In Germany, for example, a lawsuit against the one year data retention was successful and the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Germany's highest court which does only hear constitutional cases) nullified the law that required ISPs to store data for one year. In the conservative/neocon government there is currently a dispute about reintroducing it in a way that will survive a similar lawsuit.
What ISPs still may do in Germany is store data for up to seven days for technical reasons, or as long as necessary for billing.
What I *don't* want is the shitty, noisy, tacky plastic cases that come with most PCs.
Oh get off it. You can get a quiet PC with a metal case, and it won't cost you Apple prices, either. I assembled my own from cheapo parts from Newegg, and was very happy with the quality and final results. If you pay a bit more you'll get something decent from the major vendors.
True for desktops you assemble yourself. Partly true for major vendors (the Dell Otiplexes I've seen are usually quiet, but case quality is still semi-cheap). There are also some small specialty vendors who will build stuff like completely passive cooled tower PCs. But their prices are pretty mac-like;-)
Usually, you have to order stuff (and pay for it) to have it sent to you. With this scheme, I can see some clever hacker buy a few episodes of some show, then wait for the rest to "preload" and copy them out of the storage. Unless the content providers have a smart encryption/decryption scheme this time (good luck with that;-)
Well, maybe Microsoft should update their task manager to distinguish between -in use by programs -in use as cache or superfetch (which is similar in purpose, only superfetch tries to guess in advance what you want). -unused That would clear up the confusion. For a company that is otherwise so good at marketing, not showing this distinction seems a big fail. I could go on about other shortcomings in Task Manager, but that would be offtopic...
And the Republicans are trying to unfund any research into renewable energy.
They are trying to cut budgets across the board, because the government has no money.
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Wind energy makes little sense at the moment (all we will end up with is more dead windmill fields such as the ones in California and Hawaii). Solar panels are starting to make sense but why do they need government help to make it happen? People are already starting to buy things like solar shingles of their own accord.
Nuclear power plants are not renewable. Uranium will eventually run out just like oil. Granted, with breeder technology it might last a few centuries, but after Chernobyl I'm a bit wary about claims of safe fission reactors.
Solar panels being cheap enough without subsidies to pay for themselves are a very interesting development, but also a new one. Germany is currently approaching that point for private use, but it is not quite there. Maybe in another year. Large industrial customers get cheaper prices per kWh, so installing solar panels for their own use is less attractive for them. For some countries in southern Europe, we may already be beyond the break-even point. I'm not familiar with their prices per kWh, but they certainly have more sunny hours per year and get more energy from the same amount of panels.
I guess for Windows users, it might make sense to move the task bar to the left screen margin. Thus recovering some vertical pixel range at the expense of horizontal range. Disclaimer: I have not really tried it yet, since my screens are still 4:3
I know it does not exist yet, but a few years from now, there will probably a PS4 because the PS3 is becoming obsolete. At that point, everybody should remember that Sony is managed by assholes and cannot be trusted...
The image you linked to a few posts back suggests that the amount of MoS2 going into each transistor would be very small. It shows a molybdenite layer with width = source-drain distance. I guess we're talking millimeters for a big power transistor here, some 10 nanometers for transistors in a CPU. thickness = distance between SiO2 substrate and gate. I guess we're talking micrometers for a power transistor here, less for transistors in a CPU. and length = whatever gate length the transistor has.
Overall, we might end up needing a few milligrams per CPU or power transistor. Losses in the process included. The price of raw molybdenum should have not much of an influence there.
In that performance class, I'd probably prefer the Radeon HD 5570, at 43W at full load. For instance the ASUS EAH5570 Silent/DI - with passive cooling, so it is quiet as well as a "low-wattage" option.
In general, I have a similar preference for low power components, but I also like stuff like well-made cases and ECC RAM, so my systems tend to be a bit more expensive...
Oh, the computing power is increasing all right. But so is the computing power required by the latest games. So it may look like there is no progress, but that is wrong.
