That doesn't stop the losses he is suffering: damage to his name (which, granted, I think he's stretching a bit -- Mac users might be fanatics but I doubt they know the name of everyone to have appeared in a suit about apple and care enough to assault his fiance on the street), stress, etc. And in the unlikely event that a bunch of lawyers wanted satisfaction from you, they wouldn't send in "bounty hunters" -- they'd walk up to their favorite courtroom, tell the judge "he has been evading contact with us", sue you for nonpayment of services, serve you with the lawsuit, win by default (it doesn't matter that they have no case, if you don't contest it you'll lose), and ask for a lien slapped on your bank accounts/house/etc. Its the 21st century -- you can screw somebody without ever speaking with them.
Spam is not limited by number of boxes or processing power. You can get either of those for quite cheap on specialham.com, from your favorite broker of zombified PCs. The trick is getting proxies or servers with IP addresses that aren't already on all the blacklists. Since these laptops don't come with an Internet connection (merely connectivity), they no more increase the spam threat than Intel introducing a faster CPU does (yay, thats more unique spam messages you can generate that get/dev/null'ed because your machine is blacklisted).
$30 for a one-tenth chance of detection leading to a miniscule chance of recovery, versus $12 (yearly) insurance premium for a ~100% chance of replacement of the insured value (either in your homeowner's/renters insurance or as a special rider to it -- or www.safeware.com if you want to get stabbed through the eyes on fees, really go with whomever gives you the rest of your insurance they'll be HAPPY to take your money). Gee, I wonder which one is the better deal...
... because its "the new Nintendo". Would you care to take a stab at the number of Nintendos which are actually bought by their primary users? I'm guessing than half overall and less than a third at launch, which will be driven by Christmas/gift sales. Mom doesn't care what the controller looks like and probably doesn't know. She'll never know how many polygons it pushes or what the rendering pipeline looks like (she doesn't even know what "pipeline" means in the context of video games). She just knows its the Nintendo, which plays Mario/Link/Pokemon (games which, while she doesn't play, she could identify on sight because its all over junior's lunchboxes, underwear, and dinner table conversation since the age of four).
Mom has a budget for Christmas. $200 fits into that budget nicely -- split the gift among two kids, buy them a game, tell them to share, give them hugs and then watch them run off to the TV. $600 doesn't fit within that budget -- it causes mom to seize up and say "Why is this so expensive? Nintendos are always $200. What is this, a computer?"
The funny thing is, Nintendos *aren't* commoditized. They've got one monopoly supplier which makes a 20% profit margin per unit, which is unheard of in commodity electronics (stereos, hard drives, MP3 players whose names don't rhyme with tripod, etc). The real commodity is the years-old tech they stuff into every box, which keeps their costs down and lets them continue spinning straw into gold by taking the comparitively low-power, low-cost chips and letting them play *insert Nintendo franchise here*. Meanwhile, the other console manufacturers are beating themselves silly trying to cram bleeding edge stuff into their boxes and paying through the nose, then trying to make up the per-unit loss on volume (ok, to be less snide, on per-game licensing fees).
Nintendo probably has one of the best business models in the entire electronics industry. They make money on the box. They make money on the first-party games. They make a little less money on all the other games. They make money on the IP surrounding the games, to the extent that just *one* of their franchises has a worldwide value approaching that of a small country. With the advent of downloadable games on the Wii (whhhhhhhhhhhhhhy), they'll even make money on the retail/distribution of games (no more paying BestBuy/WalMart/Yamada Denki a 60% cut).
