Okay, so even if this monitoring does in the end become a fact of life (there are higher courts), what will prevent some clever hackers from making up a firewall for these Replay systems?
With a network probe or phone-line tap you could easily reverse engineer the protocols used to transmit this data.
You get a small box with a low-powered CPU, 2 network cards and modem interfaces and plug the Replay in to the "safe" side ports, and plug the others in to the wall.
Whenever the replay goes to send viewing data to SonicBlue, the fierwall changes all the data. It could either be random data or you could tell them you watched the NASA TV all day every day.
It's nice that he decided that changes in quantum state are equivilent to 'bits', the changes in the universe also happen without a quantum state change. He also doesn't acount for the movement of sub-atomic particles, or even the number of quantum states of each paricle. These 'bits' in his formula could not be binary for sure.
Hence it seems to me his equation is flawed in attempting to express the universe as a digital computer. Perhaps he should re-state the problem and look at the universe as an analog computer like it really is.
Do you get to under-report YOUR ernings to smooth out your tax liability from year to year? Could you just hide a $10,000 from the IRS each year until your tax rate goes down after retirement and then start claiming the income? (yes there are mechanisms to do this like IRA and 401k, but were're not talking about 'light of day' transactions in this story).
No. You'd be fined, charged interest, and perhaps put in federal prison for under-reporting your earnings (lying).
The government was indeed set up to be a government of the people by the people for the people. What it has devolved in to is government of the people by the politicians for the corporations.
The US Constituion grants rights to people, not companies. The companies should be held to even stricter standards than the people.
I can't get to the actual article due to it being/.ed. but from the converstation here I can assume that this is what APS would call a CPS.
At APS, a USP has a switch in it that causes the inverter to discharge the batteries and power your equipment when line current is lost.
This homebrew device seems to continually charge the batteries, and continually run the inverter from the batteries. (again, this is an assumption from the comments I've read here about the parts required).
The advantages of the homebrew are several: 1. no switchover time on line current failure 2. no switchover mechanism to fail and cause system downtime 3. provides for power conditioning 4. true spike protection 5. isolates systems from the line
It may seem unlikely, but it does happen that the solenoid/switch in a standby UPS does fail. Mechanical things jam, corrode, get dirty and such. A true UPS eliminates the mechanichal switchover and associated risk.
The power in Watts is the real power drawn by the equipment. Volt-Amps is called the "apparent power" and is the product of the voltage applied to the equipment times the current drawn by the equipment.
so what they're saying is: VA = volts * amps And W =volts * amps
Now I'm no algebra expert but even I can see that W = VA.
Then to quote dictionary.com:
Volt-ampere: A unit of electric power equal to the product of one volt and one ampere, equivalent to one watt
So it seems to me that APS is the only entity that thinks W != VA ??
Edison shouldn't have built the first power station without a degree in EE.
The Wright Brothers shouldn't have built an airplane without a degree in airframe design or aerodynamics.
Denis Papin shouldn't have built the first steam engine without a degree in thermodynamics.
Most "cool" stuff was developed/invented by the crazy people without a degree in a relevent field. If you understand what you're working with and exersise som sound judgement you can do anything.
Yes is it freedom. I just give almost no weight to comments from people like this. Critisizm without suggestion is non-productive and leads to nothing but platform wars.
If Linus had to start from complete 0, building a kernel, drivers, libraries and applications/utilites all from scratch, Linux would not be where it is today either.
RMS and the GNU project have not been working on the Mach/Hurd code exclusively. If people would like GNU to stop work on all other projects and work on HURD exclusively, then lets put that idea forward. Just don't complain when glibc, zgip,gtar, gcc, yacc, emacs or any other of the GNU programs you use every day doesn't support some new feature or platform, or some bugs don't get fixed.
If you use a Linux system based on GNU software you have very little reason to mock or complain about the progress of HURD.
I'm also curious... have you actually run a hurn based system, or are you basic your comments soley on the FUD here?
I don't know what "ideaoligy" you are talking about regarding RMS toward Linux. The only issue I know of is that he would prefer people call the such systems GNU/Linux, or otherwise provide some recognition for all the work GNU did to make those systems possible. I don't know that he's ever said those systems were wrong or bad, or that they should not exist. He's never (that I know) advocated removing the name Linux from the title of any such system.
So in brief: if you think RMS and GNU are a laughing stock, then either contribute to the projects or simply stop using their software. Find some other free libraries, programs and utilites to use insead, and make your own GNUFree dostro. Your complaints are either preaching to the choir, or falling on deaf ears.
