And don't forget that the hardware itself may be compromised.

... and this has already happened, with new stuff coming to light all the time.

And so far, most people don't really seem to care. Not enough to do anything about it, anyways.

1) who knows how far NSA has its fingers into everything. If they've hacked the voting machines ... perhaps they *can* control who we vote for.

2) it doesn't have to be the NSA. They may have the most resources and the most support from our government, but China could do similar things. And the part about getting back doors into open source software doesn't require a government agency at all.

The most recent poster child of vulnerabilities that nobody noticed was of course Heartbleed, but who knows how many other problems either 1) have been detected but not reported to anybody, or 2) were deliberately added but made to look benign? And it's always possible that the vulnerabilities aren't where you think they are -- for example, the idea of hacking the C compiler to detect when it's compiling /bin/login and adding a back door if it is is decades old, and it's only one of oodles of possible scenarios.

You can't trust open source either.

Devices like these often have "binary blobs" that aren't open source and could contain backdoors (one of the reasons RMS has been rallying against them, but probably not the primary reason), but even more fundamentally than that, it would be naive to assume that the NSA can't hire programmers to contribute to these projects and that they can't be good enough at what they do to make a backdoors that would pass a code review without being detected.

That said, at least with open source you have the chance to find such things, so there is that. But either way ... I think we're screwed.

Again, by your definition, in the real world ... almost nothing is programmed correctly.

And I imagine that Gamespy is far more than a single server. The server side is probably at least a rack of servers, with databases and who knows what else. And it's owned by a totally different company than EA, a company that wants to shut it down (probably because it doesn't make them any money) so it's not just a matter of "migrating a server".

Companies often spend weeks planning migrations of their services, and often the migration itself takes dozens of people weeks to complete. They often test their migrations on totally separate hardware just to make sure they understand all of the issues that might come up and make sure they can overcome them.

And even with all that planning and testing and redundancy ... they often still screw something up.

Blame it on being programmed poorly if you want ... but it's reality.

Longer than "rsync --archive --verbose /var/www/html/. new-host:/var/www/html/." takes to type.

But again, that's the extreme simple case. That'll serve you well for somebody's 1993 web site, though their "contact us!" form may require a little more work (though I do realize that this form doesn't fit into the "just static files" restriction I mentioned.)

But even back in 1993 that was simpler than most "real" services. Scott Adams gave a nice example of how people viewed complexity back in 1994 (and it's still accurate.). You can argue that anything that is complicated is not properly programmed ... and that's fine, but then again ... by that definition, the vast majority of stuff must not be properly programmed.

I don't know how complicated Gamespy's services are, I don't know how it's built. But I seriously doubt it can be replicated with a simple rsync to the new server. (Unless you rsync *everything*, and the new server has similar hardware to the old server and will sit at the same address in the same datacenter.) And of course EA doesn't even own Gamespy so they can't rsync it to begin with.

Yeah, good luck finding *anything* that's that simple.

Even moving the simplest possible website (just static files, nothing dynamic) to a new host is more work than that. (You could move the content itself with rsync or tar (though not with the command lines you gave), but the new server needs to be configured, the web server still needs to be set up, etc.)

If your definition of "programmed correctly" is that migration to a new host is as simple as you think it is, let me give you a hint ... by that definition, almost nothing of any value is programmed correctly. And modern systems, with clustered setups with failover across multiple nodes, multiple databases, connections to billing systems and the like are several orders of magnitude more complicated than you seem to think they should be.

In any event, this is moot. It's Gamespy that's shutting down, not some server that EA runs that's currently sitting under somebody's desk. In order to fix this, EA would need to dig the source for their old games out of storage, make sure they can still build it (for a game that hasn't been touched in a decade by them, this is real concern), pay a programmer to replace the bits that Gamespy uses to use something else, build it, run it through some minimal testing and release it. All this for a game that may not have made EA any money in years, and it needs to be repeated for a large number of older games.

It's a business decision. To update every game ever made by them would cost a bunch, so EA is wisely deciding to only support the more recent games or the games with sufficient demand. We could argue that they're not using the ideal criteria in deciding what should be updated, but ultimately they do have to draw the line somewhere.

