If you read my third paragraph then you already know I'll assert "Windows is for 'rocket scientist' computer experts, not non-tech-savvy people," IN SPITE OF REALITY. I get that, ok?;-) [I will write more half-truths below, because I'm bored and this is fun.]
Why should Google be limited to addressing how people did things in the 1990s (Windows) instead of the modern user, who doesn't have the time (or doesn't want to spend it) to research and analyze the risk of all the software they install? That's a job for repository maintainers. That's just how people decided to do things, a couple decades ago when they saw that the Windows approach wasn't working out for the common man (or the lazy expert).
If you're still running Windows, where doing things the hard way is your only option, then you are a bad ass motherfucker, with with a 5-digit-id, cyclopean computer capabilities, and risk assessment expertise such that you ought to have your own facts website. While some of us puny mortals occasionally see something cool on github and check it out and impulsively run it as our own uid, or we might do a plain http download from kernel.org without worrying that someone altered it in transit (actually I just checked and it looks like kernel.org switched to https quite some time ago) we don't always do that for everything; 99% my warez are straight out Ubuntu's repo, whitelisted by people I.. mmmostly trust.
By comparison, you Windows people are FEARLESS GODS.
All hail the fearless gods, the computer users who still do things the 1990s way.
But you must understand: Google isn't for you gods. It's for us. When you want someone dead, you just throw a lightning bolt at them, and here you are, bringing up some obscure point about how some electrical capacitance sources aren't working out all that great for you, with Star Trek technobabble-like talk of "scum polarity." We Google users, puny little mortals we are, normally don't blindly reach into the cosmic energy stores that You people do. When mortals discuss these things, we say "of course that is madness! Only the brave or suicidal, routinely tread there!"
To us, Google is something we use to read about something. Reading pages written to persuade us to install "bad" warez from our repositories, isn't really any different than reading pages written to persuade us to join Scientology. We have but one life, so in a way, I guess, a page telling us to do something foolish (e.g. install something called "greenshot" plus some scumware) is of less concern to us, because we protect the one life we have. You wouldn't understand, because you don't have to. There you are, with "scum polarity" lightning noisily crackling and flashing all over your hands (something that would have killed me a hundred times over!), grimacing with minor annoyance, looking for somewhere to spectacularly toss it, in an epic display of thunderous destruction that someone like me could only imagine, or else only witness in the very final moment of my single life.
REVEL IN YOUR POWER AND GLORY, FEARLESS GOD! We hail thine fearlessness! Is your situation really all that bad? So you installed some scumware. So what? The mere fact that you would (that you can) sightlessly leap into doing that, that you still run Windows, shows you're obviously not afraid and that you are above and beyond a certain thing that we little mortals call "personal consequences." So what's the problem?
Let's say you get married at the age of 15 in a state that allows it, and then move to a state where you're required to be 18 in order to get married. What happens?
Look that one up and you should have the answer to your own question, and I bet it'll be some hundred-year-old decision.
The "Left" once again upholds limited central government and states' rights. The "Right" once again argues (unsuccessfully) for central planning taking a larger role for the "common good" at the expense of individual liberty and states' rights to govern and set their own policies.
Three cheers for the Left (i.e. conservatives) winning again!
non tech savvy users are having problems telling the difference between the scum and the real thing.
Non-tech-savvy users (and tech-savvy ones too, most of the time) should be looking for software in their repository, not on the web. When you pick Foo in Synaptic, you know you're getting the real Foo and it won't come with extra "scumware."
I realize not everyone can always use the repository; the guys who make the repo don't. Or sometimes you need something bleeding-edge. But those are relatively advanced cases, and even then, it's not like github likes to combine Foo with scumware. Scumware is its own project and you still wouldn't check it out unless that's what you were trying to do.
Like anything else worth saying, this is said half in jest and half dead serious. I realize you're talking about Windows, but maybe you really do need to be a rocket scientist to use Windows safely. Non-rocket-scientists should upgrade to something with a reasonable means of distributing applications. It's not 1995 anymore.
The important question is not "is climate change a hoax", the important question is "can we do anything to stop it?" That, of course, contains the implicit assumption that we are causing it.
The question is "Can we go to the moon?" and that contains the implicit assumption that we left the moon.
