Not always true. As I said, there are times that you don't have a choice in the matter. Sometimes the only way to purchase the item you need for whatever task is at hand is to purchase a Chinese made version of it. If you don't believe me then take a look through the tool section of your favorite home improvement / hardware / discount / general merchandise store. There are some items that if you need them today, you have no choice but to buy Chinese - and if your choice is to buy Chinese or allow your basement to flood with water, I have a suspicion on which way you will likely choose.
There was a time when that wasn't true at all, when the USA was significantly more self-sufficient than it is today (please understand the difference between "totally self-sufficient in every way" and "more self-sufficient than today"). It took some time, several generations, for it to become this way. It isn't going to instantly change back because it didn't instantly change in the first place. No, it took a long string of decisions, most of which could probably be described as "favoring short term gain over long term viability." I'm betting that there are a lot of potential expressions of "globalism" and that "competing with someone overseas who will work for near-slave wages" is only one of them.
Why are we buying the products of these fascist dictatorships? Why do we continue to support reigimes of tyrrany?
Oh yeah, because they make shit on the cheap and we're a nation of greedy slobs with a humane streak which lasts up until that $5 is taken from your pay cheque to buy your "morality token" for the month.
Flamebait or not, if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression.
There's things which are "Flamebait" because they're blatantly false and often deliberate distortions of reality.
Then there's things which are "Flamebait" because they're completely true and people can't accept that due to a number of character flaws and other shortcomings that render them unable to call things what they are or otherwise to deal with reality. The funny thing is, people get a lot more pissy and upset about this one, and try much harder to shut it down or to shout it down (like the pleasant individuals who can avoid inflicting their personal problems on others that they are) than the first category.
Which one this is should be an exericise to the reader.
I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.
I remember that. I used to use Altavista back when the URL was altavista.digital.com and back in the day it was great.
"so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites"
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
Indeed. Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage, but I'm going to do it just to give things a try. Have been less satisfied with Google of late - not necessarily their fault as such, but there's so much targeting of them that's it's getting harder to sort wheat from chaff.
Cheers,
Ian
Maybe the best defense against the spammer is multiple successful search engines owned and operated by different companies. In other words, I don't like the idea of a Google monoculture any more than I like the Windows monoculture and the instant widespread success of malware that it enables. With spammers and others who want to "game" the search engines, it seems to me that the same principle applies.
How is telling someone that's complaining to disable the addon or spend thirty seconds on Google to uninstall it (and it's actually been fixed by M$ and doesn't require anything more than updating it to get rid of it) apologist?
When I initially read that, it sounded to me like you were downplaying or de-emphasizing the underhandedness on Microsoft's part of this action. That is, I felt you were saying that the remedy isn't so bad (and it isn't, as far as these things go) but weren't appreciating that the user shouldn't have to remedy this in the first place even if that remedy is an easy one. More on that in a moment...
I don't deny (fully agree, actually) that how M$ rolled it out is shady. Ethically speaking, they should have anything that affects a third party application as a separate download and make it clear what it's for. However, thanks to US law, they can basically say "you agreed to our terms of service when you installed the OS, and our ToS says we can push out whatever updates we want."
I do consider whether an action is legal to be an entirely separate question from whether it's right. I think we can both agree on that. I appreciate your taking the time to clarify your position because I believe I have misinterpreted it and I apologize for my assumption.
While Microsoft was in the wrong to not be more open about the installation, they at least took a step in the right direction by updating the addon so that it could be removed in the addon window.
In my opinion, it's more wrong for Microsoft to do this than it would otherwise be, because they primarily market their products as "easy to use!" and they market them to a customer base that largely consists of people who do not want to learn about computers and want many things to be taken care of for them. Personally, I disagree with the entire idea of relying on a vendor as a substitute (as opposed to a supplement) for doing your own learning and thinking, for I see that as something like institutionalized helplessness. It does amaze me that people are not only willing to use a tool every day for years without learning more about how it works, but also that many people dearly want to do this and will accept all sorts of disadvantages in order to do it. Either way, I digress. Microsoft is being trusted a lot more than people typically trust other vendors and that makes it worse when they abuse that trust.
And thank you for your considerate response.
I believe that ideally, I should be kind to the kind and the unkind alike, for I should not allow another person's impatience (or other flaws) to determine my behavior. However, I don't mind pointing out that you have made that especially easy because you have shown that you are more than worthy of a reasonable, considerate response and you demonstrated this even when I completely misinterpreted you. So, thank you too!
As much as people hate MS, is this really any different from a Linux distribution releasing patches specific to that distribution? Would we complain then?
It's different. On the Linux distribution, nothing is stopping you from using an alternative program, looking for a binary install of that program minus those patches, or failing all else, compiling the program from source code so you can have it as patched or un-patched as you like. On Windows you have no such options, nor would such options appeal to most of their customer base.
Additionally, some Linux distributions customize apps far more than do others. For example, I use Gentoo. Gentoo's attitude is "if anything we do prevents you from making a choice about what goes on your system, please file it as a bug." Again, you aren't going to get that from Microsoft. By the way, Gentoo does patch applications like most any other distribution does, only they tend to be bugfix and interoperability patches and rarely or never (I can't recall ever seeing it happen) affect the functionality or the look-and-feel of the program. One exception might be the "gentoo-sources" kernel sources, but you are not forced to use that; you also have the option of using "vanilla-sources" which is exactly what it sounds like.
And I'm not an "apologist retard" (and resorting to name calling is unbecoming, though I guess I should expect it from some posting as an AC). I actually don't really like Microsoft. However, my current career path has put me in a position that allows me to understand what the addon actually is and is used for, and I'm therefore less quick to put on my Tin Foil Hat in this case.
The problem isn't the addon or its functionality. The problem is the intrusive method by which it was installed. If the Windows Update item were not labelled a "security update", for example if the actual security update (if any) were completely separate from this addon, or if the installation of this addon required informed consent by the user, then this wouldn't have been a problem. To talk about the addon and its functionality and how useful it may be is nice and all, but it also completely misses the point. You might have the best and most useful addon in the world, but if you install it on other peoples' computers in an underhanded or less-than-honest way, you're going to cause problems.
