Or if you want to extend the range of the AirPort 802.11b base station that you already own, and whose warrantee has very likely already expired, then that too is your business.
It's useful to point out that the performance of any 802.11[abg] base station, Bluetooth node, cell phone, cordless phone, or really any RF device depends an awful lot on the environment in which it operates. Obstacles, reflections, and interference from other devices all play a role. So your AirPort base station may work great when you bring it home, but not so great when you move to a different apartment with different walls. Adding an antenna to your existing unit may improve the performance for a lot less money than adding another base station or replacing your entire network with AirPort Extreme.
Apple has been using different versions of its logo for as long as I can remember. Even back when they used the 7-color "rainbow" logo, they also used simpler, monochromatic versions on promotional literature, documentation, some business cards, t-shirts, etc.
It did seem significant to many of us when Apple dropped the rainbow logo in favor of a solid one. Apple was changing, and we were afraid that its spirit of playful innovation would be lost in the corporate shuffle. We were relieved to find over time that playful innovation remained despite the logo change, and that the new logo brought with it a number of products that the general public wanted to buy. I guess we'd forgotten that years before, when Apple dropped the Cupertino font in favor of Apple Garamond in its logo, the sky also hadn't fallen.
The fact that Apple decided to put a version of its logo rendered in chrome in the about box of a product that hasn't even been released yet doesn't feel like a significant change. After all, there's a version of the logo rendered in shiny blue in my menu bar right now, and the G4-based iMacs have always had a shiny metalic Apple logo. It's a minor change that may or may not stick around for a while.
The one thing you can bet on is that even if it sticks, this change is not permanent: Apple will change its logo anytime it feels it needs to freshen up its corporate image. All companies do this to some degree.
If you ask me, the company that has the most fun with its logo is Google.
That's nice and all, but the world would be a much better place if science concentrated on finding ways to reduce the world population rather than increasing it. Our planetary resources, natural, human, economic, and otherwise, are limited, and the more people that share this world, the harder it will be to reduce suffering and improve our lot.
What's more, it seems to me that if we're going to work on extending life expectancy, we should focus on populations which have significantly shorter life expectancies than our own: developing nations, inner city minorities, rural poor, people who do very dangerous jobs, etc. We already have all the science and technology we need to solve many of the problems these people face; what's needed now is better policy.
Beyond that, we should think about improving quality of life, rather than quantity of life, for everyone. Here again, we already have plenty of science to help, and we need to instead focus on reforms in the health care and pharmaceutical industries that will reduce suffering and increase happiness.
There may be some merit to building a Methusala Mouse. It may give us insight into the aging process which will help us help people to live better. Helping people to live longer just because we haven't yet come to terms with death seems like a waste of time.
Given that most representatives to the EU congress probalby speak English as a second, third, or eigth language, I expect that most of them will forgive an awkward turn of phrase here and there.
Now that they are comparable in power to WinTel, speed doesn't matter????
Ah, you've mistaken me for a PC zealot. I'm actually a Mac zealot who's just sick and tired of hearing people blather on about whether this machine or that one is a few miniflops faster than the other. Now that Macs are comparable to the fastest Wintel machines in speed, they're still better (IMO) mainly due to the superior OS. I'd also take an 500 MHz iMac over a 3 GHz Dell running Windows any day.
That might also help stop the continual creep of these "Rights" over the Rights and interests of The People.
You'll need to start by changing the US Constitution, then.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
A patent or copyright is exactly a grant of an exclusive right to use and profit from an idea or a work. That right is no different from your right to express yourself, or to not have soldiers live in your home.
The real problem with IP is that Congress keeps extending the terms of patents and copyrights, to the point that works copyrighted today won't come into the public domain in our lifetimes, and ideas patented today won't be available to us for decades. A related problem is that the USPTO has fallen into the habit of granting patents for trivial and obvious "inventions."
