I've noticed that lithium batteries sometimes degrade so rapidly (after 18 months or more of reliable service) that people sometimes associate the battery performance problem with some event -- a software upgrade or application install -- which was coincident with the battery demise. Sometimes they are so certain of the causality of the association that they won't buy a new battery.
Once they finally do, they are thrilled to discover that it's like having a new laptop again, with nice long battery life. Well, long by today's standards. I'd like a battery that could last a year, but I'm concerned by my own temptation to disassemble things to see how they are made...
I think you've touched on an interesting point worth exploring further. The complexity of these systems makes it difficult to figure out what's legal and what's not legal, leaving a big grey area. Much Adware and Spyware presents the user with a dialog box:
[ lots of fine print nobody reads ]
[ OK? ]
So technically, the user agreed to get pop-up ads for penis enlargement and mortgage refinancing and downloading all the trojan spyware buddies and I don't know what else because I don't run a Windows computer.
There are quite a few exploitative industries, and they pre-date the complexity of home computing and Windows and Adware and Spyware.
Rent to own? Circumvented credit laws allowing the company to, in effect, charge higher than legal interest rates to low-income consumers.
Televangelism? Exploited the home bound and lonely and sick by showing them television of people (pretending to be) healed. This was the pioneer for staged "Reality" television, and frankly I'm surprised that it took so long (decades) for the television industry to apply the basic business model to popular television (cheap to produce, add some "Scripted Assisted Reality" drama, advertise, and whammo! Dollars flow in without exploiting the poor and the sick.
The modern credit card and mortgage industries present even more complex examples. They have successfully lobbied themselves into a position where the laws are extraordinarily complex, and allow them to perform all manner of exploitative business practices that are perfectly legal. Bought a house lately? Do you have *any* idea who really paid how much for what in that stack of papers?
None of this requires exploiting the complexity of home computers. In fact, in a sense one might consider the wild west nature of marketing via spyware on the home computer to be inspired by these other industries, which pre-date these companies by decades.
One last wild hare thought... Adware and Spyware are also great equalizers, in the same way as the dot com types viewed the internet. This massive market of insecure home systems based on Windows allows *anyone* to get into a money making business with very little overhead.
One could ask the rhetorical question: why is it OK for established multi-billion dollar per year industries to first create and then exploit legal complexity, but it's not OK for budding entrepreneurs in economically disadvantaged nations to set up an, ahem, advertising company.
The problem is in "voluntarily installed'. These botnets become so large and powerful because they rely on statistics -- some PCs will be vulnerable to a given exploit, probe them all and let Gates sort it out. Eventually you have a huge army of bots.
By the time you start adding features to your "botnet" to meet the "opt in" requirement, then you're giving up this advantage. You can't probe randomly looking for systems to join your fleet.
Microsoft's system patching service is the equivalent of an opt-in patching service such as you posit. Not enough users opt-in.
I suppose there are a variety of crack scenarios that would result in massive loss of life. Spoofing the air traffic control system in some fantastically improbably way might cause a few mid air collisions before the planes were grounded.
Launching a single nuclear missile would shoot past the mark by rather a lot. Let's hope the control systems for those things are not connected via some backdoor to to a network in turn connected via some other back door to a network connected to the internet, eh?
These crackfest doomsday scenarios are not preparing government for the real problems at hand, today. Consider the case reported by the New York Times last week :
"During a two-day period they watched as the intruder tried to break into more than 100 locations on the Internet and was successful in gaining root access to more than 50.
"
It was probably a lone cracker, possibly a small group. rooting fifty boxes in a couple days. That was just a two day sample of a months long probably-one-man crackfest. Low level information theft poses a real threat to national security. Many government agencies are not even able to detect it.
By the way, it seems to be more popular in government circles to invoke September 11, probably because in the current climate it helps get funding. At least there is that perception.
That confusion is natural. Modern worms have borrowed techniques from all types of malware, and it's really not easy to tell them apart any longer. In the old days, trojans, viruses, and worms were different. Nowadays the worms:
come into your network as spyware by crawling down a browser,
open up a trojan backdoor port,
log your keystrokes,
fetch instructions and installable components from remote servers via IRC, tftp, http, and other means,
upload email addresses, passwords, data, and,
probe your network and others on various ports.
