What fine are you talking about? This isn't a case about a crime. If you bump my car in a parking lot and it costs $200 to fix, you owe me $200. It doesn't matter how my you make - if you dent my car, you get it fixed, simple as that. That's called "damages". Same here - the plaintiff claims that Apple's conduct caused financial damage to their business, so Apple needs to make it right by paying the amount of the damage. It called "making the plaintiff whole", restoring them to the same condition they would be in had the event not occurred.
Splendid post. You might, however, want to include a potentiometer with those microphone jack leads. That way you won't be applying 120 volts to an input designed for less than 100 MILLIvolts.
My local power company has four generators, wired together to provide power for the city. They are connected into a regional grid with hundreds of other generators, but to make it simple to understand ignore those and just think about the four generators which are right next to each other . What do you think happens if one generator is trying to push the grid positive while another is trying to push it negative? That doesn't work out to well, so all the generators have to be in sync to within a few milliseconds. They do that by spinning them all to run at exactly the same frequency (60hz).
Coincidentally, an overloaded generator will also slow down, because it's power source doesn't provide enough power to spin that fast against the electro-magnetic physical resistance while also supply the needed amperage. What that means is that a generator spinning to slow is a generator that overloaded. It indicates that more input power is required, so throttles should be wired to take feedback from the tach in order to maintain 60 hz.
I still find it odd that people completely make stuff up completely from their imagination and post it as if it were fact, without having the foggiest idea what they're talking about.
My damn browser kills the on-screen keyboard regularly, then applies a click wherever your finger happens to be when it takes the keyboard away. So yeah, I can press the letter "H" in a textbox, the H will show up, then the keyboard will vanish it'll register a click on the submit button, which was under the H key.
I typed this post out as an SMS message. I'll copy-paste from the SMS to the browser, to avoid a repeat of the same problem by trying to type in the browser.
My browser submitted the post before I was done writing it.
Distributing those pulses to the different windings has to be done externally, via transistors or other controlling electronics. So the pulses don't need precision timing or anything, you just have to count them.
On the other hand, stepper motors can only have a certain number of steps per revolution (64 steps is a typical example, but other values are available) . So if you want something like 1/1000th turn, you do need a gear or screw of some sort.
For very slow rotation, such as clocks, synchronous motors are normally used. They use the ac swing from positive to negative rather than a commutator. They're quite accurate, and used to be more so, because the ac supply is regulated to exactly 60 hertz in order to allow power companies to interconnect. Again you don't have to deal with any intricate control of the pulses, just count the number of swings from positive to negative and back. The precision of the 60 hertz ac rate was recently reduced in the US, but it's still precise enough for most purposes.
> I'm not really all that well versed in electric motors but isn't the precision of an electric motor dependent on how precise the bursts of current are applied to it? I am assuming that any electric motor has a set minimal step it must take..
No, for tasks which require controlling the position or rate of rotation, the precision is NOt dependent on how precise the bursts of current are. You used the magic word there, "step". If you want to control the rotation of a motor with any precision, you use a type of motor called a stepper motor. You may be familiar with the commutator which regular hobby motors use to distribute current to different windings as the motor turns. By basically just removing the commutator, you end up with a motor that turns only 1/64th rotation with each pulse, and distributing those pulses to the different windings has yo be do
This demonstrates that you can have any gear ratio you want, in the palm of your hand. UP TO 11 million : 1. It's essentially unlimited.
You may have dealt with some problems related to the 2GB or 2TB disk size limits in Windows and MBR. At the same time, other people had storage systems which would support up to 8 petabytes, or even exabytes. Exabyte storage volumes didn't actually exist, so one could say the large disk formats had no practical application, but the practical application was that it was NOT limited to 2 TB. You could (and we did) have 16 TB raid volumes, because the limit was so high as to be essentially unlimited.
I see this the same way - it demonstrates a design that has practically unlimited ratio.
> You are attacking a straw man of 'wanting ununlimited [sic] choices' (nobody said they want that),
"As many ways as possible" - FlufferMutter
> Nobody was talking about keyboard shortcuts
I see above in this thread talk about ctrl-w, ctrl-F4, "cycle through windows using the keyboard ".
Seriously, if you want a powerful, fast interface that requires learning, the bash CLI is a thousand times faster than any gui. Try it out. GUI is all about being simple by putting the knowledge in the world, not in the head. That means showing the common, sensible default choices.
