When has "what the market wants" been a primary concern for Microsoft?
Always. You really cannot sell products the market does not demand. The trick is to shape the market in such a way that everyone wants -- or needs, or believes to need -- the product.
For example, I recall a recent article where the FBI had arrested people merely for clicking links to a porn site they had set up. Are you really safe from such operations and the general tendency of Government agencies to monitor activity these days when your computer is in effect programmed to click links for you?
Yes, if links are commonly "clicked" by rogue security software, and everybody understands this, then you are really safe.
I, for one, am really glad it's the psychologists who don't know Math. Just image what would happen if it was engineers or computer scientists who didn't!
Use LaTeX instead of plain TeX, it allows you to concentrate on content without the distraction of presentation.
\section{Sure}
% TODO: rewrite this paragraph
LaTeX allows you to concentrate on content\footnote{If you are able to ignore all the clutter in your text that makes it illegible.}. There is \emph{no distraction} whatsoever.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
You're missing the point of using LaTeX. While it is true that LaTeX makes it very easy to add equations to a dissertation, the biggest problem with using Word is that you're constantly dealing with the formatting of your document rather than actually writing the content of your document.
This is a lie^H^H^Hbiased view of reality, which has been repeated over and over again ever since this pamphlet appeared about 10 years ago. I don't know what the state of affairs was at that time. Anyway, today it is perfectly possible to do structural markup in Word or any other decent word processor. You don't have to deal with formatting at all, you leave this to the designer of the template you are using. What you gain by choosing a word processor over 80s-style LaTeX is usability: you will actually see the text you are producing (and not an unreadable mixture of text and program code), and you will be able to add out-of-band comments to very specific parts of your product. You will also get an online help that is not powered by Google and mailing list archives. Try it, it works.
Sounds good but isn't a valid point. Politics is responsible to todays population. If it weren't we would call it dictatorship. Claiming to do good to someone nobody can ask inevitably leads to dictatorship: "Your grandgrandchildren may live in communist paradise some day if only you accept dictatorship of the proletariat today, which is a prerequisite for communist paradise." So if you are trying to convince me of whichever political idea of yours, please tell me why it is good for me or at least to somebody I might talk to for verification of your claims. Otherwise your claims are in no way different from, say, the idea that we should prepare for a giant spacecraft to arrive some time soon to pick up those of us who did prepare -- indistinguishable from plain nonsense.
Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes.
And actually using this feature as part of the user interface isn't new either. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen described the nature of URLs as a part a Web site's user interface.
Primarily this thought experiment speaks against the notion of war crime. The whole point of war is to use violence and deadly force to subject a country to your rule. If you don't like that, don't go to war.
Embedding credit card data of the legitimate user into files makes a lot of sense if
The files are for personal use only,
Everybody knows about it,
The data can be read out by everyone, and
The data cannot be removed without severely damaging the file's content.
Note that I have not the slightest idea whether there is a technology that could achieve the actual embedding meeting conditions (3) and (4). If there was, however, it would make sense to use it: what else could motivate the legitimate owner of such a file any better to make sure the file will not end up being traded in a file sharing network? I'm serious about it, such a technology could change the economics of file sharing. Well, unless somebody invents disposable credit card numbers. Oh, wait...
A lot of new jobs and economic opportunities will be created, but I don't see how it's a "fuckup".
Creating jobs is generally a bad thing, as it implies that more human lifetime will be wasted. Soviet Russia and its satellites for instance created lots of jobs, actually enough to guarantee a job for everyone and still have not enough workers. I suppose you know how this creation of jobs ended, and that this broken approach to national economy was successfully replaced with a system that systematically reduces the number of jobs.
The real problem is that huge american companies are NOT willing to find out the truth, whatever it is. Why? Because if it turns out that global warming COULD be caused by them, and that it COULD have negative consequences for the rest of the world, they COULD lose their big buckets o' money.
