Good idea. I'm in my shop cutting wood on the table saw. The power company sees that my neighborhood is due for a blackout, so they turn off the lights in the shop (which has a higher draw averaged over time since the saw is only on 2% of the time). Brilliant! How about they turn off my fridge for a few hours after I go shopping? What about the garage door opener? I bet if they did this, someone would die the first day.
Just raise the damn price during the day. People will change all by themselves.
Ever presented something important to a client and wished that the device you were the only one able to control your presentation? You aren't, the communications protocol is 30 years old and remains unchanged. The problem here is that the manufacturers refuse to update their control systems which are woefully inadequate for our "connected society". Ever wonder why your grandmother can't figure out how to go from watching cable TV to playing a DVD at someone else's house? Ever wonder why you buy a third party remote to get rid of the pile of remotes in the living room, yet you still need to use the Tivo remote for the Tivo because the universal remote just isn't good enough?
They have been making their customers put up with this crap for ever and now it finally caused them one percent of the grief that it causes their customers every day. Good!!! Now go fix it.
This problem is easily fixable and this should be seen as a wake up call for better control systems in AV equipment. BTW, I'll bet that most of them aren't as mad that their presentations were interrupted than they were that someone just issued a huge public reminder that IR remotes suck in their current form.
Actually, I kope this makes the manufacturers realizes that they sell $3000 TVs with $2 worth of control equipment in them. The marketing department has backed them into this situation. The marketing department can't figure out how to sell a "control port" on a device, and when they do occasionally find some use for it, they use it for competitor (and customer) lock-out.
With all of the advances that have been made in consumer electronics, the ability to control a device hasn't changed in twenty years. Today, it is difficult to find a TV or projector that has a discreet on and off remote signal and a source selecter that has one command for each source instead of a "Next input" button on the remote. My TV is even worse, the first press of "Next input" display the input on the screen, the next press changes it, if the second press is made while the display is still showing.
The problems that the presenters had at CES is exactly the problems that anyone who tries to automate their AV equipment faces every day -- no ability to reliably set and hold the state of a device. I hope they solve this problem by putting $5 worth of control electronics into each $3000 TV, write some documentation, and make the world a better place for people like me.
Why not have an Ethernet port on the back of the TV and allow telnet control? Or even better, allow push streaming to the TV!!!!
So, what is wrong with the free-as-in-beer SQL 2005 Express Edition? It has all of the core features of SQL 2005. Nobody doing MS stuff has recommended Jet for almost ten years now. Even Access broke it's strong ties to Jet in 2000. For small systems, SQL Express is far better than MySQL and equal to Oracle.
Do you think each car waited in line for 20 minutes while the customs official looked up their ID information on the computer? This will shave about 2 seconds off the process. They spent all that time while the travelers tried to convince the official that they were legitimate tourists/regular people instead of smugglers or terrorists. I don't see how pre-fetching their arrest record and their date of birth is going to make it any better.
Last time I went across the rainbow bridge I got a ten minute lecture about how I didn't bring enough documentation with me to get back home. On the way home, the guy spent one minute with me and let me go.
Not me. I'm staying away from all hi-def content until I can upgrade and keep my existing functionality. I have a multiple front-end MythTV system where I can record any program from any room or over the Internet and watch them in any room or over the Internet. I can also rip my DVD collection to the system to watch whenever and however I want.
When I can do that with HD, then I'll switch. Two of my TVs are already HD ready, I just need content (today's content doesn't count).
I have two Seiko titanium watches and a titanium wedding band. My experience is similar to yours. Although I didn't see them as quite as expensive as you do. My ring is cheaper than a gold ring of equivalent design, and I got the second watch for a little over $100 to use as a backup while the first is in the shop (second time unfortunately, but Seiko has been really good with me about fixing it for little or no charge and it's 10 years old).
That's only because the idiot politicians that developed this bill also stopped the movement to nuclear power 30 years ago. Had they not stopped back then, no mercury would go into powering an incandescent bulb. Fix that problem and CFLs look bad again from a mercury perspective.