> you are attacking...
It's a suggestion, for something you'll probably like, not an attack, silly. Don't tell me you're one of those guys who feels that if his first idea is ever imperfect, that makes him stupid, so he must defend all of his ideas from "attacks" rather than learn anything, or take any suggestions.
> Who cares whether a Unix is certified? Linux is the big daddy of the server rhythm these days
Linux has a huge installed base, absolutely. Most of my work throughout my career has been on Linux. We also know that GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix. Linux is popular, and it's explicitly Not Unix. There is no guarantee your Unix software or integrations will continue to work on any particular version of any particular Linux distribution, as they try out a third init system in as many years.
So who cares about certified Unix? Two groups of people. People who have enterprise production systems running Unix software that MATTERS care. If you're running a payroll system for 10,000 employees and a glitch means missing a pay day, or perhaps ending up with the decimal point in the wrong place on everyone's pay check, certification of the whole stack is good. You can, at a cost, show that the software uses only official Unix apis, and will therefore run on any certified Unix. Similarly , regulators and such like certified components for similar reasons.
The second group is represented by alot of the systemd comments. Certified Unix means you have certain guarantees about how things (still) behave. You won't have important stuff changed out from under you, if you interface with the system as a Unix system, not as a Brand X version y.z system. Apple CAN'T fuck certain things up in the next version, systemd style, without losing their certification. That can be attractive to a lot of people.
The claim was that "advanced users" don't use Macs. To reply "I use a Mac" would be pointless and not advance the discussion in any way, because it wouldn't tell you whether "advanced users" ever use Macs.
What does move the discussion forward is to show that some advanced users do in fact use Macs, so a relevant post must establish two things: a) I'm an advanced user b) I use a Mac
Point a is made quickly, and in an easily verifiable way, by mentioning where you can find my name on your system.
If you want ununlimited choices, where you can do anything from anywhere, any time, that's called CLI. I open a bash prompt and I can do millions of things in one step, without opening any new windows, navigating to any other location, etc. Unlimited choices. I do most of my work at the command line because that's what I like as well.
The entire point of a GUI is to present the user with the most relevant and common choices for the current task at hand, in an easy-to-use way, so they don't have to KNOW all of the choices available, they can SEE the choices available at the present time.
If you want to memorize arbitrary key strokes to get things done quickly, that's precisely what the command line IS. A GUI is the alternative, for people who want to visibly SEE the choices, not LEARN them.
Learning hundreds of arbitrary keystrokes and using them in a gui is like using a motorcycle to move furniture- precisely the wrong tool for the purpose you wish to achieve.
I've been a developer for 17 years. My name is in the kernel changelog. I've designed and built custom servers with power tools. I use Mac Pros for work.
It seems GP might think that Apple only makes iPhones. Mac Pros, which run certified Unix (OS X) are possibly the _best_ option for serious professionals. There are also a couple other companies making one or two choices in well-built hardware you can install enterprise Linux on, of course.
You're thinking of the iPhone and iPad, toys for people who don't care about control over their property, but perhaps do care about build quality, vs. Macs, which are powerful Unix computers.
I've been a developer for 17 years. My name is in the kernel changelog. I've designed and built custom servers with power tools. I use Mac Pros for work.
You're right that it's normally easy enough to find the answers to questions like "what high school did you go to?" I make that much more secure by secretly replacing "you" with "Barak Obama".* I don't enter MY high school, I enter Obama's. I enter Obama's mother's maiden name. So anyone who goes on my Facebook** to get answers will get wrong answers.
* I actually use another famous person, not Obama. ** You won't find much on my Facebook page, because I don't use Facebook. But if I did, it wouldn't show the answers I use.
The GPL requires that the program include an offer to provide the source code, either on a physical medium or on a server. It does NOT require that it be distributed via the same server or service that binary is on. v3 makes that very clear, saying:
"the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party)"
Putting the binary on the App store and the source on Github is exactly what that covers - provided that in or "next to" the binary copy you make it clear where the source can be found.
Therefore, if you are distributing a binary via the app store, and distributing the source via FTP or Github, you're fine. v3 also says that you CAN distribute the source the same way that you distribute the binary, or you can distribute it using a different method. Also under either version of the GPL you can offer it on physical media.
