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Observers were a bit flummoxed by the timing of CertCo's suit. It would seem that the company could get substantially more cash out of PayPal once PayPal had substanially more cash -- that is, after the company's IPO. But the suit has definitely put the kibosh on PayPal's stock offering, at least for the moment.

As senior vice president e-commerce at Chase Manhattan Bank, June headed up wholesale e-commerce initiatives for one of Chase's largest business sectors and led investment activities on a number of strategic e-commerce investments. June played an instrumental role in creating Spectrum, a for-profit joint venture between Wells Fargo, First Union and Chase focused on electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP).

PayPal began depositing customer balances into FDIC-insured bank accounts. The company had asked for an opinion from the FDIC on whether it could pass the insurance protection on to its customers. In its advisory letter, the FDIC said the insurance protections--up to $100,000 per customer per bank--would extend to PayPal customers, even when PayPal deposited the funds for them, PayPal said.

Hey the guy's gotta pay his bandwidth bill somehow right? Why should he be forced into forking out his own Rubel's just so you can get free software AND no pop up's?

Here's a hint for you:
Disable Javascript

and/or Use a Popup killer[it's actually download.com]

Don't like the example I provided? Google is your freind Plenty of options there.

And just so i'm not accused of being offtopic (grin), ages back when I first learned about Kazaa/Morpheus, I completely distrusted the validity of the BDE B3D projector software.

It installed itself completely seperate from (and silently) the main program. Yet after removing it (seperately, with it's OWN Uninstaller) Kazaa/Morpheus whined that a "required" component was removed, and it refused to run.

**COUGH** Yea ok.... where's that Uninstaller hm? Time to gut the registry again and seek out rogue DLL's.

Required my butt... and Kazaalite proves it.

Now someone just needs to write a plug-in for it that will automatically pingflood any one client that tries to download 10 files off you at once! =)

(Yes, i'm fully aware that you can configure the max number of DL's, the above is meant to be funny!)

Lower Your Insuance Premiums: Use Linux. The article is here. I haven't seen any follow up news, but this is where product liability has the best potential to hurt MS: where the only way they can affect the true cost of their product is by releasing a product that works.

Why on the internet?

Well,

For one thing, automobiles can participate in a massive data acquisition if their control systems are allowed to communicate. For example, if there are many cars with ABS are having activations at a certain section of road (obtained with a GPS), then the data could be analyzed by a central computer that could send out a "slippery road warning warning" and possibly even dispatch a salt truck. This goes for *all sorts* of stuff from traffic congestion to potholes. They can all be detected with the sensors on most cars these days.

I'm really looking for a standard but I'm afraid that Microsoft is already pushing their goons into it. If Linux doesn't just quickly, then MS will tie their software into another piece of hardware with a "DirectCAR API" or something. This is big.

Imagine that you pull into your garage and the bluetooth link (used to monitor tire pressure) on your car's computer tells your home PC that it is time for an oil change. With an internet connection, your home PC could look up the closest oil change joints and find you an opening (and maybe a coupon). If Linux doesn't step in, then MS will have a piece of these kind of transactions. Not good (but very smart of them).

Scott McNealy showed up to the meeting in a penguin outfit.

Banias, formerly Caesarea Philippi, is the Arabic name for the Hellenistic city of Paneas whose name derives from Pan, the Greek god of herds and shepherds. His cult was observed in a large cave at the foot of Mount Hermon, where a source of the River Jordan emerges.

Pepperdine University has conducted digs in the area that have unearthed parts of a palace from Herod Agrippa II. Modern-day Banias is located in Israel, where the Intel design team for the new chip is based. The company typically code-names its chips after geographical features.

100-500 Mbits/sec can pretty much serve as a wireless bus for most of your components. With that kind of speed, you could physically seperate your (CPU+Memory) (Harddrive) (Monitor)

Not to mention all of the wireless possibilities linking to Home Entertainment system, Car, Access Control Devices, Etc.

Given Intel's goals to make UWB cheap as they're trying to fabricate it on CMOS it would be everywhere where wires used to be.

CNET news has an article on how to remove Brilliant Digital software.. .
Story here.

When all this blew up znet produced some manual removal instructions which are here

This article is basically a fancy way of confirming the tyranny of the majority. Google's PageRank, as good as it is, both a) suffers from and b) perpetuates the tyranny of the majority (aka "the rich get richer", the "power law"). IE, the more links, the higher the pagerank, the more relevance, the more hits, the more links...