Then don't run Windows. There are plenty of perfectly acceptable alternatives out there.
Personally, I don't run Windows. They make a decent keyboard and mouse but otherwise I have no Microsoft products at all. The fact that I don't consider Microsoft to be trustworthy, and that incidents like this keep coming up from time to time to reinforce my lack of trust for them, is a big part of why I don't use their products. However, no matter how I may feel, lots of people use Windows and many of those folks enjoy it. I'm betting that stealth installs are not what those people signed up for.
What Microsoft did here is just plain wrong and it's indefensible, no matter how great the addon may be. They are a large, powerful company with many resources and much talent available to them -- it is reasonable to expect better from them, especially on an ethical issue like this one. I don't like the way the AC responded to you either, for he seems more intent on alienating you than communicating with you, but you are indeed playing the apologist.
If this question came up a generation ago, before GPS trackers and similar devices were available, you would be looking for ways to better plan school events and to hold the schoolteachers and other school staff accountable for these kinds of mishaps. I think that's the right way to deal with this, though it's not the easy band-aid solution that installing a tracking device would be. In other words, the technological development of a wrong solution doesn't change what the right solution was all along.
I just don't believe in this widespread approach of dealing only with the symptoms of problems. I might consider it (though wouldn't like it one bit) if it were a material object, but the fact that this is a human being should be all the more reason to address the actual problem. The irresponsibility of the school system and the fact that it has taken its obligations lightly is the actual core problem here. A tracking device only provides an incentive for letting them off the hook when they should have to answer for their failures. Yes, that would be much harder to arrange and would probably require political pressure from other like-minded parents, but it would be so much more worthwhile in the end.
I always wondered if they ever thought "If we didn't acquire quick and dirty OS and go with our own". If you look at the quality of their code on Mac and releases in those ages, it is clearly ages ahead of the clone of the clone they acquired.
Remember, they had UNIX license directly from AT&T too and selling it as Xenix. It really looks like they try to code Unix again in a different sense but fail, over and over. Judging from OS X Office releases, they wouldn't be a bad Unix/NeXT coding company either.
Didn't Microsoft have some sort of agreement with SCO (of all people) that prevented them from entering the Unix market? What I don't know is whether that exclusively means "bearing the Unix trademark" or if that also covers "unix clones".
Otherwise your comment reminded me of that old saying, "those who fail to understand Unix are doomed to re-implement it, poorly."
What is annoying is that it's installed without warnings or questions asked. The good part may be that it provides (or could provide) some functionality and M$ is finally acknowledging the percentage of Firefox users out there.
I've seen the way they "acknowledge" competitors before. I like Firefox; that's why I'd prefer they keep ignoring it.
Ok, just checked since there was an "update", and I was able to uninstall the plug-in via the Firefox Add-On's window. Rabid/.'s can calm down now.
That doesn't explain what it was doing there in the first place, or whether the person who put it there is still employed at Microsoft. You speak about this as though it were entirely a matter of practicality, as though being able to uninstall it makes everything okay. That isn't the case. It's a trust issue. There's just no good reason why something like that is included in a "security update".
A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla's Firefox Web browser.
If this was part of a "routine security update" then it's getting easier to understand why there are so many unpatched Windows machines out there. Things like this may seem minor but they really erode the trust that must be present in order to allow a vendor to automatically push system updates. It always did amaze me that whenever major worms come out and infect millions of PCs, they do it using vulnerabilities that have already been patched some time ago. I'm wondering how much this lack of trustworthiness has to do with it.
There is no Duopoly unless you are completely uninvolved in primary politics. And if you are dissatisfied with your choices then you have nobody but yourself to blame for not getting involved and working to get your candidate to the forefront.
There is a duopoly because those primaries are organized, sponsored, and run by the two major parties!
I'll give an analogy. Let's say that Microsoft is the one and only company making any sort of computer operating system. Let's say there is no Apple, nor Open Source, nor any other operation that competes in any way with Microsoft. What you're saying there, is just like saying "well Microsoft has many employees who work in lots of different positions in the company, and some of them have differences of opinion as to how an operating system should be designed, so clearly there is no monopoly." Only that would be absurd, and for the same reason, what you said there does not add up.
I guess your definition of "all practical purposes" doesn't include issues like health care, abortion, gay rights, environmental regulations, the promotion of religion in the public sector... you know, issues that matter to most Americans.
I'm glad you brought up the most common misconception. It's more like, both parties have only one method by which they want to deal with all of the above issues: the expansion of the size and power of government as well as its involvement in daily life. The only question is whether they will prefer to restrict economic freedoms (Democrats) or personal freedoms (Republicans) when dealing with these issues, but freedom is freedom so I see little meaningful difference there.
Fascism is supreme belief in the power of the state and/or the party and that if you're "against them" you're "against."
If you're not with us, you're AGAINST US!
If you don't like Bush, GET THE FUCK OUT OF AMERICA!
If you don't like the Patriot Act, MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY!
If you're against the war, YOU'RE AGAINST THE TROOPS!
That's fascism, and those are all quotes I've heard from Republicans, either personally or have seen at demonstrations on YouTube. None of those quotes is made up.
That's fascism, FishWithAHammer. Obama asked GM's CEO to step down and be replaced. It wasn't forced, just like we weren't forcing them to take billions of dollars of funds that would protect America's stake in the international automotive industry. But hey, if they wanted it, they had to make some concessions.
Unlike Bush, who was totally in favor of just giving away ten times as much money with no accountability whatsoever.
That made me think of something I have rarely heard anyone talk about. From what part of the Constitution does the federal government derive the authority to take such a strongly active role in the financial markets? Is this another "commerce clause" sort of thing that means whatever you want it to mean depending on what is convenient at the time and who is in power?
I suggest you go look up the definition, history, and maybe some examples of fascism, having somebody help you when you stumble over the hard words. Because calling the Republicans "fascists" (at least, while giving the "hey GM CEO, you be fired now, k?" Democrats a pass) is pretty silly.
