Hopefully by then Linux will have managed to gain enough market share that most people have heard of it and/or know someone running it and the barrier to a non-MS OS will be much lower
Linux is already far more prevalent than many of us could have dreamed a decade ago. Linux ships on cell phones, set top boxes, routers, laptops, desktops, even TVs. Linux practically runs the Internet. Any sysadmin worth his salt knows how to install a distro and get basic services up and running. While it's not quite a household name, Linux is absolutely huge right now. The fact that the average consumer doesn't quite understand what Linux is can be attributed to two things:
1) The general public doesn't really understand computers (to them, the box on the floor is the "hard drive"). 2) Linux has no marketing or advertising strategy (and thus no way to implant the word "Linux" into the pop-culture subconscious).
But to be honest, neither of these really matter.
For more than a decade, Linux advocates have been fantasizing that once Linux hits some arbitrary critical mass, it will suddenly become the iPod of operating systems. Hip and cool, everybody needs one! This won't happen. The unwashed masses don't (and shouldn't) care much what software is running on their computer, as long as the computer does what they need it to do. Firefox is an excellent example of this. Even backed by a solid marketing/advertising budget, lots of positive press, and plenty of word-of-mouth, Firefox still hasn't broken 25% market share, even though people love it and it is measurably better than its primary competitor.
Maybe Firefox will overtake IE someday, just as Linux might overtake Windows one day. But neither are going to be some big all-at-once event that we can jot down in the history books and tell our kids where we were the exact moment that it happened. Linux's market share will continue to do what it has been doing since day one: rise gradually. (With emphasis on the "gradually".)
Why exactly does it merit any research? This is not riddle posed by Nature -- people devised this device (ha-ha), and know all the answers perfectly already, they just don't want to tell you. You are not advancing scientific progress by figuring out somebody's scheme.
So as long as somebody knows exactly how the system works, that's good enough for you? Fine, but that's not how all of us are wired. Google's knowledge of their audio fingerprinting scheme is useless to me if I want to know how it works and they won't tell me.
Making the details of these kinds of systems publicly available is a valuable service to society as a whole because it means each person who is interested in similar technology or systems doesn't have to waste his/her time repeating the same experiment. It also provides extremely useful information for average Google YouTube users who want to upload videos but don't want said videos unconditionally muted because Google's algorithms can't distinguish between fair-use samples and blatant copyright infringement.
Agreed completely. There was a time when I absolutely had to have the latest and greatest just to get things done. Now, my ome and work PCs are years old and are running CPUs that were low-budget even when brand new.
Unless you're building some kind of specialized business or research system, the only reasons to shell out thousands of dollars on hardware is if you're doing virtualization or are a hardcore gamer with no social life.:P
Carbon dioxide is not the only harmful industrial pollutant, it's just the one that has everyone's attention right now because human-caused climate change is starting to look very real. Solving the carbon dioxide problem is only one of many problems that the mass consumption of fossil fuels presents.
I look at it from an economic standpoint: Which one of these is easier?
1) Allow everyone to burn all the fossil fuels they want. The fuels release pollutants and toxins into the environment when consumed or mishandled. Once damage to the environment is already done or is noticeable, create taxpayer-funded cleanup efforts for each kind of pollutant and toxin released. The damage to the planet won't ever be reversed, but there's a remote chance it could be stopped from progressing further.
2) Just don't burn massive quantities of fossil fuels in the first place.
The only difference between me and an environmentalist is that I realize that the human race is not--and will never be--smart enough to actually do #2. No matter how many protests, rallies, or websites you participate in. Those currently in power got there by exploiting (or helping to exploit) the Earth's limited energy resources. Those not in power don't care as long as they got their cable TV and their beer.
I don't understand why people want/need Flash for video anyway. Streaming video works perfectly fine without the needless overhead of Flash. Video was added to Flash pretty much as an afterthought but now it's really the only reason that people use Flash at all. Only problem is that Flash carries a lot of overhead because it wasn't specifically designed to stream audio and video in the first place.
