My original post, however, was not talking about security, but about speed. It was a reply to the person who complained that layout took too long in Word already, without re-writing it in a 'safe' language.
True. I actually agreed with your post, and was reacting to other posts in this discussion, that plainly stated that to avoid security vulnerabilities, one should just switch to LaTeX.
First: there is no reason a virus can't be attached to an email that somebody actually personally sent. Before Outlook worms arrived, that is how most email viruses used to spread. You would open a document somebody sent you, it would infect your computer, and attach itself to all emails you sent after that. At some point of time somebody figured out a way to make a virus actually mail stuff automatically. That's an email worm, but a simple virus does not have to do that.
Second: number of people are required to read emails and documents from customers, and in many cases in such situation, you simply cannot call to people and ask them if they really meant to send you a document.
Third: imagine you need to send a document to a large number of people on a company mailing list. You probably wouldn't want every single of the 200 or 300 people calling you and asking if you really sent them an email.
I don't use a word processor, I use LaTeX, which seems to have much better layout rules than any version of Word I have seen. The document I am working on is around 200 pages. Compiling it (including invoking gnuplot to draw a load of graphs, pulling in a few code files and syntax highlighting them, constructing an index and bibliography, and making sure all cross-references are correct) takes 7 seconds of wall time on my current laptop, and most of that is time spent waiting for I/O.
Since the original topic of this discussion was security vulnerabilities, let me note this: I hope you realize that in order to run gnuplot, makeindex, bibtex and who knows what else directly from LaTeX, which is what you seem to be doing based on your description (unless you use some sort of makefile based solution), you must most certainly have \write18 enabled on your TeX installation, which is a major security hole. It gives TeX a shell access, and can execute any code embedded in a tex file or hidden in a package or a cls file.
Don't get me wrong, I love TeX, use TeX for all my document processing needs, and wouldn't touch Word with a 15.5 ft pole, and have \write18 enabled on all my TeX installations, because it just make things so much easier. I just wanted to point out that as far as security goes, maybe we shouldn't be so smug when comparing to Word. Quality of output, sure, easiness and speed of document creation, definitely, in these areas we win without breaking a sweat, but we do have our own security problems.
By the way, the smalltalk based system you are talking about sure sounds interesting.
And if you think Word's too complex and shouldn't be doing that much work, you know where to find notepad (or vi), but good luck making professional documents;
Well, I wouldn't be using notepad (it's a total abomination), but a good text editor such as emacs or vim can make editing a TeX document easy and extremely fast. As for professional documents, a good TeX macro package or format (it is debatable whether LaTeX fits this description) will produce documents with much better typography and general look then Word.
It is true that I have seen Word documents that were fairly decent, and I know several people who can produce solid looking documents with Word, however, the amount of stuff they had to learn to do that definitely exceeds what I had to learn to produce better documents with LaTeX or ConTeXt. And with a good editor, I can type TeX faster than Word.
I believe that in the future we will see a TeX like formating engine behind a wysisyg like frontend, something like LyX but more user friendly, possibly with instant communication with the backend. Possibly with the backend running remotely on a server - one thing that is painful about LyX is the amount of crap you have to install with it. If all that was left on a server somewhere and user would just have the frontend on their computer, LyX wouldn't be so bad (of course besides the fact that it uses LaTeX as the default TeX format).
I typed in about 20 books that I own and that I thought could give interesting results, and the answer was invariably "Sorry. A book must be owned by at least 75 members to have unrecommendations."
I agree with your first assertion. I am an expert in some areas of higher mathematics, and in my area of expertise, articles on Wikipedia are generally very accurate. there is very little noise, very few mistakes (almost all of them typos, that get quickly corrected), and occasional controversy is nearly exclusively limited to questions of notation and terminology. People who contribute to these articles generally know very well what they are talking about, and any mistakes and inaccuracies are easy to spot and easy to fix.
