Landing pods don't have to send down people. We explore with robots all the time. Send one down to see if there are any major problems you couldn't detect from a distance.
Fair enough.
And no, they don't know that there would be a habitable planet when they arrived. Not if they have our level of tech. We are just barely able to detect planets that might be in a habitable size/orbit, and still unable to detect their atmosphere, even in general trends.
I grant them that. You're right, though.
And why are they out of fuel, when they've just arrived in Earth orbit? Earth in general is a fairly poor place for refueling, unless you happen to live here. Depending on your engine type, there are several much better fueling stops in the outer system. (Or even deep-space, if they've got a fusion engine.)
I swear to God you're being purposefully dense. Because it's a ONE-USE ship, designed to go from its homeworld to Earth, and nothing else. It's not a freakin' Greyhound bus you can gas-up and take anywhere. Why is this such a hard concept to get? It's the, what, third time? Fourth time? I've explained it.
The whole POINT of the ship is to come to Earth and land. What part of that requires refueling?
And for that matter, why do they need fuel to drop an asteroid on us?
How else would they get to the asteroid belt? Magical faeries?
Look, the ship is designed to go to Earth, land, and it's done. Forever.
It's not designed to go to Earth, then say "oops look at that", then turn around go out to the asteroid belt, attach a bunch of shit to asteroids, then go back to Earth, then wait for the asteroids to hit, then potentially repeat the process depending, then land.
Ok, it'd take a while to drop one using a solar sail, but it could be done if they wanted to. Or solar panels and an ion engine.
Yes, but they still need to GET to the asteroid belt to attach sails and/or ion drives to them.
Again, that'd take time, but we're not going anywhere and it should be within safety tolerances on even the most low-end hibernation system.
It would take infinite time, because they have no fuel.
Why did they land anything, crash or otherwise? If you are going to send something interstellar, might as well put a couple landing-pods on it, at least for exploration. (Even if they are only one way.)
Because they knew from their telescopes that the planet was reasonably suitable for life, and because they knew from their engineers that they didn't have enough fuel to make major course changes once the ship was in motion.
And, more importantly, the WHOLE PREMISE we started with is that they have technology on par with ours. They can't build a self-contained pod that is capable of landing on a planet like Earth and taking off again, since we can't do that either. And if you suggest a one-way landing-- well, say the mother ship decides to leave, now it just strands people there to die? Really nice.
If you're colonizing a planet, why would you bring a couple of landing-pods? When you could put in additional food supplies or something much more vital with the weight? (You might have a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque pod to repair the ship before landing, but engineering. Possibly.)
And as for the demonstrated capabilities: It's the same tech as the ship they built. They might not be able to do it efficiently, but they'd be able to do it before we could design and build something to stop them.
Because the ship is *designed* to make a controlled crash landing, just like so many various probes we've sent to various planets. You don't seem to get the concept here. NASA has done this a hundred times. Spirit and Opportunity got to Mars that way.
For economy's sake, the ship has just enough fuel to get up to speed, right? You leave orbit, slingshot around a couple of planets using up all the fuel you have, and you're on course for the destination. Centuries (I'll use the 900 years figure, based on nothing, but easy to type) pass before you arrive. The ship wakes itself back up, following its programming, and wakes up a few crew members.
There's no fuel left to do further slingshots and going on to another planet, because the course was pre-programmed before they even left orbit in the first place. Additionally, even if they wanted to go to another planet, everything on the ship including it's nuclear power and hibernation support systems is designed for a single trip of 900 years. So even if you wanted to abort at this point, you'd just be sentencing everybody to die.
So the crew members, knowing these facts, check-out all the systems and make whatever repairs are necessary. They pick a landing spot, now that they have a much better view of the destination planet, and do the final course programming so that the ship can use it's last remaining fuel to de-orbit. At no point here does the crew have any possibility of delaying or changing their plans because of what they find on the surface of the planet: there's no fuel to stay in orbit indefinitely (since that wasn't in the original plan), there's no fuel/energy to keep life support going indefinitely (since that wasn't in the plan), etc. They *have* to land, as planned.
Also keep in mind that since they surveyed the planet something like a thousand years ago or more, they would have absolutely no reason to expect intelligent life to be there. That wouldn't be in the plan-- and frankly if they had expected it, they probably would have just picked another destination in the first place, rather than to try to build the miracle-ship of your imagination.
