It makes it much easier to process programmatically if you have the names with no spaces and all lower case...you can then more easily use regular expressions, etc. to test for and find things.
So you are proposing that we don't use names with spaces etc., simply because your tools and languages make it awkward to support them properly? That's awful.
Of course, it's not just spaces. It's also names starting with a dash, names containing certain "special" characters (like "*"), and so on. Of course, the set of "bad" names depends on the tools you are calling. (Funny aside: did you know that GNU tar magically and unpredictably barfs on file names with a ":" in them, because it happens to interpret them as hostnames?) And you never know in advance when a tool will barf on some filename or interpret it in some strange way - which causes all those lovely security problems.
So the Unix way - tying programs together in some hacky, semantically ill-defined way - is in serious need of replacement. It may have been sufficient in 1979, but let's not pretend that no advances beyond the Unix model are possible.
The fact remains that after you've seen through all the marketing hype, XML remains inappropriate for many tasks, and configuration files are right at the top of the list.
In fact, it's the opposite: XML makes a lot of sense for configuration files. For instance, suppose that you need to write a script that automatically adds a line to/etc/X11/xorg.conf or a similar configuration file. If a file like that is in XML, this is trivial: you can write a XSL transformation or use any of a billion tools to apply the change in a correct way. But if it's in some ad-hoc file format (as it is right now), you either have to write a parser and unparser (which would have been unnecessary if it had been in XML; and how do you know for sure that your code is entirely correct?) or use some hacky combination of sed/grep/etc. to perform the change (which is, alas, the "Unix way"). The latter will of course fail unpredictably in lots of cases. E.g., are you handling those sections correctly? Comments? What if the line was already present? And so on.
Of course, XML is a horribly bulky format. But who cares? It's not like configuration files will take up a lot of disk space either way. The important thing is to have a universal standard format that can be easily manipulated using standard tools so that you don't have to implement parsers and printers all the time or approximate them using broken sed/grep hacks.
Well, 20 years ago, you'd have said the exact same thing about Japan.
People keep making the comparison to Japan in the 1980s, but it's rather misguided. Japan has less than half the population of the US. China on the other hand has more than 4 times the population of the US (and India is similarly gigantic). It is hard to see how, in the long run, the US can maintain the relative world dominance that it now enjoys.
"Small" countries (which the US is compared to China and India) can sometimes, by accident of history, obtain superpower status for a short while, e.g., the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. But eventually the bigger players will catch up with them.
What the hell is it with this unelected bunch of goons? First they do their level best to introduce patents across the EU, despite the will of the (elected) parliament, now they're sticking their noses into another area they know bugger all about.
You seem to be confused about how the EU works. The commission only proposes legislation. But nothing happens unless the Council agrees with it. That means a sizeable majority of the governments of the member states. So if bad legislation is passed in the EU, you should probably be complaining to your own government.
Of course, the same ministers who approve things in the Council then turn around and tell their peoples that unpopular decisions are "Europe's" fault, thus covering their own asses.
And they wonder why people across the EU are jumping at the chance to say NO to the EU constitution, which cements the Commission into place...
The Commission has existed in this form since 1967 or so. I'd say it's quite "cemented" already. And the rejection of the constitution means that its current powers stay exactly the same.
How on earth did we get this bunch of cretins foisted upon us
Probably because our respective democratically elected parliaments decided to join the EU.
and why aren't we the people of the EC allowed to say "actually, no, we don't want them, we never have"?
Spare me the victim mentality. You're not living in North Korea. You have elections, you know.
Nonsense. European law is already binding on "formerly sovereign" member states (and has been since 1963). The EU constitution actually would have shifted more power towards the European Parliament, which would have made a fiasco like the patent thing less likely.
I think that the defeat of the constitution was a huge mistake. It kind of dooms Europe to less relevance on the world stage and years of stagnation.
GCC did not get an "anti-SCO" clause, as that would be incompatible with the GPL. They did consider dropping support for SCO from the compiler, but eventually decided not to take action.
The poster needs to have his humour detector adjusted. It should be obvious that Tierney is not quite serious about the death penalty. It's more than a bit tongue-in-cheek. Quote from the article:
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
The hardware? You mean because Apple takes a ton of commonly sold components and puts them together in their fancy boxes? Just like Dell and HP do? You mean because they've spearheaded most of the now commonly-used device interface standards?
