You make an excellent point, although it took me a couple of reads to figure out what your analogy was trying to say. (Mostly because the numbers in your post appear to come out of nowhere, and I didn't figure out where you were getting them until I went through the exercise myself.) Perhaps a clearer way of putting it would be:
The survey found that 34 percent of boys who admitted to being in a physical fight over the last year have played "GTA," while 17 percent who were in a fight have not played the game.
34% of boys in fights played GTA, 17% did not. This makes a total of 51%. (By the way, where did the other 49% go?)
That means that of their subset (boys who got into fights), 34/51 = 67% played GTA.
The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing found in an online survey of 517 teenagers aged 13 to 17 conducted in August that 71 percent of boys in that age group have played "GTA," along with 34 percent of girls.
Of the total group (i.e. all boys surveyed), 71% had played GTA.
Comparing the two statistics (67% vs 71%), and given that their margin of error was 5%, we can conclude that the group of violent boys did not show a statistically different tendency towards playing GTA.
I wonder if the news story didn't misquote some of the statistics in the Gallup poll, because as written this doesn't make a lot of sense. (Not to mention the fact that boys in fights who played GTA + those that didn't should = 100%, but it doesn't.) My guess is that the newshound that churned out this story was probably an arts major who didn't pay close enough attention to the details of the poll and made a small typo or two somewhere in reporting the results.
You do know that most SUV deaths are passengers of SUVs, not the people they hit.
I disagree, there are plenty of studies out there showing that two-vehicle collisions involving SUVs and regular cars have a higher fatality rate for the people in the cars compared to car-vs-car collisions. Shouldn't be surprising; the US Fatality Analysis Report explains this by pointing out the obvious fact that "People in lighter vehicles are at a disadvantage in collisions with heavier vehicles."
Running a quick check on the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (HTML version here) shows that in multiple-vehicle accidents, cars had a 0.047% fatality rate, versus 0.021% (less than half!) for SUVs. Unfortunately the report doesn't track the class of the "other" cars in any given collision, but I suspect that in SUV-vs.-passenger car collisions, the statistics get even worse for the cars.
One other minor quibble:
Lower bumper, which makes rollovers less likely since it will hit the bumper of the other car, not go over the other car.
From the article:
The Guardian comes with a unibody steel frame, a stronger, crumple-resistant roof, seat belts that cinch automatically in a rollover,
lower bumpers to protect other drivers in a crash, and a seat-belt reminder that emits a noise until all passengers are belted.
The lower bumpers are to protect other cars... SUVs have a nasty tendency to ride over other cars in a collision and squish them. (A friend of mine had half his Japanese import squashed in a collision with an SUV.) Rollovers are typically single-vehicle accidents, caused by cornering too fast. SUVs are notorious for having their center of gravity too high.
Everyone's taste is different, so I'd question the appeal of the songs to teenagers. It almost seems like the song selection is specifically targetted to GenXers (us old farts that are 25-35) that like to reminisce.
Good point. Especially strange choice given that if you assume their target audience is the same as the DDR crowd, then they should have been aiming for teens and early 20-somethings. Although I do notice quite a few songs from the last few years. They probably just wanted to cover all the bases.
It'd be nice to be able to pop in a CD of your favorite song, and Karoake to any of your favorites. Most ghetto blasters and bookshelf systems had that function built in for free during the Karoake fad, so I couldn't see how difficult it may have been for them to do have done this to the PS2 game version.
Actually I'd imagine it would have been a lot more difficult. The karaoke feature you talked about simply relied on the fact that in most instances vocals are equally mixed in both channels, and can identified and therefore removed by simply changing the phase on one channel by 180 degrees. Pretty simple to do, although it doesn't work for every song (especially those with heavy processing like echo and resonance). If you're curious, check out some DSP filters like AnalogX (Winamp plugin) which do the same thing for the PC.
The game, on the other hand, would need to isolate the vocals much more accurately (the "invert-and-add" technique typically is "good enough" but not perfect), then compare your singing to it. The game itself probably does it either by having vocals and instrumentals on separate tracks, or storing the info their algorithm needs in binary format separate from the music.
(As a side note, I noticed what I assume is Cher's "Believe" up there. I wonder how many people will be able to mimic that:) )
Hall: Another big blocking factor too is, uh, people perceive massively multiplayer games to be a major investment of time.
