I've had personal experience with 3rd degree coffee burns, myself. When I was 5 years old, I managed to knock a pot of (cooling) freshly brewed coffee off the table onto myself; this caused 3rd degree burns over about 30% of my body. My mother had cool water running over me in the sink in about 30 seconds, but I still managed to get some nasty burns: I'm 21 and there are still scars (though they're fairly faint; you can easily see them if I point them out to you). I needed skin grafts and a hospital stay. On the other hand, it can be almost safe to dip a wet hand in molten lead for a few seconds (look up the Leidenfrost effect; the water flashes to steam and provides a protective "glove" for a short period of time).
As for the problems in the US legal system, the issue here is not that the US legal system assumes that you are a "moron," and European courts don't, but the fact that the US doesn't have a loser-pays rule for legal fees. In most countries, if you bring a lawsuit against someone and lose, you have to pay their legal fees and a penalty. This concept goes back to ancient Athens and really helps to put a damper on frivolous suits. Also, it means people who are sued by big companies with herds of attack lawyers can get big-name lawyers of their own and fight back, no matter what their economic situation: if the company brings a lawsuit and loses, they pay all legal costs; if the company wins their lawsuit, then you're destitute anyway and legal bills are going to be pretty insignificant against a multi-million dollar judgement.
While McDonalds might have been right to brew the coffee at temperatures just shy of boiling, they weren't right to serve it at those temperatures. Nobody can drink 95 degree coffee without a burned mouth.
I know several people who could easily be described as "serious, dyed-in-the wool" players of games like Counterstrike, Ghost Recon, and America's Army, and they don't act anything like the author describes (dressing in camoflauge, describing everything in terms of military jargon). Basically, they're normal people who spend time and money on military FPSes rather than stamp collecting or model trains. While some people who are "hardcore" gamers probably are identifiable, I'd say that there are far more who aren't. Next time you walk down the street, see if there's anyone you can peg as a "hardcore military game player" or a "hardcore sports game player." I'd put money on you not being able to find any. While many people game as a hobby, very few allow it to take over their life. The author's premise is totally off base.
First of all, while it's possible to identify what types of games people might play by their clothing and demeanor, the games are more an outgrowth of that personal style rather than the primary contributor to that style. For example, a Goth might be a fan of survival horror, and a frat boy might be a fan of sports games, but the reason they play those games is because of their personal style; they don't start out "normal," play those games, then develop a style based around that.
Second, what in the hell is going on with the description of FPS fans? The author seems to think that anyone who plays FPS games like Counterstrike or UT2k3 will become a military junkie/extreme right wing survivalist. As a fairly avid Counterstrike player and someone so far to the left Noam Chomsky would call me a pinko commie bastard, I can say decisively that this is not true. Many of my friends play FPS games, and we certainly don't obsess over guns or military jargon. While people who have an obsession with all things military in the first place are probably drawn to FPS games, people who play FPS games casually or even competitively are not going to be transformed into military killing machines. Quite simply, the author is smoking some good shit. I want some.
While Linus is many things, he has never seemed very agressive to me in any of the interviews with him that I've read. He seems more bemused and amazed that he's getting such massive attention for the OS he built as a fun project. Everything I've read about him says he comes across as nice, smart and articulate, but never "agressive."
Perhaps the reason he is being so blunt here is that SCO is basically accusing him of plagarism for no reason other than to bolster their slipping profit margins, and has even threatened him with lawsuits personally. Almost anyone accused of being a liar and cheater, particularly with regard to their life's work, will become defensive; I find that Linus' responses are quite calm considering that SCO has made groundless accusations and threatened him with a lawsuit that would ruin him personally and professionally.
I challenge you to build the "computer that can beat a human grandmaster." I think you will find it takes many thousands of years to do it. Good luck with that. (</SARCASM>)
While the tree of all possible moves would probably finish computing after the heat death of the universe, you don't have to have the complete tree to compute whether, given optimum play by both players, white always wins, always loses, or the game is always a draw. The only requirement is that each possible game be run until the game is unwinnable by either white or black; there are established algorithms to find this. Of course, this is a significantly smaller tree than that of all possible moves.
While the problem is a tough one to crack, it may well be solved within the next few decades, particularly with massively parallel computing on the horizon: miniturization plus clustering technology means cheap, powerful, small supercomputers perfect for tasks like this that consist of many more or less independent operations.
