* No doctor makes enough (especially in an environment where they don't charge extra to pay for huge insurance premiums) to ignore a quarter of a million dollars. Doctors are not going to sit down and go "well, I'm probably wrong, but I don't really give a crap about this guy's life, and hell, what's $250K anyway?" The dissuasive factor of a lawsuit is still there.
* It's hard to put a price on, say, the loss of a limb. However, ultimately, someone has to bear the blame. Before medical science, you would have just been screwed. Now, you can sometimes be helped when you have severe medical problems. Sometimes practitioners make mistakes, and you are injured in care. The question is whether the doctors should do it, or you should do it. Frankly, if "the doctors do it" is your answer, it translates to "everyone else does it" via malpractice insurance, which is a phenomenally inefficient process and blows away even more money. All you do is increase my medical costs to try to fund some other guy who's crabby that his doctor isn't perfect.
Medical care is just ridiculous these days. People should be able to go in to a doctor, get the help that the doctor can give (which, by golly, is not going to be perfect) and pay a sane price for their care. And folks accept the (existant, though small) risk that they will be hurt in meidcal care. I can have a tree fall over on me, have a car hit me, get horribly injured by a falling power line, be wounded by a stray bullet or crippled in a climbing accident, whatever. The chances of me getting a wrong limb amputated by a doctor simply *pales* in comparison to the other things that just plain can happen to you in the world at large. And yet I blow a huge amount of money on any medical visits, because of the vast awards granted people firing off lawsuits.
I miss the good old "sometimes life serves you lemons" bit. Sometimes, bad things can happen. Society is willing to terribly disadvantage everyone to try to eliminate the last little bit of people who got the sharp end of the stick. It's just silly.
Then you have the fact that the review committees in every case are made up of doctors and professionals,
That is utterly absurd. Do you trying to imply that doctors will falsify findings because someone who is *also* a doctor might be negatively impacted? Bullshit. If I find a computer programmer who is doing a lousy job and in the process screwing someone over, I'll be the first to bring up criticisms. Heck, if anything, it's even more annoying, because you *know* what the person should be doing.
Doctors are not some kind of Freemason secret society out to cover each other's asses any more than any other profession is -- that is, not at all.
I know a *lot* of bozos in the technology field. They make enough money that they don't care if they give bad advice or do a crummy job. As a matter of fact, only a very small percentage of the computer people I know really know what they're talking about.
Should they be regularly sued for millions of dollars? Oh, I know it won't happen -- it's easy to sell "emotional issues" like a pregnant mother to juries, and much harder to sell a critical database and backups blown beyond repair. But what if it did?
$150K/year minus those charges is rich to most of us.
Keep in mind:
(a) About a third to half that goes to malpractice insurance, according to the post. I'll believe it. Say that cuts it down to $70K to $100K
(b) Now consider that the person mentioned there is working over 1.5 times a normal 40 hr workweek. Cut that down $45K to $65K.
(c) I have no idea what the benefits cost, though I know that they're quite pricy given that one doesn't get to do group negotiation. Let's assume $500/mo, which is probably extremely conservative. That's another $6K off of it...now we're looking at $39K to $59K.
(d) Then consider the fact that they are going to be hammered on taxes.
(e) Remember that they had to get their doctorate, do residency, etc. They weren't making a hell of a lot of money all that time. That's years of income (income *early in their lives*) that they couldn't get and earn interest on.
(f) Medical school isn't cheap. A medical doctor is likely to enter his profession with hefty student loans and the associated interest to pay off. That's years of loan payments.
Finally, consider the fact that they are not doing a particularly easy job. They're working in an extremely stressful field (I'm sure all of us feel like that, but how often do you hold someone's life in shaking fingers while their entire family waits outside and their grandmother is tearing her hair out in agony?) They can face horrific lawsuits that can end their career for the slightest slip-up. Many doctors are on-call a huge chunk of the time. A doctor generally needs to spend a not insignificant amount of time reading up on their field to keep up with the latest medicines, cures, discovieries, etc. (Admittedly, the tech field is probably in this one aspect, but most areas are not.)
And in exchange, people say that, yes, all that is awful, but that they "get to help people", which nicely assuages their sense of guilt (this ideology helps will refusing to vote for wage increases for public school teachers as well). If you want to find for unethical, wealthy fat cats, look among executives, look among lawyers, look among investment bankers, because you're going to have much healthier pickings than among doctors. The sort of people that become doctors aren't doing it because they're lazy and like taking the path of least resistance -- it's fucking hard to become a doctor. They aren't doing it because they're stupid.
