There was some noise being made about forcing ISPs to keep records for a set amount of time. That would be a responsible complementary law to this freedom. Otherwise, you will end up with a situation where sites cannot be held responsible, and intentionally do not keep any records to prevent their users from being held responsible for their speech.
Free speech must still be used within limits, and I'm all for it. I'm also for, when someone willfully and grossly exceeds those limits, to pay the piper and take responsibility.
I'm picturing any number of sites, like youtube and many others, breathing a heavy sigh of relief that a different precedent wasn't set.
The addition of this kind of content utterly cripples anyone who doesn't farm Naxxramas and hasn't bought the expansion. Blizzard could have left this gear relatively inaccessable, or at least made it so you have to spend more than about five to ten minutes questing in the first zone in Outland in order to get it. Uhm... being level 60 compared to a bunch of 70's is what utterly cripples the person that didn't buy Burning Crusade. You're limited to 60 if you don't buy the expansion. You do, however, get the benefit of the new talent sets which are very nice.
The gear difference really affects only above level 60, and you have to have the expansion to get above 60 anyway. You can get only one or two quests at 58-60 for good gear... that's a chestpiece and some leggings and maybe a green hat. The chestpiece is good, but that will not utterly cripple a level 60 who didn't buy the Burning Crusade. (I suppose it's possible to do a bunch of dungeons for gear and somehow NOT hit 61, so yes, you can twink a 60 if you want to fight in AV.) However, anyone, even those that didn't buy the expansion, can get the BOE outland gear. This generally has a lower limit of 58 on it, so it's quite usable in the level 59 and 60 battlegrounds, too.
I wore my T2 gear for a long time. Piece by piece, some things you got were better. But the set bonuses made a big difference. It did level the playing field, but it meant that everyone starting outland with nearly equal gear. T2 stuff was still better, and more complete, than doing all the noob quests and wearing that gear.
The way they could fix this is to put a global chat channel INSIDE the LFG tool, with a timer (2 broadcasts per 30 sec). That'd make it inconvenient to use as a chat channel, and would mostly be seen only by people actually actively looking for a group. The tool is nice, but needs some tweaks. But worse, the inability to chat destroys any usefulness it might have had.
Not new at all. They met good success with scarlet monastery, but even better success with dire maul.
One new thing is that the last boss tends to be near an exit. It's a small touch but it's noticably nice to burn through a dungeon, then just jump down to exit instead of having to spend, literally, 3 minutes running out.
The dungeons are very, very well designed. Most of the scripting bugs have been hotfixed, too.
I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend).
The game does slow down after you hit 70, but more options open. Most likely, you'll be grinding to get a fast mount, but you'll almost certainly have 1000g for the slow flying mount. You'll want a guild, but one is not necessary to participate in most of the content. However, guildless, it's unlikely you'll progress into the "advanced" content for quite a while. It's difficult to complete the 10-man Karazhan key in PUGs, and even if you do, there are few 10-man PUGs. That sounds kind of funny, but Karazhan is NOT simply a level 70 UBRS. It's more like a 10-man Naxxramus.
As recently as a week ago, a friend shelved his years-old Eve character to give WoW a spin. He has a LOT of xp on this character. Why did he do this?
One of the reasons is as simple as single-session time commitment. When he did a high-level mission, he had to clear some 5 levels that take 30 min each. If he doesn't have several hours set aside to do this, the instance resets (during downtime) and he has to start from the beginning of the level and finish it, or lose faction. He was finding he couldn't take missions unless he knew, for sure, that he'd have time to do the mission.
This is terribly unfriendly to a dedicated but "casual" player as far as time commitment goes. Meanwhile, this same guy is having a blast in WoW, playing for 30 minutes at a time before he comes into work, and another hour late at night before bed.
I realize there were some strides made in Eve to get newer players up and running faster, with some nice bonus skills.
But, Does CCP have plans to make the time commitment more casual-friendly in terms of single-sessions? WoW was able to do it, quite well, giving a ton of new 5 and 10-man content if you have an hour to play.
