But under the Apache License 2, you could lose patent rights required to use the software if you initiate such a lawsuit. Under the GPL v3, you could lose such patent rights for any license violation.
You can always get screwed by software patents. If you use *any* software, someone could always come out of the blue and tell you to stop because they have a patent. If anything, licenses like the Apache License 2 and the GPLv3 are *better* than the normal case - because they usually provide you protection from some patents.
As with anything patent related, initiating a patent suit needs to be considered very carefully. Losing a couple patent licenses isn't the only risk there - I'd be much more worried about retaliatory patent suits. If you're messing with patents, you should have a good patent lawyer or four reading every software license (and every contract) that applies to you beforehand rather than assuming that some Slashdot post has summarized your legal obligations in a few words.
Then you can relax, because it doesn't install a rootkit - the story is false.
No, it just installs a tool that's specifically intended to subvert an OS security mechanism (non-Admin user accounts). That's not a root kit, but it has a lot of the same security issues.
No, seriously. We either want to discourage wasting electricity or we don't. If we do, then people with electric heating systems should be one of our first targets. Maybe we would want to use some of the money raised from this electricity tax to assist people in upgrading their heating systems (and insulation), but saying "we should introduce a tax to reduce electricity usage, but let's start by exempting the largest users" is absurd.
The Neo is neat and all, but you don't even have to be that open to do better than the iPhone.
The iPhone is explicitly designed to create vendor lock-in with AT&T. If you want a fully functional smartphone that is unlocked by default, you can get something like a Nokia Communicator.
In fact, there are great stacks of phones (all generally unavailable from carriers in the US) that are fully functional smart phones that run on industry-standard Symbian (some even on not-fully-open Linux; hell, even Windows Mobile is better than an iPhone) and have such amazing features as being unlocked and supporting 3rd party apps by default.
Here are some more phones to compare the iPhone to:
With Free Software, this is always allowed. No problem.
With Proprietary software, this can be pretty complicated. Each piece of software has its own license with its own requirements, be it per-user licensing, per-seat licensing, per-CPU licensing, per-year licensing. Better hire a dedicated lawyer to make sure you have all your licenses lined up right.
Modifying/Redistributing Software
With Free Software, this can be pretty complicated. There are a number of licenses - some of which are incompatible with each other. You'll probably want to put some effort into license tracking, or even hire a lawyer if your situation is especially complicated.
With Proprietary software, this is always prohibited. No problem. (unless you screw up somehow, then you're liable for millions in damages.)
You seem to think this is a simple issue. It isn't.
The question of software licensing has been complex and even controversial for decades. That apparently seems silly to you. That might even be a valid conclusion, but you're going to need a much more extensive understanding of the topic before you can convince anyone to agree.
If you're actually interested in understanding the topic so you can discuss it intelligently, I suggest actually reading / watching the following (completely):
Here's a much better plan: First, remove non-renewable energy subsidies. That, by itself, would have more of a beneficial effect on the environmental effects of power consumption than any five "overconsumption" taxes.
While you could hike the unit price of electric to discourage its use, you're unable to distinguish between some old age pensioner heating their house versus some guy who's playing UT3 20 hours a day on their Alienware rig.
Electric heating is, if anything, more wasteful of energy than a crazy gaming rig. Are we trying to discourage wasting electricity here, or to punish people for recreational usage?
If we can convince that pensioner to switch over to gas heating we save quite a bit more energy than we do if the gamer buys an Alienware with only one GeForce 8800 GTX instead of two.
Amdahl's law relates parallelism to MP -- it has nothing to do with power consumption.
Wrong. Amdahl's Law is a formula that covers optimizing a linear combination of resource usage. Amdahl's Law is frequently talked about in the context of parallel programming, but it applies anywhere where 1.) you want to optimize resource usage and 2.) total resource usage is the sum of the resource usage of a number of discrete components.
You can use Amdahl's Law to prove statements like "if the CPU consumes 20% of the power than cutting it's power consumption in half will make you use 10% less power over all" just as easily as you can use it to prove "if only 20% of the runtime your program can be parallelized, then doubling the number of processors will only give you at most a 10% performance increase".
SoundExchange has no idea how to create a viable business model. The money is not in charging the broadcasters, rather its in free promotion coupled with aggressive web marketing.
That depends what you think their business model is.
Personally, I think the business model of getting Congress to pass a law saying that all music streamed on the internet is subject to a royalty payment to be payed to Sound Exchange - even for music being streamed by the copyright holder or with their direct authorization - is a pretty damn good way to make a profit.
If it's such a problem for this guy, then he shouldn't break the law, thus necessitating the tracking of his computer usage.
