While I can't say I know very much about how this is being implemented, and therefore could only speculate about the threat model and how it is being addressed, I very much appreciate your point about the need for transparency. I would further submit that an aspect of the problem that is not often discussed but certainly does have a strong influence in the outcome of elections and how they affect the country (i.e. the entire point of having a vote) is not so much how the voting is carried out, but who is doing the voting.
I realize how unrealistic it is that this would actually be tried, but what I would really like to see is a restriction that prevents anyone from voting until they demonstrate that they understand how the government actually works. Something like a (hopefully very tough) civics test that must be passed every so often in order to retain the right to vote, with emphasis on what is and what is not the proper role of government. At least in the USA, it seems that just because so-called "literacy tests" were abused for the purpose of denying suffrage to black people, during a time when the evils of open racism were widespread, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to discard the entire idea that a voter should demonstrate some competence before performing such an important duty.
This could work if anyone who meets the other requirements (at least 18 years of age, not a convicted felon, etc.) is eligible to take such a test and maybe it would be a good idea to allow them to re-take the test until they pass. The idea is that with informed voters who understand how the system was intended (by the Founding Fathers) to work, elections would be determined more by a candidate's position on issues, their track record (if available) of how they handled previous positions of power, and whether their ideas are actually sustainable long-term (which many of our entitlement programs are not, such as Social Security and other vote-buying techniques) and less by 30-second ads on TV, campaign slogans, empty promises, and party affiliation. I believe this would also have the effect of selecting against the knee-jerk, ill-considered reaction of valuing security more than freedom and would probably also make it a little easier for candidates who do not belong to the two major parties to win elections beyond the local-government level.
One thing that has always bothered me about politics is the unwillingness to try new ideas to see if they are superior (and if not, why) and abandon them if they are not. It seems that we have too much faith in the status quo and are only ever willing to change it in reaction to some kind of crisis -- often due to skillful use of Problem, Reaction, Solution aka Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Hegel) -- by taking measures that wind up being set in stone and very difficult to change in the future.
And many accidents have actually been caused because people have been reluctant to slam the brake down because they've never done it (makes sense - it totally fucks up your tires, unless you do have ABS).
Sorry, but one minor thing. Accidents are not caused by reluctance to slam the brakes or any other problem with braking. Accidents other than single-car collisions are generally caused by one of two things: following too closely or failure to yield. If the skill used during braking matters, it's because one of these two has already happened and now you are talking mitigation.
With ABS, you can teach full braking to every new driver, and then they won't be scared to slam the brake when they're made to.
Scared? If you're afraid of the ball, you shouldn't be playing the game, especially when mistakes (such as panic reactions, overcompensation, etc) can kill. This is properly fixed by further training until the driver feels confident about being able to handle a vehicle on the road, including how to properly handle emergency situations, evasive maneuvers, etc. If you don't wait until you're faced with a life-and-death situation to consider for the first time how it should be handled, then you won't hesitate to do what is necessary without losing control. I love technology, but I grow weary of the way we always seem to use a technical solution for non-technical problems.
As for the kernel configuration, if you're lucky your distro has enabled/proc/config.gz. In that case you can just copy the file over into/usr/src/linux, unpack it, rename it.config. You can then tweak the settings using make menuconfig or make xconfig.
And if you're really horribly unlucky then you'll have to endure the HORROR of copying/usr/src/linux-X/.config to/usr/src/linux-Y/.config. My god!! Praise the Allmighty for the/proc/config.gz to spare you that horrible cp command.. oh wait a sec, you would have to copy anyway plus the added step of unpacking it... nevermind.... and in both cases you should run "make oldconfig".
He didn't try to defend giant multinationals, he defended "most companies". Most companies are not giant, ethically impaired multinationals.
Giant multinationals are the same idea taken to its logical conclusion by those relative few who proved themselves to be better players of the same game. Therefore they take a subtle flaw that does not usually reveal itself at a small-and-local level and make it scale until it is large and pronounced and no longer deniable.
Giant multinationals are the abberation that make the rest look bad.
Any way you look at it, the "ethnically impaired" perception is valid and did not originate in a vacuum, since the system as we know it is set up to reward and reinforce the behavior of those multinationals, otherwise they would be forced to declare bankruptcy. There is nothing aberrant about maintaining an environment that is well-suited for a particular type of entity and then having noteworthy manifestations of that type of entity; this is simple cause-and-effect. My previous comment had more to do with our misplaced trust in large organizations and their PR and their agendas and less to do with undesirable business practices, since without the former the latter could not be so widespread.
Just because publicly traded companies are sometimes forced by the shareholders to do things that aren't cool it doesn't mean business is bad, or even that big business is bad.
Most of the time, it's not that they are run by evil people, it's really just what happens when a (very) large group tries to think. It all becomes reduced to the lowest common denominator, causing the decision-making to be more selfish and more short-term, and replaces the ethics of an individual with a poor substitute, which is a need to follow any regulations and avoid legal liability. If there is to be a coherent organization, then there is simply no other mentality that a 10,000 person team could share other than "is this in the interests of the company?" with good employees separated from mediocre employees based on how much they care about that question. It's the effect that this singular focus has on any group consensus reached (either by being a decision-maker or by losing your job if you don't play along) that can be perceived as evil, although really it's amoral.
Most companies are full of good people, run by good people who try to do the right thing.
If you really look around you'll notice that most of the harm done in this world is not done by deliberate malice; it's done by people who have good intentions and fail to consider the full repercussions of their actions. No totalitarian government ever arose because "Do you want to live in a fascist police state?" was put to a vote. Even when this is the intention of a leader, it's always sold as a way to protect public safety, stop terrorists, etc. so that naive people can support feel-good measures with foreseeable negative side-effects while patting themselves on the back for how good their intent was.
The GP painted with a broad brush but your attempt to defend the good name of giant multinationals (the main cause of that perception) in terms of your personal, ethical, hard-working, money-for-kid's-college-funds-and-grandma-and-apple-pie one-man operation is not a valid comparison.
That sounds consistent with the "deregulate and privatize EVERYTHING" push we've seen in government since the 1980s. The real question is "How can we reverse the trend, and ensure we won't be locked down to one service provider?"
I would speculate that the problem is not deregulation and privitizaion alone; it's deregulation and privitization of companies that were legal monopolies and thus are entrenched in that market. There can be no real, open competition when the barriers to entry for newcomers are high enough (laying down your own fiber to many households) that they would prevent a new business from getting off the ground. So, if anything this is a recurring side-effect of the regulated environment (which had some reasons for existing) that preceded the push to privitize.
You're on the site, right? That's your benefit. You don't need to give your "express consent" for him to track what you do on his site. Don't like the terms? Don't go to the site.
