The survey controls for this by comparing the number of iPod owners who admit to pirating song to the number of other player owners who also admit to pirating songs.
Presumably, neither number is an accurate representation of the actual percentage of users who do pirate songs. The comparison between the numbers, however, is valid. It indicates either iPod users are less inclined to pirate, or that they are more inclined to lie about it.
The former explanation is reasonably supported by postulating ITMS as a successful and legitimate way to meet demand for music among iPod owners. The latter explanation I don't have a reasonable rationale for (I don't see why iPod users, as a group, should be more inclined to lie about illegal activity than the other group), though it could certainly still be valid.
Except the results of the survey compared the percentage of iPod users who admitted to piracy (7%) to the percentage of other player users who admitted to piracy (20+%). This means one of two things. Either:
a) iPod users are less likely to pirate music, or b) iPod users are less likely to admit to pirating music.
A reasonable explanation for the former conclusion is that ITMS successfully meets the demand for music among iPod users, while other players are not tied to such effective and legitimate tools. I don't have a reasonable explanation for why iPod users, as a group, should be more dishonest than owners of other players, so I tend to conclude (a). This could, of course, be wrong.
Either way, the survey isn't BS, at least not for the reason you assert. It's got a built-in control for the very error you're complaining about.
Lemme see, we've got Orion...The problem is that ALL of them require you to obtain orbit first
I bet you could launch something into orbit with an Orion drive. Just don't plan on coming back for a few thousand years.
Re:Paranoia the destroyer, and it goes like this..
on
Insider Threat
·
· Score: 1
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
Oblivious to the problem, or resigned to it?
on
Insider Threat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This sounds bogus to me.
I doubt many companies are "oblivious" to the insider threat, it's just considered an acceptable cost of doing business. For example, a grocery store I used to work at knew perfectly well that their employees were lifting candy from the bulk candy dispenser (to pick an example). But they also knew the money they lost on that was significantly less than the cost of installing cameras and paying someone to review the tapes, or than the cost in lost sales of eliminating the bulk candy dispenser. So, when someone was caught red-handed, they were read the riot act (at least) or outright fired (at worst), but no special effort was made to catch people.
I don't think the owners of that grocery store were business prodigies, either. My guess is that the same sort of logic applies to most employers: the cost of preventing the infraction is higher than the cost of allowing it. The truth of this is reflected in which industries do protect themselves against the "insider threat": places like casinos, where a successfully criminal insider could lose them huge quantities of money.
Meanwhile, the book seems to make the same suggestion a lot of security experts do: if a user doesn't need the technology, then don't let them use it. This sounds good, but it carries costs, too. First, of course, the cost of setting up and maintaining a network that enforces such policies. But second, the cost in employee morale, which cannot be discounted. Another job I had not all that long ago was in an office that didn't allow its employees to listen to talk radio. Music was fine, but talk radio was too much of a distraction. Since you didn't need it to do your job, you weren't allowed to have it.
The effect on morale was, to put it mildly, negative. Honestly, it's one of the reasons I didn't have the job for very long. Email and internet access are similar: employees have become accustomed, rightly or wrongly, to some personal use of these technologies. Take that away, and you're sure to end up with disgruntled employees, no matter how rational your reasons.
Moreover, it's a question of trust. If you demonstrate to all your employees that you don't trust them, odds are good you'll increase the number of employees who will live up (or down, if you prefer) to your expectation. At best, you'll incur the costs associated with high turnover rates. At worst, you'll fall victim to even more pernicious crime than you otherwise might have.
I guess the point is, it's not necessarily ignorance or even apathy that causes businesses to be vulnerable to insiders, it's simple cost/benefit analysis.
Actually, and pleasantly, that's not as true as many people think. In the US, only four states (mine included, though we're working on it) prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons. Nine states restrict it ("restrict" meaning that the you need approval to get a permit, rather than them needing a reason to deny you one), thirty-five states are "shall issue," meaning they have to give you a permit on request (and payment, of course) unless there is a reason not to (i.e., you're a felon), and two states which have no permitting requirements at all (Alaska and Vermont).
I don't know offhand the stats regarding which states allow open carry, beyond that mine does.
In any case, the problem you're talking about is most prevalent in CA and NY, which technically do issue concealed carry permits, but only if you beg permission from the government. Which means you don't get one unless you're famous or "important."
