Seriously, if what you say is true then why the Microsoft copy its concept and call it C#?
I dunno. Microsoft has a history of picking bad products to copy based on hype, so I suppose it's not surprising they'd copy Java.
"and has been proprietary and highly controlled by Sun for the last decade." As opposed to C#?
What's your point? Are you saying that the fact that Microsoft produces shitty software and tries to screw over their customers with proprietary non-standards means customers should just accept the same behavior from Sun?
Sun is like Microsoft, they are simply less successful at it. As a customer, I prefer not to be screwed by either company, thank you very much. Fortunately, there are other choices besides Sun and Microsoft.
Why should M$ alter the java language for "technical reasons?"
Because they wanted a language for Windows development and Java wasn't up to the task (it still isn't).
Remeber that WORM (write once run everywhere) is a core concept in java
Yeah, and a stupid one at that, and one that Sun still hasn't achieved.
hence, proprietary changes break its concept.
Microsoft didn't "break" WORM, they extended the language and runtime. Standard Java code still ran just fine on their platform. And even if it hadn't, so what? Sun was still free to ship Sun Java for Microsoft Windows, just like they are doing today.
Also, why should M$ remove java vm's from their OS and browser? This breaks far more things than it fixes, and is also very anticompetitive in a childish way.
How in the world is it "anticompetitive" if Microsoft refuses to ship Sun's proprietary with their OS? What kind of crap do you think Microsoft ought to be obligated to ship? According to you, is it also "anticompetitive" that Linux has booted Java of its distributions?
Apple has never been a "nice" company; for heaven's sake, this is the look-and-feel lawsuit company.
Don't buy Apple because you mistakingly think they are nice, buy them because they make computers that work somewhat better than your average PC and because competition is good for the market.
Java bloat continues to be a problem. There seems to be an excess of "packaging" associated with the language. Not clear why.
Nominally, it's because Java wants to give you complete platform independence, so they need to produce their own libraries for every single piece of functionality you might want.
In practice, it's because Java and its libraries are designed by committee and by fiat, as opposed to having it evolve in the market place and through competition.
So, capping H1-B visas will cause high-tech companies to move elsewhere and will cause US engineers to compete against highly skilled engineers in lower-wage countries. That's not competition. That's more like "race to the bottom".
No, that is competition: cost of living in nations like India is far lower, so they can work for less. And a significant part of their lower costs are simply that they are living more efficiently. That's entirely reasonable and it's the way a free market is supposed to operate. If the US wants to compete, it needs to lower its costs and its standard of living.
It may be unpopular to some well-heeled lobbyists to put a tax on foreign assets, but if you use the right means to make their hostility turn against them, they'll have to accept it.
You still think that Americans somehow "own" this market or the technology, but they don't. Companies like Microsoft are still US companies because, traditionally, there has been a good climate for those companies in the US. If you piss them off sufficiently with taxes, immigration restrictions, and taxes on foreign assets, they'll simply move entirely to some other, friendlier nation and treat the US as the subsidiary.
Sorry, you'll simply have to get used to the fact that hundreds of million of efficient, smart, and hard-working people in India and China are now able to compete globally. They're going to depress salaries in the US, and they're going to drive up prices for everything from natural resources to manufactured goods.
Sun was delivering a proprietary language on a proprietary implementation, going around threatening to sue people left and right. And Sun was taunting Microsoft and saying that they would turn Windows into a "device driver" for running Java. Why the hell shouldn't Microsoft try to kill Java, even if Java had been any good. Of course, Java wasn't any good: it was slow, bloated, and poorly designed, and has continued that tradition to this day.
Sun seems to have given up on attacking the Microsoft desktop, but they still seem hell-bent on trying to take over the Linux desktop (thankfully, their technology is so lousy that people aren't even noticing).
