A subscription MMO would have lapsed, and I would likely have lost my characters or their gear.
This is why I don't play WoW.
There are better and real reasons not to play WoW. Lapsed accounts do not lose characters, nor their stuff. That is a lie or you do not have the command of the English language that you think you have.
You need micropayments and particularly the Chaumian patents on Sender/Receiver anonymous payment methods. David Chaum's patents went into a kind of limbo when Digicash went bankrupt in the late 1990s.
I was a Digicash beta tester and it was a most fascinating system.
(Update: I googled Digicash and it appears they have come back to life. I will investigate this further and I pray to the Lord and Lady pair that it is not like the resurrection of SCO as Caldera)
God dammit! If you hadn't posted as an AC I would have "fan"ned you.
That *is* the solution as I and others have posted throughout the years. Make it payable to the recipient and voila, no more spam.
It's an economic problem with an economic solution.
Sender to recipient payment breaks mailing lists, which mainly affects us old timers who still use such things to develop Open Source software. But, under that model, I would be more than happy to move back to Usenet.
The way draconian sentences have stopped drug dealing?
Something like that. You cannot legislate away trade in something that people want to buy and other people are willing to sell.
Email spam is profitable due to the economics of the situation, it used to be nearly free to send out spam, now with botnets it's much, much worse than that.
Consider it from another angle. How much electricity world wide is consumed by the generation of spam and the receipt and deletion of spam? What's the carbon footprint of all this mostly useless activity? Save the Planet! Stop Spamming Now!
You're post had absolutely nothing to do with mine, why reply?
Offering to execute pieces of email should never have been an option, let alone an unprompted default. Offering a prompt is a total misunderstanding of the real issue.
I can't think of an appropriate car analogy, so how about a rake analogy? Prompting before executing a file received in email is like attaching a notice to a rake laying on the ground with the tines facing up that reads, "if you step on this rake you could do serious damage to your face, proceed?"
There were good solid reasons why shar messages were distrusted and so somebody wrote unshar so one could unpack such things without executing it directly in the Unix shell. This was all standard industry knowledge about a decade before the release of Microsoft Windows 95.
You appear to grasp the fact that only idiots execute code received in email. Microsoft popularized the misfeature and made it a feature that some people cannot live without. It should never been a feature in the first place. And for that, you most certainly can lay blame to the management chain at Microsoft that signed off on the idea. The US tobacco industry was successfully sued for billions over much less.
By the way, if you're faced with ENTIRE LIBRARIES loading ALL of their functions content into another calling applications' memory space on *NIX? That's rather inefficient, wouldn't YOU say??
That's not how it works. All of the library's.text gets mapped, but the actual data is shared, so there's only one copy in memory. And, if there are pages containing code that no one actually uses, those pages need never be loaded into memory at all.
In short, a US citizen loses none of their constitutional protections from US governmental actions simply because they leave the US.
I'm not sure that makes any sense.
A US citizen is very much under local laws, and the US government is not obligated to do anything should said citizen run afoul of said local laws.
If I am in Harare and exercise my "constitutional right" to free speech and say "Mugabe is a thief" and get put in jail by governmental goons, the US government is *not* going to come to my rescue.
You're also missing the fact that there hasn't been a single fatality from a Unicorn stabbing or a Dragon breath weapon attack on a US citizen since W was elected. You need to give the man the credit he's due.
Hmmm. Horde killing Alliance has dropped too, primarily through decreasing Horde numbers. Dang, maybe W has made the World (of Warcraft) a safer place...
If I run whatever code the net gives me, I should have fine-grained control over what that code can touch on my computer.
You have been brainwashed. The Real World has never worked that way. No matter what Microsoft has told you.
SafeTCL (and later Java) tried to do sandboxing, but...
You have only a big ON/OFF switch of which the only sensible setting is OFF. No amount of marketing either from Microsoft or Sun will EVER make it safe.
