I work for an ISP.
They seem to be very sure that an ISP keeps accurate IP address records. Why do I feel that this will result in a semi-technical employee of the ISP pulling up who the IP Address is currently leased to? We keep meticulous logs for a variety of reasons, both legal and for the security of the network. It's a blessing and a curse--when we need to track down someone for abusing the network, it's easy. But when we need to find someone who is about to be harassed by the MPAA/RIAA, it's also easy.
The people who search the logs are quite competent. The log audit software we have takes a timestamp in any format accepted by strftime, which means that we can give it a timestamp with a timezone which is not ours (99% of the complaints) and it will automatically convert it to UTC, search the logs, then return the information in UTC, our TZ, and the TZ from the complaint (so that spot-checking is easy). If the complaint is recent enough, we also check current leases as a secondary check (most of the time, the complaints come in within a couple of days of the alleged infringement, and the owner hasn't changed). If it is the same, we check to see if the IP appeared anywhere else on the network (it could happen, due to a glitch or malicious behavior).
It's honestly pretty foolproof, from our end. Smart people wrote the software, smart people use the software, and the software itself is absurdly simple. We are confident in the answers we give, and in the people who give them. Whether or not they were legitimately asked for is not in our hands. You can thank the cartels and the DMCA for that.
In the US, civil suits don't need as much evidence as criminal suits. All the RIAA has to do is convince the judge/jury that it/probably/ happened this way. Iron-clad logging isn't really necessary for that.
How much of an improvement in QWERTY could you see if you spent as much time improving that skill rather than learning DVORAK? Obviously you hit diminishing returns, but for a lot of people, the effort and time spent to switch just won't get enough of a return.
Asking the user for permission to perform administrative actions is good. Asking them 2-3 times per perceived action is bad.
One of the problems I had with early revisions of UAC (I haven't had the pleasure of trying out Vista's final version much) is that it couldn't figure out what the user was trying to do and anticipate it. When creating a new file, I first was asked if I was sure I wanted to create it, then I was asked if I was sure that I wanted to rename it. Hey Vista! It's a NEW FILE! I probably don't want your stupid default name! This sort of problem was all over the place in RC1, and not much better in RC2. I've heard that UAC didn't change much from RC2 to RTM.
Turn it off? Sure, but your average user won't know how to do that, and so they'll just be further trained to click Ok to do whatever it is they're trying to do.
And what would the virus do with that information? Disable the computer? Warn them that they did something incredibly stupid? Spew itself to as many e-mail addresses as possible in order to spread itself?
I think the term you were looking for is 'greyhat.'
Actually, there is a technical flaw, not just a human engineering one. The system allows users to install software, with global system implications, with no confirmation. Strawman.
First of all, the behavior you mention only makes it easier for the trojan to hide from antivirus. My experience has been that recent malware morphs quickly enough that they barely need to hide from antivirus at all. We examined some not too long ago which only two scanners on virustotal.com found as a virus. Three days later, most of the scanners on virustotal.com found the virus, but our test computer's version of the virus had changed, and the new version was not detected by virustotal.
This sort of behavior is possible without system privileges. My point, ultimately, is that even running as an unprivileged user isn't going to stop a trojan from doing bad things on the network (like sending spam and trying to infect other hosts).
If you really need privilege to do something (like change your password), others systems have ways of temporarily elevating privilege. Like suid on Unix. So the malware sits in the background, waiting for that privilege escalation attempt, and then hijacks it. Or spoofs privilege escalation. Or requests the privileges through legitimate OS calls--what, the user isn't going to type in their password? They're trained to, rather than trained to question whether or not a program really needs that extra access.
Buffer overflows in Microsoft products are Microsoft's fault. Auto-running attachments is Microsoft's fault. ActiveX having full control of the system is Microsoft's fault. A user running an executable they received through the mail, and optionally typing in their password to explicitly grant it control over their system is not Microsoft's fault, and it could happen on any system for which the binary was targeted. No amount of programming can fix this issue without restricting what is allowed to be run on the user's computer.
