So HD Video is the smallest possible step forward then? Given all the hi-def kit that people have already bought that isn't compatible with the copy-protecto-flibberty-fuck I suppose "quantum leap" is a fair description.
Neither Sony nor MS are interested in allowing you to have an open implementation of DRM. If it aint proprietary, and obscure, they're never gonna support it.
I think the market/corporate realities trump wether or not it's technically feasible. (That's not to say I don't think it would be a cool idea, I just don't think it's one which stands a hope in hell -- the players involved have too much at stake to buy into it.)
The nice thing about that is that the "players" will be continually stabbing each other in back with no end of snarky DRM based customer lock-in schemes. Plus, DRM has to be constantly updated since new attacks are coming out all the time. Those two things guarantee that DRM is going to be nothing but a PITA for Joe Enduser who just wants to watch movies. Google up the problems people are having using PS3s on their hi-def TVs; that is just a taste of the fun yet to come. Oh yeah, and the government joining the party makes things so much the better. See the troubles Apple is having in the EU.
I say give the hackers and "pirates" every encouragement possible. Hopefully we goad the "players" into such extreme responses that market revolt is inevitable.
There is no way in hell an open source implementation of DRM will ever be allowed to exist. Period. Believing so is very naive and idealistic.
With a bit of thought, Open Source COULD support hardware based DRM schemes. It would take some design on the part of the hardware though. Basically, the DRM components would just be black boxes with an open interface for commands such as "playback". Actual decryption would not be done by the operating system at all; at most the OS would pass encrypted streams and keyhashes from one peripheral to another. It COULD be done but both Apple and MS want to own DRM standards so that they can function as gatekeepers and middlemen for the entertainment industry. As it is, any DRM that relies on software (even super-leet TCPA stuff) is going to have multiple software based attacks available. Of course, the software can be kept in a continual state of flux (read breakage for legitimate users). Pure hardware DRM would be harder to attack but the payoff for a successful attack would be huge and probably universal.
I'm with Schnier on this one: "Making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet."
Most of the Earth's thermal energy originates in radioactive decay going on in the core. Essentially, the planet is a giant RTG. Local cooling can be caused by geothermal plants but we'd pretty much have to cover the planet with them to outrace heat production in the core.
Unlike video, digital audio is simply too well understood. Many of us here are capable of knocking together A/D and D/A converters if we had too. More realistically, good A/D,D/A designs can be written to FPGAs. It wouldn't take long for a thriving underground in deboogerfied audio equipment to develop. In time, we'll learn to efficiently pour video through the analog hole as well. There will always be legions of hackers dedicated to making DRM as difficult and expensive as possible. They like it inconvenient too; it gets everybody on their side.
ACLs are an option in the Linux/BSD world. There aren't that many that take advantage because ACLs can create as many problems as they solve. I wouldn't be surprised if the BSD backend of OS X supported them as well. Still, the lack of Finder support for them is suggestive.
It would work the same as any other legal proceeding. The accuser would have to find copies of that spec or other evidence laying around the GPL developers. The bare accusation of having seen that spec wouldn't suffice. The legal system generally recognizes that you can't prove a negative.
You can indeed download the Flash specification but the EULA specifically disallows using the information to create a player. The GPL projects implementing Flash are having to reverse engineer everything because of this.
Ubiquitous TCPA could also be used to ensure that motherboards will only boot MS approved kernels and bootloaders. I could very easily see MS strongarming large vendors into that to get good volume licensing deals.
I'm not conflating anything together. This all boils down to trademarks and copyrights, which Slashdotters are normally against except when "one of their own" is the target of infringement--such as a demoscener, open source developers writing GPL code, and so forth. That was my point, and it still stands.
Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong. "Boiling down" is an excellent way to conflate things together.
Free and Open Source software largely operate according to the same rules that govern scientific publication. Being known as the originator of a work is the very large deal in both fields. When the area of interest is somewhat obscure, it pretty much is everything. Incidentally, I notice that most Slashdotters are only against extreme and misplaced forms of copyright. I for one favor "copyright reform" not "copyright abolishment". Big difference. The contingent of the "copyrights are meaningless" crowd is fairly small. You are also assuming the group of people who read and post here is a monolith and then ascribing a tenuous moral precept to that monolith which you then demolish. It's two straw men for the price of one.
