The way this hooks in is a FEATURE OF FIREFOX. MS didn't do anything special. It takes 1 registry key to do this. Please shut the fuck up about stuff you don't know anything about.
They aren't modifying Firefox, they are adding a registry key, which firefox checks, that tells it to load a plugin as if you installed the plugin yourself.
Its made so you can install firefox plugins globally, to all users rather than one specific user. Its a way that sysadmins can roll out a plugin to an entire organization.
They aren't sabotaging a rival product, the added a plugin which had a bug in it.
Again, please shut the fuck up about things you completely don't understand, its not outrageous, its not unique, its not special, its just a fucking bug. God damn, I've been a fan of OSS for years, I am however, beginning to get incredibly tired of hearing morons like yourself shoot off at the mouth as if you have a clue and talking about how evil some non-OSS software package is.
Get a fucking clue or shut the fuck up, you're just making yourself and the rest of the OSS look like morons to anyone with even half a clue about how this works. The world isn't out to get your favorite pet OSS project, really, no one really gives a fuck, not even Microsoft. God, ignorant loud mouths like yourself need to be hung up by your balls until you learn to get a clue before running your trap.
Here's a trivial idea... Instead of spending you time whining about mobile browsing, the iPhone and AT&T, you could just buy an iPhone and have a nearly perfect mobile browsing experience.
Mobile browsing sucks because manufactures don't really care, just look at how bad it sucks on a Blackberry
Having written a multitasking 'OS' for a microcontroller...
I can say openly that real men aren't so stupid as to start from scratch in this day and age. You need some sort of framework to support your own framework until its far enough along that you no longer depend on it.
Yes, you CAN start from scratch, but WHY WOULD YOU?
Uhm, you realize licensing your work to others does not remove YOUR rights to it as the owner, right?
I got an email from a guy at MSU who was writing a textbook, and had already started using my code to handle the illustrations. He wanted to check whether it was okay under the license, since he didn't intend to release his own book under a CC license. Well, my answer ended up being that I really didn't know whether it was okay or not.
It doesn't matter what license you released it as, you can always grant him additional rights as the actual copyright holder.
Perhaps you should consider getting legal advice before even choosing a license as you seem to be pretty uneducated in the copyright system and licensing in general.
He can do it to any code licensed under a GPL license. Have you read the license? You know, the part that says you may freely swap out the current license for any future version of the license, regardless of if you are the author or not. When you license your software under GPL you explicitly give them permission to use a newer GPL license if they choose to do so. You have already given them explicit permission to switch to a newer GPL version.
If it is, relicensing it is simply a matter of changing the license to GPLv3... you know since GPLv2 says specifically that you can swap it out with any future GPL version.
No rewrite, no permissions, anyone can do it right now.
Doesn't mean anyone will contribute patches to it, but its certainly feasable for any GPLv2 code to convert to GPLv3 without the consent of any of its authors.
All of them build, have been built, and will continue to be buildable using compilers other than GCC on any OS where they want performance to not suck ass. Thanks for playing, now try again.
You don't build apache on solaris with GCC if you want performance. You certainly don't do so on Windows, and if you aren't using the intel compiler for Linux you again, don't care.
OSI didn't invent C, I was using it to compile open source software before GCC or the OSI were a stain in the Stallman/Perens love nest.
I build all of them with GCC when I need to, but its rather retarded to think that a C app depends on GCC when it has clearly been built using other compilers on MANY occasions.
No, it doesn't mean more than that. Ignorant people just like to pretend they mean the same thing.
Stallman has NEVER been about open source.
He doesn't want freedom either, he wants his brand of restrictions, which he prefers to term as free, yet GPLv3 is longer than most proprietary license agreements I've dealt with.
At best you could say he's about trying to remove any monatary value from software itself.
What has he done? Pissed people off? Ran people away from OSS? He has a big loud mouth, thats why he seems like an outstanding contributor.
Others have done more for far less recognition and with far more sanity.
