Microsoft refused and was fined a lot of money. Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story.
End of the story ? Hm, they already sent thousands pages of useless documentation back in 2005, which was rejected by EU after analyzed by a group of experts. I have this strange feeling that those 8,5k pages will not correspond to what EU is looking for...
but it never steps in when France/Germany/Italy all promote their national tel-com/air/etc... companies and make sure that they're not bought
If you check your facts more closely, you'll see that even though those governments somehow attempted to keep their big companies, it was more about political gesticulation than effective protection (Mittal/Arcelor saga was very pathetic in this regard).
Even if it works the way you think, this is *not* about protecting a monopoly, it's about keeping control of big companies, two very distinct subjects.
My biggest question is why have this in concrete? Other than the manufacturer sells concrete.
This can be mixed in concrete, but is also available as paint, hence it can fit on any surface (I did not ready something to the contrary in TFA).
We have a practical, cheap, efficient and tested solution handy. Having all those characteristics together is extremely rare in this field. That's a very bright research I'm hoping to see in application very soon; those guys deserve a huge success, bravo!
30% increase in price may not convince those that don't consider the environment that important
30% more for the *painting*; when you're dealing with city buildings, this part is next to negligible compared to the rest. If that product is as efficient as TFA says, I don't see it as a problem at all, and personally would like to see it either made non-optional, or tax assisted. The fact it also helps to keep surfaces clean would by itself be enough to motivate buyers.
Mainly you do not want to allow the buying of votes
Yes, that's an issue. Maybe that's the price I would accept to pay to get a more secured voting system.
Even if you are given a encrypted key that only you know there is no reason that you should expect that what the computer tells you is what it counts in the tally
I'm not sure to agree. If you have a central computer that hold everyone's vote, and if you can ask this same computer via Internet about you own vote, I would expect it to count properly. Doing otherwise would mean that someone with access to that computer would have compromized its software. I've the feeling that this is easier to prevent than securing the whole voting chain. We could allow every party to send his own technical experts with full access to that machine (source code and data), and make sure everything works as expected. Computing vote counts is not rocket science, the counting software should be easily and entirely verifiable.
I did not think of that because I've never seen a US voting card; you have a point here. The kind of vote we are doing in my country is basically choosing between a few sheet of papers. Not much room for mistakes, machines would be useless here.
I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work
Any electronic system, open or not, has a major problem: there is a blackbox somewhere that does the math and you can't really control it entirely from a to z. Having the source code is fine, but what makes you sure that the bytecode in operation correspond to the open source version ? Who compiled it and installed it ?
Papertrail is fine, but if you have to recount votes from paper, I don't see the benefit of that electronic vote (every losing part will likely ask for a manual recount). Plus, you should be able to check this papertrail right after the vote, hence creating a paralell paper-based voting system.
The major flaw is that this process integrate steps that require expertize. Paper require no expertize: everyone can understand and follow the full voting operation, from the beginning to the final result, as long as you keep an eye on the ballots.
Frankly, electronic voting machines are both useless and dangerous at this point.
Sure, I know that "close" colours can be referred from a single word (I don't know how many words we have for red variants we have in french, but that is likely at least a few dozen). You mention "blue" and "green": there must be a way to find them "close enough" to fit in the same word, but that's definitely a huge stretch from my own culture and language. Just by curiosity, which language is this ?
All very good points that make me think we are far away to see anything significantly useful in this field;) I did not know that some language would use a unique word for distinct colours. Linguist job must be fascinating.
We could also add to this that accurate language recognition would require to deal with "context" to smooth ambiguities, which is where a human brain is performant (though this is not something we do easily) and a software + computer (of those days at least) very poor.
I really don't see any impact anytime soon, really, but I'm looking forward to be proven wrong.
This kind of bandwith is useless for most people at this time, and probably for years; I would rather spend my tax money spent in expanding DSL infrastructure everywhere, which is probably not very expensive now.
The problem is not with the CSS standard, the problem is with implementations of that standard
Sorry, the problem is _also_ in CSS itself. Even if I focus on browser lamba (say, firefox), it's still a hell of complexity to get something close to what I want. Ok, I'm not expert enough, fine, I buy that. But so are most web developpers on this planet! Do we need a standard for gurus, or do we need something that makes the crowd's life easier ? With CSS, we have something close to the GURU side, and that's a bad thing.
Having worked with a few very absurdly complex standards (telephony field have lots of them), I find that CSS is one of the bigest fiasco, even though it started with a huge need and a nice idea. Those guys should spend more time on coding rather than filling documents that nobody can implement the same way. Too much + too abstract + too vague + too deep => bad specs => broken implementation => problem remains. Go back to the begining...
Add to that the mirriad of variations you can get with the vendors/platform/version combination, you get the nighmare we are in. That sucks hard.
