loyal to a company that doesn't even have a relationship with them? Labels don't sell to customers. Labels sell to retailers, retailers sell to customers. I'm not even a statistic to the labels, the retailers I purchase from are. Loyalty! Ga-jeebus. Direct your loyalty somewhere it's reciprocated, or at least appreciated.
I guess if I didn't over-react to that word, and mentally translated it to something more akin to "morally obliged to pay the asking price or go without" then it would make sense:-)
This provides a little bit of protection against key logging attacks, since there's a set of challenges and their associated responses, but it provides no protection at all against phishing or other man in the middle attacks, because it's all in the same communication channel. If I can intercept your user name and password, I can present the site's challenge image and intercept your response, then do what I will once authenticated. And I can do this with no special knowledge of this system, or any other, by simply presenting the original site's original login page as-is, and passing through everything you supply, then taking the free ride on the cookie or whatever token I get back.
Given we're post-Kaminsky and pre-DNSSEC, phishing attacks are the ones to defend against. Give me out of band, or don't waste my time.
Or, you just maintain the "high trust" VM and reset the other two from that one whenever you want a fresh state in them?
(Might be problematic if you store sensitive data in the VM, but I'm sure there's ways around that, eg, store sensitive data on an external drive you *unplug* when it's not needed).
My setup is simpler: no AV, Windows set to proxy via 127.0.0.1 (no IE-using software to fuck my system over ala Windows Media Player and "codec" downloads), and, the key ingredient: I don't do much with it. I play games, I browse sites related to those games, and avoid all other uses of the web. It's a console with more buttons and user-serviceable parts.
If I have any viruses, they're so silent as to not affect the running of the machine. Four years with no reinstalls so far, and no degradation in performance.
(If you're browsing porn, googling for boobies is akin to googling for "rootkit infect me please").
I think you meant to say, "with all the resources that Google is going to commit to outpacing malware sites behind it." Or, in other words, bugger all, really. You're just as vulnerable with Chrome as you are with, say, Safari (let's just assume all browsers are equally exploitable, which seems more or less true by critical vulnerability count:-).
NoScript hasn't been much hassle for me. Some video sites are a pain, but most of the time the content they host is of so little worth to me that I'd rather close the tab than fuck about with the permissions in any case, and avoid one little bit of procrastination in my day.
Wups, posting on slashdot doesn't require JS. Better go do some work. By which I mean read more stories.
Er, convection would do wonders for getting the heat up towards the top of the atmosphere, but since convection is a transfer of heat from a solid to a liquid or gas, I think it might have trouble having any effect in cooling the Earth. Perhaps you meant to say...
Radiation... it's not just for ensuring your neighbours don't have kids.
Backups are not archives. Backups are a copy of working state, such that you can restore working state if it is lost or corrupted, partially or totally.
Optical media is poorly suited to backups, for a number of reasons. Optical media backups are:
... a manual process involving physical media swapping, and thus requires high discipline to perform regularly;
... time consuming to migrate to new media, whether due to an interface change or to outpace entropy;
... time consuming to search, as you need to media swap to seek backwards in time;
... difficult to integrity check regularly.
In all those cases, hard drive backups are a win. External hard drives (I won't consider internal here, but the same generally applies) are easily automated, requiring no operator intervention. External hard drives can be copied to new hard drives easily - plug in the second drive, drag and drop all files, and walk away. Hard drive backups are easily searched (assuming good software, I'll just assume you have Time Machine or equivalent). Hard drive management interfaces can report disk failures or sector entropy as soon as it happens (and external enclosures offer RAID-1 at an affordable price point now).
If you lose your backup drive(s), it's not a big deal: get a new drive, do a backup straight away. You'll have lost your recent history, which means you may be out of luck if you accidentally deleted a file yesterday, but your current data's integrity is preserved.
