Nah the doctor does not want to yell in the parking lot what you have. But the health insurance companies sucked vast quantities of data about what every person has. The idea is, if some research shows that people who get cold more than twice a year will develop diabetes in five years, they will put everyone with two colds in a year in a "higher risk" category and asses higher premia. Or they could cherry pick patients and leave the government holding all the really sick patients and the health insurance companies insure only robust individuals in the pink of their health.
Pharma execs are not far behind. Salivating at the chance to do some direct marketing. So that they can interrupt someones dinner pitch a new medicine for his pain in the butt.
So painful and cramp inducing as it is, the intent behind HIPAA is good. But ofcourse the Big Pharma and Bid Insurance will get their data anyway. No matter what laws are passed. Only thing is they will refuse to cover cramps induced by HIPAA forms.
It is true no one would buy a car without tires. Or even a radio. Would you let auto makers off the hook so easily if they tried to make it impossible to install a thirdparty tire or radio? Infact the auto makers did that and it took lots of legislative action in the 70s to open up the "connectors and specs" to level the playing field, (or so I understand from a slashdot post.)
Now how far should the automaker go? Should you be able to install a thirdparty glove box? A steering wheel? or a gear box and transmission? The automobile is quite tangible and most consumers are well informed and they vote with their dollars in these questions. If they make a car that will accept only Ford tires, the marketplace will shun it. It is possible the glove box (and possibly the windshield) was thirdparty add-on way back in 1910s. And eventually it got incorporated into the automobile.
But in the computer arena, the public is not well informed. It would take a generation of kids who grew up with computers all their life to distinguish between what is the "glove box" and what is a "tire" in a computer. At that point we might not need any legislative action. But right now, to preseve the endangered species of independent software developers and application developers we need some basic action from the courts/legislation.
If MSFT is not competing in the applications arena and sells only the OS then it can say "I am locking up the kernel and you guys play by this rule". But MSFT is competing in the office, gaming, database, search, and email arenas. And it is using its monopoly in the OS arena to unfairly benefit its own application products.
What gives complaints against MSFT legitimacy is that it has 1. monopoly in the OS marke. 2. It has used its monopoly to unfairly undermine its competitors in other markers. MSFT can easily get out of all these restrictions and actions by breaking the company into two pieces. One is the OS company and the other is the applications company. And the OS company will give equal access to all vendors in the applications arena.
Please understand the issue is not the quantum of access given to the OS. It is the unequal access given to other vendors.
Nah, When God created the Earth 6000 years ago he also created galaxys 13b lightyears away and, get this, packed it with a continuous stream of photons stretching all the way from here to there. Most of the light have already done most of the traveling when they were created. Same is true for all the fossils. God salted the Earth with those fossils. And created oil and buried it too. Too bad he did not tell Moses where he buried it. Too bad the arabs pitched their tents over them and Moses got the only piece in the middle east without oil.
They are different things. Open Formats/Standards are simply interoperability requirements. Do not confuse it with Open Source. And dont confuse Open Source with Free Software. Proponants of Free Software also support Open Source and Open Standards. They have to. But their zeal actually turns off many companies who would otherwise support Open Standards.
Open Standards, just mean that, Open Standards. Both proprietary software and open software can implement the API and formats. We can not skew the Standards to favour either one of them. Infact to counter the deep pockets of Microsoft, we need another one with deep pockets. And such a player would definitely want to make money for all the pain and effort. So we need to support anyone who supports open standards, even if such a player wants to sell proprietary closed source solutions.
All I want is a level playing field. Let all software, open source and close source, free software and comercial software, and shareware too, fight for their marketshare in a field of guaranteed interoperability. Let the marketplace decide which is best at that time.
Now it is almost clear to all the politicians. You got a never ending source of campaign money in Microsoft. I expect it will become almost a ritual. Every year, every state a band of legislators will send up balloons about ODF, and dutifully Microsoft will send its minions and tons of money. At some point MSFT will balk and that is the day real ODF legislation will emerge.
Basic premise of the whole scheme sketched out in the article seems to be having a man in the middle. May be an evil twin router offering network connection near a coffee shop or a malicious lap top in an airport faking an "infrastructure mode" SSID in ad-hoc mode or something like that.
Once you are compromised this way the attack tries to take advantage of cross scripting vulnerabilities in a browser to run code in the compromised machine. I am not sure if there is anything unique to Google Desktop here. Could the same attack take advantage of the numerous ActiveX vulnerabilities?
Is the "security expert" trying to get more mileage by listing each exploitable hole of a man-in-the-middle attack as a separate discovery?
My name is Fiveo Twoo Nineo, Barrister-at-law, practising in Nigeria. As you might know, the notorious Spam King was arrested recently. He left behind a sum of 25,000,000 USD in trust with me and since he is going to rot in jail for 65 years, I am planning to steal it with your help. Please contact me on learning about my plan to share 40% of that money with you.
