If you come around the corner of a building and someone is there, pointing a gun at you (or at least in your direction), do you stand there arguing with your freind as to if the gun is a gun, if it's loaded, if it's really intended to kill you? Or, did you take the nescessary action to go back around the corner, out of the line of fire of that gunman?
Stupidest analogy ever.
We don't know if there's a clear and present danger, like a gun. We definitely don't know enough to justify a 'fix' that could be much, much worse then the problem if we turn out to be wrong.
This discussion is about putting something between us and the sun so as to cool down the earth. But what if we're wrong and cooling down the earth sends the climate into global chaos? What if we trigger an ice age?
I'm not advocating we continue with our current fossil fuel levels or anything like that. I'm advocating the view that we don't know enough to take such a drastic step.
To go back to your laughable gunman example, you're advocating that me and my friend don't back around the corner (which would be like cutting back on our emissions), you're advocating that we dive into an open manhole to put something between us and him. Until we know where that manhole leads, maybe we should back off with the drastic measures?
Funny, isn't it, how when Iraq was the bogey, it was of the utmost urgency that we act now, now goddammit, and only a fool or idiot would sit around waiting for definitive, iron-clad evidence.
I was against the Iraq war. I was all for waiting for evidence. In fact, I'm insulted by your implication that I would treat the issues so hypocritcally.
But when it's only global warming, with consequences ranging from the loss of entire island countries to mass species extinction... well, no need for action until all the facts are in. Let's just wait until they've managed to prove, without doubt, that there is no tiny chance of any conceivable alternative solution. One that, you know, doesn't require us to do anything.
I'm waiting for an answer because what we need to do to reverse global warming is force the earth to cool down. We don't know what this will do.
This discussion is about actions to cool down the earth. Not about stopping our use of fossil fuels. This discussion is about actions that could trigger the next ice age. I'm sure you'll agree that the stakes here are much, much higher then invading a country on flimsy accusations.
Do you really think we can release carbon dioxide and other trash into the atmosphere forever, without it having any impact, ever?
Of course it'll have an impact. I'm not saying that it won't. I'm saying that there is debate over the issue of that impact being global warming. And taking the forever extreme is stupid, can we do anything forever without it having an impact, ever?
If there is even the slightest chance that the Earth might be changing its climate due to man's actions, we should act NOW. The risks of not doing anything are far, far higher than the costs of acting.
Think about what you're saying. You're saying we should take steps now to combat something we may be wrong about. Well, actually, your argument is stupider, you're claiming that the slightest chance means we should take action. You're claiming that we should take steps to cool down the earth.
This is major. If we're wrong, we could trigger an ice age. If we're wrong, we could irrevocably damage the earth. We could kill off millions of people. You're suggesting we do this on "the slightest chance that the Earth might be changing its climate due to man's actions".
Notice, please, that I'm not taking sides here. All I'm saying is that we need to first resolve the debate before we can act.
This one. Let's see, "some "greenhouse skeptics" subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a particular viewpoint. But some of the topics focused on by the skeptics are recognized as legitimate research questions" (emphasis mine).
Legitimate research questions? That sounds like, scientifically, there is a real debate, because there are some things we do not know.
From the same page: "We now know (Hansen et al. 1998a, 1998b) that the growth rate of greenhouse gases in the period 1988-1998 has been flat". And "it is apparent that the model did a good job of predicting global temperature change. But the period of comparison is too short and the climate change too small compared to natural variability for the comparison to provide a meaningful check on the model's sensitivity to climate forcings.".
That sounds to me like the current models do not know whether or not man is impacting the climate and causing global warming. Don't let the actions of extemists cloud your views on the subject. Just because there are a large amount of people arguing that there isn't global warming, using only the facts that support their case and omitting others, does not mean that the case against global warming relies on omitting fact. Just because some people are arguing a case badly doesn't mean that there isn't a case to argue.
A) Someone states something completely obvious like "Television will change the way people see the world".
