Well, fortunately we have our kinder, gentler friends at Microsoft to teach us about rudeness. This article (Dutch) explains how Bill Gates has declared a "total war" on internet crime. To explain his new vision he will travel to... Germany.
Because obviously Germany is the home to all "total war" efforts, and the germans really appreciate being reminded of it again and again. Good call, Bill!
Hell, why didn't he call it the "endlosung for spam" while he was at it? And he could present his new DRM efforts under the title "DRM macht frei".
Maybe Microsoft is really a hotbed for nazism. For years I thought their Windows logo looks a bit like a swastika. As does the Developer Studio logo. As does the MSDN logo. All coincidences?
Coming back for a moment to the mentioning of nazis being rude when remembering Auschwitz - no, it is not. The nazis _must_ be remembered and named as the monsters they were, not hidden and ultimately forgotten.
You do realize that the punishment for inverting the truth values is dismemberment, right? Check out the following fragment:
if (TRUE) { /* This happens! */ /* uhh, except for broken values of TRUE */ } else { /* This does not happen! */ /*...see caveat above */ }
Inverting those values instantly puts most C programmers on the wrong foot and makes your code fundamentally incompatible with any other code out there. Especially when that other code has the good sense of defining TRUE and FALSE correctly...
"Intel Inside VIIV" let's analyze: V = five, I = one, so VI = six. IV is again six. The word "Intel" has five letters, and if we add the "I" of "inside" we get yet another six! So here it is, incontrovertible proof that Intel is satan!
The one call that takes the most time is DrawText(). Most of the time the app is fine, it's just when the data really floods in that we get overwhelmed.
You should draw less, then. On a reasonably modern machine DrawText() can fill the screen in a frame, so if it is slow you are either:
- Drawing stuff that is never actually displayed because it will be gone before the frame is even refreshed.
- Drawing stuff that isn't even on the screen in the first place (either off the side, or hiding underneath other windows).
- Drawing multiple items whenever a single item changes, which is obviously highly inefficient.
By the way, I obviously have no idea what your code looks like but I found that the conversion for doubles in sprintf() is actually the slowest part of my code, instead of the drawing of the converted string. Without that conversion I can convert and write out 180,000 values per second, with the conversion no more than 50,000.
It's pretty obvious that given some freedom and a large amount of financial support, a talented team will produce a fun product, like Valve with Half-Life 2
I'm surprised this gets modded "insightful". Surely food production must be considered a strategic activity for any country. Outsourcing food production would make the US extremely vulnerable to blackmail. Paying a bit of money to avoid that risk is surely money well spent?
This is precisely what I feared: You had to write the whole thing from the ground up.
Yeah. I suppose I could have used Corba, but now that I have the basic infrastructure in place there isn't really any advantage to doing so since the effort involved in remote function calls is now as small as it will ever get.
Besides, I can think of at least one major (multi-million euro) software package that is considered almost too slow to be useable precisely because it is attempting to use Corba to shift serious amounts of data. Maybe I shouldn't lay the blame on Corba here, since any form of synchronous communication will be slow and Corba _can_ be asynchronous as far as I'm aware, but unfortunately that is not what this package does.
What sort of data rate are you looking at? And, if you don't mind me nosing around, why the requirement for strong data typing in the message system?
And since I'm nosy anyone, I'm kinda curious what problem you are dealing with here. But maybe that's something better discussed in normal mail;-)
I've written a large data handling system for ESA that takes data from a variety of sources (thermocouples, PT100's, PLC's, vacuum gauges,...) and stores it on a central server. From there the data is transferred on to prentation and control modules. We are geared towards large numbers of channels, fairly slow data updates (once a minute or so, although it will also work at much quicker rates), and large numbers of acquisition, presentation, and control stations.
I've written my own wire protocol + packers and unpackers. I tag every data value with its type (number, time, string,...) and message position (this I use to selectively leave out values under specific circumstances, i.e. to send partial messages). This arrangement works just fine: the wire format is machine independent, and quick to read and write. The coding overhead for message packing and unpacking is limited to pretty much a single function per message type (to identify the various fields), and conversion from and to wire format is done using two universal conversion routines.
If you have any questions feel free to ask. Alternatively, we'd love to sell you a copy of the system;-)
Please understand I'm playing devil's advocate here: in order to make the statement that "all software patents are evil", we must prove that there are no software patents that are "good". Which is why I am asking for examples. There are many people, even here on slashdot, who think software patents are somehow good. Let them come up with concrete examples of such "good" patents.