So no, the GPL doesn't require that if the binary is delivered by mail (or app store) that the source be delivered the same way. In fact, it explicitly says the opposite.
The issue that FSF pointed out in another, more specific post, is that while Apple may not be required to do anything at all in order to conform with the GPL, they are in fact doing something. They are stating that all software distributed via the app store has certain restrictions. A more precisely fitting analogy, therefore, is post office policies about what can and cannot be shipped.
The FSF position is that the policy is an additional condition imposed by Apple which means that APPLE can't legally distribute GPL code under those conditions. That, however, takes us right back around to the question we started with. _I_ may distribute the software, as long as _I_ don't impose additional conditions. If I'm the one doing the distribution, it's legal. Apple is imposing additional conditions, but it's fine for Apple to have conditions on it's app store if they aren't the ones distributing the software. Just like the USPS has policies and conditions, which don't affect the fact that I can distribute GPL software by using USPS to do it.
Whether the person who put the app on the app store is distributing via the app store or if Apple is the one doing the distribution is murky. Viewing that phrase in isolation, a court could rule either way. However, the court will read the whole document, not just one phrase. The top of the GPL license says:
"Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure... that you receive source code or can get it if you want it"
Okay, so the purpose is to make sure you can get source code if you want it. That's the goal of the license agreement. Given the murky question of who is the distributor, a court should look at the purpose of the document. The purpose is to make sure people who want source code can get it. If it's freely available on Github and the app contains a link to that Github, the purpose is being fulfilled and the court should allow it.
The FSF post didn't say either what terms of the license they thought Apple was violating, nor why they think distributing via the app store is any different than distributing via the post office.
If I mail GPL software via the postal service, I have to comply with the GPL, which mainly means I have to include an offer to provide source code upon request. The postal service doesn't have to do ANYTHING regarding the license, they are a third party facilitating my distribution. It could be argued that Apple is no different- the person distributing via the app store needs to comply, Apple doesn't have to do anything to be in compliance.
By the wording of the license, it would be possible to argue either way, so a court would look at the INTENT of the license, it's PURPOSE. The gpl helpfully states it's purpose and intent right at the top - to maintain the four freedoms. As long as the freedoms are being maintained (by having source available, etc.), the court would probably rule that it's perfectly okay to distribute via the mail, ftp, email, http, or the app store.
Pdf is a subset of PostScript, a turing complete programming language. It's most often used for rendering documents, but is in no way limited to that. You can program an emulator in ps and run Linux inside your pdf. Gif and jpeg are not executable code. They are just (compressed) color VALUES).
There was one security hole in one specific executable LIBRARY which processes jpegs, but jpegs themselves are not executable and therefore essentially safe. Not so for pdf.
It is hoped that pdf is slightly safer than pure PostScript, but it's not FUNDAMENTALLY safer.
You make an excellent point. A corollary is a bit of a counter-point. Sometimes you DON'T need to decrypt it, and in those cases you shouldn't be able to.
The most obvious example is passwords. You store those as salted hashes which can't be decrypted. You don't need to know what their password is, you only need to know if it's the same as what they entered or not . We can apply the same principle to data we use for fraud prevention. We want to know if this transaction attempt is coming from the same device / os / ip / location that the legitimate user normally uses. We don't have to store their previous data, only a hash so we can see if the new attempt matches or not.
The OPM didn't need to store details of the applicants' past indiscretions. They could have simply encoded it as a risk score, 1-5. That's like a hash of the narrative, in a aay, irreversible but still useful. Then people couldn't be blackmailed or outed with the information.
The navy has been doing signals intelligence for a very long time. Ships communicate with their allied forces via radio using giant antennae, and they loiter close to enemy territory, and therefore enemy communications. It's only natural that they would point their large antennae at the enemy, and they've been doing so since just after radio was invented.
The navy also legitimately brings large numbers of personnel into foreign ports on a regular basis. It's only natural to give some of those sailors varying degrees of training in keeping your eyes and ears open while on foreign soil. Thus, the Office of Naval Intelligence has long been a significant part of our foreign intelligence capability.
The navy has been doing signals intelligence for a hundred years or so. Ships do two interesting things - they communicate with their allied forces via radio using giant antennae, and they loiter close to enemy territory, and therefore enemy communications. It's only natural that they would point their large antennae at the enemy, and they've been doing so since just after radio was invented.
