Why should one hesitate to call something what it is in plain language? Yes we all have biases, but I don't think the comments ammounted to bias, but an honest reaction to what was taking place in his courtroom. The only debatable part is whether it is wise to comment before the case is out of the courts, or if you want to claim that he commented directly on the matters before him. Only diehard MS appologists suggest that he expressed bias, although I see a lot of complaints that he hurt the case against MS.
I respectfully disagree, and I would like more discussion about the merrits of what is being said now in this article. He is directly challenging the appeals court rebuke, and I think what he says has merrit. Do you really think MS would have been broken up by now if he had never made these comments? It's not even clear that this would be the most desirable outcome if your aim is the stop the MS campain to take over the world.
The question is does he have a point (in the recent article). Many of us regret that his comments gave the appeals court an easy target to strike down his decision, but I wonder whether that is the only reason, or would they have done the same under even more tortured logic. Is it possible that he could see and anticipate that they (MS) would use any twisted legal tactic to reduce and delay the impact of any decision, and that the public's right to know outweighed the risks to the correct final legal decision. After all, the court left in place everything but his remedy. The basic decisions and findings were sound.
I certainly would like to know if the remedy would have stood on the merrits, and I think it is pretty weak for them to use this as the only or primary reason to strike his ruling. We all understand the tactical reasons to err on the side of silence in this situation, but the Judge Jackson also raises an important point. Is it really necessary to have complete silence in this situation, and it particular, does it serve the public interest. For MS lawyers they were engaged in the battles of an extended war, and they would spare no tactic no matter how damaging to the process.
If he had waited to comment on MS tactics it might have been better, but I'm not sure. The fact is that MS might win in court anyway with their take no prisoners approach, or a least delay until it no longer matters. After all this worked for IBM in the past. Given this, it is better for the public to know more about what is going on at the time it is happenning.
To change the example... In Illinois there is a criminal case that is still lingering in the public attention because some of the players are current candidates. A man was convicted of murder and later overturned when the DNA evidence cleared him. The prossecuters kept going to court and apposing any reversal, even though evidence was gathering of misconduct on the government side. At some point it is appropriate for a judge to publicly condemn legal manuvering that continues to delay justice. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Right, it can't be zero, but there is no minimum (theoretically, at least). I makes sense because the smaller your device, the less energy it takes. That probably terminates in quantum mechanics, but there is a long way to go before we are at that scale. Then it's a matter of reducing the 'size' of the quantum which would probably mean slowing things down (lower frequency, longer wavelength).
As a practical matter there probably is a minimum, but it is very small and we are a long way from it.
How do you know? My understanding is what motivated most the people in these ventures wasn't a guaranteed monopoly, but rather it's own value?
It doesn't matter, since you cannot prove the reverse either. I'm willing the accept the idea that people are more motivated by the creative process than any monitary reward, but you can't prove that copyright is unnecessary for the authors of creative works to be paid for their work. If you choose to place all of your work under open/free terms, then by all means do, and feel free to advocate the same to others, but don't tell all authors everywhere that they must give up all copyright. Why? Because you say? Was somebody appointed dictator when I wasn't looking?
The fact is that copyright exists, and for the US it is explicitely mentioned in the constitution. The legal framework that supoorts the GPL is based on copyright as well. You can't have one without the other.
There is no sense in which the arguments made in this case weaken the prospects for free software. To try to go the purist route with this is counterproductive, and IMHO stomps all over the right of individuals to choose. Lesig and people close to him support the Creative Commons and actively encourages people to release works under open/free licenses. You should know who you are talking about before criticizing.
The only way to make faster chips run at the same heat level is to make the buckets smaller, and I beleive that's hard to do.
No, it's not really hard, that's what happens when you scale. The buckets are the charges on the MOSFET gates in current technology, and the smaller the transister, the smaller the bucket, and the less current it takes. At some point, the wires can't take the current densities unless you scale back voltage, which makes the buckets smaller again. There is no limit to this on the bottom end, so no lower limit.
OTOH, the limits can be treated as hard within the current technology, and you have to use current technology, or wait to build it later. You can reduce the voltage, or slow the clock to reduce power, but it that means lower power == slower.
Who thinks $1400 is a price point that will move more than a small number of consumers in the top bracket? For people who want something like this, it has to be seriously multi-function and well integrated with other audio and visual components. Of course, there isn't much opportunity to do this because of a lack of widely supported standards to integrate components into a system.
