I would be shocked if Google goes to any great lengths to hunt down and exterminate H.264(especially since they now distribute and auto-update Flash, which has Adobe's H.264 support, albeit only within flash applets), though they will presumably auto-update by default, as Chrome always has, which will eliminate the older copies run by people who don't do anything to stop that from happening.
There are clear strategic reasons why Google would care about WebM vs. H.264 marketshare; but(unlike a DRM problem, where obsessively exterminating the few compromised nodes before they can leak plaintext versions is a constant activity), marketshare battles are about trying to move the mainstream in one direction or another, not about trying to twist the arms of a few percent of die-hards. Google would, one presumes, want to save the licensing money, and be able to say to web video outfits "Hey, look at the WebM vs. H.264 numbers..."; but they have nothing to gain by burning their geek PR by trying to snatch H.264 from the hands of those who are clinging on to it(nor, in the same vein, would I expect them to do anything if somebody were to release a Chrome plugin based on x.264).
IANAL; but my understanding is that, when it comes to releasing stuff you possess the copyright to under the GPL, you can release as much or as little, in whatever shape, as you wish. The code doesn't have to work at all, they could chose only to release half of it, it could rely on code from some third party available under a ludicriously restrictive licence or not at all, or whatever. Because their right to use and distribute the code does not originate with the GPL, they are not bound by it. Their right derives from ownership of the copyright, not use under license. Thus, they can do pretty much anything. Anybody else's right, though, derives from use under license, and thus is subject to the terms of the license(GPL or otherwise, whatever the owner dictates).
However, if you are creating a derived work from somebody else's code, to which you have rights to use/distribute only under the GPL, there are restrictions. You still aren't legally obliged to release only perfect, bugless, feature complete software or anything; but if your binary incorporates somebody else's GPLed code; but you are refusing to distribute your modifications, required to build it, to those you are distributing the binary to, you are in legal hot water. Even then, though, that might exclude data files, depending on how things are structured(say, just for an example, I for some stupid reason, want to release a CD of my music that, instead of just acting like a normal CD, has an auto-executed player application with band branding that pops up when the disk is inserted in a PC and plays the music on it. If I used GPLed code to build that application, I would be obliged to release my modifications and additions; but my music would just be input data, merely aggregated on the same medium as the program, and it isn't clear that I would be obliged to license it in any particular way.)
I'll be interested to see how much, if any, Tivoization they attempted, and how much hackery and/or bodging of proprietary driver blobs is required to get one's own firmware working.
Assuming they didn't pull any bullshit tricks to keep you on their firmware, a device with that flavor of screen is a compelling thing(it was already good on the XO-1, and is said to be improved since then). If, for some perverse reason, they've decided that you will take, and like, whatever dubious decisions they make on the firmware front, then the hell with it...
FCC: Pretty much all high-frequency digital logic has a nontrivial chance of interfering with licenced blocks of spectrum, unless correctly designed and/or shielded.
Devices with wifi, bluetooth, and/or one of the various flavors of cellular are, of course, explicitly designed to emit RF, and also present potential interference issues.
Level of enforcement varies; but you'll find that virtually all jurisdictions have some sort of RF-spectrum allocation, and some sort of procedure for keeping interference with reserved bands to a minimum.
I suppose, if we are really lucky, the next brilliant scheme will involve a world-of-both-worlds approach to just hiring more guards:
We can cut a massively lucrative contract with one of the many fine and ethical "contracting agencies" who have done such good work in reducing the apparent number of US troops involved in our middle eastern adventures. This should ensure that the guards are exorbitantly overpriced(and thus excessively scarce, unaffordable, or both). We can then all act surprised when our mercenaries turn out to be prone to alternating periods of corrupt inactivity in the face of narcotics trafficers(a mercenary, working for the highest bidder? I am shocked, shocked!) and callous sadism and excessive force when dealing with the sad-sack economic migrants. Should any new infrastructure be needed, Bechtel can handle the no-bid contract, and we can all be appropriately(and toothlessly) outraged when it turns out that they are using undocumented day laborers to keep the costs of erecting lethally substandard facilities down.
