I just don't get this. I'm not American, so maybe I missed some propaganda against sharing somewhere, but...
What on earth is so scary about the notion of "spreading" wealth? Especially among people who are familiar with IT work and the notion of redundancy, backups, and disaster recovery?
The more places wealth is spread to, the more diverse and resilient the economy and society must be, surely. That's a good thing in unpredictable times.
"Centralising the wealth", now *that* I find scary, because it centralises the possibility of massive mismanagement and disaster.
"It's like he's saying the rich have no right to keep the money they earned. That's not laughable."
Indeed, it's not at all laughable to say that the immensely rich have no right to keep the money they earned, if you start from the assumption that they didn't *earn* it in the first place by doing productive acts but *won* it in an economic casino by inheriting family wealth, excluding others from shared commons resources, centralising power, intimidating workers, and crushing honest competitors.
But of course, we all know that banks don't indulge in risky speculation, companies never try to block labour unionisation, and corporations don't seek monopoly power but pass all their profits on to workers and consumers as higher wages and lower prices -- so it's perfectly obvious that Marx was absolutely wrong and should be completely ignored.
"The sad truth is that we humans throughout our existence have have had a major, negative impact on nature. Just compare the diversity of species in areas where no humans live, with what we find in cultivated fields."
That may be true of the modern period of biosphere-delinked craziness, but not necessarily of human civilisation as a whole.
I can't vouch for the science, but the idea that pre-European / prehistoric humans may have not just lived in harmony with the Amazon jungle but proactively *created* it fascinates me.
I know SELinux isn't a distro, but I assume the NSA also have their own Linux distros which include SELinux capabilities, given that they presumably wrote it for the purpose of being used?
Right, so NASA feels free to drop a tank full of toxic ammonia into Earth's gravity well, knowing full well it's going to survive reentry, with just a bland warning not to go near it because it's toxic.
That's fine - I don't have a problem with that. All space gear has all sorts of toxic chemicals and they've deorbited the stuff many many times before with no problems.
But given this counterexample of how safety calls are *really* made in space, I think we can all agree that the US Navy's cover story back in February about that spy satellite (USA 193) with it's oh-so-scary tank of hydrazine was *completely and utterly bogus*.
It's a documentary about adventure games interviewing all the leading lights of the industry. Scott Adams, the Infocom Implementors, etc. He's in the final editing stage I believe.
"Worse, many of these problems were already known- the Hubble is basically a KH-11 spy satellite that points the other way- same mirror, same size, even the same shipping container."
And I imagine a large chunk of the problems NASA had with the Hubble might have been due to that very fact: that since it was partially classified technology, getting information to the right people without telling 'the wrong people' would have been fraught with complications.
Not that I know for sure, but it seems likely to me. The problem with doing all this neat technology stuff in black programs is how do you transfer that information and experience to the civilian world when the whole black system is set up specifically to *stop* such transfers?
"In this case, Ubuntu is the sum of the software it packages. But if one piece of software is slower, then Ubuntu's not slower, that piece of software is slower. 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, 3 != 1. "
I find your definition of 'sum' interesting.
1 + 1 + 1 = 3 1 + 1 + 2 = 4
If one piece of software gets bigger, sure seems to me like the sum gets bigger too...
"Over the last year or so I've noticed that the security vulnerabilities across Microsoft, but most noticeably in Windows have become bugs of a class I call "onesey - twosies" in other words, one-off bugs."
"The $64,000 question we ask ourselves when we issue any bulletin is "did SDL fail?" and the answer in this case is categorically "No!""
"The bad news is, we'll continue to have vulnerabilities because you cannot train a developer to hunt for unique bugs, and creating tools to find such bugs is also hard to do without incurring an incredible volume of false positives. With all that said, I will add detail about one-off bugs to our internal education; I think it's important to make people aware that even with great tools and great security-savvy engineers, there are still bugs that are very hard to find."
FAIL.
