Since HTTP/2 is based on SPDY, it seems likely that this plug-in will be tweaked to support HTTP/2. That said, I suspect the Apache Foundation would say something like, "patches welcome".
The vast majority of people who use the term "open source software" use it with roughly the same meaning as OSI does, which is all that matters. You can confirm this with a quick Google search. Also, note that many organizations that require something to be be "open source software" will point to the OSI definition.
By the commonly-used definition of "open source software", you MUST be able to fork the project and maintain your own version. You cannot legally do that with TrueCrypt, therefore, by definition it is not open source software. Case closed.
TrueCrypt isn't open source software, in spite of the author incorrectly claiming it is. More detail is here, which the author could have learned in 2 minutes of Googling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...... for your amusement, I have quoted it below:
TrueCrypt was released under the "TrueCrypt License" which is unique to the TrueCrypt software. It is not part of the pantheon of widely used open source licenses and is not a free software license according to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) license list, as it contains distribution and copyright-liability restrictions. As of version 7.1a (the last full version of the software, released Feb 2012), the TrueCrypt License was Version 3.0.
Discussion of the licensing terms on the Open Source Initiative (OSI)'s license-discuss mailing list in October 2013 suggests that the TrueCrypt License has made progress towards compliance with the Open Source Definition but would not yet pass if proposed for certification as Open Source software.
According to current OSI president Simon Phipps:
...it is not at all appropriate for [TrueCrypt] to describe itself as "open source." This use of the term "open source" to describe something under a license that's not only unapproved by OSI but known to be subject to issues is unacceptable.
As a result of its questionable status with regard to copyright restrictions and other potential legal issues, the TrueCrypt License is not considered "free" by several major Linux distributions and is therefore not included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or Gentoo.
The wording of the license raises doubts whether those who use it have the right to modify it and use it within other projects. Cryptographer Matthew Green noted that "There are a lot of things [the developers] could have done to make it easier for people to take over this code, including fixing the licensing situation", and speculates that since they didn't do those things (including making the license more friendly), their intent was to prevent anyone from building on their code in the future.
End of life and license version 3.1
The 28 May 2014 announcement of discontinuation of TrueCrypt also came with a new version 7.2 of the software. Among the many changes to the source code from the previous release were changes to the TrueCrypt License — including removal of specific language that required attribution of TrueCrypt as well as a link to the official website to be included on any derivative products — forming a license version 3.1.
On 16 June 2014, the only alleged TrueCrypt developer still answering emails, replied to an email by Matthew Green about the licensing situation. He is not willing to change the license to an open source one, believes that Truecrypt should not be forked, and that if someone wants to create a new version they should start from scratch.
If you transfer bitcoins to some other organization, then THEY have the bitcoins, not you. If you just want to give money to someone else, there are easier ways to do that than by using bitcoin:-).
it seems to me that if you want to use bitcoins, then you should keep the bitcoins in YOUR OWN wallet and under your OWN control until you want to spend them. Don't hand your bitcoins to a so-called "bank", a "trading company", or anyone else unless you purpose is to GIVE THEM the money. I don't know how successful bitcoins will be in the long term, but if they succeed it will be because people seriously protect the bitcoins.
90 days is really long. The US CERT vulnerability disclosure policy is 45 days as described in http://www.cert.org/vulnerabil... (see that more more details). The problem is that you have to balance two conflicting needs; in the words of the CERT, "the need of the public to be informed of security vulnerabilities with vendors' need for time to respond effectively."
Leap seconds work perfectly well for most situations. If you need precision monotonically-increasing seconds, use TAI time (or "GPS time", which is at a fixed offset from TAI). Leap seconds keep atomic clocks and the real world reasonably synchronized; any other approach will have its own problems.