I didn't say anything about being proud of having a car that can go that fast.
"I'm proud that my car isn't capable of attaining speeds of 200 mph safely." The point is that being proud of having a limited capability seems odd.
I'll agree with your statements on alcoholism when you show me evidence that gaming is actually, physically addictive. Lack of self-control is not the same as addiction.
And anyway, there is something wrong with having a really fast car. How many people would be tempted to find out how fast it can really go? Misuse of a tool is not grounds for banning a tool. Are you the type of person who thinks that handguns should be banned?
But packaging real products gets you a discount because they are moving more product. It's better to sell more sushi at a reduced price than to throw it away because the individual portions are too expensive.
Swing back into the Virtual world. The GH1 songs are done. The effort in packaging them for Xbox is absurdly minimal--most of the hard work (recording, mixing, creating the file format) was done for GH1, long before porting to the XBox was a twinkle in anyone's eye. The work they have to do to sell it on the XBox Live Market?/maybe/ some new art, samples (if they let you listen to samples before buying), and the costs associated with selling on the market (no idea what these are--it's/possible/ though seemingly unlikely, that it makes up the bulk of the purchase cost here).
If it's not Microsoft taking a huge chunk out of the purchase price, then the only explanation is greed. That's a loaded word, sure, but it's part of the heart of supply and demand. If people protest the price and refuse to buy, it's likely that the price will drop. If people are willing to pay that price--then they've made more money, and good for them.
I'm sure you were trying to be funny, but if you were serious, my response would be that an inability to resist temptation is nothing to be proud of, and an entirely different problem altogether.
Now I actually enjoy the fact that my Linux system wont play games.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get that. That's like saying, "I'm proud that my car isn't capable of attaining speeds of 200 mph safely." There's nothing wrong with having the capabilities, as long as the capabilities don't interfere with necessary components.
I think your statement must be pure elitism. You're proud that you've set yourself apart. Being proud of having a limited system, even if you don't need or want the extended capabilities, is something I just don't understand.
I don't really care to run VMWare. An equivalent statement is, "I'm proud that my FreeBSD system can't run VMWare."
I'm one of those freaky Linux people who doesn't mind the occasional bit of proprietary, closed-source software on his systems. Flash is a big reason I haven't made the 64-bit jump yet. I don't want to mess with broken chroot environments (and probably other gotchas with various binary software).
That, and going to 64-bit just isn't that useful right now. With AMD, you may get some speed increases (I really can't say, as I haven't seen the benchmarks or performed any tests myself for Linux--for FreeBSD, I know that the performance just isn't there) but that's architectural. Intel generally beats AMD64(in 32-bit mode), and if I don't have any reason to run in 64-bit mode (and plenty of reasons not to) then what's the point? My next machine will be from the Core2Duo line.
AMD had their day, and they may have it again, but for right now, I'm not interested.
Or require that general purpose computers be administered by someone with a license. Don't have a license? I'm available to administer your comptuer for $50/mo, or $10/mo if you let me remote in.
Does that mean that if I raise potatoes, and I trade a thousand potatoes for a TV, that I don't have to pay taxes on anything involving this transaction?
Actually, you have to declare any net gain (though for large sums, there may be special rules that I'm not aware of). That is, if you win $1000, but you gambled away $2000, you can actually deduct $1000 as a gambling loss. If you gamble $1000 on Red (roulette) and win $2000, you only have to declare $1000 because you only actually net $1000.
She discusses those issues. She does not promote taxation of in-game profits. It's clear as day right here: "From a policy perspective, my view is that drops and purely in-game trades should not bear income tax." but that doesn't mean that, as a subject, it shouldn't be discussed and evaluated.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and the below does not constitute tax advice.
Sales tax is not the same as income tax. Income tax is tax on money that you make--on your income. It largely doesn't matter how you made the money (when it does, you file exemptions, so that the government still knows how much money you made--just not all of it may be taxable).
