Ahem. The FSF actually recommended that the Ogg Vorbis toolkit remain under a BSD license, rather than insisting that it go GPL. This was all done, apparently, with Richard M. Stallman's blessing! Yes folks, RMS actually encouraged the Xiphophorous people to use the BSD license rather than the GPL! The story here.
In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use."
No, the FSF does not recommend exclusive use of the GPL at all times. They can encourage use of other more permissive free licenses if they believe that it will aid the cause of Free Software.
Wouldn't buying out SCO be just like negotiating with terrorists? Make no mistake: they want to be bought out! McBride and his cronies get themselves a golden parachute, SCO disappears, and the lawsuit disappears, and everyone is happy. Until one fine day a new piddly-ass failing SCO wannabe corporation with some semi-valuable "intellectual property" tries to do the same. There will be no end to it then.
IBM and RedHat and everyone concerned should do their utmost to grind SCO into the dust, so as to give a clear message that this sort of "terrorism" will never be tolerated.
In a parallel thread, it mentions that all recordings made by RIAA-signed artists are works for hire. They are not protecting the artists' copyrights in this case but their own, as it is published recordings that the artist made for them as works for hire, not actual songs, whose copyrights they are attempting to enforce. In the case of older music produced before that damnable work for hire provision was added by the US Congress in 1999, any contract that any band or artist signed with a major label would have required that they give up all copyright ownership to their recordings. Copyrights assigned this way revert back to them after 35 years, of course, but nonetheless, almost none of the music at issue here is THAT old--U2's earliest recordings come from 1980, about 23 years old, so the record company still holds the copyright. I suppose this is why you don't see a song like the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night", whose copyright supposedly reverted back to McCartney (and probably jointly to Lennon's estate) a couple of years ago, listed in the document.
Yes, you are right, the copyright holder must give specific authorization, but in most cases this specific authorization has been implicitly given by the contract signed by the artist. For works after 1999, the record labels hold all the copyrights as if they wrote the songs and performed them themselves, due to the work for hire provision. In this case they ARE the copyright holders, as much as a newspaper company owns the copyrights to an article written by its staff.
Look at a music CD you have. Any CD. Look for the copyright notice in fine print (usually on the bottom part of the back of the disc jewel case). I hold in my hands a copy of U2's Best of 1980-1990 CD, and it says the copyright is held by "Polygram Records". No mention of U2 or any of the band members anywhere in the copyright notice! The record label always owns the copyright! I have a lot of CD's, and none, I repeat none of them has a copyright notice that includes the name of the band or the artist as copyright holder (not even joint copyrights). The record companies always hold the rights to everything. If you want to know how these artists are actually treated by the RIAA, here's a small article that may enlighten you as to how the system really works.
I wonder how is it that the ionizing radiation doesn't manage to kill off these microbes before they can do their job? A typical gamma ray goes for 5 MeV, whereas a typical ionization energy is only at 15-20 eV. Interfering with chemical reactions necessary to life most definitely. Mutation and more likely outright killing of these organisms.
Imagine earning the equivalent of US$160 every month. Can you folks in America live with such a wage? That's how much money I'm making right now, and while it's not exactly a lot, it's enough for me to pay the rent and utilities, buy enough food to for me and my girlfriend to eat well every day, and allow us to have a little more fun besides romping around on the bed.:) (it's not enough for us to consider getting married and having children though) What do I do that earns me such a pittance? I deploy and design enterprise Linux systems, and write custom Linux software as well. The fact that I work for a new and impoverished startup company skews things a bit, but the facts remain. Even as much as US$500 a month is considered a very good wage where I come from. Would you folks in America even consider such pathetic wages?
I can buy a pack of cigarettes here for the equivalent of less than 50 US cents. A home-cooked meal of chicken or other meat costs around 75 US cents per person. My daily commute to work is slightly less than one US dollar. Water and electric bills amount to roughly US$8-$10 per month. Rent, US$60 per month. That's what life's like in the Third World, folks. Come by and visit sometime.
