The A+R man (and yeah, they're pretty much all men) decides his record company really needs a new teen star, or perhaps a boyband, or whatever. He draws up a contract, and goes looking for victims.
The victims in question receive this contract. Their parents are told to sign the contract, and Little Johnny/Stephanie/whatever will get a start in the music business.
Don't sign the contract? A+R Man moves to the next potential victim. The record company is holding absolutely all of the cards in this situation. However, all that said, parent is better off refusing to sign, even though little Johnny/Stephanie won't realize it at first. But, victims will be found.
X-Box: Too small. PS2: Too small. Yes, I've tried them.
Yes, they're better than the old NES controllers, with the spindly little joystick designed by Satan. Which reminded me of nothing so much as the old Kraft joysticks. (Remember them? I tried using them like once or twice, and couldn't shake the feeling that I was going to snap the shaft in two.)
Anyway. Another point: Not enough buttons. I hate having to hit eight different buttons (okay, I'm exaggerating here) in order to do something, just because the thing doesn't have 102 buttons. (And yeah, I'm one of Those Guys who likes to have pretty much every key programmed to do something in the game).
It sounds rather as though you're running a domain with tens or hundreds of thousands of email addresses off of a single MX server. Which seems unlikely:)
Oh wait, you meant a console controller. Ye gads, how I hate those things. I swear they were designed for somebody with an eight-year-old's hands. Just tiny little things. I miss the Old Days, when you could plug your WICO Boss into a console.
And I'm not a huge guy. I just have... big hands.:)
Looked, couldn't find it. How I miss having free access to QuickLaw. Ah well, nevermind. Anyway, we're obviously agreed on the original depositor, but that's not the question at hand. The question is: If a bank negligently deposits funds in a client account, does the client have the right to make use of those funds?
The answer might depend on what the client did as a result of the negligent deposit. I'll outline some scenarios.
The client doesn't notice the deposit.
It seems likely to me that the bank can just make the correction in this case, and it'll probably never even get to court.
The client notices the deposit, and feels confused; can't think why there's money in the account. Doesn't spend it, or rely on it in any way.
This looks like case #1.
The client doesn't notice there's extra money in the account, but goes ahead and spends it anyway, as the client is a spendthrift who has no idea of how much money is in the account.
Okay, now this is a tricky one. Here, we have a client who relies on the bank to - in effect - cut off the flow of money when there is none left. This is pretty common behaviour in Canada. Is it reasonable? Honestly, I don't know.
The client notices the deposit, but assumes it's some bank promotion (you know - the 400,000th person to use Interact Direct Payment this month wins a cash bonus, or something), or perhaps an income tax return or maybe a gift from a relative.
The question here becomes, is this a reasonable assumption to make?
So anyway. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if the bank, through its negligence, makes a deposit, and if the client reasonably relies on that deposit, then the bank has got to be liable to the client. Of course, lawyers love the word reasonable, and people in lawyers' offices hate it because it means whatever judges (and sometimes lawyers) think it means.
Couldn't find any caselaw. I would suspect that, unless the amount was very large, no bank would bother suing for the funds; also, I would suspect that if the amount was very large, most courts would have no problem finding that the client's reliance on the deposit was unreasonable.
It'd be fascinating though, in theory. Let's pretend we're law professors for a moment. Here's the question from the torts final: Suppose a bank client was trying to setup a small business, and had arranged with a relative to deposit $30,000 in a bank account. A week later, the bank screws up a deposit and puts $35,000 in the client's account. Meanwhile, the relative is having second thoughts, but doesn't tell the client, who goes ahead and opens the business.
Six months later, the bank discovers the mistake, and wants the money returned. What to do?
Here in Canada, banks are liable for the negligence of their employees. So if an employee negligently gives you money, it's your money. If you're nice, you can give it back to the bank, but you don't have to.
Surprisingly, this policy cuts down on banking mistakes quite a lot.:)
If you want to cancel an account with Nameless Big Corporation, write a letter. Their telephone customer service people are always setup to transfer you around in loops if you call to do it.
Send it to the address on your bill, and make a record of when you sent it. If they send you another bill (unless it says Final Bill), instead of responding with a cheque, let them know you want to be cut off now, please. Should they send a threatening letter instead, just wait for them to call an agency or threaten to sue.
Look, you were in Maine, and you got horrified by something. I'm suggesting that as a reward for not getting eaten, the Stephen King aura that surrounds the state decided instead to just give you obscene rates.
