It's a lot like a warped record. As the stars rotate past the Magellanic Clouds, the rest of the stars in the arm slowly shift and warp as they pass it. Then settle down and get flat again. Of course, this takes about 100,000 years or so, so we don't notice it happening.
Well, it is good that we figure this out before we start to someday send ships all around the place. Sure, we can maybe design a warp drive some day, but without an accurate map, we're boned.
'It has to do with the fact that open source has become such a strong force in the software world.'"
I wouldn't call less than 2% of the PC market "a strong force". The guy's been smoking too much of his own press releases if he doesn't realize that even with the antitrust oversight (such as it was) Microsoft plainly won the war.
This is the real issue at work here. The idiots in charge of SyFy are astoundingly inept and lack a real focus. When the network first started, they had about half of their entire schedule filled with repeats of old science fiction shows and so on and a few new things. But lately, it's been them spending stupid amounts of money on made for TV rubbish and failed series that have worse writing than sitcoms and pulp science fiction from the 80s. Honestly, the guys from Fox can churn out better stuff at this point, and that's not saying much.
With their last big franchise that drew in viewers gone, and no serials from the 70s, 80s, or 90s to act as filler,(even old MST3K episodes would suffice to draw in a consistent crowd of retro-viewers, let alone old Dr. Who or similar) it's dead in the water. They simple need to die off at this point. I hope that Stargate gets picked up by someone who has the vision to make it live again. But I doubt it at this point. I think it'll die off a slow and agonizing death (or has at this point, most likely) like Star Trek did. And at the hands of many of the same idiots - big surprise!
Dang. So you'd need to install a ventillation system similar to what you use for Radon gas in every home.
Way to go, oil company. You know, in a way, I'll be glad when the oil runs out and they are out of a job. Because I can't think of an industry that has done more damage to the environment worldwide or led to more wars and strife.
Nobody that I know of doesn't use a filter of some sort these days to keep at least some of the junk out of their drinking water (or buy bottled water). This just points to all the more reason to use a filter.
I've mentioned this several times over the last five years or so, but every time I do, I get mauled by idiots and whiners.
That is, that there should be a "download only" option on all torrent programs so that you can manually have the option of not uploading at all and thereby be immune to the whole legal issue presented by the RIAA and similar groups. But there is currently none, and people then complain at me that it's unfair and not right and so on to leech. And also how it would break the whole process. .
But we need a legal way to force the companies to no longer go after individuals (as opposed to actual copying rings and career criminals, which there are thousands around the world to go after, even outside of China)). If they have an issue with distribution, then fine - we don't distribute. Then they only can go after the 200 or so people who are deciding to manually seed the torrent. If nobody is seeding after such a change, well, then, they got their wish. The movie isn't "available". So sorry, don't do things you're not supposed to do. Legitimate uses would be unaffected.
oh - and watch the hate and flak I take for even suggesting this, despite the fact that it would keep people from being sued and also drastically lower the number of copies of most films and music out there. It kind of makes you wonder what's the real motivation of the programmers who make these programs.
This is absolutely typical for most large Japanese companies. The infrastructure is absolutely vertical and they admit to nothing. PR and the face that you present to the world is everything, and well, all of the rest is just stuff you should be a good worker and not ask about. Typical management is not too different than in the U.S. though, which is to tell the workers to "do it" and leave the rest of the thing to some guy five levels down the chain to make work. Just, that if there's a problem, the workers in this case never are really allowed to do more than to complain to their direct manager. And that's considered extreme. A famous saying in Japan (and they invented this phrase/proverb, mind you!) is "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down." (with an implied context of force-ably doing so). I have friends who are from the U.S. in Japan who tell me that co-workers actually worry over whether it's proper to raise a concern over something as minor as requesting more paper for the copy machine. Let alone butting heads with their bosses. To them, it's almost hilarious. To the typical Japanese worker, it's unfortunately all to real as a result of generations of top-down control and a "comply with society or die" type of attitude that's everywhere.
