If you like Starcraft you're going to flip over TA.
No - Starcraft and TA are two different games. TA involved effectivly setting up your economy and launching a massive strike, while Starcraft revolved against tactical strikes (or used to before everyone demanded that ladder games be cranked over to fastest.)
In either case, both of these games could benefit from including a semi-prebuilt base in the initial loadout - just to prevent the need for the tedious pre-combat phase.
of course, the same problem exists for krogoth as for vulcans. if you have enough resources/time to build krogoth, 1) your opponent isn't putting enough pressure on you, 2) the resource is better spent somewhere else (with more immediate results)
FYI, you can reach a stage in the game where resources are not a problem at all - build enough Moho Metal Extractors and Fustion plants, and you basically don't have to worry.
The only resource that you really need is time and unit limit space. You can cut down on time if you build enough Advanced Construction Aircraft (e.g. 20-40), and Krogoths will cut down on the unit limit.
Sure, 100000 units of metal poured into other units may be more effective than 100000 units of metal poured into a Krogoth, but 25 Krogoths are more effective than 25 other standard combat units.
(This won't be a problem with 5000 unit limit games, but that generally requires a patch.)
...for a younger sibling/child to wander up to your box and type: dd if=/dev/null of=/boot/vmlinuz
Not really - younger childs don't know how to type in that stuff unless they themselves are Unix experts. (And in that case, you probably wouldn't be running root since you wouldn't trust them.)
I'm not downplaying this, since I know first hand on why root can be dangerous. In debugging one application, I was redirecting standard error to/dev/tty6 - but accidently written to/dev/hda6 instead. This overwrote the first sectors of a 180 GB NTFS partition, which rendered the partition unusable.
I had to get a sector editor to fix this - I could copy the backup information from another sector, but if the program ran any longer, it would have hosed that backup sector and cause me to lose all information on the partition. (I'm suprised that regular disk-checking utilities can't fix this problem.)
A company has as much of a right to earn a profit to the extent of it's ability to give payola to politicians. The constitution doesn't have to give that right - all that has to be done is create a regular domestic law.
The constitution doesn't mean anything if it can be changed or dissolved. As soon as the wrong party gets into power, they can do whatever they want - wax treaties, convert government into a despotism, ban political dissent, etc. (Although this should be rare nowadays.)
2) The data shared from a torrent is broken up into pieces. Contributors can only send whole pieces. (ie many people contribute to the entire file you're downloading but only 1 person contributes to a given piece). AND EACH PIECE IS HASHED. Take a look at the.torrent for yourself. The.torrent contains the hash of every piece. So not only would you have to make a file of the SAME SIZE with the SAME HASH, but every 1MB (for example) would also need to have the SAME HASH.
This won't be a problem at all. If you inject a single incorrect block, it will not be detected until the file is completely downloaded (assuming that it disrupts the hash of the entire file.) When it is detected, the client will have to go through the trouble of trying to find which block was corrupted - which can be troublesome as the bad block was already transferred to other downloading peers which inturn are passing the bad block as legit.
Most likely, the Finnish research team (who's website is currently offline) have probably found a way to disrupt individual blocks and the entire file without changing the hash. This is the real problem, but BitTorrent could still easily defeat this by using a striped hash (every 256'th byte) in addition to it's current Linear hash (series of bytes that cover 1/256th of the file).
BitTorrent also has some other shortcomings: - In practice, it has very shoddy performance behind a firewall, as if it was not designed for use in mind. (I can still get 2:1 upload ratio in some cases.) This could be easily fixed by adding a "firewalled" bit to the appropriate clients and by including some planning commands to help firewalled clients maximize whatever bandwidth they can get. (e.g. I'll download block 1, you download block 2, then we can exchange those blocks.) - There are cases where a torrent file loses all of its seeds, and results in a file that is 90% or so downloaded for all remaining clients. Usenet already adaped to situations where segments disappear by creating PAR files - Bittorrent can easily gain from this by including special recovery blocks. (This might not be needed with BitTorrent, but in cases where bandwidth is a bottleneck, there should always be an option for the CPU to help speed things up.)