And as for the demonstrated capabilities: It's the same tech as the ship they built.
No it's not. You're talking about a magical ship that can make this long journey and still somehow have enough fuel to drive all over the solar system and move asteroids around. You've been watching too much Star Trek.
I'm talking about a ship built with technology close to ours that does the absolutely bare minimum required to colonize another planet, the *bare minimum*. Another reply to my original post mentioned that the economic cost of something like this would be massive, by far the largest undertaking in human history-- that right there is why it does the bare minimum.
because as it is now, most people view our species rather dimly: violent, stupid, warmongering, and very likely to go out and rape and pillage some other species.
Only science fiction writers.
Most people are pretty damned optimistic, from my experience.
Doesn't matter: They would have to be at least equal to us in most technology, and they would have a massive tactical advantage: A ship capable of spending an indeterminate time in deep space, with full life-support. They also would have to have more experience with space tech, notably propulsion.
Nah, the ship would destroy itself in the process of landing. It's a colony ship; they wouldn't expect to be going back. The tanks which held the fuel would serve as a huge "crumble zone" and it could come down with parachutes or something. All the details aren't worked out yet, but the important point is this:
* You're making assumptions where none are warranted.
Secondly, we already know several methods for building space propulsion drives that can do a long-term trip, centuries or longer. We just don't use them because they're useless for what we're doing in space now. They'd have more experience with it, yah I can't argue that.
Thirdly, the ship wouldn't have "full life support" because it's inhabitants would all be in hibernation. That was in the premise I brought up, remember? It would have "bare minimum" life support, at best. And it, also, would be designed for a one-way trip, like the ship itself. At best it would wake a couple crew members up for the last few weeks to check-out the functionality of the systems and find a landing spot.
All they have to do to wipe us out is retreat to the asteroid belt, and lob a couple large ones this way. All of that would be easily within their demonstrated abilities.
No, only within the abilities you pulled out of your ass. None of the ones in the original scenario.
Much better to be friendly, and see how well we can bargain. A planet-based civilization can't hold out against an attacker that holds the high orbitals.
But they don't, because their ship did a controlled crash-landing.
The problem with people who read too much sci-fi is that they get the sci-fi cliches stuck in their head and literally can't think about anything else.
Look, aliens don't have to be technologically advanced. They don't have to be friendly, *or* hostile. There's no reason an android designed to simulate a human in every way would be super-strong. Wipe every sci-fi cliche from your head and just think for awhile.
That means that even a low tech STL ship that comes in to Earth implies a level of mass production several orders above ours. That is a scary thing. It means that if they actually wanted to fight us, they could out produce us in terms of Armor and Planes. If they have a high level of automation, they won't even need many personnel.
Yah, but it's a 900 year long trip. The alien race that originally launched the damned thing might already have FTL drives-- that's a really, really long time. They might have completely forgotten it was launched in the first place, and pulled down whatever receiving station was supposed to receive it's "ping" when it reached the destination. I dunno, there's hundreds of possibilities, and all of this is science fiction anyway, so there you go.
What I do hate is the cliched science fiction concepts that: 1) Aliens necessarily have better technology than we do 2) Aliens with better technology than we do are all lovey-dovey hippies
If I have to read another science fiction story in which the aliens come to earth to protect us from blowing each other up with nukes, I'll hurl into a bucket.
Touchscreens are for noobs. All this time I've wondered what the iPhone crowd was crowing about with their touchscreens, but today, on the Pre, I really miss the fidelity and precision of a stylus and a 5 way navigation button the stylus lets me precisely hit exactly the point on the screen I am looking for and the nav button lets me precisely scroll up and down the number of items I desire. Exactly. Each time. Repeatedly.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the Pre just has a really crappy touchscreen? I like how people look at one bad implementation, and instantly declare every possible use of the technology to be horrible.
Anyway, you're actually somewhat right; the key is that the iPhone is designed around the touchscreen from day 1, and Palm applications aren't. The iPhone doesn't have any buttons that are small enough to fat-finger, except on the on-screen keyboard which has autocorrect to fix that for you anyway.
Are you suggesting that the reason we can't communicate with squids is because scientists have been trying to make love to them all these years? Instead of sharing intelligence?
Or did I misread something? Because that's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard.:)
As for talking about our guns, whoever shows up here has already demonstrated massively superior technology to ours (we are not showing up on _their_ doorstep are we?) so antagonizing them might not be such a great idea either.
