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I'd say this thing is already "wide open" but not quite the way you meant!
ALL buffer and heap overflows in individual programs are the fault of bad programming, not bad programming languages.
I agree, and I'd go one step further to say that we're starting to get into a situation where programmers are learning and using languages (such as Java) that don't allow this particular kind of sloppy coding. The problem is that many of these programmers aren't even aware of the concept of a buffer overflow, let alone how to actively detect or prevent it.
I happen to be a fan of Java, but I get very concerned when I hear folks suggest that we can solve all our security woes by simply using these "safe" programming languages. We can't totally ignore the fact that coders need to understand these issues, whether the programming language (or operating system) protects them or not. It's rather like suggesting that drivers don't need to learn to drive safely any more, since we all have seat belts and air bags.
So I'm a little skeptical about just how 'easy' they consider a reasonable system to be...
Well, did you happen to see this part of TFA:
Architects of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project are devising a computer program that tracks the tax rates of the 18 states and their localities and automatically adds that rate to the bill of every online purchase.
(emphasis added)
Apparently, they're going to just give us all a nice "computer program" to handle everything for us. Yeah, right, that's the ticket...
So I guess we all just trust them enough to run their nifty (closed source?) utility on our servers. No, better still, this will probably be offered as a web service, where we'll just happily POST each of our sale details (presumably zip code and sale amount, although it wouldn't surprise me if they needed street addresses as well) and hope their server can handle the burden.
I'm in complete support of simplifying the state sales tax rules, but this effort seems to be a particularly impractical approach.
Why is this under "your rights online"? It may have to do with people's rights (not mine, I'm Canadian) but definitly not online rights. Sure, the data is stored in a database, but that database isn't necessarily online (and a database with that sort of info I'd expect would not be online). Editors sure need to make sure their heads are on straight...
I can't presume to speak for the editors, but as a Canadian you may not realize that this is exactly the sort of database that Americans would expect to be online, in the name of "information sharing" among law enforcement organizations at the local, state, and federal levels, in order to fight terrorism. To believe that this database will be entirely offline is naive at best.
But does that destroy the data? Did you check that on anohter key?
That's a good point, and checking with another key wouldn't even help to determine this. You might manage to fry only the I/O circuits, while leaving the storage core intact. I don't know exactly how these devices work, but it's quite possible all the data could be recovered by a simple hardware swap of subcomponents.
The upside potential to be gained from Xbox far outweighs the upside potential from increased PC gaming.
I strongly agree, and I'll go even further. I'd suggest that he Xbox represents the way Microsoft can slowly but surely enter the hardware market.
As game consoles have become more powerful, they have become a more important target, perhaps even than the PC. Microsoft seems to be betting that if they control the software and the hardware, they'll not have any pesky problems of getting things like DRM into the PC chipset. Suddenly you'll find the next generation game machines with a keyboard, mouse, hard drive, removable media, and network card, all comparable to a low-end desktop PC (how close are they already?). When do you suppose we'll start seeing productivity applications (email, word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) for these so-called "gaming" platforms like Xbox? We know that most consumers already need only a mere fraction of what current PCs provide; they do want something that "just works" (think TiVo) and is moderately priced.
My suspicion has been, for quite some time, that Microsoft has very-long-term plans to abandon the OS as a product and focus entirely on what we now call "gaming" platforms.
What is the difference whether a security issue is "known...in secret" rather than simply "unknown"?
The difference is whether you know about it. After all, these are the only issues you can disclose.
That's certainly true. I probably should have better clarified that I meant this question only in the context of the one statement of denissmith above. Specifically, I'm suggesting that the likelihood that "someone else has found" a security flaw seems to be totally independent of whether (or when) some other random person may have found it but kept it secret. Rather I'd say it depends only on the length the flaw has been in existence, period. The finder's separate activities, as long as they were truly kept secret, could not affect its independent discovery by another party.
2) use my preferred approach: fix your clients' copies of the program, and otherwise keep quiet. Consider it a competitive advantage when the next Apache/SSH/PHP worm hits.