Look, if you're getting a constant FLOW of 'one-off' bugs being found by third parties -- no matter how theoretically 'hard' it is to find these bugs, and no matter how sophisticated your methods, there's something very, very wrong with your methods, BECAUSE THE BLACK HATS ARE ABLE TO DO IT SO WHY CAN'T YOU?
The chance of the black hats finding this bug turned out to be 100%.
If you scored less than that, I don't care your reasons, you lose, thanks for playing, try again.
"The American voter is not responsible for this. Your own nation's voters are."
That's just not true.
American foreign and economic policy HUGELY affects us non-Americans. You guys have the guns and the bankers which point at us and tell us what to do.
Believe me, here in New Zealand we'd *love* to live in a world where we got to vote on how we lived our life and American politicians we didn't elect didn't affect us.
"Obama isn't about change, he's about bringing back nearly all the ideas from our beloved ex-president.....Jimmy Carter."
Would that he were.
Carter was the USA's last good President.
Remember? He was the guy who was smart enough to warn you about peak oil back in the 70s and tell you some uncomfortable truths you didn't want to hear.
But no, you had to have a B-movie actor with a cowboy swagger who liked big military budgets and deregulating the finance industry and running guns for drugs into Central America. And put it all on your tab.
"This is the mindset of the early cinematographers, who were in the business of creating sideshow entertainment no different from a peep show or any other form of "pay $0.05 to gawk at novelty X"."
And this has changed how?
Last I checked even 'art movies' weren't given away for free.
"Actually I think every developer should do a year or two in end user technical support. All too often there is a disconnect between those that design and code software and the end user"
YES! PLEASE.
I work in tech support, and the bane of my life is application developers who think they're God's gift to the Turing machine and yet don't have the first clue as to how their precious little world-saving application is going to 1) share data with other systems, 2) be packaged and deployed and patched on real-world environments, and 3) be tested, debugged and trouble-shooted by the *users*.
Most application developers seem to have the unconscious assumption that *their* program is the only one that exists in the whole wide universe, that *its* data store is the only data worth considering, and that they, the developers, are the only people who are ever going to need to understand how their program works and test it. Because *of course* it's never going to have any bugs after it's shipped, that's quite unthinkable. And if there are, why, you'll be happy to erase all your data and reinstall from scratch, including Random OS Support Library Foobar version 42.3.1415, precisely, which will never conflict with any other installed version. Because you're just 'a user', and all you get is a black box that either works or breaks mysteriously.
Except tech support people are a programmer's worst nightmare: users who can think, and who need to get at the guts of your software to make it actually *work*.
A programmer who sneers at tech support people is a programmer who quite simply HAS NO CLUE as to how software is used in the real world and the wider context of what they're doing. And that kind of programmer has no business writing software at all.
Programmer arrogance is a huge part of the software quality crisis.
"It is supposed to be impossible for me to show someone how I voted. I can't be given a receipt or anything (it would be too easy to buy votes)."
It always amazes me that American general elections have anonymity and unprovability of your vote as a hard requirement, and yet to vote in a *primary* election you have to publically register your party affiliation!
Maybe that's okay if elections are a gentleman's contest between independents, but when you have a bitterly divided, utterly partisan electorate made of committed activists split over political philosophy rather than personalities, and who believe anyone voting for The Other Party is not just a dangerous, ignorant imbecile but actively Morally Evil... surely anyone who tells the whole world that they're an active Democrat or a Republican is painting themselves with a big target saying 'please fire me from my job and firebomb my house'?
Sure, there's a much smaller group of people voting in primaries... but they're the ones who actually choose *who the candidates are*, rather that just ticking one of the two assigned boxes. If any part of the political process would benefit from hard anonymity, surely it's the primaries?
But if they get by just fine without that... then maybe anonymity isn't such a big deal after all?
Yes, I'm pissed because I spent the better part of last night reinstalling Wordpress because 2.0 got rooted. Nice going, open-source movement.
