Yes; but now, since deregulation, most of the bus companies are owned by used car retailer Arriva. Almost all the train companies (privatisation was the worst thing to happen to the railways since they were nationalised) are owned (ultimately; they try their hardest to disguise it, bless them) by National Express (who aren't actually a bus company; they just hire buses from other bus companies) and they aren't allowed to own their own rolling stock -- instead, they have to lease it from hire companies, which are owned by foreign banks. (The main ones, anyway. There are also small independent hire companies with a stock of -- I was going to say "clapped out", but that's not really fair; there's almost no new rolling stock anywhere in this country anymore -- Class 47s [ancient they may be, but they're as reliable as f*ck] and Mark II/III coaches, mostly owned by crooks and liars.)
Had a crap ride on an Arriva bus? Buy a used car from Arriva used cars! Midland Mainline [owned by National Express] trains too expensive? Catch the National Express to London instead, spend five hours with your legs crossed cos the onboard toilet isn't working and pay twenty pence for a slash (how in the hell is charging money for a biological necessity ever legal? If you take a leak in the street in Britain, you will be arrested and your name put on the Sexual Offenders' Register, where there is a risk that it will be seen by News of the World readers and you will end up being hounded from your home by an angry mob brandishing flaming torches and pitchforks) when you get there!
The whole system is basically geared towards forcing people into cars and keeping them there. Investment in public transport is actively discouraged, on the basis that it will reduce the amount of revenue raised from the motorist.
Re:This is relatively benign ...
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The general idea is that road authorities should be able bill people for their actual use of the roads, with the price depending on when and where they drive and the characteristics of their vehicle.
Unfortunately, such fine granularity costs.
Back in the 19th Century, there were plans to set up an elaborate system of charging people to post letters according to size, weight and distance travelled -- until someone worked out that all measuring and calculating would actually end up contributing more to the overall cost of a stamp than the actual business of delivering the letter. Thus we ended up with the Penny Post (and, as an aside, a "penny black" stamp isn't anything like as rare or valuable as some people imagine.)
This principle -- that any extraneously-complex attempt ostensibly to increase fairness can end up having the opposite effect -- seems to have been forgotten today as we push for ever-more-complex solutions to the problems created by the last, failed attempt to solve a largely non-existent problem with too much technology.
Everybody is already a suspect in the UK. Instead of a detective going to a scene where a crime was committed and looking for clues to help find the person who did it, they now go to a CCTV monitor and look at a person, hoping to find clues to indicate a crime they have committed.
Anyone who says that British justice favours the criminal, most probably just hasn't been arrested for nothing yet. This is a police state. Just going for a walk at night nowadays because you can't get to sleep is apparently "suspicious behaviour" justifying a stop and search. Apparently they'd rather I stopped at home and necked Valium. You may as well be a criminal, just so as you get your money's worth out of it.
(Disclaimer: although I'm British, I live about 200km. from London; and also about as far from the sea is it's possible to get in a country this size.)
Which is why I say: Lawyers in civil cases must not be allowed to demand payment as long as any avenue of appeal remains open. That way, neither side gains anything by stalling; a rich nuisance with a meritless claim but deep pockets can't run a poor schmuck with a watertight case out of money. (That's why we have the "all-in" bet in in no-limit poker. A chip leader with 7-2 off-suit can't squeeze you out of the game when you have A-A. Sure, he may still flop 7-2-2, but hey -- that's poker.) Then you just have to make sure to claim enough to pay your legal team off at the end. And both sets of lawyers will want to hurry things along; because as long as they're arguing, they won't be putting food on their tables.
The Lynx was very much the exception, even in the UK (where most people wrote their own BASIC rather than licence one from Microsoft). It had no concept at all of integers; every number was stored within the program as a floating-point number (and only rendered at display time). If you used "2.5E4" for a line number, it would show up in any LISTing as 25000, because 25000 has few enough digits not to need to be displayed in scientific notation. If you used PEEK, you'd see instead of the ASCII codes for the digits that make up the number an unprintable character meaning "number follows", and the number in internal representation. Non-printing character codes were also used as shorthand forms for BASIC keywords and functions.
