Posts by Herbys

AWS says you're on your own if media codec patent owners come knocking

Re: Excerpt from the Annual Meeting of Evil (Self-Described) Geniuses

At the very least, patent process should change to only protect non-obvious inventions that require directed effort to come up with them. The only social benefit of patents is providing an incentive to do research in new inventions, but for inventions that do not require such investments it's just a bonus for smart people, but has no benefit to anyone else.

You should be required to file for a patent *before* developing your invention.

That filing needs to state what problem your invention intends to solve.

For one year, you don't get any patent or protection. If someone comes up with your idea based on your description of the problem, the idea was obvious and shouldn't be protected. No one gets a patent on your idea. If someone comes up with a different solution, you are still on the run for a patent but only for your solution.

If after one year no one has come up with a solution that matches yours, you file for a patent under the cover of your previous filing, and if granted you get protection for your job-obvious idea.

This process provides the same level or protection granted by patents today but only for inventions that are not obvious (which is something required by patents today but that not enforced since it's impossible for patent clerks to be specialists in a million complex fields as needed to assess obviousness), and that require effort to develop (and not something that comes up spontaneously and that would be produced whether you expect to profit from it or not).

Filthy PCs: The X-rated circus of horrors

That's nothing.

I once installed a server for a group at an office. They wanted to have it near the developers, so we mounted it alone in a 21 inch rack. The server worked for a year, and one day I got a call to "fix it". I went there and found that the floor had been remodeled, they were still fixing and sanding some dry panels in place near the server. I thought it might have been that someone plugged some power tool into the rack's outlet and the power flukes had blown a power supply. So we went to the server (a Compaq Proliant 2000) and opened it's lid. I saw no motherboard. Surprised, my first thought was "someone stole this server's motherboard!". Then I noticed two circular holes in the "bottom". I dragged my finger at the shiny grey surface I thought was the bottom of the server's case. It wasn't. It was a thick (about two inches deep) layer of dust from the driwalls that was sucked in by the server as the walls were being sanded!

The poor server had worked for weeks with its motherboard under a layer of dust several inches thick, but at one point it decided to give up. After a good session with the vacuum cleaner, the server resumed normal work. Very noble server.

'Doctor Dark Energy': The Ultimate LHC eccentric?

Seriously...

Dismissing the possibility of a catastrophe is plain unscientific.

There's very serious science backing the possibility that some of the doomsday scenarios might happen (the micro black-hole in particular). They have all been discarded because they have requirements (such as many-dimensions) that are invalid under the current standard model.

But we don't know that the standard model is right. In fact, we know it is not, otherwise it would explain phenomena that we can't explain now. Actually, the whole LHC is dedicated to validating, refining or correcting the standard model. And under some of the possible models, those assumptions that would make the doomsday scenarios possible would actually occur.

So the LHC supporters are discarding the risks of the LHC because under the model they are trying to confirm, it is harmless. That sort of circular thinking is not worrying for most situations, but when you are talking about the end of humanity, it is terrifying.

The fact is that those pushing forward the LHC are those that stand to benefit most from it (scientists whose fields are stuck due to the lack of experimental validation) so they might accept a risk of one in fifty million (some of the supporter's numbers) of the planet collapsing, but if you apply those risks to the whole of humanity, they are unacceptable.

Oh, and the worst part...

The worst part is that since the probability of something terrible happening is low, most likely they will succeed and be able to claim that whoever complained was a nutjob.

Just like a person playing russian roulette would call paranoid to everyone that said it was a bad idea to pull the trigger, and claim that since he's still alive, pulling the trigger was just fine.

Uh... no.

> the energy of the collisions is *still* less than that resulting from of the particles that are continually bombarding the atmosphere.

If that's what makes you feel safe, I'm sorry to ruin your year but they are not. The collisions in the LHC are a few orders of magnitude higher than any happening on earth. They are only equivalent to those *possibly* happening on neutron stars and some other remote bodies we don't know *that* much about. For all that we know, tiny black holes could be really frequent in the universe.