If we want to cut off the flow of heavy weaponry to drug lords, we should probably focus on it more as a governance problem than as an opportunity to burnish our own police state.
As long as the boundary between the local governments(whose security forces we are almost uniformly dumping guns and training on, some 'in-kind' some as 'foreign aid', with the exception of the ones too left wing for our taste) and the cartels remains extremely porous due to corruption, defection, and the like, we are going to continue to see fair numbers of heavily equipped and fairly well trained drug gang militias.
Los Zetas are probably the most notable, getting their start when 30-odd members of the Mexican special forces(more than a few of them trained on your dime at Fort Bragg in a variety of handy techniques) were hired away as a security force for the Gulf Cartel. They continue to rely heavily on hires from a variety of police and army units from Mexico and elsewhere, and most of their best equipment is skimmed from the same.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that there aren't arms purchased by American civilians in use, I'm sure that there are. However, the steady flow of police and military hardware(and personnel and expertise...), much of it kindly provided by Uncle Sam, from the dubiously effective states in the region is arguably more of a problem.
More broadly, this is arguably about the toxic mixture of the revolving door between government and its contractors, along with a certain amount of nigh-religious belief in any wiz-bang tech toy for which a sufficiently stupifying powerpoint and sufficiently invigorating 3D-rendered demo video can be produced.
"Well, lets see here: we could either hire some more guards and equip them with the sort of modestly-upgraded-versions-of-proven-technology that we know are up to the task of detecting people in a desert environment or we could throw gigantic bales of cash at some contractor to provide a 'comprehensive integrated technology solution'."
"Gosh, I sure do love solutions! Plus, everybody knows that reducing payroll costs is always efficient, no matter how high the capital and long-term-contracting costs of doing so may be."
If they can just get a colony of space bats to cling to the main tank, their tough, leathery wings should provide sufficient structural integrity to keep the tank together...
In an ideal world, wouldn't the fix be "Pick up the phone, scream at the contractor for trying to pull this shit on you, and demand a part that actually works to spec, right. the. fuck. yesterday."?
It seems like the contract must have been poorly written(and/or a blatant giveaway to our precious, precious defense contractors and their poor starving shareholders) if the solution they are ending up with is "have in-house engineers get their Macguyver on and make the gigantic tank-o'-rocket fuel on a manned vessel work somehow."
Hey, at least this time they are working around an entirely arbitrary restriction(since the dock connector has a perfectly good logic-level serial port, among other things), rather than advancing the state of the art in data transmission over the legacy copper infrastructure.
There are actually a lot of things that the average Linux setup could be doing for better security(many of them are available; but the number of systems actually doing the hardcore full-on SELinux thing is definitely smaller than the number of "Hey, a copy of linux and an outdated version of PHPmyadmin sure is cheap, and isn't nearly as hard to use as they say!" linux servers floating around out there...)
The idea that being OSS is responsible for their weaknesses, though, is risible.
Now, in fairness, having a single AV engine, running on a box with powerful CPU(s) and a fast disk subsystem; busily snipping known viral payloads off of passing emails and network shared directories is actually a reasonably sensible 'pragmatic risk reduction' strategy, no matter what OS the server is running. It does help catch a lot of the more sophmoric virus attempts floating around, at zero computational and disk access overhead to the clients, who are the ones that likely have weaker CPUs and vastly lousier disk systems...
It completely fails to surprise me that an AV would have completely given up on the notion of security through technical correctness and have fallen back on the notion of security through obscurity.
The whole idea of OSS security(unlike, say, physical security) is that software bugs and errors are what introduce insecurities, that a technically correct system will be secure even if the attacker knows what it looks like(the same principle as in cryptography). This isn't true of physical systems; because physical materials always have finite strength; but software can(at least in theory, it rarely does) possess technical correctness.
