The problem is those machines aren't actually the spammer, they are comprimised machines that the spammer is controlling.
Although, it seems to me like it would be a nice project to send a Comcast truck around the neighborhood with a list of comprimised machines, armed with a laptop running an ethernet sniffer, then use that information to track down who's controlling the machines.
Only problem is that it probably leads to machines not within the reach of US-based subopaenas.
First, Microsoft can't keep up with every possible exploit, so they don't even try. This is why they have yet to tackle viruses and trojans. Heck most of the virus companies aren't doing trojans, either.
Second, most of the fine-grained ability to really solve these sorts of problems is beyond your average user. If they had a switch to turn off BHOs, people would turn them off and then wonder why the WhizBangSuperBHO application they just downloaded doesn't work and wouldn't think to make the connection. Plus, there's no real concept of a proper sandbox, nor is there much ability to do it properly, if the default install gives everybody root.
Third, a page or internal site that uses ActiveX, BHOs, and other Microsoft-only technologies is a page or internal site that doesn't work under Opera or Mozilla. So by disabling such things, they risk turning back the clock towards standards that they've been enticing web designers with.
Fourth, spyware folks *cough*gator*cough* have a tendancy to sue their foes. Which is probably without basis, but still could cause Microsoft to have weird injunctions if they got too active about it.
The problem, and the advantage for the rest of the market, is that all of this hurts Microsoft, if they do anything, or if they don't.
In fact, there's some damn clueless stuff out there for banks online presence. Like storing passwords in touch-tone format, where it doesn't matter if you use A, B, or C if the password has an A in it. Or blindly assuming that one's SSN is secure.
The problem is, right now, the incremental cost in programming and potential bad-will to have stronger authentication are generally more expensive than writing off some small percentage of loss from these sorts of things.
Although the one-time-password thing is a damn good idea, I have to say.
You have to remember that the stock market is not a zero-sum game. It doesn't help that there's no good way to value a corporation, which clouds things slightly.
However, the "value" of a company changes over time. I put that in quotes, because there's no exact number that your average trader can figure out, but for convenience, we'll assume that there is. When you buy a stock, you are paying $X for $Y of value, where X > Y.
Now, let's say that nobody has bought or sold the stock, but the stock price has gone up in price. What happened? Well, sometimes that means that the stock is in the middle of a bubble and is trading too far above real value and is due for a crash. But sometimes that just means that the value of the company has increased. For example, the company could have twice the sales this year as last year. This means that your stock is suddenly more valuable.
If the value doesn't change, then we are talking about a zero-sum game (i.e. gambling) Generally, day trading is most likely to be in this area. However, if the value does change, then everybody wins and nobody actually loses money (Not even the customers, who are just exchanging a service for money)
I mean, who lost money so that you can earn interest on your savings account? You lent the bank money, they pay you interest for the service and then proceed to loan out your money to other who pay *them* for the service.
The big thing about the rules for information is that it's necessary for everybody to have a potentially equal crack (assuming you want to pay for the databases) at the information. Protecting their "partners" is not really a part of it, especially because it's the federal government who is actually requiring the information to be filed.
The only real exchange-specific rules are about who is allowed to view the data in "real time", because that's a valuable commoditiy. Which is generally a one-sided thing -- you pay the exchange a certain amount per real-time user, they give you the real time data. Anybody with the cash who follows the rules (i.e. there are a bunch of requirements about how you can display a price depending on what kind of trade the last one was) can sign up.
The real problem is getting a reliable (i.e. non screen-scraped from Yahoo and preferebly scrubbed for accuracy) set of data and storing it.
And, even if they'd *like* to, exchange rules *forbid* vendors from giving away real-time (i.e. non delayed-by-20-minutes) feeds.
I think, for the most part, if you don't have a lot of money, sophisticated tools are a waste of time, because you'd get better results putting them into mutual funds, bonds, ETFs, and savings accounts. If you've got a lot of money, the cost for some good tools (and a data vendor who properly scrubs the data) is money well spent.
It'd be a bargan at ten times the price, I suspect.
I mean, the big thing is that a few million to really take a good look at it and answer these sorts of questions. Compared to the benefits from being able to get stuff to and from orbit for incredibly low costs, and the cool stuff that then becomes possible, that's small change.
Plus, if it doesn't work out, there's a few *other* teather systems that could work as acceptable substitutes, so I doubt the research would be entirely wasted.
Already taken into account. In fact, it relies on them. The endpoint is in geosynch orbit, where a orbiting satelite will hover over a specific point, to keep it properly tensioned.
Apparently the major remaining problem is mass production of an approprately strong nanotube. You have to remember that this isn't fully nanotech, it's just a chemical arangement of carbon atoms, so it doesn't require all of the nano-crap that the nanotechnology people have been going along about for so long.
