If you're really writing it all yourself, none of these issues matter. If you're really writing standard C/C++ with only POSIX library functions, you're not linking against the kernel (so the kernel license doesn't matter), and you're not linking against any userspace libraries except for libgcc/libg++ (permissive license) and glibc (generally permitted). Dynamic linking is only actually a pain when either you're writing the library, or the library provider's versioning is lacking, or you've got a million libraries, or you're shipping the software not aggregated with the library you want to use.
Of course, you'll want to use other people's code for some things. You'll almost certainly want to start your program using some shell scripts, but those don't have a non-source form and are generally not worth obfuscating. If you want to use more libraries, you'll have to look at their licenses (many important Linux libraries are BSD-licensed anyway, though). If you're writing kernel code, you probably want to open-source this part and do as little of the interesting stuff there as possible (for technical reasons: kernel bugs cause a lot more damage than userspace bugs; for maintence reasons: kernel developers will maintain cleanly-written open-source code for you across trivial API changes; and for legal reasons: it's a pain to avoid making your module a derivative work of the kernel).
The ideal thing is to build a little computer running Linux with nothing in it that you wrote, and then use it to run a program that's entirely yours, and sell the whole thing to people.
I'd been thinking that goodmail was bad until I saw that messages that used it would be specially marked in user interfaces. This completely changed my mind about it. Email whose sender is willing to pay money and have list management compliance tests to have not treated as spam is almost certainly stuff I want to delete unread, and it'll be clearly marked for me. This is a big advantage over the current situation where almost all spam is obviously spam, but list mail from legitimate companies is more difficult to eliminate at a glance. For that matter, if you actually want to see any of this email, it should be possible to whitelist the sender if you actually want to opt in.
The interpersonal politics aren't bad with Linux, because everybody knows who Linus trusts with what; it's in the MAINTAINERS file, which tells you who to send your changes to. If Linus wasn't going to accept practically any PCI change from Greg KH, his tree wouldn't list Greg KH as the PCI maintainer. So you just have to convince Greg KH to take your patch, and Linus will be pretty much certain to take it eventually, regardless of who you are.
Actually, gcc seems to be doing things very similarly to how git tends to work. It's perfectly fine to have multiple people have access to a single tree, so you just give everybody with global write access to some shared official tree. Alternatively, this group of people can just routinely pull from each other, or there can be a script that pulls from all of them routinely. Likewise, this central mechanism can pull from localized maintainers when those changes fit the policy. Branch stuff is just as much of a free-for-all, but the project doesn't have to host it for everybody.
I don't think git would actually be a major policy change for gcc; it would just mean that (a) ports can be hosted elsewhere (like having the avr port at avrfreaks, where all the avr people hang out); (b) developers can do stuff offline; (c) the branch namespace doesn't have to be flat and doesn't have to affect uninterested people; and (d) branches would work a lot better (git is highly tuned for branches, because everything is a little branch until it gets pulled into a bigger branch).
That's actually one of the stated reasons for killing the ODF bills: they're not qualified to legislate on the subject. What they should actually do is legislate on what they want to happen, and leave it to the executive branch to implement it and the courts to judge it. They should be able to pass a bill that mandates the use of an ISO-standardized data format if one exists which is recommended by ISO for the particular use an agency is putting it to, provided there are tools available to handle it. Rather than try to decide whether the issues with ODF have been resolved, just codify what issues matter, and leave it to the state IT departments to figure out whether this means they have to standardize on ODF.
There's no need for legislators to understand the technology. They should just provide a mandate to people who do understand the issues. The legislative issue is whether to prioritize promoting open standards over leaving things that pretty much work alone. Either way, the IT departments could make either actual decision, but they'd have to support it against criticism from the other side based on the priorities the legislature has set.
