Before everyone celebrates, I should point out that the articles and press release give no firm indication that the actual voting software will be free software.
There are lots of warm and fuzzy words about open source, but the only thing the article says explicitly will be GPL'ed is the OS ("platform"):
The only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).
The press release refers to "ACT's Hare-Clark electoral system" and says only:
The need for high voter confidence in the system is clear. In responding to the tender Software Improvements and its subcontractors were able to cite extensive experience in the field of high integrity software. The Software Improvements solution detailed an innovative approach to meeting the many expectations the community has of this type of system.
Thanks as usual to Slashdot's editors for their insightful commentary.
There's actually a perfectly good reason to block the cell-phone radiation from going into your head, and that is to save power. With current cell phones, about half of the signal is absorbed by your head (hint: water is a very good absorber at microwave frequencies) as useless (but harmless) heat.
(I know of at least one project with Conexant and UCLA directed at using photonic crystals to point cell-phone antenna output away from the head for just this reason.)
One problem is that many software packages have a large number of authors, and it can be hard to track them all down and coordinate legal permission for an exception. Just witness the hassles that the Mozilla project is having to go through to relicense the code under the GPL (although things like this can be done, with perseverence). (It would have been much easier if they had taken RMS's advice and made the NPL/MPL GPL-compatible to begin with.)
(This is another advantage to the FSF's policy of copyright assignment: there is only a single copyright holder to deal with in case of problems.)
I'm not sure why people keep going on about the magnetic fields; the electric fields interact much more strongly with matter, in general. In particular, about half of the power radiated by a cell phone is absorbed by the water in your head, because water is an extremely good absorber at RF and microwave frequencies. (The oscillating electric fields cause the polar water molecules to wobble.)
The main problem with this is not so much the health concerns (which there's no evidence for, as I understand it; I doubt it heats up your head more than a little exercise does). Rather, it's the 50% wasted power output by the cell phone.
In any case, before long this might be a moot point; there are various companies working on ways to tune the emission pattern so that most of the power is directed away from your head. (e.g. by using a phased antenna array, or by putting some sort of non-absorbing mirror like a photonic crystal on one side.)
Linux came from Minix? Linus was certainly inspired by Minix, but the two don't share a line of code last I heard.
The thing that makes Linux Unix-like (libc, shell tools, etcetera) is the GNU System, which was started in 1983, but doesn't appear anywhere in the chart.
They just need to add an exception in their copyright statement, saying that they grant permission to link to MPLed code and distribute the resulting executables without the MPLed stuff having to fall under the GPL. Unless they're using GPL code from other sources, to which they don't hold the copyright...in which case they need to get permission.
Even GNU programs sometimes include similar sorts of exception statements, when practical issues demand it; see GNU Guile or Autoconf for examples.
As for linking to the Microsoft libraries, the GPL has a special exception allowing linking with anything that normally comes with the OS or the compiler.
What are the prerequisites for building the Open Inventor software? Linux (glibc 2.x) or IRIX, X11R6, Motif, C++ compiler and OpenGL.
Does anyone know how closely tied it is to Motif? Is it the whole thing, or just a small part? How hard would it be to use it in, say, a GTK+ program without dragging Motif (or even Lesstif) along with it?
(I would download it myself and take a look, but their server seems to be/.'ed.)
...is the lack of a central packaging organization, I think. This results in (at least) two problems.
First, if you go to a site like rpmfind.net, you'll find a zillion different versions of a given package, all with different numbering schemes. Besides the obvious duplication of effort, it is often not clear which one to use, especially if you want the "latest" RPM (or SRPM so you can build on an atypical architecture).
Second, suppose you find a program that is not packaged already, and the authors don't want to package it themselves, so you want to package it as a service to yourself and the Linux community. There is no guarantee that 10 other people aren't doing the same thing; you don't have any chance to become the "official" RPM maintainer for the program. Moreover, users will have no way of knowing whether you can be trusted. Finally, there is no definitive place to post the finished package (see above).
One of the strongest points about Debian, I think, more than any minor technical distinction between.deb and.rpm, is their strong centralized packaging organization that solves the above problems. (Based on this, they can also make nicer tools e.g. for automated network-based updates.)
Now, if only Debian stabilizes their new release so I can install it on my PPC...
It's a kind of high-performance massively parallel computer built primarily out of commodity hardware components,
running a free-software
operating system like Linux or FreeBSD, interconnected by a private high-speed network. It consists of a cluster of PCs or workstations dedicated
to running high-performance computing tasks. The nodes in the cluster don't sit on people's desks; they are dedicated to running cluster jobs. It is
usually connected to the outside world through only a single node.
