It's not the same paradigm, as with most micro payment schemes you are not paying for part of the game, but for game items. You might buy game-money with real money, you might buy a new hat for your character and stuff like that. That is something very different then just buying Episode2 and 3 of Doom.
The thing where the whole thing goes evil is because buying a lot of smaller priced items lets people lose overview about how much they spend, $40 ones a month is easy to understand, with $1 a day and sometimes $2, $3 or $5 or whatever, it's much easier to lose the overview. Another issue with micro payment is that the game end up being tweaking for maximum profit, not for maximum fun, thus how much you have to grind and such is optimized to make the most people invest real money.
That doesn't mean that it's micro payment is inherently evil, but the way a game like Farmville annoys you pretty much constantly with popups to invest real money to get this or that item is rather sickening. And when Farmville doesn't ask for money, it asks for permission to annoy your friends.
It's just a reference to a file location, nothing more.
Yeah, and that information you can use to important the file into the applications namespace. So hard to understand?
Your solution is idiotic because if you re-install and application or install a new version then every project you open you would have to manually confirm every single resource access, that's idiotic
Nothing stops the OS from transitioning privileges from one version of a program to the next.
what security issues are you having that this would fix?
Applications having full access to all the users files. With the user having no way to see what the apps are doing, ways to limit it or ways to run an untrusted application.
And it absolutely would be annoying because your suggestion that applications don't access anything outside of their own data is bullshit.
You obviously fail to grasp the concept.
Your system already has a well defined state you fool, do you have any idea how computer operating systems work?!
Obviously you don't. Can you tell me what each file on your computer does? Where it belongs to? How it got there? How it was change over time? Even on a Linux box the package manager controls only a tiny subset of files.
No, because i don't want a copy of every single resource for every single project, that's idiotic, hence why you reference resources.
And how do you expect to get your references into the project in the first place? Magic? The very same mechanism that you use to add a reference to a project you can use to export it to the applications that need access to it. There is no need for applications to just randomly mess around with your whole HDD.
Rubbish, privileges control whether an application can modify anything outside of userdata, what more control do you actually need?
Privileges are for separating users, they are not much good for separating applications.
Because you don't need it!
Yeah, the best way to fix security issues is by pretending they don't exist....
What is the problem you're having? Most users are going to find it annoying and just turn it off so what's the point?
When done right it wouldn't be annoying, it would be a hell of a lot more comfortable. As your system could have a well defined state, not just random good luck that keeps it running.
The thing does not seem to include a head tracker, so while it's ok for viewing 3D content, it doesn't look all that useful for full virtual reality (unless you tape a TrackIR, PlaystationMove, Wiimote, whatever to the thing).
Because they still are Doom clones. I haven't seen anything meaningful introduced in the last decade+ worth of Doom clones that wasn't already done in Doom.
Depends on what you call meaningful. Most FPS still follow the "put crosshair over enemy, pull trigger" mechanic, but the surrounding gameplay has changed quite a bit. The movement is now much slower and more realistic, circle strafing is rarely practical and the levels are generally driven by a whole bunch of scripted events, not just monster placement and AI.
And of course the biggest change is probably the introduction of the third-person cover-based shooter, which is now an extremely popular way to do shooters instead of the first person perspective.
It is however important to note that "advertisement" has an extremely broad definition when it comes to indexed works, it doesn't just include your regular commercial advertisment, but essentially everything that makes the game look interesting. This means that game magazines are forbidden to write about the game, they can't even mention it's name in a regular discussion.
So while the OP is technically correct in that it isn't a complete "ban", it's really not far of at all, as being put on the index essentially removes the work from regular commercial trade (that's why we have no Gears of War in Germany).
And an additional note: Germany also has real bans, aka "beschlagnahmt", it gets rarely used for normal games, but it does happen in some weird cases, such as Dead Rising. While owning the game is still legal, selling it is not, even if you are older then 18.
