The
The LaTeX Beamer class lets you use LaTeX to create very professional looking PDF presentations.
Take a look at some of the examples linked to from their homepage.
I realize that other people have already suggested using PDF but I didn't see any references to Beamer yet. I think Beamer is the best tool for making presentations regardless of platform. I also happen to think that LaTeX is the best tool by far for creating books, articles, and written works in general.
When I visited Europe a few years ago I was struck by how many Europeans treated raising and parenting the younger generation as a group activity. I saw grown-up strangers correct the behavior of children in public places and the children respected this correction.
This form of communal parenting is not even close to acceptable in the United States. For over two years I've been walking my dog, twice a day, in some fields next to my house. A neighbor of mine has sent her young grandchildren to play in that same area (after I cleaned up all the broken glass). That neighbor wanted me to stop walking there now that her grandkids play there because I am a "stranger". When it was clear I wasn't going to stop walking my dog, she forbid her grandkids from speaking to me.
I talked with the grandmother and even gave her my card so she would know my name, address, and phone number in case, god forbid, something happened to her grandkids and she was worried I was somehow involved. My intent was not to convince her I was not a pederast
("I am not a liar") but to ease some of her fears since I sure wasn't going to stop walking my dog just for her.
I much prefer not being bothered with interacting with those kids when I'm out walking but I'm struck by the extremely different attitudes toward raising children I've seen in Europe and America.
We may not have known exactly how much energy was going to be released when we split the atom, but we do know how much graviational force can be exerted by a given mass.
Two points:
We did know fairly precisely how much energy would be released when we split the atom.
The concerns over creating mini-blackholes is not the raw gravitational force they will exert. The concern is whether they will evaporate quickly or not. The concern (which many/most/all reputable physicists say is unfounded) is that one of these little black holes will not evaporate. Instead, it will orbit insde the earth swallowing more and more material over time and turning our planet into swiss cheese.
If they break it into two films then we end up with 4 to 6 hours of material instead of 2 to 3. The Rob Inglis reading of the The Hobbit clocks in at a little over 11 hours (and I highly recommend it). Converting books to film almost always involves throwing out some material. Since The Hobbit is such a classic I would prefer they split it into two films so they can throw out less material.
Granted, there will be that very uncomfortable one year wait for the second half but I think this is a fair trade off for ending up with the film done "right". For example, one of the most popular dvd's of all time is the mini-series of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which is exactly 5 hours long. I would really like to see The Hobbit get the same treatment. I would even like to see more movies (especially book adaptations) done this way.
If they do make the Hobbit and they do make it as two films, where is the best break point for splitting it in two?
Do they leave it as a cliff hanger in "Flies and Spiders" or with the Dwarves trapped by the Elven King? I think the best break point might be right when they are leaving Lake-town and heading for the Lonely Mountain.
Thanks for the info. But I think that report you linked to tends to fuel speculation rather than squash it.
They said they don't know why there was a statistically significant difference between their exit polls and the official results expect if for some unknown reason Kerry voters were more willing to partake in the exit poll than Bush voters. I can certainly think of at least one other possible reason.
But not to worry, they were able to still get their "exit poll results" closer to the official results and call all the races correctly by the simple stratagem of skewing their result toward the official results as the official results came in.
I applaud this new strategy of theirs because it is very effective at hiding the actual discrepancy between their exit polls and the official results and gives the incorrect impression that their result provide independent confirmation of the official results. Now we no longer have to worry our pretty little heads over these pesky exit poll discrepancies.
They do not give any explanation of why their raw exit poll results deviated so far from the official results nor are they willing to release their raw exit poll data. They are only willing to release exit poll data that was "adjusted" to match the official results.
They reported the exit polls that showed Kerry would win.
If you
Google("exit polls" ukraine)
you will see that there was a similar disparity between the exit polls and the official results in a Ukrainian election held around that same time.