Fair enough. In a sense, I also applaud anyone seriously trying to further the understanding of the universe, even if it's by sheer crackpottery. Some crackpots, after all, have turned out to be right.
However: it does not logically follow that every crackpot promising a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow should be carefully listened to. Once they've got some sort of real supporting evidence, then it's news.
Until then, it's just smoke, mirrors, and wishful thinking.
First: it's perhaps prideful of me, but I like to think that we haven't just rewritten "known" physical laws at random, but have fairly steadily progressed towards the actual reality of things. Thus, modern understanding is less susceptible to suddenly being overturned than older understanding.
Second: yes, we could certainly be wrong about the light speed limit in one fashion or another. In fact, I hope we are. This does not mean, however, that every Joe Bloggs who says "I can break the speed of light!" is news. It will be news if, some day, someone actually performs some real science that indicates breaking the speed of light is possible. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You know, like developing a way to actually track heavenly bodies, and thereby demonstrate that we're not the center of everything.
I am also quite sure that, over the course of centuries, current understanding of many things will be turned on its head. This story, however, is not an exampple of that happening.
More importantly (from the POV of applied science), if such a relationship exists and isn't evident in the behavior of neutron stars, it's only significant with levels of gravity and magnetism that are completely outside any regime we'll ever operate in.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense dark energy field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if a large enough dark energy field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
And really, they might as well replace "magnetic" with "pork chop," for all the real science that's discussed here.
FTA: But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion.
Yeah. Like almost all of them. This, however, is the most reasonable statement made in the whole article.
I'm not normally on the "bash slashdot" bandwagon, but...come on. Since when are completely unsubstantiated claims that it might be possible someday to violate fundamental physical laws news? If they are, here's more news:
A method to cheaply and easily turn any given substance into gold has long been the goal of alchemy, and widely regarded as fantasy. However, it seems that one is currently in development. According to slashdot user Control Group: "the theoretical process works by imbuing heavy metals - such as lead - with the essence of the sun's emanatory spirit, resulting in the lead taking on a yellowish hue. Also, if enough essence is crammed into any given substance, the very nature of it is changed, allowing incredible transformations to be performed.
Sounds like the Samsung SPH-N200 or SPH-N400, depending on how long ago you had it. They were very hit-and-miss in terms of reception (my roommate at the time and I had the same model; he got reception in lots of places I didn't), but they were just about perfect in every respect. And the cradle charger was absolutely brilliant.
I had that phone for three years, and, in retrospect, I'm still not certain why I bought a new one a year ago.
The sentence isn't about the criminal, it's about potential criminals. Whether or not this guy gets rehabilitated is almost (not quite) immaterial to the real goal: to make the cost of the crime (risk of getting caught * penalty assessed) greater than the benefit.
The lower the risk of being caught, the larger the penalty assessed has to be to compensate. Obviously, as in this case, there are functional limits. The size of the penalty, past some point, makes no difference; it spells economic death for the penalized. Simultaneously, people are very, very bad at assessing risk in personal decisions, so there's a floor beyond which the risk is too small to make up in penalty, regardless. Spam, unfortunately, is still in the category of "risk too small to worry about" crimes.
But that's the thinking behind the sentence. Obviously, an $1.1E10 fine is just hand-waving in terms of this particular case; this is just to set the stage, as it were.
Well and good, I suppose. I'm all for trying to eliminate the financial incentive to send out spam, and impossible-to-satisfy judgements are one way of doing that.
At the same time, though, that under the current judicial system and global nation-state system, this amounts to not much. One guy who was unfortunate enough to be based in the US got nailed. Great. But I've got the sneaking suspicion there are more offenders scattered in places the long arm of American law just can't effectively get to. And their services just became incrementally more attractive, since there's one fewer person selling spam.
Sure, the drive will provide movie-watching functionality, but I question the size of the market that will a) want HD-DVD capability (soon, that is; new formats generally take a little while to catch on while equipment drops in price), b) own a 360 (while this is probably significant overlap with the previous group as technology-lovers, it's still smaller), and c) prefer a game-console add-on to a stand-alone player.
Admittedly, this is partially based on the assumption that a stand-alone player will be more functional than the HD-DVD abilities of the 360. Given the history of consoles and movie playback, I think it's a pretty safe assumption, but maybe MS will nail it this time.
Come to think of it, I wonder how well the DVD playback add-on for the XBox sold? The market for DVD players was already pretty mature when it was released, of course...but at the same time, it only cost $20...
