Although, actually, wouldn't this now make changing your system time an offence under the DCMA?
In other news, Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, were raided today for distributing a circumvention device as defined under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, 17 USC 1201a.
The circumvention device in question was called How to set the clock, available from a nefarious den of black market hacker activity known in the hacker underground as the "Windows Help and How-to" website.
"These criminal hackers cost our economy an estimated $4,523 quintillion dollars in the last year by promoting piracy, terrorism, drug abuse, and the growing new epidemic of late middle-age virginity," said Jack Me Hoff, of the Business Software Alliance. "If we let these criminal enterprises get away with this, our entire economy will be ruined."
But continued relevance is at stake. Jeez, slashdot editors!
When did Slashdot ever care about having "relevance"? It's always been "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters..." (to us), who cares if it matters to you?
I'm Betaing Windows 7. Before going to bed I set up a swap partition for it. After getting up the next morning and checking, it was full.
I have *no idea* what W7 put in there while I was sleeping.
In any modern operating system, including Windows , swap isn't just used for out of physical memory conditions. It's also used to "page out" portions of the operating system and libraries, shared objects, dlls, etc., that aren't being used at the moment. This actually speeds your system up by allowing more memory to be used as disk read/write cache.
I've looked at Linux boxes with 64GB of memory in them and only using 25% of that. I usually get asked by someone, "wasn't 64GB enough? Why is there some usage in swap right now?" It's normal, I explain. The kernel just pages out sections of Linux that aren't needed, to free up more RAM for filesystem caching.
I think perhaps Windows 7 just has a more aggressive way of doing this, probably because if you need to use some obscure Windows Directmedia SuperDRM doubleplusgood Plugin X, it's just as fast to reload it out of swap into memory as it is to load the binary from disk. But 99% of home users will never load that plugin so it can stay safely swapped out, giving you more precious memory for applications and disk cache.
The BlackBerry model by design is insecure (from a national security perspective). All of the data communication is routed through systems owned by a Canadian corporation (RIM). They claim it's encrypted end-to-end. I've seen enough of their backend applications (in the form of the BlackBerry "Enterprise" Server) to suspect that even if the communication is encrypted, it would be trivial for someone at RIM to decrypt it.
I've also done enough BES deployments to know that Blackberry is incredibly secure, as long as you consider triple-DES to be secure. Keys are generated locally on the BES server and transmitted securely over a serial 9600bps connection directly to the blackberry. This means that keys never pass over the wire. Communication is then encrypted end-to-end from handheld to server without any key escrow. This is a well designed crypto system.
The only real risk I could see is if hackers were somehow able to compromise the BES and steal keys, or compromise the handheld itself and steal keys. Also, triple-DES has been around for quite some time and might not be as secure now as it was several years ago.
Other than that, Blackberry has a very secure system, although maybe not secure enough for "state secrets".
Microsoft have enough cash in the bank that they could afford to spend around five years with no income (not just no profits, or a small loss, but not selling a single product to anyone). They definitely don't need to fire anyone to get past an economic slump. If they had a surplus of good people, the best thing for them to do is put them all on projects with a 3-7 year horizon, and then when the recession is over they'll be in a much better position than many of their competitors who actually did have to cut their workforce.
That sounds suspiciously like the Vista business plan. Remember back in 2001, we were experiencing an economic slump, although Microsoft was a strong company that could definitely ride it out. Look how well it worked out for them. I suppose they can continue to do that and hope the cash reserves from the good years carry them through the bad ones. But, eventually, it looks as if the consumer market will migrate to Apple systems and away from Microsoft.
As this has segwayed a little into oral hygiene products.. can anyone tell me why there are so many different varieties of toothpaste, even from the same manufacturer? Is there any real science behind some of these, or is it just the same crap with different colours/taste?
They are all the same. If you look at the "active ingredients", you can see they all contain some percentage (around 0.16%) flouride. There are prescription toothpastes with higher flouride content that your dentist can prescribe for you, but you usually only need it if you are trying to rebuild or strengthen your enamel.
I also find 30 seconds of Listerine after brushing helps a lot, too.
Don't use Listerine. It has alcohol in it which can cause mouth cancer, and other problems. Use an alcohol free mouthwash like Crest.
Re:Success relies on our tendency to get well or d
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
I submit the quicker someone as a patient realizes that when you go to see a licensed doctor, you are not seeing a scientist, but rather a guild member, the better his health will be.