I do agree that it seems strange that libraries should have to pay a licensing fee to use the Dewey Decimal System when that system was developed 125 years ago. If said libraries also get a service (classification of new works) in return for the fee, that seems a little more reasonable.
I don't think that follows. The average F16 doesn't have any trouble at all taking off by itself, even with a tail wind, given a long enough runway.
It would be absolutely accurate, on the other hand, to assert that navy jets don't 'take off' so much as they're thrown in to the air by a giant slingshot. Once aloft, however, they can stay in the air as long as fuel is available.
I wasn't confused. But gliders also fly into the wind, using gravity to provide some forward thrust.
My point was that if the tiny engine can't provide enough thrust to generate the lift needed to lift the plain, then the plane was doing more gliding the flying. It's no coincidence that hang gliding is a hugely popular sport in Kittyhawk.
I thought that the reason planes go so fast is that we prefer get from NY to LA in 5 hours instead of 50.
Should we continue to give the Wrights credit for the first powered flight when they had to rely on 25mph winds? Seems the 1903 Wright flyer was more like a glider.
For most of the stuff that most people do most of the time, today's machines are hugely overpowered, and whether the top-end G5 or the top-end Wintel machine wins the benchmark race hardly matters at all.
Sending e-mail, writing reports, editing web pages, and 98% of what we do as software developers can be done with equal speed on a dual-processor G5, a G4-based iMac, or a G3-based iBook. Same goes for the Wintel world. Speed matters a little more if you're crunching a truly huge spreadsheet or running a filter on a large digital image. And speed really starts to count when you're editting video or running a large simulation. But most people don't run large simulations or edit video most of the time.
Those that do a lot of video editting, etc., generally do it for a living, and the speed improvements are so important that the price differential usually isn't a problem. Time is money and all that.
Re:The last comment is revealing
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 1
Just about every crime you can imagine now has a codified "conspiracy to commit $CRIME" law. No longer do you have to actually rob a bank, or murder someone, or kidnap someone; you just have to plan it, and that's enough to toss you in the clink.
I don't see a problem there, provided the laws are applied justly. "Conspire" doesn't mean 'to plan,' it means 'to secretly agree to commit a crime.' Say you're standing in line at the bank and idly notice some vulnerabilities that might allow a successful heist. If you keep those thoughts to yourself, or if you quietly point them out to the bank's president, you haven't committed a crime. If, on the other hand, you pass the information along to some thug pals of yours knowing that there's a good chance they'd take a crack at carrying out your plan, you're just as guilty as they are even if a) you're nowhere near the bank at the time, or b) the cops get wise and pick up your pals before they ever get to the bank.
Soon enough, we'll have people being arrested for crimes they might have eventually committed someday, even if there is no proof of any plan to commit such crimes.
This doesn't follow. We've had laws against conspiracy for a very long time. Four people were hanged and several more sent to prison for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln, for example, despite the fact that Booth, who pulled the trigger, had been shot to death. Still, thoughtcrime really hasn't come to pass.
Interestingly, crime prediction technology does exist, but it mostly just tells us stuff like "since the unemployment rate is up, Christmas is coming, and there are a lot of banks downtown, there's a greater than usual chance of bank robberies downtown next month."
It doesn't take pull... it takes money. Small schools have other significant advantages.
When you choose between going to a large, research-oriented school and going to a smaller school, you're essentially making a trade-off between resources and personal attention. Bigger schools have more and deeper resources, but it can be tough for undergrads to have much significant interaction with professors, particularly in the first year or two. Smaller schools may not offer the same variety of courses, or get huge research funding, or field a championship football team, but as an undergrad your chances of not just interacting with but really getting to know the faculty members (and not just the ones in your major department) are much better.
Most schools are happy to collaborate with others, so if you've got an idea that you think is well suited to Virginia Tech's cluster, talk to your advisor about submitting a proposal to VT. If it really is a good idea, your advisor may help you refine it and ultimately turn it into a research project.
To share files via P2P programs like Kazaa than it is to say build a webpage, upload it and maintain it.
