This isn't about a root process being able to bypass the firewall, it's about external users being able to bypass the firewall to talk to a process running as root.
You're making a distinction where none exists. If root starts a process that listens on a certain port, then it's logical to assume that root wanted to bypass the firewall for that process. Since root also has full control over the firewall, it doesn't make sense to touch root's processes. If you don't want to accept incoming connections, than you don't start a process that listens for incoming connections.
If you don't want a process being accessible, probably best not to run it as root, or configure it so that it rejects connections except from localhost or the LAN, rather than relying on the firewall to do it.
I can't think of that many processes that you'd want to have accepting connections and running as root anyway -- that in itself is bad practice. If you have to run it, and it has to accept connections, better to run it as its own unprivileged user (www, mail, etc.). Then it'll have some measure of compartmentalization and it'll be subject to the local firewall rules.
Apple perhaps created one more reason not to run listener daemons as root, but it's not as though there weren't a lot of compelling ones already.
I'm not 100% sure on this, but if it uses the same certificate framework that's been present in OS X up until now (which I can't see why it wouldn't, honestly), it will mean having the CA for the signing certificate in as a trusted root. I assume Apple will have its own CA cert in there by default, but there will probably be a way that users can add other certificates as they see fit. I doubt this will be easy to do, because you don't want idiots doing it because it's easy to do and basically trojaning their own systems (e.g. "To install BigBoobsPorn.app, first download xyz.p12, and install it in your X509Anchors keyring..."), but I suspect that there's no technical reason why you can't do this.
That said, according to what I've read from some people, the security might not even be that rigorous; it might be more about making sure that only the developer of an application can update it automatically (so it's more difficult for an attacker to create an update that 'fixes' your copy of Mail.app or some other approved program to do evil things) than making sure each developer has been vetted by Apple or some other Higher Authority.
There is a posting from someone who supposedly has access to the Leopard previews over at ThinkMac basically saying this:
I can't tell you much without (totally) violating my WWDC NDA, but suffice it to say that this is not as bad as you think it is.
Anyone at all can easily make a new signing identity and use it to sign an application they just compiled.
The main objective of code signing in Leopard is not the same as for SSL certificates -- it is not to evaluate the trust or confidence of something based on a list of trusted certificate authorities.
Rather, it is to provide a much better means for users to identify applications. A good example is software updates. Right now, if a user updates your application, and your application asks for an item the user's keychain, the user will get a Keychain warning telling him the application has changed.
With code signing, the user will get that dialog once the first time he or she runs your application, and if you sign every future versions of that application, the system will not bother the user again, because instead of using for example a hash of the application, it will now be using the code signature.
Use Command-H (Hide) rather than Command-M (Minimize) and then when you cycle through the window will be function as you want. Drove me insane too until I found it,.. It's worth noting this was the pre-OS X version of window minimization. I'm not sure when it originated but it was definitely around in System 7; I used to use it very heavily. Then in OS 8 they brought out 'rollup' windows that let you reduce a window to its title bar, and this is what turned into the Dock minimization in OS X. But the original show/hide functions never left.
I've always thought that the Hide function was more useful than the Dock, though. Press Cmd-H and bam, the thing just gets out of your way. No animations, no screwing around, just out of your way so you can do something.
Cmd-Opt-H is also handy, it hides all the applications except for the currently active one, nice when you're using the Finder and want to see the Desktop but it's buried in other apps' windows. If you have a mouse with a lot of extra buttons that can be programmed on an application-by-application basis, you might want to think about putting those hotkeys in. (Back in the day I had them programmed into buttons on a trackball and it was great.)
I'm still hoping someday they'll bring back the Put Away command.
OpenDNS is easier than running your own DNS (unless you have a gateway/router that does it automatically), and they generally are pretty reliable. They have a large cache, too; or at least larger than most ISPs. And they're faster than randomly picking some ISP's server on the other side of the country. (Also, do most ISPs allow random external users to access their DNS servers? I would think they'd make them internal-only.)
Also, they have very nice, well-written instructions that explain how to switch to them. This makes it easy if you're giving advice to someone who's having problems with their ISP's DNS; you can just point them to the site and it will walk them through the steps of switching over.
I'm not sure I really like their "features" of automatically routing typos and bad domains to a page, rather than just allowing the query to fail and give you an error page (this is really obnoxious when you're using CLI tools), but if you have an ISP with shady DNS it's the easiest alternative by far.
The point of the Macintosh is that you don't expose yourself to the inevitable problems that come as a result of that.
The Mac OS doesn't compete with Vista as operating systems, but the platform as a whole, as a device for doing things, does compete with other platforms and manufacturers.
