Depends on the regulations: "Commercial software can pick from one of the 5 following standard commercial licenses: ... Any commercial software license that deviates from a Standard License reverts to Standard License Type 1 wherever its EULA conflicts with this regulation. Software that complies with the Open Source Definition or otherwise allows the user to inspect the source code and remove unwanted features independently is exempt from this section."

You are then perfectly free to make money from your software. Pick whichever one of the standard licenses suits your purpose and carry on. But what you cannot do is employ a lawyer to invent a creative way to screw your users in the fine print. If you do, your license is automatically torn up and replaced with something sane.

Even if there were, you need only recompile your gcc source with llvm, icc, visual studio, or basically anything that isn't gcc to get a new compiler that won't replicate the backdoor any more. For extra fun, randomise the order of this compiling that compiling something else so that even backdoor reinsertions that cross the vendor boundary will eventually fail. Or write your own C++ interpreter in Python/Perl/whatever and use it to (very slowly) run gcc on itself - even if it takes a week you'll have a clean binary at the end. Yes, hiding such a backdoor seems scary to the untrained eye. It's also trivial to get rid of if you're paranoid enough to care.

Because those experts are morons. It ignores the economic cost of companies having to run a separate parallel Internet. Take electricity suppliers that need to monitor and control remote switching devices, for example. GSM/CDMA networks are just there, already deployed by the telecommunications industry. A cheap GSM modem and an account with the local telecomms supplier is economically better at contacting remote stations than running ones own wires out to single-point stations in the suburbs and the bush.

Isolated networks also don't work. Putting a dodgy default-passworded device on an internal network doesn't work when your attacker walks up to the remote station, cuts off the padlock, and installs their own device straight onto your wide-open "no one could possibly hack this because it's disconnected" network. Which is basically how Stuxnet got deployed - direct intervention onto a private network at a weak point.

This problem cannot be solved with simplistic "if you don't want people to hack it, don't connect it to the Internet" solutions. How about building it to be difficult to hack in the first place? Or making VPN layers the default way the Internet works rather than an afterthought? Or teaching (mostly non-software) engineers security techniques that were honed over decades of fighting malware on the open Internet? Or any of a million other practical solutions that don't boil down to "la la, I can't hear you so you can't hear me".

And none of this would be a problem if PBS would simply publish the specification for whatever JSON/XML/etc back end they are using to transmit information to the clients about shows and episodes, and use standard RFC-compatible video formats and streaming protocols with no DRM or other nonsense.

Why would it not be a problem? Because the next day the app stores would be full of "SparkleVideoPlayer now supports PBS!" updates for all of the existing streaming video apps and their loyal users. Or if my screen size, aspect ratio, blah, blah, blah is not supported, I can write my own app!

I can understand why the commercial TV outfits want to control everything - they think it's the only way to poison the experience with ads. But why are public broadcasters like PBS, BBC, and Australia's ABC doling the same thing? It's idiotic - the solution to "how do I support a million devices" is simple: "publish the spec so that the taxpaying public can write their own apps".

Oh shut up - taking a pass on DRM is not "pick your battles carefully". Flash and Silverlight are dying on their own because they don't run, or run barely, on the current generation of smart phones, tablets, and ... wait for it ... smart TV's. The content distributors desperately need standardisation because supporting hundreds of device types and dozens of plug-in technologies is a pain in the neck. The problem is they've chosen to outsource the problem by making browser vendors write the proprietary DRM plug-ins for them. Instead of simply adopting the existing specifications for Internet video formats and protocols. Everything they want to do can already be done with AVI/MP4/etc together with HTTP/RTP and a "video" tag in HTML. Everything that is except spy on users and take away people's ability to enjoy the content on a whim. If we resist DRM, they'll either have to adopt open standards or they'll have no business model at all.

Any headline where the US is demanding that some other country stop doing something can be simply answered with "You First Sparky!".

Speaks someone who has no idea where their food comes from. Hint: agriculture.

Here's one simple example: Every morning the cows come in around dawn to be milked. Several hours later the milk tanker arrives to collect the milk and take it to the bottlers to get it ready to put on the trucks to go to the supermarket for you to buy tomorrow.

The cows will come in a little later in winter. Which pushes the schedules for the tanker drivers and bottlers back by an hour. Now the bottlers who used to work 9-5 are working 10-6. Also shifted are the truck drivers going to the supermarkets. And the stockists in the stores. And so on.