Also, the low-end cards of yesterday are made obsolete by the integrated chipset graphics of today (or by integrated GPU/GPU combos). For instance, if you compare today's low end cards (like ATI Radeon HD 5450 or NVIDIA GeForce 210) to the performance of the integrated GPU in Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPUs, Sandy Bridge is close if not equal. Thus, the low end cards get "radically cost reduced": they sit in the chipset or CPU of your new mainboard;-)
You are buying a game made in 1990 and trying to run it on software made in 2009, almost two decades of hardware and software changes, and you don't think there might be a problem?
Uh, this is a PC game on a PC, built for a Microsoft OS running on a Microsoft OS; why should anyone expect it not to run? Microsoft has built its fortune on backwards compatibility.
There is one major exception to this: Around the year 2000, Microsoft gave up on full DOS compatibility, in favor of a more stable and secure operating system. So it is no surprise that Wing Commander 1 does not run on XP and Win7. Why it does not run on 98 and DOS, I can only guess. Maybe a timing issue because your computer is faster than the developers at Origin ever expected. After all, Wing Commander 1 came out when 80386 PCs were considered good machines.
I just recently read an article from late 2002 stating that XP was projected to surpass the previous versions in another few months. Quite a bit different than 20%. But again, a lot of people ran in droves away from WinME.
Also keep in mind that Vista has had 4 years now to be "embraced" and we know how that turned out. The marketshare that 7 has is almost solely due to new purchases and Vista upgrades. The decline in the XP market has been very very slow. That was not the case with XP, which ate away at 98 and ME pretty quickly in comparison.
Both true, and I think the reason is that XP did not have to compete with a well-established Windows version in good quality, at least on the home user market. 98SE was clearly inferior in terms of stability, and WinME was worse. I've heard from people who replaced it with 98SE and considered that an upgrade. Win2k was almost as good as XP and some geeks happily ran it on their home PCs, but XP was the first NT-based OS that was marketed to the home user. I'm sure if Win2k had been as widespread as XP is today, the adoption of XP would have been slower.
I think GP has a point where AMD is concerned. Intel may ignore 1% of the market refusing to buy their products. But for AMD with their smaller market share, that 1% may be important enough to keep their stuff DRM free.
Low cost needs to be balanced against getting the job done, and reliably done.
Because if your IT starts to have frequent outages or lose valuable data, it can be more expensive than investing in decent equipment and competent employees. Since/. likes car analogies: In the 90s Opel, a German branch of General motors, was a bit too aggressive in cutting manufacturing costs. The resulting quality problems were quite damaging to the brand and customers started to look elsewhere for their next car.
The software can bite you on the desktop too. A likely scenario:
Three years ago your company introduced some software that was programmed in happy ignorance of good programming practices, especially where access permissions are concerned.
Now you buy new computers. XP is no longer available, so they come with Windows 7. Not really a bad system, but it is a bit more strict where writing to the program directory and such is concerned. Also, it tries to hide this by "virtualizing" the files in question and giving every user his own copy. Very clever if said files are meant to serve to exchange data between users.
Have fun finding out where these strange side effects are coming from;-)
Your post pretty much describes my development process. Only that the company I work at does not have much in the way of mandated modeling utilities. So when I'm at the "mostly there" stage, I tend to start writing a skeleton of the program in actual code. Preferably in an object-oriented design, as this makes it easier to maintain the overview. Next is filling in the actual functionality, which means another cycle of improving things piece by piece.
If you mean the wormhole opponents in EVE, yes they are a bit smarter by going for the smaller ships first. But apart from that, they are still very predictable. BTW, bring a bunch of battleships and a Tank-Drake. Then the "smallest" ship is anything but fragile.
What Eve PVE needs to be more interesting is variety. For starters: -Some random changes in initial positions of the NPCs -Changing composition of enemy fleets -More variety in NPC weapon and ECM use just to name those things that should be relatively easy to do. Maybe Incursion will do the trick, but right now I want to try one of the upcoming space shooter MMOs (Black Prophecy, Taikodom, and maybe some day after the lawsuit is settled, Jump Gate Evolution).
You have some interesting points about how WOW has some flexibility and good end game content. But I think the above quote hits the mark. Boring grind is what IMHO kills the fun in most MMORPGs. A game that wants to be successful needs to get around that. Some possible ways to do that:
-Lots and lots of developer-generated, original quests. Problem: That approach is EXPENSIVE
-Make PVP a way of leveling, as it tends to be less boring. Problem: Will probably be exploited by all kinds of leveling services, commercial and private. Think "victim for hire".
