Every time this topic is discussed, I hear the same excuses. Mostly, people claim that the US is too large and with too many rural areas. It's a load of crap. We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of lines, more per person than numerous other countries and we still have much slower and more expensive service than those countries. Sweden has been the model of how to do this right. Despite government corruption and favoritism on par with the US, they have managed almost complete saturation, for less per-person government subsidy, and with a population density almost the same as the US.
The truth is, the US has combined the worst elements of several models. We don't have a free market to drive competition because of local telcom monopolies and failure of the FCC to enforce fair use. We don't have the benefits of central planning and widespread coverage of a socialist system, because the government just hands out money in subsidies and then does not even blink when that money does not go to the projects we were supposedly funding in the first place. So we get crappy coverage and service and high prices.
The US has high labor costs, declining manufacturing, and not a lot of unique industry. The information economy and exporting intellectual property may be our best option for maintaining a real role as an economic powerhouse. For that to happen we need two things, education, and technology. We shouldn't be 5th in broadband or 10th, we should be 1st. That two trillion dollars we blew in Iraq would have run a fiber connection and provided free internet connections to every house in the US for years to come. Heck, just the money we spent already subsidizing telecoms would have provided a fast connection to every home if we'd actually just spent it on that instead of giving it away to monopolists.
Have you seen China's network backbone diagrams? They have a beautiful three tiered full mesh that came out of a textbook. I know there is a lot of prejudice against socialist projects in the US, but we're falling behind very quickly. We either need internet and phone networks treated as a public utility and run by the government or we need to remove the local monopolies, stop politicians from taking the telecoms bribes, and have a real competitive market with equally huge subsidies given to any new players that want to build a complete competing network.
The time has come. Suck it up and invest in the future of the US with hard cash and reforms, or be left behind the rest of the world. Most Americans are blind to how some other countries are now technologically superior. How their gadgets work everywhere and are more advanced than anything sold here. his needs to be corrected now.
The moon revolves with a period of 27+ days (the sidereal period). Furthermore, any body in space with a molten core that moves with a regularly changing momentum (e.g., orbits anything) will revolve. This is due to the inertia of the molten core. So, a celestial body with a molten core that does not spin is theoretically possible, but it would require that the body is not in orbit, or that the orbit's diameter is so huge that the angular momentum is insignificant.
So you're arguing if the core is hot enough to be molten, it also has to be fluid enough to be generating a field we would have detected, based upon the rotation and your knowledge of how a geodynamo works? My understanding of the latter is pretty sketchy (I'm not sure many people if any really understand it completely), but I find it hard to believe that the cooling of the core would be so uniform as to always maintain a spinning central sphere such that it creates a noticeable magnetic field.
Another person her pointed out Mars as an example. It spins more slowly, but has a molten core much larger than any the moon would have and the result is a very, very weak field. I'm unconvinced that a noticeable magnetic field would necessarily be produced by any molten core the moon might have. I simply don't think the understanding of how these fields are generated or of the conditions of the moon and their affects are comprehensive enough to make this judgement. We don't even know that the molten material that might be the center of the moon would be one that would generate a magnetic field. I'll agree the lack of a field is a possible indicator, but not strong enough to draw a probable conclusion from.
The major indicator that a molten core is not present is the lack of a dipolar field -- which a geodynamo (from the molten core) would cause.
I'm not sure you can equate "molten core" with "geodynamo." I mean, even assuming the moon had a molten core acting as a geodynamo and creating a field, and that that core cooled sufficiently, so that the spin was interrupted, wouldn't you end up with a smaller molten core that was not spinning in such a way as to generate a field and was just undergoing random fluidic movements?
I'm no geophysicist, but a celestial body with a molten core that was not spinning could certainly exist. Is it improbable that the moon is such a body?
Dick DeVos spent a LOT more than Jennifer Granholm on his ad campaign, and lost by a fairly large margin...
Do you have numbers on this? Do they include the $150 million of state funds Granholm basically handed to Ford as a PR move?
I also saw many more commercials against the MCRI (the amendment to ban affirmative action by the state, for you non-Michiganders) and that passed by an even stronger margin.
Again, I'm not sure of the numbers on this one, but I saw quite a few ads in both directions with regard to that amendment. I suppose it depends upon what TV a person watches.
I'd say that ads have a fairly large influence on elections, because too many people rely on them for their information - but they don't change people's basic minds or attitudes, and that limits their influence to the uninformed and the undecided.
I disagree with this. Ads shape the debate in the minds of many. I heard a dozen people argue for banning dove hunting, for example and while factually they believed hunting doves was already illegal (it had been legal for 4 years) I also heard every argument revolve around the ethics of killing doves, not the ethics of taking that decision away from individuals and having the government choose for everyone. Look at the abortion debate's "pro-choice" (not pro abortion) discussions for a parallel. Most people never even considered the freedom of choice aspect, which was the important part of the issue.
