Spam represents an incredible value for the money. It has very little cost, incurs little legal risk, and can reap great rewards. There are many business plans like that, but with the exception of spam, they're all RICO predicates (in the U.S.). When things reach a certain level of profitability they become recognized as crimes and laws are passed criminalizing them. Spam is only legal because nobody's ever seen anything like it before. People easily confuse spam with a First Amendment issue, so it will take a couple years, but by the time the average email account receives 20,000 spams a day, public anger will eventually boil over, reaching a point at which one of several things will happen: -SMTP and email in general will be supplanted by some more restrictive protocol that isn't as useful to the spammers for theft of services. (Hopefully this protocol will be open and not controlled by a ruthless monopoly.) Nobody will communicate via email anymore because all emails are assumed to be spam. As fewer people rely on it, more and more network paths will become closed to SMTP traffic until it reaches the point where most emails bounce once they leave their local network. -Sending spam no longer means you lose your 30 days free trial and have to find another ISP serving your trailer park. Instead, your door is busted down by people with scary guns and flashlights and handcuffs, and you're held without bail in a real jail cell with real iron bars, maybe with a new roomate who's 581% happier now that you're there.
The solution will probably be technological rather than legal, just because of jurisdictional problems- even though the legal approach is obviously the one that socially makes the most sense. It's a real crime. But unless all the nations of the world sign a treaty to cooperate in investigating, catching, and prosecuting these idiots, they'll just keep finding more open relays in former Soviet republics.
What amazes me is how the Chinese can get their corporate lackeys to block any packets they don't like from entering their entire network, while we out here in the free world are drowning in spam because we can't keep a few hundred assholes with modems from pissing emails all over us.
This isn't a good idea because it fosters meta-spam. The spammer can say "Look at all these responses I'm getting from my bulk emails!" and sell CDs of email addresses to people.
.NET is SCRUMTRILESCENT!
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think the average Salon reader is not the kind of reader who takes things at face value. I think the editors know it too. Look at it as a subtle editorial troll, designed to provoke an outraged response. Which it has.
I don't think you can discount it so easily:
About the writer
Peter Wright is a software consultant and the author of numerous books on Visual Basic programming. He is currently working on two.Net titles for Apress slated for release later this year.
Have you read some of these quotes?
Bill Gates has already changed the face of the world as we know it, but his magnum opus has yet to be fully appreciated. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled Bill's greater masterpiece -- in the guise of the Visual Studio.Net development tools suite.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just another Microsoft product launch, just another example of the Redmond behemoth rolling ever onward in its quest to gain enough funds to brand a continent. Don't. Visual Studio.Net will have as profound an effect on the way that we live our lives as the labors of love Babbage and Gutenberg gave us. To dismiss Visual Studio.Net and the technology it encompasses is to go back in time and dismiss Henry Ford's automobile as a passing fad. [several pages of excited babbling deleted]
As developers move to embrace.Net, the Internet will be transformed from a complex, un-standardized mishmash of awkward static views of data to a dynamic pool of data connected by a true web of Web services all working together to make your life easier.
.Net marks the dawn of the third age of computing -- embrace it.
It reminded me of Will Ferrell's Actor's Studio sketch as well. ".Net is such a masterpiece that there are no words to describe it- so I will make one up: Scrumtrilescent."
I guess if you've been stuck with Visual Basic for the past several years, an MS ripoff of Java would look pretty interesting. I doubt that Java programmers are going to flock to.NET, however. It seems that the people most excited about it are the VB types..NET will probably end up displacing VB, not Java. Personally, I think James Gosling has a pretty good take on Java vs..NET. After all, he invented both.:)
Furthermore, I don't know many installers that "insist" on installing to C:\Program Files\. Usually, it's a changeable default. Now, gripe about installers not giving you a (useful) option for placing start menu icons, and I'll agree wholeheartedly.
Well it is a changeable default in theory, but there are a LOT of programmers out there who are either stupid or lazy and simply hardcode "C:\\Program Files\\..." in their routines. You'd be well advised to NOT change the default install directory to avoid bugs, or you might be surprised when the uninstaller doesn't work.
Many companies warn employees not to open attachments from unknown senders, fearful of computer viruses.
I'm surprised no spammer has included a Word virus that mails the resume to everybody in the recipient's address book. It could optionally email all their names, addresses, and phone numbers to the spammer's "legal team" so they can be included as defendants if the spammer sues for "slander".
Instead of opening these attachments, I suggest every recipient should just send this canned response:
You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it.
Sending people documents in Word format has bad effects, because that practice puts pressure on them to use Microsoft software. In effect, you become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly. This specific problem is a major obstacle to the broader adoption of GNU/Linux. Would you please reconsider the use of Word format for communication with other people?
P.S. You want to fuck with me?
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You know what, I'm really getting sick of the bigotry that I see here on Slashdot. Anytime a story is posted based on our rights, department of justice, business, etc... there always has to be a flame aimed towards the United States of America. I'm assuming most of the readers here have mostly a leftist view on most political issues, and that's absolutely fine.
But what about the conservatives who read Slashdot? What about us? How do the people who read Slashdot with a right winged attitude feel about biased comments that contain negativity, and to some of us, a fallacy (sp?) towards our government, economy, policies, etc... Am I the only one who finds the irony in this post? The story is about how the Chinese government doesn't allow dissent and is telling ISPs to police emails for subversive statements. You then complain that Americans shouldn't dissent so much and should stop criticizing the American government so you don't get offended by people disagreeing with you. It would therefore seem that you would be in favor of the Great Firewall of China, right? I doubt you are, of course, but that's only because your thinking is confused and logically inconsistent.
Criticism of the country in general (as opposed to the government) is certainly different. Your post draws no distinction. I don't see why you think conservatives should be more offended by that than anyone else- unless you somehow think that conservatism and patriotism are the same thing.
As far as criticism of the government is concerned- democracy only works when citizens constantly criticize and question those in power. Perhaps you'd rather live in a country where there is no criticism of the government.
Comments as well (I'm posting this anonymously for a reason). Whenever I post a comment that will go against something I read in an article that will have a conservative view to it, maybe 75-80% of time time it will get modded down to -1 (52 posts, no flames, Karma 2, you do the math). Whatever happened to getting 2, 3, 4, everyone's side of the story? Oh please. You sound like the people who write in to talkorigins.org complaining that the creationist side of the issue isn't getting equal treatment on the site. Nobody is obligated to rate your posts up merely so that both sides of every story are presented. Sometimes it's obvious which side is wrong. If fewer than half of the participants in a public forum like/. share your opinions on things, it might reflect on us Slashdotters as a whole, but it's statistically more likely to just reflect on you personally. Either find a forum with people who agree with your opinions already or stop whining in this one.
