No child's fingerprints taken in the US as part of an identification process were ever put into any "system". The 10-card (or whatever) was given back to the parents. I do not know of any school that wanted to keep it either - too much file space.
Vonage sold its service to tons of DSL customers. DSL customers who were using the ILEC wires. This pretty much means the ILEC was supplying their competitor so the competitor could beat them over the head.
Not that this isn't an attractive situation. If the government forced you to rent your car out for 50% less than it cost you to rent it, would you be happy about the deal? Probably not. What could you do about it? Maybe nothing directly. But if you could find a loophole like requiring renters to have a million dollar liability insurance policy, maybe you wouldn't have to rent it out as much.
Or, if McDonalds had a deal that if you bought 100 hamburgers at a time they would sell them for $0.10 each. So you go there, by 100 hamburgers and set up a stand on the corner reselling them - right in front of McDonalds. And your sign is saying how cheap your "McDonalds" hamburgers are compared to the store behind you. Would McDonalds sell you another 100? Maybe not.
This is the sort of situation that Verizon found itself in. They do not have to support their competitors, but they had to support Vonage. The government and state regulators won't let them stop supporting Vonage directly. So we dust off an old patent and find it can be used to beat up Vonage. If it wasn't for the patent, there would be something else.
Best stick with one of the under-the-radar VOIP providers that just resells some bulk service from Sprint. Lingo is one of those. Cheaper than Vonage and a lot less visible.
Napster made it clear that people wanted music for free. Napster and its successors have filled that desire. Now anybody with a fast Internet connection gets music for free.
End of story.
Sure, if are a "distributor" you ran the risk of getting RIAA's attention.
Yes, lots of people offered to pay. And then they found out they didn't have to. A few people still pay, but not enough to sustain an industry. It's like shareware - if you don't have to pay 5% do. The rest are just going to take what is offered.
Consumers/sharers won. Music has no monetary value today. If you want to sell some recorded music, you might find some people that don't know how to download or have too slow an Internet connection. Some people might pay money on iTunes for the same MP3 that you or I would just download for free. A few folks with heavy guilt complexes might want to pay or they wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Now the record companies can move on. Only problem is, where are they going to move to? Nobody in their right mind is going to pay lots of money for trinket go-with items like jewel cases for their CDs. Pretty much the "recorded music industry" is going to disappear now that the exec's have figured out their "war" is over.
I'd expect to see in the next year or so some new media distribution deal coming along. One that doesn't involve music in any way but is difficult or impossible for the average person to re-distribute. Probably because of raw size, but also temporal locality - something like a 24-hour live Big Brother show but only on the Internet. If you miss something, well, keep watching because something completely new and original will happen - just keep watching 24x7.
Just think about some unknown "instant celebrity" having a camera on them 24x7 (night vision in the dark) for people to watch. Look! She's combing her hair again! Look! She is putting on THAT dress!
In the US there is no economic incentive to make handsets that are universal. Therefore, there is no assurance without carrier testing that a given handset will work with their system. The tower systems themselves have quirks that make some handsets not work very well.
As I said, there is no incentive to change this today. This is why you can't get Nokia handsets from Verizon - their testing shows they don't work very well with the system Verizon is using.
Would it be nicer in a techy-geeky sort of way if everyone changed over to using the latest and best system and there were only universal handsets? Sure. But that isn't how it is and it is not likely to get that way in the US anytime soon.
How dare they indeed. Except you aren't paying for raw "bandwidth", you are paying for a service that the ISP is providing. The terms of that service and what it consists of are not clearly defined. Nowhere does it say that specific protocols, transports and applications are either allowed or disallowed.
A Comcast user isn't going to get much traction in trying to sue Comcast over services they were expecting and not receiving. I doubt Comcast has any more legal obligation to deliver "expected" service than Geico has to deliver "an English muffin with butter and jam" - in reference to their commercials.
Now this company might actually have some standing to say their product is being blocked. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody has Comcast (or others) over a barrel quite yet. Comcast never agreed to deliver this content, or any other specific content. What did they agree to deliver? Probably not much, and nothing specifically. You aren't guaranteed email, web browsing, VPN or any other service. They didn't define what services they are delivering, what quantities of these services or anything else.
I think the company already looked at suing Comcast and found out there isn't anything there. The only avenue would be rulemaking or legislation. Probably not much going to happen there either.