There was almost universal agreement in the West that in the Ukrainian election the exit polls were correct and the official results were rigged. AFAIK, the last two national elections that Bush purportedly won (and now the recent election in Mexico) are the only ones where the exit poll results differed from the official results by statistically significant amounts and yet the official result was still accepted by our media almost without question.
Given this, it only makes sense for them [Microsoft], or any company for that matter, to patent any ideas for present or future functionality that they might have.
Sure. Likewise, if you are in a deep hole it only makes sense to keep digging. Not.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Microsoft to work to change the current totally broken patent system?
Oops. My mistake. That would be totally non-evil and thus violate Microsoft's mantra: "do evil".
This is so much different from the NSA wiretaps or some of the other infringments on freedom we have seen of late. Some people act like there is no different but couldn't be more wrong.
I agree that warrantless wiretapping is very different from this. Warrantless wiretapping is much worse and much more dangerous because it is so very easy to abuse on a massive scale.
I'm not saying this brain-dead law is good or just or wise but I think it is very far-fetched to think that it could be used to help keep a corrupt and illegal government in power whereas the warrantless wiretapping could well be doing this right now and there is no way for us to find out. Warrantless wiretapping completely sidesteps the system of checks and balances that our system of government was founded on. With it, the executive branch took for itself the powers of the other two branches of government: the legislative and the judicial.
This Ohio law is obviously stupid and abusive. As such, it will probably be stricken down (or thrown out by the courts) once the politicians get their thumbs out of their hats long enough to figure out its full ramifications. But if the warrantless wiretapping is allowed to continue uncheck and the criminals who are authorizing it are allowed to stay in power then it represents a possibly permanent shift in our form of government away from the rule of law and back to a system where one person is "king" and that person gets to decide what all the rules are.
"He said a new offence would ban the possession of porn depicting "scenes of extreme sexual violence" and other obscene material such as bestiality and necrophilia".
In that case I want to see examples of pictures that would be just barely legal and just barely illegal from all of the categories listed. Short film clips would also be acceptable.
These examples should then be posted on an official government web site so all good citizens can know for sure whether or not they are (or would be) breaking the law.
If the decision is going to be left to the judges then each judge should have a page showing pictures that they personally think are just barely legal and just barely illegal.
I've RTFA and I'm still not clear on exactly what material is covered by this new law and what material is still legal.
I wish they would please post some examples of what is legal and what is not so I'll know for future reference what kinds of things are okay and what I need to avoid.
FYI, HTML is a typesetting language - not a programming language.
I fully agree with you that HTML is not a programming language but it sure as heck is not a typesetting language either. It is, as its name implies, a markup language. TeX is a typesetting language and a very good one at that.
Be that as it may, I think that teaching HTML could be a good way to introduce primary school youngsters to programming. I agree that it lacks all of the charm and complexity of a real programming language, but that makes it simpler for the kids to grok and it also gives them an almost immediate graphic feedback which makes it easier to find bugs.
The biggest problem I see with teaching them HTML is that modern browsers will go a good job at displaying really messed up HTML. But this could be turned into an advantage by turning it into a game and having the kids see how far they can mess up the HTML and still get the pages to display correctly.
I agree with you that the food problem is currently dominated by inadequate distribution. IMO, that fact makes the problem easier to solve, not harder. If we had reached a point where it was not possible to grow enough food to feed everyone then the food problem would be impossible to solve without either new technologies or fewer people.
I live on a planet where the US spent $300,000,000,000 on a war against Iraq based partly on the totally erroneous assertion that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. During the propaganda run up before the war 70% of Americans believed this was true. To this day the administration is saying that this $300,000,000,000 war is essential to stopping terrorism.
I'm sure it's true that in some places force would be required in order to deliver needed food supplies. But if you think the primary thing stopping starving people from getting food is repressive governments blocking US shipments then you are the one who needs to come back down to planet earth.
The food distribution problem is much more a political problem than it is a military problem as you suggested. Poor and starving people seldom have a political voice that is proportional to their numbers. Even worse for them, there is not nearly the money to be made in taking care of the poor as there is in making and selling military equipment.
