Because you want them to be do-nothing files when you aren't running in a DE (eg. logging in from a text-mode console or via SSH). Or at least that's MHO.
Fast, simple fix for this: make.desktop files scripts. Start them with "#!/usr/bin/false" or something so that if just executed from the command line they don't do anything, just fail. Gnome and KDE expect all entries to start with that and be executable. If they're executable, they act normally. If they aren't executable, the contents or their properties are displayed instead. If they don't start with the hash-bang line, the interface prompts the user for whether they want to display or execute the entry.
A fancy elaboration could register a binary-format handler (similar to the one Wine registers) that would recognize the "[Desktop Entry]" starting the file as a binary format and, if the file was executable, trigger the interface to act on the entry. That could remove the need for the hash-bang first line, but there's some other potential holes I'd have to analyze for impact.
I advocate the "Don't run as root." position for two reasons. One, it builds good habits from the start, both for users and for software vendors. It gets users used to running as ordinary users, and conditions them to expect the system to function correctly without administrative privileges except when explicitly doing administrative tasks. We've seen on Windows how many problems keep sticking around simply because of habits users have developed over the years. Inertia works, so put it to good use instead of bad. If you teach users good habits initially, they're likely to stick with them. And it gets software vendors used to living in a world without administrative privileges. When most users expect not to need admin privileges to use software, their reaction to software that expects admin privileges is to go "WTF? Why do you need that again?" and to go with other software if the vendor insists on requiring the user to break their existing habits (users are lazy and don't like changing their ways, remember). That yields a feedback loop: vendors produce software that doesn't require admin privileges because users react badly to stuff that demands admin rights for no good reason, and users react badly to software that demands admin privileges for no good reason because 99% of the software they work with "just works" without admin privileges being needed.
It's also a safety net. If I manage to bork up my user account, root's still sitting there untouched and I can still log in and repair the damage. It's like having a spare set of car keys in your wallet: you won't lock yourself out often, but when you do it's an incredible relief to pull out your wallet and find you don't have to call for help.
It does make a big difference in clean-up, though. With the malware not being able to get administrative privileges, it can't get into root's environment. That means that you can log in as root and the malware won't get a chance to take over, and then you can safely use all your scanning and clean-up tools without having the malware disable or circumvent them. Contrast this with how thoroughly rootkits can hide on Windows systems.
It's still dangerous, make no mistake. Once the malware's running locally, it can try local exploits to escalate to root access. But there's a lot fewer of those on Linux systems than on Windows, and they're a lot harder to exploit, and anything that doesn't successfully exploit them will be much easier to detect and remove. This is a significant win compared to Windows.
NB: nothing will protect a system from it's owner's stupidity. If the user insists on being willfully stupid, they're in a position to bypass any and all protections on the system. The only protection is to keep them away from the keyboard.
The Internet itself isn't broken, not by a long shot. What's broken are certain applications that run across it.
And even then whether they're broken is arguable. Take SMTP for instance. One of the big complaints seems to be that SMTP doesn't make any guarantees that the sender is who they claim to be. My response to that is "And?". The USPS doesn't make any such guarantee about physical mail either, and we get along just fine anyway. It's just acknowledged that the identity of the sender isn't determined by the return address they put on the envelope, but by the claims in the letter inside and even those claims have to be verified independently of the Post Office. And when people are naive enough to believe any important letter just because it claims to be from someone without actually contacting that someone to verify it, we laugh at them. So when people say "I got an e-mail claiming to be from Bank of America and it was fake!", why don't we laugh at them and go "Well, YES! When the e-mail said there was a problem, why didn't you call BoA directly and ask about it?".
Same for Web browsers and web sites, and dozens of other applications. People want the transport layer to substitute for their own judgement and common sense. The Internet doesn't do that, any more than UPS or the USPS do. We don't need a replacement for them, do we?
They aren't. They also aren't free from liability. It's not against the law for you to borrow my car with permission. It's not against the law for you to take it off-roading on your own property, trashing the suspension and ripping the transmission out. And the fact that you didn't break any laws won't be any bar at all to my hauling you into court and holding you liable for the damage you did to my car.
If you make perverted, sick, vile comments about someone else in a public forum that rise to the status of slander or libel, you don't escape liability.
What qualifies as actionable? What the judge says is actionable. Note that that doesn't neccesarily mean it'll be found to be libelous in the end, but it's been shown to an independent judge and he's found it's sufficient in itself to provide grounds to go forward.
