Example 1 - The pilot and co-pilot can't eat the same meal. That way, only one of them can get food poisoning.
Yeah just as well they have that rule, just imagine the arguments if the co-pilot was allowed to eat the captain's lunch. Do they have rules that stop them both sitting in the same seat as well?
Example 2 - The hydraulic system fails and the wheels won't go down. There's a hand crank.
Its the same thing with software, no shortage of cranks.
Who cares if Linux is Unix at this point? We are rapidly approaching the point at which UNIX is a Linux-like operating system rather than Linux being a UNIX-like operating system.
I have been saying that for several years now. UNIX is all but dead. The only commercial UNIX likely to still be arround in ten years time as an ongoing product is OS/X. Solaris will have long since joined IRIX, Digital UNIX and VMS as O/S you can still buy and occasionaly see a minor upgrade for it.
There is a basic set of core functions that O/S do and this has not changed in principle for over a decade. Log based file systems, threads that work etc are now standard, but none of this was new ten years ago.
The interesting stuff all takes place either above or below the O/S layer..NET, J2EE etc are where interesting stuff is happening.
At the driver level I think that both Unix and Windows have the model hopelessly wrong. We have at last got past the point where we have to recompile the kernel for each new driver. But drivers are still mostly executable code while the differences between devices of the same genre are with very few exceptions the type of thing that can be described by code tables.
I would like to see device manufaturers get out of the device driver writing business, have a genuinely generic driver in the O/S and discover the repetoire of a particular device by reading a configuration file - preferably one that can be read from the device. From a pragmatic point of view XML would probably be a good match for the task since you would inevitably need structured data and a way to extend the basic data structures.
Unix once had this with the printcap and termcap files. Unfortunately people just seem to be unable to resist turing complete code.
Is that necessarily bad? Limo builders and custom van shops do basically the same thing. I can see cracking open a piece of consumer-grade gear, putting on better connectors & capacitors, a quieter power supply, jeweled bearing inserts on the plastic gears, etc. as a perfectly sensible way to produce a top-notch unit.
I would be somewhat unhappy if someone took a Chevy Tahoe, tarted up the body a bit and wanted an extra $50,000 - but hey they found plenty of people willing to buy the H2 Hummer before gas hit $2.50 a gallon.
Sure this sort of thing gets done, but the result is a minor incremental improvement, not the sort of thing I would expect for the price tag. The Jaguar X-Type is built on a standard Ford platform, people understand that they are paying 30% extra for the wood, leather, styling etc. But what I am talking about is taking a $300 CD player, putting it in a $400 box and slapping a $5000 price tag on the result.
And last I heard H2 hummers were piling up on dealers lots faster than anything else and the Jaguar X-Type is going to be replaced after a relatively short run with a model built on an exclusive to jaguar platform.
He wasn't abusing his power. He was doing exactly what he was paid to do: stop computer misuse. His boss was misusing the computer. The only reason he got fired is because he did this to his boss, rather than to some underling.
Lets see, how many engineers have slashdot open on their desktop more than 50% of the time... hmmm...
Spyware is a defined type of computer misuse, timewasting is not a computer misuse. Timewasting may be another type of misuse but I sure as heck don't feel inclined to trust this particular guy's evidence. Looks to me like there are more 'issues' involved here than this guy is letting on.
How do we know that the images were taken at 30 minute intervals and not say 5 minute intervals and then selecting the ones that give the desired effect? 30 minute intervals is quite a long time you know...
It may shock slashdot readers but quite a few managers do not do their work on the computer. Quite a few use a device called the telephone. Others spend time actually thinking about things, or reading books or write their reports longhand before typing them in.
Managing a large organization is a complex task and not necessarily subject to the rules of common sense. It might well be that the senior management considered both the manager and the fired employee to both be a problem and put them together for that very reason. System managers are not exactly known for their social skills and civil service managers are not exactly well paid. Getting problem employees to either resign or give just cause for termination might be the most useful thing that the manager could do for the organization.
Denon knows how to follow the other whoring asian manufacturers that cut costs at the expense of quality....sell someone a Marantz cd player, they will never go back to Best Buy's overhyped Sony time-bombs; but Marantz will never be as large as Sony's audio division
Some more googling turned up the news that Marantz and Denon merged in 2002. They keep their separate brands and salesforces but its the same R&D. The merged group is controlled by a company called Ripplewood.
You sell someone a Marantz cd player, they will never go back to Best Buy's overhyped Sony time-bombs; but Marantz will never be as large as Sony's audio division, because they don't sell cheap crap that blows up after 6 months of casual use; they'd rather crank out quality products and hope that someday a loyal customer will spotaneously offer a beer or blowjob.
Since Marantz has until recently been 50.5% owned by Philips any products it has on the street today were probably designed while it was part of a large combine.
The Marantz CD players in particular are unlikely to vary in any significant respect to their Philips equivalents. The sound quality is dertermined entirely by the chip set and it is highly unlikely that they use anything other than the Philips versions. There is simply no point in duplicating the R&D.
In the days when HiFi was built using vaccum tubes the quality of the raw materials and the workmanship had a real effect on the sound. Today all that it changes is the ego of the person gullible enough to pay three times the going rate for the same product in a different box.
I used to have a friend who worked for one of the real high end HiFi components companies, the sort that used to sell $5000 turntables. They built their uber expensive gear by taking apart consumer systems and repackaging them.
Of course there are people who believe that it makes a real difference, just as there are people who can't believe that wrestling is fake or that the WMDs will be found soon.
Doesn't seem like it would be all that efficient to google for email addresses
It is efficient enough to spread fast and wide. By the time Google had a chance to respond to this the virus had probably attacked 90% of the targets at least once. All Google could do is to reduce followon attacks somewhat. I was hit 450 times, that is not counting the attacks that the spam filter just disconnected on.
I don't think the real target was Google. MyDoom has been launched several times and 2 out of 3 times there has been an uptick in phishing fraud attacks just afterwards. I don't think that the target was really SCO or Microsoft. Attacking them was just a way to throw investigators off the trail and also to work out which machines would make reliable zombies.
These guys use zombie machines for several purposes. they use them to send spam, to capture credit card numbers and to hide their tracks.
I think it is time to admit defeat with the anti-virus scanning software. We should simply block all executable attachments and zip files containing executable code. Fortunately most encrypted zip file formats do not encrypt the manifest so encrypted files can be blocked.
