Face it, you just don't have a clue about Windows do you? Why don't you try actually using it before making stuff up in your desperation to defend your own system of choice? Nah - that would be too much of a challenge wouldn't it? Here's some more cluestick bludgeonings for you:
an user who actually uses the facility of ActiveX that you seem to find so attractive has BY NECESSITY already turned at least some of these restrictions off at some sites
Garbage. I use ActiveX controls all the time (Flash, Acrobat mainly) and have nothing turned off at any site. Not even from Microsoft - especially not Microsoft actually. You enjoy making stuff up?
this is normal everyday behaviour that users absolutely have to engage in to take full advantage of a hell of a lot of ActiveX-enabled sites.
No, it's not. Tell me which site you are referring to? Oh yeah - that's right, you can't cause you're making it up.
The ease of accidentally turning this on......is non-existant. I know zero users that have their machines wide open in the way YOU describe. Like I said - you're making it up. I must admire your fantasy world though - very well constructed.
I can't believe you're honestly proposing that installing a Firefox Extension (one that doesn't exist... remember that ActiveX ships with Windows and CAN NOT BE REMOVED) is in any way comparable.
"ActiveX" is COM. Bonobo and KObjects are basically COM. Perhaps if you get your terminology right you can have a sensible discussion? If you mean that there is a download mechanism that ships with Windows which the user can explicitly configure to get untrusted binaries then, why, yes! There is! Imagine that - the user can configure the OS to be insecure if they choose.
Obviously I know better than the user
And that exact attitude is exactly why your opinion means nothing and it should never mean anything. I seriously hope you don't work in software design because I'd sell stock in that company in a hurry.
If you believed that, you would be in favor of making Internet Explorer and the Microsoft HTML control an optional component of the system
I am absolutely in favor of that, dumbass. What made you think I wouldn't be? Sheesh.
You would be in favor of eliminating the DRM component in Windows Media Player 9, because its only purpose is to artificially restrict what the user wanted to do.
Yep, in favor of that too. Why wouldn't I be? Oh yeah - because in YOUR world someone can't disagree with you and not be generalized.
You would be in favor of giving the user the option of disabling the entire Active-X-based security infrastructure and replacing it with one that puts the responsibility for security in the specific application that the user chose to run, rather than a deeply embedded component that the user is not even aware of.
You mean give them the option of running Firefox or no browser at all? Yeah - didn't you say that in the first point? Kinda repeating yourself there aren't you?
You believe in freedom in computing? Then why don't you believe in giving me the freedom to use Windows NT, which is at the heart a potentially VERY secure OS, without Microsoft's abominable ActiveX insecurity infrastructure on top of it?
I do believe that, well, except for your histrionics and overreaching generalizations about ActiveX. I absolutely believe in freedom in computing.
Damn, I know that "freedom" is one of the most heavily abused words in English. I sure didn't expect to see this kind of Orwellian doublespeak popping up in defence of Internet Explorer, though.
Because the Orwellian doublespeak is all in your own mind and the reality you seem to have created. When you come out of your denial, let us know. You'll be much happier without that pent up anger.:)
Waking up a PC from hibernation (the closest x86 equivalent to PPC sleep)
Actually, you've just proven you don't have a clue.
In hibernation, the PC can be removed from the power supply completely - battery out on the floor style. Do this to a Mac in sleep mode and it dies.
The closest thing to "sleep" mode on the Mac is (believe it or not), "sleep" mode on a PC. Anyone who tries to tell you different is either self-deluded or simply trying to delude you.
Just in case you don't believe me - have a deep, deep think about why the PC coming out of hibernate needs to load RAM from the disk and why the Mac coming out of sleep doesn't? Yep - you got it! The Mac still has power going to RAM!
Thanks for playing, but you lose. Better luck next time.
You contradict yourself. You say "There is no mechanism in IE for things to download, launch and run with no end-user intervention." Then you say "the user has to explicitly tell IE to accept code from anywhere (in about 4 different places)".
I did no such thing. I don't exactly know what you think "turning things on in 4 different places" is if it's not "end user intervention". No matter which way you want to wriggle, IE requires end user intervention to install code and run it automatically.
