There is no long term. The company could be sold, in five minutes. A scandal (made up or not) can do more harm than any management decision. The next 'green/eco friendly/non fat/low sodium' fad could make the company instantly worthless etc.
That mentality comes precisely from the thought process I mentioned. Get enough people to buy into the idea that short-term gain is all that ever mattered, and that becomes your new business reality. That is, it's a consensus reality. Those who see that it's the business reality will swear that it must have always been that way.
BTW, companies which diversify tend to be more resistant to fads. A sale of the company would change the ownership, but the new owners may ignore long-term strategy just as surely as the old owners did. A scandal can be great publicity, I bet their main concern would be whether the media spelled their names correctly.
The fact that this question has to even be asked, tells you a lot about how applications are developed.
The US has dedicated itself to a race to the bottom in quality and price. Testing is just one of those things companies throw out because it is an expense with no obvious benefits, to those who are not vested in the long term for their products.
Well of course. Concerns about larger long-term benefit might interfere with the All-Important concern about lesser short-term gain.
No shit. I don't understand how this got to be a story. What's next, "Should Engineers Who Design Bridges Demonstrate Competency Before Thousands of Automobiles Drive on Those Bridges?"
His/her history is quite irrelevant, but nice try at an ad-hominem there. Gp is correct; that AC did not provide any benchmarks, statistics, or other facts to back up the claim that was made about Opera performance vs. Chrome performance. Now, if GP really is a "fanboy" and you want to do something about that, how about some solid evidence for why Opera is inferior?
Note, I use neither Opera nor Chrome. I use Firefox. But this low-quality nonsense that passes for debate gets old.
There are European countries where software cannot be patented. The relevant question is whether this has caused their software and IT industries to collapse, and it has not. So it has already been demonstrated that software patents are not an essential component of a working economy. The burden of proof is therefore on anyone who suggests that the USA is a special case, that it cannot live without them even though other countries can.
Very good point. The first step, in designing any new system, is asking, "Do we need this system at all?"
I think acknowledging the truth of this means that you and I are never going to have a career in politics:-).
That simply will never happen. If it did then there would be anti-trust cases but it doesn't mater as it just won't happen.
It might happen if average users see enough counter-examples to understand that frequent malware infection is not some unavoidable, inherent aspect of owning a computer, that the belief that this was ever the case amounts to having had the wool pulled over their eyes. You get people angry because they feel like they've been lied to and screwed over, and they will consider alternative solutions that they'd never have made the effort to investigate before. At that point, stopping them will be as futile as stopping any other economic force (c.f. Prohibition). Alternative solutions include Linux and MacOS. This might just provide the "secure it or go bankrupt" sort of incentive that Microsoft needs.
Then when Linux is attacked in the same way as Windows we will see just how secure it is? There have been viruses written for Linux, it is not inherently secure.
With the millions of Linux machines out there, you'd think at least some of those viruses would be propagating in the wild. Not a large number, mind you, because of Linux's small percentage of marketshare. But if Linux is no more secure than Windows, that number should be significantly more than zero. Yet it isn't. Your common sense should tell you that this is a flaw in your theory there.
The viruses that exist for Linux are generally proof-of-concept examples, but they aren't actually attacking and infecting Linux machines successfully. That's despite the large number of Linux servers that have both lots of system resources (CPUs, RAM, etc) and high-speed connections, which would make them very attractive targets. I bet all of this is a real mystery to you if you believe that Windows and Linux are equally secure.
The entire idea of scanning for signatures is what's ridiculous. This broken model of ring-based security is what's ridiculous. Buy into those ideas and yeah, it would make sense then to exclude certain file types.
I don't think that ring-based security is broken merely because Microsoft and developers of most Windows software refuse to utilize the principle of least-privilege. OpenBSD uses the ring-based security of modern processors to great effect.
Of course this is a bit of a fallacy of equivocation on the word "arbitrary." In general, and in the way I used it, "arbitrary" means "with no reasonable consideration, given the context." You are redefining it to mean "not adhering to immutable laws of physics." There is quite a difference there. Then you are using that "straw man" to argue against.
Next time quote with context please. The quote with context looks like this:
The entire concept of copyright, patent, etc. is completely arbitrary. It's not the natural product of the rules of physics. It is something human beings made up for their own purposes. Therefore, the important question is not whether it's arbitrary, but whether it continues to serve those purposes.
I said that the question is whether intellectual property concepts serve the purposes for which they were created. That is a reasonable consideration.
That said, I agree with the rest of what you said. In an ideal world we could do as I suggest: Bury our dead baby and make a new one. Just as we would not simply rip out a mainframe, we could not simply scrap all of current IP law. However, simplistic solutions will definitely NOT solve the problem and I grow weary of hearing them.
