It really all depends. Once, I took a (dead) Sony Clie back, after two years. I still had the PSP (best $70 I ever spent.) The battery was behaving erratically, so it wasn't completely dead yet, and I was afraid it would work fine for them.
So, I take it back and sure enough, he doesn't know any real odd behavior. (Except that the battery meter kind of fluctuates.) Still, he said, "Well, I'll take your word for it. We don't carry Clies anymore. Would you like in-store credit?"
The whole thing took about 20 minutes. Everyone was polite. Of course, that isn't to say that everyone's experience is like that. But still, if you run into some nice employees, it can still be a pleasant experience.
And yeah, I hate those $#@$#@ receipt checkers. Why do they always give the job to someone with Parkinson's? I think it's great that they hire employees with disabilities, but don't put them in a position where expediency is important. *sigh*
I was generally speaking from ChoicePoint's perspective. They view your information as their property. You can bet they viewed this leak as a loss of revenue, not as a potential risk to hundreds of thousands of people.
You are not a ChoicePoint customer. ChoicePoint cares NOTHING about you. You are a number in a database, with a bunch of corresponding fields. Unless you've paid ChoicePoint for their services, you mean absolutely nothing to this company.
Furthermore, people keep complaining that their information got stolen. It's not your information. It's ChoicePoint's information. It belongs to them, and to the people that purchase access to it from them. They took the time to collect and aggregate it, and they own it. The fact that it may or may not directly affect your life for better or worse in substantial ways does not even enter the equation.
Obviously, there is something fundamentally wrong here that needs to be corrected. In my opinion, information should be held by an organization specicially authorized by the government to do so. The information should be encrypted and secured, and leaks should be punishable by prison time. A standard, open algorithm should be created, to convert the information into a simple number (like a "credit score.") Companies pay for access to these scores. Only upon showing direct need, in a court of law, should specific information be given to specific companies, under strict confidentiality. If a particular company needs to know a specific detail about all of their customers, they can petition to be granted access to that information only, under the same confidentiality agreement.
Furthermore, individuals should be given unfettered access to their own information, on request. (Identity verification should be draconian here.) Individuals should have the right to challenge an inaccuracy, and to provide documentation disproving it.
Granted, it may have some issues of its own, but at least it's a step up from "give everyone's most intimate financial details to every company that pays us a nickel." Any thoughts?
Unfortunately, I lack the depth of scientific knowledge to debate this effectively. Simply put, I think there is a lot of evidence that points toward a young(er) Earth, such as fossilized trees sticking through multiple periods of sediment, the ever shortening distance between us and the moon, and so on and so forth. Do I believe the earth is 6,000? years old? No, not really. I don't, however, think its age is measured in billions, or even hundreds of millions.
Furthermore, the entire Big Bang theory seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics on its face. Similar with Evolution, although I'm not sure the laws of entropy directly apply to the behavior of living organisms.
Then again, I am but a humble PHP programmer. What do I know about this shit?;)
By the way, I should clarify that by "fundie Creationist nut," I was referring to my view of my former self. I was fairly vocal about my usually ill-informed opinions. I certainly don't wish to imply that all Creationists are nuts, or apply the blanket term "fundie" to all Christians. I know a lot of very, very good Christian people, and I have a great deal of respect for them.
As a former fundie Creationist nut turned atheist, I can say that they WILL have an answer for it. Creationists tend to come up with very convincing arguments, and - for what it's worth - I'm still not satisfied with the Big Bang, or the theory of evolution, despite the fact that I've rejected creationism.
How I would have viewed it is that the Bible never says that God ONLY created life on Earth. The Bible says the Christ *died for teh sins* of humans, which the Bible implies are only on Earth. In other words, until we find sentient life on other planets, the Christians won't really have to change their tune much.
I happen to know what it's like to reverse engineer a compiler, since that's what I'm doing right now. My project is trying to reverse engineer a rather coherent, fairly well documented system. Also, our target is now defunct, and we don't have to get "certified."
I cannot imagine what it must be like to try and do the same with documentation that hasn't been updated for years, and with the target's parent company being openly hostile toward you.
He's not complaining because he can't use Java's source code. He even said Java's source code is a complete mess. Few open source developers even want to SEE proprietary (or formerly proprietary) code, much less try to shoehorn it into their application.