I've used computers since the mid-80s and I'm just losing patience with security exploits and especially with this slapdash attitude of 'it'll happen'. No. It does not need to happen. It should not happen. Real people may die when computers malfunction; it is not enough to say 'that's okay, we'll patch it afterwards'. We had the tools and the methods in the 1950s to make it stop happening, but the industry again and again refuses to apply them. And by industry I mean you and me right here. We keep picking cheap shoddy crap (and sometimes expensive shoddy crap) over correctness.
We have the same kind of quality crisis going on in software as exists in governance and finance and energy and the food industry. Like the other crises, it has the potential to crash us back to the stone age one day soon, and is already stealing real people's real money today. We've got to wake up and realise that we cannot afford to tolerate security mistakes, and then write tools and methods that allow us to work in a zero-tolerance environment.
Anything less, and we have to realise that we hand the keys to all our users' identities and life savings to the Russian Mafia the moment we release our buggy 0.1.
Seriously. Get it right to start with. Don't rely on patching.
If your software is released with ANY bugs, your customers' computers are already walking spam zombies and the bad guys have already won.
You want to know why the Net is drowning in malware that you gripe about every day on Slashdot? YOU are why! YOU, the coders who shrug and assume 'everything has bugs', and then blame the 'stupid user' for YOUR negligence to do basic array bounds checking because 'C is fast' and 'real programmers are smart enough not to make mistakes'.
Try again. The Internet needs less crap. Either go out of business already, or use formal methods if you have to, but QUIT WRITING ZERO-DAY EXPLOITABLE SOFTWARE.
Seriously. If your software has ANY security-exploitable bugs AT ANY TIME IN ITS LIFECYCLE then you have FAILED and have committed malpractice.
Oh, but the software 'engineering' industry doesn't have any kind of registration or licencing bodies, does it? Maybe it needs some.
"Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs."
FAIL.
'Sadly, the reality is that it's just too hard to build robots which don't run amok and get hijacked by alien monsters and destroy everyone. That's just the cost of living with new technology! But look! It's SHINY! And NEW!'
On the Internet, where every bug is potentially a zero-day security exploit, that attitude is not just wrong, it's LETHALLY wrong. You lose at programming. Please choose a new career. Feel free to let the recycle bin hit you on your way to/dev/null.
"If you have a dual stack (ipv6 and ipv4) machine, you can communicate with ipv4 machines just as easily as an ipv6 machine."
Right, so that's exactly what the original poster said. IPv4 can't communicate with IPv6 - the IPv6 machine ALSO NEEDS TO BE DUAL STACK WITH IPv4. And use up one of those precious rare v4 addresses. So since your v6 server needs to have v4 on it to communicate with all the legacy v4 clients out there - you might as well save time and money and just leave it as straight v4 in the first place.
Now if you could have a *pure* v6 machine and have pure v4 machines able to communicate to it through, I don't know, some kind of automatic protocol translation keyed off DNS or something, such that neither side needs to have raw IP layer connectivity... then you might have something.
"Pushing that functionality down to the data layer doesn't make sense. Would you suggest that all network stacks would have to keep a cache of all possible documents people could request?"
Speaking for myself: oh very yes.
Not necessarily have *all* the cache be in the local 'network stack', you understand - have a server on the local LAN be that. But that's the only sensible way I can see networking expanding in the future, by implementing a distributed document fragment cache. Sort of like Ted Nelson's Xanadu vision. He's crazy, but he's right.
See, we already have caching of various kinds built into the IP family stack: at layer 2, ARP caches IP addresses on each host and switches do the same; layer 3-and-a-bit, DNS has a local cache on each host and then each DNS server up to the roots also cache; layer 7, your web browser caches *aggressively* and so does every proxy you go through. Down further toward the motherboard, your OS uses RAM to cache hard drive documents, and your CPU has L1 and L2 caches of RAM.
So pervasive document caching is not an alien idea at all. It's just that we currently do it in an extremely half-assed and crappy way. If we were serious about building a sane, healthy global network - yes, we'd implement a simple 'distributed document' protocol that let you persistently allocate a GUID to chunks of data at a size maybe midway between 'IP packet' and 'web page', give them a global storage and routing address, and then cache everywhere like no tomorrow.