Because the freest country is always going to necessarily be in conflict with its government. How could it ever possibly be any other way? Remember: if you're an American, then the American government is always one of your adversaries: not quite as hated as the British government, but probably more feared and loathed. "Necessary evil" and all that.
..in iOS 6 for example, the operating system proposes four-to-six-character passwords generated from a default list of 1,842 words and then tags on a random four-digit number.
I think I can explain what happened.
First of all, this story is a dupe. It originally ran on April 1st, 1990. At the time, the story was about "System 6" but some recent tech media editor thought that meant "iOS 6" (I'll explain how the mistake happened, below). That explains the pre-mass-mainstream approach to passwords.
Secondly, even the 1990 story was a hoax. By the standards of the day, that was still such a stupid way to generate passwords, that no one would do it.
Third, the story was written by a guy who turned out to be working at Microsoft. The whole point of the hoax was to make the Newton tablet look stupid, a mis-engineered travesty designed by utterly clueless morons. The 2013 tech media editor saw "Newton" and knew that couldn't be right, which is how it became iOS. Newtons didn't really run System 6, but the original Microsoft author didn't know that.
In short, this is about stupidity that is so stupid, that people didn't do things that stupidly, even back when your mother hadn't heard of the Internet yet.
Just kidding. It's a modern story, but I just wanted to point out that even the most absurd bend-over-backward-to-rationalize-things explanation for behavior this stupid, still isn't very convincing. No field can distort reality to the required degree.
Good point. I always wondered why all the rich kids get to work as low-paid Wal-Mart greeters or burger flippers, while the poor ones are stuck with having to get jobs in management or legal. Now I finally understand why it's like that: only rich people can afford to work at Wal-Mart.
I never used it either. I don't say that to brag about ignorance (?!) but just to put this into context:
Every single description of Google Reader that I've read (keeping in mind that I've never tried it ; I realize this is a recipe for talking out of one's ass) make it sound utterly trivial, a product that any programmer could clone in an hour. It merges RSS feeds? Seriously? People are bent out of shape by that?!
Of course not. I know it can't merely be an RSS merger/splitter/etc which also happens to have a web page view of the resulting feed(s), but that's how everyone describes it. And when you read that it's hard to get motivated and curious to go see what it really is.;-)
Hey wait, maybe I am bragging about ignorance. Nooo!! I'm bitching about the fact that no person has ever explained why anyone would give a damn about Google Reader and ever mentioned a single interesting or nontrivial aspect of it. Ever. Even here on Slashdot, nobody really says anything substantial about it. Google Marketing Fail. No wonder they're turning it off; they never turned it on, in the business sense.
there was a time when an x86 box with MSDOS was pretty much only good for playing Doom 1
This is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin. Are you really implying that PC games were scarce before Doom?
I'm not saying the games were scarce; I'm saying they were irrelevant and relatively few gamers saw them. I'm saying that prior to Doom 1, if you played lots of games, you very likely didn't use an x86 box running a Microsoft OS do to it. You did that on your Atart ST or Amiga or (non-MS) console. You'd even be more likely to game on a Mac, than an x86 box running MSDOS.
Gaming on MSDOS in 1992 marked you as much an edge-case weirdo, as someone who did their word processing on Linux in 1997.
Microsoft's market share among gamers was negligible. And now it's not.
Some people mention modern Windows gaming, and ok, I shouldn't say Microsoft built that from nothing or didn't unfairly leverage anything for it. Correction acknowledged. That is the evil Microsoft we all know and hate.
But the Xbox: that was from scratch. Give Microsoft some credit. It's closed system so I wouldn't buy one or say it's not evil or anything like that, but they did build the marketshare (relatively) fair and square, and they literally compete against competitors, and with no unusual-in-the-industry tricks against users to manipulate them into buying in.
That's highly unusual for Microsoft, and not the same Microsoft that all computer people normally curse repeatedly throughout their days, as an enemy of technological innovation, its users, and the market which supports them both. You can still call 'em a force for evil if you want, but don't call 'em a dishonorable one, or one that government should be singling out and prosecuting alone, or anything like that. It's a whole other thing.
Nobody remembers the 1980s and the MSX? or the 90s with the microsoft settop boxes? Microsoft Game Studios? the windows CE deal with Sega? The poaching of the Sega console development team?
No, I don't.:-)
Ok, I remember (most) of it, but I don't remember any of it as ever having been relevant or being a significant aspect of the gaming market. I remember the Pac Man clone I wrote for my 8-bit but that doesn't mean it had an impact on anyone. Same for Microsoft and pre-Doom gaming.