We aren't asking for free code. We're asking for companies that brag about openness to use well documented, open specifications so we can see what we're doing. If they want to jerk the rug out from under us at version 2, and randomly change a bunch of stuff around, that's fine - as long as they tell us what they did.
And before anyone goes off on a rant about how it's not a business's responsibility to pander to the FLOSS community, you are correct. Bear in mind, however, that Sun likes to claim it's FLOSS-friendly. If you're going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk.
Jon admits to a bias and refuses to correct it... but he wants to still correct all sorts of faults he detects in the mainstream media.
This was exactly my point. Let me rephrase. Do you have a bias? Are you a liberal, conservative, libertarian? Librarian? Unless you're absolutely apolitical, you have some sort of affinity for a particular political party. Now, to use your argument:
"You have an admitted bias, and you refuse to correct it. But you still assume to attack Jon Stewart for having an admitted bias. When your hypocrisy was pointed out, you say, in effect, 'I'm not a journalist!' To which I say, 'EXACTLY!'"
Jon Stewart isn't a journalist. He plays one on TV. Your second argument, "So taking his advice about media bias is taking the advice of an arrogant joker." seems to indicate that you don't believe comedians can complain about how crappy the news has gotten. If that's what you really believe, well... I'm afraid we're probably never going to come to an agreement.:-)
I concede in advance that I don't have an extensive knowledge of this topic, but I'll throw my two cents in here anyway. Rest assured, paramedics are standing by with the jaws of life to unjam my foot from my mouth.
I believe the entire point is that TDS *doesn't* want to be treated seriously by its audience. As an earlier post pointed out, they even said as much in on of their disclaimers. You can say what you want about ulterior motives, but the fact of the matter is they are a comedy show, view themselves as a comedy show, and have never done or said anything to contradict that position.
People get confused when they see Jon attacking the "real" media, because they don't realize that Jon isn't speaking to them as a journalist. He's speaking to them as a concerned citizen. Something along the lines of, "Look, I run a comedy show, and people still think it's better than your real news. That shouldn't be happening." I think it's time for an illustration.
Let's say for a moment that a popular TV doctor from "E.R." breaks his leg, and goes to the real emergency room, where he is mistreated by the staff, neglected by the doctors, overcharged for the services, and denied appropriate medical treatment. As a celebrity, he has access to the public and decides to hold a conference, blasting the facility for its poor performance.
The hospital issues a press release, pointing out numerous instances in the show "E.R." where his character failed in his duties, or where much worse events transpired. They end by saying that if the show can't get it right, he has no right to complain about the real thing.
Can you see the absurdity of this? The only reasonable response is, "I didn't know hospitals took their cues on ethics from cable television." Meanwhile people like myself, who have little or no regard for "E.R." rail away at detractors by echoing the same arguments used in the press release.
The point is that The Daily Show is not a news show. Jon isn't speaking as a journalist, attacking his colleagues. He's speaking as a concerned citizen, attacking the people charged with providing him accurate, unbiased information, and failing to do their job. His capacity as a news anchor for TDS serves only to grant him access to the public. To accuse Jon Stewart of hypocrisy in failing his own journalistic responsibilities is every bit as absurd as charging a TV actor with failing in his duties as a medical professional.
It depends on your perspective. If you consider the right to freely view, modify, and redistribute source code as a natural right, then ANY infringement of that right is "restriction."
You're looking at it from a the perspective that such things AREN'T a natural right, and therefore allowing them is granting rights.
In other words, it's the difference between a philosophical and legal view. Legally, according to US Copyright, you're granting them rights. Philosophically, according to copyleft, you're restricting their rights. You're both right, so there's no reason to keep arguing about it.
With regard to photographing houses, I meant the interior. Most furniture is sculpture, as are most of the knick-nacks you see sitting around. Even a lot of electronics have very innovative, interesting designs. I believe they would qualify as sculpture. I didn't phrase what I was saying clearly, and that's my fault.
You've made some excellent points, and I stand corrected on a number of issues. Thanks for pointing those out to me.
Actually, it's more akin to the RIAA charging you everytime one of their copyrighted songs shows up in an audio/video recording of yours, or the way the biocorps are charging farmers for GM seed ending up in their fields.