I don't see any reason for Apple to want to try to do what Microsoft does, and as a user of their products I frankly don't want them to. The reason I've always felt that Apple gear was worth the price is because it's a predictable, known quantity, and because it's sold as a system rather than as bits and pieces. While being able to assemble it would admittedly be nice for hobbyists (and it was nice back in the day when Apple sold motherboards through their VAR chain, so you could build them), it's not a compelling feature for most of their core market.
The apartment complex requires a $500 deposit and apartment insurance to cover at least a hundred thousand due to an increase chance of being stuck by lightning if you want to switch to satelite. You should check the relevant FCC regs -- I think that the apartment may not be able to require you to do this, at least for a regular pizzabox-type dish. A few years back (apparently the satellite companies must have really paid their bribes that year!) the FCC coughed up some pretty stringent regulations about apartment-dwellers and satellite dishes. As long as you don't bolt or otherwise attach it to any property that's not yours (meaning you probably need to go with a free-standing dish; easy enough if you make the base a 5-gal bucket filled with concrete) I don't think they can make the insurance or deposit requirements stick.
Whether it's worth fighting or not is up to you, but I think you'd have the law on your side if you wanted to try. Obviously, it'd be worth consulting a lawyer or tenants-rights association first; you might be able to short-circuit the whole conflict just by showing the management company the relevant regs.
I think you're mistaking a "sport" for something "athletic."
Though I think 'professional gaming' is silly, there are lots of 'sports' that are not particularly athletic, and/or are more about use of certain specialized equipment than about innate physical characteristics. So that's not really a legitimate criticism.
There are almost purely athletic sports (running, perhaps, the most pure), and there are very skill-based sports (fishing, shooting, bowling, bocce, etc.), and of course a whole lot in between. Playing video games probably sets a new standard for sedentary sports, and in doing so says some unflattering things about our society, but there's nothing about it that inherently makes it 'not a sport' as a result.
However, the DMCA also makes systems for breaking copyright protection illegal (except in certain, very narrowly-defined, circumstances). So even if it was 70 years from now, and you had a now public domain copy of LoTR (and, somehow, the copyright term hadn't been extended to 150 years by Congress), you could still get in trouble for having a copy of DeCSS around because there'd still probably be a big body of works around that were still in copyright and using that as protection.
That's the sort of stupidity the DMCA writes into law -- CSS is already laughable, but as long as it's being used as copyright protection, and some court can be convinced that's the dominant reason for having it around, the programs to break it could still be illegal.
> So, is there a fund set up yet, where all of us good, fair use minded citizens, can contribute money to pay off those lawmakers that will support this? Can we use this money to buy a lobbyist to get this to the attention of the lawmakers that we in the US actually WANT this law? Yes.
Thanks for the recommendations -- I'll put 'em all on the rental list. ExciteTruck looks fun; I haven't had a chance to play any driving games on the Wii yet, but I've heard a few people say that the controller works pretty well for them.
We had a few fun evenings playing through the Ratatouille game, which for a movie tie-in was surprisingly good, although the S.O. still thought it was too "sit down" and preferred Wii Sports. Definitely a rental rather than a purchase. Tiger Woods may be just the thing.
Yeah... see how easy it is move your Photoshop install from one machine to another =-) Actually you can migrate photoshop just by moving the actual Photoshop folder, and the Adobe folder inside Application Support.
Doesn't even require reserialization. (At least, not with the version I've had, which admittedly isn't the latest and probably doesn't have the worst copy protection.)
No shit! Although... I wonder. While it's tempting to say that if the Democrats were so stupid as to have fucked this up, perhaps it's indicative of their overall incompetence and it's no wonder they haven't been able to stop, or even limit, the Iraq war, get SCHIP passed or any number of their bills. To be honest I've become convinced that the reason the Democrats can't do anything is because they're more focused on making the Republicans look bad than they are about making themselves look good, to say nothing about actually accomplishing anything. And the Republicans, at this point, don't care. They've already alienated everyone who's going to care; what remains of their base is more likely to take up arms against the government than vote Democrat.
The current failure of SCHIP is representative of this: it's designed to fail, so that the Democrats can have a touchy-feely issue to use as ammunition in the upcoming elections. It's not well-designed legislation, it's being horribly rushed, and nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to actually solve the problems that have been brought up about it. I don't think this is accidental. (In fact, I suspect that there are some people voting for the bill who wouldn't be doing it, if it weren't certain to be vetoed later -- it's an easy way to score points at little to no actual cost.)
The Democrats are slinging mud at pigs; the Republicans couldn't care less, because they've been wallowing in it for years now.
The hardcore market is worth more then all other market segments. That seems a bit shortsighted. I don't know what they're basing their analysis on, but I know a lot of people who've bought Wiis recently, who probably would have told anyone who asked, "no, I don't play videogames and wouldn't be interested in buying one." And they believed it, too, until they saw a Wii and (like me), before they knew it they were standing in line at Best Buy.
