The answer to that has been a resounding yes ever since NetBIOS was introduced. It was always a windows only way of doing things that already had other non-proprietary standard ways of being accomplished. It has also been a vector for various malware over the years.
That's just not the way malware works any more. Early viruses were great, they did something obvious like put dialog boxes on your screen, ask for cookies, wipe your hard drive, or other obvious malicious behaviour. This was a good thing because it meant that they would never really spread that far because once infected, people knew they were infected, and the infection caused enough trouble to be worth fixing. Modern malware is a completely different beast, the goal of modern malware is to be unnoticed by the end user so as to live as long as possible in the machine, and spread to as many others as possible. usually with the goal of leeching bandwidth from these machines for use in various botnets. As such, malware that causes your machine not to boot would defeat the purpose of modern malware. a machine that isn't booted up will not join a botnet, and will not spread to other machines.
What is more likely is that the virus writers will intercept the keys used by UEFI, manage to sign their own bootloader, and still run windows in a way that the average end user can't tell the difference. this will make the virus almost impossible to remove as it will then have more access to the system than even the operating system itself does. On the bright side, once the UEFI keys are in the wild, the various free operating systems can use those same keys to sign their own bootloaders allowing people to run non-windows software in a signed way on windows only hardware (call it jailbroken...)
While I assumed truck (shame on me for not following how the shuttle was being moved!) My first mental image was of them shearing the tail off on a bridge because someone forgot to measure... seeing the wingtip damage in the photos though makes me think this is mostly a non-story, that damage looks quite minor, and probably easily enough fixed/covered up. (especially being that the repair doesn't need to be able to survive launch or re-entry stresses)
Have you tried different file managers? I personally use ES file explorer and have been quite pleased with it.
Now I don't have the Transformer, I have the Acer Iconia instead, but I do have a keyboard folio case which does basically the same thing. For me I wanted a little more tablet, a little less laptop, and the Iconia having the full size USB port on the tablet itself (instead of on the dock) was the deciding factor.
The tablet has completely replaced my laptop for all uses (though I do still have a desktop at home) On it's own I use it to play games, surf the web, quick emails, streaming video, etc. or I pair it with the keyboard (and sometimes a mouse) to do some programming, server maintenance, or even light word processing and spreadsheet work (though I will admit that office suites are one place that android is a little weak, and I've tried quite a few of them)
I do try to remember to plug it in every few days to recharge...
If you want to run android, buy the android version of this. The windows version will have 1/4 or less of the battery life, and no other advantages for someone who wants to run android anyway.
I can't understand why you'd want the x86 version of something already designed for android, instead of the android version, if that's what you want to use it for.
because you were effectively ostracized by being significantly younger during middle/high school is not amusing.
Teenagers are cruel, they always have been, and probably always will be. That said, it seems likely that they pick on people who have skipped grades mainly because it is so uncommon. If our education system was completely goal oriented, instead of age oriented, there would always be a mix of various ages in every class, and that particular excuse for picking on kids wouldn't be as likely (I'm not going to pretend that it would stop kids from picking on other kids, but I don't think age would be such an issue if the school system wasn't programming them to make it so.)
We shouldn't care what age a kid is when determining what grade they should be in, we should look at their knowledge and let them work accordingly. If that means that you have a 15 year old in grade 3 and a 7 year old in grade 8, so be it.
The problem is that when someone does this extra work in school, they get absolutely no reward, or even acknowledgement for it. slacking off is therefore the encouraged behaviour because you will be treated the same either way. I can work 4 times as hard as the kid beside me, and still do the same tests on the same days, still move to the same next grade at the same time... or I can slack off, barely pass, and be in exactly the same position.
Where's the incentive to succeed?
If I knew that I could work harder and skip a grade (and therefore a year of school) I would definitely have done so! but every time I tried to work ahead the teachers told me to wait for everyone else to catch up.
We need to stop seeing school as being X years long and instead see school as being until you have met Y requirements and know the material. But schools focus very hard on the number of hours of instruction each class should take instead of the goals of what material needs to be taught and understood.