An example: My aging computers can play full-screen HD videos over the local network with no problem at all. But a standard-definition video streamed over the web in a little window is completely unwatchable because my CPU is pegged at 100% the entire time.
It's like using a 90MB Java app to play an MP3. Just doesn't make sense. I'm hoping the HTML 5 <video> and <audio> tags help rectify this, but something tells me very little will come of that.
Q's general policy has always been, "don't call me, I'll call you." But he's probably still tormenting Picard and Janeway, so MI5 should probably talk to them if they really want to find him.
That's an obvious solution but not really a workable one for two reasons. First, there's the sheer amount of copyrighted work out there. The LOC is widely regarded as possessing the largest quantity of copyrighted books and other media on the planet but percentage-wise, I'm sure its only a fraction of what's actually out there. Yes, the LOC receives a copy of every work registered through the US Copyright Office but you don't have to register with the USCO in order for the work in order to be protected. (Although it helps if litigation ever arises.) But even for the registered works, you're asking the LOC to expend an enormous amount of effort and money to process millions upon millions of documents every year just to solve one corner-case problem.
Then there's the burden on the copyright holder. Presently, the bar for copyrighting a work is very low. Basically, the work is copyrighted at the time of creation. This is a good thing. It means that anyone willing to create a work for the benefit of society and/or themselves can do so without any extra effort or onerous paperwork. This not only encourages contribution, it makes copyrighting as we know it today possible. If authors had to submit documents every year for everything they held copyright on, it would be an insurmountable task for many. Just about any written word put on paper (or screen) by a company is copyrighted. The average company wouldn't be able to keep up with this, let alone websites, blog authors, independent artists, research firms, record labels, and even regular Slashdot posters.
Since your current editors are apparently way too busy to Google for a couple of important links (some of which are even mentioned in the summary), I decided to help out.
You can get these on eBay, but they cost a pretty penny.
Also, I really hope that guy didn't actually use this 100W LED streetlight as a headlight for his bicycle as the pictures imply. Not only would that be extremely rude, but extremely dangerous/deadly as well.
It's been awhile since I took my business law class, but I seem to remember that the federal government's role emphasizes the promotion of interstate trade. In other words, if a state passes a law that arguably restricts interstate trade (for example, a state import tax), higher federal courts will generally strike it down. This is the *only* reason why we haven't seen every state create its own compulsory interstate mail order tax so far.
In order for a mail order tax to get anywhere, it either has to be a federal tax, or it has to be a state tax that is explicitly designed and enabled by U.S. Congress, which is what it sounds like TFA is getting at. Even if that does get through, however, someone is going to challenge it in court and precedent will heavily favor them.
(But mark my words, someone will figure out how to effectively tax mail order purchases eventually. It just might take a few more years.)
You simply can't budget properly in that state because once you've given some money back, getting an increase later is next to impossible
You might as well replace "in that state" with "in the entire U.S. governmental system". When I was in the Air Force, our squadron commander would come around to all the avionics shops in October (just before the end of the fiscal year) and tell us that we had to spend X thousand dollars on new test equipment, furniture, floor wax, or whatever. Anything, whether we actually needed the items or not. (This was how we got our ping-pong table one year.)
What made me angry was that we really needed new desktop computers more than anything else, but of course we couldn't because anything that looked, sounded, or smelled like a computer was completely under the control of the I.T. staff. (Funny how they got brand-new machines every 6 months but our shop never got a single upgrade in the whole 4 years I was there.)
I work in a datacenter with tens of thousands of servers and dozens of industrial AC units. Power consumption of the desktop PCs for the support and administrative staff are a drop in the bucket compared to our overall energy usage.
I wish people who've never owned or worked at an ISP would quite making these inane arguments. And since you used bold, I will too. Stop advocating the punishment of users for wanting to actually use the service that purchased. Bandwidth is not (or should not) be this precious non-renewable resource that must be conserved at all costs.
The ISP business model isn't terribly difficult to comprehend:
1) Buy a bunch of bandwidth and infrastructure, 2) Resell the bandwidth in many smaller portions, 3) Adequately fund your support department, and 4) Upgrade your infrastructure when necessary.