If you haven't provided and support or code to the project,I hardly see how you have a basis for mocking/complaining about the progression.
The issue here is that they aren't just making another version of a monolithic Uni*xy kernel, they are re-inventing much of the way the applications/kernel/u-kernel/hardware layers interact. It's not as easy a task as reverse engineering what already exists.
But even accounting for market share, the numbers don't add up.
If you take the 95%/5% Microsoft Windows/MacOS numbers and extent that ratio to the known viruses we get something interesting. Symantec says they scan for 61,148 viruses. If we use the 7,000 macro virus as true, that should mean there are 54,148 Windows system viruses. 5% of that would be 2700+ viruses for Mac systems. Instead there are like 20, mostly left over from pre system 7 days.
There must be something more than just lack of development making the Mac less virus prone.
Wireless FM microphone Rope (sometimes you just HAVE to tie someone's door shut), or someone to a bed. pen with dissapearing ink (for signing all those "honor statements") mini-blow torch (the small 2 cylinder model from RS is really nice) great for repairs, or remodeling. tank of nitrousoxide (for knocking out your dorm mates after tying their door closed) X10 light controllers (people get SOOO confused when lights go on and off automatically) super-glue is overrated: a good epoxy is the basis for MANY a good laugh , I like the "playdough" type for ease of use. a stethescope (for when you can't get the microphone in the room)
Saying that other civilzation's robots not having visited Earth (that we know about) is evidence that those robots haven't found any life is erroneous thinking. It is completely possible that those robots have found many life forms and just have not made it here yet.
And I agree... even the discovery of the machines of an extraterrestrial civilzation would be a tremendous event.
But robotics won't put people on planets, which is the part I was really trying to point out. To put a sustainable population on ~1B planets would require a tremendous campaign of forced breeding and cloning and education.
Yes, a lot of the "leg work" could be done with robotics. But the searching requires a relatively small number of humans in the model I presented.
I doubt it will take more than 10,000 more years for us to populate most of the easily habitable or terraformable worlds in the galaxy.
Even with exponential, hell even with logarithmic acceleration in technology, that would be nearly impossible. We just don't have the population.
The Milky Way galaxy is about 120,000 light years diameter, and ranges from about 12,000 light years in the middle to about 1,000 light years thing at the "edges". A very rough and conservative calculation might yield a volume of space something like 1.2 billion cubic light years. In that volume, there are estimated to be something like 100 billion stars. If even only 1% of those stars have a planetary system that has a terraformable planet orbiting it, that's still a billion planets. (and I'd bet 1% is a really low guess).
Moreover, we don't know there those planets are, we can't see them now, nor is it concievable to built a telescope or device to image these planets reliably enought to determine their composition or potential for terraforming. So we have to go searching.
Lets say we make starships. Each has a crew of 500 people. Lets say these things can do twice the speed of light and still scan for planets and do real-time complete analysis as they zoom past. You're still talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of ships to perform this exploration. With just 200,000 ships, you need a population of 100,000,000 just to staff the ships (that, by the way, is about 1/3 the current population of the Unites States).
Then when you find a suitable planet, you'll definitely want to leave behind a science/survey/terraforming crew of what, 50 people? So a ship could only visit maybe 5 planets before needing to either return home for more people, breed/clone more landing crew, or backtrack to retrieve previous landing parties.
Once a planet is terraformed, you then get people to move there. If even only 10,000 people wind up on each planet, you still need about 1,600 current Earth populations(currently a little over 6B) to accomplish that. THAT would be a phenominal accomplishment.
So... while I fully believe that we will colonize the Moon, terraform Mars, and eventually other "remote" plants, there is just no way we could terraform and populate every viable planet in this Galaxy within 10,000 years.
Let's put this "bet" on LongBets.com and we'll all hoot about it in 10,001 years.:)
I think we'll find that it is customary for the highest usage customers to recieve discounts, not rate increases.
Telephone: Residential lines run what? $15-$25/month? But purchase several hunded lines, and you can get them for $5/month.
air-travel: the most frequent customers get free upgrades, discounts and special incentives.
Roadways: Most toll roads allow frequent travellers to purchase a dicount pass, or other reduced rate access method. For example, I recall the NJ Parkway used to sell tokens where you got something like 45 tokens for $10, when the tolls were $.25 each.
