"Time is not real? So time is physical? Show me this "thing" called "time"."
Sure: t=v/s. There. The fact that you can't touch it doesn't make something automatically "unphysical". Time is a property of the real world, thus is a physical magnitude (it's not a thing, but a magnitude: for the same you could ask "bring me the fruit called brick" asuming only fruits can be physical).
"Are your dreams real? If they are not real, then how did you experience them?"
Of course they are. And you have neurophysics investigating them.
"Is consciousness physical?"
More on the same: of course yes. And you have quite a lot of researchers working on this.
"Reality is so much MORE then just the physical"
Reality is much more than *matter*. Of course you have magnitudes (like time or speed), or energy or quite a lot of other *physical* things.
"Science sets _itself_ up as a Rival Church; by ignoring the wisdom of the past Religions it has very much become its _own_ Religion."
Yeah, sure. That's why Science builds up upon the shoulders of the past (we have not to rediscover Newton's laws on each generation) while things like religion or (part of) philosophy are still dicussing or accepting ideas "frozen" 4000 years ago.
"Others have written about the problems of Rationalism"
And that's the very point: they not only write about Rationalism, but they are just circling around the same ideas once and again without the ability to reach *any* valid conclusion to build upon. From the philosophy/religion front Humanity has advanced almost zero from Socrates or Plato. But they didn't have eight-lane bridges nor did they sent a man to the Moon.
"Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks"
But then you are WRONG! Do you think this kind of hyperlinks were invented in the Internet days? Look at *any* scientific paper: they are FULL of hyperlinks. Each time you see "this happens to be A[1]" or "we already know that to be true[2]", that's an hyperlink. At the end of the paper you will find quite some references (usually a *lot* of references) that links the current paper to the immediate antecedents. Those in turn provide new citations to other references and only very few seminal papers happen to be more referenced that the references they link to.
So all the information is already there, but do you know what? Even then, unless you are already an expert on the matter it still seems to be archaic Chinese to you (unless you are an archaic Chinese expert yourself in which case it will seem to be Quantic Chromodynamics no less). It is not that the information is not already "gettable", but how many information we can grasp in just one bit. I usually offer this example: I'm absolutly negated about dancing, so I admire those dancers from TV programs: each day the team offers three/four dancing numbers on their program "how the heck they manage to learn all those movents without failure?". Till I remember they are professional dancers and that means that they do not learn their movents like I'd do: "the left foot goes 45 degrees to the right then the left hand follows, two steps to the right, then I find the girl coming to me, I move my arms towards them, but don't forget to gracily elevate my hips..." they just need to memorize higher level abstractions: we start in first position, then we go for an "eigth lace" then take her in third, then rondó... Because they are professionals they already have a basis that allow them to grasp complex concepts by just looking for the "big landscape": the details are already known and taken for granted. Well, scientific papers are just the same and without all the "taken for granted" any ten pages papers would become a 1000 pages book and no one that already knows the 1000 pages book would understand the 10 pages paper anyway.
You just try to understand Einstein's paper first published on "Annalen der physiks" titled "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies" without a firm understanding on both newtonian theory of movement and maxwellian ecuations: you will see it doesn't matter it was published by 1905, when your "copyright overlords" were not so strong, everything was published and proper citations were both accesible and properly in place. And please remember it's not even a very hard paper; currently any minimally cute 16 year old boy should understand its maths without many problems. But still, you either already have the maths and the underlying theories already grasped or no matter how many citations or how free, the article will still seem Chinese to you (unless you are Chinese, in which case it will seem archaic Saxon to you).
"The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality"
I must say "bullshit". Science *is* our definition of reality. It can be controversial how much our definition of reality pairs the "real reality" or if there's in fact a "real reality", but there's no doubt science *is* our definition of reality. Only this assumption allows even you to not think that the seven lane bridge you cross to go to job is not suspended over the river by any magic force.
"copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare?"
By means of the "right for citation" every civilized country protects. I explicitly said "any civilized country" because I don't really know what's the state of affairs about this in non-civilized countries like the USA.
"not everything can be made explicit"
That's absolutly true. I already wrote about it in a different post.
"putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read"
Redundant. That's just an specific case of your second point.
"to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions"
You are even *forced* to make such assumptions (that's the very basis of the scientific method: you make some assumptions, then you test them and the tests show them wrong or reinforce them). But by the time you publish you "assumpt" no more: either your tests can't find them wrong after you honestly tried as hard as you could to break them (then as long as you can say they are not assumptions but well backed-up theories) or they find them wrong, in which case you don't publish.
"sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered"
But then you leave them *unanswered*. Quite a different thing than take them for *granted* (or assumed them to be right).