This always struck me as odd. When I was in school it always felt to me like I could finish all the learning for each year in a couple of months if only I was allowed to do so. But instead I had to sit there while the teacher went over each thing a dozen times, and then reviewed it a dozen more. And you couldn't read ahead because you'd be told that the class hadn't got there yet. One of my friends in grade 7 gave up and taught himself calculus during math class, the teacher didn't dare stop him, but neither did he allow him to complete a single assignment or test before the requisite time, nor could he advance to the next grade early (despite the fact that he was already working himself 5-6 grades ahead of the class) And yet despite this you see stories like this from time to time where someone manages, despite the system, to come out ahead. Personally I want to know how they managed to get through the school system before the age of 18. The system which seems designed more to keep young people off the streets than it is to educate them.
What convinced me as a teenager was that the S America and Africa coastlines match pretty accurately, even down to the kinds of rock.
And this is what surprises me about the whole thing. Until this article, I didn't realize that there had ever really been any controversy on this subject, (or at least none since the first published map of the world.) Even as a child in elementary school I had a map on my wall and the coast lines of not just South America and Africa, but many other places as well just seemed to mesh too well to be coincidence. Before anyone had told me about continental drift I had always assumed it to be the case just based on my map at home. Later as the geology and biology was explained to me it just confirmed what I already thought I knew. I'm honestly a bit perplexed that this should have been any more than a "well duh!" moment in science.
1. Your 'slightly smaller' white boxes are still too bloody big and too numerous, oh and a few of them actually blew up.
Our fibre boxes are just under 3 feet tall, about the same width, and about 2 feet deep. We need one box for every 900 homes (approximately) They are a completely passive device, and as such can only "blow up" if someone places explosives in them.
2. Your speeds and prices aren't actually all that competitive against Comcast, still claiming caps, still trying to bundle when all I want is internet.
We compete quite well with our local cable company, every service has caps, but ours are large enough that the vast majority of customers never manage to reach them (500GB/month on our 25Mbps plan). Bundling is optional, if you want just internet, you get just internet. Bundling will save money over having the 3 services individually though ($5 discount per month per service you add)
3. Your TV service was absolute rubbish when I saw it. The main issue seemed to be the horribly designed Motorola DVR's running the Microsoft MediaRoom software internally... the remote was next to worthless, responsiveness was atrocious, on and on.
We ended up canceling and switching back to Comcast for internet and DirecTV for television... uVerse was so promising but the implementation is horrific.
Well first of all you haven't seen it, secondly we don't use Motorola DVRs, we use Cisco ones. Yes we do use Mediaroom, but independent tests have shown our picture quality to be at least as good as our major cable competitor (in fact better in most cases) The remote, well I'm used to it, but I find it much nicer to work with than either our cable competitor's remote, or either of the 2 satellite companies ones. Our system using mediaroom can also do all sorts of things that the local cable company hasn't figured out yet, such things as recording a show on one TV and watching it on another, controlling your recordings from your smart phone when you aren't even home, accessing facebook and twitter from the TV, recording 4 shows at a time, and many more.
Removing people's freedom to murder, steal, or rape is still removing a freedom. It's just that we all tend to agree that those are freedoms that need to be restricted. but it's still removing freedoms. The catch is to figure out what level of freedom infringment is appropriate for a society.
Cue the people in that area complaining that BT's service is slow, or that they can't get it at all. They'll invariably blame BT, and won't consider that it was their own politicians who prevented them from getting service. Now I wouldn't call those boxes particularly ugly, but I'm sure if the council was willing to work with BT something could be arranged. I work for a telco providing fibre service in north america. Our boxes are slightly smaller than that I think (it's hard to get a sense of scale from the photo), and white, they are often hidden behind fences or shrubs, or in back alleys etc. As long as we have access to them, we don't really care what is done to conceal them. In some places they have been treated with a wrap of some form of artwork (one place I really liked was in a touristy part of a city where the box was turned in to a large map of the area, made something that had to be there anyway serve yet another purpose.)
