I'd assume you want to limit that to a virus actually spreading in the wild and manipulating netstat where it's running on an otherwise properly working Windows box. I'm pretty confident there's been cases where a laboratory proof of concept manipulation of netstat, nmap, or others have been accomplished. The real question is have any of these shown up on an actual machine in the wild, whether that machine was running a botnet or showing some other compromise, i.e. just being infected via to a root-kit. For netstat, ideally, let's see an exploit that is transmitted by other methods than physically being in the same room as the PC, and infecting a machine that was behind a router and until then had both a local, wired network and internet access that worked.
Something that can only spread to machines that are directly connected to a particular brand of cable modem and only when that device is running old firmware, or only via an improperly set up wireless connection, or where the hacker has to first gain unaccompanied physical access, isn't really much of a netstat bug, even if it affects netstat once those other conditions are first met. It's sort of like complaining that it's possible to pry a safety deposit box open with a simple crowbar, if you can just first get unaccompanied access to the vault where those boxes are kept. The real question becomes, can you get the other, preliminary conditions, or not?
SCO petitioned at the last minute for an administrator, with less power than a real trustee, to handle only selected parts of a full Chapter 11 proceeding. That's what they liked best. From Groklaw, no one seems to know if such an arrangement was even a legal option.
A chapter 7 with appointed trustee is what they would like least. That presumes there's no chance of the company ever reorganizing, and the goal is instead to pay off as many of the creditors as possible.
The judge gave them something in the middle - a standard chapter 11,which means he is holding out the chance that some purchase offer might be legitimate and SCO just might rise again.
If I'm ever facing 20 years in maximum security, I plan to claim house arrest with an ankle bracelet is quite reasonable and customary for whatever I did, and see if the judge will split the difference and give me 5 in minimum security. Who knows, it could work.
I don't think that distinction is just splitting hairs - I think it's pretty damned important:
1. There is such a thing as non-criminal copyright infringement. What the heck is non-criminal theft?
2. The Supreme Court has ruled that the state governments can't have their own copyright laws or enforce them. If CV=Stealing, the federal government is keeping states from prosecuting theft in their own jurisdictions.
3. Copyrights eventually expire (even now). CV=Theft would mean there are some kinds of theft where it's legally OK, because the object stolen was too old. I don't want anyone being able to steal my Three Handled Family Grudunza just because it's become an antique. Alternately, CV=Theft means it's immoral for copyright to ever expire.
4. The copyright law was all originally in US title 17, and Title 17 was all non criminal matters at that time. Back then, anything with criminal penalties was in title 18. CV=Stealing means the country got that wrong for the first 200 years. Are you saying Jefferson and Madison were wrong and Sonny Bono was right?
5. Copyright Violation has fair use exceptions. If CV=Theft, there should be something analogous to fair use for other kinds of theft, shouldn't there? If so, what are they? If not, why not?
Well, if it is possible to have internet addiction, then TV addiction is equally possible - both or neither might be the case, but how could it possibly be just one? Jumping rapidly to a conclusion, they both are. We have to cure the TV addicts first, of course:
1. There's a lot more of them.
2. The social costs are higher (Home Shopping Network addiction can cost thousands a month in some cases, whereas even World of Warcrack is only 20 bucks a month).
3. The TV addicts are more in denial (I've just indirectly admitted I could have a problem, while they're all trying to get the society to do something about the internet addicts instead.).
4. What's the number one thing other addicts are accused of climbing out of people's windows with? TVs! When some heroin addict steals my bandwidth to finance his habit, I'll concede this point.
So right after people cure all the TV addicts (or beat them to death in a huge Chinese camp), I'll gladly discuss entering a program.
There's two events that have little in common here. A local or state government could actively check to see if there are family or friends in some other area who have the intentions of helping the homeless person and at least some potential to actually help, or they could fake it, by just taking the homeless persons word, or not bothering with a few questions in a phone conversation (what if the homeless person's potential life support is an 84 year old mother, with no other relatives living around her, surviving on Social Security only, and there's a family history of domestic violence?). Yes, it's good if the homeless person has someone who still cares, but isn't it also necessary that the person actually be in a state where they can contribute more than good intentions?
I'm glad you qualified your point by saying "usually have SOMEONE" and didn't exaggerate to claim there was always someone. I take the way you used all caps on someone to mean "not necessarily a perfect solution, but someone, and someone is generally better than no one at all", in which case, I agree. I think you need to further qualify it though. Sometimes there's a whole family that cares, sometimes only one person still gives a damn, sometimes it's (unfortunately) none. Some people who care are so screwed up themselves they won't do the things that actually help. Some people who care don't have any spare resources with which to help.
Many of these homeless persons are in trouble with the police at the time they seize upon the offer to be sent to somewhere. They may take the option simply because they think it beats jail. Unless the local government actually has reasonable cause to think the problem person may get better help or become less of a social problem somewhere else, getting them out of the area isn't really done with the intent of helping, just of making them some other locale's problem.
A service member cannot campaign for a candidate while in uniform, or identify him or herself as a member of the military to drive voters towards a candidate. They can't use their servicemember status to endorse a business either. The real distinction is not just wearing the uniform, as telling people you are a member in such cases is just as much an issue.
Former members certainly regain all their normal rights of free speech. I could, for example, go to a local military surplus shop with the owner's permission, set up cardboard backed posters, and stand around saying "I'm a former range operations officer and rifle and pistol instructor with the US Army, and I say we need to supply the guys currently in Iraq and Afghanistan with better body armor." (I could even have endorsed certain existing brands, although I kept it more classy than that). I could wear a set of my old fatigues, so long as they no longer had any unit insignia or the cloth tape reading "U. S. ARMY" over the breastpocket. (But I wore jeans and tee-shirt). An active duty servicemember could write letters to his or her congressman without mentioning his military status in any way, but to keep on the safe side, many of them prefer to discuss things with civilian friends or family and let them write the letters. In general, active duty means you rely on civilians to do a lot of your political speech for you until you get out.
As far as other rights go, I used to have to carry a military version of the Miranda card civilian police carry - The service member actually has more rights guaranteed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice than the civilian does. At the same time, the UCMJ doesn't mean the military member retains such things as the right to a 12 person jury. Some rights are different, not completely absent - for example, enlisted military people being judged by a three member or five member military tribunal have the right in some circumstances to have a fellow enlisted member as one of their judges (and most junior accused wave this right, as that fellow enlisted member is an NCO, and not likely to cut them any more slack than a commissioned officer). There is still a right to a lawyer, to have them present during questioning, and other such rights, there are legal protections against self incrimination and at least some forms of unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to confront witnesses is at least as solid as the civilian version.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit
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KDE 4.3 Released
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Flakeyness with those Plasma elements in Amarok 2 drove me to go back to Qmmp. It seemed the middle window's widgets never displayed the same way twice. Just closing Amarok and reopening it usually resulted in some borders and edges being realigned, scroll bars being lost or inactivated, font sizes changed, and so on. And this was on a system with only onboard graphics, on a genuine Intel motherboard, no ATI or Nvidia drivers supposedly needed.
