I've not found any other stealth game that so closely captures the atmosphere of the Thief series. Very captivating setting, and nicely done stealth mechanics.
Not only state-created monopolies. There are also natural monopolies - situations like utilities, where once one company enters a market it becomes impossible for another to do so profitably. This is part of why many areas have exactly one internet service provider: Whoever makes the first investment to to dig up roads and lay cables gets 100% of the customers, and no other ISP is going to invest in their own cables if they would only have to compete with an entrenched interest.
That might just be because the American hacker-spooks are good enough to not get caught. Or it might be because the Chinese retain tighter control of information, so any breaches on their side are not made known to the public - they choose to keep such things secret rather than endure public humiliation of their government.
If the second-biggest ISP in the UK can't manage to block the biggest and most publicly-known pirate site in the world, what hope is there of this working?
Maybe they can torrent a copy of whatever China uses. It still won't work, but it's the best there is.
That works for targeted monitoring with MITM attacks. Try that on a population scale, and it will be easy to detect. Injecting MITM attacks is also more expensive and riskier than passive monitoring - it can be detected.
There's no contradiction. The government is only opposed to encryption that stops them monitoring people. For example, they really don't mind if facebook uses https, because they have several legal avenues* at their disposal to obtain private messages straight from Facebook. Encrypted government sites is no problem for the same reason. They would object to people using https to access sites hosted outside the US, or to end-to-end encryption software like Retroshare or OTR.
*Which run a wide spectrum of legitimacy, from the conventional directed warrant to super-secret 'give us everything and we were never here' national security letters.
It's also to protect you from snooping by the KGB. And the Chinese, and North Korea, and all the countries in Europe that insist they don't spy on their allies but almost certainly do.
Everybody spies. Governments, businesses, individuals, loosely-affiliated hacktivist organisations and criminal gangs. They all want that precious information.
Via plugging the cassette motor relay of one into the joystick port of the other, and writing a simple serial protocol in basic. A few bps. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
I couldn't - I was still too young to fully understand syncronisation issues. It would work for a while.
I still remember the key command: OUT, port 720 decimal. That's the way to toggle the cassette motor relay.
It should be reversible. Sci-fi pinups on the outside. If anyone objects, flip it around to expose even more explicit images and a caption: 'I landed a robot on a comet, I can wear whatever I want.'
Copyright, in its current form, is unenforcable. Look how long the Bay has been in operation - and ten thouand lesser services. An unenforcable law is a bad law, and must be either abolished or revised into a more practical form.
The problem with high-mass particles is they lose energy when accelerating - and in the physics sense, which includes changing direction, as when traveling around a circular path. Linear accelerators, I assume, do not have such a problem: They don't spin their particles in circular paths. That's my guess anyway, I'm not a physicist.
I remember it ran RISC OS. Looking at pictures of Acorn machines, th A3010 looks like the one I remember - I may be wrong, but not by far. The label on top I remember as quite distinctive.
I found it very useful for media convertions: My IBM had a 2.88MB floppy drive, my other PCs had conventional 1.44MB, and my Atati used some weird Atari thing. The Acorn machine was able to read all of them and so, when not being used for Cannon Fodder (Which I never did manage to finish), it served to exchange data between them.
I remember that program - I had it many many many years ago, on an Acorn for which I can't even recall the model*. I also recall that the PC emulator was painfully, unusably slow - even just entering commands you could see the delay between keypress and character.
* You could run Cannon Fodder on it, and that is what it mostly got used for.
You've not seen enough Made in China electronics. The dirt-cheap approach is to whack a load of LEDs in series with an inductor that acts as a current limiter.
MIDI has a few surprising applications. Fireworks, for example. Running a firework show is really a matter of setting of lots of igniters with precise timing over the course of an event - and that's exactly the sort of thing MIDI does well. As far as software is concerned, it's just a strange type of music where every note gets played only once.
You could go smaller. P-orbitals are largely independant: You might be able to get one atom to be part of three diodes at once, with the individual orbitals becoming components. It'd be silly-unstable though, you'd have to keep the thing on helium cooling and try not to whisper too loudly nearby.
One nice thing about DC-DC converters: Switch modes have a really wide input voltage range.9V-30V is not uncommon. The higher the voltage, the less the current they will need.
With modifications. A lot of things like those motors and LED lighting depends upon inductive current limiting. Give them DC at what seems the right voltage and they'll probably catch fire.
Designing better inverters is easy. Giving manufacturers a reason to use them is another matter. Very few customers are going to look up the efficiency of their appliance power supply before purchase, so why waste dollars on it?
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I've not found any other stealth game that so closely captures the atmosphere of the Thief series. Very captivating setting, and nicely done stealth mechanics.
Not only state-created monopolies. There are also natural monopolies - situations like utilities, where once one company enters a market it becomes impossible for another to do so profitably. This is part of why many areas have exactly one internet service provider: Whoever makes the first investment to to dig up roads and lay cables gets 100% of the customers, and no other ISP is going to invest in their own cables if they would only have to compete with an entrenched interest.
That might just be because the American hacker-spooks are good enough to not get caught. Or it might be because the Chinese retain tighter control of information, so any breaches on their side are not made known to the public - they choose to keep such things secret rather than endure public humiliation of their government.
If the second-biggest ISP in the UK can't manage to block the biggest and most publicly-known pirate site in the world, what hope is there of this working?
Maybe they can torrent a copy of whatever China uses. It still won't work, but it's the best there is.
That works for targeted monitoring with MITM attacks. Try that on a population scale, and it will be easy to detect. Injecting MITM attacks is also more expensive and riskier than passive monitoring - it can be detected.
It's also the name of a pornography studio.
There's no contradiction. The government is only opposed to encryption that stops them monitoring people. For example, they really don't mind if facebook uses https, because they have several legal avenues* at their disposal to obtain private messages straight from Facebook. Encrypted government sites is no problem for the same reason. They would object to people using https to access sites hosted outside the US, or to end-to-end encryption software like Retroshare or OTR.
*Which run a wide spectrum of legitimacy, from the conventional directed warrant to super-secret 'give us everything and we were never here' national security letters.
It's also to protect you from snooping by the KGB. And the Chinese, and North Korea, and all the countries in Europe that insist they don't spy on their allies but almost certainly do.
Everybody spies. Governments, businesses, individuals, loosely-affiliated hacktivist organisations and criminal gangs. They all want that precious information.
There are plenty of people I wouldn't trust with a gun.
Via plugging the cassette motor relay of one into the joystick port of the other, and writing a simple serial protocol in basic. A few bps. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
I couldn't - I was still too young to fully understand syncronisation issues. It would work for a while.
I still remember the key command: OUT, port 720 decimal. That's the way to toggle the cassette motor relay.
It should be reversible. Sci-fi pinups on the outside. If anyone objects, flip it around to expose even more explicit images and a caption: 'I landed a robot on a comet, I can wear whatever I want.'
Copyright, in its current form, is unenforcable. Look how long the Bay has been in operation - and ten thouand lesser services. An unenforcable law is a bad law, and must be either abolished or revised into a more practical form.
The problem with high-mass particles is they lose energy when accelerating - and in the physics sense, which includes changing direction, as when traveling around a circular path. Linear accelerators, I assume, do not have such a problem: They don't spin their particles in circular paths. That's my guess anyway, I'm not a physicist.
I remember it ran RISC OS. Looking at pictures of Acorn machines, th A3010 looks like the one I remember - I may be wrong, but not by far. The label on top I remember as quite distinctive.
I found it very useful for media convertions: My IBM had a 2.88MB floppy drive, my other PCs had conventional 1.44MB, and my Atati used some weird Atari thing. The Acorn machine was able to read all of them and so, when not being used for Cannon Fodder (Which I never did manage to finish), it served to exchange data between them.
I remember that program - I had it many many many years ago, on an Acorn for which I can't even recall the model*. I also recall that the PC emulator was painfully, unusably slow - even just entering commands you could see the delay between keypress and character.
* You could run Cannon Fodder on it, and that is what it mostly got used for.
You've not seen enough Made in China electronics. The dirt-cheap approach is to whack a load of LEDs in series with an inductor that acts as a current limiter.
It'd be nice if their latest ridiculously-thin laptop had more than two ports on it, and one of them for headphones.
You get one port, and it's used for charging as well as USB. Want to plug in a USB device? You've got as long as the batteries last.
They succeeded in making an ultra-super-thin laptop - but at the cost of expecting people to fit a USB3 hub in their bag as well.
MIDI has a few surprising applications. Fireworks, for example. Running a firework show is really a matter of setting of lots of igniters with precise timing over the course of an event - and that's exactly the sort of thing MIDI does well. As far as software is concerned, it's just a strange type of music where every note gets played only once.
Inefficient, high-maintenance. Though compact DC motor-generator units were made for one niche application: Generating high voltages for car radios.
You could go smaller. P-orbitals are largely independant: You might be able to get one atom to be part of three diodes at once, with the individual orbitals becoming components. It'd be silly-unstable though, you'd have to keep the thing on helium cooling and try not to whisper too loudly nearby.
One nice thing about DC-DC converters: Switch modes have a really wide input voltage range.9V-30V is not uncommon. The higher the voltage, the less the current they will need.
Efficiency? Yes, especially if you're running of batteries or solar.
There are costs though. Low voltage means more current, which means lots of expensive copper.
With modifications. A lot of things like those motors and LED lighting depends upon inductive current limiting. Give them DC at what seems the right voltage and they'll probably catch fire.
Batteries are intrinsically DC. It's fundamental to how they work.
Designing better inverters is easy. Giving manufacturers a reason to use them is another matter. Very few customers are going to look up the efficiency of their appliance power supply before purchase, so why waste dollars on it?