Bah. I'm on Rogers too, and actually I've always gotten along with their telephone service people at least. But man, I could tell you insane stories about Bell. But I'm not gonna.:)
Now that that's out of the way, I'm going to talk Quake. That is, Quake the First, a love of mine, and I think a game that's never really been equalled (although Quake II and III both look better, and have their own charms).
The thing about Quake was that it was full of sudden action. No matter where you were, you always had to be on your toes. There might be an ogre around the corner, or there might not be. No matter what, though, anything that happened - happened really quickly.
The ultra-creepy soundtrack by NIN really played into this feeling. You play Quake for a couple hours, and it draws you in.
Sure, most of the AI was pretty dumb. But partly that was because of choices the designers made. When given a choice between a careful AI that would cleverly outmaneuver you, only attacking when it was good and ready, and one that would suddenly pop up and be right in your face at its first opportunity, they always went for the in your face option.
The only real complaint I had was on the range of the monsters. They didn't get around well enough, which makes them too predictable now for me to replay it anymore. But oh well.
Quake II's AI is smarter, and waits until it's got you before beginning to really attack. But the music sucks, and it's lost a lot of the suddenness in favour of these wide-open spaces. Quake III has too many wide-open spaces as well, and besides is really a deathmatch game, so not easily comparable. Although Quake III's bots are acceptably aggressive, more like Quake I.
explorer.exe is always running in Win95, yeah. But before the IE4 install, you could do a little surgery and dike out iexplore.exe along with all of its registry tags.
explorer.exe displays the desktop (i.e. the root window:), among other things, so it does need to be always running, that's okay. But IE3 (which actually ran originally on WFW 3.11) doesn't interlink with explorer.exe, and I suspect doesn't cause the RAM fluctuation you describe. Although I only have one machine with IE3 on it, and it in fact is running the aforementioned WFW 3.11:) so I can't check.
I miss the old days, when I was in university, and my university was a DSL provider. Back then, I could connect to everybody, because my IP was listed as a university IP. Now I have to hack my way around.
But it can be done. It just shouldn't have to be. Log the evil IPs, and disconnect them. (My mailserver is also an MX of its own; I get plenty of connections from spammers. Most are not dialup, but are compromised institutional servers.)
Several hundred emails in 30 seconds? That's not a 56K modem connection. It just isn't possible. It's almost certainly a fibre connection of some kind, and probably not DSL; most DSL connection's upstreams peak out around 128Kbps. Most cablemodems peak out around 64Kbps for upstream. If you're getting several hundred emails in 30 seconds, then you must be getting tens of thousands of connections.
Right now, I'm typing this message on a Toshiba T2150CDT with 24MB of RAM and a 500MB HD, running debian unstable, i.e. the latest and greatest thing.:)
This is a laptop from 1995, and it works fine. Okay, no GNOME/KDE, I don't even run xfce. Just wdm and wmaker. And ELinks for the web, no mozilla.
But what's the specs on your Thinkpad? It's probably not as ancient as my laptop.
Yeah, that's a feature that they got from MacOS. All the multitasking versions of MacOS before X do that as well.
And it's helpful in certain circumstances. For example, my elderly iMac can do captures with Final Cut Pro in OS 9, because of the extra priority, but in OS X, it drops frames like crazy.
But on my old Amiga, one of the main uses of the blitter chip was transparency. You could paste in images on top, and the blitter would handle the bitplane issues.
Of course, it didn't work with anything that used more than 8-bit colour, but surely a modern (i.e. 1998:) VGA card could handle 24-bit colour blittering?
A window manager, like Window Maker, Oroborous, icewm, fluxbox, blackbox, Enlightenment, flwm, fvwm... um, the list is pretty long... manages windows.
That's all it does. An X client (like, say, rxvt) says to the X server, "I need to open a new window, put it over here someplace" and the X server says "Great!" and draws a square, blank area, and then lets the window manager know about the new window, and the window manager draws the widgets like the close button and stuff (well, whatever the window manager supports).
A desktop package like GNOME does not contain a window manager. It has a session manager, plus some dedicated X clients that draw things like the GNOME panel. You may have noticed some talk about GNOME-compliant window managers when you were installing X, or well, maybe not, I've never done a Red Hat install. GNOME-compliant window managers, like Enlightenment, Oroborus, sawfish, and a bunch of others, are aware that they're running under GNOME, and talk to the GNOME core libraries to allow you to control them in certain ways from the central GNOME configuration screens.
