The web sites were not advertising that they were doing it, as I read the article. They contained content that catered to cannibalistic and necrophiliac fetishists.
First, catering to a fetish is not uncommon. S&M is a lighter form of roleplaying rape. Rape is decidedly illegal (well, in at least the United States and the UK). However, catering to fetishes associated with an action that is criminal is not.
Let's see. There are a number of movies that contain people (including the good guys) commiting acts of violence and disregard for human life that would be decidedly illegal all over the place. Should web sites containing information about action films be illegal?
Hell, the best thing to come out of the UK has to be Monty Python, and they have a bunch of lunatics running around murdering people. Do you feel it necessary to censor that? People *have* claimed that violence in media leads to violence, just as this official is claiming that content relating to crimes causes crimes.
I personally don't feel that there is a significant cause-and-effect, or there'd be a lot of people killed from little kids growing up after watching Westerns and playing with tin soldiers.
First, the official involved pretty much grabbed a "this porn causes people to commit crimes" principle out of the air. I'm very dubious that his personal opinion (and one that isn't currently mine) should be weighty enough to merit instituting censorship.
Second, I don't understand why the official can't do the standard thing that I'd like to see pro-censorship advocates do. If the official really thinks that porn of a particular variety is bad, why doesn't he, instead of simply suppressing it, explain his reasoning. If he really is (a) correct in his reasoning and (b) the value systems of others are similar to his own (and I don't think that he should be trying to govern their actions if his are different from the masses), then his explanation should institute a similar opinion in others, and "innoculate" them against the cannibalistic necrophilia meme.
Consider what the official has claimed. Images of porn cause criminality. That's a pretty severe allegation. He's claiming not just correlation (which would seem quite reasonable to me) but causality, which doesn't seem reasonable at all.
If the official really thinks that images are so influential, why do the English have James Bond? He frequently endangers others recklessly, destroys property, ignores military and government authority, etc. I don't see the mass of Britons running out and trying to blow up ships.
Heck, video games are plausibly even more influential -- you take *on the role* of someone. How many FPSes are there where you take out a gun and start shooting people? Most of 'em. You don't follow police rules for requirements on when to shoot, you simply try to end lives, frequently of almost anything that moves. Why aren't there masses of shootings in Britain if violent video games, so apparently much more influential, have failed to convince people to commit murder? Is it because the censors have made the blood in the games green? Is it because images really *don't* affect people to the degree that the British official assumed?
I personally feel that if there's someone with a necrophilia and cannibalism fetish, but that they recognize it and can have said fetish without running out and engaging in it (and there are a hell of a lot of fetishes and fantasies out there that don't get followed up on, like making love to a actress or whatnot), there doesn't seem to be much reason to try to force them underground.
Remember when the British thought that homosexuality was awful, deviant sexual behavior that needed to be corrected? Turing (a major player in *saving* many British asses from death, and a person that is now considered a pretty wronged great man) had his security clearance revoked, was forced to take hormone injections and modify his behavior, and was eventually driven to suicide.
People that buy peppy sports cars cause a *hell* of a lot more deaths each year than people that have cannibalism fetishes. Should peppy sports cars be banned in favor of station wagons? More human lives would be saved, and that's the only really convincing factor that I can think of.
I wouldn't oppose Flash navigation on a media-rich site
Umm. By definition, if a site is loaded with Flash, it's media-rich.:-)
I just can't really see Flash being a benefit. Folks thought that it was useful back when it was novel -- ("Look, the web page makes sounds when I click!"). We've gone through this same "novel" phones so many times on the web that it's depressing. When music came out, everyone had to put music on their personal pages, and at first it was kind of cute. Then it got really annoying. Even before that, there was GIF animation. I remember the first time that I saw GIF89a animation. I was enthralled. Here's a copy of this newish Netscape Navigator program and *stuff moves on the screen*. Surprise, a year later, with way too many sites using animated GIFs, I never wanted to see them again (and fortunately, my browser lets me disable their animation).
Flash is the same thing. It only interests anyone because it's novel. There just aren't any good justifications for using it.
Actually, no. I believe I've used effectively once before. There was a new MP3 player of some sort out, and you could use an embedded Flash file to try out the interface and see what you liked. That was actually a useful thing.
Aside from that, Flash on webpages is useless.