I think Rick Hall hit it right on the head here. Except that it's not that people perceive MMORPGs to be a big time investment, it's that they ARE a big time investment.
MMORPGs really only start getting fun once your character becomes high level and competitive with all the other regular players out there. For most games, this tends to involve a large time investment on the levelling treadmill. The result is that people who have large amounts of time to invest in a MMORPG are those who are already in the market, and those who just want a game they can play at a leisurely pace see this as a huge barrier to entry.
Unlike single-player games, where even at the beginning of the game you're having fun because the challenges are typically tailored to your level so you only see enemies (and loot) which are appropriate to your level, in MMORPGs you see right off the bat the level 50 people and monsters running around doing all this much cooler stuff, while your level 1 newbie can't really do much of anything. At this point, the hardcore online gamers will put in lots of time in the boring leveling process in the hopes of rushing to level 50, while your average gamer will quickly get bored and give up. In most games, the leveling process tends to a chore (and you'll see people treating it as such) rather than a fun part of the game process. Whether this is a good or bad game design element is open to debate, but the point is that it limits the mass appeal of such games.
Compounding this problem is the fact that, unlike most online roleplaying games, your personal skill counts for very little. For example, someone who used to play a mean game of Quake in the past decides to pick up Half-Life. It won't take them very long to develop reasonably competent gaming skills. But for MMORPGs, all that time you invested in your level 50 Blademaster for Dark Age of Camelot doesn't mean squat when you sign up for Star Wars Galaxies. So it's not even that someone can invest some time picking up a new set of gaming skills and be over the hump on the learning curve; in order to be a long-term MMORPGamer right now, it's your ability to invest time (and tolerance for leveling) that would have to change.
Until they come up with some way to address this, the MMORPG audience will continue to be limited to a specific subset of gamers, rather than all gamers in general.
Lighting looks pretty uneven
on
Solar Window Panes
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Check out the pictures to the left of the main story. There's a noticeable difference in light intensity between parts of the window with clear glass and those with the embedded miniature solar panel, leading to a mosaic light pattern. This sort of thing is fine (and maybe even artsy) for an office foyer, but won't be widely adopted in office windows (which make up the majority of downtown buildings) because it's horrible for reading or working in. Your eyes can't tell if they should adjust for the bright or dark spots.
And what do you care if your research, funded by the American tax-payer, only gets read by the people with a proper security clearance? At least they won't put it to use against you and your family!
The unfortunate truth is that academics care very much about publication; from a purely practical perspective, without being widely published, you can't get hired or tenured in academia. Having a "blank slate" in the publications department essentially kills your career.
The best analogy would probably be if American universities suddenly declared that transcripts for new graduates were going to be classified and you couldn't talk about them to the general public. Good luck going to your potential employers upon graduation and telling them, "Yeah, sure, I took some classes, but I can't tell you which ones or how well I did in them either. (But hire me anyways, please!)"
This is especially true for scientific research. All that's going to happen under draconian security restrictions is that talented people will go do their work in other countries and the information will still get disseminated through their publications. In the meantime, US research programs have trouble attracting top talent and start fall behind the rest of the world.
With all these funky keys, how does Nokia expect me to dial a freakin' phone while I'm driving my SUV at 90mph in the right lane eating two cheese burgers and a Coke?
If you've actually mastered talking with your mouth stuffed full of 2 cheeseburgers and a coke, I'm sure that the dialing part will be relatively easy:)
There's specs and some more PR stuff on the 3200 from the Nokia site.
Sounds like something that'll catch on with the younger crowd; I'm surprised that no one else has done it yet. On the other hand, faceplates are a big business with that same demographic, so maybe no one's tried it because they'd rather make you pay to customize.
When connected to an analog telephone outlet, the display shows live video of the person on the other end of the line, who must also own both the Game Boy Advance and the Campho Advance. Your own image will show up in the corner of the display. Campho Advance, which goes on sale only in Japan in December, requires no Internet service provider.
Given that phone lines are limited to about 33.6K on a good day (56K only works if you've got an ISP picking you up at the first switch before you get filtered), are you actually going to be able to see real, intelligible video through this? I remember back in the modem days, VoIP was ok when net congestion wasn't bad but videoconferencing was a lost cause.
Of course, with the Game Boy's relatively tiny screen, maybe they could make this work. Since it sounds like this widget's already out on the market, it would have been nice to see some screenshots of what the video actually looked like.