An accusation made against one party is typically defended by pointing out that the other party is no better. I have a way of neatly avoiding such bickering. For all practical purposes, whether this was intentional or accidental, the USA has one party that happens to be composed of two factions. They're both rotten bastards and the continued dominance of politics by the Democrats and the Republicans guarantees that nothing really changes. They're both leading us to a fascist nanny-state or whatever you care to call it and they'll blame each other for it the whole time that they are taking us there. For those who don't want to live in a modern police state, this is nothing to celebrate.
I mean, this news is good and it's a step in the right direction, but it's a tiny little baby-step that's barely even measurable compared to all of the other things that need to change if the USA is going to once again become a sustainable country (financially and otherwise) that really celebrates freedom instead of paying lip service to it. A good start would be to implement the single transferrable vote, this would go a long way towards breaking the two-party duopoly and allowing more third parties to actually stand any chance of winning elections (or at least, to lose elections because the people know about them and disagree with them and not because a duopoly has made them obscure).
I don't disagree with what you are saying, though I'm about to sound a lot like I do.
The reason IT gets a bad name (other than the fact we fail to deliver ALOT) is that we have bad attitudes about the skills of others and we don't listen to those that are actually paying for our services we just preach and get upset when they don't immediately take our advice. Being right and knowledgeable is important but being convincing and influential is even more important if you actually want to get something done.
If my doctor ever told me "you really need to do X", I would do it. If I thought I knew more about medicine than he does, then I wouldn't pay him to practice medicine on me. So it doesn't make any sense to pay good money for his help if I am not going to comply with his recommendations. Yeah, I could get a second opinion and all of that, but I wouldn't do that without a good reason and I'm trying to keep this analogy simple.
When somebody goes to a doctor and says "doc, it hurts when I do this" and the doctor examines you and says "well, you have Y disease", people generally would not look that doctor in the eye and say "no I don't," at least not without providing some very good reasons why they disagree. That's because doctors, lawyers, and other traditional professionals are generally recognized and respected as the trained experts that they are. This is not the case with IT. IT often has to deal with uncooperative users who don't recognize when they are out of their element. I can't really prove this, but I think I can safely say that IT deals with uncooperative clients far more than any other highly trained professional. Whether anyone likes this or not, that will definitely sour relations.
I see the practicality of it, but I disagree in principle with your comment about the importance of being convincing and influential. That's because I don't subscribe to this idea that you should have to have an uphill battle with someone in order to help them. They should either want and appreciate your help or they should deal with their own problems. I shouldn't need movie-star charisma and a silver tongue to convince people to do something that is clearly in their best interests. All I should need to do is point out how much better it would be if they took a few steps and their own desire for a better or more problem-free experience should take care of the rest.
It's hard because those users are (typically) also your customers. In business, that means you often cannot be completely up-front and honest with them if it is going to offend them. That still doesn't make it right that they hire you for your expertise and then routinely ignore that expertise when you try to use it to improve their experience. It really doesn't make it right when they scream at you because they have problems that would have been completely avoided had they followed your advice. Sure, as a professional dealing with customers you are expected to handle that gracefully, but it's a burden that most other professions don't have to shoulder to such a degree and I think that's often not recognized or appreciated.
On which of the languages I know?
Sorry, but sincerly, it is pretty hard to remember the grammar of some 9 languages I know. And I am not taking into account programming.
More. It is pain to take into account the grammar of each language, if you are reading almost simoultaneously three or four languages.
Yes, it's a handicap I cannot stick into a specific grammar. But I can read on several languages and write, in a possible comprehensible manner, on them.
Now I know several jerks who are too sticked to grammar, make a whole fuss out of it and are only able to create a complete nonsense out of a text. If I note that I had these cases on juridical documents, which decided will someone go to the gallows or not... I do prefer my horrible grammar.
ModDown offtopic but I get pretty mad when people try to teach grammar not by the error but by playing smarties.
Nine languages is quite a feat and I salute the effort it must have taken to pull that off. For that reason I felt bad that you are allowing an Anonymous Coward to upset you like this. Unfortunately he is probably a troll and your response is probably exactly what he wanted.
If it helps, I can explain where at least a little of the "grammar nazi" deal comes from. Some of the worst grammar and diction I have ever seen, on Slashdot or elsewhere, came from Americans who are native speakers of English and usually don't know any other languages. Many of them show signs of being rather well-educated. What I am saying is that lots of people who use poor grammar really have no excuse for it, they just don't care about excellence for its own sake and want to be lazy anytime they can get away with it (i.e. they're not at work and won't have to answer to their boss for it). That doesn't make the grammar-nazism right, of course, but it helps to understand where things may originate. It makes it much easier to appreciate it, even if you dislike it strongly, instead of getting upset at it.
What you describe there is quite an accomplishment. I hope you don't let a trolling grammar nazi tell you otherwise.
You have strong words, but a good point. The black hats already have tools as powerful as L0phtCrack if not far better.
The parallels to gun control are also strong. You have a group of "bad guys" who are already well-armed; in this case, that's the black hats with their cracking tools. In the real world, it's thugs who aren't concerned about committing violent crimes like robbery or murder so they sure as hell aren't worried about a weapons charge. The only (valid) question is whether you want the law-abiding people to be equally well-armed or if your desire for the state to have a monopoly on the use of all force is greater than your concern for how helpless the law-abiding people will be if they are unarmed (don't have their own security tools). What you'll never hear the gun control advocates discuss for very long is the fact that every state which has enacted conceal-carry permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime, which is easy to understand once you take the leap of faith of assuming that criminals prefer helpless victims.
What I wonder is whether there are any numbers or studies that would compare the security of networks where the administrator uses cracking tools and performs other penetration tests, versus networks where the administrators have no such tools either because they don't want them or because they live in a country like Germany which has made those tools illegal. If there is such information, and if it clearly indicates that the former group is more secure than the latter (in terms of successful attacks), then maybe those who want "hacking tools" to be illegal will be just as silent about that as the gun-control advocates are about conceal-carry permits. That is, they will continue to pretend like their position is perfectly valid and equal to the other position even though the facts don't indicate this at all, which would make it more of a religious issue.
