Please update your definitions. To groups like Al Qaeda, anything American owned (whether state or private) is a military target. For Hamas that would be anything Israeli owned. Don't forget that. One man's freedom fighter is the other man's terrorist.
Part of the reason civilian casualties in Gaza are so high is 'police stations' and 'schools' that are anything but.
The rest of the reason is of course the same why it's called "civil war" in the first place. In between child soldiers and suicide bombers there is not much difference between a fighter and a civilian.
In case of war, as we have seen in the past, merchant ships are not immune. Even today merchant ships are targeted: we call this "economic sanctions". Supplies to some countries (e.g. N. Korea) are controlled: rice can go, cars and wine not. Areas like the Gaza strip are even more locked down. Merchant ships trying to enter Gaza without permission from Israel run the risk of attack.
And didn't the US enter the European part of WW2 thanks to the sinking of a US owned merchant vessel by German torpedoes?
One of the ways to defeat a foe is to try and starve him: cut off their supplies. Make sure they have nothing to eat and they will have to surrender, or die from starvation.
On the other hand I'm sure merchant ships have been used a lot in warfare, as trojan horse kind of strategy. A fishing vessel full of armed soldiers. A bulk carrier fitted with torpedoes. I am sure it all has been done already.
By the way, besides kitting out a container with cruise missiles: how do you think most weapons are traded? My best guess would be in shipping containers.
That is not something a state that wishes to defend itself against a much bigger and more powerful foe (e.g. Iran or N. Korea vs the US) will care about much.
After all, in war, priority 1 is to survive and (hopefully) defeat the opponent.
Actually when I read this earlier in today's news paper I thought it makes total sense from a military/strategic point of view. And I was actually wondering why no-one else had thought of this before. Or maybe they are just not advertising it openly.
When it comes to transportation and handling of the equipment, a shipping container is great as it is standardised and fits easily on vessels, trains, trucks, and can be handled with standard lifting equipment.
The down side of course is the disappearance of the civil/military divide, which of course has already happened in many conflicts.
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
I guess you never heard of the 1990s?
Of course I have. In 1996 and 1997 (and 2001) Apple posted losses, all other years profits (source: Wikipedia).
Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day.
MS employs around 93000 people (MS's own figure for mid 2009).
The headcount of the Mozilla foundation I can not found but it seems to be a dozen or two at most from what I find here and there.
So when MS is making some 500 times more money than Mozilla means that they are doing worse per employee.
One large problem is the bright folks at Microsoft can't innovate on anything that could possibly lead to a loss of revenue of Windows products.
Of course. That is an issue. Though it seems they do invest a lot now in on-line services, including real improvements to IE's standards compliance.
On the user interface field they are being taken over on all sides by Apple and even Linux. There is so much innovation done there - MS doesn't have a proper touch interface to compete with the iPhone/iPad OS, for example. Of course MS has their legacy - there is no reason not to keep the old interface and allow the option of a new experimental one. Maybe even a few experimental interfaces. Let the power users find them and try them out - and listen to what the market thinks about it.
I strongly believe that it is not the underlying hardware that counts any more (yesteryear's is more than good enough for 99% of us - save hardcore gamers and hardcore CAD developers and so). It is not much the OS that counts any more (it just has to work, stable and secure - who cares what's under the hood), it is just the user interface. And there is no reason why MS can not do anything good there.
Computing is moving on-line: the browser is getting important. MS seems to understand this.
Computing is also moving more towards hand held devices. Like the iPad. MS is missing out on this.
Desktop computing as we had it will remain - the basic office work and gaming and web browsing on the "big" screen. MS is strong there now, but with the experiments going on in their competitor's products it is only a matter of time before someone finds the holy grail of desktop user interfaces and the competition really takes off. The Windows technical lock-in (mainly MS Word) is slowly dissolving already.
Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning. Now Bing, before the Zune (ended in failure), the Xbox (lost a lot of money, still alive though, can't imagine it has made them any money overall even if it would be profitable by now), and before I'm sure they lost heaps of money entering the office suite market with OpenOffice, the webmail market with Hotmail, and so on. Only their OS business has made a constant profit it seems. And Office is doing well as well. But that's it.
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
Google came out of nothing: they started up in a dorm room, came with a good product, and won the hearts and minds of the world and grew from there to become the behemoth they are now.
Sun has likely lost money on development of StarOffice, now OpenOffice.org, but their product is steadily making inroads and I don't think they are still pumping much money in it. If only because they're not such a rich company any more.
Netscape burnt and died, and from its ashes Firefox has risen. Making heaps of money, going strong, doing well.
Now for the examples above you may give counter examples of failures but it seems MS is the king. They have so much money, they can buy their way into any market they like (and they do), but they can not come up with anything innovative, anything desirable.
"Competing on the world stage" may not be cheap, but I think it may help if Microsoft starts to develop their own products and their own ideas, instead of an "iPod killer", a "Google competitor", etc. That seems to me a failure from the start. You have to have your own product that stands on its own, and is not targeting a specific existing product. "Netscape killer" Internet Explorer won due to lock-in and abuse of monopoly, not for being better than Netscape. Microsoft for some reason doesn't manage to compete on quality and on merit, they just try to solve those issues by throwing a lot of money at it. And that's a waste in more ways than one. We need innovation - no matter where it comes from, but MS is not exactly a company that is innovative these days.
Sure, the fine could run to millions. But it will only do so if thousands of people are at risk of spending months of their lives clearing up a mess of someone else's causing. As I said, the fine is still nothing next to that kind of damage.
Two problems here.
First: the victims don't get any compensation, the fine goes to state coffers. If thousands are affected, luckily in general only a few of them have more effect than having to change credit card numbers or so.
Second: if you add another zero or two to the fine, then almost certainly any company hit by it goes bankrupt. That is like the death penalty but then for companies. No chance to recover. I don't think that's so great an idea.
Those fines are probably not exactly on the light side. If just one record is lost, yes then it's not so much for a large company. However large companies tend to lose data in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of records at a time, possibly resulting in fines of many millions, maybe even billions of dollars. And you have to be quite a big company to be able to brush that under the table.
I get the idea but it's a poor example as getting to university, maybe even being able to read in the first place, indicates higher education, which is expensive, and in many poor countries only for the upper class. The rest of the people doesn't have the money - if only to not have to work and have time to study.
More like the actual electronics in it. That's the expensive part, and probably can't be made cheaper (material cost - they may use exotic materials, and development cost).
I have the feeling it has more to do with the overall manufacturing (including materials) and development costs. That is a certain cost related to these devices that will not go lower.
It requires some metal and plastic (cheap), and some more exotic stuff for the actual chips. Those will be the costly part. And when manufacturing improves the same amount of material and work can store more data. And there may simply be no cost savings on having a lower storage capacity on the drive.
Indeed for some reason the bottom of the market is missing in USB drives. And I am seeing the same in the digital camera market, in that market there is also a bottom missing (as in really simple and low-cost devices; like the single-use cameras that had 36 exposures and then you just gave the whole thing to the photographer for development).
And so on: many high-tech markets do not have a low-end line it seems. It's just not there. Using maybe yesterday's tech, low cost, still good enough for many uses where cost is an issue.
Terrible summary again. In good/. fashion I didn't RTFA - it may be better but not likely.
TFS suggests this helps "the poorest of the poor". Now how those people would get the money to buy goods over the Internet (almost by definition luxury goods - if only due to the added cost of shipping) is beyond me. The poor generally spend most of their money on housing and food, neither you can buy over the internet (basic food of course; not the luxury stuff). They will buy their stuff at the local markets, generally cheaper than over the Internet.
This is obviously a service for the upper class only, those with money that can afford such luxury goods.
And this is even less "bridging the digital divide" as all it does is allowing people that have an Internet connection already to actually use it to spend money overseas. It does not bring digital tech to the poor that do not have it yet, nor does it make Internet connections cheaper, faster, or more readily available.
