Have they decided that it's a bad idea, or that it's too difficult, or what?
I am a bit fuzzy here on the idea of "stateless" API that deals with inherently state-oriented hardware such as GPUs with their frame buffers, pixel processors, massive texture memories and what not...
It would be much better if there were OpenGL context objects that encapsulated the state, and were explicitly passed into API calls.
So you do you expect the entire (multi-hundred megabyte sized) state of the GPU and its memory to be duplicated in system RAM and somehow auto-magically transmitted back and forth with each operation? Do elaborate.
No, the guerrilla uprisings were in response to people like you taking over with the help of the Soviet Union. See: Guatemala, Nicaragua.
Yes, how dare these peasants, shock and horror, revolt against US-sponsored dictators José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala (a dude who is on a UN war-criminals list) and Israel-sponsored Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza Debayle whom even US found too toxic! What insolence!
And yes, you are a moron.
I would laugh if you were gang-raped and executed in a soccer stadium full of cheering crowds. Scum like you are why we need another General Pinochet.
Mental vomit such as this is a perfect example why your kind needs to be locked up for life in mental institutions before your brain rot disease manages to cause some wide-spread damage.
Well, then it is up to the reader to see which one of us is blowing smoke. Fortunately that is easy enough to check, it only takes a BitTorrent client...
Love, gender, sexual orientation, and the ability to reproduce should be irrelevant in the government's eyes as far as things are concerned.
The point was that government has really no business to get involved at all in matters of sexuality, reproduction, couples/trios/harems/what-not forming etc...
The fact that it does (due to religious idiocy) is at the root of all these legal problems various "alternative" sexuality types run into.
What you still keep missing is that I was not talking about government and idiotic religion motivated laws but the reactions that ordinary people have, reactions that are genetically induced. That is why even if the two men "love each other to bits", they will still get negative reactions all around because most of the typical "straight" males appear to be genetically wired for hostility towards the homosexual ones (but not towards homosexual females - it would make a fascinating research subject to figure why it is so).
Well, that's... simply not true. Most cracks -- including those for current games -- reduce the binary size. Maybe they're all using primitive DRM schemes!
Not at all. All the recent ones, like Dirt2, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Borderlands etc are far larger, some over 10meg in size vs 1.5meg original exe.
I know this from my... err.... scientific survey of the scene! Purely academic, you understand.
You forgot another reason: players just got fed-up with the cash-up-front and all-sales-final combo mentality of publishers combined with an ever increasing number of high-profile duds. When the games were $25-35 CDN (back in the 1990s) new and $10 in the bargain bin, people could simply risk buying them at a whim and throw them away when they did not like them. Now combine prices in the $60-80 CDN range ($45 or so discounted after several months) and the fact that the game review magazines (and most internet sites) are nearly universally bought-and-paid-for shills for the publishers (or simply focus on the wrong elements of the game) and it becomes a very expensive and highly unrewarding crap shoot.
Demos do not help because like the review sites, demos are usually shamelessly doctored to operate quite differently from the product sold.
In short: the marketplace has been rigged to give huge and unfair advantage to the sellers. Some people mitigate this by using their social networks and borrowing games/books/what-not from friends, but for many this is not practical.
And so over the years some have deployed a simple strategy (which also applies to all other media like movies and books): they play the game and only if they like it, they pay the authors. Junk (i.e. majority of products) is simply discarded. This returns the balance of power back to the consumer and rewards actual creativity as opposed to cookie-cutter corporate crap.
Naturally the manufacturers of cookie-cutter crap dislike this idea very much, they would have you pay up front and screw you if you do not like what they put in that shiny wrapper, which I think is one of the often missed major motivations behind DRM across the so-called "contents" industries.
That's not a similar effort, it's a LOT more work, and I'm not sure that any of it can really be automated.
which could only be read as a direct opposition of what I was talking about: that any scheme AC2 is likely to deploy will not present much difficulty for the established groups and their tools. I was proven right, as it took a mere day to crack it. Now you are saying that you were not really talking about AC2 and its DRM and rather about some speculative, possible DRM of the future...
WRT to your other reply, I gotta say I have often seen cracked exes that are a fraction of their original size because so much code has been removed, and I don't think I've seen one that increased by an order of magnitude, but I'll take your word for it.
What you describe is what used to happen with early, relatively primitive DRM schemes... also you do not have to take my word for it, just use BitTorrent!
None of this changes the fact that storing code/content on the server would bring a new dimension to the whole game, to which the existing cracking methods, elaborate as they are, simply do not apply.
And again, as I grow tired of pointing out, unless the amount of "code" (or any other part of the game to which I was simply referring as "contents") is of such significant amount as to render the game functionally indifferent from an MMORPG, the existing tools and methods are quite suitable, as will be evidenced by the number of days it will take to crack all these newfangled and utterly futile DRM schemes, thus settling our argument quite conclusively, although maybe not as spectacularly as with AC2.
