Anyway any OS regardless of the vendor requires patching at some point.... If you don't do that it is your OWN FAULT!
Aside from the undesired changes in functionality mentioned elsewhere, have you ever bothered to read the license terms on the patches for a great many Microsoft patches? If ever there was a clear-cut example of extortion in the software industry, this is it.
Could this be the same with spam? Could anti-spam vendors be sponsoring the spam itself, just to take corporate money in exchange for protection? Sounds like the mafia to me.
I believe the word you are looking for is "extortion".
As paranoid as it sounds "cold and flu" season has always been suspicious to me =)
If what you're thinking were true, cold and flu season would be year-round.
My current philosophy for things of this nature is "who stands to profit" and I think you can apply this accross the board (Including the Bush administration)
Go get a job at the Department of Justice. Or maybe the Federal Trade Commission. They could probably use you over there.
I had the opportunity to interview with Symantec about 5 years ago, for the Norton Anti-Virus unit.
If there were any covert activities going on, I sincerely doubt you were ever exposed to them. How would you know if they've got some top-secret, burn-before-reading, underground lab or two doing virus development? How would you know if they've started one since you've interviewed with them?
The heuristics involved in developing the software necessary to *fix* an already infected (sometimes by multiple virii) is pretty impressive.
Not when you designed the virus yourself! Think about it. You coded up the virus. You know it inside and out. You designed it to be easy to detect (e.g., by making it oligomorphic and knowing each of the possible permutations in advance), and equally easy to remove (e.g., by making it respond to some obscure signal to remove itself, a la '--bliss-uninfect-files-please', but probably some indirect signal, like flipping a bit in the middle of the boot sector in FAT filesystems).
There's no *good* reason why any of these engineers would intentionally create more work for themselves -- they don't need any.
How about making more money?
They would be out of the fame in a New York minute if they were ever found to be involved in disseminating virii, intentionally or not.
When you are engaging in covert and/or criminal activities, that is a risk you are taking.
Make 20M GP, then go to the Black Market and buy the Fusion Bomb. It does 20d200 damage, has +5000 to hit, pierces immunity, and adds 10000 to your HP when equipped. Unfortunately, it disintegrates the first time you attack with it, even if you miss, so make it count!
When DALnet was getting packeted, I felt sorry. Now I do not. The institution of such a ripe-for-abuse policy as this makes my stomach turn. It's sort of like banning all channels which foster terrorism: every channel on the network could be argued, to varying degrees of truth, to fit that specification. And nobody's going to scrutinize the closures of channels under this new rule. If this actually does get abused, you can bet everyone will head to the non-fascist Undernet without a second thought.
Being the filthy, ruthless capitalists we Americans are, we don't care about recycling. Just dump it in China. Recycling product A or B costs about 0. Fuck you.
</troll>
Seriously, though, you've made an excellent point. Thanks.
Product A needs to be replaced every 5 years, and costs $50.
Product B, having the same function as Product A, needs to be replaced every 3 years, and costs $20.
You get a savings in Product B, because cost over time is less than Product A, even though it needs to be replaced more often.
Cheap products are not necessarily a bad thing, if the reduce in price outweighs the frequency of replacement. Besides, you get the latest and greatest (or, at least, closer to it) this way.
Is the working theory (excuse, apology, whatever) that if the service provider is allowed to become big enough it can improve service through economies of scale and having enough capital to handle build-out?
Yes, but that's not what they're motivated to do. They're motivated to screw people over, same as usual, only now they have more power with which to do it.
You can use a lot of money to further good ends, but those with a lot of money are generally focused on making even more money.
Actually, patents on physical inventions could be licensed like this too -- you can build a device incorporating the patented idea, but you can't publicly distribute the device. Implementations of business practice patents are never distributed, so this would not work for those.
Note that the GPL only applies to distribution of software. Use and modification are not restricted in any way by the GPL.
If an entity (a company or individual) makes use of a GPL'd program in producing some product or service, but it is not selling a derivative work based on the GPL'd program, then it may use the GPL'd program in any way it pleases -- running it, modifying it, plugging it into a custom piece of software that is never distributed, and so forth.
If a patent license were to be made analogous to the GPL, it would have to apply only to distribution of products which implement the patent; internal or personal use would have to be unrestricted to maintain the analog. Something to the effect of "if you distribute a software program which incorporates the technique described in this patent, you must distribute the source code to that software program", as in the GPL.
