1) is related to 2, otherwise how would you know it is spam.
As for 2) please explain how the blacklist part is going to "magically" work after just a few dozen people transfer it.
Questions: i) Who decides it is spam? How? ii) What happens after it is marked as spam? iii) Why/How would it work better than the current methods already used with SMTP, POP3 etc systems?
Already many ISPs are tagging email as spam in the headers, and users can just configure their mail clients to handle such mails differently, if they trust the ISP's spam filters.
And like I said, the ISP's mail server would be just like an IM2000 mail repository.
Show how with IM2000 I would be receiving orders of magnitudes less spam. If it's say just 30% less, it's really not worth the bother. Work on improved spam detection methods would be better, and having a diversity of such methods makes it harder for spammers (like genetic diversity in the face of parasites and disease).
For bonus points, show how during the transition period from SMTP to IM2000, IM2000 users will be receiving significantly less spam (assuming of course they successfully receive the same amount of nonspam as they normally would - rather than the IM2000 system causing them to not receive legitimate mail). If it's just because they changed their email address, then people already do that regularly to reduce spam;).
AFAIK the original proposal never mentioned sending of a small message.
Even with such a notification based IM2000 style system, for many practical reasons the actual sender is unlikely to be the one holding the mails. The mail would have to be stored on an ISP/3rd party mail repository, or on one of the thousands of zombie machines "owned" by spammers;).
Thus you will have the problem of who gets to submit mail to the ISP's mail repository.
Wow now it looks like the same problem as SMTP doesn't it?
And I believe most of the solutions are applicable to both SMTP and IM2000. Just nobody seems to want those solutions - CAs, everyone with certificates, crypto. And many people may not like the idea of some central authority effectively deciding whether you can successfully send mail or not.
Worse, in initial stages you will have to have IM2000 to SMTP gateways and vice versa. So the IM2000 users will still get spam from SMTP sources...
I think I understand IM2000 pretty well and have some idea of how the real world works too.
I wonder whether the IM2000 proponents actually do.
I think they should think things through properly, rather than come up with half baked ideas.
And back to the topic: the problem with IPv6 is it isn't backward compatible with IPv4. If it was backward compatible, the switch to IPv6 would have been much faster.
Bernstein's IM 2000 doesn't work the way people expect mail to work, and so I'll say it will NEVER be widely used.
The fact that the sender needs a machine to always be accessible for the receiver to fetch it from, if you have 2000 possible senders does that mean the receiver has to poll 2000 different servers regularly?
If the receiver just has one IM2000 server to poll, and the senders with transient machines upload their mails to that server then that start to look like SMTP and POP3 doesn't it? And with the same problems all over again.
The amount of work implementing something practical that looks like IM2000, would be about the same as requiring everyone to use crypto/signed messages and stick to plain old SMTP/POP3/IMAP.
djb is a smart guy. But he has not shown how IM 2000 can work and be practical, and actually be a significant advantage.
Re:NAT is the IPv4 version of segmented memory
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
Thing is, "near impossible to set up P2P" is a _feature_ in many popular scenarios.
Re:QoS (Quality of Service or crap for customers?)
on
IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 1
You miss something though: You often would want some of _your_own_ traffic to take priority over other of _your_own_ traffic.
So your WoW packets should take precedence over Microsoft Windows Update, or your background email checking and IM message alerts.
If both ISP A and ISP B give you the same just barely adequate bandwidth, but ISP A supports the TOS stuff, then you'd have a better WoW experience.
The big problem with much traffic control stuff (and Linux tc is one of them) is it is hard to automatically fairly share out bandwidth on a per IP basis. Much of the stuff out there controls bandwidth on a per connection basis, which is crappy since it means bittorrent with many connections, or an http download accelerator will squeeze out your precious single WoW connection.
Example? I think you don't know what you are talking about.
Most of the stuff I run in windows sure doesn't run as SYSTEM. IE sure doesn't and it doesn't have SYSTEM privileges, neither does my email program. Same for Open Office.
If you can show that any user program running as a normal user can escalate its privileges without permission in Windows NT/2K/XP then it is a serious security bug. And you'll get your 15 minutes of fame at least.