Your "point" is about as sharp as a bowling ball. My point still stands: Unauthorized copyright and stealing attribution are two different things. Both happened to take place here as sampling was involved. Of the two, I think most people here are more hacked off about Tempest's good name.
Why? It's pretty much the partyline that Slashdotters put out in every piracy article. Not to troll, but come on.
Ummmm. No. You're trolling. The only thing you have left to do is say "I know I'll get modded down for this but....".
You are conflating two different things together to create a straw man. The Gnutella/Limewire/eMule type of copyright infringement is about getting a copy of something without paying for it. That issue is surely a mess and I'm not arguing any of its sides now. Limewiring a freebie isn't what Timbaland has done. Timbaland is taking credit for the work of another. This is an attribution issue. It is not the same thing as downloading freebies from p2p. Arguments for and against that don't apply. This is something else entirely.
Just in case snarky arguments are being mustered, I'll explain it in simple terms: Even though Bob might download "Murder by Numbers" for free he wouldn't dream of saying he wrote it rather than Sting. In other news, Sting kicked Billy the Bar Singer's ass for doing just that the other day......
You are correct that it is a social problem and that there will never be one great technological fix that solves it all. However, if you accept that it's a social problem, then:
* You should not be so aghast at the idea of fixing it with laws (after all, laws are intended to fix social problems)
* You should nevertheless support community efforts to CURB the problem.
You're either talking past or not getting what torques me and "the Slashdot crowd" off: Screwing up our hardware with "Fritz Chips" and then criggling up the software that runs the Internet so that only "Fritz Compliant" equipment can get online in the first place. Fucking up our computers so that only the likes of MicroSoft can truly program them is NOT tantamount to marking a child's toy as such. Keeping our hardware above the child's toy level is very much what we are about here; it is one issue you damn well count on to generate "community action". Secondly, I'm not against reasonable laws made by people with at least a modicum of clue. Diane Feinstein is notorious for basically letting the xxAAs draft legislation for her. The xxAAs are nasty middlemen who operate according to The Golden Rule namely "He who has the gold makes the rules." They screw both artist and customer and I don't especially give a rat's ass what hurts them. This opposition to pissing in our Wheaties is not an objection of any kind to community morals. Incidentally, many of are writing our own software and making our own entertainment under licenses and legal regimes that are FAR more compatible with community ideals. Many of us DO condemn piracy and instead advocate things like Creative Commons licensed content and FOSS software. For some reason, entrenched interests seem to find that to be more dangerous. I often think they'd rather suffer piracy than risk what "rolling our own" brings. BTW, We are not a monolith here. But even the MS fanboys don't seem to want their machines fucked over.
Just law respects everyone and not simply those who draft it to suit themselves then fork over bags of campaign contributions to get it enacted. The law is currently tending in the direction of letting companies like MS and cartels like the xxAAs dictate what we can and cannot do with our own hardware be it right, wrong, or indifferent. Until there is some acknowledgement that not all technology users are criminals and have rights just as important as those of corporate copyright holders, then they won't get any sympathy. A few years ago, Orrin Hatch tried to push through a law that would permit copyright holders to remotely disable PCs and other equipment if they merely suspected infringement. Since they can't achieve that in one fell swoop, they are doing it piecemeal. This shows a far more profound lack of respect of rights both property and moral then anything you'll see from "The Slashdot Crowd". As long as the laws proposed are blatantly unfair products of raw avarice rather than a genuine desire to serve ALL of the public then yes they'll be almost universally opposed.
In short, your view is that technologists should not be concerned with how their creations are used. In your view, laws that restrict how or what technology you create are bad. Because you are a 'craftsman', you are completely absolved from any real thinking or restrictions about implications, whatsoever. Furthermore, nobody else should be able to put any restrictions on the use of your output, because you are a 'craftsman.'