I don't think that's a given. The only two things we're lacking in order to make a slow-boat colonization ship to another planet is: 1) Hibernation technology 2) The economic dedication required to do so
You can easily imagine an alien race within about 10-50 light years having both of these things available to them, and coming to earth. It's quite possible they'd come here and be utterly flabbergasted at cellphones and the Internet. I've been toying with a science fiction story based around that idea, but I'm not that great a writer.
Bonus: because of the travel time, at the time they began the trip, they probably wouldn't have been able to observe any evidence of technological civilization on the planet, so they'd be expecting to land somewhere uninhabited.
At some point you gave it permission to install. They could make that clearer, I suppose-- it might have been buried in a EULA or "I Agree" button somewhere-- but you gave it permission. Heck, in Vista, it *requires* permission, since an installer can't write to All Users without it.
Or are you seriously suggesting that it's not only an unwanted add-on, but it's literally a virus?
Now there is an 'uninstall' button, but if you press it, the app is only uninstalled for the user who clicked the button, not other users on the computer; there's still no ready means of permanently opting out system wide.
Maybe what Microsoft should do is install the add-on into the "All Users" folder, so that if one user removes it then it's removed for all users on the computer!
Oh wait, that's exactly what they did that people are throwing a hissy-fit over.
Seriously, knowing how Windows permissions work, what is your "solution" for this problem? Either Microsoft puts it in the All Users folder, and people throw a hissy-fit, or they do what they're doing now and install it individually for all users, which means you can't disable it for all users at once. That is the way Windows works. (And Linux, and OS X, and all multi-user OSes.)
So, pray-tell, what the hell should they be doing?
But for a company that is a constant target of anti-trust suits, who is notorious for this kind of thing, you think by now that they would be more careful. Its hard to believe that someone internal at Micrsoft didn't realize what was this was doing and just say 'fuck it' - even if it was a low level developer, somebody had to know - at the very least the guy(s) who wrote the code.
Had to know what? That there's an magical unspoken rule not to install extensions that way?
Look, Firefox offers the ability to install add-ons for all users. That's a feature provided by the design of Firefox. The only "horrible" thing Microsoft did was make use of that particular Firefox feature. Now it turns out that a lot of Firefox users don't like that feature, and don't agree with how it works. Microsoft says "oops" and changes the way they install the add-on so it doesn't use that feature.
Where is there any maliciousness here? At all? No.
There's three sets of users: 1) Those who read the summaries only 2) Those who read the summaries and comments 3) Those who read the articles, summaries, and comments (extremely rare!)
You could save the teeth gnashing and anal rape metaphors for when you actually have an issue, instead of wasting it on complete non-issues. It might lower your blood pressure in the long run. But that's just my opinion.
And of course, since it's negative towards Microsoft, Slashdot dupes it a few dozen times. That's some quality journalism all-around. Oh, and it was an honest mistake in the first place, not some horrible malicious act.
Of course, if you read the Slashdot comments, you knew that Microsoft had already fixed it, since the comments are always about 10 times more on-the-ball than the actual posts. Sadly, I think the majority of visitors to this site never dive into the comments section and are probably fed a large spoon of bullshit every morning with their news.
You're not a developer, are you? Whether or not AD is a dream to work with depends heavily on what your job description is. If you are simply an administrator plugging random Windows or even Linux and *nix boxes into AD you might find it comparatively easy. If on the other hand you expect to have to develop custom applications of your own on non-Microsoft platforms that authenticate against AD or convert existing ones to use AD then it can be a painful experience to use AD. It's not an unsolvable problem mind you, just a really annoying one.
Unless you're a Windows developer, in which case you can just drag&drop the.net sign-on control into your project and you're done in 5 seconds.
When you are hoarding diamonds or real estate, your hoard has an innate value to you. When you hoard domains, your hoard has no innate value. Your squatted domains have no value to you,
And domains are different... how?
Are you saying that the domains I own (blakeyrat.com specifically) has zero innate value to me?
In reality, if someone hijacked it and made me pay to get it back, I'd be willing to pay quite a lot for it. Much more than the "value" of the domain on GoDaddy or NetworkSolutions. Of course *that* would be extortion-- I bought my domains fair and square in an open market.
BTW, excellently redundant paragraph you got going there.
A more appropriate analogy to cybersquatting would be a guy who takes all the free meals at a soup kitchen and then sells them to the hungry to the highest bidder.
