It's all relative man. Take a look at the Hulk movie which you used as an example - about $131 million in earnings, on a production budget of $120 million. That's $11 million in profits, or about 9% return. Compared to a lot of successful movies, a 9% return is not all that great. By comparison, I think the stock market's annual return is something like 8%.
Sure, they're breaking sales records, but interest and population are usually growing. That means that if they weren't becoming more efficient or better in their business, with the passage of time you'd expect them to break sales records anyway. For example, look at the number of admissions on blockbusters from 15-20 years ago and today. The disparity is ridiculous.
The movie business is just that - a business. Given their perspective on things (cold hard capitalism) sometimes the things that they do and say can seem strange. (I can imagine a plausible announcement: Microsoft is *disappointed* that they only made a couple of billion during sales period X. Relatively, that's lousy)
I'd bet that they have the market research to back this up, (if there's one thing that Hollywood doesn't fool around with, it's market research on their targeted demographics) so I would tend to believe the industry on this one.
Of course, this has nothing to do with texting, it's more about instant communication, which they can't do anything about. I suppose they could pressure theaters to disallow cell phones on some other grounds (people can't learn to turn them off during shows. That's a legitimate complaint - they really can't).
This reminds me of the music industry though. What they say in the article is that companies are used to being able to "buy their gross" and avoid negative word of mouth. That, in a way, is a business model. And just as the music industry will have to change their business model to succeed in the face of music sharing (REGARDLESS of whether or not they are able to contain it) so too will the movie industry have to make some changes.
No, we don't need to track politicians. We already know where all of the crack houses, bordellos, cheap motels, and liquor stores are. On the off chance that they're actually in session, we also already know where the Capitol is, thanks.
Well, it's good to want things like this, but I don't think it will really happen. Homeless people tend to be trasients, which means they're going to be hard to track. Additionally, most don't use legal names (preferring assumed names and nicknames), and may invent social security numbers. Others will be illegal immigrants who won't appear in any other record.
Why can't we take the collective ingenuity that it would take to build a privacy invading system like this and bend it towards helping these people rather than tracking them? By helping them, there'd be fewer to track!
Never underestimate the ability of the conspiracy theorist to connect many completely unrelated facts. By the way, his timing is all off. I received mail from the FSF about this break-in on August 2nd, and I think they probably knew about it a few days before that. So his assumed timing about SCO, GCC, and GNU is a bit off.
Personally, I think it was the aliens that cracked GNU's FTP server. That's why I wear a tin foil hat! Thinking that SCO did it is just crazy! Everybody knows it was the greys!:)
I think one of the issues is that even if they did have backups, they can't trust them. Hypothetically if someone broke in, got root, and then modified a bunch of programs to add some evil trojan, even if GNU restored their nightly backups, they'd be restoring all of the archives that have the trojan in them.
I would be willing to bet that they do have backups - hunting around for md5sums isn't going to reconstruct any files, it's going to verify the authenticity of what they have. The "MISSING_FILES" list is a list of files that are missing from the FTP server because they can't be verified, not those that GNU has lost a copy of.
Those archives might be decent as an absolute last resort, but I think GNU is looking for the pure source from the maintainer. Similar to Debian packages, don't the ports package contain distro-specific modifications and patches?
They may be verified, but I think in some cases the ports packages will be subtly different than the ones GNU is really looking for.
I'll bet that 90% (or more) of all break-ins are the result of problems that could have been patched. Yeah, it sucks that this happened to GNU, but they're only human. Last I heard, they only have one system administrator to handle all of their machines, including Savannah. I can understand that this happens from time to time. GNU has to be a relatively high profile target (such as for disgruntled BSD h4x0rs and so on) so cut them some slack. If you patch 40 machines 99.9% of the time, nobody remembers that, what they remember is that you got cracked on one tiny detail you missed.
