It is a valid point, but the people themselves will get their money back (possibly less some fees depending on their bank). I'll use the example of my parents.
A few years back, my mom lost her credit card, and the wrong person found it. They rang it up to the limit buying all sorts of stuff. They bought a couch, a few DVD's, paid their bills, and even set their car loan to automatically bill the card. My mom rarely uses it for anything, so the sudden spending spree must have set off alarm bells, and they called her within a couple days, even before she'd realized she lost it.
It took my parents almost three months to get the mess all settled. The guy who found the credit card was on the verge of bankruptcy. It went to court, and his creditors testified that he was days away from getting his car reposessed, and that the couch he bought was probably to replace a living room set that he'd bought on credit and then failed to pay for.
There was no way he could afford to pay back what he'd stolen, but my parents got all their money back (Even the $50 limit they had to pay initially) through the credit card company, who have systems in place to protect themselves against things like this.
I live in Michigan, and at this time of year water is, indeed, not all that wet at all.
Re:Orientation of Saturn
on
Imagining Titan
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm guessing the people who made those pictures are artists first and scientists second. Most of the pictures you see from NASA or in books of Saturn show the rings oriented nearly horizontal and tilted slightly towards the point of view. It isn't suprising that art depicting Saturn would do much the same.
If you wanted to hit them up for scientific realism, Saturn shouldn't be visible in the pictures anyway, since as others have posted, the probe is going to enter on the far side of Titan from Saturn, and the atmosphere would obsucre it anyway.
It's unfortunate there won't be any, but if they did have live coverage, it wouldn't be very impressive for all but the most hardcore geeks.
I remember watching the coverage from the Mars landings, and they're not that exciting. They might get some attention during the first few minutes, but by an hour into it when the most exciting thing you heard was, "Attitude adjustment in five minutes..." and then "Attitude adjustment green." after five minutes of silence, your audience is gone. I wonder if the people in the control room even get that excited, knowing that by the time they get busy, the cards have already been pretty much dealt an hour earlier, and there's not enough time to correct anything that goes wrong.
I'd rather read the summaries after the fact, myself. The information they collect doesn't say anything I can understand until after they've been processed, anyway.
Assuming you live to see the result (short trip/hibernation) and don't just end up living in a much more cramped version of any given city on Earth for the rest of your life.
But didn't the Death Star have a trench around its equator, not a ridge? So wouldn't that make this a soft of anti-Death Star? A Life Star if you'll excuse my poor humor.
Re:The submitter used the term gloat.
on
State of the Xbox
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They weren't trying to get a stranglehold on the market. They were doing something that's called "entering a market." I will give you one million dollars (if I had that much anyway), and let you pick any existing industry. You then have five years to produce a return on my investment by doing business in that industry. Very unlikely in ANY industry. Getting recognized as a legitamate name costs a lot of money and a lot of advertising. Microsoft needed to get contracts and partnerships that it didn't have before and start doing things and hiring people that it hadn't done before.
It's pretty equatable to a store (just with a few extra 0's on the bankroll). The initial investment is huge. You need to purchase property, and either build a suitable structure or remodel the existing one to fit (or pay a likely higher price on an already fitting location), you need to invest in initial inventory, hardware and electronics, pay the connection or transfer fees on all the services, and then you need to hire a workstaff. At this point you have still not made a dime, but boy are you spending it.
Once you open for business, you have a mountain of debts, which turns off investors (this is one of the few areas where a pre-existing corporation entering a new market has an advantage. it can offest these costs with profits from other divisions. However, many major investors will see this new division as a big gaping black hole and will be more hesitant to invest), meaning odds are those debts aren't going anywhere just yet.