I agree that the notion that some modes of thought are effectively illegal, especially when related to a field in which one strives to excel, is intolerable...
If you create something really novel, even if it is in software, why *shouldn't* you be able to get a patent on it?
Because that is not what usually happens. Software patents are used as weapons to destroy competition, not as protection for true innovation. If patent holders would limit themselves to only truly innovative, non-trivial solutions I doubt anyone would care. As it is we (anyone making a living in software) are under constant threat because someone might take out a patent on some completely trivial technique tomorrow and shut you down for the next twenty years.
I asked this in the previous patent discussion as well, but let me ask again: does anyone know of any "good" software patents? I.e. non-trivial, innovative, and realistic? The only one that came out of that previous discussion was the RSA patent, which I agree meets these criteria and as such is worthy of patent protection.
But right now most software patents do not fall in this category. Instead they patent utterly trivial "inventions", often in ways that have been standard practice within the industry for years.
Let me add a prediction for what will happen within a year of software patents becoming a reality in Europe: with patent protection finally possible in all major markets, Microsoft will make its big move against open source. It will attack Apache, Samba, Mozilla, Open Office, and perhaps some others, stating they all violate Microsoft-held patents. I suspect Linux itself will be allowed to exist as a sort of token competitor to Windows, but there will not be any useful software left to run on it, which accomplishes Microsofts goal as well as destroying the OS itself.
Moreover, the people who worked so hard to make these incredible projects a reality will be painted as "thieves" in the media. After all, they "stole" "intellectual property" that so clearly belongs to our beloved "innovator", Microsoft.
One final question on my mind: who keeps adding software patents to all sorts of irrelevant agenda's in Europe? It is very annoying having to fight this battle every two weeks, especially since our adversary is some nameless civil servant who apparently got one bribe too many...
Companies, at the start of their financial year, make a little calculation that involves a lot of hand waving and hot air. They then come to a number, which is their "expected profit". If, by the end of the year, this number has not been reached then money has been lost. So "loss" has nothing to do with having less money than you had before, which is a common mistake many people make.
Now, HP *expects* to make a certain figure in european cartridge sales. They fail to reach this, so they are "losing" money. Region locking their cartridges might just help in regaining this "lost" money, and as such only puts them back on par, rather than push into further profit.
In other words, it restores money that HP believes (through some weird corporate mindtwist) was rightfully theirs in the first place.
Nah, he is responsible for keeping this thing clean...
Re:If movie reviews were written like game reviews
on
Death to the Fanboy Press
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If movie reviews were written like game reviews, they would discuss the interaction you have with the movie at great length ("I sat in the comfortable chair, but the leg space was just a little too short"), have notes on the difficulty level ("the subtitling used too small letters, and there were too many words with more than four syllables"), possibly notes on weapon selection ("the hero uses a single gun throughout the movie"), and something about the online experience ("I couldn't get a connection with other movie-goers, and any attempts at doing so were shushed up").
But why do people compare movies and games in the first place? They are vastly different experiences that are attempting to do different things. Games should not be like movies and movies should not be like games; a point which is handily proven by the abysmal quality of most attempts at crossing over...
What do you think of the new layout, though? It used to be so tranquil, and now there is random splotches of color over everything... Personally I don't think this is an improvement.
Last I checked, Beagle 2 was delivered to the general vincinity of Mars just fine. Granted, maybe it was delivered just a few meters too deep, but on a distance of millions of kilometers, who's counting?
While this is true to a certain extent, at least where I work the engineers do check the products out before they are bought. I have been asked numerous times to evaluate specific products to find the one most suitable for a specific job or project. And true, I do not make the final decision, but I would have been very surprised if any of those hadn't gone with the recommended product.
And if there is anything that causes me not to recommend a product, it is being unable to find decent information on the web. You know, stuff like pricing, licensing conditions, technical capabilities, limitations, etc. Or even simply what a product is supposed to do for you!
Example: I never did find out what "Together/J" does, how much it costs, or even who makes it with any degree of certainty. The name is just too generic (try googling for it), and Borland (?) doesn't want you to know about it anyway. But it probably enables collabarative scalable enterprise solutions, or something... Oh, and I think it was using that kiss-of-death statement: "call for pricing details". In my mind that translates into "price has at least five digits", which is usually way too expensive. Besides, I want to make the initial investigation from the comfort of my desk, without picking up a trail of bloodsucking sales people calling me back twice a week to learn about my decision...