It's easier to share other peoples' copyrighted works via P2P programs like Kazaa than it is to create some of your own.
Truly, it boggles my mind to see how many slashdotters think the RIAA is completely wrong, and that they have every right to share music they didn't create. The same people would, no doubt, scream bloody murder if unlicensed copies of their own digital photos turned up on the RIAA's web site.
Nobody much cares for the SPA or the BSA, but by now most of us have accepted that there are legal repercussions associated with making, say, Microsoft Office available for anonymous download. Why is music any different from software or photographs?
Sounds good, but I just took a look at the handful of CardBus cards that I already own, and they're already plenty thin, plenty light, and plenty fast. I've never said to myself "Man, these CardBus cards are really weighing my bag down." They're already small enough that I often can't find them, and I really don't have a problem waiting the few seconds that it takes to transfer 128MB of digital photos to my PowerBook via a CardBus adapter.
Frankly, I'd strongly prefer that industry stick to the current standard, and instead focus on coming up with nifty new CardBus products that add new capabilities to the computers I already have. Let's have a very affordable data acquisition card, for example. (I know data acquisition cards are already available, but AFAIK they tend to be pretty pricey.) Or a card that measures air quality wherever I am, or analyzes chemical samples.
Are you saying that auto manufacturers come up with a design and then spend a zillion bucks to retool a production line without first hand building a few and taking them out for a spin?
What you see at auto shows, real, high end, or otherwise, are most often meant for use at... auto shows. The process of engineering just about any significant product, from automobiles to computers to cheeze doodles, requires building working prototypes to study, measure, crash into walls, drive around, show focus groups, tweak, etc. Yes, I expect that most of these also don't generally make it onto the street, but instead spend their short lives on test tracks (one purpose of which, by the way, is to hide works in progress, i.e. prototypes, from public view). Others do get driven around quite a bit to test performance in real world use, and you can bet that they don't carry bumper stickers that say "This vehicle is a prototype of the 2005 Mazda RX-8."
In other words, the process of turning a "prototype" into a "vehicle" over five years requires that engineers build test models to refine the ideas and come up with a design that performs well, is safe, and can be built at the target price point. These test models are known to engineers as prototypes.
I follow the car industry more than most car salesmen do.
Having dealt with a few car salesmen, I can tell you that that doesn't impress me.
Given that Microsoft's favorite method of innovating is to mimic whatever Apple does, it seems reasonable for Apple to hold its cards close to its vest.
Re:Well, they don't want to hurt current sales...
on
G5 PowerBook "Challenge"
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Car companies don't disguise their prototypes.
Sure they do. And just as with computer-related rumors, there are folksout there who follow and report on new developments and publish photos of suspected prototypes.
Yes, auto makers will show you their 'concept cars' as a way to generate interest. And they'll sometimes show actual prototypes as well, particularly when the prototype is close to what they expect to produce. But when GM or Ford are testing out a new engine, for example, they'll put it in a car with an existing body style. Or if they're trying out a whole new car, they'll cover the body panels with tape, or leather masking, or whatever.
Heck, I can even think of at least a couple TV spots where the manufacturers use this idea to make their new model seem more desireable. There's one, for example, where some alleged engineers are testing out a white car (Nissan Altima, maybe?) somewhere in the desert. A bunch of planes, helicopters, cars, etc. show up trying to get a look at the car, and the engineers then hide the car under a tent so that the others (press? competition?) can't see it.
So yeah, car companies do disguise their prototypes, and for the same reasons: they want to surprise the buying public and the competition with a cool new product at the introduction, and they don't want to hurt the market for the existing model until that time.
What percentage of large dry surfaces do cell phones constitute in hospitals?
If cell phones are a problem, I'd think that regular phones, desktops, countertops, garbage cans, stretchers, ventilation ducts, pens, PDA's, handrails, keyboards, monitors, walls, and floors would be a veritable public health nightmare. Yes, some of these things are cleaned from time to time, but many are not. When was the last time you saw a doctor wipe down his pen with alcohol?