You'll have to tell me how this was completely obvious. Initial televisions weren't anything special - just a flickering blob of image for more money then most people could afford. In fact, if, when faced with a brand new invention not like anything you've ever seen before, you can accurately predict (so accurately, in fact, that it's 'completely obvious') its effects on society - maybe you should go into the soothsaying business.
I really don't like it when people pass of a blog entry as a review. The author tells us that "There are simply tons of packages on this DVD", and spends three paragraphs (about a third of the 'review') describing ClamAV and how to use it - something which has little or nothing to do with Knoppix on DVD apart from that fact that it's included.
Nothing against Kyle Rankin and his blog of course, he's doing what blogs do. And it is nice to know I can now run Gnome. But shame on you Mr. IdleTime.
I can tell you how many Macs running OS X i've seen with people logged in as essentially "root". Sure OS X prompts you for an admin password when critical things happen, but everyone I've seen blindly enters the root password. Most times, the user does not even read the dialog box.
That is, simply, a user problem. They had the option to say no and didn't take it. This can be solved with education.
In the Windows world, you're seldom prompted for a password - apps just fail. A lot of apps can't be run as a non-Administrator without some serious tweaking, some won't run no matter what you do. This can't be solved without revising the Windows user model.
This isn't really an issue. Firefox will not run as the most limited use in Windows because the most limited user does not have write access to very much in the %homepath%. Which is specifically what the '"Protect my computer" min privileges' are all about - letting you run software and making sure it cannot write to or change anything important.
Oooh, that gives me an idea. Why not design a keyboard that uses standard keyboard keys, but make the keytops transparent, then put one of those virtual keyboard laser projecters under the keys.
Of course, to do this right, you'd need a special keyboard driver and a switch on the side you can use to toggle between (say) three different layouts. But that's nothing difficult once you have the hardware.
Did you read the response you refer to? Avalanche claimed to be superior to BitTorrent and based its argument on assumptions and old code. Cohen corrected the misconceptions.
He also went out of his way to explain why Avalanche is doing things wrong and where their testing methodology had come up wanting.
It's hardly pedantic. HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) is used to move HTML (HyperText Markup Language) around, they are seperate and distinct. Is it pedantic to claim that a cargo ship isn't the same thing as cargo?
To labour the point further - I can get HTML via FTP and I can get an excecutable binary with HTTP.
"Two very proud countries had been involved in a long and drawn out war, neither side able to win. When at last the war ended, they both declared themselves the victors."
The irony here is in the countries declaring themselves the victors when in reality they both lost. It is only ironic if you believe they both lost, if you think they both reached a compromise or that they reached some no-win no-lose middle ground, it isn't ironic. In that case, it would be simple allegory.
Irony is actually a lot simpler then most people think - strictly, it is a subset of allegory in which you are saying one thing and meaning its opposite. So, "Nice weather." during a hailstorm is irony.
The confusion comes, largely, when people try to decide wether an event was 'ironic'. If you put special snow tires on your car to prevent it skidding, but they turned out to skid worse then your old tires - that would be ironic. However, if you put special snow tires on your car to prevent it skidding, but one of them burst running over a bit of ice - that wouldn't qualify.
Hope that sorta cleared things up.
(The U of Cambridge English Department has a definition.)
My point came largely from what I learnt while designing modelling systems for physics majors - I was told that Newton's model was correct at some scales and that a relativistic model was correct at others. The system's results reflected this, though, thinking about it, the amount of error could well be due to limitations of precision. My apologies.
Though, to make a somewhat different point, I think that calling FTL travel 'impossible' thanks to special relativity, means that you have to accept that special relativity is a perfect model.
It really is impossible, in the true definition of the word, if special relativity, a very well-tested theory, is correct.
That isn't correct.
As it is, special relativity breaks down when it comes to describing very mundane things, like a ball flying through the air. We still use Newton's model, frequently, to describe things that can't be described using 'relativity'. At certain scales, it works, at others it doesn't work at all.
So to call something impossible because of a theory that is known to be incomplete is a little bit of a stretch.
And yet another classic example of tunnel vision Unix bigotry. If it isn't exactly the way I learned it, it's broken.