At least they yanked the programs until they could verify that they were correct. That really was the only thing they could do. The lesson to take from this is that with computer security and auditing, nothing less than absolute perfection is necessary. And so long as human beings are doing the admin work, absolute perfection just isn't realistic.:)
I don't think it's that easy. What would prevent an attacker from modifying the md5sums that were present with the machine so that the backup then contained the modified md5sums of the trojaned applications?
No, the best solution is to have a separate, offline copy of known good md5sums to compare against. Ones that came directly from the developer, preferrably signed by the developer's GPG key.
Not far off the mark. Although I'm a geek myself, it does seem strange that many in the GNU/Linux community automatically assume that everybody else is the same way. It's a total lack of vision on the part of those who are all too consumed by computing.
I mean, really what is computing about? (Not just GNU/Linux) it's a means to an end, NOT the end itself. Computers are really interesting, and that's how I earn my daily bread. I even like them just because they are, not necessarily because of the benefits that they bring to people. Still, I have to acknowledge that the majority of computer users only bother with them because they allow the user to do specific things, like balance their checkbook, order books online, or curse clippy with all the vitriol in their hearts.
The people involved in the GNU/Linux community are smart, and intense. Probably too intense. For all of the hacker humor that's out there, it's often suprising just how seriously people take things.
Let me put it this way. Since the inception of Windows Update millions of computers have been infected with Trojan's that are today allowing individuals to conduct en-masse DDoS attacks. Read that how you want, but its a fact. Here's another. Since the inception of Windows Update Microsoft has gone to producing patches almost every week. Few if any business' have found Microsoft trustworthy enough to permit automatic updates
Many people will also tell you that a false positive is far worse than a false negative. For example, if Windows Update is misconfigured and tells you that you're up to date when you're really not, that's arguably worse than not being up to date and knowing that you're not up to date. (Because in the latter situation at least you can do something about it)
Even if technically windows update is better than nothing, it's utterly pathetic that this is the best one of the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet can do for their customers.
Enforcement would be a nightmare, but the system wouldn't even work. Currently corporations spend quite a bit of money to send out snail-mail spam. That has a solid cost attached to it for printing, distribution, and postage. That cost is well above $0.01 per piece, and obviously it's still profitable. I used to work for a company that would be thrilled to get a 2% response rate to their snail mail spamming.
The fact that email is easy to send, quick, and allows you to quickly reach many people is what makes spam so popular. The fact that it's currently free of course doesn't exactly hurt, but in order to reduce the levels of spam, some arbitrarily chosen fee won't work. The fee should be roughly the same as regular postage if you really want to reduce spam. (Even then there would still be a lot since it would be cheaper than snail mail spamming given no printing costs)
Consumers would NOT go for a postage rate charge on every email - it might largely kill the utility of email. Of course all of this really is moot since given the way SMTP is put together from the ground up, it would be near impossible to enforce. We always could of course set up a worst of both worlds scenario - everybody who sends legitimate email pays, and the spammers skirt the tax.
The concept of finding local conversations more interesting than other ones is itself interesting. One of the neat features of the internet that everybody loved at first was the fact that it made geography meaningless, and TeenLuvr16 that you met in that AOL chatroom could as easily be a hairy-backed man from Australia as it could be Steve Case in Northern Virginia, or some schmoe in Japan.
Now that people have complete geographical independence, they want more geographical specific information? I guess it sort of makes sense as people want to expand the functionality of the internet, but what's really interesting about this is not how it's done or whether it's done, but if it focuses the social interest of the internet more inward than it traditionally has been.
Anything like this though is definitely a good example of something that should be optional, not mandatory.
Their response will probably be something along the lines of a more diplomatically phrased "Hell no".
Microsoft isn't interested in openness or freedom. Pretty much everybody knows that they're only doing this in the first place in order to look like they're responding to the market change that is free software. Only with them, it's free software lite - all of the rhetoric with none of the underlying pesky freedoms.
Their code I suppose is OK for study purposes as long as you don't plan on ever reapplying that knowledge. But all of the other freedoms that are important aren't there. In short, they seem to be following the form, but missing the boat on the purpose of the source code being available to things. Their "shared source" initiative I think is more of an attempt to show IT managers that they're still relevant, not an attempt to benefit developers who take advantage of source code being available.
