I'm confused, would you rather be paying $50 for a browser?
Would you rather not have all the things that have become possible in the last fifteen years because most people can get access to the internet cheaply and have a choice of browsers for nothing?
Personally I'm glad browsers are free, it's helped create whole industries and to be honest, the fact that Netscape went out of business over it is something I really don't give a rats about. Their loss was our gain. Microsoft have done some pretty shitty things over the last 30 years or so, but making browsers free is something every single person reading slashdot has personally benefited from.
I know it's hard to remember know, but when it was first released, Internet Explorer 6 was a good browser. Arguably the best browser available at the time. Microsoft made the best browser you could get and they gave it away free. That killed Netscape, but their loss was our gain. If they hadn't, there would be no firefox, and quite likely no internet as we know it. You'd have one or two proprietary, expensive, browsers, and that would be about it. We might also have a lot less of an open source movement, since communication and community are key to getting developers for that sort of thing.
True independent media is a wonderful thing, it's also rather farcical.
Government funded media can be, and occasionally is, negatively controled by the government. However, this is generally mitigated by the fact that both the governments who pay for that sort of thing and the broadcasters they fund are beauracracies and it takes an awful long time to change anything in a beauracracy. If political influence changes fairly often, and if the people value independent journalism, then major government induced bias(this excludes the general left bias of the kind of people who run and work for this sort of thing) doesn't usually take hold.
On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch has the power to shift the bias of his news outlets as and when he chooses, and what he's done to the news even where it isn't biased in order to make a buck is pretty abhorrent.
Someone has to pay for the news, and the views of that someone will always reflect in the kind of news that is produced, that's the free market being the free market. What people will pay for, people will sell. The advantage of government agencies running news is the fact that, if the agencies are set up as news outlets as opposed to propaganda ones(BBC vs the old Pravda), its fairly rare for any government to be able to make any major changes to the makeup of government employees(as opposed to elected officials) and the occasional attempts to shift things as governments change generally result in a reasonable variation as opposed to serious political bias.
I think the argument against its possibility is pretty simple.
Vaccines work by preparing the body's immune system for a fight against the real virus in a situation where its more likely to actually win.
The human body has been exposed to various and sundry flu strains for some substantial period of time and has yet to generate a universal flu anti-body(not even any substantial resistance to minor seasonal variations).
This implies that one of the following is true.
General Immunity requires a unique trigger which has not yet occured. Such a trigger would likely be difficult if not impossible to achieve.
General Immunity is not possible.
General Immunity is sufficiently hard that millenia of flu virus exposure have yet to trigger it. This probably, though not definitely means its probably sufficiently difficult as to be practically impossible.
General Immunity has already occured, but it negatively impacts survival and/or reproduction to the point that it was an evolutionary dead end.
This doesn't of course mean that it's absolutely impossible, or that the research involved isn't worthwhile even if it comes up with no result, merely that we probably shouldn't hold our breath.
Netscape died because they didn't release a worthwhile browser after 4.9(Netsape 6 had an incomplete rendering engine and Netscape 7 was Mozilla without ad blocking).
Applets died because they were like putting a tac into a bulletin board with a jackhammer, the amount of effort and resources it took to make one made them totally impractical for almost every purpose that existed at the time.
Sun is trying applets again, now that resources are cheaper, and websites are more complicated, why shouldn't Microsoft?
This sort of thing happens all the time, banks overpay, payroll overpays, people overpay. It happens, if you get called out on it, you are legally and morally obligated to return the money(personally I tend to point out the mistake if I see it being made as well, but that's me).
Is it a little petty to be going after terminated employees if the amounts are fairly trivial? Yeah. Do we know that the amounts are trivial? No. Remember an average of an extra grand per employee is 1.4 million dollars, not exactly pocket change, even to Microsoft.
Companies do this all the time, it's part interacting with human beings who can and do make mistakes. If anyone other than Microsoft had done this, the article wouldn't have been written.
So, instead of arresting the girl for texting, scaring the crap out of her and maybe, just maybe teaching her an important life lesson, you would suggest expelling her on the spot?
That is to say you would advocate one of the following.
Foisting the problem kid off onto another school without resolving it in any way.
Terminating the students ability to get any sort of education at all.
Transferring the student to a school with other disruptive kids where they will have little to no chance of mending their ways and participating in class.
Seems to me that a juvenile arrest record for a minor offense which will be expunged in a couple of years, a couple of weeks worth of community service hours, giving this girl a taste of the real world consequences of her actions, and then giving her a chance to mend her ways is a lot less extreme and a lot more likely to be effective than some sort of instant expulsion.