This surprises me not at all. Usually the vote follows wherever the majority of marketing money is spent. Marketing works, that's why people spend so much money on it. Google results probably mirror the amount of marketing pretty well, although if one group ignored online marketing or concentrated on one other form, it might be off.
I'm actually very discouraged by the Michigan elections, not because I think all the votes went the wrong way, but because 99% of the people I talked to about an issue could repeat what they heard in a television ad, but had obviously not thought the issue through at all beyond that. I was 100% right in my predictions of the election, based simply on the TV ads.
If you don't understand why IPv6 is a geek fantasy that no one will "switch" to, you either don't know what the word "switch" means (it means REPLACE), or you don't actually work in IT.
IPv6 is for geeks. Geeks run the biggest networks in the world and understand the benefits. Or did you miss the fact that most of Comcast's network is IPv6 now, or that most tier 1 ISPs have at least their management network running IPv6? Most of this is invisible to the end user, but bringing IPv6 the rest of the way to the user can solve a lot of these big ISPs headaches. What is holding them back is proper support from OS manufacturers, and if Vista solves that, they will almost certainly make the move as Vista machines become the most common (with provisioning for older machines). They will probably market it as a feature too. Vista machines can take advantage of Iv6 for faster (as maintained by their QoS solution) internet connections.
Well most of the people I speak with seem aware they have a problem, they know that web pages and pop-ups are happening outside of their control.
Sure, but they don't know how to avoid having that condition recur or even if it can be changed.
Spambots, spam and pop-ups at best represent the least desirable part of ad revenue, at worst they are a criminal enterprise and should be treated as such.
Sure, but that does not address why people don't move to better solutions that protect them from these undesirable ads. Most people assume there is no way to avoid them, or that technology would be included with the really expensive computer they bought last week.
But I would love to see some real education for these users. If that has to be by losing their internet till they clean up then so be it.
I'm all in favor of user education, but once computers are improved to the level that such education is reasonable. If an expert in computer security with a PhD and a decade of experience in the field still occasionally gets their machine compromised by a random worm, how can you expect an average user to avoid it? Well you just have to constantly run updates, buy a hardware device to go between your cable modem and your computer, install a second user account and use that account when you run downloaded software or files, and follow the news to know what to avoid when there are zero day exploits, like right now. Does that seem like a reasonable amount of education for someone who wants to send e-mail and look at news sites and porno images every now and again? I don't think so.
I only see this getting worse as these things burrow deeper into the OS. Maybe Vista will help.
Vista is way too little, way too late, way too poorly implemented. Microsoft is 5-10 years behind where they should be for security. And they don't care because it doesn't touch their bottom line. They'll fix the security as soon as it makes them a pile of money and not before. Break Microsoft up into two OS companies and an applications company. Forbid any unmonitored communications between them. With two companies both with complete rights to the Windows code, the one that delivers a secure PC to customers first, at a lower price will be rich, rich, rich. The other will be less rich and all the other OS's will have a chance to compete as well. Suddenly instead of Microsoft providing whatever security is convenient you have five major companies competing to make money by trying to make the best, most secure solution. The innovation brought by competition has brought new and better products again and again. Lets let it work by enforcing the law and letting greed combined with a capitalist free market work for the people.
Normal? Hardly, first pop-up my dad had on his Dell had him on the phone to me for support.
If you take a random sampling of home computer users, something like 80% of them will be using IE on Windows and they will be getting pop-ups regularly. Half of them will be infected with some sort of malware. When these people go talk to each other, pop-ups and malware symptoms are normal behavior for modern computers.
TV ads are used to support the medium and have been with use as such almost from the beginning.
That's not the point. Advertising everywhere and being increasingly prevalent is normal for our culture and while ads are common on TV (most channels) pop-ups are common for Web browsing (most people's computers). The underlying economics of it does not come into play and none of this is going to make a normal, ignorant individual conclude something is wrong.
When you are ignorant as to the effect your computer is having on me and the rest of the internet community, you ignore the signs ( I can't tell you how often I've heard "It's sooooooo much slower then when I bought it, maybe the internet is full") and refuse to at least try and understand then you don't need a computer. Go use one a the library.
That's your proposed solution? Most computers get malware so we should change everyone's habits and have them abandon the home computer market and go to the library? Sorry, but that just isn't going to happen. How about instead, we enforce the laws we have on the books, so that Microsoft (and whatever other company is formed when we split MS up) are motivated to make machines that are relatively resistant to malware instead. Doesn't that seem a lot easier and better than trying to change the way most of the population behaves?
But I still think people should be held responsible, people should realize that there is a problem with their computer when a million pop-ups flood their screen or their computer starts moving like molasses in January.
Why? That is normal. Should people realize their is a problem when their TV shows are interrupted every 15 minutes by ads?
