Isn't the real issue here our continued reliance on passwords that can be used more than once? When are we going to move wholeheartedly into a single-use password environment?
No, that's not the real issue. Two factor authentication does not solve the problem of DNS poisoning: the user will enter the one-time password into the fake site, which in turn will log in the real site and transfer one million $ to Nigeria. SSL does not solve the problem of DNS poisoning in a practical sense: it only works if the user opens a https:/// shortcut; the large majority of users that type "paypal.com" in the address bar, will not observe that the fake PayPal site they are seeing failed to redirect them to a SSL connection. The only thing I can think of that really plugs any DNS vulnerability is a smart card / USB token type of device that does it's own verification of the remote website's credentials before disclosing login information.
Yes but the proof RIAA would bring to the court is not just the IP/MAC address combination. That's just a pretext to grab a random student who's IP happens to match, seize his computer and find thousands of MP3 files in the shared folders of a P2P application. That would then constitute the actual evidence they need.
I know you are joking, but let's make this clear - it's not inspired by the Apple in the sense that it's has an 8 bit/1MHz CPU and 4KB of RAM. It's an 70's stile of personal computer by using the TV as a display screen. I would also assume it uses a small form factor where the case is also a keyboard, and all you need is a DC adapter and the video cable. The hardware would be probably comparable to what you get in an XO: low speed x86 CPU and SSD storage. As a person who has long used a PC attached to a TV as what it's now called a "Media Center", I can say the text quality on a CRT television is absolutely horrible, totally unusable for browsing or programming. Games, movies, sure. But not anything that would increase the computer literacy of the masses. Sure, if you get a flat panel TV things look good, but those are not likely to be found in the homes of the people this project targets.
This is nothing new. It's just usually not enforced.
Even if it's enforced, I don't think RIAA should rub their collective hands just yet. The old model says, do what you want with Internet connection, but if we find you breaking the law, we'll put you in jail, make you pay trough the nose etc. etc. This a significant deterrent for people thinking to use P2P illegally. What they are proposing here is: do what you want make sure you are not caught; if we do catch you, we will give you a slap on the wrist. This will just drive people to use more and more stealth P2P applications, share knowledge about what works and what not, switch from torrents to things la freenet etc. A three-strikes and your out policy still allows three tries, and that's plenty of room for experimenting, only the most obtuse users will keep using the same p2p application to eventually be cut off. The users will always move faster than the corporate ISPs ability to implement piracy detectors.
This is a desperate move, and privacy issues aside, a good development for driving work on the anonymizing P2P services.
Gorilla-shmorilla... All the SciFi movies I've ever seen picture men dressed in white franticaly moving their hands over huge holographic input screens. So this must be the future ! Resistance is futile; put the mouse down and raise your arms at shoulder level.
The only difference here is the budget. Not to be a prick, but I don't see anything inovative here. Except maybe the bittorent roots (22m for a modded BT client with an embbeded media player ? who's to say that a bittorent type algo is better than a p2p algo specifically designed for the task of streaming ?) This development will not change much. People prefer to have the files on their computer and build collections, not stream them. They want to move them arround to other devices not connected to the net. In very a distant future (*), when a huge library of pirated/cheap material becomes available, and most mobile devices have broadband internet connections, and the streaming is so damn perfect and flawless that it's indistinguishable whether you play a local file or a stream, than maybe something like this becomes relevant. For commercial online TV and the like, this technology it's still unproven, and I'm not referring to SwarmPlayer specifically, but to alternatives that have been available for years. As it turns out, the cost of the bandwidth is not that large. It remains to be seen if a p2p method comes close in reliability to a well provisioned CDN, until now it has not. Digital online TV has other, much larger problems, for example the fact that it's a nightmare for most ISPs, who have designed their networks so that each user is able to browse for an average of 100MB/day, and now for the same user to view 5Mb/s digital TV 10 hours/day they need to increase the capacity 200x.
