Frankly, while I loath the sheer amount of prompts when, for example, deleting non-user files, if there ever was an action that should prompt you multiple times in huge warnings, it should be turning the UAC system off.
I agree. UAC is an amazingly good idea to the bad situation MS found themselves in.
Granted, MS didn't invent this. Anti-spyware have had this idea for years, and it was invented with application-level software firewalls, but putting it in the OS allowed a special 'prompt' feature that is impossible for applications to forge.
Which is very good as more and more malware would just say 'Okay' to such security prompts. Incidentally, for competitive reasons, I hope MS has published a UAC API, and that other applications can specifically make their own UAC prompts for whatever they want. So that soon anti-viruses will be popping one up when we disable the anti-virus.
Of course, the specific security flaw in this article means the implementation is near-useless, as malware will just turn it off. People saying 'It should password prompt you' are morons, especially as, um, that wouldn't solve the security issue in the article at all.
In short: If UAC isn't tripped on 'turning UAC off', asking for passwords in UAC is not going to help a damn thing. In reality, if that tripped UAC, this wouldn't be an issue at all. (Although it really should cause a much bigger and brighter warning than all other UAC prompts.)
Seriously, Microsoft appears to have been pretty smart with this UAC thing in that it's a way to make sure it's a user-initiated command, but not get in the way too much.
I actually wish that Linux distros aimed at consumers would start doing it. Linux has an 'uninterceptable keystroke', Alt-SysRq-K, just like Windows has 'Ctrl-Alt-Del', both of which are intended to stop spoofing of login screens. (I think Alt-SysRq-K works even if you don't have Magic SysRq compiled in.)
That's actually coming from the other direction, making sure a program can't 'hook' a specific key, instead of making sure it can't spoof a specific keystroke sent elsewhere.
But it wouldn't be impossible to add a way for an X application to make sure that keystrokes and mouse movements were coming from the user instead of a program. If such a way does not already exist, it really would be a simple change in X. (Or, heck, avoid X at all, and simply read/dev/input/whatever.)
This, obviously, would not be enabled on server machines, for multiple reason. (Like they rarely run X, they rarely have someone sitting at them, etc.)
The entire point of UAC is to force the user to authorize the actions of any malware that may be running already. I.e., the executable has already been launched, but it can't add itself to startup or alter system files without permission.
'Not starting malware' is not part of UAC in any circumstances. There is no part of UAC that fulfills that function. That's the job of your antivirus software and that prompt you get when you launch an executable that Windows marked as being 'downloaded from the internet'. That is not UAC. (You can tell, the screen doesn't dim.)
The point of UAC is that the malware is already running, but it can't do certain things, such as hide itself in the system directory, or install keyloggers, or device drivers, or all sorts of stuff that make it much harder to remove.
The fact that all malware now has to do is, instead of doing all that stuff that would cause UAC prompts, is to go into the control panel and disable UAC and reboot, and then it can do all that, is an epic fail.
Although, at least, it can't install startup programs before the uAC-less reboot, so it can't startup on said reboot. It has to wait until you hit the infected point again, which is a tiny amount of security when it's a web page, not so much when the malicious executable is a downloaded program or autorun CD.
Your application is trying to be launched at startup in an fishy way. For some reason, my apps are not. HMM.
Unless by 'fishy way' you mean 'a shortcut put in the Startup Start Menu folder by the user', um no.
My copy of Vista will not automatically start, to pick an example, the World Community Grid without prompting. I thought maybe it was doing something weird, so I disable any of the program's built in methods to autostart itself, and manually copied the shortcut to the Startup folder.
Nope. Still prompts on startup. No obvious way to always allow it, no nothing.
And as far as I can tell it's not running as admin, because I can start it manually without any prompting at all.
I suspect this is because the executable is unsigned.
What they need to do is make one prompt for moving or deleting files.
Vista first warns you that said operation will require UAC. Then if you say yes it presents the UAC prompt. And then it presents another prompt asking if you want to delete the file.
