So Murphy's Law today delegates responsibility for our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate, whereas Murphy's original comment was all about our own responsibility for making systems that actually work.
Well yeah, a lot of hapless idiots like to cite Murphy's Law as an excuse for their fuckups. I prefer to think of it as a condemnation of their lack of foresight. If you're planning or designing something, you should assume there will be unforeseen mishaps, and do what you can to minimize their effect.
The obvious implication is that you shouldn't make something more complicated than it needs to be, since the extra bits increase the odds of that unforseen mishap. Something nobody at Microsoft seems to understand.
I'm often struck by the similarity between Murphy's original exasperated remark and something I heard about a class that was taught at the Naval Academy when Heinlen was a cadet there. It was a class in giving orders, and one of the mottos of the class was, "Any order that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood." Very likely Murphy attended a similar class wherever he got his officer training.
...what happens when the power goes out, like it did in the mid-atlantic states this past week?
You're screwed, of course. Just like the people who couldn't get their cars out of our company garage during the last blackout. Supposedly there was a way to operate the security curtains without power, but the guy who knew how to do it was off that week. Being dangerously dependent on technology that goes away with the first infrastructure glitch is nothing new.
I seem to recall seeing one of these in a 50s crime movie. Not that Jetsony. Now if the cars were held up by magnetic levitation. Oops, there's that power issue again...
A teletype machine, which does nothing but relay ascii codes, is a "client"? That's absurd. A client is a program that makes requests that are handled by another program. The marketoids find it convenient to call a graphics terminal a "thin client". I guess we're stuck with that, but that doesn't mean that their derivation makes any sense.
"Thin-client" is just another word for extremely small/light/cheap PC-in-a-box.
That's the current usage, but it's always irritated me. Originally, "thin clients" were just simple diskless network computers designed to run server-based Java applications. They were a little cheaper than PCs, but most of the savings was supposed to come from "cost of ownership" savings, since only the server would need ongoing maintenance.
Then Sun dropped the ball on producing a Java VM capable of supporting desktop applications. Besides, nobody wanted to totally retool for a new platform. So they tried to reinvent the "thin client" as a graphics terminal connected to a Windows application server. The absurdity of calling a simple bitmapped graphics terminal a "client" should have clued people on to what a bad idea this was.
Try entering "Redmond WA". No geographic engine can work with an ambiguous place name -- try it with one of the mapping sites. Of course, the correct response is to give the user a list of matching locations, not just fail the search. But hey, it's beta software, and very impressive beta software at that.
I'm bemused by all the posts that insist that this is nothing new, because there are all these Yellow Page database sites. Does it not occur to anybody that (a) you have to pay for a YP listing and (b) pulling street addresses out of a massive collection of free-form web pages is a lot more impressive than retrieving them for a standard relational database?
Smartpages.com is built around the same database they use to generate the classifed listings (Yellow Pages) in the phone book. Which makes each entry a kind of advertisement: you have to pay to get into the Yellow Pages in the first place, and you have to pay extra to get your web page linked in Smartpages.com.
For example, search for "books" in a particular area code. You get a bunch of YP categories. Drill down to a particular bookstore and you get the YP listing, plus the obligatory Yahoo map. Since the bookstore didn't pay for a link to their own web site Smartpages.com doesn't provide one.
Now do the same search on Google location. You get bunch of book-related links for the area, all nicely plotted on a map. What's really interesting is that many of the links are not for the home page of the business or entity being found, but for a more popular page that references it. (The abovementioned bookstore is represented by an entry on a publisher site.) I suppose that counts as a bug, since you usually want to go straight to someone's own web site. Still, it's terribly impressive that they can so consistently associate address with the correct adressee based on free-form information.
So a guy collects stuff you consider useless. So what? I own too many books, I know an otherwise sane lady who owns way too many shoes. Maybe we all need to cut back, but I don't think any of us are ignorant of that possibility.
If we start a conversation based on "how do I organize all my crap", butting in with a lecture on the crappiness of crap is arrogant and offtopic.
I'm assuming, of course, that you don't have any little vices that you prefer to cope with rather than simply get rid of. Or am I mistaken?
