The X Window System began development in 1984 and first commercially released in 1986.
Bear in mind that the first Windows wasn't actually graphical (and never mind the fact that it didn't actually work either, this is Microsoft we're discussing) so at release it didn't accomplish what X already did, namely a WYSIWYG-style GUI interface.
Moreover, neither "X" nor "the X Window System" can easily be confused with "Windows".
...which in turn can't be confused with Macintosh or Lisa, but that didn't stop Microsoft from suing Apple, and vice-versa. Did you know that variable-sized elevators are an idea that BillG personally squashed in the first graphical version of Windows because it didn't look exactly like the Macintosh?
But I digress: the Windows system can indeed be confused with any glass-plated hole in the wall which isn't actually a door. The X Windowing System is a little more difficult to confuse with the glassed hole, but still easy to confuse with the Windows system.
Unless you take the precaution of aging the machine six months or so the chances are you end up using buggy as heck device drivers or writing your own.
It would be interesting to compile a list of various areas in science and engineering where there are explanations for the general public like this, that are basically wrong, and are so widespread that even scientists and engineers use them without thinking about them when writing for the general public.
Some of the serious expose material should be more than side-splitting enough by itself, however...
I think there'd have to be a Balderdash edition as well, where people put in realistic-sounding explanations that are either total and deliberate frauds and/or proposed by people who really have no idea (like my ex-wide, who asked me (and this is a literal quote) ``I've always wondered, how do they get the batteries into battery chickens?'').
Dawkin's weasel would have to feature in the Balderdash book, together with Haeckel's ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and that wonderful theory of electricity involving different coloured electricity for the different colours of traffic lights and so on.
If this turns out to be true, the discovery will also cast a shadow of doubt over the big bang theory
It's not as if it needs another one, is it? (-:
On a more serious note, the theory will simply get re-engineered and tweaked and plastered over until a new unproveable conjecture happens along. But it must be one which doesn't smack of Young Earth Creationism, or otherwise - as Richard Lewontin wrote - ``allow a Divine Foot in the door''.
which also features a singularity.
My guess is: when the time comes to admit that the new idea is much sexier (it does have a springy foundation, after all), the small differences between a Cosmic Egg and a First Cosmic Balloon won't get anyone but theorists too excited.
If it involves balloons, though, MacDonalds will want it attributed to Ronald.
The cost of software is really not where the pain is. The Total Cost of Ownership and Return On Investment are the metrics used.
Fabulous! If you push the reinstall rate back from 1 per node per year to one per node per 3 years (or even less with something like Debian) you save about $120 per node per annum in admin time alone, to say nothing of the value of user's time. If you go whole hog and use diskless, this drops even more, as does the replacement rate and hardware failure rate. Note that I haven't mantioned cost of software yet, and this is only a couple of aspects of ROI.
And Microsoft almost never sues for blatant ripoffs of their software with confusingingly similar names (staroffice, OpenOffice, abiword, etc.)
Yes, they're being pilloried! They could've sued Stac for their Stacker product, lest people confuse it with Microsoft's disk compressor software and they didn't. They could've sued Blue Mountain for their electronic greeting cards, so similar to Microsoft's, but they didn't. They could've sued Lotus for 1-2-3, which includes not one but three of the very same numbers that Excel works with, but they didn't.
</SARCASM>
You're some kind of lunatic if you think Microsoft owns definitive title to any software product with ``office'' or ``word'' in its name. The X Windowing System predates anything Microsoft ever did by a good many years, perhaps x.org should sue Microsoft for the use of the name?
Microsoft has not used the patent system to lock up things like Plug-N-Play, COM and.NET.
OTOH, they've tried quite hard to lock up WMA, SMB and countless other things, including (IIRC) overlapping windows and the Start button concept. Why do you pick their few oversights and not their many, er, undersights?
Microsoft claims that any use of "windows" is an infringement and unleashs their 600 person legal department and Bill's dads 350 lawyer firm Preston Gates as well. But only at rare times when its a convenient measure to block competition and chase away potential funding sources.
Or to set a competitor up so that the best-for-the-shareholder path (hah!) is to be bought out by Microsoft (and often shut down, as was apparently the plan for Hancom Office).
Anyway, if LindowsOS hits market and works as advertised I'm sure a large market segment will buy your product just to spit in Microsoft's eye.
What do you think would be needed to qualify a product as of more danger to Sun's competitors' markets than Sun's own markets, which seems to be the main business reason that OpenOffice was selected for support and promotion by Sun?
