But if it's a work day, you don't have very much time to get all those drinks down.
Wait, you don't drink at work? Insane. Our office manager picked up a couple cases of microbrew just today and stuck them in the fridge for us. We used to have to stock the fridge ourselves at my last employer. Man I love the computer industry.
Actually, correlation frequently implies causation. Much of science is looking at correlations and testing to find corresponding causations. Correlation does not necessarily imply a given causation. You are correct in so much as this study does not provide any proof that drinking will cause you to live longer. It was, however, normalized for several other strong correlations, such as medical conditions and dietary habits. If you're looking to live longer, drinking a few drinks a day may help or it may not. I think it's worth a shot, but I was going to do it anyway.
So Americans should probably interpret the limit as *3* drinks per day for men.
Actually, from the somewhat better article on this study that I read, they found a difference between European and American drinking that placed 3, 10g drinks as the high end cutoff for Americans and 6 as the cutoff for Europeans. They theorized this was due to the differences in the way Americans and Europeans drink, specifically if you were drinking small amounts with meals all day, or drinking all of it at once without food.
So you should probably change that to "2" drinks per day, for men, unless you're drinking them more dispersed over the course of the day and with food.
To read the article and not see any mention of controls on reason for abstaining raises BIG question marks in my mind.
It did the same thing for me. Before I posted here, however, I went to Google to find a better article. The study does take into account several normalizing factors, although I've yet to see an article that has good specifics. Blame the press for not wanting to confuse us with facts, not the study which none of us have probably read.
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls. But you're basing that on what exactly?
I was paraphrasing a quote from the study we're discussing. I'm not sure if they have hard data or if they're just making it up, but since they included eating habits in the data set, they may well have real support for this. I don't know because I haven't found a free copy of the actual study, only discussion of it.
Well, that would be *excellent*, I love a glass of wine or three a day. A beer or two on a hot day is just heavenly.
Damn straight.
But unfortunately the correlation may not imply causation.
Holy crap! You got that quote right. No one ever does that.
Maybe really sick people don't drink as much. Maybe the people that have four drinks a day have to be quite healthy to keep that up day after day after day.
As to these two points, they claim to have normalized for the correlation between general health and drinking and still shown a positive correlation (it's unclear if this is the numbers they gave the press or if it is a lower number).
Maybe drinking keeps them off the streets, or out of other dangerous places.
Heh, I imagine drinking keeps me in more dangerous places rather than away from them. Between drive by shootings at clubs, all the cigarette smoke, and all the bar fights, I'd be surprised if the correlation went that way.
Maybe all the 4-drink-a-day people have died already and were not around for a survey.
This was composite data from many studies, but not generally survey data. It included mortality rates.
Lotsa possible ways to spoil things.
True enough. This particular article was more than a little off, from my quick look at other info on this study. They defined a drink as 10 grams of ethanol, much lower than the average drink in the US which weighs in at 14 grams. They also showed a difference between the US and Europe on top of that, with the positive effects evening out at three drinks in the US, not four. So that ends up about 2 real drinks in the US a day. It also suggests the possibility that drinking with meals throughout the day, rather than all at once is much, much better for you.
It would certainly be a mistake to take this article or this study as gospel, but the study itself is not showing anything surprising or new. A few drinks a day with meals is probably beneficial to men and not harmful to women. Hard core drinking is probably terrible for either, but I don't think any of us have ever woken up, opened the car door, and heaved onto the pavement, then went in search of the nearest place to acquire coffee, water, and aspirin have had any illusions that it was going to improve our long term health.
They defined a drink as 10 grams of ethanol, which would make the appropriate amount for americans something like 1 tumbler of scotch, I believe (assuming 120 proof). If someone cares to do a more scientific conversion, rather than the half-assed one I just put together, we're looking for what content of scotch contains 30 grams of ethanol.
I wondered if they remembered to take into account people who don't drink because of pre-existing health conditions that result in shorter life spans.
Yes. Well, sort of. They normalized for dietary habits, physical activity, and general health as they correlate to drinking and it resulted in a positive correlation, but it is unclear from the summary I read if that is the number reported or a smaller positive correlation. I suspect the latter. This article about the study also left out the difference between the European and American data and results. For Americans, three drinks was the point where the numbers no longer provided a benefit, probably because Americans are more likely to drink all of it at once and without food, rather than with meals.
Both actions are (arguably) illegal, but they are different actions and they have different implications for the market.
No they are different interpretations of the same action (MS bundling IE).
Microsoft's bad actions do not excuse your sloppy thinking and failure to distinguish important differences.
You're confusing actions with the characterization thereof. That is your sloppy thinking, not mine.
What's more, there is no evidence that Microsoft has directly profited from its development of IE...
How is that relevant? The relevant issue is and law speaks to anti-competative action, not "direct profit."
Both the courts and economists examine the specifics of the situation these days, they don't just look at the fact that something is tied together.
It's called bundling, one specifically established form of tying, which is, itself, specifically called out in the body of court precedent again and again.
Your same over-simplified argument can be made for Apple, Redhat, Palm, and other OS purveyors.
Sure it can, if you ignore the important fact that they aren't monopolies. Geez, every single time. I'd like to have one discussion of MS's monopoly abuse without some person bringing up a comparison with companies that don't have monopolies. (Apple may be an exception here and are currently being investigated to determine if they have a monopoly on portable, digital music players. If that is found to be the case then likely the courts will try to remedy their bundling/tying of those players with a software jukebox and an online music sales service.)
And while we're at it what about, say, calc.exe, notepad, wordpad, solitaire...?
All of those are covered by the fact that they are not unfairly competing with an existing market. Bundling isn't illegal by itself. Having a monopoly isn't illegal by itself. Bundling a product from a separate, existing market with a product that you have monopolized is illegal.
Hell you could even make the argument for the various shells and applets.
And you'd be off base for the same reason.
Most agree that Microsoft's actions with Netscape were illegal, but this is based on thoughtful analysis and not the simplistic test which you suggest.
Please. The issue is clear cut and quite simple. The "test" you can apply is likewise simple. Is a product in one market benefitting from a different product that is a monopoly in a different pre-existing market? Can other companies, without monopolies, gain that same benefit? If the answer to the first question is "yes" and the second is "no" then you have an antitrust violation. There are certain classic ways this happens including tying and and other forms of bundling, but it is the above concept that is important. That is what leveraging a monopoly is.
Thanks a lot - that web page completely froze up my Firefox.
