Good point. I agree, although I'll be reluctant to put half-baked worms written by beginners (such as Blaster) in the same metaphorical category as TNT. Then again, it's not very hard to break a window by throwing a stone, and that doesn't make it commendable either, as you point out.
My concern is that MS, with the help of law enforcement authorities who need to buff their image, will focus their efforts on tracking down the little vandals and do very little to improve security.
I like your analogy. I also think that the problem could be presented that way: a civil engineering company has cornered the railroad bridge market. But they use shoddy craftsmanship. Idiots and drunkards routinely walk to the bridge, and by slapping it with a wet noodle, they make parts of the bridge to collapse spectacularly. Moreover, the collapse somehow spreads to all bridges made by the same firm.
Of course, the idiots and drunkards are to blame. But really, shouldn't the firm build bridges that are more resistant? You can predict that a fraction of the population is made of malevolent bastards who get a kick out of chaos and mayhem. Good engineering should deny these idiots the opportunity to do real damage.
Putting a bounty on the head of the vandals just give them the aura of cleverness and dangerousness that they crave. As a result, idiots will flock to the bridges and collapses will multiply.
I run desktop Linux since 1999. It's kept me from getting a ton of Windows-only games which I never have time to play (blame the family and the life), thereby restoring my free time at the detriment of a bit of entertainment.
My friends running Windows do complain that I hog their PC to try out their games when I visit them, though. They tolerate me because I generally end up cleaning up their machine from the 150+ pieces of adware and spyware they accumulate by running IE (I avoid convert them to Mozilla because then I'd have to find another excuse for trying out their Windows games).
I tall you, when I visited that backwater state, they tried to make me see Monument Valley. How much do you charge? Nothing, they tell me, it's free to view.
Yeah right. It's got to be a scam. C'mon, a guy sweats for years to create a work of art, using tools and equipment he had to pay, and it's free? Anybody can come and see it? Riiiight. It has to be a scam. Maybe they'll sell you the souvenir picture or the history book on Amazon. Bastards.
So instead I went to a matinee of the movie "Waterworld". All that water, it was really feeling expensive.
Yep. Don't forget that IBM is one of the very few licensed makers of x86 processors. So the bets are not on a PowerPC Xbox2. The bets are on an IBM-supplied x86 processor integrating the graphic chip and the CPU, or maybe the x86 with an integrated high-bandwidth bridge.
Why does this make sense? Because IBM has a very 90-nm advanced process on 300-mm wafers that can spit out small -- hence cheap and fast -- dice with a very reasonable yield. And BTW, their new Fishkill factory floor in entirely under Linux!
If windows is absolutely irreplaceable, I found the easiest solution was to buy a Linux VMWare license for each machine. Install Win32 in the VMWare environment. Save a snapshot (which is just a large regular Linux file). Copy the snapshot to a server. Restoring the Windows environment is as simple as restarting VMWare from the snapshot. Costs about $300 per machine.
Points for citing the great RAH AI book! However, as many pointed out, the "computer suddenly becomes sentient" model is seriously flawed. Whereas the gene-splicing techniques already work quite well. So I think we'll see brain-boosted animals before we have computers of equivalent brainpower.
I don't know if future AI will be able to sue for their existence. But one thing is sure: Within a decade or two, biologists will have isolated the set of genes that code for human intelligence and will be tempted to splice it in monkeys, if only to prove a point. Then it will be very tempting to build brainboosted chimps as cheap, unqualified labor. Then someone will sue for the super-chimps rights not to be "put to sleep" at the end of their productive lives...
See R.A. Heinlein's short story "Jerry was a man", which looks more and more like an accurate prediction.
We have blinders on. Lobbyists say "deregulation will increase competition" but how many times are we gonna get burned?
Well, each time you write a law or a rule, you pit an inept, badly slapped-together wording against the best, most scheming minds of the regulated industry. Add the inevitable watering-down and amendments of the law due to political petty-minded coatroom deals, and what you get in the end is a text that is so full of holes that it makes Swiss cheese look watertight in contrast. Is it a surprise that said rule always ends up being distorted and misused? Naive people witness the failure of regulation and ask for more regulation to compensate. Which is doing as much good as the proverbial gazoline on the fire.
