Never attribute to malice what can be explained...
on
Gaming Netflix Ratings?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...by stupidity.
I think Hanlon's Razor applies here. Many people here on Slashdot like to put on a tinfoil hat and shout "AstroTurfing" for almost anything. I'm harder to convince of that.
I'll put aside what many have pointed out here, that the film in question has already been released in places.
In the interview he said he regretted having been first because of the backlash he received, but that he stood by his rating.
He also went on to point out the deluge of emails he received from angry fans. Many of whom would go on to criticize him at length while prefacing the email with "I haven't actually seen the film yet, but..."
Fanboys are rabid. They defend movies, hardware, software, etc, often sight unseen, because they want their horse to win. Even if they don't actually know what it looks like.
In this case, the movie is based on a book. I don't doubt that many of the votes on NetFlix are folks who have rated the film sight unseen, because they WANT to like it. They're jazzed about it, and they want it to be rated highly.
Things like this happen more often than you might think, it's just that it generally isn't the kind of thing to garner a lot of attention, or publicity. I've noticed a few changelogs that mentioned that they've removed DRM, and I know there are at least a couple games that don't have DRM on-disc once they reach bargin bin age.
Not sure about others off the top of my head, but I know that I see if from time to time in change logs.
I don't know if these companies that produce DRM tools license them to publishers on a one time fee basis, or a subscription, or a cost-per-disc basis. I suspect though that if it's not a one-time cost, that it's not worth it to a publisher to keep paying for DRM after the first few months.
I'd like to second the experience of never having experienced (stability) issues with Pidgin. Or GAIM for that matter. I used it for a long time, and I no longer do. But it's really because it's feature poor / doesn't work as expected, not because of stability.
If a service that Pidgin "supports" supports a feature, I want to be able to use that feature. File transfers, video, either don't work, or don't work right.
Um... while everything you say is indeed true, I don't see how relevant it is.
Anyone that relies on such a legacy application is likley not looking to new versions of Windows in search of an upgrade.
Hell, I'm 99% sure that dos apps that rely on any kind of direct hardware wizardry, like that wouldn't even run on XP, or any version of Windows after. Perhaps not any NT Kernel Windows?
That's why disk imaging, partitioning, and other low-level disk utilities rely on a reboot, or a live-cd to get their respective jobs done when making changes to a system volume that windows has locked.
Again, what you are doing diminishes the value of the product according to the law of supply and demand.
That person may not be able to afford the book, but may scrimp and save, or may wait for the price to come down, or may do any of a thousand other things. But when you reproduce it, it has the same diminishing value that counterfeiting does.
I will admit that to a lesser extent, loaning can do the same thing. If I have a book, and I loan it to you, or a game, or a movie, that may diminish demand for the same., Because once you've read / played / watched it, you may no longer want to purchase it. But One is considered within the bounds of "the rules" and one is generally considered to be outside "the rules".
That said, in western society, where even the poorest among us routinely spend money on fast food and cable TV, and used books are so under-valued, it's difficult for me to envision the scenario you are positing as realistic. If someone truly wants info, they generally can get it cheap enough if they look through used book stores. I'm amazed what I find every time I visit one.
I'll tell you exactly why. Because your assumption - that is hurts no one, is incorrect.
Let's back up to 2003. Let's say I'm Nintendo. And I want to publish The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition. It's nothing more than a compilation of games that have been out of print from 5-10 years. From the origional Zelda through Majora's Mask.
Under the system you propose, my ability to monetize this would be greatly diminished, simply because it became public domain during the years that I had stopped publishing. Now the market is flooded with copies of my games because I was no longer publishing them. How do I sell them now?
Now Nintendo basically made this game a give-away with Wind Waker, but my point still stands. And you can see how it would basically make endeavors like the Virtual Console worthless.