Can we stop with this namby crap that the tool is somehow used and written by 'bad people' is 'bad' itself?
And lose an excuse for manipulating and controlling other people?! No fucking way! Next thing ya know, you'll want us to stop justifying bad laws with "for the children" and "to fight terrorism". How the hell will we intrude into other peoples' lives then? Huh?! See, you haven't thought this through.
Well, I think we can see from your response that you are at odds with the common opinion in that most classic example. It's not held "sacrosanct", it's just that I think most people look at it and go "Hmm, yeah, you're right, it's very hard to cover complicated situations with a literal reading of a spare handful of worse."
I'm not necessarily at odds with it, I just question it. Sometimes I find it very useful to consider even rather oddball viewpoints because they either reinforce my preferred viewpoint or they show me a weakness in it of which I was not previously aware. If it helps, in terms of criminal law, I don't believe any activity should be illegal unless it uses either fraud or force to deprive a person other than the perpetrator of their civil rights, their property, or their life and/or physical well-being. In that classic example of shouting "FIRE" in a theater, you could say that it's akin to fraud to falsely shout that, but I don't see where that automatically has to deprive anyone of anything because the harm that could cause comes from the reaction to the speech, not the speech itself. I think people should be held responsible for how they react to events, that what separates us from animals that function only via instinct is that we can freely choose how we respond to something. That "fire in a theater" model assumes that people can only respond with a knee-jerk reaction because of fear, when I know very well that people can do better than that, it's just that no one ever expected better from most people.
I guess I'm happy for you that you can see things in such black and white terms, as it's a lot easier to live your life like that than to admit that there's a lot of gray areas.
You don't really know me, nor what I stand for, nor whether I might be playing "devil's advocate" in order to fully explore a topic. This thread has taken on a somewhat adversarial tone, which is why your dismissive response is understandable, but it need not be that way. Just understand that you chose to nit-pick my (admittedly poor) choice of words when my intended meaning was quite clear, did not initially respond to the actual point I was making, and that this does not give me much to work with in terms of constructive conversation. However, I'm not the kind of guy who is going to act like that somehow makes you a bad person or gives you ill intentions, because it doesn't. I don't subscribe to this notion that anyone who disagrees with me or says things I dislike must be demonized in some way. I think that's fair, though I'm open to suggestion.
I'll say a bit more about my opinion of the law and how it should be. I don't really think law should be entirely black-and-white, because as you point out this is unrealistic. I do believe it and the rest of government should be made as simple as possible (but no simpler). There's just too many political forces at work, too many power-hungry people who know how to put a happy smiling face on their thrist for domination, and too many citizens who are ignorant about history, specifically how a modern police state is created and the deception on which it is founded, to allow the excess complexity that can justify many things which are not really justifiable, such as the War on (some) Drugs.
We've been fighting to find decent data center space for a good while here in Tampa, FL. Level(3) keeps saying they cannot provide enough power to fully utilize their facilities (we read that as holding onto premium real estate for the high bidders) and other data centers we've looked into are either ludicrously expensive or force us to use their connections to the internet which we, as an ISP, really don't want to do.
At what point then does it make sense to hire a data center with a fat pipe that's located on foreign soil? If domestic (USA) data center space is becoming a scarcer, and thus more expensive, resource and that point is reached sooner rather than later, wouldn't this represent yet more wealth being transferred out of this country? I don't know how large and significant this market is, but it sounds like one that is only going to become more significant as the need to store electronic data is only going to grow. The summary notes:
The situation is already becoming critical for companies with large space requirements, as indicated by a flurry of leasing recently in northern Virginia, where the remaining space may be quickly absorbed by government stimulus projects
Some stimulus indeed if it encourages wealth to leave this country. Now I am rather ignorant about economics. I can apply basic reasoning like this but I really don't know much about the topic and I freely admit that. Is there any likely way that this would not be the case?
Constitutional issues aren't so hard. They boil down to this: what part of "shall not be infringed" is difficult to understand?
Well, considering "shall not be infringed" is only mentioned one time in the Constitution and Amendments and that's only in the 2nd amendment, I'd say you've already failed the boiling down test in an objective fashion.
But aside from that, take the first amendment and the wording "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech." Is making it illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater an abridgment of freedom of speech? In the narrowest terms, absolutely. In practical terms, no. That's the easiest example I can point that society in general doesn't want a literal interpretation of the Constitution.
Well, that second amendment is one of the more important ones and it gets infringed all of the time, mostly by folks who seem to think it was put in place to guarantee your ability to hunt deer. Though, you can take me too literally. To me, "this shall not be infringed" and "Congress shall make no such law" are two different ways of saying the same thing. I suppose if you just really want to feel "right" by taking a cheap shot at me, then okay, in the most literal possible sense you are correct, but you really aren't addressing my point and I think you know it.
My point is that the Constitution and its application can be very easy to understand, particularly where the Bill of Rights is concerned. Any ambiguities in its interpretation should be decided in favor of the people at the expense of the government. Any question about whether the federal government is allowed to do something? Then the answer is no. Any question about whether this law might infringe someone's civil rights? Then it should be struck down. Simple. It's just that, as I said, there are interests that don't want it to be simple. One easy example is the War on (some) Drugs and the asset forfeiture laws, whereby your property can be seized with no due process and without you ever being charged with any crime (that's right, here in America this happens). If that isn't unconstitutional, I don't know what is, yet it remains legal today because you have some very clever people who create a great deal of complexity that allows room for this ever seem legitimate. Anytime you want to address my real point, feel free.
About the "fire in a theater" issue, that's held up as a classic example of limited rights but it's never really questioned. It's almost as though it's sacrosanct. It's surprising to me that no one considers that maybe the goal should be a society where people aren't so panicky and group-oriented. That way, if people are in a theater and someone near you yells "FIRE!", you would look around and see whether you smell smoke, whether you see flame, whether you see any evidence of it, before stampeding. Assuming your five senses are intact, the guy who's a couple rows away from you isn't likely to unambiguously detect a fire in an enclosed space without you also noticing whatever it was that he noticed.