Kids are stupid, that's why we have different penalties for minors, and why we seal juvenile criminal records, even for much more serious offenses. If you don't teach them the consequences of being stupid when they're young, they're going to pay the consequences of being stupid when they're older and the price will be a lot higher for both them and for society in general.
Parents have the responsibility to teach their children right from wrong, but schools have to be part of the education process as well, and teaching people consequences is just as important if not more so than a lot of the things people learn in high school.
Actually it's not a strawman, it's a common problem.
My wife works with people with disabilities, and sometimes she gets a recalcitrant client who doesn't want to get on or off the bus(they do outings) or leave the building. She is not, in any way, permitted to even attempt to physically move the client, even if the client is easily movable. If she cannot convince said client to move of their own free will, the only option she has available is to call the police and get them to move the client for her. Some police don't really like this as they feel it wastes their time, but they have to do it anyway. I can fully understand how if the police were called out because of some obnoxious twat teenager who ought to know better as opposed to an adult with the intellect of a 6 year old they might be a little more likely to arrange for some consequences.
Despite the general libertarian anti-authority bent on Slashdot, people do not and have never had the right to do whatever the hell they want and damn the consequences to others. This girl knew she shouldn't be doing what she was doing, she refused to comply with reasonable instructions, excessive force was not used(she wasn't tasered or anything). She got what she deserves, maybe a cash fine and some hours of community service(all she's likely to get for disturbing the peace) will teach her some basic respect for others.
I said it was an issue of scheduling(when they decided to schedule updating IE) not architecture. I've never said Microsoft was right in sitting on IE 6.0 and it pisses the hell out of me too. When I said have I meant "have" as opposed to "should", they "should have updated their engine 9 years go, they "have" to update it now.
IE7 sucks because it's hard to jump straight out of a 50 foot deep hole, it's better than IE6 was.
As for your "standards compliant my ass", compare the fact that a subsection of event handling which most people don't actually use isn't quite fixed yet, to the list of crap that massively didn't work in IE6 or 7.
Is IE 8 perfect? Hell no! Do I plan on using it as my primary browser? Hell no! Am I excited that Microsoft is finally making my life easier by updating their browser to be standards compliant, even if they're not quite there yet, and that their update cycle is looking more like a year as opposed to a decade? Hell yes!
I am, among other things, a web application developer. IE's standards incompliance costs me more time than I care to think about. Every single incompatibility they fix saves me time, and I will continue to support their efforts to fix those incompatibilities for as long as they choose to do so.
The damage done by IE6 is immeasurable, and those of us who have to deal with it have reason a legitimate reason to hate Microsoft. That said the damage is done, there's no way to undo it and all we can do now is move forward. Microsoft is moving forward and since I'm not going to get rid of it, I'm going to be happy they're moving forward and hope they continue to do so.
Maybe by the time of IE 10, IE will be better than Firefox and I'll switch back to it. Competition and improvement is a good thing. Netscape dropped the ball after IE 5 overtook them, it took them the better part of 5 or 6 years to pick it back up.
Microsoft then dropped the ball with their usual lack of vision and screwed us harder. They've picked it back up too, even if it took a competitor to make them do it.
Actually it's not what Vista does. Vista says "application X is either requesting system access, or appears as if it might request system access do you want to grant it".
It doesn't allow you to define which types of system access you want it to have(I might want my screensaver installer to be able to access the settings which allow it to set the screensaver I just installed as my default screensaver, but not to arbitrarily execute code or access other system settings for instance), nor does it allow you to provide long term approval for known applications.
UAC is a massive improvement over the old system(it allows users to elevate permissions simply on demand), but it's got a whole bunch of flaws and isn't this system.
Well that's not actually a fix. If you're getting the file there by social engineering you can quite easily get the user to set permissions on the file to allow execution(you've already convinced them to download it haven't you).
If you've found a vulnerability allowing you to put the file there without user intervention, then you can easily change the permissions at the same time.
No one believed he could keep all his promises, or even necessarily that he'd even have time to try to keep all his promises.
What a lot of people beleived was that Bush did more to destroy the USA than all the terrorists in the world combined, McCain who was once a man of honesty and integrity sold out to the same assholes who gave us the last 8 years in order to get the nomination, and Sarah Palin shouldn't be allowed to be president of the PTA let alone president of country.
Given the choice between a man who has already sold out, partnered with a lunatic, and a man who has not yet sold out, partnered with someone who isn't as bad as Palin, the choice was fairly obvious. It does't mean Obama is wonderful, just that he's head and shoulders above our other choices.