Because add-ons to consoles don't sell. If MS wanted to go with HD-DVD on the 360, they needed to put the drive in the console. Alternatively, they could just satisfy themselves with time-to-market, and forego the advantages of HD-DVD. Their current plan is to half-ass it, and I'm asserting that it's a bad plan.
Also: as far as the game console is concerned, everything is still cool, in my mind. I just think the HD-DVD add on is doomed. The console will do what it will do, and the add-on won't change that. The only possible connection is people believing the add-on is a precursor to a version with built-in HD-DVD, and therefore waiting on that to come out. Given the time span involved, though, I doubt anyone willing to wait that long was going to be buying any time soon, anyway.
Oh, and as far as the component solution: no. MS claims they can provide the necessary DRM while using normal cables.
So...MS is selling a system that already has two price points: one for the basic system, and one for the system including the HDD. And now they're planning to also sell yet another add-on device - moreover, one which won't even enhance the gaming experience, but simply had movie playback functionality?
Who do they think is going to buy it? It's one thing when people decided to get a PS2 because they didn't have a DVD player. It's another thing entirely to expect people to buy an expensive add-on to an expensive system just so they can have a sub-par player of movies sold on an expensive medium.
MS should either have waited until they could cram the drive into the console, or cut bait on HD-DVD entirely. Their current strategy is a born loser.
And I say this as someone who likes the XBox, and fully intends to get a 360 at some point in the near future. I can't wait to see what the average "I AHTES TEH M$!!!11ONEONEONE" thinks of this...and I'm not even going to bother mentioning the...er, dubious...claim that the 360 is going to be the fastest selling console of all time.
That's why I cited the average mpg for US driving in 2000 (and would have cited one from later, if I could have found it) - 21.5mpg. I'm aware that comparing highs and lows is a dubious, at best, method of statistical analysis. I only pointed out the top and bottom to indicate the range of values. Given the wide variety of vehicles available, using one from the top five is as poor a way to represent mileage as using one from the bottom two.
To what extent it's an outlier is indicated by its distance from the mean, which, though probably higher than 21.5mpg for model year 2006, is certainly not three times as high.
Nintendo has generally done a better job than most by continuing to make strong games.
And that's the key. It's not that gaming properties inherently have a shorter lifespan, it's that, generally, the companies owning them allow the quality of the product to slip until the image is ruined.
Zelda, for example, isn't like the same pop song, it's like the same pop band. A given song may wear out, but as long as the band keeps putting out music that meets some standards set by the fans, they'll keep their following. Some bands last longer than others, because they keep putting out albums that meet their fans' expectations. Similarly, some game properties last longer than others for the same reason.
Now, it might be harder with games, because the bar is always being raised (technologically, if nothing else), but it's the same fundamental idea.
My point is that it's not a fairly typical compact car. It's ranked by the EPA as the vehicle with the fourth-best mileage out of all models for the 2006 model year. Two of the three vehicles which exceed it are hybrids, and the third is the new Beetle, which only exceeds it by one mpg city and three highway.
Meanwhile, while many of the lowest vehicles are Ferraris and Maseratis and such, the number one and two worst mileage vehicles are the Dodge Ram 1500 manual and the Dodge Ram 1500 automatic, scoring one-fourth the mileage of the Jetta (using EPA estimates for both, so 9/10 vs. 36/41). Unfortunately, I can't find overall average mileage for any year later than 2000 on the EPA's site, but in 2000 it was 21.5mpg. Technology has certainly progressed in five years, but I sincerely doubt the average fuel efficiency has tripled in the interim.
My point is, your dad's Jetta is very atypical, and we shouldn't draw general efficiency conclusions based on it.
While SSBM is an excellent game, it's just flat-out not as good as the original SSB is. The graphics, of course, are prettier (which has a downside, though, in that many times it's too difficult to track what's going on, even on a 65" screen), and it's got some cool game modes and options that SSB didn't have...but the gameplay itself just isn't as good. SSB hit exactly the right balance point between simple to learn and complex enough to have staying power.
I devoutly wish that SSBM had been exactly the same as SSB, but with bonus boards, extra characters, and nicer gfx. The new game options would have been neat, but I would gladly trade those for the old gameplay.
Slashdot Mirror
As I replied elsewhere in this discussion:
The survey controls for this by comparing the number of iPod owners who admit to pirating song to the number of other player owners who also admit to pirating songs.
