Guys, why are you trying to solve chess? I know this incredibly obscure, little-known, infinitely more complex game called Go that you should try instead... oh, wait. Wrong thread.
Guys, why are you trying to save Star Trek? I know of this fantastic balls-to-the-wall pedal-to-the-metal action sci-fi show called Battlestar Galactica. You should watch that instead because it's not Star Trek.
The following is a satirical account dealing with the use of having an open office specialist on staff to help install upgrades.
Bob (City Official): We've already saved millions with Open Office. Let's upgrade it from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3.
BillPro: You will need me to help you
Bob: Don't we just install it?
BillPro: No, it requires taking care of so many more subtle details than that. What it needs is a professional to implement.
Bob: OK, we will hire you for $60,000 to support our OO upgrades.
BillPro: That is fair.
Bob: Umm, this doc I had with a beautiful table... what happened to it? It isn't beautiful anymore!
BillPro: This was probably caused by the upgrade from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3.
Bob: Didn't I pay you to make sure things like this don't happen?
BillPro: I am investigating a solution by looking over the source code. That is the power of open source: I can find out what's wrong and fix it for the council.
Bob: Fantastic! We should give you a raise.
----------------------
From: BillPro To: Subject: Hey guys
Hey guys, anyone know why tables don't show up right in 1.1.3? They worked OK in 1.1.2.
----------------------
From: AngryMan To: Subject: re: Hey guys
Fix it yourself. You can see the source. If you want a faster fix, donate some money.
-----------------------
Bob: Have you been able to fix it yet?
BillPro: I have been working on it and the good news is that it will be fixed soon, but the bad news is that you will have to wait for the patch I "created" to be put in the next OO upgrade. Until then you'll need to sit tight until the fix is released.
Bob: Why did I hire you for this? I could have sat tight without you.
BillPro: Think of me as a comfort blanket when stuff doesn't work.
From there you can burn to a CD, easily playable in any $40 portable player. Heck, you could send 2 or 3 for the price of a PDA if theft concerns are that high.
If you want to send over a real reading experience and PDAs are risky to send and there are no computers, then I dunno how you're going to get around sending either the real thing or the text in microfiche or something along those lines.
I'm not so sure about Ebert. Aside from seeming that he genuinely loves movies in his reviews (ie: he'd watch 5 movies a week whether or not he's being paid anyway), he's done a lot of DVD commentary for movies like Citizen Kane and Dark City.
First off, I don't want to say "it's very realistic" because I will get annihilated, so I'll stay away from that word.
Instead, I'll say this: the steering system is a lot more involved. You can feel an actual difference in steering between cars with front and rear wheel drive. You can't just run every race by flooring the pedal and bouncing off of walls in strategic ways. Very detailed car data and the like. The cars look beautiful, especially during replays and have a lot of freedom for internal customization.
Honestly, though? I think the game mostly feeds on people's Pokemon "gotta catch them all" obsessions.
A lot of the time is spent not enjoying the races, but saving up for other cars which will let you enjoy the races. Even when you get the new car you are saving up for modifications that will further let you enjoy the car. After you get to that point the money you are making isn't enough and you go on to saving for the next best car.
After the cycle of wanting the best car ever is over, it's on to beating the game 100% and trying to get the best results on the license tests. The license tests basically let you run a part of the track in a certain vehicle in under a certain length of time. For example "ride your Porsche 911 through this S-turn in 11.7 seconds for bronze, 11.598 seconds for silver, 11.515 seconds for gold."
What I would be interested in seeing is how many people play the game for fun AFTER they've beaten the game 100% and acquired what they believe is the best car. ie: how many people play it for the sheer fun of it like someone would play Robotron or replay a Zelda game.
If you look at the FAQs you can see some signs of this. There are FAQs dedicated to showing you how to beat endurance races (some lasting 2+ hours) without you having to touch the joystick.
If this memo were real then there would be at least be a mention of the $2 trillion media extravaganza surrounding the press release which revealed that Duke Nukem was coming out before 2009.
