"It doesn't really matter if keeping the topic of sex away from kids is the right way to go or not because, frankly, the path of least resistance is avoiding the topic at all."
And this is why we have teen pregnancies. Because people are so scared of their bodies and their natural functions they won't talk about it with their spouse, much less their progeny. You can avoid talking about sex with your children, but you can't avoid your teenagers from thinking about sex. Its natural and unavoidable.
Instead of taking the path of least resistance, instead of preaching abstinence, how about an open and honest discussion? Unprotected sex leads to venereal disease. Syphilis is no fun, herpes is forever. Oh, and it helps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Because the odds are very good that a teenager doesn't want to raise a child just then, they just want to enjoy sex -- and "in the heat of the moment" aren't likely to resort to protection without good persuasion before hand.
Pregnancy is wonderful, but also a bit unnerving. My wife is of the opinion that girls should get to feel a fetus moving in a mother's belly -- especially late in the pregnancy when there is a lot of significant activity. Whether or not that would act as a deterrent it would at least help to educate them about what pregnancy will mean for them.
Seriously, do you also insist that "its the path of least resistance" to not discuss under age drinking and driving while drunk so we should just shut up and not talk about it? Pretend that it doesn't happen and hope that if it does, it doesn't happen to our own children?
You say it "makes sense", but if you think that teenagers contracting VD or having unwanted pregnancies is undesirable then it does not make sense in the slightest.
I monitor the university network where I work and preach FF/AdBlockPlus to anyone who'll listen and even those who won't. The summary implies that the advertising is done through sleight of domain name to confuse the ad network, but that is certainly not always the case. Over the last 12 months we've had an escalating number of systems compromised due to "malicious ads" and it just keeps getting worse.
Antivirus tries to enumerate badness and is doomed to failure. The bad guys pack and modify their products constantly to avoid detection (there is enough money in it to be worth the effort). Heuristics have been promised by AV vendors for the last 20 years (from discussions back on the virus-l mailing list) with no noticeable improvement.
In order of decreasing importance:
- web browser with adblocker that prevents the advertisements from being fetched
- keep system and third party software (java, adobe, flash) patched
- don't login to windows as a user with admin privileges
- run antivirus
and, if you can manage it, run FF with NoScript in addition to AdBlockPlus. It takes discipline to avoid just temporarily allowing domains which is generally not worth it for users, but for those that NoScript is a good solution then AdBlockPlus is a good backup for when you *do* allow a domain that got their content spiked.
I know, you're just using terms you don't understand, but... talk about redefining words, coining new terms and double speak/think: modems *are* broadband in the original meaning so when you say "at the time of that definition" "Narrowband" did *not* apply to modems in any technical way. I've never heard them called narrowband before your post.
Amusing. Just so you know, broadband *used* to mean something like "responding to or operating at a wide band of frequencies" or "a signal that contains energy over a broad range of the frequency spectrum". Then marketing decided to call asynchronous DSL "broadband" and the meaning started changing.
It's basically 1984. Redefine the words and change the meaning. (shrug):-)
while higher level posters may have been referring to Solaris x86, the statement about Sun 'imagined it was leading some kind of epic battle with the Microsoft "empire"' is correct. Why did they buy what became OpenOffice? And then release it for free? And then open source it?
Sun kept doing things in an attempt to hurt Microsoft (Office or Windows), no matter how much it cost them. While I always appreciated it, I understood that it made no sense from a business perspective. The fact that Sun finally bled themselves dry came as no surprise.
so I ask you (as if an anonymous coward would answer), which weighs more: a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? hint, water expanding when it solidifies doesn't change its weight.
and for teaching a six year old the "to melt ice you make it hotter/apply heat" is accurate. It may not be a complete statement with all details, but then again, neither is yours.
Of course, the real joke is whoever modded your tripe insightful...
Neither Honda nor GM appear to have any commitment to producing green vehicles. The volt is far from innovative, but after GM thought they had successfully killed California's efforts to improve emissions standards (see http://www.mindfully.org/Air/GM-Sues-CA-ZEV.htm for an early reference) they recalled and killed their electric vehicle program.
