This thread is really about misuse of cookies, but the problem would be less severe if cookies were used less often in the first place. I wonder if they're being used as a universal panacea in areas where they're not really necessary.
What are the viable alternatives to cookies, at least for some applications? Are there any good web resources that discuss this kind of thing and offer means of avoiding cookie-based solutions?
DVD Audio would be doomed to failure if everything else were to stay the same in the music scene, but it won't.
The reason it won't is that, after being stung by MP3, studios will "encourage" artists to publish on DVD Audio once it's available, because of the extra encryption. Of course we all know that that won't help them one iota against MP3, but they'll do it anyway as it'll give their single collective brain cell a good feeling of accomplishment.
As a result though, pressed music will progressively migrate to DVD, especially since there won't be many plain CD players left because the majority of hifi manufacturers will use DVD drives instead of CD drives as soon as the price difference drops sufficiently. They'll do that because product differentiation is the name of the game, and then where one leads the others have to follow in order to stay competitive in the market.
I think you're right about the awakening desire for technology to serve us without strings attached, but alas only very few people seem to take such a philosophical view of the technology, even among techies. (Increasingly, it's just "cool":-) Despite that, what you describe does seem to be happening. It's not yet a recognized meme though; possibly all that is lacking is a name by which the media can get a handle on it.
A related view is that of empowerment of the individual, the PC seen as an extension of one's arm. It's not often used in the context of any gadgets other than computers, but X10-style home automation falls easily into the same pigeon hole, and a/v or hifi equipment is often linked up quite comprehensively in modern homes. They are indeed an extension of one's arm, quite literally in the case of remote controls.
However, I don't see any sign whatsoever that either philosophy or practice are heading in this direction outside of the techie sphere. Non-tech people are as oblivious as ever to how things work, or possibly even more so than ever since the replacement of analogue by digital has made things even more obscure for them. And since they form by far the larger part of the population, I doubt that the emergence of a new awareness among techies is going to make manufacturers deviate in the slightest from their self-centred plans.
At the end of the day, the only way in which we're going to obtain technology that serves our own needs exclusively is by creating it ourselves. Free software, Linux, the MP3 scene and Internet radio, www/ftp and the largest repository of information on the planet, none of these were created by commercial entities. It's down to us alone to make the world as we want it.
Don't worry about foreign markets, they're doing just fine riding the wave of region 1 (ie. US) DVD. (I'm in the UK, which is in region 2).
Regionalization is pure evil, and R2 versions of R1 material are particularly bad: the result is sometimes sub-standard in quality, often has fewer extra features, and to cap it all, sometimes R2 versions come out as flippers when the R1 version is dual-layer.
Needless to say, lots of people in R2 are very annoyed at this situation and about regionalization in general, so it's common to hear about DVD fans boycotting region 2 altogether and buying R1 DVDs exclusively. That's what I do, and I make sure that dealers know that this is going on so that they invest more in R2 stock.
Furthermore, everyone I know buys only region-free or region-cracked players. People aren't stupid, and they're not the sheep that the studios would like them to be.
If this means that native DVD markets will not flourish, that's excellent news. Regionalization deserves to die.
You write: The inclusion of such things is not part of the Apple image and it's just a dictate that it shouldn't be in there.
But that's precisely the point: the management has, for no good reason, raised the importance of image over the importance they attach to their technical staff, even if it is in respect of such a small thing as a credit.
When a company ceases to value its people, it's on a hiding to nothing, a slippery slope, and a mixing of metaphors.:-)
Rubbish. You are in effect saying that techies should put up with crap and like it. Are you a PHB yourself?
There are two main reasons for a skilled technical person to stay in one place in this time of plenty, and those are the people with whom he or she works, and job satisfaction. Sure, you can almost certainly get more money elsewhere, but abandoning one's colleagues (usually good friends) is only for those that like you say are only in it for the money, and that's rarely the main consideration.
