Personally, I don't trust any organization with three or more people in it.
Three or more you say? Well... I have just my partner in my organization, so you can trust us! We sell bridges. We have a fine selection in the New York City area that we'd be willing to sell you, cheap!
Do it at the right time and there was a permanent ice/land bridge between asia and alaska.
Which there wasn't in the timeframe the article talks about. As far as I can recall, there is strong evidence that once the ice ages ended migration into North America ceased, which was much longer ago than the article is suggesting.
The "move 100 yards a day" argument has a hole in it. It takes far longer than a few generations for humans to adapt to radically different environments, such as desert and tundra. How many generations do you think it took the Inuits to adapt to arctic conditions? Probably a lot longer than it would take to walk from Asia to North Amerca across a land bridge at a 100 yards/day pace. But you can't make that journey and survive unless you develop the technology to survive in the environment. Europeans learned this the hard way in the 19th century where expedition after expedition went in search of the Northwest passage, only to perish because they didn't know how to cope with the environment, despite being apparently more technologically advanced than the native peoples in the area. And once you have developed the technology to cope with the environment, you tend to stay in that environment. The rate of population movement doesn't hinge on one person's ability to walk X amount per day. It hinges on an entire society making radical changes to their ways of life to be able to cope with a different environment.
My big beef with Comsumer Reports (aside from the fact that they sold my name and address to 3rd party companies when I signed up for their web site, in direct violation of their privacy statement) is that for the fast moving consumer electronics field, their test results come out way too late. I remember when I was shopping for a small all-in-one stereo system. It just so happened that Consumer Reports had reviews of all-in-one stereos in that month's issue. And every single damned one of them were no longer available, as the manufacturers had come out with new models. I suppose I could sort of assume if the XYZ20 model was no longer available, that a favorable review of it probably meant that the XYZ21 was a good bet... but I'm sure we've all seen cases where a new revision to a product line has sucked.
I also find it odd that the select so few options. Tae, for example, laptops. They reviewed just the Dells, HPs, Apples and IBMs. What about Fujitsu? Acer? All of the others?
They probably make sure the system boots to the dashboard and then send it on for packaging.
Not quite. From this Wall Street Journal Article:
After each Xbox 360 rolls off the line, it undergoes two hours or so of automated testing and five minutes of manual testing before being packed into a plane
And, if the hardware shows up damaged... doesn't MS take a hit because the packaging can't stand up to the abuse their supply channel will put it through? Making a fragile console is just as dumb as making one that's defective out of the box.
I agree that it's too soon to say that the XBox 360 is unstable... but at the same time, many people see the console as a stable platform, whereas your PC may or may not work with the latest and greatest title.
that sounds good, but would be nearly impossible to implement in a fair manner as, in this case, lexisnexis was not responsible for the breach in any way, shape, or form. therefore to punish them for a breach not resulting from their actions would be unjust.
Um... have you thought this through? If what you believe were the law, then any company that has a legal issue, such as liability for security breach, illegal dumping of toxic waste, products that become sentient and wipe out humanity, etc. could get complete absolution if it got bought out by another company. "Oops! Sorry! You can't punish us! We got bought out be Totally Innocent Corp." And you can bet, a buyer can be made to appear at an opportune time, whether it be a real buyer or a shell company set up for the express purpose of ducking liability.
When Company A buys Company B, Company A should not only get the assets of that company, but it also take on the debts of that company and the responsibility under the law for any past actiona of that company. And I believe that's how it works under the law.
Now, for a dose of reality, check out this opinion piece over at Ars Technica. It points to a study by a UC Davis professor (who wrote this op-ed piece over at News.com) found out that there was, in fact, no studies showing a shortage of IT workers. Why would both academics and indistry go off on such a chicken-little hissy fit? Money, of course.
What IBM and other tech companies really want is dirt cheap labor, not just sufficient labor. Hence their push to get H1B visas while there is still a fairly high unemployment rate among computer professionals (personally, I know of a *lot* of former colleagues who have left the industry because they couldn't find work). H1B workers have their hands tied, since the second they are no longer employed in the US, they get kicked out. That is a huge stick for a company to be able to use against an employee.
