PlanetQuake3: Is Doom3 at the stage where everyone at id plays a deathmatch game over the LAN or is that stage a ways off? Tim Willits: We are all focusing on making a great single player game and haven't started on the multiplayer component of the game yet.
Just because they haven't started the multiplayer component yet doesn't mean their engine design isn't complete enough that they know it will allow the features in your quote.
It does seem to work out as you say. However, by doing this, you've cut the effective resolution in half in each direction. If they want to claim to be off by 11% on colors but 75% on resolution, that's fine with me.
Taken to the extreme, they could come up with a full-screen dither and have an enourmous number of colors for their 1 effective pixel.:)
This is not meant as a rant at you -- just that I still disagree with their overall claim. I think that none of this would have been so annoying (not to me, I have a Treo 300 with an admitted 12-bit color screen) if they would just slap correction stickers on pre-printed boxes and allow those who want to to return the product for a refund. I suspect most people wouldn't even bother.
Other replies covered the definition of notwithstanding. My point is this:
If you are sitting in your home with a printing press putting out copies of the latest J.K. Rowling book, can the book publisher or author come busting in to your house and stop your presses? If you think I have stolen your cat, can you break into my apartment (without damaging anything) in order to look around and see if I did? I'm pretty sure (and I truly hope) the answer is no.
If I'm breaking the law and you want to stop me, have law enforcement do it. Sue me. Get me thrown in jail, and have me fined out the rear end. This is "taking the law into your own hands" in a very bad way (not saying there aren't some good ways). This is equivalent to letting you rummage through my stuff on the suspicion that I have something of yours. This is wrong.
What I expect to see (or not see) is a digital watermark which indicates the theater or film identifier (to indicate a particular shipment of a movie), but is which invisible to a casual observer/moviegoer (like most digital watermarks try to be).
They would then use this to attempt to track down and sue the people who pirate the movie, in those cases where it was a theater employee. Still wouldn't stop the person with the camera in the audience, but that's a smaller concern.
I'm not sure how effective this would be, but I expect them to try it.
You can't really say "the early days" of something based on how long you expect it to be around -- only on how long it has been around. Otherwise we can call this "the early days of humanity", since some people thing we'll be around for billions of years to come (and, of course, if we're not, who will complain that they lied:). Perhaps in another 50 years, we can start calling Napster part of "the early days".
There's a flaw in this logic. Just because it's free to you doesn't mean it's free to them. On top of that, it's not really free to you -- the cost is your info (which has value for statistical/marketing purposes). Just because you don't pay case doesn't mean it's free.
If they truly send you "spam"/marketing info from partners/subscription offers (which some percentage of people -- not necessarily you -- will take), and you don't register, you are using their services (which cost them money) without letting them earn any back.
Note that I'm just arguing the logic, not the morality of using their services without registering. That said, I generally do not read NYT online articles because I don't want to give them my info, and I'm too lazy to use the workarounds.:)
I want a law making it illegal to mislead people when naming or describing laws. Putting a little spin on law names is one thing, but calling something a "privacy law" when it's really a "no privacy law" or a "loss of privacy law" is just garbage.
My law, new style, could be called "No False Advertising in Congress". Old style, it could be called, "Misleading People for a Better America" or "Beef Jerky" or something.
Futurama notwithstanding, I think this name would be really scary for a judge.
"Move for a change of venue, since we cannot possibly trust anyone known as Justice Bender to uphold the law faithfully. I'm sure that this case would be better handled by Justice Forsale."
-Puk
p.s. That said, I think Justice Breaker would be a great name for a pro wrestler.
You've hit the nail on the head. It may not be observable -- you have to see the source code.
Blizzard has their Battle.net source. Blizzard has the bnetd (open) source. If they want to prove this, they don't need to resort to "duplicated bugs", they can just compare the two.
I am making no assertions as to whether their claim is true -- I have not seen the Battle.net source and don't know what the bug itself is. But the fact that they have to go about making their claim in this manner makes me think it's either baseless, or they're overly paranoid of having to show their code in court.
In fact, due to the openness of bnetd, I would think it would be tougher for Blizzard to authenticate their code than it would be for bnetd. How does the court know that Blizzard didn't just rip off bnetd's code in order to make them the same? Again, I'm not saying they didn't, I'm just saying they would probably have to prove that is was already there (which is reasonably possible, if you make the assumption they won't go to ridiculous lengths to fake it).