People assume a free market is operating because the US economy i founded on this and technically, our laws are supposed to be ensuring that it is happening. They incorrectly assume that if their was a better browser than IE, most computer manufacturers would bundle it with their computer, just as they assume that if there is a engine that uses less gas and costs less and has more power, car manufacturers would include it in most cars sold. The difference is, MS has a monopoly and uses it to prevent the best products from being chosen. The law is supposed to stop them, but it is not being enforced because MS gave a lot of money to a lot of corrupt people.
Biggest problem is most users are dumber then a sock full of hammers!
I really don't think so. Most infections involve no user interaction and there is no obvious sign to the user that they are infected. Even with trojans, people don't know the computer has an all or nothing security model and assume it does not since that is a crappy model for the current environment. They are ignorant, not dumb. Some people I know who have had their computer infected include brilliant physicists, biologists, and even a very, very well known and respected computer security expert. You don't have to be dumb, you just have to uninformed or careless and make some reasonable assumptions about the quality of Windows and our economy.
Look at a car as an example. If I refuse to do or pay for routine maintenance it will begin to create more and more pollution and use more and more fuel. Is it the manufactures job to fix it, no, is it the road builders job, no, is it the jerks that sold me crappy fuel, only if I can catch them. So when I fail smog tests I need to either quit using the car or pay to fix it.
If most cars using a component from one manufacturer, say Visteon, began failing emissions tests three minutes after you started it following the instructions in the owners manual, there would be a recall, regardless of whether or not the driver noticed how bad it was before their warranty expired. If half of all cars on the road did not meet emissions standards, do you think the government would or could force all of them to stop driving those cars?
Perhaps, perhaps not, depending upon who this is targeting. You can't assume that because 80% of people use Windows and IE that 80% of the people that would use a given Web service will use Windows and IE. It may be more and it may be less. The interoperability is a consideration, because maps are often used collaboratively. This is not as bad as e-mail that fails for 20% of the population, but it is worse than something like an online recipe site that works for 80% of the population.
Most of the mums and dads out there flying around the place looking at stuff don't give a rats ass it doesn't run on ObscureLinuxDistro 1.0 or even OSX - it works for them, and so is just as accessible as some fantastically cross-platform solution.
True, but they do care when they e-mail their grandchild a link to a 3D map showing where the condo they rented in Florida is, and that precious grandchild says the site is broken and won't work for them and to use Google instead. My point is that because it is a use that lends itself to collaboration, it is hit harder by a built in 20% failure rate, than less collaborative uses. This is especially a problem when there is a direct competitor that does not have the same problem and has as much or more brand recognition.
There is a large category of pornography that deals with "young" girls. School girls, baby sitters, etc. These often feature young women (18 and older) dressing and "acting" in the manner of younger girls, say 15 or 16 year olds. Interest in this kind of material is not generally seen as an illness requiring treatment or a crime that should be punished. Pedophilia, however, in which the object of the man's desire is sexually undeveloped, say at the age of 11 or 12, is seen as an illness and a crime. Is "boy love" an interest in sexually developed young men, ages 15-20 or so, or is "boy love" an interest in 11 and 12 year old boys? I think there's a difference.
I don't think the level of physical development is important at all, except in how it happens to correlate with mental development. If a 10 year old has Methuselah syndrome and has aged as much as the average 30 year old, does that make it any less of a crime to exploit their lack of sophistication and trust in adults to have sex with them, even though they are not responsible enough to make such a choice?
The fundamental problem here is exploitation of those who do not have the rights, social position, or experience to make important life choices. Attraction to those people is not a problem by itself, merely something that can lead to said problem if people do not behave ethically. If you're attracted to 16 year old girls or 8 year old girls, it doesn't bother me one bit. If you take advantage of either, however, and have sex with them before they are ready, then you've done something I find repugnant. For that matter, I would find it unethical to have sex with a 20 year old who I do not feel is in the position to responsibly make that choice, either due to severe immaturity, or some other factor. Of course my ethical standards are not everyone's I also would not have sex with someone who was indebted to me, either financially or emotionally (saved from burning building).
It is the underlying ethics that are the reason pedophilia is a problem and ethics only apply to actions, not thoughts.
Pedophilia is commonly defined as a sexual attraction to children. I don't know what "boy love" is commonly defined as, and even "love" has a great many definitions, some of which are ambiguous. In general, the gender is not a factor. Why? Does it make a difference?
How is this going to hurt Novell in any way, shape or form.
MS is going for the next big lock-in, probably with Web services. If they can get it, with the help of Suse, they will stab them when they turn their back, just as they have again and again. hose who do not learn from very recent history...
...who are you gonna choose? Some random distribution that may or may not interoperate with your Windows machines, or one that MS has worked with to make sure it works?
I'm going to formally evaluate a number of them and pick the one that works best for what I want to do and that has a roadmap that fits with what I think I want to do in the future.
I own a business that is 100% MS right now. Everything is working well, but if we ever need a Linux server in the future, I know what distro I'm choosing...
Perhaps the fact that you make decisions based upon hearsay and company reputations is the reason you have a 100% Microsoft shop in an industry where that is very rarely the best financial solution.
