Is this M$'s tail-between-the-legs way of acknowledging that people do develop homebrew apps for the XBOX, that it is relatively easy to get these apps to run, and that the best thing ever to happen to the XBOX was the ability to run Linux?:o)
How is this not something that could also be faked? If they faked the Apollo 11 landing, faked the leaving of items, etc. then could they not just as easily have saved the props in some vault, retrieve them from there, send another fake mission to the moon with the props secretly stashed on board, and "return with the items left on the moon during the original mission"?
It's not that hard for a party to fake a verification scenario of something that was supposedly faked by them to begin with. It would be much more convincing if a NASA-independent mission were to retrieve these things, yet, still likely fakeable given today's special effects wizardry. ILM and Pixar could easily do the whole thing with a special effects studio and a render farm.
With regard to the phrase "under control", it seems as though the concern here is using the DNS as 1 of 2 things: a tool for censorship, or an e-weapon. Given that certain countries already have a policy of censorship of the Internet for their respective citizens China, and that communications providers, in this case ISPs, must obey the laws of the nations in which they operate, going on about it in that regard will not be particularly fruitful. You'll have what essentially amounts to two camps: the "censorship is evil" camp, and the "I don't give a rodent's tail" camp. Use of the DNS as an e-weapon is probably the more worthwhile concern. The Internet, as I'm sure slashdotters are acutely aware, is a powerful medium for spreading information. Control the DNS, and you control the ability to find information. (Control the routing tables and you accomplish the same thing, only with a finer grain of control and with a lot more man-hours in the project.) Anyway, at the risk of sounding as though I'm crying "communist" (which arguably doesn't mean the same thing now as it did in the last half of the 1900's), isn't it better for the USA to "control the Internet" and maintain the stability of the current system than to redistribute control to non-profits that have to follow the laws of their own localities? If the world were to turn against your country and pass wartime legislation to blot out your country's DNS and replace all sites with propaganda, would it not be just as disastrous as the USA "controlling the Internet" in the same way that "it does now"? Having read the article on doc.gov, I find that what is being said is exactly that, in so many non-pessimistic words. It is essentially "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as opposed to "all your domain name resolution are belong to us".
I agree. There are plenty of options left. But I'm slightly confused as to how being able to copy pay-per-view is a fair use right. I was under the impression that fair use entailed being able to make archival copies of physical media on which you owned a music album / movie / whatever.
So anyway, I might not understand fair use in its entirety. If my understanding is somewhat like swiss-cheese, please do correct me, because I'd like to understand. If, however, I understand well enough, then I'm not sure you can even apply fair use to pay-per-view service.
Just something for both my edification, and to throw an idea out there. But like I said, please do correct me if I'm wrong about this whole fair use thing. I'd like to understand exactly how liberally I can apply it.
Coincidentally, your argument for Doom III is reasonably terrible. id Software has released Quake III for Win32, Linux, and Macintosh, and all of them play very nicely with each other. On top of which, each of the versions was released during the peak of its popularity. Aside from the obvious issue of marketshare, it's quite a shame that more game developers are not writing for the Mac OS and Linux platforms. Both of these platforms, in my experience, have insane performance benefits over the Win32 environment. That being said, I do most of my gaming in Windows simply because that's the release target for most of the games out there.
MS wouldn't necessarily lay the smack down, nor might they have grounds to do so. If, by some stroke of the imagination, a gaming company chose to steal MS's code, or take the proprietary libraries and reverse engineer those, MS would be within their rights to throw the compulsory hissy fit. However, a game maker is going to know two very important things when it comes to the data being sent over the wire: 1) The input data is being generated by their own software (i.e. the game) and 2) They can pick the resulting data (as sent out from MS proprietary networking code) off the wire and see how it was changed. Knowing these two things, they could simply implement their own library functions to do the necessary data transformations to ensure multiplatform interoperability. IANAL, but I'm relatively positive that clean-room reimplementation of proprietary code based on publically available input and output data is perfectly legal. That is, unless you're in the EU and operating under their software patents. AFAIK, the clean-room reimplementation of DirectX and Win32 API's is essentially the goal of WINE (and Transgaming WineX), so that games implemented in DirectX/Win32 are playable without missing any features under Linux (and other unices).