Guild member, you say? Screw modern medicine, the next time I get sick I'm asking level 80 Night Elf Priest Healzalot to work his magic on me... And if that doesn't work, I'll just scream over Ventrilo about how I "need a res pls kthx."
Indeed. This is why I'm for straight-up term limits. 2 terms for Senate, 4 for House (keeping in mind, a House term is only 2 years). That way a Senator can serve a maximum of 12 years, a House member, 8. I suppose you could up the limit to 6 for a House member if you want to keep the "maximum years to serve" even, I'm open to debate on that one.
I'd rather see the vast majority of them serving 10-20...
This doesn't mention the constitution... which means NSA plays by a different set of rules than the justice department.
What part of the constitution being the highest law of the land don't you understand? The NSA is a government entity, and all government entities are governed by the constitution. You can't just pick and choose and create a shadow government that claims it doesn't have to obey the basic written law of our country. Of course, that seems to be what the Bush administration has done over the last 8 years.
The article I read about this states that Linux is the first operating system to implement these standards, T10 PIM and DIE. It says that they are looking to implement the same technology in Windows, Solaris, and other Unixes. It also states that this is implemented both in hardware and software. In what way does this differ from Solaris/SPARC's data integrity implementation?
It may not be the same implementation, but Solaris on Sparc has built in ECC across all data paths, including CPU -> memory, CPU -> I/O, etc. I believe it is a combination of hardware and software (kernel) that does this.
The article, I believe, is talking about implementing the same level of software checking in x86 versions of the operating systems mentioned.
The article says "the code helps maintain integrity as data moves from application to database, and from Linux operating system to disk storage", that it checks I/O operations, and that "code contribution includes generic support for data integrity at the block and file-system layers". That's still not clear what they think the problem is. Don't most of the modern file systems already check data operations?
You might not understand why we need it, but trust me, it is needed. Not all storage device drivers are created equally, and some will happily report to the kernel that the write operation was successful even if it wasn't, and you end up with corrupted data. When Oracle operates on a trusted environment like Solaris on Sparc, this type of integrity is built in to the operating system and it's not necessary to do a read after write to verify the data was written correctly. On Linux, and other untrusted operating systems where this doesn't happen, Oracle has to do a read after write to make sure the data was written correctly. This slows things down quite a bit.
I look at the recruit-a-friend program as a way of Blizzard evening the playing field for new players that are just starting the game. Sure, those of us that have been playing for years have quested and grinded all the way up to 60, then 70, now 80, the hard way. We did it before they eased the leveling curve, when the grind from 20-30 was about 40 hours of mind-numbing, boring gameplay.
The fact is, the newer content is a lot better than the older content. If you had the same leveling curve that existed when the game was first released, new players would have to play hundreds of hours before they even got to see any new content at all. It's just too much to tell a brand new player: "Sure, this content you're playing right now sucks and reminds you of 2004, but just keep going for another 500 hours, you'll get to the good part of the game, I promise."
Most normal people that might be interested in WoW because they heard how much fun it is from their friends, are not going to invest 500 hours in 4 year old, somewhat dated content, just to get to the "good parts."
Blizzard made a good decision to create recruit-a-friend. The XP bonus only lasts until level 60, so it allows players to quickly (but not too quickly) fast forward to the good parts of the game.
How is that a bad thing? Oh yeah, the people that hate it are the elitists that love to sit around in Dalaran showing off their "L33T EPIX!!111!!1! OMG" and feel special because they play longer hours and have less of a life.
Not to mention that they've brought Bill Roper on, one of the idea men who leapt from Blizzard and sank to the bottom with Flagship.
Oh god, if Bill Roper is there it is most likely doomed to failure. Can you say "flagshipped"? I used to really admire the guy, but after the clusterfuck that was Hellgate London and his refusal to take any responsibility for it's failure and demise, I will never again buy a product made by him.
And CoH and CoV were really good games. I do have a lot of hope for the DC Universe, but it could end up sucking if Atari ruins it. Also, the trailer for Star Trek looks very nice.
I'd have to disagree with the premise that management in a guild has to do with catering to everyone's needs. If you are leading the group, what is this catering crap? You're in charge, fucker, for good or ill. This wishy-washy bullshit about not offending prima donna egos and such is exactly why I think all of you who talk about how 'difficult' it is to manage your guild all full of shit.
Of course a good manager doesn't just do everything for their guild members, or their employees. Face it, in the workplace, you have a reason to come to work: to get paid. Still, managers that get their employees to perform well usually have an interest in making sure their employees are healthy, happy, and have the right tools to do the job. This is what I mean when I say "catering to their needs". It's not making coffee for them or giving them free stuff to keep them happy.
