Mac extended attributes tell the OS when not to open a file. For example com.apple.quarentine get's tagged onto every file you download from the internet unless it's of a set of known safe file types.
Yes, but it's not something that's done by intercepting system calls. The com.apple.quarantine attribute is only respected by apps like Finder which are specifically looking for it. If you just use something like 'cat' in a terminal window you can still view the file without getting the "ZOMG! This is from teh interwebz!" dialog.
As a test I downloaded an app from the big bad internet. Double-click with Finder and I get the dialog. Cancel out, pull up Terminal, and cd into Foo.app/Contents/MacOS. I can cat the executable and I can run it with './Foo'. I try again in Finder and I get the dialog again, so I know the attribute hasn't somehow gotten cleared.
I don't doubt that there's a way for anti-virus programs to hook into the open(2) system call, but that's not how quarantine works. It's just a feature of Finder and friends.
Seems reasonably likely to me. My second-place suspicion is that it's an amateur high-power rocketry buff testing something home-built. I'd look for video of the launch posted to YouTube later today, unless the unexpected media attention has rattled the guy.
I got pretty much the exact same interview when I was leaving Tel Aviv. I was there on business in the early 1990s. Surprisingly, they didn't go apeshit when I told them that yes, someone had given me a package to put in my luggage. A local that I was working with gave me a gift-wrapped item for another co-worker in the States. I told the interviewer about it because I didn't trust this guy -- This was a time when there were fresh piles of rubble that used to be buildings, thanks to Saddam Hussein flinging missiles into Tel Aviv, and a good number of people still carried gas masks. This guy had gone off on a long, vicious political rant the night he gave me that package, and I wanted it checked out. Airport security simply took the package into another room while I was being interviewed, and returned it (still wrapped) afterward. All in a day's work, I guess.
How long before the "terrorists" simply start blowing up airports? Why go through the trouble of sneaking something onto a plane. You will yield much larger kill numbers blowing up entire terminals. After all, the objective isn't blowing up planes, it's killing people. Planes just make it more spectacular.
The objective isn't killing people either, it's instilling fear ("terror", if you will) in the survivors. And, IMHO, security lines are the perfect place for that. Everyone's queued up outside the secure zone; the queuing area is by definition insecure. Ka-Blammo! One well-placed bomb would shut down air traffic for days. Two or three coordinated in different airports would bring air traffic to a standstill for weeks, and bog it down for years as the TSA tries to come up with a solution to that threat vector. It would be hugely disruptive to the entire nation's economy, even with a minimal body count.
I'm really surprised that it hasn't been done already. The only conclusion that I can draw is that maybe the country isn't really crawling with jihadist ne'er-do-wells like our fine leaders would have us believe.
But someone has to be able to count the vote. As described in the video, the only part of the ballot that's scanned at the polling place is the part that has the check boxes and the bar code. The bit with the names is shredded before scanning.
Therefore, the part with the check boxes and bar code must contain enough information (if you can decrypt the bar code) to identify the vote. As I pointed out earlier, the video said that third parties (news media, international observers, etc.) will be able to take the scanned ballots and do their own counts. If they're going to count them, it follows that they have to be able to decrypt them.
This leaves the crypto key wide open. Too many people have access to it. Someone will leak (or sell) the key. Now, your receipt is the paper ballot. The very same ballot that was scanned to be counted. Once the key is made public, then anyone can decrypt your vote. Your abusive spouse, the corrupt union leader, or the local mob boss. Your vote is verifiable, and you can be pressured or bribed into voting a certain way.
If there's a solution to this problem it certainly wasn't presented in the video. And I don't think it's even logically possible, given that you take the very same ballot that was scanned to be counted as your receipt. There's no way around it, that slip must contain enough information to determine your vote. After all, it is what was counted.
I think the method presented in the video is fundamentally flawed. The presenter claims that, given just your receipt, no one can determine how you voted. But that's obviously false -- SOMEONE, somewhere, must have the cryptographic key that can correlate an 'X' in the third box down on your individual ballot as a vote for John Smith. Otherwise there's no way for your vote to be counted.
The presenter goes on to claim that third-parties (news media, international observers, etc.) can take the scanned ballots and count them independently. To do so, they must have access to the crypto key, just like the official ballot-counters. Now you have potentially many people with access to the key. The key will undoubtedly be leaked. Once it's out there, anyone with physical access to my receipt can see how I voted.
