Bring it back down 28 years with a renewal clause for after 14 years.
It'd like that, but they could never do it. Congress would get slammed for abuse of "eminent domain". The RIAA would accuse them of attempting to seize property ("intellectual property") without compensation, and would demand $billions paid from the US treasury.
(Nevermind that each time copyrights have been extended, it was also seizing property: IP rights were transferred from the public to corporations without the people getting paid for it.)
since among fasubbers, they have a decree that if an Anime is licensed in state (or whatever country they're doing the translation for)
Not anymore. That was prehaps the reason why fansubbing was tolerated up til 1995 or so.
But today, the much bigger reason why they don't seriously pursue fansubbers is because the producers expect to earn all their US profit from dubbed releases (including TV). While US "otaku" may prefer subtitles, the average customer 90% of the time wants to hear his own language.
they'll stop all work and cease distribution
Today that idea's a joke. Yes, the fansubbers themselves will cease work/distribution. But once the files have been released onto the internet, P2Pers will keep distributing as long as it's popular.
Also, that "rule" made more sense back when anime was rarely licensed for America. Today there are many titles that obviously have a US release written into their business plan from the start (none moreso than "Big O" volume 2)
It's not so plain either way. There's plenty of truth in his claim.
For example, current copyright law has terms of 97 years. Only "the industry", in the form of large corporations, can profit from anything for that long of a time. The artists would get paid the same regardless of copyright lasting 15 years or 100.
Nobody plans out more than 10 years when considering an attempt to profit from creativity, whether by writing a novel or hiring a singer. All copyright revenues past 15-20 years is just free money for big publishers. (And the more money they collect from Elvis, the less they need to pay to today's performers)
Just use a lap pad or TV dinner tray table or similar small table. An udjustable laptop table might be ideal.
I haven't tried these "laptop tables", but a TV dinner tray certainly won't work. They're just too flimsy. And, small tables like that force you to lean forward over them, not sink back into the couch (for maximum potato-comfort)
Second, hollowpoints are *more* destructive, not less
Of course- I thought everybody knew that. Normal high velocity bullets have a mild all-or-nothing effect, where if a person isn't killed outright by cardiovascular or neural damage, he may recover fully. A pass-through "flesh wound" to muscular tissue might be patched up in a few days. Hollowpoints (or fragmented, or spinning) bullets tend to tear open non-vital organs, leading to bleeding (often internal) that might not be fatal for an hour, or (if treated) leave chronic disabilities.
(I shouldn't make it sound like there is a tremendous difference between kinds of bullets- if you get shot, you won't notice or care what kind of round hit you. But in war, every little edge might count)
My point is that for many tactical situations (such as sniping), hollowpoint ammo would be preferred ("more destructive"). It should be up to the officers on the field to decide which to shoot- not some parchment approved in a far-off conference.
But with the arms conventions starting in the 1800s, the ruling class decided they didn't want their soldiers coming home with wounds from fragmented bullets, so they wrote-off a whole class of munition from consideration.
The 5.56mm is most dangerous due to the incredible *velocity*
Actually, part of the reason the US chose smaller than 7.62mm rounds is to work around the Geneva Convention. By using a small bullet, the tumbling can do damage resembling the effect of a hollowpoint. An M16 has only slightly more velocity than an AK-47 (and much less total kinetic energy), but leaves a bigger hole because it's path through a soft target is less straight.
When hitting a solid body, a hypersonic shock wave follows the projectile, creating damage far removed from the actual path of the projectile.
Haha. You had me going there for a minute, with the comment about "several courses on wound ballistics". But if you actually believe there's such a thing as a "hypersonic shock wound", then... well. The entire concept is a fantasy. It apparently spread from tall-tales spun by marksmen in the Korean/Vietnam wars.
No comment on the lasers, that's out of my area of expertise.
Anti-munition laser batteries have already been deployed defensively by modern armies. It would be easy to target piloted aircraft with these, or create smaller versions that can give infantry 3rd degree burns from a 6km range. But no research has been permitted (or at least admitted).
The original poster's argument still stands. The firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden would never be allowed to happen these days.
No. The ratio that actually matters is civilian deaths versus percieved total threat level.
The only reason attacking a city would be unconsciable today is because of the US miltiary's overwhelming superiority. Both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany posed significant threats to the United States, in their day.
No enemy since then has even approached the Americans' power level. Since they're not facing much danger, the US public isn't willing to support brutality in their own defense.
If ever an opponent arose that provided a meaningful challenge, the US military would be as quick to flatten cities as they were in 1945.
