What you're failing to take into account is that Mac OS X already has good security. To continue your analogy, this would be like not bothering with a $10,000 security system (complete with a cage that descends from the ceiling and sharks with frickin' lasers) because the hardened-steel deadbolt locks you're already using are good enough.
No I'm not, really. I know OS X already has good inherent security. I run a Win/OS X/Linux network. I was specifically responding to the implication that worrying about viruses that don't exist was somehow a panicky (less calm) thing to do. My only point is that strictly worrying about known threats is the Microsoft approach to security, where free-roaming horses chuckle at the sound of barn doors being slammed. It's the currently unknown threats that will get you.
And just to continue the analogy game, it's more like being so complacent with your hardened steel deadbolts that you never check to make sure that the door frame isn't weakened by dry rot; or that you left a window open; or that your kids won't open the door to anyone claiming to be a pizza delivery dude; or, or, or....
Look, it's just a hypothetical case, so calm down!
When was I anything but calm? Besides, isn't your argument -- that we should be worrying about viruses that don't actually exist -- actually rather less calm?
I beg to differ. Worrying about viruses that don't exist should be SOP. Not worrying about viruses, and other security threats, that "don't exist" is exactly how we got into the mess we're in. It's like not putting a lock on your front door because no active burgler has been reported in your area. When you're considering security, you don't limit your defenses to existing threats. You plan for potential threats.
Funny how the most efficient free market solutions end up looking a lot like socialism. Only not enforced by an external agency, of course.
Why, no, it's not funny at all. The key difference has nothing to do with the solutions and everything to do with the enforced part.
Handing a dollar bill to a total stranger on the street because he needs help looks like a personal kindness. Doing it because he's holding a gun on me looks like robbery. Doing it because a third party is holding the gun looks like either robbery or taxation, depending on one's philosophical inclination.
While we may be overpopulated in the metropolitan areas, but I am absolutely positive that you cannot say you do not contribute to that overpopulation. Go to any truly rural area - like Montana or Alaska - and you will see that overpopulation of the planet is probably not within the grasp of our children's, children's, grandchildren's wildest imaginations.
Indeed! A recent article in Smithsonian stated that the entire population of the U.S. is only using about 4% of the land. We cram ourselves together because we like to be crammed together, not because there's nowhere else to go.
The U.S. population originally clustered around seacoasts, lakes, and rivers for the same reason the rest of the world did--transportation and industry. Now, even though geographical location is less important, we still feel the need to cluster together, with the trend leaning toward populations flowing back into urban areas and revitalized downtown sections.
Incidentally, it also indicated that without immigration, the U.S. would likely to be following the same growth-rate-reversal trend that the rest of the industrialized world is in.
The main point aside from my own observations was that I would like to see the portion of my money that actually goes to the author as well as the percentages that go to other costs.
As a writer, I'd can say that it's going to vary from author to author and/or from literary agent to literary agent. What the author gets for an advance and for royalties, even how those royalties are calculated, is all negotiable. The author's, or the agent's, negotiating strength depends on things like how well known or how "marketable" the author is, how "marketable" the book is (I won't say how "good" it is, because that actually has very little to do with it), how hot the subject matter is likely to be over the next six to eight months, and a lot of other considerations.
Ancillary rights also figure into it. Who gets what cut of film rights? Translation rights?
Sure, both printing and electronic distribution have reached the point that any author can bypass the whole traditional publisher system and keep all the profit. And freelance editors and proofreaders are readily available.
But who's going to pay for the advertising that gets it noticed? The distribution to get it into the hands of booksellers (dead-tree or electronic)? Who's going to pay the staff of publicists that get it mentioned on the talk show circuit or in newspapers and magazines? Who's going to get the promotional Web site set up? Who's going to get review copies sent out? Who's going to set up the book signings?
Production and distribution costs are just the start. Getting a book noticed is where much of the money gets spent.
But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
It's not actually as difficult as that. What it means is that the site's functionality can't be dependent on graphics. Simple use of ALT and TITLE attributes goes a long way toward making a graphics-heavy design accessible. A better step is to specify the graphics through CSS backgrounds that visually blot out the text content in a visual medium, but deliver usable text in a non-visual context.
The trick is to not think of Web pages as "this page for that browser, and that page for the other browser." Think, instead, of a weakly-typed variable. What you get is dependent on the context in which you view it.
And that type of behavior should be punishable just like any other false advertising.
