[blockquote]The fact is this: America will will do anything rather than give up their gluttinous driving of automobiles.[/blockquote]And this is different from other countries in the world how exactly? People who can afford to buy cars, do so, and they do it without the slightest thought to the emissions or ecology of said purchase unlike a significant minority of Americans who will actually buy a more expensive car just to be 'green'. It sounds to me like you need to get out and see the rest of the world. It is true that we drive an unusually large number of SUVs. Other than that it's pretty much the same wherever you go. There aren't many large cities in the world that don't have traffic problems.
You do realize most parents only want what's best for their children, right?
And surely you realize that that is utter bullshit. Authoritarian parents are more interested in asserting their authority, being right, and in total obedience to their authority than they are in anything. It has nothing to do with the well-being of the child. If they actually ended up beating their child to death for viewing lesbian porn, they might be a bit remorseful about it, even if it could, after all be assumed to have been done for their own good, because they needed to learn a lesson and there was no one else to teach it to them. God. This all reminds me of a movie I recently re-watched: This Boy's Life. Deniro was great as the authoritarian father.
When I was young I thought I knew more than everyone else, too.
Oh the irony. Glad to see how much you've changed.
Maybe your parents were trying to prevent you from making the same mistakes they did?
You mean like giving your children all the love of a drill sergeant in boot camp and then wondering why they hate you so much for the rest of your life?
Perhaps they cared about you so much that they were willing to "make you hate them" in order to instill the discipline/self control you would need to become a well adjusted adult?
How are the children supposed to know the difference between someone who is hurting them (in whatever manner) 'for their own good' and someone who is doing it out of pure hatred and anger? You may be forgetting that parents are human beings too and do not always do what they do purely for some theoretical well being of their offspring. Some parents even end up killing or severely injuring their own children (in order to help them of course). The world is indeed a cold, dark place. And the older you get, the more you see that that cannot be denied. The only one you can trust in this world to act in your own interest is yourself.
You apparently are just like them and don't realize that if you keep challenging your child they will learn how little power you really have.
If only I had mod points... This is so true. I don't have children. I haven't spent much time around them either with the exception of my newphew, who is now 9. I saw my parents battling with him. But he generally continued with his behavior until he decided to stop. I was rarely allowed to be alone with him. But on the few occasions that I babysitted, I was only too aware of my limits to enforce, well, anything. I don't understand how this is not obvious to more people. In order for any punishment to work, first you need to have the cooperation of the child. An intelligent, but stubborn child will realize that it is all a bluff. Unless you really are prepared to lock a child up in chains or in a closet or unless you are prepared to beat him so severely that you risk child services coming to put him in foster care, you *are* bluffing. The first step is to admit that. Unless you are genuinely willing to hurt him, badly, you are the one who is helpless. Ground him? Unless you physically lock him up, he can leave whenever he wants. Hopefully you can connect the rest of the dots.
I don't know how many of you have ever kept a bird/parrot, but I find the lessons in bird training to be instructive. Rule #1 is that you NEVER, not for any reason, should hit a bird. No matter what the bird has done. All you will teach them is that you are the enemy. Not believing it I had occasionally hit a bird. It turned out they were right. The animal learned nothing except to fear and despise whoever did it. For those of you who don't want your children to hate you for the rest of your life, you might want to think about that. While teaching your children the consequences of their actions, you might want to imagine a few of your own.
You might want to think twice about that. How would you feel if your father had given you porn? Any kind of porn that my father might give me, unless it were truly stellar material and irreplacable, would not be just deleted, but securely wiped from the hardrive. That is disgusting. Probably more disgusting than whatever genre of porn you would be trying to 'protect' him from. Why not just trust him instead. Whatever it is that disgusts you about whatever you fear he might see will likely disgust him too. If he's attractive at all to females he will probably be having sex by the time he's 12 anyway. Deal with it.
BTW, it is precisely the absence of sex/porn that screws you up. Not the opposite. The fact that I wasn't able to see an actual naked female body until I was 18 made me a perv for life. After starving for so long, you can eat all the food you want and it will never seem like enough. The hunger remains, forever.