It could be, and most probably is a gas giant like Jupiter. If so, then why should its formation so early in the universe be such a big surprise? Jupiter itself is largely made up of light gases which would have been present in abundance in such regions in the early universe. The fact that there's a supernova remnant there (a pulsar, the article says) tells me that any heavy elements (if they are required) could have come from the results of that explosion.
Spends more on aid to other nations and their people? Well, living in a country that is on the receiving end of such "aid" I think qualifies me to tell you that such aid never comes without strings attached. Desperate nations like mine have no choice but to accept such "foreign aid", and along with it are forced to enter into disadvantageous treaties, having military bases built on our territory (and all the political, societal, and environmental problems that entails), taking it in the behind from every multinational corporation that comes our way, and seeing our natural resources drained until we're sucked dry. Yeah, aid indeed.
Nah, the US is just like any other customer, it won't give without first taking.
Yes, here in the Philppines, the 802.11b band is also regulated. A long time ago, MERALCO, the nation's largest electrical distribution company, purchased and owns an exclusive license on the 2.4 GHz band. Some of their old equipment actually uses this band, and out in the provinces (away from Metro Manila) this is an important issue. There are some pretty messy talks going underway where the large telecommunications companies and network service providers are lobbying our Congress to get our National Telecommunications Commission to revoke that 2.4 GHz franchise, by coming up with a plan that will enable the power company to gradually phase out its ancient equipment that uses that chunk of the spectrum. What with all the messes that MERALCO has gotten itself into lately, such as the Supreme Court's recent ruling that they have to pay well over 20 billion Philippine pesos (about US$ 500 millon) in rebates to their subscribers because they overcharged everyone over a period of almost a decade, I don't know whether this is going to turn out soon enough for it to matter.
Fortunately, none of this old MERALCO equipment is being used in Metro Manila and most of the provinces surrounding the capital, but that doesn't stop them from complaining.
Very nice article, but Mr. Rich has stated something down near the bottom that is not quite true.
The question is: How do all those lovely entertainment-seeking kids weaned on "Harry Potter" grow up to become thieves? Surely, they know that stealing copyrighted songs and movies is akin to shoplifting sweaters at the Gap.
How long is it going to take people to realize that there is a very big difference? I steal a sweater off the Gap, the store doesn't have it, I do. I download a song from the day's equivalent of Napster, has the person I got it off lost it, or has the artist (or more precisely the record label) actually lost something in the same way? Of course not. The misguided promoters of this idea assume that every time I or someone like me obtains unauthorized copies of something that is supposed to be "theirs" means that I would have otherwise bought an original for the prices at which they are sold. This is, of course, not true in general. It is false and misleading to consider copyright violation the moral or even legal equivalent of theft.
...it still propagates what I perceive to be a very big misconception about what copyright is really for. The Constitution of the United States, in the copyright clause, has specifically stated that the purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not specifically to provide authors like J.K. Rowling with an incentive to continue writing. Richard M. Stallman (whatever you may think of him) explains this very well in this article. Copyright law is not a monopoly granted by a (responsible) government in an attempt to strike a balance between the rights of authors and rights of the public, but rather as an attempt to balance two different, sometimes conflicting rights of the public: the public wants a lot of good quality works for its consumption, and the public also wants these works to be available at low cost. Stallman makes a nice analogy between this dilemma and that of building public works projects like buildings and dams. For public works, a government would want to build the best and safest public works, while at the same time it wouldn't want to spend too much money to do so. Nobody will build a bridge or dam for free, of course, so the government then has to decide how much money it is willing to spend for the public's welfare. For copyright legislation, the government is not spending public money, but the public's rights and freedoms.
Well, the United States government has done, with the current travesties of law like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the DMCA, the equivalent of having contractors build a bridge that totally covers the river. And worse yet, it is attempting to wrestle other countries into making similar laws apply there as well, under the pretext of protecting international trade.
