Not at all. However, I would require a 'clear and present danger', or some similar test. The problem I have with stings is not with regards to pre-emtive arrests, most of the time. The problem I have with stings is that they create a definite legal problem in my eyes- they create crime where crime is not necessarily guaranteed to have existed before.
Put it this way, okay? Say I was twenty and chatting with friends of friends on the internet. Say one of my friends (same age) had a thirteen year old sister and we got to talking and whatever and agreed to have sex for whatever reason. (And trust me, when I was that age (thirteen) there was a general consensus in my circle of friends that it was probably a definite advantage to have someone older... anyway, I digress.) The fact that I (my 20 year old self) is a pedophile (having sex with a 13 year old) makes me legally a criminal. If a police officer were to be standing in the room while we had sex, I would accept his right (I would be pissed off), but I would accept his right to arrest me on those grounds.
However, the flip side of that coin is the fact that I would not have chased down a random thirteen year old on the internet and then raped her. A cop posing as a thirteen year old might have been able to gain my trust and so on (although it would have been hard to do without an airtight false ID) and such... and that cop might have enticed me into having sex with this supposed thirteen year old... but it's a crime that wouldn't have happened, most likely, without the cop standing there and pushing it along all the time.
I don't want cops to set up sting operations, because that puts individuals (and the police) in a situation where the definition of 'criminal' is very hazy. I can see cops taking over once something is already in progress- a scared 13 year old girl, for example, turning over her MSN account to a cop who can then deal with a predator. That's fine; I can see a cop replacing a drug-dealer for a heist already in progress.
But when the cops start things, then I get itchy.
In the same way, here, I don't see the cops playing at all fair. They were basically trolling, which in my mind is both ethically wrong and legally grey.
Clear and Present Danger is a good idea. People talk a lot. When they actually attempt to do it becomes a problem. It would have to be clarified in statute, of course, because I'm not even exactly sure where I'd personally draw the line. I just think, as I was going to post on the UCLA thing about the guy who was tazered...
Officers of the Law have extraordinary powers granted to them. As a result, they require extraordinary checks and balances on the utilization of that power.
And, quite fucking frankly, this is the reason why lawyers are so misunderstood. Yes, people hate lawyers. Yes, I agree there are some really, really crappy lawyers out there.
But I know and work with a lot of lawyers who are not. I know a lot of lawyers who are out there to protect their clients, society at large, and themselves. I know a lot of lawyers who exist just to protect the freedoms we take for granted.
The fact is, this is very much a matter of freedom- and just because you don't like whose freedoms are being protected doesn't mean those freedoms deserve to be protected any less.
So get off your fucking moral high horse. Lawyers are people like anybody else, they just have a greater understanding of the legal issues- and sometimes, yes, that changes your worldview. What ignorant schmucks like you don't understand is that it often changes your worldview for the better.
They should be dealt with the same way threats are- there must be a clear and present danger. (I am not a criminal lawyer, however, so 'clear and present danger' may not be the actual test applied to whether a threat constitutes a criminal action.)
So black-letter law is to allow for those that are obviously guilty to walk free because of loopholes that were not intended to be part of the law? I'm sorry, but if I hear someone use syntax as a defense again ("Depends on what your definition of 'is' is"), I'm gonna lose my lunch! That type of BS is what causes laws to be written in such a way that they can not be understood without a law degree.
Yes, exactly. If a loophole exists, and someone finds it, they should most certainly walk.
I'll give you an example. I was reading a case dealing with a title dispute. A town had agreed to subdivide property and zone it for development if the developer agreed to build a shopping mall. The developer built the shopping mall, and the town then turned around and told him to screw off, they weren't going to allow him to subdivide it.