That might apply to overly simplistic solutions. What I advocate is that it be as simple as possible but no simpler. Any degree of complexity that is truly necessary is acceptable from this point of view. That's why I said "Making it as simple and robust as possible is a step in the right direction." It's also why I did not say "making it too simple to where it cannot serve its purpose is a great idea." Is this non-controversial only to me?
While I do agree with you on a technical level, the person to whom I was replying had said that "all software is math." I was simply showing the logical extension of that statement and way of thinking. My point, in the end, is that regardless of whether software is math or not, a more considered line needs to be drawn as to whether something should be patentable or not. Although I agree that most software patents are total BS, I do not believe that NO software should be patentable. There are some software approaches that are truly unique and not obvious which someone worked very hard to figure out and perfect. I believe those should be protected (if the inventor wants to protect them). Unfortunately, the USPTO has been giving out patents for the idea of having a certain feature rather than a particular implimentation of that feature.
"Everything is math" as stated in the post to which I replied != "all software is math", for the reason that "software" != "everything". My response was on that basis alone.
About whether software should be patentable, we need not speculate too much. There are European countries where software cannot be patented. The relevant question is whether this has caused their software and IT industries to collapse, and it has not. So it has already been demonstrated that software patents are not an essential component of a working economy. The burden of proof is therefore on anyone who suggests that the USA is a special case, that it cannot live without them even though other countries can.
That's good enough for me, although those with vested interests (and those who believe the marketing of same) won't like the simplicity of this observation.
It's hard for people to grasp "there is nothing you can do to protect yourself except become a techie" You can browse the web with Java,Java Script,Flash,etc etc turned off and still have an APP that has a security hole that will infect your system.
You need not become an expert to protect yourself; you only have to achieve competency. That's all you need to exercise best practices. To give a tired old car analogy, they don't need to be mechanics, they just need to be safe drivers. I'll use the classic Trojan horse program as an example: you don't need to understand how a trojan installs a backdoor into your system and makes it join a botnet; you only need to understand that running untrusted executables is a bad idea. I think the biggest falsehood being perpetuated here is that you are either totally ignorant or you're an elite expert. Users buy into this falsehood anytime you give them basic precautionary steps they can take and they say "but I'm not a geek!" This is despite the fact that you don't need to be a geek to follow illustrated step-by-step instructions, you only need to be literate.
I think the marketing of most commercial software is partly to blame here. "Easy to use" isn't an inherently bad thing, but it is a disservice to users when it connotes "you can use this in a totally mindless fashion with zero understanding and never have any problems."
But if you mean telling everyone to run Linux than sure that pretty much takes care of most of the problems but then you have to become their go-to person when ever they want to install something. It's all loose-loose, what really needs to happen is better enforcement of the network and better law enforcement involvement. Take all those people trying to protect the children and make them do some real work.
We already have laws against computer intrusion. The problem is twofold: catching the actual perpetrators, who go to great lengths to conceal their identities; and prosecuting them when they are in other countries/jurisdictions. Protecting the clueless is the same as protecting the children, only it's worse. It's worse because children cannot be other than children, while the clueless could decide that learning is important to them.
I think the real way to deal with this is to put real security into Windows. Removing an infection after-the-fact is not real security. It is only damage control. Windows needs a real security system that can prevent intrusions in the first place with no third-party software needed. The goal here is not perfect security. The goal is to make our systems secure enough that automated attacks are no longer successful. Then malware authors cannot just write a program one time and use it over and over again to infect millions of machines. Achieve that, and intrusions require dedicated human effort for each compromised machine and can no longer occur on massive scales with little effort. Then and only then does it make sense to think about prosecuting the computer crimes that remain.
But what is the point of making that arbitrary distinction? Simply imposing arbitrary rules with no purpose other than to make the system appear simpler, is meaningless.
The entire concept of copyright, patent, etc. is completely arbitrary. It's not the natural product of the rules of physics. It is something human beings made up for their own purposes. Therefore, the important question is not whether it's arbitrary, but whether it continues to serve those purposes. Making it as simple and robust as possible is a step in the right direction.
Many here seem to want to believe problem with IP law is merely that it is too complicated, and thus offer simplistic solutions to, well, simplify the system. The real problem is that IP law is like a legacy mainframe system that has had decades of hacks piled on top of it and then had a web based interface slapped onto it as well. It needs to be ripped out and something else designed from scratch to replace it. Not in that order, of course.
Why do you suppose a legacy mainframe with hack after hack, patch after patch applied to it would be a problem? That's easy. Because the constant hacking and patching introduces additional complexity. The complexity arises from the need to add new functionality that the original creator did not anticipate while at the same time not breaking the existing code. By contrast, redesigning something from scratch and accounting for everything you learned from all the hacking and patching gives you an opportunity to design it as simply as possible.
I agree that the IP system needs to be replaced. We can do that all at once, but this is not realistic politically. Realistically, the best we can do is to take steps in that direction. Throwing out some of the existing complexity and replacing it with simplicity is a step in that direction.