This type of system could work if it was an upscale gamebox that was somewhat open in terms of adding third party hardware. What could be done now with a PS/2 that had all the right options (disk, net, TV type remote, PCI slot or two for add ons, maybe fire-wire or USB). The apps aren't really there to make this excellent yet, so make something that the fringe Linux cases will make usable. Sony is at least moving this way a little with Linux support, why not take it to the next step?
That's exactly right. Flexible policies taylored to the individual customer's needs, and good communication when (ideally, before) the limits are hit. Some customers would love to be slashdotted as long as their site can scale to handle it, they want all the page views they can get. If you could be hitting the limits of your system resources as well as bandwidth during a traffic peak, then you are also going to have to take care that one customer spiking doesn't take out the rest that are sharing some other resource.
Also, ask your customers what is most important to them. It will vary, and you will find out what to spend your time and efforts on to make them happy.
The fastest processors of any generation will generate heat, becuase the faster you want to switch, the more power it will take. Theoretically, there is no minimum amount of energy to transmit or transform a bit or bits of information, so as your technology gets smaller and faster (from smaller geometry supported by each new generation of technology), the power required for a given speed goes down. So you can have the same speed at a lower power, or faster at the same or maybe even more power.
That said, there is a difference related to efficiency of the architecture. Some people think the RISC/CISC debate was ended when CISC (read x86 family processors) started using all the same internal architectural features as the top RISC processors, but they did it by pushing the technology, not getting rid of the complexity. It has been costing Intel more to produce the same performance as competing RISCs for a long time, but their market is so huge that they make up the difference in up-front engineering cost by having a bigger market. This also shows up in power consumption.
I find the Transmeta innovation interesting because they solve the instruction set complexity problem a different way. Translate on the fly to an efficient micro-architecture. Can't be quite as good as a simple ISA, but it does much better on the Power/Computation measure.
Clearly, the court got this wrong, and it is important to get this ruling changed (I know, could be very hard). I think the most persuasive argument is/will be that there is no place where you can draw the line between talking about code, and actual code. As 'instruction' rather than 'actions', code is clearly speech. It only becomes actions when compiled or interpreted and run on actual hardware. The lawyers fighting on the side of goodness here need to be able to deflect this kind of stupidity immediately and in context so bad ruling don't have the power of precident.
Think of a favorite analogy of algorithms as 'recipes'. They can't ban "The Anarchists Cookbook", just stop you from actually cooking something up and using it. Any judge should be able to understand it this way.
How do you know? Shark are reported to hit surfboards from time to time, probably not trying to eat the human on top, but a case of mistaken identity. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if these things stop transmitting and turn up with a chunk out of them from time to time. In the deep they would probably be hard to spot, and they wouldn't have smells that a shark would recognize (probably).
Not exactly, but the turbo effect probably contributes to the problem. If you come into a turn too fast, or even just right, and you back off the throttle (the trailing part) the reduced power, or worse engine breaking transfers the weight forward which increases the traction of the front wheels and reduces it in the back. Any rear engine car has a lot of weight in the back, so the back end will break lose very easily, and it will come around very fast. With practice, you can feather the throttle off until the back end hangs out a little, then put the throttle back down. This transfers the weight back again and also has the drive wheels pointing into the corner which helps too. For driving fast, understeer is harder to deal with because the car just won't turn and pushes to the outside of the corner, so race drivers like to be able to get a little oversteer when they need it, so they like the way this works, particularly for a car with plenty of power.
I don't know about the stability control, but I know the lengthened the 911 wheelbase by moving the rear wheels back a little at some point (in the '80s, I think). It's really an amazing design considering the longevity.
Are you discussing the idea of how to legally share non-RIAA music? There is a legal argument to be made that they are obstructing you (and others) from providing a competitive service by putting things in the way at every turn, but this is a lose unless you have deep pockets. So if you want to stay away from that you need to have a playlist that is in the clear. Rather than trying to get them to help you determine what isn't on that list, why not build the database of what is on the list. Even if something gets on the list that shouldn't be, it can be taken off at the first complaint. This wouldn't have the same problem of people sharing things under fake names that shouldn't be there because you would be making a list, not sharing the recordings. Only the real names of songs and artists makes sense here.