You, however, do contradict yourself. First you say that "it's not on by default" and then you say "it requires no end user interaction". Which is it? Does it require turning on, or does it require no end user interaction.
That's not what the user said. The user said "I don't give a damn where any executable comes from, download it and run it and don't tell me about it". It should not be possible to say that. I don't care how convenient it is, it's just too dangerous... it should not be possible to turn that mode on, or any subset of that mode.
So your position is you know better than the user? Why shouldn't a user be allowed to say exactly that *if they want to*? Last I looked, computers are tools of the users and artificially restricting them is a bad thing, not a good thing. Microsoft and many other companies come under fire for this sort of BS every day and yet we still have lame morons like you espousing that you know better than every other user on the planet. Yeah - right...
I believe in freedom in computing. You obviously don't. Thanks for playing.
You can trivially write a firefox plugin that once installed will happily download and run any executable content it wants to without any intervention from the user. Maybe one hasn't been written yet, maybe it has - do you audit the source code of every plugin to know?
There is no mechanism in IE for things to download, launch and run with no end-user intervention. At a very minimum, the user has to explicitly tell IE to accept code from anywhere (in about 4 different places), then explicitly go to a website which contains the malicious code.
This is no different technically from telling Firefox to download and install any xpi that you happen to click on, configuring yum (or apt-get, or whatever) to go fetch code from some hacker's site, download it and run it or any number of other things. In all of those things you are setting up a "trusted zone" of places that you will accept code from without question. Just because you don't see the words "trusted zone" anywhere doesn't mean there isn't one.
If you actually read the post made by Hook, you'll see that one of his primary concern was that you can write an ActiveX control which downloads secondary executables and runs them, bypassing the digital signature mechanism. How terribly different is this from doing exactly the same thing with an.xpi, or any number of autoupdate mechanisms built into apps on your system?
The problem isn't ActiveX. That's simply yet another name for COM objects. The real problem is that people run as "root" on Windows system because it's damn near impossible to do anything useful as a non-root user.
Honestly, do you really have to blame the transport/install mechanism when a user explicitly tells the computer "I don't give a damn where you get then executable code from that you are about to run as root"?
This is possible with any binary executable content that you download from the web. ActiveX just makes it easy. Other relatively simple things that could be done are:
- Write a Netscape Plugin that formats your hard drive. - Write a.exe that formats your hard drive. - Write a.msi that formats your hard drive. - Write a.rpm that formats your hard drive. - Write a shellscript that formats your hard drive. - Write a freeware version of DOOM that formats your hard drive when you lose. etc.
In other words, he's missing the whole point here. ActiveX exists to run binary content as efficiently and seamlessly as possible. It's assumed that the end user is intelligent enough to not install binary content without verifying it's origin and making the active decision to trust that publisher (akin to signing your rpms). The problem comes in that people choose to trust software authors pretty liberally when that trust really should have a lot more skepticism attached.
In short, ActiveX is simply a "better" Netscape plugin. If you want some form of sandboxing then run Java, or.NET objects.
Tom's Hardware brought up an excellent point: What happens to hardware pixel shaders that refer to a pixel that wasn't rendered by the card it's running on?
Given the almost limitless flexibility on shaders, this strikes me as a possibly huge performance bottleneck that may even make the SLI solution slower than just one card under certain conditions - or just render inaccurately.
No it didn't. NTFS drew a lot of concepts from HPFS and other file systems in it's development but it certainly wasn't a derivative of HPFS/386. If it was, IBM would have certainly had a few things to say about it.
Maybe they could meet this if they had a decent team devoting a lot of time and they knew the ins and outs of the Win32 API fully (including all the additional DLLs that get tossed around like WinINet). I still think it's hideously optimistic though.
Phase 4 - 6 to 8 weeks (Engineering and Development)
What in the hell are they smoking because I want some. Porting the Win32 API is a hellishly complex task and it's going to take way, way longer than 6 to 8 weeks. Perhaps they could have something in 2-3 years if they worked a good dev team full time on it but not 6-8 weeks and certainly not at any sort of compatibility level that would even approach running Office 2003.