No, "NTP Incorporated" is the name of the company.
So do I have to write "Coca-Cola, which produces sodas and other types of beverages"
That depends, is there something else called Coca-Cola, aside from the company, that is the most common use of the term and is Coca-Cola the company an obscure firm that produces nothing and is known only to a few lawyers?
It's not the job of a writer to baby readers by telling them every little bit of extraneous information.
No, it's the job of the editor, to make sure acronyms, especially uncommon acronyms, and especially unusual uses of a common acronym to mean something other than the common definition, are expanded or explained. I'm sure anyone else who has worked as an editor will tell you the same.
Where exactly is the lack of information?
The lack of information is where they say "NTP" instead of "NTP Inc., a patent litigation company" or "NTP Inc." It is the same common sense as if you were editing an article about a a company called "TV Technologies." In your first reference to "TV" you don't write "TV is banned from operating in Pennsylvania." It is misleading. You write "TV Technologies, a Chinese firm, is banned from operating in Pennsylvania."
... for the 20% non-Windows, non-IE users out there, sure.
And for more than that. Half the time when I'm looking at something like this, I am doing so to send it to someone else or at least want the option of so doing. If there is a 20% failure rate every time I do that, well that is a significant problem, regardless of which browser I use.
So what do you expect? Windows should be shipped without a browser?
Yes.
Oh I just bought a windows PC but how do I surf internet on it?
You use the browser pre-installed on the computer, specifically chosen by the OEM, not by Microsoft.
Oh for that you should buy a mac that comes BUNDLED with safari & cool media player and cool everything and is EU proof.
Did you even read my comment. Go back and read the part about how clueless people always present an analogy and it is always a non-monopoly. Gee, Apple is a non-monopoly for OS's and computers. Brilliant!
Sorry dude, I've stopped believing blogs as most of them (including Linux on the Wii) are nothing but lies and hoaxes.
It's one thing not to believe a random blog when it makes weird claims. It's another not to believe a blog from the person doing the work, when it is an expected move and is what the company talked about doing months ago. After the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe stated they were working to integrate PDF (an open standard) and Flash to make for better, interactive Web functionality and that they planned to make the system open to encourage open source adoption.
I thought they stated that the games had to be written to take advantage of this, it wasn't so much an automatic boost as one that you need to apply to take full advantage of.
Their literature (sparse as it is) strongly implies otherwise, but I don't have any of the NDA stuff so I could be wrong.
So typically editors, edit submissions to some degree and make sure some basic guidelines are followed. One of those is making sure acronyms are defined the first time they are used, especially if it is a really common acronym like Network Time Protocol, but you're using it to mean something else. For more information please read the Chicago Manual of Style.
But I can't help but feel a little hipocritical[sic]. We (generally) don't seek to change homosexuals in this regard because "that's just the way they are". But simply because the object of their affection is under age (or not human) we cannot accept that as "natural" and feel compelled to change them.
It is not hypocrisy because there is a real and fundamental difference between the two behaviors. Acting on homosexual tendencies hurts no one and is not a conflict of rights between citizens. It is two consenting adults exercising their free will.
When a pedophile acts on their tendency, they are acting on a person who is not yet competent to make such an important choice and who has been trained to submit their will to their elders and authority figures. They don't have the rights of an adult and thus don't have the responsibilities. Having sex with a child violates a trust that child has in adults and is therefore unethical.
Wanting to have sex with another of the same sex or with a child, or wanting to kill people is not "wrong." But if you act upon the latter two then you are taking away the rights of another, and that is the point where your own rights end.
The right to refuse business is a long-standing tradition, at least in this part of the world. Verizon can generally choose not to do business with whomever they wish, with certain provisions relating to discrimination.
True, but in doing so they lose a group of special privileges allocated to those that are "common carriers" and who just carry the mail and don't know what's in it. For example, common carriers are not prosecuted for transporting drugs, death threats, child pornography, or government secrets, even if the transportation of such things is illegal. When a carrier starts looking at the content and censoring some of it, they have taken responsibility for all the content and are no longer protected from lawsuits or criminal charges with regard to their content. I think you need to look into what a common carrier is and under what restrictions they operate in order to have that status. They have certainly endangered that status and may have opened themselves to huge amounts of legal liability.
I feel the same way about murderers... I mean, most murderers are honestly nice, normal people.
This analogy is not apt. To be apt, you'd have to replace "murderer" with "homicidal person." Have you ever talked about wanting to kill people? How about read about someone who expressed a desire to kill, but never had done so? That is analogous to a person attracted to minors. It is the acting on that attraction that is unethical.
Since our countr(ies) have no moral foundation anymore - I see no problem with ANYTHING anymore. Ah, to be free at last.
It is important to know why a behavior such as murder or child molestation is unethical, not just assume it is because that is what you were once told. By understanding the reasoning, we can make informed decisions and explain logically why one thing is okay and another is not.
