In well written software SQL injection attacks shouldn't be possible. Don't use dynamic SQL, use stored procs. If you think you have to use dynamic sql, then create the sql statement within a stored proc (not code) then access that stored proc using authentication details that permit only read only access. I've never seen a situation in which dynamic SQL was required for updating or inserting data, generally it only gets used when performing complicated searching and even then it's not the only option....
The work to standardise OpenXML has been carried out by Ecma International as part of an open, cross-industry collaboration via Technical Committee 45 (Ecma TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress.
Most of the standards that get created these days have a major corporate backer from which the majority of the work in development of the standard has taken place. It becomes a standard when it is accepted by other representatives of the development community. Who better to offer standards on word processing formats than the #1 leader in word processing on the planet. Like it or not Microsoft is that leader, not Sun who is the major backer of Open Office. I think your whole argument is based on some childish inability to accept that.
I've worked with Office 2007 xml formats, they are extremely easy to work with very powerful and extremely accessible. Microsoft has actually astonished me with the fantastic work they have done and the way in which they have provided support for Office 2007 formats in Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. I think the days of forced migrations are genuinely in the past. People are going to move to Office 2007 and Open XML formats for one reason only and that is a genuine value added benefit. Specifically from Office 2007's tight integration and it's connectivity with Sharepoint. The format of Office 2007's documents is not going to be a motivation for upgrading.
I think Microsoft is taking the right approach and has the right attitude on this one and that your comments are totally based on emotional and heavily biased opinions.
I think you're missing the point a bit. Sure you can create endless numbers of possible ways to try and help users, but as has already been quoted in this thread:
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
I guarantee you, no matter what you come up with, someone out there will find a way to make a blunder out of anything you derive, plus if you treat your users like idiots you'll find most people do not appreciate being treated like that. You might end up annoying the majority of users that do not need your functionality to the point they stop using it. What happens when all these people start using another (less annoying) product? The users you were trying to help will end up using that product as well, because it's what everyone else uses.
At the end of the day, Excel does the job. From a support perspective, for what it does, it's doing very well, so far it's done the job better than any other product on the market, hence it's success.
But the point you're missing is the argument I was making is not about Excel, it's about the supportability of radically new technology, some people adapt quicker than others that's all there is to it. A commercial software project is always going to cater for the majority.
Microsoft has entire buildings devoted totally to studying useability. They are actually very good with UI and interface design, it's one of the reasons why they have been so successful.
What's that?
Yes yes, I know they've stolen every decent idea they've ever had. But they are the masters of recognising good design and innovations, taking those ideas and transforming for the mass market then selling it on to the masses.
So what happens to your system that endlessly creates copy after copy of the same data in different formats? They could run out of storage space, then accidently delete the versions of their documents they needed to keep in the clean up. They could get confused and accidently revert to an older copy of there document, losing data. The potential for data loss is always going to be there, as data loss is a required feature of a system, occasionally you want or need to lose data.
At the end of the day there are numerous arbitrary choices that can be made when attempting to maximise the useability of an OS or application. Every one of those arbitrary choices is going to catch a certain percentage of your user base and cause them pain.
I've been developing software for over a decade and I've come to one conclusion:
There's some people out there who simply can't be helped and no matter how much effort you put in they are going to have a hard time using your software.
When developing software, the level of useability you incorporate into your system is a business decision, it has nothing to do with achieving idealisms or perfection (which is actually impossible). You build as much useability into your software as is required for the majority of your market to have a successful experience with your applications.
So I would say. YES, it is the users.
However, I think many of the problems we've seen in personal computing to date is a generational thing, over time these sorts of issues are going to disappear, as new generations come through who have lived with the existance of personal computing since the day they were born.
At the same time software development is becoming more sophisticated, as is the field of industrial design. It is becoming easier and easier for average developers to produce world class software applications that are extremely easy to use. I think these sorts of issues are always going to be around, for at least as long as new technology is being produced, however as we begin to reach the plateau in the curve of Moore's law, and the rate at which new technology leaps decreases these sorts of issues with useability are going to diminish.
There is no need for Silverlight other than to lock you into Microsoft technology.
