On Thursday, in response to questions from The New York
Times, the I.R.S. announced that it would curtail the
practice...
In totally unrelated news, the thief responsible for a string of
high-profile burglaries in New York State was acquitted after promising
he wouldn't do it anymore. Questions from the victims regarding their
lost property went unanswered.
I call BS on this story. Imagine: someone worked for "an agency", and whatever he saw and did there would of course be classified; posting about it here would put him in Leavenworth. Oh, but that's ok: he posted anonymously! One little problem with that: he gave so many details, he could certainly be identified.
If this story were real, that is.
What party, ultimately, has the most control over how many infected machines there are on the internet? Could it possibly be the software company whose chief product runs on most of the machines out there?
What parties, ultimately, bear the costs of all the infected machines out there? Their owners, sometimes. Everyone who has to deal with the billions of spam emails that clog the internet. Not so much, the aforementioned large software company.
So an executive from that software company suggests that the burden of infection should be placed squarely upon the user. Funny, that.
After the test has come and gone, will they still be interested in programming? Only if they've had fun doing it. For that you want something they can learn quickly and do significant projects with. In short, Python.
Perhaps a good method would be to blast the dust off the panels with pressurized gas. This assumes it's available, of course; an oxygen factory would be a good thing to build, as a prelude to colonization.
Ah, pity. This really should be done. Granted the lag would be a problem, but see my post above for several reasons why this is better than sending humans and all their life support.
Well, yes; but sending up telepresence robots would let us build necessary infrastructure on the moon to make colonization much easier. One way, you have to keep launching oxygen, water, and food out of a deep gravity well to supply the astronauts until they can make all that for themselves. The other way, you just use robots to build the needed infrastructure first. The robots can also be made more resistant to solar radiation and temperature extremes, and if there's a big snafu, at least no one dies of it.
Hur hur hur! Thag have silly idea to make cave from wood! Where Thag going to get wood? How Thag going to cut wood? Thag wasting time. No pay attention to Thag.
Hidden beneath all the shouting, the core issue is that computers and related technologies are all about copying. They make it very very easy to copy things; and the internet makes it very very easy to distribute them. Locking things up so they can't be copied or distributed is relatively complex and difficult. The traditional content creators and distributors can kick and scream and try to push the genie back into the bottle all they want, but their old business model is doomed by these simple facts.
One swallow does not make a summer, nor does the occasional lucid court decision give me faith in the legal system as a whole. It's nice when it happens (Kitzmiller especially), but the courts make plenty of bad calls too. That reactionary fugghead Scalia is still in SCOTUS; British libel law is still horribly broken; and then there's this story.
I can, and IANAB, just a science geek. Bacteria are prokaryotic: their DNA is distributed throughout a relatively small cell. Fungi are eukaryotic; their DNA is in a cell nucleus. This is Chapter-1-of-the-textbook stuff.
Well, he makes some good points. Code review is indeed difficult, requires good skills, and is not done by many people in the free software community (the OpenBSD development team being a notable exception). Good software engineering methodology is crucial, certainly.
He concludes that Microsoft ends up shipping fewer vulnerabilities than anyone else. Is this true? Well, with the obvious exception of OpenBSD, it might be; but that's not the whole story. What developers do when a vulnerability is found is pretty important, too. Probably even more important.
For all their professionalism and expertise, Microsoft developers labor under a severe handicap: they have to work on what Microsoft managers tell them to work on. They may think that a given bug is urgent and should be patched right away; but at the end of the day, the priorities are set by people who are focused on the bottom line, and those people know that nothing much is going to happen to Microsoft if a vulnerability is left open for a week or two. Every year, people in the Linux community confidently assert that this is the year of the Linux desktop; and every year, they're proven wrong. Too many people are locked into Microsoft's proprietary formats, and have too much time invested in learning to use Windows, to switch easily. And that's not going to change anytime soon.
Bad move? Really? What are people going to do about it if Google chooses to be evil? Stop using Google? Seriously? Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least? Can even the technically-adept people here get along easily without it? How about the other 95% of web users?
Google is at least as immune from criticism as Microsoft, at this point, and they know it.
Obviously it is not the end of the world - a similar decision was rendered in the U.S. in 1991, and the U.S. phone directory business has not gone down in flames.
Why did Wikileaks choose Iceland, of all the places they might have gone, to try to persuade? Do they have an exceptionally good press freedom record or something?
Slashdot Mirror
In totally unrelated news, the thief responsible for a string of high-profile burglaries in New York State was acquitted after promising he wouldn't do it anymore. Questions from the victims regarding their lost property went unanswered.
I call BS on this story. Imagine: someone worked for "an agency", and whatever he saw and did there would of course be classified; posting about it here would put him in Leavenworth. Oh, but that's ok: he posted anonymously! One little problem with that: he gave so many details, he could certainly be identified. If this story were real, that is.
What party, ultimately, has the most control over how many infected machines there are on the internet? Could it possibly be the software company whose chief product runs on most of the machines out there?