The idea is to get the community to create and maintain the 'good' list rather than asking the industry for the 'bad' list. You would need to design in some controls so that the list would stay accurate (or at least converge quickly). Napster got in trouble because they had no way to police it even if they wanted to, but if you made a real effort to get it right, the courts wouldn't look to favorably on them trying to shut it down. The key is that if/when they claim a violation exists, your system would be capable of fixing the problem quickly so the claim of damage to the RIAA would be demonstrably false.
Why isn't there any competition for the RIAA? This whole topic makes it clear that they aren't looking after the interests of the artists very well, so why does this situation persist? Are all or most of the artists buying into this program? I know there are a few talking sense, but there is a lot of money that is being left on the table because of incompetence and stupidity. There has got to be a way to break the stranglehold, and give the artists more money at every size segment of the market.
Yes, but where is the connection to this story. They mention a different disposition of the original two. Did this guy get them later? I still think the recent story looks suspect, even if the concept is workable.
Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Most cars are pretty stable, even at 100, unless you are in a turn and somewhat near the limits. The example of a Porsche are particularly bad when you cut the throttle (i.e. the engine dies) in a turn. Lot's of Porsche turbos end up in the ditch with 5000 or less miles because the owner is not yet familiar with 'trailing throttle overstear' and end up backwards in a blink of an eye. Good drivers use this to go very fast through the turns.
The real question is why would you want to fly when when being on the ground works pretty well. Whether autorotation is easy or hard, it requires skill beyond what is required to point a car down the road. Crashes quickly become fatal, and weather can kill you. I like to sail too, but I look a lot more closely at the weather than when I'm driving. It's just not as practical, and it never will be.
When I was a kid, the long time traffic 'copter guy for WGN radio died in a storm. Stevie Ray Vaughn and several other musicians died shortly after takeoff from Alpine Valley. Even if the statistics of per mile or per hour risks were similar or better, I doubt that it would stay that way if people are using it for regular transport.
It does make me wonder whether any of this is for real. Doesn't it all sound like a bad movie. Anyone seen it in operation (I kind of remember the Bond movie, but it wouldn't really have to work for that). I'm a little unclear on whether it is a recent or old patent. Wouldn't the patent related tech be public?
I'll admit that I'm not much up on the details, but I well understand what is involved in creating a "trusted path" if that is their central concept. The bottom line, and it probably applies even more to Palladium is who gets to be the authority for "who do you trust" questions. For example, when you use SSL to secure https transactions in your browser, you get a set of root certificates already installed by default, but there is also a process to explicitely add or delete them from the list, as well as to add new ones on the fly. The effect of this is to say which Certificate Authorities (CAs) you trust. I can easily create my own CA with the appropriate tools (all available as Free/Open source), and I can then distribute the root certificate and make host keys for my friends.
Now, for DRM purposes, a content vendor may want to say "only trust these authorities", and either embed this in the content. But there is a problem because if you build your own tools from source, your not going to be able to certify it with an authority that this vendor trusts. You might be able to get the binary certified, but that would defeat the purpose of open source, and it certainly wouldn't work for Gentoo Linux for example. This is still tricky because someone would be certifying that the source meets the TCPA guidlines, and it's hard to see how this would be available. You could get the source, and fix bugs, but it would take a long turnaround to recertify the new version to be "trusted" again.
This has little to do with securing your system. My point about securing the external interfaces is not that scanning is not useful, but that it doesn't help that much after you get compromised. You might be able to detect the intrusion this way and maybe even avoid running the infected code, but there are always going to be windows of vulnerablility where the exploit code could be compromising any or all of your 'immune system'. The intruder can update any database you might use to detect the intrusion. Burning a DB to a CDR and putting it in a read-only player is good, but the detection code can get disabled too.
The upshot of this is that once you detect the intrusion, it is too late, and you might not even get the chance to detect, so you had better concetrate on keeping the bad guys out even before thinking about detection. OTOH, belt and suspenders isn't a bad idea when it comes to security. Same thing with other critical systems that where failure might even be life threatening, although here the issue of trust is a bit different. Multiple systems with multiple ways of ariving at the same answer, voting systems, etc. You have to be careful that your checks and balances actually improve stability, not decrease it.
Wrong. The only thing a website can put in a cookie is what information you give it, or something they make up for tracking a session.
That assumes no exploitable bugs. Not convincing. The 'something they make up for tracking' could also hide a host of evils.