Is that a virus? Yes.
Is that a trojan? Yes.
Is that a worm? Yes, it spreads without asking you...
It's also interested to see a return to data-destructive worms. I can't remember the last time I had to worry about a virus that would actually screw up my machine.
Some variants of the popular email borne viruses in the last couple years have swept through not only local disk drives but also through connected "mapped drives", replacing many types of files including image files, html files, and so forth with copies of the virus. Much simpler than a worm, but very, very nasty.
Yes, this claim was made the same day the worm came out. The thing that apparently even professional antivirus types don't always remember is that just because a worm is *released* the same day that a vulnerability was announced doesn't mean it was *coded* quickly.
In the case of the Witty worm, with it's pre-determined hit list, it seems likely that reconnaissance was performed before the vulnerability was announced. In fact, the bulk of the worm code might have been sitting around, waiting for the next buffer overflow exploit to come around.
Likewise, the author of the worm might have known about the product defect for months or years before it was announced. They may have exploited it quietly for other purposes, and launched the worm once the defect was announced. Kids sometimes do this out of spite -- if another kid wants to play with their toy, they will sometimes break it.
It's not necessary that the cracker be inside the security company that found and announced the defect, nor be inside the company that made the product.
The worm known to Symantec as W32.Witty.Worm actually exploited a defect in commercial firewall products.
This worm caused quite a stir in the security consulting community as a result. Professionals for years were recommending PC firewall products as part of a defense in depth strategy. The risk with these modern fancy host based firewalls is that they let the packet on the box and inspect it before deciding what to do.
By "Power970" you seem to be referring to the PowerPC family. Don't forget that this chip family is based on the Power architecture from IBM (with some help from Apple and Motorola). The Power architecture contains other chips too, some of which don't have the limitations you cite. Certainly the chip architecture is fully capable of supporting machines with a larger number of CPUs running a single system image.
Although the really big (and custom) Blue Gene systems are apparently clusters, there isn't anything about the
IBM Power Architecture itself that would prevent large monolithic systems from being designed and built.
Building a supercomputer with a large number of CPUs running a single system image is a unique task with a limited client base, and SGI has experience with that. A whole lot more than CPU choice goes into making it work. The way they tell it it was quite a rush. The internal conversation must have gone something like this: "OK, team, we're going to build exactly one of these, and we already decided the price!" NASA doesn't build rockets like that, but SGI can build supercomputers like that. Impressive.
SGI deserves kudos. But if we step back and look at the big picture from the vantage point of SGI, it sure looks like SGI chose the IA-64 CPU for marketing reasons, not technical reasons. I'd have to guess that their engineering tasks would have been made easier by using a CPU that draws less power, for example. They've been on the ropes for years and conventional wisdom says to back Intel if you're in trouble because that's the safe bet for marketing. Why this remains conventional wisdom when the track record clearly shows that UNIX vendors who switch to Intel are cut up and fed to other UNIX vendors, is another topic.
You're right of course, that there are two different classes of super computers on the Top 500 list, with one class based on the cluster concept, and the other based on the concept of a single system image. Clusters are radically less expensive, and monoliths are better at certain computing tasks, and it's hard to compare them.
Monoliths often get custom case mods, though, and thus tend to look cooler. Who would hang a poster of a beowulf cluster of generic beige 1U rackmounts on their office wall? Everybody wants a poster of a Cray or a CM-5 or a Mach 5...
Hey! I just realized monoliths don't seem to look as cool as clusters lately. What's up with that?!
Over 90% of the visits to my company's web site are from Mac OS X systems. Do I conclude that nobody is using Windows PC's any longer? Perhaps not, since our site is of interest primarily to Macintosh users.
The numbers from your home page might be skewed a bit by the subject matter of your page. Statistics from major, high traffic sites (cnn.com perhaps) might provide a better indication of what systems people use to surf the net.
Macintosh numbers are not particularly high, granted. Interestingly enough, these sorta stats may also over-represent the Macintosh user base. How's that? Well, we know that 80% of home user PC systems running Windows are infected with viruses, ad-ware, spy-ware, worms, and bots. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some significant portion of people using Windows systems don't use the internet much, if at all, due to their experiences with malware. I've even met Windows users who have given up on email, and basically don't use the internet at all!
