As a Free/Open Source Software developer, I disagree with you. You are suggesting that there is an entitlement to the source code. You have the *right* to freely make any contractual arrangements you want within certain bounds, and this includes surrendering certain freedoms.
For example, if I release GPL code under a pseudonym (Copyright 2007 SuperGeekCoder), I might also do so under an NDA which prevents you from revealing my identity (you could still distribute the code as permitted under the GPL but would be prohibited from stating where you got it, who wrote it, etc). You have now agreed voluntarily to abridge your own right to free speech, and I can sue you for damages if you let it be known that I am SuperGeekCoder. In short, you have exercised your right to make agreements in such a way that you have taken up obligations not to use certain rights in certain ways. Same with EULAs, etc. BTW, there is a part of me which wants to do this just to show RMS that one *can* release GPL code under NDA;-) In short the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to choose what restrictions to take upon oneself (essentially self-determination). Hence one cannot be truly free unless one has the choice not to be.
The key thing however to understand is that software freedom has value to the user, and it has a different set of positive values to the developer. These can be used to encourage people to make the choice to use software with more freedom. This means moving from proprietary software to GPL software, and from single-vendor software to community-developed software (MySQL and Asterisk are single-vendor programs because all commits go through a single vendor). In many ways the GPL is a hinderance to the move to community-developed software because it allows for MySQL and Asterisk to have their business models.
In short, it is not a matter of human rights (I believe there are only 2: self-determination and equal treatment under laws), but rather a matter of positive value.
I'm interested in a free exchange of code that lets me do whatever I want with it. Public domain does not do that for me. What can't you do with public domain code?
My concern about the GPL is that, while it is very friendly towards businesses who want to release and then control the direction of their open source products (I did not say projects), it can have a stifling effect on community. Compare for example, the MySQL development model (one company *controls* what goes into the next release) with the PostgreSQL development model. In many ways Linux is an exception rather than a rule, and even GNU suffers from politics of internal control (for example RMS dismissing the head HURD architect, Thomas BUshnell, for arguing against considering the GFDL to be "Free" according to Debian's guidelines-- if this is the free speech to be associated with the FSF's free software, I want no part of the FSF).
The GPL is in many ways a sort of halfway house for companies who want to do open source but not community-centered development. If MySQL was under the BSD license, there is no way they could maintain the central control-- they would have to open up the commit access to many people in other companies, and could not sell proprietary licenses because there would be no market for them.
The GPL, while having legitimate uses, is more of a political statement than anything else. I say this as someone who contributes thousands of lines of code per week into GPL'd projects.
THe GPL v3 is confusing in number of ways. For example, there is some concern over whether a company cedes patent rights over their own patents by merely using GPLv3 software, this is because of missing one little definition buried not in the definitions section but elsewhere in the license (section 11. paragraph 6, as much as a quick reading might otherwise support the concern, only applies to distribution relying on *explicit* patent licenses hence one cannot inadvertently license patents by mere distribution of the software).
A larger issue with the GPL v3 is that section 7 can be read to be incompatible with licenses such as the BSD and MIT licenses, perhaps even with the public domain. The question is, whether paragraph 2 (removal of additional permissions) must apply to portions under other licenses as well. A plain reading of the license suggests that this is the case (and my conversations with Eben Moglen suggest he thinks that this is the case, and furthermore that he believes that licenses such as the BSD and MIT licenses allow for additional restrictions to be added to the license when merely copying the software. It is clear from public speeches that this is also the view of RMS).
However, as another member of the SFLC pointed out to me, this was not the intent of a large number of authors of the license, and that few if any lawyers are willing to give advice that changing the license on a verbatim copy of a permissively licensed work is allowed (see the SFLC's memo on ISCL/GPL collaboration). They argue that since compatibility with licenses like the BSD license was a goal, that it needs to be read as compatible. Hence they argue that the additional things you can do with BSD-licensed code fall outside of the definition in section 7 of additional terms and are not governed by the GPL v3 at all.
However, if and until we see a memo from the SFLC on that topic, we will not have a neutral document to point to and say "this is what the license means." Hence it seems to me that every project ought to contemplate these issues, seek legal advice, and include some clarifying statements in the project's documentation.
