> There is only email I wish to recieve and email I don't wish to recieve.
That is certainly your wish, and generally mine. But the law is a blunt instrument, and "I wish to" is specifically what makes this "delightfully grey." Besides, unfortunately the Law is like sausage, and unfortunately one of the key ingredients in that sausage is money. The commercial interests may $$$want$$$ you to get their message more than you can $$want$$ to not get it. (I didn't say it's right, and in principle I agree with you.)
>Or there is some law in the US requiring you to listen to any marketing company that yells at you using your equipment.
DMCA is effectively that. (Among other things.) From what I understand, in the legal realm they've extracted (from guess where?) an "implied contract" that when you decide to watch their show, you have become obligated to watch their attached advertisements, as well. They "put up with" bathroom breaks, channel surfing, and the VCR fast-forward button, but they really got uppity when Tivo came along.
This provides clear substantiation of Microsoft's assertion that, "hardware is too expensive."
The machine that my daughter (now a senior) will likely take to college is currently dual-boot, Linux and Win98SE. I'd accepted that I was probably going to pony up for XP before she went away to school, but had begun to wonder if I should get some flavor of Vista, and wasn't sure if the current hardware would handle it. Now I'm starting to think about sending it as a Linux-only machine, since that's what she uses most of the time.
The real problem here is that spam is considered an "annoyance" and is legislatively treated as such. In that light, it becomes "my business model, revenue, and profitability" vs "your annoyance" vs "their attempts to help others deal with spam." It also gets into a delightfully grey realm of defining "spam" vs "legitimate commercial email." Because these aren't simple issues, and the defined reason to stop spam is "annoyance," nothing substantive happens.
Think differently...
From what I've heard, spam constitutes something over half the traffic on the Internet. Think of blocking half of a water main, or half of a sewer, or half the lanes on the highway. No doubt at all that this would be considered more than just "an annoyance," but that's pretty much what spam is doing each and every day. Look at the legislative "encouragement" to build more bandwidth and the end-to-end compromises being threatened, but in reality we're wasting over half of what we've got, already. Spam is much more serious than just an annoyance.
How's this for an idea - link it to terrorism! Imagine for a moment that you want to transmit secret, untracable terror plans all around the world. Simply put "V1agra" on the subject line, send it to EVERYBODY, and you're pretty much guaranteed that NOBODY will read it. You could probably send your plans in clear-text safely, but steganography would be advisable. So here it is... Spam is really a secret terrorist communications channel! It needs to be stopped!
Some time back, I believe it was Cringely who criticized VCs for not doing their job. In his opinion, once upon a time, VCs would fund 10 ideas hoping for 1 or 2 things that did fairly well, 1 real winner, and accept 7 dogs. They don't want to accept the dogs any more, and in clipping out the dogs are very likely to be clipping out the real winner, as well.
If they were betting on a sure (or nearly sure) thing, they'd be ordinary investors instead of VCs.
When I used that line, "The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad," and disparaged it, I'm interpreting the intent to be, "You're clearly going to get no better if you vote Democrat, so it's just safest and best to vote Republican." In other words, I take that piece of meme as an attempt to prevent change.
I don't KNOW that the Democrats would have done any better on any of the issues you mention. There are a few key facts, though: * On 9/11, it's second guessing to say anything about whether it could or could not have been prevented. But there is one key contrast: The Clinton administration was criticized for being 'preoccupied' with the Middle East. They were clearly paying attention, and they were clearly trying to do something. They were also accused of 'wagging the dog' for having done so. The day after the Bush administration took office, they practically dropped all involvement in the Middle East, and the entire focus of the State Department was on getting out of the ABM treaty, so the US could pursue some form of Star Wars. * From everything I've been able to tell, the dot-com boom was really at least partly due to the injection of money into the IT sector by Y2K remediation. The dot-com bust was at least partly because Y2K was over, and the money dried up. Not fully, on either count, but a large part. Incidentally, I consider Y2K to be a tremendous success, *because* nothing happened. We perpared, we executed, we succeeded. So in all fairness, the Bush administration inherited that economic slowdown, most likely nothing either candidate's administration could have done would have prevented it, so it's not fair the chalk that up against him. What is in question is the response to that slowdown. * Muslims love us? No way, but I suspect that at least under a Democratic administration they wouldn't be quite so inflamed. * Katrina response? Who knows. I do suspect that part of the problem was wealth-inspired myopia: Of course you evacuate by car, doesn't EVERYONE have a car?
