It depends though. If you look at a lot of (American) schools technology is crap. About 2 years ago I was in an elementary school computer lab with computers still running Windows 98(!) on hardware made for Windows 95. And legacy software wasn't the issue the school just didn't have the funds or the motivation to switch. After all a kid can learn just as well on a Pentium II that takes 4 minutes to respond to mouse input as a Core 2 duo that responds instantly right? Even the small expense of some noiseless thin clients and a powerful server might be too much because until the HDDs are dead, the memory is bad, the CD drives are stuck and the monitor has exploded, they have no desire to upgrade.
Retraining is also hard. Schools (at least in America) generally have a large amount of dead weight. Teachers long past their prime who teach boring classes who are apathetic towards students but who have been tenured and can't be fired without having to fight through the unions. These teachers have no desire to get a new keyboard, let alone an entirely new OS or new ways of doing things. In fact I'm sure a lot of them would rather have paper grades and typewriters. So when the price is $20,000 to switch to Linux $50,000 to upgrade Windows or just $0 to do absolutely nothing, many schools choose the free option especially in lower grades.
No. The fact that your iPhone is jailbroken or not doesn't make it any less secure. The fact was it had SSH running with a default password. Having SSH running is of course a huge flag that says "Connect to me!", having the default password means that anyone can connect to it. Its not the difference between it being jailbroken that it is insecure its the stupidity of having SSH running with a default password.
There is hardly any malware for mobile platforms out in the wild. I don't see how security is a huge issue. Sure, some may point to the jailbroken iPhone worms but that is because they were running SSH with a default password! I'm surprised it took this long, whats next having the government sniff our Facebooks in the name of "security" because a few people with the password of "password" were hacked? This is opening a can of worms we should leave unopened.
So we should instead simply let them live their lives without technology that can liberate them? Look at Cuba compared to divided Germany. Pretty much most of the free world blocked Cuba, so because of this Cubans have lived their lives under a dictatorship and not known much of freedom. China on the other hand will eventually break free of their current government whenever their government fails and problems arise because unlike Cuba, North Korea, and other countries China has many people who travel abroad, who are scholarly and are free-thinking. Why isn't there a revolution in China currently? Things in China are steadily improving to the point that the Chinese don't feel a need for a different government plan. When their government fails though, expect a revolution. Just like in Europe 20 years ago and Soviet Russia.
Well, for one theres little need and for another there is little interest. The source code for Multics wasn't released till 1992, by then it was clear that UNIX was the future, development basically stopped for Multics long before then and Linux was beginning its rise as an open source UNIX system. With no legacy software to drive a tricky system to emulate why do it? I mean, with game consoles there are the games, with PC things usually there are a few nifty pieces of software, with Multics just about everything was ported to UNIX.
You have to realise a few things. For one, even though it is biased coverage (just like every American news channel) China has every right to make an iPhone app just like the BBC has every right too also. And for the record, Microsoft did make an iPhone app called Seadragon that let you view and scale large images. And while there were a few jokes it wasn't called propaganda and even embrace extend extinguish wasn't even brought up much.
and find a decent place to have a meal and a drink or two
You have an airport that has a decent place to have a meal? There seems to be only 3 types of restaurants in any airport I've been to A) expensive but decent food B) fast food that is expensive and doesn't have half the menu options C) "real" restaurants that manage to kill everything by being in an airport. For example, I ate at a steakhouse (I think it was Outback but I'm not certain) where the food was good and wasn't much overpriced compared to the restaurant outside of the airport but how the heck are you supposed to eat a steak with plastic utensils? Not only that but instead of cloth napkins they gave us paper towels.
The closest thing to a "good" airport food vendor would be either the chain coffee shops or Cinnabon. And I wouldn't eat an entire meal there.
