fwiw, all the successful attacks I've seen were due to privilege escalation for a local user. The key difference most people are talking about is being secure over a network, from a remote attacker. Viruses don't really even count here, just worms. It's a lot more important to be secure from the 35 million people out on the internet than from the 2 that have an account on your computer.
Windows has been shown to fail miserably, repeatedly, and in epic ways in this respect. OS X has yet to be owned remotely. Correct me if I'm wrong here, I'd like to heat about it.
posted an incredibly detailed account of how the exploit worked
I followed links all over the place and found lots of summaries on the response and fallout, but only very vague descriptions of HOW the exploit worked. It looks like they found a way to make reactors or run them without their fuel source (one of two kinds of moons?) Sorry I'm not an eve player so I can't just guess at these things. Can anyone summarize HOW the exploit worked? Something like having a requirement to make a reactor (have a resource), then make it, then remove/reuse the resource without the reactor being shut down / removed, then rinse n repeat?
Cern had also said new protection systems would be added as part of £14m repairs. It blamed the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections.
I wonder if there was a headhunt for the oaf with the soldering iron that cost them £14m ?
While I acknowledge the SHA1 limit, the cache files are also stored in the user home, in ~/Library/Caches/ (and ~/Library/Logs/) and will be encrypted along with everything else in the user's home.
Can anyone provide an economical argument that a 13 year old using AutoCAD/Maya/CS4 at home is a bad thing? I would argue that this would increase the producer's monetary value, as the kid would be more likely to find the software interesting and purchase it when they get to or out of college. In the long run, it increases the number of products sold, and in the short run it doesn't cost them a sale, because the person copying the software would not have bought it in the first place
I also recognize that a kid that knows how to USE the product increases the value of the product. It's a diffused effect I know, but if a dozen said 13 yr olds pirate autocad and get proficient at it and discover they have a knack for CAD, and go to school for it and hit the streets, there are a bunch of CAD educated staff for companies to hire. Intelligent CIOs that are shopping for a new CAD product will look and see what titles are going to be easier (or cheaper) to get skilled staff for. These grads are staff that will both be in the job market for CAD, and that will recommend autocad to their employer since they are familiar with it and it's their CAD of choice because they've been using it for years.
This results in increased sales and market share for autocad, at ZERO cost to them.
OS X has built-in support for user home folder encryption. It doesn't support applications and other places outside the home folder automatically though. But unlike windows, 99.9% of user data is in their home folder.
The entire home folder is a giant sparse disk image and grows as needed. There is a performance hit but it's not a big one. The only complaint we see is sometimes when you logout it will say "your home folder is using more space than needed, do you want to compress now?" That process can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on how much you deleted that session. Most users can ignore that unless space on the hard drive is running low because they'll just reuse that space during the next session.
Performance is better than whole-disk encryption because the apps and OS are not encrypted.
For mobile drives (like my flash drive) I have an encrypted disk image on there for sensitive information. When plugged into my computer, the password is in my keychain and it unlocks automatically. When in another machine I have to supply the password. This is secure in case my drive is lost or stolen, but isn't too inconvenient and requires no special software or anything to install on any machine I plug it into. OS X has built-in support for creation and use of encrypted disk images.
The system also has you create a master password when making the first encrypted account, and that password can be used to change the user's password if they forget it, which should help your IT department. Normal accounts can be easily converted to encrypted (or back again) with a few button clicks so transition is painless.
The entire department would love to stop using Windows, but the headache of teaching the faculty how to use it would drive us insane.
That's a tradeoff. Do a cost analysis, see how much money would be saved, and how much it would cost to say, double your staff? Be practical about it, and make sure they understand that the increase in staff is absolutely necessary, that there's no way to cut tech costs without increasing staff somewhat. Even if what looked like a 90% drop in cost only turns out to be a 20% drop in cost, that's still justified.
And then once you've made the jump, after a year or two, your staff can relax out of Panic Mode and quality of service will go up. (or you can lay off a couple staff)
Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
If one of his major goals is to save money (and not be an OS zealot for example, changing to OS just because etc) then doing something that causes MS to open the charity chest be an alternate, possibly acceptable alternative?