Again, you are confused. Marriage is all about control and religious historical legacy, reproduction being just an excuse for it. What I was pointing out is that the opposition to same-sex couples is deeper then just some legalistic mumbo-jumbo and is stemming from the same source as the homosexuality itself: genetic material.
That two-man family may be just like that man-woman family next door (mine, for example). I'm starting to get a little bit older and while at one time I was sure I wanted children, my wife and I are finding that it is quite possible that we will never have any. Maybe we will regret it, but in another 15-20 years when my wife hits menopause and becomes unable to bear children, what then is the difference between the gay couple and us? What if we tried to conceive and were unable to, ultimately discovering that I am shooting blanks? Our options at that point? probably about the same as the lesbians and technological insemination.
You are approaching it from the point of view of objective logic but what I was pointing out was that our genes are not operating on that level. The responses I spoke of are instinctive because genetically encoded algorithms are only capable of so much sophistication... and so seeing two men mating results in a negative sub-conscious reaction in those with "standard" sexual circuitry (particularly in males).
So you would be against a man marrying, say, a woman who'd had ovarian cancer at some point in her life and is no longer able to have children?
Since, as I pointed out, the whole concept of marriage as a legal institution is religiously motivated and thus highly suspect, I really do not care.
Would you be for dissolving the marriages of men who have had vasectomies? Surely those relationships are every bit as useless as a marriage between two dudes!
Way to go barking up the wrong tree. Genetic infertility is also counter-productive from the point of view of species propagation, and that is why men seek fertile women - as "advertised" by, say, over-sized (compared to their functional needs) mammary organs...
Acquired infertility is not easily detectable by mates before fact and so there are no simple basic instinctive responses other then loss of infatuation over time. Evolution has deployed other strategies to offset such issues, such as promiscuity for example.
But what I was pointing out is that irrespective of any legal lunacy called "marriage", gays and lesbians should not expect automatic wide spread acceptance by the "standard" sexuality types because there are genetic causes to their ostracism... as there are with, say, people having highly visible deformities - the primitive parts of our brains scream "Disease! Maybe contagious! Run away!" as soon as we see them. An average person has to work (sometimes hard) on becoming not affected by such things. And there is a looong list of such "instinctive" (i.e. genetically encoded as part of our evolutionary ancestry) reactions to smells, shapes etc.
I could point you to scholarly dissertations such as these.... but why bother. The evidence is plain as day and so easy to see that even the greatest dolt could not miss it: homosexuality occurs in all naturally heterosexual species. Dogs, cats, mice, birds... you name it. If it was all some sort of "Satan's sweet whispers to get the weak-hearted to stray from the Holy path" as the Bible-thumping boneheads would have you believe, it would only occur in humans and its prevalence would be orders of magnitude higher amongst the "Heathen non-believers (pick your Heathen religion here)" then the "pious".
Yet polygamy and cheaters are treated with persecution and hatred.
But for different reasons. Polygamy in the West is persecuted because of religious biases, while in other parts of the world (with different religious backgrounds and history) it is very common and accepted as normal.
Neither has anything whatsoever to do with "love".
If anything, I admire some of the "primitive" tribes who had no concept of marriage at all, considered all kids to be "communal responsibility" and frowned upon the advent of frustrated males who got no sex as they saw it as a prelude to violence and social discourse - subsequently the women of the tribe were strongly encouraged to "release the pressure buildup" so to speak.
Wait, which religious wackos are these? Did I miss the recent headline "NEW US LEGISLATION ESTABLISHES 'MARRIAGE'"? Care to tell me when this "unforgiveable" law was actually established?
Current laws in this respect are simply re-iteration of the original religious screeds as they took hold, which in the West mostly dictate monogamy. In some other parts of the world polygamy (due to different religious backgrounds) became the law-enshrined norm. In both cases however religion (aided by greed and desire for control) was the driving factor for establishment of these institutions.
In contrast, some of the Amazonian tribes discovered in the early last century had no concept of "marriage" only fleeting dalliances (all kids were considered a communal responsibility). If you read some of the historical records of the encounters of European sailors with the Polynesians, you will find that sex and marriage were approached in a radically different way. British soldiers during WWII who got stranded in the jungles of South Asia wrote of their experiences in remote villages where to their awe it was a custom of "good hospitality" to furnish lone male travelers with the family's young women for the night...
Etc and so on. Cultural attitudes to sex and man-woman unions are directly related to religion and history and have no global standard whatsoever. One however can see how people can get confused because the West and its religious power-brokers were always intent on aggressive global neo-puritan campaign of conquest, chiefly by trying to pretend that the wealth and power accumulated by the West is somehow directly tied to retarded Puritan nonsense. This was difficult in the past but unfortunately it seems to be working recently, mostly due to advances in communication technology and proliferation of insidious cultural "entertainment" which is slowly converting places like Japan and China into carbon-copies of the sex-schizophrenic, constipated West.
This "marriage is between a man and a woman" bit is exactly the same as "coloreds don't drink from the white fountain."