The only places I can buy CFLs locally are the supermarket, Home Depot, Lowe's, WalMart, or Target. None of them carry dimmable CFLs.
I recently spent about $3000 in light switches in my Home Automation project. They are all dimmable. I have around 100 incandescent bulbs in my house and I dim them all regularly. I really like having a good light level for regular room use, and a brighter mode for cleaning. To do this, I set the initial dim level to a carefully chosen value and then I can go to full brightness at any time.
So, now it looks like I'm going to have to spend a small fortune or get rid of a lot of the lighting features I enjoy. This is just like the HDTV switch. With standard-def TV, I could tape things in the bedroom and watch them in the living room. Now, in the oh-so-wonderful future, I have lost a lot of features.
It would have been much better to have mandated eneergy usage levels, rather than mandated types of bulbs. The real winner is going to be LED eventually, but if the CFL industry gets enough government support, LED research will be slow and CFL manufacturers will have no reason to look for alternatives. In the end, we are all going to lose because the government feels the need to do something now, instead of plan for the future.
.Net programs have a feature called "Code Access Security" that give an executable a very specific set of permissions. For example -- by default, you cannot run a.Net program that does anything beyond create windows if you launch it from a network share or the Internet. This was introduced in 2001.
If everyone doubled the distance between themselves and the car in front of them, then the road capacity at a given speed would be cut in half. This is because the volume (in cars per unit time) is a given. Due to fixed speed limits, the road would hit maximum capacity at half the volume of the tailgating driver model. Once maximum capacity is hit, stuff starts to fall apart. If the drivers stay polite, then the on-ramps become parking lots. If the drivers start to close the gaps between each other, then they start to slow down due to micro-mistake being made more frequently. Interestingly, this slowing down doesn't reduce capacity, it just allows the road to "buffer" more cars. The buffering is necessary to keep the surface streets clear. So, your strategy will get you home faster, but will delay the guy behind you because he can't get on the road. If the 30 thousand people in front of you followed the same strategy you do, then you'd be just as late, but you'd spend most of the time trying to get on the freeway, then very little time getting the rest of the way home.
The only way to make the situation better is to have a better trained driving population. Better trained drivers are able to drive fast while packed tightly without making many mistakes. Drive on the 405 in L.A. some day and you'll see 1 million people doing a pretty good job of not clogging up the road. Drive the 95 between NY and Boston and watch the idiot drivers cause backup after backup at a lower volume. All you people who live in LA are going to tell me I'm nuts and you drive with idiots every day. Trust me, the rest of the country drives far worse than your local idiots.
Please, tell me what the cost to foreign policy and national security is. We seem to have a good record of protecting our people even when we make bad descisions that provoke those that intend to harm us. Car insurance costs me $300 a year for full coverage (heck, my 196mph motorcycle only costs $350 a year for full coverage). My car costs about $7000 a year including fuel, maintenance, and insurance. If I denied myself my new car every 4 years habit and drove used cars, I could shave that to $4000 a year. I pay no money to park at work or at home and have no trouble or hassle finding a spot. I save $2500 a year just on the cab fare I'd pay to buy groceries (no stores near my house). I get to see my parents at least once a week due to owning a car. Selling my car would be a terrible financial and lifestyle choice for me. 100 million Americans living in the suburbs are in the same situation I am in.
You could certainly argue that the US is designed horribly, but you cannot successfully argue that Americans should simply "take the bus" to fix the problem. We'd have to completely change how we design, build, and sell housing in this country. It would take at least a generation for these changes to have any significant benefits.
When EFS was introduced in Windows 2000, there was no recovery agent until you went out of your way to create one. By popular demand, they made this concession in XP. Like nearly every other security flaw in Windows, this one was invented by the marketing department.
Besides, who says you have to give Circuit City the password for "Administrator"? Create a new admin just for CC and delete it when you get the computer back. You wouldn't want to give them a real password anyways.
