It's silly to hold a mutable group of persons responsible for the sins of past members of this group.
If tomorrow, MS board kicks Ballmer into the used car salesman career for which he's born, and they tie Bill Gates on a chair in his 3-acre rec room, and they reform MS corporate culture, and they stop being bastards, then MS will probably become a decent corporation. Provided they get rid of the people who ooze the current MS culture, of course.
However, such a strategy might have drawback. For example, people will be so disoriented they'll probably swamp MS' tech support for call about how to make a donation because they'll think it has been bought by the Salvation Army.
There is no danger for now, though. If anything, MS would buy the Salvation Army, distribute antifreeze-laced booze to all the hobos and homeless, and auction their body parts.
Meanwhile, the gouvenment would investigate about their unfair practices of volume-purchasing antifreeze.
It's a trend among idealists to glorify the UN as if it was some kind of saint assembly, and their delegates the unsung heros of world harmony walking the hallowed ground blessed by the Holy 33-part Symbol.
The sad truth is that if you like incompetent, lying, fumbling, greedy national goverments, you will love the UN: it has historically proven it can actually one-up governments in every aspect.
At least, the few national governments that are regularly elected are accountable to their voters (or lobbies). The UN civil servants are just nominated. They couldn't care less about the public.
Don't be naive. You shouldn't be tempted to give UN the time of day, much less control over the Internet!
Man, I admire the people who were able to isolate flame retardant compounds in the blood of office workers. Given the life hygiene of most office workers, such infinitesimal chemical traces would be hidden by the ton of crap clogging their bloodstream.
Heck, my blood is perpetually brown since that project where I lived for 3 months on espresso and sandwiches. And of course, office workers at SCO have green blood from breathing the same air as Demonic Darl.
From the article: The city lost more than $184,000 on the project after investing heavily in Pettus-Brown's failed plan to rehabilitate the 90-year-old theater on Vine Street. The FBI has said that nearly $93,000 of the money the city paid Pettus-Brown is missing.
So the guy steals about 100K and invites a date to freaking Applebee?! EIther he's really a cheap bastard or he already spent it all.
Men these days. You cannot even get a French restaurant date out of a rich thief anymore.
Re:A million zombied machines for anyones use
on
More MyDoom Gloom
·
· Score: 1
Now, this offers a nice way to actually do something. An ISP could try to systematically launch a probe on port 3127 for all its subscribers. If the probe succeeeds, just download an exec that displays a modal (always on top) dialog box warning the user his machine is contaminated and urging him to go to a certain web page to remove the worm.
I shudder at the thought of other spammers/bandits using that download feature to plant their own code in MyDoom-contaminated machines.
You know, at first, I thought "Great, like the world needs more cheaply produced crap muzak". But then again, think about all the geek garage band who don't have a good singer. Or who tried to hire a female singer, only she couldn't stand the guys' smell, and they drooled on their keyboards and drums when she sang, and they fought for the priviledge of adjusting her mike, and she left when she got invited to a LAN party.
Ahem. Sorry for the uncalled-for recollection.
Anyway, now our all-guy geek garage band can afford a female lead singer! And they don't even need to shower anymore! Singer in a box, welcome!
Not to mention that all these cool guys who were the lead singers in their band always dated the most gorgeous chicks in college, while you and I CS majors didn't stand a chance to impress these girls, like we had time to leave the lab anyway.
Well, game over, singer boys. Payback time! The geeks are back with a vengeance, and we are gonna put you in the poor house! That's right, you bunch of overpaid poofs, we're replace you with very small shell scripts! Bwaaaahahahaha!
Let's see. Overpaid beautiful actors, check (CGI). Overpaid beautiful singers, check (this software). What's next? Sports jocks? Hmmm, hand me that robotics toolkit...
Re:Increased solar radiation - less light?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
As I said in another thread of the same debate, go read the following article:
Dansgaard, W., Johnsen, S.J., Clausen, H.B., Dahl Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N.S., Hammer, C.U., Hvidberg, C.S., Steffensen, J.P., Sveinbjornsdottir, A.E., Jouzel, J., Bond, G., Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250 kyr ice core record, 1993, Nature, 364, 218.