I will also state that IMHO this particular administration has a rather firm world-view, and a strong tendancy to discard facts that disagree with that view, whenever possible. I don't know that the Democrats would have done any better, but I will say that past administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have.
I don't know if a meme can be engineered. IMHO, one sure sign of a meme is that its components will act against their personal welfare, in favor of the welfare of the meme.
We need the Juwain Philosophy. That would be powerful enough.
To paraphrase Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word 'conservative' is.
'Conservative' shares the root word with 'conservation', which might indicate that 'conservatives' would have some 'environmentalist' tendancies, wouldn't it?
'Conservative' might also mean 'mind your own business, and I'll mind mine,' in which case it's my business that I have a wife, and it's your business who you live with.
Which brings us to Vermont... Vermont does not have gay marriage, it has civil unions.
In a strange way, this is the perfect 'separation of Church and State' answer. Marriage is a religious institution, and what the heck is the State doing dabbling in the definitions of a Church institution, one way or another. In fact, Vermont's civil unions were driven by the courts, because under the existing marriage-based rules, gays were being deprived of rights like inheritance and medical decision. In a strange way, isn't this aspect really a Conservative/Libertarian issue? If you didn't know they were gay, and take religiously-inspired umbrage at the fact, wouldn't a Conservative/Libertarian be all in favor of a person being able to designate inheritance and medical decision?
Along this line, perhaps the most correct answer is that the State should not be permitted to be involved in Marriage, at all. Perhaps the State should only be allowed to grant Civil Unions, and the Church grants Marriages. I don't think the wall between Church and State would be too damaged if there were some sort of automatic recognition of Marriage as a Civil Union, in which case methods and actions come back to where we are today, but the whole 'legal definition of Marriage by the State' issue is simply taken off the table. period.
Sometimes it seems to me that the Neocons (I was raised Republican, still hold those values, and consider myself to be a moderate, but in today's spectrum that makes me a liberal. But I still don't want to sully the 'Republican' label.) have taken the liberal concept of 'cultural relativism' and run with it, convincing themselves that 'factual relativism' is real and applicable to the world.
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics: * This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this. * The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad. * The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
The 'compile from source' is what I like about Gentoo. I ran Linux for quite some before moving to Gentoo, and when it came time to install those non-distro rpms, it was frequently a crap-shoot. Try the rpm, learn about a missing dependency. Grab that, learn about its missing dependency, maybe up-level from distro standard. Grab this, find out that it doesn't play well with my distro, etc. I got quite a few non-distro things installed from rpm, but there were things that didn't, and things that I had to carefully back out and replace a base version.
By and large, Gentoo ebuilds just work, and the variety is great enough that I've had to go out-of-distro less often. Beyond that, since Gentoo is source-based, I usually don't have to go and grab some '-devel' package that isn't normally installed, in order to build out-of-distro software. Yeah, the compile time can be a pain, but the total get-arbitrary-package-running time is generally shorter.
Plus there isn't the old 'version n+1 is out, time to reinstall/upgrade' churn. Of course there's a lower level of continual churn, but aside from recent things like gcc and glibc levels, and modular xorg, it's pretty easy.
By an large, I only have problems with closed-source binary packages, and some stuff that isn't properly ported to amd64, yet. (Doomsday, for one)
Yep, right before I invented time travel using mid-1800's technology.
For that matter, my future self never showed up to take me along to one of the original Pink Floyd concerts for "Dark Side of the Moon." I was so looking forward to chatting with a dozen copies of myself from various times, while we were all waiting for the concert to begin.
Well it's obvious that we won't have time travel, at least not in my lifetime, because my future self hasn't come back and given me a sheet of sports or stock picks.
The real problem I have with "just works" is that usually, when it doesn't quite work or you want to do something a little odd, it becomes twice as hard because you end up fighting the "just works" stuff instead of being helped by it.
I'm getting a bit uncomfortable with baselayout-1.12 - it's a little too far toward the "just works (most of the time)" end for me, and doesn't really tell what it's doing under the covers. I had a bit of a "discussion" with the author, and he was happy with the "just works" aspect of things, and wasn't worried about the hiding. I'm invited to document it, but haven't had time. But now that baselayout-1.12 is stable, the urge is growing.
Over there, it's war. Over here, we don't have large groups of insurgents, so it's police work.
