I just went and wasted my time clicking those two eWeek links. The article is clearly NOT amazing, and it doesn't say much more than Moglen is going to re-write the GPL, not change it much, not change its goal, and have public discourse on it before going forth. However, if I hadn't clicked those links I woulda missed the two IBM ads.
Yes, but how do you justify paying $13/month for just a program guide which is free on tv.yahoo.com or your cable provider's site?
The program guide in TiVO allows a direct connection between the search and record features.
Now, you may like combing through tv.yahoo.com and programming the PVR manually, and you can choose to spend your time doing that. But for $13/mo TiVO will let the PVR directly connect to tv listings, and searches of them.
Pick up the TiVO box and carry it to the other room, and plug it back in. This works anywhere, TiVO is fully functional at playback even if disconnected from the cable/DirectTV.
There's record levels of CO2 already. We will need to convert to a carbon-less form of fuel, like hydrogen. Hydrogen conceivably replaces gas in cars as the portable fuel of the future. Produced, of course, by non-fossil fuel sources.
That being said, I really love driving behind my friend's SVO biodiesel school bus....mmmmm, French Fries.
It looked amazing to me. It looked rather like early pong games, the user just learned how to move the small dot onto the large one. Nothing real precise, but imagine 30 years from now...
Well, to get a truer understanding of what is possible you'd need a measure of information transfer from the surface of the scalp. It's kinda like a 120 baud modem. Controlling, in one dimension (or even two dimensions), a cursor, is not a task requiring massive bandwidth. Could be analogous, though, to piloting a wheelchair around the house.
Now, think of the bandwidth required to type this message in at/. I put out 14 keystrokes per second, each one a choice of about 2^6 available keys. Maybe 1200 baud to capture the text production, several times more than that to control my fingers using sensory feedback.
The real limitation, to anyone that has looked at scalp potentials, and invasive techniques, is the information transfer rate. The scalp will always be at least an order of magnitude (maybe several) behind. Even surface potentials (sub-cranial, but still not within the brain) are an order of magnitude behind invasive signals. An invasive implant carries the possibility of transferring information at the same rate, or faster than a human can with his motor output. Scalp potentials will always be far far far behind. It is certainly worth exploring how far you can get with a scalp potential signal, but in another 10 years Cyberkinetics will be allowing humans deprived of motor output to send text streams at realistic rates to computers to interact with their environment. That is the future I look forward to.
Individuals are awarded copyrights for their unique expression, whatever form it may take.
They may license the copyrights to others. If the licensee if defunct, common sense dictates that the copyrights go back to the author, and absolutely are not in limbo.
You can sense the difference between two and one point on your skin when they are separated by a little less than a mm.
Low threshold mechanoreceptors, of two different types, each have about 1/mm2 density in the fingertip, or about 100/sq cm. These two types are different in temporal sensitivity and dynamic range, but allow sensation of skin deflections from a few microns to a few millimeters - roughly three orders of magnitude range.
16 will not allow a reasonable assessment of surface texture. It will not allow you to discriminate 100 grit from 200 grit sandpaper. It will not allow you to read Braille, or find the right key in your pocket.
No, not quite. Samuelson recognizes that whereas there are certainly short-term gains, in the long-term, there may not be.
We ship 10% of our economy to countries that manufacture our products each year. They are beginning to compete with us on raw materials like concrete and oil. Especially oil. What happens if oil prices double in the next five years? Triple? What happens when the US can no longer afford to re-build the Bay Bridge when it is damaged in an earthquake? Are we really that far off?
Shipping 10% of your economy overseas is a short-term phenomena. Market forces will correct it, eventually. Eventually Asian nations will drive up the prices on raw materials, and we will all have a lot less spending power. And it is already happening. Outsourcing to the tune of an enormous trade imbalance is living large today for tomorrow.
Most people don't realize the amount of "body tuning" these athletes get.
They get IVs every night to replenish fluids and sugars. They sleep in high nitrogen (or hypobaric) chambers to simulate sleeping at 15000 ft and stimulate natural EPO production. Blood hematocit is regulated so this is also tested regularly, to make sure the cyclist doesn't fail a hematocrit test.
There is speculation about widespread growth hormone and testosterone "boosting". These are also regulated within a range - athletes can undetectably boost natural levels to the high end of this range.
These are all things KNOWN to occur in SOME pro athletes. So, where is the line drawn at legal or illegal. Is it legal to have a sugar/fluids IV to re-hydrate and boost blood sugars? An athlete that does not use the IV cannot compete against an athlete that does.