BBC BASIC used 32-bit integers (denoted in variable names by a trailing %) and 40-bit floating point numbers, but 16-bit line numbers. Spectrum BASIC used a 40-bit internal representation for all numbers (integers -65536..+65536 were represented specially, using an exponent of -128, and a "mantissa" formed from a "sign byte" of either 0 or 255, the units, the 256es and zero; the Spectrum's internal calculator respected this special representation as far as possible and only ever converted a specially-represented integer to its floating-point representation if a calculation step exceeded the representable range) except for line numbers, which were 16-bit. Also on the Spectrum, the "reserved word" characters weren't non-printing; they just shew up as the word in full.
Anyway, integers are fixed-precision. They just go up in ones because that's convenient for people. If you want to have fractions to two places (e.g. if you're working with money), just multiply everything by 100 (and then think of it as pence as opposed to pounds). And be creative how you print it:) There's no reason (apart from convention) why it has to be 10, 100 or 1000, either..... you could work in units of a third of an olde english fluid ounce, and divide by 60 to get pints. But that just would be silly.
I did something even more evil in a text adventure I once wrote for the BBC model B. It had a swear-word detector. If you used a swear-word, you got a sarcastic error message (something like "Ooh, look at me! Aren't I big! Aren't I clever! Bollocks Bollocks Bollocks! Bollocks yourself.") but it would also destroy an object at random (though it would never destroy a certain object which it was necessary to get rid of to win the game, nor anything present in the room or that you were carrying). This is particularly nasty because the game then becomes unsolveable without it being obvious. But then, serve you right for being so foul-mouthed:) Of course, it also became unwinnable if you ate the strange mushrooms (which you were supposed to feed to a pit bull terrier in order to get past it). In fact, not just unwinnable, but unrestartable; you had to re-load it from scratch because it had to go into a high-memory-requirement graphics mode and so lose most of the program from RAM. But it was worth it for the picture alone!
Its immediate predecessor (set in "Northwood House", a school for sexual perverts!) had another "evil" feature: a big red button on the library wall labelled "EMERGENCY MASTER RESET BUTTON". Once you pressed that, it was obvious with hindsight exactly what it was going to do.....
(You need the + to force the expression to be evaluated in a scalar context. In perl 5, unary + coerces to scalar. In perl 6, if it's ever released, unary + will coerce to numeric and unary ~ -- the tilde is the "new" string-joining operator, taking the place of . which is now used instead of -> -- will coerce to string. Presumably there's a whole new ones-complement operator in perl 6.)
On a Beeb or Speccy, you could quite happily write stuff like
50 INPUT A
55 IF A<1 OR A>5 THEN GOTO 50
60 GOTO 900+100*A
This sort of thing didn't work on machines running Microsoft BASIC (which even used to throw a hissy fit if you tried to GOTO a non-existent line number. Beebs and Speccies just carried on from the next higher line number. Meant you could aim GOTO statements at REM statements without fear that stripping them to free up RAM later on would break things). BBC BASIC had the usual ON num_expr GOTO num_expr,num_expr,num_expr... and later versions introduced ON... PROC.
Neither the BBC nor the Spectrum, however, had the absolutely classic feature found on the Camputers Lynx..... which actually supported fractions in line numbers! So the old "going up in tens" thing wasn't quite so necessary, as you could always squeeze in a line 10.5 between lines 10 and 11 if you had to.
What it's easy to forget sometimes, is that -- thanks to the GPL, and the combination (BSD licence + lots of hard work) -- Open Source is forever. Once a product has been released under an Open Source licence, it can never be closed up again. Even if they try to change it and make it incompatible, the Open implementation can always be adapted -- and general inertia is enough to buy the canny developer time in which to do this, since many people choosing the "closed" option will actually continue using the "old", "open-friendly" version for longer than it takes to get the "open" version speaking the new protocols. For instance, there's apparently some sort of closed-source SSH implementation; only nobody actually uses it -- everybody just uses the OpenBSD one.
The nightmare of someone taking something that was always open, changing it a little and locking it up -- the official reason why it took so long for Sun to open up Java -- so far mostly hasn't materialised. Because, and this is something else that's sometimes easy to forget, Open Source developers are smarter, and harder, than Closed Source developers. Fact is, it takes a lot of guts to Open Source something. What you're saying to the world is, in effect, "Look at this! You couldn't do anything like this in a million years. This is just so good, I'm not afraid of you knowing what's inside it; it stands on its own merits, and I don't have to resort to craven behaviour like locking you out of it!" You wouldn't dream of calling a Scotsman in a kilt a sissy..... same phenomenon at work.
