You assume, of course, that this bug is recent, 4chan was the first to discover it, and that there hasn't been any subtile, massively successful abuse for weeks.

Now think about the flip-side, please. The big problem with browser security, zombie computers, botnets, malware, etc. is non-updated software once security holes are found. People are either lazy, ignorant, or incompetent when it comes to timely updates -- and I mean people as a big, large blob of people, not anyone in particular like you.

Much like automatic updates in Windows, Chrome automatic updates actually attempt to prevent problems stemming from outdated, insecure software. It's not at all perfect (in either implementation), but IMHO it's a whole lot better than the alternative (even bigger botnets, even less trustable computing).

In my experience, Chrome does not eat up hundreds of megabytes for updates per month. Please don't use hyperbole. It undermines you.

Any implementation can be improved of course -- including leaving old files around or not. Maybe a constructive post about that particular bug would be useful, in the Chrome Google Groups -- or perhaps on the Chromium development lists.

So you have never used Cisco gear then ?

Your conclusion is incorrect. I may not like paying for Murdoch's news, and in the end he will have to close shop.

The tongue-in-cheek comments of other posters here are spot on. The world is a better place without his rags out there. Now if only we could get Fox to erect a paywall around their TV station (Tea-Wall ?), and other low-life rags and outlets lose their funding, we might be getting somewhere.

I would welcome a way to preserve actual journalism, or rather to give it a proper financial footing, though. But not at the expense of carrying Murdoch-"News" through with them.

I wonder why you attribute the lack of outstanding games to piracy being rampant -- the industry has been bitching and moaning about that for over 20 years now. That can't be the reason or we would not have a videogame-industry at all.

Few game developers are willing to do risky things though, and countless remakes of the same games just don't really appeal to all that many gamers -- add to that that gaming itself is being transformed (or rather, the marketplace is changing with mobile games becoming a pastime of millions, there actually being a LOT of games out there from the years prior, etc.), and I can see some reasons for that. Add to that the fact that asset-development (ugh) for modern games can be magnitudes more expensive than for old "outstanding" games and you see that the financials have changed quite a bit as well -- you can no longer just produce an AAA title in a team of 2-4 people in a basement -- the tools simply have not caught up yet.

I would not count out GPGPU as a niche product just yet -- it's true, paradigms change, but the mere fact that x86 cores are becoming more plentiful is leading to more tool support, more heads thinking about the problems and solutions involved, and more people getting used to concurrent programming. Once you know how to use 6 or 8 cores well, it will not be too much of a jump to the 300-500 threads a GPU will handle. I hope for great things in this area though admittedly I personally like it for the sciency stuff :)

Lowest common denominator, not. Degrading gracefully to it, yes. Games traditionally push the envelope, and will continue to do so -- unless the console-model and mobile gaming overtakes the entire market.

ARM-based devices have their uses, but to be quite honest -- I like a spiffy desktop.

Be VERY careful clicking those links. Ubisoft is only able to censor posts relating to cracks and such, but NOT goatse, all manner of shock pictures (mutilations, diseases, decomposition, bodily fluids, all manner of fecal matter, etc.) on their forums.

Repeat : that forum post contains tubgirl, goatse, dead people, etc. Do not click it unless you want to see just how depraved the mods at Ubisoft are to let /that/ slide but censor links to cracks.

King's Quest got released on gog.com recently, so it is still being sold (or rather, again being sold).

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/king's_quest_4_5_6

IMHO this is good news, even though it kills the "if they don't use it" argument dead. I have left quite a bit of money at gog.com (no DRM on any of their games, compatibility fixes, decent support, etc.) and was quite surprised that Activision would open their back catalogue to them at all.

"It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."

Other than Silverlight. Gee, that solves the problem.

Other than general paranoia, of course. There is no reason to assume it has not been broken, either -- just anecdotal evidence ! :P

It seems as though the poster wants to imply that there is something inherently wrong with accepting CNNIC as a CA -- but does not state why it is the case apart from rumor and that the Chinese government "may" be controlling this entity.