Additionally, if there were collisions on earth energetic enough to create a black hole, the speed at which the black hole would be going would make it go through earth without producing much damage, continuing its way into space. That wouldn't be the case with one created by the LHC, which would remain on earth. And you know what that would mean.

Sony's Windows 7 virtualization switch-off (partly) reversed

Not security - control

Sony is not concerned about security in this case (ok, never). There's no real security threat here.

What Sony cares about is that a machine being run in a VM can easily bypass DRM protections from the host. So virtualization is not good for media control, and thus it is not good for Sony.

Parents plant spyware to snare sex predator

@15 years old, but what if....?

All good points, but the guy knew that she was 15 and thus out of bounds. If he couldn't restrain for just one year, and had sex with her even if he knew that what he was doing was illegal, he is a dangerous person and it makes sense that he's in jail now.

NASA chief blasts US space policy in leaked email

@Kevin Kitts

Right.

In the past wars server a purpose of reducing the population. Now with smart bombs and surgical attacks, they barely make a dent in population, so we need science to find us other places to live.

Either that or go back to big old wars, with either man to man combat or plenty of hydrogen bombs to reduce the population. We'll be ignorant, but there will be plenty of room.

BitTorrent tracker Mininova faces legal action

Errata

> Video makes up 60 per cent of the downloads on Mininova and only 19 per cent is music.

Wrong. Torrent files pointing to video content might make up whatever percentage of the file downloads. The video files are NOT downloaded from Mininova. The site only indexes the file trackers, which are hosted by other peers.

I don't know anything about the legality of indexing illegal files, or more accurate indexing files pointing to illegal content, but there is a big difference with hosting the illegal content.

Five misunderstood Vista features

Re: there's an easy fix

1, 7 and 9 are already there in Vista. But otherwise I agree with your list.

To those saying "X is useless" do you realize there are a few hundred million Windows users out there, and not ALL of them share your usage patterns?

I use search maybe fifty times a day. I would be significantly less productive (in measurable terms) without it. So what if it takes about 1% of my CPU indexing (yes, I measured it)? I don't care. I just want to be able to search for stuff.

And I understand if you don't, you might just have few documents and mail, or you might only use very well structured content. But understand that you are a minority. Most people have lots of information (that's what computers are for, basically) and are not very good at keeping the infromation organized.

Same thing for many other complains. The fact that something bothers YOU doesn't mean it's useles. So what if I DO want to consume content X which has DRM? No one is forcing you to use the DRMd content.

To some of the criticism (like overall resource consumption, UAC and performance) I agree. It could be much better. But I can certainly live with it in exchange for some additional productivity and safety.

Re: Windows Search and "unnecessary" services

So you know where your documents are, and that's enough? You must be either using a very, very consistent file naming process coupled with some interesting folder structure to be able to find anything without search. Oh, and you must be doing the same for email, which probably takes a few hours a week to categorize well enough that searching is never necessary.

Or maybe you just have too few documents to be representative.

I've just checked, I have twenty thousand documents and a hundred and fifty thousand messages in my machine. How would it be to search through all this without indexing? I can tell you, because that's what I used to do a few years ago. it was PAINFUL. And SLOW. And INEFFECTIVE. Now I just paid a few extra dollars in a faster hard drive and some additional processor power and have my data sorted out. Isn't that a better alternative?

Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler?

@Tanya Cumpston

You know that the Southern Hemisphere is a bit more than Australia, don't you?

While in Australia you were cooking yourselves, in the rest of the southern hemisphere we were cold, very cold. So yes, the southern hemisphere had a record cold march, even if a specific small region had a different situation.

Mars

I think there's enough evidence that there's some global warming, and we can see that in the reduction of the polar icecaps. Now, I wonder if the source is human, why exactly the same amount of reduction can be seen in the other pair of icecaps we can measure, those of mars. http://www.mars-ice.org/_more/about/sphistory222.php

Is the source of global warming human? If so, then we should stop sending those gas guzzling rovers to mars, as they are making an impact there.