Presumably, neither number is an accurate representation of the actual percentage of users who do pirate songs. The comparison between the numbers, however, is valid. It indicates either iPod users are less inclined to pirate, or that they are more inclined to lie about it.
The former explanation is reasonably supported by postulating ITMS as a successful and legitimate way to meet demand for music among iPod owners. The latter explanation I don't have a reasonable rationale for (I don't see why iPod users, as a group, should be more inclined to lie about illegal activity than the other group), though it could certainly still be valid.
Except the results of the survey compared the percentage of iPod users who admitted to piracy (7%) to the percentage of other player users who admitted to piracy (20+%). This means one of two things. Either:
a) iPod users are less likely to pirate music, or
b) iPod users are less likely to admit to pirating music.
A reasonable explanation for the former conclusion is that ITMS successfully meets the demand for music among iPod users, while other players are not tied to such effective and legitimate tools. I don't have a reasonable explanation for why iPod users, as a group, should be more dishonest than owners of other players, so I tend to conclude (a). This could, of course, be wrong.
Either way, the survey isn't BS, at least not for the reason you assert. It's got a built-in control for the very error you're complaining about.
Nah
I don't think we're ready for real AI.
Lemme see, we've got Orion...The problem is that ALL of them require you to obtain orbit first
I bet you could launch something into orbit with an Orion drive. Just don't plan on coming back for a few thousand years.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
This sounds bogus to me.
I doubt many companies are "oblivious" to the insider threat, it's just considered an acceptable cost of doing business. For example, a grocery store I used to work at knew perfectly well that their employees were lifting candy from the bulk candy dispenser (to pick an example). But they also knew the money they lost on that was significantly less than the cost of installing cameras and paying someone to review the tapes, or than the cost in lost sales of eliminating the bulk candy dispenser. So, when someone was caught red-handed, they were read the riot act (at least) or outright fired (at worst), but no special effort was made to catch people.
I don't think the owners of that grocery store were business prodigies, either. My guess is that the same sort of logic applies to most employers: the cost of preventing the infraction is higher than the cost of allowing it. The truth of this is reflected in which industries do protect themselves against the "insider threat": places like casinos, where a successfully criminal insider could lose them huge quantities of money.
Meanwhile, the book seems to make the same suggestion a lot of security experts do: if a user doesn't need the technology, then don't let them use it. This sounds good, but it carries costs, too. First, of course, the cost of setting up and maintaining a network that enforces such policies. But second, the cost in employee morale, which cannot be discounted. Another job I had not all that long ago was in an office that didn't allow its employees to listen to talk radio. Music was fine, but talk radio was too much of a distraction. Since you didn't need it to do your job, you weren't allowed to have it.
The effect on morale was, to put it mildly, negative. Honestly, it's one of the reasons I didn't have the job for very long. Email and internet access are similar: employees have become accustomed, rightly or wrongly, to some personal use of these technologies. Take that away, and you're sure to end up with disgruntled employees, no matter how rational your reasons.
Moreover, it's a question of trust. If you demonstrate to all your employees that you don't trust them, odds are good you'll increase the number of employees who will live up (or down, if you prefer) to your expectation. At best, you'll incur the costs associated with high turnover rates. At worst, you'll fall victim to even more pernicious crime than you otherwise might have.
I guess the point is, it's not necessarily ignorance or even apathy that causes businesses to be vulnerable to insiders, it's simple cost/benefit analysis.
Actually, and pleasantly, that's not as true as many people think. In the US, only four states (mine included, though we're working on it) prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons. Nine states restrict it ("restrict" meaning that the you need approval to get a permit, rather than them needing a reason to deny you one), thirty-five states are "shall issue," meaning they have to give you a permit on request (and payment, of course) unless there is a reason not to (i.e., you're a felon), and two states which have no permitting requirements at all (Alaska and Vermont).
I don't know offhand the stats regarding which states allow open carry, beyond that mine does.
In any case, the problem you're talking about is most prevalent in CA and NY, which technically do issue concealed carry permits, but only if you beg permission from the government. Which means you don't get one unless you're famous or "important."
Fair enough. In a sense, I also applaud anyone seriously trying to further the understanding of the universe, even if it's by sheer crackpottery. Some crackpots, after all, have turned out to be right.
However: it does not logically follow that every crackpot promising a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow should be carefully listened to. Once they've got some sort of real supporting evidence, then it's news.