Backslashes are, and have always been a bad idea. They were implemented as a hack so that old DOS users, from before there was any sort of file structure, could still use the command line switches (like 'dir/p') they were used to.
The reason backslashes aren't as good as forward slashes is simple - the backslash is (and at the time, was) the universally accepted escape character. DOS programmers had to deal with paths full of '\\'s, software for any other OS had to be rewritten with '\\' where before there was only '/'. This caused hell with assembly programmers where every byte was then nudged up a character. Eventually, most programming languages introduced headers and libraries that translated the '/' into a '\\' - but it was truly an ugly hack just so that the interface wouldn't change all that much.
Of course, in the lag time in between it being introduced and libraries arriving that hacked around the problem - people scambled for a decent escape character. They couldn't use '\', they couldn't use '/', in fact, they couldn't use any typeable key on the keyboard. Ever used ANSI.SYS? It used the actual 'Esc' keycode - ASCII 27 - as it's escape character. I remember using some app that used the tilde, and having all sorts of trouble interacting with a unix host.
Of course, all the trouble couldv'e been avoided if MS had used the then currently accepted standard of the '/' as the path delimiter. Sometimes the all the "tunnel vision Unix bigotry" is actually just common sense.
[humming]Feedin' the troll, la de dee dee[/humming]
Can you rotate, resize and compress a JPEG, GIF or PNG on the MS$ command line? Can you do this ssh user@domain.com. Can you run a firewall script from the cmd? Can you chmod or chown?
I dunno if it's just me, but did anyone notice that none of those things have anything to do with the shell? (Well, except maybe chmod and chown - if you push it.)
Image manipulation? Just launch ImageMagick. You can do this in Windows right now, with the correct software installed.
SSH? Just launch SSH. You can do this in Windows right now, with the correct software installed.
A firewall? Launch your firewall script. You can do this in Windows right now, with the correct software installed.
Are we seeing a pattern? 100% of the relevant stuff you mentioned doesn't involve the shell, and relies on external apps. As for chmod and chown, apart from the fact that you can install them in Windows (with cygwin), they're totally irrelevant - Windows has a much more complete permissions system then your average *nix, and it has the command line tools to support it in 'cacls'.
The day I can boot Windows to the command line and strip it down to its kernel, only implementing the services I want, I will know that MS$ has finally stolen everything from Linux. MS$ is crap, It will always be crap. Putting a dress on a pig won't make it pretty - unless your another pig!
Sure. You whine about how you can't do certain things in Windows, things which are as easy to achieve as in your *nix, then you turn around and whine that if you could do them, Microsoft would be stealing.
Ideally, all a cookie would be able to store is a username and a password hash - any other info should be generated by a database query. This would, at the very least, increase the costs and maintainance time associated with appropriating your privacy.
So no, I wouldn't consider EXIF data to be a reasonable source for corroborating "ownership" claims.
But written permission is very, very easily forged. Just get type up something that looks like permission, scribble something under 'signature' and bingo!
So put in place a system where the clerk enters the images into a checker, which stores the EXIF data someplace, which will count as 'permission'.
And if someone has edited the EXIF block to show incorrect data - you have a quite clear guilty party (that very clearly isn't the photo processor).
about the whiniest people I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with.
I had a friend who worked briefly at a print shop - and I remember a story where he had a photographer trying to get a refund for ~150 prints because the red wasn't 'vibrant enough'. I seem to remember it ending rather abruptly when his boss pointed out that the uniforms that were supposed to be this 'vibrant' red were actually maroon.
I think some of the problem is that previously they didn't ask every person for a waiver when they came in to have their prints developed. If you think about it - regardless of who took the shots, when you take your photos to get devloped you are asking for a reproduction of a copyrighted work.
I agree that flat refusal is stupid, but I don't think that you should be able to get just anything printed, for the same reason my local print shop won't let me photocopy an entire book without providing some sort of proof that I'm allowed.