The problem is that the law is black and white, and this is such a gray area. How much control should artists have over their work? Should it change over time? What happens in unusual circumstances? What's the difference between taking a photograph of a painting for your scrap book, and taking a hi res Photograph to be used for reproduction?
In this particular instance, I think it's pretty clear. The sculpture itself is copyrighted, which means its three dimensional shape and form are owned by the artist. The authors can't realistically claim copyright ownership on a Photograph of it. They are most likely arguing that photographs are a derivative work of their copyrighted design, but that is (as in an aforementioned example of photographing cars) ludicrous. There is no possible way this can stand up in court. If it does, then there is no way you can take a photograph of anything man-made. Pretty much anything not utilitarian or standardized is sculpture in some form, and therefore copyrighted. By taking a photograph of a typical home, you would be creating a derivative work of dozens of copyrighted sculptures.
People need to stop looking out for themselves and actually spend some time thinking about the consequences of their actions.
It's already a Microsoft-dominated Tech Marketplace. Microsoft already uses every loophole there is to drive out competitors. It's not a step toward anything. They're just doing what's necessary to protect their investment.
Meanwhile I, and other open source developers, are doing what's necessary to make sure their investment was a bad one.
I don't get viruses or spyware - even on my Windows machines. I'm sure you don't either. We're talking about grandma here. Or your sixteen year old sister, with an entire partition of her hard disk devoted to her collection of smilies. #___L#33338440117[kMGR44]:OMFGLOL[MM483^)]
You know what? Forget what I said about making it easy to use. It should be automatic. When the system detects something dangerous, it rolls back to a safe state and instructs the user to take any necessary steps. Experienced users should be able to turn it off, but Joe Stupid will just have to live with the consequences of his failure to act.
There are what's called Volume Shadows in Windows XP and later (naturally more accessible in the server version). It's basically what you describe.
Then make it more accessible in the home version. Slap a cute GUI on it, give it an animated talking animal assistant, or give it a built in version of solitaire. Whatever makes it easy and practical for Grandma.
There's also (even in...shrug... Windows Me) System Restore, which does provide a degree of restoration of Registry and files to a previous point in time.
That's just for the operating system, and even still, it's kind of a pain in the ass.
The problems here are things like for how long you should go on keeping old versions, how do you know when the malware change was done, how sure can you be that the malware in question isn't capable of injecting itself into the previous versions, and so on.
The length should be adjustable, and should default to about a month's worth of changes. As for knowing when the malware infection occurred, that would probably require some new, currently unthought of system. Perhaps the system needs to start keeping hashes of files around, and doing regular checks for unexplained changes. When it finds a something fishy, it asks the user if s/he wants to undo recent changes to that file. Nobody's saying it would be trivial, but proactive management is almost always better than reactive management.
As far as keeping it out of previous versions, that's what write access controls are for. As I said in my post, it would require some architectural changes for Microsoft.
With regard to physical hardware separation, that would be something hardware manufacturers would have to help out with.
The fact of the matter is that protecting any network-enabled system is work, and users don't want to do that work. It becomes our job, as the tech industry, to do it for them. Not out of altruism, but to prevent their failure to act from harming us.
I would like to see an operating system feature that offers what amounts to "Undo" for disk drives. VirtualPC has had this for years, and there are (or were) a handful of third party programs available to do the same thing. Basically, it keeps a running log of changes to the disk. At any time, you can go "oops" and back up a configurable number of steps. Some backup programs offer a similar feature, but they're again third party, and the interface is confusing to new users.
This should be completely integrated into the operating system, and the data log should have root permissions. The OS itself could even watch for suspicious activity, and ask the user if he/she would like to roll back. Of course, this would require some architectural changes, and - in the case of Windows - a proper implementation of a multiple user environment. Still, I think it's the only final solution to the problems offered by viruses and their ilk.
Windows does not drive video card development. Games drive video card development, and they only drive it one direction: forward. The bigger problem is that PCs have such a wide variety of video cards, ranging from high-end to low-end, external to built-in, and they all differ in various ways. The way you do something on one card may not be the same way you do it on another.