Until then, it's just smoke, mirrors, and wishful thinking.
First: it's perhaps prideful of me, but I like to think that we haven't just rewritten "known" physical laws at random, but have fairly steadily progressed towards the actual reality of things. Thus, modern understanding is less susceptible to suddenly being overturned than older understanding.
Second: yes, we could certainly be wrong about the light speed limit in one fashion or another. In fact, I hope we are. This does not mean, however, that every Joe Bloggs who says "I can break the speed of light!" is news. It will be news if, some day, someone actually performs some real science that indicates breaking the speed of light is possible. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You know, like developing a way to actually track heavenly bodies, and thereby demonstrate that we're not the center of everything.
I am also quite sure that, over the course of centuries, current understanding of many things will be turned on its head. This story, however, is not an exampple of that happening.
Yes, I'm aware.
Hence the "cheaply and easily" part of the comment.
More importantly (from the POV of applied science), if such a relationship exists and isn't evident in the behavior of neutron stars, it's only significant with levels of gravity and magnetism that are completely outside any regime we'll ever operate in.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense dark energy field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if a large enough dark energy field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
And really, they might as well replace "magnetic" with "pork chop," for all the real science that's discussed here.
FTA: But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion.
Yeah. Like almost all of them. This, however, is the most reasonable statement made in the whole article.
I'm not normally on the "bash slashdot" bandwagon, but...come on. Since when are completely unsubstantiated claims that it might be possible someday to violate fundamental physical laws news? If they are, here's more news:
A method to cheaply and easily turn any given substance into gold has long been the goal of alchemy, and widely regarded as fantasy. However, it seems that one is currently in development. According to slashdot user Control Group: "the theoretical process works by imbuing heavy metals - such as lead - with the essence of the sun's emanatory spirit, resulting in the lead taking on a yellowish hue. Also, if enough essence is crammed into any given substance, the very nature of it is changed, allowing incredible transformations to be performed.
*eyeroll*
The vodka is good, but the meat is off!
Invisible maniac!
Sounds like the Samsung SPH-N200 or SPH-N400, depending on how long ago you had it. They were very hit-and-miss in terms of reception (my roommate at the time and I had the same model; he got reception in lots of places I didn't), but they were just about perfect in every respect. And the cradle charger was absolutely brilliant.
I had that phone for three years, and, in retrospect, I'm still not certain why I bought a new one a year ago.
That's the first time anything on /. has gotten an actual laugh from me in I don't know how long.
Snaps to you. And props, and all that.
The sentence isn't about the criminal, it's about potential criminals. Whether or not this guy gets rehabilitated is almost (not quite) immaterial to the real goal: to make the cost of the crime (risk of getting caught * penalty assessed) greater than the benefit.
The lower the risk of being caught, the larger the penalty assessed has to be to compensate. Obviously, as in this case, there are functional limits. The size of the penalty, past some point, makes no difference; it spells economic death for the penalized. Simultaneously, people are very, very bad at assessing risk in personal decisions, so there's a floor beyond which the risk is too small to make up in penalty, regardless. Spam, unfortunately, is still in the category of "risk too small to worry about" crimes.
But that's the thinking behind the sentence. Obviously, an $1.1E10 fine is just hand-waving in terms of this particular case; this is just to set the stage, as it were.
Well and good, I suppose. I'm all for trying to eliminate the financial incentive to send out spam, and impossible-to-satisfy judgements are one way of doing that.
At the same time, though, that under the current judicial system and global nation-state system, this amounts to not much. One guy who was unfortunate enough to be based in the US got nailed. Great. But I've got the sneaking suspicion there are more offenders scattered in places the long arm of American law just can't effectively get to. And their services just became incrementally more attractive, since there's one fewer person selling spam.
Sure, the drive will provide movie-watching functionality, but I question the size of the market that will a) want HD-DVD capability (soon, that is; new formats generally take a little while to catch on while equipment drops in price), b) own a 360 (while this is probably significant overlap with the previous group as technology-lovers, it's still smaller), and c) prefer a game-console add-on to a stand-alone player.
Admittedly, this is partially based on the assumption that a stand-alone player will be more functional than the HD-DVD abilities of the 360. Given the history of consoles and movie playback, I think it's a pretty safe assumption, but maybe MS will nail it this time.
