There certainly are third party stores where I can buy music for the iPod: eMusic, Amazon MP3, and Magnatune come to mind.
Sure, Apple controls the only DRM'd way to distribute content on the iPod. But there's a lot more to adding a new DRM system than just enabling it. You have to get licences from Microsoft, sign agreements that allow them to revoke your licenses, probably have code audits, and so on. Really, it would mean that Apple would have to allow their largest competitor access to and control over everything they do in their most popular and lucrative product.
Ogg (Vorbis & Theora) is freely implementable, royalty free, patent-unencumbered standard with a free (as in beer as well as in speech) library for encoding and decoding it. It is the only such standard that is reasonably high quality and actively maintained that I know of.
HTML5 is a standard in progress. As such, the whole point is to standardize; get everyone to work together and be compatible, so content producers can trust that end users can view their content, no matter what browser they use. It costs lots of money to produce content in a variety of formats, so it makes getting content out to everyone more expensive if you have to do that.
The second most widely used browser is Firefox. Firefox is open source software, covered by the MPL and GPL. This means that it cannot contain proprietary, patent encumbered software. So, if Firefox is to implement a media codec, it must be one that is patent unencumbered and freely implementable. This means that, as far as I know, Ogg is the only possible format that could reasonably be used in Firefox.
So, if you don't standardize on Ogg (or another equivalent specification that I'm unaware of), then you have two choices; no actual standardization on video formats, which pretty much makes the standard dead in the water and means that everyone will continue to use Flash for video on the web, or standardizing on something that Firefox cannot implements, which, as the second most popular browser on the market, means that the standard will be pretty much dead in the water and everyone will continue to use Flash for video on the web.
Or, they could only find the machine they wanted pre-bundled with Vista and don't know how to downgrade to XP. Or they work in a small software shop and need to make sure their software works on Vista. Or heck, even the poor administrator who has to deal with supporting all of these Vista boxes in a corporate environment deserves some pity too.
The iPhone includes WebKit as the rendering engine for its web browser, which is based on KHTML, an LGPL'd piece of software. No, I don't have a physical iPhone in front of me, but this has been confirmed from multiple sources. So yes, there is LGPL'd software on there. And no, there is no officially supported or documented way to load a modified version onto your phone, and Apple has specifically said that they won't allow 3rd party code to run on the iPhone, and it it taking quite an effort at hacking to even be able to access the filesystem on the iPhone. Apple has been notified of this (it has been discussed on the WebKit development list), including the specifics of how it violates Section 6 of the LGPL, and has not provided any form of official response. I have considered contacting Apple's legal department myself, but given that I do not hold any of the copyright in the code, I wanted to wait and see if someone with a better claim wanted to contact them first.
All of the restrictions in the GPL are aimed at preserving everyone's freedom to use, modify, and distribute in question. The problem is that we have laws limiting people's freedom (copyright laws), and byproducts of how software distribution works that also limit user's freedoms (binary compilation leave the product the end user can use as something different than what is required to realistically be able to modify it). The GPL works within that restrictive copyright regime to make sure that it is never used to restrict a given work, and also to make sure that binary-only distribution doesn't effectively restrict modification of that work.
This is similar to how we have laws against kidnapping. Sure, you could claim that those laws restrict someone's freedom, because they can't kidnap someone, but really they are laws that preserve freedom by not allowing anyone to take away anyone else's freedom. Now, I wouldn't claim that copyright is as bad as kidnapping, but the basic principle is the same; you sometimes need to limit the freedom to take freedom from others.
Not sure about the being broken part, but this patent sounds like it would fail on obviousness grounds, especially after the recent Supreme Court ruling that lowered the bar for obviousness defenses.
The algorithm described (I've only read the first dozen claims or so, not the whole patent) is basically a textbook challenge-response algorithm, used to lock access to a disk. Since there's prior art for passwords built into a hard disk (see several of the patents this one references), and the challenge-response part is a textbook security practice that's been around for ages, I think that you could claim that this is an obvious combination of two existing pieces of prior art, and thus unenforceable.
