It's a really bad idea to book a slashdertisement for two reasons. Firstly, no-one will really read the article, they'll just skip to the comments to have the people who pretend to have read it summarize it for them. Secondly the most vocal people in the comments section will be those who have been pissed off by the company / product / service and see an opportunity to finally have their revenge.
Happy enough with that price, but never buy food / drinks there, mostly due to disgusting quality of the food and drinks. Also would be more inclined to go if the Odeon gave up trying to make us sit in allocated seats.
Nobody who doesn't understand the basics of trigonometry should be teaching mathematics. I can't believe there are many maths teachers who don't. (At least here in the UK. I'm not familiar with US schools). Not having the time, or having too large a class is a common problem, but surely not a lack of knowledge in the subject.
Yes, you do need to understand the fundamentals before you can build on them, of course. Difficulty in teaching something is a slightly different argument to whether it should be taught. I happen to think that almost any child can learn basic trigonometry, however, so tend not to think difficulty is a factor in whether or not to teach it.
Regarding re-doing the maths at university. Again I can't comment on US further education, but I'd be pretty disturbed if someone doing maths, physics or statistics was being taught basic to mid-level trigonometry. It should be safe to assume that someone who has made it onto that course has studied and understood this already. Perhaps a refresher on cot^2@ + 1 = cosec^2@ for the non-maths students, but not basic trig! Is this not the case there?
I fully agree with Statistics being useful maths and I personally think cutting through Government lies should be a part of that module. But I don't agree that it needs to be either / or. Trigonometry has value even in just being able to learn it, as well as in having that knowledge afterwards. Nor is it difficult. Almost any child or adult can learn it if they want.
There is an increasing educational division in society - people who regard maths, or science or technology or politics or law as a foreign field that they are incapable of understanding or being a part of. That needs to be fought against because the consequence of this is a society of people who are helpless to understand their environment, monitor those who do work in these fields, or see useful synergies between different fields.
We've managed to teach trigonometry in schools so far and I think this is not the time to be saying it's too hard to teach and give up. I repeat my point from earlier: Trigonometry is the basis for much further learning from physics to economics to construction. Unless you can find me a 14-15 year old who knows for certain that he will never want to go further in these fields or do work relating to these fields, then it is our duty of care to children to insure that they have the freedom to go on and do anything they choose. Cut out trigonometry at high-school level and you will be mutilating your country's future development in science and technology. I'm pretty certain giving up on Trig as too hard will not cause a corresponding rise in other areas of learning. Lowering standards doesn't work that way. You just end up with a lower overall level of learning.
Wow! It's good to be reminded how much I don't know sometimes.
If I could just work out how it would be possible to just keep on studying until I'm thirty, without all this work stuff, then things would be so much more interesting.
Hey! I had a really similar occurence at a place where I was doing a short contract and a man in the graphics department was doing a flash animation of a helicopter. He came and asked me if I could give him some sort of formula for how the speed of the rotor would vary in his animation (side view). A nice little Sine wave formed the basis of it.
I was the C++ programmer on a primarily VB 6.0 project, so people tended to ask come to me with these sorts of problems.:)
by the time you finish a high school trig class those fundamentals have been crowded out by all the rest of the bullshit.
Crowded out? The average child can master not only trigonometry but much more. No additional knowledge is going to push out previously existing knowledge.
You might make the case that time pressure reduces the available learning time for cementing these basics, but I've also found that building on these foundations likewise helps deepen the understanding of them.
It shouldn't a problem for a child (or an adult) to learn more advanced trigonometry. Standards are very low in the UK and the USA. Everyone should have the opportunity to make the most out of their lives and for many paths in life, a good knowledge of mathematics is a prerequistie. Unless you trust 14-15 year olds to know for certain what they will want to do when they are adults, then it's best to help them keep their options open by giving them a grounding in as much as possible.
If you're good at basketball, you can pretty much only use that skill to play basketball.