I don't think what you are suggesting can be done with sex. In fact I'm wondering if it is a joke. There is not much in common with smoking tobacco. Tobacco contains nicotine, a deadly toxin. Sex is what we were made to do, our most important function as mammals. You might as well suggest making a child hyperventilate until they passed out would put them off breathing.
However, that is extremely unlikely, and there isn't really anything she can do besides establish a relationship with her son that is able to influence him away from WANTING to surf porn.
I have read some awfully strange and creepy things on slashdot, but this takes the cake. Are we talking medieval torture methods, B.F. Skinner and A Clockwork Orange, or blowjobs from mother? Is porn any worse than actual sex (gasp)? What is it about sex that freaks people out so much? We are mammals, people. Deal with it. If you don't want a child masturbating in your house then DON'T HAVE CHILDREN.
Are those of you who are suggesting the physical lock aware of how easy it actually is to pick/defeat those sorts of locks. Most case locks that I have seen are pin tumblers without any sort of anti-pick design. No harder than a luggage lock. And lock picking is just the sort of pastime to appeal to geeky adolescents with a taste for porn. And even with a secure combination lock they could just cut the lock and replace it with one of the same model. The parent could never prove that they didn't just forget the combination. Lots of ways to defeat that system.
Classic. I'm still waiting ever so patiently for my copy of Ultima Underworld III or at least Dark Camelot.
Most people missed System Shock 2
But this must be a joke. It sold like several zillion copies or something. It was so hyped. It was easy to see that the real LGS had little to do with it. Just a plain vanilla, but highly atmospheric shooter. The voice of Shodan was the main reason I kept at it. That voice actress (a distorted Terri Brosius) was great.
There are countless examples of inconvenient things we have to do every day
And, now, thanks to the benevolent, altruistic, cracking groups, CDs wearing out and getting scratched by needlessly sitting in the drive just waiting to be swapped out to play other games and this newer 5/25 install limitation can both be removed from that list. I for one would like to thank our benevolent cracker overlords for their assistance in these matters. Yet another evil DRM scheme that is cracked in like the first week. There are several cracked versions available for download at this point. I plan to download and generously seed one of those just on principle. The principle of spite. If I do like the game and feel the desire to reward the publisher/developer I may be willing to buy the shrinkwrapped version if at some point they are willing to remove the DRM. But not until they actually do it. Talk is cheap. Seems like a fair deal to me. I'm certainly not going to pay to install this steaming pile of rootkit malware onto my PC. I'd rather not play the game at all. I won't be able to try the game for months anyway because both my graphics card and my CPU do not meet minimum system requirements, and I'm waiting for Nvidia's next gen GPU to upgrade.
And if they write the license code down and save it, they can always reinstall from the media, even if we disappear from the face of the earth.
Actually that seems reasonable. After our particular software vendor went out of business some of our computers failed (over time) and there was no point in replacing or repairing them since the unique install ID would change. I wasn't objecting to your price actually, just to the practice of requiring a unique install ID and callback for a license in order to do a fresh install. Especially when you are paying that kind of money. There aren't many software companies that can guarantee to stay in business forever. Once you've been on the wrong end of that scenario it kind of changes your perspective. The idea is not to punish paying customers for being customers. None of the purchasing decisions were mine. I didn't take any heat for the loss of the seats and the inability to ever upgrade the hardware that still worked, but I saw the frustration and disbelief from what resulted. You can bet that if I had had the skill at the time to crack the license manager, I would have. The company was no longer in business. There was no one to complain about such cracking. My manager would have been ecstatic (small company).
Re:The issues with Bio-Shock
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BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
Also a large but high resolution (higher than 1080P) monitor (like a Dell 24"/30"), some possible stereo3D display options (including auto-stereoscopic LCDs and HMDs), and more complex/mature games targeted for older gamers would also be nice. Also being able to download demos or cracked games before buying them to make sure their worth buying. Oh and an Nvidia-like upgrade cycle of improved graphics every Nov/Dec.