"so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions"
That's neither the way to properly advance, nor the way you will get further founds. Founds come from your *effective* findings. Of course you can (and probably should) have your own opinions, but grants don't come from them, but from your current findings and the fact that your findings show that there are new "shadow zones" to inspect. It is not that "I think we can go to Mars in a three weeks space flight" but "current findings provided in this article cast shadows about what we thougth about space travels so we need more foundings to dissipate them and see what we can find beyond -it might even be that we can travel to Mars in three weeks if it happens to be true A, B and C".
What do you mean by "everything". Do you mean I should add an apendix where I copy the entry for "explicit" from Webster's?
"Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies"
What the heck is the "peer review system" you talk about? What in hell are "pay-to-read studies"? What's an study, after all? Is it the same one of those on Nature than the review the "Apocalypsers of the Seven Day of the Return of the Beast" give me for free in the middle of the street?
Just to express this cleanly: here you just tried to "plain talk" about a certain non-technical common-sense issue. But even then, your two paragrahps are full of non-trivial asumptions and non-referenced assertions (do you *really* think any layman will understand i.e. what the peer-review system is and why it's any better than an authority-based assertion?) and still you expect that on really very especialized fields any technical article can go on all-explicit? I published some scientific papers back on my day... do you really mean I should add to my ten pages article the more than 1000 pages from the Strassburger's book on Botanics that backed them up (among others)? Or else, how do you expect for a layman to understand what do I mean when I talk about i.e. "cormophyte vs spermaphyte biological selection understanding by means of echotopic adherence function"?
"specifically, any part of the EU that's let the Polacks in."
Well, you can think whatever you feel about it, but I specifically know quite a big bunch of Polacks and they are pretty good artisans specially regarding wood arts.
"But the problem was that that port was left OPEN on machines that DID NOT NEED IT OPEN."
Not only that: I administered some NT4.0 boxes back those days and I remember what a nightmare it was aplying any hotfix from Microsoft. They (suppousedly) repaired one thing but it (certainly) broke three others. Under those circumnstances is no wonder quite a lot of boxes were unpatched after so much time. I know mine ones were unpatched for that precise hotfix (I remember in the previous weeks an RPC-related hotfix broke entire networks). Of course, coming from a unix background the Slammer didn't affect us: I already knew what a "listening port" was an why I didn't want an RDBM just listening unfirewalled to the Internet, so after (quite too much) reading about it our Ms SQL server was bound just to the loopback on our NT server on the DMZ (it didn't need anything else since all connections were local) and a freebsd-based firewall was in front of it blocking everything but ports 80 and 443 anyway but that opens another very interesting issue: to what amount can be held "guilty" a company that produces systems that *seem* (just seem) that can be managed by a monkey and even have the guts to marketing themselves as such? ("get the facts: Windows is sooo easy and Windows sysadmins are sooo much cheaper than unix ones... I forgot to mention that's maybe because all those so expensive unix sysadmins know their trade while the cheap Windows sysadmins are just clicketing monkeys, but who cares?") -but then Slammer just rides away and no company goes after Microsoft to bleed their money out of trials.
"The ONLY thing I think can be argued here is whether Microsoft should include an antivirus tool or not"
I never ran an antivirus on any unix-like system I ever administered -except for mail and fileservers for Microsoft-based clients, not even Internet-facing servers.
Why do you assume a Microsoft OS *must* carry an antivirus (either provided by Microsoft or any other thir party) when no other OS seems to need one? Maybe the "Microsoft" part on the "Microsoft OS" expression is the culprit?
"OK, one may argue it's MS themselves who fostered piracy to establish their monopoly..."
This is a strong argument, no doubt, but it is not the only one. What about this?
Due to the fact that lawfully or unlawfully Microsoft OS is almost a monopoly and the network effect involved, by taking offline all that Windows-based malware they are in fact protecting their own clients: the less Windows-focused malware on the Internet, the less malware that can affect their paying customers. It's quite a lot like vaccination policies: even if you are rich and can pay for your own high quality health services it's in your very own benefit vaccinate the unwashed masses; it makes you much less exposed to dangerous diseases (much better not being exposed to cholera than having a expensive treatment to cure it once you are ill, even if you belong to the lucky ones that can pay for it). If the Rockefeller's and Rothchild's of this world were able to understand it, I think Microsoft CxOs can understand it too.
"but realistically, how is Microsoft going to support owners of pirated software?"
Realistically: do you really think Microsoft gives a damn about "secure" their IP from this point of view? Do you really think Microsoft has done its best to avoid piracy? Do you really think that allowing pirated copies of their software ihas not traditionally been part of their marketing policy in order to "lock in" future corporate users?