And how does academia benefit from the doom and gloom? Easy. More research grants. More money pumped into computer science departments to "attract new stidents." More territory for people who are more bureacratic empire builders than they are actual educators.
the 1st biggest print/press media company is merging with the 2nd.
Uhm, what does Macromedia have to do with print/press? All of their product portfolio is aimed at online. Adobe has products both for traditional printing (InDesign, FrameMaker, Illustrator, etc.), purely online (Go Live), and products that straddle the two worlds (Acrobat). Macromedia is all about online.
Adobe's penetration into the online world sucks. Beyond Photoshop, most web designers I know use the Macromedia suite of products (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) I don't think there is a real destruction of competition here. Adobe was strong in one area, Macromedia strong in another. It makes sense for Adobe to want to acquire Macromedia since they have basically reached market saturation in the markets they are in already. They have failed to compete in the newest online market for years. I don't think this is like Ford & GM wanting to merge. I think it's more like Chrystler and Mercedes Benz. The same market, to be sure, but they serve two distinct market segments. I don;t think there will be much regulatory scrutiny here.
That being said, I'm not happy about the merger. I've grown to loathe Adobe as a company, as I have seen them buy up products, then just milk them without putting in any major improvements (c.f. FrameMaker).
There is no 3rd.
That small mewing sound you hear is Quark Inc. insisting that they are not dead yet.
Re:Live Concerts are owned by Label
on
EZTree Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, they are illegal, which is why the poster took pains to say "...unreleased live musical performances..." rather than the better-known term "bootlegs" which is what they really are. Nice spin doctoring there.
I remember back in the day how dodgey record stores that carried bootleg recordings of concerts were raided by the police, under the same premise that this torrent site was shut down.
(That said, I do wish I could find recordings of several concerts I'd gone to back in the day. I'd pay good money to hear them. But of course, the control-freak music industry is too short-sighted to take advantage of this market.)
You can still do plenty of shenanigans using good old "make install" because you'll need to be root in order to get the application installed. Sure, you have the source... theoretically, you could code audit the system before you install, to make sure it won't do anything dastardly... But then the application you install might be able to do so anyhow. DO you intend to code audit every revision of every program you install on your system?
And anyhow, we do have fairly good install tools for UNIX (well, perhaps not all of UNIX... but there's apt and RPM for Linux and ports for BSD). The real problem comes with keeping configurations straight. If configurations were handled in a better way than having a bunch of files strewn around/etc (maybe... sometimes other places as well). Or, perhaps we just need better discipline from developers to consistently use a single format for configuration files, and provide sane ways of having new versions of applications be able to update the configuration files to handle new options. And we need to be able to easily version configuration files as well. Maybe something like using CVS on the/etc tree, combined with a friendly way of changing configuration options within the individual config files...
Hmm... that would result in a data coral reef... where the dead cells of ancestors provide the foundations for the living cells of the current generation.
Eventually, the planet will be made of these things
"Dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program."
Oh yeah? How do we know that the impact off of the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs wasn't due to the crash of some attempt to launch a crew of brontosaurs into orbit? Do you know how much energy a rocket full of brontos would pack? The Truth That They Don't Want You To Know (this week) is that the dinosaurs went extinct because they had a space program!
Look for my amazing new book on this subject "Really Friggin' Ancient Astronauts: T Minus for T-Rex" at a bookstore near you, soon.
... will be able to determine that...
Someone who looks like you purchased stamps!.
OK, you're not outraged because of the purposes this might be put to, since you think it's worthless. But why then aren't you outraged that this is a total waste of money on the part of the USPS? These kiosks obviously cost more than kiosks that don't have cameras hiding in them... so if they can't be put to any good use, why should the USPS pay extra for them?
What if you had a friend traveling over there, that had to get in touch with you?
Likely, that friend would use an internet cafe to connect to his/her hotmail or whatever account, and shoot of the email. The email would originate from the hotmail (or whoever) mail server, not from a chinese netblock. Not a problem.
