And, FWIW, I ran AdAware on my machine right after installing the latest Realplayer. No spyware installed either as far as I can tell.
You do realize that the AdAware engine is not psychic, right? Nor does it use a heuristic to identify mal-ware.
AdAware -- much like a virus checker --, identifies Trojans and ad-ware by "signature", some array of bytes unique to the annoyance in question. Until somebody examines a program, decides it is mal-ware, extracts that program';s signature and adds it to AdAware's signature database, Ad-ware doesn't "know" about it.
For all we know, Realplayer installs -- or is itself -- mal-ware, but no one from Ad-ware has gotten around to labelling it as such. After all, RealPlayer Ten is rather new.
And people can legitimately disagree about what is ad-ware: surely RealPlayer has claimed that all its versions of Realplayer did nothing illegitimate, as RealPlayer maintained that it wasn't popping up ads, but "informative messages", and that phoning home uniquely identifying information about its users was a positive benefit for those users.
Don't misunderstand me: AdAWare is a useful product, but it's no panacea and it -- like a virus scanner -- will unavoidably always be a bit out of date. In the case of RealPlayer, I'd trust RealPlayer's track-record of untrustworthiness.
While I personally am downloading their new software to see if they have learned their lesson, I can hardly fault others for writing this off as too little, too late.
While I admire the parent poster's fair-mindedness in giving Real another chance, I can't advise anyone else to emulate Saucepan (12098).
Why can I not? Because several versions of RealPlayer ago, I recall that Real has also claimed that they'd realized their mistakes and that their then-current version wasn't full of annoyances and spy-ware. So, trying, like the parent poster to be impartial and fair-minded, I installed that version -- only to discover that it hid anti-privacy settings deep in its settings UI, and that it attempted to phone home regardless of those settings, and that it hijacked extensions and ran unnecessary processes and in general was ill-behaved.
And on actually using it, I found that its main UI gave over as much screen real (no pun intended) estate to advertisements as to whatever I was playing, and that it wouldn't start without bombarding me with ads, and that when I actually did play any media with it, the playback quality was abysmal compared to its competitors. Oh, and.... BUFFERING.....
Real has claimed once too often that it has corrected its excesses for me to spend another half-hour installing it, and another week uninstalling it and resetting all the various settings it mucks with to status quo ante.
With apologies for invoking Godwin's Law, I've just finished reading William L. Shirer's The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940, in which he recounts reporting on Nazi Germany first for the Chicago Tribune and later for CBS Radio (in fact, Shirer and colleague Edward R. Murrow pretty much pioneered the format used by radio and TV news to this day, of having an "anchor" in one place with correspondents reporting in from the field).
Naturally, Shirer recounts, as does any history of that period, Adolf Hitler's various speeches, in each of which Hitler would claim his latest territorial demand would be his last: first he wanted nothing more than the Rhineland, then his claims ended with the Austria Anschluss, then absorbing the Sudetenland would settle his claims, then Danzig (Gdansk) and the Corridor, etc., etc. In each speech, Hitler would claim he was working for peace -- and that it could be attained by granting his latest -- and, he claimed, final -- demand.
Real's actions, while nothing compared to Hitler's of course, do seem to follow the same pattern: we are told that each new version is that last we will need, and that each news version "fixes" Real's anti-social and sneaky behavior. But with each new version, we find that somehow, despite Real's protestations to the contrary, the anti-social behavior remains. I'm sorry, but the little bit of content that can only be played using RealPlayer just isn't worth the aggravation -- or the chagrin of finding, on installing RealPlayer, that I've been tricked once again
Once again, a member of anti-slash.org has poisoned the well by copying a previous post verbatim rather than writing something original, and then he goes and brags about it on the front page of anti-slash.org,
Well, yes, the grandparent article is pointed to by anti-slash.org and attributed to their "db tool", but that article is not in the anti-slash database.
While it's possible it was removed after the parent post's alert, it's also possible that the anti-slash post was a more elaborate troll: earlier this week anti-slash.org nominated one of my posts for modding up, and attributed it to the db tool.
Of course, my post was an original work and didn't come from anti-slash's db or anywhere else -- like Athena from Zeus's, my post sprang full formed from my brow.
My post to anti-slash's forum asking why my post had been incorrectly attributed to the "db tool" wasn't answered.
A (female) friend of mine spends much of her time doing online fantasy RPing, she keeps complaining to me that idiot guys see that she plays as an elf, and [males players proposition her for "virtual sex], now, imagine this in real life....
This won't be a problem in real life. In real life -- no offense to your friend, who I'm sure is quite pulchritudinous -- the vast majority of "girls" who "spend much of [their] time doing online fantasy RPing", and as elf-maidens, no less, are, in fact boys.
That minority of online RPing elf-maidens who are actual women -- as in "born with female genitals" women --, have, trust me -- er, I mean, that is, trust my friend, who told me -- have sat in front on their PCs playing elf-maidens and eating bon-bons and Doritos long enough that -- well, let's just say that traipsing through the Mordor woods in real life would be something of a ponderous challenge for them, with their slab-sided tree-stump-like legs propelling their rotundly jiggling torsos while their bloated red faces were a-huffing and a-puffing.
And I think we can fairly say that that small minority of a minority of online "elf-maidens" who are real women and themselves mobile enough to get into location based mobile gaming will quite literally wear on their faces the reasons they decided to spend their best years of their lives for social interaction, not even going to a Renaissance Fest (the portly girl's best friend) but instead interacting from behind a computer screen; and consequently they will have to endure propositions from only those most desperate of geeks.
By the most desperate geek boys, reeking of tstosterone and despair, I of course mean the men of Slashdot.
But to take any sting out of my comment, and to show that I have only the best wishes at heart for both these rather plain "cyber elf-maidens" and the men of Slashdot who (want to) love them, let me close with a few verses from William S. Gilbert, as set to music by Sir Arthur S.Sullivan:
Oh, is there not one maiden here
Whose homely face and bad complexion
Have caused all hope to disappear
Of ever winning man's affection?
Of such a one, if such there be,
I swear by Heaven's arch above you,
If you will cast your eyes on me,
However plain you be, I'll love you,
However plain you be,
If you will cast your eyes on me,
However plain you be I'll love you,
I'll love you, I'll love, I'll love you!
In addition, they want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever.
