Speaking for myself, I have... let's call it an "above average" character in terms of education and intellect, and yet public schools couldn't be bothered with me. Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling, I would never have graduated from High School.
No offense, but it sounds like you're, let's call it "below average", on a number of other skill-sets, if you were unable to graduate from public school, especially High School.
Don't tell me, you were "soooo bored" with school that you just couldn't hack it....right? Do what the rest of us did and read during class, program on your TI85 during class, hell do diffeq in your head if you feel like it. "I'm soooo smart but can't do the work" rings, well, false.
Your presumption rings, well, ignorant. Short of writing a long essay, I chose to distill my post to what was relevant, not a life's story; I've done quite well for myself since then, thank you. I didn't need busy-work to learn, and I felt that if I was going to be in school, I should be learning, not regurgitating information I'd known for years in science, history, the arts, etc., all while being ignored as I fell steadily behind in math because it wasn't worth the teachers effort to concentrate on just one student. At a private school, I got instruction from people who realize each student is an individual with unique needs, skills and predilections, and I was able to flourish in that environment - it was also not, I should mention, one of the more traditional boarding schools, but rather much closer to a one-room school-house type of environment.
If I lack the inclination or patience for the dull, dreary, and repetitive, I'd say that speaks less about my character or qualities as a person than does your need to lash out at others by derailing a discussion of education on to the substance of my own person instead of cogently addressing the actual topic. I'm perfectly content with the fact that I score in the top 99% in everything I do and have a tendency to be a statistical outlier; what's your problem?
Of course we spend more on prisoners than students. Prisoners live in prisons 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Students are in school for 7 hours a day, for only 8 months out of the year.
Who is using the strawman here? A breakdown by hours? You can really assert sociocultural and economic importance on the number of hours a person occupies a given space? Is it not more likely better education would reduce crime, thus reducing the overall societal burden? Even forgoing that possibility, you're going to tell me we shouldn't put more care and effort into raising our children than we do caring for our criminals? There are a great number of children who aren't criminals that could seriously use $7k per year towards their health, education and general care, outside schooling, and they still exist 24 hours a day, regardless of whether they're on school property; are you really suggesting we should use a persons willingness to break the law and the minimum cost of their daily care as a yardstick to decide how much money should be devoted to educating and caring for our children?
I never said didn't want, I said "couldn't be bothered with". As in, no time to slow down for a student who struggles at math: just fail them. Student too smart for other classes, too bored to be bothered spending hours doing homework for material they mastered years before? Fail them!
(I should note though the opposite idea of eliminating competition or grades so students don't get their little feelings hurt is too extreme a polar reaction for my liking and fails with similar substance, if in different ways.)
No, my point was public schools have become cookie cutter diploma factories reminiscent of the industrial revolution-era Britain from whence the current model came, and are not capable of working outside very specific - if coarse - molds. The assembly line technique has proven itself, in this instance, insufficient to the task, as that methodology relies implicitly on all source materials being more or less identical and to a certain standard, and deviation isn't acceptable. Like it or not, humans cannot be generalized in any useful way in large numbers without the presence of statistical outliers, and systems that rely specifically on order and precision will always fail a notable percentage. In manufacturing, we can just reject parts that don't fit and recycle them, but that's a naive and inhuman way to treat children.
Speaking for myself, I have... let's call it an "above average" character in terms of education and intellect, and yet public schools couldn't be bothered with me. Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling, I would never have graduated from High School.
The answer is NOT for those who can afford such things to be taxed into giving up those funds to educate everyone else's children. The "answer" is not even something I can feasibly address with any sanity or brevity in a forum like this one (ok, I can in three words: "One room schoolhouse"), but it should be rather clearer now what a failure our current model is, where students are graduating from High School less educated than their parents - on average - for the first time in our nations history over the last several years, and that we need to completely re-address our schools, teaching methods, and sociocultural emphasis (or lack thereof) on education.
Agreed with previous posters, having electricity stored in such a way throughout a vehicle - regardless of volts or amps - doesn't seem like such a hot idea (pun intended). It would certainly be a no-go on any vehicle with any sort of secondary, fueled motor, be it gas, hydrogen, etc., and the potential for other accident based on age, faulty manufacture, simple atmospheric conditions (how well will these fare when exposed to salt air in coastal areas) and too many other things to list here is simply enormous. There is danger enough in basic battery systems during a car accident, especially a major one that might involve another I.C.E. vehicle on fire... I don't relish the idea of trying to an injured person out a car that might kill me for touching the wrong exposed part of a wrecked frame.
The sound of 500 million marching soldiers becomes the sounds of 500 million men on a boat becomes the sound of 500 million men either vaporized, drowning or otherwise dying of radiation poisoning as the invasion fleet they were being shipped in is summarily nuked.
Game over, thanks for playing. The Office of Health and Human Services along with the DEA would also like to remind you that only users lose drugs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled saber rattling and insanity from communist Asia.
TYVM to parent for some sanity. Once again the paranoid and insecure wish to eliminate liberty in the name of security. Besides, do you really think that you can legislate away irresponsibility? The better option, as Roogna suggests, is to increase training, education and awareness. As a nation, we have come to think that a drivers license is a right, not a privilege, and as a result most people do not take it seriously enough. Otherwise, you might as well go ahead and ban radio, in-car TV's, in-dash nav systems, and most importantly, ALCOHOL. Why don't you just go ahead and draft up legislation that requires an alcohol interlock on every car made, so no one can ever drive drunk again? Or you could ban driving altogether and require everyone to ride the bus.
Seriously, there are far more threats - like simple inattentiveness and basic irresponsibility - than a cellphone can account for. I, a responsible phone user who doesn't use his phone while driving yet doesn't want to have to get out and walk 15' away from any car to make a call in the middle of winter should not be punished because others cannot behave themselves. Otherwise, you might as well make everything that might hurt anyone illegal.
Besides, when you're laying draped over a car or motorcycle with a broken back 10m off the road in a ditch, and you can't crawl far enough away for your phone to work, you tell me what you think of your "it's not worth it" stance - you can say what you will when it hasn't happened to you all day long, but that holds no weight until you've been there. My friend Dave, his parents, wife, and 3 children (now 4, his wife was pregnant at the time of the accident) certainly wouldn't agree with you - that's precisely when my ability to make a phone call is worth someone's life: MINE. I shouldn't lose that ability because of the ignorant and stupid few. Or let me guess, you (ericartman) are also in favor of banning guns, too?
Then again, how is any post made by anyone who would actually CHOOSE "eric cartman" as a nickname not automatically a troll? I mean, the character is a perfect DSM IV sociopath, and thus in my estimation anyone seeking to imitate or liken themselves to that character cannot possibly express opinions with any validity to any sane person.
I have a friend who is alive today only because of a cellphone: after being involved in a motorcycle crash late at night that broke his back (leaving him paralyzed form the chest down), he managed to find his phone (that had survived the crash due to the aluminum case it was in) laying on the ground next to him and call 911, who located him with the E911 service. Had there been a jammer on his motorcycle, he might not have been able to make the call and only would have been found due to the smell weeks later.
