That's a great idea, assuming you have something that works. The WIMP interface is terrible for many tasks, because it requires frequent switches between the keyboard and mouse, requires careful aim with the mouse for many tasks, requires aiming the mouse while holding buttons, and so forth. None of these tasks is efficient. GUI is a great way to present information, but is not great for most input.
Of course, keyboard input, to a great extent, worked. But people switched to using the mouse, probably because it seemed to go well with graphics, and was the next new thing.
There is the possibility of making a free standard which is only useful if you use something non-free. For example, you are free to use the standard of driving on the right side of the road in the US, but it's only useful if you have a vehicle, which you have to pay for.
The GIF standard is free; you can use it without any problems without paying anyone anything, except that it does a funny thing with the data such that, if you use the non-free LZW algorithm on your data first, the file is smaller.
For SVG, the standard is similarly free, but in order to actually follow one of the steps legally, you have to sue Apple for patent fraud.
So you don't have to pay to use the standard. You have to pay to do the things that the standard tells you to do. It's like a user's manual that says, "buy some batteries".
I agree with what you're thinking, though: it's important for our standards to not require the purchase of other stuff, especially when the required stuff is only available from a single source or possibly not available at all (i.e., if you need a piece of software that doesn't exist for your computer). But this is distinct from a different possibility for standards: the standard itself could require a license. For example, the unicode standard has a license which prohibits further distribution (essentially so that old versions don't hang around, I think). There are standards where the document itself is not available for free. But that's not what the W3C policy is about.
Sure, why not? The first one was written with sequels in mind, so it's not like, say, Jurassic Park, where they just kept finding more things to happen in the sequels. Of course, the situation is clearly that they realized that, if people liked the movie, they'd want to make sequels, so they should have in mind a way for them not to be lame.
Ah, right. Yes, if I do the right thing, *then* slashdot doesn't like my character. Of course (❊) seems to work (maybe), but it's a pain to type decimal character values for unicode characters.
Unicode operators?
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 3, Funny
It'll be so great to be able to use expressions like "x y". Of course, you'll have to define for yourself what an eight teardrop-spoked propeller asterisk does...
Hmm... slashdot doesn't seem to like my character. Gonna make it hard to ask about my programs...
First of all, hydrogen isn't all that explosive. The Hindenberg situation was different from this situation in two ways: it was coated in rocket fuel (not known to be explosive at the time), which airplanes would not be, and it used the hydrogen for lift (lighter than air gas), rather than just for fuel.
Having a hydrogen-powered airplane would have been far preferable to a hydrocarbon-powered one, because the hydrogen, being a gas, would have gone out of the buildings. Sure, it would probably have gotten to places that the liquid fuel didn't, but much less of it would have burned, because it would have diffused to essentially normal conditions pretty quickly (there's hydrogen gas in air, remember). Sure, it would have left the building pretty effectively on fire, but such buildings are rated to be able to withstand a fire fueled by the stuff normally found in them for long enough to put the fire out and evacuate the building.
On the other hand, just switching the fuel is beyond our current technology. Jet engines are rather carefully-designed devices, and you can't just switch the fuel in them without changing a lot. And we don't yet have the fuel tanks and support systems for hydrogen; it needs to be kept under high pressure in order to fit in the airplane, and that means something strong, and designed for high fuel and low fuel situations, which will be heavy. Gas just needs a container that doesn't leak, since it's a liquid anyway.
Furthermore, the support systems for hydrogen-powered stuff aren't nearly as well in place; no big generation plants, no suitable fuel trucks, and so forth.
First of all, something like at least part of this proposal has to happen: evidentally, the W3C hasn't previously had a patent policy, and could have simply made a Recommendation that was patent-encumbered. Of course, there would have been an outcry, and they'd probably have had to just sit on it for twenty years, but it was possible.
The RAND theory makes sense to me: if people will make money off of a standard, why shouldn't they have to pay the people who provided necessary research for it?
