Application programs can be slowly migrated to a new philosophy like that (for example, an Xlib program, an Athena program, and a Qt program, and a GTK program can all execute on the same X server at the same time.) But that is not true for security. It doesn't work to have SOME of the programs on the system that want to differentiate root-on-A and root-on-B while other programs don't want to. Upgrading only half the security model is like trying to upgrade half the kernel.
Make up your mind which definition you are using. The definitions you posted are good. It's just that they have nothing to do with the way you (and apparently the courts) were using the words.
One feature of the definitions you posted is that they are NOT mutually exclusive. Being satire does not mean a thing cannot ALSO be parody. Why do you (and the courts) think otherwise??
Things that are hard to learn are usually hard to learn because you are preloading the difficulties inherent in the task into a do-once thing that you do up front, in exchange for not having to do them later.
Well, yes. And that's why people like Windows. Are you saying that's actually bad?? I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or not
I'm not. You appear to be operating under the false impression that "hard to learn but easy to use" describes the Windows philosophy. It doesn't. I was talking about the unix way things are done. A commandline is hard to learn, but easy to use. Emacs or Vi are harder to learn than Windows editors, but far easier to use for complex tasks.
Using Windows, to me, always feels like trying to plow a field with a garden trowel - yeah, it's easier to learn, and everybody understands the interface and how to use it, but it's still painful to use that when you know that taking the time to learn to drive some John Deere monstrosity is the better way in the long run.
The Windows design philosophy is "since most people only use a program a little bit from time to time, you can sell more stuff to more people by making it easy to learn and not caring if it is harder to use that way."
Unless one assumes a Pangeaic distribution of land mass, there is no basis for it.
At the time, there was zero evidence to assume otherwise. So doubling the diameter *did* change the risks. Absolutely. With half the diameter, the trip has enough supplies whether there is undiscovered land to find or not. With the doubled diameter, it only has enough supplies if there is undiscovered land to encounter.
The U-G-O scheme is embedded in so many other parts of the system. Throwing it away requires not only changing the filesystem, but also the innards of the kernels' user identification scheme itself. The notion that a process is owned by a user ID number, which in turn is a member of a group ID number, is not something that exists ONLY in the filesystem. It's also part of deciding who can send kill signals to which processes, and which processes contribute to a users ULIMITs, and so on.
I think that any *realistic* ACL scheme on unix has to start from the assumption that UGO will also have to be present too, like it or not, and there will have to be a means to marry the two together, even if it ends up looking a bit crufty to do so.
Changing the filesystem to store real names is trivial actually. The hard part (and the point you seem to have missed) is that you would also have to alter almost every unix program ever written that ever made calls to setgid() or setuid() or getgid() or getuid(). That means that adapting to this new filesystem of which you speak means chucking most of the utility programs unix has right out the window and starting over again. At that point you might as well start over and make a new OS.
Okay, fine. Put a picture of a bird with a cache-like (i.e. - meaningless) filename in a random place on your hard drive, then find it.
Wow - that's going to be a really cool feature. I was unaware that Microsoft's new filesystem contained a working A.I. with image recognition in it. (Of course, I'm just assuming that's what you're talking about since otherwise a databased file system wouldn't make your task any easier and your example would have been irrelevant.)
You were defending columbus's decision as sensible because he could just assume there was somewhere safe to land along the way. But he clearly thought he wouldn't find anything in the way.
Do you think it is sane to go off in a direction with only 1/4 of the food and water you need to get to your final destination, under the HOPE that there will be somewhere along the way where you can restock, when the area in question is a big ocean and it is unknown whether there are any landmasses in it or not?
Who was the first republican President? Oh yeah - Lincoln. What was his stance on state's rights again???
The parties pull this state's rights dodge to support whatever policies they want - when state legislators agree with their stance they push states rights. When state legislators disagree with their stance they push for federal control. They've flipped on the whole state's rights issue over and over and over. It's just a smokescreen.
