Well, if you start with a known distance between yourself and the sun and then wait for an object of known size (an asteroid, the moon, etc) to pass between you and it at another known distance, recording the exact percent of the sun which is occluded by the object, you should be able to use those figures to determine the sun's size.
Thus using an eclipse to show that the sun is bigger than the earth, albeit in a way that's exceedingly round-about and unnecessary.
Context is a huge problem when dealing with natural language. The great thing about spellchecking a program, however, is that context is made perfectly clear by the strict syntax. Otherwise, finding a reliable compiler would replace spellchecking as your top concern.
But the result of that competitive edge might be more market share of an overall smaller market, and thus not necessarily more sales or profits.
That may very well be the case, which is why it's so important to get data on this. Offhand, I'd be that anyone who stands to hold 20% of the market probably isn't going to feel like they're better off, but a small independent label who's trying to get started might get a boost from the added exposure. If this allows them to simply offset the overall market reduction (which the IFPI reported at 5% last year), then they gain some ground on the bigger players who don't benefit nearly as much from the increased exposure.
Furthermore, if it turns out that disproportionately more works whose copyrights are held by the 20% players are illegally copied than those whose copyrights are held by the small labels, then that advantage just grows.
Of course the exact opposite of these scenarios could be occurring, until we see numbers on how often individual label's copyrights were being infringed, or alternatively something like the change in market share for each label, it's going to be pretty hard to tell.
If the RIAA labels were actually competing among themselves, then any one of them would be happy to see the others suffer alleged loss of sales.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of how copyright infringement impacts each label...in fact, if someone had the resources to put that together it might convince some of these labels that it is actually giving them a competitive edge, exactly as you suggest. I have a vague impression that indie labels actually receive a net benefit from unlicensed copying, and I think many of them believe that as well, but I don't have any numbers to back that up. Is anyone aware of publicly available data that could help us work this out?
I'd like to second the parent's point. When I was in first grade (in a magnet school no less) I was punished in front of the entire class and daily called a liar for claiming that negative numbers existed. Looking back at what my teacher said and the way she handled it, I honestly believe she didn't know about their existence.
Not only does this lack of knowledge prevent students from learning individual aspects of math, but the fact that my teachers did not understand the underlying _idea_ of math, and the way it can be used to describe patterns, abstractions, and relationships, meant that the way it was taught was essentially as a series of unrelated "tricks" that you could perform with numbers, and any questioning that moved beyond those tricks--such as asking how they worked or how people had come up with them--was dealt with harshly, since they could not even begin to offer an answer.
Once in high school, my teachers began to get better and my parents engaged a wonderful math tutor. Then during university and the years that followed, I began to develop a deeper understanding of the nature of math, the way it worked, and the grand underlying unity of it all. Now I deal handily with differential equations and vector spaces on a regular basis, but to this day I still feel the lack of a truly solid foundation in things like arithmetic and basic algebra.
They're private organizations, and their ratings are by nature a matter of opinion. There's no reason anyone should be legally required to justify an opinion.
Someone please mod this parent up. I don't think I could have said it better or more succinctly.
My history is far from infallible, and I'm certainly looking at it through the lens of recent developments, but every time I've heard of a technological dark age descending upon a region, it's been a localized phenomenon, and other areas of the world were advancing quite rapidly for the time period. During the European dark/middle ages, the Middle East under the Byzantine empire and then the Islamic caliphates was making huge advances in science, mathematics, and technology. These all transfered to Europe in time for it to experience a scientific renaissance while China was falling into technological stagnation. If you look at it on a localized scale, then yes, you are very much correct. On a global scale, however, it seems to me that the rate of change has been steadily advancing at least since the invention of language, and possibly since the introduction of sexual reproduction.
Throughout most of history it was a period of many, many generations between major developments. I agree with you there. My point is that the number of generations has as a rule gotten smaller between each one, to the point that we're now well into fractional generations, with major developments happening every year or so.
To go well back beyond the last 200 years, let's look at two periods - one between 10,000 BC and 5,000 BC, and the next between 5,000 BC and the end of 1 BC. Having done some informal research (mostly via wikipedia and google), I found 9 major technological advances occurring in the first period, three that spanned the two or were estimated to be right on the cusp, and 33 that occurred during the second period. I know that this isn't at all scientific for a number of reasons, but it's meant to demonstrate that I got my assertion from more than just oral histories and living memory.
