Yes, it is sort of off-topic. No, I do not advocate anyone writing viruses. Go to town, moderators.
My point is this:
MS is now on the brink of a win so big that they will be nearly be unstoppable, possibly even by the government, once it happens.
This is, of course,.NET, which would give them a strangle-hold on ecommerce, and a hand in the pocket of nearly everyone on Passport.
MS, and even Passport, have had huge security and service blow-ups in the past (Hotmail outages, etc.), and it hasn't even been a blip on the radar as far as most average people are concerned. It hasn't even registered on a corporate level, outside of the IT departments, who are just being blamed by the executives for not taking "proper care" of their single-platform fiats.
Now, a high-profile virus that keeps going on and doesn't go away (like, for example, Code Red)and forces the public's attention on the issue and becomes a constant and increasing embarassment to MS as it continually claims to have fixed the problem just before a new version shows up.
Now, people have this in their heads, even if it is the wrong way. ("That evil Russian hacker wrote this awful virus that takes over my computer.") The point being, that even executives will start to notice it, and may take the time to read their half-page summary sheet on the problem that it only affects MS, especially their new products that they want everyone to upgrade to.
Ultimately, only a sustained, media-covered security crisis will have any sort of effect on MS. Public opinion will only be turned when the average user is affected by it. It will happen after.NET launches and the first hack happens that compromises personal data, but it won't matter unless it happens *before* then.
... is trying to get class-action status, with the assumption that by going to the press, they are going to get other people to come on board.
If you assume they're not hucksters, they are doing this to get people who may not have known about the problem to come out and join their effort to right the wrong.
If you're a realist, they are doing this because they are trying to get greedy and/or stupid people like themselves to jump on the bandwagon and get enough mass to force a settlement. Unintended
Acceleration Syndrome, anyone?
The DMCA will get smacked down if we can ever get it to the Supreme Court.
Oh, you mean the Supreme Court that ruled Dred Scott property?
Or the Supreme Court that extended equal protection coverage further than it ever had been close to acknowledging before in order to decide an election?
Point being, just because it is clearly unConstitutional does not mean it will get struck down by the Court.
I've got to say, that as good as games today are, I never had as rewarding an experience as playing those text-based Infocom games of way back when.
Even modern adventure/puzzle games, which can be quite good (Last Express, Discworld, etc.), don't really match the level of achievement I felt when playing A Mind Forever Voyaging, for example.
I mean, one of the single most vivid memories of my youth was sitting in from of my old Commie and finally figuring out the last bit of the Babel Fish puzzle.
A measly little air frag with a railgun will never, ever equal it.
I'm not one to get on the bandwagon of naysaying the site, but exactly how long would it have taken Katz to go to the IMDB to check this fact if he wasn't positive of its veracity?
Fifteen seconds? Twenty?
I've worked in publishing. People get fired every day for making mistakes less than this.
IIRC the constitution never excluded blacks and women.
Mayhaps you should read the original again.
Blacks were fractions of persons (to placate the Southern slaveowners who wanted to own slaves, wanted them to be not considered people, but wanted them to count as people for population counts so that they could wield more political power in the House of Representatives). Women were completely disenfrancised.
While perhaps not "excluded," they weren't exactly at the table, you know.
Frankly, this is the kind of--albeit somewhat silly--science that gets the public interested in science. This is physics in everyday life in ways nearly everyone can relate to.
Yeah, in a perfect world of one-to-one dollar translation, there might be "better" things to spend it on, but, eh, it was cool, and he did it.
NET doesn't have to succeed with Joe Six Pack; it has to succeed with corporate types with serious $$$ on the line... and who will think twice before letting their business depend on shaky technologies.
True, although I believe Joe SixPack will indeed use it, or at least Mrs. SixPack will.
How many businesses do you know that haven't deployed any MS products?
How many do you know that haven't followed the upgrade curve for MS?
It is like no one ever getting fired for buying IBM. These days, IT doesn't get fired for using MS.
Remember when AOL had huge outages several years ago?
Remember when users couldn't get through because there were busy signals all the time?
Remember how people said that there was going to be a mass exodus from AOL?
Remember how that didn't happen?
