If every copy of Windows on the Internet somehow magically disappeared, the SPAM problem would not abate. Bot herders and spammers would simply shift their efforts to other platforms.
Yes, and even though no one has ever done the experiment, if you got rid of religion the world would be a better place. Man, I could go on all day theorizing about hypothetical situations.
Okay, enough foolin' around. Here's what we do. Everyone in the world can shut down their windows machines for one week and then we'll measure the spam. That should settle the issue.
If you find discussions about morals annoying, you should probably pay more attention to your conscience.
I do pay attention to my own sense of ethics. But I don't insist on annoying people by asserting that their ethics are flawed or that they lack ethics for not adhering to mine. My feeling is that people who moralize have a limited sense of ethics and constantly try to remind themselves of morality by pointing out where others are unethical. If you want to change the world, start with the man in the mirror. That's the only moralistic advice I have to offer.
The Feds? No. Even the Feds don't have the power to stop a populace from flying their UAVs. Shooting down a model plane is more dangerous than the plane itself, so I don't see it becoming practice. What you are going to see is laws prohibiting *ownership* of UAVs and parts to build them. Most likely, these will come under the blanket of anti-terrorism laws.
A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox.
This doesn't solve the problem of an activation server for the OS. You boot into your VM and it can't activate because the server is non-existent. Any problem you have with open source software is magnified 10X with closed source.
If you can't use a secondary handling device (forceps) and a shield, then you do this sort of thing at arm's length in a hood. Yes, and you wear a fire resistant lab coat. And you do things very very slowly and deliberately. And you rehearse. Yes rehearse. The practice of rehearsal is seldom taught in a lab setting. I teach it because, even if you are practiced, you need to know where to place all of your essential apparatuses (yes that's the plural) before you begin. I also teach to visualize each action just before you do it, like the martial arts master breaking a stack of bricks with his hand. Visualization will help with safety--and it reduces the stochastic error of your results. Finally, the most critical safety advice when working with dangerous materials is actually printed on the cover the the Hitchhiker's Guide, but I'll repeat it here because of its importance: "DON'T PANIC."
Now maybe I don't have my name written up in some fancy shmancy "scientific journal".
But even *I* know that you don't handle pyrophoric materials without a labcoat!
Give me a break. You have no idea what you are talking about. Go get your degree in organic chemistry and then do at least a Master's thesis before you continue to pretend. "Fancy Shmancy?" You are a fucking idiot. I know I'm going to pay for that, but it needs to be said.
The lab is "on the job". Knowledge is created there. My guess is that you have never done real physical science so please stop pretending you know what you are talking about. If you have done real physical science, point to a real publication about *physical science* (chemistry, biology, biochemistry, physical chemistry, etc.) with your name on it. In industry, they don't do real physical science because they use a work flow for production or synthesis. Work flow is not science. Real science is work on the very edge of the unknown--so a worker doesn't even know what dangers she will encounter before she actually does an experiment. And she can't know what will be the result without doing the experiment. Do some science and come back and give us your thoughts. Until then your spewing flamebait that isn't going to be modded as such because 95% of the/. crowd doesn't do real physical science themselves.
the article didn't explain how they were going to improve the BSOD
That's not all they wouldn't explain:
Would Microsoft charge PC makers less per copy for Home Premium than it charges to run the exact same Home Premium SKU on a full-fledged notebook or desktop system? Would Microsoft attempt to establish itself as the judge of what is a "netbook"?
Microsoft officials had nothing more to say about my questions.
The problem has become that there is simply nothing left to improve in a typical OS for the vast majority of users. If you have a browser, an spreadsheet, and a wordprocessor, you cover 95% of your users' needs. So what can you do for sales? This seems to be the plan: (1) Increase general shininess and bling. (2) Reduce essential functionality relative to earlier distributions. (3) Price the OS on tiers based on restoring the essential functionality. You are seeing the self destruction of an antiquated business model, namely that OS sales should be profitable.
Here is a hint to all of the companies in the OS market: give your best distribution awayand use it as a client for services that google can't profitably provide for free.
They don't give one shit what OS you're running. If the user base numbers were reversed it would be linux malware on those devices not windows.