I'm not sure if windows even looks at the file extention anymore
Oh, it does, and it even goes to great lengths so you don't have to. Try name a file something.zip.shs - all you'll see is the.zip. SHS is one of a few extensions windows always hides.
Hrm, in fact, with a.shs - you could make a file that would appear to end with.zip, but that silently installs a bunch of crapware, then puts a *real*.zip containing the files you tried to download in the tempdir and launch your associated windows app to open it. It would be completely seamless unless a) the icon was different from your usual 'unzip' app and/or b) you noticed that the file was actually opening from a different dir.
And now that I give it some more thought - you could build a shs that copies a.zip to a temp dir, installs a bunch of crapware, then deletes itself and moves the.zip from the temp dir to the directory it was executed from and executes it with the default app. If done right, the only thing that would give it away would be the file's icon.
Create a file called EVILVIRUS.jpg.exe - the file extension is there and 100% visible. You would never click on that.
Now rename the file to EVILVIRUS.jpg.pif - notice how it now looks exactly like a jpg file with the wrong icon. And if you've got "Hide known file types" unchecked, you'll think it's 100% safe.
There are certain extensions (off the top of my head.shs,.lnk and.pif - there may be more) that windows always hides. Of these,.shs is the scariest because it's a shell script wrapped around an object - a script on its own can do a lot of damage, but the object can be anything excecutable.
How about the fact that Batman is Bruce Wayne and owns Wayne Enterprises?
Goddamit, you ass. I've spent my whole life with my hands hovering over my ears ready to clamp them down and start yelling LA LA LA LA LA LA at the top of my lungs whenever someone starts a sentance with 'Batman is...', AND NOW YOU'VE RUINED IT!
'Batman Begins' was a mystery until just then, I used to sit, waiting to see the film, wondering 'Who is Batman? Where does he begin?' and know I know you unconscionable bastard. It's all ruined. *sob*
Slashdot Mirror
If you come around the corner of a building and someone is there, pointing a gun at you (or at least in your direction), do you stand there arguing with your freind as to if the gun is a gun, if it's loaded, if it's really intended to kill you? Or, did you take the nescessary action to go back around the corner, out of the line of fire of that gunman?
Stupidest analogy ever.
We don't know if there's a clear and present danger, like a gun. We definitely don't know enough to justify a 'fix' that could be much, much worse then the problem if we turn out to be wrong.
This discussion is about putting something between us and the sun so as to cool down the earth. But what if we're wrong and cooling down the earth sends the climate into global chaos? What if we trigger an ice age?
I'm not advocating we continue with our current fossil fuel levels or anything like that. I'm advocating the view that we don't know enough to take such a drastic step.
To go back to your laughable gunman example, you're advocating that me and my friend don't back around the corner (which would be like cutting back on our emissions), you're advocating that we dive into an open manhole to put something between us and him. Until we know where that manhole leads, maybe we should back off with the drastic measures?
Funny, isn't it, how when Iraq was the bogey, it was of the utmost urgency that we act now, now goddammit, and only a fool or idiot would sit around waiting for definitive, iron-clad evidence.
I was against the Iraq war. I was all for waiting for evidence. In fact, I'm insulted by your implication that I would treat the issues so hypocritcally.
But when it's only global warming, with consequences ranging from the loss of entire island countries to mass species extinction... well, no need for action until all the facts are in. Let's just wait until they've managed to prove, without doubt, that there is no tiny chance of any conceivable alternative solution. One that, you know, doesn't require us to do anything.
I'm waiting for an answer because what we need to do to reverse global warming is force the earth to cool down. We don't know what this will do.
This discussion is about actions to cool down the earth. Not about stopping our use of fossil fuels. This discussion is about actions that could trigger the next ice age. I'm sure you'll agree that the stakes here are much, much higher then invading a country on flimsy accusations.
Do you really think we can release carbon dioxide and other trash into the atmosphere forever, without it having any impact, ever?
Of course it'll have an impact. I'm not saying that it won't. I'm saying that there is debate over the issue of that impact being global warming. And taking the forever extreme is stupid, can we do anything forever without it having an impact, ever?
