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little profit in spam from a legitimate business

While the meaning of "legitimate business" may be debated with regards to the businesses that employ spam, the profit is indisputable. Here is someone who made millions before age 28 from spam. There is also an Olympic skier who is a millionaire spam mogul. Here is yet another spammer who made millions off of spam. Most of the top spammers on the SpamHaus list are doing quite well financially as well - well enough that many of them jet around the world with their spam profits.

The spammer can only profit because their overhead is being spread to unsuspecting users on a global scale.

That statement doesn't match reality. The money the spammers pull in could easily purchase a cluster to pump out spam. However the botnets create one element of the great game of spam whack-a-mole in how difficult they are to shut down as they dynamically resize and pull in new nodes.

And if you look at how much the spammers pay their ISPs, you'll realize that the spammers are in no way hurting for money.

Why bother with backdooring the encryption when you can just record what you want at the source?

You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?

You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment "doesn't mark a change of direction," perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like "I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks" but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?

Huh? Google has been saying "Flash is coming for Android, 2010" since mid-2009 if not sooner. Adobe just announced AIR and Flash for Android: http://www.pcworld.com/article/189338/adobe_shows_flash_and_air_apps_for_google_android.html

Apple doesn't want Flash, Air, Java, or any other means of loading applications onto an iPhone. They want total control, and as many commercial apps as possible, so they get paid. That's the only reason they're not supporting Flash, Java, or other defacto web standards on the iPhone, despite the fact that's currently making the iPhone a lower-class web client.

Microsoft is the only proponent of Silverlight, a competitor to Flash that's just as proprietary. So it's quite natural they would not be supporting Flash themselves on their WinMo devices... 'scuse me, their "Windows Phone 7" devices... a new name with each revision. Of course, had you read the link you posted carefully, you would know that Microsoft is working with Adobe to allow them to release Flash for "Windows Phone 7". I would estimate, at this point, Microsoft will do everything they can to not screw up their new platform, and "better web experience than iPhone" will be one of the standard targets of, well, everyone but Apple.

And in fact, it is Adobe's job to push Flash. They're doing that, too, even on Linux .. they recently joined the LiMo Foundation, and play to support Flash on Linux phones and other devices: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000072-264.html

Google's YouTube is moving away from Flash, for very good reasons: they're a video site, and Flash is just extra baggage, once you have standard video. That's very different than Google saying "no Flash anywhere". YouTube is an entirely different concern than smart phones and tablets.

You're an idiot. That's smartphone online usage, not market share. In market share, the iPhone has little more than 10%, while Nokia has 36% and RIM has more than 20%.

You have no privacy, none. Any hacker, any private investigator, any stalker, can access your data from thousands of private or public databases. If you are jewish then the neo-nazi's probably already know where you live. If you voted for Bush the lefties already know who you are and where you live. If you disagree with how I think on privacy, I could find out where you live.

And nothing stops me from creating a huge list of names and addresses, putting it into a database, and selling this list to advertises so they can spam you. And nothing stops anyone from selling your health records to the nazi's, the mafia, the street gang, the Republicans. So if you are a gay homosexual you can expect that your medical records will be accessed. If you are Barack Obama then you can expect your cellphone records to be accessed http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10104997-83.html

The far right, those people who vote for Sarah Palin and who have all those guns and bibles, those people who don't believe in evolution, they know where you live and they know everything about you because you added a Republican to your facebook page. And if you added a liberal then you can expect that those global warming crazies and anti-globalists will know where to find you and all your vulnerabilities.

So why don't you have a right to privacy? You don't have a right to privacy because your life just isn't important to the government. The government knows that most Americans are dumb breeders who will pop out babies just like the Octomom. If you die the Octomom will have another baby and replace you. Corporations don't see you as anything more than consumers. And political parties only care about you when you think like they do and are willing to serve their special interests.

Face it, you aren't all that and nobody is protecting you or your privacy.

Click on turn off buzz. It will then be removed from the list of links on the top left-hand side with Inbox, Drafts, and all that.

