Folgers, sure, Folgers is liquid evil. "If the best part of waking up is Folgers in the cup... you shoulda stood in bed."
But Maxwell House? I'll take fresh Maxwell House over Starbucks any day. Like all coffee, it's got to be fresh, so it probably depends on where in the country you are and how far you are from a plant: but if you get some Maxwell House that hasn't stood around in a warehouse for three months it's much much better than Folgers. And so long as you stick to their regular blends (no 'dark' blends, which get Starbucked Up no matter what bulk roaster makes them) they're at least as drinkable as the best I've had at Starbucks.
None of this is great coffee. If you want great coffee, you get it at a place that does its own roasting that you know doesn't Starbuck Up their blends. You may take a few tries to find one... and of course it's harder and harder as Starbucks spreads and out-competes smaller businesses that have higher overheads and tighter margins... but that's the way to go.
"But, Doctor Evil, That Already Happened"
on
The Media in 2014
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· Score: 1
We don't need GoogleZon to create EPIC. It already exists. We have it right here, right now. Everything that this little show promises already exists. All the tools are there, all the features and functions, everything except for the apocalyptic vision of a single company controlling the whole thing. But that part of it, well, that's a different kind of nightmare altogether.
The idea that you need to wait for Some Big Company to pull all the pieces together, well, if that was true there wouldn't have been any search engines for Google to have grown out of, there wouldn't have been any online journals for Blogger to grow out of. None of the individual companies matter... they're just the ones out of all the companies doing the same thing that happen to have hit critical mass.
EPIC is the Internet, the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line, it's what we have right now. The idea of a personalised narrative constructed from multiple news stories, that's not even new: Simon Bond used it in one of his schticks back before most people had even heard of computer networks (in a book entitled "Getting Even", so long ago Amazon doesn't even have a copy of his book for sale 'new or used'). This isn't a vision of the future, it's a vision of the present filtered through the past.
I recommend you go read Harlan Ellison's collections The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat if you think anything that has happened recently has been a change in the status quo.
All that's happened recently is that improved communications have again lowered the barriers to entry. As has happened over and over again over the years.
now the Mob has seen through the bread and circuses, picked up javelins, and become bloggers
Similar complaints followed writing, paper, the printing press, movable type, the linotype, the mimeograph, the photocopy machine, radio, letter and phone trees, the laser printer, electronic bulletin boards, electronic mailing lists, Usenet, and the Internet itself.
Actually, the cogent and relevant portion of my post was the italicized portion, which I feel speaks to the issues surrounding this slashdot story;
The cogent and relevant portion is the paragraph above it, where you set up the background for the straw man in the italicised portion.
I knew there would be readers who *actually believe* the conspiracy theories about Flight 77, and would respond to my post
And yet, they didn't. But we did point out that you were using a bogus argument, demonstrating the value of the feedback that you get when everyone contributes.
Thank you for volunteering to be an object lesson.
It's all a "Crazy Yenta Gossip Line".
on
The Media in 2014
·
· Score: 1
Err...
"If you're one of those people who thinks that the US mainstream press doesn't report "the truth" and is completely "in the pocket" of corporations and/or government, then you're already part of the problem."
I call shenanigans!
This is a classic "straw man": proposing an obvious and easily refuted falsehood and representing it as the opposing argument, refuting it, and claiming that you have thereby disproved the opposing argument.
It doesn't matter, then, whether the conspiracy theory you're invoking is true or false, logical or ludicrous, because it has nothing to do with the point our Anonymous Coward was making.
He didn't argue "the US mainstream press [...] is completely "in the pocket" of corporations and/or government", he implied that the US press promoted "a bunch of untrue gossip and sensasionalist trivia".
And he's absolutely right. What Harlan Ellison denigrates as the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line may be full of "a bunch of untrue gossip and sensasionalist trivia", but at least it has feedback mechanisms that let you find out when it's accelerating towards the crackpot event horizon. The mainstream press claims to, but oddly enough when I know what's really behind the stories I'm amazed how obviously wrong they are.
Once again, the physorg honeypot grabs slashdot eyeballs. Physorg takes press releases and puts them up, with bad formatting, on ugly web pages... with no links to the original source.