The upgrade from KDE series 3 in Kubuntu 8 to series 4 in Kubuntu 9 definitely meant some graphics features quit working unless you had a bigger graphics card. I admit to running Kubuntu 9 on a box with only 16 Meg of graphics memory. It's probably under the minimum specs even for Linux these days. But still, that box had transparency for terminals windows, both in Konsole and Yakuake. A slide show type screensaver could easily use all the various wipes and spot transition effects and still change pictures every 20 seconds (and 20 seconds is the default setting). Widgets such as the Luna moon phase display also had transparent backgrounds. KDE 4 lost all this on my older box, and couldn't do the fancy things it wanted to replace them with like the rotating cube and jello wigglies even if I had wanted those effects. Some of those problems are getting better, and at least multiple wallpapers seems to be coming back, but I would love to understand why people could spend months fixing some graphics problems, only to have the fixes only help one the problems of one program in five, make one working one break, and change the problems of one other program to different problems, but not to any easier to accept problems.
It's like taking a car back to the mechanic, and the wibbly noise is finally fixed, but the skree from the left windshield wiper is now moved to the trunk, and the button that lowers all the windows at once now misses the passenger side rear, then when you go through the next cycle, the button lowers all the windows at once, but now raises all except the driver's side rear, the skree has become a thumpa-thumpa-poit!, and the wibbly noise has come back, but an octave lower. By KDE 4.3, I'm pretty resigned to learning half these bugs are fixed, but there's still a few, and the left turn signal will now suddenly run twice as fast as the right. Never are any of these really critical, yet never does the whole thing 'just work'.
It's got me wondering, just how many ways are there to implement transparency? I used to be able to get a bunch of different transparent effects on a windows 98 box (using third party apps). I thought I knew a bit about tricks like 8 bit pallet swapping for pseudo transparent tinted notepad applications, real alpha blending, subtractive mip-mapping, and masking layer transparency (like PNGs usually use). But evidently, some KDE aps are using all of these at once, plus five or six other strange methods to get to clear, that are all totally non-standardized, mutually don't play well with each other (or much else), and all have to be reimplemented for KDE 4.
1. The index patient is from Cameroon, but was living in France at the time of discovery. 2. The patient did not eat gorilla meat personally, by her testimony, and it is likely the mode of transmission to her was from an as yet unidentified male human. She is probably several transmissions removed from the person we would designate the true patient Zero, and that hypothetical person probably is (or was) in Cameroon, and was initially exposed in Cameroon. 3. the patient does not have AIDS symptoms at this time. Best guess is this strain will produce loss of immune function with time if untreated, and will probably respond to the same treatments as the more established strains. 4. This strain could be slower or quicker to go to symptomatic state, not react to some drugs the same, or otherwise vary, but there's no particular reason to expect any super plague or drug resistant strain.
Ah, but the music industry has demonstrated its practices include replacing musicians who sell more with ones who sell less. Doubt it all you want, but really read up on the case of Prince - a proven seller, and the industry decided to enforce contract provisions that were so draconian that by their interpretation he couldn't use his own name to sign autographs, except on their schedule, at their formal events. Once you learn how his controllers made an attempt to break him that was like something out of the Prisoner TV show, all that business with the 'Artist formerly known as...' starts making much more sense from his point of view. And the industry's profits suffered right along with his, but what was important obviously wasn't the money but breaking a difficult artist.
Here's some cases you might also google:
1. the 5 original Planet of the Apes movies, each made for less budget than the last, each bringing in more money, while the studio involved put all the profits back into epic historical pictures that mostly never broke even.
2. Roger Corman, the director who always shot within his budget and time limits, and whose films always made a profit, but who was personally insulted in vile terms by some of the biggest Hollywood studio heads, not for his film's quality but explicitly for making them look bad to stockholders.
3. The Monkees, who made public appearances to prove they weren't lip syncing and faking all their instrument playing, and got undercut by their own management team for doing it.
4. EMI's requesting in the 70's that certain artists be taken off the nominations for awards such as Grammies, either so that other EMI artists could win, or supposedly to trade favors with other recording companies. (I really should claim it was the whole industry, but EMI's actions were the only ones settled in court. Even though they lost a claim that specified they had partners in the act at all of the other recording giants, none of the others had to face lawsuits over it, AFAIK.).
5. Disney and Pixar, up until after Monsters Inc. or so.
Once you realize that the music and film industries have a real history of making 100% control the real issue and not money, the corollary becomes: It's not that people like "kiddie-shit artists", it's that the industry likes artists that will sign contracts giving the industry massive amounts of control over their personal lives and creative processes, and those tend to be young and stupid.
I'm still in favor of throwing some resources into some kinds of space exploration, where the potential gains in knowledge look worthwhile, or prepare us for longer term programs after we hopefully have more cost effective technologies. But, you just raised an interesting point.
Hydroelectric has some perceived advantages when it comes to environmental impacts. That is, the lake behind the dam changes the environment, where the pile of tailings behind the coal plant damages the environment. Lakes are generally positive (if you're a power boater or bass fisherman), neutral to mildly positive (for most people in the general area), or negative (if 'they' immanent domained you out of your family farm).
But, with the increase in extinction rates, lakes become potential environmental stressors. I know that, in my area, there are native species (both standard brown trout and related trout variants) and outsider species (rainbow trout, brought in by humans to stock those nice lakes for sport fishermen). Rainbows can't jump as well as the natives, so if you follow streams up into the Smoky Mountains, you get to areas where the pools are still only full of native species, but the closer you get to the artificial lakes, the more rainbows displace the natives.
A three foot waterfall generally stops rainbows, and in recent years, TVA and Forestry services have started cleaning them out of some spots, maintaining crumbling small waterfalls, and generally keeping the non-native species under control. For now, a new balance appears to be pretty successful, although we probably lost some more specialized local fish species when TVA first started in the 30's and 40's. The area still has a great deal of species diversity. But, if rapid climate change can greatly endanger a capstone species such as polar bears, then it can also make the whole ecology of some areas more fragile, so a once acceptable trade off shifts to more negative, or something humans could once manage becomes unmanageable.
A human presence in mars orbit could react to the unexpected quite nicely - Probe A finds something it's not equipped to interpret, Humans in near orbit design probe B to handle that and drop/launch it then. We don't have to drop 10 probes the first day in orbit and just sit back and direct only those 10 for the rest of the mission.
If humans in orbit can't build what Probe B needs, they get humans on Earth to do part of the work, which introduces delays like we have now, but only in that case. As soon as you send humans to Mars orbit with tools to design and modify some of the surface probes, you start seeing some benefits. Maybe Earth has to build the new chemical detector humans want to attach to probe C-13-J, but it's still a cost benefit if they can just ship the detector and not a whole pre-built probe and landing package for every potential detector that might be needed.