Um, you do realize that the vast majority of users who encountered that issue probably just wrote off your company and switched to another, right? I use a Mac; just using IE for the billing page isn't an option for me, so I wouldn't even consider using your company for an ISP. I wouldn't bother complaining to you; that would be a lot more work than just finding another ISP. You have such a small number of complaints because your sample is self-selecting; your users are only the ones who would put up with that sort of thing.
Um, most of the people I've heard blaming VT haven't been calling for a "lockdown". They've been wondering why they weren't even informed of what happened in the morning, until 9:26, two hours later and after the second shooting had begun (according to some sources; it seems that some are claiming the second shooting began after that, and I can't judge which is accurate). They've been wondering what evidence the school and police had to indicate that the shooter had left campus, which is why they didn't consider him a threat. I don't think there should have been a lockdown, but I do think that the campus should have been informed, and possibly that classes should have been cancelled.
I think it's kind of silly to post the principal's email address on Slashdot, but sending someone an email is not "trying, convicting, and punishing" someone, and not even remotely comparable to locking someone up for 12 days.
The thing is, you can tunnel pretty much anything over anything, and telnet would be pretty easy to tunnel over. In fact, if you really wanted you could tunnel SSH over Telnet, and retain the encryption. So, there is absolutely no reason to leave Telnet unblocked and SSH blocked. Furthermore, in an institutional environment like a school, you could just not install SSH clients, and not give the students sufficient privileges to run their own, which is more effective than blocking particular ports. As long as the users can run arbitrary software, or an SSH client that's already installed, they can just use a different port for SSH to get around a firewall block.
Basically, there is no way in which Telnet is more secure, and leaving a Telnet port open with an SSH port blocked will always harm security more than it will help.
Just a few months ago, I had to delete a sentence from Wikipedia claiming that it was a good practice for firewalls to block the SSH ports but leave open the Telnet ports. I've seen firewalls configured like that, too; I could Telnet out, but not use SSH. I'm sure there are people who turn on Telnet daemons because of such poorly configured firewalls.
Sure, it's a really stupid idea to leave Telnet turned on on a machine, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do it. Software vendors have to act like over-protective parents to their users in order for anyone to be secure, because most people, including many sysadmins (and many developers, for that matter), know next to nothing about effective security.
There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.
Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.
For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).
There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), severalcontests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner'sguides to the format as well.
Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap
You have explained why the Gettier example is not an example of knowledge. But that's what Gettier was saying; the old definition of knowledge being "justified true belief" was insufficient, since this example of justified true belief is not an example of knowledge. Or are you claiming that your argument shows how this example is not an example of "justified true belief," and thus Gettier's counterexample doesn't stand?
The problem is to actually provide a testable definition of knowledge (testable meaning that you can formalize the definition in some sense, so anyone could apply your definition to a given situation and get a consistent result), that always matches what we intuitively know about what knowledge is.
There are several proposed solutions, listed on the Wikipedia page about the problem, but there has been no general consensus on one of the solutions. Some people say that his example is bad, because the beliefs are not justified, some people provide more strict criteria other than just justification, and so on.
The only two iPhones at the show were under glass, and Apple representatives said it is a "closed platform", refusing even to identify the specific processor it uses, and there's apparently no developer kit for it, though "developers who want to do applications [for the iPhone] are welcome to contact Apple developer relations."
Still only rumors at this time, but it looks like you might be right, sadly.
History is written. Not all people have had written language. Of the set of written history that we have, we have not seen evidence that inhabited islands have submerged (unless you count Atlantis as history rather than myth). Anything that we know about pre-historic peoples (people without written language) is from archeology, and possibly geology, not history.
And if you had read the Security Advisory, you would have seen that the problem they were fixing was about data being sent to the server and was fixed. They did not remove quartz composer functionality from Quicktime movies, so the movies you can download that show you to yourself, possibly with some effects added, still work (and are still a little creepy), but they only display the picture locally. What they did was remove the functionality from unsigned Java applets to embed such movies, because those applets could take the image produced by Quicktime and send it back to the server, which was a real problem.
OK, I dislike Microsoft as much as the average Slashdotter, but that's just a silly reason to dislike them. Did you actually read what you wrote?