How about the high nitrogen chamber for sleep? Again, a significant advantage.
What about boosting natural hormones to the high end of the normal range? Why should one person have an advantage because he has naturally high levels of hGH. Why not let everyone have the same level...
Its a slippery slope, and unfortunately few know where pro cyclists such as Lance Armstrong (and the entire rest of the peloton) fall on this axis. I'd bet money he uses a nitrogen tent and uses an IV regularly. Anything beyond that is largely speculation, and it is poor form to speculate on cheating of successful athletes that tested negative.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
Federal cameras are challengable as a violation of the 4th Amendment. A Federal Body is implementing a surveillance technique on citizens who are not under reasonable suspicion. Under the constitution, such surveillance may be illegal.
Most people do not think about it, but you are, in a major US city, captured on surveillance cameras 50-60 times a day. Taxis, MUNI transportation, ATMs, banks, universities. Its just like 1984, except that the government controls few of the cameras.
When they start to control the cameras, it is time to get worried.
My reading is that the current policy states the NWS will not compete with private weather. However, the new policy would delete that proviso, and that is what Myers is pissed about. They would like a stronger enforcement of the old policy, and not the new policy.
In other words, if any party is threatened by the changes in the new policy, it is the private sector, and not the public at large, which shall continue to receive at least the level of support they currently receive.
There seems to be some fear-mongering, and not reading the finely written article, going on.
The proposal basically extends the current policy. By my reading of it, nothing currently available would disappear without plenty of prior notice, and in all likelihood nothing currently available would go away at all.
The Accuweather lobbying is for the raw data access to be put in a database format, completely open, instead of its current raw text format.
I don't know if any of you have programmatically gotten their data, but the downloads are oppressive due to size. A binary format would save a LOT of bandwidth, without the public-at-large lose any information.
In short, Accuweather and the NWS are not considering removing NWS information from the internet.
But there are, currently, dozens and dozens of small weather forecasting niches. People do weather forecasting for hang-gliding, or surfing, or wind-surfing, and do this by interpreting available NWS data.
If the change in enacted, almost all of these small-time forecasters will go away. Anyone who wants weather information will be able to get it, either by paying accuweather, or by writing their own tools to interpret the freely available raw data. I have written tools to decode raw data, and it is not tricky work, but it takes some time.
My viewpoint is that currently, all weather forecasting uses the same models and same data input, those of the military (FNMOC) and NWS. The raw data costs an enormous amount of money to get, and a small amount to provide through current web pages.
The proposal, if enacted, would DECREASE available weather sources, not INCREASE it, and would result in a net DECREASE in the quality and quantity of weather forecasts to the public. The people who would profit will be those who write weather interpreting tools and provide them to others. It is asking for a government handout - plain and simple. Remove a government service, so we can provide it instead.
The key point to keep in mind here is that ALL WEATHER MODELS and ALL FORECASTING MODELS are 100% owned by the government. The cost for development was ENORMOUS and EXTREMELY VALUABLE. Accuweather wants the VISUAL PRESENTATION to be removed, so they can use their own, and sell it, instead. The VISUAL PRESENTATION provides ALL the consumer value.
I think the better analogy would be if the government wrote an operating system and a window manager and browser. Microsoft lobbied the government to remove the window manager only, so they could sell the whole package as their own.
It will have a chilling effect on small niche weather forecasters, cost consumers more to get the same data (or worse), lead to no improvement in forecasting (remember the models will not change), and profit a few large weather companies substantially. Accuweather is just getting pissed off that the internet allows easy access to the same data they've always had easy access to, and it is eating their profit margin.
Cringely has been a long long long-time column writer for PBS. Back in the day, he was a nobody.
Then he did this movie, called Triumph of the Nerds, about Microsoft and Apple's foundings. You see, back then, he was still a tech writer, and he met with Apple in their garage, and knew Bill Gates when he wasn't worth much. He tracks them and personal computer's rise.
He is quite interested to technophiles, and that is a columnist's job. He gets people interested, reading, and writing about his ideas. He's probably the best technical writer around (I certainly think so - I started reading him around when the nerds movie came out).
If you haven't seen the movie, you may find it interesting, and free on PBS.
"Around the middle of April, I was contacted by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Ken Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions of Linux and Minix, looking for copied code.
My results are here. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other. (I realize that Minix predates Linux, but I did the comparison bidirectionally for the sake of objectivity).