I recognize he's done a lot for the OSS community, but the majority of it has been scaring people away. You are either part of his cult, or you aren't. If you are, you probably won't be next week when he add his new rant about how software can be made more free by using his restrictions instead of someone else. For those of us who aren't with him, we constitute the enemy of the state, he has no middle ground, and we when not laughing at him, are wincing at what he's perverting the idea of OSS into and crying about the number of idiots who choose to follow him.
I've read several EULAs and proprietary license agreements. GPLv3 is as bad as the worst from a commercial developers perspective.
GPLv3 may not be extremist, but unless you stop Stallman now, GPLv4 most certainly will be considered a terrorist document.
Okay, thats obviously an exaggeration, but how the fuck long do you think people can continue to scream 'its about freedom and protecting your RIGHTS' when they continue to add restrictions on those 'freedoms' and 'rights'
Seriously, STOP DRINKING THE STALLMAN COOLAID BEFORE he puts in the cyanide and you all end up hoping a trip in the spaceship behind the next comment. Most cults aren't such insane followers of a madman as the cult of Stallman.
GPL does not guarantee freedoms, it restricts them, stop using that god damn battle cry, you are lying. Public Domain is about freedom. You don't want freedom and never have, if you did you would use public domain. You want a specific form of control over your works...
For you programmers out there, maybe this will help:
Control != Freedom
The license is not being called extremist because of its current form, its being called as such because anyone with half a clue and a more than 5 years experience with Stallman and his cult has seen that its never enough for him. He's like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jack Thompson. All of them start shit and point out 'problems' where none exist. They do the VERY THING they claim to be against, and EVERYTIME they do it, they take it further, attacking things that just recently were 'Ok'. They are all extremist nut jobs who will not shut up as long as someone is stupid enough to follow them as if they aren't insane.
Stallman is an extremist because his view of the world is that everything should be free, but not really, just his version of free, which looks a hell of a lot like a pyramid scheme. I expect him to start trying to throw in things like works produced using GPL software must also be covered under GPLv4 or later. Take a good hard look at his history over the past 20 years, then I dare you to tell me he's not an extremist nut job who's only goal is that the entire world do what he wants without regard for what doing so actually means.
GPLv2 wasn't my preferred license for OSS work. LGPLv2 was closer to my preference. AGPLv*, GPLv3+ and anything like it, you've left the realm where you can claim your doing it for freedom, now its turned into 'I want someone else to come along and make my crappy project not suck, and I want them never to be able to sell it and they must give me all their work'
Not extremist? I've dealt with Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Apple and other companies license agreements, none of them are so restrictive as GPLv3. The fee they charge is far lower than that cost associated with using GPL.
At one point GPL had companies adopting it and it was becoming more popular. New version are now being banned. Larger sections of the OSS community are refusing to upgrade to v3. Some of the most important pieces are sticking to v2. All the people that made the OSS movement actually what it is don't want GPLv3, just the guy who thinks his text editor is an OS in and of itself and his cult.
This is one of the few ways to carry out Open Source business that actually works.
Which business would that be? Please exclude those that are surviving off IPO money, billionaire investors or VC money. Basically show me the company you are referring to that makes money off OSS directly and not off of funding from something else.
I don't hate it, I just find it to be rather childish and not really in the OSS spirit.
Of course, I have the nice simple solution of just remaking what you've done in a BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code base. Don't worry, we'll get the same amount of contributions regardless of license, and your app will be able to use my work without worrying about some retarded restrictions preventing you from taking my changes and using them for yourself.
You don't want open source, you want someone else to do your work for you.
It is however completely fair. So it my choice to put your software right along side all the other AGPL and GPLv3 software packages in my 'banned' software list.
You aren't being unfair, you are being misleading by claiming to be open but really just wanting someone to fix your bugs and give you feature enhancments.
Never, GPL isn't a right, and you're an idiot for thinking it is.
What the author is complaining about is that GPL screams loudly about freedom and then every time it changes it restricts freedom more and more by adding new stipulations and constraints.
GPLv3 is most certainly MORE restrictive than GPLv2. If you don't recognize that you are most certainly blind or just plain stupid.
