I can just imagine sending an asteroid into Jupiter only for it to come out the other side and smack right into us.
It is a gas giant after all. "Jupiter is thought to consist of a dense core with a mixture of elements, a surrounding layer of liquid metallic hydrogen with some helium, and an outer layer predominantly of molecular hydrogen.[23] Beyond this basic outline, there is still considerable uncertainty"
I think the liquid hydrogen will freeze and shatter any meteor we aim at jupiter... superheated in the atmosphere and then plunged into an ocean of metallic hydrogen...
besides there is believed to be at least and earth sized core, in some fiction, it's made entirely of diamond, but it probably isn't.
Eidetic memory aside, there are countless things i can remember that i truly wish i could forget, and yet there are countless things i forget that i was trying really hard not to forget.
I mean, do i forever have to remember the time i nearly tripped and fell down a stairway and got a stick shoved through the roof of my mouth that i was holding in my mouth (was a toy magic wand) as i went downstairs to play with the magic wand? Why do i recall the time i was playing with my sister, hit the back of my head against a staircase, then remember as they brought me the pillow i thought it felt really warm for a pillow (because of all my blood, before i blacked out and from there remember only a brief flash of white light probably from when i was in the hospital after that)
and for as permanent those childhood memories are (I'm 30 now BTW) i have to make a complete written list of everything i need to buy at the store or i forget it all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory(On that point when will which ever god or other deity is responsible for our design fix the bloody faulty memory unit and start using error correcting cells?)
Perhaps its a survival mechanism that keeps you from going insane and killing yourself before you reach age 10. The ability to forget might be the only thing keeping us sane.
Or maybe its a performance optimization - keeping the dataset smaller makes retrieval faster.
Or part of a disaster recovery system, enabling you not to be permanently traumatised after seeing the goatse guy.;)
yes it was the Orion program, and as a matter of fact, it's the last best hope we in humanity have against a meteor or comet big enough to shatter a tectonic plate with it's impact (or to kick enough dust up to kill any animal not wearing air filters/ block out the sun for years or however long it takes for the dust to settle)
although, by the end of the Orion program, the idea was to build it in space (like a space station) and only detonate the bombs to get us all the way out to the large comet or asteroid (Orion was aiming for 21 humans on mars). to save the earth we'd have to get to it before it was too close, luckily we'd have 50 years to reach it, and destroy it or send it into Jupiter.
It never ceases to amaze me... I know some people are very skilled at lying, they get their jobs not through education, but rather through lying, cheating, and stealing all the way to the top, but... seriously, a sysadmin flashing machines for no reason... and then claiming the software broke the machines...
wow, I would wager money that guy got through whatever training that qualified him for a sysadmin position though cheating and lying...
I learned what a bios was shortly after i started building my PCs from parts ordered over the net, rather than pre-assembled OEM machines... and I never, never felt the desire to casually flash bioses....
between you and the AC, I'm going to take this to mean that the 57% statistic ignores the volume of 'cases settled out of court' while the 88% statistic is based on claims that go all the way to a jury trial.
just for play here, if we're dealing with 400 cases a year (close to the real number but rounded to the nearest cuz i hate math)
57% of 400 is 228 cases won, with 172 cases that 'technically' are dropped, or are lost..
to get to the 88% number from 228 then only 27 cases can be lost, meaning that 145 cases were settled out of court.
unless any form of 'dismissal' isn't counted as a lost trial... for statistical purposes... but either way cases settled out of court aren't won or lost in trials anymore than cases that are dismissed...
no, it makes so much sense if you think about it, all those crazy bugs when things like friends would disappear off friends lists etc, it had to be the 25 year old bug from BSD 4.2!!!
i knew i wasn't imagining it that 'friends' would suddenly disappear off my friends list... it was obvious those friends were deleted when the 25th file of 28 was deleted, then the call for the 26th file was given and it would return the 27th file as response, clearly slashcode has been running BSD a long time, hopefully they've got the patch for that 25 year old bug, so people stop disappearing from friends lists.
"Pooley says he agrees with Baxter. 'I know the judges there, and I think very highly of all of them. This is a point of view offered by a group that's trying to bring a national perspective to the issue,' Pooley says."
Yes, surely the AIPLA prefers the judges and juries in that venue because of their fair and equitable methods that give defendants a fair chance, and not at all because if defendants started winning IP-related suits the AIPLA would be largely out of a job. the two articles in TFS contradict one another....
"Indeed, patent plaintiffs whose cases go to trial in Marshall win 88 percent of the time, according to research firm Legalmetric, compared with 68 percent nationwide." http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/16280/page2/
vs
""We thought it was chock-full of errors," Sam Baxter, a partner in Dallas-based McKool Smith who is lead counsel for the ad hoc committee, says of the AIPLA amicus brief. Baxter says Eastern District judges regularly grant Â1404(a) transfer motions. In 2007, plaintiff-patent holders won 57 percent of the suits they filed in the Eastern District, which is below the national average win rate for patent holders, he says." http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202421640751
so who do you believe? legalmetric, who says 88% of patent 'owners' win in marshal, or a lawyer who makes his living in Marshall Texas, saying that only 57% win there?
