I feel it necessary to clarify why I make the point I am making.
You seem to have a position that this judge's ruling is harmful. It may be so, and if so my hope is that people would rise up and present good arguments against it, convince others, fight against it.
But when people present bad arguments, and argue against a judge for trying to make sure his ruling is actually enforceable, it does noone any favors. I think it is WORSE to have an unenforceable bad ruling, for several reasons: 1) if it is not enforced for a short time, people are less likely to know what has happened, or to feel outraged. This dulls any reaction. 2) unenforced laws are worse than useless, as they make it harder for the average person to even know the entirety of the law 3) unenforced laws lower the respect for the law, leading to a society who disregards progressively more laws
The third point in particular means that, if things continued that way, you would end up with a more and more lawless society with harsher and harsher penalties for those who get caught-- which is in fact what we have. We have rampant copyright violation because noone respects those laws nor even understands them, and incredibly harsh examples of producers lashing out at those they can snag. Is this really the direction you want to go?
How about a non-broken analogy, where you are in the business of selling used cars, and the courts tell you it will start holding you liable for selling stolen cars.
I would assume that the presumption is that, if BT wants to do business, they need to make sure that the courts do not consider them an accessory to infringement. You can disagree with it, but it is consistent.
Ok, I get that "protecting IP" == "shady, evil business" in the slashdot mindset. But are people SERIOUSLY arguing that, given the judge's position, he needs to issue a ruling devoid of common sense? Do you think, given the nature of the internet, that the courts should be able to be crippled and circumvented by a simple change in domain registration costing $8 a pop?
Come on. You may dislike the judge's position, but arguing that he needs to act like a moron who doesnt understand the internet and the MO of sites like Pirate bay, etc ("the internet sees censorship as damage...", streisand effect, mirrored everywhere, etc) is silly. This is a judge who DOES understand the internet, and you just dont like his position-- at least be honest about it.
Issue 1: Windows meeting space is ONLY in Vista-- not in either XP, or 7. Its pretty darn useless when the solution offered is used by about 5% of computers-- I might as well standardize on FaceTime for all the good it would do.
Issue 2: Meeting space does not appear to do video chat or voice chat. The whole thing Im shooting for is lan-to-lan video chat.
It looks like a half-hearted effort, really, especially given how quickly they abandoned it. If theres a third party replacement that works on XP, Vista, and 7, that would be great.
I will grant that I probably shouldnt have been given the distro I was (which WAS given by a bearded unix guru), and that there may have been good alternatives, but I would be very impressed if they had anything close to a 3 click LDAP / AD joining process, or anything remotely like GPOs. Windows XP managed to cover the range of use cases from home user / media playing to corporate managed drone box very nicely, and I think calling it mediocre is a bit of a stretch. Only MS OS that I am more nostalgic for is Win 2000, and thats mainly because my recollection of it is on 2005-era hardware, where it was blazing fast. None of the crap, just a solid NT-based OS-- yes plz.
Apparently the cost of moving to an exchange server was guestimated at somewhere around £100m.
Apparently someone is looking for a fat retirement. Maybe im a bit naieve, but having participated in a move from IBM's groupware to Exchange for about 500 users, I think the end cost to the customer was under 100k, and took 3 engineers (some more qualified than others).
Your company may seriously want to evaluate the folks who make these estimates, as that number is an impressive display of "I dont know what budget to ask for, so Ill ask for something ridiculous and hope I get it".
Unless you were talking about moving like, an entire state's government (all departments at once) over to Exchange, in which case 100m sounds more reasonable, especially given the government tendency to try to throw money at problems until they go away.
My current biggest issue with 7 is that I am now discovering things that were abandoned with XP that 7 has no replacement for. The one that is currently haunting me is the fact that there is now no point-to-point LAN video chat software-- NetMeeting was killed with XP, and there really isnt a good replacement for Vista or 7 that would allow easy Hamachi'd file transfer, plus whiteboard, plus conferencing-- all of the "replacements" either lack functionality or rely on 3rd party mediators, which is unacceptable in scenarios where the entire point of a PtP vpn is security.
Im sure there are other issues, but that one is really bugging the crap out of me, that MS would take an awesome utility and just kill it (presumably because they want to monetize those features?).
When you say "mediocre", can you clarify? Can you point to a 2001 linux distro, for example, that was easy enough for mom and dad to use, and took about 3 minutes to completely integrate into a managed LDAP heirarchy? Or even one that supported anything remotely like GPOs? Or how about something in the era of XP SP2 (since thats the beginning of the XP we all know), that remotely competed?