I don't think it's correct to characterize Dickinson's abandonment of word processors as a "retreat". He's simply selected the tool whose feature set most closely corresponds to his needs. He wants a small, simple set of formatting options, the ability to work without moving his hand off the keyboard, etc. You could mung a word processor to act this way (by hiding all those arcane features, and adding new key macros to make the mouse unnecessary) and that's what I'd do myself. But if a text editor works best for Dickinson, it's what he should use, never mind the technology religion wars.
Bear in mind that Dickinson is not doing anything new. Software to support exactly this kind of writing has been around for decades. There are even SGML DTDs to process simple hand-formatted text. And no, you don't need tags -- these are simply the default convention in SGML. You can write a DTD that says that a double line break is a paragraph tag, and a word surrounded by asterisks is an emphasis.
It's always irritated me that there's so much software for presenting ultra-cool content, but only the most primitive tools for creating that content. In the mid 80s, there was a flurry of "thought processors" (basically outliners, though they often had clever features for rearranging and associating content). Alas, they never caught on. (Yes I know, some are still around. Selling like hotcakes, aren't they?) I think this is mainly because businesses drive most desktop software development, and they only are interested in features they can see.
Ok, you're right about the horses. The last time I read anything on the subject, the accepted theory was that there were no native horses in the Americas after Eohippus went extinct 49 million years ago. A little Googling tells me I'm out of date, and new discoveries make for a horse (or something in the horse family) being around until the big exinctions 10,000 years ago.
But I still have a couple of criticisms. First, it is rude and lame to lecture me on the whole "noble savages" thing when you're replying to a thread I started on the very same theme.
Second, you need to do a little more reading before you latch onto a pleasing theory. A lot of species went away 10,000 years ago, and on all the continents. Now, you can blame this on overhunting, since this is precisely when human populations began to increase drastically. But few experts accept this as the only cause. The planet was undergoing a massive climatic shift at the time. The most striking example of this is the Sahara desert, which before this period was more like the Sahara jungle.
I'm going to say it one last time, then I'm going to give up: you need to approach theories about the past with scepticism. Not just about the agenda of the person propounding theory, but your own agenda.
Brits always seem to assume that the U.S. liquid gallon is somehow a screwed up Imperial gallon. In fact, both American gallons (we also have a dry gallon) are older than the Imperial gallon. And, like almost all U.S. measures, they're traditional English measurements.
It's actually the Imperial gallon that's been fiddled with. There used to be a lot of different gallons. Which leads to all sort of problems, so both countries rationalized their traditional systems. The U.S. did so by standarizing on the English wine gallon (our current liquid gallon) and the English corn gallon (the dry gallon). But rather than choose between competing traditional measures, Parliment abandoned them all, and decreed that the volume of 10 pounds of water at room temperature was a gallon.
But who gets to decide what's the simplest theory? It all depends on your general world view. Ockham himself had strange, complicated beliefs that most modern people would find hard to accept. I've heard people propound some really convoluted theories and assert that they were the "simplest" explanation for some thing or another.
This is a very basic problem. In any discipline, you run the risk of falling in love with a theory. Even the physical sciences have this problem. But they at least have Experiment to poke holes in a theory that's beautiful and elegant and logical and utterly wrong. Other disciplines have to be more cautious.
Which is not to say that historical theories are a waste of time. They just have to be taken, as I said, with a grain of salt.
I love reading stuff like that, and I thank you for the book reference. But you need to take it with a grain of salt. Lots of theories "explain" the past, but do you go about deciding which ones are right?
We have all these stereotypes about the "primitive" people who lived in the Americas before Columbus. Even their descendents, struggling to find identity and self-esteem, tend to think this. These stereotypes are usually, romantic, or racist, or both.
The big stereotype is the naked savage. In Manifest Destiny days, this allowed people to justify land grabs and massacres by thinking in terms of "progress" and "dying races". The post-Hitler era is less sanguine, but still likes this stereotype -- "noble savages" make for nice guilt-tripping.
The reality is a lot more complicated. There were hunter-gatherer bands in the Americas. But there were also agricultural communities, towns, cities, and everything in between. I'm not just talking about the famous civilizations south of the Rio Grande. The first settlers in what is now upstate New York found large settlements, even nascent cities. These soon disappeared of course -- too vulnerable to epidemics and raids.
And of course these cultures had their environmental impacts, as human cultures always do. It may be comforting to think of natives as ecologically wise -- but any wisdom they actually have, they acquired the hard way. Yes, Pueblo folklore is full of sound ecological concepts -- but it also contains nasty folk memories of the Anasazi culture that was too successful for its own good.
