Hear, hear. But even Nintendo fell into this trap with Twilight Princess. They used shaking as another button which triggers attacks, since the Wii game is more or less a direct port from the Game Cube.
To date, only a few game actually use the controller in a proper game (I'm not counting Wario Wares and Mario Party 8 type games): Wii Sports, Tiger Woods golf and maybe one or two more that I've forgotten.
Also disappointing to me is the fact that there aren't any RPG's for it yet. No, I'm not talking about WoW or somesuch, I want Final Fintasy or an RPG along those lines. Wii control optional.:)
WHY would carriers want this thing on their networks again?
Because WiFi only covers a nanopercent of the area that GSM/3G covers. This means that any service you provide via WiFi, you'll also want to be able to use over EDGE/HDSPA/GPRS/whatever which uses the network and generates revenue. You'll also be using it to make calls.
In general, a carrier will just want you to have something connected to their network that you want to use and which you'll want to use a lot. I, for one, mostly just use my phone for SMS and actual phone conversations, but if I could get the phone to use WiFi for e-mail/messaging (ICQ+MSN) then I would be more likely to accept a few bytes flying over GPRS or something to get those messages when WiFi is not available. A lot more willing than I would be knowing that ALL of that data goes over an expensive network.
The only thing I'm worried about is the potential for hackers to hack the network stacks and trying to get free phone calls/data transfers with this device. If that happens it will be banned faster than you can say iPhone.
It's a common mistake to believe that most money in a pharmaceutical company goes into R&D. Most of it goes into advertising. Look it up. So why is 80% of the price of my cancer drug going to advertising Advil again?
1. Have friend hire some models and take pictures of them nekked.
2. Put said pictures on MY site.
3. Have friend sue anyone who enters my site, but "neglect" to sue me for putting them up.
4. Profit!!!
My problem isn't that resolution has increased or that bitmaps had less colors then. My complaint is that I can't hardly distinguish between what is what in OoT. The game is very blurry. Perhaps this is an effect of poor emulation on the Wii, I don't know, but it looks really crap and it takes me out of the game completely.
Perhaps a contributing factor is that I never played OoT when the game was new, so I have no nostagic feeling toward the game whatsoever.
Nevertheless, I do believe that SMB's playability factor is so high that even someone born in the 90ies might enjoy it.
Have you played Ocarina of Time recently? I have. I had never played it before but acquired the Anniversary Disc for Zelda games and played it on my Wii. The graphics are really bad. SMB and the original Zelda have clean crisp graphics. Ocarina of Time have untold amounts of problems with aliasing and stuff like that. It's almost unplayable now that the standard has been raised so far by modern games and consoles.
For a game to be truly classic it must be possible to pick up again, even after all this time. SMB and Zelda qualify. Ocarina of time does not.
Also, no FPS game sold only on a console can ever be a "best game ever" since FPS must be played with a mouse. I guess that could change now that some of the recent consoles have USB and perhaps soon there will actually be FPS games for consoles that use a mouse (or a similar device). And no, the Wiimote is not enough. You can point, it helps, but you still can't make a 180 degree turn-around like you can with a mouse.
My guess is that they could not go to the US from fear of being arrested for breaking the DMCA/some other law. I for sure wouldn't go to the US under any circumstances with information on how to defeat any kind of security.
Security by obscurity still seems to be the mantra.
There were/are many kinds of MUD servers available. Most let users collaborate in creating the world. It's all up to the game masters who to give editing privileges. MUD was originally only text, just like text adventure games, but some gained some graphics along the way. I don't think I've played a single graphical MUD though and by the time they started to catch on I think Ultima Online and its ilk were already available.
Almost as old a concept as Zork itself (not really, but probably as old as or older than WWW) is MUD, Multi User Dungeon. Text based, the point of the game was a sort of Munchkin-role-playing where you were supposed to gain levels quickly in order to become powerful enough to get allowed to write your own areas to the game. This is basically where the basis for all modern MMORPG's come from. Except no WoW player is likely to be allowed to add his/her own areas to the game.
