People may point out that most 'free' tv is paid for by watching ads, and that consumers are mistaken in counting that as free. But, what if the consumer is aware of that, and it still gives rise to the current situation? A typical hour long TV program has about 8 minutes of commercials. For a person who makes minimum wage, 8 minutes of time is worth about 75 cents, IF he treats all his time as worth as much as work, and that's itself debatable. If 52 minutes of entertainment has a base value of only about 75 cents, or argueably less, then what's the 'fair' price of a music download? 75 cents for a number of tracks the consumer will listen to for 52 minutes total? A two hour movie watched once? $1.68? For as person making 11 bucks an hour, that "fair" value is more like 3 dollars, by the same reasoning. There's going to be some price points where the 'fair' value of downloads looks about even with the amount a person pays for internet access or a commercial news server, even though none of that money is going to the content producer.
Re:This writer of the article is a journalistic ko
on
Testing ISP Censorship
·
· Score: 1
No, he's sayinmg that the law is not conducted in standard English. I'm providing you with this information "Pro Bono" and representng myself to all interested parties as "Amicus Curae", "Quod et Demonstratum".
Re:Censorship or the First Amendment
on
Testing ISP Censorship
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I am not a lawyer. This is a lay person's opinion.
In the US, if the government actually asks a non-government entity to act on its behalf in a law enforcement related matter such as gathering evidence, the accused has the same rights as if an official representitive of the government did it. Ergo, if at government request, your ISP acts in a manner not allowed LE personnel, both they, and the government person requesting it are subject to all the usual lawsuits sometimes brought against the police, i.e. for tampering with communications, (often invoked in the 60's and ocvcasionally since for wiretapping or opening mail without a court order), wrongful siezure of property, or even vandalism (for wrongful distruction of property, i.e. they purged your files).
Police Depts. pay substantially for insurance against just such suits. Since most ISPs don't, the people who are carrying out the orders are probably being very foolish. This applies to non-government people who are actually asked to censor by the government. If the government can't legally do it itself, and carries insurance just to mitigate the damages of making a mistake, why do you want to do it for them when you don't even have the same level of protection?
Better yet, let's say a local election is held on the 3rd day that your site is down, and that 'powerful mogul" is the new chief of police, mayor, or just county court clerk, and he won by 13 votes. The story that you're a child pornographer makes it from the local news to the national press, and your reputation is shot nationwide just for someone to fix a local election. It doesn't take a someone all that powerful or mogulish to abuse this situation.
DNA is a very efficent mechanism for encoding, and is in such near ubiquittous use because it beat out various more primative replicators. We know of at least 1, RNA, which is still used for genetics in a few cases, and which DNA has hijacked to use as a messenger molecule and assistant. At a guess, there are at least several others, maybe dozens of others, that are gone now because they couldn't comete with the replicators that survived.
Given that, it will be tough indeed to find a better encription scheme than DNA, where better means "adapted to survive in Earth's environment set". We may want to experiment with systems that do well in really exotic environments where DNA/Proteins don't survive, like Nanoassemblers adapted for an atmosphere of Xenon and Florine at 182 degrees C and 2,000 std. atmospheres. If we do, there won't be much risk of them spreading outside controlled conditions by merely chemical means.
If you want a pessimistic scenario you need to read the Novella length version of Blood Music. In the full length Novel version, Bear re-examined many of his own thoughts on the subject, and wrote a much more utopian work (and novas are a good thing!)
Bingo. There are some organisms that don't reproduce by individually building duplicates of themselves. Instead more than one of them has to get together to make a copy. (Well, it's news to some slashdot readers!).
More seriously, there's slime molds. First, what a slime mold colony does to spore can be described as building a dedicated factory to make new slime mold individuals without stretching the metaphore much. Second, some slime molds have many more than two sexes! They use a complex form of gender, where there are several possibilities for each gene, but seeds can only combine with others that have a different gene in each of three places. Since some genes have four, seven, or even 12 variations, that works out to 512 genders in one species.