The only way to avoid this pitfall is to abstain from overly complex regulation. Put competitors in the arena, make sure they fight instead of colluding, and let the public decide. Of course, established businesses fear this above everything else.
I agree that competition has not been that strong in certain sectors, especially telcos. But again, don't blame lack of regulations. Blame excess. Read the telecom magazines and professional web sites. Complying with FTC rules costs a fortune (paid by consumers) and bars competitors from challenging incumbents.
The telcos don't have the exclusivity of this dirty trick. In the automobile market, manufacturers are happily pushing for new, stricter rules that increase the average price of cars for dubious benefits, while making sure no new manufacturer can join the fray. The latter doesn't really work anymore (witness Korea's KIA successful entry on the market) but the former (keeping prices up) sure works, thanks a lot. As for regulation that might have been effective and helpful (about increasing car mileage for instance), it's generally so full of holes that it's trivial to market your way around it (hence the SUV, which proliferation is a consequence of the well-meaning but ineptly written regulation about improving mileage in cars!).
Ask yourself a simple question; when something is called "deregulation", shouldn't the amount of regulations decrease? If you see that a process results in more and more redtape and rules in an activity sector, isn't it a misnomer to call this process "deregulation"?
You have to questions the wording of these wonderful things that lobbyists throw at us.
Remember that big business does not object to regulation. Big business actually loves it because it keeps competitors away. If you want to fight obnoxious, uncarring pigopolists, bring competition, not regulation.
And the absolute worst hypocrisy of big business is to lobby for more complex, new rules and call it "deregulation". Let's not fall for it.
Okay, so maybe having to lease a phone is annoying. I'll grant you that. But at least the phone was made out of metal. I know because when I was a kid, I smashed the phone in the kitchen with a hammer during an exciting temper tantrum. Then mom took it back to the Ma Bell store, and they just handed her a new one. That phone, also metal, lasted until we moved out of that house. Nowadays you can buy a phone for less than ten bucks at Target, but it's plastic crap, it's not shielded from RF, and it will die in a year. I can literally listen to AM 1000 on one particularly crappy phone I still own.
Are you aware that for the rental price that Ma Bell charged you every quarter, you can now afford a digital wireless phone?
Some companies like Qwest and Ameritech are particularly crappy. They totally disregard customer s because they can afford to do it.
The remedy is competition. Alas, the telcos are using the system. Each time there is a threat of a competing telco getting a slice of their business, the telco lobby the FTC for yet another huge piece of regulation. This effectively raises the entry barrier into the market and prevents competitors from breaking into the business.
So the very regulatory process that the FTC established to allow fair market competition is now used by telcos to inhibit competitors.
This is not a surprise, though: there is a law of unintended consequences saying that after an administration reaches a certain size, its redtape will have an effect exactly opposite to the original intent!
After a week of getting phone calls every frickin' weekday morning from well-meaning folks who wanted to buy ball or roller bearings, I scrounged up the correct number for the company and started giving it out.
So how did you answer? Did you yell to them, "I have no balls!":-)
Actually, it happened to me. I feel your pain. First I got a number that was very close to the sales dept. of a local pipe and welding company (only they were in a new area code). Once, I got a particularly nasty call at 6AM: a guy was pissed that a message he left (on my phone answering machine of course) had been ignored, and since that message asked for a quote for a large order, he complained *I* was a slacker, a saboteur and an asshole.
I called the pipe company, asked for the sales director, explained the situation. The guy started a call campaign: He called every large and medium customer and made sure they had their new number. Now that's responsible behavior.
Since I valued my sanity, I asked the phone company for a new number anyway. No problemo: a few weeks later, I had my new number...
...which formerly belonged to a professional nurse who left the profession. So now I was swamped with calls of panicked geezers asking me why I didn't return their calls about an injection or an urgent enema. That was progress.
Personally I kind of like the idea of a single, nationwide, regulated telephone company.