As you can see, that's a chemical vapor deposition group, so there's no need to grind up diamond dust from real diamonds.:) It's also, um, not exactly what I'd call "nanotech"... unless you consider any product involving structures at the molecular scale (like, oh, wood, or portland cement) to be "nanotech".
That was my immediate reaction. Terrorists would be MUCH more likely to be able to deal with the absence of GPS information than folks who hadn't prepared for and weren't expecting the attack. My first thought was... what about emergency workers, ambulance, fire trucks, or would Dubya arrange for them to have military receivers that worked through the jamming?
Yep, and after some hard disk problems and having to email Apple to deauthorize my computers, I back up all my music to audio CD. It's the only format that you can actually keep a backup of that you can be sure of recovering.
You doubt Microsoft's honest word that free software is a "virus"? Would they fib? How could you even IMPLY such a thing?
[in other words, I put "viral" in quotes because I found it ironic that Microsoft would ship GPLed code after claiming that you shouldn't use it because it'd infect your intellectual properties with commie cooties or something...]
Analogies are always rough, but whenever you argue that object code can't be protected because it's not human readable, you're bringing it into the world of analogies. Why would you expect any intermediate form of a work to be human-readable?
The source is not analogous to the movie on the DVD, the source is more analogous to the script, director's notes, props, costumes, and so on. The movie on the DVD is comparable to the presentation of the program. The object code is comparable to the encoded movie data, the menus, and other not-directly-human-readable elements.
EACH of these elements can have their own copyrights in each case.
If you read MSDN blogs you occasionally come across references to people using non-Microsoft software, including Firefox, Apache, and *nix. Hotmail uses UNIX tools running on Interix... which includes the "viral" GCC.
The problem is not the copyrights. Copyrights don't do anything to control how you use software, they just provide a handle for the publisher to impose a license on you.
When you "buy" a program, you don't buy a copy that you can use under normal copyright terms, you buy a license to use the software.
If software was patented, they would come up with a similar scheme to impose similar licenses on you using patents instead of copyrights. It might even be easier for them to impose draconic restrictions for most users.
Copyright law says absolutely NOTHING about inappropriate or appropriate use, it only controls copying. What he's talking about are shrinkwrap/clickthrough licenses, which are not defined in copyright law because they're contracts... switching to patent law wouldn't change a thing: the clickthrough licenses would end up being "licenses for use of the patented invention" rather than "licences for the use of the copyrighted product", and we'd be in the same place, except patents are so much broader that patent holders wouldn't need to outcompete their competition: their competitors would have to license their patents just like their customers would.
this would strengthen software patents (which are a bad idea anyway) and do nothing to solve the real problem.
I think that's proof Moore's Law is dying. Once upon a time anything that didn't promise at least a factor of two in performance over time didn't excite anyone but fab tech freaks.
The trick is to come up with a useful metaphor for the third dimension. Once you have that, it'll be obvious how to map that into two-dimensional mouse movements.
The model most often used is a geographical model for a hierarchy... usually a file hierarchy. "See, here's the directory you're looking at. And then behind it, there's the sub directories, and when you pop up a level, everything fades back..." which is cool as hell, but when I play with it I find myself wishing for a nice isometric or plan view, which takes us back to two dimensions again.
What I think might be useful is mapping attention into three dimensions. The windows you're actually working on are in the foreground, and other windows are further back, like in Mac OS X. But instead of just having this be implemented using a 2d isometric view that's just a bit of flash on the normal layered windows model... let's use the GPU. Windows further in the background are a little smaller. They really move back in the 3d viewpoint, gradually fogging out (which may look nicer on your nVidia cards), and finally turning into a little dock-style minimized icon. Clicking on them brings them to the foreground and starts the current foreground window cycling back...
To see behind them, you hold down the navigation key (pick one), and moving the mouse moves your viewpoint. Like full-time Expose. The scroll wheel lets you drive forward over or through your windows... as you approach iconized windows they turn back into the real thing (small, in the distance, then growing to full size).
I don't think you'd want "free flight" mode. You're always looking "forward", like in a fixed-attitude video game. Scroll all the way back and you're looking at the active application. Click on something, and by default you "warp" back to home.
Now you have an environment that real 3d widgets (like a 3d "dashboard" or "konfabulator") can live in, like active icons sitting on the ground in fixed locations that windows drift past or over as they fade out of your attention...