When your primary source of income is building weapons then every solution you see looks like a war.
On 9/11, in addition to the 3,000 people who died in the attacks, there were approximately 16,000 deaths caused by starvation. On 9/12 another 16,000 died from starvation and so on.
Compared to the problem of totally eliminating all possible future attacks, world hunger is relatively cheap and easy to solve. In fact, doing things like solving world hunger and making sure everyone on earth has a shot at a decent life, would probably be the most cost effective means of reducing future attacks.
I assume that the telcos thought they would be in way more trouble if they didn't comply, the NSA would make them their enemies (Would you want to be on the bad side of the NSA?) that the media would tear them apart for assisting "terrorists".
Turns out that one telco, Qwest, did not cooperate with the NSA requests because they thought the requested actions would be illegal.
The media certainly aren't tearing them apart over this. In fact, the media has under-reported Qwest's opposition the same way a docile media would under-report claims that "the Emperor wears no clothes".
Your understanding of and apology for a secret program where the NSA and corporations conspired together to clearly deny citizens their rights granted under the constitution seems naive at best.
I have no stress. [...] Also constant breaks to read Slashdot helps.
Here's a clue. If you've got time to read Slashdot then of course your job isn't stressful. If you had a stressful job then you wouldn't have time to read Slashdot once a day, let alone taking "constant breaks" to do so. It has nothing to do with knowing the answers or knowing where to look. Likewise, lounging around the pool all day is usually not stressful.
My excuse is that I'm retired (because of too much stress).
I really do think you are talking about something entirely different. AFAIK, the fact that two identical, optimal deciders/reasoners can have diverging views of the same world when they are seeded with different a priori information is not the same thing as getting stuck in local maxima.
I looked at your resume. You seem to be a very bright and creative guy. I really encourage you to take a look at Jaynes' book. I'm pretty sure you can still get most of it from pdf's floating around the Web so you don't have to invest any money to take a look at it and find out if it interests you. I think it provides some very interesting mathematical insight into how people reason. Here is the opening paragraph:
Suppose some dark night a policeman walks down a street, apparently deserted; but suddenly he
hears a burglar alarm, looks across the street, and sees a jewelry store with a broken window. Then
a gentleman wearing a mask comes crawling out through the broken window, carrying a bag which
turns out to be full of expensive jewelry. The policeman doesn't hesitate at all in deciding that this
gentleman is dishonest. But by what reasoning process does he arrive at this conclusion? Let us
first take a leisurely look at the general nature of such problems.
It starts out with ideas similar to those of Polya in Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning but where Polya does a lot of qualitative hand waving, Jaynes is almost 100% quantitative.
Be that as it may (and I highly doubt there will always be unique solutions) it is a separate issue entirely from what the original poster and I were talking about. We were talking about the problem of deciders becoming prejudiced over time, falling into a rut where new information tends to confirm and reinforce existing "beliefs".
This effect is often seem clearly when as I said before and you quoted:
... optimal observers who have reached opposite conclusions
(due to differing initial sets of data)
The concept of a unique optimal solution giving one set particular set of new and old data doesn't really enter into the discussion we were having.
But that's okay, you still get a wonderful parting gift. Thanks for playing!
This - in humans, at least - can lead to the cyclic reinforcement of one's belief system. The belief system that explains observations initially is used to filter observations later.
I encourage you to read E. T. Jaynes' book:
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. It used to be available on the Web in pdf form before a published version became available.
In it, Jaynes shows that an optimal decision maker shares this same tendency of reinforcing exiting belief systems. He even gives examples where new information reinforces the beliefs of optimal observers who have reached opposite conclusions (due to differing initial sets of data). Each observer believes the new data further supports their own view.
Since even an optimal decision maker has this undesirable trait, I don't think the existence of this trait is a good criteria for rejecting decision making models.
