As for maturity, anyone that believes maturity is playing games that are just gorefests really should be asking themselves if they are mature.
I agree with you to a point -- I've certainly seen enough violence and profanity that it doesn't have a "novel" appeal. (Hell, two of my favorite games have been "Ocarina of Time" on the N64 and "Ape Escape" on the Playstation, neither of which would be unsuitable for most children.) While I cringe at gratuitous violence and profanity as an attention-getting tactic, I believe that's it's also sometimes appropriate for a game.
For example, in Metal Gear Solid (one of the best games ever made for the Playstation), you can sneak up behind your enemies, grab their head, and snap their neck, complete with a resounding "crack". While some might find that a little graphic (especially for, say, the target Nintendo audience of Pokemon-clad pre-teens), it's not gratuitous, in my opinion. Within the context of an unarmed special forces operative sneaking into a military facility, snapping the neck of an unsuspecting guard or two makes sense and adds to the feel of the game.
because while the concept that random data in general cannot be compressed is correct, there are no patterns, it is not necessarily true that a given set of random data cannot be compressed.
If I'm not mistaken, during the email exchange, someone mentioned that the data was probably skew-corrected. So not only would you have to hope for a nice pattern in the data, but it would have to be a pattern that the person issuing the contest didn't notice.
It is highly debatable if forcing the use of a third party relay is a good thing or not. My own opinion is that the intention should be to eliminate these.
However, it's worth pointing out that this isn't trying to force the user to use an arbitrary third-party relay. Instead, this is try to get dialup users to relay through their own ISPs mail server. If properly configured, the result is to increase accountability. Some ISPs add headers to identify the message source and, even if they don't, they've got server logs to allow them to track things in the event of spamming.
Nintendo recently has been producing quite a few "adult" titles. Anyone heard of Conker's BFD?
Conker's BFD was produced by Rareware (the company that also did Goldeneye). Nintendo may not be blocking adult titles on their system, but neither are they themselves producing them.
you can't hold a teacher responsible for a student going nuts with a gun
While I wouldn't consider holding the teachers responsible an absolute, I believe that in some cases the teachers are aware of some of the key factors that lead to these incidents. I believe that bullying and social ostracism are both frequently visible to school authorities (teachers, administrators, etc.) and motivating factors in students acting out violently. It seems to me that knowing other people only as sadistic entities bent on making the shooter's existence a living hell is likely what allows that person to dehumanize his peers enough that he has no qualms against killing them.
The person who owns the box would be no more responsible for illegal content passing through than uunet.
You're comparing apples and spheroids that've been painted red. In the case of the freenet server, the person running it is responsible for actively attempting to obscure the identity of the messages being carried, in an effort to circumvent legal enforcement. I suspect that that may very well jeopardize any claims to common carrier status that the freenet server might have otherwise had.
As far as I can remember, the closest they ever came was in the sky city -- but 3po was disassembled early in that sequence, and they never met face to face.
I heard from a friend that in one of the recent non-movie adaptations of this (comic book, maybe?), they actually attempted to add some tie-in to Episode 1 by having Vader notice the disassembled c3po and instructing one of his subordinates to give the parts to the wookiee.
Although I suspect Scott Adams was right -- Zippy has one joke and it's on the reader.
At least two:
"HELLO KITTY gang terrorizes town, family STICKERED to death!"
(Personally, I was exposed to Zippy quotes before seeing the actual Zippy comic strip. I had been hoping that most of the quotes would actually make sense when taken in context.)
and my (lame) business sense tells me that it's because there just aren't enough Linux boxes out there. Now, bear with me here, but wouldn't the same logic hold through if a Linux console ever made it to the shelves?
A Linux box requires a certain degree of know-how to install and (generally) to use. A Linux console, on the other hand, doesn't -- it's just a game system. I know there are people out there that wouldn't know Linux from Apple DOS 3.3, but who have TiVos (running Linux) sitting on top of their television set.
Now there is, obviously, a major difference between a TiVo and a Linux console (namely TiVo doesn't have its success tied to the existence of third-party software), but on the other hand, it does still illustrate that there's also a difference between a Linux box and a Linux console.
Whether it'll work or not is anyone's guess, but given that this is now being undertaken as a standard open-source volunteer-driven project instead of a corporate money-maker. There's certainly value in not having to worry about paying your programers 5 and 6 figure salaries.