They're manufacturing a market out of essentially nothing; out of people who have written off video games or have never been that interested before. I'm not sure how you quantify that market, except by churning out consoles as fast as you can and see how many of them you can sell.
Nintendo was never going to win the hardcore market anyway. They've never catered to that and I don't think that stuffing a lot more processing power in the Wii so it could render blades of grass more effectively was going to make it appeal more to the Gears of War / Halo 3 set. Given that premise, the Wii has been amazingly successful. Moreso if they profit off of the consoles themselves and don't need to depend too heavily on downstream game sales.
Yeah, but that's just a pretty crappy design, that a server -- which is designed to be stuck in a rack somewhere -- would ever require you to physically hit a button the console just to get past a boot prompt, when the option to continue booting existed. I can understanding hanging at the console prompt if there's a fatal error (no system, memory failure, whatever), but if the option to continue booting exists, it should always time out to that eventually. In a server that can't be accessed physically without a lot of trouble, booting up is the 'softer' of available failure modes. Waiting stupidly for someone to press a key on a local PS/2 keyboard is not.
Can you make a game simple enough for a Pong-lover to enjoy, but complicated enough for an RPG-lover? It would be fun to try, I'd think.
I guess I'm not sure why you'd want to. They seem to be conflicting priorities. It's like asking "can you write an epic poem that's also a haiku?" I don't know, perhaps, but you're probably never going to please fans of both genres.
The world is certainly big enough for both Halo-style epic FPS adventures, and Wii Sports type minigames that you can play with a friend over a beer, as an alternative to turning on the TV for 20 minutes. I'm not advocating that the latter is in any way superior to the former. It just happens to be my preference, and I feel like it's been ignored by the big game companies for a while, and the Wii finally addresses it.
You do find some games that seem to compromise between the two groups: WoW, in a lot of ways, did (although I still think it's a bit too hardcore for a lot of people, including myself, because it requires too much time commitment). Prior to that, you have 'light' RPGs like Zelda-Ocarina, which drew people in with relatively low-learning-curve gameplay and an engaging plot. Fun (enough so that I almost bought an N64 once to play it), but not very social. And there were a lot of very creative computer games back when the modern PC was really emerging as a game platform, like Myst and its ilk, that let you explore at your own pace without any pressure or skill requirements. You still do get innovative computer games, but I think they tend to get overshadowed by the formulaic ones that get more money because they're predictable profit-centers (just like blockbuster action movies).
I'm just glad that the Wii has been successful, because it's a testament to the rest of the industry that there are a lot of people out there, who want something different than what's been delivered to the market for the past few years. There's more to gaming than FPSes, RTSes, and RPGs, and there's more to videogaming than a two-handed thumb-driven controller. Regardless of the success of the Wii as an individual platform, if it can just break the lock that control metaphor (which really, originated with Nintendo with the NES and hasn't changed much except for the addition of analog sticks and triggers) has on videogaming, I think it'll have its place in gaming history safe.
It's not that the 360 or ps3 are bad systems. It's that what they really added to the previous generation was a little better graphics, a little more storage space, small upgrades in individual aspects of the product.
What the Wii did was introduce a really different way of playing the games, and in the process has tapped into a market the ps3 and 360 couldn't dream of. Ergo, the impact of the Wii on the console gaming genre is larger even through the technological advances involved aren't. Very well said. I wrote a fairly lengthy comment on the last Wii thread, so I won't rehash it all here, but I think the Wii is pretty amazing.
The last console I owned was an original NES,* and I do not, as a general rule, play games. I don't even have any installed on my computers (okay, well, there's the free Chess game that comes with OS X, and I might have an old copy of EV Nova around somewhere). I was pretty content to just sit this whole console generation out, until my very much anti-videogame S.O. declared one day that she wanted a Wii. That in itself says something about the Wii... it appeals to people who really dislike the sit-around-and-thumb-twiddle style of games.
That said, so far we haven't found any really drop-dead awesome games other than Wii sports. We rented Rockstar Games' table-tennis game, thinking it would be like a continued/advanced version of Wii Tennis, but it was much more of a skill/twitch game than something you could pick up and have fun with immediately. And frankly, spending an hour learning how to hit a ball in a table-tennis videogame does not strike me as a productive use of my time. If I'm going to do something that feels that much like work, I'd best be getting paid, or at least producing something tangible. That's what I like about Wii Sports; the games don't feel like work. They're just fun. Plus, you play them standing up, which makes them feel more like lightweight VR than a regular video game.