This is too much trouble for me to go to in my projects so there is no incentive to move. I *am* considering moving a fair bit of my company's projects from the GPL to some variant of the MIT or ISC license however.
Ok, here is my point. Yes, I can reasonably secure a Windows box in some environments (I do so for consumers), but I would not dream of using it in a high-value target area.
1) File permissions are a lot more complex 2) Too many braindead dependencies on network services (how many things break if you turn off the RPC service?) 3) I haven't seen a MAC framework included in Windows.
The complexity and lack of MAC means that the standard practice I use on Linux boxes of a) uninstall unnecessary services, b) simplify and lock down file permissions (the DAC element), c) turn on SELinux (a MAC framework), set appropriate policies, and test critical services to ensure they still work is not available. This makes me think that Windows security is likely to be a lot more brittle than Linux security.
Never mind the 100x power or signal signature differences. The reports I heard from Serbians involved suggested that the SAM radar arrays were turned off when incoming HARMs were suspected.
Ok, this is mostly FUD, but there are some reasonable issues here.
Active Directory. Yes, there is OpenLDAP, but it takes a lot of third party plugins on various machines to get compatible with it. For large amounts of users (10,000+) scattered around geographically, there is just no other product that can do this, and that tools (like self-service password retrieval, or hooking smart cards) are available for. Pretty much every OS out there can hook into Active Directory and use it for user access. Too many user objects in one domain that it bogs down? Create a subdomain, and do trusts. OpenLDAP + Kerberos has some advantages and some disadvantages compared to ActiveDirectory (for example, service principle handling in AD is horrid). Personally I think LDAP, H.323, and all other Open Systems Interconnect-descended protocols tend to be the wrong choices for TCP/IP networks. However some people like things like this.
Exchange or Notes. There are just no solutions available at all to handle a medium to large company's mail, messaging and calendaring infrastructure that can scale, replicate, and cluster as well as these two commercial apps. Both also have extensive device support (cellphones, Blackberries, PDAs). Not just an available IMAP server, but a thorough client, so IT can remotely validate security requirements mandated by contracts or corporate regulations. We will get there. It is not a matter of not keeping up but because the solutions which do exist are not quite as mature as they need to be.
Databases. Yes, MySQL is great for a backend for someone with a Web page about their harmonica collection, but MySQL does not scale well to large projects. There is a reason the big boys use MS SQL server, Oracle, or DB/2. Discrediting MySQL is all to easy. It is like saying that Windows ME is not suited for the enterprise.... Please try PostgreSQL or Ingres II and get back to me.
Support is an issue. All commercial products come with some sort of support. F/OSS, you are on your own. Should a business critical function go down due to come Apache/Tomcat glitch, you are SOL, and if this is a publically traded company, you have to tell shareholders why you were using a setup with no commercial support, then find a way to fast-talk them from filing shareholder lawsuits because due diligence was not followed. ASP/IIS glitch? It may bring downtime, but you can tell shareholders (and the auditors) that it was someone else's fault. My business offers support for a lot of FOSS projects. You are not on your own with our support.
OS is about coders scratching an itch. Actually it is about coders of varying motivations sharing code. Some are trying to deal with personal annoyances. Others are dong work for customers. Still others are doing work for employers.
What makes you think that programmers don't get paid to work on FOSS?
BTW, if you know Perl and/or PLPGSQL, and want to work on FOSS business software (especially accounting software), drop me a line and attach a resume (preferably in PDF format or plain text). My business is looking for people we can pay (it would be either a relocation or a work-from-home arrangement depending on what works best for everyone).
tired of doing point by point analysis, but Exchange 2007 is probably one of the most valuable products that MS still offers. That says a lot right there. Note that you are comparing Exchange to other MS products, while the GP is comparing Exchange to the competition.
Cost misses the point. Quite frankly, aside from a few issues where no customization is needed, I never position FOSS as a less expensive option.
Instead, the fact is that you often pay more for a product, training, etc than you would for commercial software. However you also get more out if it. You get a package that meets your specific needs better (because you are also paying for customization). You get a package where you can more directly steer its future by actually talking to people involved in further development. You get a package where you can more easily manage upgrades and changes, and where a lot of the support for IT management processes is free of charge.
With FOSS, often people do pay more but generally the ROI is significantly higher.