The only reason to use telnet is when an embedded device doesn't support ssh and you can't upgrade the firmware. EX-FRICKING-ACTLY. ... the whole reason this discussion started was because the guy had trouble using ssh to a router. You clearly know a lot about ssh, so you know that it has to compute a math-intensive session key that generally times out every hour or sooner. He stated this computation took exceedingly long on the router, as to be unusable. Less than a minute doesn't sound like a lot -- no more than the "whoa there cowboy" filter on/. but consider that wait is before you can even type your first character. That would certainly qualify as an embedded device that poorly supports ssh. If the firmware allowed it, he could probably use a 128-bit session key to speed it up significantly.... but then people like you would complain about a weak session key.
There's a big slider with one side marked "SECURE" and the other side marked "USABLE". Not all networks require the slider to be in the same space. I use kerb, ssh, a smart card, a [redacted] to even login at work, and that's only if I don't have to talk to the guards with machine guns or [redacted] and [redacted] first. That kind of security would be idiotic on most networks, and that was exactly what the OP said. He doesn't habitually lock his bedroom door just in case a burglar shows up, because someone's already in his house -- if his box was rooted, he doesn't care about his router or his password... the damage was already done.
If your security plan doesn't consider what it's guarding, it's crap. The OP deems telnet an acceptable risk and I believe him. Clearly, if someone is into his network already, he's not concerned about his password being sniffed. That's a fine security plan for his uses, as long as it's done with full knowledge of the risks.
Encryption will not secure the world. Even Bruce Schneier changed his views and no longer believes that.
Security best practices are the same whether you're talking about securing your home network or a military network No. It's not. The only thing those have in common is considering what you are protecting, and how much risk you wish to take versus the convenience granted. The specifics are immaterial.
The OP is right, he knows his risks and has deemed it acceptable. You and others, having no idea of the risk, deem it unacceptable and are the ignorant ones.
Except, of course, for the fact that free speech (not to mention all speech) is itself copyrighted -- by the person who spoke it. That is not correct. It must be placed into a fixed medium. Spoken words are not copyrighted unless recorded. (Hey! I just violated your copyright on your post:-)
We really do need an overhaul of both copyrights and patents, including a good and fair definition of Fair Use, possibly even making Fair Use a right instead of a defense.
That is how the DMCA works. The point is that it holds the carrier (in this case, Youtube) harmless as long as they comply. Generally, the carrier of the alleged copyrighted works will comply and give the "owner" an opportunity to fight it. The point is, you can fight it, and should within the law. If they throw a bureacracy at them, show them you're merely a concerned citizen with too much time on his hands and fight back. Hell, if they don't back down, file a federal lawsuit and demand their evidence. Subpoena their CEO and force them to spend thousands to quash it. Settle only when they give you written agreement never to issue another takedown notice to you for the video or another other video covered by your produce.
Free speech doesn't include copyrighted material, and you should know that. But this type of thing shows yet another manner that the DMCA can be used to harass or silence legitimate speech.
Scientology is a particularly interesting religion because we can see for certain that it is false and founded entirely on lies. Independent records about L. Ron Hubbard exist - you can read about his life before Scientology as a con-man, bigamist and benefit cheat. Actually, slander and excessively attacking their critics is one of the biggest (legitimate) criticisms of Scientology. That, combined with 50's psychology on how to handle vocal critics, was what got them in so much trouble on the net. Their outmoded tactics worked many years ago, but not today. They needed to adjust to the times, but suffer from what all "fundie" churches suffer - taking text literally in different times will yield different results, usually undesirable.
You have just embarked on the same slanderous path. I think you lose bitching rights by sidestepping the whole issue and merely attacking LRH. You just used the same poor tactics to criticize./not a scientologist but knows a few/doesn't believe they're an evil religion
From TFA: U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction...