I'd be more inclined to white-list TLDs rather than just dump everything over 3 characters, depending on who you do business with there are a lot of 2 letter TLDs you could easily drop too
haven't we seen articles saying that bots are now more likely to be able to beat captchas than humans are? I know I usually have to reload many captcha images 2-3 times before I can find one that I can guess at with any likelyhood of success.
So you're feeding 500,000 customers with 34-80 meg service on **Cable* with only a single loop and one head end? No, didn't think so. You don't get that many customers without deploying multiple head ends all over the city, feeding them with fibre. Deciding to do that or not is a business decision, but it's not just Cable at that point.
The argument can go either way. DSL isn't slow, and Cable isn't over-subscribed... Certain companies implementations of either one can be though. The point is that it *IS* a business decision on what upgrades you do to your network, if you don't upgrade, that is a business choice, not a technology one. We run 34-80 meg VDSL2 service over 700m copper pairs, What the customers get is very much DSL, the network is fibre, but the "last mile" is DSL, You say DSL is slow, I say you aren't deploying it right. This is no different from implementing a cable network with only one coax line from the head end splitting to all your subscribers, it will have problems too, Allowing the cable company to deploy nodes all over the city on fibre is no different from deploying DSLAMs all over the city on fibre.
Because Slashdot loves car analogies: Just because your Model T Ford can't do 200km/hr doesn't mean that internal combustion engines are all slow, and just because the Ferrari can you don't say it "isn't a car at that point".
I find the fact that the FBI is being cagey about it to be a strong indication that they did it the old fashioned way. This way they hope to scare some people in to stopping doing illegal things on TOR for fear of being caught, without having to admit that they haven't broken TOR and actually caught people the old fashioned way. I suspect had they truly managed to track it through TOR they'd be bragging about it.
That said, I agree TOR isn't perfect, I'm sure that law enforcement has invested a lot in breaking it (and may yet succeed). There is no guarantee that it is currently safe. I just don't think we have yet seen an actual case where there is any indication that they have already broken it.
generally in those cases the PI does not enter anyone's private residence. they usually simply document that your spouse spent 2 hours in someone else's house and came out with lipstick on his collar and his shirt un-tucked. If the PI stood in the bedroom and took pictures they might find themselves in some trouble...
Countries with no punishment for rape, oddly enough, *do* have a higher frequency of it.
That goes to likelihood of being caught. As I said in my example, catching someone and giving them a minor penalty is a bigger deterrent than a huge penalty when you are unlikely to be caught (a complete lack of any penalty is a guarantee you won't be "caught") Under the description in your previous post though a country with no penalty for rape would not have simply a higher frequency of it, but would in fact have nearly every person engaging in it as frequently as possible
It's in our nature to kill, rape and beat the living crap out of each other and everything around us
when in fact we still do not see that even where no penalty exists, the incidence is higher, but only to the point where the morality and ethics of most people kick in, in fact you still won't see a majority of people engaged in it. What actually reduces the incidence of rape further though tends not to be the implementation of laws against it, but rather social programs promoting the idea of woman as equals, education, and prosperity have a larger impact than simply enacting a law on the subject (this goes to my point about unjust laws, if people believe the law to be just, they will follow it, if they do not, they will not.)
You talk a lot about society and your status in it, but what you completely ignore is that there are societies where murderers *are* at the top of the social ladder.
citation needed. If people gained social status by killing, the society would quickly fall apart as everyone killed each other. we do not see that in any current society on earth.
Those constructs could not exist if you were correct about anything you've said.
Actually the first reinforces what I said, and the second seems extremely unlikely.
You also fail to understand that being removed from society (either forcibly or by being shunned) is a penalty.
Where did I contradict this in any way?
The original post stated that the only reason anyone ever does anything good is to avoid punishment. I strongly disagree. I say the majority of people do good things all the time for no reason other than the benefit of society (where it is known that an improved society benefits everyone including themselves) Social studies repeatedly show that increased penalties do not in any way reduce undesirable behaviour, however increased social programs do. This would indicate that people are driven more by generosity than by punishment.
