except a soccer mom does not know how to write a small script to get the files:)
True, but she can use "Find" to hunt down files ending in.jpg,.mpg,.avi...
Of course, the kid could always rename the extensions of encrypt the whole hard drive if he/she wanted, but by that point Mom's gonna figure out that something is up.
IMHO, if you want to keep the kid from peeping @ pr0n, simply move his computer to the living room, where everyone gets to see where he's surfing.
I remember the same discussion when DDR2 was hitting stores.
...or when PC-133 SDRAM first came out. Or when 72-pin DIMMs first came out. Or when you could stuff 4MB onto a 286 instead of just 1 or 2.
Each step was nic,e, but hampered by the tech that used those parts (e.g. DOS and its apps were still fighting each other between EMS and XMS for using anything over 640k, back when boxes started coming out with 1, then 2MB of RAM on 'em).
...and don't get me started on how frickin' worthless that 512k RAM cartridge turned out to be on my old Commodore 64. ITt took forever just to set the thing up and load the handful of programs that made use of it (for instance, 20 minutes just to load and see a hiighly crude but realtime-rendered spinning Earth on the screen...)
But, never fear - I'm sure the next version of Vista (or perhaps even its service packs) will demand every ounce of bandwidth that DDR3 can give and then some...
In that vein, I'd figure they would've had an easier time (license-wise) to take a BSD kernel, obfuscate the hell out of it, and lash a Windows UI and all the 'doze-specific APIs on top of it.
I mean, there is historical precedent (Windows' TCP/IP stack), less effort required to "play nice" w/ FOSS-friendly corps, and they'd (for once) have something more secure than what they've been issuing forth in the OS market.
Perhaps some other people should point out these concerns to those people, who probably have enough going on in their lives to not contemplate their legal status with regard to their computer applications.
Oh, no... I say let 'em find out the hard way.
The sight of MSFT's Redmond campus in flames on CNN, surrounded by a huge chanting mob of pissed-off (and cut-off) users? It would be frickin' priceless.
Okay - all kidding aside, I am serious about wanting to let them find out the hard way in this case. It's going to be pretty obvious to anyone --with, say, a pr0n collection-- that suddenly his or her data is going to be under someone else's control and whim, and maybe that's not a good thing. Those who fail to recognize even that basic of a principle kinda deserves what they get.
I'm not saying we should suddenly institute any form of Digital Darwinism here, but sometimes you don't really want to hand-hold and spoon-feed the general population so much, y'know? Maybe sometimes the general public does need to discover to their horror that they screwed up... it tends to instill a much longer memory and distrust of That Which is Bad in this industry.
Considering that both Voyagers each carry a mechanical device and a gold disk that bears lots of rich data about Earth and Humanity, I'd say that the best damned Backup/DR data storage effort we've made so far in the history of mankind.
OTOH, it makes perfect sense that an energy company wants to maintain their dominance even after their original product (petroleum) runs out. Now if BP is busily publishing their research results on all of the alternate energies, cool... but if they're keeping it a secret (or at least hard-to-get), then it's merely a matter of going from being a dominant force in one segment of the energy industry towards being a dominant force in the others, before the rest realize what's up and tries to muscle in on its new-found turf.
Now if BP was busily passing knowledge of its research along openly (a'la FOSS), then props to 'em. Otherwise they're not much more in my eyes than, say, MSFT adapting their products to run in some new technology with a lot of growth potential.
That may have easily been true for NT 4.0, but (IIRC) Win2k and later stretches 'em out a lot more than 8 chars, esp. with AD password policies turned on. (No, not defending 'doze per se, but it simply doesn't parse IMHO).
But then, NT 4.0 once let you have perfect access to its SAM registry keys by simply letting at.exe open regedt32 for you.
(PS: If it helps, I do agree w/ you perfectly that that's a pretty crappy password.)
Pardon me if I don't cry out with excitement at this "discovery." It looks more like a built in obsolescence feature has been circumvented rather than an actual technical breakthrough.
Oh, great... so now Martin Marietta is gonna file a DMCA complaint and demand the arrest of...
...oh, wait; this ain't the computer field we're talking here, so common sense actually applies. My Bad.