On the one hand, I wish they would pass me the bong/crack pipe they're smoking from, on the other hand, I can laugh at systems that are most vulnerable to attacks like this, on the gripping hand, recall that it was Microsoft that popularized the long discredited idea of executing anything coming across a wire.
The sad thing is that something like this appears to be more or less inevitable.
The Attorney General's Office in Washington, United States, and Microsoft recently announced that they are filing new lawsuits targeting scareware purveyors. One of the cases is against James Reed McCreary IV, who is accused with sending incessant pop-ups resembling system warnings to consumers' personal computers. The messages read "CRITICAL ERROR MESSAGE! â" REGISTRY DAMAGED AND CORRUPTED," and instructed users to visit a Web site to download Registry Cleaner XP.
"Consumers who visited the Web site were offered a free scan to check their computer â" but the program found 'critical' errors every time," said Senior Counsel Paula Selis, who leads the Attorney General's Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit. "Users were then told to pay USD 39.95 to repair these dubious problems." Microsoft has said that 50 percent of its customer support calls related to computer crashes can be blamed on spyware.
F-Secure notes that Registry Cleaner XP is just one of the increasing number of rogue security applications which also include Antivirus 2009, Malwarecore, WinDefender, WinSpywareProtect and XPDefender.
Um, maybe if Microsoft hadn't "innovated" the long discredited idea of execute anything downloaded over a wire, this would never have been a problem?
A handful of unusual data points in a complex system does not prove a trend.
That's what the Algores of the world do!
It's as if you were to argue, "Scientists *say* that cigarette smoking will damage your health. But I know one guy who smoked and lived to a ripe old age. Therefore, these `scientific' findings are clearly the result of some politically-motivated anti-tobacco conspiracy."
I'll take that flamebait.
Poverty is the number one killer of people, coupled with government (via wars, genocide, etc). It is easy to argue that it is only in a handful of countries that people live long enough to have their health damaged by smoking. And in the countries that do have long expected life spans, diet and automobiles have a bigger impact on mortality rates.
Cigarette smoking is actually good for my health. I get away from the keyboard frequently for "smoke breaks" and the RSI that started to appear in my hands in the mid 1990s has disappeared entirely.
However, this was never the scientific consensus. Between 1965 to 1979, 42 papers predicted a warming trend; 7 predicted cooling.
Ah, polling brought to the scientific forefront...
Of course, only a few decades ago doctors were advising patients to take up cigarette smoking; the fact that today's best scientific knowledge is different than that of several decades ago is no argument that we had better knowledge then!
I never argued that, though you've pressed one of my hot buttons and I will not flame you back.
It is disengenuous to claim the "hottest" (or "coldest" for that matter) season on record when the records only go back a few decades and the planet has been around for billions of years.
The largest input to the Earth's ecosystem is the Sun and that is where we should be looking for trends.
Dangling reference there. Which "he" are you referring to?
What you wrote is more or less exactly what you read on the sign in the ACS section of your nearest friendly US Embassy.
Certainly 1st and 2nd amendment "rights" in the US are trumped by local laws. The current President has a very bad reputation for journalists who have criticized the government being caught up in accidents and getting killed. Whether she ordered the killing or not is a matter of some debate that I cannot get involved with.
Mall bombings? What mall bombings? Glorietta was a methane explosion, a preventable accident.
I was referring to the Glorietta mall bombing and my wife is convinced it was foul play.
The Philippines doesn't have a terrorist problem, it has corruption fleeced with opportunistic greed issues going on.
I agree with the latter. The civil war going on in Mindanao right now, suggests that you are incorrect in the former.
How would you classify the kidnappings in Tagum in 2006? (When I lived in Mindanao, Tagum was the nearest city with an ATM so I've been there many, many times).
Considering all the times that the Davao City airport has been bombed in recent years (it was bombed the week I first arrived in Manila in March 2003), I stand by my statements.
a US citizen's rights, under the US constitution, extend worldwide
Nope. This is not the Empire of the USA. I suggest you read the sign prominently posted in your nearest US Embassy in the US citizens section explaining that you are no longer in the United States and what that means in legal terms.