But if you're in it for job satisfaction and for the people, and some of those people (eg. petty policy managers) show less and less appreciation for what you do and your job satisfaction drops, what then? Heck, maybe you still stay if you're in it just for the money, but if not then abandon those that have abandoned you instead of wasting your life just to line someone else's pocket..
That's typical in a corporation that has lost contact with its roots and no longer values its engineers.
The best advice when that happens is: abandon ship. There are plenty of companies out there that value technical work sufficiently to offer credit where credit is due.
The trouble with your argument is that the WTO is about as divorced from the concept of free trade as one could possibly be.
Its main concern is to disallow free trade by forcing its own view on how trade should be conducted in the world. That's not free. Free means unregulated not just by politicians but also by cartels and trade pressure groups, and that's total anathema to the WTO. Its primary goal is the exact opposite.
Feedback of this sort is an essential part of our socio-political system, because there is no other mechanism available by which the actions of political and economic institutions can be controlled in a democratic way.
So-called representative democracy is nothing of the sort, because there is no opportunity to influence individual issues through the election sledgehammer, and in any event only candidates that follow the approved line get the funding that's needed to get anywhere in politics these days. In any case, one day of democracy every five years is a joke.
In the absence of any official feedback mechanism, people have to protest to get their points across, and in this media-led world, a peaceful protest just doesn't get on the news. At the very least it's got to create a disturbance or nuisance of some variety to be reported.
Well, so be it. If the politicians in their comfy rose-tinted world don't provide any better way for the populace to express itself and to get things changed by due process, then people will take to the streets. It's that simple.
I bet that they never get the message though. That would require a clue. Nah, far easier just to send out the riot police to control it.
That's an interesting point. It makes me wonder though whether there isn't already a group making that territory its own, ie. effectively presenting the view of the Founding Fathers on relevant issues in the US today. Advocacy rules OK of course, but is there a group with enough pedigree to make government take notice? It seems not, given what we see reported so frequently.
Leaving aside reincarnation for the moment (it's probably been patented anyway), serious representation of FF views could probably be achieved by proxy if a sufficient number of learned scholars put their minds, time and money to it. However, in practice this would mean pitting oneself against the establishment, and what learned scholar is going to do that?
The annoying thing about cluelessness in government and government agencies is that, theoretically, these people are working for us, as our servents (civil), and we're paying their wages for doing the tedious admin that we want done but that would bore us silly if we had to do it ourselves.
Alas, in reality they do whatever they want, without any democratic direction whatsoever, as Slashdot and a myriad of other news outlets are highlighting almost daily. One has to ask, metaphorically, is their Berlin Wall going to come crashing down around them now that the citizenry has instant global communications and hence the means to show their actions for what they really are?
I've probably just misunderstood you, but if I did then others might have as well, so making the question a little more encouraging and positive might help.
"The Unix space" was a reference to that subset of all operating system facilities that is traditionally accepted as describing Unix (and therefore also Linux). As the HURD website makes clear, it is a primary goal of the HURD to provide functionality that is outside of that subset, ie. to offer more powerful facilities and mechanisms than are available in the Unix model. By design then, the HURD would be expected to surpass Linux in a variety of areas, which is why a more positive form of the question seemed appropriate.
You might like Exim then. The requirement you stated can be configured directly in its wonderfully clear yet powerful configuration language, without needing any additional code.
All the newer MTAs are better than sendmail, largely because sendmail was the reference and they were developed purposely to be better than sendmail.
Exim, qmail, zmailer, postfix and smail are probably the five best known, and the first three in the list are used extremely widely in mega ISPs all over the world. So is sendmail, but that's changing as sysadmins discover that alternatives to it exist.
The improvement achieved by switching from sendmail to a more modern MTA can be massive: eg. when we converted our systems from sendmail to Exim some 3 years ago, the throughput increased by a factor of 10, and that was without any optimization.
Sendmail has nothing *technical* going for it. It's used a lot merely because it comes pre-installed on virtually every Unix system, which of course is exactly the same reason why most people use Windows on PCs. It's not a particularly good reason.