This is bull shit of the most dangerous kind. It was Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, who said that the key to a successful propaganda campaign is to give the appearance of diversity, while at the same time making sure that all media venues convey the same basic message.[/quote]
Godwin's Law aside, no, it isn't "Framing", esp. based on one partisan writer's opinion (insider or not...) the cite you provided illustrates perfectly the confirmation bias that I mentioned earlier ("outfoxed.org"? a former (fired? disgruntled?) employee? I mean, c'mon... that's not exactly an unbiased or objective authority you've got there).
Incidentally, I could just as easily sink to the same level and claim that CNN is really 'liberal' and that Glenn Beck is merely a part of CNN's 'frame'. That said, I refuse to make such a comparison; CNN, like Fox, is just another cable news channel - nothing more.
You're trying to make an objective statement out of subjective criteria here: "barely (if at all)"...according to whom?
This is exactly what I'm talking about here... you make several terribly bad assumptions that are heavily colored by your own ideology as "facts". I won't even touch the fevered Nazi reference. It ends up fueling a self-perpetuating outrage that eventually consumes your every thought concerning politics.
Man - I categorically refuse to participate in such things anymore.:/
Partisanship, Fox-hatred and left v. right wing BS arguments aside, at least Fox News does go out of their way to provide two opposing viewpoints, and it seems rather popular. Sure, folks will immediately scream about Colmes' "moderate" tag, but honestly, that's nothing more than spin on Colmes' part (so as to paint his opposite as "extreme").
I have yet to see a credible truly-moderate opinionator (why? because 'beige' simply doesn't attract the attention that red or blue does, ne?) So please, let's dispense with any such notion that Colmes (or Kos, or whomever of any political stripe) is "moderate" - it's a strawman argument, to put it charitably.
Kos is nothing more than a prettified version of the Democratic Underground, IMHO. I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of left-leaning money being fed to his site, just as I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of right-leaning money being fed to his opposite counterparts' sites.
Both sides have their shills; both sites exist to feed the confirmation biases of their respective True Believers(TM, pat. pending).
That said, I wish everyone luck in removing the political money-laundering that accompanies sites like Kos. His income (again, like that from various others of either side) is likely funneled through a series of front organizations and companies who essentially parallel a given party's agendae (e.g. George Soros' funding of various 'grass-roots' events).
If you want to seriously remove political money from such events, then have the gov't set up a series of servers, where any political party can have equal bandwidth and space to proclaim whatever political theories turn them on (in a limited but equally accessible set of formats - text and image/multimedia files under a certain size, ferinstance). Sort of like a "Speakers' Corner" of sorts. It's not like they can't afford it or anything.
Is it just for throttling bit torrent traffic? Can't it also be used to report on potentially illegal bit torrent transfers, as well as legal ones?
If any ISP did, it would kiss away any hope of a DMCA safe-harbor claim. As an ISP or other such party, if you know about it, you're supposed to stop it, not throttle it. Not stopping it immediately upon discovery and confirmation IIRC constitutes complicity.
...I had let the sub lapse a few years ago, but I remember the thing being chock-full of damned nice tricks and tips. I still have and use the CD (all issues up to 2003 IIRC) once in awhile when I'm looking to do something off-the-wall, or just get stuck on something design-wise to see if an idea/solution is even remotely possible.
It was one of the few mags I'd had that put more into content, than into fluff and adverts.
So, umm, will they carry on in a web-only version?
/P
Re:Grammar flames are legit for published articles
on
Network Warrior
·
· Score: 1
At the risk of defending a "grammar nazi," you don't complain when your C++ compiler yells at you for syntax errors (e.g. forgetting a semicolon, leaving out a comma in a parameter list, misspelling a keyword, etc) so why do you complain when an English "compiler" does?:)
...because his C++-capable compiler actually does something useful and will quiet down when he tells it to?
(not banging on you, mind... but sometimes the grammar nazis tend to be mroe than a bit overbearing and come across as egotistical - something that even my debugger hasn't managed yet).
(of course, that only holds true until some bright soul re-writes GDB to spew "hahahahaha! you suck!" to STDOUT...)
Pigeonholing is even more pervasive than you thought...
Utah (at least Davis County - whose system I once taught in) had decided a couple of years ago that students need to pick out what career path they want in Junior High School. Hell, what I wanted to do for a living changed nearly every week when I was that age. (and to be honest, it changed a lot until about 12 years ago).
IMHO, a lot of what school boards are trying to do are a disservice to the kids, and seem designed to make their lives even easier than before. Given that the majority of parents and citizens are rather apathetic (how many of you folks go to vote, and simply just pick somebody for the school board, not knowing a damned thing about what each candidate stands for, or what their track records are? I admit that I used to be that way).
