Probably the same part of losing that was identified following the case as:
State of Michigan has a law wherein they cannot do business with convicted felons. They changed the law.
After the Republicans won the election everything regarding Microsoft become very quiet and although the DA didn't actually quit the legal process, I don't believe they have moved in the last 6 years. And given the money Microsoft has been able to inject into the Hill, I doubt they ever will
Face it. Our government has absolutely no balls whatsoever.
And since there were the last of the People's defense against this kind of crap why should Microsoft do anything but what they want to? You simply cannot find any reason that holds any value to any business why.
You can find many moral and ethical reasons. But you won't find any business reasons. Even the discussion about cost of spyware removal and such doesn't matter. People who use Microsoft have grown so accustomed to this that if you gave them a hardened linux or BSD installation they wouldn't use it because it doesn't have all the system tray goodies telling them it's OK.
Regardless of how you treat him, he's probably not going to be a very good word of mouth public relations element anyways. There's nothing wrong with dropping a customer if you do it in an agreeable manner. You need an exit strategy. This is an idea often ignored. But if you do a cost/benefit analysis you will find that there is a certain point where the customer goes from a profitable relationship into a liability and it is in your companies best interest to exit from the relationship.
Even if they aren't going to be agreeable you still have a policy related to termination of contract or product refunds that will allow you a path to take. If it ends up in court then you can at least show that you adhered to the original contract by following the identified exit strategy.
Do you really think you will ever sway this customers opinion? For how long? And at what final cost?
Bio Diesel is obtained from a variety of sources, not just corn.
Bio Diesel is 100% compatible with any diesel engine on the market today.
Bio Diesel is bio-degradable.
Bio Diesel is non-toxic.
Bio Diesel doesn't blow up.
Bio Diesel produces less emissions than ultra-clean Dino Diesel.
Bio Diesel may produce less emissions than gasoline (hard to test with different engines)
Bio Diesel has a 2% lower energy density than Diesel. Ethanol is 30% less than Gasoline. This means you pay more at the pump to drive 100 miles.
Bio Diesel smells like fries, really!
If you want to get energy independent quickly and reliably, this is the answer. If you want to create a lot of sloppy hype and get people to spend stupid amounts of money on shoddy technology that's going to be under development for decades, then micro-pile atomic reactors are a better bet than Ethanol.
Ethanol is not perfect. It's only being hyped because GM et al are selling E85 engines. They aren't selling Diesel engines because they don't know how to make small ones. VW, BMW, Peugot, Reanault, and Mercedes all have decades of experience with small block engines. E85 is being pushed because if they pushed Diesel engines what little is left of the big three would collapse over night. Personally, I prefer Diesel. It isn't going to explode.
How do these installations compare for stability of installation between upgrades?
Simplicity of upgrades?
How much time do you spend on performing daily software updates and sorting through config updates/changes?
How much time could you have available for the rest of your life if you weren't updating the system more than you would on Windows? (though not all security patches.)
I was waiting for someone to use the same old tag... Oh... Debians so fucking old.. Why would anyone use something so old??? Dude... get with it. Being old doesn't mean you're wrinkly and saggy. Being old means you have wisdom and experience.
Back in the heady days of Linux Kernal 2.0 every version of the kernel (or anything else for that matter) had significant advances in capabilities and hardware support. If you purchased a digital camera that didn't work today, wait maybe a month and it will be. That was my experience with a Kodak DC220 camera. It took something like 4 to 6 weeks for the support needed to crystalize. Any one can come up with more examples. I have many myself. The point is that there was a respectable probability that your recent hardware purchase would not work out of the box but would either by compiling the latest binaries of the kernel and 12 libraries or waiting a month.
Speed things up to 2006. The type of support advancement that is required to support newer hardware is much slower today than it was then. Today there is a better than average chance anything you buy will work out of the box with linux. The need to keep up on the cutting edge of software is not nearly as strong as it was 6 years ago.
