I know that the DOCTYPE is essential for certain processing environments today. Having available schema is a good thing. But there are big problems with the syntactical way the DTD and internal subset are supported in XML. It would be much better if the schema were completely switchable and validation and normalization were loosely-coupled operations on an abstract data model rather than syntactic operations at parse time. I would have no problem with DOCTYPE if it were a seperate module that you could choose to support or not support. That is why, for example, SOAP had to subset XML -- because a vicious user can define a few parameter entities and blow the server out of memory with syntax.
While a machine processor and abstract model can easily live without a bunch of character entities, standards such as MathML rely on the heavily to make it readable in raw form for users.
IDs as supplied with DTDs have a variety of problems. If doctypes went away, you have no IDs anyway. The concept of references seems to transcend many lesser considerations of a schema. It is, really, a structural question in most uses, even if not in HTML.
I agree thast XML is no DB. It is a format useful for transferring things between object models such as DBs. HTML should have an abstract data model before it is a syntax. That would tell us, for example, what is the same between the HTML syntax rendition and the XHTML syntax rendition.
(1) They need to eliminate the doctype can of worms. Unfortunately, this cries out for an alternative solution for character entities.
(2) Namespaces need to be simplified and better integrated into the core of the language. Expanding on this, there need to be much better mechanisms for modularizing parts of the markup so that it isn't necessary to parse and hold everything in memory to make sense of it.
(3) There needs to be clean-up and standardization of element id's and references, integrating it with (1) and (2).
Do others have more? Should this be done compatibly with XML?
I believe that we really need a standard for arbitrary abstract data models, with XML as just one syntactic representation, but I would have to go into long details to justify this.
If we can't depend on Google for honest results, most of us will go on to something else, and we will probably be taking a large chunk of the user community as a whole with us.
How I wish this were true. But I think the masses are comfortable with their biases and seem to thrive on distorted information flows where it unifies them in their biases. They would only revolt if their own personal interests were greatly offended, or if there were a search engine that led you to free archives of usenet binary groups or MP3s to download.
My only "hostility" towards AC's comment that it was overblown was to say "Umm, not at all, it was a serious incident".
The rest was clearly directed at AC's feigned shock that a number of people here do not like Microsoft and his lovefest for Microsoft.
Yeah, the big bad company bought good software from other people to sell. How dare they. What, again, did they even buy from the primary innovators in these fields Novell, WordPerfect, Borland, Netscape, etc.? But we all know they could afford to rewrite their code dozens of times to eventually get enough right once they got the business model locked up, but they still lack important features.
Exploits would be related to the percentage of the web actually using the platform, the number of expansive web software systems available for the platform (if you run Apache, for example, all the same exploits would apply, etc.).
No command shell... My toaster has no command shell, either, and it has never been hacked, so it must be right. Of course, it might be a function of how many useful things you can do with it.
No Root user... What a novel concept. I get it, just throw away all the security model, and then the problems don't qualify as security problems anyway. Pesky security machanisms were just distracting us. Real climbers never use safety ropes, because they just get in the way and cause a false sense of security!
Pascal strings... I have certainly spent many years working with non-null-terminated strings that used a count. It is irrelevant to buffer overflows whether the size is by delimiter or by pre-count. It is a matter of whether the program (or automatic string class) checks to see if the static buffer has room for the new string based upon the sizes of the source strings. I have seen plenty of buffer overflows with counted strings for exactly the same reasons they occur in null-terminated strings.
Macs running Webstar have ability to only run CGI placed in correct directory location and correctly file "typed"...Macs never run code ever merely based on how a file is named. ".exe" suffixes mean nothing! That explains why Macs were not vulnerable to the Word Macro exploits and a variety of other exploits -- oops, they were. Then, perhaps it is just a matter of how popular a platform it is. Let's see, no interesting modern Web Server configurations run on it, so no one uses it, and no one exploits it. A little like my daughter's TI-83, no web exploits against that, either, but it does not support the types of web aplications I want or a reasonable number of users. But no one would bother to write an exploit for it!
Your first three paragraphs were quite good and interesting.
Your fourth is full of idiocy.
I think this story is a bit overblown. Umm, not at all. It is quite a serious incident.
