Hell, the simple fact of the matter is that these games, being old hardware, don't last forever. Try finding a working copy of Zelda for NES that hasn't got a shitty home-solder job to replace the battery. They're not out there. A lot of these old games used batteries to save the data on them, and those batteries have a shelf life of about 5 years. Honestly, what's the point of having Final Fantasy if you can't save? And while yes, you CAN replace these batteries.. emulating the damn thing is a lot less hassle than pulling out an NES, hooking it up, replacing the battery after realizing it died 10 years ago, etc.
The first type of user you mention is really no threat. Does he actually get anything other than a rise out of having pirated 350 SNES games? Not really. If he doesn't get anything from it, the publisher loses nothing. All he has are some bytes on his hard drive that mean jack shit because he doesn't do anything with them. Unfortunately this is true, the way the warez piracy scene works is you have to have an archive of a bunch of shit you'll never use in hopes you find someone who has what you want and you have what they want. Warez has become a black market commodity, only when you give it to someone, you still get to keep it. Thus why companies have a hard time combatting it.
Just because it has an x86 as a CPU doesn't mean it's a PC. Old Macs and Amigas ran on a M68000 CPU. I have a SCSI card with the exact same CPU on it. Does that mean I can run MacOS/AmigaOS on my SCSI card? No, it lacks the proper memory bus and BIOS, as the Xbox lacks in common with the standard PC. People also seem to forget that the GameCube is running on what is essentially a stripped down PowerPC G3 (as the Xbox's CPU is a stripped down P3). I don't see anyone wondering if they're going to run LinuxPPC or Mac OS X on their GameCube (which is actually a far more likely scenario)
Bah, who cares about Death and Rebirth. They were just recaps of the series that Gainax used as a ploy for cash so they could finish End of. Now, End of Eva, on the other hand.. Well, let's say if you haven't seen it, get your hands on a fansub ASAP;)
I don't hate GNU software. Hell, it's great stuff. What I do get tired of, however, is everyone insisting GNU be used for everything. The truth of the matter is, as much as GNU zealots and RMS will argue otherwise, I would be honestly scared to have open source voting software run an election in this country. Because I KNOW that someone would hack it and add in half a million write in votes for Fidel Castro. This is not to say that a closed source voting system would be impregnable, but I do believe there is something to be said for security through obscurity, especially for something with actual importance.
Easybuy2000.com has sold these for about 6 months. Not that they're wonderful, but the full size eXpanium wasn't without its problems. If you really want an MP3 CD player (and they're damn cool) go with a RioVolt (or Easybuy's full size player, which is a RioVolt in different casing for $30 less) or a Pine D'Music. They don't play.ogg files, but they do play WMA and VBR encoded MP3s. Plus those cute little 3" CDs are only 170 megs, which is an order of magnitude smaller than 700..
While I realize people like to run web servers off their cable modems, I think it is @Home's duty to help stop the spread of Code Red and its derivatives. While I realize it is the system admin's responsibility to secure his/her system, if these were competent admins, they a) wouldn't be running IIS and b) if they were, it would be patched.
As we all know, this worm has gotten completely out of hand. A large number (about 1/3) of the DNS entries in my access logs trying to exploit Code Red are @Home. By cutting off these machines (which STILL aren't patched, even after a week of massive media coverage) AT&T is doing the rest of the internet a favor.
I realize a lot of legitimate servers that are secured also get screwed by this, but no war is without its casualties. Affected? Use another port. If you're running a corporate site in high demand and can't move, you probably shouldn't be running it off a cable modem anyway.
A lot of people also like to pipe up with "Well I'm paying $60 a month for it, I should be able to run a web server!" No, @Home sells these things with the intent of them being used for web browsing. The fact that you can run a homebrew webserver is merely an added bonus, not part of what @Home is selling the bandwidth for.
The fact is, @Home owns the network and you pay them to let you use it. They really can do whatever they want unless there's such a huge consumer backlash (which there won't be.) So either take it or leave it.