Either you do not understand what you are talking about or you are intentionally propagating anti-GPLv3 lies.
In the voting machine scenario, it turns out that the anti-DRM provisions of the GPLv3 actually do the right thing. The GPLv3 takes the DRM control away from the computer manufacturers and gives it back to the computer owners.
If we had an election system where every voter owned their own voting machine then your argument above might deserve some consideration. But I don't know of any place on earth that does this, nor to I see this happening in the foreseeable future. What happens in the actual world is that we have three different groups involved with voting machines:
Manufacturers, such as Diebold.
Owners, such as boards of election.
Users who are the voters.
Without the DRM provisions voting machine manufacturers could use our GPL'ed software in their voting machines and the local boards of election would have no control over which software was being run. The DRM provisions of the GPLv3 insist that the control be transferred from the manufacturer to the owner, the board of elections.
IMO, this is the way things ought to work. The board of elections buys the voting machines so they have control over what software runs on them. If you would rather have us put our trust in companies like Diebold instead of the boards of election, then there is no hope for you.
This crazy idea of yours that every person who uses a computer that runs GPLv3'ed software must be given all of the keys that control and protect that software is totally absurd. According to your logic, if I let you use my computer to check your Yahoo account does this mean I have to give you all my keys?
The DRM provisions in the GPLv3 are about giving computer owners control over their own machines. I'm sure that if you dig deep enough it is possible you might find some benevolent applications that are not a good fit with the GPLv3. Then for those apps, a different license should be used.
Think of the DRM provisions of the GPLv3 like the guard that covers the blade of a table saw or a portable circular saw. For 95% of applications those guards keep us safe and keep us from losing fingers. There are a few applications where those guards get in the way and prevent us from doing what we want. For those rare few applications we simply take the guard off. In the software world, we would simply either use non-GPLv3 software or use GPLv3 software embedded in a ROM.
1) Treacherous Computing vs. ROM
You seem to think it is a bug in the GPLv3 that allows code to be used on ROM'ed machines but not treacherous computers. I see this as a feature not a bug. You might want to look at Stallman's
description of the problem with treacherous computing so we at least have a common reference point even if you don't agree with everything he says. Personally, I've got no problem with people using my GPL'ed code on ROM'ed devices, but I am very concerned about using my GPL'ed code on treacherous computers. This is why I see the distinction made between the two by the GPLv3 as a feature not a bug.
2)Treacherous Computing via Virtualization
If I understand your second point correctly, you're suggesting that a virtualization layer (like Xen or VMware) could impose DRM restrictions on GPLv3 code. IANAL, so you might want to run this past the good folks at the FSF and see if they thought of it already, but it seems to me that holding DRM keys in a virtualization layer would be no different from holding keys in hardware so I don't see how it could make an end run around the GPLv3.
As I told you before, the GPLv3 says that if one person can modify and run the code then everyone needs to be able to modify and run the code. It doesn't matter what type of thing holds the keys, hardware or software, the GPLv3 is all about who controls the keys. If the manufacturer controls the keys and not the computer owner, then it's not legal to use GPLv3 code.
If these GPLv3 issues are of any interest to you at all, you will save both of us a lot of trouble if you just read it for yourself at the
GPLv3 web site and also read their opinion pieces, particular the one about DRM. If you still think they've missed something, you should contact them and let them know. There is a link to their comments page from both the FSF links I gave you above.
Slashdot Mirror
The The LaTeX Beamer class lets you use LaTeX to create very professional looking PDF presentations. Take a look at some of the examples linked to from their homepage.
I realize that other people have already suggested using PDF but I didn't see any references to Beamer yet. I think Beamer is the best tool for making presentations regardless of platform. I also happen to think that LaTeX is the best tool by far for creating books, articles, and written works in general.
When I visited Europe a few years ago I was struck by how many Europeans treated raising and parenting the younger generation as a group activity. I saw grown-up strangers correct the behavior of children in public places and the children respected this correction.
