So why does this only infect Windows? Are Linux and Mac users smarter?
I suspect that there are a few reasons for targeting Windows.
Low-intelligence users (who also tend to have reduced spending power) gravitate to cheap available pre-built hardware running the default OS. That points to Windows.
Windows was historically bad at security, so blackhats gained a lot of experience there. This has got to be a major factor and it can't be helped now.
Windows is much better at security now, but Microsoft hasn't quite got the usability of security right. There are just a few too many security-related confirmation dialogs popping up that users are still not quite careful enough about it.
Overall, it's a bunch of small stuff and things that just happend that way that adds up in combination to a problem.
Are all Facebook users incredibly stupid?
There are lots of Facebook users due to their (FB's) extensive market penetration; enough of the users are incredibly stupid (or at least duped by automated "social" tricks) to make it worthwhile targeting them.
Look, the real problem is that some people are incredibly stupid. For as long as that's true, there will be criminal scum who try to make a living by duping them. It's been happening for thousands of years (there must've been confidence tricksters in ancient Sumeria) and the use of computers and the internet is just the latest manifestation. Since you can't fix stupid (except by removing all the warning labels from things) we're stuck with running after the criminals to stop them.
Perhaps the medium is, but the related technology that makes the medium useful isn't. The drives can run thousands of dollars, and require specific technologies on the servers. On top of that you need software to run it, AND competent backup admins that can handle it.
Not that disk based solutions are significantly better, but they certainly have the ability to be significantly less complex ( which is always a good thing ).
The costs of SSDs start to look quite good when you're dealing with long-term preservation of a lot of data too. Yes, the storage cost itself isn't wonderful, but the fact that it is small and dense and solid state and able to be safely kept online (instead of having to physically move it about) greatly cuts the cost and risks of it. There's some interesting work going on in this area, and the answers being arrived at are often not at all intuitive.
If only we could scrap the whole mess and design a solution for the problems we face currently, instead of continuing to use the solution to the problems they faced 40 years ago. Wishful thinking, I know...
There have been many competitors to TCP/IP, but they've all fallen by the wayside because TCP/IP worked better in practice. (I remember OSI networking, but not fondly.) The key is that the internet scales better than the others, and that's made it possible for far more people to be connected to it and that in turn makes it by far the most attractive network to work with in the first place. The killer app of the internet was DNS, and especially its implementation as BIND...
Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
California has about 5 million more people than Canada; it's so large that it would count as a medium-sized European country (with a very strong economy too).
I don't. I don't have the millions of dollars to pay a high end legal team that a corporation might be able to afford, so "loser pays" would boil down to "I have no rights against rich entities". No thanks.
It doesn't work like that. The repayment of costs by the losing side is subject to a check against whether it is equitable and reasonable, and it is the judge that makes that determination. The legal principle of equitability is why costs are normally awarded (basically, why should you have to pay if you've not done anything wrong?). The legal principle of reasonableness strongly encourages the two sides to the case to bring equivalent legal firepower; yes, bring too little and you lose, but bring too much and you'll be out of pocket due to only getting a partial (sometimes very partial) award of costs. Doing the legal equivalent of using a thermonuclear weapon to crack a peanut is not reasonable, and it's been partially responsible in a number of cases for the "winners" feeling like they've lost heavily.
Yeah, but do you really think this is the only business that does this kind of thing?
Doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it legal. Doesn't make it ethical. Doesn't mean we should let them get away with it. Time to get our punishing boots on.
In any case, we often forget that the humans were employees of a corporation, not a sovereign military force. The soldiers were the equivalent of some Blackwater mercenaries. Regardless of how powerful corporations sometimes seem, it is government who still holds the leash, being jealous entities that hold the best goodies (like WMDs) for themselves.
