Roger Corman had some problems like that with studios back in the 1970s, and he won, too. Read his "How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime".
All they have to do is arrest the volunteers for being paedophiles!
I wonder if we may see the end of the religious-driven Great Porn Panic now that the Catholic Church is being hit hard in that area.
Catholics are the biggest religious group in Australia, with about 25% market share. The Catholic Church has big problems.
Search Google for Catholic priest porn. (I didn't realize, until I did that search, how many cases there were.) Priests have been caught by FBI sting operations. Dozens of priests in different countries have been caught with child porn in the last few years. Last week the Belgian police raided the headquarters of the Catholic Church in Belgium, and they've been interrogating church officials. The Vatican has been in full damage control mode for months.
Now the Vatican is scared because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, at least under some circumstances, priests may be considered employees of the Vatican. (A pedophile priest was transferred from Ireland to the US, where he caused further trouble. If a multinational corporation did that for a criminal employee, they'd be liable.) Several archdioceses in the US have already gone bankrupt over molestation suits. Now the bills may be sent to Rome. There's frantic diplomatic maneuvering by the Vatican over their "sovereign immunity", but nobody in politics wants to support the Vatican in this now.
It just keeps getting worse. Just in two days ago: "A Catholic priest stole $1.3 million from his Waterbury, Conn., parish to finance a gay old time in New York, authorities charged yesterday. The Rev. Kevin Gray allegedly blew the money he looted from his financially struggling parish over seven years on male escorts, rooms at hotels, including the Waldorf, designer clothes, trendy restaurants and tuition for several young studs." That's just pathetic.
As for Australia, last week there was "Australian priest jailed for 'sadistic' child sex abuse ". "The indecent assaults involved multiple children, often significant planning, were frequently sadistic and overall persistent, objectively serious, criminal courses of conduct. The offender's actions contributed to a culture of fear and depravity, especially at the school, which allowed these disturbing offences to occur and then remain unpunished for years."
The Catholic Church is no longer in a position to make pronouncements about sexual morality. That may be the one good thing to come of this.
Cisco collected that information so they and their "partners" could spam you:
"... we believe your registration information - specifically your Cisco Live badge number, name, title, company address and email address- was accessed. No other information was available or accessed. Although these details are commonly accessed by our World of Solutions partners".... Their "partner locator" finds 16601 partners in the United States, 3241 in China, 998 in Russia, 427 in Romania. 330 in Nigeria, and 12 in Afghanistan. So just about anybody who wants that data could get it.
They're just irked that someone who didn't pay for their mailing list might spam you.
Parser generators are a well-studied problem, and there are good solutions. Unfortunately, the "dynamic scripting language" people don't seem to be much into parsing theory. Trying to get a complex grammar to go through yacc or bison isn't easy, but at least once
the parser generator will accept it, you know you've hammered out the ambiguities. It's much easier to get parsers from systems
like "pyparsing" to sort of work, but you have to run many test cases to get them to work right.
(I'm currently writing a parser with "pyparsing" for US postal addresses. There's a trivial one available, but it doesn't handle the hard cases, and I had to essentially rewrite it. This is not fun. Some current fails: "969 Edgewater G370", "32545B Golden Lantern 147", "3853 7 Trees Blvd". It's not too hard to get to 98% success; then there's a proliferation of special cases.)
I wonder if it has some sort of means of load smoothing and a limited duty cycle
Yes, it does. One of the charging stations described itself has a battery, for load smoothing purposes.
That's a win for stations without heavy power available. But busy stations are going to need a high-current
feeder, so that can charge one car after another during busy periods.
It seems like a standardised pub/sub protocol ought to be cacheable, and everyone has an ISP, and ISPs themselves take feeds from networks - so wouldn't it make sense for every local network to have a proxy-like box which subscribes to feeds requested downstream, and therefore reduce the load on upstream boxes?