Unfortunately, it seems that removing the link from the sidebar is in fact all it'll do. Here's how to really disable buzz for good, courtesy of CNet.

"I'd rather have something in a similar form factor, but with Win7,"

Well part of the form factor is using a lighter weight OS, permitting snappy performance on less powerful hardware and thus you save on cooling, battery power/size etc. Or they end up horridly underpowered for windows.

Win7 Tablets exist and they are largely a failure. Read this Cnet review on the new Archos 9.
http://reviews.cnet.com/tablet-pcs/archos-9-pc-tablet/4505-3126_7-33800951.html

N900 doesn't excite me in the least. Linux and more open is nice, but I think the user experience is far behind. I don't need to program every device I own.

I think the biggest competitors will be Android tablets like this MSI:
http://phandroid.com/2010/01/29/msi-android-tablet-harmony/

It seems like a contest between marketing check-boxes(MSI) and user experience(iPad). I would try the MSI Android panel if I could find one before buying the iPad, but I don't think the user experience will come close and in the end that is what will win iPad sales.

Of course, with a name like "macs4all", I can expect you to be objective.

A quick Google search turns up this. DRM here, Multi-task here and underpowered for me is an extension of the fact that it cannot multitask. Having a large iTouch able to do one thing at a time does not really mean that it's blazing fast. Either it can't multitask because it doesn't have the specs for it or something is wrong with the iPhone OS (yeah, it's not running OS X).

Not for everyone but google as a really clever solution http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

I don't like those big UPSs, they are expensive, a lot of unneeded HW and they barely work when you need them most (expensive, small discharge time, batteries losing charge capacity .. )

So for our own datacenter we keep the currently bought UPSs and added some laptops for really critical services, we virtualice a lot too (OpenVZ) and both technologies enables us to degrade services gracefully and still keep high uptimes, laptops are great, cheap, and batteries can last up to 2 hours. It's not a solution for everyone, but works if your platform can be adapted to the architecture.

Private industry will continue to be in, not get into, space related projects when there's money to be made. Communication satellites are a good example, billions of dollars in private investment are being spent on building and launching them. Of course that industry wouldn't have ever been possible if the USA and other governments hadn't developed the technology first.

But exploration and development of new technology are risky with too little chance of ever recovering the investment for private industry. The Obama plan is nothing more than an excuse to shift federal dollars to companies that are friendly to Hope and Change.

The "turn off Buzz" link doesn't actually clean everything up and make things private again. It's misleading.

Windows Update checks your PC to determine which updates it needs depending on what software and devices you have installed. The service does not collect personal information -- Windows Update simply collects specific PC details needed for the update, including data such as computer make and model, version and ID numbers, and other such details.

Microsoft is committed to helping protect your privacy, and does not collect your name or other personally identifiable information. For more details on how the information is protected, see the Windows Update privacy statement.

In other words, while MS does not directly collect my name and phone number, they can uniquely identify my computer by "make and model, version and ID numbers, and other such details". Then, they can check where I am (via geolocation) and who I am by cross-referencing the information with data from data-mining companies.

Sweet.

There are few ways I can answer this.
1. The most comprehensive way is to tell you to refer to http://privacy.microsoft.com/
After which point you still have concerns, please fill our our privacy questions form:
https://support.microsoft.com/contactus/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1310&ws=1prcen

2. Microsoft complies with laws surrounding rention of customer data including IP addresses. Refer to this blog post that talks not only about Microsoft, but of Google and Yahoo as well.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10437137-265.html
Where as Google and Facebook want to redefine expectations of privacy on the web, Microsoft's privacy policy goes above and beyond the majority of companies that offer goods and services, both physically and virtually. Microsoft's privacy policy view comes from the very top from Steve Ballmer so when he says ours is better than Google's, he challenges anyone in the world to call him out on it. We do not go into your mail, we don't read your personal information, we don't access your stored content, period.