Here's a need - INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY, SECURITY, AND CAPABILITIES OVER FLASH!
You've obviously never developed an application using Microsoft.NET. I'm betting you're some poor Adobe Flash animator realising everything you know is about to be deprecated.
Adobe flash can't even be compared to what Microsoft is delivering as a development platform.
How about instead of pulling wool over my eyes I'll just breathe a huge sigh of relief instead?
Thank god for Microsoft, I can't wait for Flash to be just one of those memories that when you recollect makes you groan out load.
If you don't believe Microsoft would ever do this, you simply haven't thought it through, or don't have a clue.
Allowing other operating systems to leverage some of the power of Microsoft's development platform only ensures that their development platform gains the most market share possible. It's always going to be the case that support for.NET functionality on other operating systems is going to lag behind that available on Windows. It will always be the case that to leverage Microsoft.NET to it's fullest you are going to need to spend money on Microsoft desktop operating systems and server systems. This basicaly means open sourcing.NET is going to increase revenue for Microsoft in the long term as people move to Microsoft systems to fully leverage all the functionality available in.NET.
No you can use it now. It was released in November.
I'm implementing a solution with it as we speak and yes it is eliminating the code I once would have written to spawn worker threads and sychronise them...
So I think youre the one with the fertile imagination, which seems to be focused on denial.
This is a feature of WCF - Windows Communication Foundation in.NET 3.0 (part of Win V). WCF is designed for next gen CPUs with large numbers of cores. It spawns worker threads for you as needed and sychronises these calls for you automatically. You have the option of manually creating and sychronising threads, but out of the box it does it all for you behind the scenes.
Just imagine coding for a machine with 1024 cores! It's obvious that writing software as we've done in the past where you manually spawn threads and sychronise them is never going to effectively use such hardware. You are obviously going to have a framework like WCF (or this compiler) that takes advantage of this for you.
Maybe the wow has started now after all hmm?;) I love being flame bait... especially when I'm right.
I bet there's no dark plot here. You really think they could purposefully implement systems requiring dozens of staff with deliberate fraudulent intent and not have someone blow the whistle??
I bet this is nothing more than just your standard run of the mill incompetence.
I imagine they have an intranet site which has some information which is for internal use mixed with information that is meant to be the same as the online content. Due to the incompetence of those implementing these systems their intranet and extra-net sites are getting out of sync with each other.
Guess what the result is?
Every time the price difference is to the advantage of the customer there's not a peep to be heard.
As soon as the price difference is to the customer's disadvantage! All hell breaks loose, they go into the store go "WHAT ITS NOT THAT MUCH". Pissed off, they refuse to buy it, go home, check the price again... boom major shit and fan action.
Modern medical science is all about statistics. We should be collecting information about medical illness from people's medical histories in order to formulate new treatments and improve existing treatments. I actually think it would be a good thing for everyone's medical records to be available in some form for medical researchers, providing the records were anonymous and free of personal details.
A persons medical history is very important especially when dealing with chronic illnesses. Being able to track and graph medical results is a crucial means for a patient to analyse the effects of diet, treatments, therapies etc.
With a standardized system for keeping medical records, you could create computer systems that help doctors monitor their patients help and alert them to possible problems that should be checked upon.
The list goes on and on. Medical industry seem to have been one of the last to be evolved by the information revolution, but it's definitely one that is most in need of information systems.
Privacy issues are a concern, however, there is absolutely no question that a persons medical records should be in a standardized format and that this format should be open to enable the software development community to deliver the systems many people desperately need.
Have you checked out the price tag ? The iphone is a very expensive phone that is probably going to make many think twice, and definitely provide a barrier to those switching from other smartphones - blackberry, windows mobile.
If Jobs achieves his target of 10 million phones, that will come close to 20 billion dollars in revenue for the iphone. In today's economic environment maybe... when it's released, who knows what the conditions might be. Given I've seen very bearish outlooks for the stock market of late, I somehow doubt they'll get even half that.
Sharepoint uses open standards for it's protocols and document formats. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy for a company to switch from it.
The scope of Sharepoint encapsulates not only a company's document formats but also the company's corporate filing system, the way it is managed, how people collaborate together, CRM, intranet, and internet etc etc.
