Uhhh...dude? Your memory is SERIOUSLY off, Windows didn't start warning about the dot 3 from release until Vista, I think they MAY have added it to XP in SP2 but since I haven't been on XP since 05 I can't comment on that one but Win98SE (what you would be running in 99 unless you had a corporate supplier as WinNT was never sold to the public) would happily let you trash the dot 3, and so would WinME and like I said I'm pretty sure XP would before SP2 but I'm not gonna make a VM and dig out an old XP RTM disc just to find out.
I'm sorry I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. Show me ONE functional free market system, JUST ONE. Stock market? Nope. in fact between government money, "too big to fail" and letting them put ultra high speed trading practically on the floor (usable only by the elite who can buy access of course) the stock market is probably one of the most tilted and rigged systems on the entire planet.
The libertarians might as well be talking about John Galt or a perfect utopia for how much their viewpoint has to do with reality. Well if you want to talk fantasy systems then Star Trek communism sounds pretty damned nice to me, we'll never fucking have it but who cares? We ARE talking about fantasy systems.
But what earns the libertarians their bitchslapping is they refuse to accept that their system IS fantasy, they will stick their fingers in their ears and go "la la la, invisible hand, free market" no matter how many times you rub their nose like rubbing a dog's in shit that their system has NEVER EXISTED and WILL NEVER EXIST because the greedy fucks (which are practically saints to most libertarians) will rig the fuck out of the system EVERY SINGLE TIME. Hell we can produce writings going back thousands of years showing this is the case, for fucks sake a good 90% of human history follows this game plan 1.-Gather wealth by any means 2.-Hire goon squad, 3.- Concentrate wealth and declare yourself ruler.
So I'm sorry but when you keep talking about a fantasy system like its a real system that has been proven to work? You deserve a bitchslapping. After all if we wanna go fantasy system if everyone would just love each other and play nice there would be world peace, i don't see that happening any time soon either. ironically we did once have pretty damned close to what libertarians considered utopia, it is now known to historians as "the age of the robber barons" and ended up with rivers and air polluted, workers enslaved, and those at the top buying the law so they could make damned sure nobody could compete....hey kinda like what we are seeing here now! Hey you know what the difference between an old boxer and a libertarian is? The boxer at least has enough sense to know he is a little off in the head.
Ya know the way he did such a huge 180 on...well pretty much every thing he believed in? makes me wonder if that old Bill Hicks joke didn't have some truth: "Ya know why they always change once they get in the white house? The CIA sits them down and says 'you should watch this film and maybe rethink your position' and then plays him a film they shot of Kennedy getting offed in Texas, complete with the actual shooters. Once they see how easily they can be replaced? they read from the cue card just like the last guy".
Honestly after all the shit we have found out, from Gulf Of Tonkin being a false flag to Fast & Furious? It frankly wouldn't surprise me, not one bit. Hell the only truth we get anymore is from whistleblowers, our MSM makes Soviet era Pravda look anti-establishment, and both parties seem to be in a race to see which can use more plays in the dictatorship playbook than the other. Anybody who hasn't seen the lecture I just linked to really ought to watch, Naomi Wolf lays out how many of the same plays used by Franco, Stalin, the crazy Austrian, are being used right here and the scary part? The video is from 2007, its much worse than that now. Even scarier? She is on the watchlist now for this lecture and one she did on what rights you have under the constitution, how is that for fricking scary?
Uhhh...they ALREADY do that cap bullshit, have been for years. If I use THEIR VoIP? No cap, Vonage? Cap. I use THEIR PPV? No cap, netflix? Cap.
This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians, how the fuck can you keep babbling on about "the free market" when there is NO free market, has NEVER been a free market, and unless you wipe out ALL money and start everyone out at zero in your new system so the old money can't buy their advantages there will NEVER BE a free market, okay!
And what does that have to do with the fact that malware wasn't coming on CDs? The CDs you were getting in the late 90s were made by REAL pirates, the guys who could hand you a UHARCed "rip game" that could squeeze a 3 CD game down to a 200Mb installer file, guys whose Windows discs were frankly better than the ones MSFT was selling because it would already have the most popular software and drivers baked in, those guys weren't passing malware.