I suspect you wouldn't last very long as a GM with that type of attitude.
I feel the opposite. I feel bad for WoW, because once you've hit max level in WotLK, there's nothing else to do but grind. They tried to rip off many Warhammer features, but they still can't touch public quests and RvR.
Actually, I feel the opposite. I played AoC and WAR up to max level, and once you get to max level there is pretty much nothing to do, especially in AoC, but also in WAR. Sure, you can trade keeps all day long with the other faction hoping for a gold loot bag, which you will probably never get because somebody cheesed their contribution and outrolled everyone (see, I have played WAR in tier 4). Raid content is non-existent, gear is terrible for anything other than beating the few raid bosses in the enemy city.
On the other hand, WotLK has a huge amount of gear, raiding, large open world PvP with Wintergrasp that has real rewards (ie gear that doesn't suck). When you get to max level in WoW, it's just the beginning of establishing your character through gear.
Seriously - social skills? The same set you use with AIM or when sending a text message on a cell phone. I love how organizing or co-leading a raid really means you've got what it takes(!) to manage people or resources.
For fuck's sake, people, WoW is the least-common denominator of gaming now - there's no skillset required. Persistence and slavish devotion is what this game rewards, not innovative tactics or strategy. PvP is a matter of who has the biggest grind-peen, and thus has the most 1337 gear. What kind of skill do you need to employ with autoattack?
Clearly you have never led or been a part of a 25 man (or 40 man back in the day) raid. Managing a raid is one of the most difficult management experiences I have ever seen. How many managers have regular conference calls (Ventrilo) with 25 people and have to cater to all of their needs, educate them on tactics, put up with inter-personal conflicts (loot drama, etc.), and accomplish goals?
Don't trivialize it because you've probably never participated in a well run raiding guild, but it takes a lot of management experience. It takes a lot of management experience to get 25 people that probably wouldn't get along in real life and smooth over all of their egos and get them to organize and come together to accomplish a goal.
Unfortunately, no it doesn't pass this test because there are still several gryphon flights between cities that will take longer than 10 minutes.
I wish they made travel a little bit easier in WoW; it is a great game, but travel time is the one annoying factor. They need to just put portals (ala Dalaran) in every city that lead to all of the capital cities, like you would find on a private server. I tried a private server briefly and having portals everywhere to make travel easier was a godsend.
They have done a good job of eliminating most of the annoying parts of MMOs, even the new Death Knight doesn't have to worry about mana or rage, you simply have rune cooldowns that keep you from spamming your big damage abilities too often. They've done a masterful job at making the quests fun as well.
Now if only they could reduce the annoyance of travel time.
Not exactly. Government benefits tremendously from any war, including war on its own citizens. The Drug War brings power to government as a whole, and funnels bribe money to government employees at all levels. It's terrible for the country, but great for a lot of scumbags with power.
I think perhaps the thing that has shocked me the most about the failed war on (some) drugs is learning about what the cartels are doing in Mexico that import into America. They have been having bloody, violent war in the streets to determine who is allowed to control the export/import into America. While we can sit all safe and secure in our homes in America, confident that our government and police force is doing what it can to keep drugs out of the hands of our children, mexicans are being gunned down in the streets by rival drug cartels. We have externalized our war on drugs and of course it hits those poor countries like Mexico and Columbia where the drugs are produced the most. The most shocking thing I heard about is that one of the drug cartels, who have resorted to kidnapping children and holding them for ransom to raise money, injected a young child in the heart with battery acid. These cruel and thoughtless monsters have been bred by prohibition.
It's time to end prohibition. It's the only humane thing to do.
Sounds like the state did a pretty good job in this case.
I agree that this potential monopoly should probably be broken up, but why is it that the state only did this because Microsoft lobbyists bribed them to? It seems like justice in America only works if you have sufficient money and lobbyists to buy that justice.
I forgot to mention why I quit again after 2 months. I got my new main up to lvl 72 and felt like I'd pretty much seen the whole game. There are two areas for lvls 70-80 and I'd scoured them pretty thoroughly. I didn't feel motivated to replay any of the areas I'd already mastered with this one character which left pretty much nothing in the entire world for me to discover anew.
I'll definitely check out an expansion pack but until then I'm done.