3. How you interpret Microsoft's agenda is up to you, but before trying to find any reason to fault Microsoft, I would ask you to thoroughly consider all the software you run on your environment and ask whether your information is safe with other 3rd party vendors. There are too many who do not apply as rigourous standards and in actuality, SELL your data to 3rd parties. If you play any computer game with an online component, you should be concerned. If you use extremely proprietary niche software that costs a lot of money, you should be concerned.

You should not be concerned about a company like Microsoft, a company who has billions of users and millions of business customers, about privacy. There are businesses who take security and privacy very seriously and if Microsoft were to pull this type of stuff, we'd get called out on it very quickly, and our reputation would suffer beyond repair.

Simply put, a failure on Microsoft's part to enforce a strong privacy policy would directly cause significant financial harm to the company. It's not worth it.

Hope this persuades you a little bit.

2 years ago KDawson would've had 4 articles on the front page about this... Now? More AGW-esque science about how they've "proven" that even bugs are irritated by Rush Limbaugh...

And the Obama article? >cricketcricket

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html

Don't worry, Mr. Anonymous, Timothy posted it, and it seems to be getting more traffic.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/02/11/1822225

Here is a link to the technology in action, sharp is already making notebooks with 3D Displays that require NO GLASSES. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-978499.html Sorry but 3D shutter glasses have just become obsolete

http://news.cnet.com/i/tim/20090414/iRobot_Warrior_PackBot_270x203.jpg -- seems pretty close

here's the link to UA Engineering's story w/ youTube video:

http://www.engineering.arizona.edu/news/story.php?id=86

or, cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10450394-1.html

mod this into the ground as flamebait, but why in the hell would one want to read about scientific achievement in an article posted on a cable "news" station's web site (read: all of the cable "news" stations are pure crap), let alone the one that serves as a megaphone for those most hostile to scientific achievement. Let's see, do I want some cable "news" douche to dumb down the info so as to allow it to be presented to me in a more palatable fashion? hmmm, that's a tough one...

What? you say the article linked in TFS wasn't dumbed down? Well, I must inform you that this is /. , and as such I DIDN'T RTFA linked in TFS!

and brute-force computing does not AI make.

You say that as some kind of established fact, in reality, the issue is very much up in the air. Here's, e.g. Larry Page opining that AI is going to be about "lots of computation"

And here is where we part ways. "Incremental improvements" at specific tasks will never lead to AI.

Really? Because, as far as we know, that's how real intelligence developed, through countless incremental changes in the evolution of networks of living cells.

In fact, in a healthy economy, while factory workers sometimes lost their jobs to automation, the factories that made the robots, and associated industries, more than made up for that in employment of their own. That's just change, not loss.

Now who's talking apples and oranges? Yes, in the past, we've been able to replace old jobs with new jobs. That doesn't mean this process will continue into the future. What happens when the factories that make the robots are staffed by robots? Rather than blithely assume as a central tenet of capitalist faith, that "new jobs will come along," let's as a thought experiement, try to imagine a future where any conceivable job, from drivers, to nurses, to ad copywriting, to prostitution, can be done more cheaply and better by a machine. What then? In reality we'll probably never get to that level but even 20-30% long-term unemployability could lead the end of the expectation of work as the inevitable result of diligence and schooling. All of this has been hashed out long ago in more serious discussions than this, and the bottom line is not that I'm right or you're right, it's that we really don't know, we can only guess at this point.

A CPU can do considerably more then one computational action per second, and they have been capable of that since the 80s. You do that by having multiple ALUs and FPUs. For example, the NVIDIA gtx 280 can do 933 GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-9969234-23.html

A Pentium 4 processor is a 32 bit processor, so I am not too sure what the hell you are talking about there. It operates on base 4 billion, give or take a bit.

http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20070322/1157960476967.jpg

I doubt Microsoft will try to shut them down anymore.. seeing as Microsoft bought Sysinternals back in 2006.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-6095376.html

To cut a long story short http://news.cnet.com/Office-2007-fails-OOXML-conformance-test/2100-7344_3-6237855.html, M$ Office fails it's own standards test, so as regards the monopoly office application the standard is obviously not standard to anything, even within it's own purpose designed program suite. I suppose for that you have to buy the next upgrade or even perhaps the one after that etc. etc..