This is a Bad Idea(TM)
Indeed, Heavenly Creatures wasn't absoulutely rotten. That stands though as probably the only pre-LOTR movie of his with any redeeming qualities (unless you're also a fan of bad horror movies, in which case you might like The Frighteners - I didn't).
I'm also with you on the last: not only was he not likely the most optimal choice as director (though to be honest, better Jackson than Sam Raimi, based on Raimi's treatment of The Legend of the Seeker), nor, as you say, did they necessarily need to be filmed in the first place. They could have been worse, but in the aftermath, maybe I'm just burned out on them or something, but... Not every good book needs to be a movie, and vice-versa.
Uhhh... You haven't *really* seen anything he did prior to LOTR:TFOTR, have you?
If you think Meet The Feebles, Bad Taste or Braindead weren't bad movies... well, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. Meet The Feebles, IMNSHO, stands as one of the single worst movies ever filmed and then knowingly distributed - anyone with any sense of shame or pride would never have finished filming it, much less let other people watch it. As for Bad Taste, it was easily as bad, and last I checked, bad movie = bad movie, regardless of whether it contains scenes so stupid as to make you laugh simply so you don't weep for the shame and embarrassment of the time and brain cells you're losing seeing it, and the poor degraded schmucks making it.
To be honest, I never really understood how anyone could have seen his early movies and thought it would be a good idea to give him the money to do LOTR.
There are plenty of bright, intelligent and hardworking people already in this field, and others trying to move into it. The problems are two-fold:
the people who want in but aren't already are stifled by egos of the current batch of professionals and lack openly available tools, materials and jobs to be able to transition readily, and,
the people who are already in don't want to work directly for the Federal government for any number of reasons, both good and bad, real and imagined. Personally, while the cybersecurity of my nation is indeed very important to me, I have yet to feel compelled to go work for that gigantic bureaucratic nightmare and potentially sign away who knows what rights as a government employee in such a sensitive sector. My suggestion: continue to screen and vet candidates as normal (or even better, step up the screening process) and farm the work out to private companies.
Er... stupid 4chan meme is... lame and old and tired and, well... stupid.
Let's see, where to start... Ok, yes, large computing operations are all done on *nix. I manage THOUSANDS (note the plural) of *nix servers (and nearly as many Windows servers), and while I'm much less concerned about their default installs on a *nix, even those are just as capable of being compromised, especially depending on the distribution. And no, RHEL is not what I'd consider one of the more secure ones, unless you're also leaving SELINUX enabled, which robs the machine of a great deal of functionality and connectivity: put a default Plesk install on a *nix machine on a non-firewalled publicly addressable IP and watch how long it takes to get compromised - I can do it in under 3 minutes. You also probably have no idea just how many production *nix servers are hopelessly behind on kernel and other system updates, leaving them vulnerable to a dizzying array of compromises and exploits against everything from HTTP to SSH to webmin/usermin. Much like a Windows system, even *nix systems need some post-install configuration to ensure their safety, as well as continuing maintenance and updates, otherwise over time they become just as vulnerable as anything else, and there is no dearth of noob *nix admins who think that simply using a *nix makes them invincible and regular security maintenance unnecessary.
Also, yeah, let's see how long your "few $k a month" server(s) stands up to 10GB/s sustained DoS from Zeus or the remnants of Mariposa - unless it isn't connected to a switch that is in turn eventually connected to something else, in which case it's more or less useless for business. Botnets aren't used for computing power, and if they in fact were, I do believe you'd be rather chagrined by your above statement. There's a REASON that the various BOINC projects have been running so long, and not just because it's cheaper: it's because they crunch far more data in these distributed applications than they could do in their own server farms at any reasonable cost. Once again, this isn't the point.
Additionally, you missed the points raised by other posters above re: low-hanging fruit. You don't go after the better-administered (and a lot of Windows server admins use Windows because they have no admin skills at all), better secured servers, you go after the easy ones. Ones you can get a trojan on a 5 million Windows desktops and servers, stealing passwords and credit-card information from the former and using the latter to host the attack sites distributing your malware.
As man_of_mr_e said, especially if you live in a civilized country (which does not include China, Russia, N. Korea, Iran or Brazil, IMNSHO), then attacking a corporate system with the risk of the FBI etc. coming after you is not remotely worth it, especially when you can go after individuals who are unlikely to ever successfully initiate any sort of law enforcement action. "Grandpa's 10 year old computer" probably has his bank password on it, however.
DING! Please mod parent +1. Malware writers go after the low-hanging fruit that is easy to exploit whenever possible, since they're lazy good-for-nothing bastards to begin with. That said, if you're lazy and profit-motivated, even if OSX was easier to hack (and I'll grant all day long that OSX is much harder to remote compromise than Windows on a number of levels), the fact remains that regardless of any market share claims, there are VASTLY more computers world-wide running Windows than OSX, period. Don't argue it, you can't; if you're so inclined, here's some proof for you.
Why would anyone waste their time on less than 7% of the total number of computers available to compromise, especially when doing so is rather more difficult? Much easier to go after the much less secure ~85% of the market that will net considerably more value in return for each hour of coding or attacking.
Parent is wrong about one thing though: there are *some* of us left who do indeed care about the challenge of the hack, but most of us have gone grey-hat at worst because we've found there is pride and joy in doing good work, as well as plenty of legal monetary compensation for those of us who are actually good at what we do. Sadly though, as above, the kiddies aren't inflicting others with penis ascii and annoying screen-savers: the kiddies are running botnets to DDoS anyone with the temerity to tell them how juvenile they are on IRC, or using trojans to steal credit card info, and the adults who lack either ethics or real skills are buying up exploits and databases and using them for large-scale fraud and espionage. Especially in China, where programmers trained in US colleges then denied citizenship are sent back home to a country where the only job available to them is a government sponsored black-hat outfit. Still, there *are* a few of the "good guys" and "propellerheads" left like Schneier, et al, who take great joy in the art of the hack and then have the ethical fiber to share their knowledge with the world, rather than hoard it to use against others for personal gain.
Note to parent: "market share" is not everything. Especially when you consider Apple's market share is based not solely on OS or computer sales (which is more or less the case with other companies like HP and Dell who pretty much only sell hardware, or MS does not sell hardware at all [to speak of... I doubt the Xbox360 was counted in that study]), but also includes iPhones, iPods and iPads.
The vast majority of desktop computers are still PC's - Macs in data centers are basically non-existent except for a few specialized or one-off applications: the closest thing to a Mac in any of the data centers I've ever worked in is the hackintosh I'm currently writing this on.
Having one's head up one's own ass is bad enough, but talking out of your own isn't any better.
Obviously the claims made in TFA are damn-near custom designed to invite outraged flames based sheerly on how ludicrously incorrect they are, but that doesn't mean we should be modding Apple fanboys as Insightful just for doing what fanboys do and gushing about their favorite company at every opportunity and then flaming anyone who deigns to jump on their bandwagon.
MW:LL (Mechwarrior: Living Legends) isn't all THAT buggy, for a beta. It's still in constant development since the beta release in Dec. 2009 with a very committed and talented dev. team and updates are released fairly regularly. The game is highly playable even as it stands, and will do nothing but get exponentially better as time goes by.
