He could say it right now and the United States would be forced to either abandon Taiwan to its fate and renege on its treaty obligation or we declare war on the People's Republic of China over their invasion of Taiwan. Given the endless saber rattling of the Chinese and their unpredictable leadership a war with China sometime in the next 30 years is practically inevitable anyway. We should coordinate with Taiwan so that when the DO declare independence then we will be ready for the People's Liberation Army Navy (what a f***ed up name for a navy) when they let loose all of their short range missiles and attempt an amphibious assault across the Formosa straight. Aegis equipped Taiwanese destroyers and patriot batteries on Taiwan will knock the missiles out of the sky, US attack submarines will sink every Chinese vessel both above and below the surface, and US FA-18s and F-14s and Taiwanese F-15s guided to intercepts by AWACS will knock all of the Chinese SU-27s and J-8s right out the sky. We can then follow up with precision strikes on their mainland bases. At this point the Chinese, if they are smart, will accept their losses, pull back from the table on the Taiwan issue and live to fight another day.
Yeah, the scammers never use credit cards for these sorts of things (that's chump change). They usually send you a fraudulent cashiers check (you deposit the check, pay them the difference, and then when the bank determines that the check was bogus you are left holding the bag for the entire amount, or any money that you spent plus the amount that you paid back to the Nigerian scammers) or if the amount is truly huge then they ask you to wire transfer funds directly to a bank in Africa, Cayman Islands, or some other equally remote and shady locale known for moving money without asking questions. How people fall for these things is really quite beyond me. If you want a few laughs try this one...
The solution is term limits, but that's about as likely to happen as Congress voting themselves a pay cut.
Term limits are a double-edged sword. Here in California for example, where we have term limits in the state assembly, the net result has been more government waste due to inefficiencies in spending bills and government programs. The term limit laws ensure that a fresh crop of freshmen (inexperienced) state assemblymen, with absolutely no idea about government finance and bureaucracy, come through every few years and really screw things up. If you think that back room dealing among experienced politicians is bad, then try letting a group of grade school students run the state government, they could hardly make less of mess than our term-limited state assemblymen do right now anyway.
A pre-emptive strike to destroy a jamming system in another country simply because it exists is unlikely. However, in the event of a war with said country, such a system would be a primary target for the first wave of airstrikes along with the radar defense and communications networks. It goes without saying that actual use of an active jamming system which damages or has the potential to damage or destroy US space assets would probably be considered an act of agression with an airstrike response to destroy the offending jamming site at the very least. Other countries, namely China, are almost certainly developing similar systems. Why should not do so as well?
Dont bet on it...the chinese have a relatively advanced home grown missle capability and are becoming more advanced all of the time. They have the money to buy and European nations, especially France are willing to sell them high technology and dual use items. A war with China sometime in the next 50 years is a very real possibility if things keep going the way the are...an aggressive and ambitious China, widening trade defecit, increased competition for scare natural resources, and two powerful militaries with their fingers on the triggers
What if there is a printing error on the scantron sheet itself leaving a mark in one of the bubbles, what if the printer runs low on ink, or clogs, or the linear motor becomes loose, or you have a paper jam
Then you can always take the unmarked ballots out of the paper tray in the voting machine (the trays could be lockable with the poll workers holding the keys), give people sharpie pens, and have them manually mark them. My point was that the paper trail from the touch screen vote machine, combined with the separately locked ballot box, which never leaves the poll worker's sight, is the best of both worlds. The choices can be made sequentially on a very large and crisp digital screen that even the oldsters can read and it cuts down on errors. Of course, no system is perfect but this system combines the best aspects of computer and paper voting into one system and minimizes the chance of fraud or errors.
The scantron and other optical scanning systems have been used in the United States since the 1960s for all sorts of standardized tests and forms ranging from college entrance exams to state lotteries. Why not simply have the touch screen voting system print the voter's choices on a perfectly printed scantron card which can then be inserted physically into the ballot box. Then the ballots could be either machine counted or hand counted with a very high degree of accuracy and certainty (no hanging chads...no disagreement about which bubbles were marked). This solution is obvious and combines the best of both worlds. Why has such a system not been implemented?
Techie: Master Yoda, is the dark side of code stronger?
Master Yoda: Quicker, easier, more seductive, but once you start down the dark path of malware forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will as it did Obi Wan's apprentice.
Techie: How will I know the difference?