Don’t anthropomorphize computers, they hate that notes that most developers do use anthropomorphic language. I think there are probably a variety of good reasons for it, too. Here's one speculation: When we communicate with a human, we must use some language that will be more-or-less understood by the other human. Over the years people have developed a variety of human languages that do this pretty well (again, more-or-less). Human languages were not particularly designed to deal with computers, but languages have been honed over long periods of time to discuss human behaviors and their mental states (thoughts, beliefs, goals, and so on).
In any case, the problem isn't anthropomorphic language, it's the use of a bad analogy.
Case sensitivity is a good idea. The problem is that trying to do "case insensitive" matching depends on the locale. If you send your files to someone else, whether or not they are the "same" depends on your locale if you're serious. For Turkish users, 'i' and dotted 'I' are the same if you're considering them as case-sensitive; for many other languages and users, the dots create DIFFERENT characters. And if you're trying to make this "easy" it doesn't go far enough; Latin "a" usually looks the same as Cyrillic "". So please don't say "users can't tell the difference" - they ALREADY can't tell the difference visually, and naive solutions do not begin to address it. At least you can visually see the difference betweeen "Picture" and "picture", and in any case, users typically just click on the item and move on.
I think it would be a GOOD idea to require that Unix-like filenames be legal UTF-8 sequences (since you then know how to display them), and then reject filenames that are not UTF-8. But that's much less intrusive than filename mangling.
That said, it's too late to fix Windows, so if you're going to run on Windows you have to deal with the problem as it is.
This is excellent news. It's absurd that so many typical documents are stuck in proprietary formats. As stuff changes we should be able to read older documents using any tool we'd like. This is a major step along the way; there are now even more systems that support open document format. Congrats to Google!
Most software developers will take one look at the excessive parentheses required for Kawa and Scheme and say "nuke it from orbit". Even Lisp advocates like Paul Graham admits that syntax like "(* (+ 1 2) (- 5 4))" is painful to deal with.
Thankfully, there *are* solutions for Scheme: SRFI-105 and SRFI-110 (which I co-authored). These are extensions to Scheme that let you keep meta programming (and syntax tree editing in an editor) with readable syntax. To my knowledge Kawa doesn't implement them, but they could be added.
My understanding is that currently a patent is still valid EVEN IF the drug is taken off the market. But I think that's the right solution: Change the rules so that if you take a drug off the market, the patent is immediately declared abandoned, and anyone else can make it.
Stopping to make the original drug should cause immediate expiration of its patent. A patent is a government-created monopoly to encourage people to make the stuff. Clearly, if the company won't make it, there's no need for the patent. Requiring a company to make something they don't want to make is absurd; instead, just let others make it. And if they raise the prices substantially, perhaps require patent licensing in those cases (just as we did for music).
I'm not surprised. I wrote a paper back in 2003, Techniques for Cyber Attack Attribution, that listed a LONG list of ways to do attribution. This sounds a like a variant combining "modify transmitted messages" and "matching streams" via timing (see the paper).
Real anonymity is HARD. If someone wants to attribute you, it's hard to prevent.
noun: censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts. So if MSU, a public university, officially examines and suppresses the speech of certain ideas, then (by definition) that is censorship. If MSU censors ideas because they receive a lot of grant money in opposition to the ideas, that is even worse. No one is asking for MSU to endorse these ideas, merely for space to present them to a willing audience. I agree that MSU should not be required to endorse every speech made on its campus, but that is not what is happening here.
I agree that you can't just do an emergency broadcast at the White House. But that is irrelevant. No one has to show up at their event, or listen to it. They're being allowed to present a point of view, and those who WISH to hear their point of view may listen to it. That's nothing like an emergency broadcast.
The university sees this as a free speech issue too. The article says: "University officials say they have no plans to interfere with the event. “Free speech is at the heart of academic freedom and is something we take very seriously,” said Kent Cassella, MSU’s associate vice president for communications, in a statement. “Any group, regardless of viewpoint, has the right to assemble in public areas of campus or petition for space to host an event so long as it does not engage in disorderly conduct or violate rules. While MSU is not a sponsor of the creation summit, MSU is a marketplace of free ideas.”