Helping virus writers? Don't virus writers target the lowest-hanging fruit: the average Joe?
Joe sure as hell doesn't read the Microsoft Knowledge Base, let alone knows of its very existence! Let's be realistic, here.
Joe Sixpack does not read the Microsoft KB, true. However, he pays the highest price for the malware problem as you point out. The bickering between Microsoft and AV vendors does at least indirectly affect him. Now, I'd assume that Microsoft would be the foremost expert on Windows for obvious reasons. But let's just say that they are wrong about this, yet the AV companies believe them. Now Joe Sixpack might get hit by malware that his AV tools don't know how to look for, because those infected files are listed as "not vulnerable".
This is coming from third-party AV companies, remember... they're fighting to stay relevant.
Well sure, they have a cottage industry to protect. If Microsoft gets its act together on Windows security, which would mean REAL security and not clever ways to clean up infections after-the-fact, and/or if average nontechnical Windows users get a clue, then it's bye-bye to that cottage industry.
Look at their business model. It's an arms race; the black-hats produce new instances of malware while the AV companies index those and produce signatures and removal tools. The thing about an arms race that's good for the AV companies is that it is self-perpetuating, so there is always work for them to do. Even if there were a Final Ultimate Security Solution for Windows, the AV companies wouldn't want it. They wouldn't want that for the same reason that lawn-mower manufacturers wouldn't want a strain of grass that only grows to be 3-4 inches tall.
As eloquently illustrated here: http://xkcd.com/435/ [xkcd.com], everything is math.
Our scientific fields all use mathematics as a language to describe the phenomena they investigate. That does not mean those phenomena ARE math, or are composed of numbers. Like logic, math is a descriptive and deductive tool. I believe you are confusing the map with the territory on this one.
To put it a more facetious way, I can use English to describe how to build a house. That does not mean the home is made of my words, for they are not nearly so physically sturdy as wood, metal, and concrete.
You can't copyright a physical invention like a new machine, drug, or industrial process. You can copyright manuals and other documents that describe those things, but those documents in and of themselves are not the subject of patents.
But you can both copyright and patent a machine's visual design, which itself can be described in a document, but the copyright and patent would be on the visual design itself, not the document. So there is precedent for software being both copyrightable and patentable at the same time.
To really complicate things, visual designs can even be trademarked in some countries (including the U.S.)
What you describe is how the system currently is. What I offered was a proposal for how the system might be improved, so naturally it won't reflect the current reality. Still, I like the idea of choosing one. Anytime a work might have multiple forms of intellectual property protection (copyright, patent, trademark, etc), the owner may choose only one. So you may copyright your software but may not also patent it. Or you can patent your software, but then we're free to pirate it:-).
As eloquently illustrated here: http://xkcd.com/435/, everything is math. So, the question, as always is where does one draw the line. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How about this: you may not patent a work that is (or could be) protected by copyright. You can't copyright a physical invention like a new machine, drug, or industrial process. You can copyright manuals and other documents that describe those things, but those documents in and of themselves are not the subject of patents.
Just do what I do when you have mod points: dump all the comments into a spreadsheet to sort them by rank then mod the top 4.
That's a solution to something but not to the problem I mentioned.
The lack of posts worthy of a "Funny" mod != the need for a method of choosing which to mod. In other words, if I followed your advice, those top 4 would receive mods like Informative, Insightful and Interesting, but Funny would still be rare.
Is the search engine the default option on new devices, or is it the only option forced on existing customers who didn't know something like this could happen when they signed up?
According to the summary, it was done to the writer's phone that had been using google; he found that google was no longer an allowed search engine and he had to use bing.
It does seem like this sort of arrogant restriction should be legal ground for abrogating the contract. It should also be additional evidence in the "Net Neutrality" debate, since it's a good example of how current internet providers are blocking net access to prevent you from dealing with companies that haven't paid them for access to customers.
I wonder if any Verizon customers are discussing a class-action suit yet...
Oh, right.
The government is going to solve all these issues.
HOW!?!?!
By issuing 30,000 pages of new regulations that define "neutrality"?
Guess who's going to write those regulations? The lawyers from the folks with money - AT&T, Verizon, Google, etc.
"Net neutrality" is just a pissing contest over who gets to squeeze consumers for using bandwidth. Thank you oh so much for playing your useful idiot part.
This is an example of the kind of reactive emotionalism that lowers the overall quality of discussion. I sometimes receive responses like this myself and it usually results in wasted effort spent correcting them. The responses are both AC and pseudonymous and the wasted effort is either mine or that of others. If they progress beyond a couple of posts, the corrections become more and more like flamebait as people start to lose patience with it.
I would describe it generally as reading meanings into a post that were not actually stated. On the surface, it's a failure to appreciate that what was not said is just as important as what was said. On closer inspection, it's like a subconscious process of misinterpretation but it's not random because it invariably serves to establish a strawman. The strawman is produced because the post's actual text is more difficult to argue against than the misinterpreted version.