There is no need for yet another global police force of any sort. I neither need nor want anybody not of my nation having the authority to investigate me at the whim of... whomever. There is nothing wrong with having other countries' own police, on noticing a crime, contacting the police through established channels where the crime took place, and asking them to investigate and prosecute according to THEIR OWN LAWS.
No, the answer here is very simple. Those countries who refuse to co-operate and continually and knowingly shelter criminals using the internet to perpetrate their crimes (e.g., China, Russia, Brazil, Moldova) should simply be cut off from the global public internet, and not allowed back on until they can prove they are willing to behave. In most countries, we do nothing less when we proscribe a "cyber-criminal" from using computers for a period of time after being found guilty, and I don't see why we shouldn't do the same to countries who seek to profit off of other nations by blatantly sheltering criminal activity. Seems to me that would be a lot cheaper and more effective (much less safer to the rights of the citizens of each nation), as it would be a highly effective embargo and liable to have a major impact on commerce for both the smallest and largest of nations - exactly the thing needed to get them to take responsibility for themselves, rather than create another vector for legalistic abuse.
Can you really tell me that with such an international organization in place that it wouldn't be long before we start seeing criminal charges being placed in China and enforced by these cyber-cops because someone in Norway said something on a forum or IRC contrary to some official government party line? I don't favor the idea of being dragged to Iran for posting a picture on IRC that is a part of my guaranteed free speech here but proscribed there. You (and your nation) connect to the internet voluntarily. If you don't like what is on the internet, don't look at it or disconnect. Same with TV: at least in places where our media isn't state run, you have the option to change the channel or turn it off. As a result, if China or Iran doesn't like what's on the internet, they can get off it, and by the same token, if some nations can't at the very least comply with what the rest of the internet see as minimum basic acceptable behavior, they should be forced to deal with their own people in their own little walled garden until they realize how obnoxious those people are and do something about it. The value of neutrality and anonymity only go so far as they don't cause active, real, provable harm to others, at which point it becomes necessary to lift that veil and deal with such people - no one REQUESTS or knowingly volunteers to have their bank account hacked or to be packeted, and it's precisely when one's interaction with the internet ceases to be voluntarily that neutrality ceases to be a concern. This doesn't require people with badges who have no national boundaries and are subject to their own laws to go do something about it, simply the same thing that network operators have been doing VERY SUCCESSFULLY from day one: disconnect and ban the offending user. If that user is an entire nation, oh well. If the internet matters enough to the people of that nation, then perhaps those people will demand their government get their shit together and do something about it. If not, then obviously that country wasn't an important, useful or desirable addition to the global public internet in the first place.
> Here's a simple thought experiment: If Evolution is false, what created swine flu? The only other possible explanation is that God is a dick, and I don't believe that.
That sadly doesn't work as the religious will explain away anything even vaguely entropic as the work of Satan, and God allows Satan to exist in order to both frame, justify and test our free will as separate from God's own will... or so they tell me.
That doesn't account for the fact that the whole Apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil incident was little more than entrapment, and that would still make God a complete dick for giving Adam and Eve free will and then using it against them to kick them out of Eden and blaming them for it in the process.
This still doesn't mean ID is in any way a science and should never be given any credibility as such. Attempting to define or anthropomorphize God in any way is no less ludicrous than suggesting the amoeba on the slide were even remotely capable of perceiving the biologist looking down the microscope - presuming anyone even happens to looking down the scope at the time, or that you're even on a slide - and worthy of examination - in the first place. Much more qualified people than I have tried to discern the nature of "God", and in all cases have completely failed, as proven by a complete lack of any credible or reproduceable evidence thus far. I won't even begin to enjoin any reasonable debate on the nature or possibility or even probability of any such thing, but to refer to an "ID Scientist" and claim that "ID brushes away the dogma of science and brings the scientific method back to it" is... well, blasphemy. ID cannot produce evidence. It provides no system for analysis, prediction or correlation that can be proven or reproduced independently in any way outside a reference back to a book written by people: yes, you dogmatists, people wrote it, fallible, imperfect humans. Since said religious texts are non-obvious observations in that (to date, that I am aware of) no human who has never seen one before has spontaneously reproduced an exact copy of a Bible or Koran, etc. indicating that such texts cannot possibly be used as evidence or justification for the validation of any other observations. People also used to think the moon was made of cheese and that there were little green men on Mars, and I can find you a hundred books that say so: until you can produce observations or evidence that other people can reproduce credibly, go away and stop wasting everyone else's time.
What I *am* qualified to comment on, is the nature of the parent article. "Trolling" was not originally considered a bad thing back in the usenet days, and was often used by long term users or members of a particular group or forum as a guided way or bringing up old threads or discussions that it was felt would benefit newer members. While this type of assignment is debatable on a number of other levels such as its academic validity as a teaching method and whether it is ethically justifiable, the fact is the professor in question has almost certainly achieved their aims - now on a very large scale - where a discussion that might have been long closed or never even done on many forums has now been struck up, whether by the actions of the students, or the media attention now gained in outlets like this one... which has prompted this very discussion. In the realm of science, discussion, with its opportunities for new information, insight and correlation, is *always* a good thing, regardless of how much any given atheists' dogmatic hatred of religion might get their heart rate up and turn them into a human flamethrower for a while: people get offended and stirred up too easily on both sides. Fact is, these days modern trolls don't start discussions except maybe with the express intent of derailing or disrupting them. Even if it's a bunch of Atheists or Satanists on on a forum agreeing with each other, or whether it starts an actual discussion where ideas are exchanged, is it *really* all that bad?
So let's be done with the bullshit that the more rational among us are so hostile to, drop the religion discussion, and get back to the topic at hand.
Upon being stationed back in the US after being stationed over-seas the last 10 years, my father found himself with no U.S. drivers license. So, one day, still in his BDU (battle-dress uniform, aka "cammies" or camouflage) he gets in a staff vehicle and drives to the DMV, where he takes and fails the written drivers exam: the German philosophy of rechtsfahren or, "drive right", was not quite compatible with Georgia laws at the time.
So, having failed the driving exam, my father walks back out to his car, gets in his, starts the motor and is preparing to drive off when the rookie cop who was hanging around shooting the shit with the girl at the DMV office comes flying out of the building, runs up the drivers side door screaming "GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT NOW!" and draws his.38 service revolver, pointing it through the open window at my father.
Now, I'm sorry, but anyone who pulls a gun on a soldier in uniform is an idiot. My father, a veteran of four combat tours as a forward observer looks over, raises his hands as is expected, and in the process neatly relieves the officer of his weapon (I've since learned the trick, it's rather useful), pulling the officer by the wrist head-first into the vehicle and introducing him to his friend, a service issue M1911A1 Colt.45. You can guess who won that argument.
Long story short(er), it turned out the girl in the DMV office - who was fortunately tired of the rookie cop hitting on her all day - later admitted he had said to her that he was going to wait until he got the keys in the ignition so he'd have enough of an offense to throw my old man in jail (driving without a license) and get his first real arrest. Unfortunately for said cop, my father was a duly authorized U.S. Army officer going about official military business in a U.S. Army staff vehicle and was in possession of a valid U.S. Army Drivers license which permitted him to drive said vehicle on any any all U.S. territory, domestic and abroad. The rook's excuse for drawing his gun - that he assumed my father, as a soldier, was also armed, even though up to that point his firearm had remained in his vehicle - didn't fly in state court and he found himself without a badge very quickly. No wonder my dad liked the movie Tank so much when it came out a few years later.