If that's the intend, I am not so sure it's working out. As hacking all the closest devices just leads people to buy more of them, instead of going to open alternatives. And judging from the stuff I read around the net, it also seems to have established this expectation that no matter how locked down a device is, hackers will come to fix it, so instead of seeking free devices, people just ignore any lock down as "hackers will fix it". And well, judging by the Xbox360 that "hackers will fix it" might not be so true anymore. The Xbox1 got hacked early enough to be turned into a media center, the Xbox360 is already far later in its lifecycle and while it has been hacked, non of the hacks have lead to as widespread adoption as on the Xbox1. So in essence, the security measurements are getting better. A generation or two down the line I wouldn't be surprised if hackers have an even tougher battle ahead.
That's extremely short-sighted, just about any productivity application does need access to other files. How are you going to handle project files that reference many other additional files?
By drag&drop'ing the project folder onto the application.
Just about every productivity app does this, you don't embed everything in one file and the user doesn't manually load every single file.
That's why we have folders or if that isn't enough, invent a few new concepts, such as "packs" or whatever that group multiple related files.
How is the OS going to 'handle' this if there is no installation process it doesn't know what the applications files are.
You use AppFolders or a similar concept, aka something that is a bit more intelligence as random files in random files and the app decides what it's want.
No, they give the user just enough control to not end up bothering them with every little detail,
They are giving you essentially no control. The best you can do with todays OSs is essentially block the Internet and stop them from overwriting files that belong to another user. For protecting the users own files there is essentially nothing to stop and application from messing with them. There isn't even a proper logging mechanism for finding out what the hell happened after the fact. strace is nice, but it only helps you when you already know what you are looking for, it doesn't help you answer something like "Who modified this file?".
I don't want to have to go through a privilege dialog every time the application wants to open an external file, no one does.
You don't have to. As said, most apps do never need wild access to anything other then their own stuff or files that the user requested, or if they do, they are malware to begin with. And anyway, the point isn't even that every user should mess around with permissions, it's that the OS does give the user that type of control in the first place, which current OSs don't. They don't even give you a freaking undelete, even a 20 year old MSDOS was better then that (and no, backup does not replace undelete).
But that doesn't work, people get annoyed having to grant access privileges as it is, if the app has to get permission from the user for every file it wants to access that is going to be even more annoying, it simply will not work.
Most applications never ever need access to your HDD, all they need is access to their own data, configuration data and state data (savegames, etc.). None of those requires user intervention and can be completely handled by the OS in a sandbox. Even loading user files wouldn't need breaking the sandbox, as files the user selects via the file dialog could automatically imported into the sandbox (requires of course that the OS is actually managing the file dialog, not the application).
Essentially there are very few applications where that approach would make trouble and most of them are probably malware to begin with. The biggest problem would be backward compatibility, but that isn't an unsolvable problem either. Anyway, the point here is: Todays OSs don't even try. They give the user almost no control and they give the application almost complete control. If an application wants to go around and delete the users files, it can do that without problem and the user doesn't even has the tools to figure out which application deleted his files. On mobile phones the situation looks a lot better, as there the developers actually give a damn about security, but on desktop OSs it feels like they have given up 10 years ago to do anything new.
So the application just gets to request whatever it wants but it can only get read-only versions?
Or a copy-on-write version or whatever the user allowed the application to get. The point here is that the user is in control of what the app gets, not the app in control of the users computer without the user having any chance to intervene as today.
Unless somebody finds a hole in SHA-1, you won't see checksum collisions, they are simply to unlikely to ever happen (i.e. chance that their datacenter gets hit by a meteorite are bigger then getting a collision of hashes).
It doesn't matter if the app is a single file or a directory or whatever. The OS is free to import a read-only copy of whatever the application needs into the sandboxs namespace.
Is it possible to run a user supplied file sharing site without eventually if not immediately being accused of aiding copyright infringement?