Cache in your browser. Cache in your OS. Cache in your LAN router/proxy. Cache in your ISP. Cache in your peering hub. Cache wherever and whenever you can; design so you can trade off storage vs transmission speed, so you use whatever's locally cheaper.
If this is the dialog in question, then I think even I would have clicked 'Ok', and I'm paranoid as all get out. (Which is why I use Firefox so perhaps I'm not so familiar with IE look and feel).
I mean it's not like you have a lot of options is it? Crash out of IE? And just looking at the still image, other than the minimise/maximise controls, there's nothing that screams 'malware' to me. Even the presence of the maximise controls doesn't immediately grab me, because Microsoft changes GUI schemes and widget sets so often (Office 2007, ahem) that it's really hard to tell what a 'typical' dialog should or shouldn't look like.
Isn't the real question: if you're always only ever ONE 'OK' BUTTON CLICK from hosing your computer and giving up all control to an attacker - isn't something very wrong already?
"So what are the Democrats' reasons for demonizing their opponents? "
Being on the same team as the guy who just trashed your economy by committing a war crime isn't enough?
I mean I dunno about you, but for me as a non-American, just calling *anyone* 'someone who even once sort of kinda agreed with George W Bush' is about the most dire insult possible. No further demonisation needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I just don't get this. I'm not American, so maybe I missed some propaganda against sharing somewhere, but...
What on earth is so scary about the notion of "spreading" wealth? Especially among people who are familiar with IT work and the notion of redundancy, backups, and disaster recovery?
The more places wealth is spread to, the more diverse and resilient the economy and society must be, surely. That's a good thing in unpredictable times.
"Centralising the wealth", now *that* I find scary, because it centralises the possibility of massive mismanagement and disaster.
"It's like he's saying the rich have no right to keep the money they earned. That's not laughable."
Indeed, it's not at all laughable to say that the immensely rich have no right to keep the money they earned, if you start from the assumption that they didn't *earn* it in the first place by doing productive acts but *won* it in an economic casino by inheriting family wealth, excluding others from shared commons resources, centralising power, intimidating workers, and crushing honest competitors.
But of course, we all know that banks don't indulge in risky speculation, companies never try to block labour unionisation, and corporations don't seek monopoly power but pass all their profits on to workers and consumers as higher wages and lower prices -- so it's perfectly obvious that Marx was absolutely wrong and should be completely ignored.
"...athiest agenda."
It's not actually the athiest agenda, but it is athier than most.
"The sad truth is that we humans throughout our existence have have had a major, negative impact on nature. Just compare the diversity of species in areas where no humans live, with what we find in cultivated fields."
That may be true of the modern period of biosphere-delinked craziness, but not necessarily of human civilisation as a whole.
For example, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann
I can't vouch for the science, but the idea that pre-European / prehistoric humans may have not just lived in harmony with the Amazon jungle but proactively *created* it fascinates me.
"But we are NOT destroying it now - we are using it."
Your logic is flawless, and yet, somehow, the Earth continues to be destroyed.
The species are dying deliberately, just to spite us, aren't they?
"There is absolutely nothing immoral about using resources at your disposal."
And that's why Human Resources departments still use manacles.
I know SELinux isn't a distro, but I assume the NSA also have their own Linux distros which include SELinux capabilities, given that they presumably wrote it for the purpose of being used?
Right, so NASA feels free to drop a tank full of toxic ammonia into Earth's gravity well, knowing full well it's going to survive reentry, with just a bland warning not to go near it because it's toxic.
That's fine - I don't have a problem with that. All space gear has all sorts of toxic chemicals and they've deorbited the stuff many many times before with no problems.
But given this counterexample of how safety calls are *really* made in space, I think we can all agree that the US Navy's cover story back in February about that spy satellite (USA 193) with it's oh-so-scary tank of hydrazine was *completely and utterly bogus*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_193
We can, can't we, guys? Right? Common sense and a little scientific knowledge can prevail?
