The sad thing is that the entertainment industries that are pushing this ludicrous legislation account for a fairly small fraction of most nation's GDP, it's not like they're "too big to fail"; the UK could certainly take hit of the loss of all musical and movie-based industry without catastrophic problems and I suspect the US probably could too.
I think it's more a case of the government being afraid that the people might realise what they're up to and so is trying a pre-emptive strike. It gives "the people" too much credit to claim that they're clued up enough to actually frighten the government; the ludicrous state of US politics should show you that (by which I mean the Democrats being in-fighting pussies incapable of pushing through any legislation even with a super-majority and the Republicans having whipped their supporters into such an anti-Obama frenzy with meaningless buzzwords that they're now incapable of agreeing with him even when it means getting what they want for fear of alienating their own supporters).
Face it, 90% of the population of any given country involved in ACTA don't care in the slightest about copyright and patents and net neutrality and the like; at least, they don't realise they do, even if they do. They're quite happy to carry on with their lives and put up with or work around any shit that new legislation throws at them without changing their day-to-day routine.
I wouldn't get too excited, our governments are made up of just as many selfish dicks as yours is.
Christ, we've got The Dark Lord Mandleson handling our business affairs until at least May and given how retarded & easily led most of our population is, probably for 5 years beyond that as well.
I'm sorry, I love Firefox (and to a lesser extent Opera, Safari & Chrome), but until they come distributed as MSIs with support for (or even provided with) ADMX templates for Group Policy you're simply not going to see widespread adoption in Windows-based corporate environments. I hate MSIs as much as the next guy (really, you need the installer to uninstall, why exactly?), but that's how it is.
I work in a medium sized organisation (3,000ish machines) and if our support team was willing to make the effort to figure out how to push out Firefox to every machine we manage and set it as the default browser it would result in an epic cluster fuck. Half the users wouldn't be able to access the internet because they wouldn't have the right proxy settings and the other half would be whinging about how none of the "web" apps they use work any more (3rd party, out of our control - we've been trying for 2 years to get vaguely modern support for any of them but nobody seems to care).
I'll say it again, however much you might dislike it, if you want to make inroads into Windows-based corporate environments you have to support MSIs and GPOs - no excuses.
I feel your pain (working in the NHS); I've lost track of the number of different versions of Java we have to support on different machines for different apps. We've got the national clinical system that uses one version, an HR application *from the same fucking company* that requires another, two finance applications that need different versions of Java - one that needs one version to install and another to run *and it's from fucking Citibank*, who say it's a "local issue".
Developers seem to approach Java the same way they approach IE6; let's take advantage of all the quirks, bugs and non-standard features of this version to ensure that our app will never work with any other version of anything ever and then blame the user when they want to change something.
Modern Warfare 2 is a huge outlier; very few games sell anywhere near that many copies, once you get out of the top 10 you're looking at 2 million copies tops and that's across the whole life of the game.
Screw the costs, £3.3bn would mean (approximately) 82,500,000 units shipped each quarter. Even WoW has only sold ~12 million copies worldwide in 5 years (600,000 a quarter), so you'd need 138 games of WoW-level popularity every quarter to shift that many copies.
No, but they don't offer any actual evidence that the systems are swapping a lot, just that their memory usage is high. The "and this causes swapping" part of the claim just seems to be an assumption rather than a fact.
I'm running Windows 7 x64 with 4Gb of RAM; currently I'm running Outlook, Firefox, IE, Excel, FeedDemon, Office Communicator, AV, AD management tools, call management software, a couple of powershell instances, Context, RDTabs, Putty and the usual assortment of drivers, plugins and background apps. I'm at 2.4Gb of RAM; even on a 2Gb machine it would be usable, though I'd probably have to be a bit more zealous with closing unused apps to avoid swapping.
I can only assume that it's the usual nonsense of vendors shipping Win 7 machines with only 1Gb or 2Gb of RAM, loading them with crapware, putting cheap hard disks in, telling the users they can multitask their asses off and then acting surprised when the performance isn't up to much.
