Technical literacy and hands-on skills are considered lower class, while arts and management are considered upper class.
This explains why your boss can't use her computer (except when overcoming challenges to running.exes that come in email) -- if she knew those "techy details" she wouldn't be manager, since managers don't deal in details.
It wouldn't surprise me at all of ESPN and MSN site viewers liked the ads. First of all, most sports fans are droolers whose idea of quality TV and filmmaking isn't "Six Feet Under" but a beer ad where the women go topless and dogs fetch beer, plus, they're very "watch TV" oriented, not interactive oriented, so they're conditioned to a TV-like experience.
The MSN crowd is largely the same, except you can drop "sports fans" and replace it with "reality TV fans". Same neaderthal content, same neaderthal reaction. "MMMM..TV PICTURE WITH FUNNY COMMERCIAL...AND ME NOT EVEN WATCHING TV...MMMM...MIRACLE..."
I'm sure I'll get modded down as flamebait, but is ANYONE surprised that ESPN fans and MSN fans like commercials? Given the dreck they otherwise watch, it's hardly surprising.
I've been responsible for two high speed networks, the one at work, which is high-traffic, and high-visibility and the one at home, which is low traffic and low visibility.
Neither has been the victim of anything more than the usual portscanning behavior, which is annoying, but entirely predictable and not directly harmful in any way I can find. How common is DDoSing, anyway? I've never been a victim of it in either place.
While I'm sympathetic to your complaints with large ISPs (which are consistant with all telecomm providers; just try to get help with a rogue FAX machine on your home phone line), I also think its not surprising that it's gotten this way. Large ISPs must get thousands of complaints per day about rogue nodes, and a thorough, expert investigation of all complaints would require an unprofitable amount of resources to deal with them.
That many of the problems are temporary or accidental (misconfiguration, etc) doesn't make the problem any easier for them. And then there's the human "denial of service" aspect, where ISPs might get a lot of fake complaints about systems in attempt to get them shut down without cause.
Perhaps a better model might be charging for immediate assistance; and if the problem traffic really is sourced from their network, then these ISPs should refund the charge. This way they can filter out cranks and malevolent complainers and still provide timely service.
This happens all the time. I'd say that half of our laws are drafted by people outside of government, whether they're corporate interests or other lobbyists.
Of course the process can work for the good, and many people involved in the legislative process will tell you that this is actually a good thing and only appears to be evil.
Take, for example, a reform or change in the way that the counties in a state handle exchanges of prisoners between counties. There's expenses, rules, etc that have to be uniform statewide. The counties really want the system reformed (as its in everyone's tax interest and safety interest), but its inefficient and unproductive for a group of legislators to try to draft complex rules for entities and processes its unfamiliar with (without years of study and dedicated staff time, which nobody can afford).
So the counties get together, forge a compromise about how they want this to work, draft the legislation themselves and get representatives to submit the legislation. Assuming it passes, we just got a new law that regulates something important, largely written by those most impacted.
It sucks when its obvious payback for corporate interests, but does anyone have any stats as to "good" use of this technique vs. evil?
Most peopel who use a laptop also use a desktop, either as the primary computer or as a secondary computer. To people who use a desktop a good number of hours, even the best laptop feels handicapped -- either by RAM or slower disk speeds or even slower CPU.
I would NOT be interested in a slower laptop with more battery time and less weight. For the most part, I lug my laptop at the airport and occasionally in my car, and I don't find the weight onerous at all. From a power consumption perspective, I seldom run my battery right out -- I think have twice, and that was watching a very long movie on a very long airplane flight, DVD software being too braindead to RAM-cache the movie and constantly reading the DVD drive, not the mention the CPU task of decoding the movie, the backlight, etc.
It's like twice a year or less that I actually find myself doing real work in a mode that makes battery life an issue, but even then it's just a slight hassle to use a plug in. If laptops didn't start out handicapped performance-wise, I might consider a performance for battery/weight trade, but not now.
A $3.2 million markup is a lot, but, if the guy is accurate and there is zero groundwater seepage into the facility (either through his actions or sheer dumb luck), perhaps that alone provides extra value.
They're not making any more of these (at least not for sale), and those that are out there tend to be in rough condition, so if it has one of the few in good condition without any groundwater problems it may just be "worth" more.
Is it apparent that he actually did improvements, too? Water-tight or not, you'd think that it'd take a fairly sophisticated air management system to keep the humidity and all of its nasty consequences in check as well.