This form of communal parenting is not even close to acceptable in the United States. For over two years I've been walking my dog, twice a day, in some fields next to my house. A neighbor of mine has sent her young grandchildren to play in that same area (after I cleaned up all the broken glass). That neighbor wanted me to stop walking there now that her grandkids play there because I am a "stranger". When it was clear I wasn't going to stop walking my dog, she forbid her grandkids from speaking to me.
I talked with the grandmother and even gave her my card so she would know my name, address, and phone number in case, god forbid, something happened to her grandkids and she was worried I was somehow involved. My intent was not to convince her I was not a pederast ("I am not a liar") but to ease some of her fears since I sure wasn't going to stop walking my dog just for her.
I much prefer not being bothered with interacting with those kids when I'm out walking but I'm struck by the extremely different attitudes toward raising children I've seen in Europe and America.
If they break it into two films then we end up with 4 to 6 hours of material instead of 2 to 3. The Rob Inglis reading of the The Hobbit clocks in at a little over 11 hours (and I highly recommend it). Converting books to film almost always involves throwing out some material. Since The Hobbit is such a classic I would prefer they split it into two films so they can throw out less material.
Granted, there will be that very uncomfortable one year wait for the second half but I think this is a fair trade off for ending up with the film done "right". For example, one of the most popular dvd's of all time is the mini-series of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which is exactly 5 hours long. I would really like to see The Hobbit get the same treatment. I would even like to see more movies (especially book adaptations) done this way.
If they do make the Hobbit and they do make it as two films, where is the best break point for splitting it in two?
Do they leave it as a cliff hanger in "Flies and Spiders" or with the Dwarves trapped by the Elven King? I think the best break point might be right when they are leaving Lake-town and heading for the Lonely Mountain.
Thanks for the info. But I think that report you linked to tends to fuel speculation rather than squash it.
They said they don't know why there was a statistically significant difference between their exit polls and the official results expect if for some unknown reason Kerry voters were more willing to partake in the exit poll than Bush voters. I can certainly think of at least one other possible reason.
But not to worry, they were able to still get their "exit poll results" closer to the official results and call all the races correctly by the simple stratagem of skewing their result toward the official results as the official results came in.
I applaud this new strategy of theirs because it is very effective at hiding the actual discrepancy between their exit polls and the official results and gives the incorrect impression that their result provide independent confirmation of the official results. Now we no longer have to worry our pretty little heads over these pesky exit poll discrepancies.
They do not give any explanation of why their raw exit poll results deviated so far from the official results nor are they willing to release their raw exit poll data. They are only willing to release exit poll data that was "adjusted" to match the official results.
They reported the exit polls that showed Kerry would win.
If you Google("exit polls" ukraine) you will see that there was a similar disparity between the exit polls and the official results in a Ukrainian election held around that same time.
There was almost universal agreement in the West that in the Ukrainian election the exit polls were correct and the official results were rigged. AFAIK, the last two national elections that Bush purportedly won (and now the recent election in Mexico) are the only ones where the exit poll results differed from the official results by statistically significant amounts and yet the official result was still accepted by our media almost without question.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Microsoft to work to change the current totally broken patent system?
Oops. My mistake. That would be totally non-evil and thus violate Microsoft's mantra: "do evil".
I'm not saying this brain-dead law is good or just or wise but I think it is very far-fetched to think that it could be used to help keep a corrupt and illegal government in power whereas the warrantless wiretapping could well be doing this right now and there is no way for us to find out. Warrantless wiretapping completely sidesteps the system of checks and balances that our system of government was founded on. With it, the executive branch took for itself the powers of the other two branches of government: the legislative and the judicial.
This Ohio law is obviously stupid and abusive. As such, it will probably be stricken down (or thrown out by the courts) once the politicians get their thumbs out of their hats long enough to figure out its full ramifications. But if the warrantless wiretapping is allowed to continue uncheck and the criminals who are authorizing it are allowed to stay in power then it represents a possibly permanent shift in our form of government away from the rule of law and back to a system where one person is "king" and that person gets to decide what all the rules are.
