Why would they bother? IME they see "McAfee AntiVirus", think "Great, that saves me having to buy AV separately", and have become so inured to clicking "OK" or "Next" or "Cancel" until a window goes away that the AV software can flash up messages saying "You must pay to continue using!" until it's blue in the proverbial face, it won't achieve anything.
Ultimately, they all suffer the same problem. Trying to keep a PC secure by blocking every piece of software that isn't allowed to run and allowing anything else is Doing It Wrong.
You wouldn't set up a firewall and leave every port open except SMB and FTP, would you?
Of course, most modern operating systems don't exactly make this easy....
This probably goes some way to explaining why vendors so seldom include rescue media these days, and some are actually making it downright difficult to produce your own - over and above the "let's cut every damn cost to the bone and compete on price" attitude you see in the PC market.
Makes more sense not to make it easy if the worst-case scenario is the customer gets screwed and buys a new PC 18 months later.
Here in Portugal some companies are starting to do the same, and there was a politician that wrote an opinion piece where he said "surely no one is against this measure".
What your politician is trying to do is demonise drugs in the same way as terrorism and paedophilia - the next logical statement were you to publicly say "I'm against it" would be something along the lines of "You must be a drug-addled junkie" or "Are you in favour of more drug addicts in our society?".
Seriously, a person could (hypothetically at least) get a license, get all the paperwork agreed by the state and still wind up in prison? What's the point in the state issuing such licenses then? And who's going to line up to be the first test case? Don't all rush at once....
That's not stupid, that's institutionalised insanity.
Let's face it, Dell is the Ryanair (or, if you're American, the Southwest Airlines) of server vendors. Anyone who's ordered a server from them knows the drill only too well.
You want a cheap server? No problem, sir.
Oh, you wanted hard disks with your server? They're an optional extra, sir. They cost more.
You wanted more than 512MB RAM? That'll be extra, sir.
You wanted a processor which wasn't discontinued 18 months ago yet somehow we've managed to find a whole warehouse full of the buggers? That'll be extra, Sir.
You want a 3 year warranty or are you happy with our standard 30 minute warranty? Three year warranty's extra, Sir.
You want to actually speak to a technician during the course of the three years? Or are you happy being routed to the office cheese plant? The technician's extra, Sir.
Now we know there's another question they'll ask.
You want a motherboard that hasn't been pre-infected with firmware level trojans? That'll be extra, Sir.
I agree, but I'd go further - and my comments apply equally to free and commercial software.
We're a small shop and part of my job is to keep on top of licensing. After doing this job for some years, I have reached an inevitable conclusion.
You are not supposed to get it 100% right. Indeed, you are being set up for failure.
While some licenses are fairly straightforward, enough of them are sufficiently complicated that it is wholly unrealistic to expect any organisation to be entirely perfect. Whether this is by accident or design I wouldn't like to say, but I am dead certain that there is no organisation on God's sweet earth that would come out of a BSA audit without at least something wrong.
I thought I'd made my point obvious enough, but clearly not.
Not only are Apple taking F/OSS, they're contributing back to the community - Webkit is the most well-known example, but there are plenty of others. There's nothing stopping you - or anyone - building their own OS on the Darwin core, and indeed at least one project which does just this exists:
You'll wind up with an OS which is essentially Mac OS X under the hood, it just won't have the shiny UI. (Whether or not there is any point in OS X without the shiny UI is another issue altogether).
As I said, they don't open everything. Nor do Novell (ZenWorks isn't available in a F/OSS version, AFAIK) or IBM (DB/2 was still a proprietary product the last time I checked) yet you don't see people on/. decrying them because they haven't released every line of source as F/OSS.
I can only think of two counter-arguments to this:
1. You don't think this is enough. Everything should be open. Well, if the developers of projects from which Apple have taken code wanted every last bit to be and remain open, they'd have licensed it under the GPL. If you're a developer on such a project, the risk of someone taking your work, packaging it prettily and selling it was always there and you should have accepted that before you started. If you're not, what on Earth does it have to do with you?
Mandatory car analogy? Try pulling out an airbag system or modding it.
(For those not already aware, an airbag unit is basically a bomb. Don’t fuck with it.)