It worked fine for me with Firefox 3alpha1, although it displays the end of the tag as text. No crashes though. For an alpha, I'm pretty impressed with the stability and the native spellchecking and cocoa widgets rule. Check it out. (Disclaimer your milage may vary, it is an alpha... don't try typing your thesis in this and complain when it crashes.)
However, I'm starting to think this issue may well be a factor toward its seemingly sudden disappearance from Apple's website.
I doubt it. I suspect that they are waiting to release a new version. They pulled it from their european stores a while ago when the new import rules went into place and have not yet started selling a compliant redesign. Since they are now built-in on all laptops and imacs, there is less demand for these and it probably just is not a priority. They could even just add them as a built-in feature of their displays and stop selling stand alone models, although that would be less than ideal for some users.
So all the high rated posts I see talk about how terrible Apple's security was, 1984 comes true, blah blah blah.
I don't see that as the character of the highly rated posts here.
Well it may be possible that Apple carefully designed their hardware in such a way that the LED is software controlled and the camera is capable of invisibly monitoring people, there is no evidence to back those claims.
I strongly suspect that the LED is hardwired to the camera. That would be easy to do and makes sense from a design perspective. I'd be happier, however, if Apple provided some confirmation of this, rather than leaving us all to hope that is the case.
... but honestly let's see someone figure out how to take a picture or make a movie without the light coming on, THEN we can start calling Apple Big Brother.
I think that would make them lousy designers, not big brother, unless there is also evidence that they are doing something with that anti-feature. I'm not happy, however, about assuming all is well unless it can be proved otherwise. I like openness in this regard rather than relying upon obscurity.
Honestly if that were possible then I'd dump this laptop in a heartbeat since it would require purposely designing it with that in mind.
That's not necessarily so. It could be they bought an off the shelf component without an indicator and wanted to tie its operation to the LED, but the interface was such that you couldn't just string it inline with the power without detrimental affects. So they put them both in and tied them in firmware or software and are hoping no one will figure out that it can be bypassed. That would explain their silence on the topic, although it could just be that no one who knows has realized people want to know or have doubts. I rarely use the iSight on my laptop and I did not pay for it anyway. If I feel it is a threat a small square of metal and some electrical tape will take care of it.
Again, your lack of comprehension rears its ugly head. The "law" did not find this.
I didn't say the law "found" something. Laws are laws, courts report findings and make judgments of the application of those laws. I merely wrote that the law makes that sort of tying illegal, which it does.
There is no evidence that Microsoft made anyone pay more for IE (or for the inclusion of IE into Windows).
Luckily both economists and the law as written do not care about marketing labels. MS pays developers to create IE. The money to pay those developers comes from somewhere as they don't work for free. It is bundled together with and sold for one price in a package with Windows. That right there is enough to rule that the money from those Windows licenses is a payment for IE as well as Windows. Your line of reasoning was thrown out of court when the first company tried to claim a "buy one get one free" sale meant they did not really sell the second one, in legal terms. If you're selling a bundle, everything in that bundle is part of the price, regardless of if you want to claim some part is free and another part is not.
Here is the relevant finding of fact:
Yeah, the courts screwed the pooch, go figure. It changes nothing. The law still says this is illegal even if the courts don't bother to rule that way.
You might also note that the court found that Microsoft spent upwards of 100 million per year from 1995 onwards to develop IE...
Who cares? How does this in any way mitigate their illegal actions?
So she doesn't mind you seeing her "not quite fully dressed"?
Not everyone is a prude:) Besides, I'm living with her old roommate, who is cuter yet, which puts me in the "safe" category as far as most women are concerned.
One day I wandered into the closest Apple store and was playing with the latest version of OS X to see if I wanted to upgrade. They all had internet connections and isight cameras and I thought it would be fun to play with them. So I made up a new ichat account and added a few people I knew at the time with a camera on their system to the buddy list to see if they were online. The person available just happened to be a cute college co-ed dating one of my buddies. She's one of those skinny little redheads guys always seem to fall for. Anyway, after I got to try out the video chat feature I took off and thought no more about it.
The next time I talked to her she told me I had brought her a lot of entertainment and some embarrassment. It seems people in the store also wanted to try out the video chat, and since there was an account set up with her on the list, they kept sending her chat requests. This was the entertaining part. The embarrassing part was the first time someone did that, she assumed it was me again, and was not quite fully dressed at the time. She said the guy seemed pretty shocked, but nice enough after she jumped out of the camera's line of sight and pulled on a robe.
What they did was remove the functionality from unsigned Java applets to embed such movies, because those applets could take the image produced by Quicktime and send it back to the server, which was a real problem.
Yeah, too bad Sun announced yesterday a flaw in all their runtime environments that allows untrusted applets to access data from trusted applets. I don't think Apple has squashed that one, so there is still some potential for mischief.
Oh, no argument there. Except I am not sure that Apple has actually implemented any measure at all against it. The OS is wide open to malicious software run by the user.
Well, Apple has some protection in the form of default user privileges, warnings for application downloads, and the like. It is certainly not strong. They also have a number of potential solutions including filesystem level ACLs, and not yet released frameworks for application signing and mandatory access controls. Hopefully, they will bring these to market in a usable way before it ever does become a major problem.
and Microsoft should be punished for it. That, however, does not mean that every company that Microsoft ever acted exercised their monopoly powers against would have succeeded but for their actions.
Who cares? It's like saying "not all the people the sniper shot would have safely made it home anyway." This is no justification for not keeping both murder and antitrust abuse illegal and prosecuting criminals that do either, regardless of our assessment of their victim's health.
OEMs may well do better in a competitive OS marketplace, however that does not mean that it is in their own best interest marginally speaking...
Large companies make strategic decisions. It is a fact that at least one company had made that decision. What more do you need?
First, you haven't shown that Microsoft actually prevented single-boot installations in any way...
That is because it is irrelevant. Whether MS broke the law by stopping single OS installs or only by stopping dual boot setups, has no bearing on the fact that they stopped other OS's from being installed on some products, while they held a monopoly in that market. That is illegal.
Second, the ends achieved by Microsoft's illegal actions are what I'm questioning here, even the means by which Microsoft pursued them might be legally identical.
It is impossible to judge their motivations without information neither of us have. MS, however, has repeatedly made blatant moves to stifle competitors, so they are a habitual offender.
If you, a presumably skilled computer user, managed to successfully install and use BeOS and still found it wanting in value at the end of the day, then why do you assume others would?
Value comes from having a large enough chunk of the market. If OS X only have.0001% of the market, not enough applications would be developed and it would fail. Since BeOS was prevented from reaching any significant portion of the market, they had no chance to become useful.