Look, we understand that Windows wants to prompt the user before he deletes C:\Program Files\Empty Directory Uninstaller Left Behind\, and that there needs to be a UAC confirmation to make sure this is a user doing this, and not a virus deleting the directory of the antivirus software.
But, um, how about just one prompt? A UAC screen asking if we really want to delete that directory?
At the very least, don't warn us we're about to get a UAC prompt, that's completely inane.
And that's the point. "Release Candidate" is supposed to mean, no known bugs remaining, abuse this until you find one.
Well, not exactly. Sometimes they finalize a release candidate and are ready to distribute it when they discover a bug. Or even already know of such a complicated bug they didn't have time to fix to keep to their schedule..
In that case, it makes perfect sense to release something that is the 'release candidate' except for a certain part of the code. Like 'This is the release candidate except for filesystem speed on SCSI drives, which we are aware is horribly slow.'.
It's a 'release candidate except for X', if you will. And even normal 'release candidates' rapidly turn into this as bugs get reported and the company starts saying 'Yeah, there's a bug there. Does it work except for that?'.
And they plan another release candidate when they get that fixed, but until then everyone can test out everything else, and avoid the known problem areas.
However, you're right, the other way around makes no sense. You can't just randomly decide that you're going to have exactly one release candidate.
The original Neverwinter Nights did this, although about a year later. Of course part of it was due to the fact that they came out with the DVD version with all the expansion packs. But even the CD users got, the next time they ran the updater, a version without the CD check.
Of course, by then, they had a huge online userbase, and that did, and still does, key checks.
Um, no, I think the theory is to have 95% of the game install from the USB device, but to have specific parts happen on the USB drive.
And I don't mean 'files that simply don't get copied'. It wouldn't be a simple flash drive.
Put a chip in the USB device, have it run the pathfinding algorythm, or 'what level does this door need to load', something that's vitally important to the game, but not extremely CPU demanding. Don't have the code in the game at all.
Yes, in theory, it's crackable, but only via a lot of work.
And it really shouldn't cost more than 10 dollars or so, which is possibly less spent on DRM development. (And printing the CDs and stuff, as this would replace them.) The price would really drop once it got popular.
But, as is pointed out, this would allow infinite resale of the game. Which DRM is a fight against as much as pirating, even if they won't admit it.
I've always thought a compromise would be requiring either the original CD, or to activate it over a net connection every run.
This lets those people who don't have a network connection use the game, with as much inconvenience as already exists for many games. And no inconvenience for 99% of the people out there.
Granted, in theory, this allows two copies of the same game to be used with one purchase, without any cracking, but, frankly, purchasers don't want to need to use their original CD and are often unwilling to give the original CD out on a semi-permanent loan. (OTOH, short-term loans can't but help.) If it's really an issue, have the game first try online and then locally, so that to do that trick most people would have to disable their internet.
Obviously, said scheme would be cracked by pirates, but so would anything, so whatever.
Oh, please. Any modern game comes with an automated patcher. I point to NWN and NWN2 as examples. In fact, I'm fairly certain they don't even do key-checks, although I have no problem with that for automated updates. (Their DRM is a CD check, although the original NWN eventually discarded that.)
Steam is slightly useful outside of the DRM in that it allows you to purchase and download games electronically. And redownload them and deactivate them from one computer and move them elsewhere. (I am working from what I've read of this, as I've never used Steam.)
That makes it the iTunes of games. It's not some huge innovation, it's just useful enough that it has defenders who are willing to live with the DRM.
It's not just telling them it doesn't work, it's telling them that this has affected your chances of future purchases, and you have likewise told your friends.
It doesn't actually matter if you do so. That's not the point.
But that data, that DRM has cost sales, especially from someone confirmed as an existing customer instead of a crank, ends up tallied somewhere, and is used as ammo by the DRM-fighters within the company to fight the stupid DRM.
Every single person who doesn't like DRM, but buys games with DRM anyway, should immediately call up and complain and threaten to not buy any more products. Even if they have no problems with said DRM.