There are numerous filehosters (Rapidshare, Megaupload, Hotfile, etc.) around with exactly the same business model and user interface (nag the user with CAPTCA and 30sec wait into buying premium accounts) and while some of them had a little bit of legal trouble, I don't think any of them ever had to close down or even pay damages. So yes, that business models seems to work quite well.
Or, in other words, it's just as "legitimate" (I honestly think it is legitimate) as TPB is, just with better ass-coverage, more work required on the part of the copyright cartels, and less chance of downloaders being traced.
You forgot the best part: BayFiles cost you $5 a month or else you get a nasty 30 second wait and have to enter a CAPTCA before you can download a file. It's a perfectly way to make lots of money from copyright violation while staying outside of the reach of the law. So it's not so much that they are going legit, it's just that they are using a different (and rather successful) loophole.
Even YouTube, Google's video sharing service, doesn't go to that length.
Youtube doesn't do human screening, but they go much further then just reacting to infringement claims, they actively scan and fingerprint all content and then automatically block it before the rights holder even notices it. They are also in contractual relationship with the publishers to allow certain things to be available on Youtube. Or in the case of Germany, not available, as a videos containing copyrighted music are blocked aggressively, due to failure to reach an agreement with the local music rights management organization.
I'd wager at least part of it is due to the users wanting to install anything they want yet not knowing how to weed out the bad from the good.
The reason why users suck as managing software installation is because their OS sucks at software installation. For just running random junk for example there shouldn't be a need to install it in the first place, just click on it and run it in a sandbox, yet no OS supports that (aside from WebApps running in a browser of course). And of course the whole notion of "installing" is in itself already completely flawed, a piece of software should never ever randomly copy files around from its local namespace into the global one, yet again, that's standard procedure on most OSs (Apple has app folders, but a lot of software doesn't support them). Some do that kind of hackery better then others, but never the less, it's a big hack that causes constant trouble. The proper fix would be to let the OS pick the pieces of a software that it needs, don't do PATH=/bin/, do PATH=/packages/*/bin/.
Essentially the reason why people have problems with PC is not because PCs are powerful, but because PC OSs are incredible shitty pieces of junk that are hold together by nothing more then plain luck and a lot duct tape.
Warning people to protect themselves in the face of a legitimate threat has unmeasurable value to society, it can save countless lives and reduce the actual property damage resulting from unpreparedness. Crying wolf just teaches people to ignore the warnings.
The problem with that is that evacuations don't come free. If you move a million people around you have a good chance of killing some in the process, so you better want to have a good reason to do an evacuation.
There were 111 deaths related to Hurricane Rita in the state of Texas. The three direct deaths were from wind blown trees. A majority of the deaths (90/108 or 83.3%) were related to the mass evacuation process. Of these deaths, 10% were directly related to hyperthermia in motor vehicles. The combination of traffic gridlock and high temperatures, limitation of air conditioning to reduce fuel consumption, reduction of oral intake to decrease restroom visits, and conservation of limited supplies is suspected. 51.1% (46/90) of the evacuation deaths were persons found unresponsive in their vehicle. Hyperthermia and decompensated chronic health conditions are suspected but complete health information was not available. 25.5% (23/90) were nursing home evacuees who died in a bus fire that resulted from overheated brakes in combination with oxygen tanks. The evacuation of patients from chronic health facilities resulted in 10 deaths (11.1%).
Because that is the only way to stay in contact with the people you might care about. If a class reunion or just a random meet up is organized on a social network you essentially only have the choice of joining the network or not participating in the event. Good luck trying to convince your class mates to all give up on Facebook and join an old school mailing list.
The thing that makes the last step extra problematic is not only that you will have a hard time convincing people to switch, but they will also have very good reasons not to. Email is slow, inflexible and just a complete mess when you try to communicate with a larger group. There simply isn't an open protocol that has the features and ease of use of a social network. Google Wave could have maybe become that, but Google axed before it could become popular or even feature complete.