Yeah, but note that it's not the non-voter who's doing the writing off. It's the people who insist on wilfully misinterpreting the meaning of a non-vote.
Bull. Not voting as a protest looks identical to not voting out of apathy. If you vote you can protest by having your dislike of the big two parties actually get TALLIED. Sure it won't have an immediate effect because it won't matter in THIS election. But if the public sees the percentage of people in the "other" category rising over the years, that says something and will be noticed. If they don't see that sliver of a percentage rise, then your protest goes unnoticed.
They can't tell you are not apathetic.
And YOU are the one that chose to keep that information from them by not voting. Don't blame them for the conclusion.
Hell, even Communist Russia had elections. You could choose between the hard handed communist in corner A, or the hard handed communist in corner B.
Actually, no. You could vote for the hard handed communist in corner A, or you could vote for a write-in. There was only ever one preprinted name for the ballot. If you accept the preprinted name, you don't have to do anything but check the box. If you want to write something in, then you need to go over to the privacy area an take a few seconds to write it. Therefore people running the polling station could detect who was the refusenik that refused to vote for the official candidate - he's the one that is taking more than a second to vote. Now, under those conditions would you be willing to vote for someone else other than the sponsored candidate, knowing that the fact that you were doing so would be obvious to the party-loyal polling station people?
Now, as to the other subject of your post, if you want to send a message that the parties are pissing you off, do NOT take the lazy route of not voting - that just sends the message that you are not a voter and therefore do not matter to anyone. The only way to send a strong message that you dislike the two parites is to take the effort to show up and vote - but vote for someone else - ANYONE else. Pick a third-party or even do a protest write-in of "nobody". But do show up or you look identical to an apathetic person. If the people turning out start picking something other than the big two parties, even if that block of votes is split up all over the place, it will still send a very strong message. ("wow, this year a full 25% of the voters picked other parties instead of the big two" is still a very strong message that will have repurcussions in the elections to come.)
It is actually extremely rare that a parody is making fun of the original material itself and nothing else. I think maybe Weird Al's "This song is just six words long" might qualify, as well as maybe "Smells like teen Spirit" but that's about it. Parodies are *OFTEN* about things other than the original material - if it was just about the original material, then why change the words at all?
If you say that parody is unprotected if the subject differs from the original subject, then that would mean almost all parody produced would be unprotected.
If there's something you want to explore, but it's too expensive to be worth it, then the way to work toward that goal is to find cheaper ways to do it - improve the technology first before trying to do very much exploring. And the technology that is limiting manned travel and making it too expensive is the lifting technology - we need a cheaper way to get mass out of our gravity well. That's the golden egg. Get that and everything else falls into place - if we don't have to shave off every kilogram from a mission, then manned flight isn't such a far-flung idea (and we can make faster ships that can get us to mars and back quicker, for example - by being able to tolerate the weight of a bigger engine, with more fuel, and so on.)
The single most important obsticale to overcome is the price of getting mass into orbit. Make cheaper vehicles. That is what makes manned spaceflight too expensive. Solve that first before wasting money on more manned missions the old-fashioned expensive way.
This doesn't mean I'm against manned flight. I'm just against doing it the inefficient expensive way that never improves the technology - which is what trying to do it today amounts to.
That's not entirely true. The hunter-gatherer society is *easier* than agriculture AT FIRST, but does not make you live longer. The point that was trying to be made in that Anthropology was probably that because at first agriculture is way harder than hunter-gatherer, there needs to be some sort of additional reason or groups don't bother starting it.
Agriculture gives a better lifestyle in the LONG run, but at first it does not. (It's the classic problem where you are sitting at a point on an optimization graph where there is a local maximum that is in the opposite direction of the global maximum, and you are on the slope that heads up to the local one, not the global one. If you cannot see the rest of the graph outside your own little part of it, you don't see that going *down* the slope is the right way to go to eventually get to the global maximum.)