Come to think of it, I wonder how well the DVD playback add-on for the XBox sold? The market for DVD players was already pretty mature when it was released, of course...but at the same time, it only cost $20...
Because add-ons to consoles don't sell. If MS wanted to go with HD-DVD on the 360, they needed to put the drive in the console. Alternatively, they could just satisfy themselves with time-to-market, and forego the advantages of HD-DVD. Their current plan is to half-ass it, and I'm asserting that it's a bad plan.
Also: as far as the game console is concerned, everything is still cool, in my mind. I just think the HD-DVD add on is doomed. The console will do what it will do, and the add-on won't change that. The only possible connection is people believing the add-on is a precursor to a version with built-in HD-DVD, and therefore waiting on that to come out. Given the time span involved, though, I doubt anyone willing to wait that long was going to be buying any time soon, anyway.
Oh, and as far as the component solution: no. MS claims they can provide the necessary DRM while using normal cables.
So...MS is selling a system that already has two price points: one for the basic system, and one for the system including the HDD. And now they're planning to also sell yet another add-on device - moreover, one which won't even enhance the gaming experience, but simply had movie playback functionality?
Who do they think is going to buy it? It's one thing when people decided to get a PS2 because they didn't have a DVD player. It's another thing entirely to expect people to buy an expensive add-on to an expensive system just so they can have a sub-par player of movies sold on an expensive medium.
MS should either have waited until they could cram the drive into the console, or cut bait on HD-DVD entirely. Their current strategy is a born loser.
And I say this as someone who likes the XBox, and fully intends to get a 360 at some point in the near future. I can't wait to see what the average "I AHTES TEH M$!!!11ONEONEONE" thinks of this...and I'm not even going to bother mentioning the...er, dubious...claim that the 360 is going to be the fastest selling console of all time.
CORPORATION (n): An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit
without individual responsibility.
(Ambrose Bierce, I think)
That's why I cited the average mpg for US driving in 2000 (and would have cited one from later, if I could have found it) - 21.5mpg. I'm aware that comparing highs and lows is a dubious, at best, method of statistical analysis. I only pointed out the top and bottom to indicate the range of values. Given the wide variety of vehicles available, using one from the top five is as poor a way to represent mileage as using one from the bottom two.
To what extent it's an outlier is indicated by its distance from the mean, which, though probably higher than 21.5mpg for model year 2006, is certainly not three times as high.
Nintendo has generally done a better job than most by continuing to make strong games.
And that's the key. It's not that gaming properties inherently have a shorter lifespan, it's that, generally, the companies owning them allow the quality of the product to slip until the image is ruined.
Zelda, for example, isn't like the same pop song, it's like the same pop band. A given song may wear out, but as long as the band keeps putting out music that meets some standards set by the fans, they'll keep their following. Some bands last longer than others, because they keep putting out albums that meet their fans' expectations. Similarly, some game properties last longer than others for the same reason.
Now, it might be harder with games, because the bar is always being raised (technologically, if nothing else), but it's the same fundamental idea.
My point is that it's not a fairly typical compact car. It's ranked by the EPA as the vehicle with the fourth-best mileage out of all models for the 2006 model year. Two of the three vehicles which exceed it are hybrids, and the third is the new Beetle, which only exceeds it by one mpg city and three highway.
Meanwhile, while many of the lowest vehicles are Ferraris and Maseratis and such, the number one and two worst mileage vehicles are the Dodge Ram 1500 manual and the Dodge Ram 1500 automatic, scoring one-fourth the mileage of the Jetta (using EPA estimates for both, so 9/10 vs. 36/41). Unfortunately, I can't find overall average mileage for any year later than 2000 on the EPA's site, but in 2000 it was 21.5mpg. Technology has certainly progressed in five years, but I sincerely doubt the average fuel efficiency has tripled in the interim.
My point is, your dad's Jetta is very atypical, and we shouldn't draw general efficiency conclusions based on it.
While SSBM is an excellent game, it's just flat-out not as good as the original SSB is. The graphics, of course, are prettier (which has a downside, though, in that many times it's too difficult to track what's going on, even on a 65" screen), and it's got some cool game modes and options that SSB didn't have...but the gameplay itself just isn't as good. SSB hit exactly the right balance point between simple to learn and complex enough to have staying power.
I devoutly wish that SSBM had been exactly the same as SSB, but with bonus boards, extra characters, and nicer gfx. The new game options would have been neat, but I would gladly trade those for the old gameplay.