So he created a second corpration called C, sold all the land to C for a million dollars, and gave C a mortgage for it. C paid back 500,000 dollars, and then decided that he wanted half the property and they'd call it quits. The agreement of who got which half devided the land up in a checkerboard fashion, with C getting the red and B getting the black. Voila, the land was subdivided and owned by two corprations, both of whom were actually owned by the same guy with no real money changing hands. A loophole in the law.
The town sued him.
The developer won; the court ruled that if the zoning act allowed it in the letter, even if it was obviously against the spirit, that was too damn bad for the town. The fact of the matter is, what is legal and what is not is simply constrained by the black-letter law, and where that law is clear, it has to be followed as closely as possible- you can't retroactively create rules and punish people for them! (Incidentally, they changed the Zoning act later that year to close that and a few other loopholes.)
You know how they say 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'? The only reason for that is because people KNOW (or can find out) what the law is. As soon as you can't, ignorance of the law becomes a very real and very valid excuse.
Loopholes empower everyone. The difference is that you have to be a lawyer to understand them. *grin* Don't hate us because we're knowledgeable and well-versed, just hate us because we're beautiful.
So in other words, if you find some loophole in the law, it is OK to solicit 13 year olds?
*snip*
Legally, yes- which is how it should be.
I work in a lawyer's office, and I was dealing with a case almost exactly like this one. The court (thankfully) ruled that if the framers had intended for the law to cover the specific issue we were dealing with, they should have written it that way. As it is, the law is clear in its written meaning- and therefore any loopholes have to be fixed legislatively.
Sadly, any good legal scholar will tell you that '...the intent rather than the letter, which is the correct choice.' is absolute and total bullshit and should be struck down.
Laws can only be enforced on the black-letter law. If they are not, there's no point in having law at all, since it can be interpreted whichever way the judge prefers. There is a reason for black-letter law, and it's to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening.
Yeah, and that works for IE. (I don't know if Microsoft does slip ads into MSN... humm... do they?)
Actually, I mean, Sony COULD do the same thing if they really wanted- use their PS3 online service to spam ads for other products. But I don't know how effective that really is.
Mostly, they just have a lot of money, and that means they have a lot of money to spend on half-assed ventures like the Zune.
That has jack-all to do with the fact that they're a monopoly (in office and OS software, not MP3 players, by the way) and everything to do with the fact that they have a lot of money.
Their being a monopoly elsewhere has very little direct impact on this product, just like it has very little direct impact on the Xbox 360 or on MS' hardware business. (Are they still doing that?) All their monopoly (and busines in general) does is FUND these ventures. Any other large company could do the same thing- Sony, for example.
Actually, setting up BitLocker is not simple, and it's definately not turned on by default. Whole-drive encryption is too failure-prone, slow, and difficult for it to be any other way. BTW, it doesn't require a TPM- you can do it with a USB key.
Because it's totally different. The CIA was sabotaging their own equipment to damage a competitor. That has nothing to do with Microsoft's interoperability crap. The CIA deliberately fed the Soviets garbage. That would be equivilant, rather, to a developer who works with Microsoft networking secretly being a Samba developer and stealing code, and so Microsoft secretly feeding the Sama developer deliberately buggy code to crash Samba in retaliation.
That would be similar to Microsoft deliberately sending sabotaged versions of their software out through industrial espionage channels.
That's not what's happening. Microsoft fiddles with their software to reduce to make it less compatible, but they do not sabotage the base functionality of the system.
There's a very, very significant difference there.
Re:Far far bigger - IT sourcing bug killed a count
on
Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're comparing purposefully designed flaws done by the CIA with Microsoft incompetence? THat's kind of a stretch.
More importantly, perhaps, was the fact that the CIA was also screwing with the HARDWARE at a manufacturing level.
Frankly, your entire argument doesn't make sense at any level. If the Soviets had the people to check the software in-house, it would have been far more reasonable and realistic for them to make the software in-house too. Instead, the entire REASON the KGB was stealing this software was because they COULDN'T develop it themselves.