Now I'll admit that this is not a black and white issue, and you can not say that no harsh punishment is ever required to combat undesirable behaviour. But stating that we only do things to avoid punishment is patently absurd.
20 years from now will you still be able to find a mailbox? will the post office still exist? Hard to say.
I still think electronic voting will have to be done in the future. But I also believe it isn't yet ready. We need to find ways to make it every bit as verifiable as paper voting first. That shouldn't be that hard though. we already have electronic banking that has that level of reliability. It's not impossible.
Now the reason for electronic voting isn't because going to the polling station every 4 years is too difficult (it isn't) it's because for a true democracy to function we need to get past the "every 4 years" model, and get people involved in more of the regular business of law making. This wasn't practical 400 years ago, but it is practical now. maybe not a complete direct democracy, but a long way ahead of where we are now.
Motorola has actually backed off a bit, not on motoblur completely, but on the mandatory web-based account registration. I have an XT860 (Canadian version of the droid 3) and it does have motoblur, but does not have the mandatory web-based account registration.
the thing about this system though is that they are not being "made to" they are CHOOSING to. this is not a legally mandated thing, it's a bunch of big ISPs who decided to screw over their customers for the fun (and profit) of it.
While it is possible that someone could be tracked despite TOR, the example you give is unlikely to be one of those cases. The example given was a narcotics ring, as narcotics can not (yet) be sent through TOR, it seems more likely that they were tracked through their physical product than through TOR.
mac addresses are only used to route packets at the most local level of the network, so as long as your forged mac address is still unique on your local switch, you won't have a problem.
I suspect it's worse than that. the BSA often simply assumes that any PC that was sold without windows on it must be running a pirated copy of windows. They do not see the possibility of someone running something else. therefore everyone running linux falls in to their "pirate" category, even if all their software is legit.
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The answer to that has been a resounding yes ever since NetBIOS was introduced. It was always a windows only way of doing things that already had other non-proprietary standard ways of being accomplished. It has also been a vector for various malware over the years.
That's just not the way malware works any more.
Early viruses were great, they did something obvious like put dialog boxes on your screen, ask for cookies, wipe your hard drive, or other obvious malicious behaviour. This was a good thing because it meant that they would never really spread that far because once infected, people knew they were infected, and the infection caused enough trouble to be worth fixing.
Modern malware is a completely different beast, the goal of modern malware is to be unnoticed by the end user so as to live as long as possible in the machine, and spread to as many others as possible. usually with the goal of leeching bandwidth from these machines for use in various botnets. As such, malware that causes your machine not to boot would defeat the purpose of modern malware. a machine that isn't booted up will not join a botnet, and will not spread to other machines.
What is more likely is that the virus writers will intercept the keys used by UEFI, manage to sign their own bootloader, and still run windows in a way that the average end user can't tell the difference. this will make the virus almost impossible to remove as it will then have more access to the system than even the operating system itself does. On the bright side, once the UEFI keys are in the wild, the various free operating systems can use those same keys to sign their own bootloaders allowing people to run non-windows software in a signed way on windows only hardware (call it jailbroken...)
Hindsight is when something is obvious in retrospect. a paper published before the infection is not hindsight, but foresight.
That said, I love how clicking on the link to a paper about a security vulnerability leads to my browser giving a security certificate warning....
While I assumed truck (shame on me for not following how the shuttle was being moved!) My first mental image was of them shearing the tail off on a bridge because someone forgot to measure... seeing the wingtip damage in the photos though makes me think this is mostly a non-story, that damage looks quite minor, and probably easily enough fixed/covered up. (especially being that the repair doesn't need to be able to survive launch or re-entry stresses)
Have you tried different file managers? I personally use ES file explorer and have been quite pleased with it.
Now I don't have the Transformer, I have the Acer Iconia instead, but I do have a keyboard folio case which does basically the same thing. For me I wanted a little more tablet, a little less laptop, and the Iconia having the full size USB port on the tablet itself (instead of on the dock) was the deciding factor.