However, I think the main issue is that there is an important segment of the community which is not going to make money by use of the standard. For this segment, there is no reasonable royalty, and, so long as the implementation does not enter the segement of the community which will make money from it, no reasonable restrictions.
Proposal: include in the RAND section
* The following license must be offered:
if the licensee either does not distribute the implementation, or does not charge money for the implementation above the cost of its distribution,
the licensee is granted a non-transferable license to use the patented technology in an implementation of the Recommendation, without any need to contact the patent-holder.
(IANAL; this should be rewritten to contain all the magic words and remove the loopholes for commercial software producers)
With this clause, developers would be able to implement the Recommendations, users would be able to use the implementations, but anyone selling even a free implementation would have to pay royalties. I have not actually checked whether this clause would be compatible with the GPL (which doesn't seem likely to really want a more general license to patents than this, anyway); it would have to be tweaked to be compatible, if not.
You don't think people replaced their 40 IIS servers with a single Apache one? Actually, there's probably a large push for people to not run their own webserver, especially if they'd have to keep it up to date. So they might have had real content on a machine, but they were convinced to move it to a common server: ISP blocks port 80 when there's a worm, tells people to put their content on the ISP web server; company tells employees to stop running IIS, and put their content on the company server.
The banner ads won't be cached by the proxy, because each ad is different; if you look at/.'s banner ad code, it puts the time in the URLs, and varies a number of things. The point of web ads is that they aren't static.
Certainly no server-side software and probably no cliint-side software can tell if I'm looking at ads. It can only tell if my browser downloads them, and maybe whether the browser puts them in the page. On the other hand, the browser could automatically scroll past them, or not actually put them on the page, or a number of similar things.
If you browse/. with:
URL | s/[^#]*/\0#post-ad
Page | s///
everything will be just as if you were seeing the ads, but you'll only see them if you scroll up.
Personally, I think it would be good for ad-filters to put the ads in a canonical location and always download them last. Since may sites are significantly supported by the advertizers, it is good behavior to actually look at them, in hopes that the sites won't either need to require payment or go out of business. On the other hand, it's probably better if the ads are kept out of the user's way.
There are prototype fuel-cell-based buses. Part of their demo is that, when the finish driving you around, they give you some water from the exhaust pipe.
Pure water doesn't taste right (and *really* pure water is actually toxic -- the ultimate anti-electrolyte drink -- but enough stuff gets in it from the air that that wouldn't be a problem). But I would expect that it would taste about right once you made tea or koolaid or something with it.
I don't know about your water heater, but my water heater's hot. I suppose I have a cold water heater in the kitchen, but I normally call that a microwave.
I'm not using an image from my server, or from the recipient's server; I'm using an image from... the internet... somewhere... e.g., the two parties agree to use the first photo in the first CNN article from a certain date. The key is thus independently downloaded by the two parties involved (as well as the most of the rest of the internet).
Thus, the step of "look through your images" is rather infeasible unless the attacker is watching me closely at all times, in which case they could just read the message.
Public key cryptography is basically useful for the situation where two people want to communicate without knowing in advance who they want to communicate with (so they can't share a secret session key). If, however, the parties can agree on something beforehand, which may be very small, a one-time pad after a suitable expansion process (i.e., one that doesn't create any statistical properties) is the correct solution, being provably secure.
Why not just put the classroom machines on a LAN with the teacher's machine as the only gateway to the rest of the network? They presumably have the machines in order to do either local work or work that depends on a class server somewhere, so they don't actually need more internet access than that. If they're actually searching the net for information relevent to the course, they're still not paying attention to the class; they should do that when everyone hasn't arranged to get together.
It wouldn't even look like censorship if they didn't do it in a silly way, giving everyone a full net connection and then clamping down on it. It's not censorship when they just fail to have net access at all in the classrooms...
First, share a one-time pad. This is very easy using steganography: you just choose an image on the internet and a time and agree to seed a pseudo-random number generator with that to get your pad. Encrypt your message by XORing it with the one-time pad. Your encrypted message is now indistinguishable from random noise, assuming your PRNG is good.