History will come to note the "closed source" phenomenon as a blip, an anomaly that lived and died and was not missed. It's really not worth getting het up over. Progress depends on sharing, and the Open development model -- as long as it's done properly -- is demonstrably superior to Closed development. As for DRM and the like, that will cease to be relevant with the development of improved hac..... er, I mean, debugging tools. (Chop-and-swap analogue TV encryption is trivial to defeat nowadays from scratch -- i.e. finding the chop-and-swap points in each line just by comparing successive lines -- with even fairly ancient kit..... whoever thought in the early 1990s that CPUs would ever hit 100MHz, let alone 1GHz? Even Java or Perl probably would be fast enough to do it.)
What's needed to prevent this sort of thing happening in future (OK; in this case, it was the side with more money that was in the right. For once. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be right to change the system), is a system where lawyers are prevented from demanding payment until a verdict is delivered, accepted and all avenues of appeal are exhausted.
Otherwise, a meritless claim backed up by sufficient money could succeed anyway, simply because one party can't afford to continue. (That's exactly why there's an "all-in" move in no-limit poker; otherwise you could be effectively prevented from playing on, even if you held the nuts.) At least if your lawyers can't demand payment while the case is ongoing, you can't be squozen out on the technicality of insufficient funds. Also, any kind of delaying tactics end up hurting both sides.
OT: Thanks for taking on my sig. I can change mine now I know someone else is propping up the meme!
Re:That's just the company
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
Well, that's pretty much how football management goes. A team lose a few matches, drop down a few positions, the fans get vocal, the manager gets the sack, and then next season he's managing another club.
It makes me sick that anyone would actually need a manager to help them with the really complicated business of (kicking a ball between two white sticks|preventing a ball from passing between two white sticks)..... not to mention that they can earn more for 90 minutes' "work" than some of us manage in a year.
I'm not going to blame Microsoft. I'm going to blame the various countries' legislators for not passing a law demanding that driver Source Code be published as a condition of approval of hardware for sale.
If there were such a law on the books, many vulnerabilities would be flushed out. The closedness is at the very root of the problems, and the only way to solve them for good is to enforce Source Code availability.
(I don't buy your "Let the Free Market Decide" bleatings. I can see where you're coming from, but you have to realise there is no free market in the computer hardware sector anymore, just a cartel of vendors who use various dirty tricks to prevent competition from outside. In this situation, only Government can make a difference.)
Am I a bad citizen because I don't scan for Windows viruses on my Linux systems?
Not at all. It's not your problem. Assuming your boxes aren't acting as open SMTP relays (they're not, are they? good) and if you're running any anonymous FTP servers (what, are you crazy?) then no directory is both readable and writable, then you're doing everything right. People should be prepared to deal with the consequences of running riduculously-insecure operating systems -- or not run them.
Bad Car Analogy time: If someone's not wearing a seat belt, and you crash into them, it's not really your fault if they end up going through the windscreen.
But viruses, by definition, will always have a hard time in Lunix. People generally don't share executables. Which leaves auto-opening files such as image preview, pdf, html and openoffice docs etc.etc.
That is so true. Linux, like every Unix implementation, includes a compiler and one or more interpreters as part of the basic installation. There is absolutely no reason to pass around binary executables. (In the last century, when internet access meant dial-up, distributions took to supplying ready-compiled executables; but these were invariably checked by experts independent of the authors, digitally signed to prevent tampering and made available from centralised repositories.)
As for data files, the use of these as an attack vector depends on vulnerabilities in the viewing/editing applications (or the underlying libraries they use). And Open Source implies Open Data Formats; which implies that for any given type of data file, there will be more than one application that can work with it. If the vulnerability is in the application itself, then the chances are some other application won't be affected. If the vulnerability is in the library, then again chances are that some people will be using older versions which predate the vulnerability or newer ones which have it corrected.
While it's technically possible to write a virus in an interpreted language, I have a feeling that any attempt to do so would be short-lived; the perpetrator would necessarily have to give away the exact details of what they had done, which would provide some clues as to how to reverse the damage and guard against anything similar in future.