Archiving is a different matter. If the goal is to have highly reliable archives, again, I think hard drives offer many advantages over optical media -- do the archival work on the working system, thus letting the entire archive be backed up. Storage space is going to be your limiting factor, but hard links or delta storage can help for regular archival intervals with small deltas (eg, your SCCM repository is an archive using delta storage, you back up the repository itself, not each revision). If the goal is to have many archives, with less emphasis on reliability, optical media is probably the winner: you don't need to verify the discs regularly since individual reliability is not a key metric, and you can churn out a lot of archival entries cheaply this way. If you have massive storage requirements and massive reliability requirements, you're not doing it on a home user budget, unfortunately.
I can talk about enterprise-class storage and backup solutions if you like, running into the hundreds of thousands in capex, millions in aggregate in opex, but it might interest you to know that despite all this money thrown around on backup systems, we still run cheap USB drives attached to laptops and desktops, because it gets a user back up and running in their original configuration in half a day if their system fails and needs replacing (and frankly, I don't want to waste our enterprise storage on terabytes of staff music and photo libraries:-)
Usually, encryption is used to secure a message being sent from one party, let's call them the sender, to another party, who we'll call the recipient. The sender fully intends for the recipient to decrypt the message and read it, and ensures the recipient has the tools to do so (eg, a shared secret, or the private key corresponding to the public key used to encrypt the message). This protects the message from the prying eyes of any third party, which we'll call the spy. As long as the spy doesn't have the secret, and the algorithm is secure, they can't read the message.
The trouble is, in the satellite model (and in all DRM models) the spy and the recipient are the same entity. The sender simultaneously wants the recipient/spy to be able to decrypt the message, so they can watch the shows, but not to be able to decrypt the message, so they can exert control over how and when the recipient/spy watches the shows.
This means the spy has the secret. It takes some time and effort to discover the secret, since it's locked up inside silicon, but discovered it will be. It doesn't matter whether the algorithm is secure or not, because the secret can be used in conjunction with the unbroken algorithm to decrypt the signal. However, using an open algorithm makes life easier for the spy, since the algorithm is already understood and therefore the secret is a little easier to find.
All that said, it's most likely that N3 is founded on well known algorithms. There's not really much reason to avoid using a CFB/OFB stream cipher via AES or similar, so long as the shared key for that stream is regularly cycled and transmitted using a multiple decryption key asymmetric cipher. All the work typically would go into the understanding of key management and ensuring the multiple key method used isn't vulnerable to simple attack (ie, an n-1 method only requires two devices to be broken to have a complete set of keys).
Both use the same overall technique, which is that browsers display visited links differently to unvisited links. The JS implementation trawls a set of links looking for particular markers in the font colour or size, and the CSS implementation uses "a:visited {background-image:...}" to trick the browser into telling the server which links are visited and which are not.
The Link Status extension for FF3.5 can disable the:visited pseudo-class, preventing both methods from working.
Blizzard has released products since 2004. The Burning Crusade was launched in 2007, and Wrath of the Lich King in 2008.
But, oh yeah, for sure man, I've boycotted their RTS games, yeah. Fuck them.
(Won't be buying SC2, nor D3, but it's easy to take the moral high ground when you know damn well you don't really have the time to play them anyway:-)
(Still haven't finished the Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal campaigns!)
The real test for "is it porn" is to ejaculate, and then see if you still like it. If you're disinterested, it's porn. If you still like it, it's artistic or informative!
... maybe not the best test to use while on school grounds.
It's a sad statement on modern civilisation that kids in "first world" countries are so likely to get mugged in their home towns in broad daylight that it's taken as par for the course.
If you open two Word documents, and select File/Exit from the application menu in the document window of one, what happens?
Now if you open your Outlook to have both a Calendar and an Inbox window, and you select File/Exit from the application menu in the document window of one, what happens?
Something different!
In both cases, your task bar shows a single application group with two sub-tasks. In both cases, the same menu is duplicated in both windows. In both cases, alt-tab will switch between windows. But the result of selecting File/Exit is different!
How do you know what will happen when you select File/Exit for any application, in advance of trying it?
You don't, and can't, know.
Sure, if you spend years using the system, you'll feel like you instinctively know, but you don't, you've just trained yourself to remember what each one does.