I think, that given the fact that we all know a tank full of lawyers would win over a tank full of sharks, even if we gave the sharks lasers, that I'd prefer to trust legalmetrics numbers, not some lawyer desperately clinging to his lifeblood, winning cases for patent trolls in east Texas..
BTW, the first link was indirect, you had to follow the blog's link that was linked second in the fine summary..
for a slightly more expensive system, you can get a UPS powered security center with a cellphone like device that can only call the security company and 911, the security center the second that power cuts off, and the police when one of the sensors indicate a thief cut the power trying to break into the house.
then i suppose you'll talk of cellphone jamming etc, really, are thieves going to bring a $50 bottle of acid to eat through glass? for a house they don't even know if it has $50,000 dollars worth of fencable goods or not? the reason they don't use glass cutters is because most security systems like the homeowner to put big stickers warning thieves to find easier prey.
when the guy down the street didn't put any security in, the person with the big stickers becomes a lot less appealing, especially when both homes have the same model Lexus in the driveway.
computers aren't being hijacked by thieves just to do a little bit of key-logging, they're being used to do just about everything needed to make electronic crime profitable... key-logging is a very hit or miss opportunity, most people don't even do on-line banking, and there is a glut of stolen credit cards on the black market as it is...
spam relays, botnets, rootkits keeping systems 'ready' to go live with a botnet every time a security pro takes an infected machine off their botnet... the lists go on and on, if you have stealth rootkits on 14 million computers, but only need 1 million in your botnet, would you install the botnet software on all 14 million machines? or only on 1.5 million machines? botnet programs because of heavy Internet traffic are easy to track and pin down... systems that have been tainted with a polymorphic rootkit that are ready 'to go live as need requires' are far more common, and since the rootkit does almost nothing detectable it's virtually impossible for the 'infected' to realize they're infected, and making more computers 'infected' every time they mail a CD or DVD to friend. it's virtually impossible to detect a stealth rootkit in a burned CD or DVD, it exploits an age old bug in auto-play/auto-run, and can infect any windows PC with a stealth rootkit, with none the wiser. well I caught it, because the 06 model had horrible bugs with XP, that were 'end user noticeable' no doubt the 08 version has fixed those bugs... but due to it's polymorphic nature, the rootkit was only detected by google's g-mail as far as i could 'test' free testing programs...
I spend at least $1000 on my computers, but I'm a PC gamer, my next setup complete with HDTV is going to cost $3,800.
but then again, i am also my own security expert, etc et al... and i became highly paranoid after 2006 because that was around the time the mafia started using polymorphic rootkits.
polymorphic code, needs only be written once, it won't detect with just any scanner. the scanner must be tuned to the exact polymorphic code used. luckily the hackers reuse code, but still.. the exploit i got in 2006 is only in one database (i tried all the free to try ones, not all the commercial ones, i don't have $2500 to spend on virus subscriptions to try every av on the planet)
the google g-mail database has the signature for the polymorphic rootkit i got hit with in 06.
fortunately for hackers, google's solution is private, for use only with g-mail, and i have 1 tb of files that will never see a windows machine again, thanks to hackers and the lack of concern over polymorphic rootkit detection by mainstream security software.
It all depends on the user. When you can get the user to think your program is what he wants, he will open you all the gates necessary. No matter how many security layers. Do you think Joe Sixpack could understand a warning issued by some security system? That his newly downloaded game shouldn't really need to install a driver or that some config file for his game pad shouldn't inject a thread into explorer? or that his bittorent software contains a trojan, when the 'website' that distributes the trojaned software says 'nope, we don't include a trojan' but the software is still closed source, so their denial doesn't keep security software from detecting their program as a trojan...
at least one bittorent client is trojaned, and all the open source BT programs have trojan versions, some of which are located ate 'common typos' for the address of the original site, with a complete duplication of the entire style of the original site...
I have access to linux, linux has Diff, linux reads ntfs and fat partitions easily, i can easily make a copy of every file onto a linux partition. just as easily i can remove that linux drive in the off chance mr hacker dude put in the ability to modify reiser FS or ext2-3/4
for forensic evidence collection, I have access to a superior level of tools than any AV that relies on booting into windows (of a HDD or an optical media, even) can use to find viruses/rootkits/trojans/keyloggers.
the fact that i am paranoid enough to do this, on a regular basis, is a result of the problem with security software for windows, as well as my current diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia (current doc thiks i'm OCD as well, about computer security).
Being mentally ill, is a serious advantage over the non mentally ill when it comes to detection and removal of unwanted software.
you might have missed it, but even if you have a 'definition' for a rootkit or malware, there is nothing preventing that rootkit or malware from using polymorphic code, to make the executable undetectable. you HAVE to catch the infection Before it gets you, even if the source was polymorphic, the only alternative is to use a protected boot media that can verify the integrity of every system file, and ideally has it's databases on say a flash drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code
If you are a malware writer you only have a few days for your application to kick in or the AV companies will keep up. So it's not completely futile to run AV software but you will get some that aren't caught. The difference is that if no AV software was employed we could have a computer pandemic.