With all due respect to Google, and god knows they're one of the few companies that seems to get "it" right, what with uncluttered interfaces, unbiased services, and unobtrusive text ads -- Google also records the IP address along with the search terms of every search.
Anytime you've Googled on "anime tentacle rape", "venereal disease STD symptom", "P2P download", "closeted gay", "arguments for atheism" or "overthrow government", Google has recorded your computer's IP address and has tried to set a cookie in your browser. To Google's credit, the search still works even if you don't accept the cookie; but Google is keeping the IP and search term log -- forever.
After just a few hundred searches, you don't need to be a Kreskin to do a little data-mining and get a good idea of a user's interests, proclivities, and possible "deviancy" from his search terms.
My fear then, is this: will you be the only one who can search through your database of email, "I guess forever"? Or will Google be able to search it too. Or even if they lock themselves out of search or reading your email directly, will Google, as they do now for web searches, keep a log of the searches you make on your own email?
Again, you can tell a lot about someone if you have a list of all his Google searches, but you can probably learn even more and more immediate information if you have a list of his searches through his email.
Remember the "Halloween X" email recently released, from Mike Anderer to SCO about Anderer's attempts to raise money on SCO's behalf? Imagine if Anderer had been searching for that email before -- or after -- the release of the "Halloween X" letter; I suspect you could learn even more juicy details by seeing what search terms he used?
What if Richard Clarke and Condaleeza Rice has stored their emails in Google GMail? Of course, the government wouldn't store email in GMail -- but imagine if the people in analogous positions in your company did -- say the head of security and her deputies? Could Google learn much about your company's financial dealings from the search terms they used to review their mail?
What if you stored and looked for emails regarding your company's Non-Disclosure Agreement or upcoming patent for some new technology? Could a competitor glean import information just from your search terms?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, are you still answering "yes" to wanting to try out GMail for yourself?
It's simple: too much information concentrated into any one set of hands -- even hands as apparently benign as Google's -- invites abuse or -- even if Google never bends to that temptation -- tempts others to steal that data.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Rolodex/Programming tool Hypercard was found dead in it Cupertino, California home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its output, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
SCO is like Vader. What do we do once he's gone. Now granted, SCO is no where near as cool and powerful as Vader but they are our mortal enemy. And we both use a power like the force. Called the net.
And Darl McBride is Linus Torvald's real father?
Richard Stallman is Yoda?
In your SCO-is-Vader cosmology, who's Jar Jar Binks?
Thank you for your karma whore. You like this idea very much. You like PDAs very much. You wish you could tweak your PDA. You think the open nature of Linux would work to the PDA's advantage. Thank you for offering nothing of actual value that will be modded up. Speak in repeated short sentences that ends with a "I hope this is the beginning of..." statement that yet again doesn't actually say anything.
Thank you for finally pointing this out. I like your post very much. We should point out Karma Whores. Like you do. I wish everybody did it. I think the open nature of Slashdot lends itself to this sort of meta-moderation. Even if it's ad hoc meta-moderation. Moderation via comments, not mod points. I hope this is the beginning of a reform of Slashdot. I hope this means we'll se fewer Karma Whores.
Hire a dozen Indians. Have them show up before your colleagues get to work, and sit them in your colleagues' chairs.
Post a large message on the whiteboard/bulletin board: "Accelerated Personnel Replacement Instruction Lessons -- Followed-by Occupational Outsourcing Layoffs"
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - BBC broadcaster and writer/Television host Alistair Cooke was found dead in his New York home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an British icon.
Of course, until very recently -- I'm guessing the last century or two -- many musical instruments were made by their users, or by persons -0 like furniture makers -- who made instruments as a side-line.
Exceptions of course would probably be very large instruments -- church organs, the larger pianos -- and instruments made by dedicated instruments makers first for court musicians and later for professional orchestras.
But outside of royal halls and opera houses relying on noble patronage, popular music was probably produced by musicians who had some hand in making their own instruments. Think of the violin-picker in Appalachia, or the rebec playing sailor drifting down the Volga or the Don* -- or the Mississippi. Consider the lonely Spanish shepherd playing a bladder pipe horn made from one of his former charges -- or an equally lonely Texas cowboy plucking a Jew's harp
* I'm thinking of the Russian Don, but it could as well be the river in England, the river in Scotland, or the river in Canada; the rebec was probably known in each place and was always an instrument of the lower classes. A guide to traditional instruments can be found here.
Given the amount of money spent on CDs -- and the amount of downloading --, it's not hard to see that music is central in some way to the human experience. We've all felt it the lump in the throat listening to a mournful folk song about a love irrevocably ended; we've all had to grin at the infectious sound of a waltz; had our blood rush faster to the beat of a military march (marches are Turkish in origin, and entered the West through Vienna, almost as the Turks themselves did in 1683); felt pride and pathos at the sound of our national anthem.
Tom Paine, in his argument for Deism, Age of Reason even opines that the men and women that the Bible calls prophets were in fact musicians, taking for his text 1 Samuel, chapter 10, verse 5: "...thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy...." Paine goes on to show this is not an isolated passage:
Deborah and Barak are called prophets, not because they predicted anything, but because they composed the poem or song that bears their name, in celebration of an act already done. David is ranked among the prophets, for he was a musician, and was also reputed to be (though perhaps very erroneously) the author of the Psalms. But Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not called prophets; it does not appear from any accounts we have, that they could either sing, play music, or make poetry.
Now imagine a world without portable mp3 players -- I'm listing to music from the Stuart Age (1600s) on my handled right now --, without CD players, without even eight track tape players or phonographs. Imagine no TV or radio or Internet. Would you not still have the same desire to hear music and feel the emotions it calls up in you? How else to ensure the presence of music in your life but to learn to play an instrument yourself? And unless you were one of the small minority of the wealthy, how would you get a instrument? You'd purchase one cheaply from a more or less amateur instrument maker, or better, you'd make a simple instrument yourself.
It is one of the trade-offs of modernity, I suppose: I have at hand, on my computer, over 8000 mps -- from Bach to Bob Dylan -- more musical variety than all but the wealthiest of kings could ever have collected prior to the invention of the phonograph. I have a dozen operas, including two different productions of Wagner's four opera Ring Cycle. And my music is immediately accessible -- I don't even have to change a record or pen a CD case. I can even listen to it on my handled via WiFi, so as not to disturb the neighbors. With a credit card, or a KaZaa client, I can download nearly an
Yeah, I have tried that, and thanks for the suggestion, but it only gives the top 10 comments for each post.