Re:~$ mv CommitAccess MergePrivileges
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 5, Informative
The advantage is that MergePrivileges can be fine-grained: there can be many answers for "merge into what?" There's a -mm tree, a -stable tree, a -linus tree, a -rt tree, and a lot of vendor and distro trees. Each of these has a different maintainer, and can have a different idea of what is acceptable. And only the maintainer can merge things into their tree, and they can decide based on a variety of features of the things they're considering. For example, Linus only merges from a few people directly: maintainers of various subsystems. And he doesn't even trust them completely; if the SD/MMC maintainer has a change which changes x86 architecture code in the tree Linus is asked to merge, he'll notice and ask what's up with that. And if there are changes that look too intrusive for the current point in the development cycle, he'll put it off until the next cycle, and ask for a tree with just fixes. And -linus isn't special, except that almost everybody trusts him implicitly and merges his stuff into their trees (the main exception being -stable, which is why a new 2.6.20.x kernel isn't derived from 2.6.21; and vendor and distro kernels are generally based on -stable of some sort, and only get new stuff from Linus when they go to a new series). Also, maintainers of subsystems know the people who work in their areas, and can apply the same sorts of rules: the guy from Intel who works on their network drivers can get e100 changes into the the -netdev tree, because the maintainer knows they know what they're doing for e100 changes. And Linus sees that the e100 changes are coming in through -netdev, and the network maintainer knows what policy to apply to the drivers around there, so they're fine, even if Linus has no clue who should be allowed to do what in e100.
It's not that the politics go away. It's that the policy is no longer a binary "yes or no" decision, so the technical arrangement mirrors the social arrangement. This doesn't work with CommitAccess because people wouldn't commit the same change everywhere they should, and they couldn't be restricted to only making changes they're trusted to make (there are people who are trusted to correct spelling in comments in any file in the tree, and Linus can look through the total changes they send and verify that they only change spelling in comments).
The thing I don't like about this change is that bookmarks.html is the ideal homepage. It's a web page that's stored locally, has no ads or extra junk, and has a list of links to the things that you personally want to get to regularly, updated automatically. The biggest thing I missed when I used Konqueror for a while was that it couldn't render its bookmark list in the browser window. Of course, it should be easy enough to have an extension generate a nice file from the bookmark database every time it changes.
The point is to make the infrastructure used for forward and back, visited links, autocompletion of URLs, the history sidebar, etc. better implemented and easier to use internally. At that point, the infrastructure is sufficient for implementing bookmarks as well, so there's no need for a separate bookmark data storage feature.
They've invented rubber tires for their high-performance needs. Now they're going to replace their wagon wheels with tires, because they've got tires available.
They do have electrical outlets in the third world (at least, they did in Sierra Leone, near Nigeria and more war-torn, in 1997). Most days, they even work for some of the time. This, of course, assumes that the kids are in buildings (school is probably a building, but home may be a field with a canvas cover to keep the sun and some of the rain off. So it's likely that the students could use their computers at school most days, and for two hours after school most days.
Biggest problem, at least in western Africa, is the environment. For a third of the year, there's torrential rain. For another third, they get dust off the sahara, which is corrosive and abrasive and in the air everywhere kids are likely to be. Kids aren't going to drag their stuff down the road, but that hardly matters, because the air is just about as bad.
Wifi emits radiation in the 2.4 GHz band at a maximum of +30dBm. Higher frequency radition is generally more damaging. So a device that emitted +30dBm of radiation in the 400-800 THz band would be more hazardous than wifi. But such devices are sold in hardware and grocery stores worldwide: 20W incandescent light bulbs. You can tell they're worse than wifi because they actually do glow without any special effects.
The difference in this thread is that the OP claims that only ASCII should be used for "semantics-carrying containers", which is a confusing way of saying "control structures". The real flaw is that some systems will allow SQL string constants to be ended by non-ASCII double quote characters. In this case, the issue is the Unicode section for ASCII characters to be used in text where the normal characters have square space allotments. If the application behind a filter is using a human-meaning-preserving conversion to a character set that doesn't have these characters (which is the really dumb thing), a wide double quote (＜) gets turned into a regular one, which now changes the structure of the request.
Even people who don't know any human languages that use a latin character set can probably get by writing HTML with narrow angle brackets, and ASCII tag and attribute names.
What problems did you have in the install that he couldn't have dealt with on his own? Not that it matters a whole lot, since he'd need to first step of somebody he trusts handing him a CD and telling him to install from it, but if the install were completely straightforward, he'd probably be more confident in his ability to get yet another person set up now.
Considering that the only good thing she has to say about Windows is that it has a word processor with an outline feature, being somewhat better than Windows isn't high praise. Furthermore, it explains why she was particularly worried; in her experience, if the computer doesn't tell you it's keeping your data, it's probably not. Even if Ubuntu doesn't do bad things, it doesn't relieve new users' stress much if it responds like Windows responds when it is doing bad things.