I disagree. There may not be any discussion in that room, at that time. But that does not prevent discussion, which will continue in many venues. I suspect there will be many other presentations, where opposing points of view will be aired. Debating over valid sources of evidence is nothing new, either.
Preventing the airing of unpopular ideas is its own problem.
I am saddened by these sudden cries for censorship. I should note that I believe in evolution. I believe that most Christians do, too; for example, the Catholic church in the 1950 stated that there was "no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution". But if someone has a belief that is different from the mainstream, let them present it. If it's convincing, others will believe if. If it's not convincing, they will convince no one else.
There are absolutely no laws that keep standards (or anyone else) safe from patent claims.
Some standards organizations try to require members to license patents under "Reasonable and Non-discriminatory" terms, but the whole thing is nonsense. What is "reasonable"? The answer is, "as much as I can get from you!". And what is non-discrimantory? By definition most RAND terms discriminate against FLOSS, and they also always discriminate against organizations without the patents (since they have to pay for the patents, while others do not). In addition, for software patents and business patents, in general no one (not even the patent author) actually knows what the patent covers and what it does not, for a variety of unfortunate reasons.
I actually think that patents have their place in the physical world, but not at all in the software world.
I know of at least the following systems that exist or are being built: GPS (United States), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (planned, European Union), Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (India), and the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (China). GPS and GLONASS, in particular, have been around a long time.
By standard and by law, a "k" is x1000, an "M" is x1,000,000, and so on, and NOTHING else. Standards groups like IEC and IEEE are unanimous: they ALWAYS mean a power of 10. There have already been a number of court cases where someone used "K" etc. to mean binary prefixes, and every time they have had to concede (and typically end up paying up in out-of-court settlements). Examples include Willem Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Company and Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.
And don't tell me that computers "always" use base 2 measurements. Hard disk drives, clock cycles, and bandwidth are typically measured using base-10 prefixes (multipliers of 10^3). Yes, RAM has been traditionally been measured using prefixes that imply powers of 2, but the errors have been getting worse and worse as the numbers get larger.
Technologists should care about being precise. If you can't tell what a number means, that is a problem. The binary prefixes are a nice solution to a widespread problem. If you don't care about precision, use whatever term you want. But when you want to measure accurately, use the right units.
The practical problem is a difficulty of communication. The purpose of words is to help us communicate. If we have no word for a common idea we want to express, then we usually create a new word or phrase.
Let's say we observe an object, with mass less than a star, that is orbiting a star other than our Sun. What, exactly, do you call it? Under the IAU rules, you cannot call it a planet, because we generally cannot know if it has cleared its orbit. The standard solution in English is to call it a "planet". But if we call it a planet, then we should use the same definition everywhere.
As I commented years ago, the worst problem with the current IAU definition of "planet" is a practical one: we can't practically use it for objects orbiting other stars.
We are too far away to observe small objects around other stars, and I think we will always be able to detect larger objects but not smaller ones in many faraway orbits. So when we detect an object in another galaxy with the mass of Jupiter, and it’s orbiting a star, is it a planet? Well, under this current definition we don’t know if it’s a planet or not. Why? Because we may not be able to know what else is there in orbit. And that is a real problem. I think it’s clear that we will always be able to observe some larger objects without being able to detect the presence of smaller ones. If we can’t use the obvious word, then the definition is useless - so we need a better definition instead.
I think a much better definition of "planet" is "orbits a star, enough mass to become round". Yes, that means that Ceres and some Kuiper Belt objects become planets. That's a GOOD thing. A lot of people don't know of Ceres, yet that one object has about 1/3 of the ENTIRE mass of the asteroid belt.
Of course, none of this affects reality; this is merely a definition war. But clear terminology is important in any science.
Slashdot Mirror
One reason I bought an earlier Samsung is *specifically* because it supports a micro-SD card. Nice specs, but no micro-SD is a weakness to me.