Yes, copyright law all over the world is in bad need of reform, but without remembering its original purpose for existing in the first place. Authors are granted these copyright monopolies not because they were the original creators of the work and they are entitled to it, but because it is supposed to serve the public interest. A lot of the misapplications of copyright restrictions mentioned in the article mainly boil down to violations of this principle.
Adding a blacklist at the receiving end will only help the user using it, and one can only hope that spammers will eventually realize that much of their traffic is simply not getting through, and figure out a different sort of scam to pull on people. Unfortunately this doesn't solve some of the more serious problems with spam, such as congestion of mail servers and backbone pipes. I've heard some statistics quoted that some 80% of traffic on much of the core routers appears to be spam. A blacklist in the sense being described is no solution to this at all.
Much better would be blacklists for known open relays, and strong (i.e. cryptographic) authentication for mail servers. This is arguably not censorship, as you're merely cutting off those people who aren't good neighbors, people who don't bother to play nice with everyone else, which is what the Internet really is all about. The RFC's are just rules we all agreed to have, and anyone who doesn't bother to follow them is in effect voluntarily cutting himself or herself off from everyone who does follow the rules.
I think that much of the spam is going through illicit channels and channels made by careless fools who don't bother to read the RFC's. Cutting off such bad neighbors will go a long way towards curbing the spam problem.
However, a fortune cookie from the BSD Games Fortune Cookie files also goes:
The Consultant's Curse:
When the customer has beaten upon you long enough, give him what he asks for, instead of what he needs. This is very strong medicine, and is normally only required once.
Perhaps Sun feels sufficiently compelled by Hypertransport's effectiveness in producing powerful multiprocessor systems easily and cost-effectively. Three HyperTransport buses per Opteron, use one to interface to the system bus and the other two to interconnect with other processors. No other processor has HyperTransports like this, specifically optimized for multiprocessor configurations.
Interesting. But why in the name of all that is holy, did the OpenSSL developers choose to use an insecure-by-default system that requires every developer of an OpenSSL server application to turn on the blinding algorithm explicitly? That will mean patching every application! Apparently, some distributions that bundle OpenSSL don't include the blinding code either, without having it compiled in, which points to the distinct possibility that OpenSSL has this option turned off by default for some reason. The next release should have it turned on and active by default all the time, unless there's a really pressing reason not to (e.g. if turning it on would decrease the speed of the whole thing by roughly an order of magnitude, which I seriously doubt).
I believe Paul Kocher first proposed (this is PDF) this attack way, way back in 1995, and as I recall, he even applied it to networked systems. RSA Labs' BSAFE, since version 3.0 has included a "blinding factor" in its RSA implementation that renders this attack ineffective. Reading the original RSA Labs bulletin (also PDF) on this attack shows a very simple fix, and I'm surprised that this hasn't made its way into OpenSSL! Ron Rivest proposed this back in early 1996. What's up?
a high degree of design coordination Who says this couldn't be achieved by the Open Source world? It has, and Linux is not the only example (though it is, admittedly the largest scale project of them all).
access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment In the true spirit of Free Software/Open Source, all of the design and testing is done by the community. Having hundreds of thousands (and now millions) of people all making use of it is far far better than the best testing equipment money can buy.
access to UNIX code, methods and concepts What for? Have they taken a look at the Linux code, or even the code for the GNU utilities that are part of a standard UNIX environment? Does any of it have anything in common with the code they say is theirs? It's all open, SCO, prove it. You can have a look.
UNIX architectural experience Oh please. As if there weren't already thousands of people with this kind of expertise at the time Linus Torvalds began this work!
a very significant financial investment The off-time of thousands of hackers who would otherwise be paid significant money is indeed a "significant financial investment". And furthermore, what's wrong with the fact that real financial investments are coming in from IBM and other companies?