That's not because the manufacturer doesn't want you fucking with it, it's because a small controlled explosive charge is the quickest way to open up the airbag and in an accident they've only got a few fractions of a second to play with.
It's not as if there's no precedent for this. There's a certain operating system based upon open source components from Mach, FreeBSD, GNU, and KDE, which is somewhat infamous for being closed. At least you can load and run your own programs onto the Droid X, even if you can't update the operating system to your own version.
Except large chunks of OS X (and hence iOS) are F/OSS, remain F/OSS and are distributed from a website under Apple's control.
Granted, they don't provide a complete stack from which you can put together your own OS based on OS X from scratch and run it on your own hardware - nor does the iPhone come as a piece of hardware which makes it easy to run some other OS on, but they can hardly be described as "infamously closed".
I'm under the impression that the Droid X is intended for the business market, to try to take a bite out of RIM's market share. This sounds like an attempt to make the phone more "secure" by preventing people from getting at the data by rooting the phone. Not that it's necessarily the best way, but thats just my 2 cents.
Or they could have done what RIM et al have - which is to encrypt the data on the phone itself and when remotely instructed to selfdestruct, wipe the key.
The use of open source software, such as the Linux kernel or the Android platform, in a consumer device does not require the handset running such software to be open for re-flashing. We comply with the licenses, including GPLv2, for each of the open source packages in our handsets.
(my emphasis)
This is exactly the sort of thing GPLv3 was intended to circumvent. Whether that's because the FSF foresaw a future where there were so many locked down devices that most people simply wouldn't buy a general purpose PC any more or because they simply thought it was a bit disingenuous to provide source but no way of running the compiled code is another matter altogether.
Most proprietary IT companies have started to - if not openly embrace - at least accept and try to work with F/OSS (both in communities and with sponsored products).
Some have been quicker than others; some have taken it more seriously than others. Some have quite obviously put up with F/OSS under protest rather than actively encouraging it.
Oracle, I would say, at least before they acquired Sun, has definitely been in the "not taking entirely seriously" camp. A traditional proprietary vendor, who consider anything free (either speech or beer) to be a toy, something the kiddies can play with and then when they grow up they can start using the Super Enterprise Product. So not only is this not a surprise, I'd say it's almost expected. Frankly, there are projects which I'm far more concerned about - MySQL and OpenOffice immediately spring to mind.
Brake lights are controlled by a simple switch in the brake assembly. Regardless of how much TOyota may have jacked up the throttle system I doubt they were able to screw that up too. Sounds like most these idiots are too stupid to own a car
FWIW, I agree entirely.
Ms. Marseille sticks by her story. "It makes me very angry when someone tells me, 'She probably hit the gas pedal instead,' because I think it's a sexist comment, an ageist comment," she said.
No, Ms. Marseille, it's an idiot-ist comment. And the last time I checked, there was neither law nor social taboo against making idiot-ist comments.
I don't see how that's drastically different from CentOS.
Sure, you can use the free version of a "popular mainstream distro" (as the CentOS project describes it) but enough people are prepared to pay for support that CentOS hasn't yet driven RedHat out of business.
Computing as a field is rife with spectacularly good examples of where solutions keep on being developed without any consideration of how they're going to solve a problem - or indeed if there is a problem, or if the problem lends itself to being solved with a computer.
I can't help but feel this is similar. I'm sure I remember hearing about studies years ago when they first started putting computers in classrooms - if you just put the computer in the classroom it was a distraction, but if you invested in appropriate software and built structured lessons around it it was a very capable tool.
Let's see what this requires in order to be successful (In this case, I'll define success as: "is widely exchangeable for goods, services and other currencies"):
Massive social change. People need to be prepared to buy and sell real goods using a transaction method that is in no way related to what they already know and trust, viz. the money in their own bank account. If this social change can't be brought about quickly, then it either needs the backing of a major, trusted institution which can see major long-term benefits to operate it until it is or it needs to be a worthwhile investment for a major, trusted institution almost from day 1. (Think credit cards)
Unbreakable - or at least so expensive to break that it'll never be worth it. And I don't just mean that in the theoretical sense, I mean it in the sense of "despite repeated, regular attacks by well-funded organisations over a long period of time, has not been broken so badly as to render it worthless". Most existing financial mechanisms have some mechanism to update them without screwing over existing legitimate holders in the event of this happening - paper currencies are re-issued in a new design, online verification has dealt with the issue for credit/debit cards.