And better than that, you can examine your cookie file and see what is there.
They can make it arbitrarily hard to know what they are up to, and if they are making it easier for other sites to get your information as well.
If you don't like cookies that are attached to ad images, get yourself a browser that blocks cookies that don't originate from the site you are visiting.
I already do this, and make my browser ask. I particularly like the new features where the browser remembers my decisions. Even so, this is a pain, and some site refuse to operate if you make the wrong choice (even crash the browser in some cases, but I haven't seen that in a while).
Persistence beyond the surrent session? Easy and ubiquitous support in all web development environments?
Logins are better for that, and my browser is happy to remember this when I go back. If you want data to persist, store it on your own server, not my client. This has the advantage of persisting even when I change machines/locations.
Cookies just aren't a very good design, and there is great potential for abuse without the user's knowledge.
You might be able to use some of the TCPA hardware resources to implement privacy and security facilities, but what you design would be far removed from anything in the current proposals. Your solution is more like virus detection under Windows. It is much better to make sure the external interfaces are well secured than to constantly scan for intrusions. Scanning is a good check that you aren't getting hacked, but not a good way to run a reliable system.
/. is good for getting informed about these things, but not for political activism. The EFF might be a good place to start if you want to get involved. We are all pursuing this is our own ways, and according to our own urges. It's the "open way", you scratch your own itch. Find existing projects, or start your own if you can't find one to join. If you want to help/., post a good story with links to resources or participate by making good comments. You'll know you're in the right ballpark when you stop getting modded out of existence.
Have you seen the Robocop movies? All three? I know, the second was lame at best and the third was downright pathetic, but take a look at the way they portray OCP, the Omni Consumer Products Corporation.
I kind of liked the TV show better. It has a real comic book feel that makes it more funny than just cynical.
I'm not that cynical about the political process either. Yes, there are way too many blatant abuses not to be alarmed by the posibilities, but there are good people trying to do the right thing as well. Don't tar all of them with the same brush.
Yes, this should be true, although it will also make it very hard for you to use a lot of media products, including a lot of websites from your Linux system. It will also restrict you from running GIMP, or Mozilla under Windows.
Let's be clear about this. It is the use of closed source software in conjunction with DRM that would make this possible (subverting the vote, that is). The open source version would be inspected for this type of thing, and the authentication processes would be used to protect from tampering. You don't need all the controls that they are attempting to legislate in to get security. The idea that DRM as proposed would enhance privacy or security is a crock.
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I respectfully disagree, and I would like more discussion about the merrits of what is being said now in this article. He is directly challenging the appeals court rebuke, and I think what he says has merrit. Do you really think MS would have been broken up by now if he had never made these comments? It's not even clear that this would be the most desirable outcome if your aim is the stop the MS campain to take over the world.
I fail to see how pictures of the judge add anything to the discussion. Does his appearance alter how you feel or think about what he has written?
I certainly would like to know if the remedy would have stood on the merrits, and I think it is pretty weak for them to use this as the only or primary reason to strike his ruling. We all understand the tactical reasons to err on the side of silence in this situation, but the Judge Jackson also raises an important point. Is it really necessary to have complete silence in this situation, and it particular, does it serve the public interest. For MS lawyers they were engaged in the battles of an extended war, and they would spare no tactic no matter how damaging to the process.
If he had waited to comment on MS tactics it might have been better, but I'm not sure. The fact is that MS might win in court anyway with their take no prisoners approach, or a least delay until it no longer matters. After all this worked for IBM in the past. Given this, it is better for the public to know more about what is going on at the time it is happenning.
To change the example ... In Illinois there is a criminal case that is still lingering in the public attention because some of the players are current candidates. A man was convicted of murder and later overturned when the DNA evidence cleared him. The prossecuters kept going to court and apposing any reversal, even though evidence was gathering of misconduct on the government side. At some point it is appropriate for a judge to publicly condemn legal manuvering that continues to delay justice. Justice delayed is justice denied.
As a practical matter there probably is a minimum, but it is very small and we are a long way from it.
How do you know? My understanding is what motivated most the people in these ventures wasn't a guaranteed monopoly, but rather it's own value?
