Most of the affected digital cameras and USB memory devices were manufactured before the court decision, and in good faith that no valid patent was being infringed. In fact, the patent probably is not legally valid in most of the countries where these devices were made. And many have been exported to other jurisdictions where the FAT patent is not legally valid.
IMHO, Microsoft will be lucky to break even on this deal over the remainder of the lifetime of the patent. It is still working out ever so slightly cheaper to use an alternative file system and include a driver CD, than to pay the royalties.
If China, India, and Latin America bring in software patents, then Europe will probably give in at a subsequent world trade agreement.
I hardly think India, China or Latin America are in any danger of introducing software patents. Peru and Chile were about this far away from outlawing closed-source software altogether. Governments in countries with a high level of poverty are not going to do anything that benefits the rich at the expense of the poor -- they will be deposed quicker than you can spell AK-47.
Software patents are being granted, and are being used as the basis of litigation threats that the recipients can't afford to contest, but at least the courts are on our side, so far.
It's a statutory defence to patent infringement that the supposedly-infringed patent was improperly granted in the first place, and that won't take much effort to prove in court. The law is clear: abstract mathematics is not patentable.
Also, new laws generally can't be applied to events that took place before the law was made. So even assuming a government has granted unenforcible software patents, those patents will instantly become null and void the day that the scope of the law is widened to allow software patents, and the holders will have to re-apply for their patents. Otherwise that would constitute retroactive application of a new law {because if a new law says software patents are enforcible as of today then they must have been unenforcible yesterday}, and that would be unconstitutional in nearly every country. Meanwhile, any work which had "infringed" an improperly-granted patent would now constitute prior art which could be used to block the "proper" application.
In Europe and in Britain, the law is quite clear: software patents are null and void. As long as development work is carried out in a software-patent-free environment, there should be no patent problems.
I seem to recall it being fair use to make a version of something covered by a patent as long as it is for your own use. So it might well be OK just to host the download servers outside the USA.
Of course the best strategy in the long term will be to elect representatives who oppose software patents, and get your stupid law changed.
They already can. You just need to tweak the source code a bit but they will run. Of course you could always get something like Cygwin, but why try to teach a cat to bark? Just install Linux {maybe on a dual boot} and have done with it.
So some companies can produce functionally-similar goods to famous brand names for less money. Big surprise. They haven't got the overheads like private yachts for fatcat directors and shareholders. If government propaganda is to be believed they do have alternative overheads like bombs and stuff. Maybe blowing up buildings is cheaper than blowing up the tyres of a Ferrari?
Anyway, it's almost entirely the fault of the manufacturers of the "genuine article". If people are counterfeiting your products and still managing to make a profit selling them cheaper than you, then you obviously are overpricing them in the first place.
Debian lets you use your digital camera {or any USB mass storage device for that matter} for storing drivers that are not found on the CD. No need for a floppy drive.
How about doing a review from the perspective of someone who has never used a computer before - then lets see which one is easier to use (hint: the answer will be Windows XP by a massive margin)
This was in the alternator, not the reactor. An alternator is basically a simple electromagnet spinning at 3000rpm {in civilised countries} inside a coil of many turns of thick copper wire. Two brush contacts are required to supply DC to the electromagnet. The excitation current initially has to come from an external power source but once the machine is up and running, it is had from the output {this is no perpetual motion machine, most of the input work comes from whatever is turning the spindle, and exciting the magnet needs very little power}.
The fact that the engine was turned by a nuclear reactor really is irrelevant and only adds "scare value" to the story. The worst that could happen would be for the spindle coupling to shear off safely as it was designed to do, and the engine would run free until the speed limiter cut in as it was designed to do.