I attend a university that is currently building a beowulf cluster, and when it came down to making a decision, the deciding factor was price/performance ratio. While it may make sense for enterprises to go with the Xeon, the Opteron is a clear winner, in my mind, when money is an object. Of course, if you have the money to burn, the Xeon may seem to be the more obvious choice.
I think that using the paper as a starting point is much more appropriate than just handing the original paper in. However, it is not appropriate to simply reword the paper. Additionally, if the paper is used as a starting point, any gross similarities to the original paper should be cited, and if the original paper is simply an unpublished academic essay, it should be made clear to the professor the nature of the original paper, and that it will be made available upon request.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here, not to insult the integrity of the above "victim" of the anti-plagiarism service, but just to give the flipside of this situation.
In most cases (especially university codes of academic conduct) plagiarism can be boiled down to this: Plagiarism is the uncredited use (direct-quotation or paraphrase) of any previously published or unpublished work, including but not limited to articles, papers, essays, photographic work, and other media. The question that this definition raises is simple: Does this definition of plagiarism include previous work done by the same individual? Is there such a thing as self-plagiarism? If so, is this tantamount to plagiarising another's work?
The answer to the first question is that the definition does not explicitly exempt the author from uncredited reuse of his own past work. Therefore, according to the strict interpretation of the definition, it is plagiarism. Personally, I disagree that this particular type of reuse should be considered plagiarism unless the IP ownership of the previous work has been assigned to another party.
However, it does significantly reduce one's academic integrity simply to hand in a paper that one had written previously. For example, if I read The Iliad for a literature class, and I wrote a paper on human-deity interaction in ancient Greece based on themes from that work, and in a western civilization class later in my academic career, I was asked to write a similar paper and handed in the original, it would be right for the western civ professor to be thoroughly disappointed in me for handing in a paper that I didn't write specifically for that assignment, and furthermore, he would have a right to reflect that in my grade for that paper.
Looking at it from that perspective, and seeing it from the standpoint that it does diminish one's academic integrity to reuse papers, however, I would have to say that the full force of anti-plagiarism penalties for such situations is overkill. On the same token, though, if the penalty is specifically stated in any sort of university document (codes of conduct / honour codes, syllabi, departmental/university grading standards, etc.) to be the same as the penalty for plagiarism then you get what you deserve for reusing papers, because the bottom line is that you damage your own integrity by doing so, and loss of integrity is a far worse punishment than any disciplinary action that one could receive.
FWIW, I find it reprehensible that professors are not explicitly stating their anti-plagiarism processes in writing in advance of assignment due dates, but what is worse is that many will not disclose the fact that anti-plagiarism services like turnitin.com retain digital versions of all work checked, so that they may "enhance their service" without compensation to the originators of the work.
IANAL, but last time I checked, games fall under the category of software, which is, under current law, not able to be patented. Perhaps if developers of The Simpsons Road Rage were exposed to source code from Crazy Taxi before they began designing and coding the game, then a case of copyright infringement would be in question here. But "look and feel" and software in general, is not patentable under current law.
Furthermore, by some stretch of logic, couldn't the makers of Crazy Taxi also sue Rockstar for including Taxi mini-missions and the insane stunt bonus in their GTA series of games?
I think that perhaps game companies should worry more about producing worthwhile games than suing competing game companies for creating games that are in some ways similar, but share no source code. But when it comes to this kind of stuff we should all bow to the almighty dollar rather than customer satisfaction.
As cell phones became more powerful (and more like PDA's and computers) this was bound to happen. Unfortunately, with the adoption of GSM in the United States, that means the virus in question can be spread to US phones with the same vulnerability, as 911 is equivalent to 110 and 08 on most GSM carriers.
This is also a small part of the reason that the push was made for Java enabled phones, as there is less of a security risk (albeit still a small one) in running Java apps due to the construction of the language.