This has been done before. Aren't you old enough to remember Ma Bell? C'mon now, ask your parents if you're a kid. The AT&T company (motto: "We don't care. We're the phone company. We don't have to care.") forced you to lease your "terminal" (phone), didn't allow you to connect a modem on your phone line (remember the accoustic couplers?), took forever to start providing what's regarded today as basic amenities...
And it's not an exclusivity of AT&T either. As a European, I can tell you volumes about the wonders of the State-owned telephone monopolies in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. Up to the late 80s, you enjoyed:
No detailed bill (you pay a sum according to a mysterious meter at the phone company)
Metered local calls (10 cents per 3 minutes for LOCAL)
Months of waiting for installing a phone line.
So instead of wishing for things, ask around and check if these things have been tried in other times or places. You might get surprising answers, as well as a richly desserved cluebat whack.
Steps 3 and up presuppose that the government that took steps 1 and 2 is able to seize spammer monies... Alas, many spammers already use foreign accounts. Once a transaction has been done, the money is essentially lost. The law-enforcement agencies would not be able to recover the funds.
Setting up such a federal agency (Federal Body Part Enlargement Products Procurement Agency?) would end up in a huge, costly bureaucracy that would immediately be stumped when all spammers start using up foreign accounts. Not all spammers are living in Florida, you know... But of course, the Agency would keep gobbling its ever-enlarging budget even if it doesn't nail a single spammer.
California regulated the maximum price of electricity (as charged to consumers) while allowing a shortage condition to drive the cost of electricity (bought to producers) to go as high as five times the proce.
So how can straight-thinking people call that "deregulation"? What next? Rename DoD "The Department of Foreign Happiness"?
Sic is the Latin equiv of "that's what he said". It means "so" or "this way". It is used to denote a literal quotation. Here, the article's dumbass author uses "hacker" in a place where "cracker" should be used, and the "sic" is placed to distance the./er from said Wired dumbass.
The infrastructure (trans-Alp line) that failed in France is owned and operated by EDF, the French electricity state monopoly.
As for Italy, they do not have anything resembling a free market for electricity distribution. The state-owned ENEL monopoly is managing the infrastructure that failed.
So it is both foolish and wrong to write things like "Free markets cause blak-outs", even with a question mark at the end.
Start enlightening your own mind before you seek light in the streets, young grasshopper...
As geeks, we are probably not able to act as a united block and get the US Congress to repell the PATRIOT Act. I mean, c'mon, what are *you* gonna do? Vote for the Democrat candidate at the next election? Suuure, dude, like it's going to change things. Remember, the thrice accursed DMCA is a parting gift from a Democrat president. Or ask the orphans in Waco how good it is to
enjoy freedom under a Democrat administration.
But on another hand, who started this mess in the first place? That's right, the New York Times. This paragon of virtuous indignation and dignified moral authority has thrown the book on Adrian Lamo after a harmless whistle blowing. After all, the idiots had an
open proxy making their editorial contributor's SSN and personal data world-readable. It's not like Lamo did a Watergate on them. But the people who pose as the intelligentsia's moral authority (albeit slightly decrepit) cannot be caught with their pants down, now, can they?
So punish the morons who pretend to oppose Bush's policies and then yell "Terrorist!" at a harmless guy. Punish the bloody hypocrits who kill trees to pretend they oppose excessive freedom-smothering laws and then file lawsuits that make use of these very laws.
You're right. I am wondering why, every time the NYT farts up something full of inaccuracies and obviously lacking in basic technical knowledge, there are people on Slashdot who feel obligated to post it. I thought it was "news that matter". Where the heck is the interested from a techno-geek point of view here? Is there some kind of cult in OSDN? Oooh, the NYT has something with the word "computer" in it, all hail the NYT...
Personally, I am boycotting the paper that
ruined the life of Adrian Lamo after he told these morons that they were storing tons of confidential, personal data in a world-accessible database.
"The paper of record", my ass. The paper with a record, that's what this rag is.
Evidence of human activity impacting the weather are pretty old and commonplace.
Which evidence, you ask? Look, each time -- each freakin' time -- I wash my car, it rains. Same for yours, right?