The moderation system on slashdot is awful and wrong. Using an analogy of a hostile government. If I say anything remotely conservative, I will get modded down. Hmm... seems fair enough. A "hostile government" is modding your posts down?!? I know you're just making a bad analogy, but seems like another case of politically correct whining. You couldn't ask for fairer treatment than you're getting./. is very democratic. Moderators are chosen at random from people that visit the site.
What would you replace the current system with? One where YOU or "remotely conservative" minded people like you are the sole moderators? Your definition of "remotely conservative" might be reasonable, but it might very well fit my or other people's definition of "kookily conservative". How are we supposed to know? You posted as an AC so we can only guess.
As long as we're making questionable analogies between websites and governments, there are many online forums where the people in charge simply delete posts they don't like. Any dissent on those boards is quickly met by people saying creepy things like "soon you and your posts will go away, heh heh." Wouldn't that make a better analogy with a "hostile government"?
Sucks that you posted anonymously and lost all that karma. Bet you wish you weren't such an anonymous coward now, eh?:)
That's why it's correct to say that "time passes", not "time moves".
Yes, that is a better verb for describing what time does in ordinary circumstances and space can sometimes do in extreme ones. Although the English language is poorly equipped for describing things that happen in a curved four dimensional space. It lacks the appropriate words and you can't talk about things without getting subtle things wrong.
Even trying to come up with definitions for "time" and "space" is difficult. Relativity attracts lots of philosopher types (so does quantum mechanics) who like to construct definitions that usually sound good but turn out to be logically inconsistent. The best definitions anyone has come up with for time and space are passive ones like "what a clock measures" and "what a ruler measures".
In any case I think you and I are in agreement on the subtleties of GR, but "space moves" is still a helpful notion when you're trying to explain to someone why rockets and rope ladders are useless for escaping from a hole. Making an analogy with the passing of time appeals to people's intuition.
It doesn't make sense to say that "space moves". Moves with respect to what?
In ordinary environments like the one you're familiar with, it doesn't make sense to say that "time moves" either. "Moves with respect to what?" But it moves inexorably forward to the future, and everyone has a good intuitive sense of what this means even if they have trouble defining it logically.
This is analogous with the situation inside an event horizon, where space attains this property owing to the extreme space-time curvature. All futures take you in the direction of the singularity.
Because your light cone has tilted completely in the direction of the singularity. Space-time sort of "flows inward" inside the event horizon, meaning if you're inside it at a distance R from the center, no message you transmit can ever reach any observer who is further from the singularity than R. All your possible world-lines are moving toward the singularity and have their final state there. You can't use a rocket to get out of the hole any more than you can prevent today from turning into yesterday.
I think companies like MSN/Microsoft/Hotmail, yahoo, excite and @home should be doing the suing.
Well, maybe, perhaps not. Companies will sue if it's in their interest. If their network becomes good enough to handle the congestion from spam, and the amount of spam doesn't vary too much as a customer moves from ISP to ISP, it's conceivable that the providers might begin to view spam as the customer's problem (as they pretty much do now). And even if they do start suing- who benefits from that directly? Besides the obvious value as a deterrent to spammers, there isn't much justice being done if the plaintiffs are all going to be large ISPs. The parties most damaged by spam are the end users and especially the smaller ISPs.
I always thought class action lawsuits by the actual recipients of spam are the most logical way to counter spam if the approach is going to be via the courts. After all, have you ever received a single, individual spam that's caused you to consider taking the case to court against that particular spammer, with lawyers and court costs and all that hassle? With a judge that might ask "well why didn't you just hit delete?" And getting that single spam email message isn't really what you're suing over. It's the degradation of your daily routine, the tedium of having to delete a hundred emails a day year in and year out, the loss of almost a day of your life per year deleting countless messages about herbal Viagara and credit repair software and diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities and hair loss and government grants info packages and an EZ way to consolidate debt and reducing all payments by 60% and frisky teens. Going to court over a single spam seems to miss the point. And it's expensive and inconvenient to sue as an individual, so a spammer might very well recognize that his individual spam probably isn't going to elicit a lawsuit if it isn't outrageous enough for a spammed plaintiff to choose as THE spam (out of the 10000 in his box) that he's going to go to court over. In fact, people tend to sue when the spam particularly offends them (e.g. when it talks about sex with minors, or has nude photos in it and is received by a minor). Unless things proceed to the point where every spam message sent out results in a lawsuit, a spammer that keeps his emails polite and sticks ADV in the header is pretty much safe from being sued. So you don't even get much of a deterrent effect.
Unless we switch to using class action suits, which don't have these problems if someone with the resources starts consistently nailing all spammers with them. It's much easier than taking a case to court yourself. Someone is doing the suing for you and you get to hang on like a million other freeloaders and enjoy the fruits of your class action. I almost wouldn't mind getting spam if I knew there was a chance that I could stick it to the spammer for a few cents along with thousands of other people. If I even got a fraction of a penny on average per message, we could still be talking about some serious money. And it certainly wouldn't be too hard to set up. In fact (if this were 1999) you could probably build a dot-com out of it somehow, to coordinate the spam submissions, identify plaintiffs and defendants, litigate in court, hire collections agencies, and process the payments back to all plaintiffs. That's more of a business plan than many dot-coms had. I think that if there weren't so many jurisdictional problems with the idea in general (and if there were more spam laws) someone would try this.
I mean now I think that Microsoft has something to do with bestiality. How do I know that it wasn't really from them??
Strictly speaking, even if it turns out the email wasn't from Microsoft, it still doesn't prove that Microsoft has nothing to do with bestiality.
The problem is, you're an idiot. Your "ancestors" built a society that makes you far more wealthy now, with little direct inheritance, than you'd be if you had $8M and the kind of backwards civilization they worked hard (and in some cases gave their lives) to improve upon.
First of all, my momma didn't raise no idiots. Second, your example shows that you didn't read the post you're responding to. My ancestors built a society with infrastructure that I benefit from, that's true, but to suggest that their own efforts did nothing to enrich their own quality of life during their lifetimes strikes me as a little naive.