Call up MS's volume / edu license group and ask for quotes, saying you're comparing TCO with MS and looking at switching. Not only will you get your quotes, but the Free Gifts Fairy at MS will call you and offer all sorts of nice things to drop the idea of FOSS. Even if you're not seriously considering FOSS, that's a nice way to say, cut the bill for next year's software upgrades in half or better isn't it?
I mean, if MS is going to try to bribe you, may as well take advantage of it if you can, as a serious option.
I too loved Lode Runner, I had all three (or were there more?) releases of it. The level editor was a ton of fun. We'd stay after school working on our levels, and testing them of course. The computer teacher forbid computer games in her lab during school, but man you have to TEST those levels you're programming y'know!
We also hacked the levels on the included discs to allow editing of course plus a lot more. That game had a simple but effective AI for the enemies. The only bug I remember is you could run halfway up a ladder and stop, and it would drive all of the opponents to the highest ground available. (until you moved)
I never got into PBCS but I do remember it.
I made a level that no one besides me could finish. It was full of traps of various types that all required a special trick of sort to solve. The final trick involved luring an opponent into picking up the last piece of gold, dropping him into a hole he could not get out of, and going to a specific place and making a hole with the right timing that he'd die of a cave-in. Picking up the last piece of gold usually caused a ladder to the top to appear, but it had the same effect if an enemy died of a cave-in that was carrying the last piece of gold. You could escape, but only if the hole was already made, but one ladder appeared OVER the hole you had to have dug in advance. (since you cannot dig under ladders) Since holes filled in shortly after being dug, you had to do all this with careful timing
Lethal injection is considered humane because no pain is felt.
Civilized societies have long moved towards executions that are as respectful of life as possible, as opposed to some societies which still publicly rape and stone to death.
Criminals get many of their rights temporarily suspended because they have deprived others of their rights. If you've behaved badly enough to deserve death, society has very little moral obligation left to you.
I think the criminal view of the death penalty has lost a lot of its "deterrent-factor" over the years, partly due to the slowness of justice (spend 4 yrs on death row etc) and all this effort to make executions more "pleasant". There was a time in the past when a bank robber would make it a point not to shoot their gun for fear of "gettin the chair". Nowadays they'll cap the old lady that's blocking the door on the way out.
but this is Windows, which has been so poorly engineered for so long that roughly 97% of applications expect to be run as Admin; and thanks to the delights of 'backwards compatibility'
ya, but wasn't that what Vista was all about? Causing 80% of the existing windows apps to spontaneously combust and force the developers once and for all to fix their crap? What happened to that? (guessing... public outcry from the users and lazy devs pointing at MS as the blame) I thought that was the reason that Windows7 was going to make an even more solid, committed attempt to force the developers to adopt good coding practice. MS can't just continue to roll over on this issue.
The pain threshold, it turned out, was just two prompts in a session, which DeVaan defined as the time from turning the PC on to turning it off, or a day, whichever is shorter. "If people see more than two prompts in a session they feel that the prompts are irritating and interfering with their use of the computer," DeVaan said.
I get asked for my password when I do something in terminal that requires sudo, but other than that, I don't get a security prompt more than once a day on the average. Again depending on what I'm doing. I can go an entire day and not see one sometime.
I suppose I'd like to spend a day watching a windows7 user and see WHY they are getting all these UAC popups. I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency unless you're doing things that *I* might find common, which is not Joe User.
I have my mother's main account on her machine as a limited user, and she knows the admin l/p when needed. I bet she gets asked for it once every 2 weeks at most. (like when a firefox update wants to install, and then it's behaving exactly as expected and desired) THAT'S how I'd expect ALL "typical" computer users to want to see. I'm absolutely certain I'd be getting a phonecall after she got prompt number two (for no good reason) in the same day. Why does it keep doing that? Fix it!
I would think the safer thing to do would be to at least be consistent with yellow light length.
While red and green lights vary wildly around town, and of course are unpredictable due to traffic-tripped intersections, I take it for granted that all the lights in MY town have the same length for a yellow light.
or maybe it just "feels" that way because they're timed correctly. Thinking on this I'd be surprised if the lights on the faster roads (45 etc) are as short as on the residential (25) ones. But none of them "feel" too short or long.