Teoma seems to be aiming at this chink in Google's armor.

From Teoma's page,...

Teoma uses Subject-Specific PopularitySM. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site's level of authority.

Using vectoring algorithms to find themed hives of related content, Teoma partitions the power law into manageable chunks. IE, the rich get richer, but at least a dominant site in one field doesn't get artificially inflated relevance when querying an unrelated field. At least in theory. (Kinda like laws are supposed to keep a monopoly from illegally entering other markets, but I digress.)

This is working for Teoma: I (and others) are finding useful stuff on Teoma that Google didn't.

Google is already aware of this particular limitation of PageRank, as can be seen from what they suggest programmers submit to their programming contest...

Entries in the Applications track generally deal with the semantics of the data. Some examples include:

Detecting common templates in pages, and separating out the common structure from the individual content.
Classifying links on a page.
Detecting pages that are near-duplicates of one another.
Clustering pages by topic or type.

Even with all that, I still think that humans are the best filters (and isn't a search engine just a programmable filter?). I suspect the rise of weblogs might have something to do with the usefulness found in tapping into some weblogger's idea of what's useful/cool/interesting.

So perhaps the best way to find good info is a cross between a human and a content-vectoring search algorithm. Maybe that's why Ask Jeeves bought Teoma.

Well since you were feeling deprived by running MS products on a non-MS OS w/o the security flaws, go ahead and get your "fix" here.

I wonder if this is based on the same technique HP used to benchmark
their way into the top 500 using 255 Pentium III 700s running Linux Mandrake
back in October. Back then they said the physical limit for such a cluster was
255 devices due to switching capabilities. Hmm...

how anyone could ever make any real money on these technologies

Well, one way is to distribute a free P2P client that can be used to steal processor cycles and disk storage from unwitting users. Then write it up in your 10K and sell shares of the company.

This is two weeks old. Also, it would be nice if you included a link that actually included some information about the topic at hand, rather than saying "company Y acquired company Z" and linking to the companies' home pages, which have no information whatsoever.

Just a friendly tip from your local ReTaRd.

Since you are positive, that must mean you have proof. Please provide that proof.

On 4of12's behalf: here ya go, dingleberry.

Check this news.com article on the cross examination out.

I find it hard to accept that he "believes what he is saying", especially since he never bothered to look at what the states were proposing in the first place.

The fact that he sold out for a "well, we'll talk about it" is funny as hell, though.

That was PDQ - I just read the Reuters account here before I saw your post.

According to this article on cnet/news.com, Sanders did ask for a favour from MS in return for his testimony. He wants MS to support the Hammer architecture ahead of a "competing architecture" from Intel. Sanders also admits in the article that he did not read the State's proposed settlement, but that good old Bill Gates told him it was bad.

Microsoft's first witness against antitrust sanctions sought by nine states admitted in court on Tuesday that he asked for a favor when Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called seeking his testimony.

Jerry Sanders, chief executive of computer chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, also conceded he had not read the states' proposed sanctions, but that Gates had told him they were "crazy" and would fragment the Windows operating system.

AMD and KFC, both served REAL hot. So hot that when you touch either you better be finger-lickin' real good ;-)

But seriously his argument is flawed, he states,

In his testimony, Sanders argued that Microsoft's dominance in PC operating systems fosters diversity rather than limiting consumer choice. He compared the situation to "proprietary operating systems that run only on specific hardware designed and manufactured by the same vendor," such as Apple Computer's Mac OS or Sun Microsystems' Solaris. "Microsoft's Windows operating systems run on computers manufactured by thousands of different companies," he stated.

It's not fair to hold the actions of one dumbass manager (even if he's the CEO) against everyone in AMD, so go out everybody and buy AMD. After all it's not fair to say every American is a whore just because the President did some stuff with an intern a few years ago. The board will vote him off if enough shareholders/Wall Street suits want it, CEO is a revolving-door job that any MBA-type can do.

Now that I drove that home, on with my story:

Macromedia did try to open up the Flash 4 format so that other people could create software compatible with it. And in fact, LiveMotion was Adobe's entry into that market.

