In Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig describes the doujinshi (copyright-infringing comics) industry in Japan and describes how it not only fuels the market for "official" manga comics but can influence them as well.
These copycat comics are not a tiny part of the manga market. They are huge. More than 33,000 "circles" of creators from across Japan produce these bits of Walt Disney creativity. More than 450,000 Japanese come together twice a year, in the largest public gathering in the country, to exchange and sell them. This market exists in parallel to the mainstream commercial manga market. In some ways, it obviously competes with that market, but there is no sustained effort by those who control the commercial manga market to shut the doujinshi market down. It flourishes, despite the competition and despite the law....
Yet this illegal market exists and indeed flourishes in Japan, and in the view of many, it is precisely because it exists that Japanese manga flourish.
Total openness is an interesting idea, but only if you are guaranteed that everyone is totally open too. Yes, this means organizations as well as individuals. Otherwise, requiring you to publish your life in order to escape either incompetence or profiling (when the results of either is questionably humane incarceration) is absurd. If the government isn't totally open, then why should you have to be? This project is interesting as a thought/art exercise, but its original intent/purpose makes it another blow against the fourth amendment.
An 80Gig video ipod is $350, which is comparable to the cost of previous high end portable players.
A next-gen console with next-gen interface from Nintendo is half the cost of a PS3. At $250, it is more similar to the prices of previous consoles. than $500.
If a trademarked sound (not even a specific spelling) can be enforced throughout all industries, the good names really will be all taken soon. This lawsuit would make more sense if
(1) youtube (2005) had launched after utube.com (2006), (2) the company behind utube was actually named "You Tube", or (3) youtube was into manufacturing, and not entertainment.
And since you paid for a fully-refundable ticket, you get all your money back.
The point of my post was that you don't have to buy a ticket at all, in case you didn't want any records at all of a purchase and/or didn't have the resources (credit card, phone or net connection, etc.) to purchase the ticket. Instead, you just need some text editor and a printer (though this could be seen as more difficult to acquire than a credit card for some people).
Ask someone who's recently flown to give you their HTML boarding pass, or use one of yours from the past. Change the HTML where obvious (date/time/flight number/name). You don't even have to mess with the barcode(s) cause the people who check boarding passes don't care. Go to the airport, breeze past security, and sample the fine foods and beverages (or simply see someone off at the gate).
All this requires is a printer. No pre-paid CC, no new expenditures at all, no Internet connection required.
Of course, there might be things they DO check that you might not think to change, so this isn't a good idea, but I'm guessing that you could even get by without changing time and flight number at most airports.
I mean, you could go to that no-name place down the road, but you never know, it could end up being worse than McDonald's.
If I'm considering a no-name place down the road that isn't supported by millions of dollars of advertising and support infrastructure and yet is able to stay open, I'd be optimistic enough to think that it might be better than something I know is uniformly awful. If the no-name place is new, at least they'll be wanting to make a good first impression. If variety is the spice of life, why is a consistently bland McSomething so impressive anyway? (And if you think the no-name place is more likely to make you sick, please watch Supersize Me or find another way of waking up).
A Web-based service, the PrefPass registration itself requires only two pieces of information from a user: an e-mail address and the URL of a first Web site or feed in which the user is interested.
So if you're only identified by an already public identifier (that being your email address), what's to prevent people from messing around with other people's preferences? Cookies can be lost by the legitimiate user and spoofed by an attacker. IP-based filering doesn't work for different users behind a common firewall. I wonder how they can get by without some sort of password. I wish they had a technical FAQ to go along with their press release.
Definitely, the only part of a computer I care about is the hard drive (or whatever other storage medium it uses). Every(tangible)thing's replaceable but data is not. Not only that, it is literally priceless. You can insure an heirloom or a computer against damage or loss, but what's a $1000 check compared to years of memories and work?
Isn't it strange that pirating a song costs the record industry thousands of dollars in lost sales, yet a file sitting on your hard drive cannot be insured for a single penny?