It appears that most/.'s don't like microsoft
Tell me, is this the first time you noticed that? Not much analytical thought going on upstairs, is there?
and thats sad because microsoft is the driving company behind many many jobs They suck a very disproportionate chunk of money out of the market, they are in a position where innovation is much too risky, they are in such a controlling position that they are even greatly profitable against the trend of the rest of the market. The IBM PC pushed the boom. DOS and Windows have ridden the wave and placed Microsoft in the position of punishing any software company and they keep expanding -- that becomes too successful in the name of feeding their monstrous appetite. DOS and Windows sucked for many years, but were small and people ignored the control that was being given such an unworthy producer.
They drive their own jobs with lots of marketing and billions to spend on research, which would be much better used in a large market of competing thriving software vendors, like we had before Microsoft used monopolistic business models to destroy them all. If you become successful, Microsoft is guaranteed to take it away from you. That is successful for Microsoft and creation of Microsoft jobs, but far from good for America or the world.
The arrival of windows pushed the last boom. No questions about that. Unix had been around for 20 yrs and no boom. Windows and the net and look at how things accelerated..why..because ma/pa people use windows..not *nix. Just the facts.
You mentioned facts? The boom came on the backs of now-defunct companies who pioneered their fields, such as word processing, networking, compilers, OO Languages, etc. none of which was pioneered by Microsoft. But Microsoft was good at using software ownership to take these things away from their innovators. And now you have come full circle to why many developers are congregated here and do not always hold Microsoft in high regard.
But you knew that, didn't you? Perhaps you are AC because your large company is Microsoft?
It seems quite likely to me that that was an under-reported version of
this incident reported on MSNBC, that permitted an intruder with apparent quite-hostile intent onto US Army sites.
I've hit 12GB a week each direction just running Freenet, after adjusting the weekly average to way below that (the throttling does not work as advertised). No significant file transfers were going on -- the throughput of Freenet does not make swapping large binaries rewarding.
It is a significant non-business need for larger quotas. I had to pull the plug on an active Freenet node because my ISP has his own caps and I couldn't get it down to the 2 GB per week I could spare.
Um, where was the open source version of Windows that Microsoft had to compete against?
In other news, scientists proclaimed that dinosaurs died because they were no longer adapted to the environment, and then refused to accept that their huge skeletons and the large quantity of other life forms they consumed proved otherwise.
This unwarranted love-fest with Google is silly. Answer the question. Oh, if you mod this parent down, perhaps no one will see the criticism and Google will never have to think about fixing their broken engine. That's good thinking.
These moderators appear to have never used an engine such as Altavista that could properly filter a search.
So, the bright side of this patent is that perhaps it will keep others from focusing on Google's obsession -- the reference popularity contest. But like any patent, it is subject to abuse, not that we know at all how Google intends to enforce it.
I have requested improvements to Google's algorithms for years to make it more possible to search for a specific thing, rather than just a popular thing, but they don't have engineers, apparently, who understand these basic needs.
AltaVista lets you wildcard, search for one word NEAR another word, use common words as part of a phrase, and construct a variety of very useful filters that are impossible with Google's popularity engine.
AltaVista used to be the best out there, but compromised their own usefulness. If AV indexed more pages and had not dropped their usenet coverage, it would still be the most useful engine by far to an advanced searcher -- one looking for very specific things. I still go there often. Just because the masses use Google does not make it quality or best for advanced users. They have stagnated for years now. The masses use a lot of things produced by monopolists who are no longer required to innovate or even improve to the level of the competition.
Actually, Falconseye is a significant improvement
on
Nethack 3.4.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The game stands on it's own, but the added graphics don't need to be anywhere near perfect to make the game immensely more usable by non-techies. My six-year-old has played it again and again, and loves it, which never would have happened with the text-only version.
It depends on how you define better. Do you mean more rapidly relevant? If so, then at what "cost"? Google nearly always provides the link I need within a few pages, and the majority of time on the first page. And they do it in a manner quite lacking in other search engines (and web sites in general) - they do so quickly, quietly, and politely.
Google crawls more web pages than Altavista. Since Altavista made the decision to drop usenet listings, their coverage is even less. But for finding a particular listing within the set of covered material, Google is only really good at finding the popular page. That makes it great for the masses looking for the most popular Brittany fan website, but not for the person trying to match specific criteria.
It's going to be quite hard to be better.
It depends greatly upon your definition of "better", but I prefer "more relevant". If it means "most popular", then Google has them beat. But if I want to look for something that has "something starting with these letters near something starting with these or those letters", this is a common situation that is trivial with AltaVista. Google engineers have ignored requests for such precision. I often go to AltaVista to better weed through the masses of content for a particular type of site. All they need to do is extend their coverage and keep it a bit more current, and they are better again, because Google has always ignored real precision.