Microsoft has pulled many evil and sleazy tricks in their days. But adding "delegate", creating a faster VM, and adding plenty of native libraries to Java actually made technical sense and were completely reasonable. And if Sun hadn't been so damned arrogant and stupid and had worked with Microsoft and others in industry, we'd have a single language and core set of libraries today--far better than Java is today--instead of Java and C#/.NET.
Is the reason that Javascript-based stuff taking over the role Java was supposed to fill ten years ago that Microsoft no longer ships a Java engine but it does ship a Javascript interpreter?
Microsoft stopped shipping Java long after Java had already died on the desktop. No, the simple reason is that Sun Java is a p.o.s. technologically, and has been proprietary and highly controlled by Sun for the last decade.
Sun did it to themselves with Java. Their recent "open source" announcement is merely an act of desperation, and even now, they still can't bring themselves to let go.
I'm not gonna enumerate all the things that are wrong with Java. Instead, I'm just going to point out that I think Javascript 2.0 looks like it's going to be the future for many applications: it's easy to program, there are open source implementations of it, its default "GUI" (HTML) is cross-platform and widely used and understood, and by incorporating optional static type declarations, JavaScript 2.0 can be used for high performance computations as well. Oh, and it's going to ship with Firefox.
So, no. Although there was a lot of sabre-rattling, ISPs were not in any immediate danger of being sued out of existence. Détente was working relatively well.
Yeah, if you were a really big ISP with really big pockets and were willing to pick a fight. And even then, the liability for something like YouTube would be staggering.
Even though the current situation is far from ideal, I just don't believe that legal uncertainty was preferable.
It doesn't make any difference whether H1-B workers are paid less than American workers when they come to the US. Why? Because they will be competing with US workers no matter where they are.
If they can't come to the US on H1-B visas, companies like Microsoft will simply grow their overseas research labs further. That way, the US loses the talent, loses the tax revenue, and US workers will have to compete against people paid even less. So, capping H1-B visas will cause high-tech companies to move elsewhere and will cause US engineers to compete against highly skilled engineers in lower-wage countries.
Of course, that's exactly why it's the right thing to do: Europe, India, and China are (directly or indirectly) responsible for a large amount of US high tech exports, yet most of the highly skilled work is still being done in the US. That's obviously not fair, and restricting H1-B visas is one of the ways in which this problem can be fixed.
and it also includes mandatory Web labeling for sexually explicit pages.
I think they should also mandate that sexually explicit pages are labeled according to sexual orientation, hair color, cup size, number and gender of participants, and sex acts; it would simplify finding appropriate pr0n greatly. Ah, the semantic web might finally be put to good use.
The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA leaves ISPs and server operators little choice.
Yes, but it's still better than the alternative, namely making ISPs and server operators legally responsible, which was the situation before the DMCA.
Note that nowhere is anyone required to verify the validity of the claimant's copyright, [...] but there are no penalties prescribed for willful or negligent sending of erroneous notices
Yes, those are problems, and it would be good to fix them. But the previous situation, in which ISPs and server operators would themselves be liable for copyright infringement by their users, was probably even worse.
You should not have to provide papers that you are "allowed" to speak, and that's a principal reason why the DMCA needs to go away yesterday.
In fact, under the DMCA, you don't have to prove that you're allowed to speak; you only have to prove it when challenged by a copyright holder. Well, guess what, you always had to do that.
But if we return to the previous situation, then the ISPs and server operators would in fact have to ask you to prove that you're allowed to speak before you ever could speak, simply to cover their own asses. You might also (like in some other countries) have to provide clear, real-world identification and contact information for any web content you create. Talk about prior restraint.
I'm not sure that's such a good idea, because in that case, sites like YouTube might not exist at all, and, in fact, all sites that permit open signup and posting would be at grave risk.
I think this part of the DMCA may be working out alright. What courts need to do now is punish companies like Viacom when they try to abuse the DMCA.
even with the GPLv3, the way it looks now, there is no reason that Novell would have to stop distributing the code. The GPLv3 mainly just takes away the incentive for such deals.
