Where did Status Nadella come from. Now it's the time for a "our platform is on fire" memo and Microsoft being acquired at sale price by that former employer.
The J2ME security model did this. You would start a photo-manager midlet and you would have to authorize access in a nagging pop-up form for each single directory in the path to the photo you were going to see and then for the photo file itself. This was totally horrendous, and I prefer the security model in Android to that.
Moreover, it's difficult to make any automated system *understand* what a program is actually doing. If you just give permission to an app for connecting to a specific server for downloading the weather forecast, it could be using that same connection to funnel any data (for which it has access) away.
The more interesting approach to actually controlling access in a useful way is the way in which intents work in Android, actually. See Locale, for instance, for which you can get plugins downloaded as independent apps. The main program and the plugins communicate via a well-defined intent-based protocol. Each plugin will get different (and thus limited) permissions, as they need. The location plugin will access the GPS, a messaging one might need SMS or account access. You can enable/disable/install/uninstall them as needed, providing fine and sensible control.
To some extent, the same thing happens with the share menu, at a much more coarse level.
If you have rooted the device, you can intercept any communications through any of the operating system provided services, either by using the monitoring facilities it provides or by modifying it. You don't need to sniff the packets 'on air', and thus you can pick the traffic for bluetooth too.
If you are worried that sensitive data is transmitted over a network link... uhm... then the software should be encrypting the data.
I don't get what's your worry, anyway, other than people reverse-engineering Microsoft's protocols and creating alternative SmartGlass clients.
Most of the time Android activity screens just "stack" as they are being opened. An example with the GMail client would be InBox -> Display specific message -> Reply.
Usually, when you press the back button, you just cancel the top activity screen, popping it out of the stack. For instance, you could cancel replying to a message by pressing the back button, so that you get back to having the display specific message activity on top.
When backing/popping the last activity, the application is not needed anymore and usually its execution ends, taking you back to either the home screen or the "other" application that launched it (for instance, by choosing to share a photo via GMail from the Gallery application, you got a Gallery stack starting a nested GMail stack). This is different from pressing the home button, that just puts the activity stack aside (it's still open in the background while memory allows), so that you can "start another stack", and then switching back to the previous stack afterwards by holding home and then selecting the previous stack from the list of "currently active" stacks.
See this blog post to understand why the notification icon is needed:
Services can further negotiate this behavior by requesting they be considered "foreground." This places the service in a "please don't kill" state, but requires that it include a notification to the user about it actively running. This is useful for services such as background music playback or car navigation, which the user is actively aware of; when you're playing music and using the browser, you can always see the music-playing glyph in the status bar. Android won't try to kill these services, but as a trade-off, ensures the user knows about them and is able to explicitly stop them when desired.
So if you want it to keep running as a background service to be able to receive incoming calls, this is the standard procedure. And I seriously think Android notifications are one of the best thought parts of the system.
Another thing is the inability to leave the application screen by pressing the back button (you can use the home button though, but that's so un-androidy...) You can force the application to quit completely via a menu option in one of the screens.
Android applications are left running in the background by the operating system until the memory they use is needed, and the application process is killed in order to reclaim it. For services running in the background (as required for receiving incoming calls), displaying a notification icon will flag the process as "less killable".
Services can further negotiate this behavior by requesting they be considered "foreground." This places the service in a "please don't kill" state, but requires that it include a notification to the user about it actively running. This is useful for services such as background music playback or car navigation, which the user is actively aware of; when you're playing music and using the browser, you can always see the music-playing glyph in the status bar. Android won't try to kill these services, but as a trade-off, ensures the user knows about them and is able to explicitly stop them when desired.
There's a menu option to totally kill the program in one of the screens. But the thing about not being able of exiting the Skype screen to the Home screen by using the back button (you can use the Home button) is another, very different thing. It's so un-androidy...:-(
The interesting point here is that you EXPECT some completely new idea with every release of an Apple device. With every other mobile phone company you just expect more of the same every time. But Apple you expect a new idea with every single new model. Your expectations from Apple are higher because Apple because Apple usually delivers exceptional products.