Sendmail has had its decades of usefulness. Many very bright people have worked very hard for years at producing MTAs that are better than sendmail in numerous respects. The top three replacement MTAs (**in_alphabetic_order** Exim, qmail and zmailer) have a superb track record and are in use all over the net running the mail exchangers and delivery back ends for multi-million customer ISPs. They are also easy to use and configure on single-user workstations. There is no reason not to use them.
Of course, people do like to use whatever system they are currently used to, and that's why most people currently run Windows. Despite that, we try to overcome their inertia and show them that there is a better technology available.
Let's do the same for sendmail. It served us well in its day, but since there is no *technical* reason left for anyone to prefer sendmail over the newer MTAs, let's relegate it to the annals of history at long last. Its use should be deprecated.
This is an important question to ask, but it needs to be restated in a way that doesn't sound like a barely disguised attack from a Linux zealot. How about something like:
Since you are working on both Linux (established) and the HURD (experimental), what new mechanisms, facilities or areas do you see the HURD opening up in future years beyond the Unix space that is covered by Linux?
The whole area of concern about clients being compromised to return incorrect results stems from the meme-setting effect of dedicated clients like rc5des, seti@home and (it seems) all others currently in existence. Their susceptibility to being cracked and reworked is entirely due to the dedicated nature of their task, as it gives nasty-minded people a visible target.
The problem would not arise if distributed clients were generic, ie. if they would do arbitrary computations on arbitrary data received from arbitrary sources. In other words, if a global distributed computing system accepted numerous different computational tasks from the public and distributed interleaved fragments of them arbitrarily to an undifferentiated pool of clients, it would no longer be possible for clients to be compromised meaningfully. (Clients would really just be maths engines, and you'd be detected pretty quick if your client made 2+2=5.)
Would there be interest in creating such a global computing system as a free software / open source project?
[Note that pretty single-task stats displays would still be available from the task sponsers' site, but that's a completely separate issue to the one of data distribution and computation.]
Well, if you do decide to hold such classes then be sure to let us know. If it's anywhere near Cambridge then that means a 2-hour commute for me, but it would be well worth it -- this is an extremely important area.
I sure hope that what you have in mind is evening classes though, as otherwise you'll get just the unemployed to attend, which would be limiting.
I'm surprised that the US in particular hasn't done anything to reduce the most glaring anti-competitive aspects of patenting. Doesn't the free market lobby have anything to say on the topic?
Patents have always been intended to reduce competition for a limited period, so that inventors have an opportunity to bring their research to market during a sort of protected honeymoon period, but in practice that no longer works very well in the modern world. It's all to do with timescales: in the computer age and with instant global communications, timescales for everything are shrinking, and in some areas an advantage period for the patent holder of more than say just a couple of years is starting to become inappropriate, a restraint on progress, development and trade. Although it's impossible to tell what might have been, who knows which entire market sectors might have developed if their pivotal idea hadn't been tied down by patents.
Be that as it may, it's rare for a week to pass without totally ridiculous patents being highlighted here, and the analogy with icebergs definitely applies -- there's vastly more out there that we don't see on Slashdot. The whole area is clearly in utter shambles and needs urgent review.
A "fix" doesn't have to be complicated. As far as I can see, just three things are needed: a ban on patenting algorithms (as enforced elsewhere); a short, strict and non-extensible time limit (possibly related to the field, eg. default 2-3 years but longer in the nuclear power arena, for instance); and an informal "public review" system not unlike Slashdot, run by the patent office and used both to supply niche information and also to weed out the type of nonsense that translates into "how to breathe air".
But of course, something that simple could never come about, because otherwise patent lawyers would be out of a job. Oh well.
Thank goodness for that. If the universe had come out closed then the IRS would eventually have introduced a "no time limit" law on the grounds that anyone that escaped would eventually have to come back.
Of course Microsoft doesn't fix such user-discovered bugs. To do so would require a maintenance section of a size that would utterly dwarf their current one (which would be hugely expensive but they could probably just about afford it) hooked into such an astronomically gigantic, world-wide, all-embracing end-user support organization (at a totally unimaginable cost) that it would make the corporation entirely unviable. Support is extraordinarily expensive even in conventional quantities, and here we're not talking conventional.
