C++ is crap, but when the alternatives are a tasteful subset of C++ and a half-arsed reimplementation of a horrible subset of C++ in C macros, I'd rather take C++ and bitch about it than suffer in C. There are very few places where C++ is the right tool for the job, but C is often not the right tool for these either.
The iPhone UI made a lot of mistakes too, they were just different mistakes. The main differences were that it had a capacitive touchscreen (they'd only just become cheap enough to put in smartphones) and a sufficiently powerful CPU and GPU to do interesting things with it. Other phones released at the same time were of similar quality (typically, better in some regards, worse in others). The older mobile phone companies like Nokia had problems because they had large software stacks designed for use in a world where a high-end device had a 33MHz CPU and 4MB of RAM, but they all had some sort of flagship phone with similar capabilities to the iPhone. Their main mistake was thinking of them as incremental improvements, rather than a change in the market. Smartphones went quite quickly from being a tiny niche to a large segment of the market (due to dropping hardware costs, not software changes) and Apple positioned itself very well to take advantage of this shift.
The system has always been equally broken before, but it's a select few companies (Apple, Microsoft, Oracle) which have found it more profitable to compete in the market place. You don't see Samsung or HTC or Google trying to crush competition with lawsuits in the way that the above-named companies do.
No, most big companies maintained patent pools to make it easy to kill off newcomers. Big tech companies don't worry much about other big tech companies that they're used to competing with. Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola, for example, didn't worry much about each other. They were all producing similar classes of products, and each generation their market share would slide up and down a bit, but it stayed relatively constant. They worry about newcomers that disrupt the market. The same thing happened in the workstation market. SGI was doing very well selling 3D workstations. Their big competitors were companies like IBM and Sun, but they knew how to differentiate themselves in the market from these guys and ensure that they had enough income to keep going. Then came nVidia, and suddenly 3D workstations were built from commodity parts: their market no longer existed.
This is why you don't see too many big patent lawsuits. The big players all have cross-licensing agreements within established markets and just use their combined might to squeeze out smaller players. If you want to join in, then they'll license you their patents, for either a share of the company or a share of the profits. If you do well, then they'll get a load of money, and if it looks like you'll do really well then they'll just buy you. The thing that gives management at these companies nightmares is the idea that they won't notice a company with a disruptive technology until it's grown so big that it can't be intimidated by these tactics.
I think both could be accommodated in law, however I'm not sure that you need the wilful version. If a company is demanding money for a patent that they knew at time of filing (or subsequently) had prior art that made it invalid, then they have committed fraud. No need for new laws, just prosecute them for this. If it's invalidated on the grounds of being obvious, then that's a bit more tricky, because this is quite a subjective judgement and it's hard to prove malice.
As far as I can tell, no Android browser has the kind of fine-grained control over cookies that has been standard on desktop browsers for 5-10 years. I sort-of understand if the WebKit installed on Android doesn't have this kind of control that third-party WebKit browsers might not add them (although Chrome uses a different - slower - version of WebKit, so doesn't have this excuse), but why do Opera and FireFox not support sensible cookie management?
Maybe look for a job abroad too then. A degree from The Open University is at least as well regarded as one from a brick-and-mortar institution in the UK: the standard is similar and it indicates that you can be self-driven as well.
Nonsense. You sound like you are just repeating an argument that you heard, without understanding it. There are two problems: encryption and key distribution. The signing of the certificate is a solution to the key-signing problem, allowing the key to be transmitted over an untrusted medium and then validated at the far end. This is important if you are connecting to a remote server for the first time. In this case, we have two trusted endpoints attempting to connect. The key can easily be transferred between them out of band (e.g. upload the public key to gmail, or even just present the key fingerprint and ask the user to validate it).