Sometimes you can only fight fire with fire, and occasionally one must make a stand against harassment: most especially when it comes in the guise of a government or government official trying to abuse his standing. The same way I don't feel sorry at all for the Atlanta cops who executed a wrongly issued (complete lack of evidence of real justification) no-knock warrant on an ~80 year old grandmother who lived in a somewhat bad part of town. A couple of them got shot by an old lady trying to defend herself, thinking she was being robbed, and the cops of course blew her away. I pity the old lady and her family. The cops not at all - sadly these bunch of crooks were only injured, but it serves them right. They were just lucky it wasn't someone with better aim and a weapon bigger than a.22 revolver.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -Thomas Jefferson
As a result the city of Atlanta is much much more cautious about issuing no-knock warrants, and that whole department was reviewed rather critically, a number of people let go, and their procedures altered. I rather suspect that cops in a certain small Georgia town aren't quite so likely to pull their guns on uniformed soldiers driving Army staff vehicles, either.
As to whether pulling a gun is always a bad idea... I've had to use threat of deadly force to run off scum four times myself... twice saving someone's life (one being my own). IMO, getting beat up or robbed or killed because you won't defend yourself is a worse idea.:)
You seem to be working under the assumption that most servers have real admins.
Fact of the matter is, outside the very largest of companies, a very large majority of internet connected servers are run by small to medium size business who do not have a full-time IT department and/or often cannot either afford all the necessary equipment and software and man-hours necessary to secure against these threats, esp. since good security often winds up annoying a high-level manager who insists that they should be able to log in to the network and all their apps without a password and insists they have passwords to every computer in the building and that they can use myspace messenger and browse the web from the DNS server if they want to (which they will).
Also, many many many web servers are hosted with hosting companies like the one I work for where less than 5% of the 10,000+ physical servers have anything like a knowledgeable admin and are instead run by idiots in India who use cracked VoipSwitch software (which is itself virus infected, but they keep using it anyway even though the virus causes them to have to re-install every week or two). Or you get people who want to run their own website but simply don't have the skills to maintain it properly, but are convinced they don't need a real admin either... or a firewall... or anti-virus.
Oh, and the desktop has nothing to do with anything - these services would exists and be just as exploitable regardless of a GUI, as it's not the GUI that is being exploited - it's the poorly coded system services and libraries that aren't subject to any kind of external or peer review that are written by people who usually don't even know exactly what they are coding, leaving plenty of room for exploits to bad code crop up.
Funny, now that I think about it, MS treats the coding of it's OS similar to a terrorist operation, small groups of people working on compartmentalized tasks, never knowing who is doing exactly what or what the desired end-product actually is. This may be a great idea if you're a terrorist organization trying to get away with something and trying to prevent a loss of the whole project due to the capture of one or more cells, but this is not a good way to write software - I think the past 10+ years of shoddy performance and infection/exploit history of MS products should be a clear enough sign of the problem, but the MS execs are obviously too blind or ignorant to figure this out for themselves.
Server types and models are irrelevant - parent post is just another troll, and how it got an insightful moderation is beyond me. The real moral of the story here is that you NEVER EVER allow software or application developers to be in charge of systems and network administration - that's like trusting a vendor salesman to actually know what it is you need, what their products actually do, and to supply you with the right thing to fit your needs - both cases are guaranteed to go badly: e.g., who in the heck runs a webservice with more than 100 users and no backup or mirror of their database? It's not like you can't buy a 1TB HDD these days for ~$100USD.
If you're a programmer or developer, please, just admit what the rest of us know, and come clean about the fact that you know nothing about hardware, implementation and systems/network administration. It's ok, we promise, just admit it, move on, and stick with coding - leave administration up to the professionals, it'll be much easier that way.
I am aware of the differences between copyright and copywriting. My usage, it could be debated, in some cases, could actually apply to the subject at hand, though I perhaps should have instead said "copyrighted": "copywritten" isn't necessarily entirely wrong as the past participle of "copywrite", such as when referring to material that was in created by a copywriter for the purposes of advertising or story or what have you. However, starting a semantics debate on the usage of term which you so very obviously understood what I meant by my usage of it is not my purposes here, and I admit my usage could have been better - I was in something of a hurry to beat the rush and get my response in early.
Your view that a dearth of old, obsolete software somehow being the primary or even a considerable impetus for newer and better software is in this day and age is... flawed. Disney puts movies "in the vault" in order to artificially create a demand by eliminating supply of something that would continue to remain in demand, even if the trend of demand on a long axis of time might be relatively low, thus making regular production, marketing and distribution costs less than efficient - Disney is a somewhat patient company at times and known for taking a long view on such things. When a new format or new process to update old media comes out, and when there is a void created by years of a lack of one of their "classics", they can then profit from it by re-releasing these materials with the knowledge that a number of people are going to purchase them just b/c it's available now, Large initial sales over a short period of time and a limited but large production run is often more efficient than producing, distributing, and all the other costs of making 10000 DVD's once every year or three, as opposed to making 1 million DVD's for a low-per unit cost, shipping and marketing only once in a big blitz, and selling until they're out. Wait 10 or 15 until that generation is now old enough to remember it with nostalgia or want it for their own kids, and do one more simple large batch. It makes sense for their business model.
Old games and programs are completely different. Excepting companies or programs with very specific niche markets like perhaps the code that runs a 20 year old CNC machine off an old Packard Bell 386, software and especially game companies often find themselves fighting legal battles and employing people with the specific purpose of trying to find and stop infringement of their IP rights - if they don't do so actively and cannot show that they are at least trying to contain these abuses they can lose their rights to the work in question. Do you REALLY think that I'm going to go buy Left4Dead just because I can't play Pac-Man? Not a chance. On the other hand, would I decide not to play CoD:5 just because I could go buy an old copy of Doom for $2? Also not a chance. Old software simply has almost little to no value except in property rights for a franchise of rereleases or sequels, etc., which of course costs initial money to produce another profit from. Otherwise it's just another cost
No, Namco and others have found that by relicensing old products, like Pac-Man and R-Type and Galaga, etc., as mini-games and the like on new consoles or in other games, they can continue to receive some profit on these now old works while offsetting the cost of continuing to maintain their rights to those works. I am sure that if a legitimate business or organization with real funding, etc., approached the current holders of the last 20+ years worth of game and console producers that many would choose license their product to such an enterprise, especially if there were a potential commercially available product in the works that might allow them to continue to receive money indefinitely in the form of licensing for a product that now only costs them money to keep the rights to but doesn't cost anything to develop or distribute, and even if it is for historical purposes only in things like museums they may still choose to
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Speaking for myself, I have... let's call it an "above average" character in terms of education and intellect, and yet public schools couldn't be bothered with me. Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling, I would never have graduated from High School.