The more people running old versions of their O/Ses, the greater the danger that someone else comes up with a really Windows Compatible O/S, and they end up like a BIOS manufacturer.
For example, they are trying to come up with Vista. If it is too incompatible they might end up in the Intel Itanic vs AMD Opteron scenario. Where people look at the Itanic and say, if I want incompatible and fast, I might as well go IBM POWER, if I want compatible and fast, I go AMD.
That is why if lots of people get Dell/HP etc to skip the Vista preload and preload XP instead, Microsoft could have big problems, even if Linux is not being preloaded.
Run it using another user. Works under windows too, even with IE.
Just most Windows/Linux users don't know that, or do that.
You need to set up permissions so that your downloads can be accessible (and deletable) from your main account, but that's not too difficult under Windows, and fiddling with some ACLs on Linux. In fact I found it harder to do the permissions thing on Linux.
The other option is to run in in a virtual machine. The other benefit is firefox/mozilla can't use more RAM than the VM limit;). I've had Mozilla use 1GB of mem before.
Huh? You can sandbox browsers on Windows or Linux.
In Windows you can run IE or some other browser using another user account (runas/savecred). On Linux same thing: just run it as some other user.
IE/Firefox Windows/Linux are just about as crappy security-wise.
By _default_ whether on Linux or Windows, if your browser or email app gets exploited, there's plenty of nastiness that can occur.
So don't be so smug. Linux is maybe slightly more secure than Windows. It's just less targeted by spyware, zombie writers.
What O/S people should be doing is to sandbox apps by default AND make it userfriendly - a browser does not need full write and read privileges to everything the main user account has. And a flash game should have even fewer privileges.
Anyway, in addition to running Firefox as a different user, I've been running IE in a virtual machine for less trusted sites, or sites that require javascript etc. Hackers are free to take over a fake machine if they want - I'll just roll it back to a pristine condition.
If the creature containing the cells serves some other purpose other trhan converting food into raw energy then one should not measure efficiency in such absolute terms.
Say a human being is only 30% efficient in converting food to energy/"work". Given the human already needs a certain amount of food to stay alive, one should also measure the additional amount of food the human needs to do an additional amount of work.
If it's really expensive and stays expensive, it may be cheaper to hire someone strong enough to do the job. In lots of places the cost of labour is lower than in Japan.
Find some great innovations that happened in the 1980s and 1990s and add them to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s
I am not saying incremental improvement is bad. I'm just disappointed with the lack of real innovation.
The difference is like just improving cars compared to making a plane when there was no such thing as a plane before.
Why should I be impressed with an _ongoing_ search for an AIDS cure? It's not like they found one yet. What next, I should be impressed with someone's search for the homework his dog ate?
BTW HIV is not very contagious and its spread can be controlled - it's because of the idiot politicians that HIV is such a big problem in Africa and other places. Now a deadly flu is what you call a big problem. Even so, a vaccine for particular strain of flu would not be what I call something new. The elimination of flu would be something new. Heck the eradication of polio would be a good start, but even that's being screwed up after getting so close!
What's so innovative about the International Space Station? Skylab was launched in 1973 and did 2000 hours worth of experiments. The ISS is good at spending billions of money.
The recent probes to Mars. Sure they are better probes etc etc, big improvements over previous probes. But nope not an innovation. There were plenty of probes to Mercury, Venus, etc way before that too.
LCDs? It's old stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD
Say in 2030, someone looks back and says ok in 1990-1999 what was the great innovation or invention there? I guess maybe it'll be the exponential growth of the Internet and the WWW? But that's it?
How about 2000-2010? Monkeys and humans move their robot arms with their thoughts? People seeing with their tongues? OK that's good, but hurry and take those next obvious steps while you guys are at it. And I sure hope that's not the only stuff for this decade.
Now if someone built a space elevator that would be something not done before (not saying it will necessarily be a good thing to build, but that'll be something new).