This doesn't help fight spam, and it's retarded from a security perspective. It doesn't help fight spam, because the user must explicitly configure the POP3 server for Google to pull mail from and they will get the spam that is on that POP3 server irrespective of the security of the connection. It is retarded from a security perspective because you have two communication endpoints that are accessible by the end user and so, rather than asking the user to validate the security credentials, they require the end user to nominate (and pay) a third party to validate them. It makes as much sense as asking someone to give you the key to their locker and then reject a key if it isn't made by one of the locksmiths that you trust and requiring them to just leave the locker open.
I saw the exploit demonstrated about a month ago (when it was still not yet public, but after Cisco had been told about it). It doesn't require physical access, but it does require you to be able to run something on the local network. (From slightly fuzzy memory:) The phones have some hard-coded settings which tell them about the correct server to use for getting the configuration data. They fetch this on every boot. Tripping a power circuit can cause the phones to reboot (I think they do every few days anyway, to get updates), and once you've done that then you've can use that phone to exploit the others. Getting root is simple, because the OS has a number of system calls that don't properly validate their arguments. Once you've done that, it's entirely a software bug, and it's in a system that is not designed for sysadmins to run code on, so your IDS probably won't catch it.
That said, in a sensible deployment, you should have the SIP phones on a separate VLAN and only allow them to send TFTP packets to the authorised boot server. In this configuration, the first step of the exploit won't work unless you previously pwn the boot server, the switch (and, let's face it, they probably run IOS, so it's not that hard...), or have physical access.
By the way, this is the same guy who previously discovered an exploit for a load of HP printers, allowing you to do things like have them email copies of any documents that are printed on them to some external site. He had quite a cute demo, which involved using a previously-pwned printer to hijack the phone network, so it's important to remember to have the phones and the printers on separate networks. And not to allow printers to connect to the outside world...
Open is a nonsense word when it comes to APIs. An API is just an interface, and in the USA it can't be copyrighted, so anyone can implement any API. It only really makes sense when talking about APIs like OpenGL or POSIX, which are maintained by a consortium and so can't be arbitrarily modified by a single vendor, but describing a single-vendor API as open is pure gibberish.
The thermometer is updated manually, because some donations come via bank transfers, some via cheques, some via PayPal and some via DonateNow and automating all of those is a bit tricky. Currently, Deb goes through all of the donations by hand and updates the donors list and the title. Over the last two days, she's been completely swamped with the number of donations. The amount isn't totally unprecedented, but the number of individual donations is even larger than a few years ago when the Foundation put out the call for individual donors because they were in danger of losing their non-profit status because too much of their funding came from large corporate donations.
Also, while I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, much of the work on FreeNAS (and PC-BSD) is funded by iX Systems, so if you use either of these projects and are in a position to put any business their way, it would possibly have a larger impact. iX is on the donors' page as a gold sponsor, but that doesn't tell the whole story. As well as making a sizeable donation to the Foundation directly, they have matched funding on a couple of Foundation-sponsored projects this year, so the total amount that they've given is considerably more (not to mention employing several people to work full-time on FreeBSD).
The original poster's point, which apparently escaped you, is that no one goes out of their way to OVERPAY their taxes
This is true, but it's less true to say that most people go out of their way to ensure that they don't overpay their taxes, and so the end result is that a lot do. I could probably reduce my tax bill by around 20-40% without a huge amount of effort, but I don't. On the other hand, I also don't get my final tax calculation and then add 50% to it. Part of the problem is that the cost, for me, of going to the effort of working out exactly what the minimum amount of tax is and how to pay it is far more than the value of the tax. For Schmidt, the cost of doing that calculation isn't vastly more, but the amount of money saved is.
I doubt it. Finding the loopholes is easier when you have more income. If I were willing to spend a day or two checking tax law, I could find some that apply to myself (I found some that probably do just skimming the notes, but I'd need to check more carefully before using them) and end up paying less tax. If I were willing to pay an accountant, I'd pay even less. The problem is, I'd be paying the accountant more than I'd be saving in tax. On the other hand, if I were paying ten times as much tax, then this would be much more attractive - the cost of the accountant would be lower than the same proportional saving and the absolute saving would be greater. This means that loopholes are more attractive to the people who pay more taxes in absolute terms, irrespective of their relative tax rates. If a loophole could reduce my tax to 0%, but took a week or two of accountant's time to implement, then it would be a net loss for me, but a huge win for Schmidt.