You mean there is a closed-source SSH implementation?
I'd always thought OpenSSH on OpenBSD was the reference implementation. And anyway, when you're talking about any kind of security software, the ability to audit the Source Code should be the first item on your tick-list. If you don't know for sure what it's doing, it could be doing something nasty that you don't want; and security software would be the most obvious place to insert malware.
If not for Windows, then most regular people wouldn't even be using computers
At least they'd probably be able to read, write, spell, do sums and know when to say "please" and "thank you". I do not think that would be at all a bad thing.
As I understand it (I'm a Brit so may not be quite correct) NASA, as a Federal Government entity, are under some sort of mandate that their creations must be released into the Public Domain.
Does this extend to third parties working for and on behalf of NASA?
That sort of depends on whether or not Intellectual Property is subject to expropriation.
If so, and someone misuses your GPL'ed IP, then you might be able to order some their IP seized and handed over to you by way of compensation (and then you would be within your rights to release the source code, since it would now be yours to release). This, however, has not been tested in any court as far as I know.
Surely if the Earth's core is cooled too much due to excessive abstraction of geothermal energy, it will eventually solidify, shrink and start rattling around like an old walnut in its shell? And what if it bursts through? Come to think of it, even before that happens, there's a goodly-sized risk that the outer crust will be able to move independently with respect to the centre of mass, which will play merry havoc with the seasons.
# This is how I did it: # # Actual snippet from my Apache configuration..... mostly. # Some details have been changed to protect the innocent # And some details have been changed to protect the guilty # # The virtual host "secure.mydomain.co.uk" cannot be accessed # by http; only by https. # # The insecure port <VirtualHost 10.11.12.13:80> ServerName secure.mydomain.co.uk DocumentRoot/var/www/ <Directory/var/www/> RedirectMatch ^/[^iI]/insecure/ # In this directory is a page with a dire warning # that https is required to access this server. # NB. To avoid creating an infinite loop, we never # redirect if request begins with I or i. </Directory> </VirtualHost> # The secure port <VirtualHost 10.11.12.13:443> SSLEngine on ..... </VirtualHost>
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Yes; but now, since deregulation, most of the bus companies are owned by used car retailer Arriva. Almost all the train companies (privatisation was the worst thing to happen to the railways since they were nationalised) are owned (ultimately; they try their hardest to disguise it, bless them) by National Express (who aren't actually a bus company; they just hire buses from other bus companies) and they aren't allowed to own their own rolling stock -- instead, they have to lease it from hire companies, which are owned by foreign banks. (The main ones, anyway. There are also small independent hire companies with a stock of -- I was going to say "clapped out", but that's not really fair; there's almost no new rolling stock anywhere in this country anymore -- Class 47s [ancient they may be, but they're as reliable as f*ck] and Mark II/III coaches, mostly owned by crooks and liars.)
Had a crap ride on an Arriva bus? Buy a used car from Arriva used cars! Midland Mainline [owned by National Express] trains too expensive? Catch the National Express to London instead, spend five hours with your legs crossed cos the onboard toilet isn't working and pay twenty pence for a slash (how in the hell is charging money for a biological necessity ever legal? If you take a leak in the street in Britain, you will be arrested and your name put on the Sexual Offenders' Register, where there is a risk that it will be seen by News of the World readers and you will end up being hounded from your home by an angry mob brandishing flaming torches and pitchforks) when you get there!
The whole system is basically geared towards forcing people into cars and keeping them there. Investment in public transport is actively discouraged, on the basis that it will reduce the amount of revenue raised from the motorist.
Back in the 19th Century, there were plans to set up an elaborate system of charging people to post letters according to size, weight and distance travelled -- until someone worked out that all measuring and calculating would actually end up contributing more to the overall cost of a stamp than the actual business of delivering the letter. Thus we ended up with the Penny Post (and, as an aside, a "penny black" stamp isn't anything like as rare or valuable as some people imagine.)
This principle -- that any extraneously-complex attempt ostensibly to increase fairness can end up having the opposite effect -- seems to have been forgotten today as we push for ever-more-complex solutions to the problems created by the last, failed attempt to solve a largely non-existent problem with too much technology.
