...while you're at it so the American law enforcement could effortlessly hover over suspect with the court order.

The "counterexample" shows an opposite thing - secretly leaking the information about surveillance, not secretly adding surveillance. If you're forced to compromise your own code against your will you'd make it dead obvious for yourself and everybody else where the offending part is so that you can get rid of it easily. On top of that you might use stealth "bug" to leak the presence of surveillance, as in you example.

As it would be rather difficult to force someone to put an invisible government backdoor in an open source source project, does this bill mean that companies will be forced to put backdoors in proprietary components only, violate the GPL by publishing a modified version without providing access to their modifications or replace GPL component with a different component upon government request?

Can a government bill demand people to lie? If not a simple question "Did you put a backdor in your product" would have to result in "no" or "under the penalty of prison I'm not allowed to comment". No reasonable company would shoot themselves in the foot with the 2nd answer unless they're forced to.

To Slashdot editors: the acronym in the summary is wrongly explained!

We all know that debugging is 3 times more difficult than writing so the Congress should get at least 24 years now to review and debug the TPP.

Taking picture of me clearly violates my parents' copyright copyright for their creation.

I meant: *Software* engineers who work on steering...", Sorry for the confusion.

An experienced engineer would give more quality within the same time but at higher budget because it costs more to hire an experienced one :) Either way, from engineering perspective, an in-car audio player of acceptable quality may crash occasionally but obviously it mustn't make the car crash with it. I'm pretty sure that someone in the engineering department pointed that out. But that's not engineers who usually pull the strings and make final decisions...

Engineers who work on steering, brakes, transmission and other core systems in the car are much more experienced than those who code up an entertainment system. The core engineers cost more, use much stricter (therefore longer and more costly) processes and so on. It would be wasteful to throw all that experience, time and money into non-critical system that doesn't need it. Jeep, quite rightfully, did sensible thing there. But running all systems on shared core or bus was asking for trouble. And they got what they asked for.

Maybe next time they should try drive a pacemaker from an Android phone they also use to play games watch kitten videos, you know, to save the cost of the pacemaker's own microcontroller and battery. What can possibly go wrong?

Where's the TFA?

Didn't the home taping kill that industry years ago?

A fridge has a door that can be "programmed" to open to the left or to the right. Does it mean that I can patent 2 sets consisting of a "fridge + program" as 2 new machines and than charge everyone who uses left-hand or right-hand "programmed" fridge door a license fee?

The penis is used by 99% of rapist to perform a serious crime therefore those dangerous objects should banned first and owners of penises should be locked away imediately, without prosecution. Then ban knifes. Knifes have proven record of deadly behaviour in wrong hands. Clearly, the wide availability of those lethal objects in pretty much every house is a severe threat to humanity. By entering kitchen, even a nicest girl (boys were taken care of already) immediately turns in to killer waiting for an opportunity to attack, merely because the knifes are around. By taking care of penis and knife owners first, the risk of having a person with 3D printed gun out in the wild is minimal so there will be no need to ban 3D printing.

Don't be silly. Kepler was, by all means, a scientist and he based his "Mysterium Cosmographicum" on Copernicus' "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium". Do you really find Kepler's work non-productive?

BTW, both Kepler and Newton were wrong too.

Copernicus came up with quite blasphemous idea that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. He changed completely bonkers model of the Solar System to vaguely correct one, with the Sun in the centre. Copernicus' model predicted the observed backward movement of the planets and few other things. Kepler was one of the few scientists who did not reject the heliocentric model. Kepler refined Copernicus' model 50 years later by changing the reference point from the centre of Earth's orbit to the centre of the Sun and by making orbits elliptical. Newton corrected Kepler's big mistake nearly 100 years later, by coming up with the idea that the gravity, not geometry, is the key ingredient.Yet Newton's equations are wrong by giving the certain result rather than the probability distribution, which makes Newton's work useless for quantum physicists.

I don't get the idea why the 3 scientists came up with major milestones in science but only 2 of them are worthy.

...or you're violating patent