In the past 7 years, GNOME has done its best to address exactly that kind of criticism. Almost every single feature is scrutinized with usability in mind. GNOME has been removing more and more configuration options from the user interface in order to make things easier for the average user. In fact, they've done so much their best that the technical audiance, i.e. Slashdot/OSNews/Reddit, is constantly flaming them for removing config options. Yet this same audience is flaming them for not being usable.
I suspect that if you looked closer, you would find that those are not at all the same audiences. In any area, you will find extremes on either end. Look at home theater systems. My wife's ideal remote control would have four buttons- power, play, pause, and volume. On the other hand, there are people out there who actually care about adjusting the balance of the surround sound speakers, picking alternative menu settings on their DVD's, and a variety of other details that my wife never wants to be bothered with. "Usability experts", at least of the variety that work on the GNOME project, don't seem to understand that there is a range of users that they have to support (or at least, should want to support) and seem to aim cleanly for the software equivalent of my wife's remote control. For the most part I've been happy with the improvements that the GNOME developers have made over time, but there have been a number of times that the "more options == less usability" dogma has resulted in the removal of options making a certain program no longer useful to me. Note the distinction there. In those cases, it didn't matter to me whether the new version was more or less usable than the previous version. What mattered was that as a result of the change the new version could no longer acceptably perform the task that I had previously used it for.
For my part, I think that this author has done a pretty good job of pointing out the problems with the current approach and potential solutions (with one exception- I see no difference between his supposedly conflicting mindsets of "show me the code" and "patches welcome"- to me they both say the same thing) but if the "progress" that we have seen so far is any indication, there is a part of me that would rather that developers ignore him and stick with "software by geeks for geeks" until somebody figures out a better way to balance usability and utility. I do think that there is room for a lot of improvement in usability yet, but I'd like to see it happen in a way that doesn't alienate the people who have already been using the software for years.
Actually, it DID get approved. It was later canceled, but the state of Alaska still got to keep the money that had been earmarked for it for other projects.
While I agree with you in general on copyright, in this case I'm on Hasbro's side. For one thing, there is the fact that this lawsuit is more about trademark than copyright. More importantly, there is a big difference between expanding on previous ideas (as Newton and Disney did) and blatant copying, as the Scrabulous developers appear to have done. And while I know it isn't actually addressed in Copyright law, I appreciate the fact that Hasbro is still actively selling Scrabble, as opposed to someone like Disney enforcing copyright on works that have been out of print for ages. It wouldn't have taken the Scrabulous developers much work to make their game sufficiently different from Scrabble to avoid legal trouble, but they didn't, probably because they felt that it would not get them as many users. That's squarely in the middle of the territory that Trademark is supposed to address.
Given how easy it would have been for them to create a non-infringing version of their game, and that they are based in India, where there's not really any good way for a US court to land a judgment against them, I have to wonder if they knew this was coming from the start. Maybe their plan was just to cash in for as long as they could before they got sued, and then disappear quietly. If that's the case, they are probably thrilled that Hasbro waited so long... If they really thought they were in the right, it seems like they would have put up a bit more of a fight on this.
Well, of course that would make more sense, <sarcasm>but obviously if they had any sense they wouldn't be using MySQL in the first place</sarcasm>.
Honestly, I've never figured out why that isn't more common. I once worked on a project where within one application we had 8 separate MySQL instances running on 8 different ports. All of the instances had the same users, so it had nothing to do with permissions. I never did get a good explanation why the admin set it up that way. The only reasonable thing I can come up with is that perhaps some older versions of MySQL had weird restrictions on tablespaces, or on running multiple databases in the same instance. Or maybe working with MySQL really does rot one's brain...
With regards to the GP, it seems to me that SQLite has done a much better job than MySQL ever did of creating a fast, low overhead database. While this does seem like an obvious attempt by MySQL to get back to their roots, I have to wonder whether it's worth it.
That was exactly my thought. Hooray, we just jumped 10 years backwards. Hopefully this time they've fixed the database corruption issues that had me truncating table files once a week.
Of course this just confirms my belief (and the reason I've never yet used MySQL in an environment where I was given the choice) that even when these guys added these features they either didn't understand them or didn't believe that they were ever important.