It shows that we have very long-term data about variations that we cannot explain right now. Changes in solar output is the best bet, although a guy came up with a model involving the precession of the moon's orbit that affects tides (and hence atmospheric/oceanic heat exchanges) and his math is solid, so it might do the trick too. But since your religion doesn't involve listening to other people, don't bother looking it up.
On another hand, the debate is still open among reasonable people.
Not to mention that the Deep Core project (drilling ice in Groenland) found that they were periodic average temperature swings in the past. The most spectacular one was, I believe, 800,000 years ago with a gradient of 7 C per century. Freakin' mammoths driving their SUVs, I'm sure. Or farting.
That's the kind of data that really makes you ponder. What happen back then? Is the sun going postal on us periodically or something?
If you want to look it up, it's a rather dry read but very interesting: Dansgaard, W., Johnsen, S.J., Clausen, H.B., Dahl Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N.S., Hammer, C.U., Hvidberg, C.S., Steffensen, J.P., Sveinbjornsdottir, A.E., Jouzel, J., Bond, G., Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250 kyr ice core record, 1993, Nature, 364, 218. I tried to find a URL on nature.com, no luck though.
Re:Increased solar radiation - less light?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
What are you, a twelve-year old or something? What kind of response is this?
Your enthusiasm for the latest fad (this week, a special on global warming!) denotes a youthful naivete that is prone to mistakes. Before calling people names, you might want to check for the track record of climatologists. They've been wrong in the past. The most honest ones aren't really sure of anything. Remember the "snowball Earth" predictions in the 70s? No you don't, you're just a zit-faced young twit.
Acting on a wrong hypothesis can aggravate a situation. Surgeons in the past killed countless patients by "treating" them with bleeding.
Barking at the wrong tree is not the good method. We need to understand this complex change. If you have a religion about express trains or whatever, fine, just get out of the way of the scientific minds.
And remember, "The scientific mind is humble" (Richard Feynman). Humility means an open mind, not name-calling.
Increased solar radiation - less light?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I challenge their result, a 10% dimming is a lot. They should redo the measurements with the same instruments instead of comparing modern instrumnets with what they used 10 years ago. We don't even know if the two sets of instruments have the same sensitivity in the measured wavelenght range. Also, there is a known cyclic effect linking to the 11-year solar cycle. We need a measurement over a full cycle before crying wolf.
That said, there has been an increase in the solar output. The number of sun spots at solar peak is increasing steadily. And the Mars polar cap is melting, which is consistent with the solar output increase observation.
Note that currently, the sun is close to its radiation peak. Which means that since the high atmosphere is acting like a bubble chamber, we will see more ice crystals and water droplets at high altitude (and more precipitations). Which raises the Earth's albedo (reflectivity) and could decrease the amount of solar light reaching the ground. So at least, the findings don't contradict atmospheric physics.
But I still want to see these measurements done over an 11-year solar cycle, otherwise it's gimme-a-grant voodoo, not science.
It's not a single event, unfortunately. It's a whole trend. I am not saying that Islamism is supported by the majority of Moroccans. The problem is that historically, it doesn't need to gather more than a small minority to become a major concern in North African countries.
Look at what the Muslim Brothers did to the tourism industry in Egypt with just a few attack. Look at the tourism industry in Bali now. See my point?
You're not an authority indeed, you cannot even check the news properly.
Morocco is now a hotbed of Muslim activism, as the Casablaca bombing (20 victims) demonstrated. Once a country grows a crust of Islamism, it cannot be melted by pouring Coke and ketchup on it. Ask the Shah of Iran, he tried.
Observers fear that the clash between Islamism and the Western culture (brought by contacts with Europe and with Western tourists) will only intensify. Already, women are "encouraged" to wear full chadors in part of the country where they used to wear skirts and jeans only a few years ago.