You could have modes where windows stay partly in view all the time, moving to the side as they shrink so you can always see them around the edge of the foreground window, iconifying against the edge of the screen if they get "pushed into" it.
Once you have the software, you can experiment with things like "free flight" modes, or modes where the world is a 4d donut so the windows stay in place and you move forward or back... eventually going so far back that you start seeing the previously active windows in the distance...
But you need a reason for the 3d, first. This is one I think would work...
I didn't say it did: quite the opposite, I was talking about the license... this was before the USG/CSRG lawsuits: you needed a System V source license for 4.3-Reno.
The Tru64 license came from AIX, but the code is based directly on 4.3-Reno (the last 4.3BSD release before 4.4, and functionally almost identical to 4.4BSD/FreeBSD 2.x/Darwin 1.x) and Mach. It's unrelated to the original code donated to OSF. The code is close enough that I used to use the FreeBSD source tree when I was tracking down and fixing problems in our Alphaservers.
HPUX is based on 4.2BSD with many generations of hacks and System V code imports.
It would have been more logical to do the port in the other direction.
Phil: the security community can't force Microsoft to fix IE and Outlook. The security community has been pitching bug reports, exploit reports, and possible fixes at Microsoft since Melissa... at least. The security community has no teeth here.
The only way to get Microsoft to back down is to hit them in the market share... and the only way for that to happen is for people to quit using products that keep burning them. Not keep up with the latest security trends, just accept that security is something they should at least consider when choosing software.
There is no other alternative, we've already tried everything else and it hasn't worked except on a very small scale (e.g. I banned Outlook and IE back before Melissa hit, but got overruled last year and we promptly got hit with a passel of malware). OK, seven years ago this was obscure, and you couldn't expect people to understand that IE was a problem, but now?
After this long this isn't "it's too obscure to understand", it's staggering levels of wilful blindness and trust in an obviously untrustworthy organization.
I don't expect my grandma to learn computer security.
You're missing the point. I don't expect your grandmother to learn anything deep or complicated about computer security -- any more than I expect her to learn why Chubb locks are better than Master locks, or why penicilin is effective against bacteria. All I expect is that after she's had her front door fall off three times in a row because the brand of lock she's using has a tendency to explode she buys a different brand the next time.
Right now the average user has, I don't know, twenty spybots on their computer because they use IE. I do NOT believe it's too much to ask that AFTER they run Adaware or Spybot Search and Destroy they switch to a different browser. That's all the "computer security" they should have to know. But that doesn't seem to be within reach of their tiny little minds.
This isn't "I don't know how to change the oil in my car". This is "Why should I have to pay extra for oil changes? I already paid thirty grand for this car, it should just work!"
The scope of the IE and Outlook holes a decade ago is quite a bit different in today's world.
The most common holes in Outlook and IE today are the exact same holes that were there in IE and Outlook in 1997. Microsoft hasn't fixed the underlying security hole in the way they integrated the browser and the desktop, all they've done is block specific attacks and try and add layers of complexity over the rest of the system to paper over the bad design.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who's still using IE today is like a little old lady telling the nice locksmith to go ahead and install Exploding Brand locks because she likes how they look.
Microsoft, among others, should have severe fines levied against them
In an ideal world Bill Gates would be in jail.
See, not only is IE and the Microsoft HTML control inherently insecure, it's inherently insecure because Microsoft designed it that way to create a loophole in their agreement with the Department of Justice. Then they spent five years in court to avoid backing out of this bad design. Judge Jackson was restrained in breaking up the company, he should have done them for criminal negligence as well, and imposed jail time.
After watching that debacle, and its aftermath, I have no belief that Microsoft would suffer from any kind of controls imposed by any government Republican or Democrat. No, George Tenet's fantasy security laws would end up forcing Microsoft products into more places because more-secure open-source software wouldn't have anyone who could pay the certification fees for it.
Whether you think people should have to learn a minimal amount about security... even "you know, if this program is insecure, maybe I should use another one instead of believing that it's secure this time"... that's about the only hope we have of getting the real problems fixed. Regulations aren't going to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Folgers, sure, Folgers is liquid evil. "If the best part of waking up is Folgers in the cup... you shoulda stood in bed."