Anyway, look it up. There are most likely some of these still active. You can download them and start a server yourself.
When I studied at the university in the late nineties people where still playing MUD all night, and it was considered an old kind of game back then.
Heh, but isn't it better to come up with alternatives to fossil fuels. Using plastic would be a seriously temporary solution, with China also starting to become a motorized nation, all the fuel recovered from plastic would probably only last a month and what would we do then?
I know plastics are being recovered now, but what we need is more plastic, not more fossil fuels. Fossil fuels we can live without, plastics would be very difficult (but then again, plastics can also be replaced by different starch-based products, wood fiber and others).
Bad analogy warning:To me, researching ways to turn plastic into oil is like researching ways to make cigarette smoke back into cigarettes, not something we really need, although I bet smokers would disagree.
Finally! I mean, we've got enough plastic to drive our cars on forever, no? And we don't have any use for that plastic anyway, I mean, plastic isn't very useful at all now is it.
What about coming up with more effective ways of making old plastic into new plastic instead, since we have a tendency to destroy the raw material for making plastic by burning it in our vehicles.
Was going to post this in the "UK BAN"-thread, but post it here instead.
I have always been a firm believer in films/games not making people more violent. Something happened to me, though, to sort of make me doubt my strong belief.
I bought Manhunt and played it. It was really fun, a great little sneak-and-kill game. But it was very violent and I did not really like being that violent but it was part of the game and making the gruesome kills was fun in a strange way. It was axhilarating to see how long you could sneak behind someone before you had to do the kill.
When I finished the game I played for a particularly long day and that night I had the most bizarre and gruesome dreams. I dreamt that I cleft people with chainsaws and ran over them with my car. Everything felt OK and I didn't have any moral complaints in my dream, which, if you ask anyone in my surrounding, is totally different from my personality. I am not a psychopath as far as I can tell.:)
I haven't had any such dreams since and I hope I won't again (though they weren't nightmares in the true sense since I wasn't scared in them, only by my reaction to them). What I'm saying is that I do believe we are affected by what we see/experience. At least if its done frequently enough.
In cases like very violent films or games, however, having a 18-year restriction on buying the game is enough. Grown up people can decide for themselves what they want to see/play. I felt desturbed by my experience and probably won't buy Manhunt 2 for that reason, but I certainly don't believe in denying the experience from anyone else who is old enough to make a grown up decision about this.
I find it amusing that you think the point of having access to fire-arms is moot. How many people do you think he could have killed with a sword? Let me tell you: One, and he could have injured a couple more. Consider the time and effort it takes to actually kill someone with a sword. It is damned hard.
We had a madman going into a RFSL-clinic (an organisation for the equal treatment of gays and lesbians) and attacking a woman with an axe (she got hit in the head). The woman survived. Do you honestly think she would have been the only victim if he had had access to a handgun of any sort? Do you think she would have survived?
Having access to guns doesn't make a person a murderer. But a murderer with access to firearms (or other kinds of similar weapons, grenades, explosives, poison gas) will be way more effective than one without them.
Also, the old "If everyone had guns they could have defended themselves" NRA-rhetoric is also stupid. Would you have wanted to be in a classroom full of scared kids with handguns when the rumors of a madman going from room to room killing kids gets going? It would be a massacre of biblical proportions of people shooting each other by mistake.
In my book this is scary because so much of the worlds e-mail is sent into (and because of this stored for three years) by the US. Am I the only one seeing the problem here? Someone will have to go through all the "Hi mom. I don't feel so good, my girlfriend cheated on me"-emails to find the ones that actually have anything to do with the case? There will be humans doing the searches, humans who in general like having fun and will very likely abuse their rights to read e-mails and look for evidence.
This is one of those things that seems lika a good idea at the time, but the potential for abuse is limitless.
I really hope my friends aren't stupid enough to put pictures of me on the Internet without asking me first. Never mind tagging them with my name. I would never put an image of another person on a public web without asking their permission first. It's just common sense.