Flash still has some merit for standalone video, as there are no other good vector animation formats (SVG is just plain not designed for animation).
Marketers attempt to help a company get their message across to those who would be interested in their product.
Yes. However, marketers also have little interest in the case of targetting people who are *not* interested in said products.
In the case of the Web, frequently marketer performance is measured by hits. Thus, marketers have incentive to mis-direct users to their site even if those users are not interested in a product.
Marketers are not in the business of simply informing people about a product. You absolutely do not need a whole department to manage that -- it's quite easy. Most marketing is designed to exploit human irrationality and quirks in the thought process and preferences to make humans make irrational purchasing decisions.
I don't hate SEOs any more than I hate politicians. Both are placed in a system that we designed that is exploitable. We screwed up, and the burden of fixing the system to not be exploitable lies on us -- come up with a better search engine, suggest some way to prevent people from mucking with results.
However, SEOs cause me about as much unhappiness and discomfort as email spammers do, so I'd hardly shed a tear if they all went out of business, say.
I've had excellent luck using Google's ads for one thing -- when I'm looking for a retailer to buy something. Not infrequently when trying to buy something, I come up with plenty of garbage and irrelevant results, but the paid advertisements are there because the people are trying to sell me what I want (and they are interested in not wasting impressions on people that *aren't* interested in their product, so they have a positive incentive to focus their ads).
It's clearly in search engine spammers' benefit to do so (much like email spammers).
It also clearly disadvantages users, since PageRank is a pretty good metric (outside of people trying to game the system) of usefulness.
You clearly have some interest in discussing SEO. The parent has some interest in discussing thwarting SEO. I'd that that the second subject has at least as much merit (as in, it benefits a large group of people a good deal), and is certainly equally interesting.
Now, it's true that simply eliminating SEO-using sites may not be worthwhile -- it's possible that some SEO-using sites have merit, and over-penalization is possible.
Increasing the difficulty of SEO analysis is interesting. A couple of other interesting possibilities:
* It might be interesting to try to specifically identify users trying to "game the system" and start feeding them slightly shuffled results. As long as the shuffling isn't too heavy, it even false positives with this shouldn't be too painful.
* It might be interesting to try to identify sites attempting to utilize SEO and penalize them. Frankly, the kind of sites that use SEO are generally the sort of thing that I *don't* want to find.
* Not quite as nice, but it might be interesting to try to identify clouds of SEO sites. For example, Google seeds an inverse trust network by posting to an SEO site (and posing as an SEO) a particularly complex approach to SEO. A site implementents it, and it is immediately a "known using SEO" site. Google tries to identify sites that are "related to" it a la PageRank and looks for sites that adopt similar measures, considering them to be SEO-ized sites with a somewhat smaller probability.
It *is* a flame, but the criticism in it is legitimate. These people are clearly targeting SEO (search engine optimizers/spammers), based on pretty clear words in their article.
Besides, why would a legitimate researcher care about word density in Google? It's just not interesting research -- you're analysing an algorithm that you know nothing of. It'd be much better to make your own research search engine and analyze *its* results, and get something useful, interesting, and possibly publishable.
That being said, ultimately the flaw is with Google/Yahoo. They are exploitable (even if it's hard to pull off), and money can be made by people without risk. These guys are looking for data to build attacks. The fact that their attacks screw over a lot of other people sucks, but there you have it.
Note that there's nothing wrong with going to a data recovery firm, even if you're a knowledgeable techie. Data recovery companies are not the computer shop on the corner -- they have cleanrooms and sets of replacement parts for every drive you can think of. They can disassemble your drive and swap in a new mechanism.
Note that simple on-site backups are worth it. Data recovery can run up into the thousands of dollars, a backup hard drive (even just mirroring your crucial files) costs $100, and you are *sure* to have your hard drive fail at some point, quite possibly without enough warning to recover your files.
MS DOS 6 lacked widespread network access. All Microsoft has to do is make Windows Update provide the latest virus definitions.
You think that it won't be worth it for Microsoft to provide AV service for free? I'll bet it will. All the people pirating Windows will be lacking AV service then...at some point, Microsft is bound to start blocking Windows Update service to pirated copies of Windows.
