Saving face is exactly the wrong motivation to fix security problems.
Why, exactly? If saving face motivates people to solve the problem, then I'm all for it. Frankly, I don't care if they fix the problem because they want to save face, impress their girlfriend or because little green men from the planet Weebo have told them to. I care about results. If the problem is fixed, the problem is fixed. Their motivation doesn't even enter my mind.
No. Its stupid and immature to be angry. Embarrassed and apologetic would be more appropriate. It would then be a good idea to ask for help and admit that you made a big mistake.
No, it's not. Say you work for Microsoft, and your job deals with the NTFS filesystem. You have done everything in your power to make your system secure, but you still have to depend on other coworkers making their systems secure as well. So someone on the wireless team screws up and has a flaw. The exploit demoed uses the power of NTFS against itself to hide a virus. If I was that NTFS programmer, you're damn right I'd be upset, because you know when that bug hits the virus databases, the exploit description will include something about using a flaw in NTFS, even if the code is working exactly as it is supposed to. My work gets blamed even if it's something else that led to the exploit.
Does anyone realize that we are probably 3-5 years from a real, Orwellian existence??
And you base this on a company wanting to control a medium that it pays for and that it is, in today's litigious climate, liable for? Given that lawsuits today seem to include "every e-mail mentioning X" as a standard discovery item, why would any company want to open itself up to this kind of liability. To look at it in another light, if you're going to be held accountable (legally) for anything downloaded from your home internet connection, would you really want to keep that home wireless network wide open? This is ass-covering 101.
Sorry, but if you don't want your e-mail (or websurfing, or other internet habits) monitored, don't do them from a host that isn't under your complete control. How hard is that to understand?
Security is the responsibility of the community. Anyone who wants to fix it can, and they also can hold up their work for the rest of the community to judge.
Think of an operating system as a giant park. For the most part, this park is beautiful and has lots of nice features (playgounds, picnic tables, etc.) and lots of people use it.
However, in one corner of this park is an abandoned car that's rusty, surrounded with weeds, has things living it it and is generally an eyesore and a safety hazard for the users of the park. This is the security flaw. And for whatever reason, the government (Linus in our case) doesn't want to go to the time or the trouble to remove it.
If this is a public park, pretty much any individual could take it upon themselves to have the junker hauled away, trim back the weeds and make this part of the park clean and safe again. And the rest of the users would cheer. This is the open source model.
For the closed-source model, imagine our park is not public land, but private land. And surrounding our junker are a whole bunch of "Keep Out" signs, and there's a guy with a gun threatening anyone who attempts to take the old car away. The park owner's solution is to just warn you not to use this part of the park until he gets around to fixing it, and if you try and fix it yourself, you risk getting shot.
Now, from the perspective of the park user who wants to get rid of the problem, which is the better model?
I'm not sure that's a correct read on service contracts. The reason Red Hat makes money off of these contracts is that companies can essentially outsource the maintenance of their operating systems and have an entity to hold financially accountable if something goes wrong. From Red Hat's perspective, they are providing a service that banks on their own expertise given that they have access to the source code of the product they are supporting.
On the flip side, since Microsoft is the only one with access to the source code for their product, any third party would be foolish to try and warranty the security of that product, since they have no real way of fixing a problem that might arise.
And if Microsoft's software were truly secure, or if they felt the same level of confidence in their abilities that Red Hat does, they would offer those types of agreements. As it stands, they don't, and if something goes wrong you up a creek.
When one big multinational corporation is the only game in town, no, there is no such thing as a labor market. One word: WalMart.
In other words, when a monopoly exists, otherwise normal market forces are subverted. Uh, yeah. No real surprise there. Fortunately, with regard to labor markets, those situations tend to be rare and short-lived, as they invite competition. Again, simple supply and demand. If I, as a business owner , am looking to build a factory, and I know that the wages in Town A have been driven down by a Wal-Mart (or at least compared to Town B), then all things being equal, Town A is the better place to build. But that means that now there is competition.
Exactly right - screw labor, and screw the environment. "Burdensome", you say, as if the regulations exist simply to burden the noble capitalist.