If there is even the slightest chance that the Earth might be changing its climate due to man's actions, we should act NOW. The risks of not doing anything are far, far higher than the costs of acting.
Think about what you're saying. You're saying we should take steps now to combat something we may be wrong about. Well, actually, your argument is stupider, you're claiming that the slightest chance means we should take action. You're claiming that we should take steps to cool down the earth.
This is major. If we're wrong, we could trigger an ice age. If we're wrong, we could irrevocably damage the earth. We could kill off millions of people. You're suggesting we do this on "the slightest chance that the Earth might be changing its climate due to man's actions".
Notice, please, that I'm not taking sides here. All I'm saying is that we need to first resolve the debate before we can act.
The problem is, which debate is he referring to?
This one. Let's see, "some "greenhouse skeptics" subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a particular viewpoint. But some of the topics focused on by the skeptics are recognized as legitimate research questions " (emphasis mine).
Legitimate research questions? That sounds like, scientifically, there is a real debate, because there are some things we do not know.
From the same page: "We now know (Hansen et al. 1998a, 1998b) that the growth rate of greenhouse gases in the period 1988-1998 has been flat". And "it is apparent that the model did a good job of predicting global temperature change. But the period of comparison is too short and the climate change too small compared to natural variability for the comparison to provide a meaningful check on the model's sensitivity to climate forcings.".
That sounds to me like the current models do not know whether or not man is impacting the climate and causing global warming. Don't let the actions of extemists cloud your views on the subject. Just because there are a large amount of people arguing that there isn't global warming, using only the facts that support their case and omitting others, does not mean that the case against global warming relies on omitting fact. Just because some people are arguing a case badly doesn't mean that there isn't a case to argue.
A) Someone states something completely obvious like "Television will change the way people see the world".
You'll have to tell me how this was completely obvious. Initial televisions weren't anything special - just a flickering blob of image for more money then most people could afford. In fact, if, when faced with a brand new invention not like anything you've ever seen before, you can accurately predict (so accurately, in fact, that it's 'completely obvious') its effects on society - maybe you should go into the soothsaying business.
I really don't like it when people pass of a blog entry as a review. The author tells us that "There are simply tons of packages on this DVD", and spends three paragraphs (about a third of the 'review') describing ClamAV and how to use it - something which has little or nothing to do with Knoppix on DVD apart from that fact that it's included.
Nothing against Kyle Rankin and his blog of course, he's doing what blogs do. And it is nice to know I can now run Gnome. But shame on you Mr. IdleTime.
I can tell you how many Macs running OS X i've seen with people logged in as essentially "root". Sure OS X prompts you for an admin password when critical things happen, but everyone I've seen blindly enters the root password. Most times, the user does not even read the dialog box.
That is, simply, a user problem. They had the option to say no and didn't take it. This can be solved with education.
In the Windows world, you're seldom prompted for a password - apps just fail. A lot of apps can't be run as a non-Administrator without some serious tweaking, some won't run no matter what you do. This can't be solved without revising the Windows user model.
This isn't really an issue. Firefox will not run as the most limited use in Windows because the most limited user does not have write access to very much in the %homepath%. Which is specifically what the '"Protect my computer" min privileges' are all about - letting you run software and making sure it cannot write to or change anything important.
Oooh, that gives me an idea. Why not design a keyboard that uses standard keyboard keys, but make the keytops transparent, then put one of those virtual keyboard laser projecters under the keys.
Of course, to do this right, you'd need a special keyboard driver and a switch on the side you can use to toggle between (say) three different layouts. But that's nothing difficult once you have the hardware.
I think the obvious answer to this is that if you don't see the point of the device, or if you think it's a waste - you're not in the target market.
It may not be an Ode, but it makes a lovely acrostic - *pwuwpw* sounds just like a plunger doing it's work.
Did you read the response you refer to? Avalanche claimed to be superior to BitTorrent and based its argument on assumptions and old code. Cohen corrected the misconceptions.
