This sounds rather like the incident which occurred with the Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel where the entry level model had very similar features to the higher end "professional" model costing hundreds of dollars more. However, it was discovered by some enterprising users that a relatively simple hack, flashing the BIOS with a modified version, could "unlock" the hardware and enable most of the features that were found on the more expensive model. This type of hardware homogeneity protected by software locking is advantageous for the manufacturer because it reduces manufacturing costs, since only one version of the hardware need be produced, but it is also vulnerable to those users who are sophisticated enough to circumvent the software locks. Is it possible that NVIDIA was holding back these pipes as a stop-gap measure so that they could release a new "Ultra" version of an existing card on short notice to counter a new competitor release more quickly? Perhaps, but these two incidents, the camera hack and now the video card hack, may induce corporations to rethink their software locking strategies. In the meantime it appears that savvy consumers can reap the benefits of these companies' mistakes.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it increases the attractiveness, from the standpoint of the attacker, of cracking the one good password or key in order to recover all of the others. Depending upon how large the encrypted password file is the attacker may decide that it is worthwhile to have a go at recovering the key (good password) through cryptanalysis. Thus, the strength of the master key or password and therefore its length must constantly increase as new passwords are added to the file so that the appropriate level of deterrence is maintained as the file size increases.
If the MPAA wants to blast bit-torrent then they should select a movie which did NOT break the all-time opening day US box office record for a Thursday at over 50 million dollars. Technically they are right about people infringing by trading the pre-release cuts on bit-torrent, but with such huge receipts you could argue that bit-torrent was rather like cheap marketing and promotion. Who would be satisfied with seeing a film like this on their computer and NOT in the theater? The MPAA is crying w/two loaves of bread under their arms and they risk people taking their complaints less seriously in the future by such a crass display of greed. They are really shooting themselves in the foot on this one, it is a wonder that their public relations firm didn't advise them to let this one be, at least until the DVD sales start or perhaps they did and the morons on the MPAA board decided to pursue the matter anyway and damn the torpedoes. In the end it is their own cause which will be torpedoed and they will have nobody to blame but themselves. They should stop blaming P2P for all of their lost 'sales' and start producing some worthwhile material instead of the crap which they produce 99% of the time these days. People have more entertainment choices these days and they dont want to spend their hard earned money on crap.
Given the recent and historical financial success of the franchise it seems unlikely that the most recent installment will be the last. If Lucas or his heirs can cash in on another set of films and merchandising then why would leave money on the table? However, first they need to string everyone out for another ten years while they release and re-release the ultra deluxe special gold collector edition boxes of the series with "new materials" and added scenes every few years just to maintain interest and milk more cash from the legions of Star Wars fanatics. The franchise will continue until it fails to generate revenue or suffers a major loss, neither of which appears likely in the near future.
can't we hold the USPTO responsible for issuing patents for which there is BLATANT prior art?
Have you ever tried to sue the Federal Government before? Try it and see how far you get and don't forget that these agencies have the power to make your life miserable while your case winds its way to defeat through the courts.
Yes, but fly by wire planes are maintained by professional specialists according to strict federal standards. It is reasonable to suppose that the average car owner does not and will not do what is necessary to maintain more complex automobile systems.
They might try to craft their spoofed files in such a way that if played in common players or the P2P client they attempt to "smash the stack" (buffer overrun) to execute arbitrary code. This generally causes the machine to crash once the code has been executed, because the program counter is in the wrong place, but the byte code of the overflow has already been executed at this point so it is too late.
It means that an incrementally more efficient algorithm has been discovered which allows a slightly larger prime to be factored in a reasonable amount of time. However, this does not represent the sort of breakthrough algorithm that blows the problem wide open and allows factoring of arbitrarily large primes in time polynomial to the size of the input (the length of the prime number to be factored in this case). Thus, this new algorithm does not scale elegantly as one increases the size of the inputs and therefore it does not represent the general solution to the prime number factorization problem. Your public key crypto systems are safe if the prime numbers are large enough...for now.
The states still have power to undo Federal law if enough of them are against it
They certainly do, it is called amending the constitution and it is extremely difficult to do. When was the last time that 2/3 of the States in the US agreed on anything even halfway as controversial as immigration laws and national ID?
Populist policies, which are exploited by politicians such as the aforementioned mayor, are common in South America and Mexico and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the end result of those policies. The problem is that selective enforcement of laws for political purposes breeds contempt for all laws which leads to rampant government corruption, citizen vigilantism, and, in the most extreme cases, armed rebellions. If the states are not enforcing federal laws then the federal government needs to step in and do it for them before the problems escalate out of control.
