The hospital might have a strong argument though by saying the healthcare specific software they need is Windows only
This is true. Even 5 or so years ago, most of the EMR and other related health industry software packages ran exclusively (or preferentially) on UNIX and even Linux. There was the option to run it on Windows, sure - but it wasn't "Enterprise grade". These days, the situation has flipped: UNIX versions are being phased out and no longer supported, whereas the Windows versions are receiving all the new development.
About the only place for non-Windows systems in healthcare are for things like Xen, VMware, and maybe backend Linux/BSD file/print servers. Too many of these HMR packages have very
Sadly, many of their support requirements are: IE6, XP, and the like unless you've got their HMR package for current_year + 1. URG.
These sweeping healthcare 'reforms' are going to bankrupt hospitals through IT funding requirements. Fortunately for me, I guess that means there'll be a fair amount of demand for healthcare IT until the last drop is bled.
Please don't change your image. We like you just the way you are: attractive, sexy, loveable.
Sincerely,
Teenage Girls
... but seriously. Ubuntu has typically looked like shit: 9.10 has the "burnt amber" look, which is horrible.
Orange (gold) and purple only really work for a very small subset of the populace. Brown and orange works for nobody: these are color schemes picked by football teams to differentiate themselves from each other, with no significant purpose other than that.
Blue, on the other hand, is much more acceptable to everyone.
Consider: both OS X and Windows have done "variations of blue" for the better part of a decade. Failing that, go with grey and accents (OS X 10.5 and pre-XP, at least).
There is a good reason for using blue: blue is calming and generally appealing. Darker shades are rich and warm. Even KDE uses "blue" to one degree or another (and has since 2.0 I think - for the most part - unless you're using SuSE).
Orange/gold and purple are regal colors. Whatever. I personally hate maroon, purple, and the like, and will theme anything I've got to look at all day a softer blue, grey, or the like. I suspect many people are the same in that regard.
Part of what we will see (and, I'd argue, have started to see) in the transition is an increase in failure rates of the older devices (regardless of what's being advertised).
Shortly before LCDs became the 'default' option, maybe a year or so before, CRT quality dropped off pretty quickly. A lot more new ones were dying than would happen in previous years, and many places just said "fuck it, we're getting one of those new fangled LCDs for 2x as much" because they didn't want the big thing on their desk.
Fast forward to now: take a look at the reviews on the newer disks on a site like newegg.com. You've got a fairly high percentage of low-rating reviews, and certainly more than would be acceptable even a year or two ago for a product considered "purchasable".
So, that transition has already started. Except for very few people, the benefits of the larger capacity disks is negligible. Heck, I've got what I'd consider "a lot" of media compared to most people, and I'm not even 50% on a raid1 array yet.
The realistic thing to do would be to make the jury a completely random sampling: if you're selected for jury duty, you're going to be on the jury, period. None of this defense/prosecution exclusion based on knowledge, crap.
Yeah, you'd have more hung juries and you'd have more guilty people getting off, but that's not a conviction, upholding the whole "guilty until proven innocent" part.
Another thing to do would be to make the jury randomly selected within the demographic of the defender, but with a bias not only for the defense but also for the offense: in this case, you'd have a statistically higher number of tech workers and government employees, for instance. (Of course, knowing how gov't works, that would certainly bias the jury in his favor.)
Making a "jury of peers" is dicey because it can lead to nepotism and plutocratic results with ease, where no justice is found. Still, I think I would prefer this to the current setup.
It's not a possibility: your primary limitation isn't the filesystem, it's the drive itself.
Modern drives are, for all intents and purposes, black boxes. They do much the same kind of thing internally as an SSD does, but present the data (and drive) to the OS in the more traditional fashions through geometry and the like. The 'beginning' of the drive may not be, as indicated by tests on read/right speed across the platters being reasonably consistent (and many drives being composed of multiple platters). LBA errors result in the internal remapping of 'secret' good sectors to those previously-good but now-damaged sectors. There's precious little way to know exactly what is where on a disk.
If 99% of Ford (or Toyota, or...) cars on the road would start to malfunction after 1,000 miles and destroy the roadways in the process,they'd be sued into oblivion (if the government didn't shut them down, first).