Your brain specializes large chunks of itself to deal with the various senses, and just adding in some new input without having that chunk of brain matter to process it isn't going to do much.
But that leads to an interesting thought. While what you say is largely true once you are an adult, your brains starts largely unprogrammed with how to process optical and auditory input. It learns what is effective and how to decode the outside world's input into useful internal information. I assume most of this learning is done when young, but I bet some of it continues later on. So if you inserted this information into the brain, eventually it should train itself to use it as just another sense/input -- probably faster if you are younger.
This, of course, leads to a debate on who it would be moral to test it on, and I'm not sure there are any good answers to that. I certainly don't have any.
On a related note, I remember watching a presentation at school on a comparison between the basic structures of a image using some sort of network (sadly, I forget the details) trained on raw images and the basic structures used by vision-related groups of neurons. They were amazingly similar. No, this didn't fool me into thinking we have any clue how the brain works.:)
Given the history of scientology manipulating google's ranking system, why not just wipe them out with an equally questionable claim of your own? Send them a DMCA notification saying that every one of their pages (including the ones just used for rank boosting) individually violates a copyright you own. Watch them disappear off google. Suddenly the truly informative Scientology sites are on top. Seems like proper counter-use of a broken law -- the biggest problem being that the COS has some of the deepest pockets around.
Note that everything I say here is quite possibly illegal should not be done under any circumstances, by anyone. Really.:)
Your sig is especially appropriate right now. Do we now have a 34-byte Universal Turing Machine based in a 2-symbol language which wone one day be illegal because it has no Digital Rights Management? Is that Alan Turing I hear turning over in his grave?:P
In the words of a good friend, "It's all just ones and zeros."
One post in here got me thinking. Maybe part of this is intended to be a shot at Oracle. If their file system is really a database, and they provide standard database functionality (including SQL, etc) with the filesystem layered over it, then they can argue more reasonably that which was so obviously false with IE -- that it is an integral part of the operating system, and cannot be removed.
When the OS ships with the database build in and "free", Oracle is a much less attractive choice. No, it won't destroy Oracle due to many of the other advantages it has (cross-platform, arguably better features/performance), but it could certainly give it a good smacking around.
Here's a question for someone who has read the DMCA more carefully than I. I remember that in the Napster case, they were trying to show that Napster had "substantial non-infringing use", or something along those lines. Does the DMCA have any provisions like this? Is it against technologies that enable and allow copyright circumvention, or that are for copyright circumvention.
Okay, I got slightly un-lazy and did some reading:
"2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that - 2a) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; 2b) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or 2c) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Okay, so 2a and 2c seem okay -- it is not primarily designed to circumvent copyright protection, nor is it being marketed for that purpose.
It's 2b that scares me. Does it only have a limited commercial purpose other than copyright infringement? I cenrtainly has a very significant other purpose, but is it commercial? It's free! Some of the definitions for commercial and commere of commercial seem to indicate that it must be for profit (commerical-3), but some indicate that it might not (commercial-2, or commercial-1 with commerce-2). Could bnetd be illegal because it has a "bad" use, but is non-commercial, whereas if it were a commercial product it would be okay?! What's the legal/governmental definition of commercial?
I'm clearly NAL, so if someone who's more clued in could give me a little insight into what's really going on here and what things I've missed in my extremely brief survey, I'd appreciate it.
-Puk
p.s. The 3rd defition of commerce is "sexual intercourse". That's is news to me -- I don't even want to think about the implications.:)
Having been a part of the Street Fighter "scene" for quite a while, having a lot of friends in it, and even being in the movie for an extremely brief period, I have to say that the Jab Strong Fierce crew did an excellent job with the whole thing. I drove down to Austin this weekend to plan in the tournament they planned around the screenings, see the movie, and just hang out with friends (some of whom I don't get to see much and flew in from Chicago, LA, and the Bay Area), and I was really impressed. To be totally honest, it's a bit worrisome when you realize they're going to open a window into the things you participate in, when most people don't even know they exist -- and I was scared about how the whole thing would come across to "outsiders".
I was amazed with the results. The did a great job of capturing the events of that year and the people involved. Even people who have no interest in video games (including my friend who drove down with me) seemed to enjoy it immensely. If you have a chance to see it, go. Keep in mind, the Sunday showing was over-packed, and SXSW visitors get preference, so it may be difficult to get into, especially given the/. article. I really hope they manage to find a distributor so more people can get a peek into the fun and insanity that is involved in a SF addiction and the world around it.