You may prefer GPLv3's restrictions more than anything else for your needs. Thats fine and there is nothing wrong with you applying it to whatever copyrighted works you make, but just give up with this 'its about freedom' bullshit, its not, and never was for Stallman. Its about pushing an agenda on others through restrictions that shape the world into the way he sees fit.
The real problem for most people with GPL now days is that as soon as they read it a little bit they realize the 'free' part is a lie. Most software developers recognize that GPL is more restrictive than most proprietary licenses in terms of what you can do with source obtained from others.
The only people who seem to think its this great, end all, be all, save the worlds freedom! type of thing are ones who drink too much of Stallmans coolaid. I expect to hear about him and a large number of others who follow him dead in some rented mansion outside of San Diego soon.
Yea, thats like kids fighting on the school yard, the loser gets his ass kicked and then says 'you pulled my hair and threw sand in my eyes, you cheated, it doesn't count, it wasn't a fair fight'... all the while you're being his bitch because he beat your ass.
The Geneva Conventions results apply only when the guys who are winning want them too. If it breaks down to it, any attacked country is likely going to throw them out the window rather than get their asses kicked, well, except maybe France, but they roll over and play dead when the wind blows a little hard.
What fantasy world do you live in? Treaties between nations tend to take a back seat when those nations are blowing the hell out of each other, regardless of whos signature is on some piece of paper in some other country.
Yea, men are more capable of stopping a bullet or 2000 pound bomb than women and children are?
Really? Thats news to pretty much everyone on the planet I think.
I guess thats why they let women into the military now, because men and women are equally adapt at defending themselves against cruise missiles, laser guided bombs and depleted uranium bullets than all that stuff back in the early 40s.
Lets see... nuke you and your wife and children and avoid killing 100,000 of your countrymen and their wives and kids....
OR...
I can attack just you, kill millions of only your male countrymen, and risk killing myself.
Yea... thats a tough one...
Lets see which one of us evolves to survive that particular problem, would you care to take bets before I drop the bomb?
Of course your utterly ignorant argument assumes that no women and children will be killed in the cross fire of conventional warfare, which of course as anyone with even a quarter of a clue knows to be impossible.
In reality, what happens with your way is that not only do millions of men get killed, but hundreds of thousands of women and children do as well from cross fire, duds, debris, starvation, and all the other problems that long term war campaigns create.
Its nice of you, without any military training to act all high and mighty.
Your instant messenger will know when your available or not. Your phone system could direct your calls to you mobile if your away from the desk.
I think this is EXACTLY what he is concerned with. Do you realize how much information you tell others in the world about you with JUST your IM status? Do you realize how easy it is to use this simple bit of information already to plot crimes? Give me a week of watching little more than the IM status of active IMs and twitterers and I can pretty much tell you where you are at during any point in your day if your using a regular schedule.
He cares and is concerned about this potential problem.
You haven't even realized how big of a problem it is.
Roughly speaking, IM status is nearly as good as hang a sign on your home that automatically says 'No One Home!' when you leave.
So what do you do about the period of time between when you stop typing and walk away, and when the computer times out and locks the system down.
Too short of a time out and it annoys the piss out of you everytime it locks the machine while you compose a thought in your head, which means you get distracted, lose the thought and have to start over.
Too long of a time out and when you walk away, I walk up and own you.
For most people, the longer timeout isn't a big concern, they aren't really doing anything THAT important that it matters, which is why those people also tend to leave purses on the desk, with unlocked drawers and all sorts of other items laying on them.
But if you work somewhere that security is a high priority, and you trust no one around you, the ball game is a little different and you want to do your best to not depend on 'fallback' methods such as timeouts, which are really just a pathetic last ditch attempt at security. I'm not saying to stop using it, but for people to whom this stuff ACTUALLY MATTERS, its a piss poor solution.
Yes, because your generic PC speakers and mics which are in different configurations on every model of laptop out there are made to produce images.
What this will give you is 'there is something large near me, approximately X far away from this computer. Where X is somewhere near about the average distance between the user and the speakers and the user and the mic.