I mean, the thing is, chemical rockets will only take you so far. So it's money well spent, for what the potential benefits would be.
However, you do have to remember that a lot of classified information that would result in really major problems for many governments travels, encrypted, over the airwaves, on a regular basis. A cryptosystem isn't called secure unless it can't be broken in a reasonable amount of time, even if the bad guy knows your algorythm, and even if the bad guy is able to observe your transmissions.
Basicly, what the entire WEP debacle has shown is that when you are transmitting over the airwaves, the importance of secure encryption increases. And that if you are going to make a widespread standard for encryption, you had better check it out with some folks who know encryption first.
I think that the rights have been, at least partially, purchased by the Discovery Chanel. I know, at the very least, that they were the ones paying for the Alpha Jet's flight.
The problem is that Unix really wouldn't like not having an/etc/passwd file available for stuff.
However, you do have to remember that most accounts on reasonable-sized ISPs don't include shell accounts anymore, so it's probably not as big of a thing anymore.
Well, that, and on a Learjet, the engines aren't necessarily designed for sustained inverted flight. You'd run out of lubrication if you tried to do that, sustained.
Because they wanted the most forward and breakthrough project, because that's what it had been billed as.
Furthermore, the possibilities for the Delta Clipper weren't quite good enough, so they were hoping that a revolutionary VentureStar would have given them everything they wanted, with no penalties.
The problem is, a vehicle that you build and never manage to fly doesn't really help especially much. But NASA never realized it. There's a reason why the military often does fly-offs between two competing designs...
Bringing one's dog to work is fine.. until you hire somebody who is either deathly afraid of dogs, or is merely alergic to them.
Oh yeah, and all of the really stupid pet owners who can't control their animal, nor clean up after them, doesn't help your case. Usually ends up being part of the lease agreement.
Which is really too bad, because that would be nice.
However, I'm not sure you are drawing the *right* conclusion about cubicles. They are fine for some roles, but for programmers, I don't think they are the greatest idea.
Really, you want offices with at least two of the sides transparent. I really think that, for programmers, real walls are worth it.
Cubicles are a reasonable balance, for general office employees, which Programmers are not always.
Actually, the Russians were far more cavalier about safety than the Americans were.
The main reason why we beat them to the moon was because we had less infighting throughout, because we had smaller boosters at the beginning (which forced us to shrink the size of our electronics), and because we were able to pull off making the Saturn V (Wheras the Proton was too small and the N1 was too broken because of infighting).
Oddly enough, the Russian way of doing things actually has worked out well for them, once they stopped accidentally killing people in their mad rush to space. Russian designs tend to be simple, reliable, and sturdy, which all tends to mean that maintaining them is easier.
It's merely a scaling problem. More propellant = more delta-V.
The fuel is of the same level of efficency as most other common rocket fuels (solid / LOX+Kerosine).
So really all you need is more propellant, and a better heat shield, both of which are "solved" technology.
The thing is, Pournelle tends to be of the opinion that TSTO was the better idea and I tend to agree with him. The neat thing about SS1/WK is that improvements in either craft mean better performance. One of Rutan's rumored projects is a turborocket, which would have WK able to reach a much higher altitude, which would therefore mean a heavier SS1 or a higher trajectory.
It's also probably the case that a inexpensive WK-launched expendable booster might be able to give Pegasus a run for their money.
You need a *lot* of approvals to operate even experimentally in space. Rutan has been going on in public about how this is only a prototype and there's no way in hell he's going to be able to do it commercially because the differences in regulation.
The problem is that the past experience with boosters is ~95% reliability, which means that every 20th rocket blows up, usually catastrophically. So folks aren't going to be comfortable until we've got more of an airliner-like reliability going.
The whole sub-orbital space industry is wanting to be able to do things like that, however. The only difference between ASAsoP and a joyride weather there's organs or people in the back seat.
They are not even trying for an X-prize run this time around. They haven't notified the judges that they are going to make an attempt.
Which, given that they are in the lead, I iamgine that they are going to draw things out a little bit.
I mean, if they are confident in the design, they may fly it crewed and allow a few honored folks to ride passenger (Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, etc) for the actual prize flights.
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The problem is those machines aren't actually the spammer, they are comprimised machines that the spammer is controlling.
Although, it seems to me like it would be a nice project to send a Comcast truck around the neighborhood with a list of comprimised machines, armed with a laptop running an ethernet sniffer, then use that information to track down who's controlling the machines.
Only problem is that it probably leads to machines not within the reach of US-based subopaenas.
Nope, the problem is that cutting yourself with the blade is only one of the *many* ways you can hurt or kill yourself with power tools.