Add in any form of desktop GPU, including midrange models from 2011, and Haswell wins by a landslide.
The market for both series of products, is that you don't add anything. Use the on-CPU graphics. If you are using a graphics card instead of the integrated graphics, then neither Haswell or Richland is of interest to you. You have a Sandy Bridge-E or a non-APU AMD equivalent, which you're using along with the graphics card.
Microsoft has always been huge in two markets: Gaming and Business.
Ya know, I have to give Microsoft some credit on one thing: they were not always big in gaming, nor did they leverage their way into it, from what I've seen. That's a pretty recent phenomenon. Back when people were complaining about their PC coming with a "free" copy of Windows 3.1 that they didn't want, and which just provided a counter-incentive for upgrading to OS/2 or whatever, Microsoft wasn't in the console business. They had a few games, but were overall very easy to ignore. You didn't even have to run their OS; there was a time when an x86 box with MSDOS was pretty much only good for playing Doom 1.
By the time the XBox came along, many of us had only just recently gotten out of having to use Windows for business. I realize not everyone did, so Microsoft's position in the two different markets could seem contemporary, but they're not. You're talking about two different (but overlapping) eras.
It's pretty amazing MS built that from nothing, or amazing that we let them, as we all knew it would have to be unhealthy for everyone, long-term.
Things come and go. They used to look unbeatable in business, and nowdays there's nothing weird about a business which contains not a single Microsoft license of any kind.
That means Microsoft can be beat in gaming too, but beware, for it also means they could use their immense assets to quickly buy a lead position somewhere else. Who knows, maybe in 2023 we'll all be bitching about their unbeatable position in automobiles or nonalcoholic beverages or electricity or wheat or tribbles or Harry Potter prequel TV episodes.
You're talking about requiring a certain environment for the page to work.
They're talking about..
..the same exact thing. Their site won't work unless you download and execute their proprietary javascript, thereby creating a specific environment within your browser.
A more careful (and slightly more believable as well) analogy would be that the municipal government's site only works with MSIE 6 running on Windows XP, but they do have a download link to a free-as-in-beer VM image which contains that software (And they expect everyone to use that VM, even people who already have Windows.) You're apparently allowed to click the link and use the VM image, but what exactly you're really allowed to do with it, is murky unless you research it.
Lawyers working at FSF looked into it, and found out that you're not allowed to improve, repair, or otherwise maintain this code which is required to use this taxpayer-funded government service. If it has a bug (or malicious bit) which happens to exploit your VM containment, then sucks-to-be-you: your only two legal recourses are 1) to fix your VM instead of removing the exploit itself, and just live with the hostile code constantly probing your containment. [and I'll admit that's a good idea nevertheless.] 2) Or completely replace the entire environment (what Berkeley did to AT&T's Unix) since you aren't allowed to create derived works ; make your custom WINE environment do whatever is needed to interoperate with the government's service. If that means implementing some MSIE6 bugs, so be it.
And on the topic of whether or not Microsoft and Adobe have actually consented to you downloading and using that VM, the lawyers can't even find a solid answer (Microsoft and the webmaster probably did negotiate some kind of license, but neither of them ever happened to tell you anything about it) so the lawyers are tempted to assume that copyright law prohibits you using the VM. If Microsoft ever did happen to sue you over it, could you prove you were allowed to copy that VM?
If I were your wife, I would cease to be so, immediately after the third time you said "Sorry, cat burned the house down again when he rubbed up against my model rocket."
a website should tell you if you're entitled to use something like Greasemonkey to replace their javascript with your own clean version
Why would I ever want some website's opinion about that? I wouldn't even trust a judge's website to correctly guess my decision in the matter of what code I allow my computer to run. Asking websites' opinions just implies they could possibly have a say (or even a vote) in the matter, which is of course completely preposterous.
The movie came out in the 1970s. If Navajos haven't still added those words to their language yet, then we (white men) will. YOUR CULTURE VILL BE PRESERVED!
so what possible interest besides bullshit rent-seeking
What's wrong with rent-seeking? I live in a country which has taxes, and every single one of them is rent-seeking. Most of them are widely supported by broad expanses of the voting populace who happen to disagree on many other things. Rent-seeking is something that most people expect governments to do, and they complain about deficits and debt if the government negligently fails to do enough of it.