[I deleted the part about global warming- it was a bad example anyway, since the threat is immediate enough to eventually affect people alive today.]
You also list DEPLETION OF FOSSIL FUEL RESERVES. I guess you haven't noticed the fact that these are generally under the control of a PRICE SYSTEM that takes into account such depletion as it happens, when it happens, and communicates that depletion rapidly over the entire planet's population, requiring no special translation into anyone's "native language"? That's taking ACTION, my friend, whether it fits into your narrow little worldview of what constitutes ACTION. (Which I guess probably is only "pass a buncha laws regulating daily human behavior", eh?)
This shows how well you've been brainwashed. The country is full of wanna-be conservatives who believe that the free market is the cure for everything that ails the world. (I say "wanna-be" because real conservatives aren't dumb enough to believe their own propaganda. A real conservative knows when to dump his dogshit stock and leave his wanna-bes like you holding 401k accounts full of dogshit.) In the case of fossil-fuel reserves, the free market only goes so far. As the cost of oil goes up, more and more oilfields become profitable to use, so the supply increases to meet demand. This doesn't mean that the reserves are somehow an infinite resource. The system is going to constantly move toward a final state where the rate at which oil is consumed equals the rate at which it is created. When this happens, the cost of a gallon of gasoline will have risen to astronomical levels, entirely due to free market forces. Most people would describe this as "no more oil". You can debate and say this won't happen in our lifetimes, and you'd be right- it won't. But it will certainly happen before the sun explodes, definitely within 1000 years.
I should also like to point out that you aren't my friend.
And OVERPOPULATION? Are you NUTS? The biggest problem with Western Civ today may well be the fact that it is DECLINING IN POPULATION. That's right, what happens when people become educated, wealthy, free, and respectful of laws and property rights, is they STOP INCREASING THEIR POPULATION. Every time.
Did you think I was directing some attack at you personally, or at any specific country? The world is bigger than the U.S.A., and overpopulation is generally not considered a problem in the West because it isn't one. (We're educated/wealthy/free/fat/happy here.) The issue centers around places like China and India. Do you see any solution to the overpopulation in India?
That's why people like YOU are the biggest threat to humanity's survivability. You refuse to accept the fact that people are, everywhere, ACTING on their own initiative to insure THEIR and their offspring's survival, and since you don't particularly like their actions and hate the steps they take (e.g., drive their children around in SUVs, which are SAFER and do jack-squat to the environment compared to any other vehicle worth driving), YOU are the sort of person who will use FORCE to IMPOSE YOUR WILL on them, REDUCING their practical ability to SURVIVE whatever comes down the pike.
This paragraph is full of laughs. The quote that SUVs "do jack-squat to the environment compared to any other vehicle worth driving" is my favorite. Did it have the American flag already on it as an option when you bought it?
I'd rather let those "guys on radio talk shows" you claim "flatly deny we should do anything involving any sort of personal or national sacrifice" rule than someone like YOU. At least they let EACH of us decide WHAT we will sacrifice, WHEN we will sacrifice, HOW we will sacrifice it, based on what WE each think is best for humanity as WE see it, compared to someone like YOU, who insists everyone march to YOUR silly little tune.
Dude, I was only making an abstract point about how it's human nature not to act on a threat that's more than 100 years away. I'm sorry if I insulted your personal God somehow, since you seem to have really taken this personally. I have a suspicion though that if Rush was president, the situation wouldn't be as rosy as you imagine.
What's with all the capitalized words anyway? Can't you express yourself in writing without resorting to shouts?
The 581% figure is from an authentic spam. Haven't you gotten it before?
I remember seeing that, and commenting to a friend of mine how that was an example of a statistic with high precision and low accuracy.
My favorite spam is the one about how Fortune 500 companies are looking for losers to work from home using their computers. That and the one offering diplomas from "prestigious, non-accredited" universities. Although it stops being funny the 200th time you see it.
Also, you should stop smoking. If you need help there are many people out there selling quality stop-smoking products. Just post your email address in any public forum and they'll be in touch with you.
> I think many multi-million (and even billion) dollar companies would disagree. Applets are still used a lot... on intranets, where they're well suited.
Applets are a good technology in general, and held some promise. I think they got killed by several things:
-poor JVM performance in browsers, with broken 1.1 support, inconsistent API support, etc.
-Inconsistent methods for signing applets in Netscape and IE
-people's impatience with properly implemented security (especially with the applet "sandbox" security model) favored things like ActiveX (which takes the typical MS approach to security: "you clicked OK, so anything that happens now is your fault").
-the common misconception (widespread in the computer press) that Java is simply an inferior way of doing what Flash does better, that Java and Flash are even suited for the same tasks at all, and that the success of Flash indicates the coming demise of Java.
I agree that in a controlled environment like an Intranet, none of these (aside from people's attitudes) present an insurmountable obstacle.
Yeah, like what? I think you're talking about applets and bugs in 4 year old JVMs. Nobody writes applets anymore.
I work with AWT all the time, on a networked scientific application. We used it because 1/3 of our customers use Macs and some use Linux. Once in a while something hits a snag on one OS or another. You're coding against different libraries, so sometimes you run into JVM bugs. Usually it means you don't know what the hell you're doing and you're relying too heavily on an implementation detail of a particular JVM, instead of sticking to the spec. But it usually turns out to be a one line fix.
The CLR allows Microsoft to promote garbage-collected languages in toto. This includes C++, which now has MS extensions to allow garbage collection. You can reserve your own counsel on the topic of extensions to a language, but it works, I'll say that for it.
I think you should have stopped after the first seven words of your post.:)
Note this does not mean you can just compile different languages to the CLR, but reuse code at runtime from code written in other languages.
Could you explain to me the difference between these two statements? What prevents you from doing either one with a JVM?
.NET would make a good David Spade joke. "I liked.NET better the first time I saw it... when it was called Java."
American Scientist had a really good article on this back in 1996.
Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
"If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
(Note: I'm not positive this guy is from Microsoft, but for the hell of it I'll assume he is. A disproportionately high number of Microsoft employees are bound to be reading this thread in any case- unless they're all at "backslashdot.org".)
What kind of Enterprise or large business consults Internet Polls for business decision-making?