I'm mostly thinking about the fun tendancy of a table saw to fling wood at you if you aren't careful.
There's a bunch of stuff going on.
First, Microsoft can't keep up with every possible exploit, so they don't even try. This is why they have yet to tackle viruses and trojans. Heck most of the virus companies aren't doing trojans, either.
Second, most of the fine-grained ability to really solve these sorts of problems is beyond your average user. If they had a switch to turn off BHOs, people would turn them off and then wonder why the WhizBangSuperBHO application they just downloaded doesn't work and wouldn't think to make the connection. Plus, there's no real concept of a proper sandbox, nor is there much ability to do it properly, if the default install gives everybody root.
Third, a page or internal site that uses ActiveX, BHOs, and other Microsoft-only technologies is a page or internal site that doesn't work under Opera or Mozilla. So by disabling such things, they risk turning back the clock towards standards that they've been enticing web designers with.
Fourth, spyware folks *cough*gator*cough* have a tendancy to sue their foes. Which is probably without basis, but still could cause Microsoft to have weird injunctions if they got too active about it.
The problem, and the advantage for the rest of the market, is that all of this hurts Microsoft, if they do anything, or if they don't.
Yes.
In fact, there's some damn clueless stuff out there for banks online presence. Like storing passwords in touch-tone format, where it doesn't matter if you use A, B, or C if the password has an A in it. Or blindly assuming that one's SSN is secure.
The problem is, right now, the incremental cost in programming and potential bad-will to have stronger authentication are generally more expensive than writing off some small percentage of loss from these sorts of things.
Although the one-time-password thing is a damn good idea, I have to say.
That's not actually how the stock market works.
You have to remember that the stock market is not a zero-sum game. It doesn't help that there's no good way to value a corporation, which clouds things slightly.
However, the "value" of a company changes over time. I put that in quotes, because there's no exact number that your average trader can figure out, but for convenience, we'll assume that there is. When you buy a stock, you are paying $X for $Y of value, where X > Y.
Now, let's say that nobody has bought or sold the stock, but the stock price has gone up in price. What happened? Well, sometimes that means that the stock is in the middle of a bubble and is trading too far above real value and is due for a crash. But sometimes that just means that the value of the company has increased. For example, the company could have twice the sales this year as last year. This means that your stock is suddenly more valuable.
If the value doesn't change, then we are talking about a zero-sum game (i.e. gambling) Generally, day trading is most likely to be in this area. However, if the value does change, then everybody wins and nobody actually loses money (Not even the customers, who are just exchanging a service for money)
I mean, who lost money so that you can earn interest on your savings account? You lent the bank money, they pay you interest for the service and then proceed to loan out your money to other who pay *them* for the service.
The big thing about the rules for information is that it's necessary for everybody to have a potentially equal crack (assuming you want to pay for the databases) at the information. Protecting their "partners" is not really a part of it, especially because it's the federal government who is actually requiring the information to be filed.
The only real exchange-specific rules are about who is allowed to view the data in "real time", because that's a valuable commoditiy. Which is generally a one-sided thing -- you pay the exchange a certain amount per real-time user, they give you the real time data. Anybody with the cash who follows the rules (i.e. there are a bunch of requirements about how you can display a price depending on what kind of trade the last one was) can sign up.
The real problem is getting a reliable (i.e. non screen-scraped from Yahoo and preferebly scrubbed for accuracy) set of data and storing it.
And, even if they'd *like* to, exchange rules *forbid* vendors from giving away real-time (i.e. non delayed-by-20-minutes) feeds.
I think, for the most part, if you don't have a lot of money, sophisticated tools are a waste of time, because you'd get better results putting them into mutual funds, bonds, ETFs, and savings accounts. If you've got a lot of money, the cost for some good tools (and a data vendor who properly scrubs the data) is money well spent.
That's actually worked out.
It's some reasonably small number of launches to send up a few strands, just enough to allow the climber to work.
From there, you start a climber on the base and send up more and more strands, until it's strong enough.
It'd be a bargan at ten times the price, I suspect.
I mean, the big thing is that a few million to really take a good look at it and answer these sorts of questions. Compared to the benefits from being able to get stuff to and from orbit for incredibly low costs, and the cool stuff that then becomes possible, that's small change.
Plus, if it doesn't work out, there's a few *other* teather systems that could work as acceptable substitutes, so I doubt the research would be entirely wasted.
Radiation shielding is a well-understood problem. It just takes some extra mass.
Already taken into account. In fact, it relies on them. The endpoint is in geosynch orbit, where a orbiting satelite will hover over a specific point, to keep it properly tensioned.