But Maxwell House? I'll take fresh Maxwell House over Starbucks any day. Like all coffee, it's got to be fresh, so it probably depends on where in the country you are and how far you are from a plant: but if you get some Maxwell House that hasn't stood around in a warehouse for three months it's much much better than Folgers. And so long as you stick to their regular blends (no 'dark' blends, which get Starbucked Up no matter what bulk roaster makes them) they're at least as drinkable as the best I've had at Starbucks.
None of this is great coffee. If you want great coffee, you get it at a place that does its own roasting that you know doesn't Starbuck Up their blends. You may take a few tries to find one... and of course it's harder and harder as Starbucks spreads and out-competes smaller businesses that have higher overheads and tighter margins... but that's the way to go.
We don't need GoogleZon to create EPIC. It already exists. We have it right here, right now. Everything that this little show promises already exists. All the tools are there, all the features and functions, everything except for the apocalyptic vision of a single company controlling the whole thing. But that part of it, well, that's a different kind of nightmare altogether.
The idea that you need to wait for Some Big Company to pull all the pieces together, well, if that was true there wouldn't have been any search engines for Google to have grown out of, there wouldn't have been any online journals for Blogger to grow out of. None of the individual companies matter... they're just the ones out of all the companies doing the same thing that happen to have hit critical mass.
EPIC is the Internet, the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line, it's what we have right now. The idea of a personalised narrative constructed from multiple news stories, that's not even new: Simon Bond used it in one of his schticks back before most people had even heard of computer networks (in a book entitled "Getting Even", so long ago Amazon doesn't even have a copy of his book for sale 'new or used'). This isn't a vision of the future, it's a vision of the present filtered through the past.
But then, so was 1984.
I recommend you go read Harlan Ellison's collections The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat if you think anything that has happened recently has been a change in the status quo.
All that's happened recently is that improved communications have again lowered the barriers to entry. As has happened over and over again over the years.
now the Mob has seen through the bread and circuses, picked up javelins, and become bloggers
Similar complaints followed writing, paper, the printing press, movable type, the linotype, the mimeograph, the photocopy machine, radio, letter and phone trees, the laser printer, electronic bulletin boards, electronic mailing lists, Usenet, and the Internet itself.
Actually, the cogent and relevant portion of my post was the italicized portion, which I feel speaks to the issues surrounding this slashdot story;
The cogent and relevant portion is the paragraph above it, where you set up the background for the straw man in the italicised portion.
I knew there would be readers who *actually believe* the conspiracy theories about Flight 77, and would respond to my post
And yet, they didn't. But we did point out that you were using a bogus argument, demonstrating the value of the feedback that you get when everyone contributes.
Thank you for volunteering to be an object lesson.
Err...
"If you're one of those people who thinks that the US mainstream press doesn't report "the truth" and is completely "in the pocket" of corporations and/or government, then you're already part of the problem."
I call shenanigans!
This is a classic "straw man": proposing an obvious and easily refuted falsehood and representing it as the opposing argument, refuting it, and claiming that you have thereby disproved the opposing argument.
It doesn't matter, then, whether the conspiracy theory you're invoking is true or false, logical or ludicrous, because it has nothing to do with the point our Anonymous Coward was making.
He didn't argue "the US mainstream press [...] is completely "in the pocket" of corporations and/or government", he implied that the US press promoted "a bunch of untrue gossip and sensasionalist trivia".
And he's absolutely right. What Harlan Ellison denigrates as the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line may be full of "a bunch of untrue gossip and sensasionalist trivia", but at least it has feedback mechanisms that let you find out when it's accelerating towards the crackpot event horizon. The mainstream press claims to, but oddly enough when I know what's really behind the stories I'm amazed how obviously wrong they are.
You are Neal Stephenson, and I claim my Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Once again, the physorg honeypot grabs slashdot eyeballs. Physorg takes press releases and puts them up, with bad formatting, on ugly web pages... with no links to the original source.
:) It's also, um, not exactly what I'd call "nanotech"... unless you consider any product involving structures at the molecular scale (like, oh, wood, or portland cement) to be "nanotech".
So here's some missing links: the press release at Bristol, the diamond group at bristol and the home page of Advance Nanotech.
As you can see, that's a chemical vapor deposition group, so there's no need to grind up diamond dust from real diamonds.
Toto, something tells me Earthsea isn't Iraq.
LeGuin maintains her high standard for entertaining rants. I wonder if this is a conscious or unconscious reference to From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.
