A p2p app designed to bypass Wikipedia IP bans would destroy wikipedia a lot quicker from the outside and completely trash their method of tracking. Tor exit nodes are blocked from editing Wikipedia. Writing a P2P application designed to edit Wikipedia would also get blocked with the same level of effort.
It also takes one infiltration into the group to mess up the P2P system. Either the list of IP addresses obtained from the master server get blocked, or there is a series of rapid edits to a single page.
No, seriously, I want to know. Preventing "vanity pages" and "ads" is one of the major justifications for the periodic 'notability purges' which basically amount to book-burnings; untold hours of people's effort being put to the torch by Wikipedia admins who don't like something about the content http://www.free-webhosts.com/
If a person believes it is notable enough to keep on the Internet, that person can get his own webpage. You could even do more than just that individual content - perhaps start reviewing other webcomics or going in great detail.
(And they really go out of their way to destroy the information, too; it's not just a logical delete, the database is apparently scrubbed, it's as if the articles in question never even existed except in the delete logs.) And of course it opens the door to all types of censorship via selective enforcement. That's why you can use [[WP:DRV]]. When I noticed that the page for Polk Audio was deleted, a simple request got the page undeleted. Alternatively, you can contact one of the admins to get a copy for your own review - which is much easier if you are a strong contributor, or are known to at least one of the admins.
The content is still recoverable after several months if necessary. That's plenty of time to gain notability.
Then could you go ahead and create some webcomic articles for us? I'm still waiting for the article on "J-Space for Windows". This game is notable as it got PC Format's lowest ever rating, as described in one of their hint books. Of course, I know such an article won't be created. I can't write it myself, since I haven't played the game, and I can't research the game since there are no Google hits relating to this game.
As you know, a webcomic needs to be notable for inclusion in Wikipedia even if this is a very difficult requirement. While it may seem strict, it's necessary to prevent the vanity and spam pages from appearing all over Wikipedia. To meet notability (or at least improve it), you need to get involved with the community to the degree where you get awards for artwork, storylines, characters, etc.
In modern society, obtaining notability is much more difficult, since there's many other people trying to do the same thing. A good gauge to determine the notability of a webcomic is the amount of discussion or articles independent of the subject - however, if someone has to campaign for something to be kept, it's probably a bit too obscure.
It doesn't seem to have stopped Jimbo Wales from abusing his position. His position is very close to "Wikimedia owner", where he has a very high level of control over Wikiepdia. If you believe that Jimbo is abusing his position, then build your own community to compete with his.
It's possible to remove a high-level individual from Wikipedia, but given the size of Wikipedia and his importance, it's not going to happen.
The crashes I've experienced (although my experiences are a bit more stable) involve the latest version and thus would require a bug report. However, simply saying that Firefox crashes isn't very useful - you at least need to know where it crashes in order for the developers to know how track down the bug more easily. That's why you need a symbol table, and for the first time, there's a symbol-table server to report these bugs: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Using_the_Mozilla_symbol_server
My last crash - Mozilla went into an infinite loop and kept allocating memory. When an allocation failed, the application crashed in the ntdll.dll module - whether there's a bug in the DLL file or Mozilla passing an invalid parameter was not determined.
windows '95 probably was the most stable release of windows that MS ever made. No, it wasn't. If you attempt to access the file located at c:\con\con, you get an instant bluescreen and can no longer use your system. A malicious webpage can easily say that it needs to load an image there. There are plenty of other ways to mess up the operating system, such as attempting to load Slashdot or Kuro5hin when you have moderator privilages - the number of combo boxes on those pages alone will cause the OS to run out of GDI resources.
Architecture wise, Windows 95 is a version of Windows 3.11 with 32-bit support (when you ignore additional features). The mix of 16-bit and 32-bit code has caused stability issues through Windows ME and were not present in the Windows NT series of operating systems.