Well actually alongside all the stuff that you dismiss as more of the same (4 times as many pixels, front facing camera), there was something that was truly new that you forgot. The gyroscope.
You've betrayed yourself as yet another Apple Fanboy:-) I don't EXPECT anything from Apple. Even in the case I actually expected anything from them, then they would have failed to meet those expectatives.
I was just pointing at the fact that Apple competitors do already sell devices with both better hardware and better software than the ones the iPhone 4 has. Yes, the screen has more resolution than any other device, but its size is still 3.5", and I honestly think so many pixels in that size are way overkill to be of any use.
Regarding the gyroscopes, yes, I knew about them. More orientation sensors, then too.
What I mean is they have no more a significantly better product in the smartphone space. They definitely aren't in a position to keep making new enemies, even if what they're doing is squeezing the cow dry for their shareholders.
This business of Apple being constantly praised uncritically or damned irrationally on slashdot is getting really old. Steve Jobs is neither your saviour nor the antichrist, and iAd is just a way for developers to offer an ad-sponsored software option.
Not a way, but the way when you're forced to play by Apple's rules. I mean, they amended the developer agreement to a point that would exclude any real competitors to their own newcomer ad service. Of course using an ad-based model or not is the software developer's choice. Users just can vote with their feet.
In the case of iPhone app developers, voting with their feet about iAd just requires them abandoning the whole Apple platform. Sooner or later, Apple will find that they can't get away with anything. I know most users who buy an iThing don't give a hoot about these issues... yet. But Apple are really walking by the line, testing the antitrust limits, patent-battling everyone else at the mobile space, alienating their developer base, and (as of today here in Spain) alienating their users by their exclusive deals with specific carriers.
I think that what goes around does indeed come around. It's to be seen how long can they keep their market share by being fashionable only. iPhone 4 came with no new ideas and only more of the same (more pixels, more cameras, more hype, more limitations by contract). Don't know about the iPad, but they should be worried in the mobile phone space.
He already made an investment in learning the iPhone SDK, an iPhone developer subscription ($99 a year), and at least one Mac computer.
It's easier to rationalize out the Android ecosystem without actually providing any specific reasons than to reckon that perhaps you invested so much time and resources into what happened to be a bad choice.
The actual problem comes to the input data to these models. As TFA says, they measured the correlation value that would predict the observed market prices of CDS's.
This is kind of common in the financial business; you assume that "the market" is already taking into account all facts when deciding those prices, so that you can calibrate a single parameter (the correlation in this case) that will make up for all that assumed knowledge. If your model doesn't explain all data, you simply add more parameters.
I see two problems with this.
The first one is that many times "the market" actually doesn't know about the future, making your calibrated parameters reflect a collective subjective opinion instead of a tangible reality.
The second one is that, as markets mature, many players end up using the same models. This not only leads to a single failure mode for the whole market, but may end up producing a free-floating (unstable) fed back system if no tangible (real world) inputs are at hand; you price things with model M given parameters that were deduced from prices via the same model M. When everyone is doing the same without looking at their surrounding reality at all, there's no more of that "collective market knowledge" left, but a bunch of lemmings running towards the cliff edge.
At my work, we maintain several Windows clusters for financial derivatives valuation.
We can't really move all of them to Linux (no matter how much we would like to do it), because some of the calculations have been implemented using MS only technologies, like ActiveX (yes, you read that well) and.NET (the last time we checked it the Mono runtime was ~5-6 times slower than MS implementation of.NET for our code).
When we needed to upgrade the Windows clusters recently, we had to move from 2-cpu-1-core to 2-cpu-4-core machines, since it was what was being sold. What we've observed is that Windows (Server 2003) is unable to fairly share the CPU time when there are more active threads than available cores. We get a lot of variance on the overall calculation time when the clusters are very loaded because of this.