I heartily disagree. Being a longtime Mac user (13 years) I know how much progress the Mac has made. It has come from a niche product to the Mercedes-Benz of computers (the iMac is like the $25,000 benz;) When you buy a Mac, you buy more than a computer, you buy the the whole image of the Mac. While this sounds dumb, realize that the image of most PCs is beige and duct tape. Apple sells a sleek, cool looking product, something you wouldn't be ashamed to leave on top of your desk. Plus the new OS is damn spiffy too.:)
(before you try and LART me, realize I've also been using Linux for 6 years and Windows for 4)
My house was recently flooded by tropical storm Allison and I had a couple old Macs (a IIci and a Centris 610) sitting on the floor. They were completely underwater, they're worth a grand total of MAYBE $15, but I put in a claim for them anyway. To my surprise, the insurance company gave me over $800 for both of them. Why they couldn't have done that for the other, more valuable appliances in my house, I don't know. If only I had that old, broken Ascend Max 6000 sitting on the floor...
Most of the people in these so-called "poorer" areas are what would be described as casual gamers, who play less than 5 hours a week. More than likely they're too busy working to make ends meet to have time to play video/computer games.
This study was focusing on "hardcore" gamers, who play 18+ hours a week. That's approx. 2.5 hours a day. Most gamers I know who play 18+ hours a week don't do it on a PSX or Dreamcast, they do it on a PC. PC gaming has become expensive. To play modern games decently, you need at least a GeForce 2 (See: Black and White) and gobs of CPU power, plus you have to have the cash to upgrade every 6 months to a new system to keep up. Add that to shelling out $50/mo for a broadband connection, which is necessary to compete reasonably nowadays, (not to mention live in a neighborhood where such is available) and this takes the kind of resources that lower-middle class families just don't have.
As for the argument that sports aren't as popular among the less-financially-endowed, have you ever been to a basketball court in a poor neighborhood? Expensive organized sports aren't the only places where people can play, pickup games are quite common, cheap, and a hell of a lot of fun. I'm not a social economist or anything, but I know enoug people who aren't terribly wealthy to know what actually happens.
Some things can't be taken back
on
Adobe Backs Down
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· Score: 1
I used to have a great deal of respect for Adobe. They're one of the few companies that consistantly churns out good software, and I've been using their products for about 15 years. However, after this Skylarov thing, I see Adobe for what I had always feared they'd become; just another money-grubbing big-brother corporation.
They've actually been there for a few years, I just wanted to think of them as looking out for the little guy, because they've usually been rather responsive in adding new features. Sure, Photoshop is insanely overpriced, but if you use it professionally, you'd pay ten times what Adobe charges for it. Illustrator is the same. Their products are awesome (if a bit feature heavy) but their PR department will have a tough job fixing this one.
EFNet long ago stopped being the place where the majority of the net's illegal file traffic flowed through. Warez channel ops, along with the rest of us, got fed up with all the shit and moved to DALnet. That and the DALnet administration is too busy fighting amongst themselves to do any sort of user harassment (used to be an oper there, I know) This is also why DALnet usually sports more users than EFNet. Where the files go, so go the users.
The funny thing is, these zit-faced 14 year olds who prolly will never get laid with something you or I would call a woman get some kind of rush out of wasting other peoples' resources. I work for an ISP and frequently get kiddies scanning my IP ranges looking for vulnerable DNS/sendmail servers. I doubt most of them even know what bind or sendmail IS, they just run their happy hack program through a wingate and proceed to piss off the rest of us. I vote they should be dragged out into the street and shot.
Many people seem to forget that anything can be gotten, for a price. If China wants the specs on the PS2, well, there are plenty of free dev sites out there, and it's not terribly hard to get an official PS2 dev kit. If they want a bunch of EE chips, they hire the mafia to steal a truckload of them. And it's not like there already aren't a billion pirated DVDs coming out of China. I took a trip to Mexico about a month ago, and the black market was full of Chinese bootleg DVDs. Not just copies of retail DVDs, but they had reel capture DVDs of current movies. I picked up a few, the quality is just as good as hollywood DVDs, except I paid $5 each and they came in CD jewel cases. My point? If the Chinese want to do it, they will, and if not, they won't. There's not much the US or Japan can do to stop them.
Porn, for all the grief it gets, has done more for our society than anyone realizes. Telephone sex hotlines are the reason our nation's phone system is even somewhat reliable. In the early days of video casette players, porn outsold everything else by a large margin, quickly establishing a standard and ironing out the kinks technologically for the more morally upstanding offerings to come. Streaming video? Another porn technology. Porn sites were streaming live video YEARS before RealMedia thought of it. Not that it worked very well, but it did work and the operators made a bundle.
There are two things that make the world go round: money and sex. The two have a very close relationship.
Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit. All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU, and if you don't have AltiVec or a fast CPU, you notice the slowdown. OS X is quite cool and a commendable effort, but only if you have the hardware to run it.
I'm sorry, but I don't consider AP CS a very valuable teaching tool for learning real computer science. APCS is a total load of crap. It teaches a fluffed up curriculum with little to no real applicable value. This is why most colleges don't accept AP computer science credit, because when you learn AP computer science, you learn little more than the syntax of APs version of C++. I imagine it will be the same with Java. I learned 2 years of AP computer science from a "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" book. This doesn't say I knew anything about writing halfway decent code, just that I could write shit that ran in some form (and I made an A in the class and a 5 on the AP test.)
AP, in its current form, doesn't even really get into OOP in C++. Inheritance, virtual members, pointers to functions, derived classes, etc. aren't even covered. It basically just brushes over the fact that "A class is a struct with data hiding and functions." The first year of AP Computer Science barely introduces structs, much less basic concepts like FUNCTIONS.
Honestly, people bring up the cost issue of open-source software time and time again. The thing is, in the long run, $600 spent on a copy of photoshop to a business is nothing compared to the money they'll end up making off of it. Sure, GIMP is free, but even if Photoshop were inferior, it is still the industry standard. Photoshop is pretty much bug-free, highly optimized, overloaded with features and regularly updated. The truth of the matter is, GIMP doesn't really compete with Photoshop.
What it DOES compete with, however, are the plethora of lesser image editors available (Paint Shop, Photo Soap, GraphicConverter, etc) These programs are replacable. I expect to see GIMP become a popular choice for amateurs who don't want to spend a lot of dough but still want a relatively powerful image editing tool.
I work relatively close to the publishing industry. The combo of Quark/Illustrator/Photoshop isn't going anywhere any time soon. The general attitude of the industry is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." My father's advertising agency was running on a bunch of PowerMac 7200s with Illustrator 5.5 and Photoshop 4 until 6 months ago. If what you have works and you're used to it, why change? Upgrades are a tax writeoff anyway...;)
Sony won't actually get in any trouble over this. Why not? Because they discovered it and voluntarily (and quickly) retracted the offending ads. They didn't knowingly break the rules, though the FTC will probably tell them to be more careful in the future. Personally, I never read the crap on the movie ads anyway, it's an ad, they're SUPPOSED to make you want to go see the movie.
Cops in other parts of the world just pull out their assault rifles and shoot unarmed citizens point-blank in the face. Indonesia, Isreal, China, Serbia.. This crap happens all over the world, at least in America nobody dies. Of course, the people in other countries are often rioting about things that affect them, such as freedom and other things which most Americans take for granted (and often hide behind.) If you think being tear gassed for protesting globalization of trade is bad, go to North Korea or China where you can (and likely will be) shot in the head on the spot for muttering anti-government sentiments. Put things in perspective and suddenly they don't seem so bad.
Heh, this site is legit. I first saw it about 4 years ago. I honestly think this guy either is making fun of a lot of people or is completely looney. I go for the second. Somewhat of an Ed Wood type thing going on here, methinks...
Heh, Amazon/Yahoo/EBay get 0wned all the time.. It's just that their sysadmins are on top of it and usually have it completely fixed and patched up within 5 minutes. Regardless of how evil/stupid these companies are, the people who work at them are usually very good at what they do. Regardless, it's nigh impossible to have a hack-proof server. If you get enough people trying, it will happen because human error is often the weakest link. Hell, most of the passwords Kevin Mitnik got, he didn't hack, he called up on the telephone and weaseled them out of some tool working tech support. No matter how secure the OS is, humans will be the easiest place to hack.
This is very true. Diamonds are actually much, much more common than say, rubies or emeralds. The same thing is true of gold. The only reason gold is so expensive is because most of it is tied up as specie for national economies around the world. The only reason diamonds are so expensive is because the DeBeers family has a multinational cartel set up in Africa to control the mining and sale of diamonds. Supposedly, a lot of the civil wars in Africa are masterminded by the DeBeers in order to keep their pawns in power so they can continue to control the diamond market. Quite ingenious, actually, but also quite unethical, immoral, inhumane, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, the simple fact of the matter is that these games, being old hardware, don't last forever. Try finding a working copy of Zelda for NES that hasn't got a shitty home-solder job to replace the battery. They're not out there. A lot of these old games used batteries to save the data on them, and those batteries have a shelf life of about 5 years. Honestly, what's the point of having Final Fantasy if you can't save? And while yes, you CAN replace these batteries.. emulating the damn thing is a lot less hassle than pulling out an NES, hooking it up, replacing the battery after realizing it died 10 years ago, etc.