Nature evidently allows some species that need 30 or more members present to successfully reproduce to somehow survive, by various means, and where this happens, something along the lines of factory reproduction also seems to be the preferred method.
I suspect we will eventually be able to do better than nature, but it will require a lot of knowledge to do so. This will make some scenarios very unlikely. What's the worry about some equivalent of a computer virus writer being able to create airborne strains of Ebola, for example, to a society that understands viruses so thoroughly every home first aid kit has a generic virus reproduxction suppressor, every doctor's office has equipment to equally easily breed a customeized self propagating immunizer, every city hospital has an arsenal of custom programmable virophages they can release 15 minutes after taking a sample of the stuff, and there's a guy teaching Hygene 101 at the local 2 year college who can tell you what the next 4 common mutations of the bug are most likely to be?
At the risk of veering off topic, ATMs are another area where people need to get the word out. Most banks that are considering switching to Microsoft software on the ATM screen are doing it so they get nice pretty colors and can run ads there. I encourage everyone whose bank or credit union still has an old fashioned green or amber ATM display to tell them you want security over bells and whistles. You might even want to tell them you would move your money to avoid risking trusting it to a Windows CE based "solution".
To at least swerve back towards the topic, many of the better posts on this thread also make great ammunition for arguements against 'upgrading' ATMs to Microsoft based products.
1. SCO is essentially just claiming that Sun may or may not be able to release code to the GPL, depending on what parts Sun picks. There's not really a SCO related story there, until Sun does it, and SCO either objects to the specifics or doesn't. 2. SCO is claiming that it needs until SEP 2005 to go to court against IBM.
That's absolutely true. In fact, SCO needs all the delays it can possibly get. 3. SCO is claiming that the trial should be split into two parts, and their claims tried seperately from IBM's counterclaims. This is the part that is actually interesting.
Possible reasons:
I. it adds additional delays.
II. SCO expects to lose on its claims against IBM, and is hoping that splitting the trial will let them somehow get a venue for the IBM counter suit that won't be influenced too much by that loss. If the motion to split is approved, expect SCO to file motions to supress some of the results of the first trial.
III. SCO doesn't expect the motion to split to be allowed, but hopes that not getting it will give them grounds for an appeal.
IV. I can't think of other reasons offhand, but then I am not a lawyer. Someone else may.
Right. Anything with any person's social security number included is confidential in goverment terms. So are employee evaluations and anything remotely medical, like who's being counseled for being overweight, or legal, like who has or hasn't got a will on file. I've worked government and industry, and, while there are some businesses that take both employee confidentiality and the general public's privacy seriously, and I've been glad to work for a couple of them, most people have no idea how much of their government trys to do the right thing, or how many businesses just don't give a damn.
A few years ago, DoD spec for erasing info classifed "Confidential" was a minimum of seven passes with varying strings of 1's and 0's. DoD "erasure" for a drive that has held "Secret" data involved opening the case and applying a power sander to each surface until ALL the magnetic media has been sanded off, or in a combat situation where the destroying authority was prepared to sign that time was absolutely critical, thermite or white phosporous grenades. I don't remember offhand what the spec was for Top-Secret, as I never had to know that one.
Windows usually leaves you lots of ways to do something, and the standard user doesn't disable any of them, even when being constrained is sometimes a good thing.
For example many programs create uninstall shortcuts on the start menu. If there's any chance of a six year old child getting its hands on your mouse for 10 seconds before being forceibly removed (I recommend a mallet), this is an option you don't want. (If you ever mouse while your mind is free as in beer, ditto). I'm sure there are some people who greatly value being able to uninstall without having to go through the slightly longer control panel/add-remove programs method, but I suspect they are a minority.
What you're describing works at the level of entering control panel and clicking around, but it fails at the level of editing the registry. There's a real need for both the Windows registry, and various configuration (i.e..ini) files and similar methods to use methods such as example text that's been remarked out, or your 'change to true' example. It's not a need confined to OS's either. Any time a application programmer decides to use a seperate config file, the next step should be to write it with internal documentation, and lots of applications should use a seperate config file, while few should use the registry.
