So exactly is the part of.NET that you think makes it more prone to exploits than C and Java again?
The part that is related to interacting.NET to everything else. That's the loose cannon.
Any Java standard application that you run using "java" can format your harddisk.
You may call me ignorant, jerk or whatever. But you just don't launch "java" by loading an applet in your browser right? And the thing cannot format you HDD just like that because its infrastructure does not allow to directly interact with your machine without your knowledge. With.NET, in a near future, you may really risk not only to format something but also get "Now all your data belong to us". Java does not have such a deep interaction to other aplications or libraries as.NET. In fact, it is pretty isolated in its environment, interacting with databases and other stuff through tons of interfaces. On.NET, this frontier dissolves nearly to the impossible. Even if there are guidlines, even if the CLI is supposed to have all the security it can, even if these GTK# and VBs will have their own library infrastructure, separated from its classical GTK+ or VisualBasic DLLs, it will be impossible to get a guaranteed security. Generally, security is inversly proportional to flexibility. The more flexible you do an app, the less secure it is. This is not a strict law. But here, we are talking about something that allows several programming languages to interact. And programming languages mean nothing less than several tons of different ways to program algorithms. And algorithms can have lots of interesting problems, depending on the language they are programmed.Yes there is some animal called Common Language Infrastructure, but can you really care that this thing is strict enough to hold the security tight? I don't think so. I cannot believe that someone can manage to write in C# the same way one does in Basic. Besides why we would need so many linguages in this thing? Frankly if anyone will try to restrict the linguistics of this thing, we will end up with a Java-alike language that can just be spoken in many dialects. And I am sure that this is not the intention of the original creators of.NET. They want something like a Babylon machine, capable of understanding everyone and serve everything. This is what makes me believe, that in the future we will see that.NET, its libraries and servers are not so innocent as they look now.
Java is exploitable and we all know about that. However to create real exploits, one has to dig up inside the forest of its virtual machine and interfaces. To reach an exploitable zone, one has to calculate several moments, from the interface level down to the zone where JVM acts with the real machine. Being an enclosed environment, Java makes this a lot too difficult to be done. On.NET I may see things quite to similar to Java and its world. However the loose interactivity of this thing breaks the shell of security like the one Java possesses.
Frankly I wouldn't be admired to see a new type of exploit - the worm tunnels, systems that break into a computer and create a more active and permanent presence in it, by using the.NET communication infrastructure. A small piece of code breaks the security, calls some central node for apps/control and actively uses the victim computer for its nefarious activities. Naivety? Let's wait and see.
Partially correct. But you forget that the problem may not be the.NET itself and Mono or Microsoft's implementations... By itself,.NET looks inoccent and simple, implementators may feel secure for its children. However.NET is usually looked as an all-whole integration of local and network apps also. And I believe that the real trouble will happen when, libraries established and servers running, some people start creating.NET apps. Then, with all this loosy ideology and global interactivity, bugs and back-doors will pop-up. Frankly, I believe that.NET will be more important as a transportation system. To bring up the beef to the customer. When he bites it, the.NET apps will just help bring him the delicious smell of rotten meat and do everything so that he doesn't forget for that smell for months.
And where do you think real exploits get born from? Kidding with scripts and playing "../../.."?
Depending on the architecture of the algorithms and the philosophy of the implementantions, any system catches its environment of exploits. The loose connectivity of.NET architecture and the fact that it is deeply used for networked apps will surely mean a huge potential for exploits. C didn't have such a plague because it is not a network system per se. But its system libraries demonstrated long ago how one can get into deep trouble, due to the loosy structure of the language. Java on the contrary, was a system that was built for the network but with some concern on security. However, this costed the language some inflexibility, that was implemente to avoid certain risks. From both these systems,.NET takes the best and the worse. You may use C#, GTK#, VB or whatever. It feels like a Super-Mega-C library. However, this also means that I can put into the wagon a lot more things and interact it with even more. Can you talk about security in face of this situation? As a professional, I can tell you that no matter what bottom line you may take,.NET is a wild elephant on security. No one can make such a loose flexibility without freeing some fundamental security knots, the most important of them, a rapid and effective way to acknowledge critical situations. In a situation where you can face tons of libraries, apps and languages at once and in one place, it will be impossible to get a clear picture of a potential problem in minimal time. And that starts not in Microsoft's conspirations, but on the idea of creating a whole universal system for network apps that looks more as a can of worms.
I believe that under such level of development, soon we will see the real juice of these new technologies. And, soon, we will see how they can whitstand against serious attacks, exploits and break-ins. The more foggy and loose ideology of.NET may bring a new golden era for hordes of black and grey hats. I wouldn't be admired that we will see a revival of the 80's soon. But, then, we had only hundreds. Today, "We are a Legion!..", can only sound as a joke... What will happen when.NET gets loose in the wild is completely unpredictable.
RealNetworks may be one of the most controversial companies in the Internet. Since its advent, this company made lots of right and wrong moves. So it is quite possible that it has as many fans as flaming opponents. However, they were pioneers in their field, and had had an enemy in the face of Microsoft, which played the same dirty game with them as with Netscape. These conditions were enough to have them sweet to survive. So their story is not so simple to judge.
Frankly, we should take into attention that this company appeared very, very early. By the time they came up, they produced players for Solaris and Windows was still a conundrom among Internet nodes. and their distribution policies were in fact progressive. While many commercial *NIX producers sold their products, they were giving players for free, the same way as Netscape was distributing its navigators. However, when the market changed, they made two huge errors. First a large part of their policies was kept, no matter the new market conditions. This deeply reflected in the dynamics of development of their products, as, lots of their characteristics became simply archaic. Second they choose the worst way of marketing. As pioneers, they choosed some of the early and unproved advertisment technologies for Internet. And this brought them the fame of an isolated company that loves to spam and spy over everyone.
No matter these problems, the ideology of their products is still something that is badly explored. The architecture of these systems is not strictly centralised and it has "loose" infrastructure that allows them to be used under several conditions. Still there is a huge potential in this field.
Apart of any books you may read, the gurus that may advise you, the tons of information that you may get on Internet, there is two thing that are highly important to take into account.
The first one is what you expect to find on Linux. You can be sure that you don't get the same thing as Windows. So any expectations should be put in the typical rule of economics: "You choose something for the price of loosing the other choices". However, take into attention that this thing is more tricky than it seems. You may loose some present choices, which, in the moment you are now, may be very important for you. However nothing can be said about the potential of your choice. Here you may obtain some important personal victories or get such a slap in the face, that you will always flame Linux for the rest of your life. To avoid such desilusions, you should not only read books and news, but also take care to search for real goals in this world. Linux, and *NIX in general, is a world too vast and too amorphous to show you a direction. Here there are no arrows and signs asking where do you wanna go. You choose your path.