If these social networks are such an oppressive evil thing, locking people in will also bring about their (eventual) downfall.
I wouldn't count on it, at least not anytime soon. Once such a social communication infrastructure is in place, it becomes really hard to switch, essentially the only time people switch is when vastly superior tech comes around and that is more a matter of decades then just years. It's also far from sure that this would actually fix anything, right now the biggest danger for Facebook is G+ and that is essentially the same kind of evil with a different brand on it.
You can't force people to not join G+, but you can choose, out of your own free will, to not do the same.
That just makes you an outcast in your social circle, it helps nothing to fix G+ or Facebook. As nice as boycotts sound in theory, unless you actually have a huge number of people behind them, they are absolutely worthless.
I have noticed people adopting things like FB and G+ in addition to more traditional communication channels, but not instead of them.
That might be true for your peer group, that doesn't make it true for a hell of a lot of other people.
If there are alternative communications channels still in use, it does not matter if they are side channels or not.
Yeah, "still in use". G+ is just a few month old. Give it a few years and then see how much open communication protocols are left that are actually in use. It doesn't help to have email when the person who wants to communicate with doesn't.
Google is not cutting anyone off, or locking anyone in - there are real alternatives available.
The only reason why social networks services are such a success in the first place is because they work by locking people in. If people would have free choice what to use, Facebook would have never been as success as it is, but because you need Facebook to communicate with people on Facebook, everybody is either forced to use it or quit communicating with those people.
I have this awful feeling I just fed a Troll.
It's not a troll, it's a simple observation of how a lot of the glorious freedom the Internet should have provided is currently going down the toilet, getting replaced by cooperate controlled and censored networks. And yeah, users cheering with but "it's THEIR network" and ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.
People on G+ still have facebook and email access, don't they?
They might today, in the not so distant future I wouldn't be so sure. People are moving more and more of their communication essentially from open protocols (email, IRC) or well regulated infrastructure (phone, mail) into closed cooperation controlled environments (G+, Facebook) and the only way to communicate with them is by using said services. What is even worse, even if you can find a side channel to communicate with them, it quickly becomes impractical, as the side channel simply doesn't provide the features people expectp Yhoto sharing by mass email ain't such a good idea, services like Facebook and G+ handles that a hell of a lot better and there simply isn't a proper usable alternative (no, running your own server ain't one).
Even though Google locks out non-G+ users from THEIR network, they do not preclude G+ users from using other technologies.
They preclude communication with people on G+, the existence of side channels doesn't make that problem go away. We are essentially moving into a world where our communication infrastructure is fully cooperation controlled with so far no government oversight. Never underestimate the amount of freedom people are willing to give up for a little bit of convenience.
It's also by far the most unrealistic one. In the last 50 years we managed to put a grand total of around 500 people into space and a whole lot of them have just been low earth orbit. Even if you increase that number by a few orders of magnitude, you are still at essentially nothing in relation to overpopulation. I also doubt that it would make much sense in terms of energy and resources. How many people could you feed for a lifetime with the effort it takes to launch a single one into space?
When you want to send humans into space you have to do it for colonialist, send a few and let them reproduce. Trying to send them to get them off this rock is futile waste of resources.
Any of those are taken away, I can find alternatives very easily.
What alternative do you use to communicate with people on Google+?
Unlike email where you have an open standard and plenty of provider to chose from, you don't get that choice on Facebook or Google+, either you are with them or you are locked out of that piece of communication infrastructure.
Space exploration hasn't evolved into something useful and profitable yet but if we don't keep at it, it never will. (Note, I'm NOT equating space exploration with the ability to merely put things into orbit.)
There is nothing wrong with space exploration, in fact that is what we should do more of, but space exploration doesn't need humans, humans are nothing more then ballast that increases the cost and troubles. Just look at how far we have come. Human exploration has brought us to the moon, robotics probes on the other side are already flying outside the solar system.
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe.