And three years is *such* a long time. What happens when your company goes out of business? This happened to me at a company I was working for. Bad timing on our part I guess. Our $15,000 USD/seat software was bought out by a large foreign company and not supported after that. Tough luck right? Would you understand if that same company now hesitated to purchase your software in favor of a competitor with less restrictive licensing methods. Or, if there are no competitors, just not purchase it at all if they have that choice? At the very least there should be a method for freeing such licenses when a company goes out of business or is purchased (or whatever).
1. Any form of breakable anti-copy, anti-crack protection will add value to any cracked version that is eventually released. This means that even your paying customers would be well advised to actually use the potentially faster and more efficient software that lacks the protection.
2. It is not easy to determine how effective the protection will be before release into the wild. A dongle is usually presumed to be the most effective form, however the major inconvenience of such a tool will strongly encourage hackers to work on an emulation or a cracked binary, if necessary as a long term project. Requiring callback activation is another form that is so intrusive that again you are strongly encouraging it to be cracked eventually. Also the cost of such systems can be prohibitive depending on the cost per unit.
3. Some software desperately needs a form of virtually unbreakable protection in order to be viable. Complex (PC) computer games with long dev cycles are one example. Many of these games simply cannot recoup their costs at the current pricing model of $30-$60 per unit (especially with modern levels of P2P distribution), but at $100 to $200 per copy could do so without problem. Most development has simply stopped on such games in favor of simpler or more mainstream oriented games (pretty Doom clones mostly). And console development is favored by such a market since such games are both cheaper (with short dev cycles) and often have more difficult copy protection features that often require the use of a hardware mod in order to 'pirate'.
I would happily pay $200 for the release of an Arx Fatalis 2 for instance. Or a sequel-in-spirit to Planescape:Torment or an Ultima Underworld III. I realize that not everyone is willing to pay that much for such games, but consider that cutting edge graphics cards are getting around $600 per unit, whose only purpose is (generally) to play games and which will be obsolete within 1-2 years, and consider that at such high prices you could afford to lose half your customers and still make twice as much back on your investment. Although dongles do add quite a bit of cost per unit sold. It is possible that with this additional cost, plus all the additional dev costs involved in such sophisticated copy/crack protection, game developers would again not be able to recoup their costs. And even after all of this there is still no guarantee that it wouldn't be broken. Just look at Cubase to see an example of how far crackers can be willing to go at times.
Perhaps with something extremely intrusive like server or telephone activation combined with individually customized USB dongles along with random word challenges from the beautifully illustrated 300+ page leather-bound (ahem) user manual at install time. Perhaps the software would require a so called "secure computer" with a TPM on the motherboard and a TPM enabled OS in order to run. Although god knows how you could prevent the binary from being cracked to just leave out the TPM checks. Selling a long binary number for a price does not seem like it's going to get any easier.
I dislike copy protection and will nearly always download and use the cracked versions even if I have bought the legit one in order to keep the original copies in good condition (still shrink wrapped) and for the ease of use and often speed of the cracked version. However what I am talking about here is a type of software that is on its way to extinction as an indirect result of the lack of sufficiently robust anti-crack/anti-copy systems. Actually, even in the case of a $199 computer game, preventing the distribution of cracked versions is even more important than copy protection per se. Anyone who buys a $200 game is going to want to be able to back it up without worries. P2P is the primary threat to such a business model these days, not the possible sharing of copies with friends.
The point about obscure software is a good one. Being poor, (and unethical) I tend to buy very little software. Obscure software, so obscure that very few people have any use for it, rarely has any published cracks or keygens available. It is the only software that I have ever had to crack myself (which was actually a lot of fun). However more sophisticated copy protection would not have been worth the effort for me. If it were really a matter of life or death to use the software I would have bought it if it weren't too expensive. Usually, however, I just live without the software since there are few software packages that are priced for unemployed people. I'm not sure what software could qualify as being so important however. Pacemaker control software perhaps?