Ugh. What a complete red herring. Yes, a Mac is built from off-the-shelf components. What does that mean for me as a user? Suppose I like Mac OS X, but the hardware is too expensive for me, or doesn't meet my specific requirements, etc. Where can I go to get a competing piece of hardware to run my Mac applications on?
Likewise for the software. Sure, if your applications are all just pure console programs, you can typically run them on your favorite Unix clone. But the real value of Macs for many users lies in the graphical Mac-specific applications, and for those you are tied to the proprietary bits of Mac OS.
Truth is, with Windows you get software lock-in, but at least the hardware is an open market. With Macs, you get both software and hardware lock-in.
(And yes, I am a Mac user. But let's not pretend that the Apple world is so wonderfully open.)
While anything allocated on the stack will be destroyed when an exception is thrown, any resources allocated during execution will leak (ex: handles or memory allocated on the heap).
Wow, this is stunningly wrong. That's what destructors are for - they will free any resources that your local objects allocated/acquired. That's the resource acquisition is initialisation paradigm, and it ensures that resources are always freed when you leave a scope. This is contrary to using a goto for error handling, where you still have to be careful that every execution path goes through the cleanup code. And of course, how are you going to ensure that some future maintainer doesn't add a "return" somewhere, bypassing your cleanup code altogether?
This is one of the really nice features of C++, by the way. It's much cleaner than finally blocks.
It is expensive and time-consuming. That's why journals like JACS, JOC, Tetrahedron, etc. are respected so widely: the research in them is rock-solid and proven to work.
As in the Schön affair? He got 7 papers in Nature and 8 in Science with made-up data.
In most fields of science, it is completely infeasible for the reviewers to actually reproduce the results. It would take way too much time or money, or simply require equipment or materials not available to the reviewer (how do you reproduce results from a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator if you don't have access to one yourself?) The reviewing process is not intended to catch scientific fraud, but to assess the relevance and novelty and catch mistakes in the method, interpretation, and so on.
The VFS is a better OO abstraction than anything you will ever come up with in your lifetime.
Uh, what? The VFS is hardly a brilliant concept, but rather the sort of abstraction that any good designer will come up with. It's also not an original Linux invention (Sun OS has had it since 1985, I think). The kernel developers also seem to have a perpetual problem with defining an interface once and defining it well. It happened to me more than once that FUSE broke during a supposedly minor kernel upgrade. For all its virtues, the Linux kernel is hardly a case study in good software engineering.
There are now 140 or so comments, and it is painfully clear from them that almost none of the posters have actually bothered to read the article. If they had, they wouldn't be confused on the following:
The article does not propose that we all start writing our programs as kinds of abstract syntax trees in XML notation. The XML is just the storage format. In fact, the extensibility that the author claims this will brings would make programs less verbose, not more.
"Lisp S-expressions already do that!" The author acknowledges this, to an extent. But as he states, those never caught on, while XML can now be processed by lots of tools, so there is a new opportunity now.
There are also some bizarre claims about extensibility either being a feature of all programming languages, or being unnecessary. That's silly, of course. What this is about is the ability to add new abstraction mechanisms to a language, which is really what the entire evolution of programming languages has been about. Procedures, OOP, templates, macros, modules, lambdas, etc, are all ways to cut down on repetitiveness and the number of boring details you have to think about. With an extensible language you can do that sort of thing yourself (within reason), while tools such as debuggers will still work nicely (which is not the case with typical code generation approaches, e.g., Yacc output).
"But the source will take up so much disk space!" With a 120 GB hard disk, who cares if Hello World takes 10 KB? That's a whopping 0.0000077% of your disk space.
The author also makes a persuasive case about programmer's hyper-conservatism compared to other computer users:
Why, in the early 21st century, do programmers still insist that their tools have to draw exactly one glyph on the screen for each byte in their source files? No one expects AutoCAD or Microsoft Word to do this; even grizzled old Unix fanatics don't expect to be able to open a relational database with Vi or Emacs. One of the great ironies of the early 21st century is that secretaries can easily put organizational charts or cubicle floor plans in e-mail messages, but the programmers who made that possible can't put class diagrams in their code.
This doesn't mean that the kernel has only 985 bugs, it means that the Stanford guysfound 985 bugs using their particular tools (which scan for certain types of bugs). That's a big difference. Remember Dijkstra's law: testing can show the presence of bugs, but never their absence.