Even if you believe it was necessary to get into War in Iraq, and that containment wouldn't have worked, it has been managed from above with such utter and complete incompetence and stupidity that it boggles the imagination, including the fact that pretty much the complete cast of characters who launched this debacle is still in place.
The State of Vermont has been playing on and off with the idea of Instant Runoff for elections, and I believe it may have been used in the City of Burlington in a recent election. Of course they're only toying with the idea, but at least they're doing that much. Maybe things will change.
And I know Instant Runoff is nowhere as geeky as Condorcet or other styles of voting, but at least it's a start away from simple ballot.
Once you've heard the buzz, seen the trailers, and chatted about it with friends, what's left?
For a while I honestly thought it was all a big prank, just a hype jest, and there was no such real movie. "Snakes on a Plane" would have stood perfectly well on its own, perhaps better, as a prank.
Of course it wouldn't have made any money. But then, it's only recovered half its investment. On the other hand, assuming it has any sort of staying power, and there are more people like my son coming home and saying that it lives up to the hype, then it'll make some money. (Gross, not profits, of course)
You are talking about basic c*v**2 current, and he's talking about shoot-through current during the transition. Though one normally doesn't fuss too hard about shoot-through unless slew rates are really slow. But then again, it wasn't that many years ago that device standby leakage was nearly negligible, instead of being a substantial fraction of the active current, like it is today. For that matter, the scope traces I've seen of high-speed clocks look a heck of a lot more like a sine wave than a logic pulse, but at this point we're stressing capabilities of the measurment electonics, too.
Change of administration presumes free and fair elections. While I won't state it as a foregone conclusion, there is sufficient evidence to call into question both the 2000 and 2004 (As well as 1960, on the other foot.) elections.
In 2000 chads were a diversion. The real issue was the false classification of some 30,000-50,000 blacks as felons, denying them the right to vote. Perhaps the whole chad thing left what looked like a close vote, but the race wasn't really close at all. 30,000-50,000 falsly denied black votes in a region which votes predominately Democratic overwhelms the chad issue.
In 2004 black precincts were given insufficient numbers of voting machines. Between making it to work, and the long lines after work, many were unable to vote. I haven't heard figures on the magnitude of the problem, just that it existed.
Then there's the Canton, OH company, Diebold. Perhaps it was a restricted audience when he said it, but an executive of a company that makes voting machines should NEVER shoot of his mouth about, "delivering Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush," in ANY audience.
I will vote in both 2006 and 2008 elections. But I don't have a lot of faith in them.
IBM has been shipping virtualization since before many of these newcomers were even born. What do you think the 'V' in MVS or VM stands for? I wonder how well IBM's expired patents compare to modern virtualization. Of course in this case it helps to own the hardware, instruction set, and operating system.
I think you've hit it pretty well, but there's one thing worth mentioning.
The Windows security problems are Microsoft's own fault, and at a FAR more fundamental level than merely flawed implementation.
The problems began because Windows began as a GUI shell on top of a single-user program loader. There's an old adage, "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it - poorly." Multi-user wasn't in there at the beginning, and retrofits were awkward. I realize that the NT kernel is a true multiuser kernel, but there's so much cultural cruft above it that it doesn't help, much.
The problems got worse through the Windows95 era because of 2 competitive fronts - DOS and OS/2. To cannibalize their old DOS base, they tried to sell integration - make everything just work together and give Windows an obvious advantage even to those unafraid of the command line. One of the many things they did to kill OS/2 was the 'API of the week." Many APIs were made up, I suspect on the fly by marketing, in order to give Win95 an edge over OS/2. Many of those APIs went by the wayside once they'd done their FUD-duty, but not all. The result of these 2 competitive responses was a bunch of stuff thrown into Win32 with little true architecture work or security concern.
Combine these factors, and I'd say that from a security point of view, the Windows API was broken-by-design back in the old Win9X days. Microsoft has been struggling ever since to clean what they can and limit the breakage of backward compatiblity to something that won't stop users from upgrading. They've built themselves a mighty fine knife-edge to dance on.
Slashdot Mirror
> There is only email I wish to recieve and email I don't wish to recieve.
That is certainly your wish, and generally mine. But the law is a blunt instrument, and "I wish to" is specifically what makes this "delightfully grey." Besides, unfortunately the Law is like sausage, and unfortunately one of the key ingredients in that sausage is money. The commercial interests may $$$want$$$ you to get their message more than you can $$want$$ to not get it. (I didn't say it's right, and in principle I agree with you.)