What could really help is if EVERY game came with its own custom tailored version of linux to work with the hardware.
Then you start getting back to the "Dreamcast Ethernet" problem. As it was explained to me, only Dreamcast games that were explicitly written to use the ethernet card can support it. End-users are SOL if the game developer only included modem support. By keeping some parts of the OS away from each game, you can better support the hardware. That way, the machine itself can provide a simple "connect to ISP" command for the game to call and then it doesn't matter if you've got a modem, DSL, PPP-over-serial to another Linux box, or a set of tin cans. All the game needs to worry about is that a connection exists, that it has an approximate speed of (foo) bps, and (maybe) there'd be some proxy settings.
I still think it would have worked out better writing if young Darth had turned out to be identical twins. The possible plot twists would have been wonderful. (For example - who turns to the dark side - the one who goes for training, or the one who does not?)
That's a little too easy to answer -- obviously, it would be the one named "Anakin". I suppose you could then add some contrived situations (either twins named "Annakin" and "Anakkin" or make "Anakin Skywalker" yet another alias that he's gone through or make the evil twin pick up the name of his slain brother) to make it work, but that seems like an ugly kludge.
On the other hand, it would've been neat if they went on to draw parallels between this set of twins and Luke/Leia.
So, wouldn't the checksum server be essentially redistributing the binary?
In a sense, yes. However, I think they rejected "give a checksum to the client" as being illegal back in the original article. The method they focus on involves only sending checksums from the proxy to AOL, utilizing a previously cache response from a legitimate client.
Even earlier than that was Alias PowerAnimator. It had mouse/gesture based commands as early as 1995.
...and to go almost full-circle back to the notion of it being a game-based innovation, one could argue that Street Fighter 2 has joystick/gesture-based before all of these.
Okay, I admit it's a bit of a stretch, but there are some amusing similarities. I wonder if I'll be just as incompetent using GUIs as I was playing fighting games.
I use my TiVo to watch commercials (no joke!)
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 2
In that case, TiVo, et al is a good thing for advertisors. We've all heard about how TiVo tracks our viewing habits -- how long before they inject some sort of targeted advertising based on those viewing preferences?
As a quick aside, a potential problem to this would be the fact that you're replacing network X's advertising (which is what pays for network X programming) in order to show TiVo's advertising. The obvious solution is to have TiVo partner up with TV networks (and they've already got some existing business relationships with various networks) so that you're only replacing network X ads with other targetted ads that still help support network X (with TiVo getting a cut to cover some of the added value they provide by making it targetted coupled with bandwidth costs and so on).
But my main point I wanted to make is that not only do I like targetted advertising, but I also manually simulate the practice when using my TiVo. Normally when I fastforward through a commercial break, I do it at the 2x speed -- it takes about 8-10 seconds to go through. However, I'm more than willing to actually stop and watch a commercial that catches my interest. In the rare cases of particularly funny commercials (such as the flipside.com window washers playing tic-tac-toe), I've been known to wander into the other part of the house, drag someone back to the TV, and play the commercial for them. I've also found that annoying commercials no longer bother me -- when Chili's was running those commercials with that painfully repetitive "Baby back ribs" song, I vehemently refused to eat there. I suppose the painfully bad karaoke in the current run of Levi's ads would be the same thing -- but I've only seen each one once or twice and so I've completely failed to develop a hatred of Levi's that's directly proportional to my TV viewing. However, the commercials are distinctive enough that I always notice them while fast-forwarding past. Ditto for the current run of GAP and Old Navy commercials. Finally, I'll tend to watch movie trailers that I haven't seen before. That also tends to be where a lot of my consumer activity is focused, anyway.
Overall, I've found that when I'm only watching a commercial because I've decided to watch it, it suddenly has a lot more impact. I think most advertisers would drool over the possibility to get their commercial seen by someone who only watches a dozen or less commercials a week. In addition, a properly constructed commercial can still accomplish branding, even when viewed at fast forward speeds (Random amusing thought: Just wait until advertisers start building commercials that're customized to the fast-forward framerate of most PTRs, such that they become subliminal when you're only viewing every Nth frame).
So, we have to ask ourselves, at what point does medical assistance create a cyborg?