Actually, if you are using Windows properly, EFS works well.
Your regular user is the one that encrypts the files. You'd have to give Circuit City the password for an admin account in order for them to install a DVD drive. That admin account would have no access to the encrypted files. Even a regular user following one simple security rule -- "Don't run stuff as an admin" -- would be impervious to this information leak.
But, my Honda Civic has all those things. I traded in a full-size pickup for my Civic and I'm safer in a crash today than when I drove my Dodge Ram 1500. Also, I here people saying they need four wheel drive for snow driving around here in Western NY (Buffalo area). It's not true. Every car on the road has four wheel traction and four wheel braking. The only disadvantage of 2WD is that you might get stuck in your driveway. Just shovel the driveway and that problem goes away. 90% of the snow accidents I see are from people sliding off the road sideways or rear-ending the car in front of them. 4WD doesn't give you the ability to stick to slippery curves in the road or stop any better than my Civic.
One real problem with car-truck collisions is that trucks have bumpers that are higher than the bumpers of cars. This really needs to be adressed either by new laws or by the insurance companies factoring this into the premiums of truck drivers (which will happen all by itself eventually if the laws aren't created).
Until there is a small bug in one of your re-writes and a maintenance programmer sees the change to feature X was made on a project designed to fix feature Y.
Where I work risk analysis is a big deal. If the PMs knew I was changing that much stuff, they would rightly throw a fit and ask for two extra months of testing.
If you are going to to do a re-write to decrease maintenance needs in the future, sell the project as such. Otherwise the wrong person is in charge. Programmers shouldn't be sneaking in pet projects on the customer's (or the business unit's) dime.
Publishers are not paid to publish ads. Publishers are paid to get people to read the ads. The non-spoken agreement of a review is that it will be an opinion piece about a product. If that non-spoken agreement is violated too many times, the advertisers won't have anyone reading their ads and they will stop paying for them.
So, yes I expect a for-profit publisher to stand up for their reviewers and editors in the face of blatant fact minipulation. Publishing reviews that are basically ads will drive down readership (at least among those who do a lot of buying) and cost as much money as lost ads.
When we learn that a publisher that we trusted to perform this delicate balance is taking the easy way out and relying on the fact the we won't notice, we get very upset. It is not naive to belive the publisher will stand up to advertisers. It is naive for publishers to believe that we won't find out and that it won't cost them money.
I my neighborhood, you'd spend an extra $400 per month in County taxes and $400 in School taxes. If you only put down 5%, add another $100 for mortgage insurance and you are over $2000 a month. Yes, all those number are for a $200,000 house.
Also, a 60K IT job is pretty rare around here. Very few are making that much. However, the average garbage man makes $55K in my town and works at most 5 hours a day.
and it is highly unlikely that the ISPs will ever become more generous in what they give the consumer.
Are you suggesting that Internet access speeds will become slower over the next ten to twenty years? FIOS is being installed in my city as we speak. I'm pretty sure that my ISP is going to become more generous to me next year. A little more money, a lot more bandwidth.
Which makes you more generous, giving to the point that it financially hurts you, or writing the biggest check?
Bill Gates minus 30 billion dollars equals the tenth richest man in America. No skin off his nose. The average American giving twenty thousand dollars would be a much more generous person. If you wanted to take a cynical look at it, you could come to the conclusion that BG is buying some credibility so he can get into the history books in a better light, or so he could rub elbows with the people who wouldn't talk to him 20 yesrs ago.
Sure, the fact that BG gave the money is a credit to his character. But it doesn't make him a "good" person all by itself.
There's an easy variation of that. Just get private number blocking. 99% of the telemarketers that used to call me came up as "UNKNOWN NUMBER". The only way to come up as unknow to a subscriber that has private call blocking is if the source line doesn't support caller ID. It turns out that the only lines in the civilized world that don't support caller ID are those lines that paid to have service put in that way -- telemarketers. The calls eventually stopped after I stopped answering them. I'm probably on a "dead numbers" list that companies buy from each other.