Aussie gov to treat laser pointers like knives and guns

Blinding? Overblown.

I think this is seriously overblown.

Yes, a powerful laser pointer aimed at your eye can produce temporary or permanent blindness. But in order to do so it needs to get in your eye in the first place, and matching something with a one millimeter cross with a beam that's about one millimeter across a few hundred meters away is not an easy thing to do.

Even if the jerk manages to hit the target in the pupil (an incredibly unlikely occurrence at any reasonable distance to a moving target like a flying plane) and there IS damage to the retina, the area of damage will be proportional to the proportion of the field of view covered by the laser bean, which is incredibly small. That is, only a line of receptors in your retina (a line of pixels, if you will) would be affected.

Is that bad? Yes, it is. But that’s because somebody is causing some damage to someone (just as if you throw a stone at someone from close range), not because of the safety risk to the aircraft. The pilot would probably not note the damage for years, if at all.

I'm not saying aiming lasers at people is something acceptable, only a moron could do it and such a moron should be jailed. But jailing people just for possession "to prevent a catastrophe" would only be reasonable if the catastrophe is real or even possible, which is not.

@Rogan Paneer

It is not serious because the alleged threat is not such. GO study some optics and you'll see that in order to blind someone at a distance you need something much more powerful than a laser pointer (probably you could with a green laser pointer with the filters removed, but that would still be extremely unlikely, and such a modified laser would be already illegal given its power rating).

World Bank chief: Ethanol cars run on human misery

As false as it gets

What does this guy think third world countries produce? Spaceships?

No, they produce mostly basic commodities, in particular food.

Yes, producing Ethanol from potential food sources reduces the availability of food, but the causes for people starving are not related to food scarcity. In fact, there's enough food in the world to overfeed the whole world. No, hunger cause is poverty. These starving populations simply cannot afford food. Why? Because what they produce is not as highly valued as other things.

Raise the price of food and these populations will have to pay a higher price for food (which amounts to perhaps 50% of their cost of living) but also raise the amount of their whole income by the same proportion. Net result, they have more capacity to acquire food and be well fed.

Now, I still think that making Ethanol is stupid, but not because of the reason mentioned. It is stupid because there are much better energy sources available, and the internal combustion car is dying anyway.

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

Bull****

I'm writing this in a 2GB laptop with a core solo with Vista Ultimate, and it works just fine. I have no problems with performance. I agree on the fact that 2GB is the minimum necessary for fluid work, but the CPU needs are about one fourth of what you are claiming.

Bull****

I'm writing this in a 2GB laptop with a core solo with Vista Ultimate, and it works just fine. I have no problems with performance. I agree on the fact that 2GB is the minimum necessary for fluid work, but the CPU needs are about one fourth of what you are claiming.

Oh, and I've found several machines with the specs you describe that were completely useless with Vista. After taking a deeper look, the problem was not VIsta, but the tons of crapware the manufacturers had bundled in the machine (in some cases it was the sheer amount of useless stuff, in others it was specific pieces of software, like an agent from Toshiba or a tool from HP, that consumed amazing amounts of resources). After removing those, the machines ran just fine.

And you might claim "the customers purchased the machines with all that, so it's not their fault" but then you must admit it's not Vista's fault either. It's the PC manufacturers that will take ten dollars from some crapware manufacturer to screw the users experience. And then ten more from each of ten other companies.

A reinstall with Vista will work just as well as a reinstall with XP. But it will leave you with a more complete and secure OS.

New York's Freedom Tower to depend on RFID

Why the tower

The tower is a horrible project, and calling it the Freedom tower is ironic, since that thing is a demonstration of the fact that americans have renounced to the freedom of having the towers they want where they want them.