Realistically: Microsoft has allowed a high percentage of their installed base to be pirated. Those pirated boxes cause a hugh mess on the Internet as a whole.
Realistically: Microsoft is responsible by a big percentage on such a mess and realistically, it has the funds to be held responsible and thus being forced to be a big part of the solution too.
"if pirated Windows machines are presenting a problem that everyone has to face, why do we blast Microsoft for its desire to see these machines taken offline?"
Because we know that Microsoft's intent was not to take those machines offline but let them to be online an unprotected just making more of a mess for everybody else.
"why are we putting "stolen software" in quotes when we're talking about people who're actually willfully using unlicensed software?"
Because "unlicensed" is a *very* different thing than "stolen".
"Is the idea here that pirates are "good" because they're not playing the "evil" Microsoft's game? Is Microsoft still more "evil" because they aren't improving the security of machines that are already well out of the bounds of their support model?"
The idea is that Microsoft used the "first dose for free" on purpouse and that brings a lot of problems for everything else (ie: me? I haven't used Microsoft software for ages, still, my spam folder holds 4111 spam messages right now, and every single one of them can be directly tracked down to Microsoft marketing decisions).
"(To make this point, put the 1997 Linux kernel and distribution on a server and put it on the Internet and count the seconds until it can and will be exploited.)"
I can take your challenge any day of the week and beat your ass out of the sand with one hand on my back.
By 1997 no distribution left opened any network service after installation. Do you want telnet? Install it; do you want httpd? install it; do you want ftpd? Install it. I can bet that even installed today it will take more that "seconds" to exploit a Debian Bo, an Slackware 3.1 or a Red Hat 3.0.3. Try that with Windows 95 or Me.
You *might* had a point if you were talking about something like Red Hat by year 2000 (and then, because they tried to emulate Windows' use easyness, loading a crapfull of services by default), but not on 1997.
"However, security policy MUST take into account every possibility."
Yeah... this man seems too serene, too well-dressed and he has a briefcase. He is obviously a terrorist in disguise carrying a bomb in front of everybody's eyes, *that's* why he tries to hide so well. Or isn't he?
Of course security policy MUST take into account every possibility *and* then have the ability to discern *real* menaces from paranoia. Or else, I already have the solution: just close airports -end of the problem. Two planes crashed against the Twin Towers? Easy: let's forbide planes.
Under an untrained but paranoid eye *everything* can be a bomb. I will of course concede that girl didn't show too much of a common sense but I would consider that people carrying murderly weapons and with the responsability of our security *must* show quite of a common sense or else we are doomed anyway. I can *even* concede that under current circumnstances the girl would have been taken apart, furtherly investigated and even reprehended because of his carelessness. But a fine? That only shows something on the lines of "we are this school's bullies, and we don't want nobody showing up how stupid we are". And I can assure that's *not* what I want from people working *for* me.
"Just how much crap should the security personnel tolerate?"
How much crap should you tolerate from your boss? Remember: a public official is nobody but an employee of mine, a tax payer.
"it have been better if a judge actually ruled against them (Monsoon), setting a precedent to be used in future GPL violation cases?"
Well, I'd say it's only liminary better than current situation. After all, a precedent is the opinion of one judge impressing the opinion of another judge. Current situation is that of a lawyer (the one that settled outcourts) and it will reasonably impress future lawyers in simmilar situations. So while they don't have a precedent, they already have a "precedent".
I just can't understand how your input data makes you assume your conclussions. Except from the "why change a system already working just OK?" which I'm 100% with you, I extract very different ones from your provided data:
"In the mid-1990s, the company in question built their IT operations [...] They wrote much of their in-house code"
I read here: in the mid 90s the company built a tailor-made IT system engineered by their internal knowledgeable technical staff.
"what is somewhat unique is that they essentially continued to use those same systems up until 200what is somewhat unique is that they essentially continued to use those same systems up until 2006."
We know their staff was knowledgeable and that the system fitted well their needs from the simple fact that it managed to work about 15 years without major complains.
"One of the main reasons why they didn't switch is because their software systems worked just fine"
Exactly what I was saying.
"They even got extremely lucky in the first place, as the developers who initially designed and implemented their software systems did so in a way that allowed for the systems to easily scale"
Do you think that's "luckyness"? That properly scalable systems grow up "per chance"? No: it was properly designed, that's why the system scaled, not because "luck".
An now, for the problems:
"A variety of consultants were apparently called in"
I read here: A variety of *external* resources that surely couldn't know the bussiness better than their old internal counterparts (things cannot be done much better than "OK", and that was the standard to beat), and that surely held their own agendas (like pushing the technologies they are knowledgeable about, instead the ones that best fitted, if only because the old "for a man with only a hammer every problem seems a nail", if not worse, "Certified Microsoft Gold Partner That Gains Money Every Time Microsoft Technologies Are Pushed Into A Client") were in place to design the new system.
