If I recall my experiences using windows XP, doesn't it just automatically connect to any unsecured wireless connection that it finds?
Which might be a defense if you weren't driving up to a place you knew had unsecured wifi for customers and taking advantage of it. (Of course, if you didn't know that the policy was "for customers", that might be a defense to.)
Look, its really very simple. Windows is popular, almost entirely, because it is popular.
The number one thing people want out of an OS isn't security, a nice UI, a wide array of good files sytems.
Its the ability to run whatever application programs they want without worrying about it.
Since Windows (and DOS before it) established their dominance in the PC market—i.e., from the dawn of the PC market—the lion's share of the applications people know they might want to run are developed primarily for the current MS platforms.
Linux apps exist, and linux will run a lot of windows apps via Wine, but the visibility of linux apps and the visibility of Wine and confidence in Wine aren't enough to to overcome Windows primary advantage for anyone thinking of buying a PC—the fact that it is already dominant in the market, and therefore the target of most development.
Overcoming Windows inherent popular-therefore-popular advantage, even without MS illegally leveraging its monopoly, is a monumental task, and is going to take something that has some way of getting enormous attention with some selling point that Windows doesn't have, and unless Microsoft really fumbles in its efforts to finely slice and dice the market and target different segments, "price" won't be it (though it doesn't hurt).
Clearly the ability to reproduce sexually EVOLVED from organisms that existed before sexual reproduction. But correct in that asexual reproduction can only evolve through extremely slow random mutations.
The assumption is that fertile soil is already growing plants that you are removing in order to plant your corn, beets, sugar, etc...
So? The thing you don't seem to miss is that growing plants in the soil and burning them as fuel has the same carbon effect as growing plants in the soil and letting them go through their natural life-death-decay cycle.
The difference is that instead of powering decay organisms, you power whatever you are burning the plant material to fuel.
Provided the increase in corn price is sufficiently small, then my assumptions are quite reasonable approximations.
That's a pretty big assumption.
Now, I have no idea how to quantify "sufficiently small" in this case nor do I know how great the increase in corn price is, so I don't know if the condition of "sufficiently small" holds here. (Sometimes, "sufficiently small" turns out to be quite large indeed.) You seem to be saying that it does not hold here. Do you know that it does not?
Know? No. But think about what it would take for that to be true. On the corn displacing other food production side, it would require that the price increase was small enough that it didn't make it more profitable to grow corn in the place of any existing crop anywhere. On the sweetener supply side, it would also require (regardless of the degree of the price increase) that there was the ability to expand production at current marginal costs (that is—even neglecting any one-time capital costs of expanding production, assuming they are amortized over an infinite time for simplicity—that there is adequate idle land just as good as the land currently used for sugar-crop (cane, beets, whatever) production) without displacing any other food crop (because if your sugar production displaces other crops in ramping up, that increases food prices just the way corn displacing other crops would.)
Intuitively, it would seem likely that for a sustained (rather than spiking) price increase, it shouldn't take much price increase for the former assumption to break down, and the latter assumption seems fairly unlikely in any case.
Additionally, many of the corn substitute producing crops are grown in places that cannot grow corn very well, and vice versa. Thus, increased corn production might displace wheat production, but not so much sugar cane production.
Sure. Which is great, if you are just looking at the cost of the sweeter alone. But lots of the food products involved rely on many food inputs.
There is a reason that corn is grown in Iowa and cane is grown in Brazil, and it has rather little to do with economics.
Presuming "comparative advantage" is considered foreign to economics, sure.
Typically, as prices rise, so do wages.
Even if were general true that general price level increase were reflected 1:1 in wage levels, barring other distortions, this isn't a general price level increase; the general price increase would be smaller than the price increase in the specifically effected market, and therefore the wage increase would be smaller, and the part of the community disproportionately harmed by the price increase would, unless one assumes even more optimistically that the wage increase was also disproportionately distributd in the exact same way, remain disadvantaged, even with the wage increase.
Sorry you're right.. I actually meant that ethanol wasn't used to decrease greenhouse gases emissions, but I didn't write that properly. It is used like MTBE to help gas burn completely so that there isn't any leftover gas leftover. It is used to decrease emissions, but like I said I meant to say greenhouse gas emissions, which from what I remember, it actually increased that.
