Yes you can. If the nuke is running windows, simply infect your PDA with the latest worm. Then when you plug it into the nuke, the nuke will cease to be dangerous instead endeavoring to send out ads for Viagra to any other nukes it can talk to.
Best movie ever for accurate portrayal of shooting and ammo: Heat. That gun scene as they come out of the bank is really spot on. They are reloading constantly as you would if you were tossing off 30 round clips in that kind of situation. For the most part they fire in short bursts as well instead of just holding down the trigger and emptying a clip. The only iffy bit is how the hell they'd carry that much ammo on them, but give or take that issue, pretty solid.
This is really a bad list. Basically they seemed to have made a point of picking movies that naturally involve a lot of technology. They totally ignore things like Independence Day where their little virus takes out an entire alien attack fleet because, persumably, they didn't even try.
Wargames does not deserve to be on this list. He uses an acoustic coupled modem to dial in. He hacks using realistic approaches to it, trying to guess the password. He doesn't magically use a cracking program or have little 3D graphics fly all over his screen trying to crack it. Instead he studies the biography of Professor Falken and after much trial and error actually gets it.
Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980. They didn't want the audience to have to read what the computer was saying the whole damn movie. The computer AI for Joshua is seemingly quite primitive even though it's supposed to be a big defense department computer.
As for Firewall, I think they did a pretty good job of being realistic. The scanner IPod thing was a stretch, but when they do computer security in the movie it looks like an actual computer. We see actual firewall rules and such that look like what I'd see on my actual computer. Given that it was a hollywood movie built around a very technical subject, I was pretty impressed with the realism level.
If you really want to get picky, how about the fact that every time a computer shows up in a movie it has an Apple logo on it:)
The thing is, nobody will have HD-DVD drives for their 360's and the developers can't trust that they eventually will. So while this would permit the notion of a DVD with special HD-DVD extras for those who have a drive, by and large it won't matter.
The major problem with how business is measured in the US is that growth trumps everything. So in order for IPod to be considered successful you have to sell more this year than you did last year and then keep going. Trouble is, of course, is that a successful device tends to be it's own worst enemy because once everybody has one, your sales fall off. Even if you keep convincing those same people to upgrade their pods every 3 or 4 years, you can never achieve the same kind of growth.
So Apple has been successful. They've built a quality product, achieved strong brand recognition, and have made it the most populary music playing device in the world. But ultimately they'll no longer be successful simply because there's only so many people in the world to buy them. So now they have to push the envelope of the ipod, making it do video, be a phone, etc. They do this, not because those are necessarily good ideas, but rather because they have to grow or they'll be judged a failure by the market.
It's actually not that hard. Imagine if you bought a car and the car had a key that only you could use. So if you wanted to loan the car to a friend, he couldn't use it. When you wanted to sell the car, you wouldn't be able to sell the car either because it wouldn't work for anybody else. It would work fine for you, but the moment your wife needed to drive it, too bad.
That's DRM in a nutshell. It's actually worse than that but the metaphor degrades somewhat beyond that.
Besides, now that we know it's him, is he lifting the hold? Sure we can shame him but my impression is that Stevens is well beyond being vulnerable to that.
But in the end you'll be fine and happy with a bachelors degree once you have experience. All a masters does for you is move you up the pay bracket 10-15%, and the reality is that after the two years of real world experience rather than going for a masters, most bachelors are at that level by the time you get your masters.
This is true. The reality is that the kind of work that you need a masters degree for is pretty rare relative to everything else. Sure there are some jobs where the deeper level of understanding is useful (writing search algorithms at Google, for example), but the reality is that most of the work is about taking business requirements and making useful systems out of them. To make a "useful" system, having an understanding of the business needs and communicating effectively, are far more valuable traits than a deep understanding of CS theory.
The trick really is just getting started in the industry. To that end you're best off if you can do some networking and internships and find things that way. Once you have tangible work experience, good references, etc, the degree is usually not a big deal. Frankly, having a degree in something other than CS might be a benefit to you. For example, if you were going to work in biotech, having a biology or chem degree might give you an advantage in getting a job.