This was Flash 4, though. They're now essentially up to Flash MX (read: 6), and the spec has grown significantly since then. The first big change was scripting from 4 => 5, and while I have no idea what they added from 5 => MX, but I'm sure it's sizeable. (Memo to myself: look into it, consider upgrading just because it might be fun to try some animation.)

Remember, once again, that Macromedia makes the player plug-in, and if you base a site on Flash, you're still going to be at their mercy no matter whose development tools you use. And if you use someone else's tools, they may not keep up with Macromedia's changes.

Now, it's doubtful that they'll do anything to break an animation when viewed through an older plug-in or browser, but there may be side-effects, and they will affect both usability and user perceptions of your site.

Yes, I'll admit, this argument smacks of FUD, but sometimes the unthinkable happens.

Barring my qualms against it, I'll side with everyone else who answered so far and recommend not using Flash to build a website because it can prevent normal navigation, SWFs can take a long time to play over slow connections (I'm still stuck on a 56K dialup--I know from whence I speak), and as of Flash 5, Macromedia's authoring environment had some seriously "avant-garde" (read: bad) user interface design philosophies. There are those who believe [really C|net news] the Flash-based web is not necessarily a good idea.

The load speeds and display times could be the biggest issue, since web surfers have notoriously short attention spans.

But that's just my opinion, as always. The salt shaker is to the left; take as many grains as you need.

I try not to give Yahoo any more hits after they messed up their privacy poolicy, so here's the same exact story on CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882252.html.

• Lay Language Summary of a paper presented by Stuart Parkin at the 1999 APS March Meeting
• Magnetic RAM cures your computer of short-term memory loss by Richard Butner
• IBM, Infineon looking to shake up memory market
• Instant Access Memory by David Voss
• How Magnetic RAM Will Work by Kevin Bonsor
• The Possibility of Commercial MRAM by John Dvorak
• Nanomagnetics (a chapter of Nanostructure Science and Technology: A Worldwide Study)
• Magnetic Random-Access Memory Promises PC Changes
• IBM says breakthrough will enable commercial MRAMs

Interesting highlights:

The trasentric paper quoted Electronic Buyer's News:

"Honeywell Inc. and Motorola Inc. are hoping to spin volume quantities of MRAM through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract that is also shared by IBM. DRAM powerhouses Micron, NEC, and Samsung are said to be developing the technology, while Hewlett-Packard has a design team looking into the viability of chip-level magnetic storage."

1. Much of this research is funded by a DARPA contract which means it is the money of US Taxpayers at work.
2. Samsung is part of the same contract.

The Wired article is fairly lengthy and also details the biography of Stuart Parkin. Parkin is the IBM fellow that has been driving most of the MRAM research.

Ciao.

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-242628.html

A driver's license wasn't always required. The first states to require a driver's license were Massachusetts and Missouri in 1903. However, it wasn't until the 1950s that all states required road test and/or examination in order to get a license (reference). Somehow the world managed to survive those 40 odd years of unlicensed drivers.

Most people don't have any inkling as to how how much the world has changed in the last 50 years (or 100 years for those of you over 50). Politicians today can get elected on platforms that would have had them run out of town on a rail only 30 years ago.

In the future people watching old movies won't understand the terror implicit in the phrase "ver are your paperz!". They won't recognize that phrase as being fundamentally un-American.

Revisionist history will make sure they aren't even taught that things were ever any different. Revisionist history may not even include a mention of Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin.

If some people get their way you won't even be able to teach yourself history. All that you will know are the "facts" The State has approved for your consumption.

The sad thing is that already anyone who points these things out is derided as a nut.

I have no music in my collection from the net. NONE. If I want a CD, I will buy it. But only ONCE and only if I can copy it for my own use.

I have ALL of my music LAME MP3 encoded and I use my SliMP3 to serve that music from Linux to a primarily Linn Audio system. The versatility that comes from this (playlists, constant music, randomization, etc) is *AMAZING*. I will never go back to shuffling pain the arse CDs.

When I want to take a CD in the car, I do not take an original, I take a copy. The originals are too fragile and too expensive to replace for the on-going abuse that results.

They just don't get it.

One of the major copy protection companies - SunnComm - just announced a plan where registered owners of a protected CD can Email tracks to friends in Windows Media format. They call it "PromoPlay": news.com.com

I have *zero* interest in sharing my CDs with other people. So this does nothing for me and I will not buy their CDs.