But here enters the second important factor. On choosing your path, you will have to manage this new system. And this is not so simple as it seems. For the last years, a lot was done, that approached the *NIX world of interfaces to the more common Windows GUI. But, still the *NIX never has lost its rawness in the bottom line. Besides, it keeps paths of development that go quite far from what you may expect in Windows or some other systems. The *NIX world is a mix of rational conservatism and risky progressism. Coming here, brings a feeling much like the one that some people may find on changing cars of different countries. Imagine that you go from an confortable american car, for which you are offered service, maintenance, features and choose a rough jeep where even the driver sits in the "wrong" side. Worse, this "jeep" is much like those weird australian cars that made so much fame in certain stories. A mix of an old car and some fresh new technological mess. With exception of a certain skeleton, everything else is what you put into it. You may find a mechanic or some service that may check and maintain some general parts, but which will surely not help in everything you have there. By changing cars in this way, you will get some sort of psychological shock. You will get some feelings about the positive and negative effects of this change, you will be surely forced to change some driving habits, and you will surely need to know, more deeply, the mechanics of the monster you drive with. However, there can be a big danger here. Before you get real acquainted to the positive or negative effects of your move, despair may overcome you, and you quit early in the race. That's what happens to 90% of the people who try Linux. Unfortunately, the majority does it in a very superficial way, much like installing a new game, so, their critics cannot be taken seriously. The *NIX world is rough and wild. It needs time to reach the level of flexibility you may need to feel confortable in it. So think, that no matter the books and howtos, you may need some good months of patience before you can make a wise and weighed judgement.
And remember - negative results are also results. There can be lots of them before reaching a certain level of practice and knowledge.
It seems that HP caught compaqague. A terrible and deadly virus that destroys all the brain zones related to innovation, risk, calculation and self-estimation. Earlier we saw several companies being caught by this epidemics, the most notable, DEC, where the virus spread with such furor that in a question of months a once well-known company turned into another department in the corner of the company.
The fact that HP dropped a lot of its support for open source, closed the production of the Alpha architecture and seems to scale down other important sectors are a clear show that the desease got deeply into the corporation ranks. Soon we probably will see turning from blue to red and naming itself Compaq.
Well the guidelines are not bad at all but 30 days may be too much. We know that are frequent parallel discoveries and that there are some organisations that are quite stubborn to change their behaviour toward security. While 30 days might be a acceptable span for most problems, I would prefer a more graduated exposure timeline, based on some criteria. For example:
If the exploit is highly dangerous, but complex, it would be preferrable a step-by-step disclosure in a period up to 30 days.
If there are middle-term solutions capable of making a temporary solution, then the problem is disclosed in a shorter period.
If the vendor/developer has a terrible record of playing "it's a feature not a bug", then no pitty on him. Either disclose ASAP or in shorter periods. This could be a good instrument to punish their lamerness.
If the vendor/developer comes up with half-measures and dubious patches, disclose without pitty.
And, besides, I believe it would be good to get some early warning stuff. Or disclosure may catch many people asleep. Maybe it would be good to get a standarized warning message 24 or 48 hours before disclosure, that something wrong may have happened with that or that app. This message should n no way be similar to press releases the Mass Media uses to pump over the crowd. Or else we may risk having information spoiled by some journalists trying to gain points in their careers.
Well this thing reminds me of Matrix's brief and relatively incomprehensible episode, when Neo gets up from his eternal bathtube... You live in some sort of jellish liquid that emulates your environment, a tube feeds you with all your desired nutrients and several wires catch up your needs and reactions. A big cable connects you into the virtual world so that you think you're living...
Right now they catch up desires and wishes. Why not to think they soon they glue your mounth with a tube and pomp you with dogfood? And drill your skull to hammer your brain with the idea that you're eating the best dish on Earth?
It is very very hard to seed clouds. You've got to get the silver iodide (or whatever) concentration just right- too many condensation nuclei and all you get is suspended fog. Too few, and the dropplets grow too slowly (collision is a major growth process). There've been many attempts over the years, but it is really really hard to prove correlation in the wild.. (send refs if you know otherwise!)
You seem quite scheptyc about rainmaking. Well, Russian government disclosed that it used several technologies for local weather control. There was even a program on TV about this. That confirmed the old suspicions people had about the strange weather changes during holidays in Soviet Union. For several years, people noted that if rain was about to come to Moscow in 1st of May, then as magic, clouds would disappear. However there was a side effect, as, somewhere around Moscow rain would fall like in the tropics. This was always considered as popular fantasy. However, this summer, a TV program showed one of the crews specially prepared for those missions. They showed nearly everything, from preparing the ingredients up to seeding the clouds. In an interview, one guy told that they were doing it since the 50's and there was already a whole science behind it, from how to stop rain up to how to make it fall. There were side effects dangers and whole models to avoid certain critical situations. There were several types of ingredients on use. Silver iodide occurred to be one of the least used. The most popular was... concrete powder.They say it is tremendously effective.
In the same hardware, (Compaq one, which is usually M$ certified), the server couldn't be on for more than a week. Or it would trash a few things up to the level they couldn't work at all. So people turned off the machine every weekend. During a 4 day holiday (we have such things in Russia) someone forgot to turn it off, and when we came back it was a PROBLEM to put it in its feet again.
Today, occasionally I looked at the last time we booted that same machine in Linux - it showed 87 days. It is not super but it is is not surely the same as Windows2000 Server.
And I know a few more people who couldn't use Windows2000 Server running for more than a month. In a place where Solaris servers live for more than 6 months online and Linux server I administered lived for nearly 200 days.
And that is exactly how MS will market their products. Wanna web server? No problem, sure linux/freebsd is free, but the staff to support it will end up costing you more in the long run.
Maybe you're right. Frankly certain Windows web workers have a much lower TCO than Linux. An year ago I had to patiently see the hang-ups, web-trashing, hacks and the tons of worms that constantly plagued a Windows2000 server. We called tens of times those people demanding that they took some more care of the damned server. From time to time they would do something and the mess stopped, but only temporarly. In less than a week we were on the festival again.
Those people considered themselves as Windows vets and were quite ironic on our offers to install any other system. In the end one break-in clogged their channel and threatened our network. We simply plugged them off. They came in, we had some HELL of a discussion. We came into an agreement and one friend of ours installed FreeBSD in their server. On their part they started to learn BSD. Since then we haven't seen any problems from their network. Their server works and evolves, so, it seems they work on it...
Yeap we rose their TCO...
Windows Fileservers with lower TCO than Linux????
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Win2k Cheaper than Linux
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· Score: 5, Funny
Well for nearly 11 years I have been in the fileserver world. I touched lots of file servers. From old ancient LANtastic and Netware 2.15, going through most Novell flavours up to 5.0. For 11 years I worked with, administered, tweaked and crunched so many different file servers that I don't remember all of them. Lots of Novell flavours, OS/2, NFS on Solaris and Linux. I worked also with Windows "solutions", from WfW up to Windows2000 Server. From all these I sincerly prefer Netware. Netware is far better and manageable than any other file server system. Naturally as Novell did it specially for file servers. However there is a problem with Novell. Its prices are prohibitive for many customers. But, if your work highly depends in file server services, surely the TCO is far lower than everyone else.
