There are five to six billion people living in parts of the world without the kind of care you are talking about.
And, we have jets.
The reality is, a disease that rapidly kills and spreads easily (like Black Death) could easily wipe out hundreds of millions of people today. BD killed so quickly that infections were self-limiting. Now, it can spread far further than your local village before people even start showing symptoms.
There needs to be a distributed public directory of fingerprints that is available to all for verification.
I'll avoid commenting on most of your comments. I'm sure others will tear them to shreds, if anyone particularly cares enough.
However, how do you suggest validating that public directory of fingerprints? You are subsituting one weak-but-better-than-nothing chain of trust with another means-absolutely-nothing chain of trust.
The problem isn't software patents, the problem is lousy patents. There are just as many lousy business practice, gene and physical patents as there are lousy software patents, and there are perfectly valid ones of each type.
(And, yes, I know that/.'s knee jerk reaction to software patents is a pathological "patents bad!", but there are vanishingly few people on here who seem to understand how patents actually work, how to read them, and how to understand what is covered.)
All invention is a mental process. The point of patents is to protect the people who expended the effort to DO that mental process, and to reward them in exchange for documenting that process for others. Most ideas are obvious is retrospect to people who are experts in a field, but its a fallacy to believe it was obvious to those same people BEFORE they saw it. That's the reward for a good patent -- being the one who actually saw it and let other people know.
1) Apple isn't a software company, its a hardware and media company. 2) Apple's stock rebounds quickly, so a large number of investors are trying to game that tendancy as the market drives the price down.
I've made a killing on Apple the last two weeks day trading the swings.
This is DEFCON, it's like putting every army and mercenary group in the world in one room without disarming them first. There is a reason why the DEFCON wireless network is described as the most hostile network on earth, it's more hostile than the internet itself.
I smell next years' big summer Hollywood blockbuster!
The numbers don't work out as well as you think. If you've got a pool of, say, a half million Linksys routers to target, some percentage of which are vulnerable, or a pool of 500m installed XP systems, some percentage of which are vulnerable, you're a lot better off focusing on XP than a Linksys router. (And the numbers for any given model of a router aren't anywhere near that when you count firmware and hardware revision changes.)
Plus, if you target a router (a $50 device with a slow CPU) you have high odds that whatever you're doing will cause a noticable degradation of the services from that device and its cheap to replace. If you use a small sliver of processing on a PC, its a) expensive to replace and b) less likely to be noticed.
Plus, there isn't economically usable data on a router. You can't easily MitM SSL, there aren't passwords or bank records, there aren't browser windows you can scrape data from or add proxies to.
And, if you think Malware is only a Microsoft problem, you are clearly not even peripherally associated with the infosec industry.
You're puzzled who might be behind the propoganda because, perhaps, its not propoganda.
The fact of the matter is, if you are creating a targeted attack on a system, you don't care in the slightest what platform its on -- you are going to hand craft the attack for your specific target using no matter what vectors you have to. Look at Stuxnet as an example.
If you are creating a generic attack, where the value is in numbers, not in a specific target (stealing people's financial information, creating a spambot network, etc) you want to target the biggest pool of potential victims. Thats a pretty simple calculus to do. If you've got some reason to believe that you can get 10% of users to take an action that compromises their security and gets you your vector of attack, are you going to focus on 10% of 40m or 10% of 800m people? Odds are there are usable vectors of attack on both platforms, but the odds are a lot higher you'll have a substantial return on investment if you target the pool that is 10-20x bigger, unless you've got some reason to think you can target 90% of the small pool and only 2% of the large pool. (And, Mac elitism aside, I think the percentage of really dumb users is even across all the OS platforms -- *including* Linux).
Japan's economic success lasted a couple of decades, and by all measure ended 20 years ago.
Hong Kongs has been no longer, nor Korea or Taiwan.
Your list basically proves the GP's point -- that kind of economic boom happens for a short period of time because of having the right resources (oil, gold, sugarcane, bananas, near-slave-labor) at the right time.
Microsoft used their browser to try to lock in the market. They developed client-side CGI that only works in their browser and developed server-side software that works best with IE and uses those proprietary extensions.
Google does not engage in lock-in with Android; non-Android and non-Google browsers work with Google services essentially as well as the browsers they provide, and their browsers (both the Android-integrated browser and Chrome) work on competitors' services. I can use Yahoo or Bing or Mapquest or whatever just as well as I can use Google.
Google provides a lot of services. Internet search, Maps, E-mail, Productivity, Browser, Mobile OS, and the like, but they don't require one to use all. Certainly there's some question as to whether they're in a little hot water for providing links to their maps or other services through their search, but Yahoo and Bing do the same thing for that, so we'll see.