I've worked at and with many ISPs that do this exactly right and you know what? They have happy customers and are staying in business despite severe marketing and legal pressure from the big telcos and cablecos.
The failing ISPs, the ones that are doing it wrong (or are just plain greedy) are the ones who thought they could just throw some money at building an infrastructure and saturating a market, and then sit back and let the monthly payments roll in forever without having to touch their infrastructure again. Telcos (and cableco's in particular) pine for the days when your infrastructure was pretty much done once you had every house in town hooked up to your service and once that was paid off, almost all of the revenues were pure profit.
Well, Internet access doesn't work like that. As computers grow in sophistication, so does the Internet. As the Internet grows in sophistication, bandwidth usage rises. And I can tell you, it's not going to plateau any time soon. The proper way for any business to respond to an increase in usage is to scale their infrastructure accordingly. Or in other words, give the customer the quality service that they're asking for rather than punishing them for it.
And it has been noted plenty of times previously on Slashdot that most of the ISPs that are in favor of bandwidth caps or other restrictions on actually using the Internet are generally those that have a business interest in keeping users away from alternative forms of entertainment (e.g., streaming video).
How would that work? BT might be a top-level CA but if I have an HTTPS-only site (say, https://www.example.com/ they still don't have my private key. Without that private key, they can't do anything to the data flowing between the web server and the end-user's browser without raising some flag or another.
They could create their own certificate for www.example.com in order to fool the end-user's browser, but that would involve a very intelligent proxy and would be incredibly (almost painfully) illegal, even in Britain I'm sure.
I went down to microcenter in cambridge, ma, a half mile from mit and harvard. they don't even stock linux computers. I do my taxes on the computer (so even if they make linux tax software, i have to import, or run wine) my kids use windows for gaming (so i have to know something about it to help them)..... I actually installed ubuntu under wubi on my last laptop: it worked fine: so what why should i switch if there is ZERO incentive for me to use linux - i get absolutely nothing from linux that i don't get from windows; it is not easier to use, it is not faster, it is not anything that i need
Then, uh, don't use it? The last thing the Linux community wants is people installing it, realizing that it doesn't do 100% of what they think they want, and then complaining to everyone that their computer didn't magically transform into a glittery unicorn after they installed Ubuntu.
until the linux community patents a new type of software that i have to have and it runs only on linux, I' wont switch
Pop quiz. In the open source world, if a specific application you want to use doesn't exist, do you:
A) Petition a proprietary vendor of a suitable application into compiling their code for Linux? B) Join a project that's trying produce an open-source version of the application? C) Write the application yourself? D) Moan and complain about it on Slashdot?
It's surprising how many people around here think 'D' is an acceptable answer.
even tho the thought of giving more money to redmond makes me want to puke
I see. So you like proprietary software enough to use it, but not enough to pay for it. And you like open source software enough to try it, but not enough to contribute actual time and effort to it. There's a word for that. I think it rhymes "sea boater".
"So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on 'real time search,' bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me."
IIRC, tin whiskers don't usually form on the legs of electronic components because the metal in the legs is formulated to withstand corrosion. The biggest danger is in datacenters with old raised floors that use aluminum or zinc finished framing. The whiskers grow long enough to break off and start circulating around the room where they eventually make their way into equipment, causing all sorts of mysterious failures.
But tin whiskers are a well-known problem. Data center managers know about it and it doesn't generally affect consumer electronics except in particularly poorly-made parts. (Most computers are made of steel.) Has nothing at all to do with flash drive failure, though.
That would allow them to release the code under what is typically known as an "open source" license, sure. But releasing code that's known to be covered under a valid patent would undermine the spirit of open source no matter what license you use.
They would literally be saying to the world:
"Here's our source code free to download, view, and share. (But it's covered by several software patents so if you actually try to use it, we'll sue you. Have a day.)"
So basically yah, CFLs aren't the best we can do, but they're the best affordable replacement for incandescents we have so far.