Aside from the inflamatory formatting of the text, AMD and Intel almost certainly cross-license their patents, as is par for most big technology companies. It's just the only way to operate today. AMD swipes Intel improvements, and Intel swipes AMD improvements. Why do you think the two are so similar in performance?
Finally, "stealing" an instruction set is ridiculous. For Chrissake, an instruction set gives you very little. If AMD couldn't have "stolen" the IA32 instruction set in the first place, they would never have gotten off the ground in the consumer CPU market, since they would have had an incompatible CPU. That's akin to getting a program that can read another program's file format and claiming that the second program "merely follows in the first's footsteps".
Heck, I'm sure Intel has done some things that they shouldn't be proud about, but it damn well is not being compatible with AMD's instruction set or "jacking clock rates to fool potential AMD customers".
Copyrights don't have to be registered. At one point, you had to put a copyright notice on anything you were copyrighting, but for a number of years, that has been inactive and copyright has been automatic on anything you produce.
Of course, since 1930 or so, nothing has expired under copyright due to copyright being repeatedly extended, so that basically means that all content produced for the last seventy years cannot be freely reused.
Excuse me, but why would they put RFID tags on items like medicines and then design bags to block them from the view of the RFID system? Why not, uh...just not tag them in the first place?
Hi. My name is Bob. I'd like to see Jane my new invention, Product A. Jane is provided innumerable benefits by using Product A.
Wow, that was quite profitable. However, it turns out that Product A, when used by Jane, causes Sarah a number of problems. There really isn't any problem here -- I can just sell *Sarah* Product B, a system that cancels out the effect of Product A.
Now, admittedly, neither Sarah *nor* Jane benefit in the end. However, by Bob's manipulation of the game, Sarah and Jane both paid Bob, and Bob is richer. Pretty good deal for Bob, eh?
Note that virus scanners are quite useful on Linux as well. I use ClamAV, and am pleased with it.
Why?
Because I get eight bazillion Windows-oriented viruses in my inbox each day. I use SpamAssassin on my machine, which does a great job of blowing away actual *spam*, but short of blocking anything with Microsoft attachments, isn't that great at blocking worms.
If you use ClamAV *and* SpamAssassin on each email that comes in, however, and dump all inbound worm emails into a box called "virus" or similar, you can avoid all the worms you get *and* all the spam you get.
Actually, I'm quite peeved that one of my inbox providers started filtering out viruses, since it means that ClamAV can't get a positive on that email as a virus and dump it in the "virus" bin.:-)
In Apple's case, it actually hurt them, since it tended to drive away all the vendors (who happily relocated to Windows). Apple stopped developing their solution once they were happy with how well it worked, and the developers kept advancing.
I mean, I can't even count how many utilities this happened with. I can't think of a really good solution for Apple, though...
I do have to say that including a virus scanner with the OS makes more sense than almost anything else being bundled. It helps patch security holes. It makes it a bitch and a half to pirate Windows (sure, you can pirate it, but you damn well aren't getting any antivirus service -- have fun when the next wave of worms rolls around). It helps Microsoft look good -- instead of Symantec advisories coming out saying "Windows has another worm coming out, buy our AV product", Microsoft says "There was a worm released and we squashed it. Just hit Windows Update."
I'm sure that this thing can be abused and whatnot, but Microsoft could seriously get a lot of mileage out of AV software.
Note that it *is* going to be fun if MS ever fires off false positives, though -- every Windows box on Earth starts going spastic over some innocent package.
This is the second time today that I've felt that Microsoft is doing, if not the "right" thing, something better than their competitors. The world is standing on end.
Sigh. Trust Microsoft to release their techncial information in.doc format. Well, here's my take. The MS solution doesn't provide, as the top sender assumed, a real PKI-based solution, which is what really excited me. That would ultimately solve a lot of problems in a much better fashion.
The Microsoft solution is not actually very different than SPF. It aims at doing pretty much the same thing -- identifying outbound mail servers for a domain in DNS, and disallowing mail from any mail servers that are not listed in DNS. I *still* feel that this approach is a hack and is going to have undesireable long-term effects.
There are some things to be said for the Microsoft approach, though. It seems to be basically a "better SPF". They considered a number of implementation issues that I was upset over in SPF. They talk about DNS caching and security implications of DNS as a transport mechanism. They address server migration, and provide an attempt at dealing with multiple apparent identities -- one that I feel isn't really sufficient, but which Microsft, being Microsoft, might manage to pull off through control of Outlook.