TFA was misleading when it said "A federal judge in Texas has ruled that it is unlawful to provide a hyperlink to a Webcast if the copyright owner objects to it." That is borderline lying, IMHO. A preliminary injunction is a temporary order.
Things like restraining orders and preliminary injunctions are granted if they appear to have merit, without a full hearing, in order to prevent major injury. It would do little good for an injunction to get tied up in court for long periods of time, since big companies could simply drag it out, milking the plaintiff all the while. Preliminary injunctions are done to halt the alleged injurious action and give time to evaluate it.
It'll generally go to court for a full hearing to determine if the order should be made permanent.
Dude, oriental is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
Do you really believe the planes would be upset for me calling the parent company oriental instead of asian-american? I'm pretty sure a lot of chinese would be pissed if I called them asian-americans. Especially since 1.5 billion of them have never been to north or south america. How about north korea? Shall I refer to the inhabitants as North-Korean-Americans?
Stop saying the wrong thing in an attempt to be politically correct. It's technically incorrect and frankly, makes you sound the fool-american to misuse such a term. To quote a politically incorrect saying, learn to call a spade a spade.
Let's ignore the issues of cellphones interfering with the flight controls. We'll ignore that search for a random cellphone on some oriental airline long ago, purported to be messing up the landing.
From what I understand, cellphones work by associating themselves with "cells" of coverage. The closer they are, the less power they use, and so on. When the user moves cells, the network switches them over to the new cell.
From the air, a cellphone will see many, many different cells as being equally good. It will also have to switch across cells much faster than normal. Without the plane itself acting as a roving cell tower for the occupants, it seems to me that this would cause a lot of problems. Not only will all the cellphones be transmitting at full power, but the network will potentially have to handle many many more switches cell to cell, and faster than normal. There's evidence of this from TFA when it said some upscale, long-haul airlines are installing equipment onboard that will allow for cell phone use.
I'd love to hear from anyone in the business that could shed more light on these technical issues, and whether they are as big of a problem as I suspect if airlines were to just say "Sure! Use your phone!"
They have an "interesting" business model. Basically, they do voluntary security checking on software, then SELL the information for a set price. It comes with a not-so-veiled threat of releasing the information, although they do offer to sell the bugs to the vendor first.
On the surface, it looks like blackmail. "Nice firewall you got here, sure would hate to expose a hole in it..." But when you consider how much work is involved, it's more like being forced to hire these people for their results. Kind of like paparazzi getting a picture of a celebrity in a compromised situation.
Frankly, I disagree with the business model, simply on the basis that they are positioning themselves as contractors to a company who were never asked to be hired nor interviewed. The claim is that they force the security companies to make more secure products. I guess this is true, although their motives are not so pure. Certainly the work is worth something, but they want money for the work they performed, even though they were never actually asked to do the work... that's the aspect that bothers me.
MS is big, and vital data are distributed in not-so-vital chunks throughout the organization and in different ways.
Combined, it's all vital. But imho, saying "just cut the plug on the network" is not feasible and horribly short-sighted. MS has several web applications, update servers, search engines... what are you saying again? You propose they cut all that off, too? The damage is just as bad (if not worse) if their update servers get hacked instead of their personnel database.
Network security covers a little more than just "vital data".
This was almost exactly what I said when it first happened. It was also nothing unique in its implementation. I wrangled a -1 Troll, too!:-)
The problem exposes some very alarming trends I see in security research. It used to merely be embarassing when someone would release exploit code, but there really wasn't any recourse other than fix the flaw asap. Then, the separation between blackhat and whitehat hacking became more distinct... the responsible researchers started to notify the manufacturers with enough time to fix, with an underlying veiled threat of embarassment as the cost of exploits rose. But there was always a threat of "fix this before I release the information".
But somehow, somewhere, the government got involved and everything went to hell in research. Now we have the DMCA, and asshat maneuvers like Adobe getting people arrested for legal activities, chilling effects on legal speech through threats BY corporations who are negligent, bullying academics, and so on. We have the USA PATRIOT Act. We have a war on US citizens, not just terrorists. And then, in this windstorm, Soghoian was an idiot by sticking out his neck while the farmer had been sharpening his axe.
