There's this crazy concept called "checked baggage" where you can put just about anything that isn't actually a high explosive. That includes weapons far more dangerous than throwing stars or jeweled daggers...
English is not a culture, it's a skill. It is a skill which is required to graduate from a public school in most states. It is a skill which is required (as determined by a TOEFL score) for admission to most universities. It is not an official language of the USA, but is the de-facto standard language of not only this country but much of the international community (emphasis on international - they can speak whatever they like with their own colleagues, but in areas of economics or science with people from other countries it is the generally used language even if it is native to neither). Even non-English-speaking-country universities typically require knowledge of English, and may even teach science or engineering classes in it.
If a student can not understand the language a class is taught it, they should not be taking that class. They could take a class that is taught in their native tongue (this may require leaving the country, but it is an option) or they can defer taking that class until they are sufficiently skilled in the language used for instruction. It is not the responsibility of the professor to adapt their class to people who are attempting to take it without the prerequisite knowledge (a solid understanding of the language it is taught in certainly being a prerequisite), nor is it the responsibility of the school (publicly funded or otherwise) to ensure that students can take classes in any language they desire. Some schools will opt to do so for certain languages, and for things like instruction to deaf students a sign language translator is a reasonable accommodation, but if you cannot read written English you have no more business taking a class where English is the language of instruction than I do taking a class taught in Arabic.
It you actually have to pull out a calculator (of whatever type) to compute a 15% tip, there's something drastically wrong with your basic mathematical capability. If you can't tell that the supermarket clerk overchanged you by $20 without manually adding everything up on your won device, you're going to get screwed pretty badly in life in general. School is about education. Math and physics classes are about learning math and physics, not about learning how to solve the problems on a math or physics test. If you can't solve a problem without advanced "do it for you" computational aids, you've not learned the material and might as well have never taken the class.
Besides, your calculator example is a poor one. Even if you do always have access to a calculator, any decently designed university-level test will require knowledge that even a graphing calculator can't provide directly. Thus the statement that calculators are allowed on tests - what isn't allowed is any device where you can IM your buddy and ask for help, or plug a question into Wolfram Alpha and see what it tells you.
Most relevantly, though, this is a school and students are presumably determined to have been successful or not based on their grades. Even if grades aren't curved, a student who deservedly earns an A- on their own merits looks a lot worse if everybody else cheats their way to a full A by taking advantage of the skills of just a few people without actually understanding the stuff at all.
This would be a *hell* of a deal for an apartment building. I think our building has a bit over 100 residents, but even so some high-quality gigabit switches (which aren't cheap but would still be trivial split over that many tenants) would mean that the burst speeds for any given user would be phenomenal. Get a pair of these lines and split the building in half, and shit goes crazy. At $15/person for minimum of perhaps 15 Mbps and burst at nearly a gigabit (actually a lot of people's computers, routers, or wiring would limit them to 100 Mbps) and you've got a connection that is comparable to dial-up in cost, probably averages at least as good as fiber in performance, and provides the apartment complex with over twice what they'd be spending to provide it.
Of course, this assumes you can get a good block of IP addresses. I suspect NAT would fall over and die very quickly with that many users. Still, this could be sweet as hell. I wish this company all the best, and I hope that a similar service shows up around here soon.
Much though I wish this was a complete solution, there are two possible problems with it.
The first is that ASLR is only available on NT 6.x (Vista, 7, Server 2008). People using XP are out in the cold, which they arguably deserve for using such an outdated OS, but the rest of us don't deserve the collateral damage their rooted boxes will spew (for bonus points, XP has no form of browser sandboxing and the default user has Administrative permissions, making it the most likely to be successfully exploited in any case.)
The second is that, retarded though it seems, people do occasionally write DLLs that assume they are loaded to their specified base address and will break if they end up elsewhere (presumably due to the use of hardcoded memory addresses). This is incredibly stupid behavior, and probably very uncommon, but it's not unheard of. At least a little regression testing is required. Worse, the fact that icucnv36.dll doesn't already specify that it is relocatable may mean that Adobe *knows* it will break (arguably, is already broken). The fix shouldn't be too hard but would still require substantial testing.
*A* modern browser on fast hardware means it has GPU acceleration. The IE team's comment would make no sense if Firefox *wasn't* using GPU acceleration. The question is which browser is doing it *better* and the IE team is asserting that it's theirs. This may or may not be true, but your comment is irrelevant to the discussion.