I recall a news story, years ago, about a study of television ads. They compared the effectiveness of gratingly annoying ads ("we have the lowest price, or your mattress is FREE!") to clever, entertaining ads that people enjoyed watching (and probably even won awards).
That depends on how the ads were written - the annoying ads may have contained just enough content (or placed the focus correctly) to attract customers to their "special" price of 2 for 29 cents being more cost effective than 1 for 14 cents. On the other hand, the entertaining ads tend to place the focus the humour rather than the product itself.
IIRC, the first commercial for Nizerol (a dandruff hair shampoo) gave a scientific explaination behind dandruff - the name of the fungus they claimed existed was more memorable than the product itself. They later switched over to a mission-impossible style of commercial, which was more effective in getting people to remember the product.
Most likely, the "annoying" commercials weren't annoying enough for the average consumer.
Do people know what E, T, M mean? Well, I was reading a review of The Incredibles for Gamecube on Amazon. The angry dad reviewer said he wanted to get the game for his kid, but he was upset that it was "Teen" rated. He thought it was inappropriate for a game based on a G Rated movie (of course, The Incredibles was PG, but never mind.).
The ESRB has recently released an additional rating "E-10", which is designed to handle this sort of situation. It's basically compatable with PG, whereas T is now associated with PG-13.
Of course, the ESRB rating system still feels artificial - the most common example would be any presence of red blood (even if it's the PC cuts himself with a Jinsu knife in an adventure game, as in Willy Beamish) results in an automatic 'M' for some reason.
That's because many big companies are too lazy to fix their software. They do not encourage people to use non-admin accounts. I mean, Photoshop, CorelDraw, VisualStudio, ProTools (until the latest release), Homesite, StudioMX, Sibelius, etc, all have problems unless you are an administrator!
I'm not talking about commercial packages here - I'm referring the requirement for super-user privilages to install open-source software.
Microsoft Windows alleviated the problem slightly by allowing the Windows Insaller to use administrative privilages (or with some applications, just install in a user directory).
Such a system doesn't directly exist under Linux (aside from "su root", where you type a password or sudo). The point of security requires not needing an admin account if you want to just do user-level installations - these applications generally need to have a "make install" that needs to add a library to/lib or some other shared location. (Hmmm... maybe I should rig up sudo to do this sort of stuff more easily.)
Wait until Linux goes mainstream. Most people will just log in as root for normal activities to avoid the hassle of "su". After all, they don't have to bother with such annoyances under Windows. If they don't log in as root, they will happily supply the root password and/or click "OK" for any popup - just like on Windows.
Under a default installation of Windows/Linux, my "normal" activities require administrative privilages when dealing with some newly installed software.
You may know about Windows (and I won't go into details), but Linux seems to require root access to install applications into their normal position. While I could create a secondary account with slightly additional privilages, a program that inflicts damage can still just as easily mess up the majority of the system (requiring a reinstall even though the core OS is intact, since an OS without applications isn't really usefil.)
Because too many tasks require administrative privilages, I take the easy route and use an administrative account - at least with my computer.
After spending a couple of hours on UFO: Enemy Unknown tonight, I just had to reply to this. It is actually easier to play most DOS games now than when they were released. No need for boot disks, memory managers, hardware drivers etc. Just run DosBox on your OS of choice!
DosBox isn't at a stage where it is completely usable. It is rather slow and contains "no-error CTD" style of bugs (at least with the Windows XP port).
First example involved me running Ultima I and II under DosBox - it crashed as soon as I attempted to move, with no visible error message. I finally fixed the problem by restoring one option to the default (the change I made was to disable PC speaker emulation - this caused the failure.)
The second example involves System Shock - I did see an error message in the "console". However, this message is next to useless since the window closed instantly after the error is displayed - resulting in a message just as good as no message. (In this case, I was experimenting to see how well DosBox would run the game - turns out WinXP is still just as effective as long as you run the fan-made patches.)