There is a somewhat heartening end to this story though. Sprint and other wireless carriers provision signed updates to phone firmware all the time over the air. Most times these updates include communications updates for new versions of software running in the MTSO or in the towers, but this sets a welcome precedent: Security updates can be pushed out to all phones of a particular model when they are first released. This way, a carrier will have no customers lingering months or years behind on updates (a la Windows XP and Windows Update) because the customers do not have to have the presence of mind to update manually, nor do they get to pick and choose what updates they want and what updates they don't.
4) Likewise, some of the optional but really rare items may only be obtained thru random combat.
Forgive me for bringing up Earthbound yet again, but it truly strikes me as an RPG done properly. A great example of this random combat rare item business is found during the portion of the game where you wander around with the asian looking prince guy through a portion of the game with, what I remember to be the "Starman Supreme" enemy (or some time of special Starman). The item in question was the Sword of Kings, which made battle much easier for the asian prince guy, as it was the supreme weapon for him. But you only had a 1/127 chance of actually getting this after defeating the battle with said enemy. Furthermore, the random events that generated this particular Starman enemy were such that you had a finite number of chances to get the item (significantly less than 127, I might add). Similar things happened at other points in the game, for example, beating Krakens in a particular area gave you a certain probability of gaining another item, etc. that could not be obtained elsewhere.
It seems that almost all of the suggestions that people have made were in some form or another introduced in Earthbound. It's a shame that it was $60 and came in a box nearly as big as the actual SNES box, otherwise I think more people would have bought it.
Is it really necessary to involve the FDA? As near as I can tell, the intent of this product is neither food nor drug. This begs the question: What stake does the FDA have in determining whether this product is safe? One could argue that since it is possible for the fish to be ingested, the FDA needs to make sure that it is 100% safe to do so. However, with that reasoning, the FDA would also be testing paste, because there will invariably be, in every kindergarten, a child who eats that. So if the FDA needs to get involved in this, we should probably let the RIAA lobby for rights management, stating that you can only view the fluorescense of the fish under an officially licensed UV light under penalty of legal action.
Well, as a matter of fact mplayer (a multimedia player for linux) does have support for WMA and WMV. Get your ducks in a row before you start quacking, you mindless troll.
The only time that I've personally seen this is on an ASUS A7A266 motherboard with an AMD TBird 1400... However, the system was clocked at 1400MHz, so no overclocking was being done. It turns out that it's really not the silicon or whatever else that makes the processor work... It's really the magic smoke. Once you let the magic smoke out, the processor probably won't work. This tends to happen in circumstances where your motherboard (in this unfortunate person's case, the A7A266) reports a 1.75V Vcore and a multimeter reports 3.8V. Needless to say, the vendor in question replaced the board and the processor. All's well that ends well, I guess.
I don't play MUD's as much as I used to, but when I played Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands , I used ROAClient. It has a host of pretty decent features, like highlighting, triggers, and the like. I never used anything but the highlighting, but it seemed to me to be a good quality FREE Win32 MUD client.
Chances are that by enrolling at a university, you've already engaged yourself in some type of IP agreement. You should check with the particular university that you attend / plan to attend for the specifics of any IP agreements that enrolling has made you subject to.
Then you really haven't gotten around the restrictions at all, have you?
The whole point behind VMWare is that you can run more than one operating system at a time, however, running linux, then running Windows on top of it in VMWare doesn't negate the obvious fact that you're indeed running Windows. By running Windows, you're already adhering to part of the regulations.
So really we've just discovered that you can get the same outcome in more than one way. Just because you do something _your_ way instead of _my_ way, doesn't mean that the something wasn't done to begin with.
