To the leaders, it's about power and money. To the suckers, it's about "improving your life", and being lied to. New members are absolutely *not* exposed to http://www.xenu.net/, the successful lawsuits against Scientology by Larry Wollersheim at FACTNet, or the death of Lisa McPherson by starvation and dehydration in a Scientology run imprisonment in Clearwater, Florida.
Like most cult members, those new members come seeking guidance, and acceptance. Unfortunately, the defenders of the cult have previously been caught inventing threats of harassment, especially by Cult Awareness Network and by Paulette Cooper. Despite the convictions of senior Scientologists such as Mary Sue Hubbard for their harassment, they succeeded in blocking Paulett's book about the cult from publication.
It seems quite reasonable to oppose Scientology on legal and ethical grounds. However, there seems no need to spew random threats over on YouTube. It's easier, safer, and more effective to simply keep communications open with the members and let them reach out when they've eventually caught the cult lying to them too often.
I have an idea: take the Microsoft web tools that are designed to use such absurd behavior by default, and fire anyone caught using them. Or at least emblazon the top bar with an unremovable panel that says "Test This Page With Lynx", to avoid the use of HTML extensions to create a graphical experience instead of making the data legible and navigable. Visual Studio is a good example of such a tool.
Slashdot is a good example of how to design pages correctly. If you need to get more complex than this, you're usually doing something badly wrong in your web design. The result of the clean coding is not so pretty at the presentation to the VP who likes paisley as a background, but reduces the load on your network bandwidth and massively improves performance for the guests who actually read your website.
That's cool. Have you ever considered taking a look at the old "Clipper Chip", or "SkipJack". While I didn't take probes to one myself, my understanding from commercial presentatons for it was that the NSA had tried very hard to shield the chip against precisely the sort of probing techniques you described. And the new Trusted Computing technologies built into Intel and AMD CPU's must be public enough for both companies' engineers to actually implement, but I'd hate to try that stunt on a typical modern CPU chip. That circuitry is *dense* and complex.
I respect the fun of examining the hardwrae: I just don't think it'll do you that muchh good in many cases.
Let me turn this around, and make sure you read what I wrote, as well. Your license key is temporary. You have only your personal hardware key or token, and a temporary authorization key issued by the central signing authority, a key which is difficult at best to transfer. That temporary authorization key expires, and is linked to your hardware key or, for Kerberos, your host keys.
Having the key on the desk in front of you does you only a limited amount of good, and the authors of the tools have worked very hard to restrict the good it does you. If you don't believe me this can be useful for controlling access to resources, I suggest you look into Kerberizd tools like AFS and Kerberized telnet. That's not "security through obscurity", since the protocols are public and well-known. That's security through key exchange, and a rather good implementation for Kerberos.
If you're going to call that "security through obscruity", then that unfortunate label applies to all key based cryptography, and I'm afraid that's not true. Please go look up the term.
You're hopping from sensible statements to extreme ones that discredit your claims. Saying "Security has nothing to do with DRM." is like saying "spam has nothing to do with fraud". They're not identical, but the links are profound in practice and in theory.
Let's take a typical definition from wisegeek.com. "DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management, a broad term used to describe a number of techniques for restricting the free use and transfer of digital content. DRM is used in a number of media, but is most commonly found in video and music files."Since encrypting files to restrict their access by unauthorized people restricts the free use and transfer of digital content, it certainly implies that tools like PGP, used normally and reasonably, are in fact used for DRM.
This doesn't mean your concerns about the traditional misuse of DRM to restrict lawful or normal use are unreasonable, but don't mistake that concern for a rejection of all DRM. The distinction is important, and the original poster seemed to be looking for exactly the sort of reasonable use that encryption of the critical documents would provide.
I suggest you look into both. Mr. LaMacchia, one of the authors of.NET, is one of the creators of Palladium (which has been renamed to Trusted Computing, which is a serious fib about what it's for). He apparently wentn to MIT, and from what I see of it, he learned a lot from Kerberos.
Both rely on a trusted server which issues time-stamped keys, which unlock local and potentially remote resources with those keys. There isn't just one local key: there is a key on the server, there is a key on your local host, and there are user keys. A fascinating exchange of keys and signatures so that a time-stamped key is released to the user. It will only work on that host (barring theft of the host key), it only permits certain privileges on the local host, and the server's permissions to negotiate other services with other servers with you are also quite constrained. Servers can be permitted to authenticate things for each other, and that's supposed to be conrolled pretty robustly.