Hypothetically, this is true (in the sense that any program that uses hardware acceleration, including desktop compositors and video decoders, could find a bug in your driver) but on WDDM systems (which is the only place you can enable the hardware acceleration) the user-space portion of the driver will crash, Windows will notice this almost immediately, and it will restart the driver with no need to kill anything (much less reboot). The actual rendering code has been moved out of the kernel; the only thing that runs at ring 0 in the Windows video stack is the code that directly interacts with the GPU.
Sounds criminal to me - person X is paying person Y for something, and company Z is moving in and intercepting the money from this legitimate business transaction. That's about as legal as a store checkout clerk pocketing all your cash rather than putting it in the till - only difference in that case is that it's a lot easier for a business (the store) to go after an individual (the clerk) for stealing than it is when the positions are reversed.
Even if you can't get a criminal case, this has lawsuit written all over it. The better part of a million dollars US is plenty to get some strong legal support, and they have the best of motivations; you can't pay them unless they get your money back for you. Yeah, you end up with less than you might have otherwise had, but you also end up with more than nothing.
Completely false parallel. You're equating the cost of duplication with the cost of an item. It's not. The cost of an item is the cost of duplication PLUS the cost of amortizing the initial investment PLUS the cost of the marketing that made you aware of the item PLUS the the profit margin that gives people an incentive to produce things.
Electronic copies reduce the duplication cost to effectively zero (bandwidth isn't *quite* free) and makes the marketing both cheaper and less important (word of mouth is easier in the electronic world).
It has absolutely no impact on the initial investment; the time to write a book and the time to edit it, plus the expenses involved in being able to do these things, are exactly the same. Authors and editors need to have reason to expect a return on their investment. There's also the little bit left to do in publishing (which may be done by the author or editor, but still isn't 100% free in most cases - everything from cover art to web hosting has a cost) as another investment that one needs to anticipate recouping.
The profit margin one is the thing that people seem to have the most trouble grasping. Even if there was absolutely no cost in production, duplication, or distribution (publishing), or if those costs were completely paid by some third party, people still would deserve compensation for exercising their creative capabilities in a way that you can benefit from. Authors are people too; they like to take vacations, raise kids, live in a nice home, buy gifts for friends and loved ones, and so forth. Do you really think that just because once something has been created means it can be duplicated infinitely means that the creator is not entitled to the income that a producer of a finite commodity enjoys?
I don't know what versions of Outlook or Thunderbird you're talking about specifically, but TB 3 is still well behind Outlook 2010, and TB 2 was in many ways a worse email client than Windows Mail (the free Outlook Express++ that came with Vista). Thunderbird is a good email client, but it's definitely not a great one. It is lighter weight than Outlook, at least aside from its indexing (which is always going to be somewhat performance-intensive) but on a modern desktop or even most laptops the difference is negligible.
You don't even need SSH to do this in Windows; a domain administrator can use shutdown/m to remotely shut down any machine on the network. They could also remote desktop in and do it. Or they could kill your connection / blacklist your computer at the router. Or they could just tell you to turn the damn thing off yourself.
If your IT guys are so stupid they're running around physically pressing power switches, they're at least as technologically idiotic as people who run as Admin and run executable files linked to in email.
You know, all that due diligence makes perfect sense right up until you get to the fact that the "document" or "picture" you were sent isn't actually a PDF or image, but a.SCR - a PE-format executable binary. Windows will bitch at you about 3 different ways if you try and run one of those off the web, and the simple fact that it didn't just open in Adobe Reader should be more than enough of a tip to click no.
Personally, I suspect the people at your office are simply lying about checking the headers and all to try and look less retarded. It seems to have worked on you.
I assume you're just shooting for a "funny" mod, since even Internet Explorer doesn't contain the words "Internet Explorer" in its user agent string.
However, your post is also factually incorrect; OWA in recent Exchange versions works with the full experience on Firefox, Safari, and possibly other browsers as well.
Wait... are you saying they *do* enforce it? As you yourself pointed out, there are obviously cases where they don't enforce it. It's easy to write those apps, and nobody much cares, so they get to vastly inflate their numbers of apps by allowing them. They can still reject anything that they actually don't like, though. This is how you end up with a whole pile of Flashlight and Fart apps, and not a single lisp interpreter.
