For those complaining about my inappropriate mixture of cartoons, I was trying to stay within the new "fair use" doctrine of half a thought. Otherwise I'd be violating the DMCA by using a technological method (/.) to circumvent copyright holders' rights.:P
Yeah, that's it. I've never mixed up those cartoon characters before. Unh-uh.
"Keeping an application running on a bank of redundant servers is still easier than maintaining that same applications on 20,000 independent PC's. While it does have its drawbacks, such as when the servers or network go down, everyone is SOL, it's easier to fix that single bank of localized servers than it is to fix every single machine if something really catastrophic happened, like a virus run amok on your network that trashes 20,000 copies of Office."
This is what i thought you meant, but you went on to use examples featuring a mom-and-pop style operation. I also have experience with those, and they tend not to deploy banks of redundant servers (or anything else redundant), even when you point out the potential costs should their server or any of the components between it and their users fail.
"Single point of failure should a catastrophe happen."
I've never seen this as a good thing for survivability. The classes I took, and my industry experience tend to support adding redundancy to elements identified as SPoFs. I think I know what you're trying to say, but still...
Unfortunately, this can lead to additional single points of failure, including networking equipment, your ISP, etc. if you have failed to provision redundancy. The thing about the SOA is that these things are frequently glossed over until the customer has their first extended downtime. What's really fun is when there is a cascade failure: ISP goes down, but so does your switch. You may not know this until your ISP is happy again, especially in a small business.
"User's can't go in and break the system."
Untrue. It just pushes all attacks to the application layer, a fact that means that all of your SOA application has to be ironclad (including libraries/framework components), rather than a subset if you relied on a well-known TCP/UDP/whatev protocol.
Plus this assumes your application has the near-AI capability to detect users' misuse of your application. Sure you can check to make sure some constraints are enforced on some fields, but the more you do this, the more brittle your app is, and the harder it is to maintain and keep up to date.
"There is one system to maintain, one anti-virus package, one system to back up and so on."
Untrue w.r.t. the anti-virus especially. Once a user terminal is zombied, your server is directly exposed to application level attacks.
"Files are much easier to share and keep updated. It is a nightmare to have a single spreadsheet that is updated by several people when they are updated on the own personal systems."
Nothing keeping you from using a client-server network architecture. They've been around a while. mmm... network drives.
it's not hypothetical, it's real, but you've been lucky. I hate to say it, but it's statistical. I prefer to minimize my exposure to statistical likelihood of failure while still obtaining the desired functionality from the system of components. So say for example Sony were to integrate the PS3 functionality into their DVD changer product. This would make a component that has a lot of moving parts, an optical system, and magnetic storage. This amplifies the probability of failure for that device versus the discrete devices. Further, Sony would want to charge more for the item, possibly more than the combined prices of the PS3 and the DVD changer by claiming the convenience was a desirable feature meriting the price increase.
Additionally, the new focus of most electronics companies like Sony and MS are on the post-sale revenue stream. Therefore their user interfaces are focused on steering users towards consumption of those services. Look at the XBOX 360 interface as an example. If a device I consider buying has so many features it is also increasingly likely that there will be functionality that I don't want at all and that the producer will have gummed up the UI with attempts to get me to use it and their follow-on services.
(Tangentially, I dislike statistics because they are overused and used in inappropriate circumstances. They are most useful when there is a lack of sufficient evidence to model the system directly, but people use them by default even if sufficient evidence was available or would have been available had an assumption that statistical methods are always superior not been made.)
My statement there was a generalized truism. In practice i exercise a more complicated set of rules that govern my purchasing. I tend towards quality, but am budget-minded, which makes my feature specifications flexible. E.g. I have a 10 yr. old Nak receiver that cost me $300 which I feel absolutely no need to replace and which has lasted quite well. However, being a EE, I know there are so many subsystems with so many and varied failure vectors that my experience with the Nak is rare, despite their excellent reputation. I've repaired Nak tape decks, so yes, contrary to popular opinion, they will eventually break, even under proper care and use.