That's just my point -- what terms? I never saw or agreed to anything before such data were collected on me. If I know that it is there and decide to look for it, I can find such "terms" in the privacy statements of the site or by searching for them, but otherwise this information is collected surreptitiously (it's a tiny piece of javascript embedded in a page; it's not prominent like say a banner ad would be and there is no disclaimer or chance to opt out other than blocking it). You seem to miss my point, which is that my information is mine and is not free for the taking unless I decide that it is, and if your marketing system fails without my unwitting participation, this is a downside to your business model and not a problem with me.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with deciding not to permit some marketer to collect information on me. This is my computer and my 'Net connection and I will decide what traffic is and is not permitted to travel through it; it really is that simple. Tough shit if someone's feeling of entitlement causes them to not like this -- that is not my problem. The Web got along just fine without this sort of marketing for years and is not going to fall apart tomorrow if it were discontinued.
Now, of course any Webmaster is free to deny me access to their site because I won't allow them to collect data on me, and if they did I would respect their decision, as I do not entertain that feeling of entitlement (they don't owe me a listening socket on TCP port 80 any more than I owe them the correct DNS resolution of google-analytics.com). However, in my experience none have ever chosen to do this and there's a good reason for that; it's a bad business decision. If they did deny me access to their site, they would guarantee that I will never shop there, subscribe to their service, or otherwise allow them to earn some money from me (you know, the old-fashioned way, which is by giving me something of value in exchange). Put another way, people who value their privacy still spend money, still buy things, still sign up for services, and companies who respect their customers' wishes can still profit from these events.
Finally, I'd like to point out that the idea that I need a Webmaster to "help" me by trying to figure out for me what I want to buy is for sheep and therefore a bit insulting. I don't buy a company's product because they targeted advertisements at me or because those advertisements had celebrity-of-the-month in them. I buy a company's product because I have determined for myself what I need and have shopped around and decided it was the best deal for my needs. This is the case for any substantial purchase I make. Because of this, I am obviously not the target audience for this kind of advertising and if it has an effect on me at all, it would tend to make me view the company in a negative light (the more pushy the salesman, the more likely it is that I will walk away). Given this, please explain to me exactly what a Web site is missing out on when I decide not to allow them to track my browsing habits.
You really just sound bitter that I expect a company to earn my money by providing something of value to me instead of just allowing them to benefit from my data for free, and that's a shame because this should not be a revolutionary idea. Maybe that threatens your cash cow, but again your faulty business model is not my concern.
And how is a webmaster simply monitoring what people click on evil? Just because you may be paranoid, it doesn't make Google evil.
A webmaster simply monitoring what I click on, in order to track (at least partially) my browsing habits, for his own gain (ads), with no benefit to me, without my express consent, is the parasitic part. The privacy violation inherent in this sort of tracking and with its increase in prevalance, the idea that it should be acceptable, is the evil part. I have google-analytics.com set to 127.0.0.1 in my/etc/hosts file because this is my way of telling them that my consent was denied. There's nothing necessarily paranoid about it, I just decided that the arrangement wasn't in my best interests.
BS, at my American public school, in 1983, in (required) US History class, we spent 3 months on the Vietnam Conflict.
So because you were fortunate enough to receive a higher-quality education in history than I did, that means that what I said is bullshit? You do realize that I spoke exclusively of my own experience and never claimed that it was universal (in that I never said "all, each, and every last school handled this just like mine did!"), just that I believe it's common enough to have a significant impact?
Having said that...
The only history class I ever had that went over Vietnam was a course at my high school that was actually for college credit ("Advanced Placement" is what they call it when they cut the insult to your intelligence by half while multiplying the amount of homework by three). This consisted of a series of videos, which selectively included footage from the era, that dryly explained "this is what the politicians said, this is when X battle was fought on Y date, this is how many people protested and where, and this is a news clip from when the decision to pull out was announced". Most of the video about the protesters never included anything they said or believed, except a few clips showing a guy with a painted-up face at a microphone screaming at the crowd with every other word bleeped out. There was much talk about the casualties we sustained and the idea of trying to contain Communism (i.e. the official story) but there was little discussion about how to approach an asymmetric war, about the morality of the war, about who benefitted (both politically and financially) from the conflict, and what there was to learn from its failure. The bias expressed here should be rather evident and the number of experiences like this I had in public school (with most subjects other than "hard sciences" like physics or mathematics) are why I came to value the idea of self-education. To me, a college degree is not a measure of intelligence or wisdom; it's a measure of whether you are willing to work hard (to achieve memorization) for goals and requirements that are transmitted to you by other people, which is why employers value them. For pragmatic reasons, such a degree is still a good investment, but I certainly enjoyed Samuel Clemens' saying that "I never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education."
I strongly agree with you about what happens when we allow history to be spun by people with a statist agenda, which both of the major political policies demonstrably have when you consider that they overwhelmingly prefer to increase the size and power of government rather than curtail it. You are kinder than I am to merely refer to Bush etc. as "misguided"; I see that he has expanded the power of the executive branch more than anyone else during my lifetime and I simply cannot believe that this has all been some big accident. Personally, I believe he is humble enough and patient enough to allow people to think he's stupid to encourage his political opponents to underestimate him, which means he should be taken more seriously than most. But let's assume he is merely misguided; in that case, I submit that the misguidance is institutional and will continue so long as all of political power is dominated by the same two parties and reinforced by the media (that spin didn't become so widely promoted for no reason). I believe that political parties are doing to politics what the trade guilds of old did to the various trades, in that their only purpose is to entrench existing powers by raising the bar for newcomers who don't play by their rules. If I am wrong about this, then a minor party candidate should achieve the presidency or a majority in one of the houses of the legislature at least once every couple of decades, but this has certainly not been the case.
For what it's worth, even if you and I completely disagree regarding some points of this subject, I very much appreciate the intelligent and thoughtful reply.
You're kidding me? I'm not disputing what you say as I've never been through the US education system. I just find it astonishing that Vietnam doesn't feature in a large way in the history classes. Though maybe it is the large scale protests against it that would be most troubling to some in power today.
Yeah, our leaders thought of that. This is why there is a government monopoly on the educational system (they call them "public schools" but really, "government schools" is a more appropriate label) that requires some serious cash to avoid (private schools aren't cheap). And I agree with the grandparent that in school history classes, history ended about fifty years ago or so -- World War II was the last topic covered in any public-school history class I have ever taken, and even then important topics were left out, such as why we ended up with the current system of employer-provided benefits (the government froze wages during that war and this was a way to get around that), the effect of which is that today most people cannot afford to buy health insurance on their own and therefore lose bargaining power on the job market.