Then, you need a data file where noise is expected. Using low-order bits is no good unless you have pictures where the low order bits are actually random, rather than containing no information. One possibility is to take a photograph and make it a GIF or PNG; the lowest order bits that your camera actually produces are probably noise, and will be present in the image.
Replace the input noise with your special noise. The resulting image is now perfectly plausible (your camera could have taken it if some photons happened to land differently, with the same probability as having taken the photo it did take), and the message cannot be read or distinguished from noise unless the codebreaker knows what image you agreed on.
In order to do this, you and the recipient have to agree on an image you control and another image. Having done this, you can, of course, agree on more images later, for communications in both directions. Make sure you both look at a lot of images, including a lot that everyone looks at (e.g., CNN).
And then your recipient looks at the message on his CRT, and the spies read it in the EM radiation. Good thing you weren't saying anything they care about, but why did you bother with all the encryption, then?
The problem with surveys like Netcraft is that they only take into account web servers. But because IIS is an integral part of the operating system (tm), it gets installed on all sorts of things which aren't web servers, making it thus more popular than Apache, and a better target for worms.
Of course, you can't really blame these people for not keeping the web server they didn't know about (but probably paid for) up to date, and you may wonder why the server has to include features that MS can't make secure the first time when it does not, in fact, have to include any features at all.
Once again, people have entirely the wrong ideas about these terrorists. It is obvious that the terrorists only rely on low-tech devices, and have thus performed an attack specifically targetted at our high-tech devices. It is time the US stops relying on frigile technology for vital services and actually do the necessary legwork and have enough human involvement.
I sort of liked how the plot worked; you have the large plot, which you find out about very slowly over the course of the series (character's back stories, etc), and you have the episode plots, which get resolved each episode. It sort of makes it feel like just regular life, until the slow things come up.
While I really like the epic anime I've seen, I'd hate to watch it one episode a day or week. Watching a couple of episodes of Escaflowne out of order was bad enough when I could see the ones I missed when I got some free time with the VCR...
I think the major problem with cash-less transactions is that they take much longer than cash transactions, and have an additional fee. That makes it problematic if a group of people at dinner want to split the bill without cash, or when you get food delivered. For transactions where there's something else going on (chatting with people, finishing desert, bagging the things you bought, etc), it's not too much of a problem, but it means that one quick transaction or a number of transactions at the same time are inconvenient.
It sounds like MicroTest was trying to avoid anyone finding out that they were using GPLed code; it's hard to say whether xStore realized exactly what was in the thing they were selling when they bought the division. Now that they've been informed of what their responsibilities are with respect to the code, the new people seem likely to comply.
I suspect MicroTest would have also distributed source if someone had caught them when they still owned the division; I think they were less concerned about people getting the source to the software (since people already can get the source, as it doesn't seem to be significantly modified) than about people finding out that the product uses Free Software. Remember that until very recently the software used in these products was considered by the business world to be unreliable and so forth, and people were prohibited from using it; people would run Linux servers and pretend they were actually Windows. This is probably not a concern these days, since IBM has made Linux acceptable to the business world.
So I went to the xStore web site, and they seem to have their binaries available for download. I suspect if they were worried about people building their own, they wouldn't just give out the images. Probably they make money to a large extent on handing over the hardware with everything in place (getting a shiny new 486 box these days for a reasonable price is probably only possible in bulk). If they just give away the binaries to anyone who wants them, they'll probably just give away the source, too.
Even more fundamental and larger is figuring out what is interesting and what isn't. The unencrypted emails you mention were probably exchanging flight info, planning when they wanted to fly, where they should go, where they would come form, and so forth. Reading the email in advance probably wouldn't give anything away to someone not part of the group-- it would be profoundly stupid for them to read email that could incriminate them in a public library, where, even if it weren't examined by the FBI, someone waiting for the computer could simply happen to look over their shoulder.