No matter how badly MS screws this incident up, no matter how many judgements get made against them, the average business drone and Joe User will still end up using.NET.
The problem with over-revertial treatment of the source material will only cause larger problems, especially as they get into the later books.
The original Dune was a classic because Herbert was reigned in by editors. Each successive book gets more and more self-indulgent, until the thud of Chapterhouse.
While impressive visually, I found the first series lacking. A positive light is that they are going to compress the next two books into one series, showing that they are going to, by necessity, truncate the material some.
The question is if it will result in more of a mangled plot mess or a true television presentation of the books. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed from the next books, and there is the potential for a good adaptation.
As a matter of fact, you probably broke a lot of them.
This is for everyone who says "you don't have a right to privacy in public," "police need this to do their jobs," and especially "law-abiding people have nothing to fear." I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet.
An ex-girlfriend who was still in college at the time was taking criminal sociology courses. One of the final projects for one course was to bone up on local, state, and federal laws as much as possible, and then follow someone around for a day and see how many laws they broke. (Not telling the person of course, ad reporting would be done anoynmously as to subject.) The dear, of course, followed me.
I broke the law 235 times that day. I was aware (jay walking, speeding), of about half of them. I was a little higher than average, apparently.
I was stopped and cited for none of them, obviously. Cops can't catch most crime. They can barely catch most *serious* crime. Also, most cops aren't as aware as my gf was of the laws of the town. They just know what's probably illegal and look it up when they bring you in.
Now, nearly all of those law infractions happened in public, which is probably average for most people.
Add that to this system being implemented.
Do you hold unpopular views? Do you have any enemies on the police force? Any enemies with friends on the police force?
Oh, so you're a likeable guy who thinks this is all paranoid.
Okay. So, are you willing to bet the cop on duty on the monitors doesn't have a quota to meet? Nearly all police departments have official or unofficial quota systems by which they judge arrests or cititations of particular crimes. They are used for evaluation and PR purposes. You better bet that they will be in place for the officers monitoring these systems.
Are you willing to bet your privacy against a $20 littering fine because you didn't see the wind blowing a paper away from the garbage can you were aiming at?
That's just an example. For all you safe, law-abiding people.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is this:
MS is now on the brink of a win so big that they will be nearly be unstoppable, possibly even by the government, once it happens.
This is, of course, .NET, which would give them a strangle-hold on ecommerce, and a hand in the pocket of nearly everyone on Passport.
MS, and even Passport, have had huge security and service blow-ups in the past (Hotmail outages, etc.), and it hasn't even been a blip on the radar as far as most average people are concerned. It hasn't even registered on a corporate level, outside of the IT departments, who are just being blamed by the executives for not taking "proper care" of their single-platform fiats.
Now, a high-profile virus that keeps going on and doesn't go away (like, for example, Code Red)and forces the public's attention on the issue and becomes a constant and increasing embarassment to MS as it continually claims to have fixed the problem just before a new version shows up.
Now, people have this in their heads, even if it is the wrong way. ("That evil Russian hacker wrote this awful virus that takes over my computer.") The point being, that even executives will start to notice it, and may take the time to read their half-page summary sheet on the problem that it only affects MS, especially their new products that they want everyone to upgrade to.
Ultimately, only a sustained, media-covered security crisis will have any sort of effect on MS. Public opinion will only be turned when the average user is affected by it. It will happen after .NET launches and the first hack happens that compromises personal data, but it won't matter unless it happens *before* then.
Just a thought.
...Code Red is taking down Hotmail so that people can't get to their accounts that are filled up with SirCam?
If you assume they're not hucksters, they are doing this to get people who may not have known about the problem to come out and join their effort to right the wrong.
If you're a realist, they are doing this because they are trying to get greedy and/or stupid people like themselves to jump on the bandwagon and get enough mass to force a settlement. Unintended Acceleration Syndrome, anyone?
How can two pre-existing chat systems interact without a common user directory?
For example, there is already a username "Fred" on ICQ and MSN, for two different people.
How can you contact people on the other system without misdirecting?
Oh, you mean the Supreme Court that ruled Dred Scott property?