I agree that Apache web server support is vital if HTTP/2 is to get much use. That said, the mod_spdy plug-in for Apache supports SPDY, and has been accepted into Apache trunk. See: http://googledevelopers.blogsp... https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/...
Since HTTP/2 is based on SPDY, it seems likely that this plug-in will be tweaked to support HTTP/2. That said, I suspect the Apache Foundation would say something like, "patches welcome".
The vast majority of people who use the term "open source software" use it with roughly the same meaning as OSI does, which is all that matters. You can confirm this with a quick Google search. Also, note that many organizations that require something to be be "open source software" will point to the OSI definition.
By the commonly-used definition of "open source software", you MUST be able to fork the project and maintain your own version. You cannot legally do that with TrueCrypt, therefore, by definition it is not open source software. Case closed.
TrueCrypt isn't open source software, in spite of the author incorrectly claiming it is. More detail is here, which the author could have learned in 2 minutes of Googling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ... for your amusement, I have quoted it below:
TrueCrypt was released under the "TrueCrypt License" which is unique to the TrueCrypt software. It is not part of the pantheon of widely used open source licenses and is not a free software license according to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) license list, as it contains distribution and copyright-liability restrictions. As of version 7.1a (the last full version of the software, released Feb 2012), the TrueCrypt License was Version 3.0.
Discussion of the licensing terms on the Open Source Initiative (OSI)'s license-discuss mailing list in October 2013 suggests that the TrueCrypt License has made progress towards compliance with the Open Source Definition but would not yet pass if proposed for certification as Open Source software.
According to current OSI president Simon Phipps:
As a result of its questionable status with regard to copyright restrictions and other potential legal issues, the TrueCrypt License is not considered "free" by several major Linux distributions and is therefore not included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or Gentoo.
The wording of the license raises doubts whether those who use it have the right to modify it and use it within other projects. Cryptographer Matthew Green noted that "There are a lot of things [the developers] could have done to make it easier for people to take over this code, including fixing the licensing situation", and speculates that since they didn't do those things (including making the license more friendly), their intent was to prevent anyone from building on their code in the future.
End of life and license version 3.1
The 28 May 2014 announcement of discontinuation of TrueCrypt also came with a new version 7.2 of the software. Among the many changes to the source code from the previous release were changes to the TrueCrypt License — including removal of specific language that required attribution of TrueCrypt as well as a link to the official website to be included on any derivative products — forming a license version 3.1.
On 16 June 2014, the only alleged TrueCrypt developer still answering emails, replied to an email by Matthew Green about the licensing situation. He is not willing to change the license to an open source one, believes that Truecrypt should not be forked, and that if someone wants to create a new version they should start from scratch.
This is straight from The Dictator's Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention (recommended).
If you transfer bitcoins to some other organization, then THEY have the bitcoins, not you. If you just want to give money to someone else, there are easier ways to do that than by using bitcoin :-).
it seems to me that if you want to use bitcoins, then you should keep the bitcoins in YOUR OWN wallet and under your OWN control until you want to spend them. Don't hand your bitcoins to a so-called "bank", a "trading company", or anyone else unless you purpose is to GIVE THEM the money. I don't know how successful bitcoins will be in the long term, but if they succeed it will be because people seriously protect the bitcoins.
90 days is really long. The US CERT vulnerability disclosure policy is 45 days as described in http://www.cert.org/vulnerabil... (see that more more details). The problem is that you have to balance two conflicting needs; in the words of the CERT, "the need of the public to be informed of security vulnerabilities with vendors' need for time to respond effectively."
Leap seconds work perfectly well for most situations. If you need precision monotonically-increasing seconds, use TAI time (or "GPS time", which is at a fixed offset from TAI). Leap seconds keep atomic clocks and the real world reasonably synchronized; any other approach will have its own problems.