But you can't use any of the "standards-based" HTML5 chrome "apps" in any other HTML5 browser, you can't do half the things on an iPhone with their apps that you can do on Android with their apps, so your examples prove your point by ignoring the actual platform the post was about (phones). Hell, Google gave away Angry Birds to get people to install Chrome. On the flip side, most of Microsoft's mobile apps current work better on the iPhone than WP7. Go figure, huh?
Google and Microsoft are the same thing -- giant companies, doing anything they can to grow their market, with a legal obligation to their shareholders to keep increasing value. Anyone who believes Android being free is for any reason what-so-ever other than increasing market share and driving search is being completely irrational. (And if they are a Google shareholder, I suggest trying to make a legal case against the board of directors and senior management for allowing the company to waste resources like that!)
As a shareholder in both companies (and Apple), I expect all the tech giants are doing their best to drive up my stock's value. Success in one doesn't mean failure in the other, it just means a bigger market and more money for the shareholders.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost, 1920
I sure hope that is out of copyright, you potential thief!
Can someone explain to me why US Treasuries should be rated AAA in the first place?
Easy
the US never defaulted, that's why
Of course, past performance doesn't correspond to future gains.
It also helps that US bonds can be used as money, and are used as such.
And, more importantly, unlike every single person *in* the US, as long as the US exists, it has guaranteed income in the form of taxes.
Considering the importance of the credit rating, those creditors know that the US will pay its debts even if it means cutting services to its people. The only way that'll ever stop is a total collapse of the US, and that would collapse the entire global economy, and at that point *nothing matters anyway*.
Therefore, the US is still the safe place to put your money. You'll either get your income back, or your money will have no value no matter where else you had it. (And, there seem to be people on here that think gold is a safe place -- gold has no more intrinsic value than anything else. The dollar has value if you can use it to get things you need to survive, and gold does, too. But you can't eat gold. Historically gold has only had value because the people who controlled the resources wanted it!)
Back in my day, I grew up in a small town -- under 10,000 people. We didn't ever lock our doors until we were going on vacation for a long time. There was no need -- no one broke into houses in our town.
Now, a loooong time later, I live in a similarly sized town, but I keep my doors locked when when I'm at home. Its a real pain for me -- more than once I've locked myself out of my house and not been able to get in. Unfortunately that's the reality of being in a community where that sort of stealing is more common. Times have changed.
I can move somewhere in which people stealing isn't a concern, sure. But I want to live in this community. The downsides of being locked out of my house once in a while is acceptable to live in a place I enjoy.
(Sorry, what were we talking about in this article again?)
Its annoying that these companies and groups keep claiming they're somehow running the browser as the operating system.
All of them, Google's included, run on an operating system. Chrome (like Gecko) doesn't have SATA drivers for all the chipsets, none of them have virtual memory systems, thread schedulers, video drivers or any other other things the real OS they're pretending isn't there has. They're running a normal OSS kernel, normal set of supporting OS services. The fact that you don't give a user a useful desktop outside the browser window doesn't make it a browser-based OS.
I bought my first CD recorder (HP 4020i) for a touch over $1000 in mid 1996. At the time there were only gold CDR disks available -- the blue/green ones didn't exist yet. The name brand gold discs were ~$10 each, although you could occasionally find them as a no-name 5-pack in the $25-$30 range.
Interestingly, I recently went back and wanted to archive all those old discs onto my NAS. 100% of the gold disks going back 15 years were readable. Not a single of the blue disks from the late 90's were readable, and more than 50% of the generics from the early 2000s were readable anymore. (And more than a few of the name brand ones from more than 5 years ago aren't...)
Still, at least I could get it. I've got a box of backup tapes from the early 90's I can't read because I have no clue what software I used on them.
Unfortunately, due to the poor education system in the US, you may not be aware of this, but the country was founded by a cabal of wealthy merchants and businessmen who overthrew English rule specifically to be able to have this kind of control.
This isn't the "End of America", this is just modern media putting straight up in your face the sort of control by the wealthy the country was *explicitly created to allow*.
You have three choices if you don't like it: a) stop following mass media, put your head down in the sand a live a happy life because the reality is this sort of thing will never directly impact you, b) Make a lot more money and join the party, or c) revolution
Slashdot Mirror
There are five to six billion people living in parts of the world without the kind of care you are talking about.
And, we have jets.
The reality is, a disease that rapidly kills and spreads easily (like Black Death) could easily wipe out hundreds of millions of people today. BD killed so quickly that infections were self-limiting. Now, it can spread far further than your local village before people even start showing symptoms.
There needs to be a distributed public directory of fingerprints that is available to all for verification.
I'll avoid commenting on most of your comments. I'm sure others will tear them to shreds, if anyone particularly cares enough.
However, how do you suggest validating that public directory of fingerprints? You are subsituting one weak-but-better-than-nothing chain of trust with another means-absolutely-nothing chain of trust.