That's not really accurate. You're looking at a fantastically expensive operation that is seeking to get an incredibly valuable substance and which is a very long way from home. There have been such things in the past on Earth (e.g., during the age of sail) though to a lesser extent; Earth just isn't as hostile as all that. The history of such expeditions is that they are not run as democracies, but rather as dictatorships with theoretical overview from back home, though typically as long as the goods are delivered the rulers at home don't care what happens. (Perhaps they should care, but they don't.)
If I remember the fluff right, that corporation is rather closely linked with governments in the solar system, but that doesn't really change my major point: in the space around Prometheus the corporation is the effective government for humans. The film documents the start of a revolt (and given the value proposition of the MacGuffin, I wouldn't expect the corporation to give up; the only thing that would have forced that would have been if they found a way to synthesize it in quantity within the solar system).
You'll probably first see rail- and coil-guns show up.
They're already testing rail guns for real. Admittedly they're large, intended as a replacement for conventional naval guns (the benefit is the ability to reduce the size of the magazine, traditionally a weak point on ships with large guns). I have no idea at all if they use superconductors.
It's perfectly safe for a driver on an open highway to use a cell phone.
No. It's close to being drunk in terms of danger. The problem is that it's really hugely distracting and the person on the other end of the phone is unaware of your road situation (which can change rapidly at highway speeds, alas). A spoken GPS is much less noticeable, as you know that's a machine. (Really; human brains are funny things.) A passenger is also capable of being just as distracting as a cell phone, except they tend to watch what is going on ahead and so shut up if things are looking tricky; beware of moms with a brood of rioting kids in the back.
If he has a manual transmission, less so.
You don't know what you're talking about. The vast majority of the complex part of controlling a manual transmission is done with your left foot; only the actual changing gear is done with your hand and you can control exactly when you do it. (Yes, there's an optimal moment. Automatic transmissions usually don't get that point right.) The last time I checked, people weren't trying to control a phone or GPS (or drink coffee or...) with their feet while driving. If they are, it's damn rare. Moreover, on a highway you don't change gear much unless you're in heavy stop-start traffic.
That's not to say that it is as easy to learn to drive with a manual transmission as with an automatic. It's definitely harder to start out with, and if you're not used to a manual then you're going to need a lot more attention. Yet with training/practice, it's not hard and uses a very small part of your attention. (Basically, it transitions from being something handled by your conscious brain into something handled unconsciously. It becomes instinctive.)
Do you remember when we didn't even have cars. Oh that was a grand time, no oil changes, no breakdowns, no timing belt failures, and no worry of rising gas prices. Man those were the days.
You're forgetting the problems with inflation of buggy whip prices.
And while some might argue that's part of the fun of it the show pales in comparison to shows like Red Dwarf that were also very random but at least had an internal logic that remained consistent to itself at least for an episode or two.
Red Dwarf's internal logic was very consistent, but did involve Lister's breakfast and "brown alert". Don't think about it.
There are 50 states in the USA, and Canada has over 10% of the population of the Americans, meaning Canada is bigger than 5 average state populations combined.
Other ways to express this. The only US state with more population than Canada is California. Every other state is significantly smaller. Canada's got nearly twice as many people as New York state. Ontario, the most populous Canadian province, has about the same number of people as Illinois.
private to private? you'd do a bank transfer. doesn't cost, easy to do on the spot if you have a smartphone.
Is the bank under a legal obligation (whether statutory or contractual) to keep those bank transfers free? No? Then your testicles are already in the steam press, my friend; they've just not started squeezing yet. I'd entirely believe a bank introducing a fee for all such transfers if they thought they could, and then perhaps waiving or reducing it for transfers between their accounts; encouraging people to get all their friends and family at the same bank would be seen as a great marketing measure!
Banks: there are no moral depths that they will not eagerly plumb if they think they can get away with it.
Nor is it a word in any conventional sense, nor comprised of words. The only place it ever appears is in relation to discussion of this particular clue. The correct clever human response to such thing is to punch the setter in the face; they have broken the formal compact of crossword setting by using a non-word/non-phrase as an answer.
(minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip)
That depends on whether you're committed to using an interplanetary transfer without thrust for the large majority of the time. If you can apply thrust the whole way, you have many more options open. Admittedly that means you're not going to be using conventional rockets, but that's pretty obvious in any case. The other advantage of a transfer under power is that it greatly shortens the time that people are at great risk from radiation and solar events like flares.
We don't do those sorts of transfers at the moment though: electronics can be made more robust than flesh.
Also appropriate:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down." --Leslie Lamport This holds even more for the cloud.
Not really. It's just as true as it ever was. The cloud is just a (viable) business model for virtualized distributed systems.
The general point is that it's possible to get bad emergent behavior which is unexpected. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone (but it is, alas). We see it over and over in complex systems, and it's got pretty much nothing to do with what you implement the complex system with.
What to do about it? Well, the only real fix is to stop the drive for efficiency at all costs. All those little inefficiencies that hit your bottom line, they also mean that when things go wrong you can weather the storm more easily. And yes, that resilience means things are going to cost more. How much more? Well, depends how much risk you want to take out of the system and how much you're willing to pay. Your call. (A local backup removes a lot of risk from things like cloud providers going belly up unexpectedly, but it does mean you're stuck with actually having to pay real money to do the backup and make sure it is working.)
Essentially Youtube is great because it can do all of this as well as being a window on the world that dictators like Assad cannot control. Hopefully the asshats at the MPAA and the RIAA will finally wake up and smell the coffee before the real potential of what is happening leaves the great parts of industry they control in the dust.
Why? They see the control exerted by the dictators and dream of a world where they have that power too.
Bingo -- that is why it is hard to get researchers to stop feeding these monsters. Prestigious names look good, plain and simple; we live in a publish-or-perish world, and publishing in a big name journal is better than publishing on arXiv.
You've got to distinguish yourself from some moron publishing crap about homeopathic quantum karma alignment crystals. The most effective method of doing that so far has been to have some places marked out as special and to guard those places with a process of having to persuade peers in the field that a particular piece of work isn't crap. Your value as a researcher closely correlates with your ability to persuade your peers that you are doing worthwhile work, so getting that work into those special places ("journals") becomes hyper-important. That guarantees a place for journals (or places that work like them); all that's left is minor details like how to finance them and what exact rights should be granted.
Before you ask, no they won't be zero cost throughout nor will they be heavily advert-financed; the former just won't work (there are real costs) and the latter would open up so many conflicts of interest that it would be impossible to trust the journal even as much as today. Yet should the costs be what they are now? Should the journal publishers be reporting those revenues as profits? Should they be demanding all rights when merely a non-revokable right to publish without modification would be enough? There are plenty of problems that need to be addressed; I just don't believe that the boycott is the right way to do it. (I'm happy enough if others are going to get out of my way when I'm trying to get published myself. Making my life just a little easier? Yes, please!)
The economics of dealing with commercial publishers only make sense if you create an artificial wall between university libraries and university research labs. The libraries are paying so much to the publishers for journal access that any savings the labs might get by not paying to publish open-access are lost. Of course the overhead paid out of grant money to the university probably goes in part towards funding the library's access, but the scientists never have to bother with details like this - they only see the university skimming a certain percent off the top of their funds.
Rejigging all the finance side of things takes years. University finance moves slowly. Right now, each university will have a standard charge rate that is applied against all grant awards which will be used to pay for overheads. Part of that is the library (other parts are things like facilities maintenance, car lots, electricity, etc) and part of the library's costs are related to journal access. Switching over to the full OA model will reduce library costs and so the need to charge so much against grant awards (who will instead pay the publication costs directly) but to make that happen will require a lot of finance bureaucrats to change, and they're really a very conservative bunch.
Dealing with commercial publishers often sucks for other reasons. All of that fabled private-sector efficiency is meaningless when you're dealing with an entity whose review process is dependent on workaholic volunteers. I have a rule of thumb when dealing with Elsevier journals: don't send anything there unless you're willing to wait three months for reviews. The professors (or their postdocs, or sometimes even their students) who receive your manuscript don't give a shit. Why should they? They're not getting a share of Elsevier's 30%-plus profit margin.