And the ultimate topper is if you own a previous version, and the newest version came out without DRM. Call up the company, point out you're an existing customer, and assert you're not going to buy the new version because you've heard bad things about the 'copy protection'. (Don't even call it 'DRM'.) Do this even if you are going to, or have already, bought the game.
I know it sounds unethical, but justification for DRM are from companies (or internal company divisions) selling DRM who deliberately mistate the rate of piracy it will prevent, so the other side needs to be armed with stats about how much the DRM itself is costing, even if it's exaggerated.
Um, because the store and the publisher need to know that the game sold so they will continue to offer games like that.
Otherwise, the store will just say 'Oh, yeah, the last game like that sold two copies here, despite it apparently being somewhat popular in that genre. We had to send the other copies back. Let's not buy any of the sequel, no one who shops here buys them.'.
Not that big a deal for the popular genres, but if you like something like adventure games or RPGs or puzzle games or any of the other non-mainstream genres, you'll end up SOL when it turns out that almost no one bought Oblivion so they've essentially stopped carrying RPGs.
Likewise, games don't even get made without publishers. And unlike the store, you are actually behaving unethically from the publisher, they deserve a cut of the game they helped underwrite in exchange for said cut. (As opposed to the store, who don't 'deserve' to make money off any particular copy.)(1)
Of course, a few copies failing to get purchased from a publisher is unlikely to affect what sort of games they make, whereas doing that from local stores might, especially repeatedly for games in the same genre. When a store is only selling three or four copies of a specific game, one or two can easily matter in the decision to stock more.
Granted, in this day and age, you can just purchase them all from Amazon or other online stores that carry all products, but many of us like being able to purchase locally.
1) This is assuming that the problem you have isn't with the publisher, which is hard to demonstrate. Pirating the game and sending money directly in might be a good idea in that case, especially if you can get a bunch of people to do it.
Well that's just great. So we get two disasters in a row, huh?
Seriously, adapting to the first set of climate changes is going to be hard enough. If it undoes itself in 1000 years we're just going to have to do the whole thing over again.
Weather is not the same thing as climate. No one is ever going to predict the weather beyond seeing it approaching and predicting when said weather pattern will hit.
And there are, indeed, models that have been mostly correctly predicting the rising temperature for the last decade. ('Mostly' in the sense they tend to underestimate it, and no one is quite sure why.) These models do, indeed, work backwards to the 1950s.
Of course, as the models require the 'current amount of CO2' as one of the inputs, they're never going to be able to exactly predict anything unless we can magically predict how much CO2 is going to be released.
OTOH, as has been pointed out, we've very close to, or have hit the point of no return (As scientists have been pointing out we're going to hit at roughly this time for almost a decade, although most scientists thought we had until 2012 or so. Like I said, global warming is happening slightly faster than predicted.), and in the future, it's no longer as important how much CO2 we put in the air.
It's actually kinda funny to watch you deniers at this point in time. We have actually driven off the cliff while you're still asserting there is no cliff, or that no one knows or can predict when we'll hit it. No, we've pretty much known the cliff was coming right now for a decade at this point, and we've been watching the temp increase as predicted towards that cliff. You deniers are living in 1990 or something.
Or, my analogy is always that predicting the weather is akin to attempting to predict when a pregnant woman will give birth. Good luck with that, and it really only becomes even roughly possible a few days in advance.
Whereas predicting the climate in 2020 is like predicting the population in 2020. Yeah, it's never exactly right, but it's almost always roughly correct, barring disasters. (For example, the population predicted, in 2000, for New Orleans in 2010 will be totally wrong.)
Houses do not use energy. Houses save energy, in that it would be more costly, energy-wise, to keep alive without them.
We could, of course, use less of them. Two people living in one house uses less energy than living in two.
Or stick them closer together...an apartment uses less energy than an equal-sized house, both because of the economics of scale (Like heating water, and laundry facilities, and other shared stuff.), and because heating and cooling loss is much less when many of your walls are shared with neighbor's apartments, or hall corridors, at roughly the same temp.