Corparate users don't use Windows Update. They use a product that allows admins to allow or deny any specific update before it gets to the desktop called WSUS.
If the problem is corporate, then why are most botnet members cable modem or DSL home users?
Another thing to consider is how copy protection affects the behavior of a program. More sophisticated schemes will do stuff that is bad for business environments and bad for customers who actually manage their security well.
So, you really have to choose. If you want to sell your software to businesses and professionals, you really can't do several things; scan the hardware for something unique, write to "hidden" areas of the system, write to anywhere a normal user can't write, initiate random and/or non-standard communication streams. This means that at most you can do an install key, and maybe you can get away with online activation or online key validation. Anything else makes your software harder to manage and forces admins to reduce the security on their system just so your software can run.
If you want to sell to consumers, then all of the evil and sloppy techniques are on the table; tying an installation to a hardware signature, periodic re-validation, maybe even special services or hardware. The movement of a lot of users to Vista over the next few years is going to make that change a bit, however. The most egregious violations are going to cause support issues for even home users.
Probably the simplest method is to compile each distribution specifically for each customer. When you find it on the Internet, you'll know who put it there. Make it very clear to users at purchase or install time that their copy is unique and traceable and then the users will become part of your police force.
Correct. The government already had a lot of tools at their disposal and a lot of untapped power. They didn't need to take any more of anyone's liberty to fight terror effectively. Most of the problems that allowed 9/11 to happen were internal and solvable.
In order for me to agree to give up any rights for more security, I'd ask for some of the previously taken rights to be given back.
With that in mind, the web page is on a private server which is open to the public. However, the owner of the machine has every right to block users who do not allow for advertisements.
That's fine. But, how much of a right does the website operator have to try to pry open my computer as much as he possibly can in order to verify that I am seeing his ads. Most of these guys think that any tactic is justified. They need to remember that they are using my hardware to do the validation.
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Good idea. I'm in my shop cutting wood on the table saw. The power company sees that my neighborhood is due for a blackout, so they turn off the lights in the shop (which has a higher draw averaged over time since the saw is only on 2% of the time). Brilliant! How about they turn off my fridge for a few hours after I go shopping? What about the garage door opener? I bet if they did this, someone would die the first day.
Just raise the damn price during the day. People will change all by themselves.
Ever presented something important to a client and wished that the device you were the only one able to control your presentation? You aren't, the communications protocol is 30 years old and remains unchanged. The problem here is that the manufacturers refuse to update their control systems which are woefully inadequate for our "connected society". Ever wonder why your grandmother can't figure out how to go from watching cable TV to playing a DVD at someone else's house? Ever wonder why you buy a third party remote to get rid of the pile of remotes in the living room, yet you still need to use the Tivo remote for the Tivo because the universal remote just isn't good enough?
They have been making their customers put up with this crap for ever and now it finally caused them one percent of the grief that it causes their customers every day. Good!!! Now go fix it.
This problem is easily fixable and this should be seen as a wake up call for better control systems in AV equipment. BTW, I'll bet that most of them aren't as mad that their presentations were interrupted than they were that someone just issued a huge public reminder that IR remotes suck in their current form.
Actually, I kope this makes the manufacturers realizes that they sell $3000 TVs with $2 worth of control equipment in them. The marketing department has backed them into this situation. The marketing department can't figure out how to sell a "control port" on a device, and when they do occasionally find some use for it, they use it for competitor (and customer) lock-out.
With all of the advances that have been made in consumer electronics, the ability to control a device hasn't changed in twenty years. Today, it is difficult to find a TV or projector that has a discreet on and off remote signal and a source selecter that has one command for each source instead of a "Next input" button on the remote. My TV is even worse, the first press of "Next input" display the input on the screen, the next press changes it, if the second press is made while the display is still showing.