If your main concern is using the same language on the server and the client, maybe you need to look at a different language on the server. I used to think it was really neat, but JavaScript has a lot of problems that make it a less than ideal server side language. And when my last company started to switch to.NET on the server, I realized that really, the only benefit (besides not having to know more than one language) was that it made maintaining our JSON serializer/deserializer code much simpler.
Personally, I've never considered GWT because I know JavaScript really well, and I don't know Java. I've also never felt that there's anything all that difficult about building GUI apps using JavaScript/CSS once you have a decent DOM & XMLHttpRequest abstraction layer. Throw in Firebug, and I actually thing it's easier than building GUI apps in any compiled language. Maybe it's just because I never drank the static typing Kool-Aid.
Finally, even if I did know Java really well, I don't really like the idea of using a client side platform that ties me to a specific server side platform. (Which is why, aside from its sheer bloatedness, I never looked seriously into Atlas / ASP.Net AJAX when I was doing.NET development) There's no reason the two should be tied together.
From the mockup pictures in TFA, it looks to me like the device they are proposing is on the order of 4-5 times the size of the Nokia family. This doesn't appear to be a pocket form factor device, but rather a true tablet.
Agreed. When I first read the summary, I thought there must have been a typo. The numbers $11 and 3% just didn't compute at all. If I spent half that much money on a solar setup for my house, any bill higher than $0 would pretty much guarantee that my equipment would never pay for itself. Even at $0 it would be almost impossible at least given current energy prices. Of course, I realize that my state gets large, large amounts of cheap coal and wind power from our neighbor to the north, and California's deregulation process hasn't exactly been a showcase of the virtues of the free market in action, but I still have a hard time fathoming somebody paying almost an order of magnitude more than me for electricity in any reasonable sized house.
So, assuming that you are not actually logged in to Facebook, how does it know who you are? I have a Facebook account that I created for my job (we wrote a Facebook app a little while back. I have exactly one friend (a co-worker) and have not logged in to the site since. So how do they still know who I am?
Unfortunately, the alphabetical naming scheme for Ubuntu "only" goes back about two years. Before that, they were more random. For example, which came first, Hardy Heron, or Hoary Hedgehog?
I was wondering how long it would be before somebody mentioned Ubuntu, though, because Ubuntu already uses a date based version number scheme. The current version is 8.04 LTS, released in April, 2008. The other versions released in the last two years are 7.10, 7.04, 6.10, and 6.06 LTS. The date based version has another advantage in that it is easy to see whether a given release is still supported. The LTS (Long Term Support) versions are supported for 3 years after release (5 years for server edition), and the rest are supported for a year and a half. Based on that, we can tell that out of the above versions, 6.10 is no longer supported.
A third party may not be able to win an election, but that doesn't mean that voting for one is throwing your vote away. When third parties start to become popular, particularly when they become popular enough to swing an election or two, you will typically start to see one or both parties embracing pieces of the third party's platform, and the whole political spectrum will shift as a result. It's not quite as effective as having more than two choices to start with, but it can make a difference.
It's not a problem at all if you just turn on the firewall that comes with every version of XP, or in pretty much every consumer-level cable/ADSL modem/router.
Every DSL/Cable Modem I have ever used was essentially a straight network bridge. No firewall, no NAT. Granted my current Cable modem is about 3 years old, and I got my last DSL modem about 6 years ago, so maybe for brand new installations this is no longer the case. Still, I have to imagine that there are a large number of people out there who still have older broadband equipment, so that is certainly not true of "pretty much every consumer-level cable/adsl modem".
Not sure how RH or Solaris would fare, but a base install of most Linux or BSD OS's that I've installed in the last 5 years don't enable much from a network perspective beyond SSH and apache (with a basic index.html page) which doesn't leave a lot of surface for attack, unless you happened to have one of the SSH installations with a compromised key generator, and even then I don't remember hearing much about automated attacks.
Shouldn't be that hard to hit a groundhog with a 12 gauge, depending on what you're loading it with. Really, all you have to do is point it in the right direction. Impressive, nonetheless...