Let's take a second scenario: What about art? If I'm a famous artist, and I create one copy of a work that fetches an obscene value at auction, should I loose control over the ability to copy that work? Should anybody be able to make prints, or duplicate my work in any way that they choose just because I am no longer producing this work, and therefore no longer benefiting directly monetarily from it? I would imagine that under this system, originals would loose some of their value, because the purchaser would not have any expectation of exclusivity. You are basically opening the gates to as many legal knock-offs as the market will sustain. Values will plummet.
Both these arguments essentially rely on supply and demand factors limiting copies of a work in the market place to keep that work relatively valuable. One can make dozens of non-profit driven arguments as to why a copyright holder would wish to limit distribution of a work for non-profit driven reasons as well.
Obviously it doesn't have the cool-factor of a lone hacker putting something together like this, but Nintendo offered a similar device for the NES in the late 80s called the Nintendo Hands Free Controller (HFC).
I seem to remember reading about it at the time (though I can't verify) that Nintendo also worked with the Starlight Foundation to distribute the devices to hospitals as well.
A good analogy is having a conversation in a crowded room with lots of other conversations going on at once. Your voice doesn't go away just because it is mixed with other sounds. But at a certain point, it will become hard to distinguish from the rest.
The important difference is that humans are better at pinpointing one sound out of many. We are relatively bad at doing the same with scent.
Dogs (and other animals), however are great at this. That's how scent-tracking works, and it's how drug or bomb sniffing dogs are able to find targets that have been "masked" by other scents.
For instance: A drug smuggler is trying to conceal a quantity of cocaine to cross the border with. He knows that he may have to deal with drug sniffing dogs, so he puts the drugs in baggies and then covers those baggies in garlic oil, or another strong scent. Feeling confident, he figures the dogs can't smell through that!
But it doesn't work like that. The dog smells the garlic AND the cocaine. The same way you or I would hear the lyrics AND the guitar AND the piano AND the drums in a song.
I don't believe you. Don't assume I'm ignorant or naive of the rest of the world.
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
- Margaret Thatcher
America must listen as well as lead. But don't ever apologise for your values. Tell the world why you're proud of America. Tell them that when the star-spangled banner starts, Americans get to their feet... whatever race, colour, class or creed they are, being American means being free. That's what makes them proud. As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible; but in fact it is transient. The question is, what do you leave behind? What you can bequeath to this anxious world is the light of liberty... destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time and the task is yours to do.
- Tony Blair
Well maybe it's just Americans and Brits that call the USA "America"...
America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.
- Mikhail Gorbachev
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
- George Bernard Shaw
There's the country of America, which you have to defend, but there's also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it's an idea. An idea that's supposed to be contagious.
- Bono
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
- G. K. Chesterton
After I signed, I cried. When I studied American history as a schoolgirl and I read about those who signed the Declaration of Independence, I couldn't imagine these were real people doing something real. And there I was sitting down and signing a declaration of establishment. - Golda Meir
Stop trying to be pedantic. It's obnoxious when you're right, and you're not anyway.
"America" has been an acceptable shortened name for "The United States of America" for well over 200 years. On the other hand, I've never heard anyone collectively refer to North America and South America as "America", even though this too would probably be correct.
Words can have more than one meaning. Would you make the same argument about Australia?
A little background. I am not familiar with this research specifically, but I have exposure to a very similar concept.
I used to do ground search and rescue in New Jersey. A big portion of what we did was woodland SAR for missing persons. Because of this, there was a lot of emphasis put on tracking.
There is a man named Tom Brown Jr. who is basically considered the modern foremost expert on the subject. He learned the basics from a young age from an old Apache scout who was his best friend's grandfather. It sounds incredible, but the man has written several books, both technical, and biographical. The technical ones aren't of much interest to folks who don't have an interest in tracking, but the biographical ones I would highly recommend. He currently runs a school in Toms River, NJ.
The organization I did SAR with put a lot of stock on Tom Brown's methods and incorporated them into their training schools. Eventually we opened up a dedicated tracker school, though I never participated in that level.
