I'm not sure that "neurotic" is the best metaphor, but as the level of abstraction that computers deal with gets higher, they can start to commit more kinds of meaningful error.
To explain: If you are programming in assembly language, any programming error is likely to cause a simple failure of the system. Something goes wrong at a low level, so the higher-level thing that the system is meant to do just doesn't happen. On the other hand, if you are programming with tools (language and libraries) that deal in high level abstractions, a programming error can result in the system succesfully manipulating those abstractions in the wrong way. If the "rm" program works correctly, your script might delete the wrong files. The bugs that such a high-level system might have are more likely to look like "bad behaviour" or even insanity than the simple malfunctions of older systems. We are already seeing this. Pressing the wrong button can cause a personal email to be sent to a group of people, for example -- behaviour that looks almost malicious.
I used to think that the SF fears of machines "turning on their creators" such as "2001" or "Terminator" were just silly. "A computer can only do what it's programmed to do", I would say. I have long since seen the flaw in this. A computer that is programmed to use weapons, for instance, can use them on the wrong people due to a programming error (or a user error) at a higher level. (Worth knowing if you're an RAF pilot overflying a Patriot battery). A computer that was programmed (correctly) to create strategies (I this is still SF, or at any rate early research) might create strategies with the wrong objectives due to higher-level programming errors. That is the level of "bug" appearing in the plots of "2001" and "Terminator".
The aim of this is perfectly reasonable, but I have real problems with using legislation. Basically, I do not see "the internet" as a public utility that should be regulated by lawmakers
I would be more sympathetic to a more general law that prohibited "advertising obscene content in a misleading way" or something (it would have to be worded a lot more tightly than that, but you see what I am driving at). Pulling up a consensual, commercial system like DNS and slapping laws on it just is the wrong way to go about things. In a few years as the technology moves on, more laws will be needed and the state will be in the position of firing shotgun blast after blast at a moving target; sometimes hitting, sometimes missing, and usually spraying a few bystanders with buckshot.
What I am getting at is that laws should target the fundamentals, not the implementation details. Advertising and Obscenity are fundamentals. Domain names, search engine listings and the like are implementation details.
Protection of children on the internet ought to be market driven. It has not been successful enough because of the fraudulent advertising of web filtering product vendors. If the public were more aware of the fact that blacklist-based products like NetNanny do not work, there would be a market for workable alternatives based on whitelisting. As it is, the prospective customers of a working system are instead buying the crap.
Leaving aside the headlines, the text of the press release reads "Research suggests..."
This is good work, and part of the huge and valuable process of improving our understanding of climate, but it's quite possible that some group will run a different computer model tomorrow and come up with the opposite result.
We'll know that climate modelling is starting to "get there" when they're able to make accurate predictions about the effects of things like volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations.
This might be a problem for emulator sites. The policy of the more reputable ones is to try to get permission to distribute old 8-bit games, but if they can't find the copyright owner, to put the game up until someone complains, then take it down. Under existing law, they are only vulnerable to being sued, and if they comply promptly with requests to remove software, that is not likely to be worthwhile for the copyright owner.
Now they can be prosecuted for distributing some 20 year old spectrum game whose owner they thought was lost in the mists of time...
I'm sure there was a/. story a month or two ago about the BSA or someone sending a cease-and-desist to World of Spectrum for distributing games for which they had been given explicit permission by the copyright owner, but I can't find it.
(I think WoS is actually based in the Netherlands, but it might be here.)
I don't think most people are conscious of the distinction between civil and criminal law. Among those that are, I suspect many thought that copyright infringement was criminal already.
The classic example of the confusion between civil and criminal law was always the many signs on buildings which said "Trespassers will be prosecuted" -- despite the fact there was no criminal offense of trespass.
(There is now a criminal offense of "Aggravated Trespass", but that doesn't apply often and it is a recent Michael-Howard era law anyway.)
I used to fantasise about setting up a "Remedial English Grammar" course at my last workplace, but the #1 person who needed to be on it was the Managing Director.