If someone ACTUALLY wanted to implement this tech, they'd just stop putting the IR unit on laptops in weird places such as the front edge or the side and put it on the top of the display, right next to the web cam that almost every laptop now days has that is more than capable of doing the same thing, and certainly FAR FAR more capable doing it than the speakers and mic.
Wait, that is where my IR unit is! A slight firmware mod and its now capable of doing exactly the same thing, but actually not sucking as at it.
Of course that was just my first thought. The idea of trying to shoehorn a cheapo speaker/mic combo (and all laptops have shitty sound systems, regardless of how much extra you paid for them) into an imaging device is just silly. There are at least 5 better ways to do it that would be more cost effective and require far less modification.
As far as the webcam not working when its dark... they aren't human eyes, they don't see the same way we do, even if what they do see is translated into roughly the same thing you would see. They are more than capable of seeing infrared as soon as you remove the IR filter present on most of them. No backlight needed, you provide it with your own body heat. And its actually CHEAPER as you are removing components from the build.
Sonar gets used when every other far better method we have won't work due to cost in most cases, it rates only slightly higher than 'can we feel it with our hands' as far as imaging, unless of course you're on a nuclear powered sub with millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment and sensors listening to the ocean (different medium than air) around you.
And once again for those of you who are incredible dense...
JUST BECAUSE YOU PUT IT IN A CONTRACT AND GET SOMEONE TO SIGN IT DOESN'T MAKE IT LEGALLY BINDING.
We've been over this, it in fact was one of the factors that lead to the civil war, after which we (the USA) made efforts to make it so a bullshit contract could no longer be considered valid.
The right to freedom in America should only be given to those who care enough to understand what having and protecting that right means, your right to freedom would most certainly be revoked.
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Dear moron,
The way this hooks in is a FEATURE OF FIREFOX. MS didn't do anything special. It takes 1 registry key to do this. Please shut the fuck up about stuff you don't know anything about.
They aren't modifying Firefox, they are adding a registry key, which firefox checks, that tells it to load a plugin as if you installed the plugin yourself.
Its made so you can install firefox plugins globally, to all users rather than one specific user. Its a way that sysadmins can roll out a plugin to an entire organization.
They aren't sabotaging a rival product, the added a plugin which had a bug in it.
Again, please shut the fuck up about things you completely don't understand, its not outrageous, its not unique, its not special, its just a fucking bug. God damn, I've been a fan of OSS for years, I am however, beginning to get incredibly tired of hearing morons like yourself shoot off at the mouth as if you have a clue and talking about how evil some non-OSS software package is.
Get a fucking clue or shut the fuck up, you're just making yourself and the rest of the OSS look like morons to anyone with even half a clue about how this works. The world isn't out to get your favorite pet OSS project, really, no one really gives a fuck, not even Microsoft. God, ignorant loud mouths like yourself need to be hung up by your balls until you learn to get a clue before running your trap.
Here's a trivial idea... Instead of spending you time whining about mobile browsing, the iPhone and AT&T, you could just buy an iPhone and have a nearly perfect mobile browsing experience.
Mobile browsing sucks because manufactures don't really care, just look at how bad it sucks on a Blackberry
Having written a multitasking 'OS' for a microcontroller ...
I can say openly that real men aren't so stupid as to start from scratch in this day and age. You need some sort of framework to support your own framework until its far enough along that you no longer depend on it.
Yes, you CAN start from scratch, but WHY WOULD YOU?
Uhm, you realize licensing your work to others does not remove YOUR rights to it as the owner, right?
It doesn't matter what license you released it as, you can always grant him additional rights as the actual copyright holder.
Perhaps you should consider getting legal advice before even choosing a license as you seem to be pretty uneducated in the copyright system and licensing in general.
He can do it to any code licensed under a GPL license. Have you read the license? You know, the part that says you may freely swap out the current license for any future version of the license, regardless of if you are the author or not. When you license your software under GPL you explicitly give them permission to use a newer GPL license if they choose to do so. You have already given them explicit permission to switch to a newer GPL version.
Is the kernel not licensed under GPLv2 currently?