But, what you can do to increase the chances that someone will be SUCCESSFUL in life is to encourage and reward effort and work. For instance, if you kid gets an A, say "wow, you WORKED REALLY HARD to earn that A, great," and don't say "Wow, you're so smart!" Because if the kid later fucks something up, you want their mental arithmatic to be "I need to work harder" -- which anyone can do I'd agree, but there's a slight problem - I had a form of writer's block that prevented me from writing poetry, a component of secondary school class. My best effort that I remember was writing prose, using the "full-justification" feature in WordPerfect, and passing it off as poetry. This got an acceptable mark, but I didn't like the result as it wasn't real poetry and wasn't useful in improving my writing ability.
This was one extreme which drained motivation - the inability to perform some tasks.
As I get older, it seems that motivation, effort, and the skills needed to apply effort are way more important than raw IQ. The other extreme was in math class - I already knew how to do mathematics at a highschool level. But in Grade 8, you study basic 1/2-digit addition and subtraction (the only difference is that they introduce negative numbers.) I'm not sure anyone who would maintain motivation studying the exact same stuff they already mastered and are not going to forget.
For students to be properly motivated, they need to be taught at their level. Since I wasn't, I became very tired of school to a degree where burnout affected my later college career.
Every second you spend with a video game pretending to kill other people is a second you didn't spend learning to be more socially sophisticated. This is one of my favourite arguments - cause I can play Devil's Advocate with this one. The only problem is that there's too many ways to attack this argument that is makes it hard to decide which one to use...
Most likely, you've been in elementry and secondary school. In most of those places, the social skills of those who you are with would most likely contain bigotry (e.g. cliques, outcasts) and the usage of rapid-fire profanity. This may either be from the group you are with, or from the high-profile group that bullies random individuals. Video games obviously provide better social training than that.
While you can attend other social venues, such as parties (not raves), they aren't day-to-day. The same applies to various friends - they aren't available 24x7. The only thing to do in the meantime is to do a non-social activity by yourself, whether it's reading a book, posting to the Internet, or playing video games.
Speaking of which, the Internet provides a much better method of dealing with negative influences. For example, Slashdot posts linking to the infamous.cx site are squelched from normal view in order to minimize disruption to other users. Wikipedia blocks users that contantly vandalize or ruin articles. And multiplayer video games have ways to deal with disruptive users (e.g. vote kick, or sending a message to the admins to ban the user.)
You can see they started to pick up on or after 1980.
What's the common thread? Columbine, for instance, was straight out of a video game. Why not? Which one? I don't remember any video game in particular where you shoot high-school students. If you're referring to Doom, just remember that the enemies actually fight back and inflict damage - and also that the enemies in Doom initiated the attack. (Perhaps Doom was indirectly based on school? Bad guys make your live miserable...)
The Virginia Tech Massacre wasn't based on a video game, in spite of the initial claims by celebraties and media that it was.
If you go through the list above, there are very few, if any, that are related to video games.
Kids are being infected with the idea that violence for violence sake's is justifiable, as long as you get a kick out of it. The high of the thrill is what counts. They pick that up from schoolyard bullying - the bullies assault people at random with no punishment. If you want to claim they pick it up from Grand Theft Auto, the well known poster for encouraging violence, remember that violence gives the player wanted stars - where enough of them cause the military to engage the player with tanks.
While psychopaths may get ideas from video games, removing the games doesn't prevent them from being psychopaths.
No, sorry, go to the back of the class and put on your dunces hat - violent games have *NOTHING* to do with violence in society. Citation needed. I believe that violence in society made these violent games popular, even in the "abstracted-violence" old war games such as Chess, young-child games such as Cops and Robbers, and modern video games by simple extension. This is known as the "magnet" theory - violent games attract violent individuals
Also, violent games can easily have an inverse correlation to violence in society. The graph doesn't show causation, but can still exist by distracting potential criminals from doing violent acts (i.e. preventing violence).
And whether kids are robbing from each other, bullying each other or killing each other, whenever it happens you can always ask yourself the same question - "Where were the parents?" The parents are not the catch-all to preventing all incidents. As you know, children are smart enough to be able to smuggle or hide something (at least temporarly), and constantly searching your child's room/bags if there's otherwise no reason to believe something is wrong would be smothering or simply tedious.