The gummint obviously embeds a special weather transmogrifier in cars, which, triggered by a soapy water detector, prevents honest citizens from parading their shiny cars on country roads, so that these blasted civil servants can have them for themselves.
Instead of outlawing spamming, outlaw the purchace of products advertised with spam.
Sounds like a good idea. Of course, the devil is in the details. After all, it's already illegal to purchase a certain number of things and it just gives these items the luster of forbidden possessions.
This would certainly cut on credit-card and check purchases. The idiots who buy from spams would have to send cash. I am sure there would be enough of them, though.
More generally, administrations are not tech-savvy. Even if you abstract away the low pay,
adminsitrations don't attract the kind of geeks that are likely to put up extra hours to make a badly designed system work in spite of user carelessness. Of course, you find exceptions to this rule. But sadly, this department had no such computer-babysitting geek.
Procurement of computer hardware (and worse, software) in state and national administrations is not a pretty sight. Little things like reliability and security tend to get lost in the bigger issues of "Will this project make me/my boss look good?"
The quality of the purchased products is much less of an issue than the degree of supplier's salesmanship.
If Microsoft was selling papier-mache bridges and cardboard water mains, they'd manage to sell them by wining and dining the right officials. Not bribery, mind you, just convincing sales pitch.
Having witnessed the technical projects process in a federal administration that shall remain nameless (and which is gonna be broke in a few years so better milk it now), I can safely predict many more disasters of this nature!
Slashdot Mirror
My concern is that MS, with the help of law enforcement authorities who need to buff their image, will focus their efforts on tracking down the little vandals and do very little to improve security.
Of course, the idiots and drunkards are to blame. But really, shouldn't the firm build bridges that are more resistant? You can predict that a fraction of the population is made of malevolent bastards who get a kick out of chaos and mayhem. Good engineering should deny these idiots the opportunity to do real damage.
Putting a bounty on the head of the vandals just give them the aura of cleverness and dangerousness that they crave. As a result, idiots will flock to the bridges and collapses will multiply.
My friends running Windows do complain that I hog their PC to try out their games when I visit them, though. They tolerate me because I generally end up cleaning up their machine from the 150+ pieces of adware and spyware they accumulate by running IE (I avoid convert them to Mozilla because then I'd have to find another excuse for trying out their Windows games).
Yeah right. It's got to be a scam. C'mon, a guy sweats for years to create a work of art, using tools and equipment he had to pay, and it's free? Anybody can come and see it? Riiiight. It has to be a scam. Maybe they'll sell you the souvenir picture or the history book on Amazon. Bastards.
So instead I went to a matinee of the movie "Waterworld". All that water, it was really feeling expensive.
Why does this make sense? Because IBM has a very 90-nm advanced process on 300-mm wafers that can spit out small -- hence cheap and fast -- dice with a very reasonable yield. And BTW, their new Fishkill factory floor in entirely under Linux!
If windows is absolutely irreplaceable, I found the easiest solution was to buy a Linux VMWare license for each machine. Install Win32 in the VMWare environment. Save a snapshot (which is just a large regular Linux file). Copy the snapshot to a server. Restoring the Windows environment is as simple as restarting VMWare from the snapshot. Costs about $300 per machine.
Points for citing the great RAH AI book! However, as many pointed out, the "computer suddenly becomes sentient" model is seriously flawed. Whereas the gene-splicing techniques already work quite well. So I think we'll see brain-boosted animals before we have computers of equivalent brainpower.
I don't know if future AI will be able to sue for their existence. But one thing is sure: Within a decade or two, biologists will have isolated the set of genes that code for human intelligence and will be tempted to splice it in monkeys, if only to prove a point. Then it will be very tempting to build brainboosted chimps as cheap, unqualified labor. Then someone will sue for the super-chimps rights not to be "put to sleep" at the end of their productive lives...
See R.A. Heinlein's short story "Jerry was a man", which looks more and more like an accurate prediction.