Millions of deployments, one of which is responsible for over 20% of the total Internet traffic in the USA, increasing numbers of developers, and a public foundation that gets a larger number and quantity of donations every year. From the Ohloh.net numbers, both the number of commits and the number of active committers have increased since last year (by 20% and 4% respectively). The number of corporate contributors is increasing, and several companies that were maintaining private forks are now working to integrate their changes upstream. Why, what does 'thriving' mean to you?
Ever heard of L4? Possibly not, but you probably have a lot more devices that run it than run Linux. Oh, and some of the ones that run Linux are likely to also run L4.
The difference is, it's much easier to opt out of the Apple ecosystem. When was the last time someone sent you an iWork document to collaborate on? When was the last time someone sent a Microsoft Office document? Apple may be more restrictive, but as long as that restriction only applies to people who actively opt in to their environment, it's much harder to care.
For those unfamiliar with UK politics, Nick Clegg is the member of a minority party that gained power as part of a coalition. A lot of people who voted for them are unhappy that, in joining the coalition, they've had to make some compromises and have only managed to achieve some of their objectives. These people would, presumably, much rather that they'd stayed out and achieved none of them, allowing smug LibDem voters to keep claiming that things aren't their fault.
Because corporate tax rates make it easier for the very wealthy to hide income. For example, Steve Jobs only drew a $1 salary from Apple, but also had the use of a corporate jet. I he used it to go anywhere for a holiday, then it counted as a taxable benefit, but it didn't for business use it did not. And business use included flying to another country for a half-hour meeting and then staying there for a week. If his family went along, then the value of the taxable benefit was the extra cost of having them onboard - almost nothing, given that the plane was flying there anyway. For the slightly less wealthy, it's easy to set up companies that do things like buy two houses, rent out one at market rate, pay off the mortgage with the interest and rent the other to the owner for a token sum.
The problem is that the 'transfers of wealth' are the same kinds of transfer as normal purchasing. When a company pays another company to build widgets for them, they transfer money. When they license a patent, they transfer money. When a company like Starbucks sets up a subsidiary that owns their trademark and pays that company to license it back, then it's the same sort of transfer: money being paid in exchange for a product or service. It's very hard to write a law that would block the shell-game money transfers without blocking real purchases between companies, and if you do it wrong then you end up penalising smaller companies.
As Kennedy said, it only takes one person willing to exchange his life for that of the President. You can make 99% of the population of the USA happy, and that still leaves you with 3 million dissatisfied people, one of whom may be a potential assassin.
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time?
Actually, the FreeBSD Foundation has never missed a funding target and, given late donations in previous years and unannounced pledges by a few companies looks like it should meet it this year too (which is nice, as it's 25% higher than the goal for last year).
Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
No. The project lasted for a long time without the Foundation and could continue to do so. The Foundation does a number of useful things for the project, however. They have a lawyer, who can field tedious questions. They sponsor travel for unfunded developers to BSD conferences (and sometimes sponsor the conferences). Perhaps most importantly, they also fund work that everyone wants done but no one wants to do. For example, they funded the Intel GPU / GEM / KMS work, which is tedious work that no one wants to do, not in the commercial interests of any big FreeBSD users, but very useful for a lot of end users.
They also do an increasing amount of matched-funding work, where a commercial user pays for half of the work and the Foundation matches it. In a few cases, they also provide a matchmaking service, where two or more companies can each part-fund the work, but between them completely fund it. This is arguably the most useful thing that they do, because it's the core idea behind open source: that it's cheaper to cooperate than to work independently.
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C++ is crap, but when the alternatives are a tasteful subset of C++ and a half-arsed reimplementation of a horrible subset of C++ in C macros, I'd rather take C++ and bitch about it than suffer in C. There are very few places where C++ is the right tool for the job, but C is often not the right tool for these either.