A better analogy would be someone who collects Magic: The Gathering cards. Or Beanie Babies. He's buying a cheap product (relatively) and gambling that some of the items in his collection will end up being worth significantly more than what he paid.
Of course, you probably call this "Magic: The Gathering squatting" and equate those people to Satan, or whatever, but at least it's a hell of a lot more relevant analogy than yours.
I owned Thundarr.com with the intention of making a Thundarr The Barbarian fan site for about a year. I slacked, of course, like I do on all my projects and awhile later I got an email from a big-wig at Raven Software asking if he could buy the domain from me to make a Thundarr the Barbarian fan site. Ended up unloading it for $120 plus a pre-release copy of Soldier of Fortune Gold.
Now wait for someone on Slashdot to accuse me of squatting the domain.
Ok, two questions: If the current domain system leads to all the horrors you mention, then why hasn't the IANA changed how it works? Secondly, how do you recommend we hand out domains, instead?
It sounds to me like you've got a bad case of "hate the player, not the game"
How about the moronic PSAs? Does Washington really need to hire pilots to fly giant "click it or ticket" banners around Snohomish County all the time?
I agree with grandparent: Washingtons budget would be fine if we didn't throw money down the toilet every day. If they raise an income tax to fly more "click it or ticket" banners, expect a rebellion. They've already added tons of new pseudo-taxes, like boating licenses.
There is no legitimate reason to hoard domains, except to capitalize on the scarcity.
That's true of real estate, precious gems, and oil/natural gas as well. Why is domaining "wrong" and those other speculative businesses "right?"
If you're griping just because you didn't buy up domains when expensive ones were cheap-- well, I wasn't able to buy up land around Lake Washington when it was cheap either. Sometimes you just have to cope.
Slashdot Mirror
Fucking fuckers with their fucking intellectual fucking property fuck fuck! Fuck fuck? Fuck fuck molesting little children fuck fuck!
Landing pods don't have to send down people. We explore with robots all the time. Send one down to see if there are any major problems you couldn't detect from a distance.
Fair enough.
And no, they don't know that there would be a habitable planet when they arrived. Not if they have our level of tech. We are just barely able to detect planets that might be in a habitable size/orbit, and still unable to detect their atmosphere, even in general trends.
I grant them that. You're right, though.
And why are they out of fuel, when they've just arrived in Earth orbit? Earth in general is a fairly poor place for refueling, unless you happen to live here. Depending on your engine type, there are several much better fueling stops in the outer system. (Or even deep-space, if they've got a fusion engine.)
I swear to God you're being purposefully dense. Because it's a ONE-USE ship, designed to go from its homeworld to Earth, and nothing else. It's not a freakin' Greyhound bus you can gas-up and take anywhere. Why is this such a hard concept to get? It's the, what, third time? Fourth time? I've explained it.
The whole POINT of the ship is to come to Earth and land. What part of that requires refueling?
And for that matter, why do they need fuel to drop an asteroid on us?
How else would they get to the asteroid belt? Magical faeries?
Look, the ship is designed to go to Earth, land, and it's done. Forever.
It's not designed to go to Earth, then say "oops look at that", then turn around go out to the asteroid belt, attach a bunch of shit to asteroids, then go back to Earth, then wait for the asteroids to hit, then potentially repeat the process depending, then land.
Ok, it'd take a while to drop one using a solar sail, but it could be done if they wanted to. Or solar panels and an ion engine.
Yes, but they still need to GET to the asteroid belt to attach sails and/or ion drives to them.
Again, that'd take time, but we're not going anywhere and it should be within safety tolerances on even the most low-end hibernation system.
It would take infinite time, because they have no fuel.
Why did they land anything, crash or otherwise? If you are going to send something interstellar, might as well put a couple landing-pods on it, at least for exploration. (Even if they are only one way.)
Because they knew from their telescopes that the planet was reasonably suitable for life, and because they knew from their engineers that they didn't have enough fuel to make major course changes once the ship was in motion.
And, more importantly, the WHOLE PREMISE we started with is that they have technology on par with ours. They can't build a self-contained pod that is capable of landing on a planet like Earth and taking off again, since we can't do that either. And if you suggest a one-way landing-- well, say the mother ship decides to leave, now it just strands people there to die? Really nice.