My brother-in-law works at GM and for his (and his family's) sake I hope the company gets its act together and does well. They are, at least, hiring again instead of bleeding talent. But it remains to be seen if it will be correctly managed and pointing at the volt is not the way to instill confidence.
weak is right. Apparently all you have to do to censor someone is do a DDOS for a little bit and the hosting service will drop the target because it impacts their other customers. The DNS registrar will delist them for the same reason.
Only, don't expect this level of cooperation in censorship if the DDOS target isn't a clearly labeled enemy of the US government, and that is what really puts the lie to their statements.
Actually, killing him would be very bad for the US gov't which is why they haven't done it. If they kill him then it is a black mark, the US partaking in obvious, public, assassination. That isn't good and those in charge know it.
They do not want to create a martyr, they want to destroy the man. Ever notice how political campaigns rarely focus on the positive, instead painting their opponent in dark, nasty colors? The rape charges, and a complete misrepresentation of them (such as repeated in the summary), are how they are attacking him.
The only reason for the gov't to do a denial of service would be to try and prevent people from viewing and mirroring the content. There might be some value in that, especially if they are needing to try out their ability to DDoS against what is, ultimately, not a significant target.
Not only is it certain that worldwide intelligence services can track him (to whack him), they can also pick him up. If the US *really* wanted him arrested the UK (where he was last rumored to be anyway) would pick him up and have him extradited here (for terrorism charges) or to sweden (for the rape charges). But that might provide some conclusion to the mess.
I expect the character assassination to continue. They want him, and Wikileaks by extension, to be dirtied in everyone's mind forever. They don't want anyone to even think of daring to pick it up knowing their life will be utterly ruined if they attempt to do so.
agreed, and the thesis attempts to explain as if this were a modern phenomena when in fact it is not. Authoritarian governments are as old as "civilized" history -- that is to say as old as any governmental institution. Given that authoritarian governments are not new or modern or in fact predicated on specialization there is no need to even pursue that. There are other much more generalized explanations that work quite well. Like government being tied to power, so it is created, used, manipulated by those with power (refer to weak kings who were dominated by powerful nobles); further it attracts those who are attracted by power (okay, a truism, but the point is that those who desire to possess and wield power are those who pursue it); power is well established to corrupt; and, finally, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Conspiracy theories are well and good (and there are real conspiracies from time to time), but humans often do what they believe is the right thing to do when they are, in fact, wrong. It can be not seeing the forest for the trees, or vice versa. It can be a lack of judgement due to personal turmoil. Regardless, to err is human and governments are created and administered by humans.
It was before the current security craze (so long ago that when you went to pick someone up you could actually meet them at the gate), but I went through airport security wearing a long leather coat and tripped the metal detector. They were nice about it, ran the coat through the carry on/x-ray and had me walk through it again. I tripped it a few more times as each time I would remember another metal article to remove. They ended up using a wand on me and I was cleared to go.
When I left with the person I was picking up I happened to put my hand in the coat pocket and nearly froze. Stuffed in the pocket was one of my pistols -- not a real firearm, but a metal barrel and working metal action replica. I can't believe the metal barrel, trigger assembly, hammer, etc. wouldn't have showed on the x-ray and not *looked* like a working firearm -- they must not have been looking. Why bother putting the coat through if they weren't even going to look?
Security at airports has always been piss poor and the current theatre hasn't improved it one bit.
You *still* have to run the exploit code in some context. The set of instructions don't just magic themselves into the CPU. Where it would have some utility would be with a hosting company. You get a hosting account, compile code to break out of the hosted environment, and have fun playing with everyone else's data. The nature of the attack will depend on how the hosting company isolates client environments. Another example would be a company that (foolishly, IMO) relied on VMs to separate financial applications from general office work.
But in all probability you are talking about fairly targeted attacks. The bulk of malware these days is client-based and is working very well for the bad guys. I don't remember the district and my google-fu isn't up to snuff to find it again, but current per-instance loses are in the millions. This is less, but an older example: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2009/10/01/computer-virus-steals-325k-from-district/ Two-factor is no cure-all either, as the larger losses have been against such systems (due to implementation details two-factor may allow transactions for a window of time rather than a single, identified transaction which allows a compromised system to piggy-back on approved transactions).
