perhaps someone cares to explain to me why these sorts of hacks are possible in the first place: games like quake are clearly a client-server model. The server will of course know where every player is, and also the layout of the map.
My guess is that it's a simple issue of processor time. Figuring out exactly what all 16 players in the game can see, at a speed fast enough to keep up with the video cards of all 16 machines would be... difficult.
Which would you rather play: A normal FPS were some idiots will cheat or an FPS where no one cheats but you only get 2 fps?
While they mentioned one of the security measures being used with the new system (something like a PIN-calculator), they didn't mention the security risks of putting corporate email out on the public Internet.
Let's also not forget the security risk of having your corporate email share the same domain with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got a "700 free hours" CD in the mail. When you consider the namespace saturation of AOL's account pool, the odds of accidentally misdirecting an email go up rather sharply. When that misdirected email might wind up with someone who isn't even at the company, you're just asking for trouble.
Furthermore, since AOL has open registration, if someone discovers the AOL accounts of various "higher ups" (not too hard -- I'm sure most employess would have access to this information), they could easily register nearly identical accounts. This would be easily easy given the frequent numeric tags seen at the end of account names -- transpose two numbers and wait for someone to get it wrong.
While I'd idealistically wish that you could nail them to the wall, as many others have pointed out, you're SOL if they go bankrupt. Add to that your legal fees and it just isn't a winning proposition, especially if 2 months payment isn't all that much money in the long run.
However, provided you're willing to consider legal action, you might be able to get away with having your cake and eating it too, by signing the contract and then arguing that the contract was valid. In addition to the obvious extortion, it's my understanding that, to be valid, a contract must provide consideration to both parties.
The example I recall from my business law class involved a rich uncle signing a contract with his nephew, where his nephew agreed not to engage in various illegal behavior and the uncle would provide the nephew with a bunch of money after a set amount of time. Because the behavior of the nephew fit within what he was already required to do by law, he wasn't really doing anything for his part of the contract. As such, the contract was declared void. Since UGO is already contractually obligated to pay you this money, they aren't providing you with any considerations in this contract. Of course, this would be contingent on the details on the contract (for example, it might provide some small additional benefit to you that wasn't mentioned in the summary, thus negating this whole argument). All in all, the obvious IANAL disclaimers apply, but it might be something worth thinking about and asking a lawyer about.
Also my email address will be @aol.com so forget about geting my real name as a username. I'll end up as like JoeSmi543879879@aol.com. Hows that for professionalism?
What about prefixing your corporate initials on the address? It's more likely that TBJohnSmith@aol.com (or some variant) is untaken. Ideally, if you could get your entire department (or even more people) to use a consistent prefix ('TB', 'TBS', 'Turner', 'Trnr', and 'AOLTW' all come to mind, either with a '_', a '.', or just capitalization separating it from the rest of the address), it'd present a nice, consistent image.
Of course it certainly could be worse. The article mentions that at Sun, they force their poor employees to use StarOffice.
Hell, if GM was like AOL, by now they would have changed the administrative information on the domain name by now, and made it into a dead link.
Err, how? Last I heard, running the host that has an A record or a CNAME record for a given domain doesn't automatically give you the ability to fiddle with the registration. The email address used in the registration is hosted out of 2600.com and presumably it's their DNS servers that all this points to, as well. Finally, the domain name doesn't reference 'ford', so it's not like they can attempt the standard trademark-based bullying.
would the US gov want to do its own research on quantum computing if it knows that the same technology used to break existing codes can be used to make new ones impossible to break.
Of course they would. They just wouldn't share their results with anyone else. If anyone starts getting too nosey with FOIA requests, they'll just invoke the magic phrase of "national security" and continue working.
Granted, CNN is reporting to an American audience, so I can understand playing up the American angle a little bit, but this seems like it's poking fun at Russian Space Control a little too much.
That makes me wonder if the Russian news coverage is something like:
Following the corrupting influence of American astronaut Bill Shepherd, our two cosmonauts aboard the ISS, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, have been dupped into helping in a plot to sabotage the station's safety systems.
The trio, who surely wouldn't have partaken on this foolhardy venture if they were under the command of a Russian commander, have disassembled the important aluminum frames that hold the solid oxygen generators in place. Without these generators, people on the space station could certainly die. Why were these unnecessary risks undertaken? In order to build a kitchen table. This represents the true extremity of American commercialized excess.