Or someones company switches hosting to a.cn company.
The result is no different than if a company switches to an ISP that is known to be spam-friendly... they will usually get bounces stating "Your mail was refused because your subnet is blocked for spamming," or something similar. In which case, the company had best rethink its choice of ISP.
Or a mail gets relayed through a.cn mail server as the regular one is down for maintainence?
How often is mail rerouted these days? Especially to a server in a different country, likely on a different continent? I can't recall ever seeing this. Usually mail is held until the mail server comes back up. The mailserver going down is one of those things guaranteed to get the IT people awoken in the middle of the night, so its downtime isn't going to be long anyhow.
Oh, your mom called; you didn't reply to her mail about the free first-class tickets she was going to send you to visit her; so you missed out.
Any idiot who relies entirely on email for transmission of important information pretty much gets what he/she deserves when there's a snafu and the email is lost. That's why really important things, such as the "DMCA take down notices" sent out by lawyers are always sent both via email and snail mail.
How much is someone supposed to do with a doomed script?
One is supposed to do precisely one thing: run the hell away from it.
They are supposed to know well enough not to get involved in the film in the first place, unless they know they have a good quality script in hand.
Burton's movies are certainly ensemble pieces... the actors, the writers, set designers, etc. etc. all contribute. But he's put his stamp on each film he's made... which indicates a great level of control. When you see a clip from a film (even the preview for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) you know it's a Burton film. Burton gets the credit for things like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. So, consequently, he needs to take the heat for Plant of the Apes.
As for wanting the most recent posts, the interface still has the "sort by date" option (vs. sort by relevance) which will give you a list of the article hits with the most recent first.
What's removed is the ability to specify a date range, so that you could easily get historical information (for example, how people thought about a particular product just after it was introduced).
I just tried doing a search on Google groups to verify allof this, and have had several errors: an internal server error, the claim that the phrase "mp3" never appeared in the newsgroup *mandrake* (to search the Mandrake-related newsgroups. Very curious.
the fact that not everyone is sending legitimate email with a powerful computing device. Something that could cause an inconvenience to a spammer with a boatload of cheap commodity 2Ghz desktop systems (other their own or a zombie army) will bring more modest systems to their knees. Handhelds, phones, old 486 systems recycled for use in the 3rd world, set top boxes, embedded systems, etc. will no longer be viable systems with which to send mail. And what about web mail providers?
These's simply no reason to resort to kludge solutions that depend on penalizing those who cannot afford top-of-the-line systems.
Slashdot readers that the "authors"... apply some cryptic, personal and inconsistent criteria to the selection process, which does not include fact or consistency checking.
My bet: they do so intentionally. I mean, let's look at it this way: what's Slashdot's goal? Eventually, to make money. How do you make money on a web site? Get more page views to get more ad impressions. And how do you do that...?
Say you're a Slashdot editor (no, no, not out loud! Suppose... suppose you're a Slashdot editor). You have two stories in your queue:
A well-researched, highly annotated, and somewhat interesting story on an issue that most don't care passionately about.
A poorly researched, ungrammatical, illogical, typo-ridden submission that is from someone who apprently didn't read the article they are even submitting (or who apparently didn't have the reading comprehension skills to understand it, or who is the person responsible for the piece in the first place in a transparent plea for attention, or is a partisan with an axe to grind) on one of the hot-button geek topics. Double points for including one or more of the words:
SCO
GPL violation
Microsoft
trademarks
copyright
patents
CowboyNeal
RIAA
Linus
Star Wars
DRM
Once this puppy hits the front page, every knee-jerk froth-at-the-mouth keyboard monkey in creation is going to rush to get their say in, and flame every other froth-at-the-mouth keyboard monkey who dares disagree with them (or, heck, even some of those that do agree with them). The page count hit of this story will go through the roof.
Oh, and you're late on your payments for your BMW with built-in iPod, and you're short on cash for the new PSP. So, which story are you going to pick?