This type of technology can be written once and is then pretty much maintenance free. Maybe an occasional tweak but nothing like the constant need to work out the signatures of new viruses.
No inside info or anything, but there has been no successful attempt on IBM or Novell's part for a summary judgement in their favor. This does bring to question..."What if SCO is right?"
It is pretty rare for a case to be thrown out on summary judgement at the first attempt. IBM has been holding off on the summary dismissal motions, main reason you would do that is if you think that you have a realistic chance of winning one down the road.
SCO has consistently failed to provide the information necessary to prove its case. They have been given several chances to remedy the situation and have come up short each time. SCO is running out of excuses, to bring the case to court they have to provide the evidence.
I don't know whether it's meant as a veiled insult to this idea, but the reporter directly compares it to the UK's nationwide MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) combined vaccinations. The same vaccinations that many thousands of parents are refusing to allow their children to be given due to research linking the combined shot to autism.
I suspect that there is some confusion between what the researchers are developing for and what the policy people are talking about.
I can't imagine that the drug companies expect to do anything other than produce a drug for existing addicts. If they go any further they need psychiatric treatment, fast. If the lawsuits don't kill them the demonstrations will.
I can't imagine that anything that has such a powerfull effect on the brain as turning off receptors for opiates is going to be side effect free. Even if it is side effect free it is unlikely to be believed.
Anti-drug campaigns in the UK have been vastly more effective than in the US, they use this sophisticated technique called not telling blatant lies. It probably helps that the kids don't get 'abstinence only' propaganda from the Christian Reich.
I would be interested to know just what the policy people were asked. The answers sound as if they could be in response to 'would you consider vaccinating kids if a suitable drug were proven to be 100% safe'. Which is pretty much as idiotic as asking someone, 'would you be in favor of lower taxes if there would be no loss of tax revenue' or 'would you be in favor of building a perpetual motion machine if a design was discovered'.
Try again, that movie has pulled in 100.3 million gross so far.
Not incredibly impressive, but considering what it cost to make, there is a tidy profit there that eisner missed out on.
So assuming that the final gross is about $200 million and the distributor would make about 15% profit after expenses like prints, advertising etc that would be about $30 million in earnings that Eisner gave up.
In months past there have been some rumors of a MS - Disney partnership. After all Mickey Mouse software would fit well with Disney;)
Great so we have Michael Eisener telling slate not to publish anything too critical of Bush. Incidentally, is Eisener going to reimburse Disney shareholders the $30 million or so that they lost out on due to his refusal to distribute Farenheight 9-11?
The rumors going arround were that Microsoft would BUY Disney, sack Eisner, revamp ABC and go into content in a big way. It was certainly being considered, but it was probably a bad idea for the same reason it would be a bad idea for Microsoft to build computers or make CPUs.
You have to define boundaries to the markets you will compete in, you can't compete with your channel unless you are likely to succeed in replacing it.
I suspect that we will see MSNBC be sold as well. It has been doing pretty baddly in the ratings and is not likely to improve as long as GE continue to try to make it Fox News Lite. Its pretty amazing that the chuckleheads can't get a clue and work out that maybe the reason that people have been turning off from CNN is because the 'news' they report is utterly vapid trivia. There has actually been remarkably little switching to Fox News, the audience for 24 hour right wing propaganda was an entirely new one.
Basically CNN discovered what they thought was the killer formula during the OJ Simpson trial and have been desperately trying to apply it ever since. They are geared up to provide saturation coverage of stories that have as little importance as possible. MSNBC copied this formula and found it does not work and then tried to copy the right wing propaganda formula half the time. If they wanted to make that a commercial success they should have made it s loony left wing propaganda station, hired Moore and Franken.
It's not really an outrageous demand, if Microsoft only filed for the patent to prevent someone else doing it.
It is a demand that they have already conceeded. The argument has been created by a tiny number of people with a political agenda.
Microsoft was given some time to go talk to their lawyers. Instead of waiting for them to get back to the group these people start a flamewar and then when they are told to shut up and wait by the AD they take it public.
These guys are not doing this to help MARID or make MARID open source. They are doing it because they don't want Microsoft or for that matter any vendor having any influence in the standards process. Only they want us to then go and use our influence in the market to promote whatever decision they made.
I'm not sure how you know this. Apparently he was communicating with Michel Bouissou.
If he had made any effort to find out the Microsoft position he would know that the Microsoft lawyers were working on the situation. He could have found that out by reading the post on the matter from Ted Hardie the IETF area director.
RMS never bothers to find out what the situation is that he is wading in to.
This is almost completely not true. Microsoft lawyers have been in discussions over the license issue since early June (6 weeks ago). While there were indeed some luckers who posted first about the license issue, many of the active participants in the working group started the license discussion. People who object to the current SenderID license for MS do want the best proposal possible. If no one objected to the license, we would have a bad proposal.
Nobody has any problem with the way you raised the issue. The issue was raised earlier, but it is only a bit over a week since Microsoft took an action item from the group to raise specific license terms with their lawyers.
Sure this could have been handled better, but what do you expect when we don't have a proper issues list, we don't have regular conference calls and the internal working processes of the WG are amateurish in the extreme? If we were in OASIS then you would have raised the issue on the WG list, we would have discussed it the next week in a con call and Harry would have been given an action item to follow up. The Jabber sessions simply don't provide an acceptable substitute.
The point is that one the issue is raised, a means of addressing it is accepted and there is a deadline for a response people should not go arround asserting that it is obvious that they are acting in bad faith and that the group should proceed on the assumption that this is the case. But thats enough about the treatment of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, lets get back to the MARID WG.
The sublicensing issue is an important one for all the parties - the commercial software providers and the OSS projects. Lotus and Sendmail will have the same issue.
Actually publishing an idea will prevent it from being patentable by others accordingin to the law.
In theory yes, in practice no. Microsoft had a $500 million judgement against them on the Eolas patent before that got squashed. They were not even allowed to present their evidence of prior art. There are plenty of judges who are as stupid as the USPTO examiners.
We spent millions 'winning' a bogus patent case.
The situation in the MARID WG is like the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. We have given Microsoft a deadline to comply with the request in a satisfactory manner. If the war is started before that deadline expires who exactly is acting in bad faith?
Why cant RMS just try to improve the situation, make a counteroffering, give suggestions instead of ranting about everything that is not exactly along his line of view?
That would require him to take the trouble to find out what is actually going on.
It is much easier to just wait for someone to prod him with a stick, tell him something bad is going on and ask him to drop an email into the working group.