Are you for real? The point of the App Store is to make money for Apple, both directly (the cut they take) and indirectly (it helps drive device sales).
If Apple just wanted "to allow developers to create and distribute great software" they'd have built the next SourceForge, but without the requirement of open source and with better distribution options (including commercial distribution). That's not what the App Store is, by any stretch of the imagination. They wouldn't charge for developer tools. They wouldn't restrict the functionality of apps. They wouldn't restrict the languages or frameworks you can use. They wouldn't prohibit interpreters or emulators. They wouldn't require that the apps can only be for specific platforms that they have top-to-bottom control over. They wouldn't reject good software just because it does something better than what comes with one of their devices, or does it in a different way.
In fact, if Apples was really trying to encourage development, they'd do the opposite of most of those. They'd encourage frameworks and languages. They'd give the developer tools to anybody who showed any interest at all. If they were really serious about it, they'd open-source their own systems so that everybody could improve on them, customize them, and write code that makes the most of their capabilities.
Not quite accurate. The rate of exploits for Foxit is lower, but the rate of vulnerabilities is far, far higher. However, much like OS X, just because it's a soft target doesn't make it worth the effort of exploiting. Adobe's historically had atrocious security, but, much like Microsoft, they've learned a few things from it all (although I'd say MS is further ahead). Unfortunately, as you pointed out, *all* software has flaws, and when the return on investment for an exploit in Adobe Reader (or Internet Explorer) is so high, people will continue to hunt no matter how elusive the vulnerabilities get, and a few will get lucky, and those few will make the news (and buckets of money).
That said, I'm certainly not recommending using Adobe's software... but they at least show signs of *trying* to secure their stuff (for example, it's getting a lot harder to find exploitable crashes via fuzz testing, which means they've started fuzzing their own code). Neither Foxit nor Apple Preview are even remotely hardened. If you want to use them because you're less likely to be exploited, go right ahead. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that they're more secure.
I can carry quite an appreciable amount of 'really valuable' knowledge, thank you. I can carry the knowledge of how to build shelters, build fires, catch fish, treat a variety of wounds and illnesses, avoid still more, and diagnose many of them. I can carry the knowledge needed to plant crops, build and fire a bow and arrows, find clean water or purify unclean water, and smoke, freeze, salt, or otherwise treat food so that it keeps longer. I can carry the knowledge to communicate long-distance via Morse code. With the right bits and pieces I can assemble a simple radio, even a transmitter if there's a power source. I can turn an old car alternator, some wood or metal scraps, and a river *into* a power source.
People have held gold as valuable since the dawn of civilization, but I assure you that the average hunter-gatherer would not be terribly likely to trade you food or animals for it. If civilization all falls in the crapper, I'll trade the skills I have for the skills I don't have, the manpower I need to improve all our lives, or the resources of those who have something I need. Gold would be very, very far down that list of desirable resources, probably above today's currency but below, say, dried cow shit (which makes decent fuel for a fire that can cook food and keep people warm).
Actually, it often does (for the same approximate value of "automatically" that you're applying to Windows). If I download a.sh file, I'm offered the option of running it in bash - even if it isn't marked executable, that just means it means it needs to be passed as a parameter to a shell. If I download a.rpm or.deb, I'm asked if I want to open it with my package manager, which will happily open the file, copy its contents onto my filesystem, execute its scripts, etc. Sure, the installation will probably require root privileges, but that's true on Windows as well; it's not my (or Microsoft's) fault if you're running with those privileges already.
Technically executable binaries won't execute until you mark them executable, but that means absolutely nothing; nobody distributes raw binaries for Linux. Instead, they distribute.sh files that dd a bunch of binary from within themselves into a separate file, chmod that file, and execute it.
Trojans, which constitute the vast majority of Windows malware and have for years, will work just fine against Linux (or OS X) users too. Indeed, the very assumption that "Macs don't get viruses" has led to cases of users installing bootleg software from shady sources, and getting their Macs taken over. It hasn't happened often, but that's certainly not because it's difficult to do - it's just much more lucrative to do the same thing for Windows.
Really? That's... sick. I'm sorry, but that just seems really ridiculous. I heard that the the PS3's software emulation was bad, but at least it sounded like it had *some* games working purely on software emulation. The damn thing certainly has the processing power to do so!