Well, I'm not going to sell mathematics short (I'm the OP temp-maths teacher who started this), but if you're genuinely you apply yourself to basketball, then you will indeed see big gains in other areas, general fitness, co-ordination, attractiveness and reaction times; and a general improvement in feeling good.
Really getting good at anything will have positive knock on effects in other areas of your life. Just as really applying yourself to mathematics will not only teach you something interesting, but help you think in a logical, deductive fashion when needed and improve your ability to concentrate.
But defense of basketball aside, a strong ability with mathematics is likely to open more doors for you than basketball as well as lay a foundation for further studies in areas ranging from physics to economics to *ahem* teaching.
Could you give a bit more detail, please? That's a new one on me, and it could be a useful addition to the list. Plus, I'd be fascinated to know how, anyway.
I did a stint as a Maths teacher, and it was hard enough trying to convince the kids that it was worth learning Trigonometry then. They'll be even more determined to be ignorant if they hear of this.
The thing is, even all those cheap computers you see, come with only 256 MB of shared ram, and integrated video
Computers easily meet the requirements of most users these days. Damn Small Linux distributions come in 50MB and can run on a Pentium 1 if need be. For that, you get email, web-browser, word-processor and a variety of tools, including wireless connectivity. What's missing in a set-up like that? High-powered graphics, basically.
We've already reached the stage where there is no further need to upgrade hardware for most users, especially for office workers. Home users could make up the shortfall with consoles and media centres. For this reason alone, Microsoft could loose the business market. The moment Western society has an economic problem and people take a good look at what they actually need, the hardware market is going to shift its emphasis from latest and greatest to cheap and good enough.
I think I've suffered slight hearing damage from too much time in nightclubs where the volume was way high.
However, I never listen to portable music, not for the risk of hearing damage, but because it lowers concentration levels, I think. I spend most of my day thinking quite deeply about various things, and a constant soundtrack in the background interferes with that. Plus it's anti-social as it cuts out any interaction with people you don't know who might otherwise say "hello," along with all the little social lubricants, like thanks, sorry and jokes.
I just come from a time and place where being objective and modest about your own trade or art speaks far stronger than unmodest self-PR work.
Having read the entire interview, I found nothing in it that made me think of Hans Reiser as engaged in unmodest self-PR work. Contrary to the tiny snippet you quoted, he doesn't slate WinFS. He says that it is doing interesting work. Nor is it particularly immodest to say that his file system is considerably more mature when he's spent almost 10 years more on it than the other.
Reading the article, the parts that you consider immodest seem to me, to be just sincere enthusiasm for his work. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Contrary to the title being "no one cares", I think the replies so far show that people do.:)
Oh, agreed. My point was that the difference in perception allowed the government to get away with more in the way of smashing civil rights, not that there was a greater need to do so from the security angle. This is fear of "outsiders" is probably no more of a factor in this than the integration of modern technology into our lives as you pointed out, but the current UK government will use anything to further its goal.
That last story about the song - it was only banned by the BBC (best thing that can happen to a musician by the way). You couldn't actually be arrested for it. But having said that, I can well believe that police would pick up a kid and hassle him for it at the time.
Even if Bin Laden were motivated by something other than forcing a US withdrawal in the Mid East (something I'm not for certain allowing), do you think he would have so readily found followers, resources and even a population willing to turn a blind eye to the growing fundamentalist faction amongst them, if that population had not been the victim of US imperialism first?
Bin Laden might have been a rich and persuasive individual, but he nevertheless needed a society that was tolerant of his ideaology to be successful. If Saudi were a democracy, happily trading with Western countries on a fair basis, you can be sure that a proto-Bin Laden would have been much more likely to have gone nowhere.
An important difference is that for many Britons, muslims are more of an "outside" enemy - a foreign culture, with foreign values from foreign places.
I'm not saying everything was lovely and brotherly, it was far from that; but the English looked at the Irish and saw people who looked the same, drank the same and spoke the same language (well, close).