Or someone finally got practical fusion to work at more than break even (fusion is not new in itself, but "fusion no longer always being decades away" would be something new;) ). Or someone got an aged mouse to grow _younger_ AND live longer. Rejuvenation. Or we start being able to regrow whole limbs. Regeneration. The last two are supposedly coming soon I hear but how soon?
A permanent cure for the common cold or flu would be an innovation.
I have read lots of science stuff. YOU should read more science stuff, since you think so many things are new and innovative when they are not.
Uh I did mention that the medical side has been making some progress. Go read it again.
And yah wordstar probably shouldn't be there - coz Douglas Engelbart already demoed wordprocessing in 1968. And that's way before Wordstar.
Yeah the exponential growth of the internet and the WWW is probably one of the few major noteworthy things in the 1990s.
I'm not saying there are have been no advances, but remember the original topic was about "tech breakthroughs".
So forget my list, go make your own list - go look up what has happened for this whole century.
Anyway, perhaps its because a lot of the low hanging fruit has been taken, and real innovation is hard. Then again, when I look at a lot of the existing technologies and how they could be put together to create something really new (see the augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis stuff I mentioned for example), BUT they're not interested, everyone nowadays is just satisfied with incremental improvements. Rapid incremental improvements perhaps, but no great risky leaps (or leap attempts).
Previously I think there were a few key people backing and driving stuff like the Manhattan project.
It's a matter of the details and we don't know the details of the case. And the details are important.
After all, from what I see he could have told the bank something like the following:
"Hi, you've got security problems with your email server, the following webservers have serious problems and need to be patched (list of IPs), the following servers have easily guessable ssh username and passwords.
If you want more details my professional rates are XYZ."
While that's not the best way of going about doing things, I don't think that should be considered criminal.
The Bank is free to look for a different person/organisation to do the job, and give that info to them as a starting point.
After all providing a detailed and professional report and recommendation takes a fair bit of time and effort. You can't expect that bit for free.
So not knowing the details I don't think we should be so sure that he's been doing extortion or blackmail. Maybe the Bank has been nasty about the whole thing - after all when was the last time a Bank has behaved well?
Maybe someone had to cover up their ignorance and incompetence and thus treated it as extortion.
AND that's why I think the guy was dumb to do what he did - after all he's not dealing with a friendly organisation - he's dealing with a Bank. Lucky for him, he's in NZ and not some uncivilized country like the USA[1].
Many of the slashdotters seem to be used to the US "justice" system.
[1] If you win cases because you have more money or power, that's not really better than one of those corrupt African countries is it?
Actually in my opinion we haven't really made much progress in the recent decade at all.
1942 manhattan project 1945 first a-bomb, + hiroshima & nagasaki 1947 transistor invented 1949 Comet (passenger jet) Unveiled 1951 electricity from nuclear power plant 1952 US Airforce orders B52 1955 U2 Tested 1956 first O/S 1957 silicon wafer, FORTRAN, sputnik 1958-59 first IC, ALGOL, LISP 1961 VTOL, first man in space, CTSS 1962 spacewar computer game 1964 computer mouse & windows 1968 Douglas Engelbart demos the above, hypertext, collaborative computing and more 1969 feb Jumbo jet (747) first flight 1969 apr concorde first Mach 2 passenger jet first flight 1969 apr QE 2 ship first voyage 1969 Jul first man on moon 1969 Multics 1971 intel 4004 1972 C 1973 skylab, ethernet, UNIX, work on TCP/IP started 1974 Altair and Scelbi 1975 apollo & soyuz dock 1976 viking landings on Mars, Apple I, ethernet launched 1977 voyager 2 launched, Apple II, commodore 1978 visicalc, vi 1979 wordstar 1980 TCP/IP RFCs 1981 space shuttle, IBM PC 1982 BSD gets TCP/IP 1983 Apple Lisa 1983 "Unix Review compares six Unix-compatibles for IBM PCs" 1983 GNU project 1984 Apple Mac, X Windows 1985 Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft Windows #Stagnation starts 1986 chernobyl, challenger blow up 1988 stealth fighter 1989 stealth bomber 1990 WWW (hypertext revisited) 1991 Linux started (UNIX rehash) 1992 Windows NT, NetBSD, FreeBSD 1993 Mosaic 1994 webcrawler 1995 Windows 95, Altavista 1996 pathfinder mars rover/lander (viking rehash) 1997 google (good but not really a great leap ) 2003 spirit+opportunity mars rovers
Looking at the past 10-20 years I can say there really hasn't been as many leaps. Most are just rehashes of the same thing done before. Some not actually done better just more popular. Linux is just UNIX revisited. Just go look at the video of Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968 and you'll see we haven't really made that many advances in the computing fields.
