There's definitely been some illegal stuff going on. For example, banks have been systematically committing perjury to get foreclosures on houses they can't even prove they own the mortgage on.
I'm actually quite cautious about buying from Steam these days; too much obnoxious DRM. Even Valve are getting in on the act with Portal 2, which has some new buggy DRM that glitches out randomly on genuine purchasers, requires me to disable my antivirus software to even run the game, and is designed to make the game uncompletable if it thinks you've pirated it. (I think I may have tripped this on my genuine, purchased copy; it's hard to tell.)
Only if you're willing to either get laptop-grade performance or pay for workstation-grade hardware, and pretty much no-one actually needs workstation-grade hardware. High-end consumer/gaming gear is more than good enough performance-wise.
From what I can tell, pretty much the entire consumer electronics industry moved from silver to black as their preferred colour at around the same time period you're talking about - TVs, monitors, digital camers, DVD and Blu-Ray players, etc. (The flush bezel is probably a functional feature by the way - since Apple's marketing started making a big deal about thinness, the various tablets have been competing to be the thinnest, and you can't really do that with a raised bezel.)
Don't worry, the new Apache-ized OpenOffice is planning to improve things further by completely removing spellchecking. (The current spellchecker is LGPLed, which isn't "in alignment with The Apache Way.")
In much of the rest of the world, the equivalent violation (eg, of police or some other person obtaining evidence illegally) opens the offender for prosecution but whatever evidence is obtained can still be used. That was the case in the USA before the early 20th century. But several court cases in the 20's and 30's established the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, in which evidence which was obtained illegally is not admissible in court.
This incentivises the police and prosecution services in other countries to ride roughshod all over the rules of evidence if the crime is serious and they think it'll net them a conviction. I mean, who really cares if a pedophile was convicted using illegally-collected evidence - he obviously doesn't deserve any rights, and neither the press nor the courts are likely to see anything much wrong with this, if he even lives long enough in jail to be able to sue in the first place. Without the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, deciding whether or not to deliberately and illegally collect evidence just becomes a gamble - the odds of netting a conviction versus the odds that the person is innocent and it'll backfire - and the police tend to be biased towards assuming guilt. Only throwing out evidence collected in this way can remove the incentive to trample on the constitution.
For example, someone complained about the fact that zfs does LOTS of checksums, wasting CPU cycles; and doesn't have fsck. Well, it doesn't have fsck BECAUSE it does lots of checksums. Do you have time to wait for that 20TB arrayto finish fscking?
Which is a nice idea until something (for example a ZFS bug or a hardware glitch) causes part of the ZFS metadata to become corrupted, and the only way to get your 20 TB array working again is to dump all of the data somewhere else, recreate the array from scratch, and reload all the data.
Having a JVM - or any kind of virtual machine - is actually a pretty big security issue. For native code, modern OSes are hardened with protections like no-exec flags on data that make it harder to exploit many common classes of security holes, but as soon as you introduce a sufficiently capable virtual machine into your process this hardening becomes worthless. As far as the processor is concerned, the VM bytecode is just data like any other data, and it's fairly easy to use any security holes to trick the VM into executing your own malicious bytecode, bypassing noexec entirely.
Invention: creating the hard drive Innovation: coming up with a way to build smaller hard drives Repackaging: combining those smaller hard drives with existing chips bought from someone else and a contracted-out software package to create a better MP3 player.
The reason they had "slimmer, lightweight materials" for the iPod in the beginning was through stifling competition - they didn't invent the Microdrive that made it possible, Hitachi did. What they did was buy up essentially the entire production run, making it impossible for anyone to launch a similarly slim and capable MP3 player.
KDE actually has two choices of start menu... one closer to the style that Windows 98/XP and older versions of KDE used, and a newer more modern one that's more akin to Vista and Windows 7, though I think it's actually based on an alternative menu for KDE that predated both. I think there's also a full-screen replacement like the Windows 8 start screen, but I've never actually used it.
"ObamaCare" was very definitely an example of them compromising. A few years ago, the exact same scheme would've been considered a Republican idea, and they even piled some extra compromises on top of it. In fact, all the compromising is probably what's going to kill it; they should really have just passed a proper single-payer scheme like other countries have, but in the US that's considered too far-left for the Democrats.
The above comment was presumably brought to us by the "project your side's malevolent activities onto your opponent, get moderated Insightful" school of political thought? Because US politics didn't used to be nearly as far to the right as it was, and the way it got there was through the use of exactly the same tactics by the right that you're accusing the left wing of using - they deliberately drove ideas further and further to the right into the political mainstream, redefining what counted as centrist and far-left as they did so. We know this from statements by members of the right wing saying that this is what they were doing.