Off the top of my head, I can think of solar sails and laser sails. These are at least two propellantless propulsion technologies being seriously studied by scientists. Obviously, neither requires 'propellant' in any shape or form.
If they found 0.1 errors per 1000 lines of code, did they approach Linus and Co. to point them out? Has Reasoning submitted any kernel patches to address the errors they say they found?
One side of the issue is that if you attempt to look at any sufficiently large and complex system it will overwhelm you with its complexity. The human mind can only deal with a certain amount of complexity at a time before overloading. That's the reason why object-oriented methodologies were invented, to attempt to chop up a large and complex problem into smaller and more manageable pieces, so you can deal with certain things as "black boxes" and move on to the bigger picture. Sort of like zooming in and out. A graphic artist would never think of working at a single zoom scale when editing a picture, she would zoom in for fine work and zoom out for an overall view. Treating things as black boxes is done so that you don't lose sight of the forest for the trees, not the other way around!
But of course, as my own experience in embedded systems development and electronics work has taught me as well, it does no good to simply leave things as black boxes. You also have to know how the black box works on the inside before you can go on to treat it as a black box. I had to learn the ins and outs of semiconductor and transistor physics before I learned how to use logic IC's, which have these components as their basic building blocks, so that I'd understand the limits and quirks of these devices. I think the big problem we have is that people are generally unfamiliar with how the many black boxes they use actually look like on the inside, so if their system winds up eventually tickling limitations or quirks (which, as the complexity of the system they're building grows becomes more and more likely), they have no idea what the hell is going on or what to do about it. In other words, too much zooming out, not enough zooming in, so you get work which has too many rough edges and not enough fine detail.
Salon had a highly insightful article some years back about this very topic as it pertains to software engineering: "The Dumbing Down of Programming", by Ellen Ullman, Part One and Part Two. She talks about the way too much knowledge is disappearing into code, and the problems that causes.
Despite shipping 0.13 mm x86 devices for about a year, Intel's first 0.13 mm IA64 MPU, code named Madison, won't be introduced for another 5 or 6 months. The EV79, a 0.13 mm shrink of the 0.18 mm EV7, will be even later, shipping in about a year.
Holy cow... I didn't know microprocessor features were still so freaking huge! Methinks the author needs to remember that there is an HTML entity readily available as µ.:) Unfortunately it seems slashdot is stripping out most of my entities so we can't see it here . 0.13 mm is 130 microns, which is roughly where IC technology was in the mid- to late-1980's if I'm not mistaken. That can't possibly be right. If use of the entity is out of the question (just as it seems to be on./), maybe they could have said 0.000013 mm or even spelled out the word "micron" right out.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem. The FSF actually recommended that the Ogg Vorbis toolkit remain under a BSD license, rather than insisting that it go GPL. This was all done, apparently, with Richard M. Stallman's blessing! Yes folks, RMS actually encouraged the Xiphophorous people to use the BSD license rather than the GPL! The story here.
No, the FSF does not recommend exclusive use of the GPL at all times. They can encourage use of other more permissive free licenses if they believe that it will aid the cause of Free Software.
Wouldn't buying out SCO be just like negotiating with terrorists? Make no mistake: they want to be bought out! McBride and his cronies get themselves a golden parachute, SCO disappears, and the lawsuit disappears, and everyone is happy. Until one fine day a new piddly-ass failing SCO wannabe corporation with some semi-valuable "intellectual property" tries to do the same. There will be no end to it then.
IBM and RedHat and everyone concerned should do their utmost to grind SCO into the dust, so as to give a clear message that this sort of "terrorism" will never be tolerated.
In a parallel thread, it mentions that all recordings made by RIAA-signed artists are works for hire. They are not protecting the artists' copyrights in this case but their own, as it is published recordings that the artist made for them as works for hire, not actual songs, whose copyrights they are attempting to enforce. In the case of older music produced before that damnable work for hire provision was added by the US Congress in 1999, any contract that any band or artist signed with a major label would have required that they give up all copyright ownership to their recordings. Copyrights assigned this way revert back to them after 35 years, of course, but nonetheless, almost none of the music at issue here is THAT old--U2's earliest recordings come from 1980, about 23 years old, so the record company still holds the copyright. I suppose this is why you don't see a song like the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night", whose copyright supposedly reverted back to McCartney (and probably jointly to Lennon's estate) a couple of years ago, listed in the document.