I'm darn glad I'm not a doctor. They have a tough job to do, they catch flak from a ton of people, and they get complained at by all the aging (and, surprise, *less healthy than they used to be) baby boomers. They get people griping about their poor insight or mistake-making, but if they go all-out to try to cure some poor sod that got himself chewed up something awful, how often does a family bring them a plate of cookies or something? Heck, our *postman* regularly eats lunch with the family down the street when he comes by -- the ever-so-much-more-personal doctor gets shunted into the background. No, I'm just thankful that I'm well clear of the whole mess, and get to work in the much more friendly technology field.
I expect doctors to occasionally perform wrong procedures. That's just life. You can have a double- and triple- check as part of your procedure, but as long as you have a human doing this day and and day out all their lifes, they are going to make mistakes. I doubt that there is a single doctor out there that has worked their entire professional life and never made a single mistake, be it cutting too far in a surgery or misdiagnosing something that they *had* read about before, or confusing medical information between two patients. Oh, you may not *hear* about it, because the consequences of a doctor saying "I cut too far during the surgery and there may be additional scar tissue" are dire, but that doesn't mean that mistakes aren't there.
People of all professions make mistakes. Carpenters screw up. Teachers screw up. Butchers screw up. Even life-critical professions, like policemen and firemen screw up. Yes, you can do what you can to minimize it, but you have to be realistice. People are going to make mistakes. I make mistakes when I write software. I test my work and try to avoid it. I try to design it intelligently. Heck, I have a wonderful system -- it's clean and digital, I can test, I have phenomenal tools to analyze my work...and yet, mistakes still sometimes slip through. You can say "but in *this* profession, the consquences are so dire that it's *worth* it to beat them up for any mistakes", but it just plain isn't realistic. Doctors are going to be careful, but they're also going to have days where their kid wrecked their car late last night and they're sleepy, where they're sick, or where they're going through a messy divorce. The only benefit of having career-ending punishments (as a nasty malpractice suit can be) is if you can maintain a state of such fear in a populace that it will exert itself to a superhuman degree. You can't do that to an entire profession for their entire lives. People just don't do that.
Frankly, in almost all situations, it's better to have an honest and frank appraisal of the situation. I try to recognize that people screw up, and I'd be a lot happier having a doctor telling me that he thinks he might have made a mistake than being terrified of saying anything.
That doesn't mean that what happened to you didn't suck. And it doesn't mean that a doctor shouldn't be *liable* to some degree. It does mean that the climate of "if we ever catch you making a mistake, you're out for life" is simply not healthy.
If the database only returned information about people who have sued and LOST several times, it would have been less of a problem. As it stands, it's a danger to public health.
My guess is that the majority of malpractice suits are settled out-of-court.
That being said, the problem does not come from the doctors (well, it does, but the lion's share of the blame comes from ordinary folks like us). Doctors have insane insurance premiums. Many (ordinary old ones *without* malpractice claims against them) cannot continue practicing -- this is a huge problem in West Virginia, for instance, where doctors are leaving the state because they cannot afford to stay in business any more -- premiums are too high. Why are the insurance premiums so high? It's real simple -- because there's a lot of money flowing out in malpractice suits.
The problem is that our legal system is completely fucking idiotic when it comes to lawsuits. We award *phenomenal* damages in many cases -- malpractice is a big one, or almost anything where "pain and suffering" has a price tag put on it. Other countries don't have the litigous reputation that the US has not because it's so much harder to win cases, but because people filing lawsuits don't *make* the kind of mind-boggling prizes that they do in the US.
This is not a problem unique to the medical profession. It's the reason we have warnings on almost all products (and slathered so liberally that nobody reads them, meaning that safety is lower to people's asses are covered). It's why I have a "Contents may be hot! Sip carefully!" warning staring at me from my disposable coffee cup each morning.
It will take a nation where multimillion dollar lawsuits aren't won over spilling coffee on onesself to restore sanity.
Rolling back changes without atomic commits is a pain in fucking ass. Have you ever had to do it? You have to track down every file that you changed (somehow... hopefully you can remember), check which version was the version prior to your commit, and get all those versions of files. For example "Okay, I need version 1.7 of foo.c and version 1.8 of barf.c and version 1.13 of foo.h." It's totally annoying.
Take a look at the -D flag. You'll be pleased.