This project is doomed to failure. It's just some nice marketing slides to scam some venture capital and run off with it.
Look, what are you waiting for in the next release of SQLServer? Quite a lot actually. The big ones for me are the.NET integration with stored procs and being able to use structured exceptions within T/SQL.
By your own admission, you use magnetic instruments.
The compass is magnetic. That's about all that is though. VORs, ILS and other essential equipment rely on radio/microwave signals from outside the aircraft. If you want to potentially jam those navigation signals simply because you're too ignorant to understand the possible interactions between a transmitter in a faraday cage and a very sensitive receiver then frankly you don't deserve to fly.
This is not an original idea. It was proposed a while ago as an effective method for avoiding the GPL. If an arbitrary organization took some GPL'd code and made modifications then sharing the binaries to members of that organization is not "distribution" in the same way that a company can internally use GPL'd binaries without making the source available to all employees. Now given such an organization's requirement to entry is a nominal fee then you are effectively paying for the right to use a binary but the organization is not required to give you the source because it's not being "distributed".
Given that the torrent file itself has all the SHA1 hashes for every block within the completed set of files, distributing bogus information means you've managed to find a collision for SHA1. I think at that point you have far more to worry about than just getting bad files from your bittorrent client.
There is absolutely nothing new here. My last job was working on a system similar to this in Australia which has been running in various stages of development for at least 30 years now (the original implementation was on a HP-1000 minicomputer). From changing the signal timing on surface streets dependant on traffic flow to adjusting ramp metering to provide the optimal flow of traffic on a freeway to predicting and displaying the time the next busses are due at a stop - it's been done and works damn well.
Honestly, it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world in traffic management.
I think you missed the entire point of comparing X to local display systems. The average user cares more about their toenail clippings than they do about how lean and efficient X's network protocol is.
When you compare the local display mechanisms of X to something like Quartz or the Windows local display engine then X comes up seriously lacking - mainly due to it's network-centric interface.
The true problem with X is that it is very configurable in appearance and configurable on a per-app basis. App vendors (unfortunately) are very inconsistent in their app styles and you end up with each application looking different enough from each other to get a fairly ugly system once things are going. KDE and GNOME have gone some way to alleviating this but there are still far too many apps that don't conform to any standard.
When Linux has an application design standard like both Microsoft and Apple have for their OSes then things may start to progress. Until then - it's a real interface failure.
The alternate view, from Australia and a few court decisions pertaining almost entirely to bad-guy cybersquatters, finds universal jurisdiction comporting with due process requirements from mere posting on the internet. Under this theory, you purposefully avail yourself of every forum by merely posting on the internet and assume you can be hauled into court anywhere.
Despite the hype on Slashdot, that's not what the outcome of the Australian case was at all. Rather than go back into the murky details, I'd direct your attention to the search feature and suggest you read the ruling, including the court's comments again before sowing this type of hype.
The problem however with the command line app is you are limiting yourself to the functionality available in that application. What is a much better option is to have a scriptable GUI app which allows you to perform batch tasks on files and can be driven from the command line.
Say for example you decide you want your thumbnails sepia toned. Had you used the scripting capabilities of Photoshop and/or used the batching tool (which lets you drag/drop a stack of files onto a pre-recorded macro) then the task would be exactly the same as the simpler resize. In your simple command line case however you are left finding a new tool which performs the more complex task and possibly working out the new command line syntax to change your scripts.
The key thing isn't command line vs GUI. It's the ability to drive an application in batch mode vs one which purely runs as a GUI or command line app.
While I can understand the judge's opinion that Java should be carried on every system that ships with.NET to avoid the anticompetitive practices here's what I don't get from the ruling:
My copies of IE and Windows XP did NOT ship with the.NET runtimes - they were a separate download! I don't see why a product that Microsoft *hasn't* bundled the.NET runtimes with should be required to have Java bundled.
IANAL, but don't you lose your rights to a patent if you don't aggressively defend it?
Microsoft has publicly admitted their knowledge of Mono through publications such as MSDN and other places. They can't claim they haven't known about Mono, known its aims or known anything about what the project was capable of. I don't see how they can pursue a patent claim now - 12 months later - if my first paragraph is true.