CD driven malware didn't blow the hell up until around 03,04 when the OEMs started adding CD burners to everything, THAT was when that blew up. And the reason why was obvious, you get grandma infected by a "free screensaver" and then make sure everything grandma burns to hand to the family has the bug on it. Its no different than how I have to wipe every single flash stick i get because brand new flash sticks often have malware on them, pirates ain't doing that shit, malware guys do it because they know if they can come up with an enticing name (I've seen "Free movies" "free music 4 life" and "You are our big winner!" just to name a few) even without autorun some dumbass will likely run it.
Yeah professional help...a fucking guild. Again elitist shit to keep the "peons" away from your precious shit. We've heard it all before, if your type had your way it would be like 1975 where only programmers need apply...please go away, the world needs less of you.
Well fucking duh! The elite already own the MSM so they can make fucking sure only the proper shills say the proper corp ass kissing propaganda, and there is only ONE place left where you can freely disseminate information without falling afoul of their "free speech zones" and other black shirt bullshit, and that is the net.
Mark my words within 24 months of this coming online "hate speech" will be added to insure protected classes will vote their way, followed by "anti-government" "Terrorist" or whatever buzzword for not kissing the elite's ring is labeled under in the UK. Allowing the public to speak their mind? Why that just can't be allowed, that is doubleplus ungood citizen!
Uhhh..dude? Yeah guess what MRI scans of their brains show? The "X trapped in Y body" turns out to be a VERY apt description as you can mix their brain scans in with the gender they ID with and no doc will be able to tell them apart from those born that gender, whereas you put their scans in with their own sex its not even close.
At the end of the day it is simply biology,for one reason or another the hormones during the first trimester don't match up and there ya go. Trying to label it a "mental health issue" is frankly offensive and would be no different than saying you need a shrink because you are not gay.
Anybody believes that "If I use X then I am immune" is employing "magical thinking" and is full of shit as ALL modern OSes are some of the most complex systems ever created and where there is complexity? There is vulnerability.
You know why they didn't show the full filename? Because people would rename and wipe out the damned extension and fuck shit up, THAT'S why. God I don't know how many "guess the ext" games I had to play when some place would tell everyone to turn on full filenames without warning them NOT to fuck with the dot three, man that was a PITA.
BULLSHIT, flag on the field for bullshit, and the fact you got modded up just shows how damned many puppies we have here now!
In 95 you got a CDROM alright but you sure as fuck wasn't getting any burners which were north of a grand, were slow as hell, and were unreliable as hell to boot. You also weren't getting any third party burnt CDs because those damned things were close to $5 a pop and one out of every 3 or 4 would turn out to be a coaster. I should know as my shop had one of the first CD Burners and later the first DVD Burners and we were having to charge $10 a disc just because of how much the damned thing cost, it was NOT in any way affordable nor commonplace!
So you are basically saying that only the ones that meet your criteria should be allowed to have a PC? Nice to know elitist douchebaggery isn't dead. One of the reasons I gave up on Linux was their forums were fricking filled with those that were like "If they don't feel comfortable around editing in a CLI then maybe they should have a PC at all?" kind of elitist douchebaggery.
Autorun made it easier for companies to deploy their software, made it easier to install drivers, if it wasn't for assholes ruining it frankly it was a nice little feature to have. A lot of the reason MSFT had to stick with it was the antitrust made the idea of keeping everything in a single repo unworkable, see how you had them threatened with lawsuits when they first offered Windows Defender and even had a couple of fucking spyware companies sue because MSFT was actually "blocking their software" from infecting machines!
But the fact that you are basically proposing a fucking guild system so that only the "blessed" can install just shows how damned elitist you are, no different than how RMS addresses everyone as "hackers" because the thought that normal people may be using PCs? Doesn't really cross his mind.
It is obvious that you never worked corporate or had to deal with multi-thousand dollar software because then you'd know, it was corporate and dongles that kept the feature for so long.
Was it a great idea in hindsight? Nope but like ActiveX once a corp has spent several million dollars investing in a technology you had BETTER give their ass plenty of time to switch to something else before you break it or that is your ass, and that was the problem that MSFT faced with autorun. I was getting corporate CDs and flash sticks as late as Dec 2010 that had autorun set up to load their little presentation or whatever so it was just hard as hell to get the corps off of it. Hell look at how damned many users of IE 6 are left and that is all thanks to corporate intranet IE 6 only ActiveX crap, so you can see that corporate does NOT turn on a dime.