Tourism will probably decline after the next big terrorist attack, just like in Egypt. The King's police cannot protect every single tourist. The existing airline capacity is already more than sufficient to carry travellers to and from Morocco. I don't see the point of this tunnel except as a political toy.
The Wright brothers' contributions to aviation are more than counterbalanced by their attempts to get a legal monopoly on aircrafts. They smothered the development of aircrafts in the US until WWI.
The legal fights between Curtiss and the Wrights have been amply documented. It's largely because of the Wright's efforts that US aeronautics lagged Europe's badly up to WWI.
So their tinkering was a mixed blessing to say the least. The Wrights might be heroes now, but as far as aviation buffs were concerned back then, they were a cross between Darl McBride and Steve Ballmer, with Hillary Rosen thrown in the mix (ugh).
The French army brass, disappointed that they couldn't already have a B-52, cancelled the funding, and a bitter Clement Ader stopped his aeronautical experiments.
The real innovation introduced by the Wright brothers was an effective way of controlling the plane. The Avion was using a crude wing-warping system that didn't prove efficient. However, the Wright machine was just as unbalanced as Ader's Avion.
The steam engine was the only available motor at the time of Ader's design, and its shortcoming prevented the Avion from flying for more than a few minutes because of the water and fuel weight.
However, flight historians should say that the Wright brothers made the first powered, guided flight, wereas Ader made the first powered flight.
Obvious countermeasure: disposable addresses
on
The Life of a Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From the article: A list of e-mail addresses is a spammer's stock in trade, far more valuable than hardware.
So the obvious coutermeasure to spam is to make stolen addresses worthless.
Use spamgourmet and only give disposable addresses to businesses, web sites, forums and friends running Windows.
Maybe kilo is lower case to differentiate from Kelvin, and hecto from Henry, but what about deka?
IMHO, the most offensive is Pa for pascal. Why not P? To distinguish it from phosphorus?
Most especially, Kilo was capitalized - and indeed, kilobytes per second is still properly written Kbps, not kbps, isn't it?
No. it's kbit/s. The other abbreviations are dumbed-down gobbledygook. In tabloids such as the NYT "technology" section, maybe they write kbps or other aberrations. But in regular technical publications such as
Electronic Engineering Times, you will almost always see the scientific kbit/s or Mbit/s. The only instances of "kbps" are press releases written by mostly clueless marketdroids. A search for kpbs in the EET archives revealed 8 hits, vs. 172 for kbit/s. Same for Mbps (13 bits) vs. Mbit/s (303 hits).
These days it would appear that all the above-unity multiplier prefixes higher than kilo are still capitalized, while kilo, hecto, and deka are not. All the below-unity ones are still lower case.
Is this true, and if so, why on earth was this change made? It is so offensive to common sense of order.
Well, the conventions are the same since at least the 70s (cannot vouch for earlier). The symbol for kilo has been k (not K) for as long as I can remember. Maybe you have pre-International System memories.
I don't know about any change in the capitalization convention. The only thing for sure is the
list of standard prefixes, which I have learned at school in the 70s. According to the history of the Systeme International, these conventions have been unchanged since the 50s or so.
So if your memory predates this, then you, Sir, are certainly not usurping the Old Geezer title.
This is slightly OT, but I'd like to hear from anyone who has tried a binaural (dual-speaker) headset for regular phones. I tried to look for one, but they all require a very expensive amplifier.
I have a regular one-ear headset right now and it is not convenient for loud environments. All I want is a headset with two speakers and a mike that plugs into a regular phone's 2.5mm jack.
Any idea where I could find this?
Real coders for the mob don't grow old
on
Mafia Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In Western Europe, many bars are operating video poker machines. These machines cannot legally pay back any money. All they do if you win is increase your balance and let you play longer.
At least that's the theory.
Various news reports regularly pop up about these machines beng used for full-blown casino-like gambling in bars. A common scheme works like that: Legal no-pay machines are bought wholesale from factories. Then the ROMs are changed. When the machine is installed in a bar, it is also wired to a switch located behind the counter.