Right?
Are you aware of Jason Scott's GET LAMP project?
It's a documentary about adventure games interviewing all the leading lights of the industry. Scott Adams, the Infocom Implementors, etc. He's in the final editing stage I believe.
"Worse, many of these problems were already known- the Hubble is basically a KH-11 spy satellite that points the other way- same mirror, same size, even the same shipping container."
And I imagine a large chunk of the problems NASA had with the Hubble might have been due to that very fact: that since it was partially classified technology, getting information to the right people without telling 'the wrong people' would have been fraught with complications.
Not that I know for sure, but it seems likely to me. The problem with doing all this neat technology stuff in black programs is how do you transfer that information and experience to the civilian world when the whole black system is set up specifically to *stop* such transfers?
"In this case, Ubuntu is the sum of the software it packages. But if one piece of software is slower, then Ubuntu's not slower, that piece of software is slower. 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, 3 != 1. "
I find your definition of 'sum' interesting.
1 + 1 + 1 = 3
1 + 1 + 2 = 4
If one piece of software gets bigger, sure seems to me like the sum gets bigger too...
In the 'not credible' sense. Pure back-slapping.
http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2008/10/22/ms08-067.aspx
"Over the last year or so I've noticed that the security vulnerabilities across Microsoft, but most noticeably in Windows have become bugs of a class I call "onesey - twosies" in other words, one-off bugs."
"The $64,000 question we ask ourselves when we issue any bulletin is "did SDL fail?" and the answer in this case is categorically "No!""
"The bad news is, we'll continue to have vulnerabilities because you cannot train a developer to hunt for unique bugs, and creating tools to find such bugs is also hard to do without incurring an incredible volume of false positives. With all that said, I will add detail about one-off bugs to our internal education; I think it's important to make people aware that even with great tools and great security-savvy engineers, there are still bugs that are very hard to find."
FAIL.
Look, if you're getting a constant FLOW of 'one-off' bugs being found by third parties -- no matter how theoretically 'hard' it is to find these bugs, and no matter how sophisticated your methods, there's something very, very wrong with your methods, BECAUSE THE BLACK HATS ARE ABLE TO DO IT SO WHY CAN'T YOU?
The chance of the black hats finding this bug turned out to be 100%.
If you scored less than that, I don't care your reasons, you lose, thanks for playing, try again.
"I'm voting for Baldwin."
Alec, Daniel, William, Stephen, or Adam?
"The American voter is not responsible for this. Your own nation's voters are."
That's just not true.
American foreign and economic policy HUGELY affects us non-Americans. You guys have the guns and the bankers which point at us and tell us what to do.
Believe me, here in New Zealand we'd *love* to live in a world where we got to vote on how we lived our life and American politicians we didn't elect didn't affect us.
Doesn't happen that way, sorry.
"Once you understand how imperative languages fundamentally work you can translate that into any one, and the same goes for declarative languages."
You reckon? You think Lisp works just the same as Prolog?
Prolog doesn't even have the concept of *function*, you know.
"Obama isn't about change, he's about bringing back nearly all the ideas from our beloved ex-president.....Jimmy Carter."
Would that he were.
Carter was the USA's last good President.
Remember? He was the guy who was smart enough to warn you about peak oil back in the 70s and tell you some uncomfortable truths you didn't want to hear.
But no, you had to have a B-movie actor with a cowboy swagger who liked big military budgets and deregulating the finance industry and running guns for drugs into Central America. And put it all on your tab.
"This is the mindset of the early cinematographers, who were in the business of creating sideshow entertainment no different from a peep show or any other form of "pay $0.05 to gawk at novelty X"."
And this has changed how?
Last I checked even 'art movies' weren't given away for free.
"Actually I think every developer should do a year or two in end user technical support.
All too often there is a disconnect between those that design and code software and the end user"
YES! PLEASE.
