While I agree with you on the issue that hacking certainly doesn't have to be practical, I suspect that there's at least one practical application of this one: making games.
We've already got some games being developed for Linux, such as the previously slashdotted Tux Racer. It wouldn't be that much more a leap, once Linux-on-Dreamcast matures, to create a Dreamcast port of Tux Racer.
but the fact of the matter is that the FBI had a court order here! They had every right to tap this guy's computer.
Had you bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that it spent several paragraphs explaining that the FBI only had a search warrant. Furthermore, it explains that a traditional wiretap order requires a higher degree of approval (both the attorney general and the court) than a search warrant. In short, they bugged his computer when they would've been overstepping their legal authority to bug his phone.
I know that MP3.com samples certain areas of the CD in order to determine that it's genuine. I suspect that it's the same area of a given CD each time.
I suspect you're wrong. For values of "suspect" approaching "pretty fucking certain". All this was hashed out when my.mp3.com's BeamIt protocol first came out. It asks for different sections of the CD. Hell, it was even covered by Slashdot.
I imagine there are some real legal and technical issues to be worked out before a mirroring system could be implemented.
One possibility for the legal problems would be to cook up a standard for automatically providing permission for other people to cache a site, similar to how a robots.txt works for spidering. The iffy part would be figuring out what the default behavior would be in the absence of a 'cache.txt'.
Even nicer would be a distributed group of authoritative servers where cached copies could register themselves. Those servers could also serve as authorities to provide hashes of the mirrored files, allowing clients to automagically verify that a given cached copy is legit.
Although I suppose to a degree, such a project would be reinventing freenet. On the other hand, it'd be simpler to implement since you wouldn't be worrying about anonymity issues, as much.
Within each state, use a proportional representation within the college, such that it cannot happen that 50% of the people in any given state are not represented at all in the college.
Actually, some states do use a system to proportionally decide who gets the electoral votes. However, the US Constitution leaves the task of choosing how electors are picked up to each state. As far as changing it goes, it's one of those easier said than done issues. Besides, I'm sure some states like having the winner-take-all system, in order to receive more political attention in the case of a close race.
Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's past.
There are two problems with that statement:
1. Earlier, the Democrats were expected to lose the popular vote, but win on the electoral college.
2. The electoral college serves to normalize the power distribution. With a straight popular vote, smaller states would get glossed over, with presidential candidates focusing on the population centers. What the electoral college does is guarantees that those smaller states have a voice. The bigger states still wind up with more electoral votes, but the margin between them is reduced.
Does anybody have any idea why they are not using SSL to upload the original message?
The short answer is we're talking about Yahoo here.
The slightly longer answer is that we're talking about a site that, when you select a secure login for e-mail, switches to SSL just long enough to give you the page where you enter your user-id and password, only to immediatly redirect you back to regular, unencrypted pages. I wouldn't trust these people to protect a piece of pocket lint.
The tool then has the ability to obtain information from document's to which you don't own the copyright
What if the document cracking tool did some superficial checks in order to determine that someone was the rightful copyright holder of the document in question? For example, a program for cracking Excel passwords might verify that the copy of Excel used to create the document is the same as the copy of Excel installed on the computer, by checking the GUID. As geeks, we'd consider such a protection scheme as lauaghable at best -- right up there with having someone type in "I am not a criminal. Honest." The DMCA, on the other hand, places a great deal of importance on even the most superficial protection schemes.
Using the IP and the time it occured it should be relatively easy for the ISP to hunt down whoever was using that IP at the given time.
Public Service Announcement: Log entries are usually recorded using your local time, so you should always include a mention of your timezone when mailing the ISP your logfiles.
As for dshield.org, according to this, their internal format doesn't bother with the time of the incident; only the date. This, unfortunately, means that dshield is pretty impotent when it comes to dealing with dynamic IPs. If I remember, I'll try getting in touch with the guy who's running it after the Slashdot tide dies down. If run properly, I could see this easily becoming the anti-script kiddie equivilant to SpamCop.