Within the Windows registry though, providing a framework for editing is much harder. The files are already so big, a bunch of lines reading (Key)Setfoo(variable)0 for all the built in functions that have defaults would make it totally unmanagable. The alternative is that many undocumented hacks exist, where a user can set something like the IE throbber to a chosen alternative, but can't find out how just by, say, searching the registry for the word throbber. Given that Microsoft Regedit sometimes missreports variable types, so that you don't necessarily know the 0 is supposed to be a boolian false in the above example, the added remarks blocks needed would be especially massive.
Windows does have a lot of documentation on things like this, but the TCO factor applies. I've hacked the hell out of the graphics and some of the functionality of my desktop, using the registry, but the tips on how to do it have come mostly from lots of 39.95$ books and 6.95$ magazines rather than appearing on the internet.
Just as actual damages from copyright violations no longer form any limit on what it can end up costing a violator, expect to soon see new laws making actual damages irrelevent to trademark violation.
There ARE certain limits to the time fileing an action can be delayed in the US (Note: I Am Not A Lawyer). However these times are long for the present situation. Normally, it is possible to dismiss a claim if the filer waited over six years from when they knew about the infringment. Even that rule is limited by other factors, such as whether there is also criminal and not just civil misconduct involved. I'ts not automatic either, a judge still has to decide it applies.
A lot of the precidents in cases such as this go back to a time when the fastest means of notifying someone was horse and rider. Six years doesn't sound so long when messages might take six weeks each way. It was once routine for attempts to settle out of court to take over a year on correspondance alone, regardless of the time spent actually negotiating.
I don't usually nit-pick spelling, but this case was seriously funny. If we have to wait until a whole generation goes through school with libertarian principals to fix this, we're doomed. How about principles?
Would you believe "Force Microsoft to focus on an OS and some office software, and to give up trying to dominate the whole US economy within 10 years." and "Longhorn will have some serious shortcomings, and Joe Average User will become more aware of them".
Both more than mere rhetoric, but neither has the sound-bite feel of a good, improbable oracular vision. Rhetoric and accuracy are antonyms. We're sorry this has ruined your life.
Open the file in notepad first if you doubt it. Most registry inserts can easily be read enough to give you at least some idea of what they do and most are quite small. The full path for each entry is explicit. While it's possible to write somewhat obfuscated entries at the end of that path, even someone who's never seen the registry before can just about always tell what's being changed, if not exactly what the change is, for any legitimate patch. In your example,you're actually asking how you can tell a change in hardware configuration from a change to software, and the registry has sections like:
HKey_Local_Machine\Software\BlahBlah.
and
HKey_Local_Machine\Hardware\BlahBlah.
Without even looking at the patch, I'd just about bet it changes a setting with words like "Local_Machine" and "Hardware" or "System" in its path, and the hypothetical homepage re-router is going to a path starting with either "Current_User" or "Users", and probably having the word "Software" in its path (and more probably it would also include in the path "Internet_Explorer").
Granted, some people could still write a patch that instead of remapping the caps lock key to ctrl, remapped the letter z to number 9, and if Microsoft was representing the keys as numbers something like that might not be detectable at a glance. If you're concerned, I'd worry about a minor difference in what's claimed and what's actually done rather than such an obvious one as your example.
Most Child Pornography originates from people who have two psychosexual conditions. 1. they're paedophiles, and 2. they're exibitionists. As behavior, this is somewhat similar to serial killers - almost all serial killers are also collectors, of body parts, photos, garments or other trigger items that help them relive their own prior experiences. A rather high percentage of convicted serial killers are also exibitionists, in the sense that they leave deliberate clues to generate publicity about their crimes (Documented since Jack the Ripper's notes - note that a successful SERIAL killer is going to have a very hard time being too blatent an exibitionist in their practice.).