What anti-trust laws were ignored at that level?
Sun and Oracle had largely non-overlapping markets. Its one of the very few huge tech mergers in memory that had almost no anti-trust issues.
Why not just send Bruce Willis?
He's not Chinese.
Anything can be profitable if someone else pays for most of it.
The problem isn't software patents, the problem is lousy patents. There are just as many lousy business practice, gene and physical patents as there are lousy software patents, and there are perfectly valid ones of each type.
(And, yes, I know that /.'s knee jerk reaction to software patents is a pathological "patents bad!", but there are vanishingly few people on here who seem to understand how patents actually work, how to read them, and how to understand what is covered.)
All invention is a mental process. The point of patents is to protect the people who expended the effort to DO that mental process, and to reward them in exchange for documenting that process for others. Most ideas are obvious is retrospect to people who are experts in a field, but its a fallacy to believe it was obvious to those same people BEFORE they saw it. That's the reward for a good patent -- being the one who actually saw it and let other people know.
Did you have a robots.txt telling it not to?
If not, your non-techy boss shouldn't complain, except perhaps about his staff.
The experts in any other field discussed on here will tell you that this is not limited to biology anymore.
1) Apple isn't a software company, its a hardware and media company.
2) Apple's stock rebounds quickly, so a large number of investors are trying to game that tendancy as the market drives the price down.
I've made a killing on Apple the last two weeks day trading the swings.
This is DEFCON, it's like putting every army and mercenary group in the world in one room without disarming them first.
There is a reason why the DEFCON wireless network is described as the most hostile network on earth, it's more hostile than the internet itself.
I smell next years' big summer Hollywood blockbuster!
What's Michael Bay up to?
The numbers don't work out as well as you think. If you've got a pool of, say, a half million Linksys routers to target, some percentage of which are vulnerable, or a pool of 500m installed XP systems, some percentage of which are vulnerable, you're a lot better off focusing on XP than a Linksys router. (And the numbers for any given model of a router aren't anywhere near that when you count firmware and hardware revision changes.)
Plus, if you target a router (a $50 device with a slow CPU) you have high odds that whatever you're doing will cause a noticable degradation of the services from that device and its cheap to replace. If you use a small sliver of processing on a PC, its a) expensive to replace and b) less likely to be noticed.
Plus, there isn't economically usable data on a router. You can't easily MitM SSL, there aren't passwords or bank records, there aren't browser windows you can scrape data from or add proxies to.
And, if you think Malware is only a Microsoft problem, you are clearly not even peripherally associated with the infosec industry.
You're puzzled who might be behind the propoganda because, perhaps, its not propoganda.
The fact of the matter is, if you are creating a targeted attack on a system, you don't care in the slightest what platform its on -- you are going to hand craft the attack for your specific target using no matter what vectors you have to. Look at Stuxnet as an example.
If you are creating a generic attack, where the value is in numbers, not in a specific target (stealing people's financial information, creating a spambot network, etc) you want to target the biggest pool of potential victims. Thats a pretty simple calculus to do. If you've got some reason to believe that you can get 10% of users to take an action that compromises their security and gets you your vector of attack, are you going to focus on 10% of 40m or 10% of 800m people? Odds are there are usable vectors of attack on both platforms, but the odds are a lot higher you'll have a substantial return on investment if you target the pool that is 10-20x bigger, unless you've got some reason to think you can target 90% of the small pool and only 2% of the large pool. (And, Mac elitism aside, I think the percentage of really dumb users is even across all the OS platforms -- *including* Linux).
Japan's economic success lasted a couple of decades, and by all measure ended 20 years ago.
Hong Kongs has been no longer, nor Korea or Taiwan.
Your list basically proves the GP's point -- that kind of economic boom happens for a short period of time because of having the right resources (oil, gold, sugarcane, bananas, near-slave-labor) at the right time.
Microsoft used their browser to try to lock in the market. They developed client-side CGI that only works in their browser and developed server-side software that works best with IE and uses those proprietary extensions.
Google does not engage in lock-in with Android; non-Android and non-Google browsers work with Google services essentially as well as the browsers they provide, and their browsers (both the Android-integrated browser and Chrome) work on competitors' services. I can use Yahoo or Bing or Mapquest or whatever just as well as I can use Google.
Google provides a lot of services. Internet search, Maps, E-mail, Productivity, Browser, Mobile OS, and the like, but they don't require one to use all. Certainly there's some question as to whether they're in a little hot water for providing links to their maps or other services through their search, but Yahoo and Bing do the same thing for that, so we'll see.
But you can't use any of the "standards-based" HTML5 chrome "apps" in any other HTML5 browser, you can't do half the things on an iPhone with their apps that you can do on Android with their apps, so your examples prove your point by ignoring the actual platform the post was about (phones). Hell, Google gave away Angry Birds to get people to install Chrome. On the flip side, most of Microsoft's mobile apps current work better on the iPhone than WP7. Go figure, huh?