What features are so compelling, especially to the "mainstream user", so as to make up for all the relative deficiencies when compared to Windows or Mac?
Umm, it didn't crash all the time. It didn't have much in the way of real deficiencies except those that were the result of its lack of availability in the market. If a major OEM shipped a large number of machines configure to dual boot into BeOS, don't you think that might have encouraged some companies to develop for it? When looking at such thing a market of 400 installed users versus 10,000 makes a big difference. BeOS did not fail on its own merits because it never had that opportunity.
History is littered with such examples both with and without a monopoly presence.
I never said BeOS would have succeeded in the market. That is not something anyone will ever know, because it never had that opportunity.
That, however, does not mean that every company that failed to compete against Microsoft can pin the blame for their failure largely on Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior.
If MS is breaking the lawn then legally, hell yes they can. MS should be held to account for every instance of breaking the law until they stop doing it.
Even if Microsoft were to behave 100% legally (and maybe even positively... like providing adequate specifications for interoperability) I would expect almost all companies trying to enter those markets to fail, even moreso if they can't make a compelling argument for their adoption.
You expect? Who cares? Most companies fail. That is beside the point. Unless the illegal action is stopped, the situation will never get better because no one will ever succeed and most people who are smart won't even try. Your cause and effect are a little screwed up here. The reason we have a largely capitalist economy is because it it generates innovation and the motivation it brings more than makes up for the inefficiencies. The poin
The point of my experiences is, sans legal crapola, there is no difference. You install an OS, you get an internet browser.
Here's an analogy that might clear things up. If I go down to the local shooting range, aim a gun at a target, and pull the trigger, no one complains. If I go down to the mall, aim a gun at a target, and pull the trigger they complain about this "murder" stuff. Really, sans all this legal crapola, there is no difference. I fire a gun and hit a target.
Do you see how two people performing the exact same action in two different situations might have completely different results? Do you see why one result might be detrimental while another might not? Do you see why one might be illegal, while the other is not?
But it seems that what you are trying to tell me is that, because so many other people have installed Windows, for whatever reason, I shouldn't get a browser with that.
You are probably not one of MS's customers, or not in their core market. They sell to large organizations and computer manufacturers. The law says those computer manufacturers cannot be forced to pay for the development of IE, just because the market is such that they have to buy Windows. Is it that you don't understand the concept of monopolies and antitrust actions? Can you give me an example of an anticompetitive use of a monopoly and explain why it is illegal?
So perhaps I don't understand what you are talking about. I could be thick...
I don't think you're thick. I think you're lazy. You haven't bothered to even read the wikipedia page I mentioned have you? It is a couple of pages long and explains the concept of monopolies in fairly simple language. This is nothing new and it has been illegal much longer than any of us have been alive. MS knew it was illegal before they did it. You don't seem to have bothered to understand the issue before asserting you opinion on it. Please educate yourself.
However, the whole IE thing seems to me to be anti-MS people trying to use the law to persuade me to not purchase Windows by forcing it to be crippled compared to other any other OS.
Most users buy a computer with an OS pre-installed. Another big chunk use a computer set up for them by professionals. How does MS not being able to force others to have their browser installed harm either set. The law doesn't stop Dell from installing IE, it just requires that Dell chooses between IE and all the other options on the market. The end user may not get IE, but they may bet Firefox or Opera or some other browser that hasn't been created. This is called a free market, where the application used is chosen from a selection of the entire market and the one customers like best, wins the most money. In this way all companies are motivated to make the best application.
Right now MS doesn't care if IE sucks. They just want it to be "good enough" that people won't become so frustrated that they educate themselves and find out there are other browsers. Do you have any doubt that Firefox has been superior to IE for many years? Do you have any doubt that if MS was not able to bundle, Firefox would have been pre-installed in place of IE on many computers? That benefits end users and the industry in general.
This is a well known and understood phenomenon. Monopolies applied to other markets bring innovation to a crawl, raise prices, and reduce choice. The take away all the advantages capitalism brings over a socialist system. They also allow a single monopoly to spread into market after market despite being no better and sometimes worse than the competition. They consolidate power and wealth then use that wealth to influence the government and make the situation even worse. This is ruinous to the economy and after this happened a few times in the US, it was made illegal. If not for that fact, MS would not exist because IBM could have bundled their solutions and stopped MS from ever entering the market.
Where were you going with this argument? It applies equally to Windows and Mac OS X.
It demonstrates the folly of blaming users for security problems when they have not been given reasonable tools to accomplish normal tasks. I'd like to see both Apple and Microsoft work towards solving this, and both have implemented some measures, which are still very weak. The difference is, on Windows this is a real problem and machines are exploited in large numbers every day. This has been the case for many years. On OS X, it has not yet become a real problem and is only a potential problem.
All the security in the world isn't going to stop john q jane from authenticating itself and allowing a malicious program to run as root if it doesn't know any better.
Umm, what? who is john q jane and why are they an "it" and if they are an "it" how can they know anything? Please rephrase this in understandable English.
I think many individuals just don't care, or don't understand the implication of such actions.
Of course they don't. They're trying to accomplish a series of tasks and making the reasonable assumption their the computer in front of them is designed sanely to perform those tasks. It's not sane for someone to click on some icon the downloaded called "nekkidpics.jpg" and have it install a program that starts sending thousands of e-mail messages without telling them. The average user reasonably assumes no system would be designed that way and is thus infected with malware.
t's not unsupported, no one has successfully written a wide spread attack on OS X. There are holes in OS X, which is the point of the January 'sploit fest, as there are holes in almost every operating system.
I've just disproved your theory. I tried to write an OS X worm just now and it did not work because metasploit didn't have any unpatched OS X vulnerabilities in it. Thus, people have tried and failed to write worms because it is too hard. Just because holes exist does not mean they are easy or convenient to exploit.
The return on the investment just isn't there.
I already addressed the point of motivation.
Uh huh, so you have experience here? Seriously though - don't trivialize the complexity involved in deploying a large scale exploit and profiting from it.
You obviously have not seen the tools now available. There are point and click GUIs even.
Yeah, it would also land you in jail.
Threat of punishment is not a very good motivator in these cases. The risks are too low and most criminals do not believe they will be caught, regardless of the real risks.
This might be one of those unsupported assertion you've been talking about? What organizations use Macs to store their financial information?
Please the password I use to access my credit card account is stored on my Mac. The passwords for dozens of online stores are likewise stored there. It need not be some company's financial info.
More over, which organizations have been subject to these data mining worms (that have yet to be written)? And what data mining worms? I thought there we're any?