I'm not saying regulations are bad. What I'm saying is that they impose a cost, and it's in everyone's (company, individual, whatever) best interest to minimize cost. The thing is, you're looking at this through they eyes of a resident of a country that can afford environmental regulation. A populace that's worried about widespread starvation, on the other hand, isn't going to give a good fig about spending millions on smokestack scrubbers.
As we well know, without regulations, corporations would continue to dump their shit wherever they please.
Sure. It's referred to as the tragedy of the commons. If there is no price associated with a desirable activity (and minimizing cost through abuse of the commons is certainly desirable), then you tend to get lots of it.
Say, you wouldn't be an Ayn Rand fan, would you?
Not really. She's somewhat ponderous and she tends to employ all the subtlety of a fission bomb. But that doesn't mean she's wrong.
The notion of level playing fields and fair competition is, as you well know, total bullshit.
Do you work for a monopoly? Your family and friends? Do you only buy from monoplies? Are you housed by them? Unless you can answer yes to all of these, you disprove your own argument. Limited monopolies come and go all the time, but they also tend to invite competition. How come everyone whines about Wal-Mart closing down the local hardware store but nobody whines about the monopoly that the hardware store had before Wal-Mart came along?
And sure, companies, just like people, always seek advantage over others, through means both legal and illegal. But that's human nature. 'Twas always ever thus, and always thus shall be. Good luck changing that.
If a company sells a product in the US, then the profit from that product should be taxed. But these companies manipulate their incomes so that the US subsidiary makes no money on paper, but the tax-free Caribbean branch does.
Just for the record here, if this is truly a U.S. headquartered corporation, then they can only avoid taxes on that Caribbean subsidiary as long as the money stays outside the U.S. Once it's moved into the U.S., it's taxable.
Actually, the reason that many companies go to these lengths is that the U.S., unlike any other country in the world, imposes taxes on income earned by foreign subsidiaries. If the U.S. stopped doing that, you'd probably see the practice dry up pretty quickly.
An individual shopping for the best price in a somewhat fair market is not at all analogous to multinational companies abusing their clout to screw labor
Really? There's no such thing as a labor market? Everyone in the U.S. works for $5.15 an hour, then, right? Hell, in most major cities you can't even find anyone willing to work for that wage. The starting wage at Starbucks here in New York is $8 an hour. They're a multi-national corporation. How come they aren't paying the minimum?
Third world countries desparately need foreign investment if they ever want to move out of that category. Most of them can't compete in proximity, technology or infrastructure, so they compete where they can. That means lower wages and less burdensome regulation. If these governments mandated U.S.-level wage and environmental controls, it wouldn't make sense to build factories there. Simple supply and demand.
Incidentally, as far as subverting governments and destroying competition go, how is this at all limited to multi-national corporations? All companies, regardless of size, would like a government attuned to their interests, and all of 'em would dearly love for their competition to just disappear. Nothing unique here.
That is not the real problem, though. The real problem is triangle trading schemes that let corporations sell products to themselves at a "loss" so they can claim they made no money. Almost all multinational corporations do this; it's no secret.
Well, yes and no. Yes, corporations do play these accounting games, but the rules of these games are tricky and technical. It's really easy to make a mistake and cross the line from legal tax avoidance to illegal tax evasion. And when companies do cross that line, they tend to get spanked with big fines and/or prison sentences for those responsible. With the corresponding stock hits, too.
But again, why is the practice you describe bad? Why do you feel that companies trying to minimize their costs in taxes is wrong? Do you, when filling out your own taxes, refuse legitimate deductions and/or exemptions? Do you pay more than you have to? Why is it a virtue for you, but a vice for a company?
But, predominantly, Multi-nationals are in the business of reducing wages, labour and environmental standards, and exploitation.
Gee. And here I thought they were in the business of actually producing products. It's amazing that Coca-Cola can actually produce soda, what with all the time they spend figuring out how to screw their employees, despoil the environment and generally bring about armageddon.
It's somewhat interesting that in another one of your posts, you wrote:
My #1 concern when travelling - cost. Lower tickets mean I can afford to travel more often.
Why is it that your shopping for a deal on price is a virtue, but a company doing the same thing is a vice? Doesn't a company that spends less on wages have more money to devote to other things (or even more workers)?