It was only through the quick-thinking of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev that true disaster was averted. When Bill Sherpherd suggested that they use the airlock door as a table, Sergei stepped in and said such an action would be totally unacceptable.
Furthermore, in order to prevent intervention in this dangerous undertaking, the group chose to hide its actions from Russian ground control. It is the belief of the Russian Space Agency that this secretive nature is a direct result of using an American who was once part of the special commando force, the Navy Seals. It is likely that the Russian cosmonauts also feared for their life and thus had to keep quiet about the mission.
(Seriously, though, I got the impression that they actually built the stuff from packing material rather than stuff that was still being used. But I couldn't resist attempting to spin things the other way.)
Fileserver with access permissions won't help because it is still connected to the univeristy network and the prof can have IT manipulate it's network however is needed to access the documents.
Err, I think you're blowing things way out of proportion here. We're talking about your average professor trying to get access to a fileserver containing old tests. Circumventing access controls would be excessive in the case where the professor was unaware of the contents of the fileserver (i.e. just casually browsing Windows shares or whatever) and redundant in the case where the professor already knew the contents of the fileserver (unless he was interested in disciplinary action).
Besides, some fraternities have their own internal networks that aren't necessarily connected to the university network. When I was in a frat, we were playing Command & Conquer over the LAN long before we had any sort of non-dialup internet access.
and if God forbid everything went to hell, millions of dollars wouldn't have been spent trying to rescue you from the dept. store where you purchased your socks.
Unless Tito went around flipping random switches (pretty unlikely) or ran into a personal medical situation (certainly a greater issue given his age, but mitigated by all the testing he probably had to undergo), whether or not things went to hell should be independent of his presence.
Furthermore, Tito was hitching a ride on a mission designed to make sure that, if things did go to hell, there'd be a means for them to escape the station. I don't know how economically shaky Russia's space program is (but in general, the country's a mess), so I really can't say how important the money Tito provided was to the program's continual operation, but it certainly couldn't be hurting things.
Finally, as long as Tito wasn't the one person who put them over capacity on a rescue mission, he doesn't up the cost of that mission. If everything went to hell, they'd have to incur the cost of either deploying the rescue craft or sending another shuttle anyway. Whether they rescue 4 people or 5 is irrelevant.
Before anyone says "but why not just add permenant data to freenet" know that someone suggests this on the freenet mailing lists about once every two days - it isn't possible while staying true to Freenet's other goals.
Feel free to correct my ignorance, but...
As I understand it, freenet serves as both a caching and anonymizing repeater service. I ask the local freenet server for document #12345 and it provides it to me. What it doesn't tell me is whether it had that document or it had to ask another host for that document. Unless I can watch all the involved hosts (and decrypt their traffic, as I seem to recall it being encrypted), I have no way of knowing where that document came from.
Now let's say I'm the author of document #12345 and want it to be available no matter what. If I'm willing to take the risk, couldn't I hack my local server such that a copy of document #12345 is always returned, no matter what? Yes, it would increase the potential that the document could be traced back to me. However, one could also argue that said document was just locally popular. Further, one could argue that said document wasn't around until the law enforcement-types requested it.
So even though I understand why Freenet as a whole doesn't support permanent documents, given space concerns and all that, I don't see why a given server operator can't keep permanent information that he personally feels is important. Am I missing something or were you referring to making information permanent for general users, who aren't running their own servers?
A capitol idea, unfortunately a lot of the software used to run those BBS's is no longer being maintained and isn't Y2K compatible.
You've got a number of options:
Figure out what date setting'll give you the most correct years of operation (if you can set it back to today's date in 1973, you should be golden -- both 1973 and 2001 start on a Monday and both modulo 4 are equal to 1 so the leap years'll be correct).
Recreate the software (in some cases, someone's already done the work for you).
Go with one of the packages that is still around. For example, MajorBBS became Worldgroup which then became NetVillage (the site seems to currently be down). From what I've seen, the prices they're charging are a little too steep for a hobby system, as they're trying to sell the software as corporate groupware. Personally, I could care less about MBBS itself -- the games, on the other hand, carry lots of nostalgia. I know I'd be interested in a project to port or recreate them.
Why not resurrect the BBSes themselves? Seriously, look at some of the most popular websites out there. They're often community-based.
That's what I did, to a degree. I managed to create an online chat server that was heavily inspired by the one used on Loreli BBS (heavily modified MajorBBS system in South Florida). Unfortunately, I'd already lost touch with all the users, so instead it wound up populated with people from where I went to college.
Tell me: what content do you share on Gnutella that is in the public domain or freely distributable?
While I don't use Gnutella (and agree with you that it's questionable to try and cook up a legitimate use), I could see it being used for something like movie trailers, where it's more or less freely redistributable, but the server serving it could easily get Slashdotted as ever geek with DSL (and even some stubborn ones with modems) rushes over to see what the Matrix 2 is going to look like.
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network
If you've had the software around as long as Gnutella's been around and you're still trying to come up with a legitimate use for it, it's my opinion that you've already lost.
Napster is a search engine-like service (with some advertisements for featured music)... You do have to know the band, or the name of the song to find what you are looking for
I think you're taking an overly narrow view of Napster. While it's true that you've got the search engine, you can still browse through everything that a person is sharing. While arbitrarily viewing random shares might not be a very effective way to find stuff, looking for other files shared by someone who already had music that you like is a good way to find something similar but different.
t's more important to the/. community to be informed of MS bugs than *nix ones? I think not.
One could argue that to the stereotypical/. community (avoiding the arguments of how no stereotype truely captures even a majority of the opinions on Slashdot) MS bugs are news (i.e. "That's nice. Discuss amongst yourselves or whatever.") while *nix bugs are alerts (i.e. I don't want to wait until the Slashdot editors feel it's the proper time to post the story in order to keep the intended news pace).
As the author, you're able to release things under multiple licenses. [...] They can ask you to grant them a non-GPL license.
You run into problems, however, when other people begin to contribute code. One solution is the Democratic Software License, which allows an executive board (voted on by the contributors) to license the code. This is a lot easier than, say, getting permission from every single person who every contributed code to an open-sourced project.
For example, I'm listed as a contributor to the newsreader tin because I supplied a one character fix -- they had used 'close' instead of 'pclose' to close a pipe. In theory, someone who wanted to relicense the tin code would have to get my approval, along with that of everyone else who contributed. In reality, I could personally care less and my contribution might be so small that it fails to satisfy some legal criteria (I seem to recall hearing 20 lines of code as a magic figure at one point). However, there's no easy way for them to establish this unless the maintainers kept thorough records (I believe that they only list the file changed). Similarly, someone trying to relicense the Linux kernel, unless the kernel contains a relicensing clause in the existing license, is completely and utterly screwed.
Of course, there's no ideal solution, unless you take one of the extreme positions (GPL -> "ALL SOFTWARE MUST BE FREE!!!"; BSD -> It's public domain++). In my mind, however, the democratic software license mentioned above provides the necessary flexibility to address issues that the original license writer didn't necessarily foresee.
I can't think of any record-setting games that were based on a movie. Most of the best-sellers are original material, such as Final Fantasy and Zelda.
I don't think it was "record-setting", but "Alien vs. Predator" was a respectable game in its own right. And when you think about it, it makes sense why it worked -- the Alien and Predator movies were already how I'd expect a FPS-based movie to turn out; they just went the other way in translating it from movie to game.
When I think about "Matrix", it just screams MMORPG. I mean we're talking about a shared, consensual reality in which billions wander around while exceptional entities wield God-like power. That would, of course, make it an Internet game, which is exactly what Microsoft has the exclusive rights on. Then again, a commercial MMORPG releasing a non-Windows client is the exception, rather than the rule. But it still annoys me that that option has been ruled out entirely.
This sort of exclusive rights deal is done ALL THE TIME. Ever see those Visa commercials "...and they dont accept American Express"?
As other people have pointed out, this is slightly different from the regular exclusive deals in that the deal requires Interplay to limit features of the game. One could argue that it's an effort to artificially make the X-box seem better. For example, if Rare had released Goldeneye (a Nintendo exclusive) for the Playstation, only with half the features, people might be inclined to directly compare the two games and assume the difference was due to the Playstation being an inferior machine.
Also, a better analogy on the credit cards might be if the Visa adds ended with "...but they've got a $25 maximum on American Express."
Well, as is, one could theoretically argue that the law would prohibit the use of hardware the contains proprietary microcode (since it is a form of software). An enterprising IT manager might be able to get copies of the Linux BIOS installed as a replacement for the regular PC BIOSes. However, such changes would take a lot of time and effort, wouldn't provide a substanial benefit, and still wouldn't address the issue of other installed microcode.
The easiest solution, in my mind, would be to include an exception clause (as others have pointed out). This would be especially important for cases where an open-sourced alternative does not exist (for example, try finding open-sourced firmware replacements for most hospital equipment).
I've yet to see anyone address the issue of cheating. If you're broadcasting the game information live to a bunch of spectators, it's not that hard for someone to set up a separate machine and have a perpetual overhead view of what's going on. This could be somewhat mitigated by comparing player IPs against spectators IPs (which would stop people who're masquerading both machines behind something like a single DSL IP address), but even then someone could use a proxy or other means to get around it. All-in-all, if I were a player, I'd prefer a "tape-delayed" broadcast of the game after it was over. Even just delaying the broadcast by 5 minutes would help (although someone could still use it to gain an unfair advantage, by having a friend track the opponents' favored locations and such). Overall, though, as long as you don't spoil the results of the match before it's been broadcast, no one's going to really be able to tell the difference between live and delayed. Delaying it also has the advantage of making it easier to do those instant replays that were mentioned during the interview.
It appears that their actual claim has more to do with limiting the number of logged on users rather than trying to patent the fundamental idea of a graphical MUD.
Actually, I got the impression that it was limiting the number of displayed users for a given client that the patent focused on. If I'm in a virtual room with 10,000 avatars, it'll only display the closest ones up to the capabilities of my system. But my limitations wouldn't affect whether or not those other people are actually logged in. In short, it seems to just be avatar-centric visual clipping.
I don't want to spend $2000 on a box that does it all. Because now i'm going to have to decide if i want the one from Company A with really good audio output, or the one from company B with really good video output.
I actually have a different reason for not wanting an all-in-one box. I'd hate to have to worry about whether or not listening to mp3s and watching DVDs steals too many cycles from the PVR component that's busy recording a Very Important show. I'd really hate to be doing other stuff, only to go play the program back and discover that every 3rd second of the show got dropped because the CPU couldn't keep up with driving the MPEG-encoding chip.
Civil libertarians don't make themselves look good when they defend burglars' supposed right to steal in private!
I'm glad you posted the link -- some of the points that the civil libertarians made were certainly worth consideration (such as the "Wanted Dead or Alive" banner, which they construed as an excitement to vigilantism -- you or I may realize it was in jest, but it could still potentially cause problems).
But then they went and claimed that the people might've been cops serving a search warrant, which rapidly destroyed any credibility they built up in some of the earlier claims. ("Err, yeah. We've got, err, a search warrant for your DVD player. Yeah, that's it. And, err, it's a secret search warrant so none of the other police know about it.")
I used the examples of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark in my original post
Mea culpa. That's what happens when I read a post, go do some other work, and then sit down and reply to a selective quote.
Although (to get myself back on topic), there are times when I am in the mood for a gratuitously violent game. It's my socially acceptable alternative to yelling, screaming, and breaking things as a means of releasing stress. It's certainly better than, say, putting my fist through a wall.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that it's a simple issue of processor time. Figuring out exactly what all 16 players in the game can see, at a speed fast enough to keep up with the video cards of all 16 machines would be... difficult.
Which would you rather play: A normal FPS were some idiots will cheat or an FPS where no one cheats but you only get 2 fps?
Let's also not forget the security risk of having your corporate email share the same domain with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got a "700 free hours" CD in the mail. When you consider the namespace saturation of AOL's account pool, the odds of accidentally misdirecting an email go up rather sharply. When that misdirected email might wind up with someone who isn't even at the company, you're just asking for trouble.
Furthermore, since AOL has open registration, if someone discovers the AOL accounts of various "higher ups" (not too hard -- I'm sure most employess would have access to this information), they could easily register nearly identical accounts. This would be easily easy given the frequent numeric tags seen at the end of account names -- transpose two numbers and wait for someone to get it wrong.