And yet Microsoft has the gall to suggest the government tax us. I can understand a "use tax"; I can understand a liability tax/fee; I can even understand an unevenly distributed tax upon the highest users, or some such thing. But a tax based on negligence, when the actual fault likely sits with a 3rd party? That's absurd.
(Now, if they were GM cars, it'd be another story...)
Actually the registry was a rather benign concept. It was originally designed to host OS settings in a convenient central location (with redundancy ofcource) to enable easier migration from PC to PC, easier group policy management, etc
That's a bunch of nonsense. It never, ever worked anything like that.
That may have been the concept, sure. But the implementation was nothing like that, and for all intents and purposes, was 100% the opposite.
I'm not sure where the redundancy idea comes from in your post. I've seen more than a few Windows systems fucked over by just one or two registry keys doing the wrong thing. The fact that the path to said registry keys is cryptic and over 100 characters long doesn't help.
The ability to distribute registry settings (and to enforce them) via Active Directory is indeed nice. It's a necessity for such an operating system. But honestly, the concept has been implemented for decades longer than Microsoft has been around, and better: the almighty/etc does its job just fine (BSDs with its "two etc directories" and other such crazies withstanding). If you want to diverge, things can be configured on a per-user or group basis without much issue.
Done right, and the only two things you've got to migrate when moving from one system to another (should be)/etc and/home.
The problem here isn't that people can't afford anti-virus... it's that they can't be bothered to use it.
Actually, that's not the problem.
The problem is that people think they've got to pay for AV, so they're using old shit or an upgraded version of what they've been using for a decade. I'd say the cause for infection related problems on most computers is split 3 ways, evenly: old shit, Norton breaking things as a result of an infection, or willful stupidity on the part of the user.
Until AV approaches even 90% practical prevention and disinfection (ie you could run it daily for a year, and for any one day, you'd have a 90% chance of being clean) on the average user computer, AV is not the answer.
When a system is destroyed by the AV product, then you've got further issues which justify not using AV at all.
The best I've seen are MS Security Essentials and NOD32/eSet (the latter being better). But even those fall very, very short for the average user.
I've, on occasion, had fantasies about righting some of the wrongs in this world. I once had a dream about a Matrix-meets-Boondock Saints, where there were vigilantes taking out abusive, greedy corporate types.
McBride personifies the ideal target for this kind of thing. The man is a worm.
Get rid of first-line support and make it very, very difficult for them to get in contact with the troubleshooters and sysadmins.
No, I'm serious. That's the only way to get them to read the error messages: send them afloat by themselves, without the liferaft. They'll have to hold themselves afloat by their own sheer heft and willpower.
Even if they do manage to track down the higher level techs, the "don't talk to me, I'm busy" rule applies.
This way nobody actually gets 'blamed' for user stupidity but the user who breaks the computer, there are fewer user errors due to them actually paying attention and learning, and the sysadmins actually get work done.
More will get done and the users will have fewer actual errors. Support costs will be saved, and users won't begrudge those IT guys who do "nothing" all day.
It does the same in Chrome (well, Chromium nightly), and, I'd assume, all browsers based on Webkit. Chromium/webkit appears to display elements before running of the script elements.
From these results, we can assume one of two things:
1) Incompetence 2) Malice
There may be an off chance of both incompetence and malice given Microsoft's history, but consider that this action was performed solely to meet legal requirements set forth by the EU to inhibit Microsoft's monopolistic behaviors.
Regardless of which it was, the end result will (likely) be one of two things: the EU will say "not good enough" and another year+ long trial will go on before any actual change gets made, or the EU will let it slide and Microsoft will reap the benefit of whatever they intended with this algorithm.
To my eyes, it looks like Microsoft is giving preference to 1st place proportionately to the browser current market name recognition - to the exception of their own browser. I don't know if this is intentional.
However, also consider how dialog boxes typically work, and how people have been conditioned (on Windows and pretty much everywhere else) to immediately look to the left hand side for their "get past this irritating prompt" button. It's a technique used to install all sorts of insidious malware, so evidently it's a technique that works. By having IE hold closest position to that 'visual queue' area, they are giving it preference. Also consider the impact that having the IE logo branding (or any logo, for that matter) on your desktop for a decade will have.