You thought there weren't any worms? There are several worms that now mine for data including online account info and credit card data. None have yet been discovered attacking Macs, but the motivation to mine this data is pretty clear. Heck, I saw report of one the other day that snags WoW account info.
When you do all that you can to prevent a user from taking a harmful action as simple as running a program - and they continue to do it, what do you do?
You understand that users want to run programs and provide them a safe way to do so.
If users continue to grant programs admin access because they ask for trusted resources, what do you do then?
MS has all the leverage here. They can stick old programs in a VM if they want and design a system that makes it clear that any software that wants unreasonable privileges is an unacceptable risk by labeling it in giant bright red flashing letters as a potential worm.
The answer, enforcing code signing and creating of a chain of trust between publisher and user is the only way.
I'm all in favor of code signing, if it is handled carefully so as not to violate antitrust law. That is to say, multiple pay and free signing agencies with trust levels the user can set and defaults that avoid favoritism.
The problem is that to sign the code, you need to be a trusted party - and you must pay an external organ
Please explain to me what the difference is between IE and Safari?
They're both Web browsers. The latter is legally bundled with Mac OS X and has no adverse affect upon the market. The former is illegally bundled with Windows, which is a monopoly, and which undermines the free market. If you don't understand how monopolies undermine the free market, please go read an economics book written since 1800, or read the wikipedia page on them.
When I install Windows, I get IE, and then go download Firefox.
Congratulations you just proved you're not a typical user representative of the market.
And, no I'm not trying to post flame bait, just stating my experiences thus far.
I don't see the relevance of your experiences. What are you trying to demonstrate with them? Do you even understand what I was talking about?
Although Microsoft should be punished if they twisted OEMs arms to not install BeOS, I have little doubt that BeOS would have failed regardless.
You may have little doubt, but the market was never allowed to decide. BeOS was superior in many ways and may have been able to overcome the market position of MS, or maybe not. We'll never know.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that BeOS's users, those that would want to single-boot a brand new computer into BeOS (almost certainly all hobbyist types), would be swayed by the added time and effort involved in self-installing or would not be willing to pay the small added cost of using a lesser known OEMs (those that do not enjoy significant OEM discounts).
BeOS was attempting to capture a portion of the mainstream audience, and pre-installation is the mainstream market.
What's more, you have the question of lack-of incentive for major OEMs to install and potentially added costs/risk for them (MS' actions aside).
OEMs do have motivation, in that they would like a more competitive market for desktop OS's for the cost benefits it would bring them. In any case, at least one major vendor announced that they were shipping it until MS informed them it was in violation of their contract.
As a side note, I think you may be confusing Microsoft's actions as they relate to BeOS. Microsoft's contract with the OEMs presumably prevented them from shipping dual-boot computers, however this is not the same as preventing the OEMs from shipping computers exclusively with just one alternative-OS (e.g., Linux).
Both these contracts amount to the same thing. Monopoly abuse is judged by its affect on the market and use of the monopoly power. It doesn't matter if the contract bans an dual boot installs, or only dual boot installs with a given OS, as the anti-competitive affect is still the same.
The lack of a pre-installed dual-boot option may have reduced the number of people that would even try BeOS significantly (and is arguably the biggest potential impact MS could have had between the two, imho), but even there I wonder if BeOS could have succeeded.
We don't know, but we do know they were not given a chance to find out. That is illegal.
The advantages BeOS would have given the average user would have been few and far between and the disadvantages many.... so why would they continue to use it?
Did you ever use BeOS back in the day? It was about 10 times as fast as Windows for the same tasks and had a better group of pre-installed applications, including most of those users were actually using, and it was stable (which Windows 98 was not). It had editable metadata and smart folders and several other features just now making their way into mainstream OS's. I was never a big fan myself, but it certainly was more than competitive with other OS's in use at the time based upon the feature set.
MS's monopoly abuse in this area has been pretty well established by now, and MS has settled a whole lot of court cases for a lot of money for an "innocent" party. Given their multiple convictions for antitrust abuse and the fact that they are constantly in court for new violations I don't think this is an unreasonable opinion.
I'm just making the point that 95% of the people out there just don't know enough to prevent getting pwnd.
I'd argue that systems don't let people easily run untrusted software safely and give them enough information and granularity of control to allow the average user to avoid being compromised. Apple announced some new frameworks in 10.5, and then pulled the references to them from their public facing Web pages. Those frameworks were a Mandatory Access Control framework for applications and an application signing framework for determining trust of applications. Combining these two, you have most of what is needed to build a system that is reasonable secure, by default, for the average user who wants to run random software.
First, asking users for a password should be a very rare thing and always accompanied by specific comments on what the software wants and granular options as to what it is allowed to do. Suppose some user downloads Firefox. It is easy for this program to be signed and check-summed as coming from an official source. Better yet, there is no reason it cannot be verified as from a reputable group from a free certification agency or from Apple themselves. This speaks to the trust level as determined by the second framework I mentioned. On the other hand, some malware might be signed as from a specific Website, but any such software somehow signed as from a specific reputable company would be discovered and the cert revoked very quickly. This places it one or two notches down the trust ladder.
When each of these programs is run, different restrictions are put in place. A signed and certified app like Firefox is given an ACL specified by the app itself, and customizable by the end user. It can open only files it creates without asking and can access the internet and a few services. Or, it is only certified as from a given Website. In which case it can still only access files it creates (limited in total disk used), and it cannot access the internet. When run, the user is informed that it wants access to the internet on ports normally reserved for Webpages and the user is given the choice of letting it access the internet or not or customizing that access. When the malware is run, it to is restricted to accessing only files it created and cannot access the internet. If it wants to send spam the user is given a choice. If it wants to access an address book, the user is given a choice. If it wants to patch the kernel and install a rootkit the user is given a very strongly worded choice along the lines of "The program 'toolbarwhiz' would like complete access to control your computer completely for all time. This behavior is typical of a malicious software. (Stop it from completely controlling my computer for all time)(Let it have complete control of my computer forever)(advanced options).
Such a warning is sufficient to deter most credible software vendors from selling unsigned software that asks for unreasonable permissions. An official software registration/activation service removes another big portion of the motivation for this. Such a system is not trivial to build, but it is within the bounds of what we can currently create. It would stop the vast majority of both worms and trojans and make creating new ones a difficult social engineering challenge. Until we get to a level of security functionality such as I just described, I don't think user education for the masses will work. They need the tools and control first, before a reasonable amount of education will be effective.
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But if it's a work day, you don't have very much time to get all those drinks down.