Having read the SPF proposal and the Microsoft proposal, I do think that the Microsoft work is a lot more mature and builds on SPF, and is a better overall solution.
If one of the two must be implemented in the short term, I would prefer Microsoft's work.
I still think that Microsoft's Caller ID is still vulnerable to a number of SPF holes (such as throwaway domains). I am more than a little irritated, since Microsoft is really the only single player capable of promoting a PKI scheme (given that they control a major mail server and the major mail client). Furthermore, migrating to a PKI-based system would provide reasons to upgrade to new versions of Microsoft software -- pushing PKI makes excellent business sense for Microsoft. My guess is that Microsoft needed a solution *now*, given that they were facing SPF deployment, and wanted to fix some of SPF's problems rather than gambling on a full retrofit of the email system.
On a more fundamental - or fundamentalist - level, we have two conflicting world views.
Hmm. I'm not so sure that they need to be in conflict.
bin-laden wants fundamentalist islamic states everywhere. The West wants pluralistic, open societies.
Okay, then I'll ask, why does the West want "pluralistic, open societies"? Why not let the citizens of a given country determine what they want? If fundamentalist Islamic states really aren't that great, wouldn't it be better to let the people in a given country realize that, by simply working on making one's *own* non-fundamentalist country an example of a really great place to live, rather than trying to force other people to a particular world view? I mean, even if you're right, people tend to heavily resist being *made* to do something. One of the reasons that people dislike the US so heavily is because the US has its fingers in the politics of so many other countries where it really doesn't have a lot of justification being.
The original justification the US used that I can think of for global justification is in the anti-communism issue. Regardless of whether the US made a good decision, there was still *some* reason -- there was a significant mindset that for communism to work, a fully global revolution was required. As a result, the US worried that communist nations would try to produce US-based communist uprisings in the short term (note that we were in the same position, afraid of meddling, that other countries are now). With the claimed justification (rightly or not) of self-defense, the US started working hard to block the advance of communism and ensure that communist regimes failed.
However, there is no such justification for preventing Islamic fundamentalist states from existing. Said fundamentalist states do not have a particular reason for trying to cause a revolution in the United States (unless they are being threatened by the United States). Why does Al Quaeda have issues with the United States and Iraq? Iraq because the nation is heavily Islamic, but the regime forces a heavily secular government, and the United States (because of a lot of reasons, and I'm sure there are some that I'm unaware of, but a major one that the US tends to pursue opposing fundamentalist Islamic states, that there is a perception that the US does not respect Islamic values). Consider this report, or this. Given that these sorts of efforts, based on history, seem much likely to produce a long-term solution than invading countries, why are we putting so vastly much less effort into non-combat solutions?
That doesn't mean that "I'll be nice to you" policies always result in another person being nice back -- but it requires a fair amount of *something* to produce global networks of people who are willing to give their lives to hurt you.
If you're right, that Microsoft's system involves cryptographic signatures on a per-email-address-level, and the protocol is open, I am deeply impressed. Microsoft would be from a technical standoint far ahead of the SPF crowd (who are pushing an ugly, nasty-side-effect hack if I've ever seen one).
Microsoft may actually produce something that benefits the community as a whole. Seems incredible, but...wow, if we owe having a *good* email infrastructure to Microsoft, the world will be standing on its head.
Anyone have a link to a good technical description of Microsoft's proposed system?
It'd also be nice of upper-management to get off their anti-microsoft band-wagon and let us start using.NET, but that's another story.
That's gotta be an unusual situation.
I personally, without experience in the internal custom development market, would still tend to lean towards Java. From what I've heard, Java doesn't have any *huge* lacks compared to.NET, and it does make it rather easier to move to non-MS software.
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The web sites were not advertising that they were doing it, as I read the article. They contained content that catered to cannibalistic and necrophiliac fetishists.
First, catering to a fetish is not uncommon. S&M is a lighter form of roleplaying rape. Rape is decidedly illegal (well, in at least the United States and the UK). However, catering to fetishes associated with an action that is criminal is not.
Let's see. There are a number of movies that contain people (including the good guys) commiting acts of violence and disregard for human life that would be decidedly illegal all over the place. Should web sites containing information about action films be illegal?