The same tests done on SLES-9 (yes, 9) based Linux clusters with similar hardware did not suffer from this problem. CPU time was divided equally among all threads. And we are using a 4-year old kernel, that doesn't even sport the newest completely-fair-scheduler.
What's "free code" (I reckon you prefer "open code", but GPL is about "free") if people does not have the freedom to use it?
The two things that made most noise about GPL 3 were its stance agaist patents, and its requirements against effective tivoization.
I feel lucky that software patents seem unenforceable still here in the EU. The intent of the GPL 3 in this respect is clearly to avoid a (re)distributor from applying a layer of selective patent licenses on the receiving users. Many of us would like to ban software patents globally, as they actually can strangle independent innovation and be the means that incumbents may use in order to squash any competition, in this case in the software field. A third party (a non-user and non-distributor) could try to enforce software patents against GPL 3'd software users; GPL 3 cannot project its software-freeing agenda here, since the license does not bind a third party that does not use or (re)distribute the software. So, in the end, the behave-well-with-patents enforcement is done on the only ones the license applies to (users and redistributors), which is as far as the license may take this part of the FSF political agenda. This is, BTW, part with which I happen to agree fully.
I recognize the aspect about anti-tivoization to be a more difficult point because, unlike the former one, transcends out of the software world into the hardware one. In the TiVo case you get the code... and you would be able to use it if you were able to replicate the hardware that it's intended to run on minus the selective restrictions on the software it can run.
The case of TiVo may seem a petty one, as in this case the restriction on the software isn't placed on individuals on an arbitrary basis. "It's their hardware; let them do what they want with it." That's what people that doesn't like this aspect of the GPL 3 say. Ok; maybe you cannot replicate their hardware, and you lose some little bit of code thats GPL'd but actually unusable because there's no free hardware to use it on.
But if Microsoft is able to take along its agenda about "Trusted Computing", in which each computer available to customers would be required to enable hardware-based DRM on software (no TPM, no Windows, that's what the computer vendors would hear), then they would in fact be able to control ANY code that could be used in the hardware that's readily available to customers. And that would be very similar to a new layer of selective licensing that could be used against any user of any software, free or not.
So, even if you may be in the "free software is ok; free hardware is not really needed" camp, you may recognize that free software may be successfully reduced to insignificance if no free hardware (or "open hardware", at least) is available in order to run it. Although I don't really mind proprietary hardware to enforce restrictions on the software it may run (I simply don't buy the hardware), the possibility of ending up with no unrestricted hardware if we do nothing about it, actually makes me fully support the anti-tivoisation clause.
So, paraphrasing the famous poem:
First, they came to secure their game consoles, so that no one would run unlicensed software on them.
I did not worry, because I didn't use game consoles, nor wrote software for them.
Then, they came over the TiVo, so that the broadcasters could have their contents controlled.
I didn't say anything, since I had my MythTV.
Then, they came to oversee home optical media, so that no one could copy those contents, or even skip the commercials at the beginning.
I did not mind about it, since I used free players on my computer systems.
Then, they came with Trusted Computing, saying they would patch in hardware the gaping holes in their software.
Then, as time passed, my computers died one after another of natural death, and I was no longer able to find any new computer to run my software.
It is only when open source projects take a mature and pragmatic approach that the projects become relatively successful.
I think that the "pragmatic approach" that you seem to like in proprietary software companies in many cases amounts to bribing decision makers in order to make them select the proprietary product that offered the higher bribe.
Of course until free software proponents begin implementing these same practices (which seems rather unlikely due to the voluntary nature of most free software projects) they will be regarded as "a group of eccentrics on a religious crusade" by those corrupt decision makers.
In my company we were evaluating the possibility of migrating from Sun hardware to commodity x86 servers in order to reduce costs in new projects.