The thing is, Apple may not be doing wholly original stuff here, but the reality is that they take what they do and make it usable and appealing. Take for example, expose's ability to show you every window you have open at the same time. This is trivial to do. But it's such an amazingly useful thing and it's implemented elegantly.
I saw the preview video of time machine and yeah maybe the interface is a little hokey, but the basic idea of it and how they interface with it is borderline brilliant. No longer does somebody even have to think in terms of backups, they just go into time machine and get the old copy. It's just simple.
This is what Apple has always been good at. They don't necessarily invent the wheel, but they sure make a wheel that's easy to use and has nice rims. The stuff just works. The reviewer clearly doesn't get the appeal of it because feature for feature it isn't that different. But how it does what it does is really what makes it distinctive.
Even better, check this out. This Timothy B. Lee guy is apparently also a big supporter of Intelligent Design. Excellent. I think this confirms I'm on the correct side of the issue:)
Provided their options, then yes. The trouble is that with the average house getting service from one or two providers, and those providers controlling so much of the access throughout the country, competition is unrealistic. Odds are in this country you have Comcast cable, and AT&T phone service. Now you might get your internet service from some other company (SpeakEasy, AOL, etc), but in the end, all of it comes over the same set of wires that are owned by one of those two companies.
So long as that is the case, competition can only exist in a regime of government regulation that forces it to exist.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
They have that infrastructure because they have control over the pipe into my home. In most locations the competition for that pipe is, at most, two companies (one for phone and one for cable). There is a natural monopoly in this because it's incredibly expensive and legally complicated to wire up individual homes. This was acknowledged long ago and government regulation helped make wiring up all those homes feasible. It is more efficient to have one or two companies have exclusive access, but because it's limited, it's also important for those companies to be regulated.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!
More accurately it'd be like the people who are GIVEN a high rise apartment getting cranky when the people who gave it to them want to come over for a visit and check out their great view.
I have zero objection to the notion of the carriers tiering their network to expedite services provided that it's provider neutral. That means, if you are going to offer changes that make a VOIP call work better, you have to make it available to everybody, not just your own internal services. What the telecom companies want to do is create a competitive advantage in the IPTV space. If they can force their competition to pay higher rates to provide similar quality of service, then they have an innate advantage just because they control the pipes. That's anti-competitive and harmful to the consumer.
So long as they as it costs as much for them to provide a given service as a competitior, I have no problem with them creating tiered services.
The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.
That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.
Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.
My problem is that anonymous editing (in which I include editing by people with usernames, as they are effectively anonymous) means that you can never know the adgendas or biases of those who are publishing the facts.
Actually those using a username would be pseudonymous, and it's an important distinction. The reason it's important is that a given user can establish credibility. That is, you can look at other things they've posted and find patterns behind the changes they make, etc. You can see if they generally add credible information, or distory something.
I tend to trust Wikipedia in relation to the controversey of the topic (and to their credit they mark controversial items as being such). So if it's an article about gravity, as opposed to say the Republican party, I can reasonably assume that the gravity article is accurate where as the one on the GOP may be distorted by either side.
Accuracy is proportional to the number and variety of sources used. You just need to decide how critical accuracy is to you and do the work necessary to assure that level. So, if you're posting on say Slashdot, accuracy is... okay totally irrelevant. But if it was for a published article, you might not want to source Wikipedia (though for many subject areas it's pretty damn accurate). For a doctoral thesis, I think you'll fail, if not be burned at the stake for siteing wikipedia unless it's a thesis about wikis:)
Wikipedia provides a reasonable level of accuracy on most subjects for a very little amount of effort. Plus, well written Wikipedia articles also provide sourcing to help confirm the accuracy of the information.
The reality is that Nintendo's in an excellent position. They have a solid cash cow in the portable market and if the Wii was a total flop, it wouldn't kill them. Even if the Wii sucked they could reasonably plan to keep the market share they currently have with the Game Cube. This gives them the freedom to get a little bit experimental with the Wii and take a risk and this is why the Wii looks like it might be a winner. The Wii offers a unique experience and is cheap enough that owning one in addition to a PS3 or 360 isn't unreasonable.
