Why did nobody buy this game? It was fantastic! Cmon, you all bought into Final Fantasy 7, so it's not like there isn't a market for Console RPG's in the United States and elsewhere.
If you want a great example of 'innovation' within a genre using an FPS engine, look no further than the above.
If pr0n is copyrighted, how come they don't put copy protection on the tapes/DVDs?:P
Inane. These do not follow. Most books lack copyright protection too. I think you'll find the reason lies behind production and duplication budgeting.
do you think they care
Well, actually, yes. They have their own "interest group" on Piracy ( PMAA, perhaps ), which due to being at the office I'm not going to go hunting for on the net - but they've been mentioned several times here on Slashdot before. They take internet piracy of their work quite seriously, because many parts of the industry wish to move to internet centric distribution models.
The adult industry are content providers and are entitled to the same protection as any other content provider. Just because they are held in low esteem by the moral minority or that they do distribute a lot of free content as 'bait' doesn't mean that they have been abridged of these rights.
it runs hardly any software at all... Get Linux instead
What you say!! I have nearly all my favourite Linux/Unix software compiled on the OSX box I'm typing this on. I think if you're going to push the Linux angle, attacking the competitions software availability is the last thing you should try.
system that logs intruder activity, determines how the intruder got in,
Question: If you know how the intruder got in using this on-the-fly automated system, why not just patch the vulnerability in advance? I thought the idea of Intrusion Tolerance was to avoid systems downtime after the intrusion had been noted by Administration.
In SWG, not all animals are equal. If you want to play a "force sensitive" character ( i.e. a Jedi ), you first need to unlock something known as the Force Sensitive Character Slot on your account ( as detailed here ). Nobody seems to be sure yet how exactly this is done.
Now, this is going to create a huge market for accounts, in my eyes. Being a Jedi is the big goal for a lot of people playing this game, and if they're willing to shed a few real life bucks to buy a house, I imagine they'd be very happy to part with more to be given the inside line on what will probably be the best part of the game. Especially if the FSCS unlock method is not widely known at the time.
Agreed. Wish they'd hurry up with the patch though.
Promised bugfixes, balance adjustments and playability enhancements in Real Life 1.01:
Boyfriend/Girlfriend object to be represented by linked list instead of single object.
Bug causing male pattern baldness fixed.
Economy to be tweaked for 'balance'.
Improved treasure drops from "Tax Return" mob.
Improved AI.
Rules revision to allow limited multiplaying.
Rules revision to allow deployment of "wallhack" in shower areas.
Anything I missed? I'm also looking forward to the new Spaceflight/Posthumanist expansion. Should be out around the same time as Duke Nukem Forever and the Diablo II 1.10.
YLFI
Re:You've been wrong before and your wrong again
on
In Pursuit Of A Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
First, I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV.
I don't think advertsing should be either. Certainly the framers never considered advertising as political dissent in need of protection.
But protected speech is not necessarily just about dissent, but also about social value. To just pop an example of commercial speech that could also have social value ( depending on your social values, I guess ) from Google:
Bigelow vs Virginia (1975), which held that advertising the availability of legal, out of state abortions was considered protected.
Now, back in the day, commercial speech didn't derive any first amendment protection - now it has limited protection, under something called the Central Hudson test. This is a four pronged test that provides guidelines as to where the government can restrict commercial speech, and you can read more about it at abuse.net ( great article ).
The meat of Hudson is in the first prong, which basically rejects the protection of misleading speech. See the above posters' comments about fraud. The other prongs alow the government to interdict if it has substantial interest in the area under discussion.
Astoundingly, much of this transition from non-protected to limited protection can be laid at the feet of consumers, who brought suit to protect their right to receive factual information ( Virginia State Board of Pharmacy vs Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976) ).
I can't see Internet voting being a success any time soon, because of inherent trust issues the average person has with computers / network security, etc. A lot of people I know won't shop online for nebulous "security" reasons that they can't or won't define, and I can't see them willing to chance their vote on something they wouldn't trust with their credit card details.