The problem is that as we have customers in several countries, we'd be limited about the number of available providers that offer global support.
Given the latest benchmarks and the better architecture put forward by AMD, we would like to have Opteron servers for our deployments, but... HP and Sun Opteron servers were relatively expensive, while Dell only did Intel...
I suspect our company isn't the only one considering this case, so probably this will be a rather good move for Dell (moreover taking into account Intel's crappy multiprocessor-multicore architecture, with a shared memory controller for ALL cores).
The actual noise comes from the fact that the same guys that so expeditively push for enforcing copyright when it suits their purses would seem to have no respect for it when it comes to taking advantage of the altruist work of some free software programmer. How hypocritical!
Of course probably Sony didn't even know what was inside the XCP product they bought from First4Internet, but in any case now that they should know it they should be doing whatever it takes to "repair" the damage (at least they should stop to redistribute the infringing product).
Yet another aspect of this is whether software licence agreements that preclude the user from disassembling the product should be even legal. In this case such a disposition in the agreement could have been used knowingly with the objective of hiding the infringement.
As a Christian, I don't want a non-Christian teaching their most probably distorted perspective on something they don't believe at all with a tone of disdain throughout. They think it's hogwash, so they won't be fair in teaching the merits of whatever Intelligent Design is.
So what your talking here about is 'opinion' or 'belief'.
No, as a creationist, all I want is that teachers have the freedom to raise arguments against current evolutionary theory in class, as a topic for discussion or just as a point that the theory of evolution as the origin of all life from a common ancestor does have flaws.
Teachers shouldn't be free to 'teach' whatever they like the most. Depending on what you consider the goal of education to be, teachers should either teach 'the truth', or 'the most practical knowledge' available (meaning knowledge allowing the students to be successful through their lives).
'The truth' is what we know to be facts. Nowadays a common criterium could be what we can measure by scientific methods repeatably. This is undeniable fact-based truth (at least for non-delusional subjects). ID is not this kind of 'truth', because we can't measure anything of it.
And the most useful 'practical knowledge' today seems to be the one developed under Science and Technology. It's impossible to deny how much Science and Technology have advanced our civilizations in this last century. This is knowledge that allows us to do things knowing (predicting) what the outcome will be. ID is not 'practical knowledge', because I don't know which use it could have other than fostering long Slashdot arguments and making education yet poorer in a culturally decadent western country.
Now then, I think a teacher should be able to raise these points. That's all.
And in this way the teacher would be handling 'opinion' or 'belief' to students, rather than 'truth' or 'practical knowledge'.
If the teacher told students something like "there's people that think in this way, and some other people that think in that other way", then we would be teaching 'facts on opinions or beliefs', that at most would be social or cultural facts, but would not belong to the realm of Science.
The problem is that opinions are like asses: everyone has its own. And that's the way it should be! When one gets grown (but not before), one has to gather every piece of fact that one got before and then forge an opinion. Children at school are not grown up enough to do so, and so should not be contaminated by others' opinions.
The thing is that evolution and natural selection are both fact-based 'truth' and 'practical knowledge'.
We have records of the introduction of new species to locations where they didn't exist before, and how sometimes they overpowered and extinguished the previously-existing native ones. A lot of experiments have been done about artificially-induced mutations on insects and other species. Mutations are known to happen naturally, although at a slower rate. Evolution requires only natural selection, mutations and time. Those are facts, so this is the 'truth' part.
Moreover, man has done cattle selection and breeding for centuries, getting better breeds for every possible use. This is no more than 'controlled evolution', an evolution process in which the environment selection criteria are specified by the human breeder. This is then rather 'practical knowledge' too.
If you argue that evolution hasn't been demonstrated in every case, then I'll argue that Science doesn't need to demonstrate every possible case of a law in order to be useful. The exception is when you find a solid, repeatable negative case, which would force Science to reconsider and perhaps override the original law. Please, could you get the solid, repeatable proof for a single case of non-evolution?