(If the USSR had attacked between 1960-1990, it would've constituted a "meaningful challenge", and the USAF would've rapidly killed millions of Muscovites)
Many cheap keyboards distributed with cheap PCs can't handle a lot of simultaneous keypresses.
True, but it'd be a rare keyboard that can't handle 3 simul keydowns. Especially if the keys are widely distributed, which is how the game designer would naturally lay out the inputs (UDLR on left hand, jump/run/pause on right). If this problem was very common, then we'd surely hear about it from the legions who play console emulators.
My own keyboard is very cheap, and holding down Z and X will block recognition of A, for example. But it'd be hard-pressed to notice this if I wasn't methodically checking them. The arrow and numpad keys (which are very likely to be chosen for games) don't exhibit int
The normal lower limit is 4 simul keydowns. You can get a lot more than 4 if the keys are widely spread out, though. Examining my own inexpensive keyboard, I see that holding down "ZXCV" will block detection of "B" or "N",
Still plenty
OK, now s/Mario/Smash/ and see how it still works. Don't forget that Super Smash Bros. allows for four players on one machine.
It's easy enough to buy 4 $9.99 gamepads and plug them all into the PC with a USB hub. (Pay $19.99 for each controller, and you can get console-style analog sticks too)
The real barrier to SmashBros on a PC is not input, though, but output. The normal PC monitor is just too small to let four people view it fairly (without reaching Twister-like degrees of intimacy)
But can a PC support two keyboards?
Yes, if one of them is USB. But that's just silly.
Both "MS. PAC-MAN" and "FIDE" are trademarks, but anybody can make a game whose object is to step on each space in a maze without infringing as long as isn't called "PAC-anything".
I was talking more about redistribution than reimplementation. If the copyright on Pac-Man had expired, it would be fully legal to distribute Pac-Man ROM images (as many people already do in a bootleg manner). Sharers would just have to ensure that they do not create the impression that their efforts are endorsed by or affiliated with Namco. (Slapping "Completely unauthorized" onto each file is one simple way to comply)
But since I was discussing what might happen if it were still possible for a copyright to expire, this is all hypothetical. We don't really have any historical examples of a copyright on something expiring while its trademark is still intact. However, there are cases where a work has been voluntarily placed into the public domain, without relinquishing the trademark.
"Night of the Living Dead" is a public domain film, but someone (else?) still owns the trademark to those words. The movie can be distributed freely, as long as you are careful not to cause confusion with the trademark's new owner.
Therefore, it's probably safe to assume that the older lot (myself included) enjoy the emulation scene
Interesting that the prime emphasis of your first reason is something that's completely illegal.
There is, in fact, an emulation scene for consoles. Actually two scenes. There are self-booting CDs you can download which run mame+snes+whatever and have 500 roms on them. And there are actually fully legal discs from the real publisher (usually with only 16 classic games or so)
(Personally, I believe that copyrights should expire in 14 years, as the US first intended, so that classic games would be public-domain by now. Pac-man should be as free as Chess)
ultimately a tactical mistake by the games companies.
No, Halflife was a tactical marketplace success. Because of the popularity of its mods, Valve was able to continue selling basically the same game for full $39 price for five years. That's an enormous profit that continued long past the time most games would be $2.99 in the bargain bin.
Other moddable games had more questionable results. Battlefield 1942 has continued to sell heavily at $29 thanks to the Desert Combat mod. But unlike HalfLife, the publishers have released a sequel by now. The new Battlefield Vietnam is $39, and faces severe competition from BF1942 (which is not only a cheaper way to get similar gameplay, but is much less buggy)
It looks like moddability is only a safe moneymaker if if your company expects to have a multiyear spacing between games of the same genre. That'll give enough time for new engine development to give the sequel features the mods can't approach. (HalfLife to HL2 was 1998-2004, but BF1942 to BFV was just 2002-2004. Not enough of a wait)
we setup a dedicated quake server on a computer with a modem and had people connect to the server over the modem and play us on our lan.
How sporting. Why, I'll bet some of those fellows had a latency of only 3/10th of a second worse than you. And how much damage can a grenadelauncher possibly do in 0.3 seconds?
Super Mario Bros. or Soul Calibur II or Tetris efficiently using a keyboard
Yes! (Ignore the mouse though, it won't help)
Tetris was originally written for keyboard, and still works great. SMB had 6 input buttons, which is easily handled on a keyboard (if you had mentioned one of the post-NES sequels, then it'd have needed more buttons and the PC situation would be worse)
SC2 is more difficult. It's 4 generations after SMB, so it has a vastly broader use of controls. But yet, if the programmers wished, they could allow you adequate control by mapping the 40 available PC keys to different combat moves.