If someone isn't grumbling about the unfair tax or fee they're paying, then either you're doing it wrong, or else your government provides absolutely no welfare state, law enforcement, or defense.
If Democrats or Republicans (and also Greens and possibly some big-L Libertarians) ran Nepal, the difference is that instead of banning the guy for ten years, they would have found a way to collect the money, instead. Look down on Nepal for that: a lame AR department who loses and then cries and takes their ball home.
What's really surprising is that torrents aren't infected up the wazoo with malware anyway.
Huh? It doesn't surprise me at all, that Bram Cohen didn't think to make torrent files executable (or that no one I've heard of, ever extended them to make executing part of them become a requirement). If it were possible for torrents to be infected, they never would have become popular (because they would have been a fundamentally too stupid of an idea) and we'd be talking about some other scheme which fills the same niche, right now.
People sometimes say "security is hard" and they do have a point, but sometimes adding security holes can be hard too, or at least hard enough that designers don't bother to do it by default.
That's why we need laws like CALEA.;-)
No doubt the law MPAA is trying to buy, would have some aspect to it where whether people pirate or not, everyone would be required to be compatible with the malware. They'd probably want some kind of system where everyone's fileserver is required to poll the MPAA malware server for self-destruct orders, and anyone manufacturing or selling or trafficking in secure computers, would be in violation. Then they'd go further and make the self-destruct polling protocol obscure or require a non-free trade secret license, just to remind everyone "insecurity is hard."
The continuously-using user is easier to plan and handle than the sporadic user, less disruptive to other customers. You're right that there's a difference.
I thought this user was alleged to be a continuous user. So it raises questions as to why Verizon called him. Maybe Ars misinformed us about what this guy was really doing.
Just because idiots don't know how to use it properly.. doesn't mean the language itself is bad.
Yes, it does. I was walking down the street one day, and a guy named Larry Wall stepped on my foot. He refused to apologize.
I vowed vengeance, and told him I was going to mis-learn his language. "No. No, no!" he protested, but it was too late, as my temper does not cool easily. I followed through on my threat: I spent about 10 minutes trying to learn perl, but I only got as far as learning how to write a few things, and never bothered to proceed to the part of the lessons where one reads Perl.
This caused Perl to become a bad language.
Guido, if you ever step on my foot, apologize. Or else.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read my third paragraph then you already know I'll assert "Windows is for 'rocket scientist' computer experts, not non-tech-savvy people," IN SPITE OF REALITY. I get that, ok? ;-) [I will write more half-truths below, because I'm bored and this is fun.]
Why should Google be limited to addressing how people did things in the 1990s (Windows) instead of the modern user, who doesn't have the time (or doesn't want to spend it) to research and analyze the risk of all the software they install? That's a job for repository maintainers. That's just how people decided to do things, a couple decades ago when they saw that the Windows approach wasn't working out for the common man (or the lazy expert).
If you're still running Windows, where doing things the hard way is your only option, then you are a bad ass motherfucker, with with a 5-digit-id, cyclopean computer capabilities, and risk assessment expertise such that you ought to have your own facts website. While some of us puny mortals occasionally see something cool on github and check it out and impulsively run it as our own uid, or we might do a plain http download from kernel.org without worrying that someone altered it in transit (actually I just checked and it looks like kernel.org switched to https quite some time ago) we don't always do that for everything; 99% my warez are straight out Ubuntu's repo, whitelisted by people I .. mmmostly trust.
By comparison, you Windows people are FEARLESS GODS.
All hail the fearless gods, the computer users who still do things the 1990s way.
But you must understand: Google isn't for you gods. It's for us. When you want someone dead, you just throw a lightning bolt at them, and here you are, bringing up some obscure point about how some electrical capacitance sources aren't working out all that great for you, with Star Trek technobabble-like talk of "scum polarity." We Google users, puny little mortals we are, normally don't blindly reach into the cosmic energy stores that You people do. When mortals discuss these things, we say "of course that is madness! Only the brave or suicidal, routinely tread there!"