Among all the systems I used, the most crappy, cumbersome, crash-proned, time consuming and nervestraining was M$ crap. It came up into hanging a whole local network, just because M$ thought it could play at will with TCP/IP stack. But there are tons of stories about the crap. Let's just pick the most recent.
In April this year, I met a medium-sized Compaq server in one highly important organisation. Compaq's dealer sweeted a lot to have that lovely machine there. And sweeted even more to have it working. The thing worked, naturally, on Windows2000 Server. I was asked to tweak the crap so that several problems were gone. And the problems were: workstations loosing connection with the server, Apps frequently hanging up, file transfer working slowly (in a 100mbits network it looked much like 10mbits), and a episodic events with the machine crashing.
After some administration we came up to the conclusion that the machine was going into sure doom. The DNS was crashing every day, WINS and SMB were giving wrong packets into the network, the file system was getting wrong data, user accounts were not freed, CPU never lowered behind 30% and lots of many other problems. Besides we found that, everyday, 30 minutes of workday was lost on backing up data (it was a damn important server) as no one could work while backup was going on.
Well, we created a backup server, curiously on Linux, but with the objective to reinstall Windows2000 on the main server. We lost ONE week trying to do it. As we discovered, the original installer had also huge problems with that machine. The machine was simply unable to work stable with Windows2000.
Considering the pros and cons I decided to use my old weapon The Penguin Dancing Samba, against the huge oposition of many people. However the situation was Hell in Flames and there should be a fast solution. So the bosses agreed the change.
Well I had a whole day of headaches to install it on Compaq's RAID. Also I had lots of trouble creating a secure, stable and automatised environment. In the whole, it took me 2-3 weeks to do all the work.
Today, nearly half-year later, the admin approaches the server 1-2 times in the week. Most work is log checking and some rare tweaks in the configuration (mostly adding users), the machine carries several early warning scripts in case something goes wrong. Backup is completely automatic. With the exception of one single user (some mystic problem), everyone works without hangups, crashes or lost connections. The system lives perfectly in its 100mbps network and the problem of slow connections is forgotten. Besides, the average load of this machine is just 3% and it now carries also a MySQL server that is frequently used and which, in the future, may substitute many file server tasks.
O'Reilly's site has a very detailed and interesting article called "And Justice for Adobe". It has lots of details, a chronology of events and several links related to the case.
The USA Federal Government fought for tens of years the Soviet Regime. One of its reasons was that the soviet power was more intimidation than jurisprudence.
11 years after the Fall of the Soviet Union, Russian citizens fight a federal law that is more intimidation than jurisprudence... in the USA.
Frankly you don't pick the main trend - those who were Windows fans and got burned. They are much more visceral in their hatred toward M$ than anyone else. Because they feel betrayed. And that's what I feel in every cell of my brain. I started with a Windows 1.0beta. Till the advent of Windows95, I was critical of many M$ moves, but still I believed that they were doing something in the right way. Back then, OS/2 was far away from being considered as a real system and IBM did a lot to become the Evil Empire of those times. However, when Windows95 came out, I sincerly felt that someone sold me snakeoil in 100% purity. Many of my old programs went broke. Several third party programs I used couldn't simply work. While I tried hard to adapt to the new SDKs and environment, I couldn't because it was all a mess and a pure waste of money. That mess ended only with the advent of Windows95 OSR2, but the loss was irrecoverable. For some time I tried to reach the "secrets" of Windows NT4, only to discover that there are companies that are well able to create crap in tens of disks and name it "Developer's tools". However that was not the last drop. The last drop came in 1998 with the "fresh, new Windows98". I was hacked three times, one of them trashed completely my HDD in less than a minute. In a moment, years of hard work went into oblivion. A little later, I discovered that even M$ was hacking my own computer by sending interesting IP packets right to Redmond's HQ. A month later I was fully switching to Linux and sending M$ into the deepest bottom of Hell. I never regretted that.
I know a few people who passed nearly this same M$ Paradise. Some have switched to Linux/BSD. Others remained in Windows. But no one has ever stopped reading the whole slang dictionary over Redmond. And other OS fans can ever repeat the HATRED about Microsoft we and similar people have.
One thing about you Apple fans. Well, you are naive, sometimes look a little bit childish. You may think that we are too straight-head, naive and childish also. But there is one thing I shall say to you. People, you were ABSOLUTELY RIGHT to stick to Apple. You can't imagine how the Hell goes hot in Windows. Keep the faith people. Apple forever!
Well I wouldn't say all of them. But a large part of the people around here do hate Microsoft. Even traditional Windows users do HATE Microsoft. And, historically, Microsoft has not only argued with its office walls in Redmond.../. is full of Microsoft haters/flamers/visceral enemies. Frankly I don't hide my highly visceral hatred to M$, and many people know me here for my anti-Redmond flaming (I have 15 years of reasons for that). However I believe that this submittion goes a little too far. How this can be a newsflash when lots of people here, are here because they hate Microsoft? How many of us kicked out features, games and promises of M$ Enligthenment for the raw fields of *NIX and Apple? I am somewhere the 9949 Slashdot account. Well, by the time when I came here, Linux was surely not ready for 80% of desktops (but it was ready for 20% of them), and it was a terrible experience to work in a nearly 100% *NIX environment. But among those 9500 accounts, there were lots of people who were going 100% not-Windows. And till 2001, lots of people changed sides by "paying" the fact they could not run games and some important apps in *NIX. Till now, we have that problem with many recent games (but not with all games anymore). Well, maybe we are now 1% of/. auditory. But still this surely is not newsflash as lots of Windows fanatics know us for being too stubborn to get back to Windows.
Sincerly this is the style of headers that/. admins should have forgotten long ago. However, what is/. without some good flame?
Missing human mind with Science
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Shapes of Time
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The review is interesting but it falls in the beginning and end into a fallacy. Why this stupid Triumvirate? Are we talking about Evolution or fighting factions in Roman Senate? Considering the way the analyst glued to this term, soon we will see people discussing who's the Caeser and Pompei of Evolution, or when we catch Emperor Augustus...
There is something very dangerous on using and fixing the attention to certain terms that are simply used as metaphoras. We have an example right here, where we already see two "triumvirates" fighting each other. Frankly I believe that the original author was sincerly remarking the importance of his ideas in the frame of three important conditions for Evolution. However the reviewer made a serious mistake on catching up with this. Whatever happens in Evolution, surely is not a triumvirate and we may be quite far from it. I think that the idea of the book is utterly incomplete, but I have to read the book to be sure for that. The reviewer sincerly makes a bigger mistake on remarking three important factors of Evolution and forgetting that this is too overclassical and artificial from the very start. One cannot simply put three simple conditions to explain all the complexity of the evolutionary process. While it is important to simplify the fundamental conditions of Evolution, I think that we cannot hold up to "Three conditions". That also sounds to much as an revival of the traditionalist "Three Laws" of Physics. This sounds too human to be scientific and too subjective to accept.
Well if you are going to take every target opportunity modern means of transportation represent, then I would highly recomend to go build a castle and get everything back to the middle ages.