Easy for the layman to use and understand. Cash is easy to use and understand because ATEOTD it's not conceptually different to the idea of the idea of trading that kids have been taught for centuries: "I have ten beans and can exchange some of them for some bread". Come on, "generated in fixed amounts according to number of CPU cycles required"?
Clear benefits to all - not just the inventor. What's the problem with any generally accepted currency that A: this solves and B: cannot be solved for existing currencies? I guarantee you if there was any sign of there being significant benefit to a micropayment model, the world's payment clearing houses would develop suitable charging schemes almost overnight. Maybe a fixed fee per thousand transactions below a certain threshold or something like that.
In the current situation with the us dollar (world's "reserve currency", lol) being backed in this manner by thin air, there is nothing to stop the government simply creating more to get themselves out of debt (inflation) thus reducing the value of goods your single dollar can buy (what you SEE as inflation).
This has actually happened - a number of currencies have pegged themselves to the US dollar in exactly this manner in the past and found themselves up the creek without a paddle when the US dollar has been devalued. In the UK, our reaction was to very quickly decouple the £ sterling from the US$ and today the £ sterling is effectively another fiat currency standing on its own.
this fiaSCO has been running on for nearly 8 years - what the hell is up with the courts that they keep this bullshit alive. Kill -9 all | sort >/dev/null
Simple. A similar scenario has played out in many countries over the years, so I'm going to keep this fairly generic.
Go back in time a few centuries, you'll find systems of justice with relatively few avenues of appeal and sentences that were far more likely to kill you - even if that wasn't the intention. Medieval prisons were not nice places. It wouldn't have taken long for it to become apparent that there had been instances where people had been punished unjustly, and there clearly needed to be a way of dealing with such cases. So you have some sort of appeals mechanism to deal with it.
Okay, so now you have your basic court and your court of appeal. Except as time goes by, laws get more complicated and there's more room for error. So you wind up separating the basic court into two or more types of court, and where your case winds up depends on a number of things such as how complicated it is and how serious it is.
Then up comes a situation where somebody gets punished for doing something - except it's not entirely clear they did anything wrong in the first place. Turns out that the law they're alleged to have broken isn't particularly clear in their case, and none of the existing courts are happy with having to somehow interpret it to fit the case. However, interpret it they must - and it's inevitable that whichever way it gets interpreted, someone's going to be unhappy. So now you have a reason to develop an even higher court - one where justice is administered by the best legal brains in the land, men (and latterly women) who were probably involved in drafting the law in the first place and know damn well what it was intended to achieve. They may only hear a handful of cases a year.
Then different countries, states or whatever decide that there are real benefits to working together as one. In the US, this resulted in the United States of America. In Europe, we have the EU. In order for this to work, every member state agrees - that for some issues at least - their law will be subservient to that of the group they're a member of. Which means that (in some cases) there's now another avenue of appeal.
Now, open any dozen books that are 50,000 words in length. Search for strings that are duplicated between the books. Entire sentences, or phrases, it hardly matters. Just do the search. Anyone who is used to playing with databases can probably search those dozen books, and find numerous instances of phrases that were copy/pasted from one author's book to another. In fact, I'll bet that technical and factual books will have a higher incidence of matching phrases and sentences than works of fiction - but fiction will have it's share as well.
Actually, that's not true. There is some evidence to suggest you only need a remarkably short string of words to uniquely identify a piece of English prose - it's this kind of thing that cheating-detection algorithms rely on.
But we're talking about a structured programming language - with far more structure and rules than the English language - and the things that are at issue are by and large implementations of existing standards. The final link in TFS is a comparison of ELF utility header files, FFS. They've got to look fairly similar or they won't be any use for dealing with ELF executables! Even then they're sufficiently different that it would probably have been easier to write from scratch than it would be to execute the "copy/paste/obfuscate" cycle that is being alleged.