Your fake keygens will likely be recognized as such. Most P2P networks have validation strategies that will thwart any such effort to place viruses on your invalid user's computers. Needless to say any such attempt could also backfire by encouraging the cracking community to work even more strenuously at making updated and effective cracking software available for your application. There may also be some users who were fence-sitting as far as paying for your software but who would never even consider buying a product from your company again due to the bundling of virus functionality. Spite has a long memory.
There was a particular software app that I didn't use often, but which I liked. There was no easy to find free alternative and it was not too expensive. I only had a trial version. So I seriously considered purchasing it. However I noticed that the (small) company seemed to be seeding P2P networks with viruses disguised as bogus keygens. I will never do business with that company. Ever. Out of principle. Out of spite. Nor would I ever recommend it to others. I would advise people to stay away from anything from that company as they obviously cannot be trusted.
That hack of DX10 is not what it appears to be at first glance. Take a closer look. It won't work for actual gaming. Much too slow. I am hoping that we will see a real DX10 port for WinXP/2K at some point.
I aint gonna be reserving 10 fucking Gigabytes for my windows partition. Not even on my new 1 TB drive. Ten GB is insane. I'll wait for either a Vista-lite from lite-pc or a componentized Vista Embedded. That is unless a new DX10 game comes out that I absolutely have to play. For now I'm still running Win2k and I see no real reason to upgrade to XP. The benchmarks say that XP SP2 and 2K SP4 are roughly the same speedwise. The memory requirements and install size is still a bit higher in XP though. Compared to Vista they are both of microscopic size. I prefer an OS to be lean_and_mean if at all possible.
That article is such a load of horseshit. Both NoScript and Adblock Plus break their ad serving so they choose to claim that they are bad and/or difficult to use. Bullshit. NoScript is easy enough for any noob to use with or even without a little backgrounding of it or a help file. Personally, I think such features should be integrated into Firefox 3.0. It is just too essential. Allowing any web site you might encounter while browsing to run scripting on your computer is and always was a very bad idea.. Now that virus/worm/trojan writers are mostly money motivated, they are going after serious stuff like your credit card numbers, bank account passwords, all that. The people writing those things now are not looking for street cred, but dollars. It's a whole new world.
I find NoScript to be incredibly easy to use. It, along with Adblock Plus, are the only reason I am not migrating to Opera. Opera is much faster on my computer at least. But the javascript whitelist functionality is too cumbersome compared to the single click ease of NoScript. And the new functionality of recent versions make it even easier to use. I recently got my computer clueless film school graduate friend to ad NoScript and he hasn't had any usability problems. This is just commercially motivated FUD.
there are lots of sections of highway where the posted limit is 75
Are you talking about US states? Can you give an example? Haven't driven cross country outside of the northeast in a while. When I lived in LA I routinely exceeded 110mph on those long straight desert highways in the Mojave area. Even when I rented a Colt. Speed limits be damned.
Exactly. Goodbye Hollywood. And don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out. Nearly all Hollywood films are like 120 minute advertisements. The only difference is that the product they are selling is the movie itself. The whole enterprise is marketing driven. It is not art. It is a cynical business of manipulating the key demographics targeted by each film. There are movies for women about relationships, movies for men with violence, car chases, sex, and movies for kids about superheroes or dumb little kids defeating adult 'bad guys'. Every category of person gets their very own movie made to 'entertain' them by re-using the same tired plot devices over and over and over... If Hollywood disappeared this very day we would lose a whole heaping, steaming, pile of nothing at all.
OTOH, if everyone downloaded the movies as soon as they were released, even low budget independent films would have difficulty getting made. A million dollars is considered small change even in the independent movie business with unknown actors and no CGI or other special effects. There are some movies that I would miss.
Of course, all this is fantasyland. Movie studios are spending more money than ever on their pieces of garbage. They are making huge amounts of money. What are they complaining about? That some people are getting something without paying for it? Cry me an ocean. Their business model will survive as long as there are enough stupid people to buy their tickets. And the first rule of business is that there is *never* a shortage of stupid people.