On the contrary, commercial sponsorship could be a good thing regarding this type of venture. Creating and maintaining software that people don't directly interact with is an extraordinarily daunting task and is very costly. For example, incredibly complex software that controls traffic signals for a downtown area may take hundreds of people, and millions of dollars to build, maintain, and operate. A MMORPG where tens of thousands of users are interacting with the environment and other players could take hundreds of times that effort and capital. And where does all the money come from? Well, without sponsorship of some type, it has to come from the players, in the form of purchase prices, monthly fees, and perhaps extra fees for premium game services. The answer to lowering or eliminating these costs could be corporate sponsorship. Of course, it would be ridiculous to have a McDonalds on every screen of the game, but a certain amount of conspicuous yet unobtrusive commercial endorsement could well subsidize the sometimes steep monthly fees associated with MMORPGs.
I (and many other linux users) have known for a long time that DeCSS/libdvdcss is a necessity for those of us who like movies, but refuse to run windoze. I find it heartening that a media outlet such as the Washington post recognizes valid uses for the same. Maybe now the various distros out there won't make their users jump through hoops just to watch a dvd.
Also, as far as networking goes, try and keep your networking gear as standardized as possible. That is to say, If the majority of people have 3com cards, everybody will use a 3com card. There's nothing worse than being the poor schmuck that has network instability (and frequent computer hangs as a result) because everybody else's Realtek based network cards cause the 3com to freak out. In fact, stay away from 3com all together... It'll only give you headaches. Another note, if you're going to have more than about 8 people, you'd do really well to research and pick out a nice high-performance switch... None of this daisy chaining hubs business. Believe me. For network gaming, it's really worth the investment, especially if you plan to do more of these such events in the future.
Now go out and frag 'em!
Well... Because a lot of corporations have clauses in their IS/Internet agreements (which you agree to by signing with the company) that say "we can and do monitor any traffic on our network and reserve the right to restrict access blah blah blah...", it may be perfectly valid for them to block out SSH completely. Once you negotiate your connection via SSH, even snooping the traffic won't tell you much, so your sysadmin can't see that you're perhaps scp-ing files that you shouldn't be over to the competition. On the other hand, it would be pretty obvious if you were doing that via FTP, Kermit, etc. Just the flip side on that... devil's advocate if you will.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this M$'s tail-between-the-legs way of acknowledging that people do develop homebrew apps for the XBOX, that it is relatively easy to get these apps to run, and that the best thing ever to happen to the XBOX was the ability to run Linux? :o)
How is this not something that could also be faked? If they faked the Apollo 11 landing, faked the leaving of items, etc. then could they not just as easily have saved the props in some vault, retrieve them from there, send another fake mission to the moon with the props secretly stashed on board, and "return with the items left on the moon during the original mission"?
It's not that hard for a party to fake a verification scenario of something that was supposedly faked by them to begin with. It would be much more convincing if a NASA-independent mission were to retrieve these things, yet, still likely fakeable given today's special effects wizardry. ILM and Pixar could easily do the whole thing with a special effects studio and a render farm.
With regard to the phrase "under control", it seems as though the concern here is using the DNS as 1 of 2 things: a tool for censorship, or an e-weapon. Given that certain countries already have a policy of censorship of the Internet for their respective citizens China, and that communications providers, in this case ISPs, must obey the laws of the nations in which they operate, going on about it in that regard will not be particularly fruitful. You'll have what essentially amounts to two camps: the "censorship is evil" camp, and the "I don't give a rodent's tail" camp. Use of the DNS as an e-weapon is probably the more worthwhile concern. The Internet, as I'm sure slashdotters are acutely aware, is a powerful medium for spreading information. Control the DNS, and you control the ability to find information. (Control the routing tables and you accomplish the same thing, only with a finer grain of control and with a lot more man-hours in the project.) Anyway, at the risk of sounding as though I'm crying "communist" (which arguably doesn't mean the same thing now as it did in the last half of the 1900's), isn't it better for the USA to "control the Internet" and maintain the stability of the current system than to redistribute control to non-profits that have to follow the laws of their own localities? If the world were to turn against your country and pass wartime legislation to blot out your country's DNS and replace all sites with propaganda, would it not be just as disastrous as the USA "controlling the Internet" in the same way that "it does now"? Having read the article on doc.gov, I find that what is being said is exactly that, in so many non-pessimistic words. It is essentially "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as opposed to "all your domain name resolution are belong to us".