Here's a guess.. If the real-life scenario is any better than my guess then I'll be extremely impressed.
2 players are seated at marked spots in a room and commence play. Computer is told to begin interpreting the game with some type of audio or keyboard input. Computer ignores all input until two cards are raised. The cards must be held a certain distance from the camera and at a certain angle range so as not to introduce visual distortion. Computer scans cards and may or may not give a signal that it is done parsing the situation. One of the participants shouts in a voice as clear as possible "1" to say the person on the left won, "2" to say the person on the right won, "3" for a tie -- something to this effect. Speech recognition is getting better but I wouldn't be surprised if they just used different pitched sine waves to say who won.
I'd be incredibly impressed if any of the following worked/were tested in the experiment:
1) Shifting the angle / position / lighting of the card when it comes time to bring it up.
2) Shifting positions in the chairs or swapping chairs completely at random.
3) Changing what audio cue you use to declare a victory. (Yelling "1 wins" becomes player 1 yellin g "Yes!" becomes a visual cue pointing to the winner with the computer interpreting it as a new way of declaring victory instead of a new rule being added to how the game is played).
4) Doing any part of this experiment without telling the computer a rule to this effect beforehand:
ie: the computer knows to be in one of three states.. one where someone says "we're starting," one in which it waits for a card to be shown, and one in which it waits for the victor to be announced.
The article was too vague to say any of it and I wish someone could post more details as it sounds really interesting.
The person on that website can't accept the fact that The New Oxford Dictionary (dead tree edition) accepts the new commonly used version of the word "decimate." I expect the same to happen with ironic/irony eventually.
Let's face it: language changes. Trying to stop its change would be like trying to punch a tsunami with your fists to deflect it. Maybe a group of newspaper editors could get together and help lasso the words' meanings for the elite, but otherwise people are going to do what they want with the words and definitions.
An interesting/accessible documentary about this subject is Do You Speak American? It's a PBS deal.
I'll be honest with you, I didn't read the entire "article." I went to the one page that had a picture of the joystick, saw nothing was clickable and saw no text, closed it. I opened up the other page, read the opening paragraphs, scrolled down 5 pages of cheat codes, expected that the remainder of the doc would be more of the same and then closed it. I didn't see the section with the asterisk at the very end explaining the state of the cheats.
Whether or not the author of the parallel port program did some heuristics to define what sequence is a better metric for a potential cheat code, only they can answer it. It'd be nice if the author was here and could reply with the details:)
"The first question that should pop into your head right now is why we would need HDMI on the PC when it physically does the job of DVI - particularly considering how few people actually use DVI instead of analog connections! The answer is, again, copy protection."
Since all I see is a pic of the joystick on the main page, I wonder if he's trying out all the buttons (L3, R3, and the directions on the analog sticks as well as select and start)
Even with the 12 "buttons" he's pressing and an assumed maximum code length of 12 presses, he's got 12^12 possibilities -- 8916100448256. Testing that number of possibilities (with 12 button presses per possibility) means that if he can spit out something like 48 button presses a second that leaves him with 2,150,000 days to find all the combinations.
If the game has been out for 120 days (I don't know the real amount of time, I'm estimating), that joystick would have to be sending 1 million plus button presses a second to have a complete code list as of today? Anyone know how often the PS2 probes the joystick for button presses?
There is one key error in my math that might shrink the figure by a bit: if you have a range of 24 button presses that the joystick is sending, that could actually be a test of 12 different 12-lengthed codes. My *guess* (I can't prove it mathematically -- maybe someone else can) is that it would shrink times/sizes by a factor of 10. Meaning at 48 button presses a second you need 215,000 days or to have found every code as of today you would have need to be sending input at ~100,000 button presses a second. Even then, assuming the analog state of the joystick can be packed into a byte somehow, that exceeds parallel port speeds.