You might argue that not having SATA support in the default kernel is significant but it's hard to find a computer that doesn't support EIDE hard drives. It's also reasonably sane to build a RAID system with a boot EIDE and a RAID STAT data set instead of trying to put everything on one RAID system.
I recently spent a day installing Debian for an AMD64 machine that was fricking HUGE. It completely fell on it's ass when it came time to support the video card. It turns out that the video card problem wasn't the fault of Debian but NVidia. No drivers available for AMD64 for that newer card completely roasted the installation. I accidentally picked up the 32-bit version of the card and also affected teh NVidia drivers for the network connections. So when I toasted the video, I also toasted all the network connectivity.
In the past year, I have had MORE problems with proprietary drivers of this nature (NVidia video in particular) in their inconsistent support. But it's the price I pay for choosing their product. Some of this is Debian licensing, some of it is definitly not.
While it can be argued that Debian is slower on it's releases, this commitment to a December 2006 release is pretty fast compared to past cycles. And those who use Debian choose a system stability over system candy. You have no idea how fun it is when a routine security patch and upgrade happens to upgrade a whole bunch of really important stuff like DNS/DHCP on your SuSE box and you realize you've just crashed your entire home network. Add to that the wife and kids are all working on term papers due within the next week. Your life isn't worth much then.
I guess the challenge then isn't cryptography because we can all figure out how it's supposed to be done.
I was thinking more in terms of the most common mistake people make in terms of security on the internet is they either use one password everywhere, use simple passwords everywhere, use the same group of username/passwords everywhere... All of these resulting in a lower level of security than would be desired.
Some of the basic recommendations of passwords is that they be complex (alpha and numeric with upper/lower case), change regularly (rotated), and varied between authentication points (sites/servers).
It is well established that people don't like to do this because it resembles work and causes them to take on other bad practices, like keeping a paper list of all their usernames/passwords -- that probably aren't complex or rotated to begin with.
Probably a key difference between the two of us is that I consider the ease-of-use by an uninterested user to be of primary importance. If it's hard to use, they won't be inclined to adopt it. Given that as the first condition there are a lot of things that you have to accept as flawed (from a crypto sense) in order to at least improve the status quo.
I am not going to claim that this is a good idea to someone who has an interest in cryptography and is striving for 100% security in all aspects. I'm trying to identify as this being a good idea for someone at the other end of the spectrum.
As far as my idea being any better than any other one time password solution. Fuck it. I don't care. This was more an exercise on making network server that turned into a cgi application than anything else. I just think it's a pretty good idea. Is it perfect? Probably not considering I have three people with rubber hoses standing over my shoulder, 2 vans with enough RF equipment on them to shut down half of Europe in the parking lot, and 17 greasy man-in-the-middle dorks sitting in the back corners of the lobby. But I probably won't log into anything here.
If someone is still using Windows 98 they aren't going to have much reason to do anything in upgrading their computer. Consider why they are still running Windows 98 in the first place:
They don't want to upgrade because they don't need to.
They can't afford newer software/hardware.
and you think these people are going to run out and upgrade to Linux? Get real.
If someone doesn't want to upgrade to Windows Whatever then they certainly are not going to make any personal investment in using Linux. No matter what anyone says, changing the OS changes the user interface paradigm and that's a cost to the user. Even migrating to OSX is going to have a cost. I think even transitioning from W98 to WXP is going to have a cost.
If someone can't afford to upgrade to Windows Whatever they might be interested in Linux. But then you have to consider the rest of their lifestyle. Because they can't afford an upgrade it's likely they don't have an interst in it in the first place. How many geeks eat mac & cheese for a month to get that new dual core? It's a matter of priority and if they can't afford an upgrade then there are obviously other things more important in their life.
I for one have no real desire to encourage people to migrate to Linux. I don't want to be held responsible if they don't understand something about Linux -- like there is no trash can. I also don't want Linux to become overly influenced by all the whiney charity cases that exist in the Windows world. It was bad enough when I used SuSE for a year... A very different crowd from Debian. But now I'm getting biased...