Well, more complete combustion means less carbon monoxide is produced and more carbon dioxide is produced. Unless I'm mistaken, the former is not (or not as much as the latter) a greenhouse gas, so it would seem likely to make greenhouse gas emissions worse.
Never you mind that CFLs contain toxic levels of mercury, so that whey they are tossed in a dump, the mercury can contaminate the soil and groundwater.
Which is why they ought to be recycled, and why many places that sell CFLs also collect them for recycling.
Of course, given that large scale electricity generation in coal plants is the leading source of mercury pollution, cutting down electricity demand with CFLs is still a net benefit in terms of mercury pollution, even ignoring the other benefits.
It might well make the price of corn syrup and other corn derived sweeteners closer to the price of cane or beet sugar. Ethanol demand (corn-derived ethanol, that is) will raise the price of foods using corn sweeteners, but not raise the price of foods using cane or beet sugar (unless those foods use corn products in other ways, of course).
If the price of corn increases, then, where practical, more other crops will be displaced by corn, and consequently the cost of those crops will increase.
It will also increase the price of substitutes for corn more directly (including substitutes for corn sweeteners) as products transition from use of the more expensive corn-based options to alternatives. Now, those increases will lag and may be less than the price increases in corn, but they will be a natural consequence of the price increase in corn.
You seem to assume both that corn production is fixed and will not increase displacing other crops, and that production of products that substitute for corn is unlimited at status quo prices. Both of these are false assumptions.
If you accept the thesis that the corn subsidies and the sugar tariffs are largely to blame for poor nutrition (which I haven't seen enough evidence (just in passing, I don't care quite enough to spend time looking) to decide on yet), then it follows that a significant increase in the price of corn without a corresponding increase in the price of things like cane sugar will improve the healthfulness of the cheapest foods in the grocery stores.
It may or may not increase the healthfulness of the cheapest foods in the grocery stores, but it will more certainly increase the cost of foods in grocery stores, including the cheapest foods.
So, for people for whom their main problem is that they cannot afford healthful foods, it will make the problem worse. For people who can afford adequate quantities of healthy or unhealthy food, but they currently choose unhealthy foods in part for price, it may improve their diet. The middle class may be forced to eat better, while the poor are harder pressed to put food of any kind on the table.
A permanent moratorium on growing plants in soil as a biofuel feedstock is what we need.
Uh, why? Crops used for biofuels can be grown as sustainably as any other crops. Clearly, we need to work to eliminate non-sustainable agricultural techniques in general, but I don't see any good reason to avoid growing plants in soil for biofuels.
If corn prices doubled, then more farmers will plant corn, and it will cause the price of corn to drop.
If corn prices double, more farmers would displace other crops that were less profitable corn had become, increasing the prices of those and decreasing the price of corn until some new balance was reached in which both corn and the displaced crops were more expensive than prior to the doubling, but corn was less expensive than twice its earlier price.
BTW, ethanol is not added to make emissions cleaner, it was added to replace MTBE. It's a widely held misnomer that it was added to decrease emissions or whatnot.
No, both ethanol and MTBE were adopted as oxygenates to reduce emissions. When MTBE became perceived as a disaster, ethanol replaced it where MTBE was used, but that doesn't change the fact that the reason either was used was as a gas additive was to reduce emissions.
However, those plants are grown in fertile soil that will already be taking carbon dioxide and turning it into oxygen.
Soil does not take carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen. Plants do. They naturally die and are broken down by biological action in a process that releases the CO2 back into the air. Harvesting the plants, converting them into fuel, and burning that, releasing the CO2 in the process, is carbon neutral, since with an on-average constant biomass, the rate of CO2 release is, on average, exactly what it would be if the plants were let to go through their whole natural lifecycle, die, and decay naturally.
If ethanol is less or the same cost as gasoline at the pump, then I want ethanol. I might even pay a little MORE because it gets OPEC's huge cock out of my ass.
Only a little of the way out, since you are still dependent on oil production for your petrochemical fertilizers.