No offense, but it sounds like you're, let's call it "below average", on a number of other skill-sets, if you were unable to graduate from public school, especially High School.
Don't tell me, you were "soooo bored" with school that you just couldn't hack it....right? Do what the rest of us did and read during class, program on your TI85 during class, hell do diffeq in your head if you feel like it. "I'm soooo smart but can't do the work" rings, well, false.
Your presumption rings, well, ignorant. Short of writing a long essay, I chose to distill my post to what was relevant, not a life's story; I've done quite well for myself since then, thank you. I didn't need busy-work to learn, and I felt that if I was going to be in school, I should be learning, not regurgitating information I'd known for years in science, history, the arts, etc., all while being ignored as I fell steadily behind in math because it wasn't worth the teachers effort to concentrate on just one student. At a private school, I got instruction from people who realize each student is an individual with unique needs, skills and predilections, and I was able to flourish in that environment - it was also not, I should mention, one of the more traditional boarding schools, but rather much closer to a one-room school-house type of environment.
If I lack the inclination or patience for the dull, dreary, and repetitive, I'd say that speaks less about my character or qualities as a person than does your need to lash out at others by derailing a discussion of education on to the substance of my own person instead of cogently addressing the actual topic. I'm perfectly content with the fact that I score in the top 99% in everything I do and have a tendency to be a statistical outlier; what's your problem?
This is an excellent illustration at a much larger scale of exactly the education problems we face in the U.S., where we spend more on prisoners than students.
Of course we spend more on prisoners than students. Prisoners live in prisons 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Students are in school for 7 hours a day, for only 8 months out of the year.
Who is using the strawman here? A breakdown by hours? You can really assert sociocultural and economic importance on the number of hours a person occupies a given space? Is it not more likely better education would reduce crime, thus reducing the overall societal burden? Even forgoing that possibility, you're going to tell me we shouldn't put more care and effort into raising our children than we do caring for our criminals? There are a great number of children who aren't criminals that could seriously use $7k per year towards their health, education and general care, outside schooling, and they still exist 24 hours a day, regardless of whether they're on school property; are you really suggesting we should use a persons willingness to break the law and the minimum cost of their daily care as a yardstick to decide how much money should be devoted to educating and caring for our children?
I never said didn't want, I said "couldn't be bothered with". As in, no time to slow down for a student who struggles at math: just fail them. Student too smart for other classes, too bored to be bothered spending hours doing homework for material they mastered years before? Fail them! (I should note though the opposite idea of eliminating competition or grades so students don't get their little feelings hurt is too extreme a polar reaction for my liking and fails with similar substance, if in different ways.)
No, my point was public schools have become cookie cutter diploma factories reminiscent of the industrial revolution-era Britain from whence the current model came, and are not capable of working outside very specific - if coarse - molds. The assembly line technique has proven itself, in this instance, insufficient to the task, as that methodology relies implicitly on all source materials being more or less identical and to a certain standard, and deviation isn't acceptable. Like it or not, humans cannot be generalized in any useful way in large numbers without the presence of statistical outliers, and systems that rely specifically on order and precision will always fail a notable percentage. In manufacturing, we can just reject parts that don't fit and recycle them, but that's a naive and inhuman way to treat children.
This is an excellent illustration at a much larger scale of exactly the education problems we face in the U.S., where we spend more on prisoners than students.
Speaking for myself, I have... let's call it an "above average" character in terms of education and intellect, and yet public schools couldn't be bothered with me. Had it not been for the fact that my parents had worked hard enough to be able to afford very expensive private schooling, I would never have graduated from High School.
The answer is NOT for those who can afford such things to be taxed into giving up those funds to educate everyone else's children. The "answer" is not even something I can feasibly address with any sanity or brevity in a forum like this one (ok, I can in three words: "One room schoolhouse"), but it should be rather clearer now what a failure our current model is, where students are graduating from High School less educated than their parents - on average - for the first time in our nations history over the last several years, and that we need to completely re-address our schools, teaching methods, and sociocultural emphasis (or lack thereof) on education.
Agreed with previous posters, having electricity stored in such a way throughout a vehicle - regardless of volts or amps - doesn't seem like such a hot idea (pun intended). It would certainly be a no-go on any vehicle with any sort of secondary, fueled motor, be it gas, hydrogen, etc., and the potential for other accident based on age, faulty manufacture, simple atmospheric conditions (how well will these fare when exposed to salt air in coastal areas) and too many other things to list here is simply enormous. There is danger enough in basic battery systems during a car accident, especially a major one that might involve another I.C.E. vehicle on fire... I don't relish the idea of trying to an injured person out a car that might kill me for touching the wrong exposed part of a wrecked frame.
Please mod parent as troll. And PLEASE stop using the word fascist in context to every government you don't like or understand.
The sound of 500 million marching soldiers becomes the sounds of 500 million men on a boat becomes the sound of 500 million men either vaporized, drowning or otherwise dying of radiation poisoning as the invasion fleet they were being shipped in is summarily nuked. Game over, thanks for playing. The Office of Health and Human Services along with the DEA would also like to remind you that only users lose drugs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled saber rattling and insanity from communist Asia.
I, for one, welcome our new RoboEarth masters...
Fail@logic, try again.
TYVM to parent for some sanity. Once again the paranoid and insecure wish to eliminate liberty in the name of security. Besides, do you really think that you can legislate away irresponsibility? The better option, as Roogna suggests, is to increase training, education and awareness. As a nation, we have come to think that a drivers license is a right, not a privilege, and as a result most people do not take it seriously enough. Otherwise, you might as well go ahead and ban radio, in-car TV's, in-dash nav systems, and most importantly, ALCOHOL. Why don't you just go ahead and draft up legislation that requires an alcohol interlock on every car made, so no one can ever drive drunk again? Or you could ban driving altogether and require everyone to ride the bus.
Seriously, there are far more threats - like simple inattentiveness and basic irresponsibility - than a cellphone can account for. I, a responsible phone user who doesn't use his phone while driving yet doesn't want to have to get out and walk 15' away from any car to make a call in the middle of winter should not be punished because others cannot behave themselves. Otherwise, you might as well make everything that might hurt anyone illegal.
Besides, when you're laying draped over a car or motorcycle with a broken back 10m off the road in a ditch, and you can't crawl far enough away for your phone to work, you tell me what you think of your "it's not worth it" stance - you can say what you will when it hasn't happened to you all day long, but that holds no weight until you've been there. My friend Dave, his parents, wife, and 3 children (now 4, his wife was pregnant at the time of the accident) certainly wouldn't agree with you - that's precisely when my ability to make a phone call is worth someone's life: MINE. I shouldn't lose that ability because of the ignorant and stupid few. Or let me guess, you (ericartman) are also in favor of banning guns, too?
Then again, how is any post made by anyone who would actually CHOOSE "eric cartman" as a nickname not automatically a troll? I mean, the character is a perfect DSM IV sociopath, and thus in my estimation anyone seeking to imitate or liken themselves to that character cannot possibly express opinions with any validity to any sane person.