What he did wasn't research... it was/obvious to any hacker who's ever printed a boarding pass in advance. What he did was simple embarassing exposure. Now, I fully believe his speech should be protected, but frankly he was irresponsible in the first place and it's difficult to find any sympathy.
If you have dominant share of the market in search, you have dominant share on the market for search advertising. True, mostly. Those certainly share a relationship.
That being the case, you control the supply (another definition for monopoly btw). FALSE Dominant != Monopoly
Dell does not have a monopoly on computer manufacturing despite their dominance in the market and ability to affect stock prices, like Intel's. CompUSA does not have a monopoly on retail sales.
And Google's market share is 45%. That is not a monopoly, and not even if it were the 73% you quoted.
If any of your arguments include "abuse of power" or "leveraging marketshare" or "Google's monopoly" it is immediately invalid. If you start with false premises, the result doesn't matter. There's no reduction to absurdity proof here. You're starting with wholly-incorrect assumptions, and ending up with wholly-incorrect conclusions.
Google has a near-monopoly on web searches If under 50% of the websearch market is a "near monopoly" then I'm not sure where you get your definitions. Microsoft had about 90% of the PC OS market when it was called a monopoly... this is half that. Google has 48% (iirc from the NYT 2 days ago), yahoo has 25%, and MS has 12% of the search engines used.
Google doesn't have any sort of monopoly. What they do have, is a nice clean interface with no popups and few enough ads that I will tolerate using them. And so will about half the computer users out there.
I like the parallel between MSIE and google ads, but it doesn't fit very well. The problem with IE was that it was intentionally made difficult to use the OS with competing browsers. With google putting itself on top of its own ads, it doesn't affect your computer usage at all.
You might ask a question such as "how much does Comcast pay themselves for Comcast commercials?" Or how about, how much does Qwest pay itself for those phonesecks commercials?
That's a fabulous picture of a beautiful slippery slope. And if that did happen to someone, the BBC wants to know.
But the problem with painting a slippery slope picture is that it's not true. Certainly in law, precedents make a big difference. But in science, popular opinion and politics don't determine true or false, any more than you can make a law that Pi = 3.0.
The opinion that climate scientists are in it for the money to justify their jobs and get grants has very little basis in reality. This was put forth by an author who was trying to sell books... making money off popular opinion just like O'reilly or Jon Stewart. And the politicians who bought into it aren't scientists either, and are the real pigs you reference, above.
If your slippery slope story were true, the BBC would want to know. That's the whole purpose of this exercise. But buying into the claim that "All the world-reknown experts in climate science are cultivating an elaborate lie to keep their jobs" is rubbish. Anyone who actually believes that merely wants to believe it, despite lack of any credibility. When you consider that it's essentially believing an urban myth (yes, there is a kid dying of cancer that wants you to forward this Neiman-marcus cookie recipe), it's not surprising how stupid people can be. But stupid people can still vote and produce stupid kids.
Slashdot Mirror
There was some noise being made about forcing ISPs to keep records for a set amount of time. That would be a responsible complementary law to this freedom. Otherwise, you will end up with a situation where sites cannot be held responsible, and intentionally do not keep any records to prevent their users from being held responsible for their speech.
Free speech must still be used within limits, and I'm all for it. I'm also for, when someone willfully and grossly exceeds those limits, to pay the piper and take responsibility.
I'm picturing any number of sites, like youtube and many others, breathing a heavy sigh of relief that a different precedent wasn't set.
The gear difference really affects only above level 60, and you have to have the expansion to get above 60 anyway. You can get only one or two quests at 58-60 for good gear... that's a chestpiece and some leggings and maybe a green hat. The chestpiece is good, but that will not utterly cripple a level 60 who didn't buy the Burning Crusade. (I suppose it's possible to do a bunch of dungeons for gear and somehow NOT hit 61, so yes, you can twink a 60 if you want to fight in AV.) However, anyone, even those that didn't buy the expansion, can get the BOE outland gear. This generally has a lower limit of 58 on it, so it's quite usable in the level 59 and 60 battlegrounds, too.