But, you're right, you won't be convinced that application menus in document windows is more confusing than one application menu per application, because for you, it's not true. You shouldn't conflate what makes sense with what is familiar, though:-)
Well... the existing bridge fell down, so maybe they figure one they build themselves can't do so much worse that it's worth being totally cut off for two years?
It's more general than that, I believe. When I went to University, we were taught a variety of languages, including MIPS assembler, Modula 2, and C. People who had trouble with pointers had trouble with them in all of those languages: the concept itself is difficult for some people to understand.
Fortunately most OO languages nowadays don't let you get confused *in that way*. Objects are references and have one set of rules. Primitives are values and have another set of rules. You can't treat one as if it were the other. You just have to worry about either the delicacies of reference counting or the corner cases of garbage collection (nulling/non-nulling weak references, scope management for performance, generational collection -- if you're in CS, and looking for a thesis topic, there's plenty of room left in GC!)
(And hey, you can sneak "infant mortality" into your thesis topic!)
Morals and ethics are not absolute. I eat meat, for instance, but I accept that (some) vegetarians have reached an ethical foundation in which the killing of animals for the sake of a balanced human diet is wrong: I do not think that either they or I am incorrect. Public spitting is another great example: most Western people are quite disgusted at public spitting in China, yet a century or two back, public spitting was common in the US too. In this case, the moral guidance comes from adhering to societal norms (and the deeper sense of morals recognises the validity of the Chinese societal norms despite their conflict with your own). Or in reverse, the Japanese make a great show of the exchange of business cards; the cards are representative of the self, and should be treated with respect. A one handed fumbling card exchange is very rude in Japan, yet commonplace and expected in the US.
My own moral and ethical decisions are based on what I understand of justice: I place value in various aspects, such as personal freedom, truth and honesty, respect for others, social order, and mutually agreed duty. Consequential decisions should be weighed against those aspects, trying to resolve the conflicts within them and arrive at the best judgement I feel capable of making.
The standard I hold myself to is just that: did I act in the way that I truly believed to be right, given the information and experience I had at the time? Then I acted in good faith; I will feel far more guilt for a decision made in bad faith than one made in good faith (though the uncertainty means you can never fully escape guilt).
How do you know that a decision you make is really moral or ethical, if you rely on the Bible for your answers? Worse, what if you selectively choose parts that support the decision you want to make in any case? Not a good foundation for society if people follow Leviticus 20:13 to the letter, now is it?
Where do you suppose religions picked up those ideas? Even if you believe the literal interpretation of the Bible's view of the age of the Earth, there's a few thousand years of human society without your particular religion, and some societies without a religion that guides moral decisions. Most of those have had, at the least, an eye for an eye sort of policy, recognising that murder, theft, assault and the like are an attack on a member of that society in a way that the society as a whole must reject to continue functioning.
Religion doesn't solve evil. Religious people, from the humblest of quiet believers up to the frothiest of mouths, commit sins and crimes. Non-religious people, or people of religions other than yours, live moral and ethical lives. It largely seems, in fact, that choice of religion has very little to do with moral depth.
Religion doesn't explain evil, either. Different religions make up different stories, and invest heavily in those stories as being the one and only truth, then suffer greatly when evidence directly contradicts those stories. The devil is such a story: why do the righteous sin? Because the devil is leading them astray.
Or, more rationally, because many sins are those things which someone acting entirely out of self interest would do. The Cardinal Sins are like a who's who of self interest. If you fail to recognise the deeper interests, either your own less superficial interests, or those of others around you, then the only thing holding you back will be fear of punishment. In religion's case, you go to hell. In most childrens' case, your parents punish you.
To put it bluntly, religion as a moral compass is a crutch for people who cannot reason their way into an understanding of morals and ethics.
The Walkman's momentum carried Sony forward for far longer than it should have. Sony had a reputation for quality electronics that was fairly well justified until 10 or 15 years ago when they began the systematic destruction of their own brand. You used to pay a premium for Sony because it wasn't a cheap knock-off: better design, parts, labour, and some semblance of quality control and customer service.