I think the reason this particular example gets me so angry is because everyone knows that "X is affected" is correct, but some people think that "X is effected" means the same thing and sounds "cleverer". So "X is effected" doesn't just mean "I am ignorant" (many people can't help that), it means "I am ignorant, but I think I am clever".
All victimless or apparently victimless crimes are dressed up like this by the relevant authorities, in a desperate attempt to get public support for enforcement.
The UK Customs&Excise insists that if you buy cigarettes smuggled over from France you are supporting organised crime and/or terrorism, and explain that if you pay your car mechanic in cash you are also supporting terrorism. This is just another reason for speaking about software licenses as "Microsoft Tax" rather than as payment for services -- enforcement is being defended in the same way.
These are good points, but they're weaknesses in both KDE and Gnome rather than problems of them being different.
The problem is that neither one is yet good enough in look and feel for it to be worth the other one copying it. In these circumstances the developers should all be concentrating on getting better, rather than standardising on a second-rate look and feel now, which would be more likely to slow down future improvement.
I don't mean to attack them, by the way. They are "second-rate" in comparison to how good I believe they will be. As they mature, I would expect their interfaces to converge.
If we go the way I described, you have two options
Just carry on. Your emails from strangers will be buried in ever-larger piles of spam, but they mean a lot to you so it's worth receiving them.
Use a web-based "comment submission" system on your web site instead of listing an email address.
Number 2 might not be available to you today if you use a basic static-content-only web hosting service, but it is likely to become more widely available as the need for it grows. In theory it is also capable of being spammed, but it is easier to protect than an email address.
As to whether legislation will work; I'm leaving that question to others. I have my doubts, though.
The reason that no technical solutions have been implemented is because no-one really cares enough.
Even at 40%, spam isn't that much of a nuisance. My inbox receives about 50% unwanted crap after filtering (and about 50% of the unwanted crap is actually viruses rather than commercial spam), but I still feel it's less of a problem than 3 or 4 unwanted phone calls a week.
A few people are severely inconvenienced by spam, and a few more get worked up about it as a matter of principle (which is OK), but "Just delete" is the majority view.
As it continues to get worse, the opportunity for technical solutions will open up. At that stage, a "parallel" spam-proofed mail infrastructure will grow alongside the current one. That won't happen today because most people don't care
There are many possible approaches, once there is a need. Here is one off the top of my head
A group of major ISPs agree to the following:
Email originated on my network by a reliably identified customer gets a "nonspam" header flag
Email received from anything other than a mailserver run by another ISP in the group gets the nonspam header stripped (if it exists)
Abuse is disallowed by ISPs in the group, either reactively, or by quota-ing numbers of emails per user, depending on what becomes necessary
Customers have an option to receive only "nonspam" emails
That would do it, and it could be implemented in 5 weeks, not 5 years, and wouldn't affect anyone who didn't want to be affected. It would have unfortunate side-effects (elimination of legitimate bulk commercial email, difficulties for people outside areas/countries covered by "major" ISPs, possible abuse of the system by the ISPs for market power), but if it became necessary it, or something like it, would inevitably happen (I'm sure my suggestion could be improved; it was just an example).
Let's look at the future:
Currently, people are willing to accept email from unknown senders. If the volume of spam continues to increase as you plausibly predict, that is where the system will break. I assume that well-known people already read emails only from whitelisted senders, and that if I send email to, say, Tony Blair or Linus Torvalds it will not get read. As unwanted mail increases, the number of people doing whitelist-only filtering will increase too. Note that this can be done almost perfectly with existing protocols & software, and the only changes that will become necessary will be to prevent forged From: lines, which would not be too big a hole for spammers in any case.
That is what is at stake, therefore: our ability to communcate by email with people we have not established a relationship with. That would be an actual loss, but is it worth legislating for?
Bear in mind that it is not 'given' that there must be a legislative solution, any more than that there must be a technical solution. Both technical and legal solutions run into choppy waters when attempting to separate spam from non-spam.
It is possible that email will slowly die, and be replaced by something else - you can imagine instant messaging expanding into non-instant messaging too, but with authenticated senders and enforced whitelists. SMTP email would become like Usenet, swamped in useless messages, its functions of old taken over by different media.
