Re:Get the whistle!
on
NES PC
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Back in the day, a grocery store near my house-- I say near my house. It was 3 miles away. 10 minutes on a fast bike-- got an NES Choice Ten standup machine. It had a few titles in it, but the one I noticed as being most prominent was a strange game labeled 'SMB3' in blue without any logos or identifying marks.
Curious, I put a quarter in and got my 300 seconds of playtime. I selected 'SMB3' and was rewarded with the home play version (not the later choice ten version where you could select the level) of 'Super Mario Bros. 3'.
"This has to be a hack of some kind," I said, "Like that stupid Skater Brothers rip of Super Mario".
Mind you, this was more than four months before 'Wizard' had hit theaters and about six before you could actually buy SMB3 in stores. They weren't even advertisting SMB3 in Nintendo Power. Of course, back then, video games didn't quite have the 3 years of hype before release they tend to now. The only thing that I can figure is that the owner of the arcade machine managed to get a beta copy of the game or had a friend in Nintendo USA who 'fixed' his Choice-10 roms for him with the new game.
To my surprise, however, SMB3 was not a hack or a copy of an existing game. It was its own game, and a surprisingly good one at that. I came the next day with my allowance-- $10 in quarters. 12000 seconds... a little more than 3 hours of game play. As a matter of fact, I spent the next three saturdays like that. I must have blown $80 just on that one stupid Choice Ten machine.
By the time 'Wizard' was released in theaters, SMB3 was old hat to me. 'Wizard' was merely confirmation that I had somehow gained access to the real deal.
After 'Wizard', summer was approaching, so I could start to mow lawns for money. On the day of release, I called Wal-mart (35 minutes away on bike) every 15 minutes. When the truck finally came in and they had release copies, I got the electronics manager to promise to hold a copy for me. I biked up, only to find that he had sold all the copies he had (35, I think) to a dealer. Of course SMB2 had been fetching insane prices at Christmas a few years previously, so it was seen as a good invenstment to buy all the copies of an popular videogame you could and resell them.
I finally managed to get a copy the next week, which I promptly brought home and played after carefully re-reading the manual for about an hour at a local Wendy's. My brother, the bastard, ratted me out for spending my lawn-mowing money on a video game (A big no-no in my house, especially since my grades were starting to slip). My mom took the game away and hid it. Luckily for me, she didn't destroy it.
SMB3 was and still is a hell of a game. I still play it from time to time.
I have this love-hate thing with David Lynch movies. Most of them I hate, but even in the bad ones, you can tell that Lynch is really working his ass off stylisticly.
I didn't read Dune before seeing the David Lynch version. I still thought that it was a hell of a movie, despite its many problems. (I hate Kyle Mclaughlin almost as much as I hate Ben Affleck.) Even having read Dune, the Sci-fi mini-series just left me flat up next to the sheer style of the first movie.
Even people who read the manuals are often left befuddled by 'new features' in existing software releases.
What this boils down to is often not shortsightedness on the part of software developers, but upon software product managers, be they individual developers (as is usually the case for OSS), team leaders, project managers, or IT VP's. Most developers, if given the choice, will make the product they need and want. This may or may not be the product your customer wants. If there's an executive VP laying down software requirements, you can almost be assured that it's not the product your users need or want.
Mr. Chase, your steady diet of greasy porkrinds and quarterpounders with cheese has finally caught up with you. Your heart is damaged beyond repair. Your only hope of living longer than six months is a full heart transplant. Unfortuneately the waiting list is quite long and you're of a race that typically has very few registered donors. (Ask Asians about transplants...) The prognosis isn't good.
Fortuneately, we've been doing immune-system research with sheep and pigs that may allow you to use a pig heart in the short... or even long term.
Now, Mister Chase, do you think that the research is so wrong?
A doctor once told me that most yawns (not all) were a sign that you had high levels of C02 building up in your bloodstream. (Thus, it happens more often when you're sleepy and not moving around much) Yawning slowly expels most the gas from your lungs and causes you to deeply inhale, hopefully getting more oxygen than carbon dioxide in the mix.
Seeing another person yawn triggers the desire in you to yawn for the very real purpose of getting rid of your excess C02 as well. This may be because we know that if one of us is getting sleepy or deprived of oxygen we all are, or if one of us is in a location that is prone to oxygen depletion-- the bottom of a cave or burrow, for example-- then we need to move to an area that is more open to moving air.