The other issue is that journals need to be available for a long time. Unlike paper, data is really easy to destroy through minor neglect. Long-term preservation requires money. Lots of it, surprisingly much. If we could count on exponentially decreasing storage costs and a lack of economic shocks, it would be simple to cost and cheap to deliver. But classical economics is wrong and storage costs are not simple at all. Provisioning for keeping an article in a journal available for 40–50 years is going to be much harder than you might expect.
Personally, my complaints with Elsevier relate to their submission process. I'd prefer another root canal operation to going through that damn web submission system again...
How can a consumer prove that some electronic component ( hard disk, motherboard) defect is already present at the time of purchase?
Remember, you're talking about an argument between private parties, so the standard of proof is going to be "balance of probabilities" (or equivalent in local commercial law). The consumer has a non-working component (otherwise why bother with the fuss?) so all they need to do is to make a reasonable assertion that they've not done anything unreasonable to make it fail. Using the thing as it was intended to be used is reasonable. Because the consumer is actually going to be turning up with pretty good evidence ("I bought this thing, and it failed rapidly") it's up to the other party to provide at least equivalent proof that they shouldn't provide some kind of remedy. That's hard for them to do.
So what does the law in the EU do? Well, it sets minimum standards of "reasonableness" for how long things should last — an expensive piece of electronic equipment shouldn't fail rapidly — and states whose responsibility it is to actually deal with all this. Thus it's the retailer's problem in the first instance, not the manufacturer's; this is based on the argument the customer's contract is with the retailer. Yes, this does mean somewhat higher prices but it also means that when things go wrong, you've got much more ability to seek restitution. Having had equipment fail on me in the past, that's more valuable than you might think at first.
Slashdot Mirror
So why does this only infect Windows? Are Linux and Mac users smarter?
I suspect that there are a few reasons for targeting Windows.
Overall, it's a bunch of small stuff and things that just happend that way that adds up in combination to a problem.
Are all Facebook users incredibly stupid?
There are lots of Facebook users due to their (FB's) extensive market penetration; enough of the users are incredibly stupid (or at least duped by automated "social" tricks) to make it worthwhile targeting them.
Look, the real problem is that some people are incredibly stupid. For as long as that's true, there will be criminal scum who try to make a living by duping them. It's been happening for thousands of years (there must've been confidence tricksters in ancient Sumeria) and the use of computers and the internet is just the latest manifestation. Since you can't fix stupid (except by removing all the warning labels from things) we're stuck with running after the criminals to stop them.
puts an unbelievable amount of tentacles into your system
Sounds like it might be a good idea for you to avoid 4chan.
Perhaps the medium is, but the related technology that makes the medium useful isn't. The drives can run thousands of dollars, and require specific technologies on the servers. On top of that you need software to run it, AND competent backup admins that can handle it.
Not that disk based solutions are significantly better, but they certainly have the ability to be significantly less complex ( which is always a good thing ).
The costs of SSDs start to look quite good when you're dealing with long-term preservation of a lot of data too. Yes, the storage cost itself isn't wonderful, but the fact that it is small and dense and solid state and able to be safely kept online (instead of having to physically move it about) greatly cuts the cost and risks of it. There's some interesting work going on in this area, and the answers being arrived at are often not at all intuitive.
If only we could scrap the whole mess and design a solution for the problems we face currently, instead of continuing to use the solution to the problems they faced 40 years ago. Wishful thinking, I know...
There have been many competitors to TCP/IP, but they've all fallen by the wayside because TCP/IP worked better in practice. (I remember OSI networking, but not fondly.) The key is that the internet scales better than the others, and that's made it possible for far more people to be connected to it and that in turn makes it by far the most attractive network to work with in the first place. The killer app of the internet was DNS, and especially its implementation as BIND...
Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
California has about 5 million more people than Canada; it's so large that it would count as a medium-sized European country (with a very strong economy too).
I don't. I don't have the millions of dollars to pay a high end legal team that a corporation might be able to afford, so "loser pays" would boil down to "I have no rights against rich entities". No thanks.
It doesn't work like that. The repayment of costs by the losing side is subject to a check against whether it is equitable and reasonable, and it is the judge that makes that determination. The legal principle of equitability is why costs are normally awarded (basically, why should you have to pay if you've not done anything wrong?). The legal principle of reasonableness strongly encourages the two sides to the case to bring equivalent legal firepower; yes, bring too little and you lose, but bring too much and you'll be out of pocket due to only getting a partial (sometimes very partial) award of costs. Doing the legal equivalent of using a thermonuclear weapon to crack a peanut is not reasonable, and it's been partially responsible in a number of cases for the "winners" feeling like they've lost heavily.
Yeah, but do you really think this is the only business that does this kind of thing?
Doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it legal. Doesn't make it ethical. Doesn't mean we should let them get away with it. Time to get our punishing boots on.
In any case, we often forget that the humans were employees of a corporation, not a sovereign military force. The soldiers were the equivalent of some Blackwater mercenaries. Regardless of how powerful corporations sometimes seem, it is government who still holds the leash, being jealous entities that hold the best goodies (like WMDs) for themselves.
That's not really accurate. You're looking at a fantastically expensive operation that is seeking to get an incredibly valuable substance and which is a very long way from home. There have been such things in the past on Earth (e.g., during the age of sail) though to a lesser extent; Earth just isn't as hostile as all that. The history of such expeditions is that they are not run as democracies, but rather as dictatorships with theoretical overview from back home, though typically as long as the goods are delivered the rulers at home don't care what happens. (Perhaps they should care, but they don't.)
If I remember the fluff right, that corporation is rather closely linked with governments in the solar system, but that doesn't really change my major point: in the space around Prometheus the corporation is the effective government for humans. The film documents the start of a revolt (and given the value proposition of the MacGuffin, I wouldn't expect the corporation to give up; the only thing that would have forced that would have been if they found a way to synthesize it in quantity within the solar system).
You'll probably first see rail- and coil-guns show up.
They're already testing rail guns for real. Admittedly they're large, intended as a replacement for conventional naval guns (the benefit is the ability to reduce the size of the magazine, traditionally a weak point on ships with large guns). I have no idea at all if they use superconductors.
It's perfectly safe for a driver on an open highway to use a cell phone.
No. It's close to being drunk in terms of danger. The problem is that it's really hugely distracting and the person on the other end of the phone is unaware of your road situation (which can change rapidly at highway speeds, alas). A spoken GPS is much less noticeable, as you know that's a machine. (Really; human brains are funny things.) A passenger is also capable of being just as distracting as a cell phone, except they tend to watch what is going on ahead and so shut up if things are looking tricky; beware of moms with a brood of rioting kids in the back.
If he has a manual transmission, less so.
You don't know what you're talking about. The vast majority of the complex part of controlling a manual transmission is done with your left foot; only the actual changing gear is done with your hand and you can control exactly when you do it. (Yes, there's an optimal moment. Automatic transmissions usually don't get that point right.) The last time I checked, people weren't trying to control a phone or GPS (or drink coffee or ...) with their feet while driving. If they are, it's damn rare. Moreover, on a highway you don't change gear much unless you're in heavy stop-start traffic.
That's not to say that it is as easy to learn to drive with a manual transmission as with an automatic. It's definitely harder to start out with, and if you're not used to a manual then you're going to need a lot more attention. Yet with training/practice, it's not hard and uses a very small part of your attention. (Basically, it transitions from being something handled by your conscious brain into something handled unconsciously. It becomes instinctive.)
Do you remember when we didn't even have cars. Oh that was a grand time, no oil changes, no breakdowns, no timing belt failures, and no worry of rising gas prices. Man those were the days.