You are wrong. Of course you can't prove you are right and I can't prove that you are wrong, but trust me when I tell you that you are wrong. Here's why:
From my experience, windows loves everything to be run as root (or admin, or whatever it's called). I can't mount a samba drive without being root. I can't install an sftp program without being root. But on OS X, you can do both at the level of an unprivileged user. Now, what are you going to do as Joe stupid user? You are going to make yourself root (or admin, or whatever it's called) so that you can actually get some work done.
This is why both Linux and OS X are more secure. Both have a mechanism for on-the-fly administrative authentication and they only require root level permissions for actions that fundamentally *need* root level permissions (startup scripts, for example). If you are in the gui for OS X and Linux, you are given prompts for your password. If you like, you can take it to the command line and use sudo. Windows doesn't have sudo. It has log-out-and-log-in-as-admin instead.
Now, I haven't used vista, so maybe it's changed from XP. But I'm guessing that MS is too busy putting the shiny into Aero (or whatever eye candy is the latest-greatest) to actually focus on the interplay of usability and security. And I'm betting that it will be a cold day in hell before manufacturers don't just log in as admin and tweak their distributions, thus exposing the distribution to unintended infection. The fact that admin is the *default* account on windows and doesn't ask for authentication (as of XP) exacerbates the issue.
In short: MS does not focus on security and they especially do not think about the fact that usability and security are intricately related. And that's why I haven't used windows in over 10 years.
Huh? He's given two. Or do you mean a reference to the suppression of the geek skepticism reflex?
You are pretending to be dumb. But, in case you aren't: Yes. The parent post grouped Linux in with picture frames in terms of vulnerability but didn't give a reference specific to Linux. That's like saying that your favorite operating system sucks and giving examples of two *other* shitty operating systems as evidence. Actually, that's not like what he did. That is what he did.
We agree here and I support Chaffetz's position. But judging from your post, I don't think your reasons are sincere. Furthermore, (1) You don't understand what socialism is. (2) The election is over so quit goading Obama supporters. (3) If a republican suggested we needed a cock search of our asses before we got on a plane, you'd bet the first to bend over. Admit it.
it's clearly not the invasion of privacy, but the perceived moral issue related to bodies that is at stake for him.
If you have been traveling about every third week like I have for the past 6 years you'd be on board with any resistance to the steady erosion of privacy that has been happening at airports in recent history. I don't give a damn the man's reasons. I'm just happy someone on either side is against yet another invasion of my privacy. It's a refreshing change if you ask me.
But you never travel? Well, you'll feel your privacy eroding sooner or later and you won't give a damn anyone's reasons for resistance either. I'll be laughing when it's your naked daughter that pops up somewhere because some TSA dude/school cop/etc. thought she was hot under her clothes and posted the pictures he took on the internet.
I don't want the mechanic who thinks he can figure it out.
Weeding guys out that don't know what they are doing is what the free market is for. It's the USA. No one is forcing you to go to an incompetent (see the word "compete" in there?) mechanic. If you want to go to the dealer, go to the dealer. Me? I'm going to keep driving my 10 year old Ford and take it to my broham, Juan, when it doesn't run well. He knows where to find and how to replace the several on board computers. And I support the local economy more directly by using an independent mechanic. Competition baby!
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot spell "vile" without "vi".
Yes, and emacs put the vile in vi.
How fucking hard is it to strip non-numeric characters from a string?
Notice how you never got an answer to your question? It's that hard.
Perhaps it's time for the "open minded free thinkers" to quit trying to push their hollowness on us.
If hollowness is "open minded", how does one characterize this fullness of which you speak so fondly? Ah yes. "Closed minded."
If every copy of Windows on the Internet somehow magically disappeared, the SPAM problem would not abate. Bot herders and spammers would simply shift their efforts to other platforms.
Yes, and even though no one has ever done the experiment, if you got rid of religion the world would be a better place. Man, I could go on all day theorizing about hypothetical situations.
Okay, enough foolin' around. Here's what we do. Everyone in the world can shut down their windows machines for one week and then we'll measure the spam. That should settle the issue.
If you find discussions about morals annoying, you should probably pay more attention to your conscience.