The navy also legitimately brings large numbers of personnel into foreign ports on a regular basis. It's only natural to give some of those sailors varying degrees of training in keeping your eyes and ears open while on foreign soil. Thus, the Office of Naval Intelligence has long been a significant part of our foreign intelligence capability.
If you're underground or deep in a building, you're probably on wifi (or plugged in). That means we can geoip to within a 20 or 30 miles at worst, within a block in the best case (company IPs). That's far more accurate than we need to,know whether the acount holder COULD be there. What we're looking for is a transaction in southern California, folllowed 30 minutes later by one in South Carolina, then one in Mexico an hour later. We're computing whether it's possible for the account holder to travel that fast.
We then combine that other data points to score the likelihood of fraud. If it's card-present (swiped) that's lower risk than an internet transaction where they only have the card NUMBER, for example.
Many, possibly most, ecommerce sites do at least basic location checks for fraud protection and have for many years. The 20,000 or so sites which use our software have done so for at least ten years. If you're on the site from Comcast San Francisco at 10:00, then an hour later someone claiming to be you tries to initiate a transaction while in Russia, that's suspicious.
That red flag is then combined with other available information to choose from one of four possible outcomes: The transaction is approved. The transaction is declined. The customer gets a call / text asking them to confirm the transaction. Verified by Visa (tm) or the cashier calls in for manual approval.
The system works pretty well.
Note "tracking" is slightly overstating it for two reasons. First, the bank or processor checks only the location of the transaction- we don't know or care where you are if you're not attempting a transaction against an account holder's funds at the moment. Secondly, the "location" is strictly numerical longitude and latitude to see how far you are from the last location. Is it physically possible that you traveled that fast? We don't know or care if you're in a grocery store or a strip club. We only care if "you" are 4,000 miles from where you were two hours ago.
Sorry, I forgot fracking was invented for geothermal. That's how geothermal is done, and was done before fracking was applied to petroleum too. So I guess it's not ether / or, if you have geothermal, that means you have deep fracking.
Slashdot Mirror
What fine are you talking about? This isn't a case about a crime. If you bump my car in a parking lot and it costs $200 to fix, you owe me $200. It doesn't matter how my you make - if you dent my car, you get it fixed, simple as that. That's called "damages". Same here - the plaintiff claims that Apple's conduct caused financial damage to their business, so Apple needs to make it right by paying the amount of the damage. It called "making the plaintiff whole", restoring them to the same condition they would be in had the event not occurred.
Splendid post. You might, however, want to include a potentiometer with those microphone jack leads. That way you won't be applying 120 volts to an input designed for less than 100 MILLIvolts.
My local power company has four generators, wired together to provide power for the city. They are connected into a regional grid with hundreds of other generators, but to make it simple to understand ignore those and just think about the four generators which are right next to each other . What do you think happens if one generator is trying to push the grid positive while another is trying to push it negative? That doesn't work out to well, so all the generators have to be in sync to within a few milliseconds. They do that by spinning them all to run at exactly the same frequency (60hz).
Coincidentally, an overloaded generator will also slow down, because it's power source doesn't provide enough power to spin that fast against the electro-magnetic physical resistance while also supply the needed amperage. What that means is that a generator spinning to slow is a generator that overloaded. It indicates that more input power is required, so throttles should be wired to take feedback from the tach in order to maintain 60 hz.
I still find it odd that people completely make stuff up completely from their imagination and post it as if it were fact, without having the foggiest idea what they're talking about.
My damn browser kills the on-screen keyboard regularly, then applies a click wherever your finger happens to be when it takes the keyboard away. So yeah, I can press the letter "H" in a textbox, the H will show up, then the keyboard will vanish it'll register a click on the submit button, which was under the H key.
I typed this post out as an SMS message. I'll copy-paste from the SMS to the browser, to avoid a repeat of the same problem by trying to type in the browser.
My browser submitted the post before I was done writing it.
Distributing those pulses to the different windings has to be done externally, via transistors or other controlling electronics. So the pulses don't need precision timing or anything, you just have to count them.
On the other hand, stepper motors can only have a certain number of steps per revolution (64 steps is a typical example, but other values are available) . So if you want something like 1/1000th turn, you do need a gear or screw of some sort.