Most importantly, you're new. Few people know about you, and even those that do don't know wether it's worth doing business with you. You need to spend money to get people to do this by advertising, and it's usually neccessary to cut prices to razor-thing profit margins (or even temporary losses) so that people are more likely to gamble on a "test" purchase from you. Microsoft did this by selling the Xbox at a loss initially. Nintendo has done this, Sega did this, I'm pretty sure Sony does this, although I've never cared enough to look up the particulars, and Microsoft had to do it to keep up. I don't know if Atari ever did this, but if they did, then it would have hurt them far worse. Nintedo was an old and successful card and board game producer, Sony had a long line of successful electronics, and Microsoft has operating systems. They all had to take the initial entry pains to get into the video game market. The fact that Microsoft is dealing with those pains the same way Nintendo and Sony did should not be suprising. In fact, it should be [reassuring or troubling, depending on wether you want to be reasonable and open or simply want Microsoft to fail for failure's sake]. It worked for the the other consoles. That's not to say it'll work for the next one, but it does strongly suggest that it's a pretty good way to go.
About the only company that didn't take initial losses on entering the gaming system market is Nokia. They went and tried to sell their handheld system at $400 out of the gate (I can only hope they were trying to profit off of system sales without having to rely on game sales or gamble on continued future success, anyway. If they were selling below cost, then they have worse problems than I ever thought). Had they started out with the sort of prices they cut it down to, I still don't think they would have succeeded, but they would have had a decent shot at getting some impulse buyers on the hook.
I went to Googleand did some searches for pictures of it. Unless there are extensive underground networks carved into the bedrock under the facility, I don't see anything worthy of a headquarters that I would use. I mean, just WHERE am I going to keep the sharks? Nothing in these pictures looks even remotely laser-proof, and I don't even want to think of the mess I'll have to sweep up when the special forces attack.
The Sun is an example of everything wrong with British journalism
Nah, just journalism in general. They're just as bad over here. I'm waiting for the Saginaw News to print this story. They're pretty good at printing stories without researching it. Once, the DoE transported a steel assembly through Michigan that would eventually be used in a nuclear reactor. An unrevealed "someone" provided a "leaked DoE document" to the SN saying that the "radiation" from this material would kill "300 to 600 people" along its transport route, but that the DoE "considered that acceptably low."
The truth was, it was just like the shitillion other tons of steel stuff that gets shipped through Michigan every day. It was going to go into a nuclear reactor, but it had never been exposed to nuclear material. The steel had been forged into the desired form up in the UP, loaded on a boat, transfered to a train, and then carried to who-knows-where out west to actually go into a nuclear reactor out there. Nobody was killed, although the article triggered a protest along the transport route (It wasn't the even the correct route, they ended up protesting about 150 tons of feed corn, if I remember right), in which several people were injured when they had to be forcably pulled away from the tracks by the police before the train spread them out over the next eight miles of railroad ties.
I considered the use of the PATRIOT act to take down a file swapping site with episodes of Stargate SG1 a lot worse than this. This guy's far from a terrorist, and I swear there must be some other applicable law they could use against him.
Still, I think the gap between shining a laser on a plane for shits and giggles and shining a laser on a plane to allow a guided weapon to target it is a lot narrower (relatively speaking) than the gap between copyright violations and any kind of terrorism.
I allow myself $20 a month in subscriptions to games, and $100 a month total for games. Right now, subscription wise, I'm paying $9 a month for an MMORPG, and $10 a month for an MMORTS. If I paid them six months in advance, I'd actually pay less for the two combined than for Planetside, I've had one wipe in three years with one game (which I actually could have avoided had I had the foresight. Shortly after I started, they did a major graphical and systems overhaul, but couldn't upgrade the existing server without causing massive imbalance, so they launched the new system on a new set of servers. I was level 15 at the time - a week's work in the old system, maybe a week and a half in the new, but relative to the monsters I'd actually be overall stronger due to the new combat system, so I would have lost little or nothing to change, but I didn't. The old server was eventually discontinued, and I had to start over from a much wider gap) and none in two with the other. My friend, who convinced me to take the trial on Planetside, confesses several wipes in less than a year.
The game play is not particularly refreshing or special, and the character "advancement" seems more like an artificial limiting factor on newbies than any actual advancement.
