I will admit, on a Windows box, it is hard to get the blessed thing to tell you the size of your physical disks. Start -> Run -> compmgmt.msc
The physical sizes it shows are precise but there's an incorrect usage of GB and GiB. In some cases, you have unmountable partitions which may be for Linux rather than being encrypted.
2. Nobody will be fooled by an unusually large, seemingly random random, file, especially if you also happen to have encryption software installed; besides you might well be considered guilty until proven innocent. Windows Vista has built-in encryption software.
3. Why is your encrypted partition 10GB for 100k of files ( tax return ):-) Because I expected to fill that partition with more information than what's currently installed.
You don't want to resize partitions unless you have to - in most cases, you overestimate the need for something and create a 2GB partition and only end up storing 10MB of old data. When I picked up the Truecrypt toy, I wanted to have a secure storage that someone wouldn't be able to break into without knowing at least three of my passwords but only ended up using it to store a list of passwords and basic financial documents.
In my set of Truecrypt volumes, some have hidden partitions and others don't. Unless you have prior knowledge of the Truecrypt volume, you do not know which one is which and will be chasing wild gooses looking for such partitions.
By the way - zeroing out the "deleted space" will corrupt data. It poisons potential evidence (i.e. that child porn picture may have been added after the drive was zeroed) and risks having customs become liable for unnecessary data loss (i.e. you can't be sure that modifying data won't cause accidents.)
10.) Why do I have to tell VB what I'm "End"ing? "End For", "End Function", "End If" - wouldn't "End" be sufficient and then you could put a comment if you really cared what you were ending? "End" is a keyword for termininating the application, and was like that since basic was invented. END IF and the likes were added when Basic was modified to use free-form code rather than sticking by line numbers that were in increments of 10.
You could do fancy things with NEXT in line number format, including violating the now common programming practices. After implementing blocked statements, you need to specify what you are ending in order to avoid a broken or mismatched FOR or IF block. As long as you remember that BASIC is a basic programming language for inexperienced people, you'll understand this.
- There is no difference in the cost between valves pricing and a physical retail package. I consider Valve an even larger thief than the usual publishers, specifically because they don't have the overhead of a game that sells in physical stores. Do you know why Fileplanet implemented a service were paying subscribers get a better download priority? They need to cover the cost of the download servers. Likewise, Valve needs to have enough high-bandwidth servers in order to allow many players to download content onto their computer.
There's also the case of undercutting the retail stores - if the game price on Steam is lower than what's found in retail stores, then the stores will believe there's no point in stocking that game.
- You say they have Digital Rights and not Restrictions. When was the last time you tried to play Half Life 2 without being logged on to Steam (so they could monitor your usage, your PC specs, and other data for marketing research)? Last time I tried to do so was when I still had dial-up. Haven't needed to do that in a long time, but you still have the option to do so. If you have trouble with the offline mode, you may want to post details about the error message(s) you are getting.
33% of 100,000 attempts per day is 33,000 posts per day. That also has 67,000 failed captchas per day - something you generally notice. If your captcha system detects rapid-fire captcha attempts (requests, failed, etc), you can auto-block the IP address that is making that many requests.
You'd probably want to do that anyway, since 1.15 requests per second for captchas is on par with flooding.
33% of Yahoo capitchas isn't really impressive - you still get a large quantity of negative hits, and unless you have an array of IP addresses (most people don't), there will still be a large quantity of addresses registered from a given IP. Also, a large quantity of negatives would cast doubt on any positive matches from the same IP.
Also, Yahoo captchas aren't that "hard" - they are black text from known font pools on a white background that get slightly warped and have black lines drawn on some characters. This is hardly strong since it doesn't hit all letters within the word (which is done by reCAPTCHA) or use a large font-pool variety.
Even the Slashdot Captcha is harder - it hits the whole image and uses different fonts within the word.
It'll never happen, because there is no way Google would do anything to reduce it's revenue, but they really need to do something about Google Ad Spam on web pages. Domain name tasters don't pay google to have ads displayed - they get paid by google.
