>You'd rather have China stay a third world country?

No, I would rather that they become modernized.

I would rather that US businesses invest in the US. Because if you want customers, you have to have customers that can pay you. If they can't pay, they can't be customers.

But that's not what's happening. If you buy a Cross pen these days, it's not made in Lincoln, RI, anymore, it's made in China. Because short term profits rule the day here. We have been shipping all our high skilled jobs overseas. Where the manufacturing and skills go, the science and engineering will follow. This has been shown time and again in history. The Samuel Slater reference wasn't just a garbage reference.

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BMO

You think you can separate politics from culture.

You are wrong.

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BMO

He notes that the US needs to limit trade with China to items we can't get anywhere else. He says not to supply China with the rope that will be used to hang the US on.

1. Not bloody likely.
2. Too fucking late.

China plans for the long term

Well, duh.

People who have been looking at China for the past two decades have been screaming this at the top of their lungs, only for this concept to fall on deaf ears. The US has forgotten about the lesson of Samuel Slater, and China has picked it up and they are schooling us.

Where the manufacturing goes, so does the science and engineering. And that's what the Chinese want. They want what we had and we're giving it to them hand-over-fist for short term profits.

The "problem" is cultural, and it is entirely self-made.

And it ain't gonna get fixed until US businesses start looking at the long term, which has about the same chance of happening as a snowball's chance in Hell.

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BMO

DeVelOpERs! deveLOpErS! dEVLopeRS! deVelo....

Oh sorry, not for you guys.

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BMO

That doesn't excuse Windows 98SE and all succeeding versions of Windows up until Vista in 2009 having autorun turned on, or existing at all.

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BMO

I was saddened and embarrassed by my mis-type, but upon reading your post, I'm gonna stand by it.

Yes, it would be depressing indeed. But not unexpected. :-D

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BMO

He doesn't have any.

I'll agree with him that *nix isn't immune, but most *nix malware has to do with Layer 8 vulnerabilities than anything else.

And there isn't any anti-malware for stupid except education.

That said, I can attest to the fact that Bagle runs just fine in Wine and is well behaved. But stuff like that is really rare.

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BMO

>The real problem came with Windows XP. By this time, recordable CDs (and, later, DVDs) were commonplace

No, CD-Rs were commonplace by the time Windows 98 came out. I think there were more burned copies of Windows 98 than there were official pressed ones at that time. The first "under $1000" CD-R drive was in 1995, and 3 years to "affordability by ordinary people" in electronics had become the norm even then.

Autorun from 1998 onward revived the spread of malware by removable media. Nobody was doing bootsector viruses on floppies anymore in 1998 because the number of people booting their machines with an OS floppy was minuscule. Autorun malware took the place of bootsector malware. It was so commonplace that it was recommended by everyone who knew anything about preventing the propagation of malware by pirated software that autorun be turned off.

In 1998.

Speaking of convenience, if a software install CDROM (you know, an official one) had an autorun.inf that didn't check to see if the software was already installed, the installer would start. If you merely wanted to pick a file off the CD, you had to cancel the install and open Explorer, rather than simply pop the disk in and browse the drive. This was even before the popularity of burned disks.

While you can say this was the publisher's fault, it illustrates the dubious value of autorun even as an installation "feature"

It took a full 10 years of autorun being a problem for it to be turned off in Vista instead of in a service pack or in 98SE and NT4. That shouldn't have happened, and autorun should now not even exist.

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BMO

Because they keep being screwed by things like this all the time and there is no rioting band of geeks with pitchforks and shovels and rakes (and implements of destruction /Guthrie) demanding that this be removed from Windows.

>autorun.inf

The most dangerous thing to ever come out of a computer company. That this feature made it past review demonstrates the utter disregard for the most basic security at all, especially since boot sector worms had been around for years in DOS and Win3.1 before Win95 ever graced us with its presence. Since Windows 95, it's been trivial to write auto executing code because Microsoft deliberately yanks down the pants and underwear of the end user and says "Go to it!"

The fact that autorun still exists in modern versions of Windows is even more telling. "Backwards compatability" is more important than keeping users safe. Yes, I know that it's turned off by default since Vista, but the option to turn it on should never be there in the first place. Autorun in The Year of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Twenty-Thousand-And-Thirteen is beyond the pale.

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BMO

> There are variations between the length of the elements, the space between the elements, the space between letters and words.

This does not make it analog.

If it did, then we would say that stuff piped down an RS232 cable is analog, but it isn't.

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BMO

> but I'm pretty sure they're analog machines

Nope. It's digital. Two states, dot and dash. You could do a 1 for 1 binary encode.

As a matter of fact, the analog telephone system was a hack of a digital system.

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BMO

It's as if there's something genetic in MBA types that makes them abuse English so awfully as this summary exemplifies.

It's a good thing that tomorrow is Bloomsday.

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BMO

Bit saddened about the demise of Songbird

I'm not. It was crap. Crap software should go extinct or be improved. It never improved. A music player built out of a web browser engine was the most convoluted way I could think of to make a music player.

I think it failed not because most people who want to listen to music aren't techies and they're happy ( and I'm talking about people using MS Windows on their computers ) with Windows Media Player

I'm a techie and I despised Songbird. It was better to simply use Play (a sox front-end) and a music list. That's what techies do. They find a simple solution that doesn't put a load on their machines like Songbird did. Songbird was a load, in multiple senses of the word.

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BMO

And have the light hardwired to the camera power so it's physically impossible for software to turn it off.

And electrical tape or paint doesn't block light. Right?

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BMO

The courts are aware as we need to get a court order.

The FISA court is secret and accountable to nobody, and it's not like we didn't hear about this before as "Total Information Awareness."

TIA got shouted down publicly, but I'm not betting it ever went away. Black budgets and all that.

Even if Snowden is lying and that he exaggerated his authority, the evidence to the contrary of what the politicians are saying is pretty much overwhelming, taken as a big picture.

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BMO