The typical email to the VP saying that "our internet security is a problem and we need to fix it (ie - $$$ to do so)" by your head of local IT just never gets up the half a dozen levels to anyone in upper management. We saw this with the Toyota debacle. I'm positive that some engineer said that there was a potential problem and their immediate manager overruled them and said that it wasn't worth worrying about such an incredibly rare issue. End of story, worker drone goes back to their desk. Oh , and you also saw it with the way they handled the nuclear mess as well. "No problem" until the entire world is pretty much forcing them to admit weeks later what we all know would be the likely outcome within 24 hours of the incident.
And Sony is also in the same pattern, now. "No Problem" and blame others until they are forced to admit that they made a mistake.
Is it me, or does there seem to be a rash of government agencies seeking the help of "people online" to do their job?
It's clear that they want us to do the work for them and then get no credit or money for it. Well, I'm not some focus group member and they can figure this out themselves. It's not like the Government listens to the average person any more, as it is.
Think about the sort of password your mother or father is likely to use. It's going to be a short phrase or two words at most, and maybe 2-3 substitute letter of "noise". Unless the "noise" is unicode garbage, changing an E to a 3 won't make one bit of difference in a brute-force attack. The 30 characters would be an absolute upper limit. I bet it's less than 15 characters like 99% of people tend to use.
Let's assume, though, a password that's no longer than 30 characters and uses whatever keys he has on his keyboard and.or special symbols (he's not going to have a password in Chinese/Kanji , after all) ie - at worst, it would be a passage from the Koran or something that he could remember. At best, it's his cat's name or something similar. 50+ year old people who didn't grow up as computer geeks don't remember complicated things.
Stuff that into a supercomputer and it's probably not even months. Maybe days. You don''t have to decrypt anything - you just need the password and enough patience. And that's assuming he even used anything that sophisticated. Or that the servers that he sent the emails through did the same.
I give them a few weeks, tops, to have it all nice and pretty in a stack on someone's desk in D.C.
It's important to remember that Sony is a Typical Old-School Japanese Company (tm) that operates as such. So PR is always a high priority and when it does have a problem, it never admits to anything if it can help it. When they do, it's glacially slow as management is convinced of its own greatness and as such sees every problem as either not initially serious or something that can be fixed quickly by delegating the task to the workers and telling them to get it done. Expect to never officially know the full extent of what was compromised.
But my educated guess is that they found that the same security holes existed or ones did that they could exploit and did the exact same thing to the gaming servers as well to get information. My guess is that the hackers got literally everything short of the company emails and blackberry accounts at the HQ.
100 million+ possible compromised accounts is my guess by the time it's all over.
Right - some games do work, but a lot are poorly written and don't have a way to deal with the PSN being dead - they simply crash or refuse to run. Part of this is Sony's fault, and part if the crummy programming by the game companies to stupidly assume that the PSN will always be available and working. Sony needs to address this, because the games still will work for the most part if they disable trophies for the meantime since almost every company runs its own servers for multiplayer.
It's almost certainly #1. Criminals always go after the money. The entire thing was down for a while and everything is back up. Except for PSN. It's dead and don't expect it back up for weeks or months if this is true, as it would require a ground-up rewrite of major parts of its code. If they (as I suspect their mind-boggling hubris and ego led them to believe) didn't bother with planning to ever do a major upgrade to the PSN and were working on the future PS4 instead, they're boned. You can't write this sort of thing from scratch in a couple of days. They might not have it working for weeks, and that's going to crush their market share.
But it brings us to a bigger problem. Namely, that so many games go through Sony's server, which acts like a gatekeeper and keeps the games from running. But why is it doing this?
A: It's the TROPHIES that every game now has (is plagued with) that is causing the issue. It can't update the trophies so the entire rest of the game crashes. If I was Steam, (as an example), I'd patch Portal immediately and have it turn off this function on launch and connect to the PSN server *after* it is up and running. That way you could play even if Sony's servers are fubar. You'd not get any trophies (such a shame) but it would still run properly.