985 bugs is an absurdly low figure for a software system of any respectable size (except, maybe, life-critical systems). Hell, just looking at a handful of changelogs for Linux kernel releases gives you more bugs than that.
And it did get to Mars! Sure, it landed much like a bowl of petunias falling from several miles would -- but the fact that it flew at all was the amazing thing.
Except that the "flying to Mars" bit was an accomplishment of the Mars Express, not of the Beagle.
Interesting enough today the old dutch politician Bolkestein returned back to dutch national politics. He has spent several years in brussels and suddenly has aborted his job there. Now why would he return so swiftly all of a sudden?
Bolkestein didn't "abort" his job. He merely announced that he doesn't want a second term as European Commissioner. He will stay on until the end of the current term on November 1st. Hardly a "swift" return.
Reading datas alter them. So the man in the middle will be detected.
This is true for a passive attack, i.e., one were the attacker can only eavesdrop on a connection. However, in a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker can also arbitrarily modify data. In particular you can have the following situation:
Alice <----> Eve <----> Bob
Here Alice thinks she is talking to Bob, but in fact she's talking to Eve, who decodes her packets, re-encodes them, and sends them to Bob. Unless Alice and Bob have some authentication mechanism (say, a shared secret key, or the other's public key), they have absolutely no way to tell that this is going on. The ability to detect eavesdropping on the quantum channel doesn't help at all, since Eve isn't eavesdropping - she's tunneling between two physically separate channels. Quantum cryptography does not differ in this respect from conventional cryptography: it's a basic fact of communication - how do you establish that the bits you are receiving come from the person/system from who you think they come?
If Microsoft patents APIs, file formats, or network protocols, and you reverse engineer them and use that knowledge in your products, you are infringing on the patents in any case. The EU's decision doesn't change anything in that respect. Remember, patents are not copyrights - if you invent something completely on your own, then if someone else has a patent on it, you are still infringing. If Microsoft has patents on the SMB protocol, they could already go after the Samba team, which as far as I know they haven't done.
Besides, such patents are currently pretty much unenforcable in the EU anyway.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 3, Informative
You either have two choices -- either the mail server does the same computation, which will either bog the hell out of any high volume mail server
Of course not. It will be the sort of problem that's easy in one direction and hard in the other - like factorisation. The server would just have to pick two large primes (relatively easy, although probabilistic), send the product to the client, have the client factor the product, and verify that the primes the client sends back are the right ones.
No matter how you dress up the wording, Jon is being tried twice for the same crime here.
No. The appeal is considered part of the same trial. I can't comment on the situation in Sweden, but it's probably very similar to here in the Netherlands (which is also covered by the European Human Rights Convention). Both the prosecution and the defendant can appeal, but they have only a limited time to decide to do so (on the order of weeks). So this is consistent with the main argument for the ne bis in idem rule (a.k.a. double jeopardy): to protect against the government abusing their power and resources by continuously starting a new prosecution in the same case.
This is a bogus argument. Essentially you're saying that because regular voting isn't perfect, we might as well use Internet voting. The reality is that voter coercion and vote buying are very easy in an Internet election and rather hard to do inconspicuously in an regular election. For example, those union goons might imply that they have the ability to check my vote in a old-style election, but most voters know that it's pretty unlikely that in fact they can. On the other hand, with Internet voting it's fairly obvious that they can by requiring you to vote in their presence.
You were right about one thing:
I would accept the argument that any new system should be at least as secure as whatever system it is replacing/supplementing.
Exactly. And Internet voting is fundamentally less secure with regard to voter coercion/buying than traditional secret elections.
For what it's worth, the Watcom C Compiler has been open-sourced as well. Whether the license is really open source seems debatable, but at least you can get the complete sources and binaries of the compiler.
Not true. For example, universities, while often government-funded, do not exist to produce source code for corporations, but rather to produce knowledge for society. The question of what license to use therefore comes down to what license maximizes the production of knowledge.
In many cases that would be the GPL, since it encourages users of university-produced software to contribute back, rather than keep derivative source code secret. This is clearly beneficial to many research projects.
So many people here are getting all upset because BitKeeper is not free.
Nobody is upset that BitKeeper is not free. After all, you don't see people complaining on LKML that Microsoft Visual Studio is not free. The problem is that several Linux developers, foremost among them Linus Torvalds, have started using it. The problems with this are:
Kernel development for the first time becomes dependent on a non-free tool. You can pretend that this not so, that Linus could switch to another version management system at any time, but it just ain't so: SCM tools are a major part of a software development effort and replacing them is not easy once they are entrenched.
