Well, that's not at all obvious. For a 1 kg object, the force due to gravity is 9.8 Newtons. But, for a 2 kg object, the force is double that. Theoretically, if one could make a 5 Newton thruster( and everything else), which was much less than.5 kg, it actually could get off the ground.
The only problem is that fuel+thruster+nuclear reactor+payload is usually more than one pound. Quite a lot more, in fact. For example, Cassini was about 5600 kilograms, and that ignores an electrical power source sufficient to power the thruster. So for Cassini, 5 Newtons would be about 9e-5 times the force of gravity, rather than about half. (Force of gravity for Cassini would be about 58440 Newtons.)
No. Nobody has a working C -> GLSL compiler working yet, AFAIK. I think the next few generations will allow pointer manipulation in the shading languages, then we can start to look at really silly things like OS ports.
Really, how much cheaper can we expect a private company to do this? After all, NASa just needs to do it, while a private company needs to do it and turn a profit. And, seeing as how all "NASA" hardware is built by private contactors, how much of a difference are we really going to see?
There are already a few replies to this post which make the usual Apple-fanboy counter arguments, so I won't repeat them.
That said, what do you expect? The ones who know how to use their computers don't hang out in the Apple forums. They read slashdot instead. So, I'm not the least bit surprised that it took over a week for the folks in the Apple forum to figure out what was going on. Everybody else just used another browser, or decided the site wasn't that important.
I use my iBook all the time. A large part of the reason I use it so much is because I quite like XCode.:)
Certainly, it is quite easy to nuke a home directory, but that doesn't mean there aren't any benefits. The first that occurs to me is that a normal user can't install a service that runs at boot automatically. They also don't have permission to do things like open certain ports.
So, on Windows, as long as the average user is running your code, you can very easily have an FTP server running at boot which the user can't kill. It can run silently for a very long time, making available keylogs or whatever else.
On Linux/BSD/OS-X, the danger is slightly reduced. Sure, you can monitor a single user's access, and you can open up a port > 1024. You can certainly nuke the home directory, which would be horribly bad news for a lot of users. But, it is always possible to log in as another user and kill whatever it is. When you are running as another user, you will be fairly confident that you can at least see any problems that might present themselves. With windows, any app can make itself invisible to normal means of inspection (See Sony rootkit!).
There are some *nix fanboys who overstate the protections, certainly. But, "not much real extra security" is a hell of a lot better than "what in god's name were those chimp brained fucktards thinking?"
My assumption would have to be that he hoped anybody looking would see thr 4.99 and at a glance think it meant to say 499.00. But, yeah... 299 would probably have been less likely to draw huge amounts of attention. More deniability, too. "If I was scamming you, why am I paying you three hundred dollars for the privilege? Must be a problem with your systems!"
I was a Nielsen Television watcher for about year and a half, ending about a year ago. Instead of using my people meter while I watched television, I downloaded the shows to watch them on my computer. During this time, both Enterprise and Wonderfalls, shows I enjoyed immensely, were cancelled.
You can expect about a dozen brawny Wonderfalls fans to show up at your door and beat the crap out of you in about ten minutes.:) It's your fault I don't get to watch Caroline Dhavernas on TV! (Good job with Enterprise, though!)
Yet, I still fail to see how a videogame (or software programming at all) is in any way more "art" than a commercial or a sit-com or a board game is. Not all entertainment is "art". In fact, one could easily argue that the two things are rarely related and just because something involves creativity doesn't make it art, either.
i'll agree that the average sitcom really is hard to call art. But, some films are art. they are fundamentally the same medium, just approached from different sides. So, while I agree that Madden200X isn't, as a whole, a work of art, I do think that some games can be. Something like Black and White, which tried to do something really unique with the mechanics of gameplay, I might consider to be a work of art as a whole.
In the ARM world all opcodes are aligned on 32-bits [the lower two bits of the pc register are not available]. So if an ARM reads in 16 bytes it KNOWS it has 4 instructions [or 8 if it's in thumb mode]. It doesn't have to have a "scan" engine to find the opcode boundaries nor have to worry about verification on boundaries [e.g. if an opcode spills into the next window].