I have one TV. Even in larger households, most people have only a handful of TVs.
It can be - and indeed is - converted with a cheap box (well, cheap relative to the cost of replacing the TV)
Radios - let's see. I've got the one built into my receiver, I've got one in my car, I've got one on my bedside, one in a cheapie mini system, my wife has a portable radio/CD player, we've got a cheap battery-powered radio in the bathroom. None of these can be converted with a relatively cheap box, and most are in regular use.
The car one's mildly awkward because I'm not prepared to lose my steering-wheel remote controls. So that limits my choice, and I'm relatively lucky. On many newer cars you have to take much of the dash to bits to replace the radio.
The receiver is the central part of all my home audio - plugs into freeview box, DVD player and Wii and automagically switches between everything. I'm not even sure I've got any suitable inputs left on it - though if push comes to shove I can use the freeview box to hear the radio.
The one on the bedside is an alarm clock radio. Fantastically cheap, simple piece of equipment, all it needs to do (apart from the radio) is display a clock that's bright enough to read in the dark without being so bright as to disturb my sleep - however this seems to be too much to ask of many newer bedside clock/radios.
The bathroom radio needs to be battery powered for obvious reasons, and either damp-proof or cheap enough that I don't care too much.
Most of these radios spend all their lives tuned into the same one or two stations, and FM gives perfectly good reception. So the "more choice" and "better quality" arguments don't wash. You're asking me to spend a fair bit of cash in order to replace something that there really is nothing wrong with. And right now, the economy's in the shitter, I can't remember the last time I had a payrise and I'm not sure I'm in a particularly strong position to ask for one anyway.
I've posted a very similar idea as a thought experiment some time ago - an inexpensive, cheap to run 3D-photocopier that can create exact copies of any object.
The thing is, a large chunk of the world's economy is based on the idea that I have some sort of physical object that you want, and will give it to you in exchange for something, usually cash. If you think the RIAA kick up a stink whenever new technology comes along that makes distributing music easier, that's nothing to the kind of stink that'd be kicked up were such a device to be invented - I reckon you'd be lucky to avoid wearing concrete boots dropped off the side of a boat in the middle of the atlantic, along with your invention.
The counter-argument is that there would be no need for an economy because we'd all have everything we'd ever want - IMV that's rubbish because society doesn't change that quickly.
Seriously, look at the photographs. This thing has a 60m wingspan, is covered in cells, made of carbon fibre and weighs just 1.6 tons. It's fantastically light for its size - I shudder to think how much more efficient your solar cells would need to be to get even a small passenger airliner in the air.
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Why would they bother? IME they see "McAfee AntiVirus", think "Great, that saves me having to buy AV separately", and have become so inured to clicking "OK" or "Next" or "Cancel" until a window goes away that the AV software can flash up messages saying "You must pay to continue using!" until it's blue in the proverbial face, it won't achieve anything.
Ultimately, they all suffer the same problem. Trying to keep a PC secure by blocking every piece of software that isn't allowed to run and allowing anything else is Doing It Wrong.
You wouldn't set up a firewall and leave every port open except SMB and FTP, would you?
Of course, most modern operating systems don't exactly make this easy....
This probably goes some way to explaining why vendors so seldom include rescue media these days, and some are actually making it downright difficult to produce your own - over and above the "let's cut every damn cost to the bone and compete on price" attitude you see in the PC market.
Makes more sense not to make it easy if the worst-case scenario is the customer gets screwed and buys a new PC 18 months later.
Here in Portugal some companies are starting to do the same, and there was a politician that wrote an opinion piece where he said "surely no one is against this measure".
What your politician is trying to do is demonise drugs in the same way as terrorism and paedophilia - the next logical statement were you to publicly say "I'm against it" would be something along the lines of "You must be a drug-addled junkie" or "Are you in favour of more drug addicts in our society?".
Seriously, a person could (hypothetically at least) get a license, get all the paperwork agreed by the state and still wind up in prison? What's the point in the state issuing such licenses then? And who's going to line up to be the first test case? Don't all rush at once....
That's not stupid, that's institutionalised insanity.