Hell, the best thing to come out of the UK has to be Monty Python, and they have a bunch of lunatics running around murdering people. Do you feel it necessary to censor that? People *have* claimed that violence in media leads to violence, just as this official is claiming that content relating to crimes causes crimes.
I personally don't feel that there is a significant cause-and-effect, or there'd be a lot of people killed from little kids growing up after watching Westerns and playing with tin soldiers.
And he got a Funny mod. Because he played off a famous quote. How is that inappropriate?
I rather liked it.
The approach that I'd like to see is twofold.
First, the official involved pretty much grabbed a "this porn causes people to commit crimes" principle out of the air. I'm very dubious that his personal opinion (and one that isn't currently mine) should be weighty enough to merit instituting censorship.
Second, I don't understand why the official can't do the standard thing that I'd like to see pro-censorship advocates do. If the official really thinks that porn of a particular variety is bad, why doesn't he, instead of simply suppressing it, explain his reasoning. If he really is (a) correct in his reasoning and (b) the value systems of others are similar to his own (and I don't think that he should be trying to govern their actions if his are different from the masses), then his explanation should institute a similar opinion in others, and "innoculate" them against the cannibalistic necrophilia meme.
Consider what the official has claimed. Images of porn cause criminality. That's a pretty severe allegation. He's claiming not just correlation (which would seem quite reasonable to me) but causality, which doesn't seem reasonable at all.
If the official really thinks that images are so influential, why do the English have James Bond? He frequently endangers others recklessly, destroys property, ignores military and government authority, etc. I don't see the mass of Britons running out and trying to blow up ships.
Heck, video games are plausibly even more influential -- you take *on the role* of someone. How many FPSes are there where you take out a gun and start shooting people? Most of 'em. You don't follow police rules for requirements on when to shoot, you simply try to end lives, frequently of almost anything that moves. Why aren't there masses of shootings in Britain if violent video games, so apparently much more influential, have failed to convince people to commit murder? Is it because the censors have made the blood in the games green? Is it because images really *don't* affect people to the degree that the British official assumed?
I personally feel that if there's someone with a necrophilia and cannibalism fetish, but that they recognize it and can have said fetish without running out and engaging in it (and there are a hell of a lot of fetishes and fantasies out there that don't get followed up on, like making love to a actress or whatnot), there doesn't seem to be much reason to try to force them underground.
Remember when the British thought that homosexuality was awful, deviant sexual behavior that needed to be corrected? Turing (a major player in *saving* many British asses from death, and a person that is now considered a pretty wronged great man) had his security clearance revoked, was forced to take hormone injections and modify his behavior, and was eventually driven to suicide.
People that buy peppy sports cars cause a *hell* of a lot more deaths each year than people that have cannibalism fetishes. Should peppy sports cars be banned in favor of station wagons? More human lives would be saved, and that's the only really convincing factor that I can think of.
I wouldn't oppose Flash navigation on a media-rich site
:-)
Umm. By definition, if a site is loaded with Flash, it's media-rich.
I just can't really see Flash being a benefit. Folks thought that it was useful back when it was novel -- ("Look, the web page makes sounds when I click!"). We've gone through this same "novel" phones so many times on the web that it's depressing. When music came out, everyone had to put music on their personal pages, and at first it was kind of cute. Then it got really annoying. Even before that, there was GIF animation. I remember the first time that I saw GIF89a animation. I was enthralled. Here's a copy of this newish Netscape Navigator program and *stuff moves on the screen*. Surprise, a year later, with way too many sites using animated GIFs, I never wanted to see them again (and fortunately, my browser lets me disable their animation).
Flash is the same thing. It only interests anyone because it's novel. There just aren't any good justifications for using it.
Actually, no. I believe I've used effectively once before. There was a new MP3 player of some sort out, and you could use an embedded Flash file to try out the interface and see what you liked. That was actually a useful thing.
Aside from that, Flash on webpages is useless.
Flash still has some merit for standalone video, as there are no other good vector animation formats (SVG is just plain not designed for animation).
Marketers attempt to help a company get their message across to those who would be interested in their product.
Yes. However, marketers also have little interest in the case of targetting people who are *not* interested in said products.
In the case of the Web, frequently marketer performance is measured by hits. Thus, marketers have incentive to mis-direct users to their site even if those users are not interested in a product.