While I was working on this in my spare time, Ken kept pestering me to hurry up and finish. He told me he had a paper awaiting publication, and that my analysis was the las bit of data he needed. I sent the final results (which are, exactly as given to Ken Brown, at the above URL) to him on May 17th. When I called him to ask if he had any questions about the analysis methods or results, and to ask if he would like to have it repeated with other source comparison tools, I was in for a bit of a shock. Apparently, Ken was expecting me to find gobs of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake, since it was clearly impossible for one person to write an OS and 'code theft' had to have occured.
So, I guess what I want to say is, pay no attention to this man; to the best of my knowledge he is talking out of his ass. I apologise for any inconvenience I may have caused you by participating (however indirectly) in Ken's pet project.
Please feel free to reproduce this email and the contents of my analysis webpage."
In what volume can BioDiesel be produced, and what is the cost in doing so?
Right now my friends go to the recycled veggie oil pickup, grab a bunch of 55 gallon drums for free, filter them, and use them to drive up and down the coast while stinking up the air behind the bus with the fumes of french fries. And I think there is no shortage of vegetable oil used for frying in fast food joints.
So how do you remotely administer one of these machines ?
You turn on the services.
The real point is that no outside software can do anything bad to a Mac machine by default, because no ports are open.
If you turn a service on, then you KNOW IT IS ON, and you KNOW YOU NEED TO CHECK IT FOR SECURITY.
We're talking consumer client OSs. The vast majority of the users never turn anything on (and by default, never get a worm).
Imagine if Windows took that same philosophy...
In general, I am perfectly happy for even server machines to be shipped with only those ports open that I manually specify, or turn on myself. It's secure by default, services on demand, not unadministered services by default. The latter is insanity in today's networks.
(re djb), Yes, but not necessarily in the DNS world. I don't understand. If it's so great, why haven't more professionals adopted it?
Dan is pedantic and stubborn, and people just don't like that.
His software is also incredibly good. I would NEVER IN MY WILDEST DREAMS set up a caching only dns server on a machine with BIND. It is just asking for trouble. I use tinydns on every machine, and never think about it again. It is easy to setup. It is easy to install. It is easy to configure. It is fast. It is secure.
You may think those machines will eventually get rooted, but I'm betting an asteroid causes the next ice age first.
Protecting the middle class is an important point.
The most common reason for outsourcing is reducing skilled labor costs in business.
This has an impact, within the US, of de-valuing the financial worth of the middle class. Computer programmers were worth a LOT more before they started outsourcing. The same can be said of auto workers, electronics engineers, and clothing manufacturing workers.
The net effect is a long-term class division between those who head businesses, and those who manufacture or produce for them.
I wonder if any systematic studies of distribution of wealth, and its relation to outsourcing have been done.
Are we really to expect a major western nation to make a judgment that favors consumer rights over corporate rights?
This is just more of a PR move. It is not going to happen. Besides, the important bundled software (media player, browser, email) are already done deals - Microsoft has independent monopolies on them in the market. Unless the judgment forces Microsoft to sell a stripped down Windows (with completely open APIs), and ONLY allows OEM vendors to choose the add-ons, the playing field will not be leveled. Even that is not enough, when the playing field has been so horribly biased so far.
What is wrong with migrating to a replacement for SMTP? What is wrong with developing better challenge/response systems?
Nothing. Except that Microsoft and Yahoo! don't make millions implementing it.
A solution. 1) Bayesian filtering 2) Add SPF 3) Add whitelisting, by having encryption keys for each SMTP server's outbound mail. This is effectively a per SMTP server whitelist - public keys are obtained as part of mail client reading the mail. 4) smtp-auth
No one without a name-password can send mail. He can only send mail from his own SMTP server. His mail is encrypted to prove where it came from, and his IP address checks out with the DNS listing for his domain as a permitted sender. And, his email is still scanned for content.
This takes care of all current spammer techniques - compromising local machines (smtp-auth), forging domains (encryption key mismatch), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be just like how Microsoft beat AOL at the ISP game.
And just like Microsoft beat Sony in the game box market.
I just went and wasted my time clicking those two eWeek links. The article is clearly NOT amazing, and it doesn't say much more than Moglen is going to re-write the GPL, not change it much, not change its goal, and have public discourse on it before going forth. However, if I hadn't clicked those links I woulda missed the two IBM ads.
Yes, but how do you justify paying $13/month for just a program guide which is free on tv.yahoo.com or your cable provider's site?
