Well, concerning your quote: They are certainly lifting some fingers. You can have a very stable BSD-like kernel (Darwin) without the Aqua overlay (but you're free to load KDE or Gnome on there) for free, no strings attached, code and all. Webkit got very good feedback from Apple. Apple has been working together with FOSS projects, finding and fixing bugs. I currently use XCode for one of my FOSS projects and imho it's better than Eclipse, it's free. There is a lot of source open and very well built SDK's for iTunes, Final Cut, Aperture that allow you to do a lot of things.
There are certain things that Apple does indeed keeps closed but a lot (the parts you need to interface with as a developer or you need to review as a security analyst) is usually very open.
What the f* does WordPad have to do with anything remotely exploitable. How do you even make a bug there, it's a CS students first year project to make a text editor? I mean, it was a running joke that the only things not exploited in Windows were Calculator, Notepad and Wordpad but this just tops it. Also. How do you exploit it? Do you suggest somebody to copy/paste a piece of text or do you send them a malformed.txt file?
I recently researched DNSSEC and I was going to implement it in my environment until I read the downfalls:
1) Traffic for the signing of records would increase exponentially because to establish the authenticity you'd have to contact the originating server and do a PKI-like transaction (that's expensive). In it's current form, forcing DNSSEC throughout the world would effectively bring down the root DNS servers as well as many others 2) Because of 1) caching DNS servers would be less useful since you'd have to contact the original for the keys anyway. This also introduces the problem that if all the original DNS are unreachable for whatever reason the whole zone would become unusable whereas now they have been cached. 3) There is an attack vector where by using the no-record responses somebody can obtain the whole zone even if you didn't intend to publish it
The problems with DNS are the same as the problems with SMTP and IPv4: - The problems were there from the start and the protocol wasn't designed with current threats in mind. Fixing it would effectively break it. - The only solution is to build up a new system parallel to it and introduce it without anyone noticing - The usable solutions are only temporary patches that make it more difficult to use become quickly reduced to the above 2 problems - There are multiple solutions from separate entities with their own agendas. Choosing one over the other has it's own flaws and is sometimes not even feasible.
Well, what you have to understand is that in general, people coming out of school know absolutely nothing about anything. That's especially in the computer sciences/engineering. As was asserted above, somebody has to take them under their wings to train them or the student himself has to be motivated to work himself on something in the field he wants to work on (like bug fixing in an open source project).
In my opinion there are too many people like quite a few of my friends and family members that noticed I could make a lot of money with my computer skills (programming and selling computers and websites at 16) thinking to make an easy buck with the 'computer'. Computers are fairly simple and straightforward, even programming is just like learning the periodic table it's simple. It's the mixing of components in the right order and with the right skill just as in chemistry that makes a computer run and that's what no school seems to learn. Those students come out of school disillusioned and hope to sell their services to the highest bidder and then they're disillusioned again that the market doesn't want them because while they were in school the market changed and what they started learning ended up being deprecated.
I have not been in higher education, so I consider myself having 4-6 years more experience than my buddies who did go to college/university. They are currently still looking for jobs, some turned around and got a job in something completely different (and boring), some went back to school and some are flipping burgers or answering phones at a help desk. I on the other hand worked and got my hands dirty and while they were in school learning Windows NT, scratched Java's head and wrote hello world in C++, the Mac OS desktop revolution came, the VoIP and mobile revolution came, RAID-arrays became SANs, Linux and FOSS became mainstream in servers, C# and ObjC became accepted and I got experience in most of it while they still have to read up on it.
I thought the masterminds of 9/11 was Bin Laden or some other nutcase somewhere else. All I know these 'masterminds' they're talking about is media fluff and makes the US looks good but all they did was carry out the mission. They are POW like soldiers are, maybe some of them might have been similar to officers. The real masterminds (generals, kings, ministers, senators, vice-presidents and presidents) hardly ever become POW's yet they are the ones that start the war.