Your own examples show the point. In none of your cases were the actual statements put before a judge to rule on whether they're actionable or not. In all of them, only the complaintant (the teacher, or you) is making a claim and no judge has ruled on whether the facts (statements) support the claim. In this case the plaintiffs put the statements before the judge and he ruled that the statements supported a claim of libel.
Yes, your right to free speech extends to offensive speech. But as I said, the right to make an offensive or illegal statement doesn't include a right not to be held liable for that statement. It at most includes a right not to have your identity revealed until after a court's found the statements to in fact be actionable.
Seems like they're following the correct procedure here. They've identified specific posts, shown them to a judge, had the judge determine that they have a cause of action based on those specific posts, and now are proceeding to ask for the identities of the people who made those posts so they can proceed with legal action. That's in contrast to other cases where the demand is a blanket demand not based on showing that specific posts are actionable.
The right to state your views anonymously does not extend to being a shield against liability if your statements are found to be actionable.
Authors sign contracts for the use of their works by a publisher.
Exactly. Now, where did I as the buyer of a book sign a contract with either the publisher or the author? I didn't. So the terms they agreed to between themselves simply don't apply to me. Only copyright law binds me. And copyright law doesn't bar reading text aloud. It bars public performances without permission, but reading a book to myself isn't a public performance even if I do it out loud. Similarly if I have someone read the book to me, that's not a public performance (this distinction between performance and public performance is why you can let your friends watch your television when they're over but can't invite world+dog in to watch the big game on your fancy home-theater system).
I think Mr. Aiken is going to find himself in the position the SFWA president was in back in 2007: angering the readers upon whom the members of the organization he heads depend for their livelihood and, as a result, the members of the organization (who tend to dislike things that threaten to reduce their sales numbers).
First, collect a library of Windows-related security breaches in the last year, paying particular attention to ones that made major headlines or that cost companies money and/or reputation. When your customers call, hand them that library as evidence that it's not open-source that has the major, public security problem. Then tell them to ask that Microsoft rep to identify the last major security breach involving the open-source software they run, and to provide the third-party references of the sort that you provided to substantiate the existence of the problem. Be prepared for the MS rep to provide examples of vulnerabilities that were patched before a breach occurred, and note to your clients that you're giving examples of breaches that actually happened after customers took every precaution recommended by the vendor.
If you really want to sandbag the MS rep, collect a library of the few open-source-related breaches that've happened. Give your clients a side-by-side of the two, which should make it glaringly obvious which of the two has the better track record. One thing you can point to here are cases such as Firefox vulnerabilities where the vulnerability existed and could be exploited only when the software was running under Windows and didn't exist when the software was run under other OSes (indicating that the flaws are specific to the proprietary Windows environment). Doing this yourself undercuts the MS rep when he tries to brush it off with "But open-source has problems too.".
First, what problem are they trying to solve with this encryption? Some problems encryption won't solve, and it can create worse ones.
Is the encryption even going to work? Where I work we found out that the whole-disk encryption works fine when people shut their computers off and then boot them back up. But when you just suspend/hibernate a laptop it resumes exactly where it was, with the encryption software decrypting the disk exactly as normal, without prompting for any passphrase. And 99% of our users used suspend/hibernate rather than powering off, since battery life was the same and it was a lot slower to go through the full boot process. So the encryption wasn't protecting anything, anyone who stole the laptop would have complete access to the data without needing any passphrase.
We also found that the encryption made disk recovery impossible. One of our developers had his laptop fail. Motherboard problem, the disk was completely fine but the laptop itself had to be replaced. We didn't have any of that model of laptop (not made anymore), we couldn't use that drive as the boot disk for the new laptop and it wasn't possible to enter the boot-time password for it using an external USB disk adapter. So, complete loss of all data on the disk, even though the disk was completely intact and functional, because there wasn't any way for the authorized user to decrypt it to get the data back off.
And many of the problems can be avoided completely. For instance, I use RDP to get into my office desktop from home or a laptop using a VPN and an RDP client (built into Windows XP, or rdesktop on Linux). I don't have to worry about the laptop, since there's never any sensitive data on it. Anything sensitive stays tucked away on the office desktop, safely behind the corporate firewall. I use similar remote access to my main home desktop for my own data, e-mail and such. This won't work for everyone, since it requires the laptop be in addition to a secure desktop or server, but when it works it makes encryption on the laptop completely unneccesary.