So we've got someone who has a vested interest in seeing SCO succeed (they sell SCO software), who probably isn't an experienced coder, who says that SCO has a case? Sorry, but I'd rather see a lawyer with copyright experience and a group of decent coders go over the evidence - all the evidence - before coming to any conclusion.
All the "very interesting" article says is that some people who probably don't have much experience in these matters saw SCO's presentation and walked away with a pro-SCO viewpoint. That's what the presentation was supposed to do: make people believe SCO has a strong case. From what I've seen (the screenshots), the elements of SCO's case that were shown don't look very strong: they never proved that it was SCO who wrote the offending code in the first place, and those comments feel to me like they were cut and pasted from some specs document. SCO's refusal to show the actual implementations makes me very suspicious - if the comments were in fact cut and pasted from a publicly available specs document, then there could be two different implementations of the same specification, with no infringment at all. They're gonna have to do a lot better than that presentation if they want to have a hope of succeeding in court.
Except "average Joes" are getting ripped off, through things like their 401k retirement funds ams and individual investments. People who rip off investors (think the leadership of Enron and Worldcom) can get away with it because they have high-profile friends and can afford expensive lawyers. It has nothing to do with what "average Joes" think.
Why would they redirect it to 127.0.0.1? It would be easier to just wipe windowsupdate.com from the DNS servers, and leave the site up for a few weeks with a brief message saying "windowsupdate.com is now windowsupdate.microsoft.com, have a nice day," for people using a caching DNS server with stale records.
As for 127.0.0.1 somehow DoSing a network, no! That's the local loopback, which never goes out onto the network card unless things are seriously screwed up. Even then, other hosts will immediately drop anything coming over the network from localhost; that's never supposed to happen and will be caught by sanity checks on the recieving end. As for DoSing the local machine, forget it. Even Pentium-class machines can easily generate and reply to massive numbers of localhost pings every second; denying webserver requests isn't much more trouble than replying to a ping.
The sad thing about Outpost was that it had such incredible potential. I remember that Sierra was very proud of the fact they had NASA doing science consultation on the game; if they had put half the effort used in marketing towards designing a good UI and doing a decent beta launch, Outpost would have had the potential to be a true classic. Hell, they would've had gamers lining up around the block three deep to get a chance to beta-test Outpost. It wasn't just the hype: people saw the potential in the concept.
A scientifically accurate game that put you as the leader of one of two colonies on a hostile world, that combined the best parts of SimCity with a bit of Civilization and the inherent coolness of space and Saving Humanity Itself, would have flown off store shelves. The original Outpost did, of course, but only for a couple of days as news of its crappiness dissiminated. If Sierra hadn't bungled Outpost so badly, gamers might still be playing it today. As it is, Outpost remains an exercise in tedium until you try to skip 10 or 15 turns, at which point your colony immediately dies out. Sigh... To think what could have been.
As for Outpost 2, it was a good effort. While the RTS aspect did sometimes feel at odds with the colonization scenario (would two colonies struggling to survive really attack each other?), for the most part it combined the "build a colony" and "crush the other guy" elements well; it had decent systems for both colony management and battles, one that would reward not only good tacticians but also good governors. At its core, it was a solid game that deserved more than it got. I don't think it ever could have been a true sequel to Outpost, or what Outpost should have been. At that point, Sierra wouldn't sink massive amounts of money into a franchise that had floundered on its maiden voyage. Frankly, I'm surprised Outpost 2 ever got past the idea stage - the name practically guaranteed dismal sales. Still, the developers turned out a surprisingly good game, considering the burden of its name.
What was so bad about Enter the Matrix? Sure, it's at best an average 3rd person run-and-gun, but I found it to be a decently enjoyable game, if a bit short. There was nothing original about it, it felt "rushed," and it wasn't exactly worth what I paid, but it wasn't microwave-the-CD awful.
The big stumbling block for most people, I think, was the hype: Written by the Wachowski Brothers! Cost as much as a movie! Best thing to hit gaming since Pong! It turned out to be thoroughly average, with Powerade ads and a plot tie-in to the Matrix movies (yay! FMV!). Of course the game sucks compared to the hype, but it's not an unmitigated disaster like Daikatana or Outpost. It's just... blah.