From the picture in the Sun article, I don't think he knew it was. The cartridge looks like fifty other GBA games I have sitting around, and it has a very legitamate-looking sticker on it. It's obviously an otherwise good fake made with a crappy unclean ROM downloaded off the internet complete with the cracker intro (Where the "fuck off and die" bit came from).
There are a couple ways the father could have gotten it: 1. Bought it off ebay or otherwise from a non-vendor. Worse yet, he could have bought it from one of those carts that get set up in malls and vanish after three days. There was a strange event in the mall near me where a vender cart like that sold dozens of remote control cars with the electronics gutted out of them, and then vanished. Whatever the conditions, if this is how he got it, he's at best foolish (for not realizing it's a fake) and at worst a fool (for buying from shady vendors).
2. Somebody sold the fakes to stores as used. I've heard of it happening at the EB near me once or twice. A good fake can pass as legit to a visual inspection, and most places don't take the time to actually run the game. In this case, it's not the guy's fault for buying it, but he still should have seen it was fake and complained to the store. From what the intro text said, it should be pretty clear. I guess he's one of those people that can look at a page of text, and only see the word "fuck" in the middle of the page and nothing else.
I blamed it on all sorts of things. TV, music, friends. Parents used to be smarter though, and my parents just called me a dumbass and made me shovel the driveway with a rake for half the winter afterwards.
That's what I was thinking when I read the article. Nintendo's made a good deal of mistakes the last ten years, but most of them were around the launch of the Playstation and their drama with big name developers like Square. They've realized that mistake and done everything they could to fix it. They've seen that they were wrong with online gaming, and they're doing an about-face on that. Five years ago, I would have said they were running themselves into the ground. Now, I'd say they're doing a pretty good job avoiding that.
Things were so much easier when I was growing up. If I shoplifted a can of spraypaint and desecrated the walls of my school it was because I was a dumbass, not because of playing too much Donkey Kong.
This is about what I was thinking reading the article. This seriously sounds like its asking open source developers to try to force people out of Windows and into Linux. Meanwhile, this is the EXACT argument made against Microsoft, which tries to force people into Windows by not making their software available on other platforms and not making it difficult to change platforms, since if you do, you have to change everything else at the same time.
That this is exactly the thing I've been worrying about. I almost gavy Sony props when the batter life was better than they'd predicted, but I still said I was worried about the screen and the UMD. Well, here we are...
Well,actually, it doesn't break even, according to the article. So I suppose that even though you can get a thousand years worth of energy out of that gallon of heavy water, you'll actually have to put MORE energy into the system. It would be more efficient just to use the gas right now. However, maybe this will lead to more people researching fusion and possibly help bring about a simmilar system that will produce more energy than you need to trigger the reaction.
I never said patents were easier to get than copyrights. If I did, that was a mistake on my part, since I didn't mean it and didn't think it while I was typing it, but, hey, you're talking to the guy who mixed up ex post facto, I think I get a bit of credit for gramatical minutia. I said they aren't that hard to get. Lots of idiots patent lots of stuff, even if they didn't actually do anything with it. You don't neccessarily have to make something to get it patented, lots of them are awarded for technologies still in development, some of which never get finished, but the patents still stand, effecting anybody else who comes after and tries to finish it.
Constitutional protection from post ex facto laws doesn't help here either (and neither does my knowledge of Latin, since I think I have the wrong legal term there). The companies that would be harmed by this don't have the (financially viable) option to stop and comply with the new rules. Their defense would have to be prior art in the case of patents filed after such a ruling (which I doubt will happen, but hypotheticals here), but then that still leavs us with these already-annoying pattent sitters who patented everything under the sun in the early 90's.
Patents are harder to obtain, maybe, but they're not that hard to get, and as we've seen all to painfully they can be so vague as to apply to a huge range of very different applications.
The Open Source defense would have to either be prior art, or else challenge the patents themselves. A good way, I would think, would be anti-trust. A company that patents some very fundamental and universal aspect of operating systems would effectively have a monopoly on operating systems. Those it didn't own itself it could force to pay licensing fees or royalties.
