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I don't know what the big deal is here. This has happened to many other browsers before, including older versions of IE. With new standards, scripting and virtual machine technologies being implemented in browsers continually, it is expected. It is a simple browser vulnerability, and that is all.

This is not new, if you read Bugtraq, or even Georgi Guninski's page, you will see this and many other exploits are a common occurance in many browsers. Even browsers that handle only plain html like Lynx have been proven vulnerable at times.

Since IE3, many vulnerabilities like this have popped up in MS's browser. IE3 was far worse, as both the Windows and Macintosh platform could both be explotited in terrible ways. Also, we can't forget the famous Netscape Brown Orifice exploit, which Netscape admittedly couldn't even fix in their 4.x series of browsers. I'm sure there are some fine exploits waiting to be found in the lesser used browsers too, but they are just far less reviewed by the security community.

Now I don't think its right that such vulnerabilities exist, but bugs will always be present in software. Internet Explorer just happens to use a lot of mixed technologies and therefore there are more ways for it to be exploited. This is nothing more than someone exploiting a vulnerable version of BIND or RPC. The only difference I find here is that Microsoft is involved, and thus makes a good sensationalist Slashdot target.

If your standard for handing out the Presidency is what would happen in a more rational and fairer voting system, then Nader should probably be sworn in. See this online Condorcet poll.

This idea was based in part on a vision I wrote up in a 1982 white paper when I was "Manager of Interactive Architectures" at a major videotex startup -- some of the ideas for which are starting to take shape, such as an implementation of a more flexible voting scheme.

Back in the common law days, if the laws weren't simple enough for the common man to remember, they were discarded, primarily via jury nullifcation (yes, not only did they have juries back then, but juries originated among the "pagans" who didn't particularly like one guy from somewhere else telling them how to run their communities). Then the lawyers took over and made laws so complex you couldn't operate as a competent adult unless you had a law degree. Then the laws got so complex not even law degree qualified you to operate as a full citizen. Then things got _really_ corrupt, and you have to have been a political appointee to a Federal bureaucracy like the SEC, in order to just go do something that appears a bit out of the ordinary.

It looks like being a former head of the SEC, while it wasn't absolutely necessary to try the experiment in GPL software organization, was most definitely helpful in avoding the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt factors that accompanied my attempts to placate such fears with lawyers fees 15 years ago.

Having looked at the problems with my original ideas, I'm quite skeptical of the approach these guys are taking -- particularly focusing as they are on government contracting -- although I suppose this is consistent with their drawing an analogy to the kibutzim. The kibutzim received a lot of help from the Israeli government.

The only thing worse than bad record systems for votes is a flaw game theory of your voting.

I'm not big on political processes, but there does needs to be more experimentation given to different kinds of voting.

If you're serious about a "modeless" interface, it is hard to get less "modal" than a shell command line.

The Perl guru Rick Klement (who really likes to build specialized Tk GUIs) once commented that the reason you never see any real advances in GUIs is that the programmers who set out to develop new GUIs usually start by writing a GUI for an IDE and then quickly realize that command line interfaces are better than GUIs for for IDEs. User configurability of a GUI environment is, in a sense, user programmability. Therefore, one has to wonder whether the power given up by a GUI really buys your users enough to make up for the loss compared to, say, better text-based facilities.

For example, more flexible and forgiving parsers with better command line generation tools (a simple example being command histories with arrow keys retrieval in shells) can go along way toward simplifying text entry in computer-understandable form.

Recently, Dan Brumleve has been showing some simple extensions to Perl at Perl Mongers meetings that make writing Perl statements lines more natural and powerful -- like the determiner "it" meaning the default variable "$_" so you can say things like "store it" and the interpreter knows what you are talking about. He's put in a variety of adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.

Other, equally simple extensions to the parsing of a general language can make it a lot more flexible, accessible and forgiving. Automated composition assistants could pop up when they think they can help you compose text for the command line.

Graphical interfaces are ideal for interacting with numeric continua (continuous spaces), but most abstract information is in the form of rules or natural laws derived from observations of continua. Humans are always trying to abstract their sensory perception into such codified knowledge so they can more parsimoniously speak of their inner worlds, which reflect their private interpretation of shared sensory information, to each other.

They publish a list of people who are trying it out. So right now I'm surfing through some dude's C:\Program Files\. I was considering ganking his ICQ database file but he must have shut it down. I'm glad I put my temp directory as the directory to serve. C:\Program Files\ just has too much, imagine the fun you could have with a bunch of ICQ and email archives.