Microsoft is rich merely because they have never provided customer support in the same order of magnitude as the size of their end-user population. Indeed, there aren't enough techies on the planet for them to do this even if they employed every single one, IMO, and this is also why it's virtually unheard-of to run into anyone that has successfully managed to contact their helpdesk (in UK circles, at least). Ask any large traditional software manufacturer (ie. not free or open-source) which their single largest expenditure is if you don't believe me, and then extrapolate to Microsoft proportions taking into account the number of their products.
The really weird thing though is that people have accepted the situation as the norm now, despite the fact that they wouldn't dream of letting any other manufacturer off the hook in this way. Most odd.
So, somebody on that Debian list is your typical paparazzi and someone in Slashdot is your typical sensation-seeking news editor. Doesn't that just make one feel all warm and fuzzy?;-(
What annoys me more though is that people are making silly interpretations of the GPL instead of examining Corel's stuff. I would have thought that the relevant statement in the GPL was clear enough: 'You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.' How can that leave any doubt that there is no requirement in the GPL for contractual binding, since the GPL is not a contract binding its signatories but a legal copying and distribution constraint binding the software, and that therefore contract law is irrelevant? And as if that weren't enough, anyone with half a clue can see that games licenses do not lose validity when games are sold to minors, else the games industry would be in utter shambles. So what is there to discuss? About the GPL, nothing as far as I can see.
But about the EULA there's plenty to discuss so let's discuss it, without throwing irrelevant contractual nonsense about the GPL into the works.
That's rubbish, because if it were true then minors wouldn't be bound by the licenses in shrink-wrapped games either.
Now just go and ask games manufacturers whether their licensing binds minors as well. I don't think you'll find any disagreement or hesitation in their answers.
Slashdot Mirror
This thread is really about misuse of cookies, but the problem would be less severe if cookies were used less often in the first place. I wonder if they're being used as a universal panacea in areas where they're not really necessary.
What are the viable alternatives to cookies, at least for some applications? Are there any good web resources that discuss this kind of thing and offer means of avoiding cookie-based solutions?
DVD Audio would be doomed to failure if everything else were to stay the same in the music scene, but it won't.
The reason it won't is that, after being stung by MP3, studios will "encourage" artists to publish on DVD Audio once it's available, because of the extra encryption. Of course we all know that that won't help them one iota against MP3, but they'll do it anyway as it'll give their single collective brain cell a good feeling of accomplishment.
As a result though, pressed music will progressively migrate to DVD, especially since there won't be many plain CD players left because the majority of hifi manufacturers will use DVD drives instead of CD drives as soon as the price difference drops sufficiently. They'll do that because product differentiation is the name of the game, and then where one leads the others have to follow in order to stay competitive in the market.
I think you're right about the awakening desire for technology to serve us without strings attached, but alas only very few people seem to take such a philosophical view of the technology, even among techies. (Increasingly, it's just "cool" :-) Despite that, what you describe does seem to be happening. It's not yet a recognized meme though; possibly all that is lacking is a name by which the media can get a handle on it.
A related view is that of empowerment of the individual, the PC seen as an extension of one's arm. It's not often used in the context of any gadgets other than computers, but X10-style home automation falls easily into the same pigeon hole, and a/v or hifi equipment is often linked up quite comprehensively in modern homes. They are indeed an extension of one's arm, quite literally in the case of remote controls.
However, I don't see any sign whatsoever that either philosophy or practice are heading in this direction outside of the techie sphere. Non-tech people are as oblivious as ever to how things work, or possibly even more so than ever since the replacement of analogue by digital has made things even more obscure for them. And since they form by far the larger part of the population, I doubt that the emergence of a new awareness among techies is going to make manufacturers deviate in the slightest from their self-centred plans.
