I think if I steal your casino chips it's still theft.
I could say a very similar thing for shares traded on a stock exchange. How many think Skype was worth what ebay paid for it?
There are laws regulating publicly held companies - they can't just create new shares arbitrarily, or suddenly not recognize existing shares.
Also, if the central bank of your country chooses to print/create more money, it will devalue the money you already have. It's called inflation. Hyperinflation did actually happen in many countries.
A game company might choose to differentiate itself from other game companies (for a competitive advantage and gain market share) to voluntarily bind itself legally to regulations that ensure some protection of player owned in-game assets.
e.g. we are better than XYZ because if some guy steals your stuff even with a key-logger, we'll check our logs on item/gold transfers and work to put things right, and we are willing to freeze stuff pending a legal decision by the courts.
Naturally in some games (Eve?) stealing could be part of the game, so too bad (and there's pro-boxing where you can get yourself legally bashed or even killed by someone else).
Whether we should allow such games to be legal might actually be a good question.
Because in the future it might get less and less easy to say "It's not real".
paraphrase The Matrix: "people's minds make it real".
A WoW account is a bunch of digits in some computer. Most USD10K is a bunch of digits in some computer.
So it's a matter of supply and demand. Heck it may be harder to forge items in some online games than it is to forge paper USD.
Some game items might take months to get for normal people, so if a game account has characters loaded up with rare weapons, I figure some people might actually pay USD10K for it.
Seriously though, if the cops don't take theft of such stuff seriously or similar crimes, then more and more people might actually resort to unlawful actions.
Just like that guy in China who killed a fellow gamer - the murderer lent his sword (which he only just got at that time) to his "friend" who then sold it for USD900. In China many people consider USD250 a month a good wage. And it might have been worth more than USD900 to the original owner (who might only have sold it for more- thieves often sell for lower than market rate, so I guess it could be worth significantly more which is why he wasn't happy when his "friend" offered to give him the USD900).
I'm not saying he was right to kill, but I'm not surprised he did. People have been killed for far less than four months average salary. Especially when betrayal and other stuff is involved.
To his defense, he actually did go to the cops first, but: "Before the attack Mr Chengwei told police about the theft who said the weapon was not real property"
Not real property? Something that sold for 4 months wages? Two lives wasted (one dead and one suspended death sentence - might get out in 15 years if lucky) because the cops didn't take things seriously. Maybe the Chinese courts cut him some slack, coz over there it's real death for so many things - e.g. hooliganism, "stirring up fights and causing trouble". The parents of the dead guy are still calling for his blood though.
In South Korea the cops actually do recognize such crimes (maybe many of them play those games too and thus can understand the value of some "dragon sabre").
Many stamp collections are worth far more than their face value.
How about the recent case - a teddy bear (Mabel?) that used to belong to Elvis, apparently worth USD75K got savaged by a guard dog assigned to protect the bear collection/display.
Should the cops and courts say, "It's only an old toy bear" ? After all who can imagine paying USD75K for an old toy bear?
For justice to be served one should not be quick to judge, nor take everything at face value.
The problem is when you keep doing the sums, the errors can accumulate to a significant degree.
To reuse your analogy: when you process audio and you are interested in fidelity you try to process it the minimum number of times in order to achieve the effect you want.
If you keep playing around with the amplitudes without going back to the original sample you risk losing fidelity.
"It would be better to concentrate whilst working than making silly mistakes every day"
Why don't you drive without a seatbelt, and with a sharp metal spike sticking out from your steering wheel instead of an airbag? That'll definitely help your concentration won't it?
People make mistakes all the time. And sometimes it's you who suffers for someone else's mistake.
As for learning lessons, people still get cut by this saw - just look at the testimonials on their site. Wouldn't it be better that people learn their lessons from a painful nick and the cost of fixing the saw than losing an entire finger (or more)?
The problem I see is lobbying for a law that requires people to license patented technology AND making the license fee expensive. Of course if I hear wrong and it's a reasonable fee, then the saw industry people are the greedy selfish ones.
Hmm, the PvP[1] in Guild Wars sounds a bit more of a sport than WoW PvP.
Not sure if it'll be something you'd like though: players are capped at lev 20, can only take 8 skills to a battle, you can reallocate your attributes however you like (max on strength or min or whatever), but once in the battle "instance" that's it, it's fairly easy to get max attrib weapons, a bit harder to ge max mods, but no biggie.