This is just a commercial business, intent on making money by exploiting some hole in the market: in this case trying to solve the problem of payments from Africa and transportation of goods to Africa. Both which I can imagine are real issues. But there is surely no philanthropy involved as suggested in TFS.
Physical security: solid case, no USB/floppy/whatever. That should do the trick. Staff normally does not start meddling with hardware - if they start doing that, you will have bigger problems on your hands than just a virus risk.
the AV is kind of like car insurance: It protects you from accidents
Since when does insurance protect you from accidents? It only compensates you when an accident happened already. If you want to have a car analogy then you should compare AV with seat belts or air bags, that are prevention measures.
That said, for a smaller scale study, it might be possible to pay individuals to use or not use a cell phone;
We are not seeing anything like a brain cancer epidemic - and the research has to be done over a period of decades indeed. Paying people to not use mobile phones for decades won't work - and the numbers will be too small to be usable. I don't think we can detect any effect without looking at thousands of people over long periods of time; and even then it may be hard to detect any effects, if they exist.
Medical tech has advanced a lot indeed over the last decades, that for sure. So detection rates changed. I was thinking along the line of "more growth in brain cancer than xxx cancer over the last 50 years" but if detection capability has changed so much then that is flawed from the start.
I feel sorry for that super market chain but: wtf is AV doing on a POS computer?
POS should be a dedicated computer, running one and only one application (the POS software), on a thoroughly shielded LAN, talking to only a centralised server (or small network of servers if one is not enough) that collects the sales data and distributes prices etc. That server should itself be connected only to the POS network and a corporate LAN. In other words: no direct access out of the Internet, no web browsing, no local storage of any data files, no downloading, nothing that could have the most remote risk of a virus.
Exactly what I was thinking. Especially as there are no Amish or so in Europe.
Likely there will be no "control" as such and also no placebo group (after all proper medical research is done double blind with the real thing and placebo controls - however a placebo mobile phone just doesn't work), but there will be people that use their mobiles less than an hour a month, and others that don't put them down other than to change batteries. You can easily look at the difference between those two groups and still see whether mobile phone usage increases the risk. If there is a cancer risk, then more usage will increase this risk.
And another option for a "control" is the period until say 1980 - when mobile phones did not exist. How about brain cancer rates in that period of time compared to now?
Actually I think researchers should be able to find some effect simply by looking at total (brain)cancer rates in the population compared to mobile phone usage. Did the cancer rate, or the ratio of brain cancers vs. other cancers, increase over the last few decades?
Most Western countries keep lots of statistics including all kinds of medical records, so such a research should be relatively simple to carry out (simple as in: the data is there already, just has to be compiled together - just a lot of work). I can't believe it hasn't been done yet, still I don't recall having read anything about such a project let alone that it would show brain cancer increases together with mobile phone use increases.
Your comment makes me wonder: what, nowadays, is the real hardware bottleneck when it comes to servers?
I can imagine e.g. an SQL database server or a web server doing lots of dynamic pages needs quite some CPU horsepower and internal memory. Some multi-core Intel would be useful.
On the other hand a file server needs storage and lots of I/O bandwidth - no need for a very powerful CPU. ARM may be in place here as having enough power to keep up.
The same would account for a web server handling mainly static pages, I would also expect I/O bandwidth to be the core issue there.
Actually I have been doing for long time without AdBlockPlus but with FlashBlock. That was enough to stop those irritating blinking Flash ads.
That was until I was browsing some torrent sites and everything started to flash again. And it was slow because there was more ad than content.
Now I also have AdBlockPlus on this computer. Most of my computers don't have it though. Just FlashBlock. The non-Flash ads are generally not intrusive so OK with me.
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Please update your definitions. To groups like Al Qaeda, anything American owned (whether state or private) is a military target. For Hamas that would be anything Israeli owned. Don't forget that. One man's freedom fighter is the other man's terrorist.