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets." - Omar Bradley
In hiding behind your "I am a craftsman" defense, you are truly an ethical midget.
Since you closed with an insult, I'm going to open with pointing out that you are a snarky cheap-shot artist. You also just blew any chance you might have thought you had to change anyone's mind.
The responsibility for the use of any implement be it knife, gun, computer, or screwdriver lies with the user of the implement. Turning useful implements into dull plastic Fisher Price toys does nothing to alleviate the fact that people basically suck. Other methods can be and are effective against this sort of thing. Copyright infringement is a social problem and is only properly dealt with by social means. There is not and never will be a technological fix that takes care of it once and for all. Try searching for say ROMs for MAME. At one time, the entire collection could be pulled from some sites with wget. These days it takes hours of searching to get one. This is about the best you can expect. If you squeeze people any tighter than that and fill their electronic property with monkeywrenches then expect a (thoroughly deserved) monkeywrenching in return.
A point by point back and forth isn't needed here. The "Slashdot Perspective" is very simple and very straightforward:
1. We are technologists. Like any other sort of craftsman or artist or artist, we have a deep respect for the tools and methods of our trade.
2. The effect of these laws is to either blunt our tools into uselessness or turn them into convoluted black boxes that only a privileged few are allowed to completely understand and manipulate. Blunting a knife so that you can't cut yourself is morally equivalent to how the interest groups want to solve the issues you brought up.
I have little trouble understanding why Morimoto thought Bobby Flay an ass for standing on his cutting board. In the same vein, Frank Zappa didn't think much of the stage theatric of smashing a guitar on stage. Both are merely tomfoolery however. What the xxAA and the politicians want to do is send thugs into our hardware stores to remove the beautiful and useful in favor of stunted ugly things "Da Boss" approves of.
Once you DO get the Linux system the way you like it:
# tar cvfz etc_correctly_configured.tar.gz/etc If you running a Debian derivative add this too:
dpkg --get-selections > installed_packages.txt
You should use checkinstall to install any non repo software built from source and keep either the debs or source trees. All this can be tucked out of the way. Finally, keep a backup of your home directory on an external hard drive or burned to DVDs.
I can replicate my perfectly working setups in about four hours and most of that is waiting for apt-get to pull in and install the stuff. You don't want to drop the etc tarball on a new system. It is strictly a reference to save you from googling up how say mplayer works. I've certainly made judicious use of old config files though. What you can do with the installed_packages.txt file though is simply magical:
cp old_etc/apt/sources.list/etc/apt/sources.list dpkg --set-selections (less than symbol - f'ing lameness filter) installed_packages.txt apt-get dselect-upgrade
Those three commands will install everything that was on the old system minus anything that didn't come from the repos; that is 95% of the work of replicating a system right there. But you kept all of that stuff or know where to find it?
If you aren't using a Debian derivative, I assume equivalent tricks can be played with yum.
I'd rather have closed drivers that work for these devices under Linux than some crappy open source drivers.
What is wrong with that?
1. nVidia can change their minds about Linux support at any time.
2. People may want the hardware to be usable on other arches than i86.
3. It'd be nice to be able to distribute a complete working nVidia Linux system legally.
He's posted to Y! Scox as day5done (he denies this. The day5done nym is incredibly sympathetic to Wallace). Much joy has been had taking the piss out of Wallace/day5done on that board.
The nightmare scenario with non-net neutrality is having to pay bills to someone other than your own ISP. Last summer, AT&T's CEO was blathering something about popular sites like Google "paying their fair share" to have access to AT&T's customers. Net neutrality isn't about an ISP offering tiered services to their own customers. It is about large ISPs playing games with their customers to beat money out of people who aren't their customers.
Mr. AT&T Twit this is how it works: Google pays their ISP for bandwidth. Your customers pay you for theirs. This isn't the seventies. You don't have the privilege of billing both sides of a conversation because you don't own this network end to end. And you should not be permitted to do it in any sort of de-facto way. Here's another newsflash. Rather than cave to your extortionate demands, popular sites like Google can detect that your customers are connecting slowly and throw up a prominent explanation of exactly whose fault it is.
