I just can't help but hope this doesn't catch on. Encouraging people to plug in randomly acquired USB keys is not going to be step forward in security. While I can't imagine it would be a viable option for widespread malware distribution, it could have a significant effect on social engineering one's way into closed networks. Want to infect corporation X? Put USB keys in the restrooms of places where their employees eat lunch. (Yes that could already happen and I think I've heard of it being done, and yes unneeded USB ports should be disabled, but one has to imagine that this would increase the chances of successful penetration significantly. )
I thought there was a rule that no living person could be on a stamp, so how can there be characters on the stamps when the actors are still alive? I found this site that seems to agree with the "no living person" rule, but it isn't an official USPS site. Has this rule been changed or is it OK since they are fictional characters?
I believe that rule is true. I'd say that they get around that by the fact that the stamps aren't photos or screenshots, but rather drawings. Now they look nearly identical to the actors who played the characters in the films, but since they're not actual photos of people, I think they're ok.
I'm an undergrad at MIT (8 & 18 if you were wondering*), so I feel like I can answer your question pretty well.
First of all, don't worry about being deferred from early action. The people who get on early action are VERY good. Being deferred doesn't lessen your chances of getting overall. At this point, I think you just really need to play the waiting game. Don't pester admissions. They have enough people who think getting in here is a matter of life and death that they don't want to be bothered. That's not to say that you should contact them with questions or important information, but don't call them and ask them how to make sure you get in, or send them a package every week with your most recent high school chemistry test grade. I think you see what I'm saying.
As far as advice on how to get into college, I think the best counsel I can give is "don't do stuff specifically in order to get into college." Life is too short to screw around with trying to make yourself appear like a "perfect candidate" (whatever the hell that means). People, both students and parents, take college admissions much too seriously. During high school, I just had fun. Now I'm enough of a nerd that I thought some of the things like math competitions were fun, but the point is I didn't ever do anything grudgingly just to try to get into a school. Find something you enjoy and that you're passionate about and then just do that. You're much better spending your time on a project or activity you find interesting than specifically trying to get into school X. And what if you don't get in? Well, if you were doing something interesting, you probably had fun and learned stuff along the way. If you were trying to be Joe Perfect Candidate, you've got squat to show for your time.
For you the more relevant question advice I can give is probably how to choose between schools after you've gotten in. Don't be afraid to take the financial aspect into consideration. A degree from a slightly less prestigious school is probably worth 30k less in debt. I had the chance to choose between MIT, Caltech, and Harvard on essentially equal financial footing. Visiting Harvard made it pretty clear that it wasn't the place for me. Sometimes you'll just get those vibes. MIT vs Caltech is a pretty tough choice, and it's something you just have to make based on personal feelings. I think I could have been happy at either place, but I just felt a bit more at home at MIT, right from the start. Meet some students and profs, talk with them; just get a general idea of what's going on. Deep down, you have to like the place you're going to school, because you're going to spend about a 100 hours a week hating it**.
If you have any specific questions, you can reply to this and I'll give a shot at answering them.
* that's physics and mathematics, to the uninitiated
**a deep hatred of the Institvte is a longstanding tradition
Right? If light has only existed for, say, 14.7 billion light years, then you're not going to be seeing something that's 20 billion light years away. Or 100 billion light years away.
You're pretty much right, up to the fact that the universe is not static. Since space itself has been expanding (at varying rates throughout the history of the universe), talking about distance is not as straightforward as it may seem. Cosmologists use many different measures of distance, each telling you something about the object. The "lookback time" is how long the light has been traveling when it gets to you. But during the transit time, the object has moved away from you as the space between expanded, so the object is not really $lookback_time number of light-years away.
When one talks about a wave propagating through a medium, there are two velocities that one usually considers, the group velocity and the phase velocity. The group velocity is the speed at which energy and information are moving. (This isn't always true, but for most materials it is or is a good approximation.) The phase velocity is how fast a "phase" (a feature like a crest) appears to be moving.
A good way to visualize the difference is to think of a ocean waves hitting a wall at an angle. The speed which with the wave itself is moving is the group velocity, but if you look at the wall, you will see the crests moving along at a different speed. (If you have trouble seeing that, make a little sketch.) There is also a nice Java applet (GPLed!) here, which does a good job of illustrating the difference
Before people start saying that these guys are crackpots (yes, I agree this does sound vaguely reminiscent of the Platonic solids), their research has been published in well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals (Nature, etc.) While this isn't necessarily a widely accepted idea, it's not TimeCube.