Yes, you are right, the copyright holder must give specific authorization, but in most cases this specific authorization has been implicitly given by the contract signed by the artist. For works after 1999, the record labels hold all the copyrights as if they wrote the songs and performed them themselves, due to the work for hire provision. In this case they ARE the copyright holders, as much as a newspaper company owns the copyrights to an article written by its staff.
Look at a music CD you have. Any CD. Look for the copyright notice in fine print (usually on the bottom part of the back of the disc jewel case). I hold in my hands a copy of U2's Best of 1980-1990 CD, and it says the copyright is held by "Polygram Records". No mention of U2 or any of the band members anywhere in the copyright notice! The record label always owns the copyright! I have a lot of CD's, and none, I repeat none of them has a copyright notice that includes the name of the band or the artist as copyright holder (not even joint copyrights). The record companies always hold the rights to everything. If you want to know how these artists are actually treated by the RIAA, here's a small article that may enlighten you as to how the system really works.
I wonder how is it that the ionizing radiation doesn't manage to kill off these microbes before they can do their job? A typical gamma ray goes for 5 MeV, whereas a typical ionization energy is only at 15-20 eV. Interfering with chemical reactions necessary to life most definitely. Mutation and more likely outright killing of these organisms.
How do they survive?
Imagine earning the equivalent of US$160 every month. Can you folks in America live with such a wage? That's how much money I'm making right now, and while it's not exactly a lot, it's enough for me to pay the rent and utilities, buy enough food to for me and my girlfriend to eat well every day, and allow us to have a little more fun besides romping around on the bed. :) (it's not enough for us to consider getting married and having children though) What do I do that earns me such a pittance? I deploy and design enterprise Linux systems, and write custom Linux software as well. The fact that I work for a new and impoverished startup company skews things a bit, but the facts remain. Even as much as US$500 a month is considered a very good wage where I come from. Would you folks in America even consider such pathetic wages?
I can buy a pack of cigarettes here for the equivalent of less than 50 US cents. A home-cooked meal of chicken or other meat costs around 75 US cents per person. My daily commute to work is slightly less than one US dollar. Water and electric bills amount to roughly US$8-$10 per month. Rent, US$60 per month. That's what life's like in the Third World, folks. Come by and visit sometime.
Just a little bit lower down and I think you've got exactly what they're doing!
It could be, and most probably is a gas giant like Jupiter. If so, then why should its formation so early in the universe be such a big surprise? Jupiter itself is largely made up of light gases which would have been present in abundance in such regions in the early universe. The fact that there's a supernova remnant there (a pulsar, the article says) tells me that any heavy elements (if they are required) could have come from the results of that explosion.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sco-statement.html
Spends more on aid to other nations and their people? Well, living in a country that is on the receiving end of such "aid" I think qualifies me to tell you that such aid never comes without strings attached. Desperate nations like mine have no choice but to accept such "foreign aid", and along with it are forced to enter into disadvantageous treaties, having military bases built on our territory (and all the political, societal, and environmental problems that entails), taking it in the behind from every multinational corporation that comes our way, and seeing our natural resources drained until we're sucked dry. Yeah, aid indeed.
Nah, the US is just like any other customer, it won't give without first taking.
