need any more TLDs. We should be phasing out some of the existing ones, not creating new ones. The .mil and .gov TLDs should be transitioned to reside under .us, and .net and .edu should be transition to reside under the appropriate country. Everything else other than .com, .org, and country TLDs should be phased out.
If you're going to go that far, why not take it all the way and drop all of them, just require a three letter minimum so to not confuse them with country TLDs. The .com domain is so huge compared to the other non-country TLDs that technically it'd be no problem, just promote them to root DNS servers. If for any reason you really need to divide it, split it by the last letter so if you try to resolve google intelligent DNS resolvers will query the "e" server while legacy resolvers will query the root.
Seriously, does anyone have a good example where both the ".com" and ".org" are taken by two different serious companies/organizations and not just cybersquatters and the like? I think just having google, youtube, msn, ibm, oracle, slashdot etc. be the full domain is plenty.
No single country can veto something, it takes a majority to agree to the veto.
No single country can veto something, if a majority disagrees with the veto. It's more than semantics, nobody needs to confirm a veto. In practice it probably means each country do their own thing and unless someone starts blocking "global" terms you won't be able to raise enough shit about it to make the rest of the world intervene.
Probably because the "finding life" is just something essentially tacked on for press. It's a better way of doing mass spectroscopy, because we're mostly looking for rock and soil compositions. Yes, if they happen to be organic that could contribute to the discovery of life but that is a fringe case. That and that life is likely to be hidden away from the surface, we have a bigger chance of observing deposits that have been brought to the surface than actual life.
I don't know if you've seen what's on the app store, but it's not games which take risks. There's a 1000 variations on Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. I wouldn't call something like Fruit Ninja a risky proposition in terms of game design.
Yep, there's a 1000 variations of them but only a handful that *are* Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. There's only a few slots for the "get on the top seller list and stay there because you are on the top seller list" business model. The rest have to sell themselves in some different way, which is why I don't think the game industry as such is threatened. I got Angry Birds. I'm also planning to buy Dragon Age II. However, many of the crappy light entertainment games that cost $5-20 will be gone and good riddance.
Hahahhahahaha you seriously believe it don't you... just head on over to bugs.kde.org and you'll see there's 23000 open bugs. A quick search on the Firefox bug tracker shows a little over 20000 open bugs, I don't know of any similar overview for Gnome but no doubt tens of thousands there too. Of course not all of these are valid bugs but there's plenty things that don't work on Linux, extremely rarely the kernel but everything from X and up is not nearly as solid. In particular I find the regression testing poor, quite often I try to upgrade and find something has broken and I don't think all the problems are distribution related. I think it's more the "scratch an itch" mentality of developers that it works for me so I'm happy. If it broke it for somebody else, not really my problem.
ISPs make money selling bandwidth, file hosts make money from advertising, most usenet servers charge a subscription fee. There's nothing inherently wrong about offering a commercial service, even if you know a significant portion of your users will pirate.
What you don't get to do is cater specifically to that use or encourage piracy, which is what they may run afoul of here. That said the arguments aren't exactly watertight. For example imagine if YouTube had a profit split model where the uploaders got part of the ad revenue. You might say that'd encourage piracy, but you might also argue it's an incentive to create popular content. That people upload pirated material is not as such a fault of the model.
No doubt they're in the gray area of the law, but as long as there's money in it companies will test those limits. What we do know is that RapidShare is legal and Grokster was illegal. Hotfile is floating somewhere in between, either way we're likely to see another precision of what you can do and not.
I don't agree with your logic, as a student you're inevitably being assigned the same tasks as many other people have in the past and with lots of public information. There will always be a lot of papers you can copy fairly directly either in word or spirit, often with little thought work. In my experience, pretty much all the people I knew that cheated - let's call that copied - knew less than those that at least tried solving it on their own.
If real life was like that it'd be great, but there's nobody else doing exactly my job, of course I have documentation and colleagues and some things I can look up on the Internet, but the core part of it isn't there. What you describe are the hellish coworkers that only shuffle work on others because they got no skills and are incapable of doing their own work, they only know how to copy. Letting them copy the answers won't bring them any close to the how or why.
I have had some very productive group assignments, as long as all people are roughly on an equal level and the cooperation is voluntary. Most of the time in school it's not so, which leads to a double effect both of slackers knowing they have an easy grade and the hard working ones not wanting a "D grade" part of their assignment that they want an A on. You will find there is a much stronger internal justice system in business, the boss will very quickly be made aware who isn't up to par.
