Is it really that PHP makes it that hard to be secure, or that it makes it easy to do whatever you want, thereby allowing a lot of lazy people to take the easy route? I think the developer (writing code in PHP, not necessarily the developers of PHP) have to take responsibility for the things they write. If you're trusting user-entered data without escaping it and verifying its validity, shame on you! If you're doing other silly things that make it possible for people to h4x0r your systems, that's also largely the fault of the person writing the offending web application. I have nothing against making PHP more secure, but what does this entail? Not allowing you to do the things that make PHP flexible and fun to work with? I think the resulting language would be about as useful as safety scissors.
But PHP doesn't really have types, nor do HTML forms (aside from the differences between buttons, check boxes, etc.) And always escaping for SQL? That's the job of the SQL libraries, not the language itself. At some point a developer has to take responsibility for what they write, and they should handle data appropriately.
Larger, centralized electricity production is more efficient than having tons of little internal combustion engines running around. On top of that, it's much easier to control pollution at a power plant than it is on all those cars on the road. As I understand it electric cars themselves should be more efficient (fewer moving parts and such, in some designs they can do away with a transmission altogether). Also, we can burn less coal and gasoline, and process less uranium, if more of the power production systems move to renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro-electric).
On top of that, hydrogen is not an energy source. Hydrogen is an energy storage/transmission medium. You have to get hydrogen from something first, and at the moment, I think many producers of hydrogen get it from fossil fuels. So you'd end up with similar problems unless the grid switched to mostly renewable sources. However, I still think it's better than having all those individual little gasoline engines.
What I've always found interesting is that these people seem to be able to make threats against elected officials (calling for their death, torture, etc.) yet nobody ever says anything about it. Yet the moment a kid in a high school somewhere says something to the same effect, they're arrested, interrogated by the FBI, etc. Yet if you're a talk show host, or a popular right-wing media whore, you're allowed to call for the death or torture of anybody with whom you disagree.
Again, unless you violate Apple's patents or trademarks, there's nothing preventing somebody from producing equipment that would work in a Mac provided they can purchase the necessary parts. Apple uses components from a variety of manufacturers, so you may have to try and negotiate an agreement with each of them, but even so, they don't have to agree to sell them to you.
I don't see what legal justification Apple could possibly have for preventing the sale of used Apple equipment. I'm not saying they didn't do it, but, I don't see how they could possibly win such a case in court. As far as people at the Apple store telling customers that his store did bad work, sold bad equipment, etc., I'd chalk that up more to the people at the store rather than Apple themselves. It happens in all kinds of businesses, both computer related and not. If he had proof of the slander, he should (or should have, since you said "owned a computer store") filed a suit against them.
Apple may be the only source for Apple hardware. I have no problem with that. I don't have a problem with Microsoft being the only source for Microsoft's software. What I have a problem with is when a company like Microsoft forces other companies to do things (or not do things) as a condition of continuing to sell their software. Since the software is used on a large majority of machines the world over, refusal puts a company in a very precarious situation. Do you happen to have examples of Apple doing a similar thing?
The closest thing to an abuse of a monopoly I can see Apple being guilty of is their ties between iPods and iTunes. However, I don't think they could really be guilty of it unless they 1) made it so iPods would not play music unless it was purchased from iTunes and 2) made record companies sign an agreement stating that any music sold on iTunes could not also be licensed for sale to any competing online music distributors.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, I don't consider them an illegal monopoly because they only produce software for Windows, and Windows only works on x86 machines. I see them as an illegal monopoly when they threaten manufacturers with revocation of their distribution licenses when they choose to include a competitor's product with default installations. I expect Apple to have a monopoly on Apple products. Just as Microsoft has a monopoly on Microsoft products.
Oh, and I don't feel that anything Apple does is good, just as not everything Microsoft does is evil. But when it comes to a company listening to their customers, my opinion is that Apple wins every single time.