Frankly, I don't know where you are from. But I think that the middle of the XIXth century had lots of these examples all around the world:
Wide-road bandits in post-Napoleon Europe - they were so terribly popular that there are several folk stories about these people. Some of them were no less monstruous and blood thirsty than some modern terrorists.
North American Wild-West - Well, we all heard about this...
Pirates sacking ships crews and passengers in Indian and Pacific Ocean.
Armed groups in Afghanistan, India, North Africa - Several novels and historical records, remind us how dangerous was travelling through the parts of the world.
Latin-America and its colonial/civil wars - While the Banana Republic is more a thing of the XXth century, its main travelcard, the lawless of officers and locals, was a product of long years of political chaos and colonial dumbness.
Now pick up these facts and tell me how many people died during these times? Thousands and thousands. Well, in Europe we could reduce it to a few hundreds but in North Africa we are forced to rise things up to the thousands. British "tried" a solution for Afghanistan but the result was tens of thousands deads for both sides and a complete chaos in the region that we can see even now... In the US we had even some nations that were wiped out from the face of the Earth...
Well you could say that about the US building the A-Bomb right after Depression and during the hard years of WWII...
Or about Soviet Union building up satellites and sending the first man to Space...
Besides, the train AFAIK is built in one of the richest parts of China. And China is quite big and possesses a huge contrast in cultures, economies and resources. So I don't see a reason why they wouldn't loose some money to build a Maglev.
If you consider that they should "feed the poor and then think about progress", I sincerly consider it populist demagogy. No country has ever solved this question by putting its feet into the swamp of development. On the contrary, most socialist countries who tried to follow such path went nearly bankrupt. The only way to give people a better living is to push every possible path of development forward. Wealth does not rise from "more equal distributions among the people" but from the development of infrastructures with far-reaching effects among the population. And Maglev is one such infrastructure. This system allows common citizens to have a better and speedier means of transportation. This system demands better enginners and technicians. This system is a challenge for lots of classical means of transportation. This system is a path to new scientific and technological researches. And more, this system allows people the use of faster travel, which may be much more economical than other means with the same speeds and approximatelly the same service.
So this might be one of the things that may rise their GNIPC a few dollars more.
Let's put in clear words. What was the Shuttle? A taxi to serve the Space Station. First generation Shuttle was supposed to serve more as a prototype rather than a historical conundrom. However, Skylab went nuts and certain people preferred to empty NASA's pockets in a lackluster as the thing was big, huge, made a lot of noise and the soviets didn't have one. Well I once sis talk to one guy who was in Apollo Project and kicked out from NASA when he saw the Shuttle Project turning into a Guinea's Pig. He talked quite harshly about what people did to NASA. Every Shuttle mission was mostly a Kamikadze flight till the Challenger. As we speak in computer terms - there were lots of features, not bugs". And he didn't stop the flame in private talks. He flamed even on TV. It is interesting that once, directly on TV he mentioned those damn boosters and its mechanics. And when Challenger boomed, a few minutes after the show he simply said - "Didn't I speak about that? I did! And that's the result!" He shuggered his shoulders and went about the technical details of the tragedy.
NASA was not stupid. It was made stupid. If there is anyone to blame, then it is the people that took control of NASA somewhere during Apollo's missions. They destroyed the bigest and best team of scientists and engineers ever. And left to a bunch of stupid managers the task of caring for that Ford-T that we know as the Space Shuttle.
The problem with Space Travel is when some jerks will get rid from the idea that there is nothing faster than light. Even Einstein warned for this thing. He well remarked in his works that the speed of light was a postulate, an axioma that should be proved. Until now I have not seen a real proof. On the contrary. We know that the Speed of light is not uniform and depends on the local condtions of the spacetime frame. Besides, the effects of Gravity act with sppeds much faster than light. And that's also an 100% fact as if Gravity acted with the same speed as light, then our world would be atomic mess and we wouldn't be discussing this thing here...
However you are right in your assumptions about propulsion. These types of propulsions will never take us outta the Solar System.
I recognize that I didn't make a clear distinction between european colonists and indigeneous people of Greenland. That may be a fault of my side as there were some serious conflicts between these people. However I had too little time to write the stuff (I was going out of my office).
On what concerns Phoenicians and Romans, the story is more complex. I know that the "Roman coins" story made a lot of noise, when they were discovered in the shores of Brazil. However we know now that these coins were probably related to a more recent crash that happened in more recent times and that these coins were in fact collectioner's coins. Meanwhile there is a big problem here. According to certain facts from the Portuguese History, a lot of their discoveries were not original in full sense. Discoveries made by Portugal were mainly based in documents, stories and facts from very ancient times. Portuguese went to South Atlantic fully convinced that Phoenicians did circumvent the African continent. That's an historical fact. And based on the sources that lead to this story, there is some weird story about how they did the track around Africa. It seems that they based their navigation in very old data that mentioned that same weird track they did between West Africa and Brazil. However there are other theories and tales about how they did this. One claims that currents in Pheonicia time run nearer the African continent, so Pheonicians could never had reached Brazil. Another considers that this current has been always there and that even West African sailors did reach, from time to time, Brazil (Note: West Africa in the Middle Ages was much more developed than Europe then). Meanwhile the data is very fragmentary speculative and dubious. So I keep it away.
Meanwhile the similarities on architecture is not a work of amateurs. Is Heyerdal an amateur? I don't think so. He and several other people did a lot to study ancient civilizations. And we in Russia have one of his disciples. That guy is tremendously serious and solid. And he doesn't stop just in speculations. He shows facts. He showed Malta's constructions and compared them with similar buildings in Peru. Yes, there are huge similarities. And also some serious differences. Heyerdal's group work is careful to note it, and this guy goes step by step on his findings. And, till now, they have found more things to go further, rather than getting punched. Not long before Heyerdal's death they finally confirmed that Peru's people have been in Easter Island. This was one thing that many historians frequently dismissed as some amateur stupidity. But Heyerdal's group showed that the traditional academic circles can, sometimes, be deeply wrong. I saw a film where Heyerdal and his followers digged up the Peruvian "fortress" in Easter Island. As scientists they were quite careful to film the different stages of cleanup and the details of the walls. That building had absolutely no difference from Machu Pichu or Cuzco's "fortresses". They were made exactly with the same technology and design.
Well this does not concern exactly our problem. But it shows that we may be deeply wrong in our theories. So, while the presence of earlier Old World people in America is still a speculative point, it shall not be dismissed at all. But we should be careful to avoid the speculations of certain people who try to find tetrahedrons in the mud.
And why wouldn't be cool for X, Apple, IBM and Xerox to sue the deceptive marketing of a crap company that stole everything outta their interfaces to create Windows??? As an ex-system programmer I very well know that lots of that damn kernel crap inside Windows were purely and simply OS/2 core components... And don't tell me that this was M$'s part. Anyway, lots of development and a huge part of testing was made by IBM, before BG made that huge party back in 1987...
And besides, Before hold your tongue before calling anyone else's product "crap". Windows Commander is a very popular product and I know this because lots of Windows fans use it and prefer it to the real crap of Internet Explorer playing File Manager.