No matter what you propose, there will be some idiot who doesn't understand it protesting against it. Biomass should be obvious, since most fuel-burning furnaces can use it with minimal modification. Now, assuming decent logistics, Britain alone could feed the entire world on a vegan diet {unverified claim of some mortality-denialist vegan group}. Yet the minute you mention biomass, these same people complain that land should be used for growing food for people, not fuel for vehicles! Not that the two should even be mutually exclusive, since there is calorific value in the parts of plants that are not suited to the human digestive system {clue for the vegetarians and vegans: rapid transit} so we could still burn sweetcorn cobs, pea pods, stalks, leaves, and all manner of husks, hulls and bits people leave on the sides of their plates. But what do you expect from the same people that complain when you cut down a tree to make window frames, then complain again when you try to save trees by making window frames from uPVC? {Clue: non-biodegradability is a positive advantage for a building material; the infrastructure for collection and recycling is already mostly in place since most window installation and replacement work is done by specialist contractors; uPVC really is only dangerous when burned on a bonfire.} Of course waste products alone won't provide all our energy needs -- that's pretty much a consequence of the First Law. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Energy conservation is not a perfect solution, either: there is a fundamental limit as to how much you can save. Also, it is presently being mismanaged so as to penalise people taking the crucial first step, whilst rewarding people further along the path towards diminishing returns. Why are filament light bulbs -- surely a misnomer, "heat bulb" would be more accurate -- not heavily taxed, to make them cost about six times the price of a compact fluorescent bulb? There are genuine applications for filament bulbs {illuminating revolving machinery for one} but by and large they tend to be chosen for their low initial cost {and out of sheer ignorance}. Why is not an effort underway to retro-fit every single gas boiler and multipoint which currently uses a pilot burner, with electronic ignition, right now? {The combination of gas valve and full sequence controller used in the Glow Worm SpaceSaver and Ultimate series boilers could be retro-fitted to just about any existing, standing-pilot gas boiler with a mains-operated gas valve; the addition of a small transformer and/or an AC relay would be required in the case of a boiler with a low-voltage gas valve. Either way around, this modification would pay for itself within the first year. A different gas valve probably would be required for combis, but this is by no means insurmountable. As an aside, electronic ignition has been cheaper than pilot ignition ever since it was invented: the FSC provides flame failure detection, audible warning of flame failure condition and even automatic re-ignition when conditions are restored, all without the need for a thermocouple and specially-designed millivolt-operated solenoid coil. It even saves two apertures: there is no priming knob and no piezo.}
If the "waste" product is still radioactive, does that not rather imply that it still has calorific value? Maybe we should work on some process for liberating the rest of this energy {which sounds like it probably would be a serious amount}. Then we would end up with strictly non-radioactive waste, and more MJ per kg of fuel.
"What happened" was that throughout the 1970s, in the UK, trade union top brass -- everyone from shop stewards upward -- consistently and seriously abused their power, until ordinary employees ended up working for the Union and not the Company. All this came to a head with the Miners' Strike of 1984, and Thatcher took extreme measures to curb the power of trade unions.
Every one of the UK's coal mines eventually closed down, and every one of the UK's coal miners went on the dole. Coal was imported from abroad, and gas boilers were {secretly} subsidised to reduce the demand for coal as a heating fuel for buildings. Even some power stations were converted from coal to gas.
The coal mines can't even be re-opened as private concerns, because modern health and safety legislation -- and the hordes of ambulance-following lawyers with their "Blame and Claim" mantra -- effectively makes coal mining in the UK next to illegal. To do it "by the book" would make burning pound notes more cost-effective than buying coal.
In Europe {where there is an eclectic mix of VHF and UHF, PAL and SECAM colour schemes, and different audio modulation schemes [AM and FM analogue and NICAM digital] and subcarriers; at least they all use 25 pictures per second of 625 lines, or 50x312.5 depending how you look at it} and Britain {where it's always UHF, PAL and NICAM audio on 6.552MHz}, all TV sets {except pocket portables} have at least one 21-pin SCART connector, also found on satellite receivers, VCRs and DVD players.