CFLs are currently where LCD monitors were 10 years ago: the advantages are intriguing, but the quality of the current product lines is scattershot, there are some significant engineering and manufacturing hurdles left to deal with, and there are a lot of people denouncing the new technology mostly because they're afraid of change. All of which will be overcome in the next few years.
That does raise an interesting discussion... if a company is officially going to stop supporting a product that is still heavily in use, should they have an obligation to open up the source? I think so.
Um. You do realize that would completely do away (or at least severely mangle) with the entire concept of copyright?
Of course with xp goes an obvious problem... imagine just how much worse the malware scene would be if they had access to windows source code?
Yeah, because look at all that malware that spreads like wildfire on open source operating systems!
The truth is that open access to source code makes crafting exploits only somewhat easier. However, creating fixes, patches, and updated versions of the software is orders of magnitude easier. It's far easier to stay ahead of the exploit cycle on open source software because anyone with the know-how can create a patch to fix a specific vulnerability. With closed-source software, you have to wait for the vendor to release a patch, if they ever do.
Guessing the main reason MS would say NO is that many security problems in XP also exist in Vista/7 also due to inheritance, most of which MS is relying purely on protection from security-through-obscurity, and we all know how good a model that is. "Hmm this is vulnerable in XP, wonder if it still works in 7? well isn't that useful!"
No, the main reasons that MS would say "no," are:
1) Microsoft licenses, rather than owns, large chunks of code for XP and cannot disclose the source for them even if they wanted to.
2) Microsoft would be too afraid that a competitor would take the XP code base, pretty it up a bit, and release the result as a Vista or Windows 7 competitor. (And they'd probably be right.)
3) Microsoft has always kept the inner workings of their software, APIs, file formats, and protocols secret to promote vendor lock-in. They actively make it difficult for outsiders to interoperate with Microsoft-branded solutions. Even when XP falls to a miniscule market share, the APIs, file formats, and protocols are still likely to be in use by their newer products and open sourcing XP would also open source the Microsoft implementation of those objects thus reducing their lock-in power.
4) Microsoft has yet to give something away for free unless it is guaranteed to have a positive impact on their bottom line in the future.
5) Microsoft equates open source to cancer. (One could argue that there is some truth here, if you remove the negative connotations.)
They do already. It's called the "Upgrade Edtition" which, contrary to popular belief *CAN* be used to perform a clean install of the OS, rather than requiring an older version to be installed first.
The upgrade edition is sold under the assumption that you're actually upgrading the OS. If you install it on a new computer, you're violating the EULA, thus infringing on Microsoft's copyright, thus breaking the law.
Hey, I think it's silly too, but it's how the proprietary software world works. (Part of why I run Linux in the first place.)
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is already far more prevalent than many of us could have dreamed a decade ago. Linux ships on cell phones, set top boxes, routers, laptops, desktops, even TVs. Linux practically runs the Internet. Any sysadmin worth his salt knows how to install a distro and get basic services up and running. While it's not quite a household name, Linux is absolutely huge right now. The fact that the average consumer doesn't quite understand what Linux is can be attributed to two things:
1) The general public doesn't really understand computers (to them, the box on the floor is the "hard drive").
2) Linux has no marketing or advertising strategy (and thus no way to implant the word "Linux" into the pop-culture subconscious).
But to be honest, neither of these really matter.
For more than a decade, Linux advocates have been fantasizing that once Linux hits some arbitrary critical mass, it will suddenly become the iPod of operating systems. Hip and cool, everybody needs one! This won't happen. The unwashed masses don't (and shouldn't) care much what software is running on their computer, as long as the computer does what they need it to do. Firefox is an excellent example of this. Even backed by a solid marketing/advertising budget, lots of positive press, and plenty of word-of-mouth, Firefox still hasn't broken 25% market share, even though people love it and it is measurably better than its primary competitor.
Maybe Firefox will overtake IE someday, just as Linux might overtake Windows one day. But neither are going to be some big all-at-once event that we can jot down in the history books and tell our kids where we were the exact moment that it happened. Linux's market share will continue to do what it has been doing since day one: rise gradually. (With emphasis on the "gradually".)