Of course not. To become a leader usually you'll have to be smarter than the rest and have some creds to show for it (like a degree in a very expensive and well known school) which teaches things that usually goes into direct conflict with the traditional teachings (eg. evolution vs. creation).
One of my teachers once told me: In India, the only people who still believe in the caste system (where ones from the lower castes are upgraded in the next life if they're good) are the ones in the lower castes. The ones in the higher castes know better because they went to school in the west but it's better for them no to let the ones in the lower castes know so they do not lose their place in the caste.
Also, Bin Laden (or any other religious leader like Bush or the Pope) knows how to save himself and so far he hasn't blown himself up or let himself be killed in some Jihad or on the front lines. However, they all call upon their minions to do so. The religious aspect is only a justification to create cannon-fodder, it's not the reason of war however without religion (whether it be theological like Muslims and Catholics or ideological like patriotism and communism) there wouldn't be a reason for war.
If the world were US-centric, that would be correct. However, the EU and especially a big part of Asia as well as South America is becoming more and more China-centric. All of a sudden we would have a massive devaluation of the dollar (for the amount outstanding in China) in view of 'the rest of the world'. Of course China would lose some too but not quite as big as the US.
It doesn't sound such a bad idea. Microsoft's OS has been copied from others (DOS from IBM and NT from OS/2) or is otherwise very inadequate (95, 98, ME, XP SP1, Vista) and it's not looking any better with Windows 7 or any future versions short of a full overhaul. What MS is (somewhat) good at is creating integrated solutions (like IBM does). And that has also been the biggest selling point for their OS. A lot of users would leave Windows in a heartbeat if it weren't for but usually it's Visual Studio, Office, Exchange, SharePoint or some other program you never heard of but that you can find on one or another MSDN CD.
I have long before said that Windows should be recreated much like Apple did with Mac OS X 10.0 and maybe they have been looking at Linux but found Mac OS the better solution. If they just release their software for those platforms and suspend their own desktop platform and focus on server and services, they might be better, less evil and get more revenue.
I don't know if they still swear a Hippocratic oath but let's say they do. All the doctors, hospitals etc should then not be allowed to deny patients certain treatments (transplants) based on their insurance. But for some or another reason they do. It's truly a hypocritical oath so prescribing guns wouldn't be such a far fetched idea (it might legalize euthanasia then).
I can understand the reason for getting paid royalties and having your own work copyrighted but I have no sympathy for the untalented hacks their children or whores are (whether they are corporate (Disney) or individual (Yoko Ono)) years after the original artist or group has ceased (benefitting from his work). I also have no sympathy for the hacks that are trying to profit from the same work MULTIPLE times from the same people.
There should be a limit that cannot be extended for work done and it shouldn't be 40 years after the artist has died, it should be given up as soon as the artist or the artists as a group can't benefit from it anymore (whether it be death of a member or split from their record label).
It should also be allowed for the buyers to reclaim their own copy of a work they bought rights to in different (new) formats. I paid for the song that I wanted to listen to and I don't want to become deprived of my product simply because the format they chose 20 years ago (like DAT tapes) didn't keep up with current technology both in terms of quality as well as portability. Asking me to buy a new media-version of the identical product is like asking me to pay off my car all over again simply because I changed the tires or part of the engine or asking me to lug around a portable turntable so I can listen to the White Album while working out.
The strength of Mac against viruses lays solely in the use of very stable FOSS solutions for the basics (very close to stable Debian versions) and then building on top of that (Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage etc. don't have any links to sockets). Really, what services CAN lay bare on a Mac to the internet: SSH (OpenSSH), E-mail (Postfix), Webserver (Apache). On the program side, you have Safari (Webkit) or Mozilla with Flash (Adobe) or Java (Sun) and those don't come above user level without requiring extreme interaction from the user (passwords). There is no such thing as ~/Library/StartupItems or ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and you need to become root to put stuff in/Library.