These days Sony expects you to pay the premium for the same design, parts, and labour that goes into a Sorny, and are surprised and hurt to learn that people didn't pay the premium for the little label that said "Sony," but rather for the principles that were behind it.
We currently exchange our labour for goods and services (mediated by money). Replicators make goods abundant, not services. Therefore you will still exchange labour for services.
Designing items is a service.
People will be paid to design items.
They will be paid by:
Clients with a specific need (small tweak or entire new design);
Governments and councils with a public need (just another form of public works);
The designers themselves (hobbyists, philanthropists, like Free software now).
The graphic design industry wasn't killed by the invention of printers, it was *created* by it.
This is the truth of it. I hope no-one in this thread is allowing slashdot's ads to appear, for example -- they're served by doubleclick.net, whose advertising network has been compromised several times, using flash and pdf vulnerabilities. There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, infect me once, shame on - shame on you. Infect me - well, you can't get infected again!
So, yeah, 12-14 is hyperbole. Not by so much as to fundamentally change the point, which is, it would take more effort to convince those holders of a precious and dwindling resource that they should just give it up out of the goodness of their steel-and-concrete hearts, than you could justify by the amount of time you'd gain. Spend that time and money on IPv6 promotion and education, instead.
Predictions aren't facts. They're guesses. The assumptions that go into them can change, and given the number of factors that affect Internet usage growth, they *do* change. The current best guess suggests 2012; the past six months have seen a bit of a reduction in growth, likely due to some sort of global recession.
And, IPv4 exhaustion is a fairly well defined term, meaning either the date IANA allocates its last/8 or the date an RIR allocates its last free block. Price won't go up until *after* exhaustion, because before then, all you need to do is demonstrate a need and you get your allocation from your RIR for the same annual fee everyone else pays. Exhaustion will be an *event*: it will happen at a specific time and date.
Slashdot Mirror
She's sung already, but the recording won't play anywhere but on Zune Guy's iPod.
loyal to a company that doesn't even have a relationship with them? Labels don't sell to customers. Labels sell to retailers, retailers sell to customers. I'm not even a statistic to the labels, the retailers I purchase from are. Loyalty! Ga-jeebus. Direct your loyalty somewhere it's reciprocated, or at least appreciated.
I guess if I didn't over-react to that word, and mentally translated it to something more akin to "morally obliged to pay the asking price or go without" then it would make sense :-)
This provides a little bit of protection against key logging attacks, since there's a set of challenges and their associated responses, but it provides no protection at all against phishing or other man in the middle attacks, because it's all in the same communication channel. If I can intercept your user name and password, I can present the site's challenge image and intercept your response, then do what I will once authenticated. And I can do this with no special knowledge of this system, or any other, by simply presenting the original site's original login page as-is, and passing through everything you supply, then taking the free ride on the cookie or whatever token I get back.
Given we're post-Kaminsky and pre-DNSSEC, phishing attacks are the ones to defend against. Give me out of band, or don't waste my time.
Or, you just maintain the "high trust" VM and reset the other two from that one whenever you want a fresh state in them?
(Might be problematic if you store sensitive data in the VM, but I'm sure there's ways around that, eg, store sensitive data on an external drive you *unplug* when it's not needed).
My setup is simpler: no AV, Windows set to proxy via 127.0.0.1 (no IE-using software to fuck my system over ala Windows Media Player and "codec" downloads), and, the key ingredient: I don't do much with it. I play games, I browse sites related to those games, and avoid all other uses of the web. It's a console with more buttons and user-serviceable parts.
If I have any viruses, they're so silent as to not affect the running of the machine. Four years with no reinstalls so far, and no degradation in performance.
(If you're browsing porn, googling for boobies is akin to googling for "rootkit infect me please").
I think you meant to say, "with all the resources that Google is going to commit to outpacing malware sites behind it." Or, in other words, bugger all, really. You're just as vulnerable with Chrome as you are with, say, Safari (let's just assume all browsers are equally exploitable, which seems more or less true by critical vulnerability count :-).