By a strict interpretation of US v. Miller, weapons that would be appropriate for protection under the 2nd Amendment would include M-16s, Beretta M9s, and so forth, whereas hunting rifles and bird guns would not be protected...
That's the conclusion I came to if you read it as an individual rights declaration. However because of the somewhat nonsensical result of personal use of tactical or strategic military weapons would then come into play and cast the ruling into doubt altogether.
The way I read their ruling is the personal keeping of weapons is protected under the constitution only where it makes sense from a military point of view. If it can be argued that the personal possesion of handguns makes sense in the military protection of the US then I believe it's clearly protected. Anything else seems fair game for control (under that interpretation).
Either way you read it, handguns and sporting rifles certainly don't seem to be covered under that ruling. The real test will be what happens in the upcoming case though.
Point take on the Japanese. I think finding useful statistics (where there are no other social influences) is going to be extremely difficult which is why I'm quite suspicion of all stats on this issue.
Interesting opinion column, but refer to the ACLU's site which has some direct rulings on the subject rather than indirect and oblique references.
Of course, you can take the ACLU as neutral or not depending on what you think of them.
From the ACLU (which claim neutrality, hard to be sure):
http://archive.aclu.org/library/aaguns.html
US vs Miller, 1939: The personal ownership of firearms is guaranteed only if such ownership is necessary for the maintenance of a well controlled militia.
There's other cases listed there.
Fundamentally if the 2nd amendment is a guarantee of personal ownership of weapons then it is an absolute guarantee (without limits) of ownership. Personal nuclear devices would therefore be protected under the constitution - something I don't think many people believe is the case and is something the Supreme Court will definitely have to consider carefully in their reading of the amendment and its intent.
This wasn't the original site I got my information from, but is very close. I will be interested to see the outcome of the current case though.
Slashdot Mirror
http://bvim-qt.vitalstream.com/HitchhikersGuide/HG G_Trailer1_Book9273_3000.mov
...Kim Jong Il says that North Korea is more democratic than the United States.
(Seriously, did anyone here expect someone in this guy's position to say anything different?)
Face it, you just don't have a clue about Windows do you? Why don't you try actually using it before making stuff up in your desperation to defend your own system of choice? Nah - that would be too much of a challenge wouldn't it? Here's some more cluestick bludgeonings for you:
...is non-existant. I know zero users that have their machines wide open in the way YOU describe. Like I said - you're making it up. I must admire your fantasy world though - very well constructed.
:)
an user who actually uses the facility of ActiveX that you seem to find so attractive has BY NECESSITY already turned at least some of these restrictions off at some sites
Garbage. I use ActiveX controls all the time (Flash, Acrobat mainly) and have nothing turned off at any site. Not even from Microsoft - especially not Microsoft actually. You enjoy making stuff up?
this is normal everyday behaviour that users absolutely have to engage in to take full advantage of a hell of a lot of ActiveX-enabled sites.
No, it's not. Tell me which site you are referring to? Oh yeah - that's right, you can't cause you're making it up.
The ease of accidentally turning this on...
I can't believe you're honestly proposing that installing a Firefox Extension (one that doesn't exist... remember that ActiveX ships with Windows and CAN NOT BE REMOVED) is in any way comparable.
"ActiveX" is COM. Bonobo and KObjects are basically COM. Perhaps if you get your terminology right you can have a sensible discussion? If you mean that there is a download mechanism that ships with Windows which the user can explicitly configure to get untrusted binaries then, why, yes! There is! Imagine that - the user can configure the OS to be insecure if they choose.
Obviously I know better than the user
And that exact attitude is exactly why your opinion means nothing and it should never mean anything. I seriously hope you don't work in software design because I'd sell stock in that company in a hurry.
If you believed that, you would be in favor of making Internet Explorer and the Microsoft HTML control an optional component of the system
I am absolutely in favor of that, dumbass. What made you think I wouldn't be? Sheesh.
You would be in favor of eliminating the DRM component in Windows Media Player 9, because its only purpose is to artificially restrict what the user wanted to do.
Yep, in favor of that too. Why wouldn't I be? Oh yeah - because in YOUR world someone can't disagree with you and not be generalized.