Aside from all that, intellectual property is about the only thing the US still exports to the rest of the world and if you think that any president no matter his political beliefs is going to destroy it while that's true is fooling themselves.
I think the bigger problem is the US voting system. Barring the a major change in the political landscape(and I mean major) no US third party is ever going to get enough votes to actually win.
In the currrent US voting system, that is without run off voting, that means that every time you vote for a third party instead of for the major party which you prefer you essentially vote for the major party you like least.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you want to have third party representation in the US federal government, then you need run-off(probably instant run-off) voting. You still end up with the same two parties, but because you get to order your preferences(or allow your party of choice to negotiate where their unallocated preferences will go) then you can safely vote for a third party and hopefully influence the direction your major party of choice takes in the future.
It doesn't guarantee anything of course, but at least you could vote for your third party of choice without ending up with the practical government you didn't want.
It's not actually an architectural problem, so much as a scheduling problem.
When IE 6 was originally released a lot of the standards were still being developed. The standards that were developed seem to have been made in the usual manner of "the official standard has to be different than the defacto standard", and so IE 6 didn't properly support them.
That in itself wasn't a problem, no other web browser did either.
The problem occured when Microsoft basically didn't update their rendering engine for the following 10 or so years. They didn't really have to until fairly recently because there weren't really any viable alternatives. Netscape lost to IE 5, Mozilla was huge clunky and slow and Firefox wasn't really useable for the masses until well into 2004.
I say this as someone who has been using it since about version.2 along with Mozilla before that, and Opera before that(I switched to Mozilla because its e-mail client was one of the few clients at the time to properly support SSL IMAP which I needed for university.
The even greater irony of your statement is that its in an article talking about Microsoft pushing out IE8(which is fairly standards compliant as far as my early testing has gone) and which will make your life and my life a lot easier.
I think the whole "control" thing is what makes it a flying car as opposed to a plane.
You can already fly around the city at 150mph if you wanted to(and can get whatever permits are required) in a plane. Planes aren't even all that fuel inefficient.
The idea of a flying car is a vehicle that is as easy to control as a car(or easier), but which can fly. This is of course theoretically possible, but the lift system and power generation equipment has yet to be invented.
Yes, I'm aware that a non root user cannot bind to a port below 1024. That doesn't stop people from running an SMTP server though.
For the matter of that, if your goal is to transmit mail only (as opposed to relaying it) you don't actually have to bind to, or open, port 25 at all. Your e-mail client certainly doesn't.
The general point is that, while Microsoft Windows is definitely less secure overall than most of the alternatives, a part of the reason Microsoft gets more infections is that it's what is used by most of the people who don't know jack about computers. This applies to the server world as well, linux servers are more likely to be properly administered than Windows servers(not always of course, but more likely) and so it's more work to try and infect them. The criminals will always go for the low hanging fruit, like everyone else, but no practical amount of security can get protect against good social engineering.
You know damned well that the vast majority of infections are social engineering not technical engineering.
Every so often you get a big major incident on some flaw(every OS has a major flaw once in a while), but most of them are caused by getting people to click on things. Microsoft hasn't made it any easier, but you can run an smtp server as a regular user on Linux too, and if you made it easy enough for regular users to install software, you could easily make it easy enough for them to install malware.
I admit I haven't RTFA, but if this article is like every one that's preceded it, gated community isn't a particularly good analogy, and to the degree it is a good analogy, most people on slashdot aren't seeing it right.
It's not gated in the sense that they're going to necessarily restrict who is on the internet, it's a gated community in the sense that all members of said community are known.
There are pluses and minuses to all of this of course, loss of anonymity cuts both ways. You can do what you want without much risk of getting caught, but then so can everyone else. This means you can download your pirated movie, watch your adult entertainment, post your dissenting political opinions in relative safety. It also means that the guy who wrote the new internet worm will probably never be caught, prosecuted, or punished.
This is certainly a freedom vs security question. However there's a certain amount of question as to how much freedom for how much security.
In most of the western world, if your IP is logged(either by someone watching your traffic, or by either end of the communication), you can probably be traced. There are steps you can take(TOR, using someone elses computer, etc) to make this more difficult, but even then, someone's identifiable IP address will detectable and probably traceable. At the moment
On the other hand, without cooperation from law enforcement in other countries, knowing who did something is relatively pointless anyway.
The current internet is likely to eventually implode if the spam/botnet/etc situation isn't in some way remedied. Blaming Microsoft's bad security isn't going to help, trying to educate the users probably isn't going to help, so we need another solution.
