I first saw mention of circuits that could bypass failed areas in a mid 1980s article by Sir Clive Sinclair, who argued it could be used to produce wafer-scale technology. The errors in the wafer would be unimportant, as they'd all be bypassed. Of course, this isn't what I'd call "self-healing" (where circuit switches go along with some sort of effort to repair the original damage if possible), but actual repair - beyond perhaps some sort of robot-wielded silver pen to re-connect broken tracks on a circuit board - is far beyond modern technology.
X-Ray fluorescence must work at scales comparable to X-Rays, and X-Ray fluorescence works on the scale of the inermost electron shells and/or the nucleus itself. That seems simple enough. They needed features half that in size. That's a much harder problem, but it would seem solvable. There are probably crystal structures that would do nicely, but there is a much geekier way to do this. Superconductors have lanes runing through them that can be considered ice-skating rinks for electrons. These lanes may actually be too narrow for longer-wavelength X-Rays, but should be fine for very short wavelengths. If the gap is too narrow, then try a different approach. Get two magnetic (or one magnetic, one superconducting) materials with damn-near-perfect flat surfaces. Use magnetic fields to repell one material the required distance from the other. (The advantage of superconductors is that there should be less noise and therefore more control.)This allows you to tune the system dynamically, and the quantum step for a magnetic field is far smaller than any particle yet discovered.
If the limits on a CD are because of conventional lenses, and this can get 10 times the best a lens can do, it follows that a superlens-based CD, DVD or Blu-Ray system could get 10 times the capacity per track and 10 times as many tracks (in other words, 100 times the capacity). That would be some serious storage space.
This would seem a good time for Google to support WAIS searches, for Apache to support streaming the HTML text via Gopher, and for file delivery to take place using FSP. Better yet, have a large set of supportable (and recognized) protocols, which the browser can pick between at random. If you like, have a proxy in front of standard servers that can transliterate between the formats.
Alternatively, this might also be a good time for servers to activate opportunistic IPSec. It's not perfect, as people have pointed out on here many times, but it would complicate surveilance.
More to the point, since I'm not sure the FBI are the biggest threat, it would stop passive monitoring by crackers. Passive fingerprinting and other non-intrusive methods of gathering information on software in use, potential vulnerabilities, etc, would seem to be one of the biggest vulnerabilities that modern systems do not seriously address. If someone wanted to launch a serious cyberattack, you think they'd run nmap at the time and have every active NIDS system slam down defences? Go and read the story about the Internet Auditing Project. Pay particular attention to the section where their main computer was hacked and the kernel patched with spyware in under 5 seconds from start to finish.
The attackers had obviously mapped everything running on the computer - including the Linux kernel version - and had the entire attack pre-programmed supremely well. If anyone wanted to get serious, that is how I'd expect them to operate. It's much harder to detect and in the past 5-10 years, the techniques have probably improved significatly. If it's that easy to install a rootkit on a machine maintained by people who were clearly not ignorant of security issues, then given that most machines are NOT maintained by people with any real knowledge of security issues, the potential for either spying or actual harm is significant.
Of course, all this requires a lot of knowledge - knowledge that can't be obtained if the traffic is kept secure, but knowledge that is broadcast for anyone to see if the traffic is insecure. Yes, yes, yes, encryption is slow. That's why there are encryption chips - and both the Linux kernel and OpenSSL can take advantage of some of them. Most computers do not have such chips installed, but if you're going to have Governments running around telling people what to do, I'd far prefer the Government to mandate (and preferably pay for) strong (as in no known vulnerabilities, no viable brute-force methods will work, 128-bit or more effective key strength, believed tamper-proof) encryption, with international gateways taking care of any difference in standards or lack of such protection.
Yes, IPSec means the Government can't spy on the traffic, but frankly since cybecrime can be broken down into two major groups (attacks on systems from the outside, and insider assistance) where both groups are largely rendered ineffective by strong encryption, if there's no remaining serious crime to monitor, then there is no valid reason for them to do so.