As an example, we'll say that NetworkDNS registers a domain name that you look up. When you attempt to register from GoDaddy, you find it's been snatched up. When the 10 people that visit the site look at the page, Google pays NetworkDNS for showing these 10 ads while NetworkDNS pays nothing for tasting a registration. These 10 people are not going to follow links as most normal people can recognize a taster/pseudo-site page instantly - the result is that the ad impressions are weakened and the persons advertising don't get as much impact from advertisements that they should (as opposed to the real advertisements that you might see at the top of the page.)
Let's take this a step further - instead of NetworkDNS doing registration, you have 419-scammers entering in new territory. They use third-party credit cards to fund the 5-day taste, make money from ads (or possibly transferring) within the five days, and the registrars get hit with a chrageback.
More and more web sites have more Google Ad 'content' than real, useful information. Unless you encounter those sites by searching, don't visit them. Problem solved.
We must play different JRPGs then. The ones I played did NOT have me doing the same thing over and over and over again. Dragon Warrior I (NES version) is the pinnacle of this problem - slow leveling and you needed to reach level 30 in order to be a threat to the final opponent.
In any case, why restrict to the single-player JRPGs? There's also the MMORPGs such as Runescape, and the western ones such as the Might & Magic series. With Might & Magic VII, I'm stuck - characters aren't powerful enough to advance the plot, and the respawn rate for the monsters isn't that high. I could try going through the breeding pit as much as I can, but cracking the tougher monsters requires much more planning and knowledge of game mechanics than can be immediatly observed.
Similar problem occurred with Might & Magic VI - although I eventually found out about the Haste + Blaster + No Armour combo, which is technically a glitch in the game. (You don't have a choice here - you must use blasters in the final cave.)
Final Fantasy 7: Different enemies have different weaknesses. An optimal strategy might involve equiping appropriate "status" inflicting weapons, paired with status inflicting materia, and casting appropriate magic spells to elimiate the monsters. My "main strategy" was exactly that - Slash-All combined with Poison status on weapon, followed with regen-all. If this didn't take out the enemy in a quick battle, at least my party gets healed.
There were only three changes I needed to make from this main tactic. First was with the flying air dragon that cast Aero3 - at that point, I could only rely on regular attacks. Second was with the two-headed dragon (but I couldn't really optimize it with the items at hand - Elemental materia wasn't strong enough to effectively block lightning), and the third was against Safer-Sephiroth (to counter the toad-mini combo that he uses). In a way, this is simply a just-in-time adaptation rather than learning.
The point is that a game that has grinding teaches kids that practice makes perfect, and that as you get better at something you become able to perform more specialized tasks as well. Not really - grinding involves doing the exact same thing over and over again in hopes that you'll suddenly gain an ability to do something more complex.
Addition drills only help with addition, and become less effective if you already know how to do addition. If you want to learn multiplication, you need to drill multiplication. There's a limit on how complex you can make these drills - adding a 10-digit number isn't inherently harder than a 3-digit one aside from being longer.
If you can learn, in a week or two, that practice makes perfect, This reminds me - I learned something called a "Greatest Common Factor" based on a pretty picture found in the book that contained no real explanation. I don't remember how to calculate it, but it certainly didn't match the correct answer in the teacher's edition of the textbook - the only thing it matched was the single example.
Text adventures were always the best of games. I learned most of my twisted vocabulary from playing them at ages 5-7. at the same time MS-DOS gave me a little inside knowledge about the basic workings of a computer that the youth of today is unlikely to learn. we NEED more things involving green text on a black background! Making something a text adventure doesn't make it any better - it only makes it a text adventure. You can make it extremely great or extremely bad, which is no different from point-and-click graphical adventures, or Action-style games (such as Half-Life Episode 2). Just like everything else, you could make a great game but have it underrated within its genre - "Goose, Egg, Badger" from Comp04 suffered from this, because not everyone knew the concept behind the game (every noun was also a verb.)