I am, of course, totally unsurprised that an AV company would have completely given up on such a thing, and are falling back on obscurantism and endless layers of bandaids...
Unfortunately, the "Trusted Computing Group" seems to have based their TPM design specs on ignoring that particular possibility as systematically as possible...
"App Stores" are quite arguably a good thing. I know that I say a few words of thanks every time I type 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade' and everything automagically pulls from the repositories and does its thing. It absolutely curb-stomps the experience of a zillion separate updaters, obsolete library versions, and so forth.
On the other hand, an implementation where my apt-sources are cryptographically signed, and the BIOS refuses to boot if the list has been modified, would be a dark day indeed. That, to my mind, is the actual threat.
Although they haven't been called "app stores" in the past, package management systems kick ass, and are generally far superior in user experience to just grabbing random stuff off the internet and installing it. However, any entity who would restrict you exclusively to their own package management system fancies themselves your master and will soon be your rent-collecting landlord.
Probably not if you live in a Florida trailer park: Nuclear weapons and delivery systems are too pricey to waste on low value targets....
It's one of the perks of living in a high-density area with a lot of strategic stuff nearby. Should the shit hit the fan, I'll go from "sipping a nice gin and tonic" to "gas and/or plasma phase" with such rapidity that my neural net will be destroyed faster than impulses can travel along the nerves. I will, quite literally, be dead before I know it.
Out in the sticks, people will have to contend with violently expelling their gastrointestinal systems from both ends and fighting off the roving bands of supermutants.
Everybody owes fealty to the United States; because we are the best nation in the world. Some people just don't realize it yet, which is why we have to spend so much on our armed forces and prisons...
But this guy is merely a risibly hyperbolic instance of a much broader, more common, and (in alarmingly many circles) respected position: Namely, that the person who reveals wrongdoing is somehow guiltier of that wrongdoing than the person who commits it.
I can't figure out if this view is a cancerous outgrowth of the morally monstrous "My country right or wrong" brigade(who are certainly louder and more numerous than there more honorable "May my country always be right and, when wrong, be set right" counterparts) or if it is a symptom of an even deeper flavor of cognitive limitation and/or ethical infantalism.
Below a certain age, and in some lower animals, "object permanence" is not well established. If they see an object enter a bag, they still lose track of it once it leaves their vision, and do not conclude that it must be residing in the bag, and can be found there. Above a certain age, and in smarter animals, this conclusion sticks. One is inclined to wonder if there is some moral variant of this, where some people, for who knows what reason, cannot apply "ethical action permanence" and conclude that, if Wikileaks took it out of the bag, and the government is the one who puts stuff in the bag, even though Wikileaks is holding the unethical object, it is merely the entity that took the object out of the bag where it had earlier been placed, not the entity that created the object.
In a way, I actually find the straight-up belligerent "USA! USA! Nuke ALL RAGHEADS!!!!" crowd to be more respectable. They are atavistic, barbarous scum, but they are refreshingly honest and straightforward about their bloodlust. The mealy-mouthed "respectable" apologists, on the other hand, are ethically no better; but spend their time dripping honeyed words and "nuance" to cover for the policies that they don't have the guts to endorse public-ally. It's like Fred Phelps: He is an awful human being, and merely by existing makes one wish there were a hell for him to inhabit; but he is all honesty. No equivocation, no focusing only on soft targets(anybody can picket an abortion clinic without much in the way of controversy, hitting military funerals takes serious guts...), no "Oh, we just stand for commonsense family values" circumlocution.
A world where your choices have essentially no effect is just a rail shooter, with slightly greater or lesser twistiness in the rails. The "shooter" mechanic(whether it be literal shooting, RPG, or whatever) had better be compelling. If it is, great, you've got a game that is perfectly decent, if probably not the most emotionally involving of all time. If the mechanic sucks, you've just created another game to put on the pile of examples of why "rail shooter" is practically a four letter word in gaming circles...