>Or there is some law in the US requiring you to listen to any marketing company that yells at you using your equipment.
DMCA is effectively that. (Among other things.) From what I understand, in the legal realm they've extracted (from guess where?) an "implied contract" that when you decide to watch their show, you have become obligated to watch their attached advertisements, as well. They "put up with" bathroom breaks, channel surfing, and the VCR fast-forward button, but they really got uppity when Tivo came along.
This provides clear substantiation of Microsoft's assertion that, "hardware is too expensive."
The machine that my daughter (now a senior) will likely take to college is currently dual-boot, Linux and Win98SE. I'd accepted that I was probably going to pony up for XP before she went away to school, but had begun to wonder if I should get some flavor of Vista, and wasn't sure if the current hardware would handle it. Now I'm starting to think about sending it as a Linux-only machine, since that's what she uses most of the time.
The real problem here is that spam is considered an "annoyance" and is legislatively treated as such. In that light, it becomes "my business model, revenue, and profitability" vs "your annoyance" vs "their attempts to help others deal with spam." It also gets into a delightfully grey realm of defining "spam" vs "legitimate commercial email." Because these aren't simple issues, and the defined reason to stop spam is "annoyance," nothing substantive happens.
Think differently...
From what I've heard, spam constitutes something over half the traffic on the Internet. Think of blocking half of a water main, or half of a sewer, or half the lanes on the highway. No doubt at all that this would be considered more than just "an annoyance," but that's pretty much what spam is doing each and every day. Look at the legislative "encouragement" to build more bandwidth and the end-to-end compromises being threatened, but in reality we're wasting over half of what we've got, already. Spam is much more serious than just an annoyance.
How's this for an idea - link it to terrorism!
Imagine for a moment that you want to transmit secret, untracable terror plans all around the world. Simply put "V1agra" on the subject line, send it to EVERYBODY, and you're pretty much guaranteed that NOBODY will read it. You could probably send your plans in clear-text safely, but steganography would be advisable.
So here it is... Spam is really a secret terrorist communications channel! It needs to be stopped!
Some time back, I believe it was Cringely who criticized VCs for not doing their job. In his opinion, once upon a time, VCs would fund 10 ideas hoping for 1 or 2 things that did fairly well, 1 real winner, and accept 7 dogs. They don't want to accept the dogs any more, and in clipping out the dogs are very likely to be clipping out the real winner, as well.
If they were betting on a sure (or nearly sure) thing, they'd be ordinary investors instead of VCs.
It's pretty bad that you've got all the movies properly numbered abbreviated into initials.
It's much worse that I know what you're talking about.
I'll throw in a vote for Forbidden Planet. The theme was great, even if much of the tech looks silly now.
When I used that line, "The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad," and disparaged it, I'm interpreting the intent to be, "You're clearly going to get no better if you vote Democrat, so it's just safest and best to vote Republican." In other words, I take that piece of meme as an attempt to prevent change.
I don't KNOW that the Democrats would have done any better on any of the issues you mention. There are a few key facts, though:
* On 9/11, it's second guessing to say anything about whether it could or could not have been prevented. But there is one key contrast: The Clinton administration was criticized for being 'preoccupied' with the Middle East. They were clearly paying attention, and they were clearly trying to do something. They were also accused of 'wagging the dog' for having done so. The day after the Bush administration took office, they practically dropped all involvement in the Middle East, and the entire focus of the State Department was on getting out of the ABM treaty, so the US could pursue some form of Star Wars.
* From everything I've been able to tell, the dot-com boom was really at least partly due to the injection of money into the IT sector by Y2K remediation. The dot-com bust was at least partly because Y2K was over, and the money dried up. Not fully, on either count, but a large part. Incidentally, I consider Y2K to be a tremendous success, *because* nothing happened. We perpared, we executed, we succeeded. So in all fairness, the Bush administration inherited that economic slowdown, most likely nothing either candidate's administration could have done would have prevented it, so it's not fair the chalk that up against him. What is in question is the response to that slowdown.
* Muslims love us? No way, but I suspect that at least under a Democratic administration they wouldn't be quite so inflamed.
* Katrina response? Who knows. I do suspect that part of the problem was wealth-inspired myopia: Of course you evacuate by car, doesn't EVERYONE have a car?