Customers "in the know" can ask the barkeeper to flip the switch. This changes the operation of the machine to a different game. The customer is credited a certain amount (e.g. $50). When he leaves, he pays or gets the game's balance at the counter.
This is such a profitable business that a full-fledge gang war was raging last year in Southern France and Italy. At least one programmer was shot because he worked for the wrong people.
I don't really think that a synthetic virus would make a difference as a biological weapon.
One often-heard argument is that bacteriological weapons are the perfect terrorist weapon. Well, I don't know. As a terrorist, I want people to push their government into making hasty, irrational decisions, but I also want free circulation. If I have to stay put and if I cannot move around, I cannot coordinate (telecoms are unsecure), I cannot meet contacts, I cannot plan actions. In clandestine action, to be holed up is to be impotent. That's why, among intelligence agents, a very obvious "tail" following your every move is a powerful means for effectively paralyzing an enemy agent.
The SRAS epidemic showed that the first thing that happens when an outbreak is noticed is a strong restriction on travel. Not good for a terrorist organization. Sure, the operation would kill a few people, but terrs would lose so much due to tightened security that it would probably not be worth the trouble.
Which explain why no terrorist has ever come up with the idea of spraying some bodily bluid of an Ebola victim in the subway. While such a deed would provide entertaining news reports, it would also make free movement impossible.
Let's try a different analogy, which I hope is obvious:
Assume that you're the maker of a popular brand of cars. You're very successful and there are millions of these cars all over the places. There are problems with it, and you have issued recalls. Many times. Most users are just happy with their cars and never bothered.
Now, your cars have a curious problem: if a jerk points a finger at someone's home and yells "Shazam!", all the parked cars around just start and bee-line to this home. Soon, they crash into the walls, splash into the pool, and make the home unlivable.
Granted, these jerks are criminals. And you, the car maker, issued several recalls. But it's really not that hard to point a finger and yell "Shazam!". Lots of bored kids do it. And a lot of car owners don't even know what a recall is. So this problem happens frequently.
Now, don't you think the owners of the devastated homes might want to drag you to court?
Seriously, I have a problem here. My job is to make customers' IT systems work with my employer's product. It involves testing software and fixing bugs. It means poking into third-party products and trying to find potentially damaging flaws.
If this becomes a crime, we IT grunts better find a way out. Preferably before we're sent to jail for finding a flaw in a piece of software junk released by a company that spends more in lawyer fees than in R&D.
--SysKoll
Careful with the numbers - Creative accounting
on
Security FUD On Linux
·
· Score: 1
Careful here. MS is
known for creative accounting. The R&D figure includes things that other companies with stricter accounting policies put in marketing expenses, e.g. organizing expos and giving free software copies. Their R&D figures are not all research. You
cannot trust the figures they publicize.
I see an interesting trend here. Spammer annoys 10 million people, nothing happens. The 10,000,001th guy is an FBI agent. Spammer is sent to jail.
D Squared sends millions of Messenger pop-ups in-your-face adds. Complaints flow, nothing happens. The one ad that popped on an FTC commissioner's screen got D Squared slammed.
You know, that suggests me an obvious trend. Us lower cast peones can get shafted all day long and nobody cares. But if the e-sleazoids ever dare annoying a member of the Authorities, they get immediately sued if not jailed.
Us peones are forbidden to take any action ourselves. The state has the legal monopoly of violence and enforces it. So the obvious cure to spam (a vigorous reshaping of Eddy Marin's head with a baseball bat, for instance) is denied to us.
This means that absolutely NOTHING effective will be ever done for us lowlife taxpayers until a Higher Up get splashed by some of the shit thrown at us daily.
You know what you have to do. If you want a spammer arrested, you need to give him the email addresses of Higher Ups.
Slashdot Mirror
It's silly to hold a mutable group of persons responsible for the sins of past members of this group.
If tomorrow, MS board kicks Ballmer into the used car salesman career for which he's born, and they tie Bill Gates on a chair in his 3-acre rec room, and they reform MS corporate culture, and they stop being bastards, then MS will probably become a decent corporation. Provided they get rid of the people who ooze the current MS culture, of course.
