Personally for me, the more important thing was that the menus (DHTML drop down menus) now actually work with Opera!
Thank you Yahoo!
PS: For the record, on the other side of world, Yahoo messenger is as ubiquitous as AIM is in US. That means, virtually everybody who "chats" with friends has a Yahoo account. That means a *lot*. GMail... well its nice, but its even nicer to keep your existsing mail box and not have to notify everyone your change in address (and worse, miss people's messages!)
Once it was said that couch potatoes hurt themselves watching TV all day.
No NOT! They hurt many more. Millions of couch potatoes made dancers and singers and their supporting corporations SO strong that they're now trying to control information and educational channels because it *may* be used to *steal* *BROADCAST* signals !!!
What next ? Are they going to ban copper wires cuz they can be used to hook onto power grid and *possibly* steal electric power ???
Throw that idiot box out of your house if you're really serious about protesting against this insanity!!
1. "Every OSS program expands until it can do pluggable look and feel and themes"
Combine that with the existing law that "every program expands until it can read e-mail" and you got what firefox 2.0 will look like - Right, now prizes for guessing "Mozilla":-P
Firefox was *supposed* to be a *fast* lean-and-mean browser. One reason was given that bundling IE with OS works because people are too lazy to download another browser. That gap WIDENS as the download size increases. Already Firefox is 10+ MB!!!!
RANT: Take a look at Opera 7.51 dumbwits. It does full XHTML, HTML4, plugins, *EMAIL*, spam filtering, RSS, newgroups, *IRC*, SKINS (yep, take that eye candy too!!!), tabbed browsing and STILL it is 3.5MB download. You know *that* is what thats called a "product". I'm running an ad-supported version and seriously considering buying a license.
Firefox, well, I have it installed, but won't run it even if its *free* (and I'm going to pay $30 for opera)... now go figure.
You're whining cuz they make you pay $100/mo ! Right ?
May I ask do they hire goons to put a gun to your kids to make you pay ???
If not, you know, there is lot of life away from the tube!! Its been 5 years I stopped wathing TV and no, I don't miss it! That too when in this side of earth Cable costs $5/mo (and yeah... 30+ channels with star movies, HBO and all!!).
Its because of you idiots who pay $100 for cable and $6000 for a TV set (ok, its a large and thin plasma one... but its AFTER ALL, a "TV" set and will show the same crappy shows!!), that these supposedly "entertainment" companies are literally ruling the earth... entertainers are earning $1M an episode (remember "friends" ??) and grassroot workers... say a doctor earns far less when saving lives!!!!
Oh you can fork OpenBSD to your likeness, the only restriction is that you can't call your fork 'OpenBSD'... name it burnsBSD or whatever and you should be fine;-)
electronic voting machines are being used successfully (ie. w/o any major incidence) in largest ever task undertaken in history... namely, general elections in largest democracy - India!
Oh and Brazilians have been successfully using electronic voting for a decade, and India has been using them on and off for half a decade.
This is one of the reasons, no engineering school in India allows any programmable calculator. Infact, in IITs the most sophisticated calculator allowed is casio FX100-W (google it!)!
The funda is that, for problems requiring understanding, you don't *need* any sophisticated calculator... data provided usually computes nicely.
For *hard* problems, there are lab sessions where you have dual and quad processor sun servers running MATLAB/ANSYS/Mathematica (as the course requirements or what professor thinks), and the problems are MUCH more interesting:-)
In short, these beefed-up calculators make you dumb! Get over them. HP came to IIT campus with their shiny calculators... and they hardly got any visitors for their stalls.
... that whom-so-ever buys that thingie will have a nice time with the bomb disposal squad and couple of dozens of armoured police cars and military helicopters.
Good luck explaining them that you are not a terrorist trying to take out the whole city with that HUGE car bomb... if they don't shoot you on sight, that is.
... unless you happen to invent something that others used for nefarious purpose.
After the destruction of Hiroshima, Einstein said "If I had known that my discovery (E=mc^2) will have such results, I would rather have sit happily in my room playing my violin".