That leaves the question of whether this solution will work, how much anonymity(freedom) most of us are actually giving up, and whether in exchange for that anonymity we're getting anything worthwhile.
Personally, I'm not sure we(at least in the west), are giving up all that much freedom(presuming that identification isn't used to unfairly restrict access, though you can do that now anyway), but I'm also not convinced that knowing who everyone is going to solve the problem. It'll probably slow down the little pissant script kiddies who just want to feel like big men at other peoples expense(though sometimes those same wankers put their experience to good use later on), but I'm not entirely certain whether a criminal organization in China or Russia is going to be all that deterred.
Firstly, when the opposition opposed the stimulus plan their approval rating dropped 4 points, they're going to show some token objection and get a few tax cuts in and cave because they don't have a choice.
Secondly, without either the greens or the liberals, it still won't pass the senate. The greens hate it, and if the libs are going to support it, then it'll happen with or without the loonies.
This may pass, but it's not going to pass as part of the economic stimulus package and it's not going to pass without the liberals(and with the liberals it'll pass not matter what anyway).
The current senate situation isn't ideal for anyone, but it's not quite that bad.
I don't like this filter, and I don't really know why Rudd is trying to do it. I haven't liked a lot of the nanny state bullshit labour has done(lots of taxes on booze and porn, very little effort to fix any of the things they were elected to fix) either.
Hopefully this is just a stunt to appease the loonies and even Rudd doesn't want this to pass, if not, it'll fail miserably, slow down the internet doing so, and hopefully they'll repeal it.
Well, that's fine if you want to continue to bury the US economy.
Artificial growth is what caused this problem(and causes the vast majority of modern economic problems). You cannot have growth without an increase in value, and you can't increase value as fast as politicians want without some sort of revolutionary change. Huge growth in every industry in every year does not happen. You can't sell more cars than there are people who have money to buy them, you can't sell more homes than there are people who can afford them. Same goes for everything else.
You can increase credit and debt to the point that everyone is buying so much stuff they can't afford that they're creating artificial growth, but if there isn't real value to pay for that debt you end up with a bubble and everything goes down the tubes.
What the US(and most of the rest of the world) needs is to accept reasonable and sustainable levels of growth based on real increase in value.
The problem with this is rather simple. Short term job creation/preservation doesn't work particularly well in these kind of circumstances.
The US is in a hole because the US economy is disfunctional at a fundamental level and has been for probably at least the last 30 years or so. Bush tried throwing immediate money at it(over a trillion dollars of immediate money) and as far as I can see it hasn't worked. I'm not saying that the new stimulus plan is going to work either, but there's probably no way out of short term pain here without even more disasterous long term results(having to print its way out of debt for instance causing massive inflation for instance).
About the only thing that's going to save the US at this point is a combination of tough long term change and probably a fairly large short term welfare budget to get people through until things get better.
That's not technically true. Fusion has been developed. It works just fine, it just takes so much energy to start and maintain the reaction that its net energy output is pretty much near zero or negative.
That's a pretty big flaw when you're talking about a power plant, but not so much of a flaw when you're talking about a disposal unit. Even a small negative overall energy output would be better than waiting for stuff to decay over a million years or so.
The whole nuclear thing really pisses me off. The environmentalists believe that if we don't drastically cut our carbon emissions right now that we're basically screwed. I think, for varying definitions of "cut", "right now", and "screwed" that they might be right.
These same people scream about nuclear power whenever it's mentioned. They talk about wind and tidal, which are pretty much guaranteed to fail(they take a lot of space, have huge environmental impacts, and generate unreliable power, and not enough of it). They talk about solar which isn't ready yet, and probably won't be ready for 50 years.
Nuclear, at least as we currently know it, is not the long term solution, we probably don't want to be running anything like what we're currently looking at in even as little as a hundred years. It is however, the only thing we have NOW that works, and probably the only thing that we'll have in the next 40-50 years that works.
If everything they say about climate change is true, then even a dozen Chernobyls would be a better alternative(hell, a dozen Chernobyls would kill fewer people than a lot of the energy cuts these folks want), and we probably won't have a dozen Chernobyls. I can live with the folks who say that climate change isn't happening and don't want nuclear power, but when the same crowd who believes so vehemently that the end of the world is coming won't accept the only practical solution we currently have, it really pisses me off.
This isn't an "in conjunction with" thing though. The other stuff is fairly oppressive(the credit card one is news to me, and I think probably an exaggeration), but it's oppressive in and of itself. Saying that this is oppressive in conjunction with the other stuff is a bit like saying that having to unlock a door is intrusive in conjunction with being stripped and having a cavity search. The door isn't the thing that's intrusive, it's the other stuff.