Because most malware writers didn't have 15k+ to spend on a CD press? Dude I got one of the very first DVD burners in my state, know how much that bitch cost? $600 and media was over $4 a pop for that sucker. CD burners were likewise crazy priced and the media was expensive as hell so it really wasn't a big threat vector, at the time you could buy floppies for 8c a pop and CDR was $2, an RW was closer to $5.
I swear, these kids...they have NO clue how expensive shit was back then! I bet my fellow greybeards can back me up, when Win95 came out I had a MASSIVE 100MB HDD and that bitch cost a damned pretty penny, nobody even thought about slapping a burner in because the cost was so insane. hell how many floppies did Win95 come on again? I can't recall but it was a shitload. My first flash stick was based on CF and cost a whopping $200 for a 64Mb capacity so the risk of Joe Average having one? Really wasn't there.
Actually they kept in XP for so long (I believe it was right after SP3 or right before they put out a patch that killed it) was because of corporate dongles, a lot of companies used dongles in the early days of XP and by having autorun on the dongle they could just plug in the dongle and it would run the check and fire up the software it was connected to so it WAS a handy feature to have.
I don't know how many 4 port USB cards I had to install back then because of all the damned dongles that the high end software companies used, for awhile it was dongle madness. Of course that was before flash sticks became cheap as dirt so tying multi thousand dollar software to a USB dongle was actually a pretty decent anti piracy method.
Uhhh...dude? Yeah hate to break the news to ya but that was actually removed by a patch YEARS AGO and the only ones getting hit by this? Pirates and those that still think that 30 day trial of Norton they got with the system in 2005 actually does anything.
Here is the FACTS from the guy that builds and fixes these things, straight from the trenches...FACT: WinXP was/is the most pirated OS ON THE PLANET by a HUGE margin and thanks to WGA guess what ALL the pirates disable? Windows Updates. And I say is because I have run into machines not 6 months old running "XP Pro Razr1911 edition" put on by low rent fly by night shops and those selling PCs in flea markets and on CL. There is so many dual cores from 05-09 that don't have drivers for Win 7 I doubt this is gonna change for a while. If it gives anybody comfort pirated Win 7 is on the rise, of course those also have updates disabled so they'll be infected soon enough.
FACT: Autorun was disabled several years ago and if an XP system is fully patched? Then autorun doesn't work. Of course Vista, 7 and 8 doesn't have this at all but because many of the OEMs didn't put out drivers for any system older than 09 and most shops aren't gonna bother hunting for a driver, especially when MSFT charges over a hundred bucks for a copy of Win 7? Again they use Razr1911 XP that has all the drivers integrated. There is even an "XP Black Edition" that mimics the UI of WinVista/7 so the average clueless buyer won't even know.
So if you want to bitch about this? Bitch at the pirates and the fly by night guys using pirated software, because I can tell you that there isn't a legit XP box that has autorun on, not unless the user went in and disabled the updates several years back and if they did that? Well its hard to feel sorry for them, hell you disable security updates on ANY OS and your ass is gonna be swinging in the breeze, see MacDefender or the KDELook bug for just two examples.
Ironically that is EXACTLY what I think is gonna happen. There is a reason why NO empire, no matter how powerful, last more than a few centuries and that is because it ALWAYS becomes so corrupted the people lose faith and tear it down.
Once upon a time the Roman Empire controlled the known world, and nothing could touch Roman tech. Once upon a time the sun never set on the British empire...where are they? Gone now, the greed and corruption made them dysfunctional and they fell apart. It would be the height of arrogance to think the USA could escape the fate of those, the only question is when and how nasty its gonna be, will it be a peaceful falling apart like the USSR, or like the crazy Austrian and go into total war mode until it has to be torn down by the other countries? who knows, but the current system WILL fall, it is simply too badly tilted to stand.
I once had a VERY wise old Baptist preacher explain it to me, he said "The western religions are a salad bar. We have seen the horrors that come from strict adherence to dogma, such as the dark ages, and we learned to take away the best parts and leave the worst parts. For example see how many churches in the 40s and 50s tried to use the "Curse Of Ham" to justify Jim Crow, any church that even attempted that today would be quickly shunned."