I think like many other concepts in sci-fi that're slowly being implemented in the real world ('artificial intelligence' and 'virtual reality' spring to mind), we should let the parent term remain slightly vague and only worry about defining subterms for each piece of technology.
For example, MegaHAL is a decent enough conversation simulator but lacks no understanding of the words that it produces. Does such a program fulfill some of the "mimics human conversation" criteria of AI? Yes. But on a self-awareness scale, it's more or less tied with my toaster.
So in the realm of cybornetics, I think we should define a category (or rather, I'm sure someone else has already defined such a category) for cybornetic devices that're controlled by direct thought or conscious muscle-controlling nerve impulses. That, to me, is where the really nifty stuff is going to soon pop up. And it creates a subtype that excludes something like a pacemaker -- which is certainly a useful form of cybornetic technology, but is also at least an order of magnitude simpler than what your typical Slashdot geek thinks of as "cyborg".
The OS is just something that's necessary for you to accomplish something with a computer. Anyone who takes it more seriously than that is suspect.
In theory, programs are just utilities to help you accomplish a given task, cars are just physical transportation devices, the web is a means of providing information, and sex is just a means of perpetuating the species.
In practice, you've got entire stores devoted to computer games, you've got sports cars, and you've got online porn.
I hate to come off sounding like some loathed semantics fiend, but, c'mon. Linux is not an "operating system." At least, not alone.
While I can understand and appreciate the importance of making a distinction, I rapidly got tired of replying to "What OS do you use?" with, "I use the Linux kernel compiled with gcc 2.95.2 (formerly known as egcs, which was forked from gcc) (yes, I understand that gcc isn't Linux-dependent) coupled with a number of supporting GNU utilities (Mostly compiled by RedHat; they may or may not have some patches to fork/configure them -- yes, I understand GNU utilities aren't Linux-dependent) including the aforementioned gcc as well as glibc (yes, I understand it isn't Linux-dependent) with the original bootstrapping iteration of getting a compiled kernel up and running done using the RedHat bootdisk from version 6.1 and the RH-supplied version of gcc (which may or may not have patches make it an unofficial fork from the FSF's gcc), most of the installed software are the RedHat 6.2 rpms (including updates) although I had originally installed RedHat 6.1 and manually upgraded via RPM rather than RedHat's traditional reboot/upgrade mechanism, under Xwindows (which uses XFree86 as the server -- yes, I understand it isn't Linux-dependent) I've got GNOME (Yes, I understand it isn't Linux-dependent) using Ximian (which used to be named Helixcode -- yes, [all together now] I understand it isn't Linux-dependent)."
These days, I just say "Linux". In all that extra time I've saved, I've managed to find a 10 line proof for Fermat's Last Theorem (though I don't have enough space left in this comment to include it).
He didn't like the answer he got the first time, so he tried again.
There are two mitigating factors here. The first time the story was posted, it probably wasn't on the front page (given how few comments were posted).
Also, it was an "Ask Slashdot" story posted on April 2nd -- anyone else remember what kind of garbage was flying around (especially on Ask Slashdot) on March 31st through April 2nd? So even if it had been front page news, I could easily see it getting replies such as "Here on Mars, supreme dictator for life Gxzcvcxvqa (blessed be his name) has declared the Internet to be evil, as TCP's maximum possible RTT is 120 seconds (do a grep in the Linux kernel source for 'University of Mars' in net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c). As such, we have chosen to declare war on the horribly chauvinistic Earthians who blindly assume that everyone is on the same planet. Furthermore, Linus has yet to implement the ISO 8859-42 characterset, despite repeated requests. How am I supposed to sign my name when I can't type a guziznork?"
Unfortunately more than a couple of sites that offer you something for your email address will not accept addresses in the form bwientze-companytag@the-dma.org
With postfix, the delimeter is configurable (the default is +). Assuming you don't have any email addresses with period in them, you could hypothetically use that as your delimeter. Since so many legitimate addresses use periods, it's less likely that they'll strip them.
Just so you know, you might not want to use nobody@nowhere.com, noone@noone.com, or anything close to the aforementioned address, because sometimes I get creative.
The proper solution is to either use the domains 'example.com/net/org' (which are guaranteed never to exist) or the pseudoTLD '.invalid' (which is also guaranteed never to exist).
An http request, for example, resolves a domain name and includes that domain name in the request header. That is why virtual domains can work so well under Apache.