The tablet has completely replaced my laptop for all uses (though I do still have a desktop at home) On it's own I use it to play games, surf the web, quick emails, streaming video, etc. or I pair it with the keyboard (and sometimes a mouse) to do some programming, server maintenance, or even light word processing and spreadsheet work (though I will admit that office suites are one place that android is a little weak, and I've tried quite a few of them)
I do try to remember to plug it in every few days to recharge...
If you want to run android, buy the android version of this. The windows version will have 1/4 or less of the battery life, and no other advantages for someone who wants to run android anyway.
I can't understand why you'd want the x86 version of something already designed for android, instead of the android version, if that's what you want to use it for.
because you were effectively ostracized by being significantly younger during middle/high school is not amusing.
Teenagers are cruel, they always have been, and probably always will be. That said, it seems likely that they pick on people who have skipped grades mainly because it is so uncommon. If our education system was completely goal oriented, instead of age oriented, there would always be a mix of various ages in every class, and that particular excuse for picking on kids wouldn't be as likely (I'm not going to pretend that it would stop kids from picking on other kids, but I don't think age would be such an issue if the school system wasn't programming them to make it so.)
We shouldn't care what age a kid is when determining what grade they should be in, we should look at their knowledge and let them work accordingly. If that means that you have a 15 year old in grade 3 and a 7 year old in grade 8, so be it.
The problem is that when someone does this extra work in school, they get absolutely no reward, or even acknowledgement for it. slacking off is therefore the encouraged behaviour because you will be treated the same either way.
I can work 4 times as hard as the kid beside me, and still do the same tests on the same days, still move to the same next grade at the same time... or I can slack off, barely pass, and be in exactly the same position.
Where's the incentive to succeed?
If I knew that I could work harder and skip a grade (and therefore a year of school) I would definitely have done so! but every time I tried to work ahead the teachers told me to wait for everyone else to catch up.
We need to stop seeing school as being X years long and instead see school as being until you have met Y requirements and know the material. But schools focus very hard on the number of hours of instruction each class should take instead of the goals of what material needs to be taught and understood.
This always struck me as odd. When I was in school it always felt to me like I could finish all the learning for each year in a couple of months if only I was allowed to do so. But instead I had to sit there while the teacher went over each thing a dozen times, and then reviewed it a dozen more. And you couldn't read ahead because you'd be told that the class hadn't got there yet. One of my friends in grade 7 gave up and taught himself calculus during math class, the teacher didn't dare stop him, but neither did he allow him to complete a single assignment or test before the requisite time, nor could he advance to the next grade early (despite the fact that he was already working himself 5-6 grades ahead of the class)
And yet despite this you see stories like this from time to time where someone manages, despite the system, to come out ahead. Personally I want to know how they managed to get through the school system before the age of 18. The system which seems designed more to keep young people off the streets than it is to educate them.
What convinced me as a teenager was that the S America and Africa coastlines match pretty accurately, even down to the kinds of rock.
And this is what surprises me about the whole thing. Until this article, I didn't realize that there had ever really been any controversy on this subject, (or at least none since the first published map of the world.) Even as a child in elementary school I had a map on my wall and the coast lines of not just South America and Africa, but many other places as well just seemed to mesh too well to be coincidence. Before anyone had told me about continental drift I had always assumed it to be the case just based on my map at home. Later as the geology and biology was explained to me it just confirmed what I already thought I knew. I'm honestly a bit perplexed that this should have been any more than a "well duh!" moment in science.
Sounds like AT&T uVerse to me:
Wrong. not even the right country.
1. Your 'slightly smaller' white boxes are still too bloody big and too numerous, oh and a few of them actually blew up.
Our fibre boxes are just under 3 feet tall, about the same width, and about 2 feet deep. We need one box for every 900 homes (approximately) They are a completely passive device, and as such can only "blow up" if someone places explosives in them.
2. Your speeds and prices aren't actually all that competitive against Comcast, still claiming caps, still trying to bundle when all I want is internet.