I agree. There are plenty of options left. But I'm slightly confused as to how being able to copy pay-per-view is a fair use right. I was under the impression that fair use entailed being able to make archival copies of physical media on which you owned a music album / movie / whatever. So anyway, I might not understand fair use in its entirety. If my understanding is somewhat like swiss-cheese, please do correct me, because I'd like to understand. If, however, I understand well enough, then I'm not sure you can even apply fair use to pay-per-view service. Just something for both my edification, and to throw an idea out there. But like I said, please do correct me if I'm wrong about this whole fair use thing. I'd like to understand exactly how liberally I can apply it.
Coincidentally, your argument for Doom III is reasonably terrible. id Software has released Quake III for Win32, Linux, and Macintosh, and all of them play very nicely with each other. On top of which, each of the versions was released during the peak of its popularity. Aside from the obvious issue of marketshare, it's quite a shame that more game developers are not writing for the Mac OS and Linux platforms. Both of these platforms, in my experience, have insane performance benefits over the Win32 environment. That being said, I do most of my gaming in Windows simply because that's the release target for most of the games out there.
MS wouldn't necessarily lay the smack down, nor might they have grounds to do so. If, by some stroke of the imagination, a gaming company chose to steal MS's code, or take the proprietary libraries and reverse engineer those, MS would be within their rights to throw the compulsory hissy fit. However, a game maker is going to know two very important things when it comes to the data being sent over the wire: 1) The input data is being generated by their own software (i.e. the game) and 2) They can pick the resulting data (as sent out from MS proprietary networking code) off the wire and see how it was changed. Knowing these two things, they could simply implement their own library functions to do the necessary data transformations to ensure multiplatform interoperability. IANAL, but I'm relatively positive that clean-room reimplementation of proprietary code based on publically available input and output data is perfectly legal. That is, unless you're in the EU and operating under their software patents. AFAIK, the clean-room reimplementation of DirectX and Win32 API's is essentially the goal of WINE (and Transgaming WineX), so that games implemented in DirectX/Win32 are playable without missing any features under Linux (and other unices).
I attend a university that is currently building a beowulf cluster, and when it came down to making a decision, the deciding factor was price/performance ratio. While it may make sense for enterprises to go with the Xeon, the Opteron is a clear winner, in my mind, when money is an object. Of course, if you have the money to burn, the Xeon may seem to be the more obvious choice.
I think that using the paper as a starting point is much more appropriate than just handing the original paper in. However, it is not appropriate to simply reword the paper. Additionally, if the paper is used as a starting point, any gross similarities to the original paper should be cited, and if the original paper is simply an unpublished academic essay, it should be made clear to the professor the nature of the original paper, and that it will be made available upon request.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here, not to insult the integrity of the above "victim" of the anti-plagiarism service, but just to give the flipside of this situation.
In most cases (especially university codes of academic conduct) plagiarism can be boiled down to this: Plagiarism is the uncredited use (direct-quotation or paraphrase) of any previously published or unpublished work, including but not limited to articles, papers, essays, photographic work, and other media. The question that this definition raises is simple: Does this definition of plagiarism include previous work done by the same individual? Is there such a thing as self-plagiarism? If so, is this tantamount to plagiarising another's work?
The answer to the first question is that the definition does not explicitly exempt the author from uncredited reuse of his own past work. Therefore, according to the strict interpretation of the definition, it is plagiarism. Personally, I disagree that this particular type of reuse should be considered plagiarism unless the IP ownership of the previous work has been assigned to another party.
However, it does significantly reduce one's academic integrity simply to hand in a paper that one had written previously. For example, if I read The Iliad for a literature class, and I wrote a paper on human-deity interaction in ancient Greece based on themes from that work, and in a western civilization class later in my academic career, I was asked to write a similar paper and handed in the original, it would be right for the western civ professor to be thoroughly disappointed in me for handing in a paper that I didn't write specifically for that assignment, and furthermore, he would have a right to reflect that in my grade for that paper.