Ah, but they weren't listening to their customers, were they? They listened to complaints from the web hosts their customers were visiting and inadvertently DDOSing. Hosts who had begun to direct a large amount of that traffic back at McAfee, very likely making things rather difficult for them. There was no listening to customers involved. Now, I do think they have done the right thing by pulling the service when it was pointed out to them how much collateral damage was being caused. But it also seems to me that they could have avoided this mess altogether if they had thought a little bit about the consequences of their actions up front, and they certainly could have responded a little more quickly when it was being pointed out to them that their service was causing problems rather than coming out with the "break a few eggs" soundbyte.
I gave up on AVG about a year ago when they began nagging me endlessly. For a while AOL offered a free version of Kaspersky that was pretty nice, but they have since pulled it and replaced it with McAfee. After that expired, I gave up on all the free AV packages. I tested a couple of them (including AVG) and they were all too bloaty, too naggy, or too crippled. I eventually decided that the money wasn't worth my time and frustration, and paid for ESET NOD32. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than a new machine, it's as fast as anything I've ever used, and it does an excellent job at staying the hell out of your way. Sure it would have been nice to have something free, but when it comes down to it, I'm completely happy with it, and in my opinion it's probably worth $40 more in terms of convenience and saved frustrations than any AV product I've ever used, free or commercial. (Barring the free AOL/Kaspersky that is no longer available- I can't tell you how irritated I was when I found out that AOL had dumped it for that POS McAfee.)
Try watching some of the crash test videos. I remember watching a video of a Smart car in a 70 mph head on collision. Most people looking at one of those cars wouldn't think there'd be anything left of the car after a crash like that, but it was surprisingly undamaged. One of the front fenders was completely crushed, and the car wasn't really drivable anymore, but the passenger compartment was completely intact, and all of the doors even still opened. I imagine you kind find videos of rear impact test as well.
Having now located the video for a different post, I see that my memory was a little off. The entire front end of the car was basically gone, and I don't think the car would ever be drivable again given any amount of work. But the passenger compartment was indeed still intact. That said, I find it doubtful that a passenger would have actually survived the impact without serious injuries, but I think that would be true of just about any vehicle in a 70 mph impact with a stationary object.
I assume the donations don't come from thin air, but rather from the profit generated by Microsoft's illegal business practices.
Most of Microsoft's profits go towards growing the business. Bill's wealth doesn't come from skimming off the corporate profits, it comes from shareholder investments. Whether or not the distinction really matters, I am not really sure, but most of Bill's money comes from his ability to convince people that his company is going to continue to be at least as successful as it is currently.
Try watching some of the crash test videos. I remember watching a video of a Smart car in a 70 mph head on collision. Most people looking at one of those cars wouldn't think there'd be anything left of the car after a crash like that, but it was surprisingly undamaged. One of the front fenders was completely crushed, and the car wasn't really drivable anymore, but the passenger compartment was completely intact, and all of the doors even still opened. I imagine you kind find videos of rear impact test as well.
Look for the NHTSA safety ratings of various different cars. My wife and I drive a 2004 Corolla, and it gets the highest or second highest rating in nearly every category, better than many SUVs manufactured that year. On more recent models with side curtain airbags, I believe it gets the highest rating possible.
If you're still not convinced, try looking at the statistics. I haven't seen it lately, but I read an article a while back that compared the number of deaths per million passenger miles (or something like that) across a number of vehicles of different types and sizes. There was almost no correlation between the size of the vehicles and the number of passenger deaths per miles traveled in that car. There was, however, a noticeable trend in the number of passenger deaths in accidents involving larger cars. In other words, if I remember the numbers correctly, you aren't statistically any more likely to get killed driving a Corolla than a Ford Explorer, but as an Explorer driver you are about 3 times as likely to kill somebody else. Ponder that for a while...
Finally, if all else fails, look at the biggest money grubbers of the automotive world, the insurance providers. These guys watch their money like no one else, and if there's anything out there that's going to cost them more money, you can bet they'll find a way to charge extra for it. What's the most expensive part of an automobile accident? The injuries of course. The vast majority of cars on the road can be replaced for under $30,000, but an injury claim can be as much as 10 times that. If there was a certain class of car that was significantly more likely to be in injury causing accidents, I feel fairly confident that the insurance companies would be all to happy to charge more for those cars (and in fact, we do see this to some extent, for example, with sports cars, although this probably reflects an increased likelihood of accident as much as an increased likelihood of injury). But for the most part we see that, with a few notable exceptions, insurance costs mostly tend to follow the value of the vehicle insured. This suggests (to me at least) that, for the most part, the costs (including medical) associated with being in an accident tend to be mostly proportional to the value of the vehicle you are driving. Of course, this last bit is all entirely my speculation. And while I wouldn't take insurance costs to indicate a particular model's safety record, it at least confirms to me what the previous statistics showed, in other words, that there doesn't appear to be any industry wide trend towards bigger vehicles == safer vehicles.