There is one theory that production of alchohol is what first sparked agriculture. Whether it's ale or mead or wine, it requires some large supply of stable crop that you can predictably gather and let it ferment - and once people discovered how much they liked their "rotten grape juice stuff", they were willing to put forth the effort needed to make more of it - and *bam* agriculture is born. That's just one theory, of course.
(in fact, he wanted to reach Japan and China; contrary to a popular myth, the idea that the earth was round was reasonably well spread in his time)
The popular myth is that non-roundness was the chief complaint people had about his trip being a bad idea. The truth is that the complainers knew the world was round, but that they said Columbus was *waaay* off on how big it was, and that there was no way (with their level of ship technology) that they could outfit a ship to get all the way across the ocean before running out of food and water. They were right. Columbus was wrong. He thought it would only take a few weeks. His guess would have put China at a point not even halfway across the Atlantic.
The Ancient Greeks got a fairly good measure of how big around the world was, by just looking at how far away a boat's mast can get before it disappears over the horizon, knowing how tall that mast was, and extrapolating with their knowlege of geometry from that little patch of curve to the size of the whole world. They were within a few hundred miles of the right answer, which is pretty impressive given the lack of accuracy in the measures available to them, and that they were extrapolating from a sample that was only a teeny tiny percentage of the whole.
Now, as far as the issue at hand - Given current technology manned spaceflight is unreasonable, but that doesn't mean we should give up on it. It means the research should be going into bettering that technology first. The one single factor that is the biggest obsticle to manned flight is that it is immensely expensive to deliver mass into orbit. The more mass, the more expensive. And so that's why manned flight is not reasonable - it takes a lot of mass to support a human - you need food, water, a spacesuit, air supply, creature comforts to avoid the insanity of long isolation, and so on.
If the means to get things into orbit were cheaper, then having that extra mass wouldn't be a problem. That is the goal we should be looking at.
Which is why the X-Prize is a very good idea. It might look like nothing, but it's an attempt at getting COMPETING plans for a ship, and that makes innovation in propulsion and ship design go faster.
At the stage we are at right now, the budget for space programs should be spending that majoirity of it's money on research of new ways to get out of the gravity well of earth - with only a little bit on the actual missions being sent with our current crappy technology.
Once we know a cheaper way to fling things up and get them to stay there, then the rest of the space technologies, like how to make manned flight work well, can follow without having to be so straightjacketed by the need to shave off every sliver of mass.
No, it does not. It follows the user's display preferences.
You have *got* to be kidding, or misunderstanding what I said. If it really works like this then that is even dumber than I thought. Are you trying to tell me that whether it blocks execution of executables depends on whether the user wanted to see file extensions, and not on what the filename really is behind the scenes? That's *really* brain damaged if that's how it works.
Normal users don't think in terms of "OMFG how many lines of code did M$ put into this stupid cartoon, they should have fixed mail merge instead LOLOLOL!!!!!"
You're implication that this is the kind of complaint the technical community has, then you are mistaken. It's annoying not because of code bloat (if that was the concern there are bigger examples of that in Word) - it's annoying because it's annoying. Plain and simple - just like popups on web pages - it's annoying to have a window pop up and start demanding your attention and get in your way when you're trying to do something else entirely. And yes, normal users hate this too.
That's dumb. Anything is easy to use once you've climbed the learning curve.
False. "Carry these 12 bags of groceries home from the store, by walking back and forth to the store several times" is a very easy task to learn, in comparasin to "Carry these 12 bags of groceries home from the store by driving them in this car."
"Till this field using this garden trowel" is a very easy task to learn in comparasin to "till this field using this complex piece of equipment from John Deere."
"Type this essay by hunting and pecking at the keyboard" is very easy to learn in comparasin to "Type this essay by learning to touch-type first", but it is a much harder technique to use.
Just three examples of the difference between "easy to learn" and "easy to use".
And your Emacs example is a good one - extremely hard to learn, but easy to use once you do so.
