While I'd assume some of the connectivity is contained within the site and some within Russia itself, these are international games and you'd presume a large chunk of the traffic is destined for destinations outside of Russia.

I wonder if any economist has ever modeled what it would look like if all risk was pooled into a central risk pool versus the myriad risk pools we have now for all the various forms of hazard insurance.

Maybe it wouldn't make any sense, but one of the principal arguments for most health care reform schemes is risk pooling. Maybe it only makes sense for like risks, but there are plenty of insurance companies that sell policies for essentially dissimilar risks (ie, my home insurer also provides my boat policy).

Maybe this is largely accomplished by the reinsurance industry, at least on a macroeconomic level.

Unless they were bonds, suck it up. The stock market is a gamble, not a GIC or Treasury Certificate.

I'm long past tired of "investors" suing for their losses. You want to gamble with your money, you take the risk of losing it.

If you don't like the risk, buy bonds or deposit your money in a bank for their paltry returns.

Well, if they did it right they would be on SP5 or SP6 by now, since they should be releasing a new SP annually to roll up all the existing patches.

I seem to recall there being a demand for an SP4 at least two years ago due to the volume of updates post-SP3. I think the motivation wasn't necessarily SVCHOST but just the sheer download & install time for even new installs with SP3 slipstreamed in.

You would think this would also somewhat lighten the support burden and maybe even the burden on update servers as well, as I gotta believe there is a lot of duplication in updating with patches that supersede patches getting installed at the same time.

I know I've seen XP update listings on machines that showed whole laundry lists of IE updates for the installed IE, along with a new version of IE in the same update session -- wouldn't you just install the new IE version and then skip installing all the old IE patches? I always wondered if maybe the old IE version patches were in there because they were for OS components that weren't replaced or update by the new IE version.

The same approach applies to patent, trademark, and copyright laws.

Why in the world should software services be treated as the only exception in the world except to satisfy American megacorps?

Fuck Google.

Let them fight where their customers are.

Look, with every product in the world, you are subject to the terms, conditions, and legal system in place where the product is used/sold.

Software services should be no different. If you don't like the terms of a particular nation, block their users from using your service.

If a Japanese car's brake system fails in the US (like Toyota), they get sued where the cars were sold, not where the cars were manufactured.

Additionally you can narrow it down just just include svchost.exe tasks:

tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe"

Typical American attitude. Our laws and ideals apply everywhere. We are the world.

Every company that sells products in a region has to meet the standards of the region to sell their products. Why should software services be treated any differently?

You want to do business in China, you follow Chinese law. You want to do business in the UK, you follow UK law.

You don't want to follow the local laws, you don't get to do business.

Plain and simple.

And my magic 8-ball agrees whole heartedly...

None of that is the major problem... Declining channel quality is. In the past decade and a half, everyone has been following the model of making a good channel, keeping it that way until a lot of providers pick it up, then turning it into a piece of crap, and moving all the good content on it onto 3 other new cable channels your cable company has to start carrying.

Remember when the History Channel had shows about History? Remember when the Discovery Channel had shows with science and discovery? Remember when the Learning Channel taught viewers anything?

Proliferation of channels caused a steep decline in signal to noise ratio. Now, the lowest-common-denominator broadcast channels look very high quality in comparison, even as those morons keep chasing low-budget crap shows, and "reality" TV proliferates.

Take the money you spend on cable TV every month for a year, spend at most $150 of it on a top-of-the-line antenna system, and donate the rest to your local PBS station. You'll still get 100 channels, picture quality will be far better, and you'll quickly forget you've ever heard of Honey Boo Boo.

I think there's a bunch of interrelated issues in American culture, many tied to economics.

Parents want to their kids to be successful, and the general theory on this is that you have to do well in school early so that you can get into the right college so you can get the right degree so you can get a good job.

I think this leads to relentless pressure on kids, especially boys, to be "perfect" in school. Deviation from this leads parents to wonder what's wrong, when, in fact, what's wrong may be "he's an 8 year old boy." Parents believe and our culture does everything to reinforce the idea that if you screw up early you won't make it into the right schools, activities, college, etc. There's no room for error, no room to be an 8 year old boy for whom its perfectly normal to have a ton of physical energy and not a lot of focus on sit-still studies.

The educational system, especially in urban areas. There's this relentless focus on "the achievement gap" -- mostly blacks, but often including hispanics, not achieving the same test scores, grades, etc. as other students, mostly whites (although you could include Asians, they often outscore whites).

Fighting the "achievement gap" has led to two things. One, more testing and more focus on elementary education test scores, which has led to more intensive focus on reading and writing, which is challenging for all boys of elementary school age. We've taken something hard for young boys and kind of made it harder for them.

The second thing is that schools have tried to become social welfare delivery mechanisms. It's beyond obvious that the MAIN reason low-income blacks do poorly in schools is the absolute train wreck of urban black culture -- broken families, incarcerated parents, dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods. School districts can't solve this but they have devoted a lot of resources to it -- social workers, free meals, all kinds of social benefits to overcome the insurmountable problems when mom is on welfare or underemployed, dad is in jail or unknown, the neighborhood is a war zone, etc.

This well-intentioned but myopic attempt to solve the insoluble has led to schools losing their focus on kids generally, especially boys, as well as causing them to burn a lot of resources that could be better spent on programs that boys find engaging even though they might not contribute to the political issue of low test scores for black kids.

The last thing I'd add in is our culture's relentless, zero-slack atmosphere where everybody has to be plugged in all the time and there's no time for anything but work and more work. I hate it and I think it has a lot to do with why so many people, especially young people, are fucking snapping and going batshit with guns.

Combine it all together and you have parents terrified that their kid, performing poorly in 2nd or 3rd grade, needs to straighten out NOW or he won't go to college and will wind up poor and destitute.

It's a crazy conclusion but I tell you as a parent of an 8 year old who was in that same situation it absolutely flashes through your mind. My son was basically refusing to do assignments in class and when he did do them doing a very slapdash job, yet was scoring so high on standardized test we got a letter from the district that said he was in their "gifted" category! Of course we did everything we could (pediatric ADHD screening is an absolute joke, they don't even white-out that the screening questionnaire is made by the drug company) and went all out for a neuropsychiatric evaluation that basically said "Your son is really high IQ, school bores him and the tasks he does poorly on are really pretty poorly matched to 8 year old boys. He doesn't need ADHD meds." I'm glad we spent the money to basically learn the obvious because from a pediatrician perspective we could have easily been talked into meds, although even on the drug company ADHD screener we were iffy in terms of ADHD.

It also means children under legal age can't sign purchase contracts. In the US, there could be an argument that even a child has the right to make purchases.

But that's why our civil forfeiture laws don't have to break our constitution to be enforced. If you don't have the right to own property, it can be seized.

To the desk with lots of duct tape so it's harder for anyone to steal the computer.

Plus if you use more duct tape to stop the user from pressing on the keyboard or moving the mouse, it does wonders for preventing "drive by" website infections... :P

Other countries do have things like Canada's "Charter of Rights" section of our Constitution. Just because the US is famous for it's Constitution doesn't mean other countries don't have them.

However, unless/until the leaks come out to document that our nations are involved in spying similar to the NSA, it's not like the agencies in question are going to respond to a FOI request as to whether they're spying within a nation's boundaries or not. While I'm comfortable that CSEC isn't spying within Canada, I know all too well that bi-lateral security agreements mean that the various agencies just "outsource" their spying to partners.

We still get spied on.

There is no escape.

Anywhere.