While in general I agree with you *if* the student actual did something illegal, there are a lot of circumstances where just a cursory inspection of the user-visible parts of the system will reveal the strong probability of a security vulnerability. If you say "Hmm, I wonder if this site has a SQL injection vulnerability" and then fire off a SQL command to print out all user names to your screen, congratulations, go-to-jail-do-not-pass-go. But if you open up your own student records, hit "View Source", and see that the "View Transcript" page has a submit button with only your username as a hidden value (and no session key), I would wager a signification fraction of my weekly salary that a) thats an unintended security flaw and b) the implication is that I can access the transcript and, thus, the social security number of any student I have a username for. Which is probably anyone on campus, since I have access to a directory of email addresses. If you immediately test the vulnerability with telnet (everyone here knows you can simulate a HTTP POST with telnet, right?) and a username other than your own, congratulations, you fail at life. But if you test it with your own credentials and then file the vulnerability report ("I'm able to access my own account w/o my password, using the following method. I strongly suspect an interested attacker could access any account w/o a corresponding password. Please fix.") I don't see any reason to tar you as a lawbreaker (well, unless your state has a computer crimes law which prohibits using a system in a manner unintended by its creator -- I've seen dumber things in my life).
If you exported it to a different format, you just violated your license agreement (CC licensing comes with a bunch of options, the band has opted to forbid modification/transformation/derivative works).
... seems to me a lot like trying to teach your hardware guys circuit design without using VHDL, Xilinx, and the other automated tools that make this a heck of a lot easier. "Back in the day, I drew out all my circuits on an easel! If I wanted a multiplexor, I had to understand how the multiplexor worked and write it out directly in NAND gates rather than just picking it from a box of commonly used components! And I walked uphill both ways to school through the driving snow! Whippersnappers like you don't know how stupid you really are and how much your tools are a crutch!" Which is great, except the complexity of actual hardware design nowadays mandates the use of VHDL/Xilinx/etc and if you want to persue it professionally you will need to know how to work these. Software is similar -- even if you *could* do everything in Notepad and a command line there's no reason to do so when the guy in the next cubicle doing the same stuff in in an IDE produces better stuff quicker than you do.
It seems to me that there are two purposes to CS classes: theory and skills aquisition. You'll get plenty of the theory of computer science in your algorithms/data structures/whatever classes. For the CS101s of the world, if you get out of the class without being able to produce a simple program in the language you were using, thats a failure. In the real world, you will probably end up using an IDE, because its a tool which increases your productivity by an order of magnitude and makes managing the complexity of non-trivial programming assignments *possible*. When you've got three classes and two of them were provided by the instructor, sure, Notepad will work for you. When you get to your job and are tasked with adding a simple feature to one file which calls functions from 45 classes, then you'd best have an IDE or a lot of time on your hands to waste. Things like autocomplete, syntax checking (we all make typos or have brain farts, having a little squiggle beneath "if (x = 0)" or "if (!x.contains(y)) x.add(y);y.addContainer(x));" as soon as you type it can save minutes or hours of lost productivity), and integrated debuggers (I use and love print statements, but when you're trying to figure out why a hash function is failing for *one* input halfway through a list of ten-thousand a debugger is worth its weight in gold) are all tools that engineers should be introduced to as soon as possible.
Like Hollywood says...
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 3, Insightful
... make sure your budget makes it on the screen. Any effect/costume/acting/writing that isn't reflected on the screen doesn't exist in any way that matters. Similarly, and my own project was as guilty of this as anyone, anything which doesn't eventually make it into a release might as well not exist. We had some awesome functionality which just never managed to make it into the main branch, and our users would post feature requests saying "We want X! Give us X!", and we'd say "Hmm, well, we hope to get around to integrating it in the next release but in the meantime you can do the following hacking on your system to get this working" and the users would say, quite rightly, "Thats fricking voodoo, get back to work". Here's some other things OSS as a class could stand to do better (exceptions, of course, exist):
1) Install programs which are as easy to operate as the standard Windows ones. i.e. "click next until it terminates" should get you a usable program deployed in our best guess of a most useful default configuration. 2) Documentation. Any documentation, at all. 3) Documentation which isn't four releases out of date. 4) Documentation which is actually written in the end language of the user (oh that has caused some hilarity at the office, let me tell you). 5) Documentation which matches the program as released (ever been told to click the fourth option in the rightmost pane on a setup menu which just doesn't exist?) 6) More regular releases. Lots of the business world, in particular, could use a nice solid schedule to plan around, but it would be nice to tell home users "While your current version will work, if you come back every 6 weeks you'll get new goodies". 7) Simplification of the bewildering array of options for downloading packages into something end-users can wrap their heads around. Has anyone done usability testing with non-technical people to see if they understand the whole "stable/dev/nightly" thing that a lot of OSS projects use? Seems to me that could probably be simplified as "Recommended" vs "Everything else".