For god's sake, the KGB was stealing American technology and the CIA introduced purposeful bugs to counter them. That's got abso-fucking-lutely nothing do to with IT and everything to do with spycraft.
Only an absurd zealot would be in able to connect that somehow to Microsoft being bad.
Why do we have so much space traffic in orbit around MARS that they can take pictures of each other as they go past? hell, we don't even have that much traffic in orbit around EARTH for heaven's sake!
Can you say martian traffic jam? I bet they're pissed...
Obviously those Americans who are yelling "but we have more land to cover" have a point. But it's not, I think, a very good one. If something is going to get done, it's going to get done- especially with the enormous volume of cable already laid for cable TV and telephone service. The real problem is not land area- it is corprate mentality.
I had my house done a while ago with Cat-6; it didn't even cost 1500. (I helped, though, cutting cable, mostly, splicing the ends, and finding studs, but that's about it.) My major expense there was patching the walls back up so they looked NICE (which is harder than it looked- usually we just cut holes as large as the jack panels and dropped the stuff in through the ceiling space between walls, but in the basement we had to go through the air ducting and it was a pain in the ass to drill and seal that back up later).
It was very much worth it- I have a 16 port gigabit switch sitting in my wiring closet, and I can get gigabit access from any one of those fourteen gigabit-class jacks- the other sixteen or so are simply on 100 mbit, but that's because I don't use them- they're only for when I grab a laptop and bring it into, say, the kitchen.)
Secure, (well, MORE secure), extremely fast, and no wireless woes- it was one of the best investments I've ever made. Especially since, now that the infrastructure is all there, running new cables is a snap- you just tie the new cables onto the back of the old one, pull it through, and boom. (But I suggested, to future-proof, running dual cat-six cables to each jack, with one disconnected, for future expansion, so here's hoping if I need more speed later on I can just hook up my other cat six line.)
You ignore everything he said about non-islamic suicide bombers, which, frankly, invalidades your point. Just because something is guided and organized does not make it less of an act of passion or desperation.
The difference is that cars are relatively complex only in mechanical ways. The operation of a car is very simple, because a car only does a half-dozen things. Essentially, paring down the operation of a car can be done to four essentially operations; applying torque forward, applying torque in reverse, turning, and braking- and there is pretty much one button for each of these operations.
Learning how to drive a car is nothing like learning how to operate a computer, because your car is extremely simple at the end-user level. (That said, cars have never particularly been simplified since their induction, other than the removal of the crank.)
Computers will always be complicated objects- that's simply a part of what they are. They're complicated to manufacture, complicated to repair, and complicated to operate, because there's such a variety of different inputs they can accept, a massive variety of ways they can process that input, and then a variety of ways they can output that data.
No variety of mainstream manufacturing will change how easy it is to operate a computer without changing what a computer, as we know it, is. A UI that's intuitive and easy to use may seem like a change, but it's actually an abstraction that removes from the features of the computer and trades ease of use for functionality. The reason is simple. Ease of use is equated with 'lack of options'. Users want their computers to say 'go' when they press the green button marked 'go', and that's fine; you can equip a user's computer with a little green button marked "go" and take away their keyboard and mouse, and write a UI that only has one button, a Go button.
But they won't be able to type on it, they won't be able to do anything, really. But it'll be simple!
I can't say I agree with you With regard to the suspend state. There are simply too many things that can go wrong when not failing gracefully during suspend, especially with the network and external devices. It's possible, but it's currently not practical.
---
That said...
Yes, users are idiots. Obviously you have never worked in any sort of technical support. Why do you think users get spyware? Because they are stupid. It doesn't matter what the dialog says. It doesn't matter whether the dialog is useful (as it often is- for example, if you force shutdown of a Windows box with many windows open, a dialog box will probably pop up for each one of them, asking if you want to close it and what you want to do with all the work. You can't just not have that dialog box and scrap the work, or not have that dialog box and save it somewhere the user can't get at it... or.. you get the idea.)