My guess is that Gamespy has had very little development done in a long time and mostly just sits in a room of servers somewhere mostly running on autopilot -- costing money in hosting and power costs. I'm not sure how it is about making money -- do game publishers pay to use it? Advertising? In any event, if it's costing money but not making money, they probably told the developers if they didn't pay up they'd shut it down, and the developers didn't pay up sufficiently, so ... shut it down.

Preemptive correction: My 130,000 terawatt figure was a rough "back of the napkin" calculation. A more accurate figure would be 173,000 terawatts. The "250 watts/m^2" figure I gave was a rough estimate for what actually reaches the surface (1000 watts for the Sun directly overhead, divided by 4 for the ratio of a sphere's surface area vs its cross-section), but of course energy that's absorbed by the air also should be counted.

Either way, the heat we generate is so small that doesn't even really register. But by releasing CO2 (and some other gasses) into the atmosphere we can cause it to be better at trapping the heat from the Sun, and so that *does* warm up the Earth. Note that the greenhouse effect is not a bad thing for life on Earth -- without it, the average temperature of the Earth's surface would be something around freezing -- but we change how effective it is at our peril.

We may also be able to affect things by causing more or less of the Sun's energy to be reflected back into space by changing the overall albedo of the Earth. Our effect on this so far is small as far as I know, but it may grow more in the future.

True, but the heat that we generate is miniscule compared to the energy that the Sun throws at the Earth. The Sun throws about an average of 250 watts of energy at every square meter of the Earth -- that adds up fast.

The entire human race uses about 15 terawatts as of 2008. But the Sun throws about 130,000 terawatts at the Earth -- what we generate doesn't even compare, about 1% of 1%.

Now, these mirrors in space I mentioned could be used to cool the Earth too -- don't shine the reflected light on the Earth, but instead use them to shade part of the Earth. I think there are some international laws against such things right now, but such things could be a possible stop-gap solution to the problem of global warming. I don't know how practical the idea is -- it's probably more science fiction for now and has plenty of problems, but it's not totally unfeasable.

Fair enough, but my point is that "the greenhouse effect" is a cause of "climate change" (even if it's an effect of something else that I won't get into here) -- and not the only possible one.

An "effect" certainly can be a "cause" of something else -- the greenhouse effect (or more precisely, changes in the greenhouse effect) can (and does) cause climate change.

Yes, but you're just picking nits, I did say "on average" rather than get into details about this relatively short period of time where things are warming up to the new equibrium temperature.

The inflow and outflow (for both a greenhouse and for the entire Earth) also can vary with cloud and snow cover changes and the like, but like I said ... on average.

The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result* -- they're two different things. We could make the Earth hotter by putting giant mirrors in orbit that send more sunlight our way ... that would cause climate change but would not be an example of the greenhouse effect at all.

Realistically, the problem with a name change is that politics more than anything else -- calling it by yet another name will make the conspiracy theorists think that you're trying to hide or obfuscate something (the link talks about Benghazi, but the ideas apply to climate change too), and while that's not true, the end result is still that it overall causes people to take the problem less seriously. I think we should stick with "climate change".

Fair enough, but the equilibrium temperature where this happens does change.

"Greenhouse effect" is accurate enough. The energy entering and leaving a patch of plants is going to be equal (on average), but if you build a greenhouse around it the inflow and outflow of energy will still be equal, but the temperature where they are equal will be higher. (The flow isn't just radiative, of course, but as far as analogies go it's far better than mot.)

Stolen property is still stolen property, even after being sold to an unsuspecting (or not -- yeah, that iPhone you bought for $20 was legit. Uh-huh.) person.

Knowingly buying stolen property is a crime, and even if you don't know it, it's still stolen property and is still the legal property of the proper owner and is subject to being taken from you and returned to the rightful owner with no legal recourse on your part unless you can somehow get it from the person who sold it to you.

Reading the citation you gave, that definition is for setting the scope of the laws/regulations that the FAA has been ordered to create by Congress. The FAA has not created those laws/regulations yet, so it can't very well enforce them yet.

This may be very important once they've created these regulations ... but they're not there yet.