In most open source communities you not only have access to the code, you have access to the authors of the code. This is a big deal in terms of understanding what you are doing.
Secondly, you can get people who understand the codebase who then make changes. This is not limited to your IT staff but includes lots of other people as well (other businesses that may extend the software as one of their standard services).
Oh right, you *also* expect me to learn Windows server administration and security (which is a heck of a lot more complex than Linux server administration and security), and pay for license fees as well....
Is there some particular reason you need to replace Outlook for an Open Source alternative? Ok, you might be trolling....
Replacing outlook is not the problem. We have Evolution for that. The question is replacing Exchange.
This makes no sense to dump something that works and is clearly the best solution right now. Except that Exchange only runs on Windows, and saying that Windows works and is clearly the best solution right now is a bit of a stretch.
Domino on Linux is a possibility but if you don't want to pay big bucks and want something open source, it is not an option.
Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better. Actually in this case, you will probably spend more but get something which will, in the long run, be better.
My major concern is that I would like to see open source tools in these areas. Heck I do use some tools written by Microsoft (and they do happen to be open source-- WIX for example). I use Windows only grudgingly (and only for testing or for running through scenarios when preparing technical documentation).
If the question is one of quality open source calendaring, I would have to say that there are not a lot which really meet all needs yet. This is one area where the best approach is to find something that is almost good enough and help make it good enough.
Also engineering quality calendaring software is deceptively difficult. I expect it will be a while before something really takes the world by storm.
The fact is, we could launch air strikes. But the fact is, just as in Desert Storm, air strikes don't accomplish a lot on the ground unless you also have ground pounders to back them up.
My primary information relating to the use of microwaves as HARM decoys comes from Serbians, not from the article you linked to. They provided enough information about how HARMs were deployed in Belgrade to make me suggest that they were speaking from personal experience. The big keys for their success were a) the radar arrays had to be turned off once the B52's were sighted and only turned on again *after* the HARMs were destroyed and b) the SAM arrays would be turned back on in order to attack the second phase of the bombing raids (where the actual bombs would be dropped).
Also, I would suggest that there is nothing which prevents one from making an active radar array which looks like an ultra-powerful microwave oven to a HARM. I.e. there is no difference which is inherent to the aims and cannot be hacked around. I personally doubt that US military would allow SAM arrays to be made invisible to a HARM that easily (also, the use of this frequency does surprise me-- I would think a much lower frequency would be better since lower frequencies work better against stealth designs-- the lock-on radar doesn't need to identify a target so much as just lock on so lower frequencies would be superior. Furthermore when paired with networked air power and conventional radar, one would also have a pretty good idea when one was targeting enemy stealth aircraft). I.e. if your country has no stealth aircraft, conventional radar sees nothing, and low frequency radar picks up a blip, it is almost certainly an enemy stealth bomber or fighter. If you do have stealth aircraft, you may need to look into Friend-or-Foe systems, trajectory analysis, etc to come up with a better idea of whether it is safe to target it.
Also, I generally assumed that GPS jammers would require more of a signal than a flashlight. Maybe closer to that of a microwave. However, I am not sure why creating a jammer would be terribly difficult (then again, due to smart bombs' 75% failure rate, not sure that a jamming device is really needed). (Well, it might be possible with lower power if you could direct the signal but that would be a lot less effective.) However, under worst case cost projections, it is hard to see how creating such jammers would be expensive.
HARMs can indeed be defeated by microwave ovens. The general tactic is simple. Put the microwave ovens (modified to work with the doors open) face up on the ground as decoys. Remember microwave ovens emit the right frequency to work in this area.
HARMs are generally deployed in advance of a bombing raid, so the way you work with them is you turn off your anti-aircraft radar arrays (so they are invisible to the HARMs-- they emit more powerful microwaves on the same frequency), turn on the microwaves, etc. This is similar to dropping flares to foil heat-seaking missiles.
GPS-based smart bombs cannot be defeated with microwave ovens. THey can be beaten using reasonably available jamming technology provided that you know what frequency the GPS signals are operating at. I never claimed anything different.
Actually you need both diplomatic solutions *and* police. We don't train our soldiers to be good police officers. That isn't there job. If we were smart, we would have an entire military division dedicated to civil security in cases like this.