While the entire concept of "marriage" is just societal (religiously motivated) dogma, enshrining of which in law is frankly an unforgivable assault by religious wackos on the rest of us, I cannot exactly stand by your "equivalence" as there is this little problem of sexual reproduction involved that has no place in the fountain drinking you've referred to...
I think all these "alternate" sexuality types are shooting themselves in the foot when they go on these crusades in the vain of "our two-man family is just like that man-woman one next door!"... err.. except it isn't. No amount of wishful thinking can hide the fact that exclusively same-sex sexual interaction is simply a genetic deficiency doomed to reproductive failure, or in case of lesbians in the absence of technological insemination. Does this warrant persecution or social shunning? Hell no. But at the same time you cannot pretend that it is not likely to cause all sorts of strange reactions by the sex-controlling circuitry of the brains of those who have the "standard" wiring, ranging from discomfort to outright instinctive (genetically-dictated) hostility.
Wow, and you keep dragging this. Give it up, you're wrong, you simply don't live the tragedy that's Venezuela nowadays.
Sure, so go on being surprised, shocked and generally flabbergasted every fucking time someone like Chavez gets elected in South America. "Why could this happen?! Didn't we put enough brainless TV shows on?! It must be Castro's doing!!!" etc.
You remind of all the US dolts who go all dewy eyed and ask pleadingly "Why do all those Arabs hate us so?!"... its hopeless really.
I'd love to get into a detailed argument with you, but my comment was modded flamebait in a single mouse-click by someone too lazy to come up with a more substantial reply involving, you know,
words.
This never stopped me before. Why just in the other article about Chavez I got a horde of people down-moderating me and then braying as ACs in the same very thread, which usually happens when their hate and loathing gets better of their laziness and so they try to go for the "double whammy"...
If you are going to pay any attention to moderation then you will never post anything even remotely thoughtful here as there are always a number of lurkers of any conceivable persuasion ready to down-mod you for anything and everything at a drop of a hat. The good news is that there are also usually up-moderators to balance them out.
Also, accumulating Slashdot "karma" isn't exactly what I would call "the main objective" of one's life. This is just a goofy entertainment site for techies.
Neither does "free market", nor "capitalism". None of these simplistic systems work. They all have fatal flaws. That is why most sane countries use mixed economies, where the worst excesses of one system can be brought under control using another.
People can have the same oportunities, but not the same capabilities.
True, but in reality they have nothing like "same" opportunities, their position in life determined largely by dumb luck - and if you do not believe me, perhaps we could simulate life's roulette by for example gouging your eyes out so that you can experience at least a part of the fun of getting to the life's "start line" blind - somehow I suspect that all that belching about "opportunities" would end real quick. Furthermore, even if they start at the same point, what makes you think that because you've spent 10 years working 60% percent harder and more cleverly then the other guy, you then deserve wealth equivalent to 100000 people, not to mention that your kids will start at the top of the pyramid without lifting a finger, not having demonstrated any capabilities whatsoever? Wait, I think I know, that is because your aristocratic ass is just sooooo vastly superior to the rest of the undeserving rabble...
I'm busting my ass to be an engineer.
Which, naturally, means that you expect to be a billionaire, no? Or perhaps you've got no fucking clue about what you are talking about? None of the so-called "socialists" want to stick it to the engineers in favor of peasants. They are concerned with wealth disparities in the hundreds and thousands of times between the poorest and the wealthiest. And if you think that being an engineer entitles you to a 100 room mansion with 20 servants to lick your boots, then you have another thing coming. Also the "socialists" are concerned with having the said lowest rungs of the society and their kids to have some opportunity of a social advancement, rather then a permanent servitude in the kind of "society" (or more accurately a wolves den) you seem so keen on constructing.
Don't ask me to think like a peasant, because it's stupid.
No one ever did. But I do ask you to stop thinking like a wanna-be aristocrat, which is what you are doing, because it's even more stupid.
And don't expect me to keep reading your - really, really dumb and ignorant - comments, because arguing with you has proven to be pretty pointless.
More aristocratic farts along the lines of "I got mine, fuck everyone else, cause I am the smartest and they and you are just serfs and I shall daintily ignore you because your uncouth opinions do not agree with my Cognac"...
It amuses me how all these oh-so-self-righteous assholes post as Anonymous Cowards so that they can still down-mod the very posts they are replying to. Gives one a rather good feeling as to the sort of players involved in these political "debates"...
They are apparently too stupid to figure out that all they are doing is putting their own malignant souls on public display and bolstering their opponents argument by such splendid example.
You do know that violence increased dramatically in his presidency, right?
Well since all the wealthy right wingers started funding violent opposition - complete with actual military coup attempts, egged on relentlessly by the media companies they own... it is hardly surprising.
Their remedy for "calm" is a traditional South American military crackdown on all uppity poor, complete with mass disappearances and executions in soccer stadiums - Chile style. Would this "reduce" violence? Of course - until it spawned yet another South American tradition: an uprising of a guerrilla army of the peasants.