If they do make it possible to compile the software into a final product (which they might do if forced) then you can be sure that there's going to be an open and obvious way to tell the "pirate" binary from the "real" binary, since otherwise customers might be "tricked" into running something microsoft doesn't control.
Classic technique - compare a group you don't like (in this case the FSF) to something completely different that's evil (in this case "corporate gangsters") and link them through the smallest filament of backwards logic "they both have lawyers".
Nicely done. Now could you please explain how legal bullying by multibillion dollar international corporations is the same as a several hundred thousand dollar a year organization (non-profit mind you) asking people to comply with their license?
I think he made it clear in the article that he's not rattling sabers, but helping people comply with the GPL. I didn't hear anything in his article about cease and desist letters, or frequent lawsuits, both of which are the hallmarks of the people you're comparing him to.
Your question is a good one, and I hope it gets a good answer.
But....I have been to the Expo for the last 3 years. I'm not going this year due to time and budgeting.:) I can definately tell you though that there aren't many geeks left at this one. Three years ago the number of geeks was much higher, while as time has progressed, the number of suited business types, managers, and people who are on junkets trying to purchase or evaluate some technology for their business is much greater.
These trade shows are about commerce and industry, not about "geeks", passion for technology, or even the newest, latest, hottest stuff. That's not to say though that there's nothing out there for geeks - there's still quite a few interesting things, particularly the "community" type stuff (slashdot booth, dot org pavilion, and all of the smaller booths representing distros, LUGs, and so on) The bigger booths are usually ASPs, ISPs, and huge software vendors whose products are for the most part already very well known.
So watching the progression of the trade show, it's been depressing and hopeful. On one hand, the shift in attendance clearly signifies to me that GNU/Linux is being accepted and used out there. On the other hand, this really isn't a "geek" tradeshow, and hasn't been for quite some time.
I'm glad MIT did the right thing and walked away from this study. It is although somewhat difficult to tell whether they did this out of a principled stand or if they did it simply because they have so many foreign students that they wouldn't be able to pull it off unless they used them. That quite possibly could be the case.
There's no reason to believe that some college student from Hong Kong is a terrorist. Sure there are some terrorists out there, but I doubt they're sweating their midterms at some university. To deny foreigners the ability to work on some stuff isn't just slightly racist, it's outrageously stupid since there are some unbelievably bright people who come to the US from other places for school.
In the financial services industry, most people have to be bonded - that is the FBI gets your fingerprints and they do some sort of rudimentary background check on you. Would that placate the "homeland security" wolves? At any rate, it would be more information on foreign students than they have on most Americans.
Sometimes I think that homeland security is the process of a bunch of people staring at a collander and trying to decide which hole to patch first. Sure it's possible to keep the total morons from pullling off something big (or burning you in the same way they did before) but how many people out there really think that with anything less than a fascist state, it's possible to secure the country against someone whose well funded, clever, and out to get the US?
You can't just sue someone because you think the service sucks. You have to be suing them for breach of contract, or because they broke some law. I'm pretty sure there's no clause in your online service agreement with EverCrack that you get service within a particular timeframe.
What would you sue them for? It's not illegal to have shitty service, and it's not in violation of any contract. People who are addicted to the game and keep playing despite being unhappy and getting poor service are pretty much junkies. The service contracts have the deck stacked against the junkies and thinking that they can sue the parent company is just folly.
I think NASA should refute them, but not spend too much time on it. It should be easy quick and inexpensive to put together a dossier of information which non-paranoids would accept as reasonable evidence that it happened. Sell it for $19.95.
It's important to address the concerns because unresponsive government is not good government. Even if they're crackpots, address them long enough to say "You're crackpots, here's why you're crackpots, good night" If they don't do anything, then it is fuel on the fire.