Macintosh users, by contrast, are dramatically over-represented in the Coffee Shop Count. Watch during any week in almost any coffee shop with wireless internet access, and you'll see anywhere from 15% to 90% iBook and PowerBook systems. Even the low end of your observations will be double the representation one would expect from the installed user base. Macintosh users seem to use their systems more, user the internet more, and use wireless access in public places more, on average, than Windows users.
I expect to see a similar trend over the next year with Intel based systems running Linux, due to recent and forthcoming improvements in wireless configurations on Linux.
I simply couldn't resist the temptation of a flippant response to your provocative sig. I agree that the moderation system has flaws, but one of the most annoying is that hideously dull and even factually incorrect stuff gets modded up to 5, and I must filter it out with my wetware. I often make use of the "Overrated" mod while meta-moderating, and I consider it to be a valuable use of mod points.
In fact, to counter this problem of mod point inflation, perhaps everyone should be required to devote 1/3 of their mod points to modding down as "Overrated".
It's ancient history now, but a number of 3rd party software vendors supported NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP on 4 hardware platforms (m68k, x86, pa-risc, and sparc) via fat binaries. There were interesting non-trivial products, created and supported by tiny little companies. The frameworks did a good job of abstracting the hardware differences out of sight and mind, and the build tools did a good job enabling low-cost support of multiple hardware platforms. The operating system itself used these tools, and updates were simultaneously released for multiple platforms.
At the time, Microsoft's 3rd party software vendors were rejecting MIPS and Alpha and whatnot, because it was too difficult to support Windows applications on multiple hardware architectures.
The business model for Apple shipping Mac OS X on the Intel platform is problematic, but the engineering behind Mac OS X demonstrated a mastery of the technical challenge.
Hmm... hidden in the fine print of the Windows EULA, there seems to be a previously undiscovered reciprocity clause, based on the Golden Rule:
For each copy of Windows (TM) that an End User has been required to purchase with a system that was used for installation of Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris x86, NetBSD, OPENSTEP, FreeDOS, OS/2, or other non-Windows system, the End User is entitled to purchase a bare system and install an instance of Windows for Worms (TM). Users may issue certificates to third parties, transferring their rights to these installations, should they have no use themselves for automated worm propagation devices.
my understanding of UDP is that there is no indication to the sending computer that anything happened on the receiving end.
UDP port scanning is possible since most TPC stacks send an ICMP port unreachable message in response to a UDP packet sent to a port that's not listening. Ports that don't respond have a listener. Of course, packets might get dropped and so forth but the determined can rescan the list of listeners they accumulate to refine the accuracy of the scan.
Some TCP/IP stacks (for example Lexmark network printers) don't send an ICMP port unreachable and may appear as though every unused port is an open UDP port.
For those of you who are not a molecular biologist, there is a particularly well written and approachable source of background information on prion disease available.
Deadly Feasts is an excellent primer on the subject of prion disease and the history of the prion as a medical research mystery. It's very well written, but don't read it if you want to keep eating beef.
You seem to be assuming that each of these steps are unusual, difficult or impossible.
If you have ever looked at your poop, you've probably seen chunks of undigested material. The phrase
corn in your/my/the poop
is almost a cliche.
I don't know much about toxicology, but I seem to recall that certain types of food poisoning are caused by ingestion of toxins - proteins - manufactured by bacteria in spoiled food. These proteins are absorbed by the body from ingested material and circulate through the bloodstream. (Hang on while I Google an example... )
Botulinum toxin is a protein which happens also to be a neurotoxin. In children less than a year old the bacteria that produces it can live in the gut and produce the toxin, but in adults it's typically absorbed by eating contaminated food. The toxin itself is absorbed and circulates through the blood, eventually stopping the heart and lungs. (In this type of food poisoning, it's the high level of toxin in the contaminated food that makes one sick, not the ingestion of the bacteria.)