Everybody is already a suspect in the UK. Instead of a detective going to a scene where a crime was committed and looking for clues to help find the person who did it, they now go to a CCTV monitor and look at a person, hoping to find clues to indicate a crime they have committed.
Anyone who says that British justice favours the criminal, most probably just hasn't been arrested for nothing yet. This is a police state. Just going for a walk at night nowadays because you can't get to sleep is apparently "suspicious behaviour" justifying a stop and search. Apparently they'd rather I stopped at home and necked Valium. You may as well be a criminal, just so as you get your money's worth out of it.
Just like being in London then.
(Disclaimer: although I'm British, I live about 200km. from London; and also about as far from the sea is it's possible to get in a country this size.)
Maybe not -- never felt the need to use them. Must be all the multi-line blocks.
.....
I know perl5 doesn't let you use references as hash keys
Which is why I say: Lawyers in civil cases must not be allowed to demand payment as long as any avenue of appeal remains open. That way, neither side gains anything by stalling; a rich nuisance with a meritless claim but deep pockets can't run a poor schmuck with a watertight case out of money. (That's why we have the "all-in" bet in in no-limit poker. A chip leader with 7-2 off-suit can't squeeze you out of the game when you have A-A. Sure, he may still flop 7-2-2, but hey -- that's poker.) Then you just have to make sure to claim enough to pay your legal team off at the end. And both sets of lawyers will want to hurry things along; because as long as they're arguing, they won't be putting food on their tables.
The Lynx was very much the exception, even in the UK (where most people wrote their own BASIC rather than licence one from Microsoft). It had no concept at all of integers; every number was stored within the program as a floating-point number (and only rendered at display time). If you used "2.5E4" for a line number, it would show up in any LISTing as 25000, because 25000 has few enough digits not to need to be displayed in scientific notation. If you used PEEK, you'd see instead of the ASCII codes for the digits that make up the number an unprintable character meaning "number follows", and the number in internal representation. Non-printing character codes were also used as shorthand forms for BASIC keywords and functions.
:) There's no reason (apart from convention) why it has to be 10, 100 or 1000, either ..... you could work in units of a third of an olde english fluid ounce, and divide by 60 to get pints. But that just would be silly.
BBC BASIC used 32-bit integers (denoted in variable names by a trailing %) and 40-bit floating point numbers, but 16-bit line numbers. Spectrum BASIC used a 40-bit internal representation for all numbers (integers -65536..+65536 were represented specially, using an exponent of -128, and a "mantissa" formed from a "sign byte" of either 0 or 255, the units, the 256es and zero; the Spectrum's internal calculator respected this special representation as far as possible and only ever converted a specially-represented integer to its floating-point representation if a calculation step exceeded the representable range) except for line numbers, which were 16-bit. Also on the Spectrum, the "reserved word" characters weren't non-printing; they just shew up as the word in full.
Anyway, integers are fixed-precision. They just go up in ones because that's convenient for people. If you want to have fractions to two places (e.g. if you're working with money), just multiply everything by 100 (and then think of it as pence as opposed to pounds). And be creative how you print it
I did something even more evil in a text adventure I once wrote for the BBC model B. It had a swear-word detector. If you used a swear-word, you got a sarcastic error message (something like "Ooh, look at me! Aren't I big! Aren't I clever! Bollocks Bollocks Bollocks! Bollocks yourself.") but it would also destroy an object at random (though it would never destroy a certain object which it was necessary to get rid of to win the game, nor anything present in the room or that you were carrying). This is particularly nasty because the game then becomes unsolveable without it being obvious. But then, serve you right for being so foul-mouthed :) Of course, it also became unwinnable if you ate the strange mushrooms (which you were supposed to feed to a pit bull terrier in order to get past it). In fact, not just unwinnable, but unrestartable; you had to re-load it from scratch because it had to go into a high-memory-requirement graphics mode and so lose most of the program from RAM. But it was worth it for the picture alone!
.....