So, as you see, they probably do look for inconsistencies, logical fallicies, and biased points of view in the submissions. And promptly mash the "approve" button when they find them. That button most likely makes a cha-ching! sound when pressed.
Eventually, Slashdot will manage to hit the "perfect storm" of article submissions, that including all of those words. In which case, the Slashdot editors will be able to sit back and relax as the thread goes on and on perpetually (or, at least as long as their DB server keeps from melting down).
So, as you see, it's a conspiracy! (Damn... add conspiracy to the above list.)
Actually, there might be an easier way to take down zombie networks than creating a roaming virus... As I understand it, most zombie networks take their marching orders by watching an IRC channel on some server someplace. If you can figure out where the channel is, and can manage to compromise it, you should be able to hijack the zombie network and make it patch itself and then uninstall the viruses.
Instead of polluting the net even more with "retrovirus" traffic, this would be a surgical strike, although timing would be critical. I assume they shift IRC servers and channels fairly frequently, and the IRC servers might be well hardened.
One answer to phishing scams would be to retaliate that other scourge... spam. Spam their databases!
If everyone who got the phishing scam replied with junk information, the phisher's database would go from 100% signal to something significantly less.
I'm not sure how expensive it is timewise for phishers to pursue junk information, other whether they could filter out the junk by cross-checking the supplied data automatically. I bet, currently, they just assume all of the data they get s correct. If we could sink that assumption, and make them work harder for their ill-gotten gains, it may slow them down while more conventional means are used to prosecute them.
You probably shouldn't submit more than once to any given phisher's site, since they could easily capture your IP and filter out multiple submissions.
You and I may not, but millions will, especially if it means less expensive (free?) games.
The thing is, it won't result in cheaper games. As an example, take a look at the movies. Back in the 80's, it was unheard of to have advertisements for products (other than the coming attractions, that is, which had been established almost as early as the movie theater itself). Now, we have 10 minutes of so of ads for all sorts of crap, reducing a trip to the movies to being TV you pay $10 or more for.
And has your ticket price gone down at all since they started showing ads? Concessions gotten any cheaper? No. Prices still continue to climb. The theaters and Hollywood just pocket the extra revinue.
Hmm... I used the installer, and Firefox seemed to install OK... except that it segfaults when you try to run it as anything but root... it spews out a bunch of lines saying "*** loading the extensions datasource" then segfaults after bitching that it cannot open the default config file.
I knew a guy back when I worked for a VAR in the early 90's who would take failing hard drives and swap components around to see if he could make functioning drives out of them. This was back when even 20MB hd's were pretty damn expensive, to the point that just tossing bad ones out was a really tough decision to make.
He would even resort to opening up the drive's case and swapping around hard disk platters, when he found a few drives with platters that didn't have faulty sectors on them. He didn't have any sort of clean room, but he was able to get a fully functioning drive out of the deal more often than not.
Slashdot Mirror
Three or more you say? Well... I have just my partner in my organization, so you can trust us! We sell bridges. We have a fine selection in the New York City area that we'd be willing to sell you, cheap!
Which there wasn't in the timeframe the article talks about. As far as I can recall, there is strong evidence that once the ice ages ended migration into North America ceased, which was much longer ago than the article is suggesting.
The "move 100 yards a day" argument has a hole in it. It takes far longer than a few generations for humans to adapt to radically different environments, such as desert and tundra. How many generations do you think it took the Inuits to adapt to arctic conditions? Probably a lot longer than it would take to walk from Asia to North Amerca across a land bridge at a 100 yards/day pace. But you can't make that journey and survive unless you develop the technology to survive in the environment. Europeans learned this the hard way in the 19th century where expedition after expedition went in search of the Northwest passage, only to perish because they didn't know how to cope with the environment, despite being apparently more technologically advanced than the native peoples in the area. And once you have developed the technology to cope with the environment, you tend to stay in that environment. The rate of population movement doesn't hinge on one person's ability to walk X amount per day. It hinges on an entire society making radical changes to their ways of life to be able to cope with a different environment.