While I understand the problem for military voters and overseas citizens, for the rest of the citizenry, how hard is it really to get off your arse once every few years and wander down to the polling booth? ( assuming you even vote! )
Even if everyone could agree that the polling was fair and impartial, that there was no manipulation of the results, etc ( I mean, aside from the obvious email conspiracy theories that will spring up about, say, AOL filtering out all the democrat votes that go through their routers ), isn't this thing going to draw DDOS attacks like a moth to a very bright, very important light?
Now, direct dial-in voting using modems - that I can see possibly working. A shame that modems seem to be disappearing from the infotech landscape in some environments.
Sure hope we have universal QOS routing by the time this rolls out.
I think this might work better in a country like Australia, which has mandatory voting. In Aus, if you don't vote, down the track, someone comes looking for you ( with a Boot^Wfine ). You then at least know your vote wasn't counted. But where there is no physical ballot ( and nobody to come and tell you if your ballot attempt was unsuccessful ), I feel a lot of people would feel uneasy about the "reality" of their vote.
unlike some Battlefield servers where players would regularly mess around and destroy the game for other players.
The bots in coop do that too. You step out of your jeep for five seconds to take in the scenery, and the second you turn back, two bots have leapt out of the bushes and are motoring away in a cloud of dust, hollering and yahooing at the top of their lungs.
You can be selfish and require people to share with you if you like.
I don't know if I'd consider that too selfish. Sometimes, code takes a lot of effort to design, write, test etc. And I think some return on that investment is not an unreasonable desire. Is it selfish to go to your employer at the end of the day and ask for a paycheck? A share of the value that both of you have produced together?
Some software I release under the BSD license. I do this when I don't ever want to hear from that particular piece of software again. Some software is released under the GPL. Still other stuff goes out as Public Domain. But please don't tell me I'm selfish because I sometimes want the user community to share back with me what I've shared with them in the first place.
I don't understand how people get into mildly flamey discussions like this. Nobody asked or forced Linksys to use Linux and other GPL'd software as the basis of their AP. They chose to do it, nodoubt for reasons of their own, and initially at least, decided not to stick to the letter with the terms of the license. They could have chosen BSD. They didn't. I'm sure they were aware of the licensing differences at the time.
Now, hypothetically, do you think if they'd used BSD, they would have been good little angels, dilligently having their binaries displaying your copyright notice as clause two mandates? I honestly don't think so. I think they would have just appropriated the source as 'freeware', which it certainly isn't, and then we might have had the same scenes we're seeing here, but a little more low key.
YLFI
P.S.: I like *BSD. I like the license too. But I feel that the attitude behind the license is largely influenced by its tumultuous history intertwined with AT&T up until 1988. I think the fact that the BSD folks got to bootstrap their way up from earlier Unix sources ( and the misappropriation by AT&T of same BSD sources ) has led to a somewhat fuzzier perception of where their work ends and the work of others begins, and a less territorial mentality than the second wave GPL developers.
These are just some thoughts. I apologise for any factual innacuracies in the above... I believe I was still playing cricket in the backyard and jumping off wharves when all this was going on.
Nope. 802.11b ( probably g too ) has different frequencies or channels ( different numbers thereof in different places too, e.g. 13 channels in Japan, 11? in Australia ), but this is for the separation of logical networks and/or separation of AP's on the same logical network / coverage range ( can someone confirm that last bit? ).
Harvards wireless network usage notes includes the following:
All devices associated with a wireless access point are in contention for part of the 11 Mbps (802.11b IETF Standard) shared bandwidth. It is for this reason that certain bandwidth intensive applications may be more appropriate for the wired network.
It's good advice. I run mixed wireless / wireful in my house for this reason.
YLFI
Re:Noice cancellation
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I mean, even through triple paned windows and extra sound insulation in the walls i can still here 50 cent in the middle of the night...
Whup! Expect the RIAA to show up on your doorstep soon looking for a royalties cheque.
I don't think this is necessarily true. My day to day laptop is over five years old, and it's still performing as snappily ( Disclaimer: 166Mhz processors weren't really that snappy back in 1998 either ) as it ever was.
Here in the office, we also have all kinds of ancient laptops which are kept around for one legacy reason or another, and they're usually retired because we don't have a need for them anymore, not because of unit failure. Perhaps laptops are made more shoddily today. I sure hope not, because I'm hoping to buy a Powerbook in the next month or so.