No. That is completely counter to the principles and purpose of the Open Source movement, whose primary goal is to make quality software available to everyone -- greedy, ruthless corporations included. The fact that we don't use software patents, discriminatory and otherwise non-Open Source licenses, and other such nasty tactics to harm large corporations is what makes us better than them.
No matter what people from companies like Red Hat might tell you, the Open Source movement is about ideals, not improving quality or making it cheap. The quality and inexpensiveness of Open Source software is a most fortunate side effect of those ideals, but it is, nonetheless, a side effect. It is the ideals behind Open Source that give it such great quality and inexpensiveness, as these run counter to what the profit motive would direct.
If this sounds like some kind of hippie movement to you, well, you're pretty much right. Ever seen RMS' photo? Still, despite what you may think about people like RMS, they have this strange tendency of being right often. Even RMS' widely detested "GNU/Linux" term is, in a sense, correct -- most (i.e., general-purpose) Linux distributions are really a customized GNU system running on top of a Linux kernel. There are counterarguments to this, of course, but my point is that the things RMS has to say do make at least some sense, and usually they make a lot of sense; for example, take a look at the recent BitKeeper fiasco, and then take a look at RMS' protests some time previous, warning of such a scenario. Notice how he has been quite vindicated by these recent developments? This was not the first time.
In case you didn't figure it out from what happened to Netscape, when you play by Microsoft's rules, Microsoft wins.
In this case, Microsoft will simply stall the court case until the underdogs run out of money, or purchase a judgment in their favor like they seem to have done in the recently concluded antitrust case. Patents themselves cost a lot of money, too.
Microsoft can rot in hell if they are just trying to get a special exemption for themselves while still beating us over the head with software patents.
Bullshit. Microsoft's tactics are indicative of an increasing degree of desperation. Meanwhile, the Open Source community is unaffected, and Open Source products are still driving a wedge into Microsoft's sales, especially to businesses, where the advantage of using Open Source is painfully obvious to any bean counter worth her salt.
Conclusion: MS is fucked. F-U-C-K-E-D. By 2020, if you say 'MS' to someone, they'll think 'multiple sclerosis' (or draw a blank if both of the MS diseases have been cured by then).
What is being asked is something along the lines of:
Is a PowerPC machine running Mac OS X slower than an x86 machine running Linux?
What should be being asked is:
Is Mac OS X slower than
other operating system on the same machine?
<rant>(Answer: It doesn't matter. Mac OS X is closed source, making it insecure and untrustworthy (because Apple and Microsoft are able to throw trojans into it, and probably have), making it useless. An operating system that does absolutely nothing can be very fast. Mac OS X is such an operating system. If it were possible to run it under MOL, it would be a toy rather than useless, like Windows in a virtual machine, which is not much of an improvement.)</rant>
The 'something they make up for tracking' could also hide a host of evils.
Such as?
They can make it arbitrarily hard to know what they are up to
"They want to know who I am" is usually a fairly safe assumption. So what?
I already do this, and make my browser ask. I particularly like the new features where the browser remembers my decisions. Even so, this is a pain, and some site refuse to operate if you make the wrong choice (even crash the browser in some cases, but I haven't seen that in a while).
If any Web site is capable of crashing your browser, cookies are the least of your worries. Ever heard of buffer overflows?
Ever consider that the police have slightly more clout with NASA and the Air Force than Joe Random does?
Concerned Citizen: Is this the Air Force? Air Force Guy: Yes... Concerned Citizen: There are fireballs in the sky over my house! Air Force Guy: See a doctor. *click*
Concerned Citizen: Is this the police? Dispatch: Yes... Concerned Citizen: There are fireballs in the sky over my house! Dispatch:*looks out window* I see them too. Thanks. We'll handle it. *click* Dispatch: This is Officer Random of the Foo Bar Police Department. There are fireballs in the sky above our city. I demand that you guys get out here and investigate! Air Force Guy: You got it officer. Thanks. *click*
Slashdot Mirror
If there were any covert activities going on, I sincerely doubt you were ever exposed to them. How would you know if they've got some top-secret, burn-before-reading, underground lab or two doing virus development? How would you know if they've started one since you've interviewed with them?
Not when you designed the virus yourself! Think about it. You coded up the virus. You know it inside and out. You designed it to be easy to detect (e.g., by making it oligomorphic and knowing each of the possible permutations in advance), and equally easy to remove (e.g., by making it respond to some obscure signal to remove itself, a la '--bliss-uninfect-files-please', but probably some indirect signal, like flipping a bit in the middle of the boot sector in FAT filesystems).