The first type of user you mention is really no threat. Does he actually get anything other than a rise out of having pirated 350 SNES games? Not really. If he doesn't get anything from it, the publisher loses nothing. All he has are some bytes on his hard drive that mean jack shit because he doesn't do anything with them. Unfortunately this is true, the way the warez piracy scene works is you have to have an archive of a bunch of shit you'll never use in hopes you find someone who has what you want and you have what they want. Warez has become a black market commodity, only when you give it to someone, you still get to keep it. Thus why companies have a hard time combatting it.
This gives new meaning to those "Code Poet" shirts...
-Ryan
Just because it has an x86 as a CPU doesn't mean it's a PC. Old Macs and Amigas ran on a M68000 CPU. I have a SCSI card with the exact same CPU on it. Does that mean I can run MacOS/AmigaOS on my SCSI card? No, it lacks the proper memory bus and BIOS, as the Xbox lacks in common with the standard PC. People also seem to forget that the GameCube is running on what is essentially a stripped down PowerPC G3 (as the Xbox's CPU is a stripped down P3). I don't see anyone wondering if they're going to run LinuxPPC or Mac OS X on their GameCube (which is actually a far more likely scenario)
Bah, who cares about Death and Rebirth. They were just recaps of the series that Gainax used as a ploy for cash so they could finish End of. Now, End of Eva, on the other hand.. Well, let's say if you haven't seen it, get your hands on a fansub ASAP ;)
I don't hate GNU software. Hell, it's great stuff. What I do get tired of, however, is everyone insisting GNU be used for everything. The truth of the matter is, as much as GNU zealots and RMS will argue otherwise, I would be honestly scared to have open source voting software run an election in this country. Because I KNOW that someone would hack it and add in half a million write in votes for Fidel Castro. This is not to say that a closed source voting system would be impregnable, but I do believe there is something to be said for security through obscurity, especially for something with actual importance.
Easybuy2000.com has sold these for about 6 months. Not that they're wonderful, but the full size eXpanium wasn't without its problems. If you really want an MP3 CD player (and they're damn cool) go with a RioVolt (or Easybuy's full size player, which is a RioVolt in different casing for $30 less) or a Pine D'Music. They don't play .ogg files, but they do play WMA and VBR encoded MP3s. Plus those cute little 3" CDs are only 170 megs, which is an order of magnitude smaller than 700..
Yeah, I can. So they can AT&T can sell you a corporate connection and charge you 4 times as much. Sound like dirty play? It's called capitalism.
While I realize people like to run web servers off their cable modems, I think it is @Home's duty to help stop the spread of Code Red and its derivatives. While I realize it is the system admin's responsibility to secure his/her system, if these were competent admins, they a) wouldn't be running IIS and b) if they were, it would be patched.
As we all know, this worm has gotten completely out of hand. A large number (about 1/3) of the DNS entries in my access logs trying to exploit Code Red are @Home. By cutting off these machines (which STILL aren't patched, even after a week of massive media coverage) AT&T is doing the rest of the internet a favor.
I realize a lot of legitimate servers that are secured also get screwed by this, but no war is without its casualties. Affected? Use another port. If you're running a corporate site in high demand and can't move, you probably shouldn't be running it off a cable modem anyway.
A lot of people also like to pipe up with "Well I'm paying $60 a month for it, I should be able to run a web server!" No, @Home sells these things with the intent of them being used for web browsing. The fact that you can run a homebrew webserver is merely an added bonus, not part of what @Home is selling the bandwidth for.
The fact is, @Home owns the network and you pay them to let you use it. They really can do whatever they want unless there's such a huge consumer backlash (which there won't be.) So either take it or leave it.
Interesting.. I'm typing this on an iBook with a 21" VGA monitor running at 1280x1024 right now..