However, you should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be running GNOME on a server system. You should probably not be running X even. (Although my squid server does have X, but that's because I originally planned another use for it; sometime soon, I'm going to pull that graphics card out, stick it in another machine, and remove the X server.)
Anyway - To get back to my original point. You don't need to run GNOME to run a window manager. In fact, running GNOME effectively limits your choice of window managers to ones that support GNOME (GNOME will run with non-compliant window managers in place, but it will moan and whine endlessly). All you really need is to boot to xdm or wdm (my favourite display manager) at startup, instead of gdm, and then put the following line at the end of a file called.xsession in your home directory:
exec <executable-name-of-window-manager>
So, for example, my.xsession ends with exec wmaker to start Window Maker. You can in fact exec any program at the end of this file; that program should have an easy way to exit. My root.xsession ends with exec rxvt. That's because root only uses X normally in single-user mode, when I'm trying to debug something that's gone badly wrong with my setup, and I want to make sure that even if Window Maker dies, I can get root a window.
However, note this - running GNOME or KDE gives you an easy GUI to select your window manager. wdm does give you the ability to select as well, kind-of, but not as precisely as the desktop systems do. xdm gives you no pretty GUI at all, you've got to do it all yourself in your.xsession file.
It's that email by its nature lends itself well to fraud schemes. For example:
Competitor A and Competitor B both sell low-interest mortgages.
Competitor A is better at identifying good risks than Competitor B, and gets fewer defaults.
Competitor B notices that the U.S. Congress has passed a law against spamming, which allows the FBI to imprison people whose services are advertised using UCE.
Competitor B says "Aha!" and hires Evil Taiwan Spammer, Inc. to advertise Competitor A's services.
Competitor A is thrown in jail.
Competitor B gets a monopoly, and profits.
Nah. Technological solutions are best. What I'd like to see is PGP/GnuPG signing of all emails. If emails were signed, then we could filter out all non-signed emails, and that would pretty much be the end of spam. To this end, I think the listserver community should really investigate linking majordomo or something to gnupg, so this policy could be implemented without giving up listservs.
I really hate it when people indiscriminately block dialup IP mailservers. I hate it because I have one:)
But seriously, how much spam really comes from dialup mailservers? I mean, compared to places like university computer labs and the like. Not that many people run MTAs, compromised or otherwise, on their home machines. Whereas, if a spammer sneaks/breaks into a university lab (which as we all know are absolute paragons of security), it can install a whole bunch of MTAs on the machines and pump far more messages using the university's fibre backbone than it ever could off of a home broadband server (which usually have pretty small upstream bandwidth caps).
Also. Shouldn't the proper response to a blackholed IP address be to not pick up the phone when a call is made to port 25? I.E., just let them time you out, and cut the connection at the router level? You waste far fewer cycles that way, and also your SMTP server, SpamAssassin, etc. don't have to write anything in their logs.
Want to send North Americans email? Get your government to outlaw spamming. Hint: Mention that spam is often used to promote Western political ideas and consumer products. That should get it done.
Okay, I don't actually use them myself, but black hole listings are pretty effective. (I don't use them because my network is small enough that user-based filters are all I really need.) You don't have to accept SMTP from everywhere if you don't want to.
No, the solution is for the Patent Office to start doing its job and fully investigate patent applications.
The reason lawyers file for these patents is because, yes, you're right, they're afraid someone else will file first. The USPTO's policy of granting patents without much investigation, figuring that invalid patents will get thrown out in court, has caused this situation; and it's there that we need to make the change.
I think it's the other way around; that is, I think that Windows Explorer, in its current incarnation, is a plugin to IE.
Remember IE4? When it was released, the installer installed a new version of Windows Explorer, which had all these groovy (well, okay, mostly unbelievably stupid) features like the ability to turn your desktop into a webpage. I think it was at this point that the shared codebase came into play.
And herein lies the root of the problem. I think IE is now the base application for all of the UI of Windows. And well, since it's at its core an HTTP client, that means that any bugs in an insecure, non-encrypted client affect the whole OS.
Kinda like X-Windows, back in the bad old days before we had ssh. Oh well. Microsoft just recently built RPC support into their OS, too. You'd think they'd learn from all the *nix security holes of the '80s, but no, they seem committed to repeating them.
When you start coding the protocol right into the packet level, you increase the complexity of the firewall. In some circles, this is seen as a Bad Thing, the basic logic being that simpler programs are more bug-free.