To us, Google is something we use to read about something. Reading pages written to persuade us to install "bad" warez from our repositories, isn't really any different than reading pages written to persuade us to join Scientology. We have but one life, so in a way, I guess, a page telling us to do something foolish (e.g. install something called "greenshot" plus some scumware) is of less concern to us, because we protect the one life we have. You wouldn't understand, because you don't have to. There you are, with "scum polarity" lightning noisily crackling and flashing all over your hands (something that would have killed me a hundred times over!), grimacing with minor annoyance, looking for somewhere to spectacularly toss it, in an epic display of thunderous destruction that someone like me could only imagine, or else only witness in the very final moment of my single life.
REVEL IN YOUR POWER AND GLORY, FEARLESS GOD! We hail thine fearlessness! Is your situation really all that bad? So you installed some scumware. So what? The mere fact that you would (that you can) sightlessly leap into doing that, that you still run Windows, shows you're obviously not afraid and that you are above and beyond a certain thing that we little mortals call "personal consequences." So what's the problem?
Let's say you get married at the age of 15 in a state that allows it, and then move to a state where you're required to be 18 in order to get married. What happens?
Look that one up and you should have the answer to your own question, and I bet it'll be some hundred-year-old decision.
The "Left" once again upholds limited central government and states' rights. The "Right" once again argues (unsuccessfully) for central planning taking a larger role for the "common good" at the expense of individual liberty and states' rights to govern and set their own policies.
Three cheers for the Left (i.e. conservatives) winning again!
Non-tech-savvy users (and tech-savvy ones too, most of the time) should be looking for software in their repository, not on the web. When you pick Foo in Synaptic, you know you're getting the real Foo and it won't come with extra "scumware."
I realize not everyone can always use the repository; the guys who make the repo don't. Or sometimes you need something bleeding-edge. But those are relatively advanced cases, and even then, it's not like github likes to combine Foo with scumware. Scumware is its own project and you still wouldn't check it out unless that's what you were trying to do.
Like anything else worth saying, this is said half in jest and half dead serious. I realize you're talking about Windows, but maybe you really do need to be a rocket scientist to use Windows safely. Non-rocket-scientists should upgrade to something with a reasonable means of distributing applications. It's not 1995 anymore.
The question is "Can we go to the moon?" and that contains the implicit assumption that we left the moon.
Because the freest country is always going to necessarily be in conflict with its government. How could it ever possibly be any other way? Remember: if you're an American, then the American government is always one of your adversaries: not quite as hated as the British government, but probably more feared and loathed. "Necessary evil" and all that.
What matters is whether or not you're a person of interest. Does the US government have any reason it might want to harrass you?
If not, then you should be fine.
If so, then they'll find some reason to do so. Your music files or lack thereof, won't significantly modify the chances of this happening.
The law is irrelevant. And also supreme. You will almost certainly be breaking many laws, which nobody ever heard of, and almost never get enforced.
I think I can explain what happened.
First of all, this story is a dupe. It originally ran on April 1st, 1990. At the time, the story was about "System 6" but some recent tech media editor thought that meant "iOS 6" (I'll explain how the mistake happened, below). That explains the pre-mass-mainstream approach to passwords.
Secondly, even the 1990 story was a hoax. By the standards of the day, that was still such a stupid way to generate passwords, that no one would do it.
Third, the story was written by a guy who turned out to be working at Microsoft. The whole point of the hoax was to make the Newton tablet look stupid, a mis-engineered travesty designed by utterly clueless morons. The 2013 tech media editor saw "Newton" and knew that couldn't be right, which is how it became iOS. Newtons didn't really run System 6, but the original Microsoft author didn't know that.
In short, this is about stupidity that is so stupid, that people didn't do things that stupidly, even back when your mother hadn't heard of the Internet yet.
Just kidding. It's a modern story, but I just wanted to point out that even the most absurd bend-over-backward-to-rationalize-things explanation for behavior this stupid, still isn't very convincing. No field can distort reality to the required degree.
Good point. I always wondered why all the rich kids get to work as low-paid Wal-Mart greeters or burger flippers, while the poor ones are stuck with having to get jobs in management or legal. Now I finally understand why it's like that: only rich people can afford to work at Wal-Mart.
I never used it either. I don't say that to brag about ignorance (?!) but just to put this into context:
Every single description of Google Reader that I've read (keeping in mind that I've never tried it ; I realize this is a recipe for talking out of one's ass) make it sound utterly trivial, a product that any programmer could clone in an hour. It merges RSS feeds? Seriously? People are bent out of shape by that?!