The problem with that logic is that space isn't salvation, it's the worst kind of global disaster 24/7 all year long with no air to breath and temperatures that will kill you in a matter of minutes.
If you somehow find a way to survive in space, you can just apply those same technologies to earth and will be save for any disaster imaginable.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened? Why is this paradigm now evil?
It's not the same paradigm, as with most micro payment schemes you are not paying for part of the game, but for game items. You might buy game-money with real money, you might buy a new hat for your character and stuff like that. That is something very different then just buying Episode2 and 3 of Doom.
The thing where the whole thing goes evil is because buying a lot of smaller priced items lets people lose overview about how much they spend, $40 ones a month is easy to understand, with $1 a day and sometimes $2, $3 or $5 or whatever, it's much easier to lose the overview. Another issue with micro payment is that the game end up being tweaking for maximum profit, not for maximum fun, thus how much you have to grind and such is optimized to make the most people invest real money.
That doesn't mean that it's micro payment is inherently evil, but the way a game like Farmville annoys you pretty much constantly with popups to invest real money to get this or that item is rather sickening. And when Farmville doesn't ask for money, it asks for permission to annoy your friends.
It's just a reference to a file location, nothing more.
Yeah, and that information you can use to important the file into the applications namespace. So hard to understand?
Your solution is idiotic because if you re-install and application or install a new version then every project you open you would have to manually confirm every single resource access, that's idiotic
Nothing stops the OS from transitioning privileges from one version of a program to the next.
what security issues are you having that this would fix?
Applications having full access to all the users files. With the user having no way to see what the apps are doing, ways to limit it or ways to run an untrusted application.
And it absolutely would be annoying because your suggestion that applications don't access anything outside of their own data is bullshit.
You obviously fail to grasp the concept.
Your system already has a well defined state you fool, do you have any idea how computer operating systems work?!
Obviously you don't. Can you tell me what each file on your computer does? Where it belongs to? How it got there? How it was change over time? Even on a Linux box the package manager controls only a tiny subset of files.
No, because i don't want a copy of every single resource for every single project, that's idiotic, hence why you reference resources.
And how do you expect to get your references into the project in the first place? Magic? The very same mechanism that you use to add a reference to a project you can use to export it to the applications that need access to it. There is no need for applications to just randomly mess around with your whole HDD.
Rubbish, privileges control whether an application can modify anything outside of userdata, what more control do you actually need?
Privileges are for separating users, they are not much good for separating applications.
Because you don't need it!
Yeah, the best way to fix security issues is by pretending they don't exist....
What is the problem you're having? Most users are going to find it annoying and just turn it off so what's the point?
When done right it wouldn't be annoying, it would be a hell of a lot more comfortable. As your system could have a well defined state, not just random good luck that keeps it running.
The thing does not seem to include a head tracker, so while it's ok for viewing 3D content, it doesn't look all that useful for full virtual reality (unless you tape a TrackIR, PlaystationMove, Wiimote, whatever to the thing).
Because they still are Doom clones. I haven't seen anything meaningful introduced in the last decade+ worth of Doom clones that wasn't already done in Doom.
Depends on what you call meaningful. Most FPS still follow the "put crosshair over enemy, pull trigger" mechanic, but the surrounding gameplay has changed quite a bit. The movement is now much slower and more realistic, circle strafing is rarely practical and the levels are generally driven by a whole bunch of scripted events, not just monster placement and AI.
And of course the biggest change is probably the introduction of the third-person cover-based shooter, which is now an extremely popular way to do shooters instead of the first person perspective.
It is however important to note that "advertisement" has an extremely broad definition when it comes to indexed works, it doesn't just include your regular commercial advertisment, but essentially everything that makes the game look interesting. This means that game magazines are forbidden to write about the game, they can't even mention it's name in a regular discussion.
So while the OP is technically correct in that it isn't a complete "ban", it's really not far of at all, as being put on the index essentially removes the work from regular commercial trade (that's why we have no Gears of War in Germany).