Gandalf: I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. Go back to the shadow. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn! You shall not pass!
Street Gandalf would probably be like:
Gandalf: I carries a piece for Secret Fire, you dig? Blazing with my A-nar. Get your white-boy ass back uptown. Flame of Udun better flame out or you done, motha"#$"#. Don't be fronting any of that cracker whip-shit up in here. You be f"#$"#ing stopped, foo'.
The fundamental issue is that computer-generated results of any kind cannot be construed as doing something illegal.
Is that a positive statement ("I think the law says X") or a normative statement ("The law should say X")? Because, as a positive statement, o rly? gunzip kiddieporn.jpg.zip "What do you mean officer, I didn't actually create/possess the kiddie porn. That was all the computer's doing! I only interacted with the results of an automated algorithm!" Yeah, that will fly exactly never. The law treats data very differently than computer professionals do. There is a really excellent discussion of that here, which frames it as talking about the "colour" (he's Canadian, its OK) of bits: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001 .php . Its more applicable to, say, various specious defenses of copyright infringement than it is to my kiddie porn hypothetical.
Now, if its a normative statement: o rly? Thats like saying "guns don't kill people, people call people, ergo no use of a gun can be illegal". Come again? I mean, I can understand "technology is a tool, criminalize abusives uses of the tool rather than the tool itself". So I could buy "Google has no intention to promote warez here, go after the people who do", but certainly that can't extend to "People trying to find warez are doing nothing wrong by searching, downloading, and installing it -- these are all just computer-generated results, after all".
Battle.net is Blizzard's free online service for Diablo, Starcraft, and the Warcraft series (I hear you can even play war2 on there now). The online play, which only a fraction of your users (granted, a rabid fraction which will play for *years*) ever use, is just a loss leader. Bandwidth costs are pretty minimal, since you only really do matchmaking and CD-key authentication. The actual game server is one (or more) of the client machines. If you assume that a) your corporation is going to continue staying in business b) you'll still be using the same technology for delivering online gaming and c) server power continues to increase, then you only have to budget for the service for the lifetime of the game you're releasing today -- you can pay for tomorrow's service with chump change piggybacking on the costs for serving tomorrow's game.
I love WoW, have wasted an unhealthy amount of my life in it, and think the "lore" (backstory) sucks. Its like every fantasy universe you've ever heard of, a pastiche of cliches which have been done better elsewhere (Quick sampling: missing king, corrupt advisor perverting kingdom to her own ends, about nobody with a personality which is more than a character archetype, etc etc. ). The thing that makes Warcraft and WoW exceptional is the gameplay set in that comfortably familiar fantasy universe. I don't see that translating well to the video screen: those of us who played it might get a kick out of "Hey, I saved that guy's farm once!" but everyone else will be like "Hmm, horde of undead beasties summoned up, threatening whole world, nations of world too busy with petty infighting to see the true threat... where have I heard this story before..."
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it (x) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Sure, you could cripple your browser by having it refuse to render non-compliant pages. You would also ensure that everyone ran off to a browser which actually attempted to render in excess of 40% of the Internet without popping up a dialog which is meaningless to the end user. You think Firefox would jump to add *non-standard, user-screwing* behavior just because Microsoft did? I bet the IE team doesn't think so.
