The problem with any backdoor is that someone else can figure it out. So even if you don't care that the Chinese government can read your email, you should care that someone somewhere might find the same vulnerability and use it to capture your credit card number.
That's arguably the biggest reason backdoors are always wrong - even if you trust the FBI and the NSA, you implicitly have to trust every black hat hacker in the world too because sooner or later they'll get the keys to the same door the FBI and NSA are using.
Charging mats use about 5 watts of power, which means even if you were doing nothing but charging phones with dead batteries around the clock it would only use 40 kwh of power in a year. As far as contributing causes to the energy crisis go, that's nothing. Hand-washing one load of laundry will offset all of your energy use from charging your phone for over a month. Skipping one drive to the movies to rent something at home will offset all of your energy use for charging your cell phone for years (since one gallon of gasoline has 33kwh equivalent of energy in it).
To be fair, I am a card-carrying FSF member but I work on proprietary software because I have a mortgage and kids to feed. I suspect most lawyers are effectively in the same boat - they got into law to earn a decent living and do the right things, but ended up in a situation where the choice was either "work on something morally questionable or be unemployed" or at best "work on something morally questionable or earn janitor's wages - while still having to make your student loan payments".
The GPL never prevented reverse engineering or fair use. If I write libfoo and release it under the GPL, and you write libbar with all of the same APIs and release it under another license, that was never illegal or a GPL violation.
As far as I understand it, if you re-implement GPL software using the original code (not API, but implementation code) as a starting point, then you are violating the GPL. But the Java standard library is colossal and the bits that Google copied directly are tiny and obvious. So I genuinely don't think the GPL is weakened by this.
Separately, I agree Google is no friend to GPL. But I don't think this lawsuit is some clever attempt for them to sabotage the GPL so they can make Android 7 fully proprietary from top to bottom. I think this lawsuit is just to avoid paying Oracle licensing fees.
They compile down to Javascript, but ideally that shouldn't matter any more than the fact that C++ compiles down to intermediate language in most compilers. As long as the top level language does what you want, the intermediate steps between it and CPU microcode should be irrelevant.
I think the killer feature of Node.js is that you have the same code on client and server, which makes the mental overhead for a 'full stack developer' smaller. But now Dart, Typescript, Clojure/script, Scala, and many other languages can offer the same reduced mental overhead but with a more consistent language.
You don't have to hide. Fry himself is posting his statement on a public blog.
But blogs lend themselves to essays, ideas, and reflection. Social networks lend themselves to the kind of quick, pointless interactions you get with high school cliques, but at an even faster pace with added advertising. "We've taken everything that was bad about some of your social interactions at age 15, and figured out how to make it worse, and convinced you that it's incredibly desirable."
I don't hide anything. But I don't post it to social networks either.
There is tons of free blog hosting software available. Just do a web search for "free blog sites".
The thing Fry decries is the nature of connections and communication and advertising in the mainstream social networks. Instead of making useful statements in paragraph form, we make short assertions that are mostly meaningless and then waste hours checking statuses, responding to two sentence comments on our two sentence comments, and arguing over the latest Star Wars movie or Hillary Clinton or similar inane things. (That's not to say that intelligent discussion about Hillary Clinton is impossible. It's possible - but exceedingly rare on social networks.)
It's high speed high school cliques plus advertising, which if they thought about it carefully only shallow fools would intentionally seek out.
We long ago reached the point where people like you are the tiny majority and the great majority of patent holders are major corporations that use them to crush upstart competitors such as yourself. The original intent of patents has been turned on its ear, and it's now a weapon to protect incumbents.
With respect to the national debt - other countries have carried far higher debts for far longer.
And remember too that solving the national debt using tax levels that this country had from 1941 through 1980, including when Republican Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford were in office would work. Tax levels on the rich were literally more than twice what they are today, and nobody called Eisenhower, Nixon, or Ford a socialist.
I checked, and the first DSL provider I contacted said I lived in an area rural enough that DSL didn't make sense. He could get me service, but nowhere near the Comcast rates in the area.
On the other hand, he said his employer is buying the fiber that Verizon has basically abandoned in the area and building it out themselves. So in a few years, it might be Comcast vs. Frontier in my area. Competition is good.
I wrote a response to this yesterday but Slashdot's servers ate it. As TopSpin wrote already, this project doesn't work in the frequencies of over-the-air television or FM radio.
I think it's more interesting as an educational toy than anything else. I've been meaning to learn Software Defined Radio and play with receivers for the purposes of understanding why wireless connection bandwidth speeds in my house only come near the official ratings if I hold my laptop so close to the wireless access point that I can watch the electrons jump back and forth.
I respect their right to use any license they want, but I think their choice is inferior.
If you're just writing something for yourself, your choice of license is a matter of preference. If you want wide adoption, you need to provide an incentive or requirement for improvements to your software to come back to the original project. GNU Public License, Lesser GNU Public License, Eclipse Public License, and Mozilla Public License all provide the requirements. MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses do not.