The entire posited improbability chain in your argument is refuted by ample evidence to support the theory that ingesting prion infected material can cause prion disease to manifest in a subject animal or person. The canonical example of Kuru has been mentioned by others here. Kuru affects those who engaged in ritual cannibalism by eating infected brain tissue of deceased relatives, and this pattern of infection contrasts nicely with the statistics on spontaneous prion disease like human CJD which apparently occurs at a rate of about one in a million individuals, randomly distributed throughout the global population regardless of diet or ethnicity. This line of statistical evidence (and much other evidence) supports the potential threat to humans from prion contaminated food regardless of whether one believes there is an as-yet-undiscoverd virus associated with prion disease (which appears less likely now.)
Certainly the entire picture of prion disease hasn't been painted, but we are well past the time when declaring them "bunk" is a rational response to the serious threat of prions in our food chain.
Your analysis seems to make sense if the patented components of Caller ID strictly concern the XML stuff which is not included in the Sender ID draft specification. In an effort to learn more about this, I looked over the Microsoft site for a pointer to the relevant patents or patents pending, and didn't find one. So then I googled around looking for this, and found mostly references to, and quotes from, the same Microsoft Caller ID license page.
Caller ID licensing for software developers "If you are a software developer and are interested in implementing this specification in software, please review the terms of the Caller ID for E-Mail Implementation License before you begin, as the patent license discusses the rights that Microsoft would grant you or your organization."
Then I tripped over this article, which is a bit clumsy, and a dated reference to Caller ID (rather than a current discussion of Sender ID), but which contains an interesting and relevant idea.
Eben Moglen on Microsoft's Caller ID Patent License "Note, however, that a developer could specifically *disclaim* the Microsoft patent license, which--since it does not actually identify any patent claims being licensed--could be said to be a nullity in any event. Such a developer could legitimately distribute under GPL, which would arguably be the wiser course."
That makes some sense, although I suspect that Microsoft has a large enough patent archive and accompanying staff of attorneys that they could bog down or possibly shut down almost any Sender ID project they choose by taking them to court, citing relevant patents at that time.
Then I tripped over another reference that indicates that there may be other IP issues which could affect Sender ID.
Bill Gates Is A Thief "We believe that, totally bereft of their own ideas and lacking any in-depth understanding of the issues, Mr. Gates and company were absolutely desperate to appear relevant in the struggle against SPAM, if nothing else to deflect culpability and bad press for the unrelated, clumsy, and manifestly irresponsible security issues and quality failings in virtually every Microsoft product to date. In an odd twist of the same logic that two weeks ago had them beating up a 17-year-old over his website MikeRoweSoft.com (because it merely sounded like Gate's company site), they presumed FailSafe Designs would be too small and too timid to stop them from taking yet something else they wanted that wasn't theirs (as has been Microsoft's habit since inception). Had they merely asked, we would have considered selling or licensing our products, trademarks, patent rights, and other intellectual and real property, but Mr. Gates never stoops to common decency whenever any opportunity to bludgeon someone avails itself."
I suppose these other IP claims against Microsoft regarding their Caller ID specification might invalidate the presumed Microsoft patents relevant to Sender ID as "prior art". However, they might also directly encumber Sender ID if it includes components contributed by Microsoft but patented by another party.
In any case, it seems that this standard is important enough that it should be clearly unencumbered. This will require clear statements from Microsoft about which patents, if any, apply to Sender ID, and to which portions of Sender ID they apply. This disclosure seems to be required by the IETF. However, if Sender ID is to be adopted universally in the SMTP universe, a license that allows free software to use the patented methods without restriction is also clearly required -- and this situation at present seems anything but clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed that lithium batteries sometimes degrade so rapidly (after 18 months or more of reliable service) that people sometimes associate the battery performance problem with some event -- a software upgrade or application install -- which was coincident with the battery demise. Sometimes they are so certain of the causality of the association that they won't buy a new battery.
... *not* ... *open* ... *nuclear cannister* ...
Once they finally do, they are thrilled to discover that it's like having a new laptop again, with nice long battery life. Well, long by today's standards. I'd like a battery that could last a year, but I'm concerned by my own temptation to disassemble things to see how they are made...
*must*
Do not look directly into laser with remaining eye.
http://pleasefortheloveofgodletitdie.com
or
http://os2mustdie.com/ are already taken.
No match for "PLEASEFORTHELOVEOFGODLETITDIE.COM".