This is at least what, the 6th story we've seen on cities jacking the yellow lights below the legal limit. Would be nice if there were more than a hand-slapping to be handed out for this. Giving out tickets with "revenue enhancement" as the goal, under the flag of "safety", makes me want to whip out the 2nd amendment.
Any product, including movies or software, that breaks even has paid every single hourly and almost all salaried employees *in full*
Though I thoroughly agree with your point, due to Hollywood Accounting, no movie ever breaks even. Or if it does, someone gets to buy another solid gold caddilac.
They had a shot at this with Vista. MS's PRIMARY excuse for not doing it with XP was "but so much existing software is written to require the user to be logged in as an administrative user to run the software, and we want backward compatibility, so we don't want to break all that".
Then Vista came out, that broke a bunch of stuff anyway. THAT was their golden opportunity to make the change since they were forcing developers to make a bunch of changes for compatibility anyway, but they didn't bother. I haven't tested 7 yet, but it would not surprise me if they still have not learned that lesson. One way or another, eventually, they are going to HAVE TO do this.
The problem is somewhat twofold, from a unix/osx perspective. Users logged in as admins are members of Admin group, and I've ran into at least three installers that never will ask for a pw but just assume you are Admin and bomb when they try to write to something like/Library. Other installers even more comically, will ASK you for the login and password for an admin, and then STILL bomb because they only use the admin pw (sudo/su) when writing to files that an admin can't write to without authenticating. So when it comes time to write to/Library again, they don't bother to su, (which would work) and BOOM again. You have the key, why aren't you using it?! Windows software, particularly installers, have these issues on a seemingly universal basis. The only way to break the retarded programmers' habits is to make their installers crash and burn every time, and force them to fix them.
There are other installer issues, my pet peeve being installers that write file permissions in such a way that only the user that installed the app can use it properly. (seen that on win/osx/unix platforms) But I don't think that's something the OS writers (/ms) can really be expected to solve. But if you're having to get a root'ish l/p to do the install, chances are the files you're installing are as root, and thus the software won't run as ANYONE but root (not even the user that RAN the installer) unless you coded the installer right, so I suppose even that bird gets killed with the stone.
I can't think of any windows installers right now that can be run by a non admin, that can accept a l/p of an admin, and successfully use it to install. (do any exist?) MS's other big excuse is that users prefer to run their main acct as admins so they can't help that. But until they make the windows installer easy to run as NON admins, they will keep forcing users to logout and login as an admin to install things or make changes. If you recommend a solution, and then make it a PITA to follow, you lose the right to say Not My Fault if they don't take your advice.
So most of the time MS blames users or developers for a problem, they're the ones at the root of the problem. They hold the power to fix it and simply refuse to.
And they'd be extremely awkward to wield even if they were.
I pondered that more than once watching Worf use his. Seeing someone swing a heavy sword-ish thing at him and him block it, look at how little leverage this gives the wielder, how easy it would be to flip the thing around in the wielder's hands (so the points nearly face the wielder and the wielder's fingers now totally exposed for the next attack) with anything but a dead even blow, etc.
But would suck to get hit with it. Looks like you could easily get some serious speed (but not leverage) with it.
OK maybe not that open door, but what I mean is, this shouldn't be something that you can try to smuggle in all the time. How often are the prisoners leaving and coming back to jail?
Also makes one wonder how they charge them. But then I suppose some of the AC adapters now with the merciful retractable prongs make like easier if not gentler.
Yes copyright infringement is theft of labor. It's no different from if you hired an employee to mow your grass, and then you refused to pay them.
There are more than two things happening. You are seeing the fruits of the labor, and the money changing hands. You're overlooking the work your neighbor put in to mow your lawn. The difference with software is it's not like mowing a lawn. With lawn mowing, every x units of work you invest get you paid for x units. If you mow 2x lawns you get paid 2x. There is always a 1:1 investment, and anyone that fails to pay you directly impacts you, in two ways. One, you worked, and two you missed an opportunity to work for someone else (lost a sale) because you were busy mowing the deadbeat's lawn and couldn't mow the other guy's lawn that would have paid you.