Yes, we know that crime has nothing to do with it, but it's unclear that domestic spying does either. If it did and they were competent, they'd have rootkitted 90% of servers in the US and be able to see virtually everything already and they need no further rights or access. If they're not competent, then they won't be able to do anything with the traffic anyway, so it's of no consequence whether they see it or not. If you're THAT concerned, use source-based routing and ensure that the packets are split randomly between multiple paths. Any monitoring system will then capture only a fraction of the packets and be incapable of analyzing what you were sending. Or use IPv4-over-IPv6-over-IPv4, set up two IPv6 tunnels with load-balancing between them and bounce your traffic via the 6Bone to two completely different exit points back onto the standard Internet. Does the same thing. There are probably regular IPv4-to-IPv4 proxies you could use to the same end. Or use Tor. Point is, you can't read a stream you can't see, and there isn't the compute power on the planet to recompose a fragmented stream except at the point it is intended to be recomposed.
...the first person to google for attacked pages only turned up ASP pages as cracked. Later on, they say that the javascript attempts to use an ActiveX control. If I am exceedingly generous, I'll allow for the possibility that the story was written by someone who saw just these two comments and assumed that since both of these are generally run on Microsft OS', that this was an IIS problem. (Actually, more than a few people using Microsoft OS' run other web servers. There's quite a selection to choose from. Also, both ASP and ActiveX are usable under Linux, well, ish.)
However, it is now abundantly clear that the attack is NOT ASP-specific, and just because one of the vectors it tries is based on ActiveX does NOT mean it doesn't try other methods. It only means that the people who spotted it early spotted it trying that method. Although it's unlikely to have an attack library for multiple OS', it would be surprising if it didn't have some alternative action for when ActiveX isn't available.
I'm concerned about the number of Government sites that have been shown to be vulnerable, especially (as has been commented by others on Slashdot) a Canadian site dealing with national security. This attack is unlikely to cause any particular lasting harm, but stop and think. These are the sorts of sites that actually need to be secure. Even if not directly connected to internal secure networks (and I'd be willing to bet that far more are than are supposed to be), they are high-profile and for that reason alone are likely to be much more at-risk than other sites.
Most smaller websites are just point-of-presence and information sites. It's an irritant if they vanish for a while, but it's unlikely to hurt anything. Nobody is going to die if a blog site isn't available for an hour or so, unless they're a serious addict. No small vendor is going to lose business if their PDF datasheets aren't reachable for a little while. Adult sites risk making a one or two percent loss of webcam income out of their steady stream of millions. I seriously doubt anyone from the United Methodist church will suddenly become Mormon or Catholic because their primary website was hit.
If you use LinuxBIOS, your reboot time is about 3 seconds. If you're looking at the teleco market and want embedded Linux systems on literally millions of sites, you might even consider dumping the use of FLASH for the kernel and go to ASIC. At which point, your boot time might easily be around 0.3 seconds.
I suggest downloading one of the solar system simulators and figuring that out. We may yet be able to obtain proof that TV commercial writers are, in fact, from another world.
Ok, build crossroads at the bottom of a deep oceanic trench, bury ColdFusion as specified there along with MySpace, plate the bottom of the trench with Osmium before filling it with molten rock from the planet Mercury. You gotta take these menaces seriously.
You are correct to be suspicious. The other event I mentioned was much stronger - there was a definite genetic bottleneck, there was a geologically determinable drought, there was a reduction in human activity, and humans were still more-or-less in one region and thus much more likely to be affected by a drought. Numbers can be calculated directly from evidence of remains, but also by looking at what would have existed in the way of food and water, then calculating the maximum supportable population. You can do that with a single cluster.
This newer claim must be treated with caution, because it involves humans that have spread out (less likely to find remains, less likely the humans would have been affected catastrophically) and it's much harder to calculate numbers, because it's much harder to determine what would have been available to whom and what level of trade would have existed when levels of critical resources differed between human-inhabited areas.