Part of the reason civilian casualties in Gaza are so high is 'police stations' and 'schools' that are anything but.
The rest of the reason is of course the same why it's called "civil war" in the first place. In between child soldiers and suicide bombers there is not much difference between a fighter and a civilian.
In case of war, as we have seen in the past, merchant ships are not immune. Even today merchant ships are targeted: we call this "economic sanctions". Supplies to some countries (e.g. N. Korea) are controlled: rice can go, cars and wine not. Areas like the Gaza strip are even more locked down. Merchant ships trying to enter Gaza without permission from Israel run the risk of attack.
And didn't the US enter the European part of WW2 thanks to the sinking of a US owned merchant vessel by German torpedoes?
One of the ways to defeat a foe is to try and starve him: cut off their supplies. Make sure they have nothing to eat and they will have to surrender, or die from starvation.
On the other hand I'm sure merchant ships have been used a lot in warfare, as trojan horse kind of strategy. A fishing vessel full of armed soldiers. A bulk carrier fitted with torpedoes. I am sure it all has been done already.
By the way, besides kitting out a container with cruise missiles: how do you think most weapons are traded? My best guess would be in shipping containers.
That is not something a state that wishes to defend itself against a much bigger and more powerful foe (e.g. Iran or N. Korea vs the US) will care about much.
After all, in war, priority 1 is to survive and (hopefully) defeat the opponent.
Actually when I read this earlier in today's news paper I thought it makes total sense from a military/strategic point of view. And I was actually wondering why no-one else had thought of this before. Or maybe they are just not advertising it openly.
When it comes to transportation and handling of the equipment, a shipping container is great as it is standardised and fits easily on vessels, trains, trucks, and can be handled with standard lifting equipment.
The down side of course is the disappearance of the civil/military divide, which of course has already happened in many conflicts.
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
I guess you never heard of the 1990s?
Of course I have. In 1996 and 1997 (and 2001) Apple posted losses, all other years profits (source: Wikipedia).
Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day.
MS employs around 93000 people (MS's own figure for mid 2009).
The headcount of the Mozilla foundation I can not found but it seems to be a dozen or two at most from what I find here and there.
So when MS is making some 500 times more money than Mozilla means that they are doing worse per employee.
One large problem is the bright folks at Microsoft can't innovate on anything that could possibly lead to a loss of revenue of Windows products.
Of course. That is an issue. Though it seems they do invest a lot now in on-line services, including real improvements to IE's standards compliance.
On the user interface field they are being taken over on all sides by Apple and even Linux. There is so much innovation done there - MS doesn't have a proper touch interface to compete with the iPhone/iPad OS, for example. Of course MS has their legacy - there is no reason not to keep the old interface and allow the option of a new experimental one. Maybe even a few experimental interfaces. Let the power users find them and try them out - and listen to what the market thinks about it.
I strongly believe that it is not the underlying hardware that counts any more (yesteryear's is more than good enough for 99% of us - save hardcore gamers and hardcore CAD developers and so). It is not much the OS that counts any more (it just has to work, stable and secure - who cares what's under the hood), it is just the user interface. And there is no reason why MS can not do anything good there.
Computing is moving on-line: the browser is getting important. MS seems to understand this.
Computing is also moving more towards hand held devices. Like the iPad. MS is missing out on this.
Desktop computing as we had it will remain - the basic office work and gaming and web browsing on the "big" screen. MS is strong there now, but with the experiments going on in their competitor's products it is only a matter of time before someone finds the holy grail of desktop user interfaces and the competition really takes off. The Windows technical lock-in (mainly MS Word) is slowly dissolving already.
What surprises me most is this.
Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning. Now Bing, before the Zune (ended in failure), the Xbox (lost a lot of money, still alive though, can't imagine it has made them any money overall even if it would be profitable by now), and before I'm sure they lost heaps of money entering the office suite market with OpenOffice, the webmail market with Hotmail, and so on. Only their OS business has made a constant profit it seems. And Office is doing well as well. But that's it.