Humans have a lot of responses like this. When one of us gets sick and vomits, anyone else who sees it also feels sick and tries to vomit. The implication being that if one of us has eaten bad, possibly toxic food, the rest of us should try to purge our stomachs before it affects us.
Try this the next time you're at home with your dog or cat. Yawn widely and deeply in front of your pet. Chances are, you can make your pet yawn. This is an old, *old* mechanism.
Couldn't agree more. Why was this paper written? The author gives the reason of counting how many hosts exist on the internet.
Do we really care how many hosts are on the internet? Since most NATed boxes are workstations and not webservers, the only practical use for this algorithm is for service providers to count how many machines are using a given broadband pipe. One other poster suggested that it could be used for load balancing, in that you could accidentally load balance one ip address containing a thousand real users to one server rather than split them up.
I thought *real* load balancing used a first-come first-served approach and sent each client request to the least-used server.
This is bad mojo. The author of this paper is going straight to hell. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
I forgot the title of the 9/11 collumn, but did some digging after I posted. The title of the column is 'On Hallowed Ground'. It's still available on Miami Herald's website:
My wife recently watched an interview with Stevie Nicks. Despite having the wealth necessary to buy and maintain a huge personal home theatre system, as well as a completely wired home, she can't do anything with it. In fact, if what my wife told me was correct, she has two maids who live in her house to do nothing but operate-- not administer computer servers, mind you-- operate all of Ms. Nicks home electronics.
Mr. Barry, as we all know, the Internet is slowly killing paper news media, along with cable news. Internet news sites can carry more material, archive it an available format longer, and can target the news to a much finer-grained audience than a newspaper can hope to do. Humour in the form of comic strips or humour articles like yours can come in a much-wider array of content, and can be targeted at any subject or audiences accustomed to any level of acceptable content.
My local paper recently began to distribute free copies in an effort to revive spiraling circulation rates. This signals to me that all but the largest papers are beginning to feel the pinch from internet news and media distribution most keenly. I suspect that in the near future, only the largest papers will survive (MH possibly being one of those) and that online news sources will be accepted as the preferred method for news delivery.
Assuming that your job as a columnist for a paper should go away, what contingency plans do you have to continue to ply your craft in a completely wired world? (I already read your columns online rather than in the print version of the MH or my local paper.)
Mr. Barry... I own several of your books, as well as a copy of the 'Big Trouble' movie. (I hope you're getting some kind of royalties for that...). In all of your writing, the piece that I felt was the most powerful was your segment on visting Hiroshima in 'Dave Barry does Japan' and witnessing the holiday celbrated in rememberance of the bombing.
You've written a few more very serious pieces, such as the column on your visit to one of the 9-11 crash sites.
My question is why do you not do more serious columns and articles like these more often? While I think that your columns and humor articles are great (milk-through the nose funny, frequently) I can't help but feel that the Hiroshima and 9-11 articles were better.
No, slash just hid my angle bracket for me. If you look at the source, it's still there, being treated as broken html. If I had used a <, it would have worked. Hehehe
It took Marcus Sachs, a cyber soldier from a Pentagon unit trained to attack foreign networks, to bridge the suspicion gap. Sachs dazzled the room with his observations and theories about Leaves. With casual command of hacker lingo and the history of worms and their attacks, he demonstrated both the expertise of the government corps and the urgency of defeating this unique and dangerous foe.
And...
Assigned to the infrastructure protection center, Jupina, 36, was well-versed in cyber jargon.
So, basically, all the equipment you really need to be a government computer crime fighter is an education in 'cyber jargon' and l33+ 5p34|.
No, to impress the ladies with an app like this, you need something that can optimally play The Sims so that you can arrange any given soap-opera scenario to your liking.
This is correct. Copyright violation right now has the same stigma of speeding. You know its dangerous. You know it's against the law. You also know that *Everyone* does it. Even lawmakers.
Passing a law like this is the equivalent of abolishing speed limits in exchange for forcing auto-makers to put anti-speeding technology in cars.
There are legitimate reasons to speed (medical emergencies, accident evasion, etc...) and there are legitimate reasons to copy of copyrighted material. Exchanging one for the other simply isn't workable.