Don’t anthropomorphize computers, they hate that notes that most developers do use anthropomorphic language. I think there are probably a variety of good reasons for it, too. Here's one speculation: When we communicate with a human, we must use some language that will be more-or-less understood by the other human. Over the years people have developed a variety of human languages that do this pretty well (again, more-or-less). Human languages were not particularly designed to deal with computers, but languages have been honed over long periods of time to discuss human behaviors and their mental states (thoughts, beliefs, goals, and so on). In any case, the problem isn't anthropomorphic language, it's the use of a bad analogy.
Case sensitivity is a good idea. The problem is that trying to do "case insensitive" matching depends on the locale. If you send your files to someone else, whether or not they are the "same" depends on your locale if you're serious. For Turkish users, 'i' and dotted 'I' are the same if you're considering them as case-sensitive; for many other languages and users, the dots create DIFFERENT characters. And if you're trying to make this "easy" it doesn't go far enough; Latin "a" usually looks the same as Cyrillic "". So please don't say "users can't tell the difference" - they ALREADY can't tell the difference visually, and naive solutions do not begin to address it. At least you can visually see the difference betweeen "Picture" and "picture", and in any case, users typically just click on the item and move on.
I think it would be a GOOD idea to require that Unix-like filenames be legal UTF-8 sequences (since you then know how to display them), and then reject filenames that are not UTF-8. But that's much less intrusive than filename mangling.
That said, it's too late to fix Windows, so if you're going to run on Windows you have to deal with the problem as it is.
This is excellent news. It's absurd that so many typical documents are stuck in proprietary formats. As stuff changes we should be able to read older documents using any tool we'd like. This is a major step along the way; there are now even more systems that support open document format. Congrats to Google!
Most software developers will take one look at the excessive parentheses required for Kawa and Scheme and say "nuke it from orbit". Even Lisp advocates like Paul Graham admits that syntax like "(* (+ 1 2) (- 5 4))" is painful to deal with.
Thankfully, there *are* solutions for Scheme: SRFI-105 and SRFI-110 (which I co-authored). These are extensions to Scheme that let you keep meta programming (and syntax tree editing in an editor) with readable syntax. To my knowledge Kawa doesn't implement them, but they could be added.
My understanding is that currently a patent is still valid EVEN IF the drug is taken off the market. But I think that's the right solution: Change the rules so that if you take a drug off the market, the patent is immediately declared abandoned, and anyone else can make it.
Stopping to make the original drug should cause immediate expiration of its patent. A patent is a government-created monopoly to encourage people to make the stuff. Clearly, if the company won't make it, there's no need for the patent. Requiring a company to make something they don't want to make is absurd; instead, just let others make it. And if they raise the prices substantially, perhaps require patent licensing in those cases (just as we did for music).
I'm not surprised. I wrote a paper back in 2003, Techniques for Cyber Attack Attribution, that listed a LONG list of ways to do attribution. This sounds a like a variant combining "modify transmitted messages" and "matching streams" via timing (see the paper).
Real anonymity is HARD. If someone wants to attribute you, it's hard to prevent.
I recommend the following listening/reading: The Dictator's Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention.
noun: censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts. So if MSU, a public university, officially examines and suppresses the speech of certain ideas, then (by definition) that is censorship. If MSU censors ideas because they receive a lot of grant money in opposition to the ideas, that is even worse. No one is asking for MSU to endorse these ideas, merely for space to present them to a willing audience. I agree that MSU should not be required to endorse every speech made on its campus, but that is not what is happening here.
I agree that you can't just do an emergency broadcast at the White House. But that is irrelevant. No one has to show up at their event, or listen to it. They're being allowed to present a point of view, and those who WISH to hear their point of view may listen to it. That's nothing like an emergency broadcast.
The university sees this as a free speech issue too. The article says: "University officials say they have no plans to interfere with the event. “Free speech is at the heart of academic freedom and is something we take very seriously,” said Kent Cassella, MSU’s associate vice president for communications, in a statement. “Any group, regardless of viewpoint, has the right to assemble in public areas of campus or petition for space to host an event so long as it does not engage in disorderly conduct or violate rules. While MSU is not a sponsor of the creation summit, MSU is a marketplace of free ideas.”