That was my immediate reaction. Terrorists would be MUCH more likely to be able to deal with the absence of GPS information than folks who hadn't prepared for and weren't expecting the attack. My first thought was ... what about emergency workers, ambulance, fire trucks, or would Dubya arrange for them to have military receivers that worked through the jamming?
Yep, and after some hard disk problems and having to email Apple to deauthorize my computers, I back up all my music to audio CD. It's the only format that you can actually keep a backup of that you can be sure of recovering.
What, exactly, about GCC is "viral"?
You doubt Microsoft's honest word that free software is a "virus"? Would they fib? How could you even IMPLY such a thing?
[in other words, I put "viral" in quotes because I found it ironic that Microsoft would ship GPLed code after claiming that you shouldn't use it because it'd infect your intellectual properties with commie cooties or something...]
None of which changes the fact that they ship it, and use it internally at Hotmail.
Analogies are always rough, but whenever you argue that object code can't be protected because it's not human readable, you're bringing it into the world of analogies. Why would you expect any intermediate form of a work to be human-readable?
The source is not analogous to the movie on the DVD, the source is more analogous to the script, director's notes, props, costumes, and so on. The movie on the DVD is comparable to the presentation of the program. The object code is comparable to the encoded movie data, the menus, and other not-directly-human-readable elements.
EACH of these elements can have their own copyrights in each case.
If you read MSDN blogs you occasionally come across references to people using non-Microsoft software, including Firefox, Apache, and *nix. Hotmail uses UNIX tools running on Interix... which includes the "viral" GCC.
The problem is not the copyrights. Copyrights don't do anything to control how you use software, they just provide a handle for the publisher to impose a license on you.
When you "buy" a program, you don't buy a copy that you can use under normal copyright terms, you buy a license to use the software.
If software was patented, they would come up with a similar scheme to impose similar licenses on you using patents instead of copyrights. It might even be easier for them to impose draconic restrictions for most users.
It's especially difficult to argue that compiled software is an "expression" worthy of copyright, because it's unintelligible to humans.
The same is true of a DVD.
Copyright law says absolutely NOTHING about inappropriate or appropriate use, it only controls copying. What he's talking about are shrinkwrap/clickthrough licenses, which are not defined in copyright law because they're contracts... switching to patent law wouldn't change a thing: the clickthrough licenses would end up being "licenses for use of the patented invention" rather than "licences for the use of the copyrighted product", and we'd be in the same place, except patents are so much broader that patent holders wouldn't need to outcompete their competition: their competitors would have to license their patents just like their customers would.
this would strengthen software patents (which are a bad idea anyway) and do nothing to solve the real problem.
I think that's proof Moore's Law is dying. Once upon a time anything that didn't promise at least a factor of two in performance over time didn't excite anyone but fab tech freaks.
The trick is to come up with a useful metaphor for the third dimension. Once you have that, it'll be obvious how to map that into two-dimensional mouse movements.
The model most often used is a geographical model for a hierarchy... usually a file hierarchy. "See, here's the directory you're looking at. And then behind it, there's the sub directories, and when you pop up a level, everything fades back..." which is cool as hell, but when I play with it I find myself wishing for a nice isometric or plan view, which takes us back to two dimensions again.
What I think might be useful is mapping attention into three dimensions. The windows you're actually working on are in the foreground, and other windows are further back, like in Mac OS X. But instead of just having this be implemented using a 2d isometric view that's just a bit of flash on the normal layered windows model... let's use the GPU. Windows further in the background are a little smaller. They really move back in the 3d viewpoint, gradually fogging out (which may look nicer on your nVidia cards), and finally turning into a little dock-style minimized icon. Clicking on them brings them to the foreground and starts the current foreground window cycling back...
To see behind them, you hold down the navigation key (pick one), and moving the mouse moves your viewpoint. Like full-time Expose. The scroll wheel lets you drive forward over or through your windows... as you approach iconized windows they turn back into the real thing (small, in the distance, then growing to full size).
I don't think you'd want "free flight" mode. You're always looking "forward", like in a fixed-attitude video game. Scroll all the way back and you're looking at the active application. Click on something, and by default you "warp" back to home.
Now you have an environment that real 3d widgets (like a 3d "dashboard" or "konfabulator") can live in, like active icons sitting on the ground in fixed locations that windows drift past or over as they fade out of your attention...