It's a joke, but when I did web design, mine and my company's least favorite clients were attorneys. It was simply because if they felt like something wasn't exactly the way they liked it, they *would* file a lawsuit. An attorney's first response to any situation which upsets them is "Well, I'll just have to file a lawsuit then, won't I?" When I did tech support for the same company that I later did design work for, I could *count* on this being something said during any given tech call with an attorney.
To this day, I will *not* do consulting for an attorney. I will not offer my services to an attorney, nor will I do business with one if at all possible.
Think about it. For the first time in a decade, what with all the city and national governments giving the dirty bird to Microsoft in favor of Linux or other alternatives, Redmond has finally realized that it has real competition again. Better, Microsoft can't 'embrace and extend' this competition without a significant alteration of their core business plan.
This means that, for the foreseeable future, MS users will be getting a product that will be the result of a pricewar with Free software, will have features that compete with OSS features, and will have a level of quality that attempts to approach OSS quality.
I don't think that Microsoft will belly up any time soon, regardless of how wonderful that would be. I do see Windows getting very good in the near future since quality and ease of use are the only ways it has left to compete with Linux.
Interesting you mentioned temperature. Cats in particular are very sensitive to temperature during gestation and development.
You can see this particularly easy in Siamese and other cats with a light coat and dak 'points'. The dark grey or brown fur develops in area where the blood circulates less and that is generally less warm. Feet, tail, face, and some backs of Siamese are dark. These are the same areas that would show up darker than surrounds on an infrared image.
Two kittens with the same mother and identical markings will often show massive coat pattern changes in a very short time as they mature, especially if kept in different environments. I own a Siamese cat, for example, that had a completely white coat when she was a kitten. Since I keep it fairly cool in my house, her coat has darkened considerably and her points are very dark and very pronounced. Her brother, who lives in a much warmer house, still has a very light coat and much lighter points.
1998 - Bill Clinton's DNA found in Patomic River 1999 - Little bits of Silicone from Pamela Anderson found in the sand at all the various 'Baywatch' sets. 2000 - Florida's 'hanging chads' and its dignity found off Miami Beach. 2001 - Dot.Com shrapnel covers most of California and a significant portion of the East Coast. 2002 - The tatters and shreds of American freedom found in the dust in the bottom of Senate and House a few months after the Patriot Act was passed. 2003 - I'm not sure *what* particles those are all over the Pacific Ocean, but the Mass Spectrometer says 'CowboyNeal'.
Scapegoat Sweepstakes?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Kevin, you've said and many of us feel that you had the book thrown at you to try to deterr other wouldbe hackers and crackers from plying their craft.
How many of the charges brought against you were unfair? What do you feel would have been a fair set of charges to levy against you?
Let's face it. There's stuff out there that you want to see that comes in real format. If it's not downloadable, then I skip it. But if it is downloadable and not restricted to stream-only playback, then I don't hesitate to fire up Real Player, secure in the knowledge that it will never be able to communicate my personal details.
Learn to use software firewalls if you can. Hardware firewalls are great for keeping people from attacking you, but software firewalls are great for managing misbehaving software installations like Realplayer. I've never had a better security tool.
Really. The next time you go bitching about how wonderful Apple is compared to Microsft, remember that they're guilty of *exactly* the same kind of
- vendor intimidation - semi-legal, prohibitive licensing practices - price gouging - market control - FUD - product tying - hiding software features and - employee abuse
that our friends in Redmond are famous for. The only difference is that Apple tried to cater to a niche market while Microsoft decided to go for the lowest common denominator and won. The only reason Apple is seen as good is because they are not Microsoft.
Basically, they said what everyone else knows. Copyrights that can be extended ad inifitum are not limited. Unlimted copyrights screw over the American people.
They stopped short of outright accusing the other seven of bowing to corporate pressure and taking bribes, however. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if they did. If George W. has done nothing else positive for this country, he has proven than even the Supreme Court is suspectible to patronage, bribery, and corruption.
1. Google has accurate, intelligent search lists. 2. Google does not pollute those lists with advertisements. 3. Google loads quickly and does not attempt to invasively control your machine with javascript or other methods.
If Google changes any one of these three things to make more money based on their popularity, then their popularity will wane and they will eventually make less money.
Note to Google: Don't kill the golden goose just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day, a grocery store near my house-- I say near my house. It was 3 miles away. 10 minutes on a fast bike-- got an NES Choice Ten standup machine. It had a few titles in it, but the one I noticed as being most prominent was a strange game labeled 'SMB3' in blue without any logos or identifying marks.