We're born into this imperfect world and should expect nothing less than we've already been born into. The lock was invented before anyone presently reading this was born. This is a clear indication of the state of things and in my opinion, the nature of humans... or animals for that matter. (Raccoons, monkeys and other creatures are famous for stealing things too!)
Actually Nature, through evolution, strives to try every possible combination that can be expressed.
I mean; evolution is a blind process, not a guided one. How could evolution know which characteristics will make a being successful in its future?
The answer is that evolution doesn't know, or even care. It produces every variation in reach, so that the ones better adapted to the future are the ones which survive.
So "good" and "bad" individuals keep being "produced". Currently successful social organization seems to depend on a vast majority of mostly-good individuals that are able to defend themselves as an organized group. Remove from them the ability to defend themselves and then the future will belong to the better adapted "bad people".
Slashdot Mirror
Orwell was prophesizing when he adscribed Britain to the Oceania block (including the American territories) rather than the Eurasia one.
Where did Status Nadella come from. Now it's the time for a "our platform is on fire" memo and Microsoft being acquired at sale price by that former employer.
Then, of it's made from wood...
It's a witch!
Let me know when they get to the 30 MW mining laser. Then I can go harvesting some asteroids.
Now just don't bother me until they discover an UNKNOWN one.
Pr0n! Anywhere! Anytime!
The J2ME security model did this. You would start a photo-manager midlet and you would have to authorize access in a nagging pop-up form for each single directory in the path to the photo you were going to see and then for the photo file itself. This was totally horrendous, and I prefer the security model in Android to that.
Moreover, it's difficult to make any automated system *understand* what a program is actually doing. If you just give permission to an app for connecting to a specific server for downloading the weather forecast, it could be using that same connection to funnel any data (for which it has access) away.
The more interesting approach to actually controlling access in a useful way is the way in which intents work in Android, actually. See Locale, for instance, for which you can get plugins downloaded as independent apps. The main program and the plugins communicate via a well-defined intent-based protocol. Each plugin will get different (and thus limited) permissions, as they need. The location plugin will access the GPS, a messaging one might need SMS or account access. You can enable/disable/install/uninstall them as needed, providing fine and sensible control.
To some extent, the same thing happens with the share menu, at a much more coarse level.
If you have rooted the device, you can intercept any communications through any of the operating system provided services, either by using the monitoring facilities it provides or by modifying it. You don't need to sniff the packets 'on air', and thus you can pick the traffic for bluetooth too.
If you are worried that sensitive data is transmitted over a network link... uhm... then the software should be encrypting the data.
I don't get what's your worry, anyway, other than people reverse-engineering Microsoft's protocols and creating alternative SmartGlass clients.
A 16 bit session id should be enough for everyone...
Most of the time Android activity screens just "stack" as they are being opened. An example with the GMail client would be InBox -> Display specific message -> Reply.
Usually, when you press the back button, you just cancel the top activity screen, popping it out of the stack. For instance, you could cancel replying to a message by pressing the back button, so that you get back to having the display specific message activity on top.
When backing/popping the last activity, the application is not needed anymore and usually its execution ends, taking you back to either the home screen or the "other" application that launched it (for instance, by choosing to share a photo via GMail from the Gallery application, you got a Gallery stack starting a nested GMail stack). This is different from pressing the home button, that just puts the activity stack aside (it's still open in the background while memory allows), so that you can "start another stack", and then switching back to the previous stack afterwards by holding home and then selecting the previous stack from the list of "currently active" stacks.
See this blog post to understand why the notification icon is needed:
So if you want it to keep running as a background service to be able to receive incoming calls, this is the standard procedure. And I seriously think Android notifications are one of the best thought parts of the system.
Another thing is the inability to leave the application screen by pressing the back button (you can use the home button though, but that's so un-androidy...) You can force the application to quit completely via a menu option in one of the screens.