Tangentially, this is why I take lots of screenshots in games I play. Taking a screenshot of a memorable moment is like taking a photo of a beautiful scene on vacation: it provides a springboard for reminiscence and all sorts of mushy feelings years afterwards. A game usually plays the same way for everyone, but recording the experience makes it personal.
You're not quite sure how entertaining roller coaster tycoon 3 will be in a few weeks though. $50 is a lot of money after all. And then you step toward the MMORPGs. Now here's something a bit different! Something that you could play with your friends. Something that won't ever end!
Please tell me how it doesn't end after you've paid $50 in total. The joy of automated monthly payments is that you forget you're paying them. =)
By making excuses for idiots who cannot see their way to actually protecting confidential data, you are part of the problem.
Let me be neither the first nor last to say that perfect security for a sprawling heterogeneous institution like the Federal Government is humanly impossible. Even if you have perfect algorithms (which you don't) and perfect code (which you don't) and perfect hardware (which you don't), you'll still have people who make honest mistakes.
What can you do? Try to audit every line of code and you'll still miss things. Do the most extensive background checks and you'll still miss things. If you require more training and paperwork, compliance issues take up so much of your time that you don't get any work done (and you'll still miss things).
Yes, there are problems and they need to be fixed. Yes, the government often deserves the bad grades they get from auditors. Of course not every mistake is honest, and there are some corrupt employees. But inefficiency, corruption, and idiocy creep into every large organization, and saying "fuck him" and calling people idiots is cathartic but useless.
What, for example, have you done in the arena of information security? Since this is Slashdot, you might very well be a security expert. But if you feel strongly about a secure federal government, why don't you try to make a difference instead of posting flames on Slashdot? But since this is Slashdot, you might very well be talking out of your ass. In that case, congrats on the +5 but please get a clue before flaming.
It's easy to call the government inept, and it never gets old. That's called a cheap shot. What improvements can you suggest? I agree there need to be improvements, but I don't consider myself so eminently qualified to deride others for their efforts.
Wait, what? The difference in contrast HURTS my eyes. I find a bright screen in the middle of an otherwise dark wall to be terribly straining.
Both at work and at home, I have a small desk lamp behind the monitor, illuminating the wall in front of me. There's absolutely no glare and my eyes don't have to work so hard to readjust between the bright screen and a dark wall. I know others have posted similar experiences here before. Consider why dynamic range is so important in everything from game engines to photography: high contrast is difficult to do. It makes sense to me that it would strain my eyes as well.
"At the forefront of this are the likes of Bethesda and Bungie - flashy graphics, sequels and series, micropurchases, and universally unsatisfactory gameplay saved only by a few major strengths."
Good post, bad examples. Bungie, whose almost every game had impressive physics and realism for its day (compare Marathon Vs Doom, Myth Vs Command and Conquer, Halo Vs Quake 3). Bungie, who turned genres upside down with innovation (again, Myth: The Fallen Lords) instead of Westwood Studios, the king of RTS franchises. Bethesda, who in TES4 has the most advanced use of unscripted AI NPCs, which leads to unique single-player experiences unmatched in any other game.
So what might be a better example? What about Id, who makes neat 3d engines but also truly bland games? Q2 was a fast engine (compared to the likes of Unreal) but every map was brown, and the single player experience was a joke. Likewise Q3 pushed many FPS, which was well received by serious FPS fans, but just about any professional level designer could have made the game Q3. Even Doom 3 seemed little more than a playable lighting demo, as the massive relative following of Half-life 2 supports.
There's nothing wrong with flashy graphics unless it's the only feature. I've got nVidia's tech demos for that. There's nothing wrong with sequels and expansions if they're done well (SC:Broowdwar's missions were much better than original StarCraft and I enjoyed Half-life 2 as much as the first.) Micropurchases such as those in Oblivion likely won't get much business from me if the mod community is anywhere as strong as Morrowind's, but that's my decision to make for myself. As for unsatisfactory gameplay, I agree with the sentiment but disagree with your specific views.