If Microsoft can make the Xbox 360 run so many classic Xbox games after changing damn near every part of the system (Intel x86 to IBM PPC, nVidia to ATI graphics, RAM that's 3.5 times as fast...) then Sony sure as hell *ought* to be able to make software emulation work. The Cell processor is well-suited for this, too; like the Xbox 360 processor it has far more hardware threads, running at far higher speeds, than the older CPU. It should be possible to do dynamic recompilation on the other cores and get a near-perfect PS2 emulator running at (PS2) native speed.
%windir%\system32\perfmon.exe/res - resource monitor. All the information you can get from Taskmgr, and a whole lot more. For bonus point,s it allows you to suspend (without killing) processes. There's a lot of malware that won't auto-resume a suspended process but will auto-restart a killed one.
tasklist/taskkill - ps and kill for Windows. Not as powerful as either, but perfectly valid tools for killing problematic processes.
Powershell (included with recent Windows versions) - includes the Get-Process and Stop-Process commands (conveniently aliased to ps and kill for the Unix-users among us). Very powerful indeed. If you do any Windows maintenance, Powershell should be part of your toolbox.
As of Windows Vista, MS includes DVD decoding out of the box. As of Windows 7, MS includes AAC decoding, MPEG4 decoding, and the.mov container. There *are* still other codecs (and always will be) but the most common ones are now included in-box... including the ones most relevant to Quicktime/iTunes.
The unfortunate thing is that if you've got an iAnything, you probably use Quicktime too. iTunes, as you mentioned, uses Qt, but Qt also silently installs a browser plug-in (the attack vector used in the article) that takes over not just video playback but even things like image rendering.
To be fair, the flaw is almost a first for Quicktime
Uh... Secunia would beg to differ. 56 advisories, each if which may cover multiple vulnerabilities. There are 136 reported vulnerabilities (across 27 advisories) in Quicktime 7.x alone. The oldest reported vulnerability in Secunia's database is for Quicktime 3. It's not the worst record ever, but it's hardly valid to claim that this flaw is "almost a first" in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
There's this crazy concept called "checked baggage" where you can put just about anything that isn't actually a high explosive. That includes weapons far more dangerous than throwing stars or jeweled daggers...
So all I have to do to cheat and get away free is sniff the MAC address of somebody I don't care too much about, and spoof it? Iiinteresting.
English is not a culture, it's a skill. It is a skill which is required to graduate from a public school in most states. It is a skill which is required (as determined by a TOEFL score) for admission to most universities. It is not an official language of the USA, but is the de-facto standard language of not only this country but much of the international community (emphasis on international - they can speak whatever they like with their own colleagues, but in areas of economics or science with people from other countries it is the generally used language even if it is native to neither). Even non-English-speaking-country universities typically require knowledge of English, and may even teach science or engineering classes in it.
If a student can not understand the language a class is taught it, they should not be taking that class. They could take a class that is taught in their native tongue (this may require leaving the country, but it is an option) or they can defer taking that class until they are sufficiently skilled in the language used for instruction. It is not the responsibility of the professor to adapt their class to people who are attempting to take it without the prerequisite knowledge (a solid understanding of the language it is taught in certainly being a prerequisite), nor is it the responsibility of the school (publicly funded or otherwise) to ensure that students can take classes in any language they desire. Some schools will opt to do so for certain languages, and for things like instruction to deaf students a sign language translator is a reasonable accommodation, but if you cannot read written English you have no more business taking a class where English is the language of instruction than I do taking a class taught in Arabic.
It you actually have to pull out a calculator (of whatever type) to compute a 15% tip, there's something drastically wrong with your basic mathematical capability. If you can't tell that the supermarket clerk overchanged you by $20 without manually adding everything up on your won device, you're going to get screwed pretty badly in life in general. School is about education. Math and physics classes are about learning math and physics, not about learning how to solve the problems on a math or physics test. If you can't solve a problem without advanced "do it for you" computational aids, you've not learned the material and might as well have never taken the class.
Besides, your calculator example is a poor one. Even if you do always have access to a calculator, any decently designed university-level test will require knowledge that even a graphing calculator can't provide directly. Thus the statement that calculators are allowed on tests - what isn't allowed is any device where you can IM your buddy and ask for help, or plug a question into Wolfram Alpha and see what it tells you.