The person committing this fallacy proceeds to tear down the strawman. In opposition to honest inquiry, this is often done with frequently recited arguments with which the person is familiar and confident. It is therefore no surprise that the person shows no signs of wondering whether such easily noticed objections are a sign that they have misunderstood the post. Instead, they prefer to regard the other person as an idiot, or at the least, as having missed something obvious. In fact that "you're a moron" type of venom is an integral part of it. Of course, all of this is reinforced by using an easy argument against them and "prevailing."
The part that can be hard to understand is that it's not intentional or planned. Call someone on it, and they can sincerely yet incorrectly deny that they do it. For that reason, I am calling it a fallacy and not a tactic. Still, it is not random or accidental and it serves a purpose. I think it comes from a strong need to feel "right" coupled with the fact that being "right" isn't good enough, for someone else must also be "wrong."
If a need like that is strong enough, the need alone will engineer situations that satisfy it. This can occur only when the person is ignorant of it, for a person who knows they are doing this also knows the folly of it and would choose not to. So long as the person doesn't understand this, they will assume that they never do anything that they didn't deliberately decide to do. The objectivity that comes from cultivating a mindful awareness of one's own actions is how one obtains that knowledge. This is almost exclusively an inner process because of the great difficulty of convincing a person with a need to feel "right" that he is wrong about his own motivations.
From my experiences with Verizon as an internet provider, they're fantastic -- but all of their services just feel way too overpriced.
They really are. When I signed up for DSL service I just about grilled the sales rep, to the point that he transferred me to one of their techs because he did not know the answers to some of my questions. I asked whether they filter any ports for any reason, and they don't. I asked if they have any kind of bandwidth cap, and they don't. I asked if they would hassle me if I decided to run any servers of any kind on my Linux box, and they won't. I straight up asked them, "let's say that I totally saturate both the upstream and downstream bandwidth 24/7, would you throttle or cap or in any way interfere with this?**" and they said no. And you know what, they were honest and true to their word. Mind you, this is regular residential service, not a business plan.
Friends of mine who have Internet service through cable companies have not been nearly as satisfied. At least in my local area, the cable companies are much more eager to screw with users' traffic. They're also much less reliable in terms of outages, which almost never happen to me and have been promptly fixed the few times they did occur. I think too that the cable ISPs around here filter at least TCP port 25, possibly others. Further, while their potential maximum bandwidth is more than my DSL connection, they rarely (if ever) experience that maximum speed, presumably because of the shared nature of cable service. Anytime I have tested it, my DSL service has always been exactly the bandwidth that Verizon has agreed to provide, no more and no less.
I feel like I am getting my money's worth and I really cannot find anything to complain about. When I read negative story after negative story about Verizon Wireless, it amazes me that their wireless division is even the same company.
**I don't actually saturate my full bandwidth 24/7. That's not really the point. What matters to me is that I can do it if I feel like it without interference. At least in my case, when they say "unlimited" they really mean it.
Divorce her and leave her the phone. That'll teach her.
Man, I wish I had mod points. I hardly ever mod anything "+1 Funny" because whenever I have points, all I see is the 1x10^50th retelling of some lame formulaic "in Soviet Russia" or "sharks with lasers" or "I for one welcome our new... overlords" (etc.) meme. I generally ignore those, preferring to promote a worthy post rather than waste a point modding them Redundant.
As long as you are prepared for the economic collapse that will happen when every single driver who has a radio in their car loses their license.
Sorry to reply twice. Sometimes I wish Slashdot had an edit feature.
Note that I said such a loss of licenses would occur only after your distracted driving has caused an accident that is your fault. Those who can deal with radios/etc without causing accidents would have nothing to fear. Those who cannot can either refrain from messing with their electronic devices or can choose to do so while the vehicle is not moving. Seems really simple to me.
Besides, look at it from the perspective of the other party. Why should I have my car smashed up and why should I be injured or worse because of someone else's willful and preventable negligence? Why would it be unjust for that kind of negligence to carry a high price tag?
As long as you are prepared for the economic collapse that will happen when every single driver who has a radio in their car loses their license.
This is effectively a claim that such a law would have no deterrent effect. I know of no evidence for that claim and any measurable deterrent caused by any traffic law would contradict it. It stands to reason that holding people accountable for such a blatant disregard for the safety of others could only reduce this behavior.
To put it another way, anyone who thinks their 'Net access is more important than the safety of others around them is being extremely selfish. Selfish people are already demonstrating that any arguments about the harm they cause others are ineffective on them. What is effective against selfish people is the knowledge that they will be held personally responsible for their actions.
Besides, getting bad drivers off the road and with them, the accidents that they cause and all the lost productivity associated with that might help the economy. To suggest the opposite, that the autobody repair work and hospital/funeral expenses that go with those accidents is helping anyone would be an example of the broken window fallacy.