I think there is more to the results of this study, though. It raises good point about the nature of Wikipedia, IMHO. If I see an article in my own area of expertise, I can personally verify its correctness and accuracy. That's why I am perfectly willing to quote such articles, refer to them in discussions, and point people to them if they want to learn something about the topic.
If I, OTOH, see an article say on organic chemistry, I have no way to judge how good it is. It may very well be an excellent, completely accurate, article, however, I will never know, without actually asking an expert. All I know is that this is an article on Wikipedia, and may have been written as a prank by a high school student who has no clue about organic chemistry whatsoever. Therefore I will be very hesitant to refer to such article, and I will be very hesitant to give it high rating on correctness and accuracy.
Good point, but: if you were there, what would you do? Were you ever in a situation like that? What did you do in that case? I have repeatedly witnessed cops beating and torturing somebody, and the only thing I ever thought of doing is to run. I know, that makes me a coward. But you cannot claim that the students in the video did not lift a finger, number of them tried to argue and reason with the officers. Again, what realistic and practical thing would you do in a situation like this.
What I would like to see is some sort of follow up action, expressing a solidarity with the victim, and a protest against the behavior of the officers.
It is conceivable that the student could have been so shaken, fearful, and angry he literally could not stand up
That is completely possible. I have seen cases of police brutality in the former communist Czechoslovakia where the victims clearly appeared unable to move from fear, and there were no Tasers involved. Couple of times I have been scared shitless by what was happening around me, without actually being harmed or attacked myself, and that was enough to nearly immobilize me. Luckily for me, in each of those cases I was able to eventually pull myself together and run.
While watching the video, I had serious flashbacks of events I have personally witnessed, perpetrated by communist police. I am still really shaken just from watching the video. I think it is completely possible the student really wasn't able to get up, either for physical or psychological reason. There was absolutely no reason the cops couldn't just simply grab him by his arms and legs and carry him out. I have seen that number of times, too.
The VDM power toy is nowhere near in functionality to any decent unix window manager with virtual desktops, and litestep is a total pain. Probably the best virtual desktop manager on windows is VirtuaWin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/), but still it lacks lot of useful features of my ancient fvwm setup.
In fact it's you who have committed one of the oldest and most common logical fallacies. What I said was that a journalist is willing to share information with everybody. I never said, however, that a person who is willing to share information with everybody is a journalist. In fact, the whole second part of my post debates the question who exactly is or should be a journalist.
Also, gossips are definitely not journalists, since a gossip does not make information public. A gossip shares information with great number of people, however, he or she decides who to share it with. If a gossip does not like you, he or she can simply decide not to tell you anything. A journalist cannot do that.
Finally, I have never advocated that journalists be given a right to publish any kind of information with impunity. I was merely explaining why it makes sense for a journalist to be given the right to protect ones sources, a right that is not available to non-journalists. That's not because a journalist's ID makes them somehow "more equal", as several people seemed to suggest. It's because of what they do.
The grey area for me, at least, is when they are informed of something that is illegal to be told to anyone. Something classified, for example. The law says "this cannot be told to anyone", someone tells a journalist, and suddenly there are two classes of "anyone" - a journalist, and everyone else in the country. Suddenly it is alright to tell the journalist (since he/she has freedom of the press, and should not be compelled to reveal their source), but not anyone else (since they do not enjoy the same "freedoms").
Because they are giving the information to the journalist in order for it to be published, so in fact they give the information to everyone. That's different from giving the information to some mafioso who will use it to blackmail somebody. The special thing about being a jounalist is that you act do the job of journalist: you tell everyone else. If a journalist uses secret information to blackmail somebody, instead of publishing it, they have no right to protect their sources.
Of course the question is, who is a journalist? I think thats where the system is somewhat fucked up. As you say, maybe a blogger should be considered a journalist, since he/she really performs the same function. On the other hand, you could concievably compare it with other professions, like doctors or engineers. Not everybody can be a doctor, you have to study and pass exams. But then, you can also lose your license, if your practice is not up to the standards. Is there something like that for journalists? Should there be something? How do you assure that it won't be abused for political reasons, to silence criticism?
