What about the damn ringtones? It's the major annoyance, more than any loud guy.
It depends on the user and the ringtone. I've been stuck listening to people talking into their cellphone at what is more than conversational volume twenty feet away, and I've got one person at work whose cellphone ringtone is a loud "BLAH BLAH-BLAH BLAH BLAH!", distracting from out my office door and thirty feet down the hall, much less from ten feet away.
I have to admit that I got a chuckle every time I entered Foreas Base (IIRC) and listened to the M*A*S*H-like PA announcements. And the skill tree and Logos components that need to be acquired in particular combinations for the various abilities are an interesting goad to get players to go out and explore the world, rather than just camp a particular resource. However, since everyone has access to the same Logos abilities within the limits of their specializations, with armor and weapon skills tied to the specializations, and only the basic models of each weapon and armor available from the quartermasters, with better gear acquired from drops or crafted, it makes Tabula Rasa just another loot-based game, although the variability with which the different mobs drop items that are used in recipes, it will limit the type of spawn camping that I read about in WoW. And the constant minor upkeep costs of keeping your gear repaired on top of having to buy (or craft, but I never got enough recipes for ammo to be able to craft all the ammo I went through) all your ammunition.
And while being able to make 'paint' to color your outfit, all armor of a given type has the same appearance and paints the same parts of it, so despite the individual color choices, everyone still looks pretty much the same in the same armor, and having to buy the components and craft the 'paint' can leave you with the option of wearing the better leg armor that you just got in a drop, and have it be a generic color because you're out of the color your old leg armor was painted, or keep wearing the old armor until you get a recipe to make the color you want and either get drops for the right pigments or buy them from a quartermaster. I guess I'm just spoiled by the variation and flexibility of the City of Heroes/Villains character designer,
Having played in the beta and, for the moment, still wavering on whether I want to buy the full game, one of the things that grinds constantly at immersion is the fact that you have to buy all your ammunition. The premise of the game is that Earth has been overrun by aliens, and you are one of the few people chosen to be taken to this new world, where you are drafted to be a soldier fighting the aliens to establish a new home for humanity... but even though you're a soldier, you're not issued ammunition; you have to buy it. Now, I could understand having to buy the better grades of ammunition if you use upgraded or specialized weapons, but paying for your basic load made me feel like a mercenary, not a soldier.
However, since the historical record shows that the worst part of the Little Ice Age occurred during the Maunder Minimum, when the sunspot level was also atypically low for a protracted period, then if the current conditions on the Sun continue for long enough, it should provide evidence that would either confirm or debunk the premise that global warming is a function of fluctuations in solar activity. Unfortunately, as the controversy has assumed the status of a holy war, regardless of what happens, both sides will accuse the other of misinterpreting the data and persist in their claims.
The issue is also not parallel because of the difference in the way that health care is applied. Devices like the OnStar engine-kill feature and LoJack are always going to be of limited benefit to automobile insurers, because it doesn't make a bit of difference how effective they are in keeping the thieves from driving the stolen vehicle if they've already stripped it to pieces and shopped them to a dozen different parts resellers. With health insurance, you're always going to have your body right there generating health-care costs. So while 'recovery assistance' devices like this may get you discounts from your insurer, without something like an RFID beacon that your car has to locate within the vehicle before it will start or continue running, there won't be any huge benefit from a disablement device -- and even then, the security is only as good as how difficult it is to remove or patch around.
It's not that the placement of the recording stations in areas that have become artificially warmer makes the data garbage, but that the global warming proponents apply a 'correction' to the temperature data, then show that, even with the correction, the average temperature is still increasing -- but have no rigorous tests to show that the magnitude of the correction they're applying is correct. What the critics of their claims are saying is "Yes, the average temperature at sensor X has risen five degrees in the last ten years, but your statement that the change from being in a cornfield to being in the backyard of one unit in a 500-home suburban tract development is 'only going to cause a 3-degree temperature increase', which means that the actual temperature change is a 2-degree rise in ten years, fails to present the reasoning behind declaring the heat island effect to require a 3-degree correction in this case, and is therefore suspect." Consider that, with the scale of the numbers cited in the global warming controversy, a shift of a quarter degree in the adjustment is enough to either wipe out or double the amount of warming that is occurring; it stands therefore that the rigor with which the heat island correction is determined is crucial to establishing the validity of the adjusted data.