There is a technique known as pressure release tracking, where one looks at the characteristics of a track in a soft medium like sand, mud, or to a lesser extent, gravel or such. Within the track exists a whole environment that was created by the state of the organism that made it. Most people can figure out that if you shift your weight to your left, or favor your right foot, or are limping, that you'll see that in a track. But you can also see other things. Is the subject hurt? Is it hurt somewhere other than the legs? Is it tired? Is it male or female? Is it pregnant? How much does it weight? How tall is it? Is it carrying something? Does it have to urinate? Is it sexually aroused?
I know people who have reached the level where they can infer these things accurately. To me, it's not a stretch to believe that there are other ways that this could be done (this shadow technique for instance).
A good tracker can tell a lot by looking at your tracks, so I'd so I don't know how they plan to use gait data in a useful way, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.
Certain sectors of the defense industry, for one. Mostly it stems from fear of camera phones, so they ban all phones from the facility period, camera or not. But there are also other concerns that they have, rightly or not.
IT would work just fine, but so would a "nofollow" tag which would be even easier to implement. The problem is that it is indeed a PITA to implement across the internet.
So Googlebot will come across a web page. It follows a link. The link leads to a page with a form. Googlebot fills out the form based on content already on the site. Googlebot clicks submit. Googlebot goes to the next page, and continues to follow links.
The problem comes when that form was a post form like the one I am typing on right now for a forum, or some other type of form to create user generated content. This makes it seem like google will see the text box and input random content from the site, then post it.
What keeps googlebot from becoming a nonsensical spambot? Yes, you can use nofollow, but there is such a huge quantity of web forms that don't have that now because they've never needed it. Retrofitting all of them web wide is not the most realistic of goals.
As far as the claims that Google should have looked and saw that it's a private road, from examining the Google Streetview photos, I see two signs. A sign on the adjoining street that says "School Bus Stop Ahead", and one of those annoying vertical post style road signs that says "OAKSRIDGE LA" (sic) and presumably "Reis Run Rd" on the perpendicular side (too blurry for me to make out).
Oh, and a road sign above that with an arrow on it advising traffic that the road bends to the left.
That's it. The road doesn't necessarily "look" like it's a state owned road, because it's not even paved. But there are roads I know of that aren't paved that are owned by the township, so that alone probably isn't enough.
Perhaps there *was* a sign, but not only is it not visible now, but there are enough photos from google, that there's nowhere you could say it *could* be.
On the feeder road (Reis Run Rd) there is a curious sign that says "Yellow Belt" with a yellow circle on it. It looks like a standard government reflective road sign, but I do not know what it means. It's situated at the intersection of Reis Run Rd and Rochester Rd so that anyone turning onto Reis Run Rd would see it. Again, this is not a "private road" sign in any way I'm aware of.
At the very end of the road (dead end) there are pictures that google has taken down. But the road is shaped like a "J" There is no way one could get to where the pictures were taken without having to pass signs where there are none.
It is not, (nor does it even pretend to be) an exhaustive enumeration of personal rights.
There are plenty of "rights" not covered in The Constitution. It simply protects specific ones that the founding fathers found to be particularly important to the founding of a free state.
The story submitter as probably a teenage kid who got his head wrapped up in Linux free software, microsoft is bad, government is bad, privacy is king dogma nonsense, and wants to pass that on to his younger siblings. Not saying all those things are untrue, but we all know that there is a certain subset of the geek community that is extremely far to the edge. (Grandma, I know you've never used a computer for, and all you want one for is to look up recipes, TV guide listings, and email your grandkids, but I've set up this Red Hat box here, because free software is important! (30 minute lecture) And you need to have all your traffic encrypted, so I've done that too! Also, don't loose this USB key, it contains your 2048 bit RSA encryption key to unlock your file system!)
I can see my future kids having unmonitored access and their own boxes with their own user names and passwords, some day.