This article is about 15 months old and discusses this in the context of 1 year of WMAP data. Since then, the WMAP 3-year data has been released. I would be curious to see how this affects the theory.
Data from the European Planck Surveyor, which is scheduled for launch in 2007, will be able to determine Omega with a precision of 1%. A value lower than 1.01 will rule out the Poincaré dodecahedron model, since the size of the corresponding dodecahedron would become greater than the observable universe and would not leave any observable imprint on the microwave background. A value greater than 1.01, on the other hand, would strengthen the models' cosmological pertinence.
I believe that the WMAP 3-year data gave something like Omega = 1.010 +/- 0.001. Thus this theory seems to balanced on the knife edge. It's an interesting idea, but I have my doubts.
Advancing the Story, Exploring the Characters
on
Firefly MMORPG Announced
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've been lusting after new Firefly content for a long time, but I have to admit that a MMORPG is not exactly the culmination of my homes and dreams. There are so many dangling threads in the Firefly universe (Book, Blue Sun, etc.) that I'd give extremities to see explored/resolved. I just don't think that this kind of gaming experience is going to be able to give that kind of satisfaction. Not that the Firefly universe isn't interesting to explore on its own, but what made Firefly special was its extremely strong characters, and I don't see an MMORPG being able to advance the characters.
I took my SAT's in 2004, which was the last year of the old 2 section, 1600 format. Let me first of all say, that while I understand the necessity of the "standardized test", I don't think the old SAT was all that good of an evaluator; I'd imagine the new one probably isn't much better.
Assuming you've received a decent high school education, you probably know how to do pretty much anything they're going to throw at you. I don't think studying specific topics is going to do you any good. What you do need is a good working knowledge of the test. You need to be used to the way that questions are posed, and you need to be able to quickly identify what you need to do to respond.
The ridiculous SAT-prep culture in the US bothers me to no end, I think it's just one big feeding frenzy on student-parent pride and insecurity, so I never bought any books or took any SAT classes. What I did was just take it twice. The first time I went in completely cold, having basically no idea about the test other than its length and that there was a math and verbal section. I fully intended this to be nothing more than a dry run, and thus didn't have those scores sent anywhere. This got me familiar with the test format and testing conditions. That way, when I took it the next time, I could concentrate fully on answering the questions.
This exact approach may not be ideal for you, but I can't underestimate the importance of familiarizing yourself with the exam enough so that you can focus exclusively on responding. Just being familiar with what was happening boosted my score 150 pts. (1450 -> 1600)
The reason that the Ivy League and other top schools are no longer taking AP credit it that doesn't really mean a thing. I took AP classes in high school and did quite well in them, getting top scores on the exams. Then I came to college and found out the the AP program is pretty much a joke. It's only benefit is providing a "challenge" to HS students. AP is a shadow of classes at a top-tier university. Even ignoring the poor depth of AP curricula, it is exceedingly rare that a HS teacher is going to have sufficient understanding of the subject to be able to teach it a university level.
You have to know where the holes are to fix them. I can't see this being perceived as anything but good (improvements for Firefox now lie ahead) by reasonable members of the community. Sure, no one likes it when bugs are found in their code, but I would hope that most programmers genuinely want their code base to improve.
Those who actually RTFA will find that most of the complaints have nothing to do with Microsoft or Windows Mobile itself. (The exceptions are MS Money and complaints about the lack of a Task Manager / msconfig / regedit etc.) The issue is that vendors are writing 'security' software (password managers, antivirus) using terrible methods. In analyzing these programs, they found passwords stored as plaintext, some ROT-N encrypted, and other very poor methods of 'securely' storing data. OS security matters, but in this case it wouldn't matter if you were running OpenBSD, assuming you had chosen to (and could) run these programs.
Actually, circular orbits are the lowest energy state. Thus, tidal forces cause the system to gradually lose energy until it settles into a circular orbit. When you add up the 1/r potential of gravity and the repulsive 1/r^2 centrifugal potential, you get a function with a nice minimum which is the radius of a circular orbit. The reason that elliptical orbits occur is because the period of the orbit exactly matches the period of oscillations around the minimum potential. Thus when you go around once, you end up right back where you started and get a closed, elliptical orbit. (Note that this is true only for Newtonian mechanics. Once you take General Relativity into account, the periods aren't the same and orbits precess. We can directly observe this in the orbit of Mercury as a perhelion shift of 43 arcseconds/century.)