Of course not. I know it can't merely be an RSS merger/splitter/etc which also happens to have a web page view of the resulting feed(s), but that's how everyone describes it. And when you read that it's hard to get motivated and curious to go see what it really is. ;-)
Hey wait, maybe I am bragging about ignorance. Nooo!! I'm bitching about the fact that no person has ever explained why anyone would give a damn about Google Reader and ever mentioned a single interesting or nontrivial aspect of it. Ever. Even here on Slashdot, nobody really says anything substantial about it. Google Marketing Fail. No wonder they're turning it off; they never turned it on, in the business sense.
I'm not saying the games were scarce; I'm saying they were irrelevant and relatively few gamers saw them. I'm saying that prior to Doom 1, if you played lots of games, you very likely didn't use an x86 box running a Microsoft OS do to it. You did that on your Atart ST or Amiga or (non-MS) console. You'd even be more likely to game on a Mac, than an x86 box running MSDOS.
Gaming on MSDOS in 1992 marked you as much an edge-case weirdo, as someone who did their word processing on Linux in 1997.
Microsoft's market share among gamers was negligible. And now it's not.
Some people mention modern Windows gaming, and ok, I shouldn't say Microsoft built that from nothing or didn't unfairly leverage anything for it. Correction acknowledged. That is the evil Microsoft we all know and hate.
But the Xbox: that was from scratch. Give Microsoft some credit. It's closed system so I wouldn't buy one or say it's not evil or anything like that, but they did build the marketshare (relatively) fair and square, and they literally compete against competitors, and with no unusual-in-the-industry tricks against users to manipulate them into buying in.
That's highly unusual for Microsoft, and not the same Microsoft that all computer people normally curse repeatedly throughout their days, as an enemy of technological innovation, its users, and the market which supports them both. You can still call 'em a force for evil if you want, but don't call 'em a dishonorable one, or one that government should be singling out and prosecuting alone, or anything like that. It's a whole other thing.
No, I don't. :-)
Ok, I remember (most) of it, but I don't remember any of it as ever having been relevant or being a significant aspect of the gaming market. I remember the Pac Man clone I wrote for my 8-bit but that doesn't mean it had an impact on anyone. Same for Microsoft and pre-Doom gaming.
The market for both series of products, is that you don't add anything. Use the on-CPU graphics. If you are using a graphics card instead of the integrated graphics, then neither Haswell or Richland is of interest to you. You have a Sandy Bridge-E or a non-APU AMD equivalent, which you're using along with the graphics card.
Ya know, I have to give Microsoft some credit on one thing: they were not always big in gaming, nor did they leverage their way into it, from what I've seen. That's a pretty recent phenomenon. Back when people were complaining about their PC coming with a "free" copy of Windows 3.1 that they didn't want, and which just provided a counter-incentive for upgrading to OS/2 or whatever, Microsoft wasn't in the console business. They had a few games, but were overall very easy to ignore. You didn't even have to run their OS; there was a time when an x86 box with MSDOS was pretty much only good for playing Doom 1.
By the time the XBox came along, many of us had only just recently gotten out of having to use Windows for business. I realize not everyone did, so Microsoft's position in the two different markets could seem contemporary, but they're not. You're talking about two different (but overlapping) eras.
It's pretty amazing MS built that from nothing, or amazing that we let them, as we all knew it would have to be unhealthy for everyone, long-term.
Things come and go. They used to look unbeatable in business, and nowdays there's nothing weird about a business which contains not a single Microsoft license of any kind.
That means Microsoft can be beat in gaming too, but beware, for it also means they could use their immense assets to quickly buy a lead position somewhere else. Who knows, maybe in 2023 we'll all be bitching about their unbeatable position in automobiles or nonalcoholic beverages or electricity or wheat or tribbles or Harry Potter prequel TV episodes.
..the same exact thing. Their site won't work unless you download and execute their proprietary javascript, thereby creating a specific environment within your browser.
A more careful (and slightly more believable as well) analogy would be that the municipal government's site only works with MSIE 6 running on Windows XP, but they do have a download link to a free-as-in-beer VM image which contains that software (And they expect everyone to use that VM, even people who already have Windows.) You're apparently allowed to click the link and use the VM image, but what exactly you're really allowed to do with it, is murky unless you research it.