Nobody has ever come up with a good way to manage speed transitions. Belt joints don't work too well. The clever parallelogram arrangement that starts out wide and slow and transitions to narrow and fast was too complicated. Parallel sections at different speeds haven't been tried since the Paris Exposition in 1900. The few minutes of film of that system show someone falling.
There are serious problems with various kinds of shoes, ranging from spike heels to Crocs. People keep falling down on the things.
Now if you have to make more than one call, something is wrong. That one call should be a notification to Twitter who I am, where you can contact me and what I want to keep tabs on--be it a keyword or user.
That's not easy to do on a large scale. A persistent connection has to be in place between publisher and subscriber. Twitter would have to have a huge number of low-traffic connections open. (Hopefully only one per subscriber, not one per publisher/subscriber combination.) Then, on the server side, they'd have to have a routing system to track who's following what, invert that information, and blast out a message to all followers whenever there was an update. This is all quite feasible, but it's quite different from the classic HTTP model.
If you really wanted to scale this concept, the thing to do would be to rework a large server TCP implementation so that it used a buffer pool shared between connections, rather than allocating buffers for each open connection. The TCP implementation needs to be optimized for a very large number of mostly-idle connections. Then implement an RSS server with slow polling, so that the client makes an RSS query which either returns new data, waits for new data, or times out in a minute or two and returns a brief "no changes" reply. Clients can then just read the RSS feed, and be informed immediately when something changes. A single server should be able to serve a few million Twitter-type users in this mode.
The client side would encode what it was "following" in the URL parameters. The server side needs a fabric between data sources such that changes propagate from sources to front servers quickly, and then on each front server, all the RSS feeds for all the followers for the changed item get an update push.
There's a transient load problem. If you have 50,000,000 users, each following a few hundred random users, load is relatively uniform and it works fine.
If you have 50,000,000 people following World Cup scores, each update will force 50,000,000 transactions, all at once. All the clients get a notification that something has changed. So they immediately make a request for details (the picture of someone scoring, for example). All at the same time. However, if you arrange things so that the request for details hits a server different from the one that's doing the notifications, ordinary load-balancing will work.
For 32 screens, get individual boxes. Otherwise you're going into the cable TV business yourself, with a very tiny customer base.
Yes, you can get multichannel QAM to NTSC converters for enough money. Then you have to get the upstream cable companies to authorize them, which means you have to sign up as an MDU bulk account, like a hotel. Then you have to manage the thing. You'll probably have to publish and distribute a channel guide, for example.
Then someone on the analog net will replace their screen, and the replacement will be all-digital. But they'll only get the channels you have authorized on the bulk account for your little private cable system. They'll complain.
The multichannel conversion units are for installations where all the screens are identical, like hotels, hospitals, and prisons.
Copyright doesn't cover functional parts of objects. A D-battery sized cylinder with a light source at one end predates anything Lucas has done. The exterior detail doesn't match any Lucas product. Lucas doesn't have a design patent, and if he did, it would have expired years ago. Lucas would lose this in court.
The Wicked Lasers device is probably just a prototype, though. They admit they're getting those Nichia NDB7352 1 watt laser diodes by disassembling video projectors. If the product was in production, they'd be buying them in bulk from Nichia.
There are lots of cool things to do as desktop applications. But the easy and useful ones have been done.
Want to write a better word processor? Users will expect it to be at least as good as OpenOffice even if you give it away. If you want to charge for it, it needs to be better than Word.
How about a 3D animation program? Big job. Yours has to be at least as good as Blender, and if you want to sell it, up there with Maya.
CAD? You're competing with SolidWorks, Inventor, and ProEngineer. Yes, there are small startups in CAD; check out OpenMind, makers of HyperMill. That's how good a new desktop program has to do to make it today.
Nobody is going to buy your IRC chat client as a desktop app.
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
The owner of a domain is the entity in the "Registrant" position, even if they're a "proxy service". (This is very real, and at times a legal nightmare. See RegisterFly.)