What you are seeing in Venezuela is simply class warfare - violence will continue in one form or another until the disparities diminish and edge is taken off from all real and perceived colonial injustices.
Chavez is of course very unlikely to fix this problem, but listening to all the hateful braying of assorted racists and supremacists which he inspires is rather entertaining, particularly when they try to wrap themselves in the colors of "freedom" and "democracy"...
You're clueless. I'm working class, very far from a rich person. I don't even own a car.
So you only have a mentality of a supremacist plantation owner, without the actual trappings. A common case amongst the truly clueless and very greedy - the likes of you form Tea Parties in the US where they organize and fight for the privilege of dying horribly from some curable disease so that poor and downtrodden billionaires and mega conglomerates do not have to pay a red cent in taxes!
All has been stolen from the previous owners (very good!) then left to rot and be overtaken by anyone who does it by the force (very bad).
Ah the evils of land reform! This would be funny if it weren't 103712nd time some colonial was moaning about land reform that gave "their" land to the "unskilled" dirty locals to "rot", "be underutilized", "unprofitable" and "only suited to be returned to its rightful, God-appointed, industrious owners - namely us!". You are far, far at the end of this line of whiners, somewhere behind the Afrikaners of South Africa. You should compare notes, they had time to turn their pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth about this very thing into a form of performance art.
Second, all those education programs aren't only really, really underwhelming, but also useless if you don't want to work for the government. Echoes of communism? Hell yes.
As opposed to the previous state of... zilch, nada and bupkis - it is a grand improvement indeed. Again, your visceral hate for those getting a chance, any chance at all, no matter how flawed, to better their lives is coming through loud and clear.
Comments like these are what gives "free marketer" "libertarian" types their bad name. If "free market" was truly based on merit and if wealth directly corresponded to one's contributions to civilization, there would be very few "socialists" around. But then again there would be no hereditary billionaires (no billionaires in fact - as it is physically impossible for one man to contribute enough to warrant such wealth disparity) surrounded by billions of people whose monthly income does not exceed $20, no matter how hard they work and how clever they get with their minuscule rice paddy, either.
The emregence of "socialist" and "communist" ideologies is the "free market's" own doing, as its religious dogma is far, far removed from any practical reality, thus resulting in the negative reactions (and over-reactions) of those who are not easily blinded and bamboozled and who also happened be born at the shit-end of the deal.
Interesting stuff. Is there a website that details what cars have what in terms of chips and such?
Just google "T.R.E.A.D. act" and "RFID".
Here is an example of what you will find (its an article in a business rag extolling a manufacturers "success" in embedding the RFID chips and their "readiness" to help others to be complaint with the act - for a fee of course).
Ostensibly the act is intended to prevent accidents related to tires, but once you have unique RFID chips in tires that are all federally registered (which is required by the act) an inexpensive reader can be used (and or placed) anywhere by any government agency, for pretty much any purpose. Take into account recent government encroachments on freedom and privacy across the board, realize that the databases under government control can easily cross-correlate the TREAD manufacturer registry with VIN number registry and ownership records... and it does not take multiple readings of 1984 to figure out where this is going.
I'm not going to read all that because the fact that you think people who come from spanish, portuguese and the such families are responsible for the slaughter of the indigenous people 300 years ago.
Nice straw-man. It is their ancestors who are responsible, as I clearly wrote, but they are the indirect beneficiaries and no significant changes occurred since that time in regards to wealth distribution. The indigenous populace feel cheated and see this as an ongoing injustice.
You have no idea of how Venezuela is nowadays. It's one of the most dangerous, hostile, and ignorant countries in the world.
Thanks to the activities of the very people you defend. Poverty and lack of education breed crime and violence, particularly if the poor see themselves under the heel of the descendants of their colonial masters.
Ironically the only one who attempted to do anything about it is... Chavez, whom you hate so viscerally. He is the one with education programs and health-care for the poor. He is even trying to reduce violence by limiting glorification of violence in games and toys, which however wrong-headed and ineffective is at least an indication that he is trying... something. All the previous governments took the attitude that crackdowns by their US-equipped army on the uppity peasants are the method of choice.... with the result you see now.
The "aristocratic rich" people are like, i don't know, 1% of the whole population? Yet the last election chavez won by less than 10% of the total votes.
And the rest of the Chavez opponents are relatively well-off non natives, who are very rich indeed compared to the indigenous population. Do not try to snow us here, bud, the demographics of Venezuela as well as the distribution of votes for Chavez across various societal strata in Venezuela are well known.
There were anti-Chavez "demonstrations" in Caracas held by dudes who got there in their Mercedes and Porsche sports cars, with trophy wives strutting around in stiletto high-heals while holding pictures of Chavez photo-shopped to look like Hitler. High comedy indeed.
And speaking of statistics: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population. Or are you going to pretend that the 'hacendados' are a myth too? Given that farm work is the dominant form of employment for the indigenous population, this pretty much explains it all.
Yet the last election chavez won by less than 10% of the total votes.