I don't really know if anyone buys laptops expecting the same things you do from a PC ( the incremental upgrade path, etc ). Laptops are expensive, but for that price, you get mobility, which is very valuble to some. If you travel a lot for work, have a long public transport commute ( like me ), need computers in awkward situations ( e.g. for attaching to a router console in the top point in a rack ) or don't have much living space, the lack of upgrade potential is a non issue. If you're not a gamer, all you'll want to upgrade anyway once you reach optimal performance point is memory and hard drive space - both of which are usually accessible on a Laptop.
I would never buy desktop computers preferentially to laptops if cost wasn't such a hamstringing issue, particularly as newer laptops with DVI-outs or equivalent and USB/PS2 keyboards and mice make a functionally drop-in desktop replacement.
I don't think your average web-site defacer has ever been too concerned about the positive repercussions of his or her actions before, and I find it highly unlikely that a competition with their peers is going to jump start their sense of ethical responsibility.
A lot of people in this thread will say that a benefit of roving defacement groups is that it helps to highlight poor security. Sure - In the same way that setting peoples houses alight helps to highlight the importance of changing your smoke detector batteries.
I call shennanigans. This might be a happy side-effect, but if your happy haquer was really concerned with improving security, how hard would it be to find the hole, and then mail the site admin from inside the network boundary, or leave a message somewhere apart from the frontpage and then tip off the administrator?
They could do this. But there's no bragging rights there - and that's what this is all about when you get right down to it:
Bragging rights and a sense of importance within their peer group ( look at the 'shout outs' that accompany many defacements ).
Mean spirited embarassment for the victim
and in some rare cases
a possible political statement or message
To answer your question, and echo a sentiment that will probably be seen in numerous other posts in this thread nothing positive will come from this that could not have been achieved by less disruptive, upsetting or destructive means.
As to those who said "Great, MS will bear the brunt of it", grow up. Your mean spirited and childish attitude does you zero credit. Cracker attacks are a menace that have to be faced by all sectors of the computer community, and wishing them upon your rivals smacks of extreme poor taste ( not to mention the fact that most of the actual victims are likely to be non-technical clients of hosting companies who do not understand, wish to understand, or control their hosting solution ).
Re:Mensa is right based on Ockhams razor
on
Pure Math, Pure Joy
·
· Score: 1
But It's still a prime number.
Guh, that shold read "But primes are still primes in binary."
Interestingly enough, whats the exact wording of the law? Can you just bury it somewhere on the website which is the equivalent of a disused lavatory in an unlit basement with no stairs and a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"?
I think this law would be a lot stronger if it mandated contact by all of those forms to the extent made possible by available customer data.
This is kind of a sore spot for me at the moment because of a different, but similar misadventure of my own. Recently, my net banking access got frozen because too many incorrect password attempts had been made on it. However, the bank did not see fit to notify me of this, and I only found out when I urgently needed to do a wire transfer at 11pm on the weekend. And of course their service facility was long closed by that point and wouldn't be open until Monday. Sucks.
So what are the rules if you don't actually install the software? Instead you manually unpack the software on to the drive and never click on any 'I agree' button.
Back in the days when I was heavily into reverse engineering, we occasionally did things like this as a "learning exercise" ( it's really not that difficult to blow away a couple of calls to MessageBoxA with a carpet of NOP's, so the value of the exercise is questionable at best ).
The advice we got ( albeit, not from real lawyers ) was that the wording of ( most ) of the EULA's stated that we had no right to use the software short of viewing and acknowledging the license, regardless of the monies we might have tendered for it. No click, no license, illegal usage. The cash is just to get you to that screen, although the more generous ones will allow you to return the software for a refund if you refuse to comply.
The analogy made at the time was that jumping around the license acceptance screens one way or the other to get at the juicy marrow^Wsoftware within is like sneaking onto a skydiving plane to avoid signing the disclaimer of liabilities, even if you've paid in advance. It's a pretty awful analogy.
Any and all lawyers are invited to present a non-crappy analogy.:-)
-- YLFI
Re:Mensa is right based on Ockhams razor
on
Pure Math, Pure Joy
·
· Score: 2
One, it's Occam, from William of Occam, not "Ockham".