Yeah, because those of us that actually read Slashdot are always giving out our names, SSN, and credit card numbers on IRC. The people that might actually do that don't even know what IRC is, so they're pretty unlikely to do it either.
You may not post your personal data on IRC, but that doesn't mean somebody else won't do it for you;). Anyway, I am pretty sure the g.p. used the IRC just as a silly example. In jail, it won't really matter which particular protocol did the terrorists use;)
And I seriously doubt that an ex-wife/girlfriend/whatever is going to call the FBI and name anyone here as an enemy combatant. Yeah, it could happen. Then again, the sun could go nova tomorrow morning and kill us all. It's pretty unlikely though.
That's exactly what routinely happened (and, unfortunately, probably still happens quite often in some countries) in many past totalitarian countries. Somebody didn't like you, you stepped on somebody's toe, or you were in somebody's way, the next think you knew, you were in some dark cell, with couple of secret police goons who were trying to kick all your teeth out. I am willing to bet that majority of people arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union were turned in on some trumped up charges by somebody close to them who wanted to get rid of them for some reason. And once you were in the machine, there was no way out. I personally don't want to wait till it gets to that point here.
I am not finding fault with Indian media for their outing of the misdeeds of Hindu holymen. That is very appropriate. But they are not unbiased or even handed. The media and the govt is so scared of touching off sectarian violence they just dont report the misdeeds of the mullahs and the priests.
And that's exactly why India got such a low ranking in the report. For freedom of press, it doesn't really matter whether government suppresses the press in order to make themselves look better, to suppress criticism dorected towards them, or for any other reason, like for example trying to prevent sectarian violence. The rest of your own post explains pretty well why even such censorship is bad.
I don't think these are necessarily examples. I think they first describe the general atmosphere, and then add some specific cases, not necessarily related to it.
There is plenty happening in Ireland. And just look at the lovely corruption scandals in Czech Republic, that have certainly been going on for most of last year, with illegal wiretaps, hitmen hired, blackmail, and all sorts of appropriate decorations of such sort. Somehow all that didn't result in suppression of press.
What's more, there are plenty of sililarly insignificant countries with pretty much the same things happenning (or not happening) much lower on the list.
I think that tells you something about the status of press in these various countries. It is not necessarily just about how much do the governments respect the press. It's more about the respect press has in the various societies and cultures.
On the other hand, in some large countries that are very involved in world events, the offenses quoted by the article are nearly exclusively perpetrated by the governments.
Gnash should do it. It can run as a standalone application, rather than a browser plugin. You would then view flash content the same way you view images in lynx.
Look around, there are bunch of libraries that generate pdf. As far as applications go, every decent desktop publishing software will generate pdf. Without that it would be pretty much useless, as pdf is de facto standard format in printing industry. As far as tex goes, if you are still typsetting to PostScript and converting to pdf, you are missing a bunch of features. Pdftex can generate pdf directly, and includes bunch of nice features that the original tex engine lacks. For graphics, there are bunch of interactive graphics softwares that save to pdf, and there are several vector graphics scripting languages that can generate pdf (asymptote, metapost (via mptopdf), pyx,...).
Postscript is way too flexible, it is a freaking programming language, but pdf is in my oppinion just right. I don't agree with this "if it is xml, it is automatically portable, editable, etc." mindset. Xml could easilly be much less portable and much harder to edit than pdf.
Ehm, pdf already supports full alpha transparency and gradients. Postscript doesn't but pdf does.
If MS really does open the standard, I think it will be good, because it will force Adobe to actually compete in the market. Maybe they will actually make Adobe reader work faster, and stop crippling some of its features in an attempt to make you buy Acrobat Pro.
A lot of people I talk to regard PDF as an 'open' standard when the only part that's free is the ability to decode it--not encode it.
Not true. PDF is a true open standard, you are free to create software that both decode and encode PDF files. There are number of projects that create PDF files, for example pdftex, that has been around for a while.