The problems that the presenters had at CES is exactly the problems that anyone who tries to automate their AV equipment faces every day -- no ability to reliably set and hold the state of a device. I hope they solve this problem by putting $5 worth of control electronics into each $3000 TV, write some documentation, and make the world a better place for people like me.
Why not have an Ethernet port on the back of the TV and allow telnet control? Or even better, allow push streaming to the TV!!!!
So, what is wrong with the free-as-in-beer SQL 2005 Express Edition? It has all of the core features of SQL 2005. Nobody doing MS stuff has recommended Jet for almost ten years now. Even Access broke it's strong ties to Jet in 2000. For small systems, SQL Express is far better than MySQL and equal to Oracle.
Do you think each car waited in line for 20 minutes while the customs official looked up their ID information on the computer? This will shave about 2 seconds off the process. They spent all that time while the travelers tried to convince the official that they were legitimate tourists/regular people instead of smugglers or terrorists. I don't see how pre-fetching their arrest record and their date of birth is going to make it any better.
Last time I went across the rainbow bridge I got a ten minute lecture about how I didn't bring enough documentation with me to get back home. On the way home, the guy spent one minute with me and let me go.
Not me. I'm staying away from all hi-def content until I can upgrade and keep my existing functionality. I have a multiple front-end MythTV system where I can record any program from any room or over the Internet and watch them in any room or over the Internet. I can also rip my DVD collection to the system to watch whenever and however I want.
When I can do that with HD, then I'll switch. Two of my TVs are already HD ready, I just need content (today's content doesn't count).
I have two Seiko titanium watches and a titanium wedding band. My experience is similar to yours. Although I didn't see them as quite as expensive as you do. My ring is cheaper than a gold ring of equivalent design, and I got the second watch for a little over $100 to use as a backup while the first is in the shop (second time unfortunately, but Seiko has been really good with me about fixing it for little or no charge and it's 10 years old).
That's only because the idiot politicians that developed this bill also stopped the movement to nuclear power 30 years ago. Had they not stopped back then, no mercury would go into powering an incandescent bulb. Fix that problem and CFLs look bad again from a mercury perspective.
The only places I can buy CFLs locally are the supermarket, Home Depot, Lowe's, WalMart, or Target. None of them carry dimmable CFLs.
I recently spent about $3000 in light switches in my Home Automation project. They are all dimmable. I have around 100 incandescent bulbs in my house and I dim them all regularly. I really like having a good light level for regular room use, and a brighter mode for cleaning. To do this, I set the initial dim level to a carefully chosen value and then I can go to full brightness at any time.
So, now it looks like I'm going to have to spend a small fortune or get rid of a lot of the lighting features I enjoy. This is just like the HDTV switch. With standard-def TV, I could tape things in the bedroom and watch them in the living room. Now, in the oh-so-wonderful future, I have lost a lot of features.
It would have been much better to have mandated eneergy usage levels, rather than mandated types of bulbs. The real winner is going to be LED eventually, but if the CFL industry gets enough government support, LED research will be slow and CFL manufacturers will have no reason to look for alternatives. In the end, we are all going to lose because the government feels the need to do something now, instead of plan for the future.
.Net programs have a feature called "Code Access Security" that give an executable a very specific set of permissions. For example -- by default, you cannot run a .Net program that does anything beyond create windows if you launch it from a network share or the Internet. This was introduced in 2001.
If everyone doubled the distance between themselves and the car in front of them, then the road capacity at a given speed would be cut in half. This is because the volume (in cars per unit time) is a given. Due to fixed speed limits, the road would hit maximum capacity at half the volume of the tailgating driver model. Once maximum capacity is hit, stuff starts to fall apart. If the drivers stay polite, then the on-ramps become parking lots. If the drivers start to close the gaps between each other, then they start to slow down due to micro-mistake being made more frequently. Interestingly, this slowing down doesn't reduce capacity, it just allows the road to "buffer" more cars. The buffering is necessary to keep the surface streets clear. So, your strategy will get you home faster, but will delay the guy behind you because he can't get on the road. If the 30 thousand people in front of you followed the same strategy you do, then you'd be just as late, but you'd spend most of the time trying to get on the freeway, then very little time getting the rest of the way home.