So as long as somebody knows exactly how the system works, that's good enough for you? Fine, but that's not how all of us are wired. Google's knowledge of their audio fingerprinting scheme is useless to me if I want to know how it works and they won't tell me.
Making the details of these kinds of systems publicly available is a valuable service to society as a whole because it means each person who is interested in similar technology or systems doesn't have to waste his/her time repeating the same experiment. It also provides extremely useful information for average Google YouTube users who want to upload videos but don't want said videos unconditionally muted because Google's algorithms can't distinguish between fair-use samples and blatant copyright infringement.
Agreed completely. There was a time when I absolutely had to have the latest and greatest just to get things done. Now, my ome and work PCs are years old and are running CPUs that were low-budget even when brand new.
Unless you're building some kind of specialized business or research system, the only reasons to shell out thousands of dollars on hardware is if you're doing virtualization or are a hardcore gamer with no social life. :P
Then you're not involved in HPC applications that demand an extremely fast physical layer (e.g., clustering).
Carbon dioxide is not the only harmful industrial pollutant, it's just the one that has everyone's attention right now because human-caused climate change is starting to look very real. Solving the carbon dioxide problem is only one of many problems that the mass consumption of fossil fuels presents.
I look at it from an economic standpoint: Which one of these is easier?
1) Allow everyone to burn all the fossil fuels they want. The fuels release pollutants and toxins into the environment when consumed or mishandled. Once damage to the environment is already done or is noticeable, create taxpayer-funded cleanup efforts for each kind of pollutant and toxin released. The damage to the planet won't ever be reversed, but there's a remote chance it could be stopped from progressing further.
2) Just don't burn massive quantities of fossil fuels in the first place.
The only difference between me and an environmentalist is that I realize that the human race is not--and will never be--smart enough to actually do #2. No matter how many protests, rallies, or websites you participate in. Those currently in power got there by exploiting (or helping to exploit) the Earth's limited energy resources. Those not in power don't care as long as they got their cable TV and their beer.
I don't understand why people want/need Flash for video anyway. Streaming video works perfectly fine without the needless overhead of Flash. Video was added to Flash pretty much as an afterthought but now it's really the only reason that people use Flash at all. Only problem is that Flash carries a lot of overhead because it wasn't specifically designed to stream audio and video in the first place.
An example: My aging computers can play full-screen HD videos over the local network with no problem at all. But a standard-definition video streamed over the web in a little window is completely unwatchable because my CPU is pegged at 100% the entire time.
It's like using a 90MB Java app to play an MP3. Just doesn't make sense. I'm hoping the HTML 5 <video> and <audio> tags help rectify this, but something tells me very little will come of that.
One person blackmails another, who blackmails another, who blackmails another, and so on and so forth...
Q's general policy has always been, "don't call me, I'll call you." But he's probably still tormenting Picard and Janeway, so MI5 should probably talk to them if they really want to find him.
That's an obvious solution but not really a workable one for two reasons. First, there's the sheer amount of copyrighted work out there. The LOC is widely regarded as possessing the largest quantity of copyrighted books and other media on the planet but percentage-wise, I'm sure its only a fraction of what's actually out there. Yes, the LOC receives a copy of every work registered through the US Copyright Office but you don't have to register with the USCO in order for the work in order to be protected. (Although it helps if litigation ever arises.) But even for the registered works, you're asking the LOC to expend an enormous amount of effort and money to process millions upon millions of documents every year just to solve one corner-case problem.
Then there's the burden on the copyright holder. Presently, the bar for copyrighting a work is very low. Basically, the work is copyrighted at the time of creation. This is a good thing. It means that anyone willing to create a work for the benefit of society and/or themselves can do so without any extra effort or onerous paperwork. This not only encourages contribution, it makes copyrighting as we know it today possible. If authors had to submit documents every year for everything they held copyright on, it would be an insurmountable task for many. Just about any written word put on paper (or screen) by a company is copyrighted. The average company wouldn't be able to keep up with this, let alone websites, blog authors, independent artists, research firms, record labels, and even regular Slashdot posters.