They didn't, they generated the WebP files from the source material.
Serious question, not a troll: Where do you see that? The gallery page linked to in the summary says, "Images in the left column are JPEG originals; images in the right column are the WebP-converted equivalent." and, "Beneath each JPEG image is the file size of the original source image." (Emphasis mine.) Both indicate to me that they simply recompressed the JPEGs, not that they derived both JPEG and WebP from the same source. The first quote says it directly. "JPEG originals". The second quote is less direct, but why would they include the size of "the original source image" and the size of the WebP image, but not the size of the JPEG image for comparison? And where are the non-JPEG source images, so we can compare the two compression schemes to the originals?
The non-Google comparisons mentioned in the summary do show source, JPEG, and WebP images, but not Google's own page.
The comparison images that Google provides are practically worthless. They use the JPEG version as the original source material, and the WebP version is generated from that. All this is demonstrating is that WebP can recompress a JPEG and preserve the JPEG's existing compression artifacts. BFD. I don't care that you can reproduce a crap picture. Can you reproduce a good picture and make it look better at a given file size than the JPEG? The real test would be to compare a JPEG and a WebP both compressed from the same source source image. Then which one looks better?
Second, even assuming their numbers are accurate, the size difference isn't enough to matter. On average the WebP images are about 2/3rds of the size of their JPEG counterparts. Again, BFD. People don't care enough to bother for that little savings. You can get that kind of savings by dropping the JPEG quality factor a few percent, and the resulting image is indistinguishable to the vast majority of people. But no one bothers doing so. Why would they bother to use a new, largely unsupported image format just to shave off a few bytes? It's the 21st century, baby. Storage and bandwidth are cheap.
Yes, I know, cheap != free, and there are still applications in which storage or bandwidth are the bottleneck. WebP may find a niche for itself. But it's not going to replace JPEG in the vast majority of places where JPEG is being used now. Technically, WebP may be marginally better than JPEG. But that margin isn't going to be enough to overcome the nearly 2 decades' head start that JPEG has.
Wish I could mod you up. This kind of infraction by the government on its own people is inexcusable. Write your congressman, let them know how you feel, and vote!
I'd follow your advice, but I can't seem to find any politicians running on a platform of looser security / tighter privacy. At least, no one with a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting elected. (And yes, I do tend to vote for the unelectable minor-party candidates. For all the good that does.)
According to the Zen Magnets site, "This server is powered by renewable energy (100% Wind)" and "Best viewed with Firefox or Chrome". Regardless of the quality of their product, they sound like self-righteous pricks who can't write HTML properly.
I was itching to buy it, but then found out that the Mac version will be ready "eventually", not a simultaneous release. Bugger. Back to Civ IV for me.
In the Public Beta, Mail.app was present at a bristling young version 1.0. Surprisingly, it worked quite well.
Huh. I wonder what happened to it? Because "worked quite well" is not a phrase I would use to describe Mail.app in any version of OSX that I've used (that is, Tiger and above).
I like SuperGenPass. It never actually saves a copy of your passwords, it algorithmically generates them from the site's domain name and your master password. (Actually, from any two strings. By convention it's the domain and master password, but you could use any identifier/keyword pair.)
It's made to run as a bookmarklet which auto-populates password fields on web forms. There's also a mobile version for when you're using someone else's computer. Either way the password is dynamically generated by JavaScript running locally. The mobile version is also good for pages which have funky login prompts that don't play nice with the bookmarklet. (I'm looking at you slashdot!)
I've always wondered what the technical difference is between a good pinball simulation and a bad one. The physics are pretty straightforward, so it really can't be sloppy calculations. Could it be resolution of dimensions or time? Or perhaps they precalculated a lot of stuff for precission? Why is it so hard to create a pinball game with physics that feel right?
Because it's a very hard problem, much harder than physics in your typical shooter. Usually in a shooter you don't have to model physics at a very high level of detail. You can fake a lot of stuff -- bounding boxes for collisions can be fairly loose, the player will tolerate some degree of objects interpenetrating, the designer can tweak the amount objects bounce until it looks good, but isn't necessarily correct from a physics perspective.
In order to make a pinball sim feel right, you have to have a pretty tight physics model. There's a lot of fairly complex geometry that has to be modeled at high resolution, including collision bounds. You have to worry about the elasticity of collisions, especially between the ball and the flippers. It should be possible for the player to do a live catch, where the kinetic energy from the ball is transferred to the flipper and the ball just stops and seems to hang there for a moment.
Then there's the problem that the physics of a pinball machine don't always look right. I often see the ball do wacky things in a real machine that I'd never believe in a simulation. The live catch is one; it just looks wrong. Another is when the ball takes a wild bounce, goes airborne, and lands square on a wireform or ramp. It's possible, it happens in real pinball, and you can hardly question the accuracy of the physics in a real machine. But when you see something like this in a simulator you think, "Oh, yeah, like that's ever going to happen!" and you complain about the bogus physics engine doing impossible things.
Finally you have the problem of player interaction with the machine. There's just no way to effectively model nudges and slap-saves, primarily because there's no real input device to sense them.
Now I'm craving a game of pinball. Fortunately I have a couple machines in the basement and can satisfy that craving.:-)
It all depends on how it's done. Advertising in books is not a new thing; many paperbacks have a few pages at the back devoted to ads for other books by the publisher, or sometimes for things like book clubs. And though I haven't seen one in a while, I remember some paperbacks having a bound-in cardstock insert. If ads are limited to this sort of thing, they probably won't be a problem. They're usually relevant to the reader's interest and they're easily skippable. Where I do see a problem is if ads are done like the promos on a DVD -- Pop in the book, and have to sit through three minutes of advertising before you get to read it.
Still, the only reason why this would work is because of proprietary formats. If ebooks were published using open standards (yay, epub!) someone would just publish a reader which skips the advertisements -- just like you can get DVD players which skip straight over the "mandatory" front-matter on a DVD.
I'll just keep supporting Baen. Their whole catalog, available in open, non-DRM formats, for paperback prices. Even if they were to start including ads, they'd be easy to rip out of the HTML if they got to be obnoxious.
Capping or reducing the ticket payout as the game gets longer isn't really a good strategy. Good players feel they're being penalized for being good (which they are). Bad players are still better off dropping quarters into a pure-luck redemption game. Neither is good for repeat business.
And repeat business is necessary, because pinball machines are expensive to maintain. A video game needs to have its screen wiped and its cashbox emptied. You can hire a high-school dropout to do that. Redemption games require a little more skill to maintain, but they generally only have a few moving parts. Pinball has a ton of moving parts and takes a reasonably sophisticated maintenance guy to keep in good shape. Financially, pinball is a lousy investment for an operator.
As far as cost to play goes, you're right. Prices have approximately doubled between 1985 and 2010. (Though I would actually put the beginning of the arcade era at 1980, which was a couple years after Space Invaders hit and also the year Black Knight was released.) The cost to play can't rise gradually, though. You can't go from $.25 to $.30 -- there are no $.30 coins, and operators aren't going to be happy about having to make change in both quarters and nickels. So if you started at $.25/play, the next step really has to be $.50/play. There are some ways to fudge it (like 1 play for $.50, 3 plays for $1) but the industry really set itself up for $.25 price increments.
It's a combination of factors, but sadly, the game of pinball is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If Gary Stern hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-GAME!!
The problem was the ticket dispensing machines. Pinballs (and standard video game cabinets) lost their popularity while ticket-dispensing games have endured. I understand the reluctance to add ticket dispensers to Pinballs, but they need it in order to have any shot at renewed popularity.
Capcom tried it. All our pinballs had a ticket dispenser option, but it was never popular. It's not a game that really lends itself well to that market. Most redemption games are either pure luck, or are intrinsically limited by the design of the game. You only get a fixed number of balls in skee-ball, for instance. With pinball, a good player can theoretically make one ball last forever and rack up unlimited tickets on one play. You can artificially limit ball time, but then the player feels cheated. KingPin, which was due out next after Big Bang Bar, had a limited ball-time mechanic that was actually fun to play and fit the game's theme, but it would probably get tiresome if added gratuitously to too many games. Just like the magnets in Addam's Family: They worked great in that game, but the same gimmick felt cheap and artificial when it was used in some other games.