There was another *huge* problem with the Bush Administration's single-minded push for war in Iraq-- basically it left our interests vulnerable to interference from third parties. I don't know if you saw this but shortly before the invasion (in fact, right when the AUMF was being debated in the Senate), there was a water-rights crisis between Lebannon and Israel. Lebannon calculated (rightly) that the US could not afford for Israel to attack and opened up a new large pumping station. Israel was threatening war (Sharon was stating that it was a cause for war and that it was no different from the 1967 war which he categorized as about water rights). The US sent a mediation team in really fast.... In the end an agreement was reached (largely under US pressure) which allowed Lebannon far more water rights than they had previously exercised.
Now we are in a position where we are tied up. Our troops are generally needed either at home for emergency management, in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in half a dozen places around the world defending US interests against military threats. We don't have the capacity for another war on this scale without abandoning vital allies somewhere in the world. If we were attacked by, say, Iran, would we respond even if it meant being unable to defend South Korea or Taiwan? Iran and Syria know this, which is why their interests at the moment are best served by keeping us tied up in Iraq and not attacking us in other ways (we can't do anything serious against them using conventional warfare unless we either are freed up in Afghanistan or Iraq, or we are willing to potentially abandon allies. Nuclear options are out unless we are attacked first with nuclear weapons).
Note also that you have companies like Blackwater which need the Iraq war to continue since that is the source of their contracts. So what if a few Iraqis (or a few dozen) get shot? If it prolongs the war it helps the company. No conflict of interest there.
Actually, I thought the IEEE's take on this (the Open Source Warfare article) was more insightful. A different issue that you point out, however, is that of clueless generals.
The basic problem is that the problem is not the insurgency-- it is the lack of law and order in Iraq. The insurgency is one manifestation of that, but the lack of law and order allowed them to grow and consolidate from a few hundred tiny groups to several larger networks (see the International Crisis Group's works on the insurgency). We are in a situation in Iraq where the US military is very good at killing people but not very good at fighting the insurgency because we can't do what we need to in terms of controlling the situation on the ground.
You don't want a smaller number of more deadly soldiers. You need a larger number of policemen. We can't do it and we don't train our army to do it. So yes, one has to blame the generals.
However, the issue from the IEEE article was that the insurgent groups are able to use methods that look an similar to those found in the open source community to adapt their tactics much faster than the US military can (the US military is at least an order of magnitude slower in this regard due to standardization, procurement practices, etc). By the time new tactics are underway, the insurgent groups quickly adapt and those tactics are less useful.
The second issue is that for every expensive weapon, there is a cheap and easily available countermeasure. Note that HARM's aren't used much since Kosovo because it is now common knowledge that there are sub-$100 countermeasures using commercial off-the-shelf parts for them (cheap microwave ovens have the same RF as the anti-aircraft radar and HARMS cannot distinguish between them). The Serbians may have lost but I wonder how much damage they caused US military R&D with that one.... Smart bombs also could be conceivably confused using inexpensive jamming devices. In the end, unless you are willing to commit the people to the ground
In short, I personally do not believe that the war in Iraq is winnable under the conditions that W has set out. We will lose that one unless we can make some very difficult choices before the patience of the American people wears out.
In short one needs lots of police on the ground relying less on military weapons technology. We need to stop using American mercenaries (like Blackwater) because they have an inherent conflict of interest. And we need to be willing to withhold our support for the Iraqi government if certain basic measures are not met. These things are not going to happen so we are not going to win.
This might be an interesting question though: If the code is in the public forum providing help for a problem, then one wonders if there is an implicit license to it. Better ask a lawyer in this case, and I would probably avoid relying on such.
THe original question was just under 200 lines of code. I think that would be long enough to qualify for protection. Also this is likely to vary from application to application.
IANAL, but I have had to deal with similar situations in open source projects.
On one hand, I have found that people who post code fragments online generally intend for people to copy and adapt their works. However, obviously you don't want to rely on this norm for protection, even if it was provided specifically as sample code.
The best option is to first make a good effort to contact the author of the code and express an interest in using the code. You may or may not want to discuss the whole situation with the author without feeling the situation out-- that might be an act of goodwill but it could also put your business more at risk. I would probably initially just state that you are interested in obtaining copyright permission to use this code in your application. See where that goes.
If you cannot contact the author I would suggest rewriting the code to be on the safe side.