The bottom line is that ecological impact is just a part of being human. To manage this impact we need to find a good middle path between naive romanticisim and glib "progress and development" stupidity.
I think all the "jeez, they're try to license X next" posts kind of miss the point. The people who own Dewey aren't just selling a taxonomy. They're selling a process for mapping the subject matter of a book onto that taxonomy. Which they can't do if they let the taxonomy enter the public domain. So as silly as sounds, they have no choice but to sue anybody who uses the system without paying for it. Even if it's a hotel just trying to be clever.
The legit fear is that, once the client/non-client distinction is made, that the big boys will chase out all the hackers, and force us to become castrated clients. "You can't have your own IP address. You can only send approved protocols. You can't use IP tunneling. So there." Lots of ISP's force their customers into highly restricted interfaces and protocol sets. This is a dangerous trend.
Good point. You've just described a yet another kind of NAT imposer. Which makes three. There might be more, but lets talk about the ones that have come up in this discussion
The evil media conspiracy, that wants to change the internet into producers (servers) and consumers (clients). Perhaps somewhere some corporate type is touting this as the future model of the internet, but I haven't seen it. In any case, it's silly to blame internet balkanization on them. Groups two and three are the real culprits.
ISPs and such that, as Spinality puts it, want all their customers to be "castrated clients". Yeah, this sucks, and we do need to do whatever it takes to prevent this from becomming mandatory. But while doing this bear a couple of points in mind: (a) most users could give a shit; (b) these restrictions are motivated by very legitimate concerns. Which suggests that more sophisticated users will eventually have to resort to specialized ISPs, like Speakeasy.
People doing their own LAN, for whom private networks are a clean, simple, and effective way to keep the script kiddies offsite. It's not the right solution for everybody, but it is for most people.
NAT is about address use, not security. In no way should NAT ever be confused with security, even if it appears to give you some security.
But it does give you security, by making your network inaccessible. (If you can't connect to a machine, you can't hack into it.) Maybe that's not what it was originally meant for, but so what?
Some time during the thirties, some German company manufactured a meat locker, which was installed in Dresden. During the war, it was sometimes used as a lockup for POWs. But in the end, it did a really good job as a bomb shelter. A barrier is a barrier.
There are roughly 100 messages in this discussion saying, "but they don't keep out viruses." Well duh! It's also true that a kevlar vest won't keep out another kind of virus. Yet cops and soldiers persist in wearing them. Could they all be superstitious? Misinformed? Or maybe a virus isn't the kind of penetration they're worried about.
Your description of ownership is technically correct, but kind of beside the point. Owning something isn't some magical relationship that automatically give you total control over your property. It actually works the other way: ownership is a legal concept that codifies that relationship. Which relationship is founded on some kind of control.
Lets look at some of your examples. Yes, mutual funds are "owned" by their investors. But for all practical purposes, funds are a product and investors are the customers. Just this morning I head the New York AG talk about abuses by these business. One is that they let some investors do short-term deals that are supposedly forbidden by the terms of the fund. The interesting thing is that this is only illegal because the fund claims that this practice is forbidden, in order to hold down costs. Claim that they do this when they don't is a kind of fraud. Doesn't sound like an owner-manager relationship to me, even if it is technically.
Near where I live, there's a beach that's private property. But people have used that beach without anyone trying to stop them for something like 150 years. That usage creates something called a "public easement", which basically means that the owners of the beach no longer have the right to fence it off. Which is another example of the non-magic status of ownership -- this one actually mandated by law.
Ownership is just one form of control -- and it's not always the most effective form. You can argue that VeriSign is acting as if they "own" the database when they don't. But that's an abstract, irrelevent argument. Better to ask whether VeriSign has too much control over the database. If they do, then we should do something about it, and never mind the pseudo-legal nitpicking.
Sun let Netscape call its scripting language "JavaScript" because of some weird marketing strategy. Now they're touting their flavor of Gnome as "Java Desktop". Get a clue! All this does is confuse people. My first thought on reading this annoucement was that they'd revived the JavaStation.
Sun keeps trying to invent a Windows alternative. OpenWindows, CDE, JavaStation, SunRay, and various x86 emulators and coprocessors. And now this. Which will of course do much better than its predecessors. Oh well, maybe Sun's investors will finally realize that McNealy's obsessions impact the bottom line!