One of my biggest complaints is how they FORCE people to upgrade... They make it so that software vendors mush move along, thus leaving odler versions behind, and ensuring that new versions do NOT run on older versions of Windows... There are still a lot of systems running under 98SE that are working just fine... My 98SE runs everything I need
You claim that Windows 98 does everything you need, but that they're "forcing" you to upgrade. If 98 is so great, then just run it! I have to use Windows at work, and I'm very glad about XP's greater reliability and features than Windows 98. Heck, if you don't like XP's activation, then Windows 2000 will give you a better system without the activation. But if 98 works for you, great!
And likewise, if there's only one user, a piece of commercial software will probably stop being maintained pretty quickly.
The thing is, for any reasonably widely used piece of software, there are likely to be enough users that they can maintain the code, or pay enough for someone else to maintain it. If it's something like ReiserFS, that is included in major Linux distributions, then part of the money you pay to buy those Linux distributions (if they're commercial ones like Red Hat or SUSE) goes towards maintaining that software. It's not like you have to maintain it yourself. You have that option, sure. You also have the option of single-handedly funding it's maintenance. And other companies have the option of taking over maintenance themselves. The difference between OSS and proprietary software is that you have these options. When a piece of proprietary software is cancelled, there's nothing you can do other than try to fight the bitrot of the old software, or the headache of trying to migrate your data to a new system (if you can even access your data, which may be stored in propriety formats with no export or conversion options).
Yes, it will cause problems if Hans Reiser is not able to keep maintaining ReiserFS. However, from what I've heard, his leadership of the project has also caused problems. Maybe someone will fork it now, take control, and actually get Reiser4 to a reasonable degree of quality. Or maybe not. There are lots of other good linux filesystems out there, and maybe the effort will be better spent on them. The key is that with open source, you have all these choices, rather than being forced to do whatever the vendor wants.
The thing is, there are really two main kinds of code. There are libraries, which are intended to be dropped into other applications, and there are entire applications on their own. The LGPL, surprisingly enough, works better for libraries, and the GPL works better for applications.
The problem with always using an LGPL style license is that people can always work around it to "embrace & extend" your code in such a way that it pretty much stops being free. For instance, if you release some image editing application under the LGPL, and Adobe goes and integrates it with Photoshop as a library, they can basically get all of your features, without contributing anything back.
Anyhow, you compare the GPL to enforced communism. That's a ridiculously extreme example. Enforced communism takes everyone in an entire country, and via threat of physical violence, forces them to give up what they've created, earned, and done. The GPL is completely optional. You don't have to link with any GPL libraries, or modify any GPL programs. You can write them yourself, or you can license them from proprietary vendors, or you can use a BSD or similarly licensed piece of software. Do you complain about every proprietary piece of software you buy? Because remember, that gives you less freedom and flexibility than the GPL does.
You have the choice to use or not use GPL'd software. It is awfully tempting to use it, because the source code is right there. But it is your choice, and if you choose to use it (and I'm referring to using the code in your program, not just using the final product), you have an obligation to follow the license. It's not forcing you to do anything; it's just an offer that's really tempting.
Heck, this is even old news in the US. It's been around since 2000 or so, and it was inspired by the system in the Netherlands.
Also, it's more of a car share than a car rental. You have to be a member to use it, I believe paying a monthly fee to be a member, plus an hourly or daily fee to use the car.
You know, I'm a gamer, and I loved the first several humorous, self-deprecating pieces about how dorky gamers are, especially because I do know some people who are just that dorky, and there are always things that you recognize from games you've played. But you know what? This whole self-deprecating, let's show how dorky gamers are genre is really getting to be a tired old cliché. Come on, I'm sure there must be something better someone can do about gamers. Make the players get magically sucked into the game (a bit of which happened in The Gamers), or do a drama about how personal relationships can be strained or strengthened through gaming, or do a documentary on the positive points of gaming, or something. It's just not that original to do over-exaggerated gamers and laugh at how socially inept they are.
