Most pilots are ex-military that carried guns all the time when flying for the Air Force. Besides, we trust them with a $40 Million dollar aircraft and 100-400 passangers; why not a gun?
Most pilots are in fact not ex-military, the airlines having grown far beyond the size where military retirees could supply the needed numbers. And most miliary pilots do not carry weapons in the cockpit; they leave security (where it is deemed necessary) to the Air Police or the Marines (in combat situations).
Sure, Microsoft has to date produced lots of software with security holes "large enough to drive a truck through". However bear in mind that the holes have usually been a consequence of the overriding principle of wanting to keep things user-friendly at all costs. Their past history doesnt imply anything about how secure they can make their stuff. Certainly, Microsoft hires a lot of smart people and I'm sure that if they were given the mandate to design and implement a secure infrastructure, they could do it - something that Bruce seems to think is impossible.
I would argue that it is in fact the very "smartness" of the people at Microsoft that makes it unlikely that MS will be able to create a secure product. Mr. Gates has explicitly stated (interview in Newsweek about 1995) that when he was hiring people to build Microsoft, he wanted very young, very smart people with no previous experience in the computer industry. And he got them in droves. So these very smart people came in and started rebuilding everything from scratch - without bothering to study the fundamentals or learn about what had been tried in the past.
So the smart people at Microsoft made every mistake that had been made in computing since 1938 all over again, without knowing they were making those mistakes or what their consequences would be. Networking is a perfect example: in their haste to bring something to market that would displace Novell (keeping in mind that Novell created the market for MS-DOS networking), the genuii at MS built a clumsy, difficult to manage, insecure contraption of a networking system that ignored every lesson Xerox, Novell, 3Com, Wang, and others had already learned.
And, thanks to the power of the installed base, we are now stuck with Microsoft Networking and its insecurities for at least the next 20 years, because everything has to be backward compatible with what is already out there.
So I would say a combination of smartness, arrogance, and lack of perspective is exactly what has brought Microsoft code to where it is today. And a corporate culture of that nature is very, very hard to change.
After reading the article, I can't imagine that a home user would ever make a point of purchasing a system on the order described. Hardware-level tampering resistance is a good thing for Department of Defense computers, say, but does the average home user, surfing the web and storing recipes, really have to worry about someone leeching that information from residual information that could (maybe) be gleaned from the CPU itself?
The "average user" won't get a choice. The number of organizations capable of designing and manufacturing general computing chipsets has been falling since the 1980s; I believe that in order to produce an Intel-compatible motherboard today you would be forced to buy chips from one of three vendors. Once those three are on-board (ha ha), all chipsets and hence all Intel systems will become Palladium compliant.
A few techno-geeks might be capable to putting together Linux systems from the parts bin, but they likely then wouldn't be able to run any commercial software.
The rebuilt cities actually benefited from the opportunity to rebuild from scratch, eliminating decades of patchwork utilities and building. Of course the key is to have a plan that is human in scale, fitting with the culture, and for the benefit of residents and not just for state...
Of course, the counter-example is Brand's How Buildings Learn, which argues that the patchwork of updates and changes that accumulates over the years is what creates buildings that humans can actually enjoy, and that no planning-based architectural discipline has ever recreated this process.
Under the agreement with the DoJ MS agreed to sell the software with the same terms for all major resellers.
Thus if that agreemenet are upheld Dell has nothing to fear.
If there were an enforcement agent to monitor and punish violations of the "spirit" of the DOJ agreeement, this might mean something. Unfortunately, the DOJ has pretty much signaled to Microsoft that it is "slap on the wrist and we are out of here" time. Organizations far less crafty and far less motivated than Microsoft have figured out how to evade this type of restriction in the past; I would guess that it will be about 15 minutes after the lawsuit is completed that M$ will be back in Mr. Dell's office with an offer he can't refuse.
By going with the letter of the contract, Michael Dell can demonstrate in court that he is in compliance and Microsoft has no basis for any legal action.
It is not legal action that Mr. Dell has to fear - it is back room action in the next round of contract negotiations with Microsoft. Dell could find themselves paying $50/Windows license while Hewlett-Paqard pays $25. That would sting a bit.
Dell is taking a risk here by smacking the tiger on the nose. Wonder if they have done some game theory analysis and determined that dangers to Microsoft's monopoly pose a danger to Dell?
If the MS contract just says they can't ship the system bare, why not install Linux?
Presumably, the contract prohibits the installation of Linux and/or BSD.