This is the second reference in this story's comments I've seen to Osama on a mule in rough terrain eluding the US.
Osama's success in remaining hidden owes almost everything to an extremely militant, well-armed and sympathetic population that is only nominally under the control of the Pakistani government (as much as "under the control of the Pakistani government" ever meant much of anything) providing him cover.
The terrain does a lot to frustrate trivial air searches and ground interdiction, but even then it's more the *weather* than the terrain; you can land a helicopter pretty much anyplace you can ride a mule, but you cannot figure out where to land your helicopter if the weather prevents you from finding targets. The jungle does pretty much the same thing has mountains does (lots of cover, lots of bad air support weather).
I'd like to see someone come out with a Firewire or USB2 raid controller; basically I'm just thinking of a box that looks like a hub but would contain a hadrware RAID controller in it and allow you to plug 2+ drives into it and build external RAID arrays simply. The RAID array controller should look like a standard FW/USB2 disk to the host system for maximum portability.
The internal IDE cards work, but it can be a real PITA to build a RAID5 setup without getting into some of the really big mid/full size towers.
I'm not talking about "data center" grade RAID systems, but something that could be used with home media libraries or other storage environments where the priorities are cost, flexibility, size and performance (in that order).
No, I'm not kidding. It plugs into anything in the house that makes video, does almost frame-accurate editing, 80GB HDD and stores to either -R or -RAM discs. Never drops frames, asks for software updates, gets the audio out of sync with the video, and the discs play on anything that will play -R media.
I have a DVD-R in my PC as well, and I know I'm probably a total loser but I found that video editing on the computer was more of a PITA than it was worth. DV bridge, hundreds of dollars worth of software, and a shitload of time to do compression or transcoding. The PC drive mainly comes in handy for duping DVDs I made on the E80 (DVD Decrypter) or making backups of stuff I've bought (DVDShrink).
For $480 I got a DMR-E80 and spent the rest of my time doing something more productive. I know it's not the right answer for someone who HAS to do 'fancy' editing (TV or Movies), but for most anything else it's sooo much easier and reliable, and less money to boot.
The sheathing on the outside of the house isn't just to fill the gaps, it's to provide structural integrity as well. It adds strength to the walls. I don't think cardboard could supply that, or a base to hang the siding, for that matter.
And even if they used cardboard for sheathing, what traps moisture in houses isn't the plywood but the air-tight construction required by most housing codes, usually due to wrapping the whole house in Tyvek -- extra-tight windows and doors contribute as well.
This is almost completely eliminated by air-air heat exchangers connected to the heat/AC that mechanically ventilate the house.
We remodeled our 1955 rambler last summer and the guys working on it said that the wood they used even that recently was dramatically better than what we use now. I ran some cabling after they did some re-framing and I can see why they said that. The new studs were like going through carrots they were so soft, but the old ones killed my 18V drill after boring two holes.
The construction foreman (a crusty old Dane) said he's continually amazed at the open spans and spacing they were able to get away with in older houses due to the far better lumber. When they work in 100 year old houses it's often more of a hassle than in 40 year old houses because the codes require joist and stud spacings that the old houses don't have and it means a lot of retrofitting; open a ceiling and find a huge span that suddenly "needs" an LVL or two to meet code, despite the fact that the old floor above didn't even creak when walked on.
Our building at work has poured walls and floors and the electricians core the floor all the time for new cabling runs, and it's been like that in every building I've been in with poured floors.
They usually do have wet walls where most of the plumbing runs, but I have yet to see an electrical or comm riser that was hollow from top to bottom -- they almost always core them at every floor.
Our current building has presets chases in the floors for cabling on a given floor, but my electrician tells me it's a rarity. And they actually *hate* buildings with preset power in the floors as when they do need to get cored for new stuff (and they ALL do eventually) they actually have to come in at 2 AM and X-ray to make sure the core location won't fuck something up.
The best building was a new Amex building built near here recently -- every level of that building has a raised floor that covers the entire level; the entire *floor* can be used as a wiring chase. Now that makes sense, although I expect it's a big hassle from a fire prevention perspective (I think you need to sprinkle the subfloor area AND the above-floor areas).
I've definitely been in other buildings that had no chases -- either you went above the ceiling or cored the floor, and in some cases you cored the floor and went above the tenant below's ceiling, which was a total fucking scheduling nightmare.