Wait, you don't drink at work? Insane. Our office manager picked up a couple cases of microbrew just today and stuck them in the fridge for us. We used to have to stock the fridge ourselves at my last employer. Man I love the computer industry.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Actually, correlation frequently implies causation. Much of science is looking at correlations and testing to find corresponding causations. Correlation does not necessarily imply a given causation. You are correct in so much as this study does not provide any proof that drinking will cause you to live longer. It was, however, normalized for several other strong correlations, such as medical conditions and dietary habits. If you're looking to live longer, drinking a few drinks a day may help or it may not. I think it's worth a shot, but I was going to do it anyway.
So Americans should probably interpret the limit as *3* drinks per day for men.
Actually, from the somewhat better article on this study that I read, they found a difference between European and American drinking that placed 3, 10g drinks as the high end cutoff for Americans and 6 as the cutoff for Europeans. They theorized this was due to the differences in the way Americans and Europeans drink, specifically if you were drinking small amounts with meals all day, or drinking all of it at once without food.
So you should probably change that to "2" drinks per day, for men, unless you're drinking them more dispersed over the course of the day and with food.
To read the article and not see any mention of controls on reason for abstaining raises BIG question marks in my mind.
It did the same thing for me. Before I posted here, however, I went to Google to find a better article. The study does take into account several normalizing factors, although I've yet to see an article that has good specifics. Blame the press for not wanting to confuse us with facts, not the study which none of us have probably read.
Open it up and check.
Yeah, I'll be cracking open my production machine from work any minute now.
Yes, powering the camera also powers the LED. It's that simple. It took an hour.
Hopefully you took pictures. Is this clear from the wiring or is the LED attached to the control?
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls. But you're basing that on what exactly?
I was paraphrasing a quote from the study we're discussing. I'm not sure if they have hard data or if they're just making it up, but since they included eating habits in the data set, they may well have real support for this. I don't know because I haven't found a free copy of the actual study, only discussion of it.
Well, that would be *excellent*, I love a glass of wine or three a day. A beer or two on a hot day is just heavenly.
Damn straight.
But unfortunately the correlation may not imply causation.
Holy crap! You got that quote right. No one ever does that.
Maybe really sick people don't drink as much. Maybe the people that have four drinks a day have to be quite healthy to keep that up day after day after day.
As to these two points, they claim to have normalized for the correlation between general health and drinking and still shown a positive correlation (it's unclear if this is the numbers they gave the press or if it is a lower number).
Maybe drinking keeps them off the streets, or out of other dangerous places.
Heh, I imagine drinking keeps me in more dangerous places rather than away from them. Between drive by shootings at clubs, all the cigarette smoke, and all the bar fights, I'd be surprised if the correlation went that way.
Maybe all the 4-drink-a-day people have died already and were not around for a survey.
This was composite data from many studies, but not generally survey data. It included mortality rates.
Lotsa possible ways to spoil things.
True enough. This particular article was more than a little off, from my quick look at other info on this study. They defined a drink as 10 grams of ethanol, much lower than the average drink in the US which weighs in at 14 grams. They also showed a difference between the US and Europe on top of that, with the positive effects evening out at three drinks in the US, not four. So that ends up about 2 real drinks in the US a day. It also suggests the possibility that drinking with meals throughout the day, rather than all at once is much, much better for you.
It would certainly be a mistake to take this article or this study as gospel, but the study itself is not showing anything surprising or new. A few drinks a day with meals is probably beneficial to men and not harmful to women. Hard core drinking is probably terrible for either, but I don't think any of us have ever woken up, opened the car door, and heaved onto the pavement, then went in search of the nearest place to acquire coffee, water, and aspirin have had any illusions that it was going to improve our long term health.
They defined a drink as 10 grams of ethanol, which would make the appropriate amount for americans something like 1 tumbler of scotch, I believe (assuming 120 proof). If someone cares to do a more scientific conversion, rather than the half-assed one I just put together, we're looking for what content of scotch contains 30 grams of ethanol.
I wondered if they remembered to take into account people who don't drink because of pre-existing health conditions that result in shorter life spans.
Yes. Well, sort of. They normalized for dietary habits, physical activity, and general health as they correlate to drinking and it resulted in a positive correlation, but it is unclear from the summary I read if that is the number reported or a smaller positive correlation. I suspect the latter. This article about the study also left out the difference between the European and American data and results. For Americans, three drinks was the point where the numbers no longer provided a benefit, probably because Americans are more likely to drink all of it at once and without food, rather than with meals.
Both actions are (arguably) illegal, but they are different actions and they have different implications for the market.
No they are different interpretations of the same action (MS bundling IE).
Microsoft's bad actions do not excuse your sloppy thinking and failure to distinguish important differences.
You're confusing actions with the characterization thereof. That is your sloppy thinking, not mine.
What's more, there is no evidence that Microsoft has directly profited from its development of IE...
How is that relevant? The relevant issue is and law speaks to anti-competative action, not "direct profit."
Both the courts and economists examine the specifics of the situation these days, they don't just look at the fact that something is tied together.
It's called bundling, one specifically established form of tying, which is, itself, specifically called out in the body of court precedent again and again.
Your same over-simplified argument can be made for Apple, Redhat, Palm, and other OS purveyors.
Sure it can, if you ignore the important fact that they aren't monopolies. Geez, every single time. I'd like to have one discussion of MS's monopoly abuse without some person bringing up a comparison with companies that don't have monopolies. (Apple may be an exception here and are currently being investigated to determine if they have a monopoly on portable, digital music players. If that is found to be the case then likely the courts will try to remedy their bundling/tying of those players with a software jukebox and an online music sales service.)
And while we're at it what about, say, calc.exe, notepad, wordpad, solitaire...?
All of those are covered by the fact that they are not unfairly competing with an existing market. Bundling isn't illegal by itself. Having a monopoly isn't illegal by itself. Bundling a product from a separate, existing market with a product that you have monopolized is illegal.
Hell you could even make the argument for the various shells and applets.
And you'd be off base for the same reason.
Most agree that Microsoft's actions with Netscape were illegal, but this is based on thoughtful analysis and not the simplistic test which you suggest.
Please. The issue is clear cut and quite simple. The "test" you can apply is likewise simple. Is a product in one market benefitting from a different product that is a monopoly in a different pre-existing market? Can other companies, without monopolies, gain that same benefit? If the answer to the first question is "yes" and the second is "no" then you have an antitrust violation. There are certain classic ways this happens including tying and and other forms of bundling, but it is the above concept that is important. That is what leveraging a monopoly is.