It is not rigorously, logically proven that a similar relationship holds in reverse of the first - that almost all child pornography collectors are practicing paedophiles and collect to help them reminisce about their own molestations - but given these similarities in two forms of very abberant behavior that share strong sexual components, I'd say it looks more likely than the reverse claim that the majority people who collect child pornography just use it to difuse their urges safely.
One reason not-so-many people are this way is that the numeric keypads on an ATM, a phone, a calculator or a keyboard are all often laid out differently. Standardize the layout more and more people would rely on visual or audio for the actual numbers, rather than kenetic memory.
"I'd suspect that excentric/odd folks are vulnerable to such social engineering, as they're more likely to have a pattern of behavior that is predictable (I know a person or two like this)."
Like SF oriented geeks who use alien names - Cthulhu, Gharlane, Nostromo? From only the social engineering standpoint, the most unguessable password might be as simple as GTO, if your co-workers think you don't pay any attention to cars, or sosa if you don't seem to follow baseball. Such passwords are lousy from other viewpoints, of course, which suggests there is a need to get away from passwords entirely.
Of course unpatched boxes have affected all of us already. However, one of the affects on Microsoft is that their propriatary file formats are used for 80% - 90% of some documents. This promotes legal sales, as in the lawyer who buys a copy of office 2003 to read documents coming from some clients or other firms, and doesn't even think about whether their copy of office is legal or not.
For businesses, the rule seems simple. A few small clients submit documents in an odd format, you ask them to resend them in something your software can handle. If that odd format becomes widely used, you start accepting it too.
If Microsoft pushes pirates to switch to OS now, then business software relying on Office 2003 formats still controls 80% of the market, instead of 90%. Legitimate businesses aren't going to refuse to upgrade to Office 2005 (or whatever), so now, Microsoft isn't going to take much of a hit for this.
If they had done the same thiong back when Office only controlled say 40-50% of the market, they would have seen a real impact on sales (Which is precisely why they didn't try this before now, not because they just thought of it).
Point is, this stuff affects you (the consumer) indirectly, just as you've said. This stuff doesn't affect you (if you're a MS stockholder) the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
People may point out that most 'free' tv is paid for by watching ads, and that consumers are mistaken in counting that as free. But, what if the consumer is aware of that, and it still gives rise to the current situation? A typical hour long TV program has about 8 minutes of commercials. For a person who makes minimum wage, 8 minutes of time is worth about 75 cents, IF he treats all his time as worth as much as work, and that's itself debatable. If 52 minutes of entertainment has a base value of only about 75 cents, or argueably less, then what's the 'fair' price of a music download? 75 cents for a number of tracks the consumer will listen to for 52 minutes total? A two hour movie watched once? $1.68? For as person making 11 bucks an hour, that "fair" value is more like 3 dollars, by the same reasoning. There's going to be some price points where the 'fair' value of downloads looks about even with the amount a person pays for internet access or a commercial news server, even though none of that money is going to the content producer.
No, he's sayinmg that the law is not conducted in standard English. I'm providing you with this information "Pro Bono" and representng myself to all interested parties as "Amicus Curae", "Quod et Demonstratum".
I am not a lawyer. This is a lay person's opinion.
In the US, if the government actually asks a non-government entity to act on its behalf in a law enforcement related matter such as gathering evidence, the accused has the same rights as if an official representitive of the government did it. Ergo, if at government request, your ISP acts in a manner not allowed LE personnel, both they, and the government person requesting it are subject to all the usual lawsuits sometimes brought against the police, i.e. for tampering with communications, (often invoked in the 60's and ocvcasionally since for wiretapping or opening mail without a court order), wrongful siezure of property, or even vandalism (for wrongful distruction of property, i.e. they purged your files).
Police Depts. pay substantially for insurance against just such suits. Since most ISPs don't, the people who are carrying out the orders are probably being very foolish. This applies to non-government people who are actually asked to censor by the government. If the government can't legally do it itself, and carries insurance just to mitigate the damages of making a mistake, why do you want to do it for them when you don't even have the same level of protection?