The problem with Islam is they are where the other religions were 500 years ago and they refuse to grow the fuck up. Why do you think the most barbaric prison systems are in Muslim countries? Because THAT is what you get when you follow ANY religion to 100% adherence, which is why the other religions don't do that anymore. if we followed the bible to 100% adherence we would still have slaves, child brides, and a whole bunch of other REALLY nasty shit because those books were written in a brutal period where the old folks were the ones who made 30. And what do we see in Muslim countries? The same brutality, women and children are property, church law is inviolate, and women are stoned for being raped...yeah some "religion of peace" you got there, REAL enlightened.
Sorry but the other guy is right, fascism is by its very design a right wing concept, it is the government and corporations working as one, this is completely 180 degrees away from the left which puts the government in control of everything and corporations are powerless.
To make it easy to picture Stalin was 100% left, Hitler was 100% right, sure to the outside they both look similar but how their countries ran was VERY different. The reason you may be having trouble is we have one party in this country labeled "left" that in words and deeds is actually right wing, the only reason they are called left is that the other party is extreme right wing, which makes anybody else look left just by how far right they are.
OKC cost around 300 people, twin towers? over 3000. Sorry you lose, thanks for playing, enjoy your rice-a-roni.
Oh and just FYI while those Christian nutballs have to go to a few groups that are rightly monitored like the Aryan Nation because the mainstream churches don't want to have a fucking thing to do with dangerous nutballs the last checkup the FBI did on mosques in the USA find more than 40% of them preaching the whole "death to the great satan" bullshit, I'd post a link but after the PC police threw the racist card trying to find a copy that is still hosted on a federal site is pretty much impossible.
Again reality is poison to the politically correct, no different to how we only have two races in this country now, African American and White, because if you are Latino,Asian, pretty much ANYTHING other than African American? You are listed as white by the FBI crime statistics, why? Because the explosion of violence among urban blacks doesn't look good for their PC bullshit so they gotta skew the living fuck out of the statistics. Yeah God fucking forbid they actually ask WHY the inner cities have become warzones, better just to sweep it under the rug.
Well I was ignoring the "Holy shit the whole idea is retarded" factor but there IS a reason why the whole thing won't work...douchebags. Sorry folks but the world is filled with 'em, you'll have douchebags with cantennas turning your lights into a fucking disco just because they think its funnay.
So at least if you built it into the switch you'd not only be able to control multiple lights but as a bonus you'd have room for a little security circuitry built in. Without any security? These things won't last a week thanks to all the douchebags.
And unless you live in BFE its gonna suuuuck! You ever live in an apt? I live in an apt building that isn't even geek populated and there is no less than 4 wifi routers stepping all over each other, how is it gonna be when you have a couple of hundred bulbs all stepping on each other? Its gonna be "some guy down the hall keeps turning off my lights!" to the power of infinity, and that isn't even figuring in the jackasses that will focus on fucking with the lights for shits and giggles.
I've gone through 5 packs of CFL in my apt in 5 years and I have nice clean power coming straight off the mains (nice to be buddies with the super) while dad's ancient 48" florescent tubes put up in the mid 80s? Still putting off plenty of that sickly grey light without a bit of trouble.
Ya know I really hate to invoke that "Things ain't what they used to be" meme but when it comes to bulbs? The new ones suuuuck. I'll keep using the CFLs simply because i live in the deep south and the lower heat is worth it to me but I've had so many die that I don't even bother with the warranty, its not worth the bullshit. And before somebody says its might outlets? I got tired of ending up in the dark when I was in the bathroom so I picked up a 75c pack of incandescent and guess what? Even the super cheap shit incandescent bulbs last twice as long. The chips they are using in the ballast base are garbage according to an engineer friend of mine who tinkers with them, but they can get that chip for like 3c a pop....sound familiar?
You can have cheap or long lasting...PICK ONE. And most likely like everything else in this world you quickly won't even get a choice, the expensive ones will be the cheap ones with a few more bells and whistles.
How long was the CFLs supposed to last again?/looks at fifth pack of CFLs bought in 5 years/...yeah..bullshit. Like MTBF on hard drives and SSDs anybody who has spent ANY time with electronics knows that you get cheap OR long lasting, NEVER both. If he buys their bullshit I have some swampland he really needs to look at.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh...dude? Your memory is SERIOUSLY off, Windows didn't start warning about the dot 3 from release until Vista, I think they MAY have added it to XP in SP2 but since I haven't been on XP since 05 I can't comment on that one but Win98SE (what you would be running in 99 unless you had a corporate supplier as WinNT was never sold to the public) would happily let you trash the dot 3, and so would WinME and like I said I'm pretty sure XP would before SP2 but I'm not gonna make a VM and dig out an old XP RTM disc just to find out.