I doubt that RMS will bother to reply to the argument he hopes to start. Incidentally it is somewhat ironic to have RMS complaining about inflexible licensing conditions when he is by far the worst offender.
The license issue was brought up a week ago, Microsoft went off to talk to their lawyers about getting acceptable license terms. Then a group of newcomers suddenly arrived and started a flame fest. This went on for a few days until the Area Director read the riot act, the type of personal attacks that were appearing are OK on slashdot, they are not acceptable in a professional forum.
Given the way RMS works it is quite likely that RMS was making a belated response to a message he had been sent at the start of the flame fest.
Exactly my thought. So why is this an issue? Can we not write on own code for sendmail and other open email servers? Why does this sound like RMS is FUDing us just a bit? Sure MS' software will be non-GPL be we expect that. How does this stop anyone from writing SenderID checking software that is GPL'd or GPL friendly?
I am a member of the MARID WG. I have been working on this for two years. RMS has made no attempt to talk to anyone in the group to find out the real situation. All he did was to wade in and make a statement to promote his own agenda.
I'll not pretend that I am not pissed off with RMS, he is to the anti-spam world what Ralph Nader is to the anti-Bush world.
The real situation is that the licensing issue was considered when the original submissions were made. Then when Caller-ID and SPF were merged for sound technical reasons the licensing issue has to be revisited. We asked Harry and Jim to take up the licensing issue with their lawyers about a week ago. They are meant to come back with a reply before we have the MARID meeting at the San Diego IETF the week after next.
Obviously the group is not going to accept an encumbered specification. The brutal fact is however that if you do not patent the ideas behind a protocol someone else will. Remember the $500 million Eolas judgement? So now we have to go through the licensing issue every single time we write a standard.
The fact is that I have never been in a situation where we have failled to get a satisfactory license grant with respect to any technology that was held by a vendor who actually makes products. I have negotiated with Microsoft on this issue many times and have always ended up with a license acceptable to all parties including OSS.
Now less than 24 hours after Microsoft go off to talk with their lawyers people start campaigning to take the Microsoft technology out using the licensing issue as an excuse. This came mainly from a group of tourists who had had nothing to do with the group previously. It is very obviously a campaign by people whose priority is not getting the best MARID spec we can.
This type of scheming is both unprofessional and damaging. Microsoft are on notice that they have to deliver a satisfactory license in the next 9 days. It has been made clear that this will have to have a sublicense clause and allow both commercial and GPL implementations.
The purpose of MARID is to address the spam problem. People who have other agendas, particularly using it as a forum to attack Microsoft are so not wellcome. The IETF is already in a very weak state, over the past ten years its influence has declined from being the most influential Internet standards body to being a distant third. One of the reasons commercial vendors have learned to avoid the IETF is that more effort is spent on ideological food fights than engineering issues. The point of MARID was to try to prove that the IETF can produce specifications in a timely manner relevant to real world issues - i.e. less than five to ten years. That point is lost if we have people trying to prevent commercial vendors having any influence in the process. At the end of the day the only reason any standards group has influence is that it can influence vendors and major OSS projects that have influence.
The complaints are not about the license issue, that is being addressed. This is the machinations of a faction who want to use MARID for conducting a vendetta against Microsoft and don't care what the effect on MARID is.
You also forget that many people have problems speaking in front of audiences. Even confident lecturers slip up mid-sentence. This is not uncommon.
Yes and many people can't putt in less than 3 to save their lives but these people do not become professional golfers.
Sure this sort of thing happens, even to professional speakers. But Bush is a politician, he is a professional speaker and this happens in practically every single speech again and again.
If this is not a troll, you do not know what you are talking about. Bush's speech patterns suggest that he's either an idiot, or dyslexic - or a dyslexic idiot. I am from Santa Cruz, I grew up there and lived most of my life to date there, and so I know many many people who have consumed assorted quantities of LSD on a fairly regular basis. None of them speak anything like dubya.
I have the same type of dyslexia. Only I got better over time. Bush is dyslexic, he insists on everything being read etc. But the speech think is something additional he clearly has great difficulty forming thoughts. Sure a lot of high performing people have the same trait, but thats because there is so much going on inside. I don't think anyone thinks there is much going on inside Bush.
Public speaking is often prescribed as therapy, it trains you to keep a focused train of thought while you speak. Nobody outside the family ever knew my cousin once had a speech disorder but he was one of the most successful politicians in his generation.
I think Bush is getting worse. His recent speeches have been dreadfull from a purely technical point of view. Think about it you are giving a keynote speech on 'values' and you forget what the punchline is in mid sentence.
Through the classified appropriations process. Most of this goes on through the Senate intelligence committee, but there are some hardware programs in that category (the original B2 bomber program for example).
The $700 hammers were pure padding by the contractors. They were buying them from a 'supplier' that they owned themselves. So they bought a $1.50 hammer then sold it to their subcontracting arm for $700 and then claimed an additional $70 profit under 'cost plus'.
While we could get a lot of money by curtailing our military endeavors, we could also get plenty by ending the war on drugs, and we could get even more by legalizing some of them
If you don't think that taking drugs can scramble your brains take a look at the idiot in the Whitehouse.
He stopped flying after he failed to 'accomplish' his medical. His medical records end after compulsory drug testing was introduced for pilots. He refuses to state the reasons he could not turn in a satisfactory medical, he also refuses to deny taking drugs but denied having taken them in the past 14 years which pretty much amounts to an admission he took them.
Speculation that W took cocaine is probably false, its too early. Cocaine did not become a mainstream drug until later. It is not likely that he had a heroin habbit, bit hard to hide that. He could have stayed off pot long enough to pass the medical. That would leave LSD as the most likely drug.
Bush's speech patterns certainly suggest LSD. Can you imagine anyone managing to get a degree from Yale in that state? He is barely able to string a sentence together when he has a script. A recent example was that speech he gave when he starts out saying the american people are going to vote for me "because" and then there is a looooong gap where it is pretty clear that he has completely forgotten the reason. In fact it is not clear that he ever knew where he was going.
I think W scrambled his brains on acid when he was in the guard, got kicked out of his unit because his commanders thought him a menace, the AWOL period was tollerated because the army really didn't want him and definitely did not want to send him over to Vietnam, but they could not get rid of him because of the same strings that were pulled to get him in in the first place. I don't know how he got through Havard Business School, but the damage from LSD is cumulative. The chronic alcholoism can hardly have helped.