Now I'm going to go crash since I drove all night to get home so I could make it to work today after watching the Sunday midnight showing.
At first, I thought it should be right to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on anyone using a non-Microsoft OS, but then I realized that that would just be redundant.
Okay, I'll accept that it's not a security hole, and that they're misrepresenting the situation, but shutting down bnetd still seems to be their most convenient method of slowing down piracy.
If they made bnetd secure, it would be less than 24 hours before there were patches out there to undo the changes, after which there would be continued work on a product which would indirectly support large scale piracy of Warcraft III. There is no security when it requires trusting a component to which the user has the source. Yes, there are plenty of legitimate usees for bnetd, but the simple fact is that there is a huge amount of piracy which is enabled by it. By taking it down, they make it that much harder.
Sure, it's still out there, but development will slow without a good central meeting point. Hunting down individuals who changed the secure bnetd would be a far more costly solution (not to mention being virutally impossible). High moral ground is a great thing for a company, but from a corporate point of view, money is usually better.
In addition, they want people using their servers, and they want the packets going through them. If they trusted users enough to allow bnetd to passthrough security checks, they would have just done a security check on startup and let people play peer-to-peer or run the servers themselves, with less cost to Blizzard. They want a central point for bugfixes, for changing aspects of gameplay, and for ensuring fair client usage, not to mention collection of statistics and the value added aspect of users having a central ranking service. (Do Blizzard games provide their own way of networking over TCP/IP, if only for 2-player games?)
Keep in mind here, I'm NOT saying they did the right thing. I'm saying they quite possibly did the smart thing, under current law. I think bnetd should be completely legal, and the DMCA is severely broken. I'm just trying to explain why what they did is reasonable, though not particularly honorable. I think maybe you agree on that point, but I'm not sure.
What's to stop the buyer from scamming the seller? Say he never got the goods, or that they did not match what was sold, get his money back, and keep the goods.
I suppose you could protect against this by proving delivery of the item, but it still seems possible if you're tricky enough ("This thing he sent was broken! No, that exact same model over that was the one I already owned, which works fine and stuff."). Does this happen? Is there some protection I'm missing?
bnetd is open source. I release a patch removing all your nifty security passthrough code. We're back to the old bnetd. Everyone can use pirated clients on my server.
Also, "if Blizzard were to set up separate authentication servers" has a couple of problems. First, the servers would have to keep in sync (I suspect that they do this already, to allow multiple servers to authenticate) to prevent re-use of keys across different servers. Second, it costs Blizzard extra money to support someone else's framework, with very little visible benefit to them.
Other than that, I agree with you. Allowing a passthrough security check doesn't expose their algorithm in any new way.
Why not create a Java applet that does distributed.net work (or similar), proxied through the web server. Slashdot could have it on its main page (hell, it could be that Slashdot logo in the corner). Some clever person could submit all the work done as his or her own. Sure, running in Java only part-time would limit the amount that would get done, but given the number of computers sitting on Slashdot at any given moment, it could accomplish a lot cumulatively...
I'm not familiar enough with web Java applet security policies to know how tricky this would be, but it'd be interesting, anyway.
-Puk
Re:Most of the tagged people will be innocent.
on
The Eyes Have It
·
· Score: 2
No, fatalities per mile is a statistic rigged to favour aircraft, which only make long journeys. Fatalities per journey would be the more relevant statistic, as it answers the question that people want to know; how likely am I to die if I get into this thing? On that basis, aircraft look significantly worse than cars.
You can keep getting more and more detailed in how you break down the question, and get different results. If you're going this far, you should take the next step and break it down by distance.
In fact, the safety swings with distance. The longer the trip, the better aircraft look. On longer trips, taking an airplane is safer than driving. For shorter trips, the reverse is true (imagine flying to and from work every day). I don't know at what distance the switch is made, but I'm fairly sure it falls in the area in which airplanes do make common flights (which ranges from intercity to intercontinental).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, gee. Second question in the interview:
PlanetQuake3: Is Doom3 at the stage where everyone at id plays a deathmatch game over the LAN or is that stage a ways off?
Tim Willits: We are all focusing on making a great single player game and haven't started on the multiplayer component of the game yet.
Just because they haven't started the multiplayer component yet doesn't mean their engine design isn't complete enough that they know it will allow the features in your quote.