It's much easier to demonise a people when they're understood less. I think this lends itself to the craving for "security measures" amongst MPs who tend to be wealthy and establishment probably don't have many Pakistani neighbours.
You're quoting a man who introduced laws restricting the reporting of the press and outlawed disloyal talk.
Not that I disagree with what you've quoted however. I just think that if you know how Pitt developed later in his political life, it provides a nice example of how you should value what is said over who has said it.
The article actually says that it's due out next Christmas, though I was also under the impression that it was 2006/7.
Even then, the specifications are obscene. If I can render a GUI with a 800MHz CPU and 128MB RAM total, then how the Hell do they claim a need for 256MB solely for graphics? And a recommended 2GB in general. That's obscene.
Time to play up Linux's potential for running on low-power systems.
What do you mean, "no longer?" I remember the software market of 10 or 20 years ago as very heavily populated by a whole lot of small companies.
Small is a relative term - we have now got to the level where software is written by individuals - different to what you are talking about and that makes a difference because the motivation need no longer be profit, and because the only restriction on reproducing software is the requirement to pay the producer, then non-profit becomes pervasive.
By the way, software patents in the US only became generally accepted in the mid-eighties. The market has changed greately since the times you are talking about. There still are many, many small software companies, but they rely on copyright. The big players have the real patent arsenals.
Show me an instance where a patent was asserted against a person. Go ahead - I'll wait.
I said people, as in everyone. This includes small companies which are, of course, the first thing someone forms when they have a piece of software they want to sell. However, if nothing is done to head it off, we will see patent attacks on Linux soon, as one example of patent attacks on open-source software. There is general confusion between copyright and patents in this thread. As I have made very clear, I am talking about patents.
What you do for your own purposes with a copy of Visual Studio is largely irrelevant to patentees, unless you turn the result into some kind of product.
They're the people I've been talking about - the ones who release their code. That was clear. You can say the secret, isolationist coder is safe if you like - doesn't make it fair that those who work together are not.
The purpose of my analogy had nothing to do with the physicality of the auto vs. the intangibility of the software. That is irrelevant.
Hardly - the reproducibility of software is key to the fact that it can be created by people for themselves. This is because software is complex and needs group effort. The correct analogy for software is knowledge - it can be shared without loss to the sharer and it can be expanded on without starting from scratch. The only way your windscreen analogy would be accurate would be for you to have developed it without building on any previous technologies - a tall order. If you want sole ownership of your software, then do it without building on anyone elses.
My point was that you can choose between two product models. One product costs more up front, but does everything you might want to do with it (within reason.) The other is free, but every time you want to adapt it to a new use, you have to pay someone to customize it for you.
This bears no resemblence to the software world I know. All the commercial projects I have worked on continued to release updates. Far more than free software, the commercial model depends on continuing to sell newer versions of their software, or else periodic licencing fees, or else both. Any other scenario and you'll kill your income very quickly as a business.
As to the cusomising - my whole point is that we have now reached the point where people do it themselves. If the only reason not to, is a legal penalty, then the sole effect of the law is to enforce a dependence on the "owners" of the software.
Commercial software cannot compete with free software of equal or better quality. We have now reached the stage where people can manage this quality themselves. Copyright enables you to write and sell your software as you want. Patents enable you to stop someone else trying to improve on it. The latter is bad for humanity.
The simple fact of the matter is that technology, the availability of it, and the education necessary to use it has reached the point where it is no longer the preserve of big companies with heavy R&D budgets. All the big companies are doing with their patent efforts are trying to force people to depend on them for things they can produce themself.
All this talk of cars is meaningless and misleading. If a few hundred engineers get together to build one, then only one of them can drive away, but a few hundred get together and write an OS, or a web-browser, and everyone gets a copy.