1. Actuarial Science Lots of probability and statistics if that's your thing. I've heard the qualification exams are pretty tough, and since you haven't really devoted study to it as an undergrad, you'd have to get some graduate education before you could even hope for a job.
2. Biostatistics (and other things like this) Again, this would require some more education, but there's a good chance of you getting a job. Biological research is only going to continue to grow, and there's always room for someone to do the important mathematics.
3. Computer Science I'm sure other people will point this kind of thing out, but places like Google, etc. definitely don't mind having mathematicians with CS background for things like algorithm development and the like.
4. Mathematics Stick with it and get your PhD in pure (or applied) mathematics. Get a post-doc, and then a professorship, and enjoy a rewarding (intellectually) life in academia. If you really love it, this is a great way to go.
I think the main theme of this post is probably that the best way to ensure that you get a job (that does not involve teaching minors) is to keep going in your education. That is not to say that you can't get a job with a BS, but I think you'll find there's a lot more open to you in today's world with at least an MS.
I was just curious about how big a bit is going to be on these new drives, so I did a quick back of the envelope calculation (I actually used a scrap of paper bag.)
Let's take jewlery-sized to mean 1 cm^2 of usable area. And take 100s of GB to be 100 GB, or 10^11 bytes, so ~10^12 bits. Pop these in a 10^6 x 10^6 grid. Then we have 10^-2 / 10 ^ 6 = 10^-8 m to be the length/width of a bit. A hydrogen atom is ~ 10^-10m (I think Iron is ~2.5 times that size). So roughly, bits would be a maximum of 100 x 100 atoms, but probably more towards 50 x 50.
I saw an exhibit with this kind of technology about 10 years ago in a science museum. In their variation, you put your forehead on a postage-stamp sized metal plate, and then you suddenly heard a voice. I remember thinking that it was pretty cool. Definitely a good idea to put it in a cellphone headset. I do wonder a bit about ensuring sufficient contact with the jaw. In the exhibit I saw, you bent over to put your head on the plate, and thanks to the heaviness of the human head, there was a decent amount of pressure against the plate. No idea exactly how much you need to make sure it gets transferred to the bone, but I could see that being a bit of an issue.
If you combined that with the sub-vocalization technology that can detect what you say as you speak silently, we might be able to rid society of noisy cellphone users. Now that's tech I can appreciate.
I made the mistake of not devoting enough time to the last hour of the game. I was convinced (and rightly so) that the first hour of the game would be decisive for hooking the player, but I naively thought that one hour from the end the player's opinion would be made. I therefore devoted most of my time to the rest of the game in order to make it as perfect as possible.
This was obviously a mistake. I was forgetting that what leaves a lasting impression on the player is often the end, and that a bad ending can change his perception of the whole game.
I had the opportunity to see one of the developers talk about this game at the MIT "Innovation in Video Games: A French-American Dialogue" conference, and was quite impressed with the vision that the developers have for this game and for gaming in general. The main point that they wanted to make that was games (especially FPS) seem to spend most of the time appealing to what are very reflexive emotions (fear, anger, greed, etc.); while there's nothing wrong with this, they pointed out gamers can be involved just was well by more subtle emotions. A big draw of MMORPGS is the social interactions, and these developers wanted to try and bring a wider range of emotions to other gaming forms. They mentioned trying to incorporate things such as love, sympathy, and sadness, with the goal of creating a more immersive gaming environment. With so many games being rather weak in the plot department, it refreshes me to see people focusing more on story and emotional immersion.
I think this is a nice piece of work from the EFF. There are plenty of people who would be more concerned about DRM if they understood its potentials. I know I've talked with my father (who is very low tech) about DRM, and he certainly was legitimately concerned about what I told him. I've made backups of some of his CDs for him, and he likes knowing that he can keep the originals safe. We talked about how breaking DeCSS to make a legitimate backup copy of a DVD is illegal under the DMCA, and he thinks something like that is unreasonable. Right now, non-tech people just aren't running into deep issues of DRM. The most DRM they've probably run into is iTMS FairPlay, and thanks to Apple's 'generous' terms, they rarely, if ever, run into something they can't do. I think more people would be concerned about DRM if they understood what it's potential consequences are, and I think this animation does a good job of doing that.
I really think from a business standpoint, banning used game resales just doesn't make much sense, especially with games being $50+. In my experience at least, those who have a little more money buy the games new, and then when they resell them, that money is usually invested right back into new games. If I only have $30, Sony isn't going to get a new game sale. But with a good used market, I can buy GTA VIII from the guy down the street, and while that money isn't going directly to Sony, there's a good chance that he's going to reinvest it in new games.