Right from day one I realized that the extensions provided by Firefox could become an security issue. I use very few of them. Scriptblock, Adblock and almost nothing else. And I disable auto updates. But on the other hand, Firefox is not so closely tied to the OS that they could take this breach, elevate privileges and take over a system, like ActiveX vulnerabilities.
Yes, one should be careful about the extensions, and use them carefully. And one should be careful about using WiFi in coffee shops and hotels. I am far more worried about our salesmen plugging in their lap top in some hotel network in Bangkok, pick up an infection and coming to corporate HQ and plug that laptop in our intranet, behind the firewall, in the trusted network. I have asked my sysadmin to set up a separate network for laptops that might be used outside our intranet that is not part of the trusted intra net.
Various vendors implementing a common API is the very basic definition of modularity and interoperability. So far MSFT made its products non-interoperable by its marketshare muscle and political action etc. But it knows that once the users learn the difference between interopearability and microsoft-compatibility, people would demand truly interoperable products. It can confuse the issue only so long. Even if it pushes OOXML as an "international standard", the issues are being discussed in the open and at some point people would demand a unified standard. So it foreses the day it has to use other means to thwart competition. The other means will not be lowering the price or improving the product. It will be some soft of legal action to keep Open Standard products in a legal limbo.
Hopefully the customers will see through the effort. The marketplace has changed a lot. Netscape was smothered. But Firefox rose from the ashes. Let us not confuse Open Standard Software with free software or even open source. Another player with some financial muscle, that will benefit by taking a marketshare slice from MSOffice franchise should be able to challenge the fundamental applicability of patent protection for clone products.
Did they not have something called iDrive? a huge wheel between the passenger and driver' seat that controlled everything and you have to go through menus about trip odometer and oil change and GPS to change the damn radio station? Or am I confusing BMW with some other model/make?
Finding the links and publishing who really got the scoop and who were the followers might seem like a good idea. But already there is such a great rush to publish, such a system will give more incentives to "publish first verify later" attitude.
May be Google could maintain the records of false reports, reports that were later corrected etc and come up with a "trustability" coefficient for the reporters and reporting organizations. This will probably give some incentives to verify the reports.
If you make the current set of illegals, legal, these employers will import a fresh set of 20 million illegals to do the job. As long as the incentives to employ illegals exist, making the current batch of illegals legal does nothing to mitigate the problem.
Why is the summary making it a point to say that that student was a model student? Do these model students have more rights than nerdy students, ugly students, non-bulumic students and fluncking students?
There are billions of colors. We see only three. A few see four.
Technically speaking, the color of light is basically the frequency of the EM radiation. Since there are billions of frequencies at which light could be emitted between ultraviolet and infrared band, there are billions of color.
We humans, however, have just three kinds of photo receptor cells in our retina. The rods. They respond to just three frequencies Red, Blue and Yellow. Other frequencies excite these receptors at different strengths and we percieve them as that color. You could blend Red, Blue and Yellow in such a way you can fool the brain into thinking it is gettig the light of some frequency X, instead of a blend of y,b and r.
A few humans, almost always female, are tetrachromes who have a fourth type of cone that responds to another color. And many humands have color blindness where they lack cones of one or two types.
If the law suit goes through we can see some more interesting law suits. Like pulse-code-modulated sound cards produce a digital sound that "sounds like" a continuous wave but it is really not. Or the flourescent lights produce no light 60 times a second! Or clothing only produces a "peception of opaqueness" while in reality they are full of holes and thus they are not really opaque!
There are many real reasons why employers prefer illegal workers. Cheaper wages, lower payroll taxes, freedom from OSHA regulations, cheaper overtime and more control over the employees. But the most commonly stated official reason for hiring illegal workers is, it is impossible to find who is legal and who is not. Some would go so far as to suggest that checking the citizenship status of prospective employees would leave them open to discrimination lawsuits. This no-work database might be a badly compromised version of plugging this standard escape route.
There is no way we can stop illegal immigration without finding and punishing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Atleast for the immigrants you could say, they are poor, uneducated, they have nothing to lose and all they are trying to do is to feed their family by working instead of stealing. But most employers of illegals, are rich, educated, they have a lot to lose if caught, and they are undercutting their competitors who employ legal workers. They are the ones who trigger the race to the bottom.
People who oppose such data bases should suggest alternatives by which this "race to the bottom" can be avoided and employers of legal status workers are not unfairly undercut by others who employ the illegals.
Let us say I run a restaraunt and have been selling "all you can drink" coffee but I had been providing only thimble size cups. Suddenly someone brings in real coffee mugs and really starts drinking all coffee they can. Yeah, sure I will hate it. But I will also realize that it is time to move beyond cheap gimmicks like "all you can drink" thingies.