The scariest thing is, in my opintion, Microsoft may NOT be the one to do it. It wouldn't suprise me in the least if some guy in Alabama comes out of the woodwork with an old patent and tries to force not just open source operating systems, but even Apple and Microsoft to pay him those royalties. It's one thing that people would like to see Microsoft get hurt at their own game, but it's quite another if everybody else gets caught in the fallout, which probably would happen in a patent case. The patent holder would either attack open source OS's first and hope for an easy win, or go right for Microsoft and then use that judgement (not to mention money) against everybody else, if he gets it.
Now, back to open source, if it should successfully defend itself against patents, or even obtain patents of its own, couldn't licenses like the GPL be rewritten to apply the same freedoms to the patented software as it does with existing copyrights? After all, a patent grants the holder certain rights, just like a copyright. It grants different rights, but the holder can still sell, transfer, or even waive those rights. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can.
Everyone knows that real honest gaming reviews come from amateurs' blogs
I know you meant it as a joke, but that's probably pretty much true. Even amateur reviews are usually biased one way or the other, but if you read enough of them, you'll find at least some that aren't "OMG TEH GAEM R SUX CUZ IT R NOT [insert fanboy's favorite game title] OMG!111!1" but actually give reasons as to why they did or didn't like the game. Even so, they still may be biased, but they're honest, for what it's worth. Read a few good ones on each side and you can generally come up with enough bits to decide wether its worth a try yourself or not.
Magazine reviews I consider the same as any other "professional" review. I remember reading a review for Final Fantasy VII when it first came out. The review harped on everything that was wrong with the game (they tore into it on things that I personally didn't mind, and I hated the game), and then gave it a 97/100. Another review from the same magazine (different issue, though) for Fallout 2 had nothing but high praise and genuine admiration and gave it a 46.
A few rotten apples doesn't ruin the whole barrel, as they say, but it does raise the question as to wether the ones you haven't bitten into yet aren't also rotten. It's just safer to eat out of a different barrel.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a valid point, but the people themselves will get their money back (possibly less some fees depending on their bank). I'll use the example of my parents.
A few years back, my mom lost her credit card, and the wrong person found it. They rang it up to the limit buying all sorts of stuff. They bought a couch, a few DVD's, paid their bills, and even set their car loan to automatically bill the card. My mom rarely uses it for anything, so the sudden spending spree must have set off alarm bells, and they called her within a couple days, even before she'd realized she lost it.
It took my parents almost three months to get the mess all settled. The guy who found the credit card was on the verge of bankruptcy. It went to court, and his creditors testified that he was days away from getting his car reposessed, and that the couch he bought was probably to replace a living room set that he'd bought on credit and then failed to pay for.
There was no way he could afford to pay back what he'd stolen, but my parents got all their money back (Even the $50 limit they had to pay initially) through the credit card company, who have systems in place to protect themselves against things like this.
I live in Michigan, and at this time of year water is, indeed, not all that wet at all.
I'm guessing the people who made those pictures are artists first and scientists second. Most of the pictures you see from NASA or in books of Saturn show the rings oriented nearly horizontal and tilted slightly towards the point of view. It isn't suprising that art depicting Saturn would do much the same. If you wanted to hit them up for scientific realism, Saturn shouldn't be visible in the pictures anyway, since as others have posted, the probe is going to enter on the far side of Titan from Saturn, and the atmosphere would obsucre it anyway.
It's unfortunate there won't be any, but if they did have live coverage, it wouldn't be very impressive for all but the most hardcore geeks.
I remember watching the coverage from the Mars landings, and they're not that exciting. They might get some attention during the first few minutes, but by an hour into it when the most exciting thing you heard was, "Attitude adjustment in five minutes..." and then "Attitude adjustment green." after five minutes of silence, your audience is gone. I wonder if the people in the control room even get that excited, knowing that by the time they get busy, the cards have already been pretty much dealt an hour earlier, and there's not enough time to correct anything that goes wrong.
I'd rather read the summaries after the fact, myself. The information they collect doesn't say anything I can understand until after they've been processed, anyway.