Of course as soon as a vulnerability is reported the community fixes it which trickles down to other vendors like Apple, RedHat etc. and many of those vulnerabilities for Apache or Postfix are hardly exploitable or only for rare setups (usually buffer overflows which could lead to an exploit if somebody was savvy enough to analyze all of them and see where they have space enough to load their own stuff and then call it too).
To have a successful attack on a Mac would also mean that you can successfully attack Linux or other Unixes or it would require a serious bug in certain programs (like Safari or Mail) which also allows to unnoticeable have a huge payload to replace things like Safari with a 'hacked' version or implement a plugin that does something weird.
Actually, when part of a brain gets damaged (ie. stroke, head trauma or epilepsy) the brain will shift around functions in order to accommodate or restore all functions. That's why it's difficult to map functions of the brain (eg. using fMRI) in subjects with certain conditions. It is possible to have a loss of memory however it seems it is also possible to recall events that if it was stored in the traditional location should've been lost. The brain (especially the damaged one) is a big unknown even as there is lots of research being done.
Still, Steam is a form of DRM and if Steam stops with it, they (Valve) can say "f* it" and leave you all high and dry with your newfangled games. Of course they say RIGHT NOW that they will unlock their games but all it takes is for them to get an offer from somebody like EA or Microsoft for that 'promise' to go down the drain. And even if they break their promise or go down before you can download the legitimate crack there will be nothing you can do about it. Sure you can start a lawsuit about it after the fact but then again your priority in bankruptcy court or at the Microsoft/EA shareholder meeting will be lower for the $600 you paid in game rentals than all the loan sharks trying to get returns on their $600M investment worth.
1. You got a Dell 2. You used APO with Dell 3. You apparently used a non-tracking service
What to do: Reverse charges. Contact Apple (they use non-descript boxes and UPS or FedEx without charging extra). Their laptops are sturdier for that price as well.
Is medical imaging, gigabit, network home folders for ~50 clients good enough of a size for you?
NFS is plenty fast (pushing 200 Mbit/s per client) and then we're pushing the Ethernet and CPU limits (we should switch to Jumbo Packets but it's a bitch in the real world). We run it on PowerPC G5's, upgrades to Intel hopefully within 2 years or so. AFP is also very fast and doesn't have the caching and permission issues NFS has. SMB is very slow on our networks compared to it for no reason, maybe because the overhead on the CPU it creates.
Oh yeah, you can't get that out of the box neither on Linux or Mac. I bonded the network adapters on the server, disabled NFS over UDP, increase the number of daemons it launches and had to mess around with some of the TCP/IP settings simply because the 'fail-safe' settings but there are excellent how-to's to find for even a junior sysadmin to do it correctly.
Because whether or not you sign a contract with Fluendo, it's still illegal to distribute Fluendo (or ANY other MP3 codec/decoder) in the US, UK and EU and other patent-encumbered countries without paying Fraunhofer. Since most people (with a computer) live in the US, UK or the EU or the developers are based there, it will remain illegal unless someone wants to pony up ~$11/installation. There are linux distro's (commercial) that provide MP3 support out of the box.
You're right. I know of a bug and one of my old colleagues actually has a PoC where one can take over a whole host with simple.NET code. It has been reported in 2004 hasn't been fixed and it probably won't, the guy never gave me the code or how it worked and he will never because he like MS, gets paid partly by them and I don't. But it goes as follows: You are a developer on a machine and install.NET code in your website. Then that.NET code has a HTML interface which allows you to control just about anything on the IIS instance even though.NET in IIS is supposed to keep the whole thing separate in Application Pools, the code apparently runs as SYSTEM or some other level. Of course if the developer already has control over the machine to install code, you could say it's no big deal. However Shared Hosting providers would like to have a word with you and the concepts of separating applications in Application Pools is broken since your has control over all other applications and application pools.