I wore my T2 gear for a long time. Piece by piece, some things you got were better. But the set bonuses made a big difference. It did level the playing field, but it meant that everyone starting outland with nearly equal gear. T2 stuff was still better, and more complete, than doing all the noob quests and wearing that gear.
The way they could fix this is to put a global chat channel INSIDE the LFG tool, with a timer (2 broadcasts per 30 sec). That'd make it inconvenient to use as a chat channel, and would mostly be seen only by people actually actively looking for a group. The tool is nice, but needs some tweaks. But worse, the inability to chat destroys any usefulness it might have had.
Not new at all. They met good success with scarlet monastery, but even better success with dire maul.
One new thing is that the last boss tends to be near an exit. It's a small touch but it's noticably nice to burn through a dungeon, then just jump down to exit instead of having to spend, literally, 3 minutes running out.
The dungeons are very, very well designed. Most of the scripting bugs have been hotfixed, too.
I concur with almost everything in this review.
I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend).
The game does slow down after you hit 70, but more options open. Most likely, you'll be grinding to get a fast mount, but you'll almost certainly have 1000g for the slow flying mount. You'll want a guild, but one is not necessary to participate in most of the content. However, guildless, it's unlikely you'll progress into the "advanced" content for quite a while. It's difficult to complete the 10-man Karazhan key in PUGs, and even if you do, there are few 10-man PUGs. That sounds kind of funny, but Karazhan is NOT simply a level 70 UBRS. It's more like a 10-man Naxxramus.
As recently as a week ago, a friend shelved his years-old Eve character to give WoW a spin. He has a LOT of xp on this character. Why did he do this?
One of the reasons is as simple as single-session time commitment. When he did a high-level mission, he had to clear some 5 levels that take 30 min each. If he doesn't have several hours set aside to do this, the instance resets (during downtime) and he has to start from the beginning of the level and finish it, or lose faction. He was finding he couldn't take missions unless he knew, for sure, that he'd have time to do the mission.
This is terribly unfriendly to a dedicated but "casual" player as far as time commitment goes. Meanwhile, this same guy is having a blast in WoW, playing for 30 minutes at a time before he comes into work, and another hour late at night before bed.
I realize there were some strides made in Eve to get newer players up and running faster, with some nice bonus skills.
But, Does CCP have plans to make the time commitment more casual-friendly in terms of single-sessions? WoW was able to do it, quite well, giving a ton of new 5 and 10-man content if you have an hour to play.
There's a big slider with one side marked "SECURE" and the other side marked "USABLE". Not all networks require the slider to be in the same space. I use kerb, ssh, a smart card, a [redacted] to even login at work, and that's only if I don't have to talk to the guards with machine guns or [redacted] and [redacted] first. That kind of security would be idiotic on most networks, and that was exactly what the OP said. He doesn't habitually lock his bedroom door just in case a burglar shows up, because someone's already in his house -- if his box was rooted, he doesn't care about his router or his password... the damage was already done.
If your security plan doesn't consider what it's guarding, it's crap. The OP deems telnet an acceptable risk and I believe him. Clearly, if someone is into his network already, he's not concerned about his password being sniffed. That's a fine security plan for his uses, as long as it's done with full knowledge of the risks.
Encryption will not secure the world. Even Bruce Schneier changed his views and no longer believes that.
The OP is right, he knows his risks and has deemed it acceptable. You and others, having no idea of the risk, deem it unacceptable and are the ignorant ones.
We really do need an overhaul of both copyrights and patents, including a good and fair definition of Fair Use, possibly even making Fair Use a right instead of a defense.