Android applications are left running in the background by the operating system until the memory they use is needed, and the application process is killed in order to reclaim it. For services running in the background (as required for receiving incoming calls), displaying a notification icon will flag the process as "less killable".
See this blog entry:
There's a menu option to totally kill the program in one of the screens. But the thing about not being able of exiting the Skype screen to the Home screen by using the back button (you can use the Home button) is another, very different thing. It's so un-androidy... :-(
The interesting point here is that you EXPECT some completely new idea with every release of an Apple device. With every other mobile phone company you just expect more of the same every time. But Apple you expect a new idea with every single new model. Your expectations from Apple are higher because Apple because Apple usually delivers exceptional products.
Well actually alongside all the stuff that you dismiss as more of the same (4 times as many pixels, front facing camera), there was something that was truly new that you forgot. The gyroscope.
You've betrayed yourself as yet another Apple Fanboy :-) I don't EXPECT anything from Apple. Even in the case I actually expected anything from them, then they would have failed to meet those expectatives.
I was just pointing at the fact that Apple competitors do already sell devices with both better hardware and better software than the ones the iPhone 4 has. Yes, the screen has more resolution than any other device, but its size is still 3.5", and I honestly think so many pixels in that size are way overkill to be of any use.
Regarding the gyroscopes, yes, I knew about them. More orientation sensors, then too.
What I mean is they have no more a significantly better product in the smartphone space. They definitely aren't in a position to keep making new enemies, even if what they're doing is squeezing the cow dry for their shareholders.
This business of Apple being constantly praised uncritically or damned irrationally on slashdot is getting really old. Steve Jobs is neither your saviour nor the antichrist, and iAd is just a way for developers to offer an ad-sponsored software option.
Not a way, but the way when you're forced to play by Apple's rules. I mean, they amended the developer agreement to a point that would exclude any real competitors to their own newcomer ad service. Of course using an ad-based model or not is the software developer's choice. Users just can vote with their feet.
In the case of iPhone app developers, voting with their feet about iAd just requires them abandoning the whole Apple platform. Sooner or later, Apple will find that they can't get away with anything. I know most users who buy an iThing don't give a hoot about these issues... yet. But Apple are really walking by the line, testing the antitrust limits, patent-battling everyone else at the mobile space, alienating their developer base, and (as of today here in Spain) alienating their users by their exclusive deals with specific carriers.
I think that what goes around does indeed come around. It's to be seen how long can they keep their market share by being fashionable only. iPhone 4 came with no new ideas and only more of the same (more pixels, more cameras, more hype, more limitations by contract). Don't know about the iPad, but they should be worried in the mobile phone space.
He already made an investment in learning the iPhone SDK, an iPhone developer subscription ($99 a year), and at least one Mac computer.
It's easier to rationalize out the Android ecosystem without actually providing any specific reasons than to reckon that perhaps you invested so much time and resources into what happened to be a bad choice.
The actual problem comes to the input data to these models. As TFA says, they measured the correlation value that would predict the observed market prices of CDS's.
This is kind of common in the financial business; you assume that "the market" is already taking into account all facts when deciding those prices, so that you can calibrate a single parameter (the correlation in this case) that will make up for all that assumed knowledge. If your model doesn't explain all data, you simply add more parameters.
I see two problems with this.
The first one is that many times "the market" actually doesn't know about the future, making your calibrated parameters reflect a collective subjective opinion instead of a tangible reality.
The second one is that, as markets mature, many players end up using the same models. This not only leads to a single failure mode for the whole market, but may end up producing a free-floating (unstable) fed back system if no tangible (real world) inputs are at hand; you price things with model M given parameters that were deduced from prices via the same model M. When everyone is doing the same without looking at their surrounding reality at all, there's no more of that "collective market knowledge" left, but a bunch of lemmings running towards the cliff edge.