Fixed that for you. Don't think that 0 attacks on the news is for the terrorists' lack of trying.
ALL of the attacks on airports, malls, etc. in my adopted home country (the Philippines) since 9/11/2001 would have succeeded in the US. And in the Philippines you must pass through security to even get inside any public building.
Some countries, like the Philippines, have a terrorist problem. Other countries like the US, do not.
Global warming is different. Disproving global warming is VERY interesting, and would get published more readily than something supporting global warming.
Really? How about the recent stories which prove that glaciers in the north have been *growing*? How about followup stories to the ones we read some months ago claiming the North Pole ice cap was dying?
It's all politically motivated and has taken second stage to the banking crisis.
Anyways, it seems that if you don't tow the line on climate change, there is no room for you anywhere.
You mean "toe the line", but never mind.
Sadly, scientific progress tends to be made when dogmatic leaders die. 3 decades ago, scientists were worrying about a new ice age. We know from past evidence that the Earth naturally experiences "global warming" to melt ice ages and cools back down again.
Where are all the followup stories on the supposed North Pole ice cap melting that hasn't taken place because glaciers grew in the past winter? Hmmm?
Slashdot Mirror
A subscription MMO would have lapsed, and I would likely have lost my characters or their gear.
This is why I don't play WoW.
There are better and real reasons not to play WoW. Lapsed accounts do not lose characters, nor their stuff. That is a lie or you do not have the command of the English language that you think you have.
You need micropayments and particularly the Chaumian patents on Sender/Receiver anonymous payment methods. David Chaum's patents went into a kind of limbo when Digicash went bankrupt in the late 1990s.
I was a Digicash beta tester and it was a most fascinating system.
(Update: I googled Digicash and it appears they have come back to life. I will investigate this further and I pray to the Lord and Lady pair that it is not like the resurrection of SCO as Caldera)
Put a very small fee on emails.
God dammit! If you hadn't posted as an AC I would have "fan"ned you.
That *is* the solution as I and others have posted throughout the years. Make it payable to the recipient and voila, no more spam.
It's an economic problem with an economic solution.
Sender to recipient payment breaks mailing lists, which mainly affects us old timers who still use such things to develop Open Source software. But, under that model, I would be more than happy to move back to Usenet.
The way draconian sentences have stopped drug dealing?
Something like that. You cannot legislate away trade in something that people want to buy and other people are willing to sell.
Email spam is profitable due to the economics of the situation, it used to be nearly free to send out spam, now with botnets it's much, much worse than that.
Consider it from another angle. How much electricity world wide is consumed by the generation of spam and the receipt and deletion of spam? What's the carbon footprint of all this mostly useless activity? Save the Planet! Stop Spamming Now!
You're post had absolutely nothing to do with mine, why reply?
Offering to execute pieces of email should never have been an option, let alone an unprompted default. Offering a prompt is a total misunderstanding of the real issue.
I can't think of an appropriate car analogy, so how about a rake analogy? Prompting before executing a file received in email is like attaching a notice to a rake laying on the ground with the tines facing up that reads, "if you step on this rake you could do serious damage to your face, proceed?"
There were good solid reasons why shar messages were distrusted and so somebody wrote unshar so one could unpack such things without executing it directly in the Unix shell. This was all standard industry knowledge about a decade before the release of Microsoft Windows 95.
You appear to grasp the fact that only idiots execute code received in email. Microsoft popularized the misfeature and made it a feature that some people cannot live without. It should never been a feature in the first place. And for that, you most certainly can lay blame to the management chain at Microsoft that signed off on the idea. The US tobacco industry was successfully sued for billions over much less.
You can't sell the Linux ecosystem, and if you believe you can buy it
It's been tried before ... http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html
By the way, if you're faced with ENTIRE LIBRARIES loading ALL of their functions content into another calling applications' memory space on *NIX? That's rather inefficient, wouldn't YOU say??