...if they're selling some service (any service) to your customers, then it seems to me that they should be writing the logs on their own machines rather than on yours. After all, how can your customers (now their customers) be sure that you haven't doctored the logs if they store them on machines that you control?
I agree with others: You should be selling this service to your customers, and they should go take a flying leap.
1. Fining either users or OS manufacturers presents a problem because it creates an incentive for others to write viruses targetting systems they don't like. Linux proponents, for the sake of argument, might decide to take Microsoft down a peg by releasing a series of viruses targetting Windows. If the government fines users, users will rapidly get pissed at MS and switch to another OS. If the government fines MS directly, Microsoft gets hurt. Some slashdotters might find this situation desirable, but you have to consider that there would then be just as much incentive for MS to release malware that targets Linux or Darwin. And with the open source nature of those projects, an adversary might well be able to introduce flaws into the source just for the sake of creating future exploits.
2. The real culprits here are the people writing viruses. Yes, software manufacturers need to do all that they can to make their products secure. But even an insecure OS works well if people act in an ethical manner. Put another way: when someone pours sugar into your gas tank, do you blame Ford because your filler cap doesn't lock? Of course not; you blame the malicious punk that did the damage.
3. There's no reason that market forces couldn't work to push manufacturers to fix their security issues. They don't work right now because consumers either don't understand that Windows is full of holes, or they feel that they don't have any choice in the matter, or they feel that the benefit of using Windows outweighs the drawbacks. Educating people in this respect is something that we can do ourselves, and that includes educating your elected representatives. Indeed, I'd guess that virus attacks would be significantly reduced in both frequency and impact if 50% of federal, state, and local government computers ran anything other than Windows. A heterogeneous environment is our best defense against malicious software.
Slashdot Mirror
Or if you want to extend the range of the AirPort 802.11b base station that you already own, and whose warrantee has very likely already expired, then that too is your business.
It's useful to point out that the performance of any 802.11[abg] base station, Bluetooth node, cell phone, cordless phone, or really any RF device depends an awful lot on the environment in which it operates. Obstacles, reflections, and interference from other devices all play a role. So your AirPort base station may work great when you bring it home, but not so great when you move to a different apartment with different walls. Adding an antenna to your existing unit may improve the performance for a lot less money than adding another base station or replacing your entire network with AirPort Extreme.
Apple has been using different versions of its logo for as long as I can remember. Even back when they used the 7-color "rainbow" logo, they also used simpler, monochromatic versions on promotional literature, documentation, some business cards, t-shirts, etc.
It did seem significant to many of us when Apple dropped the rainbow logo in favor of a solid one. Apple was changing, and we were afraid that its spirit of playful innovation would be lost in the corporate shuffle. We were relieved to find over time that playful innovation remained despite the logo change, and that the new logo brought with it a number of products that the general public wanted to buy. I guess we'd forgotten that years before, when Apple dropped the Cupertino font in favor of Apple Garamond in its logo, the sky also hadn't fallen.
The fact that Apple decided to put a version of its logo rendered in chrome in the about box of a product that hasn't even been released yet doesn't feel like a significant change. After all, there's a version of the logo rendered in shiny blue in my menu bar right now, and the G4-based iMacs have always had a shiny metalic Apple logo. It's a minor change that may or may not stick around for a while.
The one thing you can bet on is that even if it sticks, this change is not permanent: Apple will change its logo anytime it feels it needs to freshen up its corporate image. All companies do this to some degree.
If you ask me, the company that has the most fun with its logo is Google.
I know what you mean, but this link leads me to consider that Darl McBride has been also been pretty consistant in deed, if not in word.
Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:
e .php3
LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLov
Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406
That's nice and all, but the world would be a much better place if science concentrated on finding ways to reduce the world population rather than increasing it. Our planetary resources, natural, human, economic, and otherwise, are limited, and the more people that share this world, the harder it will be to reduce suffering and improve our lot.