So oh yes, NASA. I think you are all missing the real story. Bush announced that the shuttle will fly no more missions after 2010. I think the real situation is that it will never fly again. The planned launch in 2005 will slip back further and further. If there has been no launch by 2006 I can't see it being restarted to only run for a few years.
Saying hubble etc will be cancelled are just part of preparing folk for the big one, cancelling the space station.
One of the main reasons that we built so many nukes is that they are actually very cheap compared to conventional forces of similar capacity.
The bulk of them date from the Eisenhower administration. They built lots of them because thats what you did during the McCarthy years. Claiming there was a strategy to it is to vastly over-rate the process. Kennedy beat Nixon using the 'missile gap' issue, when they came into office they discovered the gap was real and vastly in favor of the US.
There was a certain amount of re-engineering that went on under Reagan and many warheads were remanufactured for newer missiles. In the process the number of warheads increased. But this was part of a strategy of putting pressure on the USSR to stop its attempts to expand as it had in Afghanistan and as far as the Reaganites were concerned Nicaragua.
Reagan was not building nuclear missiles because he thought they were actually going to be of any military value. If the Soviets were building nukes the money could not be going to build tanks, rifles etc which were the weapons that their proxies were buying. So actually the attraction of building nukes was the exact opposite to the one stated.
In the event the Soviets were much much weaker than Reagan and his advisers realized. If you think through the intended consequence of forcing the Soviets to produce more nukes this makes no sense at all if you think the Soviets are on the brink of collapse. Unless that is you think that they wanted large numbers of nukes to end up in the hands of the splinter states. Equally Star wars was at best a psychological factor since the Soviets never made a significant effort to even develop counter measures. Thatcher was telling Gorbachev at the time not to be worried about it because 'as a chemist I know it won't work'.
The weapon that really brought down the Soviet Union was the stinger missile, a conventional weapon that brought down the Soviet helicopter gunships. The Stingers tipped the balance in favor of the mujahadein.
Incidentally, the blowback theories peddled that Bin Laden was a CIA agent are somewhat off base. Bin Laden was the primary conduit for Saudi funding of the rebels. There was never any reason for the CIA to pay him, or for him to need CIA funds.
There is an example of the blowback theory though. Before the invasion the KGB quickly came to the conclusion that the soviet backed communist revolution was not going to last long. They tried to persuade 'the great teacher' that he had to lay off the religious persecution, be more moderate etc. to no effect. So they organized a coup to replace him with his main rival in the party. After a few months the KGB decided their replacement was showing too many signs of acting independently so they spread a few rumours that he was a CIA agent. About six months later they started to get word from their local spies that the guy was an american agent, which as it happened was completely untrue, the KGB were just hearing the rumors they had planted themselves. The Soviet invasion was ordered on the basis of those reports - proving that its not only clueless Texans who launch disastrous invasions on the basis of bogus inteligence.
Does it really have to be an either/or question? Couldn't we cut funding for something else, like say nuclear weapons research/maintenance,
Or the $250 billion spent so far on the Iraq war with another $250 billion or so that is going to have to be spent if we want to prevent Iraq being essentially annexed by Iran.
If you look at the federal budget most of it is eaten up by so-called entitlements. The government has to pay pensions, social security, medicare, medicaid come what may and there is not much that can be done to reduce that. Those retirees in Florida are not going to allow their pensions to be cut.
The rest of the budget divides into roughly two halves, military spending and the rest, that is education, health, transport, energy, farm subsidies, corporate welfare, state aid etc.
The military budget itself consists of roughly two halves which we can call the defense budget and the political/corporate welfare budget. The defense budget is the stuff that actually has some military purpose. The political/corporate welfare budget is the bases that are only kept open to keep the local senator happy, weapons systems that the army does not want, planes that the airforce has not asked for and so on.
There are still plenty of $700 hammers and $1,200 toilet seats, in Iraq Haliburton took the spare tires off the brand new Mercedes trucks it was using, when they got a flat tire they just abandoned the truck. Cost plus you know... But the 168 billion overcharged on the fuel contract only shows what happens when they know the administration is deliberately turning a blind eye. The same thing goes on in the US on pretty much every cost plus contract, just not quite to the same extent.
Padding out the military budget with pork is a bipartisan consensus. There are a handful of folk willing to stand up to the waste. John McCain being one of the few, ever since Goldwater the folk in Arizona have not been impressed by polticians who bring back pork anyway.
There was a lot of silly speculation about Kerry choosing McCain as his VP candidate. I don't think it was ever seriously considered. McCain knows he has much more influence as a Senator wielding a swing vote than a VP with a competent President. There is only one job that I think would persuade McCain to leave the Senate and that is the only job that only he can do, Secretary of defense.
There is nothing grey or viral about the GPL. Derivative works is clearly about sourcecode, not object code or binaries or anything else.
I think you are confusing two separate issues here. Microsoft is saying that the GPL is viral but they are not claiming that it is invalid. Microsoft's argument stems from taking the GPL seriously and at face value.
Microsoft paid SCO a chunk of change some time ago to buy off any claims that SCO might have made against Microsoft. This was not as unlikely as it seems given that Microsoft ships a Unix services for Windows. They also bought other bogus claims for much much more. $2 billion to sun $450 million to the DRM guys. Microsoft could not have announced the $30 billion dividend if they had to carry a contingency to cover the SCO case.
The SCO claim is pretty confused but it is the opposite to the Microsoft issue, they cannot claim that the license is invalid because that would mean that they were in breach of copyright when they sold a Linux distribution. What they have to claim instead is that the restrictive clauses in the license grant are unenforceable.
The approach they are taking is that the GNU license is somehow unenforceable as counter to public policy. English common law does recognise this as a possible reason for a contract being invalid but I don't think the court is likely to consider it applicable here.
English common law is still the foundation of US law, precedents in one common law jurisdiction can affect the interpretation of the law in other jurisdictions. There is certainly a big interest in having contracts interpreted in a uniform manner.
Getting a contract invalidated on public policy grounds has a huge burden of proof. Basically it is an escape hole for cases where interpreting a contract as proposed makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and would be detrimental to society as a whole. What you have to prove is that the party claiming the contract was invalid could not possibly have expected the contract to have the effect being claimed and that interpreting the contract that way would have results that are contrary to public policy.