Do you really think it is a good idea to force millions and millions of low-paid truck drivers, milk bottlers, and cheese churners to work idiotic shifts and see their families even less just so that you can avoid having to change your office-worker watch twice a year? There are more people in society than you post-industrial types.

It's not the title, it's the attitude. If you write code the way a civil engineer designs bridges and or an electrical engineer builds circuits, you will build crap.

When building a bridge to take a 10 ton load, you better use 15 ton beams just in case one is under spec. When building a circuit to switch at 10 MHz, use components designed for 12 MHz just in case one is under spec. It's called "tolerances" and is the underpinning of all engineering, and is a great idea for those fields where once it is built the requirements generally stop changing.

Except in software engineering. Tolerances in software are called "fudge factors" or "heuristics", and they always result in unmaintainable spaghetti as requirements constantly change over time.

I use the term "Software Developer" for myself because I refuse to "engineer" software; i.e. build crap. My most recent contract involved fixing problems in embedded systems code written by an EE major. Total nightmare - no unit tests, no code comments to speak off, mysterious algorithms with no explanation as to where they came from, references to "see datasheet" for the component that was used three board revisions ago but not any more, and so on. The circuit? An absolutely beautiful example of balancing requirements and managing tolerances. But the code to run the circuit was rubbish that would get stamped "go back and do that again" by the code reviewers in any software development shop.

The ironic thing is that the term "Software Engineer" was coined to give developers the air of professionalism. Perhaps the engineers could learn something about professionalism from the developers instead? Like how to design a system that won't fail the minute the requirements change.

A whole car may be silly, but the thing about cars is they need repairs. I scraped the side of my car against a concrete pole in a carpark a few years back. Easy enough for the panel beaters to bang out the dings and repaint the doors ... except for a scratched-up door handle. They would have had to send away to Korea at great expense to get a completely new injection moulded handle. For now I'm putting up with the scratches. But imagine if my panel beater could just pop the design into a 3D printer and make me a new one on the spot? That's what scares the crap out of traditional car manufacturers ... that they can no longer rip you off for replacement parts.

Lua, Python, PHP? All scripting languages, useful for their purpose of quick one-off glue tasks, but not anywhere close to "real programming". Call me when you can write a 300,000 line C++ or Java monster on the thing without ending up with debilitating eye or wrist strain injuries.

Curiosity is doing more science per second ON ANOTHER PLANET just sitting there checking its systems than the entire human race has achieved to date. Decades from now, scientists will still be pulling interesting information out of the data that was missed on the first pass. This is a genuine GOOD for the human race as a whole - don't screw it up to do the equivalent of spray-painting "l33tme w0z ere" on the side. Unless you're willing to pay the cost to send up a replacement robot, find something else to amuse yourself with.

Even if we were to assume that cell phones put out sufficient radiation to heat up the water molecules in the brain enough to be noticeable, it still pales into insignificance compared to the heating your brain receives when you have a hot shower and wash your hair. Or walk around without a hat on a summers day. If low-level heat from everyday sources caused cancer then the human race would have gone extinct in 50,000BCE when we invented fire.

Porn problem? What about Wikipedia's bomb problem? Enough information about chemistry and physics to build your own homemade bomb. Depending upon your budget, everything from firecrackers and pipe bombs to nuclear weapons. What about Wikipedia's computer security problem? Blow by blow descriptions of common computer vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited.

And so on.

We've been down this road before with the debates over the Anarchist's Cookbook and hacking manuals. Banning, or labelling, or whatever serves no purpose except to enable government censors to make up excuses to block other information. And look - you gave them a nice little filtering system to help them do exactly that!

Of course Wikipedia needs to tread softly - they are the repository of the world's knowledge and anything that reduces access to knowledge is against its charter. Make the descriptions of various porn acts more clinical and less explicit, perhaps. But that won't stop the "think of the children!" crowd.

And how many milliseconds until this happens:

A new law was passed today by both houses of Congress making it illegal for pharmacies to sell over the counter HIV tests. The author of the bill, congressman John Q. Religinut, Jr (R) welcomed the passage of the law saying "Today we have taken a stand against promiscuity and the homosexual agenda".

And then come back and find the damn disk is still waiting at the "Select English or 40 Languages You Don't Speak" screen waiting for you to hit the OK button. Seriously, is it really so hard to detect the language I've already set on my Blu-Ray player and use that by default?

In any case, if "insert disk, go do something else, then watch movie" becomes a problem, I'm sure the studios will "fix" that by adding a EULA click to the Copyright warning screens.