That is, I'd blame the people who panick and stampede like a bunch of animals before I'd blame the person who said something that didn't need to be believed. I realize that the law does not agree with me, but understand that many aspects of law seem designed to protect an unwritten "right" to be a mindless jackass. Why else would a burglar ever be able to successfully sue a homeowner because he fell and hurt himself while he was trying to rob the place? Why else would a homeowner ever fear prosecution for shooting an armed intruder when there's no question that he broke into the home?
I understand where you're coming from and it is a fair point. However, the Supreme Court often has to decide on constitutional issues that go back to equality and freedom. For someone who hasn't experienced racism or sexism, their opinion on how a given action affects the equality and freedom of a person is simply different than a person who has experienced those two things. It's a "soft" issue and one that you can't quantify impartially and objectively.
Now, that doesn't mean you should look for racism and sexism where it doesn't exist. But I don't think that's the issue here.
Constitutional issues aren't so hard. They boil down to this: what part of "shall not be infringed" is difficult to understand? The rest is pretty simple, too. The Founders talked about "papers and effects" and in the digital age, that also includes things like hard drives and e-mails and there is no honest reason to presume otherwise. I know that sounds facetious but I assure you, it can be that simple. It's just that there are multiple vested interests who need all of the unnecessary complexity in order to have any semblance of a valid argument.
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There was a time when that wasn't true at all, when the USA was significantly more self-sufficient than it is today (please understand the difference between "totally self-sufficient in every way" and "more self-sufficient than today"). It took some time, several generations, for it to become this way. It isn't going to instantly change back because it didn't instantly change in the first place. No, it took a long string of decisions, most of which could probably be described as "favoring short term gain over long term viability." I'm betting that there are a lot of potential expressions of "globalism" and that "competing with someone overseas who will work for near-slave wages" is only one of them.
remember this is the instant information age now . . .
I suppose by that you mean "don't give a fuck about anyone else but myself" age.
A lot of times they don't do a very good job of looking out for their own interests either.
Why are we buying the products of these fascist dictatorships? Why do we continue to support reigimes of tyrrany? Oh yeah, because they make shit on the cheap and we're a nation of greedy slobs with a humane streak which lasts up until that $5 is taken from your pay cheque to buy your "morality token" for the month. Flamebait or not, if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression.
There's things which are "Flamebait" because they're blatantly false and often deliberate distortions of reality.
Then there's things which are "Flamebait" because they're completely true and people can't accept that due to a number of character flaws and other shortcomings that render them unable to call things what they are or otherwise to deal with reality. The funny thing is, people get a lot more pissy and upset about this one, and try much harder to shut it down or to shout it down (like the pleasant individuals who can avoid inflicting their personal problems on others that they are) than the first category.
Which one this is should be an exericise to the reader.
Altavista was always good enough for me
I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.
I remember that. I used to use Altavista back when the URL was altavista.digital.com and back in the day it was great.
"so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites" Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again. Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime. I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity! Indeed. Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage, but I'm going to do it just to give things a try. Have been less satisfied with Google of late - not necessarily their fault as such, but there's so much targeting of them that's it's getting harder to sort wheat from chaff. Cheers, Ian
Maybe the best defense against the spammer is multiple successful search engines owned and operated by different companies. In other words, I don't like the idea of a Google monoculture any more than I like the Windows monoculture and the instant widespread success of malware that it enables. With spammers and others who want to "game" the search engines, it seems to me that the same principle applies.
When I initially read that, it sounded to me like you were downplaying or de-emphasizing the underhandedness on Microsoft's part of this action. That is, I felt you were saying that the remedy isn't so bad (and it isn't, as far as these things go) but weren't appreciating that the user shouldn't have to remedy this in the first place even if that remedy is an easy one. More on that in a moment ...
I do consider whether an action is legal to be an entirely separate question from whether it's right. I think we can both agree on that. I appreciate your taking the time to clarify your position because I believe I have misinterpreted it and I apologize for my assumption.
In my opinion, it's more wrong for Microsoft to do this than it would otherwise be, because they primarily market their products as "easy to use!" and they market them to a customer base that largely consists of people who do not want to learn about computers and want many things to be taken care of for them. Personally, I disagree with the entire idea of relying on a vendor as a substitute (as opposed to a supplement) for doing your own learning and thinking, for I see that as something like institutionalized helplessness. It does amaze me that people are not only willing to use a tool every day for years without learning more about how it works, but also that many people dearly want to do this and will accept all sorts of disadvantages in order to do it. Either way, I digress. Microsoft is being trusted a lot more than people typically trust other vendors and that makes it worse when they abuse that trust.
I believe that ideally, I should be kind to the kind and the unkind alike, for I should not allow another person's impatience (or other flaws) to determine my behavior. However, I don't mind pointing out that you have made that especially easy because you have shown that you are more than worthy of a reasonable, considerate response and you demonstrated this even when I completely misinterpreted you. So, thank you too!
As much as people hate MS, is this really any different from a Linux distribution releasing patches specific to that distribution? Would we complain then?
It's different. On the Linux distribution, nothing is stopping you from using an alternative program, looking for a binary install of that program minus those patches, or failing all else, compiling the program from source code so you can have it as patched or un-patched as you like. On Windows you have no such options, nor would such options appeal to most of their customer base.
Additionally, some Linux distributions customize apps far more than do others. For example, I use Gentoo. Gentoo's attitude is "if anything we do prevents you from making a choice about what goes on your system, please file it as a bug." Again, you aren't going to get that from Microsoft. By the way, Gentoo does patch applications like most any other distribution does, only they tend to be bugfix and interoperability patches and rarely or never (I can't recall ever seeing it happen) affect the functionality or the look-and-feel of the program. One exception might be the "gentoo-sources" kernel sources, but you are not forced to use that; you also have the option of using "vanilla-sources" which is exactly what it sounds like.