I think the big challenge for the Wii is whether Nintendo can get a stream of games coming for it that give people who purchased it essentially just for Wii Sports something to do. I have no idea what their margins are on the consoles themselves, but if they're going for the usual razors-and-blades model, selling the consoles for little profit and hoping to make it up on games, they'd best do something about getting some more Wii Sports-like games out there. Otherwise, I know a lot of people who may be content to just never eject that disc and treat it as a single-purpose machine. (And I don't think that any of them will regret the cost, either; Wii Sports really is worth $250 in my estimation; any more games would just be gravy.)
The Wii was a ballsy move for Nintendo, because it essentially lets Microsoft and Sony have the 'hardcore' market. But I think it's proving to be a smart one -- or at least a popular one -- judging from the sales figures. I see a lot of parallels between the Wii and the NES, including the pack-in game being one of the best (and in the long run, the defining) titles.
What sort of proof do you want? Look at the number of papers in any theoretical physics journal and see how many of them come from industrial sources and how many are from universities. There are only a very small number of industrial research labs doing basic research anymore. The era of Bell Labs, etc., is basically dead. Shareholders don't want that sort of money being pumped into things that don't have predicable ROI.
If you look at the sort of stuff that does come out of industrial labs -- like IBM's Thomas J. Watson center in New York, Hitachi's in Japan, etc. -- most of it is definitely applied. Occasionally they might turn out a real pie-in-the-sky paper, but if you read most of those, you realize they didn't spend much money doing it, they just had an idea while doing some other research and decided to write it up (which is cheap and adds to their metrics). Or sometimes they'll do it so they can get a broad patent (IBM does this).
Anyone who's done research and gone out looking for funding knows that if you want to get industry funding, they want to know what the applications and marketability are of whatever you're doing. You don't go to industry and say "hey, I'm doing this research, it's really neat, it's going to totally advance this field!" without explaining how that helps their bottom line in some direct fashion. In many cases, they want to know what applications it's going to have within a 3 or 5 year horizon (and I suspect it's even shorter for CompSci/software research). If you want to do 'pure' research, you want government grant funding. I don't know where you'd look for 'proof' of that, because it's such an accepted part of research these days it's just taken as a premise.
Well, given that the old version used MapQuest (which only makes me want to stab people), be happy that they upgraded to Google Maps...
But I can't imagine it'll take that long before somebody figures out where they're storing the URL and creates a way to change it. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard.
But is there an approved way to do it? No, not that I can tell. It's designed to work with Google Maps, and that's that.
Yeah Rick Boucher is one of my favorites as well. He's a Democrat but it's really hard to categorize his views overall (other than 'good') -- pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-technology, usually pro-free-trade when it's not bad for the U.S., supports enforcing immigration laws... sometimes I wonder why he's a Democrat, but then you look and realize he couldn't be a Republican, either. (Although I suspect he probably has more in common with, say Olympia Snowe, than he does with Ted Kennedy or Dick Durbin. But then again, someone like Snowe has more in common with him than she does with someone like Don Nickles.)
Anyone who can annoy people on both sides of the aisle will always have my vote. Pity I doubt he'll ever go higher than where he is, but I think it's understandable and he's found a comfortable niche. We need more people like him.
UDP doesn't really establish a circuit; every packet could conceivably take a different path between the two endpoints. It's pure packet-switching. I think this guy's scheme is more circuit-like, which would actually make it more like TCP, except that the circuits/'flows' would be done by the routers rather than explicitly established by the endpoints.
Surely if I live in the UK and buy something from Amazon.Fr then its up to Amazon to make sure that I pay any import/export duty and any relevant taxes that may be due. I have no idea why you would think this. Why should that be their responsibility? It's purely a UK domestic issue, between you and your taxman, basically. They're just selling something and handing it over to a common carrier for shipment. After that, they wash their hands of it. You can even read Amazon's official stance: "Your packages may be subject to the customs fees and import duties of the country to which you have your order shipped. These charges are always the recipient's responsibility." (Emph. mine)
What would happen, if they didn't let you prepay the import duty as a convenience feature, would be that they would take your money, they would load the goods into a box, hand that box to the common carrier, and then that carrier would hold the box at their local office on your end, until you paid up the required import duties. If you didn't pay, it wouldn't be released to you.
Now, perhaps there is some sort of bilateral agreement between E.U. states such as the U.K. and France, agreeing not to ship things to each other's countries without first ensuring the correct tax has been paid at the point of origin, but if so, that's just something they've gotten together and done for convenience and to make intra-E.U. business easier.
Other countries, like the U.S. (which does not, as a general rule, care what other countries' laws are), do not require such things. However, as a convenience, companies that do a lot of international business will precompute import duties on many goods, roll it into the total cost, and allow/force you to prepay it, just so that you don't have to worry about it getting held up on the receiving end. (Amazon US does this with international customers.) And many shippers may require that the duties are prepaid before they will accept a package for shipment, because they don't want to deal with problems going through Customs. But there's nothing forcing them to do it, besides a desire to make international commerce as painless as possible -- it's merely a service to the recipient, who ultimately has responsibility for whatever they're importing.