We ultimately decide who's in power as far as technology goes. We tell the non-techs what to buy, and they believe us. Dell and MS commercials play a large part in obstructing our goals, lying to our non-tech friends and confusing them, but as long as we don't just give in and start to believe the lies there is hope.
There is truth in what you say, but perhaps you are unrealistically optimistic. How long have we been fighting the DMCA now? How much more damaging has it been to research (Felten, Ferguson) and entertainment (bnetd, aibopet.com) than IE6's broken rendering? Well, IE6 is pretty bad, but you get my gist.
The most sorely needed geeks are folks like Lessig (Eldred, Creative Commons), Rick Boucher (DMCRA), and Russ Feingold (voted against PATRIOT Act), who can actually do something. Law trumps code, and law definitely trumps Slashdot.
I'm a big fan of Internet standards, and I haven't used IE since Mozilla's Phoenix 0.2, but we need to be realistic here, and understand the real structure of power in technology.
I wish there was an easier way to sidestep version requirements of extensions. I'm often stuck choosing between security updates and what I consider essential functionality and features. For example, I love TabBrowser Preferences, but its latest version isn't compatible with the latest Firefox v1.5.0.1 so I stick with 1.5. For the longest time after the 1.0 launch, I was still using beta 0.6 because it worked with my extensions and was stable under extreme usage patterns.
So... any chance for implementing an about:config variable we could tweak if we want to use our 2-hour-old extensions with an hour-old Firefox release? I understand the desire to protect users from doing stupid things, but oftentimes so-called incompatible extensions have no problem running on versions they weren't originally designed for.
(I know I can unpack extensions and tweak their compatibility strings manually, but a more forgiving browser would save many steps.)
I was also hoping that the mouse would make the list. I've always hated using a mouse for game controls.
Really? You would prefer a gamepad for a real-time strategy game like StarCraft? A puzzle game like Minesweeper?
A mouse maps controller displacement to in-game displacement. This makes it possible to point and click. This makes it possible to turn as quickly as you want to in games like Quake.
Gamepads and joysticks map displacement to acceleration or to velocity. If you tried to turn using a pad or stick in Quake, you'd be bound by the maximum turning speed of the controller.
Now clearly game pads and joysticks have their uses, but you imply that mice are without exception an inferior interface to games.
Andy Teas with the Houston Apartment Association said that although some would consider cameras an invasion of privacy, "I think a lot of people would appreciate the thought of extra eyes looking out for them."
Yeah you'll be so safe. So when you get mugged outside your apartment at midnight, I'm sure there'll be an officer looking through that particular camera at that particular time, so they'll immediately dispatch a patrol car to the scene without you or a neighbor even having to reach a phone. You might be able to use something like this for evidence, but safety involves the lack of crime, not prosecution after the fact.
The excuses used in defense of the policy tell me that these are as relevant as ever:
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Opinion in Olmstead vs. U.S., 1928
My greatest fear is that too many members of the public will embrace the government's call to give up some freedom in return for greater safety, only to find that they have lost freedom without gaining safety. -- ACLU President Nadine Strossen, Reason, December, 2001
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- Amendment IV, United States Bill of Rights
That's what Americans do now. They're always willing to trade away a little of their freedom in exchange for the feeling, the illusion of security. -- George Carlin, You Are All Diseased
Or maybe he needs to switch tactics. If you're losing an argument do you speak louder, or do you approach the topic from another perspective? Which of those two is more likely to convince your opponent?
Stallman tried for 25 years and failed. He's unwilling to change, so let's give Lessig's ideas a shot.
2. if you stop using IE on your laptop and use Firefox, noone REDUCES the count of IE users by one, they only INCREASE the count of Firefox users. Thus, IE will always have more users, since they never LOSE them when you switch to Firefox or Opera.
Depends on if you're trying to track downloads and installations, or trying to track users based on user agent strings. Both have problems, but the second method doesn't suffer from the problem you mention.