Because of omissions like this, most other Americans are quite ignorant regarding the historical basis of most of our social programs and the way government economic interference can have consequences for many years to come. I would suggest that another problem with the way history is taught is that policies and events are not approached from a "qui bono?" (who benefits?) perspective, of which "follow the money" is one expression. This failure artificially makes the politicians of a given era appear to be more selfless than they truly are, and conveniently omits the historical basis for being distrustful of authority today.
Anyone wanting an under-represented perspective on the American public schools may find this to be an interesting read. I can't help but feel that if the media actually did its job, viewpoints like this would be well-known and people would be able to judge their validity on an individual basis. Instead, you hear about the occasional scandal by specific individuals involved in the school system but the entire idea of whether we should have government schooling is never questioned (and the fact that there is a very good reason why the Communist Manifesto insists on it is never mentioned).
I believe it was Neil Boortz who once said, "if you send your child to a Catholic school, they will be taught that Catholicism is GREAT! If you send your child to a Protestant school, they will be taught that Protestantism is GREAT! If you send your child to a government school..."
All three of your links go to the same web site, which spends most of it's time talking about ways the standard model is incomplete, as opposed to giving any sort of quick summary of what their theory claims. Not to be dismissive, but this is a bit of a red flag.
The reason why the three links point to the same Web site is because that post was not intended to be research (you can do that on your own); it was intended to display a viewpoint I have encountered and find to be interesting (but FYI a link to a synopsis is found on their main page). I'm less concerned with whether the Electric Universe theory is correct and more interested in whether we are willing to question what we think we know. I would like to see more work done on alternatives like this. I believe that in terms of cost-benefit, the possibility of a truly new discovery is worth the effort this would require.
For example there has been ongoing debate for many years now between people who are searching for dark matter and proponents of MOND. There's nothing more annoying than pontification from ignorant armchair physicists.
And dark matter is needed only because the current gravity-only model fails miserably without it. Dark matter was not predicted by the Standard Model, it was bolted onto it after it was realized that large-scale structures could not be explained without it (i.e. with only the visible matter, our galaxy should fly apart according to the gravity-only viewpoint). This is precisely the pattern by which epicycles were added to the old geocentric theories to explain away observations that suggested that it was wrong. Compare this to the truly successful predictions, (you know, the ones that were mentioned before the effect was observed?) such as gravitational lensing or time dilation, it should be obvious that something is wrong with the dark matter picture. Name for me some "current research" other than string theory (which cannot be tested in the foreseeable future, making it more closely resemble metaphysics, not science) that is doing anything other than revising theories to fix them when a new, unpredicted observation breaks them. In other words, the theory is being revised but the assumptions and thought processes that led to that theory are not. The arrogance that "we can't possibly be missing something fundamental because this time we finally get it!" certainly isn't being revised either. Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and other things that have never been directly observed are added after the fact wherever they are needed to explain away inconsistencies when they are found.
What kind of remote island are you living on that you're so out of touch and think that 'different' approaches never get funding?
Perhaps different approaches to the Standard Model get plenty of funding, but this is still a monoculture. This is not a competition among different theories to find out which is the most useful and makes the most successful predictions; this is a competition among different interpretations of the same theory.
There's nothing more annoying than pontification from ignorant armchair physicists.
And answering my opinion about the current state of physics research by talking about who has the right to speak, which island I am on, how out of touch I am, and who is an "armchair physicist" is supposed to show me the error of my ways? This might make you feel better about yourself but it's not very convincing (I won't bother pointing out what it says about your character or your level of discipline). I get it, if you just assert something strongly enough, it magically becomes true! Your single paragraph was low on facts but had plenty of expressions of your indignation that I would dare to question your sacred viewpoint, some content-free statements like "... turned upside down in the last century and changed pretty dramatically over the last 20 years," and a general display of exactly the type of hubris that hinders real progress. It's like you're personally offended that I don't see things the way that you do, which is quite a bit different from trying to correct what you perceive as my incorrect beliefs.
When any Big Bang type of theory is mentioned, I sometimes wonder why alternative theories, like the Electric Universe, are never mentioned, as though there is only one way to try to explain cosmological phenomenon. I would really like to see some experiments or at least some solid reasoning (instead of the usual approach, which is dismissal) to attempt to falsify some of the claims made here or here or here.
While I am not entirely certain that the Electric Universe has The Truth either (nor do I think it's a good idea to ever fully believe that this is the case), I too am tired of hearing about the "reality" of mathematical entities that have never been directly observed, and of the tendency to just insert dark matter wherever it's needed, after the fact (as opposed to predicting its presence and location by theory), when it is found that our currently understanding otherwise fails to describe the objects we are seeing. I do agree with Wal Thornhill that cosmology is beginning to resemble the Ptolemaic epicycles.
It's also a shame that (at least in the USA) the funding system has made science another self-reinforcing status quo just like the political system, in that no one who is willing to change things and try a totally different approach has any chance of receiving the funding and support that's necessary to get off the ground.
Stop preloaded OS. Make the customer purchase a full retail boxed set with disk and install it and activate it himself. Even with a new computer purchase, make them do it themselves, open the shrinkwrap, install it, click on the agreement and activate it. Even that isn't perfect, obviously, as CD pirates have proven, but then again, they can't have it both ways, complaining about piracy then doing *nothing* about it all over the world for years and years in order to garner mindshare.
Considering how uninformed their average customer is about these matters, and the resources they possess for PR, they probably can have it both ways, unfortunately.
That is the biggest snakeoil scam out there running, software with full capitalist pig profit protections and no warranties mandated by law. You would think by the 21st century now we might have eliminated "caveat emptor" [...]
Eliminating "caveat emptor" is not really such a good idea (in fact I believe that the scarcity of it in the software market is compounding the problem). Making every last product from all companies perform exactly as advertised, which is what it would take to truly accomplish this, is like eliminating good security practices by convincing every last black hat to stop rooting other people's computers. While giving companies a strong incentive to back up their claims is certainly a step in the right direction, there is simply no substitute for good judgment, nor should there be. The reason why your expectation for the 21st century is not practical is because the underlying problem was not identified, which is the Windows monoculture that has severely limited the possibility of voting with your wallet by choosing something better.
Otherwise, I too would love to see some way to hold people accountable when their negligence poses a risk to the larger network. I find it unfortunate that a legal approach, with all the problems of its own that it would bring (for one thing, who spends more on lobbyists, you or Microsoft?), is probably going to be the limit of our creativity in addressing this.