I have a friend who is alive today only because of a cellphone: after being involved in a motorcycle crash late at night that broke his back (leaving him paralyzed form the chest down), he managed to find his phone (that had survived the crash due to the aluminum case it was in) laying on the ground next to him and call 911, who located him with the E911 service. Had there been a jammer on his motorcycle, he might not have been able to make the call and only would have been found due to the smell weeks later. This is a Bad Idea(TM)
Indeed, Heavenly Creatures wasn't absoulutely rotten. That stands though as probably the only pre-LOTR movie of his with any redeeming qualities (unless you're also a fan of bad horror movies, in which case you might like The Frighteners - I didn't).
I'm also with you on the last: not only was he not likely the most optimal choice as director (though to be honest, better Jackson than Sam Raimi, based on Raimi's treatment of The Legend of the Seeker), nor, as you say, did they necessarily need to be filmed in the first place. They could have been worse, but in the aftermath, maybe I'm just burned out on them or something, but... Not every good book needs to be a movie, and vice-versa.
Uhhh... You haven't *really* seen anything he did prior to LOTR:TFOTR, have you?
If you think Meet The Feebles, Bad Taste or Braindead weren't bad movies... well, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. Meet The Feebles, IMNSHO, stands as one of the single worst movies ever filmed and then knowingly distributed - anyone with any sense of shame or pride would never have finished filming it, much less let other people watch it. As for Bad Taste, it was easily as bad, and last I checked, bad movie = bad movie, regardless of whether it contains scenes so stupid as to make you laugh simply so you don't weep for the shame and embarrassment of the time and brain cells you're losing seeing it, and the poor degraded schmucks making it.
To be honest, I never really understood how anyone could have seen his early movies and thought it would be a good idea to give him the money to do LOTR.
There are plenty of bright, intelligent and hardworking people already in this field, and others trying to move into it. The problems are two-fold: the people who want in but aren't already are stifled by egos of the current batch of professionals and lack openly available tools, materials and jobs to be able to transition readily, and, the people who are already in don't want to work directly for the Federal government for any number of reasons, both good and bad, real and imagined. Personally, while the cybersecurity of my nation is indeed very important to me, I have yet to feel compelled to go work for that gigantic bureaucratic nightmare and potentially sign away who knows what rights as a government employee in such a sensitive sector. My suggestion: continue to screen and vet candidates as normal (or even better, step up the screening process) and farm the work out to private companies.
Er... stupid 4chan meme is... lame and old and tired and, well... stupid.
Let's see, where to start... Ok, yes, large computing operations are all done on *nix. I manage THOUSANDS (note the plural) of *nix servers (and nearly as many Windows servers), and while I'm much less concerned about their default installs on a *nix, even those are just as capable of being compromised, especially depending on the distribution. And no, RHEL is not what I'd consider one of the more secure ones, unless you're also leaving SELINUX enabled, which robs the machine of a great deal of functionality and connectivity: put a default Plesk install on a *nix machine on a non-firewalled publicly addressable IP and watch how long it takes to get compromised - I can do it in under 3 minutes. You also probably have no idea just how many production *nix servers are hopelessly behind on kernel and other system updates, leaving them vulnerable to a dizzying array of compromises and exploits against everything from HTTP to SSH to webmin/usermin. Much like a Windows system, even *nix systems need some post-install configuration to ensure their safety, as well as continuing maintenance and updates, otherwise over time they become just as vulnerable as anything else, and there is no dearth of noob *nix admins who think that simply using a *nix makes them invincible and regular security maintenance unnecessary.
Also, yeah, let's see how long your "few $k a month" server(s) stands up to 10GB/s sustained DoS from Zeus or the remnants of Mariposa - unless it isn't connected to a switch that is in turn eventually connected to something else, in which case it's more or less useless for business. Botnets aren't used for computing power, and if they in fact were, I do believe you'd be rather chagrined by your above statement. There's a REASON that the various BOINC projects have been running so long, and not just because it's cheaper: it's because they crunch far more data in these distributed applications than they could do in their own server farms at any reasonable cost. Once again, this isn't the point.
Additionally, you missed the points raised by other posters above re: low-hanging fruit. You don't go after the better-administered (and a lot of Windows server admins use Windows because they have no admin skills at all), better secured servers, you go after the easy ones. Ones you can get a trojan on a 5 million Windows desktops and servers, stealing passwords and credit-card information from the former and using the latter to host the attack sites distributing your malware.
As man_of_mr_e said, especially if you live in a civilized country (which does not include China, Russia, N. Korea, Iran or Brazil, IMNSHO), then attacking a corporate system with the risk of the FBI etc. coming after you is not remotely worth it, especially when you can go after individuals who are unlikely to ever successfully initiate any sort of law enforcement action. "Grandpa's 10 year old computer" probably has his bank password on it, however.
DING! Please mod parent +1. Malware writers go after the low-hanging fruit that is easy to exploit whenever possible, since they're lazy good-for-nothing bastards to begin with. That said, if you're lazy and profit-motivated, even if OSX was easier to hack (and I'll grant all day long that OSX is much harder to remote compromise than Windows on a number of levels), the fact remains that regardless of any market share claims, there are VASTLY more computers world-wide running Windows than OSX, period. Don't argue it, you can't; if you're so inclined, here's some proof for you.
Why would anyone waste their time on less than 7% of the total number of computers available to compromise, especially when doing so is rather more difficult? Much easier to go after the much less secure ~85% of the market that will net considerably more value in return for each hour of coding or attacking.
Parent is wrong about one thing though: there are *some* of us left who do indeed care about the challenge of the hack, but most of us have gone grey-hat at worst because we've found there is pride and joy in doing good work, as well as plenty of legal monetary compensation for those of us who are actually good at what we do. Sadly though, as above, the kiddies aren't inflicting others with penis ascii and annoying screen-savers: the kiddies are running botnets to DDoS anyone with the temerity to tell them how juvenile they are on IRC, or using trojans to steal credit card info, and the adults who lack either ethics or real skills are buying up exploits and databases and using them for large-scale fraud and espionage. Especially in China, where programmers trained in US colleges then denied citizenship are sent back home to a country where the only job available to them is a government sponsored black-hat outfit. Still, there *are* a few of the "good guys" and "propellerheads" left like Schneier, et al, who take great joy in the art of the hack and then have the ethical fiber to share their knowledge with the world, rather than hoard it to use against others for personal gain.
Note to parent: "market share" is not everything. Especially when you consider Apple's market share is based not solely on OS or computer sales (which is more or less the case with other companies like HP and Dell who pretty much only sell hardware, or MS does not sell hardware at all [to speak of... I doubt the Xbox360 was counted in that study]), but also includes iPhones, iPods and iPads.
The vast majority of desktop computers are still PC's - Macs in data centers are basically non-existent except for a few specialized or one-off applications: the closest thing to a Mac in any of the data centers I've ever worked in is the hackintosh I'm currently writing this on.
Having one's head up one's own ass is bad enough, but talking out of your own isn't any better.
Obviously the claims made in TFA are damn-near custom designed to invite outraged flames based sheerly on how ludicrously incorrect they are, but that doesn't mean we should be modding Apple fanboys as Insightful just for doing what fanboys do and gushing about their favorite company at every opportunity and then flaming anyone who deigns to jump on their bandwagon.