Most relevantly, though, this is a school and students are presumably determined to have been successful or not based on their grades. Even if grades aren't curved, a student who deservedly earns an A- on their own merits looks a lot worse if everybody else cheats their way to a full A by taking advantage of the skills of just a few people without actually understanding the stuff at all.
This would be a *hell* of a deal for an apartment building. I think our building has a bit over 100 residents, but even so some high-quality gigabit switches (which aren't cheap but would still be trivial split over that many tenants) would mean that the burst speeds for any given user would be phenomenal. Get a pair of these lines and split the building in half, and shit goes crazy. At $15/person for minimum of perhaps 15 Mbps and burst at nearly a gigabit (actually a lot of people's computers, routers, or wiring would limit them to 100 Mbps) and you've got a connection that is comparable to dial-up in cost, probably averages at least as good as fiber in performance, and provides the apartment complex with over twice what they'd be spending to provide it.
Of course, this assumes you can get a good block of IP addresses. I suspect NAT would fall over and die very quickly with that many users. Still, this could be sweet as hell. I wish this company all the best, and I hope that a similar service shows up around here soon.
Much though I wish this was a complete solution, there are two possible problems with it.
The first is that ASLR is only available on NT 6.x (Vista, 7, Server 2008). People using XP are out in the cold, which they arguably deserve for using such an outdated OS, but the rest of us don't deserve the collateral damage their rooted boxes will spew (for bonus points, XP has no form of browser sandboxing and the default user has Administrative permissions, making it the most likely to be successfully exploited in any case.)
The second is that, retarded though it seems, people do occasionally write DLLs that assume they are loaded to their specified base address and will break if they end up elsewhere (presumably due to the use of hardcoded memory addresses). This is incredibly stupid behavior, and probably very uncommon, but it's not unheard of. At least a little regression testing is required. Worse, the fact that icucnv36.dll doesn't already specify that it is relocatable may mean that Adobe *knows* it will break (arguably, is already broken). The fix shouldn't be too hard but would still require substantial testing.
*A* modern browser on fast hardware means it has GPU acceleration. The IE team's comment would make no sense if Firefox *wasn't* using GPU acceleration. The question is which browser is doing it *better* and the IE team is asserting that it's theirs. This may or may not be true, but your comment is irrelevant to the discussion.
Hypothetically, this is true (in the sense that any program that uses hardware acceleration, including desktop compositors and video decoders, could find a bug in your driver) but on WDDM systems (which is the only place you can enable the hardware acceleration) the user-space portion of the driver will crash, Windows will notice this almost immediately, and it will restart the driver with no need to kill anything (much less reboot). The actual rendering code has been moved out of the kernel; the only thing that runs at ring 0 in the Windows video stack is the code that directly interacts with the GPU.
Sounds criminal to me - person X is paying person Y for something, and company Z is moving in and intercepting the money from this legitimate business transaction. That's about as legal as a store checkout clerk pocketing all your cash rather than putting it in the till - only difference in that case is that it's a lot easier for a business (the store) to go after an individual (the clerk) for stealing than it is when the positions are reversed.
Even if you can't get a criminal case, this has lawsuit written all over it. The better part of a million dollars US is plenty to get some strong legal support, and they have the best of motivations; you can't pay them unless they get your money back for you. Yeah, you end up with less than you might have otherwise had, but you also end up with more than nothing.
Completely false parallel. You're equating the cost of duplication with the cost of an item. It's not. The cost of an item is the cost of duplication PLUS the cost of amortizing the initial investment PLUS the cost of the marketing that made you aware of the item PLUS the the profit margin that gives people an incentive to produce things.
Electronic copies reduce the duplication cost to effectively zero (bandwidth isn't *quite* free) and makes the marketing both cheaper and less important (word of mouth is easier in the electronic world).
It has absolutely no impact on the initial investment; the time to write a book and the time to edit it, plus the expenses involved in being able to do these things, are exactly the same. Authors and editors need to have reason to expect a return on their investment. There's also the little bit left to do in publishing (which may be done by the author or editor, but still isn't 100% free in most cases - everything from cover art to web hosting has a cost) as another investment that one needs to anticipate recouping.