Shaving 99 % of the time off of telefactoring means the humans can ask the probes lots more questions so as to better assess what the new, unanticipated research subjects need for us to do real science. Who wants to have found evidence of some odd chemical reaction that just might indicate life, but need six Martian months to assess and deploy a better chemical analyzer, when by then the original probe would probably die, and it may be the middle of the Martian winter before the replacement is on hand.
A probe breaks down just as it's reporting something interesting? Send a back-up, modified if needed to avoid it breaking down from the same conditions as well, if that something interesting is also an environmental issue for existing probes. And think of being able to maneuver pairs or teams of probes, each able to wipe off another's solar panels with a handy dust rag. How about having very light weight probes, with only individual cameras or other small, lightweight sensors, and waiting to deploy some bigger probes with all sorts of additional gear such as mechanical arms and tanks of chemicals until the little ones have helped you pick targets?
Proportionately few. The percentage of our total population that is seriously. life threateningly resource poor is lower than most people think, but the percentage where the wealth that could potentially help the poorest is concentrated, that's also lower than most people think.
So if the persons were first subject to due process, would cameras in their homes, having to let people inspect the home situation with no notice, and counseling for the family's disfunctional dynamics become valid options to replace jail time?
Yes, there's many times when the kids only chance is to get them into a normal home environment. If the society can come up with enough good foster parents, or ways to find more stable relatives and get them to take in the grandkids, nephews or whatever, this is frequently the best option. Unfortunately, taking the existing kids away doesn't stop people from having new kids. That would most probably require compulsory sterilization in most cases. There we are, several slips farther down the slippery slope many of us fear.
What's really needed is firstly, well defined standards for when to start controlling people's lives. If the society is as tough on major screwing up for the people whose jobs are to manage programs or spot battered kids, as it is for the people we're considering monitoring, it has some chance of working. Cut bad cops lots of slack, ignore teachers who have lost all interest in actually teaching, reelect politicians who promise to clean up the mess and fail time and again, and nobody at the bottom will accept the authority of the society to control even the worst behavior.
Secondly, you have to have carrots, not just sticks. Orwell described a hellish situation, but a sure way to move towards just what he described is to rely only on negative reinforcement. If the system only has money to watch the most screwed up people in public housing, but none to provide jobs for the kids who stay in school, that's precisely what moves the whole society towards 1984. One thing that is working fairly well in the US, is those places where people get better public housing if they keep the kids in school, get at least part time jobs, and keep out of the court system. Quite a few states have programs where people get a chance to save something towards owning a home, and eventually getting out of the welfare system entirely.
Thirdly, there's the issue of criteria. Parent A drinks and beats his kids. Parent B drinks but doesn't beat his kids, Parent C doesn't drink or beat his kids. (Maybe there's a Parent D who doesn't drink, but beats his kids anyway, maybe those are rare as hen's teeth in the real situation). If the social programs assume that there's something about being a lower class parent, and all parents caught drinking should automatically be presumed to also beat their kids, (or worse, that all of them beat their kids even if they haven't been caught at anything else yet), there's that negative heavy reinforcement again, or at least wasted resources.
I don't remember the novel it came from, but one SF writer had a bunch of human explorers run across pretty, slowly shifting, crystaline patterns floating as thin films on the surfaces of otherwise sterile oceans in a chemically exotic environment. Human initial response was pretty much limited to 'Ooooh shiny!" After weeks of scanning the whole planet and crunching numbers, one of the ship's scientists announces there is a sophisticated civilization with billions of participants encoded in each crystal mat, and has to prepare a computer emulation translated into experiential modes the humans can better understand before anyone else will believe it.
As I've said before (stop me if you're getting sick of hearing this): If one party pays immediately (like me or most of you, supporting laws and paying taxes to protect the rights of the music industry in court), and the other party pays back a whole lot later (like the industry releasing things to the public domain 'eventually'), which side is usually more likely to rob the other?
Agreed, I've read the original article, the summary here is seriously skewed, and most of the comments aren't reflecting what has really happened.
But I have to wonder about your claim this is not an excuse to pirate. As you point out, "the onestops don't have the depth of product"
So, if I want something that's 'in the deep abyssial trenches of the mighty product ocean', it's less and less likely to be available on a physical medium in my area. If they don't want to sell item X to me, I'm not a customer for it, from their point of view, not just mine.
Then, they want a high enough price for the non-physical version, at lower audio quality, without other support such as liner notes, album art, and preferably with DRM, they are effectively pricing that too to say "customers go away, we don't really want you".
Some of this makes a pretty good excuse to pirate, or at least a reason for the government to stay out of enforcement. Just like region encoding. If the distributer insists on there being region encoding, and then doesn't sell the product at all in certain regions, they've basically said they don't regard those people in those regions as even potential customers - so they can't have lost any sales, can they? Even if I grant all claims that the piracy is still both immoral and illegal, if there was zero market, the pirates did zero damages.
Where we may not see eye to eye on this is how completely this counts as a refusal by the companies to do business. A lot of people seem to think that offering digital versions at any price counts as still being interested in providing the goods to a potential customer. I don't think so. To make a bad car analogy, if gas sells for about $2.50 a gallon in your area, and you ran across a gas station that had some unusual gas formula that had some minor advantages and some major disadvantages to use, but they want $25.00 a gallon for it. I think most of us would drive past, saying "Well, they obviously don't want me as a customer", and some of us, like me, would add "... or anybody else either.". At some level, a bad enough price gouging counts as saying you have no intention of actually doing business at all, and if you're not actually in business, you've got some nerve demanding the government enforce the laws protecting your business.
I'm a stupid employee who has access to your tax records (if you pay the corporation I work for to do your taxes). Here's why I need File transfer and web access.
1. I do returns for the normal US income tax, all 50 states and some odder locations (territories, other nations). I send these electronically most times, but some locations still require paper filing. I would need copies of both all the forms and each year's instructions, going back at least 4 years for the Federal individual taxes, and longer for corporate taxes and some others. I guess I could keep copies of all those forms in office for the occasional use, instead of downloading them only for the rare instances they are needed - However, we'd have to literally buy the grocery stores in the same malls as our typical offices to make those 'back rooms' big enough to store all that. There's a reason why Federal forms sometimes have numbers like 9737-F, or Schedule M3 (version for form 1120, hispanic).
2. I research stock basis for customers about 50 times a year - it's incredible how many people don't know what they paid for the stock they just sold. I also have to occasionally determine what the property tax rate in some particular city or county of some other state is, find an employer ID number for one of over three thousand day care centers in our area, get a copy of someone's W-2 from an employer that only posts them through an online aggregator.