This sounds like some "researcher" trying to justify themselves. You see it a lot in the security field (and presumably others) and it seems to stem from a need to establish credentials. So people will say the dumbest things, just to be saying something different, or feel a need to modify accepted and logical security principals (you can transfer, mitigate or accept risk; all attempts to add additional categories really fall under one of the three, but if you can blather loud and long enough then you can "advance the field" by convincing others that you have something new).
Where malware is *really* going is OS agnostic. Whether it is a java-based bot (yes, java *does* provide crossplatform apps when you don't intentionally cripple it), something done in perl (misses windows, but catches virtually every other OS), or a javascript/web-based system.
Although vulnerabilities are useful they aren't critical -- a lot can be done simply through presentation to the user and having them as "witting dups", ("You mean I *wasn't* supposed to authorize installation of a new "codec" to watch that video?") but the majority of in-use exploits are against third party apps/plugins such as Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and Sun/Oracle Java. Occasionally I track down the initial infection, and the one I did this on earlier this week was a Java exploit with three items downloaded (providing between them downloader and web-based command/control capabilities). Antivirus coverage was pathetic (something like 6/43 at virus total). User had no idea anything had happened. And all of this was done within the user's limited account. Maybe a better sandboxing of crappy applications would help, but until we have usable sandboxing (it must *really* sandbox the applications and still allow for what is being sandboxed to be usable and effective at what the user is trying to do with it) there's no need for malware writers to advance beyond current methods.
Current malware is very successful without any need to try and tie to specific hardware.
You are scheduled for re-education. Are you anti-American? Do you want our country's economy to crumble? You must consume. And after that? More consumption. Followed by additional consumption. You *must* spend money on other people and they on you. It isn't about thinking about or knowing the other person, it is about helping out the economy.
The nice people at Amazon are being green by trying to keep more of the useless trash that gets bought and given as gifts from going into landfills. And you want people to actually *think* before they buy? Sheesh, where is your patriotism?
Not necessarily. You are making a (fairly common) assumption that a company can use a ToS to modify the terms of a sale contract. I agree, this smells like a class action law suit.
You jest, but I've seen the "turn light fluid" used successfully on someone. It was after a rain during PMCS and a turn light on a hummer had an obvious "half full" fluid level. A new guy in the unit (who apparently didn't know much about vehicles or lighting) was sent on a mission for some "turn light fluid" to top it off with. The mechanics got a good laugh and a soldier became just a bit more cynical. Or how about the classic "hunt for grid squares" a second lieutenant fell for? My favorite was a sergeant who could tell any lie convincingly and with a straight face (often he would start with something small and plausible, then work his way up to to a real whopper). He managed to convince another sergeant that the setting sun was actually Mars on its closest approach to Earth ever.
The real lesson isn't that some people are idiots or know nothing, it is that *everyone* has a threshold of knowledge in some area past which they can be fooled.
has microsoft paid a single penny of their EU fines to date? No? Have they complied with all EU requirements? No?
I don't think they give a flying fart about what the EU says. The EU threatened an injunction against sales, but it never happened. An injunction was attempted in the US (for MS illegally incorporating another company's IP into MS Office) and was shot down by a judge because it would be hard on Microsoft and its resellers. Really? That's kind of implicit with an injunction. But apparently Microsoft is "too big to fail" and so is above the law. If you really think that only applies in the US, note the complete lack of any real action by the EU against Microsoft. No seizing of assets, nothing. Complete failure to comply with EU court orders with no repercussions.
Microsoft does the bare minimum to appease those who have a modicum of power over them. They bought ISO approval for their closed office document "standard" because it helped confuse the issue over open document standards.
The "patent pledge" you link to is meaningless. It only covers a developer who plays by Microsoft's rules (it has to be a "covered implementation" for starters). It does not apply to commercial use of open source code (RedHat, for example, is a commercial distributor of a lot of open source software). It explicitly excludes anyone who does something in addition to coding for open source "covered implementation".