Apple doesn't have this problem, because Quartz Extreme supports a finite set of graphics cards, and Apple computers all ship with compatible cards. Even without Quartz Extreme, however, most of Mac OS X's eye candy still works because it's implemented in software. The only flaw is that you can't disable the fluff and save those cycles. In the end, it's probably all for the best, because Mac OS X looks like ass without it, but it would still be nice to turn off the antialiased fonts and glowing buttons when I'm trying to run three Adobe applications at once.
Then again, I could just stop beiing a cheap bastard and buy more memory. What was my point again?
I'm not entirely sure whether you're serious or not, but that picture is from a Fark.com* photoshop contest. To the best of our knowledge, the German national socialist party never attempted to build giant, walking robot suits.
* It have been a SomethingAwful.com Photoshop Phriday.
Oh come off it. As a patent lawyer, you should know the ridiculous time and expense of attempting to obtain a patent, and the relative odds of an individual defending a patent lawsuit vs. a corporation doing the same. The math always favors the one with the most money.
Occasionally "the little guy" will stick it to the "big, evil corporation" and win, but 99/100 times, it's going to be the corporation protecting its investments. And, as EOLAS vs. Microsoft illustrated, even when the little guy wins, the news isn't always good.
The fact is that software patents are a bad idea, no matter who benefits from them. Locking up information and knowledge prevents progress, it doesn't promote it. Inventions are born out of necessity, NOT out of the promise of financial gain.
Anyone who has ever composited photos can tell you that this is improbable in the extreme. Transferring a subject to a new background is an incredibly difficult process, if you have any prayer of making it convincing.
Everything from lighting to perspective, in-scene reflections, and even the quality of the photos being combined has to be carefully taken into account and expertly matched. Unless you're starting with similar photographs, it's a nearly hopeless proposition. Your average nitwit with a copy of MS Paint has no hope of pulling this off, and, in any case, the vast majority of people lack access to huge quantities of child porn to use as source photos.
In other words, the odds of this becoming a serious problem are virtually nil. I think it's a great idea, and a wonderful use of technology. It's the cops actually doing some work, instead of trying to pass retarded, technophobic laws.
Slashdot Mirror
It really all depends. Once, I took a (dead) Sony Clie back, after two years. I still had the PSP (best $70 I ever spent.) The battery was behaving erratically, so it wasn't completely dead yet, and I was afraid it would work fine for them.
So, I take it back and sure enough, he doesn't know any real odd behavior. (Except that the battery meter kind of fluctuates.) Still, he said, "Well, I'll take your word for it. We don't carry Clies anymore. Would you like in-store credit?"
The whole thing took about 20 minutes. Everyone was polite. Of course, that isn't to say that everyone's experience is like that. But still, if you run into some nice employees, it can still be a pleasant experience.
And yeah, I hate those $#@$#@ receipt checkers. Why do they always give the job to someone with Parkinson's? I think it's great that they hire employees with disabilities, but don't put them in a position where expediency is important. *sigh*
I was generally speaking from ChoicePoint's perspective. They view your information as their property. You can bet they viewed this leak as a loss of revenue, not as a potential risk to hundreds of thousands of people.
You are not a ChoicePoint customer. ChoicePoint cares NOTHING about you. You are a number in a database, with a bunch of corresponding fields. Unless you've paid ChoicePoint for their services, you mean absolutely nothing to this company.
Furthermore, people keep complaining that their information got stolen. It's not your information. It's ChoicePoint's information. It belongs to them, and to the people that purchase access to it from them. They took the time to collect and aggregate it, and they own it. The fact that it may or may not directly affect your life for better or worse in substantial ways does not even enter the equation.
Obviously, there is something fundamentally wrong here that needs to be corrected. In my opinion, information should be held by an organization specicially authorized by the government to do so. The information should be encrypted and secured, and leaks should be punishable by prison time. A standard, open algorithm should be created, to convert the information into a simple number (like a "credit score.") Companies pay for access to these scores. Only upon showing direct need, in a court of law, should specific information be given to specific companies, under strict confidentiality. If a particular company needs to know a specific detail about all of their customers, they can petition to be granted access to that information only, under the same confidentiality agreement.
Furthermore, individuals should be given unfettered access to their own information, on request. (Identity verification should be draconian here.) Individuals should have the right to challenge an inaccuracy, and to provide documentation disproving it.
Granted, it may have some issues of its own, but at least it's a step up from "give everyone's most intimate financial details to every company that pays us a nickel." Any thoughts?