When Sharepoint is implemented in a company it totally shapes the culture of the company. People live and breathe Sharepoint in a company using it.
In the past MS Office has always faced cheaper competing products that can load and save MS Office document formats. The vast majority of companies out there haven't switched because the benefits of competing products didn't warrant the effort to shift the portion of a company's culture that had reliance on MS Office to something else.
It is the culture of a company that is hard to change, not the format of it's documents.
This is why I say Sharepoint entrenches companies in MS technology, it is the penetration of the product into the corporate culture.
Sharepoint is all about interoperability, it utilises SOAP/XML heavily and utilises many open standards such as RSS.
Not to mention the host of third party components that offer interoperability with other systems.
You probably shouldn't make comments about Sharepoint unless you have a clue about it. Your commment is utterly ridiculous, I guess you posted anonymously for a very good reason.
Microsft Sharepoint is an all in one company intranet, document management, CRM and internet portal system for medium to large companies that has been gaining significant market in recent years. Sharepoint entrenches a company in Microsoft technology far more than Office ever could or ever will.
Much of the killer features on offer in Office 2007 are features leveraging Sharepoint.
If your company has already invested in Sharepoint or is thinking about using it, the choice of Open Office versus Office 2007 is a no brainer. Choosing Sharepoint and then Open Office instead of Office 2007 would rate as a category 5 blunder.
If Open Office supporters want to see it thrive they better keep their eyes on the ball and not the man because MS Office has passed the ball to Sharepoint some time back now.
You see this whole rational you have is based on the assumption that somehow we can stop technology getting into the hands of "the bad guys" to allow us to impose our will upon "the bad guys" until they die or become "good guys" and finally like us.
Well guess what????
It's never going to happen!!!
The genie is out of the bottle.
You can't suppress these people or the technology they can get access to.
If you want "the bad guys" not to have access to technology the only option is for there not to be any "bad guys" in existence, because whilst they exist in a technological world, guess what? They're going to have access to technology. As technology advances it is highly likely that they're going to have access to weapons and systems that will pose a far greater threat than a couple of guys with some mortars and Google maps.
I am not suggesting that we try and eliminate "the bad guys" because guess what, the bad guys have friends and family. If you eliminate "the bad guys" it's quite likely to upset their friends and/or family. Who will then also become "bad guys" themselves. Leaving you back at square one - pissed off technologically enabled people.
The only possible option you have is to try and make a world in which no one has cause to be "bad guys".
If we (as a race) cannot find the wisdom to firstly recognise this simple fact and actually start taking steps towards doing something about it, then the only possible outcome is going to be our own annihilation.
What I think we need is not to stop things like Google maps, but to produce a massive number of bifocals for people like you and our political leaders who are so totally and utterly short sighted. People who measure success quarterly on a P&L report, people who don't think conservation and the environment are an issue, people who don't think it is wrong for education and access to information to be restricted to the rich and privileged, people who see welfare and social support systems as a liability... etc etc etc
"...Even if an active ASAT system exists, satellite systems typically involve whole constellations of units in orbit; shooting down enough satellites to cripple a system becomes difficult. If one were to shoot down all the low-Earth-orbit imagery satellites a company was using to survey one's territory, the resulting debris might interfere with or damage other satellites in similar orbits. An entire orbital plane could be temporarily made useless not only to potentially hostile systems but also to friendly ones...".
...and this is coming from the guys who like shooting stuff, talk to any peaceniks our there and they would more likely to use the word indefinitely than temporarily.
If any sanity were to prevail here, they would need to work out a way of disabling satellites without creating debris.... tricky considering their electronics are heavily shielded to withstand the extreme conditions you normally find in space.
Perhaps a better solution would be for the coalition forces to place their troops somewhere where Iraqi insurgents can't attack them.... say in the US for example, or England.
I'm fully aware of what this little back water of a country has to offer online and I would have thought it completely irrelevant to 98% of the planet browsing the web.
You've been rated informative. Glad someone could work out what the hell your point was, I certainly couldn't.
My main point was that Microsoft hasn't fudged page rankings on it's own site, to mis-represent it as the most highly ranked result.