Also note that there is a chance that you will get a response (like I have) stating something to the effect that "I don't know whether I even wrote the code anymore, but fwiw, go ahead." In that case, I would tend to avoid copying and pasting.
This much is actually relatively reasonable. A lot of countries still had hard feelings about WWII.
Now I am not sure what teutonic plates had to do with mountain formation. Wait I know-- the world was created out of the body of a giant. I suppose one could see Midgard as a sort of plate.....
This is fairly similar to tech-tonic theory, which emphasizes the technological capacity of Odin in the story a bit more.
However, the above theories are more or less akin to intelligent design and not accepted by modern science....
Coal-fired plants have two problems with them. One is technological, and the other is inherent.
The first is that they tend to be locally polluting, including releasing radioactive gasses such as Radon. This could be solved using technology.
The second is that they produce greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels. This is different than using biomass because the carbon cycle is not closed in a reasonable timeframe. Hence you get a net gain of CO2 from the burning of coal. This is inherent in burning coal and cannot be solved technologically.
For the latter reason, I would much rather see nuclear plants be built than clean coal plants. Yes, if we have to have coal, the clean ones are preferable to the old ones, but this is a good reason why they will do *more* damage to the environment over time because there is less incentive to replace them.
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As a Free/Open Source Software developer, I disagree with you. You are suggesting that there is an entitlement to the source code. You have the *right* to freely make any contractual arrangements you want within certain bounds, and this includes surrendering certain freedoms.
;-) In short the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to choose what restrictions to take upon oneself (essentially self-determination). Hence one cannot be truly free unless one has the choice not to be.
For example, if I release GPL code under a pseudonym (Copyright 2007 SuperGeekCoder), I might also do so under an NDA which prevents you from revealing my identity (you could still distribute the code as permitted under the GPL but would be prohibited from stating where you got it, who wrote it, etc). You have now agreed voluntarily to abridge your own right to free speech, and I can sue you for damages if you let it be known that I am SuperGeekCoder. In short, you have exercised your right to make agreements in such a way that you have taken up obligations not to use certain rights in certain ways. Same with EULAs, etc. BTW, there is a part of me which wants to do this just to show RMS that one *can* release GPL code under NDA
The key thing however to understand is that software freedom has value to the user, and it has a different set of positive values to the developer. These can be used to encourage people to make the choice to use software with more freedom. This means moving from proprietary software to GPL software, and from single-vendor software to community-developed software (MySQL and Asterisk are single-vendor programs because all commits go through a single vendor). In many ways the GPL is a hinderance to the move to community-developed software because it allows for MySQL and Asterisk to have their business models.
In short, it is not a matter of human rights (I believe there are only 2: self-determination and equal treatment under laws), but rather a matter of positive value.
My concern about the GPL is that, while it is very friendly towards businesses who want to release and then control the direction of their open source products (I did not say projects), it can have a stifling effect on community. Compare for example, the MySQL development model (one company *controls* what goes into the next release) with the PostgreSQL development model. In many ways Linux is an exception rather than a rule, and even GNU suffers from politics of internal control (for example RMS dismissing the head HURD architect, Thomas BUshnell, for arguing against considering the GFDL to be "Free" according to Debian's guidelines-- if this is the free speech to be associated with the FSF's free software, I want no part of the FSF).
The GPL is in many ways a sort of halfway house for companies who want to do open source but not community-centered development. If MySQL was under the BSD license, there is no way they could maintain the central control-- they would have to open up the commit access to many people in other companies, and could not sell proprietary licenses because there would be no market for them.
The GPL, while having legitimate uses, is more of a political statement than anything else. I say this as someone who contributes thousands of lines of code per week into GPL'd projects.
THe GPL v3 is confusing in number of ways. For example, there is some concern over whether a company cedes patent rights over their own patents by merely using GPLv3 software, this is because of missing one little definition buried not in the definitions section but elsewhere in the license (section 11. paragraph 6, as much as a quick reading might otherwise support the concern, only applies to distribution relying on *explicit* patent licenses hence one cannot inadvertently license patents by mere distribution of the software).