There's a 2009 legal decision here that's important: Solid Host vs. NameCheap. US registrars rely on a legislative immunity against lawsuits given them in the ACPA. But in Solid Host vs. NameCheap, the US District Court for the Central District of California held that "domain proxy" services don't qualify for that immunity. Even if the "proxy service" is also a registrar, that doesn't help them. "The court concludes that NameCheap's status as an accredited registrar does not shield it from liability in cases where it did not act as a registrar."
So DomainsByProxy is the entity to sue. They can try to pass the buck to their customer, if they can find them. But that's their problem. The proxy service may be on the hook for the activities of the entity they're helping to hide.
The "shell" part of a house is cheap. If you just want a box, cinder block or concrete slab construction works fine. There are also many panel building systems used for industrial structures. (Nucor notes that their product is "89% recycled content", which it is; their steel mills run almost entirely on scrap.) A useful exercise is to figure out how to build good-looking houses out of those standard low-cost components.
I ran them through our SiteTruth system. Here's what comes out. "Rating: "Site ownership unknown or questionable.
No Location.... This certificate identifies the domain only, not the actual business.
No street address found on the site."
It's not that hard to sort out the phony business sites from the real ones. You have to check business databases, not just the Web, for business legitimacy. If you just look at the web, you get bogus results like this: McAfee SiteAdvisor: "We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems." The site itself doesn't try to attack the user, so McAfee says it's good to go.
Other problem with iTunes,
"All sales are final."....
From Terms and conditions, security section:
"You are entirely responsible for all activities that occur on or through your Account, and you agree to immediately notify Apple of any unauthorized use of your Account or any other breach of security. Apple shall not be responsible for any losses arising out of the unauthorized use of your Account. "
This is probably some parts-per-billion phenomenon.
Arsenic is naturally found in some fish, and the concentrations approach regulatory limits. It's not clear in what compounds the arsenic appears; if it's locked into a compound that doesn't metabolize, it's probably not a problem.
It's not a particularly strong cypher. It's basically a monoalphabetic substitution with some feedback, but not much. For each letter encyphered, the wheels change, but they don't change by much, and the number of change possibilities is small. So if you have known plaintext anywhere in the message, you can look for it with the usual techniques for monoalphabetic substitution, while considering
all of the small number of possible changes to the two alphabets on each cycle. The "permuting" step just consists of shifting half the alphabet by one place left or right.
Once you have an entry into the cypher from some stretch of known text, you can work backwards and forwards until you've recovered the wheels.
There are better pre-computer cyphers. Jefferson's wheel cypher is much stronger, and was used by the US as late as the Vietnam War.
Data execution prevention is a no-brainer. Unix has had that since the 1970s.
ASLR, though, is iffy. Randomizing the position of code in memory is a form of security through obscurity. If there's a bug that's exploitable with ASLR, it's a bug that can crash the program without it. It also makes debugging harder. No two crash dumps for the same bug are the same. Not even close.
What's more useful is running applications with very limited privileges. If the browser's renderer can't do much except render the single page it's supposed to be rendering, then corruption within it isn't a big deal. Firefox's approach to running plugins in a separate process is a big step forward, and the more jail-like that process becomes, the better. You really need a mandatory security model like SELinux to make this work, and Windows doesn't have that.
As a conservative, I always felt it was the corporation's responsibility to insure the highest possible return on investment to the company owners. However, if no one has work, then who will buy the products produced? Perhaps free trade has gone too far.
It's worth looking at this from a conservative Republican perspective. Labor is considered a competitive commodity on a worldwide basis.
If you accept this, the median standard of living does not increase over time. Why should it? There's no shortage of humans, and competition will keep their price down to the level at which output is maximized. That's a level above mere survival, with educational opportunities so that there's a trained work force.
What is that level? Probably the level of the coastal provinces in China today, or the US in 1940. Big apartment blocks, higher city densities, mass transit, fewer cars, less meat in the diet. It's an OK life, but well below current US levels.
This implies a significant drop in consumption. Which, in turn, means less production. The system stabilizes at a modest consumption level. There is little economic growth. Japan reached that point in 1989, when their housing bubble burst, and their economy has been in decline since. In 2009, real GDP in Japan hit a 34-year low.