Apparently the major remaining problem is mass production of an approprately strong nanotube. You have to remember that this isn't fully nanotech, it's just a chemical arangement of carbon atoms, so it doesn't require all of the nano-crap that the nanotechnology people have been going along about for so long.
I mean, the thing is, chemical rockets will only take you so far. So it's money well spent, for what the potential benefits would be.
Perhaps.
However, you do have to remember that a lot of classified information that would result in really major problems for many governments travels, encrypted, over the airwaves, on a regular basis. A cryptosystem isn't called secure unless it can't be broken in a reasonable amount of time, even if the bad guy knows your algorythm, and even if the bad guy is able to observe your transmissions.
Basicly, what the entire WEP debacle has shown is that when you are transmitting over the airwaves, the importance of secure encryption increases. And that if you are going to make a widespread standard for encryption, you had better check it out with some folks who know encryption first.
I think that the rights have been, at least partially, purchased by the Discovery Chanel. I know, at the very least, that they were the ones paying for the Alpha Jet's flight.
The problem is that Unix really wouldn't like not having an /etc/passwd file available for stuff.
However, you do have to remember that most accounts on reasonable-sized ISPs don't include shell accounts anymore, so it's probably not as big of a thing anymore.
Well, that, and on a Learjet, the engines aren't necessarily designed for sustained inverted flight. You'd run out of lubrication if you tried to do that, sustained.
Because they wanted the most forward and breakthrough project, because that's what it had been billed as.
Furthermore, the possibilities for the Delta Clipper weren't quite good enough, so they were hoping that a revolutionary VentureStar would have given them everything they wanted, with no penalties.
The problem is, a vehicle that you build and never manage to fly doesn't really help especially much. But NASA never realized it. There's a reason why the military often does fly-offs between two competing designs...
Bringing one's dog to work is fine.. until you hire somebody who is either deathly afraid of dogs, or is merely alergic to them.
Oh yeah, and all of the really stupid pet owners who can't control their animal, nor clean up after them, doesn't help your case. Usually ends up being part of the lease agreement.
Which is really too bad, because that would be nice.
Very good point...
However, I'm not sure you are drawing the *right* conclusion about cubicles. They are fine for some roles, but for programmers, I don't think they are the greatest idea.
Really, you want offices with at least two of the sides transparent. I really think that, for programmers, real walls are worth it.
Cubicles are a reasonable balance, for general office employees, which Programmers are not always.
Sounds like a great idea, but you have to remember that space technology generally ends up being also useful for making ICBMs.
:/
Thus, you'd attract a *lot* of US government attention.
Actually, the Russians were far more cavalier about safety than the Americans were.
The main reason why we beat them to the moon was because we had less infighting throughout, because we had smaller boosters at the beginning (which forced us to shrink the size of our electronics), and because we were able to pull off making the Saturn V (Wheras the Proton was too small and the N1 was too broken because of infighting).
Oddly enough, the Russian way of doing things actually has worked out well for them, once they stopped accidentally killing people in their mad rush to space. Russian designs tend to be simple, reliable, and sturdy, which all tends to mean that maintaining them is easier.
It's merely a scaling problem. More propellant = more delta-V.
The fuel is of the same level of efficency as most other common rocket fuels (solid / LOX+Kerosine).
So really all you need is more propellant, and a better heat shield, both of which are "solved" technology.
The thing is, Pournelle tends to be of the opinion that TSTO was the better idea and I tend to agree with him. The neat thing about SS1/WK is that improvements in either craft mean better performance. One of Rutan's rumored projects is a turborocket,
which would have WK able to reach a much higher altitude, which would therefore mean a heavier SS1 or a higher trajectory.
It's also probably the case that a inexpensive WK-launched expendable booster might be able to give Pegasus a run for their money.
I, too, will be there.
;)
We're driving there after dinner from Ventura because we figure that the line is going to be starting before 3:00 AM.
You need a *lot* of approvals to operate even experimentally in space. Rutan has been going on in public about how this is only a prototype and there's no way in hell he's going to be able to do it commercially because the differences in regulation.
The problem is that the past experience with boosters is ~95% reliability, which means that every 20th rocket blows up, usually catastrophically. So folks aren't going to be comfortable until we've got more of an airliner-like reliability going.
The whole sub-orbital space industry is wanting to be able to do things like that, however. The only difference between ASAsoP and a joyride weather there's organs or people in the back seat.
Last time he hit 3.5Gs. I doubt that they will want it to go too much more than that operationally, because it's not good for the pilot.
They are not even trying for an X-prize run this time around. They haven't notified the judges that they are going to make an attempt.
Which, given that they are in the lead, I iamgine that they are going to draw things out a little bit.
I mean, if they are confident in the design, they may fly it crewed and allow a few honored folks to ride passenger (Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, etc) for the actual prize flights.