A larger issue with the GPL v3 is that section 7 can be read to be incompatible with licenses such as the BSD and MIT licenses, perhaps even with the public domain. The question is, whether paragraph 2 (removal of additional permissions) must apply to portions under other licenses as well. A plain reading of the license suggests that this is the case (and my conversations with Eben Moglen suggest he thinks that this is the case, and furthermore that he believes that licenses such as the BSD and MIT licenses allow for additional restrictions to be added to the license when merely copying the software. It is clear from public speeches that this is also the view of RMS).
However, as another member of the SFLC pointed out to me, this was not the intent of a large number of authors of the license, and that few if any lawyers are willing to give advice that changing the license on a verbatim copy of a permissively licensed work is allowed (see the SFLC's memo on ISCL/GPL collaboration). They argue that since compatibility with licenses like the BSD license was a goal, that it needs to be read as compatible. Hence they argue that the additional things you can do with BSD-licensed code fall outside of the definition in section 7 of additional terms and are not governed by the GPL v3 at all.
However, if and until we see a memo from the SFLC on that topic, we will not have a neutral document to point to and say "this is what the license means." Hence it seems to me that every project ought to contemplate these issues, seek legal advice, and include some clarifying statements in the project's documentation.
This is too much trouble for me to go to in my projects so there is no incentive to move. I *am* considering moving a fair bit of my company's projects from the GPL to some variant of the MIT or ISC license however.
Ok, here is my point. Yes, I can reasonably secure a Windows box in some environments (I do so for consumers), but I would not dream of using it in a high-value target area.
1) File permissions are a lot more complex
2) Too many braindead dependencies on network services (how many things break if you turn off the RPC service?)
3) I haven't seen a MAC framework included in Windows.
The complexity and lack of MAC means that the standard practice I use on Linux boxes of a) uninstall unnecessary services, b) simplify and lock down file permissions (the DAC element), c) turn on SELinux (a MAC framework), set appropriate policies, and test critical services to ensure they still work is not available. This makes me think that Windows security is likely to be a lot more brittle than Linux security.
My business is doing well.
Fact: Customer-centered businesses succeed.
Fact: Customers need things and will pay.
All that is really required is to find the arrangement where both sides win.
[sarcasm] Wow. That is so hard.... [/sarcasm]
What makes you think that programmers don't get paid to work on FOSS?
BTW, if you know Perl and/or PLPGSQL, and want to work on FOSS business software (especially accounting software), drop me a line and attach a resume (preferably in PDF format or plain text). My business is looking for people we can pay (it would be either a relocation or a work-from-home arrangement depending on what works best for everyone).
Cost misses the point. Quite frankly, aside from a few issues where no customization is needed, I never position FOSS as a less expensive option.
Instead, the fact is that you often pay more for a product, training, etc than you would for commercial software. However you also get more out if it. You get a package that meets your specific needs better (because you are also paying for customization). You get a package where you can more directly steer its future by actually talking to people involved in further development. You get a package where you can more easily manage upgrades and changes, and where a lot of the support for IT management processes is free of charge.
With FOSS, often people do pay more but generally the ROI is significantly higher.
There is a huge difference though.
In most open source communities you not only have access to the code, you have access to the authors of the code. This is a big deal in terms of understanding what you are doing.
Secondly, you can get people who understand the codebase who then make changes. This is not limited to your IT staff but includes lots of other people as well (other businesses that may extend the software as one of their standard services).
Right, but does it run on Linux?
Oh right, you *also* expect me to learn Windows server administration and security (which is a heck of a lot more complex than Linux server administration and security), and pay for license fees as well....
Sorry, I don't run production servers on Windows.
Replacing outlook is not the problem. We have Evolution for that. The question is replacing Exchange. This makes no sense to dump something that works and is clearly the best solution right now. Except that Exchange only runs on Windows, and saying that Windows works and is clearly the best solution right now is a bit of a stretch.
Domino on Linux is a possibility but if you don't want to pay big bucks and want something open source, it is not an option. Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better. Actually in this case, you will probably spend more but get something which will, in the long run, be better.
My major concern is that I would like to see open source tools in these areas. Heck I do use some tools written by Microsoft (and they do happen to be open source-- WIX for example). I use Windows only grudgingly (and only for testing or for running through scenarios when preparing technical documentation).
If the question is one of quality open source calendaring, I would have to say that there are not a lot which really meet all needs yet. This is one area where the best approach is to find something that is almost good enough and help make it good enough.