My own article was rejected that raised significant issues not even mentioned here, and this one article nearly off the front page, but just for the record, let me raise the following:
1. The number of disclosed credit cards in this case may be closer to 8 million.
2. If your credit card was compromised, it was the fault of the store for keeping the CC info forever in what amounts to a filing cabinet in a publicly-accessable area -- unless you are a technical person, who should have known better. Not all services have millions of credit card numbers just laying around like this -- only extremely incompetent ones, such as PayPal, who insist on
storing your credit card information forever, even if you close the account. This is the only way you build up millions of credit card numbers in a weakly-protected database. Because of the logistics in this case, how many bits of key they use encoding it is typically irrelevant, because the order origination process, controlled by the web pages, has o be able to decrypt it. Why did you allow it to be held there by the merchant? It is sheer stupidity.
3. This is why brick and mortar stores seem more secure. They do not keep your credit card number in a filing cabinet in the show room in case you forget to bring your wallet. PayPal does, making it vulnerable to any burglar or employee with a little knowledge years later who compromises the database, which is not hard to do if it has to be available for automatic remembering of CC numbers during ordering.
4. As customers, we have a right to know which of the major incompetent CC processors, such as PayPal was compromised this time, so we can use it better as an example to ordinary users why not to deal with a company that would forever hold your CC info hostage to the Microsoft Security oxymoron.
Sorry. The Laziness of the industry to not find a way for you to use the music conveniently trumps your own laziness because they have all the bucks and the lawyers, and they also extract more profit, at least in the short term, by branding your usage piracy.
I should have responded earlier, but I didn't see this response.
It is obvious that I do not expect your choice to match my choice. Choice depends upon preferences and requirements. There is no perfect choice, and nearly any limitation of any system, (not restricted to Windows versus Linux) can be overcome with enough inconvenience, so it just becomes a matter of which involves the least inconvenience.
Certainly I do not presume that you don't have other reasons for running Windows (which I might not prioritize as highly as you).
But you have just described a set of disadvantages of Windows that should be clearly identified as such.
Real is not the only product that thinks they have to do this mess in Windows just because the precedent has been set to do it.
Rumor has it that there are actually other windowing systems available, besides those produced by Microsoft, where RealPlayer is not placed into any system tray at all during startup.
Of course, using such a system might indicate a hackerish streak and an unnatural desire to control one's own desktop.
There are still many people who use IE and are web savvy. I consider myself to be so, I don't use Mozilla because I like the way it renders the pages that I go to better. I'm sure there are some people who would agree with me.
I would not agree at all. What odd logic. If I like the way Mozilla rendered pages that I go to better, it would seem to be a reason for me to use it more, not a reason not to use it.
I'd hold judgement on either of these patents until I see whether it is being used offensively or defensively. I do not recall AOL using any patents offensively.
Serious businesses cannot reasonably ignore the threat of hostile patents to their valuable services, and so, arguably, must be active in taking out patents.
If you want to talk about evil, refer to the British Telecom patent on hyperlinks, which they tried to enforce.
There is little to this news until we see how the patents are applied. They could, for example, be used to defend the royalty-free nature of Mozilla open source, and IMHO it is quite likely it would be used in this way if a significant problem arose blocking this technology which AOL values.
Re:He talks about the 'dogma of nostalga'
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 1
How can you *not* look back at your childhood and miss the innocence, and the feeling that your parents could save you from any evil? Sure, in the 70's we had the Soviet 'Menace', but it didn't seem so close to home as the twin towers.
Perhaps in the eye of the media.or anyone who did not understand the Soviet / US threat of nuclear war, which still exists to a certain degree.
I guess it is just me, but I have more trouble identifying with the victims of the two towers than the yearly victims of the tobacco companies, and I do not smoke. It was one smaller terrible thing in a world of much larger terrible things. It didn't make me think twice about flying or going in tall buildings, which is far less dangerous than walking out my front door onto the unreasonably unsafe speedway that has been made out of the street in front of my house to benefit corporations setting up new businesses not too far away.
But, then, in retrospect I would rather be walking than living with the consequences of this recurring war for oil, sending more and more billions in oil revenues into parts of the world I distrust.