I heartily disagree. Being a longtime Mac user (13 years) I know how much progress the Mac has made. It has come from a niche product to the Mercedes-Benz of computers (the iMac is like the $25,000 benz ;) When you buy a Mac, you buy more than a computer, you buy the the whole image of the Mac. While this sounds dumb, realize that the image of most PCs is beige and duct tape. Apple sells a sleek, cool looking product, something you wouldn't be ashamed to leave on top of your desk. Plus the new OS is damn spiffy too. :)
(before you try and LART me, realize I've also been using Linux for 6 years and Windows for 4)
My house was recently flooded by tropical storm Allison and I had a couple old Macs (a IIci and a Centris 610) sitting on the floor. They were completely underwater, they're worth a grand total of MAYBE $15, but I put in a claim for them anyway. To my surprise, the insurance company gave me over $800 for both of them. Why they couldn't have done that for the other, more valuable appliances in my house, I don't know. If only I had that old, broken Ascend Max 6000 sitting on the floor...
Most of the people in these so-called "poorer" areas are what would be described as casual gamers, who play less than 5 hours a week. More than likely they're too busy working to make ends meet to have time to play video/computer games.
This study was focusing on "hardcore" gamers, who play 18+ hours a week. That's approx. 2.5 hours a day. Most gamers I know who play 18+ hours a week don't do it on a PSX or Dreamcast, they do it on a PC. PC gaming has become expensive. To play modern games decently, you need at least a GeForce 2 (See: Black and White) and gobs of CPU power, plus you have to have the cash to upgrade every 6 months to a new system to keep up. Add that to shelling out $50/mo for a broadband connection, which is necessary to compete reasonably nowadays, (not to mention live in a neighborhood where such is available) and this takes the kind of resources that lower-middle class families just don't have.
As for the argument that sports aren't as popular among the less-financially-endowed, have you ever been to a basketball court in a poor neighborhood? Expensive organized sports aren't the only places where people can play, pickup games are quite common, cheap, and a hell of a lot of fun. I'm not a social economist or anything, but I know enoug people who aren't terribly wealthy to know what actually happens.
I used to have a great deal of respect for Adobe. They're one of the few companies that consistantly churns out good software, and I've been using their products for about 15 years. However, after this Skylarov thing, I see Adobe for what I had always feared they'd become; just another money-grubbing big-brother corporation.
They've actually been there for a few years, I just wanted to think of them as looking out for the little guy, because they've usually been rather responsive in adding new features. Sure, Photoshop is insanely overpriced, but if you use it professionally, you'd pay ten times what Adobe charges for it. Illustrator is the same. Their products are awesome (if a bit feature heavy) but their PR department will have a tough job fixing this one.
EFNet long ago stopped being the place where the majority of the net's illegal file traffic flowed through. Warez channel ops, along with the rest of us, got fed up with all the shit and moved to DALnet. That and the DALnet administration is too busy fighting amongst themselves to do any sort of user harassment (used to be an oper there, I know) This is also why DALnet usually sports more users than EFNet. Where the files go, so go the users.
The funny thing is, these zit-faced 14 year olds who prolly will never get laid with something you or I would call a woman get some kind of rush out of wasting other peoples' resources. I work for an ISP and frequently get kiddies scanning my IP ranges looking for vulnerable DNS/sendmail servers. I doubt most of them even know what bind or sendmail IS, they just run their happy hack program through a wingate and proceed to piss off the rest of us. I vote they should be dragged out into the street and shot.
Many people seem to forget that anything can be gotten, for a price. If China wants the specs on the PS2, well, there are plenty of free dev sites out there, and it's not terribly hard to get an official PS2 dev kit. If they want a bunch of EE chips, they hire the mafia to steal a truckload of them. And it's not like there already aren't a billion pirated DVDs coming out of China. I took a trip to Mexico about a month ago, and the black market was full of Chinese bootleg DVDs. Not just copies of retail DVDs, but they had reel capture DVDs of current movies. I picked up a few, the quality is just as good as hollywood DVDs, except I paid $5 each and they came in CD jewel cases. My point? If the Chinese want to do it, they will, and if not, they won't. There's not much the US or Japan can do to stop them.
Sex is most decidedly a good thing. Without it, none of us would be here. :)
Porn, for all the grief it gets, has done more for our society than anyone realizes. Telephone sex hotlines are the reason our nation's phone system is even somewhat reliable. In the early days of video casette players, porn outsold everything else by a large margin, quickly establishing a standard and ironing out the kinks technologically for the more morally upstanding offerings to come. Streaming video? Another porn technology. Porn sites were streaming live video YEARS before RealMedia thought of it. Not that it worked very well, but it did work and the operators made a bundle.