Most of you making fun of him are under 20 kids and have never seen what "death and destruction" of war means... you don't know what killing 20000 people means and what a father feels like carrying his blood covered child to hospital after a bomber dropped a 5000 pound cluster bomb.
Saddam was a bad guy... but I'd say US didn't really stand upto our expectations. With all the super duper futuristic inventions, I think dropping over 350 tonns of cluster bombs was too much for "trying" to kill a bad guy... a single bullet would have done that job.
The AIM was to kill Saddam... after 350 tonnes (to you, that is more than 700,000 pounds) of cluster bombs, he still managed to be alive... those bombs killed MOSTLY civilians.
To understand it better, think like a terrorist has taken hostage YOUR family and the cops blow the building killing many of your family members AND manage to capture the terrorist who is mostly unhurt!! (PS: Even if you can't get the point - the point of blowing up the building was supposed to be killing the terrorist... in the end if you blew up the innocent AND captured the bad guy alive, your purpose of blow up has gone TERRIBLY WRONG).
PS2: You guys are joking cuz it was not YOUR family members who were blown with 5000 pound bombs and DU shells over there in Iraq.
Being a regular on/., I've found that MOST people here-
1. Hate Apple for OVERPRICED hardware (aka, why don't they release OSX for x86... its cheaper hw you see... commoditize yada yadda)
2. You like Rio cuz they make an mp3 player that is cheaper than the iPod (how'd you feel if you could that iPod 40GB for $99 instead of $599??)
3. You like linux which is, primarily, cheaper than other commercial offerings.
4. You HATE SUN because their hw is expensive (and don't care that its backplane can push 9.2GBps... )
5. "...imagine a beowulf cluster..." you like clusters cuz they allow you to have "CHEAP" computing power.
6. Whined all the way when SUN placed $20 download fee on Solaris x86 to cover bandwidth costs
7. Bashed apple iTunes store for $9.99 album price (what... no CD and still $10!!)
Need I say more ??
Everybody likes things cheap/free. And the dot-com boom produced enough IT workers that in post dot-com era, they're in over-supply... or in short IT workers are a COMMODITY...
Its Indian workers now JUST because internet (yeah!!) made it possible to do work equally well for *most* IT jobs. Sometime ago I was reading about how IM/phone/email has changed mode of communication in office... instead of walking over to co-worker down the hall, you ring/email/IM him/her.... so how does it differ if the co-worker is half-way around the globe... internet just doesn't care!!
If it weren't for the communication boom, you might have been watching cheap mexican workers or H1B workers taking your job...
Face it... everyone likes cheap/free... even the CEOs and PHBs!
3. will probably hose MS's *expensive* products ($100+)
However you fail to understand that it is THESE very companies that used to give you paychecks!! They used to employ you (SUN laid off 6000+, ditto for SGI, and others).
So, in your free time you contributed to a software that is now responsible for your LOTS of "free-time".
When software goes free (as in $$), there will be no "software" "jobs"... (would you like to do software support??) And only jobs you'll get is the old day brick and mortar job!! No more free pepsi, airconditioned rooms, tele-commuting etc!!
So keep software free as in "freedom" but not free as in "$$$". Former is good (you purchased a software, you get rights to modify it to your heart's content), but latter's goodness is debatable...
PS: How about a license that is along the lines of GPL but says that only the folks you purchased legal copies from the vendor have rights to "use" it (i.e. the binaries). Source is free... binaries are not!
Re:Not a bad pay rate...
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
considering the value of a dollar in some countries. I guess this program's demographic includes any computer up to spec in 3rd world
Yeah Riiight... and in 3rd world countries exactly how many can afford to pay for broadband ? A housewife with 56k dialup that *usually* does
Their targets are gullible 1st world households... the normal kinda who fall for gator et al
For the record, I'm a software dev (ugh) from India... work for No. 2 software firm in world and spend quite a lotof chunk of my paycheck in 512/512 w 300MB cap ADSL line.
Oracle disclaim MySQL and PostgreSQL as "toy databases"
Yup kid and for very good reasons. Take sometime off from paying with your toys and regiter at OTN to learn about what Oracle 8i and 9i database are capable of. You'd literally blow your head off if you see what their Apps are capable of.