Of course you could never achieve your full download capacity an a swarm composed by people with similar connections. The average download speed will come down to maybe your upload speed, maybe more depending on how many users leave the client running after watching. A two hour movie / two CD movie encoded with Xvid that comes in at 1.6Mbps should be watchable on your connection - and that's already pretty decent quality. The quality could go near-HDTV if AVC is used and a speed of 4-5 Mbps is possible. Remember that intelligent Bittorrent clients reward other clients that give them chunks. So on your 2.5Mbps upload you could participate in a HDTV torrent, while someone with 5Mbps/512kbps could not, although apparently he would have enough bandwidth. People with weak uploads will just disconnect, frustrated by the jerky video. All this is theoretical, and has to be tuned in a an actual implementation. For example, it's very clear that tit-for-tat comes in conflict with the fast buffering a streaming-bittorrent client must exhibit.
Oh please. This is why I love Slashdot. I'm as big of a MS hater as the next guy, but those who ignore MS's progress from the Blaster days are just spewing FUD. A default Windows SP2 installation, with non-executable buffers (DEP) left enabled for Core windows services, running on supporting hardware will not get owned by just sitting on an infected network. I challenge any Slashdoter who thinks otherwise to prove it. Of course, when people start browsing porn sites with the default browser things get tricky, but that's no longer a remote, automated attack. TFA counts *ALL* forms of attack. Even scans for obscure webserver or game vulnerabilities, Blaster type scans and ssh brute force attempts. I fail to see how these "attacks" can have any impact on a computer running a fresh install of a recent version of Windows like XP SP2, SP3 or Vista. You can argue about security track-record all you like, and talk about why Windows is not secure by design, and how it should not be used for life support systems and ATMs, and I would agree. But this is getting ridiculous.
France needs the US's help (just as the US needs France's help) in ensuring that the IP of their companies is respected worldwide.
Well, you can't have the cake and eat it too - it's either you have a net income or a net deficit when you substract the IP you buy from what you sell. Import/export is a zero-sum game, someone sells more and someone buys more, it's impossible that all economies sell more than they buy. It just so happens that most economies in the world have a financial deficit, and US has an enormous excess, when it comes to the type of bits pirates swap for free (movies, popular software etc). So it makes sense to say that US should lead the "global fight against piracy", and not a smaller country. Would enforcing foreign copyrights on the French people increase the respect other nations have for French IP ? No, the amount of enforcing a country is expected to do is regulated with bilateral trade agreements. Ideally (egotistically), a country should have no respect for other IP, while claim 100% respect for it's own IP, if only anyone would agree to such an asymmetric deal. Making an example of your own people is anti-national , you should enforce as little as possible, without breaking the agreements, and thus have the maximum gain - your exports are respected and your imports are minimal. Even more so when you have, as explained above, a net financial deficit from IP.
Note that I'm not trying to imply that intellectual property is bad for the society as a whole, and that we would be better off without it; I make no claim on that issue. It's strictly an economical/diplomatic approach, what's the best course of action an economy should take.
Ignoring for a moment you parenthesis, I fail to see how piracy impacts the economies of other-than-US states. When most of your software is produced abroad, and your indigenous culture sells much less than Hollywood to your own people, then why should you protect the mostly-US copyrights ? Take for example the new French anti-piracy, 3 strikes law. It's obvious that most movies and most software (Games, Windows, Office) transferred by the pirates is of US origin. I would go even further, and say that if the pirates would no longer pay for American bits, and Americans themselves won't pay for french bits, the result would be a net win for France, lowering the import/export deficit - more money left to develop France, and less in Ballmer's account. In this perspective, the initiative of Sarkozy strikes me as very treacherous towards the French people - why should the French government protect the US copyright more aggressive than US themselves ? Hey, I can understand a little tap on the back from the US, but Sarkozy should protect his voters from US, not herd them like cattle into paying for imports.
Another suggestion I read somewhere else is to redirect all traffic to the AVG website
Instead of punishing the site, you could punish the users of this crappy code. Make an invisible href somewhere in you page, that triggers a script that does a temporary IP-ban. Since AVG will follow any href, when the user tries to access the site, he gets the message: Sorry AVG user, your antivirus is abusive and wastes our resources. Disable AVG and come back.
If a few important sites do this AVG's user-base will drop in a week to about 100 people.
Here's a quick way to disable that nag. I think Antivir, with the above tweaks, is an excellent choice for a geek like me. I don't know if it has a very good detection ratio on the most recent threats - I keep my computer clean, because I'm a geek and I know what to avoid. But I never had an infection and it will not hijack my computer. Just an AV, low resource consumption, no firewall/mail scanner/insert-stupid-technology-here.