My first reaction was that you were a troll, but the justification that follows it is actually well-stated, so I'm going to take a chance that you're not just trolling as an AC.
As such, I think the point above is fundamentally flawed because it makes one large assumption, namely that you yourself discovered the flaw. Using your logic, if you didn't discover the flaw, but a like-minded individual did, your clients' machines won't be fixed by you or patched by the vendor.
How exactly does this let "market forces do their thing" in any way? Basically this causes an artificial information imbalance, which, in addition to being heresy to the "information wants to be free" crowd, specifically impede the very market forces that would help consumers make informed decisions.
I consider 1 week (5 workdays) a reasonable response time.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but I'm not so sure we can ever agree on any arbitrary but fixed number of hours/days/weeks, without at least some verification of the security report itself. What if some self-proclaimed security "expert" reports to a vendor, "You have a major security flaw in product X version Y.Z" and nothing more?
Certainly this is stretching the truth to prove a point, but it might take at least a few days to even reliably replicate a complex security hole, especially if it is some sort of timing and/or concurrency attack.
Not every so-called "expert" out there who manages to find a flaw deems it useful to provide exact details regarding said flaw, and I'm sure there are at least some who pride themselves in leaving the details as a proverbial exercise for the reader.
The longer a known security issue exists, in secret, the more likely it is that someone else has found it - and that puts everyone at risk.
I mostly agree with your overall analysis, but I'm compelled to point out that this one statement seems self-contradicting. What is the difference whether a security issue is "known...in secret" rather than simply "unknown"? I submit that a better way to say this would be that "the longer any security issue exists, the more likely it is that someone else has found it," without regard to how known or unknown it may be during the interim.
The only way this is not true is if you consider the (perhaps non-trivial) cases where the "secret" is leaked, intentionally or otherwise.
If you don't know anything about the field you're managing, how are you going to make sure you have people under you who know what they're doing? Yes, it might be remotely possible with a ton of work, but most managers that I'm familiar with have done a very poor job at this.
Yes, I fully agree. These MBA types that the GP is defending typically know very well how to manage "up" the chain of command. They can make the upper strata feel all warm and fuzzy about the way things are being managed. They become very proficient at this, and ultimately get positive feedback, so they spend further effort managing in this direction.
However, the same training does not at all prepare them to manage "down" the chain, to their subserviant underlings. These poor souls only get to hear about all the management-style doublespeak from the upper tiers, while then being "directed" to just shut up and go do their job.
Such direction is typically so devoid of any meaningful "management" that these folks end up essentially on their own. It's basically random whether their tasking is even possible, let alone whether it can fit within the quality, time, and resource constraints imposed by their techincally-ignorant manager. Perhaps worse, there is no incentive for the manager in this position to change focus; managing "down" becomes both painful and unrewarding.
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
I agree with this part, but it's discouraging to note all the negative comments about such technologies in this this article from last month.
Slow hard drive speeds are one of the chief bottlenecks to performance on laptops. Setting up a RAID 0 configuration would give you some added speed.
Perhaps... But hard drives themselves are also the most likely components to fail on laptops. Configuring a two-drive RAID 0 for speed would double the chances of catastrophic failure!
What's really "interesting" is that the none of the mods ever saw the very popular movie (a comedy) where this quote was taken (the whole comment was a copy-and-paste from IMDB). The more amazing part is that they actually found it Interesting, Insightful, and Informative!
Remember, any place you shop (including ones w/cameras) is *your* choice...
*EVERYONE* should be far more concerned w/the cameras at stop lights, intersections, lamp posts (traffic patterns my ass), etc.
You've got to be kidding. Ok, more correctly, I sure hope you're kidding, or that I'm totally misunderstanding you.
If you're saying I should be more against traffic cameras than dressing room cameras, please think about this for a moment. I (part of everyone, by the way) have not problem with cameras at stop lights, as part of a targeted enforcement effort. Yes, if you've turned the thing on constantly to monitor citizen movements, it's abusing the system. I understand, and have my tinfoil hat at the ready.