Looking at it from that perspective, and seeing it from the standpoint that it does diminish one's academic integrity to reuse papers, however, I would have to say that the full force of anti-plagiarism penalties for such situations is overkill. On the same token, though, if the penalty is specifically stated in any sort of university document (codes of conduct / honour codes, syllabi, departmental/university grading standards, etc.) to be the same as the penalty for plagiarism then you get what you deserve for reusing papers, because the bottom line is that you damage your own integrity by doing so, and loss of integrity is a far worse punishment than any disciplinary action that one could receive.
FWIW, I find it reprehensible that professors are not explicitly stating their anti-plagiarism processes in writing in advance of assignment due dates, but what is worse is that many will not disclose the fact that anti-plagiarism services like turnitin.com retain digital versions of all work checked, so that they may "enhance their service" without compensation to the originators of the work.
Just my 10 cents.
Now go learn binary.
IANAL, but last time I checked, games fall under the category of software, which is, under current law, not able to be patented. Perhaps if developers of The Simpsons Road Rage were exposed to source code from Crazy Taxi before they began designing and coding the game, then a case of copyright infringement would be in question here. But "look and feel" and software in general, is not patentable under current law. Furthermore, by some stretch of logic, couldn't the makers of Crazy Taxi also sue Rockstar for including Taxi mini-missions and the insane stunt bonus in their GTA series of games? I think that perhaps game companies should worry more about producing worthwhile games than suing competing game companies for creating games that are in some ways similar, but share no source code. But when it comes to this kind of stuff we should all bow to the almighty dollar rather than customer satisfaction.
As cell phones became more powerful (and more like PDA's and computers) this was bound to happen. Unfortunately, with the adoption of GSM in the United States, that means the virus in question can be spread to US phones with the same vulnerability, as 911 is equivalent to 110 and 08 on most GSM carriers.
This is also a small part of the reason that the push was made for Java enabled phones, as there is less of a security risk (albeit still a small one) in running Java apps due to the construction of the language.
There is a somewhat heartening end to this story though. Sprint and other wireless carriers provision signed updates to phone firmware all the time over the air. Most times these updates include communications updates for new versions of software running in the MTSO or in the towers, but this sets a welcome precedent: Security updates can be pushed out to all phones of a particular model when they are first released. This way, a carrier will have no customers lingering months or years behind on updates (a la Windows XP and Windows Update) because the customers do not have to have the presence of mind to update manually, nor do they get to pick and choose what updates they want and what updates they don't.
4) Likewise, some of the optional but really rare items may only be obtained thru random combat.
Forgive me for bringing up Earthbound yet again, but it truly strikes me as an RPG done properly. A great example of this random combat rare item business is found during the portion of the game where you wander around with the asian looking prince guy through a portion of the game with, what I remember to be the "Starman Supreme" enemy (or some time of special Starman). The item in question was the Sword of Kings, which made battle much easier for the asian prince guy, as it was the supreme weapon for him. But you only had a 1/127 chance of actually getting this after defeating the battle with said enemy. Furthermore, the random events that generated this particular Starman enemy were such that you had a finite number of chances to get the item (significantly less than 127, I might add). Similar things happened at other points in the game, for example, beating Krakens in a particular area gave you a certain probability of gaining another item, etc. that could not be obtained elsewhere. It seems that almost all of the suggestions that people have made were in some form or another introduced in Earthbound. It's a shame that it was $60 and came in a box nearly as big as the actual SNES box, otherwise I think more people would have bought it.
Is it really necessary to involve the FDA? As near as I can tell, the intent of this product is neither food nor drug. This begs the question: What stake does the FDA have in determining whether this product is safe? One could argue that since it is possible for the fish to be ingested, the FDA needs to make sure that it is 100% safe to do so. However, with that reasoning, the FDA would also be testing paste, because there will invariably be, in every kindergarten, a child who eats that. So if the FDA needs to get involved in this, we should probably let the RIAA lobby for rights management, stating that you can only view the fluorescense of the fish under an officially licensed UV light under penalty of legal action.