I would not be surprised to see an article on statistics resulting from this browser selector showing up in a couple months, showing the profound popularity of IE. I'd wager at least 50%.
I bought a handful of motherboards for new workstations at work. I just picked up the cheapest thing I could find which supported i5s and didn't have too many negative reviews on NewEgg.
It's got two exposed headers with pins for serial on the motherboard. (It's also got a floppy connector, but no PATA.) I was quite surprised by this, as the board is (otherwise) very "plane jane".
I have a high-end laptop with a good SSD, and it still takes 46 seconds to go form "pressed the power button" to "logged on and usable" with Windows 7, and I suspect it wouldn't be much better with Linux.
Wow, seriously? I've got a Hitachi RAID1 (mdraid) in Ubuntu 9.04 and it takes maybe 20s to get to the X login screen from POST. It's a little longer in 10.04 on similar hardware, but then I haven't bothered to prune unneeded services - still no more than 40s or so. I don't have the time to get up and get a glass of water from the kitchen, at any rate (a 25 foot distance from where I sit).
With a mobile computer (ie one not tethered by a power cable, such as one in a car, a PDA/smartphone, or the like) can benefit quite a bit from being able to go from a power-off state to on-and-usable.
It doesn't matter if the device has a 10 day "on but not in use" lifetime if it's still draining the battery, and the device gets used once every 5 days for half an hour at a time. That'll lead to a lot of "crap the battery is dead again".
Also, for automotive use, it would be very useful to actually be able to use your in-dash computer as soon as you turn the ignition key (not having to wait for it to boot) without having the computer 'always on' and draining the car battery (even if it is a marginal drain - it's still a drain).
Really, what you ask is a silly question. Your supposition of "there's always hibernation" smacks of a hate for progress. Sure, there's hibernation, (and for saving application state, etc., that's really nice). But this has obvious applications and benefits.
I willingly look for places to properly recycle my aging computer equipment and gadgets for free and they make 100% profit off whatever they can scrape off it
And I want a pony, and a penguin, and ride on a spaceship! For Christmas, please, mommy!
I hope you realize that the reason why free recycling is not available is because it costs money. A lot of money: it doesn't turn anyone a profit (except for Office Depot, charging people $20 a box to send your computer to a Chinese dump). It's also very dirty business.
If there was actual money to be made doing recycling, there'd be a lot of people doing it.
I wonder how much of that research is "find places to steal information from and use it". Seems we've had a fair number of news articles lately about Chinese espionage, and it doesn't take much imagination to see that a lot of the "new" things from China are actually reverse engineered Western items.
Without effective search, I suspect all the shops in China making Apple product knockoffs would be hard pressed to bring products to market. Likewise for many other industries.
It's laughable that you consider disabling domains serving up spam as "infrastructure" for a country. It's absurd that you consider this akin to, say, blowing up a bridge or attacking the country's infrastructure.
The closest immediate analogy I can come up with is sinking a drug runner's US-registered boat.
Also, maybe those foreign entities could have considered not using US assets (.com) for their attacks.
If there was no big initial payoff to dealing drugs, people wouldn't start. When you can spend maybe an hour delivering your goods a day and make a couple hundred dollars for your efforts (minimum), there is incentive.
I know of a guy who made $800 in one day - his first - selling pot. I know of another guy who (while still in high school) made enough to buy a $60k vehicle outright.
There is no doubt in my mind that the casual drug dealer can make significantly more than minimum wage while doing negligible work each day. If you've got no base competency and know people who use, it's a no-brainer: your first-person acquaintances alone can stock your fridge and pay your rent.
No, I can't refer to any studies (quite possibly because I haven't looked hard enough, or because none have been published - such a study wouldn't get much funding).
A cursory google search, however, will show you numerous instances of this happening:
As far as urban/in-city transit... yes, I misspoke/was not thorough enough. If you review the rest of my post you can clearly see we're talking about transit from cities to suburbs and exurbs. I've got several friends in California, where they have seen such schemes occur: light rail goes in, area crime goes up drastically.
As for NYC... the safety of the subways is likely one reason why people use them vs. driving. There's also the whole speed issue.