If you sell 1000 World of Warcraft gold for $300, you are obliged to report that $300 on your federal income tax return. If the formula they are using that year indicates that you must pay taxes on that amount, then you are obliged to pay taxes on that $300. It was income. You pay income tax.
If you buy 1000 World of Warcraft gold for $300, and both the seller and you are in a state which has a sales tax, then the seller is obliged to charge sales tax, and you aren't obliged to pay federal income tax on the part of the purchase which was sales tax.
If you buy 1000 World of warcraft gold for $300, and you live in a different state from the seller, most states require that you pay sales tax on the purchase--though almost no one actually does.
It's all absurd, really. The complexity of tax law means that most people don't question the requirements (as I didn't, above) and just pay. People with enough to lose hire specialists in tax code to manage things for them. This should not be required, and that it is implies that the tax laws need revision and simplification.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and the above does not constitute tax advice.
Taking kids on flights is more likely a necessity[1] than talking on a cell phone is. As much as they annoy me, I'll usually give parents the benefit of the doubt, as long as they're trying to make the kids behave. Someone chatting on a cell phone? No way.
[1] For varying levels of 'necessity'. Comparitively, you can usually wait 10 minutes (from landing to deboarding) to talk to someone on the phone, but it may not be feasible to drive across the country if you are going there and taking your kids, for whatever reason.
candidates are for instance not allowed to actually change the content on their websites once campaigning is started
That sounds like an easy* way to prevent that last-minute mudslinging. Japanese elections may be overly restrictive, but are they as corrupt and nasty as American ones have become?
You get to double your damage? That's pretty cool. How fast do your enemies HP increase?
Ultimately, it's all about scale. If any MMO allowed you to vastly increase your power compared to the enemies you are expected to fight at that point in your character's development, the games would be mind-numbingly boring. My guess is that CoH enemies HP increases at a faster rate than WoW's, or that there are other ways in which a scale reasonably similar to WoW is maintained.
A better system might be a system of strengths and weaknesses where you have to constantly change your character in order to adapt (i.e. weapons do different amounts of damage depending upon who is wielding it and who is getting hit). In this way, grinding for a sword that's going to make it easier to kill a particular mob or class of mobs gives you a higher perceived benefit than that extra 1% of damage, but doesn't make you generally overpowered.
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The people who search the logs are quite competent. The log audit software we have takes a timestamp in any format accepted by strftime, which means that we can give it a timestamp with a timezone which is not ours (99% of the complaints) and it will automatically convert it to UTC, search the logs, then return the information in UTC, our TZ, and the TZ from the complaint (so that spot-checking is easy). If the complaint is recent enough, we also check current leases as a secondary check (most of the time, the complaints come in within a couple of days of the alleged infringement, and the owner hasn't changed). If it is the same, we check to see if the IP appeared anywhere else on the network (it could happen, due to a glitch or malicious behavior).
It's honestly pretty foolproof, from our end. Smart people wrote the software, smart people use the software, and the software itself is absurdly simple. We are confident in the answers we give, and in the people who give them. Whether or not they were legitimately asked for is not in our hands. You can thank the cartels and the DMCA for that.
In the US, civil suits don't need as much evidence as criminal suits. All the RIAA has to do is convince the judge/jury that it /probably/ happened this way. Iron-clad logging isn't really necessary for that.
How much of an improvement in QWERTY could you see if you spent as much time improving that skill rather than learning DVORAK? Obviously you hit diminishing returns, but for a lot of people, the effort and time spent to switch just won't get enough of a return.
Actually, yeah.
But you got one word wrong: the word 'smart'. Replace it with knowledgable, and you're spot on.
When a person is ignorant of the risks, and ignorant that there even ARE risks, how can you blame them for the mistakes they make?
Asking the user for permission to perform administrative actions is good. Asking them 2-3 times per perceived action is bad.
One of the problems I had with early revisions of UAC (I haven't had the pleasure of trying out Vista's final version much) is that it couldn't figure out what the user was trying to do and anticipate it. When creating a new file, I first was asked if I was sure I wanted to create it, then I was asked if I was sure that I wanted to rename it. Hey Vista! It's a NEW FILE! I probably don't want your stupid default name! This sort of problem was all over the place in RC1, and not much better in RC2. I've heard that UAC didn't change much from RC2 to RTM.