Just rebuild the Twin Towers.

http://www.twintowersalliance.com/

Terrorist robots dissected - anatomy of a scare

I think the article misses the point

The big issue with robokillers is that they don't have to have a great success rate to be effective. If you are going to blow yourself up (or expose yourself to jail) to kill the PM (or your neighbor) you certainly want to be sure that, once you get past the non return point, you have high chances of success. But with a bot you are not risking much. Send the drone and see if you get him. If not, you can try again another day, with little risk. And even if you fail you've certainly scared him to hell.

Apple sued over iPhone caller ID

Patent reform

I agree that patent law needs a reform. But in this case, the problem is that this shouldn't be patentable with CURRENT law. A patent has to be for a non obvious idea. Idntifying who was calling based on their number is obvious and was obviosu even in 1980. It was not technically feasible back then due to the state of technology, but it was something that probably every phone user thought at some point ("I whish I could see who's calling").

So before a patent reform, we need new patent officers. I'm not asking for Einstein to come back, but at least people to whom using a pedal to accelerate a car doesn't seem like an original idea.

Porsche to challenge London CO₂ penalty in court

@Anonymous Coward

The paragraph you quote says "more than two", you say "you can fit two or more" which is not true. In most compact cars, fitting three4 children (with the appropriate child restraints, boosters or child seats) is extremely difficult, and in many cases not legal. And more than three is simply impossible.

And regarding the "big car" comment, I happen to love big cars, and need no excuses. I'm paying for the fuel, the normal taxes and the vehicle, and I'm a tall person with a big family that simply finds stupid being crammed in a tiny vehicle.

An artificial and absolutely disproportionate tax such as this will not have any significant impact on the world's climate, as a single cow has more warming impact than even the worst (modern and properly tuned) gas guzzler.

Stop telling other people how to live.

Microsoft dishes out six critical updates

Vista

I don't know you, but VIsta works fine for me. My laptop has been on without a reboot since about a month ago (with daily sleep cycles) though I guess it will need a reboot with these patches. I haven't seen a blue screen yet in almost a year of use, so I don't even know if they are still there. What is it that doesn't work for you folks?

Yes, OSX is coold, but Vista works just as well to me.

US Army struggles with Windows to Linux overhaul

@Anonymous Coward

> That security researchers with complete access to the code of linux and it's applications have only discovered an equal number of holes, compared to a closed source OS where they have to guess at the attack vectors.

That might be a decent argument for a normal user (which I do not agree with). But we are talking about people controlling weapons systems, whole wars could be decided based on such a flaw. So the fact you recongnize that having source code makes finding holes EASIER acts against the platform for these uses. Yes, your argument might indicate that Windows has actually more holes (which, again, I do not share, based ont he fact that Microsoft has a few thousand engineers looking for holes as well, with source code access and a FULL TIME JOB, TRAINING AND SPECIFIC ASSIGNMENTS TO FIND SUCH HOLES) but that would irrelevant, as a dedicated hacker trying to achieve a specific goal with access to source code will have a much easier time than one without such code.

RealPlayer dinged by software watchdog group

Not only people do use it

But in a few years it will be mandatory, if the EU keeps supporting their complains against Microsoft.

Tesla hits ejector button on staff

RIP?

So a company that's a few weeks from releasing the product (in limited form, OK) is supposed to be RIP because they trimmed 26 employees after an important screwup?

BusinessWeek novel turns Google's cloud into epic hero

Journalism

TW Burger: yes, I see that all the time. Especially in newspapers, where every single article about a topic I cover even to a basic level is completely wrong (I'm not talking about nitpicking here, I'm talking about when the readers that read the article without prior knowledge know less after reading the article that what they knew before reading it).

But there's one thing that bothers me more: that it is almost certain that the articles about subjects I do not specialize in are equally misinformed. That would mean that 90% of the articles in the press are completely wrong! So somebody that reads no newspapers knows more than someone that does about science, current events, politics, computers, sports and basically anything.

Apple keeps critical security fixes to itself

Stupid?

Paul: common users are not stupid. They are practical. Every time Quicktime installs an update I have to go and manually remove automatic launch items from the registry, delete the icon in the quick launch bar and remove the item in the taskbar. So I end up NOT installing QT updates unless it is strictly necessary.