The list could go on... so many other goods and services in this economy are discounted for the highest consumers. Why should a service like this that is based on fixed cost be any different?
My Cable ISP does just that. There are several "options" related to the service: First, there are two distinct service levels: basic is 640K/512K for $29.95/month enhanced is 3.2M/512K for $34.95/month To lease a Docsis modem is $10/month If you want a static/routable IP, that's another $10/month per IP.
So the "average" user can purchase a modem off the street and get 24/7 unlimited access for about $30/month. On the high end you can pay up to $55/month for high-speed, "no-hassle" service. My modem has been swapped out twice, and that's worth the least fee to me.
Of course, I wish they had a "power user" setup with something more like 2M/2M for perhaps $40/month. In my experience, most web/ftp/p2p sites can't handle my 3.2 downstream bandwidth anyway. There's only a handful of sites where I can get more than 150KB/s down, and very few that saturate me to the 370KB/s download speed.
The government can indeed keep secrets... when the information is a matter of national security, would compromise an investigation and a few other reasons.
A citizen can file a Freedom of Information Act (FIA) document request for the source and see what happens. The courts usually get to decide these things. Of course the Army would probably claim at least parts of the source (like the detailed performance tables of the weapons systems) are secret, and those would be blacked out of the documents you recieved.
I agree completely that the government can use/license IP from third parties without that IP becoming public domain, but that doesn't seem to be the case here for the most part. Yes the Unreal Engine would not be covered by a request as it a product separate from the code created by or directly as a result of contract to the government.
As for the spending, yes the US tends to be extravagant. For a military example, look at the Bradly Fighting Vehicle. Initially designed as a simple armored personnel carrier, it took 14+ years and over $20B to develop. The thing wound up not accomplishing any of the tasks it was designed for. The models we sold to allies had to be re-designed before they would accept them because of the defects and shortcomings. For a good laugh watch "The Pentagon Wars", it's a movie about the whole charade.
Let's say "Comfy Rest" hotels' world wide phone number is 555-1212. Could I now get fined for purchasing all the "near miss" numbers and doing phone solicitation to those wrong number dialers?
ex: you dial 555-1211 by accident. Instead of getting "comfy rest" reservations, you get a recording trying to sell you a bottle of "Miracle Max's Life Restorer" pills.
Would that cause a $1.8B lawsuit? Me thinks not. So why this judgement?
I can only hope this gets overturned in a higher court.
The game is produced by the US Army, a Governemnt entity. According to the rules of IP, a Government entity can not hold a copyright or a patent on any works produced for it directly, or under contract.
This is the real reason they are giving it away... the law says they have to.
But, that makes this game a version of open source/free software. Some IP lawyer would have to rearch more to find out if the source code would have to be released also under the non-copyright/full disclosure laws.
That further leads to the question of how Microsoft will respond to the Government using public money (tax dollars) to produce software they intend to release for free in to a market that Microsoft would like to dominate (see Xbox and their growing library of games for PC).
Hmmm. Microsoft vs. the Army... perhaps Redmond will get bombedto ashes after all.:)
And those apps will run under the GNU's kernel, or most any other kernel/os if tweaked a bit.
De-bundled apps like the browsers, text editors and such are not inherently part of the OS, unless tightly integrated (like MSIE is in XP supposedly).
If Linus wrote a bootloader and a shellm, Linux would still not be an operating system. At a minumum he would need to write an entire set of Libraries (you do know the standard Libs in "Linux" are all writeen by GNU right?)
I'm not trivializing what Linux did. I'm just trying to de-trivialize what GNU did.
BSD is an operating system because it includes libraries, headers and utilities that were build by teh BSD project. Yes they use some GNU stuff, and likewise. GNU is an operating system in the fact that they do have a kernel. It's not completely finished yet, but what ever is. Linux is not an operating system because it contains only a kernel. A kernel alone is useless to 99.95% of the population (basically only kernel hackers and OS developers care about the kernel).
I'd like to see all the hype around the "Linux Operating System" when you take away the 95% of it that was NOT written but Linus. IE: all the GNU stuff, X, Apache, etc.
While OS-9 is easily ROMable, the OS was only ever distributed on 5 1/4" floppy for the CoCo. To use it you did need to plug a floppy controller in to the expansion slot though. But to really experience the OS you needed to run it from either a RAM disk with one of the 2MB memory kits, or from a hard disk from a company like Owlware.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so even if this monitoring does in the end become a fact of life (there are higher courts), what will prevent some clever hackers from making up a firewall for these Replay systems?