This is really bad news for SGI. I'd heard that DreamWorks was disatisfied with SGI, but they must be totally disillusioned to abandon SGI's famous massively parallel systems in favor of a Linux cluster! Makes you wonder who will buy the Itanium supercomputers SGI is betting its future on.

Although my CD purchases have increased significantly since napster was started, I didn't have a CD player before it was founded. Just so you know music retailers in college towns experienced a quite significant decline in sales. Except college students most people didn't have a connection that would allow them to replace their CD connection with MP3s. The decline was especially large in singles, which makes sense, people generally started with hits of bands that they didn't like the whole CD well enough to pay $16. Certainly there are many variables that affect this includign the growth of Wal-mart and Costco, and the rise of Amazon, and E-bay etc. as a place to purchase music which was also led by connected people. So while it doesn't prove much it was an interesting study. I also own nearly all the mp3s I have on CDs. Both because I got tired of the crappy rips and encodes, and out of an obligation to do the right thing.

Windows Longhorn will expose new APIs for accelerated 2D drawing. These new APIs will not use existing GDI acceleration but will instead use the Microsoft Direct3D® DDI. New applications, therefore, will make use of the 3D pipeline of the graphics adapter for their 2D / productivity graphics requirements.

Microsoft Chrome, anyone?

I honestly believe that it was the fact of few games, horrid controller, and did I say horrid controller?

First of all, when the Playstation 2 came out, it had just as many games as the XBox had. And don't give me any "backward-compatibility" nonsense, I have a Playstation 2, and I find it completely impossible to play the old PSX games now that I've tasted better. Secondly, the argument that the Xbox controller is horrid is just ridiculous. It is horrid for small children, women, and idiots. Have you ever played video games for several hours? That is what the Xbox contoller is designed for: they expect you to play for several hours... USING YOUR HANDS! After 10 hours of GTA3 my hands were sore beyond comparison, and I was forced to stop because I could no longer reach the buttons on the cramped PS2 controller, but the XBox controller had no such issues, even after 43 consecutive hours of Halo.

It is an excellent controller.

And don't forget: people ruled out the PS2 as dead when it was fighting the Dreamcast. That didn't happen. Now people are saying that the XBox is dead when it is fighting the PS2. Neither one is dead. The market should thrive on competition. Or is that against the rules when Microsoft is on a level playing field and just releases a product that is technologically better?

That said, I'm waiting for the Playstation 3. :)

I think that codifying the concept of "Right of First Sale" into law would be a good start. Note that the Authors Guild is raising a stink over Amazon's sale of used books. However, they are legally standing on quicksand because US law states that once you buy a book you are free to do whatever you want with it. That's the law, folks! Stomp your feet and whine all you want, you can't do anything about it.

A universal Right of First Sale would invalidate EULAs. In the state of California, you are now free to sell software that came bundled with your PC thanks to a sensible appelate judge who applied the Right of First Sale to software. The RIAA and MPAA would probably love to stop you from selling your used CDs and used DVDs, but there again is that pesky Right of First Sale. It is (still last I checked) legal to buy and sell used DVDs and CDs.

Universalizing Right of First Sale would also put a monkey wrench into attempts to criminalize the use of DeCSS to play DVDs on Linux. Hey, you bought that DVD...you have a right to play it on any OS you choose.

Same with region coding. You bought a DVD from a European or Japanese store over the Internet? Bought it fair and square? You didn't steal it? Good. You have the right to do with it what you will. Including hacking your DVD player to accommodate it.

I have no illusions that this will ever happen. But this is one way of preserving the rights we already have. The doctrine is already on the books. Let's encourage its application to new technology.

According to this NEWS.COM article, Gateway is going to be voicing its opposition to the CBDTPA. The best part is that they're going to begin airing a national TV spot on the topic of downloading and burning music. Doesn't look like it's going to directly reference the bill, but people will doubtless see it, and it will prime them for exposure to information about what's going on. I'd recommend that everyone here watch for the ad and see if it can be used as a reference when writing letters to newspapers or your Congressional reps.

Definitely a good thing here.

Click me for XBox Bad News

ZDNet has a article about Interactive Intelligence and Sprint making a deal allowing Interactive to use Sprints' lines for it's new Interactive Voice Response software, which replaces telephone operators with a computer to make (or take) phone calls to people -- one application of the software is telemarketing.