I agree that CVS was almost mind-bogglingly crufty. It may be the single most crufty piece of software that I used regularly. Everything about CVS was defined by the way RCS worked, which just didn't make that much sense for a CVS-like environment.
That's because you checked in the binary in text format instead of binary, and the linefeed translation chewed up your binaries when switching between platforms.
This is particularly annoying with text-like formats, like Visual Studio 6's.dsw files -- they look like text files, they smell like text files, and CVS autodetects them as text files, but Visual Studio 6 throws a tantrum if you try to hand it a.dsw file with LF line endings.
Yes...but keep in mind that OS X, the initial release, was a terrible resource hog. I'd go so far as to say that OS X was at least a year away from being completed when released. Apple just needed something other than classic Mac OS ASAP, and was running really late.
I want to see what all the people laughing now are saying in two years or three years, when we see how much memory Nautilus and Konqueror are using, the latest version of X (probably freedesktop.org's release by then, which will likely use more memory), with Mono possibly in use (and perhaps Java as well.
KDE/GNOME/Mac OS X are not particularly svelte when it comes to RAM usage. They are, in fact, rather fat.
You can build a much more peppy Linux desktop -- sure. I use sawfish and gkrellm. It uses a lot less memory, but I'm sure that a lot of people would be dissatisfied with this combination.
All it takes is adding something to the ink that makes it a bit more viscous or a bit less, and then modifying the mechanism to cope.
I'm surprised the Big Inkjet Printer Manufacturers haven't already done so.
When I used a printer, I used a laser that someone had tossed out, which worked nicely.
Now, though, I just plain don't print anything. Everyone likes having things in electronic format, anyway. These days, most things handed to someone on paper just get entered into a computer.
I was startled at the degree of emotion that came across, given the state of the English used. It was almost like those sentences with the jumbled inner letters showing that we use word ends to recognize words. I though that I'd just ignore it as some badly written content and found myself being drawn deeper and deeper.
I dunno...I think World War I was a bit of a shared effort -- there were a *lot* of nations too read to go to war -- and much of World War II came from World War I fallout.
Germany gets a bad rap for the World War involvement because it lost both.
And remember that Japan is a startlingly peaceful nation today...and remember Japan's history. Past wars do not dictate the current climate of a nation.
However, it'd be a tough argument to say that these apps were already broken. I'm unaware of anything in Win32 or Windows specs that says that an executable stack may not be assumed. For a couple of types of application (like interpreters) it makes a lot of sense.
Ultimately, it would be best if C simply wasn't such a broadly used application language.
I was guessing that this was execution-blocked stacks, but couldn't be sure from the description.
This is good news.
OpenBSD, Fedora Core 1 (and presumably above), and now Windows XP SP2 and above all block stack execution. It's definitely a positive move from a security standpoint.
In most cases, it's probably a better idea to use PDF than DOC if you're intending to distribute a document. This avoids problems of having copies modified, avoids viruses, avoids folks having to have the same fonts and version of Word you do, and avoids potential exposure of internal data.
The only time you'd want to use DOC is if you were trying to hand out a document that you wanted people to modify and hand back.
Re:Attention Bill Gates
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
While incindiary, this template has an enormous amount of cluefulness involved in its production. Where did it originate?
Damn, I'd hate to work at a company where the admins took this stance.
If they want to have a user sign something saying the admin isn't responsible for a computer, fine. Most users probably don't care, though I do very much. Trying to use a Windows box without a pager, Cygwin, etc is just painful.
I'm glad Apple remains a contender and a nagging thorn in the sleep of Billy Gates' mind. The fact that Apple is still around and won't go away has to bug him on some level.
To the best of my knowledge, Microsoft does not produce an MP3 player.
Apple and Microsoft compete in application software, OS software, and certain input peripherals. Microsoft is overwhelmingly dominant in each of these markets.
I've posted a patch to the clamav-users mailing list that marks all password-encrypted zip files as suspect and thus can be quarantined for manual extaction and scanning if desired.
Augh. Please don't do this. A lot of folks *use* password-encrypted zip files as the only way to securely exchange information in a world where not everyone uses PGP.
Why do you find it plausible that Microsoft uses an ludicrous blocking algorithm with an exception list including their products, but not that Microsoft uses an inclusion list including "xfree86"?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd back a $250K liability cap in a *second*.
Here's the reasoning.
* No doctor makes enough (especially in an environment where they don't charge extra to pay for huge insurance premiums) to ignore a quarter of a million dollars. Doctors are not going to sit down and go "well, I'm probably wrong, but I don't really give a crap about this guy's life, and hell, what's $250K anyway?" The dissuasive factor of a lawsuit is still there.