A domain name is advertising? How do you think that's going to work. I can think of a lot of sites that are currently guilty of this kind of false advertising. www.nytimes.com does not show a list of where to buy clocks in the state of New York. www.google.com is an intentional misspelling of the word googol, intending to mislead those who are looking for specific math information. www.apple.com has nothing about Fuji, Gala, Red Delicious, or any other kind of apple; misleading fruit lovers everywhere. www.yourpay.com had no information whatever on the details of my paycheck.
I could go on all day, but I think I've made my point. Treating a domain name as advertising is just plain silly. It would, once again, have to come down to subjective interpretations of nebulous guidelines and result in law that would be impossible to either comply with or enforce.
It's clear Congress doesn't understand what the Internet is ("a series of tubes" said the learned Congressman) or how it works
It's clear you don't know how Congress works.
Ted Stevens is a United States Senator.
You're clearly not qualified to choose your own elected representatives. You should just give up.
If you two are finished tossing verbal grenades, you might want to stop and notice that you're both right -- and both wrong. Congressman as a noun means a member of congress. That applies to both senators and members of the House. As a title, it refers specifically to a member of the House, as in Congressman Foo (as opposed to Senator Bar). That makes the GP right and you wrong.
Having said that, the GP capitalized the word which, while wrong in the specific usage, at least implies the word's use as a title. That makes you right and the GP wrong.
In the long run, I suppose it doesn't really matter. This is/., which makes it far more interesting to dip each other's hair in inkwells, or shoot spitballs, or whatever the hell the drive-by jerk behavior d'jour is. By all means, stay as far as hell away from a meaningful discussion of the topic as possible.
A computer is an abstract machine for manipulating information. As good/.ers, we all understand that implicitly, but it's amazing how many people don't. They think it's a machine for running Office, or a machine for browsing the Web, or for email, or for playing games. Whereas it is actually all of the above and infinitely more, just as "the natural numbers" are not just 1, or 2, or 3 although it includes them.
Exactly. They're also becoming pervasive in areas that have little to do with either generic office work or traditional Internet services. There are microwave ovens that can "phone home" to look up recipes now, based on UPC code product scans. I'm waiting for the first exploit--maybe the "RoastToast Worm" or something that includes the phrase "All your HotPocket are belong to us."
Clearly, whatever definition is developed is going to have to be abstract enough to get away from the traditional concepts of "computer" in common, public parlance. Otherwise, it will have to be updated every twenty minutes or so, as the landscape changes.
And let's get over the crude physical analogy of "breaking into" a computer. A computer is a machine that executes instructions. When some sets of instructions are executed, the computer can display words, numbers, and pictures meaningful to humans, and accept human input through keyboards and other devices. A computer does not have a mind of any sort, and thus cannot be deceived, pleased, annoyed, or educated. Moreover, the idea of the computer as a structure or territory that could be broken into is simply an analogy that helps us to think about it; it does not correspond to anything real.
While I agree with what you wrote before this, it starts to fall apart here. Bank vaults, homes, and automobiles don't have minds either, so that's clearly not the deciding factor in your anti-analogy. Cracking a system without abusing the contents in any way really falls somewhere between "breaking and entering" and "unauthorized use of property." What is needed is a new concept.
In some legal contexts, a person's automobile is considered an extension of the person's home. It's a legal fiction that allows prior legal concepts to extend to previously (at the time) unknown areas. In some cases, that's a good thing. For example, it allows the extension of illegal search and seizure protections to a person's car rather than declaring the car the legal equivalent of "something they left lying around in public."
If someone leaves a car unlocked and the keys in it, many jurisdictions still consider it illegal to drive off with the car or even get into it. It's still unauthorized use of someone else's property, even though the car's owner was "just asking for it."
The difference, of course, is that a car's normal function doesn't include providing an interface to services which are intended to be accessible to the public. So while there are similarities to prior concepts, any attempt at a one-to-one comparison is doomed to failure. Clearly, the concept of "unauthorized use" is heading in the right direction, but something needs to be defined as the demarcation between what the system can do, and what the owner intended for the public to be able to do. Just because XYZ server can deliver root access to anyone who shoves a 5k packet to a particular port (for example), it clearly wasn't the owner's intent.
If we need a new descriptive, we need to dump all analogies and start fresh from the basic concepts. It's been done before. There's no reason it can't be done again.