C|Net may have removed Kazaa downloads, but their subsidiary ZDNet still has it available.

They include a link to the C|Net story which discusses the B3D spyware, so this is not just an oversight.

I was all ready to applaud C|Net's decision to pull Kazaa, but this makes me wonder.

I believe you are wrong on your analysis. IANAL. There was a ruling within the last couple of years saying that the employer is responsible for all things on the network.

For example, if an employee were to forward around a racist joke. [Let's just say for this scenario it's about Green People]. A employee that is offended by the joke doesn't sue the people that is forwarding it, but rather the employer for creating a "unsafe" [I know that's not the right term..but there's another legal term] condition in the workplace. [Check Here for Other Related Situations]

Scenario 2: If an employee installs a piece of software that the employer doesn't own the license to, the person that is responsible is the employer even if he is not aware of it. [Read More Here]

Scenario 3: If a hacker sets up a warez site on one of your server, you are not technically liable, but the FBI can come in with an warrant and confiscate the server without giving you an opportunity backup all the data that you need from that server. [Operation Bandwidth]

Basically my point is this, the employer is ultimately responsible for all employees and equipment onsite. 1) If they are taking IP claims to all the work that you do on the office computers, they should also be liable for all the bad things that you do. 2) Ultimately, the employer owns all the equipment and must be actively enforcing the rules.

I had not read the bit on CNet about the distributed computing system that was being included with KaZaA until today. I find this interesting since the reason I switched from KaZaA to BearShare several weeks ago was because my whole computer became sluggish the moment I started KaZaA up, and 1ghz Thuderbirds aren't supposed to be sluggish. I don't know if this is what caused it, but I'm glad I stopped using it when I did nevertheless.

Dish: Maybe. It's at least the DVB standard.

Off topic, but this doubtful: they'll be one in the same in a few years:

• Echostar Buys DirecTV
• Hughes Buys Satellite Firm...
• Boeing Buys Hughes' Satellite Sector (i.e., Hughes is focusing on the entertainment industry)

Isn't this the same thing as Mira which Bill Gates debuted at CES in January?

Windows XP SP1 will include some changes that will allow component removal for things such as Windows Messenger, IE, and Windows Media Player. Now, why someone would want to remove IE and Windows Media Player is beyond me. Also, don't forget all those programs that rely on the Web control and need IE to function.

when did News.com become News.com.com

If you go to www.com.com you'll see the cnet networks corporate homepage. All of their sites are within the .com.com domain so they can share cookies (ie download.com.com, and so on). Or so I've been told (and that explanation does seem to make sense..).

IBM is introducing low-end servers based on the Power4. They compete head-on with the V880 from Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW). The V880 is the only profit generator for SUNW right now; the high-end SunFire 15K is almost unsellable. The new IBM servers will dent the sales of the V880 and bring its days as a profit stream for SUNW to an end.

With the new p670, IBM now has the entire range of servers from the low-end to the high-end covered by Power4-based systems. Each system outperforms the equivalent (in terms of the number of processors) system from SUNW. Worse, at the end of May, the Oracle DBMS will run on the Power4. Finally, the TPC-C numbers will be out. SUNW's systems will be crushed.

Just read the performance numbers at SPEC and TPC .

If you look at the related articles at CNET, you will notice something that is terribly wrong with SUNW. The spokesman for SUNW is Shahin Khan. The spokesman for IBM is Ravi Arimilli. Shahin Khan is a marketing drone. Ravi Arimilli is an IBM Fellow, firmly grounded in engineering. Khan is telling Arimilli why SUNW's systems are technically superior! (Read "IBM, Sun to release dueling servers".)

Finally, on the day that IBM unveils its arsenal of Power4-based servers, SUNW rushes to cut prices. (Read "Prices Lowered on Popular Sun Fire Server Family".) SUNW appears to be running scared. You should dump SUNW stock because SUNW will not achieve profitability by 2002 June. How do you achieve profitability by slashing prices and, hence, margins?

Well, that would have been a good title, except that it's not true. If you actually read the article (link kindly provided by this comment), you'll see that this announcement is for the last model in Compaq's line of Alpha processors.

btw, when did News.com become News.com.com ?? What is this, 1999 or something? I wonder how much money they blew on purchasing Com.com. That was a great investment..

btw, when did News.com become News.com.com ?? What is this, 1999 or something? I wonder how much money they blew on purchasing Com.com. That was a great investment..