The result is that while you have a key for yourself, it's linked to your host, and it's of limited duration and usability. You can pass along the Kerberos keys or Trusted Computing key authentications, but that requires a re-negotiation on the transferred machine to use them. The adventures spent to avoid trivial transfers of authority are fascinating to try and follow, and I recommend them for serious security analysis.
Trusted Computing takes it another stage, by building in deliberately obscured hardware authentication. It makes key transfer even more difficult. Part of its point is to prevent modified, rebuilt, and therefore unsigned software from being permitted to access protected files or hardware, and they've worked very hard to prevent exactly the sort of enhancement we like to provide in the open source world. It's very well targeted for encrypted hard drives and network shares, in particular, where only the signed software would have the keys to open the files.
Nope! Go take a good look at Kerberos, and at Trusted Computing. Both rely on rather sophisticated and fascinating structures to transfer only encrypted data, to provide the users with authentication to use a secured resource.
I don't think Richard likes guns. Swords, however, swords are another matter, at least according to this (http://xkcd.com/225/) andn the later attack on him by ninjas at a public speech.
But you seem to have Stallman's role backwards. If you modify the source, you need to publish your code to your recipients of the code. So "you think you can publish that binary without the source code? and you think you can be a Slashdot reader without your fingers? let's see which works better!"
[If I remember correctly, Richard does know how to punctuate, but doesn't like using capital letters: did I get him right?]
DRM means "Digital Rights Management". Encrypting a document with someone's public key so that only they, or another similarly authorized person with another valid private key, can viw it seems a perfect and reasonable example of that. We have a problem here that DRM has taken on a whole set of really unfortunate connotations because of its misuse and mishandling to prevent people who have the ability to view the document from duplicating or re-arranging it to their advantage (such as skipping the ads in DVD's, or taking legal "Fair Use" snippets from digital audio).
As long as we use that more general definition, based on the actual words "Digital Rights Management" rather than the oddness we are seeing from audio and video product vendors, I think we can reasonably support a DRM in open source. In fact, we use it: RedHat and numerous other Linux distributors publish their GPG keys, precisely to verify software packages as being from them and allow us to verify its source. That is a very basic, and very useful, sort of DRM.
He's probably using the wrong word. I'd like to see further explanation of what he really needs.
But you know, has any one else here kept a careful eye on the "Trusted Computing" software? As awful as I find its planned uses by its Microsoft developers and the fact that Microsoft will hold the master keys, and that there is no published legal framework for when they turn the keys over to law enforcementn or in fact anyone, or its obviously intended misuse to lock down hardware and software components such as DVD burners and system BIOS's to prevent their use with unmodified manufacturer software, it's overall a fascinating piece of work. And it should theoretically be possible to use its hardware/software integration and key management to do precisely this sort of approach: to make documents viewable only with authorized software on authorized hardware, with verification going on so deeply in the hardware that it's impossible or nearly impossible to transfer without being issued a new, authorized key from the central key owners.
Of course, once you've got it on the screen, you can do screen dumps and printouts and audio or video video recordings of the screen and soundtrack. Most DRM wants to prevent *that* sort of duplication.
PGP and encrypted filesystems are a potentially useful intermediate step. I'd love to see OpenOffice, for example, support direct handling of encrypted files, and AutoCAD.
"Not hackable" is not reasonable, and has never worked well. Verifiable to match a public signature, and encrypted against people without private keys, is fairly doable with PGP and other public key encryption techniques. But it's been very awkward to build them into public components, partly due to old patent issues with RSA, and partly due to direct harassment by US government and others against any encryption techniques they cannot easily break or hold the private keys to.
Take a good look at the history of RSA, PGP, and US export regulations and how they were found unconstitutional, then simply shifted to another federal department to avoid the ruling.
You've reminded me of a science fiction story, years ago, where Senate Proxmire got access to a time machine and used it to solve the problem of his worst detractrors, namely Robert Heinlein fans, by going back in time and curing the tuberculosis that pushed Heinlein out of the Navy. The final line of the story, if I remember it correctly?