-Puk
It does seem to work out as you say. However, by doing this, you've cut the effective resolution in half in each direction. If they want to claim to be off by 11% on colors but 75% on resolution, that's fine with me.
:)
Taken to the extreme, they could come up with a full-screen dither and have an enourmous number of colors for their 1 effective pixel.
This is not meant as a rant at you -- just that I still disagree with their overall claim. I think that none of this would have been so annoying (not to me, I have a Treo 300 with an admitted 12-bit color screen) if they would just slap correction stickers on pre-printed boxes and allow those who want to to return the product for a refund. I suspect most people wouldn't even bother.
-Puk
Other replies covered the definition of notwithstanding. My point is this:
If you are sitting in your home with a printing press putting out copies of the latest J.K. Rowling book, can the book publisher or author come busting in to your house and stop your presses? If you think I have stolen your cat, can you break into my apartment (without damaging anything) in order to look around and see if I did? I'm pretty sure (and I truly hope) the answer is no.
If I'm breaking the law and you want to stop me, have law enforcement do it. Sue me. Get me thrown in jail, and have me fined out the rear end. This is "taking the law into your own hands" in a very bad way (not saying there aren't some good ways). This is equivalent to letting you rummage through my stuff on the suspicion that I have something of yours. This is wrong.
-Puk
Don't forget the 6% who will disagree with that, and say that the sun is CowboyNeal instead.
-Puk
What I expect to see (or not see) is a digital watermark which indicates the theater or film identifier (to indicate a particular shipment of a movie), but is which invisible to a casual observer/moviegoer (like most digital watermarks try to be).
They would then use this to attempt to track down and sue the people who pirate the movie, in those cases where it was a theater employee. Still wouldn't stop the person with the camera in the audience, but that's a smaller concern.
I'm not sure how effective this would be, but I expect them to try it.
-Puk
You can't really say "the early days" of something based on how long you expect it to be around -- only on how long it has been around. Otherwise we can call this "the early days of humanity", since some people thing we'll be around for billions of years to come (and, of course, if we're not, who will complain that they lied :). Perhaps in another 50 years, we can start calling Napster part of "the early days".
-Puk
There's a flaw in this logic. Just because it's free to you doesn't mean it's free to them. On top of that, it's not really free to you -- the cost is your info (which has value for statistical/marketing purposes). Just because you don't pay case doesn't mean it's free.
:)
If they truly send you "spam"/marketing info from partners/subscription offers (which some percentage of people -- not necessarily you -- will take), and you don't register, you are using their services (which cost them money) without letting them earn any back.
Note that I'm just arguing the logic, not the morality of using their services without registering. That said, I generally do not read NYT online articles because I don't want to give them my info, and I'm too lazy to use the workarounds.
-Puk
I want a law making it illegal to mislead people when naming or describing laws. Putting a little spin on law names is one thing, but calling something a "privacy law" when it's really a "no privacy law" or a "loss of privacy law" is just garbage.
My law, new style, could be called "No False Advertising in Congress". Old style, it could be called, "Misleading People for a Better America" or "Beef Jerky" or something.
Blah.
-Puk
I want to see someone killed with a nonlethal weapon.
Also, this statement is false.
-Puk
Futurama notwithstanding, I think this name would be really scary for a judge.
"Move for a change of venue, since we cannot possibly trust anyone known as Justice Bender to uphold the law faithfully. I'm sure that this case would be better handled by Justice Forsale."
-Puk
p.s. That said, I think Justice Breaker would be a great name for a pro wrestler.
You've hit the nail on the head. It may not be observable -- you have to see the source code.
Blizzard has their Battle.net source. Blizzard has the bnetd (open) source. If they want to prove this, they don't need to resort to "duplicated bugs", they can just compare the two.
I am making no assertions as to whether their claim is true -- I have not seen the Battle.net source and don't know what the bug itself is. But the fact that they have to go about making their claim in this manner makes me think it's either baseless, or they're overly paranoid of having to show their code in court.
In fact, due to the openness of bnetd, I would think it would be tougher for Blizzard to authenticate their code than it would be for bnetd. How does the court know that Blizzard didn't just rip off bnetd's code in order to make them the same? Again, I'm not saying they didn't, I'm just saying they would probably have to prove that is was already there (which is reasonably possible, if you make the assumption they won't go to ridiculous lengths to fake it).