I used to be very very big on RISC. I have a MIPS R10k Octane next to me on my left, and an Alpha on my right. But, I have come to see a weird sort of twisted logic in the baroque way that X86 does things. Just think of it as gzipped instruction streams. Because X86 is so damned baroque, it tends to have appreciably smaller code than something like MIPS. Because of this, it spends less memory bandwidth on instructions. That is a big deal.
And, the number of transistors spent wrestling with the demented instruction set just isn't that big of a deal. When the P-Pro was all the rage, it made a very substantial difference. These days, eliminating instruction decode and the associated bricabrac wouldn't save you that much.
Now, this could all change if we move to massively multicore designs instead of big fast chips optimised for single threaded workloads. While a single X86 instruction decoder isn't a big deal, having 128 of them on a die would get hard. If somebody can come up with a really massively multicore chip (much moreso than niagra), and enough bandwidth to feed it, etc., you could see something really impressive. It'd probably be MIPS or ARM, or something. For a taste of the same idea, look at cell. 7 very small cores with no legacy garbage, and fantastic (theoretical peak) performance.
What exactly does "fast" rotator mean in this context? Do you know how much of a difference there would be in something tidally locked to the sun? Intuitively, it seems like a body absorbing X amount of energy ought to have the same average temperature, regardless of which side it comes from. Of course, intuitively, quantum mechanics and relativity don't work either, so I've learned to ask questions instead of trusting my intuition!:)
And, since you work with Cassini... Random question, not really your department... I understand that there exists some radar data for Titan's terrain. Do you know if this is readily available in an easy to use format like the MOLA data from Mars Global Surveyor? I've been starting work on some 3D renderings of Mars using the mola data... Would be fun to do some similar stuff with Titan.:)
Honestly, I'm surprised there isn't an extensible open source language translation community. Makes sense that there would be. Any group can maintain a database for a particular language, and there would be a standard for how the databases interact. I don't know enough about linguistics or machine translation to try to start it, but it sure seems like something that would be well recieved.
Wikipedia and Wiktonary sort of some close, but as far as I know, there is no dorect correlation between the Japanese wiktionary and the english wiktionary, so I can't easily use it for making fansubs.:)
Yeah, doesn't look to stellar. Goes along with the "Wireless TV" thing for the PSP... Sort of a yawn.
That said, for the next generation of handhelds, I can see a huge opportunity for really great language learning games. Nintendo could probably pull it off. Imagine having to control a character through an adventure game by voice, where each level forces you to learn new vocabulary. ("Take the blue book" "push the button on the largest robot" "thinly slice the duck, and sautee it in a plum sauce until golden brown, then serve on the china with a floral pattern."
With a built-in dictionary, and lesson-tutor modes. Also, handwriting recognition with the touch screen. , to help you learn the alphabet of the language. Maybe FMV snippets, so you can see real dialogs with visual cues. Having interactivity could really improve the learning process, if it were done right. If you are pronouncing a vowell sound wrong, it could give you extra tutoring. Visual cues could help you understand a scene without having to resort to your native tongue as much as a pimsleur audio tape, improving your immersion. Seeing bad results of your commands could help you organise the difference between similar sounding words, which would be very abstract in a classrom, or with a text book. "Flip the cup." (character turns over soffee cup, dumping it on ground) "No, dammit, I meant SIP from the cup." (Helpful animation appears split screen showing both what the character needs to do, and the word that the player used, with text at the bottom stating the verb.) Obviously, you couldn't make it perfectly intelligent so that It would be able to make sense of every wrong statement, but you could get a lot of generic animations for verbs, and models for nouns which could be shown when the player fails to use the right word.
Well, the Cray-2 was released in 1985, so it only just barely qualifies for the OP's criteria, since it would not have instantly been in widespread use. The X-MP Was released in 1982, so it is probably a fairly good guide to what would have been a "common" supercomputer at the start of 1985.
Before the XMP/EA's came around, the XMP had a max memory capacity of 128 MB (stated at the time as 16 Megawords, as byte notation was not yet universal.) 4 Processors, and a theoretical peak of 200 MFLOPS per processor. Thus, about 800 MFLOPS theoretical aggregate peak.