For a start, consider 4 page long nested views that pull data from more than 40 tables where some contain upwards of million rows. And these views are accesed thousands of times a day in their apps.
Here is an example of what you can do with 9i
declare type t1 is table of number; type t2 is table of varchar2(30);
SELECT a.col1, b.col2, c.col3, decode(select foo from sometbl where colx = (select bar from yay where t=t1), 'Y', X, Y) MASS COLLECT INTO my_tbl_1, my_tbl_2, my_tbl_3, my_tbl_4 FROM tbl1 a, tbl2 b, tbl3 c, tbl4 d WHERE decode(nvl(select n from y where col = a.col3), 'Y'), 'A', 'B', 'C', select colx from tabyz where col = 'F', 'Hello') = 'Hello'.
Extra points from figuring out why this query is great! (*hint* : Its subqueries and 'decode' [think it like a C 'switch' statement inside a SQL query!] on steroids... if you can't see what you can accomplish using these features, you're not a database developer.!
I second that!! I'm from India, a developing country.
ALL (yeah all) my grandparents were fully mobile and could go out even on long journeys on their own. They didn't need anybody's help.
My nanny was the most extraordinary kind of lady... he weighted may be less than 50, a very lean and frail figure but-
1. Seldom fell ill. 2. Was in full health when she died in her sleep at age of ~80+ 3. Wore glasses, but could pick chaff and pebbles from rice! 4. Used to help in regular household stuff (cleaning, cooking etc) till the day she died.
The moral of the story - Remain active when you're young, be hard working AND follow a simple lifestyle (eating specially!!) - you'll never be a liability to your family or society.
OTOH, For $100,000 I bet one can hire a househelp even in developed countries who will look after elderly much better for the rest of their life.
In major cities in India we have 2 digit LED displays on traffic lights that actually count down... it helps in many ways-
1. Reduces driver axiety - So people are less tempted to "gunning" their engines
2. Reduces road rage - People are less tempted to jump lights
3. You can see the signals from a distance and read the timer counting down... so you slow down well in advanced if you find you can't make it in time.
4. Less (well almost) fuel wastage since if the time reads anything above ~30 seconds you can easily switch off the engine and start it when the count is down to 5.
And it doesn't cost too much money either!!
Re:Viruses on Linux? Yeah, right.
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 1
Viruses ?? Say "worms".
Given that majority of "mal-ware" in past few months was "worm-ware", it is not a very alien thought for any other OS.
Worms rely on social engineering and tricking unsuspecting users into running them. Few points to note on what worms do-
1. Open an Open Relay on port xyz 2. DDoS 3. Key logger 4. Act as Backdoor/Trojan
Mind that, NONE of these activities "need" root priviledges... and a worm that can open a backdoor hole so that you can later be exploited through any N number of local root exploits is equally harmful.
Now, only things that stands between malware-writers and a compromised box are-
1. The human in charge of the box (aka User) 2. Well designed software
EMailing a worm-script to a *nix user doesn't work right now because majority of email clients on *nix do not make a file executable while saving it to disk... so even if the user is tricked into accepting that file, he/she cannot just click it and run it (which is from another point BTW, another "usability" issue too!!)... they need to
1. Save it 2. Find their way through command prompt/file browser to the file 3. execute command "chmod +x blah", or right-click the file, select properties and check the "executable" box 4. execute command "./blah" or click on the file.
Thats just TOO many steps and even the most gullible people will give up way before that and hit "open" just to see that binary file being opened in vi/vim/emacs/Kedit/Gedit etc with lots of funny characters.
So, its the very user-unfriendly nature of *nix that stands between the malware-writers and their zombie machines.
Infact, no matter how stupid you are, if you have the moolah to pay, you can get (almost) everything.
BTW, since the article says that this system is due to appear in "2005 models of Infiniti's FX sport utility vehicle, then again next spring on the 2006 M45 luxury sedan", which I bet will cost $60,000+ (may be even $100,000+), can't these super-rich-super-idiots, hire a chauffeur to drive the damn thing sensibly ??