You could have modes where windows stay partly in view all the time, moving to the side as they shrink so you can always see them around the edge of the foreground window, iconifying against the edge of the screen if they get "pushed into" it.
Once you have the software, you can experiment with things like "free flight" modes, or modes where the world is a 4d donut so the windows stay in place and you move forward or back... eventually going so far back that you start seeing the previously active windows in the distance...
But you need a reason for the 3d, first. This is one I think would work...
It's the default password on all kinds of home-office routers/firewalls/etc...
AIX had nothing to do with Tru64, aka OSF/1
I didn't say it did: quite the opposite, I was talking about the license... this was before the USG/CSRG lawsuits: you needed a System V source license for 4.3-Reno.
I'm involved in porting Tru64 code to HPUX. I can't exactly agree with your conclusions.
The Tru64 license came from AIX, but the code is based directly on 4.3-Reno (the last 4.3BSD release before 4.4, and functionally almost identical to 4.4BSD/FreeBSD 2.x/Darwin 1.x) and Mach. It's unrelated to the original code donated to OSF. The code is close enough that I used to use the FreeBSD source tree when I was tracking down and fixing problems in our Alphaservers. HPUX is based on 4.2BSD with many generations of hacks and System V code imports. It would have been more logical to do the port in the other direction.
Phil: the security community can't force Microsoft to fix IE and Outlook. The security community has been pitching bug reports, exploit reports, and possible fixes at Microsoft since Melissa... at least. The security community has no teeth here.
The only way to get Microsoft to back down is to hit them in the market share... and the only way for that to happen is for people to quit using products that keep burning them. Not keep up with the latest security trends, just accept that security is something they should at least consider when choosing software.
There is no other alternative, we've already tried everything else and it hasn't worked except on a very small scale (e.g. I banned Outlook and IE back before Melissa hit, but got overruled last year and we promptly got hit with a passel of malware). OK, seven years ago this was obscure, and you couldn't expect people to understand that IE was a problem, but now?
After this long this isn't "it's too obscure to understand", it's staggering levels of wilful blindness and trust in an obviously untrustworthy organization.
I don't expect my grandma to learn computer security.
You're missing the point. I don't expect your grandmother to learn anything deep or complicated about computer security -- any more than I expect her to learn why Chubb locks are better than Master locks, or why penicilin is effective against bacteria. All I expect is that after she's had her front door fall off three times in a row because the brand of lock she's using has a tendency to explode she buys a different brand the next time.
Right now the average user has, I don't know, twenty spybots on their computer because they use IE. I do NOT believe it's too much to ask that AFTER they run Adaware or Spybot Search and Destroy they switch to a different browser. That's all the "computer security" they should have to know. But that doesn't seem to be within reach of their tiny little minds.
This isn't "I don't know how to change the oil in my car". This is "Why should I have to pay extra for oil changes? I already paid thirty grand for this car, it should just work!"
The scope of the IE and Outlook holes a decade ago is quite a bit different in today's world.
The most common holes in Outlook and IE today are the exact same holes that were there in IE and Outlook in 1997. Microsoft hasn't fixed the underlying security hole in the way they integrated the browser and the desktop, all they've done is block specific attacks and try and add layers of complexity over the rest of the system to paper over the bad design.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who's still using IE today is like a little old lady telling the nice locksmith to go ahead and install Exploding Brand locks because she likes how they look.
Microsoft, among others, should have severe fines levied against them
In an ideal world Bill Gates would be in jail.
See, not only is IE and the Microsoft HTML control inherently insecure, it's inherently insecure because Microsoft designed it that way to create a loophole in their agreement with the Department of Justice. Then they spent five years in court to avoid backing out of this bad design. Judge Jackson was restrained in breaking up the company, he should have done them for criminal negligence as well, and imposed jail time.
After watching that debacle, and its aftermath, I have no belief that Microsoft would suffer from any kind of controls imposed by any government Republican or Democrat. No, George Tenet's fantasy security laws would end up forcing Microsoft products into more places because more-secure open-source software wouldn't have anyone who could pay the certification fees for it.
Whether you think people should have to learn a minimal amount about security... even "you know, if this program is insecure, maybe I should use another one instead of believing that it's secure this time"... that's about the only hope we have of getting the real problems fixed. Regulations aren't going to do it.