If you believe that humans are causing or contributing to a changing climate and that stopping human activities are the only way to stop it - assuming it can be stopped, you need to think about positive actions.
Let's assume that Al Gore is correct and if human activities aren't changed drastically in the very near future millions of people will die in the coming changes. Doesn't that demand that every person believing this go out and stop rampant addition of carbon to the environment? Sure, driving a hybrid car may help some, but wouldn't destroying a coal-fired power plant be far more beneficial? How about burning 10 cars a day? Destroying a jet airliner?
Come on, if you believe that global warming will be the death of millions of people how about doing something about it?
You are going to find that this applies to the expectations of what the court considers to be "an ordinary person". This is a pretty common standard and it eliminates lots of fringe stuff.
A while back Toyota ran an advertisement about how low their prices were and specifically used the phrase "for a song". Someone wrote a song, performed it in the dealership and asked for their car. Now please. I believe that guy actually got a car but the courts cut the rest of the claims off pretty quickly using the concept that an ordinary person would not be misled by this.
Now try to convince a court that whatever Comcast is advertising that this extends to what you specifically want to use their service for and how they are preventing you from doing so. You are very likely to find out that your fringe case doesn't mean they have violated the law.
I am curious what law you might think assures you that Comcast cannot block stuff? I cannot imagine any legislation at any level that would do this.
What this comes down to is what an ordinary person would believe they are supposed to get vs. what is actually being provided. Arguing that you want to download movies from Eastern European servers is a non-starter. Perhaps downloading a Linux distribution might be a starting point, but I think that falls vastly outside of the knowledge of "an ordinary person".
I don't see any possible argument for Comcast not providing 100% of the service they are claiming to.
First is exactly what is Comcast agreeing to provide? I seriously doubt they make any claims of unfiltered, unlimited access. They may not be disclosing all of the limitations on their service to customers, but have they in any way advertised services they are not providing?
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly to Comcast since there is no such thing as "common carrier" for an ISP, do they have any legal liability if it can be proven they are assisting users in gathering materials to which they are not legally entitled? Can Comcast (or Cox, Verizon, etc.) be sued for providing access and not blocking BitTorrent to the best of their ability?
My guess is that ISPs cannot be sued for providing access but that may change soon. The battle for music is over - it is freely available today. The battle over the value of movies and video is just beginning and is worth far more than music. Nobody is going to stand by and allow movies to be devalued to the extent that music has been. Nor is anyone with a high-speed internet connection going to pay for movies when they can be downloaded for free. Especially when they are high-quality DVD rips rather than silly camcorder copies.
The question isn't if someone besides the artists - that the artists contract with - should be involved. The question is as the parent indicated: is it the artists that get to control distribution or is there no control at all? If customers get to freely redistribute materials without control, then the artists aren't needed either.
The situation today is record-once, share-everywhere. The value of recorded music is zero. I'm not paying and neither is anyone else. Some folks out of charity give the artist a nickle. The music is still valued at zero.
A death thread is meaningless. We keep hearing about people that have threatened and/or planned massive destruction but apparently without the means to carry it out. By that standard a death threat is meaningless and is just someone exercising their freedom of speech.
By similar standards, what possible right would any law enforcement agency get involved with a mere threat. No crime has been committed yet. Wouldn't it just be another expression of the facist stormtrooper mentality if the police went around doing something - anything - about mere threats?
So, no I don't think a threat is meaningful at all. It does not have the power to kill anyone. Nor is it reasonable evidence that the sender of the threat might be guilty if the object of the threat ended up dead. Threats don't kill people. Pre-emptively harrassing people for speaking out and censoring their content is certainly not justified.
Excellent thinking. What makes you think that anyone without training and knowledge should have any business adminstering a computer? A lot of the problems today come from the idea that computers are simple to use and anyone should be able to buy one in a store, take it home and use it.
15 minutes later they download something that provides a gateway to using their computer to attack others.
The TV News people are never going to let you go 4 days without announcing a result. Their rule is that the results have to be announced before people go to bed. They announced Gore as the winner in 2000 before midnight in the Midwest.
If you don't have results for them, they will announce the results from exit polls. That should be accurate enough, right? Because if you don't have a system that gives real results before midnight results will be announced anyway.