His supporters constitute a majority but not everywhere. His power base is the impoverished farm workers and villagers, urban poor and the like. He is the weakest amongst the very wealthy, the relatively wealthy urban dwellers etc. In short: the poorer and more indigenous ancestry - the higher likelihood of vote for Chavez.
Really interesting isn't it?
Not really. It is completely consistent with ethnicity and wealth distribution.
Why does he win? Because the ignorant masses vote for him because he's a ridiculous clown, is funny, and keep saying he helps the poor, which is a sad lie.
Right, "the ignorant masses"! This pretty much ends any and all discussion about "freedom" and "democracy". What an hypocritical ass you are. So "democracy" and "freedom" are only for those you deem high-society enough for your tastes, dirty farmers and other serfs need not apply. What a fucker. Next you will be belching and braying about how only land owners should be allowed to vote, the aristocratic-wanna-be little nitwit that you are.
Why do I know that? For a fact. I live in Venezuela.
How is that plantation doing? Pining for the days you could whip them ungrateful "ignorant" serfs senseless so they do not get any ideas?
A more elaborate scheme would make things more inconvenient.
True, but you should keep it in the perspective of how elaborate the already defeated existing DRM schemes are as that would be an indicator of relative difficulty for the experienced hacker groups. And in that regard the scheme you described is of laughable complexity. A typical current DRM scheme involves literally hundreds of obfuscated (so that they are not easily detectable) pieces of code peppered across the game executable - and these routines are purposefully built to be as hard to remove as possible. Subsequently the automated tools that the hackers use resort to embedding entire custom-built virtual machines that run sections of code with simulated I/O operations... which results in sometimes 10-fold increase of the size of the game executable.
So when I said that this new scheme is useless unless it involves storing a significant portion of the game contents online, ala MMORPG, it is that expertise and multi-decade experience with any conceivable DRM scheme so far deployed that the hackers have, that I had in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a bit fuzzy here on the idea of "stateless" API that deals with inherently state-oriented hardware such as GPUs with their frame buffers, pixel processors, massive texture memories and what not...
So you do you expect the entire (multi-hundred megabyte sized) state of the GPU and its memory to be duplicated in system RAM and somehow auto-magically transmitted back and forth with each operation? Do elaborate.
Yes, how dare these peasants, shock and horror, revolt against US-sponsored dictators José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala (a dude who is on a UN war-criminals list) and Israel-sponsored Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza Debayle whom even US found too toxic! What insolence!
And yes, you are a moron.
Mental vomit such as this is a perfect example why your kind needs to be locked up for life in mental institutions before your brain rot disease manages to cause some wide-spread damage.
Well, then it is up to the reader to see which one of us is blowing smoke. Fortunately that is easy enough to check, it only takes a BitTorrent client...
The point was that government has really no business to get involved at all in matters of sexuality, reproduction, couples/trios/harems/what-not forming etc ...
The fact that it does (due to religious idiocy) is at the root of all these legal problems various "alternative" sexuality types run into.
What you still keep missing is that I was not talking about government and idiotic religion motivated laws but the reactions that ordinary people have, reactions that are genetically induced. That is why even if the two men "love each other to bits", they will still get negative reactions all around because most of the typical "straight" males appear to be genetically wired for hostility towards the homosexual ones (but not towards homosexual females - it would make a fascinating research subject to figure why it is so).
Not at all. All the recent ones, like Dirt2, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Borderlands etc are far larger, some over 10meg in size vs 1.5meg original exe.
I know this from my ... err .... scientific survey of the scene! Purely academic, you understand.
You forgot another reason: players just got fed-up with the cash-up-front and all-sales-final combo mentality of publishers combined with an ever increasing number of high-profile duds. When the games were $25-35 CDN (back in the 1990s) new and $10 in the bargain bin, people could simply risk buying them at a whim and throw them away when they did not like them. Now combine prices in the $60-80 CDN range ($45 or so discounted after several months) and the fact that the game review magazines (and most internet sites) are nearly universally bought-and-paid-for shills for the publishers (or simply focus on the wrong elements of the game) and it becomes a very expensive and highly unrewarding crap shoot.
Demos do not help because like the review sites, demos are usually shamelessly doctored to operate quite differently from the product sold.
In short: the marketplace has been rigged to give huge and unfair advantage to the sellers. Some people mitigate this by using their social networks and borrowing games/books/what-not from friends, but for many this is not practical.
And so over the years some have deployed a simple strategy (which also applies to all other media like movies and books): they play the game and only if they like it, they pay the authors. Junk (i.e. majority of products) is simply discarded. This returns the balance of power back to the consumer and rewards actual creativity as opposed to cookie-cutter corporate crap.
Naturally the manufacturers of cookie-cutter crap dislike this idea very much, they would have you pay up front and screw you if you do not like what they put in that shiny wrapper, which I think is one of the often missed major motivations behind DRM across the so-called "contents" industries.