A "fully-wired" SCART socket {on most sets, the socket labelled AV1 is usually fully-wired} provides for RGB+sync+audio, a "part-wired" socket {AV2 and the rest are usually part-wired} provides for composite video and audio {sometimes S-VHS and audio though S-VHS over SCART is not an official standard}. Even better, there is a transparent compatibility mode: the same pin is used for composite video or just sync signal. It always carries a full picture signal, but if RGB is available {indicated by +5V on pin 16}, picture information is taken from the RGB inputs instead. +12V on pin 8 indicates a 4x3 narrowscreen picture, +5V on pin 8 indicates a 16x9 widescreen picture, open circuit on pin 8 indicates to use the picture from the internal receiver {it's common to have to disconnect pin 8 of the SCART lead with satellite receivers and DVD players, and select the relevant input manually; cheap kit hard-wires pin 8 high at all times, and most sets won't allow you to select an input manually if pin 8 of AV1 is energised}. Inputs and outputs are always presented on the same pins and the cable is always wired as crossover.
The net result is that anything with a SCART socket should plug into anything else with a SCART socket and just work. And it does.
The players will output copy-protected HD content through the HDMI interface in the native format of the HD DVD disc content of either 720p or 1080i.
And the electronics of the TV set will strip out the copy-protection, leaving clean RGB signals available on the CRT's grid drives and the timing information recoverable from the scan coils.
Not every web server processes images with imagemagick or gd -- and you don't need libpng just to serve them up statically. Just generating images on the fly, or even composing based on known good images kept on the server, would be safe anyway -- the exploit as I have seen it described required a deliberately malformed image as input. You would have to have a web application capable of loading arbitrary images via HTTP and doing some operation on them {perhaps overlaying a caption or copyright message, or drawing on comedy genitals}, in order to be vulnerable. In which case, taking it offline for an hour or so whilst patching and recompiling libpng might be a small price to pay {I expect Windows/IE users probably are used to web sites not displaying properly anyway; when I used Windows, I never really knew what was up with it, but rebooting usually fixed it so I never worried too much}.
Did you read throught the source for any of the open source software you installed ?
Some of it. Not all of it, but probably about my fair share. And I feel much more inclined to trust my distro's packaging team {who are accountable to a large community of experienced hackers, and do read all the source code of everything they compile}, than to trust some pedlar of "free" closed binaries {if they won't show me the source code, then what are they hiding from me?}.
Given fewer people use linux and of those users even less will have enough knowledge, time and expertise to bug hunt in any meaningful way is having the source open that much of an advantage?
Yes it is. There are times when access to the source code is essential. The rarity of such occasions does not diminish the usefulness of the source code if and when they arise: you have a sample size of one if the situation does arise, or nil if it doesn't, and either way that is way too few data points to be statistically significant.
I think the real advantage is the comunity around the OSS movement as I was having a problem with firewire under linux and was able to get in contact with one of the authors of the drivers who helped fix the problem.
You seem to be forgetting that this comunity [sic] contains many people who do read source code.
Well, that isn't as far-fetched a scenario as you make out.
If anti-virus software is so good, then why is it all closed-source?
Closed-source software companies can't rely on their product wearing out with use, like a mechanical device. They depend on other measures to simulate built-in obsolescence; such as regular file-format changes forcing users to upgrade to the same version as what their friends have got {or forgo exchangeability of documents, which frequently is not an option}. But anti-virus software can be rendered obsolete, just by writing a new virus.
The anti-virus vendors are under obligation to make money for their shareholders. If they can make money overall by arranging the release of a new virus, and the product of (fine if caught * probability of detection) is small enough, then it's economically viable for them to do so. Plus, with each new alert, they will sell anti-virus protection to new customers.
It doesn't even matter if the virus does not actually do a lot of damage -- it's enough for the warning to generate hysteria in an ignorant population. The virus need not even exist in real life -- does anyone remember sulfnbk.exe or jdbgmgr.exe? And I'm sure there was another hoax that asked you to remove a file that actually did something important {though, the long-filenames-on-FAT hack arguably was fairly critical}.
The real issue is that Windows, in its default configuration, actively listens out for things that might damage it. In any other field of endeavour beside closed-source software, that sort of behaviour would render a product unfit for its intended purpose.