Things that are hard to learn are usually hard to learn because you are preloading the difficulties inherent in the task into a do-once thing that you do up front, in exchange for not having to do them later.
Can you honestly tell me that the government is going to hire a panel of people to check in in-depth source changes on OSS projects?
The likelyhood of that happening and working is almost nil, this is true. The error in your implied logic is that you fail to notice that this is not a problem unique to OSS. Closed-source software will have the exact same problem - no different.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
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Game with God
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Making email clients block executables is not problematic
It is when the mail program doesn't make use of permission bits (because the mail program was written to run on a mix of Windows versions, some of which don't even have execute permission bits). Outlook blocks based on filetype guessing, meaning it can be fooled by mucking with the extensions using the double-extension trick.
The problem of making stupid users extract an archive and run what's inside it would still be a problem either way, though. On that you are correct.
The distinction between a document and an executable in Windows is a good idea turned bad,
The problem is the exact opposite - the LACK of a distinction between them in Windows. And, No - they are not good ideas turned bad. They are bad ideas that stayed bad. Nothing about them was ever a good idea in the first place.
they made a call in the name of usability and now they're paying for it.
No. They made a call in the name of ignorantability. There is a difference between easy to use and easy to learn. What Microsoft did was push for ease of learning being more important than ease of use - saving a few extra minutes of learning up-front but creating a usability problem later on by doing so.
And, no they aren't paying for it - their users are.
Being required to license software does not imply that you have to license it in a way that teaches people how it works. That AT&T did that (as compared to the way a modern EULA typically works (you are allowed to run this. That's it. No peeking at how it works)) is the big deal here.
HURD has no SOURCE CODE that came from any existing Unix, but that doesn't mean it's not based on earlier unixes, at least in concept. If you are trying to make a system that is built on clones of "more', "grep", "tar" and so on, it's pretty clear that your goal is to make something conceptually based on unix - at least at the user-feel level.
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Yes, there is - and unlike the original post, they don't advocate trying the impossible task of obsoleting UGO away - they just add to it.
Application programs can be slowly migrated to a new philosophy like that (for example, an Xlib program, an Athena program, and a Qt program, and a GTK program can all execute on the same X server at the same time.) But that is not true for security. It doesn't work to have SOME of the programs on the system that want to differentiate root-on-A and root-on-B while other programs don't want to. Upgrading only half the security model is like trying to upgrade half the kernel.
Make up your mind which definition you are using. The definitions you posted are good. It's just that they have nothing to do with the way you (and apparently the courts) were using the words.
One feature of the definitions you posted is that they are NOT mutually exclusive. Being satire does not mean a thing cannot ALSO be parody. Why do you (and the courts) think otherwise??
I'm not. You appear to be operating under the false impression that "hard to learn but easy to use" describes the Windows philosophy. It doesn't. I was talking about the unix way things are done. A commandline is hard to learn, but easy to use. Emacs or Vi are harder to learn than Windows editors, but far easier to use for complex tasks.
Using Windows, to me, always feels like trying to plow a field with a garden trowel - yeah, it's easier to learn, and everybody understands the interface and how to use it, but it's still painful to use that when you know that taking the time to learn to drive some John Deere monstrosity is the better way in the long run.
The Windows design philosophy is "since most people only use a program a little bit from time to time, you can sell more stuff to more people by making it easy to learn and not caring if it is harder to use that way."
So now you prove you don't know what "satire" means in addition to not knowing what "parody" means.
Unless one assumes a Pangeaic distribution of land mass, there is no basis for it.
At the time, there was zero evidence to assume otherwise. So doubling the diameter *did* change the risks. Absolutely. With half the diameter, the trip has enough supplies whether there is undiscovered land to find or not. With the doubled diameter, it only has enough supplies if there is undiscovered land to encounter.