For M$ to adhere to ODF is simply a choice, for others to adhere to OOXML represents high risk of patent infringement, licence fees, of the standard saying one thing whilst their program does another, ensuring all competitors will never end up being totally compatible and remain a bit buggy.

A different opinion: Maybe the combination of Sun and Oracle will be called Snoracle.

I think Oracle is on the way down. In the future, companies will run cheap, redundant hardware with PostgreSQL.

Google is already doing something like that. You can see for yourself: Google uncloaks once-secret server.

A lot of what caused the purchase of expensive Sun servers in the past was ignorance. CEOs could be convinced the spending a lot of money with Sun was the only way to have enterprise operations, and they bought Sun equipment rather than using Linux and PostgreSQL. Now there is less ignorance. Many corporate needs can be served with much less expense.

Nature did a study and found Wikipedia was slightly less reliable than Britannica. The editors of Britannica objected to the methods, and I'm not sure I like them ether, but I think it was an honest attempt. I think all of the articles were science articles and this is from 2005, so it is not exactly what you were asking for (its not 2010).

What happens to open source browsers like FF who can't pay for the patents and licenses?

755 corporations have licensed H.264. AVC/H.264 Licensees It's a damned impressive list. Scrolling through it is like watching a freight train build up speed and momentum.

While Firefox is beginning to look more and more like the heroine tied to the railroad tracks around the next bend.

91% of Mozilla's funding comes from Google. Could open source abandon the Google train? Now would be a really, really good time to put some of that money to good use. Cut a deal.

Because I don't think Rin-Tin-Tin is coming to the rescue.

I've known about this bug for many years - it's one of a few that date back to my college days when I had a scholarly interest in such things. Back then I used to haunt the dark corners of the Internet where these things were good for a laugh. Now they're good for a quarter million dollars because GO's haunt the dark corners now and they pay good money, and only now are ones like this coming out in common knowledge. You may be sure that if you're a high value target you've been exploited this whole time and that's why your competitors mysteriously beat you to market, or how knockoffs appeared more suddenly after your innovation than reverse engineering would allow.

What's absurd is that there are hundreds more just in the core OS. Go to apps and WMP doesn't have a streaming format that doesn't have pwnership, and let's not even talk about IE. Then there's all the forgotten formats and services, each with its vestigal exploits that still work. And then there's Office. Good Lord, as if providing multiple Turing machine capable development environments were not enough, every app includes embeds for hundreds of formats that can hose any machine that opens a document, and for each of those there's a Microsoft-only undocumented interface that's truly trusted to be exploited, because that's how they roll. And one of those apps is an email client - think about that for a bit.

Each fix only adds to the problem. Even if the patch doesn't add new exploits (most do) most people don't patch, and half of the few who do patch slowly to avoid incompatibilities. In the meantime the patch gives clues to the amateurs on which features to exploit. For 90% of systems you only need to pwn it once and leave some obvious malware and the idiot running it will clean it and think it's all good. So the smart black hat builds a database of servers running Windows he can get at from his previously Pwned boxes (yes, some of them are probably inside your firewall and most but not all of them are clients) and crafts a package to pwn the rest of your network and if necessary leave some cleanable traces. The truly nefarious black hats exploit the patching system itself - of course it has exploits and hidden hooks too.

Each rewrite leads to new problems. In 2008 how the hell do you write a server OS that hangs on a bad packet on the file sharing service? That's not what Bill promised us in 2002. In six years they couldn't even get that right? That's your clue that they're not even trying or at least they're not able. At the very least they're struggling just to copy a file as if that were a new requirement.

You would think with the billions they have to throw away on XBox and Pink, from Bing to Zune, Microsoft could afford to hire a few Pakistani code geeks to haunt the dark corners and report what they find written on the wall there. They're getting rid of their profits but they're not doing it well. You would think code security audits would extend to the historical catalog of code, but no... that group has enough to do just vetting this month's patches, let alone the output of the dev teams. I imagine the rest of them are building Bing interfaces into Yahoo's services as if they had a hope in hell of getting us to use Bing. For sure they're not throwing a ton of quality code geeks into saving their butt on WiMo 7. Fixing bugs widely known in the Underground that consumers like you don't know about? That's a 0 priority task.