I'm expecting, as part of these recession, that people start buying some of the recently foreclosed McMansions, sticking another kitchen in them, paving another parking area, throw up some more walls and cut new doors, and turning them into duplexes.
Actually, the global cooling theory states that light-blocking pollutants, namely soot and ash from coal burning power plants, would reduce the amount of light hitting the surface of the earth, and cause cooling.
Nothing is really wrong with that theory. As far as we can tell it's true.
It's just any cooling has been overshadowed by various other things, such as the heat generated by burning all that stuff and added CO2 keeping more heat on earth. And less production of visibly-polluting smog.
It's sorta like asserting that the inside of a fridge will be cooler if turned on, than if it isn't...and failing to notice the fridge door is missing. So in reality the turned-on fridge will run 24/7, heating up the room and eventually making the inside of the fridge warmer. There's really nothing wrong with the original theory, most people would automatically agree with it. It just failed to notice a larger problem going on.
Incidentally, the people predicting global cooling were not incorrect. They were quite right, in that increased amounts of ash and soot from industry would cool the industrial world.
They just missed the facts that a) global warming thanks to CO2 release would counteract any global cooling, and b) 'heat island' effects around cities would counteract any localized cooling.
Oh, and c) We'd stop putting out as much damn soot and ash. Nowadays, almost no pollution is light blocking, as it was discovered that breathing stuff you can see tends to cause cancer and other lung problems.
Their predictions were wrong, because of two other effects that would counteract them hadn't been discovered yet, and we stopped being so dumb and pumping out smog. Their theories, however, were not incorrect, jut irrelevant.
It hasn't always worked before. Societies have repeatedly run out of needed food or water and died. They've been hit by plague, or daughts, or floods, and been wiped out.
The reason this don't stand out better in the historical record is, obviously, they weren't our ancestors.
No form of energy creation is 'profitable' at the price we charge for energy.
Coal pretends to be profitable, but that's only because we don't count the cost of spewing coal into the atmosphere (I'm not even talking about global warming, I'm talking about toxic cancer-causing dust.) nor of the cost of mining the coal, which also spews toxic gas plus kills miners, etc, etc. And blowing the tops off mountains and poisoning river.
And, hey, remember that toxic coal ash spill a month ago in Tennessee? Putting elevated levels of lead and thallium in the drinking water for a significant portion of the state? What was that about the dangers of nuclear waste, which is physically much smaller than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash and hence a hell of a lot easier to contain, I keep hearing about?
Gas, likewise, pretends to be profitable, but it sure as hell wouldn't if we included the cost of our middle east meddling required to keep prices down. But that's such an obvious dead-end that no one's building new gas plants anymore.
And, of course, global warming has arguably cost us tens of billions of dollars.
Of course nuclear is going to cost more if you actually all the costs of it and nothing but the operating costs for everything else. And include the costs of containing all waste from nuclear power plants while letting coal plants spew into the air.
Same with solar. Solar doesn't make a profit at current energy prices, but, like I said, that's because current energy prices do not include the damaging crap spewed out by coal plants. Solar isn't a particularly viable method because of area requirement, but it's certainly workable on the price requirement.
Why don't you show me a coal mine that doesn't cause environmental damage or health damage to workers, and a coal plant that's the same, and I'll show you a nuclear power plant that doesn't do either (I'll just pick a random one.), and, hey, we'll see which is cheaper.
Meanwhile, global warming would totally destroy almost all means of actually shipping food to where it needs to be.
People who pretend global climate change is a good thing need their head examined even more than those to deny it exists. Destroying all the ports in the world is not a good tradeoff for parts of Canada becoming marginally more habitable.
How is studying notes from a previous year 'cheating' anyway? Isn't that...um..studying?
Okay, studying previous tests might be a moral gray area, and lazy teachers might attempt to stop that in some way other than simply changing the test. But notes?
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, while I loath the sheer amount of prompts when, for example, deleting non-user files, if there ever was an action that should prompt you multiple times in huge warnings, it should be turning the UAC system off.