Curious, I put a quarter in and got my 300 seconds of playtime. I selected 'SMB3' and was rewarded with the home play version (not the later choice ten version where you could select the level) of 'Super Mario Bros. 3'.
"This has to be a hack of some kind," I said, "Like that stupid Skater Brothers rip of Super Mario".
Mind you, this was more than four months before 'Wizard' had hit theaters and about six before you could actually buy SMB3 in stores. They weren't even advertisting SMB3 in Nintendo Power. Of course, back then, video games didn't quite have the 3 years of hype before release they tend to now. The only thing that I can figure is that the owner of the arcade machine managed to get a beta copy of the game or had a friend in Nintendo USA who 'fixed' his Choice-10 roms for him with the new game.
To my surprise, however, SMB3 was not a hack or a copy of an existing game. It was its own game, and a surprisingly good one at that. I came the next day with my allowance-- $10 in quarters. 12000 seconds... a little more than 3 hours of game play. As a matter of fact, I spent the next three saturdays like that. I must have blown $80 just on that one stupid Choice Ten machine.
By the time 'Wizard' was released in theaters, SMB3 was old hat to me. 'Wizard' was merely confirmation that I had somehow gained access to the real deal.
After 'Wizard', summer was approaching, so I could start to mow lawns for money. On the day of release, I called Wal-mart (35 minutes away on bike) every 15 minutes. When the truck finally came in and they had release copies, I got the electronics manager to promise to hold a copy for me. I biked up, only to find that he had sold all the copies he had (35, I think) to a dealer. Of course SMB2 had been fetching insane prices at Christmas a few years previously, so it was seen as a good invenstment to buy all the copies of an popular videogame you could and resell them.
I finally managed to get a copy the next week, which I promptly brought home and played after carefully re-reading the manual for about an hour at a local Wendy's. My brother, the bastard, ratted me out for spending my lawn-mowing money on a video game (A big no-no in my house, especially since my grades were starting to slip). My mom took the game away and hid it. Luckily for me, she didn't destroy it.
SMB3 was and still is a hell of a game. I still play it from time to time.
I have this love-hate thing with David Lynch movies. Most of them I hate, but even in the bad ones, you can tell that Lynch is really working his ass off stylisticly.
I didn't read Dune before seeing the David Lynch version. I still thought that it was a hell of a movie, despite its many problems. (I hate Kyle Mclaughlin almost as much as I hate Ben Affleck.) Even having read Dune, the Sci-fi mini-series just left me flat up next to the sheer style of the first movie.
I wrote a short piece comparing Bush to Hitler a little while back:
http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=119
Even people who read the manuals are often left befuddled by 'new features' in existing software releases.
What this boils down to is often not shortsightedness on the part of software developers, but upon software product managers, be they individual developers (as is usually the case for OSS), team leaders, project managers, or IT VP's. Most developers, if given the choice, will make the product they need and want. This may or may not be the product your customer wants. If there's an executive VP laying down software requirements, you can almost be assured that it's not the product your users need or want.
Mr. Chase, your steady diet of greasy porkrinds and quarterpounders with cheese has finally caught up with you. Your heart is damaged beyond repair. Your only hope of living longer than six months is a full heart transplant. Unfortuneately the waiting list is quite long and you're of a race that typically has very few registered donors. (Ask Asians about transplants...) The prognosis isn't good.
Fortuneately, we've been doing immune-system research with sheep and pigs that may allow you to use a pig heart in the short... or even long term.
Now, Mister Chase, do you think that the research is so wrong?
A doctor once told me that most yawns (not all) were a sign that you had high levels of C02 building up in your bloodstream. (Thus, it happens more often when you're sleepy and not moving around much) Yawning slowly expels most the gas from your lungs and causes you to deeply inhale, hopefully getting more oxygen than carbon dioxide in the mix.
Seeing another person yawn triggers the desire in you to yawn for the very real purpose of getting rid of your excess C02 as well. This may be because we know that if one of us is getting sleepy or deprived of oxygen we all are, or if one of us is in a location that is prone to oxygen depletion-- the bottom of a cave or burrow, for example-- then we need to move to an area that is more open to moving air.
Humans have a lot of responses like this. When one of us gets sick and vomits, anyone else who sees it also feels sick and tries to vomit. The implication being that if one of us has eaten bad, possibly toxic food, the rest of us should try to purge our stomachs before it affects us.