There are couple of hooks Adobe has attached to PDF, though. For example, Adobe Reader is actually capable of modifying PDF files, adding comments and annotation, and even "drawing" on a pdf file. However, this feature is disabled by default, and is only enabled for files that has been created, encrypted and digitally signed by Acrobat Proffesional edition, which carries pretty hefty pricetag. What it means is this: I can create a pdf file with pdftex. Now I want to send it to several people to proofread. It would be great if they could add comments and annotations directly to the document, and send me the document back. They can do it using Acrobat, but some of them don't have Acrobat. Now the "funny" part: they could actually do it using Reader, too, Reader has the capability, but first I would have to load the file into Acrobat Professional edition and specifically enable commenting for that document. Because in order for this to work, the document has to be digitally signed by Acrobat Pro, there is simply no other way around it. That's why I consider Reader a crippleware.
False. If I am the sole copyright holder of a work, I may choose to release it under any license I like. However, I cannot stop people from updating my previous GPLed versions to match the new versions. For example, In The Groove is a derivative of the GPLed StepMania project, but it is closed source because permission was obtained from all the StepMania copyright holders.
That does not contradict my claim.
1) Indeed, if you are sole copyright holder, you can release your work under any license you want[1], but if you release something as GPL, you cannot retroactively revoke the license. Once it's GPLed, it's out and you cannot bring it back. Even if you later release the same code under different license, the GPLed version is still out and people can use it to create their own derivative works under GPL.
2) Indeed, but the original GPLed version of StepMania is still available under GPL. You cannot retroactively revoke the GPL.
[1] That's not actually true. Even linking your copyrighted work to a GPLed library will force you to use GPL for your work.
Slashdot Mirror
My original post, however, was not talking about security, but about speed. It was a reply to the person who complained that layout took too long in Word already, without re-writing it in a 'safe' language.
True. I actually agreed with your post, and was reacting to other posts in this discussion, that plainly stated that to avoid security vulnerabilities, one should just switch to LaTeX.
First: there is no reason a virus can't be attached to an email that somebody actually personally sent. Before Outlook worms arrived, that is how most email viruses used to spread. You would open a document somebody sent you, it would infect your computer, and attach itself to all emails you sent after that. At some point of time somebody figured out a way to make a virus actually mail stuff automatically. That's an email worm, but a simple virus does not have to do that.
Second: number of people are required to read emails and documents from customers, and in many cases in such situation, you simply cannot call to people and ask them if they really meant to send you a document.
Third: imagine you need to send a document to a large number of people on a company mailing list. You probably wouldn't want every single of the 200 or 300 people calling you and asking if you really sent them an email.
Not on PhD thesis, as it is going to be printed anyway, but it can be very useful in education.
I don't use a word processor, I use LaTeX, which seems to have much better layout rules than any version of Word I have seen. The document I am working on is around 200 pages. Compiling it (including invoking gnuplot to draw a load of graphs, pulling in a few code files and syntax highlighting them, constructing an index and bibliography, and making sure all cross-references are correct) takes 7 seconds of wall time on my current laptop, and most of that is time spent waiting for I/O.
Since the original topic of this discussion was security vulnerabilities, let me note this: I hope you realize that in order to run gnuplot, makeindex, bibtex and who knows what else directly from LaTeX, which is what you seem to be doing based on your description (unless you use some sort of makefile based solution), you must most certainly have \write18 enabled on your TeX installation, which is a major security hole. It gives TeX a shell access, and can execute any code embedded in a tex file or hidden in a package or a cls file.
Don't get me wrong, I love TeX, use TeX for all my document processing needs, and wouldn't touch Word with a 15.5 ft pole, and have \write18 enabled on all my TeX installations, because it just make things so much easier. I just wanted to point out that as far as security goes, maybe we shouldn't be so smug when comparing to Word. Quality of output, sure, easiness and speed of document creation, definitely, in these areas we win without breaking a sweat, but we do have our own security problems.
By the way, the smalltalk based system you are talking about sure sounds interesting.