How do you attract players when existing players are jumping ship? Many players start a MMO because they have friends who are already playing. The point of a MMO is as much the community as it is the dev-created content. If you don't know anyone in the game, you could certainly make friends, but I think most people start because existing friends are already playing.
At one point, I would have recommended to anyone looking to start playing a MMO to take a look at SWG. It had player cities. It had huge planet maps nearly free of barriers (unlike games like EQ2 that have many cliff walls and other barriers). It had an innovative profession system where you could multiclass as much as you liked. It had problems and shortcomings, but the overall experience was positive, and I was lucky to be in some PAs (a.k.a. guilds) and cities that were mostly free of griefers and immature dolts.
Gradually, everything changed. They killed off my server of choice (Test Center). They killed off my professions of choice (Entertainer, Creature Handler, Melee Combat Professions). They turned combat from a community-supporting system where you could talk while fighting to yet another first-person shooter.
I didn't join because of the Star Wars universe. I didn't join because of the game's features. I joined because some friends played it and liked it. Only after I joined did I learn to appreciate its unique features that were then gradually taken away. At this point, I would not recommend that anyone join the game. It's not only the changes that they made but also the way they made them that changed my mind. (Example: announcing NGE changes right after an expansion ships, so that players would rush to buy the expansion. They offered refunds only after the massive outcry against that devious tactic.)
SOE, if you really think you can alienate your original fanbase and attract a new one, best of luck. But even if you are successful, what then? You will have a community of twitch gamers, focused entirely on combat, that don't understand what a unique idea SWG was.
FULL standards compliance is a big deal, is it? I hope you're not using anything that uses Gecko, such as Netscape 7, Mozilla, or Firefox.
Firefox/Mozilla doesn't even fully implement HTML 4.0, nor has it done so in any point in its history, nor is there a target milestone for doing so. Just one example is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101
Ok so they are choosing not to implement support for displaying soft hyphens. If you hate IE6 for not implementing support for max-width (a css thing) or ABBR (an html thing), don't be a hypocrite. At least most of IE6's compliance issues are (claimed to be) solved in IE7: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx
Notice that it's been over five years since the bug was reported, and there is no target for its fix. Imagine the fun that Slashdot would have over a 5-year-old IE bug.
I have used Firefox as my primary browser since Phoenix 0.2beta, and I love it. But I'm not going to say it's perfect (or even perfectly standards-compliant).
Slashdot Mirror
In Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig describes the doujinshi (copyright-infringing comics) industry in Japan and describes how it not only fuels the market for "official" manga comics but can influence them as well.
Linky: http://www.sslug.dk/~chlor/lessig/freeculture/c-piracy.html#creators
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_159222541.h tml =)
Total openness is an interesting idea, but only if you are guaranteed that everyone is totally open too. Yes, this means organizations as well as individuals. Otherwise, requiring you to publish your life in order to escape either incompetence or profiling (when the results of either is questionably humane incarceration) is absurd. If the government isn't totally open, then why should you have to be? This project is interesting as a thought/art exercise, but its original intent/purpose makes it another blow against the fourth amendment.
The subject line should have said:
Warming a Very Tiny Piece of Mars For Terraforming
An 80Gig video ipod is $350, which is comparable to the cost of previous high end portable players.
A next-gen console with next-gen interface from Nintendo is half the cost of a PS3. At $250, it is more similar to the prices of previous consoles. than $500.
You might argue that the PS3, at launch, offers enough to justify the $500 price tag. With fewer launch titles than the Wii and the ability to play the 55 movies currently released for a format currently embroiled in a format war, I'm not convinced.
If a trademarked sound (not even a specific spelling) can be enforced throughout all industries, the good names really will be all taken soon. This lawsuit would make more sense if
(1) youtube (2005) had launched after utube.com (2006),
(2) the company behind utube was actually named "You Tube", or
(3) youtube was into manufacturing, and not entertainment.