What's more, it seems to me that if we're going to work on extending life expectancy, we should focus on populations which have significantly shorter life expectancies than our own: developing nations, inner city minorities, rural poor, people who do very dangerous jobs, etc. We already have all the science and technology we need to solve many of the problems these people face; what's needed now is better policy.
Beyond that, we should think about improving quality of life, rather than quantity of life, for everyone. Here again, we already have plenty of science to help, and we need to instead focus on reforms in the health care and pharmaceutical industries that will reduce suffering and increase happiness.
There may be some merit to building a Methusala Mouse. It may give us insight into the aging process which will help us help people to live better. Helping people to live longer just because we haven't yet come to terms with death seems like a waste of time.
Linus and Alan write on Sunday, and the EU jumps on Monday. Good show, gentlemen!
Given that most representatives to the EU congress probalby speak English as a second, third, or eigth language, I expect that most of them will forgive an awkward turn of phrase here and there.
Now that they are comparable in power to WinTel, speed doesn't matter????
Ah, you've mistaken me for a PC zealot. I'm actually a Mac zealot who's just sick and tired of hearing people blather on about whether this machine or that one is a few miniflops faster than the other. Now that Macs are comparable to the fastest Wintel machines in speed, they're still better (IMO) mainly due to the superior OS. I'd also take an 500 MHz iMac over a 3 GHz Dell running Windows any day.
That might also help stop the continual creep of these "Rights" over the Rights and interests of The People.
You'll need to start by changing the US Constitution, then.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
A patent or copyright is exactly a grant of an exclusive right to use and profit from an idea or a work. That right is no different from your right to express yourself, or to not have soldiers live in your home.
The real problem with IP is that Congress keeps extending the terms of patents and copyrights, to the point that works copyrighted today won't come into the public domain in our lifetimes, and ideas patented today won't be available to us for decades. A related problem is that the USPTO has fallen into the habit of granting patents for trivial and obvious "inventions."
I do agree that it seems strange that libraries should have to pay a licensing fee to use the Dewey Decimal System when that system was developed 125 years ago. If said libraries also get a service (classification of new works) in return for the fee, that seems a little more reasonable.
I don't think that follows. The average F16 doesn't have any trouble at all taking off by itself, even with a tail wind, given a long enough runway.
It would be absolutely accurate, on the other hand, to assert that navy jets don't 'take off' so much as they're thrown in to the air by a giant slingshot. Once aloft, however, they can stay in the air as long as fuel is available.
I wasn't confused. But gliders also fly into the wind, using gravity to provide some forward thrust.
My point was that if the tiny engine can't provide enough thrust to generate the lift needed to lift the plain, then the plane was doing more gliding the flying. It's no coincidence that hang gliding is a hugely popular sport in Kittyhawk.
I thought that the reason planes go so fast is that we prefer get from NY to LA in 5 hours instead of 50.
Should we continue to give the Wrights credit for the first powered flight when they had to rely on 25mph winds? Seems the 1903 Wright flyer was more like a glider.
It's due mostly to microphallus economics, I suspect.
For most of the stuff that most people do most of the time, today's machines are hugely overpowered, and whether the top-end G5 or the top-end Wintel machine wins the benchmark race hardly matters at all.
Sending e-mail, writing reports, editing web pages, and 98% of what we do as software developers can be done with equal speed on a dual-processor G5, a G4-based iMac, or a G3-based iBook. Same goes for the Wintel world. Speed matters a little more if you're crunching a truly huge spreadsheet or running a filter on a large digital image. And speed really starts to count when you're editting video or running a large simulation. But most people don't run large simulations or edit video most of the time.
Those that do a lot of video editting, etc., generally do it for a living, and the speed improvements are so important that the price differential usually isn't a problem. Time is money and all that.
Just about every crime you can imagine now has a codified "conspiracy to commit $CRIME" law. No longer do you have to actually rob a bank, or murder someone, or kidnap someone; you just have to plan it, and that's enough to toss you in the clink.