No match for "OS2MUSTDIE.COM".
OK, I've done my part.
I think you've touched on an interesting point worth exploring further. The complexity of these systems makes it difficult to figure out what's legal and what's not legal, leaving a big grey area. Much Adware and Spyware presents the user with a dialog box:
[ lots of fine print nobody reads ]
[ OK? ]
So technically, the user agreed to get pop-up ads for penis enlargement and mortgage refinancing and downloading all the trojan spyware buddies and I don't know what else because I don't run a Windows computer.
There are quite a few exploitative industries, and they pre-date the complexity of home computing and Windows and Adware and Spyware.
Rent to own? Circumvented credit laws allowing the company to, in effect, charge higher than legal interest rates to low-income consumers.
Televangelism? Exploited the home bound and lonely and sick by showing them television of people (pretending to be) healed. This was the pioneer for staged "Reality" television, and frankly I'm surprised that it took so long (decades) for the television industry to apply the basic business model to popular television (cheap to produce, add some "Scripted Assisted Reality" drama, advertise, and whammo! Dollars flow in without exploiting the poor and the sick.
The modern credit card and mortgage industries present even more complex examples. They have successfully lobbied themselves into a position where the laws are extraordinarily complex, and allow them to perform all manner of exploitative business practices that are perfectly legal. Bought a house lately? Do you have *any* idea who really paid how much for what in that stack of papers?
None of this requires exploiting the complexity of home computers. In fact, in a sense one might consider the wild west nature of marketing via spyware on the home computer to be inspired by these other industries, which pre-date these companies by decades.
One last wild hare thought... Adware and Spyware are also great equalizers, in the same way as the dot com types viewed the internet. This massive market of insecure home systems based on Windows allows *anyone* to get into a money making business with very little overhead.
One could ask the rhetorical question: why is it OK for established multi-billion dollar per year industries to first create and then exploit legal complexity, but it's not OK for budding entrepreneurs in economically disadvantaged nations to set up an, ahem, advertising company.
Work from home! Watch the $$$ roll in!!!
Is the tarp made of cheesecloth? *ducks*
The problem is in "voluntarily installed'. These botnets become so large and powerful because they rely on statistics -- some PCs will be vulnerable to a given exploit, probe them all and let Gates sort it out. Eventually you have a huge army of bots.
By the time you start adding features to your "botnet" to meet the "opt in" requirement, then you're giving up this advantage. You can't probe randomly looking for systems to join your fleet.
Microsoft's system patching service is the equivalent of an opt-in patching service such as you posit. Not enough users opt-in.
Launching a single nuclear missile would shoot past the mark by rather a lot. Let's hope the control systems for those things are not connected via some backdoor to to a network in turn connected via some other back door to a network connected to the internet, eh?
These crackfest doomsday scenarios are not preparing government for the real problems at hand, today. Consider the case reported by the New York Times last week : It was probably a lone cracker, possibly a small group. rooting fifty boxes in a couple days. That was just a two day sample of a months long probably-one-man crackfest. Low level information theft poses a real threat to national security. Many government agencies are not even able to detect it.
By the way, it seems to be more popular in government circles to invoke September 11, probably because in the current climate it helps get funding. At least there is that perception.
- come into your network as spyware by crawling down a browser,
- open up a trojan backdoor port,
- log your keystrokes,
- fetch instructions and installable components from remote servers via IRC, tftp, http, and other means,
- upload email addresses, passwords, data, and,
- probe your network and others on various ports.
Is that a virus? Yes.Is that a trojan? Yes.
Is that a worm? Yes, it spreads without asking you... Sorry. I couldn't resist.
Yes, this claim was made the same day the worm came out. The thing that apparently even professional antivirus types don't always remember is that just because a worm is *released* the same day that a vulnerability was announced doesn't mean it was *coded* quickly.
In the case of the Witty worm, with it's pre-determined hit list, it seems likely that reconnaissance was performed before the vulnerability was announced. In fact, the bulk of the worm code might have been sitting around, waiting for the next buffer overflow exploit to come around.
Likewise, the author of the worm might have known about the product defect for months or years before it was announced. They may have exploited it quietly for other purposes, and launched the worm once the defect was announced. Kids sometimes do this out of spite -- if another kid wants to play with their toy, they will sometimes break it.