Leave it alone. Quite trying to make a big deal out of everything. People will do what they will and things will sort themselves out. If Linux is really that good, it will stick around and attrack like minded people. We don't have to get everyone in the world using Linux. If they want to use Windows that's their business, but they all know I don't do house calls for Windows computers anymore and I'm OK with that.
Here's another consideration: If everyone uses Linux then that means 50% of the Linux users will have below average intelligence... I would venture to guess that is not the case today and I'm OK with that too.
I was hoping that the website would explain this. Did you RTFM? Assuming you did not. The advantage that still exists is that OTP, even over SMS is much harder to intercept than standing behind someone at an airport kioske or sniffing wireless networks... I didn't say it was 100% secure, in fact I think I even make mention that it is still not perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than common practice today.
I would think it would be preferred if someone would be willing to move towards a better solution than waiting for the perfect solution and damning all others.
The key problems that are addressed are:
periodically changing passwords. Changed every time.
making passwords reasonably complex. Pseudo-random beats birthdays and pets names.
simplifying username/password management.
It's easy to put down an idea. So what do you have to offer the world that might actually be useful? The biggest problem to security isn't all this hype about encryption keys and SSL and crypto-this and crypto-that. It's getting people to use it in the first place. Social Engineering is the weakest part of security bar none. If you can get people to willingly improve their security position than you have a win. If you have to do it through draconian methods, you lose.
As as far as my idea sucking. Fuck you. I don't see you coming up with anything but vinegar. You're not even trying.
Since the early 1600's everyone knew that there was a faster route from the Americas to Europe (or was it the other way around) by running south to the equator. This followed the currents.
Considering that the currents are well known, and weather satellites are now very capable of identifying wind speed and direction, this becomes a relatively trivial problem. You could even do it with an approximation based on wave size and direction which is also easy to get from the polar orbiting satellites.
Hate to make a plug for myself but I came up with a one time pad authentication method for logging into websites. It's as secure as can be socially accepted. Key words there.
http://www.tacocat.net/
The idea is to get your password sent to you by some method and upon successful authentication, the password is reset and retransmitted. The socially accepted part is sending the password to you in such a way that you'll actually be able to use it. The most common form of sending new passwords today is via email. I'll pass on any discussion about how secure this is, it's too common to ignore. But the better alternative is via SMS to your phone.
Just about everyone has a phone.
Just about everyone with a phone also has SMS support.
Those who don't can still use email.
Even if someone has access to your SMS messages (good luck) they still don't know your username. That's only paired when you sign up and when you authenticate. Forget your username and well.... you are pretty screwed. Forget your password and you can have a new one sent to your phone.
Almost as good as biometric authentication but you can run it on websites. No need for HTTPS authentication schemes since the password expires immediately. No need for each website to come up with their own password authentication modules (PAM) -- It's just a proxy pass to a central server (me) to authenticate.
I ginned up something as a proof of concept out there and it works well enough.
And before you go running off to make a patent, white papers exist on the internet dating back to 1990 on using One Time Pads for internet/computer authentication mechanisms. And the fact that I wrote all this up here also serves as prior art.
Sounds to me like all they are really going to do is create the single largest repository of child porn on the planet. I wonder how long before it gets hacked and redistributed.
The remaining questions is first the issue of sustainable lifestyle.
The other is to consider if our current climate is a stable or astable condition and we are just pushing ourselves towards the edge of the table where sufficient changes in the climate result in a non-recoverable condition. Meaning that recoverable conditions imply continuation of the human species to some degree or any degree of existence.
Absolutely Netscape 4 was shit. It became a painful experience to do anything with it. But I think it's even more noteworthy that despite the fact that Mozilla came from a shit origins, isn't already on your computer, and has no marketing and advertisement campaign, is still capable of approaching a 10% market share based on... nothing that marketing could effet.