Opinions on the second ammendment are rather diverse, even on slashdot. Being anti-gun does not an "anti-invidual rights zealot" nor an "extreme left", even by the standards of the US where extreme left would be most countries conservative parties, make. You might clarify them as anti-gun, and not like them for those reasons, but being anti-gun is not exactly extreme, even if you disagree with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused, would you rather be paying $50 for a browser?
Would you rather not have all the things that have become possible in the last fifteen years because most people can get access to the internet cheaply and have a choice of browsers for nothing?
Personally I'm glad browsers are free, it's helped create whole industries and to be honest, the fact that Netscape went out of business over it is something I really don't give a rats about. Their loss was our gain. Microsoft have done some pretty shitty things over the last 30 years or so, but making browsers free is something every single person reading slashdot has personally benefited from.
I know it's hard to remember know, but when it was first released, Internet Explorer 6 was a good browser. Arguably the best browser available at the time. Microsoft made the best browser you could get and they gave it away free. That killed Netscape, but their loss was our gain. If they hadn't, there would be no firefox, and quite likely no internet as we know it. You'd have one or two proprietary, expensive, browsers, and that would be about it. We might also have a lot less of an open source movement, since communication and community are key to getting developers for that sort of thing.
True independent media is a wonderful thing, it's also rather farcical.
Government funded media can be, and occasionally is, negatively controled by the government. However, this is generally mitigated by the fact that both the governments who pay for that sort of thing and the broadcasters they fund are beauracracies and it takes an awful long time to change anything in a beauracracy. If political influence changes fairly often, and if the people value independent journalism, then major government induced bias(this excludes the general left bias of the kind of people who run and work for this sort of thing) doesn't usually take hold.
On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch has the power to shift the bias of his news outlets as and when he chooses, and what he's done to the news even where it isn't biased in order to make a buck is pretty abhorrent.
Someone has to pay for the news, and the views of that someone will always reflect in the kind of news that is produced, that's the free market being the free market. What people will pay for, people will sell. The advantage of government agencies running news is the fact that, if the agencies are set up as news outlets as opposed to propaganda ones(BBC vs the old Pravda), its fairly rare for any government to be able to make any major changes to the makeup of government employees(as opposed to elected officials) and the occasional attempts to shift things as governments change generally result in a reasonable variation as opposed to serious political bias.
I think the argument against its possibility is pretty simple.
This doesn't of course mean that it's absolutely impossible, or that the research involved isn't worthwhile even if it comes up with no result, merely that we probably shouldn't hold our breath.
Netscape died because they didn't release a worthwhile browser after 4.9(Netsape 6 had an incomplete rendering engine and Netscape 7 was Mozilla without ad blocking).
Applets died because they were like putting a tac into a bulletin board with a jackhammer, the amount of effort and resources it took to make one made them totally impractical for almost every purpose that existed at the time.
Sun is trying applets again, now that resources are cheaper, and websites are more complicated, why shouldn't Microsoft?
This sort of thing happens all the time, banks overpay, payroll overpays, people overpay. It happens, if you get called out on it, you are legally and morally obligated to return the money(personally I tend to point out the mistake if I see it being made as well, but that's me).
Is it a little petty to be going after terminated employees if the amounts are fairly trivial? Yeah. Do we know that the amounts are trivial? No. Remember an average of an extra grand per employee is 1.4 million dollars, not exactly pocket change, even to Microsoft.
Companies do this all the time, it's part interacting with human beings who can and do make mistakes. If anyone other than Microsoft had done this, the article wouldn't have been written.
So, instead of arresting the girl for texting, scaring the crap out of her and maybe, just maybe teaching her an important life lesson, you would suggest expelling her on the spot?
That is to say you would advocate one of the following.
Seems to me that a juvenile arrest record for a minor offense which will be expunged in a couple of years, a couple of weeks worth of community service hours, giving this girl a taste of the real world consequences of her actions, and then giving her a chance to mend her ways is a lot less extreme and a lot more likely to be effective than some sort of instant expulsion.
Kids are stupid, that's why we have different penalties for minors, and why we seal juvenile criminal records, even for much more serious offenses. If you don't teach them the consequences of being stupid when they're young, they're going to pay the consequences of being stupid when they're older and the price will be a lot higher for both them and for society in general.
Parents have the responsibility to teach their children right from wrong, but schools have to be part of the education process as well, and teaching people consequences is just as important if not more so than a lot of the things people learn in high school.
Actually it's not a strawman, it's a common problem.