Well, for starters, they don't have a monopoly. Sure, only Apple makes Apple products, but what company isn't in charge of their own products? Does Dell have a monopoly on Dell machines? Does Adobe have a monopoly on Photoshop or other Adobe products? You're confusing issues here.
Apple, just like anybody else, is well within their right to prevent people from copying their trademarked or patented designs and creations. In the case of the Luxpro player, it's a blatant rip-off. Apple has never prevented, nor could they anyway, anyone from creating PowerPC-based systems. You couldn't copy the Mac itself, but you could probably piece together enough hardware to make a compatible Mac system. You could even sell it and Apple couldn't do anything to you unless you violated their patents or trademarks. Apple did decide to stop licensing the Mac platform to manufacturers who were producing Mac clones, but that's not the same as preventing people from making Mac-compatible computers whatsoever. But if Apple doesn't support your Mac-compatible machine, and it's always iffy whether or not the software would work on it, who would want to buy it? I don't think it'd be a very profitable business.
From what I understand, Apple performed an audit of their code and found a few bugs that could potentially be used to exploit a Mac in a similar fashion. However, I don't think such an exploit was ever demonstrated. I think it was a good thing that Apple performed the audit and fixed the problems, but that doesn't say that the "vulnerability" Ellch and Manor "demonstrated" was legitimate. Possible, yes, but still unconfirmed.
The hardware may completely cease to work without all the necessary stuff. While it may be possible to reverse engineer enough to do it, I'm pretty certain that'd end up falling under the DMCA provisions about copy protection circumvention. It'd be better to not have crippled hardware, even if the broken stuff is free.
I think a lot of this junk may be at the hardware level, though. So chances are the alternative OS you choose simply won't work with any of the hardware that requires this nonsense.
Not that I disagree with you about the stupidity of the US government, but, how have the courts been able to run the entire show? Not only can they not make laws, but they can't enforce them. All they can do is say whether or not the law is constitutional. On top of that, I don't think they can actually review the law until a lawsuit of some sort has been filed. There may be exceptions, but I think they're few. Could you elaborate on how the courts are going to undermine our entire system, and how this is any worse than the corruption we've already suffered from the executive and legislative branches?
As i said to the other poster in the thread, noise was not mentioned in the article. It was said the system was inefficient because it was more cumbersome to talk than it would be to type. That's where I disagreed. Whether or not noise matters is a different issue, but, I don't think it would've been a problem for the Star Trek computer.
I think a voice interface would still be a problem. It's the content of the spoken message that is important.
I can type "Show me the status of the plasma conduit in section XYZ", and I can also speak it aloud. Once it gets past speech recognition, it winds up essentially a list of tokens. English language words. Unless your speech recognition is so good it can glean different information from inflection.
I'm thinking if your computer is good enough to parse natural english when typed, it can probably just as easily handle the spoken words (provided it can understand what the words are). I'd rather speak than type if I can speak naturally.
The reason why I think a voice interface wouldn't be as good - imagine what an office would be like if everyone was chattering at their computer all the time. And the side effects of that.
Well, I didn't say it'd be necessarily practical for every situation. I'm just saying I don't think it'd be particularly inefficient.:) It depends on how you needed to use the computer.
I'd have to disagree with the article when they say the voice interfaces, such as those used in Star Trek, would be inefficient. If the machine is able to understand natural language, I'd think it would be much easier for a person to simply have a dialog with the computer than it'd be to try and figure out how to properly word the stuff, type it in, and then pick things from the screen. Not to mention the fact that the machine would literally need hundreds of thousands or millions of options, depending on what the user wanted. If you already know what you want, why not just say it?
Voice: "Computer, what's the status of the plasma conduit in section XYZ?"
Alternative: Okay, Engineering -> Systems -> Energy -> Plasma Conduits -> Section XYZ -> Status
Voice: "Computer, how many crew members on board are human, female, and single? Oh, and with big boobs?"
Alternative: Hmmm, Personnel -> Crew Listing -> Filter based on species, gender, marital status ->... wtf? no big boobs option?!