Its immediate predecessor (set in "Northwood House", a school for sexual perverts!) had another "evil" feature: a big red button on the library wall labelled "EMERGENCY MASTER RESET BUTTON". Once you pressed that, it was obvious with hindsight exactly what it was going to do
In perl, the relevant construct would be more like
goto +(9000,5066,3000,5031,2009,5031,9404,9406,5081, 5200,5200,5300,5506,5502,5504,5505)[$jverb];
(You need the + to force the expression to be evaluated in a scalar context. In perl 5, unary + coerces to scalar. In perl 6, if it's ever released, unary + will coerce to numeric and unary ~ -- the tilde is the "new" string-joining operator, taking the place of . which is now used instead of -> -- will coerce to string. Presumably there's a whole new ones-complement operator in perl 6.)
British BASIC dialects had something even better.
... and later versions introduced ON ... PROC.
..... which actually supported fractions in line numbers! So the old "going up in tens" thing wasn't quite so necessary, as you could always squeeze in a line 10.5 between lines 10 and 11 if you had to.
The TRULY calculated GOTO/GOSUB statement!
On a Beeb or Speccy, you could quite happily write stuff like
50 INPUT A
55 IF A<1 OR A>5 THEN GOTO 50
60 GOTO 900+100*A
This sort of thing didn't work on machines running Microsoft BASIC (which even used to throw a hissy fit if you tried to GOTO a non-existent line number. Beebs and Speccies just carried on from the next higher line number. Meant you could aim GOTO statements at REM statements without fear that stripping them to free up RAM later on would break things). BBC BASIC had the usual ON num_expr GOTO num_expr,num_expr,num_expr
Neither the BBC nor the Spectrum, however, had the absolutely classic feature found on the Camputers Lynx
What it's easy to forget sometimes, is that -- thanks to the GPL, and the combination (BSD licence + lots of hard work) -- Open Source is forever. Once a product has been released under an Open Source licence, it can never be closed up again. Even if they try to change it and make it incompatible, the Open implementation can always be adapted -- and general inertia is enough to buy the canny developer time in which to do this, since many people choosing the "closed" option will actually continue using the "old", "open-friendly" version for longer than it takes to get the "open" version speaking the new protocols. For instance, there's apparently some sort of closed-source SSH implementation; only nobody actually uses it -- everybody just uses the OpenBSD one.
..... same phenomenon at work.
..... er, I mean, debugging tools. (Chop-and-swap analogue TV encryption is trivial to defeat nowadays from scratch -- i.e. finding the chop-and-swap points in each line just by comparing successive lines -- with even fairly ancient kit ..... whoever thought in the early 1990s that CPUs would ever hit 100MHz, let alone 1GHz? Even Java or Perl probably would be fast enough to do it.)
The nightmare of someone taking something that was always open, changing it a little and locking it up -- the official reason why it took so long for Sun to open up Java -- so far mostly hasn't materialised. Because, and this is something else that's sometimes easy to forget, Open Source developers are smarter, and harder, than Closed Source developers. Fact is, it takes a lot of guts to Open Source something. What you're saying to the world is, in effect, "Look at this! You couldn't do anything like this in a million years. This is just so good, I'm not afraid of you knowing what's inside it; it stands on its own merits, and I don't have to resort to craven behaviour like locking you out of it!" You wouldn't dream of calling a Scotsman in a kilt a sissy
History will come to note the "closed source" phenomenon as a blip, an anomaly that lived and died and was not missed. It's really not worth getting het up over. Progress depends on sharing, and the Open development model -- as long as it's done properly -- is demonstrably superior to Closed development. As for DRM and the like, that will cease to be relevant with the development of improved hac
What's needed to prevent this sort of thing happening in future (OK; in this case, it was the side with more money that was in the right. For once. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be right to change the system), is a system where lawyers are prevented from demanding payment until a verdict is delivered, accepted and all avenues of appeal are exhausted.
Otherwise, a meritless claim backed up by sufficient money could succeed anyway, simply because one party can't afford to continue. (That's exactly why there's an "all-in" move in no-limit poker; otherwise you could be effectively prevented from playing on, even if you held the nuts.) At least if your lawyers can't demand payment while the case is ongoing, you can't be squozen out on the technicality of insufficient funds. Also, any kind of delaying tactics end up hurting both sides.
OT: Thanks for taking on my sig. I can change mine now I know someone else is propping up the meme!
Well, that's pretty much how football management goes. A team lose a few matches, drop down a few positions, the fans get vocal, the manager gets the sack, and then next season he's managing another club.