Also, if combustion is outlawed or even seriously discouraged it could lead to higher electricity prices. At the very least most of us would be running laptops if electricity jumped to say $100 per KWH. And if the superglobalwarming hypothesis turns out to be right we could all be typing under a couple of fathoms of seawater in the near future. Motherboards tend to short circuit in a salt water environment. But water cooling would be a lot easier.
It is telling that even foreign governments see that the US government is so in bed with the record labels and movie studios that the best way to get back at said government is to go after the record labels and movie studios. Antigua gets a +1 insightful mod from me.
Are you out of your mind? It's statements like that that make the rest of the world hate Americans. Do you realize how arrogant that sounds? And there is not a shred of truth to that delusion.
What America stood for was not freedom per se, but money. The 'streets were paved with gold' was what attracted immigrants. Not a free press. And it is still true today. The same people will always want to come here to strike it rich and then (maybe) return home to their 'less free' country to enjoy their winnings. Is it the pledge of allegiance that makes us into such brainwashed drones?
Slashdot Mirror
[blockquote]The fact is this: America will will do anything rather than give up their gluttinous driving of automobiles.[/blockquote]And this is different from other countries in the world how exactly? People who can afford to buy cars, do so, and they do it without the slightest thought to the emissions or ecology of said purchase unlike a significant minority of Americans who will actually buy a more expensive car just to be 'green'. It sounds to me like you need to get out and see the rest of the world. It is true that we drive an unusually large number of SUVs. Other than that it's pretty much the same wherever you go. There aren't many large cities in the world that don't have traffic problems.
And surely you realize that that is utter bullshit. Authoritarian parents are more interested in asserting their authority, being right, and in total obedience to their authority than they are in anything. It has nothing to do with the well-being of the child. If they actually ended up beating their child to death for viewing lesbian porn, they might be a bit remorseful about it, even if it could, after all be assumed to have been done for their own good, because they needed to learn a lesson and there was no one else to teach it to them. God. This all reminds me of a movie I recently re-watched: This Boy's Life. Deniro was great as the authoritarian father. Oh the irony. Glad to see how much you've changed. You mean like giving your children all the love of a drill sergeant in boot camp and then wondering why they hate you so much for the rest of your life? How are the children supposed to know the difference between someone who is hurting them (in whatever manner) 'for their own good' and someone who is doing it out of pure hatred and anger? You may be forgetting that parents are human beings too and do not always do what they do purely for some theoretical well being of their offspring. Some parents even end up killing or severely injuring their own children (in order to help them of course). The world is indeed a cold, dark place. And the older you get, the more you see that that cannot be denied. The only one you can trust in this world to act in your own interest is yourself.
If only I had mod points... This is so true. I don't have children. I haven't spent much time around them either with the exception of my newphew, who is now 9. I saw my parents battling with him. But he generally continued with his behavior until he decided to stop. I was rarely allowed to be alone with him. But on the few occasions that I babysitted, I was only too aware of my limits to enforce, well, anything. I don't understand how this is not obvious to more people. In order for any punishment to work, first you need to have the cooperation of the child. An intelligent, but stubborn child will realize that it is all a bluff. Unless you really are prepared to lock a child up in chains or in a closet or unless you are prepared to beat him so severely that you risk child services coming to put him in foster care, you *are* bluffing. The first step is to admit that. Unless you are genuinely willing to hurt him, badly, you are the one who is helpless. Ground him? Unless you physically lock him up, he can leave whenever he wants. Hopefully you can connect the rest of the dots.
I don't know how many of you have ever kept a bird/parrot, but I find the lessons in bird training to be instructive. Rule #1 is that you NEVER, not for any reason, should hit a bird. No matter what the bird has done. All you will teach them is that you are the enemy. Not believing it I had occasionally hit a bird. It turned out they were right. The animal learned nothing except to fear and despise whoever did it. For those of you who don't want your children to hate you for the rest of your life, you might want to think about that. While teaching your children the consequences of their actions, you might want to imagine a few of your own.