Master Yoda: You will know when you are calm, at rest, passive. A programmer uses the code for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
The problem with this is that court is so expensive that the mere threat of lawsuit, however unlikely, is usually enough to get yourself taken down and banned. These companies are operating to turn a razor thin profit margin on advertising and controversy drives up legal costs and drives away advertisers. The web hosting company has nothing to gain from going to court so they simply boot the alleged offender as a nuisance to their advertising revenue model and move on. What did you expect? you got the hosting for free.
Did they specify exactly how a terrorist would be at an advantage from an unplanned regional outage in the telecommunications system? If I am not mistaken, the emergency first responders are all equipped with radios and their own reserved frequencies. This sounds more like an excuse for telephone companies to conceal embarrassing information about quality of service from their customers.
Not necessarily. For example, would you like to have the original documents from the Manhattan project (weapon designs) made public simply because they are over 60 years old? No, it is better that certain records remain classified, even at the expense of the right of the public to know and especially when the documents in question are important to the national security of the United States.
It would appear that Dilbert earns a comparatively large salary for an engineer working at a dysfunctional company. If he can afford a house like that then why is he still working for the boss? Sheesh even Dilbert earns more than I do...
I am not sure, but it seems reasonable to suppose that any individual or corporation who attempts to sell a DRM-free HDTV tuner before the July 1, 2005 deadline will come under concentrated legal attack by the content industries. Even if the action is frivolous they would probably be successful in delaying the release beyond the deadline in which case the legality of the tuner in question would become a moot point.
The problem with showing the movie in a theater and dubbing it over live is that the length of the segment being parodied is the original work in its entirety. Typically a parody involves excerpting selected portions of the original work and making some type of original yet modified use, be it criticism or parody, of those excerpted portions only. Any more extensive use of the original work, even for parody or commentary purposes, requires the permission of the copyright holder. You have a safe harbor under the concept of "de minimus" with these types of commentary or parody, but only up to a point: you cannot reproduce the entire original work or a substantial portion of it in your commentary or parody. The courts have already been quite clear on this point.
The pilot of an aerial vehicle, be it a small single engine propeller plane, a four engine jet liner, or even a flying car must demonstrate that he is able to handle three dimensional spacial reasoning, emergency situations, and vast number of dials, meters, switches, and settings. Some of the proposed flying car concepts demonstrate helicopter like flight dynamics which mean that they would be even more difficult to fly. Most of the people driving vehicles on our roads right now are barely competent enough to handle forward, reverse, left, and right, so why should we hand them the keys to fa lying vehicle when they can barely handle the automobile that they already own? Piloting was and still is a skilled profession which should be hanlded by qualified licensed pilots. I do not forsee this changing any time soon.
This is not necessarily true...Do you suppose that the programmers who wrote the Fritz chess playing engine are better as human players than the grandmasters that they pit their program against? Certainly not...the computer program has the advantage of fast error-free computation of odds, random variables, board positions, heuristics, etc. These are things that good human players compute in their heads, but not everyone, including programmers, is good at doing that on the spot in a real game situation. Many games with a well defined problem space such as Chess, Cards, and Go boil down to a search of the game space in which the possible game states are searched out from the current state in a tree like pattern and probabilities assigned. The program can also be embellished with heuristic algorithms (useful when the search tree is too large to entirely compute such as in chess) and random decision making (useful for bluffing in poker). It is even possible to store the previous moves and games of frequent opponents in a database so that more accurate probabilities can be computed for particular opponents. The point of all of this is that a bad human player who happens to be a good computer scientist can write an intelligent agent who plays the game in question at master levels.
The problem is that not everyone values space exploration as much as you do. Am I suggesting that the space program is a complete waste of money and that nothing good has ever come out of it? Not at all, however different people value the space program differently depending upon their personal interest in space exploration, their personal benefit from spin-off products and services, and their willingness to fund projects which may never have significant payoffs in their lifetimes. My question is this, should society be compelled to finance the space program with their non-optional tax dollars and if so how much money should they be forced, via taxes, to contribute? This space program is a classic example of the problems associated with government finance. Without markets to allocate the appropriate level of resources via supply and demand it becomes very difficult to judge what level of spending is appropriate and to what extent the goods being financed by the government would not otherwise be provided by the private sector. Personally, I believe that the ~$15 billion dollars that the United States government currently allocates to the space program is mostly wasted on the programs of yesterday (i.e. Space Shuttle). They are wasting their time maintaining and flying a vehicle, at great expense and dubious return on investment, which makes use of 1970s era technology when they should be spending more time and money on newer and cheaper launch vehicles, advanced propulsion, and robotics. But hey, that's just my opinion and I don't control the budget and spending priorities at NASA (more is the pity):D
The timestamp is almost always retreived from a secure server using a proprietary protocol for precisely this reason. The only people who trust the system clock for operations like this are amateur programmers who either don't know better or don't care.