The only cure I know of is to throw the existing boards out - completely - every few election cycles. Term-Limit the SOB's. Then you find and elect folks who will go in and slash the hell out of the bureaucracy that exists.
Then, and most importantly - you do your best to get the federal gov't out of the school business. Too many schools have become slaves to federal funding and federal rules, when it's the states who should be doing all the work.
Yes and no... I've seen it from both sides of that question.
I was that kid who simply read ahead and blew through the tests, all without bothering w/ such niceties as homework and appearing to give a damn in class. Most teachers came down hard as a result, simply to 'keep discipline'. A few took the time to recognize that I'd studied ahead, and gave me more challenging aspects to study during class. For example, in my first High School US History class, most students got by with a small one-page summary on, say, all of World War Two. Meanwhile, I (and a couple of others in the class) found that the same assignment was a bit more detailed, and demanded an explanation of everything from the political roots and motives of each belligerent nation ("Versailles Treaty", "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", etc) to the after-effects (e.g. Atomic Weaponry, the Cold War, etc). But then, those teachers were rare (and in my case, they were all referred to as "Sister" and wore habits).
As a former teacher myself, I found that challenging the brighter students beyond the curricula was pretty labor-intensive, but it paid off. I know of quite a few students who not only took the extra load on, but only became more and more curious about what they were studying (CompSci basic and intermediate courses). I remember finding out about Gentoo Linux - from a student who was spending his lab time installing it (and as anyone who has messed with the earliest Gentoo distros know, it takes more dedication than most mortals are willing to expend...) He's a junior *nix sysadmin for a local VoIP company now, barely three years after he left the school. Another of these owns his own company and runs the local 2600 group - he's done the latter for years (he was also the only student to successfully crack my classroom LAN - and Hell Yes I gave him a grade boost for pulling it off and then explaining how he did it). Another got a full-ride scholarship to a four-year degree, courtesy of Novell - I suspect that she'll do very well once she graduates. I'm still shocked and amazed that they and others like them would even credit me for any part of how they turned out.
Students like those are very rare IMHO, and I enjoyed spending time with them, telling them what I know, and even learning from them, far more than I did in listening to the 10^4th parent - storming in and demanding to know why Their Little Angel didn't get an "A" (or in a couple handfuls of cases, even a passing grade...)
That said, I know hordes of my former peers who did --and still do-- their level best to cruise towards retirement. Grade inflation was (is) rampant and pervasive in their books (hell, it made them look good to the folks that mattered to them, though very few others). They simply didn't give a damn, so long as you showed up to class every day, made it look like you were learning, and didn't break anything. At first I resented them for surviving the layoffs while I and a few others (as low folks on the seniority pole) got the slip. Then again, I'm making twice my old teaching salary now, while the surviving faculty are still there, still in their holding patterns, still counting years and absorbing oxygen. Then again still, there are likely lots of kids with the energy and passion for the subject of computers, and they'll find little to nourish their brains there.
Tangents aside, though - there is far too much variation on both sides of the desk to really create anything definitive and apply it to either students or teachers as a general rule. It's damned ugly. Then again, occasionally you find it damned beautiful.
Name one that even approaches half the market penetration. There aren't. I'm not saying its right, I'm not saying Office, especially the new version, is good, I'm just saying that this is a very difficult market to enter, even for a major company.
Just because one does not exist does not mean that one will not exist.
Apple was once the established market leader for PC's. Not today. Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".
I'm not saying that any old app suite will simply come in and stomp an established market leader, but I am saying that I wouldn't be so sure that what dominates today will dominate tomorrow. Even MS Word had to overcome Word Perfect's market penetration, and WP was pretty damned powerful for what it did back in the day.
First, MSFT's mumblings about patents will likely go splat if a single MSFT voucher purchases a single copy of SuSE with GPLv3 code on it - at least for any patents covering those bits of code (I can imagine Samba w/ it's impending GPLv3 conversion wiping out plenty, if there are any).
Second, MSFT is rather stuck - While I don't know all the agreement details, I'm willing to bet that it will likely have the effect of cutting the legs out from under a lot of anti-competitive initiatives that MSFT might try. Hoveispan isn't exactly a stupid man.