I work in tech support, and the bane of my life is application developers who think they're God's gift to the Turing machine and yet don't have the first clue as to how their precious little world-saving application is going to 1) share data with other systems, 2) be packaged and deployed and patched on real-world environments, and 3) be tested, debugged and trouble-shooted by the *users*.
Most application developers seem to have the unconscious assumption that *their* program is the only one that exists in the whole wide universe, that *its* data store is the only data worth considering, and that they, the developers, are the only people who are ever going to need to understand how their program works and test it. Because *of course* it's never going to have any bugs after it's shipped, that's quite unthinkable. And if there are, why, you'll be happy to erase all your data and reinstall from scratch, including Random OS Support Library Foobar version 42.3.1415, precisely, which will never conflict with any other installed version. Because you're just 'a user', and all you get is a black box that either works or breaks mysteriously.
Except tech support people are a programmer's worst nightmare: users who can think, and who need to get at the guts of your software to make it actually *work*.
A programmer who sneers at tech support people is a programmer who quite simply HAS NO CLUE as to how software is used in the real world and the wider context of what they're doing. And that kind of programmer has no business writing software at all.
Programmer arrogance is a huge part of the software quality crisis.
"It is supposed to be impossible for me to show someone how I voted. I can't be given a receipt or anything (it would be too easy to buy votes)."
It always amazes me that American general elections have anonymity and unprovability of your vote as a hard requirement, and yet to vote in a *primary* election you have to publically register your party affiliation!
Maybe that's okay if elections are a gentleman's contest between independents, but when you have a bitterly divided, utterly partisan electorate made of committed activists split over political philosophy rather than personalities, and who believe anyone voting for The Other Party is not just a dangerous, ignorant imbecile but actively Morally Evil... surely anyone who tells the whole world that they're an active Democrat or a Republican is painting themselves with a big target saying 'please fire me from my job and firebomb my house'?
Sure, there's a much smaller group of people voting in primaries... but they're the ones who actually choose *who the candidates are*, rather that just ticking one of the two assigned boxes. If any part of the political process would benefit from hard anonymity, surely it's the primaries?
But if they get by just fine without that... then maybe anonymity isn't such a big deal after all?
Yes, I'm pissed because I spent the better part of last night reinstalling Wordpress because 2.0 got rooted. Nice going, open-source movement.
I've used computers since the mid-80s and I'm just losing patience with security exploits and especially with this slapdash attitude of 'it'll happen'. No. It does not need to happen. It should not happen. Real people may die when computers malfunction; it is not enough to say 'that's okay, we'll patch it afterwards'. We had the tools and the methods in the 1950s to make it stop happening, but the industry again and again refuses to apply them. And by industry I mean you and me right here. We keep picking cheap shoddy crap (and sometimes expensive shoddy crap) over correctness.
We have the same kind of quality crisis going on in software as exists in governance and finance and energy and the food industry. Like the other crises, it has the potential to crash us back to the stone age one day soon, and is already stealing real people's real money today. We've got to wake up and realise that we cannot afford to tolerate security mistakes, and then write tools and methods that allow us to work in a zero-tolerance environment.
Anything less, and we have to realise that we hand the keys to all our users' identities and life savings to the Russian Mafia the moment we release our buggy 0.1.
Seriously. Get it right to start with. Don't rely on patching.
BZZT.
If your software is released with ANY bugs, your customers' computers are already walking spam zombies and the bad guys have already won.
You want to know why the Net is drowning in malware that you gripe about every day on Slashdot? YOU are why! YOU, the coders who shrug and assume 'everything has bugs', and then blame the 'stupid user' for YOUR negligence to do basic array bounds checking because 'C is fast' and 'real programmers are smart enough not to make mistakes'.
Try again. The Internet needs less crap. Either go out of business already, or use formal methods if you have to, but QUIT WRITING ZERO-DAY EXPLOITABLE SOFTWARE.
Seriously. If your software has ANY security-exploitable bugs AT ANY TIME IN ITS LIFECYCLE then you have FAILED and have committed malpractice.