Network need for consumers vary widely. Some happily browse news sites and that serve just text. Some are bit torrent users. High time ISPs charge consumers by MBytes of data transmitted. They can offer cheapo services for people with low bandwidth needs, may be even as a loss. Those who download bit-torrents and movies will pay for the bandwidth they actually consume. Once the revenue of ISPs depend on actual data transmitted, they too will encourage and help people who transmit/recieve lots of data. It will be a good thing once the ISPs wake up and smell the coffee I mentioned earlier;-)
Even in India they are able to meter the data transmitted and charge by the Megabytes. So it should not be too difficult for the ISPs to do it. But some things India does are very hard to believe. The mobile phone rates are something like 2 cents per minute with free incoming calls. And the mobile phone companies have a 40% margin! My brother-in-law executes on line trades with a commission of some 15 Rupees, or 35 cents US. How can they do that and stil be profitable?
IBM, SUN, AAPL and others too have patents. And MSFT might be infringing on some of them. Will MSFT be sued? Will it be forced to acknowledge it and code around it?
Slashdot Mirror
Pharma execs are not far behind. Salivating at the chance to do some direct marketing. So that they can interrupt someones dinner pitch a new medicine for his pain in the butt.
So painful and cramp inducing as it is, the intent behind HIPAA is good. But ofcourse the Big Pharma and Bid Insurance will get their data anyway. No matter what laws are passed. Only thing is they will refuse to cover cramps induced by HIPAA forms.
Now how far should the automaker go? Should you be able to install a thirdparty glove box? A steering wheel? or a gear box and transmission? The automobile is quite tangible and most consumers are well informed and they vote with their dollars in these questions. If they make a car that will accept only Ford tires, the marketplace will shun it. It is possible the glove box (and possibly the windshield) was thirdparty add-on way back in 1910s. And eventually it got incorporated into the automobile.
But in the computer arena, the public is not well informed. It would take a generation of kids who grew up with computers all their life to distinguish between what is the "glove box" and what is a "tire" in a computer. At that point we might not need any legislative action. But right now, to preseve the endangered species of independent software developers and application developers we need some basic action from the courts/legislation.
What gives complaints against MSFT legitimacy is that it has 1. monopoly in the OS marke. 2. It has used its monopoly to unfairly undermine its competitors in other markers. MSFT can easily get out of all these restrictions and actions by breaking the company into two pieces. One is the OS company and the other is the applications company. And the OS company will give equal access to all vendors in the applications arena.
Please understand the issue is not the quantum of access given to the OS. It is the unequal access given to other vendors.
For every mail delivered to me with a blue ribbon I will charge 0.125 cents. If the ISPs dont pay me I will not read the mails. Howz that!
Nah, When God created the Earth 6000 years ago he also created galaxys 13b lightyears away and, get this, packed it with a continuous stream of photons stretching all the way from here to there. Most of the light have already done most of the traveling when they were created. Same is true for all the fossils. God salted the Earth with those fossils. And created oil and buried it too. Too bad he did not tell Moses where he buried it. Too bad the arabs pitched their tents over them and Moses got the only piece in the middle east without oil.
Open Standards, just mean that, Open Standards. Both proprietary software and open software can implement the API and formats. We can not skew the Standards to favour either one of them. Infact to counter the deep pockets of Microsoft, we need another one with deep pockets. And such a player would definitely want to make money for all the pain and effort. So we need to support anyone who supports open standards, even if such a player wants to sell proprietary closed source solutions.
All I want is a level playing field. Let all software, open source and close source, free software and comercial software, and shareware too, fight for their marketshare in a field of guaranteed interoperability. Let the marketplace decide which is best at that time.
Now it is almost clear to all the politicians. You got a never ending source of campaign money in Microsoft. I expect it will become almost a ritual. Every year, every state a band of legislators will send up balloons about ODF, and dutifully Microsoft will send its minions and tons of money. At some point MSFT will balk and that is the day real ODF legislation will emerge.
Once you are compromised this way the attack tries to take advantage of cross scripting vulnerabilities in a browser to run code in the compromised machine. I am not sure if there is anything unique to Google Desktop here. Could the same attack take advantage of the numerous ActiveX vulnerabilities?
Is the "security expert" trying to get more mileage by listing each exploitable hole of a man-in-the-middle attack as a separate discovery?
Me foreign born, not good English understanding. Me no understand your usage of the word merkin . You using merkin as funny speak for American, no?
My name is Fiveo Twoo Nineo, Barrister-at-law, practising in Nigeria. As you might know, the notorious Spam King was arrested recently. He left behind a sum of 25,000,000 USD in trust with me and since he is going to rot in jail for 65 years, I am planning to steal it with your help. Please contact me on learning about my plan to share 40% of that money with you.