Besides - as long as it doesn't compromise FOSS and the GPL any? Why not at least attempt to embrace the Beast, extend the Beast, then extinguish the Beast? It'd be one Hell of an ironic way to shove MSFT into obscurity.
If the property in a photograph is recognizable and unique to the business, they can demand and get a release, or they can demand royalties, or they can demand its removal.
Like I said - it would be rare, but it is something to consider.
...if and whenever you can, get the data locked up tight in your home network.
If you otherwise cannot avoid it, get each laptop user a geek-stick of appropriate size (a couple of GB), format it with an encrypted file system, and make 'em store everything even remotely sensitive on that. The odds are good that no one is going to go out of their way to target and steal a geek-stick at the airport (at least not as much as they'd want your laptop), and you can be reasonably sure that it will survive being dropped, kicked, shoved about in luggage, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but she can use "Find" to hunt down files ending in .jpg, .mpg, .avi...
Of course, the kid could always rename the extensions of encrypt the whole hard drive if he/she wanted, but by that point Mom's gonna figure out that something is up.
IMHO, if you want to keep the kid from peeping @ pr0n, simply move his computer to the living room, where everyone gets to see where he's surfing.
Each step was nic,e, but hampered by the tech that used those parts (e.g. DOS and its apps were still fighting each other between EMS and XMS for using anything over 640k, back when boxes started coming out with 1, then 2MB of RAM on 'em).
But, never fear - I'm sure the next version of Vista (or perhaps even its service packs) will demand every ounce of bandwidth that DDR3 can give and then some...
$ uname -a
Linux eschaton 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 #1 SMP Fri Jul 27 18:10:34 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
I mean, there is historical precedent (Windows' TCP/IP stack), less effort required to "play nice" w/ FOSS-friendly corps, and they'd (for once) have something more secure than what they've been issuing forth in the OS market.
Perhaps some other people should point out these concerns to those people, who probably have enough going on in their lives to not contemplate their legal status with regard to their computer applications.
Oh, no... I say let 'em find out the hard way.
The sight of MSFT's Redmond campus in flames on CNN, surrounded by a huge chanting mob of pissed-off (and cut-off) users? It would be frickin' priceless.
Okay - all kidding aside, I am serious about wanting to let them find out the hard way in this case. It's going to be pretty obvious to anyone --with, say, a pr0n collection-- that suddenly his or her data is going to be under someone else's control and whim, and maybe that's not a good thing. Those who fail to recognize even that basic of a principle kinda deserves what they get.
I'm not saying we should suddenly institute any form of Digital Darwinism here, but sometimes you don't really want to hand-hold and spoon-feed the general population so much, y'know? Maybe sometimes the general public does need to discover to their horror that they screwed up... it tends to instill a much longer memory and distrust of That Which is Bad in this industry.
I guess the point is, it's cool that they're doing it and all, but let's not get all warm and fuzzy about their motives for doing so.
OTOH, it makes perfect sense that an energy company wants to maintain their dominance even after their original product (petroleum) runs out. Now if BP is busily publishing their research results on all of the alternate energies, cool... but if they're keeping it a secret (or at least hard-to-get), then it's merely a matter of going from being a dominant force in one segment of the energy industry towards being a dominant force in the others, before the rest realize what's up and tries to muscle in on its new-found turf.
Now if BP was busily passing knowledge of its research along openly (a'la FOSS), then props to 'em. Otherwise they're not much more in my eyes than, say, MSFT adapting their products to run in some new technology with a lot of growth potential.
That may have easily been true for NT 4.0, but (IIRC) Win2k and later stretches 'em out a lot more than 8 chars, esp. with AD password policies turned on. (No, not defending 'doze per se, but it simply doesn't parse IMHO).
But then, NT 4.0 once let you have perfect access to its SAM registry keys by simply letting at.exe open regedt32 for you.
(PS: If it helps, I do agree w/ you perfectly that that's a pretty crappy password.)
Oh, great... so now Martin Marietta is gonna file a DMCA complaint and demand the arrest of...
Good Show in either case!
Godwin's Law aside, no, it isn't "Framing", esp. based on one partisan writer's opinion (insider or not...) the cite you provided illustrates perfectly the confirmation bias that I mentioned earlier ("outfoxed.org"? a former (fired? disgruntled?) employee? I mean, c'mon... that's not exactly an unbiased or objective authority you've got there).