And if you think Word's too complex and shouldn't be doing that much work, you know where to find notepad (or vi), but good luck making professional documents;
Well, I wouldn't be using notepad (it's a total abomination), but a good text editor such as emacs or vim can make editing a TeX document easy and extremely fast. As for professional documents, a good TeX macro package or format (it is debatable whether LaTeX fits this description) will produce documents with much better typography and general look then Word.
It is true that I have seen Word documents that were fairly decent, and I know several people who can produce solid looking documents with Word, however, the amount of stuff they had to learn to do that definitely exceeds what I had to learn to produce better documents with LaTeX or ConTeXt. And with a good editor, I can type TeX faster than Word.
I believe that in the future we will see a TeX like formating engine behind a wysisyg like frontend, something like LyX but more user friendly, possibly with instant communication with the backend. Possibly with the backend running remotely on a server - one thing that is painful about LyX is the amount of crap you have to install with it. If all that was left on a server somewhere and user would just have the frontend on their computer, LyX wouldn't be so bad (of course besides the fact that it uses LaTeX as the default TeX format).
I typed in about 20 books that I own and that I thought could give interesting results, and the answer was invariably "Sorry. A book must be owned by at least 75 members to have unrecommendations."
I agree with your first assertion. I am an expert in some areas of higher mathematics, and in my area of expertise, articles on Wikipedia are generally very accurate. there is very little noise, very few mistakes (almost all of them typos, that get quickly corrected), and occasional controversy is nearly exclusively limited to questions of notation and terminology. People who contribute to these articles generally know very well what they are talking about, and any mistakes and inaccuracies are easy to spot and easy to fix.
I think there is more to the results of this study, though. It raises good point about the nature of Wikipedia, IMHO. If I see an article in my own area of expertise, I can personally verify its correctness and accuracy. That's why I am perfectly willing to quote such articles, refer to them in discussions, and point people to them if they want to learn something about the topic.
If I, OTOH, see an article say on organic chemistry, I have no way to judge how good it is. It may very well be an excellent, completely accurate, article, however, I will never know, without actually asking an expert. All I know is that this is an article on Wikipedia, and may have been written as a prank by a high school student who has no clue about organic chemistry whatsoever. Therefore I will be very hesitant to refer to such article, and I will be very hesitant to give it high rating on correctness and accuracy.
to prevent their helmets from being "pinched" on Boat Race Day.
Good point, but: if you were there, what would you do? Were you ever in a situation like that? What did you do in that case? I have repeatedly witnessed cops beating and torturing somebody, and the only thing I ever thought of doing is to run. I know, that makes me a coward. But you cannot claim that the students in the video did not lift a finger, number of them tried to argue and reason with the officers. Again, what realistic and practical thing would you do in a situation like this.
What I would like to see is some sort of follow up action, expressing a solidarity with the victim, and a protest against the behavior of the officers.
It is conceivable that the student could have been so shaken, fearful, and angry he literally could not stand up
That is completely possible. I have seen cases of police brutality in the former communist Czechoslovakia where the victims clearly appeared unable to move from fear, and there were no Tasers involved. Couple of times I have been scared shitless by what was happening around me, without actually being harmed or attacked myself, and that was enough to nearly immobilize me. Luckily for me, in each of those cases I was able to eventually pull myself together and run.
While watching the video, I had serious flashbacks of events I have personally witnessed, perpetrated by communist police. I am still really shaken just from watching the video. I think it is completely possible the student really wasn't able to get up, either for physical or psychological reason. There was absolutely no reason the cops couldn't just simply grab him by his arms and legs and carry him out. I have seen that number of times, too.
That's technical papers. Nobody reads technical papers. That's stuff is not meant to be read. It's usually horribly written, too.
You only disproved his parametrization by two angles claim, the important part about the surface of Earth being 2D manifold still holds.
Now can somebody calculate the genus or the Earth surface? Counting man-made bridges and tunnels, of course.
and then everybody is surprised that there is a low voter turnout.
