Yellowcake is one of the smallest costs involved in nuclear power plants. If your plant is a reprocessing plant, it's even smaller. With a sufficiently advanced plant (and by "sufficiently advanced" I mean "we know how to build them, we just haven't done it yet thanks to politics") it's nearly economically feasible to extract uranium fuel straight out of seawater, which has enough reserves dissolved in it to last for literally tens of millions of years.
That's a conservative estimate.
Nuclear fuel is not limited in any practical sense.
Because it is cost, and it is complexity, and every port and part you can drop saves money. Or should we still have parallel ports and serial ports on our computers? How many IDE ports and floppy ports would you consider appropriate? Would you like two ISA slots, or is one enough?
At some point, you have to remove things that nobody uses. I'm going to wager that, effectively, nobody uses the line-in port - I have seven computers in my apartment and never once, in the last five years, have I used the line-in port.
I really don't think that $50 for an adapter that you will be able to use right up until USB is obsolete (which is a long, long ways off, if ever) is too high a cost compared to literally thousands of people getting another hunk of plastic and metal that they will never, ever touch.
I'm curious - does anyone know what fraction of air travel prices are oil? I'd have a hard time imagining it being more than 50%, and obviously if it's low enough then "dwindling oil" won't have a particularly big effect.
We had this same prediction 20 years ago... the increased trade with China would make it a free country and bring political liberalism. How'd that work out?
Someone told me a while back that if I worked out regularly, I'd get stronger. Well I totally lifted some iron for, like, half a week. And I didn't get any stronger! What's up with that?
Major cultural and political change takes longer than twenty years. Come back to it in eighty years. If China isn't at the very least bucking against its dictatorship, then you can say it was a failure.
They do not, in any way, do a line-by-line audit. Anyone with even a slight understanding of malicious software will know many ways to sneak malware past Apple.
Of course, getting enough people to download your malware to be useful is another matter altogether, and once your payload does activate, expect it to be pulled off the app store quite quickly.
Indeed. For example, anyone serious would have learned not to leave a backdoor:)
I certainly never claimed it would be hard, merely that it could. Obviously, UbiSoft, whether through intent, misplanning, or sheer incompetence, chose not to.
If that were that easy, we'd have programs able to do it already. We don't. It's not that easy.
I'd love to see you try to run a modern game inside VMWare, for example. The compatibility and speed just aren't there. Anyone capable of doing it would be forming a company to sell groundbreaking VM solutions, not cracking video games.
We know why children labor -- because the rich aren't willing to pay enough for a man to feed his family under his own pay.
Or, alternatively, because the owners aren't able to pay enough. I mean, let's imagine you have three options: don't pay enough for one person to keep an entire family fed, fire everyone and close down the factory, or go bankrupt, fire everyone, and then close down the factory.
Which do you choose?
by pulling workers out of the labor pool, we are making the labor resource more scarce making the resource more valuable and therefore raising the rates of pay for those who remain at work. So child labor laws might also serve to improve the amount of money that comes into individual families.
This line makes the broken window fallacy look practically unassailable in comparison.
It was one of the worst nuclear disasters in US history. It caused no immediate deaths and released an amount of radiation which, statistically, is probably responsible for one death.
Worst nuclear disaster. One death.
Meanwhile, literally thousands of people die in coal plant-related accidents every year, with an estimated tens of thousands dying every year from the pollution released.
Safety is not an absolute - it is relative to the alternatives - and by that measure, nuclear power is ridiculously safe.
I've never said it won't be possible. Of course it will be possible. In the worst-case, you just reimplement the entire game. However, they can make it really stunningly difficult - the question is how difficult it will be, when it will be truly working, how many false releases they'll make that almost work, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, of course it's crackable. But it may be nowhere near "easy".
You've summarized the easy part and glossed over the hard part:) Yes, capturing the data would be easy and would be one of the first things attempted. Figuring out how to map the data to output results may be far harder.
Input is a binary dump from every important structure in the game, appended end-to-end, with details like "size" and "type" and "what's coming next" inferred from the internal representation. Output is a bytecode program that fills structures by calling their APIs. Note that the APIs do not directly set fields - some fields are unimportant, some fields are only important if they have specific flags, some fields are set in different formats than they're internally stored in, etc etc etc.
If they are doing this, their goal is to make it as annoying to "get right" as possible. Maybe a first version will be released in a week, with one major improvement per week after that - if it takes ten versions to actually get every case right, they've pretty much succeeded.
I'm countering your argument of difficulty, not countering your argument of "ubisoft won't care". They very well might not care, that's completely true, but it's ridiculous to take "it will be difficult for a cracker to fix" and assume that implies it will be difficult for Ubisoft to change.