Parents also have very little control over the high school (aside from choosing which one) that their children are forced to attend. In 99% of these schools, the schools provide no solution to any form of constant bullying that some students experience. As you also know, a student that can smuggle something into the house can easily smuggle something out (e.g. a knife, or the gun in the gun locker when they see how to pick locks.).
The parents were there for Seung-Hui Cho. There were concerns about his behaviour and he did receive treatment for his depression, but it did not stop the massacre from occurring.
Sure, that is a possibility - but is it common? A young student can falsly accuse her principal of molesting her. The end result is that he loses his job and becomes unhirable after his photo appears in the paper with no significant punishment to the student.
Even if these situations don't involve flyers, they have the same effect. If you remove one medium (e.g. the Internet), another takes it's place (e.g. Gossip, Poison pen letters, flyers, newspapers, etc.)
Remember Mortal Kombat? That's already very nearly happened: As I stated, the restrictions have to not-violate the first amendment. The reason this is the case: the recent batch of "violence-as-porn" laws were declared unconstitutional before enforcement, and the government had to cover legal expenses.
A nutjob (soon to be former) lawyer is much less of a threat than a couple of busybody senators trying to shore up their concerned soccer mom support. Correct. However, at the rate of their progression, the senators shown in the link aren't a threat either and merely increased the popularity of the games they tried to restrict.
As you can tell from my posting, the replacement should be intelligent - not someone who tries the same predictable tactic. A great way to do this is not publicizing the bad games unless absolutely necessary (or if it can be done without making it popular).
You are incorrect sir; the store employee is not legally compelled to do anything. These are merely guidelines, and has been stated by multiple other posters, any attempt to make this mandatory has been shot down as unconstitutional. I'd be impressed if a non-American law gets shot down as unconstitutional for violating the first amendment.
Here, showing ID is mandatory for movies even if the movie theater agents don't follow the law.
Jack Thompson is a "good thing" and if he gets disbarred he might be replaced by someone more intelligent to fight the cause he is fighting. The replacement, if that person is more intelligent, would be able to do something without being insulting or counterproductive. For example, passing laws that restrict the sale of video games to minors without violating the first amendment. (This would be difficult, but possible if it doesn't restrict the speech in question.)
Furthermore, the replacement would be able to retain allies such as NiMF and Clinton without alienating them on their next concession.
The replacement would know how to deal with horrible games such as Manhunt 2. Simply say they are substandard without dealing with the violence aspect - end of story. As you know, Rockstar didn't hype the game - the media did.
And finally, the replacement would be able to convince people on message boards without being called a troll.
PLEASE stop using this term "bricked" around IT stuff. "Bricked" is a verbed noun. If you want to show the correct meaning of the word, you may want to say that bricking something means throwing a brick at it (as opposed to letting us declare that bricking something means it's been turned into a brick that could build a wall.) The three examples you gave don't really give information about what "bricked" means.
Also, saying not to use the work "bricked" in the IT field is no different than saying not to use "strafe" in FPS games, because strafing involves aircraft doing a flyby run shooting at ground targets.
Smooth, frankly, after rockstar got caught lying to the ratings boards with GTA:VC, Citation needed. In particular, there's no way you can reach the hidden content without attempting to mod the game - and furthermore, the rating change was from 17+ to 18+ (one year.) Just remember that the ESRB at the time did not factor game modifications into account even if it was a minor 1 byte change in a file that's not easily modified.
Oblivion was also re-rated by the ESRB as well, with the 'T'een rating changed to 'M'ature. The developer's response claimed that they already advised the ESRB on the violent content (although they disagree that red pixels and "inaccessible" content should bump a rating from 'T' to 'M'.)
My point was, how are you gonna require an ID from a 17 year old? Birth Certificate, and if necessary, combo it with school id. This was exactly the combination I used to cross the Canada/US border (before passports were required), and should likewise be sufficient enough to purchase a video game. If it isn't, the store employee isn't doing the job properly.