The iPhone UI made a lot of mistakes too, they were just different mistakes. The main differences were that it had a capacitive touchscreen (they'd only just become cheap enough to put in smartphones) and a sufficiently powerful CPU and GPU to do interesting things with it. Other phones released at the same time were of similar quality (typically, better in some regards, worse in others). The older mobile phone companies like Nokia had problems because they had large software stacks designed for use in a world where a high-end device had a 33MHz CPU and 4MB of RAM, but they all had some sort of flagship phone with similar capabilities to the iPhone. Their main mistake was thinking of them as incremental improvements, rather than a change in the market. Smartphones went quite quickly from being a tiny niche to a large segment of the market (due to dropping hardware costs, not software changes) and Apple positioned itself very well to take advantage of this shift.
The system has always been equally broken before, but it's a select few companies (Apple, Microsoft, Oracle) which have found it more profitable to compete in the market place. You don't see Samsung or HTC or Google trying to crush competition with lawsuits in the way that the above-named companies do.
No, most big companies maintained patent pools to make it easy to kill off newcomers. Big tech companies don't worry much about other big tech companies that they're used to competing with. Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola, for example, didn't worry much about each other. They were all producing similar classes of products, and each generation their market share would slide up and down a bit, but it stayed relatively constant. They worry about newcomers that disrupt the market. The same thing happened in the workstation market. SGI was doing very well selling 3D workstations. Their big competitors were companies like IBM and Sun, but they knew how to differentiate themselves in the market from these guys and ensure that they had enough income to keep going. Then came nVidia, and suddenly 3D workstations were built from commodity parts: their market no longer existed.
This is why you don't see too many big patent lawsuits. The big players all have cross-licensing agreements within established markets and just use their combined might to squeeze out smaller players. If you want to join in, then they'll license you their patents, for either a share of the company or a share of the profits. If you do well, then they'll get a load of money, and if it looks like you'll do really well then they'll just buy you. The thing that gives management at these companies nightmares is the idea that they won't notice a company with a disruptive technology until it's grown so big that it can't be intimidated by these tactics.
I think both could be accommodated in law, however I'm not sure that you need the wilful version. If a company is demanding money for a patent that they knew at time of filing (or subsequently) had prior art that made it invalid, then they have committed fraud. No need for new laws, just prosecute them for this. If it's invalidated on the grounds of being obvious, then that's a bit more tricky, because this is quite a subjective judgement and it's hard to prove malice.
As far as I can tell, no Android browser has the kind of fine-grained control over cookies that has been standard on desktop browsers for 5-10 years. I sort-of understand if the WebKit installed on Android doesn't have this kind of control that third-party WebKit browsers might not add them (although Chrome uses a different - slower - version of WebKit, so doesn't have this excuse), but why do Opera and FireFox not support sensible cookie management?
Okay, how do I, on an Android device (I'll make this easy, and you can use your choice of browser):
If it's as easy as typing a simple search query, I expect that your reply will be swift and detailed.
Maybe look for a job abroad too then. A degree from The Open University is at least as well regarded as one from a brick-and-mortar institution in the UK: the standard is similar and it indicates that you can be self-driven as well.
Nonsense. You sound like you are just repeating an argument that you heard, without understanding it. There are two problems: encryption and key distribution. The signing of the certificate is a solution to the key-signing problem, allowing the key to be transmitted over an untrusted medium and then validated at the far end. This is important if you are connecting to a remote server for the first time. In this case, we have two trusted endpoints attempting to connect. The key can easily be transferred between them out of band (e.g. upload the public key to gmail, or even just present the key fingerprint and ask the user to validate it).