Unfortunately, that's the reason that I quit as well. The game was a blast, and visually, the best MMO I've ever played, but after I got to level 80 there was nothing, I mean nothing to do. Keep sieges were so broken as to be completely unplayable, and the game mechanics pretty much ensured that nobody ever participated in them.
An MMO shouldn't just be "get to max level then retire, you're done." WoW has an amazing end-game. It is truly to the point where level 70 or 80 is just the beginning of your character's progress. If any MMO wants to capture a long-term audience like WoW has, they need to think of end game and what all of those players will do when they get to level 80 or whatever the max level is.
Having a few broken raid instances and a few epic pieces of gear and completely broken itemization is not acceptable any more, yet all of these new MMOs that are released seem to be exactly that (I'm looking at you, AoC and WARhammer).
I'm suprised that no one mentioned that we Mac users had a virus known as Oompa-Loompa [about.com] starting on Valentine's Day, 2006.
Unfortunately, it's not technically a virus. The Oompa-Loompa trojan installs itself to the user's ~/Library directory and runs when the user runs iChat. A trojan requires user interaction to launch, and doesn't self-propagate. There has still to this day been no virus or malware on Mac OS X that didn't require user interaction and stupidity to propagate itself.
This is possible because the default user can write to the applications folder without needing a password. Thus any application you run on OSX can silently modify iTunes, Safari, iPhoto, whatever.
That's not true. The user can write to ~/Applications, but hardly any applications are ever stored there, especially iTunes, Safari, iPhoto, and the bundled Mac OSX Applications. They are all stored under the root in/Applications, and OS X most assuredly WILL ask you for an administrator password before modifying anything there.
OSX might be immune to worms, it is *not* immune to viruses.
Your argument is invalid, because your basic premise is false, QED.
Now think about this: Many people have 50 year, $500,000 mortgages as a result of the housing bubble. With the economic spike done and over with, what remains?
You bring up a very good point that I hadn't thought of before. I think I know the republican/fascist solution to this problem:
Keep pumping out little republican babies as fast as possible, and preach to them in church that they must keep pumping out babies as much as they can. That keeps the bubble going, and every one of those little republifascist brats needs to get as much credit as possible and drive the bubble up forever and ever, amen.
To anyone with a brain it's completely unsustainable. The earth would run out of natural resources before the third or fourth generation of credit babies, but to those of us that will only be alive a few more decades (rich, white men), it's a wet dream.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, were raided today for distributing a circumvention device as defined under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, 17 USC 1201a.
The circumvention device in question was called How to set the clock, available from a nefarious den of black market hacker activity known in the hacker underground as the "Windows Help and How-to" website.
"These criminal hackers cost our economy an estimated $4,523 quintillion dollars in the last year by promoting piracy, terrorism, drug abuse, and the growing new epidemic of late middle-age virginity," said Jack Me Hoff, of the Business Software Alliance. "If we let these criminal enterprises get away with this, our entire economy will be ruined."
When did Slashdot ever care about having "relevance"? It's always been "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters..." (to us), who cares if it matters to you?
In any modern operating system, including Windows , swap isn't just used for out of physical memory conditions. It's also used to "page out" portions of the operating system and libraries, shared objects, dlls, etc., that aren't being used at the moment. This actually speeds your system up by allowing more memory to be used as disk read/write cache.
I've looked at Linux boxes with 64GB of memory in them and only using 25% of that. I usually get asked by someone, "wasn't 64GB enough? Why is there some usage in swap right now?" It's normal, I explain. The kernel just pages out sections of Linux that aren't needed, to free up more RAM for filesystem caching.
I think perhaps Windows 7 just has a more aggressive way of doing this, probably because if you need to use some obscure Windows Directmedia SuperDRM doubleplusgood Plugin X, it's just as fast to reload it out of swap into memory as it is to load the binary from disk. But 99% of home users will never load that plugin so it can stay safely swapped out, giving you more precious memory for applications and disk cache.
I've also done enough BES deployments to know that Blackberry is incredibly secure, as long as you consider triple-DES to be secure. Keys are generated locally on the BES server and transmitted securely over a serial 9600bps connection directly to the blackberry. This means that keys never pass over the wire. Communication is then encrypted end-to-end from handheld to server without any key escrow. This is a well designed crypto system.
The only real risk I could see is if hackers were somehow able to compromise the BES and steal keys, or compromise the handheld itself and steal keys. Also, triple-DES has been around for quite some time and might not be as secure now as it was several years ago.
Other than that, Blackberry has a very secure system, although maybe not secure enough for "state secrets".