I am reminded of the original Dragon Warrior - you could go everywhere except the last castle right from the start of the game. Not really. Some tiles inflict damage as you walk over them, and thus you have a minimum HP requirement to continue through them (or otherwise be able to fake your way through with healing).
Take a look at the Speedrun - while he does charge into a high-level area with a level 1 charater, he does need to power-level a bit to gain access to an item with barely enough HP to get that item.
If you are not aware of any classified scheme above TS, then how will you know such information is actually classified if you come across it. Usually, the outer folder is stamped as top secret alongside a message stating that it is only for eyes belonging to a specific group (e.g. Division Six).
If I were indeed to disclose such information how would I be prosecuted? You wouldn't. Rather, the Men in Black would simply assassinate you and make it look like the bullet to the back of your head was an accident, suicide, or whatever makes a plausable story to stop further investigation.
If they want, they can easily discredit you by placing the same content in a tabloid. There's other tactics as well, such as arresting you on a minor crime, only to have it escalated to a severe one when they "confirm" your identity.
True or false: Some software is more secure/better designed than others. True. Internet Explorer used to auto-execute code (or gave a popup asking to do so), and now it simply creates an information bar stating there was an attempt to do so.
Some PHP sites use string concatenation to build a SQL statement. Other sites use parameters on their SQL statements to prevent the SQL injection attacks.
A legacy C/C++ function, known as gets(), has no bounds checking and permits buffer overflows. It's replacement function is fgets().
The truth is that my wonderful Mother in Law had her computer infected by merely clicking the subject line of an email on her otherwise patched computer with antivirus and a hardware firewall on a DSL connection. What did she do that she shouldn't have? Outlook had a well known buffer overflow problem with the PGP plugin, where an improperly formatted e-mail header could exploit a vulnerability. If you use a different e-mail client (e.g. telnetted into a server and used a mail reader), you wouldn't have that specific issue.
As much as I like to see people go after spammers, this seems a little stupid to me. Looks like a personal email, the guy was just confused about who to contact for Slashdot. Unlikely. Slashdot appears to be a blog with user-contributions and comments (not to mention that the contributor in question doesn't have a @slashdot.org e-mail address). The traditional method of obtaining the correct address is to view the Whois information or try to find the contact information on the website.
If the user was looking for the address of Slashdot's webmaster, the initial message would be phrased differently (e.g. asking for more correct contact information to Slashdot, of which he contributes to.)
If I send an email to someone I think is the webmaster of a site concerning something on said site, but choose the wrong person by honest mistake, am I automatically a spammer? No, but the person writing the e-mail in question probably didn't make a "mistake". As with most spam, it uses harvested e-mail addresses.
That's a problem with an unpatched version of Half-Life, as released by Sierra. This occurrs with "Sierra Utilities", which incorrectly assumes you use the default installation directory.
That utility was also distributed with other Sierra games around that time, and was intended to check for updates. To my knowledge, I'm not sure anyone needed it.
Paper ballots, when done properly, aren't that easy to mess up. In the most recent provinicial election/referendum of Ontario, there are various defences to prevent this sort of stuff. First off, paper ballots have the initials of the returning officer - if it's printed, the ballot will look "awkward" and be flagged as spoiled. If the initials are forged, the returning officer will contest the initials and flag it.
Next, each ballot given out is counted. Extra ballots and/or missing ballots will be suspicious that something went wrong, and will result in a much closer examination of the ballots in question.
The slot on the ballot boxes are covered by a plastic cover, that is only removed when you clearly show the ballots you are going to put in the box. The ballots are large enough to require a significant skill in prestidigitation in order to palm to avoid detection. You can't drop a 20-pack, but even if you get a single ballot in, you need to convince 20 other people with the at least the same amount of skill to do the same as you.
Finally, there are scrutineers from every major party at the polls. If they spot anything suspcicious, it will be before they know you are voting often for them.
Municipal elections are almost the same - large paper ballots fed one-at-a-time. The only difference is that votes are fed through a mechanical feed into a storage box (and if there's more than one sheet, the machine probably would act strangely.)