I don't think there are any "consumables" that can be useful in a PvP battle.
And to think I got modded troll. I think you're probably a bigger troll;).
"In basketball, you aren't actually repeating the same thing over and over."
Hey, same answer to the grandparent post ( "c. Take item J and take it to place P").
You aren't actually repeating the same thing over and over... You can often go down the left side or the right... Blahblahblah. Same difference.
(Come to think of it bowling sounds far more repetitive than WoW and it's still pretty popular here)
", not only are you making an important decision that affects how well your team does at every moment, but you don't have a 100% chance of succeeding at everything you try, and this chance is dependent upon your skill as a player (or coordination as a team)."
Sounds like many WoW raids from what I hear. A screw-up by one member could wipe the whole team. Do a "Leeroy Jenkins" and you might even become famous.
Anyway I've been playing Guild Wars, and PvP in GW has got all the same elements you claim for basketball. So don't like WoW? Try Guild Wars then - no monthly fee too.
Don't like any of it, don't play it then...
Man, sure sounds like those football fans who keep complaining that baseball is boring...:p
Because one day you might need/want the aid of an artificial brain (Alzheimer's, or just coz you want photographic memory). And the only ones available have DRM built-in.
So you'd have photographic memory but have to pay-per-view. You'd have perfect multimedia recall, but have to pay per recall.
"end in a severe lack of artists to produce what the industry i trying to protect"
Fewer musicians = stronger monopoly. Copyright lasts for ages nowadays.
So they'll just keep selling you the same old crap. Because by that time you'd have to keep relicensing your music periodically. And you'd think it is normal.
You'd even think it's fine to pay just to recall and to relisten to music you heard yesterday (albeit with the aid of your artificial brain augmenter + DRM).
In those days a penny for your thoughts might be considered cheap - even if it's just to access your own thoughts.
"Leveling is to be honest boring an repetitive. 98% the quests can be summed up in this scheme":
98% of basketball games can be summed up in this scheme:
a) get ball b) dribble/pass or go straight to c) c) get ball through hoop somehow d) repeat
Sounds a lot like your "c. Take item J and take it to place P." doesn't it?
But lots of people love playing it. And lots of people love watching it being played.
So you don't like WoW? Well lots of people don't like basketball either. Try some other game instead.
BTW I don't even play WoW.
But it's obvious that lots of people like WoW.
The thing about games like basketball is you physically get tired within a few hours so you just have to stop (and if you aren't that young and fit, you might not even feel like playing it the next day), whereas you can keep at it for much longer in WoW (part of the design I guess).
"All they are doing in WoW is teaming up and killing monsters, so why are they playing?"
It's a game, they like doing it.
Go look at football, tennis, golf, pool, snooker in the same light.
I'm fine with people spending hours on WoW.
Much better than having young guys teaming up and killing people in real life - as it happens too often in many places around the world.
You want a more sociable thing to do? Go to drink coffee and hang out with your friends at shopping malls, maybe get a new hairdo just like your best friend's.
You could do that sort of thing in WoW too I guess, but 40 man raids are nothing compared to those massive shopping raids...;)
Most people can't even detect spyware running until there are like tons of them running!
Anyway, the blue pill stuff is overrated.
AFAIK the new x86 hardware VM features are supposed to allow you to run VMs in VMs and other stuff.
So, just make sure you boot Vista or whatever O/S of you choice in a hardware VM right from the very beginning. Call that sort of thing a "white pill" if you want.
Then the white pill can just scan for or intercept blue pill stuff. The white pill can use whatever tricks the blue pill can, and since it got there first, there's very little the blue pill can do about it.
"Coverity sounds like a scam. It is not possible for a program to analyze another program and find all the bugs"
What a silly reason! How about gzip etc then?
"gzip sounds like a scam. It is not possible for a program to analyze any data and always compress it successfully"[1].
I could go on: "life sounds like a scam..."
But I suggest you wake up to the harsh imperfect real world some time and leave that sort of thinking to the run-of-the-mill "academics".
How you deciding whether Coverity is good or not should be like how you decide whether gzip is good or not. If Coverity doesn't find bugs better than even gcc then it probably useless to most people.
[1] On a related note, in my opinion programming can be viewed as a type of compression.
I never said there are only two ways. I'd prefer if you'd come up with better alternatives rather than try to teach me about logical fallacies.