Unfortunately, I lack the depth of scientific knowledge to debate this effectively. Simply put, I think there is a lot of evidence that points toward a young(er) Earth, such as fossilized trees sticking through multiple periods of sediment, the ever shortening distance between us and the moon, and so on and so forth. Do I believe the earth is 6,000? years old? No, not really. I don't, however, think its age is measured in billions, or even hundreds of millions.
;)
Furthermore, the entire Big Bang theory seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics on its face. Similar with Evolution, although I'm not sure the laws of entropy directly apply to the behavior of living organisms.
Then again, I am but a humble PHP programmer. What do I know about this shit?
By the way, I should clarify that by "fundie Creationist nut," I was referring to my view of my former self. I was fairly vocal about my usually ill-informed opinions. I certainly don't wish to imply that all Creationists are nuts, or apply the blanket term "fundie" to all Christians. I know a lot of very, very good Christian people, and I have a great deal of respect for them.
As a former fundie Creationist nut turned atheist, I can say that they WILL have an answer for it. Creationists tend to come up with very convincing arguments, and - for what it's worth - I'm still not satisfied with the Big Bang, or the theory of evolution, despite the fact that I've rejected creationism.
How I would have viewed it is that the Bible never says that God ONLY created life on Earth. The Bible says the Christ *died for teh sins* of humans, which the Bible implies are only on Earth. In other words, until we find sentient life on other planets, the Christians won't really have to change their tune much.
I want 19 years of my life back...
I happen to know what it's like to reverse engineer a compiler, since that's what I'm doing right now. My project is trying to reverse engineer a rather coherent, fairly well documented system. Also, our target is now defunct, and we don't have to get "certified."
I cannot imagine what it must be like to try and do the same with documentation that hasn't been updated for years, and with the target's parent company being openly hostile toward you.
He's not complaining because he can't use Java's source code. He even said Java's source code is a complete mess. Few open source developers even want to SEE proprietary (or formerly proprietary) code, much less try to shoehorn it into their application.
We aren't asking for free code. We're asking for companies that brag about openness to use well documented, open specifications so we can see what we're doing. If they want to jerk the rug out from under us at version 2, and randomly change a bunch of stuff around, that's fine - as long as they tell us what they did.
And before anyone goes off on a rant about how it's not a business's responsibility to pander to the FLOSS community, you are correct. Bear in mind, however, that Sun likes to claim it's FLOSS-friendly. If you're going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk.
Jon admits to a bias and refuses to correct it... but he wants to still correct all sorts of faults he detects in the mainstream media.
:-)
This was exactly my point. Let me rephrase. Do you have a bias? Are you a liberal, conservative, libertarian? Librarian? Unless you're absolutely apolitical, you have some sort of affinity for a particular political party. Now, to use your argument:
"You have an admitted bias, and you refuse to correct it. But you still assume to attack Jon Stewart for having an admitted bias. When your hypocrisy was pointed out, you say, in effect, 'I'm not a journalist!' To which I say, 'EXACTLY!'"
Jon Stewart isn't a journalist. He plays one on TV. Your second argument, "So taking his advice about media bias is taking the advice of an arrogant joker." seems to indicate that you don't believe comedians can complain about how crappy the news has gotten. If that's what you really believe, well... I'm afraid we're probably never going to come to an agreement.
I concede in advance that I don't have an extensive knowledge of this topic, but I'll throw my two cents in here anyway. Rest assured, paramedics are standing by with the jaws of life to unjam my foot from my mouth.
I believe the entire point is that TDS *doesn't* want to be treated seriously by its audience. As an earlier post pointed out, they even said as much in on of their disclaimers. You can say what you want about ulterior motives, but the fact of the matter is they are a comedy show, view themselves as a comedy show, and have never done or said anything to contradict that position.
People get confused when they see Jon attacking the "real" media, because they don't realize that Jon isn't speaking to them as a journalist. He's speaking to them as a concerned citizen. Something along the lines of, "Look, I run a comedy show, and people still think it's better than your real news. That shouldn't be happening." I think it's time for an illustration.
Let's say for a moment that a popular TV doctor from "E.R." breaks his leg, and goes to the real emergency room, where he is mistreated by the staff, neglected by the doctors, overcharged for the services, and denied appropriate medical treatment. As a celebrity, he has access to the public and decides to hold a conference, blasting the facility for its poor performance.