Really, if you think about it, wouldn't anything that improves the ability to distribute files period will prove a boon for piracy?
Assuming you live to see the result (short trip/hibernation) and don't just end up living in a much more cramped version of any given city on Earth for the rest of your life.
But didn't the Death Star have a trench around its equator, not a ridge? So wouldn't that make this a soft of anti-Death Star? A Life Star if you'll excuse my poor humor.
They weren't trying to get a stranglehold on the market. They were doing something that's called "entering a market." I will give you one million dollars (if I had that much anyway), and let you pick any existing industry. You then have five years to produce a return on my investment by doing business in that industry. Very unlikely in ANY industry. Getting recognized as a legitamate name costs a lot of money and a lot of advertising. Microsoft needed to get contracts and partnerships that it didn't have before and start doing things and hiring people that it hadn't done before.
It's pretty equatable to a store (just with a few extra 0's on the bankroll). The initial investment is huge. You need to purchase property, and either build a suitable structure or remodel the existing one to fit (or pay a likely higher price on an already fitting location), you need to invest in initial inventory, hardware and electronics, pay the connection or transfer fees on all the services, and then you need to hire a workstaff. At this point you have still not made a dime, but boy are you spending it.
Once you open for business, you have a mountain of debts, which turns off investors (this is one of the few areas where a pre-existing corporation entering a new market has an advantage. it can offest these costs with profits from other divisions. However, many major investors will see this new division as a big gaping black hole and will be more hesitant to invest), meaning odds are those debts aren't going anywhere just yet.
Most importantly, you're new. Few people know about you, and even those that do don't know wether it's worth doing business with you. You need to spend money to get people to do this by advertising, and it's usually neccessary to cut prices to razor-thing profit margins (or even temporary losses) so that people are more likely to gamble on a "test" purchase from you. Microsoft did this by selling the Xbox at a loss initially. Nintendo has done this, Sega did this, I'm pretty sure Sony does this, although I've never cared enough to look up the particulars, and Microsoft had to do it to keep up. I don't know if Atari ever did this, but if they did, then it would have hurt them far worse. Nintedo was an old and successful card and board game producer, Sony had a long line of successful electronics, and Microsoft has operating systems. They all had to take the initial entry pains to get into the video game market. The fact that Microsoft is dealing with those pains the same way Nintendo and Sony did should not be suprising. In fact, it should be [reassuring or troubling, depending on wether you want to be reasonable and open or simply want Microsoft to fail for failure's sake]. It worked for the the other consoles. That's not to say it'll work for the next one, but it does strongly suggest that it's a pretty good way to go.
About the only company that didn't take initial losses on entering the gaming system market is Nokia. They went and tried to sell their handheld system at $400 out of the gate (I can only hope they were trying to profit off of system sales without having to rely on game sales or gamble on continued future success, anyway. If they were selling below cost, then they have worse problems than I ever thought). Had they started out with the sort of prices they cut it down to, I still don't think they would have succeeded, but they would have had a decent shot at getting some impulse buyers on the hook.
furthur alternates:
Butterball
Kessel
Kogel
Eckridge Farms
Bob Evans
I went to Googleand did some searches for pictures of it. Unless there are extensive underground networks carved into the bedrock under the facility, I don't see anything worthy of a headquarters that I would use. I mean, just WHERE am I going to keep the sharks? Nothing in these pictures looks even remotely laser-proof, and I don't even want to think of the mess I'll have to sweep up when the special forces attack.
The Sun is an example of everything wrong with British journalism Nah, just journalism in general. They're just as bad over here. I'm waiting for the Saginaw News to print this story. They're pretty good at printing stories without researching it. Once, the DoE transported a steel assembly through Michigan that would eventually be used in a nuclear reactor. An unrevealed "someone" provided a "leaked DoE document" to the SN saying that the "radiation" from this material would kill "300 to 600 people" along its transport route, but that the DoE "considered that acceptably low." The truth was, it was just like the shitillion other tons of steel stuff that gets shipped through Michigan every day. It was going to go into a nuclear reactor, but it had never been exposed to nuclear material. The steel had been forged into the desired form up in the UP, loaded on a boat, transfered to a train, and then carried to who-knows-where out west to actually go into a nuclear reactor out there. Nobody was killed, although the article triggered a protest along the transport route (It wasn't the even the correct route, they ended up protesting about 150 tons of feed corn, if I remember right), in which several people were injured when they had to be forcably pulled away from the tracks by the police before the train spread them out over the next eight miles of railroad ties.