For the sake of humanity she really must lose the lawsuit.
The internet is a wonderful social tool. It brings people closer. Including the people you don't want to be close to. Once upon a time in order to find a variety of people I had to travel many miles from my parents suburban home to find such culture and people. Today I can find all the culture I can stand in about 30 seconds and three clicks. Good and Bad people abound both on the internet and off. There are things such as "dark alleys" on the internet too. And just like it's the responsibility of the parents to keep our 14 year old daughters from roaming alleys and talking to predatory individuals, it's also our responsibility to keep them off the alleys and steer them away from certain areas on the internet. Where was Mom and Dad when the minor went on a date with a 19 year old? MySpace is not a surrogate parent or baby sitter and makes no claims to be.
Given a multi-billion dollar defense budget, how long do you think it will take to find that 4096 key and decrupt all the hard drives? Maybe a day. Sorry, you are the one that a frickin no-brainer.
No, actually he's only half right. It's a long aged discussion (177x?) about the differences of intrinsic values. How many pounds of diamonds will you pay for a glass of water? What if you have been in the desert for a week? But without the demand (desert) the product (water) has little perceived value.
The biggest problem with this whole picture is that the market availability of DSL versus Broadband is severely warped and everyone knows it. But we are unable to get the congress-critters to recognize that it's really problem at the consumer level. I can't get DSL for love or money. But I can get this expensive broadband that is only offered by one company. No choices.
I'm becoming a fan of DSL being applied to the United States in the same fashion that the Rural Electification Act was used. It required that EVERY house have electricity. I think it should be required that every house which currently have a phone line also have DSL made available at a consumer price that is consistent. You can't charge the guy with a 12 mile special line $599.99 a month and $9.99 in the big city.
But I don't think this will happen in these times. 10 years ago I was of the opinion that the Federal Government should gaurantee delivery of a TCP/IP connection in the same manner that the US Post Office works. I still am.
This is fine. Sorry Weird Al, I like you music and think you're a really creative guy. But you should probably consider dropping the recording studios and going independent and selling directly to iTunes and making his own CD's.
This isn't some realization that iTunes is somehow evil but that the RIAA is a demonstrably archaic concept in modern business models today. Not to call them evil either, but they are sounding more like the people who were pro-horse in the early 1900's
I wonder how they are going to address the marketing exploitation.
Vender B submits hundreds of reports against product supplied by Vendor A by finding a bug and then spending the money to buy multiple machines with Vender A products, configure them and then beat the system into submission with many, many bug reports.
I had to go back and read my OP... You're right, I'm not calling anyone stupid or incapable. I was only calling a spade a spade.
There's a lot of software that can do a lot of things on Windows. Just go into any Best Buy or MicroCenter and you'll see proof enough of that. It's a multi-Billion dollar market.
But if you want to do something like, as an example that I don't actually participate in, want to write something in C/C++ then you can do one of two things: Spend hundreds of dollars on software development tools and libraries for Windows (possibly approaching $1000) or just install just about any linux distro and get the same libraries for free on your local desktop.
Same goes for a database, but that is actually changing. MySQL and Postgresql are both available on Windows today. So why spend your money on buying SQL Server? Last I checked, I couldn't get SQL Server installed on a Linux box.
My point in all this is that there isn't very many products that Microsoft can offer on their platform, with the exception of gaming, that cannot also be found under a *nix platform (including Apple). Given that this gap is forever closing between the two environments, I ask the question again: What can Microsoft do for me as a F/OSS user that will bring added value to my computer experience? How much will it cost me?
If your interests in computing are only limited to gaming, browsing, email, and writing papers for you high school homework, then there probably isn't much reason for you to consider migrating to Linux. But if you are interested in development, servers (any kind), writing code for applications or web servers or just about anything else, even video editing! -- then just about everything you will want to use is available on Linux. So, what can Microsoft bring to me that I don't have already and I would need?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the same part of losing that was identified following the case as:
- State of Michigan has a law wherein they cannot do business with convicted felons. They changed the law.