The first thing you have to realise is you can't be 100% secure. Keeping plain text files isn't that terrible of an idea in all honesty, your situation of where someone would steal your laptop and access all your files and look for passwords is unlikely. Your hardware is much, much, much more valuable to most thieves than your data. I bet most either A) just wipe with a clean install of Windows B) just randomly checks a few sites and gives up or C) scraps your laptop for individual parts. A laptop thief is not usually a tech person. When faced with encryption they aren't going to try to break in, after all your laptop is worth at least $50 on the black market no matter what the data is on there, so long as it boots up it is sellable.
Similarly, few thieves are going to be looking for passwords on old sheets of paper. Most thieves if they break into a house look for A) cash B) jewellery C) expensive-looking technology. Even though it is much more important to us geeks, a thief is going to go for sellable things, chances are your plasma is more sellable than your Pentium 4 tower, your monitor more than your external HDD and your PS3 more than your stack of back-up DVDs.
There is a -lot- more threat from crackers, viruses, keyloggers and other malware than the run-of-the-mill thief getting your laptop.
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=15&DocumentID=4398#numbers says that 20 million people have significant vision loss. Plus, add in the number of people who are close to blind without contacts or glasses on and the elderly and you can easily see 55 million people.
How? This is basically a camera that turns text to speech. It doesn't record audio books or anything, and I think it should be well within your rights to have an audio copy of books you own or even library books especially if you can't normally use books due to a disability. And spying on people? Because a blind person is going to go up to someone and digitise something?
You do realise that there is such a thing as blindness right? And that there are enough of these blind people around to have just about every sign in a business have braille or raised lettering.
We did not deregulate the banks. We removed some of the regulation, but we did not deregulate them. You can't do some things half-way and have them not fail. We had too much regulation to make them be fully deregulated and therefore not fail, and too little regulation for them not to fail. We can't know what would happen if banks were fully deregulated because they were not (and don't even bring up the great depression because there was again, too much regulation to be free and too little to be controlled).
The government regulates the energy sector, and look at what we have: a system that has not imploded on itself
Yeah, but a system that is still a pain. Lets see, if I'm unhappy about the level of service of my current utility what are my options? Not a whole lot. If I don't like my bank there are at least 5 within about 5 miles where I live. On the other hand if I don't like my utility company (and for the record I don't) my options are to either move far away and thats about it. Utility companies are inflexible, charge outrageous rates, have low standards of service, and have unexplained long blackouts. I'm confident that a Windows server can have a higher uptime than some utility companies... Just because the electricity is -mostly- on doesn't mean that its a great system.
and given the attacks in Brazil, it sounds like the government should add some new regulations to the list for energy companies, in the interest of national security.
Or you know, how about allowing utility companies to actually compete for prices, service and security. For example, Rackspace is going to do everything in is power to keep their servers online and free of any attacks that might endanger their uptime because there are many hosting companies out there, utility companies on the other hand are free to take their sweet time, its not like their customers can exactly switch to a different company.
This is the beauty of package managers. Basic plugins like this can be installed system-wide on Unix-like operating systems and that installation can be maintained by the package manager just like the browser itself and every other application. On Windows they can auto-update themselves though I know this method is less than ideal. The on-screen "traffic" of many individual applications all periodically popping up their own automatic updaters asking you to upgrade is likely to annoy users and may cause them to be clicked away (i.e. cancelled or disabled) just to get rid of them. Perhaps plugins that are important for security reasons can just automatically and non-interactively update themselves when they periodically poll for a new version and find that one is available to reduce this issue on Windows.
Have you ever seen an auto-updating thing on Windows do it right? The closest thing I have seen is Firefox and even then its a bit annoying because it manages to pop up midway through an interesting article or video usually leaving me to postpone the update. The list of things that don't do it right on Windows is long. Lets see, Apple seems to bundle -everything- in their updates leaving you with about half of OS X with all the default settings, Windows update either manages to never install stuff, or decides to pop up every hour telling you its going to restart, which is a -bad thing- if you ever you know, download something that is large and won't finish in 10 mins and doesn't have a resume download feature, etc.