At the end of the day, the only way in which we're going to obtain technology that serves our own needs exclusively is by creating it ourselves. Free software, Linux, the MP3 scene and Internet radio, www/ftp and the largest repository of information on the planet, none of these were created by commercial entities. It's down to us alone to make the world as we want it.
"R2 stock" as written didn't make any sense anyway.
Don't worry about foreign markets, they're doing just fine riding the wave of region 1 (ie. US) DVD. (I'm in the UK, which is in region 2).
Regionalization is pure evil, and R2 versions of R1 material are particularly bad: the result is sometimes sub-standard in quality, often has fewer extra features, and to cap it all, sometimes R2 versions come out as flippers when the R1 version is dual-layer.
Needless to say, lots of people in R2 are very annoyed at this situation and about regionalization in general, so it's common to hear about DVD fans boycotting region 2 altogether and buying R1 DVDs exclusively. That's what I do, and I make sure that dealers know that this is going on so that they invest more in R2 stock.
Furthermore, everyone I know buys only region-free or region-cracked players. People aren't stupid, and they're not the sheep that the studios would like them to be.
If this means that native DVD markets will not flourish, that's excellent news. Regionalization deserves to die.
You write: The inclusion of such things is not part of the Apple image and it's just a dictate that it shouldn't be in there.
:-)
But that's precisely the point: the management has, for no good reason, raised the importance of image over the importance they attach to their technical staff, even if it is in respect of such a small thing as a credit.
When a company ceases to value its people, it's on a hiding to nothing, a slippery slope, and a mixing of metaphors.
Rubbish. You are in effect saying that techies should put up with crap and like it. Are you a PHB yourself?
There are two main reasons for a skilled technical person to stay in one place in this time of plenty, and those are the people with whom he or she works, and job satisfaction. Sure, you can almost certainly get more money elsewhere, but abandoning one's colleagues (usually good friends) is only for those that like you say are only in it for the money, and that's rarely the main consideration.
But if you're in it for job satisfaction and for the people, and some of those people (eg. petty policy managers) show less and less appreciation for what you do and your job satisfaction drops, what then? Heck, maybe you still stay if you're in it just for the money, but if not then abandon those that have abandoned you instead of wasting your life just to line someone else's pocket..
That's typical in a corporation that has lost contact with its roots and no longer values its engineers.
The best advice when that happens is: abandon ship. There are plenty of companies out there that value technical work sufficiently to offer credit where credit is due.
The trouble with your argument is that the WTO is about as divorced from the concept of free trade as one could possibly be.
Its main concern is to disallow free trade by forcing its own view on how trade should be conducted in the world. That's not free. Free means unregulated not just by politicians but also by cartels and trade pressure groups, and that's total anathema to the WTO. Its primary goal is the exact opposite.
Amnesty International condemns the lack of serious discussion about relevant human rights issues at WTO talks.
Feedback of this sort is an essential part of our socio-political system, because there is no other mechanism available by which the actions of political and economic institutions can be controlled in a democratic way.
So-called representative democracy is nothing of the sort, because there is no opportunity to influence individual issues through the election sledgehammer, and in any event only candidates that follow the approved line get the funding that's needed to get anywhere in politics these days. In any case, one day of democracy every five years is a joke.
In the absence of any official feedback mechanism, people have to protest to get their points across, and in this media-led world, a peaceful protest just doesn't get on the news. At the very least it's got to create a disturbance or nuisance of some variety to be reported.
Well, so be it. If the politicians in their comfy rose-tinted world don't provide any better way for the populace to express itself and to get things changed by due process, then people will take to the streets. It's that simple.
I bet that they never get the message though. That would require a clue. Nah, far easier just to send out the riot police to control it.
That's an interesting point. It makes me wonder though whether there isn't already a group making that territory its own, ie. effectively presenting the view of the Founding Fathers on relevant issues in the US today. Advocacy rules OK of course, but is there a group with enough pedigree to make government take notice? It seems not, given what we see reported so frequently.