Software development is a whole different business model. You invest y units with development and marketing, and then you sell x units and get paid x. If you sell 3x units, you get paid 3x. Once you've spent y, changes in x have no affect on y. You can increase your x beforehand by pouring more money into y with continued marketing and development, but it's nowhere near a 1:1 relationship. If somewhere along the line you sell another 1x units and don't see the payment of 1x, it doesn't even appear on the books so to speak. It's "icing on the cake".
Theft is usually described as depriving someone of their property or failure to compensate them for their labor done for you. (often referred to as "theft of property or services") We can clearly see no deprivation of property, so the question is one of labor. How much labor did we fail to compensate you for by copying that application? (how much additional work did I just cost you by copying the application instead of buying it?) None.
If you don't pay your neighbor for mowing, he's wasted his time when he could be mowing someone else's lawn and getting paid for it, or he could be doing some other work, or he could be relaxing. You've clearly affected him. But if this morning I install this single license on a second computer over to the right, I haven't affected Adobe in any way this morning.
The only way to justify it is to say that if I hadn't copied the app, I would have bought it. OK that could be viewed as theft of a sale. But that always has to assume I would have bought it. While sometimes this assumption is true, often times it's not. We see that a lot with copying music. When I see someone with 350 albums of music on their 1T hard drive, do I really think they would have bought 350 CDs if they hadn't been able to download them? Isn't that just a little bit ridiculous? I'm not denying the possibility, but it's nowhere the scope imagined. That same person may have bought a dozen or two dozen CDs or more even, but not 350. Software I'd expect to be much the same.
So there are two important differences - copying doesn't have the same direct impact to the vendor as theft, and copying does not necessarily imply a lost sale.
publishers and distributors at some point misunderstood their obligations... or did their lawyers simply say "hey I think we can get away with this, some others already in this arena are doing it!" I find it hard to believe a whole squadron of expensive suits "overlooked" this.
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fwiw, all the successful attacks I've seen were due to privilege escalation for a local user. The key difference most people are talking about is being secure over a network, from a remote attacker. Viruses don't really even count here, just worms. It's a lot more important to be secure from the 35 million people out on the internet than from the 2 that have an account on your computer.
Windows has been shown to fail miserably, repeatedly, and in epic ways in this respect. OS X has yet to be owned remotely. Correct me if I'm wrong here, I'd like to heat about it.
Opps. There goes the doorbell.
The Feds use the doorbell? I thought they used a needle and a gunnysack?
because they pay off all the right people?
posted an incredibly detailed account of how the exploit worked
I followed links all over the place and found lots of summaries on the response and fallout, but only very vague descriptions of HOW the exploit worked. It looks like they found a way to make reactors or run them without their fuel source (one of two kinds of moons?) Sorry I'm not an eve player so I can't just guess at these things. Can anyone summarize HOW the exploit worked? Something like having a requirement to make a reactor (have a resource), then make it, then remove/reuse the resource without the reactor being shut down / removed, then rinse n repeat?
tell the offending switches to shut down all their ports maybe?
Cern had also said new protection systems would be added as part of £14m repairs.
It blamed the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections.
I wonder if there was a headhunt for the oaf with the soldering iron that cost them £14m ?
While I acknowledge the SHA1 limit, the cache files are also stored in the user home, in ~/Library/Caches/ (and ~/Library/Logs/) and will be encrypted along with everything else in the user's home.
Can anyone provide an economical argument that a 13 year old using AutoCAD/Maya/CS4 at home is a bad thing? I would argue that this would increase the producer's monetary value, as the kid would be more likely to find the software interesting and purchase it when they get to or out of college. In the long run, it increases the number of products sold, and in the short run it doesn't cost them a sale, because the person copying the software would not have bought it in the first place
I also recognize that a kid that knows how to USE the product increases the value of the product. It's a diffused effect I know, but if a dozen said 13 yr olds pirate autocad and get proficient at it and discover they have a knack for CAD, and go to school for it and hit the streets, there are a bunch of CAD educated staff for companies to hire. Intelligent CIOs that are shopping for a new CAD product will look and see what titles are going to be easier (or cheaper) to get skilled staff for. These grads are staff that will both be in the job market for CAD, and that will recommend autocad to their employer since they are familiar with it and it's their CAD of choice because they've been using it for years.