You might want to think twice about that. How would you feel if your father had given you porn? Any kind of porn that my father might give me, unless it were truly stellar material and irreplacable, would not be just deleted, but securely wiped from the hardrive. That is disgusting. Probably more disgusting than whatever genre of porn you would be trying to 'protect' him from. Why not just trust him instead. Whatever it is that disgusts you about whatever you fear he might see will likely disgust him too. If he's attractive at all to females he will probably be having sex by the time he's 12 anyway. Deal with it.
BTW, it is precisely the absence of sex/porn that screws you up. Not the opposite. The fact that I wasn't able to see an actual naked female body until I was 18 made me a perv for life. After starving for so long, you can eat all the food you want and it will never seem like enough. The hunger remains, forever.
Are those of you who are suggesting the physical lock aware of how easy it actually is to pick/defeat those sorts of locks. Most case locks that I have seen are pin tumblers without any sort of anti-pick design. No harder than a luggage lock. And lock picking is just the sort of pastime to appeal to geeky adolescents with a taste for porn. And even with a secure combination lock they could just cut the lock and replace it with one of the same model. The parent could never prove that they didn't just forget the combination. Lots of ways to defeat that system.
And, now, thanks to the benevolent, altruistic, cracking groups, CDs wearing out and getting scratched by needlessly sitting in the drive just waiting to be swapped out to play other games and this newer 5/25 install limitation can both be removed from that list. I for one would like to thank our benevolent cracker overlords for their assistance in these matters. Yet another evil DRM scheme that is cracked in like the first week. There are several cracked versions available for download at this point. I plan to download and generously seed one of those just on principle. The principle of spite. If I do like the game and feel the desire to reward the publisher/developer I may be willing to buy the shrinkwrapped version if at some point they are willing to remove the DRM. But not until they actually do it. Talk is cheap. Seems like a fair deal to me. I'm certainly not going to pay to install this steaming pile of rootkit malware onto my PC. I'd rather not play the game at all. I won't be able to try the game for months anyway because both my graphics card and my CPU do not meet minimum system requirements, and I'm waiting for Nvidia's next gen GPU to upgrade.
Actually that seems reasonable. After our particular software vendor went out of business some of our computers failed (over time) and there was no point in replacing or repairing them since the unique install ID would change. I wasn't objecting to your price actually, just to the practice of requiring a unique install ID and callback for a license in order to do a fresh install. Especially when you are paying that kind of money. There aren't many software companies that can guarantee to stay in business forever. Once you've been on the wrong end of that scenario it kind of changes your perspective. The idea is not to punish paying customers for being customers. None of the purchasing decisions were mine. I didn't take any heat for the loss of the seats and the inability to ever upgrade the hardware that still worked, but I saw the frustration and disbelief from what resulted. You can bet that if I had had the skill at the time to crack the license manager, I would have. The company was no longer in business. There was no one to complain about such cracking. My manager would have been ecstatic (small company).
Also a large but high resolution (higher than 1080P) monitor (like a Dell 24"/30"), some possible stereo3D display options (including auto-stereoscopic LCDs and HMDs), and more complex/mature games targeted for older gamers would also be nice. Also being able to download demos or cracked games before buying them to make sure their worth buying. Oh and an Nvidia-like upgrade cycle of improved graphics every Nov/Dec.
And three years is *such* a long time. What happens when your company goes out of business? This happened to me at a company I was working for. Bad timing on our part I guess. Our $15,000 USD/seat software was bought out by a large foreign company and not supported after that. Tough luck right? Would you understand if that same company now hesitated to purchase your software in favor of a competitor with less restrictive licensing methods. Or, if there are no competitors, just not purchase it at all if they have that choice? At the very least there should be a method for freeing such licenses when a company goes out of business or is purchased (or whatever).
1. Any form of breakable anti-copy, anti-crack protection will add value to any cracked version that is eventually released. This means that even your paying customers would be well advised to actually use the potentially faster and more efficient software that lacks the protection.