A distinction can be made between protoscience and pseudoscience
You can make those distinctions all you want, but what matters is what they have in common: neither of them is a science, both of them are trying to pretend they are, and both of them are used to pull money out of the pockets of gullible people.
Granted, the scientologists are deeply confused and potentially dangerous. And, yes, I think people should be able to criticize them harshly, just one like should be able to criticize any other religion harshly.
But cryonics, extropianism, Drexler-style nanotechnology? This guy is pretty high on the nut-o-meter as well. It's not quite the same level as thetans, but not far off either.
Well, I live in the real world--I was making a point to the people who think Apple is the nice, touchy-feely, innovative runner up that's being crushed by evil Microsoft.
And photoshopping their label on products they had previously been shipping without the label is "reasonable and in good faith"?
Cisco was approached by Apple over the iPhone trademark long before Apple made their product announcement. If Cisco had wanted to strengthen their claims, they could simply have started shipping iPhones when the negotiations started. However, they negotiated in good faith and evidently got screwed by Apple. What happened after that was secondary.
They are, in fact, using the trademark. Product announcements count, as do advertising materials on web pages. Backdated product announcements and photoshopped web pages only count from the date you post them, not the date insinuated into them by the chichanery in question.
Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that that were true. What's the timeline then?
Apple starts negotiations with Cisco over the iPhone trademark long before Apple's product announcement. Cisco refrains from using the trademark for advertising or products until the negotiations are complete. Then, Apple turns around, simply announces the product and says "negotiations over, since we put the trademark to use before you".
Whichever way you look at it, Apple is the bad guys here. Sorry, but Apple's behavior on the "iPhone" trademark stinks.
If NASA did all of what it has done while being nothing more than a tool for corporations to steal government money
I'm not criticizing NASA, I'm criticizing politicians trying to redirect most of NASA's activities towards manned exploration. I'm saying that if NASA has to scale back its unmanned efforts (which are the only ones that are scientifically valuable) further, then I'd much rather see NASA shut down altogether, instead of becoming an excuse for pork spending on manned exploration. The space station and shuttle program have already been an enormous waste of money.
And best of all, think about the scientific opportunities space bases would allow us.
Science funding works by cost/benefit analyses. Manned space bases have an enormous cost compared to unmanned projects yielding the same or more results. On the whole, a manned space program will mean delaying space exploration and progress by many decades at least.
With the money that a manned moon or Martian colony costs, we could cover every planet in the solar system with dozens of robotic probes at least and at the same time advance robotics and AI tremendously here on earth.
You can't unplug any "inactive" but still mounted mass-storage device from any operating system without possibly damaging the file system
Oh, come on, this stuff has worked for a long time using automount. When I don't access the USB drive, it's automatically unmounted after a few seconds and can be safely removed. When I attempt to access it again, it's automatically mounted within a fraction of a second. That setup works even for MSDOS file systems. Whether you use automount or not, there is no reason ever to leave a file system in an unclean state when all writes have finished.
Furthermore, with a correctly implemented transactional file system, you can simply disconnect the drive at any time, even in the middle of a write, and you'll be fine.
This is inherent in the way computers and file systems work, and Apple can't wave a magic wand and fix it.
There is nothing "inherent" about it; people figured out this stuff in the 60's and 70's.
But, don't worry, Apple will figure this out one of these days, patent it, claim that they invented it all, and people like you will be clapping their hands.
It seems, however, that creating security vulnerabilities does pay. Why, companies like MySpace and Microsoft can always shift the blame on some teenager or "computer error" or a careless employee.
Unlike physical security, making a computer system secure against teenage hackers is not rocket science. This vulnerability was clearly a MySpace screwup, and they should be held responsible and pay the price for it. That principle may not be so important when it comes to MySpace (because there is little of value there), but it becomes of paramount importance when it's your bank or your hospital.