MW:LL (Mechwarrior: Living Legends) isn't all THAT buggy, for a beta. It's still in constant development since the beta release in Dec. 2009 with a very committed and talented dev. team and updates are released fairly regularly. The game is highly playable even as it stands, and will do nothing but get exponentially better as time goes by.
Nor has he (or his host) apparently ever heard of this thing called KVM over IP.
There is no need for yet another global police force of any sort. I neither need nor want anybody not of my nation having the authority to investigate me at the whim of... whomever. There is nothing wrong with having other countries' own police, on noticing a crime, contacting the police through established channels where the crime took place, and asking them to investigate and prosecute according to THEIR OWN LAWS.
No, the answer here is very simple. Those countries who refuse to co-operate and continually and knowingly shelter criminals using the internet to perpetrate their crimes (e.g., China, Russia, Brazil, Moldova) should simply be cut off from the global public internet, and not allowed back on until they can prove they are willing to behave. In most countries, we do nothing less when we proscribe a "cyber-criminal" from using computers for a period of time after being found guilty, and I don't see why we shouldn't do the same to countries who seek to profit off of other nations by blatantly sheltering criminal activity. Seems to me that would be a lot cheaper and more effective (much less safer to the rights of the citizens of each nation), as it would be a highly effective embargo and liable to have a major impact on commerce for both the smallest and largest of nations - exactly the thing needed to get them to take responsibility for themselves, rather than create another vector for legalistic abuse.
Can you really tell me that with such an international organization in place that it wouldn't be long before we start seeing criminal charges being placed in China and enforced by these cyber-cops because someone in Norway said something on a forum or IRC contrary to some official government party line? I don't favor the idea of being dragged to Iran for posting a picture on IRC that is a part of my guaranteed free speech here but proscribed there. You (and your nation) connect to the internet voluntarily. If you don't like what is on the internet, don't look at it or disconnect. Same with TV: at least in places where our media isn't state run, you have the option to change the channel or turn it off. As a result, if China or Iran doesn't like what's on the internet, they can get off it, and by the same token, if some nations can't at the very least comply with what the rest of the internet see as minimum basic acceptable behavior, they should be forced to deal with their own people in their own little walled garden until they realize how obnoxious those people are and do something about it. The value of neutrality and anonymity only go so far as they don't cause active, real, provable harm to others, at which point it becomes necessary to lift that veil and deal with such people - no one REQUESTS or knowingly volunteers to have their bank account hacked or to be packeted, and it's precisely when one's interaction with the internet ceases to be voluntarily that neutrality ceases to be a concern. This doesn't require people with badges who have no national boundaries and are subject to their own laws to go do something about it, simply the same thing that network operators have been doing VERY SUCCESSFULLY from day one: disconnect and ban the offending user. If that user is an entire nation, oh well. If the internet matters enough to the people of that nation, then perhaps those people will demand their government get their shit together and do something about it. If not, then obviously that country wasn't an important, useful or desirable addition to the global public internet in the first place.
> Here's a simple thought experiment: If Evolution is false, what created swine flu? The only other possible explanation is that God is a dick, and I don't believe that.
That sadly doesn't work as the religious will explain away anything even vaguely entropic as the work of Satan, and God allows Satan to exist in order to both frame, justify and test our free will as separate from God's own will... or so they tell me.
That doesn't account for the fact that the whole Apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil incident was little more than entrapment, and that would still make God a complete dick for giving Adam and Eve free will and then using it against them to kick them out of Eden and blaming them for it in the process.
This still doesn't mean ID is in any way a science and should never be given any credibility as such. Attempting to define or anthropomorphize God in any way is no less ludicrous than suggesting the amoeba on the slide were even remotely capable of perceiving the biologist looking down the microscope - presuming anyone even happens to looking down the scope at the time, or that you're even on a slide - and worthy of examination - in the first place. Much more qualified people than I have tried to discern the nature of "God", and in all cases have completely failed, as proven by a complete lack of any credible or reproduceable evidence thus far. I won't even begin to enjoin any reasonable debate on the nature or possibility or even probability of any such thing, but to refer to an "ID Scientist" and claim that "ID brushes away the dogma of science and brings the scientific method back to it" is... well, blasphemy. ID cannot produce evidence. It provides no system for analysis, prediction or correlation that can be proven or reproduced independently in any way outside a reference back to a book written by people: yes, you dogmatists, people wrote it, fallible, imperfect humans. Since said religious texts are non-obvious observations in that (to date, that I am aware of) no human who has never seen one before has spontaneously reproduced an exact copy of a Bible or Koran, etc. indicating that such texts cannot possibly be used as evidence or justification for the validation of any other observations. People also used to think the moon was made of cheese and that there were little green men on Mars, and I can find you a hundred books that say so: until you can produce observations or evidence that other people can reproduce credibly, go away and stop wasting everyone else's time.
What I *am* qualified to comment on, is the nature of the parent article. "Trolling" was not originally considered a bad thing back in the usenet days, and was often used by long term users or members of a particular group or forum as a guided way or bringing up old threads or discussions that it was felt would benefit newer members. While this type of assignment is debatable on a number of other levels such as its academic validity as a teaching method and whether it is ethically justifiable, the fact is the professor in question has almost certainly achieved their aims - now on a very large scale - where a discussion that might have been long closed or never even done on many forums has now been struck up, whether by the actions of the students, or the media attention now gained in outlets like this one... which has prompted this very discussion. In the realm of science, discussion, with its opportunities for new information, insight and correlation, is *always* a good thing, regardless of how much any given atheists' dogmatic hatred of religion might get their heart rate up and turn them into a human flamethrower for a while: people get offended and stirred up too easily on both sides. Fact is, these days modern trolls don't start discussions except maybe with the express intent of derailing or disrupting them. Even if it's a bunch of Atheists or Satanists on on a forum agreeing with each other, or whether it starts an actual discussion where ideas are exchanged, is it *really* all that bad?
So let's be done with the bullshit that the more rational among us are so hostile to, drop the religion discussion, and get back to the topic at hand.
Upon being stationed back in the US after being stationed over-seas the last 10 years, my father found himself with no U.S. drivers license. So, one day, still in his BDU (battle-dress uniform, aka "cammies" or camouflage) he gets in a staff vehicle and drives to the DMV, where he takes and fails the written drivers exam: the German philosophy of rechtsfahren or, "drive right", was not quite compatible with Georgia laws at the time.
So, having failed the driving exam, my father walks back out to his car, gets in his, starts the motor and is preparing to drive off when the rookie cop who was hanging around shooting the shit with the girl at the DMV office comes flying out of the building, runs up the drivers side door screaming "GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT NOW!" and draws his
Now, I'm sorry, but anyone who pulls a gun on a soldier in uniform is an idiot. My father, a veteran of four combat tours as a forward observer looks over, raises his hands as is expected, and in the process neatly relieves the officer of his weapon (I've since learned the trick, it's rather useful), pulling the officer by the wrist head-first into the vehicle and introducing him to his friend, a service issue M1911A1 Colt
Long story short(er), it turned out the girl in the DMV office - who was fortunately tired of the rookie cop hitting on her all day - later admitted he had said to her that he was going to wait until he got the keys in the ignition so he'd have enough of an offense to throw my old man in jail (driving without a license) and get his first real arrest. Unfortunately for said cop, my father was a duly authorized U.S. Army officer going about official military business in a U.S. Army staff vehicle and was in possession of a valid U.S. Army Drivers license which permitted him to drive said vehicle on any any all U.S. territory, domestic and abroad. The rook's excuse for drawing his gun - that he assumed my father, as a soldier, was also armed, even though up to that point his firearm had remained in his vehicle - didn't fly in state court and he found himself without a badge very quickly. No wonder my dad liked the movie Tank so much when it came out a few years later.