But I think the big problem is that people who make pinball games actually are enthusiastic about it and want to make a fun game. Redemption games aren't meant to be fun in and of themselves, they're meant strictly to maximize profits for the location. (When I take my kids to an arcade, I let them play the redemption games but I don't let them keep the tickets. If the game is fun, the tickets don't matter. If they're playing just for the tickets, they should save their money and order the cheap crap prizes directly from Oriental Trading Company or someplace similar. Yeah, I'm a mean dad.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but it's not something that's done by intercepting system calls. The com.apple.quarantine attribute is only respected by apps like Finder which are specifically looking for it. If you just use something like 'cat' in a terminal window you can still view the file without getting the "ZOMG! This is from teh interwebz!" dialog.
As a test I downloaded an app from the big bad internet. Double-click with Finder and I get the dialog. Cancel out, pull up Terminal, and cd into Foo.app/Contents/MacOS. I can cat the executable and I can run it with './Foo'. I try again in Finder and I get the dialog again, so I know the attribute hasn't somehow gotten cleared.
I don't doubt that there's a way for anti-virus programs to hook into the open(2) system call, but that's not how quarantine works. It's just a feature of Finder and friends.
Seems reasonably likely to me. My second-place suspicion is that it's an amateur high-power rocketry buff testing something home-built. I'd look for video of the launch posted to YouTube later today, unless the unexpected media attention has rattled the guy.
I got pretty much the exact same interview when I was leaving Tel Aviv. I was there on business in the early 1990s. Surprisingly, they didn't go apeshit when I told them that yes, someone had given me a package to put in my luggage. A local that I was working with gave me a gift-wrapped item for another co-worker in the States. I told the interviewer about it because I didn't trust this guy -- This was a time when there were fresh piles of rubble that used to be buildings, thanks to Saddam Hussein flinging missiles into Tel Aviv, and a good number of people still carried gas masks. This guy had gone off on a long, vicious political rant the night he gave me that package, and I wanted it checked out. Airport security simply took the package into another room while I was being interviewed, and returned it (still wrapped) afterward. All in a day's work, I guess.
The objective isn't killing people either, it's instilling fear ("terror", if you will) in the survivors. And, IMHO, security lines are the perfect place for that. Everyone's queued up outside the secure zone; the queuing area is by definition insecure. Ka-Blammo! One well-placed bomb would shut down air traffic for days. Two or three coordinated in different airports would bring air traffic to a standstill for weeks, and bog it down for years as the TSA tries to come up with a solution to that threat vector. It would be hugely disruptive to the entire nation's economy, even with a minimal body count.
I'm really surprised that it hasn't been done already. The only conclusion that I can draw is that maybe the country isn't really crawling with jihadist ne'er-do-wells like our fine leaders would have us believe.
Just to screw with Facebook's statistics, my wife changes her "in a relationship with..." person every day.
At least, she says it's just to mess with Facebook...
But someone has to be able to count the vote. As described in the video, the only part of the ballot that's scanned at the polling place is the part that has the check boxes and the bar code. The bit with the names is shredded before scanning.
Therefore, the part with the check boxes and bar code must contain enough information (if you can decrypt the bar code) to identify the vote. As I pointed out earlier, the video said that third parties (news media, international observers, etc.) will be able to take the scanned ballots and do their own counts. If they're going to count them, it follows that they have to be able to decrypt them.
This leaves the crypto key wide open. Too many people have access to it. Someone will leak (or sell) the key. Now, your receipt is the paper ballot. The very same ballot that was scanned to be counted. Once the key is made public, then anyone can decrypt your vote. Your abusive spouse, the corrupt union leader, or the local mob boss. Your vote is verifiable, and you can be pressured or bribed into voting a certain way.
If there's a solution to this problem it certainly wasn't presented in the video. And I don't think it's even logically possible, given that you take the very same ballot that was scanned to be counted as your receipt. There's no way around it, that slip must contain enough information to determine your vote. After all, it is what was counted.
I think the method presented in the video is fundamentally flawed. The presenter claims that, given just your receipt, no one can determine how you voted. But that's obviously false -- SOMEONE, somewhere, must have the cryptographic key that can correlate an 'X' in the third box down on your individual ballot as a vote for John Smith. Otherwise there's no way for your vote to be counted.
The presenter goes on to claim that third-parties (news media, international observers, etc.) can take the scanned ballots and count them independently. To do so, they must have access to the crypto key, just like the official ballot-counters. Now you have potentially many people with access to the key. The key will undoubtedly be leaked. Once it's out there, anyone with physical access to my receipt can see how I voted.
Just one word: eduke32.
Oh yeah. That, and "groovy".
Serious question, not a troll: Where do you see that? The gallery page linked to in the summary says, "Images in the left column are JPEG originals; images in the right column are the WebP-converted equivalent." and, "Beneath each JPEG image is the file size of the original source image." (Emphasis mine.) Both indicate to me that they simply recompressed the JPEGs, not that they derived both JPEG and WebP from the same source. The first quote says it directly. "JPEG originals". The second quote is less direct, but why would they include the size of "the original source image" and the size of the WebP image, but not the size of the JPEG image for comparison? And where are the non-JPEG source images, so we can compare the two compression schemes to the originals?
The non-Google comparisons mentioned in the summary do show source, JPEG, and WebP images, but not Google's own page.
The comparison images that Google provides are practically worthless. They use the JPEG version as the original source material, and the WebP version is generated from that. All this is demonstrating is that WebP can recompress a JPEG and preserve the JPEG's existing compression artifacts. BFD. I don't care that you can reproduce a crap picture. Can you reproduce a good picture and make it look better at a given file size than the JPEG? The real test would be to compare a JPEG and a WebP both compressed from the same source source image. Then which one looks better?
Second, even assuming their numbers are accurate, the size difference isn't enough to matter. On average the WebP images are about 2/3rds of the size of their JPEG counterparts. Again, BFD. People don't care enough to bother for that little savings. You can get that kind of savings by dropping the JPEG quality factor a few percent, and the resulting image is indistinguishable to the vast majority of people. But no one bothers doing so. Why would they bother to use a new, largely unsupported image format just to shave off a few bytes? It's the 21st century, baby. Storage and bandwidth are cheap.
Yes, I know, cheap != free, and there are still applications in which storage or bandwidth are the bottleneck. WebP may find a niche for itself. But it's not going to replace JPEG in the vast majority of places where JPEG is being used now. Technically, WebP may be marginally better than JPEG. But that margin isn't going to be enough to overcome the nearly 2 decades' head start that JPEG has.
Sign me up for the texting, phoning, no-eating, high-occupancy-vehicle, no-drivers-under-21, smoking, no-speed-limit lane please.
But how will they simulate a chipped tooth as you try to get two of the flat plates separated?
I'd follow your advice, but I can't seem to find any politicians running on a platform of looser security / tighter privacy. At least, no one with a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting elected. (And yes, I do tend to vote for the unelectable minor-party candidates. For all the good that does.)
According to the Zen Magnets site, "This server is powered by renewable energy (100% Wind)" and "Best viewed with Firefox or Chrome". Regardless of the quality of their product, they sound like self-righteous pricks who can't write HTML properly.
I was itching to buy it, but then found out that the Mac version will be ready "eventually", not a simultaneous release. Bugger. Back to Civ IV for me.
Huh. I wonder what happened to it? Because "worked quite well" is not a phrase I would use to describe Mail.app in any version of OSX that I've used (that is, Tiger and above).
He just needed better marketing, that's all.
I like SuperGenPass. It never actually saves a copy of your passwords, it algorithmically generates them from the site's domain name and your master password. (Actually, from any two strings. By convention it's the domain and master password, but you could use any identifier/keyword pair.)
It's made to run as a bookmarklet which auto-populates password fields on web forms. There's also a mobile version for when you're using someone else's computer. Either way the password is dynamically generated by JavaScript running locally. The mobile version is also good for pages which have funky login prompts that don't play nice with the bookmarklet. (I'm looking at you slashdot!)
Kind of like the time I overheard my friend talking about topping off the fluid levels in his tranny.
That's coming as downloadable content EXCLUSIVELY on Xbox Live.
No, it's not, and I want those two minutes back.
Because it's a very hard problem, much harder than physics in your typical shooter. Usually in a shooter you don't have to model physics at a very high level of detail. You can fake a lot of stuff -- bounding boxes for collisions can be fairly loose, the player will tolerate some degree of objects interpenetrating, the designer can tweak the amount objects bounce until it looks good, but isn't necessarily correct from a physics perspective.