No. If the prevent the presentation, an interviewer might ask, "Oh, you went to that pro-censorship university?"
I disagree. There may not be any discussion in that room, at that time. But that does not prevent discussion, which will continue in many venues. I suspect there will be many other presentations, where opposing points of view will be aired. Debating over valid sources of evidence is nothing new, either.
Preventing the airing of unpopular ideas is its own problem.
I am saddened by these sudden cries for censorship. I should note that I believe in evolution. I believe that most Christians do, too; for example, the Catholic church in the 1950 stated that there was "no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution". But if someone has a belief that is different from the mainstream, let them present it. If it's convincing, others will believe if. If it's not convincing, they will convince no one else.
There are absolutely no laws that keep standards (or anyone else) safe from patent claims.
Some standards organizations try to require members to license patents under "Reasonable and Non-discriminatory" terms, but the whole thing is nonsense. What is "reasonable"? The answer is, "as much as I can get from you!". And what is non-discrimantory? By definition most RAND terms discriminate against FLOSS, and they also always discriminate against organizations without the patents (since they have to pay for the patents, while others do not). In addition, for software patents and business patents, in general no one (not even the patent author) actually knows what the patent covers and what it does not, for a variety of unfortunate reasons.
I actually think that patents have their place in the physical world, but not at all in the software world.
I know of at least the following systems that exist or are being built: GPS (United States), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (planned, European Union), Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (India), and the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (China). GPS and GLONASS, in particular, have been around a long time.
By standard and by law, a "k" is x1000, an "M" is x1,000,000, and so on, and NOTHING else. Standards groups like IEC and IEEE are unanimous: they ALWAYS mean a power of 10. There have already been a number of court cases where someone used "K" etc. to mean binary prefixes, and every time they have had to concede (and typically end up paying up in out-of-court settlements). Examples include Willem Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Company and Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.
And don't tell me that computers "always" use base 2 measurements. Hard disk drives, clock cycles, and bandwidth are typically measured using base-10 prefixes (multipliers of 10^3). Yes, RAM has been traditionally been measured using prefixes that imply powers of 2, but the errors have been getting worse and worse as the numbers get larger.
Technologists should care about being precise. If you can't tell what a number means, that is a problem. The binary prefixes are a nice solution to a widespread problem. If you don't care about precision, use whatever term you want. But when you want to measure accurately, use the right units.
The practical problem is a difficulty of communication. The purpose of words is to help us communicate. If we have no word for a common idea we want to express, then we usually create a new word or phrase.
Let's say we observe an object, with mass less than a star, that is orbiting a star other than our Sun. What, exactly, do you call it? Under the IAU rules, you cannot call it a planet, because we generally cannot know if it has cleared its orbit. The standard solution in English is to call it a "planet". But if we call it a planet, then we should use the same definition everywhere.
As I commented years ago, the worst problem with the current IAU definition of "planet" is a practical one: we can't practically use it for objects orbiting other stars.
We are too far away to observe small objects around other stars, and I think we will always be able to detect larger objects but not smaller ones in many faraway orbits. So when we detect an object in another galaxy with the mass of Jupiter, and it’s orbiting a star, is it a planet? Well, under this current definition we don’t know if it’s a planet or not. Why? Because we may not be able to know what else is there in orbit. And that is a real problem. I think it’s clear that we will always be able to observe some larger objects without being able to detect the presence of smaller ones. If we can’t use the obvious word, then the definition is useless - so we need a better definition instead.
I think a much better definition of "planet" is "orbits a star, enough mass to become round". Yes, that means that Ceres and some Kuiper Belt objects become planets. That's a GOOD thing. A lot of people don't know of Ceres, yet that one object has about 1/3 of the ENTIRE mass of the asteroid belt.
Of course, none of this affects reality; this is merely a definition war. But clear terminology is important in any science.