How does this indicate that Microsoft isn't green?
Maybe Microsoft is simply looking at the reality: there is no incentive for people who might cross that bridge to use public transit. People who are able to afford a lengthy daily drive to work are also likely to be able to justify not sitting another 20+ minutes on a bus/train with strangers.
Also, public transit has shown to do one thing very well in the US: bring criminals from their urban homes to suburbia where they can commit crimes and then hop back on the train in time for dinner.
Upper-middle-class people do not ride on public transit unless it is very, very clean, safe, and private. (This is partially because train lines seem to typically go from urban downtown to their pleasant neighborhoods, resulting in urban scum coming out to deal drugs and expand their turf in the relatively safe 'burbs.)
Maybe Microsoft is opposed to the lengthy extensions to the bill proposing public transit because said public transit would then come out of the Redmond tax coffers.
There's probably close to a half dozen plausible reasons why MS might be opposed to this bridge, and it has nothing to do with how "Green" they are.
Why don't you call them "Reds" and have McCarthy go after them? (That's what this Green bullshit is becoming - the New McCarthyism.)
If you dig a little deeper, you may recall what caused the Crusades. Just a little deeper...
Care to explain how US "imperialism" and "terrorism" from America (pick a couple examples, if you will) have resulted in Middle Eastern hostilities towards the US? I'll forgive your supposition if you can substantiate it.
It should not surprise you that there isn't much terrorism from Latin America. They are not Muslims. Honestly, if anyone has an excuse to be terrorists, it's the people in South and Central America. I'm sure even the Polish have fucked them over. But they're not culturally hostile because, well, they're not Muslim.
We're talking about a part of the world here where it is not only commonplace but largely culturally accepted (the same way, say, driveby shootings are in S. Hollywood) - for husbands to kill their daughters or wives for disobeying them or having a relationship out of marriage.
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The hospital might have a strong argument though by saying the healthcare specific software they need is Windows only
This is true. Even 5 or so years ago, most of the EMR and other related health industry software packages ran exclusively (or preferentially) on UNIX and even Linux. There was the option to run it on Windows, sure - but it wasn't "Enterprise grade". These days, the situation has flipped: UNIX versions are being phased out and no longer supported, whereas the Windows versions are receiving all the new development.
About the only place for non-Windows systems in healthcare are for things like Xen, VMware, and maybe backend Linux/BSD file/print servers. Too many of these HMR packages have very
Sadly, many of their support requirements are: IE6, XP, and the like unless you've got their HMR package for current_year + 1. URG.
These sweeping healthcare 'reforms' are going to bankrupt hospitals through IT funding requirements. Fortunately for me, I guess that means there'll be a fair amount of demand for healthcare IT until the last drop is bled.
"Purple and orange look like domestic violence."
That is hilarious! Ubuntu: the Spousey Beatey release, now in purple and orange!
Also, baby poop is more of a black demon mud color.
Dear CarrotTop,
Please don't change your image. We like you just the way you are: attractive, sexy, loveable.
Sincerely,
Teenage Girls
... but seriously. Ubuntu has typically looked like shit: 9.10 has the "burnt amber" look, which is horrible.
Orange (gold) and purple only really work for a very small subset of the populace. Brown and orange works for nobody: these are color schemes picked by football teams to differentiate themselves from each other, with no significant purpose other than that.
Blue, on the other hand, is much more acceptable to everyone.
Consider: both OS X and Windows have done "variations of blue" for the better part of a decade. Failing that, go with grey and accents (OS X 10.5 and pre-XP, at least).
There is a good reason for using blue: blue is calming and generally appealing. Darker shades are rich and warm. Even KDE uses "blue" to one degree or another (and has since 2.0 I think - for the most part - unless you're using SuSE).
Orange/gold and purple are regal colors. Whatever. I personally hate maroon, purple, and the like, and will theme anything I've got to look at all day a softer blue, grey, or the like. I suspect many people are the same in that regard.
Part of what we will see (and, I'd argue, have started to see) in the transition is an increase in failure rates of the older devices (regardless of what's being advertised).
Shortly before LCDs became the 'default' option, maybe a year or so before, CRT quality dropped off pretty quickly. A lot more new ones were dying than would happen in previous years, and many places just said "fuck it, we're getting one of those new fangled LCDs for 2x as much" because they didn't want the big thing on their desk.