But really, too many companies make it too hard to learn about their products. Engineers _do_ read those pages, and _do_ make buying recommendations, and managers _DO_ listen to those!
Instead of discussing the technology (which is actually pretty cool...they do have smart engineers at Microsoft), I have a feeling this will be a bunch of +5 Funny Microsoft-bash posts. One third referencing some obscure GUI from the past where something almost like this has been done already, another third referencing some future project not released yet doing the same, and the rest a bunch of +5 Funny "jokes" rehashing old Microsoft jokes from the last eight years...
...and one idiot who thinks he can stave off all that by posting his insanely smart prediction about it.
The plot of that show was that they couldn't get any sleep, because every 33 minutes the cylons attack. One question: haven't these people heard of shifts?
Imagine this sort of thing happening in real life. Do aircraft carriers (which Galactica essentially is) shut down for 16 hours out of every 24 to let the crew get some much needed rest? No, they work in shifts! Same for police, fire services, hospitals, and any other kind of service that gets called out regularly, 24x7.
But no, in the Galactica universe this doesn't happen. People have to try and stay awake for a whole week in order to stave off cylon attacks. Obviously their wits were addled by all this lack of sleep, since they could have just jumped away from their current location every 32.9 minutes, leaving the cylons none the wiser as to their new location. But nobody thought of this either...
So I guess it won't come as a surprise that I do not like this new show, and stopped watching after just a few episodes. I know it is space opera and doesn't have to be realistic, but that doesn't mean it has to insult our intelligence this badly.
That I didn't otherwise like the premise much didn't help either. The human-looking cylons, the female Starbuck, the constant sex-scenes with Baltar, the Carilon scenes - it just doesn't add up...
This is a pretty weak article, but I would recommend that people read it anyway because it shows just how weak the case in favor of software patents really is. A great quote from about half way through:
The paradox of Marxism is not just a theoretical issue. Stallman, the founder of the League for Programming Freedom, heads the Free Software Foundation which is developing and planning to distribute a clone of the Unix operating system. AT&T has invested in Unix based on its ownership as manifest in patents and copyrights. AT&T can't be pleased when Mr. Stallman comes along and gives away free copies of a clone of a product it invested millions in developing and marketing.
If AT&T had not used patents and user interface copyrights to protect its intellectual property rights, Mr. Stallman would have no trouble making and distributing a Unix clone. But AT&T must pay its bills with money it receives from customers and has asserted its rights. If it is acceptable to clone Unix or any program, will anyone invest in new ideas? Should we optimize an intellectual property jurisprudence for, not large entities, not small entities, but companies that distribute free clones of other people's software?
Great stuff! It is good to see someone argue in 1992 that if UNIX were unprotected, innovation would come to a complete halt. With hindsight we can now see how unfounded those fears really were. And they still are today.
This one's nice too:
From the time the world's oldest profession began, professionals have accepted that others give it away, but they bristle if they are expected to work at the same rates.
I wonder if the author knows what the world's oldest profession is?;-)
And another prediction from the article:
The Japanese are aggressively filing for U.S. patents on software. While our strength is innovation, Japan's is in adapting innovations and steady improvement. If they have the improvement patents and we did not file for the basic patents, we lose. If we arrogantly dismiss the Japanese as incapable of creating good software or cavalierly dismiss patents as undesirable, then 20 years from now we will be trying to get back the software market from Japan just as today we are trying to get back the automobile and semiconductor markets. We aren't even trying to get back the consumer electronics market.
As it happens Japans' patents has not saved their economy. Meanwhile India, without the benefit of software patents, became a software power house that threatens jobs and companies throughout the world. The USA, despite its software patents, is losing out to them.
Similarly, if we should eliminate patents to avoid patent litigation as the League suggests, should we not eliminate all laws so as to avoid all litigation?
Tell that to somebody who has spent years developing a new algorithm for something like facial recognition. Explain to me again why a clever person who comes up with a novel algorithm to produce something useful and novel shouldn't enjoy a temporary monopoly from the fruits of his labour and research just because his invention happens to be in software rather than being hydraulic or pneumatic?
I suspect we would never have given software patents a second thought, were it not for the countless abuses that were foisted on the world. In other words, the people getting the patents brought our rage down on themselves by being total asses about it. One-click patent indeed...
I'd love to see a list of top-ten "good software patents". In other words, patents that meet (at least) the following criteria:
- The patent is on software (duh).