My wife works with people with disabilities, and sometimes she gets a recalcitrant client who doesn't want to get on or off the bus(they do outings) or leave the building. She is not, in any way, permitted to even attempt to physically move the client, even if the client is easily movable. If she cannot convince said client to move of their own free will, the only option she has available is to call the police and get them to move the client for her. Some police don't really like this as they feel it wastes their time, but they have to do it anyway. I can fully understand how if the police were called out because of some obnoxious twat teenager who ought to know better as opposed to an adult with the intellect of a 6 year old they might be a little more likely to arrange for some consequences.
Despite the general libertarian anti-authority bent on Slashdot, people do not and have never had the right to do whatever the hell they want and damn the consequences to others. This girl knew she shouldn't be doing what she was doing, she refused to comply with reasonable instructions, excessive force was not used(she wasn't tasered or anything). She got what she deserves, maybe a cash fine and some hours of community service(all she's likely to get for disturbing the peace) will teach her some basic respect for others.
Pray tell, why in the name of god would you ever have two identical USB devices which require different drivers in any realistic scenario?
Yes, but since when do we yell at companies for following standards?
I said it was an issue of scheduling(when they decided to schedule updating IE) not architecture. I've never said Microsoft was right in sitting on IE 6.0 and it pisses the hell out of me too. When I said have I meant "have" as opposed to "should", they "should have updated their engine 9 years go, they "have" to update it now.
IE7 sucks because it's hard to jump straight out of a 50 foot deep hole, it's better than IE6 was.
As for your "standards compliant my ass", compare the fact that a subsection of event handling which most people don't actually use isn't quite fixed yet, to the list of crap that massively didn't work in IE6 or 7.
Is IE 8 perfect? Hell no! Do I plan on using it as my primary browser? Hell no! Am I excited that Microsoft is finally making my life easier by updating their browser to be standards compliant, even if they're not quite there yet, and that their update cycle is looking more like a year as opposed to a decade? Hell yes!
I am, among other things, a web application developer. IE's standards incompliance costs me more time than I care to think about. Every single incompatibility they fix saves me time, and I will continue to support their efforts to fix those incompatibilities for as long as they choose to do so.
The damage done by IE6 is immeasurable, and those of us who have to deal with it have reason a legitimate reason to hate Microsoft. That said the damage is done, there's no way to undo it and all we can do now is move forward. Microsoft is moving forward and since I'm not going to get rid of it, I'm going to be happy they're moving forward and hope they continue to do so.
Maybe by the time of IE 10, IE will be better than Firefox and I'll switch back to it. Competition and improvement is a good thing. Netscape dropped the ball after IE 5 overtook them, it took them the better part of 5 or 6 years to pick it back up.
Microsoft then dropped the ball with their usual lack of vision and screwed us harder. They've picked it back up too, even if it took a competitor to make them do it.
Actually it's not what Vista does. Vista says "application X is either requesting system access, or appears as if it might request system access do you want to grant it".
It doesn't allow you to define which types of system access you want it to have(I might want my screensaver installer to be able to access the settings which allow it to set the screensaver I just installed as my default screensaver, but not to arbitrarily execute code or access other system settings for instance), nor does it allow you to provide long term approval for known applications.
UAC is a massive improvement over the old system(it allows users to elevate permissions simply on demand), but it's got a whole bunch of flaws and isn't this system.
Well that's not actually a fix. If you're getting the file there by social engineering you can quite easily get the user to set permissions on the file to allow execution(you've already convinced them to download it haven't you).
If you've found a vulnerability allowing you to put the file there without user intervention, then you can easily change the permissions at the same time.
No one believed he could keep all his promises, or even necessarily that he'd even have time to try to keep all his promises.
What a lot of people beleived was that Bush did more to destroy the USA than all the terrorists in the world combined, McCain who was once a man of honesty and integrity sold out to the same assholes who gave us the last 8 years in order to get the nomination, and Sarah Palin shouldn't be allowed to be president of the PTA let alone president of country.
Given the choice between a man who has already sold out, partnered with a lunatic, and a man who has not yet sold out, partnered with someone who isn't as bad as Palin, the choice was fairly obvious. It does't mean Obama is wonderful, just that he's head and shoulders above our other choices.
Aside from all that, intellectual property is about the only thing the US still exports to the rest of the world and if you think that any president no matter his political beliefs is going to destroy it while that's true is fooling themselves.
I think the bigger problem is the US voting system. Barring the a major change in the political landscape(and I mean major) no US third party is ever going to get enough votes to actually win.