It's worth pointing out that versions 0.9 and 1.0 of HTTP (which conforming servers are required to be backwards compatible with) don't send the hostname in the request header. That's why Apache has that workaround where you create a pseudo-directory for each virtual host (i.e. http://bob.example.com/ would be listed as http://bob.example.com/bob/; assuming that 'www' is the machine acting as the server for the virtual hosts, a request to http://www.example.com/bob would get treated the same as http://bob.example.com/bob/ and http://bob.example.com/).
Also, I'm not sure if it's still the case, but there was apparently a chicken-and-egg problem with virtual hosted SSL at one point. In order for the server to get the appropriate 'Host:' header from the client (necessary to determine which virtual host to use), it needed to provide the client with its public key. In order to provide the client with the public key, it needed to know what virtual host the client wanted to connect to.
So even HTTP, which I agree is one of the more ideal examples of a hostname-driven protocol, has its short-comings. In that light, it makes this solution appear even less useful. However, that's not to say it is completely without merit -- it helps illustrate some issues that designers should keep in mind when cooking up new protocols.
Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them
Why back in my day, we didn't have none of them fancy robots. All we had were golems, made out of clay. And when I say clay, I don't mean any of this fancy schmancy Play-Doh stuff. No, we had go down to the Moldavka river and mold it ourselves. And once we wanted to instruct the golem, we didn't have any of these easy, off-the-shelf software packages to do the work for us. No siree, we had to get a piece of paper and write out by hand what we wanted the golem to do. My handwriting's so terrible that if I had a quarter for every time the golem decided I wanted it to "bake my bed" or "mow the lan" (and the lan wasn't anything of that fancy ethernet stuff -- we used token-ring and liked it!), I'd be a rich man today.
The original poster was not trolling - just pointing out this cultural difference.
The original poster claims that its only Americans and other foreigners that find the uniquitous camera situation unusual. This statement was made in response to a Slashdot article that consists primarily of a link to a UK news article talking about all the standard privacy errosion problems.
I won't disagree that there are cultural differences, but the original poster used it as an excuse to include a number of downright ludicrous claims. To create a somewhat analogous American example (with editorial notes):
We Americans value our free speech (true enough). We believe people should be able to say anything and everything (a bit of an exaggeration -- slander is still a crime, for example). Institutions such as the National Enquirer and Howard Stern are beloved as being noble protectors of our rights (mostly false -- while it's true they help engender free speech, they're still mostly entities that exist to entertain).
Likewise, the original poster used the notion of "cultural diffferences" to argue that the residents of the UK accept the cameras, love their politicians, and trust the policemen. While there might be some truth to these claims, the entirety of them certainly exceeds my bullshit-detection threshold, especially in light of the original poster's posting history.
I don't think TiVo would care if you bought more of their units so you can have just the hard drive. TiVo makes money on each sale.
Everything I've read seems to indicate that you're wrong. TiVo is actually losing money on the hardware itself -- they don't make a profit until you buy the service.
Stop babbling. It has components. It has to be cheap. Components have drivers.
It's not that absurd for Microsoft to twiddle with things to make the components not quite 100% standard. As a Real World example, TiVo actually did this with a number of units -- they got locked drives for some of the units that require a special sequence to be sent at powerup. Presumably, the rationale was to prevent people from buying TiVos (with part of the hardware cost being subsidized by TiVo) and stuffing the drive into their PC, instead.
If TiVo could afford to do something like that, I can't imagine Microsoft not being able to look into similar options, especially in the console market -- a market where locking out unlicensed third-parties is the way to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you to a point -- I've certainly seen enough violence and profanity that it doesn't have a "novel" appeal. (Hell, two of my favorite games have been "Ocarina of Time" on the N64 and "Ape Escape" on the Playstation, neither of which would be unsuitable for most children.) While I cringe at gratuitous violence and profanity as an attention-getting tactic, I believe that's it's also sometimes appropriate for a game.
For example, in Metal Gear Solid (one of the best games ever made for the Playstation), you can sneak up behind your enemies, grab their head, and snap their neck, complete with a resounding "crack". While some might find that a little graphic (especially for, say, the target Nintendo audience of Pokemon-clad pre-teens), it's not gratuitous, in my opinion. Within the context of an unarmed special forces operative sneaking into a military facility, snapping the neck of an unsuspecting guard or two makes sense and adds to the feel of the game.