Also, how does it get all the city bureaucrats on site in one day to do all the inspections they need to do?
I'd guess that the city would approve the process and inspect it during and after, provided there was sufficient engineering support for how it worked.
As far as your other question about infrastructure, they probably just drill it out the way they do with other poured structures.
How does the velocity engine make *better* encodings using the same codecs as x86? Presuming that the codecs are implemented the same, wouldn't it just maybe do it faster?
... and should inspire the mad-hatters to find something else to fear (for now)."
There's no amount of debunking that can deter the mad-hatters and the tinfoil hat crowd. A buddy of mine is fairly inspired by the chemtrails conspiranoia and there's just no amount of debunking that will dissuade him; he's admitted that he doesn't know what they spray, that there's no scientifically valid evidence that anything IS being sprayed, or any logical rationale (other than genocide) for spraying bad things on the population.
People who buy into conspiracy and paranoia will ALWAYS find a reason to disbelieve debunking and believe the conspiracy. To their "credit", it's not like the post-WWII government hasn't given even reasonable people lots of reasons to buy into conspiratorial thinking....
That's fucking out of control, especially considering that I think paying more than $25 for a 50 pack of CD-Rs is paying too much. In fact, the first hundredpack of CDRs I ever bought came to $0.17 per CDR.
I buy that, but only so far. The feds went nuts busting people selling bongs via mail order, including putting Tommy Chong in jail. Whether you agree or disagree with pot smoking, I think you would agree that "Operation Headhunter" (the official name for the bong busts) was the most ridiculous waste of enforcement dollars, especially compared with the wholesale fraud and destruction to computer systems that goes on in the world of spam.
Prosecutors go after politically expedient and easy targets. I don't doubt that a RICO investigation of even a single spammer would be a huge undertaking -- subpeonas, records, undercover investigations, and it's probably some pretty tricky *law* to practice as well.
It's not as flashy and politically agreeable as throwing a bunch of angry muslims in the clink on trumped up charges.
They're doing it half right. While I agree that civil prosecution is mostly ineffective, especially if the "top" spammers have done any sensible corporate structuring to insulate themselves and their core businesses from lawsuits. There is the fact that SOMEONE is finally using the money trail to find the people behind it, and I find that encouraging.
However, I think you're right that both spammers and their entrepeneur clients need to go to a Federal "make me a bitch to the Aryan Brotherhood" prison to see a significant drop long-term in the spam business model.
I think it's possible for this to happen if the Feds would also "follow the money" and create a juicy RICO case that makes everyone involved (ISPs, banks, spammers, clients) eligible for major fines and long, long prison sentences.
I'm as lost as you are as to why the Feds haven't made an issue of the blatantly criminal nature of spam and recognized it for what it is -- an electronic version of organized crime (if it hasn't just become the E-commerce division of organized crime already).
I can only speculate that blue-chip, otherwise legitimate businesses are tertiary players in the spam world -- selling lists, providing banking, credit card, and ISP service, etc -- and they have told their paid-for reps in the government that spam is actually good business.
There'd be nothing wrong with MS driving new technologies -- that's a good thing -- but its the churn rate that's the problem, it's not necessarily the amount of new technologies.
In many ways the churn rate is what leads to security problems -- your overall API space gets flooded with many, overlapping technologies that even MS loses track of some of them and the code quality suffers, you get buffer overruns or other weaknesses.
One thing that's always driven me batty is the manic-depressive nature of Microsoft's feature development. On day, they announce some new technology with a commitment that seems more impressive than wedding vows, six months later they quietly kill it off in favor of another announcement of some other, newer, technology.
I'm not against new innovations, but this cycle should be more like 3-5 years, not 6-18 months, they shouldn't be unsupported and obsolete until 5-7 years, minimum. Between a new technology announcement and a real deployment can be 9-18 months depending on a business' needs and budgeting and planning cycles. Replacing it right when you want to deploy it is pretty insane (although I know they want you on the upgrade treadmill).
And their "new" innovations should in some way be improvements (with perhaps some backwards compatibility) so that they seem to have a coherent, long-term *strategy* and not just a short term marketing idea.
We'll see if they're capable of being that kind of company.
I could see this making sense if (a) they kept functionality basic (playing DVDs, CDs, watching TV -- no Tivo/Myth complexity), (b) built it around an open "system" provided driver documentation, (c) made it modular enough to add stuff to it.
