You are correct about the behavior, but I think I can explain why Apple made the choices at work here.

It turns out iMessages are cryptographically secured with public key cryptography using a per device key. There is a recent Techcrunch Article that details what they have released, but it appears to be a highly secure implementation. Each device has a private key that never leaves the device. An iMessage is actually encrypted to multiple public keys so each device can read it. No one outside the device holder, not even Apple, has the ability to decrypt messages.

I think the argument Apple would make, and I would agree with is to fall back to SMS would be insecure. It's possible to conceive of ways an attacker could prevent an iMessage from being delivered (a Denial of Service attack, for instance). That could force a fallback to SMS, which is often not well secured and/or permanently archived by the carrier or governments. Worse, with your algorithm simply sending someone a text message from a spoofed source would clear the bit, and might result in an insecure communication.

As a result, I would argue if you value strong encryption and privacy, Apple's choices make perfect sense. Turn on strong crypto when you can, and don't automatically fall back to something without strong crypto.

If the issue is the CO2 canisters, or even other supplies like liquid oxygen, what about launching supplies? Could the Russians have launched faster, perhaps with a vehicle already on the pad? Could we have used a unmanned rocket that would normally launch a satellite or similar to launch a payload of supplies?

From my read of the timeline even buying just a week or two might have changed the "launch a backup shuttle" plan from amazingly risky to just somewhat risky. I'm not trying to suggest getting supplies there would have been trivial, but if the right sort of rocket was ready to go it might have been a way to buy time.

I think you're leaving out the competitive nature of humans. Today we compete for money, in the Star Trek world people compete for opportunity.

Picard did not become captain of the Enterprise by showing up one day and saying "I'd like to do that". There is only one position as Captain of the flagship of the fleet. He became that by being the best possible at what he does, and rising to the top of his peers.

Many people in society today already choose pursuits that do not maximize their monitory return because they enjoy what they are doing. Being an Olympic Athlete is not as profitable as the NFL. Being a Veterinary is not as profitable as being a Heart Surgeon. There is only one President of the United States, regardless of his income. Many of the past's prolific inventors were relatively poor, their inventions not capitalized on until well after their deaths.

I would agree the shows depict a sort of Utopia, but I suspect it's possible for Humans to get far closer to it than you may believe.

If we all stop using SlashDot classic in "protest", there will be no one to upset with the change, and they will move forward with the Beta site. Once the users are lost there's no incentive for them to keep it around.

If you want classic to stay around you need to boycott the beta, and use the crap out of classic.

I want to be very clear on this, the world is much grayer than this bill, or the terms at hand would indicate.

Science has almost ways been published behind paywalls. Prior to the internet it was published in journals, which at the most basic level someone had to subscribe to in order to get a copy. I'm sure the youngins on here don't remember Magazines, but they were a big deal for a long time. Even when not, often times you had to pay to copy, you can show up at the Government Printing Office and get a copy of all sorts of studies, government records, and the like: for a fee.

So there's a continuum of access, here are some interesting points along it:

• Source won't release the data to anyone.
• Source charges $1,000,000 a copy for the report.
• Source charges $500 for a copy of the report.
• Source charges $5 for a copy of the report.
• Source publishes the report in a magazine that can be purchased for $1.99.
• Source publishes the report online, for free.

Clearly the first one isn't open access, and clearly the last one is, but where is the line? There is some de-minimis burden that is acceptable for it to still be "publicly available science". By attempting to set a standard of "free and open" it's an attempt to push people to the last line item, where the costs are all borne by the researcher. Imagine someone doing good research on an important topic, only to spend the next years battling hackers and DDoS'ers online trying to take down the work, all on their own expense? Crazy. That's part of why publishing in journals, all of which cost money, is the accepted method.

To directly answer your question, I do believe that any science the EPA uses should be available to the general public, the difference is I am ok with it being via paywalls with de-minimis fees. If I have to go buy a copy of a journal to find out the science, I think that's ok.

That quote is not the same attitude that would come from someone who is looking for solid, reproducible science. I believe most of the people who are strong supporters of solid, transparent, reproducible science would actually say the EPA has been near toothless, not overbearing. For example West Virginia chemical spill that contaminated the Kanawha/Ohio/Mississippi and the drinking water for millions and yet the company was allowed to store the chemical right next to the river with nearly zero monitoring or oversight. Another would be fracking, for which there is ample evidence of ground water contamination, and it causing earthquakes, and yet "full speed ahead!".