Yes. How exactly do you plan to draw any meaningful conclusions from 130 years of climate data given the ~4.5billion years of climate that the Earth has experienced thus far? Yes, I know not all of that time is valid as being habitable, but even if you're just looking at the time humans have been around it's ~2 million years.
A PC copy protection scheme on a major game will attract the attention of professional reverse engineers. These guys are likely paid to do it, because pirated games a the perfect way of getting people to install viruses and malware. The "pay per install" scene is largely based on torrents because it's so much easier than finding browser 0days.
Really? I don't think I've ever seen a 'scene' release that contained any kind of malware (apart from the occasional false positive due to the mechanisms involved); that's not to say that 3rd parties don't *replace* cracked files and keygens with malware and torrent them, but the people actually breaking the copy protection really don't seem to be involved in anything (additionally) nefarious. Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
Replying to myself, if you read the PDF it details the process on page 3; the card actually does almost all of the transaction work before the PIN is entered, all the PIN enables is the "Is this transaction allowed? Yes, it's allowed. OK" part of the process.
RTFA. The problem isn't that the PIN is "stored on the card", it's that the card doesn't send any unique data to the terminal when the correct PIN is entered, it just sends a "Correct PIN was entered" message instead.
So, you stick something between the card and the terminal (the laptop) that intercepts the "Wrong PIN was entered" message from the card and forwards a "Correct PIN was entered" message to the terminal instead.
TBH I'm rather surprised that any information is allowed to be pulled off the chip without the PIN authenticating the user first; if you had to provide the correct PIN before the card would provide any information it would make it much harder to carry out the fraudulent transaction.
Not if you're happy with MS Office and don't care about things like Cost, Openness, Install Size, Cross-platform compatibility, etc. That said, if you want a portable office suite that you can stick on a USB key, then it's very handy (http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable)
I use OO at home, because I don't want to pay for MS Office & I prefer FOSS to piracy where the FOSS option does what I need, but couldn't get by with it at work because it can't do Outlook or Sharepoint Integration and it would give me headaches swapping documents with everyone else who uses MS Office..
It's the default location; specifically "C:\Users\\Desktop\OpenOffice.org 3.2 (en-US) Installation Files\" (Win 7) - though I've never had any problems upgrading after deleting the install files because Windows should cache any required MSI files in C:\Windows\Installer\.
Though I still don't understand why MSI-installed apps need the original MSI to uninstall or change them - I thought Microsoft had abandoned that stupid behaviour when they stopped requiring you to have the Office install CD to uninstall Office 97. I've seen a few machines where a deleted or corrupt.NET MSI cache has made it impossible to upgrade, repair or remove said framework(s).
I can't easily test it right now, but it certainly used to make a big difference to the startup times if you disabled the "Use a Java Runtime Environment" option in OO.
Get spare box (or VM, or even your own machine if it's beefy enough), install WSUS (Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2003), point clients at WSUS either with a GPO or in local policy (gpedit.msc), decline KB71033 (if it even gets pushed through WSUS, which it probably won't; WGA didn't), sit back and relax.
This is also handy for any other "critical" updates that you might want to avoid, or any updates that are incompatible with your system, or may cause errors (Like KB977165), especially in environments where other people have administrator access to your machine and like to click things without reading them or you're managing several machines (friends, family, housemates, girlfriends, etc).
These days you've got malware that is a trojan (to get onto your machine) and a virus (to spread itself to all your facebook friends, email contacts & embed itself on your USB key) and a worm (to spread itself around your LAN), which will zombie your machine to send spam and conduct DDoS attacks, keylog to steal your bank and WoW credentials and try to get you to buy fake AV software to get both your cash and personal info.
To say the lines between trojans, viruses, worms and spyware are blurry is a serious understatement.
Yeah, my phrasing was terrible; I meant to imply that it was a case of Microsoft copying the principle of *nix shells rather than being a copy *of* one. Powershell is indeed a lot better in many respects, though I can't claim to be an expert on *nix shells, such as the ability to make.NET and win32 function calls inline in Powershell scripts to make use of things like crypto libraries and windows GUI elements.
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I believe you've just won the discussion.
The sad thing is that the entertainment industries that are pushing this ludicrous legislation account for a fairly small fraction of most nation's GDP, it's not like they're "too big to fail"; the UK could certainly take hit of the loss of all musical and movie-based industry without catastrophic problems and I suspect the US probably could too.