Turn it off? Sure, but your average user won't know how to do that, and so they'll just be further trained to click Ok to do whatever it is they're trying to do.
And what would the virus do with that information? Disable the computer? Warn them that they did something incredibly stupid? Spew itself to as many e-mail addresses as possible in order to spread itself?
I think the term you were looking for is 'greyhat.'
First of all, the behavior you mention only makes it easier for the trojan to hide from antivirus. My experience has been that recent malware morphs quickly enough that they barely need to hide from antivirus at all. We examined some not too long ago which only two scanners on virustotal.com found as a virus. Three days later, most of the scanners on virustotal.com found the virus, but our test computer's version of the virus had changed, and the new version was not detected by virustotal.
This sort of behavior is possible without system privileges. My point, ultimately, is that even running as an unprivileged user isn't going to stop a trojan from doing bad things on the network (like sending spam and trying to infect other hosts). If you really need privilege to do something (like change your password), others systems have ways of temporarily elevating privilege. Like suid on Unix. So the malware sits in the background, waiting for that privilege escalation attempt, and then hijacks it.
Or spoofs privilege escalation.
Or requests the privileges through legitimate OS calls--what, the user isn't going to type in their password? They're trained to, rather than trained to question whether or not a program really needs that extra access.
Buffer overflows in Microsoft products are Microsoft's fault. Auto-running attachments is Microsoft's fault. ActiveX having full control of the system is Microsoft's fault. A user running an executable they received through the mail, and optionally typing in their password to explicitly grant it control over their system is not Microsoft's fault, and it could happen on any system for which the binary was targeted. No amount of programming can fix this issue without restricting what is allowed to be run on the user's computer.
But packaging real products gets you a discount because they are moving more product. It's better to sell more sushi at a reduced price than to throw it away because the individual portions are too expensive.
/maybe/ some new art, samples (if they let you listen to samples before buying), and the costs associated with selling on the market (no idea what these are--it's /possible/ though seemingly unlikely, that it makes up the bulk of the purchase cost here).
Swing back into the Virtual world. The GH1 songs are done. The effort in packaging them for Xbox is absurdly minimal--most of the hard work (recording, mixing, creating the file format) was done for GH1, long before porting to the XBox was a twinkle in anyone's eye. The work they have to do to sell it on the XBox Live Market?
If it's not Microsoft taking a huge chunk out of the purchase price, then the only explanation is greed. That's a loaded word, sure, but it's part of the heart of supply and demand. If people protest the price and refuse to buy, it's likely that the price will drop. If people are willing to pay that price--then they've made more money, and good for them.
I'm sure you were trying to be funny, but if you were serious, my response would be that an inability to resist temptation is nothing to be proud of, and an entirely different problem altogether.
Now I actually enjoy the fact that my Linux system wont play games.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get that. That's like saying, "I'm proud that my car isn't capable of attaining speeds of 200 mph safely." There's nothing wrong with having the capabilities, as long as the capabilities don't interfere with necessary components.
I think your statement must be pure elitism. You're proud that you've set yourself apart. Being proud of having a limited system, even if you don't need or want the extended capabilities, is something I just don't understand.
I don't really care to run VMWare. An equivalent statement is, "I'm proud that my FreeBSD system can't run VMWare."
I'm one of those freaky Linux people who doesn't mind the occasional bit of proprietary, closed-source software on his systems. Flash is a big reason I haven't made the 64-bit jump yet. I don't want to mess with broken chroot environments (and probably other gotchas with various binary software).
That, and going to 64-bit just isn't that useful right now. With AMD, you may get some speed increases (I really can't say, as I haven't seen the benchmarks or performed any tests myself for Linux--for FreeBSD, I know that the performance just isn't there) but that's architectural. Intel generally beats AMD64(in 32-bit mode), and if I don't have any reason to run in 64-bit mode (and plenty of reasons not to) then what's the point? My next machine will be from the Core2Duo line.