Oh, but the software 'engineering' industry doesn't have any kind of registration or licencing bodies, does it? Maybe it needs some.
"Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs."
FAIL.
'Sadly, the reality is that it's just too hard to build robots which don't run amok and get hijacked by alien monsters and destroy everyone. That's just the cost of living with new technology! But look! It's SHINY! And NEW!'
On the Internet, where every bug is potentially a zero-day security exploit, that attitude is not just wrong, it's LETHALLY wrong. You lose at programming. Please choose a new career. Feel free to let the recycle bin hit you on your way to /dev/null.
"If you have a dual stack (ipv6 and ipv4) machine, you can communicate with ipv4 machines just as easily as an ipv6 machine."
Right, so that's exactly what the original poster said. IPv4 can't communicate with IPv6 - the IPv6 machine ALSO NEEDS TO BE DUAL STACK WITH IPv4. And use up one of those precious rare v4 addresses. So since your v6 server needs to have v4 on it to communicate with all the legacy v4 clients out there - you might as well save time and money and just leave it as straight v4 in the first place.
Now if you could have a *pure* v6 machine and have pure v4 machines able to communicate to it through, I don't know, some kind of automatic protocol translation keyed off DNS or something, such that neither side needs to have raw IP layer connectivity... then you might have something.
"Pushing that functionality down to the data layer doesn't make sense. Would you suggest that all network stacks would have to keep a cache of all possible documents people could request?"
Speaking for myself: oh very yes.
Not necessarily have *all* the cache be in the local 'network stack', you understand - have a server on the local LAN be that. But that's the only sensible way I can see networking expanding in the future, by implementing a distributed document fragment cache. Sort of like Ted Nelson's Xanadu vision. He's crazy, but he's right.
See, we already have caching of various kinds built into the IP family stack: at layer 2, ARP caches IP addresses on each host and switches do the same; layer 3-and-a-bit, DNS has a local cache on each host and then each DNS server up to the roots also cache; layer 7, your web browser caches *aggressively* and so does every proxy you go through. Down further toward the motherboard, your OS uses RAM to cache hard drive documents, and your CPU has L1 and L2 caches of RAM.
So pervasive document caching is not an alien idea at all. It's just that we currently do it in an extremely half-assed and crappy way. If we were serious about building a sane, healthy global network - yes, we'd implement a simple 'distributed document' protocol that let you persistently allocate a GUID to chunks of data at a size maybe midway between 'IP packet' and 'web page', give them a global storage and routing address, and then cache everywhere like no tomorrow.
Cache in your browser. Cache in your OS. Cache in your LAN router/proxy. Cache in your ISP. Cache in your peering hub. Cache wherever and whenever you can; design so you can trade off storage vs transmission speed, so you use whatever's locally cheaper.
I grew up surrounded with books and I can't stand James Joyce.
Possibly the same reason why people who grew up with Unix can't stand Windows... :)
If this is the dialog in question, then I think even I would have clicked 'Ok', and I'm paranoid as all get out. (Which is why I use Firefox so perhaps I'm not so familiar with IE look and feel).
I mean it's not like you have a lot of options is it? Crash out of IE? And just looking at the still image, other than the minimise/maximise controls, there's nothing that screams 'malware' to me. Even the presence of the maximise controls doesn't immediately grab me, because Microsoft changes GUI schemes and widget sets so often (Office 2007, ahem) that it's really hard to tell what a 'typical' dialog should or shouldn't look like.
Isn't the real question: if you're always only ever ONE 'OK' BUTTON CLICK from hosing your computer and giving up all control to an attacker - isn't something very wrong already?
"So what are the Democrats' reasons for demonizing their opponents? "
Being on the same team as the guy who just trashed your economy by committing a war crime isn't enough?
I mean I dunno about you, but for me as a non-American, just calling *anyone* 'someone who even once sort of kinda agreed with George W Bush' is about the most dire insult possible. No further demonisation needed.