It's not necessary that the cracker be inside the security company that found and announced the defect, nor be inside the company that made the product.
The worm known to Symantec as W32.Witty.Worm actually exploited a defect in commercial firewall products.
This worm caused quite a stir in the security consulting community as a result. Professionals for years were recommending PC firewall products as part of a defense in depth strategy. The risk with these modern fancy host based firewalls is that they let the packet on the box and inspect it before deciding what to do.
As God is my witness, I thought turkies could fly!
By "Power970" you seem to be referring to the PowerPC family. Don't forget that this chip family is based on the Power architecture from IBM (with some help from Apple and Motorola). The Power architecture contains other chips too, some of which don't have the limitations you cite. Certainly the chip architecture is fully capable of supporting machines with a larger number of CPUs running a single system image.
Although the really big (and custom) Blue Gene systems are apparently clusters, there isn't anything about the IBM Power Architecture itself that would prevent large monolithic systems from being designed and built.
The SPARC architecture can be used for machines like this, too. (Remember the CM-5?).
Building a supercomputer with a large number of CPUs running a single system image is a unique task with a limited client base, and SGI has experience with that. A whole lot more than CPU choice goes into making it work. The way they tell it it was quite a rush. The internal conversation must have gone something like this: "OK, team, we're going to build exactly one of these, and we already decided the price!" NASA doesn't build rockets like that, but SGI can build supercomputers like that. Impressive.
SGI deserves kudos. But if we step back and look at the big picture from the vantage point of SGI, it sure looks like SGI chose the IA-64 CPU for marketing reasons, not technical reasons. I'd have to guess that their engineering tasks would have been made easier by using a CPU that draws less power, for example. They've been on the ropes for years and conventional wisdom says to back Intel if you're in trouble because that's the safe bet for marketing. Why this remains conventional wisdom when the track record clearly shows that UNIX vendors who switch to Intel are cut up and fed to other UNIX vendors, is another topic.
You're right of course, that there are two different classes of super computers on the Top 500 list, with one class based on the cluster concept, and the other based on the concept of a single system image. Clusters are radically less expensive, and monoliths are better at certain computing tasks, and it's hard to compare them.
Monoliths often get custom case mods, though, and thus tend to look cooler. Who would hang a poster of a beowulf cluster of generic beige 1U rackmounts on their office wall? Everybody wants a poster of a Cray or a CM-5 or a Mach 5...
Hey! I just realized monoliths don't seem to look as cool as clusters lately. What's up with that?!
Over 90% of the visits to my company's web site are from Mac OS X systems. Do I conclude that nobody is using Windows PC's any longer? Perhaps not, since our site is of interest primarily to Macintosh users. The numbers from your home page might be skewed a bit by the subject matter of your page. Statistics from major, high traffic sites (cnn.com perhaps) might provide a better indication of what systems people use to surf the net.
Macintosh numbers are not particularly high, granted. Interestingly enough, these sorta stats may also over-represent the Macintosh user base. How's that? Well, we know that 80% of home user PC systems running Windows are infected with viruses, ad-ware, spy-ware, worms, and bots. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some significant portion of people using Windows systems don't use the internet much, if at all, due to their experiences with malware. I've even met Windows users who have given up on email, and basically don't use the internet at all!
Macintosh users, by contrast, are dramatically over-represented in the Coffee Shop Count. Watch during any week in almost any coffee shop with wireless internet access, and you'll see anywhere from 15% to 90% iBook and PowerBook systems. Even the low end of your observations will be double the representation one would expect from the installed user base. Macintosh users seem to use their systems more, user the internet more, and use wireless access in public places more, on average, than Windows users.
I expect to see a similar trend over the next year with Intel based systems running Linux, due to recent and forthcoming improvements in wireless configurations on Linux.
I simply couldn't resist the temptation of a flippant response to your provocative sig. I agree that the moderation system has flaws, but one of the most annoying is that hideously dull and even factually incorrect stuff gets modded up to 5, and I must filter it out with my wetware. I often make use of the "Overrated" mod while meta-moderating, and I consider it to be a valuable use of mod points.