Since Micro$osft and $ony both make their dough on licensing, they have a huge incentive to have games made. They push and push and push to get the games made. They even pay for development of some of the really good titles to get them going.
Whereas Nintendo is already making dough. Their incentive on making games is much lower and they tend to spend most of their time thinking up worthless doodads to pimp your Wii box with. I have a Wii and Zelda was a fantastic game, which I played through in a week. But since then I basically haven't played more than an hour or two. The titles for Wii just aren't exciting at all. Begin Rant: I mean, Excite Truck? I don't think so. Super Monkey Ball makes me seasick (and anyone watching anyone else play as well). Raving Rabbids was a lot of fun. While it lasted. Played through that in 2 days.
I am still waiting for a golf game that works. The reviews (and screenshots) of PGA '07 was less than stellar.
I'm sure you could make the same arguments for PS3 and XBox 360 when they came out, that there were few games, but the quality of PS2-games (God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Kingdom of Hearts aso), for example, more than makes up for that and Oblivion for 360 would have been killer (I already played through it twice on the PC). Maybe you notice that I'm a fan of RPG and that I'm not a fan of FPS on consoles (where is my mouse!?). So where are the RPG's for Wii. There is a serious hole in the lineup here. End Rant
The main problem, and advantage, of the Wii is the controllers. After the initial excitement dies down, you realize that games made specifically for the Wii are going to be fewer than the games made for PC/XBox 360/PS2/PS3/Game Cube because of the controllers. I'm not going to count games that only use the controller's sensors as glorified buttons (80% of Zelda's control scheme was the same as the Game Cube, except instead of pushing B-button to slash, you shook the nunchuck, the only Wii specific control was pointing the controller at the screen to aim, which I liked a lot). The feeling so far for me is that the controller is not sensitive enough for gyroscopic control (as in Rabbids when you fly) and it is hard to tilt the controller forward (the wrist just doesn't bend that way) and that we're just going to see an endless stream of games ported from other consoles with some adapted Wii controls, except for the games that Nintendo themselves make or have made.
Oh, come on, no one will throw you in jail in, for example Germany, for saying the Holocaust never happened. Speaking your mind is not illegal. Writing it in a book or paper might get you a fine, but I think that's about the extent of it. Mind, I'm Swedish so I'm not to clear about German law (and I think this is one of the places where denying the Holocaust is in fact illegal).
Anyone from Germany who is a lawyer is free to correct me on all these guesses.:)
This is one of the reasons why I changed my mind on the Danish cartoons that enraged the muslim world so much.
Fear cannot be allowed to dictate what we say or teach.
If you say what you think and someone threatens your life for saying it, they have broken the law in most civilized countries. Send them to jail.
In this case it's not even a matter of belief. It's a matter of fact. The Holocaust happened and denying it is in itself illegal in some countries. Rewriting history is a very serious thing, even though it's being done on a daily basis. History is there for us to learn from so we do not repeat it. We better learn our lessons or we're bound to make the same mistakes over and over.
I will freely admit that I don't use Skype at all. But the internet radio stations I have heard that have interviewed celebrities over the Internet convince me that this way of communicating is not even ready for voice only, much less voice and video. At times it was nigh impossible to understand what the interviewee was saying. And this was people who are supposed to know how Internet communication works (and who had technicians on both ends of the conversation).
Also, considering that the best speech recognition software still can only reach about 95% accuracy (which means that every 20th word would be wrong, 98% is considered the lowest limit for practical use) and the state of automatic translation technology today, we're looking at many years of development before software will be ready to make on the fly translations of conversations over the Internet.
I hate to break it to these "visionaries" but the stuff that humans find most easy to do is in general what computers finds most difficult to do, and vice versa. That's why we get so much use out of them.:)
I think maybe we're looking at different definitions of cable. Cable in Sweden means, among other things, ComHem, for which there is a couple of digital decoders available. One called FloppyDTV which is internal (PCI-card) and one called FireDTV which is a firewire external box. Only the latter works with encrypted sources, for some reason, and I believe that currently these cards/boxes only support Windows MCE, though the company that makes them (Digital-Everywhere) says that they are willing to share knowledge with any developer that wishes to produce drivers for GNU/Linux.