Yes, here in the Philppines, the 802.11b band is also regulated. A long time ago, MERALCO, the nation's largest electrical distribution company, purchased and owns an exclusive license on the 2.4 GHz band. Some of their old equipment actually uses this band, and out in the provinces (away from Metro Manila) this is an important issue. There are some pretty messy talks going underway where the large telecommunications companies and network service providers are lobbying our Congress to get our National Telecommunications Commission to revoke that 2.4 GHz franchise, by coming up with a plan that will enable the power company to gradually phase out its ancient equipment that uses that chunk of the spectrum. What with all the messes that MERALCO has gotten itself into lately, such as the Supreme Court's recent ruling that they have to pay well over 20 billion Philippine pesos (about US$ 500 millon) in rebates to their subscribers because they overcharged everyone over a period of almost a decade, I don't know whether this is going to turn out soon enough for it to matter.
Fortunately, none of this old MERALCO equipment is being used in Metro Manila and most of the provinces surrounding the capital, but that doesn't stop them from complaining.
Very nice article, but Mr. Rich has stated something down near the bottom that is not quite true.
How long is it going to take people to realize that there is a very big difference? I steal a sweater off the Gap, the store doesn't have it, I do. I download a song from the day's equivalent of Napster, has the person I got it off lost it, or has the artist (or more precisely the record label) actually lost something in the same way? Of course not. The misguided promoters of this idea assume that every time I or someone like me obtains unauthorized copies of something that is supposed to be "theirs" means that I would have otherwise bought an original for the prices at which they are sold. This is, of course, not true in general. It is false and misleading to consider copyright violation the moral or even legal equivalent of theft.
...it still propagates what I perceive to be a very big misconception about what copyright is really for. The Constitution of the United States, in the copyright clause, has specifically stated that the purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not specifically to provide authors like J.K. Rowling with an incentive to continue writing. Richard M. Stallman (whatever you may think of him) explains this very well in this article. Copyright law is not a monopoly granted by a (responsible) government in an attempt to strike a balance between the rights of authors and rights of the public, but rather as an attempt to balance two different, sometimes conflicting rights of the public: the public wants a lot of good quality works for its consumption, and the public also wants these works to be available at low cost. Stallman makes a nice analogy between this dilemma and that of building public works projects like buildings and dams. For public works, a government would want to build the best and safest public works, while at the same time it wouldn't want to spend too much money to do so. Nobody will build a bridge or dam for free, of course, so the government then has to decide how much money it is willing to spend for the public's welfare. For copyright legislation, the government is not spending public money, but the public's rights and freedoms.
Well, the United States government has done, with the current travesties of law like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the DMCA, the equivalent of having contractors build a bridge that totally covers the river. And worse yet, it is attempting to wrestle other countries into making similar laws apply there as well, under the pretext of protecting international trade.
Yes, copyright law all over the world is in bad need of reform, but without remembering its original purpose for existing in the first place. Authors are granted these copyright monopolies not because they were the original creators of the work and they are entitled to it, but because it is supposed to serve the public interest. A lot of the misapplications of copyright restrictions mentioned in the article mainly boil down to violations of this principle.
Remember the poor Mars Polar Lander? Thing crashed and mission failed miserably. Live and on the Internet three years ago.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/
Adding a blacklist at the receiving end will only help the user using it, and one can only hope that spammers will eventually realize that much of their traffic is simply not getting through, and figure out a different sort of scam to pull on people. Unfortunately this doesn't solve some of the more serious problems with spam, such as congestion of mail servers and backbone pipes. I've heard some statistics quoted that some 80% of traffic on much of the core routers appears to be spam. A blacklist in the sense being described is no solution to this at all.
Much better would be blacklists for known open relays, and strong (i.e. cryptographic) authentication for mail servers. This is arguably not censorship, as you're merely cutting off those people who aren't good neighbors, people who don't bother to play nice with everyone else, which is what the Internet really is all about. The RFC's are just rules we all agreed to have, and anyone who doesn't bother to follow them is in effect voluntarily cutting himself or herself off from everyone who does follow the rules.
I think that much of the spam is going through illicit channels and channels made by careless fools who don't bother to read the RFC's. Cutting off such bad neighbors will go a long way towards curbing the spam problem.