-Make PVE more interesting. There has been some progress with giving players skill combos or allowing them to take cover, which gives more tactical options. But ultimately this approach needs better NPC AI, which is a difficult field. Here I'd like to mention EVE Online in particular. That game already has a great variety of different weapons, ammo types and support mechanics that make for great tactical options in PVP. But unfortunately, poor NPC AI and mission ("quest") design make these options useless for PvE. Usually the mobs come at you in a big bunch, so hampering some of them with jamming equipment does not make much of a difference. On top of that, the NPCs always use the same tactics in the same mission, so once you know the mission you just follow the script. With smarter NPC opponents, EVE PVE could be a lot more entertaining...
-Go for MMOFPS mechanics to get rid of the old "click on enemy, lauch attack, wait what happens". Problem: Twitch combat needs a high update frequency, which increases the neccessary bandwidth (and likely server CPU power). Fortunately, both of these get cheaper year by year, and there is a slow but noticeable trend to more FPS mechanics in MMOs:-)
No shit. It's new. Low-end hardware is, by definition, low-end and therefore not expected to run high-end software. That's why they have minimum requirements.
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware
If you only give it 1 core of a Core Duo and 256mb of ram, then no shit. Give it a core of a Xenon and 2gb of ram, however, and it ain't too shabby.
Actually, one core of a Core Duo would be OK. I've had Win 7 running on much less (one core of Atom) and performance was acceptable as long as I did not run large applications. Not great but serviceable.
The problem on old PCs or netbooks is RAM: Win 7 needs much more of it than XP (Not an issue for new desktops or "big" laptops, you buy them with 2 GByte or more anyway).
For Firefox and SeaMonkey, there is MozBackup to backup your local profiles, including the mailbox. While available only for Windows, it is Open Source and should therefore not easily disappear.
Of course, relying on MozBackup requires you to generally store your mails at home, not on the server.
Good point about using other sources than corn or sugar for the ethanol.
But going for synthetic diesel made from the same source materials may be even better. The process typically consists of gasification of the biomass and subsequent Fischer-Tropsch-Synthesis for creating a diesel-like synthetic fuel.
Lets be honest folks: Nobody is holding a gun to the distro developers and saying "You are NOT allowed to buy any codecs, you commie punks!". They could just as easily buy the rights to the H.264 codec as MSFT did. But they don't want to because they want to be "free as in beer and freedom man!" and you know what? That is just lovely.
The big problem is that the "free as in freedom" means that the distros would have to grant the rights to redistribute h.264 to their customers as well. Quoting section 7 of the GPLv2 which AFAIK covers most of Linux:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So if one Linux distro gets the rights to distribute while allowing royalty-free redistribution, soon all of them would redistribute the piece of code that handles h.264 for free.
Of course, the MPEG-LA knows this too and that's why the price would be quite high. It would amount to buying out the patents to h.264 and I don't think any existing Linux distributor can afford that.
Long term, I guess the expiration of the patents in question will solve the problem. But in the mean time, we'll have several more years of somehow needing to get around stuff like h.264:-(
That sort of silent plugin installation was my reason to switch off auto-update and get the most important patches via http://www.wsusoffline.net/ instead.
Microsoft patching the OS is necessary and welcome, but Firefox is an application and I'm managing the applications on my machine. Microsoft interfering with those is NOT welcome.
And I'm not sorry to see these site lose the traffic. Its a mild punishment for the major damage that it has done to the country, and possibly more horrific consequences to come if insurgents / Taliban find a use for some of the names that may be exposed.
I hope you realize that the latest bunch of releases (government cables) is usually about high ranking politicians and diplomats worldwide, not US informants in Afghanistan who have to fear the Taliban?
Yet the massive blocking efforts TFA is about have started only now, when the government cables are all over the news. The "Afghan War Diaries" did not create such a massive reaction.
My conclusion is that the US government cares more about the embarrassment from the latest leaks than about the lives of people in Afghanistan.
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany, for example, a lawsuit against the one year data retention was successful and the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Germany's highest court which does only hear constitutional cases) nullified the law that required ISPs to store data for one year. In the conservative/neocon government there is currently a dispute about reintroducing it in a way that will survive a similar lawsuit.