Or the Supreme Court that extended equal protection coverage further than it ever had been close to acknowledging before in order to decide an election?
Point being, just because it is clearly unConstitutional does not mean it will get struck down by the Court.
Even modern adventure/puzzle games, which can be quite good (Last Express, Discworld, etc.), don't really match the level of achievement I felt when playing A Mind Forever Voyaging, for example.
I mean, one of the single most vivid memories of my youth was sitting in from of my old Commie and finally figuring out the last bit of the Babel Fish puzzle.
A measly little air frag with a railgun will never, ever equal it.
Fifteen seconds? Twenty?
I've worked in publishing. People get fired every day for making mistakes less than this.
It is just shoddy.
Actually, on second thought, it isn't funny. It is probably true.
*Sigh.*
Mayhaps you should read the original again.
Blacks were fractions of persons (to placate the Southern slaveowners who wanted to own slaves, wanted them to be not considered people, but wanted them to count as people for population counts so that they could wield more political power in the House of Representatives). Women were completely disenfrancised.
While perhaps not "excluded," they weren't exactly at the table, you know.
Why in the world is the EFF giving them what they want?
Wouldn't a more realistic course be to keep the scheduled protest and then cancel it only if Adobe concedes?
Networks create "danger buzz" about the Internet
Networks exploit this danger buzz for their own profit
And?
BTW:
pompous Congressional gasbag like Joseph Lieberman
Why the pointless ad hominem? Are you 13 and on USENET?
Yeah, in a perfect world of one-to-one dollar translation, there might be "better" things to spend it on, but, eh, it was cool, and he did it.
Good for him.
True, although I believe Joe SixPack will indeed use it, or at least Mrs. SixPack will.
How many businesses do you know that haven't deployed any MS products?
How many do you know that haven't followed the upgrade curve for MS?
It is like no one ever getting fired for buying IBM. These days, IT doesn't get fired for using MS.
Not that I approve. I'm just being realistic.
Remember when users couldn't get through because there were busy signals all the time?
Remember how people said that there was going to be a mass exodus from AOL?
Remember how that didn't happen?
No matter how badly MS screws this incident up, no matter how many judgements get made against them, the average business drone and Joe User will still end up using .NET.
The original Dune was a classic because Herbert was reigned in by editors. Each successive book gets more and more self-indulgent, until the thud of Chapterhouse.
While impressive visually, I found the first series lacking. A positive light is that they are going to compress the next two books into one series, showing that they are going to, by necessity, truncate the material some.
The question is if it will result in more of a mangled plot mess or a true television presentation of the books. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed from the next books, and there is the potential for a good adaptation.
I'll at least give it a look.
This is for everyone who says "you don't have a right to privacy in public," "police need this to do their jobs," and especially "law-abiding people have nothing to fear." I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet.
An ex-girlfriend who was still in college at the time was taking criminal sociology courses. One of the final projects for one course was to bone up on local, state, and federal laws as much as possible, and then follow someone around for a day and see how many laws they broke. (Not telling the person of course, ad reporting would be done anoynmously as to subject.) The dear, of course, followed me.
I broke the law 235 times that day. I was aware (jay walking, speeding), of about half of them. I was a little higher than average, apparently.
I was stopped and cited for none of them, obviously. Cops can't catch most crime. They can barely catch most *serious* crime. Also, most cops aren't as aware as my gf was of the laws of the town. They just know what's probably illegal and look it up when they bring you in.
Now, nearly all of those law infractions happened in public, which is probably average for most people.
Add that to this system being implemented.
Do you hold unpopular views? Do you have any enemies on the police force? Any enemies with friends on the police force?
Oh, so you're a likeable guy who thinks this is all paranoid.
Okay. So, are you willing to bet the cop on duty on the monitors doesn't have a quota to meet? Nearly all police departments have official or unofficial quota systems by which they judge arrests or cititations of particular crimes. They are used for evaluation and PR purposes. You better bet that they will be in place for the officers monitoring these systems.
Are you willing to bet your privacy against a $20 littering fine because you didn't see the wind blowing a paper away from the garbage can you were aiming at?
That's just an example. For all you safe, law-abiding people.