I agree. UAC is an amazingly good idea to the bad situation MS found themselves in.
Granted, MS didn't invent this. Anti-spyware have had this idea for years, and it was invented with application-level software firewalls, but putting it in the OS allowed a special 'prompt' feature that is impossible for applications to forge.
Which is very good as more and more malware would just say 'Okay' to such security prompts. Incidentally, for competitive reasons, I hope MS has published a UAC API, and that other applications can specifically make their own UAC prompts for whatever they want. So that soon anti-viruses will be popping one up when we disable the anti-virus.
Of course, the specific security flaw in this article means the implementation is near-useless, as malware will just turn it off. People saying 'It should password prompt you' are morons, especially as, um, that wouldn't solve the security issue in the article at all.
In short: If UAC isn't tripped on 'turning UAC off', asking for passwords in UAC is not going to help a damn thing. In reality, if that tripped UAC, this wouldn't be an issue at all. (Although it really should cause a much bigger and brighter warning than all other UAC prompts.)
Why should it ask for a password?
Seriously, Microsoft appears to have been pretty smart with this UAC thing in that it's a way to make sure it's a user-initiated command, but not get in the way too much.
I actually wish that Linux distros aimed at consumers would start doing it. Linux has an 'uninterceptable keystroke', Alt-SysRq-K, just like Windows has 'Ctrl-Alt-Del', both of which are intended to stop spoofing of login screens. (I think Alt-SysRq-K works even if you don't have Magic SysRq compiled in.)
That's actually coming from the other direction, making sure a program can't 'hook' a specific key, instead of making sure it can't spoof a specific keystroke sent elsewhere.
But it wouldn't be impossible to add a way for an X application to make sure that keystrokes and mouse movements were coming from the user instead of a program. If such a way does not already exist, it really would be a simple change in X. (Or, heck, avoid X at all, and simply read /dev/input/whatever.)
This, obviously, would not be enabled on server machines, for multiple reason. (Like they rarely run X, they rarely have someone sitting at them, etc.)
It's because they're too lazy to check and see if you've closed your web browser.
Other PDF readers tend to avoid that whole 'read PDF in your web browser' thing so don't get pulled into that nonsense.
Um, no, you're missing the point.
The entire point of UAC is to force the user to authorize the actions of any malware that may be running already. I.e., the executable has already been launched, but it can't add itself to startup or alter system files without permission.
'Not starting malware' is not part of UAC in any circumstances. There is no part of UAC that fulfills that function. That's the job of your antivirus software and that prompt you get when you launch an executable that Windows marked as being 'downloaded from the internet'. That is not UAC. (You can tell, the screen doesn't dim.)
The point of UAC is that the malware is already running, but it can't do certain things, such as hide itself in the system directory, or install keyloggers, or device drivers, or all sorts of stuff that make it much harder to remove.
The fact that all malware now has to do is, instead of doing all that stuff that would cause UAC prompts, is to go into the control panel and disable UAC and reboot, and then it can do all that, is an epic fail.
Although, at least, it can't install startup programs before the uAC-less reboot, so it can't startup on said reboot. It has to wait until you hit the infected point again, which is a tiny amount of security when it's a web page, not so much when the malicious executable is a downloaded program or autorun CD.
Your application is trying to be launched at startup in an fishy way. For some reason, my apps are not. HMM.
Unless by 'fishy way' you mean 'a shortcut put in the Startup Start Menu folder by the user', um no.
My copy of Vista will not automatically start, to pick an example, the World Community Grid without prompting. I thought maybe it was doing something weird, so I disable any of the program's built in methods to autostart itself, and manually copied the shortcut to the Startup folder.
Nope. Still prompts on startup. No obvious way to always allow it, no nothing.
And as far as I can tell it's not running as admin, because I can start it manually without any prompting at all.
I suspect this is because the executable is unsigned.
What they need to do is make one prompt for moving or deleting files.
Vista first warns you that said operation will require UAC. Then if you say yes it presents the UAC prompt. And then it presents another prompt asking if you want to delete the file.
