EXACTLY, Christ why do so many people misunderstand this? Any truly clever piece of malware/viruses are going to require very few system requirements, there is no point in stealing data if it gets caught. Could you seriously say to me that if my keylogger has no identifiable processes, ran on sub 15mb of RAM, only sent files in and out when you were using an active http/bittorent/ftp connection that 60% of users would catch it? Let's be realistic here, frankly for all intents in purposes one of the most effective attacks I saw for a company I was contracted to "solve" was this: They used client access, there were frequent odd hour logins of multiple users with sysdev and qsysopr privileges running throughout late afternoon and night, a very small spike in webtraffic around 1AM over exchange to unknown foreign IP addresses. After the usual questions about security/antivirus/firewall/users/etc I asked how often the security team actually goes and looks at these PCs. I go into the IT office, with eight people....long story, and start running scans looking around and suddenly I notice that the USB plug going into the PC looks, well, weird, so I turn the PC around. It's a jetblack keylogger about the size of a earbud headphone. I plug it into a sandboxy environment and wait for it to find a blackhole network leading nowhere, it starts trying to ping and ftp over logfiles for the past WEEK. Turns out the old System Admin installed these "Security Locks" on the keyboard so no one could visit adult sites, he was fired a month later for sexual harrasment and nobody thought twice about the box. That was one of the biggest guano-holes I have ever been forced to clean up.

You have a point going on here but you stopped your analogy too SOON. The music industry is indeed like the beer industry, and the beer industry has seen the resurgence of microbrewery's and why is this? Microbreweries having been churning out better and more unique beer more and more over the past ten years. and the major beer corporations are being chipped down from being mountains to nice sized hills and the rest of the valley filled in by the little guys. Love it or hate it, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, these services have functioned as independent record labels, the internet has given a large portion of people the ability to produce, record, market, and SELL there music with very little overhead.

You simple minded fools, we don't bring IN anything to eat the Goats. WE eat the goats! They are food, we feed the goats to the homeless and send millions of their frozen carcasses to Africa for food and reduce the amount of foreign aid we have to provide in the form of money. PRESTO INDEED.

Oh please anyone with the last name of "Punchmyballs" would be given a free pass in my office, we would assume he had been through enough in High School. However we WOULD promote him to a job where he would be known as Mister Punchmyballs, give him a public facing office with a plaque, and send him to corporate overnights.

I do so hate to feed the troll but I do feel obligated to defend my hometown. Yes, I come from Hillbillyville, also known as a lovely small town in rural NC. That is IF you define Hillbillyville as a pleasant town with a statistically abnormally low crime rate, zero murders in three years, and a an unemployment rate of less than three percent. Out of curiosity have YOUR grandparents ever seen the Terminator films, could they describe the functionality of Skynet, or explain why it is ironic to name a robotics company Cyberdyne. Hillybillyville my foot, it's a matter of generational knowledge you git. By the way don't eat the apples, I was annoyed with you and laced them with cyanide. Oh my, too late, well perhaps it is for the best.

I'm not saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, of course there is. I am simply saying that the people who buy this are going to chuckle at seeing Grandma walk around in an exo-suit with Cyberdyne written on it, likely for reasons I stated in an above reply. Marketers are judged on both how well known a product is and how well it SELLS. I have worked in marketing, clever is great but if you can't move your product you don't HAVE a JOB, much less bonuses. Case in point with the Catholic church they have spent hundred of MILLIONS of dollars dealing with the rape scandal, however religion is actually the greatest marketer's case study in history, right above bottled water. Luckily for the world BOTH are on their way out and being outed as BS, slowly but surely. You have no experience in the field of marketing I take it, so why are you commenting on it? Oh, right, /., as YOU were.

Of course it's clever, it's on /. isn't it? Plus, the target audience is NOT the elderly, they don't trust technology and have likely never even WATCHED the Terminator films. It is targeting good for nothing grandchildren who get this for their grandparents trying to be "helpful," and then proceed to "borrow" it and never give it back. Not to mention whether or not you would WANT it named after the eventual destroyer of humanity would depend on how much you like your grandparents I'd suppose.