1. Can you buy property anonymously ? Do you think you should have right to know at least Name and Address of person living 2 doors next to you ? Don't you think you should have the right to know who else is living in your apartment ? Then why do you think you should be able to buy your virtual address anonymously ? You think real world law of free speech should apply in virtual world, then why not the custom that demands you give your name/address while getting a phone service/www service or a domain name ?
2. Some things can (and are) classified as "none of your business (NOYB)" in certain circumstances. If a person in street demands your shoe number, you can tell him NOYB... but not to the shoe shop attendant! You name, address and phone number ARE NOT your secret assets... however, your SSN is! So learn to make difference... that is called "common sense".
3. I'm from India, but know enough of privacy law stated in US constitution. It says you and your private property are protected from unreasonable searches. You DO NOT have right to be anonymous while communicating! (Heard of CallerID ? Telephone Directory ?)... and Internet is just another communication medium. No privacy here! Just because its easier to be anonymous on Internet does NOT mean you have RIGHT to be anonymous.
Finally, if it bothers you, just don't do/say things that you won't in front of 2000 audience on a stage... or on phone with another person.
I second the people posting that its around 4000 year old method.
I'm from India and I first I read about it when I was around 10 year old (I'm 23) in a popular social magazine (called 'Dharmyuga', the most popular magazine of its time). It had schematics identical to those offered by this fellow, and yes, they mentioned it to be "very old technique". My dad still has collection of old issues of this mag and I'm sure I can fish out the article mentioning this 'invention'.
Can't these fellows do at least a google query to verify that whatever they're offering money for is indeed an invention ??
Slashdot Mirror
Personally for me, the more important thing was that the menus (DHTML drop down menus) now actually work with Opera!
Thank you Yahoo!
PS: For the record, on the other side of world, Yahoo messenger is as ubiquitous as AIM is in US. That means, virtually everybody who "chats" with friends has a Yahoo account. That means a *lot*. GMail... well its nice, but its even nicer to keep your existsing mail box and not have to notify everyone your change in address (and worse, miss people's messages!)
Once it was said that couch potatoes hurt themselves watching TV all day.
No NOT! They hurt many more. Millions of couch potatoes made dancers and singers and their supporting corporations SO strong that they're now trying to control information and educational channels because it *may* be used to *steal* *BROADCAST* signals !!!
What next ? Are they going to ban copper wires cuz they can be used to hook onto power grid and *possibly* steal electric power ???
Throw that idiot box out of your house if you're really serious about protesting against this insanity!!
Hmm
:-P
Ok, now we'd coin another few laws-
1. "Every OSS program expands until it can do pluggable look and feel and themes"
Combine that with the existing law that "every program expands until it can read e-mail" and you got what firefox 2.0 will look like - Right, now prizes for guessing "Mozilla"
Firefox was *supposed* to be a *fast* lean-and-mean browser. One reason was given that bundling IE with OS works because people are too lazy to download another browser. That gap WIDENS as the download size increases. Already Firefox is 10+ MB!!!!
RANT: Take a look at Opera 7.51 dumbwits. It does full XHTML, HTML4, plugins, *EMAIL*, spam filtering, RSS, newgroups, *IRC*, SKINS (yep, take that eye candy too!!!), tabbed browsing and STILL it is 3.5MB download. You know *that* is what thats called a "product". I'm running an ad-supported version and seriously considering buying a license.
Firefox, well, I have it installed, but won't run it even if its *free* (and I'm going to pay $30 for opera)... now go figure.
Okay sparky, you mean to say you can't multiply 500 with 100 ?
right they say, never underestimate Idiots!!
You're whining cuz they make you pay $100/mo ! Right ?
May I ask do they hire goons to put a gun to your kids to make you pay ???
If not, you know, there is lot of life away from the tube!! Its been 5 years I stopped wathing TV and no, I don't miss it! That too when in this side of earth Cable costs $5/mo (and yeah... 30+ channels with star movies, HBO and all!!).