For similar reasons, Microsoft is in a good position because they have piles of cash and big time cash cows in office software and operating systems. They can afford to lose a lot of money on the 360, so, once again, they aren't under a lot of pressure. Their approach is less risky though just evolving the platform a bit and more closely integrating the Live system into the unit.
Sony on the other hand is in a terrible position because the PS3 is basically the hopes and dreams of the entire company right now. They've been struggling for a while now, losing market share to cheap competitors in other realms of electronics. They are trying to use the PS3 to tie a lot of things together, a new high def video format, a new hardware platform, etc. If the PS3 flops, Sony is in a world of hurt. Even if it's moderately successful they may still be hurting depending on how much they lose per unit and how easily they can make those losses up on the back end.
Sony may pull things off but they are doubly cursed by high expectations and an almost desperate need for this to work out.
Ultimately what this boils down to is a trust issue. If you do not have a physical record of your vote that is impervious to digital tampering, it does not matter how much security there is. With digital voting there will always be the perception that somebody could rig the vote.
In a democracy, the perception of vote fraud is almost as dangerous as the actuality of vote fraud. If we all go into the booth and we all come out convinced that we've had our say and that it counted for something, then even when we lose, we can feel we were a part of the system. If we go into a booth and don't even have that basic reassurance, why go into the booth at all? Why work to change the system if you have reasonable suspicion that the system has been rigged against you in the first place? People in that mindset will either drop out of the system entirely, or seek to voice their feelings through alternative means (violence, etc).
We've had two national elections in a row that were close and had an air of suspicion about them. There are countless anecdotes of votes getting switched on the computers, voting machines dissapearing overnight, etc. Even if there's not actual fraud going on, all of that adds up to a suspicion of the system itself. We can't afford to have that suspicion if we want to remain a democracy.
Actually a lot of drug testing is happening in India these days. Lots of capable doctors there and lots of people they consider disposable. Good times.
You are talking about a situation where an executable has been run with your priveleges. It can do anything it wants to, especially in Windows where most people run as Administrators. It can disguise itself as a firefox extension, sure. But it could also modify the firefox binary, or simply install a sniffer running as a service, or format your drive, or any number of nasty things.
The only place a singature would matter in this case is when the trojan executable was run. If you are executing attached executables from an e-mail, then no amount of signature verification is going to protect you. The reality is that no technical process can exist that will prevent this kind of attack so long as users can install their own software.
It is fair to say that down the line even when they do opensource it, Sun's version will be the defacto standard. Figure if they and IBM work together on new versions, there's a pretty good guarantee that there won't be any major forks. Sure, there will be forks, but invariably those forks won't be what the average corporate server is running on, etc. Since it's open source, any of the good changes from those forks can be rolled back into the main Sun standard.
I can understand Sun's fear as Java has been a huge part of their business, but I think as long as they keep pushing the standard forward forks will be irrelevant.
Indeed. One of the critical problems we have now is that all the cars need to run on a specific forumlation of petroleum. You can't make gas from a nuclear reactor, wind turbine, solar panel, or big pile of bird poo. So as oil supplies fluctuate, there's no way to compensate by changing over to alternatives.
Electricity is the long run best bet for distribution of energy because it's agnostic. You can generate it in countless ways depending on what's the most cost efficient at the time. As pointed out above, it also permits better pollution management because it's all contained at one source where the relative cost of controls is going to be lower.
AMD and Intel are slightly out of sync in their product lifecycles. If you remember way back when, the Athlon came out and beat the pants off anything Intel had. Then Intel came out with the P4 and managed to edge out AMD for a bit, but then AMD came out with the X2, etc, and they took the crown back. Now Intel is on a new architecture and is thus getting the reigns back again.
With each architecture, there's a given life span for it. When it first releases it's a large jump ahead of the previous generation and gives a temporary advantage. The competitor is still eeking out the last ounces of performance from their previous gen and just testing out their next gen.
In the end, I believe AMD has been slightly ahead of Intel overall, taking the speed lead and holding it for longer. We'll see how it goes in the next round.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you can. If the nuke is running windows, simply infect your PDA with the latest worm. Then when you plug it into the nuke, the nuke will cease to be dangerous instead endeavoring to send out ads for Viagra to any other nukes it can talk to.