My big beef with Comsumer Reports (aside from the fact that they sold my name and address to 3rd party companies when I signed up for their web site, in direct violation of their privacy statement) is that for the fast moving consumer electronics field, their test results come out way too late. I remember when I was shopping for a small all-in-one stereo system. It just so happened that Consumer Reports had reviews of all-in-one stereos in that month's issue. And every single damned one of them were no longer available, as the manufacturers had come out with new models. I suppose I could sort of assume if the XYZ20 model was no longer available, that a favorable review of it probably meant that the XYZ21 was a good bet... but I'm sure we've all seen cases where a new revision to a product line has sucked.
I also find it odd that the select so few options. Tae, for example, laptops. They reviewed just the Dells, HPs, Apples and IBMs. What about Fujitsu? Acer? All of the others?
Um... have you thought this through? If what you believe were the law, then any company that has a legal issue, such as liability for security breach, illegal dumping of toxic waste, products that become sentient and wipe out humanity, etc. could get complete absolution if it got bought out by another company. "Oops! Sorry! You can't punish us! We got bought out be Totally Innocent Corp." And you can bet, a buyer can be made to appear at an opportune time, whether it be a real buyer or a shell company set up for the express purpose of ducking liability.
When Company A buys Company B, Company A should not only get the assets of that company, but it also take on the debts of that company and the responsibility under the law for any past actiona of that company. And I believe that's how it works under the law.
Now, for a dose of reality, check out this opinion piece over at Ars Technica. It points to a study by a UC Davis professor (who wrote this op-ed piece over at News.com) found out that there was, in fact, no studies showing a shortage of IT workers. Why would both academics and indistry go off on such a chicken-little hissy fit? Money, of course.
What IBM and other tech companies really want is dirt cheap labor, not just sufficient labor. Hence their push to get H1B visas while there is still a fairly high unemployment rate among computer professionals (personally, I know of a *lot* of former colleagues who have left the industry because they couldn't find work). H1B workers have their hands tied, since the second they are no longer employed in the US, they get kicked out. That is a huge stick for a company to be able to use against an employee.
And how does academia benefit from the doom and gloom? Easy. More research grants. More money pumped into computer science departments to "attract new stidents." More territory for people who are more bureacratic empire builders than they are actual educators.
Uhm, what does Macromedia have to do with print/press? All of their product portfolio is aimed at online. Adobe has products both for traditional printing (InDesign, FrameMaker, Illustrator, etc.), purely online (Go Live), and products that straddle the two worlds (Acrobat). Macromedia is all about online.
Adobe's penetration into the online world sucks. Beyond Photoshop, most web designers I know use the Macromedia suite of products (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) I don't think there is a real destruction of competition here. Adobe was strong in one area, Macromedia strong in another. It makes sense for Adobe to want to acquire Macromedia since they have basically reached market saturation in the markets they are in already. They have failed to compete in the newest online market for years. I don't think this is like Ford & GM wanting to merge. I think it's more like Chrystler and Mercedes Benz. The same market, to be sure, but they serve two distinct market segments. I don;t think there will be much regulatory scrutiny here.
That being said, I'm not happy about the merger. I've grown to loathe Adobe as a company, as I have seen them buy up products, then just milk them without putting in any major improvements (c.f. FrameMaker).
That small mewing sound you hear is Quark Inc. insisting that they are not dead yet.
Yes, they are illegal, which is why the poster took pains to say "...unreleased live musical performances..." rather than the better-known term "bootlegs" which is what they really are. Nice spin doctoring there.
I remember back in the day how dodgey record stores that carried bootleg recordings of concerts were raided by the police, under the same premise that this torrent site was shut down.
(That said, I do wish I could find recordings of several concerts I'd gone to back in the day. I'd pay good money to hear them. But of course, the control-freak music industry is too short-sighted to take advantage of this market.)
See JarJar.
See JarJar not die.
DIE JARJAR! DIE! PLEASE!!!!