Sure, DosBox can run games, but it leaves the user completely in the dark if something goes wrong.
I do like this idea but also start to worry that it might kill off some of the service we get. If one doesn't like to have pop up, one can install extensions for it but having this built-in would render some of the websites "criminal like". I do like this as an extension but not quite being built-in
If a given person doesn't like popups (and those using pop-up blockers don't), then all pop-up do is waste bandwidth. A better effect is to use targetted ads, such as showing off the latest and greatest video card in a banner ad on a computer site.
I'm not sure about the rest of you/.'ers, but ever since I started using firefox with tabbed browsing, I have NEVER opened a second new FF window. I feel that somewhere in the code there should only be one way to open a new FF window, Right click > open link in new window.
I would agree entirely, if it were not for one issue: When you click on a URL in another application that needs to launch a browser, Mozilla will load the page but usually clobber the contents of an existing window. (Internet Explorer has an option under some advanced setting to open such links in a new window.)
Anyway, Mozilla still uses the primitive method of dealing with both images and plugins - it either loads them unconditionally, or completely supresses them. This is a step backward from Netscape 4.7 (which was written in a time where browser developers assumed most people wanted to conserve bandwidth because of dial-up), where it only loaded plugins unconditionally and allowed manual loading of images as necessairy.
I dont like the cumulative score system, I find that it places too much emphisis on things like "graphics" and "sound" and not enough on things like "fun". I dont play games to be a tech demo for surround sound or graphics and zero gameplay (granted, the "gaming" part is supposed to ballance this out, but not always).
That's more like a problem with giving credit for being better than the other competition in one aspect. A much better system would be to collect a list of known flaws in video games - such as sterile textures (e.g. you can notice identical tiling), and to remove points from a base rating based on how many flaws appear. Not all flaws have equal weight - for example, an incomplete or missing documentation could be more serious than these sterile textures.
The only way to test such a system is to get enough flaws to make the best classics look extremely bad. By then, you've got something you can use as a rating system.
I'm unhappy about the lack of penis jokes in response to this news..
I'm not. The type of jokes that were posted on the front page were generally the unbelieveable type that made it too obvious that it was a joke.
Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic, but I preferred the ones that actually fooled people fooled people into something that was believeable. This actually touched something that a lot of readers feared, and did catch enough people to be memorable.
You should try playing Tachyon: The Fringe and Freelancer, both were very well done and have good 3D control. I like how Freelancer allows you to control yourself with the mouse (makes it feel less like a 3D FPS w/ no gravity, and more like a space combat simulator since you can quickly turn around and stuff. Tachyon also allowed you to press I think 'q' and then rotate around while still going in the same direction, then you could let go of 'q' and press your boosters and quickly change directions, which made for very cool effects.
The problem with these games is that they mix-and-match inertia physics with airplane physics.
It didn't take me too long to find out you can use the super-speed (afterburner or cruise, depending on the game), and then use the slide command to maintain that speed with no energy cost. The result: "You sure fly fast for a level 4 phoenix." (Phoenix = Slow Heavy bomber in Tachyon.)
No review starts good when the reviewer gets a basic fact totally wrong. The cutscenes in Nexus are skippable. Even the talking during games to "advance" the story can be clicked away ending the speech and making it all happen a bit faster. So basically either the reviewer was to dumb to figure out how to skip cutscenes and break off conversations OR he is lying and never played the game. Don't believe me? Download the demo.
I'll believe you, but the original poster might not know this (e.g. the game may have been poorly documented, or it may be a little unresponsive). Most games I've seen do not have a consistant method of skipping cutscenes -- For example, Far Cry might require pressing the 'Use' button to skip a cutscene, while AquaNox requires pressing space to skip (but only accelerates it by *2, since action still occurrs in a cutscene.)
I've come up with a simple rule after playing C&C: Generals - if there is absolutly no "normal" way to skip past a cutscene or FMV, then the duration of that media is included in the loading time required for the game. If you have an extremely sub-par video card, you can easily add on 10 minutes of "unnecessairy" loading time...