Incidentally, I could just as easily sink to the same level and claim that CNN is really 'liberal' and that Glenn Beck is merely a part of CNN's 'frame'. That said, I refuse to make such a comparison; CNN, like Fox, is just another cable news channel - nothing more.
[quote]They intentionally select weak voiced, barely (if at all) left-of-center people.[/quote]
You're trying to make an objective statement out of subjective criteria here: "barely (if at all)" ...according to whom?
This is exactly what I'm talking about here... you make several terribly bad assumptions that are heavily colored by your own ideology as "facts". I won't even touch the fevered Nazi reference. It ends up fueling a self-perpetuating outrage that eventually consumes your every thought concerning politics.
Man - I categorically refuse to participate in such things anymore. :/
Partisanship, Fox-hatred and left v. right wing BS arguments aside, at least Fox News does go out of their way to provide two opposing viewpoints, and it seems rather popular. Sure, folks will immediately scream about Colmes' "moderate" tag, but honestly, that's nothing more than spin on Colmes' part (so as to paint his opposite as "extreme").
I have yet to see a credible truly-moderate opinionator (why? because 'beige' simply doesn't attract the attention that red or blue does, ne?) So please, let's dispense with any such notion that Colmes (or Kos, or whomever of any political stripe) is "moderate" - it's a strawman argument, to put it charitably.
Kos is nothing more than a prettified version of the Democratic Underground, IMHO. I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of left-leaning money being fed to his site, just as I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of right-leaning money being fed to his opposite counterparts' sites.
Both sides have their shills; both sites exist to feed the confirmation biases of their respective True Believers(TM, pat. pending).
That said, I wish everyone luck in removing the political money-laundering that accompanies sites like Kos. His income (again, like that from various others of either side) is likely funneled through a series of front organizations and companies who essentially parallel a given party's agendae (e.g. George Soros' funding of various 'grass-roots' events).
If you want to seriously remove political money from such events, then have the gov't set up a series of servers, where any political party can have equal bandwidth and space to proclaim whatever political theories turn them on (in a limited but equally accessible set of formats - text and image/multimedia files under a certain size, ferinstance). Sort of like a "Speakers' Corner" of sorts. It's not like they can't afford it or anything.
If any ISP did, it would kiss away any hope of a DMCA safe-harbor claim. As an ISP or other such party, if you know about it, you're supposed to stop it, not throttle it. Not stopping it immediately upon discovery and confirmation IIRC constitutes complicity.
*shiver*
You've seen EMACS, right?
(I'm kidding you bastards!)
It was one of the few mags I'd had that put more into content, than into fluff and adverts.
So, umm, will they carry on in a web-only version?
(not banging on you, mind... but sometimes the grammar nazis tend to be mroe than a bit overbearing and come across as egotistical - something that even my debugger hasn't managed yet).
(of course, that only holds true until some bright soul re-writes GDB to spew "hahahahaha! you suck!" to STDOUT...)
Utah (at least Davis County - whose system I once taught in) had decided a couple of years ago that students need to pick out what career path they want in Junior High School. Hell, what I wanted to do for a living changed nearly every week when I was that age. (and to be honest, it changed a lot until about 12 years ago).
IMHO, a lot of what school boards are trying to do are a disservice to the kids, and seem designed to make their lives even easier than before. Given that the majority of parents and citizens are rather apathetic (how many of you folks go to vote, and simply just pick somebody for the school board, not knowing a damned thing about what each candidate stands for, or what their track records are? I admit that I used to be that way).
The only cure I know of is to throw the existing boards out - completely - every few election cycles. Term-Limit the SOB's. Then you find and elect folks who will go in and slash the hell out of the bureaucracy that exists.
Then, and most importantly - you do your best to get the federal gov't out of the school business. Too many schools have become slaves to federal funding and federal rules, when it's the states who should be doing all the work.
I was that kid who simply read ahead and blew through the tests, all without bothering w/ such niceties as homework and appearing to give a damn in class. Most teachers came down hard as a result, simply to 'keep discipline'. A few took the time to recognize that I'd studied ahead, and gave me more challenging aspects to study during class. For example, in my first High School US History class, most students got by with a small one-page summary on, say, all of World War Two. Meanwhile, I (and a couple of others in the class) found that the same assignment was a bit more detailed, and demanded an explanation of everything from the political roots and motives of each belligerent nation ("Versailles Treaty", "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", etc) to the after-effects (e.g. Atomic Weaponry, the Cold War, etc). But then, those teachers were rare (and in my case, they were all referred to as "Sister" and wore habits).