You would be in favor of giving the user the option of disabling the entire Active-X-based security infrastructure and replacing it with one that puts the responsibility for security in the specific application that the user chose to run, rather than a deeply embedded component that the user is not even aware of.
You mean give them the option of running Firefox or no browser at all? Yeah - didn't you say that in the first point? Kinda repeating yourself there aren't you?
You believe in freedom in computing? Then why don't you believe in giving me the freedom to use Windows NT, which is at the heart a potentially VERY secure OS, without Microsoft's abominable ActiveX insecurity infrastructure on top of it?
I do believe that, well, except for your histrionics and overreaching generalizations about ActiveX. I absolutely believe in freedom in computing.
Damn, I know that "freedom" is one of the most heavily abused words in English. I sure didn't expect to see this kind of Orwellian doublespeak popping up in defence of Internet Explorer, though.
Because the Orwellian doublespeak is all in your own mind and the reality you seem to have created. When you come out of your denial, let us know. You'll be much happier without that pent up anger.
Waking up a PC from hibernation (the closest x86 equivalent to PPC sleep)
Actually, you've just proven you don't have a clue.
In hibernation, the PC can be removed from the power supply completely - battery out on the floor style. Do this to a Mac in sleep mode and it dies.
The closest thing to "sleep" mode on the Mac is (believe it or not), "sleep" mode on a PC. Anyone who tries to tell you different is either self-deluded or simply trying to delude you.
Just in case you don't believe me - have a deep, deep think about why the PC coming out of hibernate needs to load RAM from the disk and why the Mac coming out of sleep doesn't? Yep - you got it! The Mac still has power going to RAM!
Thanks for playing, but you lose. Better luck next time.
You contradict yourself. You say "There is no mechanism in IE for things to download, launch and run with no end-user intervention." Then you say "the user has to explicitly tell IE to accept code from anywhere (in about 4 different places)".
I did no such thing. I don't exactly know what you think "turning things on in 4 different places" is if it's not "end user intervention". No matter which way you want to wriggle, IE requires end user intervention to install code and run it automatically.
You, however, do contradict yourself. First you say that "it's not on by default" and then you say "it requires no end user interaction". Which is it? Does it require turning on, or does it require no end user interaction.
That's not what the user said. The user said "I don't give a damn where any executable comes from, download it and run it and don't tell me about it". It should not be possible to say that. I don't care how convenient it is, it's just too dangerous... it should not be possible to turn that mode on, or any subset of that mode.
So your position is you know better than the user? Why shouldn't a user be allowed to say exactly that *if they want to*? Last I looked, computers are tools of the users and artificially restricting them is a bad thing, not a good thing. Microsoft and many other companies come under fire for this sort of BS every day and yet we still have lame morons like you espousing that you know better than every other user on the planet. Yeah - right...
I believe in freedom in computing. You obviously don't. Thanks for playing.
Learn to read.
You can trivially write a firefox plugin that once installed will happily download and run any executable content it wants to without any intervention from the user. Maybe one hasn't been written yet, maybe it has - do you audit the source code of every plugin to know?
There is no mechanism in IE for things to download, launch and run with no end-user intervention. At a very minimum, the user has to explicitly tell IE to accept code from anywhere (in about 4 different places), then explicitly go to a website which contains the malicious code.
.xpi, or any number of autoupdate mechanisms built into apps on your system?
This is no different technically from telling Firefox to download and install any xpi that you happen to click on, configuring yum (or apt-get, or whatever) to go fetch code from some hacker's site, download it and run it or any number of other things. In all of those things you are setting up a "trusted zone" of places that you will accept code from without question. Just because you don't see the words "trusted zone" anywhere doesn't mean there isn't one.
If you actually read the post made by Hook, you'll see that one of his primary concern was that you can write an ActiveX control which downloads secondary executables and runs them, bypassing the digital signature mechanism. How terribly different is this from doing exactly the same thing with an
The problem isn't ActiveX. That's simply yet another name for COM objects. The real problem is that people run as "root" on Windows system because it's damn near impossible to do anything useful as a non-root user.