I don't know, but I'm assuming you're in the states, which may be the reason why you don't know about these boxes, the maker is an Austrian company. Maybe they're not available in the US, I don't know, or, as I said first in my post, we're talking about different things.
As far as I know there are three kinds of digital TV, DV-T for terrestrial, DV-S for sattelite and DV-C for cable. The boxes/cards above are both DV-C (available in DV-T).
It bothers me that people think this is a big waste of money. It will be a very cheap thing to do. Consider the amounts the banks are losing now. I'm thinking that even a small dropoff in that amount would easily pay for something so trivial as a new top level domain.
Adding a dialogue that is shown once you first step into a.bank domain that informs you that "you are now entering a safe.bank site, that is why the address bar is green" which is never shown again would educate most people who read dialogues. Not all people do, of course, but the people that don't will have to look out for themselves.
Also, DNS poisoning requires trojans and stuff, now we're talking a whole other level of problem. Once a computer has been compromised that way, there are a thousand ways to obtain vital phishable information about a user.
I would say, my bank uses one of the few fairly safe systems. When logging in, you use a small device that generates pseudo-random-numbers. A challenge-response for logging on, for adding new receiving bank-accounts and for transferring money and you would have to be duped more than once (and the actual bank account number for the receiving account AND the amount of money beign transferred would have to be used or an incorrect response would be generated).
It's not foolproof, but it's very good in my opinion and as safe as you can get I think. Now they have even added a 9 at the beginning of all the logon random numbers so that a phishing site can't use it to generate "acceptable" amounts for transfer. At least I would react if someone tried to transfer an eight-digit amount of money from my account and the first digit being a 9.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear. But even Nintendo fell into this trap with Twilight Princess. They used shaking as another button which triggers attacks, since the Wii game is more or less a direct port from the Game Cube.
To date, only a few game actually use the controller in a proper game (I'm not counting Wario Wares and Mario Party 8 type games): Wii Sports, Tiger Woods golf and maybe one or two more that I've forgotten.
Also disappointing to me is the fact that there aren't any RPG's for it yet. No, I'm not talking about WoW or somesuch, I want Final Fintasy or an RPG along those lines. Wii control optional. :)
WHY would carriers want this thing on their networks again?
Because WiFi only covers a nanopercent of the area that GSM/3G covers. This means that any service you provide via WiFi, you'll also want to be able to use over EDGE/HDSPA/GPRS/whatever which uses the network and generates revenue. You'll also be using it to make calls.
In general, a carrier will just want you to have something connected to their network that you want to use and which you'll want to use a lot. I, for one, mostly just use my phone for SMS and actual phone conversations, but if I could get the phone to use WiFi for e-mail/messaging (ICQ+MSN) then I would be more likely to accept a few bytes flying over GPRS or something to get those messages when WiFi is not available. A lot more willing than I would be knowing that ALL of that data goes over an expensive network.
The only thing I'm worried about is the potential for hackers to hack the network stacks and trying to get free phone calls/data transfers with this device. If that happens it will be banned faster than you can say iPhone.
It's a common mistake to believe that most money in a pharmaceutical company goes into R&D. Most of it goes into advertising. Look it up. So why is 80% of the price of my cancer drug going to advertising Advil again?
1. Have friend hire some models and take pictures of them nekked.
2. Put said pictures on MY site.
3. Have friend sue anyone who enters my site, but "neglect" to sue me for putting them up.
4. Profit!!!
My problem isn't that resolution has increased or that bitmaps had less colors then. My complaint is that I can't hardly distinguish between what is what in OoT. The game is very blurry. Perhaps this is an effect of poor emulation on the Wii, I don't know, but it looks really crap and it takes me out of the game completely.
Perhaps a contributing factor is that I never played OoT when the game was new, so I have no nostagic feeling toward the game whatsoever.