For people who are interested in offering a critique (which I will gladly accept), here's what I found along with very approximate dates:
Before 5000 BC: 9000-8000 BC - The introduction of the Bow and Arrows 9500 BC - Agriculture begins to appear in the Fertile Crescent. 9000 BC - The appearance of stone structures 8700 BC - The oldest example of worked copper 7500 BC - Oldest known bricks 6500 BC - Knitting (in the form of Naalebinding) is invented 6000 BC - The scratch-plow is invented. 6000-5000 BC - Wine is invented 5400 BC - Irrigation of crops is introduced
On the cusp: 6000-3000 BC the Potter's wheel was invented 5,000 BC - Invention of Beer 5,000 BC - Woven Cloth
After 5000 BC: 4000-3500 BC - Invention of the wheel for transportation (non-potter's) 4000 BC - Salt used as a preservative 3807-3806 BC - First paved, engineered roads 3500-3100 BC - Writing invented 3500 BC - Sundial invented 3000 BC - Use of Tin 3000 BC - Human creation of glass 3000-2600 BC - Decimal system of numbers 3000-2000 BC - Banking invented 3000 BC - Papyrus 2900 BC - Formation of cities in Mesopotamia 2700-2000 BC - The phonetic alphabet 2600 BC - Earliest known dam 2500 BC - Planned cities 2500 BC - Sewage systems 2500 BC - Recorded multiplication tables 2500 BC - Smelted Iron 2400 BC - The abacus 2000 BC - Chariots, made possible by the spoked wheel 1792-1750 BC - Codification of laws (code of Hammurabi) 1650 BC - A method for extracting the square root of a number 1300 BC - Formulaic solution to second-order equations 687 BC - Coinage introduced 515 BC - The crane invented 500 BC - Gears 400 BC - The use of zero as a number 300 BC - The astrolabe 300 BC - The Odometer 300 BC - Horseshoes 202 BC - Hydraulically powered hammer 150 BC - Mechanical computation devices (Antikythera mechanism) 100 BC - Steam engine/aeolipile 20s BC - Concrete
Development and change in general is undergoing a period doubling. Not only are these new technologies amazing, but also the technologies they enable will also be amazing.
I'm trying to think of a period in human history when this wasn't true, at least for some area of the globe. Imagine when people first developed language, or writing, or math, or agriculture. Or more recently the printing press, more effective plows, the scientific method, the telegraph, or even steam-powered ships and locomotives. In each case the immediate practical benefits were augmented by an increase in the rate of future discoveries, either directly (as from the scientific method or writing), or indirectly (as from greater food production allowing a class of people who weren't subsistence farmers to develop, or faster travel allowing a more rapid exchange and synthesis of information)
Technology has never been changing as fast as it is now, but that's also been true for as far back as I'm aware...each generation just doesn't seem to see the trend of acceleration that came before them because it all seems so slow compared to what's happening just then.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
on
Storm Worm Rising
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They're the ones you see claiming that Linux and Mac's will have the "same problems" as their market share increases.
Out of curiosity, what aspects of the OSX/BSD and Linux architectures are going to stop:
An uneducated user from executing a binary file they download from a URL they are given
A process that user is running from executing further code with that user's privileges
That user's processes from making outbound TCP/UDP connections
That user's processes from accessing an SMTP server to send emails
A user from configuring a process to run on logging in
By my thinking, that's really all that's needed for a botnet to work on a given platform. I am certainly ignorant of many details regarding the BSD/Linux kernels and I stand ready to be corrected, but I believe I've seen all those things happening individually as part of day to day user life on my linux box.
TFA's servers aren't responding at the moment, so this might be included, but has anyone tried this with non-IE programs which use the Trident layout engine?
If it's Trident that's bringing down IE, then you're looking at HTML code that could also bring down Windows Media Player, several versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, Steam (from Valve), and other applications which use it to render web pages. I think at least some versions of Winamp used trident as well, but I'm not sure about that.
Very often the civilizations that suffered at the hands of colonizers were less technologically advanced because they had less trade and less contact with other civilizations - whether through political choice or geographic isolation. Those civilizations which embrace trade can can very often catch up to their more advanced neighbors in a relatively short period of time - take Europe in the renaissance, for instance. I can't think of a single situation where isolationism allowed a country to overcome a technology deficit, however. In this hypothetical situation of meeting technologically advanced alien life, if we isolate ourselves because we fear that they have better technology then all we are doing is slowing down our own rate of technological development and making the disparity worse when we do eventually come into contact.