So even if AV software isn't the best solution but merely a patch it at least protect us somewhat.
But what's needed is a completely different design of the operating systems we have. SELinux is far too weak in reality - even if it is a good step forward it is very static in it's behavior. It is also necessary to have more dynamically adapting operating systems that can see overall patterns and be able to lock down certain processes if they start to behave in an unexpected way.
Using your comparison of malware to the real life scenario of your house being broke into, it's impossible to make a house that can't be penetrated (or would be so difficult that it's not worth it). It would be the equivalent of building a fortress and running it with the various employees. Assuming people wanted to get into your house to bug it for information (i.e. spyware), it would be much more efficient to have a cheap house that you can demolish and rebuild. you don't watch 'it takes a thief' very much do, you?
for a very small investment you can get a quality 'security system' with 24 hour monitoring and 30 second police call on break in, and that's only for beginners...
for about $100 a window you can make every glass surface in your house impervious to everything except gun fire, and glass cutters and gun fire will only make a hole the size of the bullet. 99% of thieves lack glass cutters, but of course if everyone bought this product they would become standard. in the demonstration of this product, they gave the thief a nice Louisville slugger, and the window was shattered, but the thief couldn't even budge the broken pane, not even with repeated swings from the slugger (which broke on the first swing anyways, then they gave him a metal bat, and a crow bar, irrc)
not to mention hitting the window with a bat activated the security system that they installed.
they've done everything from small businesses, to home owners with priceless collections... before the ex-thief guy always gets in and almost always gets away with stuff before the cops get there (although sometimes he waits too long and gets caught by a silent alarm) after the 'upgrade' the thief never gets in, and they show him trying to think of everything from social engineering a site, to looking in the unlocked shed for tools to get in...
sometimes, the best bet is to secure your place with what an ex-criminal is unable to get past.
with organized crime running Internet crime though, it's hard to find skilled enough thieves that don't have bullets in their heads for releasing security info about what the crime families are using to get crime accomplished.
"Is this really what it's like? Is having malware violating your personal computer the norm? Is it really impossible to design secure OS's and applications from the ground up instead of making them full of holes and relying on "solutions" that pick up the pieces? Is it really better to do damage control than prevention?"
problem #1 Windows. Windows was never designed with even the slightest concern around security, every type of security product for windows, has to compensate for the fact that every admin user can modify every file on the operating system that isn't locked by a process. and ever admin user can set a registry key to modify any locked file on reboot.
Problem #2 Organized crime. The Internet is a gateway to as much as 6 billion dollars a year in crime (if you count crimes that are hybrid, parts done online, parts done offline EG:laundering money that was produced from drug sales on the street, but laundering the money via Internet based scams etc). Organized Crime has been involved in Internet crime, as soon as they realized how much faster, cheaper, and better the Internet was for their core business, doing crime. Because of the resources organized crime has, they've made doing crime on the Internet a lot more straightforward. faster, better, cheaper, every crime syndicate has used technology the the fullest their paid hackers could come up with ideas for.
no longer are we protecting computers from a john doe with a gripe about religion deleting every file on the system every Sunday at noon...
Problem 3. The Internet. by it's very design the Internet is made for the criminal, absolutely no way for any single computer to stop any other computer from sending a message and preventing another computer from receiving it... firewalls at the border or ISP aside, the Internet was designed to allow communications in a post nuclear war holocaust scenario where only a few underground bunkers had survived. Worse still, ISPs network owners, just about everyone seems adamant against changing this even in the slightest. very few want every Internet transaction to be completely traceable, completely held accountable for both sender and recipient... ISPs don't want to upgrade their hardware to allow this, because it costs money, governments don't want to force this because they are corrupt and owned by crime families anyways... billionaires have security guys with 7 digits to protect their wealth so they don't give a damn either...
so a few nutjobs in security want everything to be traceable, and nobody listens to them... and all the free speech guys are against it because they know it would basically shut down freenets etc. anyone who pirates software is against it because they're afraid they won't be able to pirate in the future etc.
so, basically, you're left with Linux etc, which was designed loosely around UNIX, which was hardcore about security because you had thousands of untrusted users sharing a single mainframe...
using Linux doesn't equal security, but the crime families aren't after Linux because it doesn't have enough ROI (yet) and it was designed around security principals in the first place so it has an edge over not designed around security products like Windows (mac os's foundation is based around security in principal, but in practical terms Apple is only as concerned about security as any OS maker is, as long as people are buying macs it's not a problem...)