Combat is simple enough. You got three kind of weapons, anti-shield, anti-hull and anti-system. You can't hit a hull when shields are up and anti-system damage is reduced with shields up.
This sounds like there isn't much thought placed into the combat system. It could be realistic, but there's a slightly better system demonstrated in Freespace 2 where weapons are given individual ratings for Hull and Shield damages. Freelancer went one step further by allowing different weapons to be effective against different shield types.
Homeworld. True 3d, really really 3d. I cannot express how 3d it is. Let's just say it makes reality seem flat. The UI is so good I think sun should just straight copy it for looking glass, because it makes 3d useable. And aside from that, it's beautiful. Really really gorgeous.
True, but most of the singleplayer maps don't exactly need too much movement in the third dimention. There's only one instance which I'm aware of where you have to launch an attack against a unit directly above or below the mothership.
Multiplayer, on the other hand, is designed to support tactical usage of the third dimention, but the 2D thinking still seems reminicant in some of the maps.
but the irony of California's mandatory notification law is that the thief may now know they have something even more valuable.
Unless there is going to be an unconditional format of the hard drive in question, either the thief or the fence (i.e. buyer) would have discovered the data eventually. Given that it's most likely an MS Access database, it shouldn't be too much of a problem extracting those numbers from the file.
In the event that difficulties are encountered, it's not too hard to find someone on the black market who will crack the information (e.g. brute forcing login passwords to gain access to whatever that follows.)
Any irony obtained by the law will only accelerate what would have occurred normally.
The bill will also contain legal protections for technological protection measures (encryptions, password requirements) and rights management systems containing information for the purpose of tracking uses of works. The removal of or tampering with such measures for the purpose of infringing copyright will itself constitute an infringement of copyright.
While it feels like the DMCA at first glance, there are differences. In particular, the word "intent" appears - you can ask a lawyer why this is significant, or you can get a brief summary from a laymen such as myself.
Basically, it puts a little extra effort on the entity claiming infringement in some rare cases. For example, I'm sure you know about defective DRM systems that make false positives - in this case, the removal of such defective systems would either be non-infringing, or create a messy situation where some annoyed customers would use it as ammunition for releasing a defective product.
I haven't read the bill in question, but I'm sure that any problems would be ironed out before it gets passed into law.
Okay, anybody who has read my past posts on Tribes knows that I'm about as close as they come to a slavering fanboy when it comes to Tribes. Tribes is the very definition of What A Game Should Be in my book, and I love it in the same way other people love opera, collectible figurines, and reality television. Tribes is what gaming should be. That said, I'm about to propose something that's sure to piss pretty much everybody off:
Tribes, on balance, was made measurably worse by the community.
I couldn't agree more. The first time I played tribes, it was a spawn install to play on avery local LAN - but there were not enough players to support proper gameplay (only 3.) Thus, I went to online play to see what it was like.
The first server I went into had a mod that kicked players out of the inventory selector within 8 seconds. The reason was to get the player to use favourites - which couldn't be set up unless you were at an inventory terminal. The problem doesn't exist in Tribes 2, but such mods can easily nail a community of new players (which is required for any game.)
This just goes to show why a multiplayer game needs to include a filter in the browser to exclude certain gametypes, mods or servers. The more easily junk can be filtered out, the stronger the community can be (as long as the users don't do something stupid like filter out a bot modification that's configured to balance the teams.)
The problem is unions, like almost any other body, looks after itself first. Extra clauses get included in the contract negotiations, things like:
* Artificial Requirements - a union programmer must have a degree from a 4 year university with a 2 year apprenticeship, to limit the available workforce to artificially increase wages. * Artificial job titles - Only a person with 15 years of experience can be a senior programmer, to keep older union guys employed * Artificial Work Requirements - Any released product (no matter if it is an expansion pack, port, or an entirely new game) must have at least - 1 Sr. Level editor, 1 Sr. Artist, 1 Artist, 1 Sr. Game Designers, 1 Sr. Engine Developer, 2 Sr. Programmers, etc. to ensure continued employment of the union workers.