It sends the message that Linux, the flag-ship open source system, apparently cannot be developed without non-free tools.
Freedom of using software in any way you like is not an abstract issue, as this case shows. People are now being prevented from doing Linux kernel development in the most convenient way currently available - using BitKeeper - and contributing to other version management systems at the same time. Hence, their freedom is reduced in a very real way. This would not be the case if only free software were used for kernel development.
Because it is information that you are forced to present. Try driving without a license plate.
This is a good example of the slippery slope that privacy-invading measures create. These surveillance cameras were originally intented to combat crime; now they are used for something entirely different. Once the technological infrastructure is there, it is almost impossible for politicians to resist the lure of using it for any purpose whatsoever.
(By the way, license plates themselves constitute an invasion of privacy, but we've become so accustomed to them that most of us no longer view it as such.)
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It makes it much easier to process programmatically if you have the names with no spaces and all lower case...you can then more easily use regular expressions, etc. to test for and find things.
So you are proposing that we don't use names with spaces etc., simply because your tools and languages make it awkward to support them properly? That's awful.
Of course, it's not just spaces. It's also names starting with a dash, names containing certain "special" characters (like "*"), and so on. Of course, the set of "bad" names depends on the tools you are calling. (Funny aside: did you know that GNU tar magically and unpredictably barfs on file names with a ":" in them, because it happens to interpret them as hostnames?) And you never know in advance when a tool will barf on some filename or interpret it in some strange way - which causes all those lovely security problems.
So the Unix way - tying programs together in some hacky, semantically ill-defined way - is in serious need of replacement. It may have been sufficient in 1979, but let's not pretend that no advances beyond the Unix model are possible.
The fact remains that after you've seen through all the marketing hype, XML remains inappropriate for many tasks, and configuration files are right at the top of the list.
In fact, it's the opposite: XML makes a lot of sense for configuration files. For instance, suppose that you need to write a script that automatically adds a line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf or a similar configuration file. If a file like that is in XML, this is trivial: you can write a XSL transformation or use any of a billion tools to apply the change in a correct way. But if it's in some ad-hoc file format (as it is right now), you either have to write a parser and unparser (which would have been unnecessary if it had been in XML; and how do you know for sure that your code is entirely correct?) or use some hacky combination of sed/grep/etc. to perform the change (which is, alas, the "Unix way"). The latter will of course fail unpredictably in lots of cases. E.g., are you handling those sections correctly? Comments? What if the line was already present? And so on.
Of course, XML is a horribly bulky format. But who cares? It's not like configuration files will take up a lot of disk space either way. The important thing is to have a universal standard format that can be easily manipulated using standard tools so that you don't have to implement parsers and printers all the time or approximate them using broken sed/grep hacks.
Well, 20 years ago, you'd have said the exact same thing about Japan.
People keep making the comparison to Japan in the 1980s, but it's rather misguided. Japan has less than half the population of the US. China on the other hand has more than 4 times the population of the US (and India is similarly gigantic). It is hard to see how, in the long run, the US can maintain the relative world dominance that it now enjoys.
"Small" countries (which the US is compared to China and India) can sometimes, by accident of history, obtain superpower status for a short while, e.g., the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. But eventually the bigger players will catch up with them.
What the hell is it with this unelected bunch of goons? First they do their level best to introduce patents across the EU, despite the will of the (elected) parliament, now they're sticking their noses into another area they know bugger all about.
You seem to be confused about how the EU works. The commission only proposes legislation. But nothing happens unless the Council agrees with it. That means a sizeable majority of the governments of the member states. So if bad legislation is passed in the EU, you should probably be complaining to your own government.
Of course, the same ministers who approve things in the Council then turn around and tell their peoples that unpopular decisions are "Europe's" fault, thus covering their own asses.
And they wonder why people across the EU are jumping at the chance to say NO to the EU constitution, which cements the Commission into place...
The Commission has existed in this form since 1967 or so. I'd say it's quite "cemented" already. And the rejection of the constitution means that its current powers stay exactly the same.
How on earth did we get this bunch of cretins foisted upon us
Probably because our respective democratically elected parliaments decided to join the EU.
and why aren't we the people of the EC allowed to say "actually, no, we don't want them, we never have"?