It would be great to be forward looking and excited about what techonology can do for the world, but all I see is petty warmongers, and a fear driven society too scared to make intellegent choices, using technology to distance people from each other, be it bombs, or toys that preclude any use of the imagination.
I agree when it comes to all the corporations, fortunately, there are lots of things happening to be happy aboput in spite of corporations, and they become more obvious with the end to gambling on technology stocks.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of hopeful people! When fear(of terrorists, government, future) is no longer dominating people, perhaps we can get something done.
The point of LOTR for me is that both "good" and "evil" are sad when their reign comes to an end, and how much really seperates them, but mortality for man and the eventual diminishing of all powers is what makes the future bright. Imagine if all the independently-beautiful organisms and organizations which have ever existed tried to coexist without death, each exacting it's own resources and control?
The record companies have had more than ample opportunity to express their committment, both verbally and in deeds, to preserving what used to be the normal use of purchased media and fair uses of media by their customers. They have made it clear that they are trying to stamp out exactly that by opposing it and never saying otherwise.
Whatever games they and you (and for all we know you are they) play to pretend otherwise, their goal is to squeeze more and more money out of those who legally purchase their works, thinking that as long as the market may be able to bear more, it is their duty to extract more by further restriction of rights, whatever that means to their customers.
This is also very obvious from your / their push to extend copyright perpetually, extracting more and more, not from the copyright violators, but from those who abide by the laws.
While you / they feel it is your right to push it to the edge to squeeze every last drop from the paying public who have suported you thus far, claiming you / they are just trying to make pirates pay their fair share. The fact kicking those who have been buying dozens or hundreds of new titles every a year does not make us more loyal, and will eventually lead to changes more fundamental than what you / they complain about today.
We know your industry hates discussion of fair use. If they ever showed any signs of actually caring about preserving the rights of the customer, they might have a legitimate sympathizer or two among the paying public. An approach that exhibited any evenhandedness, restoring some of what they have driven so hard to take away, would shock their opponents. There are any number of forms this could take technologically.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that the DOCTYPE is essential for certain processing environments today. Having available schema is a good thing. But there are big problems with the syntactical way the DTD and internal subset are supported in XML. It would be much better if the schema were completely switchable and validation and normalization were loosely-coupled operations on an abstract data model rather than syntactic operations at parse time. I would have no problem with DOCTYPE if it were a seperate module that you could choose to support or not support. That is why, for example, SOAP had to subset XML -- because a vicious user can define a few parameter entities and blow the server out of memory with syntax.
While a machine processor and abstract model can easily live without a bunch of character entities, standards such as MathML rely on the heavily to make it readable in raw form for users.
IDs as supplied with DTDs have a variety of problems. If doctypes went away, you have no IDs anyway. The concept of references seems to transcend many lesser considerations of a schema. It is, really, a structural question in most uses, even if not in HTML.
I agree thast XML is no DB. It is a format useful for transferring things between object models such as DBs. HTML should have an abstract data model before it is a syntax. That would tell us, for example, what is the same between the HTML syntax rendition and the XHTML syntax rendition.
Among other things ...
(1) They need to eliminate the doctype can of worms. Unfortunately, this cries out for an alternative solution for character entities.
(2) Namespaces need to be simplified and better integrated into the core of the language. Expanding on this, there need to be much better mechanisms for modularizing parts of the markup so that it isn't necessary to parse and hold everything in memory to make sense of it.
(3) There needs to be clean-up and standardization of element id's and references, integrating it with (1) and (2).
Do others have more? Should this be done compatibly with XML?
I believe that we really need a standard for arbitrary abstract data models, with XML as just one syntactic representation, but I would have to go into long details to justify this.
If we can't depend on Google for honest results, most of us will go on to something else, and we will probably be taking a large chunk of the user community as a whole with us.
How I wish this were true. But I think the masses are comfortable with their biases and seem to thrive on distorted information flows where it unifies them in their biases. They would only revolt if their own personal interests were greatly offended, or if there were a search engine that led you to free archives of usenet binary groups or MP3s to download.
AC,
My only "hostility" towards AC's comment that it was overblown was to say "Umm, not at all, it was a serious incident".
The rest was clearly directed at AC's feigned shock that a number of people here do not like Microsoft and his lovefest for Microsoft.
Yeah, the big bad company bought good software from other people to sell. How dare they. What, again, did they even buy from the primary innovators in these fields Novell, WordPerfect, Borland, Netscape, etc.? But we all know they could afford to rewrite their code dozens of times to eventually get enough right once they got the business model locked up, but they still lack important features.