I definitely agree that there should be some kind of minimum warranty for commercial software. The main argument against this is typically based on the fact that no piece of software can be proven to contain no bugs; however, it does not follow that this is a valid reason to avoid all software warranties. It would be reasonable to tolerate (in the sense that markets are a better way to deal with this) the occasional crash, interface quirks, and other unforeseeable bugs that are specific to a particular implementation, but any inherent design flaw or failure to conform to positive statements made in advertising should be treated as a defective product, legally no different from any company selling a tangible product. If this implies that such advertising claims would have to become less open-ended ("Most secure version of X EVER") and more demonstrable, then so much the better.
Unless it's specifically sold as a commercial, patented, or "enterprise" package (such as RHEL), I don't believe that such a minimum warranty should apply to freely available, open source software that is legal to both copy and distribute, since these are typically community efforts that are not done for profit.
And no, this isn't flamebait to anyone (just generally ranting, decided to stick it in here, not directed at anyone personally at all), this is serious, and actual warranties would help the industry! Think about it, no more having to ship crap you know is crap because some marketing weasel or PHB told you, you would get to actually develop better-more functional and more secure- code. It would help eliminate those (individuals and companies) who really shouldn't be in the code writing business as well, keeping wages up. And the code that you use from other guys would be better as well! What's not to like, make more money, h
As has been mentioned in several previous stories on here, in order to prevent media playback problems related to the way the new media architecture was designed in Windows, they opted to introduce a speed limiter into the network stack that keeps high speed networking connections from monopolizing the scheduler.
Phrased more accurately: an artificial limitation to the network stack was a band-aid placed on the sucking chest wound of a scheduler that's so easy to monopolize.
Does anyone truly believe that this is a good design principle?
By principle, I mean that details such as the prevalence of gigabit bandwidth are irrelevent; the point is what this says about the quality of Vista. However, if you approach it from that angle, consider that Windows XP was released in October of 2001 and is still in widespread use in mid-2007. I have no reason to doubt that gigabit bandwidth is going to become more common within the next six years than it is today, so it's foreseeable that this will need to be changed.
If the system worked correctly, then either (a) freedoms would gradually increase over time, or (b) the balance of state power vs. personal freedoms would remain roughly steady over time. Because the size and power of the USA government have each continued to increase over time (as measured by several factors, such as: number of laws on the books, degree of privacy of the average citizen, size of the government in terms of percentage of GDP, degree of power wielded by the executive branch today compared to just ten years ago, etc), I would judge that the system is not working as intended by its founders.
It is failing, but because it's failing gradually and has taken several lifetimes to get this way, each generation grows up used to "the way things are" (Social Security vote-buying, drug asset forfeiture laws that don't require an arrest or for charges to be brought, warrentless domestic surveillance) and may lament the freedoms lost but do not see the inevitability of the police state. B
Because of the difficulty of a massive takeover and the resistence and uprisings it would cause, freedom is almost never taken away all at once. Instead, it's eroded gradually, little bit by little tiny bit (always "for the children", "for your safety", "to stop terrorists", "to fight [some] drugs"), which suits the statists because it is never given back, making the resulting police state inevitable.
What you're really dealing with here is an almost religious, always unstated belief that the artificial construct of the nation, as personified by state power, is like a massive all-powerful organism and the individuals of which it is composed are akin to cells in the body in the sense that any one of them is expendable and insignificant and they only matter in large numbers. This mentality has become deeply established in the USA, which is why in the news, no crime ever happens to a person - it happens to a Black person, or a White person, or an Asian person, or a woman, or a senior citizen, etc because the group identity has become more significant than the individual identity. This is useful for the goal of the statists, since each group has perceived collective interests in large enough numbers to influence the politics of the State. This is how you dehumanize people and turn them into a label, because it's no longer the mind, body, and soul of an individual who has hopes and dreams and feels pain like you do but just another faceless organization that can only be understood as an abstraction.
Of course you also need to have a war of some kind going on to keep the public in a fearful state, since this is the best way to discourage rational thought and promote a groupthink "pack animal" situation. War on poverty, war on (some) drugs, war on crime, war on terror, war on obesity, etc. are how you get around that pesky Bill of Rights. For example, consider the 4th Amendment, which states:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Because of the War on (some) Drugs, it is now considered acceptable for the police to seize property without bothering to arrest anyone or charge them with any crime (reference). Thanks to the War on Terror, it is now considered acceptable for the feds to intercept communications and execute wiretaps without all that hassle of demonstrating probable cause and obtaining a warrant. Both of these practices, along with the entire idea of fighting an undeclared "war" against a battle tactic (terrorism is a particularly despicable form of guerilla warfare), would have been considered absolutely absurd things that would never happen here 100
Yes, and this strike is probably a good thing - it will make it much more difficult for any media reporting on this to gloss over the privacy issue. I don't mean to comment on whether the taxi drivers have an expectation of privacy while they are on the job, but the way real and potential threats to privacy are reported really bothers me.
I say this because typically, a news piece on a device like this will tell you all about its features, the company behind it, the technology that makes it work, why it will make things easier/better/more convenient, and at the very end of the piece they add a one-liner like "But some groups have expressed privacy concerns," without ever going into detail about the good reasons for this. In other words, it reads more like ad copy than objective news. Anything that makes obvious bias like this harder to pull off is a good thing no matter what the result of this strike may be.
It _MAKES SENSE_ to block stuff that has been observed in automated worms. It's a simple solution. It's not something that will make all systems invulnerable - but it _MAKES SENSE_. It's a quickfix. A quickfix that works.
That's just the problem - too many "quickfixes" and not enough inherent security that was part of the design from day one.
Oh, and patching the holes. Sure. You can patch the holes. Then everyone has to update.. should we try to protect, or should we ignore those that do not upgrade their systems? The cynic in me tells me : "Let them be cracked". The humanitarian in my tells me: "Well, think of the victims of the DDOS attacks from the botnets of previously-vulnerable people".
I'm dead tired of _idiots_ who thinks that any preventative measure is evil! censorship! bad!
Microsoft is simply trying to help in this case.
This is needless tampering with network traffic and it's needless because these after-the-fact quickfixes are not the best way to deal with this problem. You have an operating system with associated applications that tend to execute untrusted content from unverifiable sources on an untrusted network, made worse by the fact that the users are not expected to educate themselves since that might not meet the "Easy to Use!" criteria. Of course this situation is going to be a neverending supply of vulnerabilities.
Microsoft, and with them much of the computing world, is looking at this in terms of "fix each exploit as they come along" and they are ignoring the bigger picture of "what is it about this situation that makes so many exploits possible?" This is a "whack-a-mole" situation and it's what leads to so many half-assed, inelegant solutions like blocking IMs that contain certain strings. This sort of filtering, along with virus scanners, spyware scanners, and all after-the-fact "cleaners" need to be recognized for the superficial "band-aid" solutions that they are; that is, perhaps useful for damage control but certainly not a real solution.