I will also state that IMHO this particular administration has a rather firm world-view, and a strong tendancy to discard facts that disagree with that view, whenever possible. I don't know that the Democrats would have done any better, but I will say that past administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have.
I don't know if a meme can be engineered. IMHO, one sure sign of a meme is that its components will act against their personal welfare, in favor of the welfare of the meme.
We need the Juwain Philosophy. That would be powerful enough.
To paraphrase Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word 'conservative' is.
'Conservative' shares the root word with 'conservation', which might indicate that 'conservatives' would have some 'environmentalist' tendancies, wouldn't it?
'Conservative' might also mean 'mind your own business, and I'll mind mine,' in which case it's my business that I have a wife, and it's your business who you live with.
Which brings us to Vermont... Vermont does not have gay marriage, it has civil unions.
In a strange way, this is the perfect 'separation of Church and State' answer. Marriage is a religious institution, and what the heck is the State doing dabbling in the definitions of a Church institution, one way or another. In fact, Vermont's civil unions were driven by the courts, because under the existing marriage-based rules, gays were being deprived of rights like inheritance and medical decision. In a strange way, isn't this aspect really a Conservative/Libertarian issue? If you didn't know they were gay, and take religiously-inspired umbrage at the fact, wouldn't a Conservative/Libertarian be all in favor of a person being able to designate inheritance and medical decision?
Along this line, perhaps the most correct answer is that the State should not be permitted to be involved in Marriage, at all. Perhaps the State should only be allowed to grant Civil Unions, and the Church grants Marriages. I don't think the wall between Church and State would be too damaged if there were some sort of automatic recognition of Marriage as a Civil Union, in which case methods and actions come back to where we are today, but the whole 'legal definition of Marriage by the State' issue is simply taken off the table. period.
Sometimes it seems to me that the Neocons (I was raised Republican, still hold those values, and consider myself to be a moderate, but in today's spectrum that makes me a liberal. But I still don't want to sully the 'Republican' label.) have taken the liberal concept of 'cultural relativism' and run with it, convincing themselves that 'factual relativism' is real and applicable to the world.
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:
* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.
* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.
* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
Oh, well.
Gee, google can't give any images for that search combination.
Cue up the Gentoo jokes...
The 'compile from source' is what I like about Gentoo. I ran Linux for quite some before moving to Gentoo, and when it came time to install those non-distro rpms, it was frequently a crap-shoot. Try the rpm, learn about a missing dependency. Grab that, learn about its missing dependency, maybe up-level from distro standard. Grab this, find out that it doesn't play well with my distro, etc. I got quite a few non-distro things installed from rpm, but there were things that didn't, and things that I had to carefully back out and replace a base version.
By and large, Gentoo ebuilds just work, and the variety is great enough that I've had to go out-of-distro less often. Beyond that, since Gentoo is source-based, I usually don't have to go and grab some '-devel' package that isn't normally installed, in order to build out-of-distro software. Yeah, the compile time can be a pain, but the total get-arbitrary-package-running time is generally shorter.
Plus there isn't the old 'version n+1 is out, time to reinstall/upgrade' churn. Of course there's a lower level of continual churn, but aside from recent things like gcc and glibc levels, and modular xorg, it's pretty easy.
By an large, I only have problems with closed-source binary packages, and some stuff that isn't properly ported to amd64, yet. (Doomsday, for one)
Yep, right before I invented time travel using mid-1800's technology.
For that matter, my future self never showed up to take me along to one of the original Pink Floyd concerts for "Dark Side of the Moon." I was so looking forward to chatting with a dozen copies of myself from various times, while we were all waiting for the concert to begin.
Well it's obvious that we won't have time travel, at least not in my lifetime, because my future self hasn't come back and given me a sheet of sports or stock picks.
The real problem I have with "just works" is that usually, when it doesn't quite work or you want to do something a little odd, it becomes twice as hard because you end up fighting the "just works" stuff instead of being helped by it.
I'm getting a bit uncomfortable with baselayout-1.12 - it's a little too far toward the "just works (most of the time)" end for me, and doesn't really tell what it's doing under the covers. I had a bit of a "discussion" with the author, and he was happy with the "just works" aspect of things, and wasn't worried about the hiding. I'm invited to document it, but haven't had time. But now that baselayout-1.12 is stable, the urge is growing.
Over there, it's war.
Over here, we don't have large groups of insurgents, so it's police work.