My second point was that google's ranking for maps.live.com may have been artificially fudged down. Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn't, I'm still extremely surprised by the sites ranked ahead of it.
Uh... it's in the domain name. It's also in text on the page.
On that arguement how can you explain maps.live.com being listed in google's results for maps at all? It's obviously a key word for the page. Last time I read anything about google's ranking algorithm it uses links from other sites to determine page rankings not the title of the page. On that basis I find it hard to believe sites like www.lib.utexas.edu/maps, www.whereis.com.au/ and www.eduplace.com/ss/maps/ can be ranked or linked to more than maps.live.com.
Do you know what the true irony of all this is....
Go to live.com search for maps...
1. Yahoo Maps 2. Maps.com 3. Mapsonus.com 4. Google maps
There is a link to maps.live.com. It is the #1 in the paid advertising section.
Isn't ironic that out of all the search company's Microsoft is the only one that seems to be supplying unbiased results?
And guess where live.maps.com is on Google's search?
Go look... no it's not on the first page....
Go to the second page of results... Ah yes half way down.... HMMMM
I think Google has a case to answer here, I simply don't believe Microsoft maps can possibly legitimately be ranked where it is.
HA!!!
Hilarious, come on all you Google fanboys/MS anti-fanboys.... try and spin this one into yet another Microsoft bashing session I dare you, then I can see something truly imaginative.
Slashdot Mirror
In well written software SQL injection attacks shouldn't be possible. Don't use dynamic SQL, use stored procs. If you think you have to use dynamic sql, then create the sql statement within a stored proc (not code) then access that stored proc using authentication details that permit only read only access. I've never seen a situation in which dynamic SQL was required for updating or inserting data, generally it only gets used when performing complicated searching and even then it's not the only option....
http://www.sommarskog.se/dyn-search.html
Oops just drag my comment up a parent or two.
Slashdot developers, feature request... ability to delete your own comments !?
What are you people talking about !?
Our standard is more standard than your standard. What sort of childish argument is this?
Look here where it states...
The work to standardise OpenXML has been carried out by Ecma International as part of an open, cross-industry collaboration via Technical Committee 45 (Ecma TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress.
Most of the standards that get created these days have a major corporate backer from which the majority of the work in development of the standard has taken place. It becomes a standard when it is accepted by other representatives of the development community. Who better to offer standards on word processing formats than the #1 leader in word processing on the planet. Like it or not Microsoft is that leader, not Sun who is the major backer of Open Office. I think your whole argument is based on some childish inability to accept that.
I've worked with Office 2007 xml formats, they are extremely easy to work with very powerful and extremely accessible. Microsoft has actually astonished me with the fantastic work they have done and the way in which they have provided support for Office 2007 formats in Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. I think the days of forced migrations are genuinely in the past. People are going to move to Office 2007 and Open XML formats for one reason only and that is a genuine value added benefit. Specifically from Office 2007's tight integration and it's connectivity with Sharepoint. The format of Office 2007's documents is not going to be a motivation for upgrading.
I think Microsoft is taking the right approach and has the right attitude on this one and that your comments are totally based on emotional and heavily biased opinions.
I think you're missing the point a bit. Sure you can create endless numbers of possible ways to try and help users, but as has already been quoted in this thread:
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
I guarantee you, no matter what you come up with, someone out there will find a way to make a blunder out of anything you derive, plus if you treat your users like idiots you'll find most people do not appreciate being treated like that. You might end up annoying the majority of users that do not need your functionality to the point they stop using it. What happens when all these people start using another (less annoying) product? The users you were trying to help will end up using that product as well, because it's what everyone else uses.
At the end of the day, Excel does the job. From a support perspective, for what it does, it's doing very well, so far it's done the job better than any other product on the market, hence it's success.
But the point you're missing is the argument I was making is not about Excel, it's about the supportability of radically new technology, some people adapt quicker than others that's all there is to it. A commercial software project is always going to cater for the majority.
+5 ignorant more like it.
Microsoft has entire buildings devoted totally to studying useability. They are actually very good with UI and interface design, it's one of the reasons why they have been so successful.
What's that?