No, this is a bureaucratic trick, often used in Washington, so let's translate:

• Transparent - prohibit the EPA's administrator from proposing or finalizing any rules unless he or she also discloses "all scientific and technical information" relied on by the agency. The only problem? Much of that data is not owned by the government. It's studies and reports made by private businesses and provided to the government. The government does not, in all cases, have the rights to republish. The standard being set is all, so if the EPA finds 10 studies on something, all of which agree it's very, very bad, but can only publish 9 out of 10, it's no go! You can imagine GOP friendly companies (like those run by the Koch brothers) would do studies and then prevent them from being published just to gum up the works.
• Reproducible - In it's most benign form this is a delaying tactic. Perhaps everyone agrees on the science, but until it can be "reproduced" regulations can be delayed. There will be calls for private industry to reproduce findings when there is no (business) reason for them to do so, and then their lack of action will be used to gum up the works. However, in a more malignant form GOP friendly companies will do bad science on purpose, and attempt to question the validity of EPA findings. It's easy to imagine again 10 studies that all agree, and then right as the regulation comes to pass some bad science pseudo-report being released that calls into question the "reproducibility" of the science.

The tactic is alive right in the promotion of the bill. The "Institute for Energy Research" turns out to be a lobbying group run by an ex-Enron director, funded by ExxonMobile and the Koch brothers. As a result I think you can see the sort of transparent, reproducible "science" that will be in play here, starting with the "2013 poll from the Institute of Energy Research" used to back up this bill.

After reading the comments I want to be sure I have this right. The consensus is the beta needs more jQuery?

I love the idea that content is marked up based on it's intrinsic content (this is a heading, this is a paragraph, this is a footer) and that is independent from the styling (make this text blue and center it). However if anyone thinks HTML+CSS is a good example of how to do this, they are delusional. View source on any web site and you'll find tens to hundreds of "divs", that is markup, used solely for layout purposes. Even worse, what should be pure markup is often abused for presentational purposes. h1/h2/h3/h4/h5/h6 are rarely used in "outline" form as they are intended, but rather h1's are styled one way, and h2's are styled another, and any particular section of content may start with one or the other based on visual style.

Regions are clearly no worse, or better, in this respect.

I do think "the web" needs something like Regions to go along with load-on-demand content baked into the service. Many web sites simulate that today with Javascript. Given that device sizes are actually getting more spread out, from watches to 80" TV displays, the layouts will have to be different. Being able to design a small/medium/large layout, including some flow of where the content should go, and then providing a list of content (here's 20 articles, load however many fit on the screen) would be awesome. Phones could load one at a time. A 30" monitor user would have all 20. It would all flow, without excessive markup.

In short, I see a lot of the pot calling the kettle black here, and people arguing rather than innovating.

Given that plenty of companies sell GPL'ed software, I don't think your second statement is accurate.

With respect to money, the GPL says "I did it for free, and you can use it and tweak it, but if you make money off those tweaks you must provide them for free to the entire world."

FreeBSD has jumped ship from gcc to LLVM/clang.

http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/12/11/07/154250/freebsd-throws-the-clangllvm-switch-future-releases-use-llvm as reported on slashdot.

In general, BSD licensed projects that need a compiler are in a pickle, they could include GPL v2 software without too many issues, but the GPLv3 is considered poison to them. "gcc" is one of the more important GPLv3 licensed things, so it was the first to get attention and be replaced.

Which is an interesting data point in this entire argument, when the GPL proponents tried to force everyone to use the GPLv3, much of the rest of the world walked away completely.

You''ll likely get a pile of different answers, because it is a large, complex project. I think all of these are factors:

• LLVM/clang do not attempt to support as wide a range of platforms, instead focusing on excellence on the most popular platforms.
• LLVM/clang were able to learn from those who came before, and start with a superior design. Any existing project would have more trouble adapting their architecture.
• Apple had a huge monetary incentive (increasing their market share primarily, but also their cut of app store sales) to insure a vibrant ecosystem. That means attracting developers, which in turn means giving them high quality tools. Thus Apple invested a lot of money in the tools, LLVM in this case.
• The license allows them to lean on the community, while keeping their own extensions secret. They can get the community to maintain things they don't care about being out in the open, while keeping their private bits in house and not having to disclose them.

To me, the last is really the only one that is directly affected by the license issue. However, by the license tilting that one issue, it also tilts where the money goes from the previous line.

But it's not black and white. Both licenses are trying to influence people to make particular choices, and in fact choices that are more similar than different. They have each been successful in different ways as a result. I think what gets a lot of the non-GNU folks annoyed is that the GNU folks seem to think their way should be dominate; that the best world is a 100% GNU world. There are those of us who don't think proprietary software is always evil, or that other licenses don't have important features for particular niches. It leaves the impression of zealotry, rather than rational believe in a better solution.

I was imprecise, we don't have source code to Xcode, including any local-to-apple extensions they have added on to LLVM (or even clang). It's believed Apple has customizations and changes to LLVM/clang that have not been contributed back upstream.

It turns out in this particular case the binary blob can be had for free in some cases. Both licenses allow for a plain binary distribution, so that part is not really relevant to this discussion.

I believe these concepts are more related than you think, because if there was no proprietary software than everyone would be contributing their ideas to open-source software.

However if the goal is eliminating proprietary software then GNU might as well give up and go home now. History is littered with folks who tried to tell other people how to live their lives, and on balance almost all of them turn out pretty poorly. The more they tried to control, the more poorly in the end.

Imposing one software development model on the world is Totalitarianism, not Freedom.