So what if we have reached the stage where people can produce sophisticated software as a pasttime? The choice is for us to reach that stage at some point or never to reach it. If the only way we can deal with that is legislation to prevent it, then I guess that's about as far as mankind can go.
And remember that every bit of money saved through Open Source has to resurface somewhere else. Maybe you'll be one of the people hired with that money on something else, or maybe you'll be the shop-owner who sells products to people spending that saved money, or maybe, just maybe, I'll finally see mankind shift to a three day working week at last.
The windshield is a bad analogy. I don't agree that an analogy is needed at all here.
The new licence does not say that you cannot charge for your work. It is designed to be incompatible with Patents and DRM. This is distinct to copyright.
Much copyrighted software, written for profit and sold for profit, is developed using GPL components. This is not illegal.
Currently, software patents are invalid in Europe and other parts of the world. This has not prevented people earning a living writing code. You could make a strong argument that it actually helps.
DRM is a seperate issue. DRM is a tool that could be used positively, but with the current balance of power, is going to be used to the detriment of most people.
In using the GPL as a weapon against patents and DRM, the factions are going to divide into more extreme camps, but it's a misunderstanding of the amendments to GPL to confuse Patents with Copyright and to think it bars employment.
Cracking it on the first attempt and cracking it on the 10^50th attempt have equal probabilities.
True, but both probabilities are minute. The median of that range is 5*10^49 meaning that's the average number of tries you need. If you got lucky and found it in the first 10%, that's 10^49. If someone wanting to spy on you can muster the resources to crack that in a human lifetime, you've made an enemy of God!
Quantum computing opens up some interesting possibilities, but if a hypothetical Quantum computer in the year 2015 could search 1x10^23 keys per second (more than that massive distributed Internet project a while ago), it would still take millions of years on average.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a really bad idea to book a slashdertisement for two reasons. Firstly, no-one will really read the article, they'll just skip to the comments to have the people who pretend to have read it summarize it for them. Secondly the most vocal people in the comments section will be those who have been pissed off by the company / product / service and see an opportunity to finally have their revenge.
Still, it's a business model I suppose.
UK South, £5-6. (US$9-11)
Happy enough with that price, but never buy food / drinks there, mostly due to disgusting quality of the food and drinks. Also would be more inclined to go if the Odeon gave up trying to make us sit in allocated seats.
Plays OGG? About bloody time. Jens MP3 players to people for Christmas, then.
and the teacher
Nobody who doesn't understand the basics of trigonometry should be teaching mathematics. I can't believe there are many maths teachers who don't. (At least here in the UK. I'm not familiar with US schools). Not having the time, or having too large a class is a common problem, but surely not a lack of knowledge in the subject.
Yes, you do need to understand the fundamentals before you can build on them, of course. Difficulty in teaching something is a slightly different argument to whether it should be taught. I happen to think that almost any child can learn basic trigonometry, however, so tend not to think difficulty is a factor in whether or not to teach it.
Regarding re-doing the maths at university. Again I can't comment on US further education, but I'd be pretty disturbed if someone doing maths, physics or statistics was being taught basic to mid-level trigonometry. It should be safe to assume that someone who has made it onto that course has studied and understood this already. Perhaps a refresher on cot^2@ + 1 = cosec^2@ for the non-maths students, but not basic trig! Is this not the case there?
I fully agree with Statistics being useful maths and I personally think cutting through Government lies should be a part of that module. But I don't agree that it needs to be either / or. Trigonometry has value even in just being able to learn it, as well as in having that knowledge afterwards. Nor is it difficult. Almost any child or adult can learn it if they want.
There is an increasing educational division in society - people who regard maths, or science or technology or politics or law as a foreign field that they are incapable of understanding or being a part of. That needs to be fought against because the consequence of this is a society of people who are helpless to understand their environment, monitor those who do work in these fields, or see useful synergies between different fields.