We busted those clowns up for a reason. They should never have been allowed to re-merge. Lo and behold they are once again acting like the detested "Phone Company" of old.
Nothing forces you to disclose the fact that you installed non-vendor software on a vendor-certified system, which is a problem for the vendor.
The support contract or warranty conditions can do that. Neither version of the GPL controls the conditions under which warranties can be offered. If the support incident is escalated to an RMA then the vendor can certainly tell what has been installed on the unit. If we're talking phone support, the vendor has numerous options to verify how the system is configured. The GPL does nothing to hinder support contracts. Withdrawal of support does not affect the freedoms the GPL is intended to protect. Vendor support is mostly orthogonal to either version of the GPL. Forgoing GPL protected freedoms for the period of a warranty or support contract is an equitable exchange.
GPLv3 does not prevent hardware warranty verification. If the unit throws up some kind of prominent notice upon modified software being installed (provided the owner of the device can still do so.) that the warranty is no longer under effect then the GPLv3 doesn't prevent that. In short, you can still still use hardware verification as a justification to not offer support but don't tell me what I can run on the hardware. Stallman has explicitly that the GPLv3 will not prevent such verification. The GPLv2 relied on an implicit assumption that the user could at run (or attempt to run) modified software. Since games are being played with hardware to prevent modified v2 software from running, the implicit assumption had to be made explicit.
RTFA. That isn't their logic. The logic is: "If a sequence doesn't exist in nature it may have been selected against, possibly because it is injurious. Let's find and synthesize as many of these sequences as we can then we'll test their effects in the laboratory." One of the applications of their work is using these sequences to tag samples because they don't occur in nature. It doesn't seem that bad sci-fi genetic superweapons are topmost in their minds.
Slashdot Mirror
So HD Video is the smallest possible step forward then? Given all the hi-def kit that people have already bought that isn't compatible with the copy-protecto-flibberty-fuck I suppose "quantum leap" is a fair description.
Neither Sony nor MS are interested in allowing you to have an open implementation of DRM. If it aint proprietary, and obscure, they're never gonna support it.
I think the market/corporate realities trump wether or not it's technically feasible. (That's not to say I don't think it would be a cool idea, I just don't think it's one which stands a hope in hell -- the players involved have too much at stake to buy into it.)
The nice thing about that is that the "players" will be continually stabbing each other in back with no end of snarky DRM based customer lock-in schemes. Plus, DRM has to be constantly updated since new attacks are coming out all the time. Those two things guarantee that DRM is going to be nothing but a PITA for Joe Enduser who just wants to watch movies. Google up the problems people are having using PS3s on their hi-def TVs; that is just a taste of the fun yet to come. Oh yeah, and the government joining the party makes things so much the better. See the troubles Apple is having in the EU.
I say give the hackers and "pirates" every encouragement possible. Hopefully we goad the "players" into such extreme responses that market revolt is inevitable.
There is no way in hell an open source implementation of DRM will ever be allowed to exist. Period. Believing so is very naive and idealistic.
With a bit of thought, Open Source COULD support hardware based DRM schemes. It would take some design on the part of the hardware though. Basically, the DRM components would just be black boxes with an open interface for commands such as "playback". Actual decryption would not be done by the operating system at all; at most the OS would pass encrypted streams and keyhashes from one peripheral to another. It COULD be done but both Apple and MS want to own DRM standards so that they can function as gatekeepers and middlemen for the entertainment industry. As it is, any DRM that relies on software (even super-leet TCPA stuff) is going to have multiple software based attacks available. Of course, the software can be kept in a continual state of flux (read breakage for legitimate users). Pure hardware DRM would be harder to attack but the payoff for a successful attack would be huge and probably universal.I'm with Schnier on this one: "Making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet."
Most of the Earth's thermal energy originates in radioactive decay going on in the core. Essentially, the planet is a giant RTG. Local cooling can be caused by geothermal plants but we'd pretty much have to cover the planet with them to outrace heat production in the core.