The US is one of the largest corn producers in the world. If we can make our own alcohol fuels domestically then we should pursue that.
Sure, but we could make it from nonfood crops that will grow where foodcrops won't, take less petrochemical inputs, and have greater fuel yield per acre. So, why corn? Well, because there are big businesses with money in corn that stand to gain from policy that drives the price of corn up.
We could, of course, just subsidize the use of ethanol, and let different means of producing it compete. Or, better, we could just tax carbon emissions, and let any source that lets people avoid that compete. But, instead, we subsidize corn ethanol specifically, not for environmental reasons, but simply as hand-out to rich megabusiness that is politically well-connected.
I've heard that our heavy dependence on corn as an additive (e.g., corn syrup) is one main contributor to the lack of affordable, healthful food options in grocery stores. Might this work to reverse that trend?
No.
It will, instead, enhance it.
Making the junk food Americans eat now less cheap by increasing the price of a core food staple that also happens to be an input to the production of junk food will not make healthy food more affordable.
The usefulness of a scripts is often directly proportional to the privileges granted. Javascript is hobbled for use in browsers yet it plays a key role in the majority of browser security problems [mozilla.org] and what do you do when a script manages to break out of it's sandbox? Chroot or BSD jails are one thing but the average user will gladly grant a script extended privileges just to shoot the monkey.
You can't protect against gullible users. Any attempt at security that makes that a goal is just misguided. At the same time, you can guarantee that users that are paying attention aren't taken advantage of. Failing to provide well-designed tools aimed at doing the latter because the former is impossible is foolish.
We've heard this argument that sandboxing is the cure to scripting ills for years now, it isn't working.
Sandboxing is necessary. It may not be sufficient. OTOH, the fact that sandbox implementations have bugs doesn't mean that it can't be done right.
Sounds a lot like Java. Therefore it will never fly.
There will always be a vendor like MS to make everything so much easier for us, without thinking about the consequences. It will happen on Linux too.
Really, in this particular case, its an application issue not an OS issue, and its already happened with regard to plenty of Linux apps that support scripting.
Having a fairly secure OS doesn't you limited good if applications that run with reasonably broad permissions, for good reason, themselves serve as platform for code that doesn't run in an environment with adequate mechanisms for trust and security.
Featuritis is an illness that is cross platform I'm afraid.
Perhaps, but featuritis isn't really the problem. None of the features enabled by scripting are defeated by proper security. Though, of course, its more work to create a proper security framework, and even more work to provide a user-friendly interface for it, and generally that's a low priority. This is not about an excess of features, its about poorly-considered implementation of features.
Documents shouldn't run scripts unless explicitly authorized to do so.
Running scripts should not be a binary issue. Scripts should always run, by default, in an appropriate security sandbox, and only get additional privileges through explicit user interaction or through some kind of trust mechanism.
Programs that load scripts from external sources should not be gaping security holes, just because I trust a program doesn't mean that my only choices with a script should be trust it as much as I trust the program running it or not trust it at all.
"Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills."
People who make piles of money from working but don't save anything have to continue working to pay their bills.
How is this "unfair"? When people near retirement that have been working their whole lives at moderate income have the pension they are relying on collapse due to fraud, and have to continue working to pay their bills, that's unfair. When people who make huge stacks of money and blow it all with no thought of the future have to keep working to pay their bills, though...
That being said, Microsoft has limited the scope of its statement to "immediate future", therefore any prolonged infringement would not be protected by such mechanisms. Microsoft need only bring a few demand letters to discontinue infringement, and the defense of estoppel is waylaid.
Right. Microsoft is threading the needle, doing everything possible to preserve their ability to sue, while at the same time weakening the grounds for asserting a reasonable apprehension of suit that would justify a declaratory judgement action.
Because the last thing they want is a definitive answer that would make the FUD useless. They just want a vague fear that they could sue someone, sometime out there to discourage Linux adoption.
Everyone should know by now that non free software violates as many or more than free software [slashdot.org].