No problem, mine are encrypted so that if you attempt to play them back without post-processing through a $200,000 audio lab they sound like absolute garbage...
... oh, wait, on second thought, guess I should be worried.
If (and this is a *very big if*) this idea were actually doable, then you wouldn't have to worry about discrimination because peers who were non-discriminatory would be able to make boatloads of cash lending to clients who were not risky but being discriminated against by the marketplace. In the real world, if there are only 3 banks in your neighborhood and you need a home loan, but all 3 lending officers don't like you for whatever reason, you're sort of screwed. If, however, you have zillions of banking providers competing for your business then even if zillion - 1 say "We care more about discrimination than making a profit, neener neener" you only need one profit-maximizer to give you a loan.
In the real world, by the way, you see banks adopting the same strategy -- Bank of America invests boatloads of cash in getting its name out in the various Hispanic communities, which are typically underserved when it comes to banking services.
instructions are usually stored inside the tar file
Amazing, why didn't I think of that. Oh wait, I did, and this is what I got from readme.txt:
For information about installing, running and configuring Firefox
including a list of known issues and troubleshooting information,
refer to: http://getfirefox.com/releases/
So a quick jaunt over to that link, plus clicking through two more links, gets me to the install instructions for Linux.
Extract the tarball in the directory where you want to install Firefox:
tar -xzvf firefox-1.5.0.3.tar.gz
This will create a firefox subdirectory of that directory.
And that would be great. The problem is, these instructions are incomplete. They won't change the little globe button on the top of your UI to point to the new Firefox, nor will your other applications which depend on Firefox start using the new version. You also lose all of your settings and bookmarks. Installing on Windows has *none* of these gotchas. After I did exactly what the instructions said I fired up Firefox, checked that it worked fine, and installed the new plugin that was requiring me to use 1.5 or higher. Then I went back to developing, came back to Firefox two hours later (via the globe button), and the plugin just wasn't there. I was stumped for a few seconds before I realized I actually had succeeded in making two entirely separate installs of Firefox on the machine. Then I Googled for instructions which would actually function. This is more hassle than any user should have to put up with for a freaking trivial use case -- "install the latest version of a killer app". I don't want to even *know* what I would have to do to get my iPod working at work.
Yeah, this other day, I was setting up an Ubuntu box and wanted to install Firefox 1.5 as the default browser. Now, I'm mostly a Windows man, so I've been corrupted by habit that this should be done in about 8 mouse clicks from start to finish, 5 of them on the "Next" or "Finish" button. But after that failed to work, I decided to do it the obvious, natural way -- first I Googled for an instruction sheet, then I typed in 15 commands as printed on the sheet, and *blam* I was up and running! Nothing says natural and intuitive to a non-technical user like "sudo tar -C/opt -x -z -v -f firefox-1.5.0.3.tar.gz".
Seriously, I don't want to troll, but OSS is just not there yet for most users. I just love having a Linux box around work to do development on, but it mostly fails the "could I get my mother to understand this?" test. Incidentally, the instructions for installing Firefox 1.5 on Ubuntu are here if you want to subject them to the mother-test yourself.
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That doesn't stop the losses he is suffering: damage to his name (which, granted, I think he's stretching a bit -- Mac users might be fanatics but I doubt they know the name of everyone to have appeared in a suit about apple and care enough to assault his fiance on the street), stress, etc. And in the unlikely event that a bunch of lawyers wanted satisfaction from you, they wouldn't send in "bounty hunters" -- they'd walk up to their favorite courtroom, tell the judge "he has been evading contact with us", sue you for nonpayment of services, serve you with the lawsuit, win by default (it doesn't matter that they have no case, if you don't contest it you'll lose), and ask for a lien slapped on your bank accounts/house/etc. Its the 21st century -- you can screw somebody without ever speaking with them.