Absolutely. What you need to consider is the product of the probability that a given vulnerability will be exploited in your particular situation, times its severity. If you run a LAN on the end of an ADSL connection, everything downstream of the router is already fairly safe from remote exploits {since without a separate, successful attack on the router, it can't receive any inbound packet it didn't ask for}. So this reduces the "worry factor" -- even of an "execute arbitrary code as root" vulnerability -- substantially. And since you don't usually run much software on the router, it's much less vulnerable.
While I don't doubt that many desktop and laptop Linux / unix systems may well be running libpng, these systems most probably will be on the wrong side of a NAT box for anyone to get at them. Servers most probably won't be running X at all -- and therefore will have no need of libpng.
On a unix system, if you find something, anything, with serious enough flaws, often you can just rm it or chmod -x it until a new version is available. It'll break some things, for sure; but you have to weigh up whether the ability to display PNG images is worth more than the inability for third parties to run arbitrary code on your box {and the answer to that most probably depends on whether the system is a desktop or server}.
Anyway, the figures hardly surprise me. Everyone has access to the source code for Linux and BSD, so there are more people in a position to spot problems there {and good guys by definition outnumber bad guys}; and nobody has anything to lose from the existence of a vulnerability as long as it gets patched. But only a select few have access to the source code for Windows, and Microsoft have their own reasons for not wanting vulnerabilities to be disclosed to the public. Also, unix users seem generally to be more interested in what goes on beneath the bonnet -- and therefore more likely to apply patches in a timely fashion.
I read that US TV sets don't usually have SCART sockets {which have been required in Europe since the 1980s and Britain since the 1990s}. Is this still the case?
At least in the UK/EU, one can be confident in the ability to attach other devices to an analogue TV set and go straight to the tube, bypassing the RF tuner and possibly even the colour-decoding matrix {necessary where there is a weirdy mix of VHF and UHF, PAL and SECAM colour schemes, and different audio modulation schemes [AM and FM analogue and NICAM digital] and subcarriers; at least they all use 25 pictures per second of 625 lines, or 50x312.5 depending how you look at it}. A "fully-wired" SCART socket provides for RGB+sync+audio, a "part-wired" socket provides for composite video and audio {sometimes S-VHS and audio} and it's done using a transparent compatibility mode {same pin used for composite video or just sync signal, carries a full picture signal but if RGB is available, picture information is taken from RGB inputs instead}.
The net result is that anything with a SCART socket should plug into anything else with a SCART socket and just work. And it does. Honestly, if you haven't got them, you need to ask why not.
Has the CEO of nVidia a daughter? Perhaps if a lock of her hair were to arrive in the post, two days after she failed to arrive home from school, he might be persuaded to release the source code.
Um. Because LILO doesn't need keyboard input at all if you only want to boot the default Linux kernel?
That was a complete guess. If LILO is accepting keystrokes and GRUB isn't, then that would point to some weirdness going on somewhere {maybe lilo has a built-in keyboard driver a.o.t. GRUB's built in ext2 filesystem support}. I'm surprised by something in Ubuntu not working though -- that's usually a pretty good distro choice for modern hardware.
Why, though, would you want to install a different distribution if you're already happy with Slackware? I guess that's another question.
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Most of the affected digital cameras and USB memory devices were manufactured before the court decision, and in good faith that no valid patent was being infringed. In fact, the patent probably is not legally valid in most of the countries where these devices were made. And many have been exported to other jurisdictions where the FAT patent is not legally valid.
IMHO, Microsoft will be lucky to break even on this deal over the remainder of the lifetime of the patent. It is still working out ever so slightly cheaper to use an alternative file system and include a driver CD, than to pay the royalties.
Also, new laws generally can't be applied to events that took place before the law was made. So even assuming a government has granted unenforcible software patents, those patents will instantly become null and void the day that the scope of the law is widened to allow software patents, and the holders will have to re-apply for their patents. Otherwise that would constitute retroactive application of a new law {because if a new law says software patents are enforcible as of today then they must have been unenforcible yesterday}, and that would be unconstitutional in nearly every country. Meanwhile, any work which had "infringed" an improperly-granted patent would now constitute prior art which could be used to block the "proper" application.