The number one search engine feature that would make my life infinitely easier would be precise proximity operators in search engine syntax.
(For those who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, LEXIS-NEXIS, among others, allows you to run searches like foo w/5 bar (the word "foo" within 5 words of the word "bar"), or even foo pre/5 bar (the word "foo", followed, within five words, by the word "bar". Good proximity engines allow you to search not only within x words, but also to order terms, to specify root words within terms, etc.)
It would be great to have people reviewing and whitelisting page results, but that takes human interaction. Implementing precise proximity operators, though, can give you nearly the same benefits without any of the human cost.
Many people here have suggested eliminating ad text from search results, but if history is any indication, any algorithmic system that we can come up with to do so will be circumvented pretty quickly. The one way to fix this is to allow me to say that I want the word "modperl" within 10 words of "solaris", rather that just specify any page that contains both terms. That will get rid of 95+% of ads right away.
Surely, with all the bright people at Google, this is something that they can figure out pretty easily.
Nonsense. The OS company is perfectly free to place anybody's software in they want.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the crux of both the media and browser complaints? That Microsoft put it's own software into the OS and that harmed competing software? If they're still free to do that, and they still have an OS monopoly, then your remedy does precisely squat.
What they won't be able to do is to stack the deck by cutting special deals with a particular vendor to sneak stuff into the API to software X work faster/better/more reliably than software Y.
I know that MS has done this in the past, but in the two complaints at issue here, I don't believe that this was the problem. NS4 sucked. It was left unupdated for years. It handled CSS poorly or not at all. IE was, at that time, a far superior browser. Same deal with Real. Their software is a dog, slow to load and seems more devoted to taking over your computer and delivering you ads than presenting the content you requested. If I'm wrong here, please correct me, but I don't recall in either cases findings indicating that MS deliberately hobbled the performance of either Navigator or RealPlayer.
Tell me how this EU ruling is really going to help the European consumer. Tell me how the US findings against Microsoft a few years ago helped the US consumer.
It didn't and it won't, in either case. My argument is not that these are good remedies (in fact, they are horrible remedies, since nobody is going to buy the hobbled OS when they can get the fully-featured version for a few bucks more). My argument here is that splitting up a monopoly in such a way that it leaves the monopoly intact isn't a remedy either.
Being a monopoly means a company that large should be cut into pieces; at the very least into two (operating system and software).
And this fixes the monopoly problem how, exactly? Seems to me that you're taking one monopoly company and splitting it into two monopoly companies (as Office is pretty much a monopoly at this point). A company that holds a monopoly in operating systems will continue to do so, even after you make little pieces of it.
The only way that splitting the company up would solve the problem is if additionally you prohibit the new OS company from adding new software and/or features. In other words, give them, as a company, a death sentence. That seems a bit over the top.
But it's worse than that. To beat out its competitors, MS software and operating systems become fundementally more unreliable. To beat Netscape plugins, Microsoft brought ActiveX controls into the browser, along with a fundementally flawed upgrade mechanism which seems to have been the source of so many virus outbreaks over the last four or five years.
I'd say that's partly right. But the proper place to sort that out is in the marketplace. If a company sells a shitty product, people will stop buying that product. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. The problem is that, for the time being, there's no viable competitor out there to take away business. That's changing, and in the future I'm sure that Linux on the desktop will probably be a viable option. But for now, it isn't.
...[A]re all small potatoes compared to the next attack, when Microsoft tries to shut down Linux by any means possible; patent claims, backing stock scammers like SCO, spreading distortions and out and out lies.
Uh, again, how does splitting the company into two solve this? You're telling me that a company that makes OSes (and presumably nothing else), and still holds all of the IP rights it has now will somehow not pursue this course? Particularly if you prohibit them from improving their own product? What other option would they then have but to sabotage the competition?
[N]o one seems the least bit interested in finding a permanent solution to the problem.
If someone comes up with a workable solution, I'm all ears. The best we have now is consent decrees and business practice remedies. If you have something better, I'm all ears.