If it is, relicensing it is simply a matter of changing the license to GPLv3 ... you know since GPLv2 says specifically that you can swap it out with any future GPL version.
No rewrite, no permissions, anyone can do it right now.
Doesn't mean anyone will contribute patches to it, but its certainly feasable for any GPLv2 code to convert to GPLv3 without the consent of any of its authors.
Interestingly enough, it did it using the same viral nature that the swine flu has spread its FUD.
All of them build, have been built, and will continue to be buildable using compilers other than GCC on any OS where they want performance to not suck ass. Thanks for playing, now try again.
You don't build apache on solaris with GCC if you want performance. You certainly don't do so on Windows, and if you aren't using the intel compiler for Linux you again, don't care.
OSI didn't invent C, I was using it to compile open source software before GCC or the OSI were a stain in the Stallman/Perens love nest.
I build all of them with GCC when I need to, but its rather retarded to think that a C app depends on GCC when it has clearly been built using other compilers on MANY occasions.
No, it doesn't mean more than that. Ignorant people just like to pretend they mean the same thing.
Stallman has NEVER been about open source.
He doesn't want freedom either, he wants his brand of restrictions, which he prefers to term as free, yet GPLv3 is longer than most proprietary license agreements I've dealt with.
At best you could say he's about trying to remove any monatary value from software itself.
He is certainly not about open source. He is also not about free as in freedom.
Free as in beer perhaps.
When he starts to become for Open source and freedom in software, there will be fewer restrictions in GPL not more.
What has he done? Pissed people off? Ran people away from OSS?
He has a big loud mouth, thats why he seems like an outstanding contributor.
Others have done more for far less recognition and with far more sanity.
I recognize he's done a lot for the OSS community, but the majority of it has been scaring people away. You are either part of his cult, or you aren't. If you are, you probably won't be next week when he add his new rant about how software can be made more free by using his restrictions instead of someone else. For those of us who aren't with him, we constitute the enemy of the state, he has no middle ground, and we when not laughing at him, are wincing at what he's perverting the idea of OSS into and crying about the number of idiots who choose to follow him.
I've read several EULAs and proprietary license agreements. GPLv3 is as bad as the worst from a commercial developers perspective.
GPLv3 may not be extremist, but unless you stop Stallman now, GPLv4 most certainly will be considered a terrorist document.
Okay, thats obviously an exaggeration, but how the fuck long do you think people can continue to scream 'its about freedom and protecting your RIGHTS' when they continue to add restrictions on those 'freedoms' and 'rights'
Seriously, STOP DRINKING THE STALLMAN COOLAID BEFORE he puts in the cyanide and you all end up hoping a trip in the spaceship behind the next comment. Most cults aren't such insane followers of a madman as the cult of Stallman.
GPL does not guarantee freedoms, it restricts them, stop using that god damn battle cry, you are lying. Public Domain is about freedom. You don't want freedom and never have, if you did you would use public domain. You want a specific form of control over your works ...
For you programmers out there, maybe this will help:
Control != Freedom
The license is not being called extremist because of its current form, its being called as such because anyone with half a clue and a more than 5 years experience with Stallman and his cult has seen that its never enough for him. He's like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jack Thompson. All of them start shit and point out 'problems' where none exist. They do the VERY THING they claim to be against, and EVERYTIME they do it, they take it further, attacking things that just recently were 'Ok'. They are all extremist nut jobs who will not shut up as long as someone is stupid enough to follow them as if they aren't insane.
Stallman is an extremist because his view of the world is that everything should be free, but not really, just his version of free, which looks a hell of a lot like a pyramid scheme. I expect him to start trying to throw in things like works produced using GPL software must also be covered under GPLv4 or later. Take a good hard look at his history over the past 20 years, then I dare you to tell me he's not an extremist nut job who's only goal is that the entire world do what he wants without regard for what doing so actually means.
GPLv2 wasn't my preferred license for OSS work. LGPLv2 was closer to my preference. AGPLv*, GPLv3+ and anything like it, you've left the realm where you can claim your doing it for freedom, now its turned into 'I want someone else to come along and make my crappy project not suck, and I want them never to be able to sell it and they must give me all their work'
Not extremist? I've dealt with Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Apple and other companies license agreements, none of them are so restrictive as GPLv3. The fee they charge is far lower than that cost associated with using GPL.