Even if you believe it was necessary to get into War in Iraq, and that containment wouldn't have worked, it has been managed from above with such utter and complete incompetence and stupidity that it boggles the imagination, including the fact that pretty much the complete cast of characters who launched this debacle is still in place.
The State of Vermont has been playing on and off with the idea of Instant Runoff for elections, and I believe it may have been used in the City of Burlington in a recent election. Of course they're only toying with the idea, but at least they're doing that much. Maybe things will change.
And I know Instant Runoff is nowhere as geeky as Condorcet or other styles of voting, but at least it's a start away from simple ballot.
Either that, or perhaps Dhrawn (Hal Clement) or Cuckoo. (Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson)
But no team wants the other teams to all go bankrupt an fold, because their entire being is in the competition, itself.
Assuming they could get away with it, no business would object to all of its competitors going bankrupt, freeing them from the fetters of competition.
Once you've heard the buzz, seen the trailers, and chatted about it with friends, what's left?
For a while I honestly thought it was all a big prank, just a hype jest, and there was no such real movie. "Snakes on a Plane" would have stood perfectly well on its own, perhaps better, as a prank.
Of course it wouldn't have made any money. But then, it's only recovered half its investment. On the other hand, assuming it has any sort of staying power, and there are more people like my son coming home and saying that it lives up to the hype, then it'll make some money. (Gross, not profits, of course)
You're both right.
You are talking about basic c*v**2 current, and he's talking about shoot-through current during the transition. Though one normally doesn't fuss too hard about shoot-through unless slew rates are really slow. But then again, it wasn't that many years ago that device standby leakage was nearly negligible, instead of being a substantial fraction of the active current, like it is today. For that matter, the scope traces I've seen of high-speed clocks look a heck of a lot more like a sine wave than a logic pulse, but at this point we're stressing capabilities of the measurment electonics, too.
Change of administration presumes free and fair elections. While I won't state it as a foregone conclusion, there is sufficient evidence to call into question both the 2000 and 2004 (As well as 1960, on the other foot.) elections.
In 2000 chads were a diversion. The real issue was the false classification of some 30,000-50,000 blacks as felons, denying them the right to vote. Perhaps the whole chad thing left what looked like a close vote, but the race wasn't really close at all. 30,000-50,000 falsly denied black votes in a region which votes predominately Democratic overwhelms the chad issue.
In 2004 black precincts were given insufficient numbers of voting machines. Between making it to work, and the long lines after work, many were unable to vote. I haven't heard figures on the magnitude of the problem, just that it existed.
Then there's the Canton, OH company, Diebold. Perhaps it was a restricted audience when he said it, but an executive of a company that makes voting machines should NEVER shoot of his mouth about, "delivering Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush," in ANY audience.
I will vote in both 2006 and 2008 elections.
But I don't have a lot of faith in them.
IBM has been shipping virtualization since before many of these newcomers were even born. What do you think the 'V' in MVS or VM stands for? I wonder how well IBM's expired patents compare to modern virtualization. Of course in this case it helps to own the hardware, instruction set, and operating system.
I think you've hit it pretty well, but there's one thing worth mentioning.
The Windows security problems are Microsoft's own fault, and at a FAR more fundamental level than merely flawed implementation.
The problems began because Windows began as a GUI shell on top of a single-user program loader. There's an old adage, "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it - poorly." Multi-user wasn't in there at the beginning, and retrofits were awkward. I realize that the NT kernel is a true multiuser kernel, but there's so much cultural cruft above it that it doesn't help, much.
The problems got worse through the Windows95 era because of 2 competitive fronts - DOS and OS/2. To cannibalize their old DOS base, they tried to sell integration - make everything just work together and give Windows an obvious advantage even to those unafraid of the command line. One of the many things they did to kill OS/2 was the 'API of the week." Many APIs were made up, I suspect on the fly by marketing, in order to give Win95 an edge over OS/2. Many of those APIs went by the wayside once they'd done their FUD-duty, but not all. The result of these 2 competitive responses was a bunch of stuff thrown into Win32 with little true architecture work or security concern.
Combine these factors, and I'd say that from a security point of view, the Windows API was broken-by-design back in the old Win9X days. Microsoft has been struggling ever since to clean what they can and limit the breakage of backward compatiblity to something that won't stop users from upgrading. They've built themselves a mighty fine knife-edge to dance on.
I'm surprised it's taken this long for anyone to mention Raven's high-speed kayak, not to mention his glass knives, considering the recent news.