And until recently, that's what "medicine" and "science" thought was the case with the young man in the story.
Actually, practitioners of "medicine" thought that if they used "science", they might help the young man. Today he's up and talking solely because of science applied as medicine, not in spite of it.
You should think a bit about the difference between a poor prognosis and a mathematical impossibility. His brain was pretty much still there, just broken, the chances of our figuring out how to fix it within his lifetime were slim, but we overcame those odds with at least a partial fix. It didn't require any magic, or wondrous new discoveries about the nature of the universe, and the fix works in accordance with the way we understood the brain, even before this man's case.
A brain which has been pulped has lost pretty much all its information. Reliable regeneration of information when it has been completely destroyed is more of a mathematical impossibility, and that is where you are facing a proven fact rather than an estimated chance. Barring a wondrous new discovery that gives us very detailed information regarding the physical structure of the brain prior to the damage, pulped brains _cannot_ be restored to their previous state.
You can choose to disregard the validity of the formal proofs, or the information given to us by humanity's medical experience, but if you do so you deprive yourself of the predictive framework which allows for advances like the one in TFA. And that leaves you attempting to cure him by blind trial and error, which I'm betting both him and his family are glad his doctors _didn't_ do.
As I see it there is one key difference. A secure DRM system can not prevent me from using my machine as a general-purpose computer, but a secure voting system can. A voting system should really only be able to exhibit a few specific behaviors, and if you want to control those tightly enough it seems to me they could be implemented in hardware. For instance, the high-level behavior of encoding the votes and sending them off through the network could be entirely embedded in hardware, which removes the need for general-purpose networking calls on the part of the software, which could in turn (if implemented properly) make it far more difficult to write replicating code that would spread over a network.
It would be harder to update and cost more to produce -- and I don't know if it makes enough of a difference to render secure electronic voting feasible -- but I think the overall problem is still significantly easier than writing good end-user DRM.
I'm not certain we ever had the homegrown talent in the sense you mean...the US has always thrived on immigration, and a good many (if not most) of our most successful and famous scientists, artists, and engineers were either immigrants themselves or within a couple generations of arriving in the country.
I am continually impressed that Sony (or something, at least) has managed to turn Slashdot against a console which has such an awesome processor for parallel computation, uses open standards and API's from the Khronos Group for almost everything, and officially supports linux - complete with beowulf clustering.
If you'd have told me that a year ago, I'd have said it couldn't be done.
As I read this article, it isn't about making something fearless or preventing fear...it's more about increasing the rate at which a learned fear response decays in the absence of reinforcement. Essentially, the brain has built in mechanisms to "cure" fear on its own, given enough time without reinforcement of that particular fear. Inhibition of this enzyme--oddly enough one linked with plasticity and neural development--makes that process easier/faster.
If I understand correctly, then they are right in saying this would be potentially wonderful for treating cases of PTSD where the fear response does not significantly decrease even at points in time far removed from the initial trauma, but I don't think we have to worry about inhibition of this enzyme erasing people's ability to feel fear or leading to fear-based weapons systems. Those things are almost certainly possible (lesions on the amygdala are thought to tame animals by destroying their ability to feel fear), but I don't think they'll appear as a result of this study.
Like I was saying before, I think the key distinction here is between enforcement and applicability.
I totally and 100% agree with you that the US has no authority to enforce its laws outside of its territory. That's not something I ever meant to argue. What I meant to argue is that--despite lack of enforcement--a number of laws do still _apply_ (in the sense of restricting which actions are legal from a US government perspective) to those outside of US territory. To go back over my example and rephrase it a bit, it doesn't particularly matter what Bob is trying to bring back into the country...it wasn't a matter of the cigars being illegal. I was explaining that bob could be criminally charged for violating US Department of Treasury sactions on cuba. Bob's simple act of spending money in cuba was the illegal part. I was just using cigars because they'd be a stereotypical way for bob to get caught.
According to Treasury's web site at http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/prog rams/cuba/cuba.shtml/, these sanctions _apply_ to all US Citizens and permanent residents, no matter where in the world they happen to be. (If they did not apply in Cuba, they would be very ineffective sanctions) Will these sanctions ever be enforced in Cuba by the Cuban government? Of course not. The enforcement waits for Bob's return to US soil, exactly like you were saying. The law, however, continues to restrict which actions Bob can legally take from a US perspective, no matter where he is.