If that's your "biggest prob with Linux", then you're severely lacking in a sense of proportion. For God's sake, just pick one!
I really don't understand why having the choice bothers people so much. The only reason I can think of is the worry that you'll spend time learning to use one, and then find yourself stuck on a machine that has the other.
I can understand that kind of argument in the context of say, vi vs. emacs, but really, learning to use Gnome isn't like learning to use emacs. There isn't much to it.
The only "unified" desktop environment Linux needs is a menu on the *dm login screen that asks you if you want to run KDE or Gnome. I'm pretty sure this is already present in all major distributions.
Reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's short story "The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent" from "The Club of Queer Trades". A character (Lieutenant Drummond Keith) is involved in a scuffle and disappears. He has left his address as "The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey", but when some aquaintances go to look, there is no house of that name. The hero of the series, Basil Grant, then goes along and finds him in a tree-house in an Elm tree on Buxton Common. He then has the great line:
"The second [thing] is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it
and had written 'The Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have believed it.'
I don't think it's quite bogus enough that it can be dismissed by non-scientific judges. It is media-heavy, but most claims are made through the journals. It does claim that those who disagree are part of a conspiracy of big business, etc., but the sceptics make the same sort of claim -- that the supporters are riding a profitable bandwagon (at least I do, and I expect you do too). It doesn't hit the other 5 criteria at all.
All in all, the situation with Global Warming is not that it is being considered when it should be dismissed out of hand (which is the category this article is concerned with), but that it is being taken as proved when it the evidence only merits consideration.
In an organisation which does large-scale development for in-house applications (think telecoms or banking) developers have to support the software they write.
Such an organisation is likely to have "change control" procedures to protect against the all-too-common production outages caused by careless upgrades/installations. These procedures may entail mandatory delays, sign-offs, handing over to sys admin staff, etc.
For a developer, these well-intentioned controls can feel like an obstacle preventing him from doing his job of providing working applications to his company's users. This is particularly likely if the rules are created and enforced by remote levels of management.
In such cases, there are a whole range of "features" which can be added, more or less openly, to an application to make it easier to correct problems and make adjustments without going through the painful ISO9000-style bureaucracy. The developers may not even think of them as "backdoors", but that's what they can amount to in practice.
To take a ridiculous example, someone I know was instructed to develop an application that parsed and interpreted a subset of Java at runtime for certain aspects of program logic. When he pointed out that it would be easier and more reliable to dynamically load real.class files, he was told that that was no good as the class files would be "executables" and therefore need a formal software change notice, but the slapped-together interpreter would be reading "config files" which could be changed more easily. The manager in charge of the project, of course, was several layers below the managers that dictated the procedures, and found it easier to design round the restrictions than to change them.
I would say there are three "levels" of old computers.
Any PentiumII or above is essentially a "modern" PC: It will run a standard desktop setup like Knoppix.
Pentium "Classic" 133MHz and up can be used as a general-purpose desktop, but you need to carefully select lightweight apps. XFCE + Phoenix + Sylpheed + Abiword is the kind of setup that can work.
Less than a P133 is not a general-purpose machine. It can still be very useful, but you need to know in advance what it's going to be used for -- a single GUI app, a terminal for text-mode network access, a server -- It can do any of those things, but only the one it's been configured for.
In general, older computers are harder to use than newer ones, and you can't run one without a skilled administrator available, just like you can't run a car without visiting a mechanic occasionally (or learning how to get your hands oily).
It sounds to me like you're looking for a silver bullet that will make a 10-year-old computer useful to someone who doesn't have admin skills. They never were, and the silver bullet doesn't exist. I might be jumping to conclusions; I would like to know where these machines actually do end up.
You have to be joking. That's what copy editors are for, in the unlikely case that even they care. Good English is in no way a requirement for journalism, PR, advertising, etc. these days.
Some ad-supported free services, like Streetmap,
are very valuable. It would be a loss, socially,
if they failed because people stripped off the ads.
It's still a good thing that it's legal. The social loss of losing a few free ad-supported services is small compared to the huge social cost of intrusive and expensive law-enforcement that
would be needed to protect them. Nothing
I do in my own room with the door locked should be
illegal. (An extreme view, but I hold it.)