On the other hand, if they provide proof in the form of some dossier, the conspiracy theorists are in a position of having to refute more and more documents, and saying that the conspiracy goes even deeper than they thought in NASA. The kookier they get, the fewer people will buy their crap.
No need to remind - they already know. If these specification didn't include draconian provisions for protecting the interests of copyright holders, it's more likely because corporations are sometimes slow to move and even slower to build consensus within an industry, not because they don't want to do it.
When such a standard gets agreed upon, it's usually been in the pipeline for quite a long time. Companies rarely have the flexibility to say, "We've been working on this standard for (insert long time period here) but now we'd like to add 5 new requirements". It just don't work that way.
They didn't really have a choice. If you want to stand up for software freedom, this is pretty much what you have to do. Look at the licenses on the other software components that they're talking about, and it's understandable why they did what they did.
Your comment seems to assume that software popularity and utility are the most important. They are to some people. But people who want to use the GPL to make a principled stand don't see software just in terms of its utilitarian applications, but also as an issue of freedom. And for them, this makes a lot of sense.
Good god! Don't you understand the implications though? If the digital tri-mode defrobulator gets out of sync with the anticalisthenticator, we could have some serious subdermal anamolous activity!
Open your eyes man!
(I just thought the sentence sounded funny the way it was strung together, even if I do have enough biology to know what a blastocyst is and to recognize when it's misspelled)
What I was replying to is a request to get the government involved. Yeah, DARPA was a part of the government, it was a sub-agency of a sub-agency of a sub-agency of the defense department (which is a sub-agency of a major branch, which is a sub-agency of the government) Jeez, did you notice any heirarchy in there?
Oh, and nobody petitions DARPA to do things for them. You petition the government - your congressman, where all of my comments still apply. Using the DARPA argument that government knows about decentralization is like saying that because a 1,000,000 person company employs a contracting company of 500 that have a clue, that the company therefore has a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all relative man. Take a look at the Hulk movie which you used as an example - about $131 million in earnings, on a production budget of $120 million. That's $11 million in profits, or about 9% return. Compared to a lot of successful movies, a 9% return is not all that great. By comparison, I think the stock market's annual return is something like 8%.
Sure, they're breaking sales records, but interest and population are usually growing. That means that if they weren't becoming more efficient or better in their business, with the passage of time you'd expect them to break sales records anyway. For example, look at the number of admissions on blockbusters from 15-20 years ago and today. The disparity is ridiculous.
The movie business is just that - a business. Given their perspective on things (cold hard capitalism) sometimes the things that they do and say can seem strange. (I can imagine a plausible announcement: Microsoft is *disappointed* that they only made a couple of billion during sales period X. Relatively, that's lousy)
I'd bet that they have the market research to back this up, (if there's one thing that Hollywood doesn't fool around with, it's market research on their targeted demographics) so I would tend to believe the industry on this one.
Of course, this has nothing to do with texting, it's more about instant communication, which they can't do anything about. I suppose they could pressure theaters to disallow cell phones on some other grounds (people can't learn to turn them off during shows. That's a legitimate complaint - they really can't).
This reminds me of the music industry though. What they say in the article is that companies are used to being able to "buy their gross" and avoid negative word of mouth. That, in a way, is a business model. And just as the music industry will have to change their business model to succeed in the face of music sharing (REGARDLESS of whether or not they are able to contain it) so too will the movie industry have to make some changes.
No, we don't need to track politicians. We already know where all of the crack houses, bordellos, cheap motels, and liquor stores are. On the off chance that they're actually in session, we also already know where the Capitol is, thanks.
Well, it's good to want things like this, but I don't think it will really happen. Homeless people tend to be trasients, which means they're going to be hard to track. Additionally, most don't use legal names (preferring assumed names and nicknames), and may invent social security numbers. Others will be illegal immigrants who won't appear in any other record.
Why can't we take the collective ingenuity that it would take to build a privacy invading system like this and bend it towards helping these people rather than tracking them? By helping them, there'd be fewer to track!