With a network probe or phone-line tap you could easily reverse engineer the protocols used to transmit this data.
You get a small box with a low-powered CPU, 2 network cards and modem interfaces and plug the Replay in to the "safe" side ports, and plug the others in to the wall.
Whenever the replay goes to send viewing data to SonicBlue, the fierwall changes all the data. It could either be random data or you could tell them you watched the NASA TV all day every day.
Isn't the Universe an analog sytstem?
It's nice that he decided that changes in quantum state are equivilent to 'bits', the changes in the universe also happen without a quantum state change. He also doesn't acount for the movement of sub-atomic particles, or even the number of quantum states of each paricle. These 'bits' in his formula could not be binary for sure.
Hence it seems to me his equation is flawed in attempting to express the universe as a digital computer. Perhaps he should re-state the problem and look at the universe as an analog computer like it really is.
Do you get to under-report YOUR ernings to smooth out your tax liability from year to year? Could you just hide a $10,000 from the IRS each year until your tax rate goes down after retirement and then start claiming the income? (yes there are mechanisms to do this like IRA and 401k, but were're not talking about 'light of day' transactions in this story).
No. You'd be fined, charged interest, and perhaps put in federal prison for under-reporting your earnings (lying).
Why should any company be allowed to do this?
The government was indeed set up to be a government of the people by the people for the people.
What it has devolved in to is government of the people by the politicians for the corporations.
The US Constituion grants rights to people, not companies. The companies should be held to even stricter standards than the people.
I can't get to the actual article due to it being /.ed. but from the converstation here I can assume that this is what APS would call a CPS.
At APS, a USP has a switch in it that causes the inverter to discharge the batteries and power your equipment when line current is lost.
This homebrew device seems to continually charge the batteries, and continually run the inverter from the batteries. (again, this is an assumption from the comments I've read here about the parts required).
The advantages of the homebrew are several:
1. no switchover time on line current failure
2. no switchover mechanism to fail and cause system downtime
3. provides for power conditioning
4. true spike protection
5. isolates systems from the line
It may seem unlikely, but it does happen that the solenoid/switch in a standby UPS does fail. Mechanical things jam, corrode, get dirty and such.
A true UPS eliminates the mechanichal switchover and associated risk.
so what they're saying is: VA = volts * amps
And W =volts * amps
Now I'm no algebra expert but even I can see that W = VA.
Then to quote dictionary.com:
Volt-ampere: A unit of electric power equal to the product of one volt and one ampere, equivalent to one watt
So it seems to me that APS is the only entity that thinks W != VA ??
Edison shouldn't have built the first power station without a degree in EE.
The Wright Brothers shouldn't have built an airplane without a degree in airframe design or aerodynamics.
Denis Papin shouldn't have built the first steam engine without a degree in thermodynamics.
Most "cool" stuff was developed/invented by the crazy people without a degree in a relevent field. If you understand what you're working with and exersise som sound judgement you can do anything.
Yes is it freedom. I just give almost no weight to comments from people like this. Critisizm without suggestion is non-productive and leads to nothing but platform wars.
If Linus had to start from complete 0, building a kernel, drivers, libraries and applications/utilites all from scratch, Linux would not be where it is today either.
RMS and the GNU project have not been working on the Mach/Hurd code exclusively. If people would like GNU to stop work on all other projects and work on HURD exclusively, then lets put that idea forward. Just don't complain when glibc, zgip,gtar, gcc, yacc, emacs or any other of the GNU programs you use every day doesn't support some new feature or platform, or some bugs don't get fixed.
If you use a Linux system based on GNU software you have very little reason to mock or complain about the progress of HURD.
I'm also curious... have you actually run a hurn based system, or are you basic your comments soley on the FUD here?
I don't know what "ideaoligy" you are talking about regarding RMS toward Linux. The only issue I know of is that he would prefer people call the such systems GNU/Linux, or otherwise provide some recognition for all the work GNU did to make those systems possible.
I don't know that he's ever said those systems were wrong or bad, or that they should not exist. He's never (that I know) advocated removing the name Linux from the title of any such system.
So in brief: if you think RMS and GNU are a laughing stock, then either contribute to the projects or simply stop using their software. Find some other free libraries, programs and utilites to use insead, and make your own GNUFree dostro. Your complaints are either preaching to the choir, or falling on deaf ears.