At my work, we maintain several Windows clusters for financial derivatives valuation.
We can't really move all of them to Linux (no matter how much we would like to do it), because some of the calculations have been implemented using MS only technologies, like ActiveX (yes, you read that well) and .NET (the last time we checked it the Mono runtime was ~5-6 times slower than MS implementation of .NET for our code).
When we needed to upgrade the Windows clusters recently, we had to move from 2-cpu-1-core to 2-cpu-4-core machines, since it was what was being sold. What we've observed is that Windows (Server 2003) is unable to fairly share the CPU time when there are more active threads than available cores. We get a lot of variance on the overall calculation time when the clusters are very loaded because of this.
The same tests done on SLES-9 (yes, 9) based Linux clusters with similar hardware did not suffer from this problem. CPU time was divided equally among all threads. And we are using a 4-year old kernel, that doesn't even sport the newest completely-fair-scheduler.
What's "free code" (I reckon you prefer "open code", but GPL is about "free") if people does not have the freedom to use it?
The two things that made most noise about GPL 3 were its stance agaist patents, and its requirements against effective tivoization.
I feel lucky that software patents seem unenforceable still here in the EU. The intent of the GPL 3 in this respect is clearly to avoid a (re)distributor from applying a layer of selective patent licenses on the receiving users. Many of us would like to ban software patents globally, as they actually can strangle independent innovation and be the means that incumbents may use in order to squash any competition, in this case in the software field. A third party (a non-user and non-distributor) could try to enforce software patents against GPL 3'd software users; GPL 3 cannot project its software-freeing agenda here, since the license does not bind a third party that does not use or (re)distribute the software. So, in the end, the behave-well-with-patents enforcement is done on the only ones the license applies to (users and redistributors), which is as far as the license may take this part of the FSF political agenda. This is, BTW, part with which I happen to agree fully.
I recognize the aspect about anti-tivoization to be a more difficult point because, unlike the former one, transcends out of the software world into the hardware one. In the TiVo case you get the code... and you would be able to use it if you were able to replicate the hardware that it's intended to run on minus the selective restrictions on the software it can run.
The case of TiVo may seem a petty one, as in this case the restriction on the software isn't placed on individuals on an arbitrary basis. "It's their hardware; let them do what they want with it." That's what people that doesn't like this aspect of the GPL 3 say. Ok; maybe you cannot replicate their hardware, and you lose some little bit of code thats GPL'd but actually unusable because there's no free hardware to use it on.
But if Microsoft is able to take along its agenda about "Trusted Computing", in which each computer available to customers would be required to enable hardware-based DRM on software (no TPM, no Windows, that's what the computer vendors would hear), then they would in fact be able to control ANY code that could be used in the hardware that's readily available to customers. And that would be very similar to a new layer of selective licensing that could be used against any user of any software, free or not.
So, even if you may be in the "free software is ok; free hardware is not really needed" camp, you may recognize that free software may be successfully reduced to insignificance if no free hardware (or "open hardware", at least) is available in order to run it. Although I don't really mind proprietary hardware to enforce restrictions on the software it may run (I simply don't buy the hardware), the possibility of ending up with no unrestricted hardware if we do nothing about it, actually makes me fully support the anti-tivoisation clause.
So, paraphrasing the famous poem:
I think that the "pragmatic approach" that you seem to like in proprietary software companies in many cases amounts to bribing decision makers in order to make them select the proprietary product that offered the higher bribe.
Of course until free software proponents begin implementing these same practices (which seems rather unlikely due to the voluntary nature of most free software projects) they will be regarded as "a group of eccentrics on a religious crusade" by those corrupt decision makers.
I'll put a rootkit in every home!
The problem is that as we have customers in several countries, we'd be limited about the number of available providers that offer global support.
Given the latest benchmarks and the better architecture put forward by AMD, we would like to have Opteron servers for our deployments, but... HP and Sun Opteron servers were relatively expensive, while Dell only did Intel...