That's not a valid argument, because you could use it to support any arbitrary requirement. They could require him to have sex with a horse on national television and that argument would still work just as well.
In this particular case, requiring that a parolee replace all his software just to enable the use of a specific piece of monitoring software is an unreasonable requirement - unless you can personally demonstrate that either 1.) he doesn't use his computer to any non-trivial extent or 2.) Windows can easily be used as a functional replacement for Linux.
You're assuming he's has no marketable computer skills that are even slightly OS dependent. That's a pretty big assumption. I know that if I found myself unemployed I could make pretty damn good money doing contract programming, and that being forced to use Windows on my desktop would significantly damage that opportunity.
If computer operating systems were really arbitrarily interchangeable, then everyone would be using Linux right now because Windows would be obviously not worth the $100 in comparison.
They don't have monitoring software, except on Windows, so he uses Windows. That's not arbitrary at all, that's merely a necessary consequence of the tools they have available.
That'd be great if operating systems were arbitrarily interchangeable. They're not - unless you want to prove me wrong by switching to OS/2 Warp for all your computing needs for the next 5 months.
Like I said before, that plan accomplishes none of the goals of any party involved.
The monitoring program will record no useful surveying information since it's designed to survey local network traffic (and application usage) rather than to monitor as a router / proxy. It would probably produce almost no useful information, but even if it produced some information the law enforcement people would still (rightfully) consider it to be an attempt at evading the monitoring.
It also wouldn't provide many of the benefits of running Linux. Not only would it require him to run a copy of Windows, with all the cost, performance, and stability issues that that entails, but virtualizing an OS is simply not the same as running it on a machine directly for desktop use. Performance and hardware support would both be really bad - sure, you'll say that those things don't matter or can be worked around, and that sounds great until he tries to do something simple like run a video game he had installed or plug in his USB headseat microphone.
Actually he has not completed his sentence. His sentence was 5 months jail time and 5 months probation...
Which fits completely with what I said.
These terms are hardly arbitrary... He committed a crime with his computer and now he is going to have his computer activities monitored.
That's great. If that were the terms, then it wouldn't be terribly arbitrary. Mandating operating system *is* an arbitrary term (regardless of their excuse), and as such it has no place as a probation requirement without the explicit consent of a judge.
By the way, they did not "mandate" he use Windows, they simply said that his internet access must be monitored...
And it's their responsibility to actually accomplish that monitoring. They wouldn't install security cameras in one Pizza Hut and then require that he buy every meal there so he can be monitored. This is no different from that.
I would sooner say, "This guy is a motorcycle driver and the monitoring device is only available for cars." So his choice is to not drive for 5 months or get himself a car.
That would be appropriate only if he were a professional motorcycle courier who's job frequently require he drive places not easily accessible by car. It's entirely likely that his OS choice has a non-trivial impact on the effectiveness of his use of the computer for work.
Is it common knowledge in the USA just how much the government / mainstream media warps people's view of the world through carefully constructed propaganda?
Your reaction to that statement is probably about the same as the way a Chinese person of similar political awareness would react to your statement. Actually, if anything, the big difference between a Chinese and American person is acceptance vs. denial.
Sure, but he's done the jail time, and he's not complaining about the probation term at all.
Just because someone has committed a crime does not mean that the government gets to impose arbitrary terms on them without an explicit court ruling. It especially doesn't mean that the government should be mandating specific non-optimal technical choices that interfere the livelyhood of an expert in a technical field.
Mandating Windows to a computer expert so they can be tracked for piracy is like mandating a Chrysler mini-van to a farmer because he beat his wife. Sure, you can carry produce to market in a mini-van, but making the farmer buy a new Chrysler mini-van to replace his perfectly functional Toyota pickup truck is absurd.
People have made this comment on every single thread on this topic everywhere (Slashdot is the third site I've seen this story on), and it's still wrong and (frankly) nonsensical.
The requirement is that they run software that can monitor his computer activities. The complication is that the software is Windows-only so it won't run on his Linux system. Your suggestion accomplishes neither party's goal: It wouldn't let them monitor his computer activity, and it wouldn't let him run Linux as the OS on his machine (he'd have to run Windows, and then screw around, and then maybe run some Linux apps in a VM while still paying for a Windows license and dealing with Windows crap).
It is just me, or a lot of exploits like this. A Thief can gain access to ANYTHING in your house once they are INSIDE! OMFG!
Security systems are designed based on the security properties of the components involved. When a claimed security property of a component is shown to not be real, that is likely to have implications for the security of the entire system - even if that security property, by itself, doesn't seem like a big deal.
