I'm certain all major retailers have beefed up their security systems in light of the TJ Maxx debacle. Nevertheless, I don't actually care about their security failures. I only give them enough information for someone to use my credit card, not to steal my identity. Because I also check my credit card statements like a hawk (yay for online banking!!!), and because my credit card company will eat the loss, I am not that concerned if Best Buy lost my credit card info.
I am really concerned about stores that have your personal information such as your home address and the like. I never part with that information unless I have to do so (doctor, etc.)
In this situation, just take it up with your credit card company if you bought using your credit card. Otherwise, you're in trouble, no?
Incidentally, that's why I buy everything I can (except for low-cost stuff) with my credit card. If I'm unhappy, I can complain. More importantly, I can threaten to void purchases. The threat of voiding purchases via your credit card, in my experience, is more useful than actually voiding purchases. The only time I've actually had to follow through on the threat was when hotels.com charged my card but didn't reserve a room for me. Hotels.com refused to cancel the payment because I hadn't given them enough warning. (Ha!) I couldn't get the CSR droid to give up, so I just reserved a new room at the same hotel (for a lower price) and then voided the hotels.com purchase.
Most of the time, though, your credit card company will be on your side, especially if you are a high-value account that buys lots of stuff and have a high credit limit.
It's popular for companies to have licensing programs based upon a threat of litigation. The first step is always to convince the other guy that he needs your license, so you prepare a court case and say, "If we had to sue you for patent infringement, here is what we would say..." Then the licensee hopefully will see the error of his ways and pay you money. When things go public, it probably means that negotiations broke down a bit and the patentee is putting the screws onto the customer.
TransMeta just received a settlement from Intel for $250 million. Pretty much the same thing.
The infallibility fallacy is probably why so many bad things happen. "It can't happen to me--I know what I'm doing!"
Well, you only need one idiot to get into a car accident. Even if you're not in a high-risk group, like a teenager, you share the road with them. The first question is do you really think you can drive a car better than a commercial airline pilot can fly his airplane? Probably not. Even if you did, the second question is do you think everyone around you drives their car better than a commercial airline pilot flies his airplane?
The Space Shuttle Main Engines are now marvels of modern engineering because of all the highly expensive testing and experience that went into building them. They are the only restartable main engines in the world, including any of the great rocket engines the Russians have. The first iterations of the SSME were not good at all. They were designed component-by-component then stuck together without much testing as a unit. The engine also suffered from all sorts of integration problems. Through all the testing, engineers were able to build new models of the SSME that were much improved in terms of lowered maintenance costs and reliability.
In theory, the three branches of government are supposed to be equal. However, the Executive branch is in charge of the federal prosecutors and the military. If you piss off the Executive, your mergers will get denied by the SEC and the FTC (executive), you might get jailed or Gitmo'd for breaching national security (executive), prosecuted for Enronesque escapades (executive), etc.
I'd rather piss off Congress than this President. Don't forget they outted a spy just because her husband was a critic of the Executive.
I am in the minority here, but I think the biggest problem with software patents is how long the patent term is compared to the progress of the art. In the United States, you get twenty years from filing. Imagine the progress made in the software in that time frame and compare it to the progress in the field of airplanes, or carpet manufacture.
Much of scientific progress is evolutionary, which is fitting in some way. Everyone stands on the shoulder of giants. Watson and Crick didn't just discover the structure of DNA, nor did the Wright Brothers just decide to build an airplane. All their work came on the shoulders of others, but we wouldn't say that their discoveries aren't patentable.
The same is true of software patents. If you believe in patents in general, but disagree with software patents, I think the true objection actually lies in the length of the term and excessive protection.
Two things: 1. Hardware suppliers are supposed to give you the exact same hardware for each of the "same" system you order--makes regressing problems easier, and eases management issues. Your supplier didn't--maybe they used a different video card that had the same chipset but different manufacturer. If you installed Windows on a hundred computers, with the exact same hardware, the results should be exactly the same except for the odd crash. This doesn't sound like a "Microsoft being stupid" story as much as a "hardware supplier slipped in some greyware video cards to unsuspecting educational enterprise" story.
2. Windows Update isn't an enterprise-class solution. Again, makes regression impossible. Push your own solution with the Microsoft-provided hotfix packages, or sneakernet them.
