An interesting explanation of what lead to this was posted by an user on Reddit. (Disclaimer: I'm not from Canada, so I can't confirm/deny what that user said, but there's plenty of upvotes and comments from other canadians lending some credibility to his explanation.)
"This is actually way more complicated than the one paragraph article makes it seem. To fully understand this, you have to know a little bit about Canadian politics. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about Canadian politics.
By some measures, Canada is the most decentralized country in the world, barring absolute anarchies in Africa and all that shit. Power is divided between the Federal Government and the Provincial Governments in an entirely non-hierarchical manner; provinces and the Federal Government each have their own distinct spheres of influence, and the Federal government cannot tell a Provincial Government what to do within the provincial sphere any more than a province could give the Federal Government orders within the federal sphere of influence.
Without getting into huge amounts of details about how power is divided, it's sufficient to say that much, if not all of the powers that would be required to enforce the Kyoto protocol are within the Provincial sphere of influence, however the Kyoto Protocol was signed by the Federal Government essentially unilaterally. So then the Federal Government has to try to bring the provinces on board with Kyoto, to avoid shirking international responsibilities, but it has no power to force the issue.
So then, surprise surprise, some of the provinces dont feel like shooting their oil economies in the foot to play ball with a treaty that they never agreed to. Particularly Alberta, which is basically Canada's Texas, decided that the Federal Government had nothing big and scary enough up their sleeve to threaten them into compliance, so they decided they were not going to enforce the Kyoto Protocol internally at all, and the Federal Government could do absolutely nothing about it.
So now it's in a position where it has to either severely cut carbon for every other province that's willing to play along or pay internationally for Alberta's decision to not give a shit. Yes that's right, the Federal government would have to pay for Alberta not meeting the pollution requirements. Not fair? Well then the Federal Government should have made sure people were on board with this before signing instead of bringing home an unpopular treaty it had no power to enforce.
OR the Federal Government can drop out of the Kyoto Protocol, as it has done, learn from the mistake and make sure to get the approval of Provincial governments before signing the next environmental treaty that will undoubtedly come up.
TL;DR: Canadian politics is hella complicated, and while no one likes pollution, Peter Kent is 100% right in the article: Signing Kyoto, especially in the way Canada signed it without enough internal support, was a mistake."
...but rather a result of Sony's strange DRM implementation.
The way it's designed, the full version of a game can be downloaded in up to 5 different consoles. People noticed this, and started abusing this system by creating "sharing groups" of five people using a single account for purchases, therefore getting their games for 1/5 the cost.
Publishers obviously didn't like this, which lead to this "Phone Home" stupidity.
Because they add to the overall experience of the game. They give artwork, keyboard/controller commands, they give alot of backstory and on the side they make you actually feel like your getting somting for all the money you just spent. When i spend 60 dollars i want somthing more then a disc.
Sadly, that's not the case for the manuals included in recent Ubisoft games. Generic, black-and-white, usually less than 10 pages, completely pointless. This also happens with most EA and Activision games.
I can see the point on File and Directory, it always bugged me that they're just static methods, though I'm not sure why would one need to instance a Math object.
You're wrong about Encoding though, it's not a static class. You can't create an instance of the Encoding class only because it's marked as abstract/mustinherit, but you can instance of the derived classes (UnicodeEncoding, ASCIIEncoding, UTF8Encoding, and so on).
I have a modded PS2, and not a single pirated game in sight. Reason? Japanese-only games. I'm a hug fan of the Super Robot Wars series, and 95% of the games in that series were never released stateside.
But I agree with you that this is a very rare case, and it's hard to defend modchips when only a tiny portion of the users are using they for "proper" reasons.
Sony wasn't even the second one to release a controller with an analog pad. A few weeks after the N64 was released, Sega released "Nights into Dreams", bundled with an analog controller for the Saturn.
The most bizzare one, in my opinion, is Battlefield 1942
Not sure if this is the case, but very often when a game require Admin permissions it's due to some stupid copy-protection scheme requiring low-level access to the CD.
I don't think end users can be trusted to protect their computers. At a minimum, providers of Cable and DSL should make customers use modems with built-in NAT/firewall.
The problem is, this could lead to ISPs giving you only NAT access with no forwarded ports. I know there's at least one DSL provider here in Brazil that does that.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting explanation of what lead to this was posted by an user on Reddit. (Disclaimer: I'm not from Canada, so I can't confirm/deny what that user said, but there's plenty of upvotes and comments from other canadians lending some credibility to his explanation.)
"This is actually way more complicated than the one paragraph article makes it seem. To fully understand this, you have to know a little bit about Canadian politics. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about Canadian politics.
By some measures, Canada is the most decentralized country in the world, barring absolute anarchies in Africa and all that shit. Power is divided between the Federal Government and the Provincial Governments in an entirely non-hierarchical manner; provinces and the Federal Government each have their own distinct spheres of influence, and the Federal government cannot tell a Provincial Government what to do within the provincial sphere any more than a province could give the Federal Government orders within the federal sphere of influence.