Leaving aside reincarnation for the moment (it's probably been patented anyway), serious representation of FF views could probably be achieved by proxy if a sufficient number of learned scholars put their minds, time and money to it. However, in practice this would mean pitting oneself against the establishment, and what learned scholar is going to do that?
The annoying thing about cluelessness in government and government agencies is that, theoretically, these people are working for us, as our servents (civil), and we're paying their wages for doing the tedious admin that we want done but that would bore us silly if we had to do it ourselves.
Alas, in reality they do whatever they want, without any democratic direction whatsoever, as Slashdot and a myriad of other news outlets are highlighting almost daily. One has to ask, metaphorically, is their Berlin Wall going to come crashing down around them now that the citizenry has instant global communications and hence the means to show their actions for what they really are?
I've probably just misunderstood you, but if I did then others might have as well, so making the question a little more encouraging and positive might help.
"The Unix space" was a reference to that subset of all operating system facilities that is traditionally accepted as describing Unix (and therefore also Linux). As the HURD website makes clear, it is a primary goal of the HURD to provide functionality that is outside of that subset, ie. to offer more powerful facilities and mechanisms than are available in the Unix model. By design then, the HURD would be expected to surpass Linux in a variety of areas, which is why a more positive form of the question seemed appropriate.
You might like Exim then. The requirement you stated can be configured directly in its wonderfully clear yet powerful configuration language, without needing any additional code.
All the newer MTAs are better than sendmail, largely because sendmail was the reference and they were developed purposely to be better than sendmail.
Exim, qmail, zmailer, postfix and smail are probably the five best known, and the first three in the list are used extremely widely in mega ISPs all over the world. So is sendmail, but that's changing as sysadmins discover that alternatives to it exist.
The improvement achieved by switching from sendmail to a more modern MTA can be massive: eg. when we converted our systems from sendmail to Exim some 3 years ago, the throughput increased by a factor of 10, and that was without any optimization.
Sendmail has nothing *technical* going for it. It's used a lot merely because it comes pre-installed on virtually every Unix system, which of course is exactly the same reason why most people use Windows on PCs. It's not a particularly good reason.
Sendmail has had its decades of usefulness. Many very bright people have worked very hard for years at producing MTAs that are better than sendmail in numerous respects. The top three replacement MTAs (**in_alphabetic_order** Exim, qmail and zmailer) have a superb track record and are in use all over the net running the mail exchangers and delivery back ends for multi-million customer ISPs. They are also easy to use and configure on single-user workstations. There is no reason not to use them.
Of course, people do like to use whatever system they are currently used to, and that's why most people currently run Windows. Despite that, we try to overcome their inertia and show them that there is a better technology available.
Let's do the same for sendmail. It served us well in its day, but since there is no *technical* reason left for anyone to prefer sendmail over the newer MTAs, let's relegate it to the annals of history at long last. Its use should be deprecated.
This is an important question to ask, but it needs to be restated in a way that doesn't sound like a barely disguised attack from a Linux zealot. How about something like:
Since you are working on both Linux (established) and the HURD (experimental), what new mechanisms, facilities or areas do you see the HURD opening up in future years beyond the Unix space that is covered by Linux?
The whole area of concern about clients being compromised to return incorrect results stems from the meme-setting effect of dedicated clients like rc5des, seti@home and (it seems) all others currently in existence. Their susceptibility to being cracked and reworked is entirely due to the dedicated nature of their task, as it gives nasty-minded people a visible target.
The problem would not arise if distributed clients were generic, ie. if they would do arbitrary computations on arbitrary data received from arbitrary sources. In other words, if a global distributed computing system accepted numerous different computational tasks from the public and distributed interleaved fragments of them arbitrarily to an undifferentiated pool of clients, it would no longer be possible for clients to be compromised meaningfully. (Clients would really just be maths engines, and you'd be detected pretty quick if your client made 2+2=5.)
Would there be interest in creating such a global computing system as a free software / open source project?
[Note that pretty single-task stats displays would still be available from the task sponsers' site, but that's a completely separate issue to the one of data distribution and computation.]