I just looked up a few numbers real quick... Looks like a dual-proc, dual-core Opteron 270HE has a theoretical peak of over 17 GFLOPS. I'm not intimately familiar with the memory latency characteristics of a cray, but I really can't imagine there being much competition between the two, no matter how great the IO was in 1985.
Obviously, quad-core Opterons are fairly high end... dividing out, and a single core from the system I was looking at the numbers for would be about 4 GFLOPS. Of course, that's peak. Probably something like 2 GFLOPS easily sustained for a modern single desktop CPU. Any AthlonX2 should be able to run the old nuclear sim code quite a lot faster than the "average" cray at the start of 1985. Regardless of any verbal mis-steps, or name calling in this thread, I think the original point was well made. I'd love to get to play around with some of the old sim software. Let's break out the g77, bitches! Let's get a nuclear sim project on sourceforge. It'd be greatly educational, both from a retrocomputing perspective, and from a physics one.
And personally, Location Free televsision doesn't get me too excited, because I'm never away from my house for that long a period at a time. What I'd really like to see is Network Executive Free television.
I agree. It seems like most shows aren't that time sensitive. So, the biggest sell I can think of would be watching your local news while you are on vacation. Except that your local news will be broadcast at some sane hour locally, meaning that you would have to watch it at like 4:00 am wherever you are vacationing.
Sorry if I'm unenthusiastic. To me, location free TV means that I should be able to watch French, German, Canadian, and Japanese TV without any hassles, from here in the US. That would be cool. It would be doubly cool if I could get something like Baghdad local news subtitled in English, because I don't speak any arabic.
I would surely have tuned into French news recently during the riots. The bit torrent sites aren't all that universal or organised for me to get Stargate and France Deux from the same site, unfortunately, and TV on the internet isn't anywhere near as widespread as radio.:(
On the same vein of thinking, I can't possibly imagine that a gamer, finding themselves in a situation where they actually had a girlfriend, would let anything screw that up, up to and including getting their gaming in. I would think one would be able to balence the two, assuming of course the girlfriend doesn't expect 100% of one's free time.
I've seen it happen, but I've never understood it. Some girl decides to be girlfriend toa a gamer, for no apparent reason. Lord only knows why. Gamer is happy to have a girlfriend, and continues to play games. Girl decides she isn't getting enough attention. Girl becomes neurotic with feeling unloved, Tries to get gamer to change his ways. Gamer has no idea that girl is crazy. Gamer just knows that he played video games, and girl fell for him, and he didn't change anything, So logically the conditions still exist which caused her to fall for him. Eventually, girl abandons gamer, who is confused, and then plays some Quake.
I understand the role of the gamer, though it is not a situation I've been in. I don't understand why women are so bat shit insane. I've never seen one of them explain their emotional state to the man. I've never seen one of them capable of understanding that a man will likely continue a long-standing hobby after entering into a relationship. And, often times, they just never bother to actually get to know the gamer before becoming his girlfriend.
But then, I'm somewhere around half a decade since I had a girl-relationship of any sort, so I'm not a great source of advice when it comes to relationships. They sure do enjoy complaining about their boyfriends to me, though.
I thought so, too. But, a Japanese friend hooked me up with one of the episodes of the original ElemenSTAR, and I realised that I actually had seen like one or two episodes of the American dubbed version when I was in high school.
1. Get sample including DNA. (Can be really fast with a cheek swab.)
2. Extract DNA from the sample. (Minutes to hours; from a fruit fly, I can do this in an hour.)
3. Set up the PCR reaction. (Can be automated to be very fast.)
4. Run PCR. With miniaturization and with some other tricks (see below) this can get quite fast.
5. Interpret what you've got. If you're doing this via sequencing, add (currently) hours to the process right now. If you're doing this by examining VNTRs, you might be able to get away faster. (VNTR = variable number of tandem repeats; if you look at enough sites that have these, you can get close to a unique identification, and I'm supposing you could get the numbers in at least a loose fashion via real-time quantitative PCR and a final melt curve analysis. That's faster than sequencing by a lot, but not 3-5 minutes that people are suggesting.)
I think the security nazi's may still try to get this installed. Imagine that you get a cheek swab when you do initial checkin, or security screening. Then, you wander toward your gate, and get some overpriced McDonald's, because they told you to get to security a minimum of two hours before the boarding time.
While you are waiting for boarding, they are running the DNA samples. If something comes up, they will flag you when you try to board with your boarding pass.
It's a stupid idea, IMHO, but I still think somebody may try to spend money on it.
What is the issue? An ABI compatibility layer isn't that novel. Besides, you can run a binary with any license. Are you suggesting that if I run a GPL'd binary under Solaris, that will somehow force Sun to GPL their whole OS? That makes about as much sense as running a non-gpl binary under Linux, and forcing Linus to close the kernel source. WTF?
Well, I'm a sys-admin at a company with a few hundred desktops. AFAICT, there isn't any way to scan my whole network for the rootkit, and the only sure fire, safe way to remove it is to reimage the machines that have it. Thankfully, it does phone home, so we have started looking through firewall logs for anything trying to get to the phone-home website. Still, a major PITA.
While your analogy to cable TV has some merit, I'm going to overextend it as a means of disagreeing with you.:) I think that paying for cable TV is basically just paying for access, sort of like ISP fees. I am okay with seeing ads on web pages because the web page doesn't get a cut of my ISP bill. Likewise, sci-fi channel doesn't get a cut of the cable bill, so they need ads to pay for battlestar galactica.
Now, an MMORPG is a premium service. In this analogy, I'd compare it to HBO or Showtime. I have paid for basic access, but then I pay extra for a premium service, and the content creator gets a direct cut of the extra fee. Sony bills me directly for the MMORPG, HBO gets added to my cable bill, but it is still similar.
So, if I actually played TmO, I'd be annoyed at the ads. Sony is double-dipping. They set a fee, where they thought they would turn a tidy profit. I play TmO because I'd rather avoid all the ads on television and whatnot. Now, Sony is making more money - I have to deal with more ads - and the fee I pay doesn't go down. If HBO started carrying ads, people would be pissed, and they wouldn't be likely to pay extra for it. Personally, I think real-ads in a matrix world would sort of hurt the illusion that it is a fantastic netherworld of the imagination. If the fantasy world is exactly like our world, why do I have to pay extra to be in it?
Though, obviously, the Matrix is a much more appropriate setting for real ads than WoW or Everquest. "Dial Ye Olde Telephone..." just wouldn't see quite right in a traditional fantasy setting.:)
If a packet gets to the NAT box, and it won't accept a connection from the external interface and forward it to an internal address, then it is filtering. The filtering saves you, not the NAT. We associate NAT with filtering because they are usually done together, but there is no inherent security in NAT by itself. Even if you have a routable IP, you can set up the exact same filter without NAT, and get the exact same security because no external packets will be routed to the local network.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's not at all obvious. For a 1 kg object, the force due to gravity is 9.8 Newtons. But, for a 2 kg object, the force is double that. Theoretically, if one could make a 5 Newton thruster( and everything else), which was much less than .5 kg, it actually could get off the ground.
The only problem is that fuel+thruster+nuclear reactor+payload is usually more than one pound. Quite a lot more, in fact. For example, Cassini was about 5600 kilograms, and that ignores an electrical power source sufficient to power the thruster. So for Cassini, 5 Newtons would be about 9e-5 times the force of gravity, rather than about half. (Force of gravity for Cassini would be about 58440 Newtons.)
No. Nobody has a working C -> GLSL compiler working yet, AFAIK. I think the next few generations will allow pointer manipulation in the shading languages, then we can start to look at really silly things like OS ports.
:)
You can use them with Linux though.
Really, how much cheaper can we expect a private company to do this? After all, NASa just needs to do it, while a private company needs to do it and turn a profit. And, seeing as how all "NASA" hardware is built by private contactors, how much of a difference are we really going to see?
There are already a few replies to this post which make the usual Apple-fanboy counter arguments, so I won't repeat them.
:)
That said, what do you expect? The ones who know how to use their computers don't hang out in the Apple forums. They read slashdot instead. So, I'm not the least bit surprised that it took over a week for the folks in the Apple forum to figure out what was going on. Everybody else just used another browser, or decided the site wasn't that important.
I use my iBook all the time. A large part of the reason I use it so much is because I quite like XCode.
Certainly, it is quite easy to nuke a home directory, but that doesn't mean there aren't any benefits. The first that occurs to me is that a normal user can't install a service that runs at boot automatically. They also don't have permission to do things like open certain ports.
So, on Windows, as long as the average user is running your code, you can very easily have an FTP server running at boot which the user can't kill. It can run silently for a very long time, making available keylogs or whatever else.
On Linux/BSD/OS-X, the danger is slightly reduced. Sure, you can monitor a single user's access, and you can open up a port > 1024. You can certainly nuke the home directory, which would be horribly bad news for a lot of users. But, it is always possible to log in as another user and kill whatever it is. When you are running as another user, you will be fairly confident that you can at least see any problems that might present themselves. With windows, any app can make itself invisible to normal means of inspection (See Sony rootkit!).
There are some *nix fanboys who overstate the protections, certainly. But, "not much real extra security" is a hell of a lot better than "what in god's name were those chimp brained fucktards thinking?"
My assumption would have to be that he hoped anybody looking would see thr 4.99 and at a glance think it meant to say 499.00. But, yeah... 299 would probably have been less likely to draw huge amounts of attention. More deniability, too. "If I was scamming you, why am I paying you three hundred dollars for the privilege? Must be a problem with your systems!"
You can expect about a dozen brawny Wonderfalls fans to show up at your door and beat the crap out of you in about ten minutes.
Ahh, but if the imagery is quantum in nature, it is both necrophilia *and* bestiality until you view it and collapse the wave function.
i'll agree that the average sitcom really is hard to call art. But, some films are art. they are fundamentally the same medium, just approached from different sides. So, while I agree that Madden200X isn't, as a whole, a work of art, I do think that some games can be. Something like Black and White, which tried to do something really unique with the mechanics of gameplay, I might consider to be a work of art as a whole.
we give them trials now? good to know things are improving.
I used to be very very big on RISC. I have a MIPS R10k Octane next to me on my left, and an Alpha on my right. But, I have come to see a weird sort of twisted logic in the baroque way that X86 does things. Just think of it as gzipped instruction streams. Because X86 is so damned baroque, it tends to have appreciably smaller code than something like MIPS. Because of this, it spends less memory bandwidth on instructions. That is a big deal.
And, the number of transistors spent wrestling with the demented instruction set just isn't that big of a deal. When the P-Pro was all the rage, it made a very substantial difference. These days, eliminating instruction decode and the associated bricabrac wouldn't save you that much.
Now, this could all change if we move to massively multicore designs instead of big fast chips optimised for single threaded workloads. While a single X86 instruction decoder isn't a big deal, having 128 of them on a die would get hard. If somebody can come up with a really massively multicore chip (much moreso than niagra), and enough bandwidth to feed it, etc., you could see something really impressive. It'd probably be MIPS or ARM, or something. For a taste of the same idea, look at cell. 7 very small cores with no legacy garbage, and fantastic (theoretical peak) performance.
What exactly does "fast" rotator mean in this context? Do you know how much of a difference there would be in something tidally locked to the sun? Intuitively, it seems like a body absorbing X amount of energy ought to have the same average temperature, regardless of which side it comes from. Of course, intuitively, quantum mechanics and relativity don't work either, so I've learned to ask questions instead of trusting my intuition! :)
:)
And, since you work with Cassini... Random question, not really your department... I understand that there exists some radar data for Titan's terrain. Do you know if this is readily available in an easy to use format like the MOLA data from Mars Global Surveyor? I've been starting work on some 3D renderings of Mars using the mola data... Would be fun to do some similar stuff with Titan.
Honestly, I'm surprised there isn't an extensible open source language translation community. Makes sense that there would be. Any group can maintain a database for a particular language, and there would be a standard for how the databases interact. I don't know enough about linguistics or machine translation to try to start it, but it sure seems like something that would be well recieved.
