Good point.

I just used that example because AOC was released just ahead of Warhammer. It was another game that slipped release dates and shipped an unfinished product. They had good solid release numbers and a very sharp decline in subscribers because it was unfinished. It sounds like AoC has made progress in the months after. But in the window of time where Warhammer was released, AoC looked like it was going to die an early death.

Warhammer didn't do it self any favors by releasing so close to a WoW expansion either. I tried AoC for 2 months and skipped over Warhammer partly because of the pending WoW expansion.

I guess they did not learn anything from Age of Conan.

And if you are traveling internationally, they will charge you international rates to receive that message.

Although that is a small price to pay. Knowing that you racked up $1,000 in charges the first day instead of $7,000 after you get back. But you know someone will complain about that $0.20 message.

It was nice to see the users take a stand and for the ISP to notice.

When I was in high school we had a pre-windows PC lab of 15-20 computers and a Mac lab of 12-14 computers. One day I returned to the PC lab at the end of the day for something and I saw the PC teacher and the Mac teacher sitting at a computer. They called me over to them asking if I knew anything about this.

They told me this computer had a virus and it had my name on it. As soon as they said that, I remembered what I did. I did a net send to all the computers in the PC lab with the message "This is a virus" earlier in the day. They were not happy with me at the time and it took a bit of work for me to explain that it was not a virus, just a message saying it was a virus.

Set up a virtual machine in the cloud someplace and remote into it while you do whatever it is you are doing.

I am having a hard time installing windows to this new expensive secure drive. It gives me an operating system not found error after the first reboot.

We fight with this type of stuff all the time. The market price for things and the amount IT "charges" for the same thing can be way out of line. What I usually see is some large infrastructure investment by IT gets broken up and tacked onto other services charged to the departments that depend on them. Your TB drive may cost $100 but it may be in a high end raid on a server with some fault tolerance attached to a UPS ran by a full team of support. The company can either cover the cost of IT or hand it back to you based on the services you use.

You may be able to get away with getting you own 1TB drive and not paying the IT tax. But if the IT expenses are not being met, they will find other ways to charge you.

I would kind of like to start charging our departments something for network space. It goes unchecked at the moment. I have 16 out of 500 users that use 1/2 of our home folder storage.

Well, it is still not legal to keep using the software after the contract is up if it required to keep your software license. It is just not a DMCA violation to do so.

If they properly test the device, the everything should be covered.

I think the FDA does need to realize there is a software component. For no other reason then to require a full recertification of the devise every time the firmware changes. The risk I see is that an item gets certified and then bugs get introduced later if future firmware updates.

The FDA should also be notified of any bugs uncovered in existing firmware. Put the responsibility of deciding if an item needs recalled our of the hands of the company. I think there are other measures that can be put in place without requiring manufacturers to open source the code.

With that said, if the FDA did start looking at the source code, that would not be a bad thing.

Somebody set up us the script bomb

A pass phrase is not that bad of an idea. It does not have to be 200 chars long, but a few words that mean something to you stringed together. If nobody can see you type it, then they will have no clue its a pass phrase. If they see you tap space every 4-7 chars they will figure it out.

For a while, I used the phrase "I am the administrator!" for my workstation admin password. 23 very easy characters to remember. It is such a simple password to remember and hard to guess.

I expect that the people behind the DOS Attacks break other crimes where there is already a lot of case law supporting it.