In Europe and in Britain, the law is quite clear: software patents are null and void. As long as development work is carried out in a software-patent-free environment, there should be no patent problems.
I seem to recall it being fair use to make a version of something covered by a patent as long as it is for your own use. So it might well be OK just to host the download servers outside the USA.
Of course the best strategy in the long term will be to elect representatives who oppose software patents, and get your stupid law changed.
They already can. You just need to tweak the source code a bit but they will run. Of course you could always get something like Cygwin, but why try to teach a cat to bark? Just install Linux {maybe on a dual boot} and have done with it.
..... why wasn't the Open Source clone of the "C#" programming language called "Db" ?
So some companies can produce functionally-similar goods to famous brand names for less money. Big surprise. They haven't got the overheads like private yachts for fatcat directors and shareholders. If government propaganda is to be believed they do have alternative overheads like bombs and stuff. Maybe blowing up buildings is cheaper than blowing up the tyres of a Ferrari?
Anyway, it's almost entirely the fault of the manufacturers of the "genuine article". If people are counterfeiting your products and still managing to make a profit selling them cheaper than you, then you obviously are overpricing them in the first place.
Debian lets you use your digital camera {or any USB mass storage device for that matter} for storing drivers that are not found on the CD. No need for a floppy drive.
This was in the alternator, not the reactor. An alternator is basically a simple electromagnet spinning at 3000rpm {in civilised countries} inside a coil of many turns of thick copper wire. Two brush contacts are required to supply DC to the electromagnet. The excitation current initially has to come from an external power source but once the machine is up and running, it is had from the output {this is no perpetual motion machine, most of the input work comes from whatever is turning the spindle, and exciting the magnet needs very little power}.
The fact that the engine was turned by a nuclear reactor really is irrelevant and only adds "scare value" to the story. The worst that could happen would be for the spindle coupling to shear off safely as it was designed to do, and the engine would run free until the speed limiter cut in as it was designed to do.
They've probably heard of Finland's most famous export, though!
No matter what you propose, there will be some idiot who doesn't understand it protesting against it. Biomass should be obvious, since most fuel-burning furnaces can use it with minimal modification. Now, assuming decent logistics, Britain alone could feed the entire world on a vegan diet {unverified claim of some mortality-denialist vegan group}. Yet the minute you mention biomass, these same people complain that land should be used for growing food for people, not fuel for vehicles! Not that the two should even be mutually exclusive, since there is calorific value in the parts of plants that are not suited to the human digestive system {clue for the vegetarians and vegans: rapid transit} so we could still burn sweetcorn cobs, pea pods, stalks, leaves, and all manner of husks, hulls and bits people leave on the sides of their plates. But what do you expect from the same people that complain when you cut down a tree to make window frames, then complain again when you try to save trees by making window frames from uPVC? {Clue: non-biodegradability is a positive advantage for a building material; the infrastructure for collection and recycling is already mostly in place since most window installation and replacement work is done by specialist contractors; uPVC really is only dangerous when burned on a bonfire.} Of course waste products alone won't provide all our energy needs -- that's pretty much a consequence of the First Law. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Energy conservation is not a perfect solution, either: there is a fundamental limit as to how much you can save. Also, it is presently being mismanaged so as to penalise people taking the crucial first step, whilst rewarding people further along the path towards diminishing returns. Why are filament light bulbs -- surely a misnomer, "heat bulb" would be more accurate -- not heavily taxed, to make them cost about six times the price of a compact fluorescent bulb? There are genuine applications for filament bulbs {illuminating revolving machinery for one} but by and large they tend to be chosen for their low initial cost {and out of sheer ignorance}. Why is not an effort underway to retro-fit every single gas boiler and multipoint which currently uses a pilot burner, with electronic ignition, right now? {The combination of gas valve and full sequence controller used in the Glow Worm SpaceSaver and Ultimate series boilers could be retro-fitted to just about any existing, standing-pilot gas boiler with a mains-operated gas valve; the addition of a small transformer and/or an AC relay would be required in the case of a boiler with a low-voltage gas valve. Either way around, this modification would pay for itself within the first year. A different gas valve probably would be required for combis, but this is by no means insurmountable. As an aside, electronic ignition has been cheaper than pilot ignition ever since it was invented: the FSC provides flame failure detection, audible warning of flame failure condition and even automatic re-ignition when conditions are restored, all without the need for a thermocouple and specially-designed millivolt-operated solenoid coil. It even saves two apertures: there is no priming knob and no piezo.}
If the "waste" product is still radioactive, does that not rather imply that it still has calorific value? Maybe we should work on some process for liberating the rest of this energy {which sounds like it probably would be a serious amount}. Then we would end up with strictly non-radioactive waste, and more MJ per kg of fuel.