It is unfortunate that it has come to this, but how much longer could we in the United States or indeed anywhere else in the world continue to operate as nations with national identities in the face of massive global migrations of illegal immigrant populations? The national identity card has drawbacks to be sure, but it is finally, perhaps, the only way to avoid the loss of national integrity and social meltdown that would otherwise occur in the decades ahead as population growth spiraled out of control.
They bug the room for audio conversations that you have when you use your IP phone. You do speak when you have a phone conversation don't you? Perhaps you are deaf and use the keyboard or teletype terminal instead. In either case a bug of the appropriate type can be used to either eavesdrop on the audio conversation or intercept the keystrokes. The point was that physical access to your hardware, which the FBI can almost certainly arrange, trumps transmission security arrangements such as encryption.
The Rijndael algorithm, with is now the federal advanced encryption standard (AES), is a fast symmetric block cipher which is both public domain and spreading quickly in use. It would not be difficult for the phones to use a public key scheme such as RSA to exchange a session key for Rijndael. The FBI doesn't waste their time intercepting your network traffic and cracking the encryption by brute force computation. They simply bug the keyboard or the room and recover your key. Why waste time picking a complicated lock when you can easily steal the key?
Parents of special needs are a special interest and in democratic societies special interests will always get what they want as long as they remain small relative to the rest of the population. The special interests get their way precisely because they are small. For example, the American sugar farmers get massive subsidies from the federal government every year because they would not be able to survive on the world sugar prices without them. Those subsidies are a voting issue for those sugar farmers. If you vote to cut their subsidy they will all vote against you as a block in the next election. It is very hard to get the remainder of the population angry about the $1.25 extra per year in taxes so that the sugar farmers can get their subsidy. Sure, we don't like paying more, but the rest of us have more important stuff to worry about and if we were going to vote for the politician anyway then $1.25 per year extra probably isn't going to change our minds. So when faced with the prospect of definitely loosing 90,000 sugar farmer votes for a gain of relatively nothing popular votes how do you think the politician will vote? He will vote for the subsidy of course. The problem is that there is not just one special interest in this country, but thousands, indeed we are all part of some special interest group even if it is only the local homeowners association that cries NIMBY. The result is that the government looses massive sums of money to pork spending and waste because thousands of special interests are all taking their cut and each of them is too small to single out and target individually. They all fly below the radar when considered individually, but to the nation it is death by a thousand cuts.
The entire article looks suspiciously like what the public relations firms call a "press hit", meaning that the public relations firm feed factual background information to one of their reporter contacts, which may not be entirely false but almost certainly represents a selected truth (e.g., figures don't lie, but liars sure do figure), who then cuts and pastes the "facts" into an article. The end result is that one news bureau after another reprints the "facts" until the real source of the information in the article, (.i.e., the public relations firm), becomes entirely obscured. The vast majority of the public has no idea that the majority of the articles that they read today, especially trade-magazine articles and technology pieces where reporters have to rely more on outside experts, are "press hits" prepared by public relations firms for their clients. If I were SCO then I would certainly be engaging the services of a PR firm in light of the acrimonious nature of the ongoing litigation. A good PR firm can charge upwards of $20,000 per month for their services, but the really good ones get results and marketers, advertisers, and lawyers everywhere know that.
This is yet another example of the DMCA being abused to silence legitimate free speech. If any more evidence was needed concerning the unintended consequences of this legislation then surely this most recent incident fits the bill. The DMCA has utterly failed in its intended effects, prevention of wholesale copyright infringement in the digital age, and it has manifested many negative side effects. The copyright infringement which is currently taking place on the file sharing networks is nothing that could not be prosecuted under pre-DMCA copyright law and any notion that hackers in Russia, China, and elsewhere give a damn about what US laws say about circumvention devices, or anything else for that matter, is living in la-la-land. Meanwhile the DMCA has been used to muzzle free expression, stifle innovation, intimidate researchers, negate fair use, impede competition, and browbeat technology companies. The DMCA has done nothing to advance the progress of useful arts and sciences in this country while causing tremendous collateral damage to free speech. The other problem with laws such as the DMCA, which is rarely mentioned, is that unjust, poorly written, and unfair laws breed contempt, even among otherwise law abiding citizens, for all laws and that is dangerous because it strikes against the barrier that separates civilized society from utter chaos and anarchy. One can only hope that the DMCA will eventually be struck down by the Supreme Court, but until that day most people will continue to ignore the unjust provisions of this legislation in the same way that they ignored prohibition and every other law which makes criminals out of honest and hard-working everyday Americans.