If I'm not mistaken, during the email exchange, someone mentioned that the data was probably skew-corrected. So not only would you have to hope for a nice pattern in the data, but it would have to be a pattern that the person issuing the contest didn't notice.
However, it's worth pointing out that this isn't trying to force the user to use an arbitrary third-party relay. Instead, this is try to get dialup users to relay through their own ISPs mail server. If properly configured, the result is to increase accountability. Some ISPs add headers to identify the message source and, even if they don't, they've got server logs to allow them to track things in the event of spamming.
Conker's BFD was produced by Rareware (the company that also did Goldeneye). Nintendo may not be blocking adult titles on their system, but neither are they themselves producing them.
While I wouldn't consider holding the teachers responsible an absolute, I believe that in some cases the teachers are aware of some of the key factors that lead to these incidents. I believe that bullying and social ostracism are both frequently visible to school authorities (teachers, administrators, etc.) and motivating factors in students acting out violently. It seems to me that knowing other people only as sadistic entities bent on making the shooter's existence a living hell is likely what allows that person to dehumanize his peers enough that he has no qualms against killing them.
You're comparing apples and spheroids that've been painted red. In the case of the freenet server, the person running it is responsible for actively attempting to obscure the identity of the messages being carried, in an effort to circumvent legal enforcement. I suspect that that may very well jeopardize any claims to common carrier status that the freenet server might have otherwise had.
I heard from a friend that in one of the recent non-movie adaptations of this (comic book, maybe?), they actually attempted to add some tie-in to Episode 1 by having Vader notice the disassembled c3po and instructing one of his subordinates to give the parts to the wookiee.
At least two:
"HELLO KITTY gang terrorizes town, family STICKERED to death!"
(Personally, I was exposed to Zippy quotes before seeing the actual Zippy comic strip. I had been hoping that most of the quotes would actually make sense when taken in context.)
A Linux box requires a certain degree of know-how to install and (generally) to use. A Linux console, on the other hand, doesn't -- it's just a game system. I know there are people out there that wouldn't know Linux from Apple DOS 3.3, but who have TiVos (running Linux) sitting on top of their television set.
Now there is, obviously, a major difference between a TiVo and a Linux console (namely TiVo doesn't have its success tied to the existence of third-party software), but on the other hand, it does still illustrate that there's also a difference between a Linux box and a Linux console.
Whether it'll work or not is anyone's guess, but given that this is now being undertaken as a standard open-source volunteer-driven project instead of a corporate money-maker. There's certainly value in not having to worry about paying your programers 5 and 6 figure salaries.
Then you start getting back to the "Dreamcast Ethernet" problem. As it was explained to me, only Dreamcast games that were explicitly written to use the ethernet card can support it. End-users are SOL if the game developer only included modem support. By keeping some parts of the OS away from each game, you can better support the hardware. That way, the machine itself can provide a simple "connect to ISP" command for the game to call and then it doesn't matter if you've got a modem, DSL, PPP-over-serial to another Linux box, or a set of tin cans. All the game needs to worry about is that a connection exists, that it has an approximate speed of (foo) bps, and (maybe) there'd be some proxy settings.
That's a little too easy to answer -- obviously, it would be the one named "Anakin". I suppose you could then add some contrived situations (either twins named "Annakin" and "Anakkin" or make "Anakin Skywalker" yet another alias that he's gone through or make the evil twin pick up the name of his slain brother) to make it work, but that seems like an ugly kludge.
On the other hand, it would've been neat if they went on to draw parallels between this set of twins and Luke/Leia.
In a sense, yes. However, I think they rejected "give a checksum to the client" as being illegal back in the original article. The method they focus on involves only sending checksums from the proxy to AOL, utilizing a previously cache response from a legitimate client.
Okay, I admit it's a bit of a stretch, but there are some amusing similarities. I wonder if I'll be just as incompetent using GUIs as I was playing fighting games.
As a quick aside, a potential problem to this would be the fact that you're replacing network X's advertising (which is what pays for network X programming) in order to show TiVo's advertising. The obvious solution is to have TiVo partner up with TV networks (and they've already got some existing business relationships with various networks) so that you're only replacing network X ads with other targetted ads that still help support network X (with TiVo getting a cut to cover some of the added value they provide by making it targetted coupled with bandwidth costs and so on).
But my main point I wanted to make is that not only do I like targetted advertising, but I also manually simulate the practice when using my TiVo. Normally when I fastforward through a commercial break, I do it at the 2x speed -- it takes about 8-10 seconds to go through. However, I'm more than willing to actually stop and watch a commercial that catches my interest. In the rare cases of particularly funny commercials (such as the flipside.com window washers playing tic-tac-toe), I've been known to wander into the other part of the house, drag someone back to the TV, and play the commercial for them. I've also found that annoying commercials no longer bother me -- when Chili's was running those commercials with that painfully repetitive "Baby back ribs" song, I vehemently refused to eat there. I suppose the painfully bad karaoke in the current run of Levi's ads would be the same thing -- but I've only seen each one once or twice and so I've completely failed to develop a hatred of Levi's that's directly proportional to my TV viewing. However, the commercials are distinctive enough that I always notice them while fast-forwarding past. Ditto for the current run of GAP and Old Navy commercials. Finally, I'll tend to watch movie trailers that I haven't seen before. That also tends to be where a lot of my consumer activity is focused, anyway.
Overall, I've found that when I'm only watching a commercial because I've decided to watch it, it suddenly has a lot more impact. I think most advertisers would drool over the possibility to get their commercial seen by someone who only watches a dozen or less commercials a week. In addition, a properly constructed commercial can still accomplish branding, even when viewed at fast forward speeds (Random amusing thought: Just wait until advertisers start building commercials that're customized to the fast-forward framerate of most PTRs, such that they become subliminal when you're only viewing every Nth frame).
I think like many other concepts in sci-fi that're slowly being implemented in the real world ('artificial intelligence' and 'virtual reality' spring to mind), we should let the parent term remain slightly vague and only worry about defining subterms for each piece of technology.
For example, MegaHAL is a decent enough conversation simulator but lacks no understanding of the words that it produces. Does such a program fulfill some of the "mimics human conversation" criteria of AI? Yes. But on a self-awareness scale, it's more or less tied with my toaster.
So in the realm of cybornetics, I think we should define a category (or rather, I'm sure someone else has already defined such a category) for cybornetic devices that're controlled by direct thought or conscious muscle-controlling nerve impulses. That, to me, is where the really nifty stuff is going to soon pop up. And it creates a subtype that excludes something like a pacemaker -- which is certainly a useful form of cybornetic technology, but is also at least an order of magnitude simpler than what your typical Slashdot geek thinks of as "cyborg".
In theory, programs are just utilities to help you accomplish a given task, cars are just physical transportation devices, the web is a means of providing information, and sex is just a means of perpetuating the species.
In practice, you've got entire stores devoted to computer games, you've got sports cars, and you've got online porn.
While I can understand and appreciate the importance of making a distinction, I rapidly got tired of replying to "What OS do you use?" with, "I use the Linux kernel compiled with gcc 2.95.2 (formerly known as egcs, which was forked from gcc) (yes, I understand that gcc isn't Linux-dependent) coupled with a number of supporting GNU utilities (Mostly compiled by RedHat; they may or may not have some patches to fork/configure them -- yes, I understand GNU utilities aren't Linux-dependent) including the aforementioned gcc as well as glibc (yes, I understand it isn't Linux-dependent) with the original bootstrapping iteration of getting a compiled kernel up and running done using the RedHat bootdisk from version 6.1 and the RH-supplied version of gcc (which may or may not have patches make it an unofficial fork from the FSF's gcc), most of the installed software are the RedHat 6.2 rpms (including updates) although I had originally installed RedHat 6.1 and manually upgraded via RPM rather than RedHat's traditional reboot/upgrade mechanism, under Xwindows (which uses XFree86 as the server -- yes, I understand it isn't Linux-dependent) I've got GNOME (Yes, I understand it isn't Linux-dependent) using Ximian (which used to be named Helixcode -- yes, [all together now] I understand it isn't Linux-dependent)."
These days, I just say "Linux". In all that extra time I've saved, I've managed to find a 10 line proof for Fermat's Last Theorem (though I don't have enough space left in this comment to include it).
There are two mitigating factors here. The first time the story was posted, it probably wasn't on the front page (given how few comments were posted).