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Every time this topic is discussed, I hear the same excuses. Mostly, people claim that the US is too large and with too many rural areas. It's a load of crap. We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of lines, more per person than numerous other countries and we still have much slower and more expensive service than those countries. Sweden has been the model of how to do this right. Despite government corruption and favoritism on par with the US, they have managed almost complete saturation, for less per-person government subsidy, and with a population density almost the same as the US.
The truth is, the US has combined the worst elements of several models. We don't have a free market to drive competition because of local telcom monopolies and failure of the FCC to enforce fair use. We don't have the benefits of central planning and widespread coverage of a socialist system, because the government just hands out money in subsidies and then does not even blink when that money does not go to the projects we were supposedly funding in the first place. So we get crappy coverage and service and high prices.
The US has high labor costs, declining manufacturing, and not a lot of unique industry. The information economy and exporting intellectual property may be our best option for maintaining a real role as an economic powerhouse. For that to happen we need two things, education, and technology. We shouldn't be 5th in broadband or 10th, we should be 1st. That two trillion dollars we blew in Iraq would have run a fiber connection and provided free internet connections to every house in the US for years to come. Heck, just the money we spent already subsidizing telecoms would have provided a fast connection to every home if we'd actually just spent it on that instead of giving it away to monopolists.
Have you seen China's network backbone diagrams? They have a beautiful three tiered full mesh that came out of a textbook. I know there is a lot of prejudice against socialist projects in the US, but we're falling behind very quickly. We either need internet and phone networks treated as a public utility and run by the government or we need to remove the local monopolies, stop politicians from taking the telecoms bribes, and have a real competitive market with equally huge subsidies given to any new players that want to build a complete competing network.
The time has come. Suck it up and invest in the future of the US with hard cash and reforms, or be left behind the rest of the world. Most Americans are blind to how some other countries are now technologically superior. How their gadgets work everywhere and are more advanced than anything sold here. his needs to be corrected now.
The moon revolves with a period of 27+ days (the sidereal period). Furthermore, any body in space with a molten core that moves with a regularly changing momentum (e.g., orbits anything) will revolve. This is due to the inertia of the molten core. So, a celestial body with a molten core that does not spin is theoretically possible, but it would require that the body is not in orbit, or that the orbit's diameter is so huge that the angular momentum is insignificant.
So you're arguing if the core is hot enough to be molten, it also has to be fluid enough to be generating a field we would have detected, based upon the rotation and your knowledge of how a geodynamo works? My understanding of the latter is pretty sketchy (I'm not sure many people if any really understand it completely), but I find it hard to believe that the cooling of the core would be so uniform as to always maintain a spinning central sphere such that it creates a noticeable magnetic field.
Another person her pointed out Mars as an example. It spins more slowly, but has a molten core much larger than any the moon would have and the result is a very, very weak field. I'm unconvinced that a noticeable magnetic field would necessarily be produced by any molten core the moon might have. I simply don't think the understanding of how these fields are generated or of the conditions of the moon and their affects are comprehensive enough to make this judgement. We don't even know that the molten material that might be the center of the moon would be one that would generate a magnetic field. I'll agree the lack of a field is a possible indicator, but not strong enough to draw a probable conclusion from.
The major indicator that a molten core is not present is the lack of a dipolar field -- which a geodynamo (from the molten core) would cause.
I'm not sure you can equate "molten core" with "geodynamo." I mean, even assuming the moon had a molten core acting as a geodynamo and creating a field, and that that core cooled sufficiently, so that the spin was interrupted, wouldn't you end up with a smaller molten core that was not spinning in such a way as to generate a field and was just undergoing random fluidic movements?
I'm no geophysicist, but a celestial body with a molten core that was not spinning could certainly exist. Is it improbable that the moon is such a body?
Dick DeVos spent a LOT more than Jennifer Granholm on his ad campaign, and lost by a fairly large margin...
Do you have numbers on this? Do they include the $150 million of state funds Granholm basically handed to Ford as a PR move?
I also saw many more commercials against the MCRI (the amendment to ban affirmative action by the state, for you non-Michiganders) and that passed by an even stronger margin.
Again, I'm not sure of the numbers on this one, but I saw quite a few ads in both directions with regard to that amendment. I suppose it depends upon what TV a person watches.
I'd say that ads have a fairly large influence on elections, because too many people rely on them for their information - but they don't change people's basic minds or attitudes, and that limits their influence to the uninformed and the undecided.
I disagree with this. Ads shape the debate in the minds of many. I heard a dozen people argue for banning dove hunting, for example and while factually they believed hunting doves was already illegal (it had been legal for 4 years) I also heard every argument revolve around the ethics of killing doves, not the ethics of taking that decision away from individuals and having the government choose for everyone. Look at the abortion debate's "pro-choice" (not pro abortion) discussions for a parallel. Most people never even considered the freedom of choice aspect, which was the important part of the issue.
This surprises me not at all. Usually the vote follows wherever the majority of marketing money is spent. Marketing works, that's why people spend so much money on it. Google results probably mirror the amount of marketing pretty well, although if one group ignored online marketing or concentrated on one other form, it might be off.