- After the Republicans won the election everything regarding Microsoft become very quiet and although the DA didn't actually quit the legal process, I don't believe they have moved in the last 6 years. And given the money Microsoft has been able to inject into the Hill, I doubt they ever will
Face it. Our government has absolutely no balls whatsoever.And since there were the last of the People's defense against this kind of crap why should Microsoft do anything but what they want to? You simply cannot find any reason that holds any value to any business why.
You can find many moral and ethical reasons. But you won't find any business reasons. Even the discussion about cost of spyware removal and such doesn't matter. People who use Microsoft have grown so accustomed to this that if you gave them a hardened linux or BSD installation they wouldn't use it because it doesn't have all the system tray goodies telling them it's OK.
You have to say something at some time and if you have enough people doing it...
Regardless of how you treat him, he's probably not going to be a very good word of mouth public relations element anyways. There's nothing wrong with dropping a customer if you do it in an agreeable manner. You need an exit strategy. This is an idea often ignored. But if you do a cost/benefit analysis you will find that there is a certain point where the customer goes from a profitable relationship into a liability and it is in your companies best interest to exit from the relationship.
Even if they aren't going to be agreeable you still have a policy related to termination of contract or product refunds that will allow you a path to take. If it ends up in court then you can at least show that you adhered to the original contract by following the identified exit strategy.
Do you really think you will ever sway this customers opinion? For how long? And at what final cost?
I would tend to disagree with your assessment, but then I use a different definition of the work hot
When you can't log on to check your email or open you term paper in less than 10 minutes that is likely to get you pretty hot.
If you want to get energy independent quickly and reliably, this is the answer. If you want to create a lot of sloppy hype and get people to spend stupid amounts of money on shoddy technology that's going to be under development for decades, then micro-pile atomic reactors are a better bet than Ethanol.
Ethanol is not perfect. It's only being hyped because GM et al are selling E85 engines. They aren't selling Diesel engines because they don't know how to make small ones. VW, BMW, Peugot, Reanault, and Mercedes all have decades of experience with small block engines. E85 is being pushed because if they pushed Diesel engines what little is left of the big three would collapse over night. Personally, I prefer Diesel. It isn't going to explode.
How do these installations compare for stability of installation between upgrades?
Simplicity of upgrades?
How much time do you spend on performing daily software updates and sorting through config updates/changes?
How much time could you have available for the rest of your life if you weren't updating the system more than you would on Windows? (though not all security patches.)
I was waiting for someone to use the same old tag... Oh... Debians so fucking old.. Why would anyone use something so old??? Dude... get with it. Being old doesn't mean you're wrinkly and saggy. Being old means you have wisdom and experience.
Back in the heady days of Linux Kernal 2.0 every version of the kernel (or anything else for that matter) had significant advances in capabilities and hardware support. If you purchased a digital camera that didn't work today, wait maybe a month and it will be. That was my experience with a Kodak DC220 camera. It took something like 4 to 6 weeks for the support needed to crystalize. Any one can come up with more examples. I have many myself. The point is that there was a respectable probability that your recent hardware purchase would not work out of the box but would either by compiling the latest binaries of the kernel and 12 libraries or waiting a month.
Speed things up to 2006. The type of support advancement that is required to support newer hardware is much slower today than it was then. Today there is a better than average chance anything you buy will work out of the box with linux. The need to keep up on the cutting edge of software is not nearly as strong as it was 6 years ago.
You might argue that not having SATA support in the default kernel is significant but it's hard to find a computer that doesn't support EIDE hard drives. It's also reasonably sane to build a RAID system with a boot EIDE and a RAID STAT data set instead of trying to put everything on one RAID system.
