No, it's not their "fault", and you're a sad excuse for a human being. The problem with people with you is, well - see "Tragedy of the Commons". The point is, if everyone followed your course of action (ie, its free because I can access it despite lack of permission) then no business would sell software on the internet. Literally - if EVERYONE did it, there would be no sales - it would not be vector by which any business could sell software online.

There's a simple logical fallacy test here - for any given course of action, take it to the conclusion of "what would happen if EVERYONE did this?". If the result is that nobody could do it, it's an illogical (and likely, morally wrong) course of action. If you're performing an action which by extrapolation would prevent your fellow humans from being able to do the same, it's already at best harmful to society, and demonstrates a sad lack of empathy or cognitive association.

Note: This primarily relates to thought exercises, such as your justification for stealing. Obviously, it's not morally wrong to use your kitchen just because everyone in the world can't use your kitchen at the same time. ;) On the other hand, it is morally wrong to deprive someone else of the use of THEIR kitchen (eg, arson), because if everyone did it, nobody would have a kitchen. Do you follow? Nah, probably not. You don't come across that bright.

You're right - there's actually not many viruses which will survive a reformat if started from a different media - there are some, but they're not extremely common (well, not as a percentage of rootkit installations, although they're fairly accessible) and I may have made it sound more prevalent than it is. I further confused the issue by then talking about kernel level rootkits which would survive formats from within the OS, but certainly not from other boot media.

Back on topic - what the FBI used would almost certainly be a firmware or BIOS based rootkit on a laptop as these are available as security solutions to the private sector and almost certainly as law enforcement tools to the government (or malicious agents), and do mask their signature by already being running, unless you already have checksums to compare against. And a hardware based solution - well, unless you spot it, you're screwed. :)

The main way that rootkits survive a total hard disk format is because they're running at the time - any decent rootkit is more than able to stop a simple format from removing it simply by intercepting any parts of the format which target it, and returning OK signals. They'll usually survive a low level format in the same manner. "Whats that? You want to change one of my bits to 0? Okay.. umm.. Done! *cough*". You can generally reliably remove rootkits by taking the drive out, putting it into an external drive bay (so its not present on a PC while booting), connect the drive when your PC is started up and then format it with none of its code executing.

However, if the FBI or PC store simply formatted it through, say, re-formatting the drive by running the Windows setup disk, then a kernel level rootkit would happily stay in-tact in this manner. In fact, to spot it, you'd really have to use some imaging software with comparison checksums so that after the the imaging it can make sure everything is as it should be. While the rootkit can happily inform that "nothing is there", it can't predict what should be there in an imaged drive, and would be caught out that way. However - thats not how 99% of us format drives, especially since most don't have MD5d images of other peoples hard disks, or don't put them in external caddies before doing so. :P

Then buy offline games? Nobody forced you to buy games which have an online requirement. Unreasonable people like yourself are exactly why they made Diablo 3 require an internet connection. Because they focus-grouped and discovered that entitled brats felt ripped off if they couldn't take their offline character "online" to play with their friends - they don't expect the general populace to understand why thats bad, so they just make it "online only" instead. Also, that funnels more loot drops into the RMAH - I think you'll find this as a key motivator far ahead of "real IDs".

The same happens even if you do have an authenticator. It's got nothing whatsoever with trying to "push people towards authenticators". It's got everything to do with trying to help prevent idiots who use the same password everywhere from getting their account hacked. Seriously - I can't tell you where I got this information, but roughly 20% of registered forum accounts on a semi-popular Warcraft *hacking* site, used the same username/password as their Battle.net account. There's not enough bullets to take care of this level of stupid.

They already have your name from your account - they don't need you to sign up for a RealID which simply puts this same information in-game. If you're referring to the possibility of them making money off selling who your RealID "friends" are, then no. You're a paranoid fool. They're not selling, or even giving away, this information to anyone.

Why? How do you expect to play an online game without an account? Or do you seriously expect them to simply open servers up to the world, and rely on IP banning to deal with hackers?

Almost all of them require user intervention. Ie, malware disguised as installers. Nothing damning about that at all. If you give any trojan (which targets your OS) privileged access, you're likely to get infected. What you should be recognizing here is that the vast majority of trojan-based malware is blocked by Windows 8. The same can't be said for any other OS.

You give malicious code root on Linux, your box is owned. You give malicious code root on Mac, your box is owned. You give malicious code root on Windows 8 - 15% chance your box is owned.

Of course, the Slashdot crowd is going to skew this story exactly how they want to. Catering to your audience, etc.

15% of malware out there? You've read into the story exactly what the zealots wanted you to. Windows 8 can't get infected by "15% of malware". It can run 15% of malware which targets the Windows 7 platform, and almost all of it requires user intervention in order to activate.

A more apt comparison would be seeing what percentage of malware can infect a non-tweaked automatic install of Ubuntu 12 (as the native ISO comes), that was specifically written to target flaws in Ubuntu 11.

It's got nothing to do with residential broadband. The "national broadband network" is a fibre project, servicing residential, industrial, commercial and government interests. Huawei wants to have an instrumental role in building it. DSD says that's a bad idea. Nothing over-the-top, but an aggressor in that role would be capable of causing considerable damage down the track.

Wish I had mod points. This really is the reason a lot of these "obvious" "prior art" patents come up, especially when the US is insanely moving to "first to file". Companies have to file, prior-art be damned, just to save themselves litigation down the track. That's also why a lot of major corps are filing patents with "no-sue" agreements. They're not patenting to litigate, they're patenting to prevent litigation. A patent is cheap compared to a day in court.

That's not to say they're not going to then use that patent abusively. They probably would vs another company producing a similar product. However, if you're producing a different product which uses similar technology based on decades-old prior art, you probably wouldn't lose a case as long as you could afford the lawyers. Patents are overturned in court all the time (except in Texas :p) because they're patently (I made a pun) invalid.

Why is this modded insightful when it's completely incorrect? Dams *DO* perform runoffs (dumping it downstream) all the time, whenever their usage doesn't happen to mesh with the amount of actual rainfall, for example. If there's too much rain and they need to relieve some pressure, they do exactly that. If they want to run it through the turbines, they can do that without generating electricity from it if they really want to.

Remember, the dam you're referring to has budgeted they *will* use that amount of water, and made all appropriate allowances for this fact. If they really wanted to waste the water without generating electricty, that option is always available to them. However, $70,000 of hydropower in the form of water is a mere drop in the bucket, so this scenario you're describing wouldn't even warrant a raised intern's eyebrow.

This has NOTHING to do with "excess water" or "excess electricty". It's purely this:

What could happen:
- Microsoft agreed to pay X per kwH on the basis they'll use Y electricty.
- Microsoft used 10% less electricty than anticipated.
- Utility fines them the difference x3. (roughly)

What happened instead:
- Microsoft agreed to pay X per kwH on the basis they'll use Y electricity.
- Microsoft used 10% less electricity than anticipated.
- Microsoft burns through $70,000 of power to bring up their usage to meet Y.
- Utility gets paid the X * Y they expected, and is happy. Wheee!

A VA is a person, not the voice on your GPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_assistant

Indeed - I reinstall my PC every few months out of habit. To merely play that game now I'd require a crack, even though I bought it and have never used it on more than one PC. Install limits are ridiculously stupid. Such DRM is somewhat an incentive to instead pirate and not have any of these hassles.

Precisely. All I could think was "Short Answer: No. Long Answer: Noooooooo."