Also engineering quality calendaring software is deceptively difficult. I expect it will be a while before something really takes the world by storm.
The fact is, we could launch air strikes. But the fact is, just as in Desert Storm, air strikes don't accomplish a lot on the ground unless you also have ground pounders to back them up.
My primary information relating to the use of microwaves as HARM decoys comes from Serbians, not from the article you linked to. They provided enough information about how HARMs were deployed in Belgrade to make me suggest that they were speaking from personal experience. The big keys for their success were a) the radar arrays had to be turned off once the B52's were sighted and only turned on again *after* the HARMs were destroyed and b) the SAM arrays would be turned back on in order to attack the second phase of the bombing raids (where the actual bombs would be dropped).
Also, I would suggest that there is nothing which prevents one from making an active radar array which looks like an ultra-powerful microwave oven to a HARM. I.e. there is no difference which is inherent to the aims and cannot be hacked around. I personally doubt that US military would allow SAM arrays to be made invisible to a HARM that easily (also, the use of this frequency does surprise me-- I would think a much lower frequency would be better since lower frequencies work better against stealth designs-- the lock-on radar doesn't need to identify a target so much as just lock on so lower frequencies would be superior. Furthermore when paired with networked air power and conventional radar, one would also have a pretty good idea when one was targeting enemy stealth aircraft). I.e. if your country has no stealth aircraft, conventional radar sees nothing, and low frequency radar picks up a blip, it is almost certainly an enemy stealth bomber or fighter. If you do have stealth aircraft, you may need to look into Friend-or-Foe systems, trajectory analysis, etc to come up with a better idea of whether it is safe to target it.
Also, I generally assumed that GPS jammers would require more of a signal than a flashlight. Maybe closer to that of a microwave. However, I am not sure why creating a jammer would be terribly difficult (then again, due to smart bombs' 75% failure rate, not sure that a jamming device is really needed). (Well, it might be possible with lower power if you could direct the signal but that would be a lot less effective.) However, under worst case cost projections, it is hard to see how creating such jammers would be expensive.
HARMs can indeed be defeated by microwave ovens. The general tactic is simple. Put the microwave ovens (modified to work with the doors open) face up on the ground as decoys. Remember microwave ovens emit the right frequency to work in this area.
HARMs are generally deployed in advance of a bombing raid, so the way you work with them is you turn off your anti-aircraft radar arrays (so they are invisible to the HARMs-- they emit more powerful microwaves on the same frequency), turn on the microwaves, etc. This is similar to dropping flares to foil heat-seaking missiles.
GPS-based smart bombs cannot be defeated with microwave ovens. THey can be beaten using reasonably available jamming technology provided that you know what frequency the GPS signals are operating at. I never claimed anything different.
Actually you need both diplomatic solutions *and* police. We don't train our soldiers to be good police officers. That isn't there job. If we were smart, we would have an entire military division dedicated to civil security in cases like this.
There was another *huge* problem with the Bush Administration's single-minded push for war in Iraq-- basically it left our interests vulnerable to interference from third parties. I don't know if you saw this but shortly before the invasion (in fact, right when the AUMF was being debated in the Senate), there was a water-rights crisis between Lebannon and Israel. Lebannon calculated (rightly) that the US could not afford for Israel to attack and opened up a new large pumping station. Israel was threatening war (Sharon was stating that it was a cause for war and that it was no different from the 1967 war which he categorized as about water rights). The US sent a mediation team in really fast.... In the end an agreement was reached (largely under US pressure) which allowed Lebannon far more water rights than they had previously exercised.
Now we are in a position where we are tied up. Our troops are generally needed either at home for emergency management, in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in half a dozen places around the world defending US interests against military threats. We don't have the capacity for another war on this scale without abandoning vital allies somewhere in the world. If we were attacked by, say, Iran, would we respond even if it meant being unable to defend South Korea or Taiwan? Iran and Syria know this, which is why their interests at the moment are best served by keeping us tied up in Iraq and not attacking us in other ways (we can't do anything serious against them using conventional warfare unless we either are freed up in Afghanistan or Iraq, or we are willing to potentially abandon allies. Nuclear options are out unless we are attacked first with nuclear weapons).