I don't think that they did an intentionally crappy job of the backport; I suspect that it was more of a "We need it to run under DX9, but this is your deadline for making it happen" deal, where the programmers weren't given the time to write software versions of the effects that DX10 does directly but DX9 doesn't do as readily.
It's the chase for the almighty bottom line again. Climate researchers generate very little, if any, income from their research, so their operating costs and salaries have to be paid from research grants and contracts. The rural temperature-recording stations are being encroached on by suburban and urban development, bringing them into urban heat islands, so you pull a 'correction figure' out of your ass (nobody's actually done research to determine whether the correction factor that climate researchers are applying for the heat island effect is correct) that just happens to leave a measurable net temperature gain, and you can flog 'human activities are driving global warming' to whip up panic, which encourages people and organizations to issue grants and contracts to the climate researchers to study the effects humans are having on environmental temperatures and what can be done to reverse or halt it. Similarly, they've flogged the increase in the ozone hole for years now, again suggesting that we're causing the hole to expand... but now that it shrinks, they have to downplay the event so that the public -- a notoriously fickle audience -- won't just say "The ozone hole is shrinking; that problem is over" and start ignoring them, causing the research money to dry up; they have to discount the recent evidence that contradicts all their carefully-crafted theories in order to keep paranoia high and money coming in.
But if you made the radiation-based power source an integral part of a laptop version of this case mod, surely there'd be enough cool coming off the laptop itself to eliminate any problems with radiation leakage...
The problem with Apple bricking iPhones is that there is an explicitly-defined right -- 37 CFR Part 201, Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies" states that one of the exempted classes of copyrighted works is "Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network." As has been brought up in previous comments about the unlocking of iPhones, the law explicitly permits individual owners to circumvent the lock-in to AT&T in order to enable them to use it with another cellphone service, but does not establish an explicit right for individuals to produce and market the process to do so. And therein lies the distinction; owners of bricked iPhones, in my opinion (IANAL), have a case against Apple for taking punitive action against them for exercising their rights as set forth in 37 CFR 201; Apple will have to settle for acting against the people who are selling or otherwise distributing the 'crack'.
Digging closer, however, the articles point to magnetic materials in otoliths, located in the birds' ears; the research referenced in the article is on how the input from the magnetic sensors is processed, not where the sensor is -- how the brain is wired to receive input from them, not merely their existence.
I remember seeing a documentary that mentioned this at least 10 years ago.
Yes, indeed. A Magnetite Null Detector as the Migrating Bird's Compass, D. T. Edmonds, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 249, No. 1324 (Jul. 22, 1992), pp. 27-31
I agree; you'd do better buying one of the Fine Molds plastic model kits of the Millennium Falcon (example listing on the Hobby Link Japan website), which runs around $170 and has much better fidelity to the original.
The original Halo was released for the PC, and Halo 2 was also released for the PC, albeit much later than the Xbox release and as yet another of Microsoft's "See? If you don't upgrade to Vista, you'll never be able to do this" incentives to buck up less-than-stellar sales of its latest grab for control of your desktop.
Where are they getting this '20%' statistic from, anyway? If you're not getting it in the first place, you're not 'giving up' anything. Of course, that depends on how broadly you define 'sex', too, and whether the definition requires a partner.
ISBNs are assigned in blocks to publisher's by a country's ISBN agency; the ISBN itself does not 'belong' to the publisher, it belongs to the International Standard Book Number Agency, although the publisher chooses which book to designate by each ISBN in the block it has been assigned. Publishers are not required to assign ISBNs to books; however, many retailers will decline to stock books that do not have an ISBN.
Given the way people tend to zoom around on recreational vehicles like ATVs and the like, if a consumer product like that were available, I'd expect to see it become more of a dark, smokey blotch on the ground after users showboat with it and lose control. (e.g., the last words of a redneck pilot: "Hey, y'all, watch this!")
Thank you for digging that up; I knew I'd seen video of a similar device a while back, but couldn't remember where I'd seen it.
From the picture in TFA, though, I remember seeing a diagram of an almost identical strap-on wing about two years ago (which equals eternity in Net time) on one of the "what's happening in defense research" websites; apparently they finally got enough of the bugs out of the design to be putting people up in the air with them. The original plans for the device, though, were to have it capable of takeoff, which neither the device in TFA nor Yves Rossy's wing will do; apparently engine design hasn't gotten the power-to-weight ratio necessary to be able to make the Rocketeer.