This is partially correct. However, the main problem with a copy protection schemes is always the key distribution problem. A crypto system (assuming that the algorithm is strong) is only as safe as its key distribution system, which presents a paradox:
The fewer people who have access to the decryption key(s) the less vulnerable the system is to attack, but in order to make money the crypto system must be widely distributed, including the decryption keys, which makes the system more vulnerable to attack.
The business models of the content creation industry are often in direct conflict with the realites of secure cryptography. There is really no good way to reconcile them at this time without some sort of compromise. For the time being the content industry has seen fit to compromise the crypto in the hopes that at least Joe Sixpack will be foiled in his attempt to record his favorite TV show, but as any rancher will tell you it only takes one smart horse to open the gate and the rest of the heard will follow...
The pulp retro 1930s future with airships, aircraft, and advanced industrial age technologies (pre-computers) is a popular genre and has been featured in several other films and computer games such as "The Roketeer" and "Crimson Skies". I was probably going to see this film anyway and not expect very much out of it, but the good reviews here have sealed the deal. I am going to see it for sure now. Of course the dialog in these sorts of films is often dumbed down for the masses which detracts somewhat from what are otherwise interesting concepts (ala Hellboy or Van Helsing). We shall see...
The RIAA, MPAA, music lables, and film studios et al...have being using the legal system as a cudgel to beat the market place and the consumer into submission for decades now. Now after many years of legally harassing the consumer they are getting a taste of their own medicine, they will receive no sympathy from me.
One of the natural powers which accrue to a monopoly is the power to price discriminate. That is to say they charge each person in each the country the maximum that they are willing/able to pay. The same holds true, although to a somewhat lesser degree, in an oligopoly where a few firms have control of the entire market. The same type of pricing structure occurs with airlines and drug companies. They only charge the guy in Africa $2 for his AIDS medication because that is that entire he can afford to pay and dead people do not generate profits. In the airline industry they nail you for last minute arrangements, i.e. business travelers, because they know that you will pay big-time to get to that important convention or meeting and that there is nobody else for you to turn to, the other airlines all do the same thing. The point is that Microsoft, if it truly has monopoly power, will price discriminate, i.e. charge less in China, because they want to maximize their profits, not enforce uniform pricing in the name of fairness. They know that if the price is too high and there are not perfect substitutes people will either steal the software or do without, which is exactly what is happening in China (mostly stealing;D).
I have very politely but firmly told them where to go and use caller ID to ignore the calls of their collection agency!
This is not a very smart strategy for the following reason: The cell phone company is a major corporation and the credit reporting agencies will believe whatever they tell them and when they tell them that you didn't pay then the credit reporting agency will ding your credit rating. At the very least you should contact the credit reporting services and file an amendment with a copy of the contract and your side of the story. However, those cellphone contracts have some fairly cleverly worded clauses such as "we reserve the right to change the agreement at any time without notifying you and you agree to be bound by any changes" which basically says in so many words that they can F*** you over anytime they feel like it and get away with it. The best thing to do would be to pay them the $200, file a complaint with the FCC, post your side of the story with the credit reporting agencies and then never do business with them (the cellphone company in question) again. You may have the moral high ground but the legal system isn't always fair to the little guy and it would be really unfortunate to be turned down later on for a car or home loan because of this, or get a higher interest rate, which means you pay more in the long run anyway. I reiterate that the best thing to do now is to pay them and then file official complaints, but dont let them wreck your credit over something like this.