Lawyers working at FSF looked into it, and found out that you're not allowed to improve, repair, or otherwise maintain this code which is required to use this taxpayer-funded government service. If it has a bug (or malicious bit) which happens to exploit your VM containment, then sucks-to-be-you: your only two legal recourses are 1) to fix your VM instead of removing the exploit itself, and just live with the hostile code constantly probing your containment. [and I'll admit that's a good idea nevertheless.] 2) Or completely replace the entire environment (what Berkeley did to AT&T's Unix) since you aren't allowed to create derived works ; make your custom WINE environment do whatever is needed to interoperate with the government's service. If that means implementing some MSIE6 bugs, so be it.
And on the topic of whether or not Microsoft and Adobe have actually consented to you downloading and using that VM, the lawyers can't even find a solid answer (Microsoft and the webmaster probably did negotiate some kind of license, but neither of them ever happened to tell you anything about it) so the lawyers are tempted to assume that copyright law prohibits you using the VM. If Microsoft ever did happen to sue you over it, could you prove you were allowed to copy that VM?
If I were your wife, I would cease to be so, immediately after the third time you said "Sorry, cat burned the house down again when he rubbed up against my model rocket."
Why would I ever want some website's opinion about that? I wouldn't even trust a judge's website to correctly guess my decision in the matter of what code I allow my computer to run. Asking websites' opinions just implies they could possibly have a say (or even a vote) in the matter, which is of course completely preposterous.
The movie came out in the 1970s. If Navajos haven't still added those words to their language yet, then we (white men) will. YOUR CULTURE VILL BE PRESERVED!
What's wrong with rent-seeking? I live in a country which has taxes, and every single one of them is rent-seeking. Most of them are widely supported by broad expanses of the voting populace who happen to disagree on many other things. Rent-seeking is something that most people expect governments to do, and they complain about deficits and debt if the government negligently fails to do enough of it.
If someone isn't grumbling about the unfair tax or fee they're paying, then either you're doing it wrong, or else your government provides absolutely no welfare state, law enforcement, or defense.
If Democrats or Republicans (and also Greens and possibly some big-L Libertarians) ran Nepal, the difference is that instead of banning the guy for ten years, they would have found a way to collect the money, instead. Look down on Nepal for that: a lame AR department who loses and then cries and takes their ball home.
Huh? It doesn't surprise me at all, that Bram Cohen didn't think to make torrent files executable (or that no one I've heard of, ever extended them to make executing part of them become a requirement). If it were possible for torrents to be infected, they never would have become popular (because they would have been a fundamentally too stupid of an idea) and we'd be talking about some other scheme which fills the same niche, right now.
People sometimes say "security is hard" and they do have a point, but sometimes adding security holes can be hard too, or at least hard enough that designers don't bother to do it by default.
That's why we need laws like CALEA. ;-)
No doubt the law MPAA is trying to buy, would have some aspect to it where whether people pirate or not, everyone would be required to be compatible with the malware. They'd probably want some kind of system where everyone's fileserver is required to poll the MPAA malware server for self-destruct orders, and anyone manufacturing or selling or trafficking in secure computers, would be in violation. Then they'd go further and make the self-destruct polling protocol obscure or require a non-free trade secret license, just to remind everyone "insecurity is hard."
But the mystique of "syndrome" make is scarier! Do you want to live in a world without fear?
You're right.
Week 1: 0 , Week 2: 0 , Week 3: 77TB , Week 4: 0
Week 1: 19TB , Week 2: 20TB , Week 3: 19TB , Week 4: 19TB
The continuously-using user is easier to plan and handle than the sporadic user, less disruptive to other customers. You're right that there's a difference.
I thought this user was alleged to be a continuous user. So it raises questions as to why Verizon called him. Maybe Ars misinformed us about what this guy was really doing.
And flat-Earthers accept that the Earth looks round in the exceptional and unimportant case of viewing the planet from the moon.
My E-meter measured it! Measured evidence, isn't that what every scientician respects?
Yes, it does. I was walking down the street one day, and a guy named Larry Wall stepped on my foot. He refused to apologize.
I vowed vengeance, and told him I was going to mis-learn his language. "No. No, no!" he protested, but it was too late, as my temper does not cool easily. I followed through on my threat: I spent about 10 minutes trying to learn perl, but I only got as far as learning how to write a few things, and never bothered to proceed to the part of the lessons where one reads Perl.
This caused Perl to become a bad language.
Guido, if you ever step on my foot, apologize. Or else.