People who offer commercial services using software should be responsible for the safety and security properties of that software. And in order to prevent those companies from blame-shifting, the people breaking in should be held responsible only if they demonstrably attempted to commit a real-world crime other than simply breaking into the computer system.
That's not what he did. If that were his true intent, he would have contacted MySpace about the vulnerability. [...] To call this an altruistic attempt to help MySpace is akin to calling the guy who broke into Buckingham Palace in the 80's
I have no idea what this guy's motivations were. I do know that holding the people who break in responsible isn't working. The only thing that works is to hold the people responsible who can actually make the system secure, and that's companies like MySpace. "Holding responsible" means imposing stiff penalties on them for subjecting their users to crappy, insecure, risky software. As a side effect, people like this should go free.
If we continue with the current approach, letting companies point the finger at teenagers, our data and our software will never be secure.
Surely you knew that 90% of the world uses Windows. You can't claim a figure like that is only the result of monopolistic practices and be serious.
Why not? It has worked for many other companies before in cases where the products clearly were not superior to those of their competitors.
It fits people's needs by being something that is brain-dead useable across an enormous variety of hardware. That should be obvious from the 90%.
Windows is not "brain-dead usable" on any hardware, and its hardware compatibility is a mixed bag. Overall, Windows is just barely good enough. The technical qualities that keep Windows around are its complexity and its proprietary protocols and formats, which make the cost of switching very high.
but if you're involved in free software, why does it matter how much of the world is using it?
Because computers aren't islands; if I want to read E-mail using free software, open up attachments, conduct on-line business, etc., the protocols and formats to do so need to be open and free.
Since Microsoft has made a 20 year career out of making those protocols and formats proprietary, closed, and non-free, taking away market share from Microsoft is apparently the only way to force them to open up. And it will happen: people are really, really tired of Microsoft's business practices and crappy products.
Slashdot Mirror
It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more
In different words: we have nothing to talk about, but our PR machinery just isn't gonna shut up anyway. Or: business as usual.
Seriously, if what you say is true then why the Microsoft copy its concept and call it C#?
I dunno. Microsoft has a history of picking bad products to copy based on hype, so I suppose it's not surprising they'd copy Java.
"and has been proprietary and highly controlled by Sun for the last decade." As opposed to C#?
What's your point? Are you saying that the fact that Microsoft produces shitty software and tries to screw over their customers with proprietary non-standards means customers should just accept the same behavior from Sun?
Sun is like Microsoft, they are simply less successful at it. As a customer, I prefer not to be screwed by either company, thank you very much. Fortunately, there are other choices besides Sun and Microsoft.
Why should M$ alter the java language for "technical reasons?"
Because they wanted a language for Windows development and Java wasn't up to the task (it still isn't).
Remeber that WORM (write once run everywhere) is a core concept in java
Yeah, and a stupid one at that, and one that Sun still hasn't achieved.
hence, proprietary changes break its concept.
Microsoft didn't "break" WORM, they extended the language and runtime. Standard Java code still ran just fine on their platform. And even if it hadn't, so what? Sun was still free to ship Sun Java for Microsoft Windows, just like they are doing today.
Also, why should M$ remove java vm's from their OS and browser? This breaks far more things than it fixes, and is also very anticompetitive in a childish way.
How in the world is it "anticompetitive" if Microsoft refuses to ship Sun's proprietary with their OS? What kind of crap do you think Microsoft ought to be obligated to ship? According to you, is it also "anticompetitive" that Linux has booted Java of its distributions?
Apple has never been a "nice" company; for heaven's sake, this is the look-and-feel lawsuit company.
Don't buy Apple because you mistakingly think they are nice, buy them because they make computers that work somewhat better than your average PC and because competition is good for the market.
Java bloat continues to be a problem. There seems to be an excess of "packaging" associated with the language. Not clear why.
Nominally, it's because Java wants to give you complete platform independence, so they need to produce their own libraries for every single piece of functionality you might want.