Of course perfect security is not possible, but when the difference between damage control and real prevention is more commonly understood, we will be one step closer.
Apply some idea of "common carrier" status to MSN. Like the telephone companies, as long as they do not attempt to edit or censor the content that passes through their networks, in any way, then they are not responsible and cannot be held liable for any damage caused by such content. But the moment they start taking measures like this to try to "sanitize" the content of the network, make them legally liable to pay damages for any successful attack/exploit that they are unable to prevent.
Overnight, this stupidity would go away. It would also set a great precedent for any other companies that wish to do this.
That is some piss poor supervision... a guy in our department got fired for that. Well, he just hit the guy once, but still. Piss poor.
Not good enough. Not nearly. He should have been fired AND prosecuted and given the stiffest possible penalty (in these cases, where government officials break the law, double the normal maximum penalty should be mandatory) with an extremely public trial. When those who are sworn to uphold the law decide to willfully break the law, they harm the entire concept of rule of law for everyone. Notice I said willfully; a genuine mistake is one thing and is to be expected from time to time, but when intent can be demonstrated, the punishment needs to be harsh, swift, and public.
Put another way, if you want lots of authority, that's fine and I hope that you do a good job. But along with having more power than the rest of us, you should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us to go along with that, and I do not see this happening.
Your linux system really shouldn't be swapping. Ever. That's a last resort data-preservation technique when you run too many things at once or a cron job goes nuts. You shouldn't worry unnecessarily about it and the performance aspects of swap media X or swap media Y.
FYI, there is a difference between "hmm, I wonder what would happen if..." and "shit, I must do this right now!" and this was a case of the former (and if it were the latter, Slashdot is one of the last places I would go). My system does not use any swap and if it did, I would add more RAM. However, it seems like most of the problems you and others have pointed out (such as limited write cycles) related to placing swap on a flash device would also apply to Microsoft's idea of an extra cache on a flash device, and I have heard little or nothing from them beyond market-speak regarding how they address these.
And, am I the only one who thinks that the word "ReadyBoost" just looks stupid in print? Perhaps their marketing department decided that this made the term more catchy...
Sounds to me it would be optimally used as a primary swap partition, with the normal hd-based one as backup once the turbo-space is full ?
Yes, in Linux you could use flash memory in this way ever since flash memory has been around. With Linux there is nothing special about a swap partition; it's a partition like any other, so you could set this up easily enough. Let's say that your USB flash drive is called/dev/sda in Linux. Then simply use 'cfdisk' or equivalent to mark/dev/sda1 as a swap partition, format it using 'mkswap', then activate it using 'swapon' and you now have your swap space on flash memory.
Of course buying more RAM would be a better solution, but if you just wanted a faster swap device I would love to see some benchmarks to see if this would do the job.
Insightful? The reply below yours pwns your assumption. Sony is way more than the PS3 or any nerd-focused rootkit debacle. The public at large is still in love with Sony regardless of what some internet crybabies would have them believe.
So deciding that it is wrong for a company to try to deliberately install a rootkit on our computers makes one a crybaby? Unfortunately, like most other security issues this one is "nerd-focused," that is, until it's YOUR machine that is compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
While I can't say I know very much about how this is being implemented, and therefore could only speculate about the threat model and how it is being addressed, I very much appreciate your point about the need for transparency. I would further submit that an aspect of the problem that is not often discussed but certainly does have a strong influence in the outcome of elections and how they affect the country (i.e. the entire point of having a vote) is not so much how the voting is carried out, but who is doing the voting.
I realize how unrealistic it is that this would actually be tried, but what I would really like to see is a restriction that prevents anyone from voting until they demonstrate that they understand how the government actually works. Something like a (hopefully very tough) civics test that must be passed every so often in order to retain the right to vote, with emphasis on what is and what is not the proper role of government. At least in the USA, it seems that just because so-called "literacy tests" were abused for the purpose of denying suffrage to black people, during a time when the evils of open racism were widespread, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to discard the entire idea that a voter should demonstrate some competence before performing such an important duty.
This could work if anyone who meets the other requirements (at least 18 years of age, not a convicted felon, etc.) is eligible to take such a test and maybe it would be a good idea to allow them to re-take the test until they pass. The idea is that with informed voters who understand how the system was intended (by the Founding Fathers) to work, elections would be determined more by a candidate's position on issues, their track record (if available) of how they handled previous positions of power, and whether their ideas are actually sustainable long-term (which many of our entitlement programs are not, such as Social Security and other vote-buying techniques) and less by 30-second ads on TV, campaign slogans, empty promises, and party affiliation. I believe this would also have the effect of selecting against the knee-jerk, ill-considered reaction of valuing security more than freedom and would probably also make it a little easier for candidates who do not belong to the two major parties to win elections beyond the local-government level.
One thing that has always bothered me about politics is the unwillingness to try new ideas to see if they are superior (and if not, why) and abandon them if they are not. It seems that we have too much faith in the status quo and are only ever willing to change it in reaction to some kind of crisis -- often due to skillful use of Problem, Reaction, Solution aka Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (Hegel) -- by taking measures that wind up being set in stone and very difficult to change in the future.
Sorry, but one minor thing. Accidents are not caused by reluctance to slam the brakes or any other problem with braking. Accidents other than single-car collisions are generally caused by one of two things: following too closely or failure to yield. If the skill used during braking matters, it's because one of these two has already happened and now you are talking mitigation.
Scared? If you're afraid of the ball, you shouldn't be playing the game, especially when mistakes (such as panic reactions, overcompensation, etc) can kill. This is properly fixed by further training until the driver feels confident about being able to handle a vehicle on the road, including how to properly handle emergency situations, evasive maneuvers, etc. If you don't wait until you're faced with a life-and-death situation to consider for the first time how it should be handled, then you won't hesitate to do what is necessary without losing control. I love technology, but I grow weary of the way we always seem to use a technical solution for non-technical problems.
And if you're really horribly unlucky then you'll have to endure the HORROR of copying
Giant multinationals are the same idea taken to its logical conclusion by those relative few who proved themselves to be better players of the same game. Therefore they take a subtle flaw that does not usually reveal itself at a small-and-local level and make it scale until it is large and pronounced and no longer deniable.
Any way you look at it, the "ethnically impaired" perception is valid and did not originate in a vacuum, since the system as we know it is set up to reward and reinforce the behavior of those multinationals, otherwise they would be forced to declare bankruptcy. There is nothing aberrant about maintaining an environment that is well-suited for a particular type of entity and then having noteworthy manifestations of that type of entity; this is simple cause-and-effect. My previous comment had more to do with our misplaced trust in large organizations and their PR and their agendas and less to do with undesirable business practices, since without the former the latter could not be so widespread.