Humans would quickly become redundant in such a scenario, insofar as they would no longer have anything to contribute to the progress of our culture. The machines would inherit the Earth.
First, culture encompasses more than technology. Throughout the history of man, the single biggest consequence of technology has been to allow us to spend less time gathering food, shivering in a dark cave, and being sick so that we could instead spend more time writing stories, singing songs, and occasionally even just twiddling our thumbs. Just because humans no longer had to worry about working on technology doesn't mean there aren't many other fields of interest to explore.
Second, who says the machines have to inherit the Earth? Being non-organic in nature, there's nothing to stop them from attempting to colonize, say, Mars. Furthermore, provided they've got all these "Gee whiz!" technological advances (which is, of course, the entire premise behind this scenario), they should be more than capable of dealing with the all the new and interesting challenges required to colonize another planet.
Given this model, I could violate the DMCA by attempting to access my own documents
Let me preface my comments with the obligatory invocation of IANAL.
Are you referring to accessing your own documents by fiddling only with your document files or by attempting to crack the word processor so you can view your documents?
In the first case, while it's an intersting example, doesn't seem to be covered by the DMCA. More specifically:
"(A) to 'circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;"
Since you're the copyright owner of the document, unless you're totally wigged out on cough syrup, I can't imagine you not giving yourself permission.
As for the second case, cracking the word processor to view your own documents, I think this would be somewhat analogous to stealing gas for your car. You can make the argument that your car is your property, but that it can't doing anything without the gas. However, I do admit that that analogy suffers from the possible flaw of trying to equate real property and intellectual property. Besides, virtually all word processors have options within them to save documents in non-proprietary formats. Admittedly, this can result in less-than-ideal formatting information, but in an ideal world it's the content that's much more valuable than the presentation.
Re:Let's get some linux-only games
on
Linux Sin Demo
·
· Score: 2
If we really want gaming for linux to take off we need to have linux-only games.
While I like Linux as much as the next guy, a commercial Linux-only game doesn't make good business sense and an open source one will most likely get ported by someone else if it's that fantastically popular (and, of course, it's a moot point if the game is unpopular -- you don't see people lining up aroudn the corner to play/usr/games/mille).
And there are a number of open-source games, some of which have been mentioned on Slashdot.
One interesting project that hasn't is Star Control: Timewarp. Unfortunately, the current development is DOS-centric and there are some brain-dead coding practices, but I did manage to get it up and running on my Linux box with some fiddling.
On your first point (the lack of easy personal publishing), while that was certainly a reason gopher died, it's not one of the reasons why gopher has to stay dead. It was a lack of foresight in the server implementation rather than a fundamental lacking in the protocol.
On the second point (data wasn't very formatted), I'd argue that while documents were plain ASCII, the meta-data/navigation had much better formatting than equivilant web navigation. For awhile, I hated using lynx over gopher, as with lynx the navigation choices could be scattered throughout paragraphs of arbitrary text. With gopher, on the other hannd, it was always a simple menu that could be navigated by entering the number of your choice.
Overall, though, I agree with you that there's not a compelling need to bring back gopher back to the mainstream. What I would like to see, however, is a the addition of a gopher-like menuing structure into the native capabilities of HTML (i.e. something a little more powerful than just a frame with a bunch of anchor tags).
I was able to install it a while ago on my system. It was fun for a while, but I couldn't really do much with it.
This reminded me of my personal experience with running Hurd. I spent a considerable amount of time downloading the 0.2 distribution over a slow modem. When I'd finally gotten it all, I untarred it on my Linux box, and spent some more time wrestling with GRUB to get the system up. When everything was said and done, I was rewarded with a bash prompt and a bunch of GNU utilities. It was kind of anticlimactic -- I figured I could've gotten the same effect by most of the packages on my Linux box.