I'm actually very discouraged by the Michigan elections, not because I think all the votes went the wrong way, but because 99% of the people I talked to about an issue could repeat what they heard in a television ad, but had obviously not thought the issue through at all beyond that. I was 100% right in my predictions of the election, based simply on the TV ads.
If you don't understand why IPv6 is a geek fantasy that no one will "switch" to, you either don't know what the word "switch" means (it means REPLACE), or you don't actually work in IT.
IPv6 is for geeks. Geeks run the biggest networks in the world and understand the benefits. Or did you miss the fact that most of Comcast's network is IPv6 now, or that most tier 1 ISPs have at least their management network running IPv6? Most of this is invisible to the end user, but bringing IPv6 the rest of the way to the user can solve a lot of these big ISPs headaches. What is holding them back is proper support from OS manufacturers, and if Vista solves that, they will almost certainly make the move as Vista machines become the most common (with provisioning for older machines). They will probably market it as a feature too. Vista machines can take advantage of Iv6 for faster (as maintained by their QoS solution) internet connections.
Well most of the people I speak with seem aware they have a problem, they know that web pages and pop-ups are happening outside of their control.
Sure, but they don't know how to avoid having that condition recur or even if it can be changed.
Spambots, spam and pop-ups at best represent the least desirable part of ad revenue, at worst they are a criminal enterprise and should be treated as such.
Sure, but that does not address why people don't move to better solutions that protect them from these undesirable ads. Most people assume there is no way to avoid them, or that technology would be included with the really expensive computer they bought last week.
But I would love to see some real education for these users. If that has to be by losing their internet till they clean up then so be it.
I'm all in favor of user education, but once computers are improved to the level that such education is reasonable. If an expert in computer security with a PhD and a decade of experience in the field still occasionally gets their machine compromised by a random worm, how can you expect an average user to avoid it? Well you just have to constantly run updates, buy a hardware device to go between your cable modem and your computer, install a second user account and use that account when you run downloaded software or files, and follow the news to know what to avoid when there are zero day exploits, like right now. Does that seem like a reasonable amount of education for someone who wants to send e-mail and look at news sites and porno images every now and again? I don't think so.
I only see this getting worse as these things burrow deeper into the OS. Maybe Vista will help.
Vista is way too little, way too late, way too poorly implemented. Microsoft is 5-10 years behind where they should be for security. And they don't care because it doesn't touch their bottom line. They'll fix the security as soon as it makes them a pile of money and not before. Break Microsoft up into two OS companies and an applications company. Forbid any unmonitored communications between them. With two companies both with complete rights to the Windows code, the one that delivers a secure PC to customers first, at a lower price will be rich, rich, rich. The other will be less rich and all the other OS's will have a chance to compete as well. Suddenly instead of Microsoft providing whatever security is convenient you have five major companies competing to make money by trying to make the best, most secure solution. The innovation brought by competition has brought new and better products again and again. Lets let it work by enforcing the law and letting greed combined with a capitalist free market work for the people.
Normal? Hardly, first pop-up my dad had on his Dell had him on the phone to me for support.
If you take a random sampling of home computer users, something like 80% of them will be using IE on Windows and they will be getting pop-ups regularly. Half of them will be infected with some sort of malware. When these people go talk to each other, pop-ups and malware symptoms are normal behavior for modern computers.
TV ads are used to support the medium and have been with use as such almost from the beginning.
That's not the point. Advertising everywhere and being increasingly prevalent is normal for our culture and while ads are common on TV (most channels) pop-ups are common for Web browsing (most people's computers). The underlying economics of it does not come into play and none of this is going to make a normal, ignorant individual conclude something is wrong.
When you are ignorant as to the effect your computer is having on me and the rest of the internet community, you ignore the signs ( I can't tell you how often I've heard "It's sooooooo much slower then when I bought it, maybe the internet is full") and refuse to at least try and understand then you don't need a computer. Go use one a the library.
That's your proposed solution? Most computers get malware so we should change everyone's habits and have them abandon the home computer market and go to the library? Sorry, but that just isn't going to happen. How about instead, we enforce the laws we have on the books, so that Microsoft (and whatever other company is formed when we split MS up) are motivated to make machines that are relatively resistant to malware instead. Doesn't that seem a lot easier and better than trying to change the way most of the population behaves?
But I still think people should be held responsible, people should realize that there is a problem with their computer when a million pop-ups flood their screen or their computer starts moving like molasses in January.
Why? That is normal. Should people realize their is a problem when their TV shows are interrupted every 15 minutes by ads?
People assume a free market is operating because the US economy i founded on this and technically, our laws are supposed to be ensuring that it is happening. They incorrectly assume that if their was a better browser than IE, most computer manufacturers would bundle it with their computer, just as they assume that if there is a engine that uses less gas and costs less and has more power, car manufacturers would include it in most cars sold. The difference is, MS has a monopoly and uses it to prevent the best products from being chosen. The law is supposed to stop them, but it is not being enforced because MS gave a lot of money to a lot of corrupt people.