Spare me the victim mentality. You're not living in North Korea. You have elections, you know.
Nonsense. European law is already binding on "formerly sovereign" member states (and has been since 1963). The EU constitution actually would have shifted more power towards the European Parliament, which would have made a fiasco like the patent thing less likely.
I think that the defeat of the constitution was a huge mistake. It kind of dooms Europe to less relevance on the world stage and years of stagnation.
GCC did not get an "anti-SCO" clause, as that would be incompatible with the GPL. They did consider dropping support for SCO from the compiler, but eventually decided not to take action.
The poster needs to have his humour detector adjusted. It should be obvious that Tierney is not quite serious about the death penalty. It's more than a bit tongue-in-cheek. Quote from the article:
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
The hardware? You mean because Apple takes a ton of commonly sold components and puts them together in their fancy boxes? Just like Dell and HP do? You mean because they've spearheaded most of the now commonly-used device interface standards?
Ugh. What a complete red herring. Yes, a Mac is built from off-the-shelf components. What does that mean for me as a user? Suppose I like Mac OS X, but the hardware is too expensive for me, or doesn't meet my specific requirements, etc. Where can I go to get a competing piece of hardware to run my Mac applications on?
Likewise for the software. Sure, if your applications are all just pure console programs, you can typically run them on your favorite Unix clone. But the real value of Macs for many users lies in the graphical Mac-specific applications, and for those you are tied to the proprietary bits of Mac OS.
Truth is, with Windows you get software lock-in, but at least the hardware is an open market. With Macs, you get both software and hardware lock-in.
(And yes, I am a Mac user. But let's not pretend that the Apple world is so wonderfully open.)
While anything allocated on the stack will be destroyed when an exception is thrown, any resources allocated during execution will leak (ex: handles or memory allocated on the heap).
Wow, this is stunningly wrong. That's what destructors are for - they will free any resources that your local objects allocated/acquired. That's the resource acquisition is initialisation paradigm, and it ensures that resources are always freed when you leave a scope. This is contrary to using a goto for error handling, where you still have to be careful that every execution path goes through the cleanup code. And of course, how are you going to ensure that some future maintainer doesn't add a "return" somewhere, bypassing your cleanup code altogether?
This is one of the really nice features of C++, by the way. It's much cleaner than finally blocks.
It is expensive and time-consuming. That's why journals like JACS, JOC, Tetrahedron, etc. are respected so widely: the research in them is rock-solid and proven to work.
As in the Schön affair? He got 7 papers in Nature and 8 in Science with made-up data.
In most fields of science, it is completely infeasible for the reviewers to actually reproduce the results. It would take way too much time or money, or simply require equipment or materials not available to the reviewer (how do you reproduce results from a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator if you don't have access to one yourself?) The reviewing process is not intended to catch scientific fraud, but to assess the relevance and novelty and catch mistakes in the method, interpretation, and so on.
The VFS is a better OO abstraction than anything you will ever come up with in your lifetime.
Uh, what? The VFS is hardly a brilliant concept, but rather the sort of abstraction that any good designer will come up with. It's also not an original Linux invention (Sun OS has had it since 1985, I think). The kernel developers also seem to have a perpetual problem with defining an interface once and defining it well. It happened to me more than once that FUSE broke during a supposedly minor kernel upgrade. For all its virtues, the Linux kernel is hardly a case study in good software engineering.
There are now 140 or so comments, and it is painfully clear from them that almost none of the posters have actually bothered to read the article. If they had, they wouldn't be confused on the following:
The author also makes a persuasive case about programmer's hyper-conservatism compared to other computer users:
Something to think about.This doesn't mean that the kernel has only 985 bugs, it means that the Stanford guys found 985 bugs using their particular tools (which scan for certain types of bugs). That's a big difference. Remember Dijkstra's law: testing can show the presence of bugs, but never their absence.
985 bugs is an absurdly low figure for a software system of any respectable size (except, maybe, life-critical systems). Hell, just looking at a handful of changelogs for Linux kernel releases gives you more bugs than that.
And it did get to Mars! Sure, it landed much like a bowl of petunias falling from several miles would -- but the fact that it flew at all was the amazing thing.
Except that the "flying to Mars" bit was an accomplishment of the Mars Express, not of the Beagle.
Interesting enough today the old dutch politician Bolkestein returned back to dutch national politics. He has spent several years in brussels and suddenly has aborted his job there. Now why would he return so swiftly all of a sudden?