Linus has been employed for more than a decade with duties including maintaining Linux kernel development. In fact, Linus has had a Linux-related job longer than Hilf has worked for Microsoft. In the past decide, Linux doesn't seem to have lost much of its standing or popularity due to commercial participation, so it looks like that wasn't bad news.
The general idea of a metric space is totally intuitive to practically anybody. It's a set with a way of measuring distance that has the basic properties you'd expect of a distance (the distance between something and itself is 0, the distances there and back are the same, and going through some third spot isn't shorter total than going directly). People are familiar with Euclidian distance in 2 and 3 dimensions, and non-directed non-weighted graph edge distance (Kevin Bacon).
The thing that makes metric spaces tricky to most people is that any text that bothers to mention that something is a metric space is using either an unexpected set or an unusual distance, generally with only a brief description ("2D Euclidian figures, with the Hausdorff distance"). It's mathematical articles that use the term "metric space" and expect this to mean something to novices (without a distracting side track) that are confusing, not an article actually on the topic of metric spaces.
Um, the article is about having the light tell you when it's going to turn, because they're not really trying to keep it a secret. And you often have a pretty good idea, by watching the cross-street's light and knowing the cycle from experience.
If I do it right, and I'm not unlucky this time, you'll zip ahead of me, brake hard at the light, and wait a few seconds. Then the light turns green, and I reach it a moment later going 20 while you're still practically stopped. If I knew for sure exactly when the light would turn, I'd reach the light exactly when it turned green, going at the speed limit, and be way ahead of you by the time you're moving, especially if you've only got a gas engine with no low-end torque.
For almost all of the time we've had tools, each has been unique. If you've got a tool that performs well, it makes a lot of sense to care about maintaining it, because the next one you get might not be any good. This is still true; manufacturing defects are a reasonably large source of failures, and if the thing has survived for a little while, it may well have a lower conditional probability of failure than a replacement fresh off the line. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that a group of people quoted as saying "There are many others, but this one is mine" about an inanimate, non-anthropomorphic device would tend to care a lot about their robots.
The point of RICO is to deal with organizations made of disposable criminals. If you're trying to fight organized crime with ordinary laws, you run into the problem that gangsters can refill their ranks faster than you can investigate the individual people and convict them for their crimes, and most of the ones you can pin particular crimes on where doing it for higher-ups who don't commit any crimes directly and are sufficient nebulous in their control that it's hard to convict them.
Now, if RIAA employees were being regularly convicted of fraud or extortion for their work activities, but the RIAA was claiming that they didn't officially support this campaign, then RICO would make sense. But, in fact, any crimes being committed are being committed by the RIAA as a whole or its member organizations, so the obvious thing is just to charge them with their particular crimes.
Well, it's always been the case that there are lots of routes available for any long distance, but a particular site may have only one link, which could be taken out by a backhoe or a fire.
Also, Internet2 is designed to move large quantities of data (like databases of brain images) around between research sites. The regular internet is the alternate route for it, and you just can't move as much data if the high-speed link is down.
This is what happens because the internet is designed to deal with nukes. If a nuke took out the Longfellow Bridge, Internet2 users in Boston wouldn't be complaining about their network connection to NYC, or doing much of anything else. The internet is only designed to route around damage at larger-than-blast-radius scales, and the affected area was actually quite small by those standards.
IBM really turned around in the 90s on the whole "vendor lock-in" thing when the vendor in question became Microsoft, not IBM.
Of course, what they really want to help you avoid is "subcontractor lock-in"; if you buy from IBM, you're going to get a system put together by IBM from a lot of parts, and you can swap those parts out for other parts if the parts you have don't fit your needs. In fact, IBM will do it for you, if you've got an ongoing contract. And IBM is unique in offering this degree of safety against vendor lock-in; if you want to avoid vendor lock-in there's nowhere else to go...
Nonsense. People worldwide know about the meaning of "free" as "acting without compulsion". It's just that they tend not to expect people to be providing software that acts without compulsion, unconstrained by the desires of the user or anybody else. The problem with "free software" as a term is that, with the correct meaning of "free" and the standard compositional grammar, it means something like SkyNet, not something like Linux. It is supposed to be interpreted by analogy to "free speech", but that's an idiom, which was fixed by the phrase "freedom of speech" being well-known and actually making sense (people have "freedom of speech", which means the people, not the speech, are free, and are free in the sense that "freedom" goes exclusively with). If OSS users were commonly said to have "freedom of software", maybe "free software" would be interpretable, but as it is, there's only one grammatical reading that makes any sense, and that reading is not what's intended.