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)": this unwholesome bastard abomination is what you get when the only winnable path is, in fact, as linear as the rail shooter scenario; but the world is enough of a sandbox that you can easily deviate from that one true path in myriad illogical ways. Punishments for stupidity are fine; punishments for failure to use your telepathic powers to intuit, during level one, which apparently useless bits of scene clutter you'll need to have on level ten is bullshit. Also annoying are the "completionist heaven" ones. Homeworld, an otherwise pretty brilliant game, suffered from this. Since each level started you out with what you had accumulated the level before, you were quickly led to realize that after "beating" a given level you were semi-required to set your harvesters to work and wait until every RU in the entire level was in your coffers(extra credit for telepathically knowing which ships you should pre-build so as to not die early in the next level, and which you should avoid building because some deus ex machina is going to give you the superior replacement...)
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome. The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
Just you wait, sonny body, and be sure to snag yourself a serial wacom pad on Ebay while you still can.
You'll need it when the part of that trademark licensing deal that gives Cisco the rights to make all router configurations "intuitively multitouch gesture based" kicks in...
Insensitive clod. Do you know how many patches we send upstream to the browser vendors to help them build rendering engines that can handle 25,000+ animated.gifs and 100+ flash embeds in a single page?
Never mind the time that we had to spend three weeks groveling through the dark underbelly of the Windows driver model, trying to figure out why users of certain realtek audio chipsets would suffer bluescreens when more than 14 streams of generic crunk rap were being fed to the software audio mixer simultaneously...
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I would be shocked if Google goes to any great lengths to hunt down and exterminate H.264(especially since they now distribute and auto-update Flash, which has Adobe's H.264 support, albeit only within flash applets), though they will presumably auto-update by default, as Chrome always has, which will eliminate the older copies run by people who don't do anything to stop that from happening.
There are clear strategic reasons why Google would care about WebM vs. H.264 marketshare; but(unlike a DRM problem, where obsessively exterminating the few compromised nodes before they can leak plaintext versions is a constant activity), marketshare battles are about trying to move the mainstream in one direction or another, not about trying to twist the arms of a few percent of die-hards. Google would, one presumes, want to save the licensing money, and be able to say to web video outfits "Hey, look at the WebM vs. H.264 numbers..."; but they have nothing to gain by burning their geek PR by trying to snatch H.264 from the hands of those who are clinging on to it(nor, in the same vein, would I expect them to do anything if somebody were to release a Chrome plugin based on x.264).
IANAL; but my understanding is that, when it comes to releasing stuff you possess the copyright to under the GPL, you can release as much or as little, in whatever shape, as you wish. The code doesn't have to work at all, they could chose only to release half of it, it could rely on code from some third party available under a ludicriously restrictive licence or not at all, or whatever. Because their right to use and distribute the code does not originate with the GPL, they are not bound by it. Their right derives from ownership of the copyright, not use under license. Thus, they can do pretty much anything. Anybody else's right, though, derives from use under license, and thus is subject to the terms of the license(GPL or otherwise, whatever the owner dictates).
However, if you are creating a derived work from somebody else's code, to which you have rights to use/distribute only under the GPL, there are restrictions. You still aren't legally obliged to release only perfect, bugless, feature complete software or anything; but if your binary incorporates somebody else's GPLed code; but you are refusing to distribute your modifications, required to build it, to those you are distributing the binary to, you are in legal hot water. Even then, though, that might exclude data files, depending on how things are structured(say, just for an example, I for some stupid reason, want to release a CD of my music that, instead of just acting like a normal CD, has an auto-executed player application with band branding that pops up when the disk is inserted in a PC and plays the music on it. If I used GPLed code to build that application, I would be obliged to release my modifications and additions; but my music would just be input data, merely aggregated on the same medium as the program, and it isn't clear that I would be obliged to license it in any particular way.)