How would Sun feel about, for example, a RAD tool which competed directly with VB+ASP but was not (or at least not primarily) aimed at Java?
How about a truly open Exchange+Outlook killer suite?
There are some very small cases and mobo combinations around these days.
There has been for a very long time. I have a 286 luggable to hand, you could shoehorn a small mobo into it and (because it was designed for a baby-AT with ISA slots) do some surgery on a Yamaha or other cheap-but-good PCI soundcard to fit it in.
You'd probably have to use a laptop CPU to avoid overloading the ancient PSU in those things but OTOH the hard drives of the era weren't exactly light on power either so a compromise with a low-ish powered mainstream CPU might work.
You generally don't get battery operation like a laptop, though, unless you're also prepared to lug an inverter and battery, or modify a PSU to suck 12V (not as difficult as it sounds but still need some electronics expertise) and lug just a battery (or 'gator clips and a lead to your car).
It is entirely possible to be both an atheist and a humanist.
True. Perhaps I needed to express myself more concisely: in the Real World(tm) it generally doesn't happen that way. By far the majority of hospitals etc in third-world countries, and likewise for other useful aid organisations are funded and founded by theistic religions.
the true humanist should be in it not for some sort of payback in the afterlife, but simply for the goodness of it...
Actually, so should the true Christian; and as I understand it both Islam and Judaism in their original forms would tend to be read that way.
While not claiming that theistic religions are free from the same fault (if only!), Atheism usually encounters a problem when trying to agree on a definition of ``goodness.'' Eugenics were an example of one particular set of Atheists' views of goodness, and during the Reign of Terror it seemed good to other parties of Atheists that they should do things like pass babies and children of theists from pike-point to pike-point along the streets to be dumped.
I wasn't trying to say that that particular molecule was a precursor to modern life. It is more of a proof of the concept that tiny self-replicating molecules do exist.
Who needs a proof-of-concept? Every living thing contains proofs-of-concept! Lots of proofs-of-concept. Actually, truth be told, too many proofs-of-concept for the time available under the most optimistic evolutionary assumptions.
No biologist in the world believes that the first cell appeared, fully formed, out of nothingness.
What can I say? Ah, yes, the word on the time-saving cap I got for Christmas. WRONG (-:
The first cell was built out of smaller things that were not cells. My personal guess is that self-replicating molecules gave rise to virus-like entities that gave rise to proto-cells that gave rise to cells. Can I prove any of this right now? Nope.
One of the more obvious big gaps in this sequence is that viruses require a host organism to be anything like viable. For example, they can't reproduce themselves at all without one.
But it is an explaination that doesn't require anything supernatural.
It's not scientific to exclude the supernatural, it's merely materialistic. And materialism is a belief, even one which cannot be formally proven.
First off, Evolution isn't random
If it isn't random, then it has a purpose. If it has a purpose (teleology) then it isn't evolution. People can assert that selection is non-random until they're blue in the face (or meet Stephen J Gould) but firstly it's wrong (the success or otherwise of selection is essentially random as well, and kept so by factors such as changing circumstances), and secondly it cannot compensate for the proposed randomness in mutation.
It is a system that builds on the successes of the past.
It is a system without foundations (there is no reasonable path through abiogenesis, and all that we know of mathematics says that there never can be), and presumes upon a nett positive effect (successes, an increase in functionality) in an environment observed to be heavily dominated by destructive effects (decay, disasters).
Once a mechanism has evolved, it doesn't have to evolve again.
Error after error! If this had been the bad old days, Torquemada would be having words with you in person! (-:
A mechanism not only has to evolve, it has to establish itself in significant numbers in a viable population of organisms, and out-compete other similar mechanisms. This happens very infrequently, so the vast majority of mechanisms would have to re-evolve countless times.
The number of base pairs in a DNA molecule isn't really all that impressive when you consider that a single mutation can double the length of the molecule.
You wind up with a double molecule, one which almost always kills the organism, not a single molecule with twice the complexity.
You seem to think something magical is going on, when all there is is chemistry.
This applies more to your claims than to mine. Chemistry as we know it does not magically produce life, or any significant step toward life, when left to itself - or even when given some very directed nudges, as in Stanley Miller's experiments - it destroys and breaks down life and components of life.
No, they're the ones with the flashy temples and immense geneaologies, IIRC. You, on the other hand, posted before you thought. Now is the time, if it hasn't happened yet, to do that thinking.
you knew it was trollbait, but you just wasted a good 10+ minutes replying to it?