The VDM power toy is nowhere near in functionality to any decent unix window manager with virtual desktops, and litestep is a total pain. Probably the best virtual desktop manager on windows is VirtuaWin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/), but still it lacks lot of useful features of my ancient fvwm setup.
It's not my reasoning that's fallacious.
In fact it's you who have committed one of the oldest and most common logical
fallacies. What I said was that a journalist is willing to share information
with everybody. I never said, however, that a person who is willing to share
information with everybody is a journalist. In fact, the whole second part of
my post debates the question who exactly is or should be a journalist.
Also, gossips are definitely not journalists, since a gossip does not make
information public. A gossip shares information with great number of people,
however, he or she decides who to share it with. If a gossip does not like
you, he or she can simply decide not to tell you anything. A journalist cannot
do that.
Finally, I have never advocated that journalists be given a right to publish
any kind of information with impunity. I was merely explaining why it makes
sense for a journalist to be given the right to protect ones sources, a right
that is not available to non-journalists. That's not because a journalist's ID
makes them somehow "more equal", as several people seemed to suggest. It's
because of what they do.
The grey area for me, at least, is when they are informed of something that is illegal to be told to anyone. Something classified, for example. The law says "this cannot be told to anyone", someone tells a journalist, and suddenly there are two classes of "anyone" - a journalist, and everyone else in the country. Suddenly it is alright to tell the journalist (since he/she has freedom of the press, and should not be compelled to reveal their source), but not anyone else (since they do not enjoy the same "freedoms").
Because they are giving the information to the journalist in order for it to be published, so in fact they give the information to everyone. That's different from giving the information to some mafioso who will use it to blackmail somebody. The special thing about being a jounalist is that you act do the job of journalist: you tell everyone else. If a journalist uses secret information to blackmail somebody, instead of publishing it, they have no right to protect their sources.
Of course the question is, who is a journalist? I think thats where the system is somewhat fucked up. As you say, maybe a blogger should be considered a journalist, since he/she really performs the same function. On the other hand, you could concievably compare it with other professions, like doctors or engineers. Not everybody can be a doctor, you have to study and pass exams. But then, you can also lose your license, if your practice is not up to the standards. Is there something like that for journalists? Should there be something? How do you assure that it won't be abused for political reasons, to silence criticism?
Yeah, because those of us that actually read Slashdot are always giving out our names, SSN, and credit card numbers on IRC. The people that might actually do that don't even know what IRC is, so they're pretty unlikely to do it either.
;). Anyway, I am pretty sure the g.p. used the IRC just as a silly example. In jail, it won't really matter which particular protocol did the terrorists use ;)
You may not post your personal data on IRC, but that doesn't mean somebody else won't do it for you
And I seriously doubt that an ex-wife/girlfriend/whatever is going to call the FBI and name anyone here as an enemy combatant. Yeah, it could happen. Then again, the sun could go nova tomorrow morning and kill us all. It's pretty unlikely though.
That's exactly what routinely happened (and, unfortunately, probably still happens quite often in some countries) in many past totalitarian countries. Somebody didn't like you, you stepped on somebody's toe, or you were in somebody's way, the next think you knew, you were in some dark cell, with couple of secret police goons who were trying to kick all your teeth out. I am willing to bet that majority of people arrested in Stalin's Soviet Union were turned in on some trumped up charges by somebody close to them who wanted to get rid of them for some reason. And once you were in the machine, there was no way out. I personally don't want to wait till it gets to that point here.
You wrote:
I am not finding fault with Indian media for their outing of the misdeeds of Hindu holymen. That is very appropriate. But they are not unbiased or even handed. The media and the govt is so scared of touching off sectarian violence they just dont report the misdeeds of the mullahs and the priests.
And that's exactly why India got such a low ranking in the report. For freedom of press, it doesn't really matter whether government suppresses the press in order to make themselves look better, to suppress criticism dorected towards them, or for any other reason, like for example trying to prevent sectarian violence. The rest of your own post explains pretty well why even such censorship is bad.