I recently spent a day installing Debian for an AMD64 machine that was fricking HUGE. It completely fell on it's ass when it came time to support the video card. It turns out that the video card problem wasn't the fault of Debian but NVidia. No drivers available for AMD64 for that newer card completely roasted the installation. I accidentally picked up the 32-bit version of the card and also affected teh NVidia drivers for the network connections. So when I toasted the video, I also toasted all the network connectivity.
In the past year, I have had MORE problems with proprietary drivers of this nature (NVidia video in particular) in their inconsistent support. But it's the price I pay for choosing their product. Some of this is Debian licensing, some of it is definitly not.
While it can be argued that Debian is slower on it's releases, this commitment to a December 2006 release is pretty fast compared to past cycles. And those who use Debian choose a system stability over system candy. You have no idea how fun it is when a routine security patch and upgrade happens to upgrade a whole bunch of really important stuff like DNS/DHCP on your SuSE box and you realize you've just crashed your entire home network. Add to that the wife and kids are all working on term papers due within the next week. Your life isn't worth much then.
I'll take stability every time.
I guess the challenge then isn't cryptography because we can all figure out how it's supposed to be done.
I was thinking more in terms of the most common mistake people make in terms of security on the internet is they either use one password everywhere, use simple passwords everywhere, use the same group of username/passwords everywhere... All of these resulting in a lower level of security than would be desired.
Some of the basic recommendations of passwords is that they be complex (alpha and numeric with upper/lower case), change regularly (rotated), and varied between authentication points (sites/servers).
It is well established that people don't like to do this because it resembles work and causes them to take on other bad practices, like keeping a paper list of all their usernames/passwords -- that probably aren't complex or rotated to begin with.
Probably a key difference between the two of us is that I consider the ease-of-use by an uninterested user to be of primary importance. If it's hard to use, they won't be inclined to adopt it. Given that as the first condition there are a lot of things that you have to accept as flawed (from a crypto sense) in order to at least improve the status quo.
I am not going to claim that this is a good idea to someone who has an interest in cryptography and is striving for 100% security in all aspects. I'm trying to identify as this being a good idea for someone at the other end of the spectrum.
As far as my idea being any better than any other one time password solution. Fuck it. I don't care. This was more an exercise on making network server that turned into a cgi application than anything else. I just think it's a pretty good idea. Is it perfect? Probably not considering I have three people with rubber hoses standing over my shoulder, 2 vans with enough RF equipment on them to shut down half of Europe in the parking lot, and 17 greasy man-in-the-middle dorks sitting in the back corners of the lobby. But I probably won't log into anything here.
If someone is still using Windows 98 they aren't going to have much reason to do anything in upgrading their computer. Consider why they are still running Windows 98 in the first place:
- They don't want to upgrade because they don't need to.
- They can't afford newer software/hardware.
and you think these people are going to run out and upgrade to Linux? Get real.If someone doesn't want to upgrade to Windows Whatever then they certainly are not going to make any personal investment in using Linux. No matter what anyone says, changing the OS changes the user interface paradigm and that's a cost to the user. Even migrating to OSX is going to have a cost. I think even transitioning from W98 to WXP is going to have a cost.
If someone can't afford to upgrade to Windows Whatever they might be interested in Linux. But then you have to consider the rest of their lifestyle. Because they can't afford an upgrade it's likely they don't have an interst in it in the first place. How many geeks eat mac & cheese for a month to get that new dual core? It's a matter of priority and if they can't afford an upgrade then there are obviously other things more important in their life.
I for one have no real desire to encourage people to migrate to Linux. I don't want to be held responsible if they don't understand something about Linux -- like there is no trash can. I also don't want Linux to become overly influenced by all the whiney charity cases that exist in the Windows world. It was bad enough when I used SuSE for a year... A very different crowd from Debian. But now I'm getting biased...
Leave it alone. Quite trying to make a big deal out of everything. People will do what they will and things will sort themselves out. If Linux is really that good, it will stick around and attrack like minded people. We don't have to get everyone in the world using Linux. If they want to use Windows that's their business, but they all know I don't do house calls for Windows computers anymore and I'm OK with that.