The problem is users think that their computers should be simple. They treat the computer as if it's a car, which has exactly three critical buttons and a wheel. They don't understand that everything done on a computer is 'critical' in one way or another- if it wasn't critical, you wouldn't have seen it. Computers are complex objects, and therefore the fact that you're NOT deluged with messages about what the system is doing all the time means it's doing them by itself and not bothering you. But there's a lot that can go wrong, and that means a lot of confirmation dialogs.
It's not the programmers fault if the user does not understand what they're doing. It's the user's fault.
Thanks for the insight, Troll.
Windows, cutting edge of OS design! Raskin did it in the 80's. You could check out orthogonal persistence OS's. Maybe none right _now_ can do it in a few nanoseconds, but most are using hacks on existing computer hardware. Look at what LinuxBIOS has been able to do. It's not just possible, it's been done.
Wow, you focused on the one point I expanded on as recently becoming possible FOR THE MAINSTREAM and decried how possible it actually was. I even expanded on this- you're being pedantic. Yes, it has been possible for a while, but not reasonable for the average end-user.
I wouldn't bite this obvious troll bait if only some people didn't believe you. "Intuitive" is "Learned Behavior" NOT what humans are good at, or can do. They habituate, just like you habituate to gasing the car on a green light, or at least many of us do. But how many times have you caught yourself pressing the pedal for the wrong green light? Probably less than everyone reading this has clicked yes or no on a dialog box without reading it. If you had read the book you would have found answers to avoiding such dialog boxes, and how to make it so the user is forced to actually make a choice, they can't just habituate to hitting "yes."
Good point, and I specifically said "in the context they are being used in
Just like pressing the gas pedal at a green light is intuitive in the context it's being used in.
With regard to the yes/no dialog box, the user is always forced to make a choice. They'll ignore it anyway, if they're going to ignore it. What you put in the dialog box is irrelevant.
With regard to the errors, I was not thinking of coding bugs. Coding bugs, while probably inevitable, should be minimized to every extent possible, I agree.
But most 'bugs' are not coding bugs. They're user-error bugs. Spyware, for example, is not a coding bug, (most of the time)- it's a user bug. Remember that old programing adage, GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out?
The reason why computers have such a bad reputation is because there's so much user-garbage going in that we can't help but have garbage coming out.
There are IT problems, especially involving the bugfix mentality, as you mentioned. But the bigger problem that I bet accounts for more than 75% of 'errors' is the user.
You can't make anything idiotproof- the universe can always come up with a better idiot.
You're being pedantic. I said quite clearly that I'm sure, SOMEWHERE, there was a system that had good suspend for ages. But it wasn't mainstream then and it isn't even mainstream NOW, which is what the guy in the book is talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. However, I would require a 'clear and present danger', or some similar test.
The problem I have with stings is not with regards to pre-emtive arrests, most of the time. The problem I have with stings is that they create a definite legal problem in my eyes- they create crime where crime is not necessarily guaranteed to have existed before.
Put it this way, okay? Say I was twenty and chatting with friends of friends on the internet. Say one of my friends (same age) had a thirteen year old sister and we got to talking and whatever and agreed to have sex for whatever reason. (And trust me, when I was that age (thirteen) there was a general consensus in my circle of friends that it was probably a definite advantage to have someone older... anyway, I digress.)
The fact that I (my 20 year old self) is a pedophile (having sex with a 13 year old) makes me legally a criminal. If a police officer were to be standing in the room while we had sex, I would accept his right (I would be pissed off), but I would accept his right to arrest me on those grounds.
However, the flip side of that coin is the fact that I would not have chased down a random thirteen year old on the internet and then raped her. A cop posing as a thirteen year old might have been able to gain my trust and so on (although it would have been hard to do without an airtight false ID) and such... and that cop might have enticed me into having sex with this supposed thirteen year old... but it's a crime that wouldn't have happened, most likely, without the cop standing there and pushing it along all the time.