Marketers are not in the business of simply informing people about a product. You absolutely do not need a whole department to manage that -- it's quite easy. Most marketing is designed to exploit human irrationality and quirks in the thought process and preferences to make humans make irrational purchasing decisions.
I don't hate SEOs any more than I hate politicians. Both are placed in a system that we designed that is exploitable. We screwed up, and the burden of fixing the system to not be exploitable lies on us -- come up with a better search engine, suggest some way to prevent people from mucking with results.
However, SEOs cause me about as much unhappiness and discomfort as email spammers do, so I'd hardly shed a tear if they all went out of business, say.
I've had excellent luck using Google's ads for one thing -- when I'm looking for a retailer to buy something. Not infrequently when trying to buy something, I come up with plenty of garbage and irrelevant results, but the paid advertisements are there because the people are trying to sell me what I want (and they are interested in not wasting impressions on people that *aren't* interested in their product, so they have a positive incentive to focus their ads).
"Evil" is meaningless.
It's clearly in search engine spammers' benefit to do so (much like email spammers).
It also clearly disadvantages users, since PageRank is a pretty good metric (outside of people trying to game the system) of usefulness.
You clearly have some interest in discussing SEO. The parent has some interest in discussing thwarting SEO. I'd that that the second subject has at least as much merit (as in, it benefits a large group of people a good deal), and is certainly equally interesting.
Now, it's true that simply eliminating SEO-using sites may not be worthwhile -- it's possible that some SEO-using sites have merit, and over-penalization is possible.
Increasing the difficulty of SEO analysis is interesting. A couple of other interesting possibilities:
* It might be interesting to try to specifically identify users trying to "game the system" and start feeding them slightly shuffled results. As long as the shuffling isn't too heavy, it even false positives with this shouldn't be too painful.
* It might be interesting to try to identify sites attempting to utilize SEO and penalize them. Frankly, the kind of sites that use SEO are generally the sort of thing that I *don't* want to find.
* Not quite as nice, but it might be interesting to try to identify clouds of SEO sites. For example, Google seeds an inverse trust network by posting to an SEO site (and posing as an SEO) a particularly complex approach to SEO. A site implementents it, and it is immediately a "known using SEO" site. Google tries to identify sites that are "related to" it a la PageRank and looks for sites that adopt similar measures, considering them to be SEO-ized sites with a somewhat smaller probability.
It *is* a flame, but the criticism in it is legitimate. These people are clearly targeting SEO (search engine optimizers/spammers), based on pretty clear words in their article.
Besides, why would a legitimate researcher care about word density in Google? It's just not interesting research -- you're analysing an algorithm that you know nothing of. It'd be much better to make your own research search engine and analyze *its* results, and get something useful, interesting, and possibly publishable.
That being said, ultimately the flaw is with Google/Yahoo. They are exploitable (even if it's hard to pull off), and money can be made by people without risk. These guys are looking for data to build attacks. The fact that their attacks screw over a lot of other people sucks, but there you have it.
GNOME's pager hides if the GNOME bar is set to hide. I'm sure there are WMs with a hideable option explicitly added.
Note that there's nothing wrong with going to a data recovery firm, even if you're a knowledgeable techie. Data recovery companies are not the computer shop on the corner -- they have cleanrooms and sets of replacement parts for every drive you can think of. They can disassemble your drive and swap in a new mechanism.
Note that simple on-site backups are worth it. Data recovery can run up into the thousands of dollars, a backup hard drive (even just mirroring your crucial files) costs $100, and you are *sure* to have your hard drive fail at some point, quite possibly without enough warning to recover your files.
MS DOS 6 lacked widespread network access. All Microsoft has to do is make Windows Update provide the latest virus definitions.
You think that it won't be worth it for Microsoft to provide AV service for free? I'll bet it will. All the people pirating Windows will be lacking AV service then...at some point, Microsft is bound to start blocking Windows Update service to pirated copies of Windows.
The submitter is both a troll and uninformed.
Aside from the inflamatory formatting of the text, AMD and Intel almost certainly cross-license their patents, as is par for most big technology companies. It's just the only way to operate today. AMD swipes Intel improvements, and Intel swipes AMD improvements. Why do you think the two are so similar in performance?