Furthermore, there is such a thing as public transportation.
One more thing. Just because you have a radio does not mean it must distract you while driving. It's abundantly possible to adjust the radio while you're stopped at a traffic light, parked, etc. It's also possible to be familiar with a radio's controls so that you can adjust it by touch alone without ever taking your eyes off of the road (good luck doing that with a Web browser -- makes me wonder why you mention radios). If you absolutely must adjust your radio and simply cannot wait, and you know it will be a distraction, you can pull over or something. That's an incredibly minor inconvenience compared to trying to sleep at night with the knowledge that someone got hurt (or worse) because you couldn't be bothered.
Honestly -- did Microsoft learn nothing from the browser war? Its anti-trust lawsuits? Even if this sort of move is not technically illegal, they're sure to gain more enemies than friends in the tech community. I was never keen on the blackberry, but the sliver of interest I had in the product is now gone.
What Microsoft learned is that the general public has an extremely short memory and will continue to assume good-faith on the part of companies who have given every reason to doubt that. It's similar to what politicians learned a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no long term. The company could be sold, in five minutes. A scandal (made up or not) can do more harm than any management decision. The next 'green/eco friendly/non fat/low sodium' fad could make the company instantly worthless etc.
That mentality comes precisely from the thought process I mentioned. Get enough people to buy into the idea that short-term gain is all that ever mattered, and that becomes your new business reality. That is, it's a consensus reality. Those who see that it's the business reality will swear that it must have always been that way.
BTW, companies which diversify tend to be more resistant to fads. A sale of the company would change the ownership, but the new owners may ignore long-term strategy just as surely as the old owners did. A scandal can be great publicity, I bet their main concern would be whether the media spelled their names correctly.
The fact that this question has to even be asked, tells you a lot about how applications are developed.
The US has dedicated itself to a race to the bottom in quality and price. Testing is just one of those things companies throw out because it is an expense with no obvious benefits, to those who are not vested in the long term for their products.
Well of course. Concerns about larger long-term benefit might interfere with the All-Important concern about lesser short-term gain.
They must not have read the EULA...
Next Question.
No shit. I don't understand how this got to be a story. What's next, "Should Engineers Who Design Bridges Demonstrate Competency Before Thousands of Automobiles Drive on Those Bridges?"
It takes courage to imagine something new and different, even when it's something relatively minor like this issue.
Just check the clown's post history...
His/her history is quite irrelevant, but nice try at an ad-hominem there. Gp is correct; that AC did not provide any benchmarks, statistics, or other facts to back up the claim that was made about Opera performance vs. Chrome performance. Now, if GP really is a "fanboy" and you want to do something about that, how about some solid evidence for why Opera is inferior?
Note, I use neither Opera nor Chrome. I use Firefox. But this low-quality nonsense that passes for debate gets old.
There are European countries where software cannot be patented. The relevant question is whether this has caused their software and IT industries to collapse, and it has not. So it has already been demonstrated that software patents are not an essential component of a working economy. The burden of proof is therefore on anyone who suggests that the USA is a special case, that it cannot live without them even though other countries can.
Very good point. The first step, in designing any new system, is asking, "Do we need this system at all?"
I think acknowledging the truth of this means that you and I are never going to have a career in politics :-).
It might happen if average users see enough counter-examples to understand that frequent malware infection is not some unavoidable, inherent aspect of owning a computer, that the belief that this was ever the case amounts to having had the wool pulled over their eyes. You get people angry because they feel like they've been lied to and screwed over, and they will consider alternative solutions that they'd never have made the effort to investigate before. At that point, stopping them will be as futile as stopping any other economic force (c.f. Prohibition). Alternative solutions include Linux and MacOS. This might just provide the "secure it or go bankrupt" sort of incentive that Microsoft needs.
Then when Linux is attacked in the same way as Windows we will see just how secure it is? There have been viruses written for Linux, it is not inherently secure.
With the millions of Linux machines out there, you'd think at least some of those viruses would be propagating in the wild. Not a large number, mind you, because of Linux's small percentage of marketshare. But if Linux is no more secure than Windows, that number should be significantly more than zero. Yet it isn't. Your common sense should tell you that this is a flaw in your theory there.
The viruses that exist for Linux are generally proof-of-concept examples, but they aren't actually attacking and infecting Linux machines successfully. That's despite the large number of Linux servers that have both lots of system resources (CPUs, RAM, etc) and high-speed connections, which would make them very attractive targets. I bet all of this is a real mystery to you if you believe that Windows and Linux are equally secure.
I don't think that ring-based security is broken merely because Microsoft and developers of most Windows software refuse to utilize the principle of least-privilege. OpenBSD uses the ring-based security of modern processors to great effect.
Next time quote with context please. The quote with context looks like this:
I said that the question is whether intellectual property concepts serve the purposes for which they were created. That is a reasonable consideration.