But you see, they aren't targeting completely separate concerns like military use, they're focusing on only one thing: the freedom to use, modify, and copy the software, and not place any restrictions on the use, modification, and copying of the software by other people. TPM is fundamentally incompatible with being able to use, modify, and copy GPL'd software; if code needs to be signed by a particular entity to run on a computer, then you cannot modify it and run it on your machine.
As far as patents go, the license only disallows the use of patents to prevent people from copying and using the GPL'd code. Again, this is a perfectly reasonable measure to protect the integrity of the GPL; otherwise, anyone who wanted to use GPL'd code but didn't want anyone else to use their derived work could just add some code in that was protected by a patent they owned, and sue anyone who tried to use it.
In the case of Linksys, if they have patents on their modifications of GPL'd software, then they would have to provide a blanket license for anyone to use their patents, or they wouldn't be able to use the GPL'd software. If they don't want to do that, then they can choose not to use the GPL'd software. It would be pretty disingenuous for them to use GPL'd software and then not allow anyone else to copy it and modify it because of patents.
The patent and DRM restrictions only apply to the GPL'd software itself, not the hardware or other software running on the same machine. So you can use the software on hardware that is patented, or you can run VMWARE (which isn't covered by the GPL), and Windows, and so on.
The headline states "Mac OS X Intel Kernel Uses DRM". According to TFA, it's Rosetta (the PPC emulator, which isn't written by Apple) that uses DRM, not the kernel of the OS itself: We've discovered that the Rosetta kernel uses TCPA/TPM DRM. Some parts of the GUI like ATSServer are still not native to x86 - meaning that Rosetta is required by the GUI, which in turn requires TPM. In fact, we already know that the kernel doesn't use DRM and can run on any Intel box you want, because it's open source and can be downloaded here. It's the GUI that Apple wants to be locking in to their hardware, not the kernel. I suspect that they probably will make something other than Rosetta check the TCPA chip, but that's not what is going on right now.
Did you even glance at TFA? Your identity is not a single word in a flat namespace; your identity is a URL. So you can have foo.com/username, or whatever. Hell, this makes it less likely for you to have to have identities like martian67676, because you can just find a single domain that has your username free, and then use that on every site, rather than having everyone pollute the namespace of every site, which far cuts down the number of available options.
6. The phishing only works if you have their password... which... why would you phish then?
Um, no, that's not true. The way it works is that you go to one site, enter your ID, it redirects you to a page on your identity server asking if you want to allow the other site to verify your identity, and then it redirects you back to the original site. Now, if you weren't already logged in on your identity server, you would have to log in first, so it would redirect you to a login page on your identity server. What's to stop them from redirecting you to a page that looks exactly like your identity server login page, but steals your username and password?
Of course, there's no real way to make any sort of distributed identity server work without running into this sort of problem (unless you require people to use certificates stored on their local computer, which doesn't work for the internet kiosk use case). This is the sort of issue that caused microsoft to require you to type Ctrl-Alt-Delete to get to your login screen; otherwise, people could just put up a login screen themselves and grab your login information. On the web, though, there's no real way to deal with this, since you don't have traps like Ctrl-Alt-Delete that are guaranteed to be caught by a trusted party.
Slashdot Mirror
There certainly are third party stores where I can buy music for the iPod: eMusic, Amazon MP3, and Magnatune come to mind.
Sure, Apple controls the only DRM'd way to distribute content on the iPod. But there's a lot more to adding a new DRM system than just enabling it. You have to get licences from Microsoft, sign agreements that allow them to revoke your licenses, probably have code audits, and so on. Really, it would mean that Apple would have to allow their largest competitor access to and control over everything they do in their most popular and lucrative product.
Ogg (Vorbis & Theora) is freely implementable, royalty free, patent-unencumbered standard with a free (as in beer as well as in speech) library for encoding and decoding it. It is the only such standard that is reasonably high quality and actively maintained that I know of.
HTML5 is a standard in progress. As such, the whole point is to standardize; get everyone to work together and be compatible, so content producers can trust that end users can view their content, no matter what browser they use. It costs lots of money to produce content in a variety of formats, so it makes getting content out to everyone more expensive if you have to do that.