"it's not completely useless to have anti-virus software on your machine, but the problem is that they are always a bit behind"
you should have researched a bit more, man rootkits 'published' in 2005, and 2006 aren't even close to being removable once installed with most anti virus suites much less most anti rootkit specialized software!
so yes AV is Completely useless, for removing rootkits as developed by commercial hackers, only an anti-rootkit solution that boots from protected media, (a dvd, or BD-rom) with the capability to completely fix every system file if need be can fix the problem, and only then if the AV software allows you to download an updated DB to a USB thumbdrive for use with the specialized anti-rootkit DVD/BD-rom./. article link http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/14/1726253&from=rss
"He got sick of it and relies on Hughes satellite Internet, at $60/month, but he still has to be connected to a phone line to upload to the Internet"
I don't know where he got his hardware, but they haven't supported dial-up upload for the longest time... right on the site they tell you no phone line is used. back when they were part of direcTV long ago they had dial-up upload hardware, but that was almost 10 years ago! http://go.gethughesnet.com/
hughsnet is the worst satelite provider, absolutely horrible FAP policies, it's really only useful for casual webbrowsing... there is an upstart company that uses dial-up/sat inet, and then wildblue which has a 30 day rolling fap, you can download, but if you do too much in one day you internet will only recover a little bit each day... but i don't think their fap is nearly as restrictive as hughesnets, hugesnet doesn't even increase their fap if you get a buisness account!!!!! wtf...
there is a fourth satelite provider, that targets gas stations etc, for sending data to a central database, not sure what that companies fap is, but satelite internet is a crazy space with a lot of retarded FAPS...
Wifi can easily go a lot further, with a few after-market antennas, this company which i think sells them, has a simple primer, depending on the style of directional antenna you get setup can be as simple as using a level, and pointing in the general compass direction.
shuttleworth is almost a billionaire, and he's so far only ponied up 10 million for ubuntu.
if he has to hire 10 programmers to get ubuntu working on ultra portables, he can do it, and he can have it working so slick that anyone would want to run Linux on an ultra portable.
the fact that he hasn't done the same for laptops suggests that he doesn't value Linux laptop support. even if he did, he'd be targeting vanilla laptop support, the kind that OEMs without a big distribution can buy add an os to and sell... he wouldn't be targeting the 'aftermarket Compaq sales' because there isn't enough ROI for people who bought a windows machine and decided to switch to Linux.
remember Shuttleworth is not into Linux for charity, he's in it to get a return on his investment. he runs all his Linux projects as business ventures. clearly he thinks there is a market for Linux ultra portables, and is willing to assign developer time to try to get a decent ROI for the work.
"Marxism has this implied efficiency, "from each according to his ability" that just doesn't happen. I'll never work as hard as I possibly can (I could in theory work at least 12hrs/6days per week),"
you know, there are countless video gamers and internet addicts who devote even more time playing games, or wasting time online, than that 12hrs/6 days a week thing... if only Everything we do could be made as enjoyable and addictive as people find the internet and playing video games, then communism might actually work.
but how can you ever make a factory job as fun as a video game?
free market capitalism will never choose 'free open source software' as a de facto standard, because it is entirely to the opposite of capitalism. the goal of 'capitalism' is that one with property uses that property to create wealth. Free Open Source software doesn't create wealth, it creates a situation where anyone at all can use software without paying anyone any money for it.
The only reason why dell (who is puching their parts suppliers to write FOSS drivers, or Closed source Drivers for FOSS) is pushing FOSS is because as an OEM the cost of software licensing is costing them to the tune or half a billion dollars a year.
Dell isn't a software company, no software company would ever EVER choose FOSS over closed source, because it erodes thier customer base.
Dell is a hardware company though, and they make their money on hardware, and Software costs them on the bottom line, so a capitalistic company wants FOSS only to increase their bottom line by half a billion dollars a year, because they make the money selling the hardware, not the 'bundled' OS.
As a Linux user, I despise Ubuntu, I can't explain why, but I think it's too GUIsh along with other things like
Not using conventions i.e (at least in the Ubuntu versions I've used)/sbin/dhcpcd doesn't exists.
I prefer the slackware way of/etc/rc.d/rc.X instead of/etc/init.d or/etc/rc.d/rc.(level)/rc.ssh?
but there are few good things about Ubuntu, it made Linux and Open Source much better to new-comers, works almost always out of the box It's friendly (but silly IMhO) to people who migrate from Windows, and it's the greatest achievement made in the last few years. friendly OS for Windows migrating users. I can tell you why you despise it. Because it's considered mainstream Linux, and you are an arrogant prick who previously enjoyed looking down on the masses. not only that, he's a command line bigot. command lines are powerful tools, and i can't imagine an OS without one, but they're clunky (have to learn commands and switches and make sure things with spaces all get re-parsed with quotes around them, i scripted a lot in my Free BSD days, needing to add quotes all the time in scripts drove me batty) CLUNKY i say, i avoid the command line as much as possible, it is my last resort, the #1 reason i stopped using Free BSD was all the Bias towards Command Line Interfaces.
before ubuntu, the only distro i really liked in Linux was knoppix, smoothwall is okay, but i haven't played with it much.
like most normals i have a bad memory, like most normals to remember shortcuts i need cheat sheets, cheat sheets suck, they get lost, i spill soda on them, or they get a nice big glob of spaghetti on them... CLIs are only useful for people with photographic memories, or people who can keep a lot of cheat sheets handy. this is why DOS based word processors all died the instant 'windows 3' came out and companies could sell 'gui' based text editors. norms don't like memorization, they were forced to put up with it for 13-17 years, depending on if they managed college, and they're doing whatever they can to avoid doing what they hated.