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So exactly is the part of .NET that you think makes it more prone to exploits than C and Java again?
.NET to everything else. That's the loose cannon.
.NET, in a near future, you may really risk not only to format something but also get "Now all your data belong to us". Java does not have such a deep interaction to other aplications or libraries as .NET. In fact, it is pretty isolated in its environment, interacting with databases and other stuff through tons of interfaces. On .NET, this frontier dissolves nearly to the impossible. Even if there are guidlines, even if the CLI is supposed to have all the security it can, even if these GTK# and VBs will have their own library infrastructure, separated from its classical GTK+ or VisualBasic DLLs, it will be impossible to get a guaranteed security. Generally, security is inversly proportional to flexibility. The more flexible you do an app, the less secure it is. This is not a strict law. But here, we are talking about something that allows several programming languages to interact. And programming languages mean nothing less than several tons of different ways to program algorithms. And algorithms can have lots of interesting problems, depending on the language they are programmed.Yes there is some animal called Common Language Infrastructure, but can you really care that this thing is strict enough to hold the security tight? I don't think so. I cannot believe that someone can manage to write in C# the same way one does in Basic. Besides why we would need so many linguages in this thing? Frankly if anyone will try to restrict the linguistics of this thing, we will end up with a Java-alike language that can just be spoken in many dialects. And I am sure that this is not the intention of the original creators of .NET. They want something like a Babylon machine, capable of understanding everyone and serve everything. This is what makes me believe, that in the future we will see that .NET, its libraries and servers are not so innocent as they look now.
.NET I may see things quite to similar to Java and its world. However the loose interactivity of this thing breaks the shell of security like the one Java possesses.
.NET communication infrastructure. A small piece of code breaks the security, calls some central node for apps/control and actively uses the victim computer for its nefarious activities. Naivety? Let's wait and see.
The part that is related to interacting
Any Java standard application that you run using "java" can format your harddisk.
You may call me ignorant, jerk or whatever. But you just don't launch "java" by loading an applet in your browser right? And the thing cannot format you HDD just like that because its infrastructure does not allow to directly interact with your machine without your knowledge. With
Java is exploitable and we all know about that. However to create real exploits, one has to dig up inside the forest of its virtual machine and interfaces. To reach an exploitable zone, one has to calculate several moments, from the interface level down to the zone where JVM acts with the real machine. Being an enclosed environment, Java makes this a lot too difficult to be done. On
Frankly I wouldn't be admired to see a new type of exploit - the worm tunnels, systems that break into a computer and create a more active and permanent presence in it, by using the
Partially correct. But you forget that the problem may not be the .NET itself and Mono or Microsoft's implementations... By itself, .NET looks inoccent and simple, implementators may feel secure for its children. However .NET is usually looked as an all-whole integration of local and network apps also. And I believe that the real trouble will happen when, libraries established and servers running, some people start creating .NET apps. Then, with all this loosy ideology and global interactivity, bugs and back-doors will pop-up. Frankly, I believe that .NET will be more important as a transportation system. To bring up the beef to the customer. When he bites it, the .NET apps will just help bring him the delicious smell of rotten meat and do everything so that he doesn't forget for that smell for months.
And where do you think real exploits get born from? Kidding with scripts and playing "../../.."?
.NET architecture and the fact that it is deeply used for networked apps will surely mean a huge potential for exploits. C didn't have such a plague because it is not a network system per se. But its system libraries demonstrated long ago how one can get into deep trouble, due to the loosy structure of the language. Java on the contrary, was a system that was built for the network but with some concern on security. However, this costed the language some inflexibility, that was implemente to avoid certain risks. From both these systems, .NET takes the best and the worse. You may use C#, GTK#, VB or whatever. It feels like a Super-Mega-C library. However, this also means that I can put into the wagon a lot more things and interact it with even more. Can you talk about security in face of this situation? As a professional, I can tell you that no matter what bottom line you may take, .NET is a wild elephant on security. No one can make such a loose flexibility without freeing some fundamental security knots, the most important of them, a rapid and effective way to acknowledge critical situations. In a situation where you can face tons of libraries, apps and languages at once and in one place, it will be impossible to get a clear picture of a potential problem in minimal time. And that starts not in Microsoft's conspirations, but on the idea of creating a whole universal system for network apps that looks more as a can of worms.
Depending on the architecture of the algorithms and the philosophy of the implementantions, any system catches its environment of exploits. The loose connectivity of
I believe that under such level of development, soon we will see the real juice of these new technologies. And, soon, we will see how they can whitstand against serious attacks, exploits and break-ins. The more foggy and loose ideology of .NET may bring a new golden era for hordes of black and grey hats. I wouldn't be admired that we will see a revival of the 80's soon. But, then, we had only hundreds. Today, "We are a Legion!..", can only sound as a joke... What will happen when .NET gets loose in the wild is completely unpredictable.
RealNetworks may be one of the most controversial companies in the Internet. Since its advent, this company made lots of right and wrong moves. So it is quite possible that it has as many fans as flaming opponents. However, they were pioneers in their field, and had had an enemy in the face of Microsoft, which played the same dirty game with them as with Netscape. These conditions were enough to have them sweet to survive. So their story is not so simple to judge.
Frankly, we should take into attention that this company appeared very, very early. By the time they came up, they produced players for Solaris and Windows was still a conundrom among Internet nodes. and their distribution policies were in fact progressive. While many commercial *NIX producers sold their products, they were giving players for free, the same way as Netscape was distributing its navigators. However, when the market changed, they made two huge errors. First a large part of their policies was kept, no matter the new market conditions. This deeply reflected in the dynamics of development of their products, as, lots of their characteristics became simply archaic. Second they choose the worst way of marketing. As pioneers, they choosed some of the early and unproved advertisment technologies for Internet. And this brought them the fame of an isolated company that loves to spam and spy over everyone.
No matter these problems, the ideology of their products is still something that is badly explored. The architecture of these systems is not strictly centralised and it has "loose" infrastructure that allows them to be used under several conditions. Still there is a huge potential in this field.
Apart of any books you may read, the gurus that may advise you, the tons of information that you may get on Internet, there is two thing that are highly important to take into account.
The first one is what you expect to find on Linux. You can be sure that you don't get the same thing as Windows. So any expectations should be put in the typical rule of economics: "You choose something for the price of loosing the other choices". However, take into attention that this thing is more tricky than it seems. You may loose some present choices, which, in the moment you are now, may be very important for you. However nothing can be said about the potential of your choice. Here you may obtain some important personal victories or get such a slap in the face, that you will always flame Linux for the rest of your life. To avoid such desilusions, you should not only read books and news, but also take care to search for real goals in this world. Linux, and *NIX in general, is a world too vast and too amorphous to show you a direction. Here there are no arrows and signs asking where do you wanna go. You choose your path.