You'd be surprised. People get promoted until they reach a level at which they're incompetent. They have no idea what they should be doing. They're too scared to ask anyone what technology is appropriate for their situation, because that would reveal their incompetency. They want someone to tell them what to do. They desperately want to know what everyone else is doing, and what everyone else is going to be doing in five years. They hunger for safe decisions. They fall for FUD tactics easily. Why do you think so many shops use things like VB, ASP, and IIS? Being (obviously) from Microsoft, you must surely appreciate the tactical advantages to be gained from marketing your products to such people. Stop acting like they don't exist; they're your bread and butter.
You too are considering MS was acting as a collective... where do you stand on the bogey man and the tooth fairy?
Ummm, it really doesn't matter whether the rigging was done by MS as a "collective" or by individual idiots at MS forwarding parameterized URLs to each other. What really stands out to most observers is the way you're always faithful to your stereotype, whether you're acting as a single company or a collection of individuals. The fact is that you fools got caught rigging a poll, and your own poorly-designed technology is what gave you away! Now you have egg on your face, and everyone's opinion of you has been reaffirmed yet again.
The whole point of.NET is to make Java irrelevant. Even you seem to be convinced Java is already dead.
Well, you could say the whole point of any Microsoft technology is to make non-Microsoft technologies "irrelevant". In the case of.NET, the point seems to be creating a copy of Java with a 1-to-1 mapping to every concept in it- from the JVM ("CLR") on up to the language itself. This fits the standard MS pattern; every technology Microsoft has ever produced is an incompatible imitation of an existing successful technology. Java might not be the best technology; in fact it has some real flaws- but it's successful, so you've copied it, flaws and all. Except you aren't calling it Java, you're calling it something else- because dammit, if people aren't going to let you royally screw something up with your "innovation", you're just going to go off and play with your own toys! Funny how you make the C# to Java migration path so short. I'm sure I could learn all the differences between C# and Java in twenty minutes. In fact, I'm sure someone could write a book "C# for Java programmers" with ten pages in it, that I could finish on the toilet in one sitting. I'm not going to bother. I remember all too well the stunts you played, how you refused to support standard APIs and kept coming out with your own oddball Windows-only crap, how you made my programs not work unless I wrote MS and non-MS versions of everything. Now all of a sudden you're going to make it easy for me? Screw you. You've completely alienated all your target developers. Now nobody trusts you.
I'll only learn C# when I'm forced to use it, most likely by some middle management bonehead who's seen a rigged poll.
... because everyone knows online polls aren't statistically valid by any stretch of the imagination.
In your dreams. NOT everyone knows this, and even if they do know it, they're still likely to use these stupid polls when forming an opinion.
When teenagers buy some stock and talk it up in chat rooms before dumping it, they get in trouble even though the rumors they spread obviously have no statistical validity. Most people are innumerate and don't base their buying decisions on statistically valid information. They're influenced by stupid stuff like online polls and rumors. Part of the blame lies with zdnet for running a stupid online poll like this one. Their crime is laziness- a good poll is more work and takes more time. Easier to throw a stupid script on the site and see what happens. But most of the blame belongs squarely on the people at MS who tampered with the information.
This poll wasn't something like "Who's your favorite Spice Girl?". Its intended audience is the clueless IT guy who's got a limited budget and is faced with a decision on whether to use MS or non-MS technology for a given project. The only conceivable purpose of the poll manipulation was to sway these people. How is pumping up a worthless stock any worse than pumping up a worthless technology?
Web polls are inherently untrustworthy. Everyone knows this. No big deal.
You and your friends know this. Lots of people don't. I would even say that the people most likely to be swayed by this poll are the ones who control the largest amounts of technology spending.
Here is an example of a Java Trojan, which needs to be run from the command line as an application (it won't run as an applet).
This exploit code can infect your computer with harmful executables that are sent via email attachments.
public class ScaryTrojan {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office\\OUTLOOK.EXE");
}
catch (Exception e) {;}
}
}
Human foresight doesn't extend beyond timescales longer than two or three human lifetimes. It's just human nature. Look at the resistance to taking any action against far more immediate threats (global warming, overpopulation, depletion of fossil fuel reserves, etc.). If the rise in temperature per year stays below a certain rate, people will drive SUVs around until the atmosphere reaches the boiling point of gasoline. People care about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but generations beyond that, they only care about in a sort of theoretical sense. Ever hear about that $10 that would be worth $9 million today if it were put in a bank in 1801 and left to accrue interest until now? And yet not one of my ancestors in 1801 seems to have cared about me having $9 million.
So I have to laugh when I see people suggesting that the human race will carry out these wild survival plans that require 200-300 million years for their execution. Nobody will act on a threat from the sun even when it's a million years off, because nobody seriously worries about what's going to happen to their descendants that far in the future. If the sun were even going to explode in a thousand years, you would still be hearing guys on radio talk shows flatly denying that we should do anything involving any sort of personal or national sacrifice.
From your post, YOU obviously don't get it. When a teenager releases a trojan on the public, It causes millions and sometimes billions of dollars worth of damage.
This is commonly (although not always) true, but is irrelevant to the point he was making, which sailed over your head. He was saying that prosecutorial resources are applied preferentially to individuals as opposed to corporations. If a backdoor/Trojan is released by a corporation, it arouses little attention. If a teenager writes a similar program they're all over him in a heartbeat! Just take a look at all the Trojans that are being released by shady software companies. Go down the list. Some of them are so obnoxious that they are reported by antivirus utilities. If a teenager wrote some of these, he'd be in serious trouble! He'd be in jail waiting for his military tribunal. The corporations that produce these programs operate in plain sight with no fear of prosecution. The law hasn't caught up with technology. It's still tiptoeing around the issue of spammers. But it's certainly caught up to the teenaged miscreants, hasn't it?
Think about this: awhile back, I updated my linux server to the latest version of the kernal at the time. It corrupted my FS, and thus I lost months of valuable work. SHOULD LINUS BE RESPONSIBLE? If the answer to this is yes, then software companies should also be responsible for releasing spyware.
This is an exceptionally silly point. First of all, Linux is free and comes with no stated legal guarantees. There is nobody to sue. Second, Linus didn't design the patch with the intention that it would corrupt your filesystem. If a company releases software that corrupts my computer on purpose, I would hope that they would be nailed to the wall. I don't know what legislation would pertain to that situation but there certainly doesn't seem to be any prohibiting spyware.
Slashdot Mirror
Spam represents an incredible value for the money. It has very little cost, incurs little legal risk, and can reap great rewards. There are many business plans like that, but with the exception of spam, they're all RICO predicates (in the U.S.).