"My two most recent PC's are a Pentium M 1.60 Ghz with 512 MB RAM and a AMD Athlon 5600+ X2 with 2 GB Ram"
And here i thought ubuntu was slow on a P-3 (slot style) 400Mhz* with 80MB of RAM. it takes a full 3 minutes to log in (after enteting password) but that could easily be resolved by buying some ram... oh and replacing the 2-3 GB hdd.
*= specs from memory, they might be slightly better
Slashdot Mirror
It is a gas giant after all. "Jupiter is thought to consist of a dense core with a mixture of elements, a surrounding layer of liquid metallic hydrogen with some helium, and an outer layer predominantly of molecular hydrogen.[23] Beyond this basic outline, there is still considerable uncertainty"
I think the liquid hydrogen will freeze and shatter any meteor we aim at jupiter... superheated in the atmosphere and then plunged into an ocean of metallic hydrogen...
besides there is believed to be at least and earth sized core, in some fiction, it's made entirely of diamond, but it probably isn't.
I mean, do i forever have to remember the time i nearly tripped and fell down a stairway and got a stick shoved through the roof of my mouth that i was holding in my mouth (was a toy magic wand) as i went downstairs to play with the magic wand? Why do i recall the time i was playing with my sister, hit the back of my head against a staircase, then remember as they brought me the pillow i thought it felt really warm for a pillow (because of all my blood, before i blacked out and from there remember only a brief flash of white light probably from when i was in the hospital after that)
and for as permanent those childhood memories are (I'm 30 now BTW) i have to make a complete written list of everything i need to buy at the store or i forget it all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory (On that point when will which ever god or other deity is responsible for our design fix the bloody faulty memory unit and start using error correcting cells?)
Perhaps its a survival mechanism that keeps you from going insane and killing yourself before you reach age 10. The ability to forget might be the only thing keeping us sane.
Or maybe its a performance optimization - keeping the dataset smaller makes retrieval faster.
Or part of a disaster recovery system, enabling you not to be permanently traumatised after seeing the goatse guy.
yes it was the Orion program, and as a matter of fact, it's the last best hope we in humanity have against a meteor or comet big enough to shatter a tectonic plate with it's impact (or to kick enough dust up to kill any animal not wearing air filters/ block out the sun for years or however long it takes for the dust to settle)
although, by the end of the Orion program, the idea was to build it in space (like a space station) and only detonate the bombs to get us all the way out to the large comet or asteroid (Orion was aiming for 21 humans on mars). to save the earth we'd have to get to it before it was too close, luckily we'd have 50 years to reach it, and destroy it or send it into Jupiter.
It never ceases to amaze me... I know some people are very skilled at lying, they get their jobs not through education, but rather through lying, cheating, and stealing all the way to the top, but... seriously, a sysadmin flashing machines for no reason... and then claiming the software broke the machines...
wow, I would wager money that guy got through whatever training that qualified him for a sysadmin position though cheating and lying...
I learned what a bios was shortly after i started building my PCs from parts ordered over the net, rather than pre-assembled OEM machines... and I never, never felt the desire to casually flash bioses....
between you and the AC, I'm going to take this to mean that the 57% statistic ignores the volume of 'cases settled out of court' while the 88% statistic is based on claims that go all the way to a jury trial.
just for play here, if we're dealing with 400 cases a year (close to the real number but rounded to the nearest cuz i hate math)
57% of 400 is 228 cases won, with 172 cases that 'technically' are dropped, or are lost..
to get to the 88% number from 228 then only 27 cases can be lost, meaning that 145 cases were settled out of court.
unless any form of 'dismissal' isn't counted as a lost trial... for statistical purposes... but either way cases settled out of court aren't won or lost in trials anymore than cases that are dismissed...
okay i've tried 4 of my slashdot accounts, in opera for linux, and none of them lets me log into beta.slashdot.org...
mine was low 6 digits..
the rest were in the high 6 digits...
tried with wand asking, enabled and disables, as well as 'public terminal' checked, no dice, can't log in with opera at all.
no, it makes so much sense if you think about it, all those crazy bugs when things like friends would disappear off friends lists etc, it had to be the 25 year old bug from BSD 4.2!!!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/11/1339228&from=rss
i knew i wasn't imagining it that 'friends' would suddenly disappear off my friends list... it was obvious those friends were deleted when the 25th file of 28 was deleted, then the call for the 26th file was given and it would return the 27th file as response, clearly slashcode has been running BSD a long time, hopefully they've got the patch for that 25 year old bug, so people stop disappearing from friends lists.
Yes, surely the AIPLA prefers the judges and juries in that venue because of their fair and equitable methods that give defendants a fair chance, and not at all because if defendants started winning IP-related suits the AIPLA would be largely out of a job. the two articles in TFS contradict one another....
"Indeed, patent plaintiffs whose cases go to trial in Marshall win 88 percent of the time, according to research firm Legalmetric, compared with 68 percent nationwide."