But here enters the second important factor. On choosing your path, you will have to manage this new system. And this is not so simple as it seems. For the last years, a lot was done, that approached the *NIX world of interfaces to the more common Windows GUI. But, still the *NIX never has lost its rawness in the bottom line. Besides, it keeps paths of development that go quite far from what you may expect in Windows or some other systems. The *NIX world is a mix of rational conservatism and risky progressism. Coming here, brings a feeling much like the one that some people may find on changing cars of different countries. Imagine that you go from an confortable american car, for which you are offered service, maintenance, features and choose a rough jeep where even the driver sits in the "wrong" side. Worse, this "jeep" is much like those weird australian cars that made so much fame in certain stories. A mix of an old car and some fresh new technological mess. With exception of a certain skeleton, everything else is what you put into it. You may find a mechanic or some service that may check and maintain some general parts, but which will surely not help in everything you have there. By changing cars in this way, you will get some sort of psychological shock. You will get some feelings about the positive and negative effects of this change, you will be surely forced to change some driving habits, and you will surely need to know, more deeply, the mechanics of the monster you drive with. However, there can be a big danger here. Before you get real acquainted to the positive or negative effects of your move, despair may overcome you, and you quit early in the race. That's what happens to 90% of the people who try Linux. Unfortunately, the majority does it in a very superficial way, much like installing a new game, so, their critics cannot be taken seriously. The *NIX world is rough and wild. It needs time to reach the level of flexibility you may need to feel confortable in it. So think, that no matter the books and howtos, you may need some good months of patience before you can make a wise and weighed judgement.
And remember - negative results are also results. There can be lots of them before reaching a certain level of practice and knowledge.
It seems that HP caught compaqague. A terrible and deadly virus that destroys all the brain zones related to innovation, risk, calculation and self-estimation. Earlier we saw several companies being caught by this epidemics, the most notable, DEC, where the virus spread with such furor that in a question of months a once well-known company turned into another department in the corner of the company.
The fact that HP dropped a lot of its support for open source, closed the production of the Alpha architecture and seems to scale down other important sectors are a clear show that the desease got deeply into the corporation ranks. Soon we probably will see turning from blue to red and naming itself Compaq.
Well the guidelines are not bad at all but 30 days may be too much. We know that are frequent parallel discoveries and that there are some organisations that are quite stubborn to change their behaviour toward security. While 30 days might be a acceptable span for most problems, I would prefer a more graduated exposure timeline, based on some criteria. For example:
If the exploit is highly dangerous, but complex, it would be preferrable a step-by-step disclosure in a period up to 30 days.
If there are middle-term solutions capable of making a temporary solution, then the problem is disclosed in a shorter period.
If the vendor/developer has a terrible record of playing "it's a feature not a bug", then no pitty on him. Either disclose ASAP or in shorter periods. This could be a good instrument to punish their lamerness.
If the vendor/developer comes up with half-measures and dubious patches, disclose without pitty.
And, besides, I believe it would be good to get some early warning stuff. Or disclosure may catch many people asleep. Maybe it would be good to get a standarized warning message 24 or 48 hours before disclosure, that something wrong may have happened with that or that app. This message should n no way be similar to press releases the Mass Media uses to pump over the crowd. Or else we may risk having information spoiled by some journalists trying to gain points in their careers.
Well this thing reminds me of Matrix's brief and relatively incomprehensible episode, when Neo gets up from his eternal bathtube... You live in some sort of jellish liquid that emulates your environment, a tube feeds you with all your desired nutrients and several wires catch up your needs and reactions. A big cable connects you into the virtual world so that you think you're living...
Right now they catch up desires and wishes. Why not to think they soon they glue your mounth with a tube and pomp you with dogfood? And drill your skull to hammer your brain with the idea that you're eating the best dish on Earth?
Nope. It was the 1st Channel in its official news.
It is very very hard to seed clouds. You've got to get the silver iodide (or whatever) concentration just right- too many condensation nuclei and all you get is suspended fog. Too few, and the dropplets grow too slowly (collision is a major growth process). There've been many attempts over the years, but it is really really hard to prove correlation in the wild.. (send refs if you know otherwise!)
You seem quite scheptyc about rainmaking. Well, Russian government disclosed that it used several technologies for local weather control. There was even a program on TV about this. That confirmed the old suspicions people had about the strange weather changes during holidays in Soviet Union. For several years, people noted that if rain was about to come to Moscow in 1st of May, then as magic, clouds would disappear. However there was a side effect, as, somewhere around Moscow rain would fall like in the tropics. This was always considered as popular fantasy. However, this summer, a TV program showed one of the crews specially prepared for those missions. They showed nearly everything, from preparing the ingredients up to seeding the clouds. In an interview, one guy told that they were doing it since the 50's and there was already a whole science behind it, from how to stop rain up to how to make it fall. There were side effects dangers and whole models to avoid certain critical situations. There were several types of ingredients on use. Silver iodide occurred to be one of the least used. The most popular was... concrete powder.They say it is tremendously effective.
You're joking right?
In the same hardware, (Compaq one, which is usually M$ certified), the server couldn't be on for more than a week. Or it would trash a few things up to the level they couldn't work at all. So people turned off the machine every weekend. During a 4 day holiday (we have such things in Russia) someone forgot to turn it off, and when we came back it was a PROBLEM to put it in its feet again.
Today, occasionally I looked at the last time we booted that same machine in Linux - it showed 87 days. It is not super but it is is not surely the same as Windows2000 Server.
And I know a few more people who couldn't use Windows2000 Server running for more than a month. In a place where Solaris servers live for more than 6 months online and Linux server I administered lived for nearly 200 days.
And that is exactly how MS will market their products. Wanna web server? No problem, sure linux/freebsd is free, but the staff to support it will end up costing you more in the long run.
Maybe you're right. Frankly certain Windows web workers have a much lower TCO than Linux. An year ago I had to patiently see the hang-ups, web-trashing, hacks and the tons of worms that constantly plagued a Windows2000 server. We called tens of times those people demanding that they took some more care of the damned server. From time to time they would do something and the mess stopped, but only temporarly. In less than a week we were on the festival again.
Those people considered themselves as Windows vets and were quite ironic on our offers to install any other system. In the end one break-in clogged their channel and threatened our network. We simply plugged them off. They came in, we had some HELL of a discussion. We came into an agreement and one friend of ours installed FreeBSD in their server. On their part they started to learn BSD. Since then we haven't seen any problems from their network. Their server works and evolves, so, it seems they work on it...
Yeap we rose their TCO...
I saw it in IDG.net. It's pretty funny...
Well for nearly 11 years I have been in the fileserver world. I touched lots of file servers. From old ancient LANtastic and Netware 2.15, going through most Novell flavours up to 5.0. For 11 years I worked with, administered, tweaked and crunched so many different file servers that I don't remember all of them. Lots of Novell flavours, OS/2, NFS on Solaris and Linux. I worked also with Windows "solutions", from WfW up to Windows2000 Server. From all these I sincerly prefer Netware. Netware is far better and manageable than any other file server system. Naturally as Novell did it specially for file servers. However there is a problem with Novell. Its prices are prohibitive for many customers. But, if your work highly depends in file server services, surely the TCO is far lower than everyone else.