Biggest problem is most users are dumber then a sock full of hammers!
I really don't think so. Most infections involve no user interaction and there is no obvious sign to the user that they are infected. Even with trojans, people don't know the computer has an all or nothing security model and assume it does not since that is a crappy model for the current environment. They are ignorant, not dumb. Some people I know who have had their computer infected include brilliant physicists, biologists, and even a very, very well known and respected computer security expert. You don't have to be dumb, you just have to uninformed or careless and make some reasonable assumptions about the quality of Windows and our economy.
Look at a car as an example. If I refuse to do or pay for routine maintenance it will begin to create more and more pollution and use more and more fuel. Is it the manufactures job to fix it, no, is it the road builders job, no, is it the jerks that sold me crappy fuel, only if I can catch them. So when I fail smog tests I need to either quit using the car or pay to fix it.
If most cars using a component from one manufacturer, say Visteon, began failing emissions tests three minutes after you started it following the instructions in the owners manual, there would be a recall, regardless of whether or not the driver noticed how bad it was before their warranty expired. If half of all cars on the road did not meet emissions standards, do you think the government would or could force all of them to stop driving those cars?
And you're in the minority.
Perhaps, perhaps not, depending upon who this is targeting. You can't assume that because 80% of people use Windows and IE that 80% of the people that would use a given Web service will use Windows and IE. It may be more and it may be less. The interoperability is a consideration, because maps are often used collaboratively. This is not as bad as e-mail that fails for 20% of the population, but it is worse than something like an online recipe site that works for 80% of the population.
Most of the mums and dads out there flying around the place looking at stuff don't give a rats ass it doesn't run on ObscureLinuxDistro 1.0 or even OSX - it works for them, and so is just as accessible as some fantastically cross-platform solution.
True, but they do care when they e-mail their grandchild a link to a 3D map showing where the condo they rented in Florida is, and that precious grandchild says the site is broken and won't work for them and to use Google instead. My point is that because it is a use that lends itself to collaboration, it is hit harder by a built in 20% failure rate, than less collaborative uses. This is especially a problem when there is a direct competitor that does not have the same problem and has as much or more brand recognition.
There is a large category of pornography that deals with "young" girls. School girls, baby sitters, etc. These often feature young women (18 and older) dressing and "acting" in the manner of younger girls, say 15 or 16 year olds. Interest in this kind of material is not generally seen as an illness requiring treatment or a crime that should be punished. Pedophilia, however, in which the object of the man's desire is sexually undeveloped, say at the age of 11 or 12, is seen as an illness and a crime. Is "boy love" an interest in sexually developed young men, ages 15-20 or so, or is "boy love" an interest in 11 and 12 year old boys? I think there's a difference.
I don't think the level of physical development is important at all, except in how it happens to correlate with mental development. If a 10 year old has Methuselah syndrome and has aged as much as the average 30 year old, does that make it any less of a crime to exploit their lack of sophistication and trust in adults to have sex with them, even though they are not responsible enough to make such a choice?
The fundamental problem here is exploitation of those who do not have the rights, social position, or experience to make important life choices. Attraction to those people is not a problem by itself, merely something that can lead to said problem if people do not behave ethically. If you're attracted to 16 year old girls or 8 year old girls, it doesn't bother me one bit. If you take advantage of either, however, and have sex with them before they are ready, then you've done something I find repugnant. For that matter, I would find it unethical to have sex with a 20 year old who I do not feel is in the position to responsibly make that choice, either due to severe immaturity, or some other factor. Of course my ethical standards are not everyone's I also would not have sex with someone who was indebted to me, either financially or emotionally (saved from burning building).
It is the underlying ethics that are the reason pedophilia is a problem and ethics only apply to actions, not thoughts.
Pedophilia is commonly defined as a sexual attraction to children. I don't know what "boy love" is commonly defined as, and even "love" has a great many definitions, some of which are ambiguous. In general, the gender is not a factor. Why? Does it make a difference?
How is this going to hurt Novell in any way, shape or form.
MS is going for the next big lock-in, probably with Web services. If they can get it, with the help of Suse, they will stab them when they turn their back, just as they have again and again. hose who do not learn from very recent history...
I'm going to formally evaluate a number of them and pick the one that works best for what I want to do and that has a roadmap that fits with what I think I want to do in the future.
I own a business that is 100% MS right now. Everything is working well, but if we ever need a Linux server in the future, I know what distro I'm choosing...
Perhaps the fact that you make decisions based upon hearsay and company reputations is the reason you have a 100% Microsoft shop in an industry where that is very rarely the best financial solution.
Uhm, it's the name of the company.
No, "NTP Incorporated" is the name of the company.