This results in increased sales and market share for autocad, at ZERO cost to them.
OS X has built-in support for user home folder encryption. It doesn't support applications and other places outside the home folder automatically though. But unlike windows, 99.9% of user data is in their home folder.
The entire home folder is a giant sparse disk image and grows as needed. There is a performance hit but it's not a big one. The only complaint we see is sometimes when you logout it will say "your home folder is using more space than needed, do you want to compress now?" That process can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on how much you deleted that session. Most users can ignore that unless space on the hard drive is running low because they'll just reuse that space during the next session.
Performance is better than whole-disk encryption because the apps and OS are not encrypted.
For mobile drives (like my flash drive) I have an encrypted disk image on there for sensitive information. When plugged into my computer, the password is in my keychain and it unlocks automatically. When in another machine I have to supply the password. This is secure in case my drive is lost or stolen, but isn't too inconvenient and requires no special software or anything to install on any machine I plug it into. OS X has built-in support for creation and use of encrypted disk images.
The system also has you create a master password when making the first encrypted account, and that password can be used to change the user's password if they forget it, which should help your IT department. Normal accounts can be easily converted to encrypted (or back again) with a few button clicks so transition is painless.
The entire department would love to stop using Windows, but the headache of teaching the faculty how to use it would drive us insane.
That's a tradeoff. Do a cost analysis, see how much money would be saved, and how much it would cost to say, double your staff? Be practical about it, and make sure they understand that the increase in staff is absolutely necessary, that there's no way to cut tech costs without increasing staff somewhat. Even if what looked like a 90% drop in cost only turns out to be a 20% drop in cost, that's still justified.
And then once you've made the jump, after a year or two, your staff can relax out of Panic Mode and quality of service will go up. (or you can lay off a couple staff)
Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
If one of his major goals is to save money (and not be an OS zealot for example, changing to OS just because etc) then doing something that causes MS to open the charity chest be an alternate, possibly acceptable alternative?
Call up MS's volume / edu license group and ask for quotes, saying you're comparing TCO with MS and looking at switching. Not only will you get your quotes, but the Free Gifts Fairy at MS will call you and offer all sorts of nice things to drop the idea of FOSS. Even if you're not seriously considering FOSS, that's a nice way to say, cut the bill for next year's software upgrades in half or better isn't it?
I mean, if MS is going to try to bribe you, may as well take advantage of it if you can, as a serious option.
what's wrong with skype or ichat?
where's the goatse rickroll when you need it?
I too loved Lode Runner, I had all three (or were there more?) releases of it. The level editor was a ton of fun. We'd stay after school working on our levels, and testing them of course. The computer teacher forbid computer games in her lab during school, but man you have to TEST those levels you're programming y'know!
We also hacked the levels on the included discs to allow editing of course plus a lot more. That game had a simple but effective AI for the enemies. The only bug I remember is you could run halfway up a ladder and stop, and it would drive all of the opponents to the highest ground available. (until you moved)
I never got into PBCS but I do remember it.
I made a level that no one besides me could finish. It was full of traps of various types that all required a special trick of sort to solve. The final trick involved luring an opponent into picking up the last piece of gold, dropping him into a hole he could not get out of, and going to a specific place and making a hole with the right timing that he'd die of a cave-in. Picking up the last piece of gold usually caused a ladder to the top to appear, but it had the same effect if an enemy died of a cave-in that was carrying the last piece of gold. You could escape, but only if the hole was already made, but one ladder appeared OVER the hole you had to have dug in advance. (since you cannot dig under ladders) Since holes filled in shortly after being dug, you had to do all this with careful timing
Lethal injection is considered humane because no pain is felt.
Civilized societies have long moved towards executions that are as respectful of life as possible, as opposed to some societies which still publicly rape and stone to death.
Criminals get many of their rights temporarily suspended because they have deprived others of their rights. If you've behaved badly enough to deserve death, society has very little moral obligation left to you.