The point of my post was that you don't have to buy a ticket at all, in case you didn't want any records at all of a purchase and/or didn't have the resources (credit card, phone or net connection, etc.) to purchase the ticket. Instead, you just need some text editor and a printer (though this could be seen as more difficult to acquire than a credit card for some people).
... (but not onto the plane).
Ask someone who's recently flown to give you their HTML boarding pass, or use one of yours from the past. Change the HTML where obvious (date/time/flight number/name). You don't even have to mess with the barcode(s) cause the people who check boarding passes don't care. Go to the airport, breeze past security, and sample the fine foods and beverages (or simply see someone off at the gate).
All this requires is a printer. No pre-paid CC, no new expenditures at all, no Internet connection required.
Of course, there might be things they DO check that you might not think to change, so this isn't a good idea, but I'm guessing that you could even get by without changing time and flight number at most airports.
I mean, you could go to that no-name place down the road, but you never know, it could end up being worse than McDonald's.
If I'm considering a no-name place down the road that isn't supported by millions of dollars of advertising and support infrastructure and yet is able to stay open, I'd be optimistic enough to think that it might be better than something I know is uniformly awful. If the no-name place is new, at least they'll be wanting to make a good first impression. If variety is the spice of life, why is a consistently bland McSomething so impressive anyway? (And if you think the no-name place is more likely to make you sick, please watch Supersize Me or find another way of waking up).
A Web-based service, the PrefPass registration itself requires only two pieces of information from a user: an e-mail address and the URL of a first Web site or feed in which the user is interested.
So if you're only identified by an already public identifier (that being your email address), what's to prevent people from messing around with other people's preferences? Cookies can be lost by the legitimiate user and spoofed by an attacker. IP-based filering doesn't work for different users behind a common firewall. I wonder how they can get by without some sort of password. I wish they had a technical FAQ to go along with their press release.
Definitely, the only part of a computer I care about is the hard drive (or whatever other storage medium it uses). Every(tangible)thing's replaceable but data is not. Not only that, it is literally priceless. You can insure an heirloom or a computer against damage or loss, but what's a $1000 check compared to years of memories and work?
Isn't it strange that pirating a song costs the record industry thousands of dollars in lost sales, yet a file sitting on your hard drive cannot be insured for a single penny?
Tangentially, this is why I take lots of screenshots in games I play. Taking a screenshot of a memorable moment is like taking a photo of a beautiful scene on vacation: it provides a springboard for reminiscence and all sorts of mushy feelings years afterwards. A game usually plays the same way for everyone, but recording the experience makes it personal.
You're not quite sure how entertaining roller coaster tycoon 3 will be in a few weeks though. $50 is a lot of money after all. And then you step toward the MMORPGs. Now here's something a bit different! Something that you could play with your friends. Something that won't ever end!
Please tell me how it doesn't end after you've paid $50 in total. The joy of automated monthly payments is that you forget you're paying them. =)
Let me be neither the first nor last to say that perfect security for a sprawling heterogeneous institution like the Federal Government is humanly impossible. Even if you have perfect algorithms (which you don't) and perfect code (which you don't) and perfect hardware (which you don't), you'll still have people who make honest mistakes.
What can you do? Try to audit every line of code and you'll still miss things. Do the most extensive background checks and you'll still miss things. If you require more training and paperwork, compliance issues take up so much of your time that you don't get any work done (and you'll still miss things).
Yes, there are problems and they need to be fixed. Yes, the government often deserves the bad grades they get from auditors. Of course not every mistake is honest, and there are some corrupt employees. But inefficiency, corruption, and idiocy creep into every large organization, and saying "fuck him" and calling people idiots is cathartic but useless.
What, for example, have you done in the arena of information security? Since this is Slashdot, you might very well be a security expert. But if you feel strongly about a secure federal government, why don't you try to make a difference instead of posting flames on Slashdot? But since this is Slashdot, you might very well be talking out of your ass. In that case, congrats on the +5 but please get a clue before flaming.