However, that would destroy the funness of the game. Once it became adequate it would already be too easy, since a huge chunk of the gameplay is focused on repeating painfully memorized strings to invoke the best attacks.
If consoles would do a standard USB interface and let me plug in a keyboard and mouse, then they could really take over the market.
But they can't do this... it violates their furniture form-factor.
Now that consoles have close to parity with PC power, the single largest factor sending console and PC games down different design paths is: couch or desk.
A PC goes on a desk, which is a surface which holds your input devices in front of you while in use. Consoles go under a TV in front of a couch, a situation where the player has no way to store input devices besides his own hands.
This means that all console input devices must be fundamentally less powerful than for a PC, because the user doesn't only need to operate the device; she also must hold it in the air.
Mice, keyboards, flightsticks, and steering wheels will all remain basically incompatible with consoles until humanity either
The poor console boys will get head-shotted from afar before they have time to turn around.
Except that in the name of "fairness", the programmers will have given the console-version such a forgiving auto-aim that the consolers can be pumping rounds into you before they even know you're there. (They they push right trigger to target the next closest enemy, and repeat...)
The PC players, of course, will only have bullets that go exactly where pointed.
Philosophical programmers are free to argue about what OO means, but the only true requirement is what's expressed in the name: "Object Oriented". Meaning a program is based on objects as the fundamental unit of coding (as compared with the earlier "function oriented" languages).
Any attempt to further constrain the term's meaning is but an expression of opinion. Neither Yourdon or Stroustrup originally invented it; their works only tell what they think it is most useful for OO to mean. (That's the best any mortal can really do)
You can get real OOness in C but it takes some heavy lifting, see gtk for an example.
Implementing OO in C is a patented technique and may not be used the express written consent of Sun Microsystems, Incorporated.
Notice of this "gtk" product has been forwarded to the cognizant lawyers, who will presently establish terms to convey all "gtk" intellectual property rights to Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. The win-win synergy will leverage to new frontiers of UCI innovationness.
Terrorists are those who delibrately attack civilians. If the shoe fits, wear it.
No nation has delibrately attacked more foreign civilians than the US in WWII.
Note: groups performing "ethnic cleansing" also attack large amounts of civilians, but that is typically only inside territory they've conquerored, so the victims aren't really "foreign".
But even if you were to note that people like Josef Stalin and Hideki Tojo meet your definition of "terrorist", they doesn't fall under the purvey of what the modern US government terms "anti-terrorism" efforts. By modern popular definitions, "terrorists" are only groups without a substantial military force.
From the people who invented the Uzi, an indiscriminate killing machine- the closest you can get to the gun equivalent of a nuclear weapon- you don't pick your targets with an Uzi, you pick your areas.
That's sensless. The Uzi became famous to US citizens due to its role in movies, but it's really just another in the long series of submachineguns.
And who invented the first effective SMG? It was Nazi Germany's MP38.
1, Palestinians were there first.
An anonymous respondant has challenged you with a "thousands of years" claim for the Jews, but that's really not correct. So what if there were Jews living there millenia ago? That was ancient history. The Muslims had owned that area for centuries up til 1947, and that's what counts. (Well, military power trumps legal rights, of course)
#3, you see terrorists
Both sides have employed techniques meant to produce the emotion called terror.
On a less human note, it is occasionally more desirable to wound than kill. For instance, in the civil war many generals told their soldiers to inflict non-lethal wounds.
Yes, correct. Wounding your enemy is frequently militarily preferred to killing him. Not only do you force the opponents to spend immediate resources evacuating the wounded, but there are longer-term consequences.
Decades later, when the nation's leaders are proposing another military adventure to the citizenry, the sight of crippled veterans panhandling on sidewalks will serve as a graphic reminder of the horrors that can result. Wounded soldiers discourage war, but dead ones can actually encourage it: the victim can no longer speak for himself, so he becomes a tool for revenge-oriented patriotic pagentry staged by the government.
So we see that there are multiple reasons for military commanders to want the option of trying to maim the opposition rather than kill them. And that's what bring us to the "retarded logic" alluded to above. Because according to international treaties like the Geneva convention, it is illegal to choose weapons that are more likely to hurt than kill.
NATO soldiers are not allowed to use shotguns, hollowpoint bullets, or anti-personnel lasers, because, perversely, they might leave the target alive. The 5.56mm rounds fired from an M16 are required to be jacketed to reduce their chance of tearing off an arm or leg, making nonlethal injuries more treatable.