Fast forward to now: take a look at the reviews on the newer disks on a site like newegg.com. You've got a fairly high percentage of low-rating reviews, and certainly more than would be acceptable even a year or two ago for a product considered "purchasable".
So, that transition has already started. Except for very few people, the benefits of the larger capacity disks is negligible. Heck, I've got what I'd consider "a lot" of media compared to most people, and I'm not even 50% on a raid1 array yet.
The realistic thing to do would be to make the jury a completely random sampling: if you're selected for jury duty, you're going to be on the jury, period. None of this defense/prosecution exclusion based on knowledge, crap.
Yeah, you'd have more hung juries and you'd have more guilty people getting off, but that's not a conviction, upholding the whole "guilty until proven innocent" part.
Another thing to do would be to make the jury randomly selected within the demographic of the defender, but with a bias not only for the defense but also for the offense: in this case, you'd have a statistically higher number of tech workers and government employees, for instance. (Of course, knowing how gov't works, that would certainly bias the jury in his favor.)
Making a "jury of peers" is dicey because it can lead to nepotism and plutocratic results with ease, where no justice is found. Still, I think I would prefer this to the current setup.
It's not a possibility: your primary limitation isn't the filesystem, it's the drive itself.
Modern drives are, for all intents and purposes, black boxes. They do much the same kind of thing internally as an SSD does, but present the data (and drive) to the OS in the more traditional fashions through geometry and the like. The 'beginning' of the drive may not be, as indicated by tests on read/right speed across the platters being reasonably consistent (and many drives being composed of multiple platters). LBA errors result in the internal remapping of 'secret' good sectors to those previously-good but now-damaged sectors. There's precious little way to know exactly what is where on a disk.
If 99% of Ford (or Toyota, or...) cars on the road would start to malfunction after 1,000 miles and destroy the roadways in the process,they'd be sued into oblivion (if the government didn't shut them down, first).
And yet Microsoft has the gall to suggest the government tax us. I can understand a "use tax"; I can understand a liability tax/fee; I can even understand an unevenly distributed tax upon the highest users, or some such thing. But a tax based on negligence, when the actual fault likely sits with a 3rd party? That's absurd.
(Now, if they were GM cars, it'd be another story...)
Actually the registry was a rather benign concept. It was originally designed to host OS settings in a convenient central location (with redundancy ofcource) to enable easier migration from PC to PC, easier group policy management, etc
That's a bunch of nonsense. It never, ever worked anything like that.
That may have been the concept, sure. But the implementation was nothing like that, and for all intents and purposes, was 100% the opposite.
I'm not sure where the redundancy idea comes from in your post. I've seen more than a few Windows systems fucked over by just one or two registry keys doing the wrong thing. The fact that the path to said registry keys is cryptic and over 100 characters long doesn't help.
The ability to distribute registry settings (and to enforce them) via Active Directory is indeed nice. It's a necessity for such an operating system. But honestly, the concept has been implemented for decades longer than Microsoft has been around, and better: the almighty /etc does its job just fine (BSDs with its "two etc directories" and other such crazies withstanding). If you want to diverge, things can be configured on a per-user or group basis without much issue.
Done right, and the only two things you've got to migrate when moving from one system to another (should be) /etc and /home.
The problem here isn't that people can't afford anti-virus... it's that they can't be bothered to use it.
Actually, that's not the problem.
The problem is that people think they've got to pay for AV, so they're using old shit or an upgraded version of what they've been using for a decade. I'd say the cause for infection related problems on most computers is split 3 ways, evenly: old shit, Norton breaking things as a result of an infection, or willful stupidity on the part of the user.
Until AV approaches even 90% practical prevention and disinfection (ie you could run it daily for a year, and for any one day, you'd have a 90% chance of being clean) on the average user computer, AV is not the answer.
When a system is destroyed by the AV product, then you've got further issues which justify not using AV at all.
The best I've seen are MS Security Essentials and NOD32/eSet (the latter being better). But even those fall very, very short for the average user.