Two, how is symmetry "simpler"? It's dependant on not only number base, but also on the typescript it's printed in! Hint: eight in binary ( 1000 ) is not symmetrical except vertically. And again, that depends on the typeface. But It's still a prime number.
This is number base imperialism, you insensitive clod!
I could be very wrong, but I don't seem to recall Tesla being blacklisted or abused by the US Government. Taken advantage of by those he worked for? Yes. Stabbed in the back and then ignored by Edison? Yes. Victim of a massive government coverup? I wouldn't say so.
As to the bit about him being made out as a 'crackpot', I'm not sure if that worked very well - Tesla is well known for his research and innovations to this day ( like, the, er, practical alternating current motor he designed in ~1888 ) - and a general education in physics or electronics will bring you into contact with the man and his ideas ( at least in my experience ).
IMHO, the real crackpots are the ones who keep claiming they have discovered the 'lost weird science of Tesla' and 'Teslas unfinished overunity generator', usually right up the back of the 'new age' magazine along with the guy selling crystals from atlantis. Bleah.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did nobody buy this game? It was fantastic! Cmon, you all bought into Final Fantasy 7, so it's not like there isn't a market for Console RPG's in the United States and elsewhere.
If you want a great example of 'innovation' within a genre using an FPS engine, look no further than the above.
-- YLFIInane. These do not follow. Most books lack copyright protection too. I think you'll find the reason lies behind production and duplication budgeting.
do you think they careWell, actually, yes. They have their own "interest group" on Piracy ( PMAA, perhaps ), which due to being at the office I'm not going to go hunting for on the net - but they've been mentioned several times here on Slashdot before. They take internet piracy of their work quite seriously, because many parts of the industry wish to move to internet centric distribution models.
The adult industry are content providers and are entitled to the same protection as any other content provider. Just because they are held in low esteem by the moral minority or that they do distribute a lot of free content as 'bait' doesn't mean that they have been abridged of these rights.
YLFIWhat you say!! I have nearly all my favourite Linux/Unix software compiled on the OSX box I'm typing this on. I think if you're going to push the Linux angle, attacking the competitions software availability is the last thing you should try.
YLFIYou rang?
Question: If you know how the intruder got in using this on-the-fly automated system, why not just patch the vulnerability in advance? I thought the idea of Intrusion Tolerance was to avoid systems downtime after the intrusion had been noted by Administration.
YLFINah, it's not much better here. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
YLFIIn SWG, not all animals are equal. If you want to play a "force sensitive" character ( i.e. a Jedi ), you first need to unlock something known as the Force Sensitive Character Slot on your account ( as detailed here ). Nobody seems to be sure yet how exactly this is done.
Now, this is going to create a huge market for accounts, in my eyes. Being a Jedi is the big goal for a lot of people playing this game, and if they're willing to shed a few real life bucks to buy a house, I imagine they'd be very happy to part with more to be given the inside line on what will probably be the best part of the game. Especially if the FSCS unlock method is not widely known at the time.
YLFIAgreed. Wish they'd hurry up with the patch though.
Promised bugfixes, balance adjustments and playability enhancements in Real Life 1.01:
Anything I missed? I'm also looking forward to the new Spaceflight/Posthumanist expansion. Should be out around the same time as Duke Nukem Forever and the Diablo II 1.10.
YLFIFirst, I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV.
I don't think advertsing should be either. Certainly the framers never considered advertising as political dissent in need of protection.But protected speech is not necessarily just about dissent, but also about social value. To just pop an example of commercial speech that could also have social value ( depending on your social values, I guess ) from Google: Bigelow vs Virginia (1975), which held that advertising the availability of legal, out of state abortions was considered protected.
Now, back in the day, commercial speech didn't derive any first amendment protection - now it has limited protection, under something called the Central Hudson test. This is a four pronged test that provides guidelines as to where the government can restrict commercial speech, and you can read more about it at abuse.net ( great article ).
The meat of Hudson is in the first prong, which basically rejects the protection of misleading speech. See the above posters' comments about fraud. The other prongs alow the government to interdict if it has substantial interest in the area under discussion.