And this is the very and only problem: By the 90's they had knowdledgeable internal staff. By 2006 they went to external unfitted consultors. I bet there's an untold story here that includes those "so expensive" Solaris sysadmins and C++ developers that were fired by a "smart" manager looking for profit. All the particular problems you outlined are not problems but consecuencies of this. Of course the new web-based GUI could be Firefox-tested -if knowledgeable people were in charge. Of course the new web-based GUI could make use of proper keyboard-based navigation -if knowledgeable people were in charge. Of course that the proper ammount of iron could have been pushed on the backed (specially after 15-more years of stats and usage-patterns) -if knowledgeable people were in charge.
No one of them are strictily speaking problems with AJAX, or Windows, or dot-net, or whatever the technology (while going from a perfectly working C++/Unix environment to an all-and-only-Microsoft is a very hard hint about management going nuts). All of them can be pointed out to a very common tendency on IT: fire the old knowledgeable technicians that put the means for the company to grow and stay there in first place and contract cheap minions and expensive external consultants as substitutes; then look as a very smart manager that saves the company some pennies; then the obvious "???" and finally the "wreak havoc" instead of "profit".
"Would you want be unable to complete even one attack for three minutes straight every time you played the game?"
What part of "random" means "top notch"? Random means that sometimes you will fight against a very hard competitor, and sometimes someone as "bland" as you. Probably, since this kind of distributions tend to be F-Fisher, the problem, if any, will be for the good ones, since most of the time will fight against lessen enemies making it a bit boring.
Yeah, but I was talking about successful artisans. Obviously failed ones can and will try quite a lot of different methods. Somehow, I didn't take them into cosideration.
Then you must consider this: can there be concepts that by there very nature cannot be properly expressed full sense on a discurse with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score lower than 14? Because if that's the case, then we can imagine a situation where any "proper" law that "grasp" the concept must be expressed with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score of 14 or higher, even in theory. Or is it you position that if anything is so complex it shouldn't be regulated by definition?
Maybe it's because the concept beyond it it's not a clear an obvious one. Real Life (TM) is not television, where someting either can be exposed on three minutes or it doesn't exist. Real Life is sometimes complex, not clear and unobvious. Maybe the Constitution can be clear and obvious since it should deal with the general basements of society, but laws are there to take care of a lot of corner cases and unobviuos implications. Of course, if you can achieve the same goal with five pages than with 500, much the better, and making it 1000 pages for the sole purpouse of hidding "unlawful" bills I'd consider not only fradulent but openly treason (yeah, the kind of fault it's the only to recieve death penalty on civilized countries, so hard I consider such a misbehaviour).
"So I do not know that I actually vote any better than my representative."
Well, apples to apples. Of course you can have somebody trying to fool you like this (while I doubt this is focused to fool your representatives, but to fool *you*, the elector -they probably know quite well what they are voting, but "hiding" it on a 1000 pages bill will make it easier for them to avoid public repercusions). But that's independent to the fact you have direct or representative democracy. The thing that it is not independent is that no matter if you go representative or direct, decisions about the nitty-gritty details of goverment still will have to be taken. Are you ready to expend the vast amount of time requiered to be in touch with all those details -even more, are you ready to take the time in order to gain enough expertiseness in the fields involved so you can make an *informed* decisions about them? I bet not.
The problem of our current representative democracies is not the "government machine" itself but a whole society built around it. On a "classic Greece" scenario, you would have the time to make informed decisions because you could expend most of your time at the agora (maybe modern agora being the Internet), instead of working (that's what slaves are for); we hipothetically could have a society like this, being machines our modern "slaves" but instead of this, we have to work long hours to earn a live (and due to this we have high population densities that make government more complex too). That means you need representatives for a *lot* of things (think most of services: you could have the time to directly contact farmers for your food needs, but due to current status, you must delegate on your local market) and that includes government.
"It's not my fault that the ISP is not using the latest and greatest in web technologies. "
Maybe. But it is certainly your problem if you develop on a platform different from the one you know it's going to be your production one. You can choose *your* environment, right?
Slashdot Mirror
"Time is not real? So time is physical? Show me this "thing" called "time"."
Sure: t=v/s. There. The fact that you can't touch it doesn't make something automatically "unphysical". Time is a property of the real world, thus is a physical magnitude (it's not a thing, but a magnitude: for the same you could ask "bring me the fruit called brick" asuming only fruits can be physical).
"Are your dreams real? If they are not real, then how did you experience them?"
Of course they are. And you have neurophysics investigating them.
"Is consciousness physical?"