We've managed to teach trigonometry in schools so far and I think this is not the time to be saying it's too hard to teach and give up. I repeat my point from earlier: Trigonometry is the basis for much further learning from physics to economics to construction. Unless you can find me a 14-15 year old who knows for certain that he will never want to go further in these fields or do work relating to these fields, then it is our duty of care to children to insure that they have the freedom to go on and do anything they choose. Cut out trigonometry at high-school level and you will be mutilating your country's future development in science and technology. I'm pretty certain giving up on Trig as too hard will not cause a corresponding rise in other areas of learning. Lowering standards doesn't work that way. You just end up with a lower overall level of learning.
Wow! It's good to be reminded how much I don't know sometimes.
If I could just work out how it would be possible to just keep on studying until I'm thirty, without all this work stuff, then things would be so much more interesting.
Hey! I had a really similar occurence at a place where I was doing a short contract and a man in the graphics department was doing a flash animation of a helicopter. He came and asked me if I could give him some sort of formula for how the speed of the rotor would vary in his animation (side view). A nice little Sine wave formed the basis of it.
I was the C++ programmer on a primarily VB 6.0 project, so people tended to ask come to me with these sorts of problems.
by the time you finish a high school trig class those fundamentals have been crowded out by all the rest of the bullshit.
Crowded out? The average child can master not only trigonometry but much more. No additional knowledge is going to push out previously existing knowledge.
You might make the case that time pressure reduces the available learning time for cementing these basics, but I've also found that building on these foundations likewise helps deepen the understanding of them.
It shouldn't a problem for a child (or an adult) to learn more advanced trigonometry. Standards are very low in the UK and the USA. Everyone should have the opportunity to make the most out of their lives and for many paths in life, a good knowledge of mathematics is a prerequistie. Unless you trust 14-15 year olds to know for certain what they will want to do when they are adults, then it's best to help them keep their options open by giving them a grounding in as much as possible.
If you're good at basketball, you can pretty much only use that skill to play basketball.
Well, I'm not going to sell mathematics short (I'm the OP temp-maths teacher who started this), but if you're genuinely you apply yourself to basketball, then you will indeed see big gains in other areas, general fitness, co-ordination, attractiveness and reaction times; and a general improvement in feeling good.
Really getting good at anything will have positive knock on effects in other areas of your life. Just as really applying yourself to mathematics will not only teach you something interesting, but help you think in a logical, deductive fashion when needed and improve your ability to concentrate.
But defense of basketball aside, a strong ability with mathematics is likely to open more doors for you than basketball as well as lay a foundation for further studies in areas ranging from physics to economics to *ahem* teaching.
Could you give a bit more detail, please? That's a new one on me, and it could be a useful addition to the list. Plus, I'd be fascinated to know how, anyway.
I did a stint as a Maths teacher, and it was hard enough trying to convince the kids that it was worth learning Trigonometry then. They'll be even more determined to be ignorant if they hear of this.
Must resist! Too... easy...
The thing is, even all those cheap computers you see, come with only 256 MB of shared ram, and integrated video
Computers easily meet the requirements of most users these days. Damn Small Linux distributions come in 50MB and can run on a Pentium 1 if need be. For that, you get email, web-browser, word-processor and a variety of tools, including wireless connectivity. What's missing in a set-up like that? High-powered graphics, basically.
We've already reached the stage where there is no further need to upgrade hardware for most users, especially for office workers. Home users could make up the shortfall with consoles and media centres. For this reason alone, Microsoft could loose the business market. The moment Western society has an economic problem and people take a good look at what they actually need, the hardware market is going to shift its emphasis from latest and greatest to cheap and good enough.
I think I've suffered slight hearing damage from too much time in nightclubs where the volume was way high.
However, I never listen to portable music, not for the risk of hearing damage, but because it lowers concentration levels, I think. I spend most of my day thinking quite deeply about various things, and a constant soundtrack in the background interferes with that. Plus it's anti-social as it cuts out any interaction with people you don't know who might otherwise say "hello," along with all the little social lubricants, like thanks, sorry and jokes.