Also, there's software (like Internet Explorer) that pretty much trains people to fall victim to "thin" social engineering attacks (by, for example, crying wolf hundreds of times a day). Crying wolf isn't the problem. Instead, the problem is crying wolf when you can properly handle the wolf without collateral damage.
For example, some Firefox configurations can be set to block popups from web plugins. However, the common method of setting privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins to 2 prevents you from opening any popup from a plugin even if you wanted to. The correct procedure is to record the URL that needs to be opened (as it does if Javascript tries a popup.) Because of this, Adblock is more effective than the stock implementation.
The other example is IE6, before SP2 was released. While it correctly cried wolf when it showed something coming from Gator, you couldn't add that publisher to the list of untrusted sources from that alert window.
911 calls were the first thing I thought of, too. Any business owner who jams a call about somebody having a heart attack would be sued into oblivion, and deserve it.
For restaurants, hair salons, etc., there's a simple solution -- just make it a policy, and have the guts to enforce it. Post little "No cell phone usage inside this establishment" signs. Sonic-based jamming is still legal and acceptable: http://i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=24927
Slashdot Mirror
It also takes one infiltration into the group to mess up the P2P system. Either the list of IP addresses obtained from the master server get blocked, or there is a series of rapid edits to a single page.
If a person believes it is notable enough to keep on the Internet, that person can get his own webpage. You could even do more than just that individual content - perhaps start reviewing other webcomics or going in great detail. (And they really go out of their way to destroy the information, too; it's not just a logical delete, the database is apparently scrubbed, it's as if the articles in question never even existed except in the delete logs.) And of course it opens the door to all types of censorship via selective enforcement. That's why you can use [[WP:DRV]]. When I noticed that the page for Polk Audio was deleted, a simple request got the page undeleted. Alternatively, you can contact one of the admins to get a copy for your own review - which is much easier if you are a strong contributor, or are known to at least one of the admins.
The content is still recoverable after several months if necessary. That's plenty of time to gain notability.
As you know, a webcomic needs to be notable for inclusion in Wikipedia even if this is a very difficult requirement. While it may seem strict, it's necessary to prevent the vanity and spam pages from appearing all over Wikipedia. To meet notability (or at least improve it), you need to get involved with the community to the degree where you get awards for artwork, storylines, characters, etc.
In modern society, obtaining notability is much more difficult, since there's many other people trying to do the same thing. A good gauge to determine the notability of a webcomic is the amount of discussion or articles independent of the subject - however, if someone has to campaign for something to be kept, it's probably a bit too obscure.
It's possible to remove a high-level individual from Wikipedia, but given the size of Wikipedia and his importance, it's not going to happen.
The crashes I've experienced (although my experiences are a bit more stable) involve the latest version and thus would require a bug report. However, simply saying that Firefox crashes isn't very useful - you at least need to know where it crashes in order for the developers to know how track down the bug more easily. That's why you need a symbol table, and for the first time, there's a symbol-table server to report these bugs: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Using_the_Mozilla_symbol_server
My last crash - Mozilla went into an infinite loop and kept allocating memory. When an allocation failed, the application crashed in the ntdll.dll module - whether there's a bug in the DLL file or Mozilla passing an invalid parameter was not determined.
Architecture wise, Windows 95 is a version of Windows 3.11 with 32-bit support (when you ignore additional features). The mix of 16-bit and 32-bit code has caused stability issues through Windows ME and were not present in the Windows NT series of operating systems.
This was one extreme which drained motivation - the inability to perform some tasks. As I get older, it seems that motivation, effort, and the skills needed to apply effort are way more important than raw IQ. The other extreme was in math class - I already knew how to do mathematics at a highschool level. But in Grade 8, you study basic 1/2-digit addition and subtraction (the only difference is that they introduce negative numbers.) I'm not sure anyone who would maintain motivation studying the exact same stuff they already mastered and are not going to forget.
For students to be properly motivated, they need to be taught at their level. Since I wasn't, I became very tired of school to a degree where burnout affected my later college career.