I can quite easily put something in the mail (from the U.S.) to you in the U.K., mark it with some absurdly high value, and let you decide whether you want to pay the import duty in order to pick it up and find out what's inside. (Ever read the Saga of the P-P-Powerbook?) Your duties, your country, your problem.
Anyway, this is all offtopic to the main thrust, which is that an internet site operating in one country, should not have to worry about breaking the laws of a lot of other countries simply because it's possible for someone in that other country to access the site. There are countries where pornography is illegal, but you don't hear about people who run porn sites in civilized, porn-loving countries being extradited to Saudi Arabia for trial, or having obscenity judgments from foreign courts enforced against them. So I think the entire concept was a ridiculous threat.
Unfortunately, it was a ridiculous threat being made by a megacorporation with more than enough resources to crush and ruin a single person's life a thousand times over, so it's no surprise that the poor guy just didn't want to get involved. Sadly, that is how injustice usually happens.
And studies have shown that a large percentage of the population of the USA don't agree that man evolved from apes, but that doesn't make it the case. Just because a large number of people agree on something does not make it right. Take away the cash flow and there simply won't be popular/commercial music of the same form as there is today. Now you and I may not think that's a bad thing, but I bet the guys buying the bootleg CDs of Britney & Rhianna would feel differently. You're confusing questions of fact with questions of policy.
Questions of fact should not be resolved democratically. In fact, to do so is ridiculous. Either we evolved from apes or we didn't, either the earth is getting warmer or it's not, etc. Whether large numbers of people believe A or B doesn't make A or B more or less true in an objective sense.
However, where opinion does matter is on issues of policy. Whether we evolved from apes or not is a question of fact; what we want taught in schools (science or religion?) is an issue of policy. Whether the world is getting warmer, and whether we're causing it, is an issue of fact. Whether we should stop burning quite so many hydrocarbons is an issue of policy. This is where people's opinions, stupid or not, do start to count.
Copyright is an issue of policy, not fact. There's no objective truth behind it; you can't analyze copyright and find out that the "natural term" of copyright is a certain number of years, like pi or G. So what people believe is critically important, if you believe at all in the rightness of democracy as a system of governance.
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This isn't about a root process being able to bypass the firewall, it's about external users being able to bypass the firewall to talk to a process running as root.
You're making a distinction where none exists. If root starts a process that listens on a certain port, then it's logical to assume that root wanted to bypass the firewall for that process. Since root also has full control over the firewall, it doesn't make sense to touch root's processes. If you don't want to accept incoming connections, than you don't start a process that listens for incoming connections.
If you don't want a process being accessible, probably best not to run it as root, or configure it so that it rejects connections except from localhost or the LAN, rather than relying on the firewall to do it.
I can't think of that many processes that you'd want to have accepting connections and running as root anyway -- that in itself is bad practice. If you have to run it, and it has to accept connections, better to run it as its own unprivileged user (www, mail, etc.). Then it'll have some measure of compartmentalization and it'll be subject to the local firewall rules.
Apple perhaps created one more reason not to run listener daemons as root, but it's not as though there weren't a lot of compelling ones already.
That said, according to what I've read from some people, the security might not even be that rigorous; it might be more about making sure that only the developer of an application can update it automatically (so it's more difficult for an attacker to create an update that 'fixes' your copy of Mail.app or some other approved program to do evil things) than making sure each developer has been vetted by Apple or some other Higher Authority.
There is a posting from someone who supposedly has access to the Leopard previews over at ThinkMac basically saying this:(source)
I've always thought that the Hide function was more useful than the Dock, though. Press Cmd-H and bam, the thing just gets out of your way. No animations, no screwing around, just out of your way so you can do something.
Cmd-Opt-H is also handy, it hides all the applications except for the currently active one, nice when you're using the Finder and want to see the Desktop but it's buried in other apps' windows. If you have a mouse with a lot of extra buttons that can be programmed on an application-by-application basis, you might want to think about putting those hotkeys in. (Back in the day I had them programmed into buttons on a trackball and it was great.)
I'm still hoping someday they'll bring back the Put Away command.
OpenDNS is easier than running your own DNS (unless you have a gateway/router that does it automatically), and they generally are pretty reliable. They have a large cache, too; or at least larger than most ISPs. And they're faster than randomly picking some ISP's server on the other side of the country. (Also, do most ISPs allow random external users to access their DNS servers? I would think they'd make them internal-only.)
Also, they have very nice, well-written instructions that explain how to switch to them. This makes it easy if you're giving advice to someone who's having problems with their ISP's DNS; you can just point them to the site and it will walk them through the steps of switching over.