Anyway. I just thought it seemed silly. A lot of times it's easier to say what you want than it is to write it out. If the computer can understand written english that isn't specially formatted, then why not take it to the next step and have it accept voice input? After all that is said, they did still have LCARS and all, so it isn't like voice interaction was the only way to work with the computer.
I work as a contractor to the Navy, and we received e-mails a few weeks back saying that HTML e-mail would no longer be allowed. However, they weren't blocking it, merely converting anything that was HTML to plain-text or RTF. I've not tested by sending an HTML e-mail to my.mil address (gonna try that in a few minutes), but I don't think they're actually blocking it.
There are some of us who just want a console. I don't need another computer, another DVD or CD player (or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray for that matter). I just want something to play games on. I can do all the other stuff on other devices I already have, or I can purchase them later and use them. While it's sometimes convenient to have everything in one device, to me that's more of a problem than a feature. There's more code and more hardware, which leads to more things that can go wrong. On top of that, if it does happen to die, you lose ALL that functionality rather than just the one device.
I'm probably not going to buy a PS3 unless they're really, really cheap someday. I'm not buying an XBox360 either because the games just don't interest me. My wife and I went with a Wii on launch day and have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Now we can even browse the web on it, though it's probably easier to just get up and walk to the computer room. I'm not complaining that it does a few extra things, because it's taking advantage of hardware that's really already in the system. But, I don't want a living room desktop replacement, and I'd assume a lot of other people don't want one either. We buy consoles to play games.
1) Who cares? It's locked to your individual Wii anyway. So it's not like you can buy a VC game and then go play it elsewhere. It does suck that the games are different depending on the region, but it seems the game companies always do that.
2) I agree it would be cool, but they'd probably have to implement it in such a way so the whole VC realm of games uses friend codes. They probably just didn't feel it was important enough to include, and would rather people just play it with those sitting next to them.
3) Dunno why they didn't implement that. There's probably a reason, but I can't see that it'd be a good one.
4) I don't think they wanted to particularly modify the games. The N64 stuff probably doesn't remove the rumble functionality from the games, but the system just doesn't honor it. That's different. I've not played with any N64 games in the VC, though, so I may be mistaken.
5) I do think the pricing is a bit much. But, I don't think it's outrageous. Outrageous would be if all the retro games cost the same amount as the Wii games. But, my opinion is that it's reasonable, but a touch on the high priced side.
Well, I'll give it to you for being optimistic.:) It'd be nice if they were going to adopt a lot of these open practices and move forward towards a level playing field. But, we're talking about the largest software company in the world, whose monopoly allows them to pretty much do whatever they please. I don't see them giving that up easily, and I don't think the FOSS community is big enough for them to really care. It might be their way of conceding and working together more on the server front, but I don't see it moving over to the desktop. But, time will tell. We'll see.
They're still violating the spirit of the GPL, though.
I know they've done a few things that are at least somewhat "open", but I don't see this as being a significant part of Microsoft's strategy. It's probably more something to garner "good will" in the community, so we're more complacent. With all that said, they can *still* exert control over their patents if an open solution they've developed is used or extended by somebody else.
I just don't see them doing anything that's going to weaken their stranglehold on the PC community.
From what I understand, it doesn't protect any developers unless they work for Novell. Aside from that, it only protects Novell's customers from patent lawsuits. If you're using a different Linux distribution, you're not going to be covered.
The problem here is that it does violate the spirit of the GPL. Rather than granting all users freedom, they're granting users freedom only if they've purchased a specific distribution. The GPLv3 will more than likely fix this, but for now we're stuck with the GPLv2 allowing actions such as this.
Oh, and just how is Microsoft going to be fostering interoperability? I haven't seen yet where they've adopted any of our open protocols or open formats. I don't see them working with developers of free software products to help them inter-operate with Microsoft software. All I've seen so far is that Novell is going to be making an OpenXML plug-in for OpenOffice, and OpenXML is a standard in name only, also completely avoiding the intent of what it means to be a standard.
If you have to go with satellite, might want to give WildBlue a shot. It's $300 for equipment, but the service is pretty good and affordable when compared to the other providers like StarBand and DirecWay. My father-in-law has it (he's in an area with no cable or DSL) and now he's able to participate on the intarweb with the rest of us.
Well, for one, this isn't NPR content. It's American Public Media, which is part of Minnesota Public Radio. While their public radio stations usually play NPR content, and these shows are usually syndicated, they aren't NPR programs. On top of that, public radio only gets a small portion of its funding from tax payer money. The majority of funding comes through donations during the pledge drives.
If they have their own machines, rate-limit all that traffic. You could also potentially give them lower priority, with your machine having the highest. Aside from that, I'd hard-code some explicit priorities for their normal traffic (HTTP, FTP, games, whatever) and then dump the rest into a different queue that makes it take up much less of your bandwidth.
That said, it's still somewhat difficult to limit incoming traffic, since you can't always control what the sender does. But most of the methods work well enough.
The system does not encourage you to *throw* the Wiimote. I play pretty vigorously with the Wiimotes we have, and that doesn't cause any problems unless you're actually trying to throw the thing. I've yet to see a video where somebody was playing and didn't seem to be throwing the Wiimote as hard as they could.
My wife and I got a Wii on launch day in the US, and haven't ever had a problem with the Wiimotes flying out of our hands. We've played some vigorous Wiisports sessions, lots of Zelda, Rayman, all sorts of stuff. The closest we ever came to a mishap was when I misjudged my position in relation to our ceiling fan, and smacked the light with the Wiimote. The strap isn't meant to keep the Wiimote from flying away when you throw it, but to prevent you from dropping the Wiimote. The people in all the videos, when they're actually wearing the straps, aren't casually letting go. They're throwing the fuckers as hard as they can. Personally, I think if you're stupid enough to do that, you probably need to just go without a Wiimote until you've learned your lesson.
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Is it really that PHP makes it that hard to be secure, or that it makes it easy to do whatever you want, thereby allowing a lot of lazy people to take the easy route? I think the developer (writing code in PHP, not necessarily the developers of PHP) have to take responsibility for the things they write. If you're trusting user-entered data without escaping it and verifying its validity, shame on you! If you're doing other silly things that make it possible for people to h4x0r your systems, that's also largely the fault of the person writing the offending web application. I have nothing against making PHP more secure, but what does this entail? Not allowing you to do the things that make PHP flexible and fun to work with? I think the resulting language would be about as useful as safety scissors.
But PHP doesn't really have types, nor do HTML forms (aside from the differences between buttons, check boxes, etc.) And always escaping for SQL? That's the job of the SQL libraries, not the language itself. At some point a developer has to take responsibility for what they write, and they should handle data appropriately.
No, I think yours really has something wrong with it. With WiiConnect24 activated and on standy, ours isn't even warm.
Larger, centralized electricity production is more efficient than having tons of little internal combustion engines running around. On top of that, it's much easier to control pollution at a power plant than it is on all those cars on the road. As I understand it electric cars themselves should be more efficient (fewer moving parts and such, in some designs they can do away with a transmission altogether). Also, we can burn less coal and gasoline, and process less uranium, if more of the power production systems move to renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro-electric).
On top of that, hydrogen is not an energy source. Hydrogen is an energy storage/transmission medium. You have to get hydrogen from something first, and at the moment, I think many producers of hydrogen get it from fossil fuels. So you'd end up with similar problems unless the grid switched to mostly renewable sources. However, I still think it's better than having all those individual little gasoline engines.
What I've always found interesting is that these people seem to be able to make threats against elected officials (calling for their death, torture, etc.) yet nobody ever says anything about it. Yet the moment a kid in a high school somewhere says something to the same effect, they're arrested, interrogated by the FBI, etc. Yet if you're a talk show host, or a popular right-wing media whore, you're allowed to call for the death or torture of anybody with whom you disagree.
Again, unless you violate Apple's patents or trademarks, there's nothing preventing somebody from producing equipment that would work in a Mac provided they can purchase the necessary parts. Apple uses components from a variety of manufacturers, so you may have to try and negotiate an agreement with each of them, but even so, they don't have to agree to sell them to you.
I don't see what legal justification Apple could possibly have for preventing the sale of used Apple equipment. I'm not saying they didn't do it, but, I don't see how they could possibly win such a case in court. As far as people at the Apple store telling customers that his store did bad work, sold bad equipment, etc., I'd chalk that up more to the people at the store rather than Apple themselves. It happens in all kinds of businesses, both computer related and not. If he had proof of the slander, he should (or should have, since you said "owned a computer store") filed a suit against them.
Apple may be the only source for Apple hardware. I have no problem with that. I don't have a problem with Microsoft being the only source for Microsoft's software. What I have a problem with is when a company like Microsoft forces other companies to do things (or not do things) as a condition of continuing to sell their software. Since the software is used on a large majority of machines the world over, refusal puts a company in a very precarious situation. Do you happen to have examples of Apple doing a similar thing?
The closest thing to an abuse of a monopoly I can see Apple being guilty of is their ties between iPods and iTunes. However, I don't think they could really be guilty of it unless they 1) made it so iPods would not play music unless it was purchased from iTunes and 2) made record companies sign an agreement stating that any music sold on iTunes could not also be licensed for sale to any competing online music distributors.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, I don't consider them an illegal monopoly because they only produce software for Windows, and Windows only works on x86 machines. I see them as an illegal monopoly when they threaten manufacturers with revocation of their distribution licenses when they choose to include a competitor's product with default installations. I expect Apple to have a monopoly on Apple products. Just as Microsoft has a monopoly on Microsoft products.
Oh, and I don't feel that anything Apple does is good, just as not everything Microsoft does is evil. But when it comes to a company listening to their customers, my opinion is that Apple wins every single time.
Well, for starters, they don't have a monopoly. Sure, only Apple makes Apple products, but what company isn't in charge of their own products? Does Dell have a monopoly on Dell machines? Does Adobe have a monopoly on Photoshop or other Adobe products? You're confusing issues here.
Apple, just like anybody else, is well within their right to prevent people from copying their trademarked or patented designs and creations. In the case of the Luxpro player, it's a blatant rip-off. Apple has never prevented, nor could they anyway, anyone from creating PowerPC-based systems. You couldn't copy the Mac itself, but you could probably piece together enough hardware to make a compatible Mac system. You could even sell it and Apple couldn't do anything to you unless you violated their patents or trademarks. Apple did decide to stop licensing the Mac platform to manufacturers who were producing Mac clones, but that's not the same as preventing people from making Mac-compatible computers whatsoever. But if Apple doesn't support your Mac-compatible machine, and it's always iffy whether or not the software would work on it, who would want to buy it? I don't think it'd be a very profitable business.
From what I understand, Apple performed an audit of their code and found a few bugs that could potentially be used to exploit a Mac in a similar fashion. However, I don't think such an exploit was ever demonstrated. I think it was a good thing that Apple performed the audit and fixed the problems, but that doesn't say that the "vulnerability" Ellch and Manor "demonstrated" was legitimate. Possible, yes, but still unconfirmed.
The hardware may completely cease to work without all the necessary stuff. While it may be possible to reverse engineer enough to do it, I'm pretty certain that'd end up falling under the DMCA provisions about copy protection circumvention. It'd be better to not have crippled hardware, even if the broken stuff is free.
I think a lot of this junk may be at the hardware level, though. So chances are the alternative OS you choose simply won't work with any of the hardware that requires this nonsense.
Not that I disagree with you about the stupidity of the US government, but, how have the courts been able to run the entire show? Not only can they not make laws, but they can't enforce them. All they can do is say whether or not the law is constitutional. On top of that, I don't think they can actually review the law until a lawsuit of some sort has been filed. There may be exceptions, but I think they're few. Could you elaborate on how the courts are going to undermine our entire system, and how this is any worse than the corruption we've already suffered from the executive and legislative branches?
As i said to the other poster in the thread, noise was not mentioned in the article. It was said the system was inefficient because it was more cumbersome to talk than it would be to type. That's where I disagreed. Whether or not noise matters is a different issue, but, I don't think it would've been a problem for the Star Trek computer.
I think a voice interface would still be a problem. It's the content of the spoken message that is important.
:) It depends on how you needed to use the computer.
I can type "Show me the status of the plasma conduit in section XYZ", and I can also speak it aloud. Once it gets past speech recognition, it winds up essentially a list of tokens. English language words. Unless your speech recognition is so good it can glean different information from inflection.
I'm thinking if your computer is good enough to parse natural english when typed, it can probably just as easily handle the spoken words (provided it can understand what the words are). I'd rather speak than type if I can speak naturally.
The reason why I think a voice interface wouldn't be as good - imagine what an office would be like if everyone was chattering at their computer all the time. And the side effects of that.
Well, I didn't say it'd be necessarily practical for every situation. I'm just saying I don't think it'd be particularly inefficient.
I'd have to disagree with the article when they say the voice interfaces, such as those used in Star Trek, would be inefficient. If the machine is able to understand natural language, I'd think it would be much easier for a person to simply have a dialog with the computer than it'd be to try and figure out how to properly word the stuff, type it in, and then pick things from the screen. Not to mention the fact that the machine would literally need hundreds of thousands or millions of options, depending on what the user wanted. If you already know what you want, why not just say it?
... wtf? no big boobs option?!
Voice:
"Computer, what's the status of the plasma conduit in section XYZ?"
Alternative:
Okay, Engineering -> Systems -> Energy -> Plasma Conduits -> Section XYZ -> Status
Voice:
"Computer, how many crew members on board are human, female, and single? Oh, and with big boobs?"
Alternative:
Hmmm, Personnel -> Crew Listing -> Filter based on species, gender, marital status ->
Anyway. I just thought it seemed silly. A lot of times it's easier to say what you want than it is to write it out. If the computer can understand written english that isn't specially formatted, then why not take it to the next step and have it accept voice input? After all that is said, they did still have LCARS and all, so it isn't like voice interaction was the only way to work with the computer.
I work as a contractor to the Navy, and we received e-mails a few weeks back saying that HTML e-mail would no longer be allowed. However, they weren't blocking it, merely converting anything that was HTML to plain-text or RTF. I've not tested by sending an HTML e-mail to my .mil address (gonna try that in a few minutes), but I don't think they're actually blocking it.
There are some of us who just want a console. I don't need another computer, another DVD or CD player (or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray for that matter). I just want something to play games on. I can do all the other stuff on other devices I already have, or I can purchase them later and use them. While it's sometimes convenient to have everything in one device, to me that's more of a problem than a feature. There's more code and more hardware, which leads to more things that can go wrong. On top of that, if it does happen to die, you lose ALL that functionality rather than just the one device.
I'm probably not going to buy a PS3 unless they're really, really cheap someday. I'm not buying an XBox360 either because the games just don't interest me. My wife and I went with a Wii on launch day and have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Now we can even browse the web on it, though it's probably easier to just get up and walk to the computer room. I'm not complaining that it does a few extra things, because it's taking advantage of hardware that's really already in the system. But, I don't want a living room desktop replacement, and I'd assume a lot of other people don't want one either. We buy consoles to play games.
1) Who cares? It's locked to your individual Wii anyway. So it's not like you can buy a VC game and then go play it elsewhere. It does suck that the games are different depending on the region, but it seems the game companies always do that.
2) I agree it would be cool, but they'd probably have to implement it in such a way so the whole VC realm of games uses friend codes. They probably just didn't feel it was important enough to include, and would rather people just play it with those sitting next to them.
3) Dunno why they didn't implement that. There's probably a reason, but I can't see that it'd be a good one.