Its because of you idiots who pay $100 for cable and $6000 for a TV set (ok, its a large and thin plasma one... but its AFTER ALL, a "TV" set and will show the same crappy shows!!), that these supposedly "entertainment" companies are literally ruling the earth... entertainers are earning $1M an episode (remember "friends" ??) and grassroot workers... say a doctor earns far less when saving lives!!!!
Life's unfair because YOU made it so!!
Emacs :-P (at least the "own OS" part).
Oh you can fork OpenBSD to your likeness, the only restriction is that you can't call your fork 'OpenBSD'... name it burnsBSD or whatever and you should be fine ;-)
Yes, its free, even more free than GPL (for "users", you don't even *need* to make source available).
And yeah, GCJ and SWT play happily. there is even a native version of eclipse for linux which has been compiled with GCJ.
electronic voting machines are being used successfully (ie. w/o any major incidence) in largest ever task undertaken in history... namely, general elections in largest democracy - India!
Oh and Brazilians have been successfully using electronic voting for a decade, and India has been using them on and off for half a decade.
You know, sometime over-engineering sucks.
I have mod points, but will reply!
:-)
This is one of the reasons, no engineering school in India allows any programmable calculator. Infact, in IITs the most sophisticated calculator allowed is casio FX100-W (google it!)!
The funda is that, for problems requiring understanding, you don't *need* any sophisticated calculator... data provided usually computes nicely.
For *hard* problems, there are lab sessions where you have dual and quad processor sun servers running MATLAB/ANSYS/Mathematica (as the course requirements or what professor thinks), and the problems are MUCH more interesting
In short, these beefed-up calculators make you dumb! Get over them. HP came to IIT campus with their shiny calculators... and they hardly got any visitors for their stalls.
So you guys are now learning physics by watching movies!!!
So, don't cry when your physics reasearch gets outsourced.
Make learning fun... but NOT a JOKE !!
And that is what exactly this is!! Isn't WiX a great MS effort of pleasing itself with open source concept ?? :-P
... that whom-so-ever buys that thingie will have a nice time with the bomb disposal squad and couple of dozens of armoured police cars and military helicopters.
Good luck explaining them that you are not a terrorist trying to take out the whole city with that HUGE car bomb... if they don't shoot you on sight, that is.
... unless you happen to invent something that others used for nefarious purpose.
After the destruction of Hiroshima, Einstein said "If I had known that my discovery (E=mc^2) will have such results, I would rather have sit happily in my room playing my violin".
Most of you making fun of him are under 20 kids and have never seen what "death and destruction" of war means... you don't know what killing 20000 people means and what a father feels like carrying his blood covered child to hospital after a bomber dropped a 5000 pound cluster bomb.
Saddam was a bad guy... but I'd say US didn't really stand upto our expectations. With all the super duper futuristic inventions, I think dropping over 350 tonns of cluster bombs was too much for "trying" to kill a bad guy... a single bullet would have done that job.
The AIM was to kill Saddam... after 350 tonnes (to you, that is more than 700,000 pounds) of cluster bombs, he still managed to be alive... those bombs killed MOSTLY civilians.
To understand it better, think like a terrorist has taken hostage YOUR family and the cops blow the building killing many of your family members AND manage to capture the terrorist who is mostly unhurt!!
(PS: Even if you can't get the point - the point of blowing up the building was supposed to be killing the terrorist... in the end if you blew up the innocent AND captured the bad guy alive, your purpose of blow up has gone TERRIBLY WRONG).
PS2: You guys are joking cuz it was not YOUR family members who were blown with 5000 pound bombs and DU shells over there in Iraq.
Being a regular on /., I've found that MOST people here-
1. Hate Apple for OVERPRICED hardware (aka, why don't they release OSX for x86... its cheaper hw you see... commoditize yada yadda)
2. You like Rio cuz they make an mp3 player that is cheaper than the iPod (how'd you feel if you could that iPod 40GB for $99 instead of $599??)
3. You like linux which is, primarily, cheaper than other commercial offerings.
4. You HATE SUN because their hw is expensive (and don't care that its backplane can push 9.2GBps... )
5. "...imagine a beowulf cluster..." you like clusters cuz they allow you to have "CHEAP" computing power.