But that day is when they're in high school or so. You know, the age we often trust kids with cars and phones and other things like that. Not at age SEVEN. That's absurd.
I built a box for my girlfriend's 8 year old niece for christmas this year. Stuck Vista on it, mostly because of the parental controls. Her parents are not computer savvy at all, and would never be able to effectively monitor their kid's use of the machine. So I set up remote access so that her aunt and I can check in from time to time instead. Even if we don't have time to visit. I would never dream of handing a young kid a box and letting them have free reign like that. Let alone insisting on forcing it, like the kid in the article is.
It sounds to me like you're right, but this device does the first half (gyroscopic sensing) with a great deal more precision than the Wii remote is capable of.
It's not hard to confuse the Wii remote's gyro sensors via erratic motion, or a combination of motions it doesn't understand.
While this seems like a step up in that respect, there are very few applications that are useful on the Wii without the IR component as a frame of reference for where the screen is.
At best, this would require a quick calibration process to orient it to where the screen is ("touch the upper left corner of your screen and press 'A'. Now touch the lower right corner of your screen and touch 'A'.") At worst, it would only be able to run Wii apps like Wii Sports, Excite Truck and Marble Mania. Apps like Wii Play, or Twilight Princess or Mario Galaxy would not work with this.
I could see Nintendo courting this company to license the tech for Wii 2.0, if they felt they needed the added precision though.
While I'm American and don't know first hand of some of the shops you mentioned, I can still kind of see your point. Except where say that people wouldn't think of EB when asked where to get a Wii. I mean, EB is a video game store. They specialize in these things. I'd say that if people don't think of EB in Canada for Wiis, then EB pretty much doesn't matter at all there.
Slashdot Mirror
...by stupidity.
I think Hanlon's Razor applies here. Many people here on Slashdot like to put on a tinfoil hat and shout "AstroTurfing" for almost anything. I'm harder to convince of that.
I'll put aside what many have pointed out here, that the film in question has already been released in places.
NPR had an interview a month or so ago with David Edelstein, a film critic who happened to be the first to go public with a negative review for Dark Knight. In other words, he was the one responsible for first knocking it down from a 100% rating on metacritic and similar meta-rating sites.
In the interview he said he regretted having been first because of the backlash he received, but that he stood by his rating.
He also went on to point out the deluge of emails he received from angry fans. Many of whom would go on to criticize him at length while prefacing the email with "I haven't actually seen the film yet, but..."
Fanboys are rabid. They defend movies, hardware, software, etc, often sight unseen, because they want their horse to win. Even if they don't actually know what it looks like.
In this case, the movie is based on a book. I don't doubt that many of the votes on NetFlix are folks who have rated the film sight unseen, because they WANT to like it. They're jazzed about it, and they want it to be rated highly.
It's actually not an Opera issue. It's an Adobe issue. They have not released a version of embedded Flash beyond flash 7.
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2007/04/13/wii-browser-out-but-why-flash-7-and-not-8-or-9
Things like this happen more often than you might think, it's just that it generally isn't the kind of thing to garner a lot of attention, or publicity. I've noticed a few changelogs that mentioned that they've removed DRM, and I know there are at least a couple games that don't have DRM on-disc once they reach bargin bin age.
THQ did it with Supreme Commander:
http://files.filefront.com/Supreme+Commander+v3220+to+v3223+Patch/;7131296;/fileinfo.html
Westwood did it with Red Alert:
http://files.filefront.com/Command+Conquer+Red+Alert+3+v105+Patch+EN/;12554251;/fileinfo.html
Not sure about others off the top of my head, but I know that I see if from time to time in change logs.
I don't know if these companies that produce DRM tools license them to publishers on a one time fee basis, or a subscription, or a cost-per-disc basis.
I suspect though that if it's not a one-time cost, that it's not worth it to a publisher to keep paying for DRM after the first few months.