Sometimes you can only fight fire with fire, and occasionally one must make a stand against harassment: most especially when it comes in the guise of a government or government official trying to abuse his standing. The same way I don't feel sorry at all for the Atlanta cops who executed a wrongly issued (complete lack of evidence of real justification) no-knock warrant on an ~80 year old grandmother who lived in a somewhat bad part of town. A couple of them got shot by an old lady trying to defend herself, thinking she was being robbed, and the cops of course blew her away. I pity the old lady and her family. The cops not at all - sadly these bunch of crooks were only injured, but it serves them right. They were just lucky it wasn't someone with better aim and a weapon bigger than a
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -Thomas Jefferson
As a result the city of Atlanta is much much more cautious about issuing no-knock warrants, and that whole department was reviewed rather critically, a number of people let go, and their procedures altered. I rather suspect that cops in a certain small Georgia town aren't quite so likely to pull their guns on uniformed soldiers driving Army staff vehicles, either.
As to whether pulling a gun is always a bad idea... I've had to use threat of deadly force to run off scum four times myself... twice saving someone's life (one being my own). IMO, getting beat up or robbed or killed because you won't defend yourself is a worse idea. :)
My point
You seem to be working under the assumption that most servers have real admins.
Fact of the matter is, outside the very largest of companies, a very large majority of internet connected servers are run by small to medium size business who do not have a full-time IT department and/or often cannot either afford all the necessary equipment and software and man-hours necessary to secure against these threats, esp. since good security often winds up annoying a high-level manager who insists that they should be able to log in to the network and all their apps without a password and insists they have passwords to every computer in the building and that they can use myspace messenger and browse the web from the DNS server if they want to (which they will).
Also, many many many web servers are hosted with hosting companies like the one I work for where less than 5% of the 10,000+ physical servers have anything like a knowledgeable admin and are instead run by idiots in India who use cracked VoipSwitch software (which is itself virus infected, but they keep using it anyway even though the virus causes them to have to re-install every week or two). Or you get people who want to run their own website but simply don't have the skills to maintain it properly, but are convinced they don't need a real admin either... or a firewall... or anti-virus.
Oh, and the desktop has nothing to do with anything - these services would exists and be just as exploitable regardless of a GUI, as it's not the GUI that is being exploited - it's the poorly coded system services and libraries that aren't subject to any kind of external or peer review that are written by people who usually don't even know exactly what they are coding, leaving plenty of room for exploits to bad code crop up.
Funny, now that I think about it, MS treats the coding of it's OS similar to a terrorist operation, small groups of people working on compartmentalized tasks, never knowing who is doing exactly what or what the desired end-product actually is. This may be a great idea if you're a terrorist organization trying to get away with something and trying to prevent a loss of the whole project due to the capture of one or more cells, but this is not a good way to write software - I think the past 10+ years of shoddy performance and infection/exploit history of MS products should be a clear enough sign of the problem, but the MS execs are obviously too blind or ignorant to figure this out for themselves.
Server types and models are irrelevant - parent post is just another troll, and how it got an insightful moderation is beyond me. The real moral of the story here is that you NEVER EVER allow software or application developers to be in charge of systems and network administration - that's like trusting a vendor salesman to actually know what it is you need, what their products actually do, and to supply you with the right thing to fit your needs - both cases are guaranteed to go badly: e.g., who in the heck runs a webservice with more than 100 users and no backup or mirror of their database? It's not like you can't buy a 1TB HDD these days for ~$100USD.
If you're a programmer or developer, please, just admit what the rest of us know, and come clean about the fact that you know nothing about hardware, implementation and systems/network administration. It's ok, we promise, just admit it, move on, and stick with coding - leave administration up to the professionals, it'll be much easier that way.
I am aware of the differences between copyright and copywriting. My usage, it could be debated, in some cases, could actually apply to the subject at hand, though I perhaps should have instead said "copyrighted": "copywritten" isn't necessarily entirely wrong as the past participle of "copywrite", such as when referring to material that was in created by a copywriter for the purposes of advertising or story or what have you. However, starting a semantics debate on the usage of term which you so very obviously understood what I meant by my usage of it is not my purposes here, and I admit my usage could have been better - I was in something of a hurry to beat the rush and get my response in early.
Your view that a dearth of old, obsolete software somehow being the primary or even a considerable impetus for newer and better software is in this day and age is... flawed. Disney puts movies "in the vault" in order to artificially create a demand by eliminating supply of something that would continue to remain in demand, even if the trend of demand on a long axis of time might be relatively low, thus making regular production, marketing and distribution costs less than efficient - Disney is a somewhat patient company at times and known for taking a long view on such things. When a new format or new process to update old media comes out, and when there is a void created by years of a lack of one of their "classics", they can then profit from it by re-releasing these materials with the knowledge that a number of people are going to purchase them just b/c it's available now, Large initial sales over a short period of time and a limited but large production run is often more efficient than producing, distributing, and all the other costs of making 10000 DVD's once every year or three, as opposed to making 1 million DVD's for a low-per unit cost, shipping and marketing only once in a big blitz, and selling until they're out. Wait 10 or 15 until that generation is now old enough to remember it with nostalgia or want it for their own kids, and do one more simple large batch. It makes sense for their business model.
Old games and programs are completely different. Excepting companies or programs with very specific niche markets like perhaps the code that runs a 20 year old CNC machine off an old Packard Bell 386, software and especially game companies often find themselves fighting legal battles and employing people with the specific purpose of trying to find and stop infringement of their IP rights - if they don't do so actively and cannot show that they are at least trying to contain these abuses they can lose their rights to the work in question. Do you REALLY think that I'm going to go buy Left4Dead just because I can't play Pac-Man? Not a chance. On the other hand, would I decide not to play CoD:5 just because I could go buy an old copy of Doom for $2? Also not a chance. Old software simply has almost little to no value except in property rights for a franchise of rereleases or sequels, etc., which of course costs initial money to produce another profit from. Otherwise it's just another cost
No, Namco and others have found that by relicensing old products, like Pac-Man and R-Type and Galaga, etc., as mini-games and the like on new consoles or in other games, they can continue to receive some profit on these now old works while offsetting the cost of continuing to maintain their rights to those works. I am sure that if a legitimate business or organization with real funding, etc., approached the current holders of the last 20+ years worth of game and console producers that many would choose license their product to such an enterprise, especially if there were a potential commercially available product in the works that might allow them to continue to receive money indefinitely in the form of licensing for a product that now only costs them money to keep the rights to but doesn't cost anything to develop or distribute, and even if it is for historical purposes only in things like museums they may still choose to