In the US there is a decision that is on the verge of being made. Do we count votes or rely on exit polls? No, really. In 2000 Al Gore was announced as the winner before all the votes were counted. This announcement was done by some TV news people on their own. They did not wait for all the votes to be counted, or even for enough to be sure. This was part of the problem with the 2000 election - Al Gore was the announced winner.
If we wait for an "official" count by hand it is going to be far too late for the TV news people to wait. People aren't going to wait that long. So, the announcement will be made of the winner before midnight on the night of the election. And then, a few days or weeks later the "official" announcement will be made. And it better match people's expectations or there will be a lot of unhappy people.
So we can either have rapid results or we can let the TV news anchor announce the results based on exit polls.
MAD presumes that the structure of a nation-state is "government by the people, for the people". MAD falls apart completely when you have a government which is "by the dictator, for the oligarchy" sort of place. Iraq was clearly unintimidated - Saddam was fully prepared to let the US or any other country bomb his people while he stayed safely out of harm's way. Iran is similarly unfazed by threats against their population. No amount of sanctions or diplomatic action will have any affect on the leaders of Iran no matter what it does to the population living there.
North Korea also wouldn't seem to care what the state of the population living there is. Sanctions? People starving? Not the leaders. Not the government elite. Why are they apparently agreeing to disarm for some fuel and food? I don't think anybody knows.
Never believe that gambling is victimless. The first victims are the people playing. The second level of victims are all the people counting on the first victim. And so on. Your average gambling addict leaves a trail of victims behind and there is nothing that can be done for them and nobody to help them.
Sure you can tell yourself that you have your gambling under control. Maybe you do. But does the person next to you? What about their wife and kids? Since your gambling is under control then you won't mind supporting his wife and kids, will you? How about if they just bring their stuff over to your house and move in. You know, direct assistance rather than getting some state bureaucracy involved.
It is something like 25% of the people do not have their gambling under control, or would not be under control if they gambled. Today most of them aren't gambling. Yeah, let's make it easier and simpler for these people to start gambling right away.
Gambling isn't victimless and it isn't a crime. It is just plain dangerous when you look at who is suceptable to gambling addiction. I live in Arizona with an Indian casino on every fifth or sixth street corner practically. There are plenty of people that gamble a lot more than they can afford to lose in these places. The only salvation - unlike Las Vegas - is no credit at Indian casinos. But they make it real easy to max out your credit cards and get all the money from your bank account.
That's what I would like to see. I figure a Slots & Keno web site wouldn't be too hard to put together that would pay out 90-95%. People would love it. And that would eliminate all that nasty regulation that is so expensive.
We could have one day a week where everyone wins once.
Commercial use of email? What are you thinking? That is how the whole problem got started in the first place - letting commercial money-grubbing interests onto the Internet.
Why would any business need to send an email? When most right-thinking people just block it anyway?
Never, ever believe you can fight a non-compete agreement. You can't. Your new or prospective employer isn't going to value you so much as to agree to sign on to a legal battle that will drag them into court.
Yes, most companies aren't going to fight you over it unless you do something really stupid. Stupid is intentionally going to a competitor with lots of "ideas" that you came up with from working on similar stuff. Most companies will refuse to talk to you when they here this because they know it will get them sued not just you. But for someone even stupider than the employee trying it, take some advice. It doesn't work.
Assignment of inventions is getting pretty standard after a number of companies got burned by this. Burned so badly I believe it is used as an example in Contracts class in law school. No, you aren't going to be able to keep working somewhere and not sign something. Can you trim the term down? Maybe. Can you get some consideration for an assigned patent? Absolutely.
I didn't see any non-compete terms in what the original poster had, just patent assignment. So what is all this nonsense about lengthy and restrictive non-compete terms?
The only benefit that could possibly be derived by publishing algorithms and/or code for Windows security would be if (a) changes proposed would be implemented quickly and (b) everyone planet-wide upgraded.
If both of these did not happen, especially if (b) didn't happen, what you would be doing is exposing all non-upgrading users to the full brunt of whatever flaws their might be. Would this really be productive? Does this remind you of various failures in Linux code that led to rootkits being developed for it. Did the victims of such attacks think it was all for the best because they didn't upgrade in a timely manner?
Yes, relying on people not reverse-engineering code to protect users isn't a great plan. But the current situation - as regrettable as it is - is this is the only plan. There are no fallbacks, there are no alternatives. Most of the running copies of Windows aren't going to be "fixed" in any way whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense.