However, such a strategy might have drawback. For example, people will be so disoriented they'll probably swamp MS' tech support for call about how to make a donation because they'll think it has been bought by the Salvation Army.
There is no danger for now, though. If anything, MS would buy the Salvation Army, distribute antifreeze-laced booze to all the hobos and homeless, and auction their body parts.
Meanwhile, the gouvenment would investigate about their unfair practices of volume-purchasing antifreeze.
The sad truth is that if you like incompetent, lying, fumbling, greedy national goverments, you will love the UN: it has historically proven it can actually one-up governments in every aspect.
At least, the few national governments that are regularly elected are accountable to their voters (or lobbies). The UN civil servants are just nominated. They couldn't care less about the public.
Don't be naive. You shouldn't be tempted to give UN the time of day, much less control over the Internet!
Heck, my blood is perpetually brown since that project where I lived for 3 months on espresso and sandwiches. And of course, office workers at SCO have green blood from breathing the same air as Demonic Darl.
So the guy steals about 100K and invites a date to freaking Applebee?! EIther he's really a cheap bastard or he already spent it all.
Men these days. You cannot even get a French restaurant date out of a rich thief anymore.
I shudder at the thought of other spammers/bandits using that download feature to plant their own code in MyDoom-contaminated machines.
Ahem. Sorry for the uncalled-for recollection.
Anyway, now our all-guy geek garage band can afford a female lead singer! And they don't even need to shower anymore! Singer in a box, welcome!
Not to mention that all these cool guys who were the lead singers in their band always dated the most gorgeous chicks in college, while you and I CS majors didn't stand a chance to impress these girls, like we had time to leave the lab anyway.
Well, game over, singer boys. Payback time! The geeks are back with a vengeance, and we are gonna put you in the poor house! That's right, you bunch of overpaid poofs, we're replace you with very small shell scripts! Bwaaaahahahaha!
Let's see. Overpaid beautiful actors, check (CGI). Overpaid beautiful singers, check (this software). What's next? Sports jocks? Hmmm, hand me that robotics toolkit...
It shows that we have very long-term data about variations that we cannot explain right now. Changes in solar output is the best bet, although a guy came up with a model involving the precession of the moon's orbit that affects tides (and hence atmospheric/oceanic heat exchanges) and his math is solid, so it might do the trick too. But since your religion doesn't involve listening to other people, don't bother looking it up.
On another hand, the debate is still open among reasonable people.
That's the kind of data that really makes you ponder. What happen back then? Is the sun going postal on us periodically or something?
If you want to look it up, it's a rather dry read but very interesting: Dansgaard, W., Johnsen, S.J., Clausen, H.B., Dahl Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N.S., Hammer, C.U., Hvidberg, C.S., Steffensen, J.P., Sveinbjornsdottir, A.E., Jouzel, J., Bond, G., Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250 kyr ice core record, 1993, Nature, 364, 218. I tried to find a URL on nature.com, no luck though.
What are you, a twelve-year old or something? What kind of response is this?
Your enthusiasm for the latest fad (this week, a special on global warming!) denotes a youthful naivete that is prone to mistakes. Before calling people names, you might want to check for the track record of climatologists. They've been wrong in the past. The most honest ones aren't really sure of anything. Remember the "snowball Earth" predictions in the 70s? No you don't, you're just a zit-faced young twit.
Acting on a wrong hypothesis can aggravate a situation. Surgeons in the past killed countless patients by "treating" them with bleeding.
Barking at the wrong tree is not the good method. We need to understand this complex change. If you have a religion about express trains or whatever, fine, just get out of the way of the scientific minds.
And remember, "The scientific mind is humble" (Richard Feynman). Humility means an open mind, not name-calling.
That said, there has been an increase in the solar output. The number of sun spots at solar peak is increasing steadily. And the Mars polar cap is melting, which is consistent with the solar output increase observation.