So do I have to write "Coca-Cola, which produces sodas and other types of beverages"
That depends, is there something else called Coca-Cola, aside from the company, that is the most common use of the term and is Coca-Cola the company an obscure firm that produces nothing and is known only to a few lawyers?
It's not the job of a writer to baby readers by telling them every little bit of extraneous information.
No, it's the job of the editor, to make sure acronyms, especially uncommon acronyms, and especially unusual uses of a common acronym to mean something other than the common definition, are expanded or explained. I'm sure anyone else who has worked as an editor will tell you the same.
Where exactly is the lack of information?
The lack of information is where they say "NTP" instead of "NTP Inc., a patent litigation company" or "NTP Inc." It is the same common sense as if you were editing an article about a a company called "TV Technologies." In your first reference to "TV" you don't write "TV is banned from operating in Pennsylvania." It is misleading. You write "TV Technologies, a Chinese firm, is banned from operating in Pennsylvania."
And for more than that. Half the time when I'm looking at something like this, I am doing so to send it to someone else or at least want the option of so doing. If there is a 20% failure rate every time I do that, well that is a significant problem, regardless of which browser I use.
So what do you expect? Windows should be shipped without a browser?
Yes.
Oh I just bought a windows PC but how do I surf internet on it?
You use the browser pre-installed on the computer, specifically chosen by the OEM, not by Microsoft.
Oh for that you should buy a mac that comes BUNDLED with safari & cool media player and cool everything and is EU proof.
Did you even read my comment. Go back and read the part about how clueless people always present an analogy and it is always a non-monopoly. Gee, Apple is a non-monopoly for OS's and computers. Brilliant!
Sorry dude, I've stopped believing blogs as most of them (including Linux on the Wii) are nothing but lies and hoaxes.
It's one thing not to believe a random blog when it makes weird claims. It's another not to believe a blog from the person doing the work, when it is an expected move and is what the company talked about doing months ago. After the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe stated they were working to integrate PDF (an open standard) and Flash to make for better, interactive Web functionality and that they planned to make the system open to encourage open source adoption.
I thought they stated that the games had to be written to take advantage of this, it wasn't so much an automatic boost as one that you need to apply to take full advantage of.
Their literature (sparse as it is) strongly implies otherwise, but I don't have any of the NDA stuff so I could be wrong.
Unfortunately, the company's name actually appears to be NTP :-P
Actually, it is "NTP Incorporated."
So typically editors, edit submissions to some degree and make sure some basic guidelines are followed. One of those is making sure acronyms are defined the first time they are used, especially if it is a really common acronym like Network Time Protocol, but you're using it to mean something else. For more information please read the Chicago Manual of Style.
But I can't help but feel a little hipocritical[sic]. We (generally) don't seek to change homosexuals in this regard because "that's just the way they are". But simply because the object of their affection is under age (or not human) we cannot accept that as "natural" and feel compelled to change them.
It is not hypocrisy because there is a real and fundamental difference between the two behaviors. Acting on homosexual tendencies hurts no one and is not a conflict of rights between citizens. It is two consenting adults exercising their free will.
When a pedophile acts on their tendency, they are acting on a person who is not yet competent to make such an important choice and who has been trained to submit their will to their elders and authority figures. They don't have the rights of an adult and thus don't have the responsibilities. Having sex with a child violates a trust that child has in adults and is therefore unethical.
Wanting to have sex with another of the same sex or with a child, or wanting to kill people is not "wrong." But if you act upon the latter two then you are taking away the rights of another, and that is the point where your own rights end.
The right to refuse business is a long-standing tradition, at least in this part of the world. Verizon can generally choose not to do business with whomever they wish, with certain provisions relating to discrimination.
True, but in doing so they lose a group of special privileges allocated to those that are "common carriers" and who just carry the mail and don't know what's in it. For example, common carriers are not prosecuted for transporting drugs, death threats, child pornography, or government secrets, even if the transportation of such things is illegal. When a carrier starts looking at the content and censoring some of it, they have taken responsibility for all the content and are no longer protected from lawsuits or criminal charges with regard to their content. I think you need to look into what a common carrier is and under what restrictions they operate in order to have that status. They have certainly endangered that status and may have opened themselves to huge amounts of legal liability.
I feel the same way about murderers... I mean, most murderers are honestly nice, normal people.
This analogy is not apt. To be apt, you'd have to replace "murderer" with "homicidal person." Have you ever talked about wanting to kill people? How about read about someone who expressed a desire to kill, but never had done so? That is analogous to a person attracted to minors. It is the acting on that attraction that is unethical.
Since our countr(ies) have no moral foundation anymore - I see no problem with ANYTHING anymore. Ah, to be free at last.
It is important to know why a behavior such as murder or child molestation is unethical, not just assume it is because that is what you were once told. By understanding the reasoning, we can make informed decisions and explain logically why one thing is okay and another is not.
A paedophile, perhaps? 'Pedophile' suggests something to do with feet.
Actually, a podophile is a foot fetishist. Pedophile is an appropriate term for someone attracted to children.