I'll be interested to see how much, if any, Tivoization they attempted, and how much hackery and/or bodging of proprietary driver blobs is required to get one's own firmware working.
Assuming they didn't pull any bullshit tricks to keep you on their firmware, a device with that flavor of screen is a compelling thing(it was already good on the XO-1, and is said to be improved since then). If, for some perverse reason, they've decided that you will take, and like, whatever dubious decisions they make on the firmware front, then the hell with it...
FCC: Pretty much all high-frequency digital logic has a nontrivial chance of interfering with licenced blocks of spectrum, unless correctly designed and/or shielded.
Devices with wifi, bluetooth, and/or one of the various flavors of cellular are, of course, explicitly designed to emit RF, and also present potential interference issues.
Level of enforcement varies; but you'll find that virtually all jurisdictions have some sort of RF-spectrum allocation, and some sort of procedure for keeping interference with reserved bands to a minimum.
I suppose, if we are really lucky, the next brilliant scheme will involve a world-of-both-worlds approach to just hiring more guards:
We can cut a massively lucrative contract with one of the many fine and ethical "contracting agencies" who have done such good work in reducing the apparent number of US troops involved in our middle eastern adventures. This should ensure that the guards are exorbitantly overpriced(and thus excessively scarce, unaffordable, or both). We can then all act surprised when our mercenaries turn out to be prone to alternating periods of corrupt inactivity in the face of narcotics trafficers(a mercenary, working for the highest bidder? I am shocked, shocked!) and callous sadism and excessive force when dealing with the sad-sack economic migrants. Should any new infrastructure be needed, Bechtel can handle the no-bid contract, and we can all be appropriately(and toothlessly) outraged when it turns out that they are using undocumented day laborers to keep the costs of erecting lethally substandard facilities down.
Truly, it will be a neoliberal miracle.
If we want to cut off the flow of heavy weaponry to drug lords, we should probably focus on it more as a governance problem than as an opportunity to burnish our own police state.
As long as the boundary between the local governments(whose security forces we are almost uniformly dumping guns and training on, some 'in-kind' some as 'foreign aid', with the exception of the ones too left wing for our taste) and the cartels remains extremely porous due to corruption, defection, and the like, we are going to continue to see fair numbers of heavily equipped and fairly well trained drug gang militias.
Los Zetas are probably the most notable, getting their start when 30-odd members of the Mexican special forces(more than a few of them trained on your dime at Fort Bragg in a variety of handy techniques) were hired away as a security force for the Gulf Cartel. They continue to rely heavily on hires from a variety of police and army units from Mexico and elsewhere, and most of their best equipment is skimmed from the same.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that there aren't arms purchased by American civilians in use, I'm sure that there are. However, the steady flow of police and military hardware(and personnel and expertise...), much of it kindly provided by Uncle Sam, from the dubiously effective states in the region is arguably more of a problem.
More broadly, this is arguably about the toxic mixture of the revolving door between government and its contractors, along with a certain amount of nigh-religious belief in any wiz-bang tech toy for which a sufficiently stupifying powerpoint and sufficiently invigorating 3D-rendered demo video can be produced.
"Well, lets see here: we could either hire some more guards and equip them with the sort of modestly-upgraded-versions-of-proven-technology that we know are up to the task of detecting people in a desert environment or we could throw gigantic bales of cash at some contractor to provide a 'comprehensive integrated technology solution'."
"Gosh, I sure do love solutions! Plus, everybody knows that reducing payroll costs is always efficient, no matter how high the capital and long-term-contracting costs of doing so may be."
If they can just get a colony of space bats to cling to the main tank, their tough, leathery wings should provide sufficient structural integrity to keep the tank together...