Also, you're increasing the overhead by requiring the packet filter to read the content of packets, instead of just their headers. That means slower throughput, especially when dealing with large networks.
And finally: FTP's the only protocol designed in this ultra-stupid way in the history of IP. FTP is so obviously a relic from the days when.edu was the dominant TLD in other ways, too, like cleartext passwords (ugh).
Slashdot Mirror
The A+R man (and yeah, they're pretty much all men) decides his record company really needs a new teen star, or perhaps a boyband, or whatever. He draws up a contract, and goes looking for victims.
The victims in question receive this contract. Their parents are told to sign the contract, and Little Johnny/Stephanie/whatever will get a start in the music business.
Don't sign the contract? A+R Man moves to the next potential victim. The record company is holding absolutely all of the cards in this situation. However, all that said, parent is better off refusing to sign, even though little Johnny/Stephanie won't realize it at first. But, victims will be found.
It's still a bad practice.
Yes, they're better than the old NES controllers, with the spindly little joystick designed by Satan. Which reminded me of nothing so much as the old Kraft joysticks. (Remember them? I tried using them like once or twice, and couldn't shake the feeling that I was going to snap the shaft in two.)
Anyway. Another point: Not enough buttons. I hate having to hit eight different buttons (okay, I'm exaggerating here) in order to do something, just because the thing doesn't have 102 buttons. (And yeah, I'm one of Those Guys who likes to have pretty much every key programmed to do something in the game).
It sounds rather as though you're running a domain with tens or hundreds of thousands of email addresses off of a single MX server. Which seems unlikely :)
Rock! Okay, I'm broke, but if I stop being broke, then I now have another item for the shopping list. :)
I'm still looking for a DVD player that'll play MP4s that are burnt to a CD. MPEG-4 is so much nicer than VideoCD.
Also, there are more codecs available in Linux-friendly form than on *BSD. I think these two factors are the reason why.
Oh wait, you meant a console controller. Ye gads, how I hate those things. I swear they were designed for somebody with an eight-year-old's hands. Just tiny little things. I miss the Old Days, when you could plug your WICO Boss into a console.
And I'm not a huge guy. I just have ... big hands. :)
Looked, couldn't find it. How I miss having free access to QuickLaw. Ah well, nevermind. Anyway, we're obviously agreed on the original depositor, but that's not the question at hand. The question is: If a bank negligently deposits funds in a client account, does the client have the right to make use of those funds?
The answer might depend on what the client did as a result of the negligent deposit. I'll outline some scenarios.
- The client doesn't notice the deposit.
- The client notices the deposit, and feels confused; can't think why there's money in the account. Doesn't spend it, or rely on it in any way.
- The client doesn't notice there's extra money in the account, but goes ahead and spends it anyway, as the client is a spendthrift who has no idea of how much money is in the account.
- The client notices the deposit, but assumes it's some bank promotion (you know - the 400,000th person to use Interact Direct Payment this month wins a cash bonus, or something), or perhaps an income tax return or maybe a gift from a relative.
So anyway. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if the bank, through its negligence, makes a deposit, and if the client reasonably relies on that deposit, then the bank has got to be liable to the client. Of course, lawyers love the word reasonable, and people in lawyers' offices hate it because it means whatever judges (and sometimes lawyers) think it means.It seems likely to me that the bank can just make the correction in this case, and it'll probably never even get to court.
This looks like case #1.
Okay, now this is a tricky one. Here, we have a client who relies on the bank to - in effect - cut off the flow of money when there is none left. This is pretty common behaviour in Canada. Is it reasonable? Honestly, I don't know.
The question here becomes, is this a reasonable assumption to make?
Couldn't find any caselaw. I would suspect that, unless the amount was very large, no bank would bother suing for the funds; also, I would suspect that if the amount was very large, most courts would have no problem finding that the client's reliance on the deposit was unreasonable.
It'd be fascinating though, in theory. Let's pretend we're law professors for a moment. Here's the question from the torts final: Suppose a bank client was trying to setup a small business, and had arranged with a relative to deposit $30,000 in a bank account. A week later, the bank screws up a deposit and puts $35,000 in the client's account. Meanwhile, the relative is having second thoughts, but doesn't tell the client, who goes ahead and opens the business.
Six months later, the bank discovers the mistake, and wants the money returned. What to do?
Here in Canada, banks are liable for the negligence of their employees. So if an employee negligently gives you money, it's your money. If you're nice, you can give it back to the bank, but you don't have to.