I think the criminal view of the death penalty has lost a lot of its "deterrent-factor" over the years, partly due to the slowness of justice (spend 4 yrs on death row etc) and all this effort to make executions more "pleasant". There was a time in the past when a bank robber would make it a point not to shoot their gun for fear of "gettin the chair". Nowadays they'll cap the old lady that's blocking the door on the way out.
Bring back stoning. It might help.
but this is Windows, which has been so poorly engineered for so long that roughly 97% of applications expect to be run as Admin; and thanks to the delights of 'backwards compatibility'
ya, but wasn't that what Vista was all about? Causing 80% of the existing windows apps to spontaneously combust and force the developers once and for all to fix their crap? What happened to that? (guessing... public outcry from the users and lazy devs pointing at MS as the blame) I thought that was the reason that Windows7 was going to make an even more solid, committed attempt to force the developers to adopt good coding practice. MS can't just continue to roll over on this issue.
The pain threshold, it turned out, was just two prompts in a session, which DeVaan defined as the time from turning the PC on to turning it off, or a day, whichever is shorter. "If people see more than two prompts in a session they feel that the prompts are irritating and interfering with their use of the computer," DeVaan said.
I get asked for my password when I do something in terminal that requires sudo, but other than that, I don't get a security prompt more than once a day on the average. Again depending on what I'm doing. I can go an entire day and not see one sometime.
I suppose I'd like to spend a day watching a windows7 user and see WHY they are getting all these UAC popups. I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency unless you're doing things that *I* might find common, which is not Joe User.
I have my mother's main account on her machine as a limited user, and she knows the admin l/p when needed. I bet she gets asked for it once every 2 weeks at most. (like when a firefox update wants to install, and then it's behaving exactly as expected and desired) THAT'S how I'd expect ALL "typical" computer users to want to see. I'm absolutely certain I'd be getting a phonecall after she got prompt number two (for no good reason) in the same day. Why does it keep doing that? Fix it!
I would think the safer thing to do would be to at least be consistent with yellow light length.
While red and green lights vary wildly around town, and of course are unpredictable due to traffic-tripped intersections, I take it for granted that all the lights in MY town have the same length for a yellow light.
or maybe it just "feels" that way because they're timed correctly. Thinking on this I'd be surprised if the lights on the faster roads (45 etc) are as short as on the residential (25) ones. But none of them "feel" too short or long.
This is at least what, the 6th story we've seen on cities jacking the yellow lights below the legal limit. Would be nice if there were more than a hand-slapping to be handed out for this. Giving out tickets with "revenue enhancement" as the goal, under the flag of "safety", makes me want to whip out the 2nd amendment.
Any product, including movies or software, that breaks even has paid every single hourly and almost all salaried employees *in full*
Though I thoroughly agree with your point, due to Hollywood Accounting, no movie ever breaks even. Or if it does, someone gets to buy another solid gold caddilac.
They had a shot at this with Vista. MS's PRIMARY excuse for not doing it with XP was "but so much existing software is written to require the user to be logged in as an administrative user to run the software, and we want backward compatibility, so we don't want to break all that".
Then Vista came out, that broke a bunch of stuff anyway. THAT was their golden opportunity to make the change since they were forcing developers to make a bunch of changes for compatibility anyway, but they didn't bother. I haven't tested 7 yet, but it would not surprise me if they still have not learned that lesson. One way or another, eventually, they are going to HAVE TO do this.
The problem is somewhat twofold, from a unix/osx perspective. Users logged in as admins are members of Admin group, and I've ran into at least three installers that never will ask for a pw but just assume you are Admin and bomb when they try to write to something like /Library. Other installers even more comically, will ASK you for the login and password for an admin, and then STILL bomb because they only use the admin pw (sudo/su) when writing to files that an admin can't write to without authenticating. So when it comes time to write to /Library again, they don't bother to su, (which would work) and BOOM again. You have the key, why aren't you using it?! Windows software, particularly installers, have these issues on a seemingly universal basis. The only way to break the retarded programmers' habits is to make their installers crash and burn every time, and force them to fix them.