From within the genre, while I try to get as far as possible without hints or walkthroughs, I find that there are usually a few points where I cannot advance the plot. Sometimes, it's equal to pixel-hunting where you need to paint a shelf of books with your mouse - making a description too detailed may also have the same effect, since some readers tend to skip past "non-essential" flavour text. (This was very severe in a wave of Escape the room games - even though the item is clearly visible from somewhere in the room, it's only reachable through a one-pixel-wide clickzone to look on the side of the chair.)
Those images are strictly tongue-in-cheek. They were made by a geek for geeks No, they are made for those who still find lolcats funny. When you ignore the fact that I've seen relatively better implementations, these images are trivial photoshops that are on-par of pointing out the obvious - at best #19 would have been funny, but when browsing galleries that turn out to be substandard, I lose too much interest to go that far.
Have you heard the joke about two strings in a bar? I'm afraid not, but the readers of the rec.humor newsgroup saw that joke ad nauseum.
Posting the text of the document infringes copyright. That's illegal. The court order reflects that. [citation needed]
As shown in the last paragraph of demand posted on Wikileaks, the plaintiffs want their English legal advisers provide a written undertaking that the court orders will only be used for legal advice and not republished - and they won't give a copy of these orders beforehand. How does the court order reflect that posting the text of the document infringe copyright?
I understand that some court documents may be sealed, but I doubt this one is (since it will need to be distributed to others, perhaps in bulk.)
When all those Quake bots hit the scene a couple of years later, it was already old hat as far as I was concerned IIRC, the Quake bots were severely limited by the platform they were running on. In particular, they couldn't "see" the map directly and had to rely on waypoints. These waypoints took up space in the 600/768 entity limit which made the bots fail if you tried using them on large maps.
These bots also need to know how maps work - either by seeing players proceed through the map or by having a developer setup waypoints for the bots. In the first case, bots would be confused by complex map structures beyond a simple press button to open door. In the second case, it's time consuming, works only on a per-map basis, and needs to have capability of understanding
In a way, Netrek bots are easier to write, since there is no worry about as many obstacles that appear in a Quake map. You also have much better access to the source code.
Why the support on Slashdot for anti-spam laws then? If your smtp server accepts my connection and accepts the mail I subsequently send to you through that connection, how is this any different to the arguments posed elsewhere in this thread about public access services and presumed legality? The rational for anti-spam laws is as follows:
I don't have an smtp server, but my ISP has one. Aside from IP-address blocks, there is no infallible method to tell whether or not an individual email is spam.
Some people say that spam takes only a few kilobytes in your mailbox. They forget about the fact that there are many people on the internet, where a few kilobytes suddenly becomes a few gigabytes. As you know, corporations pay by the GB - in either bandwidth fees or for place to store the spam.
A majority of spam that I receive is for online-pharmacy, enlargement pills, "dating sites", or other crap that has no real value. Whether or not "my" smtp server accepts this is moot - there are plenty of other smtp servers that receive this, and at least one user on the many SMTP servers that will attempt to make purchase. (I would be one of those users, but the online pharmacy sites aren't accepting my randomly generated contact information anymore.)
Spam is based solely around false pretenses. If the anti-spam Haiku is required to receive e-mails (or otherwise treat it as a legitimate e-mail), spammers will simply lie about the purpose of the haiku (e.g. say it's a mailing list for people interested in pharmescutical news) and send mail in bulk.
I read Slashdot for a long time - long enough to see the effects of a massive spam campaign designed solely to disrupt the flow of comments. That same user found it funny to crapflood Kuro5hin as well.
Given that there are already venues on the Internet to properly advertise (e.g. on-topic newsgroups, classified ads, word of mouth), there is almost no reason to send bulk e-mail to every single person on the Internet.
c) printf can fail, you're not catching that. And what do you expect to do with a failure? printf() something to the console?
I remember using "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT" in some of the later BASIC variants because the default error handling does a full stop on an application on any form of error, whether it's unrecoverable or safely ignorable. At a certain point, you don't care about failure - just fire and forget.
