Yes. As long as you know not to mix drinking and deriving.

<ducks>

Here we have Mr. RollingThunder from The Burrows. He is proposing a $50,000 price tag to bring every single system in to compliance. Mr. RollingThunder, would you stand up, please?

<bang>

This demonstrates the value of not being seen

I'm no constitutional scholar, but I suspect that inefficiency was meant to be applied to Congress, not to the Executive Branch (which DHS, CIA, NSA and other TLAs are part of). The inefficiency was meant to prevent bogus laws from making it on the books. (you can argue that the inefficiency fails at this, but that was its purpose), not to prevent gov't from enforcing the laws it does have.

I was just about to bring this up. The whole point of 12 Angry Men was a jury that did their own research (all alone in the deliberation room) and came up with the 'right' verdict. Which they would never have done based only on the 'evidence' presented at the trial. I'd sure like to see how that story would turn out if the jury had had internet access.

So there may be centuries of precedent preventing jurors from conducting their own research, but 12 Angry Men is 'precedent' for the contrary strategy.

Some did. Others didn't.

In the 90's, Photoshop was a Mac product...many people bought Macs to run Photoshop. When Apple switched to OSX, Adobe took what...three years to port Photoshop? Today it does run on OSX, but most users run it on Windows. Apple's switch to OSX cost them a big killer app.

Can you understand why MS doesn't want to go that route?

What you are describing sounds a lot like Java's SecurityManager class. It's the main reason Java is considered 'secure'...the SecurityManager lets Java applets (and other types of programs) run in a sandbox, request extra permissions, and provides APIs to enable users to grant said permissions. I know JS and Flash also have sandboxes, dunno much about their security management.

The problem MS would face is providing a sandbox that is secure, yet is compatibile with the current environment that internet-based programs (eg DirectX) expects. Which (I'm sure) is terribly complex.

Basically, I suspect MS could have 'secure' or 'compatible', but not both.

Oh pish-tosh. Show of hands...how many people have a Windows VM up and running? Wow. MS doesn't even have to do anything...Dell or some other OEM could bundle machines with Linux, VirtualBox, and a Windows VM with snapshot facilities. And not even tell people there's Linux under the hood. And in case you get pwned, just revert back to a clean snapshot (like the one provided out of the box).

The only parts that would take a decade is to get graphics working (eg games). and 'weird' hardware (that has no Linux or Mac ports).

Of course, virtualization would commodatize Windows, which would interfere with MS's business model. So I don't think they're too eager to go that route.

So I guess that answer is not realistic for MS anyway. After 5 years, I believe MS *is* doing everything it can (w/o saccrificing its business model). If they haven't fixed things, maybe they *can't*.

That's the main tech boom since 1996! Think about it. Viruses existed back then, and they were destructive. They'd crash your machine on purpose, but not before alerting you to their presence. Botnets? Definitely a 21st-century tech. There was lots of spam, but it didn't contain viruses, and the web was pretty safe. Even using IE :) The big-name viruses: Melissa, ILoveYou, Blaster...all newer.

Heck Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit wasn't published until 1998.

The net hasn't improved much since '96. It's the bad guys that have. Where will THEY be in 13 years?

Actually, IIRC archie was the closest thing we had to P2P. Including the veronica search engine, as it would index the big FTP sites & let you browse & download to your hearts content.

And there were some copyright violations there, but they were mostly images (comics or porn). And what's worse, they were swamped by the (legit) free software.

And there were dire warnings that your FTP site would be brought to its knees if you made porn available there. Those faded away sometime around '96. Not that there weren't better ways to get porn anyway.

And no one called it pr0n yet :)

Actually back in 1996 there was no GNOME or KDE...we used fvwm (1!).
And emacs was only in version 19. One of the trinity, along with
netscape and xterm. People were still reading USENET although I had
tired of it after the eternal September.

Sigh...you're right. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

..but you decided to post instead. ...ducks...

Simple solution. Change the GNOME/KDE desktop & filebrowser to refuse to execute programs owned by the user. Stops trojans dead.

Yes, it is a bit inconvenient...if a user wants to run a downloaded program they have to..urk...USE THE COMMMAND LINE! AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

Perfect way to stop 'stupid' users from running malware.

Doesn't the GCC compiler use a modified version of the GPL? Don't remember details, but there is a modification of the GPL that specifically permits you to write closed-source code and compile it using GCC (without your code becoming GPL). And IIRC flex & bison have similar exemptions.

I call bullshit.

It's fairly easy to devise a virus or botnet that works on Windows without admin privileges...after all what part of a virus *requires* admin? A non-admin virus can still start up when you login, can still access the net & send spam.

I'd guess the only reason running as non-admin would stop current viruses is that few enough people do it to not make a big enough target.