Sony should immediately disable this in a patch until it gets up and running. Every day that people can't use their games, it's another few thousand people who decide to jump ship for the XBox. (Microsoft, while having its own problems, is properly paranoid about security on its servers) Trophies are a minor and essentially worthless part of the PS3 by comparison.
Exactly. If you buy games a month old, used, it's the same price as the PC version most of the time, and you can play it for a year and still get $10-$15 back when you sell it. The advantage of a console is that you don't have to deal with patches and configurations, drivers, or anything much at all. You stick the DVD in and it's running in a few seconds. Only Steam is as easy to use on a PC in terms of getting your gaming "fix" in an easy to use manner.
My next PC will be fast enough to run every game I own under Wine/Crossover anyways. That frees up my computer to run any OS I want. And I so don't want to be forced into a whole other 7-8 year cycle of Windows dependency, rules, DRM, and cost at this point.
Plus, the real advantage of non-Windows OS is that my current hardware is fast enough by far to run it all. There' s no need to upgrade everything - all I really need is to swap the CPU for a faster model and get a better video card. I don't even think I'll have to change the motherboard. Moving to Windows 7 would require a completely new system due to the fact that 3.25GB(give or take) isn't enough memory to run it - you need 64 bit everything to run it properly. Sure, this is a good idea, but if it can save me the headache *and* a full upgrade cycle, I'll swap OSs. I've spent 30 years doing computing in my life and have used 20 operating systems in that time. Moving to another isn't a big deal. Windows was fun, but after ten years, it's time to move onwards and upwards.
Only a fool buys the games at full price when they just come out. Wait a month, even, and the used price is $30. We're talking about a fairly small change in habits to wean oneself from the problem that is Windows.
Case in point - Mint. It's perhaps the best version of Ubuntu that's available from a first-time user's standpoint as it comes with all of the basic codecs and sound drivers installed. I found it to simply put, work. The transition to it is no different than any other operating system, and shouldn't be much harder than going from XP to Windows 7 would be.
It's climbed to the #2 spot at Distrowatch for exactly this reason. There's really no reason other than maybe gaming, to be forced to have to deal with moving to Windows 7 any more. But since the PC games are almost all just console clones these days and offer few actual differences and advantages over a console, you can survive without most games these days as well. (ie - just buy your games on your console and leave the PC to doing computer-related tasks.)
It takes a decade to really swap formats. Until 1997 or 1998, even, records were still competing with CD. VHS took a decade to die off as well. Blu-Ray, if you consider only the time since it "won" the format wars, is only a few years old. As HDTVs become the default medium in ten years, Blu-Ray will follow.
And I remember, as do all of you, how just a couple of years ago, a burner was $1000 or so. For $80-$120 (dual layer BD-R!), it's stupid at this point to not get one in a new system instead of a DVD burner. If for nothing else that or future-proofing your investment.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817287017 name-brand media is barely over $1 each, so it's certainly replacing DVD at this point, or quickly will. At this price, I'd not even bother buying DVDs any more than I'd buy CDs or floppy discs.
Beat me to it. The important surface on a CD is the "side" with the label on it. A few seconds with sandpaper does very easily solve any issues. Note - with something more complex like a dual-layer DVD, you have to destroy the actual disc to get at the second layer.
Nice (expensive) toy, but destroying CDs is stupidly easy.
I completely understand, but if the ESRB starts to act like the RIAA and similar agencies and start to dictate terms to the programmers (artists as it were) instead of just giving ratings, lt'll surely be dumped for something else that the industry creates. Or they'll just release it without a rating. If it's a war between a major supplier like EA games or Sony versus Gamestop, well, you know who's going to flinch first.
The silliest things also red-flag some games. For instance, if you dare mention homosexuality in any way or form, even if it is part of a normal storyline or background character, it's automatically kicked into the mature level by the Puritan Squad. Another one is to mention or deal with sex in technical terms or just simply discuss it in a normal and realistic manner. This puts many RPG type games into the M category because the developers are caught between the idiots at the ESRB and similar groups and making a non Poekmon type storyline.