Well the USA is a rich country I guess, perhaps it can afford leeches and parasites that suck out tens of billions yearly (or more if you count the Iraq war). Naturally I'm not talking about drug addicts - the more addicted they are, the more easily they can be controlled.
The US has spent billions and decades and got what?
People were claiming that prohibition doesn't work, the Taliban results are proof that prohibition does work.
So there have been two methods that appear to "work". The Netherlands method and the Taliban method.
Don't like the Taliban approach? Well the US method is obviously not a valid alternative/approach - since it doesn't work. The US method has been going for like >20 years? Results?
What's with this obsessive _deleting_? To sort through and delete stuff is extra work.
If you run out of space how much space would you recover from deleting emails? Doh. Already most people don't even appear to hit the 2GB mark of gmail (I doubt they'd even bother limiting users to 2GB).
2GB not enough? A 250GB hard drive is USD70 where I live. I wonder how long it would take people to read/scan through 250GB of email. I read pretty fast, but I doubt I'd ever get 250GB of email that would be worth reading.
Instead of deleting stuff that has a higher irreproducibility like email, people should just go delete some of those movies or mp3s they appear to download in vast amounts- especially the widespread ones - they can always find a copy of those again. Those take up a lot more space. In my case I'd do a search and destroy on some knoppix.iso or other.isos I have lying around somewhere, or delete a less important virtual machine.
So why bother spending time going through emails and deleting them? Deleting stuff before you run out of space is like shrinking caches before you run out of space. Extra work for little gain.
If it takes too long to search through your emails, or your email client can't cope with more than 65535 emails (or worse 32767) or more than 2GB of emails then your email client is crap.
Don't get me wrong, I can understand throwing away stuff in your room/house that takes up too much physical space or clutters too much. In the physical world you need space to move about in your room/house.
But this is like sifting through a pile of mail in box looking for letters to throw away, when it's all in a fair sized room which can easily fit 100-200 of those boxes. And you already have 50 or more boxes filled with easily reproducible junk. Dumb eh?
Of course if it gives you great satisfaction to delete certain emails go right ahead!
But I don't even waste much time deleting obvious spam - most of it automatically gets moved somewhere else (there's always a chance of a false positive, so from time to time I go take a glance at the past month's spam or something - subject lines often good enough).
You could try Guild Wars - there's no monthly fee. Just every few months or so they try to add an optional expansion pack (new classes, storyline) to get some more money (fair enough I guess) - I don't think I'll bother with getting the upcoming one (*yawn*), but Factions was ok.
Think of it as "WoW lite": All players are capped at lev 20 max. Most of the missions and quests can be done < 1 hour. There are elite missions that can take 4+ hours to complete, but they are optional.
There is some grind (a bit more than I'd like for PvP - I feel they should unlock everything for PvP only chars), but you definitely don't have to play everyday to get anywhere. Takes you just a few nights to get you to lev 20 with guildwars factions.
The person could have been looking for ideas for a Death Metal album cover. Or it was an 8 year old kid trying to gross out his sister. Of course the "kill a wife" thing could take some explaining.
It is likely though that "User 17556639" had a problem spelling decapitated;).
BTW why are there multiple instances of a search? Are they for each page of results? Does AOL tell the person that they may have mispelt decapitated? Like google's "Did you mean"?
"Well no, if you want to lock down a bunch of pc's, you sign yourself, require code that's been signed by yourself, and perform the required audits on the code yourself."
Good luck doing all that with the stuff in %SystemRoot%\System32 Or/bin and/usr
Get real.
"But this is a stepping stone anyway; on a full TPM machine, unsigned code wouldn't be able to exploit holes in signed code, as the two would have a greater degree of seperation."
Say you have: a signed buggy network driver, you send a naughty frame- poof. a signed buggy graphics driver, some unsigned stuff you download sends certain graphics commands - poof. a signed buggy email program, view the wrong email in the preview pane- exploit launches a process in the background to send spam.
I've definitely seen buggy network driver, graphics driver and email programs.
How many signed ring0 vista programs are there? You only need to exploit one and you're in.
This signed code thing doesn't improve security for users. It just increases the power of those who get to sign stuff.
Verisign have signed the wrong things before. Microsoft has released exploitable signed code before. Sony has intentionally released software that tampers with other people's computers and seems no one worth anything in Sony is getting prosecuted/jailed for unauthorized access and modification of computer systems.