How about I tell you about my first linux experience, in 2002, where I downloaded an iso from a questionable source, started it up, and was left with a dark screen with a "#". Having been told to type in "startx", i was left with a somewhat pretty but utterly cryptic GUI whose purpose was obscure and capabilities a mystery.
XP gets a bad rap for the viruses it got, but starting in XP SP2 it could be considered an honestly decent OS with an honestly decent firewall built in, and I would hazard that about 75% of the viruses it has been hit with since its inception could equally have affected ANY OS that went mainstream and received attention from the likes of Adobe and Sun (flash, pdf, jre plugins).
I understand Java is generally no speed demon compared to native compiled code, and desktop hard drive performance has almost stood still for ten years,
If by "stood still" you mean "almost tripled for mechanical drives", then yea, sure, i suppose.
But that doesnt explain why the article would be relevant for all of XML-enc: It mentions weaknesses in CBC, while everything Ive read leads me to believe that CBC is not necessary.
Im not going to deny that there are some clever people in the government-- the NSA, for example-- but large swaths of government are NOT those people, and it doesnt tend to encourage efficiency. My experience-- even at a local level-- has been that the tendency is far more to throw money at a problem than to actually try to do things properly.
As far as I know, XML is a class of languages which use tags and elements. HTML is, AFAIK, a type of XML. I have never heard of "XML encryption", except that a google search shows w3c recommendations and documentation for how to store encrypted data. The data itself, however, appears to use whatever cipher you want-- you could use AES CBC 128, for example, or Threefish if you desired.
Or am I missing something here? The article is quite scant on details.
With that, the only place the crackers can hide the viruses are in the user's files.
That is not correct. As I noted in the post above, Windows already HAS a file protection mechanism built in (has since Windows 2000), but it can be subverted like any other mechanism can. There IS no foolproof in computing.
That's a good start. But there needs to be more. Such as having multiple hashes of the KNOWN files for the OS and apps.
Windows has had that for ages, its called Windows File Protection. The problem is that very rarely are the system files themselves attacked-- that is too likely to trigger issues. Almost always, a third party DLL or driver is loaded at startup.
When system files ARE infected, the automatic file recovery mechanism is usually subverted, and the DLLcache copy of the file is also infected.
There is no silver bullet for this. Unless you want a walled garden, there will always be the possibility for system infections.
So things like Papa Johns and KFC are much closer to (and sometimes more than) US prices. But for food on the streets, you can still get a ton for $1.
Others have commented that for some things prices are indeed higher, especially compared to a few years ago. Groceries tend to be cheaper, however.
A lot of it probably has to do with the huge number of people without a lot of money who make their living selling things on the street; the bigger companies tend to charge higher prices.
By "about half the country feeling directly opposite of us" I have to assume you are talking about the more conservative part of the country. I guess I need to remind you that this program is being put in place and run by the liberals.
It might also be worth reminding folks that the conservatives tend to say "what does the constitution say", and it says nothing about a lot of this.
However, with nasty inflation hitting all the major cities in China (food now costs as much as here in the US)
Baloney, Im visiting over here right now (one of the 3 major cities), and food is about 1/6th as much as in the US. A 30 mile taxi ride was about $25. And a large KFC meal can be had for about 20 RMB-- about $3. Ive also heard how much some apartments cost in the area, and it is REALLY cheap when you compare with apartments in DC or NYC.
So inflation there may be, but youre out of your mind if you think food costs anywhere near as much as the US. 1 USD still goes a really long way over here.
Your argument seems to be "nothing is certain in a world where men break their promises", which is true. But according to this, its about as sure as things get: Since the start of the FDIC in 1934, no depositor has ever lost a penny of insured deposits.
So comparisons with insurance, and statements like
[It's] significantly less good as a guaranty than an insurance policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, piracy never killed anyone.
Yet it IS illegal, and it is ostensibly the duty of the courts to uphold and enforce laws.
Or are you honestly arguing that legislating from the bench is a GOOD thing?
I feel it necessary to clarify why I make the point I am making.
You seem to have a position that this judge's ruling is harmful. It may be so, and if so my hope is that people would rise up and present good arguments against it, convince others, fight against it.