However, if you catch (or better still, prevent) somebody from running a red light, doesn't that seem like a benefit to the public good? Are you truly saying I should be against these cameras *more* than I should be against dressing room cameras?
Well, I'm not convinced. I'm against them both, but I certainly tolerate traffic cameras when used appropriately. Yes, yes, again, I realize they can and will be abused, and it's the abuse I would want to stop.
However, you might very reasonably expect that stopping even one moronic motorist from running a red light might actually keep somebody from being needlessly killed. That's right, we're talking about a crime that makes people irreversibly non-living. And now are you actually saying I should be more against this device, that can save lives, than I should be against the dressing room cameras?
Now, for a moment, please picture your bride-to-be being violently killed in a horrible traffic accient, because some low-life ran a red light. You don't want anybody to even try to prevent that, because you'd rather your privacy while breaking the law with a ton or two of steel?
I see no benefit at all to society from the dressing room cameras. More to my point, getting rid of them certainly cannot possibly change the number of lives ended. In contrast, getting rid of traffic cameras might actually cause(or more correctly, fail to prevent) needless deaths.
Except if you don't have a common CA, you can't verify that the message you received is actually the one that was sent.. it's trivial to fake a key without verification.
Well, a common third-party CA does certainly make this easier, but it's not that you can't do it otherwise. You can always take it upon yourself to verify the key, or at least the key figerprint, via some out-of-band communications method (usually telephone). You could also establish your own web of trust, by trusting your own arbitrary set of third party agents to establish the links between the keys and their owners. Note that the CA does nothing more than sign the public key anyway; lack of such a signature does not necessarily imply the key is invalid.
Even PGP has a CA of sorts (the public key repositories).
Not really; the CA is a specific third-party authentication service that certifies a link between a key and its owner. The repositories are just places where you can publish your public key for easy distribution; this actually doesn't help solve the problem of unverified keys at all.
I almost hope this was a troll, rather than a sadly misinformed opinion. I think maybe I understand what you were trying to say, but I still feel compelled to answer a few (mis-)leading questions.
Why should I have to register with Verisign to send an encrypted email to my girlfriend, co-workers etc.
You don't. The third-party CA is not at all a requirement for encrypting and signing your email.
Why can't I just click a button and generate a random 128 bit key set and use PGP?
You can, although I think the minimum key length might be 1024 bits.
why can I send a MIME encoded attachement anywhere, but not a PGP encoded plain text email?
You can. See Enigmail for example. Anybody with PGP and a key can receive, verify, and decrypt, even if they don't happen to use Enigmail on their end.
I think (and hope) your point was that this isn't built-in and/or integrated into every email client by default, which is absolutely true. But I'd suggest you download GPG and install Enigmail as a plugin to Mozilla or Thunderbird, and actually see that there is a point-and-click solution. You literally click a little key icon in the message as you compose to encrypt, or a pen icon to sign. You can even encrypt and/or sign everything by default.
Something seems amiss here, and I don't mean the obvious part about (ab)using patents in this manner. I'm talking about the way patent "dates" are handled under the US system, which is different than it is just about anywhere else in the world. First, from TFA we have:
Lawyers at Bill Gates' firm filed a patent for technology behind the hugely successful digital music player two months before Apple.
immediately followed by:
The US Patent Office has ruled that Microsoft has the right to charge competitors a licence fee for each iPod sold.
The misleading bit is that this is a non-sequitur; the USPTO does not consider the filing date as material. The date of claimed invention is the only date that matters in the US.
So, it seems this must have been decided based on something other than the filing dates. Perhaps some other technology within the iPod was "invented" earlier by Microsoft, but then it's quite misleading to imply that the two-month difference in filing dates was the issue. Plus, as I've mentioned elsewhere, it's not up to the USPTO anyway to decide who has what rights in the case of a conflict; the courts decide these matters in the US.
It's important to note that TFA is a UK source, so there simply may be some confusion and assumptions made based on their local patent rules.