..... not to mention that they can earn more for 90 minutes' "work" than some of us manage in a year.
It makes me sick that anyone would actually need a manager to help them with the really complicated business of (kicking a ball between two white sticks|preventing a ball from passing between two white sticks)
I'm not going to blame Microsoft. I'm going to blame the various countries' legislators for not passing a law demanding that driver Source Code be published as a condition of approval of hardware for sale.
If there were such a law on the books, many vulnerabilities would be flushed out. The closedness is at the very root of the problems, and the only way to solve them for good is to enforce Source Code availability.
(I don't buy your "Let the Free Market Decide" bleatings. I can see where you're coming from, but you have to realise there is no free market in the computer hardware sector anymore, just a cartel of vendors who use various dirty tricks to prevent competition from outside. In this situation, only Government can make a difference.)
Bad Car Analogy time: If someone's not wearing a seat belt, and you crash into them, it's not really your fault if they end up going through the windscreen.
As for data files, the use of these as an attack vector depends on vulnerabilities in the viewing/editing applications (or the underlying libraries they use). And Open Source implies Open Data Formats; which implies that for any given type of data file, there will be more than one application that can work with it. If the vulnerability is in the application itself, then the chances are some other application won't be affected. If the vulnerability is in the library, then again chances are that some people will be using older versions which predate the vulnerability or newer ones which have it corrected.
While it's technically possible to write a virus in an interpreted language, I have a feeling that any attempt to do so would be short-lived; the perpetrator would necessarily have to give away the exact details of what they had done, which would provide some clues as to how to reverse the damage and guard against anything similar in future.
You mean there is a closed-source SSH implementation?
I'd always thought OpenSSH on OpenBSD was the reference implementation. And anyway, when you're talking about any kind of security software, the ability to audit the Source Code should be the first item on your tick-list. If you don't know for sure what it's doing, it could be doing something nasty that you don't want; and security software would be the most obvious place to insert malware.
As I understand it (I'm a Brit so may not be quite correct) NASA, as a Federal Government entity, are under some sort of mandate that their creations must be released into the Public Domain.
Does this extend to third parties working for and on behalf of NASA?
That sort of depends on whether or not Intellectual Property is subject to expropriation.
If so, and someone misuses your GPL'ed IP, then you might be able to order some their IP seized and handed over to you by way of compensation (and then you would be within your rights to release the source code, since it would now be yours to release). This, however, has not been tested in any court as far as I know.
Surely if the Earth's core is cooled too much due to excessive abstraction of geothermal energy, it will eventually solidify, shrink and start rattling around like an old walnut in its shell? And what if it bursts through? Come to think of it, even before that happens, there's a goodly-sized risk that the outer crust will be able to move independently with respect to the centre of mass, which will play merry havoc with the seasons.
Blame the auto-conversion to hyperlinks on the idiots who couldn't be arsed to use tags, or the idiots who couldn't be arsed to drag over link text, right-click and select the context-menu option of going to the link represented by the selected text (Konqueror has this feature, so one expects all the other ones would have it too -- after all, Windows is sooo much better than Linux, eh?) and blame the "showing the domain in square brackets" thing on the idiots who couldn't be arsed to check the status bar as they hovered the mouse over a link, then got all upset when it turned out to be something different that it looked like.
Thanks! I actually need to do some work with mod_rewrite anyway, so I might take you up on that idea.
Definitely some sort of a planned economy. If you give vendors free rein to set the prices of goods, consumers get royally screwed.
# This is how I did it: ..... mostly. /var/www/ /var/www/> /insecure/
.....
#
# Actual snippet from my Apache configuration
# Some details have been changed to protect the innocent
# And some details have been changed to protect the guilty
#
# The virtual host "secure.mydomain.co.uk" cannot be accessed
# by http; only by https.
#
# The insecure port
<VirtualHost 10.11.12.13:80>
ServerName secure.mydomain.co.uk
DocumentRoot
<Directory
RedirectMatch ^/[^iI]
# In this directory is a page with a dire warning
# that https is required to access this server.
# NB. To avoid creating an infinite loop, we never
# redirect if request begins with I or i.
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
# The secure port
<VirtualHost 10.11.12.13:443>
SSLEngine on
</VirtualHost>