Unlike video, digital audio is simply too well understood. Many of us here are capable of knocking together A/D and D/A converters if we had too. More realistically, good A/D,D/A designs can be written to FPGAs. It wouldn't take long for a thriving underground in deboogerfied audio equipment to develop. In time, we'll learn to efficiently pour video through the analog hole as well. There will always be legions of hackers dedicated to making DRM as difficult and expensive as possible. They like it inconvenient too; it gets everybody on their side.
ACLs are an option in the Linux/BSD world. There aren't that many that take advantage because ACLs can create as many problems as they solve. I wouldn't be surprised if the BSD backend of OS X supported them as well. Still, the lack of Finder support for them is suggestive.
Those Slylandro can be a real pain in the rear though. "We come in peace". BLAM!
It would work the same as any other legal proceeding. The accuser would have to find copies of that spec or other evidence laying around the GPL developers. The bare accusation of having seen that spec wouldn't suffice. The legal system generally recognizes that you can't prove a negative.
You can indeed download the Flash specification but the EULA specifically disallows using the information to create a player. The GPL projects implementing Flash are having to reverse engineer everything because of this.
Does Rush still have rants about throwing drug addicts in prison and throwing away the key?
He has this little weakness for beachfront property see? So he bought all of this worthless glacier and............
Ubiquitous TCPA could also be used to ensure that motherboards will only boot MS approved kernels and bootloaders. I could very easily see MS strongarming large vendors into that to get good volume licensing deals.
I'm not conflating anything together. This all boils down to trademarks and copyrights, which Slashdotters are normally against except when "one of their own" is the target of infringement--such as a demoscener, open source developers writing GPL code, and so forth. That was my point, and it still stands.
Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong. "Boiling down" is an excellent way to conflate things together.
Free and Open Source software largely operate according to the same rules that govern scientific publication. Being known as the originator of a work is the very large deal in both fields. When the area of interest is somewhat obscure, it pretty much is everything. Incidentally, I notice that most Slashdotters are only against extreme and misplaced forms of copyright. I for one favor "copyright reform" not "copyright abolishment". Big difference. The contingent of the "copyrights are meaningless" crowd is fairly small. You are also assuming the group of people who read and post here is a monolith and then ascribing a tenuous moral precept to that monolith which you then demolish. It's two straw men for the price of one.
Your "point" is about as sharp as a bowling ball. My point still stands: Unauthorized copyright and stealing attribution are two different things. Both happened to take place here as sampling was involved. Of the two, I think most people here are more hacked off about Tempest's good name.
Why? It's pretty much the partyline that Slashdotters put out in every piracy article. Not to troll, but come on.
Ummmm. No. You're trolling. The only thing you have left to do is say "I know I'll get modded down for this but....".
You are conflating two different things together to create a straw man. The Gnutella/Limewire/eMule type of copyright infringement is about getting a copy of something without paying for it. That issue is surely a mess and I'm not arguing any of its sides now. Limewiring a freebie isn't what Timbaland has done. Timbaland is taking credit for the work of another. This is an attribution issue. It is not the same thing as downloading freebies from p2p. Arguments for and against that don't apply. This is something else entirely.
Just in case snarky arguments are being mustered, I'll explain it in simple terms: Even though Bob might download "Murder by Numbers" for free he wouldn't dream of saying he wrote it rather than Sting. In other news, Sting kicked Billy the Bar Singer's ass for doing just that the other day......
You are correct that it is a social problem and that there will never be one great technological fix that solves it all. However, if you accept that it's a social problem, then: * You should not be so aghast at the idea of fixing it with laws (after all, laws are intended to fix social problems) * You should nevertheless support community efforts to CURB the problem.