Never underestimate the ability of the conspiracy theorist to connect many completely unrelated facts. By the way, his timing is all off. I received mail from the FSF about this break-in on August 2nd, and I think they probably knew about it a few days before that. So his assumed timing about SCO, GCC, and GNU is a bit off.
:)
Personally, I think it was the aliens that cracked GNU's FTP server. That's why I wear a tin foil hat! Thinking that SCO did it is just crazy! Everybody knows it was the greys!
I think one of the issues is that even if they did have backups, they can't trust them. Hypothetically if someone broke in, got root, and then modified a bunch of programs to add some evil trojan, even if GNU restored their nightly backups, they'd be restoring all of the archives that have the trojan in them.
I would be willing to bet that they do have backups - hunting around for md5sums isn't going to reconstruct any files, it's going to verify the authenticity of what they have. The "MISSING_FILES" list is a list of files that are missing from the FTP server because they can't be verified, not those that GNU has lost a copy of.
Those archives might be decent as an absolute last resort, but I think GNU is looking for the pure source from the maintainer. Similar to Debian packages, don't the ports package contain distro-specific modifications and patches?
They may be verified, but I think in some cases the ports packages will be subtly different than the ones GNU is really looking for.
I'll bet that 90% (or more) of all break-ins are the result of problems that could have been patched. Yeah, it sucks that this happened to GNU, but they're only human. Last I heard, they only have one system administrator to handle all of their machines, including Savannah. I can understand that this happens from time to time. GNU has to be a relatively high profile target (such as for disgruntled BSD h4x0rs and so on) so cut them some slack. If you patch 40 machines 99.9% of the time, nobody remembers that, what they remember is that you got cracked on one tiny detail you missed.
:)
At least they yanked the programs until they could verify that they were correct. That really was the only thing they could do. The lesson to take from this is that with computer security and auditing, nothing less than absolute perfection is necessary. And so long as human beings are doing the admin work, absolute perfection just isn't realistic.
I don't think it's that easy. What would prevent an attacker from modifying the md5sums that were present with the machine so that the backup then contained the modified md5sums of the trojaned applications?
No, the best solution is to have a separate, offline copy of known good md5sums to compare against. Ones that came directly from the developer, preferrably signed by the developer's GPG key.
Not far off the mark. Although I'm a geek myself, it does seem strange that many in the GNU/Linux community automatically assume that everybody else is the same way. It's a total lack of vision on the part of those who are all too consumed by computing.
I mean, really what is computing about? (Not just GNU/Linux) it's a means to an end, NOT the end itself. Computers are really interesting, and that's how I earn my daily bread. I even like them just because they are, not necessarily because of the benefits that they bring to people. Still, I have to acknowledge that the majority of computer users only bother with them because they allow the user to do specific things, like balance their checkbook, order books online, or curse clippy with all the vitriol in their hearts.
The people involved in the GNU/Linux community are smart, and intense. Probably too intense. For all of the hacker humor that's out there, it's often suprising just how seriously people take things.
I'm also appauled that anyone would even consider this theft
I'm not only appauled, but I'm ageorged, aringoed, and ajohned that they would consider it theft!
Is it better? Here's a quote from the article:
Let me put it this way. Since the inception of Windows Update millions of computers have been infected with Trojan's that are today allowing individuals to conduct en-masse DDoS attacks. Read that how you want, but its a fact. Here's another. Since the inception of Windows Update Microsoft has gone to producing patches almost every week. Few if any business' have found Microsoft trustworthy enough to permit automatic updates
Many people will also tell you that a false positive is far worse than a false negative. For example, if Windows Update is misconfigured and tells you that you're up to date when you're really not, that's arguably worse than not being up to date and knowing that you're not up to date. (Because in the latter situation at least you can do something about it)
Even if technically windows update is better than nothing, it's utterly pathetic that this is the best one of the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet can do for their customers.
Enforcement would be a nightmare, but the system wouldn't even work. Currently corporations spend quite a bit of money to send out snail-mail spam. That has a solid cost attached to it for printing, distribution, and postage. That cost is well above $0.01 per piece, and obviously it's still profitable. I used to work for a company that would be thrilled to get a 2% response rate to their snail mail spamming.