why would the company not continue to offer the last stable release of the old version to existing customers who chose to keep the old plan? Sort of like the way cell phone plans work today. Many people are grandfathered in on old cellphone plans that are no longer offered or sold, but as long as they keep renewing their subscription they get to keep their old plan. Companies make mistakes, but they will not usually piss of a customer if they can possibly help it. That would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Slashdot Mirror
He could say it right now and the United States would be forced to either abandon Taiwan to its fate and renege on its treaty obligation or we declare war on the People's Republic of China over their invasion of Taiwan. Given the endless saber rattling of the Chinese and their unpredictable leadership a war with China sometime in the next 30 years is practically inevitable anyway. We should coordinate with Taiwan so that when the DO declare independence then we will be ready for the People's Liberation Army Navy (what a f***ed up name for a navy) when they let loose all of their short range missiles and attempt an amphibious assault across the Formosa straight. Aegis equipped Taiwanese destroyers and patriot batteries on Taiwan will knock the missiles out of the sky, US attack submarines will sink every Chinese vessel both above and below the surface, and US FA-18s and F-14s and Taiwanese F-15s guided to intercepts by AWACS will knock all of the Chinese SU-27s and J-8s right out the sky. We can then follow up with precision strikes on their mainland bases. At this point the Chinese, if they are smart, will accept their losses, pull back from the table on the Taiwan issue and live to fight another day.
Yeah, the scammers never use credit cards for these sorts of things (that's chump change). They usually send you a fraudulent cashiers check (you deposit the check, pay them the difference, and then when the bank determines that the check was bogus you are left holding the bag for the entire amount, or any money that you spent plus the amount that you paid back to the Nigerian scammers) or if the amount is truly huge then they ask you to wire transfer funds directly to a bank in Africa, Cayman Islands, or some other equally remote and shady locale known for moving money without asking questions. How people fall for these things is really quite beyond me. If you want a few laughs try this one...
Teletype Scams
The solution is term limits, but that's about as likely to happen as Congress voting themselves a pay cut.
Term limits are a double-edged sword. Here in California for example, where we have term limits in the state assembly, the net result has been more government waste due to inefficiencies in spending bills and government programs. The term limit laws ensure that a fresh crop of freshmen (inexperienced) state assemblymen, with absolutely no idea about government finance and bureaucracy, come through every few years and really screw things up. If you think that back room dealing among experienced politicians is bad, then try letting a group of grade school students run the state government, they could hardly make less of mess than our term-limited state assemblymen do right now anyway.
A pre-emptive strike to destroy a jamming system in another country simply because it exists is unlikely. However, in the event of a war with said country, such a system would be a primary target for the first wave of airstrikes along with the radar defense and communications networks. It goes without saying that actual use of an active jamming system which damages or has the potential to damage or destroy US space assets would probably be considered an act of agression with an airstrike response to destroy the offending jamming site at the very least. Other countries, namely China, are almost certainly developing similar systems. Why should not do so as well?
Dont bet on it...the chinese have a relatively advanced home grown missle capability and are becoming more advanced all of the time. They have the money to buy and European nations, especially France are willing to sell them high technology and dual use items. A war with China sometime in the next 50 years is a very real possibility if things keep going the way the are...an aggressive and ambitious China, widening trade defecit, increased competition for scare natural resources, and two powerful militaries with their fingers on the triggers
What if there is a printing error on the scantron sheet itself leaving a mark in one of the bubbles, what if the printer runs low on ink, or clogs, or the linear motor becomes loose, or you have a paper jam
Then you can always take the unmarked ballots out of the paper tray in the voting machine (the trays could be lockable with the poll workers holding the keys), give people sharpie pens, and have them manually mark them. My point was that the paper trail from the touch screen vote machine, combined with the separately locked ballot box, which never leaves the poll worker's sight, is the best of both worlds. The choices can be made sequentially on a very large and crisp digital screen that even the oldsters can read and it cuts down on errors. Of course, no system is perfect but this system combines the best aspects of computer and paper voting into one system and minimizes the chance of fraud or errors.
The scantron and other optical scanning systems have been used in the United States since the 1960s for all sorts of standardized tests and forms ranging from college entrance exams to state lotteries. Why not simply have the touch screen voting system print the voter's choices on a perfectly printed scantron card which can then be inserted physically into the ballot box. Then the ballots could be either machine counted or hand counted with a very high degree of accuracy and certainty (no hanging chads...no disagreement about which bubbles were marked). This solution is obvious and combines the best of both worlds. Why has such a system not been implemented?
Techie: Master Yoda, is the dark side of code stronger?
Master Yoda: Quicker, easier, more seductive, but once you start down the dark path of malware forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will as it did Obi Wan's apprentice.
Techie: How will I know the difference?