Honestly, do you really have to blame the transport/install mechanism when a user explicitly tells the computer "I don't give a damn where you get then executable code from that you are about to run as root"?
This is possible with any binary executable content that you download from the web. ActiveX just makes it easy. Other relatively simple things that could be done are:
.exe that formats your hard drive. .msi that formats your hard drive. .rpm that formats your hard drive.
.NET objects.
- Write a Netscape Plugin that formats your hard drive.
- Write a
- Write a
- Write a
- Write a shellscript that formats your hard drive.
- Write a freeware version of DOOM that formats your hard drive when you lose.
etc.
In other words, he's missing the whole point here. ActiveX exists to run binary content as efficiently and seamlessly as possible. It's assumed that the end user is intelligent enough to not install binary content without verifying it's origin and making the active decision to trust that publisher (akin to signing your rpms). The problem comes in that people choose to trust software authors pretty liberally when that trust really should have a lot more skepticism attached.
In short, ActiveX is simply a "better" Netscape plugin. If you want some form of sandboxing then run Java, or
Doesn't software exist that allows you to select a session to read, or extract all the data from a particular session?
Throx
Tom's Hardware brought up an excellent point: What happens to hardware pixel shaders that refer to a pixel that wasn't rendered by the card it's running on?
Given the almost limitless flexibility on shaders, this strikes me as a possibly huge performance bottleneck that may even make the SLI solution slower than just one card under certain conditions - or just render inaccurately.
Throx
No it didn't. NTFS drew a lot of concepts from HPFS and other file systems in it's development but it certainly wasn't a derivative of HPFS/386. If it was, IBM would have certainly had a few things to say about it.
What made me chuckle was the time estimates:
Phase 3 - 3 to 4 months (Architecture and Design)
Maybe they could meet this if they had a decent team devoting a lot of time and they knew the ins and outs of the Win32 API fully (including all the additional DLLs that get tossed around like WinINet). I still think it's hideously optimistic though.
Phase 4 - 6 to 8 weeks (Engineering and Development)
What in the hell are they smoking because I want some. Porting the Win32 API is a hellishly complex task and it's going to take way, way longer than 6 to 8 weeks. Perhaps they could have something in 2-3 years if they worked a good dev team full time on it but not 6-8 weeks and certainly not at any sort of compatibility level that would even approach running Office 2003.
This project is doomed to failure. It's just some nice marketing slides to scam some venture capital and run off with it.
Look, what are you waiting for in the next release of SQLServer? .NET integration with stored procs and being able to use structured exceptions within T/SQL.
Quite a lot actually. The big ones for me are the
By your own admission, you use magnetic instruments.
The compass is magnetic. That's about all that is though. VORs, ILS and other essential equipment rely on radio/microwave signals from outside the aircraft. If you want to potentially jam those navigation signals simply because you're too ignorant to understand the possible interactions between a transmitter in a faraday cage and a very sensitive receiver then frankly you don't deserve to fly.
This is not an original idea. It was proposed a while ago as an effective method for avoiding the GPL. If an arbitrary organization took some GPL'd code and made modifications then sharing the binaries to members of that organization is not "distribution" in the same way that a company can internally use GPL'd binaries without making the source available to all employees. Now given such an organization's requirement to entry is a nominal fee then you are effectively paying for the right to use a binary but the organization is not required to give you the source because it's not being "distributed".
Given that the torrent file itself has all the SHA1 hashes for every block within the completed set of files, distributing bogus information means you've managed to find a collision for SHA1. I think at that point you have far more to worry about than just getting bad files from your bittorrent client.
There is absolutely nothing new here. My last job was working on a system similar to this in Australia which has been running in various stages of development for at least 30 years now (the original implementation was on a HP-1000 minicomputer). From changing the signal timing on surface streets dependant on traffic flow to adjusting ramp metering to provide the optimal flow of traffic on a freeway to predicting and displaying the time the next busses are due at a stop - it's been done and works damn well.
Honestly, it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world in traffic management.
I think you missed the entire point of comparing X to local display systems. The average user cares more about their toenail clippings than they do about how lean and efficient X's network protocol is.