How is that different than typing:
You can still do plenty of shenanigans using good old "make install" because you'll need to be root in order to get the application installed. Sure, you have the source... theoretically, you could code audit the system before you install, to make sure it won't do anything dastardly... But then the application you install might be able to do so anyhow. DO you intend to code audit every revision of every program you install on your system?
And anyhow, we do have fairly good install tools for UNIX (well, perhaps not all of UNIX... but there's apt and RPM for Linux and ports for BSD). The real problem comes with keeping configurations straight. If configurations were handled in a better way than having a bunch of files strewn around /etc (maybe... sometimes other places as well). Or, perhaps we just need better discipline from developers to consistently use a single format for configuration files, and provide sane ways of having new versions of applications be able to update the configuration files to handle new options. And we need to be able to easily version configuration files as well. Maybe something like using CVS on the /etc tree, combined with a friendly way of changing configuration options within the individual config files...
Hmm... that would result in a data coral reef... where the dead cells of ancestors provide the foundations for the living cells of the current generation.
Eventually, the planet will be made of these things
Oh yeah? How do we know that the impact off of the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs wasn't due to the crash of some attempt to launch a crew of brontosaurs into orbit? Do you know how much energy a rocket full of brontos would pack? The Truth That They Don't Want You To Know (this week) is that the dinosaurs went extinct because they had a space program!
Look for my amazing new book on this subject "Really Friggin' Ancient Astronauts: T Minus for T-Rex" at a bookstore near you, soon.
OK, you're not outraged because of the purposes this might be put to, since you think it's worthless. But why then aren't you outraged that this is a total waste of money on the part of the USPS? These kiosks obviously cost more than kiosks that don't have cameras hiding in them... so if they can't be put to any good use, why should the USPS pay extra for them?
Likely, that friend would use an internet cafe to connect to his/her hotmail or whatever account, and shoot of the email. The email would originate from the hotmail (or whoever) mail server, not from a chinese netblock. Not a problem.
The result is no different than if a company switches to an ISP that is known to be spam-friendly... they will usually get bounces stating "Your mail was refused because your subnet is blocked for spamming," or something similar. In which case, the company had best rethink its choice of ISP.
How often is mail rerouted these days? Especially to a server in a different country, likely on a different continent? I can't recall ever seeing this. Usually mail is held until the mail server comes back up. The mailserver going down is one of those things guaranteed to get the IT people awoken in the middle of the night, so its downtime isn't going to be long anyhow.
Any idiot who relies entirely on email for transmission of important information pretty much gets what he/she deserves when there's a snafu and the email is lost. That's why really important things, such as the "DMCA take down notices" sent out by lawyers are always sent both via email and snail mail.
One is supposed to do precisely one thing: run the hell away from it.
They are supposed to know well enough not to get involved in the film in the first place, unless they know they have a good quality script in hand.
Burton's movies are certainly ensemble pieces... the actors, the writers, set designers, etc. etc. all contribute. But he's put his stamp on each film he's made... which indicates a great level of control. When you see a clip from a film (even the preview for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) you know it's a Burton film. Burton gets the credit for things like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. So, consequently, he needs to take the heat for Plant of the Apes.
As for wanting the most recent posts, the interface still has the "sort by date" option (vs. sort by relevance) which will give you a list of the article hits with the most recent first. What's removed is the ability to specify a date range, so that you could easily get historical information (for example, how people thought about a particular product just after it was introduced). I just tried doing a search on Google groups to verify allof this, and have had several errors: an internal server error, the claim that the phrase "mp3" never appeared in the newsgroup *mandrake* (to search the Mandrake-related newsgroups. Very curious.
the fact that not everyone is sending legitimate email with a powerful computing device. Something that could cause an inconvenience to a spammer with a boatload of cheap commodity 2Ghz desktop systems (other their own or a zombie army) will bring more modest systems to their knees. Handhelds, phones, old 486 systems recycled for use in the 3rd world, set top boxes, embedded systems, etc. will no longer be viable systems with which to send mail. And what about web mail providers?
These's simply no reason to resort to kludge solutions that depend on penalizing those who cannot afford top-of-the-line systems.