Public-key crypto is still useful so that people can have a certificate that they keep really secure which signs certificates that they carry around and use. Furthermore, it's useful for cases where you want to know what somebody else thinks: this really is "that site that my friend recommended" or "a company known to the state of California". The problem isn't PKI, it's the notion that (1) signatures without assertions mean something, (2) "authenticated" without a user-meaningful identity means something, and (3) there are authorities who know globally useful information.
The way is should work is that the browser remembers certificates it's seen before, and allows the user to make statements about certificates which are then used to inform future interaction with the certificate. E.g., when I go to my bank's secure web site the first time, I get a little note that says "this site has a certificate that can be used to identify it in the future". If I click on the note, I get a window that lets me say, "Recognize this site as: My Bank". Then it asks me how I know. I compare the fingerprint on the screen with the fingerprint on my latest bank statement, and they match, so I check off "I verified the fingerprint" (the default was: "I don't really care if the wrong site is identified as 'My Bank'"). From then on, I expect to see a little bar in the browser when connected to my bank that says: "This site is recognized as 'My Bank'" with decorations to see that the recognition is good. If I didn't check off anything for how I knew, there would be a bunch of question mark decorations.
Other options would include: "I trust the chain: US Government recognizes Massachusetts Government as A State Government, and Massachusetts Government recognizes this site as A Massachusetts Bank." This would get the site a decoration with some little flags and some question marks, indicating that I'm at a verifiable business, but I could be at entirely the wrong legitimate Massachusetts bank site, because nothing in the chain of trust says it's actually my bank. (This is the chain that you'd usually use for e-commerce; you don't know anything about the site other than that it's a business that the FBI could find, but that's all you need to know to buy a lamp from it. But if you got here expecting it to be the place you got the matching table from, and your browser doesn't recognize it, you're probably at some other store.)
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If you're really writing it all yourself, none of these issues matter. If you're really writing standard C/C++ with only POSIX library functions, you're not linking against the kernel (so the kernel license doesn't matter), and you're not linking against any userspace libraries except for libgcc/libg++ (permissive license) and glibc (generally permitted). Dynamic linking is only actually a pain when either you're writing the library, or the library provider's versioning is lacking, or you've got a million libraries, or you're shipping the software not aggregated with the library you want to use.
Of course, you'll want to use other people's code for some things. You'll almost certainly want to start your program using some shell scripts, but those don't have a non-source form and are generally not worth obfuscating. If you want to use more libraries, you'll have to look at their licenses (many important Linux libraries are BSD-licensed anyway, though). If you're writing kernel code, you probably want to open-source this part and do as little of the interesting stuff there as possible (for technical reasons: kernel bugs cause a lot more damage than userspace bugs; for maintence reasons: kernel developers will maintain cleanly-written open-source code for you across trivial API changes; and for legal reasons: it's a pain to avoid making your module a derivative work of the kernel).
The ideal thing is to build a little computer running Linux with nothing in it that you wrote, and then use it to run a program that's entirely yours, and sell the whole thing to people.
I'd been thinking that goodmail was bad until I saw that messages that used it would be specially marked in user interfaces. This completely changed my mind about it. Email whose sender is willing to pay money and have list management compliance tests to have not treated as spam is almost certainly stuff I want to delete unread, and it'll be clearly marked for me. This is a big advantage over the current situation where almost all spam is obviously spam, but list mail from legitimate companies is more difficult to eliminate at a glance. For that matter, if you actually want to see any of this email, it should be possible to whitelist the sender if you actually want to opt in.
The interpersonal politics aren't bad with Linux, because everybody knows who Linus trusts with what; it's in the MAINTAINERS file, which tells you who to send your changes to. If Linus wasn't going to accept practically any PCI change from Greg KH, his tree wouldn't list Greg KH as the PCI maintainer. So you just have to convince Greg KH to take your patch, and Linus will be pretty much certain to take it eventually, regardless of who you are.