"Admiral Heinlein doesn't let the Soviets build spacecraft."
Reading the definitions you cite, I stand by "vegetarian". I'm not discussing an animal product that is harvested from animals that continue to live, such as eggs, or milk, I'm mentioning the use of beef fat rendered from slaughtered cows.
Mind you, a lot of vegetarians will tolerate some of the nastier animal products put in cheese, so there are limits to what many people worry about. But it was a bit of a surprise to find out they did this.
I do see the point of the person who pointed out that "lard" is pork, "beef tallow" is the same thing made from beef. I misunderstood that lard referred only to pork fat.
According to the articles I've read, NASA massively interfered with getting FAA approval to even test-fly it, repeatedly interfered with any tentative review by the FAA for approval of flight plans involving air craft, and insisted through such back-channel regulation with the FAA that the support structures be massively over-built. The result is that as wonderful as Ariadne was, they were never permitted to seriously consider using NASA's pre-built and under-used launching facilities, even on a rental basis, and that Ariadne's potential payload and maximum height were extremely limited.
Like an early automobile being told by law that they had to pack a spare saddle, such over-engineering made Ariadne much less investment worthy by interfering with its usability and increasing its expense.
Oh, the technology used is older than that! Werner von Braun was one of the core designers of the 1960 spacecraft of the USA, and he helped build the V-2 rockets for the Germans in World War II. And the problems predate Proxmire's campaign against federally funded research.
There are certainly material changes, and computer changes, that could enormously benefit space craft. Computers have shrunk incredibly and draw less power, GPS and other navigational techniques have improved enormously and could be used. But computers in space need to survive hard radiation, so you can only shrink them so far without risking them losing data or being fried by a casual gamma ray. And materials have evolved: ceramics and polymers have created whole new technologies that could be used for structural members and reinforcements, leaving a lot of weight left for payload for the same size rocket and amount of fuel.
But it's enormously difficult to *test* these technologies with NASA's moribund approach to private industry development.
Mercury started launched amazingly shortly after Sputnik, in 1957 or so. Gemini launched in 1963, Saturn launched in 1967. That gives less than 10 years to build 3 generations of spacecraft and launch the third generation, successfully.
NASA has known that the Space Shuttle flies like a duck-taped cow since well before its first launch in 1981, since it was designed by committees lobbying wildly to have different components manufactured in different states to get Congressional approval and for many other political, rather than engineering, reasons. Development of replacement spacecraft has been hindered by funding, similar lobbying stupidity, and the unwillingness to admit that rockets have to be built and tested rather than modeled to death for decades before actually trying anything.
Private industry has already shown a far more capable design, when the Ariadne won the X-Prize. But NASA is blocking its development for numerous political reasons, not engineering reasons. You cannot expect NASA to do anything in real development and admit that complex craft are going to crash in the design and testing phase, and treats it as an acceptable risk rather than a political nightmare. And their current leadership is too politically hidebound to do anything profoundly innovative: it would interfere with the "5 year plans" of their contracts with Boeing and other manufacturers.
Most of us will appreciate the careful handling by people by you, and the requirements to use the available tools. But yes, it is a big deal: Microsoft has a very bad history of "embracing and extending" software, and clearly breaking inter-operability in the process. Take a look at what they did to Kerberos when they incorporated it into Active Directory, and how it broke compatibility, and the resulting lawsuits and required patches by MIT to address the problems created by Microsoft and interacting with *anyone* else's release of Kerberos.
Microsoft also has a habit of abusing its patent portfolios to threaten open source projects, refusing to identify the patents they believe involved. The end user license agreement with a tool like HTK can cripple development with it, and take the ability to upgrade or refuse such crippling changes in their own tools based on HTK.
Like discovering that your McDonald's french fries are cooked with lard and thus not vegetarian, it's a big deal. (They called it "beef tallow" and hid it for years under the "natural flavors" part of the label. This led to a lot of screaming by misled Hindus and by misled vegetarians who'd been eating it.)
Don't you mean "not watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and "watching the original material they actually stole it from"? When I look at the pilots for Babylon 5 and the major plot lines the director had already included, and compare them to the later-produced byt better-funded, and thus first to be seen Deep Space Nine, the similarity is so striking that it implies theft by Paramount iv the director's ideas.