More on the same: of course yes. And you have quite a lot of researchers working on this.
"Reality is so much MORE then just the physical"
Reality is much more than *matter*. Of course you have magnitudes (like time or speed), or energy or quite a lot of other *physical* things.
"Science sets _itself_ up as a Rival Church; by ignoring the wisdom of the past Religions it has very much become its _own_ Religion."
Yeah, sure. That's why Science builds up upon the shoulders of the past (we have not to rediscover Newton's laws on each generation) while things like religion or (part of) philosophy are still dicussing or accepting ideas "frozen" 4000 years ago.
"Others have written about the problems of Rationalism"
And that's the very point: they not only write about Rationalism, but they are just circling around the same ideas once and again without the ability to reach *any* valid conclusion to build upon. From the philosophy/religion front Humanity has advanced almost zero from Socrates or Plato. But they didn't have eight-lane bridges nor did they sent a man to the Moon.
"Even so, you'd still be talking about many Libraries of Congress' worth of information that the reader would need to understand."
But then you could line-up all the books go-and-return three times to the Moon and who wouldn't understand?
"So according to you the only thing worth reporting on is mathematics?"
So do you mean those whimsical "Wright Brothers" didn't achieve anything worth reporting?
"Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks"
But then you are WRONG! Do you think this kind of hyperlinks were invented in the Internet days? Look at *any* scientific paper: they are FULL of hyperlinks. Each time you see "this happens to be A[1]" or "we already know that to be true[2]", that's an hyperlink. At the end of the paper you will find quite some references (usually a *lot* of references) that links the current paper to the immediate antecedents. Those in turn provide new citations to other references and only very few seminal papers happen to be more referenced that the references they link to.
So all the information is already there, but do you know what? Even then, unless you are already an expert on the matter it still seems to be archaic Chinese to you (unless you are an archaic Chinese expert yourself in which case it will seem to be Quantic Chromodynamics no less). It is not that the information is not already "gettable", but how many information we can grasp in just one bit. I usually offer this example: I'm absolutly negated about dancing, so I admire those dancers from TV programs: each day the team offers three/four dancing numbers on their program "how the heck they manage to learn all those movents without failure?". Till I remember they are professional dancers and that means that they do not learn their movents like I'd do: "the left foot goes 45 degrees to the right then the left hand follows, two steps to the right, then I find the girl coming to me, I move my arms towards them, but don't forget to gracily elevate my hips..." they just need to memorize higher level abstractions: we start in first position, then we go for an "eigth lace" then take her in third, then rondó... Because they are professionals they already have a basis that allow them to grasp complex concepts by just looking for the "big landscape": the details are already known and taken for granted. Well, scientific papers are just the same and without all the "taken for granted" any ten pages papers would become a 1000 pages book and no one that already knows the 1000 pages book would understand the 10 pages paper anyway.
You just try to understand Einstein's paper first published on "Annalen der physiks" titled "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies" without a firm understanding on both newtonian theory of movement and maxwellian ecuations: you will see it doesn't matter it was published by 1905, when your "copyright overlords" were not so strong, everything was published and proper citations were both accesible and properly in place. And please remember it's not even a very hard paper; currently any minimally cute 16 year old boy should understand its maths without many problems. But still, you either already have the maths and the underlying theories already grasped or no matter how many citations or how free, the article will still seem Chinese to you (unless you are Chinese, in which case it will seem archaic Saxon to you).
"The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality"
I must say "bullshit". Science *is* our definition of reality. It can be controversial how much our definition of reality pairs the "real reality" or if there's in fact a "real reality", but there's no doubt science *is* our definition of reality. Only this assumption allows even you to not think that the seven lane bridge you cross to go to job is not suspended over the river by any magic force.
"copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare?"
By means of the "right for citation" every civilized country protects. I explicitly said "any civilized country" because I don't really know what's the state of affairs about this in non-civilized countries like the USA.
"not everything can be made explicit"
That's absolutly true. I already wrote about it in a different post.
"putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read"
Redundant. That's just an specific case of your second point.
"to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions"
You are even *forced* to make such assumptions (that's the very basis of the scientific method: you make some assumptions, then you test them and the tests show them wrong or reinforce them). But by the time you publish you "assumpt" no more: either your tests can't find them wrong after you honestly tried as hard as you could to break them (then as long as you can say they are not assumptions but well backed-up theories) or they find them wrong, in which case you don't publish.
"sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered"
But then you leave them *unanswered*. Quite a different thing than take them for *granted* (or assumed them to be right).