It doesn't matter, since you cannot prove the reverse either. I'm willing the accept the idea that people are more motivated by the creative process than any monitary reward, but you can't prove that copyright is unnecessary for the authors of creative works to be paid for their work. If you choose to place all of your work under open/free terms, then by all means do, and feel free to advocate the same to others, but don't tell all authors everywhere that they must give up all copyright. Why? Because you say? Was somebody appointed dictator when I wasn't looking?
The fact is that copyright exists, and for the US it is explicitely mentioned in the constitution. The legal framework that supoorts the GPL is based on copyright as well. You can't have one without the other.
There is no sense in which the arguments made in this case weaken the prospects for free software. To try to go the purist route with this is counterproductive, and IMHO stomps all over the right of individuals to choose. Lesig and people close to him support the Creative Commons and actively encourages people to release works under open/free licenses. You should know who you are talking about before criticizing.
No, it's not really hard, that's what happens when you scale. The buckets are the charges on the MOSFET gates in current technology, and the smaller the transister, the smaller the bucket, and the less current it takes. At some point, the wires can't take the current densities unless you scale back voltage, which makes the buckets smaller again. There is no limit to this on the bottom end, so no lower limit.
OTOH, the limits can be treated as hard within the current technology, and you have to use current technology, or wait to build it later. You can reduce the voltage, or slow the clock to reduce power, but it that means lower power == slower.
This type of system could work if it was an upscale gamebox that was somewhat open in terms of adding third party hardware. What could be done now with a PS/2 that had all the right options (disk, net, TV type remote, PCI slot or two for add ons, maybe fire-wire or USB). The apps aren't really there to make this excellent yet, so make something that the fringe Linux cases will make usable. Sony is at least moving this way a little with Linux support, why not take it to the next step?
Also, ask your customers what is most important to them. It will vary, and you will find out what to spend your time and efforts on to make them happy.
That said, there is a difference related to efficiency of the architecture. Some people think the RISC/CISC debate was ended when CISC (read x86 family processors) started using all the same internal architectural features as the top RISC processors, but they did it by pushing the technology, not getting rid of the complexity. It has been costing Intel more to produce the same performance as competing RISCs for a long time, but their market is so huge that they make up the difference in up-front engineering cost by having a bigger market. This also shows up in power consumption.
I find the Transmeta innovation interesting because they solve the instruction set complexity problem a different way. Translate on the fly to an efficient micro-architecture. Can't be quite as good as a simple ISA, but it does much better on the Power/Computation measure.
Bottom line is the architecture matters.
Think of a favorite analogy of algorithms as 'recipes'. They can't ban "The Anarchists Cookbook", just stop you from actually cooking something up and using it. Any judge should be able to understand it this way.
How do you know? Shark are reported to hit surfboards from time to time, probably not trying to eat the human on top, but a case of mistaken identity. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if these things stop transmitting and turn up with a chunk out of them from time to time. In the deep they would probably be hard to spot, and they wouldn't have smells that a shark would recognize (probably).
I don't know about the stability control, but I know the lengthened the 911 wheelbase by moving the rear wheels back a little at some point (in the '80s, I think). It's really an amazing design considering the longevity.
The idea is to get the community to create and maintain the 'good' list rather than asking the industry for the 'bad' list. You would need to design in some controls so that the list would stay accurate (or at least converge quickly). Napster got in trouble because they had no way to police it even if they wanted to, but if you made a real effort to get it right, the courts wouldn't look to favorably on them trying to shut it down. The key is that if/when they claim a violation exists, your system would be capable of fixing the problem quickly so the claim of damage to the RIAA would be demonstrably false.
Why isn't there any competition for the RIAA? This whole topic makes it clear that they aren't looking after the interests of the artists very well, so why does this situation persist? Are all or most of the artists buying into this program? I know there are a few talking sense, but there is a lot of money that is being left on the table because of incompetence and stupidity. There has got to be a way to break the stranglehold, and give the artists more money at every size segment of the market.
Yes, but where is the connection to this story. They mention a different disposition of the original two. Did this guy get them later? I still think the recent story looks suspect, even if the concept is workable.
The real question is why would you want to fly when when being on the ground works pretty well. Whether autorotation is easy or hard, it requires skill beyond what is required to point a car down the road. Crashes quickly become fatal, and weather can kill you. I like to sail too, but I look a lot more closely at the weather than when I'm driving. It's just not as practical, and it never will be.