Surprisingly, this policy cuts down on banking mistakes quite a lot. :)
Send it to the address on your bill, and make a record of when you sent it. If they send you another bill (unless it says Final Bill), instead of responding with a cheque, let them know you want to be cut off now, please. Should they send a threatening letter instead, just wait for them to call an agency or threaten to sue.
Look, you were in Maine, and you got horrified by something. I'm suggesting that as a reward for not getting eaten, the Stephen King aura that surrounds the state decided instead to just give you obscene rates.
Bah. I'm on Rogers too, and actually I've always gotten along with their telephone service people at least. But man, I could tell you insane stories about Bell. But I'm not gonna. :)
Most god-games suck.
Most RTS games suck.
Most text-adventure games suck.
Most RPGs suck.
Now that that's out of the way, I'm going to talk Quake. That is, Quake the First, a love of mine, and I think a game that's never really been equalled (although Quake II and III both look better, and have their own charms).
The thing about Quake was that it was full of sudden action. No matter where you were, you always had to be on your toes. There might be an ogre around the corner, or there might not be. No matter what, though, anything that happened - happened really quickly.
The ultra-creepy soundtrack by NIN really played into this feeling. You play Quake for a couple hours, and it draws you in.
Sure, most of the AI was pretty dumb. But partly that was because of choices the designers made. When given a choice between a careful AI that would cleverly outmaneuver you, only attacking when it was good and ready, and one that would suddenly pop up and be right in your face at its first opportunity, they always went for the in your face option.
The only real complaint I had was on the range of the monsters. They didn't get around well enough, which makes them too predictable now for me to replay it anymore. But oh well.
Quake II's AI is smarter, and waits until it's got you before beginning to really attack. But the music sucks, and it's lost a lot of the suddenness in favour of these wide-open spaces. Quake III has too many wide-open spaces as well, and besides is really a deathmatch game, so not easily comparable. Although Quake III's bots are acceptably aggressive, more like Quake I.
explorer.exe displays the desktop (i.e. the root window :), among other things, so it does need to be always running, that's okay. But IE3 (which actually ran originally on WFW 3.11) doesn't interlink with explorer.exe, and I suspect doesn't cause the RAM fluctuation you describe. Although I only have one machine with IE3 on it, and it in fact is running the aforementioned WFW 3.11 :) so I can't check.
I miss the old days, when I was in university, and my university was a DSL provider. Back then, I could connect to everybody, because my IP was listed as a university IP. Now I have to hack my way around.
But it can be done. It just shouldn't have to be. Log the evil IPs, and disconnect them. (My mailserver is also an MX of its own; I get plenty of connections from spammers. Most are not dialup, but are compromised institutional servers.)
Several hundred emails in 30 seconds? That's not a 56K modem connection. It just isn't possible. It's almost certainly a fibre connection of some kind, and probably not DSL; most DSL connection's upstreams peak out around 128Kbps. Most cablemodems peak out around 64Kbps for upstream. If you're getting several hundred emails in 30 seconds, then you must be getting tens of thousands of connections.
Right now, I'm typing this message on a Toshiba T2150CDT with 24MB of RAM and a 500MB HD, running debian unstable, i.e. the latest and greatest thing. :)
This is a laptop from 1995, and it works fine. Okay, no GNOME/KDE, I don't even run xfce. Just wdm and wmaker. And ELinks for the web, no mozilla.
But what's the specs on your Thinkpad? It's probably not as ancient as my laptop.
And it's helpful in certain circumstances. For example, my elderly iMac can do captures with Final Cut Pro in OS 9, because of the extra priority, but in OS X, it drops frames like crazy.
But on my old Amiga, one of the main uses of the blitter chip was transparency. You could paste in images on top, and the blitter would handle the bitplane issues.
Of course, it didn't work with anything that used more than 8-bit colour, but surely a modern (i.e. 1998 :) VGA card could handle 24-bit colour blittering?
That's all it does. An X client (like, say, rxvt) says to the X server, "I need to open a new window, put it over here someplace" and the X server says "Great!" and draws a square, blank area, and then lets the window manager know about the new window, and the window manager draws the widgets like the close button and stuff (well, whatever the window manager supports).
A desktop package like GNOME does not contain a window manager. It has a session manager, plus some dedicated X clients that draw things like the GNOME panel. You may have noticed some talk about GNOME-compliant window managers when you were installing X, or well, maybe not, I've never done a Red Hat install. GNOME-compliant window managers, like Enlightenment, Oroborus, sawfish, and a bunch of others, are aware that they're running under GNOME, and talk to the GNOME core libraries to allow you to control them in certain ways from the central GNOME configuration screens.