Let's face it, Dell is the Ryanair (or, if you're American, the Southwest Airlines) of server vendors. Anyone who's ordered a server from them knows the drill only too well.
You want a cheap server? No problem, sir.
Oh, you wanted hard disks with your server? They're an optional extra, sir. They cost more.
You wanted more than 512MB RAM? That'll be extra, sir.
You wanted a processor which wasn't discontinued 18 months ago yet somehow we've managed to find a whole warehouse full of the buggers? That'll be extra, Sir.
You want a 3 year warranty or are you happy with our standard 30 minute warranty? Three year warranty's extra, Sir.
You want to actually speak to a technician during the course of the three years? Or are you happy being routed to the office cheese plant? The technician's extra, Sir.
Now we know there's another question they'll ask.
You want a motherboard that hasn't been pre-infected with firmware level trojans? That'll be extra, Sir.
I agree, but I'd go further - and my comments apply equally to free and commercial software.
We're a small shop and part of my job is to keep on top of licensing. After doing this job for some years, I have reached an inevitable conclusion.
You are not supposed to get it 100% right. Indeed, you are being set up for failure .
While some licenses are fairly straightforward, enough of them are sufficiently complicated that it is wholly unrealistic to expect any organisation to be entirely perfect. Whether this is by accident or design I wouldn't like to say, but I am dead certain that there is no organisation on God's sweet earth that would come out of a BSA audit without at least something wrong.
Eh?
I thought I'd made my point obvious enough, but clearly not.
Not only are Apple taking F/OSS, they're contributing back to the community - Webkit is the most well-known example, but there are plenty of others. There's nothing stopping you - or anyone - building their own OS on the Darwin core, and indeed at least one project which does just this exists:
http://www.puredarwin.org/
You'll wind up with an OS which is essentially Mac OS X under the hood, it just won't have the shiny UI. (Whether or not there is any point in OS X without the shiny UI is another issue altogether).
As I said, they don't open everything. Nor do Novell (ZenWorks isn't available in a F/OSS version, AFAIK) or IBM (DB/2 was still a proprietary product the last time I checked) yet you don't see people on /. decrying them because they haven't released every line of source as F/OSS.
I can only think of two counter-arguments to this:
1. You don't think this is enough. Everything should be open. Well, if the developers of projects from which Apple have taken code wanted every last bit to be and remain open, they'd have licensed it under the GPL. If you're a developer on such a project, the risk of someone taking your work, packaging it prettily and selling it was always there and you should have accepted that before you started. If you're not, what on Earth does it have to do with you?
2. You're a troll.
Eh? It’s just another safety feature.
Mandatory car analogy? Try pulling out an airbag system or modding it.
(For those not already aware, an airbag unit is basically a bomb. Don’t fuck with it.)
That's not because the manufacturer doesn't want you fucking with it, it's because a small controlled explosive charge is the quickest way to open up the airbag and in an accident they've only got a few fractions of a second to play with.
It's not as if there's no precedent for this. There's a certain operating system based upon open source components from Mach, FreeBSD, GNU, and KDE, which is somewhat infamous for being closed. At least you can load and run your own programs onto the Droid X, even if you can't update the operating system to your own version.
Except large chunks of OS X (and hence iOS) are F/OSS, remain F/OSS and are distributed from a website under Apple's control.
Granted, they don't provide a complete stack from which you can put together your own OS based on OS X from scratch and run it on your own hardware - nor does the iPhone come as a piece of hardware which makes it easy to run some other OS on, but they can hardly be described as "infamously closed".
I'm under the impression that the Droid X is intended for the business market, to try to take a bite out of RIM's market share. This sounds like an attempt to make the phone more "secure" by preventing people from getting at the data by rooting the phone. Not that it's necessarily the best way, but thats just my 2 cents.
Or they could have done what RIM et al have - which is to encrypt the data on the phone itself and when remotely instructed to selfdestruct, wipe the key.
The use of open source software, such as the Linux kernel or the Android platform, in a consumer device does not require the handset running such software to be open for re-flashing. We comply with the licenses, including GPLv2, for each of the open source packages in our handsets.