When I was a kid, the long time traffic 'copter guy for WGN radio died in a storm. Stevie Ray Vaughn and several other musicians died shortly after takeoff from Alpine Valley. Even if the statistics of per mile or per hour risks were similar or better, I doubt that it would stay that way if people are using it for regular transport.
Looked more like unscheduled down time. I haven't seen any scheduled outages, do that have them? How/where are they announced?
It does make me wonder whether any of this is for real. Doesn't it all sound like a bad movie. Anyone seen it in operation (I kind of remember the Bond movie, but it wouldn't really have to work for that). I'm a little unclear on whether it is a recent or old patent. Wouldn't the patent related tech be public?
Now, for DRM purposes, a content vendor may want to say "only trust these authorities", and either embed this in the content. But there is a problem because if you build your own tools from source, your not going to be able to certify it with an authority that this vendor trusts. You might be able to get the binary certified, but that would defeat the purpose of open source, and it certainly wouldn't work for Gentoo Linux for example. This is still tricky because someone would be certifying that the source meets the TCPA guidlines, and it's hard to see how this would be available. You could get the source, and fix bugs, but it would take a long turnaround to recertify the new version to be "trusted" again.
This has little to do with securing your system. My point about securing the external interfaces is not that scanning is not useful, but that it doesn't help that much after you get compromised. You might be able to detect the intrusion this way and maybe even avoid running the infected code, but there are always going to be windows of vulnerablility where the exploit code could be compromising any or all of your 'immune system'. The intruder can update any database you might use to detect the intrusion. Burning a DB to a CDR and putting it in a read-only player is good, but the detection code can get disabled too.
The upshot of this is that once you detect the intrusion, it is too late, and you might not even get the chance to detect, so you had better concetrate on keeping the bad guys out even before thinking about detection. OTOH, belt and suspenders isn't a bad idea when it comes to security. Same thing with other critical systems that where failure might even be life threatening, although here the issue of trust is a bit different. Multiple systems with multiple ways of ariving at the same answer, voting systems, etc. You have to be careful that your checks and balances actually improve stability, not decrease it.
That assumes no exploitable bugs. Not convincing. The 'something they make up for tracking' could also hide a host of evils.
And better than that, you can examine your cookie file and see what is there.
They can make it arbitrarily hard to know what they are up to, and if they are making it easier for other sites to get your information as well.
If you don't like cookies that are attached to ad images, get yourself a browser that blocks cookies that don't originate from the site you are visiting.
I already do this, and make my browser ask. I particularly like the new features where the browser remembers my decisions. Even so, this is a pain, and some site refuse to operate if you make the wrong choice (even crash the browser in some cases, but I haven't seen that in a while).
Persistence beyond the surrent session? Easy and ubiquitous support in all web development environments?
Logins are better for that, and my browser is happy to remember this when I go back. If you want data to persist, store it on your own server, not my client. This has the advantage of persisting even when I change machines/locations.
Cookies just aren't a very good design, and there is great potential for abuse without the user's knowledge.
You might be able to use some of the TCPA hardware resources to implement privacy and security facilities, but what you design would be far removed from anything in the current proposals. Your solution is more like virus detection under Windows. It is much better to make sure the external interfaces are well secured than to constantly scan for intrusions. Scanning is a good check that you aren't getting hacked, but not a good way to run a reliable system.
/. is good for getting informed about these things, but not for political activism. The EFF might be a good place to start if you want to get involved. We are all pursuing this is our own ways, and according to our own urges. It's the "open way", you scratch your own itch. Find existing projects, or start your own if you can't find one to join. If you want to help /., post a good story with links to resources or participate by making good comments. You'll know you're in the right ballpark when you stop getting modded out of existence.
I kind of liked the TV show better. It has a real comic book feel that makes it more funny than just cynical.
I'm not that cynical about the political process either. Yes, there are way too many blatant abuses not to be alarmed by the posibilities, but there are good people trying to do the right thing as well. Don't tar all of them with the same brush.
Yes, this should be true, although it will also make it very hard for you to use a lot of media products, including a lot of websites from your Linux system. It will also restrict you from running GIMP, or Mozilla under Windows.
Let's be clear about this. It is the use of closed source software in conjunction with DRM that would make this possible (subverting the vote, that is). The open source version would be inspected for this type of thing, and the authentication processes would be used to protect from tampering. You don't need all the controls that they are attempting to legislate in to get security. The idea that DRM as proposed would enhance privacy or security is a crock.