I almost always read at "0" threshold (even though I haven't had mod points for four months -- despite "Excellent" Karma for two years -- maybe I shouldn't have called out Cmdr. Taco for using DirecTV despite DireTv's baseless suits against owners of SmartCard programing devices?), because Anonymous Cowards, despite the low signal-to-noise ratio, do come up with some insights and humor.
Just seeing the top ten comments merely whets my appetite.
And, after all, if somebody weren't browsing at "0", no one would have modded your suggestion up to a "+1, Interesting", right?
By the way, you wouldn't happen to know where I can find a build of Konquerer for the Sharp ROM, would you? The one I was able to find was very old and never worked.
Re:What about Slashdot?
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
How about some CSS for Slashdot? Seriously.
Let me second Mr. Coward, and remind Slashdot's readers that we saw an article posted here several months ago showing several CSS formats especially designed for Slashdot.
I, in particular, would very much welcome CSS replacing nested tables on Slashdot, not least because I sometimes read Slashdot on my Zaurus. The default Zaurus browser, Opera, while it has a mode designed for display on smaller devices, spectacularly screwed up that mode for tables, as it doesn't line break at the end of table rows.
Whether you're using a Zaurus or a Jumbotron to view Slashdot, odds are you can write a (possibly overriding) user style-sheet that conforms to your display better than the default Slashdot display does.
Also, a properly written stylesheet likely means smaller pages, because the markup will be centralized in the stylesheet. For a site like Slashdot, with a lot of page hits, this might mean a significant bandwidth savings over time.
I wonder if the broadband would come with a keylogger which will direct a copy to the NSA, just in case someone is a terrorist (or does not vote for Bush, which in the Republican's eyes is the same)
The broadband will be built by Diebold.
It'll work most of the time -- so long as you don't live in a predominantly Democrat precinct -- and most of your own comments to Slashdot and your other online posts will end up being what you wrote, except in cases of close controversy, in which case the words you write may not always be what u;ultimately appears under your name.
And you'll no longer be allowed to make a paper print-out of your post to keep as an audit trail. That would be technically unfeasible -- uh, too expensive -- uh, might tend to undermine faith in the system.
But don't worry about the details; the big picture is, the broadband rollout will make certain specially selected business with ties to the Bush administration very rich! And that's good for the economy, because it'll mean we can offshore your job even more quickly!
Recapitulating the thread: Grandparent comment accuses Great-grandparent of pro-Bush administration spinning by asking "How is the weather in D.C. today, Mr Rove?"
Parent comment decides that's unfair to Karl Rove, who, as President Bush's primary political advisor, is clearly a public figure and one who would spin the administration line.
Parent commenter decides that the proper way to argue his case against grandparent is not to argue that facts, but to make a (rather lame -- "your suckage") ad hominem attack, and then injury to the insult by displaying grandparent poster's (unmunged) email address, in the hopes that spam-bots screen-scraping Slashdot will find it.
Now, there are these who would say that such personal smearing of opposition, without making any attempt to refute their arguments, is precisely what the Republican Party in general, and Karl Rove in particular, are doing to Richard Clarke, for Clarke's courage in coming forward and telling the American public that the Bush Administration was more concerned about going to war with Iraq than with fighting Osama bin Laden.
And there are some who would say that this sort of smear is similar to the Administration's false accusation that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill disclosed classified documents, in an attempt to discredit O'Neill's candid account of the Bush Administration's shortcomings.
And some might even go so far as to say that posting an unmunged email address is a pale echo of how the Bush Administration punished Ambassador Joseph Wilson for telling the truth -- that Iraq didn't have nuclear bomb making materials --, by telling conservative columnist Robert Novak to publish to the world that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent, thereby ending her effectiveness as a agent -- and thus harming the country's national security -- as well as threatening her own life.
But I would never say these things, because I'd be afraid that some Anonymous Coward might post my unmunged email address. Congratulations to you, Mr. Republican Coward! Once again you've let everyone know that lese majeste, any offense against King George, will be punished, even if -- especially if -- that offense is to tell the truth about this Administration's smear tactics.
Nothing is completely safe. Thing is, the alternatives - the real, viable alternatives -- to nuclear power are even less safe.
You may recall the recent FDA advisory warning pregnant women and children to limit their intake of several types of fish because of mercury contamination in those fish.
The FDA guidelines call for children and pregnant women -- and women who "may become pregnant" to abstain completely from shark, swordfish, king mackerel, or tilefish, and to limit intake to six onces of albacore tuna a week.
What you might not have heard is that the panel that made the recommendation contained two members who were former lobbyists for the fishing industry -- or that another member, a scientist, not a lobbyist, resigned in protest because he believes that even six onces a week of albacore tuna is dangerous, and that that recommendation was only made because of industry lobbying.
As it happens, the EPA is retreating from plans to more closely regulate mercury pollution from power plants, and "just coincidently" some of the language justifying that retreat is word-for-word the same as language in utility company memos.
So on the one hand, the fishing industry influences the FDA to soft-pedal its warnings to children and pregnant women, and on the other hand the power industry gets the EPA to continue to allow pollution.
And this is not to mention the other dangers of coal: despoiling the environment by digging it up, despoiling the air with smog when it's burnt, giving miners black-lung, etc.
I grew up a few miles from Three Mile Island, and I was still there when the accident happened, and I'll take clean nuclear power any day. Even in the worst case, we can contain a nuclear plant accident -- but we can't contain an ocean of mercury contaminated fish.
Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripheral/frontier dialects tend to be conservative [i.e., less changing] while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas
Also true in genetics, where's it's called Founder's Effect.
It's not that difficult to understand. Assume that in one year 1 person in X comes up with a language innovation -- a new word, a new way of pronouncing a word, an idiom, whatever. Or sate in another (but equivalent) way: assume that a language innovation happens on average every X person-years. Also assume that the innovation spreads with some frequency to persons who hear it.
Then then more people interacting in a place, the more innovation you'll have. More people will be present in core areas, fewer in peripheral or frontier areas.
And every time someone leaves an area for a previously unsettled area, that person will take with him his knowledge of the language as it currently exists in that area, like a snapshot -- but once settled in the new area, the smaller settling population will generate less innovation, causing language change to slow in the newly settled area.