There's tons of PC joypads these days that emulate the look and feel of a Playstation controller very well these days. They're usually around the same price or cheaper, and they come with well-written software drivers and other goodies like keyboard emulation for games that don't directly support gamepads. (Which, fortunately, aren't that many anymore.)
For example, I have Belkin's N45, which buy.com has for just $16. Been working great for 2 years now, no complaints, and I don't really notice any difference switching between it and a PS2 controller. Plus it plugs in out of the box, no rewiring skills required:) I'm sure there are many other brands that are just as good.
There are several converters that cost around $6 to $15, but being a student in search of a part time job I am reluctant to spend the money and it's more satisfying to do the mod yourself."
A quick check says Playstation controllers cost about $25 out of the box these days. This article seems like a cool HOW-TO and an interesting hack, but the article is more about the "geek factor" than being a cost-savings device.
Fox News pointed out that a lawsuit on this was inevitable back in June.
Frankly, I think it's silly. When you say "Apple" and "music" in the same breath, what comes to mind, the IPod or an old Beatles record label? I hadn't even heard of them before this.
The whole thing kinda reminds me of the old GIF patent lawsuits. The "legal insider" from the article was quoted as saying, "When it first happened with the iPod, we said, 'What could they be thinking?'" If it really bugged them, why didn't they say something right at the launch -- why wait until now? Sounds a bit like, "Hmm, let's keep quiet on this for now; maybe we'll get lucky and IPods'll take off. Once they're established and Apple can't just spin the idea off to some other company, then we can sic the lawyers on'em again!
According to the article, AOL agrees to advertise Gamecube games by "spotlight[ing Nintendo products] on key AOL and AOL Time Warner websites". In return, Nintendo bundles more AOL coasters and agrees to feature AOL as their ISP of choice for internet games they don't plan to develop. We all remember Nintendo reporting that, unlike Sony and Microsoft, "We still don't see online gaming as a mass-market thing".
The same IGN press release announcing the partnership even rushes to point out that "this does not indicate the unveiling of a new online gaming approach from Nintendo. Nor does it signify that we have changed our position on the current business viability in the online console gaming field." Unless I'm missing something here, sounds an awful like saying "Yep, we'll use you if we ever want to go online, but we don't, so we won't."
I'm not sure I see what the problem is with replacing your VCR with a PVR. I'll try to address your first two points (I haven't looked into DVD-recorders, so I can't say much about the 3rd):
1. Your VCR also has a tuner in it. Assuming by "replace" you mean you're going to toss out your VCR and stick in a PVR, the total number of tuners you've got is still the same.
2. Why have a VCR at all if you're not planning to record TV? No one really buys VCRs anymore to watch movies on VHS; DVD's the way to go on that front.
What really bugs me about PVRs isn't the functions, it's the subscription model. Last time I looked into it, PVR manufacturers make you pay a "per-month" subscription or your PVR doesn't work. (One model I looked at had a "buy-out" option, but with a big up-front lump sum.) Given that you can get listings for free off the net, why can't it just grab listings from one of those? Or, alternatively, at least let me program in times and channels manually for free if I don't feel like paying for the fancy "one-click" recording. If I could get a VCR replacement for a reasonable price without having to add to my recurring monthly bills, I'd consider PVRs a good all-around replacement for VCR.
You can watch other channels while recording using the tuner in your TV. That's how people used to tape shows on their VCR while watching another on the TV.
Multiple tuners only comes into play if you want to record multiple shows simultaneously. Which would be kinda sketchy anyhow due to limits on how fast the hardware they're listing could do video compression on more than one stream.
If you look at history, anytime one side was able to kill the other without having to really risk themselves, the shitty side of history results -- genocide, oppression, etc. Just because it's your side that happens to have the better guns, tech, germs or whatever doesn't mean it's a Good Thing.
Don't you mean anytime one side's leaders?
Or, put another way, it's easier to be yelling "Bring it on" when you're half a world away from the battlefield. One of the big changes in modern warfare is that wars aren't between neighbors much anymore. When you were invading someone right next to you, there was always the possibility that if things went sour, they'd follow your retreating forces right back to your capital.
As a news.com story pointed out, "Calculations and decisions have to be made rapidly, however, and the room for error is huge. A vehicle moving at 45 miles per hour is covering about 60 feet per second... If the vehicle's computer can't absorb changes in data quickly enough, it could mean a trip into a gully."