I was agreeing with you, up until the point you said:
Overall it is not a coincidence or dumb luck that Microsoft Office is the success it is
You're right; it wasn't coincidence or dumb luck, instead it was illegal business practices. Why do so many people here seem to forget that Microsoft cheated to get where they are today?
Somewhat ironically, I agree with most of your posting, that Office is indeed too far ahead to catch. However, you really lose lots of credibility when you can't admit that it was not something as grand as "innovation" that got them there. They got a nice head-start from their illegal (and dare I say unethical) behavior.
Ajax asyncronously calls JAVA functions without needing a page redraw.
Wrong.
AJAX asynchronously calls any server-side technology without needing a page redraw. It could be PERL, ASP, or anything else that can respond to an HTTP Request.
Please read the docs about Ajax before telling me something that has nothing to do with it.
The theory is that the validity of patents will be hashed out in the courts.
I have no mod points to give, but this point needs to be emphasized. This is the fundamental principle under which the USPTO has operated since its inception. You may not like it, but that's their charter. They are obligated by law to grant any patent that they believe in good faith has the potential to be enforcable and upheld by the courts. There is no "burden of proof" criteria involved; the USPTO must defer that decision to the courts.
Ever time something about USPTO comes up here, everybody gets tons of mod points here for blasting these "idiots" and "dolts" for not doing their jobs. I have no vested interest, but for crying out loud, at least these folks are indeed doing their jobs!
No matter what we may think of the concept, this is the way the USPTO works by law. If you don't like it, don't complain about the examiners, complain about the law that chartered them, and complain to somebody that can do something about it.
How many letters have any of you written to your representatives recently?
there is no astronomical measurement beyond a year that is used in the standard time measurements.
...at least not yet!
Sure, the year number is essentially an arbitrary but monotonically increasing value. But that's only because we're all stuck here on this same ball of rock. If we survive long enough to establish a Martian colony (not totally unrealistic within the 500-year planning horizon of these blathering politicians) things will change.
Remember, those intrepid folks on Mars will have a different length of year. Suddenly it would become important to reconcile future dates that cross year boundaries on both planets. Earth Years and Mars Years will certainly need to be regulated (in the sense of reliable astronomical standards, not government burdens).
Ok--to all you "what about Google" folks--this is talking about discovery of Web Services not about a human using a search engine to find a web site. It's not a trivial problem, and that statement quoted of TFA is not as far off as you might think (but you have to know what it means by Web Services).
I'm not taking the side of Amazon here, but let's please at least try to understand what we're arguing about first!
I have been here a bit longer than you, and used to mod quite frequently...
Why you think that gives you any special qualification is beyond me. You're probably wrong anyway; you have no way to know how long I've been reading here before bothering to register with an ID.
As for hasty generalisation, if several years of a behaviour abstracted is what you call hasty...
Sorry, but "hasty" in "hasty generalization" has absolutely nothing at all to do with time, it has to do with the specific type of logical fallacy. See here or any reference of your choice.
Oh, wait, never mind--I get it now--you're the one trying to troll. Sorry to have disturbed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say this thing is already "wide open" but not quite the way you meant!
I agree, and I'd go one step further to say that we're starting to get into a situation where programmers are learning and using languages (such as Java) that don't allow this particular kind of sloppy coding. The problem is that many of these programmers aren't even aware of the concept of a buffer overflow, let alone how to actively detect or prevent it.
I happen to be a fan of Java, but I get very concerned when I hear folks suggest that we can solve all our security woes by simply using these "safe" programming languages. We can't totally ignore the fact that coders need to understand these issues, whether the programming language (or operating system) protects them or not. It's rather like suggesting that drivers don't need to learn to drive safely any more, since we all have seat belts and air bags.
Well, did you happen to see this part of TFA:
(emphasis added)Apparently, they're going to just give us all a nice "computer program" to handle everything for us. Yeah, right, that's the ticket...