True, but then so could the browser. Yet there really haven't been problems with people going to mozilla.com or getfirefox.com and worrying about whether they are getting the real Firefox and not a trojaned browser, to use Firefox as an example. If the plugin is Open Source (GPL or BSD license or similar) then there's probably no reason that it can't just be included with the browser to eliminate this problem.
Yes, but those are trusted. One of the main points in educating the masses is to download things only from trusted sources, you download only 1 browser once every year or so from there. When you are downloading things all over the place, that is when problems happen with a Windows user.
And yes, there are good plugins (add-ons) for Firefox that are open source and good and extend the browser in meaningful ways. However, good luck getting MS to support HTML5 in IE anytime soon.
Ultimately, however, people need to stop being so mindless ("mindless" as in "autopilot") as to act out the results of "teaching people" by rote. Instead they could learn to judge for themselves what the situation calls for, be it the installation of a plugin or anything else. I think that's what we should be encouraging but we should do so knowing it won't happen overnight. There's no real substitute for understanding, and the attempt to provide substitutes for it is a big reason why there is so much malware in the first place.
Yeah, but the masses seem to have only 2 settings, paranoia and apathy. Either they think -everything- is a virus (such as iTunes is a virus, Limewire is a virus, Firefox is a virus, and every other thing other than MS Office -must- be a virus) or they simply don't care. I think Eternal September is truly eternal, the masses don't care about thinking, they don't want to think, they want to be reactionary.
Perhaps for IE it can be in the form of a plugin. For that reason, I don't think this is a showstopper though it certainly is a consideration.
MS is really the only browser maker that takes forever and won't develop new things. For example, SVG support was added in most browsers in 2005 or 2006, its 2009 almost 2010 now and still no SVG support. Yeah, there are plugins for SVG support but that shouldn't be MS's excuse.
A) The entire point of HTML and HTML5 video tags was to eliminate plugins
B) Plugins are a -bad idea- for most people, for one even if your browser gets updated your plugins might not, leading gaping security flaws in addition to this, teaching people to install plugins is bad because a plugin could very well contain malware/viruses.
C) A plugin can lead to reliance on the plugin and not spur development in the actual browser
Now we have SVG and a much faster JavaScript in all the good browsers
Good browsers isn't good enough for most sites though. While we can make a lot of "geek-centric" sites be viewable only in a certain handful of browsers, the stupid masses still use IE, from IE 6, 7 and 8. Until IE supports everything that Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Konqueror, etc. support, expect those features to be under-used. Good luck convincing corporate overlords that you should lock out 65% of possible users by using standards that aren't implemented in IE compared to Flash which is viewable on pretty much everything save for the iPhone, BSD and a few other mobile browsers even though Flash is proprietary.
Googling for URLs is much safer than typing in the address bar. How many times do we misspell Google if we are in a hurry? We might spell gogole.com, gooogle.com, gogle.com, googgle.com googl.com, and a whole lot of others. Any one of those could be a phishing site. With Google you get a nice spellcheck for your search for one and for another it tries to block any site that has malware on it. Using Google you will avoid phishing much more than using the address bar.
Which is fine until that one virus manages to get through by accident. I ran my machine AV-free for a long time until that happened, and the cleanup was unpleasant - the preventive features of AV software are far superior their cleanup ones.:S
Yes, but think about it this way. Lets say your computer runs at half its speed with an anti-virus. You run your machine for 365 days without an AV for 30 mins doing routine work that would be slowed down by the AV (file copying, plus additional maintenance for the AV itself, etc) so it would take an hour. That is 182.5 hours per year you use it for maintenance without an AV. With an AV that doubles to 365 hours. Even if you add in a entirely long clean up process of 48 hours, you still come out ahead. And unless you get a nasty virus that somehow corrupts everything you can just restore from backup (you do have a backup of everything important right?) and if you don't have a backup you can usually boot from a Linux disk (most can read NTFS just fine) and copy things to an external HDD. So unless that machine was really mission critical (such as, if its down for 2 days you are out of lots of money) not having an AV and having a long clean up may actually save you time.
Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media)
Because no one has heard of Leveno? The main reason why no company can make a name for themselves in a US market is A) Their name sounds distinctly foreign (I'd rather drink an English-sounding drink than a drink from Kweichow Moutai Company) B) They are tailored to a specific market. China doesn't have the mass media that the US and Europe does, almost all the media in China is state-run or sponsored. Because of this the advertising needs to be changed, where in the US, individuality and uniqueness is appreciated, in China it is not. So a lot of ads that are successful in the US because of that (such as the Think Different Mac ads) would fail in China. C) in China -a lot- of companies either have government control or influence. Cherry Automobile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chery_Automobile) is the largest independent Chinese auto maker and it is run by the Chinese government. Such things don't export well and D) A significant amount of Americans avoid things that are Chinese. There are a lot of Americans who think that China is going to nuke the US or other crazy theories, but nonetheless some people do believe them and so that keeps a lot of Chinese-sounding goods from American shores.
Yes. How many people get told "comics aren't real books" on a daily basis? Especially before manga and the superhero movies made comics "cool" again, comics were widely considered the lowest form of reading. Science fiction on the other hand wasn't/isn't under as much fire.
Its kinda common sense that Google would see how much disk space is used or how much CPU time is used. I mean, what admin -doesn't- know that 2 Gigabytes of space is used by xxxx@gmail.com? Even if all the data was super-encrypted you would still know how large the file is.
No dedicated servers? Whats next lag that automatically lags with the person with the crappiest connection? No chat features? Sounds like PC gaming is starting to hit the 360 way, I wonder when it will become like the Wii.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like how you can simply scroll and get everything zoomed in in OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard?
It depends though. If you look at a lot of (American) schools technology is crap. About 2 years ago I was in an elementary school computer lab with computers still running Windows 98(!) on hardware made for Windows 95. And legacy software wasn't the issue the school just didn't have the funds or the motivation to switch. After all a kid can learn just as well on a Pentium II that takes 4 minutes to respond to mouse input as a Core 2 duo that responds instantly right? Even the small expense of some noiseless thin clients and a powerful server might be too much because until the HDDs are dead, the memory is bad, the CD drives are stuck and the monitor has exploded, they have no desire to upgrade.
Retraining is also hard. Schools (at least in America) generally have a large amount of dead weight. Teachers long past their prime who teach boring classes who are apathetic towards students but who have been tenured and can't be fired without having to fight through the unions. These teachers have no desire to get a new keyboard, let alone an entirely new OS or new ways of doing things. In fact I'm sure a lot of them would rather have paper grades and typewriters. So when the price is $20,000 to switch to Linux $50,000 to upgrade Windows or just $0 to do absolutely nothing, many schools choose the free option especially in lower grades.
But those are not audio books. They are book-books that are converted to audio.
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No. The fact that your iPhone is jailbroken or not doesn't make it any less secure. The fact was it had SSH running with a default password. Having SSH running is of course a huge flag that says "Connect to me!", having the default password means that anyone can connect to it. Its not the difference between it being jailbroken that it is insecure its the stupidity of having SSH running with a default password.
There is hardly any malware for mobile platforms out in the wild. I don't see how security is a huge issue. Sure, some may point to the jailbroken iPhone worms but that is because they were running SSH with a default password! I'm surprised it took this long, whats next having the government sniff our Facebooks in the name of "security" because a few people with the password of "password" were hacked? This is opening a can of worms we should leave unopened.