(Emphasis added.) The Compaq machine runs Tru64 UNIX.
I thought I'd take a moment to refute a couple of (I think) fallacious arguments that I see a lot of people making, namely: "We have to allow software to disclaim warranties, or it will be swamped by lawsuits," and, "The GPL (along with every other free software license) disclaims warranty, so isn't it just as bad?"
The answer to these points is that you should be perfectly allowed to disclaim warranty and make other conditions, but you must do so before the sale, like in any other industry.
Every other industry is required to put prominent "sold as-is, no warranty" signs up in the store for this purpose--why can't software? They would get to disclaim warranty, and consumers would know exactly what they are getting into.
With free software, you can examine the warranty before you buy because you typically download it for no cost. On the other hand, I think that vendors of commercial Linux distributions and so on should be required to disclaim warranty, and in general make the terms of the sale clear, before any money exchanges hands.
Unfortunately, it looks like the courts aren't siding with consumers and common sense on this one. Even the dissenting opinion here accepts that post-sale shrinkwrap licenses in consumer transactions are valid--they only objected because here the buyer pro-actively proposed a "contract" (a purchase order) that was accepted by the vendor.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
(By the way, the other terms of free software licenses, like the GPL's terms for derived works, are different from a warranty disclaimer or a shrinkwrap license. You are free to not accept them, but in that case you go with the default under copyright law: you can't distribute copies or modified versions.)
I wonder if the rarity of Linux viruses and trojan horses is more a matter of user culture than inherent technical security. Linux users care about their operating system. Windows users, on the other hand, don't generally feel a great loyalty to their platform, and so the more adolescent and malicious among them feel no compunction in compromising it.
As a supporting example, consider the Macintosh (which has a similarly loyal user base, and probably a larger one than Linux). Macintosh viruses are pretty rare also, and it's certainly not because of any inherent security of the MacOS. (One pops up every once in a while, like the Autostart virus a year or two ago, but they get stamped out pretty quickly. The last time I saw a Mac virus on my own machine was more than ten years ago, and I have downloaded gigabytes worth of shareware binaries, etcetera.) (And then there are spillover viruses, like Word macro viruses infecting Word for Macintosh, but these are the exception that proves the rule.)
I just don't buy the argument that Linux is immune to viruses, especially since a large fraction of Linux users have root access. (You don't have to be completely clueless and log in as root all the time, either...imagine a virus that installs a replacement alias for 'su' in your shell, so that it gets root access the next time you do some administration. One can come up with countless other attacks.) (Also, I would consider self-propagating DDoS scripts like Trinoo to be viruses.)
Certainly, the lack of Windows "features" in GNU/Linux software helps security, but it seems a far cry from a complete explanation of why we see so few problems.
Apple ran a contest much like this a couple of years ago; it was open for about a month or so and offered a cash prize to break-ins (but not DoS attacks). In the end, no one was able to claim the prize and Apple gained lots of bragging points. It became an instant selling point for Apple PR and Mac advocates.
When the contest ended, Mac advocates took it up and sponsored their own contest. This ran for some time and again wasn't claimed; more bragging rights. Then, they ran another contest and upped the prize...this time, someone was able to break in using a security hole in a webserver plugin (that linked to a database--to their credit, they had set up the server to do something real, not just serve static pages). The prize was claimed, the hole was fixed, and then the contest started up again...and was quickly hacked via yet another plugin bug, as I recall.
After this, there were no more contests, and you didn't hear people touting the security so much anymore.
The moral of this story is that if someone claims their prize, Microsoft will lose more than they gain. It fixes one security hole, but there will always be others. And, their webserver got cracked--no bragging rights, and embarrassing no matter how they spin it.
I don't know where you got this idea. According to the GNU site, they consider the GPL to be just one (good) example of a free copyleft license. Other things they count as free include copyleft-like licenses such as the QPL and MPL (which GNU has practical but not moral problems with) and non-copyleft licenses such as the XFree86 license.
Please, people, check your facts before characterizing other people's positions (especially rms's--many people seem to criticize him based on little more than hearsay).
People here have put forth many (good) arguments explaining why emulators can, in fact, be legal. But here's the scary thing: it doesn't matter. The mere threat is enough. (Witness Nintendo's success in shutting down SNES9x.)
Free software authors, unlike a company such as Connectix, can't afford to defend themselves in court even against spurious copyright charges like this. With patents (even bad ones), it's even harder to prove innocence.