Dear CmdrTaco,
Since your current editors are apparently way too busy to Google for a couple of important links (some of which are even mentioned in the summary), I decided to help out.
Here they are.
Am I hired now?
(Also, that is one butt-ugly car. I'll stick with my Mazda3, thank you.)
I guess you could say he wasn't the brightest bulb in the bunch?
You can get these on eBay, but they cost a pretty penny.
Also, I really hope that guy didn't actually use this 100W LED streetlight as a headlight for his bicycle as the pictures imply. Not only would that be extremely rude, but extremely dangerous/deadly as well.
It's been awhile since I took my business law class, but I seem to remember that the federal government's role emphasizes the promotion of interstate trade. In other words, if a state passes a law that arguably restricts interstate trade (for example, a state import tax), higher federal courts will generally strike it down. This is the *only* reason why we haven't seen every state create its own compulsory interstate mail order tax so far.
In order for a mail order tax to get anywhere, it either has to be a federal tax, or it has to be a state tax that is explicitly designed and enabled by U.S. Congress, which is what it sounds like TFA is getting at. Even if that does get through, however, someone is going to challenge it in court and precedent will heavily favor them.
(But mark my words, someone will figure out how to effectively tax mail order purchases eventually. It just might take a few more years.)
You might as well replace "in that state" with "in the entire U.S. governmental system". When I was in the Air Force, our squadron commander would come around to all the avionics shops in October (just before the end of the fiscal year) and tell us that we had to spend X thousand dollars on new test equipment, furniture, floor wax, or whatever. Anything, whether we actually needed the items or not. (This was how we got our ping-pong table one year.)
What made me angry was that we really needed new desktop computers more than anything else, but of course we couldn't because anything that looked, sounded, or smelled like a computer was completely under the control of the I.T. staff. (Funny how they got brand-new machines every 6 months but our shop never got a single upgrade in the whole 4 years I was there.)
I work in a datacenter with tens of thousands of servers and dozens of industrial AC units. Power consumption of the desktop PCs for the support and administrative staff are a drop in the bucket compared to our overall energy usage.
I wish people who've never owned or worked at an ISP would quite making these inane arguments. And since you used bold, I will too. Stop advocating the punishment of users for wanting to actually use the service that purchased. Bandwidth is not (or should not) be this precious non-renewable resource that must be conserved at all costs.
The ISP business model isn't terribly difficult to comprehend:
1) Buy a bunch of bandwidth and infrastructure,
2) Resell the bandwidth in many smaller portions,
3) Adequately fund your support department, and
4) Upgrade your infrastructure when necessary.
I've worked at and with many ISPs that do this exactly right and you know what? They have happy customers and are staying in business despite severe marketing and legal pressure from the big telcos and cablecos.
The failing ISPs, the ones that are doing it wrong (or are just plain greedy) are the ones who thought they could just throw some money at building an infrastructure and saturating a market, and then sit back and let the monthly payments roll in forever without having to touch their infrastructure again. Telcos (and cableco's in particular) pine for the days when your infrastructure was pretty much done once you had every house in town hooked up to your service and once that was paid off, almost all of the revenues were pure profit.
Well, Internet access doesn't work like that. As computers grow in sophistication, so does the Internet. As the Internet grows in sophistication, bandwidth usage rises. And I can tell you, it's not going to plateau any time soon. The proper way for any business to respond to an increase in usage is to scale their infrastructure accordingly. Or in other words, give the customer the quality service that they're asking for rather than punishing them for it.
And it has been noted plenty of times previously on Slashdot that most of the ISPs that are in favor of bandwidth caps or other restrictions on actually using the Internet are generally those that have a business interest in keeping users away from alternative forms of entertainment (e.g., streaming video).
How would that work? BT might be a top-level CA but if I have an HTTPS-only site (say, https://www.example.com/ they still don't have my private key. Without that private key, they can't do anything to the data flowing between the web server and the end-user's browser without raising some flag or another.