The way to get the best of both worlds is for
people to voluntarily refrain from abusing
worthwhile free services.
What constitutes "abuse" or "worthwhile" are
pretty subjective; that's another reason why it
is important these judgements are left to
individuals and not made by governments.
My conclusion is to say: don't blindly stand on
your "rights", even as you argue (rightly) to
defend them. Bear in mind that a good legal
system leaves you a lot of responsibility to
decide what is right or wrong: Consider your own
responsibility as well as the law
There may be some interesting issues concerning mplayer, but if so they have not come to the surface. I have been following the flame war for a few days, and there are posts from three groups of people:
Some Debian users who would like to see mplayer in Debian.
Some Debian developers who explain that it is difficult to make an mplayer package that can be distributed by people who are out in the open and can be profitably sued.
Some Mplayer developers who don't care if mplayer is in debian or not, and prefer if it isn't, but react explosively to any criticism.
Not that some of the criticism wasn't unjustified; as the abuse escalated some people were going to extraordinary lengths to try to make the case that mplayer isn't any good, which is a hard case to make, and not relevant anyway.
I would have thought (and I might be wrong), that it would be possible to make a package of the parts of mplayer that are clearly distributable as source or binary without legal problems, and produce plugins for the questionable bits which can be downloaded separately. However, it's pretty clear that anyone trying to do that will get no help from the mplayer developers, who are happier shipping a single source package from Hungary for users to compile themselves.
The actual legal issues haven't been gone into in any detail, except for a trivial one of a GPL'd file modified without proper change notices. There are obviously questions over patented codecs, use of binary codecs aquired as DLLs, and so on but no-one has calmed down enough to make a list and sort out the issues; largely as neither "side" of the argument either cares much what the answers are or trusts the other "side" to answer carefully-made arguments fairly.
As the dust settles, it may turn out that some enthusiast has just quietly gone away and made a working, legal.deb of mplayer that can be checked as a concrete construction. Until that happens, the whole discussion is moot anyway.
The constitution protects you from theft, but if you contract to pay someone, then you owe them the money (which isn't the same as giving them the right to pick your pocket).
However, Borland cannot enter your property without your permission except with a court order.
If you agree to this contract, then refuse them access to your property, then you are in breach of contract. (Assuming for the sake of argument that a court wouldn't just laugh itself sick on seeing the "license")
So, you are in breach of contract. Big, fat, hairy deal. All that means is that (1) Borland can cancel the agreement, stopping you from legally using the software, and (2) Borland can sue you for the losses they incur as a result of your breach, which I would estimate as one Euro and a packet of Rolos.
If you're downloading it at home, laugh. For a business, you would want to run it past the lawyer, but I would advise you not to show it to a lawyer while they are drinking a coffee, unless you're wearing waterproofs.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that "neurotic" is the best metaphor, but as the level of abstraction that computers deal with gets higher, they can start to commit more kinds of meaningful error.
To explain: If you are programming in assembly language, any programming error is likely to cause a simple failure of the system. Something goes wrong at a low level, so the higher-level thing that the system is meant to do just doesn't happen. On the other hand, if you are programming with tools (language and libraries) that deal in high level abstractions, a programming error can result in the system succesfully manipulating those abstractions in the wrong way. If the "rm" program works correctly, your script might delete the wrong files. The bugs that such a high-level system might have are more likely to look like "bad behaviour" or even insanity than the simple malfunctions of older systems. We are already seeing this. Pressing the wrong button can cause a personal email to be sent to a group of people, for example -- behaviour that looks almost malicious.
I used to think that the SF fears of machines "turning on their creators" such as "2001" or "Terminator" were just silly. "A computer can only do what it's programmed to do", I would say. I have long since seen the flaw in this. A computer that is programmed to use weapons, for instance, can use them on the wrong people due to a programming error (or a user error) at a higher level. (Worth knowing if you're an RAF pilot overflying a Patriot battery). A computer that was programmed (correctly) to create strategies (I this is still SF, or at any rate early research) might create strategies with the wrong objectives due to higher-level programming errors. That is the level of "bug" appearing in the plots of "2001" and "Terminator".