This is utter bullshit. Companies exist to one well-defined end: to make money for their owners. Companies thus are the least susceptible to politics and political opinions. Companies just calculate, and if their markets change they will develop new ways of doing business and earning money for their owners. Or occasionally give up and stop making money for their owners.
2) If mankind has nothing to do with it, we need to find a way to artificially slow it down.
Do me a favor, keep your fucking hands off the climate under which I live. All you need to do is this: talk to a doctor NOW. Your world domination plan is just insane.
Anyway, they let you choose a color and background pattern (or even your own picture). When you visit their website, it displays that picture and color. This is extremely difficult for phishing sites to emulate.
It's pretty simple, actually. All the phishing site has to do is to fetch the color and picture from the real bank site, pretending to be the user.
The point isn't to make it expensive, it's to improve security.
To improve security, really? Unfortunately, a site having a.bank TLD does not convey any additional information to the user. Let's assume you are a bank customer and thus, a potential phishing victim. You will probably have at most a handful of banks that you do business with. All the addresses of all the online banking sites you ever interact with fit on a sticker that you can put below your screen. What exactly is the additional information you would get from all the addresses ending in.bank?
I'm also confused by the overwhelmingly negative reaction. Most of the complaints about this.bank suggestion fall under the category of "It doesn't solve problem X, therefore it's a worthless security measure."
They are trying to be polite. For those who fail to understand the point, let me express it this way: The entire.bank proposal is utter bullshit. The real problem of phsihing and related attacks (namely pharming and Trojans) is pretty simple: doing business over a compromised channel. We do have security mechanisms such as SSL that in theory protect the channel, but they fail as they ultimately rely on the user. And today we know that the average user is unable to reliably detect compromised channels even if provided with security indicators. So how exactly would a.bank TLD solve this problem or any part thereof?
I'm disappointed - Mikko's answers pretty much gloss over the real question, which is "Will it work?", ignoring all the technical arguments, and only answering the easy questions.
Of course it will work, if you take it for what it really is: a cleverly designed domain registrar business model. As a business model, it is surprisingly similar to how phishing works. Approach many for little money, break even on a very small number of respondents. At a price of... how much? 50,000? per domain it is s safe to assume that your first 5 vict^H^H^H^Hcustomers will cover all the operational cost you will ever have.
I have a phone, can't we use that as the second channel?
We can, and some banks in Germany offer this already. The scheme is called mTAN (mobile transaction number). Postbank, one of the prime target of phishing attacks, was the first to offer it. First, the customer has to register a mobile phone to be associated with the bank account. The registration process is somewhat long-winded but needs to be passed only once; obviously it needs to be secure against manipulation and abuse.
Once a phone has been registered with the bank, it can be used to authorize transactions. Whenever somebody initiates an online transaction with the bank, the bank will send a message to the previously registered phone. At this point all transaction details have been sent to the bank's system already and they cannot be changed any more without initiating a transaction. The message contains important transaction details, such as the target account and amount for a money transfer, along with a 6-digit code. In order to complete the transaction the account holder needs to enter this code, which is valid only for this particular transaction and only for a few minutes. If the code is not entered during this short period of time, the transaction is dismissed.
Another clever way of doing two-factor authentication (or rather, authorization) is based on cryptographic tokens. Those can be used not only to create one-time passwords but also as kind of an independent signature device. In order to create the authorization code for an individual transaction, the bank customer has to enter transaction details such as the target account number into the token. The token then calculates a code from its input, a key and other parameters such as time or a counter. Again, the transaction can only be completed by entering a code that matches the details submitted.
If every piece of every half-baked paper will cost $50 to read it, a typical researcher will end up with no viable access to any sort of external research.
Makes it easier to ign^H^H^Hdiscuss related work in your papers: the author controls the amount reviewers had to spent to verify claims and check for omissions.
... We can't be certain.... ... That's not enough to be certain... ... We're not certain it's a bit disaster...