I do pay attention to my own sense of ethics. But I don't insist on annoying people by asserting that their ethics are flawed or that they lack ethics for not adhering to mine. My feeling is that people who moralize have a limited sense of ethics and constantly try to remind themselves of morality by pointing out where others are unethical. If you want to change the world, start with the man in the mirror. That's the only moralistic advice I have to offer.
That kind of fraudulent access is not only illegal but immoral as well.
Quit dragging morality into a reasonable discussion. Morality is a highly personal issue. Moreover, moralizers are annoying.
and it could get you detained by you friendly TSA dude
Restrooms are free in airports because you couldn't hire enough TSA dudes to hold back the tides, if you know what I mean.
Best to make sure you won't get shot down/at.
The Feds? No. Even the Feds don't have the power to stop a populace from flying their UAVs. Shooting down a model plane is more dangerous than the plane itself, so I don't see it becoming practice. What you are going to see is laws prohibiting *ownership* of UAVs and parts to build them. Most likely, these will come under the blanket of anti-terrorism laws.
A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox.
This doesn't solve the problem of an activation server for the OS. You boot into your VM and it can't activate because the server is non-existent. Any problem you have with open source software is magnified 10X with closed source.
Or perhaps the moral of the story is that if you behave like a dick you can get into trouble.
Calling him a dick is rather dickish, don't you think?
If you can't use a secondary handling device (forceps) and a shield, then you do this sort of thing at arm's length in a hood. Yes, and you wear a fire resistant lab coat. And you do things very very slowly and deliberately. And you rehearse. Yes rehearse. The practice of rehearsal is seldom taught in a lab setting. I teach it because, even if you are practiced, you need to know where to place all of your essential apparatuses (yes that's the plural) before you begin. I also teach to visualize each action just before you do it, like the martial arts master breaking a stack of bricks with his hand. Visualization will help with safety--and it reduces the stochastic error of your results. Finally, the most critical safety advice when working with dangerous materials is actually printed on the cover the the Hitchhiker's Guide, but I'll repeat it here because of its importance: "DON'T PANIC."
Now maybe I don't have my name written up in some fancy shmancy "scientific journal". But even *I* know that you don't handle pyrophoric materials without a labcoat!
Give me a break. You have no idea what you are talking about. Go get your degree in organic chemistry and then do at least a Master's thesis before you continue to pretend. "Fancy Shmancy?" You are a fucking idiot. I know I'm going to pay for that, but it needs to be said.
The lab is "on the job". Knowledge is created there. My guess is that you have never done real physical science so please stop pretending you know what you are talking about. If you have done real physical science, point to a real publication about *physical science* (chemistry, biology, biochemistry, physical chemistry, etc.) with your name on it. In industry, they don't do real physical science because they use a work flow for production or synthesis. Work flow is not science. Real science is work on the very edge of the unknown--so a worker doesn't even know what dangers she will encounter before she actually does an experiment. And she can't know what will be the result without doing the experiment. Do some science and come back and give us your thoughts. Until then your spewing flamebait that isn't going to be modded as such because 95% of the /. crowd doesn't do real physical science themselves.
the article didn't explain how they were going to improve the BSOD
That's not all they wouldn't explain:
Would Microsoft charge PC makers less per copy for Home Premium than it charges to run the exact same Home Premium SKU on a full-fledged notebook or desktop system? Would Microsoft attempt to establish itself as the judge of what is a "netbook"? Microsoft officials had nothing more to say about my questions.
The problem has become that there is simply nothing left to improve in a typical OS for the vast majority of users. If you have a browser, an spreadsheet, and a wordprocessor, you cover 95% of your users' needs. So what can you do for sales? This seems to be the plan: (1) Increase general shininess and bling. (2) Reduce essential functionality relative to earlier distributions. (3) Price the OS on tiers based on restoring the essential functionality. You are seeing the self destruction of an antiquated business model, namely that OS sales should be profitable.
Here is a hint to all of the companies in the OS market: give your best distribution awayand use it as a client for services that google can't profitably provide for free.
That's the future.
They don't give one shit what OS you're running. If the user base numbers were reversed it would be linux malware on those devices not windows.