I'm sorry I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. Show me ONE functional free market system, JUST ONE. Stock market? Nope. in fact between government money, "too big to fail" and letting them put ultra high speed trading practically on the floor (usable only by the elite who can buy access of course) the stock market is probably one of the most tilted and rigged systems on the entire planet.
The libertarians might as well be talking about John Galt or a perfect utopia for how much their viewpoint has to do with reality. Well if you want to talk fantasy systems then Star Trek communism sounds pretty damned nice to me, we'll never fucking have it but who cares? We ARE talking about fantasy systems.
But what earns the libertarians their bitchslapping is they refuse to accept that their system IS fantasy, they will stick their fingers in their ears and go "la la la, invisible hand, free market" no matter how many times you rub their nose like rubbing a dog's in shit that their system has NEVER EXISTED and WILL NEVER EXIST because the greedy fucks (which are practically saints to most libertarians) will rig the fuck out of the system EVERY SINGLE TIME. Hell we can produce writings going back thousands of years showing this is the case, for fucks sake a good 90% of human history follows this game plan 1.-Gather wealth by any means 2.-Hire goon squad, 3.- Concentrate wealth and declare yourself ruler.
So I'm sorry but when you keep talking about a fantasy system like its a real system that has been proven to work? You deserve a bitchslapping. After all if we wanna go fantasy system if everyone would just love each other and play nice there would be world peace, i don't see that happening any time soon either. ironically we did once have pretty damned close to what libertarians considered utopia, it is now known to historians as "the age of the robber barons" and ended up with rivers and air polluted, workers enslaved, and those at the top buying the law so they could make damned sure nobody could compete....hey kinda like what we are seeing here now! Hey you know what the difference between an old boxer and a libertarian is? The boxer at least has enough sense to know he is a little off in the head.
Ya know the way he did such a huge 180 on...well pretty much every thing he believed in? makes me wonder if that old Bill Hicks joke didn't have some truth: "Ya know why they always change once they get in the white house? The CIA sits them down and says 'you should watch this film and maybe rethink your position' and then plays him a film they shot of Kennedy getting offed in Texas, complete with the actual shooters. Once they see how easily they can be replaced? they read from the cue card just like the last guy".
Honestly after all the shit we have found out, from Gulf Of Tonkin being a false flag to Fast & Furious? It frankly wouldn't surprise me, not one bit. Hell the only truth we get anymore is from whistleblowers, our MSM makes Soviet era Pravda look anti-establishment, and both parties seem to be in a race to see which can use more plays in the dictatorship playbook than the other. Anybody who hasn't seen the lecture I just linked to really ought to watch, Naomi Wolf lays out how many of the same plays used by Franco, Stalin, the crazy Austrian, are being used right here and the scary part? The video is from 2007, its much worse than that now. Even scarier? She is on the watchlist now for this lecture and one she did on what rights you have under the constitution, how is that for fricking scary?
Uhhh...they ALREADY do that cap bullshit, have been for years. If I use THEIR VoIP? No cap, Vonage? Cap. I use THEIR PPV? No cap, netflix? Cap.
This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians, how the fuck can you keep babbling on about "the free market" when there is NO free market, has NEVER been a free market, and unless you wipe out ALL money and start everyone out at zero in your new system so the old money can't buy their advantages there will NEVER BE a free market, okay!
And what does that have to do with the fact that malware wasn't coming on CDs? The CDs you were getting in the late 90s were made by REAL pirates, the guys who could hand you a UHARCed "rip game" that could squeeze a 3 CD game down to a 200Mb installer file, guys whose Windows discs were frankly better than the ones MSFT was selling because it would already have the most popular software and drivers baked in, those guys weren't passing malware.