Generally, I am particularly cautious when a piece of gear has moving parts, magnetic media, or optics. Internal power supplies are also suspect, though unavoidable and less failure prone when smaller (less load) as they tend to be in devices that do fewer things. This last bit is especially a problem when, as in this case, the vendor throws in more capability without reanalyzing the power profile of the device, or worse: ignoring unfavorable results for the existing power supply in the supply chain in order to reduce costs.
it prepares food ten different ways! Don't forget, we just added the kitchen sink!
Seriously, though. I like having discrete devices because stuff breaks and I like to: 1. amortize the impact (cost, etc.) of a breakage by having less expensive components 2. get components that do fewer things, but do them better 3. have a DVD on while playing a game. PiP, you know. and several other reasons i'm forgetting just now.
"I'm not a history buff....I was going to ask why there was all this interest overthere way back when in the 30's-50's as another poster mentioned. I mean, oil from over there wasn't as big a concern back then was it?"
Yes. that's why we helped the Brits depose the democracy in Iran and set up the shah. The whole rationale was that the democratic government there wanted to boot out the British oil companies and run their natural resource exploitation locally on better terms for the locals. You know, a free market, not a demand-side imperial market. Small wonder that bit of hypocrisy (we claim to love democracy and to want to spread it, but topple it when the locals elect leaders that do stuff we don't like) earned us a dark place in the hearts of Iranians.
We've also done it in Latin America.
I love hearing interventionist conservatives claim we're spreading democracy and how that's such a good thing when our history is full of American interventionists toppling democracies. It's the elephant in the room that isn't spoken of: they'll blab platitudes about our noble objectives until those we're "helping" decide to do something we don't like. Then we find it more advantageous to throw them back into the tender mercies of despotism.
And for the record, I'm not a "lib" or "commie" or whatever loaded word you care to use because you disagree with me: I'm an independent with fiscally-conservative, anti-authoritarian, anti-interventionist, libertarian, and constitutionalist leanings.
so much for the "the design professionals will save our knowledge economy, so it doesn't matter that we've lost the ability to make or tie our own shoes" school of economics. Though I figure it'll take a number of years before our fearless leaders have it fully and painfully (for us) engraved in their viewpoints.
to specify neoconservatives. Traditional conservatives have been disenfranchised by their party and told they're variously Libertatians, Dinosaurs, Paleo-conservatives, etc. in order to keep them out. Too bad it also keeps out their good sense, sound monetary policies, etc.
except the battery is fine. There's just some damn bit stuck somewhere that it's reading and setting off this ad/nag ware. My beef, and the GGP's beef is with the ad/nagware. I don't want it there, and I can't find a control panel item or other overt way to disable it, though it hasn't gotten annoying enough to send me registry hacking yet.
I understand your point and agree with your conclusion that fascists will latch onto this. I disagree with you completely on your proposed course of action. I believe that the concessions you would give would have us end up in the same fascism you are trying to avoid.
And I disagree with Judge Posner. Claims that the Constitution could be construed as a suicide pact are overblown. It is a social contract, and a particularly stable and supple one if maintained and followed. Here's the important part: *all* social contracts are suicide pacts for some members of society. The ideas of freedom behind ours provide for an environment where the number of individuals having to make good on the suicide pact are minimized. Members of the armed forces who lose their lives in our defense are suicides in Judge Posner's context. So too are the civilians who support them at higher risk. How about the draft? Risk of death is part of freedom, and I for one would far rather have that risk present than have lost even the freedoms we've lost since 1990, much less those you and others propose we give up.
If we desire to make changes to our way of life and governance, then alter the constitution to allow for that. Sure you'll have the debate and it'll take time, but it's been 7+ years since "things became obvious." We could have decided on some reasonable changes in that time. But they would have been tempered by the debate and by the number of legislative bodies they would have had to go through. That's exactly the idea. Just as the House is supposed to be the hotbed of popular desires and the Senate is supposed to maintain the cooling, objective hand on those ideas, so too are the mechanisms for changing the constitution slow. Think of it as a low pass filter.
