You're falling into the trap of confusing ethics and the law. Whatever you -- or I, since I expect we'd agree -- think of the ethics of the situation, so far I haven't seen anything to suggest their actions in not respecting keys used other than under the conditions they were sold with is actually illegal. The law with respect to digital purchases, DRM, and remote access/activation schemes may be some anachronistic dinosaur, but if it's the law right now then complaining about the action on a forum like Slashdot isn't going to change that.

Does anyone know why they wouldn't sidestep the infeasibility of particularly long cable runs by having the elevator climb the walls of the shaft directly, rather than being raised and lowered on a cable? I imagine that a cable and counterweight arrangement is more energy efficient for shorter runs; but if that isn't an option wouldn't a cog railway style mechanism, with 'track' on one or more walls of the elevator shaft, result in a system where the weight that has to be moved doesn't change at all with the height of the building? There would be some additional weight per unit height from the track structure; but that would be static and connected to the building's frame rather than being forced to support its own weight.

Too energy intensive? Wears too quickly? Safety breaks infeasible leading to risk of sickening plummet to doom?

Case in point, the paper that convinced everyone austerity was the answer was found to have a math error that flipped the results. Everyone knows it but austerity marches on because the top economists say what their masters want them to say.

As pointed out in the article, the program must use gethostbyname() on a name supplied by the attacker.

A much more mitigating factor is that the bug is only exercised if the name looks like a numerical id, and according to their search most software first checks this using inet_aton() and only calls gethostbyname() if this fails, thus avoiding the bug.

I have yet to have one such buffer overflow bug in my code

Yea, right. You know the authors of this function probably thought that too. They had no counter examples until now, just like you and your code.

strncpy will not overflow the buffer provided you pass the size of the buffer (if you don't pass the size of the buffer, *none* of the safer functions are going to help). It's problem is that it will not write a nul at the end of the buffer, thus reading will read right off the end. It also wastes a huge amount of time filling the unused part of the buffer with nul.

strlcpy is far, far better and does pretty much what is wanted.

However in this case they really did try to figure out if the buffer would overflow, so neither strlcpy or strncpy should be needed. They did the calculation wrong, claiming it needed 4-8 bytes less than it really did.

That's why I say the sale price approaches the cost of production. It does not start right at it and stay there forever more.

As for copyright laws and mini-monopolies, those are factors that damage the health of the market.

In another message, I looked at Far Cry 3 and assuming recovery of development price over the 10 million sold and a development cost of 60 million, that would come out to $6 ea. Note that it was never $6 each or even close (even a used copy runs twice that now after they have already paid off all development costs). Because they don't know they will sell 10 million, I would expect a higher price at first and for the market to support that based on novelty. However, after that honeymoon period, a healthy market would exert considerable downward pressure on the price.

Simply, we don't have efficient healthy markets in the U.S.

Which is why I'm not offering you one :-)

They are so empowered in the same sense that I am empowered to take my neighbor's stereo. That is, I could do it if I had no ethics and the police probably wouldn't even send someone to look in to it.

I don't understand your gripe with that name in particular. It's not an obscure name, and it evokes some sense of classical grace (as well as being an extension of the Opera name in a sense). There are any number of other projects out there, both successful and otherwise, that have much more ridiculous names. Firefox is a great example. What does "Firefox" have to do with being a web browser? Or SeaMonkey, or Chrome for that matter? What about Twitter? Or Flickr? What about LibreOffice, which I have to actually spell for people who haven't heard of it? How about "The Gimp?" But you're choosing to go on a rant over the name of a classical composer, as if no one has heard of this person?

In the first place, people are obviously fine with using things with names that don't have an obvious connection to the product. In the second place, plenty of people have actually heard of Vivaldi (the man). It's not as obscure as you apparently think it is.

I take it you have no counter argument so you have resorted to a childish ad-hominem?

Cause I got no points and that's a handy tip!

-Rick

Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.

I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).

This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.