If you're colonizing a planet, why would you bring a couple of landing-pods? When you could put in additional food supplies or something much more vital with the weight? (You might have a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque pod to repair the ship before landing, but engineering. Possibly.)
And as for the demonstrated capabilities: It's the same tech as the ship they built. They might not be able to do it efficiently, but they'd be able to do it before we could design and build something to stop them.
Because the ship is *designed* to make a controlled crash landing, just like so many various probes we've sent to various planets. You don't seem to get the concept here. NASA has done this a hundred times. Spirit and Opportunity got to Mars that way.
For economy's sake, the ship has just enough fuel to get up to speed, right? You leave orbit, slingshot around a couple of planets using up all the fuel you have, and you're on course for the destination. Centuries (I'll use the 900 years figure, based on nothing, but easy to type) pass before you arrive. The ship wakes itself back up, following its programming, and wakes up a few crew members.
There's no fuel left to do further slingshots and going on to another planet, because the course was pre-programmed before they even left orbit in the first place. Additionally, even if they wanted to go to another planet, everything on the ship including it's nuclear power and hibernation support systems is designed for a single trip of 900 years. So even if you wanted to abort at this point, you'd just be sentencing everybody to die.
So the crew members, knowing these facts, check-out all the systems and make whatever repairs are necessary. They pick a landing spot, now that they have a much better view of the destination planet, and do the final course programming so that the ship can use it's last remaining fuel to de-orbit. At no point here does the crew have any possibility of delaying or changing their plans because of what they find on the surface of the planet: there's no fuel to stay in orbit indefinitely (since that wasn't in the original plan), there's no fuel/energy to keep life support going indefinitely (since that wasn't in the plan), etc. They *have* to land, as planned.
Also keep in mind that since they surveyed the planet something like a thousand years ago or more, they would have absolutely no reason to expect intelligent life to be there. That wouldn't be in the plan-- and frankly if they had expected it, they probably would have just picked another destination in the first place, rather than to try to build the miracle-ship of your imagination.
And as for the demonstrated capabilities: It's the same tech as the ship they built.
No it's not. You're talking about a magical ship that can make this long journey and still somehow have enough fuel to drive all over the solar system and move asteroids around. You've been watching too much Star Trek.
I'm talking about a ship built with technology close to ours that does the absolutely bare minimum required to colonize another planet, the *bare minimum*. Another reply to my original post mentioned that the economic cost of something like this would be massive, by far the largest undertaking in human history-- that right there is why it does the bare minimum.
because as it is now, most people view our species rather dimly: violent, stupid, warmongering, and very likely to go out and rape and pillage some other species.
Only science fiction writers.
Most people are pretty damned optimistic, from my experience.
Thank you for a response that doesn't just say, "your idea is stupid because it goes against existing sci-fi cliches", like everybody else has so far.
Doesn't matter: They would have to be at least equal to us in most technology, and they would have a massive tactical advantage: A ship capable of spending an indeterminate time in deep space, with full life-support. They also would have to have more experience with space tech, notably propulsion.
Nah, the ship would destroy itself in the process of landing. It's a colony ship; they wouldn't expect to be going back. The tanks which held the fuel would serve as a huge "crumble zone" and it could come down with parachutes or something. All the details aren't worked out yet, but the important point is this:
* You're making assumptions where none are warranted.
Secondly, we already know several methods for building space propulsion drives that can do a long-term trip, centuries or longer. We just don't use them because they're useless for what we're doing in space now. They'd have more experience with it, yah I can't argue that.
Thirdly, the ship wouldn't have "full life support" because it's inhabitants would all be in hibernation. That was in the premise I brought up, remember? It would have "bare minimum" life support, at best. And it, also, would be designed for a one-way trip, like the ship itself. At best it would wake a couple crew members up for the last few weeks to check-out the functionality of the systems and find a landing spot.
All they have to do to wipe us out is retreat to the asteroid belt, and lob a couple large ones this way. All of that would be easily within their demonstrated abilities.
No, only within the abilities you pulled out of your ass. None of the ones in the original scenario.
Much better to be friendly, and see how well we can bargain. A planet-based civilization can't hold out against an attacker that holds the high orbitals.
But they don't, because their ship did a controlled crash-landing.
The problem with people who read too much sci-fi is that they get the sci-fi cliches stuck in their head and literally can't think about anything else.
Look, aliens don't have to be technologically advanced. They don't have to be friendly, *or* hostile. There's no reason an android designed to simulate a human in every way would be super-strong. Wipe every sci-fi cliche from your head and just think for awhile.