Best movie ever for accurate portrayal of shooting and ammo: Heat. That gun scene as they come out of the bank is really spot on. They are reloading constantly as you would if you were tossing off 30 round clips in that kind of situation. For the most part they fire in short bursts as well instead of just holding down the trigger and emptying a clip. The only iffy bit is how the hell they'd carry that much ammo on them, but give or take that issue, pretty solid.
This is really a bad list. Basically they seemed to have made a point of picking movies that naturally involve a lot of technology. They totally ignore things like Independence Day where their little virus takes out an entire alien attack fleet because, persumably, they didn't even try.
:)
Wargames does not deserve to be on this list. He uses an acoustic coupled modem to dial in. He hacks using realistic approaches to it, trying to guess the password. He doesn't magically use a cracking program or have little 3D graphics fly all over his screen trying to crack it. Instead he studies the biography of Professor Falken and after much trial and error actually gets it.
Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980. They didn't want the audience to have to read what the computer was saying the whole damn movie. The computer AI for Joshua is seemingly quite primitive even though it's supposed to be a big defense department computer.
As for Firewall, I think they did a pretty good job of being realistic. The scanner IPod thing was a stretch, but when they do computer security in the movie it looks like an actual computer. We see actual firewall rules and such that look like what I'd see on my actual computer. Given that it was a hollywood movie built around a very technical subject, I was pretty impressed with the realism level.
If you really want to get picky, how about the fact that every time a computer shows up in a movie it has an Apple logo on it
The thing is, nobody will have HD-DVD drives for their 360's and the developers can't trust that they eventually will. So while this would permit the notion of a DVD with special HD-DVD extras for those who have a drive, by and large it won't matter.
The major problem with how business is measured in the US is that growth trumps everything. So in order for IPod to be considered successful you have to sell more this year than you did last year and then keep going. Trouble is, of course, is that a successful device tends to be it's own worst enemy because once everybody has one, your sales fall off. Even if you keep convincing those same people to upgrade their pods every 3 or 4 years, you can never achieve the same kind of growth.
So Apple has been successful. They've built a quality product, achieved strong brand recognition, and have made it the most populary music playing device in the world. But ultimately they'll no longer be successful simply because there's only so many people in the world to buy them. So now they have to push the envelope of the ipod, making it do video, be a phone, etc. They do this, not because those are necessarily good ideas, but rather because they have to grow or they'll be judged a failure by the market.
It's actually not that hard. Imagine if you bought a car and the car had a key that only you could use. So if you wanted to loan the car to a friend, he couldn't use it. When you wanted to sell the car, you wouldn't be able to sell the car either because it wouldn't work for anybody else. It would work fine for you, but the moment your wife needed to drive it, too bad.
That's DRM in a nutshell. It's actually worse than that but the metaphor degrades somewhat beyond that.
Besides, now that we know it's him, is he lifting the hold? Sure we can shame him but my impression is that Stevens is well beyond being vulnerable to that.
But in the end you'll be fine and happy with a bachelors degree once you have experience. All a masters does for you is move you up the pay bracket 10-15%, and the reality is that after the two years of real world experience rather than going for a masters, most bachelors are at that level by the time you get your masters.
This is true. The reality is that the kind of work that you need a masters degree for is pretty rare relative to everything else. Sure there are some jobs where the deeper level of understanding is useful (writing search algorithms at Google, for example), but the reality is that most of the work is about taking business requirements and making useful systems out of them. To make a "useful" system, having an understanding of the business needs and communicating effectively, are far more valuable traits than a deep understanding of CS theory.
The trick really is just getting started in the industry. To that end you're best off if you can do some networking and internships and find things that way. Once you have tangible work experience, good references, etc, the degree is usually not a big deal. Frankly, having a degree in something other than CS might be a benefit to you. For example, if you were going to work in biotech, having a biology or chem degree might give you an advantage in getting a job.
