The law, as I understand it, is to allow the authority, to issue a command to render a particular smartphone totally unusable.

However, the same law could be misused by the authority as well (think of what NSA is doing, for example) - instead of killing a smartphone that has been reported stolen, the authority could issue a kill command to smartphones that are being used by "dissidents", cutting off their communication lines.

Do not ever forget that inside the NSA datacenter they have all the information of who is using what phone, who calls whom and when and how often and where they call from, etc.

Right now, without the KILL SWITCH, all they could do is to LISTEN IN to the communications of people. With KILL SWITCH, they could kill off all the communication channels of the anti-NSA people, and render them totally unable to communicate with the world.

I fervently hope that Nasa will get enough fund to construct a much powerful equipment than Gaia and sent it to space to help us understand the universe better.

I fervently hope that the American government will stop wasting money on all the wasteful and counter-productive pork-barrel programs and put the money into GOOD USE and help put America in the lead again in the Space Frontier.

2013 is drawing to a close. Will 2014 be a better beginning for the United States of America ?

If the material Perovskite is as good as they say it is, why limit the application on only the windows ?

We can apply the same thing to walls, to roof, even to pavements, so long as the sunlight can shine on them they get to generate electricity.

Heck, we can apply it on the car windows and car body surfaces as well, and and store the power inside the battery - or use it to run, aka that solar car in the Logan Run's tv series (it was aired in the 1970's, far too old for the young uns to enjoy)

Thanks for the link. I've noted it in the wiki that FSF hosts:

http://libreplanet.org/wiki/When_should_firmware_be_free#Hard_drive_controllers

I don't know if anyone from FSF reads that page, but I'll gather info and I'll raise it with someone in FSF next time I'm talking to them.

(Of course, this isn't the case with the drive of the laptop that FSF has endorsed.)

It's not new. I've been reading about it for 15 years.

Thanks for putting an accurate title on your comment.

> Oh, so if one isn't a programmer they shouldn't criticize

That's what *you* said. I'm just turning it around so you can see how silly it is. And you find it silly indeed.

I had pointed out all the non-programmer work done by FSF and you replied that the real people we should thank for GNOME are coder Miguel de Icaza and dotcom startup Eazel.

You said RMS could only take credit for the tools he wrote, but that's nonsense. He's been doing non-programmer work full-time for about twenty years now. Including launching four desktop projects and doing everything he can to make them a success. And with GNOME he did.

GNOME Foundation came years after GNOME. GNU started GNOME.

GNU has more than a hundred successful software projects. Some are cornerstones of the operating system, and you're moaning because there are some GNU projects which haven't been successful. And how are your microkernel and your Flash replacement coming along? Written any good compilers or standard c libraries recently?

GNOME was launched by FSF and RMS spent years promoting it and getting people to work on it. He still does.

You seem to be trying to make GNU disappear by arguing that nothing matters but lines of code, and only the lines written by RMS's hands count as GNU.

The toolkit is a GNU project, born from another GNU project.

Miguel de Icaza was one developer and software architect. He did years of good work and then gave up and took money to promote Microsoft software (via Novell).

> And none of those things were done by the FSF itself.

We have a GUI desktop because FSF launched four projects to make one.

The first became GNUstep (a success, but not enoughso), the second didn't produce a desktop but did produce Guile.

Then KDE was launched, with the then-proprietary QT toolkit. The problem was so urgent that FSF launched two projects to fix it, GNOME and Harmony. Harmony was a project to replace the QT toolkit, but it wasn't a success.

GNOME was a success. So much of a success that it was, IMO, what lead to QT being freed. So we've FSF to thank for directly making GNOME, and indirectly for licence changes in QT.

(And then there's the fact that FSF made the developer tools and licences which helped a lot of other projects come into being.)

But as usual, people try to avoid crediting FSF, so a lot of people don't know this.