I don't want cops to set up sting operations, because that puts individuals (and the police) in a situation where the definition of 'criminal' is very hazy. I can see cops taking over once something is already in progress- a scared 13 year old girl, for example, turning over her MSN account to a cop who can then deal with a predator. That's fine; I can see a cop replacing a drug-dealer for a heist already in progress.
But when the cops start things, then I get itchy.
In the same way, here, I don't see the cops playing at all fair. They were basically trolling, which in my mind is both ethically wrong and legally grey.
Clear and Present Danger is a good idea. People talk a lot. When they actually attempt to do it becomes a problem. It would have to be clarified in statute, of course, because I'm not even exactly sure where I'd personally draw the line. I just think, as I was going to post on the UCLA thing about the guy who was tazered...
Officers of the Law have extraordinary powers granted to them. As a result, they require extraordinary checks and balances on the utilization of that power.
And, quite fucking frankly, this is the reason why lawyers are so misunderstood. Yes, people hate lawyers. Yes, I agree there are some really, really crappy lawyers out there.
But I know and work with a lot of lawyers who are not. I know a lot of lawyers who are out there to protect their clients, society at large, and themselves. I know a lot of lawyers who exist just to protect the freedoms we take for granted.
The fact is, this is very much a matter of freedom- and just because you don't like whose freedoms are being protected doesn't mean those freedoms deserve to be protected any less.
So get off your fucking moral high horse. Lawyers are people like anybody else, they just have a greater understanding of the legal issues- and sometimes, yes, that changes your worldview. What ignorant schmucks like you don't understand is that it often changes your worldview for the better.
They should be dealt with the same way threats are- there must be a clear and present danger. (I am not a criminal lawyer, however, so 'clear and present danger' may not be the actual test applied to whether a threat constitutes a criminal action.)
Yes, exactly. If a loophole exists, and someone finds it, they should most certainly walk.
I'll give you an example. I was reading a case dealing with a title dispute. A town had agreed to subdivide property and zone it for development if the developer agreed to build a shopping mall. The developer built the shopping mall, and the town then turned around and told him to screw off, they weren't going to allow him to subdivide it.
So he created a second corpration called C, sold all the land to C for a million dollars, and gave C a mortgage for it. C paid back 500,000 dollars, and then decided that he wanted half the property and they'd call it quits. The agreement of who got which half devided the land up in a checkerboard fashion, with C getting the red and B getting the black. Voila, the land was subdivided and owned by two corprations, both of whom were actually owned by the same guy with no real money changing hands. A loophole in the law.
The town sued him.
The developer won; the court ruled that if the zoning act allowed it in the letter, even if it was obviously against the spirit, that was too damn bad for the town. The fact of the matter is, what is legal and what is not is simply constrained by the black-letter law, and where that law is clear, it has to be followed as closely as possible- you can't retroactively create rules and punish people for them! (Incidentally, they changed the Zoning act later that year to close that and a few other loopholes.)
You know how they say 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'? The only reason for that is because people KNOW (or can find out) what the law is. As soon as you can't, ignorance of the law becomes a very real and very valid excuse.
Loopholes empower everyone. The difference is that you have to be a lawyer to understand them. *grin* Don't hate us because we're knowledgeable and well-versed, just hate us because we're beautiful.
Legally, yes- which is how it should be.
I work in a lawyer's office, and I was dealing with a case almost exactly like this one. The court (thankfully) ruled that if the framers had intended for the law to cover the specific issue we were dealing with, they should have written it that way. As it is, the law is clear in its written meaning- and therefore any loopholes have to be fixed legislatively.
Sadly, any good legal scholar will tell you that '...the intent rather than the letter, which is the correct choice.' is absolute and total bullshit and should be struck down.