That's not how it works. All of the library's .text gets mapped, but the actual data is shared, so there's only one copy in memory. And, if there are pages containing code that no one actually uses, those pages need never be loaded into memory at all.
In short, a US citizen loses none of their constitutional protections from US governmental actions simply because they leave the US.
I'm not sure that makes any sense.
A US citizen is very much under local laws, and the US government is not obligated to do anything should said citizen run afoul of said local laws.
If I am in Harare and exercise my "constitutional right" to free speech and say "Mugabe is a thief" and get put in jail by governmental goons, the US government is *not* going to come to my rescue.
Let's not forget the id10t behind the keyboard that has to click on yes for it to actually run.......
Let's not forget that it was the idiot behind Microsoft Windows 95 that made this an industry standard long after the idea had been discredited.
I've had WordPerfect crash, and I've lost information because of it, even several hundred pages once
OMFG!
You're also missing the fact that there hasn't been a single fatality from a Unicorn stabbing or a Dragon breath weapon attack on a US citizen since W was elected. You need to give the man the credit he's due.
Hmmm. Horde killing Alliance has dropped too, primarily through decreasing Horde numbers. Dang, maybe W has made the World (of Warcraft) a safer place ...
If I run whatever code the net gives me, I should have fine-grained control over what that code can touch on my computer.
You have been brainwashed. The Real World has never worked that way. No matter what Microsoft has told you.
SafeTCL (and later Java) tried to do sandboxing, but ...
You have only a big ON/OFF switch of which the only sensible setting is OFF. No amount of marketing either from Microsoft or Sun will EVER make it safe.
It's a stupid idea.
On the one hand, I wish they would pass me the bong/crack pipe they're smoking from, on the other hand, I can laugh at systems that are most vulnerable to attacks like this, on the gripping hand, recall that it was Microsoft that popularized the long discredited idea of executing anything coming across a wire.
The sad thing is that something like this appears to be more or less inevitable.
The Attorney General's Office in Washington, United States, and Microsoft recently announced that they are filing new lawsuits targeting scareware purveyors. One of the cases is against James Reed McCreary IV, who is accused with sending incessant pop-ups resembling system warnings to consumers' personal computers. The messages read "CRITICAL ERROR MESSAGE! â" REGISTRY DAMAGED AND CORRUPTED," and instructed users to visit a Web site to download Registry Cleaner XP.
"Consumers who visited the Web site were offered a free scan to check their computer â" but the program found 'critical' errors every time," said Senior Counsel Paula Selis, who leads the Attorney General's Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit. "Users were then told to pay USD 39.95 to repair these dubious problems." Microsoft has said that 50 percent of its customer support calls related to computer crashes can be blamed on spyware.
F-Secure notes that Registry Cleaner XP is just one of the increasing number of rogue security applications which also include Antivirus 2009, Malwarecore, WinDefender, WinSpywareProtect and XPDefender.
Um, maybe if Microsoft hadn't "innovated" the long discredited idea of execute anything downloaded over a wire, this would never have been a problem?
A handful of unusual data points in a complex system does not prove a trend.
That's what the Algores of the world do!
It's as if you were to argue, "Scientists *say* that cigarette smoking will damage your health. But I know one guy who smoked and lived to a ripe old age. Therefore, these `scientific' findings are clearly the result of some politically-motivated anti-tobacco conspiracy."
I'll take that flamebait.
Poverty is the number one killer of people, coupled with government (via wars, genocide, etc). It is easy to argue that it is only in a handful of countries that people live long enough to have their health damaged by smoking. And in the countries that do have long expected life spans, diet and automobiles have a bigger impact on mortality rates.
Cigarette smoking is actually good for my health. I get away from the keyboard frequently for "smoke breaks" and the RSI that started to appear in my hands in the mid 1990s has disappeared entirely.