But that being said, I think there is some merit in the Hurd project. It's just that it's nowhere close to the point where it can start sucking up marketshare for any reasons other than "I'm working on Hurd" or "I was really curious, bored, and/or drunk." Furthermore, it's entirely possible that it may never become more than a novelty.
The Polish tax official obviously thought that Linux and StarOffice were at least as good as MS-Windows and Office.
Just to play devil's advocate here, the Polish tax official obviously undervalued the software. No, I'm not referring to the software quality, but rather the software licensing: A copy of Linux, assuming all other things being equal, would be equivilant to the cost of a site license for Windows or possibly even a $10,000 MSDN subscription.
But to drift back to reality a bit, it seems the tax could argued down a bit by pointing the officials at RedHat's $30 RH7 package. There's enough of a price there that you might be able to convince them that that's what the retail value of the software is -- if all else fails, you can point out that it comes in a spiffy cardboard box like most commercial software.
Something lower in the OS that will make executing Win32 binaries as easy as ELF.
Sounds like binfmt_misc to me. From/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/Documentation/Configure.help :
Kernel support for MISC binaries CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC If you say Y here, it will be possible to plug wrapper-driven binary formats into the kernel. You will like this especially when you use programs that need an interpreter to run like Java, Python or Emacs-Lisp. It's also useful if you often run DOS executables under the Linux DOS emulator DOSEMU (read the DOSEMU-HOWTO, available in ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO). Once you have registered such a binary class with the kernel, you can start one of those programs simply by typing in its name at a shell prompt; Linux will automatically feed it to the correct interpreter.
People will continue to register each site under every TLD they can get their hands on.
It gets worse. I got some NSI spam within the past week or so offering a discount to people who register the corresponding.net and.org to go along with their.com.
One of the main problems with online games is that by the time I pick up a game and try it out online (like, 2 days after being released), the community is already playing at "pro" level
One solution to both this (and the cheating problem) is smaller communities, preferably of people who already know each other. If I'm playing against friends, the odds of one of them being someone who's totally obsessed with the game and spends 16 hours a day playing it are significantly lower -- someone who does that doesn't have much time for a social life in the first place. In a "global" gamespace, such as battle.net, the people who've devoted disproportionate amounts of their time toward the game are *exactly* the kind of people I'd be more likely to run into, as they spend more time playing in the first place.
Similarly, the friend factor is quite possibly the single greatest anti-cheating technique. It's a lot easier to trust a person not to cheat than it is to try and create a whole trusted client architecture.
And as for spam, I use a dedicated email address for this type of thing anyway,
At work, our domain used to be hosted by a third-party, as we didn't have the in-house know how to do it ourselves. On the WHOIS information, one of the three contacts was someone at our company, while the other two contact points were people at that third-party that did the hosting. The e-mail address listed for the guy at our company was his first name @ our domain.com. However, when the people doing our hosting actually set up e-mail accounts, he went with his first initial followed by his last name. Furthermore, when we took control of the domain ourself (about 5 months ago), he vanished from the WHOIS information completely.
This address that is not, was not, and will not be valid (except for a few days in the transition where I had set up the mail server to forward any unknown addresses to me; Postfix's luser_relay option for the curious). Scanning the mail logs for the past 4.5 weeks indicates 64 attempts to send mail to the address. For an address that, aside from a WHOIS record, was *never* used.
NannyMUD used to have a six-dimensional maze in a Discworld-themed area done by Profezzorn. The maze was set in a 2x2x2x2x2x2 "cube" where the possible directions of travel were north/south, east/west, up/down, meta-north/meta-south, meta-east/meta-west, and meta-up/meta-down. The "goal" of the maze was to locate the one room out of the 64 that was not accessible and then use a one-shot device for destroying the wall. Conceptually, the way I envisioned the maze was as 8 separate 2x2x2 cubes. Each time I moved in a meta direction, it was as if I teleported to a different cube, while retaining my same spatial coordinate. I also named each cube using an ordered triple of its meta-coordinate. So the initial cube was (0,0,0). If I went 'meta-up', I was in the cube identified as (0,0,1), and so forth.