The "pledge" says "do what we want, how we want it, make no money (directly or indirectly), use nothing than our "open source" and we promise (corss our fingers) that we won't sue you.
All of these +5 Insightful comments from people who don't know how to support macs is a little frustrating. Wish I had mod points to improve the situation rather than post another comment that will be ignored. You have excellent points and refute the GPs assertion that boot-control keys were somehow reliant on having a functioning operating system.
As with using Windows vs OS X, the support of "PC" hardware vs Macs is mostly what you are used to. If a tech support guy with 20 years of experience has only supported macs he's going to have some issues with troubleshooting "PC" hardware due to the lack of built in diagnostics and tools. "But he's got a BIOS to play with!" Yeah, that's real useful to someone whose never seen one. The fact that the mirror image of a tech support guy with 20 years of experience supporting only "PC" hardware trying to support macs won't know how to troubleshoot issues without a BIOS -- big surprise.
Supporting a mac is different than supporting a "PC", but it is just as possible to do.
Microsoft marketing aside, you do realize this has been done before? Sony UK came up with the EyeToy, a single manual focus camera with all processing done on the PS2. With the lower specs keep in mind that this was years ago and they were sold for a fraction of the Kinect's price. A better camera and one with auto focus would've helped it a lot. The Microsoft implementation with two cameras is a win -- but it all costs more as a result.
On occassions when we have guests with children we used to fire it up and put it on one of the minigames. People were always impressed by it, but I doubt there were any additional sales because in essence its a one-trick toy. It can be a very *fun* one-trick toy, don't get me wrong, but really, the scope of games that benefit from controlling via motion sense or putting the player on the screen is pretty minimal.
If Microsoft has a creative bone in them there will be some stunning games that rely on Kinect. Outside of that it is unlikely to have much impact.
But big concept? Not really. Innovative? Sony was here years ago.
no, adobe is just trying to screw up the iphone by forcing it to have the bug ridden, under performing, joke of an unsupported-except-on-windows (sorta on mac) product. Adobe is trying to stay relevant. Boo hoo.
What you say about Apple/Jobs/h264 is all true, but you neglected his main points of security and avoiding being dominated/controlled by adobe (which happened to apple on the desktop for a while).
And to the point of comparing Android to Windows -- it doesn't matter if the hardware is a Dell or an HP, if it is running WinXP then it has certain gui calls and abilities. Period. Further, many games rely on the basic input of keyboard and mouse, both of which are bog standard and stable on Windows systems, but apparently not on Android due to widely variant hardware (the fact that there are inherently different input mechanisms should be obvious to anyone that has seen more than one phone).
And I think people are so accustomed to problems on PCs they just forget about them. In the 90s a big appeal of consoles for me was the reliability. I knew a guy with a sound card that had ~30% chance of working per boot. There was something about the initialization process that just didn't work that well. But he claimed to have a great PC gaming experience. I'm not sure how rebooting your system repeatedly until it works is great, but oh well.
Sound and video are significantly more reliable now, but that is because of standards that are adhered to (such as graphics APIs). The android cell phone market doesn't seem to have matured to that point, and probably won't until/unless cellphones become open, commodity items like PCs where you can have a vendor with their particular tweaks, but it is still using a PCI bus with USB ports, etc.
Egads. When I heard about it I missed the manufacture of child porn charge. That makes the discrepancy all the worse. Lesson: if you want to commit a crime do so as "part of your job" to escape charges. Too bad youths don't have that as an option yet...
Slashdot Mirror
"It doesn't really matter if keeping the topic of sex away from kids is the right way to go or not because, frankly, the path of least resistance is avoiding the topic at all."
And this is why we have teen pregnancies. Because people are so scared of their bodies and their natural functions they won't talk about it with their spouse, much less their progeny. You can avoid talking about sex with your children, but you can't avoid your teenagers from thinking about sex. Its natural and unavoidable.