Maybe I would change my patterns if Apple changed their patterns, but as they are I will try to avoid their products like the plague (unluckily for me, QT seems to be a necessity today, though there are some third party players that are decent replacements for QT). Oh, and installing Itunes when I just wants QT is a far worse type of bundling than anything MS was even accused of, as two completely unrelated items of the same level should NEVER be bundled together.

By the way, if all users installed all fixes as you seem to imply, why not installing the fixes automatically? Installers ask because there are reasonable situations when you will want not to update. hiding information about the updates just puts users at risk in exchange for some cheap image bonus points.

Pedophile gets 110 years in MySpace extortion scheme

Numbers

> The most damaging child abusers are parents who abuse their own children.

Yes, but a parent can only abuse a few sons/daughters, while in a case like the one reported a pedophile can abuse hundreds. The impact per child might be smaller, but the total combined damage can be enormous.

Canadian loses $20K in phony eBay sale

Ebay reputations

Ebay reputations mean nothing.

First, they can be manufactured. Just create a few hundred accounts, and then buy/sell small things between the accounts. Pay the ebay fees, which should amount to a hundred dollars at most. Always give top ratings and voila! you have a hundred sellers with high ranks! Then put a few expensive things for sale at very good prices, get a few sales on each, and you can get probably a few thousand high margin sales before anyone complains of not receiving the goods. Basically, make a million quickly.

And you can repeat the process many times if you are ambitious.

In addition to that many sellers selling fake, low total value articles (like a $30 BT headset) will include with the article a letter saying "we will post automatically a rating identical to the one you post". So if you give them a bad rating, you are getting one too, screwing up your account.

Based on my (and my close friends) experiences, the majority of products at eBay are either fakes or scams. There are many great sellers, but they are simply outnumbered by scammers. Many users do not detect the scams (they will blame the problems of a working but low quality fake to the purported manufacturer) and those who do will not dare damaging their reputations by complaining.

What bothers me most is that both problems are easily solvable. The first one by implementing a rating analysis system that detect such closed groups, or that weights the amount of a sale in the rating.

The second one by hiding one side's rating until the other one has been posted.

But apparently ebay is too happy counting the money. A sale is a sale, after all.

Boeing guards its right to tail employees

Gmail

I don't care they monitored his activities on the local computer. But when they start reading information the employee was accessing on other sites (like his or her email account) they've crossed the line.

Think of this. If you open a personal letter while on the office, does your employer have the right to read it just because it was on your desk?

They have right (in some countries) to monitor local activity and files on the computer, but accessing third party sites with personal information is out of bounds.

Animal rights activist hit with RIPA key decrypt demand

Disabling this law

If lots of people go and store a random data file somewhere in their disk, then anyone having such a file in their hard drive can claim it's just garbled data, like the files lots of people have on their machines.

Investigators can only claim her files hide something because it's not common to have files that look like that for no reason at all.

Now, about here, just put her in a cage with a hungry polar bear for a few minutes.

Met's de Menezes photo 'manipulated', says prosecution

Islam a religion of peace

J, you claim that Islam is not any more violent than Christianity. And based on their core beliefs and the writing on their books, I would agree. But there is no doubt that MUSLIMS are one of the most violent people in the world. It might not be due to what's in their book but on what's in their religion's social structure, their implementation or something else. But I don't see many christians stoning other christians due to petty offenses, thought crimes or being in the company of other "undesirable" people.

Australia to get 1,000 megawatt wind farm

Uranium mine

> Or an uranium mine (the aussies happen to have the biggest known uranium ore deposit in the world btw).

What's wrong with an uranium mine? It is just a hole in the ground, and the only drawaback is in the radiation from the Uranium... which was already there!!!

We can talk about the dangers of SPENT uranium, but extracting uranium creates just a tiny insignifficant fraction of the damage caused by the alternatives it replaces.