When things reach a certain level of profitability they become recognized as crimes and laws are passed criminalizing them. Spam is only legal because nobody's ever seen anything like it before. People easily confuse spam with a First Amendment issue, so it will take a couple years, but by the time the average email account receives 20,000 spams a day, public anger will eventually boil over, reaching a point at which one of several things will happen:
-SMTP and email in general will be supplanted by some more restrictive protocol that isn't as useful to the spammers for theft of services. (Hopefully this protocol will be open and not controlled by a ruthless monopoly.) Nobody will communicate via email anymore because all emails are assumed to be spam. As fewer people rely on it, more and more network paths will become closed to SMTP traffic until it reaches the point where most emails bounce once they leave their local network.
-Sending spam no longer means you lose your 30 days free trial and have to find another ISP serving your trailer park. Instead, your door is busted down by people with scary guns and flashlights and handcuffs, and you're held without bail in a real jail cell with real iron bars, maybe with a new roomate who's 581% happier now that you're there.
The solution will probably be technological rather than legal, just because of jurisdictional problems- even though the legal approach is obviously the one that socially makes the most sense. It's a real crime. But unless all the nations of the world sign a treaty to cooperate in investigating, catching, and prosecuting these idiots, they'll just keep finding more open relays in former Soviet republics.
What amazes me is how the Chinese can get their corporate lackeys to block any packets they don't like from entering their entire network, while we out here in the free world are drowning in spam because we can't keep a few hundred assholes with modems from pissing emails all over us.
This isn't a good idea because it fosters meta-spam. The spammer can say "Look at all these responses I'm getting from my bulk emails!" and sell CDs of email addresses to people.
I think the average Salon reader is not the kind of reader who takes things at face value. I think the editors know it too. Look at it as a subtle editorial troll, designed to provoke an outraged response. Which it has.
.Net titles for Apress slated for release later this year.
.Net, the Internet will be transformed from a complex, un-standardized mishmash of awkward static views of data to a dynamic pool of data connected by a true web of Web services all working together to make your life easier.
.NET, however. It seems that the people most excited about it are the VB types. .NET will probably end up displacing VB, not Java. Personally, I think James Gosling has a pretty good take on Java vs. .NET. After all, he invented both. :)
I don't think you can discount it so easily:
About the writer
Peter Wright is a software consultant and the author of numerous books on Visual Basic programming. He is currently working on two
Have you read some of these quotes?
Bill Gates has already changed the face of the world as we know it, but his magnum opus has yet to be fully appreciated. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled Bill's greater masterpiece -- in the guise of the Visual Studio.Net development tools suite.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just another Microsoft product launch, just another example of the Redmond behemoth rolling ever onward in its quest to gain enough funds to brand a continent. Don't. Visual Studio.Net will have as profound an effect on the way that we live our lives as the labors of love Babbage and Gutenberg gave us. To dismiss Visual Studio.Net and the technology it encompasses is to go back in time and dismiss Henry Ford's automobile as a passing fad.
[several pages of excited babbling deleted]
As developers move to embrace
.Net marks the dawn of the third age of computing -- embrace it.
It reminded me of Will Ferrell's Actor's Studio sketch as well. ".Net is such a masterpiece that there are no words to describe it- so I will make one up: Scrumtrilescent."
I guess if you've been stuck with Visual Basic for the past several years, an MS ripoff of Java would look pretty interesting. I doubt that Java programmers are going to flock to
Furthermore, I don't know many installers that "insist" on installing to C:\Program Files\. Usually, it's a changeable default. Now, gripe about installers not giving you a (useful) option for placing start menu icons, and I'll agree wholeheartedly.
Well it is a changeable default in theory, but there are a LOT of programmers out there who are either stupid or lazy and simply hardcode "C:\\Program Files\\..." in their routines. You'd be well advised to NOT change the default install directory to avoid bugs, or you might be surprised when the uninstaller doesn't work.
I'm surprised no spammer has included a Word virus that mails the resume to everybody in the recipient's address book. It could optionally email all their names, addresses, and phone numbers to the spammer's "legal team" so they can be included as defendants if the spammer sues for "slander".
Instead of opening these attachments, I suggest every recipient should just send this canned response:
Simply try this Amazing machine for 30-days and if after 30-days you do not experience both a huge increase in the amount of energy produced along with longer lasting more intense kilowatt-hours, simply send the machine back to us and we'll refund you 100% of the cost including shipping. With this guarantee, our product must work for you... or we'll lose money on every sale!
Order Now!
Winner of the BURDETT RESEARCH "GOLDEN STAR" AWARD
RESULTS MAY VARY. NOTE: Go to here to be removed.
You know what, I'm really getting sick of the bigotry that I see here on Slashdot. Anytime a story is posted based on our rights, department of justice, business, etc... there always has to be a flame aimed towards the United States of America. I'm assuming most of the readers here have mostly a leftist view on most political issues, and that's absolutely fine.
/. share your opinions on things, it might reflect on us Slashdotters as a whole, but it's statistically more likely to just reflect on you personally. Either find a forum with people who agree with your opinions already or stop whining in this one.
/. is very democratic. Moderators are chosen at random from people that visit the site.
:)
But what about the conservatives who read Slashdot? What about us? How do the people who read Slashdot with a right winged attitude feel about biased comments that contain negativity, and to some of us, a fallacy (sp?) towards our government, economy, policies, etc...
Am I the only one who finds the irony in this post? The story is about how the Chinese government doesn't allow dissent and is telling ISPs to police emails for subversive statements. You then complain that Americans shouldn't dissent so much and should stop criticizing the American government so you don't get offended by people disagreeing with you. It would therefore seem that you would be in favor of the Great Firewall of China, right? I doubt you are, of course, but that's only because your thinking is confused and logically inconsistent.
Criticism of the country in general (as opposed to the government) is certainly different. Your post draws no distinction. I don't see why you think conservatives should be more offended by that than anyone else- unless you somehow think that conservatism and patriotism are the same thing.
As far as criticism of the government is concerned- democracy only works when citizens constantly criticize and question those in power. Perhaps you'd rather live in a country where there is no criticism of the government.
Comments as well (I'm posting this anonymously for a reason). Whenever I post a comment that will go against something I read in an article that will have a conservative view to it, maybe 75-80% of time time it will get modded down to -1 (52 posts, no flames, Karma 2, you do the math). Whatever happened to getting 2, 3, 4, everyone's side of the story?