The user is demoted to acting exclusively as a client. While the user can contact and freely exchange packets with sites not behind NAT boxes, he cannot be reached by connections which originate at other sites. In economic terms, the NATted user has become a consumer of services provided by a higher-ranking class of sites, producers or publishers, not subject to NAT.
There are powerful forces, including government, large media organisations, and music publishers who think this situation is just fine. In essence, every time a user--they love the word "consumer"--goes behind a NAT box, a site which was formerly a peer to their own sites goes dark, no longer accessible to others on the Internet, while their privileged sites remain.
Well, this isn't totally paranoid. The "powerful forces" are real enough -- I've ranted against them myself. But to blame them for network blakanization is extremely naive.
Sure, NATs screw up P2P applications. But you don't see the media monopolies demanding that everybody install one. No, they want all the content to be "managed" and to make it illegal for anybody to get around the management. A lawyer-and-technomagic solution. Which is itself pretty naive. Won't work in the long run, but extremely dangerous to society in the short run. Which is something we need to deal with -- and inventing new conspiracies to blame (admitedly evil) people for doesn't help.
So what drives the use of private networks? Hackers (I refuse to call them Farmers From Georgia), Script Kiddies, and Spammers. They want to break into your system and do silly things with it. A NAT is the simplest, least headache inducing protection against these folks. Yeah, you can always use a firewall. But firewalls are a pain to deal with -- you're constantly trying to solve the tourist-or-terrorist problem, and usually getting it wrong. I'd rather use a NAT and do without the P2P software.
As would most users. All these strange and arcane P2P applications are insteresting, but very few people can be bothered with them. For the same reason Ham and CB radios never replaced the telephone system.
The open Internet is an outdated concept on many levels. Security is just one of them. A bigger issue is scalability. If you want to make some kind of service available on the Internet, you do not want to put the service on your own machine and then publish your address. Not if you expect any real response. I mean most of us have heard of the Slashdot effect, right? There are also issues of data backup, etc. For these things, you go and pay a few bucks to somebody who can offer the necessary, expertise, scalability, and so on.
On the other hand, you offer services on a private network very easily. But that's only practical because your private network is isolated from the network at large.
It's too bad the Internet is no longer the friendly little place it was when SpeakFreely was invented. But it's moved past that, and you can't go back, not without kicking of 90% of the users. It's especially unproductive to blame the problem on the media monopolies. We've already got plenty to blame them for!
If you hope nobody can hack you or cause any problems with your servers because you assume they dont know what you are running...that is a problem.
It's universally considered a bad idea to emit version strings. But you're right, it's also a bad idea to place to count on obscurity. Good security assumes that an intruder knows exactly what you're running, because inevitably one will come along who makes the right set of assumptions.
Here's an amusing item about vulnerability scanners and version strings. A reminder how silly it is to focus on trivia like this.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious implication is that you shouldn't make something more complicated than it needs to be, since the extra bits increase the odds of that unforseen mishap. Something nobody at Microsoft seems to understand.
I'm often struck by the similarity between Murphy's original exasperated remark and something I heard about a class that was taught at the Naval Academy when Heinlen was a cadet there. It was a class in giving orders, and one of the mottos of the class was, "Any order that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood." Very likely Murphy attended a similar class wherever he got his officer training.
I seem to recall seeing one of these in a 50s crime movie. Not that Jetsony. Now if the cars were held up by magnetic levitation. Oops, there's that power issue again...
The Jack Valenti hit squad is coming to your house!
He can write? I've only ever heard him rant!
A teletype machine, which does nothing but relay ascii codes, is a "client"? That's absurd. A client is a program that makes requests that are handled by another program. The marketoids find it convenient to call a graphics terminal a "thin client". I guess we're stuck with that, but that doesn't mean that their derivation makes any sense.
Then Sun dropped the ball on producing a Java VM capable of supporting desktop applications. Besides, nobody wanted to totally retool for a new platform. So they tried to reinvent the "thin client" as a graphics terminal connected to a Windows application server. The absurdity of calling a simple bitmapped graphics terminal a "client" should have clued people on to what a bad idea this was.