Well, each time you write a law or a rule, you pit an inept, badly slapped-together wording against the best, most scheming minds of the regulated industry. Add the inevitable watering-down and amendments of the law due to political petty-minded coatroom deals, and what you get in the end is a text that is so full of holes that it makes Swiss cheese look watertight in contrast. Is it a surprise that said rule always ends up being distorted and misused? Naive people witness the failure of regulation and ask for more regulation to compensate. Which is doing as much good as the proverbial gazoline on the fire.
The only way to avoid this pitfall is to abstain from overly complex regulation. Put competitors in the arena, make sure they fight instead of colluding, and let the public decide. Of course, established businesses fear this above everything else.
I agree that competition has not been that strong in certain sectors, especially telcos. But again, don't blame lack of regulations. Blame excess. Read the telecom magazines and professional web sites. Complying with FTC rules costs a fortune (paid by consumers) and bars competitors from challenging incumbents.
The telcos don't have the exclusivity of this dirty trick. In the automobile market, manufacturers are happily pushing for new, stricter rules that increase the average price of cars for dubious benefits, while making sure no new manufacturer can join the fray. The latter doesn't really work anymore (witness Korea's KIA successful entry on the market) but the former (keeping prices up) sure works, thanks a lot. As for regulation that might have been effective and helpful (about increasing car mileage for instance), it's generally so full of holes that it's trivial to market your way around it (hence the SUV, which proliferation is a consequence of the well-meaning but ineptly written regulation about improving mileage in cars!).
Ask yourself a simple question; when something is called "deregulation", shouldn't the amount of regulations decrease? If you see that a process results in more and more redtape and rules in an activity sector, isn't it a misnomer to call this process "deregulation"?
You have to questions the wording of these wonderful things that lobbyists throw at us.
Remember that big business does not object to regulation. Big business actually loves it because it keeps competitors away. If you want to fight obnoxious, uncarring pigopolists, bring competition, not regulation.
And the absolute worst hypocrisy of big business is to lobby for more complex, new rules and call it "deregulation". Let's not fall for it.
Are you aware that for the rental price that Ma Bell charged you every quarter, you can now afford a digital wireless phone?
The remedy is competition. Alas, the telcos are using the system. Each time there is a threat of a competing telco getting a slice of their business, the telco lobby the FTC for yet another huge piece of regulation. This effectively raises the entry barrier into the market and prevents competitors from breaking into the business.
So the very regulatory process that the FTC established to allow fair market competition is now used by telcos to inhibit competitors.
This is not a surprise, though: there is a law of unintended consequences saying that after an administration reaches a certain size, its redtape will have an effect exactly opposite to the original intent!
So how did you answer? Did you yell to them, "I have no balls!" :-)
Actually, it happened to me. I feel your pain. First I got a number that was very close to the sales dept. of a local pipe and welding company (only they were in a new area code). Once, I got a particularly nasty call at 6AM: a guy was pissed that a message he left (on my phone answering machine of course) had been ignored, and since that message asked for a quote for a large order, he complained *I* was a slacker, a saboteur and an asshole.
I called the pipe company, asked for the sales director, explained the situation. The guy started a call campaign: He called every large and medium customer and made sure they had their new number. Now that's responsible behavior.
Since I valued my sanity, I asked the phone company for a new number anyway. No problemo: a few weeks later, I had my new number...
...which formerly belonged to a professional nurse who left the profession. So now I was swamped with calls of panicked geezers asking me why I didn't return their calls about an injection or an urgent enema. That was progress.
I guess you can't win.
This has been done before. Aren't you old enough to remember Ma Bell? C'mon now, ask your parents if you're a kid. The AT&T company (motto: "We don't care. We're the phone company. We don't have to care.") forced you to lease your "terminal" (phone), didn't allow you to connect a modem on your phone line (remember the accoustic couplers?), took forever to start providing what's regarded today as basic amenities...
And it's not an exclusivity of AT&T either. As a European, I can tell you volumes about the wonders of the State-owned telephone monopolies in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. Up to the late 80s, you enjoyed:
So instead of wishing for things, ask around and check if these things have been tried in other times or places. You might get surprising answers, as well as a richly desserved cluebat whack.