:)
Wikipedia and Wiktonary sort of some close, but as far as I know, there is no dorect correlation between the Japanese wiktionary and the english wiktionary, so I can't easily use it for making fansubs.
Yeah, doesn't look to stellar. Goes along with the "Wireless TV" thing for the PSP... Sort of a yawn.
That said, for the next generation of handhelds, I can see a huge opportunity for really great language learning games. Nintendo could probably pull it off. Imagine having to control a character through an adventure game by voice, where each level forces you to learn new vocabulary. ("Take the blue book" "push the button on the largest robot" "thinly slice the duck, and sautee it in a plum sauce until golden brown, then serve on the china with a floral pattern."
With a built-in dictionary, and lesson-tutor modes. Also, handwriting recognition with the touch screen. , to help you learn the alphabet of the language. Maybe FMV snippets, so you can see real dialogs with visual cues. Having interactivity could really improve the learning process, if it were done right. If you are pronouncing a vowell sound wrong, it could give you extra tutoring. Visual cues could help you understand a scene without having to resort to your native tongue as much as a pimsleur audio tape, improving your immersion. Seeing bad results of your commands could help you organise the difference between similar sounding words, which would be very abstract in a classrom, or with a text book. "Flip the cup." (character turns over soffee cup, dumping it on ground) "No, dammit, I meant SIP from the cup." (Helpful animation appears split screen showing both what the character needs to do, and the word that the player used, with text at the bottom stating the verb.) Obviously, you couldn't make it perfectly intelligent so that It would be able to make sense of every wrong statement, but you could get a lot of generic animations for verbs, and models for nouns which could be shown when the player fails to use the right word.
Well, the Cray-2 was released in 1985, so it only just barely qualifies for the OP's criteria, since it would not have instantly been in widespread use. The X-MP Was released in 1982, so it is probably a fairly good guide to what would have been a "common" supercomputer at the start of 1985.
Before the XMP/EA's came around, the XMP had a max memory capacity of 128 MB (stated at the time as 16 Megawords, as byte notation was not yet universal.) 4 Processors, and a theoretical peak of 200 MFLOPS per processor. Thus, about 800 MFLOPS theoretical aggregate peak.
I just looked up a few numbers real quick... Looks like a dual-proc, dual-core Opteron 270HE has a theoretical peak of over 17 GFLOPS. I'm not intimately familiar with the memory latency characteristics of a cray, but I really can't imagine there being much competition between the two, no matter how great the IO was in 1985.
Obviously, quad-core Opterons are fairly high end... dividing out, and a single core from the system I was looking at the numbers for would be about 4 GFLOPS. Of course, that's peak. Probably something like 2 GFLOPS easily sustained for a modern single desktop CPU. Any AthlonX2 should be able to run the old nuclear sim code quite a lot faster than the "average" cray at the start of 1985. Regardless of any verbal mis-steps, or name calling in this thread, I think the original point was well made. I'd love to get to play around with some of the old sim software. Let's break out the g77, bitches! Let's get a nuclear sim project on sourceforge. It'd be greatly educational, both from a retrocomputing perspective, and from a physics one.
I agree. It seems like most shows aren't that time sensitive. So, the biggest sell I can think of would be watching your local news while you are on vacation. Except that your local news will be broadcast at some sane hour locally, meaning that you would have to watch it at like 4:00 am wherever you are vacationing.
Sorry if I'm unenthusiastic. To me, location free TV means that I should be able to watch French, German, Canadian, and Japanese TV without any hassles, from here in the US. That would be cool. It would be doubly cool if I could get something like Baghdad local news subtitled in English, because I don't speak any arabic.
I would surely have tuned into French news recently during the riots. The bit torrent sites aren't all that universal or organised for me to get Stargate and France Deux from the same site, unfortunately, and TV on the internet isn't anywhere near as widespread as radio.