If its just a closed-source BIOS that can play TV and CDs and DVDs, then it's just a badly designed all-in-one that's more expensive than the ones that they sell at Wall Mart.
The PHB and I had this conversation today; we can only think of two businesses where the customer service is *good* and way more businesses where the customer service is *awful*. A fuck-you-gimme-your-money attitude when things go well and a fuck-you-gimme-your-money-you're-an-asshole attitude when things go poorly.
Cell phones, SCO, the local phone company, the ISP, the bank, the government, the cable TV, the networks, Verisign, Microsoft, the list goes on and on of companies that jerk us around badly and then raise their fees, outsource our support to India and dump the quality right down the toilet.
I think customer service mattered at one time, but I think people have become so accepting of the shafting they get that it's disappeared. I also think that MBAs have figured out that customer service costs money (ie, you have to have good people with power to make decisions) and decided it wasn't worth it.
I ran into a spyware application on a colleague's computer that:
1) Wasn't detected by the newest AdAware+Definitions 2) Had a randomly named.exe process listed in task manager that, when terminated, caused ANOTHER one to be launched. 3) Had a start\run\ registry key that when deleted, got re-created automatically.
I think what I did to fix it was to rename the registry key instead of deleting it, reboot, and then the app wasn't active. It was a challenge, though -- whoever wrote it did an excellent job of avoiding spyware detection and even manual deletion by randomizing the.EXE and monitoring the registry and process list.
And MAD, on the other hand, is less viable than ever as a strategy (given enemy psychology).
It's not less viable as a strategy, it's just that we've been unwilling to scale its targeting beyond the nation state.
If we told the muslim world that attacks against the US like 9/11 would result in the assured destruction of the arab or muslim world, we wouldn't have attacks against us by those people. Terrorists and other rogue elements in the arab and muslim world are not immune to pressure from their own kind, since many of them are secretly supported by other more visible members of their communities.
These people know that if we choose to escalate this war into total warfare against the larger target (the Arab world, for example) that they cannot win and in fact, face the a high risk of losing their entire civilization.
The problem we have, though, is that we are unwilling to see this conflict as what it is -- a clash of civilizations -- and therefore we aren't able to scale our possible military responses accordingly.
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Technical literacy and hands-on skills are considered lower class, while arts and management are considered upper class.
.exes that come in email) -- if she knew those "techy details" she wouldn't be manager, since managers don't deal in details.
This explains why your boss can't use her computer (except when overcoming challenges to running
It wouldn't surprise me at all of ESPN and MSN site viewers liked the ads. First of all, most sports fans are droolers whose idea of quality TV and filmmaking isn't "Six Feet Under" but a beer ad where the women go topless and dogs fetch beer, plus, they're very "watch TV" oriented, not interactive oriented, so they're conditioned to a TV-like experience.
The MSN crowd is largely the same, except you can drop "sports fans" and replace it with "reality TV fans". Same neaderthal content, same neaderthal reaction. "MMMM..TV PICTURE WITH FUNNY COMMERCIAL...AND ME NOT EVEN WATCHING TV...MMMM...MIRACLE..."
I'm sure I'll get modded down as flamebait, but is ANYONE surprised that ESPN fans and MSN fans like commercials? Given the dreck they otherwise watch, it's hardly surprising.
I've been responsible for two high speed networks, the one at work, which is high-traffic, and high-visibility and the one at home, which is low traffic and low visibility.
Neither has been the victim of anything more than the usual portscanning behavior, which is annoying, but entirely predictable and not directly harmful in any way I can find. How common is DDoSing, anyway? I've never been a victim of it in either place.
While I'm sympathetic to your complaints with large ISPs (which are consistant with all telecomm providers; just try to get help with a rogue FAX machine on your home phone line), I also think its not surprising that it's gotten this way. Large ISPs must get thousands of complaints per day about rogue nodes, and a thorough, expert investigation of all complaints would require an unprofitable amount of resources to deal with them.
That many of the problems are temporary or accidental (misconfiguration, etc) doesn't make the problem any easier for them. And then there's the human "denial of service" aspect, where ISPs might get a lot of fake complaints about systems in attempt to get them shut down without cause.
Perhaps a better model might be charging for immediate assistance; and if the problem traffic really is sourced from their network, then these ISPs should refund the charge. This way they can filter out cranks and malevolent complainers and still provide timely service.
This happens all the time. I'd say that half of our laws are drafted by people outside of government, whether they're corporate interests or other lobbyists.