Repeat less, understand more. You are damn right, we can't be certain about predictions of the future. After repeating this several times, however, you attempt to make a point based on your favorite prediction of the future:
If we do take action then it might mean we all end up less wealthy, maybe even out of work if we work in a polluting industry, but is that really so bad if the cost of doing nothing is potentially the end of the human race, or even the sum of life on Earth?
You seem pretty certain what taking or not taking action might lead to. But doing something is potentially the end of the human race, too. We are not talking about simple stuff like climate here, we are talking about complex systems such as societies. Small changes make a difference, an unpredictable one. What if your action turns into a religion some day? Do you really think you can predict what this will lead to after, say, 2000 years? Seems so, since this is the assumption you make without stating: that the action you want to take today will have no unforeseen negative side effects in the future. You fail to substantiate this claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Always. You really cannot sell products the market does not demand. The trick is to shape the market in such a way that everyone wants -- or needs, or believes to need -- the product.
Yes, if links are commonly "clicked" by rogue security software, and everybody understands this, then you are really safe.
I, for one, am really glad it's the psychologists who don't know Math. Just image what would happen if it was engineers or computer scientists who didn't!
\section{Sure}
% TODO: rewrite this paragraph
LaTeX allows you to concentrate on content\footnote{If you are able to ignore all the clutter in your text that makes it illegible.}. There is \emph{no distraction} whatsoever.
This is a lie^H^H^Hbiased view of reality, which has been repeated over and over again ever since this pamphlet appeared about 10 years ago. I don't know what the state of affairs was at that time. Anyway, today it is perfectly possible to do structural markup in Word or any other decent word processor. You don't have to deal with formatting at all, you leave this to the designer of the template you are using. What you gain by choosing a word processor over 80s-style LaTeX is usability: you will actually see the text you are producing (and not an unreadable mixture of text and program code), and you will be able to add out-of-band comments to very specific parts of your product. You will also get an online help that is not powered by Google and mailing list archives. Try it, it works.
Sounds good but isn't a valid point. Politics is responsible to todays population. If it weren't we would call it dictatorship. Claiming to do good to someone nobody can ask inevitably leads to dictatorship: "Your grandgrandchildren may live in communist paradise some day if only you accept dictatorship of the proletariat today, which is a prerequisite for communist paradise." So if you are trying to convince me of whichever political idea of yours, please tell me why it is good for me or at least to somebody I might talk to for verification of your claims. Otherwise your claims are in no way different from, say, the idea that we should prepare for a giant spacecraft to arrive some time soon to pick up those of us who did prepare -- indistinguishable from plain nonsense.
And actually using this feature as part of the user interface isn't new either. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen described the nature of URLs as a part a Web site's user interface.
Primarily this thought experiment speaks against the notion of war crime. The whole point of war is to use violence and deadly force to subject a country to your rule. If you don't like that, don't go to war.
Embedding credit card data of the legitimate user into files makes a lot of sense if
Note that I have not the slightest idea whether there is a technology that could achieve the actual embedding meeting conditions (3) and (4). If there was, however, it would make sense to use it: what else could motivate the legitimate owner of such a file any better to make sure the file will not end up being traded in a file sharing network? I'm serious about it, such a technology could change the economics of file sharing. Well, unless somebody invents disposable credit card numbers. Oh, wait ...
Creating jobs is generally a bad thing, as it implies that more human lifetime will be wasted. Soviet Russia and its satellites for instance created lots of jobs, actually enough to guarantee a job for everyone and still have not enough workers. I suppose you know how this creation of jobs ended, and that this broken approach to national economy was successfully replaced with a system that systematically reduces the number of jobs.
This is utter bullshit. Companies exist to one well-defined end: to make money for their owners. Companies thus are the least susceptible to politics and political opinions. Companies just calculate, and if their markets change they will develop new ways of doing business and earning money for their owners. Or occasionally give up and stop making money for their owners.