In genetics, Founder's Effect of course refers to genes (and alleles): if a small group branches off from a larger group to settle a new area, all alleles/traits present in the larger group may not be represented in the settlers, or represented in the same frequency. What was a rare trait, (e.g., blue eyes) in the larger group might not be so rare in the smaller group.
Indeed, physical separation of groups of animals of the same species, as by geographical barriers, is though to be one of the main causes of speciation, where one species splits into two.
Interestingly, there are a number of parallels between genetic distribution over space and language transmission over space. Of course, we should remember that we get our genes exclusively from our parents, but our language from peers as well as parents.
The average indian would sooner drink piss than marry (or let their daughter marry...) a non-indian....
Well sir, I am understanding why they would not be wanting their daughter to marry an uninformed Anglo-Desi like you (the emphasizing is being my own):
Morarji Desai, a Brahmin belonging to the Anavil sub-caste, was installed as Prime Minister of India on March 24, 1977.... Immediately after coming to power, he devoted all his powers to propagating Brahmanism, especially
the peculiar Brahmin custom of drinking human urine....
You're right, she does. Gail Zappa goes after cover bands who use Frank Zappa's name, forcing them to take all references and photos of him off of their websites and their flyers.... Really, to smother Frank Zappa's name and image under a mountain of lawyers like that seems kind of odd, especially considering how much disdain the man himself had for the music industry's choke-hold on everything.
So?
Thought-experiment time. I represent the Fascist White-Power neo-Nazi rock band "Kill All the Mud-People". While I'm against almost everything Frank Zappa stood for, and for almost everything he disdained, I rather like some of his tunes, so I decide to re-name my band "Frank Zappa Would Agree: Kill All the Mud-People", and put up a big photoshop of Frank Zappa's face centered on a Nazi flag.
Now before you protest that this is a rather extreme example -- and that many or all the bands Gail Zappa has gone after are not in any way Fascist or Neo-Nazi, you will agree, I hope, that none of the bands Gail Zappa has gone after actualy have Frank Zappa as a member, and indeed, that none of them, in all likely-hood share all of Frank Zappa's opinions, musical styles, or personal affiliations, right?
So if these bands are bands that Frank Zappa never cared -- for whatever reasons -- to affiliate himself with in life, why should they be allowed to appropriate his name and likeness -- and the implicit approval that goes with those -- after his death?
The author of the post to which I'm replying is "The I Shing (700142)"; should I have any moral right to start signing my posts, "The above is the opinion of orthogonal (588627) and The I Shing (700142)?" Should I be able to excuse my appropriation of someone else's name by saying, "but The I Shing (700142) is on record for disdaining the music industry's choke hold"?
A person's name and likeness, to the extent that it implies a person's endorsement or authorship, is something that must be retained by that person.
As I noted in a post (Firefox artwork Tuesday 16 March 2004) about the Firefox logo not being GPL'd along with the Firefox code,
I've made some of my code open source, but I've never said that people could remove my name from the copyright, or conversely, put my name on their own work. If my signature were a Chinese ideogram, or a picture of fox wrapped around a globe, I wouldn't let anyone else use that.
Similarly, I can wholly understand why Frank Zappa -- or his widow -- wouldn't want his legacy diluted by a bunch of Zappa pretenders and wannabees. While few are likely to be, as in the thought experiment above, neo-Nazis, few are likely to be as accomplished as musicians and social commentators as Frank Zappa -- because if they were, they wouldn't have to use Zappa's name like a crutch to prop up their own publicity machines. They'd be able to stand on their own.
I like to think my posts and writing -- and for good or bad, they're nowhere as good as those by the writers I most cherish -- can also stand on their own. That's why I "sign" them "orthogonal" and not
"-- Robert Heinlein-esque, Eric Blair-like, Tom Paine-ish, Thomas Jefferson-influenced, John Lockean, John Milton-aspiring orthogonal"
I can grab all sort of nice information through [DDE]. Netscape, Opera, IE -- all support this function. Firefox currently does not.
Well, about ten posts above you, we have a user explaining that online gambling sites write their software to close down any window with a titlebar string equal to the string of some well-known gambling 'bot, so that a user can't use the 'bot to do his gambling for him. Possibly this is done through DDE (or through direct calls to the Windows API).
Automation, and the ability for one program to use another can provide a great deal of convenience, but it can also allow for a great deal of maliciousness.
Microsoft products, indeed, are legendary for being extremely convenient to any number of malicious subornings. Microsoft products are also legendary for short-sighted fixes. A prime example is Microsoft Outlook: Outlook originally embedded a fully functional macro language, and processed HTML mail in such a way that attachments could be run automatically. This of course, made it easy to send a virus or trojan to even a savvy user, and have the virus be run automatically.
Microsoft's "fix" was to disallow the saving of any attachment with certain names (e.g., *.exe) and to cripple the macro language such that even locally run -- and written -- macros would ask for user confirmation at least every ten minutes -- a user could not even allow a particular macro for any period longer than ten minutes. Furthermore, Outlook made it impossible for anyone not running an Exchange server to "sign" even locally run macros. The short-sighted macro "fix" could only be gotten around by running -- and relying on the safety of -- certain additional third party software.
So while DDE can be awfully convenient, I in no way consider every application running on my computer to be equal; some applications are widely trusted, but most are expected to do what they are meant to do without ranging over all active processes with DDE requests.
Ideally, one would balance safety with convenience by doing what Outlook failed to do: allow users to "sign" or "revoke" DDE permissions for individual programs, and at several levels of granularity (read, write, more specific functionality as exposed by specific apps, etc.), much like a Windows-based software firewall can allow only specific applications to attach to specific port numbers for specific protocols.
But until such a "DDE Firewall" exists, I'm pretty happy that Firefox doesn't support DDE. Firefox (by necessity) is one of the most trusted applications running on my machine: it's allowed to make outbound connections to any IP address so long as those connections are to port 80. For that very reasons, I don't want other programs to be able to audit its activities, or, worse, remotely use Firefox to initiate connections.
If you really need something that can be programmed to do what Firefox does, consider writing your own program. There are a number of libraries such as Apache Common's HttpClient (for Java) and WWW::Mechanize (for Perl) that make it easy to set up something like "remote-controlled" browser; WWW::Mechanize::shell will even record your (non-GUI) interaction with web sites and produce from that a working Perl program that automates that interaction. And of course you can write Firefox extensions for anything that must happen within Firefox. But DDE is a too general approach that does more to threaten security than add convenience.