That's a sure fireway to kill any union - with only Seniour developers working on a project, there will be *no* new workers entering the field because of a lack of entry points. Even when I was in college, I couldn't get hold of any co-op position involved in the IT field - the best was in the office environment.
A top-heavy union isn't a union at all - it's an inverted pyramid that will topple over, resulting in no benefit whatsoever.
So because it is hard today, you support something that would make it even harder?
Building a game isn't that hard. The 7-day Roguelike contest proves that it is possible, and that it is possible to rapidly develop a game. In this contest, there are games that have met the requirements and are playable - others have failed because the author was not satisified with the work or because of last minute bugs.
The best way to write a game is to plan out the details ahead of time - including the development environment. (You don't want to get nailed because the miniature Linux distribution you chose included GCC, but omitted GDB.)
The problem is the games were much more playable when the graphics were shit.
Not really. As an example, I'll point to either Warcraft or Dune II, where you could only select one unit at a time. It took until graphics actually became good (e.g. TA or later) before the strategy genre became playable enough - and even so, it still isn't playable because of unit AI and paradigm flaws (e.g. all units prefer to remain at rest as soon as their "order" is finished, resulting in people queueing up multiple attack orders to get reinforcements from across the map into battle)
As far as I know, Real-Time strategy is the only genre that has this problem. In most other genres, faulty games were the exception rather than the rule.
This is not a Firefox exploit. It is not an IE or Java exploit. It is a USER STUPIDITY exploit.
Are you aware that the default selection for a Windows Yes/No dialog box is Yes? It just takes one mis-timed Enter hit (e.g. when typing in this Slashdot text-post window while loading links in the background) when the malware gets given permission to install.
There is a second problem to these dialog boxes - until SP2 (wbich a lot of people don't install because of compatability reasons), there is no way to tell these dialogs to go away entirely - they'll instead appear as Alert boxes saying that ActiveX content is disabled and your page won't display as expected.
I try to be as secure as possible by not going to such potentially bad sites (or if I do, in Mozilla.) However, I've already had at least one spyware infection because one other family member is much more careless.
Slashdot Mirror
No - Starcraft and TA are two different games. TA involved effectivly setting up your economy and launching a massive strike, while Starcraft revolved against tactical strikes (or used to before everyone demanded that ladder games be cranked over to fastest.)
In either case, both of these games could benefit from including a semi-prebuilt base in the initial loadout - just to prevent the need for the tedious pre-combat phase.
FYI, you can reach a stage in the game where resources are not a problem at all - build enough Moho Metal Extractors and Fustion plants, and you basically don't have to worry.
The only resource that you really need is time and unit limit space. You can cut down on time if you build enough Advanced Construction Aircraft (e.g. 20-40), and Krogoths will cut down on the unit limit.
Sure, 100000 units of metal poured into other units may be more effective than 100000 units of metal poured into a Krogoth, but 25 Krogoths are more effective than 25 other standard combat units.
(This won't be a problem with 5000 unit limit games, but that generally requires a patch.)
I'm not downplaying this, since I know first hand on why root can be dangerous. In debugging one application, I was redirecting standard error to
I had to get a sector editor to fix this - I could copy the backup information from another sector, but if the program ran any longer, it would have hosed that backup sector and cause me to lose all information on the partition. (I'm suprised that regular disk-checking utilities can't fix this problem.)
A company has as much of a right to earn a profit to the extent of it's ability to give payola to politicians. The constitution doesn't have to give that right - all that has to be done is create a regular domestic law.
The constitution doesn't mean anything if it can be changed or dissolved. As soon as the wrong party gets into power, they can do whatever they want - wax treaties, convert government into a despotism, ban political dissent, etc. (Although this should be rare nowadays.)
This won't be a problem at all. If you inject a single incorrect block, it will not be detected until the file is completely downloaded (assuming that it disrupts the hash of the entire file.) When it is detected, the client will have to go through the trouble of trying to find which block was corrupted - which can be troublesome as the bad block was already transferred to other downloading peers which inturn are passing the bad block as legit.