Teachers are exactly the opposite and like to keep their groups balanced, we had exactly one assignment where we got to choose freely and the four brightest of us produced an assignment that was head and shoulders above the rest. In business it'd be applauded, but for the teacher it just made his life hard because it showed off the great imbalance in the class, there was nobody to "save" the grades in the other groups and it simply depressed the worst students. After that we were each put on a separate group so all the groups could save face.
Assuming he actually bins it. My desktop tends to replace my dad's machine that'll replace my mom's machine and sometimes a generation is used as my server. So barring hardware failure it can easily last 12 years even if I replace it every three. Or just sell it on the second hand market or whatever. If you are one of those still pushing the limits - even if it's just for entertainment like gaming - then three years is still a long time.
Both include 25% VAT so $55 is around $44 without taxes. That combined with good warranty in law (2 or 5 year, depends) I'd say the prices are very close to global market prices.
Disable it in BIOS, remove the physical ports, update the specs. Sure it'll be an odd configuration to only ship with 2 SATA ports, but it won't be a "taint". I'd be very surprised if after all this, Intel will let OEMs ship machines with faulty ports. Personally I wouldn't mind a 4 port SATA card that I could bring along to my next machine.
In fact, I'm surprised that Intel hasn't made a cheap SATA controller of their own, the cheapest 4-port controller card I can find costs 313,- NOK while you can get a full H67 motherboard with 6 ports for 667,- NOK. Discrete controller cards are extremely overpriced.
Which is why every private transport company has been a security disaster. Wait, nope it hasn't. Being unreliable and lethal tends to be bad for business and as the industry matures it's sure to be updated with security regulations.
If you want safe then strapping yourself on top of tons of rocket fuel to be shot up into space probably isn't the best idea anyway, the margins before something goes catastrophically wrong are slim no matter who runs it.
That said, I think the Shuttle is a rather poor business case. With something like SpaceX you can feed yourself launching satellites which only carry an economic risk, then use your most conservative and trusted designs for human transport. The Shuttle is just too expensive for that.
You assume that every application needs to run with every permission my user has, which is obviously false. For example this browser could be locked to its own application directory and a download directory. If I want to open anything executable it could trigger some kind of "sandbox to user" prompt like sudo or UAC. Accessing any other file, like for example if I want to upload something could go through a broker process that'd be heavily audited and give the application a handle to work with, yet unable to access anything but that specific file. That way if my browser is compromised it can't do more than wipe my download directory, not my whole home directory.
For example, a media player would work quite fine with write access to its own configuration file and nothing but read access to anything else. Or it could be given specific accesses to certain media libraries if you want to make changes from within the application. There's lots of such things that could be used to tighten security.
I think it's better to talk of backwards and forwards compatibility, either at a system or UI level.
For example to use one of the great debate subjects, the move from menus to a ribbon is clearly what I consider a major version because people who are used to the old version can't continue working in the same way they have. Typically it's the kind of change that in a corporate setting would require training to use and cause temporary productivity loss, that you would never (semi-)silently upgrade your users to.
Implementing new features like 64 bit support or the "identity" feature I would consider minor changes, as long as people can continue to use it as before on 32 bit and without using the identity feature. You can of course add some extra menu entries and dialog options to use them, but not alter existing workflows much. If the new features are really important to the users and involve say new best practices that differ, I'll accept some market based promotions to major versions.
Finally, you have the patch level. They should not change any features, just fix bugs. It really just exists to know what patches has been applied and not. I'd say that kind of x.y.z pattern is quite well defined. The Qt toolkit for example uses this pattern and I find it quite informative. Version 4.5.2 tells me most everything I need to know.
Always respond to a user action within 50 ms
Never lose user data or state
So it runs on faerie wings and pixie dust...
Build Web Apps, Identity and Social into the Open Web Platform
...and will be some Web 3.0 monstrosity.
Maybe they can pull it off but the roadmap isn't really worth anything, it sounds a lot like other products I know where the next version will fix all the slowness and data/state bugs. Combined with the buzzword bingo, I wouldn't put money on it.