London man coughs to 172mph Porsche jaunt

Safespeed graph

Graham:

The graph you point at at Safespeed.org is in logarithmic scale. So it doesn't imply anything being zero, ever. While the cause for the change in pattern is certianly debatable, there is nothing wrong with the trend highlighted in the graph.

Chinese netizens prevent 800-cat stir-fry

Eating carnivores

The point about not eating carnivores is a good one.

Eating hervibores is much less efficient (one fourth to one tenth) than eating plants, but there are some significant benefits with eating them that might offset, for some, the inefficiency (a more complete and balanced diet, better taste, etc.).

But there's no signifficant advantage in eating carnivores, and that adds another 4x-10x inefficiency. Eating carnivores is a signifficant waste of resources, and given that there's barely enough food for everyone on earth I don't see the need for adding more inefficiency to the process.

Rivals torture consumers via Microsoft

What's an OS?

> ...an OS provider (that is OPERATING system provider) shouldn't be involved in user level things such as search.

I think you are confusing an Operating System with a Kernel.

Microsoft is an OS provider, not a kernel provider. An Operating System can include anything that's not application specific and still be an OS.

Search is not application specific, as isn't TCP/IP or a browser.

BTW, Desktop Search in vista is easy to disable as is. There's nothing today that prevents you from disabling Vista's DS and installing Google's. The move is about what comes enabled by default.

Since DS is NOT a business for Microsoft, how can you claim that they are "extending" their monopolu to other "businesses".

Paris Hilton dereassigned back to jail

Days in jail

> I wonder how many of the people who think 23 days is a breeze have done even a day behind bars, let alone a day as Paris Hilton.

Now innocent people that never break the law are supposed to feel guilty?

NASA chief regrets having unpopular opinion

And the earth is flat

People dissenting with the mainstream opinion is the basis of advance. Even when they are wrong (as it is most likely this case) they help us evaulate our theories and confirm they resist criticism.

Do YOU, the guys posting comments here, have more information about global warming than this guy? I seriously doubt it. DId he say anything that's proven wrong, or even highly unlikely? No, he just said that there's no proof that today's temperature is the best one for humans. It is possible that a higher average temperature would lead to higher water evaporation and more rainfall in most of the world. It is likely that more ground would become hospitable with higher temperatures (areas like greenland) than the ground that the ones that would become inhabitable. It is possible that higher temperatures would enable more green areas in the world to grow. Or perhaps not. The fact is that there are few studies in that area (as opposed to the actual global warming likelyhood) and this guy has his right to express an opinion on it, even if it is not a popular one.

Microsoft still just re-Surfacing Windows

Some you missed

You missed a few escapades fromthe grey boxes that seem to be at least partially successful for MS:

1) XBox. You might contend that the 360 is not doing that well, but it set its aim at beating the Playstation and so far it has crushed it. Yes, the Wii is selling like hot cakes, but so is the PS2, and the wii can be said to be fighting last generation console war while the XBox is winning the new generation, even if this generation is not yet as popular as the old one.

2) Pocket PCs. While it is true that the pocket PCs are becoming less of a necessity as the smartphones become more prevalent, MS won the game on that one hands down, and lots of devices are being sold even now.

3) Servers: OK, you might call those grey boxes (though most are actually black or dark brown) but they are different boxes placed in different environments and owned by different people. And it is a clear win for MS, and even a very profitable one.

4) Terminals: Putting Windows remotely on dumb terminals, some of them even running non MS embedded operating systems was a clear win for MS and away from the classic PC model.

Creationists open biblical history museum

Your ignorance about something doesn't make false

I often find this argument in the mouth of creationists. They don't understand evolution (or genetics, or physics) so it means it has to be wrong.

For you creationists: we (scientific thinkers) are not a bunch of self deluded guys that, when we find a hole in our theories, just bury it. That's exactly the opposite of what scientists do: they look for holes and develop rational and demonstrable explanations.