"so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions"
That's neither the way to properly advance, nor the way you will get further founds. Founds come from your *effective* findings. Of course you can (and probably should) have your own opinions, but grants don't come from them, but from your current findings and the fact that your findings show that there are new "shadow zones" to inspect. It is not that "I think we can go to Mars in a three weeks space flight" but "current findings provided in this article cast shadows about what we thougth about space travels so we need more foundings to dissipate them and see what we can find beyond -it might even be that we can travel to Mars in three weeks if it happens to be true A, B and C".
"My suggestion: Make everything explicit."
What do you mean by "everything". Do you mean I should add an apendix where I copy the entry for "explicit" from Webster's?
"Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies"
What the heck is the "peer review system" you talk about? What in hell are "pay-to-read studies"? What's an study, after all? Is it the same one of those on Nature than the review the "Apocalypsers of the Seven Day of the Return of the Beast" give me for free in the middle of the street?
Just to express this cleanly: here you just tried to "plain talk" about a certain non-technical common-sense issue. But even then, your two paragrahps are full of non-trivial asumptions and non-referenced assertions (do you *really* think any layman will understand i.e. what the peer-review system is and why it's any better than an authority-based assertion?) and still you expect that on really very especialized fields any technical article can go on all-explicit? I published some scientific papers back on my day... do you really mean I should add to my ten pages article the more than 1000 pages from the Strassburger's book on Botanics that backed them up (among others)? Or else, how do you expect for a layman to understand what do I mean when I talk about i.e. "cormophyte vs spermaphyte biological selection understanding by means of echotopic adherence function"?
"specifically, any part of the EU that's let the Polacks in."
Well, you can think whatever you feel about it, but I specifically know quite a big bunch of Polacks and they are pretty good artisans specially regarding wood arts.
"But the problem was that that port was left OPEN on machines that DID NOT NEED IT OPEN."
Not only that: I administered some NT4.0 boxes back those days and I remember what a nightmare it was aplying any hotfix from Microsoft. They (suppousedly) repaired one thing but it (certainly) broke three others. Under those circumnstances is no wonder quite a lot of boxes were unpatched after so much time. I know mine ones were unpatched for that precise hotfix (I remember in the previous weeks an RPC-related hotfix broke entire networks). Of course, coming from a unix background the Slammer didn't affect us: I already knew what a "listening port" was an why I didn't want an RDBM just listening unfirewalled to the Internet, so after (quite too much) reading about it our Ms SQL server was bound just to the loopback on our NT server on the DMZ (it didn't need anything else since all connections were local) and a freebsd-based firewall was in front of it blocking everything but ports 80 and 443 anyway but that opens another very interesting issue: to what amount can be held "guilty" a company that produces systems that *seem* (just seem) that can be managed by a monkey and even have the guts to marketing themselves as such? ("get the facts: Windows is sooo easy and Windows sysadmins are sooo much cheaper than unix ones... I forgot to mention that's maybe because all those so expensive unix sysadmins know their trade while the cheap Windows sysadmins are just clicketing monkeys, but who cares?") -but then Slammer just rides away and no company goes after Microsoft to bleed their money out of trials.
"The ONLY thing I think can be argued here is whether Microsoft should include an antivirus tool or not"
I never ran an antivirus on any unix-like system I ever administered -except for mail and fileservers for Microsoft-based clients, not even Internet-facing servers.
Why do you assume a Microsoft OS *must* carry an antivirus (either provided by Microsoft or any other thir party) when no other OS seems to need one? Maybe the "Microsoft" part on the "Microsoft OS" expression is the culprit?
"OK, one may argue it's MS themselves who fostered piracy to establish their monopoly..."
This is a strong argument, no doubt, but it is not the only one. What about this?
Due to the fact that lawfully or unlawfully Microsoft OS is almost a monopoly and the network effect involved, by taking offline all that Windows-based malware they are in fact protecting their own clients: the less Windows-focused malware on the Internet, the less malware that can affect their paying customers. It's quite a lot like vaccination policies: even if you are rich and can pay for your own high quality health services it's in your very own benefit vaccinate the unwashed masses; it makes you much less exposed to dangerous diseases (much better not being exposed to cholera than having a expensive treatment to cure it once you are ill, even if you belong to the lucky ones that can pay for it). If the Rockefeller's and Rothchild's of this world were able to understand it, I think Microsoft CxOs can understand it too.
"but realistically, how is Microsoft going to support owners of pirated software?"
Realistically: do you really think Microsoft gives a damn about "secure" their IP from this point of view? Do you really think Microsoft has done its best to avoid piracy? Do you really think that allowing pirated copies of their software ihas not traditionally been part of their marketing policy in order to "lock in" future corporate users?
Realistically: Microsoft has allowed a high percentage of their installed base to be pirated. Those pirated boxes cause a hugh mess on the Internet as a whole.