The "Laws of War" are supposedly meant to make war more humane, but they actually make it more common. By encouraging killing over wounding, they keep wars tidy, and make it easier for national leaders to initiate violent combats.
The type of WWII war where massive civilian casualties are accepted so long as you kill lots of enemy combatants are long gone.
I wish that were true. But in each of the 2 Iraq wars the US has prosecuted, more civilian noncombatants were killed by a single poorly-considered American shot than the total number of US deaths.
Ironically, if the US forces tightened up their ROE, they'd save not only civilian lives, but their own (since rate of fratricide keeps on going up in each "major combat")
It would be better for bad array access to throw an exception
If a remote attacker can force your program to throw exceptions, that's also a denial of service, but possibly on a smaller scale. (Some service the program was doing was denied by the exception).
The difference, though, is that if the whole program aborts, when the programmer hears about this complaint from his users he'll have no choice but to fix it properly (which might be just bounds-checking himself, or could include sending messages back to the remote side reporting that it's request was malformed). Whereas a Java programmer might respond by wrapping the whole thing in try{...}catch(Exception e){}, which has made the symptom go away, but doesn't necessarily fix the problem.
Remember, a buffer-overrun is only one kind of an exploitable logic-error. If an external computer can cause your software to attempt to access an element outside an array, it can probably also make it try to read the wrong element inside an array. That could create a more subtle exploit (returning one customer's data to another?), so language-provided bounds-checking shouldn't be your only defense against bad accesses.
Not a declaration of war, that's for sure. Otherwise it'd have mentioned someplace about declaring war.
If you look at official Declarations of War from the US Congress, they all contain a block like the following after all the Whereases:
Therefore be it resolved, that a state of
war between the United states and the ENEMY is hereby formally declared; and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the ENEMY; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United states."
Notice it contains the important keywords "war" and "declared". That's what makes it a "declaration" of "war". Simple!
Of course, if Operation Iraqi Freedom had been a real, honest war, then Bush would've faced some problems. Being in an actual war, and not just an "operation", he'd have had to at some time point out when the war was over. But he can't do that, because he never really had a way to tell.
So a non-declaration of war really helped the President avoid a complex thought problem. Instead, he could just declare an end to "major combat", and not look quite as moronic when casualties only increase afterwards.
Virus writers are now developing a tactical doctrine.
Good form. Breezy and fluffy, but original enough to provide a convincing imitation of insight.
A key point of modern tactical doctrine is to act faster than the opposition can react.
Yeah, that's a "modern" technique alright! Sun-Tsu and Clauswitz never fathomed such a brilliant idea as "moving faster" or "seizing initiative".
If MDCP-1 "revolutionized" the MC, maybe that says more about the Marines...
That's exactly what we saw with this worm. The attack was launched in a way that rendered the usual strategies of anti-virus companies ineffective.
Their strategies have never been effective. But this case is not substantially different from any other: the infection spreads for a while, some systems are harmed, then signatures and patches are deployed which halts it. Nothing is different.
Of course the "strategy" was ineffective. The whole concept of virus-scanning is flawed. Basing your protection on recognizing known previous offenders is just a way to give every new attacker the first strike.
That isn't news, even if this spread was marginally faster than typical. It was slower than RTM, and slower than some recent Outlook infections. Nothing significantly better about it's spread rate.
Military doctrine gives us some insights on what to expect next.
No it doesn't. If you have any predictions about what'll come next, state them.
One attack acquired machines to be used as bases in a later attack.
The zombie-legion is a standard hacking technique since 2001. It's not derived from anything military. You're streching to apply metaphors that don't teach anything meaningful.
The digital world is not like the physical. Pretending it is will only get you in trouble.
We may well see an attack that wipes out most of the Internet-connected Windows machines in the world in a single day.
True, but unrelated to your thesis. I've been warning about that for a while. (The current anti-virus/anti-hacker measures taken in the US serve only to increase the risk of a future catastrophy) But such an attack would be entirely unlike any known or even anticipated military operation. It's closest physical equivalent would be a genetically engineered superflu- and that's a threat MCDP-1 won't help you face down.
Slashdot Mirror
Bring it back down 28 years with a renewal clause for after 14 years.
It'd like that, but they could never do it. Congress would get slammed for abuse of "eminent domain". The RIAA would accuse them of attempting to seize property ("intellectual property") without compensation, and would demand $billions paid from the US treasury.