Try this the next time you're at home with your dog or cat. Yawn widely and deeply in front of your pet. Chances are, you can make your pet yawn. This is an old, *old* mechanism.
I know I'm yawning just thinking about it.
Couldn't agree more. Why was this paper written? The author gives the reason of counting how many hosts exist on the internet.
Do we really care how many hosts are on the internet? Since most NATed boxes are workstations and not webservers, the only practical use for this algorithm is for service providers to count how many machines are using a given broadband pipe. One other poster suggested that it could be used for load balancing, in that you could accidentally load balance one ip address containing a thousand real users to one server rather than split them up.
I thought *real* load balancing used a first-come first-served approach and sent each client request to the least-used server.
This is bad mojo. The author of this paper is going straight to hell. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
I forgot the title of the 9/11 collumn, but did some digging after I posted. The title of the column is 'On Hallowed Ground'. It's still available on Miami Herald's website:
n ists/dave_barry/3972571.htm
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/colum
Even if you don't normally like Dave Barry's stuff, you should read this. It's quite good.
My wife recently watched an interview with Stevie Nicks. Despite having the wealth necessary to buy and maintain a huge personal home theatre system, as well as a completely wired home, she can't do anything with it. In fact, if what my wife told me was correct, she has two maids who live in her house to do nothing but operate-- not administer computer servers, mind you-- operate all of Ms. Nicks home electronics.
One question per post... ehehe....
Mr. Barry, as we all know, the Internet is slowly killing paper news media, along with cable news. Internet news sites can carry more material, archive it an available format longer, and can target the news to a much finer-grained audience than a newspaper can hope to do. Humour in the form of comic strips or humour articles like yours can come in a much-wider array of content, and can be targeted at any subject or audiences accustomed to any level of acceptable content.
My local paper recently began to distribute free copies in an effort to revive spiraling circulation rates. This signals to me that all but the largest papers are beginning to feel the pinch from internet news and media distribution most keenly. I suspect that in the near future, only the largest papers will survive (MH possibly being one of those) and that online news sources will be accepted as the preferred method for news delivery.
Assuming that your job as a columnist for a paper should go away, what contingency plans do you have to continue to ply your craft in a completely wired world? (I already read your columns online rather than in the print version of the MH or my local paper.)
Mr. Barry... I own several of your books, as well as a copy of the 'Big Trouble' movie. (I hope you're getting some kind of royalties for that...). In all of your writing, the piece that I felt was the most powerful was your segment on visting Hiroshima in 'Dave Barry does Japan' and witnessing the holiday celbrated in rememberance of the bombing.
You've written a few more very serious pieces, such as the column on your visit to one of the 9-11 crash sites.
My question is why do you not do more serious columns and articles like these more often? While I think that your columns and humor articles are great (milk-through the nose funny, frequently) I can't help but feel that the Hiroshima and 9-11 articles were better.
No, slash just hid my angle bracket for me. If you look at the source, it's still there, being treated as broken html. If I had used a <, it would have worked. Hehehe
From the article:
It took Marcus Sachs, a cyber soldier from a Pentagon unit trained to attack foreign networks, to bridge the suspicion gap. Sachs dazzled the room with his observations and theories about Leaves. With casual command of hacker lingo and the history of worms and their attacks, he demonstrated both the expertise of the government corps and the urgency of defeating this unique and dangerous foe.
And...
Assigned to the infrastructure protection center, Jupina, 36, was well-versed in cyber jargon.
So, basically, all the equipment you really need to be a government computer crime fighter is an education in 'cyber jargon' and l33+ 5p34|.
No, to impress the ladies with an app like this, you need something that can optimally play The Sims so that you can arrange any given soap-opera scenario to your liking.
This is correct. Copyright violation right now has the same stigma of speeding. You know its dangerous. You know it's against the law. You also know that *Everyone* does it. Even lawmakers.
Passing a law like this is the equivalent of abolishing speed limits in exchange for forcing auto-makers to put anti-speeding technology in cars.
There are legitimate reasons to speed (medical emergencies, accident evasion, etc...) and there are legitimate reasons to copy of copyrighted material. Exchanging one for the other simply isn't workable.