That might apply to overly simplistic solutions. What I advocate is that it be as simple as possible but no simpler. Any degree of complexity that is truly necessary is acceptable from this point of view. That's why I said "Making it as simple and robust as possible is a step in the right direction." It's also why I did not say "making it too simple to where it cannot serve its purpose is a great idea." Is this non-controversial only to me?
While I do agree with you on a technical level, the person to whom I was replying had said that "all software is math." I was simply showing the logical extension of that statement and way of thinking. My point, in the end, is that regardless of whether software is math or not, a more considered line needs to be drawn as to whether something should be patentable or not. Although I agree that most software patents are total BS, I do not believe that NO software should be patentable. There are some software approaches that are truly unique and not obvious which someone worked very hard to figure out and perfect. I believe those should be protected (if the inventor wants to protect them). Unfortunately, the USPTO has been giving out patents for the idea of having a certain feature rather than a particular implimentation of that feature.
"Everything is math" as stated in the post to which I replied != "all software is math", for the reason that "software" != "everything". My response was on that basis alone.
About whether software should be patentable, we need not speculate too much. There are European countries where software cannot be patented. The relevant question is whether this has caused their software and IT industries to collapse, and it has not. So it has already been demonstrated that software patents are not an essential component of a working economy. The burden of proof is therefore on anyone who suggests that the USA is a special case, that it cannot live without them even though other countries can.
That's good enough for me, although those with vested interests (and those who believe the marketing of same) won't like the simplicity of this observation.
You need not become an expert to protect yourself; you only have to achieve competency. That's all you need to exercise best practices. To give a tired old car analogy, they don't need to be mechanics, they just need to be safe drivers. I'll use the classic Trojan horse program as an example: you don't need to understand how a trojan installs a backdoor into your system and makes it join a botnet; you only need to understand that running untrusted executables is a bad idea. I think the biggest falsehood being perpetuated here is that you are either totally ignorant or you're an elite expert. Users buy into this falsehood anytime you give them basic precautionary steps they can take and they say "but I'm not a geek!" This is despite the fact that you don't need to be a geek to follow illustrated step-by-step instructions, you only need to be literate.
I think the marketing of most commercial software is partly to blame here. "Easy to use" isn't an inherently bad thing, but it is a disservice to users when it connotes "you can use this in a totally mindless fashion with zero understanding and never have any problems."
We already have laws against computer intrusion. The problem is twofold: catching the actual perpetrators, who go to great lengths to conceal their identities; and prosecuting them when they are in other countries/jurisdictions. Protecting the clueless is the same as protecting the children, only it's worse. It's worse because children cannot be other than children, while the clueless could decide that learning is important to them.
I think the real way to deal with this is to put real security into Windows. Removing an infection after-the-fact is not real security. It is only damage control. Windows needs a real security system that can prevent intrusions in the first place with no third-party software needed. The goal here is not perfect security. The goal is to make our systems secure enough that automated attacks are no longer successful. Then malware authors cannot just write a program one time and use it over and over again to infect millions of machines. Achieve that, and intrusions require dedicated human effort for each compromised machine and can no longer occur on massive scales with little effort. Then and only then does it make sense to think about prosecuting the computer crimes that remain.
The entire concept of copyright, patent, etc. is completely arbitrary. It's not the natural product of the rules of physics. It is something human beings made up for their own purposes. Therefore, the important question is not whether it's arbitrary, but whether it continues to serve those purposes. Making it as simple and robust as possible is a step in the right direction.
Why do you suppose a legacy mainframe with hack after hack, patch after patch applied to it would be a problem? That's easy. Because the constant hacking and patching introduces additional complexity. The complexity arises from the need to add new functionality that the original creator did not anticipate while at the same time not breaking the existing code. By contrast, redesigning something from scratch and accounting for everything you learned from all the hacking and patching gives you an opportunity to design it as simply as possible.
I agree that the IP system needs to be replaced. We can do that all at once, but this is not realistic politically. Realistically, the best we can do is to take steps in that direction. Throwing out some of the existing complexity and replacing it with simplicity is a step in that direction.
Joe Sixpack does not read the Microsoft KB, true. However, he pays the highest price for the malware problem as you point out. The bickering between Microsoft and AV vendors does at least indirectly affect him. Now, I'd assume that Microsoft would be the foremost expert on Windows for obvious reasons. But let's just say that they are wrong about this, yet the AV companies believe them. Now Joe Sixpack might get hit by malware that his AV tools don't know how to look for, because those infected files are listed as "not vulnerable".
Well sure, they have a cottage industry to protect. If Microsoft gets its act together on Windows security, which would mean REAL security and not clever ways to clean up infections after-the-fact, and/or if average nontechnical Windows users get a clue, then it's bye-bye to that cottage industry.