As an export economy, Japan has to trade down to China's level.
Demand is saturated in the US. Anything you want to buy will is easily available, and probably on sale. There are no supply shortages.
One of the basic problems in human history, simply making enough stuff, has been solved. There's only so much disposable income available to buy it, though. Less than there used to be. There are probably vacant storefronts near you, and perhaps entire abandoned malls.
The other killer is that higher productivity doesn't increase living standards. The US is still the world's largest manufacturing country (at least until 2011, when China catches up), with only 13% of the work force in manufacturing. That doesn't mean high wages in manufacturing any more; it means competition for manufacturing jobs pushing wages down. The US auto worker of 1975 had a significantly higher real income than the US auto worker of today. Those workers were overpriced as economic units. That problem has been solved by pay cuts.
"Google has no plans to sell airline tickets to consumers", they say. However, Google Corporate Travel could be a big moneymaker. Companies will pay for outsourcing services to handle and account for their employee travel.
I work for a very large American computer company and while everyone thinks we build machines we don't. We don't even really design it.
Start looking for another job. Soon, your company will be replaced by a brand from India or China.
Take a look at these laptops from Hanbo. US$100 to $288, delivered to the US. Order 500, and they'll put your logo on them. You too can be a "computer manufacturer". Who needs a US false front?
Slashdot Mirror
Roger Corman had some problems like that with studios back in the 1970s, and he won, too. Read his "How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime".
All they have to do is arrest the volunteers for being paedophiles!
I wonder if we may see the end of the religious-driven Great Porn Panic now that the Catholic Church is being hit hard in that area. Catholics are the biggest religious group in Australia, with about 25% market share. The Catholic Church has big problems. Search Google for Catholic priest porn. (I didn't realize, until I did that search, how many cases there were.) Priests have been caught by FBI sting operations. Dozens of priests in different countries have been caught with child porn in the last few years. Last week the Belgian police raided the headquarters of the Catholic Church in Belgium, and they've been interrogating church officials. The Vatican has been in full damage control mode for months.
Now the Vatican is scared because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, at least under some circumstances, priests may be considered employees of the Vatican. (A pedophile priest was transferred from Ireland to the US, where he caused further trouble. If a multinational corporation did that for a criminal employee, they'd be liable.) Several archdioceses in the US have already gone bankrupt over molestation suits. Now the bills may be sent to Rome. There's frantic diplomatic maneuvering by the Vatican over their "sovereign immunity", but nobody in politics wants to support the Vatican in this now.
It just keeps getting worse. Just in two days ago: "A Catholic priest stole $1.3 million from his Waterbury, Conn., parish to finance a gay old time in New York, authorities charged yesterday. The Rev. Kevin Gray allegedly blew the money he looted from his financially struggling parish over seven years on male escorts, rooms at hotels, including the Waldorf, designer clothes, trendy restaurants and tuition for several young studs." That's just pathetic.
As for Australia, last week there was "Australian priest jailed for 'sadistic' child sex abuse ". "The indecent assaults involved multiple children, often significant planning, were frequently sadistic and overall persistent, objectively serious, criminal courses of conduct. The offender's actions contributed to a culture of fear and depravity, especially at the school, which allowed these disturbing offences to occur and then remain unpunished for years."
The Catholic Church is no longer in a position to make pronouncements about sexual morality. That may be the one good thing to come of this.
Cisco collected that information so they and their "partners" could spam you: "... we believe your registration information - specifically your Cisco Live badge number, name, title, company address and email address- was accessed. No other information was available or accessed. Although these details are commonly accessed by our World of Solutions partners".... Their "partner locator" finds 16601 partners in the United States, 3241 in China, 998 in Russia, 427 in Romania. 330 in Nigeria, and 12 in Afghanistan. So just about anybody who wants that data could get it.
They're just irked that someone who didn't pay for their mailing list might spam you.