As a former teacher myself, I found that challenging the brighter students beyond the curricula was pretty labor-intensive, but it paid off. I know of quite a few students who not only took the extra load on, but only became more and more curious about what they were studying (CompSci basic and intermediate courses). I remember finding out about Gentoo Linux - from a student who was spending his lab time installing it (and as anyone who has messed with the earliest Gentoo distros know, it takes more dedication than most mortals are willing to expend...) He's a junior *nix sysadmin for a local VoIP company now, barely three years after he left the school. Another of these owns his own company and runs the local 2600 group - he's done the latter for years (he was also the only student to successfully crack my classroom LAN - and Hell Yes I gave him a grade boost for pulling it off and then explaining how he did it). Another got a full-ride scholarship to a four-year degree, courtesy of Novell - I suspect that she'll do very well once she graduates. I'm still shocked and amazed that they and others like them would even credit me for any part of how they turned out.
Students like those are very rare IMHO, and I enjoyed spending time with them, telling them what I know, and even learning from them, far more than I did in listening to the 10^4th parent - storming in and demanding to know why Their Little Angel didn't get an "A" (or in a couple handfuls of cases, even a passing grade...)
That said, I know hordes of my former peers who did --and still do-- their level best to cruise towards retirement. Grade inflation was (is) rampant and pervasive in their books (hell, it made them look good to the folks that mattered to them, though very few others). They simply didn't give a damn, so long as you showed up to class every day, made it look like you were learning, and didn't break anything. At first I resented them for surviving the layoffs while I and a few others (as low folks on the seniority pole) got the slip. Then again, I'm making twice my old teaching salary now, while the surviving faculty are still there, still in their holding patterns, still counting years and absorbing oxygen. Then again still, there are likely lots of kids with the energy and passion for the subject of computers, and they'll find little to nourish their brains there.
Tangents aside, though - there is far too much variation on both sides of the desk to really create anything definitive and apply it to either students or teachers as a general rule. It's damned ugly. Then again, occasionally you find it damned beautiful.
Sorry if I rambled a bit.
Just because one does not exist does not mean that one will not exist.
Apple was once the established market leader for PC's. Not today. Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".
I'm not saying that any old app suite will simply come in and stomp an established market leader, but I am saying that I wouldn't be so sure that what dominates today will dominate tomorrow. Even MS Word had to overcome Word Perfect's market penetration, and WP was pretty damned powerful for what it did back in the day.
First, MSFT's mumblings about patents will likely go splat if a single MSFT voucher purchases a single copy of SuSE with GPLv3 code on it - at least for any patents covering those bits of code (I can imagine Samba w/ it's impending GPLv3 conversion wiping out plenty, if there are any).
Second, MSFT is rather stuck - While I don't know all the agreement details, I'm willing to bet that it will likely have the effect of cutting the legs out from under a lot of anti-competitive initiatives that MSFT might try. Hoveispan isn't exactly a stupid man.
Besides - as long as it doesn't compromise FOSS and the GPL any? Why not at least attempt to embrace the Beast, extend the Beast, then extinguish the Beast? It'd be one Hell of an ironic way to shove MSFT into obscurity.
Like I said - it would be rare, but it is something to consider.
All it would really take is for a corp to do a couple of things, and have it done (relatively) on the cheap:
- License an existing game engine for a fixed sum
- hit a place like Gamasutra (or any popular MOD board) and hire some freelancers
It's not exactly as if you have to howl in the wilderness. It just takes some brains is all.For 5 million bucks, I'm sure a corp could secure and contract the requisite resources w/o having to resort to desperate measures.
While rare, I can see someone getting their panties in a bunch over their place of business being photographed without permission...
Then we have the "hey! I got an idea! let's photograph the inside of a Wal-Mart!" (where the photog will promptly get thrown out...)
Could be wrong (they might've covered, you know, permissions), but I can see lots of kids getting snagged in something like that. /P
If you otherwise cannot avoid it, get each laptop user a geek-stick of appropriate size (a couple of GB), format it with an encrypted file system, and make 'em store everything even remotely sensitive on that. The odds are good that no one is going to go out of their way to target and steal a geek-stick at the airport (at least not as much as they'd want your laptop), and you can be reasonably sure that it will survive being dropped, kicked, shoved about in luggage, etc.