Realistically: Microsoft is responsible by a big percentage on such a mess and realistically, it has the funds to be held responsible and thus being forced to be a big part of the solution too.
"if pirated Windows machines are presenting a problem that everyone has to face, why do we blast Microsoft for its desire to see these machines taken offline?"
Because we know that Microsoft's intent was not to take those machines offline but let them to be online an unprotected just making more of a mess for everybody else.
"why are we putting "stolen software" in quotes when we're talking about people who're actually willfully using unlicensed software?"
Because "unlicensed" is a *very* different thing than "stolen".
"Is the idea here that pirates are "good" because they're not playing the "evil" Microsoft's game? Is Microsoft still more "evil" because they aren't improving the security of machines that are already well out of the bounds of their support model?"
The idea is that Microsoft used the "first dose for free" on purpouse and that brings a lot of problems for everything else (ie: me? I haven't used Microsoft software for ages, still, my spam folder holds 4111 spam messages right now, and every single one of them can be directly tracked down to Microsoft marketing decisions).
"(To make this point, put the 1997 Linux kernel and distribution on a server and put it on the Internet and count the seconds until it can and will be exploited.)"
I can take your challenge any day of the week and beat your ass out of the sand with one hand on my back.
By 1997 no distribution left opened any network service after installation. Do you want telnet? Install it; do you want httpd? install it; do you want ftpd? Install it. I can bet that even installed today it will take more that "seconds" to exploit a Debian Bo, an Slackware 3.1 or a Red Hat 3.0.3. Try that with Windows 95 or Me.
You *might* had a point if you were talking about something like Red Hat by year 2000 (and then, because they tried to emulate Windows' use easyness, loading a crapfull of services by default), but not on 1997.
"I would rather side with the police and have the girl arrested (or shot if needed) and avoid possible loss of life"
So shooting to death a girl is somehow not a "loss of life" nowadays?
Of course nobody remembers now what happened to the one Brazilian shooted by London police, do we?
"However, security policy MUST take into account every possibility."
Yeah... this man seems too serene, too well-dressed and he has a briefcase. He is obviously a terrorist in disguise carrying a bomb in front of everybody's eyes, *that's* why he tries to hide so well. Or isn't he?
Of course security policy MUST take into account every possibility *and* then have the ability to discern *real* menaces from paranoia. Or else, I already have the solution: just close airports -end of the problem. Two planes crashed against the Twin Towers? Easy: let's forbide planes.
Under an untrained but paranoid eye *everything* can be a bomb. I will of course concede that girl didn't show too much of a common sense but I would consider that people carrying murderly weapons and with the responsability of our security *must* show quite of a common sense or else we are doomed anyway. I can *even* concede that under current circumnstances the girl would have been taken apart, furtherly investigated and even reprehended because of his carelessness. But a fine? That only shows something on the lines of "we are this school's bullies, and we don't want nobody showing up how stupid we are". And I can assure that's *not* what I want from people working *for* me.
"Just how much crap should the security personnel tolerate?"
How much crap should you tolerate from your boss? Remember: a public official is nobody but an employee of mine, a tax payer.
"it have been better if a judge actually ruled against them (Monsoon), setting a precedent to be used in future GPL violation cases?"
Well, I'd say it's only liminary better than current situation. After all, a precedent is the opinion of one judge impressing the opinion of another judge. Current situation is that of a lawyer (the one that settled outcourts) and it will reasonably impress future lawyers in simmilar situations. So while they don't have a precedent, they already have a "precedent".
I just can't understand how your input data makes you assume your conclussions. Except from the "why change a system already working just OK?" which I'm 100% with you, I extract very different ones from your provided data:
"In the mid-1990s, the company in question built their IT operations [...] They wrote much of their in-house code"
I read here: in the mid 90s the company built a tailor-made IT system engineered by their internal knowledgeable technical staff.
"what is somewhat unique is that they essentially continued to use those same systems up until 200what is somewhat unique is that they essentially continued to use those same systems up until 2006."
We know their staff was knowledgeable and that the system fitted well their needs from the simple fact that it managed to work about 15 years without major complains.
"One of the main reasons why they didn't switch is because their software systems worked just fine"
Exactly what I was saying.
"They even got extremely lucky in the first place, as the developers who initially designed and implemented their software systems did so in a way that allowed for the systems to easily scale"
Do you think that's "luckyness"? That properly scalable systems grow up "per chance"? No: it was properly designed, that's why the system scaled, not because "luck".
An now, for the problems:
"A variety of consultants were apparently called in"
I read here: A variety of *external* resources that surely couldn't know the bussiness better than their old internal counterparts (things cannot be done much better than "OK", and that was the standard to beat), and that surely held their own agendas (like pushing the technologies they are knowledgeable about, instead the ones that best fitted, if only because the old "for a man with only a hammer every problem seems a nail", if not worse, "Certified Microsoft Gold Partner That Gains Money Every Time Microsoft Technologies Are Pushed Into A Client") were in place to design the new system.