I've, on occasion, had fantasies about righting some of the wrongs in this world. I once had a dream about a Matrix-meets-Boondock Saints, where there were vigilantes taking out abusive, greedy corporate types.
McBride personifies the ideal target for this kind of thing. The man is a worm.
Get rid of first-line support and make it very, very difficult for them to get in contact with the troubleshooters and sysadmins.
No, I'm serious. That's the only way to get them to read the error messages: send them afloat by themselves, without the liferaft. They'll have to hold themselves afloat by their own sheer heft and willpower.
Even if they do manage to track down the higher level techs, the "don't talk to me, I'm busy" rule applies.
This way nobody actually gets 'blamed' for user stupidity but the user who breaks the computer, there are fewer user errors due to them actually paying attention and learning, and the sysadmins actually get work done.
More will get done and the users will have fewer actual errors. Support costs will be saved, and users won't begrudge those IT guys who do "nothing" all day.
It does the same in Chrome (well, Chromium nightly), and, I'd assume, all browsers based on Webkit. Chromium/webkit appears to display elements before running of the script elements.
Exactly.
From these results, we can assume one of two things:
1) Incompetence
2) Malice
There may be an off chance of both incompetence and malice given Microsoft's history, but consider that this action was performed solely to meet legal requirements set forth by the EU to inhibit Microsoft's monopolistic behaviors.
Regardless of which it was, the end result will (likely) be one of two things: the EU will say "not good enough" and another year+ long trial will go on before any actual change gets made, or the EU will let it slide and Microsoft will reap the benefit of whatever they intended with this algorithm.
To my eyes, it looks like Microsoft is giving preference to 1st place proportionately to the browser current market name recognition - to the exception of their own browser. I don't know if this is intentional.
However, also consider how dialog boxes typically work, and how people have been conditioned (on Windows and pretty much everywhere else) to immediately look to the left hand side for their "get past this irritating prompt" button. It's a technique used to install all sorts of insidious malware, so evidently it's a technique that works. By having IE hold closest position to that 'visual queue' area, they are giving it preference. Also consider the impact that having the IE logo branding (or any logo, for that matter) on your desktop for a decade will have.
I would not be surprised to see an article on statistics resulting from this browser selector showing up in a couple months, showing the profound popularity of IE. I'd wager at least 50%.
What does an all-purpose herbicide used on pot plants have anything to do with intentionally poisoning people?
I bought a handful of motherboards for new workstations at work. I just picked up the cheapest thing I could find which supported i5s and didn't have too many negative reviews on NewEgg.
It's got two exposed headers with pins for serial on the motherboard. (It's also got a floppy connector, but no PATA.) I was quite surprised by this, as the board is (otherwise) very "plane jane".
I have a high-end laptop with a good SSD, and it still takes 46 seconds to go form "pressed the power button" to "logged on and usable" with Windows 7, and I suspect it wouldn't be much better with Linux.
Wow, seriously? I've got a Hitachi RAID1 (mdraid) in Ubuntu 9.04 and it takes maybe 20s to get to the X login screen from POST. It's a little longer in 10.04 on similar hardware, but then I haven't bothered to prune unneeded services - still no more than 40s or so. I don't have the time to get up and get a glass of water from the kitchen, at any rate (a 25 foot distance from where I sit).
With a mobile computer (ie one not tethered by a power cable, such as one in a car, a PDA/smartphone, or the like) can benefit quite a bit from being able to go from a power-off state to on-and-usable.
It doesn't matter if the device has a 10 day "on but not in use" lifetime if it's still draining the battery, and the device gets used once every 5 days for half an hour at a time. That'll lead to a lot of "crap the battery is dead again".
Also, for automotive use, it would be very useful to actually be able to use your in-dash computer as soon as you turn the ignition key (not having to wait for it to boot) without having the computer 'always on' and draining the car battery (even if it is a marginal drain - it's still a drain).
Really, what you ask is a silly question. Your supposition of "there's always hibernation" smacks of a hate for progress. Sure, there's hibernation, (and for saving application state, etc., that's really nice). But this has obvious applications and benefits.
I willingly look for places to properly recycle my aging computer equipment and gadgets for free and they make 100% profit off whatever they can scrape off it
And I want a pony, and a penguin, and ride on a spaceship! For Christmas, please, mommy!