Most likely, you've been in elementry and secondary school. In most of those places, the social skills of those who you are with would most likely contain bigotry (e.g. cliques, outcasts) and the usage of rapid-fire profanity. This may either be from the group you are with, or from the high-profile group that bullies random individuals. Video games obviously provide better social training than that.
While you can attend other social venues, such as parties (not raves), they aren't day-to-day. The same applies to various friends - they aren't available 24x7. The only thing to do in the meantime is to do a non-social activity by yourself, whether it's reading a book, posting to the Internet, or playing video games.
Speaking of which, the Internet provides a much better method of dealing with negative influences. For example, Slashdot posts linking to the infamous
You can see they started to pick up on or after 1980. What's the common thread? Columbine, for instance, was straight out of a video game. Why not? Which one? I don't remember any video game in particular where you shoot high-school students. If you're referring to Doom, just remember that the enemies actually fight back and inflict damage - and also that the enemies in Doom initiated the attack. (Perhaps Doom was indirectly based on school? Bad guys make your live miserable...)
The Virginia Tech Massacre wasn't based on a video game, in spite of the initial claims by celebraties and media that it was.
If you go through the list above, there are very few, if any, that are related to video games. Kids are being infected with the idea that violence for violence sake's is justifiable, as long as you get a kick out of it. The high of the thrill is what counts. They pick that up from schoolyard bullying - the bullies assault people at random with no punishment. If you want to claim they pick it up from Grand Theft Auto, the well known poster for encouraging violence, remember that violence gives the player wanted stars - where enough of them cause the military to engage the player with tanks.
While psychopaths may get ideas from video games, removing the games doesn't prevent them from being psychopaths.
Also, violent games can easily have an inverse correlation to violence in society. The graph doesn't show causation, but can still exist by distracting potential criminals from doing violent acts (i.e. preventing violence). And whether kids are robbing from each other, bullying each other or killing each other, whenever it happens you can always ask yourself the same question - "Where were the parents?" The parents are not the catch-all to preventing all incidents. As you know, children are smart enough to be able to smuggle or hide something (at least temporarly), and constantly searching your child's room/bags if there's otherwise no reason to believe something is wrong would be smothering or simply tedious.
Parents also have very little control over the high school (aside from choosing which one) that their children are forced to attend. In 99% of these schools, the schools provide no solution to any form of constant bullying that some students experience. As you also know, a student that can smuggle something into the house can easily smuggle something out (e.g. a knife, or the gun in the gun locker when they see how to pick locks.).
The parents were there for Seung-Hui Cho. There were concerns about his behaviour and he did receive treatment for his depression, but it did not stop the massacre from occurring.
This type of thing was on Dr. Phil a few times:
http://drphil.com/shows/show/596/ - "You Ruined My Reputation!"
http://drphil.com/shows/show/40 - Wrongly Accused
http://drphil.com/shows/show/612/ - Falsely Accused
If you want to see a movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377092/
Even if these situations don't involve flyers, they have the same effect. If you remove one medium (e.g. the Internet), another takes it's place (e.g. Gossip, Poison pen letters, flyers, newspapers, etc.)
As you can tell from my posting, the replacement should be intelligent - not someone who tries the same predictable tactic. A great way to do this is not publicizing the bad games unless absolutely necessary (or if it can be done without making it popular).
Here, showing ID is mandatory for movies even if the movie theater agents don't follow the law.
Furthermore, the replacement would be able to retain allies such as NiMF and Clinton without alienating them on their next concession.
The replacement would know how to deal with horrible games such as Manhunt 2. Simply say they are substandard without dealing with the violence aspect - end of story. As you know, Rockstar didn't hype the game - the media did.
And finally, the replacement would be able to convince people on message boards without being called a troll.
Also, saying not to use the work "bricked" in the IT field is no different than saying not to use "strafe" in FPS games, because strafing involves aircraft doing a flyby run shooting at ground targets.