Yes. This world being what it is, real live people will refer to that troll, and the real live people referred to it will read it and note that nobody answered it. Sometimes neither individual is equipped to figure out that it's a troll. In fact, even a reasonably computer-literate reader could, on a bad day or if distracted, fail to actually process the content. It needed at least one sensible answer. Done.
Because it is on SlashDot, it needed at least one rash and ill-thought-out response, and it got those as well. Does being in a majority bring you good feelings? (-:
Nice troll, but pretending that you're serious for a moment... after all, many readers won't know enough to take this as complete bulldust...
I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
...and of propagating Nimda, but let's not dwell on that, because they were actually (so we are told) serving stuff, and that in itself is amazing. (-:
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming.
Ooh, what a giveaway! Kernel-level as in acorns? Those things harvested and eaten (and lost) by squirrels?
VB is about as well suited to low-level work as thongs are for total building-site safety gear. (That's why Aussies call them JSB's, y'know, Japanese Safety Boots).
I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries.
Other than the bogus gcc version: why bother? Mandrake ships with Pentium-optimised binaries, and you're not going to get noticeably better performance except for very CPU-intensive applications such as ray-tracing.
After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing!
If I had boxes doing that, I'd replace the boxes.
Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it.
Actually, given that this is Microsoft we're discussing, I think you mean ``full-fledged marketing team.''
Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc,
I run many SMP Linux systems, and most of them use a stock-standard Linux distribution which ships with a choice of three (3) different journalling filesystems. Memory protection was there from Day One.
with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
If by ``work'' you mean chewing up resources, yes. Otherwise it sounds like you have the system names the wrong way around. (-:
Droll troll, how abut writing some software instead of baiting people?
It's always funny to read on how people mistake communism (which is an utopian ideal) with countries which claim to be communists (such as China) while they are but totalitarian state capitalists.
It's always funny how time and time again people set out to implement ``true Communism'' and every single time it fails to happen, they get despotism of one form or another instead.
Perhaps the entire concept is broken, and instead of trying to fix the system, we should be giving the people involved room and resources to fix themselves? With an earnest, altruistic population, almost any system of government will work well.
You won't get people like that out of Atheism, nor will you get it out of ``organised'' (read: politicised) religion.
the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire [...] with a transmitting antenna a mile long
Properly-designed transmission line does not radiate (much).
How about properly designed barbed wire? Does that radiate much? Does the strainer, dropper or wire-run spacing make a difference? Is razor wire better or worse? Does the mile include the twists used as barbs, only the actual barbs, or none of it? (-:
Some companies working seriously outback in Australia have been in the habit of ``losing'' bulldozers. One simply starts the 'dozer, aims it elsewhere and occy-straps the clutches shut.
The moral dilemma is this: do I spend a fortune getting someone to bring a rough-terrain lowloader hundreds or possibly thousands of km out into the scrub to pick up my worn-out bulldozer, or do I lose it and have the insurance company (whose investigators are *not* about to spend hours on a jet, more hours on a prop-driven buzzbox and more hours - possibly days - in a rented 4WD just to get to the general area) replace it with a new one?
You might think that following the tracks would be an easy answer, but if the 'dozer's been busy in the area, and if the company takes its time reporting the incident, things ain't so simple. In a day, a 'dozer might be 100 or more km away, representing over 300,000 sq km to search for it in.
Moral justice is sometimes done, however, when a strap comes off or a big rock or tree turns the 'dozer so that it either comes back to camp or goes the wrong way and crosses a road or a fence-line where it will be noticed.
Only twice! Dear me, a recent WildList (208 qualifying, 695 total) still mentions the ancient KaK worm as current! The same mistakes have been made thousands of times by Microsoft. Why was CodeRed II called CodeRed II?
MS Suit: and this box over here, what's it running?
Joe, IT Manager: It's a debian box I built out of spares, and it basically runs everything. File services, web, FTP, mail, database, legacy apps, a few instant messengers, name service, firewall, proxy, virus filter, the lot. I haven't had it off-line in the last year. The other boxes are there to make the server room look good and keep the managers and accountants happy. I think some of them run game servers.
MS Suit: Could you repeat that, please? I can't write that fast. What's in an `F' teepee? And you reckon it's poxy? Why's that?