I'm bemused by all the posts that insist that this is nothing new, because there are all these Yellow Page database sites. Does it not occur to anybody that (a) you have to pay for a YP listing and (b) pulling street addresses out of a massive collection of free-form web pages is a lot more impressive than retrieving them for a standard relational database?
For example, search for "books" in a particular area code. You get a bunch of YP categories. Drill down to a particular bookstore and you get the YP listing, plus the obligatory Yahoo map. Since the bookstore didn't pay for a link to their own web site Smartpages.com doesn't provide one.
Now do the same search on Google location. You get bunch of book-related links for the area, all nicely plotted on a map. What's really interesting is that many of the links are not for the home page of the business or entity being found, but for a more popular page that references it. (The abovementioned bookstore is represented by an entry on a publisher site.) I suppose that counts as a bug, since you usually want to go straight to someone's own web site. Still, it's terribly impressive that they can so consistently associate address with the correct adressee based on free-form information.
Google does so much neat stuff, I can almost forgive them for moving into the ugliest building in Silicon Valley.
If we start a conversation based on "how do I organize all my crap", butting in with a lecture on the crappiness of crap is arrogant and offtopic.
I'm assuming, of course, that you don't have any little vices that you prefer to cope with rather than simply get rid of. Or am I mistaken?
Bear in mind that Dickinson is not doing anything new. Software to support exactly this kind of writing has been around for decades. There are even SGML DTDs to process simple hand-formatted text. And no, you don't need tags -- these are simply the default convention in SGML. You can write a DTD that says that a double line break is a paragraph tag, and a word surrounded by asterisks is an emphasis.
It's always irritated me that there's so much software for presenting ultra-cool content, but only the most primitive tools for creating that content. In the mid 80s, there was a flurry of "thought processors" (basically outliners, though they often had clever features for rearranging and associating content). Alas, they never caught on. (Yes I know, some are still around. Selling like hotcakes, aren't they?) I think this is mainly because businesses drive most desktop software development, and they only are interested in features they can see.
But I still have a couple of criticisms. First, it is rude and lame to lecture me on the whole "noble savages" thing when you're replying to a thread I started on the very same theme.
Second, you need to do a little more reading before you latch onto a pleasing theory. A lot of species went away 10,000 years ago, and on all the continents. Now, you can blame this on overhunting, since this is precisely when human populations began to increase drastically. But few experts accept this as the only cause. The planet was undergoing a massive climatic shift at the time. The most striking example of this is the Sahara desert, which before this period was more like the Sahara jungle.
I'm going to say it one last time, then I'm going to give up: you need to approach theories about the past with scepticism. Not just about the agenda of the person propounding theory, but your own agenda.
It's actually the Imperial gallon that's been fiddled with. There used to be a lot of different gallons. Which leads to all sort of problems, so both countries rationalized their traditional systems. The U.S. did so by standarizing on the English wine gallon (our current liquid gallon) and the English corn gallon (the dry gallon). But rather than choose between competing traditional measures, Parliment abandoned them all, and decreed that the volume of 10 pounds of water at room temperature was a gallon.
Apology accepted.
I was arguing for a non-romantic attitude towards native peoples, not racist garbage.
This is a very basic problem. In any discipline, you run the risk of falling in love with a theory. Even the physical sciences have this problem. But they at least have Experiment to poke holes in a theory that's beautiful and elegant and logical and utterly wrong. Other disciplines have to be more cautious.
Which is not to say that historical theories are a waste of time. They just have to be taken, as I said, with a grain of salt.
I love reading stuff like that, and I thank you for the book reference. But you need to take it with a grain of salt. Lots of theories "explain" the past, but do you go about deciding which ones are right?
The big stereotype is the naked savage. In Manifest Destiny days, this allowed people to justify land grabs and massacres by thinking in terms of "progress" and "dying races". The post-Hitler era is less sanguine, but still likes this stereotype -- "noble savages" make for nice guilt-tripping.
The reality is a lot more complicated. There were hunter-gatherer bands in the Americas. But there were also agricultural communities, towns, cities, and everything in between. I'm not just talking about the famous civilizations south of the Rio Grande. The first settlers in what is now upstate New York found large settlements, even nascent cities. These soon disappeared of course -- too vulnerable to epidemics and raids.
And of course these cultures had their environmental impacts, as human cultures always do. It may be comforting to think of natives as ecologically wise -- but any wisdom they actually have, they acquired the hard way. Yes, Pueblo folklore is full of sound ecological concepts -- but it also contains nasty folk memories of the Anasazi culture that was too successful for its own good.