Obligatory:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/
I'd like to second the experience of never having experienced (stability) issues with Pidgin. Or GAIM for that matter. I used it for a long time, and I no longer do. But it's really because it's feature poor / doesn't work as expected, not because of stability.
If a service that Pidgin "supports" supports a feature, I want to be able to use that feature. File transfers, video, either don't work, or don't work right.
I can't speak for plugins though.
Um... while everything you say is indeed true, I don't see how relevant it is.
Anyone that relies on such a legacy application is likley not looking to new versions of Windows in search of an upgrade.
Hell, I'm 99% sure that dos apps that rely on any kind of direct hardware wizardry, like that wouldn't even run on XP, or any version of Windows after. Perhaps not any NT Kernel Windows?
That's why disk imaging, partitioning, and other low-level disk utilities rely on a reboot, or a live-cd to get their respective jobs done when making changes to a system volume that windows has locked.
Again, what you are doing diminishes the value of the product according to the law of supply and demand.
That person may not be able to afford the book, but may scrimp and save, or may wait for the price to come down, or may do any of a thousand other things. But when you reproduce it, it has the same diminishing value that counterfeiting does.
I will admit that to a lesser extent, loaning can do the same thing. If I have a book, and I loan it to you, or a game, or a movie, that may diminish demand for the same., Because once you've read / played / watched it, you may no longer want to purchase it. But One is considered within the bounds of "the rules" and one is generally considered to be outside "the rules".
That said, in western society, where even the poorest among us routinely spend money on fast food and cable TV, and used books are so under-valued, it's difficult for me to envision the scenario you are positing as realistic. If someone truly wants info, they generally can get it cheap enough if they look through used book stores. I'm amazed what I find every time I visit one.
The crucial difference is that this method damages (some would say destroys) the original medium. Ripping a CD or tape does not (minor wear aside).
I'll tell you exactly why. Because your assumption - that is hurts no one, is incorrect.
Let's back up to 2003. Let's say I'm Nintendo. And I want to publish The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition. It's nothing more than a compilation of games that have been out of print from 5-10 years. From the origional Zelda through Majora's Mask.
Under the system you propose, my ability to monetize this would be greatly diminished, simply because it became public domain during the years that I had stopped publishing. Now the market is flooded with copies of my games because I was no longer publishing them. How do I sell them now?
Now Nintendo basically made this game a give-away with Wind Waker, but my point still stands. And you can see how it would basically make endeavors like the Virtual Console worthless.
Let's take a second scenario: What about art? If I'm a famous artist, and I create one copy of a work that fetches an obscene value at auction, should I loose control over the ability to copy that work? Should anybody be able to make prints, or duplicate my work in any way that they choose just because I am no longer producing this work, and therefore no longer benefiting directly monetarily from it? I would imagine that under this system, originals would loose some of their value, because the purchaser would not have any expectation of exclusivity. You are basically opening the gates to as many legal knock-offs as the market will sustain. Values will plummet.
Both these arguments essentially rely on supply and demand factors limiting copies of a work in the market place to keep that work relatively valuable. One can make dozens of non-profit driven arguments as to why a copyright holder would wish to limit distribution of a work for non-profit driven reasons as well.
No denial here.
Obviously it doesn't have the cool-factor of a lone hacker putting something together like this, but Nintendo offered a similar device for the NES in the late 80s called the Nintendo Hands Free Controller (HFC).
I seem to remember reading about it at the time (though I can't verify) that Nintendo also worked with the Starlight Foundation to distribute the devices to hospitals as well.
No.
A good analogy is having a conversation in a crowded room with lots of other conversations going on at once. Your voice doesn't go away just because it is mixed with other sounds. But at a certain point, it will become hard to distinguish from the rest.
The important difference is that humans are better at pinpointing one sound out of many. We are relatively bad at doing the same with scent.
Dogs (and other animals), however are great at this. That's how scent-tracking works, and it's how drug or bomb sniffing dogs are able to find targets that have been "masked" by other scents.