Actually, gcc seems to be doing things very similarly to how git tends to work. It's perfectly fine to have multiple people have access to a single tree, so you just give everybody with global write access to some shared official tree. Alternatively, this group of people can just routinely pull from each other, or there can be a script that pulls from all of them routinely. Likewise, this central mechanism can pull from localized maintainers when those changes fit the policy. Branch stuff is just as much of a free-for-all, but the project doesn't have to host it for everybody.
I don't think git would actually be a major policy change for gcc; it would just mean that (a) ports can be hosted elsewhere (like having the avr port at avrfreaks, where all the avr people hang out); (b) developers can do stuff offline; (c) the branch namespace doesn't have to be flat and doesn't have to affect uninterested people; and (d) branches would work a lot better (git is highly tuned for branches, because everything is a little branch until it gets pulled into a bigger branch).
That's actually one of the stated reasons for killing the ODF bills: they're not qualified to legislate on the subject. What they should actually do is legislate on what they want to happen, and leave it to the executive branch to implement it and the courts to judge it. They should be able to pass a bill that mandates the use of an ISO-standardized data format if one exists which is recommended by ISO for the particular use an agency is putting it to, provided there are tools available to handle it. Rather than try to decide whether the issues with ODF have been resolved, just codify what issues matter, and leave it to the state IT departments to figure out whether this means they have to standardize on ODF.
There's no need for legislators to understand the technology. They should just provide a mandate to people who do understand the issues. The legislative issue is whether to prioritize promoting open standards over leaving things that pretty much work alone. Either way, the IT departments could make either actual decision, but they'd have to support it against criticism from the other side based on the priorities the legislature has set.
The advantage is that MergePrivileges can be fine-grained: there can be many answers for "merge into what?" There's a -mm tree, a -stable tree, a -linus tree, a -rt tree, and a lot of vendor and distro trees. Each of these has a different maintainer, and can have a different idea of what is acceptable. And only the maintainer can merge things into their tree, and they can decide based on a variety of features of the things they're considering. For example, Linus only merges from a few people directly: maintainers of various subsystems. And he doesn't even trust them completely; if the SD/MMC maintainer has a change which changes x86 architecture code in the tree Linus is asked to merge, he'll notice and ask what's up with that. And if there are changes that look too intrusive for the current point in the development cycle, he'll put it off until the next cycle, and ask for a tree with just fixes. And -linus isn't special, except that almost everybody trusts him implicitly and merges his stuff into their trees (the main exception being -stable, which is why a new 2.6.20.x kernel isn't derived from 2.6.21; and vendor and distro kernels are generally based on -stable of some sort, and only get new stuff from Linus when they go to a new series). Also, maintainers of subsystems know the people who work in their areas, and can apply the same sorts of rules: the guy from Intel who works on their network drivers can get e100 changes into the the -netdev tree, because the maintainer knows they know what they're doing for e100 changes. And Linus sees that the e100 changes are coming in through -netdev, and the network maintainer knows what policy to apply to the drivers around there, so they're fine, even if Linus has no clue who should be allowed to do what in e100.
It's not that the politics go away. It's that the policy is no longer a binary "yes or no" decision, so the technical arrangement mirrors the social arrangement. This doesn't work with CommitAccess because people wouldn't commit the same change everywhere they should, and they couldn't be restricted to only making changes they're trusted to make (there are people who are trusted to correct spelling in comments in any file in the tree, and Linus can look through the total changes they send and verify that they only change spelling in comments).
The thing I don't like about this change is that bookmarks.html is the ideal homepage. It's a web page that's stored locally, has no ads or extra junk, and has a list of links to the things that you personally want to get to regularly, updated automatically. The biggest thing I missed when I used Konqueror for a while was that it couldn't render its bookmark list in the browser window. Of course, it should be easy enough to have an extension generate a nice file from the bookmark database every time it changes.
The point is to make the infrastructure used for forward and back, visited links, autocompletion of URLs, the history sidebar, etc. better implemented and easier to use internally. At that point, the infrastructure is sufficient for implementing bookmarks as well, so there's no need for a separate bookmark data storage feature.
They've invented rubber tires for their high-performance needs. Now they're going to replace their wagon wheels with tires, because they've got tires available.