The program guide in TiVO allows a direct connection between the search and record features.
Now, you may like combing through tv.yahoo.com and programming the PVR manually, and you can choose to spend your time doing that. But for $13/mo TiVO will let the PVR directly connect to tv listings, and searches of them.
You forgot this one
Pick up the TiVO box and carry it to the other room, and plug it back in. This works anywhere, TiVO is fully functional at playback even if disconnected from the cable/DirectTV.
There's record levels of CO2 already. We will need to convert to a carbon-less form of fuel, like hydrogen. Hydrogen conceivably replaces gas in cars as the portable fuel of the future. Produced, of course, by non-fossil fuel sources.
That being said, I really love driving behind my friend's SVO biodiesel school bus....mmmmm, French Fries.
It looked amazing to me. It looked rather like early pong games, the user just learned how to move the small dot onto the large one. Nothing real precise, but imagine 30 years from now...
/. I put out 14 keystrokes per second, each one a choice of about 2^6 available keys. Maybe 1200 baud to capture the text production, several times more than that to control my fingers using sensory feedback.
Well, to get a truer understanding of what is possible you'd need a measure of information transfer from the surface of the scalp. It's kinda like a 120 baud modem. Controlling, in one dimension (or even two dimensions), a cursor, is not a task requiring massive bandwidth. Could be analogous, though, to piloting a wheelchair around the house.
Now, think of the bandwidth required to type this message in at
The real limitation, to anyone that has looked at scalp potentials, and invasive techniques, is the information transfer rate. The scalp will always be at least an order of magnitude (maybe several) behind. Even surface potentials (sub-cranial, but still not within the brain) are an order of magnitude behind invasive signals. An invasive implant carries the possibility of transferring information at the same rate, or faster than a human can with his motor output. Scalp potentials will always be far far far behind. It is certainly worth exploring how far you can get with a scalp potential signal, but in another 10 years Cyberkinetics will be allowing humans deprived of motor output to send text streams at realistic rates to computers to interact with their environment. That is the future I look forward to.
Companies NEVER own copyrights.
Individuals are awarded copyrights for their unique expression, whatever form it may take.
They may license the copyrights to others. If the licensee if defunct, common sense dictates that the copyrights go back to the author, and absolutely are not in limbo.
You can sense the difference between two and one point on your skin when they are separated by a little less than a mm.
Low threshold mechanoreceptors, of two different types, each have about 1/mm2 density in the fingertip, or about 100/sq cm. These two types are different in temporal sensitivity and dynamic range, but allow sensation of skin deflections from a few microns to a few millimeters - roughly three orders of magnitude range.
16 will not allow a reasonable assessment of surface texture. It will not allow you to discriminate 100 grit from 200 grit sandpaper. It will not allow you to read Braille, or find the right key in your pocket.
But certainly it will allow lots of function.
No, not quite. Samuelson recognizes that whereas there are certainly short-term gains, in the long-term, there may not be.
We ship 10% of our economy to countries that manufacture our products each year. They are beginning to compete with us on raw materials like concrete and oil. Especially oil. What happens if oil prices double in the next five years? Triple? What happens when the US can no longer afford to re-build the Bay Bridge when it is damaged in an earthquake? Are we really that far off?
Shipping 10% of your economy overseas is a short-term phenomena. Market forces will correct it, eventually. Eventually Asian nations will drive up the prices on raw materials, and we will all have a lot less spending power. And it is already happening. Outsourcing to the tune of an enormous trade imbalance is living large today for tomorrow.
Most people don't realize the amount of "body tuning" these athletes get.
They get IVs every night to replenish fluids and sugars. They sleep in high nitrogen (or hypobaric) chambers to simulate sleeping at 15000 ft and stimulate natural EPO production. Blood hematocit is regulated so this is also tested regularly, to make sure the cyclist doesn't fail a hematocrit test.
There is speculation about widespread growth hormone and testosterone "boosting". These are also regulated within a range - athletes can undetectably boost natural levels to the high end of this range.
These are all things KNOWN to occur in SOME pro athletes. So, where is the line drawn at legal or illegal. Is it legal to have a sugar/fluids IV to re-hydrate and boost blood sugars? An athlete that does not use the IV cannot compete against an athlete that does.
How about the high nitrogen chamber for sleep? Again, a significant advantage.
What about boosting natural hormones to the high end of the normal range? Why should one person have an advantage because he has naturally high levels of hGH. Why not let everyone have the same level...