WWIIOL has a 'grognard' community associated with it -- people who began playing SVGA Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, then the various subsequent incarnations of Air Warrior and its 'replacements' (Confirmed Kill, Aces High, etc.); the replacements were created by people who were unhappy with the slow improvement of Air Warrior and went off to make their own WWII online simulation (there were several iterations of "If you're not happy with how things are progressing, why don't you make your own sim?" "Okay, I will!"). What makes the online-simulation games more stable is the time investment; because these are simulations and not just games, your progress depends on the skill you acquire -- in Aces High and WWIIOL, you can't just do the "I'm level 60, you're level 1" drive-by ganking; unless you can fly better than your opponent, you're not going to be able to shoot them down; each plane has its own handling characteristics, and learning your plane is as important as learning the tactics of air combat. And that investment of time doesn't transfer except to a similar online simulation, so you won't often see a dedicated WWIIOL player deciding to switch to WoW, for example. It's a different mindset in how the players view the game; the increase in eye candy has been a relatively recent development, with the primary focus being on the modeling (i.e., 'how well does this simulation replicate the flight characteristics of a real A6M5 Zero compared to that simulation?') with eye-candy sacrificed to keep the modeling accurate and frame rates up, while WoW could abstract physics and real-time performance to make the game more attractive.
Then, too, the monetary investment in an online simulation like WWIIOL can quickly grow to where a player can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on peripherals -- several hundred dollars on a Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar stick/throttle system and rudder pedals, and then go out and buy third-party upgrades -- custom-machined gimbal replacement to eliminate the slop and wear in the joystick, Hall sensors to eliminate spiking potentiometers, strain-gauge sensors to elminate the moving parts of the stick completely -- that can add hundreds more dollars to the cost of their gear. While you see the same expenditures by people who play non-MMO flight simulations, between the hardware and skill investments of online-sim gamers, it creates a largely self-perpetuating population.
As an interesting aside, real-world air-combat skills and online air-combat skills appear to transfer back and forth to some degree; the instructor-pilots at places like Air Combat USA, which offer people the chance to go up and 'dogfight' for real, have observed that people with extensive online air-combat sim experience do better than other non-pilots (already having learned the 'lose the sight, lose the fight' adage), and some years ago one of the online air-combat sims had an event where a number of members of the Tuskegee Airmen were brought into the game as a group (at an internet-gaming site, IIRC) and proceeded to clean almost everyone's clock, proving that doing it for real beats doing it online -- but also that the non-fatality of mistakes online makes it a lot easier to learn from them; some of the long-term sim players were able to take on the Airmen on an even basis.
Remembering the flap over the WGA meltdown Microsoft had recently, I expect that it's merely a matter of time before legitimate customers start getting "reduced functionality", and a ticking time bomb for Microsoft's bottom line when a major corporate system gets hit. I wouldn't be surprised to see a fast scramble to make sure critical systems either aren't on Vista in the first place, or are moved off of them post-haste.
... keyboards drawn on the screen under each input field, with Javascript to tie clicks by the mouse pointer on the keys in that keyboard image so the characters are inserted into the appropriate field.
At least one government website has taken to doing this for password entry, taking the additional step of randomizing arrangement of characters on the 'keys' each time the page loads to prevent someone from sniffing the key selection. Since only the server knows which arrangement of keys is in use, knowing which buttons the user clicked on doesn't tell you anything about the password.
From Spider Robinson, author of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon stories:
When you swim in da sea / an' an eel bites you knee, / dat's a moray. A New Zealander man / with a permanent tan, / that's a Maori. When two patterns combine, / in a way serpentine, / that's a moiré. He tells jokes, he's a ham, / his last name's Amsterdam, / that's a Morey. If your vitamins be / mostly C, D, and E, / take some more A. When a Canadian shows / you his mother, he goes: / "Dat's my mawr, eh?" With the high price of feed, / it's for farmers in need, / that some mow hay. My new ray gun here tries / to put out both your eyes: / It's a Moe-ray.
Eradication by ridicule
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
However, denials of a rumor can work to destroy a myth if they are directed to play into popular preconceptions. For example, back in the 1970s, a rumor spread that McDonald's used worms in the meat for its burgers. The company issued press releases, denying the rumors:
Newsweek: At an Atlanta press conference, McDonald's officials, backed by a regional officer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, denounced the rumors as "completely unfounded and unsubstantiated," and swore that the company's hamburgers contain nothing but beef.