He also went out of his way to explain why Avalanche is doing things wrong and where their testing methodology had come up wanting.
It's hardly pedantic. HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) is used to move HTML (HyperText Markup Language) around, they are seperate and distinct. Is it pedantic to claim that a cargo ship isn't the same thing as cargo?
To labour the point further - I can get HTML via FTP and I can get an excecutable binary with HTTP.
"Two very proud countries had been involved in a long and drawn out war, neither side able to win. When at last the war ended, they both declared themselves the victors."
The irony here is in the countries declaring themselves the victors when in reality they both lost. It is only ironic if you believe they both lost, if you think they both reached a compromise or that they reached some no-win no-lose middle ground, it isn't ironic. In that case, it would be simple allegory.
Irony is actually a lot simpler then most people think - strictly, it is a subset of allegory in which you are saying one thing and meaning its opposite. So, "Nice weather." during a hailstorm is irony.
The confusion comes, largely, when people try to decide wether an event was 'ironic'. If you put special snow tires on your car to prevent it skidding, but they turned out to skid worse then your old tires - that would be ironic. However, if you put special snow tires on your car to prevent it skidding, but one of them burst running over a bit of ice - that wouldn't qualify.
Hope that sorta cleared things up.
(The U of Cambridge English Department has a definition.)
My point came largely from what I learnt while designing modelling systems for physics majors - I was told that Newton's model was correct at some scales and that a relativistic model was correct at others. The system's results reflected this, though, thinking about it, the amount of error could well be due to limitations of precision. My apologies.
Though, to make a somewhat different point, I think that calling FTL travel 'impossible' thanks to special relativity, means that you have to accept that special relativity is a perfect model.
It really is impossible, in the true definition of the word, if special relativity, a very well-tested theory, is correct.
That isn't correct.
As it is, special relativity breaks down when it comes to describing very mundane things, like a ball flying through the air. We still use Newton's model, frequently, to describe things that can't be described using 'relativity'. At certain scales, it works, at others it doesn't work at all.
So to call something impossible because of a theory that is known to be incomplete is a little bit of a stretch.
And yet another classic example of tunnel vision Unix bigotry. If it isn't exactly the way I learned it, it's broken.
Backslashes are, and have always been a bad idea. They were implemented as a hack so that old DOS users, from before there was any sort of file structure, could still use the command line switches (like 'dir /p') they were used to.
The reason backslashes aren't as good as forward slashes is simple - the backslash is (and at the time, was) the universally accepted escape character. DOS programmers had to deal with paths full of '\\'s, software for any other OS had to be rewritten with '\\' where before there was only '/'. This caused hell with assembly programmers where every byte was then nudged up a character. Eventually, most programming languages introduced headers and libraries that translated the '/' into a '\\' - but it was truly an ugly hack just so that the interface wouldn't change all that much.
Of course, in the lag time in between it being introduced and libraries arriving that hacked around the problem - people scambled for a decent escape character. They couldn't use '\', they couldn't use '/', in fact, they couldn't use any typeable key on the keyboard. Ever used ANSI.SYS? It used the actual 'Esc' keycode - ASCII 27 - as it's escape character. I remember using some app that used the tilde, and having all sorts of trouble interacting with a unix host.
Of course, all the trouble couldv'e been avoided if MS had used the then currently accepted standard of the '/' as the path delimiter. Sometimes the all the "tunnel vision Unix bigotry" is actually just common sense.
[humming]Feedin' the troll, la de dee dee[/humming]
Can you rotate, resize and compress a JPEG, GIF or PNG on the MS$ command line? Can you do this ssh user@domain.com. Can you run a firewall script from the cmd? Can you chmod or chown?
I dunno if it's just me, but did anyone notice that none of those things have anything to do with the shell? (Well, except maybe chmod and chown - if you push it.)
Image manipulation? Just launch ImageMagick. You can do this in Windows right now, with the correct software installed.
SSH? Just launch SSH. You can do this in Windows right now, with the correct software installed.
A firewall? Launch your firewall script. You can do this in Windows right now, with the correct software installed.