Yet blowing up people, swearing, violence towards authority figures, and so on are just 13+? I think there's a far larger issue with the ESRB that they don't want to really deal with. I think what this will end up doing is making developers revert to either their own rating system or not rating their games at all. I know if I was EA games and most other companies, having to submit a (excruciatingly long and tedious) set of documents for each game would get old really fast.
15 years ago, there was no rating system and people used their brains. Now, as it was originally feared, what was a ratings system has become a hindrance and a set of barriers that developers have to deal with. And you wonder why games are becoming more and more like the worthless crap Hollywood churns out...
We've known about issues like this since the early 90s. It's not news at all, really. The issue is that people are amazingly dumb when it comes to dealing with a huge wad of choices being thrown at them. The reason that it all evolved exactly as it did is because unless you only present people with a few clearly visible choices, there's simply a disconnect and nothing at all gets done. It's like the silly joke in tennis of throwing two balls at once at the other player. 95% of the time their brain does absolutely nothing for half a second.
Now multiply that times a million coders and people who have to make this all work together. (let alone the poor end users)
Reinventing the wheel while it's moving when most CIS graduates can't think for themselves any more thanks to our nearly useless testing and learning methods is asking for failure. You can thank middle and high schools for this for the most part. A generation of excellent test-takers who can't figure out how to deal with anything that involves real problem-solving.
These conventions came as a result of much earlier (basic) aspects of human society and our entire way of thinking is trained from birth to operate along these same guidelines. Yes, it's crude and inefficient, but it works and sometimes quick and effective-enough for now is exactly what we want.
I guess it kind of gets to me how the quality filter here on Slashdot has sunk to essentially none at all. If my 12 year old son could figure out that it's junk, poorly cited, opinion, or some worthless blog in 5 minutes or less, perhaps it should be caught by whomever is in charge. Because there actually *is* plenty of tech-worthy news out there every day.
Slashdot Mirror
The more you learn about what really goes on in the U.S., the more you realize how closely it resembles ancient Rome.
Corrupt? What's amazing is that the people actually believe that our leaders *aren't* corrupt by default.
It's a lot like a warped record. As the stars rotate past the Magellanic Clouds, the rest of the stars in the arm slowly shift and warp as they pass it. Then settle down and get flat again. Of course, this takes about 100,000 years or so, so we don't notice it happening.
Well, it is good that we figure this out before we start to someday send ships all around the place. Sure, we can maybe design a warp drive some day, but without an accurate map, we're boned.
'It has to do with the fact that open source has become such a strong force in the software world.'"
I wouldn't call less than 2% of the PC market "a strong force". The guy's been smoking too much of his own press releases if he doesn't realize that even with the antitrust oversight (such as it was) Microsoft plainly won the war.
This is the real issue at work here. The idiots in charge of SyFy are astoundingly inept and lack a real focus. When the network first started, they had about half of their entire schedule filled with repeats of old science fiction shows and so on and a few new things. But lately, it's been them spending stupid amounts of money on made for TV rubbish and failed series that have worse writing than sitcoms and pulp science fiction from the 80s. Honestly, the guys from Fox can churn out better stuff at this point, and that's not saying much.
With their last big franchise that drew in viewers gone, and no serials from the 70s, 80s, or 90s to act as filler,(even old MST3K episodes would suffice to draw in a consistent crowd of retro-viewers, let alone old Dr. Who or similar) it's dead in the water. They simple need to die off at this point. I hope that Stargate gets picked up by someone who has the vision to make it live again. But I doubt it at this point. I think it'll die off a slow and agonizing death (or has at this point, most likely) like Star Trek did. And at the hands of many of the same idiots - big surprise!
Dang. So you'd need to install a ventillation system similar to what you use for Radon gas in every home.
Way to go, oil company. You know, in a way, I'll be glad when the oil runs out and they are out of a job. Because I can't think of an industry that has done more damage to the environment worldwide or led to more wars and strife.
Well, if it's that bad that even distilling it won't fix it, then you're right - they're screwed.
Nobody that I know of doesn't use a filter of some sort these days to keep at least some of the junk out of their drinking water (or buy bottled water). This just points to all the more reason to use a filter.