Laws can only be enforced on the black-letter law. If they are not, there's no point in having law at all, since it can be interpreted whichever way the judge prefers. There is a reason for black-letter law, and it's to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening.
Yeah, and that works for IE. (I don't know if Microsoft does slip ads into MSN... humm... do they?)
Actually, I mean, Sony COULD do the same thing if they really wanted- use their PS3 online service to spam ads for other products. But I don't know how effective that really is.
Mostly, they just have a lot of money, and that means they have a lot of money to spend on half-assed ventures like the Zune.
That has jack-all to do with the fact that they're a monopoly (in office and OS software, not MP3 players, by the way) and everything to do with the fact that they have a lot of money.
Their being a monopoly elsewhere has very little direct impact on this product, just like it has very little direct impact on the Xbox 360 or on MS' hardware business. (Are they still doing that?) All their monopoly (and busines in general) does is FUND these ventures. Any other large company could do the same thing- Sony, for example.
"OMGZ! Microsoft has set us up the BRIBEZ!"
Actually, setting up BitLocker is not simple, and it's definately not turned on by default. Whole-drive encryption is too failure-prone, slow, and difficult for it to be any other way. BTW, it doesn't require a TPM- you can do it with a USB key.
*sigh*
Was drDos stealing Microsoft's product? No? Then it's not the same!
Because it's totally different. The CIA was sabotaging their own equipment to damage a competitor. That has nothing to do with Microsoft's interoperability crap. The CIA deliberately fed the Soviets garbage. That would be equivilant, rather, to a developer who works with Microsoft networking secretly being a Samba developer and stealing code, and so Microsoft secretly feeding the Sama developer deliberately buggy code to crash Samba in retaliation.
That would be similar to Microsoft deliberately sending sabotaged versions of their software out through industrial espionage channels.
That's not what's happening. Microsoft fiddles with their software to reduce to make it less compatible, but they do not sabotage the base functionality of the system.
There's a very, very significant difference there.
You're comparing purposefully designed flaws done by the CIA with Microsoft incompetence? THat's kind of a stretch.
More importantly, perhaps, was the fact that the CIA was also screwing with the HARDWARE at a manufacturing level.
Frankly, your entire argument doesn't make sense at any level. If the Soviets had the people to check the software in-house, it would have been far more reasonable and realistic for them to make the software in-house too. Instead, the entire REASON the KGB was stealing this software was because they COULDN'T develop it themselves.
For god's sake, the KGB was stealing American technology and the CIA introduced purposeful bugs to counter them. That's got abso-fucking-lutely nothing do to with IT and everything to do with spycraft.
Only an absurd zealot would be in able to connect that somehow to Microsoft being bad.
Why do we have so much space traffic in orbit around MARS that they can take pictures of each other as they go past? hell, we don't even have that much traffic in orbit around EARTH for heaven's sake!
Can you say martian traffic jam? I bet they're pissed...
Obviously those Americans who are yelling "but we have more land to cover" have a point. But it's not, I think, a very good one. If something is going to get done, it's going to get done- especially with the enormous volume of cable already laid for cable TV and telephone service. The real problem is not land area- it is corprate mentality.
I had my house done a while ago with Cat-6; it didn't even cost 1500. (I helped, though, cutting cable, mostly, splicing the ends, and finding studs, but that's about it.) My major expense there was patching the walls back up so they looked NICE (which is harder than it looked- usually we just cut holes as large as the jack panels and dropped the stuff in through the ceiling space between walls, but in the basement we had to go through the air ducting and it was a pain in the ass to drill and seal that back up later).
It was very much worth it- I have a 16 port gigabit switch sitting in my wiring closet, and I can get gigabit access from any one of those fourteen gigabit-class jacks- the other sixteen or so are simply on 100 mbit, but that's because I don't use them- they're only for when I grab a laptop and bring it into, say, the kitchen.)