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/16280/page2/
vs
""We thought it was chock-full of errors," Sam Baxter, a partner in Dallas-based McKool Smith who is lead counsel for the ad hoc committee, says of the AIPLA amicus brief. Baxter says Eastern District judges regularly grant Â1404(a) transfer motions. In 2007, plaintiff-patent holders won 57 percent of the suits they filed in the Eastern District, which is below the national average win rate for patent holders, he says."
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202421640751
so who do you believe? legalmetric, who says 88% of patent 'owners' win in marshal, or a lawyer who makes his living in Marshall Texas, saying that only 57% win there?
I think, that given the fact that we all know a tank full of lawyers would win over a tank full of sharks, even if we gave the sharks lasers, that I'd prefer to trust legalmetrics numbers, not some lawyer desperately clinging to his lifeblood, winning cases for patent trolls in east Texas..
BTW, the first link was indirect, you had to follow the blog's link that was linked second in the fine summary..
for a slightly more expensive system, you can get a UPS powered security center with a cellphone like device that can only call the security company and 911, the security center the second that power cuts off, and the police when one of the sensors indicate a thief cut the power trying to break into the house.
then i suppose you'll talk of cellphone jamming etc, really, are thieves going to bring a $50 bottle of acid to eat through glass? for a house they don't even know if it has $50,000 dollars worth of fencable goods or not? the reason they don't use glass cutters is because most security systems like the homeowner to put big stickers warning thieves to find easier prey.
when the guy down the street didn't put any security in, the person with the big stickers becomes a lot less appealing, especially when both homes have the same model Lexus in the driveway.
computers aren't being hijacked by thieves just to do a little bit of key-logging, they're being used to do just about everything needed to make electronic crime profitable... key-logging is a very hit or miss opportunity, most people don't even do on-line banking, and there is a glut of stolen credit cards on the black market as it is...
spam relays, botnets, rootkits keeping systems 'ready' to go live with a botnet every time a security pro takes an infected machine off their botnet... the lists go on and on, if you have stealth rootkits on 14 million computers, but only need 1 million in your botnet, would you install the botnet software on all 14 million machines? or only on 1.5 million machines? botnet programs because of heavy Internet traffic are easy to track and pin down... systems that have been tainted with a polymorphic rootkit that are ready 'to go live as need requires' are far more common, and since the rootkit does almost nothing detectable it's virtually impossible for the 'infected' to realize they're infected, and making more computers 'infected' every time they mail a CD or DVD to friend. it's virtually impossible to detect a stealth rootkit in a burned CD or DVD, it exploits an age old bug in auto-play/auto-run, and can infect any windows PC with a stealth rootkit, with none the wiser. well I caught it, because the 06 model had horrible bugs with XP, that were 'end user noticeable' no doubt the 08 version has fixed those bugs... but due to it's polymorphic nature, the rootkit was only detected by google's g-mail as far as i could 'test' free testing programs...
I spend at least $1000 on my computers, but I'm a PC gamer, my next setup complete with HDTV is going to cost $3,800.
but then again, i am also my own security expert, etc et al... and i became highly paranoid after 2006 because that was around the time the mafia started using polymorphic rootkits.
polymorphic code, needs only be written once, it won't detect with just any scanner. the scanner must be tuned to the exact polymorphic code used. luckily the hackers reuse code, but still.. the exploit i got in 2006 is only in one database (i tried all the free to try ones, not all the commercial ones, i don't have $2500 to spend on virus subscriptions to try every av on the planet)
the google g-mail database has the signature for the polymorphic rootkit i got hit with in 06.
fortunately for hackers, google's solution is private, for use only with g-mail, and i have 1 tb of files that will never see a windows machine again, thanks to hackers and the lack of concern over polymorphic rootkit detection by mainstream security software.
at least one bittorent client is trojaned, and all the open source BT programs have trojan versions, some of which are located ate 'common typos' for the address of the original site, with a complete duplication of the entire style of the original site...
I have access to linux, linux has Diff, linux reads ntfs and fat partitions easily, i can easily make a copy of every file onto a linux partition. just as easily i can remove that linux drive in the off chance mr hacker dude put in the ability to modify reiser FS or ext2-3/4
for forensic evidence collection, I have access to a superior level of tools than any AV that relies on booting into windows (of a HDD or an optical media, even) can use to find viruses/rootkits/trojans/keyloggers.
the fact that i am paranoid enough to do this, on a regular basis, is a result of the problem with security software for windows, as well as my current diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia (current doc thiks i'm OCD as well, about computer security).
Being mentally ill, is a serious advantage over the non mentally ill when it comes to detection and removal of unwanted software.
you might have missed it, but even if you have a 'definition' for a rootkit or malware, there is nothing preventing that rootkit or malware from using polymorphic code, to make the executable undetectable. you HAVE to catch the infection Before it gets you, even if the source was polymorphic, the only alternative is to use a protected boot media that can verify the integrity of every system file, and ideally has it's databases on say a flash drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code If you are a malware writer you only have a few days for your application to kick in or the AV companies will keep up. So it's not completely futile to run AV software but you will get some that aren't caught. The difference is that if no AV software was employed we could have a computer pandemic.
So even if AV software isn't the best solution but merely a patch it at least protect us somewhat.