I don't think these are necessarily examples. I think they first describe the general atmosphere, and then add some specific cases, not necessarily related to it.
There is plenty happening in Ireland. And just look at the lovely corruption scandals in Czech Republic, that have certainly been going on for most of last year, with illegal wiretaps, hitmen hired, blackmail, and all sorts of appropriate decorations of such sort. Somehow all that didn't result in suppression of press.
What's more, there are plenty of sililarly insignificant countries with pretty much the same things happenning (or not happening) much lower on the list.
I think that tells you something about the status of press in these various countries. It is not necessarily just about how much do the governments respect the press. It's more about the respect press has in the various societies and cultures.
On the other hand, in some large countries that are very involved in world events, the offenses quoted by the article are nearly exclusively perpetrated by the governments.
Gnash should do it. It can run as a standalone application, rather than a browser plugin. You would then view flash content the same way you view images in lynx.
Look around, there are bunch of libraries that generate pdf. As far as applications go, every decent desktop publishing software will generate pdf. Without that it would be pretty much useless, as pdf is de facto standard format in printing industry. As far as tex goes, if you are still typsetting to PostScript and converting to pdf, you are missing a bunch of features. Pdftex can generate pdf directly, and includes bunch of nice features that the original tex engine lacks. For graphics, there are bunch of interactive graphics softwares that save to pdf, and there are several vector graphics scripting languages that can generate pdf (asymptote, metapost (via mptopdf), pyx, ...).
Postscript is way too flexible, it is a freaking programming language, but pdf is in my oppinion just right. I don't agree with this "if it is xml, it is automatically portable, editable, etc." mindset. Xml could easilly be much less portable and much harder to edit than pdf.
Ehm, pdf already supports full alpha transparency and gradients. Postscript doesn't but pdf does.
If MS really does open the standard, I think it will be good, because it will force Adobe to actually compete in the market. Maybe they will actually make Adobe reader work faster, and stop crippling some of its features in an attempt to make you buy Acrobat Pro.
A lot of people I talk to regard PDF as an 'open' standard when the only part that's free is the ability to decode it--not encode it.
Not true. PDF is a true open standard, you are free to create software that both decode and encode PDF files. There are number of projects that create PDF files, for example pdftex, that has been around for a while.
There are couple of hooks Adobe has attached to PDF, though. For example, Adobe Reader is actually capable of modifying PDF files, adding comments and annotation, and even "drawing" on a pdf file. However, this feature is disabled by default, and is only enabled for files that has been created, encrypted and digitally signed by Acrobat Proffesional edition, which carries pretty hefty pricetag. What it means is this: I can create a pdf file with pdftex. Now I want to send it to several people to proofread. It would be great if they could add comments and annotations directly to the document, and send me the document back. They can do it using Acrobat, but some of them don't have Acrobat. Now the "funny" part: they could actually do it using Reader, too, Reader has the capability, but first I would have to load the file into Acrobat Professional edition and specifically enable commenting for that document. Because in order for this to work, the document has to be digitally signed by Acrobat Pro, there is simply no other way around it. That's why I consider Reader a crippleware.
False. If I am the sole copyright holder of a work, I may choose to release it under any license I like. However, I cannot stop people from updating my previous GPLed versions to match the new versions. For example, In The Groove is a derivative of the GPLed StepMania project, but it is closed source because permission was obtained from all the StepMania copyright holders.
That does not contradict my claim.
1) Indeed, if you are sole copyright holder, you can release your work under any license you want[1], but if you release something as GPL, you cannot retroactively revoke the license. Once it's GPLed, it's out and you cannot bring it back. Even if you later release the same code under different license, the GPLed version is still out and people can use it to create their own derivative works under GPL.
2) Indeed, but the original GPLed version of StepMania is still available under GPL. You cannot retroactively revoke the GPL.
[1] That's not actually true. Even linking your copyrighted work to a GPLed library will force you to use GPL for your work.