That said, I'm not sure if initiating a computer-virus war would really be a good idea. It seems like we're definitely throwing stones out the window of a glass house there; do we really want to give our enemy a really good virus that they could tweak and throw back at us?
Yes, actually. Historically, what prompts improved structural building codes? Earthquakes. What prompts the construction of decent flood-control systems? Floods. I can go on. Throughout history, people have chosen not to act to counter hypothetical threats. I'm willing to bet the first domesticated horse get out of the first barn before someone thought to put a door on it.
You want a better level of security in the at-large computing world? You'll get it. Right after something seriously nasty happens to Joe Public. Until then, computer security hawks are all just Chicken Littles to the general public.
Historically such competitions and prizes tend to breed solutions optimized towards winning the prize or competition - not general technologies.
I guess that depends on how you define "historically." There have been some pretty major technological and societal changes brought about by such competitions. One of them is accurate clocks and, thus, accurate trans-oceanic navigation:
The Board of Longitude was established in England in 1714 and offered 20,000 pounds (12 million dollars in today's currency) to whoever would come up with a method for determining longitude with in a distance of 30- nautical miles during a voyage from England to the West Indies.
I think it's incredibly valuable to have both the video game and movie rating systems. Yes, they're imperfect, but at least they give me a starting place.
They are also voluntary systems. There is no law against putting out an unrated film. There is no law against using deceptive advertising for film content. Look how many Hollywood films promise to be interesting or funny or exciting when they're really just dull rehashes of the same crap that stunk the first time around.
If the pr0n industry wanted to adopt the system as described on a voluntary basis, no one would care. Giving it the force of law and setting up some federal board as the arbiters is dancing on the edge of a slippery cliff.
I think, if you check, you'll find that Larry Niven had something to do with it. In fact, if you check carefully, you'll find that Larry and Jerry called in Mr. Flynn (I don't use his first name because I don't know him personally, unlike the other two authors.) because they were having problems make it jell.
Holy carp! How did I manage to do that? My sincere apologies to Mr. Niven for the sloppy cut and paste.
he referred in that book to a world that was suffering from an ice age,
but that was not the issue, and it was not solved it in the text...
Acutally, the book was Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, and it went a little further than that. The ice age had been held off by pollution-related greenhouse warming. It was only after the world cleaned up its act that the ice age came on.
It works on mine, and it's apparently the same version. IE 6.0.2800.1106 and Win2k. Since it's using Flash, it may be dependent on which Flash player version is installed.
As noted elsewhere, ALL browser plug-in architectures are vulnerable (the reason TBL got involved in the first place). IE was just the first target because 1) they didn't license it (actually thumbed their noses at it), and 2) they have the largest market share.
Mozilla could be hit at any point Eolas feels like it.
I have to confess that I find patent-ese virtually unreadable, but from reading the patent document, I get the impression that every embedded Web-based technology is subject to it. The possible exceptions seem to be that the patent specifically describes (I think) compiled applications (computer readable program code) and ongoing interprocess communication between the browser, the plugin, and the server.
Then again, it could be a patent for "process by which to make money using lawsuits".
I dont know about the rest, but " Ogg Vorbis support?" becasue literally, no one other than a tiny tiny handful of people use it. And looking at how big a deal it was getting OGG working oh a portable (what was it? a floating point issue?) , it is really not worth the extra cost. Of the few people who even know what OGG is, fewer have OGG files even fewer will buy ipods. Do you see how in apple's eyes, it is basically some obscure format no one really uses?
That's kind of my point, though I'd argue that it's used by somewhat more than "a tiny tiny handful" of people. The iPod was designed to be a lowest-common-denominator kind of player in the same way that eight tracks were targeted at people for whom flipping over a cassette tape was too complicated. It's popularity has effectively lowered the general expectations for audio quality coming from a DAP.
ok, why is everything an ipod killer these days? I've seen everything from cell phones to game consoles labelled an ipod killer.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking from people who actually enjoy music. Let's face it, the iPod has done for digital audio players what the eight track did for hi-fi. Would it have killed them to spend a little extra development time to deliver gapless playback, a real equalizer, and Ogg Vorbis support?
"Defense in depth" does not mean that because you live in a gated community you can leave your front door unlocked. It means you lock your front door and you live in a gated community.
Substituting one layer for another does absolutely nothing to increase the depth of your security.
This, RIGHT HERE, is the problem. An industry powerhouse like Michael Dell tells the Linux community what he wants, and how does the Linux community respond? By insisting that he's wrong and telling him what he actually wants.