In practice, it's because Java and its libraries are designed by committee and by fiat, as opposed to having it evolve in the market place and through competition.
So, capping H1-B visas will cause high-tech companies to move elsewhere and will cause US engineers to compete against highly skilled engineers in lower-wage countries.
That's not competition. That's more like "race to the bottom".
No, that is competition: cost of living in nations like India is far lower, so they can work for less. And a significant part of their lower costs are simply that they are living more efficiently. That's entirely reasonable and it's the way a free market is supposed to operate. If the US wants to compete, it needs to lower its costs and its standard of living.
It may be unpopular to some well-heeled lobbyists to put a tax on foreign assets, but if you use the right means to make their hostility turn against them, they'll have to accept it.
You still think that Americans somehow "own" this market or the technology, but they don't. Companies like Microsoft are still US companies because, traditionally, there has been a good climate for those companies in the US. If you piss them off sufficiently with taxes, immigration restrictions, and taxes on foreign assets, they'll simply move entirely to some other, friendlier nation and treat the US as the subsidiary.
Sorry, you'll simply have to get used to the fact that hundreds of million of efficient, smart, and hard-working people in India and China are now able to compete globally. They're going to depress salaries in the US, and they're going to drive up prices for everything from natural resources to manufactured goods.
Sun was delivering a proprietary language on a proprietary implementation, going around threatening to sue people left and right. And Sun was taunting Microsoft and saying that they would turn Windows into a "device driver" for running Java. Why the hell shouldn't Microsoft try to kill Java, even if Java had been any good. Of course, Java wasn't any good: it was slow, bloated, and poorly designed, and has continued that tradition to this day.
Sun seems to have given up on attacking the Microsoft desktop, but they still seem hell-bent on trying to take over the Linux desktop (thankfully, their technology is so lousy that people aren't even noticing).
Microsoft has pulled many evil and sleazy tricks in their days. But adding "delegate", creating a faster VM, and adding plenty of native libraries to Java actually made technical sense and were completely reasonable. And if Sun hadn't been so damned arrogant and stupid and had worked with Microsoft and others in industry, we'd have a single language and core set of libraries today--far better than Java is today--instead of Java and C#/.NET.
Is the reason that Javascript-based stuff taking over the role Java was supposed to fill ten years ago that Microsoft no longer ships a Java engine but it does ship a Javascript interpreter?
Microsoft stopped shipping Java long after Java had already died on the desktop. No, the simple reason is that Sun Java is a p.o.s. technologically, and has been proprietary and highly controlled by Sun for the last decade.
Sun did it to themselves with Java. Their recent "open source" announcement is merely an act of desperation, and even now, they still can't bring themselves to let go.
I'm not gonna enumerate all the things that are wrong with Java. Instead, I'm just going to point out that I think Javascript 2.0 looks like it's going to be the future for many applications: it's easy to program, there are open source implementations of it, its default "GUI" (HTML) is cross-platform and widely used and understood, and by incorporating optional static type declarations, JavaScript 2.0 can be used for high performance computations as well. Oh, and it's going to ship with Firefox.
So, no. Although there was a lot of sabre-rattling, ISPs were not in any immediate danger of being sued out of existence. Détente was working relatively well.
Yeah, if you were a really big ISP with really big pockets and were willing to pick a fight. And even then, the liability for something like YouTube would be staggering.
Even though the current situation is far from ideal, I just don't believe that legal uncertainty was preferable.
It doesn't make any difference whether H1-B workers are paid less than American workers when they come to the US. Why? Because they will be competing with US workers no matter where they are.
If they can't come to the US on H1-B visas, companies like Microsoft will simply grow their overseas research labs further. That way, the US loses the talent, loses the tax revenue, and US workers will have to compete against people paid even less. So, capping H1-B visas will cause high-tech companies to move elsewhere and will cause US engineers to compete against highly skilled engineers in lower-wage countries.