Add *ALL* the buttons into the mix, R3, L3, Select, Start, and the directions on the analog sticks and the problem just gets a whole lot harder.
Someone please correct me if my math is off. I really am curious to know how the guy discovered so many codes so quickly.
I don't know about your first paragraph (because I don't know the guy personally) but I agree with the rest.
As a non-Christian I'm offended by this being posted on Slashdot. The article does nothing good for the world as a whole and goes beyond the realm of satire into mean-spiritedness. Reading between the lines of the article, all I can see is a person who has nothing but an axe to grind.
What crossed the line for me? The line "I doubt any of them play sports so you can pretty much guess that there are lots of gay boys and fat little pale-faced Wiccan girls on the servers who hate themselves and escape into virtual characters so they don't have to deal with their pathetic lives." That is not satire. That is, like the parent poster said, basically reinforcing negative stereotypes for those who might already look at another group with wary eyes. It's a fine line.
If you don't think so, take a look at the list of the comments and see how many people believed the article text.
And you misspelled "misspelled." I would say this is ironic but there is a group of people on here (think of the "rabble rabble rabble" guys from South Park) who wget/grep slashdot every 4 minutes for the word "ironic/irony" being used and auto-reply to say it is being used incorrectly.
At its vaguest, I'd say old enough that their brains have been able to learn via other stimuli (not TV, not computers) and young enough that that by the time they need it in school (grade 3?) they'll be able to at least be able to get around enough to write a document in Word or whatever.
Take it for what you like, but people I know who've been raised with a large focus being TV or computers at very young ages tend to be less empathetic than others I've known.
Now that I've offended about 99% of the people looking at this, let me further explain why:)
It could be a coincidence that out of the people I've gotten to know well enough that those that were heavy TV watchers and computer users lost their sense of empathy, but my theory about it is this: both mediums put you in an unerring position of power.
Computers can be programmed and, assuming you entered the program correctly, do most anything you want within the limitations of that medium. I can't help but wonder how that type of heavy reinforcement daily for hours at a time affects future social interactions with other kids who will not behave the way that computer-raised child wants them to.
TV is much of the same deal. If something offends the child, they can change channels instantly. If something bores the child, they can change channels instantly. Again, it makes me wonder what kind of internal stress is created when a child who channel surfs all day gets when dealing with another child who's not exciting as TV.
Not all children will suffer from this. I'm not saying that at all. But in my case this is why I would raise my kids w/o TV and computers till at least grade 3ish and my reasoning behind it.
If you're concerned about them maybe not getting a degree in Comp. Sci. if they're not thrown headfirst in front of a CRT/LCD junior kindergarten, it's possible at pretty much any age. One of my best friends now has a masters degree in Comp. Sci. and had not used a computer until grade 9 and didn't own one of his own until the second year of university. Again, more anecdotal evidence but maybe someone else can back me up here with stories of their own:)
1) Shell out money for the game because you have to pay for the development work done to bring the game to the shelf.
2) Pay a monthly fee in order to pay for bandwidth and new content.
3) Pay an annual expansion pack fee to pay for new content.
4) Pay a quest pack fee to pay for new content.
I can understand 1) and 2). 3) and 4) don't make sense to me from a common sense perspective. From a business perspective they make sense but it's because of this multi-tiered leeching -- both in terms of money spent and in terms of time spent doing grindwork to stick around many more months than you would need to -- that I refuse to pay for MMORPGs.
Please note that when AMD released their GHz processor first that it was all about "the need for speed and increasing GHz." Now that they've fallen back all of a sudden it's not about the GHz anymore.
LordOfYourPants' law: The importance of GHz measurements are proportional to the ratio of your company's highest GHz CPU offering relative to all other companies.
As an X700 video card user that's been awaiting decent linux X11 drivers for a few months now (booting into console mode can only be so fun in terms of gaming), I would have to say "no."
I agree with the idea that if there were no theft there would be no DRM. I also agree that you can not legally justify downloading a movie/game without reimbursing anyone for it (or getting permission from the creators to have it for free).