The alternative, ignoring the constitution and allowing it to become irrelevant through neglect, which we are currently enamored of is the surest way to fascism that I can think of. Look at the escalation of hostilities between the two parties in congress in recent years, especially w.r.t. the filibuster and other rules protecting the minority.
That's why there's a second amendment. Read Jefferson or Paine for a far more exacting rationale for leaving the citizenry empowered (literally) to change government or address threats against them.
My dell here does that for me. It's let me know for the past 6 months that my battery "is still working, but nearing the end of its useful life." The same notice provides a handy "come on down to the web dealership..." notice and link to dell's shop. It does this each time the laptop starts. Oh, and the laptop is one year old, so it was six months old when it started this crap.
As to the WMD aspect of this, were you aware that botulism is a WMD? For those of you who don't know, botulism is what happens when you can food incorrectly. This means that there are literally thousands of WMD producing country folk out there in America. We must strip them of the constitutional rights they have so unjustly gotten used to and subverted for their canning purposes. They're domestic terrorists!
(Not actually advocating this, just pointing out the absurdity. Who knows, maybe next week propane or canned air will be listed as the next WMD.)
"Within a few generations, I think it'll be possible for pretty much anyone who really wants to, to put together some form of WMD -- or at very least, a severe mass-casualty weapon. Without completely halting progress in any number of industries (which itself would be an affront to freedom), I don't think there's any way to stop this. Therefore, we will have no choice but to decide how best we can keep rogue groups or individuals from paralyzing society while minimizing the danger to individual liberty. If we just put our heads in the sand and refuse to act, eventually we'll be caught unprepared in the face of some truly large-scale incident, and that will be exactly the sort of political ammunition that some fascist needs to put the country on the road to its demise."
Here you infer that 1. corporations deserve to be treated as individuals. and 2. that in fact they deserve preferential treatment vis a vis freedom. E.g. you seem to believe that companies are more legitimate possessors of goods than individuals. This is fatally flawed for a number of reasons, most notably that companies are comprised of individuals (sometimes just one or two individuals) and companies are immune to our usual punishments for criminal offenses. Recently I read about a company that was charged with manslaughter. How exactly will the government place the company in prison? Or do we move to a purely financial punishment which 1. is passed onto the investors in that company 2. fails to punish the actual people within the company responsible for the crime and 3. sets a disturbing precedent as far as the punishment of individuals is concerned?
By the way, this whole "treating companies as individuals" comes from a 1870's robber-baron era supreme court case. I.e. it is bench legislation. Which is something "conservatives" claim to hate. Yet most "conservatives" are in favor of this bench legislation. There were companies at the time of the revolution. I'm sure if the founders or our legislators since felt it was a good idea, they were perfectly able to make this happen in the open.
"(The best treatment of this scenario -- although perhaps not a particularly uplifting one -- that I've read in fiction would be in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Although the book has some outlandish elements, or at least ones that I don't think we'll see in the timeframe it calls for, his treatment of terrorism and cybercrime is a scenario that could quite easily come to pass.)"
How about the rest of Vinge's projections, like the decline and fall of the government as a distinguishable entity from corporations? Or the free-trade-mixed-with-anarchy that results in the "burbclave" and private security with military weapons?
... "And while you're at it, spank your children and stop reading them politically correct fairy tales. Yes the gingerbread house is made from bad little boys and girls."
Dude, the topic in this thread is buying games online vs. in store as it pertains to ESRB and availability of games from merchants. Where do you get cars from out of that?
Look, personally I use a variety of methods of consumption depending on whim and philosophy (agreeing with most of your objections, though acknowledging the relative futility in the face of some of the EULAs or undocumented spyware "features" of modern software.)
Please read the GP of your post to see the worldview I was addressing. I chose to take a stance that was closer to compatibility with their worldview in order to persuade them that there might be valid reasons to go to a store. My other option was to flame them. Maybe you could have recognized that and directed your flame at them instead of me. If you didn't read the GP to your post, then I'd suggest lowering your filter threshold.