Instead of taking the path of least resistance, instead of preaching abstinence, how about an open and honest discussion? Unprotected sex leads to venereal disease. Syphilis is no fun, herpes is forever. Oh, and it helps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Because the odds are very good that a teenager doesn't want to raise a child just then, they just want to enjoy sex -- and "in the heat of the moment" aren't likely to resort to protection without good persuasion before hand.
Pregnancy is wonderful, but also a bit unnerving. My wife is of the opinion that girls should get to feel a fetus moving in a mother's belly -- especially late in the pregnancy when there is a lot of significant activity. Whether or not that would act as a deterrent it would at least help to educate them about what pregnancy will mean for them.
Seriously, do you also insist that "its the path of least resistance" to not discuss under age drinking and driving while drunk so we should just shut up and not talk about it? Pretend that it doesn't happen and hope that if it does, it doesn't happen to our own children?
You say it "makes sense", but if you think that teenagers contracting VD or having unwanted pregnancies is undesirable then it does not make sense in the slightest.
Unfortunately it isn't just "third party javascript" and it isn't necessarily interpreted by the browser.
- Adobe PDF: you can put in javascript and by abusing it can do bad things. Browser "breaking third party javascript" isn't going to help you there.
- Oracle nee Sun Java: this isn't javascript and can be abused (e.g., a one-shot download-and-execute java applet)
- Adobe Flash: what can I say, it not only sucks its a serious security hole
this list can (and I expect will) be extended by any sufficiently popular browser plugin
I monitor the university network where I work and preach FF/AdBlockPlus to anyone who'll listen and even those who won't. The summary implies that the advertising is done through sleight of domain name to confuse the ad network, but that is certainly not always the case. Over the last 12 months we've had an escalating number of systems compromised due to "malicious ads" and it just keeps getting worse.
Antivirus tries to enumerate badness and is doomed to failure. The bad guys pack and modify their products constantly to avoid detection (there is enough money in it to be worth the effort). Heuristics have been promised by AV vendors for the last 20 years (from discussions back on the virus-l mailing list) with no noticeable improvement.
In order of decreasing importance:
- web browser with adblocker that prevents the advertisements from being fetched
- keep system and third party software (java, adobe, flash) patched
- don't login to windows as a user with admin privileges
- run antivirus
and, if you can manage it, run FF with NoScript in addition to AdBlockPlus. It takes discipline to avoid just temporarily allowing domains which is generally not worth it for users, but for those that NoScript is a good solution then AdBlockPlus is a good backup for when you *do* allow a domain that got their content spiked.
I know, you're just using terms you don't understand, but... talk about redefining words, coining new terms and double speak/think: modems *are* broadband in the original meaning so when you say "at the time of that definition" "Narrowband" did *not* apply to modems in any technical way. I've never heard them called narrowband before your post.
Amusing. Just so you know, broadband *used* to mean something like "responding to or operating at a wide band of frequencies" or "a signal that contains energy over a broad range of the frequency spectrum". Then marketing decided to call asynchronous DSL "broadband" and the meaning started changing.
It's basically 1984. Redefine the words and change the meaning. (shrug) :-)
while higher level posters may have been referring to Solaris x86, the statement about Sun 'imagined it was leading some kind of epic battle with the Microsoft "empire"' is correct. Why did they buy what became OpenOffice? And then release it for free? And then open source it?
Sun kept doing things in an attempt to hurt Microsoft (Office or Windows), no matter how much it cost them. While I always appreciated it, I understood that it made no sense from a business perspective. The fact that Sun finally bled themselves dry came as no surprise.
so I ask you (as if an anonymous coward would answer), which weighs more: a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? hint, water expanding when it solidifies doesn't change its weight.
and for teaching a six year old the "to melt ice you make it hotter/apply heat" is accurate. It may not be a complete statement with all details, but then again, neither is yours.
Of course, the real joke is whoever modded your tripe insightful...