Thanks a lot - that web page completely froze up my Firefox.
It worked fine for me with Firefox 3alpha1, although it displays the end of the tag as text. No crashes though. For an alpha, I'm pretty impressed with the stability and the native spellchecking and cocoa widgets rule. Check it out. (Disclaimer your milage may vary, it is an alpha... don't try typing your thesis in this and complain when it crashes.)
However, I'm starting to think this issue may well be a factor toward its seemingly sudden disappearance from Apple's website.
I doubt it. I suspect that they are waiting to release a new version. They pulled it from their european stores a while ago when the new import rules went into place and have not yet started selling a compliant redesign. Since they are now built-in on all laptops and imacs, there is less demand for these and it probably just is not a priority. They could even just add them as a built-in feature of their displays and stop selling stand alone models, although that would be less than ideal for some users.
So all the high rated posts I see talk about how terrible Apple's security was, 1984 comes true, blah blah blah.
I don't see that as the character of the highly rated posts here.
Well it may be possible that Apple carefully designed their hardware in such a way that the LED is software controlled and the camera is capable of invisibly monitoring people, there is no evidence to back those claims.
I strongly suspect that the LED is hardwired to the camera. That would be easy to do and makes sense from a design perspective. I'd be happier, however, if Apple provided some confirmation of this, rather than leaving us all to hope that is the case.
I think that would make them lousy designers, not big brother, unless there is also evidence that they are doing something with that anti-feature. I'm not happy, however, about assuming all is well unless it can be proved otherwise. I like openness in this regard rather than relying upon obscurity.
Honestly if that were possible then I'd dump this laptop in a heartbeat since it would require purposely designing it with that in mind.
That's not necessarily so. It could be they bought an off the shelf component without an indicator and wanted to tie its operation to the LED, but the interface was such that you couldn't just string it inline with the power without detrimental affects. So they put them both in and tied them in firmware or software and are hoping no one will figure out that it can be bypassed. That would explain their silence on the topic, although it could just be that no one who knows has realized people want to know or have doubts. I rarely use the iSight on my laptop and I did not pay for it anyway. If I feel it is a threat a small square of metal and some electrical tape will take care of it.
Again, your lack of comprehension rears its ugly head. The "law" did not find this.
I didn't say the law "found" something. Laws are laws, courts report findings and make judgments of the application of those laws. I merely wrote that the law makes that sort of tying illegal, which it does.
There is no evidence that Microsoft made anyone pay more for IE (or for the inclusion of IE into Windows).
Luckily both economists and the law as written do not care about marketing labels. MS pays developers to create IE. The money to pay those developers comes from somewhere as they don't work for free. It is bundled together with and sold for one price in a package with Windows. That right there is enough to rule that the money from those Windows licenses is a payment for IE as well as Windows. Your line of reasoning was thrown out of court when the first company tried to claim a "buy one get one free" sale meant they did not really sell the second one, in legal terms. If you're selling a bundle, everything in that bundle is part of the price, regardless of if you want to claim some part is free and another part is not.
Here is the relevant finding of fact:
Yeah, the courts screwed the pooch, go figure. It changes nothing. The law still says this is illegal even if the courts don't bother to rule that way.
You might also note that the court found that Microsoft spent upwards of 100 million per year from 1995 onwards to develop IE...
Who cares? How does this in any way mitigate their illegal actions?
So she doesn't mind you seeing her "not quite fully dressed"?
Not everyone is a prude :) Besides, I'm living with her old roommate, who is cuter yet, which puts me in the "safe" category as far as most women are concerned.
One day I wandered into the closest Apple store and was playing with the latest version of OS X to see if I wanted to upgrade. They all had internet connections and isight cameras and I thought it would be fun to play with them. So I made up a new ichat account and added a few people I knew at the time with a camera on their system to the buddy list to see if they were online. The person available just happened to be a cute college co-ed dating one of my buddies. She's one of those skinny little redheads guys always seem to fall for. Anyway, after I got to try out the video chat feature I took off and thought no more about it.
The next time I talked to her she told me I had brought her a lot of entertainment and some embarrassment. It seems people in the store also wanted to try out the video chat, and since there was an account set up with her on the list, they kept sending her chat requests. This was the entertaining part. The embarrassing part was the first time someone did that, she assumed it was me again, and was not quite fully dressed at the time. She said the guy seemed pretty shocked, but nice enough after she jumped out of the camera's line of sight and pulled on a robe.
What they did was remove the functionality from unsigned Java applets to embed such movies, because those applets could take the image produced by Quicktime and send it back to the server, which was a real problem.
Yeah, too bad Sun announced yesterday a flaw in all their runtime environments that allows untrusted applets to access data from trusted applets. I don't think Apple has squashed that one, so there is still some potential for mischief.
Oh, no argument there. Except I am not sure that Apple has actually implemented any measure at all against it. The OS is wide open to malicious software run by the user.
Well, Apple has some protection in the form of default user privileges, warnings for application downloads, and the like. It is certainly not strong. They also have a number of potential solutions including filesystem level ACLs, and not yet released frameworks for application signing and mandatory access controls. Hopefully, they will bring these to market in a usable way before it ever does become a major problem.
and Microsoft should be punished for it. That, however, does not mean that every company that Microsoft ever acted exercised their monopoly powers against would have succeeded but for their actions.
Who cares? It's like saying "not all the people the sniper shot would have safely made it home anyway." This is no justification for not keeping both murder and antitrust abuse illegal and prosecuting criminals that do either, regardless of our assessment of their victim's health.
OEMs may well do better in a competitive OS marketplace, however that does not mean that it is in their own best interest marginally speaking...
Large companies make strategic decisions. It is a fact that at least one company had made that decision. What more do you need?
First, you haven't shown that Microsoft actually prevented single-boot installations in any way...
That is because it is irrelevant. Whether MS broke the law by stopping single OS installs or only by stopping dual boot setups, has no bearing on the fact that they stopped other OS's from being installed on some products, while they held a monopoly in that market. That is illegal.
Second, the ends achieved by Microsoft's illegal actions are what I'm questioning here, even the means by which Microsoft pursued them might be legally identical.
It is impossible to judge their motivations without information neither of us have. MS, however, has repeatedly made blatant moves to stifle competitors, so they are a habitual offender.
If you, a presumably skilled computer user, managed to successfully install and use BeOS and still found it wanting in value at the end of the day, then why do you assume others would?
Value comes from having a large enough chunk of the market. If OS X only have .0001% of the market, not enough applications would be developed and it would fail. Since BeOS was prevented from reaching any significant portion of the market, they had no chance to become useful.