There are some interpretations of the GPL that could fall due to the public policy defense. For example the concern Microsoft has raised that a subcontractor could provide code that they did not own the rights to and was covered by the GPL, thus leading to all the code it was linked to being contaminated by the GPL. If someone tried to make the claim in court that Microsoft was obliged to offer Windows for free because some employee had without authorization once compiled a version with GPL code the public policy defense would be relevant. Equally if someone tried to claim that because some clerk agreed to a clickwrap license that IBM had entered into a binding contract to sell Lotus for a dollar that was hidden in the small print.
The point about the SCO case is that SCO/Caldera knew exactly what they were doing when they sold Linux. If you are selling valuable copyright material you undertake to be bound and expect to be bound by the licensing constraints. If you are getting the material for free and selling it for a large sum you can expect to be required to give up some pretty valuable property claims in turn.
I don't see how SCO can make the public policy argument work for their case. They had a very substantial benefit from the GNU license. That made them a considerable sum of money. One of the core purposes of the GNU license is expressly to prevent the type of submarine claim that SCO is making.
Do you mean that manufacturers would be required to implement DRM? But so what? Just because it's there, doesn't mean you are forced to use it.
DRM is not going to be any more successful on Windows than it has been in any other context. The problem is that its a break once run anywhere problem. I am not rushing out to buy a HDTV without broadcast flag implementation because I know that the scheme will be as leaky as a sieve.
Do you mean that manufacturers would be required to implement a compulsory form of DRM that stopped unsigned OSs from booting? That's also absurd. The big corporate interests behind Linux would never let that happen.
I think its a control issue, people don't want to feel that their PC is being controlled by someone else. But the real advantage of trusted computing is to make it so that you can boot a machine and be certain that it is not running any type of trojan or malware.
I don't think that this is why RMS wants an OSS BIOS, he wants it on religious grounds.
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Yeah just as well they have that rule, just imagine the arguments if the co-pilot was allowed to eat the captain's lunch. Do they have rules that stop them both sitting in the same seat as well?
Example 2 - The hydraulic system fails and the wheels won't go down. There's a hand crank.
Its the same thing with software, no shortage of cranks.
I have been saying that for several years now. UNIX is all but dead. The only commercial UNIX likely to still be arround in ten years time as an ongoing product is OS/X. Solaris will have long since joined IRIX, Digital UNIX and VMS as O/S you can still buy and occasionaly see a minor upgrade for it.
There is a basic set of core functions that O/S do and this has not changed in principle for over a decade. Log based file systems, threads that work etc are now standard, but none of this was new ten years ago.
The interesting stuff all takes place either above or below the O/S layer. .NET, J2EE etc are where interesting stuff is happening.
At the driver level I think that both Unix and Windows have the model hopelessly wrong. We have at last got past the point where we have to recompile the kernel for each new driver. But drivers are still mostly executable code while the differences between devices of the same genre are with very few exceptions the type of thing that can be described by code tables.
I would like to see device manufaturers get out of the device driver writing business, have a genuinely generic driver in the O/S and discover the repetoire of a particular device by reading a configuration file - preferably one that can be read from the device. From a pragmatic point of view XML would probably be a good match for the task since you would inevitably need structured data and a way to extend the basic data structures.
Unix once had this with the printcap and termcap files. Unfortunately people just seem to be unable to resist turing complete code.
Incorrect, it is open source. It isn't GPL. There's a big difference.
The point being made is that djbdns is not open in some pretty important ways, like allowing other people to extend it for example.
Bernstein is a total control freak, he demands that people install and use his code in very specific ways...
I would be somewhat unhappy if someone took a Chevy Tahoe, tarted up the body a bit and wanted an extra $50,000 - but hey they found plenty of people willing to buy the H2 Hummer before gas hit $2.50 a gallon.
Sure this sort of thing gets done, but the result is a minor incremental improvement, not the sort of thing I would expect for the price tag. The Jaguar X-Type is built on a standard Ford platform, people understand that they are paying 30% extra for the wood, leather, styling etc. But what I am talking about is taking a $300 CD player, putting it in a $400 box and slapping a $5000 price tag on the result.
And last I heard H2 hummers were piling up on dealers lots faster than anything else and the Jaguar X-Type is going to be replaced after a relatively short run with a model built on an exclusive to jaguar platform.
Lets see, how many engineers have slashdot open on their desktop more than 50% of the time... hmmm...
Spyware is a defined type of computer misuse, timewasting is not a computer misuse. Timewasting may be another type of misuse but I sure as heck don't feel inclined to trust this particular guy's evidence. Looks to me like there are more 'issues' involved here than this guy is letting on.
How do we know that the images were taken at 30 minute intervals and not say 5 minute intervals and then selecting the ones that give the desired effect? 30 minute intervals is quite a long time you know...
It may shock slashdot readers but quite a few managers do not do their work on the computer. Quite a few use a device called the telephone. Others spend time actually thinking about things, or reading books or write their reports longhand before typing them in.
Managing a large organization is a complex task and not necessarily subject to the rules of common sense. It might well be that the senior management considered both the manager and the fired employee to both be a problem and put them together for that very reason. System managers are not exactly known for their social skills and civil service managers are not exactly well paid. Getting problem employees to either resign or give just cause for termination might be the most useful thing that the manager could do for the organization.
Some more googling turned up the news that Marantz and Denon merged in 2002. They keep their separate brands and salesforces but its the same R&D. The merged group is controlled by a company called Ripplewood.
Since Marantz has until recently been 50.5% owned by Philips any products it has on the street today were probably designed while it was part of a large combine.
The Marantz CD players in particular are unlikely to vary in any significant respect to their Philips equivalents. The sound quality is dertermined entirely by the chip set and it is highly unlikely that they use anything other than the Philips versions. There is simply no point in duplicating the R&D.
In the days when HiFi was built using vaccum tubes the quality of the raw materials and the workmanship had a real effect on the sound. Today all that it changes is the ego of the person gullible enough to pay three times the going rate for the same product in a different box.
I used to have a friend who worked for one of the real high end HiFi components companies, the sort that used to sell $5000 turntables. They built their uber expensive gear by taking apart consumer systems and repackaging them.
Of course there are people who believe that it makes a real difference, just as there are people who can't believe that wrestling is fake or that the WMDs will be found soon.
It is efficient enough to spread fast and wide. By the time Google had a chance to respond to this the virus had probably attacked 90% of the targets at least once. All Google could do is to reduce followon attacks somewhat. I was hit 450 times, that is not counting the attacks that the spam filter just disconnected on.