The problem isn't the addon or its functionality. The problem is the intrusive method by which it was installed. If the Windows Update item were not labelled a "security update", for example if the actual security update (if any) were completely separate from this addon, or if the installation of this addon required informed consent by the user, then this wouldn't have been a problem. To talk about the addon and its functionality and how useful it may be is nice and all, but it also completely misses the point. You might have the best and most useful addon in the world, but if you install it on other peoples' computers in an underhanded or less-than-honest way, you're going to cause problems.
Personally, I don't run Windows. They make a decent keyboard and mouse but otherwise I have no Microsoft products at all. The fact that I don't consider Microsoft to be trustworthy, and that incidents like this keep coming up from time to time to reinforce my lack of trust for them, is a big part of why I don't use their products. However, no matter how I may feel, lots of people use Windows and many of those folks enjoy it. I'm betting that stealth installs are not what those people signed up for.
What Microsoft did here is just plain wrong and it's indefensible, no matter how great the addon may be. They are a large, powerful company with many resources and much talent available to them -- it is reasonable to expect better from them, especially on an ethical issue like this one. I don't like the way the AC responded to you either, for he seems more intent on alienating you than communicating with you, but you are indeed playing the apologist.
If this question came up a generation ago, before GPS trackers and similar devices were available, you would be looking for ways to better plan school events and to hold the schoolteachers and other school staff accountable for these kinds of mishaps. I think that's the right way to deal with this, though it's not the easy band-aid solution that installing a tracking device would be. In other words, the technological development of a wrong solution doesn't change what the right solution was all along.
I just don't believe in this widespread approach of dealing only with the symptoms of problems. I might consider it (though wouldn't like it one bit) if it were a material object, but the fact that this is a human being should be all the more reason to address the actual problem. The irresponsibility of the school system and the fact that it has taken its obligations lightly is the actual core problem here. A tracking device only provides an incentive for letting them off the hook when they should have to answer for their failures. Yes, that would be much harder to arrange and would probably require political pressure from other like-minded parents, but it would be so much more worthwhile in the end.
I always wondered if they ever thought "If we didn't acquire quick and dirty OS and go with our own". If you look at the quality of their code on Mac and releases in those ages, it is clearly ages ahead of the clone of the clone they acquired.
Remember, they had UNIX license directly from AT&T too and selling it as Xenix. It really looks like they try to code Unix again in a different sense but fail, over and over. Judging from OS X Office releases, they wouldn't be a bad Unix/NeXT coding company either.
Didn't Microsoft have some sort of agreement with SCO (of all people) that prevented them from entering the Unix market? What I don't know is whether that exclusively means "bearing the Unix trademark" or if that also covers "unix clones".
Otherwise your comment reminded me of that old saying, "those who fail to understand Unix are doomed to re-implement it, poorly."
What is annoying is that it's installed without warnings or questions asked. The good part may be that it provides (or could provide) some functionality and M$ is finally acknowledging the percentage of Firefox users out there.
I've seen the way they "acknowledge" competitors before. I like Firefox; that's why I'd prefer they keep ignoring it.
Ok, just checked since there was an "update", and I was able to uninstall the plug-in via the Firefox Add-On's window. Rabid /.'s can calm down now.
That doesn't explain what it was doing there in the first place, or whether the person who put it there is still employed at Microsoft. You speak about this as though it were entirely a matter of practicality, as though being able to uninstall it makes everything okay. That isn't the case. It's a trust issue. There's just no good reason why something like that is included in a "security update".
If this was part of a "routine security update" then it's getting easier to understand why there are so many unpatched Windows machines out there. Things like this may seem minor but they really erode the trust that must be present in order to allow a vendor to automatically push system updates. It always did amaze me that whenever major worms come out and infect millions of PCs, they do it using vulnerabilities that have already been patched some time ago. I'm wondering how much this lack of trustworthiness has to do with it.
There is a duopoly because those primaries are organized, sponsored, and run by the two major parties!
I'll give an analogy. Let's say that Microsoft is the one and only company making any sort of computer operating system. Let's say there is no Apple, nor Open Source, nor any other operation that competes in any way with Microsoft. What you're saying there, is just like saying "well Microsoft has many employees who work in lots of different positions in the company, and some of them have differences of opinion as to how an operating system should be designed, so clearly there is no monopoly." Only that would be absurd, and for the same reason, what you said there does not add up.
I'm glad you brought up the most common misconception. It's more like, both parties have only one method by which they want to deal with all of the above issues: the expansion of the size and power of government as well as its involvement in daily life. The only question is whether they will prefer to restrict economic freedoms (Democrats) or personal freedoms (Republicans) when dealing with these issues, but freedom is freedom so I see little meaningful difference there.
Fascism is supreme belief in the power of the state and/or the party and that if you're "against them" you're "against ."
If you're not with us, you're AGAINST US!
If you don't like Bush, GET THE FUCK OUT OF AMERICA!
If you don't like the Patriot Act, MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY!
If you're against the war, YOU'RE AGAINST THE TROOPS!
That's fascism, and those are all quotes I've heard from Republicans, either personally or have seen at demonstrations on YouTube. None of those quotes is made up.
That's fascism, FishWithAHammer. Obama asked GM's CEO to step down and be replaced. It wasn't forced, just like we weren't forcing them to take billions of dollars of funds that would protect America's stake in the international automotive industry. But hey, if they wanted it, they had to make some concessions.
Unlike Bush, who was totally in favor of just giving away ten times as much money with no accountability whatsoever.
That made me think of something I have rarely heard anyone talk about. From what part of the Constitution does the federal government derive the authority to take such a strongly active role in the financial markets? Is this another "commerce clause" sort of thing that means whatever you want it to mean depending on what is convenient at the time and who is in power?
I suggest you go look up the definition, history, and maybe some examples of fascism, having somebody help you when you stumble over the hard words. Because calling the Republicans "fascists" (at least, while giving the "hey GM CEO, you be fired now, k?" Democrats a pass) is pretty silly.
An accusation made against one party is typically defended by pointing out that the other party is no better. I have a way of neatly avoiding such bickering. For all practical purposes, whether this was intentional or accidental, the USA has one party that happens to be composed of two factions. They're both rotten bastards and the continued dominance of politics by the Democrats and the Republicans guarantees that nothing really changes. They're both leading us to a fascist nanny-state or whatever you care to call it and they'll blame each other for it the whole time that they are taking us there. For those who don't want to live in a modern police state, this is nothing to celebrate.