This sort of thing is a huge threat to free software in general. The only solutions I can think of don't seem likely to happen any time soon: (1) clear laws (or court decisions) eliminating software patents and upholding emulation and reverse-engineering and (2) a legal defense fund for free software (only a partial solution).
Sounds like a nice project. I hope you guys think about coordinating with the Mac-on-Linux people, who are creating the equivalent thing for running MacOS on Linux/PPC. (They already have something running, too.) I realize that quite a lot of this stuff is processor-specific, but I would hope that there is a fair amount that generalizes, too.
What an odd comment! If one company makes a product, don't you think that other companies should be allowed to create competing products? If so, why shouldn't the free software community be able to do the same thing?
I don't think there is any justification for creating a monopoly here, thank you very much.
Does anyone know the bill number for the Bliley bill? Slashdot's link seems to be broken, and I can't find any digital signature bill by Bliley on Thomas.
It should be noted that none of these bills specify a particular digital signature technology. The Digital Signature Act directs the appropriate government agencies to draft guidelines within 6 months (for use in transactions with the government). The Millennium act just says that "the parties to an interstate transaction may establish by contract" the technologies they want to use (one wonders how you are supposed to sign the contract).
I don't care how fast the search engine is, if it still returns 10,000 useless links. When are the other search engines going to realize that intelligent relevancy ranking is the single most important feature of a search engine?
The only search engine I know that does a good job at this is Google. It is so good at finding relevant sites, I don't care if the response time is occasionally a little slow.
(Google uses a nice algorithm where they gauge the "importance" of a page by how many other sites link to it.)
Beowulf IS useful for many applications
on
PPC SMP Boxes
·
· Score: 1
We do parallel scientific computing, and regularly use Cray T3E's with 500 processors. While I agree that ordinary end-users don't benefit from this kind of parallelism, there are lots of important applications that do.
Actually </p> is (and always has been) optional. The HTML 4.0 spec says:
You can omit the end tag, which is then implied by the next block-level start tag. It is also implied by the end tag of the element that encloses the P element.
The place to get this changed is Congress--they need to pass a revision to patent law making it clear that software, algorithms, and similar things are not patentable.
All the courts are supposed to do is interpret existing law. If they decide that existing law makes software patentable, then it is the court's duty to enforce it (even if it is bad for the economy, and for a host of other reasons).
On the other hand, my impression is that judges "legislating from the bench" are what got us into this mess. Patent legislation hasn't changed--the courts have only recently decided to "interpret" it to cover software etc. If they just went back to a strict interpretation we'd be fine, but it would be better if the law's wording were black and white on this issue.
The big software companies have too much influence on Congress for them to change the patent legislation on their own. My only hope is that other countries don't allow this sort of patent, and that competition from them will force the US to change its laws to match.
The original idea of the patent system was to promote progress and innovation, and the free disclosure of ideas.
I don't think software patents, "business model patents," or patents on mathematical algorithms will increase the pace of innovation. It doesn't take a lot of capital to make a new algorithm, and people don't do this sort of computer science because they plan to patent it. This sort of patent simply lines the pockets of companies that would have made the same "inventions" anyway.
I'm really afraid of what the effects of increasing use of software patents will be on the rate of progress. Programmers come up with new algorithms continually as they work, but now they are going to have to be constantly looking over their shoulders to see if they are infringing on anyone's patents. All the big companies will have cross-licensing agreements with each other, but small companies and individual developers will be left out in the cold. This isn't good for programmers, users, or the economy in the long run.
Free software is screwed the worst, since it has no revenues to cover patent licensing fees.
What makes it even worse is that the patent office has no hope of weeding out patents for ideas that have prior art or are obvious. (Any competent computer scientist can get a better job than patent clerk.) This is why we get patents on things like "Save As" and web spiders (i.e. depth-first search). Even if the patent is bad, there's no way that individuals and small companies can afford to defend themselves in court.
Whatever happened to the League for Programming Freedom (an anti-software-patent lobbying organization)?
Slashdot Mirror
There should be no need for user-visible options for this sort of preference: the browser should be secure against such annoyances by default.
There are lots of warm and fuzzy words about open source, but the only thing the article says explicitly will be GPL'ed is the OS ("platform"):
The press release refers to "ACT's Hare-Clark electoral system" and says only:
Thanks as usual to Slashdot's editors for their insightful commentary.
(I know of at least one project with Conexant and UCLA directed at using photonic crystals to point cell-phone antenna output away from the head for just this reason.)