I don't think the real target was Google. MyDoom has been launched several times and 2 out of 3 times there has been an uptick in phishing fraud attacks just afterwards. I don't think that the target was really SCO or Microsoft. Attacking them was just a way to throw investigators off the trail and also to work out which machines would make reliable zombies.
These guys use zombie machines for several purposes. they use them to send spam, to capture credit card numbers and to hide their tracks.
I think it is time to admit defeat with the anti-virus scanning software. We should simply block all executable attachments and zip files containing executable code. Fortunately most encrypted zip file formats do not encrypt the manifest so encrypted files can be blocked.
This type of technology can be written once and is then pretty much maintenance free. Maybe an occasional tweak but nothing like the constant need to work out the signatures of new viruses.
It is pretty rare for a case to be thrown out on summary judgement at the first attempt. IBM has been holding off on the summary dismissal motions, main reason you would do that is if you think that you have a realistic chance of winning one down the road.
SCO has consistently failed to provide the information necessary to prove its case. They have been given several chances to remedy the situation and have come up short each time. SCO is running out of excuses, to bring the case to court they have to provide the evidence.
I suspect that there is some confusion between what the researchers are developing for and what the policy people are talking about.
I can't imagine that the drug companies expect to do anything other than produce a drug for existing addicts. If they go any further they need psychiatric treatment, fast. If the lawsuits don't kill them the demonstrations will.
I can't imagine that anything that has such a powerfull effect on the brain as turning off receptors for opiates is going to be side effect free. Even if it is side effect free it is unlikely to be believed.
Anti-drug campaigns in the UK have been vastly more effective than in the US, they use this sophisticated technique called not telling blatant lies. It probably helps that the kids don't get 'abstinence only' propaganda from the Christian Reich.
I would be interested to know just what the policy people were asked. The answers sound as if they could be in response to 'would you consider vaccinating kids if a suitable drug were proven to be 100% safe'. Which is pretty much as idiotic as asking someone, 'would you be in favor of lower taxes if there would be no loss of tax revenue' or 'would you be in favor of building a perpetual motion machine if a design was discovered'.
So assuming that the final gross is about $200 million and the distributor would make about 15% profit after expenses like prints, advertising etc that would be about $30 million in earnings that Eisner gave up.
Great so we have Michael Eisener telling slate not to publish anything too critical of Bush. Incidentally, is Eisener going to reimburse Disney shareholders the $30 million or so that they lost out on due to his refusal to distribute Farenheight 9-11?
The rumors going arround were that Microsoft would BUY Disney, sack Eisner, revamp ABC and go into content in a big way. It was certainly being considered, but it was probably a bad idea for the same reason it would be a bad idea for Microsoft to build computers or make CPUs. You have to define boundaries to the markets you will compete in, you can't compete with your channel unless you are likely to succeed in replacing it.
I suspect that we will see MSNBC be sold as well. It has been doing pretty baddly in the ratings and is not likely to improve as long as GE continue to try to make it Fox News Lite. Its pretty amazing that the chuckleheads can't get a clue and work out that maybe the reason that people have been turning off from CNN is because the 'news' they report is utterly vapid trivia. There has actually been remarkably little switching to Fox News, the audience for 24 hour right wing propaganda was an entirely new one.
Basically CNN discovered what they thought was the killer formula during the OJ Simpson trial and have been desperately trying to apply it ever since. They are geared up to provide saturation coverage of stories that have as little importance as possible. MSNBC copied this formula and found it does not work and then tried to copy the right wing propaganda formula half the time. If they wanted to make that a commercial success they should have made it s loony left wing propaganda station, hired Moore and Franken.
It is a demand that they have already conceeded. The argument has been created by a tiny number of people with a political agenda.
Microsoft was given some time to go talk to their lawyers. Instead of waiting for them to get back to the group these people start a flamewar and then when they are told to shut up and wait by the AD they take it public.
These guys are not doing this to help MARID or make MARID open source. They are doing it because they don't want Microsoft or for that matter any vendor having any influence in the standards process. Only they want us to then go and use our influence in the market to promote whatever decision they made.
Real life does not work that way.
If he had made any effort to find out the Microsoft position he would know that the Microsoft lawyers were working on the situation. He could have found that out by reading the post on the matter from Ted Hardie the IETF area director.
RMS never bothers to find out what the situation is that he is wading in to.
This is almost completely not true. Microsoft lawyers have been in discussions over the license issue since early June (6 weeks ago). While there were indeed some luckers who posted first about the license issue, many of the active participants in the working group started the license discussion. People who object to the current SenderID license for MS do want the best proposal possible. If no one objected to the license, we would have a bad proposal.
Nobody has any problem with the way you raised the issue. The issue was raised earlier, but it is only a bit over a week since Microsoft took an action item from the group to raise specific license terms with their lawyers.
Sure this could have been handled better, but what do you expect when we don't have a proper issues list, we don't have regular conference calls and the internal working processes of the WG are amateurish in the extreme? If we were in OASIS then you would have raised the issue on the WG list, we would have discussed it the next week in a con call and Harry would have been given an action item to follow up. The Jabber sessions simply don't provide an acceptable substitute.
The point is that one the issue is raised, a means of addressing it is accepted and there is a deadline for a response people should not go arround asserting that it is obvious that they are acting in bad faith and that the group should proceed on the assumption that this is the case. But thats enough about the treatment of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, lets get back to the MARID WG.
The sublicensing issue is an important one for all the parties - the commercial software providers and the OSS projects. Lotus and Sendmail will have the same issue.
In theory yes, in practice no. Microsoft had a $500 million judgement against them on the Eolas patent before that got squashed. They were not even allowed to present their evidence of prior art. There are plenty of judges who are as stupid as the USPTO examiners.
We spent millions 'winning' a bogus patent case.
The situation in the MARID WG is like the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. We have given Microsoft a deadline to comply with the request in a satisfactory manner. If the war is started before that deadline expires who exactly is acting in bad faith?
That would require him to take the trouble to find out what is actually going on.
It is much easier to just wait for someone to prod him with a stick, tell him something bad is going on and ask him to drop an email into the working group.
I doubt that RMS will bother to reply to the argument he hopes to start. Incidentally it is somewhat ironic to have RMS complaining about inflexible licensing conditions when he is by far the worst offender.
The license issue was brought up a week ago, Microsoft went off to talk to their lawyers about getting acceptable license terms. Then a group of newcomers suddenly arrived and started a flame fest. This went on for a few days until the Area Director read the riot act, the type of personal attacks that were appearing are OK on slashdot, they are not acceptable in a professional forum.