I can't even imagine the dose she's soaking up. I look at the reading she's showing in pictures and she's taken up my YEARLY dose in HOURS
Elena's one HOT babe.
She kinda reminds me of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer: "And if you ever saw [her], you would even say [she] glows."
Seriously, she's a brave woman and a good photographer, and her original photo essay was haunting and poignant. I'm looking forward to this addition to it.
Slashdot Mirror
And, FWIW, I ran AdAware on my machine right after installing the latest Realplayer. No spyware installed either as far as I can tell.
You do realize that the AdAware engine is not psychic, right? Nor does it use a heuristic to identify mal-ware.
AdAware -- much like a virus checker --, identifies Trojans and ad-ware by "signature", some array of bytes unique to the annoyance in question. Until somebody examines a program, decides it is mal-ware, extracts that program';s signature and adds it to AdAware's signature database, Ad-ware doesn't "know" about it.
For all we know, Realplayer installs -- or is itself -- mal-ware, but no one from Ad-ware has gotten around to labelling it as such. After all, RealPlayer Ten is rather new.
And people can legitimately disagree about what is ad-ware: surely RealPlayer has claimed that all its versions of Realplayer did nothing illegitimate, as RealPlayer maintained that it wasn't popping up ads, but "informative messages", and that phoning home uniquely identifying information about its users was a positive benefit for those users.
Don't misunderstand me: AdAWare is a useful product, but it's no panacea and it -- like a virus scanner -- will unavoidably always be a bit out of date. In the case of RealPlayer, I'd trust RealPlayer's track-record of untrustworthiness.
While I personally am downloading their new software to see if they have learned their lesson, I can hardly fault others for writing this off as too little, too late.
.... BUFFERING .....
While I admire the parent poster's fair-mindedness in giving Real another chance, I can't advise anyone else to emulate Saucepan (12098).
Why can I not? Because several versions of RealPlayer ago, I recall that Real has also claimed that they'd realized their mistakes and that their then-current version wasn't full of annoyances and spy-ware. So, trying, like the parent poster to be impartial and fair-minded, I installed that version -- only to discover that it hid anti-privacy settings deep in its settings UI, and that it attempted to phone home regardless of those settings, and that it hijacked extensions and ran unnecessary processes and in general was ill-behaved.
And on actually using it, I found that its main UI gave over as much screen real (no pun intended) estate to advertisements as to whatever I was playing, and that it wouldn't start without bombarding me with ads, and that when I actually did play any media with it, the playback quality was abysmal compared to its competitors. Oh, and
Real has claimed once too often that it has corrected its excesses for me to spend another half-hour installing it, and another week uninstalling it and resetting all the various settings it mucks with to status quo ante.
With apologies for invoking Godwin's Law, I've just finished reading William L. Shirer's The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940, in which he recounts reporting on Nazi Germany first for the Chicago Tribune and later for CBS Radio (in fact, Shirer and colleague Edward R. Murrow pretty much pioneered the format used by radio and TV news to this day, of having an "anchor" in one place with correspondents reporting in from the field).
Naturally, Shirer recounts, as does any history of that period, Adolf Hitler's various speeches, in each of which Hitler would claim his latest territorial demand would be his last: first he wanted nothing more than the Rhineland, then his claims ended with the Austria Anschluss, then absorbing the Sudetenland would settle his claims, then Danzig (Gdansk) and the Corridor, etc., etc. In each speech, Hitler would claim he was working for peace -- and that it could be attained by granting his latest -- and, he claimed, final -- demand.
Real's actions, while nothing compared to Hitler's of course, do seem to follow the same pattern: we are told that each new version is that last we will need, and that each news version "fixes" Real's anti-social and sneaky behavior. But with each new version, we find that somehow, despite Real's protestations to the contrary, the anti-social behavior remains. I'm sorry, but the little bit of content that can only be played using RealPlayer just isn't worth the aggravation -- or the chagrin of finding, on installing RealPlayer, that I've been tricked once again
Uh, what?
While I'm sure it's difficult for you to conceive that there are attractive women out there who have little social confidence, they do exist.
Conceive? Hell, if it weren't for the "attractive women out there who have little social confidence", I wouldn't be getting any.
I kid, I kid.
But please, let's not use the word "conceive" -- that word always scares a bachelor.
Once again, a member of anti-slash.org has poisoned the well by copying a previous post verbatim rather than writing something original, and then he goes and brags about it on the front page of anti-slash.org,
Well, yes, the grandparent article is pointed to by anti-slash.org and attributed to their "db tool", but that article is not in the anti-slash database.
While it's possible it was removed after the parent post's alert, it's also possible that the anti-slash post was a more elaborate troll: earlier this week anti-slash.org nominated one of my posts for modding up, and attributed it to the db tool.
Of course, my post was an original work and didn't come from anti-slash's db or anywhere else -- like Athena from Zeus's, my post sprang full formed from my brow.
My post to anti-slash's forum asking why my post had been incorrectly attributed to the "db tool" wasn't answered.
This won't be a problem in real life. In real life -- no offense to your friend, who I'm sure is quite pulchritudinous -- the vast majority of "girls" who "spend much of [their] time doing online fantasy RPing", and as elf-maidens, no less, are, in fact boys.
That minority of online RPing elf-maidens who are actual women -- as in "born with female genitals" women --, have, trust me -- er, I mean, that is, trust my friend, who told me -- have sat in front on their PCs playing elf-maidens and eating bon-bons and Doritos long enough that -- well, let's just say that traipsing through the Mordor woods in real life would be something of a ponderous challenge for them, with their slab-sided tree-stump-like legs propelling their rotundly jiggling torsos while their bloated red faces were a-huffing and a-puffing.
And I think we can fairly say that that small minority of a minority of online "elf-maidens" who are real women and themselves mobile enough to get into location based mobile gaming will quite literally wear on their faces the reasons they decided to spend their best years of their lives for social interaction, not even going to a Renaissance Fest (the portly girl's best friend) but instead interacting from behind a computer screen; and consequently they will have to endure propositions from only those most desperate of geeks.
By the most desperate geek boys, reeking of tstosterone and despair, I of course mean the men of Slashdot.
But to take any sting out of my comment, and to show that I have only the best wishes at heart for both these rather plain "cyber elf-maidens" and the men of Slashdot who (want to) love them, let me close with a few verses from William S. Gilbert, as set to music by Sir Arthur S.Sullivan:
In addition, they want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever.