For instance: A drug smuggler is trying to conceal a quantity of cocaine to cross the border with. He knows that he may have to deal with drug sniffing dogs, so he puts the drugs in baggies and then covers those baggies in garlic oil, or another strong scent. Feeling confident, he figures the dogs can't smell through that!
But it doesn't work like that. The dog smells the garlic AND the cocaine. The same way you or I would hear the lyrics AND the guitar AND the piano AND the drums in a song.
I don't believe you. Don't assume I'm ignorant or naive of the rest of the world.
Well maybe it's just Americans and Brits that call the USA "America"...
Okay, maybe not...
See 3.
See 1.
See 1.
See 2.
Stop trying to be pedantic. It's obnoxious when you're right, and you're not anyway.
"America" has been an acceptable shortened name for "The United States of America" for well over 200 years. On the other hand, I've never heard anyone collectively refer to North America and South America as "America", even though this too would probably be correct.
Words can have more than one meaning. Would you make the same argument about Australia?
Your gait isn't so much like a fingerprint.
A little background. I am not familiar with this research specifically, but I have exposure to a very similar concept.
I used to do ground search and rescue in New Jersey. A big portion of what we did was woodland SAR for missing persons. Because of this, there was a lot of emphasis put on tracking.
There is a man named Tom Brown Jr. who is basically considered the modern foremost expert on the subject. He learned the basics from a young age from an old Apache scout who was his best friend's grandfather. It sounds incredible, but the man has written several books, both technical, and biographical. The technical ones aren't of much interest to folks who don't have an interest in tracking, but the biographical ones I would highly recommend. He currently runs a school in Toms River, NJ.
The organization I did SAR with put a lot of stock on Tom Brown's methods and incorporated them into their training schools. Eventually we opened up a dedicated tracker school, though I never participated in that level.
There is a technique known as pressure release tracking, where one looks at the characteristics of a track in a soft medium like sand, mud, or to a lesser extent, gravel or such. Within the track exists a whole environment that was created by the state of the organism that made it. Most people can figure out that if you shift your weight to your left, or favor your right foot, or are limping, that you'll see that in a track. But you can also see other things. Is the subject hurt? Is it hurt somewhere other than the legs? Is it tired? Is it male or female? Is it pregnant? How much does it weight? How tall is it? Is it carrying something? Does it have to urinate? Is it sexually aroused?
I know people who have reached the level where they can infer these things accurately. To me, it's not a stretch to believe that there are other ways that this could be done (this shadow technique for instance).
A good tracker can tell a lot by looking at your tracks, so I'd so I don't know how they plan to use gait data in a useful way, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.
Just nitpicking here:
You make great points. But there was far more than 48 hours of grounded flights contributing to the economic trouble in the wake of 9/11.
The nation panicked. The groundings certainly didn't help, but I'd hardly place the bulk of the blame on that.
It's time to buzz the tower.
Certain sectors of the defense industry, for one. Mostly it stems from fear of camera phones, so they ban all phones from the facility period, camera or not. But there are also other concerns that they have, rightly or not.
IT would work just fine, but so would a "nofollow" tag which would be even easier to implement. The problem is that it is indeed a PITA to implement across the internet.
This brings up a concern from the description.
So Googlebot will come across a web page.
It follows a link.
The link leads to a page with a form.
Googlebot fills out the form based on content already on the site.
Googlebot clicks submit.
Googlebot goes to the next page, and continues to follow links.
The problem comes when that form was a post form like the one I am typing on right now for a forum, or some other type of form to create user generated content. This makes it seem like google will see the text box and input random content from the site, then post it.
What keeps googlebot from becoming a nonsensical spambot? Yes, you can use nofollow, but there is such a huge quantity of web forms that don't have that now because they've never needed it. Retrofitting all of them web wide is not the most realistic of goals.
Oh, no. do you think they can afford to?
I sure hope so!