What if the mole is not an addressee? True, it would get them one step closer to the mole, but if I were aiming to do this kind of leaking, I'd be passively network-sniffing and shoving the encoded and disguised emails out to a binary newsgroup or something else I can grab it from anonymously.
Brian's probably not even wondering what this busy little process on his laptop called NetBus.DLL is for.
OTOH, given Microsoft's typical security competency levels, one of the addressees is probably a channel partner called leaks@theregister.co.uk...
With thrusters that can put out about as much as you could fart, only for maybe a few hours tops before they died, you needn't lose any sleep over the prospect of being bopped on the nose by the great-grandson of TIROS I.
Even if you had perfect control over a sat, steering it to do as much as dinging another sat would be like playing billiards on Kennedy Field, starting in opposite corners; or perhaps like blindfolding yourself and trying to pick up the same grain of sand from a beach, by itself, twice running.
To get yourself hijacked, you'd need to hit some turkey on the fine line between smart enough to break it, and dumb enough to think you can drive it like Zidgel from the 3-2-1-Penguins videos does his ship (hint: it's a manual withthree-on-the-tree shift).
``What happened? Did the landing gear fall off or something?'' (-:
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Well-picked... but actually, she's skinnier (and always has been) than her less-broken more-honest replacement.
Bear in mind that the first Windows wasn't actually graphical (and never mind the fact that it didn't actually work either, this is Microsoft we're discussing) so at release it didn't accomplish what X already did, namely a WYSIWYG-style GUI interface.
Now, given that X is descended from Paul Asente's W Windowing System, which already existed in 1984, tell me, which Window(s|ing) has the longer history?
...which in turn can't be confused with Macintosh or Lisa, but that didn't stop Microsoft from suing Apple, and vice-versa. Did you know that variable-sized elevators are an idea that BillG personally squashed in the first graphical version of Windows because it didn't look exactly like the Macintosh?
But I digress: the Windows system can indeed be confused with any glass-plated hole in the wall which isn't actually a door. The X Windowing System is a little more difficult to confuse with the glassed hole, but still easy to confuse with the Windows system.
And Windows is different?
Some of the serious expose material should be more than side-splitting enough by itself, however...
I think there'd have to be a Balderdash edition as well, where people put in realistic-sounding explanations that are either total and deliberate frauds and/or proposed by people who really have no idea (like my ex-wide, who asked me (and this is a literal quote) ``I've always wondered, how do they get the batteries into battery chickens?'').
Dawkin's weasel would have to feature in the Balderdash book, together with Haeckel's ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and that wonderful theory of electricity involving different coloured electricity for the different colours of traffic lights and so on.
It's not as if it needs another one, is it? (-:
On a more serious note, the theory will simply get re-engineered and tweaked and plastered over until a new unproveable conjecture happens along. But it must be one which doesn't smack of Young Earth Creationism, or otherwise - as Richard Lewontin wrote - ``allow a Divine Foot in the door''.
My guess is: when the time comes to admit that the new idea is much sexier (it does have a springy foundation, after all), the small differences between a Cosmic Egg and a First Cosmic Balloon won't get anyone but theorists too excited.
If it involves balloons, though, MacDonalds will want it attributed to Ronald.
Fabulous! If you push the reinstall rate back from 1 per node per year to one per node per 3 years (or even less with something like Debian) you save about $120 per node per annum in admin time alone, to say nothing of the value of user's time. If you go whole hog and use diskless, this drops even more, as does the replacement rate and hardware failure rate. Note that I haven't mantioned cost of software yet, and this is only a couple of aspects of ROI.
Nice therory. Which well have you been living at the bottom of for the last two decades?
Yes, they're being pilloried! They could've sued Stac for their Stacker product, lest people confuse it with Microsoft's disk compressor software and they didn't. They could've sued Blue Mountain for their electronic greeting cards, so similar to Microsoft's, but they didn't. They could've sued Lotus for 1-2-3, which includes not one but three of the very same numbers that Excel works with, but they didn't.
</SARCASM>
You're some kind of lunatic if you think Microsoft owns definitive title to any software product with ``office'' or ``word'' in its name. The X Windowing System predates anything Microsoft ever did by a good many years, perhaps x.org should sue Microsoft for the use of the name?
OTOH, they've tried quite hard to lock up WMA, SMB and countless other things, including (IIRC) overlapping windows and the Start button concept. Why do you pick their few oversights and not their many, er, undersights?
Or to set a competitor up so that the best-for-the-shareholder path (hah!) is to be bought out by Microsoft (and often shut down, as was apparently the plan for Hancom Office).