His wish to remain an eternal child appears to be linked to the repeated sexual abuse he reported suffering from a nun at the school for the blind that he attended as a child...
Calm down, he obviously enjoyed it and wished to remain an eternal child. Hey, who doesn't have a thing for nuns ?
Tons more examples of current sites being on domains that they 'shouldn`t' be in
No amount of policing the tld system will fix that, it's a fundamental issue: TLDs track a single feature, while sites can be defined by any number of characteristics, and there's no easy way to find a dominant one. Think Gmail's tags versus plain folders. A site can be at the same time non profit (.org), US based(.us), and pornographic (.xxx). In short, there's no point in expecting that the TLD give correct info about the site's content or about the entity that runs it. At best, a TLD should be easy to remember, no more.
when I say "survival", it shouldn't be t aken literally. In fact it's quite the opposite, these traits have very little to do with survival in our society. The "bad boy" traits are things women find "sexy" and "attractive", although they know that rationally they should be attracted to the man with the biggest wallet (call it how you want: culture, education, apparent intelligence, professional success etc.). Females from most species are genetically programmed to be attracted to the pack leader. In humans it's a leftover from the time we were monkeys, just that the subconscious has not yet caught on. So women continue to seek out pack leader traits for example aggressiveness, risky behavior, large physical stature.
Also, don't underestimate the cost of keeping a server running and capable of serving out the eBooks 24/7. The actual cost of sending the bits through the tubes might not be high, but the cost of keeping those servers running and cool isn't negligible. On the contrary, it's quite negligible, if you outsource it to a competent 3rd party. For 100$ you can get terabytes of traffic, within a secure, stable server. Add to that an upfront payment for someone to develop you a website, of a few hundred - thousands of dollars. You will also outsource the checkout/payment to a payment processor, for a small commission. If you add everything up, you get no more than a few pennies per book, 100-1000 times less than what ebooks actually sell for. So yeah, the actual costs of ebooks are negligible. Just look at thepiratebay.com - they distribute tens of millions of ebooks copies for free and have not yet went bankrupt.
http://pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang I don't understand why PDF+paper costs more than paper only. PDF costs 0 to produce, you are paying only for the information, which you already have in the paper version. Other than this, the prices seem fair.
Whether it's rich white men in a city far away, or a gang of young men with automatic weapons on your block, someone will seize power. This hits the very essence of the Orwell quote. He's not an anarchist; as you point out, there are degrees of evilness and power-thirst. What is certain is that leadership has the tendency to slip into totalitarianism when not checked, and we should be ever so vigilant with our leaders. They are not bad or evil men, it's part of the human nature, and there's a small Hitler or Bush lurking in each of us, waiting.
Who actually believes that our governments have any reason to exist anymore beyond their existence itself? "We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Just forget about Multicast, it's a dead-end idea. Not because it's technically flawed (actually, it works pretty nicely), but because it ignores economics. A simplified economic model of the Internet calls for multiple level of service providers that sell bandwidth to each other. So I, as your ISP / backbone provider make as much money as bandwidth you can use. I have the option of enabling a technology that allows you to be more efficient and use less bandwidth, therefore pay me less. Meanwhile, this technology offers no benefits for me, in fact costs me money, the money needed to implement it and manage it. To add insult to injury, this technology works properly only if all the hops between you and your destination have deployed it correctly. So a bunch of telcos who's primary business is selling bandwidth must go trough hoops to make your data transfer more efficient. No, it's not gonna happen. To be successful, Multicast must be completely redesigned from an economical perspective such as to provide a immediate benefit for the provider that uses it (if this is at all possible), without reducing his revenue potential.
What is occurring with these bacteria is analogous to what is observed with the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Mutations occur in the DNA leading to bacterial proteins that cannot interact with the antibiotic and the bacteria survive. Although they survive well in this environment, it has come at a cost. The altered protein is less efficient in performing its normal function. In an environment without antibiotics, the non-mutant bacteria are more likely to survive because the mutant bacteria cannot compete as well. This single piece of "conclusion" pretty sums up this article. So antibiotic-resistant bacteria are less able to compete with original bacteria. To bad we cannot use the "original" strain of TBC to save us from the mutated one. The fact that adapted organisms are less equipped to compete in the original environment of their parents is irrelevant, that environment is no longer current, so useless traits atrophy. Nothing in their logic proves that genetic information is always lost, never gained on the path from simple to complex organisms.