Yeah, but the plan hinges on them not being able to *prove* they got it under CC-licensing. And just saying "Well, your honour, when I downloaded it there was a pretty copy-left sign on the page" probably won't cut it. Are you a lawyer? If so, can you tell me the significance of placing such a pretty logo next to the image, if it can be proven that logo was there?
As far as I'm concerned, such a logo indicates (unofficially) that the image is distributed under the associated license or otherwise leads me (a reasonable layman) to believe this is the case.
A corporation is a large-scale version of a street vendor that has access to a larger quantity of inventory/services. It's as much of a hack as using a more powerful processor for a task, no matter how much Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor believes otherwise.
Uh, Quake has been fully open source for quite a while, Quake is a dated engine. Before it was open source, you had a limit of 600 entities (including triggers, doors and projectiles) at one time, and going over it would crash the game.
At least it was the first game that allowed modders to create deathmatch bots, which worked perfectly in normal quake. However, you generally needed to do plenty of workarounds if you wanted to create your bot to work with Teamfortress as the engine has no concept of AI players and will crash if certain functions treat those bots as humans. (Plus, bots had a completely different set of physics.)
Also, Quake 3 is bound by the GPL. Depending on what game you want to write and your target audience, forced GPL may be a bad thing for newly released games.
Alien Arena: This is the first free game that I played that I actually like and would play seriously. The controls are solid and the weapons are well-balanced. The controls (I include the UI) are only as solid as Quake 2. I normally switch weapons through the mouse wheel since it's hard to memorize the number slots for the weapons across the massive number of FPS games. In Quake 2, you only see the current weapon selection - IIRC, there may have been an icon that showed you which weapon you were switching to.
The one time I tried Alien Arena was the same time I noticed this. After playing Quake 3 and UT, this isn't a feature I can play without. In fact, I couldn't play an unmodified version of Nexuiz because of a very similar problem - it only showed your weaponry when you were switching, and it doesn't display that until the server knows you are switching weapons (Nexuiz is based on NQ, where all actions were server-side.)
FYI, if you want to annoy players like me, pickup a weapon that has a long transition time when switching, and drop it so that I'd pick it up. While not a perfectly effective tactic, it is known to lock down players that use mouse wheels. It also works on players that still have weapon-switch on pickup enabled.
Much as it might disturb some to acknowledge it, Mitnick was found guilty of outright fraud. Correct, although he wasn't allowed to use a notebook computer that had no network capability in order to view some of the evidence against him. Whether or not an individual committed a crime, this can easily cause problems with defendants that are falsely accused. This is relativly comparable to withholding a harddrive containing evidence.
I know Kevin was a bad example, but it was the best I could come up with.
Remember how we scoffed that politicians just don't "get" computers? I think they understand now. We'll soon wish they had remained ignorant. Remaining ignorant means: - Jack Thompson can disable a primary use of computers - video games. While technically useless, these were able to make computers as powerful as they were today. Furthermore, they give access to a wider variety of games should they be in a position of not liking this one. - People such as Kevin Mitnick get treated much more severely for computer crime than they should be. Granted, there's a lot of work for ensuring that your systems are secure once again, but some damages were inflated and inconsistently reported (i.e. damages ranging in the millions were allegedly reported to the FBI but not shareholders.) - Various politicians can do fear mongering, such as claiming a kid interested in computers is going to be a future basement hacker that could launch nuclear missiles. Even if they can't directly act against those children, they could easily turn their peers against them with this propaganda. - And finally, you'd have civilians driving loudspeaker vans saying things similar to "It looks like you're writing a letter". This would usually appear before elections (and IIRC, there were a few personal accounts of this still occurring in Japan.)
Since computers are now more mainstream, people can more easily recognize BS - at least that's the theory anyway. The average person won't easily believe that computers can easily explode (but remain gullible enough to believe pressing ALT-F4 activates an IRC exploit), and computer experts will more easily lock onto incorrect statements that they've seen before.
Sorry folks, you're making the mistake of thumping the dictionary instead of looking at actual, in the wild use, of the word "brick". It works perfectly, in this context, as a term to describe breaking some aspect of a device. A burnt out lightbulb doesn't brick the whole lamp. Likewise, uninstalling Windows does not brick a computer unless there is no means to install any replacements.