They do have electrical outlets in the third world (at least, they did in Sierra Leone, near Nigeria and more war-torn, in 1997). Most days, they even work for some of the time. This, of course, assumes that the kids are in buildings (school is probably a building, but home may be a field with a canvas cover to keep the sun and some of the rain off. So it's likely that the students could use their computers at school most days, and for two hours after school most days.
Biggest problem, at least in western Africa, is the environment. For a third of the year, there's torrential rain. For another third, they get dust off the sahara, which is corrosive and abrasive and in the air everywhere kids are likely to be. Kids aren't going to drag their stuff down the road, but that hardly matters, because the air is just about as bad.
Wifi emits radiation in the 2.4 GHz band at a maximum of +30dBm. Higher frequency radition is generally more damaging. So a device that emitted +30dBm of radiation in the 400-800 THz band would be more hazardous than wifi. But such devices are sold in hardware and grocery stores worldwide: 20W incandescent light bulbs. You can tell they're worse than wifi because they actually do glow without any special effects.
The difference in this thread is that the OP claims that only ASCII should be used for "semantics-carrying containers", which is a confusing way of saying "control structures". The real flaw is that some systems will allow SQL string constants to be ended by non-ASCII double quote characters. In this case, the issue is the Unicode section for ASCII characters to be used in text where the normal characters have square space allotments. If the application behind a filter is using a human-meaning-preserving conversion to a character set that doesn't have these characters (which is the really dumb thing), a wide double quote (＜) gets turned into a regular one, which now changes the structure of the request.
Even people who don't know any human languages that use a latin character set can probably get by writing HTML with narrow angle brackets, and ASCII tag and attribute names.
What problems did you have in the install that he couldn't have dealt with on his own? Not that it matters a whole lot, since he'd need to first step of somebody he trusts handing him a CD and telling him to install from it, but if the install were completely straightforward, he'd probably be more confident in his ability to get yet another person set up now.
Considering that the only good thing she has to say about Windows is that it has a word processor with an outline feature, being somewhat better than Windows isn't high praise. Furthermore, it explains why she was particularly worried; in her experience, if the computer doesn't tell you it's keeping your data, it's probably not. Even if Ubuntu doesn't do bad things, it doesn't relieve new users' stress much if it responds like Windows responds when it is doing bad things.
Linus has been employed for more than a decade with duties including maintaining Linux kernel development. In fact, Linus has had a Linux-related job longer than Hilf has worked for Microsoft. In the past decide, Linux doesn't seem to have lost much of its standing or popularity due to commercial participation, so it looks like that wasn't bad news.
The general idea of a metric space is totally intuitive to practically anybody. It's a set with a way of measuring distance that has the basic properties you'd expect of a distance (the distance between something and itself is 0, the distances there and back are the same, and going through some third spot isn't shorter total than going directly). People are familiar with Euclidian distance in 2 and 3 dimensions, and non-directed non-weighted graph edge distance (Kevin Bacon).
The thing that makes metric spaces tricky to most people is that any text that bothers to mention that something is a metric space is using either an unexpected set or an unusual distance, generally with only a brief description ("2D Euclidian figures, with the Hausdorff distance"). It's mathematical articles that use the term "metric space" and expect this to mean something to novices (without a distracting side track) that are confusing, not an article actually on the topic of metric spaces.
Um, the article is about having the light tell you when it's going to turn, because they're not really trying to keep it a secret. And you often have a pretty good idea, by watching the cross-street's light and knowing the cycle from experience.
If I do it right, and I'm not unlucky this time, you'll zip ahead of me, brake hard at the light, and wait a few seconds. Then the light turns green, and I reach it a moment later going 20 while you're still practically stopped. If I knew for sure exactly when the light would turn, I'd reach the light exactly when it turned green, going at the speed limit, and be way ahead of you by the time you're moving, especially if you've only got a gas engine with no low-end torque.
For almost all of the time we've had tools, each has been unique. If you've got a tool that performs well, it makes a lot of sense to care about maintaining it, because the next one you get might not be any good. This is still true; manufacturing defects are a reasonably large source of failures, and if the thing has survived for a little while, it may well have a lower conditional probability of failure than a replacement fresh off the line. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that a group of people quoted as saying "There are many others, but this one is mine" about an inanimate, non-anthropomorphic device would tend to care a lot about their robots.