Parser generators are a well-studied problem, and there are good solutions. Unfortunately, the "dynamic scripting language" people don't seem to be much into parsing theory. Trying to get a complex grammar to go through yacc or bison isn't easy, but at least once the parser generator will accept it, you know you've hammered out the ambiguities. It's much easier to get parsers from systems like "pyparsing" to sort of work, but you have to run many test cases to get them to work right.
(I'm currently writing a parser with "pyparsing" for US postal addresses. There's a trivial one available, but it doesn't handle the hard cases, and I had to essentially rewrite it. This is not fun. Some current fails: "969 Edgewater G370", "32545B Golden Lantern 147", "3853 7 Trees Blvd". It's not too hard to get to 98% success; then there's a proliferation of special cases.)
I wonder if it has some sort of means of load smoothing and a limited duty cycle
Yes, it does. One of the charging stations described itself has a battery, for load smoothing purposes.
That's a win for stations without heavy power available. But busy stations are going to need a high-current feeder, so that can charge one car after another during busy periods.
Watch from 1:15 to 1:56, avoid idiot blithering.
It seems like a standardised pub/sub protocol ought to be cacheable, and everyone has an ISP, and ISPs themselves take feeds from networks - so wouldn't it make sense for every local network to have a proxy-like box which subscribes to feeds requested downstream, and therefore reduce the load on upstream boxes?
Like NNTP.
Nobody has ever come up with a good way to manage speed transitions. Belt joints don't work too well. The clever parallelogram arrangement that starts out wide and slow and transitions to narrow and fast was too complicated. Parallel sections at different speeds haven't been tried since the Paris Exposition in 1900. The few minutes of film of that system show someone falling. There are serious problems with various kinds of shoes, ranging from spike heels to Crocs. People keep falling down on the things.
Now if you have to make more than one call, something is wrong. That one call should be a notification to Twitter who I am, where you can contact me and what I want to keep tabs on--be it a keyword or user.
That's not easy to do on a large scale. A persistent connection has to be in place between publisher and subscriber. Twitter would have to have a huge number of low-traffic connections open. (Hopefully only one per subscriber, not one per publisher/subscriber combination.) Then, on the server side, they'd have to have a routing system to track who's following what, invert that information, and blast out a message to all followers whenever there was an update. This is all quite feasible, but it's quite different from the classic HTTP model.
It's been done before, though. Remember Push technology? That's what this is. PointCast sent their final news/stock push message in February 2000. There's more support for "push" in HTML5, incidentally.
If you really wanted to scale this concept, the thing to do would be to rework a large server TCP implementation so that it used a buffer pool shared between connections, rather than allocating buffers for each open connection. The TCP implementation needs to be optimized for a very large number of mostly-idle connections. Then implement an RSS server with slow polling, so that the client makes an RSS query which either returns new data, waits for new data, or times out in a minute or two and returns a brief "no changes" reply. Clients can then just read the RSS feed, and be informed immediately when something changes. A single server should be able to serve a few million Twitter-type users in this mode.
The client side would encode what it was "following" in the URL parameters. The server side needs a fabric between data sources such that changes propagate from sources to front servers quickly, and then on each front server, all the RSS feeds for all the followers for the changed item get an update push.
There's a transient load problem. If you have 50,000,000 users, each following a few hundred random users, load is relatively uniform and it works fine. If you have 50,000,000 people following World Cup scores, each update will force 50,000,000 transactions, all at once. All the clients get a notification that something has changed. So they immediately make a request for details (the picture of someone scoring, for example). All at the same time. However, if you arrange things so that the request for details hits a server different from the one that's doing the notifications, ordinary load-balancing will work.
For 32 screens, get individual boxes. Otherwise you're going into the cable TV business yourself, with a very tiny customer base. Yes, you can get multichannel QAM to NTSC converters for enough money. Then you have to get the upstream cable companies to authorize them, which means you have to sign up as an MDU bulk account, like a hotel. Then you have to manage the thing. You'll probably have to publish and distribute a channel guide, for example.