You are wrong. Of course you can't prove you are right and I can't prove that you are wrong, but trust me when I tell you that you are wrong. Here's why:
From my experience, windows loves everything to be run as root (or admin, or whatever it's called). I can't mount a samba drive without being root. I can't install an sftp program without being root. But on OS X, you can do both at the level of an unprivileged user. Now, what are you going to do as Joe stupid user? You are going to make yourself root (or admin, or whatever it's called) so that you can actually get some work done.
This is why both Linux and OS X are more secure. Both have a mechanism for on-the-fly administrative authentication and they only require root level permissions for actions that fundamentally *need* root level permissions (startup scripts, for example). If you are in the gui for OS X and Linux, you are given prompts for your password. If you like, you can take it to the command line and use sudo. Windows doesn't have sudo. It has log-out-and-log-in-as-admin instead.
Now, I haven't used vista, so maybe it's changed from XP. But I'm guessing that MS is too busy putting the shiny into Aero (or whatever eye candy is the latest-greatest) to actually focus on the interplay of usability and security. And I'm betting that it will be a cold day in hell before manufacturers don't just log in as admin and tweak their distributions, thus exposing the distribution to unintended infection. The fact that admin is the *default* account on windows and doesn't ask for authentication (as of XP) exacerbates the issue.
In short: MS does not focus on security and they especially do not think about the fact that usability and security are intricately related. And that's why I haven't used windows in over 10 years.
Huh? He's given two. Or do you mean a reference to the suppression of the geek skepticism reflex?
You are pretending to be dumb. But, in case you aren't: Yes. The parent post grouped Linux in with picture frames in terms of vulnerability but didn't give a reference specific to Linux. That's like saying that your favorite operating system sucks and giving examples of two *other* shitty operating systems as evidence. Actually, that's not like what he did. That is what he did.
most people don't walk around on the street corner with their wang out.
I do.
And you get modded insightful... What's going on today
I'll clear this up for you. His name is Peter Wang.
transgression of basic dignity
We agree here and I support Chaffetz's position. But judging from your post, I don't think your reasons are sincere. Furthermore, (1) You don't understand what socialism is. (2) The election is over so quit goading Obama supporters. (3) If a republican suggested we needed a cock search of our asses before we got on a plane, you'd bet the first to bend over. Admit it.
The reasoning behind a law is often not just fluff and "ends justify means". Because the reasoning is often recycled as an argument for more laws.
Two laws:
1. Everyone shall hereby be scanned by this machine.
2. No one shall be subject to being scanned by this machine.
Pick one. There are always going to be more laws. Forget about picking new ones based on the stated motives of your legislators.
I am afraid of a guy with a wooden/plastic/non-metal bomb.
I'm not afraid of them. Why should your paranoia impact my life? You fraidy people annoy me at every turn.
I don't want people to be "innocent until proven guilty" if I can only prove their guilt after they've blown up the plane I'm on.
I do.
Silly ciggieposeur, you forgot the tags and got your ass mod slapped.
it's clearly not the invasion of privacy, but the perceived moral issue related to bodies that is at stake for him.
If you have been traveling about every third week like I have for the past 6 years you'd be on board with any resistance to the steady erosion of privacy that has been happening at airports in recent history. I don't give a damn the man's reasons. I'm just happy someone on either side is against yet another invasion of my privacy. It's a refreshing change if you ask me.
But you never travel? Well, you'll feel your privacy eroding sooner or later and you won't give a damn anyone's reasons for resistance either. I'll be laughing when it's your naked daughter that pops up somewhere because some TSA dude/school cop/etc. thought she was hot under her clothes and posted the pictures he took on the internet.
I don't want the mechanic who thinks he can figure it out.
Weeding guys out that don't know what they are doing is what the free market is for. It's the USA. No one is forcing you to go to an incompetent (see the word "compete" in there?) mechanic. If you want to go to the dealer, go to the dealer. Me? I'm going to keep driving my 10 year old Ford and take it to my broham, Juan, when it doesn't run well. He knows where to find and how to replace the several on board computers. And I support the local economy more directly by using an independent mechanic. Competition baby!
So if you create a virus that stops the functionality of your OS, is M$ gonna sue you for patent infringement?
Not in their best interest. The virus writers keep the AV arm of the company in business.