6. Whined all the way when SUN placed $20 download fee on Solaris x86 to cover bandwidth costs
7. Bashed apple iTunes store for $9.99 album price (what... no CD and still $10!!)
Need I say more ??
Everybody likes things cheap/free. And the dot-com boom produced enough IT workers that in post dot-com era, they're in over-supply... or in short IT workers are a COMMODITY...
Its Indian workers now JUST because internet (yeah!!) made it possible to do work equally well for *most* IT jobs. Sometime ago I was reading about how IM/phone/email has changed mode of communication in office... instead of walking over to co-worker down the hall, you ring/email/IM him/her.... so how does it differ if the co-worker is half-way around the globe... internet just doesn't care!!
If it weren't for the communication boom, you might have been watching cheap mexican workers or H1B workers taking your job...
Face it... everyone likes cheap/free... even the CEOs and PHBs!
Something to ponder over here-
So you are celebrating that Linux/Dell/Wintel has -
1. hosed SUN's *expensive* boxen and business model ($100000+)
2. hosed SGI's expensive graphics workstations ($100000+)
3. hosed SCO's expensive UNIX distro ($10000+)
3. will probably hose MS's *expensive* products ($100+)
However you fail to understand that it is THESE very companies that used to give you paychecks!! They used to employ you (SUN laid off 6000+, ditto for SGI, and others).
So, in your free time you contributed to a software that is now responsible for your LOTS of "free-time".
When software goes free (as in $$), there will be no "software" "jobs"... (would you like to do software support??) And only jobs you'll get is the old day brick and mortar job!! No more free pepsi, airconditioned rooms, tele-commuting etc!!
So keep software free as in "freedom" but not free as in "$$$". Former is good (you purchased a software, you get rights to modify it to your heart's content), but latter's goodness is debatable...
PS: How about a license that is along the lines of GPL but says that only the folks you purchased legal copies from the vendor have rights to "use" it (i.e. the binaries). Source is free... binaries are not!
Yeah Riiight... and in 3rd world countries exactly how many can afford to pay for broadband ? A housewife with 56k dialup that *usually* does
Their targets are gullible 1st world households... the normal kinda who fall for gator et al
For the record, I'm a software dev (ugh) from India... work for No. 2 software firm in world and spend quite a lotof chunk of my paycheck in 512/512 w 300MB cap ADSL line.
Oracle disclaim MySQL and PostgreSQL as "toy databases"
Yup kid and for very good reasons. Take sometime off from paying with your toys and regiter at OTN to learn about what Oracle 8i and 9i database are capable of. You'd literally blow your head off if you see what their Apps are capable of.
For a start, consider 4 page long nested views that pull data from more than 40 tables where some contain upwards of million rows. And these views are accesed thousands of times a day in their apps.
Here is an example of what you can do with 9i
Extra points from figuring out why this query is great! (*hint* : Its subqueries and 'decode' [think it like a C 'switch' statement inside a SQL query!] on steroids... if you can't see what you can accomplish using these features, you're not a database developer.!Since they can hardly take care of themselves, I hired almost-full time help to take care of them. I pay this person almost $80,000 a year for this.
I'm from India, I will happily do it for $40,000, are you hiring ? :-P
I have mod points, but will reply!!
I second that!! I'm from India, a developing country.
ALL (yeah all) my grandparents were fully mobile and could go out even on long journeys on their own. They didn't need anybody's help.
My nanny was the most extraordinary kind of lady... he weighted may be less than 50, a very lean and frail figure but-
1. Seldom fell ill.
2. Was in full health when she died in her sleep at age of ~80+
3. Wore glasses, but could pick chaff and pebbles from rice!
4. Used to help in regular household stuff (cleaning, cooking etc) till the day she died.
The moral of the story - Remain active when you're young, be hard working AND follow a simple lifestyle (eating specially!!) - you'll never be a liability to your family or society.
OTOH, For $100,000 I bet one can hire a househelp even in developed countries who will look after elderly much better for the rest of their life.