(my emphasis)
This is exactly the sort of thing GPLv3 was intended to circumvent. Whether that's because the FSF foresaw a future where there were so many locked down devices that most people simply wouldn't buy a general purpose PC any more or because they simply thought it was a bit disingenuous to provide source but no way of running the compiled code is another matter altogether.
Most proprietary IT companies have started to - if not openly embrace - at least accept and try to work with F/OSS (both in communities and with sponsored products).
Some have been quicker than others; some have taken it more seriously than others. Some have quite obviously put up with F/OSS under protest rather than actively encouraging it.
Oracle, I would say, at least before they acquired Sun, has definitely been in the "not taking entirely seriously" camp. A traditional proprietary vendor, who consider anything free (either speech or beer) to be a toy, something the kiddies can play with and then when they grow up they can start using the Super Enterprise Product. So not only is this not a surprise, I'd say it's almost expected. Frankly, there are projects which I'm far more concerned about - MySQL and OpenOffice immediately spring to mind.
Brake lights are controlled by a simple switch in the brake assembly. Regardless of how much TOyota may have jacked up the throttle system I doubt they were able to screw that up too. Sounds like most these idiots are too stupid to own a car
FWIW, I agree entirely.
Ms. Marseille sticks by her story. "It makes me very angry when someone tells me, 'She probably hit the gas pedal instead,' because I think it's a sexist comment, an ageist comment," she said.
No, Ms. Marseille, it's an idiot-ist comment. And the last time I checked, there was neither law nor social taboo against making idiot-ist comments.
I'm not sure which is the best joke - Yes, Minister or the fact that it's still remarkably relevant 25 years later.
I don't see how that's drastically different from CentOS.
Sure, you can use the free version of a "popular mainstream distro" (as the CentOS project describes it) but enough people are prepared to pay for support that CentOS hasn't yet driven RedHat out of business.
Computing as a field is rife with spectacularly good examples of where solutions keep on being developed without any consideration of how they're going to solve a problem - or indeed if there is a problem, or if the problem lends itself to being solved with a computer.
I can't help but feel this is similar. I'm sure I remember hearing about studies years ago when they first started putting computers in classrooms - if you just put the computer in the classroom it was a distraction, but if you invested in appropriate software and built structured lessons around it it was a very capable tool.
Let's see what this requires in order to be successful (In this case, I'll define success as: "is widely exchangeable for goods, services and other currencies"):
You what?
Deflation led to the Great Depression and hence (indirectly) to the Second World War and the loss of 60 million lives.
Other than that it worked out just great.
In the current situation with the us dollar (world's "reserve currency", lol) being backed in this manner by thin air, there is nothing to stop the government simply creating more to get themselves out of debt (inflation) thus reducing the value of goods your single dollar can buy (what you SEE as inflation).
This has actually happened - a number of currencies have pegged themselves to the US dollar in exactly this manner in the past and found themselves up the creek without a paddle when the US dollar has been devalued. In the UK, our reaction was to very quickly decouple the £ sterling from the US$ and today the £ sterling is effectively another fiat currency standing on its own.
this fiaSCO has been running on for nearly 8 years - what the hell is up with the courts that they keep this bullshit alive. /dev/null
Kill -9 all | sort >
Simple. A similar scenario has played out in many countries over the years, so I'm going to keep this fairly generic.
Go back in time a few centuries, you'll find systems of justice with relatively few avenues of appeal and sentences that were far more likely to kill you - even if that wasn't the intention. Medieval prisons were not nice places. It wouldn't have taken long for it to become apparent that there had been instances where people had been punished unjustly, and there clearly needed to be a way of dealing with such cases. So you have some sort of appeals mechanism to deal with it.
Okay, so now you have your basic court and your court of appeal. Except as time goes by, laws get more complicated and there's more room for error. So you wind up separating the basic court into two or more types of court, and where your case winds up depends on a number of things such as how complicated it is and how serious it is.
Then up comes a situation where somebody gets punished for doing something - except it's not entirely clear they did anything wrong in the first place. Turns out that the law they're alleged to have broken isn't particularly clear in their case, and none of the existing courts are happy with having to somehow interpret it to fit the case. However, interpret it they must - and it's inevitable that whichever way it gets interpreted, someone's going to be unhappy. So now you have a reason to develop an even higher court - one where justice is administered by the best legal brains in the land, men (and latterly women) who were probably involved in drafting the law in the first place and know damn well what it was intended to achieve. They may only hear a handful of cases a year.