2. It is not easy to determine how effective the protection will be before release into the wild. A dongle is usually presumed to be the most effective form, however the major inconvenience of such a tool will strongly encourage hackers to work on an emulation or a cracked binary, if necessary as a long term project. Requiring callback activation is another form that is so intrusive that again you are strongly encouraging it to be cracked eventually. Also the cost of such systems can be prohibitive depending on the cost per unit.
3. Some software desperately needs a form of virtually unbreakable protection in order to be viable. Complex (PC) computer games with long dev cycles are one example. Many of these games simply cannot recoup their costs at the current pricing model of $30-$60 per unit (especially with modern levels of P2P distribution), but at $100 to $200 per copy could do so without problem. Most development has simply stopped on such games in favor of simpler or more mainstream oriented games (pretty Doom clones mostly). And console development is favored by such a market since such games are both cheaper (with short dev cycles) and often have more difficult copy protection features that often require the use of a hardware mod in order to 'pirate'.
I would happily pay $200 for the release of an Arx Fatalis 2 for instance. Or a sequel-in-spirit to Planescape:Torment or an Ultima Underworld III. I realize that not everyone is willing to pay that much for such games, but consider that cutting edge graphics cards are getting around $600 per unit, whose only purpose is (generally) to play games and which will be obsolete within 1-2 years, and consider that at such high prices you could afford to lose half your customers and still make twice as much back on your investment. Although dongles do add quite a bit of cost per unit sold. It is possible that with this additional cost, plus all the additional dev costs involved in such sophisticated copy/crack protection, game developers would again not be able to recoup their costs. And even after all of this there is still no guarantee that it wouldn't be broken. Just look at Cubase to see an example of how far crackers can be willing to go at times.
Perhaps with something extremely intrusive like server or telephone activation combined with individually customized USB dongles along with random word challenges from the beautifully illustrated 300+ page leather-bound (ahem) user manual at install time. Perhaps the software would require a so called "secure computer" with a TPM on the motherboard and a TPM enabled OS in order to run. Although god knows how you could prevent the binary from being cracked to just leave out the TPM checks. Selling a long binary number for a price does not seem like it's going to get any easier.
I dislike copy protection and will nearly always download and use the cracked versions even if I have bought the legit one in order to keep the original copies in good condition (still shrink wrapped) and for the ease of use and often speed of the cracked version. However what I am talking about here is a type of software that is on its way to extinction as an indirect result of the lack of sufficiently robust anti-crack/anti-copy systems. Actually, even in the case of a $199 computer game, preventing the distribution of cracked versions is even more important than copy protection per se. Anyone who buys a $200 game is going to want to be able to back it up without worries. P2P is the primary threat to such a business model these days, not the possible sharing of copies with friends.
The point about obscure software is a good one. Being poor, (and unethical) I tend to buy very little software. Obscure software, so obscure that very few people have any use for it, rarely has any published cracks or keygens available. It is the only software that I have ever had to crack myself (which was actually a lot of fun). However more sophisticated copy protection would not have been worth the effort for me. If it were really a matter of life or death to use the software I would have bought it if it weren't too expensive. Usually, however, I just live without the software since there are few software packages that are priced for unemployed people. I'm not sure what software could qualify as being so important however. Pacemaker control software perhaps?
Your fake keygens will likely be recognized as such. Most P2P networks have validation strategies that will thwart any such effort to place viruses on your invalid user's computers. Needless to say any such attempt could also backfire by encouraging the cracking community to work even more strenuously at making updated and effective cracking software available for your application. There may also be some users who were fence-sitting as far as paying for your software but who would never even consider buying a product from your company again due to the bundling of virus functionality. Spite has a long memory.
There was a particular software app that I didn't use often, but which I liked. There was no easy to find free alternative and it was not too expensive. I only had a trial version. So I seriously considered purchasing it. However I noticed that the (small) company seemed to be seeding P2P networks with viruses disguised as bogus keygens. I will never do business with that company. Ever. Out of principle. Out of spite. Nor would I ever recommend it to others. I would advise people to stay away from anything from that company as they obviously cannot be trusted.