Oh really ? You call it advanced ??
In major cities in India we have 2 digit LED displays on traffic lights that actually count down... it helps in many ways-
1. Reduces driver axiety - So people are less tempted to "gunning" their engines
2. Reduces road rage - People are less tempted to jump lights
3. You can see the signals from a distance and read the timer counting down... so you slow down well in advanced if you find you can't make it in time.
4. Less (well almost) fuel wastage since if the time reads anything above ~30 seconds you can easily switch off the engine and start it when the count is down to 5.
And it doesn't cost too much money either!!
Viruses ?? Say "worms".
Given that majority of "mal-ware" in past few months was "worm-ware", it is not a very alien thought for any other OS.
Worms rely on social engineering and tricking unsuspecting users into running them. Few points to note on what worms do-
1. Open an Open Relay on port xyz
2. DDoS
3. Key logger
4. Act as Backdoor/Trojan
Mind that, NONE of these activities "need" root priviledges... and a worm that can open a backdoor hole so that you can later be exploited through any N number of local root exploits is equally harmful.
Now, only things that stands between malware-writers and a compromised box are-
1. The human in charge of the box (aka User)
2. Well designed software
EMailing a worm-script to a *nix user doesn't work right now because majority of email clients on *nix do not make a file executable while saving it to disk... so even if the user is tricked into accepting that file, he/she cannot just click it and run it (which is from another point BTW, another "usability" issue too!!)... they need to
1. Save it
2. Find their way through command prompt/file browser to the file
3. execute command "chmod +x blah", or right-click the file, select properties and check the "executable" box
4. execute command "./blah" or click on the file.
Thats just TOO many steps and even the most gullible people will give up way before that and hit "open" just to see that binary file being opened in vi/vim/emacs/Kedit/Gedit etc with lots of funny characters.
So, its the very user-unfriendly nature of *nix that stands between the malware-writers and their zombie machines.
They keep protecting "rich" idiots!!
Infact, no matter how stupid you are, if you have the moolah to pay, you can get (almost) everything.
BTW, since the article says that this system is due to appear in "2005 models of Infiniti's FX sport utility vehicle, then again next spring on the 2006 M45 luxury sedan", which I bet will cost $60,000+ (may be even $100,000+), can't these super-rich-super-idiots, hire a chauffeur to drive the damn thing sensibly ??
Well I do have modpoints, but I'll reply instead!
Here are three points, ponder over them-
1. Can you buy property anonymously ? Do you think you should have right to know at least Name and Address of person living 2 doors next to you ? Don't you think you should have the right to know who else is living in your apartment ? Then why do you think you should be able to buy your virtual address anonymously ? You think real world law of free speech should apply in virtual world, then why not the custom that demands you give your name/address while getting a phone service/www service or a domain name ?
2. Some things can (and are) classified as "none of your business (NOYB)" in certain circumstances. If a person in street demands your shoe number, you can tell him NOYB... but not to the shoe shop attendant! You name, address and phone number ARE NOT your secret assets... however, your SSN is! So learn to make difference... that is called "common sense".
3. I'm from India, but know enough of privacy law stated in US constitution. It says you and your private property are protected from unreasonable searches. You DO NOT have right to be anonymous while communicating! (Heard of CallerID ? Telephone Directory ?)... and Internet is just another communication medium. No privacy here! Just because its easier to be anonymous on Internet does NOT mean you have RIGHT to be anonymous.
Finally, if it bothers you, just don't do/say things that you won't in front of 2000 audience on a stage... or on phone with another person.
- Akhilesh
I second the people posting that its around 4000 year old method.
I'm from India and I first I read about it when I was around 10 year old (I'm 23) in a popular social magazine (called 'Dharmyuga', the most popular magazine of its time). It had schematics identical to those offered by this fellow, and yes, they mentioned it to be "very old technique". My dad still has collection of old issues of this mag and I'm sure I can fish out the article mentioning this 'invention'.
Can't these fellows do at least a google query to verify that whatever they're offering money for is indeed an invention ??
Several docs with feedback