However, provided you're willing to consider legal action, you might be able to get away with having your cake and eating it too, by signing the contract and then arguing that the contract was valid. In addition to the obvious extortion, it's my understanding that, to be valid, a contract must provide consideration to both parties.
The example I recall from my business law class involved a rich uncle signing a contract with his nephew, where his nephew agreed not to engage in various illegal behavior and the uncle would provide the nephew with a bunch of money after a set amount of time. Because the behavior of the nephew fit within what he was already required to do by law, he wasn't really doing anything for his part of the contract. As such, the contract was declared void. Since UGO is already contractually obligated to pay you this money, they aren't providing you with any considerations in this contract. Of course, this would be contingent on the details on the contract (for example, it might provide some small additional benefit to you that wasn't mentioned in the summary, thus negating this whole argument). All in all, the obvious IANAL disclaimers apply, but it might be something worth thinking about and asking a lawyer about.
What about prefixing your corporate initials on the address? It's more likely that TBJohnSmith@aol.com (or some variant) is untaken. Ideally, if you could get your entire department (or even more people) to use a consistent prefix ('TB', 'TBS', 'Turner', 'Trnr', and 'AOLTW' all come to mind, either with a '_', a '.', or just capitalization separating it from the rest of the address), it'd present a nice, consistent image.
Of course it certainly could be worse. The article mentions that at Sun, they force their poor employees to use StarOffice.
Err, how? Last I heard, running the host that has an A record or a CNAME record for a given domain doesn't automatically give you the ability to fiddle with the registration. The email address used in the registration is hosted out of 2600.com and presumably it's their DNS servers that all this points to, as well. Finally, the domain name doesn't reference 'ford', so it's not like they can attempt the standard trademark-based bullying.
Of course they would. They just wouldn't share their results with anyone else. If anyone starts getting too nosey with FOIA requests, they'll just invoke the magic phrase of "national security" and continue working.
That makes me wonder if the Russian news coverage is something like:
Following the corrupting influence of American astronaut Bill Shepherd, our two cosmonauts aboard the ISS, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, have been dupped into helping in a plot to sabotage the station's safety systems.
The trio, who surely wouldn't have partaken on this foolhardy venture if they were under the command of a Russian commander, have disassembled the important aluminum frames that hold the solid oxygen generators in place. Without these generators, people on the space station could certainly die. Why were these unnecessary risks undertaken? In order to build a kitchen table. This represents the true extremity of American commercialized excess.
It was only through the quick-thinking of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev that true disaster was averted. When Bill Sherpherd suggested that they use the airlock door as a table, Sergei stepped in and said such an action would be totally unacceptable.
Furthermore, in order to prevent intervention in this dangerous undertaking, the group chose to hide its actions from Russian ground control. It is the belief of the Russian Space Agency that this secretive nature is a direct result of using an American who was once part of the special commando force, the Navy Seals. It is likely that the Russian cosmonauts also feared for their life and thus had to keep quiet about the mission.
(Seriously, though, I got the impression that they actually built the stuff from packing material rather than stuff that was still being used. But I couldn't resist attempting to spin things the other way.)
Err, I think you're blowing things way out of proportion here. We're talking about your average professor trying to get access to a fileserver containing old tests. Circumventing access controls would be excessive in the case where the professor was unaware of the contents of the fileserver (i.e. just casually browsing Windows shares or whatever) and redundant in the case where the professor already knew the contents of the fileserver (unless he was interested in disciplinary action).
Besides, some fraternities have their own internal networks that aren't necessarily connected to the university network. When I was in a frat, we were playing Command & Conquer over the LAN long before we had any sort of non-dialup internet access.
Unless Tito went around flipping random switches (pretty unlikely) or ran into a personal medical situation (certainly a greater issue given his age, but mitigated by all the testing he probably had to undergo), whether or not things went to hell should be independent of his presence.
Furthermore, Tito was hitching a ride on a mission designed to make sure that, if things did go to hell, there'd be a means for them to escape the station. I don't know how economically shaky Russia's space program is (but in general, the country's a mess), so I really can't say how important the money Tito provided was to the program's continual operation, but it certainly couldn't be hurting things.
Finally, as long as Tito wasn't the one person who put them over capacity on a rescue mission, he doesn't up the cost of that mission. If everything went to hell, they'd have to incur the cost of either deploying the rescue craft or sending another shuttle anyway. Whether they rescue 4 people or 5 is irrelevant.
Feel free to correct my ignorance, but...
As I understand it, freenet serves as both a caching and anonymizing repeater service. I ask the local freenet server for document #12345 and it provides it to me. What it doesn't tell me is whether it had that document or it had to ask another host for that document. Unless I can watch all the involved hosts (and decrypt their traffic, as I seem to recall it being encrypted), I have no way of knowing where that document came from.
Now let's say I'm the author of document #12345 and want it to be available no matter what. If I'm willing to take the risk, couldn't I hack my local server such that a copy of document #12345 is always returned, no matter what? Yes, it would increase the potential that the document could be traced back to me. However, one could also argue that said document was just locally popular. Further, one could argue that said document wasn't around until the law enforcement-types requested it.
So even though I understand why Freenet as a whole doesn't support permanent documents, given space concerns and all that, I don't see why a given server operator can't keep permanent information that he personally feels is important. Am I missing something or were you referring to making information permanent for general users, who aren't running their own servers?
You've got a number of options:
Figure out what date setting'll give you the most correct years of operation (if you can set it back to today's date in 1973, you should be golden -- both 1973 and 2001 start on a Monday and both modulo 4 are equal to 1 so the leap years'll be correct).
Recreate the software (in some cases, someone's already done the work for you).
Go with one of the packages that is still around. For example, MajorBBS became Worldgroup which then became NetVillage (the site seems to currently be down). From what I've seen, the prices they're charging are a little too steep for a hobby system, as they're trying to sell the software as corporate groupware. Personally, I could care less about MBBS itself -- the games, on the other hand, carry lots of nostalgia. I know I'd be interested in a project to port or recreate them.
That's what I did, to a degree. I managed to create an online chat server that was heavily inspired by the one used on Loreli BBS (heavily modified MajorBBS system in South Florida). Unfortunately, I'd already lost touch with all the users, so instead it wound up populated with people from where I went to college.
While I don't use Gnutella (and agree with you that it's questionable to try and cook up a legitimate use), I could see it being used for something like movie trailers, where it's more or less freely redistributable, but the server serving it could easily get Slashdotted as ever geek with DSL (and even some stubborn ones with modems) rushes over to see what the Matrix 2 is going to look like.
If you've had the software around as long as Gnutella's been around and you're still trying to come up with a legitimate use for it, it's my opinion that you've already lost.
I think you're taking an overly narrow view of Napster. While it's true that you've got the search engine, you can still browse through everything that a person is sharing. While arbitrarily viewing random shares might not be a very effective way to find stuff, looking for other files shared by someone who already had music that you like is a good way to find something similar but different.
One could argue that to the stereotypical /. community (avoiding the arguments of how no stereotype truely captures even a majority of the opinions on Slashdot) MS bugs are news (i.e. "That's nice. Discuss amongst yourselves or whatever.") while *nix bugs are alerts (i.e. I don't want to wait until the Slashdot editors feel it's the proper time to post the story in order to keep the intended news pace).
You run into problems, however, when other people begin to contribute code. One solution is the Democratic Software License, which allows an executive board (voted on by the contributors) to license the code. This is a lot easier than, say, getting permission from every single person who every contributed code to an open-sourced project.
For example, I'm listed as a contributor to the newsreader tin because I supplied a one character fix -- they had used 'close' instead of 'pclose' to close a pipe. In theory, someone who wanted to relicense the tin code would have to get my approval, along with that of everyone else who contributed. In reality, I could personally care less and my contribution might be so small that it fails to satisfy some legal criteria (I seem to recall hearing 20 lines of code as a magic figure at one point). However, there's no easy way for them to establish this unless the maintainers kept thorough records (I believe that they only list the file changed). Similarly, someone trying to relicense the Linux kernel, unless the kernel contains a relicensing clause in the existing license, is completely and utterly screwed.
Of course, there's no ideal solution, unless you take one of the extreme positions (GPL -> "ALL SOFTWARE MUST BE FREE!!!"; BSD -> It's public domain++). In my mind, however, the democratic software license mentioned above provides the necessary flexibility to address issues that the original license writer didn't necessarily foresee.
I don't think it was "record-setting", but "Alien vs. Predator" was a respectable game in its own right. And when you think about it, it makes sense why it worked -- the Alien and Predator movies were already how I'd expect a FPS-based movie to turn out; they just went the other way in translating it from movie to game.
When I think about "Matrix", it just screams MMORPG. I mean we're talking about a shared, consensual reality in which billions wander around while exceptional entities wield God-like power. That would, of course, make it an Internet game, which is exactly what Microsoft has the exclusive rights on. Then again, a commercial MMORPG releasing a non-Windows client is the exception, rather than the rule. But it still annoys me that that option has been ruled out entirely.
As other people have pointed out, this is slightly different from the regular exclusive deals in that the deal requires Interplay to limit features of the game. One could argue that it's an effort to artificially make the X-box seem better. For example, if Rare had released Goldeneye (a Nintendo exclusive) for the Playstation, only with half the features, people might be inclined to directly compare the two games and assume the difference was due to the Playstation being an inferior machine.
Also, a better analogy on the credit cards might be if the Visa adds ended with "...but they've got a $25 maximum on American Express."
Well, as is, one could theoretically argue that the law would prohibit the use of hardware the contains proprietary microcode (since it is a form of software). An enterprising IT manager might be able to get copies of the Linux BIOS installed as a replacement for the regular PC BIOSes. However, such changes would take a lot of time and effort, wouldn't provide a substanial benefit, and still wouldn't address the issue of other installed microcode.
The easiest solution, in my mind, would be to include an exception clause (as others have pointed out). This would be especially important for cases where an open-sourced alternative does not exist (for example, try finding open-sourced firmware replacements for most hospital equipment).
I've yet to see anyone address the issue of cheating. If you're broadcasting the game information live to a bunch of spectators, it's not that hard for someone to set up a separate machine and have a perpetual overhead view of what's going on. This could be somewhat mitigated by comparing player IPs against spectators IPs (which would stop people who're masquerading both machines behind something like a single DSL IP address), but even then someone could use a proxy or other means to get around it. All-in-all, if I were a player, I'd prefer a "tape-delayed" broadcast of the game after it was over. Even just delaying the broadcast by 5 minutes would help (although someone could still use it to gain an unfair advantage, by having a friend track the opponents' favored locations and such). Overall, though, as long as you don't spoil the results of the match before it's been broadcast, no one's going to really be able to tell the difference between live and delayed. Delaying it also has the advantage of making it easier to do those instant replays that were mentioned during the interview.
Actually, I got the impression that it was limiting the number of displayed users for a given client that the patent focused on. If I'm in a virtual room with 10,000 avatars, it'll only display the closest ones up to the capabilities of my system. But my limitations wouldn't affect whether or not those other people are actually logged in. In short, it seems to just be avatar-centric visual clipping.
I actually have a different reason for not wanting an all-in-one box. I'd hate to have to worry about whether or not listening to mp3s and watching DVDs steals too many cycles from the PVR component that's busy recording a Very Important show. I'd really hate to be doing other stuff, only to go play the program back and discover that every 3rd second of the show got dropped because the CPU couldn't keep up with driving the MPEG-encoding chip.
I'm glad you posted the link -- some of the points that the civil libertarians made were certainly worth consideration (such as the "Wanted Dead or Alive" banner, which they construed as an excitement to vigilantism -- you or I may realize it was in jest, but it could still potentially cause problems).
But then they went and claimed that the people might've been cops serving a search warrant, which rapidly destroyed any credibility they built up in some of the earlier claims. ("Err, yeah. We've got, err, a search warrant for your DVD player. Yeah, that's it. And, err, it's a secret search warrant so none of the other police know about it.")
Mea culpa. That's what happens when I read a post, go do some other work, and then sit down and reply to a selective quote.
Although (to get myself back on topic), there are times when I am in the mood for a gratuitously violent game. It's my socially acceptable alternative to yelling, screaming, and breaking things as a means of releasing stress. It's certainly better than, say, putting my fist through a wall.