They named their company Cyberdyne and later realized their mistake did they? I highly doubt this, clever marketing though. On the other hand I have a coworker who IS actually named John Conner, poor man we covered his office in tin foil while he was on vacation, left him a nice note explaining that we are trying to hide him from satellite surveillance. Did lead to one of the greatest owned moments I have ever seen, our boss from NJ was handing out our new Blackberry Tours, everyone on the IT team got one but John, Jay says "I just thought in the interest of personal safety....these things have GPS tracking you know." He did actually get one of course, but not before we set his ringtone to say "Come with me if you want to live." and play the theme.

Except 95% of history was freaking boring. Seriously hundreds of years of people walking, talking, trying to find food, running out of food, moving somewhere new, getting into pansy-waisted fights over goats and rivers, and getting drunk and telling their grandkids about how they used to be heroes. Think about every single second of YOUR life, I am sitting at work, posting to /., anybody lining to right a thesis on how this contributed to society or thinking future archeologists will go "Amazing, what insight into a primitive people!" We sit around a lot, spent a 1/3 of human history sleeping, they are hundreds of thousands of interesting lives and stories, but there are BILLIONS of stories like THIS: "I was hungry." "People died of malntrition, including my brother" "I think I may be dying to." "Yep, pretty much dead" "...." Who the hell wants movies or games about THAT? The greatest stories in human history are TOTAL bullshit. The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, this list goes ON, and ON, and ON, all complete and utter BS, but interesting!

Bingo, we have a winner! That is EXACTLY what this is about, it is about corruption in the name of greed and what happens when you cut out the middle man. I used to live next to a college campus and there was a very well known "tutoring" service with some very attractive ladies who were frequent visitors to the campus. My roomate was campus security, he made an extra 2 grand a week for putting the proper id visitor badges on the girls and "escorting them to their clients in the name of safety." Plenty of the RAs were in on it was well, keep security happy, keep the RAs happy, college kids get their bone on, plenty of people make some money, all in all it was a good business arrangement. Secruity helped keep the girls relatively safe as well, rode in their little carts to the dorms and back to their cars, cuts out a lot of rapes, murders, and robberies to boot. Highly illegal and unethical but a nice little package, suddenly you have Craigslist and people cutting everyone else out of the picture, things get messy pretty quickly.

I'm sorry, it was USB powered foot warmers, although they do have non powered leg warmers...
http://www.akinaiblog.com/product/2058
http://www.akinaiblog.com/product/2127

There is NOTHING natural about the urge to write code in Haiku, have Hello Kitty usb-powered leg warmers, play real life missile command via web cam, or to sit for hours in artificially lit rooms as a favorite pastime. Short answer? Yes.

We already KNEW about this, it is called the Great Galactic Barrier
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Galactic_barrier
It's just the little one for each solar system, and these guys get federal grant money!

He OR She, before I get flamed!

Here is how I look at difficulty or how I would like it to be. Anyone can beat the game and have fun doing so, but make it so that when I take the harder routes or perfect harder combos, inventive problem solving, etc. I get rewarded by seeing my character do acts of absolute badassery. Ever watch a REALLY REALLY EXCELLENT player go through Ninja Gaiden Sigma? My character looks like a boring old movie extra in comparison, there guy is covered in gore, doing backflips, and generally looking like one bad-a$$ mofo. I can still complete the game AND enjoy it, but it's much less impressive doing it, personally I enjoy adaptive difficulty to a point. I like games that make me change my tactics as well, Call of Duty is ocassionally excellent at this on Veteran, if you sniper for too long the enemy will flank you and come around from behind, the same way real live players do. Now sometimes I just want to kill some Nazis, I drop the difficulty down, same thing I do on Rock Band/DDR. It all comes down to how impressive do I LOOK while doing this, making a pro LOOK like a pro is VERY important. It loses it's shine if anybody can play through looking like a God, I enjoy showing off my skills so when people watch me play they go, "How did you DO that?" Then again, that's just my opinion. The crux of this is why I HATE racing games, there is little middle ground, easy is too easy and I always win, but on expert I have to be consistently perfect lap after lap to even have a CHANCE of winning. One more example before I go, Metal Gear Solid 4, watching a first time player go through that game on Liquid Easy and watching somone on Boss Hard is a completely different experiance, as it should be, again the key is making a devoted and skilled player LOOK superior because he IS.