In an ideal world, wouldn't the fix be "Pick up the phone, scream at the contractor for trying to pull this shit on you, and demand a part that actually works to spec, right. the. fuck. yesterday."?
It seems like the contract must have been poorly written(and/or a blatant giveaway to our precious, precious defense contractors and their poor starving shareholders) if the solution they are ending up with is "have in-house engineers get their Macguyver on and make the gigantic tank-o'-rocket fuel on a manned vessel work somehow."
Hey, at least this time they are working around an entirely arbitrary restriction(since the dock connector has a perfectly good logic-level serial port, among other things), rather than advancing the state of the art in data transmission over the legacy copper infrastructure.
Surely that, um, makes it better?
There are actually a lot of things that the average Linux setup could be doing for better security(many of them are available; but the number of systems actually doing the hardcore full-on SELinux thing is definitely smaller than the number of "Hey, a copy of linux and an outdated version of PHPmyadmin sure is cheap, and isn't nearly as hard to use as they say!" linux servers floating around out there...)
The idea that being OSS is responsible for their weaknesses, though, is risible.
No need to ask...
Now, in fairness, having a single AV engine, running on a box with powerful CPU(s) and a fast disk subsystem; busily snipping known viral payloads off of passing emails and network shared directories is actually a reasonably sensible 'pragmatic risk reduction' strategy, no matter what OS the server is running. It does help catch a lot of the more sophmoric virus attempts floating around, at zero computational and disk access overhead to the clients, who are the ones that likely have weaker CPUs and vastly lousier disk systems...
They then politely ignored inquiries as to why their software was needed to protect superior closed-source systems...
If I had spent years building AV software to paper over Windows' flaws, I'd probably have given up on technical correctness as well...
It completely fails to surprise me that an AV would have completely given up on the notion of security through technical correctness and have fallen back on the notion of security through obscurity.
The whole idea of OSS security(unlike, say, physical security) is that software bugs and errors are what introduce insecurities, that a technically correct system will be secure even if the attacker knows what it looks like(the same principle as in cryptography). This isn't true of physical systems; because physical materials always have finite strength; but software can(at least in theory, it rarely does) possess technical correctness.
I am, of course, totally unsurprised that an AV company would have completely given up on such a thing, and are falling back on obscurantism and endless layers of bandaids...
Unfortunately, the "Trusted Computing Group" seems to have based their TPM design specs on ignoring that particular possibility as systematically as possible...
Are "fascism" and "ignorance" some kind of degenerate foreign-speak for "national unity" and "moral certainty" respectively?
"App Stores" are quite arguably a good thing. I know that I say a few words of thanks every time I type 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade' and everything automagically pulls from the repositories and does its thing. It absolutely curb-stomps the experience of a zillion separate updaters, obsolete library versions, and so forth.
On the other hand, an implementation where my apt-sources are cryptographically signed, and the BIOS refuses to boot if the list has been modified, would be a dark day indeed. That, to my mind, is the actual threat.
Although they haven't been called "app stores" in the past, package management systems kick ass, and are generally far superior in user experience to just grabbing random stuff off the internet and installing it. However, any entity who would restrict you exclusively to their own package management system fancies themselves your master and will soon be your rent-collecting landlord.
Prejudice is just the drunk, mean, cousin of pattern recognition, which is just the folksy-handyman version of the scientific method....
Probably not if you live in a Florida trailer park: Nuclear weapons and delivery systems are too pricey to waste on low value targets....
It's one of the perks of living in a high-density area with a lot of strategic stuff nearby. Should the shit hit the fan, I'll go from "sipping a nice gin and tonic" to "gas and/or plasma phase" with such rapidity that my neural net will be destroyed faster than impulses can travel along the nerves. I will, quite literally, be dead before I know it.
Out in the sticks, people will have to contend with violently expelling their gastrointestinal systems from both ends and fighting off the roving bands of supermutants.