And an additional note: Germany also has real bans, aka "beschlagnahmt", it gets rarely used for normal games, but it does happen in some weird cases, such as Dead Rising. While owning the game is still legal, selling it is not, even if you are older then 18.
It's about preserving that right,
If that's the intend, I am not so sure it's working out. As hacking all the closest devices just leads people to buy more of them, instead of going to open alternatives. And judging from the stuff I read around the net, it also seems to have established this expectation that no matter how locked down a device is, hackers will come to fix it, so instead of seeking free devices, people just ignore any lock down as "hackers will fix it". And well, judging by the Xbox360 that "hackers will fix it" might not be so true anymore. The Xbox1 got hacked early enough to be turned into a media center, the Xbox360 is already far later in its lifecycle and while it has been hacked, non of the hacks have lead to as widespread adoption as on the Xbox1. So in essence, the security measurements are getting better. A generation or two down the line I wouldn't be surprised if hackers have an even tougher battle ahead.
That's extremely short-sighted, just about any productivity application does need access to other files. How are you going to handle project files that reference many other additional files?
By drag&drop'ing the project folder onto the application.
Just about every productivity app does this, you don't embed everything in one file and the user doesn't manually load every single file.
That's why we have folders or if that isn't enough, invent a few new concepts, such as "packs" or whatever that group multiple related files.
How is the OS going to 'handle' this if there is no installation process it doesn't know what the applications files are.
You use AppFolders or a similar concept, aka something that is a bit more intelligence as random files in random files and the app decides what it's want.
No, they give the user just enough control to not end up bothering them with every little detail,
They are giving you essentially no control. The best you can do with todays OSs is essentially block the Internet and stop them from overwriting files that belong to another user. For protecting the users own files there is essentially nothing to stop and application from messing with them. There isn't even a proper logging mechanism for finding out what the hell happened after the fact. strace is nice, but it only helps you when you already know what you are looking for, it doesn't help you answer something like "Who modified this file?".
I don't want to have to go through a privilege dialog every time the application wants to open an external file, no one does.
You don't have to. As said, most apps do never need wild access to anything other then their own stuff or files that the user requested, or if they do, they are malware to begin with. And anyway, the point isn't even that every user should mess around with permissions, it's that the OS does give the user that type of control in the first place, which current OSs don't. They don't even give you a freaking undelete, even a 20 year old MSDOS was better then that (and no, backup does not replace undelete).
But that doesn't work, people get annoyed having to grant access privileges as it is, if the app has to get permission from the user for every file it wants to access that is going to be even more annoying, it simply will not work.
Most applications never ever need access to your HDD, all they need is access to their own data, configuration data and state data (savegames, etc.). None of those requires user intervention and can be completely handled by the OS in a sandbox. Even loading user files wouldn't need breaking the sandbox, as files the user selects via the file dialog could automatically imported into the sandbox (requires of course that the OS is actually managing the file dialog, not the application).
Essentially there are very few applications where that approach would make trouble and most of them are probably malware to begin with. The biggest problem would be backward compatibility, but that isn't an unsolvable problem either. Anyway, the point here is: Todays OSs don't even try. They give the user almost no control and they give the application almost complete control. If an application wants to go around and delete the users files, it can do that without problem and the user doesn't even has the tools to figure out which application deleted his files. On mobile phones the situation looks a lot better, as there the developers actually give a damn about security, but on desktop OSs it feels like they have given up 10 years ago to do anything new.
So the application just gets to request whatever it wants but it can only get read-only versions?
Or a copy-on-write version or whatever the user allowed the application to get. The point here is that the user is in control of what the app gets, not the app in control of the users computer without the user having any chance to intervene as today.
Unless somebody finds a hole in SHA-1, you won't see checksum collisions, they are simply to unlikely to ever happen (i.e. chance that their datacenter gets hit by a meteorite are bigger then getting a collision of hashes).