The second most widely used browser is Firefox. Firefox is open source software, covered by the MPL and GPL. This means that it cannot contain proprietary, patent encumbered software. So, if Firefox is to implement a media codec, it must be one that is patent unencumbered and freely implementable. This means that, as far as I know, Ogg is the only possible format that could reasonably be used in Firefox.
So, if you don't standardize on Ogg (or another equivalent specification that I'm unaware of), then you have two choices; no actual standardization on video formats, which pretty much makes the standard dead in the water and means that everyone will continue to use Flash for video on the web, or standardizing on something that Firefox cannot implements, which, as the second most popular browser on the market, means that the standard will be pretty much dead in the water and everyone will continue to use Flash for video on the web.
Or, they could only find the machine they wanted pre-bundled with Vista and don't know how to downgrade to XP. Or they work in a small software shop and need to make sure their software works on Vista. Or heck, even the poor administrator who has to deal with supporting all of these Vista boxes in a corporate environment deserves some pity too.
The iPhone includes WebKit as the rendering engine for its web browser, which is based on KHTML, an LGPL'd piece of software. No, I don't have a physical iPhone in front of me, but this has been confirmed from multiple sources. So yes, there is LGPL'd software on there. And no, there is no officially supported or documented way to load a modified version onto your phone, and Apple has specifically said that they won't allow 3rd party code to run on the iPhone, and it it taking quite an effort at hacking to even be able to access the filesystem on the iPhone. Apple has been notified of this (it has been discussed on the WebKit development list), including the specifics of how it violates Section 6 of the LGPL, and has not provided any form of official response. I have considered contacting Apple's legal department myself, but given that I do not hold any of the copyright in the code, I wanted to wait and see if someone with a better claim wanted to contact them first.
All of the restrictions in the GPL are aimed at preserving everyone's freedom to use, modify, and distribute in question. The problem is that we have laws limiting people's freedom (copyright laws), and byproducts of how software distribution works that also limit user's freedoms (binary compilation leave the product the end user can use as something different than what is required to realistically be able to modify it). The GPL works within that restrictive copyright regime to make sure that it is never used to restrict a given work, and also to make sure that binary-only distribution doesn't effectively restrict modification of that work.
This is similar to how we have laws against kidnapping. Sure, you could claim that those laws restrict someone's freedom, because they can't kidnap someone, but really they are laws that preserve freedom by not allowing anyone to take away anyone else's freedom. Now, I wouldn't claim that copyright is as bad as kidnapping, but the basic principle is the same; you sometimes need to limit the freedom to take freedom from others.
Not sure about the being broken part, but this patent sounds like it would fail on obviousness grounds, especially after the recent Supreme Court ruling that lowered the bar for obviousness defenses. The algorithm described (I've only read the first dozen claims or so, not the whole patent) is basically a textbook challenge-response algorithm, used to lock access to a disk. Since there's prior art for passwords built into a hard disk (see several of the patents this one references), and the challenge-response part is a textbook security practice that's been around for ages, I think that you could claim that this is an obvious combination of two existing pieces of prior art, and thus unenforceable.
Um, you do realize that the vast majority of users who encountered that issue probably just wrote off your company and switched to another, right? I use a Mac; just using IE for the billing page isn't an option for me, so I wouldn't even consider using your company for an ISP. I wouldn't bother complaining to you; that would be a lot more work than just finding another ISP. You have such a small number of complaints because your sample is self-selecting; your users are only the ones who would put up with that sort of thing.
Um, most of the people I've heard blaming VT haven't been calling for a "lockdown". They've been wondering why they weren't even informed of what happened in the morning, until 9:26, two hours later and after the second shooting had begun (according to some sources; it seems that some are claiming the second shooting began after that, and I can't judge which is accurate). They've been wondering what evidence the school and police had to indicate that the shooter had left campus, which is why they didn't consider him a threat. I don't think there should have been a lockdown, but I do think that the campus should have been informed, and possibly that classes should have been cancelled.
I think it's kind of silly to post the principal's email address on Slashdot, but sending someone an email is not "trying, convicting, and punishing" someone, and not even remotely comparable to locking someone up for 12 days.