Given the way RMS works it is quite likely that RMS was making a belated response to a message he had been sent at the start of the flame fest.
I am a member of the MARID WG. I have been working on this for two years. RMS has made no attempt to talk to anyone in the group to find out the real situation. All he did was to wade in and make a statement to promote his own agenda.
I'll not pretend that I am not pissed off with RMS, he is to the anti-spam world what Ralph Nader is to the anti-Bush world.
The real situation is that the licensing issue was considered when the original submissions were made. Then when Caller-ID and SPF were merged for sound technical reasons the licensing issue has to be revisited. We asked Harry and Jim to take up the licensing issue with their lawyers about a week ago. They are meant to come back with a reply before we have the MARID meeting at the San Diego IETF the week after next.
Obviously the group is not going to accept an encumbered specification. The brutal fact is however that if you do not patent the ideas behind a protocol someone else will. Remember the $500 million Eolas judgement? So now we have to go through the licensing issue every single time we write a standard.
The fact is that I have never been in a situation where we have failled to get a satisfactory license grant with respect to any technology that was held by a vendor who actually makes products. I have negotiated with Microsoft on this issue many times and have always ended up with a license acceptable to all parties including OSS.
Now less than 24 hours after Microsoft go off to talk with their lawyers people start campaigning to take the Microsoft technology out using the licensing issue as an excuse. This came mainly from a group of tourists who had had nothing to do with the group previously. It is very obviously a campaign by people whose priority is not getting the best MARID spec we can.
This type of scheming is both unprofessional and damaging. Microsoft are on notice that they have to deliver a satisfactory license in the next 9 days. It has been made clear that this will have to have a sublicense clause and allow both commercial and GPL implementations.
The purpose of MARID is to address the spam problem. People who have other agendas, particularly using it as a forum to attack Microsoft are so not wellcome. The IETF is already in a very weak state, over the past ten years its influence has declined from being the most influential Internet standards body to being a distant third. One of the reasons commercial vendors have learned to avoid the IETF is that more effort is spent on ideological food fights than engineering issues. The point of MARID was to try to prove that the IETF can produce specifications in a timely manner relevant to real world issues - i.e. less than five to ten years. That point is lost if we have people trying to prevent commercial vendors having any influence in the process. At the end of the day the only reason any standards group has influence is that it can influence vendors and major OSS projects that have influence.
The complaints are not about the license issue, that is being addressed. This is the machinations of a faction who want to use MARID for conducting a vendetta against Microsoft and don't care what the effect on MARID is.
Yes and many people can't putt in less than 3 to save their lives but these people do not become professional golfers.
Sure this sort of thing happens, even to professional speakers. But Bush is a politician, he is a professional speaker and this happens in practically every single speech again and again.
I have the same type of dyslexia. Only I got better over time. Bush is dyslexic, he insists on everything being read etc. But the speech think is something additional he clearly has great difficulty forming thoughts. Sure a lot of high performing people have the same trait, but thats because there is so much going on inside. I don't think anyone thinks there is much going on inside Bush.
Public speaking is often prescribed as therapy, it trains you to keep a focused train of thought while you speak. Nobody outside the family ever knew my cousin once had a speech disorder but he was one of the most successful politicians in his generation.
I think Bush is getting worse. His recent speeches have been dreadfull from a purely technical point of view. Think about it you are giving a keynote speech on 'values' and you forget what the punchline is in mid sentence.
Through the classified appropriations process. Most of this goes on through the Senate intelligence committee, but there are some hardware programs in that category (the original B2 bomber program for example).
The $700 hammers were pure padding by the contractors. They were buying them from a 'supplier' that they owned themselves. So they bought a $1.50 hammer then sold it to their subcontracting arm for $700 and then claimed an additional $70 profit under 'cost plus'.
If you don't think that taking drugs can scramble your brains take a look at the idiot in the Whitehouse.
He stopped flying after he failed to 'accomplish' his medical. His medical records end after compulsory drug testing was introduced for pilots. He refuses to state the reasons he could not turn in a satisfactory medical, he also refuses to deny taking drugs but denied having taken them in the past 14 years which pretty much amounts to an admission he took them.
Speculation that W took cocaine is probably false, its too early. Cocaine did not become a mainstream drug until later. It is not likely that he had a heroin habbit, bit hard to hide that. He could have stayed off pot long enough to pass the medical. That would leave LSD as the most likely drug.
Bush's speech patterns certainly suggest LSD. Can you imagine anyone managing to get a degree from Yale in that state? He is barely able to string a sentence together when he has a script. A recent example was that speech he gave when he starts out saying the american people are going to vote for me "because" and then there is a looooong gap where it is pretty clear that he has completely forgotten the reason. In fact it is not clear that he ever knew where he was going.
I think W scrambled his brains on acid when he was in the guard, got kicked out of his unit because his commanders thought him a menace, the AWOL period was tollerated because the army really didn't want him and definitely did not want to send him over to Vietnam, but they could not get rid of him because of the same strings that were pulled to get him in in the first place. I don't know how he got through Havard Business School, but the damage from LSD is cumulative. The chronic alcholoism can hardly have helped.
So oh yes, NASA. I think you are all missing the real story. Bush announced that the shuttle will fly no more missions after 2010. I think the real situation is that it will never fly again. The planned launch in 2005 will slip back further and further. If there has been no launch by 2006 I can't see it being restarted to only run for a few years.
Saying hubble etc will be cancelled are just part of preparing folk for the big one, cancelling the space station.
The bulk of them date from the Eisenhower administration. They built lots of them because thats what you did during the McCarthy years. Claiming there was a strategy to it is to vastly over-rate the process. Kennedy beat Nixon using the 'missile gap' issue, when they came into office they discovered the gap was real and vastly in favor of the US.
There was a certain amount of re-engineering that went on under Reagan and many warheads were remanufactured for newer missiles. In the process the number of warheads increased. But this was part of a strategy of putting pressure on the USSR to stop its attempts to expand as it had in Afghanistan and as far as the Reaganites were concerned Nicaragua.
Reagan was not building nuclear missiles because he thought they were actually going to be of any military value. If the Soviets were building nukes the money could not be going to build tanks, rifles etc which were the weapons that their proxies were buying. So actually the attraction of building nukes was the exact opposite to the one stated.