It remains to be seen whether he (Lucas) will attempt to channel the wealth of printed, electronic, and other materials concerning the events following the Battle of Endor into a further series of films. The core Stars Wars market will still be around for the foreseeable future to support any further productions and there are new generations coming along that will expect fresh materials. The studios certainly wouldn't mind financing these projects because there is obviously a great deal of equity remaining in the franchise to be exploited. I doubt that episode III will be the last feature length foray into the Star Wars universe.
I will single out IT Depts -- On many occassions, I've seen IT actually fight to prevent users from using programming tools.
They cannot handle a squirt gun and you want to hand them a bazooka? Seriously though, IT people are not against the uninitiated trying their hand at programming, they just don't want to be dragged into answering thousands of questions that a skilled engineer would never ask so that Bob in marketing can write a VB program which opens and closes the database connection thousands of times in a nested loop while using cursors and bubble sorting the results. The executives don't want the engineers in the board meetings and the marketing people don't want the developers Monday morning quarterbacking their advertising campaigns and promotional decisions. The business people can use their spreadsheet macros if they must, but is it to much to ask that they leave the heavy lifting to the more qualified people? I cannot do Bob's marketing job nearly as well as Bob does and I understand that non-IT personnel are important, but IT has enough to worry about without turning amateur unskilled sys-admins and programmers loose on the company networks.
Not to single out IT departments in particular, but I think the reason that these spreadsheets start up and grow is specifically that it's often difficult to get someone in another department to understand your needs well enough to make the tool that you really need.
This is precisely where skilled project managers are valuable. To use an analogy from the DUNE universe; skilled project managers are like reverend mothers, they take the poisonous bile that comes from the marketing trolls and management worms and transmute it into a drug which extends the life and expands the consciousness of engineers.
The space battles which are featured in the fictional Star Wars universe are meant to be entertaining diversions for movie audiences seeking a few hours of what if escapism; they are not intended to be accurate depictions of realistic space combat scenarios.
These sorts of grade school obsessions are common amongst children of his age group whether it is computer games, collectible card games, or some other entertainment product with extensive branding and marketing tie-ins. Marketers love to target children in this age group because they have considerable influence on how family income is spent and, not being wise to the sophisticated tactics employed by the marketers (how can they be at age 5?), they are particularly vulnerable to sales pitches for engaging, expensive, and elaborate entertainment products. I would not be too concerned about this effecting his long term emotional, educational, and social development of your child. However, if you believe as parents that his game playing is interfering with his other responsibilities then you must intervene on behalf of your son's best interests. He may not understand, but your child needs a parent in this matter not a friend. It is not reasonable to expect that a five year old, even one as bright as yours, would be able to exercise unerring judgment and discernment when it comes to managing his free time so in this case you must do it for him. You are right to be concerned about the undue influence that corporations and their advertisers, pitching everything from electronic games to junk foods to your children, have in our public schools, but that is another rant. Rest assured that by intervening you are doing the right thing, but it would perhaps be best to limit his time playing the game rather than removing it entirely at once. Perhaps then the allure of the game will fade with time until it once again becomes merely a harmless diversion and not an all consuming obsession.
Even if they remained twelve miles off the coast it would not be long before this ship had an 'accident' that resulted in the unfortunate sinking of the ship. The US Coast Guard would be on hand to rescue and deport the programmers and that would be the official story. Of course, everyone with more than two rocks rattling around upstairs would realize that the whole affair was no 'accident' and would take the hint. The point is that countries, especially the United States, do not suffer such insolence even from other nations much less a bunch of non-citizens hanging around offshore in a boat.
What happens when the US Coast Guard or the US Navy kindly asks you to leave US territorial waters? It's tough to argue with.50 caliber bullets and governments don't suffer such insulting gestures to their sovereignty. The aforementioned SeaLand off the coast of Britain had the same problems. Even if the government nearest you puts up with it what happens when you piss off some other country? They have destroyers, submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft. They will come and blow your ass right out of the water if you thumb your nose at them.