My suggestion to Judge Jackson was that Microsoft be required to publish the terms of all OEM contracts three years after they take effect. Too bad he didn't listen;-(
But this often fails - the threat either goes around the armour, or the incoming shell is bigger than you'd bargained for, and penetrates. Far safer in practice, though not in theory, is the Blob. This has layer after layer of safety features, each of which is easily circumvented in isolation, but every one of which limits the damage.
Two problems: (1) in an actual organization, people need to get work done, and don't have an infinite amount of time to deal with security systems. This is easily seen at a nuclear power plant where Joe Operator can spend up to 25% of his (paid, presumably productive) workday dealing with security and access control mechanisms (2) organizations don't have an infinite amount of money to spend on IT, either. Consider $250,000 spent on a 5-axis milling machine vs. the same amount spent on IT systems and their associated security requirements. Yes, the 5-axis machine is expensive, fussy, difficult to set up, and requires a lot of training. But once it is in and running, it works, generating a stream of profit for the organization. And while it requires maintenance from time to time, it doesn't suddenly explode, taking the entire customer list with it (say). Which may explain the sudden drop in IT investement in the last 2 years!
the problem is the client. If you have a private key and a browser comes up with an erroneous key, what is stopping someone from doing a mim attack on you because the client can't tell the difference between a faked key and the one that he has to push yes to upon entering the damn site?
Have you ever known anyone (except perhaps Bruce Sterling) to visit a site to get a download or submit an order, get a "certificate not known" message, and do anything except click "Proceed"? Joe and Jane sysadmin, much less Richard and Sally end user, have no idea how certificates work and what answers should be given to what dialogue.
Totally broken protocol from the end users' perspective.
I was very interested A) to see what questions would be allowed to be asked, and B)to hear what he had to say. I guess their methods for patent approval are patented and, therefore, cannot be discussed in an open forum.
If you have ever dealt with the ISO, the ITU, or the EU regulatory bodies, you know that description isn't too far from the truth. North American regulatory bodies may well be captured by the regulated parties, but at least you as a citizen have some right-to-know and to participate. Europe perfers that these processes occur in a controlled environment.
it's not the clothes I dislike, it's the lack of options.
I also dislike being treated as if I don't know how to dress myself. (I'm not married either)
I used to work in a "dark suit and tie" environment. Think IBM but more conservative.
One day I had to stop by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to pick up paintings from my girlfriend's locker. I zipped over after worked dressed in my suit and tie. I got lots of nasty comments about my clothing and about being a "corporate drone".
Funny thing was, every person there was wearing black cotton from head to toe, red Converse All-Stars, had either punk-red hair or at least a streak of red down the middle, and was smoking a clove cigarette. Every one.
Talk about drones. From that day on I never even bothered to listen to anyone's opinion of my clothing choice!
This was the early days of PC networks and client server apps, when the virtuous business departments were wresting control of their data from the evil Data Processors with their fossilized insistence on things like "operational discipline" and "disaster recovery exercises". I was also young and naive. I never made that mistake again I can assure you. Luckily we had been testing another server (one with a "massive" 1 GB hard drive) and we had made a duplicate copy of the data so we were able to recover.
However, I have since negotiated some big software contracts, and I have never had a vendor budge 1 mm on the disclaimer of liability. Howdya get them to cough up on that?
If you can somehow illustrate how the terminology in the computer industry is similarly bastardized, I'd welcome the chance to debunk it. Regardless what seems "pretty obvious" - the truth is in the words. If it can't be quoted, it CAN be denied.
When your ERP system corrupts all your accounts receivable data, leaving your company with no source of revenue, the ERP vendor will tell you the software is "working as designed". So you go to your backup tapes, hoping against hope that you can at least load the data in Excel and do something with it, only to find out that the backup software has been reporting for 6 months that it has backed up and verified your data files but hasn't actually written anything to tape (happened to me). The backup vendor tells you their software has a "bug" or an "issue", and of course the disclaimer of liability means it isn't their fault. Bye bye company.
I dunno, but I don't think Canada has had a nuclear meltdown yet...
It is difficult to get a CANDU-type reactor to actually melt down, but I believe that there have been several incidents with core damage at sites in Canada. Darlington comes to mind but it has been a long time since I read those trade pubs so I could be disremembering.
It's easy. You just pay enough money as a tribute, and things start happening. There's more greasy palms in the FCC than in every nudie booth in the world.
In many respects I would agree, but not in this particular case. Here there about about 11 different pressure groups, each with a different agenda and each about equally powerful (including the consumers, for once!).