By the way, if you want to see some truly awful games, Something Awful's Games Reviews have you covered (note: visiting Something Awful from work may earn you a "chat" with your admin or worse. You have been warned). Also, there's Valu-Soft. Anyone who's ever played a Valu-Soft game (usually sold in the bare jewel cases at computer stores stuck out in front of the good games) will immediately know what I'm talking about; the rest of you, STAY AWAY! Your eyes will melt, your hair will fall out, you will age 50 years in a single second, and that's before the install is over. Valu-Soft is the worst travesty against gaming ever created by Satan.
Perhaps you should define "owner negligence." If there are not boundaries set, then the insurance company could refuse to pay, due to the fact that you didn't camp out by your car with a shotgun 24/7 and shoot anyone who came within 20 meters. While it's well and good to not pay out to negligent owners, there must be limits to what exactly is "negligent" behavior, or almost any behavior could be said to not have exercised due diligence. In the example I gave, in which someone forgot to set their car alarm, they would certainly have some case if the insurance company refused payment. There's a big difference between leaving the alarm off accidentally and leaving the car unlocked, running with a big "STEAL ME" sign in the window.
By the way, I know you're trolling. I'm just bored.
What's the fee for? Extorting people worried about Linux licensing (read: big business).
Interestingly, the logic behind that claim is similar to the logic behind SCO's core claim: SCO believes that it has trade secret rights to the NUMA and RCU code developed by IBM and Sequent, because it was developed for AIX and Linux, and a lot of the files are the same. Since SCO has trade secret rights to UNIX and thus most of AIX, they seem to think that the shared code between the AIX RCU and NUMA implementation and the Linux NUMA and RCU implementation is a derivative work of Unix and thus they are the only ones allowed to license it (while the code still belongs to IBM, they can't do much with it because it's SCO who has the ability to license it).
SCO seems to think they have a strange Midas touch: whatever they touch, becomes theirs. We'll see how that holds up in court.
How would the examiner know the difference? As long as your responses are consistent throughout the "baseline" tests (nonsense questions with obvious true/false answers) given at the beginning, they won't know the difference. While being obviously stressed over some questions and obviously relaxed over others will certainly raise eyebrows, the techniques used to decieve polygraph tests are more subtle than that. From my reading on the subject, people have even been able to mess with polygraph tests via a sheer effort of will, with no muscle contractions to give them away: it's all just biofeedback and learning to control supposedly unconcious reactions.
Let's take a hypothetical scenario: You have a fairly new, expensive car with good comprehensive insurance. You leave the alarm system disabled by accident one day, and your car is stolen. You submit a claim to the insurance company and file a police report. A few days later, you are called into their office, to give a statement into a tape recorder. You fail the "voice stress analysis." Due to this, the insurance company starts to dig. They find that you left your alarm off, and think they can take you to court. You are taken to court and convicted of fraud, and punished accordingly. You are punished, but did nothing wrong.
What's the point I'm trying to make? It's simple: these essentially random tests will be used to determine who is suspected of a crime and thus investigated further, with a heavy bias towards criminal activity - investigators will tend to look for any evidence at all that might support the "criminal activity" theory, and doubt evidence that disproves that theory. It's a basic tenet of psychology that people tend to choose one theory and build up supporting evidence for it, while disregarding evidence that might disprove it.
Of the many cases detected by this "lie detector," there are almost certainly cases that have done nothing wrong, but have a large amount of circumstantial evidence against the person making the claim. While circumstantial evidence is technically inadmissable in court, expensive legal attack teams, like the ones held on retainer or employed by large companies like insurers and banks, can get away with almost anything and make it look reasonable. I doubt you could afford your own counterattack lawyers.
The end result is that it's possible for innocents to be punished. While I agree that insurance fraud is without a doubt a Bad Thing, and deterrents to insurance fraud are good, the chance of error here is simply too high.
What happens if you get falsely accused? Lie detectors are at best random and can be conciously affected by an adept scammer (when you tell something you want to be recognized as the truth, relax, when you tell something you want to be detected as a lie, tense up a few muscles subtly; the toes are ideal as long as you wear shoes). Lie detectors are bogus science; while there may be physiological responses associated with dishonesty, they can be easily overwhelmed by other stresses (like going into a lie detector test and being grilled mercilessly). Also, it's very rare that two polygraph "experts" will read the results the same way. You might "fail" the test, while if your results had been interpreted by someone else, you might have "passed."
This is not just bad, this is awful. If you were falsely accused, you could land in jail and be out thousands of dollars in fines. Even if you miraculously avoided all that, you would still be left with a valid insurance claim that wouldn't be paid, despite the fact that you paid your premiums and did nothing wrong, other than fail a pseudoscientific test.
As for the supposed deterrent effect, that's a ridiculous analogy. You might as well suggest that we fine and jail people who "look suspicious" at random; you would get the same results. While you'd certainly catch criminals, you'd also punish a number of completely innocent people. Deterrent effect? No, there's a difference between deterrents and people living in fear of the law. The fact that polygraph tests are generally inadmissable in American and European courts should tell you something about what effects this would have.
How do you figure that? No matter what, the game had to have certain costs: pressing CDs, printing a manual (even if it's just a single sheet describing how to install Acrobat Reader), printing the box, shipping to retailers, and of course paying employees. While it's certainly possible to make a profit making bargain-bin games (look at Serious Sam), costs like pressing the first run of CDs and paying developers, marketroids, and managers are constant no matter how many copies you sell. While corners weren't as much cut as bombarded with tactical nuclear devices, I still can't see HeadGames making more than $5 per copy sold, or maybe $2.50 on the bare jewel case versions released after a while.
It seems to me that HeadGames went after the less PC-savvy market with the "Extreme" series of games; people who play paintball would probably, on average, have less computer knowledge than the general population (although I do know a few sysadmins, programmers and the like who play paintball, most of the people I know who like paintball aren't the computer-savvy type). Thus, it's possible to rip them off once or twice before they're turned off to HeadGames or gaming in general.
Another possiblity is a Producers-style scam; for some reason, the upper management wanted the company to fail. After all, word does get around about software, especially something as outstandingly awful as Extreme Paintbrawl. To ignore this fact is rather naive, and I am surprised that whoever was providing HeadGames with financial backing would continue supporting them after they saw a product as awful as Extreme Paintbrawl. Perhaps someone needed to lose money fast for some reason (taxes, laundering?) and decided to sink it into a POS company and run it into the ground.
A few years ago, a friend handed me a CD that'd seen its share of abuse; it was called "Extreme Paintbrawl." Quite simply, it was the worst game I've ever played. It's a credit to the creators to call the piece of trash a game. It was done in the Build engine (same as Duke Nukem 3D), at a time when Quake III was just out. Although it's certainly possible to make a good game with older technology, the game was full of errors: half the sprites weren't done correctly: some models, you'd only ever see the back (even if they were facing you). The AI was miserable: your own "teammates" would jump around like they were having a seizure, while the enemy would manage to both look like idiots and land every single shot. Not only that, but the damned thing was absolutely chock-full of bugs. I would have been seriously pissed if I had paid money for it; I've seen it still languishing in bargain bins here and there for $5 or so. On the positive side, though, it provided a great joke among friends. Any buggy, crappy, or half-finished game immediately draws comparisons to the Great Evil Game, Extreme Paintbrawl.
On a more serious note, the one game I've had serious expectations for that turned out to be a waste of money was the original Outpost; it had a wonderful premise and lots of interesting concepts, but was awfully buggy and had a user-hostile UI. Sadly, the sequel was fairly good but was saddled by the "Outpost" name and tanked. Still, I was able to get my space-colony sim fix five years later with Alpha Centauri, which I still play to this day. That's a game worth getting out of the bargain bin.
RPC is used to call other programs' functions remotely; it's a network-transparent protocol that lets an application run a function from another process, and recieve the data returned. While it's designed to work well over networks, it doesn't have to be run over anything but one system: many Windows apps use it, including MS Installer and MS Office. It's a form of IPC; it's somewhat similar to BSD-style sockets (another network-transparent IPC system more often encountered under UNIX/Linux, and, of course, on the Internet; sockets differ from RPC calls in that they're based around datastreams rather than functions).
IPC is more a problem with multiple solutions than an implementation; RCP, shared memory, BSD sockets, pipe links, and other IPC implementations are used based on what is best for the specific application.
Anyone care to recommend a good firewall or perhaps firewall/router box for a home/small business network.
Not personal/single machine jobs, but standalone units.
SmoothWall is a great little Linux-based firewall, although its owner/maintainer is kind of an ass about tech support for anyone using the GPL edition and it requires a spare computer. Still, it's secure and works very well. I'm running it now on an old Pentium box; I've never had problems with it aside from flaky hardware. It can support dial-on-demand modems, some USB-based DSL and cable modems, a DMZ for servers, and provides good protection. Also, it's Linux-based; you can tinker with it and play around all you want (not reccomended in a production environment, of course).
If you want a dedicated appliance, check out the various routers from Linksys and D-Link; they provide a nice, easy-to-use solution in one little box. While I haven't used any personally, I've helped many friends set up connection sharing and firewalling with them; both brands make good products. Also, they have features you might find useful: integrated switches, wireless access points, etc. They don't tend to be as featureful or customizable as Linux-based solutions like SmoothWall, but if you're willing to sacrifice those qualities for convenience, ease of use, and a support hotline, they can be good deals.
What happens when your ISP recieves the letter, though? They HAVE to shut your connection off, thus making it impossible to reply to the email. That's what makes the DMCA Evil with a capital E: you are punished (your connection is cut off) before you're given a chance to defend yourself.
Worse yet, it's not even the legal system that does the punishing, it's the company which thinks its copyright might have been infringed. Using bots to automatically send out cease-and-desist letters, with no human oversight, is legal under the DMCA. All that's required is that the copyright holder make a "good faith effort," something that has no real meaning other than they have to have done something - what exactly they have to do under the law has never been established. Scary, no?
Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by
persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.
He's within his rights to "reproduce" and "retransmit" it; it's just boilerplate saying, in effect, "if you got this message in error, delete it NOW or we might sue you."
It's there to save the sender's butt if something happens like <SCENARIO TYPE="HYPOTHETICAL> a merger notice is leaked, someone trades on inside information, and the SEC looks into the matter. With that notice, the company is protecting itself from the accusation that it was at fault for sending the data in the first place.</SCENARIO>
RPC isn't just for over-the-network calls; it's also what some Win32 apps use for interprocess communication. Thus, if RPC is borked, your whole system is in trouble (I had a system where the RPC DLLs were corrupted; I couldn't even use simple things like copy and paste, since programs couldn't communmicate with the clipboard buffer).
The only real solution in this case is a good firewall and keeping up with the endless stream of security patches; unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that users can't turn off RPC's network functionality. While turning off services you don't need is good security practice, there are some exploitable services that the system needs and you can't just turn off. RPC falls into this category, and you can't do much besides firewall and patch it.
The article mentions that games "don't teach real-world problem solving." So what? Most of the stuff taught in the K-12 phase doesn't. You probably remember memorizing your times tables; that wasn't necessarily done with 144 story problems.
While real-world applications of the material are a good thing, not everything can be reduced to "real-world problem solving." Some material is best taught in a drill setting, as old-fashioned as that may be. Games can help make memorization of facts (like those annoying times tables) fun. I still credit games like Math Blaster with helping me learn to do arithmetic quickly.
Assuming the page was fairly small, without lots of pictures or movies, I'd imagine that a small 10/100 switch would handle the load fairly well.
On the stats link provided for a January slashdotting, the most bandwidth used in a day was a little under 7.4 GB. Assume that it was posted on/. at noon, so there were 12 hours to spread the big hit over: about 617 MB/hr. That's a little over 10 MB/Min, or 170 KB/sec. Even if we assume that the initial hit was double that, I can easily stream a 1000 KB/sec Divx movie over my 100 Mbps switched home LAN. The limiting factors here are the servers, routers and bandwidth to the Internet, not the local network connecting the servers.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the problems in the US legal system, the issue here is not that the US legal system assumes that you are a "moron," and European courts don't, but the fact that the US doesn't have a loser-pays rule for legal fees. In most countries, if you bring a lawsuit against someone and lose, you have to pay their legal fees and a penalty. This concept goes back to ancient Athens and really helps to put a damper on frivolous suits. Also, it means people who are sued by big companies with herds of attack lawyers can get big-name lawyers of their own and fight back, no matter what their economic situation: if the company brings a lawsuit and loses, they pay all legal costs; if the company wins their lawsuit, then you're destitute anyway and legal bills are going to be pretty insignificant against a multi-million dollar judgement.
While McDonalds might have been right to brew the coffee at temperatures just shy of boiling, they weren't right to serve it at those temperatures. Nobody can drink 95 degree coffee without a burned mouth.
I know several people who could easily be described as "serious, dyed-in-the wool" players of games like Counterstrike, Ghost Recon, and America's Army, and they don't act anything like the author describes (dressing in camoflauge, describing everything in terms of military jargon). Basically, they're normal people who spend time and money on military FPSes rather than stamp collecting or model trains. While some people who are "hardcore" gamers probably are identifiable, I'd say that there are far more who aren't. Next time you walk down the street, see if there's anyone you can peg as a "hardcore military game player" or a "hardcore sports game player." I'd put money on you not being able to find any. While many people game as a hobby, very few allow it to take over their life. The author's premise is totally off base.
Second, what in the hell is going on with the description of FPS fans? The author seems to think that anyone who plays FPS games like Counterstrike or UT2k3 will become a military junkie/extreme right wing survivalist. As a fairly avid Counterstrike player and someone so far to the left Noam Chomsky would call me a pinko commie bastard, I can say decisively that this is not true. Many of my friends play FPS games, and we certainly don't obsess over guns or military jargon. While people who have an obsession with all things military in the first place are probably drawn to FPS games, people who play FPS games casually or even competitively are not going to be transformed into military killing machines. Quite simply, the author is smoking some good shit. I want some.
Perhaps the reason he is being so blunt here is that SCO is basically accusing him of plagarism for no reason other than to bolster their slipping profit margins, and has even threatened him with lawsuits personally. Almost anyone accused of being a liar and cheater, particularly with regard to their life's work, will become defensive; I find that Linus' responses are quite calm considering that SCO has made groundless accusations and threatened him with a lawsuit that would ruin him personally and professionally.
(</SARCASM>)
While the tree of all possible moves would probably finish computing after the heat death of the universe, you don't have to have the complete tree to compute whether, given optimum play by both players, white always wins, always loses, or the game is always a draw. The only requirement is that each possible game be run until the game is unwinnable by either white or black; there are established algorithms to find this. Of course, this is a significantly smaller tree than that of all possible moves.
While the problem is a tough one to crack, it may well be solved within the next few decades, particularly with massively parallel computing on the horizon: miniturization plus clustering technology means cheap, powerful, small supercomputers perfect for tasks like this that consist of many more or less independent operations.
All the "very interesting" article says is that some people who probably don't have much experience in these matters saw SCO's presentation and walked away with a pro-SCO viewpoint. That's what the presentation was supposed to do: make people believe SCO has a strong case. From what I've seen (the screenshots), the elements of SCO's case that were shown don't look very strong: they never proved that it was SCO who wrote the offending code in the first place, and those comments feel to me like they were cut and pasted from some specs document. SCO's refusal to show the actual implementations makes me very suspicious - if the comments were in fact cut and pasted from a publicly available specs document, then there could be two different implementations of the same specification, with no infringment at all. They're gonna have to do a lot better than that presentation if they want to have a hope of succeeding in court.
Except "average Joes" are getting ripped off, through things like their 401k retirement funds ams and individual investments. People who rip off investors (think the leadership of Enron and Worldcom) can get away with it because they have high-profile friends and can afford expensive lawyers. It has nothing to do with what "average Joes" think.
As for 127.0.0.1 somehow DoSing a network, no! That's the local loopback, which never goes out onto the network card unless things are seriously screwed up. Even then, other hosts will immediately drop anything coming over the network from localhost; that's never supposed to happen and will be caught by sanity checks on the recieving end. As for DoSing the local machine, forget it. Even Pentium-class machines can easily generate and reply to massive numbers of localhost pings every second; denying webserver requests isn't much more trouble than replying to a ping.
A scientifically accurate game that put you as the leader of one of two colonies on a hostile world, that combined the best parts of SimCity with a bit of Civilization and the inherent coolness of space and Saving Humanity Itself, would have flown off store shelves. The original Outpost did, of course, but only for a couple of days as news of its crappiness dissiminated. If Sierra hadn't bungled Outpost so badly, gamers might still be playing it today. As it is, Outpost remains an exercise in tedium until you try to skip 10 or 15 turns, at which point your colony immediately dies out. Sigh... To think what could have been.
As for Outpost 2, it was a good effort. While the RTS aspect did sometimes feel at odds with the colonization scenario (would two colonies struggling to survive really attack each other?), for the most part it combined the "build a colony" and "crush the other guy" elements well; it had decent systems for both colony management and battles, one that would reward not only good tacticians but also good governors. At its core, it was a solid game that deserved more than it got. I don't think it ever could have been a true sequel to Outpost, or what Outpost should have been. At that point, Sierra wouldn't sink massive amounts of money into a franchise that had floundered on its maiden voyage. Frankly, I'm surprised Outpost 2 ever got past the idea stage - the name practically guaranteed dismal sales. Still, the developers turned out a surprisingly good game, considering the burden of its name.
The big stumbling block for most people, I think, was the hype: Written by the Wachowski Brothers! Cost as much as a movie! Best thing to hit gaming since Pong! It turned out to be thoroughly average, with Powerade ads and a plot tie-in to the Matrix movies (yay! FMV!). Of course the game sucks compared to the hype, but it's not an unmitigated disaster like Daikatana or Outpost. It's just... blah.
By the way, if you want to see some truly awful games, Something Awful's Games Reviews have you covered (note: visiting Something Awful from work may earn you a "chat" with your admin or worse. You have been warned). Also, there's Valu-Soft. Anyone who's ever played a Valu-Soft game (usually sold in the bare jewel cases at computer stores stuck out in front of the good games) will immediately know what I'm talking about; the rest of you, STAY AWAY! Your eyes will melt, your hair will fall out, you will age 50 years in a single second, and that's before the install is over. Valu-Soft is the worst travesty against gaming ever created by Satan.
By the way, I know you're trolling. I'm just bored.
Interestingly, the logic behind that claim is similar to the logic behind SCO's core claim: SCO believes that it has trade secret rights to the NUMA and RCU code developed by IBM and Sequent, because it was developed for AIX and Linux, and a lot of the files are the same. Since SCO has trade secret rights to UNIX and thus most of AIX, they seem to think that the shared code between the AIX RCU and NUMA implementation and the Linux NUMA and RCU implementation is a derivative work of Unix and thus they are the only ones allowed to license it (while the code still belongs to IBM, they can't do much with it because it's SCO who has the ability to license it).
SCO seems to think they have a strange Midas touch: whatever they touch, becomes theirs. We'll see how that holds up in court.
How would the examiner know the difference? As long as your responses are consistent throughout the "baseline" tests (nonsense questions with obvious true/false answers) given at the beginning, they won't know the difference. While being obviously stressed over some questions and obviously relaxed over others will certainly raise eyebrows, the techniques used to decieve polygraph tests are more subtle than that. From my reading on the subject, people have even been able to mess with polygraph tests via a sheer effort of will, with no muscle contractions to give them away: it's all just biofeedback and learning to control supposedly unconcious reactions.
You have a fairly new, expensive car with good comprehensive insurance. You leave the alarm system disabled by accident one day, and your car is stolen. You submit a claim to the insurance company and file a police report. A few days later, you are called into their office, to give a statement into a tape recorder. You fail the "voice stress analysis." Due to this, the insurance company starts to dig. They find that you left your alarm off, and think they can take you to court. You are taken to court and convicted of fraud, and punished accordingly. You are punished, but did nothing wrong.
What's the point I'm trying to make? It's simple: these essentially random tests will be used to determine who is suspected of a crime and thus investigated further, with a heavy bias towards criminal activity - investigators will tend to look for any evidence at all that might support the "criminal activity" theory, and doubt evidence that disproves that theory. It's a basic tenet of psychology that people tend to choose one theory and build up supporting evidence for it, while disregarding evidence that might disprove it.
Of the many cases detected by this "lie detector," there are almost certainly cases that have done nothing wrong, but have a large amount of circumstantial evidence against the person making the claim. While circumstantial evidence is technically inadmissable in court, expensive legal attack teams, like the ones held on retainer or employed by large companies like insurers and banks, can get away with almost anything and make it look reasonable. I doubt you could afford your own counterattack lawyers.
The end result is that it's possible for innocents to be punished. While I agree that insurance fraud is without a doubt a Bad Thing, and deterrents to insurance fraud are good, the chance of error here is simply too high.