This sort of thing is also unfortunately common for new directors and authors when they pitch their ideas to a major studio. It also happens quite a deal in software, where a market niche is filled by a big company before a small company can get their ideas to market, despite the NDA's signed by both when discussing the concept.
Well, not to a species: if the change alters it in such a way that is beneficial to individuals and creates a new species that can no longer interbreed with their peers, that's a benefit to the new species, not the old one.
Mutation is also not a stable requirement. Big environmental changes can be of enormous benefit to particular species, or with particular mutations, but devastate others that have evolved over millions or billions of years. Look at the devastation to species when plants learned how to make oxygen, or after the dinosaur killer asteroid. You can't predict that kind of need for mutation, so in the meantime the species in the stable environment could evolve to survive in their stable world.
Most of them allow authenticated mail services from outside: you might check your provider's services. This helps prevent spammers from using them as an open relay, and email worms from blowing their customers off the net or spewing worms that overwhelm their mail servres andn imperil their customers' systems.
As much as my friends loathe it and scream about violations of their freedoms, I think we have to live with this one as a basic spam andn worm blocking technique. It does interfere with people who want to run their own private mailservers from home to block incoming port 25: but like letting people leave meat on their lawsns in bear country, it draws trouble.
I don't see what makes you think this: companies have *lost* common carrier status, or been shown not to have it, when they exerted editorial control over user material and then failed to prevent other inappropriate behavior and were held responsible for it. But that doesn't mean the whole industry doesn't have common carrier: why do you think this?
Plenty of content providers and software publishers have extremely open licenses. But what you're describing would strip GPL, BSD, and other licensing from anything that is transmitted via Bittorrent or public FTP sites. It can't work because people will turn around, at least in the software world, and proprietize these public broadcasts under your "we won't sue you" doctrine.
I think you need to go back and work on that idea a bit more.
Slashdot Mirror
To the leaders, it's about power and money. To the suckers, it's about "improving your life", and being lied to. New members are absolutely *not* exposed to http://www.xenu.net/, the successful lawsuits against Scientology by Larry Wollersheim at FACTNet, or the death of Lisa McPherson by starvation and dehydration in a Scientology run imprisonment in Clearwater, Florida.
Like most cult members, those new members come seeking guidance, and acceptance. Unfortunately, the defenders of the cult have previously been caught inventing threats of harassment, especially by Cult Awareness Network and by Paulette Cooper. Despite the convictions of senior Scientologists such as Mary Sue Hubbard for their harassment, they succeeded in blocking Paulett's book about the cult from publication.
It seems quite reasonable to oppose Scientology on legal and ethical grounds. However, there seems no need to spew random threats over on YouTube. It's easier, safer, and more effective to simply keep communications open with the members and let them reach out when they've eventually caught the cult lying to them too often.
I have an idea: take the Microsoft web tools that are designed to use such absurd behavior by default, and fire anyone caught using them. Or at least emblazon the top bar with an unremovable panel that says "Test This Page With Lynx", to avoid the use of HTML extensions to create a graphical experience instead of making the data legible and navigable. Visual Studio is a good example of such a tool.
Slashdot is a good example of how to design pages correctly. If you need to get more complex than this, you're usually doing something badly wrong in your web design. The result of the clean coding is not so pretty at the presentation to the VP who likes paisley as a background, but reduces the load on your network bandwidth and massively improves performance for the guests who actually read your website.
I thought that was Darl McBride? He's looking pretty hard for money these days.
That's cool. Have you ever considered taking a look at the old "Clipper Chip", or "SkipJack". While I didn't take probes to one myself, my understanding from commercial presentatons for it was that the NSA had tried very hard to shield the chip against precisely the sort of probing techniques you described. And the new Trusted Computing technologies built into Intel and AMD CPU's must be public enough for both companies' engineers to actually implement, but I'd hate to try that stunt on a typical modern CPU chip. That circuitry is *dense* and complex.
I respect the fun of examining the hardwrae: I just don't think it'll do you that muchh good in many cases.