* It's hard to put a price on, say, the loss of a limb. However, ultimately, someone has to bear the blame. Before medical science, you would have just been screwed. Now, you can sometimes be helped when you have severe medical problems. Sometimes practitioners make mistakes, and you are injured in care. The question is whether the doctors should do it, or you should do it. Frankly, if "the doctors do it" is your answer, it translates to "everyone else does it" via malpractice insurance, which is a phenomenally inefficient process and blows away even more money. All you do is increase my medical costs to try to fund some other guy who's crabby that his doctor isn't perfect.
Medical care is just ridiculous these days. People should be able to go in to a doctor, get the help that the doctor can give (which, by golly, is not going to be perfect) and pay a sane price for their care. And folks accept the (existant, though small) risk that they will be hurt in meidcal care. I can have a tree fall over on me, have a car hit me, get horribly injured by a falling power line, be wounded by a stray bullet or crippled in a climbing accident, whatever. The chances of me getting a wrong limb amputated by a doctor simply *pales* in comparison to the other things that just plain can happen to you in the world at large. And yet I blow a huge amount of money on any medical visits, because of the vast awards granted people firing off lawsuits.
I miss the good old "sometimes life serves you lemons" bit. Sometimes, bad things can happen. Society is willing to terribly disadvantage everyone to try to eliminate the last little bit of people who got the sharp end of the stick. It's just silly.
Know what she got for near permanent damage to her sight? $8k.
So it was permanent or it wasn't?
Then you have the fact that the review committees in every case are made up of doctors and professionals,
That is utterly absurd. Do you trying to imply that doctors will falsify findings because someone who is *also* a doctor might be negatively impacted? Bullshit. If I find a computer programmer who is doing a lousy job and in the process screwing someone over, I'll be the first to bring up criticisms. Heck, if anything, it's even more annoying, because you *know* what the person should be doing.
Doctors are not some kind of Freemason secret society out to cover each other's asses any more than any other profession is -- that is, not at all.
I know a *lot* of bozos in the technology field. They make enough money that they don't care if they give bad advice or do a crummy job. As a matter of fact, only a very small percentage of the computer people I know really know what they're talking about.
Should they be regularly sued for millions of dollars? Oh, I know it won't happen -- it's easy to sell "emotional issues" like a pregnant mother to juries, and much harder to sell a critical database and backups blown beyond repair. But what if it did?
$150K/year minus those charges is rich to most of us.
Keep in mind:
(a) About a third to half that goes to malpractice insurance, according to the post. I'll believe it. Say that cuts it down to $70K to $100K
(b) Now consider that the person mentioned there is working over 1.5 times a normal 40 hr workweek. Cut that down $45K to $65K.
(c) I have no idea what the benefits cost, though I know that they're quite pricy given that one doesn't get to do group negotiation. Let's assume $500/mo, which is probably extremely conservative. That's another $6K off of it...now we're looking at $39K to $59K.
(d) Then consider the fact that they are going to be hammered on taxes.
(e) Remember that they had to get their doctorate, do residency, etc. They weren't making a hell of a lot of money all that time. That's years of income (income *early in their lives*) that they couldn't get and earn interest on.
(f) Medical school isn't cheap. A medical doctor is likely to enter his profession with hefty student loans and the associated interest to pay off. That's years of loan payments.
Finally, consider the fact that they are not doing a particularly easy job. They're working in an extremely stressful field (I'm sure all of us feel like that, but how often do you hold someone's life in shaking fingers while their entire family waits outside and their grandmother is tearing her hair out in agony?) They can face horrific lawsuits that can end their career for the slightest slip-up. Many doctors are on-call a huge chunk of the time. A doctor generally needs to spend a not insignificant amount of time reading up on their field to keep up with the latest medicines, cures, discovieries, etc. (Admittedly, the tech field is probably in this one aspect, but most areas are not.)
And in exchange, people say that, yes, all that is awful, but that they "get to help people", which nicely assuages their sense of guilt (this ideology helps will refusing to vote for wage increases for public school teachers as well). If you want to find for unethical, wealthy fat cats, look among executives, look among lawyers, look among investment bankers, because you're going to have much healthier pickings than among doctors. The sort of people that become doctors aren't doing it because they're lazy and like taking the path of least resistance -- it's fucking hard to become a doctor. They aren't doing it because they're stupid.