Yes yes, I know they've stolen every decent idea they've ever had. But they are the masters of recognising good design and innovations, taking those ideas and transforming for the mass market then selling it on to the masses.
So what happens to your system that endlessly creates copy after copy of the same data in different formats? They could run out of storage space, then accidently delete the versions of their documents they needed to keep in the clean up. They could get confused and accidently revert to an older copy of there document, losing data. The potential for data loss is always going to be there, as data loss is a required feature of a system, occasionally you want or need to lose data.
At the end of the day there are numerous arbitrary choices that can be made when attempting to maximise the useability of an OS or application. Every one of those arbitrary choices is going to catch a certain percentage of your user base and cause them pain.
I've been developing software for over a decade and I've come to one conclusion:
There's some people out there who simply can't be helped and no matter how much effort you put in they are going to have a hard time using your software.
When developing software, the level of useability you incorporate into your system is a business decision, it has nothing to do with achieving idealisms or perfection (which is actually impossible). You build as much useability into your software as is required for the majority of your market to have a successful experience with your applications.
So I would say. YES, it is the users.
However, I think many of the problems we've seen in personal computing to date is a generational thing, over time these sorts of issues are going to disappear, as new generations come through who have lived with the existance of personal computing since the day they were born.
At the same time software development is becoming more sophisticated, as is the field of industrial design. It is becoming easier and easier for average developers to produce world class software applications that are extremely easy to use. I think these sorts of issues are always going to be around, for at least as long as new technology is being produced, however as we begin to reach the plateau in the curve of Moore's law, and the rate at which new technology leaps decreases these sorts of issues with useability are going to diminish.
Since when did Slashdot support such ridiculously logical arguments?
I'm too use to the "M$ sux" level of reasoning I guess.
*COUGH* *COUGH* *COUGH*
OK now that someone has explained how rape could be punished in second life.
Can someone please explain to me how the hell one character can rape another in second life?
What did they do?
Walk off for a coffee came back to find three guys going to town on their their second life character?
Having never played the game, my limited knowledge of the game's dynamics tells me "rape" as I know it is a little hard to accomplish in second life.
There is no need for Silverlight other than to lock you into Microsoft technology.
.NET. I'm betting you're some poor Adobe Flash animator realising everything you know is about to be deprecated.
Here's a need - INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY, SECURITY, AND CAPABILITIES OVER FLASH!
You've obviously never developed an application using Microsoft
Adobe flash can't even be compared to what Microsoft is delivering as a development platform.
How about instead of pulling wool over my eyes I'll just breathe a huge sigh of relief instead?
Thank god for Microsoft, I can't wait for Flash to be just one of those memories that when you recollect makes you groan out load.
Um.... guys... this article is totally wrong and misleading.
.NET to be cross platform.
.NET functionality on other operating systems is going to lag behind that available on Windows. It will always be the case that to leverage Microsoft .NET to it's fullest you are going to need to spend money on Microsoft desktop operating systems and server systems. This basicaly means open sourcing .NET is going to increase revenue for Microsoft in the long term as people move to Microsoft systems to fully leverage all the functionality available in .NET.
Microsoft from the start has always intended
The CLI has been an open standard since day 1.
You can download the source code for the CLI here
If you don't believe Microsoft would ever do this, you simply haven't thought it through, or don't have a clue.
Allowing other operating systems to leverage some of the power of Microsoft's development platform only ensures that their development platform gains the most market share possible. It's always going to be the case that support for
No you can use it now. It was released in November. I'm implementing a solution with it as we speak and yes it is eliminating the code I once would have written to spawn worker threads and sychronise them... So I think youre the one with the fertile imagination, which seems to be focused on denial.
This is a feature of WCF - Windows Communication Foundation in .NET 3.0 (part of Win V). WCF is designed for next gen CPUs with large numbers of cores. It spawns worker threads for you as needed and sychronises these calls for you automatically. You have the option of manually creating and sychronising threads, but out of the box it does it all for you behind the scenes.
Just imagine coding for a machine with 1024 cores! It's obvious that writing software as we've done in the past where you manually spawn threads and sychronise them is never going to effectively use such hardware. You are obviously going to have a framework like WCF (or this compiler) that takes advantage of this for you.