"Alternatively, some of us like having backup copies of the games we play and don't trust magnetic media for it."
was above the part you got upset about. My list of reasons was not meant to be exhaustive, and I find my posts are quite long enough without having to put in a bloody disclaimer or qualifier like "there are more, but these are the ones I think you will relate to best."
Well in that case yes, but it's a bit OT, though it does bring up the question of culpability for network behavior of machines serving torrents, especially since the torrent app used by a company for distro may have security vulnerabilities that could allow all sorts of nefarious activity. Typically this is not an issue for (e.g. Linux distros and other common uses of torrents) because lawsuits follow the money and the typical distro is a community labor of love, not money. Even the largest distro, Ubuntu, is funded mostly as a philanthropy. Besides, most distros are placed in torrents not by the distro maintainer/comapany, but by a user. Introduce game companies and viola! money!
If my connection can only handle 1Mbps, my max torrent speed will be slightly less than 1Mbps.
Torrents only make sense to reduce the impact of bottlenecks elsewhere in the network. In the example where my connection is 1Mbps, if the game company's server was slammed and limiting my download speed to 1Mbps (say 100Kbps) then I would benefit from being able to torrent it.
The point here is that torrents don't make your actual link to the internet any faster.
The ESRB itself is an industry-funded organization intended to give the illusion of self-regulation. They adopted this model for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the resemblance between their industry and the movie industry. Additionally, there is the heavy involvement of the movie industry in the game industry.
Another valid reason for instituting ESRB was to forestall federal content regulation, a la the FCC. Some will say that it would be hard for the government to establish standing to regulate, but the pragmatic among us recognize that the government will find a way to do so if our dear elected officials think it will make it look like they are doing something to address their constituents' concerns and thus "earn" them reelection.
That being said, many localities and states have enacted legislation referencing ESRB ratings as the criterion for a variety of measures. Obviously these have met with varying degrees of permanence. http://www.davis.ca/en/blog/Video-Game-Law has some good references for your perusal.
So, if you happen to live in a jurisdiction that has such a law on the books, then it could, depending on the exact style of legislation be equivalently illegal to provide a minor with an "A" game as it is to provide them tobacco or alcohol. Obviously there is the question of prioritized enforcement of laws (jurisdictions targeting DUI enforcement more than (fill in the blank), but that's a bigger and even more inconsistent topic. Yeah.
More important than this on an economic scale is the compliance and recording burden placed on businesses that decide to sell all games regardless of rating in a jurisdiction that prohibits some sales. This is perhaps where the game and movie industries' similarity diverges the most in that movie theaters are able to simply not admit minors to certain movies and there is a strong precedent for this, whereas the legislation for games is newer and is done by legislators obsessed with metrics and atemporal enforcement.
it would be interesting to try one of these cards in a Vista machine whilst playing audio to see to what extent the performance is still impacted. Of course this would require a quick profiling of network performance with the new card without audio active as a baseline.
I haven't played it, but the wikipedia article claims you can play an earlier version vicariously through the main character in the game.
Also, i remember the original LSL on a CGA IBM PC AT. It wasn't that racy. This was in part because the graphics technology kept it from being that way, in addition to umm... restraint on the part of the producers. So i don't know what you mean by "hasn't been a real Larry game for years."
Slashdot Mirror
For those complaining about my inappropriate mixture of cartoons, I was trying to stay within the new "fair use" doctrine of half a thought. Otherwise I'd be violating the DMCA by using a technological method (/.) to circumvent copyright holders' rights. :P
Yeah, that's it. I've never mixed up those cartoon characters before. Unh-uh.
I agree with you, but Apple's figures probably include inventory sold to AT&T and people buying them for use on WLANs, as toys, etc.
I bought a computer and have the right to modify it and subsequently turn around and sell it? Amazing!
...the same thing we do every night, Stimpy: try to take over the world!
What will I do with this new-found freedom?