For very slow rotation, such as clocks, synchronous motors are normally used. They use the ac swing from positive to negative rather than a commutator. They're quite accurate, and used to be more so, because the ac supply is regulated to exactly 60 hertz in order to allow power companies to interconnect. Again you don't have to deal with any intricate control of the pulses, just count the number of swings from positive to negative and back. The precision of the 60 hertz ac rate was recently reduced in the US, but it's still precise enough for most purposes.
> I'm not really all that well versed in electric motors but isn't the precision of an electric motor dependent on how precise the bursts of current are applied to it? I am assuming that any electric motor has a set minimal step it must take..
No, for tasks which require controlling the position or rate of rotation, the precision is NOt dependent on how precise the bursts of current are. You used the magic word there, "step". If you want to control the rotation of a motor with any precision, you use a type of motor called a stepper motor. You may be familiar with the commutator which regular hobby motors use to distribute current to different windings as the motor turns. By basically just removing the commutator, you end up with a motor that turns only 1/64th rotation with each pulse, and distributing those pulses to the different windings has yo be do
This demonstrates that you can have any gear ratio you want, in the palm of your hand. UP TO 11 million : 1. It's essentially unlimited.
You may have dealt with some problems related to the 2GB or 2TB disk size limits in Windows and MBR. At the same time, other people had storage systems which would support up to 8 petabytes, or even exabytes. Exabyte storage volumes didn't actually exist, so one could say the large disk formats had no practical application, but the practical application was that it was NOT limited to 2 TB. You could (and we did) have 16 TB raid volumes, because the limit was so high as to be essentially unlimited.
I see this the same way - it demonstrates a design that has practically unlimited ratio.
> You are attacking a straw man of 'wanting ununlimited [sic] choices' (nobody said they want that),
"As many ways as possible" - FlufferMutter
> Nobody was talking about keyboard shortcuts
I see above in this thread talk about ctrl-w, ctrl-F4, "cycle through windows using the keyboard ".
Seriously, if you want a powerful, fast interface that requires learning, the bash CLI is a thousand times faster than any gui. Try it out. GUI is all about being simple by putting the knowledge in the world, not in the head. That means showing the common, sensible default choices.
> you are attacking ...
It's a suggestion, for something you'll probably like, not an attack, silly. Don't tell me you're one of those guys who feels that if his first idea is ever imperfect, that makes him stupid, so he must defend all of his ideas from "attacks" rather than learn anything, or take any suggestions.
> Who cares whether a Unix is certified? Linux is the big daddy of the server rhythm these days
Linux has a huge installed base, absolutely. Most of my work throughout my career has been on Linux. We also know that GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix. Linux is popular, and it's explicitly Not Unix. There is no guarantee your Unix software or integrations will continue to work on any particular version of any particular Linux distribution, as they try out a third init system in as many years.
So who cares about certified Unix? Two groups of people. People who have enterprise production systems running Unix software that MATTERS care. If you're running a payroll system for 10,000 employees and a glitch means missing a pay day, or perhaps ending up with the decimal point in the wrong place on everyone's pay check, certification of the whole stack is good. You can, at a cost, show that the software uses only official Unix apis, and will therefore run on any certified Unix. Similarly , regulators and such like certified components for similar reasons.
The second group is represented by alot of the systemd comments. Certified Unix means you have certain guarantees about how things (still) behave. You won't have important stuff changed out from under you, if you interface with the system as a Unix system, not as a Brand X version y.z system. Apple CAN'T fuck certain things up in the next version, systemd style, without losing their certification. That can be attractive to a lot of people.
The claim was that "advanced users" don't use Macs.
To reply "I use a Mac" would be pointless and not advance the discussion in any way, because it wouldn't tell you whether "advanced users" ever use Macs.
What does move the discussion forward is to show that some advanced users do in fact use Macs, so a relevant post must establish two things:
a) I'm an advanced user
b) I use a Mac
Point a is made quickly, and in an easily verifiable way, by mentioning where you can find my name on your system.
If you want ununlimited choices, where you can do anything from anywhere, any time, that's called CLI. I open a bash prompt and I can do millions of things in one step, without opening any new windows, navigating to any other location, etc. Unlimited choices. I do most of my work at the command line because that's what I like as well.