I am feeding trolls today.
Exploits would be related to the percentage of the web actually using the platform, the number of expansive web software systems available for the platform (if you run Apache, for example, all the same exploits would apply, etc.).
No command shell... My toaster has no command shell, either, and it has never been hacked, so it must be right. Of course, it might be a function of how many useful things you can do with it.
No Root user... What a novel concept. I get it, just throw away all the security model, and then the problems don't qualify as security problems anyway. Pesky security machanisms were just distracting us. Real climbers never use safety ropes, because they just get in the way and cause a false sense of security!
Pascal strings... I have certainly spent many years working with non-null-terminated strings that used a count. It is irrelevant to buffer overflows whether the size is by delimiter or by pre-count. It is a matter of whether the program (or automatic string class) checks to see if the static buffer has room for the new string based upon the sizes of the source strings. I have seen plenty of buffer overflows with counted strings for exactly the same reasons they occur in null-terminated strings.
Macs running Webstar have ability to only run CGI placed in correct directory location and correctly file "typed"...Macs never run code ever merely based on how a file is named. ".exe" suffixes mean nothing! That explains why Macs were not vulnerable to the Word Macro exploits and a variety of other exploits -- oops, they were. Then, perhaps it is just a matter of how popular a platform it is. Let's see, no interesting modern Web Server configurations run on it, so no one uses it, and no one exploits it. A little like my daughter's TI-83, no web exploits against that, either, but it does not support the types of web aplications I want or a reasonable number of users. But no one would bother to write an exploit for it!
Your first three paragraphs were quite good and interesting.
Your fourth is full of idiocy.
I think this story is a bit overblown. Umm, not at all. It is quite a serious incident.
It appears that most /.'s don't like microsoft
Tell me, is this the first time you noticed that? Not much analytical thought going on upstairs, is there?and thats sad because microsoft is the driving company behind many many jobs They suck a very disproportionate chunk of money out of the market, they are in a position where innovation is much too risky, they are in such a controlling position that they are even greatly profitable against the trend of the rest of the market. The IBM PC pushed the boom. DOS and Windows have ridden the wave and placed Microsoft in the position of punishing any software company and they keep expanding -- that becomes too successful in the name of feeding their monstrous appetite. DOS and Windows sucked for many years, but were small and people ignored the control that was being given such an unworthy producer.
They drive their own jobs with lots of marketing and billions to spend on research, which would be much better used in a large market of competing thriving software vendors, like we had before Microsoft used monopolistic business models to destroy them all. If you become successful, Microsoft is guaranteed to take it away from you. That is successful for Microsoft and creation of Microsoft jobs, but far from good for America or the world.
The arrival of windows pushed the last boom. No questions about that. Unix had been around for 20 yrs and no boom. Windows and the net and look at how things accelerated..why..because ma/pa people use windows..not *nix. Just the facts.
You mentioned facts? The boom came on the backs of now-defunct companies who pioneered their fields, such as word processing, networking, compilers, OO Languages, etc. none of which was pioneered by Microsoft. But Microsoft was good at using software ownership to take these things away from their innovators. And now you have come full circle to why many developers are congregated here and do not always hold Microsoft in high regard.
But you knew that, didn't you? Perhaps you are AC because your large company is Microsoft?
It seems quite likely to me that that was an under-reported version of this incident reported on MSNBC, that permitted an intruder with apparent quite-hostile intent onto US Army sites.
I've hit 12GB a week each direction just running Freenet, after adjusting the weekly average to way below that (the throttling does not work as advertised). No significant file transfers were going on -- the throughput of Freenet does not make swapping large binaries rewarding.
It is a significant non-business need for larger quotas. I had to pull the plug on an active Freenet node because my ISP has his own caps and I couldn't get it down to the 2 GB per week I could spare.
Um, where was the open source version of Windows that Microsoft had to compete against?
In other news, scientists proclaimed that dinosaurs died because they were no longer adapted to the environment, and then refused to accept that their huge skeletons and the large quantity of other life forms they consumed proved otherwise.
Mod parent back up.
This unwarranted love-fest with Google is silly. Answer the question. Oh, if you mod this parent down, perhaps no one will see the criticism and Google will never have to think about fixing their broken engine. That's good thinking.
These moderators appear to have never used an engine such as Altavista that could properly filter a search.