You should check out DAR. It does exactly what you want. It's free under the GPL.
It's command line based and you will need to read the documentation before using it, but it does what you want.
newandyh-r reports: In that case I want to see examples of pictures that would be just barely legal and just barely illegal from all of the categories listed. Short film clips would also be acceptable.
These examples should then be posted on an official government web site so all good citizens can know for sure whether or not they are (or would be) breaking the law.
If the decision is going to be left to the judges then each judge should have a page showing pictures that they personally think are just barely legal and just barely illegal.
Thanks for the info, but I still want to see the pictures of what would be legal and what would be outlawed.
Show me the pictures! Inquiring minds want to know.
I've RTFA and I'm still not clear on exactly what material is covered by this new law and what material is still legal.
I wish they would please post some examples of what is legal and what is not so I'll know for future reference what kinds of things are okay and what I need to avoid.
Thanks in advance.
Be that as it may, I think that teaching HTML could be a good way to introduce primary school youngsters to programming. I agree that it lacks all of the charm and complexity of a real programming language, but that makes it simpler for the kids to grok and it also gives them an almost immediate graphic feedback which makes it easier to find bugs.
The biggest problem I see with teaching them HTML is that modern browsers will go a good job at displaying really messed up HTML. But this could be turned into an advantage by turning it into a game and having the kids see how far they can mess up the HTML and still get the pages to display correctly.
I agree with you that the food problem is currently dominated by inadequate distribution. IMO, that fact makes the problem easier to solve, not harder. If we had reached a point where it was not possible to grow enough food to feed everyone then the food problem would be impossible to solve without either new technologies or fewer people.
I live on a planet where the US spent $300,000,000,000 on a war against Iraq based partly on the totally erroneous assertion that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. During the propaganda run up before the war 70% of Americans believed this was true. To this day the administration is saying that this $300,000,000,000 war is essential to stopping terrorism.
I'm sure it's true that in some places force would be required in order to deliver needed food supplies. But if you think the primary thing stopping starving people from getting food is repressive governments blocking US shipments then you are the one who needs to come back down to planet earth.
The food distribution problem is much more a political problem than it is a military problem as you suggested. Poor and starving people seldom have a political voice that is proportional to their numbers. Even worse for them, there is not nearly the money to be made in taking care of the poor as there is in making and selling military equipment.
When your primary source of income is building weapons then every solution you see looks like a war.
On 9/11, in addition to the 3,000 people who died in the attacks, there were approximately 16,000 deaths caused by starvation. On 9/12 another 16,000 died from starvation and so on.
Compared to the problem of totally eliminating all possible future attacks, world hunger is relatively cheap and easy to solve. In fact, doing things like solving world hunger and making sure everyone on earth has a shot at a decent life, would probably be the most cost effective means of reducing future attacks.
The media certainly aren't tearing them apart over this. In fact, the media has under-reported Qwest's opposition the same way a docile media would under-report claims that "the Emperor wears no clothes".
Your understanding of and apology for a secret program where the NSA and corporations conspired together to clearly deny citizens their rights granted under the constitution seems naive at best.
My excuse is that I'm retired (because of too much stress).
I really do think you are talking about something entirely different. AFAIK, the fact that two identical, optimal deciders/reasoners can have diverging views of the same world when they are seeded with different a priori information is not the same thing as getting stuck in local maxima.
I looked at your resume. You seem to be a very bright and creative guy. I really encourage you to take a look at Jaynes' book. I'm pretty sure you can still get most of it from pdf's floating around the Web so you don't have to invest any money to take a look at it and find out if it interests you. I think it provides some very interesting mathematical insight into how people reason. Here is the opening paragraph:
It starts out with ideas similar to those of Polya in Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning but where Polya does a lot of qualitative hand waving, Jaynes is almost 100% quantitative.