It takes a whole day for this supercomputer to do the same number of calculations as 6 billion hand calculators can do in 24 years? I am not at all impressed. If it could do that in something like, umm... a second! yeah, that would be something.
Nintendo will dump it's consoles wherever it can find buyers, at whatever price allows them to make money. It's not like they have a limited supply of consoles: I'm sure any shortages are temporary, and Nintendo is happy to convert a small Yen price in a large $ amount, and get your money.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the real issue here our continued reliance on passwords that can be used more than once? When are we going to move wholeheartedly into a single-use password environment?
No, that's not the real issue. Two factor authentication does not solve the problem of DNS poisoning: the user will enter the one-time password into the fake site, which in turn will log in the real site and transfer one million $ to Nigeria.
SSL does not solve the problem of DNS poisoning in a practical sense: it only works if the user opens a https:/// shortcut; the large majority of users that type "paypal.com" in the address bar, will not observe that the fake PayPal site they are seeing failed to redirect them to a SSL connection.
The only thing I can think of that really plugs any DNS vulnerability is a smart card / USB token type of device that does it's own verification of the remote website's credentials before disclosing login information.
Yes but the proof RIAA would bring to the court is not just the IP/MAC address combination. That's just a pretext to grab a random student who's IP happens to match, seize his computer and find thousands of MP3 files in the shared folders of a P2P application. That would then constitute the actual evidence they need.
Maybe I can finally play Ultima II on the Apple
I know you are joking, but let's make this clear - it's not inspired by the Apple in the sense that it's has an 8 bit/1MHz CPU and 4KB of RAM.
It's an 70's stile of personal computer by using the TV as a display screen. I would also assume it uses a small form factor where the case is also a keyboard, and all you need is a DC adapter and the video cable. The hardware would be probably comparable to what you get in an XO: low speed x86 CPU and SSD storage.
As a person who has long used a PC attached to a TV as what it's now called a "Media Center", I can say the text quality on a CRT television is absolutely horrible, totally unusable for browsing or programming. Games, movies, sure. But not anything that would increase the computer literacy of the masses.
Sure, if you get a flat panel TV things look good, but those are not likely to be found in the homes of the people this project targets.
This is nothing new. It's just usually not enforced.
Even if it's enforced, I don't think RIAA should rub their collective hands just yet.
The old model says, do what you want with Internet connection, but if we find you breaking the law, we'll put you in jail, make you pay trough the nose etc. etc. This a significant deterrent for people thinking to use P2P illegally.
What they are proposing here is: do what you want make sure you are not caught; if we do catch you, we will give you a slap on the wrist.
This will just drive people to use more and more stealth P2P applications, share knowledge about what works and what not, switch from torrents to things la freenet etc.
A three-strikes and your out policy still allows three tries, and that's plenty of room for experimenting, only the most obtuse users will keep using the same p2p application to eventually be cut off. The users will always move faster than the corporate ISPs ability to implement piracy detectors.
This is a desperate move, and privacy issues aside, a good development for driving work on the anonymizing P2P services.
Because it is reliable, easy to develop, implement and support?
Neah, that can't be it.
Gorilla-shmorilla... All the SciFi movies I've ever seen picture men dressed in white franticaly moving their hands over huge holographic input screens. So this must be the future !
Resistance is futile; put the mouse down and raise your arms at shoulder level.
Very interesting concept, and I'm surprised nobody thought of it sooner.
In fact, they did.
http://www.peercast.org/
http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/
http://www.streamerp2p.com/
The only difference here is the budget. Not to be a prick, but I don't see anything inovative here. Except maybe the bittorent roots (22m for a modded BT client with an embbeded media player ? who's to say that a bittorent type algo is better than a p2p algo specifically designed for the task of streaming ?)
This development will not change much. People prefer to have the files on their computer and build collections, not stream them. They want to move them arround to other devices not connected to the net.