Firefox does better, and unlike Microsoft, they're actually trying
Trying. You named it. They're _still_ trying after years of huge efforts from bright people! Man, this has to tell us that this standard was mistargeted and badly designed in the first place, no ?
There is less alternative at this point, we have to live with more years of insane coding to get something that work well enough on most platforms.
So far, antivirus business is a windows centric / closed source business. They rely on something that makes creating an antivirus for windows a rather expensive and complex task: amongst many other complex things, you need to build a filter driver that intercept filesystem accesses to files. The problem is not about rocket science (ok, that's not trivial either), but lies in the largely undocumented and secret field. No doc, no sample, nothing to work with except some overpriced toolkits. Strategic area here?
So far, only closed-source commercial products achieve that. This is the only piece that lacks to clamwin,for example, to compete efficiently with others. If someone manage to go that far, there will be much less space for those fat and horribly bloated and intrusive commercial AV products. As someone who once tried to do that, I doubt it gonna happen soon. There are too many little secrets around this technology and unless you pay the big buck and sign a handful of NDAs, you can hardly be one of those guys.
Granted, AV products does much more that filesystem filtering, but I'm probably not alone to only need that feature from them. I would actually love to get rid of the rest most of the time !
If someone can prove wrong on that, I'll be extremely happy !
I don't think those guys are going to be in such a favorable position on other platform though. I never tried that yet on OSX, but filesystem interceptions/monitoring is something that can be done rather simply on most *nix OSes. If we ever see days when OSX *need* an AV shield, I think we will have open sourced solutions for that very shortly.
I agree with most of what he said, except I don't think its limited to open source projects. I have seen that on purely commercial context as well. The problem is that you *need* some kind of "geek toys" occasionnally, because they sometimes give birth to a very valuable technology (I've seen that many times). That's a complex task to find the fair balance between what is reasonable/valuable and what is not in term of focus diversion, and that's a hell of a management task to deal with people who can't see that balance (either way).
I'm with you in saying that freedom of speech is sacred, but I fail to see why you (and many others) are saying that "people died for it". I just don't see what it brings to the point. I even find it counter productive in the sense that saying that gives some credit to those islamists who just died while expressing their anger against danish: people also died there, and that does not give their cause any legitimity to me. People are dying for all sort of stupid reasons.
Applying such boolean logic is not going to help much. Some people believe in human rights, which they consider universally valid for any human beeing, no matter where they live. This is what makes yahoo! behavior questionable at best if you are on the side of those human right supporters.
Most machines I had to deal with came preinstalled with as single user having administrator privileges. I know that dealing with a separated administrator account is not trivial, mostly because applications don't always support it nicely, but still: why don't we find promeminent alert messages & documentation about the problem that running as admin raises ?
unlike Perl, it's very easy to do complicated things in simple, legible code.
Not willing to start some useless python vs perl comparizon, your assertion is wrong: in perl, it is also easy to do complicated things in simple legible code. As someone who write and read perl code on a daily basis for about 5 years, I have the feeling that you should have written: "with perl, it is very easy to do complex things in obfuscated write-only code".
What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
My feeling is that you should not know who this user is in the first place.
Why not setting up something that expose stories anonymously and with some randomness in their order to you guys (that would require to group and hold stories for a short while); It would give everyone a fair chance to be selected for a single story that has many submissions.
I really don't think you should bother and know about who send what.
strings "The Microsoft Sound.wav" | tail -n12 Brian Eno ICOP 1995 Microsoft Corporation INAM The Microsoft Sound IPRD Microsoft Windows 95 ISRCB Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399
It's not like they're starting to hire professional musicians ! Brian Eno composed this sound for windows 1995.
I suspect that for 99% of non-geek users, the ability to play the Sony CD was much more important than removing "some rootkit,
I don't think you need to look at the story this way. You're right, the vaste majority don't have a clue about rootkits, cloacking and such obviously. But what Schneier wrote is that people pay a high price to get "protected" from those "security companies", and they deserve a much better service! Security companies must have known about sony rookit potential risks. Especially if, like those bastards in "First 4 Internet" tells us, they have been on the loop from the begining ! By not evaluating the security breach of this copy protection, and not acting properly by not advertizing the risk and not removing the software, they prove they're either extremely incompetent, or totally biased, or both.
However, it is wrong to suggest that this housing was built to segregate immigrants I don't think I suggested something like that. I totally agree with you, those housing were built for anyone having low resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft refused and was fined a lot of money. Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story.