If only we could find out that LSBs requirement to use RPM was also an April Fool
It doesn't work! I tried to download that "FormMail" thing because I thought it looked really useful, but the link didn't work.
The aim of this is perfectly reasonable, but I have real problems with using legislation. Basically, I do not see "the internet" as a public utility that should be regulated by lawmakers
I would be more sympathetic to a more general law that prohibited "advertising obscene content in a misleading way" or something (it would have to be worded a lot more tightly than that, but you see what I am driving at). Pulling up a consensual, commercial system like DNS and slapping laws on it just is the wrong way to go about things. In a few years as the technology moves on, more laws will be needed and the state will be in the position of firing shotgun blast after blast at a moving target; sometimes hitting, sometimes missing, and usually spraying a few bystanders with buckshot.
What I am getting at is that laws should target the fundamentals, not the implementation details. Advertising and Obscenity are fundamentals. Domain names, search engine listings and the like are implementation details.
Protection of children on the internet ought to be market driven. It has not been successful enough because of the fraudulent advertising of web filtering product vendors. If the public were more aware of the fact that blacklist-based products like NetNanny do not work, there would be a market for workable alternatives based on whitelisting. As it is, the prospective customers of a working system are instead buying the crap.
Leaving aside the headlines, the text of the press release reads "Research suggests..."
This is good work, and part of the huge and valuable process of improving our understanding of climate, but it's quite possible that some group will run a different computer model tomorrow and come up with the opposite result.
We'll know that climate modelling is starting to "get there" when they're able to make accurate predictions about the effects of things like volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations.
Discovery Channel, 9p.m. 1st April in the UK.
Cloning the Tasmanian Tiger
(It's been shown before).
This might be a problem for emulator sites. The policy of the more reputable ones is to try to get permission to distribute old 8-bit games, but if they can't find the copyright owner, to put the game up until someone complains, then take it down. Under existing law, they are only vulnerable to being sued, and if they comply promptly with requests to remove software, that is not likely to be worthwhile for the copyright owner.
Now they can be prosecuted for distributing some 20 year old spectrum game whose owner they thought was lost in the mists of time...
I'm sure there was a /. story a month or two ago about the BSA or someone sending a cease-and-desist to World of Spectrum for distributing games for which they had been given explicit permission by the copyright owner, but I can't find it.
(I think WoS is actually based in the Netherlands, but it might be here.)
I don't think most people are conscious of the distinction between civil and criminal law. Among those that are, I suspect many thought that copyright infringement was criminal already.
The classic example of the confusion between civil and criminal law was always the many signs on buildings which said "Trespassers will be prosecuted" -- despite the fact there was no criminal offense of trespass.
(There is now a criminal offense of "Aggravated Trespass", but that doesn't apply often and it is a recent Michael-Howard era law anyway.)
Shout it!
People who get this wrong really need treatment.
I used to fantasise about setting up a "Remedial English Grammar" course at my last workplace, but the #1 person who needed to be on it was the Managing Director.
I think the reason this particular example gets me so angry is because everyone knows that "X is affected" is correct, but some people think that "X is effected" means the same thing and sounds "cleverer". So "X is effected" doesn't just mean "I am ignorant" (many people can't help that), it means "I am ignorant, but I think I am clever".
This is a common misperception
They must distribute the source to the people they distribute the binary to.
If you buy a phone, you are entitled to the source. If you don't, you're not.
Of course, once someone buys the phone and obtains the source, they are then allowed to distribute it more widely, if they want.
In the meantime, they have no obligation to post source on their web site or anywhere else.
All victimless or apparently victimless crimes are dressed up like this by the relevant authorities, in a desperate attempt to get public support for enforcement.
The UK Customs&Excise insists that if you buy cigarettes smuggled over from France you are supporting organised crime and/or terrorism, and explain that if you pay your car mechanic in cash you are also supporting terrorism. This is just another reason for speaking about software licenses as "Microsoft Tax" rather than as payment for services -- enforcement is being defended in the same way.