Except for the part where he never said #2. He said he was worried about Firefox becoming another monopoly, but he never said bundling would contribute to that.
But doesn't the general history of click throughs being upheld by the courts suggest that the principle is right - that it is, despite what I agree is a disturbing point you make - a valid contract. The issue is the clauses and whether they are lawful in the jurisdiction and not unconscionable?
The problem is that so far, in every click-through case I've read about, the user started off by admitting they'd accepted the agreement and then trying to find the agreement invalid. That's a dead loss from the start. The difference here is starting with the assertion that I have not accepted the agreement, and that I do not need to accept the agreement to use the software since I have all the rights I need from my having paid for and received possession of my copy and through copyright law. The question then becomes the rather different one of does the copyright owner now have any legal right to prevent lawful access to my own property in my possession, and if they try whether I have the right to remove, bypass or ignore their attempts. It's back to that piece of tape: if the car dealer doesn't own the car anymore and has no legal right to prevent me from getting in to it or demanding additional terms from me, can he legally object to my ignoring his unlawful piece of tape and hold me to his interpretation of it?
Except that that goes back to a situation we discussed in business law classes. Take the case where you've paid the seller for the goods, he's accepted your payment, and all that's left is for him to actually deliver the goods. If the goods are still in his possession, say on his loading dock, and he won't give you access to them, you have to go through the authorities to get them (or sue him for non-delivery, demanding your payment back). But if he's released the goods into your possession but is preventing your access, eg. he's shipped them to you but the shipping container's sealed with locks and he won't give you the keys, being owner and in possession of the goods you're allowed to call a locksmith to remove the locks and gain access to your property. You can't unduly damage the seller's property in the process, but you aren't helpless.
Applying that reasoning to the case where the seller delivers the goods sealed with a piece of tape saying "By breaking this seal you agree to additional terms contained inside.", breaking that tape would be legally meaningless. You own the goods, the seller has delivered the goods into your possession, the seller has no more legal right to demand agreement to terms regarding your property.
Another analogous situation: you pay for your groceries, take your bags and head to the door. On the way, a supermarket employee stops you and asks you to complete a survey. You refuse and he says "I'm sorry, we can't let you leave with your groceries until you do.". Not only can you ignore his demand, if he tries to stop you you can call the cops and have him arrested for unlawful restraint.
Which all comes to the question: if the seller has accepted your payment and delivered the software into your possession, does he have any legal right to demand you agree to additional terms at all? If he doesn't, what gives any legal force to the idea that doing what's neccesary for you to gain access to your goods constitutes agreement to a demand the seller has no legal right to make?
Probably, but that'd be more work. I'd have to write a custom program to parse the requested path looking for things that looked like image requests, and it'd probably miss a lot of them because nothing requires an image request to be for a file ending in.gif/.jpg/etc.. And 404 Not Found works just fine to trigger the browser's broken-image placeholder, so doing better's IMO more effort than it's worth.
I found it much less intrusive once every host in the adimpact.com domain started serving up 404 Not Found for all pages.
DNS is your friend, especially when your nameserver is declared a master for that domain and the zonefile contains a wildcard record pointing all names to the IP address of your own dedicated nothing-there Web server.
We aren't talking about tech. Tech changes quickly. People change slowly, if at all. Look at how long it took from the passage of the first civil-rights laws in the US to the point where blacks could assume fair treatment everywhere without having to think twice about it or push for it and where the Klan was non-existent as a political force. Oh, that's right, we haven't gotten there yet! Witness David Duke. Do you think Russia changes faster than the US?
Consider this: Putin grew up in the Russia of the 60s. Do you think he forgot all of that and changed his basic attitudes when a simple wall came down? I doubt it.
Not very different. Face it, Windows 7 is simply Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft just can't call it that because of the bad reputation Vista gained thanks to MS's mishandling and misapprehension of what users actually want. What we're seeing isn't a shortened beta cycle for Windows 7, it's a longer-than-usual testing/beta cycle for a service pack.
Actually it's fairly easy for them to find the users that're using WoWGlider. But it's unattractive from a PR and subscriptions standpoint to kick their own paying users off. They'd rather kill Glider without having to target their own users, hence the convoluted arguments and tortured logic to try and find some way of doing that.