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This sounds rather like the incident which occurred with the Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel where the entry level model had very similar features to the higher end "professional" model costing hundreds of dollars more. However, it was discovered by some enterprising users that a relatively simple hack, flashing the BIOS with a modified version, could "unlock" the hardware and enable most of the features that were found on the more expensive model. This type of hardware homogeneity protected by software locking is advantageous for the manufacturer because it reduces manufacturing costs, since only one version of the hardware need be produced, but it is also vulnerable to those users who are sophisticated enough to circumvent the software locks. Is it possible that NVIDIA was holding back these pipes as a stop-gap measure so that they could release a new "Ultra" version of an existing card on short notice to counter a new competitor release more quickly? Perhaps, but these two incidents, the camera hack and now the video card hack, may induce corporations to rethink their software locking strategies. In the meantime it appears that savvy consumers can reap the benefits of these companies' mistakes.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it increases the attractiveness, from the standpoint of the attacker, of cracking the one good password or key in order to recover all of the others. Depending upon how large the encrypted password file is the attacker may decide that it is worthwhile to have a go at recovering the key (good password) through cryptanalysis. Thus, the strength of the master key or password and therefore its length must constantly increase as new passwords are added to the file so that the appropriate level of deterrence is maintained as the file size increases.
If the MPAA wants to blast bit-torrent then they should select a movie which did NOT break the all-time opening day US box office record for a Thursday at over 50 million dollars. Technically they are right about people infringing by trading the pre-release cuts on bit-torrent, but with such huge receipts you could argue that bit-torrent was rather like cheap marketing and promotion. Who would be satisfied with seeing a film like this on their computer and NOT in the theater? The MPAA is crying w/two loaves of bread under their arms and they risk people taking their complaints less seriously in the future by such a crass display of greed. They are really shooting themselves in the foot on this one, it is a wonder that their public relations firm didn't advise them to let this one be, at least until the DVD sales start or perhaps they did and the morons on the MPAA board decided to pursue the matter anyway and damn the torpedoes. In the end it is their own cause which will be torpedoed and they will have nobody to blame but themselves. They should stop blaming P2P for all of their lost 'sales' and start producing some worthwhile material instead of the crap which they produce 99% of the time these days. People have more entertainment choices these days and they dont want to spend their hard earned money on crap.
Given the recent and historical financial success of the franchise it seems unlikely that the most recent installment will be the last. If Lucas or his heirs can cash in on another set of films and merchandising then why would leave money on the table? However, first they need to string everyone out for another ten years while they release and re-release the ultra deluxe special gold collector edition boxes of the series with "new materials" and added scenes every few years just to maintain interest and milk more cash from the legions of Star Wars fanatics. The franchise will continue until it fails to generate revenue or suffers a major loss, neither of which appears likely in the near future.
can't we hold the USPTO responsible for issuing patents for which there is BLATANT prior art?
Have you ever tried to sue the Federal Government before? Try it and see how far you get and don't forget that these agencies have the power to make your life miserable while your case winds its way to defeat through the courts.
Yes, but fly by wire planes are maintained by professional specialists according to strict federal standards. It is reasonable to suppose that the average car owner does not and will not do what is necessary to maintain more complex automobile systems.
They might try to craft their spoofed files in such a way that if played in common players or the P2P client they attempt to "smash the stack" (buffer overrun) to execute arbitrary code. This generally causes the machine to crash once the code has been executed, because the program counter is in the wrong place, but the byte code of the overflow has already been executed at this point so it is too late.
It means that an incrementally more efficient algorithm has been discovered which allows a slightly larger prime to be factored in a reasonable amount of time. However, this does not represent the sort of breakthrough algorithm that blows the problem wide open and allows factoring of arbitrarily large primes in time polynomial to the size of the input (the length of the prime number to be factored in this case). Thus, this new algorithm does not scale elegantly as one increases the size of the inputs and therefore it does not represent the general solution to the prime number factorization problem. Your public key crypto systems are safe if the prime numbers are large enough...for now.
The states still have power to undo Federal law if enough of them are against it
They certainly do, it is called amending the constitution and it is extremely difficult to do. When was the last time that 2/3 of the States in the US agreed on anything even halfway as controversial as immigration laws and national ID?
Populist policies, which are exploited by politicians such as the aforementioned mayor, are common in South America and Mexico and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the end result of those policies. The problem is that selective enforcement of laws for political purposes breeds contempt for all laws which leads to rampant government corruption, citizen vigilantism, and, in the most extreme cases, armed rebellions. If the states are not enforcing federal laws then the federal government needs to step in and do it for them before the problems escalate out of control.