But what's needed is a completely different design of the operating systems we have. SELinux is far too weak in reality - even if it is a good step forward it is very static in it's behavior. It is also necessary to have more dynamically adapting operating systems that can see overall patterns and be able to lock down certain processes if they start to behave in an unexpected way.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
tin sheeting? i was fairly sure that they bought all the fabric they lined the pavilion with from the guy who sold the emperor his new clothes.
too bad nobody at Microsoft listened to all the people saying 'but he's naked!' and instead slapped injunctions on them for disclosing trade secrets.
for a very small investment you can get a quality 'security system' with 24 hour monitoring and 30 second police call on break in, and that's only for beginners...
for about $100 a window you can make every glass surface in your house impervious to everything except gun fire, and glass cutters and gun fire will only make a hole the size of the bullet. 99% of thieves lack glass cutters, but of course if everyone bought this product they would become standard. in the demonstration of this product, they gave the thief a nice Louisville slugger, and the window was shattered, but the thief couldn't even budge the broken pane, not even with repeated swings from the slugger (which broke on the first swing anyways, then they gave him a metal bat, and a crow bar, irrc)
not to mention hitting the window with a bat activated the security system that they installed.
they've done everything from small businesses, to home owners with priceless collections... before the ex-thief guy always gets in and almost always gets away with stuff before the cops get there (although sometimes he waits too long and gets caught by a silent alarm) after the 'upgrade' the thief never gets in, and they show him trying to think of everything from social engineering a site, to looking in the unlocked shed for tools to get in...
sometimes, the best bet is to secure your place with what an ex-criminal is unable to get past.
with organized crime running Internet crime though, it's hard to find skilled enough thieves that don't have bullets in their heads for releasing security info about what the crime families are using to get crime accomplished.
"Is this really what it's like? Is having malware violating your personal computer the norm? Is it really impossible to design secure OS's and applications from the ground up instead of making them full of holes and relying on "solutions" that pick up the pieces? Is it really better to do damage control than prevention?"
problem #1 Windows. Windows was never designed with even the slightest concern around security, every type of security product for windows, has to compensate for the fact that every admin user can modify every file on the operating system that isn't locked by a process. and ever admin user can set a registry key to modify any locked file on reboot.
Problem #2 Organized crime. The Internet is a gateway to as much as 6 billion dollars a year in crime (if you count crimes that are hybrid, parts done online, parts done offline EG:laundering money that was produced from drug sales on the street, but laundering the money via Internet based scams etc). Organized Crime has been involved in Internet crime, as soon as they realized how much faster, cheaper, and better the Internet was for their core business, doing crime. Because of the resources organized crime has, they've made doing crime on the Internet a lot more straightforward. faster, better, cheaper, every crime syndicate has used technology the the fullest their paid hackers could come up with ideas for.
no longer are we protecting computers from a john doe with a gripe about religion deleting every file on the system every Sunday at noon...
Problem 3. The Internet. by it's very design the Internet is made for the criminal, absolutely no way for any single computer to stop any other computer from sending a message and preventing another computer from receiving it... firewalls at the border or ISP aside, the Internet was designed to allow communications in a post nuclear war holocaust scenario where only a few underground bunkers had survived. Worse still, ISPs network owners, just about everyone seems adamant against changing this even in the slightest. very few want every Internet transaction to be completely traceable, completely held accountable for both sender and recipient... ISPs don't want to upgrade their hardware to allow this, because it costs money, governments don't want to force this because they are corrupt and owned by crime families anyways... billionaires have security guys with 7 digits to protect their wealth so they don't give a damn either...
so a few nutjobs in security want everything to be traceable, and nobody listens to them... and all the free speech guys are against it because they know it would basically shut down freenets etc. anyone who pirates software is against it because they're afraid they won't be able to pirate in the future etc.
so, basically, you're left with Linux etc, which was designed loosely around UNIX, which was hardcore about security because you had thousands of untrusted users sharing a single mainframe...
using Linux doesn't equal security, but the crime families aren't after Linux because it doesn't have enough ROI (yet) and it was designed around security principals in the first place so it has an edge over not designed around security products like Windows (mac os's foundation is based around security in principal, but in practical terms Apple is only as concerned about security as any OS maker is, as long as people are buying macs it's not a problem...)
"it's not completely useless to have anti-virus software on your machine, but the problem is that they are always a bit behind"
/. article link
you should have researched a bit more, man rootkits 'published' in 2005, and 2006 aren't even close to being removable once installed with most anti virus suites much less most anti rootkit specialized software!
so yes AV is Completely useless, for removing rootkits as developed by commercial hackers, only an anti-rootkit solution that boots from protected media, (a dvd, or BD-rom) with the capability to completely fix every system file if need be can fix the problem, and only then if the AV software allows you to download an updated DB to a USB thumbdrive for use with the specialized anti-rootkit DVD/BD-rom.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/14/1726253&from=rss
my post about the problem
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=553006&cid=23410560
"He got sick of it and relies on Hughes satellite Internet, at $60/month, but he still has to be connected to a phone line to upload to the Internet"
I don't know where he got his hardware, but they haven't supported dial-up upload for the longest time... right on the site they tell you no phone line is used. back when they were part of direcTV long ago they had dial-up upload hardware, but that was almost 10 years ago! http://go.gethughesnet.com/
hughsnet is the worst satelite provider, absolutely horrible FAP policies, it's really only useful for casual webbrowsing... there is an upstart company that uses dial-up/sat inet, and then wildblue which has a 30 day rolling fap, you can download, but if you do too much in one day you internet will only recover a little bit each day... but i don't think their fap is nearly as restrictive as hughesnets, hugesnet doesn't even increase their fap if you get a buisness account!!!!! wtf...
there is a fourth satelite provider, that targets gas stations etc, for sending data to a central database, not sure what that companies fap is, but satelite internet is a crazy space with a lot of retarded FAPS...