Some people have discovered an flaw in the security of this key system. The only immediate attack they have demonstrated as a result of that flaw is the ability to copy a key in about an hour - that's a reduction in the system's security, but not one that matters much by itself. That doesn't tell us how important the flaw itself was though - a more detailed analysis of the security system could reveal other more severe attacks based on this flaw, and if other flaws are discovered they may combine to make better attacks.
I must admit I didn't know about CSP. Did you actually use it and what are you practical experiences with it?
CSP isn't so much a programming tool as a mathematical model. The most well known concurrent programming tool based on it is in Erlang, but there are others. I personally don't get a chance to do that much complex concurrent programming, but from what I have done it looks like a CSP-based concurrency model has the practical effect of abstracting away most of the real problems in concurrent programming - many applications actually become *simpler* to write in an asynchronous concurrent fashion than they would be with an asynchronous event loop or whatever.
This is totally uncalled for. If you are suggesting that multithreading is as easy as correctly releasing the dynamic memory than I must wonder if you have any practical experience with either.
Have you ever tried dealing with dynamic memory in a programming language with neither lexical scopes or a garbage collector? That's pretty similar in difficulty to trying to deal with concurrency with only shared memory and locks.
Memory is just one possible resource that has to be managed in any non-trivial program. Garbage collectors will not save you from releasing other kinds of resources such as file handles, sockets, database cursors etc, and they have their own set of problems (usually performance related such as non-deterministic garbage collection).
Right. Garbage collection only solves the most common resource management issue, not every such issue. Java programmers still need to deal with manually freeing non-memory resources because they can't use lexically-triggered destructors like in C++ - but that doesn't mean that Java's garbage collection isn't a step up on C-style manual memory management in most common cases.
But even with these complications, I fail to see how memory/resource management even approaches multithreading in complexity.
That's because memory management is a mostly-solved problem and you're used to the solutions, while you hadn't even heard of the potential solutions for concurrent programming woes. If you had talked to a Fortran programmer in the late '70's about dynamic memory allocation you probably would have gotten very similar responses to what I'm hearing from you about software concurrency: "Dynamic memory allocation is neat, but it's way too complicated. You'll get memory leaks and non-deterministic bugs depending on how the memory allocator reuses what. Better to just stick to static memory allocation."
Using low cost rockets isn't ground breaking, and in fact in order to have low cost rockets you can't be doing anything cutting edge.
The hell? That's false, dumb, and wrong.
It's true that rockets aren't new, but only very rarely does anyone do anything legitimately interesting with completely new technology.
The fact that he's using rockets isn't groundbreaking, but the details of what he's doing with them very well may be. I'll admit that I don't know the area well enough to say - but I do know that simply having a low budget doesn't mean that you aren't doing groundbreaking engineering, especially in an area like VTVL rockets where *any* work is likely to break new ground.
I dropped out of high school. I can assure you that the thought of possibly getting $1000 if I managed to get all my credits together on time wouldn't have influenced my decision at all. I would have considered staying for $10/hour. Or if I could have gotten a useful and interesting education there.
Government is not the solution to every problem. But it is one of the best solutions we have for problems like educating and keeping out of jail millions of people a year.
As far as I can tell, government is really good at putting people *in* jail. I see no evidence that they can help keep people out of jail.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always get screwed by software patents. If you use *any* software, someone could always come out of the blue and tell you to stop because they have a patent. If anything, licenses like the Apache License 2 and the GPLv3 are *better* than the normal case - because they usually provide you protection from some patents.
As with anything patent related, initiating a patent suit needs to be considered very carefully. Losing a couple patent licenses isn't the only risk there - I'd be much more worried about retaliatory patent suits. If you're messing with patents, you should have a good patent lawyer or four reading every software license (and every contract) that applies to you beforehand rather than assuming that some Slashdot post has summarized your legal obligations in a few words.
No, it just installs a tool that's specifically intended to subvert an OS security mechanism (non-Admin user accounts). That's not a root kit, but it has a lot of the same security issues.
No, seriously. We either want to discourage wasting electricity or we don't. If we do, then people with electric heating systems should be one of our first targets. Maybe we would want to use some of the money raised from this electricity tax to assist people in upgrading their heating systems (and insulation), but saying "we should introduce a tax to reduce electricity usage, but let's start by exempting the largest users" is absurd.
The Neo is neat and all, but you don't even have to be that open to do better than the iPhone.
The iPhone is explicitly designed to create vendor lock-in with AT&T. If you want a fully functional smartphone that is unlocked by default, you can get something like a Nokia Communicator.