I'm darn glad I'm not a doctor. They have a tough job to do, they catch flak from a ton of people, and they get complained at by all the aging (and, surprise, *less healthy than they used to be) baby boomers. They get people griping about their poor insight or mistake-making, but if they go all-out to try to cure some poor sod that got himself chewed up something awful, how often does a family bring them a plate of cookies or something? Heck, our *postman* regularly eats lunch with the family down the street when he comes by -- the ever-so-much-more-personal doctor gets shunted into the background. No, I'm just thankful that I'm well clear of the whole mess, and get to work in the much more friendly technology field.
"I am a green-haird Martian who likes Pink Floyd and lives in Nevada."
There do not have to be any others like me.
I expect doctors to occasionally perform wrong procedures. That's just life. You can have a double- and triple- check as part of your procedure, but as long as you have a human doing this day and and day out all their lifes, they are going to make mistakes. I doubt that there is a single doctor out there that has worked their entire professional life and never made a single mistake, be it cutting too far in a surgery or misdiagnosing something that they *had* read about before, or confusing medical information between two patients. Oh, you may not *hear* about it, because the consequences of a doctor saying "I cut too far during the surgery and there may be additional scar tissue" are dire, but that doesn't mean that mistakes aren't there.
People of all professions make mistakes. Carpenters screw up. Teachers screw up. Butchers screw up. Even life-critical professions, like policemen and firemen screw up. Yes, you can do what you can to minimize it, but you have to be realistice. People are going to make mistakes. I make mistakes when I write software. I test my work and try to avoid it. I try to design it intelligently. Heck, I have a wonderful system -- it's clean and digital, I can test, I have phenomenal tools to analyze my work...and yet, mistakes still sometimes slip through. You can say "but in *this* profession, the consquences are so dire that it's *worth* it to beat them up for any mistakes", but it just plain isn't realistic. Doctors are going to be careful, but they're also going to have days where their kid wrecked their car late last night and they're sleepy, where they're sick, or where they're going through a messy divorce. The only benefit of having career-ending punishments (as a nasty malpractice suit can be) is if you can maintain a state of such fear in a populace that it will exert itself to a superhuman degree. You can't do that to an entire profession for their entire lives. People just don't do that.
Frankly, in almost all situations, it's better to have an honest and frank appraisal of the situation. I try to recognize that people screw up, and I'd be a lot happier having a doctor telling me that he thinks he might have made a mistake than being terrified of saying anything.
That doesn't mean that what happened to you didn't suck. And it doesn't mean that a doctor shouldn't be *liable* to some degree. It does mean that the climate of "if we ever catch you making a mistake, you're out for life" is simply not healthy.
If the database only returned information about people who have sued and LOST several times, it would have been less of a problem. As it stands, it's a danger to public health.
My guess is that the majority of malpractice suits are settled out-of-court.
That being said, the problem does not come from the doctors (well, it does, but the lion's share of the blame comes from ordinary folks like us). Doctors have insane insurance premiums. Many (ordinary old ones *without* malpractice claims against them) cannot continue practicing -- this is a huge problem in West Virginia, for instance, where doctors are leaving the state because they cannot afford to stay in business any more -- premiums are too high. Why are the insurance premiums so high? It's real simple -- because there's a lot of money flowing out in malpractice suits.
The problem is that our legal system is completely fucking idiotic when it comes to lawsuits. We award *phenomenal* damages in many cases -- malpractice is a big one, or almost anything where "pain and suffering" has a price tag put on it. Other countries don't have the litigous reputation that the US has not because it's so much harder to win cases, but because people filing lawsuits don't *make* the kind of mind-boggling prizes that they do in the US.
This is not a problem unique to the medical profession. It's the reason we have warnings on almost all products (and slathered so liberally that nobody reads them, meaning that safety is lower to people's asses are covered). It's why I have a "Contents may be hot! Sip carefully!" warning staring at me from my disposable coffee cup each morning.
It will take a nation where multimillion dollar lawsuits aren't won over spilling coffee on onesself to restore sanity.
Rolling back changes without atomic commits is a pain in fucking ass. Have you ever had to do it? You have to track down every file that you changed (somehow... hopefully you can remember), check which version was the version prior to your commit, and get all those versions of files. For example "Okay, I need version 1.7 of foo.c and version 1.8 of barf.c and version 1.13 of foo.h." It's totally annoying.
Take a look at the -D flag. You'll be pleased.