Then someone on the analog net will replace their screen, and the replacement will be all-digital. But they'll only get the channels you have authorized on the bulk account for your little private cable system. They'll complain.
The multichannel conversion units are for installations where all the screens are identical, like hotels, hospitals, and prisons.
That's a big stretch for copyright.
Copyright doesn't cover functional parts of objects. A D-battery sized cylinder with a light source at one end predates anything Lucas has done. The exterior detail doesn't match any Lucas product. Lucas doesn't have a design patent, and if he did, it would have expired years ago. Lucas would lose this in court.
The Wicked Lasers device is probably just a prototype, though. They admit they're getting those Nichia NDB7352 1 watt laser diodes by disassembling video projectors. If the product was in production, they'd be buying them in bulk from Nichia.
That's not hooking a classic terminal to a netbook. This is hooking a classic terminal to a netbook. (More pictures.)
There are lots of cool things to do as desktop applications. But the easy and useful ones have been done.
Want to write a better word processor? Users will expect it to be at least as good as OpenOffice even if you give it away. If you want to charge for it, it needs to be better than Word.
How about a 3D animation program? Big job. Yours has to be at least as good as Blender, and if you want to sell it, up there with Maya.
CAD? You're competing with SolidWorks, Inventor, and ProEngineer. Yes, there are small startups in CAD; check out OpenMind, makers of HyperMill. That's how good a new desktop program has to do to make it today.
Nobody is going to buy your IRC chat client as a desktop app.
Domain Name: THENERDSUPPORT.COM
Registrant:
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
The owner of a domain is the entity in the "Registrant" position, even if they're a "proxy service". (This is very real, and at times a legal nightmare. See RegisterFly.)
There's a 2009 legal decision here that's important: Solid Host vs. NameCheap. US registrars rely on a legislative immunity against lawsuits given them in the ACPA. But in Solid Host vs. NameCheap, the US District Court for the Central District of California held that "domain proxy" services don't qualify for that immunity. Even if the "proxy service" is also a registrar, that doesn't help them. "The court concludes that NameCheap's status as an accredited registrar does not shield it from liability in cases where it did not act as a registrar."
So DomainsByProxy is the entity to sue. They can try to pass the buck to their customer, if they can find them. But that's their problem. The proxy service may be on the hook for the activities of the entity they're helping to hide.
The "shell" part of a house is cheap. If you just want a box, cinder block or concrete slab construction works fine. There are also many panel building systems used for industrial structures. (Nucor notes that their product is "89% recycled content", which it is; their steel mills run almost entirely on scrap.) A useful exercise is to figure out how to build good-looking houses out of those standard low-cost components.
Here's a streamlined railroad train that's now a fixed structure in San Francisco. That location used to be a railroad siding, but the owner didn't move his cars before the freight tracks in San Francisco were removed. Now the cars are stuck there.
The actual site mentioned is thenerdsupport.com
I ran them through our SiteTruth system. Here's what comes out. "Rating: "Site ownership unknown or questionable. No Location. ... This certificate identifies the domain only, not the actual business.
No street address found on the site."
Compare the SiteTruth results for Geek Squad. Street addresses found, found in the US business directory, found in Open Directory.
It's not that hard to sort out the phony business sites from the real ones. You have to check business databases, not just the Web, for business legitimacy. If you just look at the web, you get bogus results like this: McAfee SiteAdvisor: "We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems." The site itself doesn't try to attack the user, so McAfee says it's good to go.
This was the very goal of the 9/11 attacks and we have taken the bait, hook, line and sinker.
That's what bin Laden wrote, years before 9/11. That was his plan. Read Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America., published in 1999.
If you can take the $0.99 MP3 and use that to perform a song yourself, go ahead. I'm sure the composer won't mind.
You owe the composer the statutory royalty of about 9.1 cents per track per copy sold. You don't owe the performer or the record company anything.
Other problem with iTunes, "All sales are final." ....