I'm not one to normally defend Microsoft's business practices, but how exactly are they "shut[ting] others out of the marketplace" here? Didn't Real come up with a proprietary streaming format? Do they not make the only player that will actually play that format? If Real made a decent player that didn't try and hijack your system, and if their streaming technology was better than others out there, they would be winning hands down. They didn't, and they're not.
Yes, Microsoft is a monopoly. But does that then force them to freeze all future development? Can't update fdisk (which is a complete piece of crap) because that would be shutting out PartitionMagic. Can't update IE (and fix it's rather glaring holes) because that will be hurting Mozilla.
Being a monopoly does mean you have to play by different rules, but it doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to play at all.
Another solution would be to not use a fully featured multimedia OS aimed at home users for relatively simple functions that can affect peoples health and/or lives.
You got me. Am I the only one who's going to go to bed tonight with nightmares involving a little paper clip saying "It looks like you're trying to do open-heart surgery. Would you like some help?"
"Publicly accessible" can mean a whole bunch of things. I'd be hard-pressed to believe that, if you knew the right IP address, you could hook into Grandpa's ventilator from your cable modem. I'd bet it's safe to say that these devices, if they're networked at all, are already in a somewhat restricted environment.
However, all of that protection is meaningless when John Q. Doctor plugs his infected laptop into a spare network port in that environment.
How can I trust a device I don't know what is REALLY doing with my votes?
Honestly, do you EVER know what's being done with your vote, regardless of the voting system? Every potential voting mechanism has it's flaws, from hanging chads to..uh..sledhammer-wielding madmen (see above). Hell, even a paper trail isn't foolproof, since all sorts of nefarious things can happen (printer runs out of toner or ink, paper catches fire, etc.)
I agree that in theory you can make a pretty reliable computer-based voting system that will be based on open-source, locked-down software. But considering how much of the general public fears and distruts most things computer-related, will they truly believe in such a system anyway?
because you can use TweakUI to add multiple workspaces.
Not really. While there is a powertoy (MSVDM) for multiple desktops, all it really does is give you a desktop with everything running minimized. So all of the taskbar clutter is still there. Or am I missing something?
I agree with several (many?) other posters that the randomness of collapsing taskbar entries to groups is annoying, I'm more annoyed with Microsoft itself. Collapsing IE windows makes some sense, since they show up with at least the title of the page (Office 2003 does the same thing). But there are plenty of Microsoft products that I use (SQL Query Analyzer springs to mind here) where all of the windows are titled with the same string. Invariably, of course, I click on the wrong one.
Collapsing into groups makes sense, but only where windows are actually identified in a meaningful manner. Alas, since I don't see most (commercial) software developers providing us an easy interface to change window titles, this feature ranks pretty low in the usability scale for me.
You're probably right, but here I was looking forward to articles about the world's first warship capable of delivering 50 57mm shells and 10,000 penis enlargment e-mails per minute.
Actually, if you aren't the intended recipient, the notice itself prohibits you from doing what it requests.
If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that...the taking of any action in reliance on the information herein is strictly prohibited.
It then tells you:
If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete this message.
Wouldn't notifying the sender be taking an action based on the information contained therein, and thus be expressly prohibited?
They have real investments -- Billions of dollars...
And? Toyota has billions of dollars invested in its internal combusion line of vehicles. Did that stop them from developing the Prius. Apple had billions invested in the 680x0 line. Did that stop them from moving to PowerPC? You go where the market takes you or you get left behind.
As I said earlier in this thread, the oil-based gasoline market will not disappear overnight. These investments will still make money. The point is that "big oil" is in the business of selling fuel for cars to end consumers. In a competitive marketplace, oil companies will jump on whatever technology makes that task easier. Oil extraction is the easiest now. If that changes, watch these comapnies follow suit rather quickly.
First off, why does there need to be just one area of production? It would make much more sense to have several smaller areas closer to the refineries/consumers. And from an economic point of view, it would be better to have lots of companies producing this. Otherwise you get back to where we are now with a cartel that controls a significant chunk of worldwide production.
Second, a change in the public's consumption habits will not happen overnight. If nothing else, you have a huge number of cars that simply won't burn diesel fuel, and it will take a long time to get them out of circulation (and you'll probably never completely be rid of them). But here's the point: if you give the oil producing nations some serious competition, they will fight tooth and nail to hold onto whatever share of the market they can. This means increased production and lower prices.