I know this is a joke, but one of the final effects of hypothermia is a feeling of complete warmth that causes its victims to strip down in the bitter cold and freeze to death. It's called paradoxical undressing. Drinking also makes you feel warmer than you actually are; that's probably why so many homeless alcoholics freeze to death during a cold snap. Anyone drinking to stay warm probably shouldn't.
If you're cynical enough to believe that the military is using this as an excuse to develop high-powered lasers, or potentially a space-based death ray, then why do you also say that it's a really "stupid" idea? By your thesis, it's a good but *evil* idea.
Dude, you must be naive as all hell if you believe that, in an environment where twelve members of a jury falsely convict the defendant, that the judge of all people will free the defendant.
"However, during the Civil Rights era, all-white juries were known to refuse to convict white defendants for the murder of African-Americans."
From the Wikipedia article on jury nullification. If the laws are unjust, let them stand and be mocked. Let them be remembered in history as a shameful chapter. But don't take matters into your own hands in a back room.
The law that was violated allowed for damages many times heavier than what the jury alloted. The jury, believe it or not, showed restraint in not grinding the defendant into the ground. The defendant's utter lack of a case and seemingly frivolous defense must have annoyed the jury.
The law is the law. If you don't like the law, change it at the ballots, not the jury box. It's a democracy, after all. If the law was applied based on how the jury feels about the defendant, there'd really be no point in having courts. "Oh, she's a single mother--let's let her off." "Oh, she's disabled, let's let her off." "Oh, she's white! Let's let her off." "Oh, she's black, single mother scamming disability--let's screw her!"
I think the law is retarded. But blaming the jury is like blaming the soldier on the ground in Iraq for the war--he just does what he's told, and not what he thinks should be done.
American patent law (35 U.S.C. Sec 287) allows patentees to recover only when the infringer is actually aware of the patents or if the product was actually marked with the patents. There is a question of how to "mark" software with patent numbers. Certainly Microsoft hasn't given the kind of notice that would let anyone know which patents have been allegedly infringed. The question becomes whether its products have been sufficiently marked with all the patents that can be enforced.
Microsoft can sue to stop the infringement of patents it hasn't marked products with or where infringers were aware, but it can't get back damages.
Gives you leverage when negotiating tax breaks with the municipality. Traditional theory always has been that work-related taxes fall on property owners in the long term because they can't move their property. Being able to move your server room, as complicated and huge as it is, to another state within a week forces the municipality to give you tax breaks--or else.
Foxit has a related vulnerability that requires user interaction to run the arbitrary code. The Adobe version, of course, runs the arbitrary code without the vulnerability. You could say that Foxit doesn't have the same vulnerability but it comes from the same flaw.
As the average Slashdotter knows, the F-117 Shadowhawk is bumpy-looking plane with faceted surfaces that helps hide it from enemy radar systems. During the development of the aircraft, they made advances in fly-by-wire systems that allowed such an oddly-shaped monstrosity in the air. At one point, the system manager said something like, "I can make the Statue of Liberty do barrel rolls." I guess the same thing is true here.
Are you sure that your thoughts are secure? You have the right to remain quiet for a criminal prosecution for which you fear punishment. This excludes civil suits (like the RIAA suits) and criminal prosecutions of your friends and family.
Anyway, keys are not ephemeral just like IP logs aren't just bits and bytes. No one remembers all their keys--you save them on a hard drive, a floppy, a key drive, etc. The physical iteration they take is what the government will demand. No one wants your thoughts.
The written request may be "All e-mails between persons X and Y between January 2007 and June, 2007, inclusive." Then you have to come up with all the session keys for all the thousands of encrypted e-mails you sent. The government guy will smile at you as you realize you're going to jail because you didn't keep all of these keys. Then you have to cave in and sell out your friends to avoid jail time.
Sabre was crucial technology that kept AA at the head of the pack. The system was quick and assigned the quickest available flight to each passnger. Sabre began as a military system for assigning interceptors to incoming targets, but there was clearly an application to assigning passengers to planes. Sabre eventually got spun off into its own company. Travelocity is based on SABRE technology.
Another reason for secrecy is that SABRE was used to manipulate rankings to favor American Airlines flights over others. This eventually got outlawed by the federal government as unfair competition.