Most of the time, it's not that they are run by evil people, it's really just what happens when a (very) large group tries to think. It all becomes reduced to the lowest common denominator, causing the decision-making to be more selfish and more short-term, and replaces the ethics of an individual with a poor substitute, which is a need to follow any regulations and avoid legal liability. If there is to be a coherent organization, then there is simply no other mentality that a 10,000 person team could share other than "is this in the interests of the company?" with good employees separated from mediocre employees based on how much they care about that question. It's the effect that this singular focus has on any group consensus reached (either by being a decision-maker or by losing your job if you don't play along) that can be perceived as evil, although really it's amoral.
If you really look around you'll notice that most of the harm done in this world is not done by deliberate malice; it's done by people who have good intentions and fail to consider the full repercussions of their actions. No totalitarian government ever arose because "Do you want to live in a fascist police state?" was put to a vote. Even when this is the intention of a leader, it's always sold as a way to protect public safety, stop terrorists, etc. so that naive people can support feel-good measures with foreseeable negative side-effects while patting themselves on the back for how good their intent was.
The GP painted with a broad brush but your attempt to defend the good name of giant multinationals (the main cause of that perception) in terms of your personal, ethical, hard-working, money-for-kid's-college-funds-and-grandma-and-apple-pie one-man operation is not a valid comparison.
That's just my point -- what terms? I never saw or agreed to anything before such data were collected on me. If I know that it is there and decide to look for it, I can find such "terms" in the privacy statements of the site or by searching for them, but otherwise this information is collected surreptitiously (it's a tiny piece of javascript embedded in a page; it's not prominent like say a banner ad would be and there is no disclaimer or chance to opt out other than blocking it). You seem to miss my point, which is that my information is mine and is not free for the taking unless I decide that it is, and if your marketing system fails without my unwitting participation, this is a downside to your business model and not a problem with me.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with deciding not to permit some marketer to collect information on me. This is my computer and my 'Net connection and I will decide what traffic is and is not permitted to travel through it; it really is that simple. Tough shit if someone's feeling of entitlement causes them to not like this -- that is not my problem. The Web got along just fine without this sort of marketing for years and is not going to fall apart tomorrow if it were discontinued.
Now, of course any Webmaster is free to deny me access to their site because I won't allow them to collect data on me, and if they did I would respect their decision, as I do not entertain that feeling of entitlement (they don't owe me a listening socket on TCP port 80 any more than I owe them the correct DNS resolution of google-analytics.com). However, in my experience none have ever chosen to do this and there's a good reason for that; it's a bad business decision. If they did deny me access to their site, they would guarantee that I will never shop there, subscribe to their service, or otherwise allow them to earn some money from me (you know, the old-fashioned way, which is by giving me something of value in exchange). Put another way, people who value their privacy still spend money, still buy things, still sign up for services, and companies who respect their customers' wishes can still profit from these events.
Finally, I'd like to point out that the idea that I need a Webmaster to "help" me by trying to figure out for me what I want to buy is for sheep and therefore a bit insulting. I don't buy a company's product because they targeted advertisements at me or because those advertisements had celebrity-of-the-month in them. I buy a company's product because I have determined for myself what I need and have shopped around and decided it was the best deal for my needs. This is the case for any substantial purchase I make. Because of this, I am obviously not the target audience for this kind of advertising and if it has an effect on me at all, it would tend to make me view the company in a negative light (the more pushy the salesman, the more likely it is that I will walk away). Given this, please explain to me exactly what a Web site is missing out on when I decide not to allow them to track my browsing habits.
You really just sound bitter that I expect a company to earn my money by providing something of value to me instead of just allowing them to benefit from my data for free, and that's a shame because this should not be a revolutionary idea. Maybe that threatens your cash cow, but again your faulty business model is not my concern.
That strategy is optimal if it's congruent with your personal values; otherwise there is an attached, non-monetary cost.
A webmaster simply monitoring what I click on, in order to track (at least partially) my browsing habits, for his own gain (ads), with no benefit to me, without my express consent, is the parasitic part. The privacy violation inherent in this sort of tracking and with its increase in prevalance, the idea that it should be acceptable, is the evil part. I have google-analytics.com set to 127.0.0.1 in my
So because you were fortunate enough to receive a higher-quality education in history than I did, that means that what I said is bullshit? You do realize that I spoke exclusively of my own experience and never claimed that it was universal (in that I never said "all, each, and every last school handled this just like mine did!"), just that I believe it's common enough to have a significant impact?
Having said that
The only history class I ever had that went over Vietnam was a course at my high school that was actually for college credit ("Advanced Placement" is what they call it when they cut the insult to your intelligence by half while multiplying the amount of homework by three). This consisted of a series of videos, which selectively included footage from the era, that dryly explained "this is what the politicians said, this is when X battle was fought on Y date, this is how many people protested and where, and this is a news clip from when the decision to pull out was announced". Most of the video about the protesters never included anything they said or believed, except a few clips showing a guy with a painted-up face at a microphone screaming at the crowd with every other word bleeped out. There was much talk about the casualties we sustained and the idea of trying to contain Communism (i.e. the official story) but there was little discussion about how to approach an asymmetric war, about the morality of the war, about who benefitted (both politically and financially) from the conflict, and what there was to learn from its failure. The bias expressed here should be rather evident and the number of experiences like this I had in public school (with most subjects other than "hard sciences" like physics or mathematics) are why I came to value the idea of self-education. To me, a college degree is not a measure of intelligence or wisdom; it's a measure of whether you are willing to work hard (to achieve memorization) for goals and requirements that are transmitted to you by other people, which is why employers value them. For pragmatic reasons, such a degree is still a good investment, but I certainly enjoyed Samuel Clemens' saying that "I never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education."
I strongly agree with you about what happens when we allow history to be spun by people with a statist agenda, which both of the major political policies demonstrably have when you consider that they overwhelmingly prefer to increase the size and power of government rather than curtail it. You are kinder than I am to merely refer to Bush etc. as "misguided"; I see that he has expanded the power of the executive branch more than anyone else during my lifetime and I simply cannot believe that this has all been some big accident. Personally, I believe he is humble enough and patient enough to allow people to think he's stupid to encourage his political opponents to underestimate him, which means he should be taken more seriously than most. But let's assume he is merely misguided; in that case, I submit that the misguidance is institutional and will continue so long as all of political power is dominated by the same two parties and reinforced by the media (that spin didn't become so widely promoted for no reason). I believe that political parties are doing to politics what the trade guilds of old did to the various trades, in that their only purpose is to entrench existing powers by raising the bar for newcomers who don't play by their rules. If I am wrong about this, then a minor party candidate should achieve the presidency or a majority in one of the houses of the legislature at least once every couple of decades, but this has certainly not been the case.