This was not sufficient to quash the rumors; the owner of four McDonald's restaurants in the Atlanta area saw his sales drop by 30%, forcing him to lay off a third of his employees. But it was Ray Kroc, who had bought the chain from the original owners back in 1955, who delivered the most telling rebuttal, which exploited the "profit-hungry corporation" stereotype:
"We couldn't afford to grind worms into our meat. Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers six dollars."
I am reminded of the offhand reference in Robert Heinlein's novel Friday that the California Republic, having determined that citizens with a bachelor's degree earned, on average, 40% more than citizens without such a degree, passed legislation awarding each citizen a bachelor's degree when they reached 18, thereby eliminating this shocking social inequity.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the user and the ringtone. I've been stuck listening to people talking into their cellphone at what is more than conversational volume twenty feet away, and I've got one person at work whose cellphone ringtone is a loud "BLAH BLAH-BLAH BLAH BLAH!", distracting from out my office door and thirty feet down the hall, much less from ten feet away.
I have to admit that I got a chuckle every time I entered Foreas Base (IIRC) and listened to the M*A*S*H-like PA announcements. And the skill tree and Logos components that need to be acquired in particular combinations for the various abilities are an interesting goad to get players to go out and explore the world, rather than just camp a particular resource. However, since everyone has access to the same Logos abilities within the limits of their specializations, with armor and weapon skills tied to the specializations, and only the basic models of each weapon and armor available from the quartermasters, with better gear acquired from drops or crafted, it makes Tabula Rasa just another loot-based game, although the variability with which the different mobs drop items that are used in recipes, it will limit the type of spawn camping that I read about in WoW. And the constant minor upkeep costs of keeping your gear repaired on top of having to buy (or craft, but I never got enough recipes for ammo to be able to craft all the ammo I went through) all your ammunition.
And while being able to make 'paint' to color your outfit, all armor of a given type has the same appearance and paints the same parts of it, so despite the individual color choices, everyone still looks pretty much the same in the same armor, and having to buy the components and craft the 'paint' can leave you with the option of wearing the better leg armor that you just got in a drop, and have it be a generic color because you're out of the color your old leg armor was painted, or keep wearing the old armor until you get a recipe to make the color you want and either get drops for the right pigments or buy them from a quartermaster. I guess I'm just spoiled by the variation and flexibility of the City of Heroes/Villains character designer,
Having played in the beta and, for the moment, still wavering on whether I want to buy the full game, one of the things that grinds constantly at immersion is the fact that you have to buy all your ammunition. The premise of the game is that Earth has been overrun by aliens, and you are one of the few people chosen to be taken to this new world, where you are drafted to be a soldier fighting the aliens to establish a new home for humanity... but even though you're a soldier, you're not issued ammunition; you have to buy it. Now, I could understand having to buy the better grades of ammunition if you use upgraded or specialized weapons, but paying for your basic load made me feel like a mercenary, not a soldier.
However, since the historical record shows that the worst part of the Little Ice Age occurred during the Maunder Minimum, when the sunspot level was also atypically low for a protracted period, then if the current conditions on the Sun continue for long enough, it should provide evidence that would either confirm or debunk the premise that global warming is a function of fluctuations in solar activity. Unfortunately, as the controversy has assumed the status of a holy war, regardless of what happens, both sides will accuse the other of misinterpreting the data and persist in their claims.
The issue is also not parallel because of the difference in the way that health care is applied. Devices like the OnStar engine-kill feature and LoJack are always going to be of limited benefit to automobile insurers, because it doesn't make a bit of difference how effective they are in keeping the thieves from driving the stolen vehicle if they've already stripped it to pieces and shopped them to a dozen different parts resellers. With health insurance, you're always going to have your body right there generating health-care costs. So while 'recovery assistance' devices like this may get you discounts from your insurer, without something like an RFID beacon that your car has to locate within the vehicle before it will start or continue running, there won't be any huge benefit from a disablement device -- and even then, the security is only as good as how difficult it is to remove or patch around.
It's not that the placement of the recording stations in areas that have become artificially warmer makes the data garbage, but that the global warming proponents apply a 'correction' to the temperature data, then show that, even with the correction, the average temperature is still increasing -- but have no rigorous tests to show that the magnitude of the correction they're applying is correct. What the critics of their claims are saying is "Yes, the average temperature at sensor X has risen five degrees in the last ten years, but your statement that the change from being in a cornfield to being in the backyard of one unit in a 500-home suburban tract development is 'only going to cause a 3-degree temperature increase', which means that the actual temperature change is a 2-degree rise in ten years, fails to present the reasoning behind declaring the heat island effect to require a 3-degree correction in this case, and is therefore suspect." Consider that, with the scale of the numbers cited in the global warming controversy, a shift of a quarter degree in the adjustment is enough to either wipe out or double the amount of warming that is occurring; it stands therefore that the rigor with which the heat island correction is determined is crucial to establishing the validity of the adjusted data.
I don't think that they did an intentionally crappy job of the backport; I suspect that it was more of a "We need it to run under DX9, but this is your deadline for making it happen" deal, where the programmers weren't given the time to write software versions of the effects that DX10 does directly but DX9 doesn't do as readily.
It's the chase for the almighty bottom line again. Climate researchers generate very little, if any, income from their research, so their operating costs and salaries have to be paid from research grants and contracts. The rural temperature-recording stations are being encroached on by suburban and urban development, bringing them into urban heat islands, so you pull a 'correction figure' out of your ass (nobody's actually done research to determine whether the correction factor that climate researchers are applying for the heat island effect is correct) that just happens to leave a measurable net temperature gain, and you can flog 'human activities are driving global warming' to whip up panic, which encourages people and organizations to issue grants and contracts to the climate researchers to study the effects humans are having on environmental temperatures and what can be done to reverse or halt it. Similarly, they've flogged the increase in the ozone hole for years now, again suggesting that we're causing the hole to expand... but now that it shrinks, they have to downplay the event so that the public -- a notoriously fickle audience -- won't just say "The ozone hole is shrinking; that problem is over" and start ignoring them, causing the research money to dry up; they have to discount the recent evidence that contradicts all their carefully-crafted theories in order to keep paranoia high and money coming in.
But if you made the radiation-based power source an integral part of a laptop version of this case mod, surely there'd be enough cool coming off the laptop itself to eliminate any problems with radiation leakage...
The problem with Apple bricking iPhones is that there is an explicitly-defined right -- 37 CFR Part 201, Exemption to Prohibition on
Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies" states that one of the exempted classes of copyrighted works is "Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network." As has been brought up in previous comments about the unlocking of iPhones, the law explicitly permits individual owners to circumvent the lock-in to AT&T in order to enable them to use it with another cellphone service, but does not establish an explicit right for individuals to produce and market the process to do so. And therein lies the distinction; owners of bricked iPhones, in my opinion (IANAL), have a case against Apple for taking punitive action against them for exercising their rights as set forth in 37 CFR 201; Apple will have to settle for acting against the people who are selling or otherwise distributing the 'crack'.
Digging closer, however, the articles point to magnetic materials in otoliths, located in the birds' ears; the research referenced in the article is on how the input from the magnetic sensors is processed, not where the sensor is -- how the brain is wired to receive input from them, not merely their existence.
Yes, indeed. A Magnetite Null Detector as the Migrating Bird's Compass , D. T. Edmonds, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 249, No. 1324 (Jul. 22, 1992), pp. 27-31
I agree; you'd do better buying one of the Fine Molds plastic model kits of the Millennium Falcon (example listing on the Hobby Link Japan website), which runs around $170 and has much better fidelity to the original.
The original Halo was released for the PC, and Halo 2 was also released for the PC, albeit much later than the Xbox release and as yet another of Microsoft's "See? If you don't upgrade to Vista, you'll never be able to do this" incentives to buck up less-than-stellar sales of its latest grab for control of your desktop.
Where are they getting this '20%' statistic from, anyway? If you're not getting it in the first place, you're not 'giving up' anything. Of course, that depends on how broadly you define 'sex', too, and whether the definition requires a partner.
ISBNs are assigned in blocks to publisher's by a country's ISBN agency; the ISBN itself does not 'belong' to the publisher, it belongs to the International Standard Book Number Agency, although the publisher chooses which book to designate by each ISBN in the block it has been assigned. Publishers are not required to assign ISBNs to books; however, many retailers will decline to stock books that do not have an ISBN.
Given the way people tend to zoom around on recreational vehicles like ATVs and the like, if a consumer product like that were available, I'd expect to see it become more of a dark, smokey blotch on the ground after users showboat with it and lose control. (e.g., the last words of a redneck pilot: "Hey, y'all, watch this!")
Thank you for digging that up; I knew I'd seen video of a similar device a while back, but couldn't remember where I'd seen it.
