This reminded me of soft heaps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_heap
Basically it creates a heap but some of the elements get corrupted and are not in the proper place as if it were a proper heap. Oddly enough, this can be used to write deterministic algorithms, and provides the best complexity for finding minimum spanning trees.

And yet you see many slashdotters practically bending over backwards trying to get DRM integrated into html nowadays... The stuff in this story is exactly what it will get you.

This is precisely the type of dick waving we should have between nations. It is pretty much harmless, unlike war, and at the end of the day everyone, not just the one nation that "wins", will benefit from the technology that comes out of it.

You are entirely missing the point. You do not have the Windows source (sure, SOME people can get this, most cannot), and even if you did have it you wouldn't be able to build or distribute it. You are entirely at Microsoft's whim, and they are legally bound to comply with the US government. You seem to think a complex black box built by people at the governments whims, without any ability to fix the internals if something is wrong is somehow more secure than a complex transparent box that allows you to fix the internals.

The difference is that you have the Freedom to find and fix any flaws in Linux.

Consider if a hacker was breaking into a corporation's systems, monitoring all their data, storing every communication they made and breaking their encryption. And then, the company found out about it and identified the hacker. What do you think would happen to that hacker in our modern court systems? Would the excuse "Oh they should have secured things better!" work and let the hacker off the hook, or would the DoJ pursue ridiculous fines and a life sentence? I am willing to bet the latter. So why does the US government get a free pass here? They are essentially hacking everyone on the planet, they should have the same ridiculous charges placed on them that the CFAA & Holder has brought up on "hackers".

And don't give me that bullshit "It is ok, since they are the government." excuse. IMO, the surest sign of a failing government is when they start picking and choosing which laws apply, because the laws have grown so out of control and ridiculous that they are incompatible with each other. That is exactly what is happening right now.

Yeah I don't know why so many people seem confused about the purpose of this thing. It is a prototype killing platform. Replace the gas engine with a small nuclear reactor, strap on a machine gun with automated targeting software, and you have a quick manueverable discreet death machine that obeys any order it recieves. And if it falls into the wrong hands, you say? What of the nuclear material then? That's the bueaty of it, it doubles as a dirty bomb.

Current reality is even more frightening. The education book publishers and tech companies are already pushing iPads, digital books, digital exercises, digital quizes, and digital tests on students. This is *already* happening in many states, California being perhaps the biggest example. You have schools beholden to these entrenched tech companies and publishers (although, I guess that is nothing new), and those companies are pushing automated teaching tools to the nation's children in public schools.

If this process ever reaches critical mass, schools will no longer have teachers, and corporations will have complete control over education. Just picture it, a student has trouble with a problem, they tap the help button on the iPad, and then a Pearson rep comes up in video chat. Ugh. And then that job will be outsourced. Critical thinking's fossilized remains will be found years later by whatever out evolves us.

That baseline protection is essentially no protection at all. The site owners (Netflix for example) are not obligated to support this baseline protection either, so if you visit Netflix and your browser only supports this open source baseline encryption, you will see nothing. You should just pretend this part of the standard doesn't exist, it is completely meaningless.

Sort of. The userspace interface is the ABI that linux keeps constant. Basically all the syscalls, ioctls, and Linus even likes to include the nuances of how they operate as part of the ABI. This is the stuff that must not change, and it does a pretty good job at keeping it constant. Supposedly apps compiled to target the 1.0 kernel can still run just fine on the latest kernel, provided the libraries it links to also maintained good ABI stability.

The ABI breakage that occurs happens with in kernel functions themselves. These are things that are not considered standardized API functions or syscalls that should be accessed by userspace. But, in order to produce closed source drivers for Linux, companies like NVIDIA will need to link to these functions. Linking to these is of course a violation of the GPL, though, so NVIDIA gets around it by writing an open source shim that gets compiled when the driver is installed, which then connects to their more proprietary parts. One of the points of the GPL and allowed in kernel ABI breakage is to make it more difficult for people to keep their drivers closed source and outside the kernel.

Ah sorry to hear that, hope you enjoy Mint at least! Also, gentoo is ridiculously good at packaging KDE, pretty stable even if you use stable packages, but that distro is a bit of a... committment...

I pretty much have had the opposite experience... I decided to try fedora out on my main machine after 19 came out and I was pretty impressed. It never fails to boot, no app crashes, everything is stable and fast. Upgrades have been installing just fine too, I was getting tired of the hastle of maintaining Gentoo, and Ubuntu has given me kernel oopses stalling the entire boot process since it is so slow to upgrade the kernel.

Ah, actually I just remembered I DID have a failed boot, last week too. That was when fedora upgraded to 3.11... basically, the nvidia driver is incompatible at the moment. Any chance you are using the blob drivers? And yeah I guess this makes my previous statements seem a little silly... (I do kind of consider it an nvidia problem though, as you can't get the blob driver from official fedora repos).

I would say that they are code, since they rather directly affect the running software, but it is up for debate. It is akin to JavaScript really. Anyway, the scripts would be pretty easily accessible to any owner of the game anyway, since they would need to be on the filesystem.

It is already trivial to copy game assets, just go to the pirate bay. At some point you need to just stop worrying about "Who might be stealing my game?!", or it will just drive you mad. If the product is good enough, and convenient enough to purchase, odds are people will buy it.

Well that is a tough one, it certainly is easier cheat in a game you have the source to. But it is also quite possible to cheat in a game that you do not have the source to. People have been hacking games and reading player locations directly out of memory for well over a decade now, and it just creates a cat and mouse game between the developer and potential hackers. Access to the source could allow players themselves to attempt to come up with clever solutions to cheats, you could rely on dedicated servers (though those would not be immune to cheaters either), or something else. I really cannot answer this one with anything other than "There will always be cheaters."

I just want to reiterate too, that I think closed source games are totally fine in the free software ecosystem. I just think that open source engines provide more benefits to the users.

Personally, I don't see the problem with that. Stallman's main argument for libre software was that it allows you to know and control functional processes on your computer (software). Making the engine itself but not the art assets available in source form accomplishes that. You can study it, modify it, and fix bugs that crop up. Furthermore, I seem to recall him regarding games as art, and he does not consider artistic software as functional processes required to get things done on your computer, thus there is no worries about them not being libre software.

Certainly it would be nice if more games were open source; there are numerous consumer benefits to it, but it is not that big of a deal.

From what I can tell, I'd say it is more of an interim compromise. Ideally, they would have the entire existing steam library running on SteamOS. But obviously they can't do that, since many companies simply do not wish to go through the hassle of porting their old code to a new OS. So, streaming from a Windows box allows them to support the entire existing steam library as more games are ported and created for SteamOS. Also, I am guessing they will do some sort of input passthrough, so your steambox will process the input, stream it to the Windows box, and then stream the video and audio back to the steambox. This should allow you to put the Windows box anywhere you please, out of sight.

All in all, it sounds like a neat idea, hopefully they can keep input and output delays from the streaming box low though, otherwise some of the more hardcore gamers might get annoyed with it. But again, this seems like more of a middle ground compromise to please people with existing libraries, they even mention announcements of upcoming AAA games for SteamOS in the next few weeks in the link.