I considered the use of the PATRIOT act to take down a file swapping site with episodes of Stargate SG1 a lot worse than this. This guy's far from a terrorist, and I swear there must be some other applicable law they could use against him.
Still, I think the gap between shining a laser on a plane for shits and giggles and shining a laser on a plane to allow a guided weapon to target it is a lot narrower (relatively speaking) than the gap between copyright violations and any kind of terrorism.
I allow myself $20 a month in subscriptions to games, and $100 a month total for games. Right now, subscription wise, I'm paying $9 a month for an MMORPG, and $10 a month for an MMORTS. If I paid them six months in advance, I'd actually pay less for the two combined than for Planetside, I've had one wipe in three years with one game (which I actually could have avoided had I had the foresight. Shortly after I started, they did a major graphical and systems overhaul, but couldn't upgrade the existing server without causing massive imbalance, so they launched the new system on a new set of servers. I was level 15 at the time - a week's work in the old system, maybe a week and a half in the new, but relative to the monsters I'd actually be overall stronger due to the new combat system, so I would have lost little or nothing to change, but I didn't. The old server was eventually discontinued, and I had to start over from a much wider gap) and none in two with the other. My friend, who convinced me to take the trial on Planetside, confesses several wipes in less than a year.
The game play is not particularly refreshing or special, and the character "advancement" seems more like an artificial limiting factor on newbies than any actual advancement.
From the picture in the Sun article, I don't think he knew it was. The cartridge looks like fifty other GBA games I have sitting around, and it has a very legitamate-looking sticker on it. It's obviously an otherwise good fake made with a crappy unclean ROM downloaded off the internet complete with the cracker intro (Where the "fuck off and die" bit came from).
There are a couple ways the father could have gotten it:
1. Bought it off ebay or otherwise from a non-vendor. Worse yet, he could have bought it from one of those carts that get set up in malls and vanish after three days. There was a strange event in the mall near me where a vender cart like that sold dozens of remote control cars with the electronics gutted out of them, and then vanished. Whatever the conditions, if this is how he got it, he's at best foolish (for not realizing it's a fake) and at worst a fool (for buying from shady vendors).
2. Somebody sold the fakes to stores as used. I've heard of it happening at the EB near me once or twice. A good fake can pass as legit to a visual inspection, and most places don't take the time to actually run the game. In this case, it's not the guy's fault for buying it, but he still should have seen it was fake and complained to the store. From what the intro text said, it should be pretty clear. I guess he's one of those people that can look at a page of text, and only see the word "fuck" in the middle of the page and nothing else.
I'm pretty sure that joke has happened before.
I blamed it on all sorts of things. TV, music, friends. Parents used to be smarter though, and my parents just called me a dumbass and made me shovel the driveway with a rake for half the winter afterwards.
That's what I was thinking when I read the article. Nintendo's made a good deal of mistakes the last ten years, but most of them were around the launch of the Playstation and their drama with big name developers like Square. They've realized that mistake and done everything they could to fix it. They've seen that they were wrong with online gaming, and they're doing an about-face on that. Five years ago, I would have said they were running themselves into the ground. Now, I'd say they're doing a pretty good job avoiding that.
Things were so much easier when I was growing up. If I shoplifted a can of spraypaint and desecrated the walls of my school it was because I was a dumbass, not because of playing too much Donkey Kong.
I'm pretty sure this isn't the one. This is 1,300 feet, not 16.
And the server's name is NEO standing for Near Earth Object.