4) I don't think they wanted to particularly modify the games. The N64 stuff probably doesn't remove the rumble functionality from the games, but the system just doesn't honor it. That's different. I've not played with any N64 games in the VC, though, so I may be mistaken.
5) I do think the pricing is a bit much. But, I don't think it's outrageous. Outrageous would be if all the retro games cost the same amount as the Wii games. But, my opinion is that it's reasonable, but a touch on the high priced side.
Well, I'll give it to you for being optimistic. :) It'd be nice if they were going to adopt a lot of these open practices and move forward towards a level playing field. But, we're talking about the largest software company in the world, whose monopoly allows them to pretty much do whatever they please. I don't see them giving that up easily, and I don't think the FOSS community is big enough for them to really care. It might be their way of conceding and working together more on the server front, but I don't see it moving over to the desktop. But, time will tell. We'll see.
They're still violating the spirit of the GPL, though.
I know they've done a few things that are at least somewhat "open", but I don't see this as being a significant part of Microsoft's strategy. It's probably more something to garner "good will" in the community, so we're more complacent. With all that said, they can *still* exert control over their patents if an open solution they've developed is used or extended by somebody else.
I just don't see them doing anything that's going to weaken their stranglehold on the PC community.
From what I understand, it doesn't protect any developers unless they work for Novell. Aside from that, it only protects Novell's customers from patent lawsuits. If you're using a different Linux distribution, you're not going to be covered.
The problem here is that it does violate the spirit of the GPL. Rather than granting all users freedom, they're granting users freedom only if they've purchased a specific distribution. The GPLv3 will more than likely fix this, but for now we're stuck with the GPLv2 allowing actions such as this.
Oh, and just how is Microsoft going to be fostering interoperability? I haven't seen yet where they've adopted any of our open protocols or open formats. I don't see them working with developers of free software products to help them inter-operate with Microsoft software. All I've seen so far is that Novell is going to be making an OpenXML plug-in for OpenOffice, and OpenXML is a standard in name only, also completely avoiding the intent of what it means to be a standard.
If you have to go with satellite, might want to give WildBlue a shot. It's $300 for equipment, but the service is pretty good and affordable when compared to the other providers like StarBand and DirecWay. My father-in-law has it (he's in an area with no cable or DSL) and now he's able to participate on the intarweb with the rest of us.
Well, for one, this isn't NPR content. It's American Public Media, which is part of Minnesota Public Radio. While their public radio stations usually play NPR content, and these shows are usually syndicated, they aren't NPR programs. On top of that, public radio only gets a small portion of its funding from tax payer money. The majority of funding comes through donations during the pledge drives.
If they have their own machines, rate-limit all that traffic. You could also potentially give them lower priority, with your machine having the highest. Aside from that, I'd hard-code some explicit priorities for their normal traffic (HTTP, FTP, games, whatever) and then dump the rest into a different queue that makes it take up much less of your bandwidth.
That said, it's still somewhat difficult to limit incoming traffic, since you can't always control what the sender does. But most of the methods work well enough.
The system does not encourage you to *throw* the Wiimote. I play pretty vigorously with the Wiimotes we have, and that doesn't cause any problems unless you're actually trying to throw the thing. I've yet to see a video where somebody was playing and didn't seem to be throwing the Wiimote as hard as they could.
My wife and I got a Wii on launch day in the US, and haven't ever had a problem with the Wiimotes flying out of our hands. We've played some vigorous Wiisports sessions, lots of Zelda, Rayman, all sorts of stuff. The closest we ever came to a mishap was when I misjudged my position in relation to our ceiling fan, and smacked the light with the Wiimote. The strap isn't meant to keep the Wiimote from flying away when you throw it, but to prevent you from dropping the Wiimote. The people in all the videos, when they're actually wearing the straps, aren't casually letting go. They're throwing the fuckers as hard as they can. Personally, I think if you're stupid enough to do that, you probably need to just go without a Wiimote until you've learned your lesson.