As for aerospace:
All NASA can do is try to stop the space shuttles from blowing up.
They're talking about going to the Moon again (so 1960s). Then there was all that fuss about sending probes to mars. Oh wow, like wasn't that done in 1976?
Then there's the supersonic jetliner and big passenger jet... Heck the 747 design is still being used to this day (and it works pretty well too).
Only thing new so far is the space tourism innovation by the Russians. Where on a regular schedule anyone reasonably fit and healthy with USD20 million bucks can go to space.
Automobile tech? No breakthroughs. Now if there's practical gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel cell+filter that'll be a breakthrough.
Nuclear fusion/fission? No significant progress at all.
They've already spent billions and decades on hot fusion with not much to show for it, maybe they should just spend a bit more time and money investigating the cold fusion stuff - even if it isn't fusion, there's evidence that it could be an interesting phenomena. Or just spend some billions to make fission better.
AI has been a field for bullshit artists.
But medical tech has had some advances. You can now actually implement brain augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis with current communications/computing and medical technology. But the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA etc may hold the progress back in that field (they'll want a penny for your^H^H^H^H_their_ thoughts or more). And then there's the threat of lawsuits of course.
Still TB and many other diseases seem to be threatening to make a comeback, so it's not been that great either.
Lifespans are up mainly because infant mortality is down, and ER treatment is much better.
Now, tell me of something really innovative in the past 10 years. No hypersonic jetliner to be seen. When the Concorde came out it was definitely not a rehash. The first man on the moon in 1969 was not
The main reason why Windows is on most desktops is the network effect. And the main reason why it stays there is it comes _preinstalled_.
IF (a big IF) the big buyers ( large organisations etc) think that Vista is crap (or not worth it), and get Dell, HP, IBM etc to just keep preinstalling XP instead of Vista, then there is a chance (albeit a slim one) for Windows XP to end up a defacto standard that even Microsoft can't break free from.
Then Win XP would be like "IBM PC BIOS", and MS would be one of the BIOS manufacturers.
Naturally MS does NOT want to be like a BIOS manufacturer, and that's why they keep changing and breaking stuff at a calculated pace.
So if Vista is not acceptable soon enough, then in theory someone could make a Win XP compatible get the hardware people to use it and MS would have some problems.
It does not have to be a perfect Win XP compatibility (even XP SP2 differs a lot from XP SP1). It just has to be significantly more compatible than Vista and for a better price.
It'll be like AMD's Opteron vs Intel's Itanic. Without the Opteron, people would have had no alternative but the crappy Itanic.
Unfortunately I think the odds aren't that good. Making a "Windows XP compatible" O/S is not an easy task (as MS knows;) ).
Well if Vista is crap or incompatible enough, perhaps Apple could take over - I think they are getting Intel's best prices. Dell used to get those.
Slashdot Mirror
1) is related to 2, otherwise how would you know it is spam.
;).
As for 2) please explain how the blacklist part is going to "magically" work after just a few dozen people transfer it.
Questions:
i) Who decides it is spam? How?
ii) What happens after it is marked as spam?
iii) Why/How would it work better than the current methods already used with SMTP, POP3 etc systems?
Already many ISPs are tagging email as spam in the headers, and users can just configure their mail clients to handle such mails differently, if they trust the ISP's spam filters.
And like I said, the ISP's mail server would be just like an IM2000 mail repository.
Show how with IM2000 I would be receiving orders of magnitudes less spam. If it's say just 30% less, it's really not worth the bother. Work on improved spam detection methods would be better, and having a diversity of such methods makes it harder for spammers (like genetic diversity in the face of parasites and disease).