In the currrent US voting system, that is without run off voting, that means that every time you vote for a third party instead of for the major party which you prefer you essentially vote for the major party you like least.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you want to have third party representation in the US federal government, then you need run-off(probably instant run-off) voting. You still end up with the same two parties, but because you get to order your preferences(or allow your party of choice to negotiate where their unallocated preferences will go) then you can safely vote for a third party and hopefully influence the direction your major party of choice takes in the future.
It doesn't guarantee anything of course, but at least you could vote for your third party of choice without ending up with the practical government you didn't want.
It's not actually an architectural problem, so much as a scheduling problem.
When IE 6 was originally released a lot of the standards were still being developed. The standards that were developed seem to have been made in the usual manner of "the official standard has to be different than the defacto standard", and so IE 6 didn't properly support them.
That in itself wasn't a problem, no other web browser did either.
The problem occured when Microsoft basically didn't update their rendering engine for the following 10 or so years. They didn't really have to until fairly recently because there weren't really any viable alternatives. Netscape lost to IE 5, Mozilla was huge clunky and slow and Firefox wasn't really useable for the masses until well into 2004.
I say this as someone who has been using it since about version .2 along with Mozilla before that, and Opera before that(I switched to Mozilla because its e-mail client was one of the few clients at the time to properly support SSL IMAP which I needed for university.
The even greater irony of your statement is that its in an article talking about Microsoft pushing out IE8(which is fairly standards compliant as far as my early testing has gone) and which will make your life and my life a lot easier.
I think the whole "control" thing is what makes it a flying car as opposed to a plane.
You can already fly around the city at 150mph if you wanted to(and can get whatever permits are required) in a plane. Planes aren't even all that fuel inefficient.
The idea of a flying car is a vehicle that is as easy to control as a car(or easier), but which can fly. This is of course theoretically possible, but the lift system and power generation equipment has yet to be invented.
Yes, I'm aware that a non root user cannot bind to a port below 1024. That doesn't stop people from running an SMTP server though.
For the matter of that, if your goal is to transmit mail only (as opposed to relaying it) you don't actually have to bind to, or open, port 25 at all. Your e-mail client certainly doesn't.
The general point is that, while Microsoft Windows is definitely less secure overall than most of the alternatives, a part of the reason Microsoft gets more infections is that it's what is used by most of the people who don't know jack about computers. This applies to the server world as well, linux servers are more likely to be properly administered than Windows servers(not always of course, but more likely) and so it's more work to try and infect them. The criminals will always go for the low hanging fruit, like everyone else, but no practical amount of security can get protect against good social engineering.
You know damned well that the vast majority of infections are social engineering not technical engineering.
Every so often you get a big major incident on some flaw(every OS has a major flaw once in a while), but most of them are caused by getting people to click on things. Microsoft hasn't made it any easier, but you can run an smtp server as a regular user on Linux too, and if you made it easy enough for regular users to install software, you could easily make it easy enough for them to install malware.
I admit I haven't RTFA, but if this article is like every one that's preceded it, gated community isn't a particularly good analogy, and to the degree it is a good analogy, most people on slashdot aren't seeing it right.
It's not gated in the sense that they're going to necessarily restrict who is on the internet, it's a gated community in the sense that all members of said community are known.
There are pluses and minuses to all of this of course, loss of anonymity cuts both ways. You can do what you want without much risk of getting caught, but then so can everyone else. This means you can download your pirated movie, watch your adult entertainment, post your dissenting political opinions in relative safety. It also means that the guy who wrote the new internet worm will probably never be caught, prosecuted, or punished.
This is certainly a freedom vs security question. However there's a certain amount of question as to how much freedom for how much security.
In most of the western world, if your IP is logged(either by someone watching your traffic, or by either end of the communication), you can probably be traced. There are steps you can take(TOR, using someone elses computer, etc) to make this more difficult, but even then, someone's identifiable IP address will detectable and probably traceable. At the moment
On the other hand, without cooperation from law enforcement in other countries, knowing who did something is relatively pointless anyway.
The current internet is likely to eventually implode if the spam/botnet/etc situation isn't in some way remedied. Blaming Microsoft's bad security isn't going to help, trying to educate the users probably isn't going to help, so we need another solution.
That leaves the question of whether this solution will work, how much anonymity(freedom) most of us are actually giving up, and whether in exchange for that anonymity we're getting anything worthwhile.
Personally, I'm not sure we(at least in the west), are giving up all that much freedom(presuming that identification isn't used to unfairly restrict access, though you can do that now anyway), but I'm also not convinced that knowing who everyone is going to solve the problem. It'll probably slow down the little pissant script kiddies who just want to feel like big men at other peoples expense(though sometimes those same wankers put their experience to good use later on), but I'm not entirely certain whether a criminal organization in China or Russia is going to be all that deterred.