Another poster offered to buy notebooks for up to $100 (based on make/model). If you believe those notebooks are bricked, he'll make an instant profit on E-Bay because you didn't do a factory restore.
When you have to have Vista to run new non-Microsoft programs (I was really pissed when DOOM 3 required XP and I was running 98) you can make the statement and I'll agree with you, but as of now I'm scratching my head. Huh? W95/98/ME is a different architecture than WNT/XP/Vista, and there are ways to tell if you are bumping into the limitations of the W9x architecture series.
As a quick test, open up a few browser windows on Slashdot. If you are logged in and have moderator privilages, you'll fill up the available Window handles on the W9x system, requiring you to close the browser windows in order to keep the system stable. This is the main reason why I cannot go back from Windows XP to the Windows 9x series (aside from running the very rare individual application.)
There is a way to get it working on W98 if you really want - it involves hotwiring the call to GlobalMemoryStatusEx() - a function designed for systems and architecture that support more than 4GB of memory.
Slashdot Mirror
The physical sizes it shows are precise but there's an incorrect usage of GB and GiB. In some cases, you have unmountable partitions which may be for Linux rather than being encrypted.
You don't want to resize partitions unless you have to - in most cases, you overestimate the need for something and create a 2GB partition and only end up storing 10MB of old data. When I picked up the Truecrypt toy, I wanted to have a secure storage that someone wouldn't be able to break into without knowing at least three of my passwords but only ended up using it to store a list of passwords and basic financial documents.
In my set of Truecrypt volumes, some have hidden partitions and others don't. Unless you have prior knowledge of the Truecrypt volume, you do not know which one is which and will be chasing wild gooses looking for such partitions.
By the way - zeroing out the "deleted space" will corrupt data. It poisons potential evidence (i.e. that child porn picture may have been added after the drive was zeroed) and risks having customs become liable for unnecessary data loss (i.e. you can't be sure that modifying data won't cause accidents.)
You could do fancy things with NEXT in line number format, including violating the now common programming practices. After implementing blocked statements, you need to specify what you are ending in order to avoid a broken or mismatched FOR or IF block. As long as you remember that BASIC is a basic programming language for inexperienced people, you'll understand this.
There's also the case of undercutting the retail stores - if the game price on Steam is lower than what's found in retail stores, then the stores will believe there's no point in stocking that game. - You say they have Digital Rights and not Restrictions. When was the last time you tried to play Half Life 2 without being logged on to Steam (so they could monitor your usage, your PC specs, and other data for marketing research)? Last time I tried to do so was when I still had dial-up. Haven't needed to do that in a long time, but you still have the option to do so. If you have trouble with the offline mode, you may want to post details about the error message(s) you are getting.
You'd probably want to do that anyway, since 1.15 requests per second for captchas is on par with flooding.
33% of Yahoo capitchas isn't really impressive - you still get a large quantity of negative hits, and unless you have an array of IP addresses (most people don't), there will still be a large quantity of addresses registered from a given IP. Also, a large quantity of negatives would cast doubt on any positive matches from the same IP.
Also, Yahoo captchas aren't that "hard" - they are black text from known font pools on a white background that get slightly warped and have black lines drawn on some characters. This is hardly strong since it doesn't hit all letters within the word (which is done by reCAPTCHA) or use a large font-pool variety.
Even the Slashdot Captcha is harder - it hits the whole image and uses different fonts within the word.
As an example, we'll say that NetworkDNS registers a domain name that you look up. When you attempt to register from GoDaddy, you find it's been snatched up. When the 10 people that visit the site look at the page, Google pays NetworkDNS for showing these 10 ads while NetworkDNS pays nothing for tasting a registration. These 10 people are not going to follow links as most normal people can recognize a taster/pseudo-site page instantly - the result is that the ad impressions are weakened and the persons advertising don't get as much impact from advertisements that they should (as opposed to the real advertisements that you might see at the top of the page.)