One of the carrots that's dangled every so often, though, is the idea that if piracy of a product were 0, the price of the item would be drastically reduced. This is a lie.
Souring the game industry:
Case in point, the Nintendo Gamecube. It was thought of as "unhackable" by the PR folk at Nintendo and yet the cost of their games was just as much as any other console. Do actions like this not foster cynicism among both paying and non-paying gamers? People were already expecting a price drop as the alleged source of high prices with Nintendo before was the fact that they used cartridges instead of CD-like media.
Souring the film industry:
Putting red dots on the screen to psychologically interrupt a movie experience is ridiculous. This form of copy protection should be the bane of any film director who respects his or her works as art. Can you imagine the Mona Lisa having these dots over top its portrait? Does interpolating the frames before and after the dots as a way of removing them make this form of protection all that effective when you consider how the work is marred in contrast?
Souring the TV industry:
The industry itself is inherently sour. The medium of network and cable television is not a delivery vehicle for content, it's a delivery vehicle of advertisements to viewers (who are the end product). If any form of entertainment needs to go pay-per-view on a per-episode or per-season basis, it's television.
Again, I'm not saying any of this justifies theft of artists' works, but I do think there are serious problems on BOTH sides of the fence. Simple finger-pointing by industry lobbyers / sycophants at pirates in order to justify artificially inflated prices and obscene forms of copy protection is morally -- and should be legally -- wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Guys, why are you trying to solve chess? I know this incredibly obscure, little-known, infinitely more complex game called Go that you should try instead... oh, wait. Wrong thread.
Guys, why are you trying to save Star Trek? I know of this fantastic balls-to-the-wall pedal-to-the-metal action sci-fi show called Battlestar Galactica. You should watch that instead because it's not Star Trek.
The following is a satirical account dealing with the use of having an open office specialist on staff to help install upgrades.
Bob (City Official): We've already saved millions with Open Office. Let's upgrade it from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3.
BillPro: You will need me to help you
Bob: Don't we just install it?
BillPro: No, it requires taking care of so many more subtle details than that. What it needs is a professional to implement.
Bob: OK, we will hire you for $60,000 to support our OO upgrades.
BillPro: That is fair.
Bob: Umm, this doc I had with a beautiful table... what happened to it? It isn't beautiful anymore!
BillPro: This was probably caused by the upgrade from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3.
Bob: Didn't I pay you to make sure things like this don't happen?
BillPro: I am investigating a solution by looking over the source code. That is the power of open source: I can find out what's wrong and fix it for the council.
Bob: Fantastic! We should give you a raise.
----------------------
From: BillPro
To:
Subject: Hey guys
Hey guys, anyone know why tables don't show up right in 1.1.3? They worked OK in 1.1.2.
----------------------
From: AngryMan
To:
Subject: re: Hey guys
Fix it yourself. You can see the source. If you want a faster fix, donate some money.
-----------------------
Bob: Have you been able to fix it yet?
BillPro: I have been working on it and the good news is that it will be fixed soon, but the bad news is that you will have to wait for the patch I "created" to be put in the next OO upgrade. Until then you'll need to sit tight until the fix is released.
Bob: Why did I hire you for this? I could have sat tight without you.
BillPro: Think of me as a comfort blanket when stuff doesn't work.
Project Gutenberg has some ebooks done by text-to-speech synths as well as those read by human readers which were donated by www.audiobooksforfree.com. A note about the final site mentioned: if you want their material for free, it requires you to sign up, download low-quality versions, etc. The rest comes at a price.
From there you can burn to a CD, easily playable in any $40 portable player. Heck, you could send 2 or 3 for the price of a PDA if theft concerns are that high.
If you want to send over a real reading experience and PDAs are risky to send and there are no computers, then I dunno how you're going to get around sending either the real thing or the text in microfiche or something along those lines.