That is how the DMCA works. The point is that it holds the carrier (in this case, Youtube) harmless as long as they comply. Generally, the carrier of the alleged copyrighted works will comply and give the "owner" an opportunity to fight it. The point is, you can fight it, and should within the law. If they throw a bureacracy at them, show them you're merely a concerned citizen with too much time on his hands and fight back. Hell, if they don't back down, file a federal lawsuit and demand their evidence. Subpoena their CEO and force them to spend thousands to quash it. Settle only when they give you written agreement never to issue another takedown notice to you for the video or another other video covered by your produce.
Free speech doesn't include copyrighted material, and you should know that. But this type of thing shows yet another manner that the DMCA can be used to harass or silence legitimate speech.
If they can't answer "What level is your character?" without flinching, it's DATE OVER.
You have just embarked on the same slanderous path. I think you lose bitching rights by sidestepping the whole issue and merely attacking LRH. You just used the same poor tactics to criticize.
You were escorted out? As in, fired??! For what reason?
Simple answer: counter-sue for wrongful termination.
Talk to a real lawyer if you ever get a notice of lawsuit, not the ianals on a message board.
In the meantime, don't lose any sleep at all. Enjoy your extra week of vacation!
It's like a non cable tv station complaining because people turn the volume down or switch to another channel during commercials.
No, it's like a tv station broadcasting another station's shows, and inserting their own commercials during the breaks.
It's amazing that people actually think something "free" under certain terms somehow means it can't be stolen.
From TFA: U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction...
TFA was misleading when it said "A federal judge in Texas has ruled that it is unlawful to provide a hyperlink to a Webcast if the copyright owner objects to it." That is borderline lying, IMHO. A preliminary injunction is a temporary order.
Things like restraining orders and preliminary injunctions are granted if they appear to have merit, without a full hearing, in order to prevent major injury. It would do little good for an injunction to get tied up in court for long periods of time, since big companies could simply drag it out, milking the plaintiff all the while. Preliminary injunctions are done to halt the alleged injurious action and give time to evaluate it.
It'll generally go to court for a full hearing to determine if the order should be made permanent.
Dude, oriental is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
Do you really believe the planes would be upset for me calling the parent company oriental instead of asian-american? I'm pretty sure a lot of chinese would be pissed if I called them asian-americans. Especially since 1.5 billion of them have never been to north or south america. How about north korea? Shall I refer to the inhabitants as North-Korean-Americans?
Stop saying the wrong thing in an attempt to be politically correct. It's technically incorrect and frankly, makes you sound the fool-american to misuse such a term. To quote a politically incorrect saying, learn to call a spade a spade.
Let's ignore the issues of cellphones interfering with the flight controls. We'll ignore that search for a random cellphone on some oriental airline long ago, purported to be messing up the landing.
From what I understand, cellphones work by associating themselves with "cells" of coverage. The closer they are, the less power they use, and so on. When the user moves cells, the network switches them over to the new cell.
From the air, a cellphone will see many, many different cells as being equally good. It will also have to switch across cells much faster than normal. Without the plane itself acting as a roving cell tower for the occupants, it seems to me that this would cause a lot of problems. Not only will all the cellphones be transmitting at full power, but the network will potentially have to handle many many more switches cell to cell, and faster than normal. There's evidence of this from TFA when it said some upscale, long-haul airlines are installing equipment onboard that will allow for cell phone use.
I'd love to hear from anyone in the business that could shed more light on these technical issues, and whether they are as big of a problem as I suspect if airlines were to just say "Sure! Use your phone!"
They have an "interesting" business model. Basically, they do voluntary security checking on software, then SELL the information for a set price. It comes with a not-so-veiled threat of releasing the information, although they do offer to sell the bugs to the vendor first.
On the surface, it looks like blackmail. "Nice firewall you got here, sure would hate to expose a hole in it..." But when you consider how much work is involved, it's more like being forced to hire these people for their results. Kind of like paparazzi getting a picture of a celebrity in a compromised situation.