The thing is, you can tunnel pretty much anything over anything, and telnet would be pretty easy to tunnel over. In fact, if you really wanted you could tunnel SSH over Telnet, and retain the encryption. So, there is absolutely no reason to leave Telnet unblocked and SSH blocked. Furthermore, in an institutional environment like a school, you could just not install SSH clients, and not give the students sufficient privileges to run their own, which is more effective than blocking particular ports. As long as the users can run arbitrary software, or an SSH client that's already installed, they can just use a different port for SSH to get around a firewall block.
Basically, there is no way in which Telnet is more secure, and leaving a Telnet port open with an SSH port blocked will always harm security more than it will help.
Just a few months ago, I had to delete a sentence from Wikipedia claiming that it was a good practice for firewalls to block the SSH ports but leave open the Telnet ports. I've seen firewalls configured like that, too; I could Telnet out, but not use SSH. I'm sure there are people who turn on Telnet daemons because of such poorly configured firewalls.
Sure, it's a really stupid idea to leave Telnet turned on on a machine, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do it. Software vendors have to act like over-protective parents to their users in order for anyone to be secure, because most people, including many sysadmins (and many developers, for that matter), know next to nothing about effective security.
There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.
Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.
For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).
There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), several contests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner's guides to the format as well.
Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap
You have explained why the Gettier example is not an example of knowledge. But that's what Gettier was saying; the old definition of knowledge being "justified true belief" was insufficient, since this example of justified true belief is not an example of knowledge. Or are you claiming that your argument shows how this example is not an example of "justified true belief," and thus Gettier's counterexample doesn't stand? The problem is to actually provide a testable definition of knowledge (testable meaning that you can formalize the definition in some sense, so anyone could apply your definition to a given situation and get a consistent result), that always matches what we intuitively know about what knowledge is. There are several proposed solutions, listed on the Wikipedia page about the problem, but there has been no general consensus on one of the solutions. Some people say that his example is bad, because the beliefs are not justified, some people provide more strict criteria other than just justification, and so on.
History is written. Not all people have had written language. Of the set of written history that we have, we have not seen evidence that inhabited islands have submerged (unless you count Atlantis as history rather than myth). Anything that we know about pre-historic peoples (people without written language) is from archeology, and possibly geology, not history.
And if you had read the Security Advisory, you would have seen that the problem they were fixing was about data being sent to the server and was fixed. They did not remove quartz composer functionality from Quicktime movies, so the movies you can download that show you to yourself, possibly with some effects added, still work (and are still a little creepy), but they only display the picture locally. What they did was remove the functionality from unsigned Java applets to embed such movies, because those applets could take the image produced by Quicktime and send it back to the server, which was a real problem.
And likewise, if there's only one user, a piece of commercial software will probably stop being maintained pretty quickly. The thing is, for any reasonably widely used piece of software, there are likely to be enough users that they can maintain the code, or pay enough for someone else to maintain it. If it's something like ReiserFS, that is included in major Linux distributions, then part of the money you pay to buy those Linux distributions (if they're commercial ones like Red Hat or SUSE) goes towards maintaining that software. It's not like you have to maintain it yourself. You have that option, sure. You also have the option of single-handedly funding it's maintenance. And other companies have the option of taking over maintenance themselves. The difference between OSS and proprietary software is that you have these options. When a piece of proprietary software is cancelled, there's nothing you can do other than try to fight the bitrot of the old software, or the headache of trying to migrate your data to a new system (if you can even access your data, which may be stored in propriety formats with no export or conversion options). Yes, it will cause problems if Hans Reiser is not able to keep maintaining ReiserFS. However, from what I've heard, his leadership of the project has also caused problems. Maybe someone will fork it now, take control, and actually get Reiser4 to a reasonable degree of quality. Or maybe not. There are lots of other good linux filesystems out there, and maybe the effort will be better spent on them. The key is that with open source, you have all these choices, rather than being forced to do whatever the vendor wants.
