They don't need to sift through a trillion emails hoping to spot J.Random Terrorist if someone calls them and tells them where to look.

And even if they wanted to, that would immediately bang into the issue of applying mass surveillance of Americans. I mean everyone knows its happening anyway but as long as they keep claiming its "accidental" they can retain plausible deniability.

Or they'll find someone who will hire them based on their skills rather than their body art.

And then when they're 40, they'll be the ones doing the hiring. Its already not uncommon to see people with strange hair colors, tattoos, stretched earlobes, etc in various work environments, including interacting with the public. At least not where I'm from. In some places (particularly places like "trendy" clothing stores,) its getting hard to find an employee that doesn't have some form of body expression.

And that's great. As long as you're not doing something intentionally controversial like tattooing a swastika on your forehead, employers and customers alike need to stop giving a damn about anything other than the ability of the employee to do their job. The cashier with black hair who does a good job today can do just as good a job tomorrow if she dyes it pink.

Well, the people who go out partying with friends are obviously completely socially maladjusted whereas online gamers are all fine upstanding citizens. Just spend an hour on XBox Live and see for yourself!

Because the PR hit for overreacting to a "threat" is far lower than the PR hit for failing to react to one (and even that's better than silently snuffing out a threat -- bad PR is better than no PR.)

Actually protecting the public isn't all that much of a concern. And for the most part, the public likes it that way because feeling safe is more immediately obvious than being safe. The former is defined by action (the police caught some bad guys!) whereas the latter is defined by inaction (nothing terrible happened to me today..)

Read up on security theater. I'm not sure that this would technically fall into that category, but its the same mentality nonetheless.

Presumably this would be done in a sterile room and that the patient would need to be cleared for any potentially hazardous bacterial infections and the such.

They noted that the BBB is restored within a few hours. Assuredly not a 100% safe treatment to be sure, but that's hardly new in medical science (think of all the potential side-effects listed with every medication. Never mind things like full body irradiation as prep for bone marrow transplants, cutting up (or even out) pieces of the brain to reduce seizures and so on.)

Sometimes the cure is worth taking some risks. Of course "sometimes" isn't the same as "always" and it would need to be determined case by case based on the patient's other co-existing conditions, the will of the family, financial situation, etc.

I can't think of any scenario where being cured and missing memories is in any way better than still missing those memories but having your brain slowly being eaten away and losing even more memories.

These are already confused and sickly old people.. curing them if such a thing is possible will mean that they can eventually become less confused. Probably with a lot of therapy and rehab, similar to what we do after significant physical trauma leaves a person's body incapacitated.

But absolutely, the people who will benefit the most from such a treatment would be those who are diagnosed early and can be treated before they lose too much.

Apparently neither did you:

Ok. So you have some long-term media. You include the player on the media itself. Solves half the problem.

You can't really just "include Linux" because future computers might not support x86/x64/whatever architecture you included. Same for including codecs and/or playback software. Including the computer requires having hardware that itself will last 50-100 years. All the Linuxes and VLCs and GPL licenses in the world will do you exactly squat if you can't even get the machine to POST.

Of course I'm assuming the most pessimistic zero-knowledge situation (which would be more on the scale of several hundred to thousands of years, realistically.)

If you relax a little and assume that say, M.Disc is still a relevant format that you can get readers for in 100 years, you can work around a lot of this. You'd want to include detailed instructions in plain text on the disc (and hope that your text encoding is still supported!) Perhaps even include source code (though also with a disclaimer -- our great-grandchildren may view today's languages the same way we view punch cards today.)

That's relying entirely on that one single technology still having support for 100 years though. If it doesn't you end up back at square one -- no way to read the media -- even if the media itself is still in tact.

Cost is also a factor. If we're committing all of human knowledge for post-apocalyptic people to use in order to rebuild society, we'd likely be willing to spend more money to ensure the data survives and is accessible (and our post-apocalyptic successors would likely spend a LOT more to ensure they can access it) as compared to say a school project or whatever.

So you take your car in to get oil change or whatever and the mechanic tells you your head gasket should be replaced. Your first response is "hold on let me just go ahead and Google that so that I can confirm with my 5 minutes of research whether your 30 years of experience is justified or if you're just trying to pull a fast one."