Next up, you're not allowed to know what you've been charged with or what you've been sentenced to.
I think it's more a case of the government being afraid that the people might realise what they're up to and so is trying a pre-emptive strike. It gives "the people" too much credit to claim that they're clued up enough to actually frighten the government; the ludicrous state of US politics should show you that (by which I mean the Democrats being in-fighting pussies incapable of pushing through any legislation even with a super-majority and the Republicans having whipped their supporters into such an anti-Obama frenzy with meaningless buzzwords that they're now incapable of agreeing with him even when it means getting what they want for fear of alienating their own supporters).
No, you're not, but you are still in a minority.
Face it, 90% of the population of any given country involved in ACTA don't care in the slightest about copyright and patents and net neutrality and the like; at least, they don't realise they do, even if they do. They're quite happy to carry on with their lives and put up with or work around any shit that new legislation throws at them without changing their day-to-day routine.
I wouldn't get too excited, our governments are made up of just as many selfish dicks as yours is.
Christ, we've got The Dark Lord Mandleson handling our business affairs until at least May and given how retarded & easily led most of our population is, probably for 5 years beyond that as well.
I'm sorry, I love Firefox (and to a lesser extent Opera, Safari & Chrome), but until they come distributed as MSIs with support for (or even provided with) ADMX templates for Group Policy you're simply not going to see widespread adoption in Windows-based corporate environments. I hate MSIs as much as the next guy (really, you need the installer to uninstall, why exactly?), but that's how it is.
I work in a medium sized organisation (3,000ish machines) and if our support team was willing to make the effort to figure out how to push out Firefox to every machine we manage and set it as the default browser it would result in an epic cluster fuck. Half the users wouldn't be able to access the internet because they wouldn't have the right proxy settings and the other half would be whinging about how none of the "web" apps they use work any more (3rd party, out of our control - we've been trying for 2 years to get vaguely modern support for any of them but nobody seems to care).
I'll say it again, however much you might dislike it, if you want to make inroads into Windows-based corporate environments you have to support MSIs and GPOs - no excuses.
I feel your pain (working in the NHS); I've lost track of the number of different versions of Java we have to support on different machines for different apps. We've got the national clinical system that uses one version, an HR application *from the same fucking company* that requires another, two finance applications that need different versions of Java - one that needs one version to install and another to run *and it's from fucking Citibank*, who say it's a "local issue".
Developers seem to approach Java the same way they approach IE6; let's take advantage of all the quirks, bugs and non-standard features of this version to ensure that our app will never work with any other version of anything ever and then blame the user when they want to change something.
Modern Warfare 2 is a huge outlier; very few games sell anywhere near that many copies, once you get out of the top 10 you're looking at 2 million copies tops and that's across the whole life of the game.
Splinter Cell 2; one of the first Starforce protected games.
Screw the costs, £3.3bn would mean (approximately) 82,500,000 units shipped each quarter. Even WoW has only sold ~12 million copies worldwide in 5 years (600,000 a quarter), so you'd need 138 games of WoW-level popularity every quarter to shift that many copies.
No, but they don't offer any actual evidence that the systems are swapping a lot, just that their memory usage is high. The "and this causes swapping" part of the claim just seems to be an assumption rather than a fact.
I'm running Windows 7 x64 with 4Gb of RAM; currently I'm running Outlook, Firefox, IE, Excel, FeedDemon, Office Communicator, AV, AD management tools, call management software, a couple of powershell instances, Context, RDTabs, Putty and the usual assortment of drivers, plugins and background apps. I'm at 2.4Gb of RAM; even on a 2Gb machine it would be usable, though I'd probably have to be a bit more zealous with closing unused apps to avoid swapping.
I can only assume that it's the usual nonsense of vendors shipping Win 7 machines with only 1Gb or 2Gb of RAM, loading them with crapware, putting cheap hard disks in, telling the users they can multitask their asses off and then acting surprised when the performance isn't up to much.