In fact, to counter this problem of mod point inflation, perhaps everyone should be required to devote 1/3 of their mod points to modding down as "Overrated".
All negative sigs are moderated "Troll". Well, not all of them. Just yours.
Is it possible to mod a whole topic down?
It's ancient history now, but a number of 3rd party software vendors supported NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP on 4 hardware platforms (m68k, x86, pa-risc, and sparc) via fat binaries. There were interesting non-trivial products, created and supported by tiny little companies. The frameworks did a good job of abstracting the hardware differences out of sight and mind, and the build tools did a good job enabling low-cost support of multiple hardware platforms. The operating system itself used these tools, and updates were simultaneously released for multiple platforms.
At the time, Microsoft's 3rd party software vendors were rejecting MIPS and Alpha and whatnot, because it was too difficult to support Windows applications on multiple hardware architectures.
The business model for Apple shipping Mac OS X on the Intel platform is problematic, but the engineering behind Mac OS X demonstrated a mastery of the technical challenge.
$ cat knowledge | grep understanding cat: knowledge: No such file or directory $ find . -name "knowledge" $ Hmm...
Some TCP/IP stacks (for example Lexmark network printers) don't send an ICMP port unreachable and may appear as though every unused port is an open UDP port.
You might be interested in this brief introduction to various port scanning techniques.
Nah, it will only take people a few more minutes to figure out that IBM remains dependent on Windows, and last I checked, Microsoft still owned it.
For those of you who are not a molecular biologist, there is a particularly well written and approachable source of background information on prion disease available. Deadly Feasts is an excellent primer on the subject of prion disease and the history of the prion as a medical research mystery. It's very well written, but don't read it if you want to keep eating beef.
There is also an online interview with Richard Rhodes the author of that book, which comes with the same caveat.
The book was written several years ago. More recent information about current research and such is available at New Scientist.
You seem to be assuming that each of these steps are unusual, difficult or impossible.
If you have ever looked at your poop, you've probably seen chunks of undigested material. The phrase corn in your/my/the poop is almost a cliche.
I don't know much about toxicology, but I seem to recall that certain types of food poisoning are caused by ingestion of toxins - proteins - manufactured by bacteria in spoiled food. These proteins are absorbed by the body from ingested material and circulate through the bloodstream. (Hang on while I Google an example... )
Botulinum toxin is a protein which happens also to be a neurotoxin. In children less than a year old the bacteria that produces it can live in the gut and produce the toxin, but in adults it's typically absorbed by eating contaminated food. The toxin itself is absorbed and circulates through the blood, eventually stopping the heart and lungs. (In this type of food poisoning, it's the high level of toxin in the contaminated food that makes one sick, not the ingestion of the bacteria.)
The entire posited improbability chain in your argument is refuted by ample evidence to support the theory that ingesting prion infected material can cause prion disease to manifest in a subject animal or person. The canonical example of Kuru has been mentioned by others here. Kuru affects those who engaged in ritual cannibalism by eating infected brain tissue of deceased relatives, and this pattern of infection contrasts nicely with the statistics on spontaneous prion disease like human CJD which apparently occurs at a rate of about one in a million individuals, randomly distributed throughout the global population regardless of diet or ethnicity. This line of statistical evidence (and much other evidence) supports the potential threat to humans from prion contaminated food regardless of whether one believes there is an as-yet-undiscoverd virus associated with prion disease (which appears less likely now.)
Certainly the entire picture of prion disease hasn't been painted, but we are well past the time when declaring them "bunk" is a rational response to the serious threat of prions in our food chain.
Then I tripped over another reference that indicates that there may be other IP issues which could affect Sender ID. I suppose these other IP claims against Microsoft regarding their Caller ID specification might invalidate the presumed Microsoft patents relevant to Sender ID as "prior art". However, they might also directly encumber Sender ID if it includes components contributed by Microsoft but patented by another party.
In any case, it seems that this standard is important enough that it should be clearly unencumbered. This will require clear statements from Microsoft about which patents, if any, apply to Sender ID, and to which portions of Sender ID they apply. This disclosure seems to be required by the IETF. However, if Sender ID is to be adopted universally in the SMTP universe, a license that allows free software to use the patented methods without restriction is also clearly required -- and this situation at present seems anything but clear.