Note that currently, the sun is close to its radiation peak. Which means that since the high atmosphere is acting like a bubble chamber, we will see more ice crystals and water droplets at high altitude (and more precipitations). Which raises the Earth's albedo (reflectivity) and could decrease the amount of solar light reaching the ground. So at least, the findings don't contradict atmospheric physics.
But I still want to see these measurements done over an 11-year solar cycle, otherwise it's gimme-a-grant voodoo, not science.
Look at what the Muslim Brothers did to the tourism industry in Egypt with just a few attack. Look at the tourism industry in Bali now. See my point?
Morocco is now a hotbed of Muslim activism, as the Casablaca bombing (20 victims) demonstrated. Once a country grows a crust of Islamism, it cannot be melted by pouring Coke and ketchup on it. Ask the Shah of Iran, he tried.
Observers fear that the clash between Islamism and the Western culture (brought by contacts with Europe and with Western tourists) will only intensify. Already, women are "encouraged" to wear full chadors in part of the country where they used to wear skirts and jeans only a few years ago.
Tourism will probably decline after the next big terrorist attack, just like in Egypt. The King's police cannot protect every single tourist. The existing airline capacity is already more than sufficient to carry travellers to and from Morocco. I don't see the point of this tunnel except as a political toy.
So their tinkering was a mixed blessing to say the least. The Wrights might be heroes now, but as far as aviation buffs were concerned back then, they were a cross between Darl McBride and Steve Ballmer, with Hillary Rosen thrown in the mix (ugh).
The French army brass, disappointed that they couldn't already have a B-52, cancelled the funding, and a bitter Clement Ader stopped his aeronautical experiments.
The real innovation introduced by the Wright brothers was an effective way of controlling the plane. The Avion was using a crude wing-warping system that didn't prove efficient. However, the Wright machine was just as unbalanced as Ader's Avion.
The steam engine was the only available motor at the time of Ader's design, and its shortcoming prevented the Avion from flying for more than a few minutes because of the water and fuel weight.
However, flight historians should say that the Wright brothers made the first powered, guided flight, wereas Ader made the first powered flight.
So the obvious coutermeasure to spam is to make stolen addresses worthless.
Use spamgourmet and only give disposable addresses to businesses, web sites, forums and friends running Windows.
IMHO, the most offensive is Pa for pascal. Why not P? To distinguish it from phosphorus?
Most especially, Kilo was capitalized - and indeed, kilobytes per second is still properly written Kbps, not kbps, isn't it?
No. it's kbit/s. The other abbreviations are dumbed-down gobbledygook. In tabloids such as the NYT "technology" section, maybe they write kbps or other aberrations. But in regular technical publications such as Electronic Engineering Times, you will almost always see the scientific kbit/s or Mbit/s. The only instances of "kbps" are press releases written by mostly clueless marketdroids. A search for kpbs in the EET archives revealed 8 hits, vs. 172 for kbit/s. Same for Mbps (13 bits) vs. Mbit/s (303 hits).
These days it would appear that all the above-unity multiplier prefixes higher than kilo are still capitalized, while kilo, hecto, and deka are not. All the below-unity ones are still lower case. Is this true, and if so, why on earth was this change made? It is so offensive to common sense of order. Well, the conventions are the same since at least the 70s (cannot vouch for earlier). The symbol for kilo has been k (not K) for as long as I can remember. Maybe you have pre-International System memories.
I don't know about any change in the capitalization convention. The only thing for sure is the list of standard prefixes, which I have learned at school in the 70s. According to the history of the Systeme International, these conventions have been unchanged since the 50s or so.
So if your memory predates this, then you, Sir, are certainly not usurping the Old Geezer title.
What you wrote is meaningless. K is Kelvin, P is not a unit, H is Henry. KPH would be "kilo-Henry times whatever P would be".
This is science, not feel-good-improvisation and fluff, for crying out loud. Look at a unit tutorial for details.