I could probably keep updated local tax tables for 140,000+ locations without the net, but there's a turnover of about 250 new daycare businesses a year in the area I am responsible for, and the average phone contact with one of those results in some idiot who thinks what I am asking for is their sacred duty to protect from me the 'social engineer', instead of something they are legally required to add to their yearly statements to their customers. Being able to get those from the state's website saves us maybe a hundred hours a year and greatly improves chances of our clients managing to file on time.
Take away the net for daycare contact, and you have two choices. Draconian enforcement of the laws about providing records on time, with all the escalating penalties maximized until any mom and pop business that doesn't bother to learn and follow all the regs is savagely and swiftly driven out of business, or my company and all our competitors raise the fees for filing a child care credit by about 200$ a form.
3. I sort and handle records by SSN, something I personally don't trust when most businesses do it to me and wish I could avoid asking for with my clients. But, in this case, there is no other way for me to do it - I have to collect and give people's SSNs to the government on the forms, so I might as well use them for internal tracking as well. I see all sorts of other data, i.e. bank account numbers for people paying the IRS by direct withdrawal or getting back by direct deposit at the very least, or prescription numbers for controlled painkillers when I prepare some people's schedule As, and recording any of that that isn't absolutlely required or keeping it after it's been used would be even riskier than purging it from the databases after use and keeping the SSNs. I still have to hand carry many documents rather than fax them, even though a lot of federal or state agencies are a lot looser with security than we are and I see faxes into the office that break all sorts of rules.
I need web access to do my job, but that required access is so broad there is no policy you could write to limit that web access that wouldn't hurt some of my clients. I have had to get copies of 1099-MISC's for exotic dancers, Breakdowns of employee related expenses from Game designing companies, and even look at a person's home office over a webcam before. The first year we set a policy that prohibited adult sites, game sites, or webcams, I had to request five exemptions and it would have been higher but most of the customers were willing to go to some trouble to put returns on hold and wait till they hand carried forms instead. Probably most preparers in my district had two or three such problems minimum. We still have a policy, but the exemptions system makes it pretty much swiss cheese.
I'm sure a substantial portion of downloaders actually think of it as beating the system by getting something totally free. I think they are wrong about that, but I don't doubt they think pretty much as you describe. At the same time, industries in general calculate price points and occasionally try alternate models and revise their thinking to see if overall profits would be better at a different price point. What we seem to be seeing for the media industries is two trends that go counter to many other industries.
1. They don't revise their calculations often enough. For example, a number of music companies have admitted they didn't see any need to revise CD price models when they first started hearing that the percentages of people who said they were replacing their record collection with CD versions went into rapid fall off. (This is one reason people criticize the industry as having a dinosaur business model - if you pay for surveys and then don't apply them, that's a perfect example of what obsolete means).
2. They do an estimate that assumes whatever new DRM scheme they have will work well this time, but don't even try to do an alternate that assumes it will last about as long as the least few times. This is sort of like the banking industry assuming they can count on 100% of bank robbers being caught from now on, or the oil industry assuming prices will stay in the $70/barrel range, and not doing any alternate projections.
One of the best ways to get rid of DRM and make the DMCA appear irrelevant would be if the dedicated pirates didn't crack ubisoft's new system for a few weeks, but sales sucked just as much anyway. The challenge of beating a new system quickly means crackers focus attention on the game even if there's little reason for anyone else to want it once cracked. Then they flood Usenet and torrents as part of bragging about their success. Companies interpret all this attention as demand, which would theoretically otherwise result in sales. That's the first source of pressure for DRM measures.
The second source comes about when people download these cracked versions, just because it theoretically costs so little to find out if this game sucks as much as the last one, or for bragging rights to friends and similar reasons. This model is a mistaken cost analysis. The downloaders aren't taking into account the hidden costs of encouraging companies to think real demand exists for games which actually suck. The result is more sucky games and more companies falsely thinking they have a product that would sell like hotcakes if they could just get a DRM solution that was actually uncrackable, at least for the first month or so.
Unfortunately, since downloading numbers are hard/expensive to estimate with any accuracy, the smaller companies have to go mostly on the time it takes for the software to be cracked and uploaded. Thus it only takes one guy to start the DRM ball rolling if he targets a smaller company. Companies that can actually afford to get some independent estimates of how many people are sharing a torrent or downloading from a particular Usenet provider might occasionally get a reality check if dowmloads are flat, but that group consists of a few large movie or music distributers, and very few gaming companies do much in gathering download data. Most of them feel they simply can't afford it, beyond maybe paying someone to watch for it to be initially uploaded to usenet wares groups.
Let's look at Pakistan vs India. If we assume a radical Islamic faction gets control in Pakistan, and elects to use part or all their arsenal against particularly Hindu dominated portions of India, the direct casualties on the Indian side would be in the 1's to 10's of millions range. That's because the Pakistanis would be using relatively low yield Plutonium based devices, but their missiles are inaccurate enough and take long enough to prep that cities are about their only effective targets. An Indian retaliatory strike would involve some actual H-Bombs (which they don't admit having still in their arsenal, but they built and tested several designs), and probably more focus on pure military targets, but India has multiple Islamic neighbors, and they have made it clear in the past that they are not real concerned about fallout on those nations in a Pakistan/India exchange. A safe lowball estimate on total casualties is upwards of 200 Million. That's assuming India doesn't decide to kill the Indonesian navy and some other resources under Islamic regime control as a just in case. Could that happen? If it did, would that push total casualties over a billion? The best answer I ever heard on both those was 'not highly probable, but just maybe'. No one really wants to commit to a lower number, even if a billion seems a little high.
Then there's the claim that Israel has a secret doctrine that in the event of a nuclear attack from an Islamic power on their major cities, they will coldly and deliberately kill Mecca and as many great centers of the Muslim faith as they can hit. The idea there is that the Koran supposedly says that all believers who fail to prevent the loss of the ability to make the journey to Mecca will burn in hell forever regardless of what else they do in their faith (or some Muslim factions have interpreted various verses in a way that justifies Jehad as physical violence, but also implies this, so if they insist it's true, the idea is give them the negative side of the claim.).
It's hard to see people clinging to their religion if they are doctrinally a whole generation all condemned to hell down to the youngest born child and beyond no matter what they do. But it's also quite possible this would lead to a tremendous number of fanatics willing to die for the cause if their Mullahs assure them there's an escape clause in their somewhere, and a war that would have to be fought to the last fanatic on either side. I'd say that exchange could easily build into a Gigadeath or more.
The biggest doubt I have about this scenario is the claim for secret Israeli plans seems to come from some of the very Muslim fanatics that you'd think it would be a big de-motivator for them to seek nukes of their own if they really believed it. That seems exceptionally illogical unless they are very confident it's just a claim they made up.
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Seems kind of self contradictory - increased penetration and less pornography.