Among all the systems I used, the most crappy, cumbersome, crash-proned, time consuming and nervestraining was M$ crap. It came up into hanging a whole local network, just because M$ thought it could play at will with TCP/IP stack. But there are tons of stories about the crap. Let's just pick the most recent.
In April this year, I met a medium-sized Compaq server in one highly important organisation. Compaq's dealer sweeted a lot to have that lovely machine there. And sweeted even more to have it working. The thing worked, naturally, on Windows2000 Server. I was asked to tweak the crap so that several problems were gone. And the problems were: workstations loosing connection with the server, Apps frequently hanging up, file transfer working slowly (in a 100mbits network it looked much like 10mbits), and a episodic events with the machine crashing.
After some administration we came up to the conclusion that the machine was going into sure doom. The DNS was crashing every day, WINS and SMB were giving wrong packets into the network, the file system was getting wrong data, user accounts were not freed, CPU never lowered behind 30% and lots of many other problems. Besides we found that, everyday, 30 minutes of workday was lost on backing up data (it was a damn important server) as no one could work while backup was going on.
Well, we created a backup server, curiously on Linux, but with the objective to reinstall Windows2000 on the main server. We lost ONE week trying to do it. As we discovered, the original installer had also huge problems with that machine. The machine was simply unable to work stable with Windows2000.
Considering the pros and cons I decided to use my old weapon The Penguin Dancing Samba, against the huge oposition of many people. However the situation was Hell in Flames and there should be a fast solution. So the bosses agreed the change.
Well I had a whole day of headaches to install it on Compaq's RAID. Also I had lots of trouble creating a secure, stable and automatised environment. In the whole, it took me 2-3 weeks to do all the work.
Today, nearly half-year later, the admin approaches the server 1-2 times in the week. Most work is log checking and some rare tweaks in the configuration (mostly adding users), the machine carries several early warning scripts in case something goes wrong. Backup is completely automatic. With the exception of one single user (some mystic problem), everyone works without hangups, crashes or lost connections. The system lives perfectly in its 100mbps network and the problem of slow connections is forgotten. Besides, the average load of this machine is just 3% and it now carries also a MySQL server that is frequently used and which, in the future, may substitute many file server tasks.
Is this the the higher TCO they talk about?
O'Reilly's site has a very detailed and interesting article called "And Justice for Adobe". It has lots of details, a chronology of events and several links related to the case.
The USA Federal Government fought for tens of years the Soviet Regime. One of its reasons was that the soviet power was more intimidation than jurisprudence.
11 years after the Fall of the Soviet Union, Russian citizens fight a federal law that is more intimidation than jurisprudence... in the USA.
Frankly you don't pick the main trend - those who were Windows fans and got burned. They are much more visceral in their hatred toward M$ than anyone else. Because they feel betrayed. And that's what I feel in every cell of my brain. I started with a Windows 1.0beta. Till the advent of Windows95, I was critical of many M$ moves, but still I believed that they were doing something in the right way. Back then, OS/2 was far away from being considered as a real system and IBM did a lot to become the Evil Empire of those times. However, when Windows95 came out, I sincerly felt that someone sold me snakeoil in 100% purity. Many of my old programs went broke. Several third party programs I used couldn't simply work. While I tried hard to adapt to the new SDKs and environment, I couldn't because it was all a mess and a pure waste of money. That mess ended only with the advent of Windows95 OSR2, but the loss was irrecoverable. For some time I tried to reach the "secrets" of Windows NT4, only to discover that there are companies that are well able to create crap in tens of disks and name it "Developer's tools". However that was not the last drop. The last drop came in 1998 with the "fresh, new Windows98". I was hacked three times, one of them trashed completely my HDD in less than a minute. In a moment, years of hard work went into oblivion. A little later, I discovered that even M$ was hacking my own computer by sending interesting IP packets right to Redmond's HQ. A month later I was fully switching to Linux and sending M$ into the deepest bottom of Hell. I never regretted that.
I know a few people who passed nearly this same M$ Paradise. Some have switched to Linux/BSD. Others remained in Windows. But no one has ever stopped reading the whole slang dictionary over Redmond. And other OS fans can ever repeat the HATRED about Microsoft we and similar people have.
One thing about you Apple fans. Well, you are naive, sometimes look a little bit childish. You may think that we are too straight-head, naive and childish also. But there is one thing I shall say to you. People, you were ABSOLUTELY RIGHT to stick to Apple. You can't imagine how the Hell goes hot in Windows. Keep the faith people. Apple forever!
Well I wouldn't say all of them. But a large part of the people around here do hate Microsoft. Even traditional Windows users do HATE Microsoft. And, historically, Microsoft has not only argued with its office walls in Redmond... /. is full of Microsoft haters/flamers/visceral enemies. Frankly I don't hide my highly visceral hatred to M$, and many people know me here for my anti-Redmond flaming (I have 15 years of reasons for that). However I believe that this submittion goes a little too far. How this can be a newsflash when lots of people here, are here because they hate Microsoft? How many of us kicked out features, games and promises of M$ Enligthenment for the raw fields of *NIX and Apple? I am somewhere the 9949 Slashdot account. Well, by the time when I came here, Linux was surely not ready for 80% of desktops (but it was ready for 20% of them), and it was a terrible experience to work in a nearly 100% *NIX environment. But among those 9500 accounts, there were lots of people who were going 100% not-Windows. And till 2001, lots of people changed sides by "paying" the fact they could not run games and some important apps in *NIX. Till now, we have that problem with many recent games (but not with all games anymore). Well, maybe we are now 1% of /. auditory. But still this surely is not newsflash as lots of Windows fanatics know us for being too stubborn to get back to Windows.
/. admins should have forgotten long ago. However, what is /. without some good flame?
Sincerly this is the style of headers that
The review is interesting but it falls in the beginning and end into a fallacy. Why this stupid Triumvirate? Are we talking about Evolution or fighting factions in Roman Senate? Considering the way the analyst glued to this term, soon we will see people discussing who's the Caeser and Pompei of Evolution, or when we catch Emperor Augustus...
There is something very dangerous on using and fixing the attention to certain terms that are simply used as metaphoras. We have an example right here, where we already see two "triumvirates" fighting each other. Frankly I believe that the original author was sincerly remarking the importance of his ideas in the frame of three important conditions for Evolution. However the reviewer made a serious mistake on catching up with this. Whatever happens in Evolution, surely is not a triumvirate and we may be quite far from it. I think that the idea of the book is utterly incomplete, but I have to read the book to be sure for that. The reviewer sincerly makes a bigger mistake on remarking three important factors of Evolution and forgetting that this is too overclassical and artificial from the very start. One cannot simply put three simple conditions to explain all the complexity of the evolutionary process. While it is important to simplify the fundamental conditions of Evolution, I think that we cannot hold up to "Three conditions". That also sounds to much as an revival of the traditionalist "Three Laws" of Physics. This sounds too human to be scientific and too subjective to accept.
Well if you are going to take every target opportunity modern means of transportation represent, then I would highly recomend to go build a castle and get everything back to the middle ages.