But when people present bad arguments, and argue against a judge for trying to make sure his ruling is actually enforceable, it does noone any favors. I think it is WORSE to have an unenforceable bad ruling, for several reasons:
1) if it is not enforced for a short time, people are less likely to know what has happened, or to feel outraged. This dulls any reaction.
2) unenforced laws are worse than useless, as they make it harder for the average person to even know the entirety of the law
3) unenforced laws lower the respect for the law, leading to a society who disregards progressively more laws
The third point in particular means that, if things continued that way, you would end up with a more and more lawless society with harsher and harsher penalties for those who get caught-- which is in fact what we have. We have rampant copyright violation because noone respects those laws nor even understands them, and incredibly harsh examples of producers lashing out at those they can snag. Is this really the direction you want to go?
How about a non-broken analogy, where you are in the business of selling used cars, and the courts tell you it will start holding you liable for selling stolen cars.
Oh wait, we have laws like that.
I would assume that the presumption is that, if BT wants to do business, they need to make sure that the courts do not consider them an accessory to infringement. You can disagree with it, but it is consistent.
Arguments like yours are why we cant have "common sense" rulings and legislation any more. The sad thing is that you may see that as a good thing.
Ok, I get that "protecting IP" == "shady, evil business" in the slashdot mindset. But are people SERIOUSLY arguing that, given the judge's position, he needs to issue a ruling devoid of common sense? Do you think, given the nature of the internet, that the courts should be able to be crippled and circumvented by a simple change in domain registration costing $8 a pop?
Come on. You may dislike the judge's position, but arguing that he needs to act like a moron who doesnt understand the internet and the MO of sites like Pirate bay, etc ("the internet sees censorship as damage...", streisand effect, mirrored everywhere, etc) is silly. This is a judge who DOES understand the internet, and you just dont like his position-- at least be honest about it.
Sharepoint is a disaster, and I hope I never am tasked (again) with trying to make it useful.
Theres an old saying about this-- something like "when all you have is sharepoint, every problem looks like a nail."
Issue 1: Windows meeting space is ONLY in Vista-- not in either XP, or 7. Its pretty darn useless when the solution offered is used by about 5% of computers-- I might as well standardize on FaceTime for all the good it would do.
Issue 2: Meeting space does not appear to do video chat or voice chat. The whole thing Im shooting for is lan-to-lan video chat.
It looks like a half-hearted effort, really, especially given how quickly they abandoned it. If theres a third party replacement that works on XP, Vista, and 7, that would be great.
I will grant that I probably shouldnt have been given the distro I was (which WAS given by a bearded unix guru), and that there may have been good alternatives, but I would be very impressed if they had anything close to a 3 click LDAP / AD joining process, or anything remotely like GPOs. Windows XP managed to cover the range of use cases from home user / media playing to corporate managed drone box very nicely, and I think calling it mediocre is a bit of a stretch. Only MS OS that I am more nostalgic for is Win 2000, and thats mainly because my recollection of it is on 2005-era hardware, where it was blazing fast. None of the crap, just a solid NT-based OS-- yes plz.
Funny, in many civilized nations it is an innate right.
What we have here, is a failure to understand the word "innate".
Apparently the cost of moving to an exchange server was guestimated at somewhere around £100m.
Apparently someone is looking for a fat retirement. Maybe im a bit naieve, but having participated in a move from IBM's groupware to Exchange for about 500 users, I think the end cost to the customer was under 100k, and took 3 engineers (some more qualified than others).
Your company may seriously want to evaluate the folks who make these estimates, as that number is an impressive display of "I dont know what budget to ask for, so Ill ask for something ridiculous and hope I get it".
Unless you were talking about moving like, an entire state's government (all departments at once) over to Exchange, in which case 100m sounds more reasonable, especially given the government tendency to try to throw money at problems until they go away.
My current biggest issue with 7 is that I am now discovering things that were abandoned with XP that 7 has no replacement for. The one that is currently haunting me is the fact that there is now no point-to-point LAN video chat software-- NetMeeting was killed with XP, and there really isnt a good replacement for Vista or 7 that would allow easy Hamachi'd file transfer, plus whiteboard, plus conferencing-- all of the "replacements" either lack functionality or rely on 3rd party mediators, which is unacceptable in scenarios where the entire point of a PtP vpn is security.
Im sure there are other issues, but that one is really bugging the crap out of me, that MS would take an awesome utility and just kill it (presumably because they want to monetize those features?).