It's an essentially unbreakable end-to-end chaffing system: only say things that are just like what anyone would say if they were doing ordinary things, but have some shared understanding that only the people involved know about (like, when we're all on planes at the same time, we'll hijack them).
As far as I can tell, VRML was trying to be both Inventor and HTML. This was before XML got big, with people routinely using that sort of format for non-text. Inventor was a pain to actually view, and it influenced too many 3D viewers; VRML was watered down from Inventor, as well.
There's now a good example of a XML-based graphics format which is at least usable, and which will probably gain substantial browser support (even if it doesn't become popular to actually use for a while). A vector graphics format, as well, is a good basis for a 3D format, because the user will be able to change the size of objects by getting closer or farther away. Extending SVG into 3 dimensions shouldn't be too difficult; it would require 3D primitives, of course, and people would have to figure out a useful user interface, but the first is relatively trivial and the second is a universal problem.
It's a light sentence, as sentences go, but it makes the whole process, from putting it together to serving the sentence, more trouble than it's worth in entertainment.
The reason lame modern viruses get written is that it's really easy; you put in very little time, and then get to hear reports about how it spreads: very little effort, a little entertainment. If he'd known that it would take 250 hours of work, he probably wouldn't have bothered.
The same goes for hacking websites: people do it because it doesn't take any real effort. If it took 250 hours of boring work that you can't automate, people wouldn't bother.
He could sell it, but he could not include the contributions of other people (unless they were in on it). Of course, other people's contributions have gotten into the kernel long enough ago that Linus probably couldn't make a coherent and modern package of only his code.
On the other hand, he could certainly sell a particular contribution, if that's what someone wanted to buy; e.g., if he did a clever memory manager, he could sell that. Of course, they might not be able to link it with the rest of the kernel and distribute the result, making it thus somewhat useless, but if they only wanted to copy chunks out of it and port it, that would be a sensible possible sale.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a great idea, assuming you have something that works. The WIMP interface is terrible for many tasks, because it requires frequent switches between the keyboard and mouse, requires careful aim with the mouse for many tasks, requires aiming the mouse while holding buttons, and so forth. None of these tasks is efficient. GUI is a great way to present information, but is not great for most input.
Of course, keyboard input, to a great extent, worked. But people switched to using the mouse, probably because it seemed to go well with graphics, and was the next new thing.
There is the possibility of making a free standard which is only useful if you use something non-free. For example, you are free to use the standard of driving on the right side of the road in the US, but it's only useful if you have a vehicle, which you have to pay for.
The GIF standard is free; you can use it without any problems without paying anyone anything, except that it does a funny thing with the data such that, if you use the non-free LZW algorithm on your data first, the file is smaller.
For SVG, the standard is similarly free, but in order to actually follow one of the steps legally, you have to sue Apple for patent fraud.
So you don't have to pay to use the standard. You have to pay to do the things that the standard tells you to do. It's like a user's manual that says, "buy some batteries".
I agree with what you're thinking, though: it's important for our standards to not require the purchase of other stuff, especially when the required stuff is only available from a single source or possibly not available at all (i.e., if you need a piece of software that doesn't exist for your computer). But this is distinct from a different possibility for standards: the standard itself could require a license. For example, the unicode standard has a license which prohibits further distribution (essentially so that old versions don't hang around, I think). There are standards where the document itself is not available for free. But that's not what the W3C policy is about.
Sure, why not? The first one was written with sequels in mind, so it's not like, say, Jurassic Park, where they just kept finding more things to happen in the sequels. Of course, the situation is clearly that they realized that, if people liked the movie, they'd want to make sequels, so they should have in mind a way for them not to be lame.
Ah, right. Yes, if I do the right thing, *then* slashdot doesn't like my character. Of course (❊) seems to work (maybe), but it's a pain to type decimal character values for unicode characters.