Anyway, if LindowsOS hits market and works as advertised I'm sure a large market segment will buy your product just to spit in Microsoft's eye.
So... buy lots of XboXes and use them as diskless workstations, advertising displays, etc... anything but buy the games.
What do you think would be needed to qualify a product as of more danger to Sun's competitors' markets than Sun's own markets, which seems to be the main business reason that OpenOffice was selected for support and promotion by Sun?
How would Sun feel about, for example, a RAD tool which competed directly with VB+ASP but was not (or at least not primarily) aimed at Java?
How about a truly open Exchange+Outlook killer suite?
There has been for a very long time. I have a 286 luggable to hand, you could shoehorn a small mobo into it and (because it was designed for a baby-AT with ISA slots) do some surgery on a Yamaha or other cheap-but-good PCI soundcard to fit it in.
You'd probably have to use a laptop CPU to avoid overloading the ancient PSU in those things but OTOH the hard drives of the era weren't exactly light on power either so a compromise with a low-ish powered mainstream CPU might work.
You generally don't get battery operation like a laptop, though, unless you're also prepared to lug an inverter and battery, or modify a PSU to suck 12V (not as difficult as it sounds but still need some electronics expertise) and lug just a battery (or 'gator clips and a lead to your car).
True. Perhaps I needed to express myself more concisely: in the Real World(tm) it generally doesn't happen that way. By far the majority of hospitals etc in third-world countries, and likewise for other useful aid organisations are funded and founded by theistic religions.
Actually, so should the true Christian; and as I understand it both Islam and Judaism in their original forms would tend to be read that way.
While not claiming that theistic religions are free from the same fault (if only!), Atheism usually encounters a problem when trying to agree on a definition of ``goodness.'' Eugenics were an example of one particular set of Atheists' views of goodness, and during the Reign of Terror it seemed good to other parties of Atheists that they should do things like pass babies and children of theists from pike-point to pike-point along the streets to be dumped.
Who needs a proof-of-concept? Every living thing contains proofs-of-concept! Lots of proofs-of-concept. Actually, truth be told, too many proofs-of-concept for the time available under the most optimistic evolutionary assumptions.
What can I say? Ah, yes, the word on the time-saving cap I got for Christmas. WRONG (-:
One of the more obvious big gaps in this sequence is that viruses require a host organism to be anything like viable. For example, they can't reproduce themselves at all without one.
It's not scientific to exclude the supernatural, it's merely materialistic. And materialism is a belief, even one which cannot be formally proven.
If it isn't random, then it has a purpose. If it has a purpose (teleology) then it isn't evolution. People can assert that selection is non-random until they're blue in the face (or meet Stephen J Gould) but firstly it's wrong (the success or otherwise of selection is essentially random as well, and kept so by factors such as changing circumstances), and secondly it cannot compensate for the proposed randomness in mutation.
It is a system without foundations (there is no reasonable path through abiogenesis, and all that we know of mathematics says that there never can be), and presumes upon a nett positive effect (successes, an increase in functionality) in an environment observed to be heavily dominated by destructive effects (decay, disasters).
Error after error! If this had been the bad old days, Torquemada would be having words with you in person! (-:
A mechanism not only has to evolve, it has to establish itself in significant numbers in a viable population of organisms, and out-compete other similar mechanisms. This happens very infrequently, so the vast majority of mechanisms would have to re-evolve countless times.
You wind up with a double molecule, one which almost always kills the organism, not a single molecule with twice the complexity.
This applies more to your claims than to mine. Chemistry as we know it does not magically produce life, or any significant step toward life, when left to itself - or even when given some very directed nudges, as in Stanley Miller's experiments - it destroys and breaks down life and components of life.
No, they're the ones with the flashy temples and immense geneaologies, IIRC. You, on the other hand, posted before you thought. Now is the time, if it hasn't happened yet, to do that thinking.
Yes. This world being what it is, real live people will refer to that troll, and the real live people referred to it will read it and note that nobody answered it. Sometimes neither individual is equipped to figure out that it's a troll. In fact, even a reasonably computer-literate reader could, on a bad day or if distracted, fail to actually process the content. It needed at least one sensible answer. Done.
Because it is on SlashDot, it needed at least one rash and ill-thought-out response, and it got those as well. Does being in a majority bring you good feelings? (-:
...and of propagating Nimda, but let's not dwell on that, because they were actually (so we are told) serving stuff, and that in itself is amazing. (-:
Ooh, what a giveaway! Kernel-level as in acorns? Those things harvested and eaten (and lost) by squirrels?