They could create their own certificate for www.example.com in order to fool the end-user's browser, but that would involve a very intelligent proxy and would be incredibly (almost painfully) illegal, even in Britain I'm sure.
Heh, "since XP," because man, that was freakin' eons ago. Like back before marketshare fell from 63.76% to 63.67%.
Then, uh, don't use it? The last thing the Linux community wants is people installing it, realizing that it doesn't do 100% of what they think they want, and then complaining to everyone that their computer didn't magically transform into a glittery unicorn after they installed Ubuntu.
Pop quiz. In the open source world, if a specific application you want to use doesn't exist, do you:
A) Petition a proprietary vendor of a suitable application into compiling their code for Linux?
B) Join a project that's trying produce an open-source version of the application?
C) Write the application yourself?
D) Moan and complain about it on Slashdot?
It's surprising how many people around here think 'D' is an acceptable answer.
I see. So you like proprietary software enough to use it, but not enough to pay for it. And you like open source software enough to try it, but not enough to contribute actual time and effort to it. There's a word for that. I think it rhymes "sea boater".
And nothing of value was lost?
IIRC, tin whiskers don't usually form on the legs of electronic components because the metal in the legs is formulated to withstand corrosion. The biggest danger is in datacenters with old raised floors that use aluminum or zinc finished framing. The whiskers grow long enough to break off and start circulating around the room where they eventually make their way into equipment, causing all sorts of mysterious failures.
But tin whiskers are a well-known problem. Data center managers know about it and it doesn't generally affect consumer electronics except in particularly poorly-made parts. (Most computers are made of steel.) Has nothing at all to do with flash drive failure, though.
That would allow them to release the code under what is typically known as an "open source" license, sure. But releasing code that's known to be covered under a valid patent would undermine the spirit of open source no matter what license you use.
They would literally be saying to the world:
"Here's our source code free to download, view, and share. (But it's covered by several software patents so if you actually try to use it, we'll sue you. Have a day.)"
CFLs are currently where LCD monitors were 10 years ago: the advantages are intriguing, but the quality of the current product lines is scattershot, there are some significant engineering and manufacturing hurdles left to deal with, and there are a lot of people denouncing the new technology mostly because they're afraid of change. All of which will be overcome in the next few years.
Um. You do realize that would completely do away (or at least severely mangle) with the entire concept of copyright?
Yeah, because look at all that malware that spreads like wildfire on open source operating systems!
The truth is that open access to source code makes crafting exploits only somewhat easier. However, creating fixes, patches, and updated versions of the software is orders of magnitude easier. It's far easier to stay ahead of the exploit cycle on open source software because anyone with the know-how can create a patch to fix a specific vulnerability. With closed-source software, you have to wait for the vendor to release a patch, if they ever do.
No, the main reasons that MS would say "no," are:
1) Microsoft licenses, rather than owns, large chunks of code for XP and cannot disclose the source for them even if they wanted to.
2) Microsoft would be too afraid that a competitor would take the XP code base, pretty it up a bit, and release the result as a Vista or Windows 7 competitor. (And they'd probably be right.)
3) Microsoft has always kept the inner workings of their software, APIs, file formats, and protocols secret to promote vendor lock-in. They actively make it difficult for outsiders to interoperate with Microsoft-branded solutions. Even when XP falls to a miniscule market share, the APIs, file formats, and protocols are still likely to be in use by their newer products and open sourcing XP would also open source the Microsoft implementation of those objects thus reducing their lock-in power.
4) Microsoft has yet to give something away for free unless it is guaranteed to have a positive impact on their bottom line in the future.
5) Microsoft equates open source to cancer. (One could argue that there is some truth here, if you remove the negative connotations.)
The upgrade edition is sold under the assumption that you're actually upgrading the OS. If you install it on a new computer, you're violating the EULA, thus infringing on Microsoft's copyright, thus breaking the law.
Hey, I think it's silly too, but it's how the proprietary software world works. (Part of why I run Linux in the first place.)