Well, you've made statements like this:
which could only be read as a direct opposition of what I was talking about: that any scheme AC2 is likely to deploy will not present much difficulty for the established groups and their tools. I was proven right, as it took a mere day to crack it. Now you are saying that you were not really talking about AC2 and its DRM and rather about some speculative, possible DRM of the future...
What you describe is what used to happen with early, relatively primitive DRM schemes ... also you do not have to take my word for it, just use BitTorrent!
And again, as I grow tired of pointing out, unless the amount of "code" (or any other part of the game to which I was simply referring as "contents") is of such significant amount as to render the game functionally indifferent from an MMORPG, the existing tools and methods are quite suitable, as will be evidenced by the number of days it will take to crack all these newfangled and utterly futile DRM schemes, thus settling our argument quite conclusively, although maybe not as spectacularly as with AC2.
Again, you are confused. Marriage is all about control and religious historical legacy, reproduction being just an excuse for it. What I was pointing out is that the opposition to same-sex couples is deeper then just some legalistic mumbo-jumbo and is stemming from the same source as the homosexuality itself: genetic material.
You are approaching it from the point of view of objective logic but what I was pointing out was that our genes are not operating on that level. The responses I spoke of are instinctive because genetically encoded algorithms are only capable of so much sophistication... and so seeing two men mating results in a negative sub-conscious reaction in those with "standard" sexual circuitry (particularly in males).
Since, as I pointed out, the whole concept of marriage as a legal institution is religiously motivated and thus highly suspect, I really do not care.
Way to go barking up the wrong tree. Genetic infertility is also counter-productive from the point of view of species propagation, and that is why men seek fertile women - as "advertised" by, say, over-sized (compared to their functional needs) mammary organs...
Acquired infertility is not easily detectable by mates before fact and so there are no simple basic instinctive responses other then loss of infatuation over time. Evolution has deployed other strategies to offset such issues, such as promiscuity for example.
But what I was pointing out is that irrespective of any legal lunacy called "marriage", gays and lesbians should not expect automatic wide spread acceptance by the "standard" sexuality types because there are genetic causes to their ostracism... as there are with, say, people having highly visible deformities - the primitive parts of our brains scream "Disease! Maybe contagious! Run away!" as soon as we see them. An average person has to work (sometimes hard) on becoming not affected by such things. And there is a looong list of such "instinctive" (i.e. genetically encoded as part of our evolutionary ancestry) reactions to smells, shapes etc.
I could point you to scholarly dissertations such as these.... but why bother. The evidence is plain as day and so easy to see that even the greatest dolt could not miss it: homosexuality occurs in all naturally heterosexual species. Dogs, cats, mice, birds ... you name it. If it was all some sort of "Satan's sweet whispers to get the weak-hearted to stray from the Holy path" as the Bible-thumping boneheads would have you believe, it would only occur in humans and its prevalence would be orders of magnitude higher amongst the "Heathen non-believers (pick your Heathen religion here)" then the "pious".
But for different reasons. Polygamy in the West is persecuted because of religious biases, while in other parts of the world (with different religious backgrounds and history) it is very common and accepted as normal.
Neither has anything whatsoever to do with "love".
If anything, I admire some of the "primitive" tribes who had no concept of marriage at all, considered all kids to be "communal responsibility" and frowned upon the advent of frustrated males who got no sex as they saw it as a prelude to violence and social discourse - subsequently the women of the tribe were strongly encouraged to "release the pressure buildup" so to speak.
Current laws in this respect are simply re-iteration of the original religious screeds as they took hold, which in the West mostly dictate monogamy. In some other parts of the world polygamy (due to different religious backgrounds) became the law-enshrined norm. In both cases however religion (aided by greed and desire for control) was the driving factor for establishment of these institutions.
In contrast, some of the Amazonian tribes discovered in the early last century had no concept of "marriage" only fleeting dalliances (all kids were considered a communal responsibility). If you read some of the historical records of the encounters of European sailors with the Polynesians, you will find that sex and marriage were approached in a radically different way. British soldiers during WWII who got stranded in the jungles of South Asia wrote of their experiences in remote villages where to their awe it was a custom of "good hospitality" to furnish lone male travelers with the family's young women for the night ...
Etc and so on. Cultural attitudes to sex and man-woman unions are directly related to religion and history and have no global standard whatsoever. One however can see how people can get confused because the West and its religious power-brokers were always intent on aggressive global neo-puritan campaign of conquest, chiefly by trying to pretend that the wealth and power accumulated by the West is somehow directly tied to retarded Puritan nonsense. This was difficult in the past but unfortunately it seems to be working recently, mostly due to advances in communication technology and proliferation of insidious cultural "entertainment" which is slowly converting places like Japan and China into carbon-copies of the sex-schizophrenic, constipated West.
While the entire concept of "marriage" is just societal (religiously motivated) dogma, enshrining of which in law is frankly an unforgivable assault by religious wackos on the rest of us, I cannot exactly stand by your "equivalence" as there is this little problem of sexual reproduction involved that has no place in the fountain drinking you've referred to ...