DNA is also a dangerous thing to go by. We know there was a mitochondrial Eve, and we know a date but not whether it was the date of the event horizon (the point at which all surviving humans were descendents of Eve, within a timeframe in which differences in mtDNA would not yet be significant in the only regions we have really mapped for such purposes) or the point of singularity itself (when Eve lived). We also don't know why homogenious mtDNA occured - unless it conveyed such dramatic advantage as to be always selected (mtDNA handles energy conversion in cells), there's nothing that makes it obviously preferential, so all mtDNA lines should have survived on a completely random distribution.
Only twelve descendent lines exist in the whole of Europe and Asia. Another eight pretty much covers the rest of the planet. I say "only", but remember at least one actual catastrophic drought and this supposed one happened much later than mtDNA Eve. If a uniform, homogenous strain was preferential, we should not be getting such divergence now. It's not a simple picture.
(Also, dating an event by mutations is dangerous, since mutations can revert, not all markers mutate at the same rate, and all kinds of other factors make such calculations extremely messy. On the DNA mailing list, people often point out that the margins of error on last common ancestor calculations are so broad as to make the calculation worthless.)
It's a Douglas Adams kind of situation: even if we knew for certain, we wouldn't really know what it was we were certain about, or indeed that we were even certain about it.
You don't have to go that far. Microsoft simply picks one or two of its technologies that work well with one group of the things that needs defining, and makes sure that it defines that group according to how its technology works. Instant specification. Better yet, the specification can then be completely open as the only way to implement it "correctly" is via a technology Microsoft has patented, and since that's how all IE browsers will implement it, that is how those elements will be understood and used by web developers.
This tactic works best if said group of elements is big, so that other browser developers back off from implementing the tags or guessing the syntax until they are better-defined. That way, Microsoft is pretty much assured that what they implement must be the de-facto standard, even if there is resistance within the W3C. And whether you agree or disagree with the decision, de-facto standards resulted in HTML 3.1 (which had maths tags) being dropped entirely in favour of HTML 3.2. There is precedent for Microsoft telling the W3C what it can and cannot make standard.
Never, ever allow a monopolist onto the board of a standards body. In fact, never, ever allow them within a thousand miles of a standards body. And then only if it's not yet possible to ship the monopoly off-planet.
Oh, it would have taken more than one such event, but we know that more than one such event occured. There have been other reports of other droughts nearly killing off humanity and the bottlenecks showing up in the DNA. Once humanity fragmented globally, however, mutations would have stayed reasonably local, and this also created races. (The two African tribes mentioned in the article formed from the drought mentioned and the Australian aborigines formed from early geographic isolation, making the three very special examples of humanity, but that should not lead anyone to conclude they should be treated as ouside humanity - they've a greater right to the title than most extremists.)
The rest of humanity spread out across the globe, the Genography project has some nice maps of how the genetic markers show humanity to have moved. They do make one error when it comes to Europe. Europe was settled at least twice - once by a long-headed hunter-gatherer people and then later by a rounder-headed farming people. The long-headed people are the ones who developed lactose tolerence and anyone who can digest cheese or milk in any quantity is descended from the long-heads. In order for that to make sense, the long-heads must have migrated with cattle or goats, much as many nomadic tribes do today. The Iron age "Ice Man" (central Europeans give them such boring names - at least Britain's bogman was called Pete Marsh) was, if I remember the description correctly, one of the round-headed people. He was also left-handed, but that probably doesn't signify anything of interest. He was either a trader or a trapper and there can't have been many tools in either trade that were designed with a specific hand in mind.
You might have spotted something there. Could this work on a 50-year cycle? (In other words, about every other generation. Or, in yet other words, society as a whole is Type I Bipolar.)
ColdFusion should be shot with a silver bullet, stabbed through the heart with a stake, be stuffed with garlic, and be buried at a crossroads at midnight in a holy water-filled lead coffin with elder signs on all sides, inside and out. Other than that, I have no idea why it ranks in the top 20.