"Keeping an application running on a bank of redundant servers is still easier than maintaining that same applications on 20,000 independent PC's. While it does have its drawbacks, such as when the servers or network go down, everyone is SOL, it's easier to fix that single bank of localized servers than it is to fix every single machine if something really catastrophic happened, like a virus run amok on your network that trashes 20,000 copies of Office."
This is what i thought you meant, but you went on to use examples featuring a mom-and-pop style operation. I also have experience with those, and they tend not to deploy banks of redundant servers (or anything else redundant), even when you point out the potential costs should their server or any of the components between it and their users fail.
"Single point of failure should a catastrophe happen."
I've never seen this as a good thing for survivability. The classes I took, and my industry experience tend to support adding redundancy to elements identified as SPoFs. I think I know what you're trying to say, but still...
Unfortunately, this can lead to additional single points of failure, including networking equipment, your ISP, etc. if you have failed to provision redundancy. The thing about the SOA is that these things are frequently glossed over until the customer has their first extended downtime. What's really fun is when there is a cascade failure: ISP goes down, but so does your switch. You may not know this until your ISP is happy again, especially in a small business.
"User's can't go in and break the system."
Untrue. It just pushes all attacks to the application layer, a fact that means that all of your SOA application has to be ironclad (including libraries/framework components), rather than a subset if you relied on a well-known TCP/UDP/whatev protocol.
Plus this assumes your application has the near-AI capability to detect users' misuse of your application. Sure you can check to make sure some constraints are enforced on some fields, but the more you do this, the more brittle your app is, and the harder it is to maintain and keep up to date.
"There is one system to maintain, one anti-virus package, one system to back up and so on."
Untrue w.r.t. the anti-virus especially. Once a user terminal is zombied, your server is directly exposed to application level attacks.
"Files are much easier to share and keep updated. It is a nightmare to have a single spreadsheet that is updated by several people when they are updated on the own personal systems."
Nothing keeping you from using a client-server network architecture. They've been around a while. mmm... network drives.
it's not hypothetical, it's real, but you've been lucky. I hate to say it, but it's statistical. I prefer to minimize my exposure to statistical likelihood of failure while still obtaining the desired functionality from the system of components. So say for example Sony were to integrate the PS3 functionality into their DVD changer product. This would make a component that has a lot of moving parts, an optical system, and magnetic storage. This amplifies the probability of failure for that device versus the discrete devices. Further, Sony would want to charge more for the item, possibly more than the combined prices of the PS3 and the DVD changer by claiming the convenience was a desirable feature meriting the price increase.
Additionally, the new focus of most electronics companies like Sony and MS are on the post-sale revenue stream. Therefore their user interfaces are focused on steering users towards consumption of those services. Look at the XBOX 360 interface as an example. If a device I consider buying has so many features it is also increasingly likely that there will be functionality that I don't want at all and that the producer will have gummed up the UI with attempts to get me to use it and their follow-on services.
(Tangentially, I dislike statistics because they are overused and used in inappropriate circumstances. They are most useful when there is a lack of sufficient evidence to model the system directly, but people use them by default even if sufficient evidence was available or would have been available had an assumption that statistical methods are always superior not been made.)
My statement there was a generalized truism. In practice i exercise a more complicated set of rules that govern my purchasing. I tend towards quality, but am budget-minded, which makes my feature specifications flexible. E.g. I have a 10 yr. old Nak receiver that cost me $300 which I feel absolutely no need to replace and which has lasted quite well. However, being a EE, I know there are so many subsystems with so many and varied failure vectors that my experience with the Nak is rare, despite their excellent reputation. I've repaired Nak tape decks, so yes, contrary to popular opinion, they will eventually break, even under proper care and use.
Generally, I am particularly cautious when a piece of gear has moving parts, magnetic media, or optics. Internal power supplies are also suspect, though unavoidable and less failure prone when smaller (less load) as they tend to be in devices that do fewer things. This last bit is especially a problem when, as in this case, the vendor throws in more capability without reanalyzing the power profile of the device, or worse: ignoring unfavorable results for the existing power supply in the supply chain in order to reduce costs.
it prepares food ten different ways! Don't forget, we just added the kitchen sink!