In very a distant future (*), when a huge library of pirated/cheap material becomes available, and most mobile devices have broadband internet connections, and the streaming is so damn perfect and flawless that it's indistinguishable whether you play a local file or a stream, than maybe something like this becomes relevant.
For commercial online TV and the like, this technology it's still unproven, and I'm not referring to SwarmPlayer specifically, but to alternatives that have been available for years. As it turns out, the cost of the bandwidth is not that large. It remains to be seen if a p2p method comes close in reliability to a well provisioned CDN, until now it has not. Digital online TV has other, much larger problems, for example the fact that it's a nightmare for most ISPs, who have designed their networks so that each user is able to browse for an average of 100MB/day, and now for the same user to view 5Mb/s digital TV 10 hours/day they need to increase the capacity 200x.
(*) 2 years in internet time
Of course you could never achieve your full download capacity an a swarm composed by people with similar connections. The average download speed will come down to maybe your upload speed, maybe more depending on how many users leave the client running after watching.
A two hour movie / two CD movie encoded with Xvid that comes in at 1.6Mbps should be watchable on your connection - and that's already pretty decent quality. The quality could go near-HDTV if AVC is used and a speed of 4-5 Mbps is possible.
Remember that intelligent Bittorrent clients reward other clients that give them chunks. So on your 2.5Mbps upload you could participate in a HDTV torrent, while someone with 5Mbps/512kbps could not, although apparently he would have enough bandwidth. People with weak uploads will just disconnect, frustrated by the jerky video.
All this is theoretical, and has to be tuned in a an actual implementation. For example, it's very clear that tit-for-tat comes in conflict with the fast buffering a streaming-bittorrent client must exhibit.
Oh please. This is why I love Slashdot. I'm as big of a MS hater as the next guy, but those who ignore MS's progress from the Blaster days are just spewing FUD. A default Windows SP2 installation, with non-executable buffers (DEP) left enabled for Core windows services, running on supporting hardware will not get owned by just sitting on an infected network. I challenge any Slashdoter who thinks otherwise to prove it. Of course, when people start browsing porn sites with the default browser things get tricky, but that's no longer a remote, automated attack.
TFA counts *ALL* forms of attack. Even scans for obscure webserver or game vulnerabilities, Blaster type scans and ssh brute force attempts. I fail to see how these "attacks" can have any impact on a computer running a fresh install of a recent version of Windows like XP SP2, SP3 or Vista.
You can argue about security track-record all you like, and talk about why Windows is not secure by design, and how it should not be used for life support systems and ATMs, and I would agree. But this is getting ridiculous.
That will make for a crappy game, IMO.
France needs the US's help (just as the US needs France's help) in ensuring that the IP of their companies is respected worldwide.
Well, you can't have the cake and eat it too - it's either you have a net income or a net deficit when you substract the IP you buy from what you sell. Import/export is a zero-sum game, someone sells more and someone buys more, it's impossible that all economies sell more than they buy.
It just so happens that most economies in the world have a financial deficit, and US has an enormous excess, when it comes to the type of bits pirates swap for free (movies, popular software etc). So it makes sense to say that US should lead the "global fight against piracy", and not a smaller country.
Would enforcing foreign copyrights on the French people increase the respect other nations have for French IP ? No, the amount of enforcing a country is expected to do is regulated with bilateral trade agreements. Ideally (egotistically), a country should have no respect for other IP, while claim 100% respect for it's own IP, if only anyone would agree to such an asymmetric deal.
Making an example of your own people is anti-national , you should enforce as little as possible, without breaking the agreements, and thus have the maximum gain - your exports are respected and your imports are minimal. Even more so when you have, as explained above, a net financial deficit from IP.
Note that I'm not trying to imply that intellectual property is bad for the society as a whole, and that we would be better off without it; I make no claim on that issue. It's strictly an economical/diplomatic approach, what's the best course of action an economy should take.
Ignoring for a moment you parenthesis, I fail to see how piracy impacts the economies of other-than-US states.
When most of your software is produced abroad, and your indigenous culture sells much less than Hollywood to your own people, then why should you protect the mostly-US copyrights ?