Most likely, the Finnish research team (who's website is currently offline) have probably found a way to disrupt individual blocks and the entire file without changing the hash. This is the real problem, but BitTorrent could still easily defeat this by using a striped hash (every 256'th byte) in addition to it's current Linear hash (series of bytes that cover 1/256th of the file).
BitTorrent also has some other shortcomings:
- In practice, it has very shoddy performance behind a firewall, as if it was not designed for use in mind. (I can still get 2:1 upload ratio in some cases.) This could be easily fixed by adding a "firewalled" bit to the appropriate clients and by including some planning commands to help firewalled clients maximize whatever bandwidth they can get. (e.g. I'll download block 1, you download block 2, then we can exchange those blocks.)
- There are cases where a torrent file loses all of its seeds, and results in a file that is 90% or so downloaded for all remaining clients. Usenet already adaped to situations where segments disappear by creating PAR files - Bittorrent can easily gain from this by including special recovery blocks. (This might not be needed with BitTorrent, but in cases where bandwidth is a bottleneck, there should always be an option for the CPU to help speed things up.)
That depends on how the ads were written - the annoying ads may have contained just enough content (or placed the focus correctly) to attract customers to their "special" price of 2 for 29 cents being more cost effective than 1 for 14 cents. On the other hand, the entertaining ads tend to place the focus the humour rather than the product itself.
IIRC, the first commercial for Nizerol (a dandruff hair shampoo) gave a scientific explaination behind dandruff - the name of the fungus they claimed existed was more memorable than the product itself. They later switched over to a mission-impossible style of commercial, which was more effective in getting people to remember the product.
Most likely, the "annoying" commercials weren't annoying enough for the average consumer.
Of course, the ESRB rating system still feels artificial - the most common example would be any presence of red blood (even if it's the PC cuts himself with a Jinsu knife in an adventure game, as in Willy Beamish) results in an automatic 'M' for some reason.
The ratings are listed here, complete with both general descriptions and the minimal age.
Microsoft Windows alleviated the problem slightly by allowing the Windows Insaller to use administrative privilages (or with some applications, just install in a user directory).
Such a system doesn't directly exist under Linux (aside from "su root", where you type a password or sudo). The point of security requires not needing an admin account if you want to just do user-level installations - these applications generally need to have a "make install" that needs to add a library to
Under a default installation of Windows/Linux, my "normal" activities require administrative privilages when dealing with some newly installed software.
You may know about Windows (and I won't go into details), but Linux seems to require root access to install applications into their normal position. While I could create a secondary account with slightly additional privilages, a program that inflicts damage can still just as easily mess up the majority of the system (requiring a reinstall even though the core OS is intact, since an OS without applications isn't really usefil.)
Because too many tasks require administrative privilages, I take the easy route and use an administrative account - at least with my computer.
First example involved me running Ultima I and II under DosBox - it crashed as soon as I attempted to move, with no visible error message. I finally fixed the problem by restoring one option to the default (the change I made was to disable PC speaker emulation - this caused the failure.)
The second example involves System Shock - I did see an error message in the "console". However, this message is next to useless since the window closed instantly after the error is displayed - resulting in a message just as good as no message. (In this case, I was experimenting to see how well DosBox would run the game - turns out WinXP is still just as effective as long as you run the fan-made patches.)
Sure, DosBox can run games, but it leaves the user completely in the dark if something goes wrong.
If a given person doesn't like popups (and those using pop-up blockers don't), then all pop-up do is waste bandwidth. A better effect is to use targetted ads, such as showing off the latest and greatest video card in a banner ad on a computer site.
Anyway, Mozilla still uses the primitive method of dealing with both images and plugins - it either loads them unconditionally, or completely supresses them. This is a step backward from Netscape 4.7 (which was written in a time where browser developers assumed most people wanted to conserve bandwidth because of dial-up), where it only loaded plugins unconditionally and allowed manual loading of images as necessairy.