Or your dentist says you need a filling.. do you go home and Google how to self-diagnose a cavity? You have the proper equipment laying around to make the self-diagnosis even if you did know how?

Yes there are plenty of stupid people and I wouldn't disagree with that claim. The part I find disagreeable is the jump from "you did something that I would have known not to do" straight to "because you're stupid" based on a single data point that could have many possible alternate explanations.

1) Try to ban illegal downloads. That doesn't work.
2) Try to ban sites that link to illegal downloads. That doesn't work.
3) Try to ban sites that link to sites that link to illegal downloads. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this won't work either. ...
X) Ban everybody who's ever heard the word "download." Shut off the internet. Everybody goes back to direct copying and it still doesn't bloody work.

Three things need to be realized and acted upon if there's any hope of reducing copyright infringement:
- Make legitimate viewing easy. Recent history with iTunes, Netflix, etc.. and hell older history in the form of things like 7-11.. have shown repeatedly that people are happy to pay, and even pay more if they have to, for the product they want to be on demand.

- Unnnlessss you price it too high. People will not pay 20% more for a one-time stream of a movie compared to buying the DVD. Its absolutely stupid to think they would. You can charge more for convenient access, but only for the part of the product that the consumer is receiving -- you must discount the cost of permanence, the cost of physical media/packaging, the cost of distribution, etc. If you don't people will just see it for the scam it is. (And of course there's an absolute maximum price point as well but that's standard economics and applies equally to the physical media.)

- Realize that reducing copyright infringement by 100% is not possible. I'm not saying to stop fighting all together, but when all of your strategies seem to be "all or nothing," you're going to end up on that "nothing" side every single time. Things like invasive DRM that stops infringers for all of about one day but annoy legitimate users until the end of time is NOT really helping the situation. When I have a better experience downloading a pirated copy of something I've already purchased rather than watching the legitimate copy, there's something wrong with the whole situation and it doesn't take too long to start skipping that whole "already purchased" step.

And you expect any of that to last 50-100 years?

Film, photographs, cave drawings, etc have the advantage that they're direct representations of what they're depicting. If half a film gets destroyed, you can still watch the other half. If your projector doesn't work you can get a bright light and a magnifying glass.

Encoded representations (especially digital but even analog encodings like a vinyl record) require a working decoder. If your decoder is broken and you don't know how its encoded in order to build a new one, you're screwed. There's absolutely nothing you can recover in that case.

I mean to some extent you could consider that "bright light and magnifying glass" to be a decoder of sorts, but its an extremely obvious decoder since you can usually tell that there's "something" on a piece of film with the naked eye and its pretty natural to see a small, dark image and immediately jump to "enlarge and brighten."

Its not necessarily obvious to run a needle across the grooves in a vinyl record and amplify the.. however it reads the signal (see.. I couldn't do it! At least not without some instructions.) And its really not obvious how one would go about decoding an mpg when all you have to go by is "here's a large amount of bits" (oh and yeah.. you have to figure out how to read those bits from the physical media in the first place, which is probably even more challenging than decoding the stream given how unbelievably small a "bit" is in modern hardware.)

Define "stupid." Would you be able to tell when an auto mechanic is BSing you? When your contractor does a half-assed job building your home but still charges you full price? Any of 1000 other scams that are out there attacking areas of knowledge you haven't studied?

Just because a person can't tell a mouse from a memory stick doesn't mean they're stupid -- it means they don't know about computers. And that's still a large portion of the population, even among the younger crowd ("can use Facebook" does not indicate "knowing about computers" in any useful sense.)

Because most people have no need to know. Just like you don't need to know how to design and build the car you drive or the house you live in, most people don't need to know every detail about computers in order to use them.

There is (or at least should be) an argument that because computers (/phone/tablets/etc) are increasingly storing large chunks of our critical information that we should be training everyone in at least basic security.

Of course that's easier said than done. Its hard to make a full-term course out of that to push in public education (where they don't have the funding to support existing courses anyway.) Doing it as one of those three-day seminar type courses would be great except how do you convince more than a handful of people to attend? And nobody wants to see registration and licensing for basic computer usage (enforcing a minimal amount of training in order to obtain the license) -- even those who think programmers should be licensed generally wouldn't go that far.