Yes, one should be careful about the extensions, and use them carefully. And one should be careful about using WiFi in coffee shops and hotels. I am far more worried about our salesmen plugging in their lap top in some hotel network in Bangkok, pick up an infection and coming to corporate HQ and plug that laptop in our intranet, behind the firewall, in the trusted network. I have asked my sysadmin to set up a separate network for laptops that might be used outside our intranet that is not part of the trusted intra net.
Hopefully the customers will see through the effort. The marketplace has changed a lot. Netscape was smothered. But Firefox rose from the ashes. Let us not confuse Open Standard Software with free software or even open source. Another player with some financial muscle, that will benefit by taking a marketshare slice from MSOffice franchise should be able to challenge the fundamental applicability of patent protection for clone products.
Bringing matter and antimatter so close together? What if they annihilate each other in a giant explosion?
Did they not have something called iDrive? a huge wheel between the passenger and driver' seat that controlled everything and you have to go through menus about trip odometer and oil change and GPS to change the damn radio station? Or am I confusing BMW with some other model/make?
May be Google could maintain the records of false reports, reports that were later corrected etc and come up with a "trustability" coefficient for the reporters and reporting organizations. This will probably give some incentives to verify the reports.
It is a fake story. Some kind of april fools joke. Now you should be as angry with Muslim baiting as you are with Holocaust denial. Will you be?
If you make the current set of illegals, legal, these employers will import a fresh set of 20 million illegals to do the job. As long as the incentives to employ illegals exist, making the current batch of illegals legal does nothing to mitigate the problem.
I am not a fluncking student, heck, I dont even know how to spell flunking!
Why is the summary making it a point to say that that student was a model student? Do these model students have more rights than nerdy students, ugly students, non-bulumic students and fluncking students?
Technically speaking, the color of light is basically the frequency of the EM radiation. Since there are billions of frequencies at which light could be emitted between ultraviolet and infrared band, there are billions of color.
We humans, however, have just three kinds of photo receptor cells in our retina. The rods. They respond to just three frequencies Red, Blue and Yellow. Other frequencies excite these receptors at different strengths and we percieve them as that color. You could blend Red, Blue and Yellow in such a way you can fool the brain into thinking it is gettig the light of some frequency X, instead of a blend of y,b and r.
A few humans, almost always female, are tetrachromes who have a fourth type of cone that responds to another color. And many humands have color blindness where they lack cones of one or two types.
If the law suit goes through we can see some more interesting law suits. Like pulse-code-modulated sound cards produce a digital sound that "sounds like" a continuous wave but it is really not. Or the flourescent lights produce no light 60 times a second! Or clothing only produces a "peception of opaqueness" while in reality they are full of holes and thus they are not really opaque!
There is no way we can stop illegal immigration without finding and punishing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Atleast for the immigrants you could say, they are poor, uneducated, they have nothing to lose and all they are trying to do is to feed their family by working instead of stealing. But most employers of illegals, are rich, educated, they have a lot to lose if caught, and they are undercutting their competitors who employ legal workers. They are the ones who trigger the race to the bottom.
People who oppose such data bases should suggest alternatives by which this "race to the bottom" can be avoided and employers of legal status workers are not unfairly undercut by others who employ the illegals.
bool microsoft_fud_manager::HandleNews(){ //throw "unexpected condition"; //throw disabled by bg.
if( GetPlatform(clusters) == "Linux" ) then
return IssuePressRelease("Linux is a hackers tool breaking encryption");
}else if( GetPlatform(clusters) == "Windows"){
return IssuePressRelease("Windows Rules! We solve big problems");
}
IssueGeneralFud();
}
You fail miserably as a budding virus author. Even a script kiddie knows you should sudo before you take malicious action. bah!
Network need for consumers vary widely. Some happily browse news sites and that serve just text. Some are bit torrent users. High time ISPs charge consumers by MBytes of data transmitted. They can offer cheapo services for people with low bandwidth needs, may be even as a loss. Those who download bit-torrents and movies will pay for the bandwidth they actually consume. Once the revenue of ISPs depend on actual data transmitted, they too will encourage and help people who transmit/recieve lots of data. It will be a good thing once the ISPs wake up and smell the coffee I mentioned earlier ;-)
Even in India they are able to meter the data transmitted and charge by the Megabytes. So it should not be too difficult for the ISPs to do it. But some things India does are very hard to believe. The mobile phone rates are something like 2 cents per minute with free incoming calls. And the mobile phone companies have a 40% margin! My brother-in-law executes on line trades with a commission of some 15 Rupees, or 35 cents US. How can they do that and stil be profitable?
IBM, SUN, AAPL and others too have patents. And MSFT might be infringing on some of them. Will MSFT be sued? Will it be forced to acknowledge it and code around it?