I'd assume you want to limit that to a virus actually spreading in the wild and manipulating netstat where it's running on an otherwise properly working Windows box. I'm pretty confident there's been cases where a laboratory proof of concept manipulation of netstat, nmap, or others have been accomplished. The real question is have any of these shown up on an actual machine in the wild, whether that machine was running a botnet or showing some other compromise, i.e. just being infected via to a root-kit. For netstat, ideally, let's see an exploit that is transmitted by other methods than physically being in the same room as the PC, and infecting a machine that was behind a router and until then had both a local, wired network and internet access that worked.
Something that can only spread to machines that are directly connected to a particular brand of cable modem and only when that device is running old firmware, or only via an improperly set up wireless connection, or where the hacker has to first gain unaccompanied physical access, isn't really much of a netstat bug, even if it affects netstat once those other conditions are first met. It's sort of like complaining that it's possible to pry a safety deposit box open with a simple crowbar, if you can just first get unaccompanied access to the vault where those boxes are kept. The real question becomes, can you get the other, preliminary conditions, or not?
SCO petitioned at the last minute for an administrator, with less power than a real trustee, to handle only selected parts of a full Chapter 11 proceeding. That's what they liked best. From Groklaw, no one seems to know if such an arrangement was even a legal option.
A chapter 7 with appointed trustee is what they would like least. That presumes there's no chance of the company ever reorganizing, and the goal is instead to pay off as many of the creditors as possible.
The judge gave them something in the middle - a standard chapter 11 ,which means he is holding out the chance that some purchase offer might be legitimate and SCO just might rise again.
If I'm ever facing 20 years in maximum security, I plan to claim house arrest with an ankle bracelet is quite reasonable and customary for whatever I did, and see if the judge will split the difference and give me 5 in minimum security. Who knows, it could work.
I don't think that distinction is just splitting hairs - I think it's pretty damned important:
1. There is such a thing as non-criminal copyright infringement. What the heck is non-criminal theft?
2. The Supreme Court has ruled that the state governments can't have their own copyright laws or enforce them. If CV=Stealing, the federal government is keeping states from prosecuting theft in their own jurisdictions.
3. Copyrights eventually expire (even now). CV=Theft would mean there are some kinds of theft where it's legally OK, because the object stolen was too old. I don't want anyone being able to steal my Three Handled Family Grudunza just because it's become an antique. Alternately, CV=Theft means it's immoral for copyright to ever expire.
4. The copyright law was all originally in US title 17, and Title 17 was all non criminal matters at that time. Back then, anything with criminal penalties was in title 18. CV=Stealing means the country got that wrong for the first 200 years. Are you saying Jefferson and Madison were wrong and Sonny Bono was right?
5. Copyright Violation has fair use exceptions. If CV=Theft, there should be something analogous to fair use for other kinds of theft, shouldn't there? If so, what are they? If not, why not?
Well, if it is possible to have internet addiction, then TV addiction is equally possible - both or neither might be the case, but how could it possibly be just one?
Jumping rapidly to a conclusion, they both are. We have to cure the TV addicts first, of course:
1. There's a lot more of them.
2. The social costs are higher (Home Shopping Network addiction can cost thousands a month in some cases, whereas even World of Warcrack is only 20 bucks a month).
3. The TV addicts are more in denial (I've just indirectly admitted I could have a problem, while they're all trying to get the society to do something about the internet addicts instead.).
4. What's the number one thing other addicts are accused of climbing out of people's windows with? TVs! When some heroin addict steals my bandwidth to finance his habit, I'll concede this point.
So right after people cure all the TV addicts (or beat them to death in a huge Chinese camp), I'll gladly discuss entering a program.
Yeah, but until they get enough power to bend the laws their way, which one would you rather have living next door?
There's two events that have little in common here. A local or state government could actively check to see if there are family or friends in some other area who have the intentions of helping the homeless person and at least some potential to actually help, or they could fake it, by just taking the homeless persons word, or not bothering with a few questions in a phone conversation (what if the homeless person's potential life support is an 84 year old mother, with no other relatives living around her, surviving on Social Security only, and there's a family history of domestic violence?). Yes, it's good if the homeless person has someone who still cares, but isn't it also necessary that the person actually be in a state where they can contribute more than good intentions?
I'm glad you qualified your point by saying " usually have SOMEONE" and didn't exaggerate to claim there was always someone. I take the way you used all caps on someone to mean "not necessarily a perfect solution, but someone, and someone is generally better than no one at all", in which case, I agree. I think you need to further qualify it though. Sometimes there's a whole family that cares, sometimes only one person still gives a damn, sometimes it's (unfortunately) none. Some people who care are so screwed up themselves they won't do the things that actually help. Some people who care don't have any spare resources with which to help.
Many of these homeless persons are in trouble with the police at the time they seize upon the offer to be sent to somewhere. They may take the option simply because they think it beats jail. Unless the local government actually has reasonable cause to think the problem person may get better help or become less of a social problem somewhere else, getting them out of the area isn't really done with the intent of helping, just of making them some other locale's problem.
A service member cannot campaign for a candidate while in uniform, or identify him or herself as a member of the military to drive voters towards a candidate. They can't use their servicemember status to endorse a business either. The real distinction is not just wearing the uniform, as telling people you are a member in such cases is just as much an issue.
Former members certainly regain all their normal rights of free speech. I could, for example, go to a local military surplus shop with the owner's permission, set up cardboard backed posters, and stand around saying "I'm a former range operations officer and rifle and pistol instructor with the US Army, and I say we need to supply the guys currently in Iraq and Afghanistan with better body armor." (I could even have endorsed certain existing brands, although I kept it more classy than that). I could wear a set of my old fatigues, so long as they no longer had any unit insignia or the cloth tape reading "U. S. ARMY" over the breastpocket. (But I wore jeans and tee-shirt). An active duty servicemember could write letters to his or her congressman without mentioning his military status in any way, but to keep on the safe side, many of them prefer to discuss things with civilian friends or family and let them write the letters. In general, active duty means you rely on civilians to do a lot of your political speech for you until you get out.
As far as other rights go, I used to have to carry a military version of the Miranda card civilian police carry - The service member actually has more rights guaranteed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice than the civilian does. At the same time, the UCMJ doesn't mean the military member retains such things as the right to a 12 person jury. Some rights are different, not completely absent - for example, enlisted military people being judged by a three member or five member military tribunal have the right in some circumstances to have a fellow enlisted member as one of their judges (and most junior accused wave this right, as that fellow enlisted member is an NCO, and not likely to cut them any more slack than a commissioned officer). There is still a right to a lawyer, to have them present during questioning, and other such rights, there are legal protections against self incrimination and at least some forms of unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to confront witnesses is at least as solid as the civilian version.