With all due respect to Google, and god knows they're one of the few companies that seems to get "it" right, what with uncluttered interfaces, unbiased services, and unobtrusive text ads -- Google also records the IP address along with the search terms of every search.
Anytime you've Googled on "anime tentacle rape", "venereal disease STD symptom", "P2P download", "closeted gay", "arguments for atheism" or "overthrow government", Google has recorded your computer's IP address and has tried to set a cookie in your browser. To Google's credit, the search still works even if you don't accept the cookie; but Google is keeping the IP and search term log -- forever.
After just a few hundred searches, you don't need to be a Kreskin to do a little data-mining and get a good idea of a user's interests, proclivities, and possible "deviancy" from his search terms.
My fear then, is this: will you be the only one who can search through your database of email, "I guess forever"? Or will Google be able to search it too. Or even if they lock themselves out of search or reading your email directly, will Google, as they do now for web searches, keep a log of the searches you make on your own email?
Again, you can tell a lot about someone if you have a list of all his Google searches, but you can probably learn even more and more immediate information if you have a list of his searches through his email.
Remember the "Halloween X" email recently released, from Mike Anderer to SCO about Anderer's attempts to raise money on SCO's behalf? Imagine if Anderer had been searching for that email before -- or after -- the release of the "Halloween X" letter; I suspect you could learn even more juicy details by seeing what search terms he used?
What if Richard Clarke and Condaleeza Rice has stored their emails in Google GMail? Of course, the government wouldn't store email in GMail -- but imagine if the people in analogous positions in your company did -- say the head of security and her deputies? Could Google learn much about your company's financial dealings from the search terms they used to review their mail?
What if you stored and looked for emails regarding your company's Non-Disclosure Agreement or upcoming patent for some new technology? Could a competitor glean import information just from your search terms?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, are you still answering "yes" to wanting to try out GMail for yourself?
It's simple: too much information concentrated into any one set of hands -- even hands as apparently benign as Google's -- invites abuse or -- even if Google never bends to that temptation -- tempts others to steal that data.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Rolodex/Programming tool Hypercard was found dead in it Cupertino, California home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its output, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
SCO is like Vader. What do we do once he's gone. Now granted, SCO is no where near as cool and powerful as Vader but they are our mortal enemy. And we both use a power like the force. Called the net.
And Darl McBride is Linus Torvald's real father?
Richard Stallman is Yoda?
In your SCO-is-Vader cosmology, who's Jar Jar Binks?
spafbnerf notes that "SCO has filed a motion for the patent infringement claim to be split into a separate case."
But, why?
I mean, if IBM gets the declaratory judgment, it'll wrap this all up.
Splitting off the patent infringement into another lawsuit will just drag this out for another year...
Oh!
Thank you for your karma whore. You like this idea very much. You like PDAs very much. You wish you could tweak your PDA. You think the open nature of Linux would work to the PDA's advantage. Thank you for offering nothing of actual value that will be modded up. Speak in repeated short sentences that ends with a "I hope this is the beginning of..." statement that yet again doesn't actually say anything.
:) )
Thank you for finally pointing this out. I like your post very much. We should point out Karma Whores. Like you do. I wish everybody did it. I think the open nature of Slashdot lends itself to this sort of meta-moderation. Even if it's ad hoc meta-moderation. Moderation via comments, not mod points. I hope this is the beginning of a reform of Slashdot. I hope this means we'll se fewer Karma Whores.
(Sheepish grin
Sound can occur anywhere you can get something to vibrate.
Yeah, I had a girlfriend like that. God she was noisy.
(But in all seriousness, good "crafty" examples in your post.)
Hire a dozen Indians. Have them show up before your colleagues get to work, and sit them in your colleagues' chairs.
Post a large message on the whiteboard/bulletin board: "Accelerated Personnel Replacement Instruction Lessons -- Followed-by Occupational Outsourcing Layoffs"
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - BBC broadcaster and writer/Television host Alistair Cooke was found dead in his New York home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an British icon.
Of course, until very recently -- I'm guessing the last century or two -- many musical instruments were made by their users, or by persons -0 like furniture makers -- who made instruments as a side-line.
Exceptions of course would probably be very large instruments -- church organs, the larger pianos -- and instruments made by dedicated instruments makers first for court musicians and later for professional orchestras.
But outside of royal halls and opera houses relying on noble patronage, popular music was probably produced by musicians who had some hand in making their own instruments. Think of the violin-picker in Appalachia, or the rebec playing sailor drifting down the Volga or the Don* -- or the Mississippi. Consider the lonely Spanish shepherd playing a bladder pipe horn made from one of his former charges -- or an equally lonely Texas cowboy plucking a Jew's harp
* I'm thinking of the Russian Don, but it could as well be the river in England, the river in Scotland, or the river in Canada; the rebec was probably known in each place and was always an instrument of the lower classes. A guide to traditional instruments can be found here.
Given the amount of money spent on CDs -- and the amount of downloading --, it's not hard to see that music is central in some way to the human experience. We've all felt it the lump in the throat listening to a mournful folk song about a love irrevocably ended; we've all had to grin at the infectious sound of a waltz; had our blood rush faster to the beat of a military march (marches are Turkish in origin, and entered the West through Vienna, almost as the Turks themselves did in 1683); felt pride and pathos at the sound of our national anthem.
Tom Paine, in his argument for Deism, Age of Reason even opines that the men and women that the Bible calls prophets were in fact musicians, taking for his text 1 Samuel, chapter 10, verse 5: "...thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy...." Paine goes on to show this is not an isolated passage:
Now imagine a world without portable mp3 players -- I'm listing to music from the Stuart Age (1600s) on my handled right now --, without CD players, without even eight track tape players or phonographs. Imagine no TV or radio or Internet. Would you not still have the same desire to hear music and feel the emotions it calls up in you? How else to ensure the presence of music in your life but to learn to play an instrument yourself? And unless you were one of the small minority of the wealthy, how would you get a instrument? You'd purchase one cheaply from a more or less amateur instrument maker, or better, you'd make a simple instrument yourself.