It doesn't matter if the app is a single file or a directory or whatever. The OS is free to import a read-only copy of whatever the application needs into the sandboxs namespace.
Is it possible to run a user supplied file sharing site without eventually if not immediately being accused of aiding copyright infringement?
There are numerous filehosters (Rapidshare, Megaupload, Hotfile, etc.) around with exactly the same business model and user interface (nag the user with CAPTCA and 30sec wait into buying premium accounts) and while some of them had a little bit of legal trouble, I don't think any of them ever had to close down or even pay damages. So yes, that business models seems to work quite well.
Or, in other words, it's just as "legitimate" (I honestly think it is legitimate) as TPB is, just with better ass-coverage, more work required on the part of the copyright cartels, and less chance of downloaders being traced.
You forgot the best part: BayFiles cost you $5 a month or else you get a nasty 30 second wait and have to enter a CAPTCA before you can download a file. It's a perfectly way to make lots of money from copyright violation while staying outside of the reach of the law. So it's not so much that they are going legit, it's just that they are using a different (and rather successful) loophole.
Even YouTube, Google's video sharing service, doesn't go to that length.
Youtube doesn't do human screening, but they go much further then just reacting to infringement claims, they actively scan and fingerprint all content and then automatically block it before the rights holder even notices it. They are also in contractual relationship with the publishers to allow certain things to be available on Youtube. Or in the case of Germany, not available, as a videos containing copyrighted music are blocked aggressively, due to failure to reach an agreement with the local music rights management organization.
I'd wager at least part of it is due to the users wanting to install anything they want yet not knowing how to weed out the bad from the good.
The reason why users suck as managing software installation is because their OS sucks at software installation. For just running random junk for example there shouldn't be a need to install it in the first place, just click on it and run it in a sandbox, yet no OS supports that (aside from WebApps running in a browser of course). And of course the whole notion of "installing" is in itself already completely flawed, a piece of software should never ever randomly copy files around from its local namespace into the global one, yet again, that's standard procedure on most OSs (Apple has app folders, but a lot of software doesn't support them). Some do that kind of hackery better then others, but never the less, it's a big hack that causes constant trouble. The proper fix would be to let the OS pick the pieces of a software that it needs, don't do PATH=/bin/, do PATH=/packages/*/bin/.
Essentially the reason why people have problems with PC is not because PCs are powerful, but because PC OSs are incredible shitty pieces of junk that are hold together by nothing more then plain luck and a lot duct tape.
Warning people to protect themselves in the face of a legitimate threat has unmeasurable value to society, it can save countless lives and reduce the actual property damage resulting from unpreparedness. Crying wolf just teaches people to ignore the warnings.
The problem with that is that evacuations don't come free. If you move a million people around you have a good chance of killing some in the process, so you better want to have a good reason to do an evacuation.
DEATHS RELATED TO HURRICANE RITA AND MASS EVACUATION :
Why should I be the one to join G+/FB/etc?
Because that is the only way to stay in contact with the people you might care about. If a class reunion or just a random meet up is organized on a social network you essentially only have the choice of joining the network or not participating in the event. Good luck trying to convince your class mates to all give up on Facebook and join an old school mailing list.
The thing that makes the last step extra problematic is not only that you will have a hard time convincing people to switch, but they will also have very good reasons not to. Email is slow, inflexible and just a complete mess when you try to communicate with a larger group. There simply isn't an open protocol that has the features and ease of use of a social network. Google Wave could have maybe become that, but Google axed before it could become popular or even feature complete.
If these social networks are such an oppressive evil thing, locking people in will also bring about their (eventual) downfall.
I wouldn't count on it, at least not anytime soon. Once such a social communication infrastructure is in place, it becomes really hard to switch, essentially the only time people switch is when vastly superior tech comes around and that is more a matter of decades then just years. It's also far from sure that this would actually fix anything, right now the biggest danger for Facebook is G+ and that is essentially the same kind of evil with a different brand on it.