AMD had their day, and they may have it again, but for right now, I'm not interested.
Or require that general purpose computers be administered by someone with a license. Don't have a license? I'm available to administer your comptuer for $50/mo, or $10/mo if you let me remote in.
We'd create a whole new market.
Does that mean that if I raise potatoes, and I trade a thousand potatoes for a TV, that I don't have to pay taxes on anything involving this transaction?
I am not a lawyer, and this is not tax advice
Actually, you have to declare any net gain (though for large sums, there may be special rules that I'm not aware of). That is, if you win $1000, but you gambled away $2000, you can actually deduct $1000 as a gambling loss. If you gamble $1000 on Red (roulette) and win $2000, you only have to declare $1000 because you only actually net $1000.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not tax advice
She discusses those issues. She does not promote taxation of in-game profits. It's clear as day right here: "From a policy perspective, my view is that drops and purely in-game trades should not bear income tax." but that doesn't mean that, as a subject, it shouldn't be discussed and evaluated.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and the below does not constitute tax advice.
Sales tax is not the same as income tax. Income tax is tax on money that you make--on your income. It largely doesn't matter how you made the money (when it does, you file exemptions, so that the government still knows how much money you made--just not all of it may be taxable).
If you sell 1000 World of Warcraft gold for $300, you are obliged to report that $300 on your federal income tax return. If the formula they are using that year indicates that you must pay taxes on that amount, then you are obliged to pay taxes on that $300. It was income. You pay income tax.
If you buy 1000 World of Warcraft gold for $300, and both the seller and you are in a state which has a sales tax, then the seller is obliged to charge sales tax, and you aren't obliged to pay federal income tax on the part of the purchase which was sales tax.
If you buy 1000 World of warcraft gold for $300, and you live in a different state from the seller, most states require that you pay sales tax on the purchase--though almost no one actually does.
It's all absurd, really. The complexity of tax law means that most people don't question the requirements (as I didn't, above) and just pay. People with enough to lose hire specialists in tax code to manage things for them. This should not be required, and that it is implies that the tax laws need revision and simplification.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and the above does not constitute tax advice.
Are those usually at 640x480 (or higher) resolution? What is the audio on those? And length?
/this/big/ are watchable!" because there are many other factors involved.
You really can't just say, "Video in files
Taking kids on flights is more likely a necessity[1] than talking on a cell phone is. As much as they annoy me, I'll usually give parents the benefit of the doubt, as long as they're trying to make the kids behave. Someone chatting on a cell phone? No way.
[1] For varying levels of 'necessity'. Comparitively, you can usually wait 10 minutes (from landing to deboarding) to talk to someone on the phone, but it may not be feasible to drive across the country if you are going there and taking your kids, for whatever reason.
candidates are for instance not allowed to actually change the content on their websites once campaigning is started
That sounds like an easy* way to prevent that last-minute mudslinging. Japanese elections may be overly restrictive, but are they as corrupt and nasty as American ones have become?
* Easy is not always good or better.
It's called a managed switch, and if they don't have them, their network could use some work.
With a car, you have to transfer the title. A better example would be a bicycle with a sign on it which read, "Free bicycle to a good home."
You get to double your damage? That's pretty cool. How fast do your enemies HP increase?
Ultimately, it's all about scale. If any MMO allowed you to vastly increase your power compared to the enemies you are expected to fight at that point in your character's development, the games would be mind-numbingly boring. My guess is that CoH enemies HP increases at a faster rate than WoW's, or that there are other ways in which a scale reasonably similar to WoW is maintained.
A better system might be a system of strengths and weaknesses where you have to constantly change your character in order to adapt (i.e. weapons do different amounts of damage depending upon who is wielding it and who is getting hit). In this way, grinding for a sword that's going to make it easier to kill a particular mob or class of mobs gives you a higher perceived benefit than that extra 1% of damage, but doesn't make you generally overpowered.