I wanted to add to your point #4: look at GMs compliance with California's requirements. Then look at how much money Tesla (and others) have reported in their statements by selling ZEV credits. For an older discussion of this see http://www.examiner.com/green-transportation-in-national/tesla-openly-admitted-to-zev-credit-sales-an-interesting-2008-letter-to-the-air-resources-board
Neither Honda nor GM appear to have any commitment to producing green vehicles. The volt is far from innovative, but after GM thought they had successfully killed California's efforts to improve emissions standards (see http://www.mindfully.org/Air/GM-Sues-CA-ZEV.htm for an early reference) they recalled and killed their electric vehicle program.
My brother-in-law works at GM and for his (and his family's) sake I hope the company gets its act together and does well. They are, at least, hiring again instead of bleeding talent. But it remains to be seen if it will be correctly managed and pointing at the volt is not the way to instill confidence.
weak is right. Apparently all you have to do to censor someone is do a DDOS for a little bit and the hosting service will drop the target because it impacts their other customers. The DNS registrar will delist them for the same reason.
Only, don't expect this level of cooperation in censorship if the DDOS target isn't a clearly labeled enemy of the US government, and that is what really puts the lie to their statements.
Actually, killing him would be very bad for the US gov't which is why they haven't done it. If they kill him then it is a black mark, the US partaking in obvious, public, assassination. That isn't good and those in charge know it.
They do not want to create a martyr, they want to destroy the man. Ever notice how political campaigns rarely focus on the positive, instead painting their opponent in dark, nasty colors? The rape charges, and a complete misrepresentation of them (such as repeated in the summary), are how they are attacking him.
The only reason for the gov't to do a denial of service would be to try and prevent people from viewing and mirroring the content. There might be some value in that, especially if they are needing to try out their ability to DDoS against what is, ultimately, not a significant target.
Not only is it certain that worldwide intelligence services can track him (to whack him), they can also pick him up. If the US *really* wanted him arrested the UK (where he was last rumored to be anyway) would pick him up and have him extradited here (for terrorism charges) or to sweden (for the rape charges). But that might provide some conclusion to the mess.
I expect the character assassination to continue. They want him, and Wikileaks by extension, to be dirtied in everyone's mind forever. They don't want anyone to even think of daring to pick it up knowing their life will be utterly ruined if they attempt to do so.
agreed, and the thesis attempts to explain as if this were a modern phenomena when in fact it is not. Authoritarian governments are as old as "civilized" history -- that is to say as old as any governmental institution. Given that authoritarian governments are not new or modern or in fact predicated on specialization there is no need to even pursue that. There are other much more generalized explanations that work quite well. Like government being tied to power, so it is created, used, manipulated by those with power (refer to weak kings who were dominated by powerful nobles); further it attracts those who are attracted by power (okay, a truism, but the point is that those who desire to possess and wield power are those who pursue it); power is well established to corrupt; and, finally, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Conspiracy theories are well and good (and there are real conspiracies from time to time), but humans often do what they believe is the right thing to do when they are, in fact, wrong. It can be not seeing the forest for the trees, or vice versa. It can be a lack of judgement due to personal turmoil. Regardless, to err is human and governments are created and administered by humans.
It was before the current security craze (so long ago that when you went to pick someone up you could actually meet them at the gate), but I went through airport security wearing a long leather coat and tripped the metal detector. They were nice about it, ran the coat through the carry on/x-ray and had me walk through it again. I tripped it a few more times as each time I would remember another metal article to remove. They ended up using a wand on me and I was cleared to go.
When I left with the person I was picking up I happened to put my hand in the coat pocket and nearly froze. Stuffed in the pocket was one of my pistols -- not a real firearm, but a metal barrel and working metal action replica. I can't believe the metal barrel, trigger assembly, hammer, etc. wouldn't have showed on the x-ray and not *looked* like a working firearm -- they must not have been looking. Why bother putting the coat through if they weren't even going to look?
Security at airports has always been piss poor and the current theatre hasn't improved it one bit.
True, true. Makes you wonder about Rush, then.
You *still* have to run the exploit code in some context. The set of instructions don't just magic themselves into the CPU. Where it would have some utility would be with a hosting company. You get a hosting account, compile code to break out of the hosted environment, and have fun playing with everyone else's data. The nature of the attack will depend on how the hosting company isolates client environments. Another example would be a company that (foolishly, IMO) relied on VMs to separate financial applications from general office work.