Astoundingly, much of this transition from non-protected to limited protection can be laid at the feet of consumers, who brought suit to protect their right to receive factual information ( Virginia State Board of Pharmacy vs Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976) ).
Over here, we call them "ballot boxes". HTH!
YLFISome random thoughts:
I think this might work better in a country like Australia, which has mandatory voting. In Aus, if you don't vote, down the track, someone comes looking for you ( with a Boot^Wfine ). You then at least know your vote wasn't counted. But where there is no physical ballot ( and nobody to come and tell you if your ballot attempt was unsuccessful ), I feel a lot of people would feel uneasy about the "reality" of their vote.
YLFISure. Merida , Pinarello and Lodestar are some manufacturers. I am told a British firm ( Kirk? ) made a magnesium framed bike back in the late 1980's.
Merida have a little puff piece about the benefits of Magnesium for bike frames here.
YLFI
That's no good! Imagine if you slapped into a rusty old Pinto and one of those magnesium framed mountain bikes - instant thermite!
Oh, the humanity!,
YLFI.
The bots in coop do that too. You step out of your jeep for five seconds to take in the scenery, and the second you turn back, two bots have leapt out of the bushes and are motoring away in a cloud of dust, hollering and yahooing at the top of their lungs.
*shakes his fist*
I don't know if I'd consider that too selfish. Sometimes, code takes a lot of effort to design, write, test etc. And I think some return on that investment is not an unreasonable desire. Is it selfish to go to your employer at the end of the day and ask for a paycheck? A share of the value that both of you have produced together?
Some software I release under the BSD license. I do this when I don't ever want to hear from that particular piece of software again. Some software is released under the GPL. Still other stuff goes out as Public Domain. But please don't tell me I'm selfish because I sometimes want the user community to share back with me what I've shared with them in the first place.
I don't understand how people get into mildly flamey discussions like this. Nobody asked or forced Linksys to use Linux and other GPL'd software as the basis of their AP. They chose to do it, nodoubt for reasons of their own, and initially at least, decided not to stick to the letter with the terms of the license. They could have chosen BSD. They didn't. I'm sure they were aware of the licensing differences at the time.
Now, hypothetically, do you think if they'd used BSD, they would have been good little angels, dilligently having their binaries displaying your copyright notice as clause two mandates? I honestly don't think so. I think they would have just appropriated the source as 'freeware', which it certainly isn't, and then we might have had the same scenes we're seeing here, but a little more low key.
YLFI
P.S.: I like *BSD. I like the license too. But I feel that the attitude behind the license is largely influenced by its tumultuous history intertwined with AT&T up until 1988. I think the fact that the BSD folks got to bootstrap their way up from earlier Unix sources ( and the misappropriation by AT&T of same BSD sources ) has led to a somewhat fuzzier perception of where their work ends and the work of others begins, and a less territorial mentality than the second wave GPL developers.
These are just some thoughts. I apologise for any factual innacuracies in the above... I believe I was still playing cricket in the backyard and jumping off wharves when all this was going on.
Harvards wireless network usage notes includes the following:
All devices associated with a wireless access point are in contention for part of the 11 Mbps (802.11b IETF Standard) shared bandwidth. It is for this reason that certain bandwidth intensive applications may be more appropriate for the wired network.
It's good advice. I run mixed wireless / wireful in my house for this reason.
YLFI
Whup! Expect the RIAA to show up on your doorstep soon looking for a royalties cheque.
YLFI
Sheesh. I have to work on an 800x480 screen when I'm on the move. :-P ( As seen here, running Debian ).
YLFI.
I don't think this is necessarily true. My day to day laptop is over five years old, and it's still performing as snappily ( Disclaimer: 166Mhz processors weren't really that snappy back in 1998 either ) as it ever was.
Here in the office, we also have all kinds of ancient laptops which are kept around for one legacy reason or another, and they're usually retired because we don't have a need for them anymore, not because of unit failure. Perhaps laptops are made more shoddily today. I sure hope not, because I'm hoping to buy a Powerbook in the next month or so.