Well, as a matter of fact mplayer (a multimedia player for linux) does have support for WMA and WMV. Get your ducks in a row before you start quacking, you mindless troll.
The only time that I've personally seen this is on an ASUS A7A266 motherboard with an AMD TBird 1400... However, the system was clocked at 1400MHz, so no overclocking was being done. It turns out that it's really not the silicon or whatever else that makes the processor work... It's really the magic smoke. Once you let the magic smoke out, the processor probably won't work. This tends to happen in circumstances where your motherboard (in this unfortunate person's case, the A7A266) reports a 1.75V Vcore and a multimeter reports 3.8V. Needless to say, the vendor in question replaced the board and the processor. All's well that ends well, I guess.
I don't play MUD's as much as I used to, but when I played Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands , I used ROAClient. It has a host of pretty decent features, like highlighting, triggers, and the like. I never used anything but the highlighting, but it seemed to me to be a good quality FREE Win32 MUD client.
Unless you sign an IP agreement...
Chances are that by enrolling at a university, you've already engaged yourself in some type of IP agreement. You should check with the particular university that you attend / plan to attend for the specifics of any IP agreements that enrolling has made you subject to.
Then you really haven't gotten around the restrictions at all, have you? The whole point behind VMWare is that you can run more than one operating system at a time, however, running linux, then running Windows on top of it in VMWare doesn't negate the obvious fact that you're indeed running Windows. By running Windows, you're already adhering to part of the regulations. So really we've just discovered that you can get the same outcome in more than one way. Just because you do something _your_ way instead of _my_ way, doesn't mean that the something wasn't done to begin with.
On the contrary, commercial sponsorship could be a good thing regarding this type of venture. Creating and maintaining software that people don't directly interact with is an extraordinarily daunting task and is very costly. For example, incredibly complex software that controls traffic signals for a downtown area may take hundreds of people, and millions of dollars to build, maintain, and operate. A MMORPG where tens of thousands of users are interacting with the environment and other players could take hundreds of times that effort and capital. And where does all the money come from? Well, without sponsorship of some type, it has to come from the players, in the form of purchase prices, monthly fees, and perhaps extra fees for premium game services. The answer to lowering or eliminating these costs could be corporate sponsorship. Of course, it would be ridiculous to have a McDonalds on every screen of the game, but a certain amount of conspicuous yet unobtrusive commercial endorsement could well subsidize the sometimes steep monthly fees associated with MMORPGs.
I (and many other linux users) have known for a long time that DeCSS/libdvdcss is a necessity for those of us who like movies, but refuse to run windoze. I find it heartening that a media outlet such as the Washington post recognizes valid uses for the same. Maybe now the various distros out there won't make their users jump through hoops just to watch a dvd.
All this talk brings to mind new meaning for the term "computer virus".
Also, as far as networking goes, try and keep your networking gear as standardized as possible. That is to say, If the majority of people have 3com cards, everybody will use a 3com card. There's nothing worse than being the poor schmuck that has network instability (and frequent computer hangs as a result) because everybody else's Realtek based network cards cause the 3com to freak out. In fact, stay away from 3com all together... It'll only give you headaches. Another note, if you're going to have more than about 8 people, you'd do really well to research and pick out a nice high-performance switch... None of this daisy chaining hubs business. Believe me. For network gaming, it's really worth the investment, especially if you plan to do more of these such events in the future. Now go out and frag 'em!
Well... Because a lot of corporations have clauses in their IS/Internet agreements (which you agree to by signing with the company) that say "we can and do monitor any traffic on our network and reserve the right to restrict access blah blah blah...", it may be perfectly valid for them to block out SSH completely. Once you negotiate your connection via SSH, even snooping the traffic won't tell you much, so your sysadmin can't see that you're perhaps scp-ing files that you shouldn't be over to the competition. On the other hand, it would be pretty obvious if you were doing that via FTP, Kermit, etc. Just the flip side on that... devil's advocate if you will.