But in all probability you are talking about fairly targeted attacks. The bulk of malware these days is client-based and is working very well for the bad guys. I don't remember the district and my google-fu isn't up to snuff to find it again, but current per-instance loses are in the millions. This is less, but an older example: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2009/10/01/computer-virus-steals-325k-from-district/ Two-factor is no cure-all either, as the larger losses have been against such systems (due to implementation details two-factor may allow transactions for a window of time rather than a single, identified transaction which allows a compromised system to piggy-back on approved transactions).
This sounds like some "researcher" trying to justify themselves. You see it a lot in the security field (and presumably others) and it seems to stem from a need to establish credentials. So people will say the dumbest things, just to be saying something different, or feel a need to modify accepted and logical security principals (you can transfer, mitigate or accept risk; all attempts to add additional categories really fall under one of the three, but if you can blather loud and long enough then you can "advance the field" by convincing others that you have something new).
Where malware is *really* going is OS agnostic. Whether it is a java-based bot (yes, java *does* provide crossplatform apps when you don't intentionally cripple it), something done in perl (misses windows, but catches virtually every other OS), or a javascript/web-based system.
Although vulnerabilities are useful they aren't critical -- a lot can be done simply through presentation to the user and having them as "witting dups", ("You mean I *wasn't* supposed to authorize installation of a new "codec" to watch that video?") but the majority of in-use exploits are against third party apps/plugins such as Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and Sun/Oracle Java. Occasionally I track down the initial infection, and the one I did this on earlier this week was a Java exploit with three items downloaded (providing between them downloader and web-based command/control capabilities). Antivirus coverage was pathetic (something like 6/43 at virus total). User had no idea anything had happened. And all of this was done within the user's limited account. Maybe a better sandboxing of crappy applications would help, but until we have usable sandboxing (it must *really* sandbox the applications and still allow for what is being sandboxed to be usable and effective at what the user is trying to do with it) there's no need for malware writers to advance beyond current methods.
Current malware is very successful without any need to try and tie to specific hardware.
You are scheduled for re-education. Are you anti-American? Do you want our country's economy to crumble? You must consume. And after that? More consumption. Followed by additional consumption. You *must* spend money on other people and they on you. It isn't about thinking about or knowing the other person, it is about helping out the economy.
The nice people at Amazon are being green by trying to keep more of the useless trash that gets bought and given as gifts from going into landfills. And you want people to actually *think* before they buy? Sheesh, where is your patriotism?
Not necessarily. You are making a (fairly common) assumption that a company can use a ToS to modify the terms of a sale contract. I agree, this smells like a class action law suit.
You jest, but I've seen the "turn light fluid" used successfully on someone. It was after a rain during PMCS and a turn light on a hummer had an obvious "half full" fluid level. A new guy in the unit (who apparently didn't know much about vehicles or lighting) was sent on a mission for some "turn light fluid" to top it off with. The mechanics got a good laugh and a soldier became just a bit more cynical. Or how about the classic "hunt for grid squares" a second lieutenant fell for? My favorite was a sergeant who could tell any lie convincingly and with a straight face (often he would start with something small and plausible, then work his way up to to a real whopper). He managed to convince another sergeant that the setting sun was actually Mars on its closest approach to Earth ever.
The real lesson isn't that some people are idiots or know nothing, it is that *everyone* has a threshold of knowledge in some area past which they can be fooled.
has microsoft paid a single penny of their EU fines to date? No? Have they complied with all EU requirements? No?
I don't think they give a flying fart about what the EU says. The EU threatened an injunction against sales, but it never happened. An injunction was attempted in the US (for MS illegally incorporating another company's IP into MS Office) and was shot down by a judge because it would be hard on Microsoft and its resellers. Really? That's kind of implicit with an injunction. But apparently Microsoft is "too big to fail" and so is above the law. If you really think that only applies in the US, note the complete lack of any real action by the EU against Microsoft. No seizing of assets, nothing. Complete failure to comply with EU court orders with no repercussions.