This is a situation which I really think falls in a gray area. Students should understand that they have no expectation of privacy on a site like MySpace. That being said, I don't think school officials should constantly monitor MySpace; that's essentially like listening to all the public conversations in the school. But I don't think that's quite what is happening. The summary and even the story title are a bit misleading. The TFA says:
District officials won't regularly search students' sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.
Assuming this is actually true, that seems pretty reasonable. Postings are just the internet age equivalent of bragging to your friends, only you're shouting loud enough that everyone can hear. However, the district is also requiring that students (at least those in extracuricular activities) sign a pledge which agrees that
evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action
Two things bother me about this. First, there's no restiction to school-related activities (at least mentioned in TFA.) I know during high school extracurricular activities, I had to sign a pledge that I would abide by certain rules. I think that's fine. If the Quiz Bowl Team is getting wasted during competition weekends, I think the school has a solid reason to disipline and discourage that behavior. However, I don't think they have any business getting involved in issues which have no relation to the school. (Hopefully this was just an omission in TFA) Secondly, I worry about the definition of "inappropriate". Discipline illegal activities. That's fine with me. But what is inappropriate? Criticizing a teacher or administrator? Making inflamitory statements? It just seems like something that could easily get bent to curtail students "free speech" (not as if it's all that free now.)
Slashdot Mirror
I just can't help but hope this doesn't catch on. Encouraging people to plug in randomly acquired USB keys is not going to be step forward in security. While I can't imagine it would be a viable option for widespread malware distribution, it could have a significant effect on social engineering one's way into closed networks. Want to infect corporation X? Put USB keys in the restrooms of places where their employees eat lunch. (Yes that could already happen and I think I've heard of it being done, and yes unneeded USB ports should be disabled, but one has to imagine that this would increase the chances of successful penetration significantly. )
(Yes, I know a polymer is not a chain of polys. It's supposed to be funny. Leave me alone.)
What do Odysseus and a bunch of ./ers have in common?
They can both down a Ciclops.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I'm an undergrad at MIT (8 & 18 if you were wondering*), so I feel like I can answer your question pretty well.
First of all, don't worry about being deferred from early action. The people who get on early action are VERY good. Being deferred doesn't lessen your chances of getting overall. At this point, I think you just really need to play the waiting game. Don't pester admissions. They have enough people who think getting in here is a matter of life and death that they don't want to be bothered. That's not to say that you should contact them with questions or important information, but don't call them and ask them how to make sure you get in, or send them a package every week with your most recent high school chemistry test grade. I think you see what I'm saying.
As far as advice on how to get into college, I think the best counsel I can give is "don't do stuff specifically in order to get into college." Life is too short to screw around with trying to make yourself appear like a "perfect candidate" (whatever the hell that means). People, both students and parents, take college admissions much too seriously. During high school, I just had fun. Now I'm enough of a nerd that I thought some of the things like math competitions were fun, but the point is I didn't ever do anything grudgingly just to try to get into a school. Find something you enjoy and that you're passionate about and then just do that. You're much better spending your time on a project or activity you find interesting than specifically trying to get into school X. And what if you don't get in? Well, if you were doing something interesting, you probably had fun and learned stuff along the way. If you were trying to be Joe Perfect Candidate, you've got squat to show for your time.
For you the more relevant question advice I can give is probably how to choose between schools after you've gotten in. Don't be afraid to take the financial aspect into consideration. A degree from a slightly less prestigious school is probably worth 30k less in debt. I had the chance to choose between MIT, Caltech, and Harvard on essentially equal financial footing. Visiting Harvard made it pretty clear that it wasn't the place for me. Sometimes you'll just get those vibes. MIT vs Caltech is a pretty tough choice, and it's something you just have to make based on personal feelings. I think I could have been happy at either place, but I just felt a bit more at home at MIT, right from the start. Meet some students and profs, talk with them; just get a general idea of what's going on. Deep down, you have to like the place you're going to school, because you're going to spend about a 100 hours a week hating it**.
If you have any specific questions, you can reply to this and I'll give a shot at answering them.
* that's physics and mathematics, to the uninitiated
**a deep hatred of the Institvte is a longstanding tradition
When one talks about a wave propagating through a medium, there are two velocities that one usually considers, the group velocity and the phase velocity. The group velocity is the speed at which energy and information are moving. (This isn't always true, but for most materials it is or is a good approximation.) The phase velocity is how fast a "phase" (a feature like a crest) appears to be moving.