Oh please. You sound like the people who write in to talkorigins.org complaining that the creationist side of the issue isn't getting equal treatment on the site. Nobody is obligated to rate your posts up merely so that both sides of every story are presented. Sometimes it's obvious which side is wrong. If fewer than half of the participants in a public forum like
The moderation system on slashdot is awful and wrong. Using an analogy of a hostile government. If I say anything remotely conservative, I will get modded down. Hmm... seems fair enough.
A "hostile government" is modding your posts down?!? I know you're just making a bad analogy, but seems like another case of politically correct whining. You couldn't ask for fairer treatment than you're getting.
What would you replace the current system with? One where YOU or "remotely conservative" minded people like you are the sole moderators? Your definition of "remotely conservative" might be reasonable, but it might very well fit my or other people's definition of "kookily conservative". How are we supposed to know? You posted as an AC so we can only guess.
As long as we're making questionable analogies between websites and governments, there are many online forums where the people in charge simply delete posts they don't like. Any dissent on those boards is quickly met by people saying creepy things like "soon you and your posts will go away, heh heh." Wouldn't that make a better analogy with a "hostile government"?
Sucks that you posted anonymously and lost all that karma. Bet you wish you weren't such an anonymous coward now, eh?
That's why it's correct to say that "time passes", not "time moves".
Yes, that is a better verb for describing what time does in ordinary circumstances and space can sometimes do in extreme ones. Although the English language is poorly equipped for describing things that happen in a curved four dimensional space. It lacks the appropriate words and you can't talk about things without getting subtle things wrong.
Even trying to come up with definitions for "time" and "space" is difficult. Relativity attracts lots of philosopher types (so does quantum mechanics) who like to construct definitions that usually sound good but turn out to be logically inconsistent. The best definitions anyone has come up with for time and space are passive ones like "what a clock measures" and "what a ruler measures".
In any case I think you and I are in agreement on the subtleties of GR, but "space moves" is still a helpful notion when you're trying to explain to someone why rockets and rope ladders are useless for escaping from a hole. Making an analogy with the passing of time appeals to people's intuition.
It doesn't make sense to say that "space moves". Moves with respect to what?
In ordinary environments like the one you're familiar with, it doesn't make sense to say that "time moves" either. "Moves with respect to what?" But it moves inexorably forward to the future, and everyone has a good intuitive sense of what this means even if they have trouble defining it logically.
This is analogous with the situation inside an event horizon, where space attains this property owing to the extreme space-time curvature. All futures take you in the direction of the singularity.
Because your light cone has tilted completely in the direction of the singularity. Space-time sort of "flows inward" inside the event horizon, meaning if you're inside it at a distance R from the center, no message you transmit can ever reach any observer who is further from the singularity than R. All your possible world-lines are moving toward the singularity and have their final state there. You can't use a rocket to get out of the hole any more than you can prevent today from turning into yesterday.
I think companies like MSN/Microsoft/Hotmail, yahoo, excite and @home should be doing the suing.
Well, maybe, perhaps not. Companies will sue if it's in their interest. If their network becomes good enough to handle the congestion from spam, and the amount of spam doesn't vary too much as a customer moves from ISP to ISP, it's conceivable that the providers might begin to view spam as the customer's problem (as they pretty much do now). And even if they do start suing- who benefits from that directly? Besides the obvious value as a deterrent to spammers, there isn't much justice being done if the plaintiffs are all going to be large ISPs. The parties most damaged by spam are the end users and especially the smaller ISPs.
I always thought class action lawsuits by the actual recipients of spam are the most logical way to counter spam if the approach is going to be via the courts. After all, have you ever received a single, individual spam that's caused you to consider taking the case to court against that particular spammer, with lawyers and court costs and all that hassle? With a judge that might ask "well why didn't you just hit delete?" And getting that single spam email message isn't really what you're suing over. It's the degradation of your daily routine, the tedium of having to delete a hundred emails a day year in and year out, the loss of almost a day of your life per year deleting countless messages about herbal Viagara and credit repair software and diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities and hair loss and government grants info packages and an EZ way to consolidate debt and reducing all payments by 60% and frisky teens. Going to court over a single spam seems to miss the point. And it's expensive and inconvenient to sue as an individual, so a spammer might very well recognize that his individual spam probably isn't going to elicit a lawsuit if it isn't outrageous enough for a spammed plaintiff to choose as THE spam (out of the 10000 in his box) that he's going to go to court over. In fact, people tend to sue when the spam particularly offends them (e.g. when it talks about sex with minors, or has nude photos in it and is received by a minor). Unless things proceed to the point where every spam message sent out results in a lawsuit, a spammer that keeps his emails polite and sticks ADV in the header is pretty much safe from being sued. So you don't even get much of a deterrent effect.
Unless we switch to using class action suits, which don't have these problems if someone with the resources starts consistently nailing all spammers with them. It's much easier than taking a case to court yourself. Someone is doing the suing for you and you get to hang on like a million other freeloaders and enjoy the fruits of your class action. I almost wouldn't mind getting spam if I knew there was a chance that I could stick it to the spammer for a few cents along with thousands of other people. If I even got a fraction of a penny on average per message, we could still be talking about some serious money. And it certainly wouldn't be too hard to set up. In fact (if this were 1999) you could probably build a dot-com out of it somehow, to coordinate the spam submissions, identify plaintiffs and defendants, litigate in court, hire collections agencies, and process the payments back to all plaintiffs. That's more of a business plan than many dot-coms had. I think that if there weren't so many jurisdictional problems with the idea in general (and if there were more spam laws) someone would try this.
I mean now I think that Microsoft has something to do with bestiality. How do I know that it wasn't really from them??
Strictly speaking, even if it turns out the email wasn't from Microsoft, it still doesn't prove that Microsoft has nothing to do with bestiality.
The problem is, you're an idiot. Your "ancestors" built a society that makes you far more wealthy now, with little direct inheritance, than you'd be if you had $8M and the kind of backwards civilization they worked hard (and in some cases gave their lives) to improve upon.
First of all, my momma didn't raise no idiots. Second, your example shows that you didn't read the post you're responding to. My ancestors built a society with infrastructure that I benefit from, that's true, but to suggest that their own efforts did nothing to enrich their own quality of life during their lifetimes strikes me as a little naive.
[I deleted the part about global warming- it was a bad example anyway, since the threat is immediate enough to eventually affect people alive today.]