I suspect our company isn't the only one considering this case, so probably this will be a rather good move for Dell (moreover taking into account Intel's crappy multiprocessor-multicore architecture, with a shared memory controller for ALL cores).
The actual noise comes from the fact that the same guys that so expeditively push for enforcing copyright when it suits their purses would seem to have no respect for it when it comes to taking advantage of the altruist work of some free software programmer. How hypocritical!
Of course probably Sony didn't even know what was inside the XCP product they bought from First4Internet, but in any case now that they should know it they should be doing whatever it takes to "repair" the damage (at least they should stop to redistribute the infringing product).
Yet another aspect of this is whether software licence agreements that preclude the user from disassembling the product should be even legal. In this case such a disposition in the agreement could have been used knowingly with the objective of hiding the infringement.
So what your talking here about is 'opinion' or 'belief'.
Teachers shouldn't be free to 'teach' whatever they like the most. Depending on what you consider the goal of education to be, teachers should either teach 'the truth', or 'the most practical knowledge' available (meaning knowledge allowing the students to be successful through their lives).
'The truth' is what we know to be facts. Nowadays a common criterium could be what we can measure by scientific methods repeatably. This is undeniable fact-based truth (at least for non-delusional subjects). ID is not this kind of 'truth', because we can't measure anything of it.
And the most useful 'practical knowledge' today seems to be the one developed under Science and Technology. It's impossible to deny how much Science and Technology have advanced our civilizations in this last century. This is knowledge that allows us to do things knowing (predicting) what the outcome will be. ID is not 'practical knowledge', because I don't know which use it could have other than fostering long Slashdot arguments and making education yet poorer in a culturally decadent western country.
And in this way the teacher would be handling 'opinion' or 'belief' to students, rather than 'truth' or 'practical knowledge'.
If the teacher told students something like "there's people that think in this way, and some other people that think in that other way", then we would be teaching 'facts on opinions or beliefs', that at most would be social or cultural facts, but would not belong to the realm of Science.
The problem is that opinions are like asses: everyone has its own. And that's the way it should be! When one gets grown (but not before), one has to gather every piece of fact that one got before and then forge an opinion. Children at school are not grown up enough to do so, and so should not be contaminated by others' opinions.
The thing is that evolution and natural selection are both fact-based 'truth' and 'practical knowledge'.
We have records of the introduction of new species to locations where they didn't exist before, and how sometimes they overpowered and extinguished the previously-existing native ones. A lot of experiments have been done about artificially-induced mutations on insects and other species. Mutations are known to happen naturally, although at a slower rate. Evolution requires only natural selection, mutations and time. Those are facts, so this is the 'truth' part.
Moreover, man has done cattle selection and breeding for centuries, getting better breeds for every possible use. This is no more than 'controlled evolution', an evolution process in which the environment selection criteria are specified by the human breeder. This is then rather 'practical knowledge' too.
If you argue that evolution hasn't been demonstrated in every case, then I'll argue that Science doesn't need to demonstrate every possible case of a law in order to be useful. The exception is when you find a solid, repeatable negative case, which would force Science to reconsider and perhaps override the original law. Please, could you get the solid, repeatable proof for a single case of non-evolution?
So,
Actually Nature, through evolution, strives to try every possible combination that can be expressed.
I mean; evolution is a blind process, not a guided one. How could evolution know which characteristics will make a being successful in its future?
The answer is that evolution doesn't know, or even care. It produces every variation in reach, so that the ones better adapted to the future are the ones which survive.
So "good" and "bad" individuals keep being "produced". Currently successful social organization seems to depend on a vast majority of mostly-good individuals that are able to defend themselves as an organized group. Remove from them the ability to defend themselves and then the future will belong to the better adapted "bad people".
http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/strace/http://www.lia cs.nl/~wichert/strace/