You're either talking past or not getting what torques me and "the Slashdot crowd" off: Screwing up our hardware with "Fritz Chips" and then criggling up the software that runs the Internet so that only "Fritz Compliant" equipment can get online in the first place. Fucking up our computers so that only the likes of MicroSoft can truly program them is NOT tantamount to marking a child's toy as such. Keeping our hardware above the child's toy level is very much what we are about here; it is one issue you damn well count on to generate "community action". Secondly, I'm not against reasonable laws made by people with at least a modicum of clue. Diane Feinstein is notorious for basically letting the xxAAs draft legislation for her. The xxAAs are nasty middlemen who operate according to The Golden Rule namely "He who has the gold makes the rules." They screw both artist and customer and I don't especially give a rat's ass what hurts them. This opposition to pissing in our Wheaties is not an objection of any kind to community morals. Incidentally, many of are writing our own software and making our own entertainment under licenses and legal regimes that are FAR more compatible with community ideals. Many of us DO condemn piracy and instead advocate things like Creative Commons licensed content and FOSS software. For some reason, entrenched interests seem to find that to be more dangerous. I often think they'd rather suffer piracy than risk what "rolling our own" brings. BTW, We are not a monolith here. But even the MS fanboys don't seem to want their machines fucked over.
Just law respects everyone and not simply those who draft it to suit themselves then fork over bags of campaign contributions to get it enacted. The law is currently tending in the direction of letting companies like MS and cartels like the xxAAs dictate what we can and cannot do with our own hardware be it right, wrong, or indifferent. Until there is some acknowledgement that not all technology users are criminals and have rights just as important as those of corporate copyright holders, then they won't get any sympathy. A few years ago, Orrin Hatch tried to push through a law that would permit copyright holders to remotely disable PCs and other equipment if they merely suspected infringement. Since they can't achieve that in one fell swoop, they are doing it piecemeal. This shows a far more profound lack of respect of rights both property and moral then anything you'll see from "The Slashdot Crowd". As long as the laws proposed are blatantly unfair products of raw avarice rather than a genuine desire to serve ALL of the public then yes they'll be almost universally opposed.
In short, your view is that technologists should not be concerned with how their creations are used. In your view, laws that restrict how or what technology you create are bad. Because you are a 'craftsman', you are completely absolved from any real thinking or restrictions about implications, whatsoever. Furthermore, nobody else should be able to put any restrictions on the use of your output, because you are a 'craftsman.'
Since you closed with an insult, I'm going to open with pointing out that you are a snarky cheap-shot artist. You also just blew any chance you might have thought you had to change anyone's mind.The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets." - Omar Bradley
In hiding behind your "I am a craftsman" defense, you are truly an ethical midget.
The responsibility for the use of any implement be it knife, gun, computer, or screwdriver lies with the user of the implement. Turning useful implements into dull plastic Fisher Price toys does nothing to alleviate the fact that people basically suck. Other methods can be and are effective against this sort of thing. Copyright infringement is a social problem and is only properly dealt with by social means. There is not and never will be a technological fix that takes care of it once and for all. Try searching for say ROMs for MAME. At one time, the entire collection could be pulled from some sites with wget. These days it takes hours of searching to get one. This is about the best you can expect. If you squeeze people any tighter than that and fill their electronic property with monkeywrenches then expect a (thoroughly deserved) monkeywrenching in return.
A point by point back and forth isn't needed here. The "Slashdot Perspective" is very simple and very straightforward:
1. We are technologists. Like any other sort of craftsman or artist or artist, we have a deep respect for the tools and methods of our trade.
2. The effect of these laws is to either blunt our tools into uselessness or turn them into convoluted black boxes that only a privileged few are allowed to completely understand and manipulate. Blunting a knife so that you can't cut yourself is morally equivalent to how the interest groups want to solve the issues you brought up.
I have little trouble understanding why Morimoto thought Bobby Flay an ass for standing on his cutting board. In the same vein,
Frank Zappa didn't think much of the stage theatric of smashing a guitar on stage. Both are merely tomfoolery however. What the xxAA and the politicians want to do is send thugs into our hardware stores to remove the beautiful and useful in favor of stunted ugly things "Da Boss" approves of.
Never use Worcester Sauce to embalm a dead company. Do NOT use chainsaws to dismember it.