From the picture in TFA, though, I remember seeing a diagram of an almost identical strap-on wing about two years ago (which equals eternity in Net time) on one of the "what's happening in defense research" websites; apparently they finally got enough of the bugs out of the design to be putting people up in the air with them. The original plans for the device, though, were to have it capable of takeoff, which neither the device in TFA nor Yves Rossy's wing will do; apparently engine design hasn't gotten the power-to-weight ratio necessary to be able to make the Rocketeer.
WWIIOL has a 'grognard' community associated with it -- people who began playing SVGA Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, then the various subsequent incarnations of Air Warrior and its 'replacements' (Confirmed Kill, Aces High, etc.); the replacements were created by people who were unhappy with the slow improvement of Air Warrior and went off to make their own WWII online simulation (there were several iterations of "If you're not happy with how things are progressing, why don't you make your own sim?" "Okay, I will!"). What makes the online-simulation games more stable is the time investment; because these are simulations and not just games, your progress depends on the skill you acquire -- in Aces High and WWIIOL, you can't just do the "I'm level 60, you're level 1" drive-by ganking; unless you can fly better than your opponent, you're not going to be able to shoot them down; each plane has its own handling characteristics, and learning your plane is as important as learning the tactics of air combat. And that investment of time doesn't transfer except to a similar online simulation, so you won't often see a dedicated WWIIOL player deciding to switch to WoW, for example. It's a different mindset in how the players view the game; the increase in eye candy has been a relatively recent development, with the primary focus being on the modeling (i.e., 'how well does this simulation replicate the flight characteristics of a real A6M5 Zero compared to that simulation?') with eye-candy sacrificed to keep the modeling accurate and frame rates up, while WoW could abstract physics and real-time performance to make the game more attractive.
Then, too, the monetary investment in an online simulation like WWIIOL can quickly grow to where a player can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on peripherals -- several hundred dollars on a Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar stick/throttle system and rudder pedals, and then go out and buy third-party upgrades -- custom-machined gimbal replacement to eliminate the slop and wear in the joystick, Hall sensors to eliminate spiking potentiometers, strain-gauge sensors to elminate the moving parts of the stick completely -- that can add hundreds more dollars to the cost of their gear. While you see the same expenditures by people who play non-MMO flight simulations, between the hardware and skill investments of online-sim gamers, it creates a largely self-perpetuating population.
As an interesting aside, real-world air-combat skills and online air-combat skills appear to transfer back and forth to some degree; the instructor-pilots at places like Air Combat USA, which offer people the chance to go up and 'dogfight' for real, have observed that people with extensive online air-combat sim experience do better than other non-pilots (already having learned the 'lose the sight, lose the fight' adage), and some years ago one of the online air-combat sims had an event where a number of members of the Tuskegee Airmen were brought into the game as a group (at an internet-gaming site, IIRC) and proceeded to clean almost everyone's clock, proving that doing it for real beats doing it online -- but also that the non-fatality of mistakes online makes it a lot easier to learn from them; some of the long-term sim players were able to take on the Airmen on an even basis.
Right next to the Intel Inside stickers.
Remembering the flap over the WGA meltdown Microsoft had recently, I expect that it's merely a matter of time before legitimate customers start getting "reduced functionality", and a ticking time bomb for Microsoft's bottom line when a major corporate system gets hit. I wouldn't be surprised to see a fast scramble to make sure critical systems either aren't on Vista in the first place, or are moved off of them post-haste.
At least one government website has taken to doing this for password entry, taking the additional step of randomizing arrangement of characters on the 'keys' each time the page loads to prevent someone from sniffing the key selection. Since only the server knows which arrangement of keys is in use, knowing which buttons the user clicked on doesn't tell you anything about the password.
From Spider Robinson, author of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon stories:
When you swim in da sea / an' an eel bites you knee, / dat's a moray.
A New Zealander man / with a permanent tan, / that's a Maori.
When two patterns combine, / in a way serpentine, / that's a moiré.
He tells jokes, he's a ham, / his last name's Amsterdam, / that's a Morey.
If your vitamins be / mostly C, D, and E, / take some more A.
When a Canadian shows / you his mother, he goes: / "Dat's my mawr, eh?"
With the high price of feed, / it's for farmers in need, / that some mow hay.
My new ray gun here tries / to put out both your eyes: / It's a Moe-ray.
I am reminded of the offhand reference in Robert Heinlein's novel Friday that the California Republic, having determined that citizens with a bachelor's degree earned, on average, 40% more than citizens without such a degree, passed legislation awarding each citizen a bachelor's degree when they reached 18, thereby eliminating this shocking social inequity.