I don't see a problem there, provided the laws are applied justly. "Conspire" doesn't mean 'to plan,' it means 'to secretly agree to commit a crime.' Say you're standing in line at the bank and idly notice some vulnerabilities that might allow a successful heist. If you keep those thoughts to yourself, or if you quietly point them out to the bank's president, you haven't committed a crime. If, on the other hand, you pass the information along to some thug pals of yours knowing that there's a good chance they'd take a crack at carrying out your plan, you're just as guilty as they are even if a) you're nowhere near the bank at the time, or b) the cops get wise and pick up your pals before they ever get to the bank.
Soon enough, we'll have people being arrested for crimes they might have eventually committed someday, even if there is no proof of any plan to commit such crimes.
This doesn't follow. We've had laws against conspiracy for a very long time. Four people were hanged and several more sent to prison for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln, for example, despite the fact that Booth, who pulled the trigger, had been shot to death. Still, thoughtcrime really hasn't come to pass.
Interestingly, crime prediction technology does exist, but it mostly just tells us stuff like "since the unemployment rate is up, Christmas is coming, and there are a lot of banks downtown, there's a greater than usual chance of bank robberies downtown next month."
It doesn't take pull... it takes money. Small schools have other significant advantages.
When you choose between going to a large, research-oriented school and going to a smaller school, you're essentially making a trade-off between resources and personal attention. Bigger schools have more and deeper resources, but it can be tough for undergrads to have much significant interaction with professors, particularly in the first year or two. Smaller schools may not offer the same variety of courses, or get huge research funding, or field a championship football team, but as an undergrad your chances of not just interacting with but really getting to know the faculty members (and not just the ones in your major department) are much better.
Most schools are happy to collaborate with others, so if you've got an idea that you think is well suited to Virginia Tech's cluster, talk to your advisor about submitting a proposal to VT. If it really is a good idea, your advisor may help you refine it and ultimately turn it into a research project.
To share files via P2P programs like Kazaa than it is to say build a webpage, upload it and maintain it.
It's easier to share other peoples' copyrighted works via P2P programs like Kazaa than it is to create some of your own.
Truly, it boggles my mind to see how many slashdotters think the RIAA is completely wrong, and that they have every right to share music they didn't create. The same people would, no doubt, scream bloody murder if unlicensed copies of their own digital photos turned up on the RIAA's web site.
Nobody much cares for the SPA or the BSA, but by now most of us have accepted that there are legal repercussions associated with making, say, Microsoft Office available for anonymous download. Why is music any different from software or photographs?
Widely available, universally ignored.
"thinner, lighter, faster"
Sounds good, but I just took a look at the handful of CardBus cards that I already own, and they're already plenty thin, plenty light, and plenty fast. I've never said to myself "Man, these CardBus cards are really weighing my bag down." They're already small enough that I often can't find them, and I really don't have a problem waiting the few seconds that it takes to transfer 128MB of digital photos to my PowerBook via a CardBus adapter.
Frankly, I'd strongly prefer that industry stick to the current standard, and instead focus on coming up with nifty new CardBus products that add new capabilities to the computers I already have. Let's have a very affordable data acquisition card, for example. (I know data acquisition cards are already available, but AFAIK they tend to be pretty pricey.) Or a card that measures air quality wherever I am, or analyzes chemical samples.
ExpressCard stinks to me of planned obsolescence.
The thing is, prototypes never hit the streets.
Are you saying that auto manufacturers come up with a design and then spend a zillion bucks to retool a production line without first hand building a few and taking them out for a spin?
What you see at auto shows, real, high end, or otherwise, are most often meant for use at... auto shows. The process of engineering just about any significant product, from automobiles to computers to cheeze doodles, requires building working prototypes to study, measure, crash into walls, drive around, show focus groups, tweak, etc. Yes, I expect that most of these also don't generally make it onto the street, but instead spend their short lives on test tracks (one purpose of which, by the way, is to hide works in progress, i.e. prototypes, from public view). Others do get driven around quite a bit to test performance in real world use, and you can bet that they don't carry bumper stickers that say "This vehicle is a prototype of the 2005 Mazda RX-8."