And this is the very and only problem: By the 90's they had knowdledgeable internal staff. By 2006 they went to external unfitted consultors. I bet there's an untold story here that includes those "so expensive" Solaris sysadmins and C++ developers that were fired by a "smart" manager looking for profit. All the particular problems you outlined are not problems but consecuencies of this. Of course the new web-based GUI could be Firefox-tested -if knowledgeable people were in charge. Of course the new web-based GUI could make use of proper keyboard-based navigation -if knowledgeable people were in charge. Of course that the proper ammount of iron could have been pushed on the backed (specially after 15-more years of stats and usage-patterns) -if knowledgeable people were in charge.
No one of them are strictily speaking problems with AJAX, or Windows, or dot-net, or whatever the technology (while going from a perfectly working C++/Unix environment to an all-and-only-Microsoft is a very hard hint about management going nuts). All of them can be pointed out to a very common tendency on IT: fire the old knowledgeable technicians that put the means for the company to grow and stay there in first place and contract cheap minions and expensive external consultants as substitutes; then look as a very smart manager that saves the company some pennies; then the obvious "???" and finally the "wreak havoc" instead of "profit".
"Would you want be unable to complete even one attack for three minutes straight every time you played the game?"
What part of "random" means "top notch"? Random means that sometimes you will fight against a very hard competitor, and sometimes someone as "bland" as you. Probably, since this kind of distributions tend to be F-Fisher, the problem, if any, will be for the good ones, since most of the time will fight against lessen enemies making it a bit boring.
"If you are fighting unknown people it needs to be able to match them to your level."
Why?
"For these reasons, I hate social networks with a passion."
This, of course, being said on an HTTP-based site that adds absolute nothing to the NNTP protocol and paradigm it predates.
"The client isn't the right place to do this."
The server isn't, either.
So what does it leave us with?
"Or they just guess."
Yeah, but I was talking about successful artisans. Obviously failed ones can and will try quite a lot of different methods. Somehow, I didn't take them into cosideration.
"It's been suggested by RAH"
Then you must consider this: can there be concepts that by there very nature cannot be properly expressed full sense on a discurse with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score lower than 14? Because if that's the case, then we can imagine a situation where any "proper" law that "grasp" the concept must be expressed with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score of 14 or higher, even in theory. Or is it you position that if anything is so complex it shouldn't be regulated by definition?
"If a legal idea is not clear and obvious"
Maybe it's because the concept beyond it it's not a clear an obvious one. Real Life (TM) is not television, where someting either can be exposed on three minutes or it doesn't exist. Real Life is sometimes complex, not clear and unobvious. Maybe the Constitution can be clear and obvious since it should deal with the general basements of society, but laws are there to take care of a lot of corner cases and unobviuos implications. Of course, if you can achieve the same goal with five pages than with 500, much the better, and making it 1000 pages for the sole purpouse of hidding "unlawful" bills I'd consider not only fradulent but openly treason (yeah, the kind of fault it's the only to recieve death penalty on civilized countries, so hard I consider such a misbehaviour).
"So I do not know that I actually vote any better than my representative."
Well, apples to apples. Of course you can have somebody trying to fool you like this (while I doubt this is focused to fool your representatives, but to fool *you*, the elector -they probably know quite well what they are voting, but "hiding" it on a 1000 pages bill will make it easier for them to avoid public repercusions). But that's independent to the fact you have direct or representative democracy. The thing that it is not independent is that no matter if you go representative or direct, decisions about the nitty-gritty details of goverment still will have to be taken. Are you ready to expend the vast amount of time requiered to be in touch with all those details -even more, are you ready to take the time in order to gain enough expertiseness in the fields involved so you can make an *informed* decisions about them? I bet not.
The problem of our current representative democracies is not the "government machine" itself but a whole society built around it. On a "classic Greece" scenario, you would have the time to make informed decisions because you could expend most of your time at the agora (maybe modern agora being the Internet), instead of working (that's what slaves are for); we hipothetically could have a society like this, being machines our modern "slaves" but instead of this, we have to work long hours to earn a live (and due to this we have high population densities that make government more complex too). That means you need representatives for a *lot* of things (think most of services: you could have the time to directly contact farmers for your food needs, but due to current status, you must delegate on your local market) and that includes government.
"It's not my fault that the ISP is not using the latest and greatest in web technologies. "
Maybe. But it is certainly your problem if you develop on a platform different from the one you know it's going to be your production one. You can choose *your* environment, right?