Yeah, but enterprise doesn't care. If they get software from a big corporation like Microsoft, that represents that they have the legal right to sell it, then even if the user gets sued they can seek any damages assessed against them from the big manufacturer, and win, and if its someone who can pay, they'll be off relatively scot-free. And, most likely, if there is a case, it won't be filed against them, but against the commercial software vendor.
If they get it from a an Open Source vendor that isn't as big and attractive a litigation target, there is a better chance that any patent suit will be against the big enterprise user, and a bigger chance that they won't be able to recover any damages assessed against them from the vendor.
So even if both pieces are equally full of patent violations, the open source product is riskier. So that line of defense won't work. What is necessary is establishing that Linux is not, in fact, full of patent violations that pose a significant risk of legal liability.
But, that only applies to a specific cause of action. So, while "we could have filed suit 3 years ago against someone" doesn't protect any particular violator, unless that violator can prove that they were the subject of that comment, and that Microsoft knew of its action against them specifically.
Since the FUD is designed to stop new adoption of Linux, the statement provides no security for the people the FUD is directed at making feel insecure about Linux, even in the best of cases.
At what point does this become illegal? Are you allowed to threaten whoever you like to strong arm customers into buying your product?
It may have been illegal from the outset, under general defamation or Lanham Act provisions. The issue isn't when it becomes illegal. OTOH, Microsoft is being very careful, I think, to spread as much FUD as they can without it being clearly, provably illegal, and without providing their opponents an easy remedy for any misrepresentation.
Sounds like it may be an attempt to weaken the grounds (reasonable apprehension of suit) for supposed "violators" to file for a declaratory judgement, while keeping the "we could sue somebody someday" FUD alive to scare enterprises away from Linux.
O.k, how about: can republishing *previously publicly available* information be construed as a negligent or malicious act?
Publicly publishing already publicly available even if not widely known true information about matters of public concern is about as protected an act as there is under the first amendment.
If the police really wanted to turn those "No Snitch" movements around, they should go back to doing what they have written on their cars: To Protect and Serve.
IIRC, that's just the LAPD, and they never say what they are to protect or who they are to serve.
Slashdot Mirror
Which might be a defense if you weren't driving up to a place you knew had unsecured wifi for customers and taking advantage of it. (Of course, if you didn't know that the policy was "for customers", that might be a defense to.)
Look, its really very simple. Windows is popular, almost entirely, because it is popular.
The number one thing people want out of an OS isn't security, a nice UI, a wide array of good files sytems.
Its the ability to run whatever application programs they want without worrying about it.
Since Windows (and DOS before it) established their dominance in the PC market—i.e., from the dawn of the PC market—the lion's share of the applications people know they might want to run are developed primarily for the current MS platforms.
Linux apps exist, and linux will run a lot of windows apps via Wine, but the visibility of linux apps and the visibility of Wine and confidence in Wine aren't enough to to overcome Windows primary advantage for anyone thinking of buying a PC—the fact that it is already dominant in the market, and therefore the target of most development.
Overcoming Windows inherent popular-therefore-popular advantage, even without MS illegally leveraging its monopoly, is a monumental task, and is going to take something that has some way of getting enormous attention with some selling point that Windows doesn't have, and unless Microsoft really fumbles in its efforts to finely slice and dice the market and target different segments, "price" won't be it (though it doesn't hurt).
Or the insertion of DNA from, e.g., viruses.
So? The thing you don't seem to miss is that growing plants in the soil and burning them as fuel has the same carbon effect as growing plants in the soil and letting them go through their natural life-death-decay cycle.
The difference is that instead of powering decay organisms, you power whatever you are burning the plant material to fuel.
That's a pretty big assumption.
Know? No. But think about what it would take for that to be true. On the corn displacing other food production side, it would require that the price increase was small enough that it didn't make it more profitable to grow corn in the place of any existing crop anywhere. On the sweetener supply side, it would also require (regardless of the degree of the price increase) that there was the ability to expand production at current marginal costs (that is—even neglecting any one-time capital costs of expanding production, assuming they are amortized over an infinite time for simplicity—that there is adequate idle land just as good as the land currently used for sugar-crop (cane, beets, whatever) production) without displacing any other food crop (because if your sugar production displaces other crops in ramping up, that increases food prices just the way corn displacing other crops would.)