The hospital issues a press release, pointing out numerous instances in the show "E.R." where his character failed in his duties, or where much worse events transpired. They end by saying that if the show can't get it right, he has no right to complain about the real thing.
Can you see the absurdity of this? The only reasonable response is, "I didn't know hospitals took their cues on ethics from cable television." Meanwhile people like myself, who have little or no regard for "E.R." rail away at detractors by echoing the same arguments used in the press release.
The point is that The Daily Show is not a news show. Jon isn't speaking as a journalist, attacking his colleagues. He's speaking as a concerned citizen, attacking the people charged with providing him accurate, unbiased information, and failing to do their job. His capacity as a news anchor for TDS serves only to grant him access to the public. To accuse Jon Stewart of hypocrisy in failing his own journalistic responsibilities is every bit as absurd as charging a TV actor with failing in his duties as a medical professional.
... but you would whack someone, and spend the rest of your life in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison over tech lust? Ah, Slashdot priorities. ;)
/All in good fun
It depends on your perspective. If you consider the right to freely view, modify, and redistribute source code as a natural right, then ANY infringement of that right is "restriction."
You're looking at it from a the perspective that such things AREN'T a natural right, and therefore allowing them is granting rights.
In other words, it's the difference between a philosophical and legal view. Legally, according to US Copyright, you're granting them rights. Philosophically, according to copyleft, you're restricting their rights. You're both right, so there's no reason to keep arguing about it.
With regard to photographing houses, I meant the interior. Most furniture is sculpture, as are most of the knick-nacks you see sitting around. Even a lot of electronics have very innovative, interesting designs. I believe they would qualify as sculpture. I didn't phrase what I was saying clearly, and that's my fault.
You've made some excellent points, and I stand corrected on a number of issues. Thanks for pointing those out to me.
Actually, it's more akin to the RIAA charging you everytime one of their copyrighted songs shows up in an audio/video recording of yours, or the way the biocorps are charging farmers for GM seed ending up in their fields.
The problem is that the law is black and white, and this is such a gray area. How much control should artists have over their work? Should it change over time? What happens in unusual circumstances? What's the difference between taking a photograph of a painting for your scrap book, and taking a hi res Photograph to be used for reproduction?
In this particular instance, I think it's pretty clear. The sculpture itself is copyrighted, which means its three dimensional shape and form are owned by the artist. The authors can't realistically claim copyright ownership on a Photograph of it. They are most likely arguing that photographs are a derivative work of their copyrighted design, but that is (as in an aforementioned example of photographing cars) ludicrous. There is no possible way this can stand up in court. If it does, then there is no way you can take a photograph of anything man-made. Pretty much anything not utilitarian or standardized is sculpture in some form, and therefore copyrighted. By taking a photograph of a typical home, you would be creating a derivative work of dozens of copyrighted sculptures.
People need to stop looking out for themselves and actually spend some time thinking about the consequences of their actions.
As opposed to... what, exactly?
It's already a Microsoft-dominated Tech Marketplace. Microsoft already uses every loophole there is to drive out competitors. It's not a step toward anything. They're just doing what's necessary to protect their investment.
Meanwhile I, and other open source developers, are doing what's necessary to make sure their investment was a bad one.
I don't get viruses or spyware - even on my Windows machines. I'm sure you don't either. We're talking about grandma here. Or your sixteen year old sister, with an entire partition of her hard disk devoted to her collection of smilies. #___L#33338440117[kMGR44]:OMFGLOL[MM483^)]
You know what? Forget what I said about making it easy to use. It should be automatic. When the system detects something dangerous, it rolls back to a safe state and instructs the user to take any necessary steps. Experienced users should be able to turn it off, but Joe Stupid will just have to live with the consequences of his failure to act.
There are what's called Volume Shadows in Windows XP and later (naturally more accessible in the server version). It's basically what you describe.
Then make it more accessible in the home version. Slap a cute GUI on it, give it an animated talking animal assistant, or give it a built in version of solitaire. Whatever makes it easy and practical for Grandma.
There's also (even in...shrug... Windows Me) System Restore, which does provide a degree of restoration of Registry and files to a previous point in time.