Let me turn this around, and make sure you read what I wrote, as well. Your license key is temporary. You have only your personal hardware key or token, and a temporary authorization key issued by the central signing authority, a key which is difficult at best to transfer. That temporary authorization key expires, and is linked to your hardware key or, for Kerberos, your host keys.
Having the key on the desk in front of you does you only a limited amount of good, and the authors of the tools have worked very hard to restrict the good it does you. If you don't believe me this can be useful for controlling access to resources, I suggest you look into Kerberizd tools like AFS and Kerberized telnet. That's not "security through obscurity", since the protocols are public and well-known. That's security through key exchange, and a rather good implementation for Kerberos.
If you're going to call that "security through obscruity", then that unfortunate label applies to all key based cryptography, and I'm afraid that's not true. Please go look up the term.
You're hopping from sensible statements to extreme ones that discredit your claims. Saying "Security has nothing to do with DRM." is like saying "spam has nothing to do with fraud". They're not identical, but the links are profound in practice and in theory.
Let's take a typical definition from wisegeek.com. "DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management, a broad term used to describe a number of techniques for restricting the free use and transfer of digital content. DRM is used in a number of media, but is most commonly found in video and music files."Since encrypting files to restrict their access by unauthorized people restricts the free use and transfer of digital content, it certainly implies that tools like PGP, used normally and reasonably, are in fact used for DRM.
This doesn't mean your concerns about the traditional misuse of DRM to restrict lawful or normal use are unreasonable, but don't mistake that concern for a rejection of all DRM. The distinction is important, and the original poster seemed to be looking for exactly the sort of reasonable use that encryption of the critical documents would provide.
I suggest you look into both. Mr. LaMacchia, one of the authors of .NET, is one of the creators of Palladium (which has been renamed to Trusted Computing, which is a serious fib about what it's for). He apparently wentn to MIT, and from what I see of it, he learned a lot from Kerberos.
Both rely on a trusted server which issues time-stamped keys, which unlock local and potentially remote resources with those keys. There isn't just one local key: there is a key on the server, there is a key on your local host, and there are user keys. A fascinating exchange of keys and signatures so that a time-stamped key is released to the user. It will only work on that host (barring theft of the host key), it only permits certain privileges on the local host, and the server's permissions to negotiate other services with other servers with you are also quite constrained. Servers can be permitted to authenticate things for each other, and that's supposed to be conrolled pretty robustly.
The result is that while you have a key for yourself, it's linked to your host, and it's of limited duration and usability. You can pass along the Kerberos keys or Trusted Computing key authentications, but that requires a re-negotiation on the transferred machine to use them. The adventures spent to avoid trivial transfers of authority are fascinating to try and follow, and I recommend them for serious security analysis.
Trusted Computing takes it another stage, by building in deliberately obscured hardware authentication. It makes key transfer even more difficult. Part of its point is to prevent modified, rebuilt, and therefore unsigned software from being permitted to access protected files or hardware, and they've worked very hard to prevent exactly the sort of enhancement we like to provide in the open source world. It's very well targeted for encrypted hard drives and network shares, in particular, where only the signed software would have the keys to open the files.
Nope! Go take a good look at Kerberos, and at Trusted Computing. Both rely on rather sophisticated and fascinating structures to transfer only encrypted data, to provide the users with authentication to use a secured resource.
I don't think Richard likes guns. Swords, however, swords are another matter, at least according to this (http://xkcd.com/225/) andn the later attack on him by ninjas at a public speech.
But you seem to have Stallman's role backwards. If you modify the source, you need to publish your code to your recipients of the code. So "you think you can publish that binary without the source code? and you think you can be a Slashdot reader without your fingers? let's see which works better!"
[If I remember correctly, Richard does know how to punctuate, but doesn't like using capital letters: did I get him right?]
DRM means "Digital Rights Management". Encrypting a document with someone's public key so that only they, or another similarly authorized person with another valid private key, can viw it seems a perfect and reasonable example of that. We have a problem here that DRM has taken on a whole set of really unfortunate connotations because of its misuse and mishandling to prevent people who have the ability to view the document from duplicating or re-arranging it to their advantage (such as skipping the ads in DVD's, or taking legal "Fair Use" snippets from digital audio).