You also list DEPLETION OF FOSSIL FUEL RESERVES. I guess you haven't noticed the fact that these are generally under the control of a PRICE SYSTEM that takes into account such depletion as it happens, when it happens, and communicates that depletion rapidly over the entire planet's population, requiring no special translation into anyone's "native language"? That's taking ACTION, my friend, whether it fits into your narrow little worldview of what constitutes ACTION. (Which I guess probably is only "pass a buncha laws regulating daily human behavior", eh?)
This shows how well you've been brainwashed. The country is full of wanna-be conservatives who believe that the free market is the cure for everything that ails the world. (I say "wanna-be" because real conservatives aren't dumb enough to believe their own propaganda. A real conservative knows when to dump his dogshit stock and leave his wanna-bes like you holding 401k accounts full of dogshit.) In the case of fossil-fuel reserves, the free market only goes so far. As the cost of oil goes up, more and more oilfields become profitable to use, so the supply increases to meet demand. This doesn't mean that the reserves are somehow an infinite resource. The system is going to constantly move toward a final state where the rate at which oil is consumed equals the rate at which it is created. When this happens, the cost of a gallon of gasoline will have risen to astronomical levels, entirely due to free market forces. Most people would describe this as "no more oil". You can debate and say this won't happen in our lifetimes, and you'd be right- it won't. But it will certainly happen before the sun explodes, definitely within 1000 years.
I should also like to point out that you aren't my friend.
And OVERPOPULATION? Are you NUTS? The biggest problem with Western Civ today may well be the fact that it is DECLINING IN POPULATION. That's right, what happens when people become educated, wealthy, free, and respectful of laws and property rights, is they STOP INCREASING THEIR POPULATION. Every time.
Did you think I was directing some attack at you personally, or at any specific country? The world is bigger than the U.S.A., and overpopulation is generally not considered a problem in the West because it isn't one. (We're educated/wealthy/free/fat/happy here.) The issue centers around places like China and India. Do you see any solution to the overpopulation in India?
That's why people like YOU are the biggest threat to humanity's survivability. You refuse to accept the fact that people are, everywhere, ACTING on their own initiative to insure THEIR and their offspring's survival, and since you don't particularly like their actions and hate the steps they take (e.g., drive their children around in SUVs, which are SAFER and do jack-squat to the environment compared to any other vehicle worth driving), YOU are the sort of person who will use FORCE to IMPOSE YOUR WILL on them, REDUCING their practical ability to SURVIVE whatever comes down the pike.
This paragraph is full of laughs. The quote that SUVs "do jack-squat to the environment compared to any other vehicle worth driving" is my favorite. Did it have the American flag already on it as an option when you bought it?
I'd rather let those "guys on radio talk shows" you claim "flatly deny we should do anything involving any sort of personal or national sacrifice" rule than someone like YOU. At least they let EACH of us decide WHAT we will sacrifice, WHEN we will sacrifice, HOW we will sacrifice it, based on what WE each think is best for humanity as WE see it, compared to someone like YOU, who insists everyone march to YOUR silly little tune.
Dude, I was only making an abstract point about how it's human nature not to act on a threat that's more than 100 years away. I'm sorry if I insulted your personal God somehow, since you seem to have really taken this personally. I have a suspicion though that if Rush was president, the situation wouldn't be as rosy as you imagine.
What's with all the capitalized words anyway? Can't you express yourself in writing without resorting to shouts?
The 581% figure is from an authentic spam. Haven't you gotten it before?
I remember seeing that, and commenting to a friend of mine how that was an example of a statistic with high precision and low accuracy.
My favorite spam is the one about how Fortune 500 companies are looking for losers to work from home using their computers. That and the one offering diplomas from "prestigious, non-accredited" universities. Although it stops being funny the 200th time you see it.
Also, you should stop smoking. If you need help there are many people out there selling quality stop-smoking products. Just post your email address in any public forum and they'll be in touch with you.
>> "Nobody writes applets anymore."
> I think many multi-million (and even billion) dollar companies would disagree. Applets are still used a lot... on intranets, where they're well suited.
Applets are a good technology in general, and held some promise. I think they got killed by several things:
-poor JVM performance in browsers, with broken 1.1 support, inconsistent API support, etc.
-Inconsistent methods for signing applets in Netscape and IE
-people's impatience with properly implemented security (especially with the applet "sandbox" security model) favored things like ActiveX (which takes the typical MS approach to security: "you clicked OK, so anything that happens now is your fault").
-the common misconception (widespread in the computer press) that Java is simply an inferior way of doing what Flash does better, that Java and Flash are even suited for the same tasks at all, and that the success of Flash indicates the coming demise of Java.
I agree that in a controlled environment like an Intranet, none of these (aside from people's attitudes) present an insurmountable obstacle.
Yeah, like what? I think you're talking about applets and bugs in 4 year old JVMs. Nobody writes applets anymore.
I work with AWT all the time, on a networked scientific application. We used it because 1/3 of our customers use Macs and some use Linux. Once in a while something hits a snag on one OS or another. You're coding against different libraries, so sometimes you run into JVM bugs. Usually it means you don't know what the hell you're doing and you're relying too heavily on an implementation detail of a particular JVM, instead of sticking to the spec. But it usually turns out to be a one line fix.
What were you doing to break AWT?
The CLR allows Microsoft to promote garbage-collected languages in toto. This includes C++, which now has MS extensions to allow garbage collection. You can reserve your own counsel on the topic of extensions to a language, but it works, I'll say that for it.
:)
.NET better the first time I saw it... when it was called Java."
I think you should have stopped after the first seven words of your post.
Note this does not mean you can just compile different languages to the CLR, but reuse code at runtime from code written in other languages.
Could you explain to me the difference between these two statements? What prevents you from doing either one with a JVM?
.NET would make a good David Spade joke. "I liked
American Scientist had a really good article on this back in 1996.
Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
"If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
Can you see the mistake in his logic?
(Note: I'm not positive this guy is from Microsoft, but for the hell of it I'll assume he is. A disproportionately high number of Microsoft employees are bound to be reading this thread in any case- unless they're all at "backslashdot.org".)
.NET is to make Java irrelevant. Even you seem to be convinced Java is already dead.