For bonus points, show how during the transition period from SMTP to IM2000, IM2000 users will be receiving significantly less spam (assuming of course they successfully receive the same amount of nonspam as they normally would - rather than the IM2000 system causing them to not receive legitimate mail). If it's just because they changed their email address, then people already do that regularly to reduce spam
AFAIK the original proposal never mentioned sending of a small message.
;).
Even with such a notification based IM2000 style system, for many practical reasons the actual sender is unlikely to be the one holding the mails. The mail would have to be stored on an ISP/3rd party mail repository, or on one of the thousands of zombie machines "owned" by spammers
Thus you will have the problem of who gets to submit mail to the ISP's mail repository.
Wow now it looks like the same problem as SMTP doesn't it?
And I believe most of the solutions are applicable to both SMTP and IM2000. Just nobody seems to want those solutions - CAs, everyone with certificates, crypto. And many people may not like the idea of some central authority effectively deciding whether you can successfully send mail or not.
Worse, in initial stages you will have to have IM2000 to SMTP gateways and vice versa. So the IM2000 users will still get spam from SMTP sources...
I think I understand IM2000 pretty well and have some idea of how the real world works too.
I wonder whether the IM2000 proponents actually do.
I think they should think things through properly, rather than come up with half baked ideas.
And back to the topic: the problem with IPv6 is it isn't backward compatible with IPv4. If it was backward compatible, the switch to IPv6 would have been much faster.
Bernstein's IM 2000 doesn't work the way people expect mail to work, and so I'll say it will NEVER be widely used.
The fact that the sender needs a machine to always be accessible for the receiver to fetch it from, if you have 2000 possible senders does that mean the receiver has to poll 2000 different servers regularly?
If the receiver just has one IM2000 server to poll, and the senders with transient machines upload their mails to that server then that start to look like SMTP and POP3 doesn't it? And with the same problems all over again.
The amount of work implementing something practical that looks like IM2000, would be about the same as requiring everyone to use crypto/signed messages and stick to plain old SMTP/POP3/IMAP.
djb is a smart guy. But he has not shown how IM 2000 can work and be practical, and actually be a significant advantage.
Thing is, "near impossible to set up P2P" is a _feature_ in many popular scenarios.
You miss something though: You often would want some of _your_own_ traffic to take priority over other of _your_own_ traffic.
So your WoW packets should take precedence over Microsoft Windows Update, or your background email checking and IM message alerts.
If both ISP A and ISP B give you the same just barely adequate bandwidth, but ISP A supports the TOS stuff, then you'd have a better WoW experience.
The big problem with much traffic control stuff (and Linux tc is one of them) is it is hard to automatically fairly share out bandwidth on a per IP basis. Much of the stuff out there controls bandwidth on a per connection basis, which is crappy since it means bittorrent with many connections, or an http download accelerator will squeeze out your precious single WoW connection.
Example? I think you don't know what you are talking about.
Most of the stuff I run in windows sure doesn't run as SYSTEM. IE sure doesn't and it doesn't have SYSTEM privileges, neither does my email program. Same for Open Office.
If you can show that any user program running as a normal user can escalate its privileges without permission in Windows NT/2K/XP then it is a serious security bug. And you'll get your 15 minutes of fame at least.
The more people running old versions of their O/Ses, the greater the danger that someone else comes up with a really Windows Compatible O/S, and they end up like a BIOS manufacturer.
For example, they are trying to come up with Vista. If it is too incompatible they might end up in the Intel Itanic vs AMD Opteron scenario. Where people look at the Itanic and say, if I want incompatible and fast, I might as well go IBM POWER, if I want compatible and fast, I go AMD.
That is why if lots of people get Dell/HP etc to skip the Vista preload and preload XP instead, Microsoft could have big problems, even if Linux is not being preloaded.
Run it using another user. Works under windows too, even with IE.
;). I've had Mozilla use 1GB of mem before.
Just most Windows/Linux users don't know that, or do that.