Windows shops: not only are we laughing at you - we always have and we always will. You poor bastards.

The article mentions that law enforcement considers Cox Communications "uncooperative". That's because Cox Communications' procedures are legally correct.

Cox insists that all requests go through their Records Custodian in Atlanta. Local offices aren't allowed to deal with law enforcement. There's a worksheet to be filled out. "Please complete with all relevant information and fax with court order". Cox flatly refuses to do anything without a court order. They do accept "emergency requests". The "Emergency Request" form requires law enforcement people to sign this:

• "The requester states, as representative of a governmental entity, that this request relates to an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to a person and the information provided shall not be used for any unlawful or harmful purpose. Requesting party represents that he or she has the authority to execute this form and agrees to indemnify Cox Communications, its subsidiaries, employees, and agents harmless for any claim, demand, loss, or injury, including attorneys fees brought against Cox by a third party, including the subscriber, as a result of Cox's compliance with this request."

That makes whomever signs that personally responsible if there's anything illegal about the request.

Then there's billing. Trap and trace, $2500 for 30 days. Wiretap, $3500 for 30 days. Inaccurate requests (for non-Cox phones), $25 each. Payment may be required in advance. Visa, Master Card, and AMEX accepted. Cox reserves the right to withhold delivery until payment.

Cox refused to cooperate with NSA's warrentless wiretapping program.

Cox is obeying the law. Law enforcement hates that when it applies to them.

that's a fairy tale for the moment, just as is to expect Microsoft to take security seriously

Pfft, shows what you know. Microsoft made security its top priority in 2002. I bet you feel really dumb now, huh?

The sad thing is that gamers (i.e. technology enthusiasts) are usually the ones who are hacked by the Chinese.

Not sure about that. Take a look at this and there is this

Hmmm.... this would be related now would it?

Google is finalizing an agreement with the National Security Agency to help the search giant ward off cyberattacks, according to the Washington Post.

This is not really surprising if you are aware what a real coma is. There is a lot of states between fully consciousness and complete unconsciousness. In movies, and in soaps you switch between those states in a surprise wake-up. In reality this is much more complex.

Anyway, better diagnosis is needed to prevent accidents like Brain scan finds man was not in a coma--23 years later and other possible improvements in brain damage treatment.

they do regularly open source their products (though mostly minor ones, as you rightly pointed out)

And if we look at reality:

Conservatively, we've released about 14 million lines of code. Android tops 10 million lines of code, and then you have Chrome (2 million lines of code), GWT (300,000 lines of code), and about a project released every week over the last five years. Then you have a couple hundred Googlers patching on a weekly or monthly basis.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10354530-16.html

It's hard to imagine that doing a quick Google search (or Yahoo or Bing or whatever if you feel that there's a conflict of interest) would have hurt, here.

You are mistaken here, and the outrage about digital media (at least as regards ebooks) is indeed unjustified. I know people who work at Macmillan who have verified that the per-unit manufacturing/shipping costs for a single hardcover are around $2/book. Less for mass markets. (I've seen online figures suggesting it's more like $3, e.g. here, but that's a different company.)

I suppose one could make the argument that ebooks should be discounted the warehousing costs, too, but that's only true if you expect that publishers will release ebook-only in the future. That is not the case now, because people who want to read ebooks in preference to regular books are a very, very small proportion of the market; but ebook sales at the date of release are lost hardcover sales. So long as you want to sell hardcovers, you're in trouble if you're selling an ebook for a greatly reduced price. IF you're willing to wait for ebooks to be released along with mass markets, then you can expect mass market prices; frankly that's the only point at which I'd be willing to take an ebook offering.