Delphi and Pascal are other puzzlers. Pascal is great as a teaching language, but there are later iterations of that family of languages - Modula-2 and Modula-3 - that arguably provide better rigor if rigor is what you are after. And I see no obvious reason to use Pascal or related languages if you're not after truly rigorous code.
C seems to be holding ground, the slight loss seems to be within the fluctuations other languages that are holding steady are seeing. It's too powerful, too close to bare-metal programming and too close to the actual machine architecture to fade for some time yet. C++ might genuinely be losing ground - C# and D provide a lot of the power and object-orientedness of C++ but make an effort to learn from the complexity of C++. Personally, I suspect D might stand a better chance as C# is still very much tied to a single vendor in people's minds. I don't see C++ vanishing, rather I see them reaching some common point and staying there.
VB is quick-n-dirty, and it's popular because it's so easy to write something in it. If it ever became unlawful to have a website that was dangerously insecure or a hazard to Internet traffic (in much the same way cars have to be inspected every so often in some places to ensure it meets certain minimum safety standards) I imagine Visual Basic would lose appeal. Well, that or the EU eventually raising the fines to the point of driving Microsoft out of international competition.
Given that so much new scientific code is still produced in Fortran, whereas not much is really written in COBOL although a lot of legacy code is maintained in it, I'm surprised COBOL is there and Fortran is not. (Fortran is popular enough that there are TWO competing front-ends for GCC for it. There are open-source COBOL compilers, but as far as I know, all work has stopped on all of them. To me, that says something about the level of interest and serious usage.)
What happened to the idea that, if you indulged in dishonest and otherwise scumbag practices, you had 'unclean hands' and deserved to lose on that basis.
They found Herod's hand-washing dish. Besides, if you put two corporations in the same room and argue that the one with dirty hands looses, we'd need a new type of verdict of mutual guilt, where both sides get locked in the slammer for a few years. Hmmm. Actually, there might be something to be said for that...
had to prove that it harmed consumers in order to fall under anti-trust law. This is, unfortunately, a very dangerous ruling in light of some of Microsoft's activities relating to OOXML because it raises the bar on the proof required to act against such behavior.
There is proof that it has damaged ISO operations (their voting system has been crippled due to OOXML supporters not voting on other issues) and there is proof that it has damaged ISO credibility (several countries are appealing their own votes, others have blogged on extreme irregularities). At the moment, ISO is a major customer of OOXML, but ISO's operations and credibility are what sell ISO standards. Thus, OOXML has harmed ISO's modus operandi and thus harmed ISO.
Is this enough? IANAL, so I don't know what the legal definition of harm is, in a case like this, but damaging the primary mode of operation through which ISO is funded would seem to be harm by any reasonable standard, even if no monetary (income) harm has (yet) taken place. The harm is in the form of the expense to ISO's reputation and good standing, the expense of any necessary reorganization and reconstruction of its entire mode of operation, and the probable loss of future earnings as a direct result of the first two.
Most places that have high-speed Internet have only one, or perhaps two, actual ISPs. There may be a few low-speed ISPs around (eg: 802.11b wireless) and there might also be one or two resellers of the high-speed bandwidth, but the odds are fairly high that if you've upset one ISP, that confidential information will somehow appear on the desk of all the other ISPs. The odds are much much greater for resellers. Choice in the ISP world is very limited and what appears to be choice will often be an illusion, at least in the general consumer market.
When you get into the big money game, then the rules are different. You have choices when you start talking T1s or above. Not, as a rule, always a good set of choices, and again most of the smaller companies have long-since been bought out. You might have three or four real, genuine, independent ISPs to choose from. They charge the Earth, may ignore their own quality of service guarantees (one company I worked for got bit by the small-print), and cusomer service is almost as bad as the domestic service, but appear to show a marginally higher interest in keeping you as a customer.