Of course the process can work for the good, and many people involved in the legislative process will tell you that this is actually a good thing and only appears to be evil.
Take, for example, a reform or change in the way that the counties in a state handle exchanges of prisoners between counties. There's expenses, rules, etc that have to be uniform statewide. The counties really want the system reformed (as its in everyone's tax interest and safety interest), but its inefficient and unproductive for a group of legislators to try to draft complex rules for entities and processes its unfamiliar with (without years of study and dedicated staff time, which nobody can afford).
So the counties get together, forge a compromise about how they want this to work, draft the legislation themselves and get representatives to submit the legislation. Assuming it passes, we just got a new law that regulates something important, largely written by those most impacted.
It sucks when its obvious payback for corporate interests, but does anyone have any stats as to "good" use of this technique vs. evil?
Most peopel who use a laptop also use a desktop, either as the primary computer or as a secondary computer. To people who use a desktop a good number of hours, even the best laptop feels handicapped -- either by RAM or slower disk speeds or even slower CPU.
I would NOT be interested in a slower laptop with more battery time and less weight. For the most part, I lug my laptop at the airport and occasionally in my car, and I don't find the weight onerous at all. From a power consumption perspective, I seldom run my battery right out -- I think have twice, and that was watching a very long movie on a very long airplane flight, DVD software being too braindead to RAM-cache the movie and constantly reading the DVD drive, not the mention the CPU task of decoding the movie, the backlight, etc.
It's like twice a year or less that I actually find myself doing real work in a mode that makes battery life an issue, but even then it's just a slight hassle to use a plug in. If laptops didn't start out handicapped performance-wise, I might consider a performance for battery/weight trade, but not now.
A $3.2 million markup is a lot, but, if the guy is accurate and there is zero groundwater seepage into the facility (either through his actions or sheer dumb luck), perhaps that alone provides extra value.
They're not making any more of these (at least not for sale), and those that are out there tend to be in rough condition, so if it has one of the few in good condition without any groundwater problems it may just be "worth" more.
Is it apparent that he actually did improvements, too? Water-tight or not, you'd think that it'd take a fairly sophisticated air management system to keep the humidity and all of its nasty consequences in check as well.
Osama on a mule and foot is still eluding the US
This is the second reference in this story's comments I've seen to Osama on a mule in rough terrain eluding the US.
Osama's success in remaining hidden owes almost everything to an extremely militant, well-armed and sympathetic population that is only nominally under the control of the Pakistani government (as much as "under the control of the Pakistani government" ever meant much of anything) providing him cover.
The terrain does a lot to frustrate trivial air searches and ground interdiction, but even then it's more the *weather* than the terrain; you can land a helicopter pretty much anyplace you can ride a mule, but you cannot figure out where to land your helicopter if the weather prevents you from finding targets. The jungle does pretty much the same thing has mountains does (lots of cover, lots of bad air support weather).
I could live with this system if I was getting some of that cheap opium you mention.
I'd like to see someone come out with a Firewire or USB2 raid controller; basically I'm just thinking of a box that looks like a hub but would contain a hadrware RAID controller in it and allow you to plug 2+ drives into it and build external RAID arrays simply. The RAID array controller should look like a standard FW/USB2 disk to the host system for maximum portability.
The internal IDE cards work, but it can be a real PITA to build a RAID5 setup without getting into some of the really big mid/full size towers.
I'm not talking about "data center" grade RAID systems, but something that could be used with home media libraries or other storage environments where the priorities are cost, flexibility, size and performance (in that order).
No, I'm not kidding. It plugs into anything in the house that makes video, does almost frame-accurate editing, 80GB HDD and stores to either -R or -RAM discs. Never drops frames, asks for software updates, gets the audio out of sync with the video, and the discs play on anything that will play -R media.
I have a DVD-R in my PC as well, and I know I'm probably a total loser but I found that video editing on the computer was more of a PITA than it was worth. DV bridge, hundreds of dollars worth of software, and a shitload of time to do compression or transcoding. The PC drive mainly comes in handy for duping DVDs I made on the E80 (DVD Decrypter) or making backups of stuff I've bought (DVDShrink).
For $480 I got a DMR-E80 and spent the rest of my time doing something more productive. I know it's not the right answer for someone who HAS to do 'fancy' editing (TV or Movies), but for most anything else it's sooo much easier and reliable, and less money to boot.