No child's fingerprints taken in the US as part of an identification process were ever put into any "system". The 10-card (or whatever) was given back to the parents. I do not know of any school that wanted to keep it either - too much file space.
Paranoid is clearly OK on Slashdot, stupid isn't.
Vonage sold its service to tons of DSL customers. DSL customers who were using the ILEC wires. This pretty much means the ILEC was supplying their competitor so the competitor could beat them over the head.
Not that this isn't an attractive situation. If the government forced you to rent your car out for 50% less than it cost you to rent it, would you be happy about the deal? Probably not. What could you do about it? Maybe nothing directly. But if you could find a loophole like requiring renters to have a million dollar liability insurance policy, maybe you wouldn't have to rent it out as much.
Or, if McDonalds had a deal that if you bought 100 hamburgers at a time they would sell them for $0.10 each. So you go there, by 100 hamburgers and set up a stand on the corner reselling them - right in front of McDonalds. And your sign is saying how cheap your "McDonalds" hamburgers are compared to the store behind you. Would McDonalds sell you another 100? Maybe not.
This is the sort of situation that Verizon found itself in. They do not have to support their competitors, but they had to support Vonage. The government and state regulators won't let them stop supporting Vonage directly. So we dust off an old patent and find it can be used to beat up Vonage. If it wasn't for the patent, there would be something else.
Best stick with one of the under-the-radar VOIP providers that just resells some bulk service from Sprint. Lingo is one of those. Cheaper than Vonage and a lot less visible.
Napster made it clear that people wanted music for free. Napster and its successors have filled that desire. Now anybody with a fast Internet connection gets music for free.
End of story.
Sure, if are a "distributor" you ran the risk of getting RIAA's attention.
Yes, lots of people offered to pay. And then they found out they didn't have to. A few people still pay, but not enough to sustain an industry. It's like shareware - if you don't have to pay 5% do. The rest are just going to take what is offered.
iTunes is probably the most successful music venture in the 21st century. iTunes is delivering 3-4% of the music downloads - the rest are free.
How the heck is iTunes a success or even relevent?
Consumers/sharers won. Music has no monetary value today. If you want to sell some recorded music, you might find some people that don't know how to download or have too slow an Internet connection. Some people might pay money on iTunes for the same MP3 that you or I would just download for free. A few folks with heavy guilt complexes might want to pay or they wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Now the record companies can move on. Only problem is, where are they going to move to? Nobody in their right mind is going to pay lots of money for trinket go-with items like jewel cases for their CDs. Pretty much the "recorded music industry" is going to disappear now that the exec's have figured out their "war" is over.
I'd expect to see in the next year or so some new media distribution deal coming along. One that doesn't involve music in any way but is difficult or impossible for the average person to re-distribute. Probably because of raw size, but also temporal locality - something like a 24-hour live Big Brother show but only on the Internet. If you miss something, well, keep watching because something completely new and original will happen - just keep watching 24x7.
Just think about some unknown "instant celebrity" having a camera on them 24x7 (night vision in the dark) for people to watch. Look! She's combing her hair again! Look! She is putting on THAT dress!
In the US there is no economic incentive to make handsets that are universal. Therefore, there is no assurance without carrier testing that a given handset will work with their system. The tower systems themselves have quirks that make some handsets not work very well.
As I said, there is no incentive to change this today. This is why you can't get Nokia handsets from Verizon - their testing shows they don't work very well with the system Verizon is using.
Would it be nicer in a techy-geeky sort of way if everyone changed over to using the latest and best system and there were only universal handsets? Sure. But that isn't how it is and it is not likely to get that way in the US anytime soon.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with common carrier. It is called DMCA Safe Harbor provisions.
A whole different thing that any sort of "common carrier" status.
How dare they indeed. Except you aren't paying for raw "bandwidth", you are paying for a service that the ISP is providing. The terms of that service and what it consists of are not clearly defined. Nowhere does it say that specific protocols, transports and applications are either allowed or disallowed.
Pretty much, you bought a pig in a poke.
A Comcast user isn't going to get much traction in trying to sue Comcast over services they were expecting and not receiving. I doubt Comcast has any more legal obligation to deliver "expected" service than Geico has to deliver "an English muffin with butter and jam" - in reference to their commercials.