This is about what I was thinking reading the article. This seriously sounds like its asking open source developers to try to force people out of Windows and into Linux. Meanwhile, this is the EXACT argument made against Microsoft, which tries to force people into Windows by not making their software available on other platforms and not making it difficult to change platforms, since if you do, you have to change everything else at the same time.
That this is exactly the thing I've been worrying about. I almost gavy Sony props when the batter life was better than they'd predicted, but I still said I was worried about the screen and the UMD. Well, here we are...
Well,actually, it doesn't break even, according to the article. So I suppose that even though you can get a thousand years worth of energy out of that gallon of heavy water, you'll actually have to put MORE energy into the system. It would be more efficient just to use the gas right now. However, maybe this will lead to more people researching fusion and possibly help bring about a simmilar system that will produce more energy than you need to trigger the reaction.
I never said patents were easier to get than copyrights. If I did, that was a mistake on my part, since I didn't mean it and didn't think it while I was typing it, but, hey, you're talking to the guy who mixed up ex post facto, I think I get a bit of credit for gramatical minutia. I said they aren't that hard to get. Lots of idiots patent lots of stuff, even if they didn't actually do anything with it. You don't neccessarily have to make something to get it patented, lots of them are awarded for technologies still in development, some of which never get finished, but the patents still stand, effecting anybody else who comes after and tries to finish it.
Constitutional protection from post ex facto laws doesn't help here either (and neither does my knowledge of Latin, since I think I have the wrong legal term there). The companies that would be harmed by this don't have the (financially viable) option to stop and comply with the new rules. Their defense would have to be prior art in the case of patents filed after such a ruling (which I doubt will happen, but hypotheticals here), but then that still leavs us with these already-annoying pattent sitters who patented everything under the sun in the early 90's.
Patents are harder to obtain, maybe, but they're not that hard to get, and as we've seen all to painfully they can be so vague as to apply to a huge range of very different applications.
The Open Source defense would have to either be prior art, or else challenge the patents themselves. A good way, I would think, would be anti-trust. A company that patents some very fundamental and universal aspect of operating systems would effectively have a monopoly on operating systems. Those it didn't own itself it could force to pay licensing fees or royalties.
The scariest thing is, in my opintion, Microsoft may NOT be the one to do it. It wouldn't suprise me in the least if some guy in Alabama comes out of the woodwork with an old patent and tries to force not just open source operating systems, but even Apple and Microsoft to pay him those royalties. It's one thing that people would like to see Microsoft get hurt at their own game, but it's quite another if everybody else gets caught in the fallout, which probably would happen in a patent case. The patent holder would either attack open source OS's first and hope for an easy win, or go right for Microsoft and then use that judgement (not to mention money) against everybody else, if he gets it.
Now, back to open source, if it should successfully defend itself against patents, or even obtain patents of its own, couldn't licenses like the GPL be rewritten to apply the same freedoms to the patented software as it does with existing copyrights? After all, a patent grants the holder certain rights, just like a copyright. It grants different rights, but the holder can still sell, transfer, or even waive those rights. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can.
Everyone knows that real honest gaming reviews come from amateurs' blogs
I know you meant it as a joke, but that's probably pretty much true. Even amateur reviews are usually biased one way or the other, but if you read enough of them, you'll find at least some that aren't "OMG TEH GAEM R SUX CUZ IT R NOT [insert fanboy's favorite game title] OMG!111!1" but actually give reasons as to why they did or didn't like the game. Even so, they still may be biased, but they're honest, for what it's worth. Read a few good ones on each side and you can generally come up with enough bits to decide wether its worth a try yourself or not.
Magazine reviews I consider the same as any other "professional" review. I remember reading a review for Final Fantasy VII when it first came out. The review harped on everything that was wrong with the game (they tore into it on things that I personally didn't mind, and I hated the game), and then gave it a 97/100. Another review from the same magazine (different issue, though) for Fallout 2 had nothing but high praise and genuine admiration and gave it a 46.
A few rotten apples doesn't ruin the whole barrel, as they say, but it does raise the question as to wether the ones you haven't bitten into yet aren't also rotten. It's just safer to eat out of a different barrel.