Do you honestly believe that's what Dell was saying? Personally, I think that's total horse crap! Allow me to run this through the BS filter for you. The BS-less version goes something like this:
Well, we can get away with Linux on servers, but if we get anywhere near the desktop, Gates will castrate me. So to stay on Bill's good side I'll tell everyone that the real reason is Microsoft-approved anti-Linux FUD item #37. No one will ever notice that it makes absolutely no business sense.
How does a plethora of distributions affect Dell choosing and supporting one of them? It doesn't. What keeps them from getting inundated with tech support calls regarding fifty different distros right now? Nothing. It's just "Sorry, we don't support that." How would selling and supporting a machine with distro-X on it change that? It wouldn't. Tech support calls for distro-Y just get "Sorry, we don't support that."
It's Dell's mouth moving, but it's Gates doing the talking.
never really got the whole "look we'll hide the file type for you! So convenient!" thing in Windows. The first thing I do on a new Windows box is unhide system files and unhide known extensions.
Oddly, it was intended to make Windows more Mac-like. The Mac GUI was heralded as being simpler and easier to use precisely because it didn't bog users down with techno-jargon like ".exe", ".com", etc. Windows decided to follow suit, while leaving the option available. The problem is, they were hiding the *one bloody thing* that determined whether or not the entity would execute with a double-click. OSs with execute bits don't need no stinkin' extensions for that.
If I recall correctly, there was some sort of experiment a while back along these lines that NASA did to see if they could generate electricity by having a super-long tether.
You're probably thinking of the TSS-1R (1996) mission, a joint experiment between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. It developed something like 8Kv across a tether just under 20km long.
Scientific American had an excellent article [pdf] on the electrical charges involved in tethered satellites back in August of 2004. It also went into the potential for using that energy as a means of propulsion to alter the tethered system's orbit.
Actually, they are taking care of their end users: The advertisers.
To quote from Blade Runner: "I'm not in the business, Mr. Deckard. I am the business." We who use Google products aren't the end users. We're the product that Google sells to the advertisers. It's the same with any other advertiser or advertising-supported medium.
I don't understand why that's so hard for people to figure out.
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No I'm not, really. I know OS X already has good inherent security. I run a Win/OS X/Linux network. I was specifically responding to the implication that worrying about viruses that don't exist was somehow a panicky (less calm) thing to do. My only point is that strictly worrying about known threats is the Microsoft approach to security, where free-roaming horses chuckle at the sound of barn doors being slammed. It's the currently unknown threats that will get you.
And just to continue the analogy game, it's more like being so complacent with your hardened steel deadbolts that you never check to make sure that the door frame isn't weakened by dry rot; or that you left a window open; or that your kids won't open the door to anyone claiming to be a pizza delivery dude; or, or, or....
I beg to differ. Worrying about viruses that don't exist should be SOP. Not worrying about viruses, and other security threats, that "don't exist" is exactly how we got into the mess we're in. It's like not putting a lock on your front door because no active burgler has been reported in your area. When you're considering security, you don't limit your defenses to existing threats. You plan for potential threats.
Why, no, it's not funny at all. The key difference has nothing to do with the solutions and everything to do with the enforced part.
Handing a dollar bill to a total stranger on the street because he needs help looks like a personal kindness. Doing it because he's holding a gun on me looks like robbery. Doing it because a third party is holding the gun looks like either robbery or taxation, depending on one's philosophical inclination.
Indeed! A recent article in Smithsonian stated that the entire population of the U.S. is only using about 4% of the land. We cram ourselves together because we like to be crammed together, not because there's nowhere else to go.
The U.S. population originally clustered around seacoasts, lakes, and rivers for the same reason the rest of the world did--transportation and industry. Now, even though geographical location is less important, we still feel the need to cluster together, with the trend leaning toward populations flowing back into urban areas and revitalized downtown sections.
Incidentally, it also indicated that without immigration, the U.S. would likely to be following the same growth-rate-reversal trend that the rest of the industrialized world is in.
Where did you get that idea?
As a writer, I'd can say that it's going to vary from author to author and/or from literary agent to literary agent. What the author gets for an advance and for royalties, even how those royalties are calculated, is all negotiable. The author's, or the agent's, negotiating strength depends on things like how well known or how "marketable" the author is, how "marketable" the book is (I won't say how "good" it is, because that actually has very little to do with it), how hot the subject matter is likely to be over the next six to eight months, and a lot of other considerations.