Everybody owes fealty to the United States; because we are the best nation in the world. Some people just don't realize it yet, which is why we have to spend so much on our armed forces and prisons...
But this guy is merely a risibly hyperbolic instance of a much broader, more common, and (in alarmingly many circles) respected position: Namely, that the person who reveals wrongdoing is somehow guiltier of that wrongdoing than the person who commits it.
I can't figure out if this view is a cancerous outgrowth of the morally monstrous "My country right or wrong" brigade(who are certainly louder and more numerous than there more honorable "May my country always be right and, when wrong, be set right" counterparts) or if it is a symptom of an even deeper flavor of cognitive limitation and/or ethical infantalism.
Below a certain age, and in some lower animals, "object permanence" is not well established. If they see an object enter a bag, they still lose track of it once it leaves their vision, and do not conclude that it must be residing in the bag, and can be found there. Above a certain age, and in smarter animals, this conclusion sticks. One is inclined to wonder if there is some moral variant of this, where some people, for who knows what reason, cannot apply "ethical action permanence" and conclude that, if Wikileaks took it out of the bag, and the government is the one who puts stuff in the bag, even though Wikileaks is holding the unethical object, it is merely the entity that took the object out of the bag where it had earlier been placed, not the entity that created the object.
In a way, I actually find the straight-up belligerent "USA! USA! Nuke ALL RAGHEADS!!!!" crowd to be more respectable. They are atavistic, barbarous scum, but they are refreshingly honest and straightforward about their bloodlust. The mealy-mouthed "respectable" apologists, on the other hand, are ethically no better; but spend their time dripping honeyed words and "nuance" to cover for the policies that they don't have the guts to endorse public-ally. It's like Fred Phelps: He is an awful human being, and merely by existing makes one wish there were a hell for him to inhabit; but he is all honesty. No equivocation, no focusing only on soft targets(anybody can picket an abortion clinic without much in the way of controversy, hitting military funerals takes serious guts...), no "Oh, we just stand for commonsense family values" circumlocution.
A world where your choices have essentially no effect is just a rail shooter, with slightly greater or lesser twistiness in the rails. The "shooter" mechanic(whether it be literal shooting, RPG, or whatever) had better be compelling. If it is, great, you've got a game that is perfectly decent, if probably not the most emotionally involving of all time. If the mechanic sucks, you've just created another game to put on the pile of examples of why "rail shooter" is practically a four letter word in gaming circles...
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)": this unwholesome bastard abomination is what you get when the only winnable path is, in fact, as linear as the rail shooter scenario; but the world is enough of a sandbox that you can easily deviate from that one true path in myriad illogical ways. Punishments for stupidity are fine; punishments for failure to use your telepathic powers to intuit, during level one, which apparently useless bits of scene clutter you'll need to have on level ten is bullshit. Also annoying are the "completionist heaven" ones. Homeworld, an otherwise pretty brilliant game, suffered from this. Since each level started you out with what you had accumulated the level before, you were quickly led to realize that after "beating" a given level you were semi-required to set your harvesters to work and wait until every RU in the entire level was in your coffers(extra credit for telepathically knowing which ships you should pre-build so as to not die early in the next level, and which you should avoid building because some deus ex machina is going to give you the superior replacement...)
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome. The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
Just you wait, sonny body, and be sure to snag yourself a serial wacom pad on Ebay while you still can.
You'll need it when the part of that trademark licensing deal that gives Cisco the rights to make all router configurations "intuitively multitouch gesture based" kicks in...
Insensitive clod. Do you know how many patches we send upstream to the browser vendors to help them build rendering engines that can handle 25,000+ animated .gifs and 100+ flash embeds in a single page?
Never mind the time that we had to spend three weeks groveling through the dark underbelly of the Windows driver model, trying to figure out why users of certain realtek audio chipsets would suffer bluescreens when more than 14 streams of generic crunk rap were being fed to the software audio mixer simultaneously...