It's easy to call the government inept, and it never gets old. That's called a cheap shot. What improvements can you suggest? I agree there need to be improvements, but I don't consider myself so eminently qualified to deride others for their efforts.
Just wait till they get to Inebriated Iguana and Vomiting Vixen. They're all possible, according to the list.
Wait, what? The difference in contrast HURTS my eyes. I find a bright screen in the middle of an otherwise dark wall to be terribly straining.
Both at work and at home, I have a small desk lamp behind the monitor, illuminating the wall in front of me. There's absolutely no glare and my eyes don't have to work so hard to readjust between the bright screen and a dark wall. I know others have posted similar experiences here before. Consider why dynamic range is so important in everything from game engines to photography: high contrast is difficult to do. It makes sense to me that it would strain my eyes as well.
"At the forefront of this are the likes of Bethesda and Bungie - flashy graphics, sequels and series, micropurchases, and universally unsatisfactory gameplay saved only by a few major strengths."
Good post, bad examples. Bungie, whose almost every game had impressive physics and realism for its day (compare Marathon Vs Doom, Myth Vs Command and Conquer, Halo Vs Quake 3). Bungie, who turned genres upside down with innovation (again, Myth: The Fallen Lords) instead of Westwood Studios, the king of RTS franchises. Bethesda, who in TES4 has the most advanced use of unscripted AI NPCs, which leads to unique single-player experiences unmatched in any other game.
So what might be a better example? What about Id, who makes neat 3d engines but also truly bland games? Q2 was a fast engine (compared to the likes of Unreal) but every map was brown, and the single player experience was a joke. Likewise Q3 pushed many FPS, which was well received by serious FPS fans, but just about any professional level designer could have made the game Q3. Even Doom 3 seemed little more than a playable lighting demo, as the massive relative following of Half-life 2 supports.
There's nothing wrong with flashy graphics unless it's the only feature. I've got nVidia's tech demos for that. There's nothing wrong with sequels and expansions if they're done well (SC:Broowdwar's missions were much better than original StarCraft and I enjoyed Half-life 2 as much as the first.) Micropurchases such as those in Oblivion likely won't get much business from me if the mod community is anywhere as strong as Morrowind's, but that's my decision to make for myself. As for unsatisfactory gameplay, I agree with the sentiment but disagree with your specific views.
IM DONT MATH FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE
<FreshBrew> HELL FUCKING YES
<kolby> you still in english?
( http://www.bash.org/?4602 )
We ultimately decide who's in power as far as technology goes. We tell the non-techs what to buy, and they believe us. Dell and MS commercials play a large part in obstructing our goals, lying to our non-tech friends and confusing them, but as long as we don't just give in and start to believe the lies there is hope.
There is truth in what you say, but perhaps you are unrealistically optimistic. How long have we been fighting the DMCA now? How much more damaging has it been to research (Felten, Ferguson) and entertainment (bnetd, aibopet.com) than IE6's broken rendering? Well, IE6 is pretty bad, but you get my gist.
The most sorely needed geeks are folks like Lessig (Eldred, Creative Commons), Rick Boucher (DMCRA), and Russ Feingold (voted against PATRIOT Act), who can actually do something. Law trumps code, and law definitely trumps Slashdot.
Suck.com said it best: http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/09/08/daily.html
I'm a big fan of Internet standards, and I haven't used IE since Mozilla's Phoenix 0.2, but we need to be realistic here, and understand the real structure of power in technology.
I wish there was an easier way to sidestep version requirements of extensions. I'm often stuck choosing between security updates and what I consider essential functionality and features. For example, I love TabBrowser Preferences, but its latest version isn't compatible with the latest Firefox v1.5.0.1 so I stick with 1.5. For the longest time after the 1.0 launch, I was still using beta 0.6 because it worked with my extensions and was stable under extreme usage patterns.
So... any chance for implementing an about:config variable we could tweak if we want to use our 2-hour-old extensions with an hour-old Firefox release? I understand the desire to protect users from doing stupid things, but oftentimes so-called incompatible extensions have no problem running on versions they weren't originally designed for.