Master Yoda: You will know when you are calm, at rest, passive. A programmer uses the code for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
The problem with this is that court is so expensive that the mere threat of lawsuit, however unlikely, is usually enough to get yourself taken down and banned. These companies are operating to turn a razor thin profit margin on advertising and controversy drives up legal costs and drives away advertisers. The web hosting company has nothing to gain from going to court so they simply boot the alleged offender as a nuisance to their advertising revenue model and move on. What did you expect? you got the hosting for free.
Did they specify exactly how a terrorist would be at an advantage from an unplanned regional outage in the telecommunications system? If I am not mistaken, the emergency first responders are all equipped with radios and their own reserved frequencies. This sounds more like an excuse for telephone companies to conceal embarrassing information about quality of service from their customers.
Not necessarily. For example, would you like to have the original documents from the Manhattan project (weapon designs) made public simply because they are over 60 years old? No, it is better that certain records remain classified, even at the expense of the right of the public to know and especially when the documents in question are important to the national security of the United States.
It would appear that Dilbert earns a comparatively large salary for an engineer working at a dysfunctional company. If he can afford a house like that then why is he still working for the boss? Sheesh even Dilbert earns more than I do...
I am not sure, but it seems reasonable to suppose that any individual or corporation who attempts to sell a DRM-free HDTV tuner before the July 1, 2005 deadline will come under concentrated legal attack by the content industries. Even if the action is frivolous they would probably be successful in delaying the release beyond the deadline in which case the legality of the tuner in question would become a moot point.
The problem with showing the movie in a theater and dubbing it over live is that the length of the segment being parodied is the original work in its entirety. Typically a parody involves excerpting selected portions of the original work and making some type of original yet modified use, be it criticism or parody, of those excerpted portions only. Any more extensive use of the original work, even for parody or commentary purposes, requires the permission of the copyright holder. You have a safe harbor under the concept of "de minimus" with these types of commentary or parody, but only up to a point: you cannot reproduce the entire original work or a substantial portion of it in your commentary or parody. The courts have already been quite clear on this point.
The pilot of an aerial vehicle, be it a small single engine propeller plane, a four engine jet liner, or even a flying car must demonstrate that he is able to handle three dimensional spacial reasoning, emergency situations, and vast number of dials, meters, switches, and settings. Some of the proposed flying car concepts demonstrate helicopter like flight dynamics which mean that they would be even more difficult to fly. Most of the people driving vehicles on our roads right now are barely competent enough to handle forward, reverse, left, and right, so why should we hand them the keys to fa lying vehicle when they can barely handle the automobile that they already own? Piloting was and still is a skilled profession which should be hanlded by qualified licensed pilots. I do not forsee this changing any time soon.
Unix to Windows95? more like downgrade...big time
This is not necessarily true...Do you suppose that the programmers who wrote the Fritz chess playing engine are better as human players than the grandmasters that they pit their program against? Certainly not...the computer program has the advantage of fast error-free computation of odds, random variables, board positions, heuristics, etc. These are things that good human players compute in their heads, but not everyone, including programmers, is good at doing that on the spot in a real game situation. Many games with a well defined problem space such as Chess, Cards, and Go boil down to a search of the game space in which the possible game states are searched out from the current state in a tree like pattern and probabilities assigned. The program can also be embellished with heuristic algorithms (useful when the search tree is too large to entirely compute such as in chess) and random decision making (useful for bluffing in poker). It is even possible to store the previous moves and games of frequent opponents in a database so that more accurate probabilities can be computed for particular opponents. The point of all of this is that a bad human player who happens to be a good computer scientist can write an intelligent agent who plays the game in question at master levels.
The problem is that not everyone values space exploration as much as you do. Am I suggesting that the space program is a complete waste of money and that nothing good has ever come out of it? Not at all, however different people value the space program differently depending upon their personal interest in space exploration, their personal benefit from spin-off products and services, and their willingness to fund projects which may never have significant payoffs in their lifetimes. My question is this, should society be compelled to finance the space program with their non-optional tax dollars and if so how much money should they be forced, via taxes, to contribute? This space program is a classic example of the problems associated with government finance. Without markets to allocate the appropriate level of resources via supply and demand it becomes very difficult to judge what level of spending is appropriate and to what extent the goods being financed by the government would not otherwise be provided by the private sector. Personally, I believe that the ~$15 billion dollars that the United States government currently allocates to the space program is mostly wasted on the programs of yesterday (i.e. Space Shuttle). They are wasting their time maintaining and flying a vehicle, at great expense and dubious return on investment, which makes use of 1970s era technology when they should be spending more time and money on newer and cheaper launch vehicles, advanced propulsion, and robotics. But hey, that's just my opinion and I don't control the budget and spending priorities at NASA (more is the pity) :D
The timestamp is almost always retreived from a secure server using a proprietary protocol for precisely this reason. The only people who trust the system clock for operations like this are amateur programmers who either don't know better or don't care.