Maybe the wow has started now after all hmm? ;) I love being flame bait ... especially when I'm right.
I bet there's no dark plot here. You really think they could purposefully implement systems requiring dozens of staff with deliberate fraudulent intent and not have someone blow the whistle??
I bet this is nothing more than just your standard run of the mill incompetence.
I imagine they have an intranet site which has some information which is for internal use mixed with information that is meant to be the same as the online content. Due to the incompetence of those implementing these systems their intranet and extra-net sites are getting out of sync with each other.
Guess what the result is?
Every time the price difference is to the advantage of the customer there's not a peep to be heard.
As soon as the price difference is to the customer's disadvantage! All hell breaks loose, they go into the store go "WHAT ITS NOT THAT MUCH". Pissed off, they refuse to buy it, go home, check the price again... boom major shit and fan action.
There are absolutely huge advantages.
Modern medical science is all about statistics. We should be collecting information about medical illness from people's medical histories in order to formulate new treatments and improve existing treatments. I actually think it would be a good thing for everyone's medical records to be available in some form for medical researchers, providing the records were anonymous and free of personal details.
A persons medical history is very important especially when dealing with chronic illnesses. Being able to track and graph medical results is a crucial means for a patient to analyse the effects of diet, treatments, therapies etc.
With a standardized system for keeping medical records, you could create computer systems that help doctors monitor their patients help and alert them to possible problems that should be checked upon.
The list goes on and on. Medical industry seem to have been one of the last to be evolved by the information revolution, but it's definitely one that is most in need of information systems.
Privacy issues are a concern, however, there is absolutely no question that a persons medical records should be in a standardized format and that this format should be open to enable the software development community to deliver the systems many people desperately need.
I still think the iphone will sell a lot...
Have you checked out the price tag ? The iphone is a very expensive phone that is probably going to make many think twice, and definitely provide a barrier to those switching from other smartphones - blackberry, windows mobile.
If Jobs achieves his target of 10 million phones, that will come close to 20 billion dollars in revenue for the iphone. In today's economic environment maybe... when it's released, who knows what the conditions might be. Given I've seen very bearish outlooks for the stock market of late, I somehow doubt they'll get even half that.
Sharepoint uses open standards for it's protocols and document formats. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy for a company to switch from it.
The scope of Sharepoint encapsulates not only a company's document formats but also the company's corporate filing system, the way it is managed, how people collaborate together, CRM, intranet, and internet etc etc.
When Sharepoint is implemented in a company it totally shapes the culture of the company. People live and breathe Sharepoint in a company using it.
In the past MS Office has always faced cheaper competing products that can load and save MS Office document formats. The vast majority of companies out there haven't switched because the benefits of competing products didn't warrant the effort to shift the portion of a company's culture that had reliance on MS Office to something else.
It is the culture of a company that is hard to change, not the format of it's documents.
This is why I say Sharepoint entrenches companies in MS technology, it is the penetration of the product into the corporate culture.
Interoperability with what ? Examples?
Sharepoint is all about interoperability, it utilises SOAP/XML heavily and utilises many open standards such as RSS.
Not to mention the host of third party components that offer interoperability with other systems.
You probably shouldn't make comments about Sharepoint unless you have a clue about it. Your commment is utterly ridiculous, I guess you posted anonymously for a very good reason.
Microsoft no longer sees Office as it's cashcow.
Sharepoint is the new cashcow.
Microsft Sharepoint is an all in one company intranet, document management, CRM and internet portal system for medium to large companies that has been gaining significant market in recent years. Sharepoint entrenches a company in Microsoft technology far more than Office ever could or ever will.
Much of the killer features on offer in Office 2007 are features leveraging Sharepoint.
If your company has already invested in Sharepoint or is thinking about using it, the choice of Open Office versus Office 2007 is a no brainer. Choosing Sharepoint and then Open Office instead of Office 2007 would rate as a category 5 blunder.
If Open Office supporters want to see it thrive they better keep their eyes on the ball and not the man because MS Office has passed the ball to Sharepoint some time back now.
I think you need to go travel and open your eyes.
Just go to Europe and get out of your fear bubble.