Of course, that's exactly why it's the right thing to do: Europe, India, and China are (directly or indirectly) responsible for a large amount of US high tech exports, yet most of the highly skilled work is still being done in the US. That's obviously not fair, and restricting H1-B visas is one of the ways in which this problem can be fixed.
and it also includes mandatory Web labeling for sexually explicit pages.
I think they should also mandate that sexually explicit pages are labeled according to sexual orientation, hair color, cup size, number and gender of participants, and sex acts; it would simplify finding appropriate pr0n greatly. Ah, the semantic web might finally be put to good use.
According to the research, 86 percent of those who committed cybercrimes held ...
That's nearly useless information. By analogy, nearly 100% of rapists are male, yet very few males are actually rapists.
The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA leaves ISPs and server operators little choice.
Yes, but it's still better than the alternative, namely making ISPs and server operators legally responsible, which was the situation before the DMCA.
Note that nowhere is anyone required to verify the validity of the claimant's copyright, [...] but there are no penalties prescribed for willful or negligent sending of erroneous notices
Yes, those are problems, and it would be good to fix them. But the previous situation, in which ISPs and server operators would themselves be liable for copyright infringement by their users, was probably even worse.
You should not have to provide papers that you are "allowed" to speak, and that's a principal reason why the DMCA needs to go away yesterday.
In fact, under the DMCA, you don't have to prove that you're allowed to speak; you only have to prove it when challenged by a copyright holder. Well, guess what, you always had to do that.
But if we return to the previous situation, then the ISPs and server operators would in fact have to ask you to prove that you're allowed to speak before you ever could speak, simply to cover their own asses. You might also (like in some other countries) have to provide clear, real-world identification and contact information for any web content you create. Talk about prior restraint.
Here's an even better idea, get rid of the DMCA
I'm not sure that's such a good idea, because in that case, sites like YouTube might not exist at all, and, in fact, all sites that permit open signup and posting would be at grave risk.
I think this part of the DMCA may be working out alright. What courts need to do now is punish companies like Viacom when they try to abuse the DMCA.
even with the GPLv3, the way it looks now, there is no reason that Novell would have to stop distributing the code. The GPLv3 mainly just takes away the incentive for such deals.
A distinction can be made between protoscience and pseudoscience
You can make those distinctions all you want, but what matters is what they have in common: neither of them is a science, both of them are trying to pretend they are, and both of them are used to pull money out of the pockets of gullible people.
Granted, the scientologists are deeply confused and potentially dangerous. And, yes, I think people should be able to criticize them harshly, just one like should be able to criticize any other religion harshly.
But cryonics, extropianism, Drexler-style nanotechnology? This guy is pretty high on the nut-o-meter as well. It's not quite the same level as thetans, but not far off either.
Welcome to the real world.
Well, I live in the real world--I was making a point to the people who think Apple is the nice, touchy-feely, innovative runner up that's being crushed by evil Microsoft.
And photoshopping their label on products they had previously been shipping without the label is "reasonable and in good faith"?
Cisco was approached by Apple over the iPhone trademark long before Apple made their product announcement. If Cisco had wanted to strengthen their claims, they could simply have started shipping iPhones when the negotiations started. However, they negotiated in good faith and evidently got screwed by Apple. What happened after that was secondary.
They are, in fact, using the trademark. Product announcements count, as do advertising materials on web pages. Backdated product announcements and photoshopped web pages only count from the date you post them, not the date insinuated into them by the chichanery in question.
Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that that were true. What's the timeline then?
Apple starts negotiations with Cisco over the iPhone trademark long before Apple's product announcement. Cisco refrains from using the trademark for advertising or products until the negotiations are complete. Then, Apple turns around, simply announces the product and says "negotiations over, since we put the trademark to use before you".
Whichever way you look at it, Apple is the bad guys here. Sorry, but Apple's behavior on the "iPhone" trademark stinks.