Its a slippery slope, and unfortunately few know where pro cyclists such as Lance Armstrong (and the entire rest of the peloton) fall on this axis. I'd bet money he uses a nitrogen tent and uses an IV regularly. Anything beyond that is largely speculation, and it is poor form to speculate on cheating of successful athletes that tested negative.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
Federal cameras are challengable as a violation of the 4th Amendment. A Federal Body is implementing a surveillance technique on citizens who are not under reasonable suspicion. Under the constitution, such surveillance may be illegal.
Most people do not think about it, but you are, in a major US city, captured on surveillance cameras 50-60 times a day. Taxis, MUNI transportation, ATMs, banks, universities. Its just like 1984, except that the government controls few of the cameras.
When they start to control the cameras, it is time to get worried.
My reading is that the current policy states the NWS will not compete with private weather. However, the new policy would delete that proviso, and that is what Myers is pissed about. They would like a stronger enforcement of the old policy, and not the new policy.
In other words, if any party is threatened by the changes in the new policy, it is the private sector, and not the public at large, which shall continue to receive at least the level of support they currently receive.
There seems to be some fear-mongering, and not reading the finely written article, going on.
The proposal basically extends the current policy. By my reading of it, nothing currently available would disappear without plenty of prior notice, and in all likelihood nothing currently available would go away at all.
The Accuweather lobbying is for the raw data access to be put in a database format, completely open, instead of its current raw text format.
I don't know if any of you have programmatically gotten their data, but the downloads are oppressive due to size. A binary format would save a LOT of bandwidth, without the public-at-large lose any information.
In short, Accuweather and the NWS are not considering removing NWS information from the internet.
It might be a simple principle to George Bush.
But there are, currently, dozens and dozens of small weather forecasting niches. People do weather forecasting for hang-gliding, or surfing, or wind-surfing, and do this by interpreting available NWS data.
If the change in enacted, almost all of these small-time forecasters will go away. Anyone who wants weather information will be able to get it, either by paying accuweather, or by writing their own tools to interpret the freely available raw data. I have written tools to decode raw data, and it is not tricky work, but it takes some time.
My viewpoint is that currently, all weather forecasting uses the same models and same data input, those of the military (FNMOC) and NWS. The raw data costs an enormous amount of money to get, and a small amount to provide through current web pages.
The proposal, if enacted, would DECREASE available weather sources, not INCREASE it, and would result in a net DECREASE in the quality and quantity of weather forecasts to the public. The people who would profit will be those who write weather interpreting tools and provide them to others. It is asking for a government handout - plain and simple. Remove a government service, so we can provide it instead.
The key point to keep in mind here is that ALL WEATHER MODELS and ALL FORECASTING MODELS are 100% owned by the government. The cost for development was ENORMOUS and EXTREMELY VALUABLE. Accuweather wants the VISUAL PRESENTATION to be removed, so they can use their own, and sell it, instead. The VISUAL PRESENTATION provides ALL the consumer value.
I think the better analogy would be if the government wrote an operating system and a window manager and browser. Microsoft lobbied the government to remove the window manager only, so they could sell the whole package as their own.
It will have a chilling effect on small niche weather forecasters, cost consumers more to get the same data (or worse), lead to no improvement in forecasting (remember the models will not change), and profit a few large weather companies substantially. Accuweather is just getting pissed off that the internet allows easy access to the same data they've always had easy access to, and it is eating their profit margin.
Cringely has been a long long long-time column writer for PBS. Back in the day, he was a nobody.
Then he did this movie, called Triumph of the Nerds, about Microsoft and Apple's foundings. You see, back then, he was still a tech writer, and he met with Apple in their garage, and knew Bill Gates when he wasn't worth much. He tracks them and personal computer's rise.
He is quite interested to technophiles, and that is a columnist's job. He gets people interested, reading, and writing about his ideas. He's probably the best technical writer around (I certainly think so - I started reading him around when the nerds movie came out).
If you haven't seen the movie, you may find it interesting, and free on PBS.
A message I received from Alexey Toptygin
"Around the middle of April, I was contacted by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Ken Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions of Linux and Minix, looking for copied code.
My results are here. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other. (I realize that Minix predates Linux, but I did the comparison bidirectionally for the sake of objectivity).
While I was working on this in my spare time, Ken kept pestering me to hurry up and finish. He told me he had a paper awaiting publication, and that my analysis was the las bit of data he needed. I sent the final results (which are, exactly as given to Ken Brown, at the above URL) to him on May 17th.