For what it's worth, even if you and I completely disagree regarding some points of this subject, I very much appreciate the intelligent and thoughtful reply.
Yeah, our leaders thought of that. This is why there is a government monopoly on the educational system (they call them "public schools" but really, "government schools" is a more appropriate label) that requires some serious cash to avoid (private schools aren't cheap). And I agree with the grandparent that in school history classes, history ended about fifty years ago or so -- World War II was the last topic covered in any public-school history class I have ever taken, and even then important topics were left out, such as why we ended up with the current system of employer-provided benefits (the government froze wages during that war and this was a way to get around that), the effect of which is that today most people cannot afford to buy health insurance on their own and therefore lose bargaining power on the job market.
Because of omissions like this, most other Americans are quite ignorant regarding the historical basis of most of our social programs and the way government economic interference can have consequences for many years to come. I would suggest that another problem with the way history is taught is that policies and events are not approached from a "qui bono?" (who benefits?) perspective, of which "follow the money" is one expression. This failure artificially makes the politicians of a given era appear to be more selfless than they truly are, and conveniently omits the historical basis for being distrustful of authority today.
Anyone wanting an under-represented perspective on the American public schools may find this to be an interesting read. I can't help but feel that if the media actually did its job, viewpoints like this would be well-known and people would be able to judge their validity on an individual basis. Instead, you hear about the occasional scandal by specific individuals involved in the school system but the entire idea of whether we should have government schooling is never questioned (and the fact that there is a very good reason why the Communist Manifesto insists on it is never mentioned).
I believe it was Neil Boortz who once said, "if you send your child to a Catholic school, they will be taught that Catholicism is GREAT! If you send your child to a Protestant school, they will be taught that Protestantism is GREAT! If you send your child to a government school
The reason why the three links point to the same Web site is because that post was not intended to be research (you can do that on your own); it was intended to display a viewpoint I have encountered and find to be interesting (but FYI a link to a synopsis is found on their main page). I'm less concerned with whether the Electric Universe theory is correct and more interested in whether we are willing to question what we think we know. I would like to see more work done on alternatives like this. I believe that in terms of cost-benefit, the possibility of a truly new discovery is worth the effort this would require.
And dark matter is needed only because the current gravity-only model fails miserably without it. Dark matter was not predicted by the Standard Model, it was bolted onto it after it was realized that large-scale structures could not be explained without it (i.e. with only the visible matter, our galaxy should fly apart according to the gravity-only viewpoint). This is precisely the pattern by which epicycles were added to the old geocentric theories to explain away observations that suggested that it was wrong. Compare this to the truly successful predictions, (you know, the ones that were mentioned before the effect was observed?) such as gravitational lensing or time dilation, it should be obvious that something is wrong with the dark matter picture. Name for me some "current research" other than string theory (which cannot be tested in the foreseeable future, making it more closely resemble metaphysics, not science) that is doing anything other than revising theories to fix them when a new, unpredicted observation breaks them. In other words, the theory is being revised but the assumptions and thought processes that led to that theory are not. The arrogance that "we can't possibly be missing something fundamental because this time we finally get it!" certainly isn't being revised either. Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and other things that have never been directly observed are added after the fact wherever they are needed to explain away inconsistencies when they are found.
Perhaps different approaches to the Standard Model get plenty of funding, but this is still a monoculture. This is not a competition among different theories to find out which is the most useful and makes the most successful predictions; this is a competition among different interpretations of the same theory.
And answering my opinion about the current state of physics research by talking about who has the right to speak, which island I am on, how out of touch I am, and who is an "armchair physicist" is supposed to show me the error of my ways? This might make you feel better about yourself but it's not very convincing (I won't bother pointing out what it says about your character or your level of discipline). I get it, if you just assert something strongly enough, it magically becomes true! Your single paragraph was low on facts but had plenty of expressions of your indignation that I would dare to question your sacred viewpoint, some content-free statements like "... turned upside down in the last century and changed pretty dramatically over the last 20 years," and a general display of exactly the type of hubris that hinders real progress. It's like you're personally offended that I don't see things the way that you do, which is quite a bit different from trying to correct what you perceive as my incorrect beliefs.
When any Big Bang type of theory is mentioned, I sometimes wonder why alternative theories, like the Electric Universe, are never mentioned, as though there is only one way to try to explain cosmological phenomenon. I would really like to see some experiments or at least some solid reasoning (instead of the usual approach, which is dismissal) to attempt to falsify some of the claims made here or here or here.
While I am not entirely certain that the Electric Universe has The Truth either (nor do I think it's a good idea to ever fully believe that this is the case), I too am tired of hearing about the "reality" of mathematical entities that have never been directly observed, and of the tendency to just insert dark matter wherever it's needed, after the fact (as opposed to predicting its presence and location by theory), when it is found that our currently understanding otherwise fails to describe the objects we are seeing. I do agree with Wal Thornhill that cosmology is beginning to resemble the Ptolemaic epicycles.
It's also a shame that (at least in the USA) the funding system has made science another self-reinforcing status quo just like the political system, in that no one who is willing to change things and try a totally different approach has any chance of receiving the funding and support that's necessary to get off the ground.
Considering how uninformed their average customer is about these matters, and the resources they possess for PR, they probably can have it both ways, unfortunately.
Eliminating "caveat emptor" is not really such a good idea (in fact I believe that the scarcity of it in the software market is compounding the problem). Making every last product from all companies perform exactly as advertised, which is what it would take to truly accomplish this, is like eliminating good security practices by convincing every last black hat to stop rooting other people's computers. While giving companies a strong incentive to back up their claims is certainly a step in the right direction, there is simply no substitute for good judgment, nor should there be. The reason why your expectation for the 21st century is not practical is because the underlying problem was not identified, which is the Windows monoculture that has severely limited the possibility of voting with your wallet by choosing something better.
Otherwise, I too would love to see some way to hold people accountable when their negligence poses a risk to the larger network. I find it unfortunate that a legal approach, with all the problems of its own that it would bring (for one thing, who spends more on lobbyists, you or Microsoft?), is probably going to be the limit of our creativity in addressing this.
I definitely agree that there should be some kind of minimum warranty for commercial software. The main argument against this is typically based on the fact that no piece of software can be proven to contain no bugs; however, it does not follow that this is a valid reason to avoid all software warranties. It would be reasonable to tolerate (in the sense that markets are a better way to deal with this) the occasional crash, interface quirks, and other unforeseeable bugs that are specific to a particular implementation, but any inherent design flaw or failure to conform to positive statements made in advertising should be treated as a defective product, legally no different from any company selling a tangible product. If this implies that such advertising claims would have to become less open-ended ("Most secure version of X EVER") and more demonstrable, then so much the better.