It'll be so great to be able to use expressions like "x y". Of course, you'll have to define for yourself what an eight teardrop-spoked propeller asterisk does...
Hmm... slashdot doesn't seem to like my character. Gonna make it hard to ask about my programs...
They tend to use helium in blimps these days, since the gas doesn't have to burn at all; it just has to be lighter than air.
First of all, hydrogen isn't all that explosive. The Hindenberg situation was different from this situation in two ways: it was coated in rocket fuel (not known to be explosive at the time), which airplanes would not be, and it used the hydrogen for lift (lighter than air gas), rather than just for fuel.
Having a hydrogen-powered airplane would have been far preferable to a hydrocarbon-powered one, because the hydrogen, being a gas, would have gone out of the buildings. Sure, it would probably have gotten to places that the liquid fuel didn't, but much less of it would have burned, because it would have diffused to essentially normal conditions pretty quickly (there's hydrogen gas in air, remember). Sure, it would have left the building pretty effectively on fire, but such buildings are rated to be able to withstand a fire fueled by the stuff normally found in them for long enough to put the fire out and evacuate the building.
On the other hand, just switching the fuel is beyond our current technology. Jet engines are rather carefully-designed devices, and you can't just switch the fuel in them without changing a lot. And we don't yet have the fuel tanks and support systems for hydrogen; it needs to be kept under high pressure in order to fit in the airplane, and that means something strong, and designed for high fuel and low fuel situations, which will be heavy. Gas just needs a container that doesn't leak, since it's a liquid anyway.
Furthermore, the support systems for hydrogen-powered stuff aren't nearly as well in place; no big generation plants, no suitable fuel trucks, and so forth.
First of all, something like at least part of this proposal has to happen: evidentally, the W3C hasn't previously had a patent policy, and could have simply made a Recommendation that was patent-encumbered. Of course, there would have been an outcry, and they'd probably have had to just sit on it for twenty years, but it was possible.
The RAND theory makes sense to me: if people will make money off of a standard, why shouldn't they have to pay the people who provided necessary research for it?
However, I think the main issue is that there is an important segment of the community which is not going to make money by use of the standard. For this segment, there is no reasonable royalty, and, so long as the implementation does not enter the segement of the community which will make money from it, no reasonable restrictions.
Proposal: include in the RAND section
* The following license must be offered:
if the licensee either does not distribute the implementation, or does not charge money for the implementation above the cost of its distribution,
the licensee is granted a non-transferable license to use the patented technology in an implementation of the Recommendation, without any need to contact the patent-holder.
(IANAL; this should be rewritten to contain all the magic words and remove the loopholes for commercial software producers)
With this clause, developers would be able to implement the Recommendations, users would be able to use the implementations, but anyone selling even a free implementation would have to pay royalties. I have not actually checked whether this clause would be compatible with the GPL (which doesn't seem likely to really want a more general license to patents than this, anyway); it would have to be tweaked to be compatible, if not.
You don't think people replaced their 40 IIS servers with a single Apache one? Actually, there's probably a large push for people to not run their own webserver, especially if they'd have to keep it up to date. So they might have had real content on a machine, but they were convinced to move it to a common server: ISP blocks port 80 when there's a worm, tells people to put their content on the ISP web server; company tells employees to stop running IIS, and put their content on the company server.
The banner ads won't be cached by the proxy, because each ad is different; if you look at /.'s banner ad code, it puts the time in the URLs, and varies a number of things. The point of web ads is that they aren't static.
/. with:
Certainly no server-side software and probably no cliint-side software can tell if I'm looking at ads. It can only tell if my browser downloads them, and maybe whether the browser puts them in the page. On the other hand, the browser could automatically scroll past them, or not actually put them on the page, or a number of similar things.
If you browse
URL | s/[^#]*/\0#post-ad
Page | s///
everything will be just as if you were seeing the ads, but you'll only see them if you scroll up.