VB is about as well suited to low-level work as thongs are for total building-site safety gear. (That's why Aussies call them JSB's, y'know, Japanese Safety Boots).
Other than the bogus gcc version: why bother? Mandrake ships with Pentium-optimised binaries, and you're not going to get noticeably better performance except for very CPU-intensive applications such as ray-tracing.
If I had boxes doing that, I'd replace the boxes.
Actually, given that this is Microsoft we're discussing, I think you mean ``full-fledged marketing team.''
I run many SMP Linux systems, and most of them use a stock-standard Linux distribution which ships with a choice of three (3) different journalling filesystems. Memory protection was there from Day One.
If by ``work'' you mean chewing up resources, yes. Otherwise it sounds like you have the system names the wrong way around. (-:
Droll troll, how abut writing some software instead of baiting people?
It's always funny how time and time again people set out to implement ``true Communism'' and every single time it fails to happen, they get despotism of one form or another instead.
Perhaps the entire concept is broken, and instead of trying to fix the system, we should be giving the people involved room and resources to fix themselves? With an earnest, altruistic population, almost any system of government will work well.
You won't get people like that out of Atheism, nor will you get it out of ``organised'' (read: politicised) religion.
Given Beijing's position as capital of the country, your point was...?
...and I imagine that Hugh was well beyond sick of it before you even started. Sigh.
How about properly designed barbed wire? Does that radiate much? Does the strainer, dropper or wire-run spacing make a difference? Is razor wire better or worse? Does the mile include the twists used as barbs, only the actual barbs, or none of it? (-:
The moral dilemma is this: do I spend a fortune getting someone to bring a rough-terrain lowloader hundreds or possibly thousands of km out into the scrub to pick up my worn-out bulldozer, or do I lose it and have the insurance company (whose investigators are *not* about to spend hours on a jet, more hours on a prop-driven buzzbox and more hours - possibly days - in a rented 4WD just to get to the general area) replace it with a new one?
You might think that following the tracks would be an easy answer, but if the 'dozer's been busy in the area, and if the company takes its time reporting the incident, things ain't so simple. In a day, a 'dozer might be 100 or more km away, representing over 300,000 sq km to search for it in.
Moral justice is sometimes done, however, when a strap comes off or a big rock or tree turns the 'dozer so that it either comes back to camp or goes the wrong way and crosses a road or a fence-line where it will be noticed.
Only twice! Dear me, a recent WildList (208 qualifying, 695 total) still mentions the ancient KaK worm as current! The same mistakes have been made thousands of times by Microsoft. Why was CodeRed II called CodeRed II?
MS Suit: and this box over here, what's it running?
Joe, IT Manager: It's a debian box I built out of spares, and it basically runs everything. File services, web, FTP, mail, database, legacy apps, a few instant messengers, name service, firewall, proxy, virus filter, the lot. I haven't had it off-line in the last year. The other boxes are there to make the server room look good and keep the managers and accountants happy. I think some of them run game servers.
MS Suit: Could you repeat that, please? I can't write that fast. What's in an `F' teepee? And you reckon it's poxy? Why's that?
Joe (rolling eyes): We are out of touch.
What if the mole is not an addressee? True, it would get them one step closer to the mole, but if I were aiming to do this kind of leaking, I'd be passively network-sniffing and shoving the encoded and disguised emails out to a binary newsgroup or something else I can grab it from anonymously.
Brian's probably not even wondering what this busy little process on his laptop called NetBus.DLL is for.
OTOH, given Microsoft's typical security competency levels, one of the addressees is probably a channel partner called leaks@theregister.co.uk...
With thrusters that can put out about as much as you could fart, only for maybe a few hours tops before they died, you needn't lose any sleep over the prospect of being bopped on the nose by the great-grandson of TIROS I.
Even if you had perfect control over a sat, steering it to do as much as dinging another sat would be like playing billiards on Kennedy Field, starting in opposite corners; or perhaps like blindfolding yourself and trying to pick up the same grain of sand from a beach, by itself, twice running.
To get yourself hijacked, you'd need to hit some turkey on the fine line between smart enough to break it, and dumb enough to think you can drive it like Zidgel from the 3-2-1-Penguins videos does his ship (hint: it's a manual withthree-on-the-tree shift).
``What happened? Did the landing gear fall off or something?'' (-: