The other usage for mod chips, which very few people in this thread appear to a) have mentioned or b) care about, is for playing imported games. In general this is not a big thing in the US (which is why it gets ignored) but in other places such as Europe it is a much larger issue - the US tends to get games months or even years sooner than EU countries. For example, Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball ships on 3rd December in the US, but does not come out until February 2003 in the UK. And two months is pretty quick - Final Fantasy 10 took around 9 months.
>I guess I just don't see it. If I was gonna bad
>mouth my boss, I'd use my domain as the e-mail
>address, and PGP crypt the message.
PGP encrypting it would do you no good, RIP gives the government powers to demand that you hand over your encryption key(s). And if you don't comply, or you've lost the key, or something? 2 years in the slammer.
There's an interesting article about RIP and what people can do to avoid it at http://www.fipr.org/rip/RIPcountermeasures.htm
Assassinations, while a fun and extremely tempting idea, are totally unnecessary in this case, since (as several people have already mentioned) this practice has already been used by some companies and is about as much trouble to circumvent as it is to make a hole in a wet paper bag in the monsoon season.
> There's one more cool thing that can be done
> with this. There are now discs which check the
> GUI region and enable/disable features
> depending on the native region of the player.
> So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region
> 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets
> them sell in multiple regions, but they only
> have to master the disc once, and only keep one
> item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to
> be one of these.
This will only work if the two (or more) countries they are region-coding it for share the same video signal format. You couldn't, for example, make a disc that would work in both the US and the UK (well, you COULD, but it would probably play in black and white on older televisions)
This is British Telecom who are doing this, right? In that case you can be sure the charges will be so massively high that it just won't be worth it unless you are some kind of rich businessman or something. If something freaky happens like e.g. it turns out NOT to be massively expensive I might have to see about getting a mobile phone myself and dump HomeHighway (BT's "home" version of ISDN2).
Also.. slightly offtopic.. but does anyone actually know of any 0800-number ISPs in the UK who a) have actually launched, b) have not subsequently crashed and burned and c) don't cost £50 a month and still require you to have ad banners on your screen?
Slashdot Mirror
The other usage for mod chips, which very few people in this thread appear to a) have mentioned or b) care about, is for playing imported games. In general this is not a big thing in the US (which is why it gets ignored) but in other places such as Europe it is a much larger issue - the US tends to get games months or even years sooner than EU countries. For example, Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball ships on 3rd December in the US, but does not come out until February 2003 in the UK. And two months is pretty quick - Final Fantasy 10 took around 9 months.
>I guess I just don't see it. If I was gonna bad
>mouth my boss, I'd use my domain as the e-mail
>address, and PGP crypt the message.
PGP encrypting it would do you no good, RIP gives the government powers to demand that you hand over your encryption key(s). And if you don't comply, or you've lost the key, or something? 2 years in the slammer.
There's an interesting article about RIP and what people can do to avoid it at http://www.fipr.org/rip/RIPcountermeasures.htm
Assassinations, while a fun and extremely tempting idea, are totally unnecessary in this case, since (as several people have already mentioned) this practice has already been used by some companies and is about as much trouble to circumvent as it is to make a hole in a wet paper bag in the monsoon season.
> There's one more cool thing that can be done
> with this. There are now discs which check the
> GUI region and enable/disable features
> depending on the native region of the player.
> So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region
> 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets
> them sell in multiple regions, but they only
> have to master the disc once, and only keep one
> item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to
> be one of these.
This will only work if the two (or more) countries they are region-coding it for share the same video signal format. You couldn't, for example, make a disc that would work in both the US and the UK (well, you COULD, but it would probably play in black and white on older televisions)
Also.. slightly offtopic.. but does anyone actually know of any 0800-number ISPs in the UK who a) have actually launched, b) have not subsequently crashed and burned and c) don't cost £50 a month and still require you to have ad banners on your screen?