Just a few of the players:
Existing VHF/UHF license holders (including the traditional networks and big stations such as WGN), who are grandfathered from having to pay for their licenses and who do not want to lose any of their advantages, decaying though those might be
The FCC, which wants to reauction the existing licenses for lots of bucks
The military, the EU, the FCC, and others who desperately want to grab some of the VHF station bandwidth
The existing cell phone companies, who don't want any new bandwidth to become available
The remaining cell phone dreamers, who want more bandwidth so they can pay billions for it
The content providers, who want to use the move to digital to impose copy protection
The hardware mfgs, who are deeply conflicted: they would love to sell everyone a new TV (at least as of the 1990 census, 98% of US households had a TV while 94% had flush toilets), but who don't really want to get involved with copy protection and who are afraid everyone will just stop buying for a while
And finally, the consumer/voter, who watches 60 hours a week of TV and who may not care much about school taxes or world peace, but who WILL get off his butt and vote any congressman who interrupts his TV watching out of office so fast the Capitol will be smoking.A big, big fight with everyone being both a good guy and a bad guy. What fun!
It's been noted for years that one benchmark of a machine's ability to think intelligently was to beat a grandmaster in chess. That goal has been significantly harder to achieve than beating the Turing test.
Significantly harder? Besides playing chess, Gary Kasparov writes political essays and participates in Russian politics, participates in the management of the international chess world, reads, speaks, and can therefore translate among several languages, and (he hasn't told me personally but I am willing to bet) can drive an automobile, swim, play ping-pong, and pitch woo to significant others of his choice.
When Deep Blue can play chess and do those other tasks as well, we can talk about making an appointment for a Turing Test! Chess is about the easiest AI problem imaginable.
That's bull. How is chess harder than the turing test? It has pretty much been proven that brute force calculation can win the game of chess. We still have very little idea of how to beat the turing test. I would say the chess is infinitely easier than the turing test...
I would go a little farther than that. Computers should be able to beat humans at chess - just as backhoes can outdig a laborer with a shovel. In fact, computers should have been able to beat humans at chess sometime around 1960, when the calculating ability of the computer exceeded that of the fastest human calculator/estimator. Yet they couldn't, and even today (with computers being 7 orders of magnitude faster than they were in 1960), it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to build a computer that can beat a grandmaster.
Which I think shows that we don't have the least idea how humans play chess or how they think. It's as if John Henry could still show up at a railroad cut in 2002 and have a fighting chance to beat a D-12 Cat!
If I were an AI or chess-playing-computer researcher, I would be ashamed to show my face in public!
Actually, I lived in Phoenix for two and a half years. Try commuting 45 minutes a day in a 1970 volkswagon beetle with black vinyl interior in 120 degrees and 0% humidity. You can't even imagine how much water you lose. I would suck down big gulps like nothing.
Of course, here in the midwest, I can't imagine finishing 5 pints of anything other than beer.
(1) Caffine is a diuretic, so the faster a person drinks Big Gulps of cola, the faster he loses water from his body.
(2) Here in St. Louis, we had 6 weeks of temperatures in the 95 deg.F - 101 deg.F range with the typical St. Louis 90% humidity. None of your wimpy Phoenix "dry heat" here - 32 days straight of heat stress warnings with heat indexes in the 110 - 120 range. Take that;-).
Interesing topic, but I would think it is moot. The DGA fought the same battle through the courts when the studios started colorizing and rereleasing black & white movies in the 80s. They lost the battle 100%. Hard to see how this is much different.
Unfortunately, these things never quite get off the ground. Ha ha ha... CargoLifter is just the lastest in a long stream of ventures to build heavy-lift airships, none of which have succeeded. It is quite difficult to beat the economics of airplane for fast/expensive, railroad for moderate/moderate, and barge for slow/cheap.
Microsoft must be making the assumption (very bold IMHO) that it can control/win the appeals process up through the Supreme Court. Which would further indicate that this has been signaled to them by the parties involved.
Therefore, the purpose of this move would be to antagonize the current judge into doing something which would call her decision into question, as Judge Jackson's was after the trial.
No longer true. When my children were born, a SSN form was required for them prior to leaving the hospital. The days of an "optional" SSN are gone.
An SSN is absolutely not required for a child at birth. If you were fanatical about it, and willing to fight your local school board on the issue, you could probably get away without having one up to 16.
However, the IRS, state governments, and medical insurance companies have put tremendous pressure on maternity hospitals to pre-enter the information on the forms and hand it to the parents with a bunch of other paperwork, implying that they must sign and submit it. No, you don't, but it will be a long battle if you choose to fight.
My coworkers and I have used many different providers throughout North America (both metro and rural locations). The only provider we have found that works reliably pretty much everywhere, and actually has something that resembles a customer service dept., is AT&T Wireless. Plus they support quad-band phones with GSM and number portability to Europe.