You have to remember, however, that the Government is paranoid when it comes to the citizenry, making all searches (and indeed activities) entirely reasonable, as viewed by those subject to such paranoia. Besides which, the President gave himself powers, oh, 2001-ish, in which he can declare anyone he so chooses to be a de-facto terrorist on his word alone, and it's obvious to any judge (especially those not wanting to be arrested) that terrorists may have any posession or personal information confiscated and used as the Government pleases.
After Rockall was given independence from the United Kigngdom, you will probably find it has the best record on democracy of any western nation.
Europeans now refer to 1914-1918 as "the lost generation" and suffer from a collective guilt quite unheard-of in any conflict before or since. Every town, every village dating that far back has a memorial similar to the Vietnam memorials in most American cities. You might notice a slight disparity in the scale. People genuinely did believe it was so terrible that nobody would want to go to war again. When critics point to efforts to avert World War II, they forget that the ones who were making the decision to fight were the survivors from the prior war, who knew what they were going to be deciding about.
But politicos avoid war, right? In the States, perhaps. In Britain, Prince Philip saw combat in World War II, Prince Andrew in the Falklands. Queen Elizabeth in World War II was part of an ambulance team that were out in London whilst the bombs were falling. Many in the House of Lords also saw combat. These are people who know pain and have seen far too much blood - sometimes their own. People who have been there tend to be more wary about being there again.
There was one big difference, though. The World Wars were right there, for Europeans. It's easier to distance yourself from war when it's many thousands of miles away.
I agree, but there should - soomehow - be a penalty exacted for their refusal to state their case in an open forum in front of the FCC. I have no idea what sort of penalty would be reasonable - maybe just an "accidental" delay in processing future paperwork, or something, but some indication that they really were unreasonable should be given.
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I first saw mention of circuits that could bypass failed areas in a mid 1980s article by Sir Clive Sinclair, who argued it could be used to produce wafer-scale technology. The errors in the wafer would be unimportant, as they'd all be bypassed. Of course, this isn't what I'd call "self-healing" (where circuit switches go along with some sort of effort to repair the original damage if possible), but actual repair - beyond perhaps some sort of robot-wielded silver pen to re-connect broken tracks on a circuit board - is far beyond modern technology.
ZEN: Auto-repair circuits are working at maximum capacity. Damage exceeds rectification capability.
DAYNA: Damage? What damage?
ZEN: That information is not available.
X-Ray fluorescence must work at scales comparable to X-Rays, and X-Ray fluorescence works on the scale of the inermost electron shells and/or the nucleus itself. That seems simple enough. They needed features half that in size. That's a much harder problem, but it would seem solvable. There are probably crystal structures that would do nicely, but there is a much geekier way to do this. Superconductors have lanes runing through them that can be considered ice-skating rinks for electrons. These lanes may actually be too narrow for longer-wavelength X-Rays, but should be fine for very short wavelengths. If the gap is too narrow, then try a different approach. Get two magnetic (or one magnetic, one superconducting) materials with damn-near-perfect flat surfaces. Use magnetic fields to repell one material the required distance from the other. (The advantage of superconductors is that there should be less noise and therefore more control.)This allows you to tune the system dynamically, and the quantum step for a magnetic field is far smaller than any particle yet discovered.
If the limits on a CD are because of conventional lenses, and this can get 10 times the best a lens can do, it follows that a superlens-based CD, DVD or Blu-Ray system could get 10 times the capacity per track and 10 times as many tracks (in other words, 100 times the capacity). That would be some serious storage space.
That's fine for people with blood, but what happens to those of us who are caffeine-based lifeforms?
Alternatively, this might also be a good time for servers to activate opportunistic IPSec. It's not perfect, as people have pointed out on here many times, but it would complicate surveilance.
More to the point, since I'm not sure the FBI are the biggest threat, it would stop passive monitoring by crackers. Passive fingerprinting and other non-intrusive methods of gathering information on software in use, potential vulnerabilities, etc, would seem to be one of the biggest vulnerabilities that modern systems do not seriously address. If someone wanted to launch a serious cyberattack, you think they'd run nmap at the time and have every active NIDS system slam down defences? Go and read the story about the Internet Auditing Project. Pay particular attention to the section where their main computer was hacked and the kernel patched with spyware in under 5 seconds from start to finish.