Here it is

Since it wasn't in the Slashdot post...here it is!

Unix servers breaking out all over

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 8, 2002, 12:50 PM PT

The Unix server floodgates are opening this week, with Compaq Computer and SGI showing off new systems at the same time that powerhouses IBM and Sun Microsystems release new machines.
Compaq has begun shipping test versions of a new line of AlphaServer Unix servers using the EV7 "Marvel" version of the company's Alpha processor, the Houston-based company said Monday. The system uses direct connections between processors, forgoing the usual high-speed switch that typically connects processors in high-end systems, Compaq said.

Also moving ahead is SGI, which thus far hasn't been able to escape the graphics and technical-computing niche and break into the broader business market. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced a Unix machine tuned to broadcast markets and began showing its next-generation "Fuel" workstation. The system is based on the top-end 3000 family of Onyx workstations and Origin servers, which have high-speed connections linking processors, memory and video.

But Compaq and SGI haven't achieved the market success of competing Unix servers from IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard. Those larger companies are moving aggressively as well, trying to eke sales out of a Unix market that shrank 18.7 percent from $25.3 billion in 2001 to $20.6 billion in 2000.

As expected, IBM released on Monday its p670, a 16-processor machine that's essentially a smaller version of Big Blue's top-end 32-processor p690 "Regatta" server introduced in late 2001.

The p670 has a starting price of $178,000 with four processors, $317,000 with eight, and $536,000 with 16, IBM said. The system can be divided into as many as 16 "partitions"--essentially mini-servers within the overall system--but IBM hasn't yet released software that will allow the sizes of those partitions to be changed without rebooting.

Big Blue's newest machine will compete chiefly against the Unix servers from HP, long king of the midrange market, and from Sun, which will release its own midrange offering, the "Starkitty," on Tuesday. The Starkitty is a lesser version of Sun's 72-processor Sun Fire 15K "Starcat" system.

HP, whose midrange 16-processor rp8400 also has advanced features culled from the company's top-end Superdome model, said Monday that it's the "preferred" provider of servers for some Oracle software used by HP customers to handle interactions with their own customers.

In regard to Compaq's chip and server designs, the company decided to cancel the highly regarded Alpha chip and adopt Intel's Itanium family instead, a move that's not complicated too much by the HP-Compaq merger because HP plans a similar move later with its own PA-RISC chip. HP spawned the idea behind the Itanium family and is working gradually to move from its PA-RISC processors to the Itanium family. Compaq's EV7 will be the last major version of the Alpha.

Compaq's design expertise is expected to live on, though, whether as part of HP or not. The company's designers have built features into the EV7 AlphaServers that can let the systems diagnose and repair some problems, correct data transfer problems automatically, and be easily expanded.

The new EV7 systems are in testing at health care computing company Cerner, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the French Atomic Commission's Military Applications Department.

SGI also announced at the National Association of Broadcasters conference a new video-on-demand server, a machine that can send out 600 video streams simultaneously. The system is based on the Origin 300 server and has two or four processors, as much as 4GB of memory, and a TP900 storage system. It can be used to send video on networks using Ethernet, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), SGI said.

Sun, however, is making moves of its own in the market. It teamed up with Sony, which will build video-on-demand servers incorporating Sun computers, the companies said Monday.

Here's a link to the actual story. It'd be nice if the /. editors could include it.

How about a fricking link?

It's not just illegal. It's stupid. It's well known that this is not a responsible approach. There's no way to prevent such a program from causing network congestion and affecting computers that it isn't supposed to.
It's a bad idea that sounds like an attractive concept. But good intent only matters so much with self-replicating programs. They can have unexpected results. Xerox PARC experimented with "good worms" in the early eighties. They wrote worms to do things like clear printer queues and install software packages. Then they wrote a worm with a bug in it, and discovered that even worms you write yourself can create a path of destruction across your network.
There are other reasons why it's a bad idea. A "good worm" can be modified into an evil worm very easily. Also, you don't want to send mixed messages to an easily confused public, and make people think they can sometimes "trust" a worm. At least one malicious Outlook worm has been seen in the wild that pretends it's antivirus software from Symantec.