CD driven malware didn't blow the hell up until around 03,04 when the OEMs started adding CD burners to everything, THAT was when that blew up. And the reason why was obvious, you get grandma infected by a "free screensaver" and then make sure everything grandma burns to hand to the family has the bug on it. Its no different than how I have to wipe every single flash stick i get because brand new flash sticks often have malware on them, pirates ain't doing that shit, malware guys do it because they know if they can come up with an enticing name (I've seen "Free movies" "free music 4 life" and "You are our big winner!" just to name a few) even without autorun some dumbass will likely run it.
Yeah professional help...a fucking guild. Again elitist shit to keep the "peons" away from your precious shit. We've heard it all before, if your type had your way it would be like 1975 where only programmers need apply...please go away, the world needs less of you.
Well fucking duh! The elite already own the MSM so they can make fucking sure only the proper shills say the proper corp ass kissing propaganda, and there is only ONE place left where you can freely disseminate information without falling afoul of their "free speech zones" and other black shirt bullshit, and that is the net.
Mark my words within 24 months of this coming online "hate speech" will be added to insure protected classes will vote their way, followed by "anti-government" "Terrorist" or whatever buzzword for not kissing the elite's ring is labeled under in the UK. Allowing the public to speak their mind? Why that just can't be allowed, that is doubleplus ungood citizen!
Not to mention there are several examples in nature where only the alpha breeds and the rest do not, would he likewise say nature is suicidal?
Uhhh..dude? Yeah guess what MRI scans of their brains show? The "X trapped in Y body" turns out to be a VERY apt description as you can mix their brain scans in with the gender they ID with and no doc will be able to tell them apart from those born that gender, whereas you put their scans in with their own sex its not even close.
At the end of the day it is simply biology,for one reason or another the hormones during the first trimester don't match up and there ya go. Trying to label it a "mental health issue" is frankly offensive and would be no different than saying you need a shrink because you are not gay.
I can 1 million Android malware infections by the end of this year and since Linux claim Android is Linux you have to claim the malware as well, if that isn't good enough here you go and its not a fluke by any means.
Anybody believes that "If I use X then I am immune" is employing "magical thinking" and is full of shit as ALL modern OSes are some of the most complex systems ever created and where there is complexity? There is vulnerability.
You know why they didn't show the full filename? Because people would rename and wipe out the damned extension and fuck shit up, THAT'S why. God I don't know how many "guess the ext" games I had to play when some place would tell everyone to turn on full filenames without warning them NOT to fuck with the dot three, man that was a PITA.
BULLSHIT, flag on the field for bullshit, and the fact you got modded up just shows how damned many puppies we have here now!
In 95 you got a CDROM alright but you sure as fuck wasn't getting any burners which were north of a grand, were slow as hell, and were unreliable as hell to boot. You also weren't getting any third party burnt CDs because those damned things were close to $5 a pop and one out of every 3 or 4 would turn out to be a coaster. I should know as my shop had one of the first CD Burners and later the first DVD Burners and we were having to charge $10 a disc just because of how much the damned thing cost, it was NOT in any way affordable nor commonplace!
So you are basically saying that only the ones that meet your criteria should be allowed to have a PC? Nice to know elitist douchebaggery isn't dead. One of the reasons I gave up on Linux was their forums were fricking filled with those that were like "If they don't feel comfortable around editing in a CLI then maybe they should have a PC at all?" kind of elitist douchebaggery.
Autorun made it easier for companies to deploy their software, made it easier to install drivers, if it wasn't for assholes ruining it frankly it was a nice little feature to have. A lot of the reason MSFT had to stick with it was the antitrust made the idea of keeping everything in a single repo unworkable, see how you had them threatened with lawsuits when they first offered Windows Defender and even had a couple of fucking spyware companies sue because MSFT was actually "blocking their software" from infecting machines!
But the fact that you are basically proposing a fucking guild system so that only the "blessed" can install just shows how damned elitist you are, no different than how RMS addresses everyone as "hackers" because the thought that normal people may be using PCs? Doesn't really cross his mind.
It is obvious that you never worked corporate or had to deal with multi-thousand dollar software because then you'd know, it was corporate and dongles that kept the feature for so long.
Was it a great idea in hindsight? Nope but like ActiveX once a corp has spent several million dollars investing in a technology you had BETTER give their ass plenty of time to switch to something else before you break it or that is your ass, and that was the problem that MSFT faced with autorun. I was getting corporate CDs and flash sticks as late as Dec 2010 that had autorun set up to load their little presentation or whatever so it was just hard as hell to get the corps off of it. Hell look at how damned many users of IE 6 are left and that is all thanks to corporate intranet IE 6 only ActiveX crap, so you can see that corporate does NOT turn on a dime.