Wonder if this spammer has any relation to good 'ol John. ;)
However, a fortune cookie from the BSD Games Fortune Cookie files also goes:
The Consultant's Curse:
Perhaps Sun feels sufficiently compelled by Hypertransport's effectiveness in producing powerful multiprocessor systems easily and cost-effectively. Three HyperTransport buses per Opteron, use one to interface to the system bus and the other two to interconnect with other processors. No other processor has HyperTransports like this, specifically optimized for multiprocessor configurations.
Interesting. But why in the name of all that is holy, did the OpenSSL developers choose to use an insecure-by-default system that requires every developer of an OpenSSL server application to turn on the blinding algorithm explicitly? That will mean patching every application! Apparently, some distributions that bundle OpenSSL don't include the blinding code either, without having it compiled in, which points to the distinct possibility that OpenSSL has this option turned off by default for some reason. The next release should have it turned on and active by default all the time, unless there's a really pressing reason not to (e.g. if turning it on would decrease the speed of the whole thing by roughly an order of magnitude, which I seriously doubt).
I believe Paul Kocher first proposed (this is PDF) this attack way, way back in 1995, and as I recall, he even applied it to networked systems. RSA Labs' BSAFE, since version 3.0 has included a "blinding factor" in its RSA implementation that renders this attack ineffective. Reading the original RSA Labs bulletin (also PDF) on this attack shows a very simple fix, and I'm surprised that this hasn't made its way into OpenSSL! Ron Rivest proposed this back in early 1996. What's up?
A brief exposition on why the points are BS...
Off the top of my head, I can think of solar sails and laser sails. These are at least two propellantless propulsion technologies being seriously studied by scientists. Obviously, neither requires 'propellant' in any shape or form.
If they found 0.1 errors per 1000 lines of code, did they approach Linus and Co. to point them out? Has Reasoning submitted any kernel patches to address the errors they say they found?
One side of the issue is that if you attempt to look at any sufficiently large and complex system it will overwhelm you with its complexity. The human mind can only deal with a certain amount of complexity at a time before overloading. That's the reason why object-oriented methodologies were invented, to attempt to chop up a large and complex problem into smaller and more manageable pieces, so you can deal with certain things as "black boxes" and move on to the bigger picture. Sort of like zooming in and out. A graphic artist would never think of working at a single zoom scale when editing a picture, she would zoom in for fine work and zoom out for an overall view. Treating things as black boxes is done so that you don't lose sight of the forest for the trees, not the other way around!
But of course, as my own experience in embedded systems development and electronics work has taught me as well, it does no good to simply leave things as black boxes. You also have to know how the black box works on the inside before you can go on to treat it as a black box. I had to learn the ins and outs of semiconductor and transistor physics before I learned how to use logic IC's, which have these components as their basic building blocks, so that I'd understand the limits and quirks of these devices. I think the big problem we have is that people are generally unfamiliar with how the many black boxes they use actually look like on the inside, so if their system winds up eventually tickling limitations or quirks (which, as the complexity of the system they're building grows becomes more and more likely), they have no idea what the hell is going on or what to do about it. In other words, too much zooming out, not enough zooming in, so you get work which has too many rough edges and not enough fine detail.
Salon had a highly insightful article some years back about this very topic as it pertains to software engineering: "The Dumbing Down of Programming", by Ellen Ullman, Part One and Part Two. She talks about the way too much knowledge is disappearing into code, and the problems that causes.
Holy cow... I didn't know microprocessor features were still so freaking huge! Methinks the author needs to remember that there is an HTML entity readily available as µ. :) Unfortunately it seems slashdot is stripping out most of my entities so we can't see it here . 0.13 mm is 130 microns, which is roughly where IC technology was in the mid- to late-1980's if I'm not mistaken. That can't possibly be right. If use of the entity is out of the question (just as it seems to be on ./), maybe they could have said 0.000013 mm or even spelled out the word "micron" right out.