Now this company might actually have some standing to say their product is being blocked. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody has Comcast (or others) over a barrel quite yet. Comcast never agreed to deliver this content, or any other specific content. What did they agree to deliver? Probably not much, and nothing specifically. You aren't guaranteed email, web browsing, VPN or any other service. They didn't define what services they are delivering, what quantities of these services or anything else.
I think the company already looked at suing Comcast and found out there isn't anything there. The only avenue would be rulemaking or legislation. Probably not much going to happen there either.
If you believe that humans are causing or contributing to a changing climate and that stopping human activities are the only way to stop it - assuming it can be stopped, you need to think about positive actions.
Let's assume that Al Gore is correct and if human activities aren't changed drastically in the very near future millions of people will die in the coming changes. Doesn't that demand that every person believing this go out and stop rampant addition of carbon to the environment? Sure, driving a hybrid car may help some, but wouldn't destroying a coal-fired power plant be far more beneficial? How about burning 10 cars a day? Destroying a jet airliner?
Come on, if you believe that global warming will be the death of millions of people how about doing something about it?
You are going to find that this applies to the expectations of what the court considers to be "an ordinary person". This is a pretty common standard and it eliminates lots of fringe stuff.
A while back Toyota ran an advertisement about how low their prices were and specifically used the phrase "for a song". Someone wrote a song, performed it in the dealership and asked for their car. Now please. I believe that guy actually got a car but the courts cut the rest of the claims off pretty quickly using the concept that an ordinary person would not be misled by this.
Now try to convince a court that whatever Comcast is advertising that this extends to what you specifically want to use their service for and how they are preventing you from doing so. You are very likely to find out that your fringe case doesn't mean they have violated the law.
I am curious what law you might think assures you that Comcast cannot block stuff? I cannot imagine any legislation at any level that would do this.
What this comes down to is what an ordinary person would believe they are supposed to get vs. what is actually being provided. Arguing that you want to download movies from Eastern European servers is a non-starter. Perhaps downloading a Linux distribution might be a starting point, but I think that falls vastly outside of the knowledge of "an ordinary person".
I don't see any possible argument for Comcast not providing 100% of the service they are claiming to.
First is exactly what is Comcast agreeing to provide? I seriously doubt they make any claims of unfiltered, unlimited access. They may not be disclosing all of the limitations on their service to customers, but have they in any way advertised services they are not providing?
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly to Comcast since there is no such thing as "common carrier" for an ISP, do they have any legal liability if it can be proven they are assisting users in gathering materials to which they are not legally entitled? Can Comcast (or Cox, Verizon, etc.) be sued for providing access and not blocking BitTorrent to the best of their ability?
My guess is that ISPs cannot be sued for providing access but that may change soon. The battle for music is over - it is freely available today. The battle over the value of movies and video is just beginning and is worth far more than music. Nobody is going to stand by and allow movies to be devalued to the extent that music has been. Nor is anyone with a high-speed internet connection going to pay for movies when they can be downloaded for free. Especially when they are high-quality DVD rips rather than silly camcorder copies.
The question isn't if someone besides the artists - that the artists contract with - should be involved. The question is as the parent indicated: is it the artists that get to control distribution or is there no control at all? If customers get to freely redistribute materials without control, then the artists aren't needed either.
The situation today is record-once, share-everywhere. The value of recorded music is zero. I'm not paying and neither is anyone else. Some folks out of charity give the artist a nickle. The music is still valued at zero.
A death thread is meaningless. We keep hearing about people that have threatened and/or planned massive destruction but apparently without the means to carry it out. By that standard a death threat is meaningless and is just someone exercising their freedom of speech.
By similar standards, what possible right would any law enforcement agency get involved with a mere threat. No crime has been committed yet. Wouldn't it just be another expression of the facist stormtrooper mentality if the police went around doing something - anything - about mere threats?
So, no I don't think a threat is meaningful at all. It does not have the power to kill anyone. Nor is it reasonable evidence that the sender of the threat might be guilty if the object of the threat ended up dead. Threats don't kill people. Pre-emptively harrassing people for speaking out and censoring their content is certainly not justified.
Excellent thinking. What makes you think that anyone without training and knowledge should have any business adminstering a computer? A lot of the problems today come from the idea that computers are simple to use and anyone should be able to buy one in a store, take it home and use it.