When you say "mediocre", can you clarify? Can you point to a 2001 linux distro, for example, that was easy enough for mom and dad to use, and took about 3 minutes to completely integrate into a managed LDAP heirarchy? Or even one that supported anything remotely like GPOs? Or how about something in the era of XP SP2 (since thats the beginning of the XP we all know), that remotely competed?
How about I tell you about my first linux experience, in 2002, where I downloaded an iso from a questionable source, started it up, and was left with a dark screen with a "#". Having been told to type in "startx", i was left with a somewhat pretty but utterly cryptic GUI whose purpose was obscure and capabilities a mystery.
XP gets a bad rap for the viruses it got, but starting in XP SP2 it could be considered an honestly decent OS with an honestly decent firewall built in, and I would hazard that about 75% of the viruses it has been hit with since its inception could equally have affected ANY OS that went mainstream and received attention from the likes of Adobe and Sun (flash, pdf, jre plugins).
I understand Java is generally no speed demon compared to native compiled code, and desktop hard drive performance has almost stood still for ten years,
If by "stood still" you mean "almost tripled for mechanical drives", then yea, sure, i suppose.
But that doesnt explain why the article would be relevant for all of XML-enc: It mentions weaknesses in CBC, while everything Ive read leads me to believe that CBC is not necessary.
Im not going to deny that there are some clever people in the government-- the NSA, for example-- but large swaths of government are NOT those people, and it doesnt tend to encourage efficiency. My experience-- even at a local level-- has been that the tendency is far more to throw money at a problem than to actually try to do things properly.
Oursourcing is not the same as cloud. It can be, but not always.
Cloud is not the same as insecure, or unreliable. It can be, but not always.
In house is not the same as cheap and responsive. It can be, but not always.
Hope that clarifies things.
As far as I know, XML is a class of languages which use tags and elements. HTML is, AFAIK, a type of XML. I have never heard of "XML encryption", except that a google search shows w3c recommendations and documentation for how to store encrypted data. The data itself, however, appears to use whatever cipher you want-- you could use AES CBC 128, for example, or Threefish if you desired.
Or am I missing something here? The article is quite scant on details.
With that, the only place the crackers can hide the viruses are in the user's files.
That is not correct. As I noted in the post above, Windows already HAS a file protection mechanism built in (has since Windows 2000), but it can be subverted like any other mechanism can. There IS no foolproof in computing.
That's a good start. But there needs to be more. Such as having multiple hashes of the KNOWN files for the OS and apps.
Windows has had that for ages, its called Windows File Protection. The problem is that very rarely are the system files themselves attacked-- that is too likely to trigger issues. Almost always, a third party DLL or driver is loaded at startup.
When system files ARE infected, the automatic file recovery mechanism is usually subverted, and the DLLcache copy of the file is also infected.
There is no silver bullet for this. Unless you want a walled garden, there will always be the possibility for system infections.
Apparently I was a little soon in speaking.
So things like Papa Johns and KFC are much closer to (and sometimes more than) US prices. But for food on the streets, you can still get a ton for $1.
Others have commented that for some things prices are indeed higher, especially compared to a few years ago. Groceries tend to be cheaper, however.
A lot of it probably has to do with the huge number of people without a lot of money who make their living selling things on the street; the bigger companies tend to charge higher prices.
By "about half the country feeling directly opposite of us" I have to assume you are talking about the more conservative part of the country. I guess I need to remind you that this program is being put in place and run by the liberals.
It might also be worth reminding folks that the conservatives tend to say "what does the constitution say", and it says nothing about a lot of this.
However, with nasty inflation hitting all the major cities in China (food now costs as much as here in the US)
Baloney, Im visiting over here right now (one of the 3 major cities), and food is about 1/6th as much as in the US. A 30 mile taxi ride was about $25. And a large KFC meal can be had for about 20 RMB-- about $3. Ive also heard how much some apartments cost in the area, and it is REALLY cheap when you compare with apartments in DC or NYC.
So inflation there may be, but youre out of your mind if you think food costs anywhere near as much as the US. 1 USD still goes a really long way over here.
Your argument seems to be "nothing is certain in a world where men break their promises", which is true. But according to this, its about as sure as things get:
Since the start of the FDIC in 1934, no depositor has ever lost a penny of insured deposits.
So comparisons with insurance, and statements like
[It's] significantly less good as a guaranty than an insurance policy.
seem to fall flat.
When I ask for my money, who is returning it to me, the bank or the government?
Can you cite a period of time in the last 50 years when your answer would be different?