That means that even a low tech STL ship that comes in to Earth implies a level of mass production several orders above ours. That is a scary thing. It means that if they actually wanted to fight us, they could out produce us in terms of Armor and Planes. If they have a high level of automation, they won't even need many personnel.
Yah, but it's a 900 year long trip. The alien race that originally launched the damned thing might already have FTL drives-- that's a really, really long time. They might have completely forgotten it was launched in the first place, and pulled down whatever receiving station was supposed to receive it's "ping" when it reached the destination. I dunno, there's hundreds of possibilities, and all of this is science fiction anyway, so there you go.
What I do hate is the cliched science fiction concepts that:
1) Aliens necessarily have better technology than we do
2) Aliens with better technology than we do are all lovey-dovey hippies
If I have to read another science fiction story in which the aliens come to earth to protect us from blowing each other up with nukes, I'll hurl into a bucket.
Touchscreens are for noobs. All this time I've wondered what the iPhone crowd was crowing about with their touchscreens, but today, on the Pre, I really miss the fidelity and precision of a stylus and a 5 way navigation button the stylus lets me precisely hit exactly the point on the screen I am looking for and the nav button lets me precisely scroll up and down the number of items I desire. Exactly. Each time. Repeatedly.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the Pre just has a really crappy touchscreen? I like how people look at one bad implementation, and instantly declare every possible use of the technology to be horrible.
Anyway, you're actually somewhat right; the key is that the iPhone is designed around the touchscreen from day 1, and Palm applications aren't. The iPhone doesn't have any buttons that are small enough to fat-finger, except on the on-screen keyboard which has autocorrect to fix that for you anyway.
Are you suggesting that the reason we can't communicate with squids is because scientists have been trying to make love to them all these years? Instead of sharing intelligence?
Or did I misread something? Because that's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard. :)
As for talking about our guns, whoever shows up here has already demonstrated massively superior technology to ours (we are not showing up on _their_ doorstep are we?) so antagonizing them might not be such a great idea either.
I don't think that's a given. The only two things we're lacking in order to make a slow-boat colonization ship to another planet is:
1) Hibernation technology
2) The economic dedication required to do so
You can easily imagine an alien race within about 10-50 light years having both of these things available to them, and coming to earth. It's quite possible they'd come here and be utterly flabbergasted at cellphones and the Internet. I've been toying with a science fiction story based around that idea, but I'm not that great a writer.
Bonus: because of the travel time, at the time they began the trip, they probably wouldn't have been able to observe any evidence of technological civilization on the planet, so they'd be expecting to land somewhere uninhabited.
At some point you gave it permission to install. They could make that clearer, I suppose-- it might have been buried in a EULA or "I Agree" button somewhere-- but you gave it permission. Heck, in Vista, it *requires* permission, since an installer can't write to All Users without it.
Or are you seriously suggesting that it's not only an unwanted add-on, but it's literally a virus?
"Because when the aliens come down to earth, they come inside raindrops, making the rain chubby. Chubby rain!"
I love that movie. Both Bowfinger and Chubby Rain.
Now there is an 'uninstall' button, but if you press it, the app is only uninstalled for the user who clicked the button, not other users on the computer; there's still no ready means of permanently opting out system wide.
Maybe what Microsoft should do is install the add-on into the "All Users" folder, so that if one user removes it then it's removed for all users on the computer!
Oh wait, that's exactly what they did that people are throwing a hissy-fit over.
Seriously, knowing how Windows permissions work, what is your "solution" for this problem? Either Microsoft puts it in the All Users folder, and people throw a hissy-fit, or they do what they're doing now and install it individually for all users, which means you can't disable it for all users at once. That is the way Windows works. (And Linux, and OS X, and all multi-user OSes.)
So, pray-tell, what the hell should they be doing?
But for a company that is a constant target of anti-trust suits, who is notorious for this kind of thing, you think by now that they would be more careful. Its hard to believe that someone internal at Micrsoft didn't realize what was this was doing and just say 'fuck it' - even if it was a low level developer, somebody had to know - at the very least the guy(s) who wrote the code.
Had to know what? That there's an magical unspoken rule not to install extensions that way?