Finally, loosen the tinfoil hat a bit, since it's clearly affecting your thinking. Why would "big oil" be against this? Last I checked, Exxon, Texaco, Mobile and BP didn't make most of their money by selling oil. They made it by selling gas to consumers. Oil is a necessary part of that transaction for now, but please explain why any of these companies wouldn't jump aboard something that would a) lower their production costs, b) remove geopolitical uncertainty, c) remove exchange rate uncertainty, and d) remove supply-line constraints if they thought it could work? It's in their best interests. Again, the oil business is not going to disappear overnight, but it's in any company's interest to adapt to the market and to survive long-term. Even oil companies.
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Why, exactly? If saving face motivates people to solve the problem, then I'm all for it. Frankly, I don't care if they fix the problem because they want to save face, impress their girlfriend or because little green men from the planet Weebo have told them to. I care about results. If the problem is fixed, the problem is fixed. Their motivation doesn't even enter my mind.
No, it's not. Say you work for Microsoft, and your job deals with the NTFS filesystem. You have done everything in your power to make your system secure, but you still have to depend on other coworkers making their systems secure as well. So someone on the wireless team screws up and has a flaw. The exploit demoed uses the power of NTFS against itself to hide a virus. If I was that NTFS programmer, you're damn right I'd be upset, because you know when that bug hits the virus databases, the exploit description will include something about using a flaw in NTFS, even if the code is working exactly as it is supposed to. My work gets blamed even if it's something else that led to the exploit.
And you base this on a company wanting to control a medium that it pays for and that it is, in today's litigious climate, liable for? Given that lawsuits today seem to include "every e-mail mentioning X" as a standard discovery item, why would any company want to open itself up to this kind of liability. To look at it in another light, if you're going to be held accountable (legally) for anything downloaded from your home internet connection, would you really want to keep that home wireless network wide open? This is ass-covering 101.
Sorry, but if you don't want your e-mail (or websurfing, or other internet habits) monitored, don't do them from a host that isn't under your complete control. How hard is that to understand?
Security is the responsibility of the community. Anyone who wants to fix it can, and they also can hold up their work for the rest of the community to judge. Think of an operating system as a giant park. For the most part, this park is beautiful and has lots of nice features (playgounds, picnic tables, etc.) and lots of people use it.
However, in one corner of this park is an abandoned car that's rusty, surrounded with weeds, has things living it it and is generally an eyesore and a safety hazard for the users of the park. This is the security flaw. And for whatever reason, the government (Linus in our case) doesn't want to go to the time or the trouble to remove it.
If this is a public park, pretty much any individual could take it upon themselves to have the junker hauled away, trim back the weeds and make this part of the park clean and safe again. And the rest of the users would cheer. This is the open source model.
For the closed-source model, imagine our park is not public land, but private land. And surrounding our junker are a whole bunch of "Keep Out" signs, and there's a guy with a gun threatening anyone who attempts to take the old car away. The park owner's solution is to just warn you not to use this part of the park until he gets around to fixing it, and if you try and fix it yourself, you risk getting shot.
Now, from the perspective of the park user who wants to get rid of the problem, which is the better model?
I'm not sure that's a correct read on service contracts. The reason Red Hat makes money off of these contracts is that companies can essentially outsource the maintenance of their operating systems and have an entity to hold financially accountable if something goes wrong. From Red Hat's perspective, they are providing a service that banks on their own expertise given that they have access to the source code of the product they are supporting.
On the flip side, since Microsoft is the only one with access to the source code for their product, any third party would be foolish to try and warranty the security of that product, since they have no real way of fixing a problem that might arise.
And if Microsoft's software were truly secure, or if they felt the same level of confidence in their abilities that Red Hat does, they would offer those types of agreements. As it stands, they don't, and if something goes wrong you up a creek.
And sure, companies, just like people, always seek advantage over others, through means both legal and illegal. But that's human nature. 'Twas always ever thus, and always thus shall be. Good luck changing that.