Flakeyness with those Plasma elements in Amarok 2 drove me to go back to Qmmp. It seemed the middle window's widgets never displayed the same way twice. Just closing Amarok and reopening it usually resulted in some borders and edges being realigned, scroll bars being lost or inactivated, font sizes changed, and so on. And this was on a system with only onboard graphics, on a genuine Intel motherboard, no ATI or Nvidia drivers supposedly needed.
The upgrade from KDE series 3 in Kubuntu 8 to series 4 in Kubuntu 9 definitely meant some graphics features quit working unless you had a bigger graphics card. I admit to running Kubuntu 9 on a box with only 16 Meg of graphics memory. It's probably under the minimum specs even for Linux these days. But still, that box had transparency for terminals windows, both in Konsole and Yakuake. A slide show type screensaver could easily use all the various wipes and spot transition effects and still change pictures every 20 seconds (and 20 seconds is the default setting). Widgets such as the Luna moon phase display also had transparent backgrounds. KDE 4 lost all this on my older box, and couldn't do the fancy things it wanted to replace them with like the rotating cube and jello wigglies even if I had wanted those effects. Some of those problems are getting better, and at least multiple wallpapers seems to be coming back, but I would love to understand why people could spend months fixing some graphics problems, only to have the fixes only help one the problems of one program in five, make one working one break, and change the problems of one other program to different problems, but not to any easier to accept problems.
It's like taking a car back to the mechanic, and the wibbly noise is finally fixed, but the skree from the left windshield wiper is now moved to the trunk, and the button that lowers all the windows at once now misses the passenger side rear, then when you go through the next cycle, the button lowers all the windows at once, but now raises all except the driver's side rear, the skree has become a thumpa-thumpa-poit!, and the wibbly noise has come back, but an octave lower. By KDE 4.3, I'm pretty resigned to learning half these bugs are fixed, but there's still a few, and the left turn signal will now suddenly run twice as fast as the right. Never are any of these really critical, yet never does the whole thing 'just work'.
It's got me wondering, just how many ways are there to implement transparency? I used to be able to get a bunch of different transparent effects on a windows 98 box (using third party apps). I thought I knew a bit about tricks like 8 bit pallet swapping for pseudo transparent tinted notepad applications, real alpha blending, subtractive mip-mapping, and masking layer transparency (like PNGs usually use). But evidently, some KDE aps are using all of these at once, plus five or six other strange methods to get to clear, that are all totally non-standardized, mutually don't play well with each other (or much else), and all have to be reimplemented for KDE 4.
1. The index patient is from Cameroon, but was living in France at the time of discovery.
2. The patient did not eat gorilla meat personally, by her testimony, and it is likely the mode of transmission to her was from an as yet unidentified male human. She is probably several transmissions removed from the person we would designate the true patient Zero, and that hypothetical person probably is (or was) in Cameroon, and was initially exposed in Cameroon.
3. the patient does not have AIDS symptoms at this time. Best guess is this strain will produce loss of immune function with time if untreated, and will probably respond to the same treatments as the more established strains.
4. This strain could be slower or quicker to go to symptomatic state, not react to some drugs the same, or otherwise vary, but there's no particular reason to expect any super plague or drug resistant strain.
Ah, but the music industry has demonstrated its practices include replacing musicians who sell more with ones who sell less. Doubt it all you want, but really read up on the case of Prince - a proven seller, and the industry decided to enforce contract provisions that were so draconian that by their interpretation he couldn't use his own name to sign autographs, except on their schedule, at their formal events. Once you learn how his controllers made an attempt to break him that was like something out of the Prisoner TV show, all that business with the 'Artist formerly known as...' starts making much more sense from his point of view. And the industry's profits suffered right along with his, but what was important obviously wasn't the money but breaking a difficult artist.
Here's some cases you might also google:
1. the 5 original Planet of the Apes movies, each made for less budget than the last, each bringing in more money, while the studio involved put all the profits back into epic historical pictures that mostly never broke even.
2. Roger Corman, the director who always shot within his budget and time limits, and whose films always made a profit, but who was personally insulted in vile terms by some of the biggest Hollywood studio heads, not for his film's quality but explicitly for making them look bad to stockholders.
3. The Monkees, who made public appearances to prove they weren't lip syncing and faking all their instrument playing, and got undercut by their own management team for doing it.
4. EMI's requesting in the 70's that certain artists be taken off the nominations for awards such as Grammies, either so that other EMI artists could win, or supposedly to trade favors with other recording companies. (I really should claim it was the whole industry, but EMI's actions were the only ones settled in court. Even though they lost a claim that specified they had partners in the act at all of the other recording giants, none of the others had to face lawsuits over it, AFAIK.).
5. Disney and Pixar, up until after Monsters Inc. or so.
Once you realize that the music and film industries have a real history of making 100% control the real issue and not money, the corollary becomes: It's not that people like "kiddie-shit artists", it's that the industry likes artists that will sign contracts giving the industry massive amounts of control over their personal lives and creative processes, and those tend to be young and stupid.
I'm still in favor of throwing some resources into some kinds of space exploration, where the potential gains in knowledge look worthwhile, or prepare us for longer term programs after we hopefully have more cost effective technologies. But, you just raised an interesting point.
Hydroelectric has some perceived advantages when it comes to environmental impacts. That is, the lake behind the dam changes the environment, where the pile of tailings behind the coal plant damages the environment. Lakes are generally positive (if you're a power boater or bass fisherman), neutral to mildly positive (for most people in the general area), or negative (if 'they' immanent domained you out of your family farm).
But, with the increase in extinction rates, lakes become potential environmental stressors. I know that, in my area, there are native species (both standard brown trout and related trout variants) and outsider species (rainbow trout, brought in by humans to stock those nice lakes for sport fishermen). Rainbows can't jump as well as the natives, so if you follow streams up into the Smoky Mountains, you get to areas where the pools are still only full of native species, but the closer you get to the artificial lakes, the more rainbows displace the natives.
A three foot waterfall generally stops rainbows, and in recent years, TVA and Forestry services have started cleaning them out of some spots, maintaining crumbling small waterfalls, and generally keeping the non-native species under control. For now, a new balance appears to be pretty successful, although we probably lost some more specialized local fish species when TVA first started in the 30's and 40's. The area still has a great deal of species diversity. But, if rapid climate change can greatly endanger a capstone species such as polar bears, then it can also make the whole ecology of some areas more fragile, so a once acceptable trade off shifts to more negative, or something humans could once manage becomes unmanageable.
A human presence in mars orbit could react to the unexpected quite nicely - Probe A finds something it's not equipped to interpret, Humans in near orbit design probe B to handle that and drop/launch it then. We don't have to drop 10 probes the first day in orbit and just sit back and direct only those 10 for the rest of the mission.
If humans in orbit can't build what Probe B needs, they get humans on Earth to do part of the work, which introduces delays like we have now, but only in that case. As soon as you send humans to Mars orbit with tools to design and modify some of the surface probes, you start seeing some benefits. Maybe Earth has to build the new chemical detector humans want to attach to probe C-13-J, but it's still a cost benefit if they can just ship the detector and not a whole pre-built probe and landing package for every potential detector that might be needed.