Spam is not limited by number of boxes or processing power. You can get either of those for quite cheap on specialham.com, from your favorite broker of zombified PCs. The trick is getting proxies or servers with IP addresses that aren't already on all the blacklists. Since these laptops don't come with an Internet connection (merely connectivity), they no more increase the spam threat than Intel introducing a faster CPU does (yay, thats more unique spam messages you can generate that get /dev/null'ed because your machine is blacklisted).
Dang, if only they allowed signatures long enough to fit that whole thing in...
$30 for a one-tenth chance of detection leading to a miniscule chance of recovery, versus $12 (yearly) insurance premium for a ~100% chance of replacement of the insured value (either in your homeowner's/renters insurance or as a special rider to it -- or www.safeware.com if you want to get stabbed through the eyes on fees, really go with whomever gives you the rest of your insurance they'll be HAPPY to take your money). Gee, I wonder which one is the better deal...
Thanks for your sharp eye. We'll fix it when we dupe the article.
Sincerely,
The Slashdot Editors
Mom has a budget for Christmas. $200 fits into that budget nicely -- split the gift among two kids, buy them a game, tell them to share, give them hugs and then watch them run off to the TV. $600 doesn't fit within that budget -- it causes mom to seize up and say "Why is this so expensive? Nintendos are always $200. What is this, a computer?"
Nintendo probably has one of the best business models in the entire electronics industry. They make money on the box. They make money on the first-party games. They make a little less money on all the other games. They make money on the IP surrounding the games, to the extent that just *one* of their franchises has a worldwide value approaching that of a small country. With the advent of downloadable games on the Wii (whhhhhhhhhhhhhhy), they'll even make money on the retail/distribution of games (no more paying BestBuy/WalMart/Yamada Denki a 60% cut).
While in general I agree with you *if* the student actual did something illegal, there are a lot of circumstances where just a cursory inspection of the user-visible parts of the system will reveal the strong probability of a security vulnerability. If you say "Hmm, I wonder if this site has a SQL injection vulnerability" and then fire off a SQL command to print out all user names to your screen, congratulations, go-to-jail-do-not-pass-go. But if you open up your own student records, hit "View Source", and see that the "View Transcript" page has a submit button with only your username as a hidden value (and no session key), I would wager a signification fraction of my weekly salary that a) thats an unintended security flaw and b) the implication is that I can access the transcript and, thus, the social security number of any student I have a username for. Which is probably anyone on campus, since I have access to a directory of email addresses. If you immediately test the vulnerability with telnet (everyone here knows you can simulate a HTTP POST with telnet, right?) and a username other than your own, congratulations, you fail at life. But if you test it with your own credentials and then file the vulnerability report ("I'm able to access my own account w/o my password, using the following method. I strongly suspect an interested attacker could access any account w/o a corresponding password. Please fix.") I don't see any reason to tar you as a lawbreaker (well, unless your state has a computer crimes law which prohibits using a system in a manner unintended by its creator -- I've seen dumber things in my life).
Forget politics -- I would be fascinated to see what percentage of Trekkies self-identified as human.
If you exported it to a different format, you just violated your license agreement (CC licensing comes with a bunch of options, the band has opted to forbid modification/transformation/derivative works).
... seems to me a lot like trying to teach your hardware guys circuit design without using VHDL, Xilinx, and the other automated tools that make this a heck of a lot easier. "Back in the day, I drew out all my circuits on an easel! If I wanted a multiplexor, I had to understand how the multiplexor worked and write it out directly in NAND gates rather than just picking it from a box of commonly used components! And I walked uphill both ways to school through the driving snow! Whippersnappers like you don't know how stupid you really are and how much your tools are a crutch!" Which is great, except the complexity of actual hardware design nowadays mandates the use of VHDL/Xilinx/etc and if you want to persue it professionally you will need to know how to work these. Software is similar -- even if you *could* do everything in Notepad and a command line there's no reason to do so when the guy in the next cubicle doing the same stuff in in an IDE produces better stuff quicker than you do.