Actually, the reason that many companies go to these lengths is that the U.S., unlike any other country in the world, imposes taxes on income earned by foreign subsidiaries. If the U.S. stopped doing that, you'd probably see the practice dry up pretty quickly.
Third world countries desparately need foreign investment if they ever want to move out of that category. Most of them can't compete in proximity, technology or infrastructure, so they compete where they can. That means lower wages and less burdensome regulation. If these governments mandated U.S.-level wage and environmental controls, it wouldn't make sense to build factories there. Simple supply and demand.
Incidentally, as far as subverting governments and destroying competition go, how is this at all limited to multi-national corporations? All companies, regardless of size, would like a government attuned to their interests, and all of 'em would dearly love for their competition to just disappear. Nothing unique here.
But again, why is the practice you describe bad? Why do you feel that companies trying to minimize their costs in taxes is wrong? Do you, when filling out your own taxes, refuse legitimate deductions and/or exemptions? Do you pay more than you have to? Why is it a virtue for you, but a vice for a company?
It's somewhat interesting that in another one of your posts, you wrote: Why is it that your shopping for a deal on price is a virtue, but a company doing the same thing is a vice? Doesn't a company that spends less on wages have more money to devote to other things (or even more workers)?
The number one search engine feature that would make my life infinitely easier would be precise proximity operators in search engine syntax.
(For those who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, LEXIS-NEXIS, among others, allows you to run searches like foo w/5 bar (the word "foo" within 5 words of the word "bar"), or even foo pre/5 bar (the word "foo", followed, within five words, by the word "bar". Good proximity engines allow you to search not only within x words, but also to order terms, to specify root words within terms, etc.)
It would be great to have people reviewing and whitelisting page results, but that takes human interaction. Implementing precise proximity operators, though, can give you nearly the same benefits without any of the human cost.
Many people here have suggested eliminating ad text from search results, but if history is any indication, any algorithmic system that we can come up with to do so will be circumvented pretty quickly. The one way to fix this is to allow me to say that I want the word "modperl" within 10 words of "solaris", rather that just specify any page that contains both terms. That will get rid of 95+% of ads right away.
Surely, with all the bright people at Google, this is something that they can figure out pretty easily.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the crux of both the media and browser complaints? That Microsoft put it's own software into the OS and that harmed competing software? If they're still free to do that, and they still have an OS monopoly, then your remedy does precisely squat.
I know that MS has done this in the past, but in the two complaints at issue here, I don't believe that this was the problem. NS4 sucked. It was left unupdated for years. It handled CSS poorly or not at all. IE was, at that time, a far superior browser. Same deal with Real. Their software is a dog, slow to load and seems more devoted to taking over your computer and delivering you ads than presenting the content you requested. If I'm wrong here, please correct me, but I don't recall in either cases findings indicating that MS deliberately hobbled the performance of either Navigator or RealPlayer.
It didn't and it won't, in either case. My argument is not that these are good remedies (in fact, they are horrible remedies, since nobody is going to buy the hobbled OS when they can get the fully-featured version for a few bucks more). My argument here is that splitting up a monopoly in such a way that it leaves the monopoly intact isn't a remedy either.
And this fixes the monopoly problem how, exactly? Seems to me that you're taking one monopoly company and splitting it into two monopoly companies (as Office is pretty much a monopoly at this point). A company that holds a monopoly in operating systems will continue to do so, even after you make little pieces of it.
The only way that splitting the company up would solve the problem is if additionally you prohibit the new OS company from adding new software and/or features. In other words, give them, as a company, a death sentence. That seems a bit over the top.
I'd say that's partly right. But the proper place to sort that out is in the marketplace. If a company sells a shitty product, people will stop buying that product. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. The problem is that, for the time being, there's no viable competitor out there to take away business. That's changing, and in the future I'm sure that Linux on the desktop will probably be a viable option. But for now, it isn't.
Uh, again, how does splitting the company into two solve this? You're telling me that a company that makes OSes (and presumably nothing else), and still holds all of the IP rights it has now will somehow not pursue this course? Particularly if you prohibit them from improving their own product? What other option would they then have but to sabotage the competition?
If someone comes up with a workable solution, I'm all ears. The best we have now is consent decrees and business practice remedies. If you have something better, I'm all ears.