This is partially correct. However, the main problem with a copy protection schemes is always the key distribution problem. A crypto system (assuming that the algorithm is strong) is only as safe as its key distribution system, which presents a paradox:
The fewer people who have access to the decryption key(s) the less vulnerable the system is to attack, but in order to make money the crypto system must be widely distributed, including the decryption keys, which makes the system more vulnerable to attack.
The business models of the content creation industry are often in direct conflict with the realites of secure cryptography. There is really no good way to reconcile them at this time without some sort of compromise. For the time being the content industry has seen fit to compromise the crypto in the hopes that at least Joe Sixpack will be foiled in his attempt to record his favorite TV show, but as any rancher will tell you it only takes one smart horse to open the gate and the rest of the heard will follow...
The pulp retro 1930s future with airships, aircraft, and advanced industrial age technologies (pre-computers) is a popular genre and has been featured in several other films and computer games such as "The Roketeer" and "Crimson Skies". I was probably going to see this film anyway and not expect very much out of it, but the good reviews here have sealed the deal. I am going to see it for sure now. Of course the dialog in these sorts of films is often dumbed down for the masses which detracts somewhat from what are otherwise interesting concepts (ala Hellboy or Van Helsing). We shall see...
The RIAA, MPAA, music lables, and film studios et al...have being using the legal system as a cudgel to beat the market place and the consumer into submission for decades now. Now after many years of legally harassing the consumer they are getting a taste of their own medicine, they will receive no sympathy from me.
One of the natural powers which accrue to a monopoly is the power to price discriminate. That is to say they charge each person in each the country the maximum that they are willing/able to pay. The same holds true, although to a somewhat lesser degree, in an oligopoly where a few firms have control of the entire market. The same type of pricing structure occurs with airlines and drug companies. They only charge the guy in Africa $2 for his AIDS medication because that is that entire he can afford to pay and dead people do not generate profits. In the airline industry they nail you for last minute arrangements, i.e. business travelers, because they know that you will pay big-time to get to that important convention or meeting and that there is nobody else for you to turn to, the other airlines all do the same thing. The point is that Microsoft, if it truly has monopoly power, will price discriminate, i.e. charge less in China, because they want to maximize their profits, not enforce uniform pricing in the name of fairness. They know that if the price is too high and there are not perfect substitutes people will either steal the software or do without, which is exactly what is happening in China (mostly stealing ;D).
I have very politely but firmly told them where to go and use caller ID to ignore the calls of their collection agency!
This is not a very smart strategy for the following reason: The cell phone company is a major corporation and the credit reporting agencies will believe whatever they tell them and when they tell them that you didn't pay then the credit reporting agency will ding your credit rating. At the very least you should contact the credit reporting services and file an amendment with a copy of the contract and your side of the story. However, those cellphone contracts have some fairly cleverly worded clauses such as "we reserve the right to change the agreement at any time without notifying you and you agree to be bound by any changes" which basically says in so many words that they can F*** you over anytime they feel like it and get away with it. The best thing to do would be to pay them the $200, file a complaint with the FCC, post your side of the story with the credit reporting agencies and then never do business with them (the cellphone company in question) again. You may have the moral high ground but the legal system isn't always fair to the little guy and it would be really unfortunate to be turned down later on for a car or home loan because of this, or get a higher interest rate, which means you pay more in the long run anyway. I reiterate that the best thing to do now is to pay them and then file official complaints, but dont let them wreck your credit over something like this.
why would the company not continue to offer the last stable release of the old version to existing customers who chose to keep the old plan? Sort of like the way cell phone plans work today. Many people are grandfathered in on old cellphone plans that are no longer offered or sold, but as long as they keep renewing their subscription they get to keep their old plan. Companies make mistakes, but they will not usually piss of a customer if they can possibly help it. That would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face.