Look, we understand that Windows wants to prompt the user before he deletes C:\Program Files\Empty Directory Uninstaller Left Behind\, and that there needs to be a UAC confirmation to make sure this is a user doing this, and not a virus deleting the directory of the antivirus software.
But, um, how about just one prompt? A UAC screen asking if we really want to delete that directory?
At the very least, don't warn us we're about to get a UAC prompt, that's completely inane.
And that's the point. "Release Candidate" is supposed to mean, no known bugs remaining, abuse this until you find one.
Well, not exactly. Sometimes they finalize a release candidate and are ready to distribute it when they discover a bug. Or even already know of such a complicated bug they didn't have time to fix to keep to their schedule..
In that case, it makes perfect sense to release something that is the 'release candidate' except for a certain part of the code. Like 'This is the release candidate except for filesystem speed on SCSI drives, which we are aware is horribly slow.'.
It's a 'release candidate except for X', if you will. And even normal 'release candidates' rapidly turn into this as bugs get reported and the company starts saying 'Yeah, there's a bug there. Does it work except for that?'.
And they plan another release candidate when they get that fixed, but until then everyone can test out everything else, and avoid the known problem areas.
However, you're right, the other way around makes no sense. You can't just randomly decide that you're going to have exactly one release candidate.
The original Neverwinter Nights did this, although about a year later. Of course part of it was due to the fact that they came out with the DVD version with all the expansion packs. But even the CD users got, the next time they ran the updater, a version without the CD check.
Of course, by then, they had a huge online userbase, and that did, and still does, key checks.
Um, no, I think the theory is to have 95% of the game install from the USB device, but to have specific parts happen on the USB drive.
And I don't mean 'files that simply don't get copied'. It wouldn't be a simple flash drive.
Put a chip in the USB device, have it run the pathfinding algorythm, or 'what level does this door need to load', something that's vitally important to the game, but not extremely CPU demanding. Don't have the code in the game at all.
Yes, in theory, it's crackable, but only via a lot of work.
And it really shouldn't cost more than 10 dollars or so, which is possibly less spent on DRM development. (And printing the CDs and stuff, as this would replace them.) The price would really drop once it got popular.
But, as is pointed out, this would allow infinite resale of the game. Which DRM is a fight against as much as pirating, even if they won't admit it.
I've always thought a compromise would be requiring either the original CD, or to activate it over a net connection every run.
This lets those people who don't have a network connection use the game, with as much inconvenience as already exists for many games. And no inconvenience for 99% of the people out there.
Granted, in theory, this allows two copies of the same game to be used with one purchase, without any cracking, but, frankly, purchasers don't want to need to use their original CD and are often unwilling to give the original CD out on a semi-permanent loan. (OTOH, short-term loans can't but help.) If it's really an issue, have the game first try online and then locally, so that to do that trick most people would have to disable their internet.
Obviously, said scheme would be cracked by pirates, but so would anything, so whatever.
Oh, please. Any modern game comes with an automated patcher. I point to NWN and NWN2 as examples. In fact, I'm fairly certain they don't even do key-checks, although I have no problem with that for automated updates. (Their DRM is a CD check, although the original NWN eventually discarded that.)
Steam is slightly useful outside of the DRM in that it allows you to purchase and download games electronically. And redownload them and deactivate them from one computer and move them elsewhere. (I am working from what I've read of this, as I've never used Steam.)
That makes it the iTunes of games. It's not some huge innovation, it's just useful enough that it has defenders who are willing to live with the DRM.
It's not just telling them it doesn't work, it's telling them that this has affected your chances of future purchases, and you have likewise told your friends.
It doesn't actually matter if you do so. That's not the point.
But that data, that DRM has cost sales, especially from someone confirmed as an existing customer instead of a crank, ends up tallied somewhere, and is used as ammo by the DRM-fighters within the company to fight the stupid DRM.
Every single person who doesn't like DRM, but buys games with DRM anyway, should immediately call up and complain and threaten to not buy any more products. Even if they have no problems with said DRM.