However, this was never the scientific consensus. Between 1965 to 1979, 42 papers predicted a warming trend; 7 predicted cooling.
Ah, polling brought to the scientific forefront ...
Of course, only a few decades ago doctors were advising patients to take up cigarette smoking; the fact that today's best scientific knowledge is different than that of several decades ago is no argument that we had better knowledge then!
I never argued that, though you've pressed one of my hot buttons and I will not flame you back.
It is disengenuous to claim the "hottest" (or "coldest" for that matter) season on record when the records only go back a few decades and the planet has been around for billions of years.
The largest input to the Earth's ecosystem is the Sun and that is where we should be looking for trends.
Dangling reference there. Which "he" are you referring to?
What you wrote is more or less exactly what you read on the sign in the ACS section of your nearest friendly US Embassy.
Certainly 1st and 2nd amendment "rights" in the US are trumped by local laws. The current President has a very bad reputation for journalists who have criticized the government being caught up in accidents and getting killed. Whether she ordered the killing or not is a matter of some debate that I cannot get involved with.
I prefer a Word Processor for any serious writing (I use WordPerfect).
Let me take a wild guess at the amount of work you have lost to crashes in WordPerfect over the years ... 0 (or a reasonable approximation thereof)?
(Just by saying you prefer WordPerfect suggests to me that its gratuitous data lossage is nil).
Mall bombings? What mall bombings? Glorietta was a methane explosion, a preventable accident.
I was referring to the Glorietta mall bombing and my wife is convinced it was foul play.
The Philippines doesn't have a terrorist problem, it has corruption fleeced with opportunistic greed issues going on.
I agree with the latter. The civil war going on in Mindanao right now, suggests that you are incorrect in the former.
How would you classify the kidnappings in Tagum in 2006? (When I lived in Mindanao, Tagum was the nearest city with an ATM so I've been there many, many times).
Considering all the times that the Davao City airport has been bombed in recent years (it was bombed the week I first arrived in Manila in March 2003), I stand by my statements.
a US citizen's rights, under the US constitution, extend worldwide
Nope. This is not the Empire of the USA. I suggest you read the sign prominently posted in your nearest US Embassy in the US citizens section explaining that you are no longer in the United States and what that means in legal terms.
Does this mean it's time for me to burn my Fedora 9/MacOS 10.5 CDs and install Microsoft Vista?
Fixed that for you. Don't think that 0 attacks on the news is for the terrorists' lack of trying.
ALL of the attacks on airports, malls, etc. in my adopted home country (the Philippines) since 9/11/2001 would have succeeded in the US. And in the Philippines you must pass through security to even get inside any public building.
Some countries, like the Philippines, have a terrorist problem. Other countries like the US, do not.
And your point is?
As I see it. Either don't use your real name in online postings or on online sites, so searching is not fruitful.
It's not that simple. I would recommend using your real name on everything technical and an alias on everything political and/or social.
Slashdot is in the grey area in between and I decided to go with real name. When I feel like trolling, I can always click the "Post Anonymously" box.
Or use it everywhere such that if someone googles for your name, there will be several million irrelevent hits.
Quoted for truth.
Global warming is different. Disproving global warming is VERY interesting, and would get published more readily than something supporting global warming.
Really? How about the recent stories which prove that glaciers in the north have been *growing*? How about followup stories to the ones we read some months ago claiming the North Pole ice cap was dying?
It's all politically motivated and has taken second stage to the banking crisis.
Anyways, it seems that if you don't tow the line on climate change, there is no room for you anywhere.
You mean "toe the line", but never mind.
Sadly, scientific progress tends to be made when dogmatic leaders die. 3 decades ago, scientists were worrying about a new ice age. We know from past evidence that the Earth naturally experiences "global warming" to melt ice ages and cools back down again.
Where are all the followup stories on the supposed North Pole ice cap melting that hasn't taken place because glaciers grew in the past winter? Hmmm?