-Puk
Well, at least it will solve the "patch penguin" problem. Imagine a whole army of Linuses (what's the plural of Linus?) verifying patches!
-Puk
Your brain specializes large chunks of itself to deal with the various senses, and just adding in some new input without having that chunk of brain matter to process it isn't going to do much.
:)
But that leads to an interesting thought. While what you say is largely true once you are an adult, your brains starts largely unprogrammed with how to process optical and auditory input. It learns what is effective and how to decode the outside world's input into useful internal information. I assume most of this learning is done when young, but I bet some of it continues later on. So if you inserted this information into the brain, eventually it should train itself to use it as just another sense/input -- probably faster if you are younger.
This, of course, leads to a debate on who it would be moral to test it on, and I'm not sure there are any good answers to that. I certainly don't have any.
On a related note, I remember watching a presentation at school on a comparison between the basic structures of a image using some sort of network (sadly, I forget the details) trained on raw images and the basic structures used by vision-related groups of neurons. They were amazingly similar. No, this didn't fool me into thinking we have any clue how the brain works.
-Puk
Given the history of scientology manipulating google's ranking system, why not just wipe them out with an equally questionable claim of your own? Send them a DMCA notification saying that every one of their pages (including the ones just used for rank boosting) individually violates a copyright you own. Watch them disappear off google. Suddenly the truly informative Scientology sites are on top. Seems like proper counter-use of a broken law -- the biggest problem being that the COS has some of the deepest pockets around.
:)
Note that everything I say here is quite possibly illegal should not be done under any circumstances, by anyone. Really.
-Puk
Your sig is especially appropriate right now. Do we now have a 34-byte Universal Turing Machine based in a 2-symbol language which wone one day be illegal because it has no Digital Rights Management? Is that Alan Turing I hear turning over in his grave? :P
In the words of a good friend, "It's all just ones and zeros."
-Puk, half-joking
One post in here got me thinking. Maybe part of this is intended to be a shot at Oracle. If their file system is really a database, and they provide standard database functionality (including SQL, etc) with the filesystem layered over it, then they can argue more reasonably that which was so obviously false with IE -- that it is an integral part of the operating system, and cannot be removed.
When the OS ships with the database build in and "free", Oracle is a much less attractive choice. No, it won't destroy Oracle due to many of the other advantages it has (cross-platform, arguably better features/performance), but it could certainly give it a good smacking around.
Thoughts?
-Puk
Here's a question for someone who has read the DMCA more carefully than I. I remember that in the Napster case, they were trying to show that Napster had "substantial non-infringing use", or something along those lines. Does the DMCA have any provisions like this? Is it against technologies that enable and allow copyright circumvention, or that are for copyright circumvention.
:)
Okay, I got slightly un-lazy and did some reading:
"2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
2a) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
2b) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
2c) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Okay, so 2a and 2c seem okay -- it is not primarily designed to circumvent copyright protection, nor is it being marketed for that purpose.
It's 2b that scares me. Does it only have a limited commercial purpose other than copyright infringement? I cenrtainly has a very significant other purpose, but is it commercial? It's free! Some of the definitions for commercial and commere of commercial seem to indicate that it must be for profit (commerical-3), but some indicate that it might not (commercial-2, or commercial-1 with commerce-2). Could bnetd be illegal because it has a "bad" use, but is non-commercial, whereas if it were a commercial product it would be okay?! What's the legal/governmental definition of commercial?
I'm clearly NAL, so if someone who's more clued in could give me a little insight into what's really going on here and what things I've missed in my extremely brief survey, I'd appreciate it.
-Puk
p.s. The 3rd defition of commerce is "sexual intercourse". That's is news to me -- I don't even want to think about the implications.
Having been a part of the Street Fighter "scene" for quite a while, having a lot of friends in it, and even being in the movie for an extremely brief period, I have to say that the Jab Strong Fierce crew did an excellent job with the whole thing. I drove down to Austin this weekend to plan in the tournament they planned around the screenings, see the movie, and just hang out with friends (some of whom I don't get to see much and flew in from Chicago, LA, and the Bay Area), and I was really impressed. To be totally honest, it's a bit worrisome when you realize they're going to open a window into the things you participate in, when most people don't even know they exist -- and I was scared about how the whole thing would come across to "outsiders".
/. article. I really hope they manage to find a distributor so more people can get a peek into the fun and insanity that is involved in a SF addiction and the world around it.