Intuitively, it would seem likely that for a sustained (rather than spiking) price increase, it shouldn't take much price increase for the former assumption to break down, and the latter assumption seems fairly unlikely in any case.
Sure. Which is great, if you are just looking at the cost of the sweeter alone. But lots of the food products involved rely on many food inputs.
Presuming "comparative advantage" is considered foreign to economics, sure.
Even if were general true that general price level increase were reflected 1:1 in wage levels, barring other distortions, this isn't a general price level increase; the general price increase would be smaller than the price increase in the specifically effected market, and therefore the wage increase would be smaller, and the part of the community disproportionately harmed by the price increase would, unless one assumes even more optimistically that the wage increase was also disproportionately distributd in the exact same way, remain disadvantaged, even with the wage increase.
Well, more complete combustion means less carbon monoxide is produced and more carbon dioxide is produced. Unless I'm mistaken, the former is not (or not as much as the latter) a greenhouse gas, so it would seem likely to make greenhouse gas emissions worse.
Which is why they ought to be recycled, and why many places that sell CFLs also collect them for recycling.
Of course, given that large scale electricity generation in coal plants is the leading source of mercury pollution, cutting down electricity demand with CFLs is still a net benefit in terms of mercury pollution, even ignoring the other benefits.
If the price of corn increases, then, where practical, more other crops will be displaced by corn, and consequently the cost of those crops will increase.
It will also increase the price of substitutes for corn more directly (including substitutes for corn sweeteners) as products transition from use of the more expensive corn-based options to alternatives. Now, those increases will lag and may be less than the price increases in corn, but they will be a natural consequence of the price increase in corn.
You seem to assume both that corn production is fixed and will not increase displacing other crops, and that production of products that substitute for corn is unlimited at status quo prices. Both of these are false assumptions.
It may or may not increase the healthfulness of the cheapest foods in the grocery stores, but it will more certainly increase the cost of foods in grocery stores, including the cheapest foods.
So, for people for whom their main problem is that they cannot afford healthful foods, it will make the problem worse. For people who can afford adequate quantities of healthy or unhealthy food, but they currently choose unhealthy foods in part for price, it may improve their diet. The middle class may be forced to eat better, while the poor are harder pressed to put food of any kind on the table.
Uh, why? Crops used for biofuels can be grown as sustainably as any other crops. Clearly, we need to work to eliminate non-sustainable agricultural techniques in general, but I don't see any good reason to avoid growing plants in soil for biofuels.
If corn prices double, more farmers would displace other crops that were less profitable corn had become, increasing the prices of those and decreasing the price of corn until some new balance was reached in which both corn and the displaced crops were more expensive than prior to the doubling, but corn was less expensive than twice its earlier price.
No, both ethanol and MTBE were adopted as oxygenates to reduce emissions. When MTBE became perceived as a disaster, ethanol replaced it where MTBE was used, but that doesn't change the fact that the reason either was used was as a gas additive was to reduce emissions.
Soil does not take carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen. Plants do. They naturally die and are broken down by biological action in a process that releases the CO2 back into the air. Harvesting the plants, converting them into fuel, and burning that, releasing the CO2 in the process, is carbon neutral, since with an on-average constant biomass, the rate of CO2 release is, on average, exactly what it would be if the plants were let to go through their whole natural lifecycle, die, and decay naturally.
Only a little of the way out, since you are still dependent on oil production for your petrochemical fertilizers.
Sure, but we could make it from nonfood crops that will grow where foodcrops won't, take less petrochemical inputs, and have greater fuel yield per acre. So, why corn? Well, because there are big businesses with money in corn that stand to gain from policy that drives the price of corn up.
We could, of course, just subsidize the use of ethanol, and let different means of producing it compete. Or, better, we could just tax carbon emissions, and let any source that lets people avoid that compete. But, instead, we subsidize corn ethanol specifically, not for environmental reasons, but simply as hand-out to rich megabusiness that is politically well-connected.
No.
It will, instead, enhance it.