The sheathing on the outside of the house isn't just to fill the gaps, it's to provide structural integrity as well. It adds strength to the walls. I don't think cardboard could supply that, or a base to hang the siding, for that matter.
And even if they used cardboard for sheathing, what traps moisture in houses isn't the plywood but the air-tight construction required by most housing codes, usually due to wrapping the whole house in Tyvek -- extra-tight windows and doors contribute as well.
This is almost completely eliminated by air-air heat exchangers connected to the heat/AC that mechanically ventilate the house.
We remodeled our 1955 rambler last summer and the guys working on it said that the wood they used even that recently was dramatically better than what we use now. I ran some cabling after they did some re-framing and I can see why they said that. The new studs were like going through carrots they were so soft, but the old ones killed my 18V drill after boring two holes.
The construction foreman (a crusty old Dane) said he's continually amazed at the open spans and spacing they were able to get away with in older houses due to the far better lumber. When they work in 100 year old houses it's often more of a hassle than in 40 year old houses because the codes require joist and stud spacings that the old houses don't have and it means a lot of retrofitting; open a ceiling and find a huge span that suddenly "needs" an LVL or two to meet code, despite the fact that the old floor above didn't even creak when walked on.
Our building at work has poured walls and floors and the electricians core the floor all the time for new cabling runs, and it's been like that in every building I've been in with poured floors.
They usually do have wet walls where most of the plumbing runs, but I have yet to see an electrical or comm riser that was hollow from top to bottom -- they almost always core them at every floor.
Our current building has presets chases in the floors for cabling on a given floor, but my electrician tells me it's a rarity. And they actually *hate* buildings with preset power in the floors as when they do need to get cored for new stuff (and they ALL do eventually) they actually have to come in at 2 AM and X-ray to make sure the core location won't fuck something up.
The best building was a new Amex building built near here recently -- every level of that building has a raised floor that covers the entire level; the entire *floor* can be used as a wiring chase. Now that makes sense, although I expect it's a big hassle from a fire prevention perspective (I think you need to sprinkle the subfloor area AND the above-floor areas).
I've definitely been in other buildings that had no chases -- either you went above the ceiling or cored the floor, and in some cases you cored the floor and went above the tenant below's ceiling, which was a total fucking scheduling nightmare.
Also, how does it get all the city bureaucrats on site in one day to do all the inspections they need to do?
I'd guess that the city would approve the process and inspect it during and after, provided there was sufficient engineering support for how it worked.
As far as your other question about infrastructure, they probably just drill it out the way they do with other poured structures.
How does the velocity engine make *better* encodings using the same codecs as x86? Presuming that the codecs are implemented the same, wouldn't it just maybe do it faster?
... and should inspire the mad-hatters to find something else to fear (for now)."
There's no amount of debunking that can deter the mad-hatters and the tinfoil hat crowd. A buddy of mine is fairly inspired by the chemtrails conspiranoia and there's just no amount of debunking that will dissuade him; he's admitted that he doesn't know what they spray, that there's no scientifically valid evidence that anything IS being sprayed, or any logical rationale (other than genocide) for spraying bad things on the population.
People who buy into conspiracy and paranoia will ALWAYS find a reason to disbelieve debunking and believe the conspiracy. To their "credit", it's not like the post-WWII government hasn't given even reasonable people lots of reasons to buy into conspiratorial thinking....
That's fucking out of control, especially considering that I think paying more than $25 for a 50 pack of CD-Rs is paying too much. In fact, the first hundredpack of CDRs I ever bought came to $0.17 per CDR.
I buy that, but only so far. The feds went nuts busting people selling bongs via mail order, including putting Tommy Chong in jail. Whether you agree or disagree with pot smoking, I think you would agree that "Operation Headhunter" (the official name for the bong busts) was the most ridiculous waste of enforcement dollars, especially compared with the wholesale fraud and destruction to computer systems that goes on in the world of spam.
Prosecutors go after politically expedient and easy targets. I don't doubt that a RICO investigation of even a single spammer would be a huge undertaking -- subpeonas, records, undercover investigations, and it's probably some pretty tricky *law* to practice as well.
It's not as flashy and politically agreeable as throwing a bunch of angry muslims in the clink on trumped up charges.
They're doing it half right. While I agree that civil prosecution is mostly ineffective, especially if the "top" spammers have done any sensible corporate structuring to insulate themselves and their core businesses from lawsuits. There is the fact that SOMEONE is finally using the money trail to find the people behind it, and I find that encouraging.