- The patent covers something not entirely obvious to an experienced programmer (the "five minute test": given the problem, could an experienced problem come up with a solution in less than five minutes?).
- The patent represents an innovation, rather than a restating of previous known techniques (as this one appears to be).
- The patent describes something that actually exists, as opposed to wishful thinking (like patents on artificial intelligence)
And since everyone who is in favor of software patents mentions that the poor inventor spent so much of his time and resources, I'll also add:
- The patent protects significant investment.
To me the "five minute test" is the most important: any problem that can be solved in that time isn't worthy of a patent, and any patents in that category will only hamper development of the field as a whole. Maybe the patent office should have panels of experienced programmers who get five minutes to reproduce each patent, immediately invalidating it if they do? That would certainly cut down on a lot of crap...
incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.
Is that the one where you learn that the USA became an industrial and economic powerhouse by shamelessly stealing every invention they could from Europe during its formative years, i.e. before it acknowledged any so-called intellectual property from other places in the world?
Surely there's no single person in the patent office who has all that data in their heads, so I'd like to know what criteria they use to identify what is a unique piece.
Maybe they could use a hash table to uniquely identify previous patents?
What would it take to create an engine that allow the destruction of the entire environment.
Lots. For each object in the game you would need to know how it breaks apart. All parts stay in the game world, so they must be separately and correctly textured (i.e. each brick in a wall becomes a real brick instead of rendering lots of bricks as one object). And the game engine must keep track of all this information too, and save it when you leave the area if there is any chance if you coming back (people quickly rebuilding their houses when you cross a load-boundary is not very realistic). This would lead to massive save games, and much longer load/save times when changing areas. In other words, it isn't very practical to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Because obviously Germany is the home to all "total war" efforts, and the germans really appreciate being reminded of it again and again. Good call, Bill!
Hell, why didn't he call it the "endlosung for spam" while he was at it? And he could present his new DRM efforts under the title "DRM macht frei".
Maybe Microsoft is really a hotbed for nazism. For years I thought their Windows logo looks a bit like a swastika. As does the Developer Studio logo. As does the MSDN logo. All coincidences?
Coming back for a moment to the mentioning of nazis being rude when remembering Auschwitz - no, it is not. The nazis _must_ be remembered and named as the monsters they were, not hidden and ultimately forgotten.
You do realize that the punishment for inverting the truth values is dismemberment, right? Check out the following fragment:
Inverting those values instantly puts most C programmers on the wrong foot and makes your code fundamentally incompatible with any other code out there. Especially when that other code has the good sense of defining TRUE and FALSE correctly...That's what they said about the IT sector... just before the bubble crashed.
You should draw less, then. On a reasonably modern machine DrawText() can fill the screen in a frame, so if it is slow you are either:
- Drawing stuff that is never actually displayed because it will be gone before the frame is even refreshed.
- Drawing stuff that isn't even on the screen in the first place (either off the side, or hiding underneath other windows).
- Drawing multiple items whenever a single item changes, which is obviously highly inefficient.
By the way, I obviously have no idea what your code looks like but I found that the conversion for doubles in sprintf() is actually the slowest part of my code, instead of the drawing of the converted string. Without that conversion I can convert and write out 180,000 values per second, with the conversion no more than 50,000.
I'm surprised this gets modded "insightful". Surely food production must be considered a strategic activity for any country. Outsourcing food production would make the US extremely vulnerable to blackmail. Paying a bit of money to avoid that risk is surely money well spent?
Yeah. I suppose I could have used Corba, but now that I have the basic infrastructure in place there isn't really any advantage to doing so since the effort involved in remote function calls is now as small as it will ever get.
Besides, I can think of at least one major (multi-million euro) software package that is considered almost too slow to be useable precisely because it is attempting to use Corba to shift serious amounts of data. Maybe I shouldn't lay the blame on Corba here, since any form of synchronous communication will be slow and Corba _can_ be asynchronous as far as I'm aware, but unfortunately that is not what this package does.
What sort of data rate are you looking at? And, if you don't mind me nosing around, why the requirement for strong data typing in the message system?
And since I'm nosy anyone, I'm kinda curious what problem you are dealing with here. But maybe that's something better discussed in normal mail ;-)
I've written my own wire protocol + packers and unpackers. I tag every data value with its type (number, time, string, ...) and message position (this I use to selectively leave out values under specific circumstances, i.e. to send partial messages). This arrangement works just fine: the wire format is machine independent, and quick to read and write. The coding overhead for message packing and unpacking is limited to pretty much a single function per message type (to identify the various fields), and conversion from and to wire format is done using two universal conversion routines.