(Nevermind that each time copyrights have been extended, it was also seizing property: IP rights were transferred from the public to corporations without the people getting paid for it.)
since among fasubbers, they have a decree that if an Anime is licensed in state (or whatever country they're doing the translation for)
Not anymore. That was prehaps the reason why fansubbing was tolerated up til 1995 or so.
But today, the much bigger reason why they don't seriously pursue fansubbers is because the producers expect to earn all their US profit from dubbed releases (including TV). While US "otaku" may prefer subtitles, the average customer 90% of the time wants to hear his own language.
they'll stop all work and cease distribution
Today that idea's a joke. Yes, the fansubbers themselves will cease work/distribution. But once the files have been released onto the internet, P2Pers will keep distributing as long as it's popular.
Also, that "rule" made more sense back when anime was rarely licensed for America. Today there are many titles that obviously have a US release written into their business plan from the start (none moreso than "Big O" volume 2)
Just put a clause in the Kazaa EULA
The only thing that might accomplish is finally getting EULAs declared invalid.
That is plainly wrong.
It's not so plain either way. There's plenty of truth in his claim.
For example, current copyright law has terms of 97 years. Only "the industry", in the form of large corporations, can profit from anything for that long of a time. The artists would get paid the same regardless of copyright lasting 15 years or 100.
Nobody plans out more than 10 years when considering an attempt to profit from creativity, whether by writing a novel or hiring a singer. All copyright revenues past 15-20 years is just free money for big publishers. (And the more money they collect from Elvis, the less they need to pay to today's performers)
Just use a lap pad or TV dinner tray table or similar small table. An udjustable laptop table might be ideal.
I haven't tried these "laptop tables", but a TV dinner tray certainly won't work. They're just too flimsy. And, small tables like that force you to lean forward over them, not sink back into the couch (for maximum potato-comfort)
Second, hollowpoints are *more* destructive, not less
Of course- I thought everybody knew that. Normal high velocity bullets have a mild all-or-nothing effect, where if a person isn't killed outright by cardiovascular or neural damage, he may recover fully. A pass-through "flesh wound" to muscular tissue might be patched up in a few days. Hollowpoints (or fragmented, or spinning) bullets tend to tear open non-vital organs, leading to bleeding (often internal) that might not be fatal for an hour, or (if treated) leave chronic disabilities.
(I shouldn't make it sound like there is a tremendous difference between kinds of bullets- if you get shot, you won't notice or care what kind of round hit you. But in war, every little edge might count)
My point is that for many tactical situations (such as sniping), hollowpoint ammo would be preferred ("more destructive"). It should be up to the officers on the field to decide which to shoot- not some parchment approved in a far-off conference.
But with the arms conventions starting in the 1800s, the ruling class decided they didn't want their soldiers coming home with wounds from fragmented bullets, so they wrote-off a whole class of munition from consideration.
The 5.56mm is most dangerous due to the incredible *velocity*
Actually, part of the reason the US chose smaller than 7.62mm rounds is to work around the Geneva Convention. By using a small bullet, the tumbling can do damage resembling the effect of a hollowpoint. An M16 has only slightly more velocity than an AK-47 (and much less total kinetic energy), but leaves a bigger hole because it's path through a soft target is less straight.
When hitting a solid body, a hypersonic shock wave follows the projectile, creating damage far removed from the actual path of the projectile.
Haha. You had me going there for a minute, with the comment about "several courses on wound ballistics". But if you actually believe there's such a thing as a "hypersonic shock wound", then... well. The entire concept is a fantasy. It apparently spread from tall-tales spun by marksmen in the Korean/Vietnam wars.
No comment on the lasers, that's out of my area of expertise.
Anti-munition laser batteries have already been deployed defensively by modern armies. It would be easy to target piloted aircraft with these, or create smaller versions that can give infantry 3rd degree burns from a 6km range. But no research has been permitted (or at least admitted).
This was acceptable to the Israelis, but not the Arabs.
If I mug you, and take half your money at gunpoint, is that acceptable?
The original poster's argument still stands. The firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden would never be allowed to happen these days.
No. The ratio that actually matters is civilian deaths versus percieved total threat level.
The only reason attacking a city would be unconsciable today is because of the US miltiary's overwhelming superiority. Both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany posed significant threats to the United States, in their day.
No enemy since then has even approached the Americans' power level. Since they're not facing much danger, the US public isn't willing to support brutality in their own defense.
If ever an opponent arose that provided a meaningful challenge, the US military would be as quick to flatten cities as they were in 1945.