This effect is often seem clearly when as I said before and you quoted: The concept of a unique optimal solution giving one set particular set of new and old data doesn't really enter into the discussion we were having.
But that's okay, you still get a wonderful parting gift. Thanks for playing!
In it, Jaynes shows that an optimal decision maker shares this same tendency of reinforcing exiting belief systems. He even gives examples where new information reinforces the beliefs of optimal observers who have reached opposite conclusions (due to differing initial sets of data). Each observer believes the new data further supports their own view.
Since even an optimal decision maker has this undesirable trait, I don't think the existence of this trait is a good criteria for rejecting decision making models.
In the voting machine scenario, it turns out that the anti-DRM provisions of the GPLv3 actually do the right thing. The GPLv3 takes the DRM control away from the computer manufacturers and gives it back to the computer owners.
If we had an election system where every voter owned their own voting machine then your argument above might deserve some consideration. But I don't know of any place on earth that does this, nor to I see this happening in the foreseeable future. What happens in the actual world is that we have three different groups involved with voting machines:
- Manufacturers, such as Diebold.
- Owners, such as boards of election.
- Users who are the voters.
Without the DRM provisions voting machine manufacturers could use our GPL'ed software in their voting machines and the local boards of election would have no control over which software was being run. The DRM provisions of the GPLv3 insist that the control be transferred from the manufacturer to the owner, the board of elections.IMO, this is the way things ought to work. The board of elections buys the voting machines so they have control over what software runs on them. If you would rather have us put our trust in companies like Diebold instead of the boards of election, then there is no hope for you.
This crazy idea of yours that every person who uses a computer that runs GPLv3'ed software must be given all of the keys that control and protect that software is totally absurd. According to your logic, if I let you use my computer to check your Yahoo account does this mean I have to give you all my keys?
The DRM provisions in the GPLv3 are about giving computer owners control over their own machines. I'm sure that if you dig deep enough it is possible you might find some benevolent applications that are not a good fit with the GPLv3. Then for those apps, a different license should be used.
Think of the DRM provisions of the GPLv3 like the guard that covers the blade of a table saw or a portable circular saw. For 95% of applications those guards keep us safe and keep us from losing fingers. There are a few applications where those guards get in the way and prevent us from doing what we want. For those rare few applications we simply take the guard off. In the software world, we would simply either use non-GPLv3 software or use GPLv3 software embedded in a ROM.
Two issues.
1) Treacherous Computing vs. ROM
You seem to think it is a bug in the GPLv3 that allows code to be used on ROM'ed machines but not treacherous computers. I see this as a feature not a bug. You might want to look at Stallman's description of the problem with treacherous computing so we at least have a common reference point even if you don't agree with everything he says. Personally, I've got no problem with people using my GPL'ed code on ROM'ed devices, but I am very concerned about using my GPL'ed code on treacherous computers. This is why I see the distinction made between the two by the GPLv3 as a feature not a bug.
2)Treacherous Computing via Virtualization
If I understand your second point correctly, you're suggesting that a virtualization layer (like Xen or VMware) could impose DRM restrictions on GPLv3 code. IANAL, so you might want to run this past the good folks at the FSF and see if they thought of it already, but it seems to me that holding DRM keys in a virtualization layer would be no different from holding keys in hardware so I don't see how it could make an end run around the GPLv3.
As I told you before, the GPLv3 says that if one person can modify and run the code then everyone needs to be able to modify and run the code. It doesn't matter what type of thing holds the keys, hardware or software, the GPLv3 is all about who controls the keys. If the manufacturer controls the keys and not the computer owner, then it's not legal to use GPLv3 code.
If these GPLv3 issues are of any interest to you at all, you will save both of us a lot of trouble if you just read it for yourself at the GPLv3 web site and also read their opinion pieces, particular the one about DRM. If you still think they've missed something, you should contact them and let them know. There is a link to their comments page from both the FSF links I gave you above.