That sounds suspiciously like the Vista business plan. Remember back in 2001, we were experiencing an economic slump, although Microsoft was a strong company that could definitely ride it out. Look how well it worked out for them. I suppose they can continue to do that and hope the cash reserves from the good years carry them through the bad ones. But, eventually, it looks as if the consumer market will migrate to Apple systems and away from Microsoft.
They are all the same. If you look at the "active ingredients", you can see they all contain some percentage (around 0.16%) flouride. There are prescription toothpastes with higher flouride content that your dentist can prescribe for you, but you usually only need it if you are trying to rebuild or strengthen your enamel.
Don't use Listerine. It has alcohol in it which can cause mouth cancer, and other problems. Use an alcohol free mouthwash like Crest.
Guild member, you say? Screw modern medicine, the next time I get sick I'm asking level 80 Night Elf Priest Healzalot to work his magic on me... And if that doesn't work, I'll just scream over Ventrilo about how I "need a res pls kthx."
I'd rather see the vast majority of them serving 10-20...
What part of the constitution being the highest law of the land don't you understand? The NSA is a government entity, and all government entities are governed by the constitution. You can't just pick and choose and create a shadow government that claims it doesn't have to obey the basic written law of our country. Of course, that seems to be what the Bush administration has done over the last 8 years.
It may not be the same implementation, but Solaris on Sparc has built in ECC across all data paths, including CPU -> memory, CPU -> I/O, etc. I believe it is a combination of hardware and software (kernel) that does this.
The article, I believe, is talking about implementing the same level of software checking in x86 versions of the operating systems mentioned.
You might not understand why we need it, but trust me, it is needed. Not all storage device drivers are created equally, and some will happily report to the kernel that the write operation was successful even if it wasn't, and you end up with corrupted data. When Oracle operates on a trusted environment like Solaris on Sparc, this type of integrity is built in to the operating system and it's not necessary to do a read after write to verify the data was written correctly. On Linux, and other untrusted operating systems where this doesn't happen, Oracle has to do a read after write to make sure the data was written correctly. This slows things down quite a bit.
I look at the recruit-a-friend program as a way of Blizzard evening the playing field for new players that are just starting the game. Sure, those of us that have been playing for years have quested and grinded all the way up to 60, then 70, now 80, the hard way. We did it before they eased the leveling curve, when the grind from 20-30 was about 40 hours of mind-numbing, boring gameplay.
The fact is, the newer content is a lot better than the older content. If you had the same leveling curve that existed when the game was first released, new players would have to play hundreds of hours before they even got to see any new content at all. It's just too much to tell a brand new player: "Sure, this content you're playing right now sucks and reminds you of 2004, but just keep going for another 500 hours, you'll get to the good part of the game, I promise."
Most normal people that might be interested in WoW because they heard how much fun it is from their friends, are not going to invest 500 hours in 4 year old, somewhat dated content, just to get to the "good parts."
Blizzard made a good decision to create recruit-a-friend. The XP bonus only lasts until level 60, so it allows players to quickly (but not too quickly) fast forward to the good parts of the game.
How is that a bad thing? Oh yeah, the people that hate it are the elitists that love to sit around in Dalaran showing off their "L33T EPIX!!111!!1! OMG" and feel special because they play longer hours and have less of a life.
Oh god, if Bill Roper is there it is most likely doomed to failure. Can you say "flagshipped"? I used to really admire the guy, but after the clusterfuck that was Hellgate London and his refusal to take any responsibility for it's failure and demise, I will never again buy a product made by him.
And CoH and CoV were really good games. I do have a lot of hope for the DC Universe, but it could end up sucking if Atari ruins it. Also, the trailer for Star Trek looks very nice.
Of course a good manager doesn't just do everything for their guild members, or their employees. Face it, in the workplace, you have a reason to come to work: to get paid. Still, managers that get their employees to perform well usually have an interest in making sure their employees are healthy, happy, and have the right tools to do the job. This is what I mean when I say "catering to their needs". It's not making coffee for them or giving them free stuff to keep them happy.
I suspect you wouldn't last very long as a GM with that type of attitude.
Actually, I feel the opposite. I played AoC and WAR up to max level, and once you get to max level there is pretty much nothing to do, especially in AoC, but also in WAR. Sure, you can trade keeps all day long with the other faction hoping for a gold loot bag, which you will probably never get because somebody cheesed their contribution and outrolled everyone (see, I have played WAR in tier 4). Raid content is non-existent, gear is terrible for anything other than beating the few raid bosses in the enemy city.