That's just for the operating system, and even still, it's kind of a pain in the ass.
The problems here are things like for how long you should go on keeping old versions, how do you know when the malware change was done, how sure can you be that the malware in question isn't capable of injecting itself into the previous versions, and so on.
The length should be adjustable, and should default to about a month's worth of changes. As for knowing when the malware infection occurred, that would probably require some new, currently unthought of system. Perhaps the system needs to start keeping hashes of files around, and doing regular checks for unexplained changes. When it finds a something fishy, it asks the user if s/he wants to undo recent changes to that file. Nobody's saying it would be trivial, but proactive management is almost always better than reactive management.
As far as keeping it out of previous versions, that's what write access controls are for. As I said in my post, it would require some architectural changes for Microsoft.
With regard to physical hardware separation, that would be something hardware manufacturers would have to help out with.
The fact of the matter is that protecting any network-enabled system is work, and users don't want to do that work. It becomes our job, as the tech industry, to do it for them. Not out of altruism, but to prevent their failure to act from harming us.
I would like to see an operating system feature that offers what amounts to "Undo" for disk drives. VirtualPC has had this for years, and there are (or were) a handful of third party programs available to do the same thing. Basically, it keeps a running log of changes to the disk. At any time, you can go "oops" and back up a configurable number of steps. Some backup programs offer a similar feature, but they're again third party, and the interface is confusing to new users.
This should be completely integrated into the operating system, and the data log should have root permissions. The OS itself could even watch for suspicious activity, and ask the user if he/she would like to roll back. Of course, this would require some architectural changes, and - in the case of Windows - a proper implementation of a multiple user environment. Still, I think it's the only final solution to the problems offered by viruses and their ilk.
Windows does not drive video card development. Games drive video card development, and they only drive it one direction: forward. The bigger problem is that PCs have such a wide variety of video cards, ranging from high-end to low-end, external to built-in, and they all differ in various ways. The way you do something on one card may not be the same way you do it on another.
Apple doesn't have this problem, because Quartz Extreme supports a finite set of graphics cards, and Apple computers all ship with compatible cards. Even without Quartz Extreme, however, most of Mac OS X's eye candy still works because it's implemented in software. The only flaw is that you can't disable the fluff and save those cycles. In the end, it's probably all for the best, because Mac OS X looks like ass without it, but it would still be nice to turn off the antialiased fonts and glowing buttons when I'm trying to run three Adobe applications at once.
Then again, I could just stop beiing a cheap bastard and buy more memory. What was my point again?
I'm not entirely sure whether you're serious or not, but that picture is from a Fark.com* photoshop contest. To the best of our knowledge, the German national socialist party never attempted to build giant, walking robot suits.
* It have been a SomethingAwful.com Photoshop Phriday.
Oui. Ce serait une idée très bonne.
Oh come off it. As a patent lawyer, you should know the ridiculous time and expense of attempting to obtain a patent, and the relative odds of an individual defending a patent lawsuit vs. a corporation doing the same. The math always favors the one with the most money.
Occasionally "the little guy" will stick it to the "big, evil corporation" and win, but 99/100 times, it's going to be the corporation protecting its investments. And, as EOLAS vs. Microsoft illustrated, even when the little guy wins, the news isn't always good.
The fact is that software patents are a bad idea, no matter who benefits from them. Locking up information and knowledge prevents progress, it doesn't promote it. Inventions are born out of necessity, NOT out of the promise of financial gain.
Well I, for one, welcome our new accidentally mis-posting overlords, you insensitive clod. Now WHERE ARE MY HOT GRITS?
That cover it all?
Anyone who has ever composited photos can tell you that this is improbable in the extreme. Transferring a subject to a new background is an incredibly difficult process, if you have any prayer of making it convincing.
Everything from lighting to perspective, in-scene reflections, and even the quality of the photos being combined has to be carefully taken into account and expertly matched. Unless you're starting with similar photographs, it's a nearly hopeless proposition. Your average nitwit with a copy of MS Paint has no hope of pulling this off, and, in any case, the vast majority of people lack access to huge quantities of child porn to use as source photos.
In other words, the odds of this becoming a serious problem are virtually nil. I think it's a great idea, and a wonderful use of technology. It's the cops actually doing some work, instead of trying to pass retarded, technophobic laws.