So we should instead simply let them live their lives without technology that can liberate them? Look at Cuba compared to divided Germany. Pretty much most of the free world blocked Cuba, so because of this Cubans have lived their lives under a dictatorship and not known much of freedom. China on the other hand will eventually break free of their current government whenever their government fails and problems arise because unlike Cuba, North Korea, and other countries China has many people who travel abroad, who are scholarly and are free-thinking. Why isn't there a revolution in China currently? Things in China are steadily improving to the point that the Chinese don't feel a need for a different government plan. When their government fails though, expect a revolution. Just like in Europe 20 years ago and Soviet Russia.
Well, for one theres little need and for another there is little interest. The source code for Multics wasn't released till 1992, by then it was clear that UNIX was the future, development basically stopped for Multics long before then and Linux was beginning its rise as an open source UNIX system. With no legacy software to drive a tricky system to emulate why do it? I mean, with game consoles there are the games, with PC things usually there are a few nifty pieces of software, with Multics just about everything was ported to UNIX.
You have to realise a few things. For one, even though it is biased coverage (just like every American news channel) China has every right to make an iPhone app just like the BBC has every right too also. And for the record, Microsoft did make an iPhone app called Seadragon that let you view and scale large images. And while there were a few jokes it wasn't called propaganda and even embrace extend extinguish wasn't even brought up much.
and find a decent place to have a meal and a drink or two
You have an airport that has a decent place to have a meal? There seems to be only 3 types of restaurants in any airport I've been to A) expensive but decent food B) fast food that is expensive and doesn't have half the menu options C) "real" restaurants that manage to kill everything by being in an airport. For example, I ate at a steakhouse (I think it was Outback but I'm not certain) where the food was good and wasn't much overpriced compared to the restaurant outside of the airport but how the heck are you supposed to eat a steak with plastic utensils? Not only that but instead of cloth napkins they gave us paper towels.
The closest thing to a "good" airport food vendor would be either the chain coffee shops or Cinnabon. And I wouldn't eat an entire meal there.
The first thing you have to realise is you can't be 100% secure. Keeping plain text files isn't that terrible of an idea in all honesty, your situation of where someone would steal your laptop and access all your files and look for passwords is unlikely. Your hardware is much, much, much more valuable to most thieves than your data. I bet most either A) just wipe with a clean install of Windows B) just randomly checks a few sites and gives up or C) scraps your laptop for individual parts. A laptop thief is not usually a tech person. When faced with encryption they aren't going to try to break in, after all your laptop is worth at least $50 on the black market no matter what the data is on there, so long as it boots up it is sellable.
Similarly, few thieves are going to be looking for passwords on old sheets of paper. Most thieves if they break into a house look for A) cash B) jewellery C) expensive-looking technology. Even though it is much more important to us geeks, a thief is going to go for sellable things, chances are your plasma is more sellable than your Pentium 4 tower, your monitor more than your external HDD and your PS3 more than your stack of back-up DVDs.
There is a -lot- more threat from crackers, viruses, keyloggers and other malware than the run-of-the-mill thief getting your laptop.
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=15&DocumentID=4398#numbers says that 20 million people have significant vision loss. Plus, add in the number of people who are close to blind without contacts or glasses on and the elderly and you can easily see 55 million people.
How? This is basically a camera that turns text to speech. It doesn't record audio books or anything, and I think it should be well within your rights to have an audio copy of books you own or even library books especially if you can't normally use books due to a disability. And spying on people? Because a blind person is going to go up to someone and digitise something?
You do realise that there is such a thing as blindness right? And that there are enough of these blind people around to have just about every sign in a business have braille or raised lettering.
and that we then deregulated the banks,
We did not deregulate the banks. We removed some of the regulation, but we did not deregulate them. You can't do some things half-way and have them not fail. We had too much regulation to make them be fully deregulated and therefore not fail, and too little regulation for them not to fail. We can't know what would happen if banks were fully deregulated because they were not (and don't even bring up the great depression because there was again, too much regulation to be free and too little to be controlled).