I'm not sure I really like their "features" of automatically routing typos and bad domains to a page, rather than just allowing the query to fail and give you an error page (this is really obnoxious when you're using CLI tools), but if you have an ISP with shady DNS it's the easiest alternative by far.
The point of the Macintosh is that you don't expose yourself to the inevitable problems that come as a result of that.
The Mac OS doesn't compete with Vista as operating systems, but the platform as a whole, as a device for doing things, does compete with other platforms and manufacturers.
I don't see any reason for Apple to want to try to do what Microsoft does, and as a user of their products I frankly don't want them to. The reason I've always felt that Apple gear was worth the price is because it's a predictable, known quantity, and because it's sold as a system rather than as bits and pieces. While being able to assemble it would admittedly be nice for hobbyists (and it was nice back in the day when Apple sold motherboards through their VAR chain, so you could build them), it's not a compelling feature for most of their core market.
Whether it's worth fighting or not is up to you, but I think you'd have the law on your side if you wanted to try. Obviously, it'd be worth consulting a lawyer or tenants-rights association first; you might be able to short-circuit the whole conflict just by showing the management company the relevant regs.
I think you're mistaking a "sport" for something "athletic."
Though I think 'professional gaming' is silly, there are lots of 'sports' that are not particularly athletic, and/or are more about use of certain specialized equipment than about innate physical characteristics. So that's not really a legitimate criticism.
There are almost purely athletic sports (running, perhaps, the most pure), and there are very skill-based sports (fishing, shooting, bowling, bocce, etc.), and of course a whole lot in between. Playing video games probably sets a new standard for sedentary sports, and in doing so says some unflattering things about our society, but there's nothing about it that inherently makes it 'not a sport' as a result.
This is true.
However, the DMCA also makes systems for breaking copyright protection illegal (except in certain, very narrowly-defined, circumstances). So even if it was 70 years from now, and you had a now public domain copy of LoTR (and, somehow, the copyright term hadn't been extended to 150 years by Congress), you could still get in trouble for having a copy of DeCSS around because there'd still probably be a big body of works around that were still in copyright and using that as protection.
That's the sort of stupidity the DMCA writes into law -- CSS is already laughable, but as long as it's being used as copyright protection, and some court can be convinced that's the dominant reason for having it around, the programs to break it could still be illegal.
Thanks for the recommendations -- I'll put 'em all on the rental list. ExciteTruck looks fun; I haven't had a chance to play any driving games on the Wii yet, but I've heard a few people say that the controller works pretty well for them.
We had a few fun evenings playing through the Ratatouille game, which for a movie tie-in was surprisingly good, although the S.O. still thought it was too "sit down" and preferred Wii Sports. Definitely a rental rather than a purchase. Tiger Woods may be just the thing.
Doesn't even require reserialization. (At least, not with the version I've had, which admittedly isn't the latest and probably doesn't have the worst copy protection.)
The current failure of SCHIP is representative of this: it's designed to fail, so that the Democrats can have a touchy-feely issue to use as ammunition in the upcoming elections. It's not well-designed legislation, it's being horribly rushed, and nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to actually solve the problems that have been brought up about it. I don't think this is accidental. (In fact, I suspect that there are some people voting for the bill who wouldn't be doing it, if it weren't certain to be vetoed later -- it's an easy way to score points at little to no actual cost.)
The Democrats are slinging mud at pigs; the Republicans couldn't care less, because they've been wallowing in it for years now.
More than that, where would they implant it?
More like two heads on the same beast -- or maybe two lobes of the brain inside one head of the three-headed beast.
They're manufacturing a market out of essentially nothing; out of people who have written off video games or have never been that interested before. I'm not sure how you quantify that market, except by churning out consoles as fast as you can and see how many of them you can sell.
Nintendo was never going to win the hardcore market anyway. They've never catered to that and I don't think that stuffing a lot more processing power in the Wii so it could render blades of grass more effectively was going to make it appeal more to the Gears of War / Halo 3 set. Given that premise, the Wii has been amazingly successful. Moreso if they profit off of the consoles themselves and don't need to depend too heavily on downstream game sales.
Yeah, but that's just a pretty crappy design, that a server -- which is designed to be stuck in a rack somewhere -- would ever require you to physically hit a button the console just to get past a boot prompt, when the option to continue booting existed. I can understanding hanging at the console prompt if there's a fatal error (no system, memory failure, whatever), but if the option to continue booting exists, it should always time out to that eventually. In a server that can't be accessed physically without a lot of trouble, booting up is the 'softer' of available failure modes. Waiting stupidly for someone to press a key on a local PS/2 keyboard is not.
Can you make a game simple enough for a Pong-lover to enjoy, but complicated enough for an RPG-lover? It would be fun to try, I'd think.
I guess I'm not sure why you'd want to. They seem to be conflicting priorities. It's like asking "can you write an epic poem that's also a haiku?" I don't know, perhaps, but you're probably never going to please fans of both genres.