Solving a problem, and solving the same problem in an efficient and timely matter are two different things. As any student walking out of a final exam can tell you, time pressure makes everything much more interesting:)
News.com covered the Grand Challenge a while back in one of their articles. Gives a more viewer-friendly overview of what it's all about than DARPA's site.
Lord British in UO was cool because he was Richard Gariott; running into him was kinda like a celebrity sighting. It's nice for story continuity that Gariott is letting Origin put Lord British back in, but it's not going to have the same "wow" factor now that it'll just be some random Origin rep behind the keyboard.
Not to mention if it ever became popular, you'd have to deal with some pretty serious bandwidth demands since you'd be transmitting video to a whole bunch of viewers. As other posts have pointed out, it's barely been a few minutes since the post and the link site's already slashdotted, and that's just text... I'd imagine something like the Times Square intersection live video feed would probably go down even faster.
That's without even considering "digital vandalism" in the form of DOS attacks...
And for all the people who will post about "I want this on my car" - no, you don't. Many municipalities have a legal limit of about 90% on car windows - pass less than this and the nice police officer can ticket you. Since 50% < 90%, if the cop wants to give you grief he can.
Depends on where you live: assuming you're talking about the U.S., tint laws vary from state to state. Many states will allow you to pass much less than 90% through your windows -- often 50% or less, for which this material would be suited just fine. Also, regulations tend to be more lenient if you're talking about side/back windows rather than front.
This guy has a summary of the limits from each state, or you can just google "tint laws" in the state of your choice.
As the article points out, the problem is more that people are lazy/ignorant about patching.
"There were a certain percentage of students that wouldn't listen to us unless we hit them upside the head with a lockout," he said. "You simply can't deal with these problems until you've got your network under control."
Any operating system can be insecure if users won't take the time to properly secure it.
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You make an excellent point, although it took me a couple of reads to figure out what your analogy was trying to say. (Mostly because the numbers in your post appear to come out of nowhere, and I didn't figure out where you were getting them until I went through the exercise myself.) Perhaps a clearer way of putting it would be:
34% of boys in fights played GTA, 17% did not. This makes a total of 51%. (By the way, where did the other 49% go?)That means that of their subset (boys who got into fights), 34/51 = 67% played GTA.
Of the total group (i.e. all boys surveyed), 71% had played GTA.Comparing the two statistics (67% vs 71%), and given that their margin of error was 5%, we can conclude that the group of violent boys did not show a statistically different tendency towards playing GTA.
I wonder if the news story didn't misquote some of the statistics in the Gallup poll, because as written this doesn't make a lot of sense. (Not to mention the fact that boys in fights who played GTA + those that didn't should = 100%, but it doesn't.) My guess is that the newshound that churned out this story was probably an arts major who didn't pay close enough attention to the details of the poll and made a small typo or two somewhere in reporting the results.
Running a quick check on the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (HTML version here) shows that in multiple-vehicle accidents, cars had a 0.047% fatality rate, versus 0.021% (less than half!) for SUVs. Unfortunately the report doesn't track the class of the "other" cars in any given collision, but I suspect that in SUV-vs.-passenger car collisions, the statistics get even worse for the cars.
One other minor quibble:
From the article: The lower bumpers are to protect other carsThe game, on the other hand, would need to isolate the vocals much more accurately (the "invert-and-add" technique typically is "good enough" but not perfect), then compare your singing to it. The game itself probably does it either by having vocals and instrumentals on separate tracks, or storing the info their algorithm needs in binary format separate from the music.
(As a side note, I noticed what I assume is Cher's "Believe" up there. I wonder how many people will be able to mimic that :) )
MMORPGs really only start getting fun once your character becomes high level and competitive with all the other regular players out there. For most games, this tends to involve a large time investment on the levelling treadmill. The result is that people who have large amounts of time to invest in a MMORPG are those who are already in the market, and those who just want a game they can play at a leisurely pace see this as a huge barrier to entry.