There are other installer issues, my pet peeve being installers that write file permissions in such a way that only the user that installed the app can use it properly. (seen that on win/osx/unix platforms) But I don't think that's something the OS writers (/ms) can really be expected to solve. But if you're having to get a root'ish l/p to do the install, chances are the files you're installing are as root, and thus the software won't run as ANYONE but root (not even the user that RAN the installer) unless you coded the installer right, so I suppose even that bird gets killed with the stone.
I can't think of any windows installers right now that can be run by a non admin, that can accept a l/p of an admin, and successfully use it to install. (do any exist?) MS's other big excuse is that users prefer to run their main acct as admins so they can't help that. But until they make the windows installer easy to run as NON admins, they will keep forcing users to logout and login as an admin to install things or make changes. If you recommend a solution, and then make it a PITA to follow, you lose the right to say Not My Fault if they don't take your advice.
So most of the time MS blames users or developers for a problem, they're the ones at the root of the problem. They hold the power to fix it and simply refuse to.
And they'd be extremely awkward to wield even if they were.
I pondered that more than once watching Worf use his. Seeing someone swing a heavy sword-ish thing at him and him block it, look at how little leverage this gives the wielder, how easy it would be to flip the thing around in the wielder's hands (so the points nearly face the wielder and the wielder's fingers now totally exposed for the next attack) with anything but a dead even blow, etc.
But would suck to get hit with it. Looks like you could easily get some serious speed (but not leverage) with it.
"OK... if you can say 'Give me all your money' in Klingon, you can have it!"
OK maybe not that open door, but what I mean is, this shouldn't be something that you can try to smuggle in all the time. How often are the prisoners leaving and coming back to jail?
Also makes one wonder how they charge them. But then I suppose some of the AC adapters now with the merciful retractable prongs make like easier if not gentler.
Yes copyright infringement is theft of labor. It's no different from if you hired an employee to mow your grass, and then you refused to pay them.
There are more than two things happening. You are seeing the fruits of the labor, and the money changing hands. You're overlooking the work your neighbor put in to mow your lawn. The difference with software is it's not like mowing a lawn. With lawn mowing, every x units of work you invest get you paid for x units. If you mow 2x lawns you get paid 2x. There is always a 1:1 investment, and anyone that fails to pay you directly impacts you, in two ways. One, you worked, and two you missed an opportunity to work for someone else (lost a sale) because you were busy mowing the deadbeat's lawn and couldn't mow the other guy's lawn that would have paid you.
Software development is a whole different business model. You invest y units with development and marketing, and then you sell x units and get paid x. If you sell 3x units, you get paid 3x. Once you've spent y, changes in x have no affect on y. You can increase your x beforehand by pouring more money into y with continued marketing and development, but it's nowhere near a 1:1 relationship. If somewhere along the line you sell another 1x units and don't see the payment of 1x, it doesn't even appear on the books so to speak. It's "icing on the cake".
Theft is usually described as depriving someone of their property or failure to compensate them for their labor done for you. (often referred to as "theft of property or services") We can clearly see no deprivation of property, so the question is one of labor. How much labor did we fail to compensate you for by copying that application? (how much additional work did I just cost you by copying the application instead of buying it?) None.
If you don't pay your neighbor for mowing, he's wasted his time when he could be mowing someone else's lawn and getting paid for it, or he could be doing some other work, or he could be relaxing. You've clearly affected him. But if this morning I install this single license on a second computer over to the right, I haven't affected Adobe in any way this morning.
The only way to justify it is to say that if I hadn't copied the app, I would have bought it. OK that could be viewed as theft of a sale. But that always has to assume I would have bought it. While sometimes this assumption is true, often times it's not. We see that a lot with copying music. When I see someone with 350 albums of music on their 1T hard drive, do I really think they would have bought 350 CDs if they hadn't been able to download them? Isn't that just a little bit ridiculous? I'm not denying the possibility, but it's nowhere the scope imagined. That same person may have bought a dozen or two dozen CDs or more even, but not 350. Software I'd expect to be much the same.
So there are two important differences - copying doesn't have the same direct impact to the vendor as theft, and copying does not necessarily imply a lost sale.
publishers and distributors at some point misunderstood their obligations ... or did their lawyers simply say "hey I think we can get away with this, some others already in this arena are doing it!" I find it hard to believe a whole squadron of expensive suits "overlooked" this.