Seriously, though. I like having discrete devices because stuff breaks and I like to:
1. amortize the impact (cost, etc.) of a breakage by having less expensive components
2. get components that do fewer things, but do them better
3. have a DVD on while playing a game. PiP, you know.
and several other reasons i'm forgetting just now.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/10/park.police.chief /
It's been three years, so the public has forgotten and the executive can batten down another hatch. Whack-A-Mole anyone?
"I'm not a history buff....I was going to ask why there was all this interest overthere way back when in the 30's-50's as another poster mentioned. I mean, oil from over there wasn't as big a concern back then was it?"
e lations#The_1950s_and_the_politics_of_oil.2C_a_tur ning_point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Iran_r
Yes. that's why we helped the Brits depose the democracy in Iran and set up the shah. The whole rationale was that the democratic government there wanted to boot out the British oil companies and run their natural resource exploitation locally on better terms for the locals. You know, a free market, not a demand-side imperial market. Small wonder that bit of hypocrisy (we claim to love democracy and to want to spread it, but topple it when the locals elect leaders that do stuff we don't like) earned us a dark place in the hearts of Iranians.
We've also done it in Latin America.
I love hearing interventionist conservatives claim we're spreading democracy and how that's such a good thing when our history is full of American interventionists toppling democracies. It's the elephant in the room that isn't spoken of: they'll blab platitudes about our noble objectives until those we're "helping" decide to do something we don't like. Then we find it more advantageous to throw them back into the tender mercies of despotism.
And for the record, I'm not a "lib" or "commie" or whatever loaded word you care to use because you disagree with me: I'm an independent with fiscally-conservative, anti-authoritarian, anti-interventionist, libertarian, and constitutionalist leanings.
so much for the "the design professionals will save our knowledge economy, so it doesn't matter that we've lost the ability to make or tie our own shoes" school of economics. Though I figure it'll take a number of years before our fearless leaders have it fully and painfully (for us) engraved in their viewpoints.
to specify neoconservatives. Traditional conservatives have been disenfranchised by their party and told they're variously Libertatians, Dinosaurs, Paleo-conservatives, etc. in order to keep them out. Too bad it also keeps out their good sense, sound monetary policies, etc.
except the battery is fine. There's just some damn bit stuck somewhere that it's reading and setting off this ad/nag ware. My beef, and the GGP's beef is with the ad/nagware. I don't want it there, and I can't find a control panel item or other overt way to disable it, though it hasn't gotten annoying enough to send me registry hacking yet.
I understand your point and agree with your conclusion that fascists will latch onto this. I disagree with you completely on your proposed course of action. I believe that the concessions you would give would have us end up in the same fascism you are trying to avoid.
And I disagree with Judge Posner. Claims that the Constitution could be construed as a suicide pact are overblown. It is a social contract, and a particularly stable and supple one if maintained and followed. Here's the important part: *all* social contracts are suicide pacts for some members of society. The ideas of freedom behind ours provide for an environment where the number of individuals having to make good on the suicide pact are minimized. Members of the armed forces who lose their lives in our defense are suicides in Judge Posner's context. So too are the civilians who support them at higher risk. How about the draft? Risk of death is part of freedom, and I for one would far rather have that risk present than have lost even the freedoms we've lost since 1990, much less those you and others propose we give up.
If we desire to make changes to our way of life and governance, then alter the constitution to allow for that. Sure you'll have the debate and it'll take time, but it's been 7+ years since "things became obvious." We could have decided on some reasonable changes in that time. But they would have been tempered by the debate and by the number of legislative bodies they would have had to go through. That's exactly the idea. Just as the House is supposed to be the hotbed of popular desires and the Senate is supposed to maintain the cooling, objective hand on those ideas, so too are the mechanisms for changing the constitution slow. Think of it as a low pass filter.