Oblivion was also re-rated by the ESRB as well, with the 'T'een rating changed to 'M'ature. The developer's response claimed that they already advised the ESRB on the violent content (although they disagree that red pixels and "inaccessible" content should bump a rating from 'T' to 'M'.)
Take a look at the Speedrun - while he does charge into a high-level area with a level 1 charater, he does need to power-level a bit to gain access to an item with barely enough HP to get that item.
If they want, they can easily discredit you by placing the same content in a tabloid. There's other tactics as well, such as arresting you on a minor crime, only to have it escalated to a severe one when they "confirm" your identity.
Some PHP sites use string concatenation to build a SQL statement. Other sites use parameters on their SQL statements to prevent the SQL injection attacks.
A legacy C/C++ function, known as gets(), has no bounds checking and permits buffer overflows. It's replacement function is fgets(). The truth is that my wonderful Mother in Law had her computer infected by merely clicking the subject line of an email on her otherwise patched computer with antivirus and a hardware firewall on a DSL connection. What did she do that she shouldn't have? Outlook had a well known buffer overflow problem with the PGP plugin, where an improperly formatted e-mail header could exploit a vulnerability. If you use a different e-mail client (e.g. telnetted into a server and used a mail reader), you wouldn't have that specific issue.
If the user was looking for the address of Slashdot's webmaster, the initial message would be phrased differently (e.g. asking for more correct contact information to Slashdot, of which he contributes to.) If I send an email to someone I think is the webmaster of a site concerning something on said site, but choose the wrong person by honest mistake, am I automatically a spammer? No, but the person writing the e-mail in question probably didn't make a "mistake". As with most spam, it uses harvested e-mail addresses.
http://www.pcuser.com.au/pcuser/hs2.nsf/lookup+1/4670E6FD91CB3839CA256F39001F4FCF
That's a problem with an unpatched version of Half-Life, as released by Sierra. This occurrs with "Sierra Utilities", which incorrectly assumes you use the default installation directory.
That utility was also distributed with other Sierra games around that time, and was intended to check for updates. To my knowledge, I'm not sure anyone needed it.
Loss of progress due to technical issues is a valid reason to initiate cheat codes. In particular, the cheats for Baldur's Gate is found here: http://www.cheatscodesguides.com/pc-cheats/baldurs-gate/
Paper ballots, when done properly, aren't that easy to mess up. In the most recent provinicial election/referendum of Ontario, there are various defences to prevent this sort of stuff. First off, paper ballots have the initials of the returning officer - if it's printed, the ballot will look "awkward" and be flagged as spoiled. If the initials are forged, the returning officer will contest the initials and flag it.
Next, each ballot given out is counted. Extra ballots and/or missing ballots will be suspicious that something went wrong, and will result in a much closer examination of the ballots in question.
The slot on the ballot boxes are covered by a plastic cover, that is only removed when you clearly show the ballots you are going to put in the box. The ballots are large enough to require a significant skill in prestidigitation in order to palm to avoid detection. You can't drop a 20-pack, but even if you get a single ballot in, you need to convince 20 other people with the at least the same amount of skill to do the same as you.
Finally, there are scrutineers from every major party at the polls. If they spot anything suspcicious, it will be before they know you are voting often for them.
Municipal elections are almost the same - large paper ballots fed one-at-a-time. The only difference is that votes are fed through a mechanical feed into a storage box (and if there's more than one sheet, the machine probably would act strangely.)
For example, some Firefox configurations can be set to block popups from web plugins. However, the common method of setting privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins to 2 prevents you from opening any popup from a plugin even if you wanted to. The correct procedure is to record the URL that needs to be opened (as it does if Javascript tries a popup.) Because of this, Adblock is more effective than the stock implementation.
The other example is IE6, before SP2 was released. While it correctly cried wolf when it showed something coming from Gator, you couldn't add that publisher to the list of untrusted sources from that alert window.
For restaurants, hair salons, etc., there's a simple solution -- just make it a policy, and have the guts to enforce it. Post little "No cell phone usage inside this establishment" signs. Sonic-based jamming is still legal and acceptable: http://i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=24927