Nevertheless, I do believe that SMB's playability factor is so high that even someone born in the 90ies might enjoy it.
Have you played Ocarina of Time recently? I have. I had never played it before but acquired the Anniversary Disc for Zelda games and played it on my Wii. The graphics are really bad. SMB and the original Zelda have clean crisp graphics. Ocarina of Time have untold amounts of problems with aliasing and stuff like that. It's almost unplayable now that the standard has been raised so far by modern games and consoles.
For a game to be truly classic it must be possible to pick up again, even after all this time. SMB and Zelda qualify. Ocarina of time does not.
Also, no FPS game sold only on a console can ever be a "best game ever" since FPS must be played with a mouse. I guess that could change now that some of the recent consoles have USB and perhaps soon there will actually be FPS games for consoles that use a mouse (or a similar device). And no, the Wiimote is not enough. You can point, it helps, but you still can't make a 180 degree turn-around like you can with a mouse.
My guess is that they could not go to the US from fear of being arrested for breaking the DMCA/some other law. I for sure wouldn't go to the US under any circumstances with information on how to defeat any kind of security.
Security by obscurity still seems to be the mantra.
There were/are many kinds of MUD servers available. Most let users collaborate in creating the world. It's all up to the game masters who to give editing privileges. MUD was originally only text, just like text adventure games, but some gained some graphics along the way. I don't think I've played a single graphical MUD though and by the time they started to catch on I think Ultima Online and its ilk were already available.
Almost as old a concept as Zork itself (not really, but probably as old as or older than WWW) is MUD, Multi User Dungeon. Text based, the point of the game was a sort of Munchkin-role-playing where you were supposed to gain levels quickly in order to become powerful enough to get allowed to write your own areas to the game. This is basically where the basis for all modern MMORPG's come from. Except no WoW player is likely to be allowed to add his/her own areas to the game.
Anyway, look it up. There are most likely some of these still active. You can download them and start a server yourself.
When I studied at the university in the late nineties people where still playing MUD all night, and it was considered an old kind of game back then.
Heh, but isn't it better to come up with alternatives to fossil fuels. Using plastic would be a seriously temporary solution, with China also starting to become a motorized nation, all the fuel recovered from plastic would probably only last a month and what would we do then?
I know plastics are being recovered now, but what we need is more plastic, not more fossil fuels. Fossil fuels we can live without, plastics would be very difficult (but then again, plastics can also be replaced by different starch-based products, wood fiber and others).
Bad analogy warning:To me, researching ways to turn plastic into oil is like researching ways to make cigarette smoke back into cigarettes, not something we really need, although I bet smokers would disagree.
Finally! I mean, we've got enough plastic to drive our cars on forever, no? And we don't have any use for that plastic anyway, I mean, plastic isn't very useful at all now is it.
What about coming up with more effective ways of making old plastic into new plastic instead, since we have a tendency to destroy the raw material for making plastic by burning it in our vehicles.
The age restriction solution to this problem is like democracy. It's the least worst solution to the problem.
Until someone can come up with a better system, this is the one we have.
Was going to post this in the "UK BAN"-thread, but post it here instead.
I have always been a firm believer in films/games not making people more violent. Something happened to me, though, to sort of make me doubt my strong belief.
I bought Manhunt and played it. It was really fun, a great little sneak-and-kill game. But it was very violent and I did not really like being that violent but it was part of the game and making the gruesome kills was fun in a strange way. It was axhilarating to see how long you could sneak behind someone before you had to do the kill.
When I finished the game I played for a particularly long day and that night I had the most bizarre and gruesome dreams. I dreamt that I cleft people with chainsaws and ran over them with my car. Everything felt OK and I didn't have any moral complaints in my dream, which, if you ask anyone in my surrounding, is totally different from my personality. I am not a psychopath as far as I can tell. :)
I haven't had any such dreams since and I hope I won't again (though they weren't nightmares in the true sense since I wasn't scared in them, only by my reaction to them). What I'm saying is that I do believe we are affected by what we see/experience. At least if its done frequently enough.