As long as we use that more general definition, based on the actual words "Digital Rights Management" rather than the oddness we are seeing from audio and video product vendors, I think we can reasonably support a DRM in open source. In fact, we use it: RedHat and numerous other Linux distributors publish their GPG keys, precisely to verify software packages as being from them and allow us to verify its source. That is a very basic, and very useful, sort of DRM.
He's probably using the wrong word. I'd like to see further explanation of what he really needs.
But you know, has any one else here kept a careful eye on the "Trusted Computing" software? As awful as I find its planned uses by its Microsoft developers and the fact that Microsoft will hold the master keys, and that there is no published legal framework for when they turn the keys over to law enforcementn or in fact anyone, or its obviously intended misuse to lock down hardware and software components such as DVD burners and system BIOS's to prevent their use with unmodified manufacturer software, it's overall a fascinating piece of work. And it should theoretically be possible to use its hardware/software integration and key management to do precisely this sort of approach: to make documents viewable only with authorized software on authorized hardware, with verification going on so deeply in the hardware that it's impossible or nearly impossible to transfer without being issued a new, authorized key from the central key owners.
Of course, once you've got it on the screen, you can do screen dumps and printouts and audio or video video recordings of the screen and soundtrack. Most DRM wants to prevent *that* sort of duplication.
PGP and encrypted filesystems are a potentially useful intermediate step. I'd love to see OpenOffice, for example, support direct handling of encrypted files, and AutoCAD.
"Not hackable" is not reasonable, and has never worked well. Verifiable to match a public signature, and encrypted against people without private keys, is fairly doable with PGP and other public key encryption techniques. But it's been very awkward to build them into public components, partly due to old patent issues with RSA, and partly due to direct harassment by US government and others against any encryption techniques they cannot easily break or hold the private keys to.
Take a good look at the history of RSA, PGP, and US export regulations and how they were found unconstitutional, then simply shifted to another federal department to avoid the ruling.
You've reminded me of a science fiction story, years ago, where Senate Proxmire got access to a time machine and used it to solve the problem of his worst detractrors, namely Robert Heinlein fans, by going back in time and curing the tuberculosis that pushed Heinlein out of the Navy. The final line of the story, if I remember it correctly?
"Admiral Heinlein doesn't let the Soviets build spacecraft."
Thank you for the correction. I'll look for where I pulled the "Ariadne" name: the flight of SpaceShipOne is documented fairly well over at Wikipedia.
Reading the definitions you cite, I stand by "vegetarian". I'm not discussing an animal product that is harvested from animals that continue to live, such as eggs, or milk, I'm mentioning the use of beef fat rendered from slaughtered cows.
Mind you, a lot of vegetarians will tolerate some of the nastier animal products put in cheese, so there are limits to what many people worry about. But it was a bit of a surprise to find out they did this.
I do see the point of the person who pointed out that "lard" is pork, "beef tallow" is the same thing made from beef. I misunderstood that lard referred only to pork fat.
According to the articles I've read, NASA massively interfered with getting FAA approval to even test-fly it, repeatedly interfered with any tentative review by the FAA for approval of flight plans involving air craft, and insisted through such back-channel regulation with the FAA that the support structures be massively over-built. The result is that as wonderful as Ariadne was, they were never permitted to seriously consider using NASA's pre-built and under-used launching facilities, even on a rental basis, and that Ariadne's potential payload and maximum height were extremely limited.
Like an early automobile being told by law that they had to pack a spare saddle, such over-engineering made Ariadne much less investment worthy by interfering with its usability and increasing its expense.
Oh, the technology used is older than that! Werner von Braun was one of the core designers of the 1960 spacecraft of the USA, and he helped build the V-2 rockets for the Germans in World War II. And the problems predate Proxmire's campaign against federally funded research.
There are certainly material changes, and computer changes, that could enormously benefit space craft. Computers have shrunk incredibly and draw less power, GPS and other navigational techniques have improved enormously and could be used. But computers in space need to survive hard radiation, so you can only shrink them so far without risking them losing data or being fried by a casual gamma ray. And materials have evolved: ceramics and polymers have created whole new technologies that could be used for structural members and reinforcements, leaving a lot of weight left for payload for the same size rocket and amount of fuel.
But it's enormously difficult to *test* these technologies with NASA's moribund approach to private industry development.