Better yet, let's say a local election is held on the 3rd day that your site is down, and that 'powerful mogul" is the new chief of police, mayor, or just county court clerk, and he won by 13 votes. The story that you're a child pornographer makes it from the local news to the national press, and your reputation is shot nationwide just for someone to fix a local election. It doesn't take a someone all that powerful or mogulish to abuse this situation.
DNA is a very efficent mechanism for encoding, and is in such near ubiquittous use because it beat out various more primative replicators. We know of at least 1, RNA, which is still used for genetics in a few cases, and which DNA has hijacked to use as a messenger molecule and assistant. At a guess, there are at least several others, maybe dozens of others, that are gone now because they couldn't comete with the replicators that survived.
Given that, it will be tough indeed to find a better encription scheme than DNA, where better means "adapted to survive in Earth's environment set". We may want to experiment with systems that do well in really exotic environments where DNA/Proteins don't survive, like Nanoassemblers adapted for an atmosphere of Xenon and Florine at 182 degrees C and 2,000 std. atmospheres. If we do, there won't be much risk of them spreading outside controlled conditions by merely chemical means.
If you want a pessimistic scenario you need to read the Novella length version of Blood Music. In the full length Novel version, Bear re-examined many of his own thoughts on the subject, and wrote a much more utopian work (and novas are a good thing!)
Bingo. There are some organisms that don't reproduce by individually building duplicates of themselves. Instead more than one of them has to get together to make a copy. (Well, it's news to some slashdot readers!).
More seriously, there's slime molds. First, what a slime mold colony does to spore can be described as building a dedicated factory to make new slime mold individuals without stretching the metaphore much. Second, some slime molds have many more than two sexes! They use a complex form of gender, where there are several possibilities for each gene, but seeds can only combine with others that have a different gene in each of three places. Since some genes have four, seven, or even 12 variations, that works out to 512 genders in one species.
Nature evidently allows some species that need 30 or more members present to successfully reproduce to somehow survive, by various means, and where this happens, something along the lines of factory reproduction also seems to be the preferred method.
I suspect we will eventually be able to do better than nature, but it will require a lot of knowledge to do so. This will make some scenarios very unlikely. What's the worry about some equivalent of a computer virus writer being able to create airborne strains of Ebola, for example, to a society that understands viruses so thoroughly every home first aid kit has a generic virus reproduxction suppressor, every doctor's office has equipment to equally easily breed a customeized self propagating immunizer, every city hospital has an arsenal of custom programmable virophages they can release 15 minutes after taking a sample of the stuff, and there's a guy teaching Hygene 101 at the local 2 year college who can tell you what the next 4 common mutations of the bug are most likely to be?
At the risk of veering off topic, ATMs are another area where people need to get the word out. Most banks that are considering switching to Microsoft software on the ATM screen are doing it so they get nice pretty colors and can run ads there. I encourage everyone whose bank or credit union still has an old fashioned green or amber ATM display to tell them you want security over bells and whistles. You might even want to tell them you would move your money to avoid risking trusting it to a Windows CE based "solution".
To at least swerve back towards the topic, many of the better posts on this thread also make great ammunition for arguements against 'upgrading' ATMs to Microsoft based products.
1. SCO is essentially just claiming that Sun may or may not be able to release code to the GPL, depending on what parts Sun picks. There's not really a SCO related story there, until Sun does it, and SCO either objects to the specifics or doesn't.
2. SCO is claiming that it needs until SEP 2005 to go to court against IBM.
That's absolutely true. In fact, SCO needs all the delays it can possibly get.
3. SCO is claiming that the trial should be split into two parts, and their claims tried seperately from IBM's counterclaims. This is the part that is actually interesting.
Possible reasons:
I. it adds additional delays.
II. SCO expects to lose on its claims against IBM, and is hoping that splitting the trial will let them somehow get a venue for the IBM counter suit that won't be influenced too much by that loss. If the motion to split is approved, expect SCO to file motions to supress some of the results of the first trial.
III. SCO doesn't expect the motion to split to be allowed, but hopes that not getting it will give them grounds for an appeal.