What ISPs still may do in Germany is store data for up to seven days for technical reasons, or as long as necessary for billing.
What I *don't* want is the shitty, noisy, tacky plastic cases that come with most PCs.
Oh get off it. You can get a quiet PC with a metal case, and it won't cost you Apple prices, either. I assembled my own from cheapo parts from Newegg, and was very happy with the quality and final results. If you pay a bit more you'll get something decent from the major vendors.
True for desktops you assemble yourself. ;-)
Partly true for major vendors (the Dell Otiplexes I've seen are usually quiet, but case quality is still semi-cheap).
There are also some small specialty vendors who will build stuff like completely passive cooled tower PCs. But their prices are pretty mac-like
According to one of the linked articles they do that... scratch the above remark :-(
Usually, you have to order stuff (and pay for it) to have it sent to you. With this scheme, I can see some clever hacker buy a few episodes of some show, then wait for the rest to "preload" and copy them out of the storage. Unless the content providers have a smart encryption/decryption scheme this time (good luck with that ;-)
Well, maybe Microsoft should update their task manager to distinguish between
-in use by programs
-in use as cache or superfetch (which is similar in purpose, only superfetch tries to guess in advance what you want).
-unused
That would clear up the confusion. For a company that is otherwise so good at marketing, not showing this distinction seems a big fail. I could go on about other shortcomings in Task Manager, but that would be offtopic...
And the Republicans are trying to unfund any research into renewable energy.
They are trying to cut budgets across the board, because the government has no money.
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Wind energy makes little sense at the moment (all we will end up with is more dead windmill fields such as the ones in California and Hawaii). Solar panels are starting to make sense but why do they need government help to make it happen? People are already starting to buy things like solar shingles of their own accord.
Nuclear power plants are not renewable. Uranium will eventually run out just like oil. Granted, with breeder technology it might last a few centuries, but after Chernobyl I'm a bit wary about claims of safe fission reactors.
Solar panels being cheap enough without subsidies to pay for themselves are a very interesting development, but also a new one.
Germany is currently approaching that point for private use, but it is not quite there. Maybe in another year. Large industrial customers get cheaper prices per kWh, so installing solar panels for their own use is less attractive for them.
For some countries in southern Europe, we may already be beyond the break-even point. I'm not familiar with their prices per kWh, but they certainly have more sunny hours per year and get more energy from the same amount of panels.
I guess for Windows users, it might make sense to move the task bar to the left screen margin. Thus recovering some vertical pixel range at the expense of horizontal range.
Disclaimer: I have not really tried it yet, since my screens are still 4:3
I know it does not exist yet, but a few years from now, there will probably a PS4 because the PS3 is becoming obsolete.
At that point, everybody should remember that Sony is managed by assholes and cannot be trusted...
The image you linked to a few posts back suggests that the amount of MoS2 going into each transistor would be very small.
It shows a molybdenite layer with
width = source-drain distance. I guess we're talking millimeters for a big power transistor here, some 10 nanometers for transistors in a CPU.
thickness = distance between SiO2 substrate and gate. I guess we're talking micrometers for a power transistor here, less for transistors in a CPU.
and length = whatever gate length the transistor has.
Overall, we might end up needing a few milligrams per CPU or power transistor. Losses in the process included. The price of raw molybdenum should have not much of an influence there.
In that performance class, I'd probably prefer the Radeon HD 5570, at 43W at full load. For instance the ASUS EAH5570 Silent/DI - with passive cooling, so it is quiet as well as a "low-wattage" option.
In general, I have a similar preference for low power components, but I also like stuff like well-made cases and ECC RAM, so my systems tend to be a bit more expensive...
Oh, the computing power is increasing all right. But so is the computing power required by the latest games. So it may look like there is no progress, but that is wrong.
Also, the low-end cards of yesterday are made obsolete by the integrated chipset graphics of today (or by integrated GPU/GPU combos). For instance, if you compare today's low end cards (like ATI Radeon HD 5450 or NVIDIA GeForce 210) to the performance of the integrated GPU in Intel's new Sandy Bridge CPUs, Sandy Bridge is close if not equal. Thus, the low end cards get "radically cost reduced": ;-)
they sit in the chipset or CPU of your new mainboard
You are buying a game made in 1990 and trying to run it on software made in 2009, almost two decades of hardware and software changes, and you don't think there might be a problem?