Computer may be multi-purpose but there are many discs that are single-purpose or close to it. Like say if you insert a driver disk, it's very likely you are trying to install a driver. If you insert a game disc, it's very likely you are trying to install/play it. Yes, you might be making a CD image or whatever but you're looking very hard to find the 1% exceptions and not the 99% common use case, this is what's called a "sane default". Exceptions such as yourself probably know how to disable it, either by holding down the shift key to disable it once or to disable it permanently. From a usability perspective in a world without malicious discs, I have absolutely no problem seeing the benefits. Inserting the disc is my command to the computer, telling it twice is redundant and poor usability. You can pretend that's not a sacrifice but it is, there's not always a win-win between security and usability.
You can always try to say you should pick the "smart" regulation and not the "stupid" regulation, but in practice you almost always end up in a tug of war where the choices are "more regulation" or "less regulation". Here in Norway we currently have 7 parties in parliament, but even so most issues are very one dimensional with the parties choosing sides. Remember that even in our system we couldn't even cover all combinations of three yes/no questions - 2^3 = 8 would take even more parties. If I were to give 2 word descriptions they'd be:
SV - radical socialists
Ap - moderate socialists
Sp - rural / environmentalists
KrF - value conservatives
V - social liberals
H - moderate conservatives
FrP - populist conservatives
Just from those descriptions you can guess where they'll end up in most questions. You essentially have one socialist block, one conservative block and three small special interest parties that'll court one of the blocks for influence.
I find the huge advantage is more that every party must fight to keep their votes, because there are parties much closer to you politically but with different candidates and different management. You can still vote conservative without voting for those conservatives. Unlike the US, where you have no "democratish" or "republicanish" choice if you like the politics but think the people are asswads.
I think the short summary is that I can't change OS X any more than I can change Windows, no matter how much BSD code is in it. There's no "open source" freedoms to BSD-derivatives.
Either you can say that those freedoms aren't important and that open source exists to produce such great derivatives and bring all software forward, open and closed source. BSD code is more of a toolbox for other developers than something normal users have access to.
Or you can say that those features are important, and that running *BSD using only BSD code is the ideal. That in fact most people should run the "pure" tools because that gives them greater freedom.
Neither of those positions really make sense to me. In the first case, you essentially do free work for the derivatives developing their product. In the second case, you want more open source code yet divert most of the development into writing proprietary forks.
As for the GPLv3 controversy, yes it became important because there's an important distinction between being able to fix your hardware and using the code in some other hardware. They used to be one and the same before signature checking hardware and operating systems. Linux may just like to look at what others are doing and improve his kernel, but I think what most people want is the ability to fix their own hardware. So while the prominence was great, I think the actual divide is minor.
You seem to think this is something that they experimentally test in a lab and determine to be true or false. Reality is that game launches are so unique depending on so many factors both internal to the game and external in the market that nobody really can measure it. The same game has never launched at the same time in the same way both with and without DRM - and if you did that'd be pointless because it would essentially be like launching without DRM.
Publishers do things they think contribute positively into this mix. More marketing is better than less marketing, less bugs is better than more bugs but many things are unknown like if they'd gone with game play style X instead of Y. Or whether they should apply DRM and if so what kind. That is in fact just guesswork, sometimes educated guesswork and sometimes just pure belief.
It's a little bit like your health, very complicated thing. Everybody knows some things are healthy and some things are not, but some things are more belief than anything else. For example what the best way to lose weight is, I've heard roughly as many theories as the number of people I've talked to. Same with exercise and how you should exercise. People are more acting out of belief than fact, and game publishers are just like that.
The short summary is that they're the SCO of porn producers. Hell, SCO claimed the GPL was unenforceable, unconstitutional and void because Linux was pummeling it, Their PR campaign made the Iraqi information minister look honest.
YouTube doesn't lose their safe harbor even if they show ads along with a pirated video clip or song. "Directly attributable" in this sense means more of a profit-split, rather than the normal cost of using the company's services. If you pay for hosting and upload something illegal, the hosting company is still protected even though you paid them money. Least that's my impression of how that clause is interpreted. Your mileage in court may vary.
Does it matter anymore as only Intel makes chips to go with the newest Intel processors and there's a new generation of chips for each new CPU generation. "Sandy Bridge boards" == "Cougar Point" for all intents and purposes.
In fact, motherboards have become increasingly generic. There's your choice of chipset and how many USB/SATA ports come extra, but for the most part you could really just have Intel make all of them except for the anti-trust hell that'd make.