End of the story ? Hm, they already sent thousands pages of useless documentation back in 2005, which was rejected by EU after analyzed by a group of experts. I have this strange feeling that those 8,5k pages will not correspond to what EU is looking for...
but it never steps in when France/Germany/Italy all promote their national tel-com/air/etc... companies and make sure that they're not bought
If you check your facts more closely, you'll see that even though those governments somehow attempted to keep their big companies, it was more about political gesticulation than effective protection (Mittal/Arcelor saga was very pathetic in this regard).
Even if it works the way you think, this is *not* about protecting a monopoly, it's about keeping control of big companies, two very distinct subjects.
My biggest question is why have this in concrete? Other than the manufacturer sells concrete.
This can be mixed in concrete, but is also available as paint, hence it can fit on any surface (I did not ready something to the contrary in TFA).
We have a practical, cheap, efficient and tested solution handy. Having all those characteristics together is extremely rare in this field. That's a very bright research I'm hoping to see in application very soon; those guys deserve a huge success, bravo!
30% increase in price may not convince those that don't consider the environment that important
30% more for the *painting*; when you're dealing with city buildings, this part is next to negligible compared to the rest. If that product is as efficient as TFA says, I don't see it as a problem at all, and personally would like to see it either made non-optional, or tax assisted. The fact it also helps to keep surfaces clean would by itself be enough to motivate buyers.
Mainly you do not want to allow the buying of votes
Yes, that's an issue. Maybe that's the price I would accept to pay to get a more secured voting system.
Even if you are given a encrypted key that only you know there is no reason that you should expect that what the computer tells you is what it counts in the tally
I'm not sure to agree. If you have a central computer that hold everyone's vote, and if you can ask this same computer via Internet about you own vote, I would expect it to count properly. Doing otherwise would mean that someone with access to that computer would have compromized its software. I've the feeling that this is easier to prevent than securing the whole voting chain. We could allow every party to send his own technical experts with full access to that machine (source code and data), and make sure everything works as expected. Computing vote counts is not rocket science, the counting software should be easily and entirely verifiable.
if the result is challenged, we have the old-fashioned system to do a recount
I tend to believe that the losing camp would systematically challenge the results. In this case, the benefit of evoting would be simply nul.
I did not think of that because I've never seen a US voting card; you have a point here. The kind of vote we are doing in my country is basically choosing between a few sheet of papers. Not much room for mistakes, machines would be useless here.
I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work
Any electronic system, open or not, has a major problem: there is a blackbox somewhere that does the math and you can't really control it entirely from a to z. Having the source code is fine, but what makes you sure that the bytecode in operation correspond to the open source version ? Who compiled it and installed it ?
Papertrail is fine, but if you have to recount votes from paper, I don't see the benefit of that electronic vote (every losing part will likely ask for a manual recount). Plus, you should be able to check this papertrail right after the vote, hence creating a paralell paper-based voting system.
The major flaw is that this process integrate steps that require expertize. Paper require no expertize: everyone can understand and follow the full voting operation, from the beginning to the final result, as long as you keep an eye on the ballots.
Frankly, electronic voting machines are both useless and dangerous at this point.
Sure, I know that "close" colours can be referred from a single word (I don't know how many words we have for red variants we have in french, but that is likely at least a few dozen). You mention "blue" and "green": there must be a way to find them "close enough" to fit in the same word, but that's definitely a huge stretch from my own culture and language. Just by curiosity, which language is this ?
All very good points that make me think we are far away to see anything significantly useful in this field ;) I did not know that some language would use a unique word for distinct colours. Linguist job must be fascinating.
We could also add to this that accurate language recognition would require to deal with "context" to smooth ambiguities, which is where a human brain is performant (though this is not something we do easily) and a software + computer (of those days at least) very poor.
I really don't see any impact anytime soon, really, but I'm looking forward to be proven wrong.
This kind of bandwith is useless for most people at this time, and probably for years; I would rather spend my tax money spent in expanding DSL infrastructure everywhere, which is probably not very expensive now.
The problem is not with the CSS standard, the problem is with implementations of that standard
Sorry, the problem is _also_ in CSS itself. Even if I focus on browser lamba (say, firefox), it's still a hell of complexity to get something close to what I want. Ok, I'm not expert enough, fine, I buy that. But so are most web developpers on this planet! Do we need a standard for gurus, or do we need something that makes the crowd's life easier ? With CSS, we have something close to the GURU side, and that's a bad thing.
Having worked with a few very absurdly complex standards (telephony field have lots of them), I find that CSS is one of the bigest fiasco, even though it started with a huge need and a nice idea. Those guys should spend more time on coding rather than filling documents that nobody can implement the same way. Too much + too abstract + too vague + too deep => bad specs => broken implementation => problem remains. Go back to the begining...
Add to that the mirriad of variations you can get with the vendors/platform/version combination, you get the nighmare we are in. That sucks hard.