The thing is, Apple may not be doing wholly original stuff here, but the reality is that they take what they do and make it usable and appealing. Take for example, expose's ability to show you every window you have open at the same time. This is trivial to do. But it's such an amazingly useful thing and it's implemented elegantly.
I saw the preview video of time machine and yeah maybe the interface is a little hokey, but the basic idea of it and how they interface with it is borderline brilliant. No longer does somebody even have to think in terms of backups, they just go into time machine and get the old copy. It's just simple.
This is what Apple has always been good at. They don't necessarily invent the wheel, but they sure make a wheel that's easy to use and has nice rims. The stuff just works. The reviewer clearly doesn't get the appeal of it because feature for feature it isn't that different. But how it does what it does is really what makes it distinctive.
Even better, check this out. This Timothy B. Lee guy is apparently also a big supporter of Intelligent Design. Excellent. I think this confirms I'm on the correct side of the issue :)
Provided their options, then yes. The trouble is that with the average house getting service from one or two providers, and those providers controlling so much of the access throughout the country, competition is unrealistic. Odds are in this country you have Comcast cable, and AT&T phone service. Now you might get your internet service from some other company (SpeakEasy, AOL, etc), but in the end, all of it comes over the same set of wires that are owned by one of those two companies.
So long as that is the case, competition can only exist in a regime of government regulation that forces it to exist.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
They have that infrastructure because they have control over the pipe into my home. In most locations the competition for that pipe is, at most, two companies (one for phone and one for cable). There is a natural monopoly in this because it's incredibly expensive and legally complicated to wire up individual homes. This was acknowledged long ago and government regulation helped make wiring up all those homes feasible. It is more efficient to have one or two companies have exclusive access, but because it's limited, it's also important for those companies to be regulated.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!
More accurately it'd be like the people who are GIVEN a high rise apartment getting cranky when the people who gave it to them want to come over for a visit and check out their great view.
Thank you for pointing that out. I was really baffled to see him coming out against net neutrality.
I have zero objection to the notion of the carriers tiering their network to expedite services provided that it's provider neutral. That means, if you are going to offer changes that make a VOIP call work better, you have to make it available to everybody, not just your own internal services. What the telecom companies want to do is create a competitive advantage in the IPTV space. If they can force their competition to pay higher rates to provide similar quality of service, then they have an innate advantage just because they control the pipes. That's anti-competitive and harmful to the consumer.
So long as they as it costs as much for them to provide a given service as a competitior, I have no problem with them creating tiered services.
The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.
That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.
Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.
My problem is that anonymous editing (in which I include editing by people with usernames, as they are effectively anonymous) means that you can never know the adgendas or biases of those who are publishing the facts.
Actually those using a username would be pseudonymous, and it's an important distinction. The reason it's important is that a given user can establish credibility. That is, you can look at other things they've posted and find patterns behind the changes they make, etc. You can see if they generally add credible information, or distory something.
I tend to trust Wikipedia in relation to the controversey of the topic (and to their credit they mark controversial items as being such). So if it's an article about gravity, as opposed to say the Republican party, I can reasonably assume that the gravity article is accurate where as the one on the GOP may be distorted by either side.
Accuracy is proportional to the number and variety of sources used. You just need to decide how critical accuracy is to you and do the work necessary to assure that level. So, if you're posting on say Slashdot, accuracy is... okay totally irrelevant. But if it was for a published article, you might not want to source Wikipedia (though for many subject areas it's pretty damn accurate). For a doctoral thesis, I think you'll fail, if not be burned at the stake for siteing wikipedia unless it's a thesis about wikis :)
Wikipedia provides a reasonable level of accuracy on most subjects for a very little amount of effort. Plus, well written Wikipedia articles also provide sourcing to help confirm the accuracy of the information.
The reality is that Nintendo's in an excellent position. They have a solid cash cow in the portable market and if the Wii was a total flop, it wouldn't kill them. Even if the Wii sucked they could reasonably plan to keep the market share they currently have with the Game Cube. This gives them the freedom to get a little bit experimental with the Wii and take a risk and this is why the Wii looks like it might be a winner. The Wii offers a unique experience and is cheap enough that owning one in addition to a PS3 or 360 isn't unreasonable.