Google: hire some real engineers.
So, the bright side of this patent is that perhaps it will keep others from focusing on Google's obsession -- the reference popularity contest. But like any patent, it is subject to abuse, not that we know at all how Google intends to enforce it.
I have requested improvements to Google's algorithms for years to make it more possible to search for a specific thing, rather than just a popular thing, but they don't have engineers, apparently, who understand these basic needs.
AltaVista lets you wildcard, search for one word NEAR another word, use common words as part of a phrase, and construct a variety of very useful filters that are impossible with Google's popularity engine.
AltaVista used to be the best out there, but compromised their own usefulness. If AV indexed more pages and had not dropped their usenet coverage, it would still be the most useful engine by far to an advanced searcher -- one looking for very specific things. I still go there often. Just because the masses use Google does not make it quality or best for advanced users. They have stagnated for years now. The masses use a lot of things produced by monopolists who are no longer required to innovate or even improve to the level of the competition.
The game stands on it's own, but the added graphics don't need to be anywhere near perfect to make the game immensely more usable by non-techies. My six-year-old has played it again and again, and loves it, which never would have happened with the text-only version.
Choosing a language or programmer which is not strong on structure is a judgement call that is sometimes appropriate and sometimes not.
I think we would need to hear exact and complete cases before we could make any sort of intelligent determination.
Mistakes happen. Bad judgement happens. Also, good judgement happens that isn't recognized by someone lacking expertise and the big picture.
Yes, that is the way to make micropayments take off: patent them.
It depends on how you define better. Do you mean more rapidly relevant? If so, then at what "cost"? Google nearly always provides the link I need within a few pages, and the majority of time on the first page. And they do it in a manner quite lacking in other search engines (and web sites in general) - they do so quickly, quietly, and politely.
Google crawls more web pages than Altavista. Since Altavista made the decision to drop usenet listings, their coverage is even less. But for finding a particular listing within the set of covered material, Google is only really good at finding the popular page. That makes it great for the masses looking for the most popular Brittany fan website, but not for the person trying to match specific criteria.
It's going to be quite hard to be better.
It depends greatly upon your definition of "better", but I prefer "more relevant". If it means "most popular", then Google has them beat. But if I want to look for something that has "something starting with these letters near something starting with these or those letters", this is a common situation that is trivial with AltaVista. Google engineers have ignored requests for such precision. I often go to AltaVista to better weed through the masses of content for a particular type of site. All they need to do is extend their coverage and keep it a bit more current, and they are better again, because Google has always ignored real precision.
My own article was rejected that raised significant issues not even mentioned here, and this one article nearly off the front page, but just for the record, let me raise the following:
1. The number of disclosed credit cards in this case may be closer to 8 million.
2. If your credit card was compromised, it was the fault of the store for keeping the CC info forever in what amounts to a filing cabinet in a publicly-accessable area -- unless you are a technical person, who should have known better. Not all services have millions of credit card numbers just laying around like this -- only extremely incompetent ones, such as PayPal, who insist on storing your credit card information forever, even if you close the account. This is the only way you build up millions of credit card numbers in a weakly-protected database. Because of the logistics in this case, how many bits of key they use encoding it is typically irrelevant, because the order origination process, controlled by the web pages, has o be able to decrypt it. Why did you allow it to be held there by the merchant? It is sheer stupidity.
3. This is why brick and mortar stores seem more secure. They do not keep your credit card number in a filing cabinet in the show room in case you forget to bring your wallet. PayPal does, making it vulnerable to any burglar or employee with a little knowledge years later who compromises the database, which is not hard to do if it has to be available for automatic remembering of CC numbers during ordering.
4. As customers, we have a right to know which of the major incompetent CC processors, such as PayPal was compromised this time, so we can use it better as an example to ordinary users why not to deal with a company that would forever hold your CC info hostage to the Microsoft Security oxymoron.
If spammers were really under the control of a jurisdiction, it does not take a "do not spam" list to stop them.
If I were a spammer, the do-not-spam list sounds like an ideal source for qualified, good email addresses to spam. What a completely stupid concept.
Sorry. The Laziness of the industry to not find a way for you to use the music conveniently trumps your own laziness because they have all the bucks and the lawyers, and they also extract more profit, at least in the short term, by branding your usage piracy.
I should have responded earlier, but I didn't see this response.