Making the junk food Americans eat now less cheap by increasing the price of a core food staple that also happens to be an input to the production of junk food will not make healthy food more affordable.
It will just make all food more expensive.
You can't protect against gullible users. Any attempt at security that makes that a goal is just misguided. At the same time, you can guarantee that users that are paying attention aren't taken advantage of. Failing to provide well-designed tools aimed at doing the latter because the former is impossible is foolish.
Sandboxing is necessary. It may not be sufficient. OTOH, the fact that sandbox implementations have bugs doesn't mean that it can't be done right.
There will always be a vendor like MS to make everything so much easier for us, without thinking about the consequences. It will happen on Linux too.
Really, in this particular case, its an application issue not an OS issue, and its already happened with regard to plenty of Linux apps that support scripting.
Having a fairly secure OS doesn't you limited good if applications that run with reasonably broad permissions, for good reason, themselves serve as platform for code that doesn't run in an environment with adequate mechanisms for trust and security.
Perhaps, but featuritis isn't really the problem. None of the features enabled by scripting are defeated by proper security. Though, of course, its more work to create a proper security framework, and even more work to provide a user-friendly interface for it, and generally that's a low priority. This is not about an excess of features, its about poorly-considered implementation of features.
Running scripts should not be a binary issue. Scripts should always run, by default, in an appropriate security sandbox, and only get additional privileges through explicit user interaction or through some kind of trust mechanism.
Programs that load scripts from external sources should not be gaping security holes, just because I trust a program doesn't mean that my only choices with a script should be trust it as much as I trust the program running it or not trust it at all.
People who make piles of money from working but don't save anything have to continue working to pay their bills.
How is this "unfair"? When people near retirement that have been working their whole lives at moderate income have the pension they are relying on collapse due to fraud, and have to continue working to pay their bills, that's unfair. When people who make huge stacks of money and blow it all with no thought of the future have to keep working to pay their bills, though...
Right. Microsoft is threading the needle, doing everything possible to preserve their ability to sue, while at the same time weakening the grounds for asserting a reasonable apprehension of suit that would justify a declaratory judgement action.
Because the last thing they want is a definitive answer that would make the FUD useless. They just want a vague fear that they could sue someone, sometime out there to discourage Linux adoption.
Yeah, but enterprise doesn't care. If they get software from a big corporation like Microsoft, that represents that they have the legal right to sell it, then even if the user gets sued they can seek any damages assessed against them from the big manufacturer, and win, and if its someone who can pay, they'll be off relatively scot-free. And, most likely, if there is a case, it won't be filed against them, but against the commercial software vendor.
If they get it from a an Open Source vendor that isn't as big and attractive a litigation target, there is a better chance that any patent suit will be against the big enterprise user, and a bigger chance that they won't be able to recover any damages assessed against them from the vendor.
So even if both pieces are equally full of patent violations, the open source product is riskier. So that line of defense won't work. What is necessary is establishing that Linux is not, in fact, full of patent violations that pose a significant risk of legal liability.
But, that only applies to a specific cause of action. So, while "we could have filed suit 3 years ago against someone" doesn't protect any particular violator, unless that violator can prove that they were the subject of that comment, and that Microsoft knew of its action against them specifically.
Since the FUD is designed to stop new adoption of Linux, the statement provides no security for the people the FUD is directed at making feel insecure about Linux, even in the best of cases.
It may have been illegal from the outset, under general defamation or Lanham Act provisions. The issue isn't when it becomes illegal. OTOH, Microsoft is being very careful, I think, to spread as much FUD as they can without it being clearly, provably illegal, and without providing their opponents an easy remedy for any misrepresentation.
You mean, from the same political allies that left them off with virtually no punishment when they were convicted last time? Yeah, BFD.
Sounds like it may be an attempt to weaken the grounds (reasonable apprehension of suit) for supposed "violators" to file for a declaratory judgement, while keeping the "we could sue somebody someday" FUD alive to scare enterprises away from Linux.
Publicly publishing already publicly available even if not widely known true information about matters of public concern is about as protected an act as there is under the first amendment.
IIRC, that's just the LAPD, and they never say what they are to protect or who they are to serve.