Well, if you do decide to hold such classes then be sure to let us know. If it's anywhere near Cambridge then that means a 2-hour commute for me, but it would be well worth it -- this is an extremely important area.
I sure hope that what you have in mind is evening classes though, as otherwise you'll get just the unemployed to attend, which would be limiting.
Sounds like an excellent project!
I'm surprised that the US in particular hasn't done anything to reduce the most glaring anti-competitive aspects of patenting. Doesn't the free market lobby have anything to say on the topic?
Patents have always been intended to reduce competition for a limited period, so that inventors have an opportunity to bring their research to market during a sort of protected honeymoon period, but in practice that no longer works very well in the modern world. It's all to do with timescales: in the computer age and with instant global communications, timescales for everything are shrinking, and in some areas an advantage period for the patent holder of more than say just a couple of years is starting to become inappropriate, a restraint on progress, development and trade. Although it's impossible to tell what might have been, who knows which entire market sectors might have developed if their pivotal idea hadn't been tied down by patents.
Be that as it may, it's rare for a week to pass without totally ridiculous patents being highlighted here, and the analogy with icebergs definitely applies -- there's vastly more out there that we don't see on Slashdot. The whole area is clearly in utter shambles and needs urgent review.
A "fix" doesn't have to be complicated. As far as I can see, just three things are needed: a ban on patenting algorithms (as enforced elsewhere); a short, strict and non-extensible time limit (possibly related to the field, eg. default 2-3 years but longer in the nuclear power arena, for instance); and an informal "public review" system not unlike Slashdot, run by the patent office and used both to supply niche information and also to weed out the type of nonsense that translates into "how to breathe air".
But of course, something that simple could never come about, because otherwise patent lawyers would be out of a job. Oh well.
Thank goodness for that. If the universe had come out closed then the IRS would eventually have introduced a "no time limit" law on the grounds that anyone that escaped would eventually have to come back.
Of course Microsoft doesn't fix such user-discovered bugs. To do so would require a maintenance section of a size that would utterly dwarf their current one (which would be hugely expensive but they could probably just about afford it) hooked into such an astronomically gigantic, world-wide, all-embracing end-user support organization (at a totally unimaginable cost) that it would make the corporation entirely unviable. Support is extraordinarily expensive even in conventional quantities, and here we're not talking conventional.
Microsoft is rich merely because they have never provided customer support in the same order of magnitude as the size of their end-user population. Indeed, there aren't enough techies on the planet for them to do this even if they employed every single one, IMO, and this is also why it's virtually unheard-of to run into anyone that has successfully managed to contact their helpdesk (in UK circles, at least). Ask any large traditional software manufacturer (ie. not free or open-source) which their single largest expenditure is if you don't believe me, and then extrapolate to Microsoft proportions taking into account the number of their products.
The really weird thing though is that people have accepted the situation as the norm now, despite the fact that they wouldn't dream of letting any other manufacturer off the hook in this way. Most odd.
So, somebody on that Debian list is your typical paparazzi and someone in Slashdot is your typical sensation-seeking news editor. Doesn't that just make one feel all warm and fuzzy? ;-(
What annoys me more though is that people are making silly interpretations of the GPL instead of examining Corel's stuff. I would have thought that the relevant statement in the GPL was clear enough: 'You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.' How can that leave any doubt that there is no requirement in the GPL for contractual binding, since the GPL is not a contract binding its signatories but a legal copying and distribution constraint binding the software, and that therefore contract law is irrelevant? And as if that weren't enough, anyone with half a clue can see that games licenses do not lose validity when games are sold to minors, else the games industry would be in utter shambles. So what is there to discuss? About the GPL, nothing as far as I can see.
But about the EULA there's plenty to discuss so let's discuss it, without throwing irrelevant contractual nonsense about the GPL into the works.
That's rubbish, because if it were true then minors wouldn't be bound by the licenses in shrink-wrapped games either.
Now just go and ask games manufacturers whether their licensing binds minors as well. I don't think you'll find any disagreement or hesitation in their answers.