The profit margin one is the thing that people seem to have the most trouble grasping. Even if there was absolutely no cost in production, duplication, or distribution (publishing), or if those costs were completely paid by some third party, people still would deserve compensation for exercising their creative capabilities in a way that you can benefit from. Authors are people too; they like to take vacations, raise kids, live in a nice home, buy gifts for friends and loved ones, and so forth. Do you really think that just because once something has been created means it can be duplicated infinitely means that the creator is not entitled to the income that a producer of a finite commodity enjoys?
I don't know what versions of Outlook or Thunderbird you're talking about specifically, but TB 3 is still well behind Outlook 2010, and TB 2 was in many ways a worse email client than Windows Mail (the free Outlook Express++ that came with Vista). Thunderbird is a good email client, but it's definitely not a great one. It is lighter weight than Outlook, at least aside from its indexing (which is always going to be somewhat performance-intensive) but on a modern desktop or even most laptops the difference is negligible.
You don't even need SSH to do this in Windows; a domain administrator can use /m
shutdown
to remotely shut down any machine on the network. They could also remote desktop in and do it. Or they could kill your connection / blacklist your computer at the router. Or they could just tell you to turn the damn thing off yourself.
If your IT guys are so stupid they're running around physically pressing power switches, they're at least as technologically idiotic as people who run as Admin and run executable files linked to in email.
You know, all that due diligence makes perfect sense right up until you get to the fact that the "document" or "picture" you were sent isn't actually a PDF or image, but a .SCR - a PE-format executable binary. Windows will bitch at you about 3 different ways if you try and run one of those off the web, and the simple fact that it didn't just open in Adobe Reader should be more than enough of a tip to click no.
Personally, I suspect the people at your office are simply lying about checking the headers and all to try and look less retarded. It seems to have worked on you.
If you mean you'd prefer to not use the AJAX-y interface, there's a "light" (plain HTML) mode option right on the login screen.
I assume you're just shooting for a "funny" mod, since even Internet Explorer doesn't contain the words "Internet Explorer" in its user agent string.
However, your post is also factually incorrect; OWA in recent Exchange versions works with the full experience on Firefox, Safari, and possibly other browsers as well.
Wait... are you saying they *do* enforce it? As you yourself pointed out, there are obviously cases where they don't enforce it. It's easy to write those apps, and nobody much cares, so they get to vastly inflate their numbers of apps by allowing them. They can still reject anything that they actually don't like, though. This is how you end up with a whole pile of Flashlight and Fart apps, and not a single lisp interpreter.
Are you for real? The point of the App Store is to make money for Apple, both directly (the cut they take) and indirectly (it helps drive device sales).
If Apple just wanted "to allow developers to create and distribute great software" they'd have built the next SourceForge, but without the requirement of open source and with better distribution options (including commercial distribution). That's not what the App Store is, by any stretch of the imagination. They wouldn't charge for developer tools. They wouldn't restrict the functionality of apps. They wouldn't restrict the languages or frameworks you can use. They wouldn't prohibit interpreters or emulators. They wouldn't require that the apps can only be for specific platforms that they have top-to-bottom control over. They wouldn't reject good software just because it does something better than what comes with one of their devices, or does it in a different way.
In fact, if Apples was really trying to encourage development, they'd do the opposite of most of those. They'd encourage frameworks and languages. They'd give the developer tools to anybody who showed any interest at all. If they were really serious about it, they'd open-source their own systems so that everybody could improve on them, customize them, and write code that makes the most of their capabilities.
Not quite accurate. The rate of exploits for Foxit is lower, but the rate of vulnerabilities is far, far higher. However, much like OS X, just because it's a soft target doesn't make it worth the effort of exploiting. Adobe's historically had atrocious security, but, much like Microsoft, they've learned a few things from it all (although I'd say MS is further ahead). Unfortunately, as you pointed out, *all* software has flaws, and when the return on investment for an exploit in Adobe Reader (or Internet Explorer) is so high, people will continue to hunt no matter how elusive the vulnerabilities get, and a few will get lucky, and those few will make the news (and buckets of money).
That said, I'm certainly not recommending using Adobe's software... but they at least show signs of *trying* to secure their stuff (for example, it's getting a lot harder to find exploitable crashes via fuzz testing, which means they've started fuzzing their own code). Neither Foxit nor Apple Preview are even remotely hardened. If you want to use them because you're less likely to be exploited, go right ahead. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that they're more secure.