Once you DO get the Linux system the way you like it:
/etc
/etc/apt/sources.list
# tar cvfz etc_correctly_configured.tar.gz
If you running a Debian derivative add this too:
dpkg --get-selections > installed_packages.txt
You should use checkinstall to install any non repo software built from source and keep either the debs or source trees. All this can be tucked out of the way. Finally, keep a backup of your home directory on an external hard drive or burned to DVDs.
I can replicate my perfectly working setups in about four hours and most of that is waiting for apt-get to pull in and install the stuff. You don't want to drop the etc tarball on a new system. It is strictly a reference to save you from googling up how say mplayer works. I've certainly made judicious use of old config files though. What you can do with the installed_packages.txt file though is simply magical:
cp old_etc/apt/sources.list
dpkg --set-selections (less than symbol - f'ing lameness filter) installed_packages.txt
apt-get dselect-upgrade
Those three commands will install everything that was on the old system minus anything that didn't come from the repos; that is 95% of the work of replicating a system right there. But you kept all of that stuff or know where to find it?
If you aren't using a Debian derivative, I assume equivalent tricks can be played with yum.
I'd rather have closed drivers that work for these devices under Linux than some crappy open source drivers.
What is wrong with that?
1. nVidia can change their minds about Linux support at any time.
2. People may want the hardware to be usable on other arches than i86.
3. It'd be nice to be able to distribute a complete working nVidia Linux system legally.
What is wrong with any of that?
He's posted to Y! Scox as day5done (he denies this. The day5done nym is incredibly sympathetic to Wallace). Much joy has been had taking the piss out of Wallace/day5done on that board.
The nightmare scenario with non-net neutrality is having to pay bills to someone other than your own ISP. Last summer, AT&T's CEO was blathering something about popular sites like Google "paying their fair share" to have access to AT&T's customers. Net neutrality isn't about an ISP offering tiered services to their own customers. It is about large ISPs playing games with their customers to beat money out of people who aren't their customers.
Mr. AT&T Twit this is how it works: Google pays their ISP for bandwidth. Your customers pay you for theirs. This isn't the seventies. You don't have the privilege of billing both sides of a conversation because you don't own this network end to end. And you should not be permitted to do it in any sort of de-facto way. Here's another newsflash. Rather than cave to your extortionate demands, popular sites like Google can detect that your customers are connecting slowly and throw up a prominent explanation of exactly whose fault it is.
We busted those clowns up for a reason. They should never have been allowed to re-merge. Lo and behold they are once again acting like the detested "Phone Company" of old.
Nothing forces you to disclose the fact that you installed non-vendor software on a vendor-certified system, which is a problem for the vendor.
The support contract or warranty conditions can do that. Neither version of the GPL controls the conditions under which warranties can be offered. If the support incident is escalated to an RMA then the vendor can certainly tell what has been installed on the unit. If we're talking phone support, the vendor has numerous options to verify how the system is configured. The GPL does nothing to hinder support contracts. Withdrawal of support does not affect the freedoms the GPL is intended to protect. Vendor support is mostly orthogonal to either version of the GPL. Forgoing GPL protected freedoms for the period of a warranty or support contract is an equitable exchange.GPLv3 does not prevent hardware warranty verification. If the unit throws up some kind of prominent notice upon modified software being installed (provided the owner of the device can still do so.) that the warranty is no longer under effect then the GPLv3 doesn't prevent that. In short, you can still still use hardware verification as a justification to not offer support but don't tell me what I can run on the hardware. Stallman has explicitly that the GPLv3 will not prevent such verification. The GPLv2 relied on an implicit assumption that the user could at run (or attempt to run) modified software. Since games are being played with hardware to prevent modified v2 software from running, the implicit assumption had to be made explicit.
RTFA. That isn't their logic. The logic is: "If a sequence doesn't exist in nature it may have been selected against, possibly because it is injurious. Let's find and synthesize as many of these sequences as we can then we'll test their effects in the laboratory." One of the applications of their work is using these sequences to tag samples because they don't occur in nature. It doesn't seem that bad sci-fi genetic superweapons are topmost in their minds.