Do me a favor, keep your fucking hands off the climate under which I live. All you need to do is this: talk to a doctor NOW. Your world domination plan is just insane.
Past experience: Climate is not an issue. Mankind evolves well under the sun unless there is an ice age. No need to be worried.
There is a robust consensus among climate scientists that this is true, I suppose. But is it? If so, why?
There has been such a process. It is called history.
Paypal is about to become one, at least in Europe:
It's pretty simple, actually. All the phishing site has to do is to fetch the color and picture from the real bank site, pretending to be the user.
To improve security, really? Unfortunately, a site having a .bank TLD does not convey any additional information to the user. Let's assume you are a bank customer and thus, a potential phishing victim. You will probably have at most a handful of banks that you do business with. All the addresses of all the online banking sites you ever interact with fit on a sticker that you can put below your screen. What exactly is the additional information you would get from all the addresses ending in .bank?
They are trying to be polite. For those who fail to understand the point, let me express it this way: The entire .bank proposal is utter bullshit. The real problem of phsihing and related attacks (namely pharming and Trojans) is pretty simple: doing business over a compromised channel. We do have security mechanisms such as SSL that in theory protect the channel, but they fail as they ultimately rely on the user. And today we know that the average user is unable to reliably detect compromised channels even if provided with security indicators. So how exactly would a .bank TLD solve this problem or any part thereof?
They might stop immediately as they notice that selling .bank domains yields much higher profits.
Of course it will work, if you take it for what it really is: a cleverly designed domain registrar business model. As a business model, it is surprisingly similar to how phishing works. Approach many for little money, break even on a very small number of respondents. At a price of ... how much? 50,000? per domain it is s safe to assume that your first 5 vict^H^H^H^Hcustomers will cover all the operational cost you will ever have.
We can, and some banks in Germany offer this already. The scheme is called mTAN (mobile transaction number). Postbank, one of the prime target of phishing attacks, was the first to offer it. First, the customer has to register a mobile phone to be associated with the bank account. The registration process is somewhat long-winded but needs to be passed only once; obviously it needs to be secure against manipulation and abuse.
Once a phone has been registered with the bank, it can be used to authorize transactions. Whenever somebody initiates an online transaction with the bank, the bank will send a message to the previously registered phone. At this point all transaction details have been sent to the bank's system already and they cannot be changed any more without initiating a transaction. The message contains important transaction details, such as the target account and amount for a money transfer, along with a 6-digit code. In order to complete the transaction the account holder needs to enter this code, which is valid only for this particular transaction and only for a few minutes. If the code is not entered during this short period of time, the transaction is dismissed.
Another clever way of doing two-factor authentication (or rather, authorization) is based on cryptographic tokens. Those can be used not only to create one-time passwords but also as kind of an independent signature device. In order to create the authorization code for an individual transaction, the bank customer has to enter transaction details such as the target account number into the token. The token then calculates a code from its input, a key and other parameters such as time or a counter. Again, the transaction can only be completed by entering a code that matches the details submitted.
Makes it easier to ign^H^H^Hdiscuss related work in your papers: the author controls the amount reviewers had to spent to verify claims and check for omissions.
Repeat less, understand more. You are damn right, we can't be certain about predictions of the future. After repeating this several times, however, you attempt to make a point based on your favorite prediction of the future:
You seem pretty certain what taking or not taking action might lead to. But doing something is potentially the end of the human race, too. We are not talking about simple stuff like climate here, we are talking about complex systems such as societies. Small changes make a difference, an unpredictable one. What if your action turns into a religion some day? Do you really think you can predict what this will lead to after, say, 2000 years? Seems so, since this is the assumption you make without stating: that the action you want to take today will have no unforeseen negative side effects in the future. You fail to substantiate this claim.
There is a dissenting opinion by Don Norman, by the way.