I think all these "alternate" sexuality types are shooting themselves in the foot when they go on these crusades in the vain of "our two-man family is just like that man-woman one next door!" ... err .. except it isn't. No amount of wishful thinking can hide the fact that exclusively same-sex sexual interaction is simply a genetic deficiency doomed to reproductive failure, or in case of lesbians in the absence of technological insemination. Does this warrant persecution or social shunning? Hell no. But at the same time you cannot pretend that it is not likely to cause all sorts of strange reactions by the sex-controlling circuitry of the brains of those who have the "standard" wiring, ranging from discomfort to outright instinctive (genetically-dictated) hostility.
Sure, so go on being surprised, shocked and generally flabbergasted every fucking time someone like Chavez gets elected in South America. "Why could this happen?! Didn't we put enough brainless TV shows on?! It must be Castro's doing!!!" etc.
You remind of all the US dolts who go all dewy eyed and ask pleadingly "Why do all those Arabs hate us so?!" ... its hopeless really.
This never stopped me before. Why just in the other article about Chavez I got a horde of people down-moderating me and then braying as ACs in the same very thread, which usually happens when their hate and loathing gets better of their laziness and so they try to go for the "double whammy" ...
If you are going to pay any attention to moderation then you will never post anything even remotely thoughtful here as there are always a number of lurkers of any conceivable persuasion ready to down-mod you for anything and everything at a drop of a hat. The good news is that there are also usually up-moderators to balance them out.
Also, accumulating Slashdot "karma" isn't exactly what I would call "the main objective" of one's life. This is just a goofy entertainment site for techies.
Neither does "free market", nor "capitalism". None of these simplistic systems work. They all have fatal flaws. That is why most sane countries use mixed economies, where the worst excesses of one system can be brought under control using another.
True, but in reality they have nothing like "same" opportunities, their position in life determined largely by dumb luck - and if you do not believe me, perhaps we could simulate life's roulette by for example gouging your eyes out so that you can experience at least a part of the fun of getting to the life's "start line" blind - somehow I suspect that all that belching about "opportunities" would end real quick. Furthermore, even if they start at the same point, what makes you think that because you've spent 10 years working 60% percent harder and more cleverly then the other guy, you then deserve wealth equivalent to 100000 people, not to mention that your kids will start at the top of the pyramid without lifting a finger, not having demonstrated any capabilities whatsoever? Wait, I think I know, that is because your aristocratic ass is just sooooo vastly superior to the rest of the undeserving rabble...
Which, naturally, means that you expect to be a billionaire, no? Or perhaps you've got no fucking clue about what you are talking about? None of the so-called "socialists" want to stick it to the engineers in favor of peasants. They are concerned with wealth disparities in the hundreds and thousands of times between the poorest and the wealthiest. And if you think that being an engineer entitles you to a 100 room mansion with 20 servants to lick your boots, then you have another thing coming. Also the "socialists" are concerned with having the said lowest rungs of the society and their kids to have some opportunity of a social advancement, rather then a permanent servitude in the kind of "society" (or more accurately a wolves den) you seem so keen on constructing.
No one ever did. But I do ask you to stop thinking like a wanna-be aristocrat, which is what you are doing, because it's even more stupid.
More aristocratic farts along the lines of "I got mine, fuck everyone else, cause I am the smartest and they and you are just serfs and I shall daintily ignore you because your uncouth opinions do not agree with my Cognac" ...
It amuses me how all these oh-so-self-righteous assholes post as Anonymous Cowards so that they can still down-mod the very posts they are replying to. Gives one a rather good feeling as to the sort of players involved in these political "debates" ...
They are apparently too stupid to figure out that all they are doing is putting their own malignant souls on public display and bolstering their opponents argument by such splendid example.
Well since all the wealthy right wingers started funding violent opposition - complete with actual military coup attempts, egged on relentlessly by the media companies they own ... it is hardly surprising.
Their remedy for "calm" is a traditional South American military crackdown on all uppity poor, complete with mass disappearances and executions in soccer stadiums - Chile style. Would this "reduce" violence? Of course - until it spawned yet another South American tradition: an uprising of a guerrilla army of the peasants.
What you are seeing in Venezuela is simply class warfare - violence will continue in one form or another until the disparities diminish and edge is taken off from all real and perceived colonial injustices.
Chavez is of course very unlikely to fix this problem, but listening to all the hateful braying of assorted racists and supremacists which he inspires is rather entertaining, particularly when they try to wrap themselves in the colors of "freedom" and "democracy"...
So you only have a mentality of a supremacist plantation owner, without the actual trappings. A common case amongst the truly clueless and very greedy - the likes of you form Tea Parties in the US where they organize and fight for the privilege of dying horribly from some curable disease so that poor and downtrodden billionaires and mega conglomerates do not have to pay a red cent in taxes!