In cases like very violent films or games, however, having a 18-year restriction on buying the game is enough. Grown up people can decide for themselves what they want to see/play. I felt desturbed by my experience and probably won't buy Manhunt 2 for that reason, but I certainly don't believe in denying the experience from anyone else who is old enough to make a grown up decision about this.
I find it amusing that you think the point of having access to fire-arms is moot. How many people do you think he could have killed with a sword? Let me tell you: One, and he could have injured a couple more. Consider the time and effort it takes to actually kill someone with a sword. It is damned hard.
We had a madman going into a RFSL-clinic (an organisation for the equal treatment of gays and lesbians) and attacking a woman with an axe (she got hit in the head). The woman survived. Do you honestly think she would have been the only victim if he had had access to a handgun of any sort? Do you think she would have survived?
Having access to guns doesn't make a person a murderer. But a murderer with access to firearms (or other kinds of similar weapons, grenades, explosives, poison gas) will be way more effective than one without them.
Also, the old "If everyone had guns they could have defended themselves" NRA-rhetoric is also stupid. Would you have wanted to be in a classroom full of scared kids with handguns when the rumors of a madman going from room to room killing kids gets going? It would be a massacre of biblical proportions of people shooting each other by mistake.
In my book this is scary because so much of the worlds e-mail is sent into (and because of this stored for three years) by the US. Am I the only one seeing the problem here? Someone will have to go through all the "Hi mom. I don't feel so good, my girlfriend cheated on me"-emails to find the ones that actually have anything to do with the case? There will be humans doing the searches, humans who in general like having fun and will very likely abuse their rights to read e-mails and look for evidence.
This is one of those things that seems lika a good idea at the time, but the potential for abuse is limitless.
With that kind of friends, who needs enemies?
I really hope my friends aren't stupid enough to put pictures of me on the Internet without asking me first. Never mind tagging them with my name. I would never put an image of another person on a public web without asking their permission first. It's just common sense.
Then again, common sense is uncommon these days.
Since Micro$osft and $ony both make their dough on licensing, they have a huge incentive to have games made. They push and push and push to get the games made. They even pay for development of some of the really good titles to get them going.
Whereas Nintendo is already making dough. Their incentive on making games is much lower and they tend to spend most of their time thinking up worthless doodads to pimp your Wii box with. I have a Wii and Zelda was a fantastic game, which I played through in a week. But since then I basically haven't played more than an hour or two. The titles for Wii just aren't exciting at all. Begin Rant: I mean, Excite Truck? I don't think so. Super Monkey Ball makes me seasick (and anyone watching anyone else play as well). Raving Rabbids was a lot of fun. While it lasted. Played through that in 2 days.
I am still waiting for a golf game that works. The reviews (and screenshots) of PGA '07 was less than stellar.
I'm sure you could make the same arguments for PS3 and XBox 360 when they came out, that there were few games, but the quality of PS2-games (God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Kingdom of Hearts aso), for example, more than makes up for that and Oblivion for 360 would have been killer (I already played through it twice on the PC). Maybe you notice that I'm a fan of RPG and that I'm not a fan of FPS on consoles (where is my mouse!?). So where are the RPG's for Wii. There is a serious hole in the lineup here. End Rant
The main problem, and advantage, of the Wii is the controllers. After the initial excitement dies down, you realize that games made specifically for the Wii are going to be fewer than the games made for PC/XBox 360/PS2/PS3/Game Cube because of the controllers. I'm not going to count games that only use the controller's sensors as glorified buttons (80% of Zelda's control scheme was the same as the Game Cube, except instead of pushing B-button to slash, you shook the nunchuck, the only Wii specific control was pointing the controller at the screen to aim, which I liked a lot). The feeling so far for me is that the controller is not sensitive enough for gyroscopic control (as in Rabbids when you fly) and it is hard to tilt the controller forward (the wrist just doesn't bend that way) and that we're just going to see an endless stream of games ported from other consoles with some adapted Wii controls, except for the games that Nintendo themselves make or have made.