Finally, "stealing" an instruction set is ridiculous. For Chrissake, an instruction set gives you very little. If AMD couldn't have "stolen" the IA32 instruction set in the first place, they would never have gotten off the ground in the consumer CPU market, since they would have had an incompatible CPU. That's akin to getting a program that can read another program's file format and claiming that the second program "merely follows in the first's footsteps".
Heck, I'm sure Intel has done some things that they shouldn't be proud about, but it damn well is not being compatible with AMD's instruction set or "jacking clock rates to fool potential AMD customers".
Copyrights don't have to be registered. At one point, you had to put a copyright notice on anything you were copyrighting, but for a number of years, that has been inactive and copyright has been automatic on anything you produce.
Of course, since 1930 or so, nothing has expired under copyright due to copyright being repeatedly extended, so that basically means that all content produced for the last seventy years cannot be freely reused.
Wow, wearing a tin-foil hat *does* have a practical benefit in today's society. :-)
Seriously, I wonder what clothing does contain seignificant amounts of metal -- enough to muck with RFID.
Excuse me, but why would they put RFID tags on items like medicines and then design bags to block them from the view of the RFID system? Why not, uh...just not tag them in the first place?
Hi. My name is Bob. I'd like to see Jane my new invention, Product A. Jane is provided innumerable benefits by using Product A.
Wow, that was quite profitable. However, it turns out that Product A, when used by Jane, causes Sarah a number of problems. There really isn't any problem here -- I can just sell *Sarah* Product B, a system that cancels out the effect of Product A.
Now, admittedly, neither Sarah *nor* Jane benefit in the end. However, by Bob's manipulation of the game, Sarah and Jane both paid Bob, and Bob is richer. Pretty good deal for Bob, eh?
Note that virus scanners are quite useful on Linux as well. I use ClamAV, and am pleased with it.
:-)
Why?
Because I get eight bazillion Windows-oriented viruses in my inbox each day. I use SpamAssassin on my machine, which does a great job of blowing away actual *spam*, but short of blocking anything with Microsoft attachments, isn't that great at blocking worms.
If you use ClamAV *and* SpamAssassin on each email that comes in, however, and dump all inbound worm emails into a box called "virus" or similar, you can avoid all the worms you get *and* all the spam you get.
Actually, I'm quite peeved that one of my inbox providers started filtering out viruses, since it means that ClamAV can't get a positive on that email as a virus and dump it in the "virus" bin.
In Apple's case, it actually hurt them, since it tended to drive away all the vendors (who happily relocated to Windows). Apple stopped developing their solution once they were happy with how well it worked, and the developers kept advancing.
I mean, I can't even count how many utilities this happened with. I can't think of a really good solution for Apple, though...
I do have to say that including a virus scanner with the OS makes more sense than almost anything else being bundled. It helps patch security holes. It makes it a bitch and a half to pirate Windows (sure, you can pirate it, but you damn well aren't getting any antivirus service -- have fun when the next wave of worms rolls around). It helps Microsoft look good -- instead of Symantec advisories coming out saying "Windows has another worm coming out, buy our AV product", Microsoft says "There was a worm released and we squashed it. Just hit Windows Update."
I'm sure that this thing can be abused and whatnot, but Microsoft could seriously get a lot of mileage out of AV software.
Note that it *is* going to be fun if MS ever fires off false positives, though -- every Windows box on Earth starts going spastic over some innocent package.
This is the second time today that I've felt that Microsoft is doing, if not the "right" thing, something better than their competitors. The world is standing on end.
Thanks for the link -- much appreciated and read.
.doc format. Well, here's my take. The MS solution doesn't provide, as the top sender assumed, a real PKI-based solution, which is what really excited me. That would ultimately solve a lot of problems in a much better fashion.
Sigh. Trust Microsoft to release their techncial information in
The Microsoft solution is not actually very different than SPF. It aims at doing pretty much the same thing -- identifying outbound mail servers for a domain in DNS, and disallowing mail from any mail servers that are not listed in DNS. I *still* feel that this approach is a hack and is going to have undesireable long-term effects.
There are some things to be said for the Microsoft approach, though. It seems to be basically a "better SPF". They considered a number of implementation issues that I was upset over in SPF. They talk about DNS caching and security implications of DNS as a transport mechanism. They address server migration, and provide an attempt at dealing with multiple apparent identities -- one that I feel isn't really sufficient, but which Microsft, being Microsoft, might manage to pull off through control of Outlook.