Bullshit.
Firstly, when the opposition opposed the stimulus plan their approval rating dropped 4 points, they're going to show some token objection and get a few tax cuts in and cave because they don't have a choice.
Secondly, without either the greens or the liberals, it still won't pass the senate. The greens hate it, and if the libs are going to support it, then it'll happen with or without the loonies.
This may pass, but it's not going to pass as part of the economic stimulus package and it's not going to pass without the liberals(and with the liberals it'll pass not matter what anyway).
The current senate situation isn't ideal for anyone, but it's not quite that bad.
I don't like this filter, and I don't really know why Rudd is trying to do it. I haven't liked a lot of the nanny state bullshit labour has done(lots of taxes on booze and porn, very little effort to fix any of the things they were elected to fix) either.
Hopefully this is just a stunt to appease the loonies and even Rudd doesn't want this to pass, if not, it'll fail miserably, slow down the internet doing so, and hopefully they'll repeal it.
Well, that's fine if you want to continue to bury the US economy.
Artificial growth is what caused this problem(and causes the vast majority of modern economic problems). You cannot have growth without an increase in value, and you can't increase value as fast as politicians want without some sort of revolutionary change. Huge growth in every industry in every year does not happen. You can't sell more cars than there are people who have money to buy them, you can't sell more homes than there are people who can afford them. Same goes for everything else.
You can increase credit and debt to the point that everyone is buying so much stuff they can't afford that they're creating artificial growth, but if there isn't real value to pay for that debt you end up with a bubble and everything goes down the tubes.
What the US(and most of the rest of the world) needs is to accept reasonable and sustainable levels of growth based on real increase in value.
The problem with this is rather simple. Short term job creation/preservation doesn't work particularly well in these kind of circumstances.
The US is in a hole because the US economy is disfunctional at a fundamental level and has been for probably at least the last 30 years or so. Bush tried throwing immediate money at it(over a trillion dollars of immediate money) and as far as I can see it hasn't worked. I'm not saying that the new stimulus plan is going to work either, but there's probably no way out of short term pain here without even more disasterous long term results(having to print its way out of debt for instance causing massive inflation for instance).
About the only thing that's going to save the US at this point is a combination of tough long term change and probably a fairly large short term welfare budget to get people through until things get better.
That's not technically true. Fusion has been developed. It works just fine, it just takes so much energy to start and maintain the reaction that its net energy output is pretty much near zero or negative.
That's a pretty big flaw when you're talking about a power plant, but not so much of a flaw when you're talking about a disposal unit. Even a small negative overall energy output would be better than waiting for stuff to decay over a million years or so.
The whole nuclear thing really pisses me off. The environmentalists believe that if we don't drastically cut our carbon emissions right now that we're basically screwed. I think, for varying definitions of "cut", "right now", and "screwed" that they might be right.
These same people scream about nuclear power whenever it's mentioned. They talk about wind and tidal, which are pretty much guaranteed to fail(they take a lot of space, have huge environmental impacts, and generate unreliable power, and not enough of it). They talk about solar which isn't ready yet, and probably won't be ready for 50 years.
Nuclear, at least as we currently know it, is not the long term solution, we probably don't want to be running anything like what we're currently looking at in even as little as a hundred years. It is however, the only thing we have NOW that works, and probably the only thing that we'll have in the next 40-50 years that works.
If everything they say about climate change is true, then even a dozen Chernobyls would be a better alternative(hell, a dozen Chernobyls would kill fewer people than a lot of the energy cuts these folks want), and we probably won't have a dozen Chernobyls. I can live with the folks who say that climate change isn't happening and don't want nuclear power, but when the same crowd who believes so vehemently that the end of the world is coming won't accept the only practical solution we currently have, it really pisses me off.
This isn't an "in conjunction with" thing though. The other stuff is fairly oppressive(the credit card one is news to me, and I think probably an exaggeration), but it's oppressive in and of itself. Saying that this is oppressive in conjunction with the other stuff is a bit like saying that having to unlock a door is intrusive in conjunction with being stripped and having a cavity search. The door isn't the thing that's intrusive, it's the other stuff.
Opinions on the second ammendment are rather diverse, even on slashdot. Being anti-gun does not an "anti-invidual rights zealot" nor an "extreme left", even by the standards of the US where extreme left would be most countries conservative parties, make. You might clarify them as anti-gun, and not like them for those reasons, but being anti-gun is not exactly extreme, even if you disagree with it.