Mercury started launched amazingly shortly after Sputnik, in 1957 or so. Gemini launched in 1963, Saturn launched in 1967. That gives less than 10 years to build 3 generations of spacecraft and launch the third generation, successfully.
NASA has known that the Space Shuttle flies like a duck-taped cow since well before its first launch in 1981, since it was designed by committees lobbying wildly to have different components manufactured in different states to get Congressional approval and for many other political, rather than engineering, reasons. Development of replacement spacecraft has been hindered by funding, similar lobbying stupidity, and the unwillingness to admit that rockets have to be built and tested rather than modeled to death for decades before actually trying anything.
Private industry has already shown a far more capable design, when the Ariadne won the X-Prize. But NASA is blocking its development for numerous political reasons, not engineering reasons. You cannot expect NASA to do anything in real development and admit that complex craft are going to crash in the design and testing phase, and treats it as an acceptable risk rather than a political nightmare. And their current leadership is too politically hidebound to do anything profoundly innovative: it would interfere with the "5 year plans" of their contracts with Boeing and other manufacturers.
Most of us will appreciate the careful handling by people by you, and the requirements to use the available tools. But yes, it is a big deal: Microsoft has a very bad history of "embracing and extending" software, and clearly breaking inter-operability in the process. Take a look at what they did to Kerberos when they incorporated it into Active Directory, and how it broke compatibility, and the resulting lawsuits and required patches by MIT to address the problems created by Microsoft and interacting with *anyone* else's release of Kerberos.
Microsoft also has a habit of abusing its patent portfolios to threaten open source projects, refusing to identify the patents they believe involved. The end user license agreement with a tool like HTK can cripple development with it, and take the ability to upgrade or refuse such crippling changes in their own tools based on HTK.
Like discovering that your McDonald's french fries are cooked with lard and thus not vegetarian, it's a big deal. (They called it "beef tallow" and hid it for years under the "natural flavors" part of the label. This led to a lot of screaming by misled Hindus and by misled vegetarians who'd been eating it.)
Don't you mean "not watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and "watching the original material they actually stole it from"? When I look at the pilots for Babylon 5 and the major plot lines the director had already included, and compare them to the later-produced byt better-funded, and thus first to be seen Deep Space Nine, the similarity is so striking that it implies theft by Paramount iv the director's ideas.
This sort of thing is also unfortunately common for new directors and authors when they pitch their ideas to a major studio. It also happens quite a deal in software, where a market niche is filled by a big company before a small company can get their ideas to market, despite the NDA's signed by both when discussing the concept.
But when he gets old enough for MMORPG's, would he trade *you*?
Look up "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish" by Neil Gaiman for an example of the situation.
Well, not to a species: if the change alters it in such a way that is beneficial to individuals and creates a new species that can no longer interbreed with their peers, that's a benefit to the new species, not the old one.
Mutation is also not a stable requirement. Big environmental changes can be of enormous benefit to particular species, or with particular mutations, but devastate others that have evolved over millions or billions of years. Look at the devastation to species when plants learned how to make oxygen, or after the dinosaur killer asteroid. You can't predict that kind of need for mutation, so in the meantime the species in the stable environment could evolve to survive in their stable world.
Most of them allow authenticated mail services from outside: you might check your provider's services. This helps prevent spammers from using them as an open relay, and email worms from blowing their customers off the net or spewing worms that overwhelm their mail servres andn imperil their customers' systems.
As much as my friends loathe it and scream about violations of their freedoms, I think we have to live with this one as a basic spam andn worm blocking technique. It does interfere with people who want to run their own private mailservers from home to block incoming port 25: but like letting people leave meat on their lawsns in bear country, it draws trouble.
I don't see what makes you think this: companies have *lost* common carrier status, or been shown not to have it, when they exerted editorial control over user material and then failed to prevent other inappropriate behavior and were held responsible for it. But that doesn't mean the whole industry doesn't have common carrier: why do you think this?
Plenty of content providers and software publishers have extremely open licenses. But what you're describing would strip GPL, BSD, and other licensing from anything that is transmitted via Bittorrent or public FTP sites. It can't work because people will turn around, at least in the software world, and proprietize these public broadcasts under your "we won't sue you" doctrine.
I think you need to go back and work on that idea a bit more.