Personally, I think it would be good for ad-filters to put the ads in a canonical location and always download them last. Since may sites are significantly supported by the advertizers, it is good behavior to actually look at them, in hopes that the sites won't either need to require payment or go out of business. On the other hand, it's probably better if the ads are kept out of the user's way.
There are prototype fuel-cell-based buses. Part of their demo is that, when the finish driving you around, they give you some water from the exhaust pipe.
Pure water doesn't taste right (and *really* pure water is actually toxic -- the ultimate anti-electrolyte drink -- but enough stuff gets in it from the air that that wouldn't be a problem). But I would expect that it would taste about right once you made tea or koolaid or something with it.
I don't know about your water heater, but my water heater's hot. I suppose I have a cold water heater in the kitchen, but I normally call that a microwave.
I'm not using an image from my server, or from the recipient's server; I'm using an image from... the internet... somewhere... e.g., the two parties agree to use the first photo in the first CNN article from a certain date. The key is thus independently downloaded by the two parties involved (as well as the most of the rest of the internet).
Thus, the step of "look through your images" is rather infeasible unless the attacker is watching me closely at all times, in which case they could just read the message.
Public key cryptography is basically useful for the situation where two people want to communicate without knowing in advance who they want to communicate with (so they can't share a secret session key). If, however, the parties can agree on something beforehand, which may be very small, a one-time pad after a suitable expansion process (i.e., one that doesn't create any statistical properties) is the correct solution, being provably secure.
Why not just put the classroom machines on a LAN with the teacher's machine as the only gateway to the rest of the network? They presumably have the machines in order to do either local work or work that depends on a class server somewhere, so they don't actually need more internet access than that. If they're actually searching the net for information relevent to the course, they're still not paying attention to the class; they should do that when everyone hasn't arranged to get together.
It wouldn't even look like censorship if they didn't do it in a silly way, giving everyone a full net connection and then clamping down on it. It's not censorship when they just fail to have net access at all in the classrooms...
First, share a one-time pad. This is very easy using steganography: you just choose an image on the internet and a time and agree to seed a pseudo-random number generator with that to get your pad. Encrypt your message by XORing it with the one-time pad. Your encrypted message is now indistinguishable from random noise, assuming your PRNG is good.
Then, you need a data file where noise is expected. Using low-order bits is no good unless you have pictures where the low order bits are actually random, rather than containing no information. One possibility is to take a photograph and make it a GIF or PNG; the lowest order bits that your camera actually produces are probably noise, and will be present in the image.
Replace the input noise with your special noise. The resulting image is now perfectly plausible (your camera could have taken it if some photons happened to land differently, with the same probability as having taken the photo it did take), and the message cannot be read or distinguished from noise unless the codebreaker knows what image you agreed on.
In order to do this, you and the recipient have to agree on an image you control and another image. Having done this, you can, of course, agree on more images later, for communications in both directions. Make sure you both look at a lot of images, including a lot that everyone looks at (e.g., CNN).
And then your recipient looks at the message on his CRT, and the spies read it in the EM radiation. Good thing you weren't saying anything they care about, but why did you bother with all the encryption, then?
The problem with surveys like Netcraft is that they only take into account web servers. But because IIS is an integral part of the operating system (tm), it gets installed on all sorts of things which aren't web servers, making it thus more popular than Apache, and a better target for worms.
Of course, you can't really blame these people for not keeping the web server they didn't know about (but probably paid for) up to date, and you may wonder why the server has to include features that MS can't make secure the first time when it does not, in fact, have to include any features at all.
Once again, people have entirely the wrong ideas about these terrorists. It is obvious that the terrorists only rely on low-tech devices, and have thus performed an attack specifically targetted at our high-tech devices. It is time the US stops relying on frigile technology for vital services and actually do the necessary legwork and have enough human involvement.
I sort of liked how the plot worked; you have the large plot, which you find out about very slowly over the course of the series (character's back stories, etc), and you have the episode plots, which get resolved each episode. It sort of makes it feel like just regular life, until the slow things come up.