In order to make a pinball sim feel right, you have to have a pretty tight physics model. There's a lot of fairly complex geometry that has to be modeled at high resolution, including collision bounds. You have to worry about the elasticity of collisions, especially between the ball and the flippers. It should be possible for the player to do a live catch, where the kinetic energy from the ball is transferred to the flipper and the ball just stops and seems to hang there for a moment.
Then there's the problem that the physics of a pinball machine don't always look right. I often see the ball do wacky things in a real machine that I'd never believe in a simulation. The live catch is one; it just looks wrong. Another is when the ball takes a wild bounce, goes airborne, and lands square on a wireform or ramp. It's possible, it happens in real pinball, and you can hardly question the accuracy of the physics in a real machine. But when you see something like this in a simulator you think, "Oh, yeah, like that's ever going to happen!" and you complain about the bogus physics engine doing impossible things.
Finally you have the problem of player interaction with the machine. There's just no way to effectively model nudges and slap-saves, primarily because there's no real input device to sense them.
Now I'm craving a game of pinball. Fortunately I have a couple machines in the basement and can satisfy that craving. :-)
It all depends on how it's done. Advertising in books is not a new thing; many paperbacks have a few pages at the back devoted to ads for other books by the publisher, or sometimes for things like book clubs. And though I haven't seen one in a while, I remember some paperbacks having a bound-in cardstock insert. If ads are limited to this sort of thing, they probably won't be a problem. They're usually relevant to the reader's interest and they're easily skippable. Where I do see a problem is if ads are done like the promos on a DVD -- Pop in the book, and have to sit through three minutes of advertising before you get to read it.
Still, the only reason why this would work is because of proprietary formats. If ebooks were published using open standards (yay, epub!) someone would just publish a reader which skips the advertisements -- just like you can get DVD players which skip straight over the "mandatory" front-matter on a DVD.
I'll just keep supporting Baen. Their whole catalog, available in open, non-DRM formats, for paperback prices. Even if they were to start including ads, they'd be easy to rip out of the HTML if they got to be obnoxious.
Capping or reducing the ticket payout as the game gets longer isn't really a good strategy. Good players feel they're being penalized for being good (which they are). Bad players are still better off dropping quarters into a pure-luck redemption game. Neither is good for repeat business.
And repeat business is necessary, because pinball machines are expensive to maintain. A video game needs to have its screen wiped and its cashbox emptied. You can hire a high-school dropout to do that. Redemption games require a little more skill to maintain, but they generally only have a few moving parts. Pinball has a ton of moving parts and takes a reasonably sophisticated maintenance guy to keep in good shape. Financially, pinball is a lousy investment for an operator.
As far as cost to play goes, you're right. Prices have approximately doubled between 1985 and 2010. (Though I would actually put the beginning of the arcade era at 1980, which was a couple years after Space Invaders hit and also the year Black Knight was released.) The cost to play can't rise gradually, though. You can't go from $.25 to $.30 -- there are no $.30 coins, and operators aren't going to be happy about having to make change in both quarters and nickels. So if you started at $.25/play, the next step really has to be $.50/play. There are some ways to fudge it (like 1 play for $.50, 3 plays for $1) but the industry really set itself up for $.25 price increments.
It's a combination of factors, but sadly, the game of pinball is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If Gary Stern hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-GAME!!
Capcom tried it. All our pinballs had a ticket dispenser option, but it was never popular. It's not a game that really lends itself well to that market. Most redemption games are either pure luck, or are intrinsically limited by the design of the game. You only get a fixed number of balls in skee-ball, for instance. With pinball, a good player can theoretically make one ball last forever and rack up unlimited tickets on one play. You can artificially limit ball time, but then the player feels cheated. KingPin, which was due out next after Big Bang Bar, had a limited ball-time mechanic that was actually fun to play and fit the game's theme, but it would probably get tiresome if added gratuitously to too many games. Just like the magnets in Addam's Family: They worked great in that game, but the same gimmick felt cheap and artificial when it was used in some other games.
But I think the big problem is that people who make pinball games actually are enthusiastic about it and want to make a fun game. Redemption games aren't meant to be fun in and of themselves, they're meant strictly to maximize profits for the location. (When I take my kids to an arcade, I let them play the redemption games but I don't let them keep the tickets. If the game is fun, the tickets don't matter. If they're playing just for the tickets, they should save their money and order the cheap crap prizes directly from Oriental Trading Company or someplace similar. Yeah, I'm a mean dad.)