So until someone figures out how to educate the entire country (/planet!), just calling people "stupid" and shutting down the conversation isn't helping anything. Or you know, since you're apparently perfect at everything (otherwise you'd be "stupid" too) maybe you can be the one to figure out how to solve the problem!

The one I got (well the only one I actually bothered listening to) wanted a credit card number before they'd connect and "fix" my machine..

I hadn't given them my IP so I'm not entirely sure how they were planning to do that, but as I don't have fake CC numbers laying around I pretty much terminated the call at that point so I never got to find out what their next step was..

My guess is that they would have just kept me on the line for another few minutes claiming to do something they weren't actually doing while they verified and charged whatever to my card. There are much more efficient attack vectors than manually calling people if your only goal is to install a back door into the home PC of someone who doesn't know how to protect themselves.

Trouble with trolling them is that they don't really care. The worst you'll accomplish is getting some low-paid (probably illegally low since you know, illegal business anyway) phone drone fired and replaced with the next one.

Your time is more valuable than theirs..

Most people consider backwards-compatibility to be a good thing. Not to mention it save MS having to try to redo 30 years of development every release cycle. I'm not saying the system is perfect (there's a lot of weirdnesses in the common controls that could probably have been corrected if they didn't have to worry about compatibility -- and doubly so as a C# developer where you have to break paradigm and drop into C-style win32 code in order to solve/work around some problems.) But its a hell of lot better than having to start from scratch every 2-4 years.

This one bugs me as a dual-screen user. I've found third-party utilities to help with the situation but they're nowhere near as nice as the "real" taskbar. But MS is definitely not the only company to mostly ignore dual screen users (I'm not sure whether EDID detection is a video card or an OS issue or a combination, but holy hell is it annoying.. about 90% of games and other full-screen apps only support dedicated full screen -- no borderless windows -- and half of them force it to be on the primary monitor to boot.. MPC-HC refuses to stay in full screen under certain conditions (and its a totally free, open-source media player.. I even examined the code at one point and if my reading was correct, it was intentionally done that way.. not just a bug.) No idea if Linux or OSx handles multiple monitors significantly better but since most things I need to do don't support Linux and I can't stand Apple products, I'm rather stuck where I am anyway.

And if they included one, they'd run the risk of another antitrust lawsuit. Its not like they have a much of a choice on that one. The rest of your examples probably would fall into this category as well except a) they suck (as you pointed out), b) they've (mostly) always existed in Windows and c) most of them don't have any competition anyway (nobody is going to claim that Paint is a legitimate competitor to Photoshop.) Its kind of odd that Winzip or someone hasn't tried to challenge MS' inclusion of a compression program but maybe they just don't think its worth the legal costs.

That goes for any computer issue. Doesn't matter what OS (or even if its something other than the OS.) Hell it goes for any moderately complex technology.. I have to call someone if something goes wrong with my car too. Expecting everybody to be experts with every piece of technology they ever touch is just stupid.

Because "Segmentation fault" and "Kernel panic" are so much clearer than "The program has stopped working" or a blue screen. People who know what they're looking for will glean info from it. People who don't are just as confused either way.

And you sure as hell can Google Windows issues just as easily as Linux issues. I have no idea how you figure Linux is in any way easier to troubleshoot (unless you're a kernel programmer and then yes, being able to inspect the source code may help.. but most end users -- even among other programmers -- aren't kernel programmers.)

The big fact everyone ignores when making these kind of stupid claims is that most people who can't figure out Windows issues on their own also wouldn't be able to figure out Linux issues on their own. There just happens to be a significantly larger number of that type of user among the Windows world.

To go back to the car analogy, it would be like comparing your average driver to a professional racer. Even if the racer isn't actually a mechanic, there's a good chance that they know a hell of a lot more about cars than most "normal" drivers. So yes, they probably can do a lot more minor maintenance themselves without having to call a "real" mechanic. But putting a bunch of normal people into Nascar-ready cars isn't going to reduce the need for mechanics to any great extent.