The government regulates the energy sector, and look at what we have: a system that has not imploded on itself
Yeah, but a system that is still a pain. Lets see, if I'm unhappy about the level of service of my current utility what are my options? Not a whole lot. If I don't like my bank there are at least 5 within about 5 miles where I live. On the other hand if I don't like my utility company (and for the record I don't) my options are to either move far away and thats about it. Utility companies are inflexible, charge outrageous rates, have low standards of service, and have unexplained long blackouts. I'm confident that a Windows server can have a higher uptime than some utility companies... Just because the electricity is -mostly- on doesn't mean that its a great system.
and given the attacks in Brazil, it sounds like the government should add some new regulations to the list for energy companies, in the interest of national security.
Or you know, how about allowing utility companies to actually compete for prices, service and security. For example, Rackspace is going to do everything in is power to keep their servers online and free of any attacks that might endanger their uptime because there are many hosting companies out there, utility companies on the other hand are free to take their sweet time, its not like their customers can exactly switch to a different company.
This is the beauty of package managers. Basic plugins like this can be installed system-wide on Unix-like operating systems and that installation can be maintained by the package manager just like the browser itself and every other application. On Windows they can auto-update themselves though I know this method is less than ideal. The on-screen "traffic" of many individual applications all periodically popping up their own automatic updaters asking you to upgrade is likely to annoy users and may cause them to be clicked away (i.e. cancelled or disabled) just to get rid of them. Perhaps plugins that are important for security reasons can just automatically and non-interactively update themselves when they periodically poll for a new version and find that one is available to reduce this issue on Windows.
Have you ever seen an auto-updating thing on Windows do it right? The closest thing I have seen is Firefox and even then its a bit annoying because it manages to pop up midway through an interesting article or video usually leaving me to postpone the update. The list of things that don't do it right on Windows is long. Lets see, Apple seems to bundle -everything- in their updates leaving you with about half of OS X with all the default settings, Windows update either manages to never install stuff, or decides to pop up every hour telling you its going to restart, which is a -bad thing- if you ever you know, download something that is large and won't finish in 10 mins and doesn't have a resume download feature, etc.
True, but then so could the browser. Yet there really haven't been problems with people going to mozilla.com or getfirefox.com and worrying about whether they are getting the real Firefox and not a trojaned browser, to use Firefox as an example. If the plugin is Open Source (GPL or BSD license or similar) then there's probably no reason that it can't just be included with the browser to eliminate this problem.
Yes, but those are trusted. One of the main points in educating the masses is to download things only from trusted sources, you download only 1 browser once every year or so from there. When you are downloading things all over the place, that is when problems happen with a Windows user.
And yes, there are good plugins (add-ons) for Firefox that are open source and good and extend the browser in meaningful ways. However, good luck getting MS to support HTML5 in IE anytime soon.
Ultimately, however, people need to stop being so mindless ("mindless" as in "autopilot") as to act out the results of "teaching people" by rote. Instead they could learn to judge for themselves what the situation calls for, be it the installation of a plugin or anything else. I think that's what we should be encouraging but we should do so knowing it won't happen overnight. There's no real substitute for understanding, and the attempt to provide substitutes for it is a big reason why there is so much malware in the first place.
Yeah, but the masses seem to have only 2 settings, paranoia and apathy. Either they think -everything- is a virus (such as iTunes is a virus, Limewire is a virus, Firefox is a virus, and every other thing other than MS Office -must- be a virus) or they simply don't care. I think Eternal September is truly eternal, the masses don't care about thinking, they don't want to think, they want to be reactionary.
Perhaps for IE it can be in the form of a plugin. For that reason, I don't think this is a showstopper though it certainly is a consideration.
MS is really the only browser maker that takes forever and won't develop new things. For example, SVG support was added in most browsers in 2005 or 2006, its 2009 almost 2010 now and still no SVG support. Yeah, there are plugins for SVG support but that shouldn't be MS's excuse.
Neither is nuclear, tidal, hydro, solar or wind if you include assembly, transportation, etc.