Finally, a little bit of mechanics. While it may seem to you that a 6000 lb car has twice as much metal protecting you as a 3000 lb car, only a relatively small amount of that increase is actually going to the passenger compartment. A bigger car needs stiffer suspension and a bigger engine. A bigger engine needs a stronger drive train. Now you need bigger brakes to handle the increased weight, not only of the car, but of the whole drive train, and it goes on and on. Adding weight to one part of the car has a cascading effect throughout the entire vehicle. While it might make you feel safer, in reality, most of the weight that you added is used up just in moving your bigger fame around.
It appears to just be a fan that blows air across a couple of frozen blocks... and you just heated your house in order to cool the blocks in your freezer.
Perhaps, but this still may be an effective device. It won't cool your house overall, but unless you live in a studio apartment, it could still be effective at redistributing heat. My kitchen almost never gets uncomfortably warm, but several of the upstairs rooms can occasionally get oppressively hot. In that case, pulling a couple block of ice out of the freezer an sticking them upstairs could help balance out the temperatures. Not saying that this particular device would or would not be an effective way to accomplish that, but it's not a total scam, either.
I suspect that the "scam" is that the government issued coupon probably only applies towards the actual price of the box (i.e. $0), so the consumer is forced to pay the full price of the unit, rather than about half the price, if they just sold it for $80 with the 5 year warranty as part of the deal. I'm not sure how that benefits this manufacturer, but there is probably some loophole they are looking to exploit.
I would be very careful about getting campus cops involved in a criminal matter, unless you are dealing with a state university that you know has real police officers. Most universities employ (cheap) rent-a-cops who definitely do not have the authority, and probably not the competence, to treat the situation properly.
That said, I can vouch for the fact that many campus network administrators will be almost gleefully willing to help you catch a suspected criminal on their network. In fact, if you are considering going that route, I would at least tell the PD that you intend to speak to somebody who works for the university before you do, in case your newfound ally turns out to be a little overzealous.
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So I'd get a warning every time I try to submit my phone number to a web site? No thanks...
I suspect that if you looked closer, you would find that those are not at all the same audiences. In any area, you will find extremes on either end. Look at home theater systems. My wife's ideal remote control would have four buttons- power, play, pause, and volume. On the other hand, there are people out there who actually care about adjusting the balance of the surround sound speakers, picking alternative menu settings on their DVD's, and a variety of other details that my wife never wants to be bothered with. "Usability experts", at least of the variety that work on the GNOME project, don't seem to understand that there is a range of users that they have to support (or at least, should want to support) and seem to aim cleanly for the software equivalent of my wife's remote control. For the most part I've been happy with the improvements that the GNOME developers have made over time, but there have been a number of times that the "more options == less usability" dogma has resulted in the removal of options making a certain program no longer useful to me. Note the distinction there. In those cases, it didn't matter to me whether the new version was more or less usable than the previous version. What mattered was that as a result of the change the new version could no longer acceptably perform the task that I had previously used it for.
For my part, I think that this author has done a pretty good job of pointing out the problems with the current approach and potential solutions (with one exception- I see no difference between his supposedly conflicting mindsets of "show me the code" and "patches welcome"- to me they both say the same thing) but if the "progress" that we have seen so far is any indication, there is a part of me that would rather that developers ignore him and stick with "software by geeks for geeks" until somebody figures out a better way to balance usability and utility. I do think that there is room for a lot of improvement in usability yet, but I'd like to see it happen in a way that doesn't alienate the people who have already been using the software for years.
Actually, it DID get approved. It was later canceled, but the state of Alaska still got to keep the money that had been earmarked for it for other projects.