Let's take this a step further - instead of NetworkDNS doing registration, you have 419-scammers entering in new territory. They use third-party credit cards to fund the 5-day taste, make money from ads (or possibly transferring) within the five days, and the registrars get hit with a chrageback. More and more web sites have more Google Ad 'content' than real, useful information. Unless you encounter those sites by searching, don't visit them. Problem solved.
In any case, why restrict to the single-player JRPGs? There's also the MMORPGs such as Runescape, and the western ones such as the Might & Magic series. With Might & Magic VII, I'm stuck - characters aren't powerful enough to advance the plot, and the respawn rate for the monsters isn't that high. I could try going through the breeding pit as much as I can, but cracking the tougher monsters requires much more planning and knowledge of game mechanics than can be immediatly observed.
Similar problem occurred with Might & Magic VI - although I eventually found out about the Haste + Blaster + No Armour combo, which is technically a glitch in the game. (You don't have a choice here - you must use blasters in the final cave.) Final Fantasy 7: Different enemies have different weaknesses. An optimal strategy might involve equiping appropriate "status" inflicting weapons, paired with status inflicting materia, and casting appropriate magic spells to elimiate the monsters. My "main strategy" was exactly that - Slash-All combined with Poison status on weapon, followed with regen-all. If this didn't take out the enemy in a quick battle, at least my party gets healed.
There were only three changes I needed to make from this main tactic. First was with the flying air dragon that cast Aero3 - at that point, I could only rely on regular attacks. Second was with the two-headed dragon (but I couldn't really optimize it with the items at hand - Elemental materia wasn't strong enough to effectively block lightning), and the third was against Safer-Sephiroth (to counter the toad-mini combo that he uses). In a way, this is simply a just-in-time adaptation rather than learning.
Addition drills only help with addition, and become less effective if you already know how to do addition. If you want to learn multiplication, you need to drill multiplication. There's a limit on how complex you can make these drills - adding a 10-digit number isn't inherently harder than a 3-digit one aside from being longer. If you can learn, in a week or two, that practice makes perfect, This reminds me - I learned something called a "Greatest Common Factor" based on a pretty picture found in the book that contained no real explanation. I don't remember how to calculate it, but it certainly didn't match the correct answer in the teacher's edition of the textbook - the only thing it matched was the single example.
at the same time MS-DOS gave me a little inside knowledge about the basic workings of a computer that the youth of today is unlikely to learn.
we NEED more things involving green text on a black background! Making something a text adventure doesn't make it any better - it only makes it a text adventure. You can make it extremely great or extremely bad, which is no different from point-and-click graphical adventures, or Action-style games (such as Half-Life Episode 2). Just like everything else, you could make a great game but have it underrated within its genre - "Goose, Egg, Badger" from Comp04 suffered from this, because not everyone knew the concept behind the game (every noun was also a verb.)
From within the genre, while I try to get as far as possible without hints or walkthroughs, I find that there are usually a few points where I cannot advance the plot. Sometimes, it's equal to pixel-hunting where you need to paint a shelf of books with your mouse - making a description too detailed may also have the same effect, since some readers tend to skip past "non-essential" flavour text. (This was very severe in a wave of Escape the room games - even though the item is clearly visible from somewhere in the room, it's only reachable through a one-pixel-wide clickzone to look on the side of the chair.)
Have you heard the joke about two strings in a bar? I'm afraid not, but the readers of the rec.humor newsgroup saw that joke ad nauseum.
As shown in the last paragraph of demand posted on Wikileaks, the plaintiffs want their English legal advisers provide a written undertaking that the court orders will only be used for legal advice and not republished - and they won't give a copy of these orders beforehand. How does the court order reflect that posting the text of the document infringe copyright?
I understand that some court documents may be sealed, but I doubt this one is (since it will need to be distributed to others, perhaps in bulk.)