The attackers had obviously mapped everything running on the computer - including the Linux kernel version - and had the entire attack pre-programmed supremely well. If anyone wanted to get serious, that is how I'd expect them to operate. It's much harder to detect and in the past 5-10 years, the techniques have probably improved significatly. If it's that easy to install a rootkit on a machine maintained by people who were clearly not ignorant of security issues, then given that most machines are NOT maintained by people with any real knowledge of security issues, the potential for either spying or actual harm is significant.
Of course, all this requires a lot of knowledge - knowledge that can't be obtained if the traffic is kept secure, but knowledge that is broadcast for anyone to see if the traffic is insecure. Yes, yes, yes, encryption is slow. That's why there are encryption chips - and both the Linux kernel and OpenSSL can take advantage of some of them. Most computers do not have such chips installed, but if you're going to have Governments running around telling people what to do, I'd far prefer the Government to mandate (and preferably pay for) strong (as in no known vulnerabilities, no viable brute-force methods will work, 128-bit or more effective key strength, believed tamper-proof) encryption, with international gateways taking care of any difference in standards or lack of such protection.
Yes, IPSec means the Government can't spy on the traffic, but frankly since cybecrime can be broken down into two major groups (attacks on systems from the outside, and insider assistance) where both groups are largely rendered ineffective by strong encryption, if there's no remaining serious crime to monitor, then there is no valid reason for them to do so.
Yes, we know that crime has nothing to do with it, but it's unclear that domestic spying does either. If it did and they were competent, they'd have rootkitted 90% of servers in the US and be able to see virtually everything already and they need no further rights or access. If they're not competent, then they won't be able to do anything with the traffic anyway, so it's of no consequence whether they see it or not. If you're THAT concerned, use source-based routing and ensure that the packets are split randomly between multiple paths. Any monitoring system will then capture only a fraction of the packets and be incapable of analyzing what you were sending. Or use IPv4-over-IPv6-over-IPv4, set up two IPv6 tunnels with load-balancing between them and bounce your traffic via the 6Bone to two completely different exit points back onto the standard Internet. Does the same thing. There are probably regular IPv4-to-IPv4 proxies you could use to the same end. Or use Tor. Point is, you can't read a stream you can't see, and there isn't the compute power on the planet to recompose a fragmented stream except at the point it is intended to be recomposed.
However, it is now abundantly clear that the attack is NOT ASP-specific, and just because one of the vectors it tries is based on ActiveX does NOT mean it doesn't try other methods. It only means that the people who spotted it early spotted it trying that method. Although it's unlikely to have an attack library for multiple OS', it would be surprising if it didn't have some alternative action for when ActiveX isn't available.
I'm concerned about the number of Government sites that have been shown to be vulnerable, especially (as has been commented by others on Slashdot) a Canadian site dealing with national security. This attack is unlikely to cause any particular lasting harm, but stop and think. These are the sorts of sites that actually need to be secure. Even if not directly connected to internal secure networks (and I'd be willing to bet that far more are than are supposed to be), they are high-profile and for that reason alone are likely to be much more at-risk than other sites.
Most smaller websites are just point-of-presence and information sites. It's an irritant if they vanish for a while, but it's unlikely to hurt anything. Nobody is going to die if a blog site isn't available for an hour or so, unless they're a serious addict. No small vendor is going to lose business if their PDF datasheets aren't reachable for a little while. Adult sites risk making a one or two percent loss of webcam income out of their steady stream of millions. I seriously doubt anyone from the United Methodist church will suddenly become Mormon or Catholic because their primary website was hit.