There are two things that make the world go round: money and sex. The two have a very close relationship.
Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit. All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU, and if you don't have AltiVec or a fast CPU, you notice the slowdown. OS X is quite cool and a commendable effort, but only if you have the hardware to run it.
I'm sorry, but I don't consider AP CS a very valuable teaching tool for learning real computer science. APCS is a total load of crap. It teaches a fluffed up curriculum with little to no real applicable value. This is why most colleges don't accept AP computer science credit, because when you learn AP computer science, you learn little more than the syntax of APs version of C++. I imagine it will be the same with Java. I learned 2 years of AP computer science from a "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" book. This doesn't say I knew anything about writing halfway decent code, just that I could write shit that ran in some form (and I made an A in the class and a 5 on the AP test.)
AP, in its current form, doesn't even really get into OOP in C++. Inheritance, virtual members, pointers to functions, derived classes, etc. aren't even covered. It basically just brushes over the fact that "A class is a struct with data hiding and functions." The first year of AP Computer Science barely introduces structs, much less basic concepts like FUNCTIONS.
Honestly, people bring up the cost issue of open-source software time and time again. The thing is, in the long run, $600 spent on a copy of photoshop to a business is nothing compared to the money they'll end up making off of it. Sure, GIMP is free, but even if Photoshop were inferior, it is still the industry standard. Photoshop is pretty much bug-free, highly optimized, overloaded with features and regularly updated. The truth of the matter is, GIMP doesn't really compete with Photoshop.
;)
What it DOES compete with, however, are the plethora of lesser image editors available (Paint Shop, Photo Soap, GraphicConverter, etc) These programs are replacable. I expect to see GIMP become a popular choice for amateurs who don't want to spend a lot of dough but still want a relatively powerful image editing tool.
I work relatively close to the publishing industry. The combo of Quark/Illustrator/Photoshop isn't going anywhere any time soon. The general attitude of the industry is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." My father's advertising agency was running on a bunch of PowerMac 7200s with Illustrator 5.5 and Photoshop 4 until 6 months ago. If what you have works and you're used to it, why change? Upgrades are a tax writeoff anyway...
Sony won't actually get in any trouble over this. Why not? Because they discovered it and voluntarily (and quickly) retracted the offending ads. They didn't knowingly break the rules, though the FTC will probably tell them to be more careful in the future. Personally, I never read the crap on the movie ads anyway, it's an ad, they're SUPPOSED to make you want to go see the movie.
Cops in other parts of the world just pull out their assault rifles and shoot unarmed citizens point-blank in the face. Indonesia, Isreal, China, Serbia.. This crap happens all over the world, at least in America nobody dies. Of course, the people in other countries are often rioting about things that affect them, such as freedom and other things which most Americans take for granted (and often hide behind.) If you think being tear gassed for protesting globalization of trade is bad, go to North Korea or China where you can (and likely will be) shot in the head on the spot for muttering anti-government sentiments. Put things in perspective and suddenly they don't seem so bad.
Heh, this site is legit. I first saw it about 4 years ago. I honestly think this guy either is making fun of a lot of people or is completely looney. I go for the second. Somewhat of an Ed Wood type thing going on here, methinks...
Heh, Amazon/Yahoo/EBay get 0wned all the time.. It's just that their sysadmins are on top of it and usually have it completely fixed and patched up within 5 minutes. Regardless of how evil/stupid these companies are, the people who work at them are usually very good at what they do. Regardless, it's nigh impossible to have a hack-proof server. If you get enough people trying, it will happen because human error is often the weakest link. Hell, most of the passwords Kevin Mitnik got, he didn't hack, he called up on the telephone and weaseled them out of some tool working tech support. No matter how secure the OS is, humans will be the easiest place to hack.
This is very true. Diamonds are actually much, much more common than say, rubies or emeralds. The same thing is true of gold. The only reason gold is so expensive is because most of it is tied up as specie for national economies around the world. The only reason diamonds are so expensive is because the DeBeers family has a multinational cartel set up in Africa to control the mining and sale of diamonds. Supposedly, a lot of the civil wars in Africa are masterminded by the DeBeers in order to keep their pawns in power so they can continue to control the diamond market. Quite ingenious, actually, but also quite unethical, immoral, inhumane, etc.