I don't really know if anyone buys laptops expecting the same things you do from a PC ( the incremental upgrade path, etc ). Laptops are expensive, but for that price, you get mobility, which is very valuble to some. If you travel a lot for work, have a long public transport commute ( like me ), need computers in awkward situations ( e.g. for attaching to a router console in the top point in a rack ) or don't have much living space, the lack of upgrade potential is a non issue. If you're not a gamer, all you'll want to upgrade anyway once you reach optimal performance point is memory and hard drive space - both of which are usually accessible on a Laptop.
I would never buy desktop computers preferentially to laptops if cost wasn't such a hamstringing issue, particularly as newer laptops with DVI-outs or equivalent and USB/PS2 keyboards and mice make a functionally drop-in desktop replacement.
I don't think your average web-site defacer has ever been too concerned about the positive repercussions of his or her actions before, and I find it highly unlikely that a competition with their peers is going to jump start their sense of ethical responsibility.
A lot of people in this thread will say that a benefit of roving defacement groups is that it helps to highlight poor security. Sure - In the same way that setting peoples houses alight helps to highlight the importance of changing your smoke detector batteries.
I call shennanigans. This might be a happy side-effect, but if your happy haquer was really concerned with improving security, how hard would it be to find the hole, and then mail the site admin from inside the network boundary, or leave a message somewhere apart from the frontpage and then tip off the administrator?
They could do this. But there's no bragging rights there - and that's what this is all about when you get right down to it:
- Bragging rights and a sense of importance within their peer group ( look at the 'shout outs' that accompany many defacements ).
- Mean spirited embarassment for the victim
and in some rare casesTo answer your question, and echo a sentiment that will probably be seen in numerous other posts in this thread nothing positive will come from this that could not have been achieved by less disruptive, upsetting or destructive means.
As to those who said "Great, MS will bear the brunt of it", grow up. Your mean spirited and childish attitude does you zero credit. Cracker attacks are a menace that have to be faced by all sectors of the computer community, and wishing them upon your rivals smacks of extreme poor taste ( not to mention the fact that most of the actual victims are likely to be non-technical clients of hosting companies who do not understand, wish to understand, or control their hosting solution ).
Guh, that shold read "But primes are still primes in binary."
YLFI.
I think this law would be a lot stronger if it mandated contact by all of those forms to the extent made possible by available customer data.
This is kind of a sore spot for me at the moment because of a different, but similar misadventure of my own. Recently, my net banking access got frozen because too many incorrect password attempts had been made on it. However, the bank did not see fit to notify me of this, and I only found out when I urgently needed to do a wire transfer at 11pm on the weekend. And of course their service facility was long closed by that point and wouldn't be open until Monday. Sucks.
YLFI
Back in the days when I was heavily into reverse engineering, we occasionally did things like this as a "learning exercise" ( it's really not that difficult to blow away a couple of calls to MessageBoxA with a carpet of NOP's, so the value of the exercise is questionable at best ).
The advice we got ( albeit, not from real lawyers ) was that the wording of ( most ) of the EULA's stated that we had no right to use the software short of viewing and acknowledging the license, regardless of the monies we might have tendered for it. No click, no license, illegal usage. The cash is just to get you to that screen, although the more generous ones will allow you to return the software for a refund if you refuse to comply.
The analogy made at the time was that jumping around the license acceptance screens one way or the other to get at the juicy marrow^Wsoftware within is like sneaking onto a skydiving plane to avoid signing the disclaimer of liabilities, even if you've paid in advance. It's a pretty awful analogy.
Any and all lawyers are invited to present a non-crappy analogy. :-)
-- YLFI
Two, how is symmetry "simpler"? It's dependant on not only number base, but also on the typescript it's printed in! Hint: eight in binary ( 1000 ) is not symmetrical except vertically. And again, that depends on the typeface. But It's still a prime number.
This is number base imperialism, you insensitive clod!
-- YLFI
As to the bit about him being made out as a 'crackpot', I'm not sure if that worked very well - Tesla is well known for his research and innovations to this day ( like, the, er, practical alternating current motor he designed in ~1888 ) - and a general education in physics or electronics will bring you into contact with the man and his ideas ( at least in my experience ).
IMHO, the real crackpots are the ones who keep claiming they have discovered the 'lost weird science of Tesla' and 'Teslas unfinished overunity generator', usually right up the back of the 'new age' magazine along with the guy selling crystals from atlantis. Bleah.