NoScript hasn't been much hassle for me. Some video sites are a pain, but most of the time the content they host is of so little worth to me that I'd rather close the tab than fuck about with the permissions in any case, and avoid one little bit of procrastination in my day.
Wups, posting on slashdot doesn't require JS. Better go do some work. By which I mean read more stories.
Er, convection would do wonders for getting the heat up towards the top of the atmosphere, but since convection is a transfer of heat from a solid to a liquid or gas, I think it might have trouble having any effect in cooling the Earth. Perhaps you meant to say...
Radiation... it's not just for ensuring your neighbours don't have kids.
?
Backups are not archives. Backups are a copy of working state, such that you can restore working state if it is lost or corrupted, partially or totally.
Optical media is poorly suited to backups, for a number of reasons. Optical media backups are:
In all those cases, hard drive backups are a win. External hard drives (I won't consider internal here, but the same generally applies) are easily automated, requiring no operator intervention. External hard drives can be copied to new hard drives easily - plug in the second drive, drag and drop all files, and walk away. Hard drive backups are easily searched (assuming good software, I'll just assume you have Time Machine or equivalent). Hard drive management interfaces can report disk failures or sector entropy as soon as it happens (and external enclosures offer RAID-1 at an affordable price point now).
If you lose your backup drive(s), it's not a big deal: get a new drive, do a backup straight away. You'll have lost your recent history, which means you may be out of luck if you accidentally deleted a file yesterday, but your current data's integrity is preserved.
Archiving is a different matter. If the goal is to have highly reliable archives, again, I think hard drives offer many advantages over optical media -- do the archival work on the working system, thus letting the entire archive be backed up. Storage space is going to be your limiting factor, but hard links or delta storage can help for regular archival intervals with small deltas (eg, your SCCM repository is an archive using delta storage, you back up the repository itself, not each revision). If the goal is to have many archives, with less emphasis on reliability, optical media is probably the winner: you don't need to verify the discs regularly since individual reliability is not a key metric, and you can churn out a lot of archival entries cheaply this way. If you have massive storage requirements and massive reliability requirements, you're not doing it on a home user budget, unfortunately.
I can talk about enterprise-class storage and backup solutions if you like, running into the hundreds of thousands in capex, millions in aggregate in opex, but it might interest you to know that despite all this money thrown around on backup systems, we still run cheap USB drives attached to laptops and desktops, because it gets a user back up and running in their original configuration in half a day if their system fails and needs replacing (and frankly, I don't want to waste our enterprise storage on terabytes of staff music and photo libraries :-)
Yes, there's a reason.
Usually, encryption is used to secure a message being sent from one party, let's call them the sender, to another party, who we'll call the recipient. The sender fully intends for the recipient to decrypt the message and read it, and ensures the recipient has the tools to do so (eg, a shared secret, or the private key corresponding to the public key used to encrypt the message). This protects the message from the prying eyes of any third party, which we'll call the spy. As long as the spy doesn't have the secret, and the algorithm is secure, they can't read the message.
The trouble is, in the satellite model (and in all DRM models) the spy and the recipient are the same entity. The sender simultaneously wants the recipient/spy to be able to decrypt the message, so they can watch the shows, but not to be able to decrypt the message, so they can exert control over how and when the recipient/spy watches the shows.
This means the spy has the secret. It takes some time and effort to discover the secret, since it's locked up inside silicon, but discovered it will be. It doesn't matter whether the algorithm is secure or not, because the secret can be used in conjunction with the unbroken algorithm to decrypt the signal. However, using an open algorithm makes life easier for the spy, since the algorithm is already understood and therefore the secret is a little easier to find.
All that said, it's most likely that N3 is founded on well known algorithms. There's not really much reason to avoid using a CFB/OFB stream cipher via AES or similar, so long as the shared key for that stream is regularly cycled and transmitted using a multiple decryption key asymmetric cipher. All the work typically would go into the understanding of key management and ensuring the multiple key method used isn't vulnerable to simple attack (ie, an n-1 method only requires two devices to be broken to have a complete set of keys).