The outstanding OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD projects thrive because they have over twenty three years of development each to draw upon - more if you count the original BSD code they draw from. And even with all of that accumulated code and brilliant contributors, they can't match the device driver support in the Linux kernel. And the GPL is the reason why.
I wish them well, but I suspect they'll remain a niche project forever.
Rust came from Mozilla, but RedoxOS is independent. All of Mozilla's work is available under the MPL, which is more similar to the LGPL than the MIT license.
That's awesome that you've been able to shop around for DSL options. if they're available in PA, I haven't been able to find them. I'll check again, having more options is always good. Thanks for mentioning it.
It probably makes me pathetic, but that got me to laugh out loud. Thanks. "We're sorry. You've transferred 125 MB of data this month. To get another gigabit, you must first send another $80 payment."
I live in Pennsylvania, and I also have internet choices of Comcast or 3G (not 4G, I'm too far outside Philadelphia for 4G) wireless. I have called every DSL provider I could find in the state, none provide service to my property.
On the other hand, I've had Comcast internet for fourteen years with three service outages total. My experience with Comcast, at least locally (north west of Philadelphia) is that if you walk into a branch office and ask for help, the people there and the service technicians will solve your problems. They can't get you lower prices, but they'll get billing and service problems fixed. The Comcast websites and especially their phone support come from the thirteenth level of hell, though.
Google averages on the order of $55 in ad revenue per user, per year. Google Fiber, last I checked, is $70 per month. So if they're the only internet service provider, it does financially benefit them to screw you on internet price even if it reduces your usage.
They have nearly a natural monopoly, so it's in their best interest to invest the minimum amount required to keep customers from canceling their service and milk the cash cow forever.
The truth is that the payback for a fiber rollout is probably under two years in areas where they have a high number of subscribers - and in areas where they don't have a high number of subscribers, a fiber rollout probably still pays for itself quickly because they'll get more subscribers due to the better speeds.
If anything, this is counter productive. Trump's campaign is feeding on the media circus. He's like something out of a bad horror movie, your attacks only make him stronger.
The best way to attack Trump is plain facts. He inherited his money, four of his business ventures have declared bankruptcy, he openly cheated on his wives, he's lying about his current net worth. His primary claim to fame is his brilliant business sense, and it's a lie.
I have to assume you love Trump and are flaming this discussion to discredit people who disagree with him. If you're serious in your dislike for his ideas, find something better to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with any backdoor is that someone else can figure it out. So even if you don't care that the Chinese government can read your email, you should care that someone somewhere might find the same vulnerability and use it to capture your credit card number.
That's arguably the biggest reason backdoors are always wrong - even if you trust the FBI and the NSA, you implicitly have to trust every black hat hacker in the world too because sooner or later they'll get the keys to the same door the FBI and NSA are using.
Charging mats use about 5 watts of power, which means even if you were doing nothing but charging phones with dead batteries around the clock it would only use 40 kwh of power in a year. As far as contributing causes to the energy crisis go, that's nothing. Hand-washing one load of laundry will offset all of your energy use from charging your phone for over a month. Skipping one drive to the movies to rent something at home will offset all of your energy use for charging your cell phone for years (since one gallon of gasoline has 33kwh equivalent of energy in it).
To be fair, I am a card-carrying FSF member but I work on proprietary software because I have a mortgage and kids to feed. I suspect most lawyers are effectively in the same boat - they got into law to earn a decent living and do the right things, but ended up in a situation where the choice was either "work on something morally questionable or be unemployed" or at best "work on something morally questionable or earn janitor's wages - while still having to make your student loan payments".
The GPL never prevented reverse engineering or fair use. If I write libfoo and release it under the GPL, and you write libbar with all of the same APIs and release it under another license, that was never illegal or a GPL violation.
As far as I understand it, if you re-implement GPL software using the original code (not API, but implementation code) as a starting point, then you are violating the GPL. But the Java standard library is colossal and the bits that Google copied directly are tiny and obvious. So I genuinely don't think the GPL is weakened by this.
Separately, I agree Google is no friend to GPL. But I don't think this lawsuit is some clever attempt for them to sabotage the GPL so they can make Android 7 fully proprietary from top to bottom. I think this lawsuit is just to avoid paying Oracle licensing fees.
They compile down to Javascript, but ideally that shouldn't matter any more than the fact that C++ compiles down to intermediate language in most compilers. As long as the top level language does what you want, the intermediate steps between it and CPU microcode should be irrelevant.
I think the killer feature of Node.js is that you have the same code on client and server, which makes the mental overhead for a 'full stack developer' smaller. But now Dart, Typescript, Clojure/script, Scala, and many other languages can offer the same reduced mental overhead but with a more consistent language.
You don't have to hide. Fry himself is posting his statement on a public blog.
But blogs lend themselves to essays, ideas, and reflection. Social networks lend themselves to the kind of quick, pointless interactions you get with high school cliques, but at an even faster pace with added advertising. "We've taken everything that was bad about some of your social interactions at age 15, and figured out how to make it worse, and convinced you that it's incredibly desirable."
I don't hide anything. But I don't post it to social networks either.
There is tons of free blog hosting software available. Just do a web search for "free blog sites".