My bet: they do so intentionally. I mean, let's look at it this way: what's Slashdot's goal? Eventually, to make money. How do you make money on a web site? Get more page views to get more ad impressions. And how do you do that...?
Say you're a Slashdot editor (no, no, not out loud! Suppose... suppose you're a Slashdot editor). You have two stories in your queue:
- SCO
- GPL violation
- Microsoft
- trademarks
- copyright
- patents
- CowboyNeal
- RIAA
- Linus
- Star Wars
- DRM
Once this puppy hits the front page, every knee-jerk froth-at-the-mouth keyboard monkey in creation is going to rush to get their say in, and flame every other froth-at-the-mouth keyboard monkey who dares disagree with them (or, heck, even some of those that do agree with them). The page count hit of this story will go through the roof.Oh, and you're late on your payments for your BMW with built-in iPod, and you're short on cash for the new PSP. So, which story are you going to pick?
So, as you see, they probably do look for inconsistencies, logical fallicies, and biased points of view in the submissions. And promptly mash the "approve" button when they find them. That button most likely makes a cha-ching! sound when pressed.
Eventually, Slashdot will manage to hit the "perfect storm" of article submissions, that including all of those words. In which case, the Slashdot editors will be able to sit back and relax as the thread goes on and on perpetually (or, at least as long as their DB server keeps from melting down).
So, as you see, it's a conspiracy! (Damn... add conspiracy to the above list.)
Actually, there might be an easier way to take down zombie networks than creating a roaming virus... As I understand it, most zombie networks take their marching orders by watching an IRC channel on some server someplace. If you can figure out where the channel is, and can manage to compromise it, you should be able to hijack the zombie network and make it patch itself and then uninstall the viruses.
Instead of polluting the net even more with "retrovirus" traffic, this would be a surgical strike, although timing would be critical. I assume they shift IRC servers and channels fairly frequently, and the IRC servers might be well hardened.
One answer to phishing scams would be to retaliate that other scourge... spam. Spam their databases! If everyone who got the phishing scam replied with junk information, the phisher's database would go from 100% signal to something significantly less. I'm not sure how expensive it is timewise for phishers to pursue junk information, other whether they could filter out the junk by cross-checking the supplied data automatically. I bet, currently, they just assume all of the data they get s correct. If we could sink that assumption, and make them work harder for their ill-gotten gains, it may slow them down while more conventional means are used to prosecute them. You probably shouldn't submit more than once to any given phisher's site, since they could easily capture your IP and filter out multiple submissions.
Apple's going to be coming out with a snappy multimedia app that makes giving multimedia depositions really easy... you can even add a soundtrack!
Yup, look for iWitness soon...
Hmm... well, to prove their product actually works (and to confuse the hell out of Netcraft) they could host their site on IIS running under OS X.
You and I may not, but millions will, especially if it means less expensive (free?) games.
The thing is, it won't result in cheaper games. As an example, take a look at the movies. Back in the 80's, it was unheard of to have advertisements for products (other than the coming attractions, that is, which had been established almost as early as the movie theater itself). Now, we have 10 minutes of so of ads for all sorts of crap, reducing a trip to the movies to being TV you pay $10 or more for.
And has your ticket price gone down at all since they started showing ads? Concessions gotten any cheaper? No. Prices still continue to climb. The theaters and Hollywood just pocket the extra revinue.
Hmm... I used the installer, and Firefox seemed to install OK... except that it segfaults when you try to run it as anything but root... it spews out a bunch of lines saying "*** loading the extensions datasource" then segfaults after bitching that it cannot open the default config file.
I knew a guy back when I worked for a VAR in the early 90's who would take failing hard drives and swap components around to see if he could make functioning drives out of them. This was back when even 20MB hd's were pretty damn expensive, to the point that just tossing bad ones out was a really tough decision to make.
He would even resort to opening up the drive's case and swapping around hard disk platters, when he found a few drives with platters that didn't have faulty sectors on them. He didn't have any sort of clean room, but he was able to get a fully functioning drive out of the deal more often than not.