Both use the same overall technique, which is that browsers display visited links differently to unvisited links. The JS implementation trawls a set of links looking for particular markers in the font colour or size, and the CSS implementation uses "a:visited {background-image:...}" to trick the browser into telling the server which links are visited and which are not.
The Link Status extension for FF3.5 can disable the :visited pseudo-class, preventing both methods from working.
Blizzard has released products since 2004. The Burning Crusade was launched in 2007, and Wrath of the Lich King in 2008.
But, oh yeah, for sure man, I've boycotted their RTS games, yeah. Fuck them.
(Won't be buying SC2, nor D3, but it's easy to take the moral high ground when you know damn well you don't really have the time to play them anyway :-)
(Still haven't finished the Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal campaigns!)
The real test for "is it porn" is to ejaculate, and then see if you still like it. If you're disinterested, it's porn. If you still like it, it's artistic or informative!
... maybe not the best test to use while on school grounds.
It's a sad statement on modern civilisation that kids in "first world" countries are so likely to get mugged in their home towns in broad daylight that it's taken as par for the course.
Wups, too down, time to read happy news!
Sense!?
If you open two Word documents, and select File/Exit from the application menu in the document window of one, what happens?
Now if you open your Outlook to have both a Calendar and an Inbox window, and you select File/Exit from the application menu in the document window of one, what happens?
Something different!
In both cases, your task bar shows a single application group with two sub-tasks. In both cases, the same menu is duplicated in both windows. In both cases, alt-tab will switch between windows. But the result of selecting File/Exit is different!
How do you know what will happen when you select File/Exit for any application, in advance of trying it?
You don't, and can't, know.
Sure, if you spend years using the system, you'll feel like you instinctively know, but you don't, you've just trained yourself to remember what each one does.
But, you're right, you won't be convinced that application menus in document windows is more confusing than one application menu per application, because for you, it's not true. You shouldn't conflate what makes sense with what is familiar, though :-)
If you're wondering if we MIGHT see astroturfing, I don't think you and I read the same comments thread.
... admit it, you searched for "latina takes it from behind".
Well... the existing bridge fell down, so maybe they figure one they build themselves can't do so much worse that it's worth being totally cut off for two years?
It's more general than that, I believe. When I went to University, we were taught a variety of languages, including MIPS assembler, Modula 2, and C. People who had trouble with pointers had trouble with them in all of those languages: the concept itself is difficult for some people to understand.
Fortunately most OO languages nowadays don't let you get confused *in that way*. Objects are references and have one set of rules. Primitives are values and have another set of rules. You can't treat one as if it were the other. You just have to worry about either the delicacies of reference counting or the corner cases of garbage collection (nulling/non-nulling weak references, scope management for performance, generational collection -- if you're in CS, and looking for a thesis topic, there's plenty of room left in GC!)
(And hey, you can sneak "infant mortality" into your thesis topic!)
You can never know.
Morals and ethics are not absolute. I eat meat, for instance, but I accept that (some) vegetarians have reached an ethical foundation in which the killing of animals for the sake of a balanced human diet is wrong: I do not think that either they or I am incorrect. Public spitting is another great example: most Western people are quite disgusted at public spitting in China, yet a century or two back, public spitting was common in the US too. In this case, the moral guidance comes from adhering to societal norms (and the deeper sense of morals recognises the validity of the Chinese societal norms despite their conflict with your own). Or in reverse, the Japanese make a great show of the exchange of business cards; the cards are representative of the self, and should be treated with respect. A one handed fumbling card exchange is very rude in Japan, yet commonplace and expected in the US.
My own moral and ethical decisions are based on what I understand of justice: I place value in various aspects, such as personal freedom, truth and honesty, respect for others, social order, and mutually agreed duty. Consequential decisions should be weighed against those aspects, trying to resolve the conflicts within them and arrive at the best judgement I feel capable of making.