If you have any questions feel free to ask. Alternatively, we'd love to sell you a copy of the system ;-)
I agree that the notion that some modes of thought are effectively illegal, especially when related to a field in which one strives to excel, is intolerable...
Because that is not what usually happens. Software patents are used as weapons to destroy competition, not as protection for true innovation. If patent holders would limit themselves to only truly innovative, non-trivial solutions I doubt anyone would care. As it is we (anyone making a living in software) are under constant threat because someone might take out a patent on some completely trivial technique tomorrow and shut you down for the next twenty years.
I asked this in the previous patent discussion as well, but let me ask again: does anyone know of any "good" software patents? I.e. non-trivial, innovative, and realistic? The only one that came out of that previous discussion was the RSA patent, which I agree meets these criteria and as such is worthy of patent protection.
But right now most software patents do not fall in this category. Instead they patent utterly trivial "inventions", often in ways that have been standard practice within the industry for years.
Let me add a prediction for what will happen within a year of software patents becoming a reality in Europe: with patent protection finally possible in all major markets, Microsoft will make its big move against open source. It will attack Apache, Samba, Mozilla, Open Office, and perhaps some others, stating they all violate Microsoft-held patents. I suspect Linux itself will be allowed to exist as a sort of token competitor to Windows, but there will not be any useful software left to run on it, which accomplishes Microsofts goal as well as destroying the OS itself.
Moreover, the people who worked so hard to make these incredible projects a reality will be painted as "thieves" in the media. After all, they "stole" "intellectual property" that so clearly belongs to our beloved "innovator", Microsoft.
One final question on my mind: who keeps adding software patents to all sorts of irrelevant agenda's in Europe? It is very annoying having to fight this battle every two weeks, especially since our adversary is some nameless civil servant who apparently got one bribe too many...
Now, HP *expects* to make a certain figure in european cartridge sales. They fail to reach this, so they are "losing" money. Region locking their cartridges might just help in regaining this "lost" money, and as such only puts them back on par, rather than push into further profit.
In other words, it restores money that HP believes (through some weird corporate mindtwist) was rightfully theirs in the first place.
Nah, he is responsible for keeping this thing clean...
But why do people compare movies and games in the first place? They are vastly different experiences that are attempting to do different things. Games should not be like movies and movies should not be like games; a point which is handily proven by the abysmal quality of most attempts at crossing over...
What do you think of the new layout, though? It used to be so tranquil, and now there is random splotches of color over everything... Personally I don't think this is an improvement.
Last I checked, Beagle 2 was delivered to the general vincinity of Mars just fine. Granted, maybe it was delivered just a few meters too deep, but on a distance of millions of kilometers, who's counting?
And if there is anything that causes me not to recommend a product, it is being unable to find decent information on the web. You know, stuff like pricing, licensing conditions, technical capabilities, limitations, etc. Or even simply what a product is supposed to do for you!
Example: I never did find out what "Together/J" does, how much it costs, or even who makes it with any degree of certainty. The name is just too generic (try googling for it), and Borland (?) doesn't want you to know about it anyway. But it probably enables collabarative scalable enterprise solutions, or something... Oh, and I think it was using that kiss-of-death statement: "call for pricing details". In my mind that translates into "price has at least five digits", which is usually way too expensive. Besides, I want to make the initial investigation from the comfort of my desk, without picking up a trail of bloodsucking sales people calling me back twice a week to learn about my decision...
But really, too many companies make it too hard to learn about their products. Engineers _do_ read those pages, and _do_ make buying recommendations, and managers _DO_ listen to those!
Imagine this sort of thing happening in real life. Do aircraft carriers (which Galactica essentially is) shut down for 16 hours out of every 24 to let the crew get some much needed rest? No, they work in shifts! Same for police, fire services, hospitals, and any other kind of service that gets called out regularly, 24x7.
But no, in the Galactica universe this doesn't happen. People have to try and stay awake for a whole week in order to stave off cylon attacks. Obviously their wits were addled by all this lack of sleep, since they could have just jumped away from their current location every 32.9 minutes, leaving the cylons none the wiser as to their new location. But nobody thought of this either...
So I guess it won't come as a surprise that I do not like this new show, and stopped watching after just a few episodes. I know it is space opera and doesn't have to be realistic, but that doesn't mean it has to insult our intelligence this badly.