Or better, avoid these pesky meters, grams and seconds entirely. Just stick to furlongs, fortnights and stones like a good American. :-)
I have a regular one-ear headset right now and it is not convenient for loud environments. All I want is a headset with two speakers and a mike that plugs into a regular phone's 2.5mm jack.
Any idea where I could find this?
At least that's the theory.
Various news reports regularly pop up about these machines beng used for full-blown casino-like gambling in bars. A common scheme works like that: Legal no-pay machines are bought wholesale from factories. Then the ROMs are changed. When the machine is installed in a bar, it is also wired to a switch located behind the counter.
Customers "in the know" can ask the barkeeper to flip the switch. This changes the operation of the machine to a different game. The customer is credited a certain amount (e.g. $50). When he leaves, he pays or gets the game's balance at the counter.
This is such a profitable business that a full-fledge gang war was raging last year in Southern France and Italy. At least one programmer was shot because he worked for the wrong people.
Friendly betting my ass.
One often-heard argument is that bacteriological weapons are the perfect terrorist weapon. Well, I don't know. As a terrorist, I want people to push their government into making hasty, irrational decisions, but I also want free circulation. If I have to stay put and if I cannot move around, I cannot coordinate (telecoms are unsecure), I cannot meet contacts, I cannot plan actions. In clandestine action, to be holed up is to be impotent. That's why, among intelligence agents, a very obvious "tail" following your every move is a powerful means for effectively paralyzing an enemy agent.
The SRAS epidemic showed that the first thing that happens when an outbreak is noticed is a strong restriction on travel. Not good for a terrorist organization. Sure, the operation would kill a few people, but terrs would lose so much due to tightened security that it would probably not be worth the trouble.
Which explain why no terrorist has ever come up with the idea of spraying some bodily bluid of an Ebola victim in the subway. While such a deed would provide entertaining news reports, it would also make free movement impossible.
Assume that you're the maker of a popular brand of cars. You're very successful and there are millions of these cars all over the places. There are problems with it, and you have issued recalls. Many times. Most users are just happy with their cars and never bothered.
Now, your cars have a curious problem: if a jerk points a finger at someone's home and yells "Shazam!", all the parked cars around just start and bee-line to this home. Soon, they crash into the walls, splash into the pool, and make the home unlivable.
Granted, these jerks are criminals. And you, the car maker, issued several recalls. But it's really not that hard to point a finger and yell "Shazam!". Lots of bored kids do it. And a lot of car owners don't even know what a recall is. So this problem happens frequently.
Now, don't you think the owners of the devastated homes might want to drag you to court?
No, I'm not talking about his dick, you perv! I'm talking about the DMCA, President Clinton's personal gift to the IT world.
Seriously, I have a problem here. My job is to make customers' IT systems work with my employer's product. It involves testing software and fixing bugs. It means poking into third-party products and trying to find potentially damaging flaws.
If this becomes a crime, we IT grunts better find a way out. Preferably before we're sent to jail for finding a flaw in a piece of software junk released by a company that spends more in lawyer fees than in R&D.
Careful here. MS is known for creative accounting. The R&D figure includes things that other companies with stricter accounting policies put in marketing expenses, e.g. organizing expos and giving free software copies. Their R&D figures are not all research. You cannot trust the figures they publicize.
Or is it a computer-driven player?
D Squared sends millions of Messenger pop-ups in-your-face adds. Complaints flow, nothing happens. The one ad that popped on an FTC commissioner's screen got D Squared slammed.
You know, that suggests me an obvious trend. Us lower cast peones can get shafted all day long and nobody cares. But if the e-sleazoids ever dare annoying a member of the Authorities, they get immediately sued if not jailed.
Us peones are forbidden to take any action ourselves. The state has the legal monopoly of violence and enforces it. So the obvious cure to spam (a vigorous reshaping of Eddy Marin's head with a baseball bat, for instance) is denied to us.
This means that absolutely NOTHING effective will be ever done for us lowlife taxpayers until a Higher Up get splashed by some of the shit thrown at us daily.
You know what you have to do. If you want a spammer arrested, you need to give him the email addresses of Higher Ups.