Look at their business model. It's an arms race; the black-hats produce new instances of malware while the AV companies index those and produce signatures and removal tools. The thing about an arms race that's good for the AV companies is that it is self-perpetuating, so there is always work for them to do. Even if there were a Final Ultimate Security Solution for Windows, the AV companies wouldn't want it. They wouldn't want that for the same reason that lawn-mower manufacturers wouldn't want a strain of grass that only grows to be 3-4 inches tall.
Our scientific fields all use mathematics as a language to describe the phenomena they investigate. That does not mean those phenomena ARE math, or are composed of numbers. Like logic, math is a descriptive and deductive tool. I believe you are confusing the map with the territory on this one.
To put it a more facetious way, I can use English to describe how to build a house. That does not mean the home is made of my words, for they are not nearly so physically sturdy as wood, metal, and concrete.
You can't copyright a physical invention like a new machine, drug, or industrial process. You can copyright manuals and other documents that describe those things, but those documents in and of themselves are not the subject of patents.
But you can both copyright and patent a machine's visual design, which itself can be described in a document, but the copyright and patent would be on the visual design itself, not the document. So there is precedent for software being both copyrightable and patentable at the same time.
To really complicate things, visual designs can even be trademarked in some countries (including the U.S.)
What you describe is how the system currently is. What I offered was a proposal for how the system might be improved, so naturally it won't reflect the current reality. Still, I like the idea of choosing one. Anytime a work might have multiple forms of intellectual property protection (copyright, patent, trademark, etc), the owner may choose only one. So you may copyright your software but may not also patent it. Or you can patent your software, but then we're free to pirate it :-).
As eloquently illustrated here: http://xkcd.com/435/, everything is math. So, the question, as always is where does one draw the line. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How about this: you may not patent a work that is (or could be) protected by copyright. You can't copyright a physical invention like a new machine, drug, or industrial process. You can copyright manuals and other documents that describe those things, but those documents in and of themselves are not the subject of patents.
Just do what I do when you have mod points: dump all the comments into a spreadsheet to sort them by rank then mod the top 4.
That's a solution to something but not to the problem I mentioned.
The lack of posts worthy of a "Funny" mod != the need for a method of choosing which to mod. In other words, if I followed your advice, those top 4 would receive mods like Informative, Insightful and Interesting, but Funny would still be rare.
Is the search engine the default option on new devices, or is it the only option forced on existing customers who didn't know something like this could happen when they signed up?
According to the summary, it was done to the writer's phone that had been using google; he found that google was no longer an allowed search engine and he had to use bing.
It does seem like this sort of arrogant restriction should be legal ground for abrogating the contract. It should also be additional evidence in the "Net Neutrality" debate, since it's a good example of how current internet providers are blocking net access to prevent you from dealing with companies that haven't paid them for access to customers.
I wonder if any Verizon customers are discussing a class-action suit yet ...
Oh, right.
The government is going to solve all these issues.
HOW!?!?!
By issuing 30,000 pages of new regulations that define "neutrality"?
Guess who's going to write those regulations? The lawyers from the folks with money - AT&T, Verizon, Google, etc.
"Net neutrality" is just a pissing contest over who gets to squeeze consumers for using bandwidth. Thank you oh so much for playing your useful idiot part.
This is an example of the kind of reactive emotionalism that lowers the overall quality of discussion. I sometimes receive responses like this myself and it usually results in wasted effort spent correcting them. The responses are both AC and pseudonymous and the wasted effort is either mine or that of others. If they progress beyond a couple of posts, the corrections become more and more like flamebait as people start to lose patience with it.
I would describe it generally as reading meanings into a post that were not actually stated. On the surface, it's a failure to appreciate that what was not said is just as important as what was said. On closer inspection, it's like a subconscious process of misinterpretation but it's not random because it invariably serves to establish a strawman. The strawman is produced because the post's actual text is more difficult to argue against than the misinterpreted version.
The person committing this fallacy proceeds to tear down the strawman. In opposition to honest inquiry, this is often done with frequently recited arguments with which the person is familiar and confident. It is therefore no surprise that the person shows no signs of wondering whether such easily noticed objections are a sign that they have misunderstood the post. Instead, they prefer to regard the other person as an idiot, or at the least, as having missed something obvious. In fact that "you're a moron" type of venom is an integral part of it. Of course, all of this is reinforced by using an easy argument against them and "prevailing."
The part that can be hard to understand is that it's not intentional or planned. Call someone on it, and they can sincerely yet incorrectly deny that they do it. For that reason, I am calling it a fallacy and not a tactic. Still, it is not random or accidental and it serves a purpose. I think it comes from a strong need to feel "right" coupled with the fact that being "right" isn't good enough, for someone else must also be "wrong."