Look, Firefox offers the ability to install add-ons for all users. That's a feature provided by the design of Firefox. The only "horrible" thing Microsoft did was make use of that particular Firefox feature. Now it turns out that a lot of Firefox users don't like that feature, and don't agree with how it works. Microsoft says "oops" and changes the way they install the add-on so it doesn't use that feature.
Where is there any maliciousness here? At all? No.
There's three sets of users:
1) Those who read the summaries only
2) Those who read the summaries and comments
3) Those who read the articles, summaries, and comments (extremely rare!)
You could save the teeth gnashing and anal rape metaphors for when you actually have an issue, instead of wasting it on complete non-issues. It might lower your blood pressure in the long run. But that's just my opinion.
And of course, since it's negative towards Microsoft, Slashdot dupes it a few dozen times. That's some quality journalism all-around. Oh, and it was an honest mistake in the first place, not some horrible malicious act.
Of course, if you read the Slashdot comments, you knew that Microsoft had already fixed it, since the comments are always about 10 times more on-the-ball than the actual posts. Sadly, I think the majority of visitors to this site never dive into the comments section and are probably fed a large spoon of bullshit every morning with their news.
Success! We've trained this dog to sniff out bombs and counterfeit DVDs. Unfortunatly, all he can do now is detect fake copies of Uwe Boll films...
Uwe Boll films are all bombs, so I don't see where the contradiction lies...
You're not a developer, are you? Whether or not AD is a dream to work with depends heavily on what your job description is. If you are simply an administrator plugging random Windows or even Linux and *nix boxes into AD you might find it comparatively easy. If on the other hand you expect to have to develop custom applications of your own on non-Microsoft platforms that authenticate against AD or convert existing ones to use AD then it can be a painful experience to use AD. It's not an unsolvable problem mind you, just a really annoying one.
Unless you're a Windows developer, in which case you can just drag&drop the .net sign-on control into your project and you're done in 5 seconds.
When you are hoarding diamonds or real estate, your hoard has an innate value to you. When you hoard domains, your hoard has no innate value. Your squatted domains have no value to you,
And domains are different... how?
Are you saying that the domains I own (blakeyrat.com specifically) has zero innate value to me?
In reality, if someone hijacked it and made me pay to get it back, I'd be willing to pay quite a lot for it. Much more than the "value" of the domain on GoDaddy or NetworkSolutions. Of course *that* would be extortion-- I bought my domains fair and square in an open market.
BTW, excellently redundant paragraph you got going there.
A more appropriate analogy to cybersquatting would be a guy who takes all the free meals at a soup kitchen and then sells them to the hungry to the highest bidder.
You're really, really, really stretching. S-100, a.k.a. BadAnalogyGuy?
A better analogy would be someone who collects Magic: The Gathering cards. Or Beanie Babies. He's buying a cheap product (relatively) and gambling that some of the items in his collection will end up being worth significantly more than what he paid.
Of course, you probably call this "Magic: The Gathering squatting" and equate those people to Satan, or whatever, but at least it's a hell of a lot more relevant analogy than yours.
I owned Thundarr.com with the intention of making a Thundarr The Barbarian fan site for about a year. I slacked, of course, like I do on all my projects and awhile later I got an email from a big-wig at Raven Software asking if he could buy the domain from me to make a Thundarr the Barbarian fan site. Ended up unloading it for $120 plus a pre-release copy of Soldier of Fortune Gold.
Now wait for someone on Slashdot to accuse me of squatting the domain.
Ok, two questions:
If the current domain system leads to all the horrors you mention, then why hasn't the IANA changed how it works?
Secondly, how do you recommend we hand out domains, instead?
It sounds to me like you've got a bad case of "hate the player, not the game"
First of all, the name does exist. Try it.
Secondly, it's sad because he and you take shit way too seriously. Nobody cares.
How about the moronic PSAs? Does Washington really need to hire pilots to fly giant "click it or ticket" banners around Snohomish County all the time?
I agree with grandparent: Washingtons budget would be fine if we didn't throw money down the toilet every day. If they raise an income tax to fly more "click it or ticket" banners, expect a rebellion. They've already added tons of new pseudo-taxes, like boating licenses.
There is no legitimate reason to hoard domains, except to capitalize on the scarcity.
That's true of real estate, precious gems, and oil/natural gas as well. Why is domaining "wrong" and those other speculative businesses "right?"
If you're griping just because you didn't buy up domains when expensive ones were cheap-- well, I wasn't able to buy up land around Lake Washington when it was cheap either. Sometimes you just have to cope.