You seem to misunderstand what DRM, a.k.a. "copy protection", is advertised to do. It's about preventing copies of the content that is "protected" by DRM from becoming widely available to non-paying users.

The negative effects of implementing DRM systems, which is that users' devices remain out of their control (for most users), are alive and well. That doesn't mean that DRM is accomplishing its stated purpose.

You think you're safe, eh? Consider that Canada's Thanksgiving is *on a completely different day* from U.S. Thanksgiving, and yet somehow, Black Friday still happened in Canada on Nov 23.

No one is safe.

Because over the past decades, we've learned that allowing people like you to patent all of these thigs actually results in a "patent thicket" that punishes innovation. Today, if you try to build your utterly new and difficult invention in the US, you have a high risk of losing a patent infringement lawsuit (or spending a ton of money defending yourself against one), because doing so would infringe on dozens of other people's patents.

Actually, if you're using something like direct-sequence spread spectrum modulation over a wide bandwidth, it's really going to just look like noise that's *quieter* than the noise floor at the receiver. Unless you know what you're looking for, you're not going to be able to distinguish the signal from the background noise.

Of course, if aliens are at least as concerned about battery life as we are, they aren't going to be transmitting signals with so much excess power and with so much redundancy that the signals will reach us AND that we'll be able to decode them.

No kidding. The fragmentation problem with Android comes from the fact that every hardware manufacturer effectively spins its own Linux distro for each device that they manufacture. There should be one or two Android distributions in the world, just like we have with desktop Linux distros.

It's probably related to this comment by Linus (in the same thread where he threatened to stop merging ARM patches altogether):

The long-term situation should be that you should be able to have ONE binary kernel "just work". That's where we are on x86. Really.

[...]

Now, some of it is quite understandable - ie real drivers for real hardware. But a _lot_ of it seems to be just descriptor tables, and I'm getting the very strong feeling that ARM people aren't even _trying_ to make it sane, and trying to standardize things, or trying to aim for the whole notion of "one kernel image, with much more hw description done elsewhere".

You wouldn't, as long as you don't mind having to do all the development work yourself, rather than working with a community of developers. As soon as you merge other people's patches, you're bound by the terms of the license.

I'm glad you took the time to read the GPL before commenting:

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

You must be new here.

Not only does it misuse the term "virus", as you mentioned, but it also misuses the term "encrypted". The correct term here is "obfuscated". The obfuscation code might happen to contain something that looks very similar to AES, but it isn't encryption (and it certainly isn't AES) if the "key" can just be recovered from the executable.