(If the USSR had attacked between 1960-1990, it would've constituted a "meaningful challenge", and the USAF would've rapidly killed millions of Muscovites)
Many cheap keyboards distributed with cheap PCs can't handle a lot of simultaneous keypresses.
True, but it'd be a rare keyboard that can't handle 3 simul keydowns. Especially if the keys are widely distributed, which is how the game designer would naturally lay out the inputs (UDLR on left hand, jump/run/pause on right). If this problem was very common, then we'd surely hear about it from the legions who play console emulators.
My own keyboard is very cheap, and holding down Z and X will block recognition of A, for example. But it'd be hard-pressed to notice this if I wasn't methodically checking them. The arrow and numpad keys (which are very likely to be chosen for games) don't exhibit int
The normal lower limit is 4 simul keydowns. You can get a lot more than 4 if the keys are widely spread out, though. Examining my own inexpensive keyboard, I see that holding down "ZXCV" will block detection of "B" or "N",
Still plenty
OK, now s/Mario/Smash/ and see how it still works. Don't forget that Super Smash Bros. allows for four players on one machine.
It's easy enough to buy 4 $9.99 gamepads and plug them all into the PC with a USB hub. (Pay $19.99 for each controller, and you can get console-style analog sticks too)
The real barrier to SmashBros on a PC is not input, though, but output. The normal PC monitor is just too small to let four people view it fairly (without reaching Twister-like degrees of intimacy)
But can a PC support two keyboards?
Yes, if one of them is USB. But that's just silly.
How many of their games have you not bought because you were still playing Half-Life? I bet I know the answer!
Zero, because Valve hasn't released any other games. (That's what I meant by a "multiyear spacing" between games)
Both "MS. PAC-MAN" and "FIDE" are trademarks, but anybody can make a game whose object is to step on each space in a maze without infringing as long as isn't called "PAC-anything".
I was talking more about redistribution than reimplementation. If the copyright on Pac-Man had expired, it would be fully legal to distribute Pac-Man ROM images (as many people already do in a bootleg manner). Sharers would just have to ensure that they do not create the impression that their efforts are endorsed by or affiliated with Namco. (Slapping "Completely unauthorized" onto each file is one simple way to comply)
But since I was discussing what might happen if it were still possible for a copyright to expire, this is all hypothetical. We don't really have any historical examples of a copyright on something expiring while its trademark is still intact. However, there are cases where a work has been voluntarily placed into the public domain, without relinquishing the trademark.
"Night of the Living Dead" is a public domain film, but someone (else?) still owns the trademark to those words. The movie can be distributed freely, as long as you are careful not to cause confusion with the trademark's new owner.
Therefore, it's probably safe to assume that the older lot (myself included) enjoy the emulation scene
Interesting that the prime emphasis of your first reason is something that's completely illegal.
There is, in fact, an emulation scene for consoles. Actually two scenes. There are self-booting CDs you can download which run mame+snes+whatever and have 500 roms on them. And there are actually fully legal discs from the real publisher (usually with only 16 classic games or so)
(Personally, I believe that copyrights should expire in 14 years, as the US first intended, so that classic games would be public-domain by now. Pac-man should be as free as Chess)
ultimately a tactical mistake by the games companies.
No, Halflife was a tactical marketplace success. Because of the popularity of its mods, Valve was able to continue selling basically the same game for full $39 price for five years. That's an enormous profit that continued long past the time most games would be $2.99 in the bargain bin.
Other moddable games had more questionable results. Battlefield 1942 has continued to sell heavily at $29 thanks to the Desert Combat mod. But unlike HalfLife, the publishers have released a sequel by now. The new Battlefield Vietnam is $39, and faces severe competition from BF1942 (which is not only a cheaper way to get similar gameplay, but is much less buggy)
It looks like moddability is only a safe moneymaker if if your company expects to have a multiyear spacing between games of the same genre. That'll give enough time for new engine development to give the sequel features the mods can't approach. (HalfLife to HL2 was 1998-2004, but BF1942 to BFV was just 2002-2004. Not enough of a wait)
we setup a dedicated quake server on a computer with a modem and had people connect to the server over the modem and play us on our lan.
How sporting. Why, I'll bet some of those fellows had a latency of only 3/10th of a second worse than you. And how much damage can a grenadelauncher possibly do in 0.3 seconds?