What parties, ultimately, bear the costs of all the infected machines out there? Their owners, sometimes. Everyone who has to deal with the billions of spam emails that clog the internet. Not so much, the aforementioned large software company.
So an executive from that software company suggests that the burden of infection should be placed squarely upon the user. Funny, that.
After the test has come and gone, will they still be interested in programming? Only if they've had fun doing it. For that you want something they can learn quickly and do significant projects with. In short, Python.
Memo to Senator Stevens: the posters above are joking. You do not need to introduce legislation to prevent these disasters. Kthxbai.
I realize you aren't being serious here, but come on, the CIA didn't even exist in the Prohibition Era.
Well, if you get a lot of earthquakes, you don't end up with many buildings that can't survive them, do you. One way or another.
Or, put more briefly, they have a 40 year history of being run like a typical American business.
I think we very likely could do it in Arizona now, if there was an economic reason to do so. In Arizona, there isn't. In space, there is.
Perhaps a good method would be to blast the dust off the panels with pressurized gas. This assumes it's available, of course; an oxygen factory would be a good thing to build, as a prelude to colonization.
Ah, pity. This really should be done. Granted the lag would be a problem, but see my post above for several reasons why this is better than sending humans and all their life support.
Well, yes; but sending up telepresence robots would let us build necessary infrastructure on the moon to make colonization much easier. One way, you have to keep launching oxygen, water, and food out of a deep gravity well to supply the astronauts until they can make all that for themselves. The other way, you just use robots to build the needed infrastructure first. The robots can also be made more resistant to solar radiation and temperature extremes, and if there's a big snafu, at least no one dies of it.
Hur hur hur! Thag have silly idea to make cave from wood! Where Thag going to get wood? How Thag going to cut wood? Thag wasting time. No pay attention to Thag.
But where will the next Microsoft come from?
If you mean the next big abusive computer monopoly: Mountain View, California.
If you mean the next big game changer and innovator: somewhere outside the Benighted States of America, obviously.
Hidden beneath all the shouting, the core issue is that computers and related technologies are all about copying. They make it very very easy to copy things; and the internet makes it very very easy to distribute them. Locking things up so they can't be copied or distributed is relatively complex and difficult. The traditional content creators and distributors can kick and scream and try to push the genie back into the bottle all they want, but their old business model is doomed by these simple facts.
One swallow does not make a summer, nor does the occasional lucid court decision give me faith in the legal system as a whole. It's nice when it happens (Kitzmiller especially), but the courts make plenty of bad calls too. That reactionary fugghead Scalia is still in SCOTUS; British libel law is still horribly broken; and then there's this story.
Really? Didn't work out that way in England.
I use Comcast and I've noticed DNS has been damned slow the last few days. Maybe this is why?
I can, and IANAB, just a science geek. Bacteria are prokaryotic: their DNA is distributed throughout a relatively small cell. Fungi are eukaryotic; their DNA is in a cell nucleus. This is Chapter-1-of-the-textbook stuff.
On Slashdot? I think you took the wrong turn at Albuquerque.
No, that was Bill Gates. He should have taken the left turn.
Well, he makes some good points. Code review is indeed difficult, requires good skills, and is not done by many people in the free software community (the OpenBSD development team being a notable exception). Good software engineering methodology is crucial, certainly.
He concludes that Microsoft ends up shipping fewer vulnerabilities than anyone else. Is this true? Well, with the obvious exception of OpenBSD, it might be; but that's not the whole story. What developers do when a vulnerability is found is pretty important, too. Probably even more important.
Not long ago, a serious vulnerability was discovered in several versions of IE. Turns out Microsoft had known about it for several months. So, naturally, they had a patch all ready and tested before it became a problem - right? Well, no. Instead, they urged users to upgrade to IE8. The bug didn't get patched until almost a week after exploits were seen.
For all their professionalism and expertise, Microsoft developers labor under a severe handicap: they have to work on what Microsoft managers tell them to work on. They may think that a given bug is urgent and should be patched right away; but at the end of the day, the priorities are set by people who are focused on the bottom line, and those people know that nothing much is going to happen to Microsoft if a vulnerability is left open for a week or two. Every year, people in the Linux community confidently assert that this is the year of the Linux desktop; and every year, they're proven wrong. Too many people are locked into Microsoft's proprietary formats, and have too much time invested in learning to use Windows, to switch easily. And that's not going to change anytime soon.
Bad move? Really? What are people going to do about it if Google chooses to be evil? Stop using Google? Seriously? Does anyone here go a single day without using Google a dozen times at least? Can even the technically-adept people here get along easily without it? How about the other 95% of web users?
Google is at least as immune from criticism as Microsoft, at this point, and they know it.
While I agree that Justice Gordon is sensible, I'm pretty sure the Honorable Michelle Marjorie Gordon (photo) is not a man.
Obviously it is not the end of the world - a similar decision was rendered in the U.S. in 1991, and the U.S. phone directory business has not gone down in flames.
Why did Wikileaks choose Iceland, of all the places they might have gone, to try to persuade? Do they have an exceptionally good press freedom record or something?