When you compare the local display mechanisms of X to something like Quartz or the Windows local display engine then X comes up seriously lacking - mainly due to it's network-centric interface.
The true problem with X is that it is very configurable in appearance and configurable on a per-app basis. App vendors (unfortunately) are very inconsistent in their app styles and you end up with each application looking different enough from each other to get a fairly ugly system once things are going. KDE and GNOME have gone some way to alleviating this but there are still far too many apps that don't conform to any standard.
When Linux has an application design standard like both Microsoft and Apple have for their OSes then things may start to progress. Until then - it's a real interface failure.
The alternate view, from Australia and a few court decisions pertaining almost entirely to bad-guy cybersquatters, finds universal jurisdiction comporting with due process requirements from mere posting on the internet. Under this theory, you purposefully avail yourself of every forum by merely posting on the internet and assume you can be hauled into court anywhere.
Despite the hype on Slashdot, that's not what the outcome of the Australian case was at all. Rather than go back into the murky details, I'd direct your attention to the search feature and suggest you read the ruling, including the court's comments again before sowing this type of hype.
Other than that, good post.
The problem however with the command line app is you are limiting yourself to the functionality available in that application. What is a much better option is to have a scriptable GUI app which allows you to perform batch tasks on files and can be driven from the command line.
Say for example you decide you want your thumbnails sepia toned. Had you used the scripting capabilities of Photoshop and/or used the batching tool (which lets you drag/drop a stack of files onto a pre-recorded macro) then the task would be exactly the same as the simpler resize. In your simple command line case however you are left finding a new tool which performs the more complex task and possibly working out the new command line syntax to change your scripts.
The key thing isn't command line vs GUI. It's the ability to drive an application in batch mode vs one which purely runs as a GUI or command line app.
While I can understand the judge's opinion that Java should be carried on every system that ships with .NET to avoid the anticompetitive practices here's what I don't get from the ruling:
.NET runtimes - they were a separate download! I don't see why a product that Microsoft *hasn't* bundled the .NET runtimes with should be required to have Java bundled.
My copies of IE and Windows XP did NOT ship with the
IANAL, but don't you lose your rights to a patent if you don't aggressively defend it?
Microsoft has publicly admitted their knowledge of Mono through publications such as MSDN and other places. They can't claim they haven't known about Mono, known its aims or known anything about what the project was capable of. I don't see how they can pursue a patent claim now - 12 months later - if my first paragraph is true.
By a strict interpretation of US v. Miller, weapons that would be appropriate for protection under the 2nd Amendment would include M-16s, Beretta M9s, and so forth, whereas hunting rifles and bird guns would not be protected ...
That's the conclusion I came to if you read it as an individual rights declaration. However because of the somewhat nonsensical result of personal use of tactical or strategic military weapons would then come into play and cast the ruling into doubt altogether.
The way I read their ruling is the personal keeping of weapons is protected under the constitution only where it makes sense from a military point of view. If it can be argued that the personal possesion of handguns makes sense in the military protection of the US then I believe it's clearly protected. Anything else seems fair game for control (under that interpretation).
Either way you read it, handguns and sporting rifles certainly don't seem to be covered under that ruling. The real test will be what happens in the upcoming case though.
Point take on the Japanese. I think finding useful statistics (where there are no other social influences) is going to be extremely difficult which is why I'm quite suspicion of all stats on this issue.
Interesting opinion column, but refer to the ACLU's site which has some direct rulings on the subject rather than indirect and oblique references.
Of course, you can take the ACLU as neutral or not depending on what you think of them.
From the ACLU (which claim neutrality, hard to be sure):
http://archive.aclu.org/library/aaguns.html
US vs Miller, 1939: The personal ownership of firearms is guaranteed only if such ownership is necessary for the maintenance of a well controlled militia.
There's other cases listed there.
Fundamentally if the 2nd amendment is a guarantee of personal ownership of weapons then it is an absolute guarantee (without limits) of ownership. Personal nuclear devices would therefore be protected under the constitution - something I don't think many people believe is the case and is something the Supreme Court will definitely have to consider carefully in their reading of the amendment and its intent.
This wasn't the original site I got my information from, but is very close. I will be interested to see the outcome of the current case though.