It is one of the trade-offs of modernity, I suppose: I have at hand, on my computer, over 8000 mps -- from Bach to Bob Dylan -- more musical variety than all but the wealthiest of kings could ever have collected prior to the invention of the phonograph. I have a dozen operas, including two different productions of Wagner's four opera Ring Cycle. And my music is immediately accessible -- I don't even have to change a record or pen a CD case. I can even listen to it on my handled via WiFi, so as not to disturb the neighbors. With a credit card, or a KaZaa client, I can download nearly an
use slashdot.org/palm/
Yeah, I have tried that, and thanks for the suggestion, but it only gives the top 10 comments for each post.
I almost always read at "0" threshold (even though I haven't had mod points for four months -- despite "Excellent" Karma for two years -- maybe I shouldn't have called out Cmdr. Taco for using DirecTV despite DireTv's baseless suits against owners of SmartCard programing devices?), because Anonymous Cowards, despite the low signal-to-noise ratio, do come up with some insights and humor.
Just seeing the top ten comments merely whets my appetite.
And, after all, if somebody weren't browsing at "0", no one would have modded your suggestion up to a "+1, Interesting", right?
By the way, you wouldn't happen to know where I can find a build of Konquerer for the Sharp ROM, would you? The one I was able to find was very old and never worked.
How about some CSS for Slashdot? Seriously.
Let me second Mr. Coward, and remind Slashdot's readers that we saw an article posted here several months ago showing several CSS formats especially designed for Slashdot.
I, in particular, would very much welcome CSS replacing nested tables on Slashdot, not least because I sometimes read Slashdot on my Zaurus. The default Zaurus browser, Opera, while it has a mode designed for display on smaller devices, spectacularly screwed up that mode for tables, as it doesn't line break at the end of table rows.
Whether you're using a Zaurus or a Jumbotron to view Slashdot, odds are you can write a (possibly overriding) user style-sheet that conforms to your display better than the default Slashdot display does.
Also, a properly written stylesheet likely means smaller pages, because the markup will be centralized in the stylesheet. For a site like Slashdot, with a lot of page hits, this might mean a significant bandwidth savings over time.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
I wonder if the broadband would come with a keylogger which will direct a copy to the NSA, just in case someone is a terrorist (or does not vote for Bush, which in the Republican's eyes is the same)
The broadband will be built by Diebold.
It'll work most of the time -- so long as you don't live in a predominantly Democrat precinct -- and most of your own comments to Slashdot and your other online posts will end up being what you wrote, except in cases of close controversy, in which case the words you write may not always be what u;ultimately appears under your name.
And you'll no longer be allowed to make a paper print-out of your post to keep as an audit trail. That would be technically unfeasible -- uh, too expensive -- uh, might tend to undermine faith in the system.
But don't worry about the details; the big picture is, the broadband rollout will make certain specially selected business with ties to the Bush administration very rich! And that's good for the economy, because it'll mean we can offshore your job even more quickly!
your suckage seems to be on the rise
Recapitulating the thread: Grandparent comment accuses Great-grandparent of pro-Bush administration spinning by asking "How is the weather in D.C. today, Mr Rove?"
Parent comment decides that's unfair to Karl Rove, who, as President Bush's primary political advisor, is clearly a public figure and one who would spin the administration line.
Parent commenter decides that the proper way to argue his case against grandparent is not to argue that facts, but to make a (rather lame -- "your suckage") ad hominem attack, and then injury to the insult by displaying grandparent poster's (unmunged) email address, in the hopes that spam-bots screen-scraping Slashdot will find it.
Now, there are these who would say that such personal smearing of opposition, without making any attempt to refute their arguments, is precisely what the Republican Party in general, and Karl Rove in particular, are doing to Richard Clarke, for Clarke's courage in coming forward and telling the American public that the Bush Administration was more concerned about going to war with Iraq than with fighting Osama bin Laden.
And there are some who would say that this sort of smear is similar to the Administration's false accusation that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill disclosed classified documents, in an attempt to discredit O'Neill's candid account of the Bush Administration's shortcomings.
And some might even go so far as to say that posting an unmunged email address is a pale echo of how the Bush Administration punished Ambassador Joseph Wilson for telling the truth -- that Iraq didn't have nuclear bomb making materials --, by telling conservative columnist Robert Novak to publish to the world that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent, thereby ending her effectiveness as a agent -- and thus harming the country's national security -- as well as threatening her own life.
But I would never say these things, because I'd be afraid that some Anonymous Coward might post my unmunged email address. Congratulations to you, Mr. Republican Coward! Once again you've let everyone know that lese majeste, any offense against King George, will be punished, even if -- especially if -- that offense is to tell the truth about this Administration's smear tactics.
No, it [nuclear power] is not safe
.
Nothing is completely safe. Thing is, the alternatives - the real, viable alternatives -- to nuclear power are even less safe.
You may recall the recent FDA advisory warning pregnant women and children to limit their intake of several types of fish because of mercury contamination in those fish.
The FDA guidelines call for children and pregnant women -- and women who "may become pregnant" to abstain completely from shark, swordfish, king mackerel, or tilefish, and to limit intake to six onces of albacore tuna a week.
What you might not have heard is that the panel that made the recommendation contained two members who were former lobbyists for the fishing industry -- or that another member, a scientist, not a lobbyist, resigned in protest because he believes that even six onces a week of albacore tuna is dangerous, and that that recommendation was only made because of industry lobbying.
What you also might not have heard is that the primary source of mercury in fish is from "mercury rain" -- and the primary source of mercury rain is from coal fired power plants
As it happens, the EPA is retreating from plans to more closely regulate mercury pollution from power plants, and "just coincidently" some of the language justifying that retreat is word-for-word the same as language in utility company memos.
So on the one hand, the fishing industry influences the FDA to soft-pedal its warnings to children and pregnant women, and on the other hand the power industry gets the EPA to continue to allow pollution.
And this is not to mention the other dangers of coal: despoiling the environment by digging it up, despoiling the air with smog when it's burnt, giving miners black-lung, etc.
I grew up a few miles from Three Mile Island, and I was still there when the accident happened, and I'll take clean nuclear power any day. Even in the worst case, we can contain a nuclear plant accident -- but we can't contain an ocean of mercury contaminated fish.
Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripheral/frontier dialects tend to be conservative [i.e., less changing] while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas
Also true in genetics, where's it's called Founder's Effect.
It's not that difficult to understand. Assume that in one year 1 person in X comes up with a language innovation -- a new word, a new way of pronouncing a word, an idiom, whatever. Or sate in another (but equivalent) way: assume that a language innovation happens on average every X person-years. Also assume that the innovation spreads with some frequency to persons who hear it.