You see this whole rational you have is based on the assumption that somehow we can stop technology getting into the hands of "the bad guys" to allow us to impose our will upon "the bad guys" until they die or become "good guys" and finally like us.
Well guess what????
It's never going to happen!!!
The genie is out of the bottle.
You can't suppress these people or the technology they can get access to.
If you want "the bad guys" not to have access to technology the only option is for there not to be any "bad guys" in existence, because whilst they exist in a technological world, guess what? They're going to have access to technology. As technology advances it is highly likely that they're going to have access to weapons and systems that will pose a far greater threat than a couple of guys with some mortars and Google maps.
I am not suggesting that we try and eliminate "the bad guys" because guess what, the bad guys have friends and family. If you eliminate "the bad guys" it's quite likely to upset their friends and/or family. Who will then also become "bad guys" themselves. Leaving you back at square one - pissed off technologically enabled people.
The only possible option you have is to try and make a world in which no one has cause to be "bad guys".
If we (as a race) cannot find the wisdom to firstly recognise this simple fact and actually start taking steps towards doing something about it, then the only possible outcome is going to be our own annihilation.
What I think we need is not to stop things like Google maps, but to produce a massive number of bifocals for people like you and our political leaders who are so totally and utterly short sighted. People who measure success quarterly on a P&L report, people who don't think conservation and the environment are an issue, people who don't think it is wrong for education and access to information to be restricted to the rich and privileged, people who see welfare and social support systems as a liability... etc etc etc
Forget about the legalities. They simply can't go round blowing up satellites.
...and this is coming from the guys who like shooting stuff, talk to any peaceniks our there and they would more likely to use the word indefinitely than temporarily.
One very good reason for countries not to go around shooting up satellites is that it would very soon render orbital space useless for everyone.
To quote this article
"...Even if an active ASAT system exists, satellite systems typically involve whole constellations of units in orbit; shooting down enough satellites to cripple a system becomes difficult. If one were to shoot down all the low-Earth-orbit imagery satellites a company was using to survey one's territory, the resulting debris might interfere with or damage other satellites in similar orbits. An entire orbital plane could be temporarily made useless not only to potentially hostile systems but also to friendly ones...".
If any sanity were to prevail here, they would need to work out a way of disabling satellites without creating debris.... tricky considering their electronics are heavily shielded to withstand the extreme conditions you normally find in space.
Perhaps a better solution would be for the coalition forces to place their troops somewhere where Iraqi insurgents can't attack them.... say in the US for example, or England.
You sir are a coward.
An Anonymous coward.
I'm fully aware of what this little back water of a country has to offer online and I would have thought it completely irrelevant to 98% of the planet browsing the web.
You've been rated informative. Glad someone could work out what the hell your point was, I certainly couldn't.
My main point was that Microsoft hasn't fudged page rankings on it's own site, to mis-represent it as the most highly ranked result.
My second point was that google's ranking for maps.live.com may have been artificially fudged down. Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn't, I'm still extremely surprised by the sites ranked ahead of it.
Uh... it's in the domain name. It's also in text on the page. On that arguement how can you explain maps.live.com being listed in google's results for maps at all? It's obviously a key word for the page. Last time I read anything about google's ranking algorithm it uses links from other sites to determine page rankings not the title of the page. On that basis I find it hard to believe sites like www.lib.utexas.edu/maps, www.whereis.com.au/ and www.eduplace.com/ss/maps/ can be ranked or linked to more than maps.live.com.
Do you know what the true irony of all this is....
Go to live.com search for maps...
1. Yahoo Maps
2. Maps.com
3. Mapsonus.com
4. Google maps
There is a link to maps.live.com. It is the #1 in the paid advertising section.
Isn't ironic that out of all the search company's Microsoft is the only one that seems to be supplying unbiased results?
And guess where live.maps.com is on Google's search?
Go look... no it's not on the first page....
Go to the second page of results... Ah yes half way down.... HMMMM
I think Google has a case to answer here, I simply don't believe Microsoft maps can possibly legitimately be ranked where it is.
HA!!!
Hilarious, come on all you Google fanboys/MS anti-fanboys.... try and spin this one into yet another Microsoft bashing session I dare you, then I can see something truly imaginative.