If you haven't provided and support or code to the project,I hardly see how you have a basis for mocking/complaining about the progression.
The issue here is that they aren't just making another version of a monolithic Uni*xy kernel, they are re-inventing much of the way the applications/kernel/u-kernel/hardware layers interact. It's not as easy a task as reverse engineering what already exists.
WHAT Linux utilities? GNU, BSD and others wrote all those utilites you refer to, not Linus.
But even accounting for market share, the numbers don't add up.
If you take the 95%/5% Microsoft Windows/MacOS numbers and extent that ratio to the known viruses we get something interesting.
Symantec says they scan for 61,148 viruses. If we use the 7,000 macro virus as true, that should mean there are 54,148 Windows system viruses. 5% of that would be 2700+ viruses for Mac systems. Instead there are like 20, mostly left over from pre system 7 days.
There must be something more than just lack of development making the Mac less virus prone.
Wireless FM microphone
Rope (sometimes you just HAVE to tie someone's door shut), or someone to a bed.
pen with dissapearing ink (for signing all those "honor statements")
mini-blow torch (the small 2 cylinder model from RS is really nice) great for repairs, or remodeling.
tank of nitrousoxide (for knocking out your dorm mates after tying their door closed)
X10 light controllers (people get SOOO confused when lights go on and off automatically)
super-glue is overrated: a good epoxy is the basis for MANY a good laugh
, I like the "playdough" type for ease of use.
a stethescope (for when you can't get the microphone in the room)
Saying that other civilzation's robots not having visited Earth (that we know about) is evidence that those robots haven't found any life is erroneous thinking.
It is completely possible that those robots have found many life forms and just have not made it here yet.
And I agree... even the discovery of the machines of an extraterrestrial civilzation would be a tremendous event.
But robotics won't put people on planets, which is the part I was really trying to point out.
To put a sustainable population on ~1B planets would require a tremendous campaign of forced breeding and cloning and education.
Yes, a lot of the "leg work" could be done with robotics. But the searching requires a relatively small number of humans in the model I presented.
Even with exponential, hell even with logarithmic acceleration in technology, that would be nearly impossible. We just don't have the population.
The Milky Way galaxy is about 120,000 light years diameter, and ranges from about 12,000 light years in the middle to about 1,000 light years thing at the "edges". A very rough and conservative calculation might yield a volume of space something like 1.2 billion cubic light years. In that volume, there are estimated to be something like 100 billion stars. If even only 1% of those stars have a planetary system that has a terraformable planet orbiting it, that's still a billion planets. (and I'd bet 1% is a really low guess).
Moreover, we don't know there those planets are, we can't see them now, nor is it concievable to built a telescope or device to image these planets reliably enought to determine their composition or potential for terraforming. So we have to go searching.
Lets say we make starships. Each has a crew of 500 people. Lets say these things can do twice the speed of light and still scan for planets and do real-time complete analysis as they zoom past.
You're still talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of ships to perform this exploration. With just 200,000 ships, you need a population of 100,000,000 just to staff the ships (that, by the way, is about 1/3 the current population of the Unites States).
Then when you find a suitable planet, you'll definitely want to leave behind a science/survey/terraforming crew of what, 50 people? So a ship could only visit maybe 5 planets before needing to either return home for more people, breed/clone more landing crew, or backtrack to retrieve previous landing parties.
Once a planet is terraformed, you then get people to move there. If even only 10,000 people wind up on each planet, you still need about 1,600 current Earth populations(currently a little over 6B) to accomplish that. THAT would be a phenominal accomplishment.
So... while I fully believe that we will colonize the Moon, terraform Mars, and eventually other "remote" plants, there is just no way we could terraform and populate every viable planet in this Galaxy within 10,000 years.
Let's put this "bet" on LongBets.com and we'll all hoot about it in 10,001 years.
Several other "lopsided" situations.
I think we'll find that it is customary for the highest usage customers to recieve discounts, not rate increases.
Telephone: Residential lines run what? $15-$25/month? But purchase several hunded lines, and you can get them for $5/month.
air-travel: the most frequent customers get free upgrades, discounts and special incentives.
Roadways: Most toll roads allow frequent travellers to purchase a dicount pass, or other reduced rate access method. For example, I recall the NJ Parkway used to sell tokens where you got something like 45 tokens for $10, when the tolls were $.25 each.
The list could go on... so many other goods and services in this economy are discounted for the highest consumers. Why should a service like this that is based on fixed cost be any different?