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
Google came out of nothing: they started up in a dorm room, came with a good product, and won the hearts and minds of the world and grew from there to become the behemoth they are now.
Sun has likely lost money on development of StarOffice, now OpenOffice.org, but their product is steadily making inroads and I don't think they are still pumping much money in it. If only because they're not such a rich company any more.
Netscape burnt and died, and from its ashes Firefox has risen. Making heaps of money, going strong, doing well.
Now for the examples above you may give counter examples of failures but it seems MS is the king. They have so much money, they can buy their way into any market they like (and they do), but they can not come up with anything innovative, anything desirable.
"Competing on the world stage" may not be cheap, but I think it may help if Microsoft starts to develop their own products and their own ideas, instead of an "iPod killer", a "Google competitor", etc. That seems to me a failure from the start. You have to have your own product that stands on its own, and is not targeting a specific existing product. "Netscape killer" Internet Explorer won due to lock-in and abuse of monopoly, not for being better than Netscape. Microsoft for some reason doesn't manage to compete on quality and on merit, they just try to solve those issues by throwing a lot of money at it. And that's a waste in more ways than one. We need innovation - no matter where it comes from, but MS is not exactly a company that is innovative these days.
Sure, the fine could run to millions. But it will only do so if thousands of people are at risk of spending months of their lives clearing up a mess of someone else's causing. As I said, the fine is still nothing next to that kind of damage.
Two problems here.
First: the victims don't get any compensation, the fine goes to state coffers. If thousands are affected, luckily in general only a few of them have more effect than having to change credit card numbers or so.
Second: if you add another zero or two to the fine, then almost certainly any company hit by it goes bankrupt. That is like the death penalty but then for companies. No chance to recover. I don't think that's so great an idea.
Those fines are probably not exactly on the light side. If just one record is lost, yes then it's not so much for a large company. However large companies tend to lose data in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of records at a time, possibly resulting in fines of many millions, maybe even billions of dollars. And you have to be quite a big company to be able to brush that under the table.
I get the idea but it's a poor example as getting to university, maybe even being able to read in the first place, indicates higher education, which is expensive, and in many poor countries only for the upper class. The rest of the people doesn't have the money - if only to not have to work and have time to study.
More like the actual electronics in it. That's the expensive part, and probably can't be made cheaper (material cost - they may use exotic materials, and development cost).
And no more boot-sector viruses.
I have the feeling it has more to do with the overall manufacturing (including materials) and development costs. That is a certain cost related to these devices that will not go lower.
It requires some metal and plastic (cheap), and some more exotic stuff for the actual chips. Those will be the costly part. And when manufacturing improves the same amount of material and work can store more data. And there may simply be no cost savings on having a lower storage capacity on the drive.
Indeed for some reason the bottom of the market is missing in USB drives. And I am seeing the same in the digital camera market, in that market there is also a bottom missing (as in really simple and low-cost devices; like the single-use cameras that had 36 exposures and then you just gave the whole thing to the photographer for development).
And so on: many high-tech markets do not have a low-end line it seems. It's just not there. Using maybe yesterday's tech, low cost, still good enough for many uses where cost is an issue.
Terrible summary again. In good /. fashion I didn't RTFA - it may be better but not likely.
TFS suggests this helps "the poorest of the poor". Now how those people would get the money to buy goods over the Internet (almost by definition luxury goods - if only due to the added cost of shipping) is beyond me. The poor generally spend most of their money on housing and food, neither you can buy over the internet (basic food of course; not the luxury stuff). They will buy their stuff at the local markets, generally cheaper than over the Internet.
This is obviously a service for the upper class only, those with money that can afford such luxury goods.
And this is even less "bridging the digital divide" as all it does is allowing people that have an Internet connection already to actually use it to spend money overseas. It does not bring digital tech to the poor that do not have it yet, nor does it make Internet connections cheaper, faster, or more readily available.