I agree that CVS was almost mind-bogglingly crufty. It may be the single most crufty piece of software that I used regularly. Everything about CVS was defined by the way RCS worked, which just didn't make that much sense for a CVS-like environment.
That's because you checked in the binary in text format instead of binary, and the linefeed translation chewed up your binaries when switching between platforms.
.dsw files -- they look like text files, they smell like text files, and CVS autodetects them as text files, but Visual Studio 6 throws a tantrum if you try to hand it a .dsw file with LF line endings.
This is particularly annoying with text-like formats, like Visual Studio 6's
Yes...but keep in mind that OS X, the initial release, was a terrible resource hog. I'd go so far as to say that OS X was at least a year away from being completed when released. Apple just needed something other than classic Mac OS ASAP, and was running really late.
I want to see what all the people laughing now are saying in two years or three years, when we see how much memory Nautilus and Konqueror are using, the latest version of X (probably freedesktop.org's release by then, which will likely use more memory), with Mono possibly in use (and perhaps Java as well.
KDE/GNOME/Mac OS X are not particularly svelte when it comes to RAM usage. They are, in fact, rather fat.
You can build a much more peppy Linux desktop -- sure. I use sawfish and gkrellm. It uses a lot less memory, but I'm sure that a lot of people would be dissatisfied with this combination.
4. Consumers are rational.
All it takes is adding something to the ink that makes it a bit more viscous or a bit less, and then modifying the mechanism to cope.
I'm surprised the Big Inkjet Printer Manufacturers haven't already done so.
When I used a printer, I used a laser that someone had tossed out, which worked nicely.
Now, though, I just plain don't print anything. Everyone likes having things in electronic format, anyway. These days, most things handed to someone on paper just get entered into a computer.
Isn't the point of using paintballs instead of bullets to *avoid* the risk of severe physical harm?
I was startled at the degree of emotion that came across, given the state of the English used. It was almost like those sentences with the jumbled inner letters showing that we use word ends to recognize words. I though that I'd just ignore it as some badly written content and found myself being drawn deeper and deeper.
I dunno...I think World War I was a bit of a shared effort -- there were a *lot* of nations too read to go to war -- and much of World War II came from World War I fallout.
Germany gets a bad rap for the World War involvement because it lost both.
And remember that Japan is a startlingly peaceful nation today...and remember Japan's history. Past wars do not dictate the current climate of a nation.
I agree that Microsoft did the right thing here.
However, it'd be a tough argument to say that these apps were already broken. I'm unaware of anything in Win32 or Windows specs that says that an executable stack may not be assumed. For a couple of types of application (like interpreters) it makes a lot of sense.
Ultimately, it would be best if C simply wasn't such a broadly used application language.
I was guessing that this was execution-blocked stacks, but couldn't be sure from the description.
This is good news.
OpenBSD, Fedora Core 1 (and presumably above), and now Windows XP SP2 and above all block stack execution. It's definitely a positive move from a security standpoint.
Why did you even waste time asking?
I mean, were you actually concerned about losing a lawsuit to SCO?
In most cases, it's probably a better idea to use PDF than DOC if you're intending to distribute a document. This avoids problems of having copies modified, avoids viruses, avoids folks having to have the same fonts and version of Word you do, and avoids potential exposure of internal data.
The only time you'd want to use DOC is if you were trying to hand out a document that you wanted people to modify and hand back.
While incindiary, this template has an enormous amount of cluefulness involved in its production. Where did it originate?
Damn, I'd hate to work at a company where the admins took this stance.
If they want to have a user sign something saying the admin isn't responsible for a computer, fine. Most users probably don't care, though I do very much. Trying to use a Windows box without a pager, Cygwin, etc is just painful.
I'm glad Apple remains a contender and a nagging thorn in the sleep of Billy Gates' mind. The fact that Apple is still around and won't go away has to bug him on some level.
To the best of my knowledge, Microsoft does not produce an MP3 player.
Apple and Microsoft compete in application software, OS software, and certain input peripherals. Microsoft is overwhelmingly dominant in each of these markets.
I've posted a patch to the clamav-users mailing list that marks all password-encrypted zip files as suspect and thus can be quarantined for manual extaction and scanning if desired.
Augh. Please don't do this. A lot of folks *use* password-encrypted zip files as the only way to securely exchange information in a world where not everyone uses PGP.
Why do you find it plausible that Microsoft uses an ludicrous blocking algorithm with an exception list including their products, but not that Microsoft uses an inclusion list including "xfree86"?