I hope you realize that the reason why free recycling is not available is because it costs money. A lot of money: it doesn't turn anyone a profit (except for Office Depot, charging people $20 a box to send your computer to a Chinese dump). It's also very dirty business.
If there was actual money to be made doing recycling, there'd be a lot of people doing it.
Chinese "research", eh?
I wonder how much of that research is "find places to steal information from and use it". Seems we've had a fair number of news articles lately about Chinese espionage, and it doesn't take much imagination to see that a lot of the "new" things from China are actually reverse engineered Western items.
Without effective search, I suspect all the shops in China making Apple product knockoffs would be hard pressed to bring products to market. Likewise for many other industries.
The only instance of 'movie hackers' which spring to mind is:
"It's a UNIX system! I know this! "
It's laughable that you consider disabling domains serving up spam as "infrastructure" for a country. It's absurd that you consider this akin to, say, blowing up a bridge or attacking the country's infrastructure.
The closest immediate analogy I can come up with is sinking a drug runner's US-registered boat.
Also, maybe those foreign entities could have considered not using US assets (.com) for their attacks.
If there was no big initial payoff to dealing drugs, people wouldn't start. When you can spend maybe an hour delivering your goods a day and make a couple hundred dollars for your efforts (minimum), there is incentive.
I know of a guy who made $800 in one day - his first - selling pot. I know of another guy who (while still in high school) made enough to buy a $60k vehicle outright.
There is no doubt in my mind that the casual drug dealer can make significantly more than minimum wage while doing negligible work each day. If you've got no base competency and know people who use, it's a no-brainer: your first-person acquaintances alone can stock your fridge and pay your rent.
No, I can't refer to any studies (quite possibly because I haven't looked hard enough, or because none have been published - such a study wouldn't get much funding).
A cursory google search, however, will show you numerous instances of this happening:
http://www.oregoncatalyst.com/index.php?/archives/965-Crime-Near-Light-Rail-Stations.html
As far as urban/in-city transit... yes, I misspoke/was not thorough enough. If you review the rest of my post you can clearly see we're talking about transit from cities to suburbs and exurbs. I've got several friends in California, where they have seen such schemes occur: light rail goes in, area crime goes up drastically.
As for NYC... the safety of the subways is likely one reason why people use them vs. driving. There's also the whole speed issue.
How does this indicate that Microsoft isn't green?
Maybe Microsoft is simply looking at the reality: there is no incentive for people who might cross that bridge to use public transit. People who are able to afford a lengthy daily drive to work are also likely to be able to justify not sitting another 20+ minutes on a bus/train with strangers.
Also, public transit has shown to do one thing very well in the US: bring criminals from their urban homes to suburbia where they can commit crimes and then hop back on the train in time for dinner.
Upper-middle-class people do not ride on public transit unless it is very, very clean, safe, and private. (This is partially because train lines seem to typically go from urban downtown to their pleasant neighborhoods, resulting in urban scum coming out to deal drugs and expand their turf in the relatively safe 'burbs.)
Maybe Microsoft is opposed to the lengthy extensions to the bill proposing public transit because said public transit would then come out of the Redmond tax coffers.
There's probably close to a half dozen plausible reasons why MS might be opposed to this bridge, and it has nothing to do with how "Green" they are.
Why don't you call them "Reds" and have McCarthy go after them? (That's what this Green bullshit is becoming - the New McCarthyism.)
I'm going to go burn some tires.
If you dig a little deeper, you may recall what caused the Crusades. Just a little deeper...
Care to explain how US "imperialism" and "terrorism" from America (pick a couple examples, if you will) have resulted in Middle Eastern hostilities towards the US? I'll forgive your supposition if you can substantiate it.
It should not surprise you that there isn't much terrorism from Latin America. They are not Muslims. Honestly, if anyone has an excuse to be terrorists, it's the people in South and Central America. I'm sure even the Polish have fucked them over. But they're not culturally hostile because, well, they're not Muslim.
We're talking about a part of the world here where it is not only commonplace but largely culturally accepted (the same way, say, driveby shootings are in S. Hollywood) - for husbands to kill their daughters or wives for disobeying them or having a relationship out of marriage.