"What happened" was that throughout the 1970s, in the UK, trade union top brass -- everyone from shop stewards upward -- consistently and seriously abused their power, until ordinary employees ended up working for the Union and not the Company. All this came to a head with the Miners' Strike of 1984, and Thatcher took extreme measures to curb the power of trade unions.
Every one of the UK's coal mines eventually closed down, and every one of the UK's coal miners went on the dole. Coal was imported from abroad, and gas boilers were {secretly} subsidised to reduce the demand for coal as a heating fuel for buildings. Even some power stations were converted from coal to gas.
The coal mines can't even be re-opened as private concerns, because modern health and safety legislation -- and the hordes of ambulance-following lawyers with their "Blame and Claim" mantra -- effectively makes coal mining in the UK next to illegal. To do it "by the book" would make burning pound notes more cost-effective than buying coal.
Begging a question is bringing up a question!
In Europe {where there is an eclectic mix of VHF and UHF, PAL and SECAM colour schemes, and different audio modulation schemes [AM and FM analogue and NICAM digital] and subcarriers; at least they all use 25 pictures per second of 625 lines, or 50x312.5 depending how you look at it} and Britain {where it's always UHF, PAL and NICAM audio on 6.552MHz}, all TV sets {except pocket portables} have at least one 21-pin SCART connector, also found on satellite receivers, VCRs and DVD players.
A "fully-wired" SCART socket {on most sets, the socket labelled AV1 is usually fully-wired} provides for RGB+sync+audio, a "part-wired" socket {AV2 and the rest are usually part-wired} provides for composite video and audio {sometimes S-VHS and audio though S-VHS over SCART is not an official standard}. Even better, there is a transparent compatibility mode: the same pin is used for composite video or just sync signal. It always carries a full picture signal, but if RGB is available {indicated by +5V on pin 16}, picture information is taken from the RGB inputs instead. +12V on pin 8 indicates a 4x3 narrowscreen picture, +5V on pin 8 indicates a 16x9 widescreen picture, open circuit on pin 8 indicates to use the picture from the internal receiver {it's common to have to disconnect pin 8 of the SCART lead with satellite receivers and DVD players, and select the relevant input manually; cheap kit hard-wires pin 8 high at all times, and most sets won't allow you to select an input manually if pin 8 of AV1 is energised}. Inputs and outputs are always presented on the same pins and the cable is always wired as crossover. The net result is that anything with a SCART socket should plug into anything else with a SCART socket and just work. And it does.
Well, that isn't as far-fetched a scenario as you make out.
If anti-virus software is so good, then why is it all closed-source?
Closed-source software companies can't rely on their product wearing out with use, like a mechanical device. They depend on other measures to simulate built-in obsolescence; such as regular file-format changes forcing users to upgrade to the same version as what their friends have got {or forgo exchangeability of documents, which frequently is not an option}. But anti-virus software can be rendered obsolete, just by writing a new virus.