What features are so compelling, especially to the "mainstream user", so as to make up for all the relative deficiencies when compared to Windows or Mac?
Umm, it didn't crash all the time. It didn't have much in the way of real deficiencies except those that were the result of its lack of availability in the market. If a major OEM shipped a large number of machines configure to dual boot into BeOS, don't you think that might have encouraged some companies to develop for it? When looking at such thing a market of 400 installed users versus 10,000 makes a big difference. BeOS did not fail on its own merits because it never had that opportunity.
History is littered with such examples both with and without a monopoly presence.
I never said BeOS would have succeeded in the market. That is not something anyone will ever know, because it never had that opportunity.
That, however, does not mean that every company that failed to compete against Microsoft can pin the blame for their failure largely on Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior.
If MS is breaking the lawn then legally, hell yes they can. MS should be held to account for every instance of breaking the law until they stop doing it.
Even if Microsoft were to behave 100% legally (and maybe even positively... like providing adequate specifications for interoperability) I would expect almost all companies trying to enter those markets to fail, even moreso if they can't make a compelling argument for their adoption.
You expect? Who cares? Most companies fail. That is beside the point. Unless the illegal action is stopped, the situation will never get better because no one will ever succeed and most people who are smart won't even try. Your cause and effect are a little screwed up here. The reason we have a largely capitalist economy is because it it generates innovation and the motivation it brings more than makes up for the inefficiencies. The poin
The point of my experiences is, sans legal crapola, there is no difference. You install an OS, you get an internet browser.
Here's an analogy that might clear things up. If I go down to the local shooting range, aim a gun at a target, and pull the trigger, no one complains. If I go down to the mall, aim a gun at a target, and pull the trigger they complain about this "murder" stuff. Really, sans all this legal crapola, there is no difference. I fire a gun and hit a target.
Do you see how two people performing the exact same action in two different situations might have completely different results? Do you see why one result might be detrimental while another might not? Do you see why one might be illegal, while the other is not?
But it seems that what you are trying to tell me is that, because so many other people have installed Windows, for whatever reason, I shouldn't get a browser with that.
You are probably not one of MS's customers, or not in their core market. They sell to large organizations and computer manufacturers. The law says those computer manufacturers cannot be forced to pay for the development of IE, just because the market is such that they have to buy Windows. Is it that you don't understand the concept of monopolies and antitrust actions? Can you give me an example of an anticompetitive use of a monopoly and explain why it is illegal?
So perhaps I don't understand what you are talking about. I could be thick...
I don't think you're thick. I think you're lazy. You haven't bothered to even read the wikipedia page I mentioned have you? It is a couple of pages long and explains the concept of monopolies in fairly simple language. This is nothing new and it has been illegal much longer than any of us have been alive. MS knew it was illegal before they did it. You don't seem to have bothered to understand the issue before asserting you opinion on it. Please educate yourself.
However, the whole IE thing seems to me to be anti-MS people trying to use the law to persuade me to not purchase Windows by forcing it to be crippled compared to other any other OS.
Most users buy a computer with an OS pre-installed. Another big chunk use a computer set up for them by professionals. How does MS not being able to force others to have their browser installed harm either set. The law doesn't stop Dell from installing IE, it just requires that Dell chooses between IE and all the other options on the market. The end user may not get IE, but they may bet Firefox or Opera or some other browser that hasn't been created. This is called a free market, where the application used is chosen from a selection of the entire market and the one customers like best, wins the most money. In this way all companies are motivated to make the best application.
Right now MS doesn't care if IE sucks. They just want it to be "good enough" that people won't become so frustrated that they educate themselves and find out there are other browsers. Do you have any doubt that Firefox has been superior to IE for many years? Do you have any doubt that if MS was not able to bundle, Firefox would have been pre-installed in place of IE on many computers? That benefits end users and the industry in general.
This is a well known and understood phenomenon. Monopolies applied to other markets bring innovation to a crawl, raise prices, and reduce choice. The take away all the advantages capitalism brings over a socialist system. They also allow a single monopoly to spread into market after market despite being no better and sometimes worse than the competition. They consolidate power and wealth then use that wealth to influence the government and make the situation even worse. This is ruinous to the economy and after this happened a few times in the US, it was made illegal. If not for that fact, MS would not exist because IBM could have bundled their solutions and stopped MS from ever entering the market.
You seem to think that people are somehow
Where were you going with this argument? It applies equally to Windows and Mac OS X.
It demonstrates the folly of blaming users for security problems when they have not been given reasonable tools to accomplish normal tasks. I'd like to see both Apple and Microsoft work towards solving this, and both have implemented some measures, which are still very weak. The difference is, on Windows this is a real problem and machines are exploited in large numbers every day. This has been the case for many years. On OS X, it has not yet become a real problem and is only a potential problem.
All the security in the world isn't going to stop john q jane from authenticating itself and allowing a malicious program to run as root if it doesn't know any better.
Umm, what? who is john q jane and why are they an "it" and if they are an "it" how can they know anything? Please rephrase this in understandable English.
I think many individuals just don't care, or don't understand the implication of such actions.
Of course they don't. They're trying to accomplish a series of tasks and making the reasonable assumption their the computer in front of them is designed sanely to perform those tasks. It's not sane for someone to click on some icon the downloaded called "nekkidpics.jpg" and have it install a program that starts sending thousands of e-mail messages without telling them. The average user reasonably assumes no system would be designed that way and is thus infected with malware.
t's not unsupported, no one has successfully written a wide spread attack on OS X. There are holes in OS X, which is the point of the January 'sploit fest, as there are holes in almost every operating system.
I've just disproved your theory. I tried to write an OS X worm just now and it did not work because metasploit didn't have any unpatched OS X vulnerabilities in it. Thus, people have tried and failed to write worms because it is too hard. Just because holes exist does not mean they are easy or convenient to exploit.
The return on the investment just isn't there.
I already addressed the point of motivation.
Uh huh, so you have experience here? Seriously though - don't trivialize the complexity involved in deploying a large scale exploit and profiting from it.
You obviously have not seen the tools now available. There are point and click GUIs even.
Yeah, it would also land you in jail.
Threat of punishment is not a very good motivator in these cases. The risks are too low and most criminals do not believe they will be caught, regardless of the real risks.
This might be one of those unsupported assertion you've been talking about? What organizations use Macs to store their financial information?
Please the password I use to access my credit card account is stored on my Mac. The passwords for dozens of online stores are likewise stored there. It need not be some company's financial info.