Super Mario Bros. or Soul Calibur II or Tetris efficiently using a keyboard
Yes! (Ignore the mouse though, it won't help)
Tetris was originally written for keyboard, and still works great. SMB had 6 input buttons, which is easily handled on a keyboard (if you had mentioned one of the post-NES sequels, then it'd have needed more buttons and the PC situation would be worse)
SC2 is more difficult. It's 4 generations after SMB, so it has a vastly broader use of controls. But yet, if the programmers wished, they could allow you adequate control by mapping the 40 available PC keys to different combat moves.
However, that would destroy the funness of the game. Once it became adequate it would already be too easy, since a huge chunk of the gameplay is focused on repeating painfully memorized strings to invoke the best attacks.
Is it really hardcore FPS?
Not really. The best parts of Halo are actually the vehicles. It's better as a driving game than shooting.
Consoles will soon have starcraft:ghost which is FPS too,
No, Starcraft:Ghost is third person. Tomb Raider in space!
But they can't do this... it violates their furniture form-factor.
Now that consoles have close to parity with PC power, the single largest factor sending console and PC games down different design paths is: couch or desk.
A PC goes on a desk, which is a surface which holds your input devices in front of you while in use. Consoles go under a TV in front of a couch, a situation where the player has no way to store input devices besides his own hands.
This means that all console input devices must be fundamentally less powerful than for a PC, because the user doesn't only need to operate the device; she also must hold it in the air.
Mice, keyboards, flightsticks, and steering wheels will all remain basically incompatible with consoles until humanity either
- Invents portable antigrav
- Genetically engineers people with four arms
- Gives up the the TV+couch living from layout
Which will happen first?The poor console boys will get head-shotted from afar before they have time to turn around.
Except that in the name of "fairness", the programmers will have given the console-version such a forgiving auto-aim that the consolers can be pumping rounds into you before they even know you're there. (They they push right trigger to target the next closest enemy, and repeat...)
The PC players, of course, will only have bullets that go exactly where pointed.
Philosophical programmers are free to argue about what OO means, but the only true requirement is what's expressed in the name: "Object Oriented". Meaning a program is based on objects as the fundamental unit of coding (as compared with the earlier "function oriented" languages).
Any attempt to further constrain the term's meaning is but an expression of opinion. Neither Yourdon or Stroustrup originally invented it; their works only tell what they think it is most useful for OO to mean. (That's the best any mortal can really do)
You can get real OOness in C but it takes some heavy lifting, see gtk for an example.
Implementing OO in C is a patented technique and may not be used the express written consent of Sun Microsystems, Incorporated.
Notice of this "gtk" product has been forwarded to the cognizant lawyers, who will presently establish terms to convey all "gtk" intellectual property rights to Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. The win-win synergy will leverage to new frontiers of UCI innovationness.
Terrorists are those who delibrately attack civilians. If the shoe fits, wear it.
No nation has delibrately attacked more foreign civilians than the US in WWII.
Note: groups performing "ethnic cleansing" also attack large amounts of civilians, but that is typically only inside territory they've conquerored, so the victims aren't really "foreign".
But even if you were to note that people like Josef Stalin and Hideki Tojo meet your definition of "terrorist", they doesn't fall under the purvey of what the modern US government terms "anti-terrorism" efforts. By modern popular definitions, "terrorists" are only groups without a substantial military force.
From the people who invented the Uzi, an indiscriminate killing machine- the closest you can get to the gun equivalent of a nuclear weapon- you don't pick your targets with an Uzi, you pick your areas.
That's sensless. The Uzi became famous to US citizens due to its role in movies, but it's really just another in the long series of submachineguns.
And who invented the first effective SMG? It was Nazi Germany's MP38.
1, Palestinians were there first.
An anonymous respondant has challenged you with a "thousands of years" claim for the Jews, but that's really not correct. So what if there were Jews living there millenia ago? That was ancient history. The Muslims had owned that area for centuries up til 1947, and that's what counts. (Well, military power trumps legal rights, of course)
#3, you see terrorists
Both sides have employed techniques meant to produce the emotion called terror.
On a less human note, it is occasionally more desirable to wound than kill. For instance, in the civil war many generals told their soldiers to inflict non-lethal wounds.
Yes, correct. Wounding your enemy is frequently militarily preferred to killing him. Not only do you force the opponents to spend immediate resources evacuating the wounded, but there are longer-term consequences.
Decades later, when the nation's leaders are proposing another military adventure to the citizenry, the sight of crippled veterans panhandling on sidewalks will serve as a graphic reminder of the horrors that can result. Wounded soldiers discourage war, but dead ones can actually encourage it: the victim can no longer speak for himself, so he becomes a tool for revenge-oriented patriotic pagentry staged by the government.