A good way to visualize the difference is to think of a ocean waves hitting a wall at an angle. The speed which with the wave itself is moving is the group velocity, but if you look at the wall, you will see the crests moving along at a different speed. (If you have trouble seeing that, make a little sketch.) There is also a nice Java applet (GPLed!) here, which does a good job of illustrating the difference
This article is about 15 months old and discusses this in the context of 1 year of WMAP data. Since then, the WMAP 3-year data has been released. I would be curious to see how this affects the theory. I believe that the WMAP 3-year data gave something like Omega = 1.010 +/- 0.001. Thus this theory seems to balanced on the knife edge. It's an interesting idea, but I have my doubts.
I've been lusting after new Firefly content for a long time, but I have to admit that a MMORPG is not exactly the culmination of my homes and dreams. There are so many dangling threads in the Firefly universe (Book, Blue Sun, etc.) that I'd give extremities to see explored/resolved. I just don't think that this kind of gaming experience is going to be able to give that kind of satisfaction. Not that the Firefly universe isn't interesting to explore on its own, but what made Firefly special was its extremely strong characters, and I don't see an MMORPG being able to advance the characters.
I took my SAT's in 2004, which was the last year of the old 2 section, 1600 format. Let me first of all say, that while I understand the necessity of the "standardized test", I don't think the old SAT was all that good of an evaluator; I'd imagine the new one probably isn't much better.
Assuming you've received a decent high school education, you probably know how to do pretty much anything they're going to throw at you. I don't think studying specific topics is going to do you any good. What you do need is a good working knowledge of the test. You need to be used to the way that questions are posed, and you need to be able to quickly identify what you need to do to respond.
The ridiculous SAT-prep culture in the US bothers me to no end, I think it's just one big feeding frenzy on student-parent pride and insecurity, so I never bought any books or took any SAT classes. What I did was just take it twice. The first time I went in completely cold, having basically no idea about the test other than its length and that there was a math and verbal section. I fully intended this to be nothing more than a dry run, and thus didn't have those scores sent anywhere. This got me familiar with the test format and testing conditions. That way, when I took it the next time, I could concentrate fully on answering the questions.
This exact approach may not be ideal for you, but I can't underestimate the importance of familiarizing yourself with the exam enough so that you can focus exclusively on responding. Just being familiar with what was happening boosted my score 150 pts. (1450 -> 1600)
The reason that the Ivy League and other top schools are no longer taking AP credit it that doesn't really mean a thing. I took AP classes in high school and did quite well in them, getting top scores on the exams. Then I came to college and found out the the AP program is pretty much a joke. It's only benefit is providing a "challenge" to HS students. AP is a shadow of classes at a top-tier university. Even ignoring the poor depth of AP curricula, it is exceedingly rare that a HS teacher is going to have sufficient understanding of the subject to be able to teach it a university level.
You have to know where the holes are to fix them. I can't see this being perceived as anything but good (improvements for Firefox now lie ahead) by reasonable members of the community. Sure, no one likes it when bugs are found in their code, but I would hope that most programmers genuinely want their code base to improve.
Those who actually RTFA will find that most of the complaints have nothing to do with Microsoft or Windows Mobile itself. (The exceptions are MS Money and complaints about the lack of a Task Manager / msconfig / regedit etc.) The issue is that vendors are writing 'security' software (password managers, antivirus) using terrible methods. In analyzing these programs, they found passwords stored as plaintext, some ROT-N encrypted, and other very poor methods of 'securely' storing data. OS security matters, but in this case it wouldn't matter if you were running OpenBSD, assuming you had chosen to (and could) run these programs.
Creating an Unhackable Server via the Slashdot Effect!
Actually, circular orbits are the lowest energy state. Thus, tidal forces cause the system to gradually lose energy until it settles into a circular orbit. When you add up the 1/r potential of gravity and the repulsive 1/r^2 centrifugal potential, you get a function with a nice minimum which is the radius of a circular orbit. The reason that elliptical orbits occur is because the period of the orbit exactly matches the period of oscillations around the minimum potential. Thus when you go around once, you end up right back where you started and get a closed, elliptical orbit. (Note that this is true only for Newtonian mechanics. Once you take General Relativity into account, the periods aren't the same and orbits precess. We can directly observe this in the orbit of Mercury as a perhelion shift of 43 arcseconds/century.)