Bolkestein didn't "abort" his job. He merely announced that he doesn't want a second term as European Commissioner. He will stay on until the end of the current term on November 1st. Hardly a "swift" return.
Reading datas alter them. So the man in the middle will be detected.
This is true for a passive attack, i.e., one were the attacker can only eavesdrop on a connection. However, in a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker can also arbitrarily modify data. In particular you can have the following situation:
Here Alice thinks she is talking to Bob, but in fact she's talking to Eve, who decodes her packets, re-encodes them, and sends them to Bob. Unless Alice and Bob have some authentication mechanism (say, a shared secret key, or the other's public key), they have absolutely no way to tell that this is going on. The ability to detect eavesdropping on the quantum channel doesn't help at all, since Eve isn't eavesdropping - she's tunneling between two physically separate channels. Quantum cryptography does not differ in this respect from conventional cryptography: it's a basic fact of communication - how do you establish that the bits you are receiving come from the person/system from who you think they come?
what if MS files patents on the CIFS APIs ?
If Microsoft patents APIs, file formats, or network protocols, and you reverse engineer them and use that knowledge in your products, you are infringing on the patents in any case. The EU's decision doesn't change anything in that respect. Remember, patents are not copyrights - if you invent something completely on your own, then if someone else has a patent on it, you are still infringing. If Microsoft has patents on the SMB protocol, they could already go after the Samba team, which as far as I know they haven't done.
Besides, such patents are currently pretty much unenforcable in the EU anyway.
You either have two choices -- either the mail server does the same computation, which will either bog the hell out of any high volume mail server
Of course not. It will be the sort of problem that's easy in one direction and hard in the other - like factorisation. The server would just have to pick two large primes (relatively easy, although probabilistic), send the product to the client, have the client factor the product, and verify that the primes the client sends back are the right ones.
The First Amendment isn't law, it's a part of the Constitution.
Actually, Article VI of the constitution says:
This Constitution [...] shall be the supreme law of the land
No matter how you dress up the wording, Jon is being tried twice for the same crime here.
No. The appeal is considered part of the same trial. I can't comment on the situation in Sweden, but it's probably very similar to here in the Netherlands (which is also covered by the European Human Rights Convention). Both the prosecution and the defendant can appeal, but they have only a limited time to decide to do so (on the order of weeks). So this is consistent with the main argument for the ne bis in idem rule (a.k.a. double jeopardy): to protect against the government abusing their power and resources by continuously starting a new prosecution in the same case.This is a bogus argument. Essentially you're saying that because regular voting isn't perfect, we might as well use Internet voting. The reality is that voter coercion and vote buying are very easy in an Internet election and rather hard to do inconspicuously in an regular election. For example, those union goons might imply that they have the ability to check my vote in a old-style election, but most voters know that it's pretty unlikely that in fact they can. On the other hand, with Internet voting it's fairly obvious that they can by requiring you to vote in their presence.
You were right about one thing:
I would accept the argument that any new system should be at least as secure as whatever system it is replacing/supplementing.
Exactly. And Internet voting is fundamentally less secure with regard to voter coercion/buying than traditional secret elections.
For what it's worth, the Watcom C Compiler has been open-sourced as well. Whether the license is really open source seems debatable, but at least you can get the complete sources and binaries of the compiler.
That's why it should be BSD licensed.
Not true. For example, universities, while often government-funded, do not exist to produce source code for corporations, but rather to produce knowledge for society. The question of what license to use therefore comes down to what license maximizes the production of knowledge.
In many cases that would be the GPL, since it encourages users of university-produced software to contribute back, rather than keep derivative source code secret. This is clearly beneficial to many research projects.
So many people here are getting all upset because BitKeeper is not free.
Nobody is upset that BitKeeper is not free. After all, you don't see people complaining on LKML that Microsoft Visual Studio is not free. The problem is that several Linux developers, foremost among them Linus Torvalds, have started using it. The problems with this are:
Because it is information that you are forced to present. Try driving without a license plate.
This is a good example of the slippery slope that privacy-invading measures create. These surveillance cameras were originally intented to combat crime; now they are used for something entirely different. Once the technological infrastructure is there, it is almost impossible for politicians to resist the lure of using it for any purpose whatsoever.
(By the way, license plates themselves constitute an invasion of privacy, but we've become so accustomed to them that most of us no longer view it as such.)