Shaving 99 % of the time off of telefactoring means the humans can ask the probes lots more questions so as to better assess what the new, unanticipated research subjects need for us to do real science. Who wants to have found evidence of some odd chemical reaction that just might indicate life, but need six Martian months to assess and deploy a better chemical analyzer, when by then the original probe would probably die, and it may be the middle of the Martian winter before the replacement is on hand.
A probe breaks down just as it's reporting something interesting? Send a back-up, modified if needed to avoid it breaking down from the same conditions as well, if that something interesting is also an environmental issue for existing probes. And think of being able to maneuver pairs or teams of probes, each able to wipe off another's solar panels with a handy dust rag. How about having very light weight probes, with only individual cameras or other small, lightweight sensors, and waiting to deploy some bigger probes with all sorts of additional gear such as mechanical arms and tanks of chemicals until the little ones have helped you pick targets?
Proportionately few. The percentage of our total population that is seriously. life threateningly resource poor is lower than most people think, but the percentage where the wealth that could potentially help the poorest is concentrated, that's also lower than most people think.
So if the persons were first subject to due process, would cameras in their homes, having to let people inspect the home situation with no notice, and counseling for the family's disfunctional dynamics become valid options to replace jail time?
Yes, there's many times when the kids only chance is to get them into a normal home environment. If the society can come up with enough good foster parents, or ways to find more stable relatives and get them to take in the grandkids, nephews or whatever, this is frequently the best option. Unfortunately, taking the existing kids away doesn't stop people from having new kids. That would most probably require compulsory sterilization in most cases. There we are, several slips farther down the slippery slope many of us fear.
What's really needed is firstly, well defined standards for when to start controlling people's lives. If the society is as tough on major screwing up for the people whose jobs are to manage programs or spot battered kids, as it is for the people we're considering monitoring, it has some chance of working. Cut bad cops lots of slack, ignore teachers who have lost all interest in actually teaching, reelect politicians who promise to clean up the mess and fail time and again, and nobody at the bottom will accept the authority of the society to control even the worst behavior.
Secondly, you have to have carrots, not just sticks. Orwell described a hellish situation, but a sure way to move towards just what he described is to rely only on negative reinforcement. If the system only has money to watch the most screwed up people in public housing, but none to provide jobs for the kids who stay in school, that's precisely what moves the whole society towards 1984. One thing that is working fairly well in the US, is those places where people get better public housing if they keep the kids in school, get at least part time jobs, and keep out of the court system. Quite a few states have programs where people get a chance to save something towards owning a home, and eventually getting out of the welfare system entirely.
Thirdly, there's the issue of criteria. Parent A drinks and beats his kids. Parent B drinks but doesn't beat his kids, Parent C doesn't drink or beat his kids. (Maybe there's a Parent D who doesn't drink, but beats his kids anyway, maybe those are rare as hen's teeth in the real situation). If the social programs assume that there's something about being a lower class parent, and all parents caught drinking should automatically be presumed to also beat their kids, (or worse, that all of them beat their kids even if they haven't been caught at anything else yet), there's that negative heavy reinforcement again, or at least wasted resources.
I don't remember the novel it came from, but one SF writer had a bunch of human explorers run across pretty, slowly shifting, crystaline patterns floating as thin films on the surfaces of otherwise sterile oceans in a chemically exotic environment. Human initial response was pretty much limited to 'Ooooh shiny!" After weeks of scanning the whole planet and crunching numbers, one of the ship's scientists announces there is a sophisticated civilization with billions of participants encoded in each crystal mat, and has to prepare a computer emulation translated into experiential modes the humans can better understand before anyone else will believe it.
Read up on right of first sale and then see if you want to keep making the same claim.
As I've said before (stop me if you're getting sick of hearing this): If one party pays immediately (like me or most of you, supporting laws and paying taxes to protect the rights of the music industry in court), and the other party pays back a whole lot later (like the industry releasing things to the public domain 'eventually'), which side is usually more likely to rob the other?
Agreed, I've read the original article, the summary here is seriously skewed, and most of the comments aren't reflecting what has really happened.
But I have to wonder about your claim this is not an excuse to pirate. As you point out, "the onestops don't have the depth of product"
So, if I want something that's 'in the deep abyssial trenches of the mighty product ocean', it's less and less likely to be available on a physical medium in my area. If they don't want to sell item X to me, I'm not a customer for it, from their point of view, not just mine.
Then, they want a high enough price for the non-physical version, at lower audio quality, without other support such as liner notes, album art, and preferably with DRM, they are effectively pricing that too to say "customers go away, we don't really want you".
Some of this makes a pretty good excuse to pirate, or at least a reason for the government to stay out of enforcement. Just like region encoding. If the distributer insists on there being region encoding, and then doesn't sell the product at all in certain regions, they've basically said they don't regard those people in those regions as even potential customers - so they can't have lost any sales, can they? Even if I grant all claims that the piracy is still both immoral and illegal, if there was zero market, the pirates did zero damages.
Where we may not see eye to eye on this is how completely this counts as a refusal by the companies to do business. A lot of people seem to think that offering digital versions at any price counts as still being interested in providing the goods to a potential customer. I don't think so. To make a bad car analogy, if gas sells for about $2.50 a gallon in your area, and you ran across a gas station that had some unusual gas formula that had some minor advantages and some major disadvantages to use, but they want $25.00 a gallon for it. I think most of us would drive past, saying "Well, they obviously don't want me as a customer", and some of us, like me, would add "... or anybody else either.". At some level, a bad enough price gouging counts as saying you have no intention of actually doing business at all, and if you're not actually in business, you've got some nerve demanding the government enforce the laws protecting your business.
I'm a stupid employee who has access to your tax records (if you pay the corporation I work for to do your taxes). Here's why I need File transfer and web access.
1. I do returns for the normal US income tax, all 50 states and some odder locations (territories, other nations). I send these electronically most times, but some locations still require paper filing. I would need copies of both all the forms and each year's instructions, going back at least 4 years for the Federal individual taxes, and longer for corporate taxes and some others. I guess I could keep copies of all those forms in office for the occasional use, instead of downloading them only for the rare instances they are needed - However, we'd have to literally buy the grocery stores in the same malls as our typical offices to make those 'back rooms' big enough to store all that. There's a reason why Federal forms sometimes have numbers like 9737-F, or Schedule M3 (version for form 1120, hispanic).
2. I research stock basis for customers about 50 times a year - it's incredible how many people don't know what they paid for the stock they just sold. I also have to occasionally determine what the property tax rate in some particular city or county of some other state is, find an employer ID number for one of over three thousand day care centers in our area, get a copy of someone's W-2 from an employer that only posts them through an online aggregator.