IMO they should have gone after him on other grounds. Every WoW subscriber has to agree to the EULA to access the servers. The only purpose of WoWGlider is to break that EULA, and the Glider's author knows it. I'm fairly sure Blizzard could easily come up with advertising from that author touting those violations as reasons to buy Glider. And I'm fairly sure that inducing a breach of contract is a tort with legal liability attached. That would fit the facts better than the tortured appeal to the DMCA does.
Possibly, but I'd direct you to Robert Heinlein's essays on how to deal with Russians and the Russian system, "Pravda Means Truth" and "Inside Intourist", both in Expanded Universe. These were written based on personal experience travelling inside Russia, with his wife learning Russian fluently enough to talk to people there without needing a translator. They provide quite a bit of insight into why Putin reacts the way he does.
But first you have to have them. Case in point: the DARPA autonomous-driving challenge. Watch the videos of it sometime. It's like a Marx Brothers routine in places. And those are the best we have. The cutting edge, leaps and bounds beyond the next best thing. Yet the best of them can't go more than a few blocks without making a hard left for no apparent reason and driving straight into a building. And this is what you're proposing we explore Mars with? Somehow, I don't think that's going to end well.
Because, for most of what needs done, we don't have anything even a fraction as capable as a human being. If we could build completely automated factories and mines, why haven't we done so on Earth? It's not like we're lacking in factories and mines. But nobody's been able to do it. We can automate things when everything's going right, but when something breaks or goes wrong we need to send a human in to clean up the mess and fix the problem. Space isn't going to be much different, other than there being a lot more things to break or go wrong and need fixing.
Take the simple problem of getting from point A to point B in a car in an obstructed environment. The absolute best we can manage in autonomous vehicles is something that can crawl along at 5-10mph and maybe, possibly, make it a few blocks before it crashes into something, high-centers itself or otherwise does something fatally bad. And that's on a course where the obstacles are stationary. A human, by contrast, can drive a car hundreds of miles, travelling at speeds upwards of 75mph, on roads with dozens of other vehicles also doing 75+mph mere feet away and making erratic, unpredictable moves, and do it while carrying on a conversation with someone else the whole time. That's quite a difference in capability.
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Because you want them to be do-nothing files when you aren't running in a DE (eg. logging in from a text-mode console or via SSH). Or at least that's MHO.
Fast, simple fix for this: make .desktop files scripts. Start them with "#!/usr/bin/false" or something so that if just executed from the command line they don't do anything, just fail. Gnome and KDE expect all entries to start with that and be executable. If they're executable, they act normally. If they aren't executable, the contents or their properties are displayed instead. If they don't start with the hash-bang line, the interface prompts the user for whether they want to display or execute the entry.
A fancy elaboration could register a binary-format handler (similar to the one Wine registers) that would recognize the "[Desktop Entry]" starting the file as a binary format and, if the file was executable, trigger the interface to act on the entry. That could remove the need for the hash-bang first line, but there's some other potential holes I'd have to analyze for impact.
I advocate the "Don't run as root." position for two reasons. One, it builds good habits from the start, both for users and for software vendors. It gets users used to running as ordinary users, and conditions them to expect the system to function correctly without administrative privileges except when explicitly doing administrative tasks. We've seen on Windows how many problems keep sticking around simply because of habits users have developed over the years. Inertia works, so put it to good use instead of bad. If you teach users good habits initially, they're likely to stick with them. And it gets software vendors used to living in a world without administrative privileges. When most users expect not to need admin privileges to use software, their reaction to software that expects admin privileges is to go "WTF? Why do you need that again?" and to go with other software if the vendor insists on requiring the user to break their existing habits (users are lazy and don't like changing their ways, remember). That yields a feedback loop: vendors produce software that doesn't require admin privileges because users react badly to stuff that demands admin rights for no good reason, and users react badly to software that demands admin privileges for no good reason because 99% of the software they work with "just works" without admin privileges being needed.
It's also a safety net. If I manage to bork up my user account, root's still sitting there untouched and I can still log in and repair the damage. It's like having a spare set of car keys in your wallet: you won't lock yourself out often, but when you do it's an incredible relief to pull out your wallet and find you don't have to call for help.
It does make a big difference in clean-up, though. With the malware not being able to get administrative privileges, it can't get into root's environment. That means that you can log in as root and the malware won't get a chance to take over, and then you can safely use all your scanning and clean-up tools without having the malware disable or circumvent them. Contrast this with how thoroughly rootkits can hide on Windows systems.