The entire point of a GUI is to present the user with the most relevant and common choices for the current task at hand, in an easy-to-use way, so they don't have to KNOW all of the choices available, they can SEE the choices available at the present time.
If you want to memorize arbitrary key strokes to get things done quickly, that's precisely what the command line IS. A GUI is the alternative, for people who want to visibly SEE the choices, not LEARN them.
Learning hundreds of arbitrary keystrokes and using them in a gui is like using a motorcycle to move furniture- precisely the wrong tool for the purpose you wish to achieve.
Here's a post a made over two years ago.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Not very good at this internet thing, are you?
You're talking about me.
I've been a developer for 17 years. My name is in the kernel changelog. I've designed and built custom servers with power tools. I use Mac Pros for work.
It seems GP might think that Apple only makes iPhones. Mac Pros, which run certified Unix (OS X) are possibly the _best_ option for serious professionals. There are also a couple other companies making one or two choices in well-built hardware you can install enterprise Linux on, of course.
You're thinking of the iPhone and iPad, toys for people who don't care about control over their property, but perhaps do care about build quality, vs. Macs, which are powerful Unix computers.
I've been a developer for 17 years. My name is in the kernel changelog. I've designed and built custom servers with power tools. I use Mac Pros for work.
You're right that it's normally easy enough to find the answers to questions like "what high school did you go to?" I make that much more secure by secretly replacing "you" with "Barak Obama".* I don't enter MY high school, I enter Obama's. I enter Obama's mother's maiden name. So anyone who goes on my Facebook** to get answers will get wrong answers.
* I actually use another famous person, not Obama.
** You won't find much on my Facebook page, because I don't use Facebook. But if I did, it wouldn't show the answers I use.
The GPL requires that the program include an offer to provide the source code, either on a physical medium or on a server. It does NOT require that it be distributed via the same server or service that binary is on. v3 makes that very clear, saying:
"the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party)"
Putting the binary on the App store and the source on Github is exactly what that covers - provided that in or "next to" the binary copy you make it clear where the source can be found.
Therefore, if you are distributing a binary via the app store, and distributing the source via FTP or Github, you're fine. v3 also says that you CAN distribute the source the same way that you distribute the binary, or you can distribute it using a different method. Also under either version of the GPL you can offer it on physical media.
So no, the GPL doesn't require that if the binary is delivered by mail (or app store) that the source be delivered the same way. In fact, it explicitly says the opposite.
The issue that FSF pointed out in another, more specific post, is that while Apple may not be required to do anything at all in order to conform with the GPL, they are in fact doing something. They are stating that all software distributed via the app store has certain restrictions. A more precisely fitting analogy, therefore, is post office policies about what can and cannot be shipped.
The FSF position is that the policy is an additional condition imposed by Apple which means that APPLE can't legally distribute GPL code under those conditions. That, however, takes us right back around to the question we started with. _I_ may distribute the software, as long as _I_ don't impose additional conditions. If I'm the one doing the distribution, it's legal. Apple is imposing additional conditions, but it's fine for Apple to have conditions on it's app store if they aren't the ones distributing the software. Just like the USPS has policies and conditions, which don't affect the fact that I can distribute GPL software by using USPS to do it.
Whether the person who put the app on the app store is distributing via the app store or if Apple is the one doing the distribution is murky. Viewing that phrase in isolation, a court could rule either way. However, the court will read the whole document, not just one phrase. The top of the GPL license says:
"Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure ... that you receive source code or can get it if you want it"
Okay, so the purpose is to make sure you can get source code if you want it. That's the goal of the license agreement. Given the murky question of who is the distributor, a court should look at the purpose of the document. The purpose is to make sure people who want source code can get it. If it's freely available on Github and the app contains a link to that Github, the purpose is being fulfilled and the court should allow it.
The FSF post didn't say either what terms of the license they thought Apple was violating, nor why they think distributing via the app store is any different than distributing via the post office.
If I mail GPL software via the postal service, I have to comply with the GPL, which mainly means I have to include an offer to provide source code upon request. The postal service doesn't have to do ANYTHING regarding the license, they are a third party facilitating my distribution. It could be argued that Apple is no different- the person distributing via the app store needs to comply, Apple doesn't have to do anything to be in compliance.