However, I think you're right that both spammers and their entrepeneur clients need to go to a Federal "make me a bitch to the Aryan Brotherhood" prison to see a significant drop long-term in the spam business model.
I think it's possible for this to happen if the Feds would also "follow the money" and create a juicy RICO case that makes everyone involved (ISPs, banks, spammers, clients) eligible for major fines and long, long prison sentences.
I'm as lost as you are as to why the Feds haven't made an issue of the blatantly criminal nature of spam and recognized it for what it is -- an electronic version of organized crime (if it hasn't just become the E-commerce division of organized crime already).
I can only speculate that blue-chip, otherwise legitimate businesses are tertiary players in the spam world -- selling lists, providing banking, credit card, and ISP service, etc -- and they have told their paid-for reps in the government that spam is actually good business.
There'd be nothing wrong with MS driving new technologies -- that's a good thing -- but its the churn rate that's the problem, it's not necessarily the amount of new technologies.
In many ways the churn rate is what leads to security problems -- your overall API space gets flooded with many, overlapping technologies that even MS loses track of some of them and the code quality suffers, you get buffer overruns or other weaknesses.
One thing that's always driven me batty is the manic-depressive nature of Microsoft's feature development. On day, they announce some new technology with a commitment that seems more impressive than wedding vows, six months later they quietly kill it off in favor of another announcement of some other, newer, technology.
I'm not against new innovations, but this cycle should be more like 3-5 years, not 6-18 months, they shouldn't be unsupported and obsolete until 5-7 years, minimum. Between a new technology announcement and a real deployment can be 9-18 months depending on a business' needs and budgeting and planning cycles. Replacing it right when you want to deploy it is pretty insane (although I know they want you on the upgrade treadmill).
And their "new" innovations should in some way be improvements (with perhaps some backwards compatibility) so that they seem to have a coherent, long-term *strategy* and not just a short term marketing idea.
We'll see if they're capable of being that kind of company.
I could see this making sense if (a) they kept functionality basic (playing DVDs, CDs, watching TV -- no Tivo/Myth complexity), (b) built it around an open "system" provided driver documentation, (c) made it modular enough to add stuff to it.
If its just a closed-source BIOS that can play TV and CDs and DVDs, then it's just a badly designed all-in-one that's more expensive than the ones that they sell at Wall Mart.
The PHB and I had this conversation today; we can only think of two businesses where the customer service is *good* and way more businesses where the customer service is *awful*. A fuck-you-gimme-your-money attitude when things go well and a fuck-you-gimme-your-money-you're-an-asshole attitude when things go poorly.
Cell phones, SCO, the local phone company, the ISP, the bank, the government, the cable TV, the networks, Verisign, Microsoft, the list goes on and on of companies that jerk us around badly and then raise their fees, outsource our support to India and dump the quality right down the toilet.
I think customer service mattered at one time, but I think people have become so accepting of the shafting they get that it's disappeared. I also think that MBAs have figured out that customer service costs money (ie, you have to have good people with power to make decisions) and decided it wasn't worth it.
I ran into a spyware application on a colleague's computer that:
.exe process listed in task manager that, when terminated, caused ANOTHER one to be launched.
.EXE and monitoring the registry and process list.
1) Wasn't detected by the newest AdAware+Definitions
2) Had a randomly named
3) Had a start\run\ registry key that when deleted, got re-created automatically.
I think what I did to fix it was to rename the registry key instead of deleting it, reboot, and then the app wasn't active. It was a challenge, though -- whoever wrote it did an excellent job of avoiding spyware detection and even manual deletion by randomizing the
And MAD, on the other hand, is less viable than ever as a strategy (given enemy psychology).
It's not less viable as a strategy, it's just that we've been unwilling to scale its targeting beyond the nation state.
If we told the muslim world that attacks against the US like 9/11 would result in the assured destruction of the arab or muslim world, we wouldn't have attacks against us by those people. Terrorists and other rogue elements in the arab and muslim world are not immune to pressure from their own kind, since many of them are secretly supported by other more visible members of their communities.
These people know that if we choose to escalate this war into total warfare against the larger target (the Arab world, for example) that they cannot win and in fact, face the a high risk of losing their entire civilization.
The problem we have, though, is that we are unwilling to see this conflict as what it is -- a clash of civilizations -- and therefore we aren't able to scale our possible military responses accordingly.