Unless it's specifically sold as a commercial, patented, or "enterprise" package (such as RHEL), I don't believe that such a minimum warranty should apply to freely available, open source software that is legal to both copy and distribute, since these are typically community efforts that are not done for profit.
Phrased more accurately: an artificial limitation to the network stack was a band-aid placed on the sucking chest wound of a scheduler that's so easy to monopolize.
Does anyone truly believe that this is a good design principle?
By principle, I mean that details such as the prevalence of gigabit bandwidth are irrelevent; the point is what this says about the quality of Vista. However, if you approach it from that angle, consider that Windows XP was released in October of 2001 and is still in widespread use in mid-2007. I have no reason to doubt that gigabit bandwidth is going to become more common within the next six years than it is today, so it's foreseeable that this will need to be changed.
It is failing, but because it's failing gradually and has taken several lifetimes to get this way, each generation grows up used to "the way things are" (Social Security vote-buying, drug asset forfeiture laws that don't require an arrest or for charges to be brought, warrentless domestic surveillance) and may lament the freedoms lost but do not see the inevitability of the police state. B
Because of the difficulty of a massive takeover and the resistence and uprisings it would cause, freedom is almost never taken away all at once. Instead, it's eroded gradually, little bit by little tiny bit (always "for the children", "for your safety", "to stop terrorists", "to fight [some] drugs"), which suits the statists because it is never given back, making the resulting police state inevitable.
What you're really dealing with here is an almost religious, always unstated belief that the artificial construct of the nation, as personified by state power, is like a massive all-powerful organism and the individuals of which it is composed are akin to cells in the body in the sense that any one of them is expendable and insignificant and they only matter in large numbers. This mentality has become deeply established in the USA, which is why in the news, no crime ever happens to a person - it happens to a Black person, or a White person, or an Asian person, or a woman, or a senior citizen, etc because the group identity has become more significant than the individual identity. This is useful for the goal of the statists, since each group has perceived collective interests in large enough numbers to influence the politics of the State. This is how you dehumanize people and turn them into a label, because it's no longer the mind, body, and soul of an individual who has hopes and dreams and feels pain like you do but just another faceless organization that can only be understood as an abstraction.
Of course you also need to have a war of some kind going on to keep the public in a fearful state, since this is the best way to discourage rational thought and promote a groupthink "pack animal" situation. War on poverty, war on (some) drugs, war on crime, war on terror, war on obesity, etc. are how you get around that pesky Bill of Rights. For example, consider the 4th Amendment, which states:
Because of the War on (some) Drugs, it is now considered acceptable for the police to seize property without bothering to arrest anyone or charge them with any crime (reference). Thanks to the War on Terror, it is now considered acceptable for the feds to intercept communications and execute wiretaps without all that hassle of demonstrating probable cause and obtaining a warrant. Both of these practices, along with the entire idea of fighting an undeclared "war" against a battle tactic (terrorism is a particularly despicable form of guerilla warfare), would have been considered absolutely absurd things that would never happen here 100
Yes, and this strike is probably a good thing - it will make it much more difficult for any media reporting on this to gloss over the privacy issue. I don't mean to comment on whether the taxi drivers have an expectation of privacy while they are on the job, but the way real and potential threats to privacy are reported really bothers me.
I say this because typically, a news piece on a device like this will tell you all about its features, the company behind it, the technology that makes it work, why it will make things easier/better/more convenient, and at the very end of the piece they add a one-liner like "But some groups have expressed privacy concerns," without ever going into detail about the good reasons for this. In other words, it reads more like ad copy than objective news. Anything that makes obvious bias like this harder to pull off is a good thing no matter what the result of this strike may be.
That's just the problem - too many "quickfixes" and not enough inherent security that was part of the design from day one.
This is needless tampering with network traffic and it's needless because these after-the-fact quickfixes are not the best way to deal with this problem. You have an operating system with associated applications that tend to execute untrusted content from unverifiable sources on an untrusted network, made worse by the fact that the users are not expected to educate themselves since that might not meet the "Easy to Use!" criteria. Of course this situation is going to be a neverending supply of vulnerabilities.
Microsoft, and with them much of the computing world, is looking at this in terms of "fix each exploit as they come along" and they are ignoring the bigger picture of "what is it about this situation that makes so many exploits possible?" This is a "whack-a-mole" situation and it's what leads to so many half-assed, inelegant solutions like blocking IMs that contain certain strings. This sort of filtering, along with virus scanners, spyware scanners, and all after-the-fact "cleaners" need to be recognized for the superficial "band-aid" solutions that they are; that is, perhaps useful for damage control but certainly not a real solution.
Of course perfect security is not possible, but when the difference between damage control and real prevention is more commonly understood, we will be one step closer.
The solution?
Apply some idea of "common carrier" status to MSN. Like the telephone companies, as long as they do not attempt to edit or censor the content that passes through their networks, in any way, then they are not responsible and cannot be held liable for any damage caused by such content. But the moment they start taking measures like this to try to "sanitize" the content of the network, make them legally liable to pay damages for any successful attack/exploit that they are unable to prevent.
Overnight, this stupidity would go away. It would also set a great precedent for any other companies that wish to do this.
Not good enough. Not nearly. He should have been fired AND prosecuted and given the stiffest possible penalty (in these cases, where government officials break the law, double the normal maximum penalty should be mandatory) with an extremely public trial. When those who are sworn to uphold the law decide to willfully break the law, they harm the entire concept of rule of law for everyone. Notice I said willfully; a genuine mistake is one thing and is to be expected from time to time, but when intent can be demonstrated, the punishment needs to be harsh, swift, and public.
Put another way, if you want lots of authority, that's fine and I hope that you do a good job. But along with having more power than the rest of us, you should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us to go along with that, and I do not see this happening.
FYI, there is a difference between "hmm, I wonder what would happen if
And, am I the only one who thinks that the word "ReadyBoost" just looks stupid in print? Perhaps their marketing department decided that this made the term more catchy
Yes, in Linux you could use flash memory in this way ever since flash memory has been around. With Linux there is nothing special about a swap partition; it's a partition like any other, so you could set this up easily enough. Let's say that your USB flash drive is called
Of course buying more RAM would be a better solution, but if you just wanted a faster swap device I would love to see some benchmarks to see if this would do the job.
So deciding that it is wrong for a company to try to deliberately install a rootkit on our computers makes one a crybaby? Unfortunately, like most other security issues this one is "nerd-focused," that is, until it's YOUR machine that is compromised.
It seems to have been LOST upon you.