But not one of the torrent programs allows for just leeching.(ie - truly zero upload speed and zero seeding)
And watch the hate I get for even suggesting such an option be added.
I've mentioned this several times over the last five years or so, but every time I do, I get mauled by idiots and whiners.
That is, that there should be a "download only" option on all torrent programs so that you can manually have the option of not uploading at all and thereby be immune to the whole legal issue presented by the RIAA and similar groups. But there is currently none, and people then complain at me that it's unfair and not right and so on to leech. And also how it would break the whole process. .
But we need a legal way to force the companies to no longer go after individuals (as opposed to actual copying rings and career criminals, which there are thousands around the world to go after, even outside of China)). If they have an issue with distribution, then fine - we don't distribute. Then they only can go after the 200 or so people who are deciding to manually seed the torrent. If nobody is seeding after such a change, well, then, they got their wish. The movie isn't "available". So sorry, don't do things you're not supposed to do. Legitimate uses would be unaffected.
oh - and watch the hate and flak I take for even suggesting this, despite the fact that it would keep people from being sued and also drastically lower the number of copies of most films and music out there. It kind of makes you wonder what's the real motivation of the programmers who make these programs.
This is absolutely typical for most large Japanese companies. The infrastructure is absolutely vertical and they admit to nothing. PR and the face that you present to the world is everything, and well, all of the rest is just stuff you should be a good worker and not ask about. Typical management is not too different than in the U.S. though, which is to tell the workers to "do it" and leave the rest of the thing to some guy five levels down the chain to make work. Just, that if there's a problem, the workers in this case never are really allowed to do more than to complain to their direct manager. And that's considered extreme. A famous saying in Japan (and they invented this phrase/proverb, mind you!) is "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down." (with an implied context of force-ably doing so). I have friends who are from the U.S. in Japan who tell me that co-workers actually worry over whether it's proper to raise a concern over something as minor as requesting more paper for the copy machine. Let alone butting heads with their bosses. To them, it's almost hilarious. To the typical Japanese worker, it's unfortunately all to real as a result of generations of top-down control and a "comply with society or die" type of attitude that's everywhere.
The typical email to the VP saying that "our internet security is a problem and we need to fix it (ie - $$$ to do so)" by your head of local IT just never gets up the half a dozen levels to anyone in upper management. We saw this with the Toyota debacle. I'm positive that some engineer said that there was a potential problem and their immediate manager overruled them and said that it wasn't worth worrying about such an incredibly rare issue. End of story, worker drone goes back to their desk. Oh , and you also saw it with the way they handled the nuclear mess as well. "No problem" until the entire world is pretty much forcing them to admit weeks later what we all know would be the likely outcome within 24 hours of the incident.
And Sony is also in the same pattern, now. "No Problem" and blame others until they are forced to admit that they made a mistake.
Is it me, or does there seem to be a rash of government agencies seeking the help of "people online" to do their job?
It's clear that they want us to do the work for them and then get no credit or money for it. Well, I'm not some focus group member and they can figure this out themselves. It's not like the Government listens to the average person any more, as it is.
Think about the sort of password your mother or father is likely to use. It's going to be a short phrase or two words at most, and maybe 2-3 substitute letter of "noise". Unless the "noise" is unicode garbage, changing an E to a 3 won't make one bit of difference in a brute-force attack. The 30 characters would be an absolute upper limit. I bet it's less than 15 characters like 99% of people tend to use.
Let's assume, though, a password that's no longer than 30 characters and uses whatever keys he has on his keyboard and.or special symbols (he's not going to have a password in Chinese/Kanji , after all) ie - at worst, it would be a passage from the Koran or something that he could remember. At best, it's his cat's name or something similar. 50+ year old people who didn't grow up as computer geeks don't remember complicated things.
Stuff that into a supercomputer and it's probably not even months. Maybe days. You don''t have to decrypt anything - you just need the password and enough patience. And that's assuming he even used anything that sophisticated. Or that the servers that he sent the emails through did the same.