Here's another consideration: If everyone uses Linux then that means 50% of the Linux users will have below average intelligence... I would venture to guess that is not the case today and I'm OK with that too.
Requires both phone and hose. With the phone you still need to know the user name...
I was hoping that the website would explain this. Did you RTFM? Assuming you did not. The advantage that still exists is that OTP, even over SMS is much harder to intercept than standing behind someone at an airport kioske or sniffing wireless networks... I didn't say it was 100% secure, in fact I think I even make mention that it is still not perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than common practice today.
I would think it would be preferred if someone would be willing to move towards a better solution than waiting for the perfect solution and damning all others.
The key problems that are addressed are:
- periodically changing passwords. Changed every time.
- making passwords reasonably complex. Pseudo-random beats birthdays and pets names.
- simplifying username/password management.
It's easy to put down an idea. So what do you have to offer the world that might actually be useful? The biggest problem to security isn't all this hype about encryption keys and SSL and crypto-this and crypto-that. It's getting people to use it in the first place. Social Engineering is the weakest part of security bar none. If you can get people to willingly improve their security position than you have a win. If you have to do it through draconian methods, you lose.As as far as my idea sucking. Fuck you. I don't see you coming up with anything but vinegar. You're not even trying.
That was Jacques Cousteau and his research vessel.
Since the early 1600's everyone knew that there was a faster route from the Americas to Europe (or was it the other way around) by running south to the equator. This followed the currents.
Considering that the currents are well known, and weather satellites are now very capable of identifying wind speed and direction, this becomes a relatively trivial problem. You could even do it with an approximation based on wave size and direction which is also easy to get from the polar orbiting satellites.
Hate to make a plug for myself but I came up with a one time pad authentication method for logging into websites. It's as secure as can be socially accepted. Key words there.
http://www.tacocat.net/
The idea is to get your password sent to you by some method and upon successful authentication, the password is reset and retransmitted. The socially accepted part is sending the password to you in such a way that you'll actually be able to use it. The most common form of sending new passwords today is via email. I'll pass on any discussion about how secure this is, it's too common to ignore. But the better alternative is via SMS to your phone.
- Just about everyone has a phone.
- Just about everyone with a phone also has SMS support.
- Those who don't can still use email.
Even if someone has access to your SMS messages (good luck) they still don't know your username. That's only paired when you sign up and when you authenticate. Forget your username and well.... you are pretty screwed. Forget your password and you can have a new one sent to your phone.Almost as good as biometric authentication but you can run it on websites. No need for HTTPS authentication schemes since the password expires immediately. No need for each website to come up with their own password authentication modules (PAM) -- It's just a proxy pass to a central server (me) to authenticate.
I ginned up something as a proof of concept out there and it works well enough.
And before you go running off to make a patent, white papers exist on the internet dating back to 1990 on using One Time Pads for internet/computer authentication mechanisms. And the fact that I wrote all this up here also serves as prior art.
Sounds to me like all they are really going to do is create the single largest repository of child porn on the planet. I wonder how long before it gets hacked and redistributed.
You're funny!
You remind me of the man who quit the US Patent Office because he believed there was nothing else to invent.
That was somewhere around 1905.
The remaining questions is first the issue of sustainable lifestyle.
The other is to consider if our current climate is a stable or astable condition and we are just pushing ourselves towards the edge of the table where sufficient changes in the climate result in a non-recoverable condition. Meaning that recoverable conditions imply continuation of the human species to some degree or any degree of existence.
Maybe the dolphins have been right all along.
Absolutely Netscape 4 was shit. It became a painful experience to do anything with it. But I think it's even more noteworthy that despite the fact that Mozilla came from a shit origins, isn't already on your computer, and has no marketing and advertisement campaign, is still capable of approaching a 10% market share based on... nothing that marketing could effet.
Considering that most of us don't vote then I guess it says that most of us don't care.