Ancillary rights also figure into it. Who gets what cut of film rights? Translation rights?
Sure, both printing and electronic distribution have reached the point that any author can bypass the whole traditional publisher system and keep all the profit. And freelance editors and proofreaders are readily available.
But who's going to pay for the advertising that gets it noticed? The distribution to get it into the hands of booksellers (dead-tree or electronic)? Who's going to pay the staff of publicists that get it mentioned on the talk show circuit or in newspapers and magazines? Who's going to get the promotional Web site set up? Who's going to get review copies sent out? Who's going to set up the book signings?
Production and distribution costs are just the start. Getting a book noticed is where much of the money gets spent.
It's not actually as difficult as that. What it means is that the site's functionality can't be dependent on graphics. Simple use of ALT and TITLE attributes goes a long way toward making a graphics-heavy design accessible. A better step is to specify the graphics through CSS backgrounds that visually blot out the text content in a visual medium, but deliver usable text in a non-visual context.
The trick is to not think of Web pages as "this page for that browser, and that page for the other browser." Think, instead, of a weakly-typed variable. What you get is dependent on the context in which you view it.
A domain name is advertising? How do you think that's going to work. I can think of a lot of sites that are currently guilty of this kind of false advertising. www.nytimes.com does not show a list of where to buy clocks in the state of New York. www.google.com is an intentional misspelling of the word googol, intending to mislead those who are looking for specific math information. www.apple.com has nothing about Fuji, Gala, Red Delicious, or any other kind of apple; misleading fruit lovers everywhere. www.yourpay.com had no information whatever on the details of my paycheck.
I could go on all day, but I think I've made my point. Treating a domain name as advertising is just plain silly. It would, once again, have to come down to subjective interpretations of nebulous guidelines and result in law that would be impossible to either comply with or enforce.
If you two are finished tossing verbal grenades, you might want to stop and notice that you're both right -- and both wrong. Congressman as a noun means a member of congress. That applies to both senators and members of the House. As a title, it refers specifically to a member of the House, as in Congressman Foo (as opposed to Senator Bar). That makes the GP right and you wrong.
Having said that, the GP capitalized the word which, while wrong in the specific usage, at least implies the word's use as a title. That makes you right and the GP wrong.
In the long run, I suppose it doesn't really matter. This is /., which makes it far more interesting to dip each other's hair in inkwells, or shoot spitballs, or whatever the hell the drive-by jerk behavior d'jour is. By all means, stay as far as hell away from a meaningful discussion of the topic as possible.
Exactly. They're also becoming pervasive in areas that have little to do with either generic office work or traditional Internet services. There are microwave ovens that can "phone home" to look up recipes now, based on UPC code product scans. I'm waiting for the first exploit--maybe the "RoastToast Worm" or something that includes the phrase "All your HotPocket are belong to us."
Clearly, whatever definition is developed is going to have to be abstract enough to get away from the traditional concepts of "computer" in common, public parlance. Otherwise, it will have to be updated every twenty minutes or so, as the landscape changes.
While I agree with what you wrote before this, it starts to fall apart here. Bank vaults, homes, and automobiles don't have minds either, so that's clearly not the deciding factor in your anti-analogy. Cracking a system without abusing the contents in any way really falls somewhere between "breaking and entering" and "unauthorized use of property." What is needed is a new concept.
In some legal contexts, a person's automobile is considered an extension of the person's home. It's a legal fiction that allows prior legal concepts to extend to previously (at the time) unknown areas. In some cases, that's a good thing. For example, it allows the extension of illegal search and seizure protections to a person's car rather than declaring the car the legal equivalent of "something they left lying around in public."
If someone leaves a car unlocked and the keys in it, many jurisdictions still consider it illegal to drive off with the car or even get into it. It's still unauthorized use of someone else's property, even though the car's owner was "just asking for it."
The difference, of course, is that a car's normal function doesn't include providing an interface to services which are intended to be accessible to the public. So while there are similarities to prior concepts, any attempt at a one-to-one comparison is doomed to failure. Clearly, the concept of "unauthorized use" is heading in the right direction, but something needs to be defined as the demarcation between what the system can do, and what the owner intended for the public to be able to do. Just because XYZ server can deliver root access to anyone who shoves a 5k packet to a particular port (for example), it clearly wasn't the owner's intent.