We compete quite well with our local cable company, every service has caps, but ours are large enough that the vast majority of customers never manage to reach them (500GB/month on our 25Mbps plan). Bundling is optional, if you want just internet, you get just internet. Bundling will save money over having the 3 services individually though ($5 discount per month per service you add)
3. Your TV service was absolute rubbish when I saw it. The main issue seemed to be the horribly designed Motorola DVR's running the Microsoft MediaRoom software internally... the remote was next to worthless, responsiveness was atrocious, on and on.
We ended up canceling and switching back to Comcast for internet and DirecTV for television... uVerse was so promising but the implementation is horrific.
Well first of all you haven't seen it, secondly we don't use Motorola DVRs, we use Cisco ones. Yes we do use Mediaroom, but independent tests have shown our picture quality to be at least as good as our major cable competitor (in fact better in most cases) The remote, well I'm used to it, but I find it much nicer to work with than either our cable competitor's remote, or either of the 2 satellite companies ones. Our system using mediaroom can also do all sorts of things that the local cable company hasn't figured out yet, such things as recording a show on one TV and watching it on another, controlling your recordings from your smart phone when you aren't even home, accessing facebook and twitter from the TV, recording 4 shows at a time, and many more.
Removing people's freedom to murder, steal, or rape is still removing a freedom. It's just that we all tend to agree that those are freedoms that need to be restricted. but it's still removing freedoms. The catch is to figure out what level of freedom infringment is appropriate for a society.
Cue the people in that area complaining that BT's service is slow, or that they can't get it at all. They'll invariably blame BT, and won't consider that it was their own politicians who prevented them from getting service.
Now I wouldn't call those boxes particularly ugly, but I'm sure if the council was willing to work with BT something could be arranged.
I work for a telco providing fibre service in north america. Our boxes are slightly smaller than that I think (it's hard to get a sense of scale from the photo), and white, they are often hidden behind fences or shrubs, or in back alleys etc. As long as we have access to them, we don't really care what is done to conceal them. In some places they have been treated with a wrap of some form of artwork (one place I really liked was in a touristy part of a city where the box was turned in to a large map of the area, made something that had to be there anyway serve yet another purpose.)
I'd be more inclined to white-list TLDs rather than just dump everything over 3 characters, depending on who you do business with there are a lot of 2 letter TLDs you could easily drop too
haven't we seen articles saying that bots are now more likely to be able to beat captchas than humans are? I know I usually have to reload many captcha images 2-3 times before I can find one that I can guess at with any likelyhood of success.
So you're feeding 500,000 customers with 34-80 meg service on **Cable* with only a single loop and one head end? No, didn't think so. You don't get that many customers without deploying multiple head ends all over the city, feeding them with fibre. Deciding to do that or not is a business decision, but it's not just Cable at that point.
The argument can go either way. DSL isn't slow, and Cable isn't over-subscribed... Certain companies implementations of either one can be though. The point is that it *IS* a business decision on what upgrades you do to your network, if you don't upgrade, that is a business choice, not a technology one. We run 34-80 meg VDSL2 service over 700m copper pairs, What the customers get is very much DSL, the network is fibre, but the "last mile" is DSL,
You say DSL is slow, I say you aren't deploying it right. This is no different from implementing a cable network with only one coax line from the head end splitting to all your subscribers, it will have problems too, Allowing the cable company to deploy nodes all over the city on fibre is no different from deploying DSLAMs all over the city on fibre.
Because Slashdot loves car analogies: Just because your Model T Ford can't do 200km/hr doesn't mean that internal combustion engines are all slow, and just because the Ferrari can you don't say it "isn't a car at that point".
I find the fact that the FBI is being cagey about it to be a strong indication that they did it the old fashioned way. This way they hope to scare some people in to stopping doing illegal things on TOR for fear of being caught, without having to admit that they haven't broken TOR and actually caught people the old fashioned way. I suspect had they truly managed to track it through TOR they'd be bragging about it.