At one point GPL had companies adopting it and it was becoming more popular. New version are now being banned. Larger sections of the OSS community are refusing to upgrade to v3. Some of the most important pieces are sticking to v2. All the people that made the OSS movement actually what it is don't want GPLv3, just the guy who thinks his text editor is an OS in and of itself and his cult.
Stallman continues to let both communities suck his fat ass off nightly, which is pretty much what they seem to live for.
Which business would that be? Please exclude those that are surviving off IPO money, billionaire investors or VC money. Basically show me the company you are referring to that makes money off OSS directly and not off of funding from something else.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Yes, the software world has changed.
What I would like to know, from your examples is what ANY of them have to do with being a reason that GPLv2 needs changed?
Please, explain to me why GPLv2 needs to be changed because of the DMCA. I'd love to hear your real arguments, not the party line.
I don't hate it, I just find it to be rather childish and not really in the OSS spirit.
Of course, I have the nice simple solution of just remaking what you've done in a BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code base. Don't worry, we'll get the same amount of contributions regardless of license, and your app will be able to use my work without worrying about some retarded restrictions preventing you from taking my changes and using them for yourself.
You don't want open source, you want someone else to do your work for you.
It is however completely fair. So it my choice to put your software right along side all the other AGPL and GPLv3 software packages in my 'banned' software list.
You aren't being unfair, you are being misleading by claiming to be open but really just wanting someone to fix your bugs and give you feature enhancments.
Never, GPL isn't a right, and you're an idiot for thinking it is.
What the author is complaining about is that GPL screams loudly about freedom and then every time it changes it restricts freedom more and more by adding new stipulations and constraints.
GPLv3 is most certainly MORE restrictive than GPLv2. If you don't recognize that you are most certainly blind or just plain stupid.
You may prefer GPLv3's restrictions more than anything else for your needs. Thats fine and there is nothing wrong with you applying it to whatever copyrighted works you make, but just give up with this 'its about freedom' bullshit, its not, and never was for Stallman. Its about pushing an agenda on others through restrictions that shape the world into the way he sees fit.
The real problem for most people with GPL now days is that as soon as they read it a little bit they realize the 'free' part is a lie. Most software developers recognize that GPL is more restrictive than most proprietary licenses in terms of what you can do with source obtained from others.
The only people who seem to think its this great, end all, be all, save the worlds freedom! type of thing are ones who drink too much of Stallmans coolaid. I expect to hear about him and a large number of others who follow him dead in some rented mansion outside of San Diego soon.
Hahahah
Yea, thats like kids fighting on the school yard, the loser gets his ass kicked and then says 'you pulled my hair and threw sand in my eyes, you cheated, it doesn't count, it wasn't a fair fight' ... all the while you're being his bitch because he beat your ass.
The Geneva Conventions results apply only when the guys who are winning want them too. If it breaks down to it, any attacked country is likely going to throw them out the window rather than get their asses kicked, well, except maybe France, but they roll over and play dead when the wind blows a little hard.
What fantasy world do you live in? Treaties between nations tend to take a back seat when those nations are blowing the hell out of each other, regardless of whos signature is on some piece of paper in some other country.
Yea, men are more capable of stopping a bullet or 2000 pound bomb than women and children are?
Really? Thats news to pretty much everyone on the planet I think.
I guess thats why they let women into the military now, because men and women are equally adapt at defending themselves against cruise missiles, laser guided bombs and depleted uranium bullets than all that stuff back in the early 40s.
You've never held a weapon have you?
Lets see ... nuke you and your wife and children and avoid killing 100,000 of your countrymen and their wives and kids ....
OR ...
I can attack just you, kill millions of only your male countrymen, and risk killing myself.
Yea ... thats a tough one ...
Lets see which one of us evolves to survive that particular problem, would you care to take bets before I drop the bomb?