While I agree with you in general on copyright, in this case I'm on Hasbro's side. For one thing, there is the fact that this lawsuit is more about trademark than copyright. More importantly, there is a big difference between expanding on previous ideas (as Newton and Disney did) and blatant copying, as the Scrabulous developers appear to have done. And while I know it isn't actually addressed in Copyright law, I appreciate the fact that Hasbro is still actively selling Scrabble, as opposed to someone like Disney enforcing copyright on works that have been out of print for ages. It wouldn't have taken the Scrabulous developers much work to make their game sufficiently different from Scrabble to avoid legal trouble, but they didn't, probably because they felt that it would not get them as many users. That's squarely in the middle of the territory that Trademark is supposed to address.
Given how easy it would have been for them to create a non-infringing version of their game, and that they are based in India, where there's not really any good way for a US court to land a judgment against them, I have to wonder if they knew this was coming from the start. Maybe their plan was just to cash in for as long as they could before they got sued, and then disappear quietly. If that's the case, they are probably thrilled that Hasbro waited so long... If they really thought they were in the right, it seems like they would have put up a bit more of a fight on this.
It must have thrown them off long enough to reach the Pay-N-Spray without being run off the road. I'll have to try that next time and see if it helps.
Well, of course that would make more sense, <sarcasm>but obviously if they had any sense they wouldn't be using MySQL in the first place</sarcasm>.
Honestly, I've never figured out why that isn't more common. I once worked on a project where within one application we had 8 separate MySQL instances running on 8 different ports. All of the instances had the same users, so it had nothing to do with permissions. I never did get a good explanation why the admin set it up that way. The only reasonable thing I can come up with is that perhaps some older versions of MySQL had weird restrictions on tablespaces, or on running multiple databases in the same instance. Or maybe working with MySQL really does rot one's brain...
With regards to the GP, it seems to me that SQLite has done a much better job than MySQL ever did of creating a fast, low overhead database. While this does seem like an obvious attempt by MySQL to get back to their roots, I have to wonder whether it's worth it.
That was exactly my thought. Hooray, we just jumped 10 years backwards. Hopefully this time they've fixed the database corruption issues that had me truncating table files once a week.
Of course this just confirms my belief (and the reason I've never yet used MySQL in an environment where I was given the choice) that even when these guys added these features they either didn't understand them or didn't believe that they were ever important.
If your main concern is using the same language on the server and the client, maybe you need to look at a different language on the server. I used to think it was really neat, but JavaScript has a lot of problems that make it a less than ideal server side language. And when my last company started to switch to .NET on the server, I realized that really, the only benefit (besides not having to know more than one language) was that it made maintaining our JSON serializer/deserializer code much simpler.
Personally, I've never considered GWT because I know JavaScript really well, and I don't know Java. I've also never felt that there's anything all that difficult about building GUI apps using JavaScript/CSS once you have a decent DOM & XMLHttpRequest abstraction layer. Throw in Firebug, and I actually thing it's easier than building GUI apps in any compiled language. Maybe it's just because I never drank the static typing Kool-Aid.
Finally, even if I did know Java really well, I don't really like the idea of using a client side platform that ties me to a specific server side platform. (Which is why, aside from its sheer bloatedness, I never looked seriously into Atlas / ASP.Net AJAX when I was doing .NET development) There's no reason the two should be tied together.
From the mockup pictures in TFA, it looks to me like the device they are proposing is on the order of 4-5 times the size of the Nokia family. This doesn't appear to be a pocket form factor device, but rather a true tablet.
And the $200 bit...
Agreed. When I first read the summary, I thought there must have been a typo. The numbers $11 and 3% just didn't compute at all. If I spent half that much money on a solar setup for my house, any bill higher than $0 would pretty much guarantee that my equipment would never pay for itself. Even at $0 it would be almost impossible at least given current energy prices. Of course, I realize that my state gets large, large amounts of cheap coal and wind power from our neighbor to the north, and California's deregulation process hasn't exactly been a showcase of the virtues of the free market in action, but I still have a hard time fathoming somebody paying almost an order of magnitude more than me for electricity in any reasonable sized house.