It would seem they're also producing the PS2 and the 360. In fact, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn/ all the various production difficulties that have plagued consoles this generation and caused endless arguments on the internet seem to have been experienced by this one company, who is actually manufacturing every console currently on the market.
Maybe we need a revolution to take power back from the corrupt government system that has taken over. After all, both the main democratic candidates (Hillary and Barrack) have taken money from the MPAA / RIAA so we cannot expect any change in the next administration.
Wait...are you actually suggesting that people band together in armed revolt and take to the streets with the stated purpose of violently overthrowing the government of the United States and fundamentally altering the social and political order of the nation - all in the name of copyright reform?
As I understand things, Nintendo is not in the business of actually manufacturing hardware. This separates them from companies like Sony.
The Wii is currently being manufactured under contract by a company called Foxconn. My bet would be that the contract only allows for so much of a manufacturing ramp-up without having to renegotiate terms, not to mention any physical production limits Foxconn may run up against. At a certain point Foxconn has to do its own cost-benefit analysis and decide whether or not it's worth creating new manufacturing plants or delivering late on their other contracts in order to meet a demand from Nintendo that is almost certainly going to fall off in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus using an eclipse to show that the sun is bigger than the earth, albeit in a way that's exceedingly round-about and unnecessary.
Context is a huge problem when dealing with natural language. The great thing about spellchecking a program, however, is that context is made perfectly clear by the strict syntax. Otherwise, finding a reliable compiler would replace spellchecking as your top concern.
Furthermore, if it turns out that disproportionately more works whose copyrights are held by the 20% players are illegally copied than those whose copyrights are held by the small labels, then that advantage just grows.
Of course the exact opposite of these scenarios could be occurring, until we see numbers on how often individual label's copyrights were being infringed, or alternatively something like the change in market share for each label, it's going to be pretty hard to tell.
I'd like to second the parent's point. When I was in first grade (in a magnet school no less) I was punished in front of the entire class and daily called a liar for claiming that negative numbers existed. Looking back at what my teacher said and the way she handled it, I honestly believe she didn't know about their existence.
Not only does this lack of knowledge prevent students from learning individual aspects of math, but the fact that my teachers did not understand the underlying _idea_ of math, and the way it can be used to describe patterns, abstractions, and relationships, meant that the way it was taught was essentially as a series of unrelated "tricks" that you could perform with numbers, and any questioning that moved beyond those tricks--such as asking how they worked or how people had come up with them--was dealt with harshly, since they could not even begin to offer an answer.
Once in high school, my teachers began to get better and my parents engaged a wonderful math tutor. Then during university and the years that followed, I began to develop a deeper understanding of the nature of math, the way it worked, and the grand underlying unity of it all. Now I deal handily with differential equations and vector spaces on a regular basis, but to this day I still feel the lack of a truly solid foundation in things like arithmetic and basic algebra.
My history is far from infallible, and I'm certainly looking at it through the lens of recent developments, but every time I've heard of a technological dark age descending upon a region, it's been a localized phenomenon, and other areas of the world were advancing quite rapidly for the time period. During the European dark/middle ages, the Middle East under the Byzantine empire and then the Islamic caliphates was making huge advances in science, mathematics, and technology. These all transfered to Europe in time for it to experience a scientific renaissance while China was falling into technological stagnation. If you look at it on a localized scale, then yes, you are very much correct. On a global scale, however, it seems to me that the rate of change has been steadily advancing at least since the invention of language, and possibly since the introduction of sexual reproduction.
Throughout most of history it was a period of many, many generations between major developments. I agree with you there. My point is that the number of generations has as a rule gotten smaller between each one, to the point that we're now well into fractional generations, with major developments happening every year or so.
To go well back beyond the last 200 years, let's look at two periods - one between 10,000 BC and 5,000 BC, and the next between 5,000 BC and the end of 1 BC. Having done some informal research (mostly via wikipedia and google), I found 9 major technological advances occurring in the first period, three that spanned the two or were estimated to be right on the cusp, and 33 that occurred during the second period. I know that this isn't at all scientific for a number of reasons, but it's meant to demonstrate that I got my assertion from more than just oral histories and living memory.