You need to set up permissions so that your downloads can be accessible (and deletable) from your main account, but that's not too difficult under Windows, and fiddling with some ACLs on Linux. In fact I found it harder to do the permissions thing on Linux.
The other option is to run in in a virtual machine. The other benefit is firefox/mozilla can't use more RAM than the VM limit
Huh? You can sandbox browsers on Windows or Linux.
/savecred).
In Windows you can run IE or some other browser using another user account (runas
On Linux same thing: just run it as some other user.
IE/Firefox Windows/Linux are just about as crappy security-wise.
By _default_ whether on Linux or Windows, if your browser or email app gets exploited, there's plenty of nastiness that can occur.
So don't be so smug. Linux is maybe slightly more secure than Windows. It's just less targeted by spyware, zombie writers.
What O/S people should be doing is to sandbox apps by default AND make it userfriendly - a browser does not need full write and read privileges to everything the main user account has. And a flash game should have even fewer privileges.
Anyway, in addition to running Firefox as a different user, I've been running IE in a virtual machine for less trusted sites, or sites that require javascript etc. Hackers are free to take over a fake machine if they want - I'll just roll it back to a pristine condition.
In Law, there's more than one way to lose an English Major in an English sentence. ;)
I'm actually waiting for parrot and ponie, not perl6. Then hopefully perl5 will run faster.
;).
Unfortunately ponie seems to have got stuck or something.
Then if there are some things that perl5 doesn't do well, maybe you switch to perl6.
Or python
You miss my point.
Say X = food required for a particular human to stay alive.
And Y = additional food required to do Z amount of work.
Then in many cases one should use Y and Z for calculating efficiency, since you are going to assume that you're going to have to "pay" for X anyway.
I doubt that the Y-Z ratio would remain constant to the max Z of a human.
So it could be more interesting to know the incremental efficiency.
If the creature containing the cells serves some other purpose other trhan converting food into raw energy then one should not measure efficiency in such absolute terms.
Say a human being is only 30% efficient in converting food to energy/"work". Given the human already needs a certain amount of food to stay alive, one should also measure the additional amount of food the human needs to do an additional amount of work.
If it's really expensive and stays expensive, it may be cheaper to hire someone strong enough to do the job. In lots of places the cost of labour is lower than in Japan.
I think the USA in the 1940s was different from the USA now. Different people in charge too.
So rip away.
Come up with your own timeline then.
Find some great innovations that happened in the 1980s and 1990s and add them to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s
I am not saying incremental improvement is bad. I'm just disappointed with the lack of real innovation.
;) ).
The difference is like just improving cars compared to making a plane when there was no such thing as a plane before.
Why should I be impressed with an _ongoing_ search for an AIDS cure? It's not like they found one yet. What next, I should be impressed with someone's search for the homework his dog ate?
BTW HIV is not very contagious and its spread can be controlled - it's because of the idiot politicians that HIV is such a big problem in Africa and other places. Now a deadly flu is what you call a big problem. Even so, a vaccine for particular strain of flu would not be what I call something new. The elimination of flu would be something new. Heck the eradication of polio would be a good start, but even that's being screwed up after getting so close!
What's so innovative about the International Space Station? Skylab was launched in 1973 and did 2000 hours worth of experiments. The ISS is good at spending billions of money.
The recent probes to Mars. Sure they are better probes etc etc, big improvements over previous probes. But nope not an innovation. There were plenty of probes to Mercury, Venus, etc way before that too.
LCDs? It's old stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD
Say in 2030, someone looks back and says ok in 1990-1999 what was the great innovation or invention there? I guess maybe it'll be the exponential growth of the Internet and the WWW? But that's it?
How about 2000-2010? Monkeys and humans move their robot arms with their thoughts? People seeing with their tongues? OK that's good, but hurry and take those next obvious steps while you guys are at it. And I sure hope that's not the only stuff for this decade.
Now if someone built a space elevator that would be something not done before (not saying it will necessarily be a good thing to build, but that'll be something new).