Of course your utterly ignorant argument assumes that no women and children will be killed in the cross fire of conventional warfare, which of course as anyone with even a quarter of a clue knows to be impossible.
In reality, what happens with your way is that not only do millions of men get killed, but hundreds of thousands of women and children do as well from cross fire, duds, debris, starvation, and all the other problems that long term war campaigns create.
Its nice of you, without any military training to act all high and mighty.
I think this is EXACTLY what he is concerned with. Do you realize how much information you tell others in the world about you with JUST your IM status? Do you realize how easy it is to use this simple bit of information already to plot crimes? Give me a week of watching little more than the IM status of active IMs and twitterers and I can pretty much tell you where you are at during any point in your day if your using a regular schedule.
He cares and is concerned about this potential problem.
You haven't even realized how big of a problem it is.
Roughly speaking, IM status is nearly as good as hang a sign on your home that automatically says 'No One Home!' when you leave.
So what do you do about the period of time between when you stop typing and walk away, and when the computer times out and locks the system down.
Too short of a time out and it annoys the piss out of you everytime it locks the machine while you compose a thought in your head, which means you get distracted, lose the thought and have to start over.
Too long of a time out and when you walk away, I walk up and own you.
For most people, the longer timeout isn't a big concern, they aren't really doing anything THAT important that it matters, which is why those people also tend to leave purses on the desk, with unlocked drawers and all sorts of other items laying on them.
But if you work somewhere that security is a high priority, and you trust no one around you, the ball game is a little different and you want to do your best to not depend on 'fallback' methods such as timeouts, which are really just a pathetic last ditch attempt at security. I'm not saying to stop using it, but for people to whom this stuff ACTUALLY MATTERS, its a piss poor solution.
You and I? Its more than adequate.
Yes, because your generic PC speakers and mics which are in different configurations on every model of laptop out there are made to produce images.
What this will give you is 'there is something large near me, approximately X far away from this computer. Where X is somewhere near about the average distance between the user and the speakers and the user and the mic.
If someone ACTUALLY wanted to implement this tech, they'd just stop putting the IR unit on laptops in weird places such as the front edge or the side and put it on the top of the display, right next to the web cam that almost every laptop now days has that is more than capable of doing the same thing, and certainly FAR FAR more capable doing it than the speakers and mic.
Wait, that is where my IR unit is! A slight firmware mod and its now capable of doing exactly the same thing, but actually not sucking as at it.
Of course that was just my first thought. The idea of trying to shoehorn a cheapo speaker/mic combo (and all laptops have shitty sound systems, regardless of how much extra you paid for them) into an imaging device is just silly. There are at least 5 better ways to do it that would be more cost effective and require far less modification.
As far as the webcam not working when its dark ... they aren't human eyes, they don't see the same way we do, even if what they do see is translated into roughly the same thing you would see. They are more than capable of seeing infrared as soon as you remove the IR filter present on most of them. No backlight needed, you provide it with your own body heat. And its actually CHEAPER as you are removing components from the build.
Sonar gets used when every other far better method we have won't work due to cost in most cases, it rates only slightly higher than 'can we feel it with our hands' as far as imaging, unless of course you're on a nuclear powered sub with millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment and sensors listening to the ocean (different medium than air) around you.
And once again for those of you who are incredible dense ...
JUST BECAUSE YOU PUT IT IN A CONTRACT AND GET SOMEONE TO SIGN IT DOESN'T MAKE IT LEGALLY BINDING.
We've been over this, it in fact was one of the factors that lead to the civil war, after which we (the USA) made efforts to make it so a bullshit contract could no longer be considered valid.
The right to freedom in America should only be given to those who care enough to understand what having and protecting that right means, your right to freedom would most certainly be revoked.
Contrary to popular belief, no, innocent people aren't randomly targeted.
There is, in almost every single case, a link between the two.
Seriously though, WTF are you talking about with your degree in criminology ... wait ... you don't have on do you?
Of course, the sane person who really believes they are being targeted calls the authorities, they don't just let people continue to disturb them.
I'm sorry, but it IS your fault if you don't tell someone or ask for help.