The alternative, ignoring the constitution and allowing it to become irrelevant through neglect, which we are currently enamored of is the surest way to fascism that I can think of. Look at the escalation of hostilities between the two parties in congress in recent years, especially w.r.t. the filibuster and other rules protecting the minority.
That's why there's a second amendment. Read Jefferson or Paine for a far more exacting rationale for leaving the citizenry empowered (literally) to change government or address threats against them.
My dell here does that for me. It's let me know for the past 6 months that my battery "is still working, but nearing the end of its useful life." The same notice provides a handy "come on down to the web dealership..." notice and link to dell's shop. It does this each time the laptop starts. Oh, and the laptop is one year old, so it was six months old when it started this crap.
"Are you interested in C TECH ASTRONOMY?"
"We're interested in all kinds of astronomy."
As to the WMD aspect of this, were you aware that botulism is a WMD? For those of you who don't know, botulism is what happens when you can food incorrectly. This means that there are literally thousands of WMD producing country folk out there in America. We must strip them of the constitutional rights they have so unjustly gotten used to and subverted for their canning purposes. They're domestic terrorists!
s m_g.htm
(Not actually advocating this, just pointing out the absurdity. Who knows, maybe next week propane or canned air will be listed as the next WMD.)
it's a WMD:
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/botulism/
but wait, you can get it in the normal course of life:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/botuli
especially if you eat improperly canned food:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canning
http://www.canningpantry.com/botulism.html
"Within a few generations, I think it'll be possible for pretty much anyone who really wants to, to put together some form of WMD -- or at very least, a severe mass-casualty weapon. Without completely halting progress in any number of industries (which itself would be an affront to freedom), I don't think there's any way to stop this. Therefore, we will have no choice but to decide how best we can keep rogue groups or individuals from paralyzing society while minimizing the danger to individual liberty. If we just put our heads in the sand and refuse to act, eventually we'll be caught unprepared in the face of some truly large-scale incident, and that will be exactly the sort of political ammunition that some fascist needs to put the country on the road to its demise."
Here you infer that 1. corporations deserve to be treated as individuals. and 2. that in fact they deserve preferential treatment vis a vis freedom. E.g. you seem to believe that companies are more legitimate possessors of goods than individuals. This is fatally flawed for a number of reasons, most notably that companies are comprised of individuals (sometimes just one or two individuals) and companies are immune to our usual punishments for criminal offenses. Recently I read about a company that was charged with manslaughter. How exactly will the government place the company in prison? Or do we move to a purely financial punishment which 1. is passed onto the investors in that company 2. fails to punish the actual people within the company responsible for the crime and 3. sets a disturbing precedent as far as the punishment of individuals is concerned?
By the way, this whole "treating companies as individuals" comes from a 1870's robber-baron era supreme court case. I.e. it is bench legislation. Which is something "conservatives" claim to hate. Yet most "conservatives" are in favor of this bench legislation. There were companies at the time of the revolution. I'm sure if the founders or our legislators since felt it was a good idea, they were perfectly able to make this happen in the open.
"(The best treatment of this scenario -- although perhaps not a particularly uplifting one -- that I've read in fiction would be in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Although the book has some outlandish elements, or at least ones that I don't think we'll see in the timeframe it calls for, his treatment of terrorism and cybercrime is a scenario that could quite easily come to pass.)"
How about the rest of Vinge's projections, like the decline and fall of the government as a distinguishable entity from corporations? Or the free-trade-mixed-with-anarchy that results in the "burbclave" and private security with military weapons?
Oh wait. It's already happening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_USA
Stop the erosion of our Constitution! Stop accepting the fear our leaders are mongering!
... "And while you're at it, spank your children and stop reading them politically correct fairy tales. Yes the gingerbread house is made from bad little boys and girls."
- Stories-Modern/dp/002542730X
http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Correct-Bedtime
Dude, the topic in this thread is buying games online vs. in store as it pertains to ESRB and availability of games from merchants. Where do you get cars from out of that?