I was amazed with the results. The did a great job of capturing the events of that year and the people involved. Even people who have no interest in video games (including my friend who drove down with me) seemed to enjoy it immensely. If you have a chance to see it, go. Keep in mind, the Sunday showing was over-packed, and SXSW visitors get preference, so it may be difficult to get into, especially given the
Now I'm going to go crash since I drove all night to get home so I could make it to work today after watching the Sunday midnight showing.
-Puk
Argh, I'm an idiot. That's on anyone using a Microsoft OS.
Blah.
-Puk
At first, I thought it should be right to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on anyone using a non-Microsoft OS, but then I realized that that would just be redundant.
-Puk
Okay, I'll accept that it's not a security hole, and that they're misrepresenting the situation, but shutting down bnetd still seems to be their most convenient method of slowing down piracy.
If they made bnetd secure, it would be less than 24 hours before there were patches out there to undo the changes, after which there would be continued work on a product which would indirectly support large scale piracy of Warcraft III. There is no security when it requires trusting a component to which the user has the source. Yes, there are plenty of legitimate usees for bnetd, but the simple fact is that there is a huge amount of piracy which is enabled by it. By taking it down, they make it that much harder.
Sure, it's still out there, but development will slow without a good central meeting point. Hunting down individuals who changed the secure bnetd would be a far more costly solution (not to mention being virutally impossible). High moral ground is a great thing for a company, but from a corporate point of view, money is usually better.
In addition, they want people using their servers, and they want the packets going through them. If they trusted users enough to allow bnetd to passthrough security checks, they would have just done a security check on startup and let people play peer-to-peer or run the servers themselves, with less cost to Blizzard. They want a central point for bugfixes, for changing aspects of gameplay, and for ensuring fair client usage, not to mention collection of statistics and the value added aspect of users having a central ranking service. (Do Blizzard games provide their own way of networking over TCP/IP, if only for 2-player games?)
Keep in mind here, I'm NOT saying they did the right thing. I'm saying they quite possibly did the smart thing, under current law. I think bnetd should be completely legal, and the DMCA is severely broken. I'm just trying to explain why what they did is reasonable, though not particularly honorable. I think maybe you agree on that point, but I'm not sure.
-Puk
I've always wondered this about escrow:
What's to stop the buyer from scamming the seller? Say he never got the goods, or that they did not match what was sold, get his money back, and keep the goods.
I suppose you could protect against this by proving delivery of the item, but it still seems possible if you're tricky enough ("This thing he sent was broken! No, that exact same model over that was the one I already owned, which works fine and stuff."). Does this happen? Is there some protection I'm missing?
-Puk
The security hole is this:
bnetd is open source. I release a patch removing all your nifty security passthrough code. We're back to the old bnetd. Everyone can use pirated clients on my server.
Also, "if Blizzard were to set up separate authentication servers" has a couple of problems. First, the servers would have to keep in sync (I suspect that they do this already, to allow multiple servers to authenticate) to prevent re-use of keys across different servers. Second, it costs Blizzard extra money to support someone else's framework, with very little visible benefit to them.
Other than that, I agree with you. Allowing a passthrough security check doesn't expose their algorithm in any new way.
-Puk
This is brilliant.
Why not create a Java applet that does distributed.net work (or similar), proxied through the web server. Slashdot could have it on its main page (hell, it could be that Slashdot logo in the corner). Some clever person could submit all the work done as his or her own. Sure, running in Java only part-time would limit the amount that would get done, but given the number of computers sitting on Slashdot at any given moment, it could accomplish a lot cumulatively...
I'm not familiar enough with web Java applet security policies to know how tricky this would be, but it'd be interesting, anyway.
-Puk
No, fatalities per mile is a statistic rigged to favour aircraft, which only make long journeys. Fatalities per journey would be the more relevant statistic, as it answers the question that people want to know; how likely am I to die if I get into this thing? On that basis, aircraft look significantly worse than cars.
You can keep getting more and more detailed in how you break down the question, and get different results. If you're going this far, you should take the next step and break it down by distance.
In fact, the safety swings with distance. The longer the trip, the better aircraft look. On longer trips, taking an airplane is safer than driving. For shorter trips, the reverse is true (imagine flying to and from work every day). I don't know at what distance the switch is made, but I'm fairly sure it falls in the area in which airplanes do make common flights (which ranges from intercity to intercontinental).
-Puk