The point of RICO is to deal with organizations made of disposable criminals. If you're trying to fight organized crime with ordinary laws, you run into the problem that gangsters can refill their ranks faster than you can investigate the individual people and convict them for their crimes, and most of the ones you can pin particular crimes on where doing it for higher-ups who don't commit any crimes directly and are sufficient nebulous in their control that it's hard to convict them.
Now, if RIAA employees were being regularly convicted of fraud or extortion for their work activities, but the RIAA was claiming that they didn't officially support this campaign, then RICO would make sense. But, in fact, any crimes being committed are being committed by the RIAA as a whole or its member organizations, so the obvious thing is just to charge them with their particular crimes.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Well, it's always been the case that there are lots of routes available for any long distance, but a particular site may have only one link, which could be taken out by a backhoe or a fire.
Also, Internet2 is designed to move large quantities of data (like databases of brain images) around between research sites. The regular internet is the alternate route for it, and you just can't move as much data if the high-speed link is down.
This is what happens because the internet is designed to deal with nukes. If a nuke took out the Longfellow Bridge, Internet2 users in Boston wouldn't be complaining about their network connection to NYC, or doing much of anything else. The internet is only designed to route around damage at larger-than-blast-radius scales, and the affected area was actually quite small by those standards.
But the shooter did have a hammer. (Although there weren't any reports of him hammering that morning.)
IBM really turned around in the 90s on the whole "vendor lock-in" thing when the vendor in question became Microsoft, not IBM.
Of course, what they really want to help you avoid is "subcontractor lock-in"; if you buy from IBM, you're going to get a system put together by IBM from a lot of parts, and you can swap those parts out for other parts if the parts you have don't fit your needs. In fact, IBM will do it for you, if you've got an ongoing contract. And IBM is unique in offering this degree of safety against vendor lock-in; if you want to avoid vendor lock-in there's nowhere else to go...
Nonsense. People worldwide know about the meaning of "free" as "acting without compulsion". It's just that they tend not to expect people to be providing software that acts without compulsion, unconstrained by the desires of the user or anybody else. The problem with "free software" as a term is that, with the correct meaning of "free" and the standard compositional grammar, it means something like SkyNet, not something like Linux. It is supposed to be interpreted by analogy to "free speech", but that's an idiom, which was fixed by the phrase "freedom of speech" being well-known and actually making sense (people have "freedom of speech", which means the people, not the speech, are free, and are free in the sense that "freedom" goes exclusively with). If OSS users were commonly said to have "freedom of software", maybe "free software" would be interpretable, but as it is, there's only one grammatical reading that makes any sense, and that reading is not what's intended.
Public-key crypto is still useful so that people can have a certificate that they keep really secure which signs certificates that they carry around and use. Furthermore, it's useful for cases where you want to know what somebody else thinks: this really is "that site that my friend recommended" or "a company known to the state of California". The problem isn't PKI, it's the notion that (1) signatures without assertions mean something, (2) "authenticated" without a user-meaningful identity means something, and (3) there are authorities who know globally useful information.
The way is should work is that the browser remembers certificates it's seen before, and allows the user to make statements about certificates which are then used to inform future interaction with the certificate. E.g., when I go to my bank's secure web site the first time, I get a little note that says "this site has a certificate that can be used to identify it in the future". If I click on the note, I get a window that lets me say, "Recognize this site as: My Bank". Then it asks me how I know. I compare the fingerprint on the screen with the fingerprint on my latest bank statement, and they match, so I check off "I verified the fingerprint" (the default was: "I don't really care if the wrong site is identified as 'My Bank'"). From then on, I expect to see a little bar in the browser when connected to my bank that says: "This site is recognized as 'My Bank'" with decorations to see that the recognition is good. If I didn't check off anything for how I knew, there would be a bunch of question mark decorations.
Other options would include: "I trust the chain: US Government recognizes Massachusetts Government as A State Government, and Massachusetts Government recognizes this site as A Massachusetts Bank." This would get the site a decoration with some little flags and some question marks, indicating that I'm at a verifiable business, but I could be at entirely the wrong legitimate Massachusetts bank site, because nothing in the chain of trust says it's actually my bank. (This is the chain that you'd usually use for e-commerce; you don't know anything about the site other than that it's a business that the FBI could find, but that's all you need to know to buy a lamp from it. But if you got here expecting it to be the place you got the matching table from, and your browser doesn't recognize it, you're probably at some other store.)