I'm not so sure about Ebert. Aside from seeming that he genuinely loves movies in his reviews (ie: he'd watch 5 movies a week whether or not he's being paid anyway), he's done a lot of DVD commentary for movies like Citizen Kane and Dark City.
On top of that, he's WRITTEN a few movies.
Yeah man, the code is protected in a hardcore way too. They did a poke 775,171 and EVERYTHING!
First off, I don't want to say "it's very realistic" because I will get annihilated, so I'll stay away from that word.
Instead, I'll say this: the steering system is a lot more involved. You can feel an actual difference in steering between cars with front and rear wheel drive. You can't just run every race by flooring the pedal and bouncing off of walls in strategic ways. Very detailed car data and the like. The cars look beautiful, especially during replays and have a lot of freedom for internal customization.
Honestly, though? I think the game mostly feeds on people's Pokemon "gotta catch them all" obsessions.
A lot of the time is spent not enjoying the races, but saving up for other cars which will let you enjoy the races. Even when you get the new car you are saving up for modifications that will further let you enjoy the car. After you get to that point the money you are making isn't enough and you go on to saving for the next best car.
After the cycle of wanting the best car ever is over, it's on to beating the game 100% and trying to get the best results on the license tests. The license tests basically let you run a part of the track in a certain vehicle in under a certain length of time. For example "ride your Porsche 911 through this S-turn in 11.7 seconds for bronze, 11.598 seconds for silver, 11.515 seconds for gold."
What I would be interested in seeing is how many people play the game for fun AFTER they've beaten the game 100% and acquired what they believe is the best car. ie: how many people play it for the sheer fun of it like someone would play Robotron or replay a Zelda game.
If you look at the FAQs you can see some signs of this. There are FAQs dedicated to showing you how to beat endurance races (some lasting 2+ hours) without you having to touch the joystick.
If this memo were real then there would be at least be a mention of the $2 trillion media extravaganza surrounding the press release which revealed that Duke Nukem was coming out before 2009.
Here's a guess.. If the real-life scenario is any better than my guess then I'll be extremely impressed.
2 players are seated at marked spots in a room and commence play. Computer is told to begin interpreting the game with some type of audio or keyboard input. Computer ignores all input until two cards are raised. The cards must be held a certain distance from the camera and at a certain angle range so as not to introduce visual distortion. Computer scans cards and may or may not give a signal that it is done parsing the situation. One of the participants shouts in a voice as clear as possible "1" to say the person on the left won, "2" to say the person on the right won, "3" for a tie -- something to this effect. Speech recognition is getting better but I wouldn't be surprised if they just used different pitched sine waves to say who won.
I'd be incredibly impressed if any of the following worked/were tested in the experiment:
1) Shifting the angle / position / lighting of the card when it comes time to bring it up.
2) Shifting positions in the chairs or swapping chairs completely at random.
3) Changing what audio cue you use to declare a victory. (Yelling "1 wins" becomes player 1 yellin g "Yes!" becomes a visual cue pointing to the winner with the computer interpreting it as a new way of declaring victory instead of a new rule being added to how the game is played).
4) Doing any part of this experiment without telling the computer a rule to this effect beforehand:
ParseStartCue();
for(;;)
{
ParseCardRevealCue();
ParseVictoryAnnounceCue();
}
ie: the computer knows to be in one of three states.. one where someone says "we're starting," one in which it waits for a card to be shown, and one in which it waits for the victor to be announced.
The article was too vague to say any of it and I wish someone could post more details as it sounds really interesting.
The person on that website can't accept the fact that The New Oxford Dictionary (dead tree edition) accepts the new commonly used version of the word "decimate." I expect the same to happen with ironic/irony eventually.
Let's face it: language changes. Trying to stop its change would be like trying to punch a tsunami with your fists to deflect it. Maybe a group of newspaper editors could get together and help lasso the words' meanings for the elite, but otherwise people are going to do what they want with the words and definitions.
An interesting/accessible documentary about this subject is Do You Speak American? It's a PBS deal.
&thatsawrap
I'll be honest with you, I didn't read the entire "article." I went to the one page that had a picture of the joystick, saw nothing was clickable and saw no text, closed it. I opened up the other page, read the opening paragraphs, scrolled down 5 pages of cheat codes, expected that the remainder of the doc would be more of the same and then closed it. I didn't see the section with the asterisk at the very end explaining the state of the cheats.
:)
Whether or not the author of the parallel port program did some heuristics to define what sequence is a better metric for a potential cheat code, only they can answer it. It'd be nice if the author was here and could reply with the details
You forgot one little detail:
"The first question that should pop into your head right now is why we would need HDMI on the PC when it physically does the job of DVI - particularly considering how few people actually use DVI instead of analog connections! The answer is, again, copy protection."
Since all I see is a pic of the joystick on the main page, I wonder if he's trying out all the buttons (L3, R3, and the directions on the analog sticks as well as select and start)
Even with the 12 "buttons" he's pressing and an assumed maximum code length of 12 presses, he's got 12^12 possibilities -- 8916100448256. Testing that number of possibilities (with 12 button presses per possibility) means that if he can spit out something like 48 button presses a second that leaves him with 2,150,000 days to find all the combinations.
If the game has been out for 120 days (I don't know the real amount of time, I'm estimating), that joystick would have to be sending 1 million plus button presses a second to have a complete code list as of today? Anyone know how often the PS2 probes the joystick for button presses?
There is one key error in my math that might shrink the figure by a bit: if you have a range of 24 button presses that the joystick is sending, that could actually be a test of 12 different 12-lengthed codes. My *guess* (I can't prove it mathematically -- maybe someone else can) is that it would shrink times/sizes by a factor of 10. Meaning at 48 button presses a second you need 215,000 days or to have found every code as of today you would have need to be sending input at ~100,000 button presses a second. Even then, assuming the analog state of the joystick can be packed into a byte somehow, that exceeds parallel port speeds.
Add *ALL* the buttons into the mix, R3, L3, Select, Start, and the directions on the analog sticks and the problem just gets a whole lot harder.
Someone please correct me if my math is off. I really am curious to know how the guy discovered so many codes so quickly.
I don't know about your first paragraph (because I don't know the guy personally) but I agree with the rest.
As a non-Christian I'm offended by this being posted on Slashdot. The article does nothing good for the world as a whole and goes beyond the realm of satire into mean-spiritedness. Reading between the lines of the article, all I can see is a person who has nothing but an axe to grind.
What crossed the line for me? The line "I doubt any of them play sports so you can pretty much guess that there are lots of gay boys and fat little pale-faced Wiccan girls on the servers who hate themselves and escape into virtual characters so they don't have to deal with their pathetic lives." That is not satire. That is, like the parent poster said, basically reinforcing negative stereotypes for those who might already look at another group with wary eyes. It's a fine line.
If you don't think so, take a look at the list of the comments and see how many people believed the article text.
Sorry to see you got modded down.
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext.
Brilliant! Best joke I've read here in weeks. I wish I had mod points.
If anyone ever got hallucinations from playing text adventures. And if so, what the hell were they?!
And you misspelled "misspelled." I would say this is ironic but there is a group of people on here (think of the "rabble rabble rabble" guys from South Park) who wget/grep slashdot every 4 minutes for the word "ironic/irony" being used and auto-reply to say it is being used incorrectly.
According to the Wayback Machine's mirror, the timeline itself has been around since at LEAST December 12, 2001.
At its vaguest, I'd say old enough that their brains have been able to learn via other stimuli (not TV, not computers) and young enough that that by the time they need it in school (grade 3?) they'll be able to at least be able to get around enough to write a document in Word or whatever.
:)
:)
Take it for what you like, but people I know who've been raised with a large focus being TV or computers at very young ages tend to be less empathetic than others I've known.
Now that I've offended about 99% of the people looking at this, let me further explain why
It could be a coincidence that out of the people I've gotten to know well enough that those that were heavy TV watchers and computer users lost their sense of empathy, but my theory about it is this: both mediums put you in an unerring position of power.
Computers can be programmed and, assuming you entered the program correctly, do most anything you want within the limitations of that medium. I can't help but wonder how that type of heavy reinforcement daily for hours at a time affects future social interactions with other kids who will not behave the way that computer-raised child wants them to.
TV is much of the same deal. If something offends the child, they can change channels instantly. If something bores the child, they can change channels instantly. Again, it makes me wonder what kind of internal stress is created when a child who channel surfs all day gets when dealing with another child who's not exciting as TV.
Not all children will suffer from this. I'm not saying that at all. But in my case this is why I would raise my kids w/o TV and computers till at least grade 3ish and my reasoning behind it.
If you're concerned about them maybe not getting a degree in Comp. Sci. if they're not thrown headfirst in front of a CRT/LCD junior kindergarten, it's possible at pretty much any age. One of my best friends now has a masters degree in Comp. Sci. and had not used a computer until grade 9 and didn't own one of his own until the second year of university. Again, more anecdotal evidence but maybe someone else can back me up here with stories of their own
1) Shell out money for the game because you have to pay for the development work done to bring the game to the shelf.
2) Pay a monthly fee in order to pay for bandwidth and new content.
3) Pay an annual expansion pack fee to pay for new content.
4) Pay a quest pack fee to pay for new content.
I can understand 1) and 2). 3) and 4) don't make sense to me from a common sense perspective. From a business perspective they make sense but it's because of this multi-tiered leeching -- both in terms of money spent and in terms of time spent doing grindwork to stick around many more months than you would need to -- that I refuse to pay for MMORPGs.
Please note that when AMD released their GHz processor first that it was all about "the need for speed and increasing GHz." Now that they've fallen back all of a sudden it's not about the GHz anymore.
LordOfYourPants' law: The importance of GHz measurements are proportional to the ratio of your company's highest GHz CPU offering relative to all other companies.
If the project is important enough to warrant an external PCI card surely it is worth $1000 to buy an adapter?
I'm guessing you work for the government as a budget advisor.
As an X700 video card user that's been awaiting decent linux X11 drivers for a few months now (booting into console mode can only be so fun in terms of gaming), I would have to say "no."
I agree with the idea that if there were no theft there would be no DRM. I also agree that you can not legally justify downloading a movie/game without reimbursing anyone for it (or getting permission from the creators to have it for free).
One of the carrots that's dangled every so often, though, is the idea that if piracy of a product were 0, the price of the item would be drastically reduced. This is a lie.
Souring the game industry:
Case in point, the Nintendo Gamecube. It was thought of as "unhackable" by the PR folk at Nintendo and yet the cost of their games was just as much as any other console. Do actions like this not foster cynicism among both paying and non-paying gamers? People were already expecting a price drop as the alleged source of high prices with Nintendo before was the fact that they used cartridges instead of CD-like media.
Souring the film industry:
Putting red dots on the screen to psychologically interrupt a movie experience is ridiculous. This form of copy protection should be the bane of any film director who respects his or her works as art. Can you imagine the Mona Lisa having these dots over top its portrait? Does interpolating the frames before and after the dots as a way of removing them make this form of protection all that effective when you consider how the work is marred in contrast?
Souring the TV industry:
The industry itself is inherently sour. The medium of network and cable television is not a delivery vehicle for content, it's a delivery vehicle of advertisements to viewers (who are the end product). If any form of entertainment needs to go pay-per-view on a per-episode or per-season basis, it's television.
Again, I'm not saying any of this justifies theft of artists' works, but I do think there are serious problems on BOTH sides of the fence. Simple finger-pointing by industry lobbyers / sycophants at pirates in order to justify artificially inflated prices and obscene forms of copy protection is morally -- and should be legally -- wrong.