The standard I hold myself to is just that: did I act in the way that I truly believed to be right, given the information and experience I had at the time? Then I acted in good faith; I will feel far more guilt for a decision made in bad faith than one made in good faith (though the uncertainty means you can never fully escape guilt).
How do you know that a decision you make is really moral or ethical, if you rely on the Bible for your answers? Worse, what if you selectively choose parts that support the decision you want to make in any case? Not a good foundation for society if people follow Leviticus 20:13 to the letter, now is it?
Where do you suppose religions picked up those ideas? Even if you believe the literal interpretation of the Bible's view of the age of the Earth, there's a few thousand years of human society without your particular religion, and some societies without a religion that guides moral decisions. Most of those have had, at the least, an eye for an eye sort of policy, recognising that murder, theft, assault and the like are an attack on a member of that society in a way that the society as a whole must reject to continue functioning.
Religion doesn't solve evil. Religious people, from the humblest of quiet believers up to the frothiest of mouths, commit sins and crimes. Non-religious people, or people of religions other than yours, live moral and ethical lives. It largely seems, in fact, that choice of religion has very little to do with moral depth.
Religion doesn't explain evil, either. Different religions make up different stories, and invest heavily in those stories as being the one and only truth, then suffer greatly when evidence directly contradicts those stories. The devil is such a story: why do the righteous sin? Because the devil is leading them astray.
Or, more rationally, because many sins are those things which someone acting entirely out of self interest would do. The Cardinal Sins are like a who's who of self interest. If you fail to recognise the deeper interests, either your own less superficial interests, or those of others around you, then the only thing holding you back will be fear of punishment. In religion's case, you go to hell. In most childrens' case, your parents punish you.
To put it bluntly, religion as a moral compass is a crutch for people who cannot reason their way into an understanding of morals and ethics.
The Walkman's momentum carried Sony forward for far longer than it should have. Sony had a reputation for quality electronics that was fairly well justified until 10 or 15 years ago when they began the systematic destruction of their own brand. You used to pay a premium for Sony because it wasn't a cheap knock-off: better design, parts, labour, and some semblance of quality control and customer service.
These days Sony expects you to pay the premium for the same design, parts, and labour that goes into a Sorny, and are surprised and hurt to learn that people didn't pay the premium for the little label that said "Sony," but rather for the principles that were behind it.
We currently exchange our labour for goods and services (mediated by money). Replicators make goods abundant, not services. Therefore you will still exchange labour for services.
Designing items is a service.
People will be paid to design items.
They will be paid by:
The graphic design industry wasn't killed by the invention of printers, it was *created* by it.
This is the truth of it. I hope no-one in this thread is allowing slashdot's ads to appear, for example -- they're served by doubleclick.net, whose advertising network has been compromised several times, using flash and pdf vulnerabilities. There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, infect me once, shame on - shame on you. Infect me - well, you can't get infected again!
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml is a bit easier to parse mechanically. There were 9 /8 allocations to RIRs in 2008. Not 12-14. 2007 was 13 allocations. 2006: 10. 2005: 11. 2004: 9. 2003: 5. 2002: 4. 2001: 7. So far in 2009: 4.
So, yeah, 12-14 is hyperbole. Not by so much as to fundamentally change the point, which is, it would take more effort to convince those holders of a precious and dwindling resource that they should just give it up out of the goodness of their steel-and-concrete hearts, than you could justify by the amount of time you'd gain. Spend that time and money on IPv6 promotion and education, instead.
All you wanted to know about IPv4 exhaustion, and more.
Predictions aren't facts. They're guesses. The assumptions that go into them can change, and given the number of factors that affect Internet usage growth, they *do* change. The current best guess suggests 2012; the past six months have seen a bit of a reduction in growth, likely due to some sort of global recession.
And, IPv4 exhaustion is a fairly well defined term, meaning either the date IANA allocates its last /8 or the date an RIR allocates its last free block. Price won't go up until *after* exhaustion, because before then, all you need to do is demonstrate a need and you get your allocation from your RIR for the same annual fee everyone else pays. Exhaustion will be an *event*: it will happen at a specific time and date.