Do we have to understand it, first? It seems like if we could cheat a bit, and just model a mouse brain inside a physics simulation, we'd have a computer engaging in perception-like tasks. The obvious drawback to this is that it wouldn't be capable of doing anything a mouse couldn't do (and would lead to a flurry of/. posts along the lines of "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things! They could run through mazes and find cheese! The possibilities are limitless!"). However, by modelling a mouse brain, scientists would be able to better "fiddle" with it and understand it, possibly leading to a more practical understanding of perception.
And to get further off on a tangent (but hopefully remaining within the realm of a worthwhile discussion), we suddenly open up a whole can of worms with regard to creating a machine-based consciousness. In my own opinion (and this is just opinion here), a hypothetically powerful/complete enough simulation of a human brain approaches consciousness. I'm of the opinion that an actual living, breathing human is just such a simulation via chemical means. I'm a little afraid of the ethical consequences when we gain the ability to create neural networks with complexity rivaling that of our own brains; one could argue that it's of even greater ethical concern than human cloning. A human clone, at least, has the benefit of being inarguably human (barring something really weird like a gorilla/human hybrid), and would thus be protected by normal laws.
I don't want reality in my games. That is what I am escaping from.
I agree with you to a degree; reality is boring. Imagine a fighting game that, if your character took too much damage during a fight, required you to "play" through 2 months of game time recuperating in a hospital. More realistic, but less fun. Graphical realism, on the other hand, is something that generally doesn't alter the gameplay/fun factor (with exception of excessive polygon counts slowing down the rendering engine). Compare and contrast playing something like Quake 2 with and without a 3D accelerator; even if you "rigged" the fps count to balance things out a bit, there's just no getting around the more aesthetically pleasing visuals from the more "realistic" rendering.
As long as game designers don't go overboard ("If you do too many kicks, it causes a realistic physical simulation of a tear in your pants, which then drop to your ankles and make you fall flat on your face."), i don't think it'll be a problem.
Err, reading Slashdot is an efficient means through which I can stay current on various developments within the computing industry, thus allowing me to more effectively do my job. At least that's the rationalization that I'm sticking with.
Ebay, for example, puts no restrictions on what you sell or buy.
Err, not quite. Here's a list of what's restricted from sale on ebay. Among the things that you aren't allowed to sell are alcohol (due to heavy regulation/potential of sale to minors), controlled substances (for obvious reasons), tobacco (same reason as alcohol), human parts and remains (with an exception for snippets of hair in a locket and educational skeletons), and live animals (presumably due to all the complications). In general, it seems like ebay erred heavily on the side of covering their own asses (which probably helped their common carrier status granted in the ruling).
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with you on the issue that hacking certainly doesn't have to be practical, I suspect that there's at least one practical application of this one: making games.
We've already got some games being developed for Linux, such as the previously slashdotted Tux Racer. It wouldn't be that much more a leap, once Linux-on-Dreamcast matures, to create a Dreamcast port of Tux Racer.
Had you bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that it spent several paragraphs explaining that the FBI only had a search warrant. Furthermore, it explains that a traditional wiretap order requires a higher degree of approval (both the attorney general and the court) than a search warrant. In short, they bugged his computer when they would've been overstepping their legal authority to bug his phone.
I suspect you're wrong. For values of "suspect" approaching "pretty fucking certain". All this was hashed out when my.mp3.com's BeamIt protocol first came out. It asks for different sections of the CD. Hell, it was even covered by Slashdot.
One possibility for the legal problems would be to cook up a standard for automatically providing permission for other people to cache a site, similar to how a robots.txt works for spidering. The iffy part would be figuring out what the default behavior would be in the absence of a 'cache.txt'.