IV. I can't think of other reasons offhand, but then I am not a lawyer. Someone else may.
Right. Anything with any person's social security number included is confidential in goverment terms. So are employee evaluations and anything remotely medical, like who's being counseled for being overweight, or legal, like who has or hasn't got a will on file. I've worked government and industry, and, while there are some businesses that take both employee confidentiality and the general public's privacy seriously, and I've been glad to work for a couple of them, most people have no idea how much of their government trys to do the right thing, or how many businesses just don't give a damn.
Maybe NASA could steer them towards each other, and they could huddle together for warmth. ;-)
A few years ago, DoD spec for erasing info classifed "Confidential" was a minimum of seven passes with varying strings of 1's and 0's. DoD "erasure" for a drive that has held "Secret" data involved opening the case and applying a power sander to each surface until ALL the magnetic media has been sanded off, or in a combat situation where the destroying authority was prepared to sign that time was absolutely critical, thermite or white phosporous grenades. I don't remember offhand what the spec was for Top-Secret, as I never had to know that one.
Windows usually leaves you lots of ways to do something, and the standard user doesn't disable any of them, even when being constrained is sometimes a good thing.
For example many programs create uninstall shortcuts on the start menu. If there's any chance of a six year old child getting its hands on your mouse for 10 seconds before being forceibly removed (I recommend a mallet), this is an option you don't want. (If you ever mouse while your mind is free as in beer, ditto). I'm sure there are some people who greatly value being able to uninstall without having to go through the slightly longer control panel/add-remove programs method, but I suspect they are a minority.
What you're describing works at the level of entering control panel and clicking around, but it fails at the level of editing the registry. There's a real need for both the Windows registry, and various configuration (i.e. .ini) files and similar methods to use methods such as example text that's been remarked out, or your 'change to true' example. It's not a need confined to OS's either. Any time a application programmer decides to use a seperate config file, the next step should be to write it with internal documentation, and lots of applications should use a seperate config file, while few should use the registry.
Within the Windows registry though, providing a framework for editing is much harder. The files are already so big, a bunch of lines reading (Key)Setfoo(variable)0 for all the built in functions that have defaults would make it totally unmanagable. The alternative is that many undocumented hacks exist, where a user can set something like the IE throbber to a chosen alternative, but can't find out how just by, say, searching the registry for the word throbber.
Given that Microsoft Regedit sometimes missreports variable types, so that you don't necessarily know the 0 is supposed to be a boolian false in the above example, the added remarks blocks needed would be especially massive.
Windows does have a lot of documentation on things like this, but the TCO factor applies. I've hacked the hell out of the graphics and some of the functionality of my desktop, using the registry, but the tips on how to do it have come mostly from lots of 39.95$ books and 6.95$ magazines rather than appearing on the internet.
In other news, the Sun was charged with violating the DMCA...
Just as actual damages from copyright violations no longer form any limit on what it can end up costing a violator, expect to soon see new laws making actual damages irrelevent to trademark violation.
There ARE certain limits to the time fileing an action can be delayed in the US (Note: I Am Not A Lawyer). However these times are long for the present situation. Normally, it is possible to dismiss a claim if the filer waited over six years from when they knew about the infringment. Even that rule is limited by other factors, such as whether there is also criminal and not just civil misconduct involved. I'ts not automatic either, a judge still has to decide it applies.
A lot of the precidents in cases such as this go back to a time when the fastest means of notifying someone was horse and rider. Six years doesn't sound so long when messages might take six weeks each way. It was once routine for attempts to settle out of court to take over a year on correspondance alone, regardless of the time spent actually negotiating.
I don't usually nit-pick spelling, but this case was seriously funny. If we have to wait until a whole generation goes through school with libertarian principals to fix this, we're doomed. How about principles?
Would you believe "Force Microsoft to focus on an OS and some office software, and to give up trying to dominate the whole US economy within 10 years." and "Longhorn will have some serious shortcomings, and Joe Average User will become more aware of them".