These are good points, but they're weaknesses in both KDE and Gnome rather than problems of them being different.
The problem is that neither one is yet good enough in look and feel for it to be worth the other one copying it. In these circumstances the developers should all be concentrating on getting better, rather than standardising on a second-rate look and feel now, which would be more likely to slow down future improvement.
I don't mean to attack them, by the way. They are "second-rate" in comparison to how good I believe they will be. As they mature, I would expect their interfaces to converge.
If we go the way I described, you have two options
Number 2 might not be available to you today if you use a basic static-content-only web hosting service, but it is likely to become more widely available as the need for it grows. In theory it is also capable of being spammed, but it is easier to protect than an email address.
As to whether legislation will work; I'm leaving that question to others. I have my doubts, though.
The reason that no technical solutions have been implemented is because no-one really cares enough.
Even at 40%, spam isn't that much of a nuisance. My inbox receives about 50% unwanted crap after filtering (and about 50% of the unwanted crap is actually viruses rather than commercial spam), but I still feel it's less of a problem than 3 or 4 unwanted phone calls a week.
A few people are severely inconvenienced by spam, and a few more get worked up about it as a matter of principle (which is OK), but "Just delete" is the majority view.
As it continues to get worse, the opportunity for technical solutions will open up. At that stage, a "parallel" spam-proofed mail infrastructure will grow alongside the current one. That won't happen today because most people don't care
There are many possible approaches, once there is a need. Here is one off the top of my head
A group of major ISPs agree to the following:
That would do it, and it could be implemented in 5 weeks, not 5 years, and wouldn't affect anyone who didn't want to be affected. It would have unfortunate side-effects (elimination of legitimate bulk commercial email, difficulties for people outside areas/countries covered by "major" ISPs, possible abuse of the system by the ISPs for market power), but if it became necessary it, or something like it, would inevitably happen (I'm sure my suggestion could be improved; it was just an example).
Fair questions.
Let's look at the future: Currently, people are willing to accept email from unknown senders. If the volume of spam continues to increase as you plausibly predict, that is where the system will break. I assume that well-known people already read emails only from whitelisted senders, and that if I send email to, say, Tony Blair or Linus Torvalds it will not get read. As unwanted mail increases, the number of people doing whitelist-only filtering will increase too. Note that this can be done almost perfectly with existing protocols & software, and the only changes that will become necessary will be to prevent forged From: lines, which would not be too big a hole for spammers in any case.
That is what is at stake, therefore: our ability to communcate by email with people we have not established a relationship with. That would be an actual loss, but is it worth legislating for?
Bear in mind that it is not 'given' that there must be a legislative solution, any more than that there must be a technical solution. Both technical and legal solutions run into choppy waters when attempting to separate spam from non-spam.
It is possible that email will slowly die, and be replaced by something else - you can imagine instant messaging expanding into non-instant messaging too, but with authenticated senders and enforced whitelists. SMTP email would become like Usenet, swamped in useless messages, its functions of old taken over by different media.
If that's your "biggest prob with Linux", then you're severely lacking in a sense of proportion. For God's sake, just pick one!
I really don't understand why having the choice bothers people so much. The only reason I can think of is the worry that you'll spend time learning to use one, and then find yourself stuck on a machine that has the other.
I can understand that kind of argument in the context of say, vi vs. emacs, but really, learning to use Gnome isn't like learning to use emacs. There isn't much to it.
The only "unified" desktop environment Linux needs is a menu on the *dm login screen that asks you if you want to run KDE or Gnome. I'm pretty sure this is already present in all major distributions.
Reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's short story "The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent" from "The Club of Queer Trades". A character (Lieutenant Drummond Keith) is involved in a scuffle and disappears. He has left his address as "The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey", but when some aquaintances go to look, there is no house of that name. The hero of the series, Basil Grant, then goes along and finds him in a tree-house in an Elm tree on Buxton Common. He then has the great line:
"The second [thing] is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have believed it.'