Or someone finally got practical fusion to work at more than break even (fusion is not new in itself, but "fusion no longer always being decades away" would be something new
Or someone got an aged mouse to grow _younger_ AND live longer. Rejuvenation.
Or we start being able to regrow whole limbs. Regeneration. The last two are supposedly coming soon I hear but how soon?
A permanent cure for the common cold or flu would be an innovation.
I have read lots of science stuff. YOU should read more science stuff, since you think so many things are new and innovative when they are not.
Uh I did mention that the medical side has been making some progress. Go read it again.
And yah wordstar probably shouldn't be there - coz Douglas Engelbart already demoed wordprocessing in 1968. And that's way before Wordstar.
Yeah the exponential growth of the internet and the WWW is probably one of the few major noteworthy things in the 1990s.
I'm not saying there are have been no advances, but remember the original topic was about "tech breakthroughs".
So forget my list, go make your own list - go look up what has happened for this whole century.
Anyway, perhaps its because a lot of the low hanging fruit has been taken, and real innovation is hard. Then again, when I look at a lot of the existing technologies and how they could be put together to create something really new (see the augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis stuff I mentioned for example), BUT they're not interested, everyone nowadays is just satisfied with incremental improvements. Rapid incremental improvements perhaps, but no great risky leaps (or leap attempts).
Previously I think there were a few key people backing and driving stuff like the Manhattan project.
Oops it should read: "If you want more details and help my professional rates are XYZ."
It's a matter of the details and we don't know the details of the case. And the details are important.
After all, from what I see he could have told the bank something like the following:
"Hi, you've got security problems with your email server, the following webservers have serious problems and need to be patched (list of IPs), the following servers have easily guessable ssh username and passwords.
If you want more details my professional rates are XYZ."
While that's not the best way of going about doing things, I don't think that should be considered criminal.
The Bank is free to look for a different person/organisation to do the job, and give that info to them as a starting point.
After all providing a detailed and professional report and recommendation takes a fair bit of time and effort. You can't expect that bit for free.
So not knowing the details I don't think we should be so sure that he's been doing extortion or blackmail. Maybe the Bank has been nasty about the whole thing - after all when was the last time a Bank has behaved well?
Maybe someone had to cover up their ignorance and incompetence and thus treated it as extortion.
AND that's why I think the guy was dumb to do what he did - after all he's not dealing with a friendly organisation - he's dealing with a Bank. Lucky for him, he's in NZ and not some uncivilized country like the USA[1].
Many of the slashdotters seem to be used to the US "justice" system.
[1] If you win cases because you have more money or power, that's not really better than one of those corrupt African countries is it?
Actually in my opinion we haven't really made much progress in the recent decade at all.
1942 manhattan project
1945 first a-bomb, + hiroshima & nagasaki
1947 transistor invented
1949 Comet (passenger jet) Unveiled
1951 electricity from nuclear power plant
1952 US Airforce orders B52
1955 U2 Tested
1956 first O/S
1957 silicon wafer, FORTRAN, sputnik
1958-59 first IC, ALGOL, LISP
1961 VTOL, first man in space, CTSS
1962 spacewar computer game
1964 computer mouse & windows
1968 Douglas Engelbart demos the above, hypertext, collaborative computing and more
1969 feb Jumbo jet (747) first flight
1969 apr concorde first Mach 2 passenger jet first flight
1969 apr QE 2 ship first voyage
1969 Jul first man on moon
1969 Multics
1971 intel 4004
1972 C
1973 skylab, ethernet, UNIX, work on TCP/IP started
1974 Altair and Scelbi
1975 apollo & soyuz dock
1976 viking landings on Mars, Apple I, ethernet launched
1977 voyager 2 launched, Apple II, commodore
1978 visicalc, vi
1979 wordstar
1980 TCP/IP RFCs
1981 space shuttle, IBM PC
1982 BSD gets TCP/IP
1983 Apple Lisa
1983 "Unix Review compares six Unix-compatibles for IBM PCs"
1983 GNU project
1984 Apple Mac, X Windows
1985 Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft Windows
#Stagnation starts
1986 chernobyl, challenger blow up
1988 stealth fighter
1989 stealth bomber
1990 WWW (hypertext revisited)
1991 Linux started (UNIX rehash)
1992 Windows NT, NetBSD, FreeBSD
1993 Mosaic
1994 webcrawler
1995 Windows 95, Altavista
1996 pathfinder mars rover/lander (viking rehash)
1997 google (good but not really a great leap )
2003 spirit+opportunity mars rovers
Looking at the past 10-20 years I can say there really hasn't been as many leaps. Most are just rehashes of the same thing done before. Some not actually done better just more popular. Linux is just UNIX revisited. Just go look at the video of Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968 and you'll see we haven't really made that many advances in the computing fields.