Uh, this is a PC game on a PC, built for a Microsoft OS running on a Microsoft OS; why should anyone expect it not to run? Microsoft has built its fortune on backwards compatibility.
There is one major exception to this:
Around the year 2000, Microsoft gave up on full DOS compatibility, in favor of a more stable and secure operating system. So it is no surprise that Wing Commander 1 does not run on XP and Win7.
Why it does not run on 98 and DOS, I can only guess. Maybe a timing issue because your computer is faster than the developers at Origin ever expected. After all, Wing Commander 1 came out when 80386 PCs were considered good machines.
I just recently read an article from late 2002 stating that XP was projected to surpass the previous versions in another few months. Quite a bit different than 20%. But again, a lot of people ran in droves away from WinME.
Also keep in mind that Vista has had 4 years now to be "embraced" and we know how that turned out. The marketshare that 7 has is almost solely due to new purchases and Vista upgrades. The decline in the XP market has been very very slow. That was not the case with XP, which ate away at 98 and ME pretty quickly in comparison.
Both true, and I think the reason is that XP did not have to compete with a well-established Windows version in good quality, at least on the home user market.
98SE was clearly inferior in terms of stability, and WinME was worse. I've heard from people who replaced it with 98SE and considered that an upgrade. Win2k was almost as good as XP and some geeks happily ran it on their home PCs, but XP was the first NT-based OS that was marketed to the home user.
I'm sure if Win2k had been as widespread as XP is today, the adoption of XP would have been slower.
I think GP has a point where AMD is concerned. Intel may ignore 1% of the market refusing to buy their products. But for AMD with their smaller market share, that 1% may be important enough to keep their stuff DRM free.
Low cost needs to be balanced against getting the job done, and reliably done.
Because if your IT starts to have frequent outages or lose valuable data, it can be more expensive than investing in decent equipment and competent employees. /. likes car analogies:
Since
In the 90s Opel, a German branch of General motors, was a bit too aggressive in cutting manufacturing costs. The resulting quality problems were quite damaging to the brand and customers started to look elsewhere for their next car.
The software can bite you on the desktop too. A likely scenario:
Three years ago your company introduced some software that was programmed in happy ignorance of good programming practices, especially where access permissions are concerned.
Now you buy new computers. XP is no longer available, so they come with Windows 7. Not really a bad system, but it is a bit more strict where writing to the program directory and such is concerned. Also, it tries to hide this by "virtualizing" the files in question and giving every user his own copy. Very clever if said files are meant to serve to exchange data between users.
Have fun finding out where these strange side effects are coming from ;-)
Your post pretty much describes my development process. Only that the company I work at does not have much in the way of mandated modeling utilities. So when I'm at the "mostly there" stage, I tend to start writing a skeleton of the program in actual code. Preferably in an object-oriented design, as this makes it easier to maintain the overview.
Next is filling in the actual functionality, which means another cycle of improving things piece by piece.
If you mean the wormhole opponents in EVE, yes they are a bit smarter by going for the smaller ships first. But apart from that, they are still very predictable. BTW, bring a bunch of battleships and a Tank-Drake. Then the "smallest" ship is anything but fragile.
What Eve PVE needs to be more interesting is variety. For starters:
-Some random changes in initial positions of the NPCs
-Changing composition of enemy fleets
-More variety in NPC weapon and ECM use
just to name those things that should be relatively easy to do. Maybe Incursion will do the trick, but right now I want to try one of the upcoming space shooter MMOs (Black Prophecy, Taikodom, and maybe some day after the lawsuit is settled, Jump Gate Evolution).
It was just as grindy as all other games.
You have some interesting points about how WOW has some flexibility and good end game content. But I think the above quote hits the mark. Boring grind is what IMHO kills the fun in most MMORPGs. A game that wants to be successful needs to get around that. Some possible ways to do that:
-Lots and lots of developer-generated, original quests. Problem: That approach is EXPENSIVE
-Make PVP a way of leveling, as it tends to be less boring. Problem: Will probably be exploited by all kinds of leveling services, commercial and private. Think "victim for hire".