Setting up such a federal agency (Federal Body Part Enlargement Products Procurement Agency?) would end up in a huge, costly bureaucracy that would immediately be stumped when all spammers start using up foreign accounts. Not all spammers are living in Florida, you know... But of course, the Agency would keep gobbling its ever-enlarging budget even if it doesn't nail a single spammer.
So that's why it hasn't been done yet.
So how can straight-thinking people call that "deregulation"? What next? Rename DoD "The Department of Foreign Happiness"?
Sic is the Latin equiv of "that's what he said". It means "so" or "this way". It is used to denote a literal quotation. Here, the article's dumbass author uses "hacker" in a place where "cracker" should be used, and the "sic" is placed to distance the ./er from said Wired dumbass.
The infrastructure (trans-Alp line) that failed in France is owned and operated by EDF, the French electricity state monopoly.
As for Italy, they do not have anything resembling a free market for electricity distribution. The state-owned ENEL monopoly is managing the infrastructure that failed.
So it is both foolish and wrong to write things like "Free markets cause blak-outs", even with a question mark at the end.
Start enlightening your own mind before you seek light in the streets, young grasshopper...
As geeks, we are probably not able to act as a united block and get the US Congress to repell the PATRIOT Act. I mean, c'mon, what are *you* gonna do? Vote for the Democrat candidate at the next election? Suuure, dude, like it's going to change things. Remember, the thrice accursed DMCA is a parting gift from a Democrat president. Or ask the orphans in Waco how good it is to enjoy freedom under a Democrat administration.
But on another hand, who started this mess in the first place? That's right, the New York Times. This paragon of virtuous indignation and dignified moral authority has thrown the book on Adrian Lamo after a harmless whistle blowing. After all, the idiots had an open proxy making their editorial contributor's SSN and personal data world-readable. It's not like Lamo did a Watergate on them. But the people who pose as the intelligentsia's moral authority (albeit slightly decrepit) cannot be caught with their pants down, now, can they?
So punish the morons who pretend to oppose Bush's policies and then yell "Terrorist!" at a harmless guy. Punish the bloody hypocrits who kill trees to pretend they oppose excessive freedom-smothering laws and then file lawsuits that make use of these very laws.
Boycott the New York Times.
Personally, I am boycotting the paper that ruined the life of Adrian Lamo after he told these morons that they were storing tons of confidential, personal data in a world-accessible database.
"The paper of record", my ass. The paper with a record, that's what this rag is.
It's voila, you insensitive clod! Viola is a music instrument. Or an admission you viola-te spelling.
Evidence of human activity impacting the weather are pretty old and commonplace.
Which evidence, you ask? Look, each time -- each freakin' time -- I wash my car, it rains. Same for yours, right?
The gummint obviously embeds a special weather transmogrifier in cars, which, triggered by a soapy water detector, prevents honest citizens from parading their shiny cars on country roads, so that these blasted civil servants can have them for themselves.
"Cattle mutilations are up." -- Sneakers
[duck a rotten fruit]
Sounds like a good idea. Of course, the devil is in the details. After all, it's already illegal to purchase a certain number of things and it just gives these items the luster of forbidden possessions.
This would certainly cut on credit-card and check purchases. The idiots who buy from spams would have to send cash. I am sure there would be enough of them, though.
Now I use Spamgourmet and I can track my addresses as well as block them. Never had a problem in more than a year.
More generally, administrations are not tech-savvy. Even if you abstract away the low pay, adminsitrations don't attract the kind of geeks that are likely to put up extra hours to make a badly designed system work in spite of user carelessness. Of course, you find exceptions to this rule. But sadly, this department had no such computer-babysitting geek.
Procurement of computer hardware (and worse, software) in state and national administrations is not a pretty sight. Little things like reliability and security tend to get lost in the bigger issues of "Will this project make me/my boss look good?"
The quality of the purchased products is much less of an issue than the degree of supplier's salesmanship. If Microsoft was selling papier-mache bridges and cardboard water mains, they'd manage to sell them by wining and dining the right officials. Not bribery, mind you, just convincing sales pitch.
Having witnessed the technical projects process in a federal administration that shall remain nameless (and which is gonna be broke in a few years so better milk it now), I can safely predict many more disasters of this nature!