As for aerospace:
All NASA can do is try to stop the space shuttles from blowing up.
They're talking about going to the Moon again (so 1960s). Then there was all that fuss about sending probes to mars. Oh wow, like wasn't that done in 1976?
Then there's the supersonic jetliner and big passenger jet... Heck the 747 design is still being used to this day (and it works pretty well too).
Only thing new so far is the space tourism innovation by the Russians. Where on a regular schedule anyone reasonably fit and healthy with USD20 million bucks can go to space.
Automobile tech? No breakthroughs. Now if there's practical gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel cell+filter that'll be a breakthrough.
Nuclear fusion/fission? No significant progress at all.
They've already spent billions and decades on hot fusion with not much to show for it, maybe they should just spend a bit more time and money investigating the cold fusion stuff - even if it isn't fusion, there's evidence that it could be an interesting phenomena. Or just spend some billions to make fission better.
AI has been a field for bullshit artists.
But medical tech has had some advances. You can now actually implement brain augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis with current communications/computing and medical technology. But the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA etc may hold the progress back in that field (they'll want a penny for your^H^H^H^H_their_ thoughts or more). And then there's the threat of lawsuits of course.
Still TB and many other diseases seem to be threatening to make a comeback, so it's not been that great either.
Lifespans are up mainly because infant mortality is down, and ER treatment is much better.
Now, tell me of something really innovative in the past 10 years. No hypersonic jetliner to be seen. When the Concorde came out it was definitely not a rehash. The first man on the moon in 1969 was not
The T1 was probably behind the very day it was launched.
And by now it's way behind as AMD and Intel battle it out furiously.
Just look at Intel's new CPUs (which beat AMD's chips is many situations by 40-50% - AMDs chips beat Intel's old CPUs by a similar margin too ).
Show me a real world benchmark done by an independent party where the T1 does better.
The main reason why Windows is on most desktops is the network effect. And the main reason why it stays there is it comes _preinstalled_.
;) ).
IF (a big IF) the big buyers ( large organisations etc) think that Vista is crap (or not worth it), and get Dell, HP, IBM etc to just keep preinstalling XP instead of Vista, then there is a chance (albeit a slim one) for Windows XP to end up a defacto standard that even Microsoft can't break free from.
Then Win XP would be like "IBM PC BIOS", and MS would be one of the BIOS manufacturers.
Naturally MS does NOT want to be like a BIOS manufacturer, and that's why they keep changing and breaking stuff at a calculated pace.
So if Vista is not acceptable soon enough, then in theory someone could make a Win XP compatible get the hardware people to use it and MS would have some problems.
It does not have to be a perfect Win XP compatibility (even XP SP2 differs a lot from XP SP1). It just has to be significantly more compatible than Vista and for a better price.
It'll be like AMD's Opteron vs Intel's Itanic. Without the Opteron, people would have had no alternative but the crappy Itanic.
Unfortunately I think the odds aren't that good. Making a "Windows XP compatible" O/S is not an easy task (as MS knows
Well if Vista is crap or incompatible enough, perhaps Apple could take over - I think they are getting Intel's best prices. Dell used to get those.
When I last checked, Win XP has probs with hibernate if the computer has more than a certain amount of RAM (1GB or more). There is a hot fix for this.
Yeah, once you're sentient enough to be sufficiently delusional (or dishonest) - you get to define "best possible solution".
;).
Even if nobody is sure what the problem is, the solution is "42"