Firefox does better, and unlike Microsoft, they're actually trying
Trying. You named it. They're _still_ trying after years of huge efforts from bright people! Man, this has to tell us that this standard was mistargeted and badly designed in the first place, no ?
There is less alternative at this point, we have to live with more years of insane coding to get something that work well enough on most platforms.
So far, antivirus business is a windows centric / closed source business. They rely on something that makes creating an antivirus for windows a rather expensive and complex task: amongst many other complex things, you need to build a filter driver that intercept filesystem accesses to files. The problem is not about rocket science (ok, that's not trivial either), but lies in the largely undocumented and secret field. No doc, no sample, nothing to work with except some overpriced toolkits. Strategic area here?
So far, only closed-source commercial products achieve that. This is the only piece that lacks to clamwin,for example, to compete efficiently with others. If someone manage to go that far, there will be much less space for those fat and horribly bloated and intrusive commercial AV products. As someone who once tried to do that, I doubt it gonna happen soon. There are too many little secrets around this technology and unless you pay the big buck and sign a handful of NDAs, you can hardly be one of those guys.
Granted, AV products does much more that filesystem filtering, but I'm probably not alone to only need that feature from them. I would actually love to get rid of the rest most of the time !
If someone can prove wrong on that, I'll be extremely happy !
I don't think those guys are going to be in such a favorable position on other platform though. I never tried that yet on OSX, but filesystem interceptions/monitoring is something that can be done rather simply on most *nix OSes. If we ever see days when OSX *need* an AV shield, I think we will have open sourced solutions for that very shortly.
Bush claims democracy in Irak soon.
We're sorry... this story is not currently available
We don't want customers to be forced into buying something that isn't going to meet all their needs
Great. So, you are going to let me buy a laptop not preinstalled with windows ?
I agree with most of what he said, except I don't think its limited to open source projects. I have seen that on purely commercial context as well. The problem is that you *need* some kind of "geek toys" occasionnally, because they sometimes give birth to a very valuable technology (I've seen that many times). That's a complex task to find the fair balance between what is reasonable/valuable and what is not in term of focus diversion, and that's a hell of a management task to deal with people who can't see that balance (either way).
I'm with you in saying that freedom of speech is sacred, but I fail to see why you (and many others) are saying that "people died for it". I just don't see what it brings to the point. I even find it counter productive in the sense that saying that gives some credit to those islamists who just died while expressing their anger against danish: people also died there, and that does not give their cause any legitimity to me. People are dying for all sort of stupid reasons.
Applying such boolean logic is not going to help much. Some people believe in human rights, which they consider universally valid for any human beeing, no matter where they live. This is what makes yahoo! behavior questionable at best if you are on the side of those human right supporters.
Most machines I had to deal with came preinstalled with as single user having administrator privileges. I know that dealing with a separated administrator account is not trivial, mostly because applications don't always support it nicely, but still: why don't we find promeminent alert messages & documentation about the problem that running as admin raises ?
unlike Perl, it's very easy to do complicated things in simple, legible code.
Not willing to start some useless python vs perl comparizon, your assertion is wrong: in perl, it is also easy to do complicated things in simple legible code. As someone who write and read perl code on a daily basis for about 5 years, I have the feeling that you should have written: "with perl, it is very easy to do complex things in obfuscated write-only code".
I really don't mind to buy unformatted USB drives, just the way I used to buy unformatted floppy disks in the past.
What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?
My feeling is that you should not know who this user is in the first place.
Why not setting up something that expose stories anonymously and with some randomness in their order to you guys (that would require to group and hold stories for a short while); It would give everyone a fair chance to be selected for a single story that has many submissions.
I really don't think you should bother and know about who send what.
(...) microsoft is starting to learn (...)
strings "The Microsoft Sound.wav" | tail -n12
Brian Eno
ICOP
1995 Microsoft Corporation
INAM
The Microsoft Sound
IPRD
Microsoft Windows 95
ISRCB
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
It's not like they're starting to hire professional musicians ! Brian Eno composed this sound for windows 1995.
I suspect that for 99% of non-geek users, the ability to play the Sony CD was much more important than removing "some rootkit,
I don't think you need to look at the story this way. You're right, the vaste majority don't have a clue about rootkits, cloacking and such obviously. But what Schneier wrote is that people pay a high price to get "protected" from those "security companies", and they deserve a much better service!
Security companies must have known about sony rookit potential risks. Especially if, like those bastards in "First 4 Internet" tells us, they have been on the loop from the begining ! By not evaluating the security breach of this copy protection, and not acting properly by not advertizing the risk and not removing the software, they prove they're either extremely incompetent, or totally biased, or both.
However, it is wrong to suggest that this housing was built to segregate immigrants
I don't think I suggested something like that. I totally agree with you, those housing were built for anyone having low resources.