The world is certainly big enough for both Halo-style epic FPS adventures, and Wii Sports type minigames that you can play with a friend over a beer, as an alternative to turning on the TV for 20 minutes. I'm not advocating that the latter is in any way superior to the former. It just happens to be my preference, and I feel like it's been ignored by the big game companies for a while, and the Wii finally addresses it.
You do find some games that seem to compromise between the two groups: WoW, in a lot of ways, did (although I still think it's a bit too hardcore for a lot of people, including myself, because it requires too much time commitment). Prior to that, you have 'light' RPGs like Zelda-Ocarina, which drew people in with relatively low-learning-curve gameplay and an engaging plot. Fun (enough so that I almost bought an N64 once to play it), but not very social. And there were a lot of very creative computer games back when the modern PC was really emerging as a game platform, like Myst and its ilk, that let you explore at your own pace without any pressure or skill requirements. You still do get innovative computer games, but I think they tend to get overshadowed by the formulaic ones that get more money because they're predictable profit-centers (just like blockbuster action movies).
I'm just glad that the Wii has been successful, because it's a testament to the rest of the industry that there are a lot of people out there, who want something different than what's been delivered to the market for the past few years. There's more to gaming than FPSes, RTSes, and RPGs, and there's more to videogaming than a two-handed thumb-driven controller. Regardless of the success of the Wii as an individual platform, if it can just break the lock that control metaphor (which really, originated with Nintendo with the NES and hasn't changed much except for the addition of analog sticks and triggers) has on videogaming, I think it'll have its place in gaming history safe.
It's not that the 360 or ps3 are bad systems. It's that what they really added to the previous generation was a little better graphics, a little more storage space, small upgrades in individual aspects of the product.
What the Wii did was introduce a really different way of playing the games, and in the process has tapped into a market the ps3 and 360 couldn't dream of. Ergo, the impact of the Wii on the console gaming genre is larger even through the technological advances involved aren't. Very well said. I wrote a fairly lengthy comment on the last Wii thread, so I won't rehash it all here, but I think the Wii is pretty amazing.
The last console I owned was an original NES,* and I do not, as a general rule, play games. I don't even have any installed on my computers (okay, well, there's the free Chess game that comes with OS X, and I might have an old copy of EV Nova around somewhere). I was pretty content to just sit this whole console generation out, until my very much anti-videogame S.O. declared one day that she wanted a Wii. That in itself says something about the Wii
That said, so far we haven't found any really drop-dead awesome games other than Wii sports. We rented Rockstar Games' table-tennis game, thinking it would be like a continued/advanced version of Wii Tennis, but it was much more of a skill/twitch game than something you could pick up and have fun with immediately. And frankly, spending an hour learning how to hit a ball in a table-tennis videogame does not strike me as a productive use of my time. If I'm going to do something that feels that much like work, I'd best be getting paid, or at least producing something tangible. That's what I like about Wii Sports; the games don't feel like work. They're just fun. Plus, you play them standing up, which makes them feel more like lightweight VR than a regular video game.
I think the big challenge for the Wii is whether Nintendo can get a stream of games coming for it that give people who purchased it essentially just for Wii Sports something to do. I have no idea what their margins are on the consoles themselves, but if they're going for the usual razors-and-blades model, selling the consoles for little profit and hoping to make it up on games, they'd best do something about getting some more Wii Sports-like games out there. Otherwise, I know a lot of people who may be content to just never eject that disc and treat it as a single-purpose machine. (And I don't think that any of them will regret the cost, either; Wii Sports really is worth $250 in my estimation; any more games would just be gravy.)
The Wii was a ballsy move for Nintendo, because it essentially lets Microsoft and Sony have the 'hardcore' market. But I think it's proving to be a smart one -- or at least a popular one -- judging from the sales figures. I see a lot of parallels between the Wii and the NES, including the pack-in game being one of the best (and in the long run, the defining) titles.
What sort of proof do you want? Look at the number of papers in any theoretical physics journal and see how many of them come from industrial sources and how many are from universities. There are only a very small number of industrial research labs doing basic research anymore. The era of Bell Labs, etc., is basically dead. Shareholders don't want that sort of money being pumped into things that don't have predicable ROI.
If you look at the sort of stuff that does come out of industrial labs -- like IBM's Thomas J. Watson center in New York, Hitachi's in Japan, etc. -- most of it is definitely applied. Occasionally they might turn out a real pie-in-the-sky paper, but if you read most of those, you realize they didn't spend much money doing it, they just had an idea while doing some other research and decided to write it up (which is cheap and adds to their metrics). Or sometimes they'll do it so they can get a broad patent (IBM does this).