It'll be relatively easy for Ubisoft. I still don't know if they'll bother, of course.
Emulating the server can be pretty complicated. I'm imagining a setup where the "save" function sends a bunch of unprocessed data in one format to the server, then the "load" process accepts a bunch of heavily processed data in another format. The server could very well do things like pickle AI state, remap function, all the way up to generating an entire bytecode miniprogram to recreate the game state.
I'm not saying it does, note, but it could. Saying "all they have to do is emulate the server" is pretty meaningless when you don't know what the server is doing.
This isn't really accurate. Patching a game with access to its source code is an entire different beast from patching a game from assembly (or, even worse, DRM-mangled bytecode or hooked assembly or whatever wacky techniques they're using.)
Presumably, all they'd have to do would be to take the server savegame code and build it into the client.
Your argument is like saying "well, if it's so hard for people to write perfectly-compatible WoW servers, then obviously Blizzard has to go through the same amount of work every time they modify their game!" Duh. No.
If it provided that functionality, then the specialization wouldn't be needed - you'd just call HasCompass() and it would give you all the compass data necessary. The fact that the libraries are buggy is what causes the issue in the first place.
I'm always curious by people talking about "useless forms of social networking". I mean, what's the supposed purpose of social networking sites? Is there a fixed goal? A constitution? Should we measure a social networking site by how many jobs it fills, or how many dates are had through it?
As I see it, there are people, and they chat. That's social. That's the essence of humanity.
How can you get any more, or any less, useful than that?
In summary: what forms of social networking do you consider "useful", and why?
Remember, folks: piracy is killing movies. That's why good movies like The Chronicles of Riddick didn't make money. Because of piracy. And despite the fact that the movie didn't make money, they're making a sequel, which might not make money either, which can also be blamed on piracy.
And yet, despite the fact that both of these movies didn't make money (piracy), somehow the studio remains profitable.
Hell, with profits like these, who needs "profitable movies"?
Slashdot Mirror
Yellowcake is one of the smallest costs involved in nuclear power plants. If your plant is a reprocessing plant, it's even smaller. With a sufficiently advanced plant (and by "sufficiently advanced" I mean "we know how to build them, we just haven't done it yet thanks to politics") it's nearly economically feasible to extract uranium fuel straight out of seawater, which has enough reserves dissolved in it to last for literally tens of millions of years.
That's a conservative estimate.
Nuclear fuel is not limited in any practical sense.
Because it is cost, and it is complexity, and every port and part you can drop saves money. Or should we still have parallel ports and serial ports on our computers? How many IDE ports and floppy ports would you consider appropriate? Would you like two ISA slots, or is one enough?
At some point, you have to remove things that nobody uses. I'm going to wager that, effectively, nobody uses the line-in port - I have seven computers in my apartment and never once, in the last five years, have I used the line-in port.
I really don't think that $50 for an adapter that you will be able to use right up until USB is obsolete (which is a long, long ways off, if ever) is too high a cost compared to literally thousands of people getting another hunk of plastic and metal that they will never, ever touch.
This is the sound of the joke going over your head.
I'm curious - does anyone know what fraction of air travel prices are oil? I'd have a hard time imagining it being more than 50%, and obviously if it's low enough then "dwindling oil" won't have a particularly big effect.
Someone told me a while back that if I worked out regularly, I'd get stronger. Well I totally lifted some iron for, like, half a week. And I didn't get any stronger! What's up with that?
Major cultural and political change takes longer than twenty years. Come back to it in eighty years. If China isn't at the very least bucking against its dictatorship, then you can say it was a failure.
I have trouble imagining how that is possible considering that you don't submit your source code to the App Store.
They do not, in any way, do a line-by-line audit. Anyone with even a slight understanding of malicious software will know many ways to sneak malware past Apple.
Of course, getting enough people to download your malware to be useful is another matter altogether, and once your payload does activate, expect it to be pulled off the app store quite quickly.
Indeed. For example, anyone serious would have learned not to leave a backdoor :)
I certainly never claimed it would be hard, merely that it could. Obviously, UbiSoft, whether through intent, misplanning, or sheer incompetence, chose not to.
If that were that easy, we'd have programs able to do it already. We don't. It's not that easy.
I'd love to see you try to run a modern game inside VMWare, for example. The compatibility and speed just aren't there. Anyone capable of doing it would be forming a company to sell groundbreaking VM solutions, not cracking video games.
Or, alternatively, because the owners aren't able to pay enough. I mean, let's imagine you have three options: don't pay enough for one person to keep an entire family fed, fire everyone and close down the factory, or go bankrupt, fire everyone, and then close down the factory.