So we see that there are multiple reasons for military commanders to want the option of trying to maim the opposition rather than kill them. And that's what bring us to the "retarded logic" alluded to above. Because according to international treaties like the Geneva convention, it is illegal to choose weapons that are more likely to hurt than kill.
NATO soldiers are not allowed to use shotguns, hollowpoint bullets, or anti-personnel lasers, because, perversely, they might leave the target alive. The 5.56mm rounds fired from an M16 are required to be jacketed to reduce their chance of tearing off an arm or leg, making nonlethal injuries more treatable.
The "Laws of War" are supposedly meant to make war more humane, but they actually make it more common. By encouraging killing over wounding, they keep wars tidy, and make it easier for national leaders to initiate violent combats.
The type of WWII war where massive civilian casualties are accepted so long as you kill lots of enemy combatants are long gone.
I wish that were true. But in each of the 2 Iraq wars the US has prosecuted, more civilian noncombatants were killed by a single poorly-considered American shot than the total number of US deaths.
Ironically, if the US forces tightened up their ROE, they'd save not only civilian lives, but their own (since rate of fratricide keeps on going up in each "major combat")
It would be better for bad array access to throw an exception
If a remote attacker can force your program to throw exceptions, that's also a denial of service, but possibly on a smaller scale. (Some service the program was doing was denied by the exception).
The difference, though, is that if the whole program aborts, when the programmer hears about this complaint from his users he'll have no choice but to fix it properly (which might be just bounds-checking himself, or could include sending messages back to the remote side reporting that it's request was malformed). Whereas a Java programmer might respond by wrapping the whole thing in try{...}catch(Exception e){}, which has made the symptom go away, but doesn't necessarily fix the problem.
Remember, a buffer-overrun is only one kind of an exploitable logic-error. If an external computer can cause your software to attempt to access an element outside an array, it can probably also make it try to read the wrong element inside an array. That could create a more subtle exploit (returning one customer's data to another?), so language-provided bounds-checking shouldn't be your only defense against bad accesses.
Not a declaration of war, that's for sure. Otherwise it'd have mentioned someplace about declaring war.
If you look at official Declarations of War from the US Congress, they all contain a block like the following after all the Whereases:
Notice it contains the important keywords "war" and "declared". That's what makes it a "declaration" of "war". Simple!
Of course, if Operation Iraqi Freedom had been a real, honest war, then Bush would've faced some problems. Being in an actual war, and not just an "operation", he'd have had to at some time point out when the war was over. But he can't do that, because he never really had a way to tell.
So a non-declaration of war really helped the President avoid a complex thought problem. Instead, he could just declare an end to "major combat", and not look quite as moronic when casualties only increase afterwards.
Virus writers are now developing a tactical doctrine.
Good form. Breezy and fluffy, but original enough to provide a convincing imitation of insight.
A key point of modern tactical doctrine is to act faster than the opposition can react.
Yeah, that's a "modern" technique alright! Sun-Tsu and Clauswitz never fathomed such a brilliant idea as "moving faster" or "seizing initiative".
If MDCP-1 "revolutionized" the MC, maybe that says more about the Marines...
That's exactly what we saw with this worm. The attack was launched in a way that rendered the usual strategies of anti-virus companies ineffective.
Their strategies have never been effective. But this case is not substantially different from any other: the infection spreads for a while, some systems are harmed, then signatures and patches are deployed which halts it. Nothing is different.
Of course the "strategy" was ineffective. The whole concept of virus-scanning is flawed. Basing your protection on recognizing known previous offenders is just a way to give every new attacker the first strike.
That isn't news, even if this spread was marginally faster than typical. It was slower than RTM, and slower than some recent Outlook infections. Nothing significantly better about it's spread rate.
Military doctrine gives us some insights on what to expect next.
No it doesn't. If you have any predictions about what'll come next, state them.
One attack acquired machines to be used as bases in a later attack.
The zombie-legion is a standard hacking technique since 2001. It's not derived from anything military. You're streching to apply metaphors that don't teach anything meaningful.
The digital world is not like the physical. Pretending it is will only get you in trouble.
We may well see an attack that wipes out most of the Internet-connected Windows machines in the world in a single day.
True, but unrelated to your thesis. I've been warning about that for a while. (The current anti-virus/anti-hacker measures taken in the US serve only to increase the risk of a future catastrophy) But such an attack would be entirely unlike any known or even anticipated military operation. It's closest physical equivalent would be a genetically engineered superflu- and that's a threat MCDP-1 won't help you face down.