It's kind of like David Hager, a gynecologist who worked for the FDA. Hager stopped the emergency contraception pill Plan B from being sold over-the-counter despite the science advisory committee suggesting that it should be. For the second time in fifty years, the suggestion of the committee was ignored. The objection was that it would encourage unprotected sex. Eventually, Plan B was sold OTC but the fact that the FDA was politicalized made news.
During a divorce, Hager's wife alleged that he had raped and sodomized her while she was asleep under the influence of prescription medication. His defense was that he had gotten lost and hadn't meant to sodomize her. (I forget how he got around the whole unwanted sex part of the charges.) Yes, a gynecologist couldn't find his wife's personal parts.
Or perhaps eBay is incompetent or lying. This may be amazing, but hackers may actually cover their tracks so well that administrators don't even know exactly what was stolen. For example, data that is supposed to be transient may be intercepted and saved by the hacker. The administrator doesn't know what was there because the transient data was destroyed and not saved on their systems. This is almost definitely not the case here because the eBay server would have to be massively PWND but it's definitely happened before on a massive scale.
The most disgusting part of all of this is that the telcos let the little guys take all the risks, prove and market the technology to the public, and show that there is a viable market for VoIP phone service. They they realized that they could squeeze more money out of consumers than Vonage et.al. were, but the only way to do that was put them out of business.
The strategy you describe is known as "follow the follower." Imagine a sailing race where you can risk how you tack your sails--riskier ways may give you more speed but may also stop you dead. One guy is way in the lead. How does he tack his sails? He looks at the guy right behind him and does whatever the follower does. If the follower's tacking makes good time, they both make good time and the lead is preserved. If the follower's tacking slows them down, then they both slow down and the lead is preserve. That's why incumbents who by definition are winning the race aren't in a spirit of innovation--why fix what isn't broke?
Look at Windows. It was crap and didn't innovate at all until OS X became a real threat. Then Vista began to focus on security, and then there was all the pretty GUI features. As long as it's close enough, then consumers will keep going to Microsoft and make this strategy pay off.
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I'm certain all major retailers have beefed up their security systems in light of the TJ Maxx debacle. Nevertheless, I don't actually care about their security failures. I only give them enough information for someone to use my credit card, not to steal my identity. Because I also check my credit card statements like a hawk (yay for online banking!!!), and because my credit card company will eat the loss, I am not that concerned if Best Buy lost my credit card info.
I am really concerned about stores that have your personal information such as your home address and the like. I never part with that information unless I have to do so (doctor, etc.)
In this situation, just take it up with your credit card company if you bought using your credit card. Otherwise, you're in trouble, no?
Incidentally, that's why I buy everything I can (except for low-cost stuff) with my credit card. If I'm unhappy, I can complain. More importantly, I can threaten to void purchases. The threat of voiding purchases via your credit card, in my experience, is more useful than actually voiding purchases. The only time I've actually had to follow through on the threat was when hotels.com charged my card but didn't reserve a room for me. Hotels.com refused to cancel the payment because I hadn't given them enough warning. (Ha!) I couldn't get the CSR droid to give up, so I just reserved a new room at the same hotel (for a lower price) and then voided the hotels.com purchase.
Most of the time, though, your credit card company will be on your side, especially if you are a high-value account that buys lots of stuff and have a high credit limit.
It's popular for companies to have licensing programs based upon a threat of litigation. The first step is always to convince the other guy that he needs your license, so you prepare a court case and say, "If we had to sue you for patent infringement, here is what we would say..." Then the licensee hopefully will see the error of his ways and pay you money. When things go public, it probably means that negotiations broke down a bit and the patentee is putting the screws onto the customer.
TransMeta just received a settlement from Intel for $250 million. Pretty much the same thing.
Nope. You have one year to patent an invention after you offer to sell the product, or disclose its existence.
The infallibility fallacy is probably why so many bad things happen. "It can't happen to me--I know what I'm doing!"
Well, you only need one idiot to get into a car accident. Even if you're not in a high-risk group, like a teenager, you share the road with them. The first question is do you really think you can drive a car better than a commercial airline pilot can fly his airplane? Probably not. Even if you did, the second question is do you think everyone around you drives their car better than a commercial airline pilot flies his airplane?