How about making more money?
When you are engaging in covert and/or criminal activities, that is a risk you are taking.
Make 20M GP, then go to the Black Market and buy the Fusion Bomb. It does 20d200 damage, has +5000 to hit, pierces immunity, and adds 10000 to your HP when equipped. Unfortunately, it disintegrates the first time you attack with it, even if you miss, so make it count!
Goodbye, DALnet. It was nice knowing you.
One of the windowsupdate.microsoft.com servers was 0wn3d by Code Red the other year. Does that count?
Vega Strike!
Being the filthy, ruthless capitalists we Americans are, we don't care about recycling. Just dump it in China. Recycling product A or B costs about 0. Fuck you.
</troll>
Seriously, though, you've made an excellent point. Thanks.
You get a savings in Product B, because cost over time is less than Product A, even though it needs to be replaced more often.
Cheap products are not necessarily a bad thing, if the reduce in price outweighs the frequency of replacement. Besides, you get the latest and greatest (or, at least, closer to it) this way.
You can use a lot of money to further good ends, but those with a lot of money are generally focused on making even more money.
Unless of course the president doesn't take orders (cf. Clinton).
Actually, patents on physical inventions could be licensed like this too -- you can build a device incorporating the patented idea, but you can't publicly distribute the device. Implementations of business practice patents are never distributed, so this would not work for those.
If an entity (a company or individual) makes use of a GPL'd program in producing some product or service, but it is not selling a derivative work based on the GPL'd program, then it may use the GPL'd program in any way it pleases -- running it, modifying it, plugging it into a custom piece of software that is never distributed, and so forth.
If a patent license were to be made analogous to the GPL, it would have to apply only to distribution of products which implement the patent; internal or personal use would have to be unrestricted to maintain the analog. Something to the effect of "if you distribute a software program which incorporates the technique described in this patent, you must distribute the source code to that software program", as in the GPL.
No matter what people from companies like Red Hat might tell you, the Open Source movement is about ideals, not improving quality or making it cheap. The quality and inexpensiveness of Open Source software is a most fortunate side effect of those ideals, but it is, nonetheless, a side effect. It is the ideals behind Open Source that give it such great quality and inexpensiveness, as these run counter to what the profit motive would direct.
If this sounds like some kind of hippie movement to you, well, you're pretty much right. Ever seen RMS' photo? Still, despite what you may think about people like RMS, they have this strange tendency of being right often. Even RMS' widely detested "GNU/Linux" term is, in a sense, correct -- most (i.e., general-purpose) Linux distributions are really a customized GNU system running on top of a Linux kernel. There are counterarguments to this, of course, but my point is that the things RMS has to say do make at least some sense, and usually they make a lot of sense; for example, take a look at the recent BitKeeper fiasco, and then take a look at RMS' protests some time previous, warning of such a scenario. Notice how he has been quite vindicated by these recent developments? This was not the first time.
In this case, Microsoft will simply stall the court case until the underdogs run out of money, or purchase a judgment in their favor like they seem to have done in the recently concluded antitrust case. Patents themselves cost a lot of money, too.
Conclusion: MS is fucked. F-U-C-K-E-D. By 2020, if you say 'MS' to someone, they'll think 'multiple sclerosis' (or draw a blank if both of the MS diseases have been cured by then).
<rant>(Answer: It doesn't matter. Mac OS X is closed source, making it insecure and untrustworthy (because Apple and Microsoft are able to throw trojans into it, and probably have), making it useless. An operating system that does absolutely nothing can be very fast. Mac OS X is such an operating system. If it were possible to run it under MOL, it would be a toy rather than useless, like Windows in a virtual machine, which is not much of an improvement.)</rant>
But the RIAA would.
Concerned Citizen: Is this the Air Force?
Air Force Guy: Yes...
Concerned Citizen: There are fireballs in the sky over my house!
Air Force Guy: See a doctor. *click*
Concerned Citizen: Is this the police?
Dispatch: Yes...
Concerned Citizen: There are fireballs in the sky over my house!
Dispatch: *looks out window* I see them too. Thanks. We'll handle it. *click*
Dispatch: This is Officer Random of the Foo Bar Police Department. There are fireballs in the sky above our city. I demand that you guys get out here and investigate!
Air Force Guy: You got it officer. Thanks. *click*