I just come from a time and place where being objective and modest about your own trade or art speaks far stronger than unmodest self-PR work.
Having read the entire interview, I found nothing in it that made me think of Hans Reiser as engaged in unmodest self-PR work. Contrary to the tiny snippet you quoted, he doesn't slate WinFS. He says that it is doing interesting work. Nor is it particularly immodest to say that his file system is considerably more mature when he's spent almost 10 years more on it than the other.
Reading the article, the parts that you consider immodest seem to me, to be just sincere enthusiasm for his work. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Contrary to the title being "no one cares", I think the replies so far show that people do.
Oh, agreed. My point was that the difference in perception allowed the government to get away with more in the way of smashing civil rights, not that there was a greater need to do so from the security angle. This is fear of "outsiders" is probably no more of a factor in this than the integration of modern technology into our lives as you pointed out, but the current UK government will use anything to further its goal.
That last story about the song - it was only banned by the BBC (best thing that can happen to a musician by the way). You couldn't actually be arrested for it. But having said that, I can well believe that police would pick up a kid and hassle him for it at the time.
Even if Bin Laden were motivated by something other than forcing a US withdrawal in the Mid East (something I'm not for certain allowing), do you think he would have so readily found followers, resources and even a population willing to turn a blind eye to the growing fundamentalist faction amongst them, if that population had not been the victim of US imperialism first?
Bin Laden might have been a rich and persuasive individual, but he nevertheless needed a society that was tolerant of his ideaology to be successful. If Saudi were a democracy, happily trading with Western countries on a fair basis, you can be sure that a proto-Bin Laden would have been much more likely to have gone nowhere.
Bad analogy - voting does not result in broken bones, ragged skin and blood poueing from your hands.
I agree with the GP - don't vote for the lesser of two evils, vote against the two party system by choosing an outsider.
An important difference is that for many Britons, muslims are more of an "outside" enemy - a foreign culture, with foreign values from foreign places.
I'm not saying everything was lovely and brotherly, it was far from that; but the English looked at the Irish and saw people who looked the same, drank the same and spoke the same language (well, close).
It's much easier to demonise a people when they're understood less. I think this lends itself to the craving for "security measures" amongst MPs who tend to be wealthy and establishment probably don't have many Pakistani neighbours.
You're quoting a man who introduced laws restricting the reporting of the press and outlawed disloyal talk.
Not that I disagree with what you've quoted however. I just think that if you know how Pitt developed later in his political life, it provides a nice example of how you should value what is said over who has said it.
The article actually says that it's due out next Christmas, though I was also under the impression that it was 2006/7.
Even then, the specifications are obscene. If I can render a GUI with a 800MHz CPU and 128MB RAM total, then how the Hell do they claim a need for 256MB solely for graphics? And a recommended 2GB in general. That's obscene.
Time to play up Linux's potential for running on low-power systems.
What do you mean, "no longer?" I remember the software market of 10 or 20 years ago as very heavily populated by a whole lot of small companies.
Small is a relative term - we have now got to the level where software is written by individuals - different to what you are talking about and that makes a difference because the motivation need no longer be profit, and because the only restriction on reproducing software is the requirement to pay the producer, then non-profit becomes pervasive.
By the way, software patents in the US only became generally accepted in the mid-eighties. The market has changed greately since the times you are talking about. There still are many, many small software companies, but they rely on copyright. The big players have the real patent arsenals.
Show me an instance where a patent was asserted against a person. Go ahead - I'll wait.
I said people, as in everyone. This includes small companies which are, of course, the first thing someone forms when they have a piece of software they want to sell. However, if nothing is done to head it off, we will see patent attacks on Linux soon, as one example of patent attacks on open-source software. There is general confusion between copyright and patents in this thread. As I have made very clear, I am talking about patents.