Frankly, I disagree with the business model, simply on the basis that they are positioning themselves as contractors to a company who were never asked to be hired nor interviewed. The claim is that they force the security companies to make more secure products. I guess this is true, although their motives are not so pure. Certainly the work is worth something, but they want money for the work they performed, even though they were never actually asked to do the work... that's the aspect that bothers me.
MS is big, and vital data are distributed in not-so-vital chunks throughout the organization and in different ways.
Combined, it's all vital. But imho, saying "just cut the plug on the network" is not feasible and horribly short-sighted. MS has several web applications, update servers, search engines... what are you saying again? You propose they cut all that off, too? The damage is just as bad (if not worse) if their update servers get hacked instead of their personnel database.
Network security covers a little more than just "vital data".
This was almost exactly what I said when it first happened. It was also nothing unique in its implementation. I wrangled a -1 Troll, too! :-)
/obvious to any hacker who's ever printed a boarding pass in advance. What he did was simple embarassing exposure. Now, I fully believe his speech should be protected, but frankly he was irresponsible in the first place and it's difficult to find any sympathy.
The problem exposes some very alarming trends I see in security research. It used to merely be embarassing when someone would release exploit code, but there really wasn't any recourse other than fix the flaw asap. Then, the separation between blackhat and whitehat hacking became more distinct... the responsible researchers started to notify the manufacturers with enough time to fix, with an underlying veiled threat of embarassment as the cost of exploits rose. But there was always a threat of "fix this before I release the information".
But somehow, somewhere, the government got involved and everything went to hell in research. Now we have the DMCA, and asshat maneuvers like Adobe getting people arrested for legal activities, chilling effects on legal speech through threats BY corporations who are negligent, bullying academics, and so on. We have the USA PATRIOT Act. We have a war on US citizens, not just terrorists. And then, in this windstorm, Soghoian was an idiot by sticking out his neck while the farmer had been sharpening his axe.
What he did wasn't research... it was
Dell does not have a monopoly on computer manufacturing despite their dominance in the market and ability to affect stock prices, like Intel's. CompUSA does not have a monopoly on retail sales.
And Google's market share is 45%. That is not a monopoly, and not even if it were the 73% you quoted.
If any of your arguments include "abuse of power" or "leveraging marketshare" or "Google's monopoly" it is immediately invalid. If you start with false premises, the result doesn't matter. There's no reduction to absurdity proof here. You're starting with wholly-incorrect assumptions, and ending up with wholly-incorrect conclusions.
Google doesn't have any sort of monopoly. What they do have, is a nice clean interface with no popups and few enough ads that I will tolerate using them. And so will about half the computer users out there.
I like the parallel between MSIE and google ads, but it doesn't fit very well. The problem with IE was that it was intentionally made difficult to use the OS with competing browsers. With google putting itself on top of its own ads, it doesn't affect your computer usage at all.
You might ask a question such as "how much does Comcast pay themselves for Comcast commercials?" Or how about, how much does Qwest pay itself for those phonesecks commercials?
The right answer is: who cares?
That's a fabulous picture of a beautiful slippery slope. And if that did happen to someone, the BBC wants to know.
But the problem with painting a slippery slope picture is that it's not true. Certainly in law, precedents make a big difference. But in science, popular opinion and politics don't determine true or false, any more than you can make a law that Pi = 3.0.
The opinion that climate scientists are in it for the money to justify their jobs and get grants has very little basis in reality. This was put forth by an author who was trying to sell books... making money off popular opinion just like O'reilly or Jon Stewart. And the politicians who bought into it aren't scientists either, and are the real pigs you reference, above.
If your slippery slope story were true, the BBC would want to know. That's the whole purpose of this exercise. But buying into the claim that "All the world-reknown experts in climate science are cultivating an elaborate lie to keep their jobs" is rubbish. Anyone who actually believes that merely wants to believe it, despite lack of any credibility. When you consider that it's essentially believing an urban myth (yes, there is a kid dying of cancer that wants you to forward this Neiman-marcus cookie recipe), it's not surprising how stupid people can be. But stupid people can still vote and produce stupid kids.