This is just a commercial business, intent on making money by exploiting some hole in the market: in this case trying to solve the problem of payments from Africa and transportation of goods to Africa. Both which I can imagine are real issues. But there is surely no philanthropy involved as suggested in TFS.
Physical security: solid case, no USB/floppy/whatever. That should do the trick. Staff normally does not start meddling with hardware - if they start doing that, you will have bigger problems on your hands than just a virus risk.
the AV is kind of like car insurance: It protects you from accidents
Since when does insurance protect you from accidents? It only compensates you when an accident happened already. If you want to have a car analogy then you should compare AV with seat belts or air bags, that are prevention measures.
That said, for a smaller scale study, it might be possible to pay individuals to use or not use a cell phone;
We are not seeing anything like a brain cancer epidemic - and the research has to be done over a period of decades indeed. Paying people to not use mobile phones for decades won't work - and the numbers will be too small to be usable. I don't think we can detect any effect without looking at thousands of people over long periods of time; and even then it may be hard to detect any effects, if they exist.
Medical tech has advanced a lot indeed over the last decades, that for sure. So detection rates changed. I was thinking along the line of "more growth in brain cancer than xxx cancer over the last 50 years" but if detection capability has changed so much then that is flawed from the start.
Quite apt, even though not POS: http://xkcd.com/463/.
I feel sorry for that super market chain but: wtf is AV doing on a POS computer?
POS should be a dedicated computer, running one and only one application (the POS software), on a thoroughly shielded LAN, talking to only a centralised server (or small network of servers if one is not enough) that collects the sales data and distributes prices etc. That server should itself be connected only to the POS network and a corporate LAN. In other words: no direct access out of the Internet, no web browsing, no local storage of any data files, no downloading, nothing that could have the most remote risk of a virus.
Or am I missing something here?
Exactly what I was thinking. Especially as there are no Amish or so in Europe.
Likely there will be no "control" as such and also no placebo group (after all proper medical research is done double blind with the real thing and placebo controls - however a placebo mobile phone just doesn't work), but there will be people that use their mobiles less than an hour a month, and others that don't put them down other than to change batteries. You can easily look at the difference between those two groups and still see whether mobile phone usage increases the risk. If there is a cancer risk, then more usage will increase this risk.
And another option for a "control" is the period until say 1980 - when mobile phones did not exist. How about brain cancer rates in that period of time compared to now?
Actually I think researchers should be able to find some effect simply by looking at total (brain)cancer rates in the population compared to mobile phone usage. Did the cancer rate, or the ratio of brain cancers vs. other cancers, increase over the last few decades?
Most Western countries keep lots of statistics including all kinds of medical records, so such a research should be relatively simple to carry out (simple as in: the data is there already, just has to be compiled together - just a lot of work). I can't believe it hasn't been done yet, still I don't recall having read anything about such a project let alone that it would show brain cancer increases together with mobile phone use increases.
This way running anti-virus is worse for an end user than no anti-virus.
The cure becomes worse than the disease.
At least being part of a spam-spewing botnet keeps the computer mostly functional.
Your comment makes me wonder: what, nowadays, is the real hardware bottleneck when it comes to servers?
I can imagine e.g. an SQL database server or a web server doing lots of dynamic pages needs quite some CPU horsepower and internal memory. Some multi-core Intel would be useful.
On the other hand a file server needs storage and lots of I/O bandwidth - no need for a very powerful CPU. ARM may be in place here as having enough power to keep up.
The same would account for a web server handling mainly static pages, I would also expect I/O bandwidth to be the core issue there.
But... does it run Windows?
Actually I have been doing for long time without AdBlockPlus but with FlashBlock. That was enough to stop those irritating blinking Flash ads.
That was until I was browsing some torrent sites and everything started to flash again. And it was slow because there was more ad than content.
Now I also have AdBlockPlus on this computer. Most of my computers don't have it though. Just FlashBlock. The non-Flash ads are generally not intrusive so OK with me.