Having read the SPF proposal and the Microsoft proposal, I do think that the Microsoft work is a lot more mature and builds on SPF, and is a better overall solution.
If one of the two must be implemented in the short term, I would prefer Microsoft's work.
I still think that Microsoft's Caller ID is still vulnerable to a number of SPF holes (such as throwaway domains). I am more than a little irritated, since Microsoft is really the only single player capable of promoting a PKI scheme (given that they control a major mail server and the major mail client). Furthermore, migrating to a PKI-based system would provide reasons to upgrade to new versions of Microsoft software -- pushing PKI makes excellent business sense for Microsoft. My guess is that Microsoft needed a solution *now*, given that they were facing SPF deployment, and wanted to fix some of SPF's problems rather than gambling on a full retrofit of the email system.
On a more fundamental - or fundamentalist - level, we have two conflicting world views.
Hmm. I'm not so sure that they need to be in conflict.
bin-laden wants fundamentalist islamic states everywhere. The West wants pluralistic, open societies.
Okay, then I'll ask, why does the West want
"pluralistic, open societies"? Why not let the citizens of a given country determine what they want? If fundamentalist Islamic states really aren't that great, wouldn't it be better to let the people in a given country realize that, by simply working on making one's *own* non-fundamentalist country an example of a really great place to live, rather than trying to force other people to a particular world view? I mean, even if you're right, people tend to heavily resist being *made* to do something. One of the reasons that people dislike the US so heavily is because the US has its fingers in the politics of so many other countries where it really doesn't have a lot of justification being.
The original justification the US used that I can think of for global justification is in the anti-communism issue. Regardless of whether the US made a good decision, there was still *some* reason -- there was a significant mindset that for communism to work, a fully global revolution was required. As a result, the US worried that communist nations would try to produce US-based communist uprisings in the short term (note that we were in the same position, afraid of meddling, that other countries are now). With the claimed justification (rightly or not) of self-defense, the US started working hard to block the advance of communism and ensure that communist regimes failed.
However, there is no such justification for preventing Islamic fundamentalist states from existing. Said fundamentalist states do not have a particular reason for trying to cause a revolution in the United States (unless they are being threatened by the United States). Why does Al Quaeda have issues with the United States and Iraq? Iraq because the nation is heavily Islamic, but the regime forces a heavily secular government, and the United States (because of a lot of reasons, and I'm sure there are some that I'm unaware of, but a major one that the US tends to pursue opposing fundamentalist Islamic states, that there is a perception that the US does not respect Islamic values). Consider this report, or this. Given that these sorts of efforts, based on history, seem much likely to produce a long-term solution than invading countries, why are we putting so vastly much less effort into non-combat solutions?
That doesn't mean that "I'll be nice to you" policies always result in another person being nice back -- but it requires a fair amount of *something* to produce global networks of people who are willing to give their lives to hurt you.
I like this handtop. It is a good bridge between my ultraportable Averatec Laptop and my Palm PDA.
You, my friend, are a gargoyle in the Stephenson sense of the word.
Naw, that'd be useless too. The screen's tiny, and your hand would cover up whatever you're working on.
The nipple is clearly the way to go for this.
When you can tap on something, throw it across the room, or pee on it, that's when it exists.
I'd be interested in seeing you test Bush Junior's existence.
If you're right, that Microsoft's system involves cryptographic signatures on a per-email-address-level, and the protocol is open, I am deeply impressed. Microsoft would be from a technical standoint far ahead of the SPF crowd (who are pushing an ugly, nasty-side-effect hack if I've ever seen one).
Microsoft may actually produce something that benefits the community as a whole. Seems incredible, but...wow, if we owe having a *good* email infrastructure to Microsoft, the world will be standing on its head.
Anyone have a link to a good technical description of Microsoft's proposed system?
What makes you uncomfortable about the IBM Public License?
It'd also be nice of upper-management to get off their anti-microsoft band-wagon and let us start using .NET, but that's another story.
.NET, and it does make it rather easier to move to non-MS software.
That's gotta be an unusual situation.
I personally, without experience in the internal custom development market, would still tend to lean towards Java. From what I've heard, Java doesn't have any *huge* lacks compared to