All this talk of security is just to mislead people into swallowing THEIR PILL.
There are other ways of increasing security which would work better - e.g. "permission templates" for applications. E.g. games need full graphics access, full keyboard, mouse input, sound, read access to their own app directories, read/write to app config/data directory, limited network access and that's it.
Flash "fun" applet only needs windowed graphics, sound, basic input and that's it.
Already many windows firewall software do something like this. Just needs to be done better and with reasonable defaults.
Picking reasonable defaults is probably one of the hardest parts.
With XP you can also use the save credentials option, so the short cut works without you having to type a password.
I did this before when working at some other company - you'd also want to set the necessary file system permissions, so that the stuff you download using that browser user can be accessed by your normal user account. This is fairly easy to do with NTFS.
Win2K/XP isn't really less secure than Linux or most BSDs. They all have the same sort of privilege system.
e.g. when a user runs stuff it automatically runs with the user's full privileges. This actually sucks. Of course this is a bit less true with the windows firewall stuff - but that makes windows actually more secure than linux (the *trace stuff doesn't have a user friendly interface).
If you had the same class of users and the same market share, Linux machines would be taken over all the time. And imagine what a malware perl script would do. The AV people already have probs with normal C++ stuff, good luck figuring out whether a perl script is malicious or not - the malware writers could whip out new scripts faster than the AV people can analyze and redo signatures.
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I think if I steal your casino chips it's still theft.
I could say a very similar thing for shares traded on a stock exchange. How many think Skype was worth what ebay paid for it?
There are laws regulating publicly held companies - they can't just create new shares arbitrarily, or suddenly not recognize existing shares.
Also, if the central bank of your country chooses to print/create more money, it will devalue the money you already have. It's called inflation. Hyperinflation did actually happen in many countries.
A game company might choose to differentiate itself from other game companies (for a competitive advantage and gain market share) to voluntarily bind itself legally to regulations that ensure some protection of player owned in-game assets.
e.g. we are better than XYZ because if some guy steals your stuff even with a key-logger, we'll check our logs on item/gold transfers and work to put things right, and we are willing to freeze stuff pending a legal decision by the courts.
Naturally in some games (Eve?) stealing could be part of the game, so too bad (and there's pro-boxing where you can get yourself legally bashed or even killed by someone else).
Whether we should allow such games to be legal might actually be a good question.
Because in the future it might get less and less easy to say "It's not real".
paraphrase The Matrix: "people's minds make it real".
A WoW account is a bunch of digits in some computer. Most USD10K is a bunch of digits in some computer.
So it's a matter of supply and demand. Heck it may be harder to forge items in some online games than it is to forge paper USD.
Some game items might take months to get for normal people, so if a game account has characters loaded up with rare weapons, I figure some people might actually pay USD10K for it.
Seriously though, if the cops don't take theft of such stuff seriously or similar crimes, then more and more people might actually resort to unlawful actions.
Just like that guy in China who killed a fellow gamer - the murderer lent his sword (which he only just got at that time) to his "friend" who then sold it for USD900. In China many people consider USD250 a month a good wage. And it might have been worth more than USD900 to the original owner (who might only have sold it for more- thieves often sell for lower than market rate, so I guess it could be worth significantly more which is why he wasn't happy when his "friend" offered to give him the USD900).
I'm not saying he was right to kill, but I'm not surprised he did. People have been killed for far less than four months average salary. Especially when betrayal and other stuff is involved.
To his defense, he actually did go to the cops first, but:
"Before the attack Mr Chengwei told police about the theft who said the weapon was not real property"
Not real property? Something that sold for 4 months wages? Two lives wasted (one dead and one suspended death sentence - might get out in 15 years if lucky) because the cops didn't take things seriously. Maybe the Chinese courts cut him some slack, coz over there it's real death for so many things - e.g. hooliganism, "stirring up fights and causing trouble". The parents of the dead guy are still calling for his blood though.
In South Korea the cops actually do recognize such crimes (maybe many of them play those games too and thus can understand the value of some "dragon sabre").
Many stamp collections are worth far more than their face value.
How about the recent case - a teddy bear (Mabel?) that used to belong to Elvis, apparently worth USD75K got savaged by a guard dog assigned to protect the bear collection/display.