The anti-virus vendors are under obligation to make money for their shareholders. If they can make money overall by arranging the release of a new virus, and the product of (fine if caught * probability of detection) is small enough, then it's economically viable for them to do so. Plus, with each new alert, they will sell anti-virus protection to new customers.
It doesn't even matter if the virus does not actually do a lot of damage -- it's enough for the warning to generate hysteria in an ignorant population. The virus need not even exist in real life -- does anyone remember sulfnbk.exe or jdbgmgr.exe? And I'm sure there was another hoax that asked you to remove a file that actually did something important {though, the long-filenames-on-FAT hack arguably was fairly critical}.
The real issue is that Windows, in its default configuration, actively listens out for things that might damage it. In any other field of endeavour beside closed-source software, that sort of behaviour would render a product unfit for its intended purpose.
Absolutely. What you need to consider is the product of the probability that a given vulnerability will be exploited in your particular situation, times its severity. If you run a LAN on the end of an ADSL connection, everything downstream of the router is already fairly safe from remote exploits {since without a separate, successful attack on the router, it can't receive any inbound packet it didn't ask for}. So this reduces the "worry factor" -- even of an "execute arbitrary code as root" vulnerability -- substantially. And since you don't usually run much software on the router, it's much less vulnerable.
While I don't doubt that many desktop and laptop Linux / unix systems may well be running libpng, these systems most probably will be on the wrong side of a NAT box for anyone to get at them. Servers most probably won't be running X at all -- and therefore will have no need of libpng.
On a unix system, if you find something, anything, with serious enough flaws, often you can just rm it or chmod -x it until a new version is available. It'll break some things, for sure; but you have to weigh up whether the ability to display PNG images is worth more than the inability for third parties to run arbitrary code on your box {and the answer to that most probably depends on whether the system is a desktop or server}.
Anyway, the figures hardly surprise me. Everyone has access to the source code for Linux and BSD, so there are more people in a position to spot problems there {and good guys by definition outnumber bad guys}; and nobody has anything to lose from the existence of a vulnerability as long as it gets patched. But only a select few have access to the source code for Windows, and Microsoft have their own reasons for not wanting vulnerabilities to be disclosed to the public. Also, unix users seem generally to be more interested in what goes on beneath the bonnet -- and therefore more likely to apply patches in a timely fashion.
I read that US TV sets don't usually have SCART sockets {which have been required in Europe since the 1980s and Britain since the 1990s}. Is this still the case?
At least in the UK/EU, one can be confident in the ability to attach other devices to an analogue TV set and go straight to the tube, bypassing the RF tuner and possibly even the colour-decoding matrix {necessary where there is a weirdy mix of VHF and UHF, PAL and SECAM colour schemes, and different audio modulation schemes [AM and FM analogue and NICAM digital] and subcarriers; at least they all use 25 pictures per second of 625 lines, or 50x312.5 depending how you look at it}. A "fully-wired" SCART socket provides for RGB+sync+audio, a "part-wired" socket provides for composite video and audio {sometimes S-VHS and audio} and it's done using a transparent compatibility mode {same pin used for composite video or just sync signal, carries a full picture signal but if RGB is available, picture information is taken from RGB inputs instead}.
The net result is that anything with a SCART socket should plug into anything else with a SCART socket and just work. And it does. Honestly, if you haven't got them, you need to ask why not.
Has the CEO of nVidia a daughter? Perhaps if a lock of her hair were to arrive in the post, two days after she failed to arrive home from school, he might be persuaded to release the source code.
I'll stick with the open-source "nv" drivers from X.org, thank you very much indeed.
Um. Because LILO doesn't need keyboard input at all if you only want to boot the default Linux kernel?
That was a complete guess. If LILO is accepting keystrokes and GRUB isn't, then that would point to some weirdness going on somewhere {maybe lilo has a built-in keyboard driver a.o.t. GRUB's built in ext2 filesystem support}. I'm surprised by something in Ubuntu not working though -- that's usually a pretty good distro choice for modern hardware.
Why, though, would you want to install a different distribution if you're already happy with Slackware? I guess that's another question.