Then different countries, states or whatever decide that there are real benefits to working together as one. In the US, this resulted in the United States of America. In Europe, we have the EU. In order for this to work, every member state agrees - that for some issues at least - their law will be subservient to that of the group they're a member of. Which means that (in some cases) there's now another avenue of appeal.
Now, open any dozen books that are 50,000 words in length. Search for strings that are duplicated between the books. Entire sentences, or phrases, it hardly matters. Just do the search. Anyone who is used to playing with databases can probably search those dozen books, and find numerous instances of phrases that were copy/pasted from one author's book to another. In fact, I'll bet that technical and factual books will have a higher incidence of matching phrases and sentences than works of fiction - but fiction will have it's share as well.
Actually, that's not true. There is some evidence to suggest you only need a remarkably short string of words to uniquely identify a piece of English prose - it's this kind of thing that cheating-detection algorithms rely on.
But we're talking about a structured programming language - with far more structure and rules than the English language - and the things that are at issue are by and large implementations of existing standards. The final link in TFS is a comparison of ELF utility header files, FFS. They've got to look fairly similar or they won't be any use for dealing with ELF executables! Even then they're sufficiently different that it would probably have been easier to write from scratch than it would be to execute the "copy/paste/obfuscate" cycle that is being alleged.
I can think of one gigantic difference:
I have one TV. Even in larger households, most people have only a handful of TVs.
It can be - and indeed is - converted with a cheap box (well, cheap relative to the cost of replacing the TV)
Radios - let's see. I've got the one built into my receiver, I've got one in my car, I've got one on my bedside, one in a cheapie mini system, my wife has a portable radio/CD player, we've got a cheap battery-powered radio in the bathroom. None of these can be converted with a relatively cheap box, and most are in regular use.
The car one's mildly awkward because I'm not prepared to lose my steering-wheel remote controls. So that limits my choice, and I'm relatively lucky. On many newer cars you have to take much of the dash to bits to replace the radio.
The receiver is the central part of all my home audio - plugs into freeview box, DVD player and Wii and automagically switches between everything. I'm not even sure I've got any suitable inputs left on it - though if push comes to shove I can use the freeview box to hear the radio.
The one on the bedside is an alarm clock radio. Fantastically cheap, simple piece of equipment, all it needs to do (apart from the radio) is display a clock that's bright enough to read in the dark without being so bright as to disturb my sleep - however this seems to be too much to ask of many newer bedside clock/radios.
The bathroom radio needs to be battery powered for obvious reasons, and either damp-proof or cheap enough that I don't care too much.
Most of these radios spend all their lives tuned into the same one or two stations, and FM gives perfectly good reception. So the "more choice" and "better quality" arguments don't wash. You're asking me to spend a fair bit of cash in order to replace something that there really is nothing wrong with. And right now, the economy's in the shitter, I can't remember the last time I had a payrise and I'm not sure I'm in a particularly strong position to ask for one anyway.
I've posted a very similar idea as a thought experiment some time ago - an inexpensive, cheap to run 3D-photocopier that can create exact copies of any object.
The thing is, a large chunk of the world's economy is based on the idea that I have some sort of physical object that you want, and will give it to you in exchange for something, usually cash. If you think the RIAA kick up a stink whenever new technology comes along that makes distributing music easier, that's nothing to the kind of stink that'd be kicked up were such a device to be invented - I reckon you'd be lucky to avoid wearing concrete boots dropped off the side of a boat in the middle of the atlantic, along with your invention.
The counter-argument is that there would be no need for an economy because we'd all have everything we'd ever want - IMV that's rubbish because society doesn't change that quickly.
Seriously, look at the photographs. This thing has a 60m wingspan, is covered in cells, made of carbon fibre and weighs just 1.6 tons. It's fantastically light for its size - I shudder to think how much more efficient your solar cells would need to be to get even a small passenger airliner in the air.