Anyone who's done research and gone out looking for funding knows that if you want to get industry funding, they want to know what the applications and marketability are of whatever you're doing. You don't go to industry and say "hey, I'm doing this research, it's really neat, it's going to totally advance this field!" without explaining how that helps their bottom line in some direct fashion. In many cases, they want to know what applications it's going to have within a 3 or 5 year horizon (and I suspect it's even shorter for CompSci/software research). If you want to do 'pure' research, you want government grant funding. I don't know where you'd look for 'proof' of that, because it's such an accepted part of research these days it's just taken as a premise.
It's a really terrible daytime television talk show in the U.S.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_View
One of the hosts is Whoopi Goldberg. I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.
Well, given that the old version used MapQuest (which only makes me want to stab people), be happy that they upgraded to Google Maps...
But I can't imagine it'll take that long before somebody figures out where they're storing the URL and creates a way to change it. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard.
But is there an approved way to do it? No, not that I can tell. It's designed to work with Google Maps, and that's that.
Yeah Rick Boucher is one of my favorites as well. He's a Democrat but it's really hard to categorize his views overall (other than 'good') -- pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-technology, usually pro-free-trade when it's not bad for the U.S., supports enforcing immigration laws ... sometimes I wonder why he's a Democrat, but then you look and realize he couldn't be a Republican, either. (Although I suspect he probably has more in common with, say Olympia Snowe, than he does with Ted Kennedy or Dick Durbin. But then again, someone like Snowe has more in common with him than she does with someone like Don Nickles.)
Anyone who can annoy people on both sides of the aisle will always have my vote. Pity I doubt he'll ever go higher than where he is, but I think it's understandable and he's found a comfortable niche. We need more people like him.
UDP doesn't really establish a circuit; every packet could conceivably take a different path between the two endpoints. It's pure packet-switching. I think this guy's scheme is more circuit-like, which would actually make it more like TCP, except that the circuits/'flows' would be done by the routers rather than explicitly established by the endpoints.
What would happen, if they didn't let you prepay the import duty as a convenience feature, would be that they would take your money, they would load the goods into a box, hand that box to the common carrier, and then that carrier would hold the box at their local office on your end, until you paid up the required import duties. If you didn't pay, it wouldn't be released to you.
Now, perhaps there is some sort of bilateral agreement between E.U. states such as the U.K. and France, agreeing not to ship things to each other's countries without first ensuring the correct tax has been paid at the point of origin, but if so, that's just something they've gotten together and done for convenience and to make intra-E.U. business easier.
Other countries, like the U.S. (which does not, as a general rule, care what other countries' laws are), do not require such things. However, as a convenience, companies that do a lot of international business will precompute import duties on many goods, roll it into the total cost, and allow/force you to prepay it, just so that you don't have to worry about it getting held up on the receiving end. (Amazon US does this with international customers.) And many shippers may require that the duties are prepaid before they will accept a package for shipment, because they don't want to deal with problems going through Customs. But there's nothing forcing them to do it, besides a desire to make international commerce as painless as possible -- it's merely a service to the recipient, who ultimately has responsibility for whatever they're importing.
I can quite easily put something in the mail (from the U.S.) to you in the U.K., mark it with some absurdly high value, and let you decide whether you want to pay the import duty in order to pick it up and find out what's inside. (Ever read the Saga of the P-P-Powerbook?) Your duties, your country, your problem.
Anyway, this is all offtopic to the main thrust, which is that an internet site operating in one country, should not have to worry about breaking the laws of a lot of other countries simply because it's possible for someone in that other country to access the site. There are countries where pornography is illegal, but you don't hear about people who run porn sites in civilized, porn-loving countries being extradited to Saudi Arabia for trial, or having obscenity judgments from foreign courts enforced against them. So I think the entire concept was a ridiculous threat.
Unfortunately, it was a ridiculous threat being made by a megacorporation with more than enough resources to crush and ruin a single person's life a thousand times over, so it's no surprise that the poor guy just didn't want to get involved. Sadly, that is how injustice usually happens.
Questions of fact should not be resolved democratically. In fact, to do so is ridiculous. Either we evolved from apes or we didn't, either the earth is getting warmer or it's not, etc. Whether large numbers of people believe A or B doesn't make A or B more or less true in an objective sense.
However, where opinion does matter is on issues of policy. Whether we evolved from apes or not is a question of fact; what we want taught in schools (science or religion?) is an issue of policy. Whether the world is getting warmer, and whether we're causing it, is an issue of fact. Whether we should stop burning quite so many hydrocarbons is an issue of policy. This is where people's opinions, stupid or not, do start to count.
Copyright is an issue of policy, not fact. There's no objective truth behind it; you can't analyze copyright and find out that the "natural term" of copyright is a certain number of years, like pi or G. So what people believe is critically important, if you believe at all in the rightness of democracy as a system of governance.