The idea itself is correct, though. It worked in the 30s with the Hoover Dam, which was of course a project to produce electricity and regulate the Colorado to avoid droughts and floods, but it also created an incredible amount of jobs during a time when jobs were sorely needed. Pretty much like today.

I could well see another, similar project, maybe in the south east of the US to protect it from Hurricane floods. There are many projects you could create that don't lead to an overabundance of certain infrastructural systems that lead to more problems. We could actually use that time (and money) to solve problems we have, create jobs at the same time and in the end create better living conditions in the long run.

Punishing "not spending" sounds about right in this economy where our problem is pretty much that people stopped spending.

Enjoy playing whack-a-mole a lot? Because that's what it would be if you really wanted to execute that injunction. There's literally millions of computers participating here, and every single one thereof might contain a copy of that video. Not to mention all the media that were connected to the internet when the video was reproduced and are no longer connected. But may be so in the future. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next year. Or in 10.

You can order whatever you want, there are simply things the precious law can't order. Well, it can order, but likewise, the people can tell it to go fuck itself, and with impunity. It's not like there is any chance in hell to find out who has the video, who publishes it and where. Unless you're willing to spend a vastly disproportional amount of resources.

Do you REALLY think any country on this whole planet would go out of its way to execute such an injunction? If anything, countries will pay lip service to it, if it's not forwarded to officer /dev/null altogether.

Well, what do you expect when you let corporations write your laws?

It's no longer really possible for "normal" people to tell apart real images from photoshopped or even completely CGI rendered ones. Computer imagining has become this good.

What's real? What's fake? Or rather, where does the fake start? Pretty much every ad picture is 'shopped. Models don't "grow" that way. A real human isn't pretty enough for us. And real reality isn't sensationalist enough either.

Get used to fake images being broadcast as news. Thinking about it, you probably already are, you just don't know it yet.

Don't get me wrong, I love Queen and every single Mercury song is a piece of marvel and art, his voice is absolutely awesome and will be through the times, and he went at least a century too early, but that mustache... sorry.

Eventually, we will have to leave this marble if we, as a species, plan to outlive the predictable expiry date of our planet. Of course, the planned death occurs not for a few million years, but even if you're one of those that, not unlike politicians, think in service terms rather than generations, since we're treating this planet like we have another spare one for the time when (not if) this one becomes inhabitable, I'd say that yes, we should try to find out how and where to settle off planet.

I'd guess we have about a century left.

Yup, was pondering the same. Singing a David Bowie song with a Freddy Mercury memorial snot brake.

Being spaced out doesn't mean being in space.

You are aware that then the blame would land on the "bad" teacher who is clearly unable to teach because the kid should have learned this when he was in his class? So what will teachers do with kids who are too stupid to learn to write their own name? Because you can rest assured that parents won't accept that little Timmy is a little dim.

Teaching to the test will get a whole new meaning.

Certainly. But that's just the tip of the ice berg.

Not every game allows modding, but a lot of them make very interesting attack vectors. Imagine WoW having an exploitable angle. Aside of the obvious target (getting access to the WoW account and stripping it), what do you think would happen if there was a way to infect machines running WoW by, say, slipping an infected version of a popular mod into one of the download areas?

And then we're really talking about some serious attack surface. Skyrim is a fairly small one, actually. Yes, it was a popular game, and it has a very active modder scene, but the amount of people modding the game is not as big as it may seem at first. While OTOH I don't know anyone playing WoW who doesn't use certain "must have" plugins.

And I'm pretty sure one could come up with more "interesting" vectors. How about infected servers for multiplayer FPS games? Do you know the servers you play CoG, CS or TF2 on well enough to know that they will be ok, in case there is a vector for your game?

9 out of 10 AAA-titles on Windows require admin privileges due to their DRM scheme. This alone makes games an interesting attack vector. If I can hijack something running with admin privileges, I can easily install whatever I deem fit into your machine.

Now add that games are usually done with far less concern for security than, say, Windows or Acrobat Reader (yes, it's possible...), making it certainly a lot easier to find something exploitable. Also, it's very unlikely that the average game developer reacts as quickly as MS does by now.

How about putting a structure you allow the user to specify the length of on the stack? Like it was done in the animated cursor in Windows (and of course exploited for an attack).

And, unlike games, that was in an OS that has been under attack for years when this was exploited.

Game developers usually don't consider security when they develop. If anything should be a dead giveaway, it's how DRM is implemented. I think we're going to see a lot more exploits targeting games in the future. For very obvious reasons:

- Tend to run with admin privileges due to DRM
- Little to no consideration for security during development
- AAA-titles usually widely spread, leaving a big attack surface
- Tend to be used with rather powerful machines due to requirements of the graphics engine

And those are only the reasons that I could come up with without even thinking.

Because a hijacked machine is a hijacked machine. It can be used to send spam, participate in a DOS or mine bitcoins. And given that it's games we're talking, and power hungry games too, it's likely that you get a machine with a very powerful GPU and CPU.