Google and Microsoft are the same thing -- giant companies, doing anything they can to grow their market, with a legal obligation to their shareholders to keep increasing value. Anyone who believes Android being free is for any reason what-so-ever other than increasing market share and driving search is being completely irrational. (And if they are a Google shareholder, I suggest trying to make a legal case against the board of directors and senior management for allowing the company to waste resources like that!)
As a shareholder in both companies (and Apple), I expect all the tech giants are doing their best to drive up my stock's value. Success in one doesn't mean failure in the other, it just means a bigger market and more money for the shareholders.
Guns killed suits of armor.
Tanks beat out horses.
Two seconds of thinking killed your point.
- Robert Frost, 1920
I sure hope that is out of copyright, you potential thief!
It has nothing to do with being a corporation. IRS lets anyone deduct gambling losses from winnings.
Can someone explain to me why US Treasuries should be rated AAA in the first place?
Easy
the US never defaulted, that's why
Of course, past performance doesn't correspond to future gains.
It also helps that US bonds can be used as money, and are used as such.
And, more importantly, unlike every single person *in* the US, as long as the US exists, it has guaranteed income in the form of taxes.
Considering the importance of the credit rating, those creditors know that the US will pay its debts even if it means cutting services to its people. The only way that'll ever stop is a total collapse of the US, and that would collapse the entire global economy, and at that point *nothing matters anyway*.
Therefore, the US is still the safe place to put your money. You'll either get your income back, or your money will have no value no matter where else you had it. (And, there seem to be people on here that think gold is a safe place -- gold has no more intrinsic value than anything else. The dollar has value if you can use it to get things you need to survive, and gold does, too. But you can't eat gold. Historically gold has only had value because the people who controlled the resources wanted it!)
Back in my day, I grew up in a small town -- under 10,000 people. We didn't ever lock our doors until we were going on vacation for a long time. There was no need -- no one broke into houses in our town.
Now, a loooong time later, I live in a similarly sized town, but I keep my doors locked when when I'm at home. Its a real pain for me -- more than once I've locked myself out of my house and not been able to get in. Unfortunately that's the reality of being in a community where that sort of stealing is more common. Times have changed.
I can move somewhere in which people stealing isn't a concern, sure. But I want to live in this community. The downsides of being locked out of my house once in a while is acceptable to live in a place I enjoy.
(Sorry, what were we talking about in this article again?)
Its annoying that these companies and groups keep claiming they're somehow running the browser as the operating system.
All of them, Google's included, run on an operating system. Chrome (like Gecko) doesn't have SATA drivers for all the chipsets, none of them have virtual memory systems, thread schedulers, video drivers or any other other things the real OS they're pretending isn't there has. They're running a normal OSS kernel, normal set of supporting OS services. The fact that you don't give a user a useful desktop outside the browser window doesn't make it a browser-based OS.
How much data do you really think something like that will move around?
Netflix and bittorrent, and an American subculture of people who seem to need 10 hours of video entertainment a day are why caps are a problem.
Business servers and people who go outside tend to not run into caps.
I think you may be remembering wrong.
I bought my first CD recorder (HP 4020i) for a touch over $1000 in mid 1996. At the time there were only gold CDR disks available -- the blue/green ones didn't exist yet. The name brand gold discs were ~$10 each, although you could occasionally find them as a no-name 5-pack in the $25-$30 range.
Interestingly, I recently went back and wanted to archive all those old discs onto my NAS. 100% of the gold disks going back 15 years were readable. Not a single of the blue disks from the late 90's were readable, and more than 50% of the generics from the early 2000s were readable anymore. (And more than a few of the name brand ones from more than 5 years ago aren't...)
Still, at least I could get it. I've got a box of backup tapes from the early 90's I can't read because I have no clue what software I used on them.
Unfortunately, due to the poor education system in the US, you may not be aware of this, but the country was founded by a cabal of wealthy merchants and businessmen who overthrew English rule specifically to be able to have this kind of control.
This isn't the "End of America", this is just modern media putting straight up in your face the sort of control by the wealthy the country was *explicitly created to allow*.
You have three choices if you don't like it: a) stop following mass media, put your head down in the sand a live a happy life because the reality is this sort of thing will never directly impact you, b) Make a lot more money and join the party, or c) revolution
A) is probably easiest.
So, you're saying what they really should do is make a game with a gun accessory where musical notes and sparks fly out with each headshot?
I'd call it Snipe Hero: Music Edition.
As far as I can tell, NFLX never booked a loss. They were making plenty of profit they could reinvest to grow the company.
They didn't need to change their model, much less twice.
This message brought to you by Borders management.