I give them a few weeks, tops, to have it all nice and pretty in a stack on someone's desk in D.C.
It's important to remember that Sony is a Typical Old-School Japanese Company (tm) that operates as such. So PR is always a high priority and when it does have a problem, it never admits to anything if it can help it. When they do, it's glacially slow as management is convinced of its own greatness and as such sees every problem as either not initially serious or something that can be fixed quickly by delegating the task to the workers and telling them to get it done. Expect to never officially know the full extent of what was compromised.
But my educated guess is that they found that the same security holes existed or ones did that they could exploit and did the exact same thing to the gaming servers as well to get information. My guess is that the hackers got literally everything short of the company emails and blackberry accounts at the HQ.
100 million+ possible compromised accounts is my guess by the time it's all over.
Right - some games do work, but a lot are poorly written and don't have a way to deal with the PSN being dead - they simply crash or refuse to run. Part of this is Sony's fault, and part if the crummy programming by the game companies to stupidly assume that the PSN will always be available and working. Sony needs to address this, because the games still will work for the most part if they disable trophies for the meantime since almost every company runs its own servers for multiplayer.
It's almost certainly #1. Criminals always go after the money. The entire thing was down for a while and everything is back up. Except for PSN. It's dead and don't expect it back up for weeks or months if this is true, as it would require a ground-up rewrite of major parts of its code. If they (as I suspect their mind-boggling hubris and ego led them to believe) didn't bother with planning to ever do a major upgrade to the PSN and were working on the future PS4 instead, they're boned. You can't write this sort of thing from scratch in a couple of days. They might not have it working for weeks, and that's going to crush their market share.
But it brings us to a bigger problem. Namely, that so many games go through Sony's server, which acts like a gatekeeper and keeps the games from running.
But why is it doing this?
A: It's the TROPHIES that every game now has (is plagued with) that is causing the issue. It can't update the trophies so the entire rest of the game crashes. If I was Steam, (as an example), I'd patch Portal immediately and have it turn off this function on launch and connect to the PSN server *after* it is up and running. That way you could play even if Sony's servers are fubar. You'd not get any trophies (such a shame) but it would still run properly.
Sony should immediately disable this in a patch until it gets up and running. Every day that people can't use their games, it's another few thousand people who decide to jump ship for the XBox. (Microsoft, while having its own problems, is properly paranoid about security on its servers) Trophies are a minor and essentially worthless part of the PS3 by comparison.
Exactly. If you buy games a month old, used, it's the same price as the PC version most of the time, and you can play it for a year and still get $10-$15 back when you sell it. The advantage of a console is that you don't have to deal with patches and configurations, drivers, or anything much at all. You stick the DVD in and it's running in a few seconds. Only Steam is as easy to use on a PC in terms of getting your gaming "fix" in an easy to use manner.
My next PC will be fast enough to run every game I own under Wine/Crossover anyways. That frees up my computer to run any OS I want. And I so don't want to be forced into a whole other 7-8 year cycle of Windows dependency, rules, DRM, and cost at this point.
Plus, the real advantage of non-Windows OS is that my current hardware is fast enough by far to run it all. There' s no need to upgrade everything - all I really need is to swap the CPU for a faster model and get a better video card. I don't even think I'll have to change the motherboard. Moving to Windows 7 would require a completely new system due to the fact that 3.25GB(give or take) isn't enough memory to run it - you need 64 bit everything to run it properly. Sure, this is a good idea, but if it can save me the headache *and* a full upgrade cycle, I'll swap OSs. I've spent 30 years doing computing in my life and have used 20 operating systems in that time. Moving to another isn't a big deal. Windows was fun, but after ten years, it's time to move onwards and upwards.
Only a fool buys the games at full price when they just come out. Wait a month, even, and the used price is $30. We're talking about a fairly small change in habits to wean oneself from the problem that is Windows.
Case in point - Mint. It's perhaps the best version of Ubuntu that's available from a first-time user's standpoint as it comes with all of the basic codecs and sound drivers installed. I found it to simply put, work. The transition to it is no different than any other operating system, and shouldn't be much harder than going from XP to Windows 7 would be.