The only way to make the situation better is to have a better trained driving population. Better trained drivers are able to drive fast while packed tightly without making many mistakes. Drive on the 405 in L.A. some day and you'll see 1 million people doing a pretty good job of not clogging up the road. Drive the 95 between NY and Boston and watch the idiot drivers cause backup after backup at a lower volume. All you people who live in LA are going to tell me I'm nuts and you drive with idiots every day. Trust me, the rest of the country drives far worse than your local idiots.
Please, tell me what the cost to foreign policy and national security is. We seem to have a good record of protecting our people even when we make bad descisions that provoke those that intend to harm us. Car insurance costs me $300 a year for full coverage (heck, my 196mph motorcycle only costs $350 a year for full coverage). My car costs about $7000 a year including fuel, maintenance, and insurance. If I denied myself my new car every 4 years habit and drove used cars, I could shave that to $4000 a year. I pay no money to park at work or at home and have no trouble or hassle finding a spot. I save $2500 a year just on the cab fare I'd pay to buy groceries (no stores near my house). I get to see my parents at least once a week due to owning a car. Selling my car would be a terrible financial and lifestyle choice for me. 100 million Americans living in the suburbs are in the same situation I am in.
You could certainly argue that the US is designed horribly, but you cannot successfully argue that Americans should simply "take the bus" to fix the problem. We'd have to completely change how we design, build, and sell housing in this country. It would take at least a generation for these changes to have any significant benefits.
When EFS was introduced in Windows 2000, there was no recovery agent until you went out of your way to create one. By popular demand, they made this concession in XP. Like nearly every other security flaw in Windows, this one was invented by the marketing department.
Besides, who says you have to give Circuit City the password for "Administrator"? Create a new admin just for CC and delete it when you get the computer back. You wouldn't want to give them a real password anyways.
Actually, if you are using Windows properly, EFS works well.
Your regular user is the one that encrypts the files. You'd have to give Circuit City the password for an admin account in order for them to install a DVD drive. That admin account would have no access to the encrypted files. Even a regular user following one simple security rule -- "Don't run stuff as an admin" -- would be impervious to this information leak.
But, my Honda Civic has all those things. I traded in a full-size pickup for my Civic and I'm safer in a crash today than when I drove my Dodge Ram 1500. Also, I here people saying they need four wheel drive for snow driving around here in Western NY (Buffalo area). It's not true. Every car on the road has four wheel traction and four wheel braking. The only disadvantage of 2WD is that you might get stuck in your driveway. Just shovel the driveway and that problem goes away. 90% of the snow accidents I see are from people sliding off the road sideways or rear-ending the car in front of them. 4WD doesn't give you the ability to stick to slippery curves in the road or stop any better than my Civic.
One real problem with car-truck collisions is that trucks have bumpers that are higher than the bumpers of cars. This really needs to be adressed either by new laws or by the insurance companies factoring this into the premiums of truck drivers (which will happen all by itself eventually if the laws aren't created).
Until there is a small bug in one of your re-writes and a maintenance programmer sees the change to feature X was made on a project designed to fix feature Y.
Where I work risk analysis is a big deal. If the PMs knew I was changing that much stuff, they would rightly throw a fit and ask for two extra months of testing.
If you are going to to do a re-write to decrease maintenance needs in the future, sell the project as such. Otherwise the wrong person is in charge. Programmers shouldn't be sneaking in pet projects on the customer's (or the business unit's) dime.
Publishers are not paid to publish ads. Publishers are paid to get people to read the ads. The non-spoken agreement of a review is that it will be an opinion piece about a product. If that non-spoken agreement is violated too many times, the advertisers won't have anyone reading their ads and they will stop paying for them.