Should the cops and courts say, "It's only an old toy bear" ? After all who can imagine paying USD75K for an old toy bear?
For justice to be served one should not be quick to judge, nor take everything at face value.
The problem is when you keep doing the sums, the errors can accumulate to a significant degree.
To reuse your analogy: when you process audio and you are interested in fidelity you try to process it the minimum number of times in order to achieve the effect you want.
If you keep playing around with the amplitudes without going back to the original sample you risk losing fidelity.
"It would be better to concentrate whilst working than making silly mistakes every day"
Why don't you drive without a seatbelt, and with a sharp metal spike sticking out from your steering wheel instead of an airbag? That'll definitely help your concentration won't it?
People make mistakes all the time. And sometimes it's you who suffers for someone else's mistake.
As for learning lessons, people still get cut by this saw - just look at the testimonials on their site. Wouldn't it be better that people learn their lessons from a painful nick and the cost of fixing the saw than losing an entire finger (or more)?
The problem I see is lobbying for a law that requires people to license patented technology AND making the license fee expensive. Of course if I hear wrong and it's a reasonable fee, then the saw industry people are the greedy selfish ones.
Hmm, the PvP[1] in Guild Wars sounds a bit more of a sport than WoW PvP.
Not sure if it'll be something you'd like though: players are capped at lev 20, can only take 8 skills to a battle, you can reallocate your attributes however you like (max on strength or min or whatever), but once in the battle "instance" that's it, it's fairly easy to get max attrib weapons, a bit harder to ge max mods, but no biggie.
I don't think there are any "consumables" that can be useful in a PvP battle.
[1] Example PvP mission descriptions:
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Fort_Aspenwood
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Etnaran_Keys
And to think I got modded troll. I think you're probably a bigger troll ;).
:p
"In basketball, you aren't actually repeating the same thing over and over."
Hey, same answer to the grandparent post ( "c. Take item J and take it to place P").
You aren't actually repeating the same thing over and over... You can often go down the left side or the right... Blahblahblah. Same difference.
(Come to think of it bowling sounds far more repetitive than WoW and it's still pretty popular here)
", not only are you making an important decision that affects how well your team does at every moment, but you don't have a 100% chance of succeeding at everything you try, and this chance is dependent upon your skill as a player (or coordination as a team)."
Sounds like many WoW raids from what I hear. A screw-up by one member could wipe the whole team. Do a "Leeroy Jenkins" and you might even become famous.
Anyway I've been playing Guild Wars, and PvP in GW has got all the same elements you claim for basketball. So don't like WoW? Try Guild Wars then - no monthly fee too.
Don't like any of it, don't play it then...
Man, sure sounds like those football fans who keep complaining that baseball is boring...
One day his publisher/owner might.
Because one day you might need/want the aid of an artificial brain (Alzheimer's, or just coz you want photographic memory). And the only ones available have DRM built-in.
So you'd have photographic memory but have to pay-per-view. You'd have perfect multimedia recall, but have to pay per recall.
A penny for your thoughts, it all adds up.
"end in a severe lack of artists to produce what the industry i trying to protect"
Fewer musicians = stronger monopoly. Copyright lasts for ages nowadays.
So they'll just keep selling you the same old crap. Because by that time you'd have to keep relicensing your music periodically. And you'd think it is normal.
You'd even think it's fine to pay just to recall and to relisten to music you heard yesterday (albeit with the aid of your artificial brain augmenter + DRM).
In those days a penny for your thoughts might be considered cheap - even if it's just to access your own thoughts.
I'd be surprised if the NSA doesn't have some sort of tap on most/all of Google's leased lines.
"Leveling is to be honest boring an repetitive. 98% the quests can be summed up in this scheme":
98% of basketball games can be summed up in this scheme:
a) get ball
b) dribble/pass or go straight to c)
c) get ball through hoop somehow
d) repeat
Sounds a lot like your "c. Take item J and take it to place P." doesn't it?
But lots of people love playing it. And lots of people love watching it being played.
So you don't like WoW? Well lots of people don't like basketball either. Try some other game instead.
BTW I don't even play WoW.
But it's obvious that lots of people like WoW.
The thing about games like basketball is you physically get tired within a few hours so you just have to stop (and if you aren't that young and fit, you might not even feel like playing it the next day), whereas you can keep at it for much longer in WoW (part of the design I guess).
"All they are doing in WoW is teaming up and killing monsters, so why are they playing?"