Then then more people interacting in a place, the more innovation you'll have. More people will be present in core areas, fewer in peripheral or frontier areas.
And every time someone leaves an area for a previously unsettled area, that person will take with him his knowledge of the language as it currently exists in that area, like a snapshot -- but once settled in the new area, the smaller settling population will generate less innovation, causing language change to slow in the newly settled area.
In genetics, Founder's Effect of course refers to genes (and alleles): if a small group branches off from a larger group to settle a new area, all alleles/traits present in the larger group may not be represented in the settlers, or represented in the same frequency. What was a rare trait, (e.g., blue eyes) in the larger group might not be so rare in the smaller group.
Indeed, physical separation of groups of animals of the same species, as by geographical barriers, is though to be one of the main causes of speciation, where one species splits into two.
Interestingly, there are a number of parallels between genetic distribution over space and language transmission over space. Of course, we should remember that we get our genes exclusively from our parents, but our language from peers as well as parents.
Well sir, I am understanding why they would not be wanting their daughter to marry an uninformed Anglo-Desi like you (the emphasizing is being my own):
So?
Thought-experiment time. I represent the Fascist White-Power neo-Nazi rock band "Kill All the Mud-People". While I'm against almost everything Frank Zappa stood for, and for almost everything he disdained, I rather like some of his tunes, so I decide to re-name my band "Frank Zappa Would Agree: Kill All the Mud-People", and put up a big photoshop of Frank Zappa's face centered on a Nazi flag.
Now before you protest that this is a rather extreme example -- and that many or all the bands Gail Zappa has gone after are not in any way Fascist or Neo-Nazi, you will agree, I hope, that none of the bands Gail Zappa has gone after actualy have Frank Zappa as a member, and indeed, that none of them, in all likely-hood share all of Frank Zappa's opinions, musical styles, or personal affiliations, right?
So if these bands are bands that Frank Zappa never cared -- for whatever reasons -- to affiliate himself with in life, why should they be allowed to appropriate his name and likeness -- and the implicit approval that goes with those -- after his death?
The author of the post to which I'm replying is "The I Shing (700142)"; should I have any moral right to start signing my posts, "The above is the opinion of orthogonal (588627) and The I Shing (700142)?" Should I be able to excuse my appropriation of someone else's name by saying, "but The I Shing (700142) is on record for disdaining the music industry's choke hold"?
A person's name and likeness, to the extent that it implies a person's endorsement or authorship, is something that must be retained by that person.
As I noted in a post (Firefox artwork Tuesday 16 March 2004) about the Firefox logo not being GPL'd along with the Firefox code,
Similarly, I can wholly understand why Frank Zappa -- or his widow -- wouldn't want his legacy diluted by a bunch of Zappa pretenders and wannabees. While few are likely to be, as in the thought experiment above, neo-Nazis, few are likely to be as accomplished as musicians and social commentators as Frank Zappa -- because if they were, they wouldn't have to use Zappa's name like a crutch to prop up their own publicity machines. They'd be able to stand on their own.
I like to think my posts and writing -- and for good or bad, they're nowhere as good as those by the writers I most cherish -- can also stand on their own. That's why I "sign" them "orthogonal" and not
"-- Robert Heinlein-esque, Eric Blair-like, Tom Paine-ish, Thomas Jefferson-influenced, John Lockean, John Milton-aspiring orthogonal"
I can grab all sort of nice information through [DDE]. Netscape, Opera, IE -- all support this function. Firefox currently does not.
Well, about ten posts above you, we have a user explaining that online gambling sites write their software to close down any window with a titlebar string equal to the string of some well-known gambling 'bot, so that a user can't use the 'bot to do his gambling for him. Possibly this is done through DDE (or through direct calls to the Windows API).
Automation, and the ability for one program to use another can provide a great deal of convenience, but it can also allow for a great deal of maliciousness.
Microsoft products, indeed, are legendary for being extremely convenient to any number of malicious subornings. Microsoft products are also legendary for short-sighted fixes. A prime example is Microsoft Outlook: Outlook originally embedded a fully functional macro language, and processed HTML mail in such a way that attachments could be run automatically. This of course, made it easy to send a virus or trojan to even a savvy user, and have the virus be run automatically.
Microsoft's "fix" was to disallow the saving of any attachment with certain names (e.g., *.exe) and to cripple the macro language such that even locally run -- and written -- macros would ask for user confirmation at least every ten minutes -- a user could not even allow a particular macro for any period longer than ten minutes. Furthermore, Outlook made it impossible for anyone not running an Exchange server to "sign" even locally run macros. The short-sighted macro "fix" could only be gotten around by running -- and relying on the safety of -- certain additional third party software.
So while DDE can be awfully convenient, I in no way consider every application running on my computer to be equal; some applications are widely trusted, but most are expected to do what they are meant to do without ranging over all active processes with DDE requests.
Ideally, one would balance safety with convenience by doing what Outlook failed to do: allow users to "sign" or "revoke" DDE permissions for individual programs, and at several levels of granularity (read, write, more specific functionality as exposed by specific apps, etc.), much like a Windows-based software firewall can allow only specific applications to attach to specific port numbers for specific protocols.
But until such a "DDE Firewall" exists, I'm pretty happy that Firefox doesn't support DDE. Firefox (by necessity) is one of the most trusted applications running on my machine: it's allowed to make outbound connections to any IP address so long as those connections are to port 80. For that very reasons, I don't want other programs to be able to audit its activities, or, worse, remotely use Firefox to initiate connections.
If you really need something that can be programmed to do what Firefox does, consider writing your own program. There are a number of libraries such as Apache Common's HttpClient (for Java) and WWW::Mechanize (for Perl) that make it easy to set up something like "remote-controlled" browser; WWW::Mechanize::shell will even record your (non-GUI) interaction with web sites and produce from that a working Perl program that automates that interaction. And of course you can write Firefox extensions for anything that must happen within Firefox. But DDE is a too general approach that does more to threaten security than add convenience.
I can't even imagine the dose she's soaking up. I look at the reading she's showing in pictures and she's taken up my YEARLY dose in HOURS
Elena's one HOT babe.
She kinda reminds me of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer: "And if you ever saw [her], you would even say [she] glows."
Seriously, she's a brave woman and a good photographer, and her original photo essay was haunting and poignant. I'm looking forward to this addition to it.