It is unfortunate that it has come to this, but how much longer could we in the United States or indeed anywhere else in the world continue to operate as nations with national identities in the face of massive global migrations of illegal immigrant populations? The national identity card has drawbacks to be sure, but it is finally, perhaps, the only way to avoid the loss of national integrity and social meltdown that would otherwise occur in the decades ahead as population growth spiraled out of control.
They bug the room for audio conversations that you have when you use your IP phone. You do speak when you have a phone conversation don't you? Perhaps you are deaf and use the keyboard or teletype terminal instead. In either case a bug of the appropriate type can be used to either eavesdrop on the audio conversation or intercept the keystrokes. The point was that physical access to your hardware, which the FBI can almost certainly arrange, trumps transmission security arrangements such as encryption.
The Rijndael algorithm, with is now the federal advanced encryption standard (AES), is a fast symmetric block cipher which is both public domain and spreading quickly in use. It would not be difficult for the phones to use a public key scheme such as RSA to exchange a session key for Rijndael. The FBI doesn't waste their time intercepting your network traffic and cracking the encryption by brute force computation. They simply bug the keyboard or the room and recover your key. Why waste time picking a complicated lock when you can easily steal the key?
Parents of special needs are a special interest and in democratic societies special interests will always get what they want as long as they remain small relative to the rest of the population. The special interests get their way precisely because they are small. For example, the American sugar farmers get massive subsidies from the federal government every year because they would not be able to survive on the world sugar prices without them. Those subsidies are a voting issue for those sugar farmers. If you vote to cut their subsidy they will all vote against you as a block in the next election. It is very hard to get the remainder of the population angry about the $1.25 extra per year in taxes so that the sugar farmers can get their subsidy. Sure, we don't like paying more, but the rest of us have more important stuff to worry about and if we were going to vote for the politician anyway then $1.25 per year extra probably isn't going to change our minds. So when faced with the prospect of definitely loosing 90,000 sugar farmer votes for a gain of relatively nothing popular votes how do you think the politician will vote? He will vote for the subsidy of course. The problem is that there is not just one special interest in this country, but thousands, indeed we are all part of some special interest group even if it is only the local homeowners association that cries NIMBY. The result is that the government looses massive sums of money to pork spending and waste because thousands of special interests are all taking their cut and each of them is too small to single out and target individually. They all fly below the radar when considered individually, but to the nation it is death by a thousand cuts.
The entire article looks suspiciously like what the public relations firms call a "press hit", meaning that the public relations firm feed factual background information to one of their reporter contacts, which may not be entirely false but almost certainly represents a selected truth (e.g., figures don't lie, but liars sure do figure), who then cuts and pastes the "facts" into an article. The end result is that one news bureau after another reprints the "facts" until the real source of the information in the article, (.i.e., the public relations firm), becomes entirely obscured. The vast majority of the public has no idea that the majority of the articles that they read today, especially trade-magazine articles and technology pieces where reporters have to rely more on outside experts, are "press hits" prepared by public relations firms for their clients. If I were SCO then I would certainly be engaging the services of a PR firm in light of the acrimonious nature of the ongoing litigation. A good PR firm can charge upwards of $20,000 per month for their services, but the really good ones get results and marketers, advertisers, and lawyers everywhere know that.
bless the maker and his water, bless the coming and going of him, may his passing cleanse the world...
This is yet another example of the DMCA being abused to silence legitimate free speech. If any more evidence was needed concerning the unintended consequences of this legislation then surely this most recent incident fits the bill. The DMCA has utterly failed in its intended effects, prevention of wholesale copyright infringement in the digital age, and it has manifested many negative side effects. The copyright infringement which is currently taking place on the file sharing networks is nothing that could not be prosecuted under pre-DMCA copyright law and any notion that hackers in Russia, China, and elsewhere give a damn about what US laws say about circumvention devices, or anything else for that matter, is living in la-la-land. Meanwhile the DMCA has been used to muzzle free expression, stifle innovation, intimidate researchers, negate fair use, impede competition, and browbeat technology companies. The DMCA has done nothing to advance the progress of useful arts and sciences in this country while causing tremendous collateral damage to free speech. The other problem with laws such as the DMCA, which is rarely mentioned, is that unjust, poorly written, and unfair laws breed contempt, even among otherwise law abiding citizens, for all laws and that is dangerous because it strikes against the barrier that separates civilized society from utter chaos and anarchy. One can only hope that the DMCA will eventually be struck down by the Supreme Court, but until that day most people will continue to ignore the unjust provisions of this legislation in the same way that they ignored prohibition and every other law which makes criminals out of honest and hard-working everyday Americans.