Note also that you have companies like Blackwater which need the Iraq war to continue since that is the source of their contracts. So what if a few Iraqis (or a few dozen) get shot? If it prolongs the war it helps the company. No conflict of interest there.
Actually, I thought the IEEE's take on this (the Open Source Warfare article) was more insightful. A different issue that you point out, however, is that of clueless generals.
The basic problem is that the problem is not the insurgency-- it is the lack of law and order in Iraq. The insurgency is one manifestation of that, but the lack of law and order allowed them to grow and consolidate from a few hundred tiny groups to several larger networks (see the International Crisis Group's works on the insurgency). We are in a situation in Iraq where the US military is very good at killing people but not very good at fighting the insurgency because we can't do what we need to in terms of controlling the situation on the ground.
You don't want a smaller number of more deadly soldiers. You need a larger number of policemen. We can't do it and we don't train our army to do it. So yes, one has to blame the generals.
However, the issue from the IEEE article was that the insurgent groups are able to use methods that look an similar to those found in the open source community to adapt their tactics much faster than the US military can (the US military is at least an order of magnitude slower in this regard due to standardization, procurement practices, etc). By the time new tactics are underway, the insurgent groups quickly adapt and those tactics are less useful.
The second issue is that for every expensive weapon, there is a cheap and easily available countermeasure. Note that HARM's aren't used much since Kosovo because it is now common knowledge that there are sub-$100 countermeasures using commercial off-the-shelf parts for them (cheap microwave ovens have the same RF as the anti-aircraft radar and HARMS cannot distinguish between them). The Serbians may have lost but I wonder how much damage they caused US military R&D with that one.... Smart bombs also could be conceivably confused using inexpensive jamming devices. In the end, unless you are willing to commit the people to the ground
In short, I personally do not believe that the war in Iraq is winnable under the conditions that W has set out. We will lose that one unless we can make some very difficult choices before the patience of the American people wears out.
In short one needs lots of police on the ground relying less on military weapons technology. We need to stop using American mercenaries (like Blackwater) because they have an inherent conflict of interest. And we need to be willing to withhold our support for the Iraqi government if certain basic measures are not met. These things are not going to happen so we are not going to win.
This might be an interesting question though: If the code is in the public forum providing help for a problem, then one wonders if there is an implicit license to it. Better ask a lawyer in this case, and I would probably avoid relying on such.
THe original question was just under 200 lines of code. I think that would be long enough to qualify for protection. Also this is likely to vary from application to application.
IANAL, but I have had to deal with similar situations in open source projects.
On one hand, I have found that people who post code fragments online generally intend for people to copy and adapt their works. However, obviously you don't want to rely on this norm for protection, even if it was provided specifically as sample code.
The best option is to first make a good effort to contact the author of the code and express an interest in using the code. You may or may not want to discuss the whole situation with the author without feeling the situation out-- that might be an act of goodwill but it could also put your business more at risk. I would probably initially just state that you are interested in obtaining copyright permission to use this code in your application. See where that goes.
If you cannot contact the author I would suggest rewriting the code to be on the safe side.
Also note that there is a chance that you will get a response (like I have) stating something to the effect that "I don't know whether I even wrote the code anymore, but fwiw, go ahead." In that case, I would tend to avoid copying and pasting.
This much is actually relatively reasonable. A lot of countries still had hard feelings about WWII.
Now I am not sure what teutonic plates had to do with mountain formation. Wait I know-- the world was created out of the body of a giant. I suppose one could see Midgard as a sort of plate.....
This is fairly similar to tech-tonic theory, which emphasizes the technological capacity of Odin in the story a bit more.
However, the above theories are more or less akin to intelligent design and not accepted by modern science....
Coal-fired plants have two problems with them. One is technological, and the other is inherent.
The first is that they tend to be locally polluting, including releasing radioactive gasses such as Radon. This could be solved using technology.
The second is that they produce greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels. This is different than using biomass because the carbon cycle is not closed in a reasonable timeframe. Hence you get a net gain of CO2 from the burning of coal. This is inherent in burning coal and cannot be solved technologically.
For the latter reason, I would much rather see nuclear plants be built than clean coal plants. Yes, if we have to have coal, the clean ones are preferable to the old ones, but this is a good reason why they will do *more* damage to the environment over time because there is less incentive to replace them.