In fact, there are great stacks of phones (all generally unavailable from carriers in the US) that are fully functional smart phones that run on industry-standard Symbian (some even on not-fully-open Linux; hell, even Windows Mobile is better than an iPhone) and have such amazing features as being unlocked and supporting 3rd party apps by default.
Here are some more phones to compare the iPhone to:
There are two completely separate cases:
Using Software
With Free Software, this is always allowed. No problem.
With Proprietary software, this can be pretty complicated. Each piece of software has its own license with its own requirements, be it per-user licensing, per-seat licensing, per-CPU licensing, per-year licensing. Better hire a dedicated lawyer to make sure you have all your licenses lined up right.
Modifying/Redistributing Software
With Free Software, this can be pretty complicated. There are a number of licenses - some of which are incompatible with each other. You'll probably want to put some effort into license tracking, or even hire a lawyer if your situation is especially complicated.
With Proprietary software, this is always prohibited. No problem. (unless you screw up somehow, then you're liable for millions in damages.)
You seem to think this is a simple issue. It isn't.
The question of software licensing has been complex and even controversial for decades. That apparently seems silly to you. That might even be a valid conclusion, but you're going to need a much more extensive understanding of the topic before you can convince anyone to agree.
If you're actually interested in understanding the topic so you can discuss it intelligently, I suggest actually reading / watching the following (completely):
Here's a much better plan: First, remove non-renewable energy subsidies. That, by itself, would have more of a beneficial effect on the environmental effects of power consumption than any five "overconsumption" taxes.
Electric heating is, if anything, more wasteful of energy than a crazy gaming rig. Are we trying to discourage wasting electricity here, or to punish people for recreational usage?
If we can convince that pensioner to switch over to gas heating we save quite a bit more energy than we do if the gamer buys an Alienware with only one GeForce 8800 GTX instead of two.
Wrong. Amdahl's Law is a formula that covers optimizing a linear combination of resource usage. Amdahl's Law is frequently talked about in the context of parallel programming, but it applies anywhere where 1.) you want to optimize resource usage and 2.) total resource usage is the sum of the resource usage of a number of discrete components.
You can use Amdahl's Law to prove statements like "if the CPU consumes 20% of the power than cutting it's power consumption in half will make you use 10% less power over all" just as easily as you can use it to prove "if only 20% of the runtime your program can be parallelized, then doubling the number of processors will only give you at most a 10% performance increase".
That would make this situation slightly closer to being reasonable (but still pretty bad). Do you have any evidence that that is really how it works?
That depends what you think their business model is.
Personally, I think the business model of getting Congress to pass a law saying that all music streamed on the internet is subject to a royalty payment to be payed to Sound Exchange - even for music being streamed by the copyright holder or with their direct authorization - is a pretty damn good way to make a profit.
That's not a valid argument, because you could use it to support any arbitrary requirement. They could require him to have sex with a horse on national television and that argument would still work just as well.
In this particular case, requiring that a parolee replace all his software just to enable the use of a specific piece of monitoring software is an unreasonable requirement - unless you can personally demonstrate that either 1.) he doesn't use his computer to any non-trivial extent or 2.) Windows can easily be used as a functional replacement for Linux.
You're assuming he's has no marketable computer skills that are even slightly OS dependent. That's a pretty big assumption. I know that if I found myself unemployed I could make pretty damn good money doing contract programming, and that being forced to use Windows on my desktop would significantly damage that opportunity.
If computer operating systems were really arbitrarily interchangeable, then everyone would be using Linux right now because Windows would be obviously not worth the $100 in comparison.
That'd be great if operating systems were arbitrarily interchangeable. They're not - unless you want to prove me wrong by switching to OS/2 Warp for all your computing needs for the next 5 months.
Like I said before, that plan accomplishes none of the goals of any party involved.
The monitoring program will record no useful surveying information since it's designed to survey local network traffic (and application usage) rather than to monitor as a router / proxy. It would probably produce almost no useful information, but even if it produced some information the law enforcement people would still (rightfully) consider it to be an attempt at evading the monitoring.
It also wouldn't provide many of the benefits of running Linux. Not only would it require him to run a copy of Windows, with all the cost, performance, and stability issues that that entails, but virtualizing an OS is simply not the same as running it on a machine directly for desktop use. Performance and hardware support would both be really bad - sure, you'll say that those things don't matter or can be worked around, and that sounds great until he tries to do something simple like run a video game he had installed or plug in his USB headseat microphone.
Which fits completely with what I said.
That's great. If that were the terms, then it wouldn't be terribly arbitrary. Mandating operating system *is* an arbitrary term (regardless of their excuse), and as such it has no place as a probation requirement without the explicit consent of a judge.