It remains to be seen whether he (Lucas) will attempt to channel the wealth of printed, electronic, and other materials concerning the events following the Battle of Endor into a further series of films. The core Stars Wars market will still be around for the foreseeable future to support any further productions and there are new generations coming along that will expect fresh materials. The studios certainly wouldn't mind financing these projects because there is obviously a great deal of equity remaining in the franchise to be exploited. I doubt that episode III will be the last feature length foray into the Star Wars universe.
I will single out IT Depts -- On many occassions, I've seen IT actually fight to prevent users from using programming tools.
They cannot handle a squirt gun and you want to hand them a bazooka? Seriously though, IT people are not against the uninitiated trying their hand at programming, they just don't want to be dragged into answering thousands of questions that a skilled engineer would never ask so that Bob in marketing can write a VB program which opens and closes the database connection thousands of times in a nested loop while using cursors and bubble sorting the results. The executives don't want the engineers in the board meetings and the marketing people don't want the developers Monday morning quarterbacking their advertising campaigns and promotional decisions. The business people can use their spreadsheet macros if they must, but is it to much to ask that they leave the heavy lifting to the more qualified people? I cannot do Bob's marketing job nearly as well as Bob does and I understand that non-IT personnel are important, but IT has enough to worry about without turning amateur unskilled sys-admins and programmers loose on the company networks.
Not to single out IT departments in particular, but I think the reason that these spreadsheets start up and grow is specifically that it's often difficult to get someone in another department to understand your needs well enough to make the tool that you really need.
This is precisely where skilled project managers are valuable. To use an analogy from the DUNE universe; skilled project managers are like reverend mothers, they take the poisonous bile that comes from the marketing trolls and management worms and transmute it into a drug which extends the life and expands the consciousness of engineers.
They must be using that partially hydrogenated butter-food instead because nine out of ten trailer park dwellers cannot believe that it is not butter.
The space battles which are featured in the fictional Star Wars universe are meant to be entertaining diversions for movie audiences seeking a few hours of what if escapism; they are not intended to be accurate depictions of realistic space combat scenarios.
These sorts of grade school obsessions are common amongst children of his age group whether it is computer games, collectible card games, or some other entertainment product with extensive branding and marketing tie-ins. Marketers love to target children in this age group because they have considerable influence on how family income is spent and, not being wise to the sophisticated tactics employed by the marketers (how can they be at age 5?), they are particularly vulnerable to sales pitches for engaging, expensive, and elaborate entertainment products. I would not be too concerned about this effecting his long term emotional, educational, and social development of your child. However, if you believe as parents that his game playing is interfering with his other responsibilities then you must intervene on behalf of your son's best interests. He may not understand, but your child needs a parent in this matter not a friend. It is not reasonable to expect that a five year old, even one as bright as yours, would be able to exercise unerring judgment and discernment when it comes to managing his free time so in this case you must do it for him. You are right to be concerned about the undue influence that corporations and their advertisers, pitching everything from electronic games to junk foods to your children, have in our public schools, but that is another rant. Rest assured that by intervening you are doing the right thing, but it would perhaps be best to limit his time playing the game rather than removing it entirely at once. Perhaps then the allure of the game will fade with time until it once again becomes merely a harmless diversion and not an all consuming obsession.
Even if they remained twelve miles off the coast it would not be long before this ship had an 'accident' that resulted in the unfortunate sinking of the ship. The US Coast Guard would be on hand to rescue and deport the programmers and that would be the official story. Of course, everyone with more than two rocks rattling around upstairs would realize that the whole affair was no 'accident' and would take the hint. The point is that countries, especially the United States, do not suffer such insolence even from other nations much less a bunch of non-citizens hanging around offshore in a boat.
What happens when the US Coast Guard or the US Navy kindly asks you to leave US territorial waters? It's tough to argue with .50 caliber bullets and governments don't suffer such insulting gestures to their sovereignty. The aforementioned SeaLand off the coast of Britain had the same problems. Even if the government nearest you puts up with it what happens when you piss off some other country? They have destroyers, submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft. They will come and blow your ass right out of the water if you thumb your nose at them.