While I really like the epic anime I've seen, I'd hate to watch it one episode a day or week. Watching a couple of episodes of Escaflowne out of order was bad enough when I could see the ones I missed when I got some free time with the VCR...
I think the major problem with cash-less transactions is that they take much longer than cash transactions, and have an additional fee. That makes it problematic if a group of people at dinner want to split the bill without cash, or when you get food delivered. For transactions where there's something else going on (chatting with people, finishing desert, bagging the things you bought, etc), it's not too much of a problem, but it means that one quick transaction or a number of transactions at the same time are inconvenient.
It sounds like MicroTest was trying to avoid anyone finding out that they were using GPLed code; it's hard to say whether xStore realized exactly what was in the thing they were selling when they bought the division. Now that they've been informed of what their responsibilities are with respect to the code, the new people seem likely to comply.
I suspect MicroTest would have also distributed source if someone had caught them when they still owned the division; I think they were less concerned about people getting the source to the software (since people already can get the source, as it doesn't seem to be significantly modified) than about people finding out that the product uses Free Software. Remember that until very recently the software used in these products was considered by the business world to be unreliable and so forth, and people were prohibited from using it; people would run Linux servers and pretend they were actually Windows. This is probably not a concern these days, since IBM has made Linux acceptable to the business world.
So I went to the xStore web site, and they seem to have their binaries available for download. I suspect if they were worried about people building their own, they wouldn't just give out the images. Probably they make money to a large extent on handing over the hardware with everything in place (getting a shiny new 486 box these days for a reasonable price is probably only possible in bulk). If they just give away the binaries to anyone who wants them, they'll probably just give away the source, too.
Even more fundamental and larger is figuring out what is interesting and what isn't. The unencrypted emails you mention were probably exchanging flight info, planning when they wanted to fly, where they should go, where they would come form, and so forth. Reading the email in advance probably wouldn't give anything away to someone not part of the group-- it would be profoundly stupid for them to read email that could incriminate them in a public library, where, even if it weren't examined by the FBI, someone waiting for the computer could simply happen to look over their shoulder.
It's an essentially unbreakable end-to-end chaffing system: only say things that are just like what anyone would say if they were doing ordinary things, but have some shared understanding that only the people involved know about (like, when we're all on planes at the same time, we'll hijack them).
As far as I can tell, VRML was trying to be both Inventor and HTML. This was before XML got big, with people routinely using that sort of format for non-text. Inventor was a pain to actually view, and it influenced too many 3D viewers; VRML was watered down from Inventor, as well.
There's now a good example of a XML-based graphics format which is at least usable, and which will probably gain substantial browser support (even if it doesn't become popular to actually use for a while). A vector graphics format, as well, is a good basis for a 3D format, because the user will be able to change the size of objects by getting closer or farther away. Extending SVG into 3 dimensions shouldn't be too difficult; it would require 3D primitives, of course, and people would have to figure out a useful user interface, but the first is relatively trivial and the second is a universal problem.
It's a light sentence, as sentences go, but it makes the whole process, from putting it together to serving the sentence, more trouble than it's worth in entertainment.
The reason lame modern viruses get written is that it's really easy; you put in very little time, and then get to hear reports about how it spreads: very little effort, a little entertainment. If he'd known that it would take 250 hours of work, he probably wouldn't have bothered.
The same goes for hacking websites: people do it because it doesn't take any real effort. If it took 250 hours of boring work that you can't automate, people wouldn't bother.
He could sell it, but he could not include the contributions of other people (unless they were in on it). Of course, other people's contributions have gotten into the kernel long enough ago that Linus probably couldn't make a coherent and modern package of only his code.
On the other hand, he could certainly sell a particular contribution, if that's what someone wanted to buy; e.g., if he did a clever memory manager, he could sell that. Of course, they might not be able to link it with the rest of the kernel and distribute the result, making it thus somewhat useless, but if they only wanted to copy chunks out of it and port it, that would be a sensible possible sale.