Unlike single-player games, where even at the beginning of the game you're having fun because the challenges are typically tailored to your level so you only see enemies (and loot) which are appropriate to your level, in MMORPGs you see right off the bat the level 50 people and monsters running around doing all this much cooler stuff, while your level 1 newbie can't really do much of anything. At this point, the hardcore online gamers will put in lots of time in the boring leveling process in the hopes of rushing to level 50, while your average gamer will quickly get bored and give up. In most games, the leveling process tends to a chore (and you'll see people treating it as such) rather than a fun part of the game process. Whether this is a good or bad game design element is open to debate, but the point is that it limits the mass appeal of such games.
Compounding this problem is the fact that, unlike most online roleplaying games, your personal skill counts for very little. For example, someone who used to play a mean game of Quake in the past decides to pick up Half-Life. It won't take them very long to develop reasonably competent gaming skills. But for MMORPGs, all that time you invested in your level 50 Blademaster for Dark Age of Camelot doesn't mean squat when you sign up for Star Wars Galaxies. So it's not even that someone can invest some time picking up a new set of gaming skills and be over the hump on the learning curve; in order to be a long-term MMORPGamer right now, it's your ability to invest time (and tolerance for leveling) that would have to change.
Until they come up with some way to address this, the MMORPG audience will continue to be limited to a specific subset of gamers, rather than all gamers in general.
Ah, this must be how they make blacklights.
Check out the pictures to the left of the main story. There's a noticeable difference in light intensity between parts of the window with clear glass and those with the embedded miniature solar panel, leading to a mosaic light pattern. This sort of thing is fine (and maybe even artsy) for an office foyer, but won't be widely adopted in office windows (which make up the majority of downtown buildings) because it's horrible for reading or working in. Your eyes can't tell if they should adjust for the bright or dark spots.
The best analogy would probably be if American universities suddenly declared that transcripts for new graduates were going to be classified and you couldn't talk about them to the general public. Good luck going to your potential employers upon graduation and telling them, "Yeah, sure, I took some classes, but I can't tell you which ones or how well I did in them either. (But hire me anyways, please!)"
This is especially true for scientific research. All that's going to happen under draconian security restrictions is that talented people will go do their work in other countries and the information will still get disseminated through their publications. In the meantime, US research programs have trouble attracting top talent and start fall behind the rest of the world.
there'd actually be a reason for them to make you turn your laptops off on takeoff.
There's specs and some more PR stuff on the 3200 from the Nokia site.
Sounds like something that'll catch on with the younger crowd; I'm surprised that no one else has done it yet. On the other hand, faceplates are a big business with that same demographic, so maybe no one's tried it because they'd rather make you pay to customize.
Of course, with the Game Boy's relatively tiny screen, maybe they could make this work. Since it sounds like this widget's already out on the market, it would have been nice to see some screenshots of what the video actually looked like.
There's tons of PC joypads these days that emulate the look and feel of a Playstation controller very well these days. They're usually around the same price or cheaper, and they come with well-written software drivers and other goodies like keyboard emulation for games that don't directly support gamepads. (Which, fortunately, aren't that many anymore.)
For example, I have Belkin's N45, which buy.com has for just $16. Been working great for 2 years now, no complaints, and I don't really notice any difference switching between it and a PS2 controller. Plus it plugs in out of the box, no rewiring skills required :) I'm sure there are many other brands that are just as good.
A quick check says Playstation controllers cost about $25 out of the box these days. This article seems like a cool HOW-TO and an interesting hack, but the article is more about the "geek factor" than being a cost-savings device.Fox News pointed out that a lawsuit on this was inevitable back in June.
Frankly, I think it's silly. When you say "Apple" and "music" in the same breath, what comes to mind, the IPod or an old Beatles record label? I hadn't even heard of them before this.
The whole thing kinda reminds me of the old GIF patent lawsuits. The "legal insider" from the article was quoted as saying, "When it first happened with the iPod, we said, 'What could they be thinking?'" If it really bugged them, why didn't they say something right at the launch -- why wait until now? Sounds a bit like, "Hmm, let's keep quiet on this for now; maybe we'll get lucky and IPods'll take off. Once they're established and Apple can't just spin the idea off to some other company, then we can sic the lawyers on'em again!
According to the article, AOL agrees to advertise Gamecube games by "spotlight[ing Nintendo products] on key AOL and AOL Time Warner websites". In return, Nintendo bundles more AOL coasters and agrees to feature AOL as their ISP of choice for internet games they don't plan to develop. We all remember Nintendo reporting that, unlike Sony and Microsoft, "We still don't see online gaming as a mass-market thing".