Project Gutenburg has the book
I don't think it's quite bogus enough that it can be dismissed by non-scientific judges. It is media-heavy, but most claims are made through the journals. It does claim that those who disagree are part of a conspiracy of big business, etc., but the sceptics make the same sort of claim -- that the supporters are riding a profitable bandwagon (at least I do, and I expect you do too). It doesn't hit the other 5 criteria at all.
All in all, the situation with Global Warming is not that it is being considered when it should be dismissed out of hand (which is the category this article is concerned with), but that it is being taken as proved when it the evidence only merits consideration.
Has anyone any more up-to-date information? Like, did the predictions the article made about the mid-80s come true?
Such an organisation is likely to have "change control" procedures to protect against the all-too-common production outages caused by careless upgrades/installations. These procedures may entail mandatory delays, sign-offs, handing over to sys admin staff, etc.
For a developer, these well-intentioned controls can feel like an obstacle preventing him from doing his job of providing working applications to his company's users. This is particularly likely if the rules are created and enforced by remote levels of management.
In such cases, there are a whole range of "features" which can be added, more or less openly, to an application to make it easier to correct problems and make adjustments without going through the painful ISO9000-style bureaucracy. The developers may not even think of them as "backdoors", but that's what they can amount to in practice.
To take a ridiculous example, someone I know was instructed to develop an application that parsed and interpreted a subset of Java at runtime for certain aspects of program logic. When he pointed out that it would be easier and more reliable to dynamically load real .class files, he was told that that was no good as the class files would be "executables" and therefore need a formal software change notice, but the slapped-together interpreter would be reading "config files" which could be changed more easily. The manager in charge of the project, of course, was several layers below the managers that dictated the procedures, and found it easier to design round the restrictions than to change them.
In general, older computers are harder to use than newer ones, and you can't run one without a skilled administrator available, just like you can't run a car without visiting a mechanic occasionally (or learning how to get your hands oily).
It sounds to me like you're looking for a silver bullet that will make a 10-year-old computer useful to someone who doesn't have admin skills. They never were, and the silver bullet doesn't exist. I might be jumping to conclusions; I would like to know where these machines actually do end up.
You have to be joking. That's what copy editors are for, in the unlikely case that even they care. Good English is in no way a requirement for journalism, PR, advertising, etc. these days.
Some Debian users who would like to see mplayer in Debian.
Some Debian developers who explain that it is difficult to make an mplayer package that can be distributed by people who are out in the open and can be profitably sued.
Some Mplayer developers who don't care if mplayer is in debian or not, and prefer if it isn't, but react explosively to any criticism.
Not that some of the criticism wasn't unjustified; as the abuse escalated some people were going to extraordinary lengths to try to make the case that mplayer isn't any good, which is a hard case to make, and not relevant anyway.
I would have thought (and I might be wrong), that it would be possible to make a package of the parts of mplayer that are clearly distributable as source or binary without legal problems, and produce plugins for the questionable bits which can be downloaded separately. However, it's pretty clear that anyone trying to do that will get no help from the mplayer developers, who are happier shipping a single source package from Hungary for users to compile themselves.
The actual legal issues haven't been gone into in any detail, except for a trivial one of a GPL'd file modified without proper change notices. There are obviously questions over patented codecs, use of binary codecs aquired as DLLs, and so on but no-one has calmed down enough to make a list and sort out the issues; largely as neither "side" of the argument either cares much what the answers are or trusts the other "side" to answer carefully-made arguments fairly.
As the dust settles, it may turn out that some enthusiast has just quietly gone away and made a working, legal
However, Borland cannot enter your property without your permission except with a court order.
If you agree to this contract, then refuse them access to your property, then you are in breach of contract. (Assuming for the sake of argument that a court wouldn't just laugh itself sick on seeing the "license")
So, you are in breach of contract. Big, fat, hairy deal. All that means is that
(1) Borland can cancel the agreement, stopping you from legally using the software, and
(2) Borland can sue you for the losses they incur as a result of your breach, which I would estimate as one Euro and a packet of Rolos.
If you're downloading it at home, laugh. For a business, you would want to run it past the lawyer, but I would advise you not to show it to a lawyer while they are drinking a coffee, unless you're wearing waterproofs.