It's still dangerous, make no mistake. Once the malware's running locally, it can try local exploits to escalate to root access. But there's a lot fewer of those on Linux systems than on Windows, and they're a lot harder to exploit, and anything that doesn't successfully exploit them will be much easier to detect and remove. This is a significant win compared to Windows.
NB: nothing will protect a system from it's owner's stupidity. If the user insists on being willfully stupid, they're in a position to bypass any and all protections on the system. The only protection is to keep them away from the keyboard.
The Internet itself isn't broken, not by a long shot. What's broken are certain applications that run across it.
And even then whether they're broken is arguable. Take SMTP for instance. One of the big complaints seems to be that SMTP doesn't make any guarantees that the sender is who they claim to be. My response to that is "And?". The USPS doesn't make any such guarantee about physical mail either, and we get along just fine anyway. It's just acknowledged that the identity of the sender isn't determined by the return address they put on the envelope, but by the claims in the letter inside and even those claims have to be verified independently of the Post Office. And when people are naive enough to believe any important letter just because it claims to be from someone without actually contacting that someone to verify it, we laugh at them. So when people say "I got an e-mail claiming to be from Bank of America and it was fake!", why don't we laugh at them and go "Well, YES! When the e-mail said there was a problem, why didn't you call BoA directly and ask about it?".
Same for Web browsers and web sites, and dozens of other applications. People want the transport layer to substitute for their own judgement and common sense. The Internet doesn't do that, any more than UPS or the USPS do. We don't need a replacement for them, do we?
They aren't. They also aren't free from liability. It's not against the law for you to borrow my car with permission. It's not against the law for you to take it off-roading on your own property, trashing the suspension and ripping the transmission out. And the fact that you didn't break any laws won't be any bar at all to my hauling you into court and holding you liable for the damage you did to my car.
If you make perverted, sick, vile comments about someone else in a public forum that rise to the status of slander or libel, you don't escape liability.
What qualifies as actionable? What the judge says is actionable. Note that that doesn't neccesarily mean it'll be found to be libelous in the end, but it's been shown to an independent judge and he's found it's sufficient in itself to provide grounds to go forward.
Your own examples show the point. In none of your cases were the actual statements put before a judge to rule on whether they're actionable or not. In all of them, only the complaintant (the teacher, or you) is making a claim and no judge has ruled on whether the facts (statements) support the claim. In this case the plaintiffs put the statements before the judge and he ruled that the statements supported a claim of libel.
Yes, your right to free speech extends to offensive speech. But as I said, the right to make an offensive or illegal statement doesn't include a right not to be held liable for that statement. It at most includes a right not to have your identity revealed until after a court's found the statements to in fact be actionable.
Seems like they're following the correct procedure here. They've identified specific posts, shown them to a judge, had the judge determine that they have a cause of action based on those specific posts, and now are proceeding to ask for the identities of the people who made those posts so they can proceed with legal action. That's in contrast to other cases where the demand is a blanket demand not based on showing that specific posts are actionable.
The right to state your views anonymously does not extend to being a shield against liability if your statements are found to be actionable.
Authors sign contracts for the use of their works by a publisher.
Exactly. Now, where did I as the buyer of a book sign a contract with either the publisher or the author? I didn't. So the terms they agreed to between themselves simply don't apply to me. Only copyright law binds me. And copyright law doesn't bar reading text aloud. It bars public performances without permission, but reading a book to myself isn't a public performance even if I do it out loud. Similarly if I have someone read the book to me, that's not a public performance (this distinction between performance and public performance is why you can let your friends watch your television when they're over but can't invite world+dog in to watch the big game on your fancy home-theater system).
I think Mr. Aiken is going to find himself in the position the SFWA president was in back in 2007: angering the readers upon whom the members of the organization he heads depend for their livelihood and, as a result, the members of the organization (who tend to dislike things that threaten to reduce their sales numbers).
So reading a book you own aloud to yourself is copyright infringement? I think not, and I think any judge would agree with me.
First, collect a library of Windows-related security breaches in the last year, paying particular attention to ones that made major headlines or that cost companies money and/or reputation. When your customers call, hand them that library as evidence that it's not open-source that has the major, public security problem. Then tell them to ask that Microsoft rep to identify the last major security breach involving the open-source software they run, and to provide the third-party references of the sort that you provided to substantiate the existence of the problem. Be prepared for the MS rep to provide examples of vulnerabilities that were patched before a breach occurred, and note to your clients that you're giving examples of breaches that actually happened after customers took every precaution recommended by the vendor.