You can't force people to not join G+, but you can choose, out of your own free will, to not do the same.
That just makes you an outcast in your social circle, it helps nothing to fix G+ or Facebook. As nice as boycotts sound in theory, unless you actually have a huge number of people behind them, they are absolutely worthless.
I have noticed people adopting things like FB and G+ in addition to more traditional communication channels, but not instead of them.
That might be true for your peer group, that doesn't make it true for a hell of a lot of other people.
If there are alternative communications channels still in use, it does not matter if they are side channels or not.
Yeah, "still in use". G+ is just a few month old. Give it a few years and then see how much open communication protocols are left that are actually in use. It doesn't help to have email when the person who wants to communicate with doesn't.
Google is not cutting anyone off, or locking anyone in - there are real alternatives available.
The only reason why social networks services are such a success in the first place is because they work by locking people in. If people would have free choice what to use, Facebook would have never been as success as it is, but because you need Facebook to communicate with people on Facebook, everybody is either forced to use it or quit communicating with those people.
I have this awful feeling I just fed a Troll.
It's not a troll, it's a simple observation of how a lot of the glorious freedom the Internet should have provided is currently going down the toilet, getting replaced by cooperate controlled and censored networks. And yeah, users cheering with but "it's THEIR network" and ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.
The phone number is for spam protection, so you can't create hundreds of accounts and spam other people.
People on G+ still have facebook and email access, don't they?
They might today, in the not so distant future I wouldn't be so sure. People are moving more and more of their communication essentially from open protocols (email, IRC) or well regulated infrastructure (phone, mail) into closed cooperation controlled environments (G+, Facebook) and the only way to communicate with them is by using said services. What is even worse, even if you can find a side channel to communicate with them, it quickly becomes impractical, as the side channel simply doesn't provide the features people expectp Yhoto sharing by mass email ain't such a good idea, services like Facebook and G+ handles that a hell of a lot better and there simply isn't a proper usable alternative (no, running your own server ain't one).
Even though Google locks out non-G+ users from THEIR network, they do not preclude G+ users from using other technologies.
They preclude communication with people on G+, the existence of side channels doesn't make that problem go away. We are essentially moving into a world where our communication infrastructure is fully cooperation controlled with so far no government oversight. Never underestimate the amount of freedom people are willing to give up for a little bit of convenience.
#3 is by far the most morally correct option.
It's also by far the most unrealistic one. In the last 50 years we managed to put a grand total of around 500 people into space and a whole lot of them have just been low earth orbit. Even if you increase that number by a few orders of magnitude, you are still at essentially nothing in relation to overpopulation. I also doubt that it would make much sense in terms of energy and resources. How many people could you feed for a lifetime with the effort it takes to launch a single one into space?
When you want to send humans into space you have to do it for colonialist, send a few and let them reproduce. Trying to send them to get them off this rock is futile waste of resources.
Any of those are taken away, I can find alternatives very easily.
What alternative do you use to communicate with people on Google+?
Unlike email where you have an open standard and plenty of provider to chose from, you don't get that choice on Facebook or Google+, either you are with them or you are locked out of that piece of communication infrastructure.
Space exploration hasn't evolved into something useful and profitable yet but if we don't keep at it, it never will. (Note, I'm NOT equating space exploration with the ability to merely put things into orbit.)
There is nothing wrong with space exploration, in fact that is what we should do more of, but space exploration doesn't need humans, humans are nothing more then ballast that increases the cost and troubles. Just look at how far we have come. Human exploration has brought us to the moon, robotics probes on the other side are already flying outside the solar system.
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe.
The problem with that logic is that space isn't salvation, it's the worst kind of global disaster 24/7 all year long with no air to breath and temperatures that will kill you in a matter of minutes.
If you somehow find a way to survive in space, you can just apply those same technologies to earth and will be save for any disaster imaginable.