Because of a few reasons.
A) The entire point of HTML and HTML5 video tags was to eliminate plugins
B) Plugins are a -bad idea- for most people, for one even if your browser gets updated your plugins might not, leading gaping security flaws in addition to this, teaching people to install plugins is bad because a plugin could very well contain malware/viruses.
C) A plugin can lead to reliance on the plugin and not spur development in the actual browser
Now we have SVG and a much faster JavaScript in all the good browsers
Good browsers isn't good enough for most sites though. While we can make a lot of "geek-centric" sites be viewable only in a certain handful of browsers, the stupid masses still use IE, from IE 6, 7 and 8. Until IE supports everything that Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Konqueror, etc. support, expect those features to be under-used. Good luck convincing corporate overlords that you should lock out 65% of possible users by using standards that aren't implemented in IE compared to Flash which is viewable on pretty much everything save for the iPhone, BSD and a few other mobile browsers even though Flash is proprietary.
Googling for URLs is much safer than typing in the address bar. How many times do we misspell Google if we are in a hurry? We might spell gogole.com, gooogle.com, gogle.com, googgle.com googl.com, and a whole lot of others. Any one of those could be a phishing site. With Google you get a nice spellcheck for your search for one and for another it tries to block any site that has malware on it. Using Google you will avoid phishing much more than using the address bar.
Which is fine until that one virus manages to get through by accident. I ran my machine AV-free for a long time until that happened, and the cleanup was unpleasant - the preventive features of AV software are far superior their cleanup ones. :S
Yes, but think about it this way. Lets say your computer runs at half its speed with an anti-virus. You run your machine for 365 days without an AV for 30 mins doing routine work that would be slowed down by the AV (file copying, plus additional maintenance for the AV itself, etc) so it would take an hour. That is 182.5 hours per year you use it for maintenance without an AV. With an AV that doubles to 365 hours. Even if you add in a entirely long clean up process of 48 hours, you still come out ahead. And unless you get a nasty virus that somehow corrupts everything you can just restore from backup (you do have a backup of everything important right?) and if you don't have a backup you can usually boot from a Linux disk (most can read NTFS just fine) and copy things to an external HDD. So unless that machine was really mission critical (such as, if its down for 2 days you are out of lots of money) not having an AV and having a long clean up may actually save you time.
Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media)
Because no one has heard of Leveno? The main reason why no company can make a name for themselves in a US market is A) Their name sounds distinctly foreign (I'd rather drink an English-sounding drink than a drink from Kweichow Moutai Company) B) They are tailored to a specific market. China doesn't have the mass media that the US and Europe does, almost all the media in China is state-run or sponsored. Because of this the advertising needs to be changed, where in the US, individuality and uniqueness is appreciated, in China it is not. So a lot of ads that are successful in the US because of that (such as the Think Different Mac ads) would fail in China. C) in China -a lot- of companies either have government control or influence. Cherry Automobile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chery_Automobile) is the largest independent Chinese auto maker and it is run by the Chinese government. Such things don't export well and D) A significant amount of Americans avoid things that are Chinese. There are a lot of Americans who think that China is going to nuke the US or other crazy theories, but nonetheless some people do believe them and so that keeps a lot of Chinese-sounding goods from American shores.
Yes. How many people get told "comics aren't real books" on a daily basis? Especially before manga and the superhero movies made comics "cool" again, comics were widely considered the lowest form of reading. Science fiction on the other hand wasn't/isn't under as much fire.
Its kinda common sense that Google would see how much disk space is used or how much CPU time is used. I mean, what admin -doesn't- know that 2 Gigabytes of space is used by xxxx@gmail.com? Even if all the data was super-encrypted you would still know how large the file is.
No dedicated servers? Whats next lag that automatically lags with the person with the crappiest connection? No chat features? Sounds like PC gaming is starting to hit the 360 way, I wonder when it will become like the Wii.