Because most malware writers didn't have 15k+ to spend on a CD press? Dude I got one of the very first DVD burners in my state, know how much that bitch cost? $600 and media was over $4 a pop for that sucker. CD burners were likewise crazy priced and the media was expensive as hell so it really wasn't a big threat vector, at the time you could buy floppies for 8c a pop and CDR was $2, an RW was closer to $5.
I swear, these kids...they have NO clue how expensive shit was back then! I bet my fellow greybeards can back me up, when Win95 came out I had a MASSIVE 100MB HDD and that bitch cost a damned pretty penny, nobody even thought about slapping a burner in because the cost was so insane. hell how many floppies did Win95 come on again? I can't recall but it was a shitload. My first flash stick was based on CF and cost a whopping $200 for a 64Mb capacity so the risk of Joe Average having one? Really wasn't there.
Actually they kept in XP for so long (I believe it was right after SP3 or right before they put out a patch that killed it) was because of corporate dongles, a lot of companies used dongles in the early days of XP and by having autorun on the dongle they could just plug in the dongle and it would run the check and fire up the software it was connected to so it WAS a handy feature to have.
I don't know how many 4 port USB cards I had to install back then because of all the damned dongles that the high end software companies used, for awhile it was dongle madness. Of course that was before flash sticks became cheap as dirt so tying multi thousand dollar software to a USB dongle was actually a pretty decent anti piracy method.
Uhhh...dude? Yeah hate to break the news to ya but that was actually removed by a patch YEARS AGO and the only ones getting hit by this? Pirates and those that still think that 30 day trial of Norton they got with the system in 2005 actually does anything.
Here is the FACTS from the guy that builds and fixes these things, straight from the trenches...FACT: WinXP was/is the most pirated OS ON THE PLANET by a HUGE margin and thanks to WGA guess what ALL the pirates disable? Windows Updates. And I say is because I have run into machines not 6 months old running "XP Pro Razr1911 edition" put on by low rent fly by night shops and those selling PCs in flea markets and on CL. There is so many dual cores from 05-09 that don't have drivers for Win 7 I doubt this is gonna change for a while. If it gives anybody comfort pirated Win 7 is on the rise, of course those also have updates disabled so they'll be infected soon enough.
FACT: Autorun was disabled several years ago and if an XP system is fully patched? Then autorun doesn't work. Of course Vista, 7 and 8 doesn't have this at all but because many of the OEMs didn't put out drivers for any system older than 09 and most shops aren't gonna bother hunting for a driver, especially when MSFT charges over a hundred bucks for a copy of Win 7? Again they use Razr1911 XP that has all the drivers integrated. There is even an "XP Black Edition" that mimics the UI of WinVista/7 so the average clueless buyer won't even know.
So if you want to bitch about this? Bitch at the pirates and the fly by night guys using pirated software, because I can tell you that there isn't a legit XP box that has autorun on, not unless the user went in and disabled the updates several years back and if they did that? Well its hard to feel sorry for them, hell you disable security updates on ANY OS and your ass is gonna be swinging in the breeze, see MacDefender or the KDELook bug for just two examples.
Ironically that is EXACTLY what I think is gonna happen. There is a reason why NO empire, no matter how powerful, last more than a few centuries and that is because it ALWAYS becomes so corrupted the people lose faith and tear it down.
Once upon a time the Roman Empire controlled the known world, and nothing could touch Roman tech. Once upon a time the sun never set on the British empire...where are they? Gone now, the greed and corruption made them dysfunctional and they fell apart. It would be the height of arrogance to think the USA could escape the fate of those, the only question is when and how nasty its gonna be, will it be a peaceful falling apart like the USSR, or like the crazy Austrian and go into total war mode until it has to be torn down by the other countries? who knows, but the current system WILL fall, it is simply too badly tilted to stand.
I once had a VERY wise old Baptist preacher explain it to me, he said "The western religions are a salad bar. We have seen the horrors that come from strict adherence to dogma, such as the dark ages, and we learned to take away the best parts and leave the worst parts. For example see how many churches in the 40s and 50s tried to use the "Curse Of Ham" to justify Jim Crow, any church that even attempted that today would be quickly shunned."