We pay the peer reviewers.
Not in any journal I've ever heard of! Referees are expected to work for no charge. (Maybe this varies between fields, though.)
That said, the editors, typesetters, printers, and distributers clearly expend a lot of resources in making journal articles available.
One problem is that many software packages have a large number of authors, and it can be hard to track them all down and coordinate legal permission for an exception. Just witness the hassles that the Mozilla project is having to go through to relicense the code under the GPL (although things like this can be done, with perseverence). (It would have been much easier if they had taken RMS's advice and made the NPL/MPL GPL-compatible to begin with.)
(This is another advantage to the FSF's policy of copyright assignment: there is only a single copyright holder to deal with in case of problems.)
The main problem with this is not so much the health concerns (which there's no evidence for, as I understand it; I doubt it heats up your head more than a little exercise does). Rather, it's the 50% wasted power output by the cell phone.
In any case, before long this might be a moot point; there are various companies working on ways to tune the emission pattern so that most of the power is directed away from your head. (e.g. by using a phased antenna array, or by putting some sort of non-absorbing mirror like a photonic crystal on one side.)
The thing that makes Linux Unix-like (libc, shell tools, etcetera) is the GNU System, which was started in 1983, but doesn't appear anywhere in the chart.
Even GNU programs sometimes include similar sorts of exception statements, when practical issues demand it; see GNU Guile or Autoconf for examples.
As for linking to the Microsoft libraries, the GPL has a special exception allowing linking with anything that normally comes with the OS or the compiler.
Does anyone know how closely tied it is to Motif? Is it the whole thing, or just a small part? How hard would it be to use it in, say, a GTK+ program without dragging Motif (or even Lesstif) along with it?
(I would download it myself and take a look, but their server seems to be /.'ed.)
One of the strongest points about Debian, I think, more than any minor technical distinction between .deb and .rpm, is their strong centralized packaging organization that solves the above problems. (Based on this, they can also make nicer tools e.g. for automated network-based updates.)
Now, if only Debian stabilizes their new release so I can install it on my PPC...
(Emphasis added.) The Compaq machine runs Tru64 UNIX.
I thought I'd take a moment to refute a couple of (I think) fallacious arguments that I see a lot of people making, namely: "We have to allow software to disclaim warranties, or it will be swamped by lawsuits," and, "The GPL (along with every other free software license) disclaims warranty, so isn't it just as bad?"
The answer to these points is that you should be perfectly allowed to disclaim warranty and make other conditions, but you must do so before the sale, like in any other industry.
Every other industry is required to put prominent "sold as-is, no warranty" signs up in the store for this purpose--why can't software? They would get to disclaim warranty, and consumers would know exactly what they are getting into.
With free software, you can examine the warranty before you buy because you typically download it for no cost. On the other hand, I think that vendors of commercial Linux distributions and so on should be required to disclaim warranty, and in general make the terms of the sale clear, before any money exchanges hands.
Unfortunately, it looks like the courts aren't siding with consumers and common sense on this one. Even the dissenting opinion here accepts that post-sale shrinkwrap licenses in consumer transactions are valid--they only objected because here the buyer pro-actively proposed a "contract" (a purchase order) that was accepted by the vendor.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
(By the way, the other terms of free software licenses, like the GPL's terms for derived works, are different from a warranty disclaimer or a shrinkwrap license. You are free to not accept them, but in that case you go with the default under copyright law: you can't distribute copies or modified versions.)
I wonder if the rarity of Linux viruses and trojan horses is more a matter of user culture than inherent technical security. Linux users care about their operating system. Windows users, on the other hand, don't generally feel a great loyalty to their platform, and so the more adolescent and malicious among them feel no compunction in compromising it.
As a supporting example, consider the Macintosh (which has a similarly loyal user base, and probably a larger one than Linux). Macintosh viruses are pretty rare also, and it's certainly not because of any inherent security of the MacOS. (One pops up every once in a while, like the Autostart virus a year or two ago, but they get stamped out pretty quickly. The last time I saw a Mac virus on my own machine was more than ten years ago, and I have downloaded gigabytes worth of shareware binaries, etcetera.) (And then there are spillover viruses, like Word macro viruses infecting Word for Macintosh, but these are the exception that proves the rule.)
I just don't buy the argument that Linux is immune to viruses, especially since a large fraction of Linux users have root access. (You don't have to be completely clueless and log in as root all the time, either...imagine a virus that installs a replacement alias for 'su' in your shell, so that it gets root access the next time you do some administration. One can come up with countless other attacks.) (Also, I would consider self-propagating DDoS scripts like Trinoo to be viruses.)