I could probably keep updated local tax tables for 140,000+ locations without the net, but there's a turnover of about 250 new daycare businesses a year in the area I am responsible for, and the average phone contact with one of those results in some idiot who thinks what I am asking for is their sacred duty to protect from me the 'social engineer', instead of something they are legally required to add to their yearly statements to their customers. Being able to get those from the state's website saves us maybe a hundred hours a year and greatly improves chances of our clients managing to file on time.
Take away the net for daycare contact, and you have two choices. Draconian enforcement of the laws about providing records on time, with all the escalating penalties maximized until any mom and pop business that doesn't bother to learn and follow all the regs is savagely and swiftly driven out of business, or my company and all our competitors raise the fees for filing a child care credit by about 200$ a form.
3. I sort and handle records by SSN, something I personally don't trust when most businesses do it to me and wish I could avoid asking for with my clients. But, in this case, there is no other way for me to do it - I have to collect and give people's SSNs to the government on the forms, so I might as well use them for internal tracking as well. I see all sorts of other data, i.e. bank account numbers for people paying the IRS by direct withdrawal or getting back by direct deposit at the very least, or prescription numbers for controlled painkillers when I prepare some people's schedule As, and recording any of that that isn't absolutlely required or keeping it after it's been used would be even riskier than purging it from the databases after use and keeping the SSNs. I still have to hand carry many documents rather than fax them, even though a lot of federal or state agencies are a lot looser with security than we are and I see faxes into the office that break all sorts of rules.
I need web access to do my job, but that required access is so broad there is no policy you could write to limit that web access that wouldn't hurt some of my clients. I have had to get copies of 1099-MISC's for exotic dancers, Breakdowns of employee related expenses from Game designing companies, and even look at a person's home office over a webcam before. The first year we set a policy that prohibited adult sites, game sites, or webcams, I had to request five exemptions and it would have been higher but most of the customers were willing to go to some trouble to put returns on hold and wait till they hand carried forms instead. Probably most preparers in my district had two or three such problems minimum. We still have a policy, but the exemptions system makes it pretty much swiss cheese.
I'm sure a substantial portion of downloaders actually think of it as beating the system by getting something totally free. I think they are wrong about that, but I don't doubt they think pretty much as you describe. At the same time, industries in general calculate price points and occasionally try alternate models and revise their thinking to see if overall profits would be better at a different price point. What we seem to be seeing for the media industries is two trends that go counter to many other industries.
1. They don't revise their calculations often enough. For example, a number of music companies have admitted they didn't see any need to revise CD price models when they first started hearing that the percentages of people who said they were replacing their record collection with CD versions went into rapid fall off. (This is one reason people criticize the industry as having a dinosaur business model - if you pay for surveys and then don't apply them, that's a perfect example of what obsolete means).
2. They do an estimate that assumes whatever new DRM scheme they have will work well this time, but don't even try to do an alternate that assumes it will last about as long as the least few times. This is sort of like the banking industry assuming they can count on 100% of bank robbers being caught from now on, or the oil industry assuming prices will stay in the $70/barrel range, and not doing any alternate projections.
One of the best ways to get rid of DRM and make the DMCA appear irrelevant would be if the dedicated pirates didn't crack ubisoft's new system for a few weeks, but sales sucked just as much anyway. The challenge of beating a new system quickly means crackers focus attention on the game even if there's little reason for anyone else to want it once cracked. Then they flood Usenet and torrents as part of bragging about their success. Companies interpret all this attention as demand, which would theoretically otherwise result in sales. That's the first source of pressure for DRM measures.
The second source comes about when people download these cracked versions, just because it theoretically costs so little to find out if this game sucks as much as the last one, or for bragging rights to friends and similar reasons. This model is a mistaken cost analysis. The downloaders aren't taking into account the hidden costs of encouraging companies to think real demand exists for games which actually suck. The result is more sucky games and more companies falsely thinking they have a product that would sell like hotcakes if they could just get a DRM solution that was actually uncrackable, at least for the first month or so.
Unfortunately, since downloading numbers are hard/expensive to estimate with any accuracy, the smaller companies have to go mostly on the time it takes for the software to be cracked and uploaded. Thus it only takes one guy to start the DRM ball rolling if he targets a smaller company. Companies that can actually afford to get some independent estimates of how many people are sharing a torrent or downloading from a particular Usenet provider might occasionally get a reality check if dowmloads are flat, but that group consists of a few large movie or music distributers, and very few gaming companies do much in gathering download data. Most of them feel they simply can't afford it, beyond maybe paying someone to watch for it to be initially uploaded to usenet wares groups.
Let's look at Pakistan vs India. If we assume a radical Islamic faction gets control in Pakistan, and elects to use part or all their arsenal against particularly Hindu dominated portions of India, the direct casualties on the Indian side would be in the 1's to 10's of millions range. That's because the Pakistanis would be using relatively low yield Plutonium based devices, but their missiles are inaccurate enough and take long enough to prep that cities are about their only effective targets. An Indian retaliatory strike would involve some actual H-Bombs (which they don't admit having still in their arsenal, but they built and tested several designs), and probably more focus on pure military targets, but India has multiple Islamic neighbors, and they have made it clear in the past that they are not real concerned about fallout on those nations in a Pakistan/India exchange. A safe lowball estimate on total casualties is upwards of 200 Million. That's assuming India doesn't decide to kill the Indonesian navy and some other resources under Islamic regime control as a just in case. Could that happen? If it did, would that push total casualties over a billion? The best answer I ever heard on both those was 'not highly probable, but just maybe'. No one really wants to commit to a lower number, even if a billion seems a little high.
Then there's the claim that Israel has a secret doctrine that in the event of a nuclear attack from an Islamic power on their major cities, they will coldly and deliberately kill Mecca and as many great centers of the Muslim faith as they can hit. The idea there is that the Koran supposedly says that all believers who fail to prevent the loss of the ability to make the journey to Mecca will burn in hell forever regardless of what else they do in their faith (or some Muslim factions have interpreted various verses in a way that justifies Jehad as physical violence, but also implies this, so if they insist it's true, the idea is give them the negative side of the claim.).
It's hard to see people clinging to their religion if they are doctrinally a whole generation all condemned to hell down to the youngest born child and beyond no matter what they do. But it's also quite possible this would lead to a tremendous number of fanatics willing to die for the cause if their Mullahs assure them there's an escape clause in their somewhere, and a war that would have to be fought to the last fanatic on either side. I'd say that exchange could easily build into a Gigadeath or more.
The biggest doubt I have about this scenario is the claim for secret Israeli plans seems to come from some of the very Muslim fanatics that you'd think it would be a big de-motivator for them to seek nukes of their own if they really believed it. That seems exceptionally illogical unless they are very confident it's just a claim they made up.
I'm not real comfortable with the lack of arthropod vectors in New York part either.