My Cable ISP does just that. There are several "options" related to the service:
First, there are two distinct service levels:
basic is 640K/512K for $29.95/month
enhanced is 3.2M/512K for $34.95/month
To lease a Docsis modem is $10/month
If you want a static/routable IP, that's another $10/month per IP.
So the "average" user can purchase a modem off the street and get 24/7 unlimited access for about $30/month. On the high end you can pay up to $55/month for high-speed, "no-hassle" service. My modem has been swapped out twice, and that's worth the least fee to me.
Of course, I wish they had a "power user" setup with something more like 2M/2M for perhaps $40/month. In my experience, most web/ftp/p2p sites can't handle my 3.2 downstream bandwidth anyway. There's only a handful of sites where I can get more than 150KB/s down, and very few that saturate me to the 370KB/s download speed.
The government can indeed keep secrets... when the information is a matter of national security, would compromise an investigation and a few other reasons.
A citizen can file a Freedom of Information Act (FIA) document request for the source and see what happens. The courts usually get to decide these things.
Of course the Army would probably claim at least parts of the source (like the detailed performance tables of the weapons systems) are secret, and those would be blacked out of the documents you recieved.
I agree completely that the government can use/license IP from third parties without that IP becoming public domain, but that doesn't seem to be the case here for the most part. Yes the Unreal Engine would not be covered by a request as it a product separate from the code created by or directly as a result of contract to the government.
As for the spending, yes the US tends to be extravagant. For a military example, look at the Bradly Fighting Vehicle. Initially designed as a simple armored personnel carrier, it took 14+ years and over $20B to develop. The thing wound up not accomplishing any of the tasks it was designed for. The models we sold to allies had to be re-designed before they would accept them because of the defects and shortcomings. For a good laugh watch "The Pentagon Wars", it's a movie about the whole charade.
Let's say "Comfy Rest" hotels' world wide phone number is 555-1212.
Could I now get fined for purchasing all the "near miss" numbers and doing phone solicitation to those wrong number dialers?
ex: you dial 555-1211 by accident. Instead of getting "comfy rest" reservations, you get a recording trying to sell you a bottle of "Miracle Max's Life Restorer" pills.
Would that cause a $1.8B lawsuit? Me thinks not. So why this judgement?
I can only hope this gets overturned in a higher court.
The game is produced by the US Army, a Governemnt entity. According to the rules of IP, a Government entity can not hold a copyright or a patent on any works produced for it directly, or under contract.
:)
This is the real reason they are giving it away... the law says they have to.
But, that makes this game a version of open source/free software. Some IP lawyer would have to rearch more to find out if the source code would have to be released also under the non-copyright/full disclosure laws.
That further leads to the question of how Microsoft will respond to the Government using public money (tax dollars) to produce software they intend to release for free in to a market that Microsoft would like to dominate (see Xbox and their growing library of games for PC).
Hmmm. Microsoft vs. the Army... perhaps Redmond will get bombedto ashes after all.
You could also call a potato chip an operating system. That doesn't make it one.
And those apps will run under the GNU's kernel, or most any other kernel/os if tweaked a bit.
De-bundled apps like the browsers, text editors and such are not inherently part of the OS, unless tightly integrated (like MSIE is in XP supposedly).
If Linus wrote a bootloader and a shellm, Linux would still not be an operating system. At a minumum he would need to write an entire set of Libraries (you do know the standard Libs in "Linux" are all writeen by GNU right?)
I'm not trivializing what Linux did. I'm just trying to de-trivialize what GNU did.
BSD is an operating system because it includes libraries, headers and utilities that were build by teh BSD project. Yes they use some GNU stuff, and likewise.
GNU is an operating system in the fact that they do have a kernel. It's not completely finished yet, but what ever is.
Linux is not an operating system because it contains only a kernel. A kernel alone is useless to 99.95% of the population (basically only kernel hackers and OS developers care about the kernel).
I'd like to see all the hype around the "Linux Operating System" when you take away the 95% of it that was NOT written but Linus. IE: all the GNU stuff, X, Apache, etc.
LINUX IS NOT AN OPERATING SYSTEM. It's a KERNEL.
While OS-9 is easily ROMable, the OS was only ever distributed on 5 1/4" floppy for the CoCo. To use it you did need to plug a floppy controller in to the expansion slot though.
But to really experience the OS you needed to run it from either a RAM disk with one of the 2MB memory kits, or from a hard disk from a company like Owlware.