So, assuming that you are not actually logged in to Facebook, how does it know who you are? I have a Facebook account that I created for my job (we wrote a Facebook app a little while back. I have exactly one friend (a co-worker) and have not logged in to the site since. So how do they still know who I am?
Unfortunately, the alphabetical naming scheme for Ubuntu "only" goes back about two years. Before that, they were more random. For example, which came first, Hardy Heron, or Hoary Hedgehog?
I was wondering how long it would be before somebody mentioned Ubuntu, though, because Ubuntu already uses a date based version number scheme. The current version is 8.04 LTS, released in April, 2008. The other versions released in the last two years are 7.10, 7.04, 6.10, and 6.06 LTS. The date based version has another advantage in that it is easy to see whether a given release is still supported. The LTS (Long Term Support) versions are supported for 3 years after release (5 years for server edition), and the rest are supported for a year and a half. Based on that, we can tell that out of the above versions, 6.10 is no longer supported.
A third party may not be able to win an election, but that doesn't mean that voting for one is throwing your vote away. When third parties start to become popular, particularly when they become popular enough to swing an election or two, you will typically start to see one or both parties embracing pieces of the third party's platform, and the whole political spectrum will shift as a result. It's not quite as effective as having more than two choices to start with, but it can make a difference.
Every DSL/Cable Modem I have ever used was essentially a straight network bridge. No firewall, no NAT. Granted my current Cable modem is about 3 years old, and I got my last DSL modem about 6 years ago, so maybe for brand new installations this is no longer the case. Still, I have to imagine that there are a large number of people out there who still have older broadband equipment, so that is certainly not true of "pretty much every consumer-level cable/adsl modem".
Not sure how RH or Solaris would fare, but a base install of most Linux or BSD OS's that I've installed in the last 5 years don't enable much from a network perspective beyond SSH and apache (with a basic index.html page) which doesn't leave a lot of surface for attack, unless you happened to have one of the SSH installations with a compromised key generator, and even then I don't remember hearing much about automated attacks.
Shouldn't be that hard to hit a groundhog with a 12 gauge, depending on what you're loading it with. Really, all you have to do is point it in the right direction. Impressive, nonetheless...
Ah, but they weren't listening to their customers, were they? They listened to complaints from the web hosts their customers were visiting and inadvertently DDOSing. Hosts who had begun to direct a large amount of that traffic back at McAfee, very likely making things rather difficult for them. There was no listening to customers involved. Now, I do think they have done the right thing by pulling the service when it was pointed out to them how much collateral damage was being caused. But it also seems to me that they could have avoided this mess altogether if they had thought a little bit about the consequences of their actions up front, and they certainly could have responded a little more quickly when it was being pointed out to them that their service was causing problems rather than coming out with the "break a few eggs" soundbyte.
I gave up on AVG about a year ago when they began nagging me endlessly. For a while AOL offered a free version of Kaspersky that was pretty nice, but they have since pulled it and replaced it with McAfee. After that expired, I gave up on all the free AV packages. I tested a couple of them (including AVG) and they were all too bloaty, too naggy, or too crippled. I eventually decided that the money wasn't worth my time and frustration, and paid for ESET NOD32. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than a new machine, it's as fast as anything I've ever used, and it does an excellent job at staying the hell out of your way. Sure it would have been nice to have something free, but when it comes down to it, I'm completely happy with it, and in my opinion it's probably worth $40 more in terms of convenience and saved frustrations than any AV product I've ever used, free or commercial. (Barring the free AOL/Kaspersky that is no longer available- I can't tell you how irritated I was when I found out that AOL had dumped it for that POS McAfee.)
Having now located the video for a different post, I see that my memory was a little off. The entire front end of the car was basically gone, and I don't think the car would ever be drivable again given any amount of work. But the passenger compartment was indeed still intact. That said, I find it doubtful that a passenger would have actually survived the impact without serious injuries, but I think that would be true of just about any vehicle in a 70 mph impact with a stationary object.
Most of Microsoft's profits go towards growing the business. Bill's wealth doesn't come from skimming off the corporate profits, it comes from shareholder investments. Whether or not the distinction really matters, I am not really sure, but most of Bill's money comes from his ability to convince people that his company is going to continue to be at least as successful as it is currently.
No accident pictures, but how about a 70mph frontal collision with a concrete barrier?