Yes. How exactly do you plan to draw any meaningful conclusions from 130 years of climate data given the ~4.5billion years of climate that the Earth has experienced thus far? Yes, I know not all of that time is valid as being habitable, but even if you're just looking at the time humans have been around it's ~2 million years.
A PC copy protection scheme on a major game will attract the attention of professional reverse engineers. These guys are likely paid to do it, because pirated games a the perfect way of getting people to install viruses and malware. The "pay per install" scene is largely based on torrents because it's so much easier than finding browser 0days.
Really? I don't think I've ever seen a 'scene' release that contained any kind of malware (apart from the occasional false positive due to the mechanisms involved); that's not to say that 3rd parties don't *replace* cracked files and keygens with malware and torrent them, but the people actually breaking the copy protection really don't seem to be involved in anything (additionally) nefarious. Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
There isn't one, any more than there is a verb for Wednesday.
Replying to myself, if you read the PDF it details the process on page 3; the card actually does almost all of the transaction work before the PIN is entered, all the PIN enables is the "Is this transaction allowed? Yes, it's allowed. OK" part of the process.
Only because America decided they wouldn't let any of us into the country if we didn't implement RFID passports.
RTFA. The problem isn't that the PIN is "stored on the card", it's that the card doesn't send any unique data to the terminal when the correct PIN is entered, it just sends a "Correct PIN was entered" message instead.
So, you stick something between the card and the terminal (the laptop) that intercepts the "Wrong PIN was entered" message from the card and forwards a "Correct PIN was entered" message to the terminal instead.
TBH I'm rather surprised that any information is allowed to be pulled off the chip without the PIN authenticating the user first; if you had to provide the correct PIN before the card would provide any information it would make it much harder to carry out the fraudulent transaction.
Not if you're happy with MS Office and don't care about things like Cost, Openness, Install Size, Cross-platform compatibility, etc. That said, if you want a portable office suite that you can stick on a USB key, then it's very handy (http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable)
I use OO at home, because I don't want to pay for MS Office & I prefer FOSS to piracy where the FOSS option does what I need, but couldn't get by with it at work because it can't do Outlook or Sharepoint Integration and it would give me headaches swapping documents with everyone else who uses MS Office..
It's the default location; specifically "C:\Users\\Desktop\OpenOffice.org 3.2 (en-US) Installation Files\" (Win 7) - though I've never had any problems upgrading after deleting the install files because Windows should cache any required MSI files in C:\Windows\Installer\.
Though I still don't understand why MSI-installed apps need the original MSI to uninstall or change them - I thought Microsoft had abandoned that stupid behaviour when they stopped requiring you to have the Office install CD to uninstall Office 97. I've seen a few machines where a deleted or corrupt .NET MSI cache has made it impossible to upgrade, repair or remove said framework(s).
I can't easily test it right now, but it certainly used to make a big difference to the startup times if you disabled the "Use a Java Runtime Environment" option in OO.
Get spare box (or VM, or even your own machine if it's beefy enough), install WSUS (Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2003), point clients at WSUS either with a GPO or in local policy (gpedit.msc), decline KB71033 (if it even gets pushed through WSUS, which it probably won't; WGA didn't), sit back and relax.
This is also handy for any other "critical" updates that you might want to avoid, or any updates that are incompatible with your system, or may cause errors (Like KB977165), especially in environments where other people have administrator access to your machine and like to click things without reading them or you're managing several machines (friends, family, housemates, girlfriends, etc).
These days you've got malware that is a trojan (to get onto your machine) and a virus (to spread itself to all your facebook friends, email contacts & embed itself on your USB key) and a worm (to spread itself around your LAN), which will zombie your machine to send spam and conduct DDoS attacks, keylog to steal your bank and WoW credentials and try to get you to buy fake AV software to get both your cash and personal info.
To say the lines between trojans, viruses, worms and spyware are blurry is a serious understatement.
Yeah, my phrasing was terrible; I meant to imply that it was a case of Microsoft copying the principle of *nix shells rather than being a copy *of* one. Powershell is indeed a lot better in many respects, though I can't claim to be an expert on *nix shells, such as the ability to make .NET and win32 function calls inline in Powershell scripts to make use of things like crypto libraries and windows GUI elements.