On the other hand, WotLK has a huge amount of gear, raiding, large open world PvP with Wintergrasp that has real rewards (ie gear that doesn't suck). When you get to max level in WoW, it's just the beginning of establishing your character through gear.
Clearly you have never led or been a part of a 25 man (or 40 man back in the day) raid. Managing a raid is one of the most difficult management experiences I have ever seen. How many managers have regular conference calls (Ventrilo) with 25 people and have to cater to all of their needs, educate them on tactics, put up with inter-personal conflicts (loot drama, etc.), and accomplish goals?
Don't trivialize it because you've probably never participated in a well run raiding guild, but it takes a lot of management experience. It takes a lot of management experience to get 25 people that probably wouldn't get along in real life and smooth over all of their egos and get them to organize and come together to accomplish a goal.
Unfortunately, no it doesn't pass this test because there are still several gryphon flights between cities that will take longer than 10 minutes.
I wish they made travel a little bit easier in WoW; it is a great game, but travel time is the one annoying factor. They need to just put portals (ala Dalaran) in every city that lead to all of the capital cities, like you would find on a private server. I tried a private server briefly and having portals everywhere to make travel easier was a godsend.
They have done a good job of eliminating most of the annoying parts of MMOs, even the new Death Knight doesn't have to worry about mana or rage, you simply have rune cooldowns that keep you from spamming your big damage abilities too often. They've done a masterful job at making the quests fun as well.
Now if only they could reduce the annoyance of travel time.
I think perhaps the thing that has shocked me the most about the failed war on (some) drugs is learning about what the cartels are doing in Mexico that import into America. They have been having bloody, violent war in the streets to determine who is allowed to control the export/import into America. While we can sit all safe and secure in our homes in America, confident that our government and police force is doing what it can to keep drugs out of the hands of our children, mexicans are being gunned down in the streets by rival drug cartels. We have externalized our war on drugs and of course it hits those poor countries like Mexico and Columbia where the drugs are produced the most. The most shocking thing I heard about is that one of the drug cartels, who have resorted to kidnapping children and holding them for ransom to raise money, injected a young child in the heart with battery acid. These cruel and thoughtless monsters have been bred by prohibition.
It's time to end prohibition. It's the only humane thing to do.
I agree that this potential monopoly should probably be broken up, but why is it that the state only did this because Microsoft lobbyists bribed them to? It seems like justice in America only works if you have sufficient money and lobbyists to buy that justice.
Unfortunately, that's the reason that I quit as well. The game was a blast, and visually, the best MMO I've ever played, but after I got to level 80 there was nothing, I mean nothing to do. Keep sieges were so broken as to be completely unplayable, and the game mechanics pretty much ensured that nobody ever participated in them.
An MMO shouldn't just be "get to max level then retire, you're done." WoW has an amazing end-game. It is truly to the point where level 70 or 80 is just the beginning of your character's progress. If any MMO wants to capture a long-term audience like WoW has, they need to think of end game and what all of those players will do when they get to level 80 or whatever the max level is.
Having a few broken raid instances and a few epic pieces of gear and completely broken itemization is not acceptable any more, yet all of these new MMOs that are released seem to be exactly that (I'm looking at you, AoC and WARhammer).
Except any attempt to write to /Applications, even by an administrative user, will result in a password dialog box.
What part of this security model do you not understand?
Unfortunately, it's not technically a virus. The Oompa-Loompa trojan installs itself to the user's ~/Library directory and runs when the user runs iChat. A trojan requires user interaction to launch, and doesn't self-propagate. There has still to this day been no virus or malware on Mac OS X that didn't require user interaction and stupidity to propagate itself.
That's not true. The user can write to ~/Applications, but hardly any applications are ever stored there, especially iTunes, Safari, iPhoto, and the bundled Mac OSX Applications. They are all stored under the root in /Applications, and OS X most assuredly WILL ask you for an administrator password before modifying anything there.
Your argument is invalid, because your basic premise is false, QED.
You bring up a very good point that I hadn't thought of before. I think I know the republican/fascist solution to this problem:
Keep pumping out little republican babies as fast as possible, and preach to them in church that they must keep pumping out babies as much as they can. That keeps the bubble going, and every one of those little republifascist brats needs to get as much credit as possible and drive the bubble up forever and ever, amen.
To anyone with a brain it's completely unsustainable. The earth would run out of natural resources before the third or fourth generation of credit babies, but to those of us that will only be alive a few more decades (rich, white men), it's a wet dream.