Microsoft does the bare minimum to appease those who have a modicum of power over them. They bought ISO approval for their closed office document "standard" because it helped confuse the issue over open document standards.
The "patent pledge" you link to is meaningless. It only covers a developer who plays by Microsoft's rules (it has to be a "covered implementation" for starters). It does not apply to commercial use of open source code (RedHat, for example, is a commercial distributor of a lot of open source software). It explicitly excludes anyone who does something in addition to coding for open source "covered implementation".
The "pledge" says "do what we want, how we want it, make no money (directly or indirectly), use nothing than our "open source" and we promise (corss our fingers) that we won't sue you.
All of these +5 Insightful comments from people who don't know how to support macs is a little frustrating. Wish I had mod points to improve the situation rather than post another comment that will be ignored. You have excellent points and refute the GPs assertion that boot-control keys were somehow reliant on having a functioning operating system.
As with using Windows vs OS X, the support of "PC" hardware vs Macs is mostly what you are used to. If a tech support guy with 20 years of experience has only supported macs he's going to have some issues with troubleshooting "PC" hardware due to the lack of built in diagnostics and tools. "But he's got a BIOS to play with!" Yeah, that's real useful to someone whose never seen one. The fact that the mirror image of a tech support guy with 20 years of experience supporting only "PC" hardware trying to support macs won't know how to troubleshoot issues without a BIOS -- big surprise.
Supporting a mac is different than supporting a "PC", but it is just as possible to do.
Microsoft marketing aside, you do realize this has been done before? Sony UK came up with the EyeToy, a single manual focus camera with all processing done on the PS2. With the lower specs keep in mind that this was years ago and they were sold for a fraction of the Kinect's price. A better camera and one with auto focus would've helped it a lot. The Microsoft implementation with two cameras is a win -- but it all costs more as a result.
On occassions when we have guests with children we used to fire it up and put it on one of the minigames. People were always impressed by it, but I doubt there were any additional sales because in essence its a one-trick toy. It can be a very *fun* one-trick toy, don't get me wrong, but really, the scope of games that benefit from controlling via motion sense or putting the player on the screen is pretty minimal.
If Microsoft has a creative bone in them there will be some stunning games that rely on Kinect. Outside of that it is unlikely to have much impact.
But big concept? Not really. Innovative? Sony was here years ago.
no, adobe is just trying to screw up the iphone by forcing it to have the bug ridden, under performing, joke of an unsupported-except-on-windows (sorta on mac) product. Adobe is trying to stay relevant. Boo hoo.
What you say about Apple/Jobs/h264 is all true, but you neglected his main points of security and avoiding being dominated/controlled by adobe (which happened to apple on the desktop for a while).
the irony is that you are modded troll instead of GP...
wow! you are capable of the best double think ever. You might want to educate yourself on the basics of math such as fractions and decimal notation.
And to the point of comparing Android to Windows -- it doesn't matter if the hardware is a Dell or an HP, if it is running WinXP then it has certain gui calls and abilities. Period. Further, many games rely on the basic input of keyboard and mouse, both of which are bog standard and stable on Windows systems, but apparently not on Android due to widely variant hardware (the fact that there are inherently different input mechanisms should be obvious to anyone that has seen more than one phone).
And I think people are so accustomed to problems on PCs they just forget about them. In the 90s a big appeal of consoles for me was the reliability. I knew a guy with a sound card that had ~30% chance of working per boot. There was something about the initialization process that just didn't work that well. But he claimed to have a great PC gaming experience. I'm not sure how rebooting your system repeatedly until it works is great, but oh well.
Sound and video are significantly more reliable now, but that is because of standards that are adhered to (such as graphics APIs). The android cell phone market doesn't seem to have matured to that point, and probably won't until/unless cellphones become open, commodity items like PCs where you can have a vendor with their particular tweaks, but it is still using a PCI bus with USB ports, etc.
Egads. When I heard about it I missed the manufacture of child porn charge. That makes the discrepancy all the worse. Lesson: if you want to commit a crime do so as "part of your job" to escape charges. Too bad youths don't have that as an option yet...