If a need like that is strong enough, the need alone will engineer situations that satisfy it. This can occur only when the person is ignorant of it, for a person who knows they are doing this also knows the folly of it and would choose not to. So long as the person doesn't understand this, they will assume that they never do anything that they didn't deliberately decide to do. The objectivity that comes from cultivating a mindful awareness of one's own actions is how one obtains that knowledge. This is almost exclusively an inner process because of the great difficulty of convincing a person with a need to feel "right" that he is wrong about his own motivations.
From my experiences with Verizon as an internet provider, they're fantastic -- but all of their services just feel way too overpriced.
They really are. When I signed up for DSL service I just about grilled the sales rep, to the point that he transferred me to one of their techs because he did not know the answers to some of my questions. I asked whether they filter any ports for any reason, and they don't. I asked if they have any kind of bandwidth cap, and they don't. I asked if they would hassle me if I decided to run any servers of any kind on my Linux box, and they won't. I straight up asked them, "let's say that I totally saturate both the upstream and downstream bandwidth 24/7, would you throttle or cap or in any way interfere with this?**" and they said no. And you know what, they were honest and true to their word. Mind you, this is regular residential service, not a business plan.
Friends of mine who have Internet service through cable companies have not been nearly as satisfied. At least in my local area, the cable companies are much more eager to screw with users' traffic. They're also much less reliable in terms of outages, which almost never happen to me and have been promptly fixed the few times they did occur. I think too that the cable ISPs around here filter at least TCP port 25, possibly others. Further, while their potential maximum bandwidth is more than my DSL connection, they rarely (if ever) experience that maximum speed, presumably because of the shared nature of cable service. Anytime I have tested it, my DSL service has always been exactly the bandwidth that Verizon has agreed to provide, no more and no less.
I feel like I am getting my money's worth and I really cannot find anything to complain about. When I read negative story after negative story about Verizon Wireless, it amazes me that their wireless division is even the same company.
**I don't actually saturate my full bandwidth 24/7. That's not really the point. What matters to me is that I can do it if I feel like it without interference. At least in my case, when they say "unlimited" they really mean it.
Divorce her and leave her the phone. That'll teach her.
Man, I wish I had mod points. I hardly ever mod anything "+1 Funny" because whenever I have points, all I see is the 1x10^50th retelling of some lame formulaic "in Soviet Russia" or "sharks with lasers" or "I for one welcome our new ... overlords" (etc.) meme. I generally ignore those, preferring to promote a worthy post rather than waste a point modding them Redundant.
This, however, was genuinely amusing.
As long as you are prepared for the economic collapse that will happen when every single driver who has a radio in their car loses their license.
Sorry to reply twice. Sometimes I wish Slashdot had an edit feature.
Note that I said such a loss of licenses would occur only after your distracted driving has caused an accident that is your fault. Those who can deal with radios/etc without causing accidents would have nothing to fear. Those who cannot can either refrain from messing with their electronic devices or can choose to do so while the vehicle is not moving. Seems really simple to me.
Besides, look at it from the perspective of the other party. Why should I have my car smashed up and why should I be injured or worse because of someone else's willful and preventable negligence? Why would it be unjust for that kind of negligence to carry a high price tag?
As long as you are prepared for the economic collapse that will happen when every single driver who has a radio in their car loses their license.
This is effectively a claim that such a law would have no deterrent effect. I know of no evidence for that claim and any measurable deterrent caused by any traffic law would contradict it. It stands to reason that holding people accountable for such a blatant disregard for the safety of others could only reduce this behavior.
To put it another way, anyone who thinks their 'Net access is more important than the safety of others around them is being extremely selfish. Selfish people are already demonstrating that any arguments about the harm they cause others are ineffective on them. What is effective against selfish people is the knowledge that they will be held personally responsible for their actions.
Besides, getting bad drivers off the road and with them, the accidents that they cause and all the lost productivity associated with that might help the economy. To suggest the opposite, that the autobody repair work and hospital/funeral expenses that go with those accidents is helping anyone would be an example of the broken window fallacy.
Furthermore, there is such a thing as public transportation.
One more thing. Just because you have a radio does not mean it must distract you while driving. It's abundantly possible to adjust the radio while you're stopped at a traffic light, parked, etc. It's also possible to be familiar with a radio's controls so that you can adjust it by touch alone without ever taking your eyes off of the road (good luck doing that with a Web browser -- makes me wonder why you mention radios). If you absolutely must adjust your radio and simply cannot wait, and you know it will be a distraction, you can pull over or something. That's an incredibly minor inconvenience compared to trying to sleep at night with the knowledge that someone got hurt (or worse) because you couldn't be bothered.
Honestly -- did Microsoft learn nothing from the browser war? Its anti-trust lawsuits? Even if this sort of move is not technically illegal, they're sure to gain more enemies than friends in the tech community. I was never keen on the blackberry, but the sliver of interest I had in the product is now gone.
What Microsoft learned is that the general public has an extremely short memory and will continue to assume good-faith on the part of companies who have given every reason to doubt that. It's similar to what politicians learned a long time ago.