It's also an issue inherent to both plasma and LCD screens. You can take a look at our wonderful 42" LCD security camera wall which is pretty burnt in at the lines where the white divider lines are at. It may not happen as quickly (as with the old CRT's where a few hours was enough, the newer CRT's take longer) but it still happens.
I don't know why it takes Vista 4 whole seconds to come from a suspend-to-ram while my PowerMac G4 does it in less than a second. It takes them 22 seconds to come from hibernate which is about the boot time of my average machine (including the G4)
And most of those people actually thought they could get away with it, that is legally stealing from the banks. I had similar offers made when I was looking for a home and I KNEW something was fishy about having loans that are cheaper than the deprecation of it's own value although I'm not a lawyer (if yearly inflation rates are higher than your APR something is wrong because then the bank would over time pay you to loan their money).
Also I know that VARIABLE percentages means that the person loaning to you can jack up the prices as they want (just look at your energy bill with variable adjustments) but unlike an energy bill which you can change every year, you make the choice for the next 15-30 years no matter what happens to either yourself or the economy. It's a matter of federal law that rates and types are made clear to the buyer before lending and usually it's either on the first or last page, requiring a signature next to it.
If people are too stupid and like to listen to their SALESman instead of forking over $200 to a real-estate lawyer (that's what it costed my parents 2 years ago) to review and make clear the paperwork to them then that's their own fault.
Pure anarchy in itself is not oppressive. Anarchy however has a very short half life and quickly decays into feudalism. For some or another reason, a lot of sheeple require leadership in their life of some sort in order to function. Without leadership they kind of stand around looking like a deer in the headlights until the more leadery people comes in and (ab)uses that.
In the 23rd century everyone will have forgotten about it and there will be an amusement park built around it with a catchy jingle: We're sailors on the moon, we carry a harpoon, but there ain't no whales so tell this tale and sing our whaling tune!
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Well, concerning your quote: They are certainly lifting some fingers. You can have a very stable BSD-like kernel (Darwin) without the Aqua overlay (but you're free to load KDE or Gnome on there) for free, no strings attached, code and all. Webkit got very good feedback from Apple. Apple has been working together with FOSS projects, finding and fixing bugs. I currently use XCode for one of my FOSS projects and imho it's better than Eclipse, it's free. There is a lot of source open and very well built SDK's for iTunes, Final Cut, Aperture that allow you to do a lot of things.
There are certain things that Apple does indeed keeps closed but a lot (the parts you need to interface with as a developer or you need to review as a security analyst) is usually very open.
What the f* does WordPad have to do with anything remotely exploitable. How do you even make a bug there, it's a CS students first year project to make a text editor? I mean, it was a running joke that the only things not exploited in Windows were Calculator, Notepad and Wordpad but this just tops it. Also. How do you exploit it? Do you suggest somebody to copy/paste a piece of text or do you send them a malformed .txt file?
I recently researched DNSSEC and I was going to implement it in my environment until I read the downfalls:
1) Traffic for the signing of records would increase exponentially because to establish the authenticity you'd have to contact the originating server and do a PKI-like transaction (that's expensive). In it's current form, forcing DNSSEC throughout the world would effectively bring down the root DNS servers as well as many others
2) Because of 1) caching DNS servers would be less useful since you'd have to contact the original for the keys anyway. This also introduces the problem that if all the original DNS are unreachable for whatever reason the whole zone would become unusable whereas now they have been cached.
3) There is an attack vector where by using the no-record responses somebody can obtain the whole zone even if you didn't intend to publish it
The problems with DNS are the same as the problems with SMTP and IPv4:
- The problems were there from the start and the protocol wasn't designed with current threats in mind. Fixing it would effectively break it.
- The only solution is to build up a new system parallel to it and introduce it without anyone noticing
- The usable solutions are only temporary patches that make it more difficult to use become quickly reduced to the above 2 problems
- There are multiple solutions from separate entities with their own agendas. Choosing one over the other has it's own flaws and is sometimes not even feasible.