This doesn't help fight spam, and it's retarded from a security perspective. It doesn't help fight spam, because the user must explicitly configure the POP3 server for Google to pull mail from and they will get the spam that is on that POP3 server irrespective of the security of the connection. It is retarded from a security perspective because you have two communication endpoints that are accessible by the end user and so, rather than asking the user to validate the security credentials, they require the end user to nominate (and pay) a third party to validate them. It makes as much sense as asking someone to give you the key to their locker and then reject a key if it isn't made by one of the locksmiths that you trust and requiring them to just leave the locker open.
I saw the exploit demonstrated about a month ago (when it was still not yet public, but after Cisco had been told about it). It doesn't require physical access, but it does require you to be able to run something on the local network. (From slightly fuzzy memory:) The phones have some hard-coded settings which tell them about the correct server to use for getting the configuration data. They fetch this on every boot. Tripping a power circuit can cause the phones to reboot (I think they do every few days anyway, to get updates), and once you've done that then you've can use that phone to exploit the others. Getting root is simple, because the OS has a number of system calls that don't properly validate their arguments. Once you've done that, it's entirely a software bug, and it's in a system that is not designed for sysadmins to run code on, so your IDS probably won't catch it.
That said, in a sensible deployment, you should have the SIP phones on a separate VLAN and only allow them to send TFTP packets to the authorised boot server. In this configuration, the first step of the exploit won't work unless you previously pwn the boot server, the switch (and, let's face it, they probably run IOS, so it's not that hard...), or have physical access.
By the way, this is the same guy who previously discovered an exploit for a load of HP printers, allowing you to do things like have them email copies of any documents that are printed on them to some external site. He had quite a cute demo, which involved using a previously-pwned printer to hijack the phone network, so it's important to remember to have the phones and the printers on separate networks. And not to allow printers to connect to the outside world...
If the API is truly "open"
Open is a nonsense word when it comes to APIs. An API is just an interface, and in the USA it can't be copyrighted, so anyone can implement any API. It only really makes sense when talking about APIs like OpenGL or POSIX, which are maintained by a consortium and so can't be arbitrarily modified by a single vendor, but describing a single-vendor API as open is pure gibberish.
The thermometer is updated manually, because some donations come via bank transfers, some via cheques, some via PayPal and some via DonateNow and automating all of those is a bit tricky. Currently, Deb goes through all of the donations by hand and updates the donors list and the title. Over the last two days, she's been completely swamped with the number of donations. The amount isn't totally unprecedented, but the number of individual donations is even larger than a few years ago when the Foundation put out the call for individual donors because they were in danger of losing their non-profit status because too much of their funding came from large corporate donations.
Also, while I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, much of the work on FreeNAS (and PC-BSD) is funded by iX Systems, so if you use either of these projects and are in a position to put any business their way, it would possibly have a larger impact. iX is on the donors' page as a gold sponsor, but that doesn't tell the whole story. As well as making a sizeable donation to the Foundation directly, they have matched funding on a couple of Foundation-sponsored projects this year, so the total amount that they've given is considerably more (not to mention employing several people to work full-time on FreeBSD).
How on earth does NORAD not have its own satellite imagery that they could use?
The original poster's point, which apparently escaped you, is that no one goes out of their way to OVERPAY their taxes
This is true, but it's less true to say that most people go out of their way to ensure that they don't overpay their taxes, and so the end result is that a lot do. I could probably reduce my tax bill by around 20-40% without a huge amount of effort, but I don't. On the other hand, I also don't get my final tax calculation and then add 50% to it. Part of the problem is that the cost, for me, of going to the effort of working out exactly what the minimum amount of tax is and how to pay it is far more than the value of the tax. For Schmidt, the cost of doing that calculation isn't vastly more, but the amount of money saved is.
I doubt it. Finding the loopholes is easier when you have more income. If I were willing to spend a day or two checking tax law, I could find some that apply to myself (I found some that probably do just skimming the notes, but I'd need to check more carefully before using them) and end up paying less tax. If I were willing to pay an accountant, I'd pay even less. The problem is, I'd be paying the accountant more than I'd be saving in tax. On the other hand, if I were paying ten times as much tax, then this would be much more attractive - the cost of the accountant would be lower than the same proportional saving and the absolute saving would be greater. This means that loopholes are more attractive to the people who pay more taxes in absolute terms, irrespective of their relative tax rates. If a loophole could reduce my tax to 0%, but took a week or two of accountant's time to implement, then it would be a net loss for me, but a huge win for Schmidt.