Ah the evils of land reform! This would be funny if it weren't 103712nd time some colonial was moaning about land reform that gave "their" land to the "unskilled" dirty locals to "rot", "be underutilized", "unprofitable" and "only suited to be returned to its rightful, God-appointed, industrious owners - namely us!". You are far, far at the end of this line of whiners, somewhere behind the Afrikaners of South Africa. You should compare notes, they had time to turn their pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth about this very thing into a form of performance art.
As opposed to the previous state of ... zilch, nada and bupkis - it is a grand improvement indeed. Again, your visceral hate for those getting a chance, any chance at all, no matter how flawed, to better their lives is coming through loud and clear.
Comments like these are what gives "free marketer" "libertarian" types their bad name. If "free market" was truly based on merit and if wealth directly corresponded to one's contributions to civilization, there would be very few "socialists" around. But then again there would be no hereditary billionaires (no billionaires in fact - as it is physically impossible for one man to contribute enough to warrant such wealth disparity) surrounded by billions of people whose monthly income does not exceed $20, no matter how hard they work and how clever they get with their minuscule rice paddy, either.
The emregence of "socialist" and "communist" ideologies is the "free market's" own doing, as its religious dogma is far, far removed from any practical reality, thus resulting in the negative reactions (and over-reactions) of those who are not easily blinded and bamboozled and who also happened be born at the shit-end of the deal.
Also, I will accept your heart-felt apologies now ... don't forget the beer!
Just google "T.R.E.A.D. act" and "RFID".
Here is an example of what you will find (its an article in a business rag extolling a manufacturers "success" in embedding the RFID chips and their "readiness" to help others to be complaint with the act - for a fee of course).
Ostensibly the act is intended to prevent accidents related to tires, but once you have unique RFID chips in tires that are all federally registered (which is required by the act) an inexpensive reader can be used (and or placed) anywhere by any government agency, for pretty much any purpose. Take into account recent government encroachments on freedom and privacy across the board, realize that the databases under government control can easily cross-correlate the TREAD manufacturer registry with VIN number registry and ownership records ... and it does not take multiple readings of 1984 to figure out where this is going.
Nice straw-man. It is their ancestors who are responsible, as I clearly wrote, but they are the indirect beneficiaries and no significant changes occurred since that time in regards to wealth distribution. The indigenous populace feel cheated and see this as an ongoing injustice.
Thanks to the activities of the very people you defend. Poverty and lack of education breed crime and violence, particularly if the poor see themselves under the heel of the descendants of their colonial masters.
Ironically the only one who attempted to do anything about it is ... Chavez, whom you hate so viscerally. He is the one with education programs and health-care for the poor. He is even trying to reduce violence by limiting glorification of violence in games and toys, which however wrong-headed and ineffective is at least an indication that he is trying ... something. All the previous governments took the attitude that crackdowns by their US-equipped army on the uppity peasants are the method of choice .... with the result you see now.
And the rest of the Chavez opponents are relatively well-off non natives, who are very rich indeed compared to the indigenous population. Do not try to snow us here, bud, the demographics of Venezuela as well as the distribution of votes for Chavez across various societal strata in Venezuela are well known.
There were anti-Chavez "demonstrations" in Caracas held by dudes who got there in their Mercedes and Porsche sports cars, with trophy wives strutting around in stiletto high-heals while holding pictures of Chavez photo-shopped to look like Hitler. High comedy indeed.
And speaking of statistics: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population. Or are you going to pretend that the 'hacendados' are a myth too? Given that farm work is the dominant form of employment for the indigenous population, this pretty much explains it all.
His supporters constitute a majority but not everywhere. His power base is the impoverished farm workers and villagers, urban poor and the like. He is the weakest amongst the very wealthy, the relatively wealthy urban dwellers etc. In short: the poorer and more indigenous ancestry - the higher likelihood of vote for Chavez.
Not really. It is completely consistent with ethnicity and wealth distribution.
Right, "the ignorant masses"! This pretty much ends any and all discussion about "freedom" and "democracy". What an hypocritical ass you are. So "democracy" and "freedom" are only for those you deem high-society enough for your tastes, dirty farmers and other serfs need not apply. What a fucker. Next you will be belching and braying about how only land owners should be allowed to vote, the aristocratic-wanna-be little nitwit that you are.
How is that plantation doing? Pining for the days you could whip them ungrateful "ignorant" serfs senseless so they do not get any ideas?
Anyon
True, but you should keep it in the perspective of how elaborate the already defeated existing DRM schemes are as that would be an indicator of relative difficulty for the experienced hacker groups. And in that regard the scheme you described is of laughable complexity. A typical current DRM scheme involves literally hundreds of obfuscated (so that they are not easily detectable) pieces of code peppered across the game executable - and these routines are purposefully built to be as hard to remove as possible. Subsequently the automated tools that the hackers use resort to embedding entire custom-built virtual machines that run sections of code with simulated I/O operations ... which results in sometimes 10-fold increase of the size of the game executable.
So when I said that this new scheme is useless unless it involves storing a significant portion of the game contents online, ala MMORPG, it is that expertise and multi-decade experience with any conceivable DRM scheme so far deployed that the hackers have, that I had in mind.