Well, what you have to understand is that in general, people coming out of school know absolutely nothing about anything. That's especially in the computer sciences/engineering. As was asserted above, somebody has to take them under their wings to train them or the student himself has to be motivated to work himself on something in the field he wants to work on (like bug fixing in an open source project).
In my opinion there are too many people like quite a few of my friends and family members that noticed I could make a lot of money with my computer skills (programming and selling computers and websites at 16) thinking to make an easy buck with the 'computer'. Computers are fairly simple and straightforward, even programming is just like learning the periodic table it's simple. It's the mixing of components in the right order and with the right skill just as in chemistry that makes a computer run and that's what no school seems to learn. Those students come out of school disillusioned and hope to sell their services to the highest bidder and then they're disillusioned again that the market doesn't want them because while they were in school the market changed and what they started learning ended up being deprecated.
I have not been in higher education, so I consider myself having 4-6 years more experience than my buddies who did go to college/university. They are currently still looking for jobs, some turned around and got a job in something completely different (and boring), some went back to school and some are flipping burgers or answering phones at a help desk. I on the other hand worked and got my hands dirty and while they were in school learning Windows NT, scratched Java's head and wrote hello world in C++, the Mac OS desktop revolution came, the VoIP and mobile revolution came, RAID-arrays became SANs, Linux and FOSS became mainstream in servers, C# and ObjC became accepted and I got experience in most of it while they still have to read up on it.
I thought the masterminds of 9/11 was Bin Laden or some other nutcase somewhere else. All I know these 'masterminds' they're talking about is media fluff and makes the US looks good but all they did was carry out the mission. They are POW like soldiers are, maybe some of them might have been similar to officers. The real masterminds (generals, kings, ministers, senators, vice-presidents and presidents) hardly ever become POW's yet they are the ones that start the war.
Of course not. To become a leader usually you'll have to be smarter than the rest and have some creds to show for it (like a degree in a very expensive and well known school) which teaches things that usually goes into direct conflict with the traditional teachings (eg. evolution vs. creation).
One of my teachers once told me: In India, the only people who still believe in the caste system (where ones from the lower castes are upgraded in the next life if they're good) are the ones in the lower castes. The ones in the higher castes know better because they went to school in the west but it's better for them no to let the ones in the lower castes know so they do not lose their place in the caste.
Also, Bin Laden (or any other religious leader like Bush or the Pope) knows how to save himself and so far he hasn't blown himself up or let himself be killed in some Jihad or on the front lines. However, they all call upon their minions to do so. The religious aspect is only a justification to create cannon-fodder, it's not the reason of war however without religion (whether it be theological like Muslims and Catholics or ideological like patriotism and communism) there wouldn't be a reason for war.
If the world were US-centric, that would be correct. However, the EU and especially a big part of Asia as well as South America is becoming more and more China-centric. All of a sudden we would have a massive devaluation of the dollar (for the amount outstanding in China) in view of 'the rest of the world'. Of course China would lose some too but not quite as big as the US.
It doesn't sound such a bad idea. Microsoft's OS has been copied from others (DOS from IBM and NT from OS/2) or is otherwise very inadequate (95, 98, ME, XP SP1, Vista) and it's not looking any better with Windows 7 or any future versions short of a full overhaul. What MS is (somewhat) good at is creating integrated solutions (like IBM does). And that has also been the biggest selling point for their OS. A lot of users would leave Windows in a heartbeat if it weren't for but usually it's Visual Studio, Office, Exchange, SharePoint or some other program you never heard of but that you can find on one or another MSDN CD.
I have long before said that Windows should be recreated much like Apple did with Mac OS X 10.0 and maybe they have been looking at Linux but found Mac OS the better solution. If they just release their software for those platforms and suspend their own desktop platform and focus on server and services, they might be better, less evil and get more revenue.