From Terms and conditions, security section:
"You are entirely responsible for all activities that occur on or through your Account, and you agree to immediately notify Apple of any unauthorized use of your Account or any other breach of security. Apple shall not be responsible for any losses arising out of the unauthorized use of your Account. "
That's so Steve Jobs.
This is probably some parts-per-billion phenomenon.
Arsenic is naturally found in some fish, and the concentrations approach regulatory limits. It's not clear in what compounds the arsenic appears; if it's locked into a compound that doesn't metabolize, it's probably not a problem.
It's not a particularly strong cypher. It's basically a monoalphabetic substitution with some feedback, but not much. For each letter encyphered, the wheels change, but they don't change by much, and the number of change possibilities is small. So if you have known plaintext anywhere in the message, you can look for it with the usual techniques for monoalphabetic substitution, while considering all of the small number of possible changes to the two alphabets on each cycle. The "permuting" step just consists of shifting half the alphabet by one place left or right.
Once you have an entry into the cypher from some stretch of known text, you can work backwards and forwards until you've recovered the wheels.
There are better pre-computer cyphers. Jefferson's wheel cypher is much stronger, and was used by the US as late as the Vietnam War.
Data execution prevention is a no-brainer. Unix has had that since the 1970s.
ASLR, though, is iffy. Randomizing the position of code in memory is a form of security through obscurity. If there's a bug that's exploitable with ASLR, it's a bug that can crash the program without it. It also makes debugging harder. No two crash dumps for the same bug are the same. Not even close.
What's more useful is running applications with very limited privileges. If the browser's renderer can't do much except render the single page it's supposed to be rendering, then corruption within it isn't a big deal. Firefox's approach to running plugins in a separate process is a big step forward, and the more jail-like that process becomes, the better. You really need a mandatory security model like SELinux to make this work, and Windows doesn't have that.
As a conservative, I always felt it was the corporation's responsibility to insure the highest possible return on investment to the company owners. However, if no one has work, then who will buy the products produced? Perhaps free trade has gone too far.
It's worth looking at this from a conservative Republican perspective. Labor is considered a competitive commodity on a worldwide basis. If you accept this, the median standard of living does not increase over time. Why should it? There's no shortage of humans, and competition will keep their price down to the level at which output is maximized. That's a level above mere survival, with educational opportunities so that there's a trained work force.
What is that level? Probably the level of the coastal provinces in China today, or the US in 1940. Big apartment blocks, higher city densities, mass transit, fewer cars, less meat in the diet. It's an OK life, but well below current US levels.
This implies a significant drop in consumption. Which, in turn, means less production. The system stabilizes at a modest consumption level. There is little economic growth. Japan reached that point in 1989, when their housing bubble burst, and their economy has been in decline since. In 2009, real GDP in Japan hit a 34-year low. As an export economy, Japan has to trade down to China's level.
Demand is saturated in the US. Anything you want to buy will is easily available, and probably on sale. There are no supply shortages. One of the basic problems in human history, simply making enough stuff, has been solved. There's only so much disposable income available to buy it, though. Less than there used to be. There are probably vacant storefronts near you, and perhaps entire abandoned malls.
The other killer is that higher productivity doesn't increase living standards. The US is still the world's largest manufacturing country (at least until 2011, when China catches up), with only 13% of the work force in manufacturing. That doesn't mean high wages in manufacturing any more; it means competition for manufacturing jobs pushing wages down. The US auto worker of 1975 had a significantly higher real income than the US auto worker of today. Those workers were overpriced as economic units. That problem has been solved by pay cuts.
That's competitiveness. Deal with it.
"Google has no plans to sell airline tickets to consumers", they say. However, Google Corporate Travel could be a big moneymaker. Companies will pay for outsourcing services to handle and account for their employee travel.
I work for a very large American computer company and while everyone thinks we build machines we don't. We don't even really design it.
Start looking for another job. Soon, your company will be replaced by a brand from India or China. Take a look at these laptops from Hanbo. US$100 to $288, delivered to the US. Order 500, and they'll put your logo on them. You too can be a "computer manufacturer". Who needs a US false front?