I mean, this news is good and it's a step in the right direction, but it's a tiny little baby-step that's barely even measurable compared to all of the other things that need to change if the USA is going to once again become a sustainable country (financially and otherwise) that really celebrates freedom instead of paying lip service to it. A good start would be to implement the single transferrable vote, this would go a long way towards breaking the two-party duopoly and allowing more third parties to actually stand any chance of winning elections (or at least, to lose elections because the people know about them and disagree with them and not because a duopoly has made them obscure).
If my doctor ever told me "you really need to do X", I would do it. If I thought I knew more about medicine than he does, then I wouldn't pay him to practice medicine on me. So it doesn't make any sense to pay good money for his help if I am not going to comply with his recommendations. Yeah, I could get a second opinion and all of that, but I wouldn't do that without a good reason and I'm trying to keep this analogy simple.
When somebody goes to a doctor and says "doc, it hurts when I do this" and the doctor examines you and says "well, you have Y disease", people generally would not look that doctor in the eye and say "no I don't," at least not without providing some very good reasons why they disagree. That's because doctors, lawyers, and other traditional professionals are generally recognized and respected as the trained experts that they are. This is not the case with IT. IT often has to deal with uncooperative users who don't recognize when they are out of their element. I can't really prove this, but I think I can safely say that IT deals with uncooperative clients far more than any other highly trained professional. Whether anyone likes this or not, that will definitely sour relations.
I see the practicality of it, but I disagree in principle with your comment about the importance of being convincing and influential. That's because I don't subscribe to this idea that you should have to have an uphill battle with someone in order to help them. They should either want and appreciate your help or they should deal with their own problems. I shouldn't need movie-star charisma and a silver tongue to convince people to do something that is clearly in their best interests. All I should need to do is point out how much better it would be if they took a few steps and their own desire for a better or more problem-free experience should take care of the rest.
It's hard because those users are (typically) also your customers. In business, that means you often cannot be completely up-front and honest with them if it is going to offend them. That still doesn't make it right that they hire you for your expertise and then routinely ignore that expertise when you try to use it to improve their experience. It really doesn't make it right when they scream at you because they have problems that would have been completely avoided had they followed your advice. Sure, as a professional dealing with customers you are expected to handle that gracefully, but it's a burden that most other professions don't have to shoulder to such a degree and I think that's often not recognized or appreciated.
On which of the languages I know? Sorry, but sincerly, it is pretty hard to remember the grammar of some 9 languages I know. And I am not taking into account programming.
More. It is pain to take into account the grammar of each language, if you are reading almost simoultaneously three or four languages.
Yes, it's a handicap I cannot stick into a specific grammar. But I can read on several languages and write, in a possible comprehensible manner, on them.
Now I know several jerks who are too sticked to grammar, make a whole fuss out of it and are only able to create a complete nonsense out of a text. If I note that I had these cases on juridical documents, which decided will someone go to the gallows or not... I do prefer my horrible grammar.
ModDown offtopic but I get pretty mad when people try to teach grammar not by the error but by playing smarties.
Nine languages is quite a feat and I salute the effort it must have taken to pull that off. For that reason I felt bad that you are allowing an Anonymous Coward to upset you like this. Unfortunately he is probably a troll and your response is probably exactly what he wanted.
If it helps, I can explain where at least a little of the "grammar nazi" deal comes from. Some of the worst grammar and diction I have ever seen, on Slashdot or elsewhere, came from Americans who are native speakers of English and usually don't know any other languages. Many of them show signs of being rather well-educated. What I am saying is that lots of people who use poor grammar really have no excuse for it, they just don't care about excellence for its own sake and want to be lazy anytime they can get away with it (i.e. they're not at work and won't have to answer to their boss for it). That doesn't make the grammar-nazism right, of course, but it helps to understand where things may originate. It makes it much easier to appreciate it, even if you dislike it strongly, instead of getting upset at it.
What you describe there is quite an accomplishment. I hope you don't let a trolling grammar nazi tell you otherwise.
The parallels to gun control are also strong. You have a group of "bad guys" who are already well-armed; in this case, that's the black hats with their cracking tools. In the real world, it's thugs who aren't concerned about committing violent crimes like robbery or murder so they sure as hell aren't worried about a weapons charge. The only (valid) question is whether you want the law-abiding people to be equally well-armed or if your desire for the state to have a monopoly on the use of all force is greater than your concern for how helpless the law-abiding people will be if they are unarmed (don't have their own security tools). What you'll never hear the gun control advocates discuss for very long is the fact that every state which has enacted conceal-carry permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime, which is easy to understand once you take the leap of faith of assuming that criminals prefer helpless victims.
What I wonder is whether there are any numbers or studies that would compare the security of networks where the administrator uses cracking tools and performs other penetration tests, versus networks where the administrators have no such tools either because they don't want them or because they live in a country like Germany which has made those tools illegal. If there is such information, and if it clearly indicates that the former group is more secure than the latter (in terms of successful attacks), then maybe those who want "hacking tools" to be illegal will be just as silent about that as the gun-control advocates are about conceal-carry permits. That is, they will continue to pretend like their position is perfectly valid and equal to the other position even though the facts don't indicate this at all, which would make it more of a religious issue.
And lose an excuse for manipulating and controlling other people?! No fucking way! Next thing ya know, you'll want us to stop justifying bad laws with "for the children" and "to fight terrorism". How the hell will we intrude into other peoples' lives then? Huh?! See, you haven't thought this through.