If you use LinuxBIOS, your reboot time is about 3 seconds. If you're looking at the teleco market and want embedded Linux systems on literally millions of sites, you might even consider dumping the use of FLASH for the kernel and go to ASIC. At which point, your boot time might easily be around 0.3 seconds.
I suggest downloading one of the solar system simulators and figuring that out. We may yet be able to obtain proof that TV commercial writers are, in fact, from another world.
Ok, build crossroads at the bottom of a deep oceanic trench, bury ColdFusion as specified there along with MySpace, plate the bottom of the trench with Osmium before filling it with molten rock from the planet Mercury. You gotta take these menaces seriously.
This newer claim must be treated with caution, because it involves humans that have spread out (less likely to find remains, less likely the humans would have been affected catastrophically) and it's much harder to calculate numbers, because it's much harder to determine what would have been available to whom and what level of trade would have existed when levels of critical resources differed between human-inhabited areas.
DNA is also a dangerous thing to go by. We know there was a mitochondrial Eve, and we know a date but not whether it was the date of the event horizon (the point at which all surviving humans were descendents of Eve, within a timeframe in which differences in mtDNA would not yet be significant in the only regions we have really mapped for such purposes) or the point of singularity itself (when Eve lived). We also don't know why homogenious mtDNA occured - unless it conveyed such dramatic advantage as to be always selected (mtDNA handles energy conversion in cells), there's nothing that makes it obviously preferential, so all mtDNA lines should have survived on a completely random distribution.
Only twelve descendent lines exist in the whole of Europe and Asia. Another eight pretty much covers the rest of the planet. I say "only", but remember at least one actual catastrophic drought and this supposed one happened much later than mtDNA Eve. If a uniform, homogenous strain was preferential, we should not be getting such divergence now. It's not a simple picture.
(Also, dating an event by mutations is dangerous, since mutations can revert, not all markers mutate at the same rate, and all kinds of other factors make such calculations extremely messy. On the DNA mailing list, people often point out that the margins of error on last common ancestor calculations are so broad as to make the calculation worthless.)
It's a Douglas Adams kind of situation: even if we knew for certain, we wouldn't really know what it was we were certain about, or indeed that we were even certain about it.
This tactic works best if said group of elements is big, so that other browser developers back off from implementing the tags or guessing the syntax until they are better-defined. That way, Microsoft is pretty much assured that what they implement must be the de-facto standard, even if there is resistance within the W3C. And whether you agree or disagree with the decision, de-facto standards resulted in HTML 3.1 (which had maths tags) being dropped entirely in favour of HTML 3.2. There is precedent for Microsoft telling the W3C what it can and cannot make standard.
Never, ever allow a monopolist onto the board of a standards body. In fact, never, ever allow them within a thousand miles of a standards body. And then only if it's not yet possible to ship the monopoly off-planet.
Oh, c'mon, be real. If it's Microsoft we're talking about, then ISO isn't just a schill. They're a very very well-paid schill.
Ohhhhh that's briliant!
The rest of humanity spread out across the globe, the Genography project has some nice maps of how the genetic markers show humanity to have moved. They do make one error when it comes to Europe. Europe was settled at least twice - once by a long-headed hunter-gatherer people and then later by a rounder-headed farming people. The long-headed people are the ones who developed lactose tolerence and anyone who can digest cheese or milk in any quantity is descended from the long-heads. In order for that to make sense, the long-heads must have migrated with cattle or goats, much as many nomadic tribes do today. The Iron age "Ice Man" (central Europeans give them such boring names - at least Britain's bogman was called Pete Marsh) was, if I remember the description correctly, one of the round-headed people. He was also left-handed, but that probably doesn't signify anything of interest. He was either a trader or a trapper and there can't have been many tools in either trade that were designed with a specific hand in mind.
You might have spotted something there. Could this work on a 50-year cycle? (In other words, about every other generation. Or, in yet other words, society as a whole is Type I Bipolar.)
Delphi and Pascal are other puzzlers. Pascal is great as a teaching language, but there are later iterations of that family of languages - Modula-2 and Modula-3 - that arguably provide better rigor if rigor is what you are after. And I see no obvious reason to use Pascal or related languages if you're not after truly rigorous code.