Even nicer would be a distributed group of authoritative servers where cached copies could register themselves. Those servers could also serve as authorities to provide hashes of the mirrored files, allowing clients to automagically verify that a given cached copy is legit.
Although I suppose to a degree, such a project would be reinventing freenet. On the other hand, it'd be simpler to implement since you wouldn't be worrying about anonymity issues, as much.
Actually, some states do use a system to proportionally decide who gets the electoral votes. However, the US Constitution leaves the task of choosing how electors are picked up to each state. As far as changing it goes, it's one of those easier said than done issues. Besides, I'm sure some states like having the winner-take-all system, in order to receive more political attention in the case of a close race.
There are two problems with that statement:
1. Earlier, the Democrats were expected to lose the popular vote, but win on the electoral college.
2. The electoral college serves to normalize the power distribution. With a straight popular vote, smaller states would get glossed over, with presidential candidates focusing on the population centers. What the electoral college does is guarantees that those smaller states have a voice. The bigger states still wind up with more electoral votes, but the margin between them is reduced.
The short answer is we're talking about Yahoo here.
The slightly longer answer is that we're talking about a site that, when you select a secure login for e-mail, switches to SSL just long enough to give you the page where you enter your user-id and password, only to immediatly redirect you back to regular, unencrypted pages. I wouldn't trust these people to protect a piece of pocket lint.
What if the document cracking tool did some superficial checks in order to determine that someone was the rightful copyright holder of the document in question? For example, a program for cracking Excel passwords might verify that the copy of Excel used to create the document is the same as the copy of Excel installed on the computer, by checking the GUID. As geeks, we'd consider such a protection scheme as lauaghable at best -- right up there with having someone type in "I am not a criminal. Honest." The DMCA, on the other hand, places a great deal of importance on even the most superficial protection schemes.
Completely failed to even admit that other linux distributions exist.
From the interview:
The fact that we don't care about problem X or Y creates opportunities for other distributions.
I pity the fool who lacks basic reading comprehension.
Public Service Announcement: Log entries are usually recorded using your local time, so you should always include a mention of your timezone when mailing the ISP your logfiles.
As for dshield.org, according to this, their internal format doesn't bother with the time of the incident; only the date. This, unfortunately, means that dshield is pretty impotent when it comes to dealing with dynamic IPs. If I remember, I'll try getting in touch with the guy who's running it after the Slashdot tide dies down. If run properly, I could see this easily becoming the anti-script kiddie equivilant to SpamCop.
First, culture encompasses more than technology. Throughout the history of man, the single biggest consequence of technology has been to allow us to spend less time gathering food, shivering in a dark cave, and being sick so that we could instead spend more time writing stories, singing songs, and occasionally even just twiddling our thumbs. Just because humans no longer had to worry about working on technology doesn't mean there aren't many other fields of interest to explore.
Second, who says the machines have to inherit the Earth? Being non-organic in nature, there's nothing to stop them from attempting to colonize, say, Mars. Furthermore, provided they've got all these "Gee whiz!" technological advances (which is, of course, the entire premise behind this scenario), they should be more than capable of dealing with the all the new and interesting challenges required to colonize another planet.
Let me preface my comments with the obligatory invocation of IANAL.
Are you referring to accessing your own documents by fiddling only with your document files or by attempting to crack the word processor so you can view your documents?
In the first case, while it's an intersting example, doesn't seem to be covered by the DMCA. More specifically:
Since you're the copyright owner of the document, unless you're totally wigged out on cough syrup, I can't imagine you not giving yourself permission.
As for the second case, cracking the word processor to view your own documents, I think this would be somewhat analogous to stealing gas for your car. You can make the argument that your car is your property, but that it can't doing anything without the gas. However, I do admit that that analogy suffers from the possible flaw of trying to equate real property and intellectual property. Besides, virtually all word processors have options within them to save documents in non-proprietary formats. Admittedly, this can result in less-than-ideal formatting information, but in an ideal world it's the content that's much more valuable than the presentation.