The same IGN press release announcing the partnership even rushes to point out that "this does not indicate the unveiling of a new online gaming approach from Nintendo. Nor does it signify that we have changed our position on the current business viability in the online console gaming field." Unless I'm missing something here, sounds an awful like saying "Yep, we'll use you if we ever want to go online, but we don't, so we won't."
I'm not sure I see what the problem is with replacing your VCR with a PVR. I'll try to address your first two points (I haven't looked into DVD-recorders, so I can't say much about the 3rd):
1. Your VCR also has a tuner in it. Assuming by "replace" you mean you're going to toss out your VCR and stick in a PVR, the total number of tuners you've got is still the same.
2. Why have a VCR at all if you're not planning to record TV? No one really buys VCRs anymore to watch movies on VHS; DVD's the way to go on that front.
What really bugs me about PVRs isn't the functions, it's the subscription model. Last time I looked into it, PVR manufacturers make you pay a "per-month" subscription or your PVR doesn't work. (One model I looked at had a "buy-out" option, but with a big up-front lump sum.) Given that you can get listings for free off the net, why can't it just grab listings from one of those? Or, alternatively, at least let me program in times and channels manually for free if I don't feel like paying for the fancy "one-click" recording. If I could get a VCR replacement for a reasonable price without having to add to my recurring monthly bills, I'd consider PVRs a good all-around replacement for VCR.
You can watch other channels while recording using the tuner in your TV. That's how people used to tape shows on their VCR while watching another on the TV.
Multiple tuners only comes into play if you want to record multiple shows simultaneously. Which would be kinda sketchy anyhow due to limits on how fast the hardware they're listing could do video compression on more than one stream.
Beer is the most freedom-loving person you could hope to imagine.
Ah, this must be where the phrase "free as in Beer" I keep seeing on Slashdot comes from.
If you look at history, anytime one side was able to kill the other without having to really risk themselves, the shitty side of history results -- genocide, oppression, etc. Just because it's your side that happens to have the better guns, tech, germs or whatever doesn't mean it's a Good Thing.
Don't you mean anytime one side's leaders?
Or, put another way, it's easier to be yelling "Bring it on" when you're half a world away from the battlefield. One of the big changes in modern warfare is that wars aren't between neighbors much anymore. When you were invading someone right next to you, there was always the possibility that if things went sour, they'd follow your retreating forces right back to your capital.
the challenge is high-speed automated navigation.
As a news.com story pointed out, "Calculations and decisions have to be made rapidly, however, and the room for error is huge. A vehicle moving at 45 miles per hour is covering about 60 feet per second ... If the vehicle's computer can't absorb changes in data quickly enough, it could mean a trip into a gully."
Solving a problem, and solving the same problem in an efficient and timely matter are two different things. As any student walking out of a final exam can tell you, time pressure makes everything much more interesting :)
News.com covered the Grand Challenge a while back in one of their articles. Gives a more viewer-friendly overview of what it's all about than DARPA's site.
Lord British in UO was cool because he was Richard Gariott; running into him was kinda like a celebrity sighting. It's nice for story continuity that Gariott is letting Origin put Lord British back in, but it's not going to have the same "wow" factor now that it'll just be some random Origin rep behind the keyboard.
Not to mention if it ever became popular, you'd have to deal with some pretty serious bandwidth demands since you'd be transmitting video to a whole bunch of viewers. As other posts have pointed out, it's barely been a few minutes since the post and the link site's already slashdotted, and that's just text ... I'd imagine something like the Times Square intersection live video feed would probably go down even faster.
That's without even considering "digital vandalism" in the form of DOS attacks ...
And for all the people who will post about "I want this on my car" - no, you don't. Many municipalities have a legal limit of about 90% on car windows - pass less than this and the nice police officer can ticket you. Since 50% < 90%, if the cop wants to give you grief he can.
Depends on where you live: assuming you're talking about the U.S., tint laws vary from state to state. Many states will allow you to pass much less than 90% through your windows -- often 50% or less, for which this material would be suited just fine. Also, regulations tend to be more lenient if you're talking about side/back windows rather than front.
This guy has a summary of the limits from each state, or you can just google "tint laws" in the state of your choice.
As the article points out, the problem is more that people are lazy/ignorant about patching.
Any operating system can be insecure if users won't take the time to properly secure it.