Frankly, I don't know where you are from. But I think that the middle of the XIXth century had lots of these examples all around the world:
Wide-road bandits in post-Napoleon Europe - they were so terribly popular that there are several folk stories about these people. Some of them were no less monstruous and blood thirsty than some modern terrorists.
North American Wild-West - Well, we all heard about this...
Pirates sacking ships crews and passengers in Indian and Pacific Ocean.
Armed groups in Afghanistan, India, North Africa - Several novels and historical records, remind us how dangerous was travelling through the parts of the world.
Latin-America and its colonial/civil wars - While the Banana Republic is more a thing of the XXth century, its main travelcard, the lawless of officers and locals, was a product of long years of political chaos and colonial dumbness.
Now pick up these facts and tell me how many people died during these times? Thousands and thousands. Well, in Europe we could reduce it to a few hundreds but in North Africa we are forced to rise things up to the thousands. British "tried" a solution for Afghanistan but the result was tens of thousands deads for both sides and a complete chaos in the region that we can see even now... In the US we had even some nations that were wiped out from the face of the Earth...
So, is travelling more risky than those days?
Well you could say that about the US building the A-Bomb right after Depression and during the hard years of WWII...
Or about Soviet Union building up satellites and sending the first man to Space...
Besides, the train AFAIK is built in one of the richest parts of China. And China is quite big and possesses a huge contrast in cultures, economies and resources. So I don't see a reason why they wouldn't loose some money to build a Maglev.
If you consider that they should "feed the poor and then think about progress", I sincerly consider it populist demagogy. No country has ever solved this question by putting its feet into the swamp of development. On the contrary, most socialist countries who tried to follow such path went nearly bankrupt. The only way to give people a better living is to push every possible path of development forward. Wealth does not rise from "more equal distributions among the people" but from the development of infrastructures with far-reaching effects among the population. And Maglev is one such infrastructure. This system allows common citizens to have a better and speedier means of transportation. This system demands better enginners and technicians. This system is a challenge for lots of classical means of transportation. This system is a path to new scientific and technological researches. And more, this system allows people the use of faster travel, which may be much more economical than other means with the same speeds and approximatelly the same service.
So this might be one of the things that may rise their GNIPC a few dollars more.
Let's put in clear words. What was the Shuttle? A taxi to serve the Space Station. First generation Shuttle was supposed to serve more as a prototype rather than a historical conundrom. However, Skylab went nuts and certain people preferred to empty NASA's pockets in a lackluster as the thing was big, huge, made a lot of noise and the soviets didn't have one. Well I once sis talk to one guy who was in Apollo Project and kicked out from NASA when he saw the Shuttle Project turning into a Guinea's Pig. He talked quite harshly about what people did to NASA. Every Shuttle mission was mostly a Kamikadze flight till the Challenger. As we speak in computer terms - there were lots of features, not bugs". And he didn't stop the flame in private talks. He flamed even on TV. It is interesting that once, directly on TV he mentioned those damn boosters and its mechanics. And when Challenger boomed, a few minutes after the show he simply said - "Didn't I speak about that? I did! And that's the result!" He shuggered his shoulders and went about the technical details of the tragedy.
NASA was not stupid. It was made stupid. If there is anyone to blame, then it is the people that took control of NASA somewhere during Apollo's missions. They destroyed the bigest and best team of scientists and engineers ever. And left to a bunch of stupid managers the task of caring for that Ford-T that we know as the Space Shuttle.
The problem with Space Travel is when some jerks will get rid from the idea that there is nothing faster than light. Even Einstein warned for this thing. He well remarked in his works that the speed of light was a postulate, an axioma that should be proved. Until now I have not seen a real proof. On the contrary. We know that the Speed of light is not uniform and depends on the local condtions of the spacetime frame. Besides, the effects of Gravity act with sppeds much faster than light. And that's also an 100% fact as if Gravity acted with the same speed as light, then our world would be atomic mess and we wouldn't be discussing this thing here...
However you are right in your assumptions about propulsion. These types of propulsions will never take us outta the Solar System.
I recognize that I didn't make a clear distinction between european colonists and indigeneous people of Greenland. That may be a fault of my side as there were some serious conflicts between these people. However I had too little time to write the stuff (I was going out of my office).
On what concerns Phoenicians and Romans, the story is more complex. I know that the "Roman coins" story made a lot of noise, when they were discovered in the shores of Brazil. However we know now that these coins were probably related to a more recent crash that happened in more recent times and that these coins were in fact collectioner's coins. Meanwhile there is a big problem here. According to certain facts from the Portuguese History, a lot of their discoveries were not original in full sense. Discoveries made by Portugal were mainly based in documents, stories and facts from very ancient times. Portuguese went to South Atlantic fully convinced that Phoenicians did circumvent the African continent. That's an historical fact. And based on the sources that lead to this story, there is some weird story about how they did the track around Africa. It seems that they based their navigation in very old data that mentioned that same weird track they did between West Africa and Brazil. However there are other theories and tales about how they did this. One claims that currents in Pheonicia time run nearer the African continent, so Pheonicians could never had reached Brazil. Another considers that this current has been always there and that even West African sailors did reach, from time to time, Brazil (Note: West Africa in the Middle Ages was much more developed than Europe then). Meanwhile the data is very fragmentary speculative and dubious. So I keep it away.
Meanwhile the similarities on architecture is not a work of amateurs. Is Heyerdal an amateur? I don't think so. He and several other people did a lot to study ancient civilizations. And we in Russia have one of his disciples. That guy is tremendously serious and solid. And he doesn't stop just in speculations. He shows facts. He showed Malta's constructions and compared them with similar buildings in Peru. Yes, there are huge similarities. And also some serious differences. Heyerdal's group work is careful to note it, and this guy goes step by step on his findings. And, till now, they have found more things to go further, rather than getting punched. Not long before Heyerdal's death they finally confirmed that Peru's people have been in Easter Island. This was one thing that many historians frequently dismissed as some amateur stupidity. But Heyerdal's group showed that the traditional academic circles can, sometimes, be deeply wrong. I saw a film where Heyerdal and his followers digged up the Peruvian "fortress" in Easter Island. As scientists they were quite careful to film the different stages of cleanup and the details of the walls. That building had absolutely no difference from Machu Pichu or Cuzco's "fortresses". They were made exactly with the same technology and design.
Well this does not concern exactly our problem. But it shows that we may be deeply wrong in our theories. So, while the presence of earlier Old World people in America is still a speculative point, it shall not be dismissed at all. But we should be careful to avoid the speculations of certain people who try to find tetrahedrons in the mud.
And why wouldn't be cool for X, Apple, IBM and Xerox to sue the deceptive marketing of a crap company that stole everything outta their interfaces to create Windows??? As an ex-system programmer I very well know that lots of that damn kernel crap inside Windows were purely and simply OS/2 core components... And don't tell me that this was M$'s part. Anyway, lots of development and a huge part of testing was made by IBM, before BG made that huge party back in 1987...
And besides, Before hold your tongue before calling anyone else's product "crap". Windows Commander is a very popular product and I know this because lots of Windows fans use it and prefer it to the real crap of Internet Explorer playing File Manager.