Yes, Microsoft is a monopoly. But does that then force them to freeze all future development? Can't update fdisk (which is a complete piece of crap) because that would be shutting out PartitionMagic. Can't update IE (and fix it's rather glaring holes) because that will be hurting Mozilla.
Being a monopoly does mean you have to play by different rules, but it doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to play at all.
You got me. Am I the only one who's going to go to bed tonight with nightmares involving a little paper clip saying "It looks like you're trying to do open-heart surgery. Would you like some help?"
Why does anyone assume that doctors, nurses, etc. are any better at securing their laptops than the rest of the public?
However, all of that protection is meaningless when John Q. Doctor plugs his infected laptop into a spare network port in that environment.
Honestly, do you EVER know what's being done with your vote, regardless of the voting system? Every potential voting mechanism has it's flaws, from hanging chads to..uh..sledhammer-wielding madmen (see above). Hell, even a paper trail isn't foolproof, since all sorts of nefarious things can happen (printer runs out of toner or ink, paper catches fire, etc.)
I agree that in theory you can make a pretty reliable computer-based voting system that will be based on open-source, locked-down software. But considering how much of the general public fears and distruts most things computer-related, will they truly believe in such a system anyway?
because you can use TweakUI to add multiple workspaces.
Not really. While there is a powertoy (MSVDM) for multiple desktops, all it really does is give you a desktop with everything running minimized. So all of the taskbar clutter is still there. Or am I missing something?
I agree with several (many?) other posters that the randomness of collapsing taskbar entries to groups is annoying, I'm more annoyed with Microsoft itself. Collapsing IE windows makes some sense, since they show up with at least the title of the page (Office 2003 does the same thing). But there are plenty of Microsoft products that I use (SQL Query Analyzer springs to mind here) where all of the windows are titled with the same string. Invariably, of course, I click on the wrong one.
Collapsing into groups makes sense, but only where windows are actually identified in a meaningful manner. Alas, since I don't see most (commercial) software developers providing us an easy interface to change window titles, this feature ranks pretty low in the usability scale for me.
You're probably right, but here I was looking forward to articles about the world's first warship capable of delivering 50 57mm shells and 10,000 penis enlargment e-mails per minute.
And whatever is that poor Nigerian businessman going to do now that I've lost his e-mail address?
If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that...the taking of any action in reliance on the information herein is strictly prohibited.
It then tells you:
If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete this message.
Wouldn't notifying the sender be taking an action based on the information contained therein, and thus be expressly prohibited?
And? Toyota has billions of dollars invested in its internal combusion line of vehicles. Did that stop them from developing the Prius. Apple had billions invested in the 680x0 line. Did that stop them from moving to PowerPC? You go where the market takes you or you get left behind.
As I said earlier in this thread, the oil-based gasoline market will not disappear overnight. These investments will still make money. The point is that "big oil" is in the business of selling fuel for cars to end consumers. In a competitive marketplace, oil companies will jump on whatever technology makes that task easier. Oil extraction is the easiest now. If that changes, watch these comapnies follow suit rather quickly.
Second, a change in the public's consumption habits will not happen overnight. If nothing else, you have a huge number of cars that simply won't burn diesel fuel, and it will take a long time to get them out of circulation (and you'll probably never completely be rid of them). But here's the point: if you give the oil producing nations some serious competition, they will fight tooth and nail to hold onto whatever share of the market they can. This means increased production and lower prices.
Finally, loosen the tinfoil hat a bit, since it's clearly affecting your thinking. Why would "big oil" be against this? Last I checked, Exxon, Texaco, Mobile and BP didn't make most of their money by selling oil. They made it by selling gas to consumers. Oil is a necessary part of that transaction for now, but please explain why any of these companies wouldn't jump aboard something that would a) lower their production costs, b) remove geopolitical uncertainty, c) remove exchange rate uncertainty, and d) remove supply-line constraints if they thought it could work? It's in their best interests. Again, the oil business is not going to disappear overnight, but it's in any company's interest to adapt to the market and to survive long-term. Even oil companies.
Can't speak for SBC, but if this was Verizon in New York, my response would be "How could you tell?"