Only problem is - they know this, and charge accordingly. So if you have the bucks go AT&T.
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
So the smart people at Microsoft made every mistake that had been made in computing since 1938 all over again, without knowing they were making those mistakes or what their consequences would be. Networking is a perfect example: in their haste to bring something to market that would displace Novell (keeping in mind that Novell created the market for MS-DOS networking), the genuii at MS built a clumsy, difficult to manage, insecure contraption of a networking system that ignored every lesson Xerox, Novell, 3Com, Wang, and others had already learned.
And, thanks to the power of the installed base, we are now stuck with Microsoft Networking and its insecurities for at least the next 20 years, because everything has to be backward compatible with what is already out there.
So I would say a combination of smartness, arrogance, and lack of perspective is exactly what has brought Microsoft code to where it is today. And a corporate culture of that nature is very, very hard to change.
sPh
A few techno-geeks might be capable to putting together Linux systems from the parts bin, but they likely then wouldn't be able to run any commercial software.
sPh
sPh
The two most unlivable places on the face of the Earth.
Yep, that's the way to go.
sPh
sPh
Dell is taking a risk here by smacking the tiger on the nose. Wonder if they have done some game theory analysis and determined that dangers to Microsoft's monopoly pose a danger to Dell?
sPh
My suggestion to Judge Jackson was that Microsoft be required to publish the terms of all OEM contracts three years after they take effect. Too bad he didn't listen ;-(
sph
sPh
Totally broken protocol from the end users' perspective.
sPh
sPh
One day I had to stop by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to pick up paintings from my girlfriend's locker. I zipped over after worked dressed in my suit and tie. I got lots of nasty comments about my clothing and about being a "corporate drone".
Funny thing was, every person there was wearing black cotton from head to toe, red Converse All-Stars, had either punk-red hair or at least a streak of red down the middle, and was smoking a clove cigarette. Every one.
Talk about drones. From that day on I never even bothered to listen to anyone's opinion of my clothing choice!
sPh
However, I have since negotiated some big software contracts, and I have never had a vendor budge 1 mm on the disclaimer of liability. Howdya get them to cough up on that?
sPh
Do you need more examples? I can provide plenty!
sPh
Sorry - it was Pickering.
sPh
sPh
Just a few of the players:
The FCC, which wants to reauction the existing licenses for lots of bucks
The military, the EU, the FCC, and others who desperately want to grab some of the VHF station bandwidth
The existing cell phone companies, who don't want any new bandwidth to become available
The remaining cell phone dreamers, who want more bandwidth so they can pay billions for it
The content providers, who want to use the move to digital to impose copy protection
The hardware mfgs, who are deeply conflicted: they would love to sell everyone a new TV (at least as of the 1990 census, 98% of US households had a TV while 94% had flush toilets), but who don't really want to get involved with copy protection and who are afraid everyone will just stop buying for a while
And finally, the consumer/voter, who watches 60 hours a week of TV and who may not care much about school taxes or world peace, but who WILL get off his butt and vote any congressman who interrupts his TV watching out of office so fast the Capitol will be smoking.A big, big fight with everyone being both a good guy and a bad guy. What fun!
sPh
When Deep Blue can play chess and do those other tasks as well, we can talk about making an appointment for a Turing Test! Chess is about the easiest AI problem imaginable.
sPh
Which I think shows that we don't have the least idea how humans play chess or how they think. It's as if John Henry could still show up at a railroad cut in 2002 and have a fighting chance to beat a D-12 Cat!
If I were an AI or chess-playing-computer researcher, I would be ashamed to show my face in public!
sPh
(2) Here in St. Louis, we had 6 weeks of temperatures in the 95 deg.F - 101 deg.F range with the typical St. Louis 90% humidity. None of your wimpy Phoenix "dry heat" here - 32 days straight of heat stress warnings with heat indexes in the 110 - 120 range. Take that ;-).
sPh
Interesing topic, but I would think it is moot. The DGA fought the same battle through the courts when the studios started colorizing and rereleasing black & white movies in the 80s. They lost the battle 100%. Hard to see how this is much different.
sPh
sPh
Therefore, the purpose of this move would be to antagonize the current judge into doing something which would call her decision into question, as Judge Jackson's was after the trial.
Very very confident if you ask me.
sPh
However, the IRS, state governments, and medical insurance companies have put tremendous pressure on maternity hospitals to pre-enter the information on the forms and hand it to the parents with a bunch of other paperwork, implying that they must sign and submit it. No, you don't, but it will be a long battle if you choose to fight.
sPh
Only problem is - they know this, and charge accordingly. So if you have the bucks go AT&T.
sPh