When I called him to ask if he had any questions about the analysis methods or results, and to ask if he would like to have it repeated with other source comparison tools, I was in for a bit of a shock. Apparently, Ken was expecting me to find gobs of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake, since it was clearly impossible for one person to write an OS and 'code theft' had to have occured.
So, I guess what I want to say is, pay no attention to this man; to the best of my knowledge he is talking out of his ass. I apologise for any inconvenience I may have caused you by participating (however indirectly) in Ken's pet project.
Please feel free to reproduce this email and the contents of my analysis webpage."
--Alexey Toptygin
Andy Tanenbaum, 20 May 2004
Well, that's not quite the same.
Trademarks are defined based on markets, and generics.
Windows was a generic OS term BEFORE 1985. Mustang was not a generic car term before Ford.
In what volume can BioDiesel be produced, and what is the cost in doing so?
Right now my friends go to the recycled veggie oil pickup, grab a bunch of 55 gallon drums for free, filter them, and use them to drive up and down the coast while stinking up the air behind the bus with the fumes of french fries. And I think there is no shortage of vegetable oil used for frying in fast food joints.
So how do you remotely administer one of these machines ?
You turn on the services.
The real point is that no outside software can do anything bad to a Mac machine by default, because no ports are open.
If you turn a service on, then you KNOW IT IS ON, and you KNOW YOU NEED TO CHECK IT FOR SECURITY.
We're talking consumer client OSs. The vast majority of the users never turn anything on (and by default, never get a worm).
Imagine if Windows took that same philosophy...
In general, I am perfectly happy for even server machines to be shipped with only those ports open that I manually specify, or turn on myself. It's secure by default, services on demand, not unadministered services by default. The latter is insanity in today's networks.
(re djb), Yes, but not necessarily in the DNS world. I don't understand. If it's so great, why haven't more professionals adopted it?
Dan is pedantic and stubborn, and people just don't like that.
His software is also incredibly good. I would NEVER IN MY WILDEST DREAMS set up a caching only dns server on a machine with BIND. It is just asking for trouble. I use tinydns on every machine, and never think about it again. It is easy to setup. It is easy to install. It is easy to configure. It is fast. It is secure.
You may think those machines will eventually get rooted, but I'm betting an asteroid causes the next ice age first.
Top ways to get spam
1) post your email address on a web page that is not robot protected from web crawlers
2) post your email address on Usenet
3) respond to a few of the "email us to be taken off this mailing list" spams
I'd bet using these three alone you can hit several hundred a day. Good luck.
Protecting the middle class is an important point.
The most common reason for outsourcing is reducing skilled labor costs in business.
This has an impact, within the US, of de-valuing the financial worth of the middle class. Computer programmers were worth a LOT more before they started outsourcing. The same can be said of auto workers, electronics engineers, and clothing manufacturing workers.
The net effect is a long-term class division between those who head businesses, and those who manufacture or produce for them.
I wonder if any systematic studies of distribution of wealth, and its relation to outsourcing have been done.
Are we really to expect a major western nation to make a judgment that favors consumer rights over corporate rights?
This is just more of a PR move. It is not going to happen. Besides, the important bundled software (media player, browser, email) are already done deals - Microsoft has independent monopolies on them in the market. Unless the judgment forces Microsoft to sell a stripped down Windows (with completely open APIs), and ONLY allows OEM vendors to choose the add-ons, the playing field will not be leveled. Even that is not enough, when the playing field has been so horribly biased so far.
What is wrong with migrating to a replacement for SMTP? What is wrong with developing better challenge/response systems?
Nothing. Except that Microsoft and Yahoo! don't make millions implementing it.
A solution.
1) Bayesian filtering
2) Add SPF
3) Add whitelisting, by having encryption keys for each SMTP server's outbound mail. This is effectively a per SMTP server whitelist - public keys are obtained as part of mail client reading the mail.
4) smtp-auth
No one without a name-password can send mail. He can only send mail from his own SMTP server. His mail is encrypted to prove where it came from, and his IP address checks out with the DNS listing for his domain as a permitted sender. And, his email is still scanned for content.
This takes care of all current spammer techniques - compromising local machines (smtp-auth), forging domains (encryption key mismatch), etc.
I actually read the stats - all the linux distros are growing at rather similar rates - Debian just ever so slightly faster than the others.
It seems to say, instead that Debian is growing fastest, that linux installations are growing.
But somehow I also want to know the rate at which servers as a whole are growing, to compare the numbers...