The Space Shuttle Main Engines are now marvels of modern engineering because of all the highly expensive testing and experience that went into building them. They are the only restartable main engines in the world, including any of the great rocket engines the Russians have. The first iterations of the SSME were not good at all. They were designed component-by-component then stuck together without much testing as a unit. The engine also suffered from all sorts of integration problems. Through all the testing, engineers were able to build new models of the SSME that were much improved in terms of lowered maintenance costs and reliability.
In theory, the three branches of government are supposed to be equal. However, the Executive branch is in charge of the federal prosecutors and the military. If you piss off the Executive, your mergers will get denied by the SEC and the FTC (executive), you might get jailed or Gitmo'd for breaching national security (executive), prosecuted for Enronesque escapades (executive), etc.
I'd rather piss off Congress than this President. Don't forget they outted a spy just because her husband was a critic of the Executive.
I am in the minority here, but I think the biggest problem with software patents is how long the patent term is compared to the progress of the art. In the United States, you get twenty years from filing. Imagine the progress made in the software in that time frame and compare it to the progress in the field of airplanes, or carpet manufacture.
Much of scientific progress is evolutionary, which is fitting in some way. Everyone stands on the shoulder of giants. Watson and Crick didn't just discover the structure of DNA, nor did the Wright Brothers just decide to build an airplane. All their work came on the shoulders of others, but we wouldn't say that their discoveries aren't patentable.
The same is true of software patents. If you believe in patents in general, but disagree with software patents, I think the true objection actually lies in the length of the term and excessive protection.
Two things:
1. Hardware suppliers are supposed to give you the exact same hardware for each of the "same" system you order--makes regressing problems easier, and eases management issues. Your supplier didn't--maybe they used a different video card that had the same chipset but different manufacturer. If you installed Windows on a hundred computers, with the exact same hardware, the results should be exactly the same except for the odd crash. This doesn't sound like a "Microsoft being stupid" story as much as a "hardware supplier slipped in some greyware video cards to unsuspecting educational enterprise" story.
2. Windows Update isn't an enterprise-class solution. Again, makes regression impossible. Push your own solution with the Microsoft-provided hotfix packages, or sneakernet them.
I know this is a joke, but one of the final effects of hypothermia is a feeling of complete warmth that causes its victims to strip down in the bitter cold and freeze to death. It's called paradoxical undressing. Drinking also makes you feel warmer than you actually are; that's probably why so many homeless alcoholics freeze to death during a cold snap. Anyone drinking to stay warm probably shouldn't.
If you're cynical enough to believe that the military is using this as an excuse to develop high-powered lasers, or potentially a space-based death ray, then why do you also say that it's a really "stupid" idea? By your thesis, it's a good but *evil* idea.
Dude, you must be naive as all hell if you believe that, in an environment where twelve members of a jury falsely convict the defendant, that the judge of all people will free the defendant.
"However, during the Civil Rights era, all-white juries were known to refuse to convict white defendants for the murder of African-Americans."
From the Wikipedia article on jury nullification. If the laws are unjust, let them stand and be mocked. Let them be remembered in history as a shameful chapter. But don't take matters into your own hands in a back room.
The law that was violated allowed for damages many times heavier than what the jury alloted. The jury, believe it or not, showed restraint in not grinding the defendant into the ground. The defendant's utter lack of a case and seemingly frivolous defense must have annoyed the jury.
The law is the law. If you don't like the law, change it at the ballots, not the jury box. It's a democracy, after all. If the law was applied based on how the jury feels about the defendant, there'd really be no point in having courts. "Oh, she's a single mother--let's let her off." "Oh, she's disabled, let's let her off." "Oh, she's white! Let's let her off." "Oh, she's black, single mother scamming disability--let's screw her!"
I think the law is retarded. But blaming the jury is like blaming the soldier on the ground in Iraq for the war--he just does what he's told, and not what he thinks should be done.
American patent law (35 U.S.C. Sec 287) allows patentees to recover only when the infringer is actually aware of the patents or if the product was actually marked with the patents. There is a question of how to "mark" software with patent numbers. Certainly Microsoft hasn't given the kind of notice that would let anyone know which patents have been allegedly infringed. The question becomes whether its products have been sufficiently marked with all the patents that can be enforced.
Microsoft can sue to stop the infringement of patents it hasn't marked products with or where infringers were aware, but it can't get back damages.