The U-G-O scheme is embedded in so many other parts of the system. Throwing it away requires not only changing the filesystem, but also the innards of the kernels' user identification scheme itself. The notion that a process is owned by a user ID number, which in turn is a member of a group ID number, is not something that exists ONLY in the filesystem. It's also part of deciding who can send kill signals to which processes, and which processes contribute to a users ULIMITs, and so on.
I think that any *realistic* ACL scheme on unix has to start from the assumption that UGO will also have to be present too, like it or not, and there will have to be a means to marry the two together, even if it ends up looking a bit crufty to do so.
Changing the filesystem to store real names is trivial actually. The hard part (and the point you seem to have missed) is that you would also have to alter almost every unix program ever written that ever made calls to setgid() or setuid() or getgid() or getuid(). That means that adapting to this new filesystem of which you speak means chucking most of the utility programs unix has right out the window and starting over again. At that point you might as well start over and make a new OS.
Okay, fine. Put a picture of a bird with a cache-like (i.e. - meaningless) filename in a random place on your hard drive, then find it.
Wow - that's going to be a really cool feature. I was unaware that Microsoft's new filesystem contained a working A.I. with image recognition in it. (Of course, I'm just assuming that's what you're talking about since otherwise a databased file system wouldn't make your task any easier and your example would have been irrelevant.)
You were defending columbus's decision as sensible because he could just assume there was somewhere safe to land along the way. But he clearly thought he wouldn't find anything in the way.
Do you think it is sane to go off in a direction with only 1/4 of the food and water you need to get to your final destination, under the HOPE that there will be somewhere along the way where you can restock, when the area in question is a big ocean and it is unknown whether there are any landmasses in it or not?
Let's see, Republicans stand for states rights
Who was the first republican President? Oh yeah - Lincoln. What was his stance on state's rights again???
The parties pull this state's rights dodge to support whatever policies they want - when state legislators agree with their stance they push states rights. When state legislators disagree with their stance they push for federal control. They've flipped on the whole state's rights issue over and over and over. It's just a smokescreen.
Yeah, but note that it's not the non-voter who's doing the writing off. It's the people who insist on wilfully misinterpreting the meaning of a non-vote.
Bull. Not voting as a protest looks identical to not voting out of apathy. If you vote you can protest by having your dislike of the big two parties actually get TALLIED. Sure it won't have an immediate effect because it won't matter in THIS election. But if the public sees the percentage of people in the "other" category rising over the years, that says something and will be noticed. If they don't see that sliver of a percentage rise, then your protest goes unnoticed.
They can't tell you are not apathetic.
And YOU are the one that chose to keep that information from them by not voting. Don't blame them for the conclusion.
Hell, even Communist Russia had elections. You could choose between the hard handed communist in corner A, or the hard handed communist in corner B.
Actually, no. You could vote for the hard handed communist in corner A, or you could vote for a write-in. There was only ever one preprinted name for the ballot. If you accept the preprinted name, you don't have to do anything but check the box. If you want to write something in, then you need to go over to the privacy area an take a few seconds to write it. Therefore people running the polling station could detect who was the refusenik that refused to vote for the official candidate - he's the one that is taking more than a second to vote. Now, under those conditions would you be willing to vote for someone else other than the sponsored candidate, knowing that the fact that you were doing so would be obvious to the party-loyal polling station people?
Now, as to the other subject of your post, if you want to send a message that the parties are pissing you off, do NOT take the lazy route of not voting - that just sends the message that you are not a voter and therefore do not matter to anyone. The only way to send a strong message that you dislike the two parites is to take the effort to show up and vote - but vote for someone else - ANYONE else. Pick a third-party or even do a protest write-in of "nobody". But do show up or you look identical to an apathetic person. If the people turning out start picking something other than the big two parties, even if that block of votes is split up all over the place, it will still send a very strong message. ("wow, this year a full 25% of the voters picked other parties instead of the big two" is still a very strong message that will have repurcussions in the elections to come.)
It is actually extremely rare that a parody is making fun of the original material itself and nothing else. I think maybe Weird Al's "This song is just six words long" might qualify, as well as maybe "Smells like teen Spirit" but that's about it. Parodies are *OFTEN* about things other than the original material - if it was just about the original material, then why change the words at all?