Yes, you are right. Of this I am ignorant. Now I know better. Though I fail to see how calling me ignorant helped.
Still not convinced that you can get thrown in jail for it. Do you have any court cases?
Oh, come on, no one will throw you in jail in, for example Germany, for saying the Holocaust never happened. Speaking your mind is not illegal. Writing it in a book or paper might get you a fine, but I think that's about the extent of it. Mind, I'm Swedish so I'm not to clear about German law (and I think this is one of the places where denying the Holocaust is in fact illegal).
Anyone from Germany who is a lawyer is free to correct me on all these guesses. :)
This is one of the reasons why I changed my mind on the Danish cartoons that enraged the muslim world so much.
Fear cannot be allowed to dictate what we say or teach.
If you say what you think and someone threatens your life for saying it, they have broken the law in most civilized countries. Send them to jail.
In this case it's not even a matter of belief. It's a matter of fact. The Holocaust happened and denying it is in itself illegal in some countries. Rewriting history is a very serious thing, even though it's being done on a daily basis. History is there for us to learn from so we do not repeat it. We better learn our lessons or we're bound to make the same mistakes over and over.
Well, it's not paranoia if they're actually after you.
I will freely admit that I don't use Skype at all. But the internet radio stations I have heard that have interviewed celebrities over the Internet convince me that this way of communicating is not even ready for voice only, much less voice and video. At times it was nigh impossible to understand what the interviewee was saying. And this was people who are supposed to know how Internet communication works (and who had technicians on both ends of the conversation).
Also, considering that the best speech recognition software still can only reach about 95% accuracy (which means that every 20th word would be wrong, 98% is considered the lowest limit for practical use) and the state of automatic translation technology today, we're looking at many years of development before software will be ready to make on the fly translations of conversations over the Internet.
I hate to break it to these "visionaries" but the stuff that humans find most easy to do is in general what computers finds most difficult to do, and vice versa. That's why we get so much use out of them. :)
I think maybe we're looking at different definitions of cable. Cable in Sweden means, among other things, ComHem, for which there is a couple of digital decoders available. One called FloppyDTV which is internal (PCI-card) and one called FireDTV which is a firewire external box. Only the latter works with encrypted sources, for some reason, and I believe that currently these cards/boxes only support Windows MCE, though the company that makes them (Digital-Everywhere) says that they are willing to share knowledge with any developer that wishes to produce drivers for GNU/Linux.
I don't know, but I'm assuming you're in the states, which may be the reason why you don't know about these boxes, the maker is an Austrian company. Maybe they're not available in the US, I don't know, or, as I said first in my post, we're talking about different things.
As far as I know there are three kinds of digital TV, DV-T for terrestrial, DV-S for sattelite and DV-C for cable. The boxes/cards above are both DV-C (available in DV-T).
It bothers me that people think this is a big waste of money. It will be a very cheap thing to do. Consider the amounts the banks are losing now. I'm thinking that even a small dropoff in that amount would easily pay for something so trivial as a new top level domain.
Adding a dialogue that is shown once you first step into a .bank domain that informs you that "you are now entering a safe .bank site, that is why the address bar is green" which is never shown again would educate most people who read dialogues. Not all people do, of course, but the people that don't will have to look out for themselves.
Also, DNS poisoning requires trojans and stuff, now we're talking a whole other level of problem. Once a computer has been compromised that way, there are a thousand ways to obtain vital phishable information about a user.
I would say, my bank uses one of the few fairly safe systems. When logging in, you use a small device that generates pseudo-random-numbers. A challenge-response for logging on, for adding new receiving bank-accounts and for transferring money and you would have to be duped more than once (and the actual bank account number for the receiving account AND the amount of money beign transferred would have to be used or an incorrect response would be generated).
It's not foolproof, but it's very good in my opinion and as safe as you can get I think. Now they have even added a 9 at the beginning of all the logon random numbers so that a phishing site can't use it to generate "acceptable" amounts for transfer. At least I would react if someone tried to transfer an eight-digit amount of money from my account and the first digit being a 9. :)