;)
It's a game, they like doing it.
Go look at football, tennis, golf, pool, snooker in the same light.
I'm fine with people spending hours on WoW.
Much better than having young guys teaming up and killing people in real life - as it happens too often in many places around the world.
You want a more sociable thing to do? Go to drink coffee and hang out with your friends at shopping malls, maybe get a new hairdo just like your best friend's.
You could do that sort of thing in WoW too I guess, but 40 man raids are nothing compared to those massive shopping raids...
Once you put the blue pill in your Matrix, it can't get out unless you let it or there is a bug in your Matrix.
It can think it got out, it can relaunch Vista in it's own "blue pill" Matrix, but it is not out.
You may also wish to see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
(we are talking about the new x86 stuff after all).
Uh, just make sure you own the "topmost" hypervisor in the first place, then you put vista or whatever in it.
;).
k eywords); ...
The blue pill can continue running vista within itself, but it's not going to be able to put the first hypervisor in it
Go figure.
Any time you suspect something fishy is going on, you could pause the entire thing using the "top most" hypervisor and scan.
IMO it's high level malware that will be harder.
Example: whether the following actually executes malicious code or not is dependent on what the search engine returns.
my ($code,$sig)=&$fetch_updates_via_search_engines($
if ($sig eq $valid) {
eval "$code";
}
Most people can't even detect spyware running until there are like tons of them running!
Anyway, the blue pill stuff is overrated.
AFAIK the new x86 hardware VM features are supposed to allow you to run VMs in VMs and other stuff.
So, just make sure you boot Vista or whatever O/S of you choice in a hardware VM right from the very beginning. Call that sort of thing a "white pill" if you want.
Then the white pill can just scan for or intercept blue pill stuff. The white pill can use whatever tricks the blue pill can, and since it got there first, there's very little the blue pill can do about it.
Yawn...
"Coverity sounds like a scam. It is not possible for a program to analyze another program and find all the bugs"
What a silly reason! How about gzip etc then?
"gzip sounds like a scam. It is not possible for a program to analyze any data and always compress it successfully"[1].
I could go on: "life sounds like a scam..."
But I suggest you wake up to the harsh imperfect real world some time and leave that sort of thinking to the run-of-the-mill "academics".
How you deciding whether Coverity is good or not should be like how you decide whether gzip is good or not. If Coverity doesn't find bugs better than even gcc then it probably useless to most people.
[1] On a related note, in my opinion programming can be viewed as a type of compression.
I never said there are only two ways. I'd prefer if you'd come up with better alternatives rather than try to teach me about logical fallacies.
Well the USA is a rich country I guess, perhaps it can afford leeches and parasites that suck out tens of billions yearly (or more if you count the Iraq war). Naturally I'm not talking about drug addicts - the more addicted they are, the more easily they can be controlled.
A big waste though.
The US has spent billions and decades and got what?
People were claiming that prohibition doesn't work, the Taliban results are proof that prohibition does work.
So there have been two methods that appear to "work". The Netherlands method and the Taliban method.
Don't like the Taliban approach? Well the US method is obviously not a valid alternative/approach - since it doesn't work. The US method has been going for like >20 years? Results?
What's with this obsessive _deleting_? To sort through and delete stuff is extra work.
.isos I have lying around somewhere, or delete a less important virtual machine.
;).
If you run out of space how much space would you recover from deleting emails? Doh. Already most people don't even appear to hit the 2GB mark of gmail (I doubt they'd even bother limiting users to 2GB).
2GB not enough? A 250GB hard drive is USD70 where I live. I wonder how long it would take people to read/scan through 250GB of email. I read pretty fast, but I doubt I'd ever get 250GB of email that would be worth reading.
Instead of deleting stuff that has a higher irreproducibility like email, people should just go delete some of those movies or mp3s they appear to download in vast amounts- especially the widespread ones - they can always find a copy of those again. Those take up a lot more space. In my case I'd do a search and destroy on some knoppix.iso or other
So why bother spending time going through emails and deleting them? Deleting stuff before you run out of space is like shrinking caches before you run out of space. Extra work for little gain.
If it takes too long to search through your emails, or your email client can't cope with more than 65535 emails (or worse 32767) or more than 2GB of emails then your email client is crap.
Don't get me wrong, I can understand throwing away stuff in your room/house that takes up too much physical space or clutters too much. In the physical world you need space to move about in your room/house.