If you really want to sandbag the MS rep, collect a library of the few open-source-related breaches that've happened. Give your clients a side-by-side of the two, which should make it glaringly obvious which of the two has the better track record. One thing you can point to here are cases such as Firefox vulnerabilities where the vulnerability existed and could be exploited only when the software was running under Windows and didn't exist when the software was run under other OSes (indicating that the flaws are specific to the proprietary Windows environment). Doing this yourself undercuts the MS rep when he tries to brush it off with "But open-source has problems too.".
First, what problem are they trying to solve with this encryption? Some problems encryption won't solve, and it can create worse ones.
Is the encryption even going to work? Where I work we found out that the whole-disk encryption works fine when people shut their computers off and then boot them back up. But when you just suspend/hibernate a laptop it resumes exactly where it was, with the encryption software decrypting the disk exactly as normal, without prompting for any passphrase. And 99% of our users used suspend/hibernate rather than powering off, since battery life was the same and it was a lot slower to go through the full boot process. So the encryption wasn't protecting anything, anyone who stole the laptop would have complete access to the data without needing any passphrase.
We also found that the encryption made disk recovery impossible. One of our developers had his laptop fail. Motherboard problem, the disk was completely fine but the laptop itself had to be replaced. We didn't have any of that model of laptop (not made anymore), we couldn't use that drive as the boot disk for the new laptop and it wasn't possible to enter the boot-time password for it using an external USB disk adapter. So, complete loss of all data on the disk, even though the disk was completely intact and functional, because there wasn't any way for the authorized user to decrypt it to get the data back off.
And many of the problems can be avoided completely. For instance, I use RDP to get into my office desktop from home or a laptop using a VPN and an RDP client (built into Windows XP, or rdesktop on Linux). I don't have to worry about the laptop, since there's never any sensitive data on it. Anything sensitive stays tucked away on the office desktop, safely behind the corporate firewall. I use similar remote access to my main home desktop for my own data, e-mail and such. This won't work for everyone, since it requires the laptop be in addition to a secure desktop or server, but when it works it makes encryption on the laptop completely unneccesary.
Except for the part where he never said #2. He said he was worried about Firefox becoming another monopoly, but he never said bundling would contribute to that.
But doesn't the general history of click throughs being upheld by the courts suggest that the principle is right - that it is, despite what I agree is a disturbing point you make - a valid contract. The issue is the clauses and whether they are lawful in the jurisdiction and not unconscionable?
The problem is that so far, in every click-through case I've read about, the user started off by admitting they'd accepted the agreement and then trying to find the agreement invalid. That's a dead loss from the start. The difference here is starting with the assertion that I have not accepted the agreement, and that I do not need to accept the agreement to use the software since I have all the rights I need from my having paid for and received possession of my copy and through copyright law. The question then becomes the rather different one of does the copyright owner now have any legal right to prevent lawful access to my own property in my possession, and if they try whether I have the right to remove, bypass or ignore their attempts. It's back to that piece of tape: if the car dealer doesn't own the car anymore and has no legal right to prevent me from getting in to it or demanding additional terms from me, can he legally object to my ignoring his unlawful piece of tape and hold me to his interpretation of it?
Except that that goes back to a situation we discussed in business law classes. Take the case where you've paid the seller for the goods, he's accepted your payment, and all that's left is for him to actually deliver the goods. If the goods are still in his possession, say on his loading dock, and he won't give you access to them, you have to go through the authorities to get them (or sue him for non-delivery, demanding your payment back). But if he's released the goods into your possession but is preventing your access, eg. he's shipped them to you but the shipping container's sealed with locks and he won't give you the keys, being owner and in possession of the goods you're allowed to call a locksmith to remove the locks and gain access to your property. You can't unduly damage the seller's property in the process, but you aren't helpless.
Applying that reasoning to the case where the seller delivers the goods sealed with a piece of tape saying "By breaking this seal you agree to additional terms contained inside.", breaking that tape would be legally meaningless. You own the goods, the seller has delivered the goods into your possession, the seller has no more legal right to demand agreement to terms regarding your property.