The real important question is... Why?
For the sake of humanity she really must lose the lawsuit.
The internet is a wonderful social tool. It brings people closer. Including the people you don't want to be close to. Once upon a time in order to find a variety of people I had to travel many miles from my parents suburban home to find such culture and people. Today I can find all the culture I can stand in about 30 seconds and three clicks. Good and Bad people abound both on the internet and off. There are things such as "dark alleys" on the internet too. And just like it's the responsibility of the parents to keep our 14 year old daughters from roaming alleys and talking to predatory individuals, it's also our responsibility to keep them off the alleys and steer them away from certain areas on the internet. Where was Mom and Dad when the minor went on a date with a 19 year old? MySpace is not a surrogate parent or baby sitter and makes no claims to be.
Given a multi-billion dollar defense budget, how long do you think it will take to find that 4096 key and decrupt all the hard drives? Maybe a day. Sorry, you are the one that a frickin no-brainer.
No, actually he's only half right. It's a long aged discussion (177x?) about the differences of intrinsic values. How many pounds of diamonds will you pay for a glass of water? What if you have been in the desert for a week? But without the demand (desert) the product (water) has little perceived value.
The biggest problem with this whole picture is that the market availability of DSL versus Broadband is severely warped and everyone knows it. But we are unable to get the congress-critters to recognize that it's really problem at the consumer level. I can't get DSL for love or money. But I can get this expensive broadband that is only offered by one company. No choices.
I'm becoming a fan of DSL being applied to the United States in the same fashion that the Rural Electification Act was used. It required that EVERY house have electricity. I think it should be required that every house which currently have a phone line also have DSL made available at a consumer price that is consistent. You can't charge the guy with a 12 mile special line $599.99 a month and $9.99 in the big city.
But I don't think this will happen in these times. 10 years ago I was of the opinion that the Federal Government should gaurantee delivery of a TCP/IP connection in the same manner that the US Post Office works. I still am.
This is fine. Sorry Weird Al, I like you music and think you're a really creative guy. But you should probably consider dropping the recording studios and going independent and selling directly to iTunes and making his own CD's.
This isn't some realization that iTunes is somehow evil but that the RIAA is a demonstrably archaic concept in modern business models today. Not to call them evil either, but they are sounding more like the people who were pro-horse in the early 1900's
I wonder how they are going to address the marketing exploitation.
Vender B submits hundreds of reports against product supplied by Vendor A by finding a bug and then spending the money to buy multiple machines with Vender A products, configure them and then beat the system into submission with many, many bug reports.
I had to go back and read my OP... You're right, I'm not calling anyone stupid or incapable. I was only calling a spade a spade.
There's a lot of software that can do a lot of things on Windows. Just go into any Best Buy or MicroCenter and you'll see proof enough of that. It's a multi-Billion dollar market.
But if you want to do something like, as an example that I don't actually participate in, want to write something in C/C++ then you can do one of two things: Spend hundreds of dollars on software development tools and libraries for Windows (possibly approaching $1000) or just install just about any linux distro and get the same libraries for free on your local desktop.
Same goes for a database, but that is actually changing. MySQL and Postgresql are both available on Windows today. So why spend your money on buying SQL Server? Last I checked, I couldn't get SQL Server installed on a Linux box.
My point in all this is that there isn't very many products that Microsoft can offer on their platform, with the exception of gaming, that cannot also be found under a *nix platform (including Apple). Given that this gap is forever closing between the two environments, I ask the question again: What can Microsoft do for me as a F/OSS user that will bring added value to my computer experience? How much will it cost me?
If your interests in computing are only limited to gaming, browsing, email, and writing papers for you high school homework, then there probably isn't much reason for you to consider migrating to Linux. But if you are interested in development, servers (any kind), writing code for applications or web servers or just about anything else, even video editing! -- then just about everything you will want to use is available on Linux. So, what can Microsoft bring to me that I don't have already and I would need?