Here a few possibilties
1. Actuarial Science
Lots of probability and statistics if that's your thing. I've heard the qualification exams are pretty tough, and since you haven't really devoted study to it as an undergrad, you'd have to get some graduate education before you could even hope for a job.
2. Biostatistics (and other things like this)
Again, this would require some more education, but there's a good chance of you getting a job. Biological research is only going to continue to grow, and there's always room for someone to do the important mathematics.
3. Computer Science
I'm sure other people will point this kind of thing out, but places like Google, etc. definitely don't mind having mathematicians with CS background for things like algorithm development and the like.
4. Mathematics
Stick with it and get your PhD in pure (or applied) mathematics. Get a post-doc, and then a professorship, and enjoy a rewarding (intellectually) life in academia. If you really love it, this is a great way to go.
I think the main theme of this post is probably that the best way to ensure that you get a job (that does not involve teaching minors) is to keep going in your education. That is not to say that you can't get a job with a BS, but I think you'll find there's a lot more open to you in today's world with at least an MS.
I was just curious about how big a bit is going to be on these new drives, so I did a quick back of the envelope calculation (I actually used a scrap of paper bag.)
Let's take jewlery-sized to mean 1 cm^2 of usable area. And take 100s of GB to be 100 GB, or 10^11 bytes, so ~10^12 bits. Pop these in a 10^6 x 10^6 grid. Then we have 10^-2 / 10 ^ 6 = 10^-8 m to be the length/width of a bit. A hydrogen atom is ~ 10^-10m (I think Iron is ~2.5 times that size). So roughly, bits would be a maximum of 100 x 100 atoms, but probably more towards 50 x 50.
That is pretty small!
I saw an exhibit with this kind of technology about 10 years ago in a science museum. In their variation, you put your forehead on a postage-stamp sized metal plate, and then you suddenly heard a voice. I remember thinking that it was pretty cool. Definitely a good idea to put it in a cellphone headset. I do wonder a bit about ensuring sufficient contact with the jaw. In the exhibit I saw, you bent over to put your head on the plate, and thanks to the heaviness of the human head, there was a decent amount of pressure against the plate. No idea exactly how much you need to make sure it gets transferred to the bone, but I could see that being a bit of an issue.
If you combined that with the sub-vocalization technology that can detect what you say as you speak silently, we might be able to rid society of noisy cellphone users. Now that's tech I can appreciate.
I'm not sure why English volume/distance measurement was (albeit correcly) switched to a distance/volume measurement in the metric conversion.
Whatever the case, it can't be a coincidence that this gets 1337 km/L.
I had the opportunity to see one of the developers talk about this game at the MIT "Innovation in Video Games: A French-American Dialogue" conference, and was quite impressed with the vision that the developers have for this game and for gaming in general. The main point that they wanted to make that was games (especially FPS) seem to spend most of the time appealing to what are very reflexive emotions (fear, anger, greed, etc.); while there's nothing wrong with this, they pointed out gamers can be involved just was well by more subtle emotions. A big draw of MMORPGS is the social interactions, and these developers wanted to try and bring a wider range of emotions to other gaming forms. They mentioned trying to incorporate things such as love, sympathy, and sadness, with the goal of creating a more immersive gaming environment. With so many games being rather weak in the plot department, it refreshes me to see people focusing more on story and emotional immersion.
I think this is a nice piece of work from the EFF. There are plenty of people who would be more concerned about DRM if they understood its potentials. I know I've talked with my father (who is very low tech) about DRM, and he certainly was legitimately concerned about what I told him. I've made backups of some of his CDs for him, and he likes knowing that he can keep the originals safe. We talked about how breaking DeCSS to make a legitimate backup copy of a DVD is illegal under the DMCA, and he thinks something like that is unreasonable. Right now, non-tech people just aren't running into deep issues of DRM. The most DRM they've probably run into is iTMS FairPlay, and thanks to Apple's 'generous' terms, they rarely, if ever, run into something they can't do. I think more people would be concerned about DRM if they understood what it's potential consequences are, and I think this animation does a good job of doing that.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
I really think from a business standpoint, banning used game resales just doesn't make much sense, especially with games being $50+. In my experience at least, those who have a little more money buy the games new, and then when they resell them, that money is usually invested right back into new games. If I only have $30, Sony isn't going to get a new game sale. But with a good used market, I can buy GTA VIII from the guy down the street, and while that money isn't going directly to Sony, there's a good chance that he's going to reinvest it in new games.
I think the issue is that Perl code can be classified as a form of encryption.