The thing Fry decries is the nature of connections and communication and advertising in the mainstream social networks. Instead of making useful statements in paragraph form, we make short assertions that are mostly meaningless and then waste hours checking statuses, responding to two sentence comments on our two sentence comments, and arguing over the latest Star Wars movie or Hillary Clinton or similar inane things. (That's not to say that intelligent discussion about Hillary Clinton is impossible. It's possible - but exceedingly rare on social networks.)
It's high speed high school cliques plus advertising, which if they thought about it carefully only shallow fools would intentionally seek out.
Charles Stross wrote about this very idea in the science fiction novel Accelerando, pubished in 2005. So unless you beat him, he gets the credit.
He may have borrowed the concept in turn, I don't know.
We long ago reached the point where people like you are the tiny majority and the great majority of patent holders are major corporations that use them to crush upstart competitors such as yourself. The original intent of patents has been turned on its ear, and it's now a weapon to protect incumbents.
With respect to the national debt - other countries have carried far higher debts for far longer.
And remember too that solving the national debt using tax levels that this country had from 1941 through 1980, including when Republican Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford were in office would work. Tax levels on the rich were literally more than twice what they are today, and nobody called Eisenhower, Nixon, or Ford a socialist.
I checked, and the first DSL provider I contacted said I lived in an area rural enough that DSL didn't make sense. He could get me service, but nowhere near the Comcast rates in the area.
On the other hand, he said his employer is buying the fiber that Verizon has basically abandoned in the area and building it out themselves. So in a few years, it might be Comcast vs. Frontier in my area. Competition is good.
I wrote a response to this yesterday but Slashdot's servers ate it. As TopSpin wrote already, this project doesn't work in the frequencies of over-the-air television or FM radio.
I think it's more interesting as an educational toy than anything else. I've been meaning to learn Software Defined Radio and play with receivers for the purposes of understanding why wireless connection bandwidth speeds in my house only come near the official ratings if I hold my laptop so close to the wireless access point that I can watch the electrons jump back and forth.
Right - but in practice it often filters back to the original author.
Wikipedia says Mozilla - do you have a source for the Apache claim? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I respect their right to use any license they want, but I think their choice is inferior.
If you're just writing something for yourself, your choice of license is a matter of preference. If you want wide adoption, you need to provide an incentive or requirement for improvements to your software to come back to the original project. GNU Public License, Lesser GNU Public License, Eclipse Public License, and Mozilla Public License all provide the requirements. MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses do not.
The outstanding OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD projects thrive because they have over twenty three years of development each to draw upon - more if you count the original BSD code they draw from. And even with all of that accumulated code and brilliant contributors, they can't match the device driver support in the Linux kernel. And the GPL is the reason why.
I wish them well, but I suspect they'll remain a niche project forever.
Rust came from Mozilla, but RedoxOS is independent. All of Mozilla's work is available under the MPL, which is more similar to the LGPL than the MIT license.
That's awesome that you've been able to shop around for DSL options. if they're available in PA, I haven't been able to find them. I'll check again, having more options is always good. Thanks for mentioning it.
It probably makes me pathetic, but that got me to laugh out loud. Thanks. "We're sorry. You've transferred 125 MB of data this month. To get another gigabit, you must first send another $80 payment."
I live in Pennsylvania, and I also have internet choices of Comcast or 3G (not 4G, I'm too far outside Philadelphia for 4G) wireless. I have called every DSL provider I could find in the state, none provide service to my property.
On the other hand, I've had Comcast internet for fourteen years with three service outages total. My experience with Comcast, at least locally (north west of Philadelphia) is that if you walk into a branch office and ask for help, the people there and the service technicians will solve your problems. They can't get you lower prices, but they'll get billing and service problems fixed. The Comcast websites and especially their phone support come from the thirteenth level of hell, though.
In south east PA, Comcast 1Gbps service is $299 per month. I don't know what the regular rates are for it in Georgia.
I have Comcast, and I can buy 1Gbps from them - but it's $299 per month, not $80. I couldn't talk my wife into it, though.
Google averages on the order of $55 in ad revenue per user, per year. Google Fiber, last I checked, is $70 per month. So if they're the only internet service provider, it does financially benefit them to screw you on internet price even if it reduces your usage.
They have nearly a natural monopoly, so it's in their best interest to invest the minimum amount required to keep customers from canceling their service and milk the cash cow forever.
The truth is that the payback for a fiber rollout is probably under two years in areas where they have a high number of subscribers - and in areas where they don't have a high number of subscribers, a fiber rollout probably still pays for itself quickly because they'll get more subscribers due to the better speeds.
If anything, this is counter productive. Trump's campaign is feeding on the media circus. He's like something out of a bad horror movie, your attacks only make him stronger.
The best way to attack Trump is plain facts. He inherited his money, four of his business ventures have declared bankruptcy, he openly cheated on his wives, he's lying about his current net worth. His primary claim to fame is his brilliant business sense, and it's a lie.
I have to assume you love Trump and are flaming this discussion to discredit people who disagree with him. If you're serious in your dislike for his ideas, find something better to do.