That I didn't otherwise like the premise much didn't help either. The human-looking cylons, the female Starbuck, the constant sex-scenes with Baltar, the Carilon scenes - it just doesn't add up...
The paradox of Marxism is not just a theoretical issue. Stallman, the founder of the League for Programming Freedom, heads the Free Software Foundation which is developing and planning to distribute a clone of the Unix operating system. AT&T has invested in Unix based on its ownership as manifest in patents and copyrights. AT&T can't be pleased when Mr. Stallman comes along and gives away free copies of a clone of a product it invested millions in developing and marketing.
If AT&T had not used patents and user interface copyrights to protect its intellectual property rights, Mr. Stallman would have no trouble making and distributing a Unix clone. But AT&T must pay its bills with money it receives from customers and has asserted its rights. If it is acceptable to clone Unix or any program, will anyone invest in new ideas? Should we optimize an intellectual property jurisprudence for, not large entities, not small entities, but companies that distribute free clones of other people's software?
Great stuff! It is good to see someone argue in 1992 that if UNIX were unprotected, innovation would come to a complete halt. With hindsight we can now see how unfounded those fears really were. And they still are today.
This one's nice too:
From the time the world's oldest profession began, professionals have accepted that others give it away, but they bristle if they are expected to work at the same rates.
I wonder if the author knows what the world's oldest profession is? ;-)
And another prediction from the article:
The Japanese are aggressively filing for U.S. patents on software. While our strength is innovation, Japan's is in adapting innovations and steady improvement. If they have the improvement patents and we did not file for the basic patents, we lose. If we arrogantly dismiss the Japanese as incapable of creating good software or cavalierly dismiss patents as undesirable, then 20 years from now we will be trying to get back the software market from Japan just as today we are trying to get back the automobile and semiconductor markets. We aren't even trying to get back the consumer electronics market.
As it happens Japans' patents has not saved their economy. Meanwhile India, without the benefit of software patents, became a software power house that threatens jobs and companies throughout the world. The USA, despite its software patents, is losing out to them.
Similarly, if we should eliminate patents to avoid patent litigation as the League suggests, should we not eliminate all laws so as to avoid all litigation?
Is this even supposed to be a serious article?
I suspect we would never have given software patents a second thought, were it not for the countless abuses that were foisted on the world. In other words, the people getting the patents brought our rage down on themselves by being total asses about it. One-click patent indeed...
I'd love to see a list of top-ten "good software patents". In other words, patents that meet (at least) the following criteria:
- The patent is on software (duh).
- The patent covers something not entirely obvious to an experienced programmer (the "five minute test": given the problem, could an experienced problem come up with a solution in less than five minutes?).
- The patent represents an innovation, rather than a restating of previous known techniques (as this one appears to be).
- The patent describes something that actually exists, as opposed to wishful thinking (like patents on artificial intelligence)
And since everyone who is in favor of software patents mentions that the poor inventor spent so much of his time and resources, I'll also add:
- The patent protects significant investment.
To me the "five minute test" is the most important: any problem that can be solved in that time isn't worthy of a patent, and any patents in that category will only hamper development of the field as a whole. Maybe the patent office should have panels of experienced programmers who get five minutes to reproduce each patent, immediately invalidating it if they do? That would certainly cut down on a lot of crap...
incidentally, any "all patents must be abolished" responders need not bother. go visit economic history 101 instead.
Is that the one where you learn that the USA became an industrial and economic powerhouse by shamelessly stealing every invention they could from Europe during its formative years, i.e. before it acknowledged any so-called intellectual property from other places in the world?
Maybe they could use a hash table to uniquely identify previous patents?
Bha-dum-ching!
Thanks, I'll show myself out...
Why, did you shoot him or something? ;-)
Lots. For each object in the game you would need to know how it breaks apart. All parts stay in the game world, so they must be separately and correctly textured (i.e. each brick in a wall becomes a real brick instead of rendering lots of bricks as one object). And the game engine must keep track of all this information too, and save it when you leave the area if there is any chance if you coming back (people quickly rebuilding their houses when you cross a load-boundary is not very realistic). This would lead to massive save games, and much longer load/save times when changing areas. In other words, it isn't very practical to do this.
Which is sad, because it would be pretty cool...
Tell you what: next time I'll try to be funny I'll include plenty of guidelines for sarcasm-impaired moderators...
NOTE TO MODERATORS: this message is a half-serious joke. If you are utterly humor impaired you may mod it down.