It's climbed to the #2 spot at Distrowatch for exactly this reason. There's really no reason other than maybe gaming, to be forced to have to deal with moving to Windows 7 any more. But since the PC games are almost all just console clones these days and offer few actual differences and advantages over a console, you can survive without most games these days as well. (ie - just buy your games on your console and leave the PC to doing computer-related tasks.)
Exactly. I'd mod you up, but I'm out of points ;)
It takes a decade to really swap formats. Until 1997 or 1998, even, records were still competing with CD. VHS took a decade to die off as well. Blu-Ray, if you consider only the time since it "won" the format wars, is only a few years old. As HDTVs become the default medium in ten years, Blu-Ray will follow.
And I remember, as do all of you, how just a couple of years ago, a burner was $1000 or so. For $80-$120 (dual layer BD-R!), it's stupid at this point to not get one in a new system instead of a DVD burner. If for nothing else that or future-proofing your investment.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817287017
name-brand media is barely over $1 each, so it's certainly replacing DVD at this point, or quickly will. At this price, I'd not even bother buying DVDs any more than I'd buy CDs or floppy discs.
Beat me to it. The important surface on a CD is the "side" with the label on it. A few seconds with sandpaper does very easily solve any issues. Note - with something more complex like a dual-layer DVD, you have to destroy the actual disc to get at the second layer.
Nice (expensive) toy, but destroying CDs is stupidly easy.
I completely understand, but if the ESRB starts to act like the RIAA and similar agencies and start to dictate terms to the programmers (artists as it were) instead of just giving ratings, lt'll surely be dumped for something else that the industry creates. Or they'll just release it without a rating. If it's a war between a major supplier like EA games or Sony versus Gamestop, well, you know who's going to flinch first.
The silliest things also red-flag some games. For instance, if you dare mention homosexuality in any way or form, even if it is part of a normal storyline or background character, it's automatically kicked into the mature level by the Puritan Squad. Another one is to mention or deal with sex in technical terms or just simply discuss it in a normal and realistic manner. This puts many RPG type games into the M category because the developers are caught between the idiots at the ESRB and similar groups and making a non Poekmon type storyline.
Yet blowing up people, swearing, violence towards authority figures, and so on are just 13+? I think there's a far larger issue with the ESRB that they don't want to really deal with. I think what this will end up doing is making developers revert to either their own rating system or not rating their games at all. I know if I was EA games and most other companies, having to submit a (excruciatingly long and tedious) set of documents for each game would get old really fast.
15 years ago, there was no rating system and people used their brains. Now, as it was originally feared, what was a ratings system has become a hindrance and a set of barriers that developers have to deal with. And you wonder why games are becoming more and more like the worthless crap Hollywood churns out...
We've known about issues like this since the early 90s. It's not news at all, really. The issue is that people are amazingly dumb when it comes to dealing with a huge wad of choices being thrown at them. The reason that it all evolved exactly as it did is because unless you only present people with a few clearly visible choices, there's simply a disconnect and nothing at all gets done. It's like the silly joke in tennis of throwing two balls at once at the other player. 95% of the time their brain does absolutely nothing for half a second.
Now multiply that times a million coders and people who have to make this all work together. (let alone the poor end users)
Reinventing the wheel while it's moving when most CIS graduates can't think for themselves any more thanks to our nearly useless testing and learning methods is asking for failure. You can thank middle and high schools for this for the most part. A generation of excellent test-takers who can't figure out how to deal with anything that involves real problem-solving.
These conventions came as a result of much earlier (basic) aspects of human society and our entire way of thinking is trained from birth to operate along these same guidelines. Yes, it's crude and inefficient, but it works and sometimes quick and effective-enough for now is exactly what we want.
I guess it kind of gets to me how the quality filter here on Slashdot has sunk to essentially none at all. If my 12 year old son could figure out that it's junk, poorly cited, opinion, or some worthless blog in 5 minutes or less, perhaps it should be caught by whomever is in charge. Because there actually *is* plenty of tech-worthy news out there every day.