The problem with Islam is they are where the other religions were 500 years ago and they refuse to grow the fuck up. Why do you think the most barbaric prison systems are in Muslim countries? Because THAT is what you get when you follow ANY religion to 100% adherence, which is why the other religions don't do that anymore. if we followed the bible to 100% adherence we would still have slaves, child brides, and a whole bunch of other REALLY nasty shit because those books were written in a brutal period where the old folks were the ones who made 30. And what do we see in Muslim countries? The same brutality, women and children are property, church law is inviolate, and women are stoned for being raped...yeah some "religion of peace" you got there, REAL enlightened.
Sorry but the other guy is right, fascism is by its very design a right wing concept, it is the government and corporations working as one, this is completely 180 degrees away from the left which puts the government in control of everything and corporations are powerless.
To make it easy to picture Stalin was 100% left, Hitler was 100% right, sure to the outside they both look similar but how their countries ran was VERY different. The reason you may be having trouble is we have one party in this country labeled "left" that in words and deeds is actually right wing, the only reason they are called left is that the other party is extreme right wing, which makes anybody else look left just by how far right they are.
OKC cost around 300 people, twin towers? over 3000. Sorry you lose, thanks for playing, enjoy your rice-a-roni.
Oh and just FYI while those Christian nutballs have to go to a few groups that are rightly monitored like the Aryan Nation because the mainstream churches don't want to have a fucking thing to do with dangerous nutballs the last checkup the FBI did on mosques in the USA find more than 40% of them preaching the whole "death to the great satan" bullshit, I'd post a link but after the PC police threw the racist card trying to find a copy that is still hosted on a federal site is pretty much impossible.
Again reality is poison to the politically correct, no different to how we only have two races in this country now, African American and White, because if you are Latino,Asian, pretty much ANYTHING other than African American? You are listed as white by the FBI crime statistics, why? Because the explosion of violence among urban blacks doesn't look good for their PC bullshit so they gotta skew the living fuck out of the statistics. Yeah God fucking forbid they actually ask WHY the inner cities have become warzones, better just to sweep it under the rug.
Well I was ignoring the "Holy shit the whole idea is retarded" factor but there IS a reason why the whole thing won't work...douchebags. Sorry folks but the world is filled with 'em, you'll have douchebags with cantennas turning your lights into a fucking disco just because they think its funnay.
So at least if you built it into the switch you'd not only be able to control multiple lights but as a bonus you'd have room for a little security circuitry built in. Without any security? These things won't last a week thanks to all the douchebags.
And unless you live in BFE its gonna suuuuck! You ever live in an apt? I live in an apt building that isn't even geek populated and there is no less than 4 wifi routers stepping all over each other, how is it gonna be when you have a couple of hundred bulbs all stepping on each other? Its gonna be "some guy down the hall keeps turning off my lights!" to the power of infinity, and that isn't even figuring in the jackasses that will focus on fucking with the lights for shits and giggles.
I've gone through 5 packs of CFL in my apt in 5 years and I have nice clean power coming straight off the mains (nice to be buddies with the super) while dad's ancient 48" florescent tubes put up in the mid 80s? Still putting off plenty of that sickly grey light without a bit of trouble.
Ya know I really hate to invoke that "Things ain't what they used to be" meme but when it comes to bulbs? The new ones suuuuck. I'll keep using the CFLs simply because i live in the deep south and the lower heat is worth it to me but I've had so many die that I don't even bother with the warranty, its not worth the bullshit. And before somebody says its might outlets? I got tired of ending up in the dark when I was in the bathroom so I picked up a 75c pack of incandescent and guess what? Even the super cheap shit incandescent bulbs last twice as long. The chips they are using in the ballast base are garbage according to an engineer friend of mine who tinkers with them, but they can get that chip for like 3c a pop....sound familiar?
You can have cheap or long lasting...PICK ONE. And most likely like everything else in this world you quickly won't even get a choice, the expensive ones will be the cheap ones with a few more bells and whistles.
How long was the CFLs supposed to last again? /looks at fifth pack of CFLs bought in 5 years/...yeah..bullshit. Like MTBF on hard drives and SSDs anybody who has spent ANY time with electronics knows that you get cheap OR long lasting, NEVER both. If he buys their bullshit I have some swampland he really needs to look at.