And the ultimate topper is if you own a previous version, and the newest version came out without DRM. Call up the company, point out you're an existing customer, and assert you're not going to buy the new version because you've heard bad things about the 'copy protection'. (Don't even call it 'DRM'.) Do this even if you are going to, or have already, bought the game.
I know it sounds unethical, but justification for DRM are from companies (or internal company divisions) selling DRM who deliberately mistate the rate of piracy it will prevent, so the other side needs to be armed with stats about how much the DRM itself is costing, even if it's exaggerated.
Um, because the store and the publisher need to know that the game sold so they will continue to offer games like that.
Otherwise, the store will just say 'Oh, yeah, the last game like that sold two copies here, despite it apparently being somewhat popular in that genre. We had to send the other copies back. Let's not buy any of the sequel, no one who shops here buys them.'.
Not that big a deal for the popular genres, but if you like something like adventure games or RPGs or puzzle games or any of the other non-mainstream genres, you'll end up SOL when it turns out that almost no one bought Oblivion so they've essentially stopped carrying RPGs.
Likewise, games don't even get made without publishers. And unlike the store, you are actually behaving unethically from the publisher, they deserve a cut of the game they helped underwrite in exchange for said cut. (As opposed to the store, who don't 'deserve' to make money off any particular copy.)(1)
Of course, a few copies failing to get purchased from a publisher is unlikely to affect what sort of games they make, whereas doing that from local stores might, especially repeatedly for games in the same genre. When a store is only selling three or four copies of a specific game, one or two can easily matter in the decision to stock more.
Granted, in this day and age, you can just purchase them all from Amazon or other online stores that carry all products, but many of us like being able to purchase locally.
1) This is assuming that the problem you have isn't with the publisher, which is hard to demonstrate. Pirating the game and sending money directly in might be a good idea in that case, especially if you can get a bunch of people to do it.
Well that's just great. So we get two disasters in a row, huh?
Seriously, adapting to the first set of climate changes is going to be hard enough. If it undoes itself in 1000 years we're just going to have to do the whole thing over again.
Weather is not the same thing as climate. No one is ever going to predict the weather beyond seeing it approaching and predicting when said weather pattern will hit.
And there are, indeed, models that have been mostly correctly predicting the rising temperature for the last decade. ('Mostly' in the sense they tend to underestimate it, and no one is quite sure why.) These models do, indeed, work backwards to the 1950s.
Of course, as the models require the 'current amount of CO2' as one of the inputs, they're never going to be able to exactly predict anything unless we can magically predict how much CO2 is going to be released.
OTOH, as has been pointed out, we've very close to, or have hit the point of no return (As scientists have been pointing out we're going to hit at roughly this time for almost a decade, although most scientists thought we had until 2012 or so. Like I said, global warming is happening slightly faster than predicted.), and in the future, it's no longer as important how much CO2 we put in the air.
It's actually kinda funny to watch you deniers at this point in time. We have actually driven off the cliff while you're still asserting there is no cliff, or that no one knows or can predict when we'll hit it. No, we've pretty much known the cliff was coming right now for a decade at this point, and we've been watching the temp increase as predicted towards that cliff. You deniers are living in 1990 or something.
Or, my analogy is always that predicting the weather is akin to attempting to predict when a pregnant woman will give birth. Good luck with that, and it really only becomes even roughly possible a few days in advance.
Whereas predicting the climate in 2020 is like predicting the population in 2020. Yeah, it's never exactly right, but it's almost always roughly correct, barring disasters. (For example, the population predicted, in 2000, for New Orleans in 2010 will be totally wrong.)
Houses do not use energy. Houses save energy, in that it would be more costly, energy-wise, to keep alive without them.
We could, of course, use less of them. Two people living in one house uses less energy than living in two.
Or stick them closer together...an apartment uses less energy than an equal-sized house, both because of the economics of scale (Like heating water, and laundry facilities, and other shared stuff.), and because heating and cooling loss is much less when many of your walls are shared with neighbor's apartments, or hall corridors, at roughly the same temp.