So, yes I expect a for-profit publisher to stand up for their reviewers and editors in the face of blatant fact minipulation. Publishing reviews that are basically ads will drive down readership (at least among those who do a lot of buying) and cost as much money as lost ads.
When we learn that a publisher that we trusted to perform this delicate balance is taking the easy way out and relying on the fact the we won't notice, we get very upset. It is not naive to belive the publisher will stand up to advertisers. It is naive for publishers to believe that we won't find out and that it won't cost them money.
I my neighborhood, you'd spend an extra $400 per month in County taxes and $400 in School taxes. If you only put down 5%, add another $100 for mortgage insurance and you are over $2000 a month. Yes, all those number are for a $200,000 house.
Also, a 60K IT job is pretty rare around here. Very few are making that much. However, the average garbage man makes $55K in my town and works at most 5 hours a day.
and it is highly unlikely that the ISPs will ever become more generous in what they give the consumer.
Are you suggesting that Internet access speeds will become slower over the next ten to twenty years? FIOS is being installed in my city as we speak. I'm pretty sure that my ISP is going to become more generous to me next year. A little more money, a lot more bandwidth.
Which makes you more generous, giving to the point that it financially hurts you, or writing the biggest check?
Bill Gates minus 30 billion dollars equals the tenth richest man in America. No skin off his nose. The average American giving twenty thousand dollars would be a much more generous person. If you wanted to take a cynical look at it, you could come to the conclusion that BG is buying some credibility so he can get into the history books in a better light, or so he could rub elbows with the people who wouldn't talk to him 20 yesrs ago.
Sure, the fact that BG gave the money is a credit to his character. But it doesn't make him a "good" person all by itself.
There's an easy variation of that. Just get private number blocking. 99% of the telemarketers that used to call me came up as "UNKNOWN NUMBER". The only way to come up as unknow to a subscriber that has private call blocking is if the source line doesn't support caller ID. It turns out that the only lines in the civilized world that don't support caller ID are those lines that paid to have service put in that way -- telemarketers. The calls eventually stopped after I stopped answering them. I'm probably on a "dead numbers" list that companies buy from each other.
Corparate users don't use Windows Update. They use a product that allows admins to allow or deny any specific update before it gets to the desktop called WSUS.
If the problem is corporate, then why are most botnet members cable modem or DSL home users?
Another thing to consider is how copy protection affects the behavior of a program. More sophisticated schemes will do stuff that is bad for business environments and bad for customers who actually manage their security well.
So, you really have to choose. If you want to sell your software to businesses and professionals, you really can't do several things; scan the hardware for something unique, write to "hidden" areas of the system, write to anywhere a normal user can't write, initiate random and/or non-standard communication streams. This means that at most you can do an install key, and maybe you can get away with online activation or online key validation. Anything else makes your software harder to manage and forces admins to reduce the security on their system just so your software can run.
If you want to sell to consumers, then all of the evil and sloppy techniques are on the table; tying an installation to a hardware signature, periodic re-validation, maybe even special services or hardware. The movement of a lot of users to Vista over the next few years is going to make that change a bit, however. The most egregious violations are going to cause support issues for even home users.
Probably the simplest method is to compile each distribution specifically for each customer. When you find it on the Internet, you'll know who put it there. Make it very clear to users at purchase or install time that their copy is unique and traceable and then the users will become part of your police force.
Correct. The government already had a lot of tools at their disposal and a lot of untapped power. They didn't need to take any more of anyone's liberty to fight terror effectively. Most of the problems that allowed 9/11 to happen were internal and solvable.
In order for me to agree to give up any rights for more security, I'd ask for some of the previously taken rights to be given back.
With that in mind, the web page is on a private server which is open to the public. However, the owner of the machine has every right to block users who do not allow for advertisements.
That's fine. But, how much of a right does the website operator have to try to pry open my computer as much as he possibly can in order to verify that I am seeing his ads. Most of these guys think that any tactic is justified. They need to remember that they are using my hardware to do the validation.