For people who are interested in offering a critique (which I will gladly accept), here's what I found along with very approximate dates:
Before 5000 BC:
9000-8000 BC - The introduction of the Bow and Arrows
9500 BC - Agriculture begins to appear in the Fertile Crescent.
9000 BC - The appearance of stone structures
8700 BC - The oldest example of worked copper
7500 BC - Oldest known bricks
6500 BC - Knitting (in the form of Naalebinding) is invented
6000 BC - The scratch-plow is invented.
6000-5000 BC - Wine is invented
5400 BC - Irrigation of crops is introduced
On the cusp:
6000-3000 BC the Potter's wheel was invented
5,000 BC - Invention of Beer
5,000 BC - Woven Cloth
After 5000 BC:
4000-3500 BC - Invention of the wheel for transportation (non-potter's)
4000 BC - Salt used as a preservative
3807-3806 BC - First paved, engineered roads
3500-3100 BC - Writing invented
3500 BC - Sundial invented
3000 BC - Use of Tin
3000 BC - Human creation of glass
3000-2600 BC - Decimal system of numbers
3000-2000 BC - Banking invented
3000 BC - Papyrus
2900 BC - Formation of cities in Mesopotamia
2700-2000 BC - The phonetic alphabet
2600 BC - Earliest known dam
2500 BC - Planned cities
2500 BC - Sewage systems
2500 BC - Recorded multiplication tables
2500 BC - Smelted Iron
2400 BC - The abacus
2000 BC - Chariots, made possible by the spoked wheel
1792-1750 BC - Codification of laws (code of Hammurabi)
1650 BC - A method for extracting the square root of a number
1300 BC - Formulaic solution to second-order equations
687 BC - Coinage introduced
515 BC - The crane invented
500 BC - Gears
400 BC - The use of zero as a number
300 BC - The astrolabe
300 BC - The Odometer
300 BC - Horseshoes
202 BC - Hydraulically powered hammer
150 BC - Mechanical computation devices (Antikythera mechanism)
100 BC - Steam engine/aeolipile
20s BC - Concrete
Technology has never been changing as fast as it is now, but that's also been true for as far back as I'm aware...each generation just doesn't seem to see the trend of acceleration that came before them because it all seems so slow compared to what's happening just then.
- An uneducated user from executing a binary file they download from a URL they are given
- A process that user is running from executing further code with that user's privileges
- That user's processes from making outbound TCP/UDP connections
- That user's processes from accessing an SMTP server to send emails
- A user from configuring a process to run on logging in
By my thinking, that's really all that's needed for a botnet to work on a given platform. I am certainly ignorant of many details regarding the BSD/Linux kernels and I stand ready to be corrected, but I believe I've seen all those things happening individually as part of day to day user life on my linux box.TFA's servers aren't responding at the moment, so this might be included, but has anyone tried this with non-IE programs which use the Trident layout engine?
If it's Trident that's bringing down IE, then you're looking at HTML code that could also bring down Windows Media Player, several versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, Steam (from Valve), and other applications which use it to render web pages. I think at least some versions of Winamp used trident as well, but I'm not sure about that.
Very often the civilizations that suffered at the hands of colonizers were less technologically advanced because they had less trade and less contact with other civilizations - whether through political choice or geographic isolation. Those civilizations which embrace trade can can very often catch up to their more advanced neighbors in a relatively short period of time - take Europe in the renaissance, for instance. I can't think of a single situation where isolationism allowed a country to overcome a technology deficit, however. In this hypothetical situation of meeting technologically advanced alien life, if we isolate ourselves because we fear that they have better technology then all we are doing is slowing down our own rate of technological development and making the disparity worse when we do eventually come into contact.
Actually, practitioners of "medicine" thought that if they used "science", they might help the young man. Today he's up and talking solely because of science applied as medicine, not in spite of it.
You should think a bit about the difference between a poor prognosis and a mathematical impossibility. His brain was pretty much still there, just broken, the chances of our figuring out how to fix it within his lifetime were slim, but we overcame those odds with at least a partial fix. It didn't require any magic, or wondrous new discoveries about the nature of the universe, and the fix works in accordance with the way we understood the brain, even before this man's case.
A brain which has been pulped has lost pretty much all its information. Reliable regeneration of information when it has been completely destroyed is more of a mathematical impossibility, and that is where you are facing a proven fact rather than an estimated chance. Barring a wondrous new discovery that gives us very detailed information regarding the physical structure of the brain prior to the damage, pulped brains _cannot_ be restored to their previous state.