The fact that email is easy to send, quick, and allows you to quickly reach many people is what makes spam so popular. The fact that it's currently free of course doesn't exactly hurt, but in order to reduce the levels of spam, some arbitrarily chosen fee won't work. The fee should be roughly the same as regular postage if you really want to reduce spam. (Even then there would still be a lot since it would be cheaper than snail mail spamming given no printing costs)
Consumers would NOT go for a postage rate charge on every email - it might largely kill the utility of email. Of course all of this really is moot since given the way SMTP is put together from the ground up, it would be near impossible to enforce. We always could of course set up a worst of both worlds scenario - everybody who sends legitimate email pays, and the spammers skirt the tax.
The concept of finding local conversations more interesting than other ones is itself interesting. One of the neat features of the internet that everybody loved at first was the fact that it made geography meaningless, and TeenLuvr16 that you met in that AOL chatroom could as easily be a hairy-backed man from Australia as it could be Steve Case in Northern Virginia, or some schmoe in Japan.
Now that people have complete geographical independence, they want more geographical specific information? I guess it sort of makes sense as people want to expand the functionality of the internet, but what's really interesting about this is not how it's done or whether it's done, but if it focuses the social interest of the internet more inward than it traditionally has been.
Anything like this though is definitely a good example of something that should be optional, not mandatory.
Their response will probably be something along the lines of a more diplomatically phrased "Hell no".
Microsoft isn't interested in openness or freedom. Pretty much everybody knows that they're only doing this in the first place in order to look like they're responding to the market change that is free software. Only with them, it's free software lite - all of the rhetoric with none of the underlying pesky freedoms.
Their code I suppose is OK for study purposes as long as you don't plan on ever reapplying that knowledge. But all of the other freedoms that are important aren't there. In short, they seem to be following the form, but missing the boat on the purpose of the source code being available to things. Their "shared source" initiative I think is more of an attempt to show IT managers that they're still relevant, not an attempt to benefit developers who take advantage of source code being available.
If they do make it possible to compile the software into a final product (which they might do if forced) then you can be sure that there's going to be an open and obvious way to tell the "pirate" binary from the "real" binary, since otherwise customers might be "tricked" into running something microsoft doesn't control.
Classic technique - compare a group you don't like (in this case the FSF) to something completely different that's evil (in this case "corporate gangsters") and link them through the smallest filament of backwards logic "they both have lawyers".
Nicely done. Now could you please explain how legal bullying by multibillion dollar international corporations is the same as a several hundred thousand dollar a year organization (non-profit mind you) asking people to comply with their license?
I think he made it clear in the article that he's not rattling sabers, but helping people comply with the GPL. I didn't hear anything in his article about cease and desist letters, or frequent lawsuits, both of which are the hallmarks of the people you're comparing him to.
Mr. Moglen works for the free software foundation, and he is a staunch supporter of free software rather than open source.
Check this link for information on the differences between the two: Free software for freedom.
Your question is a good one, and I hope it gets a good answer.
:) I can definately tell you though that there aren't many geeks left at this one. Three years ago the number of geeks was much higher, while as time has progressed, the number of suited business types, managers, and people who are on junkets trying to purchase or evaluate some technology for their business is much greater.
But....I have been to the Expo for the last 3 years. I'm not going this year due to time and budgeting.
These trade shows are about commerce and industry, not about "geeks", passion for technology, or even the newest, latest, hottest stuff. That's not to say though that there's nothing out there for geeks - there's still quite a few interesting things, particularly the "community" type stuff (slashdot booth, dot org pavilion, and all of the smaller booths representing distros, LUGs, and so on) The bigger booths are usually ASPs, ISPs, and huge software vendors whose products are for the most part already very well known.
So watching the progression of the trade show, it's been depressing and hopeful. On one hand, the shift in attendance clearly signifies to me that GNU/Linux is being accepted and used out there. On the other hand, this really isn't a "geek" tradeshow, and hasn't been for quite some time.