The thing is, there are really two main kinds of code. There are libraries, which are intended to be dropped into other applications, and there are entire applications on their own. The LGPL, surprisingly enough, works better for libraries, and the GPL works better for applications. The problem with always using an LGPL style license is that people can always work around it to "embrace & extend" your code in such a way that it pretty much stops being free. For instance, if you release some image editing application under the LGPL, and Adobe goes and integrates it with Photoshop as a library, they can basically get all of your features, without contributing anything back. Anyhow, you compare the GPL to enforced communism. That's a ridiculously extreme example. Enforced communism takes everyone in an entire country, and via threat of physical violence, forces them to give up what they've created, earned, and done. The GPL is completely optional. You don't have to link with any GPL libraries, or modify any GPL programs. You can write them yourself, or you can license them from proprietary vendors, or you can use a BSD or similarly licensed piece of software. Do you complain about every proprietary piece of software you buy? Because remember, that gives you less freedom and flexibility than the GPL does. You have the choice to use or not use GPL'd software. It is awfully tempting to use it, because the source code is right there. But it is your choice, and if you choose to use it (and I'm referring to using the code in your program, not just using the final product), you have an obligation to follow the license. It's not forcing you to do anything; it's just an offer that's really tempting.
Heck, this is even old news in the US. It's been around since 2000 or so, and it was inspired by the system in the Netherlands. Also, it's more of a car share than a car rental. You have to be a member to use it, I believe paying a monthly fee to be a member, plus an hourly or daily fee to use the car.
You know, I'm a gamer, and I loved the first several humorous, self-deprecating pieces about how dorky gamers are, especially because I do know some people who are just that dorky, and there are always things that you recognize from games you've played. But you know what? This whole self-deprecating, let's show how dorky gamers are genre is really getting to be a tired old cliché. Come on, I'm sure there must be something better someone can do about gamers. Make the players get magically sucked into the game (a bit of which happened in The Gamers), or do a drama about how personal relationships can be strained or strengthened through gaming, or do a documentary on the positive points of gaming, or something. It's just not that original to do over-exaggerated gamers and laugh at how socially inept they are.
But you see, they aren't targeting completely separate concerns like military use, they're focusing on only one thing: the freedom to use, modify, and copy the software, and not place any restrictions on the use, modification, and copying of the software by other people. TPM is fundamentally incompatible with being able to use, modify, and copy GPL'd software; if code needs to be signed by a particular entity to run on a computer, then you cannot modify it and run it on your machine. As far as patents go, the license only disallows the use of patents to prevent people from copying and using the GPL'd code. Again, this is a perfectly reasonable measure to protect the integrity of the GPL; otherwise, anyone who wanted to use GPL'd code but didn't want anyone else to use their derived work could just add some code in that was protected by a patent they owned, and sue anyone who tried to use it. In the case of Linksys, if they have patents on their modifications of GPL'd software, then they would have to provide a blanket license for anyone to use their patents, or they wouldn't be able to use the GPL'd software. If they don't want to do that, then they can choose not to use the GPL'd software. It would be pretty disingenuous for them to use GPL'd software and then not allow anyone else to copy it and modify it because of patents. The patent and DRM restrictions only apply to the GPL'd software itself, not the hardware or other software running on the same machine. So you can use the software on hardware that is patented, or you can run VMWARE (which isn't covered by the GPL), and Windows, and so on.
The headline states "Mac OS X Intel Kernel Uses DRM". According to TFA, it's Rosetta (the PPC emulator, which isn't written by Apple) that uses DRM, not the kernel of the OS itself: We've discovered that the Rosetta kernel uses TCPA/TPM DRM. Some parts of the GUI like ATSServer are still not native to x86 - meaning that Rosetta is required by the GUI, which in turn requires TPM. In fact, we already know that the kernel doesn't use DRM and can run on any Intel box you want, because it's open source and can be downloaded here. It's the GUI that Apple wants to be locking in to their hardware, not the kernel. I suspect that they probably will make something other than Rosetta check the TCPA chip, but that's not what is going on right now.
Did you even glance at TFA? Your identity is not a single word in a flat namespace; your identity is a URL. So you can have foo.com/username, or whatever. Hell, this makes it less likely for you to have to have identities like martian67676, because you can just find a single domain that has your username free, and then use that on every site, rather than having everyone pollute the namespace of every site, which far cuts down the number of available options.