One method: Subvert the BIOS upgrade process and insert malicious code that injects a payload into the Windows kernel during the boot proccess. Use the security features intended to block unauthorised BIOS upgrades to instead prevent removal of this new BIOS-level rootkit. (This protection of BIOS updates is mandated by Microsoft to try and stop people from bypassing UEFI secure boot.) For bonus points, virtualize the entire OS to block any attempts to remove the malicious code from RAM.
No, it doesn't. It allows you to verify that your computer is running software that the company that manufactured it approved - nothing more, nothing less. As far as I can tell this could just as easily be used to incorporate backdoors and malware that you as an end user cannot ever remove. In combination with other Trusted Computing functionality, it could even be used to create backdoors and malware that cannot be detected and cannot be analyzed.
Yep. On the other hand, the LiMo Foundation's entire purpose was to develop a closed source platform for mobile phones based on top of Linux. They tried to obtain the cost savings associated with open source by adopting open source-style development practices and using a license that granted access to the source code to members of the group, but with a restriction preventing their members from sharing the LiMo source code with anyone outside of the foundation. (IIRC members weren't even allowed to share source code they'd written themselves for LiMo without permission from all the other members.)
It's not Amazon that'll refuse to sell it, but app makers that'll refuse to offer their apps on the Amazon app store. Amazon's terms and conditions are quite nasty; they require the ability to sell your app for less than it sells for in any other store and then - obviously - the ability for them to pay you proportionally less than you would if the purchasser bought them from another app store.
It'd actually be very surprising if WebM did infringe any MPEG-LA patents; it was carefully designed to avoid doing so, and this shouldn't be that hard to do because a lot of the patents in question are very narrow. The reason they're so narrow is that because of the MPEG standards body's stance of patent-neutrality, the original patent holder can submit technologies to the standard that infringe on their patents and the MPEG Group won't modify them to work around the patents no matter how trivial it is to do so. Narrow patents are more easily defended against prior art, hence most of them are just broad enough to catch all standards-compliant implementations.
So basically, it's a very one-sided clause - EA can still sue you in court and run up massive legal bills for you for the most common causes of action they're likely to have against you, but you're stuck using binding arbitration if you sue them.
Technically any game could trigger epilepsy, I think - I'm not sure how much that disclaimer would help them if they knowingly included content that posed a high epilepsy risk, not least because most people would have no way of knowing they were susceptible...
Slashdot Mirror
There's definitely been some illegal stuff going on. For example, banks have been systematically committing perjury to get foreclosures on houses they can't even prove they own the mortgage on.
I'm actually quite cautious about buying from Steam these days; too much obnoxious DRM. Even Valve are getting in on the act with Portal 2, which has some new buggy DRM that glitches out randomly on genuine purchasers, requires me to disable my antivirus software to even run the game, and is designed to make the game uncompletable if it thinks you've pirated it. (I think I may have tripped this on my genuine, purchased copy; it's hard to tell.)
I believe the traditional approach is to make sure someone honest knows the details of the planned trial in advance, including the number of subjects.
Only if you're willing to either get laptop-grade performance or pay for workstation-grade hardware, and pretty much no-one actually needs workstation-grade hardware. High-end consumer/gaming gear is more than good enough performance-wise.
From what I can tell, pretty much the entire consumer electronics industry moved from silver to black as their preferred colour at around the same time period you're talking about - TVs, monitors, digital camers, DVD and Blu-Ray players, etc. (The flush bezel is probably a functional feature by the way - since Apple's marketing started making a big deal about thinness, the various tablets have been competing to be the thinnest, and you can't really do that with a raised bezel.)
Will this be another one-shot code dump that's difficult to actually integrate?
Don't worry, the new Apache-ized OpenOffice is planning to improve things further by completely removing spellchecking. (The current spellchecker is LGPLed, which isn't "in alignment with The Apache Way.")
Errm... the entire point of namecoin is that it can be used to register meaningful domain names in a decentralized way.
Your programs probably aren't compiled with some of the more Intel-oriented optimisations in the common benchmark suites either...
In much of the rest of the world, the equivalent violation (eg, of police or some other person obtaining evidence illegally) opens the offender for prosecution but whatever evidence is obtained can still be used. That was the case in the USA before the early 20th century. But several court cases in the 20's and 30's established the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, in which evidence which was obtained illegally is not admissible in court.
This incentivises the police and prosecution services in other countries to ride roughshod all over the rules of evidence if the crime is serious and they think it'll net them a conviction. I mean, who really cares if a pedophile was convicted using illegally-collected evidence - he obviously doesn't deserve any rights, and neither the press nor the courts are likely to see anything much wrong with this, if he even lives long enough in jail to be able to sue in the first place. Without the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, deciding whether or not to deliberately and illegally collect evidence just becomes a gamble - the odds of netting a conviction versus the odds that the person is innocent and it'll backfire - and the police tend to be biased towards assuming guilt. Only throwing out evidence collected in this way can remove the incentive to trample on the constitution.