If you say that parody is unprotected if the subject differs from the original subject, then that would mean almost all parody produced would be unprotected.
If there's something you want to explore, but it's too expensive to be worth it, then the way to work toward that goal is to find cheaper ways to do it - improve the technology first before trying to do very much exploring. And the technology that is limiting manned travel and making it too expensive is the lifting technology - we need a cheaper way to get mass out of our gravity well. That's the golden egg. Get that and everything else falls into place - if we don't have to shave off every kilogram from a mission, then manned flight isn't such a far-flung idea (and we can make faster ships that can get us to mars and back quicker, for example - by being able to tolerate the weight of a bigger engine, with more fuel, and so on.)
The single most important obsticale to overcome is the price of getting mass into orbit. Make cheaper vehicles. That is what makes manned spaceflight too expensive. Solve that first before wasting money on more manned missions the old-fashioned expensive way.
This doesn't mean I'm against manned flight. I'm just against doing it the inefficient expensive way that never improves the technology - which is what trying to do it today amounts to.
That's not entirely true. The hunter-gatherer society is *easier* than agriculture AT FIRST, but does not make you live longer. The point that was trying to be made in that Anthropology was probably that because at first agriculture is way harder than hunter-gatherer, there needs to be some sort of additional reason or groups don't bother starting it.
Agriculture gives a better lifestyle in the LONG run, but at first it does not. (It's the classic problem where you are sitting at a point on an optimization graph where there is a local maximum that is in the opposite direction of the global maximum, and you are on the slope that heads up to the local one, not the global one. If you cannot see the rest of the graph outside your own little part of it, you don't see that going *down* the slope is the right way to go to eventually get to the global maximum.)
There is one theory that production of alchohol is what first sparked agriculture. Whether it's ale or mead or wine, it requires some large supply of stable crop that you can predictably gather and let it ferment - and once people discovered how much they liked their "rotten grape juice stuff", they were willing to put forth the effort needed to make more of it - and *bam* agriculture is born. That's just one theory, of course.
In the alternate universe where Columbus claimed he was looking for a new landmass, your point would have been relevant.
(in fact, he wanted to reach Japan and China; contrary to a popular myth, the idea that the earth was round was reasonably well spread in his time)
The popular myth is that non-roundness was the chief complaint people had about his trip being a bad idea. The truth is that the complainers knew the world was round, but that they said Columbus was *waaay* off on how big it was, and that there was no way (with their level of ship technology) that they could outfit a ship to get all the way across the ocean before running out of food and water. They were right. Columbus was wrong. He thought it would only take a few weeks. His guess would have put China at a point not even halfway across the Atlantic.
The Ancient Greeks got a fairly good measure of how big around the world was, by just looking at how far away a boat's mast can get before it disappears over the horizon, knowing how tall that mast was, and extrapolating with their knowlege of geometry from that little patch of curve to the size of the whole world. They were within a few hundred miles of the right answer, which is pretty impressive given the lack of accuracy in the measures available to them, and that they were extrapolating from a sample that was only a teeny tiny percentage of the whole.
Now, as far as the issue at hand - Given current technology manned spaceflight is unreasonable, but that doesn't mean we should give up on it. It means the research should be going into bettering that technology first. The one single factor that is the biggest obsticle to manned flight is that it is immensely expensive to deliver mass into orbit. The more mass, the more expensive. And so that's why manned flight is not reasonable - it takes a lot of mass to support a human - you need food, water, a spacesuit, air supply, creature comforts to avoid the insanity of long isolation, and so on.
If the means to get things into orbit were cheaper, then having that extra mass wouldn't be a problem. That is the goal we should be looking at.
Which is why the X-Prize is a very good idea. It might look like nothing, but it's an attempt at getting COMPETING plans for a ship, and that makes innovation in propulsion and ship design go faster.