But this is like sifting through a pile of mail in box looking for letters to throw away, when it's all in a fair sized room which can easily fit 100-200 of those boxes. And you already have 50 or more boxes filled with easily reproducible junk. Dumb eh?
Of course if it gives you great satisfaction to delete certain emails go right ahead!
But I don't even waste much time deleting obvious spam - most of it automatically gets moved somewhere else (there's always a chance of a false positive, so from time to time I go take a glance at the past month's spam or something - subject lines often good enough).
What my inbox says about me? I'm lazy I guess
On a related note- most of these RPGs (MM or not) allow you to res stuff.
So why is it such a big deal that an NPC or something dies? Just res it.
You could try Guild Wars - there's no monthly fee. Just every few months or so they try to add an optional expansion pack (new classes, storyline) to get some more money (fair enough I guess) - I don't think I'll bother with getting the upcoming one (*yawn*), but Factions was ok.
Think of it as "WoW lite": All players are capped at lev 20 max. Most of the missions and quests can be done < 1 hour. There are elite missions that can take 4+ hours to complete, but they are optional.
There is some grind (a bit more than I'd like for PvP - I feel they should unlock everything for PvP only chars), but you definitely don't have to play everyday to get anywhere. Takes you just a few nights to get you to lev 20 with guildwars factions.
Funny that the Taliban were a lot more effective than the USA in their respective "wars against drugs".
There are so many other ways to look at it.
;).
The person could have been looking for ideas for a Death Metal album cover.
Or it was an 8 year old kid trying to gross out his sister. Of course the "kill a wife" thing could take some explaining.
It is likely though that "User 17556639" had a problem spelling decapitated
BTW why are there multiple instances of a search? Are they for each page of results? Does AOL tell the person that they may have mispelt decapitated? Like google's "Did you mean"?
"Well no, if you want to lock down a bunch of pc's, you sign yourself, require code that's been signed by yourself, and perform the required audits on the code yourself."
/bin and /usr
Good luck doing all that with the stuff in %SystemRoot%\System32
Or
Get real.
"But this is a stepping stone anyway; on a full TPM machine, unsigned code wouldn't be able to exploit holes in signed code, as the two would have a greater degree of seperation."
Say you have:
a signed buggy network driver, you send a naughty frame- poof.
a signed buggy graphics driver, some unsigned stuff you download sends certain graphics commands - poof.
a signed buggy email program, view the wrong email in the preview pane- exploit launches a process in the background to send spam.
I've definitely seen buggy network driver, graphics driver and email programs.
Big deal.
How many signed ring0 vista programs are there? You only need to exploit one and you're in.
This signed code thing doesn't improve security for users. It just increases the power of those who get to sign stuff.
Verisign have signed the wrong things before. Microsoft has released exploitable signed code before. Sony has intentionally released software that tampers with other people's computers and seems no one worth anything in Sony is getting prosecuted/jailed for unauthorized access and modification of computer systems.
All this talk of security is just to mislead people into swallowing THEIR PILL.
There are other ways of increasing security which would work better - e.g. "permission templates" for applications. E.g. games need full graphics access, full keyboard, mouse input, sound, read access to their own app directories, read/write to app config/data directory, limited network access and that's it.
Flash "fun" applet only needs windowed graphics, sound, basic input and that's it.
Already many windows firewall software do something like this. Just needs to be done better and with reasonable defaults.
Picking reasonable defaults is probably one of the hardest parts.
Change it then.
With XP you can also use the save credentials option, so the short cut works without you having to type a password.
I did this before when working at some other company - you'd also want to set the necessary file system permissions, so that the stuff you download using that browser user can be accessed by your normal user account. This is fairly easy to do with NTFS.
Win2K/XP isn't really less secure than Linux or most BSDs. They all have the same sort of privilege system.
e.g. when a user runs stuff it automatically runs with the user's full privileges. This actually sucks. Of course this is a bit less true with the windows firewall stuff - but that makes windows actually more secure than linux (the *trace stuff doesn't have a user friendly interface).
If you had the same class of users and the same market share, Linux machines would be taken over all the time. And imagine what a malware perl script would do. The AV people already have probs with normal C++ stuff, good luck figuring out whether a perl script is malicious or not - the malware writers could whip out new scripts faster than the AV people can analyze and redo signatures.