You're forgetting the problems with inflation of buggy whip prices.
far less distracting than staring at a huge overhead sign and muttering "Do I want Dewsbury?"
Of course, the answer to that particular question is "No". Nobody sane wants Dewsbury, with its shoddy (and mungo) manufacturers.
And while some might argue that's part of the fun of it the show pales in comparison to shows like Red Dwarf that were also very random but at least had an internal logic that remained consistent to itself at least for an episode or two.
Red Dwarf's internal logic was very consistent, but did involve Lister's breakfast and "brown alert". Don't think about it.
There are 50 states in the USA, and Canada has over 10% of the population of the Americans, meaning Canada is bigger than 5 average state populations combined.
Other ways to express this. The only US state with more population than Canada is California. Every other state is significantly smaller. Canada's got nearly twice as many people as New York state. Ontario, the most populous Canadian province, has about the same number of people as Illinois.
private to private? you'd do a bank transfer. doesn't cost, easy to do on the spot if you have a smartphone.
Is the bank under a legal obligation (whether statutory or contractual) to keep those bank transfers free? No? Then your testicles are already in the steam press, my friend; they've just not started squeezing yet. I'd entirely believe a bank introducing a fee for all such transfers if they thought they could, and then perhaps waiving or reducing it for transfers between their accounts; encouraging people to get all their friends and family at the same bank would be seen as a great marketing measure!
Banks: there are no moral depths that they will not eagerly plumb if they think they can get away with it.
HIJKLMNO (5)
That reminds me of this one:
ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (4)
Nor is it a word in any conventional sense, nor comprised of words. The only place it ever appears is in relation to discussion of this particular clue. The correct clever human response to such thing is to punch the setter in the face; they have broken the formal compact of crossword setting by using a non-word/non-phrase as an answer.
(minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip)
That depends on whether you're committed to using an interplanetary transfer without thrust for the large majority of the time. If you can apply thrust the whole way, you have many more options open. Admittedly that means you're not going to be using conventional rockets, but that's pretty obvious in any case. The other advantage of a transfer under power is that it greatly shortens the time that people are at great risk from radiation and solar events like flares.
We don't do those sorts of transfers at the moment though: electronics can be made more robust than flesh.
Also appropriate:
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down." --Leslie Lamport
This holds even more for the cloud.
Not really. It's just as true as it ever was. The cloud is just a (viable) business model for virtualized distributed systems.
The general point is that it's possible to get bad emergent behavior which is unexpected. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone (but it is, alas). We see it over and over in complex systems, and it's got pretty much nothing to do with what you implement the complex system with.
What to do about it? Well, the only real fix is to stop the drive for efficiency at all costs. All those little inefficiencies that hit your bottom line, they also mean that when things go wrong you can weather the storm more easily. And yes, that resilience means things are going to cost more. How much more? Well, depends how much risk you want to take out of the system and how much you're willing to pay. Your call. (A local backup removes a lot of risk from things like cloud providers going belly up unexpectedly, but it does mean you're stuck with actually having to pay real money to do the backup and make sure it is working.)
Essentially Youtube is great because it can do all of this as well as being a window on the world that dictators like Assad cannot control. Hopefully the asshats at the MPAA and the RIAA will finally wake up and smell the coffee before the real potential of what is happening leaves the great parts of industry they control in the dust.
Why? They see the control exerted by the dictators and dream of a world where they have that power too.
If your goal is to get someone back to 100% function
As opposed to being stuck with the current, say, 1–5% function? Having 100% as the only possible target is dumb.
Bingo -- that is why it is hard to get researchers to stop feeding these monsters. Prestigious names look good, plain and simple; we live in a publish-or-perish world, and publishing in a big name journal is better than publishing on arXiv.
