Hopefully you don't consider the "run any program in the plugin directory" part to be the bug. Seeing as if you require the plugin to be registered in some plugin DB before it's run, the inserting malware will just alter the DB so that the inserted plugin is registered. It'll still be exactly as vulnerable, but you've got added complexity to maintain.
Ha. Ha. Phobos and Deimos have mass, relative to Mars, of jack and shit. Mars/Eris relative mass would at least be in the same (decimal) order of magnitude as Earth/Moon.
And to repeat again what I said before, the science is still out, if it wasn't we wouldn't be debating, just like we aren't debating gravity.
You are still debating about whether global warming is happening or not. The scientists aren't. What they're debating about is how much of it is going to happen.
And no, a trade secret certainly does not qualify as prior art in the US. Nor should it.
Why? I think patents are wrong anyway, but letting someone shut down a competitor by getting a patent on whatever trade secret thing the competitor's doing? That's just evil.
You do realize that the only reason Mutually Assured Destruction worked for keeping a nuclear war from happening was the Mutually part? So building that missile shield is essentially declaring that you (the USA) want the ability to use nuclear weapons without retaliation. So, as a denizen of the Baltic region, it would really have been nice if you'd picked a president that doesn't do military aggression four years back already. At least the next one hopefully won't be doing everything he can to make things worse like Bush has.
Personally I would instead recommend a utility to show which directories take up space, I used a nice one some time ago but don't remember the name - realized I had some 50GB down a path I didn't realize.
Konqueror, one of the standard directory views does that.
From what I've read, the bug causing the overwrite is in somewhere other than the network card's driver. That something is overwriting random memory and it happens to hit the memory region mapped for writing the card's firmware.
The only versions of Windows you ever get to see are the final releases. However, I'd bet they occasionally break some hardware on that multi-thousand machine internal testing farm of theirs.
And what part of "alpha release" does imply "not testing" to you?
So what you're saying is that that particular subset of the strong fucks everyone else over anyway. The difference then is that with religion, it doesn't help, but still imposes irrational and stupid rules on the society. Oh, and is an excellent tool for those wishing to control the masses of average lusers.
If you're a believer in free markets, you have no problem with any market you're dominating.
Frankly, you free-market ideologists are even more naive about greed than communists. At least the latter only ignore it, while you build your system on the assumption that people will be motivated by greed and then declare all to be well before fully considering the implications of that.
(The GNU folks will argue, approximately, "well, if you didn't accept the license, then you must be infringing the copyright of the software." That's correct, so far as it goes. But, there are other ways to get permission to run, such as Section 117 of the copyright act (in the US) or just an implied license. It's possible to argue "Well, you gave it to me without telling me you were licensing it under the GPL. Why should the GPL apply at all instead of the default set of rules for when this happens?")
Could you please at least read the GPL before talking about it? It quite specifically states that you don't need to agree to it to run the software covered by it.
And seeing as those legacy documents are stored in a format that is not, in fact, OOXML, how does WordWrapLikeWord95 help? A format conversion will be required anyway, so as long as the new target format has flexible enough word wrap specification, there is no need for something as specific as WordWrapLikeWord95.
The only case in which it makes any sense, and what probably is the case, is that OOXML is just a direct conversion of the old binary formats. The tag and attribute names actually often look like they were taken from the source code for old formats. Which makes it pretty easy for MS to implement the file format - they already had the code (with all the now standard-enforced bugs to boot). And about as hard for everyone else as the binary formats have been.
So how does the client's user agent know where to display that pad? Oh, hey, the attacking program can use that information too. Now, you could just not display the pad, which would certainly stop the attack. But that approach might also have some adverse effects as far as usability goes.
Please try to understand that any security scheme that requires the attacker to not know something you tell them just won't work.
Did you take into account that the Mozilla record didn't count automated updates, just manual downloads? I wouldn't be so certain those others have beaten the record in the same terms.
You don't seem to understand that GPL doesn't forbid commercial distribution. It does, however, forbid adding extra restrictions on the code licensed under it. "No commercial distribution" would be such extra restriction.
And this is a relevant point, since there are plenty of commercial redistributors of OO.o and KOffice. For example, I think all Linux distros that have paid support available would qualify.
Non-commercial projects can implement them. Commercial projects can not. So Lotus Symphony and Sun Office can't use these specs. OpenOffice and KOffice can.
They can't, either. At least not without changing their license to forbid commercial distribution.
Actually, altering the atmospheric composition really is one way we could render the planet uninhabitable for all but maybe some extremophiles. A runaway greenhouse effect is what happened to Venus.
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Hopefully you don't consider the "run any program in the plugin directory" part to be the bug. Seeing as if you require the plugin to be registered in some plugin DB before it's run, the inserting malware will just alter the DB so that the inserted plugin is registered. It'll still be exactly as vulnerable, but you've got added complexity to maintain.
Also, it's "go out of business". What if EA or other DRM-happy giant corporation buys them out?
Ha. Ha.