It is obvious that I do not expect your choice to match my choice. Choice depends upon preferences and requirements. There is no perfect choice, and nearly any limitation of any system, (not restricted to Windows versus Linux) can be overcome with enough inconvenience, so it just becomes a matter of which involves the least inconvenience.
Certainly I do not presume that you don't have other reasons for running Windows (which I might not prioritize as highly as you).
But you have just described a set of disadvantages of Windows that should be clearly identified as such.
Real is not the only product that thinks they have to do this mess in Windows just because the precedent has been set to do it.
Rumor has it that there are actually other windowing systems available, besides those produced by Microsoft, where RealPlayer is not placed into any system tray at all during startup.
Of course, using such a system might indicate a hackerish streak and an unnatural desire to control one's own desktop.
There are still many people who use IE and are web savvy. I consider myself to be so, I don't use Mozilla because I like the way it renders the pages that I go to better. I'm sure there are some people who would agree with me.
I would not agree at all. What odd logic. If I like the way Mozilla rendered pages that I go to better, it would seem to be a reason for me to use it more, not a reason not to use it.
There was no such command for sending files in VAX VMS or any related software I am aware of.
Two commands of VAX VMS that might be compared are the "Phone" command and the SEND command, but the SEND command certainly did not send files.
I'd hold judgement on either of these patents until I see whether it is being used offensively or defensively. I do not recall AOL using any patents offensively.
Serious businesses cannot reasonably ignore the threat of hostile patents to their valuable services, and so, arguably, must be active in taking out patents.
If you want to talk about evil, refer to the British Telecom patent on hyperlinks, which they tried to enforce.
There is little to this news until we see how the patents are applied. They could, for example, be used to defend the royalty-free nature of Mozilla open source, and IMHO it is quite likely it would be used in this way if a significant problem arose blocking this technology which AOL values.
How can you *not* look back at your childhood and miss the innocence, and the feeling that your parents could save you from any evil? Sure, in the 70's we had the Soviet 'Menace', but it didn't seem so close to home as the twin towers.
Perhaps in the eye of the media.or anyone who did not understand the Soviet / US threat of nuclear war, which still exists to a certain degree.
I guess it is just me, but I have more trouble identifying with the victims of the two towers than the yearly victims of the tobacco companies, and I do not smoke. It was one smaller terrible thing in a world of much larger terrible things. It didn't make me think twice about flying or going in tall buildings, which is far less dangerous than walking out my front door onto the unreasonably unsafe speedway that has been made out of the street in front of my house to benefit corporations setting up new businesses not too far away.
But, then, in retrospect I would rather be walking than living with the consequences of this recurring war for oil, sending more and more billions in oil revenues into parts of the world I distrust.
It would be great to be forward looking and excited about what techonology can do for the world, but all I see is petty warmongers, and a fear driven society too scared to make intellegent choices, using technology to distance people from each other, be it bombs, or toys that preclude any use of the imagination.
I agree when it comes to all the corporations, fortunately, there are lots of things happening to be happy aboput in spite of corporations, and they become more obvious with the end to gambling on technology stocks.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of hopeful people! When fear(of terrorists, government, future) is no longer dominating people, perhaps we can get something done.
The point of LOTR for me is that both "good" and "evil" are sad when their reign comes to an end, and how much really seperates them, but mortality for man and the eventual diminishing of all powers is what makes the future bright. Imagine if all the independently-beautiful organisms and organizations which have ever existed tried to coexist without death, each exacting it's own resources and control?
Whatever games they and you (and for all we know you are they) play to pretend otherwise, their goal is to squeeze more and more money out of those who legally purchase their works, thinking that as long as the market may be able to bear more, it is their duty to extract more by further restriction of rights, whatever that means to their customers.
This is also very obvious from your / their push to extend copyright perpetually, extracting more and more, not from the copyright violators, but from those who abide by the laws.
While you / they feel it is your right to push it to the edge to squeeze every last drop from the paying public who have suported you thus far, claiming you / they are just trying to make pirates pay their fair share. The fact kicking those who have been buying dozens or hundreds of new titles every a year does not make us more loyal, and will eventually lead to changes more fundamental than what you / they complain about today.
We know your industry hates discussion of fair use. If they ever showed any signs of actually caring about preserving the rights of the customer, they might have a legitimate sympathizer or two among the paying public. An approach that exhibited any evenhandedness, restoring some of what they have driven so hard to take away, would shock their opponents. There are any number of forms this could take technologically.