By the wording of the license, it would be possible to argue either way, so a court would look at the INTENT of the license, it's PURPOSE. The gpl helpfully states it's purpose and intent right at the top - to maintain the four freedoms. As long as the freedoms are being maintained (by having source available, etc.), the court would probably rule that it's perfectly okay to distribute via the mail, ftp, email, http, or the app store.
Pdf is a subset of PostScript, a turing complete programming language. It's most often used for rendering documents, but is in no way limited to that. You can program an emulator in ps and run Linux inside your pdf. Gif and jpeg are not executable code. They are just (compressed) color VALUES).
There was one security hole in one specific executable LIBRARY which processes jpegs, but jpegs themselves are not executable and therefore essentially safe. Not so for pdf.
It is hoped that pdf is slightly safer than pure PostScript, but it's not FUNDAMENTALLY safer.
You make an excellent point. A corollary is a bit of a counter-point. Sometimes you DON'T need to decrypt it, and in those cases you shouldn't be able to.
The most obvious example is passwords. You store those as salted hashes which can't be decrypted. You don't need to know what their password is, you only need to know if it's the same as what they entered or not . We can apply the same principle to data we use for fraud prevention. We want to know if this transaction attempt is coming from the same device / os / ip / location that the legitimate user normally uses. We don't have to store their previous data, only a hash so we can see if the new attempt matches or not.
The OPM didn't need to store details of the applicants' past indiscretions. They could have simply encoded it as a risk score, 1-5. That's like a hash of the narrative, in a aay, irreversible but still useful. Then people couldn't be blackmailed or outed with the information.
The navy has been doing signals intelligence for a very long time. Ships communicate with their allied forces via radio using giant antennae, and they loiter close to enemy territory, and therefore enemy communications. It's only natural that they would point their large antennae at the enemy, and they've been doing so since just after radio was invented.
The navy also legitimately brings large numbers of personnel into foreign ports on a regular basis. It's only natural to give some of those sailors varying degrees of training in keeping your eyes and ears open while on foreign soil. Thus, the Office of Naval Intelligence has long been a significant part of our foreign intelligence capability.
The navy has been doing signals intelligence for a hundred years or so. Ships do two interesting things - they communicate with their allied forces via radio using giant antennae, and they loiter close to enemy territory, and therefore enemy communications. It's only natural that they would point their large antennae at the enemy, and they've been doing so since just after radio was invented.
The navy also legitimately brings large numbers of personnel into foreign ports on a regular basis. It's only natural to give some of those sailors varying degrees of training in keeping your eyes and ears open while on foreign soil. Thus, the Office of Naval Intelligence has long been a significant part of our foreign intelligence capability.
If you're underground or deep in a building, you're probably on wifi (or plugged in). That means we can geoip to within a 20 or 30 miles at worst, within a block in the best case (company IPs). That's far more accurate than we need to,know whether the acount holder COULD be there. What we're looking for is a transaction in southern California, folllowed 30 minutes later by one in South Carolina, then one in Mexico an hour later. We're computing whether it's possible for the account holder to travel that fast.
We then combine that other data points to score the likelihood of fraud. If it's card-present (swiped) that's lower risk than an internet transaction where they only have the card NUMBER, for example.
Many, possibly most, ecommerce sites do at least basic location checks for fraud protection and have for many years. The 20,000 or so sites which use our software have done so for at least ten years. If you're on the site from Comcast San Francisco at 10:00, then an hour later someone claiming to be you tries to initiate a transaction while in Russia, that's suspicious.
That red flag is then combined with other available information to choose from one of four possible outcomes:
The transaction is approved.
The transaction is declined.
The customer gets a call / text asking them to confirm the transaction.
Verified by Visa (tm) or the cashier calls in for manual approval.
The system works pretty well.
Note "tracking" is slightly overstating it for two reasons. First, the bank or processor checks only the location of the transaction- we don't know or care where you are if you're not attempting a transaction against an account holder's funds at the moment. Secondly, the "location" is strictly numerical longitude and latitude to see how far you are from the last location. Is it physically possible that you traveled that fast? We don't know or care if you're in a grocery store or a strip club. We only care if "you" are 4,000 miles from where you were two hours ago.
Sorry, I forgot fracking was invented for geothermal. That's how geothermal is done, and was done before fracking was applied to petroleum too. So I guess it's not ether / or, if you have geothermal, that means you have deep fracking.
Which would you rather have, fracking, or geothermal?