Take for example the new French anti-piracy, 3 strikes law. It's obvious that most movies and most software (Games, Windows, Office) transferred by the pirates is of US origin. I would go even further, and say that if the pirates would no longer pay for American bits, and Americans themselves won't pay for french bits, the result would be a net win for France, lowering the import/export deficit - more money left to develop France, and less in Ballmer's account.
In this perspective, the initiative of Sarkozy strikes me as very treacherous towards the French people - why should the French government protect the US copyright more aggressive than US themselves ? Hey, I can understand a little tap on the back from the US, but Sarkozy should protect his voters from US, not herd them like cattle into paying for imports.
Another suggestion I read somewhere else is to redirect all traffic to the AVG website
Instead of punishing the site, you could punish the users of this crappy code. Make an invisible href somewhere in you page, that triggers a script that does a temporary IP-ban. Since AVG will follow any href, when the user tries to access the site, he gets the message:
Sorry AVG user, your antivirus is abusive and wastes our resources. Disable AVG and come back.
If a few important sites do this AVG's user-base will drop in a week to about 100 people.
Here's a quick way to disable that nag. I think Antivir, with the above tweaks, is an excellent choice for a geek like me. I don't know if it has a very good detection ratio on the most recent threats - I keep my computer clean, because I'm a geek and I know what to avoid. But I never had an infection and it will not hijack my computer. Just an AV, low resource consumption, no firewall/mail scanner/insert-stupid-technology-here.
TFA:
His wish to remain an eternal child appears to be linked to the repeated sexual abuse he reported suffering from a nun at the school for the blind that he attended as a child...
Calm down, he obviously enjoyed it and wished to remain an eternal child. Hey, who doesn't have a thing for nuns ?
Tons more examples of current sites being on domains that they 'shouldn`t' be in
No amount of policing the tld system will fix that, it's a fundamental issue: TLDs track a single feature, while sites can be defined by any number of characteristics, and there's no easy way to find a dominant one. Think Gmail's tags versus plain folders. A site can be at the same time non profit (.org), US based(.us), and pornographic (.xxx).
In short, there's no point in expecting that the TLD give correct info about the site's content or about the entity that runs it. At best, a TLD should be easy to remember, no more.
Females from most species are genetically programmed to be attracted to the pack leader. In humans it's a leftover from the time we were monkeys, just that the subconscious has not yet caught on. So women continue to seek out pack leader traits for example aggressiveness, risky behavior, large physical stature.
If you add everything up, you get no more than a few pennies per book, 100-1000 times less than what ebooks actually sell for.
So yeah, the actual costs of ebooks are negligible. Just look at thepiratebay.com - they distribute tens of millions of ebooks copies for free and have not yet went bankrupt.
Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Just forget about Multicast, it's a dead-end idea. Not because it's technically flawed (actually, it works pretty nicely), but because it ignores economics.
A simplified economic model of the Internet calls for multiple level of service providers that sell bandwidth to each other. So I, as your ISP / backbone provider make as much money as bandwidth you can use. I have the option of enabling a technology that allows you to be more efficient and use less bandwidth, therefore pay me less. Meanwhile, this technology offers no benefits for me, in fact costs me money, the money needed to implement it and manage it.
To add insult to injury, this technology works properly only if all the hops between you and your destination have deployed it correctly. So a bunch of telcos who's primary business is selling bandwidth must go trough hoops to make your data transfer more efficient. No, it's not gonna happen.
To be successful, Multicast must be completely redesigned from an economical perspective such as to provide a immediate benefit for the provider that uses it (if this is at all possible), without reducing his revenue potential.
The fact that adapted organisms are less equipped to compete in the original environment of their parents is irrelevant, that environment is no longer current, so useless traits atrophy.
Nothing in their logic proves that genetic information is always lost, never gained on the path from simple to complex organisms.
It takes a whole day for this supercomputer to do the same number of calculations as 6 billion hand calculators can do in 24 years? I am not at all impressed.
If it could do that in something like, umm... a second! yeah, that would be something.
Nintendo will dump it's consoles wherever it can find buyers, at whatever price allows them to make money.
It's not like they have a limited supply of consoles: I'm sure any shortages are temporary, and Nintendo is happy to convert a small Yen price in a large $ amount, and get your money.