So I guess we all just trust them enough to run their nifty (closed source?) utility on our servers. No, better still, this will probably be offered as a web service, where we'll just happily POST each of our sale details (presumably zip code and sale amount, although it wouldn't surprise me if they needed street addresses as well) and hope their server can handle the burden.
I'm in complete support of simplifying the state sales tax rules, but this effort seems to be a particularly impractical approach.
Issuer:
CN = Microsoft Secure Server Authority
DC = redmond
DC = corp
DC = microsoft
DC = com
I can't presume to speak for the editors, but as a Canadian you may not realize that this is exactly the sort of database that Americans would expect to be online, in the name of "information sharing" among law enforcement organizations at the local, state, and federal levels, in order to fight terrorism. To believe that this database will be entirely offline is naive at best.
That's a good point, and checking with another key wouldn't even help to determine this. You might manage to fry only the I/O circuits, while leaving the storage core intact. I don't know exactly how these devices work, but it's quite possible all the data could be recovered by a simple hardware swap of subcomponents.
I strongly agree, and I'll go even further. I'd suggest that he Xbox represents the way Microsoft can slowly but surely enter the hardware market.
As game consoles have become more powerful, they have become a more important target, perhaps even than the PC. Microsoft seems to be betting that if they control the software and the hardware, they'll not have any pesky problems of getting things like DRM into the PC chipset. Suddenly you'll find the next generation game machines with a keyboard, mouse, hard drive, removable media, and network card, all comparable to a low-end desktop PC (how close are they already?). When do you suppose we'll start seeing productivity applications (email, word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) for these so-called "gaming" platforms like Xbox? We know that most consumers already need only a mere fraction of what current PCs provide; they do want something that "just works" (think TiVo) and is moderately priced.
My suspicion has been, for quite some time, that Microsoft has very-long-term plans to abandon the OS as a product and focus entirely on what we now call "gaming" platforms.
The difference is whether you know about it. After all, these are the only issues you can disclose.
That's certainly true. I probably should have better clarified that I meant this question only in the context of the one statement of denissmith above. Specifically, I'm suggesting that the likelihood that "someone else has found" a security flaw seems to be totally independent of whether (or when) some other random person may have found it but kept it secret. Rather I'd say it depends only on the length the flaw has been in existence, period. The finder's separate activities, as long as they were truly kept secret, could not affect its independent discovery by another party.
My first reaction was that you were a troll, but the justification that follows it is actually well-stated, so I'm going to take a chance that you're not just trolling as an AC.
As such, I think the point above is fundamentally flawed because it makes one large assumption, namely that you yourself discovered the flaw. Using your logic, if you didn't discover the flaw, but a like-minded individual did, your clients' machines won't be fixed by you or patched by the vendor.
How exactly does this let "market forces do their thing" in any way? Basically this causes an artificial information imbalance, which, in addition to being heresy to the "information wants to be free" crowd, specifically impede the very market forces that would help consumers make informed decisions.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but I'm not so sure we can ever agree on any arbitrary but fixed number of hours/days/weeks, without at least some verification of the security report itself. What if some self-proclaimed security "expert" reports to a vendor, "You have a major security flaw in product X version Y.Z" and nothing more?
Certainly this is stretching the truth to prove a point, but it might take at least a few days to even reliably replicate a complex security hole, especially if it is some sort of timing and/or concurrency attack.
Not every so-called "expert" out there who manages to find a flaw deems it useful to provide exact details regarding said flaw, and I'm sure there are at least some who pride themselves in leaving the details as a proverbial exercise for the reader.
I mostly agree with your overall analysis, but I'm compelled to point out that this one statement seems self-contradicting. What is the difference whether a security issue is "known...in secret" rather than simply "unknown"? I submit that a better way to say this would be that "the longer any security issue exists, the more likely it is that someone else has found it," without regard to how known or unknown it may be during the interim.
The only way this is not true is if you consider the (perhaps non-trivial) cases where the "secret" is leaked, intentionally or otherwise.
If you don't know anything about the field you're managing, how are you going to make sure you have people under you who know what they're doing? Yes, it might be remotely possible with a ton of work, but most managers that I'm familiar with have done a very poor job at this.