There are no holes in evolution. Evolution has been proved in as many ways as something can be proven. It has been proven by logic (given what we know about the structure of living beings, it is inevitable that it will occur). It has been proven in the lab (by observing the rate of adaptation and evolution in micro organisms, which matches the rate theory would predict). We have NOT observed new species to develop in the lab, which is EXACTLY what theory predicts. If someone had observed in the lab that a new species arose naturally in a short period, then that woudl actually DISPROVE evolution. It has been proven by direct observation, since finding the cadaver of an animal (in the form of a fossil) and using very accurate mechanisms to predict it's date can be considered direct observation. The holes in the fossil record match very well what would be expected.

It has also been simulated in computers and the results match very well the predictions. And it has been confirmed by later findings (Darwin's theory was developed decades before the first findings about DNA were done, but he predicted, based on the evidence, that some form of transmitting information beteen generations, highly but not perfectly reliable and common to all living beings was there, and that's exactly what scientists found in DNA many decades later). It explains extremely well all forms of life we find now, even those that have "design errors" that are sub optimal for their environment but that can be explained by evolution from other forms that were adapted to a different environment.

Evolution and cosmology are WAY more complex than you imagine, and the fact that you, at first glance over a few facts, don't understand everything, doesn't make it wrong. If there's something you don't understand, just ask. There's a perfectly good explanation that doesn't involve "someone must have come up and created it like it is" and the scientists, more often than not, have that answer. And when they don't, it is almost always something that we just, as humas, haven't figured out yet, but it doesn't contradict logic or science.

Lies

Apparently telling lies is not something against the creationsts beliefs.

Because Darwin NEVER converted, and NEVER dismissed evolution. There's no record or indication that he did, and all the potential witnesses (family and friends) always said he didn't. It is a later invention by someone that wanted to dismiss Darwin's theory.

But even if he had done such an absurd thing (again, he didn't) a fact is a fact and a change in mind of his author doesn't change it.

Microsoft squares up to Google with $6bn buy

Really?

> Anti-trust. Monopoly leverage. Locked deals. MS has done nothing good for the computer industry and a lot of harm.

Antitrust was not something done by Microsoft. it was done by the government (and MSs competitors).

And I can think of plenty of good things that MS has done for the market. Oc course not because they are good samaritans, just because it made good business sense.

I'd rather have MS than most of its competitors.

I'm tired of people saying "MS is bad because they WILL do this" even if MS rarely does what the pundits said they would.

MoD to publish secret UFO files

What baffles me

In the seventies we used to get blurry and undefined pictures of UFOs from amateurs holding primitive cameras without automatic high speed focusing and adjusting, using low sensitivity film and without any sort of electronig asssistance.

Today every amateur owns high tech digital cameras with automatic, high speed focusing, burst picture capabilities, high sensitivity CCDs, image stabilization and all the technology only the NASA had in the seventies and we still get.... blurry and undefined pictures of UFOs.

Program Names govern admin rights in Vista

Wrongly reported

Yes, if Microsoft had done this they would be utterly stupid. But they didn't. File name is NOT used to make privilege decisions for executables. The article (and the comments) are misintepreting what the OS does with the name.

What Vista does is ASKING FOR ELEVATION based on many factors, which include file name. But asking for elevation just equates to asking the user is asked if this is an install program and should run elevated. If the user says yes, then it is run elevated (the decision is on the user). If the user says no, the app is run without privileges and if it is an installer or malware requiring privileges it will fail. The feature is just a shortcut to ease the users lifes by suggesting that certian applications might need privileges and letting the user decide if they should be granted. The user is the only one that knows (hopefully) what he or she is attempting to do.

Does this mean you can fool the system by using another name? NO! If your file does not have such a name, elevation will not be requested and the file will be run without privileges. So if it is malware or an installer, it will just fail, unless ran by a full time admin (the Administrator account, or manually launched with "run as administrator").

So those of you drawing conclusions that Vista security is flawed because of this I would suggest go and grab a decent security book, because you are seriously confused.

Nothing to see here, move along...