For similar reasons, Microsoft is in a good position because they have piles of cash and big time cash cows in office software and operating systems. They can afford to lose a lot of money on the 360, so, once again, they aren't under a lot of pressure. Their approach is less risky though just evolving the platform a bit and more closely integrating the Live system into the unit.
Sony on the other hand is in a terrible position because the PS3 is basically the hopes and dreams of the entire company right now. They've been struggling for a while now, losing market share to cheap competitors in other realms of electronics. They are trying to use the PS3 to tie a lot of things together, a new high def video format, a new hardware platform, etc. If the PS3 flops, Sony is in a world of hurt. Even if it's moderately successful they may still be hurting depending on how much they lose per unit and how easily they can make those losses up on the back end.
Sony may pull things off but they are doubly cursed by high expectations and an almost desperate need for this to work out.
You still have to verify data.
If you care to have accurate information this statement is true of all sources.
Ultimately what this boils down to is a trust issue. If you do not have a physical record of your vote that is impervious to digital tampering, it does not matter how much security there is. With digital voting there will always be the perception that somebody could rig the vote.
In a democracy, the perception of vote fraud is almost as dangerous as the actuality of vote fraud. If we all go into the booth and we all come out convinced that we've had our say and that it counted for something, then even when we lose, we can feel we were a part of the system. If we go into a booth and don't even have that basic reassurance, why go into the booth at all? Why work to change the system if you have reasonable suspicion that the system has been rigged against you in the first place? People in that mindset will either drop out of the system entirely, or seek to voice their feelings through alternative means (violence, etc).
We've had two national elections in a row that were close and had an air of suspicion about them. There are countless anecdotes of votes getting switched on the computers, voting machines dissapearing overnight, etc. Even if there's not actual fraud going on, all of that adds up to a suspicion of the system itself. We can't afford to have that suspicion if we want to remain a democracy.
Actually a lot of drug testing is happening in India these days. Lots of capable doctors there and lots of people they consider disposable. Good times.
You are talking about a situation where an executable has been run with your priveleges. It can do anything it wants to, especially in Windows where most people run as Administrators. It can disguise itself as a firefox extension, sure. But it could also modify the firefox binary, or simply install a sniffer running as a service, or format your drive, or any number of nasty things.
The only place a singature would matter in this case is when the trojan executable was run. If you are executing attached executables from an e-mail, then no amount of signature verification is going to protect you. The reality is that no technical process can exist that will prevent this kind of attack so long as users can install their own software.
It is fair to say that down the line even when they do opensource it, Sun's version will be the defacto standard. Figure if they and IBM work together on new versions, there's a pretty good guarantee that there won't be any major forks. Sure, there will be forks, but invariably those forks won't be what the average corporate server is running on, etc. Since it's open source, any of the good changes from those forks can be rolled back into the main Sun standard.
I can understand Sun's fear as Java has been a huge part of their business, but I think as long as they keep pushing the standard forward forks will be irrelevant.
Indeed. One of the critical problems we have now is that all the cars need to run on a specific forumlation of petroleum. You can't make gas from a nuclear reactor, wind turbine, solar panel, or big pile of bird poo. So as oil supplies fluctuate, there's no way to compensate by changing over to alternatives.
Electricity is the long run best bet for distribution of energy because it's agnostic. You can generate it in countless ways depending on what's the most cost efficient at the time. As pointed out above, it also permits better pollution management because it's all contained at one source where the relative cost of controls is going to be lower.
AMD and Intel are slightly out of sync in their product lifecycles. If you remember way back when, the Athlon came out and beat the pants off anything Intel had. Then Intel came out with the P4 and managed to edge out AMD for a bit, but then AMD came out with the X2, etc, and they took the crown back. Now Intel is on a new architecture and is thus getting the reigns back again.
With each architecture, there's a given life span for it. When it first releases it's a large jump ahead of the previous generation and gives a temporary advantage. The competitor is still eeking out the last ounces of performance from their previous gen and just testing out their next gen.
In the end, I believe AMD has been slightly ahead of Intel overall, taking the speed lead and holding it for longer. We'll see how it goes in the next round.