Yes, I fully agree. These MBA types that the GP is defending typically know very well how to manage "up" the chain of command. They can make the upper strata feel all warm and fuzzy about the way things are being managed. They become very proficient at this, and ultimately get positive feedback, so they spend further effort managing in this direction.
However, the same training does not at all prepare them to manage "down" the chain, to their subserviant underlings. These poor souls only get to hear about all the management-style doublespeak from the upper tiers, while then being "directed" to just shut up and go do their job.
Such direction is typically so devoid of any meaningful "management" that these folks end up essentially on their own. It's basically random whether their tasking is even possible, let alone whether it can fit within the quality, time, and resource constraints imposed by their techincally-ignorant manager. Perhaps worse, there is no incentive for the manager in this position to change focus; managing "down" becomes both painful and unrewarding.
I agree with this part, but it's discouraging to note all the negative comments about such technologies in this this article from last month.
Perhaps... But hard drives themselves are also the most likely components to fail on laptops. Configuring a two-drive RAID 0 for speed would double the chances of catastrophic failure!
Moderation +5
40% Interesting
20% Insightful
20% Informative
What's really "interesting" is that the none of the mods ever saw the very popular movie (a comedy) where this quote was taken (the whole comment was a copy-and-paste from IMDB). The more amazing part is that they actually found it Interesting, Insightful, and Informative!
*EVERYONE* should be far more concerned w/the cameras at stop lights, intersections, lamp posts (traffic patterns my ass), etc.
You've got to be kidding. Ok, more correctly, I sure hope you're kidding, or that I'm totally misunderstanding you.
If you're saying I should be more against traffic cameras than dressing room cameras, please think about this for a moment. I (part of everyone, by the way) have not problem with cameras at stop lights, as part of a targeted enforcement effort. Yes, if you've turned the thing on constantly to monitor citizen movements, it's abusing the system. I understand, and have my tinfoil hat at the ready.
However, if you catch (or better still, prevent) somebody from running a red light, doesn't that seem like a benefit to the public good? Are you truly saying I should be against these cameras *more* than I should be against dressing room cameras?
Well, I'm not convinced. I'm against them both, but I certainly tolerate traffic cameras when used appropriately. Yes, yes, again, I realize they can and will be abused, and it's the abuse I would want to stop.
However, you might very reasonably expect that stopping even one moronic motorist from running a red light might actually keep somebody from being needlessly killed. That's right, we're talking about a crime that makes people irreversibly non-living. And now are you actually saying I should be more against this device, that can save lives, than I should be against the dressing room cameras?
Now, for a moment, please picture your bride-to-be being violently killed in a horrible traffic accient, because some low-life ran a red light. You don't want anybody to even try to prevent that, because you'd rather your privacy while breaking the law with a ton or two of steel?
I see no benefit at all to society from the dressing room cameras. More to my point, getting rid of them certainly cannot possibly change the number of lives ended. In contrast, getting rid of traffic cameras might actually cause(or more correctly, fail to prevent) needless deaths.
Well, a common third-party CA does certainly make this easier, but it's not that you can't do it otherwise. You can always take it upon yourself to verify the key, or at least the key figerprint, via some out-of-band communications method (usually telephone). You could also establish your own web of trust, by trusting your own arbitrary set of third party agents to establish the links between the keys and their owners. Note that the CA does nothing more than sign the public key anyway; lack of such a signature does not necessarily imply the key is invalid.
Even PGP has a CA of sorts (the public key repositories).
Not really; the CA is a specific third-party authentication service that certifies a link between a key and its owner. The repositories are just places where you can publish your public key for easy distribution; this actually doesn't help solve the problem of unverified keys at all.
Why should I have to register with Verisign to send an encrypted email to my girlfriend, co-workers etc.
You don't. The third-party CA is not at all a requirement for encrypting and signing your email.
Why can't I just click a button and generate a random 128 bit key set and use PGP?