If we need a new descriptive, we need to dump all analogies and start fresh from the basic concepts. It's been done before. There's no reason it can't be done again.
Yes, actually. Historically, what prompts improved structural building codes? Earthquakes. What prompts the construction of decent flood-control systems? Floods. I can go on. Throughout history, people have chosen not to act to counter hypothetical threats. I'm willing to bet the first domesticated horse get out of the first barn before someone thought to put a door on it.
You want a better level of security in the at-large computing world? You'll get it. Right after something seriously nasty happens to Joe Public. Until then, computer security hawks are all just Chicken Littles to the general public.
I guess that depends on how you define "historically." There have been some pretty major technological and societal changes brought about by such competitions. One of them is accurate clocks and, thus, accurate trans-oceanic navigation:
They are also voluntary systems. There is no law against putting out an unrated film. There is no law against using deceptive advertising for film content. Look how many Hollywood films promise to be interesting or funny or exciting when they're really just dull rehashes of the same crap that stunk the first time around.
If the pr0n industry wanted to adopt the system as described on a voluntary basis, no one would care. Giving it the force of law and setting up some federal board as the arbiters is dancing on the edge of a slippery cliff.
Holy carp! How did I manage to do that? My sincere apologies to Mr. Niven for the sloppy cut and paste.
Acutally, the book was Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, and it went a little further than that. The ice age had been held off by pollution-related greenhouse warming. It was only after the world cleaned up its act that the ice age came on.
It's a great book. The heroes were SF fans.
It works on mine, and it's apparently the same version. IE 6.0.2800.1106 and Win2k. Since it's using Flash, it may be dependent on which Flash player version is installed.
I have to confess that I find patent-ese virtually unreadable, but from reading the patent document, I get the impression that every embedded Web-based technology is subject to it. The possible exceptions seem to be that the patent specifically describes (I think) compiled applications (computer readable program code) and ongoing interprocess communication between the browser, the plugin, and the server.
Then again, it could be a patent for "process by which to make money using lawsuits".
That's kind of my point, though I'd argue that it's used by somewhat more than "a tiny tiny handful" of people. The iPod was designed to be a lowest-common-denominator kind of player in the same way that eight tracks were targeted at people for whom flipping over a cassette tape was too complicated. It's popularity has effectively lowered the general expectations for audio quality coming from a DAP.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking from people who actually enjoy music. Let's face it, the iPod has done for digital audio players what the eight track did for hi-fi. Would it have killed them to spend a little extra development time to deliver gapless playback, a real equalizer, and Ogg Vorbis support?
Help me, Rockbox, you're my only hope.
"Defense in depth" does not mean that because you live in a gated community you can leave your front door unlocked. It means you lock your front door and you live in a gated community.
Substituting one layer for another does absolutely nothing to increase the depth of your security.
Do you honestly believe that's what Dell was saying? Personally, I think that's total horse crap! Allow me to run this through the BS filter for you. The BS-less version goes something like this:
How does a plethora of distributions affect Dell choosing and supporting one of them? It doesn't. What keeps them from getting inundated with tech support calls regarding fifty different distros right now? Nothing. It's just "Sorry, we don't support that." How would selling and supporting a machine with distro-X on it change that? It wouldn't. Tech support calls for distro-Y just get "Sorry, we don't support that."
It's Dell's mouth moving, but it's Gates doing the talking.
Oddly, it was intended to make Windows more Mac-like. The Mac GUI was heralded as being simpler and easier to use precisely because it didn't bog users down with techno-jargon like ".exe", ".com", etc. Windows decided to follow suit, while leaving the option available. The problem is, they were hiding the *one bloody thing* that determined whether or not the entity would execute with a double-click. OSs with execute bits don't need no stinkin' extensions for that.
You're probably thinking of the TSS-1R (1996) mission, a joint experiment between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. It developed something like 8Kv across a tether just under 20km long.
Scientific American had an excellent article [pdf] on the electrical charges involved in tethered satellites back in August of 2004. It also went into the potential for using that energy as a means of propulsion to alter the tethered system's orbit.
Actually, they are taking care of their end users: The advertisers.
To quote from Blade Runner: "I'm not in the business, Mr. Deckard. I am the business." We who use Google products aren't the end users. We're the product that Google sells to the advertisers. It's the same with any other advertiser or advertising-supported medium.
I don't understand why that's so hard for people to figure out.