What you do for your own purposes with a copy of Visual Studio is largely irrelevant to patentees, unless you turn the result into some kind of product.
They're the people I've been talking about - the ones who release their code. That was clear. You can say the secret, isolationist coder is safe if you like - doesn't make it fair that those who work together are not.
The purpose of my analogy had nothing to do with the physicality of the auto vs. the intangibility of the software. That is irrelevant.
Hardly - the reproducibility of software is key to the fact that it can be created by people for themselves. This is because software is complex and needs group effort. The correct analogy for software is knowledge - it can be shared without loss to the sharer and it can be expanded on without starting from scratch. The only way your windscreen analogy would be accurate would be for you to have developed it without building on any previous technologies - a tall order. If you want sole ownership of your software, then do it without building on anyone elses.
My point was that you can choose between two product models. One product costs more up front, but does everything you might want to do with it (within reason.) The other is free, but every time you want to adapt it to a new use, you have to pay someone to customize it for you.
This bears no resemblence to the software world I know. All the commercial projects I have worked on continued to release updates. Far more than free software, the commercial model depends on continuing to sell newer versions of their software, or else periodic licencing fees, or else both. Any other scenario and you'll kill your income very quickly as a business.
As to the cusomising - my whole point is that we have now reached the point where people do it themselves. If the only reason not to, is a legal penalty, then the sole effect of the law is to enforce a dependence on the "owners" of the software.
Commercial software cannot compete with free software of equal or better quality. We have now reached the stage where people can manage this quality themselves. Copyright enables you to write and sell your software as you want. Patents enable you to stop someone else trying to improve on it. The latter is bad for humanity.
The simple fact of the matter is that technology, the availability of it, and the education necessary to use it has reached the point where it is no longer the preserve of big companies with heavy R&D budgets. All the big companies are doing with their patent efforts are trying to force people to depend on them for things they can produce themself.
All this talk of cars is meaningless and misleading. If a few hundred engineers get together to build one, then only one of them can drive away, but a few hundred get together and write an OS, or a web-browser, and everyone gets a copy.
So what if we have reached the stage where people can produce sophisticated software as a pasttime? The choice is for us to reach that stage at some point or never to reach it. If the only way we can deal with that is legislation to prevent it, then I guess that's about as far as mankind can go.
And remember that every bit of money saved through Open Source has to resurface somewhere else. Maybe you'll be one of the people hired with that money on something else, or maybe you'll be the shop-owner who sells products to people spending that saved money, or maybe, just maybe, I'll finally see mankind shift to a three day working week at last.
The windshield is a bad analogy. I don't agree that an analogy is needed at all here.
The new licence does not say that you cannot charge for your work. It is designed to be incompatible with Patents and DRM. This is distinct to copyright.
Much copyrighted software, written for profit and sold for profit, is developed using GPL components. This is not illegal.
Currently, software patents are invalid in Europe and other parts of the world. This has not prevented people earning a living writing code. You could make a strong argument that it actually helps.
DRM is a seperate issue. DRM is a tool that could be used positively, but with the current balance of power, is going to be used to the detriment of most people.
In using the GPL as a weapon against patents and DRM, the factions are going to divide into more extreme camps, but it's a misunderstanding of the amendments to GPL to confuse Patents with Copyright and to think it bars employment.
What's wrong with the existing html, anyway?
It could be better. Do we need another reason?
Cracking it on the first attempt and cracking it on the 10^50th attempt have equal probabilities.
True, but both probabilities are minute. The median of that range is 5*10^49 meaning that's the average number of tries you need. If you got lucky and found it in the first 10%, that's 10^49. If someone wanting to spy on you can muster the resources to crack that in a human lifetime, you've made an enemy of God!
Quantum computing opens up some interesting possibilities, but if a hypothetical Quantum computer in the year 2015 could search 1x10^23 keys per second (more than that massive distributed Internet project a while ago), it would still take millions of years on average.
10^50 is a big number.