For example, someone complained about the fact that zfs does LOTS of checksums, wasting CPU cycles; and doesn't have fsck. Well, it doesn't have fsck BECAUSE it does lots of checksums. Do you have time to wait for that 20TB arrayto finish fscking?
Which is a nice idea until something (for example a ZFS bug or a hardware glitch) causes part of the ZFS metadata to become corrupted, and the only way to get your 20 TB array working again is to dump all of the data somewhere else, recreate the array from scratch, and reload all the data.
Having a JVM - or any kind of virtual machine - is actually a pretty big security issue. For native code, modern OSes are hardened with protections like no-exec flags on data that make it harder to exploit many common classes of security holes, but as soon as you introduce a sufficiently capable virtual machine into your process this hardening becomes worthless. As far as the processor is concerned, the VM bytecode is just data like any other data, and it's fairly easy to use any security holes to trick the VM into executing your own malicious bytecode, bypassing noexec entirely.
Invention: creating the hard drive
Innovation: coming up with a way to build smaller hard drives
Repackaging: combining those smaller hard drives with existing chips bought from someone else and a contracted-out software package to create a better MP3 player.
The reason they had "slimmer, lightweight materials" for the iPod in the beginning was through stifling competition - they didn't invent the Microdrive that made it possible, Hitachi did. What they did was buy up essentially the entire production run, making it impossible for anyone to launch a similarly slim and capable MP3 player.
KDE actually has two choices of start menu... one closer to the style that Windows 98/XP and older versions of KDE used, and a newer more modern one that's more akin to Vista and Windows 7, though I think it's actually based on an alternative menu for KDE that predated both. I think there's also a full-screen replacement like the Windows 8 start screen, but I've never actually used it.
"ObamaCare" was very definitely an example of them compromising. A few years ago, the exact same scheme would've been considered a Republican idea, and they even piled some extra compromises on top of it. In fact, all the compromising is probably what's going to kill it; they should really have just passed a proper single-payer scheme like other countries have, but in the US that's considered too far-left for the Democrats.
The above comment was presumably brought to us by the "project your side's malevolent activities onto your opponent, get moderated Insightful" school of political thought? Because US politics didn't used to be nearly as far to the right as it was, and the way it got there was through the use of exactly the same tactics by the right that you're accusing the left wing of using - they deliberately drove ideas further and further to the right into the political mainstream, redefining what counted as centrist and far-left as they did so. We know this from statements by members of the right wing saying that this is what they were doing.
That wouldn't be so bad if they weren't also deliberately closing down DMV branches in Democrat-leaning areas...
One method: Subvert the BIOS upgrade process and insert malicious code that injects a payload into the Windows kernel during the boot proccess. Use the security features intended to block unauthorised BIOS upgrades to instead prevent removal of this new BIOS-level rootkit. (This protection of BIOS updates is mandated by Microsoft to try and stop people from bypassing UEFI secure boot.) For bonus points, virtualize the entire OS to block any attempts to remove the malicious code from RAM.
No, it doesn't. It allows you to verify that your computer is running software that the company that manufactured it approved - nothing more, nothing less. As far as I can tell this could just as easily be used to incorporate backdoors and malware that you as an end user cannot ever remove. In combination with other Trusted Computing functionality, it could even be used to create backdoors and malware that cannot be detected and cannot be analyzed.
Yep. On the other hand, the LiMo Foundation's entire purpose was to develop a closed source platform for mobile phones based on top of Linux. They tried to obtain the cost savings associated with open source by adopting open source-style development practices and using a license that granted access to the source code to members of the group, but with a restriction preventing their members from sharing the LiMo source code with anyone outside of the foundation. (IIRC members weren't even allowed to share source code they'd written themselves for LiMo without permission from all the other members.)
It's not Amazon that'll refuse to sell it, but app makers that'll refuse to offer their apps on the Amazon app store. Amazon's terms and conditions are quite nasty; they require the ability to sell your app for less than it sells for in any other store and then - obviously - the ability for them to pay you proportionally less than you would if the purchasser bought them from another app store.
It'd actually be very surprising if WebM did infringe any MPEG-LA patents; it was carefully designed to avoid doing so, and this shouldn't be that hard to do because a lot of the patents in question are very narrow. The reason they're so narrow is that because of the MPEG standards body's stance of patent-neutrality, the original patent holder can submit technologies to the standard that infringe on their patents and the MPEG Group won't modify them to work around the patents no matter how trivial it is to do so. Narrow patents are more easily defended against prior art, hence most of them are just broad enough to catch all standards-compliant implementations.
So basically, it's a very one-sided clause - EA can still sue you in court and run up massive legal bills for you for the most common causes of action they're likely to have against you, but you're stuck using binding arbitration if you sue them.
Technically any game could trigger epilepsy, I think - I'm not sure how much that disclaimer would help them if they knowingly included content that posed a high epilepsy risk, not least because most people would have no way of knowing they were susceptible...