I'm glad MIT did the right thing and walked away from this study. It is although somewhat difficult to tell whether they did this out of a principled stand or if they did it simply because they have so many foreign students that they wouldn't be able to pull it off unless they used them. That quite possibly could be the case.
There's no reason to believe that some college student from Hong Kong is a terrorist. Sure there are some terrorists out there, but I doubt they're sweating their midterms at some university. To deny foreigners the ability to work on some stuff isn't just slightly racist, it's outrageously stupid since there are some unbelievably bright people who come to the US from other places for school.
In the financial services industry, most people have to be bonded - that is the FBI gets your fingerprints and they do some sort of rudimentary background check on you. Would that placate the "homeland security" wolves? At any rate, it would be more information on foreign students than they have on most Americans.
Sometimes I think that homeland security is the process of a bunch of people staring at a collander and trying to decide which hole to patch first. Sure it's possible to keep the total morons from pullling off something big (or burning you in the same way they did before) but how many people out there really think that with anything less than a fascist state, it's possible to secure the country against someone whose well funded, clever, and out to get the US?
You can't just sue someone because you think the service sucks. You have to be suing them for breach of contract, or because they broke some law. I'm pretty sure there's no clause in your online service agreement with EverCrack that you get service within a particular timeframe.
What would you sue them for? It's not illegal to have shitty service, and it's not in violation of any contract. People who are addicted to the game and keep playing despite being unhappy and getting poor service are pretty much junkies. The service contracts have the deck stacked against the junkies and thinking that they can sue the parent company is just folly.
I think NASA should refute them, but not spend too much time on it. It should be easy quick and inexpensive to put together a dossier of information which non-paranoids would accept as reasonable evidence that it happened. Sell it for $19.95.
It's important to address the concerns because unresponsive government is not good government. Even if they're crackpots, address them long enough to say "You're crackpots, here's why you're crackpots, good night" If they don't do anything, then it is fuel on the fire.
On the other hand, if they provide proof in the form of some dossier, the conspiracy theorists are in a position of having to refute more and more documents, and saying that the conspiracy goes even deeper than they thought in NASA. The kookier they get, the fewer people will buy their crap.
No need to remind - they already know. If these specification didn't include draconian provisions for protecting the interests of copyright holders, it's more likely because corporations are sometimes slow to move and even slower to build consensus within an industry, not because they don't want to do it.
When such a standard gets agreed upon, it's usually been in the pipeline for quite a long time. Companies rarely have the flexibility to say, "We've been working on this standard for (insert long time period here) but now we'd like to add 5 new requirements". It just don't work that way.
They didn't really have a choice. If you want to stand up for software freedom, this is pretty much what you have to do. Look at the licenses on the other software components that they're talking about, and it's understandable why they did what they did.
Your comment seems to assume that software popularity and utility are the most important. They are to some people. But people who want to use the GPL to make a principled stand don't see software just in terms of its utilitarian applications, but also as an issue of freedom. And for them, this makes a lot of sense.
blactocyst to create progeny hybrid organisms
Good god! Don't you understand the implications though? If the digital tri-mode defrobulator gets out of sync with the anticalisthenticator, we could have some serious subdermal anamolous activity!
Open your eyes man!
(I just thought the sentence sounded funny the way it was strung together, even if I do have enough biology to know what a blastocyst is and to recognize when it's misspelled)
What I was replying to is a request to get the government involved. Yeah, DARPA was a part of the government, it was a sub-agency of a sub-agency of a sub-agency of the defense department (which is a sub-agency of a major branch, which is a sub-agency of the government) Jeez, did you notice any heirarchy in there?
Oh, and nobody petitions DARPA to do things for them. You petition the government - your congressman, where all of my comments still apply. Using the DARPA argument that government knows about decentralization is like saying that because a 1,000,000 person company employs a contracting company of 500 that have a clue, that the company therefore has a clue.
Which just ain't so.