The only way to test such a system is to get enough flaws to make the best classics look extremely bad. By then, you've got something you can use as a rating system.
Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic, but I preferred the ones that actually fooled people fooled people into something that was believeable. This actually touched something that a lot of readers feared, and did catch enough people to be memorable.
It didn't take me too long to find out you can use the super-speed (afterburner or cruise, depending on the game), and then use the slide command to maintain that speed with no energy cost. The result: "You sure fly fast for a level 4 phoenix." (Phoenix = Slow Heavy bomber in Tachyon.)
I've come up with a simple rule after playing C&C: Generals - if there is absolutly no "normal" way to skip past a cutscene or FMV, then the duration of that media is included in the loading time required for the game. If you have an extremely sub-par video card, you can easily add on 10 minutes of "unnecessairy" loading time...
This sounds like there isn't much thought placed into the combat system. It could be realistic, but there's a slightly better system demonstrated in Freespace 2 where weapons are given individual ratings for Hull and Shield damages. Freelancer went one step further by allowing different weapons to be effective against different shield types.
Multiplayer, on the other hand, is designed to support tactical usage of the third dimention, but the 2D thinking still seems reminicant in some of the maps.
Unless there is going to be an unconditional format of the hard drive in question, either the thief or the fence (i.e. buyer) would have discovered the data eventually. Given that it's most likely an MS Access database, it shouldn't be too much of a problem extracting those numbers from the file.
In the event that difficulties are encountered, it's not too hard to find someone on the black market who will crack the information (e.g. brute forcing login passwords to gain access to whatever that follows.)
Any irony obtained by the law will only accelerate what would have occurred normally.
Basically, it puts a little extra effort on the entity claiming infringement in some rare cases. For example, I'm sure you know about defective DRM systems that make false positives - in this case, the removal of such defective systems would either be non-infringing, or create a messy situation where some annoyed customers would use it as ammunition for releasing a defective product.
I haven't read the bill in question, but I'm sure that any problems would be ironed out before it gets passed into law.
The first server I went into had a mod that kicked players out of the inventory selector within 8 seconds. The reason was to get the player to use favourites - which couldn't be set up unless you were at an inventory terminal. The problem doesn't exist in Tribes 2, but such mods can easily nail a community of new players (which is required for any game.)
This just goes to show why a multiplayer game needs to include a filter in the browser to exclude certain gametypes, mods or servers. The more easily junk can be filtered out, the stronger the community can be (as long as the users don't do something stupid like filter out a bot modification that's configured to balance the teams.)
That's a sure fireway to kill any union - with only Seniour developers working on a project, there will be *no* new workers entering the field because of a lack of entry points. Even when I was in college, I couldn't get hold of any co-op position involved in the IT field - the best was in the office environment.
A top-heavy union isn't a union at all - it's an inverted pyramid that will topple over, resulting in no benefit whatsoever.
Building a game isn't that hard. The 7-day Roguelike contest proves that it is possible, and that it is possible to rapidly develop a game. In this contest, there are games that have met the requirements and are playable - others have failed because the author was not satisified with the work or because of last minute bugs.
The best way to write a game is to plan out the details ahead of time - including the development environment. (You don't want to get nailed because the miniature Linux distribution you chose included GCC, but omitted GDB.)
As far as I know, Real-Time strategy is the only genre that has this problem. In most other genres, faulty games were the exception rather than the rule.
Are you aware that the default selection for a Windows Yes/No dialog box is Yes? It just takes one mis-timed Enter hit (e.g. when typing in this Slashdot text-post window while loading links in the background) when the malware gets given permission to install.
There is a second problem to these dialog boxes - until SP2 (wbich a lot of people don't install because of compatability reasons), there is no way to tell these dialogs to go away entirely - they'll instead appear as Alert boxes saying that ActiveX content is disabled and your page won't display as expected.
I try to be as secure as possible by not going to such potentially bad sites (or if I do, in Mozilla.) However, I've already had at least one spyware infection because one other family member is much more careless.