It seems to me that there are two purposes to CS classes: theory and skills aquisition. You'll get plenty of the theory of computer science in your algorithms/data structures/whatever classes. For the CS101s of the world, if you get out of the class without being able to produce a simple program in the language you were using, thats a failure. In the real world, you will probably end up using an IDE, because its a tool which increases your productivity by an order of magnitude and makes managing the complexity of non-trivial programming assignments *possible*. When you've got three classes and two of them were provided by the instructor, sure, Notepad will work for you. When you get to your job and are tasked with adding a simple feature to one file which calls functions from 45 classes, then you'd best have an IDE or a lot of time on your hands to waste. Things like autocomplete, syntax checking (we all make typos or have brain farts, having a little squiggle beneath "if (x = 0)" or "if (!x.contains(y)) x.add(y);y.addContainer(x));" as soon as you type it can save minutes or hours of lost productivity), and integrated debuggers (I use and love print statements, but when you're trying to figure out why a hash function is failing for *one* input halfway through a list of ten-thousand a debugger is worth its weight in gold) are all tools that engineers should be introduced to as soon as possible.
... make sure your budget makes it on the screen. Any effect/costume/acting/writing that isn't reflected on the screen doesn't exist in any way that matters. Similarly, and my own project was as guilty of this as anyone, anything which doesn't eventually make it into a release might as well not exist. We had some awesome functionality which just never managed to make it into the main branch, and our users would post feature requests saying "We want X! Give us X!", and we'd say "Hmm, well, we hope to get around to integrating it in the next release but in the meantime you can do the following hacking on your system to get this working" and the users would say, quite rightly, "Thats fricking voodoo, get back to work". Here's some other things OSS as a class could stand to do better (exceptions, of course, exist):
1) Install programs which are as easy to operate as the standard Windows ones. i.e. "click next until it terminates" should get you a usable program deployed in our best guess of a most useful default configuration.
2) Documentation. Any documentation, at all.
3) Documentation which isn't four releases out of date.
4) Documentation which is actually written in the end language of the user (oh that has caused some hilarity at the office, let me tell you).
5) Documentation which matches the program as released (ever been told to click the fourth option in the rightmost pane on a setup menu which just doesn't exist?)
6) More regular releases. Lots of the business world, in particular, could use a nice solid schedule to plan around, but it would be nice to tell home users "While your current version will work, if you come back every 6 weeks you'll get new goodies".
7) Simplification of the bewildering array of options for downloading packages into something end-users can wrap their heads around. Has anyone done usability testing with non-technical people to see if they understand the whole "stable/dev/nightly" thing that a lot of OSS projects use? Seems to me that could probably be simplified as "Recommended" vs "Everything else".
In the movie, it was
Gandalf: I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. Go back to the shadow. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn! You shall not pass!
Street Gandalf would probably be like:
Gandalf: I carries a piece for Secret Fire, you dig? Blazing with my A-nar. Get your white-boy ass back uptown. Flame of Udun better flame out or you done, motha"#$"#. Don't be fronting any of that cracker whip-shit up in here. You be f"#$"#ing stopped, foo'.
How in God's name did that make it past the lameness filter?q
Is that a positive statement ("I think the law says X") or a normative statement ("The law should say X")? Because, as a positive statement, o rly? gunzip kiddieporn.jpg.zip "What do you mean officer, I didn't actually create/possess the kiddie porn. That was all the computer's doing! I only interacted with the results of an automated algorithm!" Yeah, that will fly exactly never. The law treats data very differently than computer professionals do. There is a really excellent discussion of that here, which frames it as talking about the "colour" (he's Canadian, its OK) of bits: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001 .php . Its more applicable to, say, various specious defenses of copyright infringement than it is to my kiddie porn hypothetical.