You can, although I think the minimum key length might be 1024 bits.
why can I send a MIME encoded attachement anywhere, but not a PGP encoded plain text email?
You can. See Enigmail for example. Anybody with PGP and a key can receive, verify, and decrypt, even if they don't happen to use Enigmail on their end.
I think (and hope) your point was that this isn't built-in and/or integrated into every email client by default, which is absolutely true. But I'd suggest you download GPG and install Enigmail as a plugin to Mozilla or Thunderbird, and actually see that there is a point-and-click solution. You literally click a little key icon in the message as you compose to encrypt, or a pen icon to sign. You can even encrypt and/or sign everything by default.
immediately followed by:
The misleading bit is that this is a non-sequitur; the USPTO does not consider the filing date as material. The date of claimed invention is the only date that matters in the US.
So, it seems this must have been decided based on something other than the filing dates. Perhaps some other technology within the iPod was "invented" earlier by Microsoft, but then it's quite misleading to imply that the two-month difference in filing dates was the issue. Plus, as I've mentioned elsewhere, it's not up to the USPTO anyway to decide who has what rights in the case of a conflict; the courts decide these matters in the US.
It's important to note that TFA is a UK source, so there simply may be some confusion and assumptions made based on their local patent rules.
Overall it is not a coincidence or dumb luck that Microsoft Office is the success it is
You're right; it wasn't coincidence or dumb luck, instead it was illegal business practices. Why do so many people here seem to forget that Microsoft cheated to get where they are today?
Somewhat ironically, I agree with most of your posting, that Office is indeed too far ahead to catch. However, you really lose lots of credibility when you can't admit that it was not something as grand as "innovation" that got them there. They got a nice head-start from their illegal (and dare I say unethical) behavior.
Wrong.
AJAX asynchronously calls any server-side technology without needing a page redraw. It could be PERL, ASP, or anything else that can respond to an HTTP Request.
Please read the docs about Ajax before telling me something that has nothing to do with it.
Please follow your own advice.
I have no mod points to give, but this point needs to be emphasized. This is the fundamental principle under which the USPTO has operated since its inception. You may not like it, but that's their charter. They are obligated by law to grant any patent that they believe in good faith has the potential to be enforcable and upheld by the courts. There is no "burden of proof" criteria involved; the USPTO must defer that decision to the courts.
Ever time something about USPTO comes up here, everybody gets tons of mod points here for blasting these "idiots" and "dolts" for not doing their jobs. I have no vested interest, but for crying out loud, at least these folks are indeed doing their jobs!
No matter what we may think of the concept, this is the way the USPTO works by law. If you don't like it, don't complain about the examiners, complain about the law that chartered them, and complain to somebody that can do something about it.
How many letters have any of you written to your representatives recently?
Sure, the year number is essentially an arbitrary but monotonically increasing value. But that's only because we're all stuck here on this same ball of rock. If we survive long enough to establish a Martian colony (not totally unrealistic within the 500-year planning horizon of these blathering politicians) things will change.
Remember, those intrepid folks on Mars will have a different length of year. Suddenly it would become important to reconcile future dates that cross year boundaries on both planets. Earth Years and Mars Years will certainly need to be regulated (in the sense of reliable astronomical standards, not government burdens).
Ok--to all you "what about Google" folks--this is talking about discovery of Web Services not about a human using a search engine to find a web site. It's not a trivial problem, and that statement quoted of TFA is not as far off as you might think (but you have to know what it means by Web Services).
I'm not taking the side of Amazon here, but let's please at least try to understand what we're arguing about first!
Why you think that gives you any special qualification is beyond me. You're probably wrong anyway; you have no way to know how long I've been reading here before bothering to register with an ID.
As for hasty generalisation, if several years of a behaviour abstracted is what you call hasty...
Sorry, but "hasty" in "hasty generalization" has absolutely nothing at all to do with time, it has to do with the specific type of logical fallacy. See here or any reference of your choice.
Oh, wait, never mind--I get it now--you're the one trying to troll. Sorry to have disturbed.