Certainly, the lack of Windows "features" in GNU/Linux software helps security, but it seems a far cry from a complete explanation of why we see so few problems.
When the contest ended, Mac advocates took it up and sponsored their own contest. This ran for some time and again wasn't claimed; more bragging rights. Then, they ran another contest and upped the prize...this time, someone was able to break in using a security hole in a webserver plugin (that linked to a database--to their credit, they had set up the server to do something real, not just serve static pages). The prize was claimed, the hole was fixed, and then the contest started up again...and was quickly hacked via yet another plugin bug, as I recall.
After this, there were no more contests, and you didn't hear people touting the security so much anymore.
The moral of this story is that if someone claims their prize, Microsoft will lose more than they gain. It fixes one security hole, but there will always be others. And, their webserver got cracked--no bragging rights, and embarrassing no matter how they spin it.
Please, people, check your facts before characterizing other people's positions (especially rms's--many people seem to criticize him based on little more than hearsay).
Free software authors, unlike a company such as Connectix, can't afford to defend themselves in court even against spurious copyright charges like this. With patents (even bad ones), it's even harder to prove innocence.
This sort of thing is a huge threat to free software in general. The only solutions I can think of don't seem likely to happen any time soon: (1) clear laws (or court decisions) eliminating software patents and upholding emulation and reverse-engineering and (2) a legal defense fund for free software (only a partial solution).
Sounds like a nice project. I hope you guys think about coordinating with the Mac-on-Linux people, who are creating the equivalent thing for running MacOS on Linux/PPC. (They already have something running, too.) I realize that quite a lot of this stuff is processor-specific, but I would hope that there is a fair amount that generalizes, too.
I don't think there is any justification for creating a monopoly here, thank you very much.
Does anyone know the bill number for the Bliley bill? Slashdot's link seems to be broken, and I can't find any digital signature bill by Bliley on Thomas.
It should be noted that none of these bills specify a particular digital signature technology. The Digital Signature Act directs the appropriate government agencies to draft guidelines within 6 months (for use in transactions with the government). The Millennium act just says that "the parties to an interstate transaction may establish by contract" the technologies they want to use (one wonders how you are supposed to sign the contract).
The only search engine I know that does a good job at this is Google. It is so good at finding relevant sites, I don't care if the response time is occasionally a little slow.
(Google uses a nice algorithm where they gauge the "importance" of a page by how many other sites link to it.)
We do parallel scientific computing, and regularly use Cray T3E's with 500 processors. While I agree that ordinary end-users don't benefit from this kind of parallelism, there are lots of important applications that do.
Actually </p> is (and always has been) optional. The HTML 4.0 spec says:
All the courts are supposed to do is interpret existing law. If they decide that existing law makes software patentable, then it is the court's duty to enforce it (even if it is bad for the economy, and for a host of other reasons).
On the other hand, my impression is that judges "legislating from the bench" are what got us into this mess. Patent legislation hasn't changed--the courts have only recently decided to "interpret" it to cover software etc. If they just went back to a strict interpretation we'd be fine, but it would be better if the law's wording were black and white on this issue.
The big software companies have too much influence on Congress for them to change the patent legislation on their own. My only hope is that other countries don't allow this sort of patent, and that competition from them will force the US to change its laws to match.
I don't think software patents, "business model patents," or patents on mathematical algorithms will increase the pace of innovation. It doesn't take a lot of capital to make a new algorithm, and people don't do this sort of computer science because they plan to patent it. This sort of patent simply lines the pockets of companies that would have made the same "inventions" anyway.
I'm really afraid of what the effects of increasing use of software patents will be on the rate of progress. Programmers come up with new algorithms continually as they work, but now they are going to have to be constantly looking over their shoulders to see if they are infringing on anyone's patents. All the big companies will have cross-licensing agreements with each other, but small companies and individual developers will be left out in the cold. This isn't good for programmers, users, or the economy in the long run.
Free software is screwed the worst, since it has no revenues to cover patent licensing fees.
What makes it even worse is that the patent office has no hope of weeding out patents for ideas that have prior art or are obvious. (Any competent computer scientist can get a better job than patent clerk.) This is why we get patents on things like "Save As" and web spiders (i.e. depth-first search). Even if the patent is bad, there's no way that individuals and small companies can afford to defend themselves in court.
Whatever happened to the League for Programming Freedom (an anti-software-patent lobbying organization)?