Secure, (well, MORE secure), extremely fast, and no wireless woes- it was one of the best investments I've ever made. Especially since, now that the infrastructure is all there, running new cables is a snap- you just tie the new cables onto the back of the old one, pull it through, and boom. (But I suggested, to future-proof, running dual cat-six cables to each jack, with one disconnected, for future expansion, so here's hoping if I need more speed later on I can just hook up my other cat six line.)
Bullfrog's Theme Park?
You ignore everything he said about non-islamic suicide bombers, which, frankly, invalidades your point. Just because something is guided and organized does not make it less of an act of passion or desperation.
South Africa wants two, that's right-
One for the black and one for the white!
The difference is that cars are relatively complex only in mechanical ways. The operation of a car is very simple, because a car only does a half-dozen things. Essentially, paring down the operation of a car can be done to four essentially operations; applying torque forward, applying torque in reverse, turning, and braking- and there is pretty much one button for each of these operations.
Learning how to drive a car is nothing like learning how to operate a computer, because your car is extremely simple at the end-user level. (That said, cars have never particularly been simplified since their induction, other than the removal of the crank.)
Computers will always be complicated objects- that's simply a part of what they are. They're complicated to manufacture, complicated to repair, and complicated to operate, because there's such a variety of different inputs they can accept, a massive variety of ways they can process that input, and then a variety of ways they can output that data.
No variety of mainstream manufacturing will change how easy it is to operate a computer without changing what a computer, as we know it, is. A UI that's intuitive and easy to use may seem like a change, but it's actually an abstraction that removes from the features of the computer and trades ease of use for functionality. The reason is simple. Ease of use is equated with 'lack of options'. Users want their computers to say 'go' when they press the green button marked 'go', and that's fine; you can equip a user's computer with a little green button marked "go" and take away their keyboard and mouse, and write a UI that only has one button, a Go button.
But they won't be able to type on it, they won't be able to do anything, really. But it'll be simple!
---
That said...
Yes, users are idiots. Obviously you have never worked in any sort of technical support. Why do you think users get spyware? Because they are stupid. It doesn't matter what the dialog says. It doesn't matter whether the dialog is useful (as it often is- for example, if you force shutdown of a Windows box with many windows open, a dialog box will probably pop up for each one of them, asking if you want to close it and what you want to do with all the work. You can't just not have that dialog box and scrap the work, or not have that dialog box and save it somewhere the user can't get at it... or.. you get the idea.)
The problem is users think that their computers should be simple. They treat the computer as if it's a car, which has exactly three critical buttons and a wheel. They don't understand that everything done on a computer is 'critical' in one way or another- if it wasn't critical, you wouldn't have seen it. Computers are complex objects, and therefore the fact that you're NOT deluged with messages about what the system is doing all the time means it's doing them by itself and not bothering you. But there's a lot that can go wrong, and that means a lot of confirmation dialogs.
It's not the programmers fault if the user does not understand what they're doing. It's the user's fault.
With regard to the yes/no dialog box, the user is always forced to make a choice. They'll ignore it anyway, if they're going to ignore it. What you put in the dialog box is irrelevant.
With regard to the errors, I was not thinking of coding bugs. Coding bugs, while probably inevitable, should be minimized to every extent possible, I agree.
But most 'bugs' are not coding bugs. They're user-error bugs. Spyware, for example, is not a coding bug, (most of the time)- it's a user bug. Remember that old programing adage, GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out?
The reason why computers have such a bad reputation is because there's so much user-garbage going in that we can't help but have garbage coming out.
There are IT problems, especially involving the bugfix mentality, as you mentioned. But the bigger problem that I bet accounts for more than 75% of 'errors' is the user.
You can't make anything idiotproof- the universe can always come up with a better idiot.
You're being pedantic. I said quite clearly that I'm sure, SOMEWHERE, there was a system that had good suspend for ages. But it wasn't mainstream then and it isn't even mainstream NOW, which is what the guy in the book is talking about.