Phobos and Deimos have mass, relative to Mars, of jack and shit. Mars/Eris relative mass would at least be in the same (decimal) order of magnitude as Earth/Moon.
And to repeat again what I said before, the science is still out, if it wasn't we wouldn't be debating, just like we aren't debating gravity.
You are still debating about whether global warming is happening or not. The scientists aren't. What they're debating about is how much of it is going to happen.
And no, a trade secret certainly does not qualify as prior art in the US. Nor should it.
Why? I think patents are wrong anyway, but letting someone shut down a competitor by getting a patent on whatever trade secret thing the competitor's doing? That's just evil.
And you must be no geek. It's possible to admire a system that has parts doing really neat stuff without approving of the system's purpose as a whole.
You do realize that the only reason Mutually Assured Destruction worked for keeping a nuclear war from happening was the Mutually part? So building that missile shield is essentially declaring that you (the USA) want the ability to use nuclear weapons without retaliation.
So, as a denizen of the Baltic region, it would really have been nice if you'd picked a president that doesn't do military aggression four years back already. At least the next one hopefully won't be doing everything he can to make things worse like Bush has.
Ah, the good old "X is not quite as bad as Y, therefore we can ignore X being bad" defense.
And this is usefull how? Other than when writing device drivers.
Personally I would instead recommend a utility to show which directories take up space, I used a nice one some time ago but don't remember the name - realized I had some 50GB down a path I didn't realize.
Konqueror, one of the standard directory views does that.
Or du.
From what I've read, the bug causing the overwrite is in somewhere other than the network card's driver. That something is overwriting random memory and it happens to hit the memory region mapped for writing the card's firmware.
The only versions of Windows you ever get to see are the final releases. However, I'd bet they occasionally break some hardware on that multi-thousand machine internal testing farm of theirs.
And what part of "alpha release" does imply "not testing" to you?
I would guess that OpenOffice Calc is not suitable either, although I would tend to trust it a little more than Excel simply because it's open source.
Their spec is to be bug-compatible with Excel. Though, IIRC, with optional parameters for correct behaviour.
So what you're saying is that that particular subset of the strong fucks everyone else over anyway. The difference then is that with religion, it doesn't help, but still imposes irrational and stupid rules on the society. Oh, and is an excellent tool for those wishing to control the masses of average lusers.
Oh, hey. That's exactly what they're doing.
Research. Then, maybe, talk.
If you're a believer in free markets, you have no problem with any market you're dominating.
Frankly, you free-market ideologists are even more naive about greed than communists. At least the latter only ignore it, while you build your system on the assumption that people will be motivated by greed and then declare all to be well before fully considering the implications of that.
(The GNU folks will argue, approximately, "well, if you didn't accept the license, then you must be infringing the copyright of the software." That's correct, so far as it goes. But, there are other ways to get permission to run, such as Section 117 of the copyright act (in the US) or just an implied license. It's possible to argue "Well, you gave it to me without telling me you were licensing it under the GPL. Why should the GPL apply at all instead of the default set of rules for when this happens?")
Could you please at least read the GPL before talking about it? It quite specifically states that you don't need to agree to it to run the software covered by it.
And seeing as those legacy documents are stored in a format that is not, in fact, OOXML, how does WordWrapLikeWord95 help? A format conversion will be required anyway, so as long as the new target format has flexible enough word wrap specification, there is no need for something as specific as WordWrapLikeWord95.
The only case in which it makes any sense, and what probably is the case, is that OOXML is just a direct conversion of the old binary formats. The tag and attribute names actually often look like they were taken from the source code for old formats. Which makes it pretty easy for MS to implement the file format - they already had the code (with all the now standard-enforced bugs to boot). And about as hard for everyone else as the binary formats have been.
So how does the client's user agent know where to display that pad? Oh, hey, the attacking program can use that information too.
Now, you could just not display the pad, which would certainly stop the attack. But that approach might also have some adverse effects as far as usability goes.
Please try to understand that any security scheme that requires the attacker to not know something you tell them just won't work.
Which in turn probably means the advertiser gets to wiggle out of paying for any clicks in the period the bots have been active.
Did you take into account that the Mozilla record didn't count automated updates, just manual downloads? I wouldn't be so certain those others have beaten the record in the same terms.
RTFM? http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ
Firefox's prefetch only loads stuff explicitly marked as prefetchable. AVG just loads everything.
I hope you can see the difference there.
You don't seem to understand that GPL doesn't forbid commercial distribution. It does, however, forbid adding extra restrictions on the code licensed under it. "No commercial distribution" would be such extra restriction.
And this is a relevant point, since there are plenty of commercial redistributors of OO.o and KOffice. For example, I think all Linux distros that have paid support available would qualify.
Non-commercial projects can implement them. Commercial projects can not. So Lotus Symphony and Sun Office can't use these specs. OpenOffice and KOffice can.
They can't, either. At least not without changing their license to forbid commercial distribution.
Actually, altering the atmospheric composition really is one way we could render the planet uninhabitable for all but maybe some extremophiles. A runaway greenhouse effect is what happened to Venus.