While I like Linux as much as the next guy, a commercial Linux-only game doesn't make good business sense and an open source one will most likely get ported by someone else if it's that fantastically popular (and, of course, it's a moot point if the game is unpopular -- you don't see people lining up aroudn the corner to play /usr/games/mille).
And there are a number of open-source games, some of which have been mentioned on Slashdot.
One interesting project that hasn't is Star Control: Timewarp. Unfortunately, the current development is DOS-centric and there are some brain-dead coding practices, but I did manage to get it up and running on my Linux box with some fiddling.
On the second point (data wasn't very formatted), I'd argue that while documents were plain ASCII, the meta-data/navigation had much better formatting than equivilant web navigation. For awhile, I hated using lynx over gopher, as with lynx the navigation choices could be scattered throughout paragraphs of arbitrary text. With gopher, on the other hannd, it was always a simple menu that could be navigated by entering the number of your choice.
Overall, though, I agree with you that there's not a compelling need to bring back gopher back to the mainstream. What I would like to see, however, is a the addition of a gopher-like menuing structure into the native capabilities of HTML (i.e. something a little more powerful than just a frame with a bunch of anchor tags).
This reminded me of my personal experience with running Hurd. I spent a considerable amount of time downloading the 0.2 distribution over a slow modem. When I'd finally gotten it all, I untarred it on my Linux box, and spent some more time wrestling with GRUB to get the system up. When everything was said and done, I was rewarded with a bash prompt and a bunch of GNU utilities. It was kind of anticlimactic -- I figured I could've gotten the same effect by most of the packages on my Linux box.
But that being said, I think there is some merit in the Hurd project. It's just that it's nowhere close to the point where it can start sucking up marketshare for any reasons other than "I'm working on Hurd" or "I was really curious, bored, and/or drunk." Furthermore, it's entirely possible that it may never become more than a novelty.
Just to play devil's advocate here, the Polish tax official obviously undervalued the software. No, I'm not referring to the software quality, but rather the software licensing: A copy of Linux, assuming all other things being equal, would be equivilant to the cost of a site license for Windows or possibly even a $10,000 MSDN subscription.
But to drift back to reality a bit, it seems the tax could argued down a bit by pointing the officials at RedHat's $30 RH7 package. There's enough of a price there that you might be able to convince them that that's what the retail value of the software is -- if all else fails, you can point out that it comes in a spiffy cardboard box like most commercial software.
Sounds like binfmt_misc to me. From /usr/src/linux-2.2.14/Documentation/Configure.help :
Kernel support for MISC binaries
CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC
If you say Y here, it will be possible to plug wrapper-driven binary formats into the kernel. You will like this especially when you use programs that need an interpreter to run like Java, Python or Emacs-Lisp. It's also useful if you often run DOS executables under the Linux DOS emulator DOSEMU (read the DOSEMU-HOWTO, available in ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO). Once you have registered such a binary class with the kernel, you can start one of those programs simply by typing in its name at a shell prompt; Linux will automatically feed it to the correct interpreter.
It gets worse. I got some NSI spam within the past week or so offering a discount to people who register the corresponding .net and .org to go along with their .com.
One solution to both this (and the cheating problem) is smaller communities, preferably of people who already know each other. If I'm playing against friends, the odds of one of them being someone who's totally obsessed with the game and spends 16 hours a day playing it are significantly lower -- someone who does that doesn't have much time for a social life in the first place. In a "global" gamespace, such as battle.net, the people who've devoted disproportionate amounts of their time toward the game are *exactly* the kind of people I'd be more likely to run into, as they spend more time playing in the first place.
Similarly, the friend factor is quite possibly the single greatest anti-cheating technique. It's a lot easier to trust a person not to cheat than it is to try and create a whole trusted client architecture.
At work, our domain used to be hosted by a third-party, as we didn't have the in-house know how to do it ourselves. On the WHOIS information, one of the three contacts was someone at our company, while the other two contact points were people at that third-party that did the hosting. The e-mail address listed for the guy at our company was his first name @ our domain.com. However, when the people doing our hosting actually set up e-mail accounts, he went with his first initial followed by his last name. Furthermore, when we took control of the domain ourself (about 5 months ago), he vanished from the WHOIS information completely.
This address that is not, was not, and will not be valid (except for a few days in the transition where I had set up the mail server to forward any unknown addresses to me; Postfix's luser_relay option for the curious). Scanning the mail logs for the past 4.5 weeks indicates 64 attempts to send mail to the address. For an address that, aside from a WHOIS record, was *never* used.
NannyMUD used to have a six-dimensional maze in a Discworld-themed area done by Profezzorn. The maze was set in a 2x2x2x2x2x2 "cube" where the possible directions of travel were north/south, east/west, up/down, meta-north/meta-south, meta-east/meta-west, and meta-up/meta-down. The "goal" of the maze was to locate the one room out of the 64 that was not accessible and then use a one-shot device for destroying the wall. Conceptually, the way I envisioned the maze was as 8 separate 2x2x2 cubes. Each time I moved in a meta direction, it was as if I teleported to a different cube, while retaining my same spatial coordinate. I also named each cube using an ordered triple of its meta-coordinate. So the initial cube was (0,0,0). If I went 'meta-up', I was in the cube identified as (0,0,1), and so forth.
Do we have to understand it, first? It seems like if we could cheat a bit, and just model a mouse brain inside a physics simulation, we'd have a computer engaging in perception-like tasks. The obvious drawback to this is that it wouldn't be capable of doing anything a mouse couldn't do (and would lead to a flurry of /. posts along the lines of "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things! They could run through mazes and find cheese! The possibilities are limitless!"). However, by modelling a mouse brain, scientists would be able to better "fiddle" with it and understand it, possibly leading to a more practical understanding of perception.
And to get further off on a tangent (but hopefully remaining within the realm of a worthwhile discussion), we suddenly open up a whole can of worms with regard to creating a machine-based consciousness. In my own opinion (and this is just opinion here), a hypothetically powerful/complete enough simulation of a human brain approaches consciousness. I'm of the opinion that an actual living, breathing human is just such a simulation via chemical means. I'm a little afraid of the ethical consequences when we gain the ability to create neural networks with complexity rivaling that of our own brains; one could argue that it's of even greater ethical concern than human cloning. A human clone, at least, has the benefit of being inarguably human (barring something really weird like a gorilla/human hybrid), and would thus be protected by normal laws.
I agree with you to a degree; reality is boring. Imagine a fighting game that, if your character took too much damage during a fight, required you to "play" through 2 months of game time recuperating in a hospital. More realistic, but less fun. Graphical realism, on the other hand, is something that generally doesn't alter the gameplay/fun factor (with exception of excessive polygon counts slowing down the rendering engine). Compare and contrast playing something like Quake 2 with and without a 3D accelerator; even if you "rigged" the fps count to balance things out a bit, there's just no getting around the more aesthetically pleasing visuals from the more "realistic" rendering.
As long as game designers don't go overboard ("If you do too many kicks, it causes a realistic physical simulation of a tear in your pants, which then drop to your ankles and make you fall flat on your face."), i don't think it'll be a problem.
Err, reading Slashdot is an efficient means through which I can stay current on various developments within the computing industry, thus allowing me to more effectively do my job. At least that's the rationalization that I'm sticking with.
Err, not quite. Here's a list of what's restricted from sale on ebay. Among the things that you aren't allowed to sell are alcohol (due to heavy regulation/potential of sale to minors), controlled substances (for obvious reasons), tobacco (same reason as alcohol), human parts and remains (with an exception for snippets of hair in a locket and educational skeletons), and live animals (presumably due to all the complications). In general, it seems like ebay erred heavily on the side of covering their own asses (which probably helped their common carrier status granted in the ruling).