In other words, the process of turning a "prototype" into a "vehicle" over five years requires that engineers build test models to refine the ideas and come up with a design that performs well, is safe, and can be built at the target price point. These test models are known to engineers as prototypes.
I follow the car industry more than most car salesmen do.
Having dealt with a few car salesmen, I can tell you that that doesn't impress me.
Given that Microsoft's favorite method of innovating is to mimic whatever Apple does, it seems reasonable for Apple to hold its cards close to its vest.
Car companies don't disguise their prototypes.
Sure they do. And just as with computer-related rumors, there are folks out there who follow and report on new developments and publish photos of suspected prototypes.
Yes, auto makers will show you their 'concept cars' as a way to generate interest. And they'll sometimes show actual prototypes as well, particularly when the prototype is close to what they expect to produce. But when GM or Ford are testing out a new engine, for example, they'll put it in a car with an existing body style. Or if they're trying out a whole new car, they'll cover the body panels with tape, or leather masking, or whatever.
Heck, I can even think of at least a couple TV spots where the manufacturers use this idea to make their new model seem more desireable. There's one, for example, where some alleged engineers are testing out a white car (Nissan Altima, maybe?) somewhere in the desert. A bunch of planes, helicopters, cars, etc. show up trying to get a look at the car, and the engineers then hide the car under a tent so that the others (press? competition?) can't see it.
So yeah, car companies do disguise their prototypes, and for the same reasons: they want to surprise the buying public and the competition with a cool new product at the introduction, and they don't want to hurt the market for the existing model until that time.
What percentage of large dry surfaces do cell phones constitute in hospitals?
If cell phones are a problem, I'd think that regular phones, desktops, countertops, garbage cans, stretchers, ventilation ducts, pens, PDA's, handrails, keyboards, monitors, walls, and floors would be a veritable public health nightmare. Yes, some of these things are cleaned from time to time, but many are not. When was the last time you saw a doctor wipe down his pen with alcohol?
...if they're selling some service (any service) to your customers, then it seems to me that they should be writing the logs on their own machines rather than on yours. After all, how can your customers (now their customers) be sure that you haven't doctored the logs if they store them on machines that you control?
I agree with others: You should be selling this service to your customers, and they should go take a flying leap.
1. Fining either users or OS manufacturers presents a problem because it creates an incentive for others to write viruses targetting systems they don't like. Linux proponents, for the sake of argument, might decide to take Microsoft down a peg by releasing a series of viruses targetting Windows. If the government fines users, users will rapidly get pissed at MS and switch to another OS. If the government fines MS directly, Microsoft gets hurt. Some slashdotters might find this situation desirable, but you have to consider that there would then be just as much incentive for MS to release malware that targets Linux or Darwin. And with the open source nature of those projects, an adversary might well be able to introduce flaws into the source just for the sake of creating future exploits.
2. The real culprits here are the people writing viruses. Yes, software manufacturers need to do all that they can to make their products secure. But even an insecure OS works well if people act in an ethical manner. Put another way: when someone pours sugar into your gas tank, do you blame Ford because your filler cap doesn't lock? Of course not; you blame the malicious punk that did the damage.
3. There's no reason that market forces couldn't work to push manufacturers to fix their security issues. They don't work right now because consumers either don't understand that Windows is full of holes, or they feel that they don't have any choice in the matter, or they feel that the benefit of using Windows outweighs the drawbacks. Educating people in this respect is something that we can do ourselves, and that includes educating your elected representatives. Indeed, I'd guess that virus attacks would be significantly reduced in both frequency and impact if 50% of federal, state, and local government computers ran anything other than Windows. A heterogeneous environment is our best defense against malicious software.