I'm expecting, as part of these recession, that people start buying some of the recently foreclosed McMansions, sticking another kitchen in them, paving another parking area, throw up some more walls and cut new doors, and turning them into duplexes.
Actually, the global cooling theory states that light-blocking pollutants, namely soot and ash from coal burning power plants, would reduce the amount of light hitting the surface of the earth, and cause cooling.
Nothing is really wrong with that theory. As far as we can tell it's true.
It's just any cooling has been overshadowed by various other things, such as the heat generated by burning all that stuff and added CO2 keeping more heat on earth. And less production of visibly-polluting smog.
It's sorta like asserting that the inside of a fridge will be cooler if turned on, than if it isn't...and failing to notice the fridge door is missing. So in reality the turned-on fridge will run 24/7, heating up the room and eventually making the inside of the fridge warmer. There's really nothing wrong with the original theory, most people would automatically agree with it. It just failed to notice a larger problem going on.
Incidentally, the people predicting global cooling were not incorrect. They were quite right, in that increased amounts of ash and soot from industry would cool the industrial world.
They just missed the facts that a) global warming thanks to CO2 release would counteract any global cooling, and b) 'heat island' effects around cities would counteract any localized cooling.
Oh, and c) We'd stop putting out as much damn soot and ash. Nowadays, almost no pollution is light blocking, as it was discovered that breathing stuff you can see tends to cause cancer and other lung problems.
Their predictions were wrong, because of two other effects that would counteract them hadn't been discovered yet, and we stopped being so dumb and pumping out smog. Their theories, however, were not incorrect, jut irrelevant.
It hasn't always worked before. Societies have repeatedly run out of needed food or water and died. They've been hit by plague, or daughts, or floods, and been wiped out.
The reason this don't stand out better in the historical record is, obviously, they weren't our ancestors.
No form of energy creation is 'profitable' at the price we charge for energy.
Coal pretends to be profitable, but that's only because we don't count the cost of spewing coal into the atmosphere (I'm not even talking about global warming, I'm talking about toxic cancer-causing dust.) nor of the cost of mining the coal, which also spews toxic gas plus kills miners, etc, etc. And blowing the tops off mountains and poisoning river.
And, hey, remember that toxic coal ash spill a month ago in Tennessee? Putting elevated levels of lead and thallium in the drinking water for a significant portion of the state? What was that about the dangers of nuclear waste, which is physically much smaller than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash and hence a hell of a lot easier to contain, I keep hearing about?
Gas, likewise, pretends to be profitable, but it sure as hell wouldn't if we included the cost of our middle east meddling required to keep prices down. But that's such an obvious dead-end that no one's building new gas plants anymore.
And, of course, global warming has arguably cost us tens of billions of dollars.
Of course nuclear is going to cost more if you actually all the costs of it and nothing but the operating costs for everything else. And include the costs of containing all waste from nuclear power plants while letting coal plants spew into the air.
Same with solar. Solar doesn't make a profit at current energy prices, but, like I said, that's because current energy prices do not include the damaging crap spewed out by coal plants. Solar isn't a particularly viable method because of area requirement, but it's certainly workable on the price requirement.
Why don't you show me a coal mine that doesn't cause environmental damage or health damage to workers, and a coal plant that's the same, and I'll show you a nuclear power plant that doesn't do either (I'll just pick a random one.), and, hey, we'll see which is cheaper.
Meanwhile, global warming would totally destroy almost all means of actually shipping food to where it needs to be.
People who pretend global climate change is a good thing need their head examined even more than those to deny it exists. Destroying all the ports in the world is not a good tradeoff for parts of Canada becoming marginally more habitable.
Well, taking the tests back at least makes some sense. They are, in fact, the teacher's tests.
Taking notes back is insane land.
How is studying notes from a previous year 'cheating' anyway? Isn't that...um..studying?
Okay, studying previous tests might be a moral gray area, and lazy teachers might attempt to stop that in some way other than simply changing the test. But notes?