Keep in mind the relevant comparison is not with the $10 paperback but with the $30 hardcover. The paperback is a bit of gravy if the hardcover sells well; most fiction does not get a mass market release. And publishing is operating on a razor-thin margin already (maybe 10% on a book that sells pretty well -- and most don't). These aren't greedy fat-cats with swarms of lawyers (with the exception of specialty market segments, like textbooks, test prep, and medical, all of which I have worked in).

The vast majority of the cost difference between a mass market and a hardcover is that with the hardcover, the book's already been promoted, edited, marketed to booksellers (who've agreed to carry it), etc. The mass market release is just trying to squeeze those last drops out of the orange, and hopefully get you to buy the author's next book in hardcover.

Incidentally, most of that marketing budget is not for advertisements to the consumer, but to book-buyers, at book fairs, and such. Trying to market the book -- i.e. put it into the right market segment and get it onto the shelves in bookstores. That's work that has to be done regardless of the venue of sale (but has already been done for mass-market paperbacks). The only way ebooks would change that is if Amazon agreed to carry everything under the sun; and then you'd probably still have to spend more to help customers find out about books they want to read.

green

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I have little detail about iBooks, but I see a comment asking about DRM within the first 31 comments on the review on cnet.com. The reply to that comment leads me to believe that the eBook industry is heading into a big mess of incompatible DRM formats, just what caused the music industry such problems when they unsuccessfully tried to dethrone iTunes.

One of the fallouts of that was that selling DRM-free music started to be viewed by the music industry as a a necessary evil. We can only hope that the book publishing industry will take less time to get to the same (correct) conclusion.

Cardboard with OLED.

Nope. Very misleading headline and cardboard under a projector.

Cardboard with OLED.

It's worse than you think. In some countries they have even more rights and are harder to try in court since it's kinda hard to lock them up in a prison. I know a story of a corporation that willfully infected its customers with malware (which would get a teenager nearly in jail and gives him a criminal record) and got off with paying some pocket change.

drunk drivers are drunk. Address them not alcohol.

Fixed that for ya. You get the idea now?

Talking on cell phones can be just as dangerous. Here's a nice write up on CNET about it.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6090342-7.html

As an FYI, skip the NYTimes version of this story, I have had 4 users walk in today with infected systems. It appears that NYTimes has pulled another screwup in security land http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10351460-83.html

Actually, your car already has a lot of this stuff:

It 'dings' if you don't use your belt. It won't start if you don't have the key. Some GPS can't be interacted with when you're moving.

Microsoft already checks for pirate OS, Google assumes a "Moderate" safe search on images.

A lot of things are there to "protect us from ourselves."

Google is even coming out with an app to keep you from "drunk texting" (Your boss! Your ex! )

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6090342-7.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6090342-7.html

Prince is a total dick, and hired investigators for the sole purpose of sending DMCA notices to people he felt were infringing his copyright.

Hehe. Here it is: http://news.cnet.com/2010-1041_3-6141607.html

And look how right that article was - remember that was about the first Iphone model, which sold very little. Even for Apple's mobile phone share as a whole now, whilst I concede it's not right to say "largely fail" (they're still making money and selling them), he did get it spot on with his main point, that it wouldn't be the success of the Ipod, and I think for the reasons he gave.

But the sad thing is that some people on Slashdot seriously believe that the Iphone is another Ipod. Indeed, I predict I'll get replies to my comment from people arguing blue in the face that the Iphone is market leader, and as successful in the phone market as the Ipod is in the mp3 market, completely oblivious to actual market facts.

Yeah, an exploit for firefox couldn't possibly be made public before a bug is patched patched. Adding to that, if a bug is exploited in Firefox it is far easier for it to do more damage than in IE8 due to lack of sandboxing and protected memory.

This current exploit doesn't even work if people had IE8 with default settings.

Wasting resources trying to attack a ghost like Linux, where there is no one corp they can go after...

But they keep attacking, don't they? TomTom, Novell, Lindows, other attacks from 1998 to 2007.

And, since 2003 MS has considered Linux their number two threat.

Microsoft disagrees with you.