Also, it was an "Ask Slashdot" story posted on April 2nd -- anyone else remember what kind of garbage was flying around (especially on Ask Slashdot) on March 31st through April 2nd? So even if it had been front page news, I could easily see it getting replies such as "Here on Mars, supreme dictator for life Gxzcvcxvqa (blessed be his name) has declared the Internet to be evil, as TCP's maximum possible RTT is 120 seconds (do a grep in the Linux kernel source for 'University of Mars' in net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c). As such, we have chosen to declare war on the horribly chauvinistic Earthians who blindly assume that everyone is on the same planet. Furthermore, Linus has yet to implement the ISO 8859-42 characterset, despite repeated requests. How am I supposed to sign my name when I can't type a guziznork?"
With postfix, the delimeter is configurable (the default is +). Assuming you don't have any email addresses with period in them, you could hypothetically use that as your delimeter. Since so many legitimate addresses use periods, it's less likely that they'll strip them.
The proper solution is to either use the domains 'example.com/net/org' (which are guaranteed never to exist) or the pseudoTLD '.invalid' (which is also guaranteed never to exist).
It's worth pointing out that versions 0.9 and 1.0 of HTTP (which conforming servers are required to be backwards compatible with) don't send the hostname in the request header. That's why Apache has that workaround where you create a pseudo-directory for each virtual host (i.e. http://bob.example.com/ would be listed as http://bob.example.com/bob/; assuming that 'www' is the machine acting as the server for the virtual hosts, a request to http://www.example.com/bob would get treated the same as http://bob.example.com/bob/ and http://bob.example.com/).
Also, I'm not sure if it's still the case, but there was apparently a chicken-and-egg problem with virtual hosted SSL at one point. In order for the server to get the appropriate 'Host:' header from the client (necessary to determine which virtual host to use), it needed to provide the client with its public key. In order to provide the client with the public key, it needed to know what virtual host the client wanted to connect to.
So even HTTP, which I agree is one of the more ideal examples of a hostname-driven protocol, has its short-comings. In that light, it makes this solution appear even less useful. However, that's not to say it is completely without merit -- it helps illustrate some issues that designers should keep in mind when cooking up new protocols.
Why back in my day, we didn't have none of them fancy robots. All we had were golems, made out of clay. And when I say clay, I don't mean any of this fancy schmancy Play-Doh stuff. No, we had go down to the Moldavka river and mold it ourselves. And once we wanted to instruct the golem, we didn't have any of these easy, off-the-shelf software packages to do the work for us. No siree, we had to get a piece of paper and write out by hand what we wanted the golem to do. My handwriting's so terrible that if I had a quarter for every time the golem decided I wanted it to "bake my bed" or "mow the lan" (and the lan wasn't anything of that fancy ethernet stuff -- we used token-ring and liked it!), I'd be a rich man today.
The original poster claims that its only Americans and other foreigners that find the uniquitous camera situation unusual. This statement was made in response to a Slashdot article that consists primarily of a link to a UK news article talking about all the standard privacy errosion problems.
I won't disagree that there are cultural differences, but the original poster used it as an excuse to include a number of downright ludicrous claims. To create a somewhat analogous American example (with editorial notes):
We Americans value our free speech (true enough). We believe people should be able to say anything and everything (a bit of an exaggeration -- slander is still a crime, for example). Institutions such as the National Enquirer and Howard Stern are beloved as being noble protectors of our rights (mostly false -- while it's true they help engender free speech, they're still mostly entities that exist to entertain).
Likewise, the original poster used the notion of "cultural diffferences" to argue that the residents of the UK accept the cameras, love their politicians, and trust the policemen. While there might be some truth to these claims, the entirety of them certainly exceeds my bullshit-detection threshold, especially in light of the original poster's posting history.
Everything I've read seems to indicate that you're wrong. TiVo is actually losing money on the hardware itself -- they don't make a profit until you buy the service.
It's not that absurd for Microsoft to twiddle with things to make the components not quite 100% standard. As a Real World example, TiVo actually did this with a number of units -- they got locked drives for some of the units that require a special sequence to be sent at powerup. Presumably, the rationale was to prevent people from buying TiVos (with part of the hardware cost being subsidized by TiVo) and stuffing the drive into their PC, instead.
If TiVo could afford to do something like that, I can't imagine Microsoft not being able to look into similar options, especially in the console market -- a market where locking out unlicensed third-parties is the way to make money.