I don't know if they still swear a Hippocratic oath but let's say they do. All the doctors, hospitals etc should then not be allowed to deny patients certain treatments (transplants) based on their insurance. But for some or another reason they do. It's truly a hypocritical oath so prescribing guns wouldn't be such a far fetched idea (it might legalize euthanasia then).
I can understand the reason for getting paid royalties and having your own work copyrighted but I have no sympathy for the untalented hacks their children or whores are (whether they are corporate (Disney) or individual (Yoko Ono)) years after the original artist or group has ceased (benefitting from his work). I also have no sympathy for the hacks that are trying to profit from the same work MULTIPLE times from the same people.
There should be a limit that cannot be extended for work done and it shouldn't be 40 years after the artist has died, it should be given up as soon as the artist or the artists as a group can't benefit from it anymore (whether it be death of a member or split from their record label).
It should also be allowed for the buyers to reclaim their own copy of a work they bought rights to in different (new) formats. I paid for the song that I wanted to listen to and I don't want to become deprived of my product simply because the format they chose 20 years ago (like DAT tapes) didn't keep up with current technology both in terms of quality as well as portability. Asking me to buy a new media-version of the identical product is like asking me to pay off my car all over again simply because I changed the tires or part of the engine or asking me to lug around a portable turntable so I can listen to the White Album while working out.
The strength of Mac against viruses lays solely in the use of very stable FOSS solutions for the basics (very close to stable Debian versions) and then building on top of that (Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage etc. don't have any links to sockets). Really, what services CAN lay bare on a Mac to the internet: SSH (OpenSSH), E-mail (Postfix), Webserver (Apache). On the program side, you have Safari (Webkit) or Mozilla with Flash (Adobe) or Java (Sun) and those don't come above user level without requiring extreme interaction from the user (passwords). There is no such thing as ~/Library/StartupItems or ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and you need to become root to put stuff in /Library.
Of course as soon as a vulnerability is reported the community fixes it which trickles down to other vendors like Apple, RedHat etc. and many of those vulnerabilities for Apache or Postfix are hardly exploitable or only for rare setups (usually buffer overflows which could lead to an exploit if somebody was savvy enough to analyze all of them and see where they have space enough to load their own stuff and then call it too).
To have a successful attack on a Mac would also mean that you can successfully attack Linux or other Unixes or it would require a serious bug in certain programs (like Safari or Mail) which also allows to unnoticeable have a huge payload to replace things like Safari with a 'hacked' version or implement a plugin that does something weird.
Actually, when part of a brain gets damaged (ie. stroke, head trauma or epilepsy) the brain will shift around functions in order to accommodate or restore all functions. That's why it's difficult to map functions of the brain (eg. using fMRI) in subjects with certain conditions. It is possible to have a loss of memory however it seems it is also possible to recall events that if it was stored in the traditional location should've been lost. The brain (especially the damaged one) is a big unknown even as there is lots of research being done.
Still, Steam is a form of DRM and if Steam stops with it, they (Valve) can say "f* it" and leave you all high and dry with your newfangled games. Of course they say RIGHT NOW that they will unlock their games but all it takes is for them to get an offer from somebody like EA or Microsoft for that 'promise' to go down the drain. And even if they break their promise or go down before you can download the legitimate crack there will be nothing you can do about it. Sure you can start a lawsuit about it after the fact but then again your priority in bankruptcy court or at the Microsoft/EA shareholder meeting will be lower for the $600 you paid in game rentals than all the loan sharks trying to get returns on their $600M investment worth.
1. You got a Dell
2. You used APO with Dell
3. You apparently used a non-tracking service
What to do: Reverse charges. Contact Apple (they use non-descript boxes and UPS or FedEx without charging extra). Their laptops are sturdier for that price as well.
Yup, you can indeed do so. Of course, you might need some protection for your 'junk'. Sure a lead apron won't cause any suspicion.
Is medical imaging, gigabit, network home folders for ~50 clients good enough of a size for you?