Are we seeing a pattern? 100% of the relevant stuff you mentioned doesn't involve the shell, and relies on external apps. As for chmod and chown, apart from the fact that you can install them in Windows (with cygwin), they're totally irrelevant - Windows has a much more complete permissions system then your average *nix, and it has the command line tools to support it in 'cacls'.
The day I can boot Windows to the command line and strip it down to its kernel, only implementing the services I want, I will know that MS$ has finally stolen everything from Linux. MS$ is crap, It will always be crap. Putting a dress on a pig won't make it pretty - unless your another pig!
Sure. You whine about how you can't do certain things in Windows, things which are as easy to achieve as in your *nix, then you turn around and whine that if you could do them, Microsoft would be stealing.
How does supply and demand work in your world?
Ideally, all a cookie would be able to store is a username and a password hash - any other info should be generated by a database query. This would, at the very least, increase the costs and maintainance time associated with appropriating your privacy.
So no, I wouldn't consider EXIF data to be a reasonable source for corroborating "ownership" claims.
But written permission is very, very easily forged. Just get type up something that looks like permission, scribble something under 'signature' and bingo!
So put in place a system where the clerk enters the images into a checker, which stores the EXIF data someplace, which will count as 'permission'.
And if someone has edited the EXIF block to show incorrect data - you have a quite clear guilty party (that very clearly isn't the photo processor).
about the whiniest people I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with.
I had a friend who worked briefly at a print shop - and I remember a story where he had a photographer trying to get a refund for ~150 prints because the red wasn't 'vibrant enough'. I seem to remember it ending rather abruptly when his boss pointed out that the uniforms that were supposed to be this 'vibrant' red were actually maroon.
I think some of the problem is that previously they didn't ask every person for a waiver when they came in to have their prints developed. If you think about it - regardless of who took the shots, when you take your photos to get devloped you are asking for a reproduction of a copyrighted work.
I agree that flat refusal is stupid, but I don't think that you should be able to get just anything printed, for the same reason my local print shop won't let me photocopy an entire book without providing some sort of proof that I'm allowed.
I'm not sure if windows even looks at the file extention anymore
Oh, it does, and it even goes to great lengths so you don't have to. Try name a file something.zip.shs - all you'll see is the .zip. SHS is one of a few extensions windows always hides.
Hrm, in fact, with a .shs - you could make a file that would appear to end with .zip, but that silently installs a bunch of crapware, then puts a *real* .zip containing the files you tried to download in the tempdir and launch your associated windows app to open it. It would be completely seamless unless a) the icon was different from your usual 'unzip' app and/or b) you noticed that the file was actually opening from a different dir.
And now that I give it some more thought - you could build a shs that copies a .zip to a temp dir, installs a bunch of crapware, then deletes itself and moves the .zip from the temp dir to the directory it was executed from and executes it with the default app. If done right, the only thing that would give it away would be the file's icon.
I'm suprised noone's ever tried it.
Create a file called EVILVIRUS.jpg.exe - the file extension is there and 100% visible. You would never click on that.
Now rename the file to EVILVIRUS.jpg.pif - notice how it now looks exactly like a jpg file with the wrong icon. And if you've got "Hide known file types" unchecked, you'll think it's 100% safe.
There are certain extensions (off the top of my head .shs, .lnk and .pif - there may be more) that windows always hides. Of these, .shs is the scariest because it's a shell script wrapped around an object - a script on its own can do a lot of damage, but the object can be anything excecutable.
Still feel safe opening your attachments?
How about the fact that Batman is Bruce Wayne and owns Wayne Enterprises?
Goddamit, you ass. I've spent my whole life with my hands hovering over my ears ready to clamp them down and start yelling LA LA LA LA LA LA at the top of my lungs whenever someone starts a sentance with 'Batman is...', AND NOW YOU'VE RUINED IT!
'Batman Begins' was a mystery until just then, I used to sit, waiting to see the film, wondering 'Who is Batman? Where does he begin?' and know I know you unconscionable bastard. It's all ruined. *sob*