Look, personally I use a variety of methods of consumption depending on whim and philosophy (agreeing with most of your objections, though acknowledging the relative futility in the face of some of the EULAs or undocumented spyware "features" of modern software.)
Please read the GP of your post to see the worldview I was addressing. I chose to take a stance that was closer to compatibility with their worldview in order to persuade them that there might be valid reasons to go to a store. My other option was to flame them. Maybe you could have recognized that and directed your flame at them instead of me. If you didn't read the GP to your post, then I'd suggest lowering your filter threshold.
"Alternatively, some of us like having backup copies of the games we play and don't trust magnetic media for it."
was above the part you got upset about. My list of reasons was not meant to be exhaustive, and I find my posts are quite long enough without having to put in a bloody disclaimer or qualifier like "there are more, but these are the ones I think you will relate to best."
Well in that case yes, but it's a bit OT, though it does bring up the question of culpability for network behavior of machines serving torrents, especially since the torrent app used by a company for distro may have security vulnerabilities that could allow all sorts of nefarious activity. Typically this is not an issue for (e.g. Linux distros and other common uses of torrents) because lawsuits follow the money and the typical distro is a community labor of love, not money. Even the largest distro, Ubuntu, is funded mostly as a philanthropy. Besides, most distros are placed in torrents not by the distro maintainer/comapany, but by a user. Introduce game companies and viola! money!
If my connection can only handle 1Mbps, my max torrent speed will be slightly less than 1Mbps.
Torrents only make sense to reduce the impact of bottlenecks elsewhere in the network. In the example where my connection is 1Mbps, if the game company's server was slammed and limiting my download speed to 1Mbps (say 100Kbps) then I would benefit from being able to torrent it.
The point here is that torrents don't make your actual link to the internet any faster.
May I help the next customer in line?
The ESRB itself is an industry-funded organization intended to give the illusion of self-regulation. They adopted this model for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the resemblance between their industry and the movie industry. Additionally, there is the heavy involvement of the movie industry in the game industry.
Another valid reason for instituting ESRB was to forestall federal content regulation, a la the FCC. Some will say that it would be hard for the government to establish standing to regulate, but the pragmatic among us recognize that the government will find a way to do so if our dear elected officials think it will make it look like they are doing something to address their constituents' concerns and thus "earn" them reelection.
That being said, many localities and states have enacted legislation referencing ESRB ratings as the criterion for a variety of measures. Obviously these have met with varying degrees of permanence. http://www.davis.ca/en/blog/Video-Game-Law has some good references for your perusal.
So, if you happen to live in a jurisdiction that has such a law on the books, then it could, depending on the exact style of legislation be equivalently illegal to provide a minor with an "A" game as it is to provide them tobacco or alcohol. Obviously there is the question of prioritized enforcement of laws (jurisdictions targeting DUI enforcement more than (fill in the blank), but that's a bigger and even more inconsistent topic. Yeah.
More important than this on an economic scale is the compliance and recording burden placed on businesses that decide to sell all games regardless of rating in a jurisdiction that prohibits some sales. This is perhaps where the game and movie industries' similarity diverges the most in that movie theaters are able to simply not admit minors to certain movies and there is a strong precedent for this, whereas the legislation for games is newer and is done by legislators obsessed with metrics and atemporal enforcement.
some of the nicer netwerk cards' network processors have large portions of the stack implemented wholly within the cards' processor firmware. http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/networkin frastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15000186
it would be interesting to try one of these cards in a Vista machine whilst playing audio to see to what extent the performance is still impacted. Of course this would require a quick profiling of network performance with the new card without audio active as a baseline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry:_M agna_Cum_Laude
I haven't played it, but the wikipedia article claims you can play an earlier version vicariously through the main character in the game.
Also, i remember the original LSL on a CGA IBM PC AT. It wasn't that racy. This was in part because the graphics technology kept it from being that way, in addition to umm... restraint on the part of the producers. So i don't know what you mean by "hasn't been a real Larry game for years."