You've got to distinguish yourself from some moron publishing crap about homeopathic quantum karma alignment crystals. The most effective method of doing that so far has been to have some places marked out as special and to guard those places with a process of having to persuade peers in the field that a particular piece of work isn't crap. Your value as a researcher closely correlates with your ability to persuade your peers that you are doing worthwhile work, so getting that work into those special places ("journals") becomes hyper-important. That guarantees a place for journals (or places that work like them); all that's left is minor details like how to finance them and what exact rights should be granted.
Before you ask, no they won't be zero cost throughout nor will they be heavily advert-financed; the former just won't work (there are real costs) and the latter would open up so many conflicts of interest that it would be impossible to trust the journal even as much as today. Yet should the costs be what they are now? Should the journal publishers be reporting those revenues as profits? Should they be demanding all rights when merely a non-revokable right to publish without modification would be enough? There are plenty of problems that need to be addressed; I just don't believe that the boycott is the right way to do it. (I'm happy enough if others are going to get out of my way when I'm trying to get published myself. Making my life just a little easier? Yes, please!)
The economics of dealing with commercial publishers only make sense if you create an artificial wall between university libraries and university research labs. The libraries are paying so much to the publishers for journal access that any savings the labs might get by not paying to publish open-access are lost. Of course the overhead paid out of grant money to the university probably goes in part towards funding the library's access, but the scientists never have to bother with details like this - they only see the university skimming a certain percent off the top of their funds.
Rejigging all the finance side of things takes years. University finance moves slowly. Right now, each university will have a standard charge rate that is applied against all grant awards which will be used to pay for overheads. Part of that is the library (other parts are things like facilities maintenance, car lots, electricity, etc) and part of the library's costs are related to journal access. Switching over to the full OA model will reduce library costs and so the need to charge so much against grant awards (who will instead pay the publication costs directly) but to make that happen will require a lot of finance bureaucrats to change, and they're really a very conservative bunch.
Dealing with commercial publishers often sucks for other reasons. All of that fabled private-sector efficiency is meaningless when you're dealing with an entity whose review process is dependent on workaholic volunteers. I have a rule of thumb when dealing with Elsevier journals: don't send anything there unless you're willing to wait three months for reviews. The professors (or their postdocs, or sometimes even their students) who receive your manuscript don't give a shit. Why should they? They're not getting a share of Elsevier's 30%-plus profit margin.
The other issue is that journals need to be available for a long time. Unlike paper, data is really easy to destroy through minor neglect. Long-term preservation requires money. Lots of it, surprisingly much. If we could count on exponentially decreasing storage costs and a lack of economic shocks, it would be simple to cost and cheap to deliver. But classical economics is wrong and storage costs are not simple at all. Provisioning for keeping an article in a journal available for 40–50 years is going to be much harder than you might expect.
Personally, my complaints with Elsevier relate to their submission process. I'd prefer another root canal operation to going through that damn web submission system again...
How can a consumer prove that some electronic component ( hard disk, motherboard) defect is already present at the time of purchase?
Remember, you're talking about an argument between private parties, so the standard of proof is going to be "balance of probabilities" (or equivalent in local commercial law). The consumer has a non-working component (otherwise why bother with the fuss?) so all they need to do is to make a reasonable assertion that they've not done anything unreasonable to make it fail. Using the thing as it was intended to be used is reasonable. Because the consumer is actually going to be turning up with pretty good evidence ("I bought this thing, and it failed rapidly") it's up to the other party to provide at least equivalent proof that they shouldn't provide some kind of remedy. That's hard for them to do.
So what does the law in the EU do? Well, it sets minimum standards of "reasonableness" for how long things should last — an expensive piece of electronic equipment shouldn't fail rapidly — and states whose responsibility it is to actually deal with all this. Thus it's the retailer's problem in the first instance, not the manufacturer's; this is based on the argument the customer's contract is with the retailer. Yes, this does mean somewhat higher prices but it also means that when things go wrong, you've got much more ability to seek restitution. Having had equipment fail on me in the past, that's more valuable than you might think at first.