Millions of deployments, one of which is responsible for over 20% of the total Internet traffic in the USA, increasing numbers of developers, and a public foundation that gets a larger number and quantity of donations every year. From the Ohloh.net numbers, both the number of commits and the number of active committers have increased since last year (by 20% and 4% respectively). The number of corporate contributors is increasing, and several companies that were maintaining private forks are now working to integrate their changes upstream. Why, what does 'thriving' mean to you?
Ever heard of L4? Possibly not, but you probably have a lot more devices that run it than run Linux. Oh, and some of the ones that run Linux are likely to also run L4.
Why tolerate it? It's easy to opt out, so just do so.
No, that's (US) constitutionally protected free speech, which is a subset of free speech.
The difference is, it's much easier to opt out of the Apple ecosystem. When was the last time someone sent you an iWork document to collaborate on? When was the last time someone sent a Microsoft Office document? Apple may be more restrictive, but as long as that restriction only applies to people who actively opt in to their environment, it's much harder to care.
For those unfamiliar with UK politics, Nick Clegg is the member of a minority party that gained power as part of a coalition. A lot of people who voted for them are unhappy that, in joining the coalition, they've had to make some compromises and have only managed to achieve some of their objectives. These people would, presumably, much rather that they'd stayed out and achieved none of them, allowing smug LibDem voters to keep claiming that things aren't their fault.
Because corporate tax rates make it easier for the very wealthy to hide income. For example, Steve Jobs only drew a $1 salary from Apple, but also had the use of a corporate jet. I he used it to go anywhere for a holiday, then it counted as a taxable benefit, but it didn't for business use it did not. And business use included flying to another country for a half-hour meeting and then staying there for a week. If his family went along, then the value of the taxable benefit was the extra cost of having them onboard - almost nothing, given that the plane was flying there anyway. For the slightly less wealthy, it's easy to set up companies that do things like buy two houses, rent out one at market rate, pay off the mortgage with the interest and rent the other to the owner for a token sum.
The problem is that the 'transfers of wealth' are the same kinds of transfer as normal purchasing. When a company pays another company to build widgets for them, they transfer money. When they license a patent, they transfer money. When a company like Starbucks sets up a subsidiary that owns their trademark and pays that company to license it back, then it's the same sort of transfer: money being paid in exchange for a product or service. It's very hard to write a law that would block the shell-game money transfers without blocking real purchases between companies, and if you do it wrong then you end up penalising smaller companies.
As Kennedy said, it only takes one person willing to exchange his life for that of the President. You can make 99% of the population of the USA happy, and that still leaves you with 3 million dissatisfied people, one of whom may be a potential assassin.
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time?
Actually, the FreeBSD Foundation has never missed a funding target and, given late donations in previous years and unannounced pledges by a few companies looks like it should meet it this year too (which is nice, as it's 25% higher than the goal for last year).
Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
No. The project lasted for a long time without the Foundation and could continue to do so. The Foundation does a number of useful things for the project, however. They have a lawyer, who can field tedious questions. They sponsor travel for unfunded developers to BSD conferences (and sometimes sponsor the conferences). Perhaps most importantly, they also fund work that everyone wants done but no one wants to do. For example, they funded the Intel GPU / GEM / KMS work, which is tedious work that no one wants to do, not in the commercial interests of any big FreeBSD users, but very useful for a lot of end users.
They also do an increasing amount of matched-funding work, where a commercial user pays for half of the work and the Foundation matches it. In a few cases, they also provide a matchmaking service, where two or more companies can each part-fund the work, but between them completely fund it. This is arguably the most useful thing that they do, because it's the core idea behind open source: that it's cheaper to cooperate than to work independently.