If NASA did all of what it has done while being nothing more than a tool for corporations to steal government money
I'm not criticizing NASA, I'm criticizing politicians trying to redirect most of NASA's activities towards manned exploration. I'm saying that if NASA has to scale back its unmanned efforts (which are the only ones that are scientifically valuable) further, then I'd much rather see NASA shut down altogether, instead of becoming an excuse for pork spending on manned exploration. The space station and shuttle program have already been an enormous waste of money.
And best of all, think about the scientific opportunities space bases would allow us.
Science funding works by cost/benefit analyses. Manned space bases have an enormous cost compared to unmanned projects yielding the same or more results. On the whole, a manned space program will mean delaying space exploration and progress by many decades at least.
With the money that a manned moon or Martian colony costs, we could cover every planet in the solar system with dozens of robotic probes at least and at the same time advance robotics and AI tremendously here on earth.
You can't unplug any "inactive" but still mounted mass-storage device from any operating system without possibly damaging the file system
Oh, come on, this stuff has worked for a long time using automount. When I don't access the USB drive, it's automatically unmounted after a few seconds and can be safely removed. When I attempt to access it again, it's automatically mounted within a fraction of a second. That setup works even for MSDOS file systems. Whether you use automount or not, there is no reason ever to leave a file system in an unclean state when all writes have finished.
Furthermore, with a correctly implemented transactional file system, you can simply disconnect the drive at any time, even in the middle of a write, and you'll be fine.
This is inherent in the way computers and file systems work, and Apple can't wave a magic wand and fix it.
There is nothing "inherent" about it; people figured out this stuff in the 60's and 70's.
But, don't worry, Apple will figure this out one of these days, patent it, claim that they invented it all, and people like you will be clapping their hands.
It seems, however, that creating security vulnerabilities does pay. Why, companies like MySpace and Microsoft can always shift the blame on some teenager or "computer error" or a careless employee.
Unlike physical security, making a computer system secure against teenage hackers is not rocket science. This vulnerability was clearly a MySpace screwup, and they should be held responsible and pay the price for it. That principle may not be so important when it comes to MySpace (because there is little of value there), but it becomes of paramount importance when it's your bank or your hospital.
People who offer commercial services using software should be responsible for the safety and security properties of that software. And in order to prevent those companies from blame-shifting, the people breaking in should be held responsible only if they demonstrably attempted to commit a real-world crime other than simply breaking into the computer system.
That's not what he did. If that were his true intent, he would have contacted MySpace about the vulnerability. [...] To call this an altruistic attempt to help MySpace is akin to calling the guy who broke into Buckingham Palace in the 80's
I have no idea what this guy's motivations were. I do know that holding the people who break in responsible isn't working. The only thing that works is to hold the people responsible who can actually make the system secure, and that's companies like MySpace. "Holding responsible" means imposing stiff penalties on them for subjecting their users to crappy, insecure, risky software. As a side effect, people like this should go free.
If we continue with the current approach, letting companies point the finger at teenagers, our data and our software will never be secure.
Surely you knew that 90% of the world uses Windows. You can't claim a figure like that is only the result of monopolistic practices and be serious.
Why not? It has worked for many other companies before in cases where the products clearly were not superior to those of their competitors.
It fits people's needs by being something that is brain-dead useable across an enormous variety of hardware. That should be obvious from the 90%.
Windows is not "brain-dead usable" on any hardware, and its hardware compatibility is a mixed bag. Overall, Windows is just barely good enough. The technical qualities that keep Windows around are its complexity and its proprietary protocols and formats, which make the cost of switching very high.
but if you're involved in free software, why does it matter how much of the world is using it?
Because computers aren't islands; if I want to read E-mail using free software, open up attachments, conduct on-line business, etc., the protocols and formats to do so need to be open and free.
Since Microsoft has made a 20 year career out of making those protocols and formats proprietary, closed, and non-free, taking away market share from Microsoft is apparently the only way to force them to open up. And it will happen: people are really, really tired of Microsoft's business practices and crappy products.