.NET, the point seems to be creating a copy of Java with a 1-to-1 mapping to every concept in it- from the JVM ("CLR") on up to the language itself. This fits the standard MS pattern; every technology Microsoft has ever produced is an incompatible imitation of an existing successful technology. Java might not be the best technology; in fact it has some real flaws- but it's successful, so you've copied it, flaws and all. Except you aren't calling it Java, you're calling it something else- because dammit, if people aren't going to let you royally screw something up with your "innovation", you're just going to go off and play with your own toys! Funny how you make the C# to Java migration path so short. I'm sure I could learn all the differences between C# and Java in twenty minutes. In fact, I'm sure someone could write a book "C# for Java programmers" with ten pages in it, that I could finish on the toilet in one sitting. I'm not going to bother. I remember all too well the stunts you played, how you refused to support standard APIs and kept coming out with your own oddball Windows-only crap, how you made my programs not work unless I wrote MS and non-MS versions of everything. Now all of a sudden you're going to make it easy for me? Screw you. You've completely alienated all your target developers. Now nobody trusts you.
What kind of Enterprise or large business consults Internet Polls for business decision-making?
You'd be surprised. People get promoted until they reach a level at which they're incompetent. They have no idea what they should be doing. They're too scared to ask anyone what technology is appropriate for their situation, because that would reveal their incompetency. They want someone to tell them what to do. They desperately want to know what everyone else is doing, and what everyone else is going to be doing in five years. They hunger for safe decisions. They fall for FUD tactics easily. Why do you think so many shops use things like VB, ASP, and IIS? Being (obviously) from Microsoft, you must surely appreciate the tactical advantages to be gained from marketing your products to such people. Stop acting like they don't exist; they're your bread and butter.
You too are considering MS was acting as a collective... where do you stand on the bogey man and the tooth fairy?
Ummm, it really doesn't matter whether the rigging was done by MS as a "collective" or by individual idiots at MS forwarding parameterized URLs to each other. What really stands out to most observers is the way you're always faithful to your stereotype, whether you're acting as a single company or a collection of individuals. The fact is that you fools got caught rigging a poll, and your own poorly-designed technology is what gave you away! Now you have egg on your face, and everyone's opinion of you has been reaffirmed yet again.
The whole point of
Well, you could say the whole point of any Microsoft technology is to make non-Microsoft technologies "irrelevant". In the case of
I'll only learn C# when I'm forced to use it, most likely by some middle management bonehead who's seen a rigged poll.
... because everyone knows online polls aren't statistically valid by any stretch of the imagination.
In your dreams. NOT everyone knows this, and even if they do know it, they're still likely to use these stupid polls when forming an opinion.
When teenagers buy some stock and talk it up in chat rooms before dumping it, they get in trouble even though the rumors they spread obviously have no statistical validity. Most people are innumerate and don't base their buying decisions on statistically valid information. They're influenced by stupid stuff like online polls and rumors. Part of the blame lies with zdnet for running a stupid online poll like this one. Their crime is laziness- a good poll is more work and takes more time. Easier to throw a stupid script on the site and see what happens. But most of the blame belongs squarely on the people at MS who tampered with the information.
This poll wasn't something like "Who's your favorite Spice Girl?". Its intended audience is the clueless IT guy who's got a limited budget and is faced with a decision on whether to use MS or non-MS technology for a given project. The only conceivable purpose of the poll manipulation was to sway these people. How is pumping up a worthless stock any worse than pumping up a worthless technology?
Web polls are inherently untrustworthy. Everyone knows this. No big deal.
You and your friends know this. Lots of people don't. I would even say that the people most likely to be swayed by this poll are the ones who control the largest amounts of technology spending.
Here is an example of a Java Trojan, which needs to be run from the command line as an application (it won't run as an applet).
This exploit code can infect your computer with harmful executables that are sent via email attachments.
public class ScaryTrojan {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office\\OUTLOOK.EXE");
}
catch (Exception e) {;}
}
}
Human foresight doesn't extend beyond timescales longer than two or three human lifetimes. It's just human nature. Look at the resistance to taking any action against far more immediate threats (global warming, overpopulation, depletion of fossil fuel reserves, etc.). If the rise in temperature per year stays below a certain rate, people will drive SUVs around until the atmosphere reaches the boiling point of gasoline. People care about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but generations beyond that, they only care about in a sort of theoretical sense. Ever hear about that $10 that would be worth $9 million today if it were put in a bank in 1801 and left to accrue interest until now? And yet not one of my ancestors in 1801 seems to have cared about me having $9 million.
So I have to laugh when I see people suggesting that the human race will carry out these wild survival plans that require 200-300 million years for their execution. Nobody will act on a threat from the sun even when it's a million years off, because nobody seriously worries about what's going to happen to their descendants that far in the future. If the sun were even going to explode in a thousand years, you would still be hearing guys on radio talk shows flatly denying that we should do anything involving any sort of personal or national sacrifice.
They've done this for years, from the very beginning. They outsourced the original version of MS-DOS.
From your post, YOU obviously don't get it. When a teenager releases a trojan on the public, It causes millions and sometimes billions of dollars worth of damage.
This is commonly (although not always) true, but is irrelevant to the point he was making, which sailed over your head. He was saying that prosecutorial resources are applied preferentially to individuals as opposed to corporations. If a backdoor/Trojan is released by a corporation, it arouses little attention. If a teenager writes a similar program they're all over him in a heartbeat! Just take a look at all the Trojans that are being released by shady software companies. Go down the list. Some of them are so obnoxious that they are reported by antivirus utilities. If a teenager wrote some of these, he'd be in serious trouble! He'd be in jail waiting for his military tribunal. The corporations that produce these programs operate in plain sight with no fear of prosecution. The law hasn't caught up with technology. It's still tiptoeing around the issue of spammers. But it's certainly caught up to the teenaged miscreants, hasn't it?
Think about this: awhile back, I updated my linux server to the latest version of the kernal at the time. It corrupted my FS, and thus I lost months of valuable work. SHOULD LINUS BE RESPONSIBLE? If the answer to this is yes, then software companies should also be responsible for releasing spyware.
This is an exceptionally silly point. First of all, Linux is free and comes with no stated legal guarantees. There is nobody to sue. Second, Linus didn't design the patch with the intention that it would corrupt your filesystem. If a company releases software that corrupts my computer on purpose, I would hope that they would be nailed to the wall. I don't know what legislation would pertain to that situation but there certainly doesn't seem to be any prohibiting spyware.
I heard Peter Jackson is giving Al Gore a cameo in the Two Towers. He plays one of the Ents.