Another analogous situation: you pay for your groceries, take your bags and head to the door. On the way, a supermarket employee stops you and asks you to complete a survey. You refuse and he says "I'm sorry, we can't let you leave with your groceries until you do.". Not only can you ignore his demand, if he tries to stop you you can call the cops and have him arrested for unlawful restraint.
Which all comes to the question: if the seller has accepted your payment and delivered the software into your possession, does he have any legal right to demand you agree to additional terms at all? If he doesn't, what gives any legal force to the idea that doing what's neccesary for you to gain access to your goods constitutes agreement to a demand the seller has no legal right to make?
AdBlock Plus, the replacement for Adblock. It includes automatic updates (disableable) of the filter list.
Probably, but that'd be more work. I'd have to write a custom program to parse the requested path looking for things that looked like image requests, and it'd probably miss a lot of them because nothing requires an image request to be for a file ending in .gif/.jpg/etc.. And 404 Not Found works just fine to trigger the browser's broken-image placeholder, so doing better's IMO more effort than it's worth.
I found it much less intrusive once every host in the adimpact.com domain started serving up 404 Not Found for all pages.
DNS is your friend, especially when your nameserver is declared a master for that domain and the zonefile contains a wildcard record pointing all names to the IP address of your own dedicated nothing-there Web server.
We aren't talking about tech. Tech changes quickly. People change slowly, if at all. Look at how long it took from the passage of the first civil-rights laws in the US to the point where blacks could assume fair treatment everywhere without having to think twice about it or push for it and where the Klan was non-existent as a political force. Oh, that's right, we haven't gotten there yet! Witness David Duke. Do you think Russia changes faster than the US?
Consider this: Putin grew up in the Russia of the 60s. Do you think he forgot all of that and changed his basic attitudes when a simple wall came down? I doubt it.
Not very different. Face it, Windows 7 is simply Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft just can't call it that because of the bad reputation Vista gained thanks to MS's mishandling and misapprehension of what users actually want. What we're seeing isn't a shortened beta cycle for Windows 7, it's a longer-than-usual testing/beta cycle for a service pack.
Actually it's fairly easy for them to find the users that're using WoWGlider. But it's unattractive from a PR and subscriptions standpoint to kick their own paying users off. They'd rather kill Glider without having to target their own users, hence the convoluted arguments and tortured logic to try and find some way of doing that.
IMO they should have gone after him on other grounds. Every WoW subscriber has to agree to the EULA to access the servers. The only purpose of WoWGlider is to break that EULA, and the Glider's author knows it. I'm fairly sure Blizzard could easily come up with advertising from that author touting those violations as reasons to buy Glider. And I'm fairly sure that inducing a breach of contract is a tort with legal liability attached. That would fit the facts better than the tortured appeal to the DMCA does.
Minority Report.
Possibly, but I'd direct you to Robert Heinlein's essays on how to deal with Russians and the Russian system, "Pravda Means Truth" and "Inside Intourist", both in Expanded Universe. These were written based on personal experience travelling inside Russia, with his wife learning Russian fluently enough to talk to people there without needing a translator. They provide quite a bit of insight into why Putin reacts the way he does.
But first you have to have them. Case in point: the DARPA autonomous-driving challenge. Watch the videos of it sometime. It's like a Marx Brothers routine in places. And those are the best we have. The cutting edge, leaps and bounds beyond the next best thing. Yet the best of them can't go more than a few blocks without making a hard left for no apparent reason and driving straight into a building. And this is what you're proposing we explore Mars with? Somehow, I don't think that's going to end well.
Because, for most of what needs done, we don't have anything even a fraction as capable as a human being. If we could build completely automated factories and mines, why haven't we done so on Earth? It's not like we're lacking in factories and mines. But nobody's been able to do it. We can automate things when everything's going right, but when something breaks or goes wrong we need to send a human in to clean up the mess and fix the problem. Space isn't going to be much different, other than there being a lot more things to break or go wrong and need fixing.
Take the simple problem of getting from point A to point B in a car in an obstructed environment. The absolute best we can manage in autonomous vehicles is something that can crawl along at 5-10mph and maybe, possibly, make it a few blocks before it crashes into something, high-centers itself or otherwise does something fatally bad. And that's on a course where the obstacles are stationary. A human, by contrast, can drive a car hundreds of miles, travelling at speeds upwards of 75mph, on roads with dozens of other vehicles also doing 75+mph mere feet away and making erratic, unpredictable moves, and do it while carrying on a conversation with someone else the whole time. That's quite a difference in capability.