Wifi can easily go a lot further, with a few after-market antennas, this company which i think sells them, has a simple primer, depending on the style of directional antenna you get setup can be as simple as using a level, and pointing in the general compass direction.
http://www.radiolabs.com/Articles/wifi-antenna.html
shuttleworth is almost a billionaire, and he's so far only ponied up 10 million for ubuntu.
if he has to hire 10 programmers to get ubuntu working on ultra portables, he can do it, and he can have it working so slick that anyone would want to run Linux on an ultra portable.
the fact that he hasn't done the same for laptops suggests that he doesn't value Linux laptop support. even if he did, he'd be targeting vanilla laptop support, the kind that OEMs without a big distribution can buy add an os to and sell... he wouldn't be targeting the 'aftermarket Compaq sales' because there isn't enough ROI for people who bought a windows machine and decided to switch to Linux.
remember Shuttleworth is not into Linux for charity, he's in it to get a return on his investment. he runs all his Linux projects as business ventures. clearly he thinks there is a market for Linux ultra portables, and is willing to assign developer time to try to get a decent ROI for the work.
"Marxism has this implied efficiency, "from each according to his ability" that just doesn't happen. I'll never work as hard as I possibly can (I could in theory work at least 12hrs/6days per week),"
you know, there are countless video gamers and internet addicts who devote even more time playing games, or wasting time online, than that 12hrs/6 days a week thing... if only Everything we do could be made as enjoyable and addictive as people find the internet and playing video games, then communism might actually work.
but how can you ever make a factory job as fun as a video game?
free market capitalism will never choose 'free open source software' as a de facto standard, because it is entirely to the opposite of capitalism. the goal of 'capitalism' is that one with property uses that property to create wealth. Free Open Source software doesn't create wealth, it creates a situation where anyone at all can use software without paying anyone any money for it.
The only reason why dell (who is puching their parts suppliers to write FOSS drivers, or Closed source Drivers for FOSS) is pushing FOSS is because as an OEM the cost of software licensing is costing them to the tune or half a billion dollars a year.
Dell isn't a software company, no software company would ever EVER choose FOSS over closed source, because it erodes thier customer base.
Dell is a hardware company though, and they make their money on hardware, and Software costs them on the bottom line, so a capitalistic company wants FOSS only to increase their bottom line by half a billion dollars a year, because they make the money selling the hardware, not the 'bundled' OS.
Not using conventions i.e (at least in the Ubuntu versions I've used)
I prefer the slackware way of
but there are few good things about Ubuntu, it made Linux and Open Source much better to new-comers, works almost always out of the box
It's friendly (but silly IMhO) to people who migrate from Windows, and it's the greatest achievement made in the last few years. friendly OS for Windows migrating users. I can tell you why you despise it. Because it's considered mainstream Linux, and you are an arrogant prick who previously enjoyed looking down on the masses. not only that, he's a command line bigot. command lines are powerful tools, and i can't imagine an OS without one, but they're clunky (have to learn commands and switches and make sure things with spaces all get re-parsed with quotes around them, i scripted a lot in my Free BSD days, needing to add quotes all the time in scripts drove me batty) CLUNKY i say, i avoid the command line as much as possible, it is my last resort, the #1 reason i stopped using Free BSD was all the Bias towards Command Line Interfaces.
before ubuntu, the only distro i really liked in Linux was knoppix, smoothwall is okay, but i haven't played with it much.
like most normals i have a bad memory, like most normals to remember shortcuts i need cheat sheets, cheat sheets suck, they get lost, i spill soda on them, or they get a nice big glob of spaghetti on them... CLIs are only useful for people with photographic memories, or people who can keep a lot of cheat sheets handy. this is why DOS based word processors all died the instant 'windows 3' came out and companies could sell 'gui' based text editors. norms don't like memorization, they were forced to put up with it for 13-17 years, depending on if they managed college, and they're doing whatever they can to avoid doing what they hated.
"My two most recent PC's are a Pentium M 1.60 Ghz with 512 MB RAM and a AMD Athlon 5600+ X2 with 2 GB Ram"
And here i thought ubuntu was slow on a P-3 (slot style) 400Mhz* with 80MB of RAM. it takes a full 3 minutes to log in (after enteting password) but that could easily be resolved by buying some ram... oh and replacing the 2-3 GB hdd.
*= specs from memory, they might be slightly better