Try watching some of the crash test videos. I remember watching a video of a Smart car in a 70 mph head on collision. Most people looking at one of those cars wouldn't think there'd be anything left of the car after a crash like that, but it was surprisingly undamaged. One of the front fenders was completely crushed, and the car wasn't really drivable anymore, but the passenger compartment was completely intact, and all of the doors even still opened. I imagine you kind find videos of rear impact test as well.
Look for the NHTSA safety ratings of various different cars. My wife and I drive a 2004 Corolla, and it gets the highest or second highest rating in nearly every category, better than many SUVs manufactured that year. On more recent models with side curtain airbags, I believe it gets the highest rating possible.
If you're still not convinced, try looking at the statistics. I haven't seen it lately, but I read an article a while back that compared the number of deaths per million passenger miles (or something like that) across a number of vehicles of different types and sizes. There was almost no correlation between the size of the vehicles and the number of passenger deaths per miles traveled in that car. There was, however, a noticeable trend in the number of passenger deaths in accidents involving larger cars. In other words, if I remember the numbers correctly, you aren't statistically any more likely to get killed driving a Corolla than a Ford Explorer, but as an Explorer driver you are about 3 times as likely to kill somebody else. Ponder that for a while...
Finally, if all else fails, look at the biggest money grubbers of the automotive world, the insurance providers. These guys watch their money like no one else, and if there's anything out there that's going to cost them more money, you can bet they'll find a way to charge extra for it. What's the most expensive part of an automobile accident? The injuries of course. The vast majority of cars on the road can be replaced for under $30,000, but an injury claim can be as much as 10 times that. If there was a certain class of car that was significantly more likely to be in injury causing accidents, I feel fairly confident that the insurance companies would be all to happy to charge more for those cars (and in fact, we do see this to some extent, for example, with sports cars, although this probably reflects an increased likelihood of accident as much as an increased likelihood of injury). But for the most part we see that, with a few notable exceptions, insurance costs mostly tend to follow the value of the vehicle insured. This suggests (to me at least) that, for the most part, the costs (including medical) associated with being in an accident tend to be mostly proportional to the value of the vehicle you are driving. Of course, this last bit is all entirely my speculation. And while I wouldn't take insurance costs to indicate a particular model's safety record, it at least confirms to me what the previous statistics showed, in other words, that there doesn't appear to be any industry wide trend towards bigger vehicles == safer vehicles.
Finally, a little bit of mechanics. While it may seem to you that a 6000 lb car has twice as much metal protecting you as a 3000 lb car, only a relatively small amount of that increase is actually going to the passenger compartment. A bigger car needs stiffer suspension and a bigger engine. A bigger engine needs a stronger drive train. Now you need bigger brakes to handle the increased weight, not only of the car, but of the whole drive train, and it goes on and on. Adding weight to one part of the car has a cascading effect throughout the entire vehicle. While it might make you feel safer, in reality, most of the weight that you added is used up just in moving your bigger fame around.
Perhaps, but this still may be an effective device. It won't cool your house overall, but unless you live in a studio apartment, it could still be effective at redistributing heat. My kitchen almost never gets uncomfortably warm, but several of the upstairs rooms can occasionally get oppressively hot. In that case, pulling a couple block of ice out of the freezer an sticking them upstairs could help balance out the temperatures. Not saying that this particular device would or would not be an effective way to accomplish that, but it's not a total scam, either.
I suspect that the "scam" is that the government issued coupon probably only applies towards the actual price of the box (i.e. $0), so the consumer is forced to pay the full price of the unit, rather than about half the price, if they just sold it for $80 with the 5 year warranty as part of the deal. I'm not sure how that benefits this manufacturer, but there is probably some loophole they are looking to exploit.
I would be very careful about getting campus cops involved in a criminal matter, unless you are dealing with a state university that you know has real police officers. Most universities employ (cheap) rent-a-cops who definitely do not have the authority, and probably not the competence, to treat the situation properly.
That said, I can vouch for the fact that many campus network administrators will be almost gleefully willing to help you catch a suspected criminal on their network. In fact, if you are considering going that route, I would at least tell the PD that you intend to speak to somebody who works for the university before you do, in case your newfound ally turns out to be a little overzealous.