15 minutes later they download something that provides a gateway to using their computer to attack others.
Absolutely. Cause as much havoc as you possibly can using this new toy "the Internet".
Do you wonder why people think only children are "online"? Oh, children, fraudsters and mischief-makers.
96 hours? That's four days!
The TV News people are never going to let you go 4 days without announcing a result. Their rule is that the results have to be announced before people go to bed. They announced Gore as the winner in 2000 before midnight in the Midwest.
If you don't have results for them, they will announce the results from exit polls. That should be accurate enough, right? Because if you don't have a system that gives real results before midnight results will be announced anyway.
In the US there is a decision that is on the verge of being made. Do we count votes or rely on exit polls? No, really. In 2000 Al Gore was announced as the winner before all the votes were counted. This announcement was done by some TV news people on their own. They did not wait for all the votes to be counted, or even for enough to be sure. This was part of the problem with the 2000 election - Al Gore was the announced winner.
If we wait for an "official" count by hand it is going to be far too late for the TV news people to wait. People aren't going to wait that long. So, the announcement will be made of the winner before midnight on the night of the election. And then, a few days or weeks later the "official" announcement will be made. And it better match people's expectations or there will be a lot of unhappy people.
So we can either have rapid results or we can let the TV news anchor announce the results based on exit polls.
Well, maybe.
MAD presumes that the structure of a nation-state is "government by the people, for the people". MAD falls apart completely when you have a government which is "by the dictator, for the oligarchy" sort of place. Iraq was clearly unintimidated - Saddam was fully prepared to let the US or any other country bomb his people while he stayed safely out of harm's way. Iran is similarly unfazed by threats against their population. No amount of sanctions or diplomatic action will have any affect on the leaders of Iran no matter what it does to the population living there.
North Korea also wouldn't seem to care what the state of the population living there is. Sanctions? People starving? Not the leaders. Not the government elite. Why are they apparently agreeing to disarm for some fuel and food? I don't think anybody knows.
Never believe that gambling is victimless. The first victims are the people playing. The second level of victims are all the people counting on the first victim. And so on. Your average gambling addict leaves a trail of victims behind and there is nothing that can be done for them and nobody to help them.
Sure you can tell yourself that you have your gambling under control. Maybe you do. But does the person next to you? What about their wife and kids? Since your gambling is under control then you won't mind supporting his wife and kids, will you? How about if they just bring their stuff over to your house and move in. You know, direct assistance rather than getting some state bureaucracy involved.
It is something like 25% of the people do not have their gambling under control, or would not be under control if they gambled. Today most of them aren't gambling. Yeah, let's make it easier and simpler for these people to start gambling right away.
Gambling isn't victimless and it isn't a crime. It is just plain dangerous when you look at who is suceptable to gambling addiction. I live in Arizona with an Indian casino on every fifth or sixth street corner practically. There are plenty of people that gamble a lot more than they can afford to lose in these places. The only salvation - unlike Las Vegas - is no credit at Indian casinos. But they make it real easy to max out your credit cards and get all the money from your bank account.
That's what I would like to see. I figure a Slots & Keno web site wouldn't be too hard to put together that would pay out 90-95%. People would love it. And that would eliminate all that nasty regulation that is so expensive.
We could have one day a week where everyone wins once.
Commercial use of email? What are you thinking? That is how the whole problem got started in the first place - letting commercial money-grubbing interests onto the Internet.
Why would any business need to send an email? When most right-thinking people just block it anyway?
I didn't see any non-compete terms in what the original poster had, just patent assignment. So what is all this nonsense about lengthy and restrictive non-compete terms?
The only benefit that could possibly be derived by publishing algorithms and/or code for Windows security would be if (a) changes proposed would be implemented quickly and (b) everyone planet-wide upgraded.
If both of these did not happen, especially if (b) didn't happen, what you would be doing is exposing all non-upgrading users to the full brunt of whatever flaws their might be. Would this really be productive? Does this remind you of various failures in Linux code that led to rootkits being developed for it. Did the victims of such attacks think it was all for the best because they didn't upgrade in a timely manner?
Yes, relying on people not reverse-engineering code to protect users isn't a great plan. But the current situation - as regrettable as it is - is this is the only plan. There are no fallbacks, there are no alternatives. Most of the running copies of Windows aren't going to be "fixed" in any way whatsoever.