NFS is plenty fast (pushing 200 Mbit/s per client) and then we're pushing the Ethernet and CPU limits (we should switch to Jumbo Packets but it's a bitch in the real world). We run it on PowerPC G5's, upgrades to Intel hopefully within 2 years or so. AFP is also very fast and doesn't have the caching and permission issues NFS has. SMB is very slow on our networks compared to it for no reason, maybe because the overhead on the CPU it creates.
Oh yeah, you can't get that out of the box neither on Linux or Mac. I bonded the network adapters on the server, disabled NFS over UDP, increase the number of daemons it launches and had to mess around with some of the TCP/IP settings simply because the 'fail-safe' settings but there are excellent how-to's to find for even a junior sysadmin to do it correctly.
Because whether or not you sign a contract with Fluendo, it's still illegal to distribute Fluendo (or ANY other MP3 codec/decoder) in the US, UK and EU and other patent-encumbered countries without paying Fraunhofer. Since most people (with a computer) live in the US, UK or the EU or the developers are based there, it will remain illegal unless someone wants to pony up ~$11/installation. There are linux distro's (commercial) that provide MP3 support out of the box.
You're right. I know of a bug and one of my old colleagues actually has a PoC where one can take over a whole host with simple .NET code. It has been reported in 2004 hasn't been fixed and it probably won't, the guy never gave me the code or how it worked and he will never because he like MS, gets paid partly by them and I don't. But it goes as follows: You are a developer on a machine and install .NET code in your website. Then that .NET code has a HTML interface which allows you to control just about anything on the IIS instance even though .NET in IIS is supposed to keep the whole thing separate in Application Pools, the code apparently runs as SYSTEM or some other level. Of course if the developer already has control over the machine to install code, you could say it's no big deal. However Shared Hosting providers would like to have a word with you and the concepts of separating applications in Application Pools is broken since your has control over all other applications and application pools.
It's also an issue inherent to both plasma and LCD screens. You can take a look at our wonderful 42" LCD security camera wall which is pretty burnt in at the lines where the white divider lines are at. It may not happen as quickly (as with the old CRT's where a few hours was enough, the newer CRT's take longer) but it still happens.
I don't know why it takes Vista 4 whole seconds to come from a suspend-to-ram while my PowerMac G4 does it in less than a second. It takes them 22 seconds to come from hibernate which is about the boot time of my average machine (including the G4)
And most of those people actually thought they could get away with it, that is legally stealing from the banks. I had similar offers made when I was looking for a home and I KNEW something was fishy about having loans that are cheaper than the deprecation of it's own value although I'm not a lawyer (if yearly inflation rates are higher than your APR something is wrong because then the bank would over time pay you to loan their money).
Also I know that VARIABLE percentages means that the person loaning to you can jack up the prices as they want (just look at your energy bill with variable adjustments) but unlike an energy bill which you can change every year, you make the choice for the next 15-30 years no matter what happens to either yourself or the economy. It's a matter of federal law that rates and types are made clear to the buyer before lending and usually it's either on the first or last page, requiring a signature next to it.
If people are too stupid and like to listen to their SALESman instead of forking over $200 to a real-estate lawyer (that's what it costed my parents 2 years ago) to review and make clear the paperwork to them then that's their own fault.
It's government for the people alright, their own and their closest friends that is.
Pure anarchy in itself is not oppressive. Anarchy however has a very short half life and quickly decays into feudalism. For some or another reason, a lot of sheeple require leadership in their life of some sort in order to function. Without leadership they kind of stand around looking like a deer in the headlights until the more leadery people comes in and (ab)uses that.
Not people, but Microsoft Live does kill a kitten each time you perform a search there, Yahoo just makes a puppy cry.
In the 23rd century everyone will have forgotten about it and there will be an amusement park built around it with a catchy jingle:
We're sailors on the moon, we carry a harpoon, but there ain't no whales so tell this tale and sing our whaling tune!