That hack of DX10 is not what it appears to be at first glance. Take a closer look. It won't work for actual gaming. Much too slow. I am hoping that we will see a real DX10 port for WinXP/2K at some point.
I aint gonna be reserving 10 fucking Gigabytes for my windows partition. Not even on my new 1 TB drive. Ten GB is insane. I'll wait for either a Vista-lite from lite-pc or a componentized Vista Embedded. That is unless a new DX10 game comes out that I absolutely have to play. For now I'm still running Win2k and I see no real reason to upgrade to XP. The benchmarks say that XP SP2 and 2K SP4 are roughly the same speedwise. The memory requirements and install size is still a bit higher in XP though. Compared to Vista they are both of microscopic size. I prefer an OS to be lean_and_mean if at all possible.
That article is such a load of horseshit. Both NoScript and Adblock Plus break their ad serving so they choose to claim that they are bad and/or difficult to use. Bullshit. NoScript is easy enough for any noob to use with or even without a little backgrounding of it or a help file. Personally, I think such features should be integrated into Firefox 3.0. It is just too essential. Allowing any web site you might encounter while browsing to run scripting on your computer is and always was a very bad idea.. Now that virus/worm/trojan writers are mostly money motivated, they are going after serious stuff like your credit card numbers, bank account passwords, all that. The people writing those things now are not looking for street cred, but dollars. It's a whole new world.
I find NoScript to be incredibly easy to use. It, along with Adblock Plus, are the only reason I am not migrating to Opera. Opera is much faster on my computer at least. But the javascript whitelist functionality is too cumbersome compared to the single click ease of NoScript. And the new functionality of recent versions make it even easier to use. I recently got my computer clueless film school graduate friend to ad NoScript and he hasn't had any usability problems. This is just commercially motivated FUD.
You mean like the Ford Nucleon?
Exactly. Goodbye Hollywood. And don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out. Nearly all Hollywood films are like 120 minute advertisements. The only difference is that the product they are selling is the movie itself. The whole enterprise is marketing driven. It is not art. It is a cynical business of manipulating the key demographics targeted by each film. There are movies for women about relationships, movies for men with violence, car chases, sex, and movies for kids about superheroes or dumb little kids defeating adult 'bad guys'. Every category of person gets their very own movie made to 'entertain' them by re-using the same tired plot devices over and over and over... If Hollywood disappeared this very day we would lose a whole heaping, steaming, pile of nothing at all.
OTOH, if everyone downloaded the movies as soon as they were released, even low budget independent films would have difficulty getting made. A million dollars is considered small change even in the independent movie business with unknown actors and no CGI or other special effects. There are some movies that I would miss.
Of course, all this is fantasyland. Movie studios are spending more money than ever on their pieces of garbage. They are making huge amounts of money. What are they complaining about? That some people are getting something without paying for it? Cry me an ocean. Their business model will survive as long as there are enough stupid people to buy their tickets. And the first rule of business is that there is *never* a shortage of stupid people.
Also, if combustion is outlawed or even seriously discouraged it could lead to higher electricity prices. At the very least most of us would be running laptops if electricity jumped to say $100 per KWH. And if the superglobalwarming hypothesis turns out to be right we could all be typing under a couple of fathoms of seawater in the near future. Motherboards tend to short circuit in a salt water environment. But water cooling would be a lot easier.
It is telling that even foreign governments see that the US government is so in bed with the record labels and movie studios that the best way to get back at said government is to go after the record labels and movie studios. Antigua gets a +1 insightful mod from me.
What America stood for was not freedom per se, but money. The 'streets were paved with gold' was what attracted immigrants. Not a free press. And it is still true today. The same people will always want to come here to strike it rich and then (maybe) return home to their 'less free' country to enjoy their winnings. Is it the pledge of allegiance that makes us into such brainwashed drones?