I'm not necessarily at odds with it, I just question it. Sometimes I find it very useful to consider even rather oddball viewpoints because they either reinforce my preferred viewpoint or they show me a weakness in it of which I was not previously aware. If it helps, in terms of criminal law, I don't believe any activity should be illegal unless it uses either fraud or force to deprive a person other than the perpetrator of their civil rights, their property, or their life and/or physical well-being. In that classic example of shouting "FIRE" in a theater, you could say that it's akin to fraud to falsely shout that, but I don't see where that automatically has to deprive anyone of anything because the harm that could cause comes from the reaction to the speech, not the speech itself. I think people should be held responsible for how they react to events, that what separates us from animals that function only via instinct is that we can freely choose how we respond to something. That "fire in a theater" model assumes that people can only respond with a knee-jerk reaction because of fear, when I know very well that people can do better than that, it's just that no one ever expected better from most people.
You don't really know me, nor what I stand for, nor whether I might be playing "devil's advocate" in order to fully explore a topic. This thread has taken on a somewhat adversarial tone, which is why your dismissive response is understandable, but it need not be that way. Just understand that you chose to nit-pick my (admittedly poor) choice of words when my intended meaning was quite clear, did not initially respond to the actual point I was making, and that this does not give me much to work with in terms of constructive conversation. However, I'm not the kind of guy who is going to act like that somehow makes you a bad person or gives you ill intentions, because it doesn't. I don't subscribe to this notion that anyone who disagrees with me or says things I dislike must be demonized in some way. I think that's fair, though I'm open to suggestion.
I'll say a bit more about my opinion of the law and how it should be. I don't really think law should be entirely black-and-white, because as you point out this is unrealistic. I do believe it and the rest of government should be made as simple as possible (but no simpler). There's just too many political forces at work, too many power-hungry people who know how to put a happy smiling face on their thrist for domination, and too many citizens who are ignorant about history, specifically how a modern police state is created and the deception on which it is founded, to allow the excess complexity that can justify many things which are not really justifiable, such as the War on (some) Drugs.
We've been fighting to find decent data center space for a good while here in Tampa, FL. Level(3) keeps saying they cannot provide enough power to fully utilize their facilities (we read that as holding onto premium real estate for the high bidders) and other data centers we've looked into are either ludicrously expensive or force us to use their connections to the internet which we, as an ISP, really don't want to do.
At what point then does it make sense to hire a data center with a fat pipe that's located on foreign soil? If domestic (USA) data center space is becoming a scarcer, and thus more expensive, resource and that point is reached sooner rather than later, wouldn't this represent yet more wealth being transferred out of this country? I don't know how large and significant this market is, but it sounds like one that is only going to become more significant as the need to store electronic data is only going to grow. The summary notes:
Some stimulus indeed if it encourages wealth to leave this country. Now I am rather ignorant about economics. I can apply basic reasoning like this but I really don't know much about the topic and I freely admit that. Is there any likely way that this would not be the case?
Constitutional issues aren't so hard. They boil down to this: what part of "shall not be infringed" is difficult to understand?
Well, considering "shall not be infringed" is only mentioned one time in the Constitution and Amendments and that's only in the 2nd amendment, I'd say you've already failed the boiling down test in an objective fashion.
But aside from that, take the first amendment and the wording "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech." Is making it illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater an abridgment of freedom of speech? In the narrowest terms, absolutely. In practical terms, no. That's the easiest example I can point that society in general doesn't want a literal interpretation of the Constitution.
Well, that second amendment is one of the more important ones and it gets infringed all of the time, mostly by folks who seem to think it was put in place to guarantee your ability to hunt deer. Though, you can take me too literally. To me, "this shall not be infringed" and "Congress shall make no such law" are two different ways of saying the same thing. I suppose if you just really want to feel "right" by taking a cheap shot at me, then okay, in the most literal possible sense you are correct, but you really aren't addressing my point and I think you know it.
My point is that the Constitution and its application can be very easy to understand, particularly where the Bill of Rights is concerned. Any ambiguities in its interpretation should be decided in favor of the people at the expense of the government. Any question about whether the federal government is allowed to do something? Then the answer is no. Any question about whether this law might infringe someone's civil rights? Then it should be struck down. Simple. It's just that, as I said, there are interests that don't want it to be simple. One easy example is the War on (some) Drugs and the asset forfeiture laws, whereby your property can be seized with no due process and without you ever being charged with any crime (that's right, here in America this happens). If that isn't unconstitutional, I don't know what is, yet it remains legal today because you have some very clever people who create a great deal of complexity that allows room for this ever seem legitimate. Anytime you want to address my real point, feel free.
About the "fire in a theater" issue, that's held up as a classic example of limited rights but it's never really questioned. It's almost as though it's sacrosanct. It's surprising to me that no one considers that maybe the goal should be a society where people aren't so panicky and group-oriented. That way, if people are in a theater and someone near you yells "FIRE!", you would look around and see whether you smell smoke, whether you see flame, whether you see any evidence of it, before stampeding. Assuming your five senses are intact, the guy who's a couple rows away from you isn't likely to unambiguously detect a fire in an enclosed space without you also noticing whatever it was that he noticed.
That is, I'd blame the people who panick and stampede like a bunch of animals before I'd blame the person who said something that didn't need to be believed. I realize that the law does not agree with me, but understand that many aspects of law seem designed to protect an unwritten "right" to be a mindless jackass. Why else would a burglar ever be able to successfully sue a homeowner because he fell and hurt himself while he was trying to rob the place? Why else would a homeowner ever fear prosecution for shooting an armed intruder when there's no question that he broke into the home?
I understand where you're coming from and it is a fair point. However, the Supreme Court often has to decide on constitutional issues that go back to equality and freedom. For someone who hasn't experienced racism or sexism, their opinion on how a given action affects the equality and freedom of a person is simply different than a person who has experienced those two things. It's a "soft" issue and one that you can't quantify impartially and objectively.
Now, that doesn't mean you should look for racism and sexism where it doesn't exist. But I don't think that's the issue here.
Constitutional issues aren't so hard. They boil down to this: what part of "shall not be infringed" is difficult to understand? The rest is pretty simple, too. The Founders talked about "papers and effects" and in the digital age, that also includes things like hard drives and e-mails and there is no honest reason to presume otherwise. I know that sounds facetious but I assure you, it can be that simple. It's just that there are multiple vested interests who need all of the unnecessary complexity in order to have any semblance of a valid argument.