(I know I can unpack extensions and tweak their compatibility strings manually, but a more forgiving browser would save many steps.)
--Curby
I was also hoping that the mouse would make the list. I've always hated using a mouse for game controls.
Really? You would prefer a gamepad for a real-time strategy game like StarCraft? A puzzle game like Minesweeper?
A mouse maps controller displacement to in-game displacement. This makes it possible to point and click. This makes it possible to turn as quickly as you want to in games like Quake.
Gamepads and joysticks map displacement to acceleration or to velocity. If you tried to turn using a pad or stick in Quake, you'd be bound by the maximum turning speed of the controller.
Now clearly game pads and joysticks have their uses, but you imply that mice are without exception an inferior interface to games.
Yeah you'll be so safe. So when you get mugged outside your apartment at midnight, I'm sure there'll be an officer looking through that particular camera at that particular time, so they'll immediately dispatch a patrol car to the scene without you or a neighbor even having to reach a phone. You might be able to use something like this for evidence, but safety involves the lack of crime, not prosecution after the fact.
The excuses used in defense of the policy tell me that these are as relevant as ever:
Or maybe he needs to switch tactics. If you're losing an argument do you speak louder, or do you approach the topic from another perspective? Which of those two is more likely to convince your opponent?
Stallman tried for 25 years and failed. He's unwilling to change, so let's give Lessig's ideas a shot.
Depends on if you're trying to track downloads and installations, or trying to track users based on user agent strings. Both have problems, but the second method doesn't suffer from the problem you mention.
How do you attract players when existing players are jumping ship? Many players start a MMO because they have friends who are already playing. The point of a MMO is as much the community as it is the dev-created content. If you don't know anyone in the game, you could certainly make friends, but I think most people start because existing friends are already playing.
At one point, I would have recommended to anyone looking to start playing a MMO to take a look at SWG. It had player cities. It had huge planet maps nearly free of barriers (unlike games like EQ2 that have many cliff walls and other barriers). It had an innovative profession system where you could multiclass as much as you liked. It had problems and shortcomings, but the overall experience was positive, and I was lucky to be in some PAs (a.k.a. guilds) and cities that were mostly free of griefers and immature dolts.
Gradually, everything changed. They killed off my server of choice (Test Center). They killed off my professions of choice (Entertainer, Creature Handler, Melee Combat Professions). They turned combat from a community-supporting system where you could talk while fighting to yet another first-person shooter.
I didn't join because of the Star Wars universe. I didn't join because of the game's features. I joined because some friends played it and liked it. Only after I joined did I learn to appreciate its unique features that were then gradually taken away. At this point, I would not recommend that anyone join the game. It's not only the changes that they made but also the way they made them that changed my mind. (Example: announcing NGE changes right after an expansion ships, so that players would rush to buy the expansion. They offered refunds only after the massive outcry against that devious tactic.)
SOE, if you really think you can alienate your original fanbase and attract a new one, best of luck. But even if you are successful, what then? You will have a community of twitch gamers, focused entirely on combat, that don't understand what a unique idea SWG was.
FULL standards compliance is a big deal, is it? I hope you're not using anything that uses Gecko, such as Netscape 7, Mozilla, or Firefox.
2 .aspx
Firefox/Mozilla doesn't even fully implement HTML 4.0, nor has it done so in any point in its history, nor is there a target milestone for doing so. Just one example is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101
Ok so they are choosing not to implement support for displaying soft hyphens. If you hate IE6 for not implementing support for max-width (a css thing) or ABBR (an html thing), don't be a hypocrite. At least most of IE6's compliance issues are (claimed to be) solved in IE7: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/44524
Notice that it's been over five years since the bug was reported, and there is no target for its fix. Imagine the fun that Slashdot would have over a 5-year-old IE bug.
I have used Firefox as my primary browser since Phoenix 0.2beta, and I love it. But I'm not going to say it's perfect (or even perfectly standards-compliant).