That doesn't make sense since humanity have been living on parts of the Earth with constant night during winter and constant day during summer since god knows when. "One sunrise to the next" doesn't make sense there. There were probably local units all over the place.

I have a hard time imagining all people on Earth of the 11th century all agreeing on the definition of time units at all, let alone on the second. It's probably one of those things where the now standardized time units of hours, minute and second was used more and more, and gradually took over any existing local units and standards.

I imagine it's because it was convenient to divide the minute in the same way as the hour. There's 60 minutes in an hour thanks to the Babylonians, who used that as their base (just as we use base-10).

Uhm yes, the license text itself? Just diff COPYING in the kernel tree with the one available at gnu.org. Honestly, it's not that difficult.

Anyway, since you were to lazy to do it, the difference is this added preamble (sans some layout changes):

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

Linus Torvalds

No, I think he's straight on. Secure boot stems from a broken threat model: that kernel access is extremely important. I know about userspace security, but the kernel already secures userspace without secure boot and proper privilege separation secures the kernel. Secure boot is a way of securing the system from root, which is futile (look at SELinux, for example).

This is primarily a technology for vendor lock-in. Always has been, always will be.

Unless you passed the entire memory image trough the TPM, how are you going to accomplish this without compromising the key to the operating system?

All of those patents are most likely incredibly trivial and all companies and organizations that sucessfully lobbied them in, did so not for their technological benefits but to make sure their patents were as widely used as possible.

If the ITU were to demand patent-free standards, they would be just as good but without the royalties.

Back in 2008--2009, they were violating the GPL knowingly and I don't think that's changed. Buying stuff from them is a big no-no for me, no matter how good they are.

I'm still using my WRT54GL as my primary wireless router and I haven't noticed it's range decreasing at all. Perhaps it's just me, but I think it's working as flawlessly as when I first got it and installed OpenWRT on it six years ago.

You are only guaranteed that sizeof(long) >= 32 bits and sizeof(int) >= 16, so it's perfectly valid to have sizeof(long) == sizeof(int). There is no data type guaranteed to be >= 2*sizeof(int) (a long long is >= 64 bits). This is all for crappy legacy reasons. If you don't believe me, wikipedia has a good list.

To be honest, I have seen one or two proof of concepts of this. It's not that difficult to do, either (especially if there's money and tax avoidance in it). They should probably look into this as well as open sourcing the code, as a complement.

A strike is probably whenever the entertainment industry who has paid Verizon to do this, enter your IP in a list and report you. If you think the ISP will do anything except tell you to "stop pirating stuff" (such as cross-checking or verifying their data), I think you're sadly mistaken.

I don't think so, people on Slashdot see oversubscription as an excuse to not expand your network as evil. To use your car analogy: It's perfectly fine to build a 4-lane highway instead of a 15-lane highway as the latter would be hopelessly oversized almost all day, except for peak hours. The problem is when you build a 2-lane highway and tell people "You can't take your car to work more than twice a week, or you are using an unreasonable amount of highway space".

Just to preempt all comments about imperial or home-grown measurement systems: All measurement systems in the world are defined from the metric base units, which are in turn defined from a few physical constants and this kilogram prototype. When the kilogram prototype gains mass, this affects the kilogram, pound, liter and fluid ounce equally.

You are right that it's perfectly possible, especially if you've had some practice. However, I'd dare say that doing a rough count of 70x180 is easier in my head than doing a matrix multiplication of [2 4] and [6 2], then doing unit conversions.

No it's not: (70 * 200) - (70 * 20) cm^2 = 7000 * 2 - 700 * 2 cm^2 = 6300 * 2 cm^2 = 12600 cm^2 = 1.26 m^2

Seriously, doing math by rough count is the stuff we learn in 4th grade.

You don't for example cook food on an every day basis ... ?