Without getting into huge amounts of details about how power is divided, it's sufficient to say that much, if not all of the powers that would be required to enforce the Kyoto protocol are within the Provincial sphere of influence, however the Kyoto Protocol was signed by the Federal Government essentially unilaterally. So then the Federal Government has to try to bring the provinces on board with Kyoto, to avoid shirking international responsibilities, but it has no power to force the issue. So then, surprise surprise, some of the provinces dont feel like shooting their oil economies in the foot to play ball with a treaty that they never agreed to. Particularly Alberta, which is basically Canada's Texas, decided that the Federal Government had nothing big and scary enough up their sleeve to threaten them into compliance, so they decided they were not going to enforce the Kyoto Protocol internally at all, and the Federal Government could do absolutely nothing about it.
So now it's in a position where it has to either severely cut carbon for every other province that's willing to play along or pay internationally for Alberta's decision to not give a shit. Yes that's right, the Federal government would have to pay for Alberta not meeting the pollution requirements. Not fair? Well then the Federal Government should have made sure people were on board with this before signing instead of bringing home an unpopular treaty it had no power to enforce. OR the Federal Government can drop out of the Kyoto Protocol, as it has done, learn from the mistake and make sure to get the approval of Provincial governments before signing the next environmental treaty that will undoubtedly come up.
TL;DR: Canadian politics is hella complicated, and while no one likes pollution, Peter Kent is 100% right in the article: Signing Kyoto, especially in the way Canada signed it without enough internal support, was a mistake."
Enjoy: http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FTricorder
...but rather a result of Sony's strange DRM implementation.
The way it's designed, the full version of a game can be downloaded in up to 5 different consoles. People noticed this, and started abusing this system by creating "sharing groups" of five people using a single account for purchases, therefore getting their games for 1/5 the cost.
Publishers obviously didn't like this, which lead to this "Phone Home" stupidity.
Yes, but you can download the APK and install an app even if it's banned from the Android Market.
Because they add to the overall experience of the game. They give artwork, keyboard/controller commands, they give alot of backstory and on the side they make you actually feel like your getting somting for all the money you just spent. When i spend 60 dollars i want somthing more then a disc.
Sadly, that's not the case for the manuals included in recent Ubisoft games. Generic, black-and-white, usually less than 10 pages, completely pointless. This also happens with most EA and Activision games.
If that's what he wanted, then why the hell didn't he just buy a PS3 instead of a X360?
To my surprise, you're right, someone actually did it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8885
The only thing Wikipedia was forced to block was editing from anonymous UK users.
According to Opera, it's Adobe's fault: http://operawatch.com/news/2007/04/why-the-wii-browser-has-flash-7-and-not-flash-8-or-9.html
One great reason to run homebrew on the Wii: Region-free gaming.
I can see the point on File and Directory, it always bugged me that they're just static methods, though I'm not sure why would one need to instance a Math object.
You're wrong about Encoding though, it's not a static class. You can't create an instance of the Encoding class only because it's marked as abstract/mustinherit, but you can instance of the derived classes (UnicodeEncoding, ASCIIEncoding, UTF8Encoding, and so on).
I have a modded PS2, and not a single pirated game in sight. Reason? Japanese-only games. I'm a hug fan of the Super Robot Wars series, and 95% of the games in that series were never released stateside.
But I agree with you that this is a very rare case, and it's hard to defend modchips when only a tiny portion of the users are using they for "proper" reasons.
Sony wasn't even the second one to release a controller with an analog pad. A few weeks after the N64 was released, Sega released "Nights into Dreams", bundled with an analog controller for the Saturn.
[]s Badaro
IIRC Diablo II supported Direct TCP/IP connection, so you probably didn't need bnetd to play online with a pirated copy. :P
And bnetd was pretty darn useful back when I played Starcraft, since that game did not support TCP/IP LAN play until one of the latest versions.
[]s Badaro
Look at the title of the discussion... "Linksys".
Specifically, the Linksys WMP54G. Could never get it working a P2 or older computer.
[]s Badaro
My experiences:
[]s Badaro
Try port 6969, that's the one traditional trackers use (AFAIK the "Trackerless" mode runs a lightweight tracker on the client).
[]s Badaro
Dunno if Bittorrent does hashing of the individual chunks, but I know that Gnutella only computes the hash (also SHA1, IIRC) of the whole file.
AFAIK it does.
[]s Badaro
The most bizzare one, in my opinion, is Battlefield 1942
Not sure if this is the case, but very often when a game require Admin permissions it's due to some stupid copy-protection scheme requiring low-level access to the CD.
[]s Badaro
I don't think end users can be trusted to protect their computers. At a minimum, providers of Cable and DSL should make customers use modems with built-in NAT/firewall.
The problem is, this could lead to ISPs giving you only NAT access with no forwarded ports. I know there's at least one DSL provider here in Brazil that does that.
[]s Badaro
Damn, the e-mail in the previous post should read <lastname>@gmail.com.
[]s Badaro
Curiously enough, my account which is @gmail.com hardly gets any SPAM. I wonder if I have an unusual name or something.
[]s Badaro
This site has some rather nice videogame remixes.
http://www.ssh.ne.jp/
[]s Badaro
Bzzz, wrong! :p
You can use Run As to run any program with different credentials in Windows. Hold SHIFT, right-click an icon than choose the "Run As" option.
If you prefer, you can also use runas from the command line.
[]s Badaro
I wasn't complaining, just adding a bit more of detail to your story. :)
[]s Badaro