I've seen it happen, but I've never understood it. Some girl decides to be girlfriend toa a gamer, for no apparent reason. Lord only knows why. Gamer is happy to have a girlfriend, and continues to play games. Girl decides she isn't getting enough attention. Girl becomes neurotic with feeling unloved, Tries to get gamer to change his ways. Gamer has no idea that girl is crazy. Gamer just knows that he played video games, and girl fell for him, and he didn't change anything, So logically the conditions still exist which caused her to fall for him. Eventually, girl abandons gamer, who is confused, and then plays some Quake.
I understand the role of the gamer, though it is not a situation I've been in. I don't understand why women are so bat shit insane. I've never seen one of them explain their emotional state to the man. I've never seen one of them capable of understanding that a man will likely continue a long-standing hobby after entering into a relationship. And, often times, they just never bother to actually get to know the gamer before becoming his girlfriend.
But then, I'm somewhere around half a decade since I had a girl-relationship of any sort, so I'm not a great source of advice when it comes to relationships. They sure do enjoy complaining about their boyfriends to me, though.
I thought so, too. But, a Japanese friend hooked me up with one of the episodes of the original ElemenSTAR, and I realised that I actually had seen like one or two episodes of the American dubbed version when I was in high school.
Not until tomorrow, at the earliest. It will take a little time to et up the website. :)
I think the security nazi's may still try to get this installed. Imagine that you get a cheek swab when you do initial checkin, or security screening. Then, you wander toward your gate, and get some overpriced McDonald's, because they told you to get to security a minimum of two hours before the boarding time.
While you are waiting for boarding, they are running the DNA samples. If something comes up, they will flag you when you try to board with your boarding pass.
It's a stupid idea, IMHO, but I still think somebody may try to spend money on it.
What is the issue? An ABI compatibility layer isn't that novel. Besides, you can run a binary with any license. Are you suggesting that if I run a GPL'd binary under Solaris, that will somehow force Sun to GPL their whole OS? That makes about as much sense as running a non-gpl binary under Linux, and forcing Linus to close the kernel source. WTF?
Well, I'm a sys-admin at a company with a few hundred desktops. AFAICT, there isn't any way to scan my whole network for the rootkit, and the only sure fire, safe way to remove it is to reimage the machines that have it. Thankfully, it does phone home, so we have started looking through firewall logs for anything trying to get to the phone-home website. Still, a major PITA.
Damn, Information wants to be free, not a couple bucks a month. Well, I want information to be free.
While your analogy to cable TV has some merit, I'm going to overextend it as a means of disagreeing with you. :) I think that paying for cable TV is basically just paying for access, sort of like ISP fees. I am okay with seeing ads on web pages because the web page doesn't get a cut of my ISP bill. Likewise, sci-fi channel doesn't get a cut of the cable bill, so they need ads to pay for battlestar galactica.
..." just wouldn't see quite right in a traditional fantasy setting. :)
Now, an MMORPG is a premium service. In this analogy, I'd compare it to HBO or Showtime. I have paid for basic access, but then I pay extra for a premium service, and the content creator gets a direct cut of the extra fee. Sony bills me directly for the MMORPG, HBO gets added to my cable bill, but it is still similar.
So, if I actually played TmO, I'd be annoyed at the ads. Sony is double-dipping. They set a fee, where they thought they would turn a tidy profit. I play TmO because I'd rather avoid all the ads on television and whatnot. Now, Sony is making more money - I have to deal with more ads - and the fee I pay doesn't go down. If HBO started carrying ads, people would be pissed, and they wouldn't be likely to pay extra for it. Personally, I think real-ads in a matrix world would sort of hurt the illusion that it is a fantastic netherworld of the imagination. If the fantasy world is exactly like our world, why do I have to pay extra to be in it?
Though, obviously, the Matrix is a much more appropriate setting for real ads than WoW or Everquest. "Dial Ye Olde Telephone
If a packet gets to the NAT box, and it won't accept a connection from the external interface and forward it to an internal address, then it is filtering. The filtering saves you, not the NAT. We associate NAT with filtering because they are usually done together, but there is no inherent security in NAT by itself. Even if you have a routable IP, you can set up the exact same filter without NAT, and get the exact same security because no external packets will be routed to the local network.