As far as the claims that Google should have looked and saw that it's a private road, from examining the Google Streetview photos, I see two signs. A sign on the adjoining street that says "School Bus Stop Ahead", and one of those annoying vertical post style road signs that says "OAKSRIDGE LA" (sic) and presumably "Reis Run Rd" on the perpendicular side (too blurry for me to make out).
Oh, and a road sign above that with an arrow on it advising traffic that the road bends to the left.
That's it. The road doesn't necessarily "look" like it's a state owned road, because it's not even paved. But there are roads I know of that aren't paved that are owned by the township, so that alone probably isn't enough.
Perhaps there *was* a sign, but not only is it not visible now, but there are enough photos from google, that there's nowhere you could say it *could* be.
On the feeder road (Reis Run Rd) there is a curious sign that says "Yellow Belt" with a yellow circle on it. It looks like a standard government reflective road sign, but I do not know what it means. It's situated at the intersection of Reis Run Rd and Rochester Rd so that anyone turning onto Reis Run Rd would see it. Again, this is not a "private road" sign in any way I'm aware of.
At the very end of the road (dead end) there are pictures that google has taken down. But the road is shaped like a "J" There is no way one could get to where the pictures were taken without having to pass signs where there are none.
The U.S. Constitution is a wonderful document.
It is not, (nor does it even pretend to be) an exhaustive enumeration of personal rights.
There are plenty of "rights" not covered in The Constitution. It simply protects specific ones that the founding fathers found to be particularly important to the founding of a free state.
Well, I'm not a parent.
But I have a little sense, and I agree 100%.
The story submitter as probably a teenage kid who got his head wrapped up in Linux free software, microsoft is bad, government is bad, privacy is king dogma nonsense, and wants to pass that on to his younger siblings. Not saying all those things are untrue, but we all know that there is a certain subset of the geek community that is extremely far to the edge. (Grandma, I know you've never used a computer for, and all you want one for is to look up recipes, TV guide listings, and email your grandkids, but I've set up this Red Hat box here, because free software is important! (30 minute lecture) And you need to have all your traffic encrypted, so I've done that too! Also, don't loose this USB key, it contains your 2048 bit RSA encryption key to unlock your file system!)
I can see my future kids having unmonitored access and their own boxes with their own user names and passwords, some day.
But that day is when they're in high school or so. You know, the age we often trust kids with cars and phones and other things like that. Not at age SEVEN. That's absurd.
I built a box for my girlfriend's 8 year old niece for christmas this year. Stuck Vista on it, mostly because of the parental controls. Her parents are not computer savvy at all, and would never be able to effectively monitor their kid's use of the machine. So I set up remote access so that her aunt and I can check in from time to time instead. Even if we don't have time to visit. I would never dream of handing a young kid a box and letting them have free reign like that. Let alone insisting on forcing it, like the kid in the article is.
It sounds to me like you're right, but this device does the first half (gyroscopic sensing) with a great deal more precision than the Wii remote is capable of.
It's not hard to confuse the Wii remote's gyro sensors via erratic motion, or a combination of motions it doesn't understand.
While this seems like a step up in that respect, there are very few applications that are useful on the Wii without the IR component as a frame of reference for where the screen is.
At best, this would require a quick calibration process to orient it to where the screen is ("touch the upper left corner of your screen and press 'A'. Now touch the lower right corner of your screen and touch 'A'.") At worst, it would only be able to run Wii apps like Wii Sports, Excite Truck and Marble Mania. Apps like Wii Play, or Twilight Princess or Mario Galaxy would not work with this.
I could see Nintendo courting this company to license the tech for Wii 2.0, if they felt they needed the added precision though.
While I'm American and don't know first hand of some of the shops you mentioned, I can still kind of see your point. Except where say that people wouldn't think of EB when asked where to get a Wii. I mean, EB is a video game store. They specialize in these things. I'd say that if people don't think of EB in Canada for Wiis, then EB pretty much doesn't matter at all there.