More over, which organizations have been subject to these data mining worms (that have yet to be written)? And what data mining worms? I thought there we're any?
You thought there weren't any worms? There are several worms that now mine for data including online account info and credit card data. None have yet been discovered attacking Macs, but the motivation to mine this data is pretty clear. Heck, I saw report of one the other day that snags WoW account info.
When you do all that you can to prevent a user from taking a harmful action as simple as running a program - and they continue to do it, what do you do?
You understand that users want to run programs and provide them a safe way to do so.
If users continue to grant programs admin access because they ask for trusted resources, what do you do then?
MS has all the leverage here. They can stick old programs in a VM if they want and design a system that makes it clear that any software that wants unreasonable privileges is an unacceptable risk by labeling it in giant bright red flashing letters as a potential worm.
The answer, enforcing code signing and creating of a chain of trust between publisher and user is the only way.
I'm all in favor of code signing, if it is handled carefully so as not to violate antitrust law. That is to say, multiple pay and free signing agencies with trust levels the user can set and defaults that avoid favoritism.
The problem is that to sign the code, you need to be a trusted party - and you must pay an external organ
Please explain to me what the difference is between IE and Safari?
They're both Web browsers. The latter is legally bundled with Mac OS X and has no adverse affect upon the market. The former is illegally bundled with Windows, which is a monopoly, and which undermines the free market. If you don't understand how monopolies undermine the free market, please go read an economics book written since 1800, or read the wikipedia page on them.
When I install Windows, I get IE, and then go download Firefox.
Congratulations you just proved you're not a typical user representative of the market.
And, no I'm not trying to post flame bait, just stating my experiences thus far.
I don't see the relevance of your experiences. What are you trying to demonstrate with them? Do you even understand what I was talking about?
Although Microsoft should be punished if they twisted OEMs arms to not install BeOS, I have little doubt that BeOS would have failed regardless.
You may have little doubt, but the market was never allowed to decide. BeOS was superior in many ways and may have been able to overcome the market position of MS, or maybe not. We'll never know.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that BeOS's users, those that would want to single-boot a brand new computer into BeOS (almost certainly all hobbyist types), would be swayed by the added time and effort involved in self-installing or would not be willing to pay the small added cost of using a lesser known OEMs (those that do not enjoy significant OEM discounts).
BeOS was attempting to capture a portion of the mainstream audience, and pre-installation is the mainstream market.
What's more, you have the question of lack-of incentive for major OEMs to install and potentially added costs/risk for them (MS' actions aside).
OEMs do have motivation, in that they would like a more competitive market for desktop OS's for the cost benefits it would bring them. In any case, at least one major vendor announced that they were shipping it until MS informed them it was in violation of their contract.
As a side note, I think you may be confusing Microsoft's actions as they relate to BeOS. Microsoft's contract with the OEMs presumably prevented them from shipping dual-boot computers, however this is not the same as preventing the OEMs from shipping computers exclusively with just one alternative-OS (e.g., Linux).
Both these contracts amount to the same thing. Monopoly abuse is judged by its affect on the market and use of the monopoly power. It doesn't matter if the contract bans an dual boot installs, or only dual boot installs with a given OS, as the anti-competitive affect is still the same.
The lack of a pre-installed dual-boot option may have reduced the number of people that would even try BeOS significantly (and is arguably the biggest potential impact MS could have had between the two, imho), but even there I wonder if BeOS could have succeeded.
We don't know, but we do know they were not given a chance to find out. That is illegal.
The advantages BeOS would have given the average user would have been few and far between and the disadvantages many.... so why would they continue to use it?
Did you ever use BeOS back in the day? It was about 10 times as fast as Windows for the same tasks and had a better group of pre-installed applications, including most of those users were actually using, and it was stable (which Windows 98 was not). It had editable metadata and smart folders and several other features just now making their way into mainstream OS's. I was never a big fan myself, but it certainly was more than competitive with other OS's in use at the time based upon the feature set.
MS's monopoly abuse in this area has been pretty well established by now, and MS has settled a whole lot of court cases for a lot of money for an "innocent" party. Given their multiple convictions for antitrust abuse and the fact that they are constantly in court for new violations I don't think this is an unreasonable opinion.
I'm just making the point that 95% of the people out there just don't know enough to prevent getting pwnd.
I'd argue that systems don't let people easily run untrusted software safely and give them enough information and granularity of control to allow the average user to avoid being compromised. Apple announced some new frameworks in 10.5, and then pulled the references to them from their public facing Web pages. Those frameworks were a Mandatory Access Control framework for applications and an application signing framework for determining trust of applications. Combining these two, you have most of what is needed to build a system that is reasonable secure, by default, for the average user who wants to run random software.
First, asking users for a password should be a very rare thing and always accompanied by specific comments on what the software wants and granular options as to what it is allowed to do. Suppose some user downloads Firefox. It is easy for this program to be signed and check-summed as coming from an official source. Better yet, there is no reason it cannot be verified as from a reputable group from a free certification agency or from Apple themselves. This speaks to the trust level as determined by the second framework I mentioned. On the other hand, some malware might be signed as from a specific Website, but any such software somehow signed as from a specific reputable company would be discovered and the cert revoked very quickly. This places it one or two notches down the trust ladder.
When each of these programs is run, different restrictions are put in place. A signed and certified app like Firefox is given an ACL specified by the app itself, and customizable by the end user. It can open only files it creates without asking and can access the internet and a few services. Or, it is only certified as from a given Website. In which case it can still only access files it creates (limited in total disk used), and it cannot access the internet. When run, the user is informed that it wants access to the internet on ports normally reserved for Webpages and the user is given the choice of letting it access the internet or not or customizing that access. When the malware is run, it to is restricted to accessing only files it created and cannot access the internet. If it wants to send spam the user is given a choice. If it wants to access an address book, the user is given a choice. If it wants to patch the kernel and install a rootkit the user is given a very strongly worded choice along the lines of "The program 'toolbarwhiz' would like complete access to control your computer completely for all time. This behavior is typical of a malicious software. (Stop it from completely controlling my computer for all time)(Let it have complete control of my computer forever)(advanced options).
Such a warning is sufficient to deter most credible software vendors from selling unsigned software that asks for unreasonable permissions. An official software registration/activation service removes another big portion of the motivation for this. Such a system is not trivial to build, but it is within the bounds of what we can currently create. It would stop the vast majority of both worms and trojans and make creating new ones a difficult social engineering challenge. Until we get to a level of security functionality such as I just described, I don't think user education for the masses will work. They need the tools and control first, before a reasonable amount of education will be effective.