C seems to be holding ground, the slight loss seems to be within the fluctuations other languages that are holding steady are seeing. It's too powerful, too close to bare-metal programming and too close to the actual machine architecture to fade for some time yet. C++ might genuinely be losing ground - C# and D provide a lot of the power and object-orientedness of C++ but make an effort to learn from the complexity of C++. Personally, I suspect D might stand a better chance as C# is still very much tied to a single vendor in people's minds. I don't see C++ vanishing, rather I see them reaching some common point and staying there.
VB is quick-n-dirty, and it's popular because it's so easy to write something in it. If it ever became unlawful to have a website that was dangerously insecure or a hazard to Internet traffic (in much the same way cars have to be inspected every so often in some places to ensure it meets certain minimum safety standards) I imagine Visual Basic would lose appeal. Well, that or the EU eventually raising the fines to the point of driving Microsoft out of international competition.
Given that so much new scientific code is still produced in Fortran, whereas not much is really written in COBOL although a lot of legacy code is maintained in it, I'm surprised COBOL is there and Fortran is not. (Fortran is popular enough that there are TWO competing front-ends for GCC for it. There are open-source COBOL compilers, but as far as I know, all work has stopped on all of them. To me, that says something about the level of interest and serious usage.)
They found Herod's hand-washing dish. Besides, if you put two corporations in the same room and argue that the one with dirty hands looses, we'd need a new type of verdict of mutual guilt, where both sides get locked in the slammer for a few years. Hmmm. Actually, there might be something to be said for that...
There is proof that it has damaged ISO operations (their voting system has been crippled due to OOXML supporters not voting on other issues) and there is proof that it has damaged ISO credibility (several countries are appealing their own votes, others have blogged on extreme irregularities). At the moment, ISO is a major customer of OOXML, but ISO's operations and credibility are what sell ISO standards. Thus, OOXML has harmed ISO's modus operandi and thus harmed ISO.
Is this enough? IANAL, so I don't know what the legal definition of harm is, in a case like this, but damaging the primary mode of operation through which ISO is funded would seem to be harm by any reasonable standard, even if no monetary (income) harm has (yet) taken place. The harm is in the form of the expense to ISO's reputation and good standing, the expense of any necessary reorganization and reconstruction of its entire mode of operation, and the probable loss of future earnings as a direct result of the first two.
When you get into the big money game, then the rules are different. You have choices when you start talking T1s or above. Not, as a rule, always a good set of choices, and again most of the smaller companies have long-since been bought out. You might have three or four real, genuine, independent ISPs to choose from. They charge the Earth, may ignore their own quality of service guarantees (one company I worked for got bit by the small-print), and cusomer service is almost as bad as the domestic service, but appear to show a marginally higher interest in keeping you as a customer.
After Rockall was given independence from the United Kigngdom, you will probably find it has the best record on democracy of any western nation.
But politicos avoid war, right? In the States, perhaps. In Britain, Prince Philip saw combat in World War II, Prince Andrew in the Falklands. Queen Elizabeth in World War II was part of an ambulance team that were out in London whilst the bombs were falling. Many in the House of Lords also saw combat. These are people who know pain and have seen far too much blood - sometimes their own. People who have been there tend to be more wary about being there again.
There was one big difference, though. The World Wars were right there, for Europeans. It's easier to distance yourself from war when it's many thousands of miles away.
I'm too sexy for this flamewar, for this flamewar, flamewar's a bore...
I'm too sexy for this hate, hate's gotta leave be!
I agree, but there should - soomehow - be a penalty exacted for their refusal to state their case in an open forum in front of the FCC. I have no idea what sort of penalty would be reasonable - maybe just an "accidental" delay in processing future paperwork, or something, but some indication that they really were unreasonable should be given.
Just imagine what the scale would have been like if he'd worked in northern Alaska....