Which do you choose?
This line makes the broken window fallacy look practically unassailable in comparison.
It was one of the worst nuclear disasters in US history. It caused no immediate deaths and released an amount of radiation which, statistically, is probably responsible for one death.
Worst nuclear disaster. One death.
Meanwhile, literally thousands of people die in coal plant-related accidents every year, with an estimated tens of thousands dying every year from the pollution released.
Safety is not an absolute - it is relative to the alternatives - and by that measure, nuclear power is ridiculously safe.
I've never said it won't be possible. Of course it will be possible. In the worst-case, you just reimplement the entire game. However, they can make it really stunningly difficult - the question is how difficult it will be, when it will be truly working, how many false releases they'll make that almost work, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, of course it's crackable. But it may be nowhere near "easy".
I've linked this before, but check out http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php - it goes over some of the real goals and issues involved with copy protection.
You've summarized the easy part and glossed over the hard part :) Yes, capturing the data would be easy and would be one of the first things attempted. Figuring out how to map the data to output results may be far harder.
Writing "save" and "load" code in a game is reasonably difficult even if you have the source available. If you don't, it's far worse.
I should point out that I'm not saying any of this is impossible. Just nasty and annoying. Their goal is to delay cracking, not stop it entirely.
Input is a binary dump from every important structure in the game, appended end-to-end, with details like "size" and "type" and "what's coming next" inferred from the internal representation. Output is a bytecode program that fills structures by calling their APIs. Note that the APIs do not directly set fields - some fields are unimportant, some fields are only important if they have specific flags, some fields are set in different formats than they're internally stored in, etc etc etc.
If they are doing this, their goal is to make it as annoying to "get right" as possible. Maybe a first version will be released in a week, with one major improvement per week after that - if it takes ten versions to actually get every case right, they've pretty much succeeded.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php is a good example of the kind of subtlety and complexity that, if I were designing this system, I would be trying to create.
And then you can't save your game, because the "load" function takes data in a fundamentally different format than the "save" function outputs.
(Again, I have no idea if this is true - I'm just saying it's theoretically possible.)
Don't worry, they'll just raise the price of the game to compensate. :D
That said, "complicated" has nothing to do with "cpu cycles". It may do something very complicated and very computationally inexpensive.
I'm countering your argument of difficulty, not countering your argument of "ubisoft won't care". They very well might not care, that's completely true, but it's ridiculous to take "it will be difficult for a cracker to fix" and assume that implies it will be difficult for Ubisoft to change.
It'll be relatively easy for Ubisoft. I still don't know if they'll bother, of course.
Emulating the server can be pretty complicated. I'm imagining a setup where the "save" function sends a bunch of unprocessed data in one format to the server, then the "load" process accepts a bunch of heavily processed data in another format. The server could very well do things like pickle AI state, remap function, all the way up to generating an entire bytecode miniprogram to recreate the game state.
I'm not saying it does, note, but it could. Saying "all they have to do is emulate the server" is pretty meaningless when you don't know what the server is doing.
This isn't really accurate. Patching a game with access to its source code is an entire different beast from patching a game from assembly (or, even worse, DRM-mangled bytecode or hooked assembly or whatever wacky techniques they're using.)
Presumably, all they'd have to do would be to take the server savegame code and build it into the client.
Your argument is like saying "well, if it's so hard for people to write perfectly-compatible WoW servers, then obviously Blizzard has to go through the same amount of work every time they modify their game!" Duh. No.
If it provided that functionality, then the specialization wouldn't be needed - you'd just call HasCompass() and it would give you all the compass data necessary. The fact that the libraries are buggy is what causes the issue in the first place.
This does seem to exactly describe the site, though.
I'm always curious by people talking about "useless forms of social networking". I mean, what's the supposed purpose of social networking sites? Is there a fixed goal? A constitution? Should we measure a social networking site by how many jobs it fills, or how many dates are had through it?
As I see it, there are people, and they chat. That's social. That's the essence of humanity.
How can you get any more, or any less, useful than that?
In summary: what forms of social networking do you consider "useful", and why?
Remember, folks: piracy is killing movies. That's why good movies like The Chronicles of Riddick didn't make money. Because of piracy. And despite the fact that the movie didn't make money, they're making a sequel, which might not make money either, which can also be blamed on piracy.
And yet, despite the fact that both of these movies didn't make money (piracy), somehow the studio remains profitable.
Hell, with profits like these, who needs "profitable movies"?
Honestly, I don't see much of a difference between your description and actual human beings.