It escapes me what the problem is; there are lots and lots of CAs listed as trusted roots -- any number of which could do malicious things without anybody being the wiser (and some of which will gladly hand out certificates to microsoft.com and others, if only either your story is good enough ("internal test server"), or their interface is bad enough). "Trusted CA" is a misnomer in any browser distribution -- I sure as heck do not trust half the companies in that list, and neither should you -- since you never even heard about most of them.

None of this actually impacts the security of SSL. Let's face it, the PKI for SSL is broken. Anybody can claim to be anybody and somebody will sign off on it. You won't even be notified when that happens to "your" domain. There is no such thing as a central registry -- as with DNS, for instance. There is no such thing as proper delegation -- as with DNS, for instance. If you trust a SSL certificate because it is signed by some "trusted" CA in a browser, you are doing it wrong. Not that it really matters -- people do not check certificate chains or even particularly care about changed certs so long as the "Buy now" button works on Amazon.

There is no inherent value in a certificate signed by a "trusted" CA over a self-signed certificate. Both result in a stream-cipher-encrypted connection. That is about all SSL is good for, unless you have a local CA and that local CA is the only trusted CA in any of your CA-aware applications -- and, of course, you have cryptography-savvy users. I'll wait a while for the laughter to die down.

And the big answer is "if you assume it is, you are an idiot". Use something you can audit.

You are, of course, assuming that "all the data, code, levels" actually exist. It does not take much cynicism to believe otherwise.

Struck a nerve, eh ?

I ask people their preferences. Most say cash. Some say they would say cash, but have been brought up not to.

And yes, gift giving is all about the giver. Think about it. Maybe not in the way you mean, but it is usually a display of affection or comes with expectations; both of which reflect on the giver in the recipient's mind, no matter how thoughtful the gift.

Now run along and assume things. You do that best.

Sorry, but I don't buy the "use it responsibly" angle. If you need permission to have fun with your very own money, there is something wrong. And if you really wanted to put that gift certificate into savings, go to eBay, sell it, and put the proceeds into savings. There, I just ruined all your gift certificates for you :P

A gift certificate gives exactly the same message as cash (depending on your point of view that would be "I didn't have any idea what to get !" or "I'd rather you choose the perfect gift yourself !"). Personally I like to buy myself stuff you can't buy at stores that sell gift certificates.

Sorry, but you are glossing over something here -- it's not the "megabytes per minute" thing that bothers, it's the "many small writes" thing. Even the very best wear leveling algorithm can't do much about that, unless they use a write cache (which most SSDs do not; I do not know the exact procedere of the Intel offering (which is ahead of its competitors at the moment), but I would be somewhat surprised if the chip waited overly long to commit). A one-byte-write will, in the worst case, cause an entire 128kb slice to be overwritten. This can quickly become significant, especially considering that the operating system does not necessarily attempt to group writes, likes to overwrite data in sectors, and even sometimes will insist on flushes (think security logfiles) even if you had the foresight to enable write caching -- which still won't help much if you have multiple open files.

Desktop users in particular need to think about this stuff. Observe your Windows page file. Observe how it gets used NO MATTER how much free memory you have. (don't believe it ? Open 10 windows. Go away from your computer for 10 minutes. Optionally start a large I/O job (say, copying a few gigs of files), though this is not usually necessary and just serves to illustrate the point more clearly. Switch between those 10 windows. No matter whether you have 512m, 2g, or 10g of free memory, they will have been paged to disk. Yes, it's braindead, and yes, it happens at default settings.
There are some diagnostic tools which will tell you the average rate of rewritten slices on SSDs; I don't have it handy atm, but Google will find it (or failing that, the OCZ forums are pretty nifty for this kind of thing, even though their SSDs are somewhat inferior to the Intel offering).

You might also want to run procmon on your Windows system in an ostensibly idle system (possibly with a few open applications) and see what actually happens at the file system level.