These bots also need to know how maps work - either by seeing players proceed through the map or by having a developer setup waypoints for the bots. In the first case, bots would be confused by complex map structures beyond a simple press button to open door. In the second case, it's time consuming, works only on a per-map basis, and needs to have capability of understanding
In a way, Netrek bots are easier to write, since there is no worry about as many obstacles that appear in a Quake map. You also have much better access to the source code.
Given that there are already venues on the Internet to properly advertise (e.g. on-topic newsgroups, classified ads, word of mouth), there is almost no reason to send bulk e-mail to every single person on the Internet.
For open source to succeed, it needs money to host the project (or at least be placed on a "free public" server), and time from volunteers.
A recession may impact the first portion, but as long as there are programmers for the second portion that have free time, development will continue.
I remember using "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT" in some of the later BASIC variants because the default error handling does a full stop on an application on any form of error, whether it's unrecoverable or safely ignorable. At a certain point, you don't care about failure - just fire and forget.
As far as I'm concerned, such a logo indicates (unofficially) that the image is distributed under the associated license or otherwise leads me (a reasonable layman) to believe this is the case.
A corporation is a large-scale version of a street vendor that has access to a larger quantity of inventory/services. It's as much of a hack as using a more powerful processor for a task, no matter how much Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor believes otherwise.
At least it was the first game that allowed modders to create deathmatch bots, which worked perfectly in normal quake. However, you generally needed to do plenty of workarounds if you wanted to create your bot to work with Teamfortress as the engine has no concept of AI players and will crash if certain functions treat those bots as humans. (Plus, bots had a completely different set of physics.)
Also, Quake 3 is bound by the GPL. Depending on what game you want to write and your target audience, forced GPL may be a bad thing for newly released games.
The one time I tried Alien Arena was the same time I noticed this. After playing Quake 3 and UT, this isn't a feature I can play without. In fact, I couldn't play an unmodified version of Nexuiz because of a very similar problem - it only showed your weaponry when you were switching, and it doesn't display that until the server knows you are switching weapons (Nexuiz is based on NQ, where all actions were server-side.)
FYI, if you want to annoy players like me, pickup a weapon that has a long transition time when switching, and drop it so that I'd pick it up. While not a perfectly effective tactic, it is known to lock down players that use mouse wheels. It also works on players that still have weapon-switch on pickup enabled.
I know Kevin was a bad example, but it was the best I could come up with.
- Jack Thompson can disable a primary use of computers - video games. While technically useless, these were able to make computers as powerful as they were today. Furthermore, they give access to a wider variety of games should they be in a position of not liking this one.
- People such as Kevin Mitnick get treated much more severely for computer crime than they should be. Granted, there's a lot of work for ensuring that your systems are secure once again, but some damages were inflated and inconsistently reported (i.e. damages ranging in the millions were allegedly reported to the FBI but not shareholders.)
- Various politicians can do fear mongering, such as claiming a kid interested in computers is going to be a future basement hacker that could launch nuclear missiles. Even if they can't directly act against those children, they could easily turn their peers against them with this propaganda.
- And finally, you'd have civilians driving loudspeaker vans saying things similar to "It looks like you're writing a letter". This would usually appear before elections (and IIRC, there were a few personal accounts of this still occurring in Japan.)
Since computers are now more mainstream, people can more easily recognize BS - at least that's the theory anyway. The average person won't easily believe that computers can easily explode (but remain gullible enough to believe pressing ALT-F4 activates an IRC exploit), and computer experts will more easily lock onto incorrect statements that they've seen before.
Another poster offered to buy notebooks for up to $100 (based on make/model). If you believe those notebooks are bricked, he'll make an instant profit on E-Bay because you didn't do a factory restore.
As a quick test, open up a few browser windows on Slashdot. If you are logged in and have moderator privilages, you'll fill up the available Window handles on the W9x system, requiring you to close the browser windows in order to keep the system stable. This is the main reason why I cannot go back from Windows XP to the Windows 9x series (aside from running the very rare individual application.)
There is a way to get it working on W98 if you really want - it involves hotwiring the call to GlobalMemoryStatusEx() - a function designed for systems and architecture that support more than 4GB of memory.