At the stage we are at right now, the budget for space programs should be spending that majoirity of it's money on research of new ways to get out of the gravity well of earth - with only a little bit on the actual missions being sent with our current crappy technology.
Once we know a cheaper way to fling things up and get them to stay there, then the rest of the space technologies, like how to make manned flight work well, can follow without having to be so straightjacketed by the need to shave off every sliver of mass.
No, it does not. It follows the user's display preferences.
You have *got* to be kidding, or misunderstanding what I said. If it really works like this then that is even dumber than I thought. Are you trying to tell me that whether it blocks execution of executables depends on whether the user wanted to see file extensions, and not on what the filename really is behind the scenes? That's *really* brain damaged if that's how it works.
Normal users don't think in terms of "OMFG how many lines of code did M$ put into this stupid cartoon, they should have fixed mail merge instead LOLOLOL!!!!!"
You're implication that this is the kind of complaint the technical community has, then you are mistaken. It's annoying not because of code bloat (if that was the concern there are bigger examples of that in Word) - it's annoying because it's annoying. Plain and simple - just like popups on web pages - it's annoying to have a window pop up and start demanding your attention and get in your way when you're trying to do something else entirely. And yes, normal users hate this too.
That's dumb. Anything is easy to use once you've climbed the learning curve.
False. "Carry these 12 bags of groceries home from the store, by walking back and forth to the store several times" is a very easy task to learn, in comparasin to "Carry these 12 bags of groceries home from the store by driving them in this car."
"Till this field using this garden trowel" is a very easy task to learn in comparasin to "till this field using this complex piece of equipment from John Deere."
"Type this essay by hunting and pecking at the keyboard" is very easy to learn in comparasin to "Type this essay by learning to touch-type first", but it is a much harder technique to use.
Just three examples of the difference between "easy to learn" and "easy to use".
And your Emacs example is a good one - extremely hard to learn, but easy to use once you do so.
Things that are hard to learn are usually hard to learn because you are preloading the difficulties inherent in the task into a do-once thing that you do up front, in exchange for not having to do them later.
Can you honestly tell me that the government is going to hire a panel of people to check in in-depth source changes on OSS projects?
The likelyhood of that happening and working is almost nil, this is true. The error in your implied logic is that you fail to notice that this is not a problem unique to OSS. Closed-source software will have the exact same problem - no different.
You're a bigot. A rude, close-minded, bigot.
Hypocrite.
Making email clients block executables is not problematic
It is when the mail program doesn't make use of permission bits (because the mail program was written to run on a mix of Windows versions, some of which don't even have execute permission bits). Outlook blocks based on filetype guessing, meaning it can be fooled by mucking with the extensions using the double-extension trick.
The problem of making stupid users extract an archive and run what's inside it would still be a problem either way, though. On that you are correct.
The distinction between a document and an executable in Windows is a good idea turned bad,
The problem is the exact opposite - the LACK of a distinction between them in Windows. And, No - they are not good ideas turned bad. They are bad ideas that stayed bad. Nothing about them was ever a good idea in the first place.
they made a call in the name of usability and now they're paying for it.
No. They made a call in the name of ignorantability. There is a difference between easy to use and easy to learn. What Microsoft did was push for ease of learning being more important than ease of use - saving a few extra minutes of learning up-front but creating a usability problem later on by doing so.
And, no they aren't paying for it - their users are.
Yah, but appearently he's just using it the same way he used a vt100.
Being required to license software does not imply that you have to license it in a way that teaches people how it works. That AT&T did that (as compared to the way a modern EULA typically works (you are allowed to run this. That's it. No peeking at how it works)) is the big deal here.
HURD has no SOURCE CODE that came from any existing Unix, but that doesn't mean it's not based on earlier unixes, at least in concept. If you are trying to make a system that is built on clones of "more', "grep", "tar" and so on, it's pretty clear that your goal is to make something conceptually based on unix - at least at the user-feel level.