It's a joke, but when I did web design, mine and my company's least favorite clients were attorneys. It was simply because if they felt like something wasn't exactly the way they liked it, they *would* file a lawsuit. An attorney's first response to any situation which upsets them is "Well, I'll just have to file a lawsuit then, won't I?" When I did tech support for the same company that I later did design work for, I could *count* on this being something said during any given tech call with an attorney.
To this day, I will *not* do consulting for an attorney. I will not offer my services to an attorney, nor will I do business with one if at all possible.
Think about it. For the first time in a decade, what with all the city and national governments giving the dirty bird to Microsoft in favor of Linux or other alternatives, Redmond has finally realized that it has real competition again. Better, Microsoft can't 'embrace and extend' this competition without a significant alteration of their core business plan.
This means that, for the foreseeable future, MS users will be getting a product that will be the result of a pricewar with Free software, will have features that compete with OSS features, and will have a level of quality that attempts to approach OSS quality.
I don't think that Microsoft will belly up any time soon, regardless of how wonderful that would be. I do see Windows getting very good in the near future since quality and ease of use are the only ways it has left to compete with Linux.
Interesting you mentioned temperature. Cats in particular are very sensitive to temperature during gestation and development.
You can see this particularly easy in Siamese and other cats with a light coat and dak 'points'. The dark grey or brown fur develops in area where the blood circulates less and that is generally less warm. Feet, tail, face, and some backs of Siamese are dark. These are the same areas that would show up darker than surrounds on an infrared image.
Two kittens with the same mother and identical markings will often show massive coat pattern changes in a very short time as they mature, especially if kept in different environments. I own a Siamese cat, for example, that had a completely white coat when she was a kitten. Since I keep it fairly cool in my house, her coat has darkened considerably and her points are very dark and very pronounced. Her brother, who lives in a much warmer house, still has a very light coat and much lighter points.
1998 - Bill Clinton's DNA found in Patomic River
1999 - Little bits of Silicone from Pamela Anderson found in the sand at all the various 'Baywatch' sets.
2000 - Florida's 'hanging chads' and its dignity found off Miami Beach.
2001 - Dot.Com shrapnel covers most of California and a significant portion of the East Coast.
2002 - The tatters and shreds of American freedom found in the dust in the bottom of Senate and House a few months after the Patriot Act was passed.
2003 - I'm not sure *what* particles those are all over the Pacific Ocean, but the Mass Spectrometer says 'CowboyNeal'.
Kevin, you've said and many of us feel that you had the book thrown at you to try to deterr other wouldbe hackers and crackers from plying their craft.
How many of the charges brought against you were unfair? What do you feel would have been a fair set of charges to levy against you?
Is that they are going to reduce the number of published artists by 24% and jack up the prices by 18% and blame the resulting 6% 'loss' on Kazaa.
Let's face it. There's stuff out there that you want to see that comes in real format. If it's not downloadable, then I skip it. But if it is downloadable and not restricted to stream-only playback, then I don't hesitate to fire up Real Player, secure in the knowledge that it will never be able to communicate my personal details.
Learn to use software firewalls if you can. Hardware firewalls are great for keeping people from attacking you, but software firewalls are great for managing misbehaving software installations like Realplayer. I've never had a better security tool.
Really. The next time you go bitching about how wonderful Apple is compared to Microsft, remember that they're guilty of *exactly* the same kind of
- vendor intimidation
- semi-legal, prohibitive licensing practices
- price gouging
- market control
- FUD
- product tying
- hiding software features
and
- employee abuse
that our friends in Redmond are famous for. The only difference is that Apple tried to cater to a niche market while Microsoft decided to go for the lowest common denominator and won. The only reason Apple is seen as good is because they are not Microsoft.
Stevens and Breyer (SP?)
Basically, they said what everyone else knows. Copyrights that can be extended ad inifitum are not limited. Unlimted copyrights screw over the American people.
They stopped short of outright accusing the other seven of bowing to corporate pressure and taking bribes, however. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if they did. If George W. has done nothing else positive for this country, he has proven than even the Supreme Court is suspectible to patronage, bribery, and corruption.
1. Google has accurate, intelligent search lists.
2. Google does not pollute those lists with advertisements.
3. Google loads quickly and does not attempt to invasively control your machine with javascript or other methods.
If Google changes any one of these three things to make more money based on their popularity, then their popularity will wane and they will eventually make less money.
Note to Google: Don't kill the golden goose just yet.