Now, if its a normative statement: o rly? Thats like saying "guns don't kill people, people call people, ergo no use of a gun can be illegal". Come again? I mean, I can understand "technology is a tool, criminalize abusives uses of the tool rather than the tool itself". So I could buy "Google has no intention to promote warez here, go after the people who do", but certainly that can't extend to "People trying to find warez are doing nothing wrong by searching, downloading, and installing it -- these are all just computer-generated results, after all".
Battle.net is Blizzard's free online service for Diablo, Starcraft, and the Warcraft series (I hear you can even play war2 on there now). The online play, which only a fraction of your users (granted, a rabid fraction which will play for *years*) ever use, is just a loss leader. Bandwidth costs are pretty minimal, since you only really do matchmaking and CD-key authentication. The actual game server is one (or more) of the client machines. If you assume that a) your corporation is going to continue staying in business b) you'll still be using the same technology for delivering online gaming and c) server power continues to increase, then you only have to budget for the service for the lifetime of the game you're releasing today -- you can pay for tomorrow's service with chump change piggybacking on the costs for serving tomorrow's game.
I love WoW, have wasted an unhealthy amount of my life in it, and think the "lore" (backstory) sucks. Its like every fantasy universe you've ever heard of, a pastiche of cliches which have been done better elsewhere (Quick sampling: missing king, corrupt advisor perverting kingdom to her own ends, about nobody with a personality which is more than a character archetype, etc etc. ). The thing that makes Warcraft and WoW exceptional is the gameplay set in that comfortably familiar fantasy universe. I don't see that translating well to the video screen: those of us who played it might get a kick out of "Hey, I saved that guy's farm once!" but everyone else will be like "Hmm, horde of undead beasties summoned up, threatening whole world, nations of world too busy with petty infighting to see the true threat... where have I heard this story before..."
Sure, you could cripple your browser by having it refuse to render non-compliant pages. You would also ensure that everyone ran off to a browser which actually attempted to render in excess of 40% of the Internet without popping up a dialog which is meaningless to the end user. You think Firefox would jump to add *non-standard, user-screwing* behavior just because Microsoft did? I bet the IE team doesn't think so.
Sure. Rather than a news account I'd direct you straight to the horse's mouth, as they have more details: http://www.bankofamerica.com/newsroom/presskits/vi ew.cfm?page=hispanic
In the real world, by the way, you see banks adopting the same strategy -- Bank of America invests boatloads of cash in getting its name out in the various Hispanic communities, which are typically underserved when it comes to banking services.
Amazing, why didn't I think of that. Oh wait, I did, and this is what I got from readme.txt:
For information about installing, running and configuring Firefox including a list of known issues and troubleshooting information, refer to: http://getfirefox.com/releases/
So a quick jaunt over to that link, plus clicking through two more links, gets me to the install instructions for Linux.
Extract the tarball in the directory where you want to install Firefox:
tar -xzvf firefox-1.5.0.3.tar.gz
This will create a firefox subdirectory of that directory.
And that would be great. The problem is, these instructions are incomplete. They won't change the little globe button on the top of your UI to point to the new Firefox, nor will your other applications which depend on Firefox start using the new version. You also lose all of your settings and bookmarks. Installing on Windows has *none* of these gotchas. After I did exactly what the instructions said I fired up Firefox, checked that it worked fine, and installed the new plugin that was requiring me to use 1.5 or higher. Then I went back to developing, came back to Firefox two hours later (via the globe button), and the plugin just wasn't there. I was stumped for a few seconds before I realized I actually had succeeded in making two entirely separate installs of Firefox on the machine. Then I Googled for instructions which would actually function. This is more hassle than any user should have to put up with for a freaking trivial use case -- "install the latest version of a killer app". I don't want to even *know* what I would have to do to get my iPod working at work.
Seriously, I don't want to troll, but OSS is just not there yet for most users. I just love having a Linux box around work to do development on, but it mostly fails the "could I get my mother to understand this?" test. Incidentally, the instructions for installing Firefox 1.5 on Ubuntu are here if you want to subject them to the mother-test yourself.
What are you selling and what is it going to cost me?