The bottom line is that ecological impact is just a part of being human. To manage this impact we need to find a good middle path between naive romanticisim and glib "progress and development" stupidity.
I think all the "jeez, they're try to license X next" posts kind of miss the point. The people who own Dewey aren't just selling a taxonomy. They're selling a process for mapping the subject matter of a book onto that taxonomy. Which they can't do if they let the taxonomy enter the public domain. So as silly as sounds, they have no choice but to sue anybody who uses the system without paying for it. Even if it's a hotel just trying to be clever.
Some time during the thirties, some German company manufactured a meat locker, which was installed in Dresden. During the war, it was sometimes used as a lockup for POWs. But in the end, it did a really good job as a bomb shelter. A barrier is a barrier.
There are roughly 100 messages in this discussion saying, "but they don't keep out viruses." Well duh! It's also true that a kevlar vest won't keep out another kind of virus. Yet cops and soldiers persist in wearing them. Could they all be superstitious? Misinformed? Or maybe a virus isn't the kind of penetration they're worried about.
Lets look at some of your examples. Yes, mutual funds are "owned" by their investors. But for all practical purposes, funds are a product and investors are the customers. Just this morning I head the New York AG talk about abuses by these business. One is that they let some investors do short-term deals that are supposedly forbidden by the terms of the fund. The interesting thing is that this is only illegal because the fund claims that this practice is forbidden, in order to hold down costs. Claim that they do this when they don't is a kind of fraud. Doesn't sound like an owner-manager relationship to me, even if it is technically.
Near where I live, there's a beach that's private property. But people have used that beach without anyone trying to stop them for something like 150 years. That usage creates something called a "public easement", which basically means that the owners of the beach no longer have the right to fence it off. Which is another example of the non-magic status of ownership -- this one actually mandated by law.
Ownership is just one form of control -- and it's not always the most effective form. You can argue that VeriSign is acting as if they "own" the database when they don't. But that's an abstract, irrelevent argument. Better to ask whether VeriSign has too much control over the database. If they do, then we should do something about it, and never mind the pseudo-legal nitpicking.
Sun keeps trying to invent a Windows alternative. OpenWindows, CDE, JavaStation, SunRay, and various x86 emulators and coprocessors. And now this. Which will of course do much better than its predecessors. Oh well, maybe Sun's investors will finally realize that McNealy's obsessions impact the bottom line!
Sure, NATs screw up P2P applications. But you don't see the media monopolies demanding that everybody install one. No, they want all the content to be "managed" and to make it illegal for anybody to get around the management. A lawyer-and-technomagic solution. Which is itself pretty naive. Won't work in the long run, but extremely dangerous to society in the short run. Which is something we need to deal with -- and inventing new conspiracies to blame (admitedly evil) people for doesn't help.
So what drives the use of private networks? Hackers (I refuse to call them Farmers From Georgia), Script Kiddies, and Spammers. They want to break into your system and do silly things with it. A NAT is the simplest, least headache inducing protection against these folks. Yeah, you can always use a firewall. But firewalls are a pain to deal with -- you're constantly trying to solve the tourist-or-terrorist problem, and usually getting it wrong. I'd rather use a NAT and do without the P2P software.
As would most users. All these strange and arcane P2P applications are insteresting, but very few people can be bothered with them. For the same reason Ham and CB radios never replaced the telephone system.
The open Internet is an outdated concept on many levels. Security is just one of them. A bigger issue is scalability. If you want to make some kind of service available on the Internet, you do not want to put the service on your own machine and then publish your address. Not if you expect any real response. I mean most of us have heard of the Slashdot effect, right? There are also issues of data backup, etc. For these things, you go and pay a few bucks to somebody who can offer the necessary, expertise, scalability, and so on.
On the other hand, you offer services on a private network very easily. But that's only practical because your private network is isolated from the network at large.
It's too bad the Internet is no longer the friendly little place it was when SpeakFreely was invented. But it's moved past that, and you can't go back, not without kicking of 90% of the users. It's especially unproductive to blame the problem on the media monopolies. We've already got plenty to blame them for!
Here's an amusing item about vulnerability scanners and version strings. A reminder how silly it is to focus on trivia like this.