Gives you leverage when negotiating tax breaks with the municipality. Traditional theory always has been that work-related taxes fall on property owners in the long term because they can't move their property. Being able to move your server room, as complicated and huge as it is, to another state within a week forces the municipality to give you tax breaks--or else.
Foxit has a related vulnerability that requires user interaction to run the arbitrary code. The Adobe version, of course, runs the arbitrary code without the vulnerability. You could say that Foxit doesn't have the same vulnerability but it comes from the same flaw.
As the average Slashdotter knows, the F-117 Shadowhawk is bumpy-looking plane with faceted surfaces that helps hide it from enemy radar systems. During the development of the aircraft, they made advances in fly-by-wire systems that allowed such an oddly-shaped monstrosity in the air. At one point, the system manager said something like, "I can make the Statue of Liberty do barrel rolls." I guess the same thing is true here.
Are you sure that your thoughts are secure? You have the right to remain quiet for a criminal prosecution for which you fear punishment. This excludes civil suits (like the RIAA suits) and criminal prosecutions of your friends and family.
Anyway, keys are not ephemeral just like IP logs aren't just bits and bytes. No one remembers all their keys--you save them on a hard drive, a floppy, a key drive, etc. The physical iteration they take is what the government will demand. No one wants your thoughts.
The written request may be "All e-mails between persons X and Y between January 2007 and June, 2007, inclusive." Then you have to come up with all the session keys for all the thousands of encrypted e-mails you sent. The government guy will smile at you as you realize you're going to jail because you didn't keep all of these keys. Then you have to cave in and sell out your friends to avoid jail time.
Sabre was crucial technology that kept AA at the head of the pack. The system was quick and assigned the quickest available flight to each passnger. Sabre began as a military system for assigning interceptors to incoming targets, but there was clearly an application to assigning passengers to planes. Sabre eventually got spun off into its own company. Travelocity is based on SABRE technology.
Another reason for secrecy is that SABRE was used to manipulate rankings to favor American Airlines flights over others. This eventually got outlawed by the federal government as unfair competition.
It's kind of like David Hager, a gynecologist who worked for the FDA. Hager stopped the emergency contraception pill Plan B from being sold over-the-counter despite the science advisory committee suggesting that it should be. For the second time in fifty years, the suggestion of the committee was ignored. The objection was that it would encourage unprotected sex. Eventually, Plan B was sold OTC but the fact that the FDA was politicalized made news.
During a divorce, Hager's wife alleged that he had raped and sodomized her while she was asleep under the influence of prescription medication. His defense was that he had gotten lost and hadn't meant to sodomize her. (I forget how he got around the whole unwanted sex part of the charges.) Yes, a gynecologist couldn't find his wife's personal parts.
Sigh.
Or perhaps eBay is incompetent or lying. This may be amazing, but hackers may actually cover their tracks so well that administrators don't even know exactly what was stolen. For example, data that is supposed to be transient may be intercepted and saved by the hacker. The administrator doesn't know what was there because the transient data was destroyed and not saved on their systems. This is almost definitely not the case here because the eBay server would have to be massively PWND but it's definitely happened before on a massive scale.
Whenever asked about my salary, I answer, "More than I deserve, but less than I want."
That's pretty much the situation for most of the working world, I bet.
The most disgusting part of all of this is that the telcos let the little guys take all the risks, prove and market the technology to the public, and show that there is a viable market for VoIP phone service. They they realized that they could squeeze more money out of consumers than Vonage et.al. were, but the only way to do that was put them out of business.
The strategy you describe is known as "follow the follower." Imagine a sailing race where you can risk how you tack your sails--riskier ways may give you more speed but may also stop you dead. One guy is way in the lead. How does he tack his sails? He looks at the guy right behind him and does whatever the follower does. If the follower's tacking makes good time, they both make good time and the lead is preserved. If the follower's tacking slows them down, then they both slow down and the lead is preserve. That's why incumbents who by definition are winning the race aren't in a spirit of innovation--why fix what isn't broke?
Look at Windows. It was crap and didn't innovate at all until OS X became a real threat. Then Vista began to focus on security, and then there was all the pretty GUI features. As long as it's close enough, then consumers will keep going to Microsoft and make this strategy pay off.