I can carry quite an appreciable amount of 'really valuable' knowledge, thank you. I can carry the knowledge of how to build shelters, build fires, catch fish, treat a variety of wounds and illnesses, avoid still more, and diagnose many of them. I can carry the knowledge needed to plant crops, build and fire a bow and arrows, find clean water or purify unclean water, and smoke, freeze, salt, or otherwise treat food so that it keeps longer. I can carry the knowledge to communicate long-distance via Morse code. With the right bits and pieces I can assemble a simple radio, even a transmitter if there's a power source. I can turn an old car alternator, some wood or metal scraps, and a river *into* a power source.
People have held gold as valuable since the dawn of civilization, but I assure you that the average hunter-gatherer would not be terribly likely to trade you food or animals for it. If civilization all falls in the crapper, I'll trade the skills I have for the skills I don't have, the manpower I need to improve all our lives, or the resources of those who have something I need. Gold would be very, very far down that list of desirable resources, probably above today's currency but below, say, dried cow shit (which makes decent fuel for a fire that can cook food and keep people warm).
Actually, it often does (for the same approximate value of "automatically" that you're applying to Windows). If I download a .sh file, I'm offered the option of running it in bash - even if it isn't marked executable, that just means it means it needs to be passed as a parameter to a shell. If I download a .rpm or .deb, I'm asked if I want to open it with my package manager, which will happily open the file, copy its contents onto my filesystem, execute its scripts, etc. Sure, the installation will probably require root privileges, but that's true on Windows as well; it's not my (or Microsoft's) fault if you're running with those privileges already.
Technically executable binaries won't execute until you mark them executable, but that means absolutely nothing; nobody distributes raw binaries for Linux. Instead, they distribute .sh files that dd a bunch of binary from within themselves into a separate file, chmod that file, and execute it.
Trojans, which constitute the vast majority of Windows malware and have for years, will work just fine against Linux (or OS X) users too. Indeed, the very assumption that "Macs don't get viruses" has led to cases of users installing bootleg software from shady sources, and getting their Macs taken over. It hasn't happened often, but that's certainly not because it's difficult to do - it's just much more lucrative to do the same thing for Windows.
Really? That's... sick. I'm sorry, but that just seems really ridiculous. I heard that the the PS3's software emulation was bad, but at least it sounded like it had *some* games working purely on software emulation. The damn thing certainly has the processing power to do so!
If Microsoft can make the Xbox 360 run so many classic Xbox games after changing damn near every part of the system (Intel x86 to IBM PPC, nVidia to ATI graphics, RAM that's 3.5 times as fast...) then Sony sure as hell *ought* to be able to make software emulation work. The Cell processor is well-suited for this, too; like the Xbox 360 processor it has far more hardware threads, running at far higher speeds, than the older CPU. It should be possible to do dynamic recompilation on the other cores and get a near-perfect PS2 emulator running at (PS2) native speed.
Disabling task manager means nothing.
%windir%\system32\perfmon.exe /res - resource monitor. All the information you can get from Taskmgr, and a whole lot more. For bonus point,s it allows you to suspend (without killing) processes. There's a lot of malware that won't auto-resume a suspended process but will auto-restart a killed one.
tasklist/taskkill - ps and kill for Windows. Not as powerful as either, but perfectly valid tools for killing problematic processes.
Powershell (included with recent Windows versions) - includes the Get-Process and Stop-Process commands (conveniently aliased to ps and kill for the Unix-users among us). Very powerful indeed. If you do any Windows maintenance, Powershell should be part of your toolbox.
As of Windows Vista, MS includes DVD decoding out of the box. As of Windows 7, MS includes AAC decoding, MPEG4 decoding, and the .mov container. There *are* still other codecs (and always will be) but the most common ones are now included in-box... including the ones most relevant to Quicktime/iTunes.
The unfortunate thing is that if you've got an iAnything, you probably use Quicktime too. iTunes, as you mentioned, uses Qt, but Qt also silently installs a browser plug-in (the attack vector used in the article) that takes over not just video playback but even things like image rendering.
To be fair, the flaw is almost a first for Quicktime
Uh... Secunia would beg to differ. 56 advisories, each if which may cover multiple vulnerabilities. There are 136 reported vulnerabilities (across 27 advisories) in Quicktime 7.x alone. The oldest reported vulnerability in Secunia's database is for Quicktime 3. It's not the worst record ever, but it's hardly valid to claim that this flaw is "almost a first" in any way.