That said, I agree TOR isn't perfect, I'm sure that law enforcement has invested a lot in breaking it (and may yet succeed). There is no guarantee that it is currently safe. I just don't think we have yet seen an actual case where there is any indication that they have already broken it.
generally in those cases the PI does not enter anyone's private residence. they usually simply document that your spouse spent 2 hours in someone else's house and came out with lipstick on his collar and his shirt un-tucked. If the PI stood in the bedroom and took pictures they might find themselves in some trouble...
Countries with no punishment for rape, oddly enough, *do* have a higher frequency of it.
That goes to likelihood of being caught. As I said in my example, catching someone and giving them a minor penalty is a bigger deterrent than a huge penalty when you are unlikely to be caught (a complete lack of any penalty is a guarantee you won't be "caught") Under the description in your previous post though a country with no penalty for rape would not have simply a higher frequency of it, but would in fact have nearly every person engaging in it as frequently as possible
It's in our nature to kill, rape and beat the living crap out of each other and everything around us
when in fact we still do not see that even where no penalty exists, the incidence is higher, but only to the point where the morality and ethics of most people kick in, in fact you still won't see a majority of people engaged in it. What actually reduces the incidence of rape further though tends not to be the implementation of laws against it, but rather social programs promoting the idea of woman as equals, education, and prosperity have a larger impact than simply enacting a law on the subject (this goes to my point about unjust laws, if people believe the law to be just, they will follow it, if they do not, they will not.)
You talk a lot about society and your status in it, but what you completely ignore is that there are societies where murderers *are* at the top of the social ladder.
citation needed. If people gained social status by killing, the society would quickly fall apart as everyone killed each other. we do not see that in any current society on earth.
Those constructs could not exist if you were correct about anything you've said.
Actually the first reinforces what I said, and the second seems extremely unlikely.
You also fail to understand that being removed from society (either forcibly or by being shunned) is a penalty.
Where did I contradict this in any way?
The original post stated that the only reason anyone ever does anything good is to avoid punishment. I strongly disagree. I say the majority of people do good things all the time for no reason other than the benefit of society (where it is known that an improved society benefits everyone including themselves) Social studies repeatedly show that increased penalties do not in any way reduce undesirable behaviour, however increased social programs do. This would indicate that people are driven more by generosity than by punishment.
Now I'll admit that this is not a black and white issue, and you can not say that no harsh punishment is ever required to combat undesirable behaviour. But stating that we only do things to avoid punishment is patently absurd.
20 years from now will you still be able to find a mailbox? will the post office still exist? Hard to say.
I still think electronic voting will have to be done in the future. But I also believe it isn't yet ready. We need to find ways to make it every bit as verifiable as paper voting first. That shouldn't be that hard though. we already have electronic banking that has that level of reliability. It's not impossible.
Now the reason for electronic voting isn't because going to the polling station every 4 years is too difficult (it isn't) it's because for a true democracy to function we need to get past the "every 4 years" model, and get people involved in more of the regular business of law making. This wasn't practical 400 years ago, but it is practical now. maybe not a complete direct democracy, but a long way ahead of where we are now.
Motorola has actually backed off a bit, not on motoblur completely, but on the mandatory web-based account registration. I have an XT860 (Canadian version of the droid 3) and it does have motoblur, but does not have the mandatory web-based account registration.
the thing about this system though is that they are not being "made to" they are CHOOSING to. this is not a legally mandated thing, it's a bunch of big ISPs who decided to screw over their customers for the fun (and profit) of it.
While it is possible that someone could be tracked despite TOR, the example you give is unlikely to be one of those cases. The example given was a narcotics ring, as narcotics can not (yet) be sent through TOR, it seems more likely that they were tracked through their physical product than through TOR.
mac addresses are only used to route packets at the most local level of the network, so as long as your forged mac address is still unique on your local switch, you won't have a problem.
I suspect it's worse than that. the BSA often simply assumes that any PC that was sold without windows on it must be running a pirated copy of windows. They do not see the possibility of someone running something else. therefore everyone running linux falls in to their "pirate" category, even if all their software is legit.