And it's their responsibility to actually accomplish that monitoring. They wouldn't install security cameras in one Pizza Hut and then require that he buy every meal there so he can be monitored. This is no different from that.
That would be appropriate only if he were a professional motorcycle courier who's job frequently require he drive places not easily accessible by car. It's entirely likely that his OS choice has a non-trivial impact on the effectiveness of his use of the computer for work.
Is it common knowledge in the USA just how much the government / mainstream media warps people's view of the world through carefully constructed propaganda?
Your reaction to that statement is probably about the same as the way a Chinese person of similar political awareness would react to your statement. Actually, if anything, the big difference between a Chinese and American person is acceptance vs. denial.
Sure, but he's done the jail time, and he's not complaining about the probation term at all.
Just because someone has committed a crime does not mean that the government gets to impose arbitrary terms on them without an explicit court ruling. It especially doesn't mean that the government should be mandating specific non-optimal technical choices that interfere the livelyhood of an expert in a technical field.
Mandating Windows to a computer expert so they can be tracked for piracy is like mandating a Chrysler mini-van to a farmer because he beat his wife. Sure, you can carry produce to market in a mini-van, but making the farmer buy a new Chrysler mini-van to replace his perfectly functional Toyota pickup truck is absurd.
People have made this comment on every single thread on this topic everywhere (Slashdot is the third site I've seen this story on), and it's still wrong and (frankly) nonsensical.
The requirement is that they run software that can monitor his computer activities. The complication is that the software is Windows-only so it won't run on his Linux system. Your suggestion accomplishes neither party's goal: It wouldn't let them monitor his computer activity, and it wouldn't let him run Linux as the OS on his machine (he'd have to run Windows, and then screw around, and then maybe run some Linux apps in a VM while still paying for a Windows license and dealing with Windows crap).
Security systems are designed based on the security properties of the components involved. When a claimed security property of a component is shown to not be real, that is likely to have implications for the security of the entire system - even if that security property, by itself, doesn't seem like a big deal.
Some people have discovered an flaw in the security of this key system. The only immediate attack they have demonstrated as a result of that flaw is the ability to copy a key in about an hour - that's a reduction in the system's security, but not one that matters much by itself. That doesn't tell us how important the flaw itself was though - a more detailed analysis of the security system could reveal other more severe attacks based on this flaw, and if other flaws are discovered they may combine to make better attacks.
CSP isn't so much a programming tool as a mathematical model. The most well known concurrent programming tool based on it is in Erlang, but there are others. I personally don't get a chance to do that much complex concurrent programming, but from what I have done it looks like a CSP-based concurrency model has the practical effect of abstracting away most of the real problems in concurrent programming - many applications actually become *simpler* to write in an asynchronous concurrent fashion than they would be with an asynchronous event loop or whatever.
Have you ever tried dealing with dynamic memory in a programming language with neither lexical scopes or a garbage collector? That's pretty similar in difficulty to trying to deal with concurrency with only shared memory and locks.
Right. Garbage collection only solves the most common resource management issue, not every such issue. Java programmers still need to deal with manually freeing non-memory resources because they can't use lexically-triggered destructors like in C++ - but that doesn't mean that Java's garbage collection isn't a step up on C-style manual memory management in most common cases.
That's because memory management is a mostly-solved problem and you're used to the solutions, while you hadn't even heard of the potential solutions for concurrent programming woes. If you had talked to a Fortran programmer in the late '70's about dynamic memory allocation you probably would have gotten very similar responses to what I'm hearing from you about software concurrency: "Dynamic memory allocation is neat, but it's way too complicated. You'll get memory leaks and non-deterministic bugs depending on how the memory allocator reuses what. Better to just stick to static memory allocation."
I'd suggest watching this video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8102320126 17965344 - it shows some example programs written in a CSP-based imperative concurrent programming language.
The hell? That's false, dumb, and wrong.
It's true that rockets aren't new, but only very rarely does anyone do anything legitimately interesting with completely new technology.
The fact that he's using rockets isn't groundbreaking, but the details of what he's doing with them very well may be. I'll admit that I don't know the area well enough to say - but I do know that simply having a low budget doesn't mean that you aren't doing groundbreaking engineering, especially in an area like VTVL rockets where *any* work is likely to break new ground.
I dropped out of high school. I can assure you that the thought of possibly getting $1000 if I managed to get all my credits together on time wouldn't have influenced my decision at all. I would have considered staying for $10/hour. Or if I could have gotten a useful and interesting education there.
As far as I can tell, government is really good at putting people *in* jail. I see no evidence that they can help keep people out of jail.