You can choose to disregard the validity of the formal proofs, or the information given to us by humanity's medical experience, but if you do so you deprive yourself of the predictive framework which allows for advances like the one in TFA. And that leaves you attempting to cure him by blind trial and error, which I'm betting both him and his family are glad his doctors _didn't_ do.
As I see it there is one key difference. A secure DRM system can not prevent me from using my machine as a general-purpose computer, but a secure voting system can. A voting system should really only be able to exhibit a few specific behaviors, and if you want to control those tightly enough it seems to me they could be implemented in hardware. For instance, the high-level behavior of encoding the votes and sending them off through the network could be entirely embedded in hardware, which removes the need for general-purpose networking calls on the part of the software, which could in turn (if implemented properly) make it far more difficult to write replicating code that would spread over a network.
It would be harder to update and cost more to produce -- and I don't know if it makes enough of a difference to render secure electronic voting feasible -- but I think the overall problem is still significantly easier than writing good end-user DRM.
If only there were some way of modding the modders...it'd be like moderation, only meta.
I actually find it far easier to control my gate from the side opposite its hinges. Lots more leverage that way.
I'm not certain we ever had the homegrown talent in the sense you mean...the US has always thrived on immigration, and a good many (if not most) of our most successful and famous scientists, artists, and engineers were either immigrants themselves or within a couple generations of arriving in the country.
I am continually impressed that Sony (or something, at least) has managed to turn Slashdot against a console which has such an awesome processor for parallel computation, uses open standards and API's from the Khronos Group for almost everything, and officially supports linux - complete with beowulf clustering.
If you'd have told me that a year ago, I'd have said it couldn't be done.
As I read this article, it isn't about making something fearless or preventing fear...it's more about increasing the rate at which a learned fear response decays in the absence of reinforcement. Essentially, the brain has built in mechanisms to "cure" fear on its own, given enough time without reinforcement of that particular fear. Inhibition of this enzyme--oddly enough one linked with plasticity and neural development--makes that process easier/faster.
If I understand correctly, then they are right in saying this would be potentially wonderful for treating cases of PTSD where the fear response does not significantly decrease even at points in time far removed from the initial trauma, but I don't think we have to worry about inhibition of this enzyme erasing people's ability to feel fear or leading to fear-based weapons systems. Those things are almost certainly possible (lesions on the amygdala are thought to tame animals by destroying their ability to feel fear), but I don't think they'll appear as a result of this study.
Like I was saying before, I think the key distinction here is between enforcement and applicability.
g rams/cuba/cuba.shtml/, these sanctions _apply_ to all US Citizens and permanent residents, no matter where in the world they happen to be. (If they did not apply in Cuba, they would be very ineffective sanctions) Will these sanctions ever be enforced in Cuba by the Cuban government? Of course not. The enforcement waits for Bob's return to US soil, exactly like you were saying. The law, however, continues to restrict which actions Bob can legally take from a US perspective, no matter where he is.
I totally and 100% agree with you that the US has no authority to enforce its laws outside of its territory. That's not something I ever meant to argue. What I meant to argue is that--despite lack of enforcement--a number of laws do still _apply_ (in the sense of restricting which actions are legal from a US government perspective) to those outside of US territory. To go back over my example and rephrase it a bit, it doesn't particularly matter what Bob is trying to bring back into the country...it wasn't a matter of the cigars being illegal. I was explaining that bob could be criminally charged for violating US Department of Treasury sactions on cuba. Bob's simple act of spending money in cuba was the illegal part. I was just using cigars because they'd be a stereotypical way for bob to get caught.
According to Treasury's web site at http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/pro
It would seem they're also producing the PS2 and the 360. In fact, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn/ all the various production difficulties that have plagued consoles this generation and caused endless arguments on the internet seem to have been experienced by this one company, who is actually manufacturing every console currently on the market.
Now that I find funny.
I don't know...Berzerk used to seriously stress me out when I was playing. Evil Otto still scares me a little.
As I understand things, Nintendo is not in the business of actually manufacturing hardware. This separates them from companies like Sony.
The Wii is currently being manufactured under contract by a company called Foxconn. My bet would be that the contract only allows for so much of a manufacturing ramp-up without having to renegotiate terms, not to mention any physical production limits Foxconn may run up against. At a certain point Foxconn has to do its own cost-benefit analysis and decide whether or not it's worth creating new manufacturing plants or delivering late on their other contracts in order to meet a demand from Nintendo that is almost certainly going to fall off in the future.
Okay, I love my Wii and all, but have you had really high end caviar?