Both more than mere rhetoric, but neither has the sound-bite feel of a good, improbable oracular vision. Rhetoric and accuracy are antonyms. We're sorry this has ruined your life.
Open the file in notepad first if you doubt it. Most registry inserts can easily be read enough to give you at least some idea of what they do and most are quite small. The full path for each entry is explicit. While it's possible to write somewhat obfuscated entries at the end of that path, even someone who's never seen the registry before can just about always tell what's being changed, if not exactly what the change is, for any legitimate patch. In your example,you're actually asking how you can tell a change in hardware configuration from a change to software, and the registry has sections like:
HKey_Local_Machine\Software\BlahBlah.
and
HKey_Local_Machine\Hardware\BlahBlah.
Without even looking at the patch, I'd just about bet it changes a setting with words like "Local_Machine" and "Hardware" or "System" in its path, and the hypothetical homepage re-router is going to a path starting with either "Current_User" or "Users", and probably having the word "Software" in its path (and more probably it would also include in the path "Internet_Explorer").
Granted, some people could still write a patch that instead of remapping the caps lock key to ctrl, remapped the letter z to number 9, and if Microsoft was representing the keys as numbers something like that might not be detectable at a glance. If you're concerned, I'd worry about a minor difference in what's claimed and what's actually done rather than such an obvious one as your example.
Most Child Pornography originates from people who have two psychosexual conditions. 1. they're paedophiles, and 2. they're exibitionists. As behavior, this is somewhat similar to serial killers - almost all serial killers are also collectors, of body parts, photos, garments or other trigger items that help them relive their own prior experiences. A rather high percentage of convicted serial killers are also exibitionists, in the sense that they leave deliberate clues to generate publicity about their crimes (Documented since Jack the Ripper's notes - note that a successful SERIAL killer is going to have a very hard time being too blatent an exibitionist in their practice.).
It is not rigorously, logically proven that a similar relationship holds in reverse of the first - that almost all child pornography collectors are practicing paedophiles and collect to help them reminisce about their own molestations - but given these similarities in two forms of very abberant behavior that share strong sexual components, I'd say it looks more likely than the reverse claim that the majority people who collect child pornography just use it to difuse their urges safely.
One reason not-so-many people are this way is that the numeric keypads on an ATM, a phone, a calculator or a keyboard are all often laid out differently. Standardize the layout more and more people would rely on visual or audio for the actual numbers, rather than kenetic memory.
"I'd suspect that excentric/odd folks are vulnerable to such social engineering, as they're more likely to have a pattern of behavior that is predictable (I know a person or two like this)."
Like SF oriented geeks who use alien names - Cthulhu, Gharlane, Nostromo?
From only the social engineering standpoint, the most unguessable password might be as simple as GTO, if your co-workers think you don't pay any attention to cars, or sosa if you don't seem to follow baseball. Such passwords are lousy from other viewpoints, of course, which suggests there is a need to get away from passwords entirely.
Of course unpatched boxes have affected all of us already. However, one of the affects on Microsoft is that their propriatary file formats are used for 80% - 90% of some documents. This promotes legal sales, as in the lawyer who buys a copy of office 2003 to read documents coming from some clients or other firms, and doesn't even think about whether their copy of office is legal or not.
For businesses, the rule seems simple. A few small clients submit documents in an odd format, you ask them to resend them in something your software can handle. If that odd format becomes widely used, you start accepting it too.
If Microsoft pushes pirates to switch to OS now, then business software relying on Office 2003 formats still controls 80% of the market, instead of 90%. Legitimate businesses aren't going to refuse to upgrade to Office 2005 (or whatever), so now, Microsoft isn't going to take much of a hit for this.
If they had done the same thiong back when Office only controlled say 40-50% of the market, they would have seen a real impact on sales (Which is precisely why they didn't try this before now, not because they just thought of it).
Point is, this stuff affects you (the consumer) indirectly, just as you've said. This stuff doesn't affect you (if you're a MS stockholder) the same way.