-Make PVE more interesting. There has been some progress with giving players skill combos or allowing them to take cover, which gives more tactical options. But ultimately this approach needs better NPC AI, which is a difficult field.
Here I'd like to mention EVE Online in particular. That game already has a great variety of different weapons, ammo types and support mechanics that make for great tactical options in PVP.
But unfortunately, poor NPC AI and mission ("quest") design make these options useless for PvE. Usually the mobs come at you in a big bunch, so hampering some of them with jamming equipment does not make much of a difference. On top of that, the NPCs always use the same tactics in the same mission, so once you know the mission you just follow the script.
With smarter NPC opponents, EVE PVE could be a lot more entertaining...
-Go for MMOFPS mechanics to get rid of the old "click on enemy, lauch attack, wait what happens". Problem: Twitch combat needs a high update frequency, which increases the neccessary bandwidth (and likely server CPU power). Fortunately, both of these get cheaper year by year, and there is a slow but noticeable trend to more FPS mechanics in MMOs :-)
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware
No shit. It's new. Low-end hardware is, by definition, low-end and therefore not expected to run high-end software. That's why they have minimum requirements.
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware
If you only give it 1 core of a Core Duo and 256mb of ram, then no shit. Give it a core of a Xenon and 2gb of ram, however, and it ain't too shabby.
Actually, one core of a Core Duo would be OK. I've had Win 7 running on much less (one core of Atom) and performance was acceptable as long as I did not run large applications. Not great but serviceable.
The problem on old PCs or netbooks is RAM: Win 7 needs much more of it than XP (Not an issue for new desktops or "big" laptops, you buy them with 2 GByte or more anyway).
For Firefox and SeaMonkey, there is MozBackup to backup your local profiles, including the mailbox. While available only for Windows, it is Open Source and should therefore not easily disappear.
Of course, relying on MozBackup requires you to generally store your mails at home, not on the server.
Good point about using other sources than corn or sugar for the ethanol.
But going for synthetic diesel made from the same source materials may be even better. The process typically consists of gasification of the biomass and subsequent Fischer-Tropsch-Synthesis for creating a diesel-like synthetic fuel.
Here is some info from one of the companies working on it: http://www.choren.com/en/carbo-v/carbo-v/
Lets be honest folks: Nobody is holding a gun to the distro developers and saying "You are NOT allowed to buy any codecs, you commie punks!". They could just as easily buy the rights to the H.264 codec as MSFT did. But they don't want to because they want to be "free as in beer and freedom man!" and you know what? That is just lovely.
The big problem is that the "free as in freedom" means that the distros would have to grant the rights to redistribute h.264 to their customers as well.
Quoting section 7 of the GPLv2 which AFAIK covers most of Linux:
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So if one Linux distro gets the rights to distribute while allowing royalty-free redistribution, soon all of them would redistribute the piece of code that handles h.264 for free.
Of course, the MPEG-LA knows this too and that's why the price would be quite high. It would amount to buying out the patents to h.264 and I don't think any existing Linux distributor can afford that.
Long term, I guess the expiration of the patents in question will solve the problem. But in the mean time, we'll have several more years of somehow needing to get around stuff like h.264 :-(
That sort of silent plugin installation was my reason to switch off auto-update and get the most important patches via http://www.wsusoffline.net/ instead.
Microsoft patching the OS is necessary and welcome, but Firefox is an application and I'm managing the applications on my machine. Microsoft interfering with those is NOT welcome.
And I'm not sorry to see these site lose the traffic. Its a mild punishment for the major damage that it has done to the country, and possibly more horrific consequences to come if insurgents / Taliban find a use for some of the names that may be exposed.
I hope you realize that the latest bunch of releases (government cables) is usually about high ranking politicians and diplomats worldwide, not US informants in Afghanistan who have to fear the Taliban?
Yet the massive blocking efforts TFA is about have started only now, when the government cables are all over the news. The "Afghan War Diaries" did not create such a massive reaction.
My conclusion is that the US government cares more about the embarrassment from the latest leaks than about the lives of people in Afghanistan.