In the event the Soviets were much much weaker than Reagan and his advisers realized. If you think through the intended consequence of forcing the Soviets to produce more nukes this makes no sense at all if you think the Soviets are on the brink of collapse. Unless that is you think that they wanted large numbers of nukes to end up in the hands of the splinter states. Equally Star wars was at best a psychological factor since the Soviets never made a significant effort to even develop counter measures. Thatcher was telling Gorbachev at the time not to be worried about it because 'as a chemist I know it won't work'.
The weapon that really brought down the Soviet Union was the stinger missile, a conventional weapon that brought down the Soviet helicopter gunships. The Stingers tipped the balance in favor of the mujahadein.
Incidentally, the blowback theories peddled that Bin Laden was a CIA agent are somewhat off base. Bin Laden was the primary conduit for Saudi funding of the rebels. There was never any reason for the CIA to pay him, or for him to need CIA funds.
There is an example of the blowback theory though. Before the invasion the KGB quickly came to the conclusion that the soviet backed communist revolution was not going to last long. They tried to persuade 'the great teacher' that he had to lay off the religious persecution, be more moderate etc. to no effect. So they organized a coup to replace him with his main rival in the party. After a few months the KGB decided their replacement was showing too many signs of acting independently so they spread a few rumours that he was a CIA agent. About six months later they started to get word from their local spies that the guy was an american agent, which as it happened was completely untrue, the KGB were just hearing the rumors they had planted themselves. The Soviet invasion was ordered on the basis of those reports - proving that its not only clueless Texans who launch disastrous invasions on the basis of bogus inteligence.
Or the $250 billion spent so far on the Iraq war with another $250 billion or so that is going to have to be spent if we want to prevent Iraq being essentially annexed by Iran.
If you look at the federal budget most of it is eaten up by so-called entitlements. The government has to pay pensions, social security, medicare, medicaid come what may and there is not much that can be done to reduce that. Those retirees in Florida are not going to allow their pensions to be cut.
The rest of the budget divides into roughly two halves, military spending and the rest, that is education, health, transport, energy, farm subsidies, corporate welfare, state aid etc.
The military budget itself consists of roughly two halves which we can call the defense budget and the political/corporate welfare budget. The defense budget is the stuff that actually has some military purpose. The political/corporate welfare budget is the bases that are only kept open to keep the local senator happy, weapons systems that the army does not want, planes that the airforce has not asked for and so on.
There are still plenty of $700 hammers and $1,200 toilet seats, in Iraq Haliburton took the spare tires off the brand new Mercedes trucks it was using, when they got a flat tire they just abandoned the truck. Cost plus you know... But the 168 billion overcharged on the fuel contract only shows what happens when they know the administration is deliberately turning a blind eye. The same thing goes on in the US on pretty much every cost plus contract, just not quite to the same extent.
Padding out the military budget with pork is a bipartisan consensus. There are a handful of folk willing to stand up to the waste. John McCain being one of the few, ever since Goldwater the folk in Arizona have not been impressed by polticians who bring back pork anyway.
There was a lot of silly speculation about Kerry choosing McCain as his VP candidate. I don't think it was ever seriously considered. McCain knows he has much more influence as a Senator wielding a swing vote than a VP with a competent President. There is only one job that I think would persuade McCain to leave the Senate and that is the only job that only he can do, Secretary of defense.
I think you are confusing two separate issues here. Microsoft is saying that the GPL is viral but they are not claiming that it is invalid. Microsoft's argument stems from taking the GPL seriously and at face value.
Microsoft paid SCO a chunk of change some time ago to buy off any claims that SCO might have made against Microsoft. This was not as unlikely as it seems given that Microsoft ships a Unix services for Windows. They also bought other bogus claims for much much more. $2 billion to sun $450 million to the DRM guys. Microsoft could not have announced the $30 billion dividend if they had to carry a contingency to cover the SCO case.
The SCO claim is pretty confused but it is the opposite to the Microsoft issue, they cannot claim that the license is invalid because that would mean that they were in breach of copyright when they sold a Linux distribution. What they have to claim instead is that the restrictive clauses in the license grant are unenforceable.
The approach they are taking is that the GNU license is somehow unenforceable as counter to public policy. English common law does recognise this as a possible reason for a contract being invalid but I don't think the court is likely to consider it applicable here.
English common law is still the foundation of US law, precedents in one common law jurisdiction can affect the interpretation of the law in other jurisdictions. There is certainly a big interest in having contracts interpreted in a uniform manner.
Getting a contract invalidated on public policy grounds has a huge burden of proof. Basically it is an escape hole for cases where interpreting a contract as proposed makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and would be detrimental to society as a whole. What you have to prove is that the party claiming the contract was invalid could not possibly have expected the contract to have the effect being claimed and that interpreting the contract that way would have results that are contrary to public policy.
There are some interpretations of the GPL that could fall due to the public policy defense. For example the concern Microsoft has raised that a subcontractor could provide code that they did not own the rights to and was covered by the GPL, thus leading to all the code it was linked to being contaminated by the GPL. If someone tried to make the claim in court that Microsoft was obliged to offer Windows for free because some employee had without authorization once compiled a version with GPL code the public policy defense would be relevant. Equally if someone tried to claim that because some clerk agreed to a clickwrap license that IBM had entered into a binding contract to sell Lotus for a dollar that was hidden in the small print.
The point about the SCO case is that SCO/Caldera knew exactly what they were doing when they sold Linux. If you are selling valuable copyright material you undertake to be bound and expect to be bound by the licensing constraints. If you are getting the material for free and selling it for a large sum you can expect to be required to give up some pretty valuable property claims in turn.
I don't see how SCO can make the public policy argument work for their case. They had a very substantial benefit from the GNU license. That made them a considerable sum of money. One of the core purposes of the GNU license is expressly to prevent the type of submarine claim that SCO is making.
DRM is not going to be any more successful on Windows than it has been in any other context. The problem is that its a break once run anywhere problem. I am not rushing out to buy a HDTV without broadcast flag implementation because I know that the scheme will be as leaky as a sieve.
Do you mean that manufacturers would be required to implement a compulsory form of DRM that stopped unsigned OSs from booting? That's also absurd. The big corporate interests behind Linux would never let that happen.
I think its a control issue, people don't want to feel that their PC is being controlled by someone else. But the real advantage of trusted computing is to make it so that you can boot a machine and be certain that it is not running any type of trojan or malware.
I don't think that this is why RMS wants an OSS BIOS, he wants it on religious grounds.