However, you should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be running GNOME on a server system. You should probably not be running X even. (Although my squid server does have X, but that's because I originally planned another use for it; sometime soon, I'm going to pull that graphics card out, stick it in another machine, and remove the X server.)
Anyway - To get back to my original point. You don't need to run GNOME to run a window manager. In fact, running GNOME effectively limits your choice of window managers to ones that support GNOME (GNOME will run with non-compliant window managers in place, but it will moan and whine endlessly). All you really need is to boot to xdm or wdm (my favourite display manager) at startup, instead of gdm, and then put the following line at the end of a file called .xsession in your home directory:
exec <executable-name-of-window-manager>
So, for example, my .xsession ends with exec wmaker to start Window Maker. You can in fact exec any program at the end of this file; that program should have an easy way to exit. My root .xsession ends with exec rxvt. That's because root only uses X normally in single-user mode, when I'm trying to debug something that's gone badly wrong with my setup, and I want to make sure that even if Window Maker dies, I can get root a window.
However, note this - running GNOME or KDE gives you an easy GUI to select your window manager. wdm does give you the ability to select as well, kind-of, but not as precisely as the desktop systems do. xdm gives you no pretty GUI at all, you've got to do it all yourself in your .xsession file.
- Competitor A and Competitor B both sell low-interest mortgages.
- Competitor A is better at identifying good risks than Competitor B, and gets fewer defaults.
- Competitor B notices that the U.S. Congress has passed a law against spamming, which allows the FBI to imprison people whose services are advertised using UCE.
- Competitor B says "Aha!" and hires Evil Taiwan Spammer, Inc. to advertise Competitor A's services.
- Competitor A is thrown in jail.
- Competitor B gets a monopoly, and profits.
Nah. Technological solutions are best. What I'd like to see is PGP/GnuPG signing of all emails. If emails were signed, then we could filter out all non-signed emails, and that would pretty much be the end of spam. To this end, I think the listserver community should really investigate linking majordomo or something to gnupg, so this policy could be implemented without giving up listservs.But seriously, how much spam really comes from dialup mailservers? I mean, compared to places like university computer labs and the like. Not that many people run MTAs, compromised or otherwise, on their home machines. Whereas, if a spammer sneaks/breaks into a university lab (which as we all know are absolute paragons of security), it can install a whole bunch of MTAs on the machines and pump far more messages using the university's fibre backbone than it ever could off of a home broadband server (which usually have pretty small upstream bandwidth caps).
Also. Shouldn't the proper response to a blackholed IP address be to not pick up the phone when a call is made to port 25? I.E., just let them time you out, and cut the connection at the router level? You waste far fewer cycles that way, and also your SMTP server, SpamAssassin, etc. don't have to write anything in their logs.
Want to send North Americans email? Get your government to outlaw spamming. Hint: Mention that spam is often used to promote Western political ideas and consumer products. That should get it done.
Okay, I don't actually use them myself, but black hole listings are pretty effective. (I don't use them because my network is small enough that user-based filters are all I really need.) You don't have to accept SMTP from everywhere if you don't want to.
The reason lawyers file for these patents is because, yes, you're right, they're afraid someone else will file first. The USPTO's policy of granting patents without much investigation, figuring that invalid patents will get thrown out in court, has caused this situation; and it's there that we need to make the change.
Remember IE4? When it was released, the installer installed a new version of Windows Explorer, which had all these groovy (well, okay, mostly unbelievably stupid) features like the ability to turn your desktop into a webpage. I think it was at this point that the shared codebase came into play.
And herein lies the root of the problem. I think IE is now the base application for all of the UI of Windows. And well, since it's at its core an HTTP client, that means that any bugs in an insecure, non-encrypted client affect the whole OS.
Kinda like X-Windows, back in the bad old days before we had ssh. Oh well. Microsoft just recently built RPC support into their OS, too. You'd think they'd learn from all the *nix security holes of the '80s, but no, they seem committed to repeating them.
Also, you're increasing the overhead by requiring the packet filter to read the content of packets, instead of just their headers. That means slower throughput, especially when dealing with large networks.
And finally: FTP's the only protocol designed in this ultra-stupid way in the history of IP. FTP is so obviously a relic from the days when .edu was the dominant TLD in other ways, too, like cleartext passwords (ugh).