This is not just bad, this is awful. If you were falsely accused, you could land in jail and be out thousands of dollars in fines. Even if you miraculously avoided all that, you would still be left with a valid insurance claim that wouldn't be paid, despite the fact that you paid your premiums and did nothing wrong, other than fail a pseudoscientific test.
As for the supposed deterrent effect, that's a ridiculous analogy. You might as well suggest that we fine and jail people who "look suspicious" at random; you would get the same results. While you'd certainly catch criminals, you'd also punish a number of completely innocent people. Deterrent effect? No, there's a difference between deterrents and people living in fear of the law. The fact that polygraph tests are generally inadmissable in American and European courts should tell you something about what effects this would have.
It seems to me that HeadGames went after the less PC-savvy market with the "Extreme" series of games; people who play paintball would probably, on average, have less computer knowledge than the general population (although I do know a few sysadmins, programmers and the like who play paintball, most of the people I know who like paintball aren't the computer-savvy type). Thus, it's possible to rip them off once or twice before they're turned off to HeadGames or gaming in general.
Another possiblity is a Producers-style scam; for some reason, the upper management wanted the company to fail. After all, word does get around about software, especially something as outstandingly awful as Extreme Paintbrawl. To ignore this fact is rather naive, and I am surprised that whoever was providing HeadGames with financial backing would continue supporting them after they saw a product as awful as Extreme Paintbrawl. Perhaps someone needed to lose money fast for some reason (taxes, laundering?) and decided to sink it into a POS company and run it into the ground.
On a more serious note, the one game I've had serious expectations for that turned out to be a waste of money was the original Outpost; it had a wonderful premise and lots of interesting concepts, but was awfully buggy and had a user-hostile UI. Sadly, the sequel was fairly good but was saddled by the "Outpost" name and tanked. Still, I was able to get my space-colony sim fix five years later with Alpha Centauri, which I still play to this day. That's a game worth getting out of the bargain bin.
IPC is more a problem with multiple solutions than an implementation; RCP, shared memory, BSD sockets, pipe links, and other IPC implementations are used based on what is best for the specific application.
If you want a dedicated appliance, check out the various routers from Linksys and D-Link; they provide a nice, easy-to-use solution in one little box. While I haven't used any personally, I've helped many friends set up connection sharing and firewalling with them; both brands make good products. Also, they have features you might find useful: integrated switches, wireless access points, etc. They don't tend to be as featureful or customizable as Linux-based solutions like SmoothWall, but if you're willing to sacrifice those qualities for convenience, ease of use, and a support hotline, they can be good deals.
Worse yet, it's not even the legal system that does the punishing, it's the company which thinks its copyright might have been infringed. Using bots to automatically send out cease-and-desist letters, with no human oversight, is legal under the DMCA. All that's required is that the copyright holder make a "good faith effort," something that has no real meaning other than they have to have done something - what exactly they have to do under the law has never been established. Scary, no?
It's there to save the sender's butt if something happens like <SCENARIO TYPE="HYPOTHETICAL> a merger notice is leaked, someone trades on inside information, and the SEC looks into the matter. With that notice, the company is protecting itself from the accusation that it was at fault for sending the data in the first place.</SCENARIO>
The only real solution in this case is a good firewall and keeping up with the endless stream of security patches; unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that users can't turn off RPC's network functionality. While turning off services you don't need is good security practice, there are some exploitable services that the system needs and you can't just turn off. RPC falls into this category, and you can't do much besides firewall and patch it.
While real-world applications of the material are a good thing, not everything can be reduced to "real-world problem solving." Some material is best taught in a drill setting, as old-fashioned as that may be. Games can help make memorization of facts (like those annoying times tables) fun. I still credit games like Math Blaster with helping me learn to do arithmetic quickly.
On the stats link provided for a January slashdotting, the most bandwidth used in a day was a little under 7.4 GB. Assume that it was posted on /. at noon, so there were 12 hours to spread the big hit over: about 617 MB/hr. That's a little over 10 MB/Min, or 170 KB/sec. Even if we assume that the initial hit was double that, I can easily stream a 1000 KB/sec Divx movie over my 100 Mbps switched home LAN. The limiting factors here are the servers, routers and bandwidth to the Internet, not the local network connecting the servers.